Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information you get."

– William Feather

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child."

– Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Champions keep playing until they get it right."

– Billie Jean King

1. U.S. Steps Up Planning for Possible Action in Iran

2. Weakened by War, Iran’s Regime Faces Its Toughest Challenge Yet

3. Russia’s Fearsome Arsenal Fizzled in Venezuela. Here’s Why.

4. The Perception War over Venezuela

5. China Has Been Gorging on Black-Market Oil. That’s Now Getting Harder.

6. Trump ‘Inclined’ to Keep Exxon Out of Venezuela

7. Washington’s New Lobbyists: Paid Online Influencers With Few Rules

8. The Chinese Company Taking On the World’s Memory-Chip Giants

9. As Trump threatens Iran strikes, China denounces use of force in Middle East

10. Could China execute a special forces operation like the US precision Maduro abduction?

11. Special Operations News – Jan 12, 2025

12. Opinion | Forget Venezuela and Greenland – here is the real trillion-dollar question

13. From Steam to Sats: Energy and Bitcoin Strategy to Win the 21st Century

14. Once More, the Sensor (FICINT)

15. No Bench, No Game: Reconstituting Special Operations Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Depth from the Reserve

16. The Problem with Trump’s Venezuela Plan By Elliott Abrams

17. Donald Trump’s Red Line

18. Venezuelan and Cuban Military: A Comparative Analysis and Potential U.S. Operation in Cuba

19. Cognitive Warfare and the Indo-Pacific

20. Why the U.S. Navy Doesn’t Build Battleships Anymore

21. Neither America Nor China Can Achieve True Tech Dominance

22. How Greenland Falls: Imagining a Bloodless Trump Takeover

1. U.S. Steps Up Planning for Possible Action in Iran

Summary:

Facing a nationwide revolt in Iran, POTUS will meet senior advisers Tuesday to review options that range from new sanctions and covert cyber operations to overt military strikes and information support such as Starlink access. No forces have been repositioned, and aides worry U.S. or Israeli action could validate regime propaganda or trigger regional escalation. The team is weighing whether symbolic moves would demoralize protesters who expect concrete support. The debate unfolds after prior U.S. attacks on Iranian nuclear sites, the Maduro raid, and other regional strikes, as Washington balances coercive pressure with a stated openness to renewed nuclear talks.

Comment: To be a fly on the way for this one. I would like to watch the rehearsals/murder board for the briefs today and hear the strategic debate before they get to POTUS.

If the center of gravity in Iran is the population’s will, what mix of information, economic, cyber, and limited kinetic tools actually strengthens that will rather than shifting risk and cost onto the protesters alone?

How will U.S. choices in Iran, especially visible strikes or covert cyber operations, shape adversary and ally perceptions of American resolve and reliability in other theaters, including the Asia-Indo-Pacific and the Korean Peninsula?

Does a primarily coercive “maximum pressure” frame help or hinder a long game of political warfare and narrative competition against the Iran–Russia–China–north Korea (CRInK) axis, and what old, alternative, or new narrative architecture would better align U.S. means with stated ends of freedom and self-determination? (assuming we want to uphold our values that are universal - the right to self determination of government and freedom and individual liberty).

U.S. Steps Up Planning for Possible Action in Iran

WSJ

Trump aides are set to brief the president Tuesday on measures, including military, cyber and economic, to follow through on his threats

By Alexander Ward

and Lara Seligman

Updated Jan. 11, 2026 10:26 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/major-trump-briefing-on-iran-options-planned-for-tuesday-5827429f

President Trump isn’t expected to make a final decision at the meeting. Bonnie Cash/UPI/Bloomberg News

WASHINGTON—President Trump is scheduled to be briefed Tuesday on options to respond to the protests in Iran, according to U.S. officials, a sign the president is considering reprimanding the regime for its crackdown on demonstrators as he has repeatedly threatened.

The president’s planned meeting with senior administration officials will be a discussion about the next steps, which could include boosting antigovernment sources online, deploying secretive cyber weapons against Iranian military and civilian sites, placing more sanctions on the regime and military strikes, the officials said.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Dan Caine are expected to attend the Tuesday meeting, the officials said.

Trump, speaking Sunday to reporters on Air Force One, said he had been reviewing military options to strike Iran after the regime was “starting to” cross his red line of not killing protesters.

“We’re looking at some very strong options,” he said. If Iran retaliates to an American attack by targeting U.S. troops in the region, “we will hit them at levels that they’ve never been hit before.”

He also said “the leaders of Iran called” to negotiate. “We may have to act before a meeting. … A meeting is being set up. Iran called. They want to negotiate.”

Trump isn’t expected to make a final decision at the meeting as the deliberations are at an early stage. On Sunday, Iran’s parliamentary speaker threatened to attack American military bases in the Middle East if the U.S. acted first.

During preliminary discussions between senior administration staff last week, aides expressed concern that the U.S. or Israel acting in the name of protesters could fuel regime propaganda that hostile outside powers are behind the countrywide uprising, some of the officials said.

The Pentagon hasn’t moved any forces in preparation for potential military strikes. The U.S. would need to put assets in place not only to launch attacks but also protect American forces in the region. The U.S. recently moved the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group from the Mediterranean to Latin America, leaving no carrier in either the Middle East or Europe.

Protesters march in Tehran, the Iranian capital, in an image taken from video UGC/AFP/Getty Images

The discussions come at a time of already heightened tensions in the region, especially over Syria. The U.S. launched wide-scale strikes against Islamic State targets in Syria on Saturday in response to the killing of two American soldiers and a civilian interpreter last month.

Memos are being sent to agencies seeking their input on specific responses to the Iran situation—including potential military targets and economic options—ahead of the Trump meeting, according to some of the officials.

One option under discussion is the possibility of the U.S. sending terminals of Starlink, a satellite-based internet service owned by Elon Musk, into Iran for the first time during the Trump administration, officials said, which could help protesters skirt a recent internet shutdown in the country.

Trump said he would speak with Musk about sending Starlink satellite-internet terminals into Iran.

Rubio and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke Saturday about the protests and other Middle East matters in Syria and Gaza, officials said.

Some administration officials are concerned that any U.S. response could escalate tensions in the region, potentially provoking a direct confrontation between the U.S., Iran and possibly Israel. The administration is also aware that acting in a more symbolic way that harms but doesn’t degrade the regime could demoralize protesters who believe Washington will support them.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Jacob Helberg, State Department Under Secretary for Economic Affairs, wrote Sunday on social media that “President Trump’s strategy of MAXIMUM PRESSURE has brought the regime to its knees.”

Tuesday’s meeting would be the first time Trump sits down with senior officials for a formal discussion about his options. However, Trump frequently asks aides for their thoughts on serious topics, including Iran policy, outside of less-formal briefings and has already received some ideas from his staff about what his response should be.

The president has escalated his forceful language since the Iranian protests began two weeks ago. On Jan. 2, he said on social media that the U.S. is “locked and loaded” as he warned the Iranian regime not to kill peaceful protesters. Then on Friday, he said the U.S. would “start shooting” if authorities opened fire on demonstrators.

He has continued offering his support for the uprising. “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before,” he posted Saturday to social media. “The USA stands ready to help!!!” He also linked to a story about a man in London who removed Iran’s flag from its embassy and replaced it with an antiregime banner.

The State Department, alluding to the U.S. operation to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro after many Trump warnings, posted on X: “Do not play games with President Trump. When he says he’ll do something, he means it.”

Trump has been emboldened after the Maduro mission as well as other bombing campaigns in Nigeria, Somalia, Syria and Yemen he believes have secured U.S. interests, officials say.

WSJ’s Benoit Faucon explains the financial collapse fueling deadly clashes, how President Trump and Iran are responding to the unrest and what’s next for the country’s deteriorating political situation. Photo: UGC/AFP/Getty Images

Vice President JD Vance last week said Iran could still show a willingness to negotiate with the U.S. over its nuclear program, a potential sign that Washington is open to a diplomatic result to the current crisis, not a military one. “The smartest thing for them to have done, it was true two months ago, it is true today, is for them to actually have a real negotiation with the United States about what we need to see when it comes to their nuclear program,” he told reporters in a White House briefing.

Tehran has made no serious entreaties about talks in recent months, U.S. officials say.

Tehran for now shows no signs of fearing U.S. action. Beyond the threat to American bases, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his aides indicate a broader crackdown on the demonstrators is coming. Mohammad Movahedi Azad, Iran’s attorney general, said Saturday people who take part in the protests are an “enemy of God”—a charge that results in the death penalty.

The country’s army said Saturday it would “firmly safeguard national interests, strategic infrastructure, and public property,” blaming Israel and what it called terrorist groups for the unrest and vowing to “thwart the enemy’s plots.”

The protests began with merchants protesting economic conditions two weeks ago, growing into a nationwide revolt on Jan. 8 against the regime. More than 500 people, including members of security services, have been killed in the unrest, Human Rights Activists in Iran said Sunday.

A new aerial strike on Iran would be the second time Trump has authorized an attack on the country. In August, B-2 stealth bombers heavily damaged three of the Iranian nuclear sites, setting back the regime’s nuclear program.

Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com and Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com

Appeared in the January 12, 2026, print edition as 'U.S. Steps Up Iran Planning, Studies Possible Military Action'.

WSJ

2. Weakened by War, Iran’s Regime Faces Its Toughest Challenge Yet

Summary:

Iran’s regime now confronts its hardest test since 1979. The 12-day war with Israel and the U.S. destroyed the bargain that Iranians would accept hardship in exchange for security. Israeli and U.S. strikes shattered the image of invincibility and exposed the cost of Tehran’s proxy strategy. Combined with sanctions, currency collapse, and mass unemployment, this has produced nationwide protests calling for the end of the Islamic Republic despite hundreds killed. Neighbors fear state failure more than regime change, preferring a weakened but intact Iran, while Washington weighs pressure, protest support, and possible decapitation against risks of civil war and unrealized revolutionary hopes.

Comment: What do you do now Lieutenant? (that is to all the Iranian, US. and international Lieutenants). So many questions (some from my biased perspective) :

If the regime’s last pillar of legitimacy was security, what mix of sanctions relief, pressure, and support to Iranian civil society can deepen the crisis of confidence in the state without tipping the country into a Syria style fragmentation that destabilizes the region?

How should U.S. strategy toward a wounded but still dangerous Iran be integrated into a broader campaign against the China, Russia, Iran, north Korea axis, and what second order effects would a Maduro style decapitation attempt in Tehran have for deterrence and assurance in the Asia-Indo-Pacific?

If military humiliation often precedes regime change, what specific political end state (acceptable durable political arrangement) in Iran serves U.S. and allied interests, who are the realistic agents of that transition inside the country, and what narrative, economic, and security guarantees is Washington actually prepared to underwrite rather than merely encourage from afar?

Weakened by War, Iran’s Regime Faces Its Toughest Challenge Yet

WSJ

Iranian leaders’ last claim to legitimacy was shattered in the war with Israel

By Yaroslav Trofimov

Updated Jan. 12, 2026 5:13 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/weakened-by-war-irans-regime-faces-its-toughest-challenge-yet-3a804570?mod=hp_lead_pos1

Protesters in Tehran last week, in an image taken from a social-media video. UGC/AFP/Getty Images

DUBAI—Iran’s 12-day war with Israel and the U.S. last June broke the regime’s carefully nurtured image of invincibility, many ordinary Iranians say. Now the aftermath is helping to fuel a wave of protests over the past two weeks that has left at least 500 people dead as the Islamic Republic attempts to regain control.

Footage seeping out of the country shows mass protests are continuing despite the crackdown. Human-rights-group assessments say security forces have already gunned down hundreds, and possibly thousands, of protesters. President Trump has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran if deadly force is used, and on Tuesday aides are scheduled to brief him on specific measures the U.S. can take to respond to the killings.

Iran’s leaders have weathered similar storms before. This time, the regime is in a far weaker position.

The ayatollahs’ rule was shaped by the bloody eight-year war that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq launched in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The social compact that endured since that trauma was that Iranians would acquiesce to hardship and restrictions in return for a strong state that protects them from foreign attack.

That assumption came crashing down when Iranian-backed Hamas and Hezbollah attacked Israel in 2023, triggering a regional war that brought death and destruction into the heart of Tehran last summer.

Israeli strikes across Iran destroyed much of its military leadership, and the follow-on U.S. bombing campaign struck a heavy blow against Iran’s nuclear program. It was a humiliation for a regime that had invested so much of the country’s national wealth into a proxy network that was designed to deter exactly this sort of assault on the homeland.

Now protesters are braving arrest or bullets as they demand not just changes in policy, but the downfall of the Islamic Republic itself.

Crowds cheer a motorcade carrying Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Tehran in 1979. GABRIEL DUVAL/AFP/Getty Images

“This was the last straw. The regime over the years had argued that although it has not been able to bring about prosperity or pluralism for the Iranians, at least it had brought them safety and security. Turns out, it didn’t,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group. “Now the people have reached the point of saying: Enough is enough.”

June’s 12-day war gave the regime a “temporary sugar high, which many mistakenly believed was a national rallying around the flag,” said Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pointing out that the Islamic Republic, since its inception in 1979, had chosen to wage a war of choice, rather than a war of necessity, against Israel. “External wars tend to strengthen revolutionary regimes in their early years, but military humiliations expose the brittleness of late-stage dictatorships.”

Indeed, history is replete with examples of repressive regimes falling to domestic unrest after military setbacks against foreign adversaries. In Serbia, President Slobodan Milošević was toppled in 2000, a year after a North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign forced him to surrender control of Kosovo. Argentina’s junta was replaced with a democratic government a year after being defeated by the United Kingdom in the 1982 Falklands War. And Greece’s military dictatorship collapsed after losing a war over Cyprus in 1974.

No upheaval has a single cause. The immediate reason for the latest round of protests in Iran was a series of currency devaluations, a sign of Iran’s deepening economic crisis as oil prices decline and Western sanctions strangle business activity. This crisis, however, is inextricably linked to Iran’s isolation, which is a clear result of its failed foreign policy.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, 86 years old, has resisted pressure to change course since the 12-day war, attempting to carry on business as usual. Tehran didn’t significantly alter its foreign policy or seek a deal with Trump over Iran’s nuclear program, something that could have led to an alleviation of sanctions. Nor did the regime implement any major domestic political and economic reforms that could have buttressed its popular support.

Tehran was hit by Israeli airstrikes in June 2025. Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

“The fact that the U.S. Air Force can blow Iran to smithereens wasn’t a surprise to anyone. The surprise was that once you are blown up, you still want to go back to the same policies that have brought the country to this situation in the first place,” said Alex Vatanka, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “This is what has given this sense of absolute hopelessness, with people saying: I’ve got nothing else here to lose.”

This isn’t the first time the Iranian regime has been challenged by mass protests. It survived the so-called “Green Revolution” over the disputed presidential election in 2009, as well as rounds of major unrest in 2019 and 2022.

Now, though, the international environment has changed. The U.S., under Trump, is encouraging the protests—while Iran’s regional rivals, especially Saudi Arabia, hope that the regime will be tamed and focus inward, but won’t collapse.

Many of Iran’s neighbors fear that the country of more than 90 million people could plunge into a Syria-style civil war, with separatist uprisings in provinces populated by Iranian Kurds, Baluchis and other minorities spilling across borders.

“The perception among Iran’s neighbors in the Gulf is that they prefer to deal with an Iran that they know, rather than something new or a zone of instability,” said Nikolay Kozhanov, research associate professor at the Gulf Studies Center of Qatar University. “The Arab neighbors, despite all the problems and contradictions, want to see a weakened Iran, but an Iran that they understand. Let’s not have illusions that a regime change in Iran would necessarily lead to a more friendly regime there.”

Back in 2009, then-President Barack Obama had similar concerns and stayed away from supporting Iranian “Green Revolution” protesters, focusing more on negotiating a nuclear deal with Khamenei’s regime. In 2013, Obama also backed out of striking the Iranian-sponsored Syrian regime for a nerve-gas attack on civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, after initially declaring that the use of chemical weapons would be a “red line” triggering U.S. intervention.

A mural in Tehran depicting Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/Shutterstock

Trump, by contrast, is indicating that he will act. “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The U.S.A. stands ready to help!!!” Trump posted on social media Saturday, shortly after reposting Sen. Lindsey Graham’s statement that the brutality “of the Iranian ayatollah and his religious Nazi henchmen” won’t go unchallenged.

Trump, of course, has been buoyed by the success of decapitating the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro, and securing, at least so far, the cooperation of his successor. He may be tempted by the same template of removing Khamenei, and hoping for better luck with a more pliable successor, diplomats and Iran watchers say.

Last June, Trump said on social media that he knew where Khamenei was hiding, but that he wouldn’t have him killed—“at least not for now.”

Ellie Geranmayeh, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that if Khamenei is removed it could offer an opportunity for the rest of the regime to take a more pragmatic approach—as happened in Caracas.

The remaining Iranian regime could tell the population, “We can give you hopes for economic improvement because we are going to push for a deal with the U.S. that lifts sanctions, and we are repairing the rupture in the security node of our social contract because we have removed the constant threat of strikes by the U.S.,” she said.

“The big question is whether this would be enough to appease the Iranian citizenry, given the level of dissatisfaction, rioting and violence we are seeing on the ground at the moment,” she said. “But that is one off-ramp that is available to the current ruling system. It’s also one that—if we look at Venezuela—may be appealing to Trump, and to the Gulf states.”

It wouldn’t necessarily be as appealing to Iran’s pro-democracy protesters.

“If we end up there, what would be the point of all of this?” said Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, CEO of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation think tank, predicting that the Iranian system would move toward a more pragmatic approach anyway after Khamenei’s eventual death.

A decapitation that preserves the essence of the regime, he added, would be tragic. “It would mean that everyone who lost their lives so far in these protests, and in the protests leading up to this, would have done it in vain,” he said.

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

Appeared in the January 12, 2026, print edition as 'Tehran Faces Its Toughest Challenge Yet'.

WSJ

3. Russia’s Fearsome Arsenal Fizzled in Venezuela. Here’s Why.

Summary:

Venezuela’s vaunted Russian air defenses, S-300s, Buk-M2s and thousands of Manpads, were largely inoperable or still in storage when Operation Absolute Resolve began, crippled by corruption, poor logistics, sanctions and weak Russian sustainment. U.S. forces destroyed key systems before they could deploy and faced minimal effective air defense fire. Moscow, distracted by Ukraine and wary of direct confrontation if a U.S. aircraft were shot down, let capability atrophy, revealing limits of its reach and reliability. The failed deterrent tarnishes Russian prestige, exposes the hollowness of its “strategic partnership” with Caracas, and underscores that hardware without readiness, training and will is a paper tiger.

Comment: I am sure our intelligence agencies are thoroughly analyzing these failures. What we must do is anticipate how our adversaries who use these systems will adapt from the failures.

If Russian high-end systems become symbols rather than capabilities in Venezuela, Ukraine and elsewhere, how should U.S. planners reassess Russian military credibility in other theaters, including the Asia-Indo-Pacific, without underestimating residual risk and more importantly the possible adaptations that will create future risk?

What changes in U.S. strategy and security assistance are needed so that partners’ air defenses and other high-tech systems avoid the same decay, and instead become reliably integrated, maintained and ready in a crisis rather than impressive but useless showpieces? Are there lessons from the Russian system failures that can improve our systems and tactics, techniques, and procedures? "Intelligent people learn from their mistakes and wise people learn from the mistakes of others." Can the Russian systems/Venezuelan failures make us wise?

Russia’s Fearsome Arsenal Fizzled in Venezuela. Here’s Why.

NY Times · Julian E. Barnes · January 12, 2026

The Venezuelan regime had high-powered air defense systems from its allies in the Kremlin, but failed to set much of it up.

By Maria Abi-Habib Eric Schmitt Christiaan Triebert and Julian E. Barnes

Jan. 12, 2026

Leer en español

The Venezuelan regime had high-powered air defense systems from its allies in the Kremlin, but failed to set much of it up.

A destroyed Buk launcher at La Carlota air base in Caracas after the U.S. strikes.Credit...The New York Times

The Venezuelan regime had high-powered air defense systems from its allies in the Kremlin, but failed to set much of it up.

A destroyed Buk launcher at La Carlota air base in Caracas after the U.S. strikes.Credit...The New York Times

Venezuela’s advanced, Russian-made air defense systems were not even hooked up to radar when U.S. helicopters swooped in to snatch President Nicolás Maduro, American officials say, rendering Venezuelan airspace surprisingly unprotected long before the Pentagon launched its attack.

The vaunted, Russian-made S-300 and Buk-M2 air defense systems were supposed to be a potent symbol of the close ties between Venezuela and Russia, two rivals of the United States. Their alliance appeared to give Russia a growing foothold in the Western Hemisphere.

With great fanfare, Venezuela announced it was buying the air defenses from Russia in 2009 amid tensions with Washington. Venezuela’s leftist president at the time, Hugo Chávez, heralded the weapons as a deterrent to American aggression.

But Venezuela was unable to maintain and operate the S-300 — one of the world’s most advanced antiaircraft systems — as well as the Buk defense systems, leaving its airspace vulnerable when the Pentagon launched Operation Absolute Resolve to capture Mr. Maduro, four current and former American officials said.

Beyond that, an analysis by The New York Times of photos, videos and satellite imagery found that some air defense components were still in storage, rather than operational, at the time of the attack. Taken together, the evidence suggests that, despite months of warnings, Venezuela was not ready for the American invasion.

In short, the Venezuelan military’s incompetence appears to have played a big role in the U.S. success. Venezuela’s much-touted antiaircraft systems were essentially not connected when U.S. forces entered the skies over Venezuela’s capital, and they may not have been working for years, former officials and analysts said.

“After years of corruption, poor logistics and sanctions, all those things would have certainly degraded the readiness of Venezuela’s air defense systems,” said Richard de la Torre, a former C.I.A. station chief in Venezuela who now runs Tower Strategy, a Washington-based lobbying firm.

A Russian Buk air defense system at a rehearsal for a Victory Day military parade in Red Square in 2018.Credit...Alexander Zemlianichenko/Associated Press

Russia shared in the failure, officials and experts said, because Russian trainers and technicians would have had to ensure the system was fully operational and help keep it that way.

“Russia’s own war demands in Ukraine may have limited its ability to sustain those systems in Venezuela, to make sure they were fully integrated,” Mr. de la Torre said.

In fact, two former American officials argued that Russia may have quietly allowed the military equipment it sold Venezuela to fall into disrepair, to avoid greater conflict with Washington. If the Venezuelan military had shot down an American aircraft, they said, the blowback on Russia could have been significant.

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Venezuela? , and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

When Mr. Chávez bought the air defense systems from Russia, they were part of a spending spree worth billions of dollars that was supposed to remake Venezuela’s military, filling its arsenal with Su-30 fighters jets, T-72 tanks and thousands of shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile systems known as Manpads. Before then, Venezuela had largely relied on U.S. military hardware, but as hostilities grew, Washington banned the sale of arms to the South American country in 2006.

“With these rockets it’s going to be very difficult for foreign planes to come and bomb us,” Mr. Chávez said in 2009, after the deal to buy the Russian air defense systems was announced.

But Venezuela struggled to maintain the Russian equipment, often running out of spare parts and the technical know-how to service the military hardware or operate it, said the four current and former senior U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive intelligence.

“Seems those Russian air defenses didn’t quite work so well, did they?” The U.S. defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said just days after the attack.

The ouster of Mr. Maduro and the Venezuelan government’s new, if uneasy, partnership with the United States is a blow to Russian influence in the region.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia with his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro in Moscow, Russia, in May.Credit...Pool photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko

Over the past 15 years, Moscow had steadily rebuilt its presence in Latin America after the collapse of the Soviet Union, increasing its arms sales to the region and forging new alliances, especially with Venezuela.

But that alliance may not have been as ironclad as Russia and Venezuela portrayed. Moscow had signaled to Washington that it would give the Americans unfettered influence in Venezuela in return for a free hand in Ukraine, according to Fiona Hill, who ran Russian and European affairs on the National Security Council during the first Trump administration.

At a news conference in November, the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, was asked if Moscow would deploy more weapons to Venezuela to shore up its defenses in the way it has to neighboring Belarus, one of Russia’s closest allies.

Mr. Lavrov made it clear that Venezuela, so far from Russian soil, was not as central to Russia. “It would be inaccurate to juxtapose our partnership with Venezuela with our union with the Republic of Belarus,” he said.

Russia and Venezuela signed a strategic partnership agreement in May, when Mr. Maduro visited Moscow, to expand ties, including defense cooperation. But it did not commit either country to collective defense.

“I think, coming out of this crisis, Russian prestige is going to be quite tarnished,” said Brian Naranjo, who was deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas from 2014 to 2018.

An apartment building in Catia la Mar, Venezuela, after the U.S. strikes.Credit...The New York Times

“They didn’t show up when Venezuela needed it,” he said. “They’ve been revealed to be a paper tiger.”

The Venezuelan military appeared to be taken by surprise by the U.S. operation, despite months of threats from Washington.

An assessment by The Times of photos and videos posted to social media, along with satellite imagery, shows that the U.S. military primarily targeted locations where Venezuela had deployed or stored Buk air defense systems.

In one location, storage units containing components of the Buk missile system were destroyed by U.S. aircraft before they were even deployed, indicating that the Venezuelan military was unprepared for the invasion that unfolded.

Where the U.S. targeted Buk missile systems

Source: Locations of strikes based on analysis of photos, videos and satellite imagery.

By Leanne Abraham and Christiaan Triebert

In La Guaira, a coastal city that buffers Caracas, several videos posted online showed a large explosion at warehouses in the port. Days later, the local governor, José Alejandro Terán, posted a video on his Facebook page of him touring the damaged warehouses. He said they had been used to store medicine for kidney patients.

The footage also showed the burned-out remains of a Buk missile launcher, along with what appeared to be missile or missile debris scattered between two warehouses.

Credit...

Just a few miles away, in Catia La Mar, loud explosions were also reported during the night of the attack. Mr. Terán later visited the site and posted videos from the area, as did other social media users. The footage showed bombed-out warehouses containing several components of a Buk system, including launchers and a command vehicle, suggesting the air defense vehicles had been in storage, instead of being operational.

Credit...

At La Carlota Air Base, videos recorded during the attack show explosions across the military airfield and smoke billowing into the air. Hours later, after daybreak, footage — including video broadcast by Venezuela’s state-run television network — showed the smoldering remains of a Buk missile launcher system.

Credit...

At another airport, in the coastal town of Higuerote, footage posted online captured a nighttime explosion as a separate fire burned nearby. Video from the aftermath showed a destroyed Buk missile launcher.

Credit...

“The Venezuelan armed forces were practically unprepared for the U.S. attack,” said Yaser Trujillo, a military analyst in Venezuela. “Their troops were not dispersed, the detection radar was not activated, deployed or operational. It was a chain of errors that allowed the United States to operate with ease, facing a very low threat from the Venezuelan air defense system.”

Venezuela’s Manpads also failed to make much of an appearance to defend the country’s airspace against U.S. aircraft.

In October, Mr. Maduro boasted about Venezuela’s arsenal of SA-24 Manpads, claiming they had been deployed in key positions to defend the country, ready for a U.S. attack. Venezuela’s bulk purchase of Russian Manpads in 2017 had long concerned American officials, given their ability to shoot down aircraft.

“Any military force in the world knows the power of the Igla-S, and Venezuela has no less than 5,000,” Mr. Maduro said at the time, using another name for the SA-24.

Several videos, however, showed the same moment in which what appeared to be a Manpads was fired during the operation only to come under intense counterfire from U.S. aircraft. Two American officials familiar with the operation suggested that the heavy response from the U.S. military may have created a disincentive for other Venezuelan troops to fire their Manpads.

Credit...

How long the fragile peace with the United States will hold remains to be seen. Washington is threatening to use its naval forces massed in the Caribbean if Caracas does not heed its demands, including opening up oil fields to U.S. companies.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also pressuring the interim Venezuelan government to expel foreign advisers from Russia, Cuba, Iran and China, in a bid to assert Washington’s dominance over the country and the region more widely.

Shortly after Mr. Maduro’s capture, the State Department published a photo of a glowering President Trump with the caption “this is our hemisphere.”

“On many levels, what the Russians were trying to do was just to piss us off just by being in Venezuela,” said Mr. Naranjo, the former U.S. diplomat. “There’s a desire on Russia’s part to demonstrate that they still have strategic reach around the globe.”

But, he said, Putin’s ability “to come into our backyard and annoy us doesn’t go to the point of actually confronting us.”

Paul Sonne contributed reporting from Berlin. Video production by Jamie Leventhal and McKinnon de Kuyper.

Maria Abi-Habib is an investigative correspondent reporting on Latin America and is based in Mexico City.

Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.

Christiaan Triebert is a Times reporter working on the Visual Investigations team, a group that combines traditional reporting with digital sleuthing and analysis of visual evidence to verify and source facts from around the world.

Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.

See more on: Nicolás Maduro

NY Times · Julian E. Barnes · January 12, 2026

4. The Perception War over Venezuela

Comment: Please go to the link to view the excellent full report from EdgeTheory.

The Perception War over Venezuela

January 11, 2026 | Ellie Munshi

https://edgetheory.com/resources/the-perception-war-over-venezuela

This EdgeTheory report synthesizes geospatial narrative mapping, narrative attribution, and emotion and network analysis surrounding the U.S. military capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. The brief focuses on coordinated Russian and Chinese information operations that frame the action as illegal aggression and resource-driven imperialism while positioning Moscow and Beijing as defenders of sovereignty and international law. Drawing from multi-platform collection streams, including state media, social media actors, RSS feeds, and X posts, this assessment maps how narratives of U.S. illegitimacy, neocolonialism, and the collapse of the rules-based order propagate across the global information environment. Using EdgeTheory’s narrative classification and amplification tools, the report traces how state-aligned, proxy, and influence-for-hire networks organize, interact, and reinforce emotionally charged messaging, providing a layered view of how adversarial information power seeks to undermine U.S. credibility, fracture allied cohesion, and normalize a sphere-of-influence model of global order.

Thank you! Your email has been submitted, and the full content is now visible below.

Introduction

The U.S. military capture of Nicolás Maduro triggered not only an international diplomatic crisis but an immediate and coordinated battle of narratives across the global information environment. Within hours, Russian and Chinese state aligned actors, media outlets, and social media networks began reframing the operation as an act of imperial aggression, a violation of international law, and a resource driven intervention aimed at Venezuelan oil. These narratives spread rapidly across X, state media, and syndicated news platforms, exploiting existing sensitivities around sovereignty, interventionism, and U.S. influence in Latin America. Rather than contesting operational facts directly, adversarial actors emphasized emotional framing, legal rhetoric, and historical grievance to shift attention away from Maduro’s alleged crimes and toward the legitimacy of U.S. power. The resulting information environment is highly polarized, with Russia and China leveraging the incident to undermine the rules based order, fracture allied consensus, and normalize a sphere of influence model that favors coercive state action.

5. China Has Been Gorging on Black-Market Oil. That’s Now Getting Harder.

Summary:

Washington’s takedown of Maduro and stepped-up maritime seizures is squeezing the shadow market for sanctioned crude that has quietly supplied a third of China’s oil imports from Iran, Russia and Venezuela at steep discounts. With Venezuelan barrels now likely rerouted to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries under selective sanctions relief, China loses cheap heavy crude and faces higher replacement costs once its stockpiles run dry. The move signals a broader American campaign to box out Russia and China in Latin America while enforcing energy sanctions during a period of global oversupply. China must reassess storage, sourcing and geopolitical risk as its illicit energy strategy becomes harder to sustain.

Comment: Venezuela is a move on the Go/Wei Chi/Baduk board that affects China. Does cutting off or significantly reducing major oil resources to China contribute to deterrence and prevention of an invasion of Taiwan?

Can the United States leverage energy sanctions and hemispheric power to turn China’s discount oil addiction into a long-term strategic liability without igniting a price shock that undermines allied cohesion and domestic political support?

China Has Been Gorging on Black-Market Oil. That’s Now Getting Harder.

WSJ

Official market for crude could soon start to feel disturbances as the U.S. and Europe crack down on illicit trading

By Carol Ryan

Jan. 12, 2026 5:30 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/china-has-been-gorging-on-black-market-oil-thats-now-getting-harder-3b5e1f0c?mod=hp_lead_pos6

The U.S. military last week released this photo of what it said was the seizure of a tanker in the North Atlantic. Handout/U.S. European Command/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

For now, the official oil price is calm. But the U.S. attack on Venezuela is creating pressure on the shadowy market for sanctioned crude and its biggest customer: China.

Brent, the main international benchmark, is trading around $63 a barrel and has risen less than $3 since President Nicolás Maduro was captured. Some additional supply from Venezuela has been priced into oil futures, but it will take time for this to be felt in the physical market. Even if there is a smooth political transition, it will take at least a couple of years to fix Venezuela’s neglected oil infrastructure and raise production.

The blockade around Venezuela and America’s seizure of oil tankers is a major warning to the market for “dark” barrels. The volume of oil under Western sanctions stands at a record 15% of the world’s supply, based on Kpler data. A shadow fleet of vessels that transports this sanctioned oil has ballooned to a fifth of global deadweight tonnage, data from maritime journal Lloyd’s List shows.

Western powers are ramping up pressure on these tankers: America seized three in international waters last week. Low oil prices and plentiful supply are giving U.S. and European leaders a rare window to do something about illicit trading without triggering a fresh bout of energy inflation for their voters.

Maduro’s overthrow is a problem for China. Along with India, it has been the biggest beneficiary of the flow of heavily discounted oil that Western sanctions have created. Beijing has been getting a third of its total oil imports from Iran, Russia and Venezuela, Kpler data shows.

This has lowered its energy bills. China saved nearly $9 a barrel on Venezuelan oil delivered in November, compared with what it would have paid for an equivalent heavy crude from Canada, according to commodity-data provider Argus Media.

Now, the roughly half a million barrels a day of Venezuelan crude that China used to mop up will likely be diverted to U.S. refineries along the Gulf Coast. The White House has said sanctions on Venezuela will be selectively rolled back in the coming days. This will shift supply from illicit channels to the mainstream market, reducing the discount on Venezuela’s crude and immediately boosting the country’s oil revenue.

Although heavy crude from Canada and other countries has become cheaper in recent days on expectations the U.S. will replace Canadian barrels in particular with Venezuelan oil, it is still much more expensive than what China is used to paying.

A strategy of buying cheap sanctioned oil has left China vulnerable to disruption. The attack on Venezuela is the third time in less than a year that Chinese energy imports have been threatened by the White House’s activities.

Israel’s attacks on Iran last summer, aided by the U.S., made Chinese buyers nervous about the possibility of strikes on the Islamic Republic’s energy export facilities. China’s independent “teapot” refineries in the Shandong region take 90% of Iran’s sanctioned crude.

In October, the U.S. sanctioned Russian oil producers Lukoil and Rosneft, making it riskier to buy Moscow’s crude. The latest upheaval in Venezuela vindicates China’s drive to hoard oil. The country has been buying barrels far in excess of its domestic needs over the past year and socking them away in storage.

Its heavy crude stockpiles are big enough to last until March, says Tom Reed, vice president of China crude at Argus Media. After that, it will need to find alternative suppliers, possibly Canada or Colombia.

And longer term, Beijing may need to reassess the risks of investing in Latin America, where the Trump administration seems determined to flex its muscles and box out Russia and China. China Concord Resources Corp. recently started developing two oil fields in Venezuela and plans to invest more than $1 billion in a project to reach 60,000 barrels of oil a day by the end of 2026, J.P. Morgan analysts say. The future of this and other upstream investments in Venezuela is now up in the air. Iran, too, is looking less reliable as antiregime protests there rage on.

A crackdown on illicit oil trading is risky, even with a global glut of crude. Russia is becoming more aggressive about defending its shadow fleet. Last week, it sent a submarine to the North Atlantic, where a tanker was pursued by the U.S. Coast Guard and ultimately seized. Last year, Moscow scrambled jets in Estonian airspace after Estonia’s navy tried to detain a Russian tanker.

Moscow is allowing more vessels carrying sanctioned oil to sail openly under the Russian flag, which is a new development. This means it is no longer hiding the real origin of the oil, and may be testing whether Europe and the U.S. have the stomach to seize more Russian ships. According to Lloyd’s List, 42 vessels have switched to sailing under the Russian flag over the past six months.

The oil price isn’t reflecting geopolitical risk, because there is so much spare supply. But pressure is building in the sanctioned market. Millions of barrels of dark oil are languishing in tankers on the ocean, unable to find buyers as enforcement steps up and producers try to find ways to skirt the latest round of sanctions. The black market is now so large, at 6 million barrels a day, that further disruptions to supply there could quickly send the official oil price higher.

Write to Carol Ryan at carol.ryan@wsj.com

WSJ

6. Trump ‘Inclined’ to Keep Exxon Out of Venezuela

Summary:

POTUS says he is “inclined” to exclude ExxonMobil from Venezuela’s oil revival after the company’s CEO called the country “uninvestable,” undermining White House efforts to attract $100 billion in U.S. energy investment post-Maduro. Trump criticized the executive’s caution and signaled that Washington, not Caracas, will control investment access. Chevron and others appeared more willing to commit, while Trump’s executive actions aim to protect Venezuelan oil revenues and shape the rebuilding of the industry under U.S. oversight. Exxon’s hesitation reflects legal and commercial risks rooted in Venezuela’s unstable frameworks and past asset seizures.

Comment: Does privileging politically aligned U.S. firms in Venezuela strengthen American leverage and narrative power across the hemisphere, or does it risk undermining market confidence and slowing the very reconstruction POTUS seeks to control?

Trump ‘Inclined’ to Keep Exxon Out of Venezuela

WSJ

President says he didn’t like comments from company’s CEO during a meeting Friday at the White House

By Annie Linskey

Updated Jan. 11, 2026 9:26 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-inclined-to-keep-exxon-out-of-venezuela-39ea78c7?mod=hp_lead_pos5

Darren Woods, center, CEO of Exxon Mobil, during a meeting with President Trump and oil and gas executives at the White House on Friday. Jim Lo Scalzo/POOL/EPA/Shutterstock

WASHINGTON—President Trump said he might block Exxon Mobil from drilling in Venezuela after the company’s top executive publicly acknowledged the barriers involved in doing business in the country.

“I’ll probably be inclined to keep Exxon out,” Trump said Sunday evening, speaking to reporters traveling with him aboard Air Force One.

During a meeting with oil-company executives at the White House on Friday, Exxon Chief Executive Darren Woods said that Venezuela is currently “uninvestable” without significant changes to the country’s commercial frameworks, legal system and hydrocarbon laws. He expressed confidence those changes could be put in place with the Trump administration and Venezuelan government working together.

“I didn’t like their response. They’re playing too cute,” Trump said Sunday of Woods’s comments, adding that other companies want to invest in Venezuela.

Exxon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump has been pushing U.S. energy companies to invest in Venezuela following the capture of the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. But some companies have expressed concerns about entering the volatile country.

At the White House on Friday, Trump told the oil-industry executives that the U.S. would provide unspecified security guarantees to companies that go into Venezuela and invest in the country’s ailing energy infrastructure.

Exxon has a troubled history in Venezuela. Its assets there were nationalized for the second time in 2007. The company sued for $12 billion but recovered only a fraction of that sum. Woods said Exxon would need to see some pretty significant changes from what it has seen there historically to consider entering the country a third time.

He said he could have a technical team visit to assess the current state of Venezuelan assets within the next couple of weeks. The company has a major oil project in neighboring Guyana.

ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance expressed similar reservations about re-entering the country during Friday’s meeting. He told Trump his company is currently the largest nonsovereign credit holder in Venezuela and is owed $12 billion. ConocoPhillips also left the country in 2007.

Trump dismissed the possibility of covering any of those debts. “We’re not gonna look at what people lost in the past,” he said Friday. “You’re gonna make a lot of money, but we’re not going to go back.”

Oil prices barely budged after the U.S. ousted Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and President Trump pledged billions to revive the country’s oil infrastructure. WSJ’s David Uberti breaks down the market reaction. Photo: Matias Delacroix/Associated Press

Chevron is the only major U.S. company currently active in Venezuela. Vice Chairman Mark Nelson said at Friday’s meeting that his company can ramp up production relatively quickly—but even he stopped short of committing to a big investment during the public part of the meeting.

On Sunday, Trump posted an image on Truth Social that referred to himself as the “Acting President of Venezuela.”

After the raid, Trump said Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado “doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country” to lead the country. He instead threw his support behind Delcy Rodríguez, a Maduro lieutenant who is serving as acting president of the country.

Trump is expected to meet with Machado at the White House this week. The president told reporters on Sunday that he plans to meet with Rodríguez “at some point,” adding, “She’s been very good.”

Write to Annie Linskey at annie.linskey@wsj.com

Appeared in the January 12, 2026, print edition as 'Trump ‘Inclined’ to Exclude Exxon'.

WSJ

7. Washington’s New Lobbyists: Paid Online Influencers With Few Rules

Summary:

A new class of paid political influencers now operates as hybrid lobbyists, propagandists and media personalities without the transparency rules that bind traditional press, PACs or foreign agents. Corporate, foreign and factional interests exploit this ecosystem to shape sentiment and influence access to POTUS and senior officials. The line between persuasion, narrative shaping and covert advocacy is blurring. This is not merely partisan drama. It reflects a strategic shift in how influence, legitimacy and agenda-setting now occur in a digital battlespace where foreign governments can hire “authentic” voices to launder narratives. It raises national security questions about cognitive warfare, perception management and democratic resilience.

Comment: This has national security implications beyond domestic partisan politics.

If the decisive terrain of the cognitive domain is “who defines reality,” what happens when foreign states can rent domestic authenticity at scale without disclosure, oversight, or counterintelligence visibility? Is this foreign interference or meddling with US elections?

What narrative intelligence architecture does the United States require to map, attribute, and contest influence operations that look like lifestyle marketing but function as political warfare?

Can a democracy defend itself in the cognitive domain if market incentives, legal loopholes, and partisan incentives all privilege influence over transparency, and persuasion over truth.

POTUS told us how to defend ourselves in his 2017 NSS. I know it is old school, but sometimes old school works best.

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access the 2017 NSS HERE

Washington’s New Lobbyists: Paid Online Influencers With Few Rules

Corporate and foreign interests pour money into getting pro-Trump social-media stars to push their causes

and Eliza Collins

Jan. 11, 2026 9:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/washington-lobbyists-paid-online-influencers-few-rules-69eccd13

Last summer, Donald Trump’s 28-year-old former campaign aide Alex Bruesewitz had some new advice for the president: reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug. “Nearly 70% of Republican voters support Trump on this. No brainer!,” he said to more than 640,000 followers on X.

What Bruesewitz left out of the post: A political-action committee funded by legal marijuana’s biggest players had just paid him $300,000.

Trump’s return to the White House has transformed the federal government and upended the business of lobbying, creating a new class of Washington operatives that blur the lines between consulting, advocacy and journalism.

Corporate and foreign interests that used to rely primarily on paid lobbyists to pitch their case to lawmakers and administration officials are instead pouring money into trying to get their cause promoted by a group of young, conservative influencers known to be close to Trump’s staff.

A camera-ready pack of Gen-Z social-media natives—many of whom were too young to vote when Trump announced his first run for office—are reaping the rewards. They don’t work for traditional news outlets and are thus unshackled from newsroom ethics rules, such as the typical ban on accepting gifts worth more than $25. They don’t have to follow the disclosure laws that apply to big-money super PACs or lobbyists. And they have large followings eager to hear pro-Trump views, a gold mine for those looking to sway both Washington and the public.

Israel made plans over the past year to spend $900,000 on an influencer campaign with a U.S. audience, according to disclosure documents, as Israel fights negative sentiment on the right. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with conservative social-media stars on at least two of his visits.

The solar energy and health industries have paid thousands of dollars to influencers to support their interests, according to people who have been offered or participated in such deals. Qatar, beverage interests and others have courted those with online political followings.

MAGA influencers are turning access to the White House into lucrative new businesses. Trump’s former campaign manager Brad Parscale has pivoted from campaigning to running a prominent firm that specializes in connecting influencers to companies and others willing to pay for their posts.

Guests at the Power 30 Awards inauguration party. kevin mohatt/Reuters

Alex Bruesewitz at the Power 30 Awards party with now-fiancée Carolina Urrea. kevin mohatt/Reuters

Bruesewitz’s comments had focused attention on the marijuana reclassification issue. In August, boxer Mike Tyson reposted Bruesewitz’s remarks that said reclassification would be “well received.” In October, Bruesewitz, who has no role in the administration and works for an outside political group aligned with the president, told The Free Press it would be a “politically savvy move.”

In December, Trump overrode objections from Republican lawmakers and directed the federal government to reclassify the drug.

A White House spokesperson said “it’s essential that we meet Americans where they are and allow media from across the ideological spectrum to cover the White House,” and that the administration “is adapting to the new media landscape in 2025.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump heard from many different people about reclassifying marijuana and decided doing it was “the best policy and political decision to make for the country.”

Party by the pool

One of the largest historic spenders on Washington lobbying, Qatar, is pursuing an influencer strategy that appears to be paying dividends. In November, it sponsored trips to Doha for several pro-Trump social-media personalities, promising interactions with members of Congress who were also there and celebrities—and VIP Formula One tickets with paddock access that regularly go for more than $10,000 apiece.

“Thanksgiving looking a little different this year,” former journalist Caitlin Sinclair wrote on Instagram alongside a photo of a glimmering hotel pool at night, and the outside of a Qatari outpost of Cipriani, the classic New York Italian spot, where partygoers inside ate oysters while a woman in a sequin dress sang “Stand by Me.”

Those who went to Doha said they weren’t paid to post specific messages about the trip, but some offered glowing reviews. Rob Smith, a veteran and gay pro-Trump commentator, Instagrammed a photo of himself beaming next to Serena Williams. “TBH I had ZERO clue that [Doha] was such a cultural hub,” he wrote in the caption.

In another post after the trip, Smith, who has close to half a million followers on X, said his visit had been “eye-opening” and that he wanted to help “keep America strong by understanding and highlighting the unique and mutually beneficial military and financial partnerships that we share with Qatar.”

After Trump ally Laura Loomer, who is critical of Qatar, posted online about the influencers who took the trip and raised questions over whether they were “shilling for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood,” Smith found himself in an online firestorm.

“I think it was an attempt to pre-emptively discredit anything I have to say in the future,” Smith said, adding he thought it would benefit him “to go and experience something for myself.”

The trip “provided an opportunity to gain firsthand insight into Qatar and to ask questions directly to Qataris, rather than relying on inaccurate or misleading narratives,” said Ali Al-Ansari, a spokesperson at the Embassy of Qatar in Washington.

Loomer herself has been suspected of being paid for some of her positions, but she has denied taking money for specific social-media posts. She has received funding from those with politically aligned interests, according to people familiar with the matter.

The influencer campaigns are part lobbying effort and part traditional advertising, but because the players are speaking directly to their audience, they can appear more casual and more authentic than traditional efforts. People respond differently to advertisements than to messages that they think are authentic opinions, campaign finance experts said.

“It becomes very easy for a foreign or a corporate interest group to significantly shape Americans’ views of political issues in secret if they can launder their message through an army of influencers,” said Brendan Fischer, director at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center.

Attention from White House

The campaigns frequently seek to influence White House policy.

While many traditional lobbyists and the press have had their access to Trump curtailed during his second term, Trump aides follow the work of certain influencers online, inviting them to the West Wing for briefings with Cabinet officials and top White House officials, such as Leavitt, the press secretary.

Those known to have a good relationship with Trump’s assistant Natalie Harp and other White House officials can command thousands of dollars more per post than others, according to a person familiar with the business. If Harp notices a policy position picking up steam among well-watched social-media stars, she’s known to print out the relevant posts and give them to the president as evidence of what prominent supporters are saying.

Lobbyists and PR professionals who hire influencers in Washington said campaigns can range from a few hundred dollars a post to tens of thousands of dollars. Some popular accounts have doubled or tripled the price-per-post they net during the Trump administration as demand soars.

Sinclair, who is 29, received $67,500 in the past year from the MAHA PAC to host videos about issues of interest to the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. aligned movement, according to the organization’s financial disclosures. “Creators have the attention right now,” she said in an interview. “In 2026, I believe attention is going to be the currency of power.”

Caitlin Sinclair in Phoenix in December. Adriana Zehbrauskas for WSJ

CJ Pearson, a 23-year-old conservative who advised the Trump campaign on reaching young voters, is in regular touch with top Trump officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and calls Leavitt a personal friend. He texted with Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI who stepped down this month, about football at the University of Alabama, where he dropped out of college a few years ago.

The Solar Energy Industries Association hired him to promote solar power for conservatives, after Trump routinely criticized renewable power. In a September video, standing next to a sunny window, Pearson said that solar is the ultimate symbol of freedom, comparing being dependent on electric power to Biden-era pandemic restrictions.

“There’s a natural inclination on the right to be against” solar energy, Pearson said in an interview, given Republican efforts to cut green energy tax credits.

The solar campaign didn’t change policy, but Pearson has inked so many deals he launched his own firm to help connect peers with companies seeking influence. “I’ve never seen more interest in working with creators than right now,” he said.

He has celebrated his growing business by throwing lavish parties, renting out a nightclub in Washington over Halloween weekend for a costumed bash where “Hustlin’” rapper Rick Ross appeared and Pearson gave away orange-and-black MAGA hats. (One White House aide arrived in a reflective construction vest labeled “BALLROOM CONSTRUCTION TEAM,” the Daily Mail reported.)

CJ Pearson, center without glasses, and other conservative influencers at a party in Washington in July. Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post/Getty Images

Courting influencers “is probably the best use of time that you can spend as a policy person or campaign person,” said Sean Spicer, Trump’s onetime press secretary who has pivoted to hosting a daily streaming news show on YouTube.

Federal law mandates lobbyists and PACs register with the federal government and disclose basic information such as how much money is being spent, but most rules don’t cover social-media personalities, who play a new, murky role in politics.

At times, firms disclose they are paying influencers in a general way but don’t report who receives the payments.

Many transactions with influencers are brokered through informal deals with few details in writing, influencers and lobbyists said.

The influencers take money while also acting as providers of information and allies of the president. The laws that do apply to influencers, such as Federal Trade Commission rules mandating that paid ad campaigns are labeled as such, are lightly enforced.

Influencer Debra Lea, 25, launched to internet fame after a video criticizing modern feminism. She has at various times acted as an adviser to government officials, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.); questioned administration officials at White House briefings as a member of the White House approved “new media”; and been paid to promote everything from the solar industry to the prediction market platform Kalshi. She’s a frequent Fox News commentator, and she has appeared there as a “brand voice” for the Parler social-media site.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, she said the most she has made from a single contract was more than $20,000 to represent them during TV hits, but she declined to name the company.

Debra Lea in New York in December. Julian Rigg/WSJ

She briefly broke with Johnson when she was paid by the solar industry to try to save credits in the GOP megabill. “The Big Beautiful Bill passing through Congress is definitely big but it can be a lot more beautiful,” she said in one video. The bill, signed into law on July 4, phased out the solar credits.

In November, Trump posted that one of Lea’s Fox News appearances had been “GREAT.” Several friends in the administration reached out to congratulate her, she said.

“I girl bossed my way to the top, literally from TikTok to the White House,” Lea said in the interview.

She has said she isn’t worried about the ethics of working in so many lanes. The only problem, she said, might be that since she is involved in so many different things she could be considered not an expert in any one issue. “My conflict comes with being spread thin by doing everything,” Lea said.

Her agent, Reid Pakula, said most deals his company, IF Management, does with political influencers range between $5,000 and $20,000 per post.

NASA and marijuana

People with personal interests before Trump have also started testing the waters with an influencer strategy.

After billionaire Jared Isaacman saw the administration pull his nomination to become NASA administrator after Trump’s blow up with Elon Musk, he hosted independent pro-MAGA commentators Benny Johnson and Nick Sortor at a private Montana hangar where he keeps a fleet of fighter jets.

While his allies pushed for him to be renominated, Isaacman treated Johnson and Sortor to rides in the jets and a tour of his private, Star Wars-themed “cantina” bar that overlooks the planes. It was “one of the best days of my life,” Johnson said in a video he posted online.

In the weeks after the trip, Johnson and others advocated online for Isaacman’s renomination. Johnson called him “the man who could save NASA.” Isaacman said he didn’t pay the men beyond covering the trip and cost of flying the jets. He was eventually renominated by Trump and in December was confirmed to run the agency.

Benny Johnson at a Turning Point USA event in December. Cheney Orr/Reuters

People watched Johnson speak during the Turning Point USA event. Caitlin O’Hara/Reuters

While companies have for years experimented with paying influencers, Trump’s 2024 campaign to return to Washington, which was powered in part by social media, expanded the scale of such efforts.

In July 2024, a political committee backing a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana in Florida paid ex-entertainment lawyer and commentator Rogan O’Handley $59,000, according to its filings. O’Handley, who posts to more than 10 million followers across platforms under the name @DC_Draino, posted on Aug. 8, 2024, in favor of Trump reclassifying the drug. A legalization policy was one of several that would “win him young voters in record numbers,” O’Handley wrote on X. On Aug. 26, the pro-marijuana initiative paid him an additional $105,000.

O’Handley said in a statement that the money “was for multiple posts on my Instagram (not X) and I openly disclosed on each post that it was paid for.” He added, “I have been a proponent of decriminalizing marijuana for years.”

Soda pitch

Democrats have had limited success in developing a parallel network of influencers. The Biden-Harris 2024 campaign did pay influencer firms, and Democratic strategists are trying to build an ecosystem of influencers to support liberal politics. Groups such as Chorus and Double Tap Democracy are trying to incubate and train a new generation of influencers on the left.

Foreign governments are meanwhile turning their attention to courting and hiring those on the right.

Israel’s Netanyahu has sat down at least twice with American podcasters and influencers in the past year. At Blair House across the street from the White House in April—where his guests included Spicer, MAHA advocate Jessica Reed Kraus and podcaster Tim Pool—he urged support for U.S. intervention in Iran, which Trump would eventually carry out in June.

At the Israeli Consulate in New York during a September meeting timed to the United Nations General Assembly, Netanyahu called on the influencers to fight back against anti-Israel sentiment on the right. “We have to fight back. How do we fight back? Our influencers,” Netanyahu said, according to a video posted on Instagram by Lea, who attended. “That community, they’re very important.”

In September, a newly formed firm called Bridges Partners registered as a foreign agent for the government of Israel and disclosed plans for a $900,000 influencer program dubbed “Esther Project.”

The project, which started during the summer of 2025 and was scheduled to continue until the end of the year, would cost up to $250,000 a month when it was in full swing, regulatory disclosures said.

A representative for the Israeli government didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Lea with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sara Netanyahu. Debra Lea

A growing number of prominent Republicans are launching new businesses that pay influencers. One, Urban Legend, boasts a proprietary platform where influencers can log in and choose from a menu of options available for politically connected sponsored content. The company’s leader, Ory Rinat, was a special government employee during the early months of the administration but has since left, White House officials said.

The mechanics of the new influence campaigns spilled into the open in March when Influenceable, a company co-founded by Parscale that hires conservative influencers, sent a request to several X accounts asking them to criticize an effort in several states to prohibit using food stamps to buy soda. The Influenceable offer instructed recipients to post about “the dangers of government overregulation” in restricting soda on food aid, and included a payment of up to $1,000. Among the suggested posts was a photo of Trump drinking Diet Coke while riding in a golf cart.

Several influencers took up the offer, leading to a conspicuous rush of posts online about soda—until Sortor, the pro-MAGA commentator, posted the pitch from Influenceable online, saying that it was a dirty tactic meant to manipulate people. It led some accounts to delete their posts on the subject. The firm declined to comment on the effort or identify the client sponsoring it.

“The eyeballs have moved to social, so now more money moves to social,” Parscale said.

Write to Maggie Severns at maggie.severns@wsj.com, Natalie Andrews at natalie.andrews@wsj.com, Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com and Eliza Collins at eliza.collins@wsj.com

WSJ

8. The Chinese Company Taking On the World’s Memory-Chip Giants

Summary:

CXMT has emerged as China’s national DRAM champion, preparing a $4 billion listing and capturing roughly 5% of the global market amid the AI memory boom. Backed by state capital and major tech firms, it accelerated despite U.S. export controls, exploiting IP acquisitions, talent poaching and legacy patents. CXMT aims to fill gaps created as Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron prioritize high-margin AI memory. Seoul has charged former Samsung employees with leaking trade secrets, while U.S. lawmakers debate blacklisting. If CXMT supplies Huawei’s AI processors, Beijing edges closer to an autonomous semiconductor stack, reducing vulnerability to Western chokepoints and strengthening China’s AI industrial base.

Comment: Does CXMT’s rise signal that U.S. semiconductor controls are forcing China to innovate around chokepoints faster than expected, implying that we must rethink our long-term competitive theory rather than assume indefinite leverage.

The Chinese Company Taking On the World’s Memory-Chip Giants

WSJ

As AI demand drives prices up, CXMT overcomes Washington’s curbs to vie with Micron and South Korean leaders

Yang Jie

in Tokyo and

Jiyoung Sohn

in Seoul

Jan. 11, 2026 11:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/tech/the-chinese-company-taking-on-the-worlds-memory-chip-giants-78dfea55?mod=hp_lead_pos10

DRAM memory wafers are displayed at a convention in Hefei, China. Cfoto/DDP/Zuma Press

China’s national champion in memory-chip manufacturing is preparing a $4 billion share offering after making significant technical advances, upending an industry dominated by South Korean and U.S. companies.

The offering by ChangXin Memory Technologies, known as CXMT, is one of the biggest by a chip maker this century and would normally be great news for tech companies starved of memory chips during the artificial-intelligence boom. AI data centers have been grabbing chip capacity that would otherwise serve the makers of computers, videogame consoles and smartphones, driving up prices for American consumers.

But even though CXMT intends to boost production and says it wants more international business, the geopolitical walls are high. Successive U.S. administrations have tightened curbs on Chinese chip makers.

And prosecutors in South Korea, home to memory-chip leaders Samsung Electronics 005930 -0.14%decrease; red down pointing triangle and SK Hynix, are alleging that some of CXMT’s rise comes from theft of trade secrets obtained from former Samsung employees.

Memory chips are like the fuel lines feeding the engines of computing machines. As AI engines made by Nvidia of the U.S. and others get more powerful, they need more memory, both the traditional kind and an advanced type called high-bandwidth memory.

A single AI server now uses more dynamic random-access memory than entire fleets of laptops, and the price of conventional DRAM is forecast to surge more than 50% this quarter compared with the previous quarter, according to research firm TrendForce.

Until recently, the global DRAM market was dominated by three companies—Samsung, SK Hynix and U.S.-based Micron Technology. Those makers have pivoted toward higher-margin AI memory chips, and Micron is retreating from parts of the consumer market.

That opens the door for CXMT. The company was formed a decade ago after a bid by a state-backed Chinese company to acquire Micron failed. A local government in the eastern city of Hefei decided it should create its own DRAM maker.

The company, now led by U.S.-trained chip engineer Zhu Yiming, garnered support from a national tech fund and a who’s-who list of Chinese tech companies including Alibaba and Xiaomi.

CXMT said in late December that it had submitted plans to list on Shanghai’s Nasdaq-like tech board, aiming to raise the equivalent of $4 billion. Recent capital injections have valued the company at more than $20 billion, analysts said.

CXMT is among the stars in a roster of Chinese companies across the semiconductor industry that the government hopes will lift the country’s self-sufficiency during its trade war with the U.S. From manufacturing specialist SMIC to equipment maker AMEC, Beijing is pushing the industry to develop local alternatives to everything the U.S. and its allies produce.

CXMT’s prospectus shows the company has rapidly advanced from prototypes to mass production in just a few years. Revenue nearly tripled over two years to more than $3 billion in 2024. Analysts said its process technology has come within a generation or two of the industry leaders, and the company’s global DRAM market share has risen to around 5% by revenue.

The progress comes despite U.S. curbs on China’s access to advanced chip-making equipment.

“The progress CXMT has made in the face of U.S. end-use controls on memory has surprised the industry,” said Paul Triolo, technology policy lead at consulting firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group.

Triolo said U.S. concerns would be heightened if CXMT could supply high-bandwidth memory chips to Huawei, whose AI processors represent China’s closest domestic alternative to Nvidia’s AI accelerators.

According to DSET, a think tank backed by the Taiwanese government, CXMT built its foundation on the ruins of others, acquiring patents from the bankrupt German chip maker Qimonda and raiding Taiwan’s talent pool.

In December, Korean prosecutors said they had indicted 10 people including a former Samsung executive and employees on charges of transferring secrets to CXMT including technology to help CXMT mass-produce advanced DRAM chips.

The suspects allegedly worked systematically to avoid detection, joining CXMT through shell companies, shifting offices and disguising travel to China by routing trips through other locations. They exchanged a coded warning using four heart emojis to warn each other in case South Korea tried to bar their travel or arrest them, prosecutors said.

The prosecutors said the leak of trade secrets caused billions of dollars in losses to Samsung and South Korea’s semiconductor-driven economy.

Samsung and CXMT didn’t respond to requests for comment. Prosecutors didn’t disclose the names of the defendants.

U.S. rules don’t currently bar American companies from doing business with CXMT, but U.S. lawmakers already have signaled their discomfort.

In 2022, Apple abandoned plans to use NAND flash-storage memory chips from China’s Yangtze Memory Technologies after congressional opposition. A year later, several members of Congress urged the Commerce Department to consider adding CXMT to the department’s export‑control blacklist, citing concerns over intellectual‑property theft and the firm’s role in China’s industrial strategy.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Should U.S. lawmakers take further steps to respond to the rise of Chinese chip-making? Join the conversation below.

Gregory Allen, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said CXMT’s pursuit of high-bandwidth memory for AI computing was particularly concerning. U.S. export controls have blocked Huawei from acquiring HBM chips in recent years, and having a company like CXMT fill the gap would be extremely valuable to Beijing, he said.

“The rise of CXMT translates to the rise of domestic Chinese AI chip-making,” Allen said.

Zhu, the company’s chief executive, studied at China’s elite Tsinghua University and in New York at what is now called Stony Brook University. He worked in Silicon Valley and previously founded a Chinese maker of specialized memory chips.

Zhu told Tsinghua’s magazine more than a decade ago, “Whoever leads in memory technology will be able to dominate the entire integrated circuit industry.”

Write to Yang Jie at jie.yang@wsj.com and Jiyoung Sohn at jiyoung.sohn@wsj.com

Appeared in the January 12, 2026, print edition as 'Chinese Company Takes On World’s Memory-Chip Giants'.

WSJ

9. As Trump threatens Iran strikes, China denounces use of force in Middle East

Summary:

China publicly rejects POTUS’s threats to strike Iran, framing any U.S. action as illegitimate interference and a violation of sovereignty while calling for “peace and stability” and a political resolution. Beijing reaffirms Iran as a strategic partner and key trading counterpart, condemns the earlier U.S. operation in Venezuela, and casts Washington as self-appointed “international policeman.” Chinese officials signal they will protect their citizens in Iran but avoid direct confrontation with the United States. The statement underscores Beijing’s narrative: defend non-Western regimes against U.S. coercion, preserve energy and economic ties, and present China as champion of noninterference amid widening unrest.

Comment: How will China’s defense of Iranian sovereignty and its criticism of U.S. force projection in the Middle East shape global perceptions of Beijing as a putative guardian of state sovereignty, and what are the second order effects on U.S. narrative and deterrence credibility in the Asia-Indo-Pacific and on the Korean Peninsula? What happens when the Chinese narrative resonates in the Asia-Indo-Pacific and Global South? How do we counter that (or offer a superior narrative)?

As Trump threatens Iran strikes, China denounces use of force in Middle East

Beijing calls for ‘peace and stability’ in the region amid escalating protests in Iran

Dewey Simin Beijing

Published: 6:14pm, 12 Jan 2026

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3339609/trump-threatens-iran-strikes-china-denounces-use-force-middle-east

China has voiced opposition to the use of force in the Middle East as US President Donald Trump threatened to strike Iran over escalating protests there.

Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning on Monday said Beijing hoped Iran’s government and its people would overcome “current difficulties” and uphold stability in the country.

“We always oppose interference in other countries’ internal affairs,” she said at a press conference, responding to a question about Trump’s threats to attack Iran.

“The sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries should be respected and [we] oppose the use or threat of force in international relations. We call on parties to act in ways conducive to peace and stability in the Middle East.”

Hundreds of protesters and security officers dead as Iran steps up efforts to quell unrest

The protests in Iran started in December over rising inflation and soaring food prices but quickly broadened into widespread anti-government demonstrations. The Iranian government responded with a violent crackdown that has left over 500 people dead, according to rights groups.

Trump on Sunday indicated that he was considering a range of responses to the growing unrest, saying it appeared Iran had crossed his previously stated red line of protesters being killed.

“We’re looking at it very seriously,” Trump said, according to reports. “The military is looking at it, and we’re looking at some very strong options. We’ll make a determination.”

Reuters reported that Trump was set to meet senior advisers on Tuesday to discuss options for Iran. The Wall Street Journal earlier said the options included military strikes, using cyber weapons and widening sanctions. Trump has also claimed that Iran has proposed negotiations.

On Sunday, Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned Washington against a “miscalculation”, saying that if Iran was attacked, “all US bases and ships will be our legitimate target”.

Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi suggested that the protests had turned violent “to give an excuse” for the US to intervene militarily in the country but added that Iran was “ready for war but also dialogue”.

Trump’s threat to strike Iran followed Washington’s attack on Venezuela earlier this month and its abduction of Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s former leader. Beijing condemned the US military intervention as a violation of international law and Venezuelan sovereignty and accused Washington of playing the role of an “international policeman”.

Iran counts China as its key backer and largest trading partner, and the relationship has taken on greater strategic significance as Tehran faces growing isolation from the West.

In September, when Chinese President Xi Jinping met his Iranian counterpart Masoud Pezeshkian in Beijing, he described ties as having “stood the test of changes in the world and maintained steady and healthy development”.

The Chinese leader said Beijing supported Tehran in safeguarding its sovereignty, territorial integrity and “national dignity”, as well as defending its legitimate rights and interests.

Mao, the Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, on Monday said that China was closely monitoring the situation in Iran and that it would do its best to protect the safety of Chinese citizens there amid the escalating violence.

Dewey Sim

Dewey Sim is a reporter for the China desk covering Beijing's foreign policy. He was previously writing about Singapore and Southeast Asia for the Post's Asia desk. A Singapore native, Dewey joined the Post in 2019 and is a graduate of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and

10. Could China execute a special forces operation like the US precision Maduro abduction?

Summary:

The article argues that while the PLA now fields modern SOF units, fifth gen aircraft, cyber and EW tools, it still lacks the integrated all domain command, aviation lift, stealth, electronic warfare, intelligence fusion and combat experience that enabled Delta Force’s three hour Maduro abduction. Chinese SOF are dispersed across services, with no JSOC equivalent and no organic lift, and rely on helicopters and conventional forces. U.S. assessments conclude Beijing would struggle to execute a similar stand alone precision raid today, though China could attempt a cruder, more destructive decapitation strike, especially in a Taiwan scenario, if ordered.

Comment: I recommend prudent caution in the face of reports like these.

If U.S. and allied planners accept this reassuring assessment at face value, how do we avoid drifting into complacency and strategic surprise when a learning adversary like the PLA compresses the gap faster than our assumptions and bureaucratic cycles adjust?

Given China’s current SOF and all domain shortfalls, should U.S. strategy emphasize widening those gaps through counterintelligence, EW, and alliance exercises, or focus instead on hardening leadership, bases and information networks against a future Chinese version of Operation Absolute Resolve?

Could China execute a special forces operation like the US precision Maduro abduction?

The Pentagon sees China’s 20,000-30,000 special operation personnel as limited by logistics support and fragmented command structure

Liu ZhenandZhao Ziwen

Published: 10:00pm, 11 Jan 2026

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3339503/could-china-execute-special-forces-operation-us-precision-maduro-abduction

Liu ZhenandZhao Ziwen

Published: 10:00pm, 11 Jan 2026

The extreme precision of the US in its Venezuelan operation shows why nations must be able to execute a complex special surgical strike, according to analysts who said China had long pursued the capability but had yet to master it.

In a complex joint endeavour integrating its air force, navy, intelligence agencies and space and cyber units, the US military’s elite Delta Force special mission unit completed its precision raid in Caracas – from infiltration to exfiltration – in less than three hours, abducting Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife and taking them to the US.

“Operation Absolute Resolve” was a culmination of years of developing multi-domain operations, lessons from decades of global engagement – both successes and failures – and the advanced integration of intelligence from many sources, according to Joshua Arostegui, chair of the China Landpower Studies Centre at the US Army War College.

What does Maduro’s removal mean for Chinese investments in Venezuela?

Thanks to China’s rapid military modernisation, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has many of the assets the US showcased in Venezuela, including fifth-generation stealth fighters, modern naval systems, cyber and electronic warfare platforms, advanced helicopters and precision munitions.

But there was a critical gap between China and the US in integrating them for “all-domain operations”, Arostegui noted.

“The ability to effectively enable the ‘convergence’ of the different domains [that] those weapons and systems use or control is what differentiates the US military and the PLA currently,” he said.

Despite years of efforts to improve its own all-domain operation capabilities, the PLA would still “struggle” to carry out a stand-alone special operation similar to the US model, rather than acting as part of a larger campaign, Arostegui added.

Structure

China is estimated to have between 20,000 and 30,000 special operation personnel, reportedly consisting of its most qualified and highly trained officers and soldiers and equipped with advanced weaponry. They are tasked with three primary missions: direct action, special reconnaissance and counterterrorism.

An apparent limitation of the PLA’s special operation forces, as highlighted by the Pentagon’s China Military Power Report 2024, is their fragmented command structure and logistics support.

The PLA Ground Force’s 13 group armies, along with the Xinjiang and Tibet military districts, each maintain a Special Operations Forces (SOF) brigade. In addition, SOF units are assigned to the navy’s marine corps, the air force’s airborne corps, the rocket force’s reconnaissance regiment and the People’s Armed Police (PAP).

“There is no national-level special operations command responsible for all SOF activities. PLA SOF does not have organic or dedicated infrastructure or support and, therefore, must rely on conventional forces to support their missions,” the report said.

It said the major overhaul of the PLA since late 2015, while emphasising joint operations at the theatre-command level, did not create joint task forces to encourage increased coordination between the services.

The Chinese military also lacked a dedicated unit for more strategic-level missions, said Dennis Wilder, a professor at Georgetown University and a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

“China does not have the equivalent of Seal Team Six or Delta Force for this kind of strategic insertion,” he said.

The structure showed a continued expectation that special operations units were designed to support conventional forces or their service branches, Arostegui noted.

In earlier PLA writings detailing plans for a joint island landing campaign against Taiwan, special operations units were expected to “harass” the adversary behind enemy lines to create an operational opening for the main ground forces.

Since mid-2025, changes in state media references to the PLA group army-level SOF brigades have sparked speculation about further structural reforms. However, no details have been disclosed, and there was still no evidence that SOF personnel now fell under a dedicated special operations headquarters, Arostegui said.

Beijing views Taiwan as a part of China to be reunited, by force if necessary. Most countries, including the US, do not recognise the island as an independent state, but Washington is opposed to any attempt to take the self-governed island by force and is committed to supplying it with weapons.

Tensions across the Taiwan Strait have escalated since 2016 when the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) came to power on the island and as Beijing has ratcheted up military pressure in recent years to warn against separatist moves in Taiwan.

Hardware capabilities

The PLA lacks adequate aviation assets to carry out long-range insertion of special forces to conduct strategic-level direct action or reconnaissance, mainly relying on helicopters to transport the SOF units for airborne and air assault missions, according to the Pentagon report.

Regarding a cross-strait VIP capture operation in particular, PLA SOF units were also constrained by limited helicopter numbers, Arostegui said.

“While SOF personnel train with affiliated aviation units, they do not have their own organic heliborne lift, leaving them unable to train regularly with such capabilities,” he said, adding that the US helicopter pilots in the Maduro operation were trained for such risky manoeuvres and missions.

Ni Lexiong, a professor in the political science department at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, said Washington’s electronic warfare, which suppressed Venezuela’s radar system, and aircraft stealth capabilities played a major part in securing air superiority – capabilities that Beijing still needed to improve.

“Electromagnetic suppression technology, namely electronic jamming or electronic warfare, and its air force’s stealth technology, coupled with America’s battlefield experience – these are three crucial dimensions [for the strike],” Ni said.

Experience

In listing major international deployments the PLA special forces had taken part in – including earthquake search and rescue in Nepal, war evacuation in Yemen, counterpiracy in the Gulf of Aden and border reinforcement after a clash with India – the Pentagon report concluded that, despite unilateral and multilateral training, the PLA lacked real-world combat experience.

Arostegui said that in terms of individual target hunting and seizure missions, some special forces teams in western China might have experience in missions against suspected terrorists or insurgents.

“But those types of missions would be much smaller in scale and limited in the need for joint integration,” he said.

Although the PLA was not likely to be currently capable of carrying out a US-style precision strike operation, they had other options to complete a “decapitation” if ordered, although probably with much higher collateral damage, Arostegui added.

“It could still have a similar effect but would not be as complex.”

The PLA has conducted simulation training in recent years, with state media stating that the military’s training base in Zhurihe in Inner Mongolia features life-size mock-ups of Taiwan’s presidential office and parliament.

But no information has been revealed on exercise scenarios carried out by the PLA there.

How Maduro’s abduction is set to change Latin America

Intelligence

Analysts pointed out that the success of the Delta Force operation was paired with a crucial strength – America’s ability to gather intelligence – a power that the PLA must strengthen to chase its biggest rival.

Song Zhongping, a former Chinese military instructor, said PLA special forces had sufficient capabilities and had been tested through their anti-terrorism actions. However, intelligence would be a key factor in whether the PLA could achieve a lightning strike or a “targeted elimination”.

“The US military, comparatively, achieved this through the coordinated efforts of various agencies and intelligence departments, obtaining comprehensive first-hand intelligence. Additionally, they secured the support of informants to ensure the precision of their intelligence,” he said.

Wilder also highlighted the importance of intelligence in the Caracas operation. He said it succeeded because of “superb covert intelligence gathering, months of careful preparation, the use of offensive cyber and electronic warfare”.

“The relevance is that China has a long way still to go to reach the US gold standard,” he said.

Liu Zhen

Liu Zhen joined the Post in 2015 as a reporter on the China desk. She previously worked with Reuters in Beijing.

Zhao Ziwen

Ziwen joined the Post in 2022, covering China’s foreign affairs. He holds degrees from Beijing Foreign Studies University and Hong Kong Baptist University. He worked for Caixin in Beijing, completed a study exchange in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, and undertook a reporting stint in Washington, D.C.

11. Special Operations News – Jan 12, 2025

Special Operations News – Jan 12, 2025

January 12, 2026 SOF News Update 0

https://sof.news/update/20250112/

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.

Photo / Image: SOF winter warfare training above the Arctic Circle, Kiruna, Sweden. (Photo from SOCEUR video by SPC Liem Huynh, February 24, 2018).

Do you receive our daily newsletter? If not, you can sign up here and enjoy it 2 or 3 days a week with your morning coffee (or afternoon tea depending on where in the world you are).

SOF News

Kevin James Kelly, Jr. – RIP. An former member of the 75th Ranger Regiment and a Special Forces Weapons Sergeant serving with the 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne) was killed in Ukraine on December 12, 2025. https://specialforcestaps.com/f/kevin-james-kelly-jr

160th SOAR Recruitment in Germany. The 160th SOAR recruitment team will hold career opportunity briefs on 12 January 2026 at Wiesbaden, Germany. Click on link to the Go 160th SOAR page for more details.

New Fitness Test for SEALs, Divers, etc. There are now new evaluation standards to measure the physical readiness of selected personnel in the Navy. The new combat fitness test applies to Navy special warfare, EOD, and diving personnel. “Navy introduces combat fitness test for SEALs, fleet divers, others”, Military Times, January 7, 2026.

CIWAG Provides Pre-Deployment Training for SF. The Center on Irregular Warfare and Armed Groups (CIWAG) held a three-day workshop for A/2/19th SFG(A) in December. The Special Forces company is deploying to the EUCOM AOR. “U.S. Naval War College’s Irregular Warfare Center Provides Special Forces Group Pre-Deployment Workshop”, USNWC, Jan 2026.

SOAR’s Little Bird. The small size and superb transportability of the MH-6 makes it a very suitable platform for special operations forces. “Night Stalker MH-6 Little Bird’s Ability to Appear Out of Nowhere Highlighted in Tanker Raid”, The War Zone, January 7, 2026.

Owen West Back in DoD. A former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations / Low Intensity Conflict ASD SO/LIC has been selected to lead its Defense Innovation Unit. West is a former Marine, banker, and author (three books). He deployed to Iraq twice. He has a degree from Harvard University and Standford. (DoD biography)

Bond between Delta Force and SAS. The relationship between two elite units is summarized in “Delta Force and SAS: Elite SF Units Compared”, Forces News, January 7, 2026.

SOF, Biometrics, and AI. The United States Special Operations Command is looking to industry develop ways that artificial intelligence can analyze information from biometrics, documents, OSINT, and other means. Part of this effort would include facial recognition, speaker identification, and DNA profiling capabilities. “SOCOM exploring how AI can process biometrics, other data gathered by operators”, by Drew F. Lawrence, Defense Scoop, January 8, 2026.

Delta Force. Harrison Kass has provided an article that describes one of the US Army’s most elite units. “The US Army “Delta Force”: The Unit That Captured Nicolas Maduro”, The National Interest, January 6, 2026.

SOF History

LTG Yarborough and the Green Berets. The impact that Lieutenant General William P. Yarborogh had on the Special Forces formation was very significant. His most enduring impact came in the early 1960s while he commanded the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Read more in an article published by the U.S. Army on January 5, 2026.

“Wild Bill” Donovan. A Medal of Honor winner from his service in World War I, William Donovan was selected to establish and lead the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). “Wild Bill: The Leadership Legacy of William Donovan”, Small Wars Journal, January 8, 2026.

On January 15, 1951, the Army established the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare (OCPW) as a special staff division under the Deputy Chief of Staff and supervisory control of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-3, headed by Brigadier General Robert A. McClure.

On January 18, 1991, Iraq launched SCUD missiles into Israel. The Coalition quickly deployed ground ‘SCUD Hunter teams’ to find the mobile missiles for aircraft to strike. Read more in “Desert Storm – SOF SCUD Hinting Mission in Iraq” (SOF News).

https://sof.news/history/desert-storm-sof-scud-hunting-mission-in-iraq/

National Security and Commentary

Modern Statecraft Needs to Integrate Military. Dave Maxwell, a retired Special Forces officer, puts forth the position that the Department of State needs a dedicated military advisor embedded at the highest level. One principal function will be to advise on special operations and irregular warfare. He argues that American statecraft has entered an era where diplomacy, influence, and special operations are converging at the center of policy. “To Support an America First State Department, Establish a Deputy Secretary of State for Military Affairs”, Small Wars Journal, January 8, 2026.

U.S. Withdraws from 66 International Organizations. On Wednesday, January 7, 2026, the White House announced that the United States was leaving international organizations – some affiliated with the United Nations (31) and others non-governmental organizations (35). The U.S. Department of State sent out a press statement: “Withdrawal from Wasteful, Ineffective, or Harmful International Organizations”, DoS, January 7, 2026. Some of the organizations pertain to national security:

European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats
Global Counterterrorism Forum
Freedom Online Coalition
UN Register of Conventional Arms

Demotion of Senator Mark Kelly. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has set in motion a process that may result in the reduction in retired rank of Senator Kelly for his participation in a video that encouraged U.S. service members to ignore illegal orders from superiors. Kelly (biography) is a retired U.S. Navy Captain who served over twenty-five years in the U.S. Navy, flew thirty-nine combat missions as a pilot of an A-6E Intruder attack aircraft, was a Navy test pilot, and went to space four times as an astronaut.

Greenland in the News . . . Again

Part of the U.S.? The Trump administration is renewing threats to make Greenland a U.S. territory in the aftermath of the successful raid to capture President Maduro in Caracas, Venezuela. On Sunday, January 4th, President Trump stated that “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it.” In a recent interview, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller stated “The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? What is the basis of their territorial claim? What is their basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark?” (The Hill, Jan 6, 2026)

A Military Option? The White House released a statement on January 6, 2025 pertaining to Greenland:

“President Trump has made it well known that acquiring Greenland is a national security priority of the United States, and it’s vital to deter our adversaries in the Arctic region. The President and his team are discussing a range of options to pursue this important foreign policy goal, and of course, utilizing the U.S. Military is always an option at the Commander in Chief’s disposal.”

Denmark, a NATO ally, is quite concerned with these statements and a number of NATO allies have pushed back on the idea of the U.S. forcibly taking Greenland from Denmark. Greenlanders are not very enthusiastic about the prospect. In a January 2025 poll, 85% said they were against becoming part of the United States. They are worried that Greenland will become ‘Americanized’, they would lose their free healthcare, their culture, their language, and the ability to control their island. The island has full employment. American investment and development would bring in foreign workers, eventually ending the current Inuit population majority. “Trump’s Threats Push Greenlanders Closer to Denmark”, Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2025. (subscription)

Intel, IO, Cyber, AI, IW

New Deputy Director of NSA. Timothy Kosiba is now the Deputy Director and senior civilian leader of the National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA conducts foreign signals intelligence and cybersecurity in support of national priorities. (NSA, Jan 9, 2026)

New Head CIA Lawyer. The nominee for Central Intelligence Agency General Counsel, Josh Simmons, was confirmed by the Senate. Read a short press release by the agency dated January 6, 2026.

Aldrich Ames – CIA Officer and Russian Spy. Ames, age 84, died in prison on January 6, 2026. He was convicted of espionage charges in 1994. At the time of his arrest he was a 31-year veteran of the CIA. He was a CIA case officer, but he also had been spying for the Russians since 1985. Ames spoke Russian and specialized in the Russian intelligence service. He and the Russians used “dead drops” to exchange secret documents and money. He later, during interrogations, detailed that he compromised the identities of CIA and FBI humans sources, some of whom were executed by the Soviets.

Running Agents. Marc Polymeropoulos writes about how to spot, assess, recruit, train, and motivate an someone in the espionage business. He discusses the fascinating psychological aspects of agent-running and the bind between agents and case officers. Read more in “The Art of Agent-Running”, Engelsberg Ideas, January 6, 2026.

Strategic Competition

USCG and Political Warfare. China has been expanding its influence through fishing fleets, maritime militia, and artificial islands. It has employed a maritime “Gray Zone” strategy – employing political warfare over the conventional alternate to advance its strategic interests. While the U.S. Navy has a robust presence on the high seas, the U.S. Coast Guard could augment the Navy’s presence – providing a law enforcement approach. Read more in “The Coast Guard’s Place in Political Warfare”, Special Operations Association of America (SOAA), December 9, 2025.

Proxy Wars, ARSOF, and SFABs. To ensure that proxy wars do not escalate into a large-scale conventional war the U.S. should forward-base Army special operations forces and Security Force Assistance Brigades into pre-conflict areas. “The Escalating Stakes of Proxy Wars”, Military Review, Nov-Dec 2025.

However;

Army Shuts Down SFAC. The Security Force Assistance Command (SFAC) has gone away. The one-star general officer command had under its command six Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFAB); of which only two will remain in the future. The move is part of the Army’s reorganization effort to prioritize units that provide combat power over other capabilities. The SFABs provided an advisory capability to foreign military forces and were designed to take the pressure off of combat brigades assigned advisor missions. The SFAC was established in 2018. “Army shuts down foreign military training command, will retain 2 SFABs”, Stars and Stripes, January 9, 2026.

Ukraine Conflict

New SOF Leader in Ukraine. In what appears to be a demotion, Vasyl Malyuk has been replaced as head of the Security Service but will now lead special operations. “Zelensky forces out Ukrainian spy chief who led daring raids against Russia”, The Guardian, January 5, 2026.

Oil Tanker Hit. A drone strike hit the Palau-flagged oil tanker ELBUS in the Black Sea on January 7, 2026. She was reportedly enroute to Russia’s Novorossiysk to load oil. The upper section was damaged, no injuries to crew. This is part of Ukraine’s anti-“Shadow Fleet” campaign – striking vessels that are helping Moscow evade sanctions by re-flagging to other countries. This tactic diminishes the revenue stream of Russia that can be used to continue the occupation and fighting in Ukraine. (The Sun, Jan 7, 2026)

“3 Day Special Military Operation”. Putin’s three-day long operation has now lasted longer than the “Great Patriotic War” (1,418 days) when the Soviet Union fought Germany in World War II. In WWII the Russians went up against the Wehrmacht’s Panzer formations and liberated half of Europe. In Ukraine, the Russians are liberating almost a football field a day.

References:
Interactive Map. Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine by the Institute for the Study of War and Critical Threats. On storymaps.arcgis.com See also https://www.national-security.info/ukraine/maps.html

SOF News welcomes the submission of articles for publication. If it is related to special operations, current conflicts, national security, or defense then we are interested.

Around the World

Oil Tanker Operations. The U.S. Navy and Coast Guard is continuing the monitoring and pursuit of sanctioned oil tankers that left Venezuela for the Atlantic Ocean over the past week. There should be more seizures in the coming days. Thus far, since December 2025, the U.S. has boarded five sanctioned oil tankers. The latest was the M/T Olina tanker in the Caribbean near Trinidad on Friday morning, January 9, 2026. The Olina was seized by Marines, Sailors, and Coast Guard personnel from Joint Task Force Southern Spear in a pre-dawn action. It was flying the false flag of Timor Leste and carrying a load of oil from Venezuela.

CENTCOM: Syria Strikes. Central Command announced that the U.S. launched airstrikes against ISIS in Syria on Saturday, January 10, 2026. U.S. and Jordanian aircraft hit 35 targets with over 90 precision munitions. Aircraft used were Jordanian F-16s, and US F15Es, A-10s, AC-130Js, and MQ-9s. The strikes were part of Operation Hawkeye Strike.

And Now Mexico? President Trump was interview on January 8, 2026, by Fox News’s Sean Hannity. He stated that special operations and land strikes are going to begin soon against the drug cartels in Mexico. The missions would likely be done in support of and with Mexico’s Secretariat of National Defense.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-announces-expansion-drug-cartel-crackdown-issues-grim-warning-iran

Chaos in Iran. The demonstrations and riots across the country are continuing into the second week. The country’s internet has been undergoing a sustained nationwide shutdown since January 8. What started out in late December 2025 as a small demonstration by shopkeepers in one city has grown into open revolt against the government. Originally, the protests were about severe economic issues but has spread to broader political challenges against the theocracy. There are incidents of gunfire exchanges every day. The protests are in over 100 cities in all provinces of Iran. Many observers believe that this is the closest the country has been to replacing its current regime in the last forty years. “Iran is on the edge of revolution”, by Abbas Milani, The News Statesman, January 8, 2026.

Afghanistan. There are currently over 800 Afghans, more than half are women and children, at Camp As Sayliya (Qatar) that are in the midst of the relocation process from Afghanistan to the United States. The current administration has frozen the relocation program and these families have been stuck for many months in Qatar. Now, according to advocates (#AfghanEvac) of the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) and other U.S. affiliated refugee relocation programs, the U.S. Department of State is offering cash payments to Afghans at CAS to abandon their resettlement to the United States and return to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. These Afghans were thoroughly vetted under Enduring Welcome, approved as refugees, and brought to CAS by the U.S. Department of State. Refugee arrivals were shut down in January 2025. Read more in “Trump administration strikes another hammer blow at Afghan allies”, by Beth Bailey, Washington Examiner, January 9, 2026. See also “The Cruelty of Trump’s Crackdown on Afghan Refugees”, The New York Times, January 9, 2026. (subscription)

Toppling the Taliban. This article examines how fragmented anti-Taliban forces could adopt a mobility-focused, population-centric campaign to exploit these Taliban regime vulnerabilities and progressively erode Taliban control. The article then specifies low-footprint Western support measures – such as intelligence sharing, precision weapons, exile training, and deniable funding – that could enable victory without reintroducing conventional forces. “Lawrence’s Shadow: How Afghan Resistance Can Topple the Taliban”, by Robert D. Billard, Jr., Small Wars Journal, January 9, 2026.

Yemen in Transition. For years Yemen was split into the Houthi area in the north and a quasi-government entity in the south. Part of the south was dominated by the United Arab Emirate-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC). However, the UAE pulled back its support of the STC and Saudi Arabia assisted government forces in the roll back of the STC. Read “From coalition to confrontation: Saudi-UAE rivalry in Yemenand its regional implications”, Middle East Institute, January 5, 2026. See also “Saudi-UAE Strategic Friction and Regional Fragmentation”, Intelbrief, The Soufan Center, January 6, 2026.

Books, Podcasts, Videos, and Movies

Publication – Operation Serval: A Memoir of War. The Army University Press has translated and republished a French account of the Operation Serval – the French effort to defeat jihadist fighters in Mali and Chad. (PDF, 321 pages) https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/Research and Books/2025/Serval/OpServal-ua1.pdf

Video – Mike Waltz– United Nations Ambassador. Mike Waltz is an American politician, diplomat, author, businessman, and retired U.S. Army Colonel, a combat-decorated Green Beret with 27 years of military service, and the first retired Special Forces officer elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Mike is interviewed on the Shawn Ryan Show, January 5, 2026, two hours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbjZ9_QxLsU

Video – Silent Warrior 25. Silent Warrior, a critical forum for senior special operations leaders from across Africa and allied countries to discuss topics such as countering terrorism, strengthening partnerships, and fostering cross-border collaboration, was held in December 2025. View a 3-minute video of some of the conference proceedings. (DVIDS, SOCAFRICA, 8 December 2025, 3 minutes).

https://www.dvidshub.net/video/990939/silent-warrior-25

Book Review – Out of Laos: The Surprising, Spectacular, Origin Story of America’s Hmong People, by Roger Warner. Marc Yablonka provides an excellent review of Roger Warner’s book about the Hmong people of Laos. The book details the U.S. involvement with the Hmong during the Vietnam War, the plight of the Hmong people after the Pathet Lao took over in May 1975, the refugee flight to Thailand, and eventual resettlement in the United States. (Hmong Daily News, Dec 12, 2025)

Perspectives on Terrorism. The latest issue, December 2025, is now online. The journal is published by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. (PDF, 119 pgs)

SOF News Book Shop

View our selection of books about special operations forces at the SOF News Book Shop.

Upcoming Events

January 20-23, 2026

Shot Show

Las Vegas, NV

February 10-12, 2026

Special Air Warfare Symposium

GSOF – Fort Walton Beach, FL

February 17-18, 2026

36th Annual NDIA Special Operations Symposium

NDIA – Washington, D.C.

April 27 – May 1, 2026

SOMA 2026 – Raleigh, NC

Special Operations Medical Association

May 18-21, 2026

SOF Week 2026

GSOF – Tampa, FL

June 8-11, 2026

Special Forces Association Convention

Eglin AFB, Florida

SOF News is not a ‘money making’ enterprise; but we do have administrative, operating, and publishing expenses. Individuals and businesses provide the funds to defray these expenses. Their contributions are deeply appreciated. Learn how you can support SOF News.

About SOF News

1200 Articles

SOF News provides news, analysis, commentary, and information about special operations forces (SOF) from around the world.

12. Opinion | Forget Venezuela and Greenland – here is the real trillion-dollar question

Summary:

The piece argues that while attention fixates on POTUS’s raid in Venezuela or talk of Greenland, the real story is structural. The United States races toward trillion-dollar milestones in debt service, annual defense spending and wealth gains at the very top, alongside soaring AI and consumption. China hits its own trillions in trade surplus, R&D, semiconductors, renewables and soon education, driven by export-led upgrades into higher value tech. The result is a slow but profound shift in productive capacity, innovation and fiscal resilience. Future power balances may be decided less by headline interventions and more by who sustains these trillion-dollar trajectories over time.

Comment: "Danger Will Robinson." (a boomer joke I know). Or this is more like a $36 and $38 trillion question.

Questions for economic and financial experts and strategists:

If we accept reassuring narratives about current U.S. economic strength and military dominance at face value, do we risk strategic complacency while China methodically compounds trillion-dollar advantages in trade, R&D and education that only become visible when it is too late to adjust?

How should U.S. and allied national security strategy rebalance investments between short-term kinetic power projection and long-term foundations of competitiveness such as innovation, human capital, and fiscal sustainability, given that the emerging contest is being waged in trillion-dollar flows rather than single military operations?

US-Venezuela conflict

China Diplomacy

Chow Chung-yan

Opinion | Forget Venezuela and Greenland – here is the real trillion-dollar question

As the world fixates on US military adventurism, trillion-dollar shifts in trade, R&D and debt are rebalancing the global economy and geopolitics

Chow Chung-yan

Published: 9:00am, 12 Jan 2026Updated: 9:02am, 12 Jan 2026

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3339507/forget-venezuela-and-greenland-here-real-trillion-dollar-question

Chow Chung-yan

Published: 9:00am, 12 Jan 2026Updated: 9:02am, 12 Jan 2026

In today’s chaotic world, we can sum up the shift in the global economy and geopolitics with a single number: 1 trillion.

The year 2024 will be remembered as the first time in history that a national government’s interest payments on its debt exceeded US$1 trillion, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis.

Despite US President Donald Trump’s pledge to cut federal spending and his aggressive global trade war, the United States is now adding US$1 trillion in national debt every 71 days – up from every 150 days in 2024, according to the US Congress Joint Economic Committee. This pace marks the fastest peacetime accumulation of national debt in history, with no sign of slowing soon.

Last year, the Trump administration unveiled a plan to reach a US$1 trillion defence budget by the late 2020s – a target later revised upwards to a staggering US$1.5 trillion by 2027.

Trump, who has lamented being overlooked by the Nobel Peace Prize committee, ordered military strikes on seven countries during the first year of his second term. US military spending last year was estimated between US$832 billion and US$962 billion. Barring a major surprise, the US is poised to become the first nation ever to spend US$1 trillion annually on its military – either this year or next.

Some observers may shrug off these figures, noting the surprising resilience of the US economy. Annualised gross domestic product (GDP) growth hit 4.3 per cent in the third quarter of last year, outpacing most other developed economies, which are significantly smaller in absolute terms.

This strength stems largely from robust artificial intelligence (AI) investment and consumer spending. Despite ongoing tariff wars, nominal personal consumption rose by 3.7 per cent in 2025, adding over US$1.2 trillion year on year. Meanwhile, major US tech firms poured US$437 billion into AI technology in 2025 alone – an increase of 61 per cent from 2024.

Fuelled by the AI boom, the US now hosts nine companies with market capitalisations above US$1 trillion. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway stands as the only non-tech member of this elite “trillion-dollar club”. Notably, no mainland Chinese firms made the list.

Yet a deeper look reveals another reality. According to Forbes, the 15 richest billionaires in the US added US$1 trillion to their collective net worth during the first year of Trump’s second term – the fastest concentration of wealth at the top in recorded history.

At the same time, a trillion-dollar crisis unfolded at the bottom. American credit card debt, having crossed the US$1 trillion mark in 2023, surged to a record US$1.23 trillion last year. The New York-based Bankrate reported that 46 per cent of US adults with credit cards carried a balance, “often relying solely on credit to afford basic necessities”. A study by Academy Bank found that 73 per cent of American credit cardholders used borrowed funds for essentials such as medical bills, home and car repairs and daily living expenses.

Across the globe, China is forging its own “trillion” milestones. Last year, it became the first nation ever to post a US$1 trillion annual trade surplus – an extraordinary feat given the intensifying trade war with the US and growing resistance from the European Union.

Beijing achieved this by aggressively expanding into non-US markets, especially Belt and Road Initiative countries. As of last year, China’s trade surplus with belt and road nations had surpassed its surplus with the US, driven by a strategic push up the value chain through hi-tech exports such as electric vehicles, solar panels and advanced electronics.

While this export surge offers relief to an economy still grappling with weak domestic demand, it has heightened anxieties in the West. The so-called China Shock 2.0 may intensify as Beijing remains laser-focused on technological and manufacturing upgrades. In March, China is set to unveil its next five-year plan covering 2026-2030, with analysts widely expecting R&D spending to surpass nominal US$1 trillion by the end of the period.

According to a forecast by US-based R&D World magazine, China matched the US in research and development expenditure on a purchasing power parity basis last year – with each surpassing US$1 trillion – and is projected to overtake it this year. The report called this shift “the sharpest reversal of innovation leadership in the modern era”.

The US has led global R&D since the 1950s, peaking at 69 per cent of worldwide spending in 1960. By 2020, that share had fallen to 31 per cent, and it is now on the verge of being eclipsed.

For two decades, China’s R&D investment has grown faster than its GDP – a trajectory reminiscent of US military spending patterns. Under President Xi Jinping and amid Western tech restrictions, innovation has become a top-tier policy priority.

In 2024 and 2025 combined, China committed 1 trillion yuan (US$143 billion) to its semiconductor industry, and in 2025 alone, it invested another 1 trillion yuan in renewable energy.

Its total education spending, which reached US$906 billion in 2023, is expected to cross the US$1 trillion threshold this year. Even as the central government pledged overall fiscal restraint, it reaffirmed that education funding would “only increase and never decrease”.

Admittedly, the full picture is far more nuanced than these headline-grabbing trillions suggest. Yet taken together, these figures offer a revealing window into the emerging global order.

While the world fixates on US military adventurism in Venezuela or threats to annex Greenland, history is being shaped by quieter, structural shifts. When future historians reflect on this era, they may well ask how we missed the obvious trillion-dollar question staring us in the face.

Chow Chung-yan

Chow Chung-yan began his journalistic career at the South China Morning Post and rose to become Editor-in-Chief in 2025. He has been running the SCMP’s day-to-day news operations since 2011. He led the newsroom’s organisational restructuring, streamlined its production

13. From Steam to Sats: Energy and Bitcoin Strategy to Win the 21st Century

Summary:

Steven Biebel argues that energy abundance underwrites national power and that Bitcoin mining should be harnessed as a strategic tool for grid stability, AI era competitiveness, and financial strength. Flexible miners could soak up surplus nuclear and other baseload power, smoothing demand for civilian grids and programs like the Army’s Janus reactors. The author urges building a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and keeping a majority of global hashrate and key ASIC production under U.S. or even federal control, including forced American ownership of Bitmain, so that Bitcoin becomes a sovereignty asset that strengthens deterrence and cushions mounting debt pressures.

Excerpts:

Bitmain is the world’s leading manufacturer of Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) miners, with a dominant market share of around 80 percent. It is also a Chinese company, so there is an understandable conflict of interest; however, a potential solution exists. The recent discussions of TikTok ownership changes and Intel public ownership examples offer very appealing solutions. In fact, the author’s recommendation is a combination of both solutions.

The Trump administration should demand that Bitmain become an American-owned company, given that most of the world’s hashrate is already based in the United States. The TikTok model could be pursued once again. There are already some steps in a positive direction as Bitmain will be placing a factory in either Texas or Florida to avoid the impact of tariffs. The author argues that the United States government should demand and purchase a significant equity stake in Bitmain. This would enable the United States to fully pursue Bitcoin mining as a national strategic imperative, as outlined in this article. Then the United States could appoint several American patriots to the board and management to uphold American interests.

Comment: Way out of my league here. If U.S. strategy embraces Bitcoin and hashrate dominance as a core pillar of national power, how do we rigorously assess the risks of volatility, technological disruption, and adversary adaptation so that this bet does not create strategic complacency or a single point of failure in a long war for 21st century advantage? Why would China give up such a company? Cna the TikTok model be applied again? Is it even a good "model?" But again. I am way out of my league here.

From Steam to Sats: Energy and Bitcoin Strategy to Win the 21st Century

by Steven Biebel

01.12.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/12/from-steam-to-sats-energy-and-bitcoin-strategy-to-win-the-21st-century/

Background

The intersection of thermodynamics and economics is the realization that nearly all metrics of quality of life can be simplified to ever-increasing energy expenditure per capita. From horses to coal to fossil fuels, the efficient development and consumption of these fuels led the relatively small nations of Western Europe to transform into civilization-defining super and hyperpowers that have culminated in our 21st-century American experience.

This American way of life—and the quality of life it provides—is currently under siege by the ascendant Axis of Autocracy and its formalizing Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, et al (BRICS+) alliance against the Western liberal financial system. The downstream effects of this strategic challenge are seen in daily life across the United States, with supply chain bottlenecks, inflation, and rising debts and energy prices among a myriad of resultant and related social ills. Electricity prices, in particular, have been rising greatly in the United States, and the American power grid is an extremely complex system-of-systems that is under siege simultaneously by both the insatiable demands of hyperscaler data centers running artificial intelligence (AI) models and the threat of foreign actor meddling.

The solution to all of these challenges is Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Mining for Grid Optimization

The understanding that the United States’ power grid needs a massive overhaul and expansion appears to have entered public consciousness. This scaling is already causing shuttered plants to reopen, and the nuclear power debate has finally receded to recognizing that nuclear generation is the ultimate path forward. These nuclear plants, and others, operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as the frictional costs of starting and stopping are too high. Bitcoin mining and miners can absorb the peaks and flatten the valleys in power demand, optimizing the performance of the American power grid to deliver uninterrupted electricity when and where it is needed. It is far easier to shutter and start mining rigs than to supply power.

The United States Army recently revealed the Janus Program, a next-generation nuclear power system to power military installations. Similar to civilian demands, military installations will experience peaks and troughs in demand that can be smoothed by public and/or private Bitcoin miners. This concept has already been floated by French politicians who are considering redirecting nuclear generation surpluses into cryptocurrency mining rather than traditional export sales to Germany.

Bitcoin Mining as a Strategic Advantage

Winning the 21st century is, and will further be, based on digitalization at scale, just as winning the 20th century was based on industrialization at scale. Artificial intelligence models have already outpaced hardware capabilities, and order backlogs at electrical grid suppliers measure in years. The Washington, D.C. establishment understands the importance of winning the artificial intelligence technology race with legislation for the CHIPS and GENIUS Acts, as well as the recent partial federal acquisition of domestic chip maker, Intel. These are unquestionably the right steps as winning the AI race and its impending merger with humanoid robotics will determine 21st-century hegemony.

It is now important to take these positive steps further and utilize Bitcoin mining as a means of securing American national security. Both public and private mining can unite to ensure that the majority of the global Bitcoin hashrate remains in the United States. This ensures that network control is grounded in small, free enterprise miners, rather than potentially being deceptively controlled by an opaque authoritarian regime. Space Force Officer Jason Lowery has called for a “strategic hashforce” to compete in an electrically based digital world. He notes that traditional competition and kinetic warfare are outdated, given the hyper-destructive nature of nuclear warfare and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). This view is shared by the author, who also notes that while competing to gain strategic access to Bitcoin, the United States can also build and fortify the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) as created by the current administration. This means that the inherent stock-to-flow advantages of the Bitcoin design will further enrich the United States, make the sovereign debt level more manageable, and ultimately lead to triumph over our peer competitors.

American adversaries already understand the potential of cryptocurrency mining and its impact on the electrical grid. Reports of Chinese targeting of American critical infrastructure have been reported for years; however, a recent 60 Minutes report highlighted that China has been building cryptocurrency mining data centers, illegal in the People’s Republic of China itself, in the United States with the dual capacity to conduct espionage and have the latent ability to disrupt the electrical grid. This problem is worsened by the fact that the mined Bitcoin is likely sent to Chinese-controlled wallets. This is of dual concern for the American economy and overall national security.

Recommendations

Below, I detail actionable steps that should be taken immediately to ensure American dominance of the 21st century.

Public-Private Partnerships for Grid Optimization through Bitcoin Mining

Bitcoin miners are eager to utilize cheap and abundant electricity—especially during periods of off-peak load for other applications. The Departments of War and Energy already understand the importance of energy in winning the AI race (not to mention other emergent high-demand needs such as electric cars), and Bitcoin mining can sit adjacent to this buildout to absorb excess and/or off-peak capacity. Project Janus was previously mentioned, and this is an excellent example of how excess electricity generated from military base-scale nuclear reactors can be cheaply sold to Bitcoin miners. This could even be further incentivized, as Bitcoin miners may pay a “sat tax”, which would be a production tax paid directly in Bitcoin, back to the government for the privilege of cheap sovereign power, which can then further fortify the SBR.

Encouragement of the Chinese Divestiture of Bitmain

Bitmain is the world’s leading manufacturer of Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) miners, with a dominant market share of around 80 percent. It is also a Chinese company, so there is an understandable conflict of interest; however, a potential solution exists. The recent discussions of TikTok ownership changes and Intel public ownership examples offer very appealing solutions. In fact, the author’s recommendation is a combination of both solutions.

The Trump administration should demand that Bitmain become an American-owned company, given that most of the world’s hashrate is already based in the United States. The TikTok model could be pursued once again. There are already some steps in a positive direction as Bitmain will be placing a factory in either Texas or Florida to avoid the impact of tariffs. The author argues that the United States government should demand and purchase a significant equity stake in Bitmain. This would enable the United States to fully pursue Bitcoin mining as a national strategic imperative, as outlined in this article. Then the United States could appoint several American patriots to the board and management to uphold American interests.

Tags: cryptocurrency, Energy, national security, Project Janus

About The Author

Steven Biebel
Steven Biebel, a Delaware native, is the Chief Engineer for Mission Engineering Analysis within OUSD R&E, leading mission-level studies. He also serves as a Lieutenant Engineering Duty Officer in the US Navy Reserve. His career began at the Missile Defense Agency in 2012 and later at Strategic Systems Program, leading the D5LE2 System Architecture team. He then managed Integrated Acquisition Portfolio Reviews for OUSD A&S. Mr. Biebel holds a Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Delaware, a Master's in Business Administration from the University of Delaware, and a Master's in Mechanical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

14. Once More, the Sensor (FICINT)

Summary:

The story imagines a Second Ukraine War world where weaponized AI, quantum systems, and orbital “seraphs” collapse global timing and navigation, erasing the digital scaffolding of modern war. In that vacuum, Green Berets again become “sensors in the mud,” relying on map, compass, HUMINT, and small-unit tactics. The battlespace shifts from physical destruction to control of minds and beliefs, yet remains anchored in violence and human risk. The tale warns that technological overreach can implode the very systems it once empowered, and that in deep crisis the decisive instruments of strategy are still human perception, resilience, and moral purpose.

Comment: Like all good and useful fiction, it raises questions. Do we need to sustain "old school skills?" (of course) How can we merge old school with high tech to sustain old school while effectively employing the high tech (for as long as it still functions)?

If the ultimate “sensor” is a human in the mud, how should force design, training, and SOF investment rebalance between exquisite networks and the primitive skills that survive a systemic tech collapse?

What safeguards, red-teaming, and narrative discipline are needed to ensure our pursuit of AI enabled advantage does not create a brittle war architecture that, once broken, leaves us cognitively unprepared for a world where only people and ideas still maneuver?

Fiction| The Latest

Once More, the Sensor

by Daniel Ross

01.12.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/12/once-more-the-sensor/

Note: This short fiction article was written in October 2024 and originally submitted for the Horizon 2040 Writing Competition. The piece has been edited and revised over the past year.

His faded, crusty green beret remained crumpled up in his right pocket. He had little use for it now, but it always remained there, just as it had in the old days. The same U.S. Army Special Forces flash and insignia from the first conflict adorned the front of the once coveted hat, sun-bleached, like the hazy memories from barely recognizable operational times. “De Oppresso Liber,” he remembered, “free the oppressed…. look what that got us with the Second Ukraine War. Now, we all need freedom.”

He always knew time would kill him—and all of us, really—just not this slowly and methodically. Not old age, though, maybe death in combat—a glory that only mattered if civilizations—or at least your buddies—survived to remember you. But a stupid clock? Quantum this or that, they said. “Incessant progress always somehow plunges us backward,” he supposed. Time seemed relevant when humans knew it could not be controlled. Once the clock became the master, everything changed. In the quest for complete control, a failed attempt to cause global nuclear impotence, all the power-hungry became the gods of absolute nothingness.

He wiped the frozen grime off his desiccated lips and wondered how so much could change throughout the world in twenty years of endless combat. “2039—how did we even have the time to progress forward or backward?” he pondered. They were caught in the nexus of the in-between, the ebbs and flows of technology advancing and dying, and yet, the resilient human aspect of warfare always seemed to creep back into relevance.

He sank lower into his soggy hide-site, the silence blanketing the vast marshland always more frightening than the mechanical noises of the past. The rest of the Detachment soldiers continued to lie low in the damp, reeking Baltic earth. Sometimes, he never felt like he could get close enough to the ground. The mud embraced him; the madness made him its friend: dirt, the same companion of the dead. “It’s almost amusing; what a wasteland now.”

Something fluttered in one of the distant remaining coppices, and more memories overcame him. It was his first stand-up gunfight. 2019 seemed so long ago, but that was the pinnacle of what society once called the Global War on Terror. He thought about Zabul province, jumping off the ramp of a CH-47 for a prison raid in the dark Afghanistan night. Silence to anarchy. The utter chaos of going toe-to-toe at 40 meters with the Taliban while moving to secure a foothold, knowing that only technology and fire superiority would keep you alive. Then he remembered fighting ISIS-K in Nangarhar, chasing terrorists in Africa, and everything that almost killed him in Ukraine.

In retrospect, those conflicts nearly seemed like a gentleman’s game before the politicians desecrated the memory. “If nothing else, what was left of a memory of that global war against a hodgepodge of self-proclaimed ‘freedom fighters.” Speed, surprise, and violence of action mattered back then. Tactical actions yielding strategic effects; the Green Berets’ bread and butter for the GWOT. At a minimum, there seemed to be some honor in the exchange of bullets. But he was not sure if any of that still mattered now. It all ended up being one giant testing ground for the cataclysm to come.

By 2030, he should have been retiring to find some tranquility and enjoy a well-deserved pension. He pictured a modest house on a little piece of land, some tomatoes growing on vines. However, pensions only mattered when governments still existed to pay them. That was almost ten years ago; a different life, a different time. He scoffed at the thought and adjusted his chest rig; it was much easier without body armor. “Once a warrior, never again a gardener.” He’d become an old man, an old greybeard—the boss. He’d seen the teams evolve to harness the power of artificial intelligence. Even blockchain and quantum computing trickled into the world of Special Operations. For years, drone and counter-drone warfare in all domains danced back and forth like some sick, emotionally-void mechanized natural selection. Robotics and warfare evolved to lack any semblance of humanity, yet humans remained the only ones cognizant of the concept of death. It was almost haunting; now, nothing besieged the skies.

His toes had long become numb from the incessant dampness; he scrunched them in his worn-out boots and peered through a busted set of binoculars. He reminisced about how efficient the teams became with resilient networks, various disaggregating capabilities, and cryptography that brought unconventional communication to an entirely different level. They even had real-time language translation capabilities due to advancements in AI accelerator chips. Special Forces Operational Detachments became the world’s greatest sensors and disrupters to plague enemy interior lines. The days of slugging it out with their foe quickly vanished; all they had to do was let AI aggregate the intelligence, sense deep for the conventional forces, and let the long-range meatgrinders do their work. Humans merely carried sensors; technology did the job. Weapons of the mind no longer mattered until superpowers went too far.

None of it existed now. He dragged out his compass, “a relic of the past,” he thought. He rechecked the azimuths of his sector stakes before pulling out his map to reconfirm his coordinates. Once the old-Russians used weaponized AI to create and then launch those awful things into High Earth Orbit, satellites desynchronized, atomic clocks failed, terrestrial mapping and radar failed, and the AI created an altered perception of celestial navigation. Those were the buzzwords he could remember about the disaster. GPS and inertial navigation systems across the continents crashed. Something about the nukes. And then, as the Second Ukraine War appeared all but won, old-Russia lost control of its so-called “seraphs” in 2032, plunging itself and the rest of the world into technologically devoid disorder.

Since those days, the world inexorably descended into chaos. Owning and controlling information, ideas, and thoughts mattered more than the simple attrition of butchering each other in the slop. He thought about an age-old SF adage to always be ready to destroy the “thing” you created and trained. The irony was not lost on him as he scanned the tree lines for targets; the old NATO countries writhed in a stagnant, bloody stalemate with the Ukrainian regime in Moscow. “I wonder if I might recognize any of my counterparts from the First War,” he seethed. He then thought about how the human mind had once again become the weapon of choice and the contested battlespace all at the same time. “Now, to capture another one of them,” he thinks.

There was more movement in the thicket—maybe 400 meters to the 9 o’clock. He used hand signals to prepare the rest of the team for the ambush. “Funny how technology remains a cyclical reminder of warfare from the past. What technology?” he thought. “It’s gone.” The character of warfare evolved with technology, but humans have always been the ultimate sensors, unearthing the information necessary to influence individuals, the collective, and subsequent policy. Once again, they have become the sensors anew. Small unit tactics, land navigation, survival, prolonged field care—it all mattered once more—the basics in the deep fires. He mused on how the old ways always find their way back to the forefront. The divergent, yet again emergent, in the void of mankind’s self-induced nosedive into obscurity.

He knew he needed to bring at least one in still breathing. It was the only way to gather information in this post-seraph world; human intelligence re-crowned king. The tricky part was getting the enemy out of the bogs alive. “What a shitty way to go,” he thought. “Face down, drowning in the muck.” Yet, the conflict had transcended the physical struggle for control; killing was just the incidental, blunt instrument. Flesh and blood suffered the cost while the true aim was the reshaping of beliefs and dominion over human minds. But he understood that influence, deception, and psychological manipulation still meant nothing in this world without those willing to get their hands dirty. Bodies still needed to be broken for minds to bend. The power of gathering information and weaving controlling webs of ideas outlasted all the drones, bullets, and bombs. The unseen, the intangible realms of perception provided the most potent ability to infect hearts and minds long after the fighting had ceased. He knew this; his masters knew it.

His heart rate quickened. A muffled disturbance persisted in disrupting the eerie dawn silence. Finally, the wet suction of approaching footsteps became discernible. The sounds crept closer, echoing louder with each step sinking deeper into the gunk. There they sat like less-evolved trapdoor spiders, waiting for the prey called ‘information’—Green Beret “snake-eaters” once again just nameless sensors in the mud, scattered across a vast post-European frontline. He knew, though, that they were no longer the ones eating the snake. Like humanity, the snake continued to consume itself, an interminable ouroboros, constantly changing but never disappearing. He wondered when the cycle of destruction would come to an end. “How do we recreate and rebuild after such a quagmire?”

Those thoughts would have to wait.

One final step—the sensor triggered. And the battlespace around him, within him, once more erupted into madness.

Check out everything Small Wars Journal has to offer.

Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Future of War, Special Forces, Special Operations

About The Author

Daniel Ross
Dr. Daniel W. Ross is a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier with experience across multiple echelons of the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne), including deployments to Africa, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. He teaches graduate courses concerning homeland security, homeland defense, and emergency and disaster management. His work has been published in ProQuest, Special Warfare Journal, Small Wars Journal, and the NCO Journal. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the official policy or position of the U.S. Army or the Department of War.

15. No Bench, No Game: Reconstituting Special Operations Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Depth from the Reserve

No Bench, No Game: Reconstituting Special Operations Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Depth from the Reserve

by SWJ Staff

01.11.2026 at 08:16pm

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/11/no-bench-no-game-reconstituting-special-operations-civil-affairs-and-psychological-operations-depth-from-the-reserve/

No Bench, No Game: Reconstituting Special Operations Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Depth from the Reserve | By: MAJ Lucas Harrell for Eunomia Journal

This article by MAJ Harrell examines the urgent necessity of developing a robust reconstitution strategy for Special Operations Forces, with a specific focus on Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations. By using recent casualty data from the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a benchmark, he illustrates that modern near-peer warfare demands a rate of force replacement far exceeding the experiences of the last two decades. Current U.S. Army doctrine, such as FM 4-0 and FM 3-0, remains heavily focused on conventional force replenishment, which fails to account for the specialized cultural expertise and lengthy training pipelines required for special operations. This gap is particularly concerning given that ninety-two percent of Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations personnel reside in the Army Reserve, a component currently hindered by institutional training models that do not mirror the performance requirements of active-duty units.

His piece highlights specific modern threats that increase the vulnerability of these forces, including artificial intelligence-driven facial recognition, sophisticated signals intelligence, and robust human intelligence networks utilized by adversaries like Russia and China. To address these risks, MAJ Harrell proposes a paradigm shift toward a merit-based selection pipeline within the Reserves. This would involve identifying personnel with high cognitive aptitude and language proficiency for intensive, special operations-aligned training. By increasing the frequency of joint exercises and embedding reservists into active-duty rotations, the military can reduce mobilization latency. The ultimate goal is to ensure that the U.S. can rapidly replace specialized combat power to maintain operational momentum and seize the initiative in a high-intensity environment.

About Eunomia Journal

Eunomia was the Greek goddess of law, governance, and good order. Ancient Greeks believed she upheld civil order and maintained the internal stability of polities and city-states from the malign efforts of Dysnomia the goddess of chaos and lawlessness. Eunomia personifies the charge of Civil Affairs elements who bring order, balance, and stability to the inherently chaotic environment of war and its aftermath. Eunomia’s endeavor to facilitate peace, justice, and lawful governance represents the efforts of Civil Affairs elements across the entire spectrum of operations and throughout the competition continuum.

Within the logo, Eunomia grasps a scroll in one hand, while wielding a sword at the ready in the other. This juxtaposition represents the bifurcated nature of the warrior-diplomats of the Civil Affairs regiment, who coexist between the realms of conflict and cooperation and regularly strive to expand their understanding of both. The color purple mirrors the regimental insignia, which in turn draws its lineage from the long-standing association of purple with political power. Finally, the olive branches highlight the role of Civil Affairs in “securing the victory” of durable peace after war’s conclusion.

Tags: Civil Affairs, Eunomia Journal, Psychological Operations, PSYOP, Special Operations Forces

About The Author

SWJ Staff
SWJ Staff searches the internet daily for articles and posts that we think are of great interests to our readers.

16. The Problem with Trump’s Venezuela Plan By Elliott Abrams

Summary:

POTUS’s bold Maduro raid removed the figurehead but left chavista power structures intact. Delcy Rodríguez and the security bosses still rule, political prisoners remain, and only minimal concessions address U.S. demands on oil and foreign interference. Washington is focused on routing crude to U.S. ports and expelling Cubans, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia and China, but has no clear plan to empower Venezuela’s democratic opposition or manage oil revenues without either starving the populace or funding the regime. The core choice is unresolved: partner with remnants of the dictatorship or with democratic forces, and on what negotiated transition timetable.

Comment: If Washington treats Maduro’s removal as victory while leaving chavista enforcers, oil flows, and security organs largely untouched, how long before the regime simply adapts, recovers legitimacy and turns a tactical success into a strategic defeat for democracy and U.S. influence?

What concrete sequencing of pressure, incentives, and guarantees is required to split criminals from politicians inside chavismo, protect opposition leaders, and channel oil revenues toward a real transition, rather than allowing short term energy gains to harden Venezuela into a resilient, anti-American petro dictatorship under new management?

The Problem with Trump’s Venezuela Plan

thefp.com

The president is relying on the current regime to guide a transition to a Venezuela that is a free, democratic, prosperous, capitalist U.S. ally. That’s absurd.

By Elliott Abrams

01.11.26 —

International

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-problem-with-trumps-venezuela

A week after the spectacular raid that captured Nicolás Maduro, little else has changed in Caracas and the action is in Washington.

In Caracas, the regime remains fully in charge. While there are concessions—some real, some merely rhetorical—for the Americans, none of them compromise the plenary power of the gang that has ruled under Chávez and Maduro. The ministers of defense and interior, both indicted drug traffickers, remain in place. Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as interim president by her brother Jorge, who heads the National Assembly. Chavista gangs are still used to prevent or punish demonstrations. As of Saturday, just 16 of the country’s 800 political prisoners had been released.

In other words, the regime is functioning internally exactly as it would have had Maduro been removed by a heart attack, and it is making the smallest concessions to Washington that it can.

Happily for the gang running the country, the American demands thus far revolve around oil and foreign interference rather than an opening in the political system. The gringos want control of the oil, but may accept the “Chevron Model” for that sector. Chevron now runs its own operations in Venezuela with limited regime interference and pays the regime in oil to cover taxes and fees. The regime sells that oil on the black market (due to U.S. sanctions) for the money it needs to keep the economy afloat and stay in power.

Under the new model, all the oil produced will go to U.S. ports—but what happens to the proceeds? There is talk of special escrow accounts at the Treasury Department to hold the revenue, and the president says he will determine how the money is spent. That creates a legal problem: Money paid into the Treasury is not supposed to be spent without a Congressional appropriation. Does Congress care? And it creates a practical problem: Every dollar handed over to the regime to pay taxes or fees will strengthen its hold. But if no money goes back into Venezuela, there will very soon be no way to pay for food or medicine. Is there a plan?

On the foreign interference issue, U.S. demands are clearer: Cubans and Hezbollah out, Iran out, Russia and China out. That will be a real challenge for the regime, because the Russians and Iranians have a partnership with the military (formally, the Bolivarian Army of Venezuela) and Cuban intelligence agents are pervasive in it. The fact that American troops had to kill almost three dozen Cuban guards to get Maduro is a reminder of who was providing his security. On all of this the regime will have to comply, but how fast? It’s easy for the U.S. to say “Cubans and Hezbollah out,” but we can expect the regime to delay and to lie. Enforcement of our demands will be an important task for the CIA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency).

The Trump administration seems blind, thus far, to the need to strengthen the democratic forces in Venezuela. President Trump’s bold and totally successful decision to seize Maduro has opened the door to freedom in Venezuela, but he seems reluctant to walk through it—although María Corina Machado’s visit to Washington in the coming week gives the administration a chance to make up for initial errors.

The president’s repeated statements about how easy it is to work with Delcy Rodríguez, how cooperative the regime is being, and how elections are impossible, have all undermined Venezuela’s opposition. “They couldn’t have an election. The country’s become Third World, and they wouldn’t know how to have an election right now,” the president said last week. This is entirely wrong; Venezuelans know very well how to hold elections and it was in the last presidential election, in 2024, that the opposition ticket won 67 percent of the vote.

What should the United States be doing? The Trump conclusion that an immediate transfer of power to Edmundo González, who won the 2024 election, and Machado is impossible because they could not control the army and police is not foolish or baseless. But that conclusion should lead to the immediate start of negotiations between the regime and the democratic parties under U.S. auspices, for a transition in whatever we and Venezuelan democrat leaders conclude is the shortest reasonable time period. And it is critical that Washington not try to be a neutral broker here; we should be clear that we support democracy in Venezuela and we should pressure the regime to agree to and then adhere to a timetable.

Those running the country—Rodríguez, her brother Jorge, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino, and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello (who is the chief thug and enforcer)—know what may await them after the transition, which is prison. They will therefore resist any real transition to democracy and hope that President Trump will not really require one.

If the United States insists, they will seek amnesty for themselves and others who’ve stolen fortunes of money, brutally abused opponents, and engaged in trafficking drugs. Some sort of amnesty has been part of every democratic transition in the last 40 years (Eastern Europe, South Africa, Latin America). But the whole negotiation—timetable, release of political prisoners, open access to media, return of exiled political leaders, amnesty discussions, and so on—can only begin and can only succeed if the United States is forcefully backing the democratic side.

Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez arrive at the National Congress in Caracas on December 4, 2025. (Pedro Mattey/AFP via Getty Images)

Chavismo began as both a populist political movement and a direct effort to seize power illegally, and has always retained both faces. There are Chavista thugs like Cabello who think opponents should be jailed or killed, and there are Chavista politicians who have a future in a democratic Venezuela. It should be part of the opposition’s plans now, and of the American plan, to create a split within Chavismo between those two groups—the criminals and the politicians. That will both weaken the regime and help lay a foundation for electoral politics around the corner.

What American officials must keep in mind is that the junta now running Venezuela is fundamentally opposed to what we ought to want. They have spent decades trying to create a Venezuela that is anti-American, works closely with terrorist groups and governments hostile to the United States, has a socialist rather than free-market economy, and is a brutal dictatorship rather than a democracy. Relying on them to guide a transition to a Venezuela that is a free, democratic, prosperous, capitalist U.S. ally is absurd and dangerous. Those running Venezuela today are smart, ruthless people with much to lose, and they will resist losing it with all the power they have. Delcy Rodríguez is not our partner in creating the new Venezuela.

After a week, much attention in Washington has shifted to Iran and Greenland, and the president has announced that there will be no second strike in Caracas. But he has also said the flotilla in the Caribbean will remain for now, and on Friday he met with top oil executives. How is this all going to work? The president said we will “run” Venezuela, but others, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have walked that back; we will run the policy. That seems to mean we will tell Delcy what to do and she will follow instructions. But what instructions? Do we have a plan for the democratization of Venezuela? Do we even have a plan for the oil sector? All oil production seems headed for Houston and other Gulf ports, but then what? How will it be decided who gets that oil, at what price? And what happens, as noted above, to the money? Can the president really allocate it at will? How much goes to Venezuela, and to whom there? To the regime, enforcing its power? To charitable groups that can distribute it to the poor (who are the vast majority of Venezuelans) so that regime officials cannot steal it? Which groups, which NGOs? When will our sanctions be lifted—which sanctions, and at what pace?

Then there is the embassy, closed in early 2019. The Trump administration is thinking about reopening it, which presents logistical problems. What shape is it in? If personnel were sent back to Caracas, would they be safe? But that sort of question is minor compared to the legal issues. If we reopen the embassy, will we recognize the government? If we recognize Delcy as legitimate in any way, we should remember how she got her job: Nicolás Maduro appointed her. If he had the legitimate power to appoint her, that must be because he was president. If he was legitimately president (which we have denied since 2019, because he stole the 2018 and 2024 elections), he can argue he has head of state immunity when he comes to trial. Under customary international law, heads of state are immune from criminal prosecution in foreign courts. If Maduro lacks immunity because he was not legit, how could we recognize the government he led and the vice president he appointed?

Moreover, if we recognize that government, it will immediately have a right to the Venezuelan state funds that are frozen now, mostly in Europe. In London sits over a billion dollars in gold that the high court there has refused to let the Maduro regime grab. (Delcy Rodríguez knows all about these matters; in 2020 she made a secret trip to Spain where she allegedly sold $68 million in gold to Spanish businessmen, in a transaction known as Delcygate.) Has the Trump administration thought this through? Assuming that the administration is clear on not recognizing Delcy as legitimate in any way, has it consulted with the British on what’s needed to keep that money frozen?

As for the oil plans, the president’s show-and-tell with oil executives did not go as well as planned; the CEO of the largest company, Exxon, called Venezuela “uninvestable” and no one arrived with a checkbook. The New York Times rightly called the response from industry “tepid,” and that was while they were sitting with the president in front of TV cameras. One has to assume they spoke more candidly with the cameras off, but repeated their position that (among other things) Venezuela will need to rebuild a legal system that protects property rights. What is the U.S. government’s plan for that?

The apparent lack of planning is on the civilian side only. The fantastic military action a week ago was a triumph of planning, which the military does very well. The Trump administration does it less well, partly because some high officials are incompetent, partly because the civilian bureaucracy has so often been at war with the administration (and has now been decimated as Trump strikes back at it), and partly because the president is himself an instinctive rather than methodical player.

These are early days; we are in week two after the Maduro arrest. But the most fundamental decision about U.S. policy must be made now: Do we view the regime remnants around Delcy Rodríguez or the democratic forces, leaders, and parties as our key partners in Venezuela? Today the answer remains unclear.

thefp.com

17. Donald Trump’s Red Line

Summary:

POTUS drew a red line on killing protesters, and Iran’s regime has crossed it with large scale shootings under an internet blackout. The piece argues his credibility, earned in Venezuela, and in strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, now hinges on visible consequences. It urges non-kinetic options to avoid discrediting an organic uprising: layered cyber operations to blind command and control, hijack state media, and aid opposition movements, plus funds for striking oil workers, expanded Starlink access, and conditional offers of immunity to regime insiders like President Pezeshkian to split the elite and catalyze a negotiated transition to a post-Islamic Republic order.

Comment: Equivalent of killing Syrians with chemical weapons?

If POTUS fails to act in a way that is visible to both the regime and the Iranian people, does he risk turning prior bold actions into a one off spectacle that erodes, rather than cements, American deterrent credibility? (But will actions in Iran contribute to deterrence - I am guilty of putting everything in terms of deterrence - do we do that too much or am I caught in the DOW trap of "restoring deterrence?" What does that mean?)

Could aggressive cyber, information, and financial support from Washington unintentionally taint the uprising as foreign driven, thereby strengthening regime propaganda, and if so, what balance of overt and covert assistance best preserves Iranian agency? And of course this is one danger of taking action

How far should the United States go in offering amnesty, security guarantees, and a future political role to tainted insiders like Pezeshkian in order to fracture the regime, and at what point do such bargains undermine justice, the legitimacy of any new government, and the moral narrative Washington claims to defend? This is not only a question for Iran but every other authoritarian regime that teeters on the brink of collapse. How far down should transitional justice go after the fall of the despots?

Donald Trump’s Red Line

thefp.com

Time to make good on your promise to the Iranian people, Mr. President.

By Eli Lake

01.11.26 —

U.S. Politics

https://www.thefp.com/p/donald-trumps-red-line

Ever since the mass demonstrations began in Iran two weeks ago, President Donald Trump has offered more than just moral support. He has promised to attack the regime if it started killing protesters. It’s now time for Trump to make good on his promise.

On January 8, Iran’s regime shut down the internet and has used the occasion to turn the streets of its cities into abattoirs. According to Iran International, a London-based news outlet, an estimated 2,000 protesters have been slain in the past three days by the regime’s security forces. Precise figures are nearly impossible to obtain because of the digital blackout. But Iran International has obtained videos from hospitals that show mounting corpses from the shooting of citizens in the streets.

The good news is that Trump’s advisers are briefing him on military and cyber options to respond. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Trump will meet Tuesday with senior administration officials to discuss possible actions against Iran. The bad news is that the situation in Iran is getting dire and it’s unclear how much longer Iran’s people can be expected to march in the streets now that the Basij militia, Revolutionary Guard Corps, and regular army apparently have orders to use lethal force against them.

Trump is at a hinge point in his presidency. He has threatened Iran’s leaders if they start killing protesters. Now that they have, Trump risks looking like one of his predecessors, Barack Obama, if he doesn’t follow through. This is what happened in August 2013. Obama had warned for a year that if Syria’s then-tyrant, Bashar al-Assad, used chemical weapons against the rebels, the U.S. would militarily intervene. When Assad finally dropped sarin gas on a rebel stronghold outside of Damascus, Obama flinched. He asked for an authorization of force from Congress, and ended up not entering the war.

Obama’s failure to enforce his own red line on chemical weapons had dire implications for the balance of power, not just in the Middle East but throughout the world. Only seven months later, Russia invaded and later annexed Crimea from Ukraine, the first salvo in a war that has continued to this day. In the Middle East, Russia established air bases in Syria in 2015.

Trump has already established serious credibility with America’s adversaries. The flawless raid to apprehend Venezuela’s strongman, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, made good on the president’s earlier threats. Trump’s decision to join Israel’s war against Iran’s regime in June and take out the country’s main nuclear facilities is further evidence that Trump’s words should not be ignored.

But if Iran’s latest uprising is put down by the regime and there are no consequences to the ayatollahs and generals who gave the orders for the mass slaughter, Trump will lose credibility with the regime, the Iranian people, and onlookers in the capitals around the world.

That said, the U.S. response need not be a military one. Ezra Cohen, who served as undersecretary of defense for intelligence in Trump’s first term and is a fellow at the Hudson Institute, emphasized that America has a number of options short of kinetic strikes, which could risk discrediting the organic Iranian uprising on the ground.

“As we saw during the Venezuela operation, the U.S. has the ability to layer a variety of cyber effects,” Cohen said. “This is the result of President Trump’s historic executive order, which removed many barriers to conducting offensive cyber operations.”

Other former U.S. officials told me that those cyber options include blinding Iran’s internal command and control system, making it impossible for commanders in Tehran to communicate with local Basij officials in the field. The U.S. and Israel also have capabilities to hack into Iran’s state broadcasting stations. One operation would be to disrupt the regime’s propaganda with a message from Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah that the original 1979 Islamic revolution deposed. Other options include sharing real-time intelligence on the locations of Basij units with opposition leaders on the ground, so protests can avoid those areas or seize upon them.

Beyond cyber support, the U.S. can also help establish a fund to help prop up striking oil workers, if a decision is made to stop work at Iran’s most crucial state industry. The U.S. can also flood Iran with more Starlink ground stations that provide access to the internet during the imposed digital blackout.

Finally, there is an opportunity to reach out to some figures in the Iranian regime that have signaled a softer line amid the crisis. At the top of that list is Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who has distinguished between peaceful protesters and rioters. While there’s no merit to this argument, it marks a different line from other senior officials who have condemned all protesters as committing crimes against God. Pezeshkian has also pledged to address the economic crisis that sparked the latest uprising.

If the U.S. or other American allies can entice Pezeshkian and other officials to support a transition to a post–Islamic Republic government in exchange for immunity and safety, there is a chance that the teetering regime will finally fall.

Either way, Trump has to make clear what he is now doing to make good on his threats to the tormentors of the Iranian people. If he doesn’t, he will squander the international credibility he has built up in the first year of his second term.

18. Venezuelan and Cuban Military: A Comparative Analysis and Potential U.S. Operation in Cuba

Summary:

The article compares pre-raid Venezuela with today’s Cuba, arguing that Havana is even more vulnerable to a U.S. Maduro-style decapitation operation. Venezuela fielded modern Russian air defenses and Su-30s on paper, but corruption, poor maintenance, and U.S. cyber, electronic warfare, and SEAD collapsed its system in three hours. Cuba’s force is smaller, older, and more hollow, with S-125s, museum-piece MiGs, weak logistics, and a symbolic navy. Geography favors the United States, with targets just 90 miles from Florida. Cuba’s “War of All the People” doctrine offers only theoretical, long-term guerrilla resistance, not credible defense against a rapid, precise leadership snatch.

Comment: An "estimate of the situation" for Cuba. I would caution against overconfidence. Any estimate that postulates a quick and easy operation must be treated with skepticism.

Venezuelan and Cuban Military: A Comparative Analysis and Potential U.S. Operation in Cuba

Saturday, January 10, 2026 by Ernesto Alvarez

https://www.cubaheadlines.com/articles/318230

Introduction

On January 3, 2026, the United States launched "Absolute Resolve," a lightning-fast operation in Venezuela that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro in under three hours. This historical event highlighted the stark contrast between the theoretical military capabilities of Venezuela and its actual combat readiness. For Cuba, which closely monitored Venezuela's swift downfall and suffered the loss of 32 intelligence officers in Caracas, a pressing question arises: how would a similar operation unfold in Cuba?

This article thoroughly examines the military capabilities of Venezuela (prior to January 3) and Cuba (as of January 2026). It reviews air defenses, aviation, armored vehicles, ground forces, and, importantly, the geographic and structural differences that would influence the outcome of a hypothetical U.S. operation targeting Havana.

Venezuelan Military Before January 3, 2026

Size and Structure of the Venezuelan Armed Forces

The Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) boasted over 123,000 active personnel: 63,000 in the Army, 25,500 in the Navy, 11,500 in the Air Force, and 23,000 in the National Guard. On paper, it appeared formidable within the region. However, extreme politicization, corruption, lack of professional mid-level leadership, and low morale plagued the regular units, which focused more on internal control and illicit activities than on conventional warfare.

Air Defense: The Illusion of a Modern IADS

Venezuela invested billions in Russian, Chinese, and Iranian systems since the Chávez era, creating one of Latin America's densest integrated air defense networks on paper:

Long-range systems: S-300VM (SA-23 "Gladiator/Giant"), Buk-M2E (SA-17 "Grizzly")
Short-range systems: Pantsir-S1, S-125 Pechora-2M, MANPADS Igla
Radars: 55Zh6M "Nebo-SV," 64N6E Gamma-DE, 1L119 "Kasta-2E2," Chinese JY-27A and JYL-1

Real State: Critical Operational Status

Prior analyses indicated that less than 50% of these systems were operational. Over 60% of the Chinese radar network was non-functional due to lack of parts and technical support. Equipment cannibalization was rampant, training sporadic, and dependency on foreign parts left the FANB in a precarious state.

Combat Aviation

Venezuela's inventory included:

21 Su-30MK2 Flankers (multi-role, Russian origin)
Approximately 10 residual F-16s (acquired in the 1980s, lacking U.S. parts since 2006)
Mi-35 attack helicopters, Mi-17 transports

Readiness: It was estimated that less than half could effectively fly due to fuel shortages, lack of parts, and limited flight hours.

Armored and Ground Forces

The Venezuelan army had:

~180 main battle tanks: 92 T-72B1Vs (modernized Russian), 81 AMX-30s (French, obsolete)
123 BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles, BTR-80A armored transports
Artillery: Smerch and Grad MLRS, M-46 self-propelled guns

The units suffered from low training, scarce fuel, and irregular morale, with most unable to operate beyond battalion level.

Navy

The Venezuelan Navy was limited: 1 Mariscal Sucre frigate, 1 Type-209 submarine, patrol boats, and fast boats. It lacked real projection or air defense capabilities.

January 3: Collapse in Three Hours

Sequence of "Absolute Resolve"

H-hour -60 min: Cyber and electronic warfare began, cutting power in Caracas and disabling command and control of the IADS. EA-18G Growler aircraft jammed Venezuelan radars, forcing them to reveal positions.

H-hour -30 min: SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses) commenced. F-35C and F-22 aircraft launched AGM-88 HARM missiles at SAM emitters tracking U.S. planes. Several Buk-M2E systems were destroyed on the ground without firing a missile.

H-hour: Helicopter assault. ~150 U.S. aircraft participated. MH-47 Chinook and MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters from the 160th SOAR penetrated Miraflores in Caracas with Delta Force operators, leading to a direct assault on Fuerte Tiuna, where Maduro resided. He was captured after limited resistance.

H+180 min: Complete extraction. Helicopters with Maduro onboard returned to USS Iwo Jima, then transfer to the U.S.

Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces

Size and Structure

The Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) consist of:

50,000-76,000 active personnel: 35,000 in the Army, 5,000 in the Navy, 10,000 in Air Defense
39,000 reserves
90,000 paramilitaries (Territorial Troop Militias, Civil Defense)

The official doctrine is "War of All the People," involving total mobilization, territorial defense, and guerrilla warfare. However, this requires resources like ammunition, fuel, and food that Cuba lacks in 2026.

Air Defense: Obsolete Even After Modernization

Inventory:

144 S-125 Pechora-2BM launchers: Modernized in May 2025 with Belarusian assistance, mounted on T-55 chassis for mobility, with updated electronics
Residual S-75s (1950s)
MANPADS Igla

Without long-range systems like S-300 or S-400, and lacking an integrated IADS comparable to Venezuela's, the S-125 remains outdated. It was originally designed in the 1950s to intercept subsonic bombers and is ineffective against modern stealth aircraft with advanced electronic warfare capabilities.

Cuban Aviation: A Museum Collection

Inventory (on paper):

18 MiG-29s (fourth-generation multi-role, Soviet/Russian origin)
17 MiG-23s (third-generation interceptors, 1970s)
24 MiG-21s (second-generation interceptors, 1960s)
~12 Mi-17/24/35 helicopters (transport/attack)

A recent analysis states that Cuban MiG-29s are "currently inoperable." Without Russian parts, limited fuel, and poor maintenance, the Air Force is more decorative than functional. The MiG-23s and MiG-21s stand no chance against fifth-generation fighters and would likely be downed swiftly.

Armored Vehicles: T-55, T-62, and BMP-1 (1960s Technology)

Inventory:

~500 main battle tanks: T-54/55, T-62 (Soviet, 1950s-1960s)
~400 armored vehicles: BMP-1, BTR-60/BRDM
Artillery: M-46, D-30 (towed), MLRS Grad

Despite some local modernization attempts, these vehicles remain vulnerable to modern threats like drones and precision missiles. Without sustained fuel, they are essentially rolling museum pieces.

Navy: Symbolic

Cuba possesses:

2 Pauk-class frigates (converted from fishing vessels, 1980s)
1 Delfín-class submarine (training mini-submarine, 200 tons, no real combat capability)
Coastal patrol boats

The Cuban Navy lacks projection or air defense capabilities and is insignificant compared to U.S. naval power in the Caribbean.

Realistic Cuban Response Possibilities

Air Defense: Nonexistent

The S-125 Pechora-2BM, despite the 2025 Belarusian upgrade, remains technology from the 1950s. Against F-35/F-22 aircraft, EA-18G electronic warfare, and AGM-88 HARM missiles, they would be destroyed without a chance to retaliate, as was the case with more modern systems in Venezuela.

Aviation: Ineffective

Cuban MiG-29/23/21 aircraft are outmatched against fifth-generation fighters. Analysts believe they wouldn't even take off or would be shot down swiftly. A specialized analysis confirms that Cuban MiG-29s are "currently inoperable." Without sustained fuel, the Air Force remains largely ceremonial.

Armored and Ground Forces: Irrelevant in a Lightning Operation

In a Venezuela-like scenario (leader capture in 2-3 hours), T-55/T-62 tanks would lack the time and fuel for effective deployment. Their role would be post-incursion, during prolonged resistance or occupation, but without air support or logistics, they would collapse quickly.

Asymmetric Warfare (MTT, Guerrillas): Theoretical Potential, Material Limitations

The "War of All the People" doctrine is Cuba's only real strategic card. With over 1 million militiamen and a historical guerrilla tradition, it could wear down an occupying force over time. However:

Crisis of morale: Exhausted population, mass exodus, doubtful fighting spirit in 2026 vs. 1961
Lack of resources: Ammunition, food, fuel, and electricity depleted
Doctrine requires leadership: With Díaz-Canel captured, the chain of command would be fractured, questioning its effectiveness
Infeasible in a lightning raid: The doctrine is suited for prolonged resistance, not the immediate defense of strategic objectives against special operations

Navy: Insignificant

Two converted fishing vessel frigates and a mini-submarine cannot counter U.S. naval strength in the Caribbean.

CONCLUSION: Absolute Asymmetry

If Venezuela—with superior inventory, continental geography, and regional support—collapsed in three hours, Cuba would face an even faster and more decisive fate:

Factors Making Cuba More Vulnerable Than Venezuela

Extreme geographical proximity: 90 miles from Florida vs. operations from multiple Caribbean bases facilitate U.S. logistics and response time
Overwhelming technological superiority: The gap between F-35/F-22/EA-18G Growler vs. S-125/MiG-21 represents 70 years of military evolution
Deeper prior structural collapse: Cuba in January 2026 is in a worse state than Venezuela in December 2025:
Terminal electrical crisis (5 total collapses in 2025)
Fuel depleted (no Venezuelan supply)
Economy in freefall
More vulnerable presidential target: El Laguito is a civilian residential area, unlike Fuerte Tiuna, which was a fortified military complex with a guard battalion, bunkers, and tunnels
Completely inoperative aviation: MiG-29s out of service, no fuel for operations
No credible external support: Russia and China have symbolic agreements but wouldn't militarily intervene in the Caribbean against the U.S.

Estimated Operation Time

2-3 hours from SEAD initiation to complete extraction (similar or faster than Caracas):

H-30 min: SEAD (neutralization of S-125)
H-hour: Assault on El Laguito (15-30 min on the ground)
H+60-90 min: Complete extraction, forces "over the water"

Probability of Success

90-95%, higher than Venezuela's due to:

Target in a civilian residential area, not a fortified military complex
Obsolete air defenses (S-125 vs. S-300VM)
Collapsed infrastructure (electricity, fuel)
Geographical proximity to the U.S.
Overwhelming technological superiority

Estimated Casualties

U.S.: 0-2 (low risk due to extreme superiority)
Cuba: 10-30 (MININT/personal guards, limited resistance)
Civilians: 0-5 (if the operation is as surgical as Venezuela's)

The Only Real Cuban Capability

The "War of All the People" is Cuba's only military doctrine with real potential, but it's designed for prolonged asymmetric resistance post-invasion, not for immediate defense against lightning special operations.

In a leadership capture raid (2-3 hours), Territorial Militias wouldn't have time to mobilize. Without leadership, with collapsed logistics, or external support, their effectiveness in prolonged resistance would be limited, and the humanitarian cost to the civilian population could be devastating.

Critical Variable

The only critical operational variable for the U.S. is confirming Díaz-Canel's exact location at H-hour (El Laguito residence vs. Palace of the Revolution), which requires precise prior HUMINT/ISR intelligence. With that information, the operation is highly viable and likely to succeed quickly with minimal casualties.

The lesson from January 3, 2026, is clear: inventory on paper doesn't win wars; real operational capability does. In this regard, Cuba is in a worse position than Venezuela was when Maduro fell.

Key Questions About Cuban Military Capabilities

How does Cuba's military compare to Venezuela's before the 2026 operation?

Cuba's military is less equipped and less prepared compared to Venezuela's forces prior to the 2026 operation. While both countries faced issues with outdated equipment and resource limitations, Cuba's military lacks modern air defense systems and is more geographically vulnerable.

What are the main weaknesses of the Cuban air defense system?

Cuba's air defense relies on outdated systems like the S-125 Pechora-2BM, which are ineffective against modern stealth aircraft equipped with advanced electronic warfare capabilities. The lack of long-range systems and an integrated air defense network further weakens their defensive capabilities.

Why is the "War of All the People" doctrine significant for Cuba?

The "War of All the People" doctrine is significant because it represents Cuba's strategy of total mobilization and territorial defense through guerrilla warfare. It is designed for prolonged resistance rather than immediate defense against rapid assaults, offering a potential long-term strategy to resist occupation.

See related topics

Venezuelan Military Cuban Military Absolute Resolve Nicolás Maduro Havana Integrated Air Defense System (IADS)MiG-29 Fighter Jets War of All the People Doctrine Díaz-Canel USS Iwo Jima

19. Cognitive Warfare and the Indo-Pacific

Summary:

Jon Reisher argues that China exploits an algorithmically biased information environment to wage cognitive warfare against small Asia-Indo-Pacific states, eroding norms like UNCLOS and undermining alliances. It proposes a partner-enabled Cognitive Warfare Framework built around a multinational Cognitive Warfare Operations Cell, a Pacific Cognitive Commons for shared data and narrative tools, and tech grants for local journalists, influencers, and fact-checkers. The goal is to empower authentic local voices, expose PRC gray-zone tactics in real time, and create “micro-deterrents” across platforms. Technology, cheap drones, and AI become equalizers that let even small states shape perceptions, impose reputational costs, and support a denial strategy.

Comment: How do we embed a Cognitive Warfare Operations Cell and Pacific Cognitive Commons inside existing Asia-Indo-Pacific architectures (Quad, ASEAN, treaty alliances) without creating another stovepiped “info shop” that never truly drives campaign design and deterrence planning?

If we deliberately weaponize civil society narratives and local influencers for cognitive warfare, how do we protect their independence, credibility, and safety, and avoid turning partners’ information spaces into extensions of U.S. psychological operations?

What safeguards, red lines, and legal frameworks are needed so that U.S. and allied cognitive warfare in defense of international norms does not slowly converge toward the same manipulative practices we condemn in Beijing, eroding our own moral and narrative advantage over time?

Cognitive Warfare and the Indo-Pacific

irregularwarfare.org · Jon Reisher · January 12, 2026

https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/cognitive-warfare-and-the-indo-pacific/

Editor’s Note: This article was submitted as part of the Irregular Warfare Initiative’s 2025 Writing Contest, in which authors were invited to explore how the United States and its partners can use irregular warfare to strengthen security cooperation, build trust, and enhance resilience among Indo-Pacific nations. This article stood out for its innovative framing of cognitive warfare as a tool of deterrence and alliance-building, and for its practical recommendations on how small Indo-Pacific nations can leverage information operations to uphold international norms. We have edited the piece after its selection.

“Psychologically, the PRC is trying to cause mental disarray and confusion, in order to weaken fighting will and determination to defend ourselves.”

The balance of the modern global information environment has become algorithmically biased, with social media platforms tailoring content to users’ preferences and reinforcing their pre-existing beliefs. By isolating users in personalized filter bubbles, these algorithms amplify confirmation bias and cultivate increasingly polarized online echo chambers, distorting users’ perceptions of reality and fueling societal division—conditions the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has learned to weaponize.

This is particularly true in small, strategically important countries in the Indo-Pacific, where the PRC orchestrates influence campaigns to propagate pro-Beijing narratives and discredit critics. For example, in the Philippines, a Chinese embassy–funded marketing firm called InfinitUs created fake social media accounts that praised China’s actions in the South China Sea, disparaged the U.S.–Philippine alliance, and amplified anti-American content under the guise of local voices. This kind of targeted political propaganda, sometimes called “spamoflauge,” illustrates how hostile actors exploit algorithmic amplification to reinforce existing rifts.

How, then, can the United States address the PRC’s systemic use of information warfare, given its unrestrained employment of misinformation against the United States and its allies in the Indo-Pacific? Part of the solution lies in adopting a partner-enabled Cognitive Warfare Framework: a construct designed to strengthen sovereign resilience while changing the PRC’s perception of risk in conducting influence campaigns or irregular warfare. At the center of this framework is a Cognitive Warfare Operations Cell (CWOC): a multinational staff that synchronizes social-media campaigns, influence measures of performance, and legal-diplomatic messaging across the information environment. The framework would also establish a Pacific Cognitive Commons, an open-architecture data lake where partners and the CWOC could share sensor feeds, disinformation forensics, and narrative templates in near real time. Finally, the framework would provide local information power brokers technology grants with an emphasis on transparency and strengthening partner capacity.

Protecting International Norms Through the Human Dimension

Global stability depends on shared international norms, which the PRC has attempted to undermine by leveraging gray-zone tactics that allow Beijing to operate below the threshold of open conflict. Keeping with communist ideology, the PRC assiduously works to control information and narratives at home and abroad, developing information campaigns that weave together public opinion warfare, legal manipulation, and psychological pressure to erode the foundations of international law, particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). For instance, China’s assertion of the Nine-Dash Line in the South China Sea disregards established maritime boundaries and challenges UNCLOS provisions, while simultaneously pressuring neighboring states to acquiesce through coercive presence operations and persuasive narratives.

In effect, China’s strategy aims to redefine the status quo without triggering direct confrontation. This gradual erosion of norms matters because agreements like UNCLOS provide more than legal clarity; they underpin stability by setting predictable standards for state conduct, constraining unilateral aggression, and legitimizing collective responses. When these norms weaken, predictability gives way to coercion, and the international order drifts from one rooted in law to one governed by opportunism or an alternative set of rules and facts of Beijing’s choosing—which it also backs up through concerted information campaigns and lawfare.

Countering China’s human-centered, narrative-driven strategy requires a response anchored in the human dimension—one that empowers authenticity and local voices across social media platforms, civil society fact-checkers, civil literacy education, and independent regional journalists not influenced or financed by outside state sponsors. Doing so can create an organic, scalable information network that makes it easier for civil society or the public to identify illegal behavior and misinformation in real time.

Furthermore, China fears empowered, networked activism which is why Beijing devotes significant resources to monitoring and managing the online activities of its own population. When taken in context of the South China Sea example raised earlier, the more that U.S. allies publish unclassified drone footage, crowdsource maritime data, or use artificial intelligence (AI) to expose PRC narratives and falsities, the higher the reputational cost incurred by Beijing, and the harder it becomes to alter political conditions with impunity.

In cognitive warfare, repetition across multiple media vectors—as opposed to amassing volume on one platform—becomes the metric of success. That is because one source of information is easier to counter than a network of different voices across multiple platforms and domains. As a result, every social media post, newspaper opinion piece, or fiery YouTube video can serve as a micro-deterrent that sustains truthful narratives.

Building Alliances Around Shared Cognitive Effects

Cognitive warfare is the deliberate shaping of perceptions, narratives, and decision cycles and is a decisive precondition for a strategy of denial against the PRC. Cognitive warfare also entails the purposeful manipulation of information, technology, and social dynamics to influence how audiences perceive reality, decide, and act, effectively turning perception itself into the primary battlespace. An effective cognitive warfare campaign to deter China’s aggression would emphasize messaging that upholds international norms, signals costs to China’s aggression and PRC stability, demonstrates allied unity, and integrates low-cost information effects to skew Beijing’s cost–benefit calculus long before crisis.

A strategy of denial in the information environment depends on an alliance ecosystem that can see, understand, and signal faster than the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) can maneuver. Strategic denial is vital in the information dimension because once a narrative takes hold it is more difficult to counter or debunk an entrenched line of thinking. In economics this is known as a first mover advantage. Furthermore, RAND’s analysis of denial underscores the importance of credible, distributed American forces backed by partners that are willing to accept risk on behalf of each other. Modern technology lowers the barrier to collaboration by providing narrative toolkits, bot-detection software, and TikTok templates—open-source tools that can be shared with any cognitive warfare partner.

While the previous sections addressed integrated and combined information operations, the need for structure—a central body where practitioners and local actors can coordinate, seek guidance, and reinforce shared narratives—becomes essential. That’s where a Cognitive Warfare Operations Cell (CWOC)—a multi-national staff that synchronizes social-media campaigns, influences measures of performance, and crafts legal-diplomatic talking points—comes in. Creating such a cell could allow even the smallest coast guard in Oceania to punch above its weight if it is integrated with partner information platforms along a coherent information campaign. The CWOC would operate with the flexibility of modern intelligence-sharing agreements, while focusing specifically on coordinating a cohesive, multinational cognitive warfare campaign.

Technology as the Key Enabler

Technology is the new equalizer in modern warfare and is the primary conduit to conduct cognitive warfare at the speed and scale required of the modern information environment. Low-cost, effective technologies have proliferated in the last several years. Particularly with regard to access to free Large Language Models (LLMs) and cheap drones. As a result, humanity is experiencing a rapid expansion of accessible capabilities and, in effect, a democratization of cognitive warfare–related technologies.

The PRC fears the democratization of technology because cheap quadcopters, commercial SATCOM, and open-source AI capabilities make it possible for even the most remote village in the Indo-Pacific to collect evidence counter to PRC narratives, live-stream it to global audiences, and auto-translate subtitles within minutes. Additionally, the greater a U.S. partner’s technological tempo (firmware drops, fresh data, rapid prototype cycles), the more uncertain Beijing becomes concerning their ability to obscure (and therefore leverage) their own Irregular Warfare campaigns below the conflict threshold.

Illustrative Scenario: Palau

Palau, a strategic archipelago east of the Philippines, is one of three Pacific nations that formally recognize Taiwan. Located in the second island chain, Palau sits between a U.S. base in Guam and the Philippines, a key American partner against Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea. With a population of around 17,600, this U.S. ally draws significant attention from the PRC, whose influence in Palau poses risks to broader American power projection.

Absent an organic capability, and due to a lack of regional resistance frameworks like the cognitive warfare framework, the PRC employs targeted social media campaigns and strives for full control of Palauan information networks. Most notably, efforts to prop up a pro-Chinese newspaper, Tia Belau, represent the kind of systematic attempts to control local perceptions of PRC activities. Ultimately the owner of Tia Belau unsuccessfully attempted to launch a media venture promoting Palau in China in 2018. Although that initiative failed, Beijing continues to wield economic leverage over Palau and makes concerted efforts to interfere in Palau’s elections.

Under a cognitive warfare framework, Palau can counter PRC influence by identifying threats, such as social media manipulation, via the CWOC headquarters. Alternatively, the CWOC can also support grass roots counter-PRC influence campaigns.

For example, once a PRC influence operation or territorial incursion s identified, the CWOC can first empower local voices through training, small grants, and cost effective tools such as Generative AI to create and disseminate investigative content exposing PRC intentions. A second step would entail a coordinated narrative campaign across varied languages and media platforms by CWOC member states. Finally, the content would further amplify local efforts by distributing coordinated information campaigns across the Indo-Pacific and leveraging the content against adversarial messaging networks.

Establishing a Cognitive Warfare Framework in the Indo-Pacific

A partner-enabled cognitive warfare Framework that counters PRC influence campaigns would require the following initial steps:

Fund a Pacific Cognitive Commons: maintain an unclassified, open-architecture data lake where local partners and CWOC upload sensor feeds, disinformation forensics, and narrative templates in near real time.
Institutionalize the Cognitive Warfare Operations Cell (CWOC): establish the CWOC under the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue plus ASEAN invitees and rotate leadership quarterly to reinforce ownership. Require members to coordinate information campaigns and provide resourcing to the cognitive warfare Framework.
Tie Technology Grants to Outcomes: establish a fund and then release micro-grants to partners and local journalists or social media influencers who publish verifiable evidence of norm violations, incentivizing transparency. CWOC members would conduct training on provided technology via online or in-person engagement.

Conclusion

A partner-enabled cognitive warfare framework would complicate the PRC’s risk calculus by introducing uncertainty in the information space well before conflict, and sow doubt in Chinese decision makers before considering even the smallest forms of aggression. Partner-enabled cognitive warfare shifts the strategic high ground from geography to mindset and brings strategic competition to where the PRC has been prioritizing for decades. Technology-enabled signaling by the United States and its allies would amplify alliance actions, reinforce the states’ sovereignty and international order, and convince Beijing that any attempted aggression would trigger a multi-spectral backlash it cannot afford. Perception is nine-tenths of deterrence, and if wielded effectively, the United States and its partners have the opportunity to wield the loudest megaphones.

Jon Reisher holds a master’s degree in public policy and management from Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College and has multiple deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the wider Middle East.

Main Image generated by ChatGPT using DALL·E, OpenAI (Sept 29, 2025).

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

If you value reading the Irregular Warfare Initiative, please consider supporting our work. And for the best gear, check out the IWI store for mugs, coasters, apparel, and other items.

Irregular Warfare in the Indo-Pacific Region
The panel includes: Major General James (Jamie) Jarrard is the Chief of Staff of Indo-Pacific Command. General Jarrard has significant experience in the Pacific with 2-27 Infantry and as the…
What makes warfare irregular? Pineland Underground speaks with Mr/LTC Doug Livermore on Irregular Warfare
Did you know the entire Joint Force engages in Irregular Warfare? Often defined differently depending on the individual or organization you speak to. The Pineland Underground podcast has Doug Livermore…
Sneaky Wars in the Indo-Pacific
Episode 119 discusses irregular warfare in the Indo-Pacific with Dr. Sean McFate, and COL Ed Croot. Our guests discuss the evolving landscape of irregular warfare. They critique the conventional vs.…

irregularwarfare.org · Jon Reisher · January 12, 2026

20. Why the U.S. Navy Doesn’t Build Battleships Anymore

Summary:

The article explains that battleships, once symbols of national power, are obsolete in modern naval warfare. Yamato’s fate, and the rise of carrier aviation, then long-range missiles, show that striking first at distance, not armored gun duels, now decides sea battles. POTUS’s proposed Trump-class battleship, USS Defiant, offers fewer missiles and less resilience than multiple smaller destroyers or Zumwalts, undermining distributed maritime operations, which depend on many networked nodes. The real value of the proposal is political symbolism that spotlights chronic underinvestment in the fleet. The Navy no longer needs battleships, but it still needs the public imagination, and money.

Comment: As an aside, perhaps battleships are to warships as Special Forces is to Special Operations Forces. Battleships are misused as the all encompassing term. Or maybe that is not a good analogy that only works from my SF perspective. But on a more serious note this article provides what I think is critical analysis of what our Navy needs to support national security. What does our nation need and what will Americans support?

Why the U.S. Navy Doesn’t Build Battleships Anymore

warontherocks.com · January 12, 2026

Trent Hone

January 12, 2026

https://warontherocks.com/2026/01/why-the-u-s-navy-doesnt-build-battleships-anymore/

On Apr. 7, 1945, aircraft from the U.S. Navy’s fast carrier task force sank the largest battleship ever built, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Yamato. Escorted by the light cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers, Yamato was on its way to Okinawa. It was intended to be a one-way trip: Yamato was expected to beach and use its guns as a coastal battery against the U.S. invasion fleet. Its approach was detected by American submarines and signals intelligence. Eleven U.S. aircraft carriers launched almost 300 aircraft. Over about two hours, Yamato was hit more than 15 times by torpedoes and bombs. When Yamato blew apart, the blast could be seen from 100 miles away.

Designed for a clash of battle lines — opposing battleship formations — that never came, Yamato was the culmination of the battleship concept, combining unprecedented firepower, massive armor, and high speed in a hull displacing 70,000 tons. It was the largest and most heavily armed battleship ever constructed. To Japanese leaders, Yamato was more than a ship. It was a symbol of national power, technological prowess, and imperial ambitions.

That symbolism has returned to American politics. President Donald Trump recently announced plans for a new U.S. Navy battleship, reviving a type of warship the Navy abandoned generations ago. Evaluating that proposal requires separating two distinct questions that Yamato itself embodies: whether the battleship still makes operational sense in modern naval warfare, and whether it retains political and symbolic value even after its military utility has passed.

The answer to the first question is straightforward. The operational concept that once justified battleships has been obsolete for decades, supplanted first by aircraft carriers and now by long-range precision missiles and networked fleets. Building a modern battleship would produce a smaller, less resilient, and less lethal force than existing alternatives. The answer to the second question is more complicated. Battleships have always carried symbolic weight far beyond their combat performance, shaping public perceptions of naval power, national prestige, and global standing.

While battleships no longer belong in the U.S. Navy’s fleet, they still occupy a powerful place in the political imagination. Understanding why the Navy stopped building them and why calls to revive them persist requires examining both the operational logic that doomed the battleship and the symbolic logic that continues to resurrect it.

BECOME A MEMBER

Battleships: What Are They?

Battleships were the most powerful ships in the world when naval combat was dominated by gunfire. Their origins date back to the ships of the line that ruled the waves in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 19th century, wooden sailing ships were replaced by steel-hulled, steam-driven warships and the battleship was born. Instead of mounting their guns along the hull in neat rows, like sailing ships, battleships grouped their guns in turrets to provide all-around fire. And such guns! Although the 18-inch guns of Yamato were the largest, ships of the U.S., British, German, Italian, and French navies all mounted guns of 15 inches or larger, firing armor-piercing shells weighing about a ton (the inches here refer to the internal diameter of the gun’s bore).

Those shells were designed to strike other ships and destroy them. During the battleship era, there was a competition between firepower and protection. Initially, battleships were protected by plates of iron and steel. As increasingly powerful guns proved capable of penetrating those plates, rudimentary protection schemes gave way to layered arrangements of face-hardened armor designed to resist penetration and contain the explosion of any shells that made it through. Smaller ships lacked such protection and could not mount guns large enough to penetrate battleship armor. In an encounter between a battleship and a cruiser or a destroyer, the battleship was sure to win. Their size, firepower, and ability to absorb extensive punishment reinforced their symbolic power. They were the largest, strongest, and most survivable ships in the world.

The Battleship Operational Concept

However, because of their reliance on guns battleships always fought at close ranges, at least by modern standards. In 1898, at the Battle of Manila Bay, Commodore George Dewey’s squadron defeated the Spanish from no more than 5000 yards away. Although increasingly accurate fire control systems and new technologies like radar allowed guns to hit at greater ranges in the 20th century, the longest ranges at which battleships scored hits in battle were no more than 26,000 yards, less than 13 nautical miles. For example, HMS Warspite, a British battleship, hit the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare at this distance during the Battle of Calabria in July 1940. The month before, the German battleship Scharnhorst hit the British carrier HMS Glorious at a similar range.

At first, battleships cruised in independent squadrons. However, in the early 20th century, the introduction of new technologies like the torpedo, submarines, and aircraft made it imperative to operate battleships as part of a “balanced” fleet. Cruisers scouted ahead, destroyers screened the battleships and protected them from submarines, and, eventually, aircraft carriers provided an aerial umbrella over the entire fleet. To bring their guns to bear and use them, battleships had to operate in concert with other ship types.

The introduction of carriers changed naval warfare, not because they immediately replaced battleships but because their aircraft could attack at much greater ranges. By the late 1930s, aircraft could strike targets 150 miles away, an order of magnitude farther than battleship guns. That created new opportunities to “attack effectively first,” which, as U.S. Navy Capt. Wayne Hughes noted in his seminal Fleet Tactics, is the most important principle of naval warfare.

At the start of World War II, the striking power of carriers remained limited. Although their aircraft could sink isolated ships afloat or in harbor — Taranto in November 1940, Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and Ceylon in April 1942 were proof enough — a balanced fleet was still necessary to secure command of the sea and undertake major operations. As the capabilities of carriers and their aircraft increased, battleships began to take on secondary roles. The older and slower U.S. Navy battleships, for example, concentrated primarily on shore bombardment for amphibious operations in the latter half of World War II. By the end of the war, it was clear that the validity of the battleship’s original operational concept was coming to an end.

Although the U.S. Navy intended to keep the four ships of the Iowa class — its fastest and newest battleships — in service after the war, the cost was too great and there was no need. Each Iowa required a crew of nearly 2000. With no enemy battleships left to fight — the Cold War Soviet Navy emphasized bombers and submarines — those sailors could serve better elsewhere. By 1950 only one Iowa, the USS Missouri, was still in commission. All returned to service during the Korean War, but they were used for shore bombardment, not fighting other ships. That pattern repeated during the Vietnam War and in the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s. Although no other ships could match their 16-inch guns, the Iowa-class ships proved costly to refit and operate, and not just in terms of money. Forty-seven sailors died when an error loading the guns caused one of USS Iowa’s turrets to explode in April 1989. All the Iowas were decommissioned by 1993.

Battleships as Symbols

Even as naval warfare changed, battleships remained powerful symbols. In the late 19th century, the number of battleships in a fleet was the standard measure of naval power. Britain asserted mastery of the seas by maintaining a “two power standard.” Formalized in the Naval Defense Act of 1899, it called for the British battlefleet to be at least equal in size to that of the next two largest navies combined. The increasing strength of the German navy in the early 20th century made it impossible for Britain to maintain the standard. Thus, in the years before World War I, Britain and Germany engaged in a building race as the British sought to maintain their lead. While the British and German fleets clashed at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, the neutral United States committed to build a battlefleet “second to none” to secure its global interests.

To stave off another naval race in the aftermath of World War I, the great powers came together in Washington and signed a series of treaties. The Five-Power Treaty between the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy — commonly known as the Washington Treaty of 1922 — limited naval armaments and used battleships as the gauge. Fixed ratios were set for the size of battle fleets and limits were established for the size of battleships: They could not exceed 35,000 tons or be armed with guns larger than 16 inches. That forced the cancellation of most of the U.S. Navy’s 1916 program as well as similar programs in Britain and Japan.

Exceptions for some existing ships were made. The British were allowed to retain HMS Hood, the largest capital ship in the world. Nominally a battlecruiser (traditionally a battlecruiser combined battleship guns with cruiser armor to secure high speed), HMS Hood was armored on the scale of some battleships. The ship cruised the world in 1923 and 1924, visiting sites in Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, North America, and the Caribbean. This “Empire Cruise” reminded the world of the power and global reach of the Royal Navy. It was a symbolic blow, then, when German battleship Bismarck sank HMS Hood during the Battle of the Denmark Strait on May 24, 1941.

Seven months later, the U.S. Navy suffered similarly when the Pacific Fleet’s battle line was destroyed at Pearl Harbor. Just a week before the attack, the program for the Army-Navy football game proudly displayed a picture of USS Arizona, with the caption proclaiming that “despite the claims of air enthusiasts no battleship has yet been sunk by bombs.” USS Arizona was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941, consumed in a conflagration triggered by a Japanese bomb. The destruction of the U.S. Navy’s battle line was a symbolic blow as much as a physical one and it disrupted the Navy’s moral cohesion as the Japanese intended.

Yamato was the ultimate expression of this trend, a culmination both of battleship as warship design and battleship as symbol. However, the time and effort devoted to its construction could arguably have been better invested in creating the kind of balanced fleet Imperial Japan needed to win a mid-20th-century naval war. While that might not have prevented defeat in World War II, it would have given the Japanese more options. The symbolic aura associated with Yamato and its twin Musashi meant that the Japanese were hesitant to risk them and they spent most of World War II underutilized.

The Concept Behind USS Defiant

This history is useful for evaluating Trump’s proposed battleship class, dubbed the Trump class. The administration has stated the first of this class will be the USS Defiant. The operational concept behind the design is weak. In a modern fleet, missiles have become the primary weapon. Just as aircraft supplanted battleship guns in the 1940s, missiles have today supplanted aircraft. They can strike farther, faster, and with less risk because there is no aircrew to suffer loss or capture. However, from the specifications that have been shared, the USS Defiant will carry a vertical launch system with just 128 cells and 12 conventional prompt strike missiles on 35,000 tons.

This compares poorly with existing ships in the Navy’s inventory. The latest Arleigh Burke-class destroyers mount 96 cells on 10,000 tons. Since the size of a ship is a reasonable approximation of its cost, three Arleigh Burke ships would provide 125 percent more firepower (288 cells versus 128) for less expense than one of the Trump class. The ships of the Zumwalt class are being refitted to carry 12 conventional prompt strike missiles in addition to 80 cells on 15,000 tons. Comparing them to the USS Defiant leads to a similar outcome. Two Zumwalts give twice the missiles and 25 percent more launch systems (160 vs. 128) at less cost than one of the Trump class.

Building the USS Defiant and additional ships of the Trump class would result in a smaller, less capable fleet. Unlike the battleships of the 20th century, which could endure substantial battle damage and keep fighting because of thick armor and watertight subdivisions, the USS Defiant’s fighting strength will be determined by its vulnerable electronics. That means avoiding hits, not fighting through them. In the missile age, a larger fleet with more ships has a distinct advantage because it presents the enemy with a greater targeting challenge. Today, defense is rooted mainly in numbers and dispersion, not armor. The best approach for the U.S. Navy is to not build the Trump class but larger numbers of smaller ships instead. Not only would that mean more vertical launch cells, and therefore greater firepower. It would also mean a more resilient fleet, with greater capacity to absorb enemy attacks and keep fighting.

This is particularly important given the U.S. Navy’s distributed maritime operations concept, which involves fighting the fleet as a network. The resilience of a network, or, in this case, the survivability of the fleet, increases with the number of nodes. Building the Trump class would mean fewer nodes, decreased resilience, and less overall capability. Jeff Vandenengel articulated this argument well in his book, Questioning the Carrier. Although Vandenengel’s argument centered on the carrier battle group, it can be employed equally well against the new battleship. Both risk investing too much in large, costly platforms that restrict the fleet’s flexibility and fighting power.

The Golden Fleet

However, the fact that it is a large, costly platform is the most valuable thing about the USS Defiant. The president’s announcement has captured the attention of the public and raised questions about U.S. Navy ship design. What he has proposed is not just a new ship, but a symbolic resurrection of U.S. naval power, captured in the idea of a “Golden Fleet.” In that sense, more than any other, the Trump class harkens back to the battleships of old.

I believe that Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle have embraced the battleship idea because they understand this. I hope they also know the operational concept is weak. They probably know Congress may never authorize such a ship. However, they also know that they need to draw attention to the fact that the U.S. Navy needs investment. For decades, it has been asked to do too much with too little, putting undue pressure on ships, officers, and sailors. If Trump’s proposal to reinvigorate battleship construction can raise the visibility of that challenge, increase investment to adequately address it, and lead to a more capable force, then it will be worthwhile. While Congress is set to boost the Navy’s shipbuilding account in the Fiscal Year 2026 budget, I suspect it will not appropriate funds for a new battleship anytime soon. However, the Navy may very well waste research and development funds designing the Trump class — which it can do without congressional approval.

The U.S. Navy doesn’t build battleships anymore because the need for them has passed, but the Navy does need to find ways to capture the imagination of the American people and encourage investment. Battleships remain symbols of national power and prestige. The public’s linkage to them is more tenuous than it was a century ago — most battleships are gone, but the aura and majesty that surrounds them survives. The president and Phelan have tried to tap into that with the USS Defiant.

BECOME A MEMBER

Trent Hone is the Marine Corps University Foundation chair of strategic studies at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. He is the author of several books, including Learning War: The Evolution of Fighting Doctrine in the U.S. Navy, 1898–1945 and Mastering the Art of Command: Admiral Chester W. Nimitz and Victory in the Pacific War. He is the co-author of Battle Line: The United States Navy, 1919–1939.

These views in this article do not represent those of the U.S. Marine Corps, the Marine Corps University, or any part of the Department of Defense. The views in this article similarly do not represent those of, the Marine Corps University Foundation.

**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.

Image: U.S. Navy

warontherocks.com · January 12, 2026

21. The Myth of the AI Race: Neither America Nor China Can Achieve True Tech Dominance

Summary:

Colin Kahl argues there is no single, winner-take-all AI race. The United States leads in frontier models and compute, while China closes the gap in practical models, open-weight diffusion, and embodied AI in factories, robots, and infrastructure. POTUS’s decision to loosen chip export controls risks eroding U.S. compute advantages, enabling a U.S.-enabled Chinese stack abroad, and accelerating asymmetric AI bipolarity. Kahl urges tighter controls on high-end chips, investments in allied AI infrastructure, domestic workforce and manufacturing resilience, and structured U.S.-China dialogue to manage shared AI risks, rather than chasing illusory total dominance.

Comment: How should U.S. defense planners adapt integrated deterrence, cognitive warfare, and campaign design in the Asia-Indo-Pacific if AI competition is a fragmented decathlon rather than a single race?

If Washington accepts enduring AI bipolarity, what specific guardrails and crisis mechanisms with Beijing are needed to prevent AI-enabled miscalculation, coercive leverage over supply chains, or a destabilizing race to deploy risky autonomous systems? And is it even possible to develop such mechanisms with Beijing?

The Myth of the AI Race

Foreign Affairs · More by Colin H. Kahl · January 12, 2026

Neither America Nor China Can Achieve True Tech Dominance

Colin H. Kahl

January 12, 2026

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/myth-ai-race

Data storage tapes in Berkeley, California, May 2025 Manuel Orbegozo / Reuters

COLIN H. KAHL is Director and Steven C. Hazy Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Print Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Save Sign in and save to read later

In July, the Trump administration released an artificial intelligence action plan titled “Winning the AI Race,” which framed global competition over AI in stark terms: whichever country achieves dominance in the technology will reap overwhelming economic, military, and geopolitical advantages. As it did during the Cold War with the space race or the nuclear buildup, the U.S. government is now treating AI as a contest with a single finish line and a single victor.

But that premise is misleading. The United States and China, the world’s two AI superpowers, are not converging on the same path to AI leadership, nor are they competing across a single dimension. Instead, the AI competition is fragmenting across many domains, including the development of the most advanced large language and multimodal models; control over computing infrastructure such as data centers and top-of-the-line chips used to train and run models; influence over which technologies and standards are used throughout the world; and integration of AI into physical systems such as robots, factories, vehicles, and military platforms. Having an edge in one area does not automatically translate into an advantage in the others. As a result, it is plausible that Washington and Beijing could each emerge as leaders in different parts of the AI ecosystem rather than one side decisively outpacing the other across the board.

This outcome is even more likely in the wake of the Trump administration’s decision to lift some export controls on advanced AI chips to China. In December, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. government would permit the sale of Nvidia’s H200—the company’s second most powerful AI chip—to approved customers in China. The decision reflects a belief that allowing China access to “good enough” computing power can generate revenue for U.S. companies and reinforce American technological standards without risking the United States’ edge in AI innovation. But the danger of selling high-end U.S. chips to China is that it could lead to a more divided AI landscape—one in which U.S. firms maintain a lead in providing advanced AI-based services, but Chinese companies gain ground in disseminating their slightly less advanced but cheaper technology around the world and applying AI to machines, factories, and infrastructure.

The most plausible outcome of the AI race, then, may not be decisive American or Chinese victory, but something more complex and more consequential: an asymmetric form of AI bipolarity. In a world without a clear winner, the United States will need to adapt to a longer-term competition while engaging China to manage the shared risks that advanced AI is likely to produce.

PLAYING CATCH-UP

The United States still enjoys a clear advantage at the cutting edge of AI. The world’s most capable large language models and multimodal systems are produced by U.S. firms such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. These models demonstrate superior reasoning and tool-use capabilities—such as autonomously writing and debugging code, querying live databases, and analyzing spreadsheets—and anchor the most commercially valuable AI services, including AI assistants that help manage cloud platforms, productivity software, and customer service.

But the United States’ lead at the frontier is narrower than it once appeared. Chinese firms including DeepSeek, Alibaba (through its Qwen models), and Moonshot AI (with its Kimi series) are catching up. For many practical applications, such as drafting text, summarizing and translating documents, writing routine code, or powering customer service chatbots, the difference between the best U.S. models and the best Chinese ones is already marginal.

For now, the United States’ most significant advantage lies not in models but in compute—the quality and quantity of computing resources to train and run AI models. U.S. companies design the world’s most advanced AI chips, primarily through Nvidia, and the United States is far ahead of China in the scale of AI data centers. U.S. firms control roughly 70 percent of global AI compute, whereas Chinese companies control around ten percent. This capacity allows U.S. companies to train larger and more capable models and absorb the enormous computational costs of customers making requests of models in ways that Chinese competitors cannot easily match. U.S. companies, such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, plan to spend trillions of dollars on specialized chips, AI-focused data centers, and the energy infrastructure to power them over the next few years, likely widening the computing power gap between the United States and China, at least in the near term.

Export controls that were enacted during Trump’s first term and dramatically strengthened under the Biden administration reinforced this advantage. Restrictions on advanced AI chips and on semiconductor manufacturing equipment have made it difficult for Chinese firms to acquire or produce sufficient quantities of leading-edge chips for AI, which has slowed China’s ability to create the computing power required to train and deploy the most advanced models.

China has still managed to make some decent chips. Huawei’s Ascend 910 series—the best Chinese semiconductors—perform about 60 to 70 percent as well as Nvidia’s H100 or H200 on some AI workloads. But Huawei can make only hundreds of thousands of them, whereas Nvidia currently produces and exports millions of far more capable AI chips each year.

HANDS OFF

China has access to vast quantities of data and deep pools of AI talent. It can also easily and quickly build AI-related infrastructure and generate the energy to power it. Access to computing power, then, remains the single most binding constraint on China’s global AI ambitions—a constraint that the Trump administration just eased with its decision to allow some Chinese firms to buy Nvidia’s H200 chips. Although Chinese companies still won’t have access to Nvidia’s newest Blackwell generation or its forthcoming Rubin line, the H200 remains highly capable. It was released in 2024, is still used in major AI data centers run by U.S. companies, and is about ten times more powerful than the chips that could be sold to China under U.S. President Joe Biden’s export regulations. The Trump administration has hinted that other U.S. chipmakers, including AMD and Intel, might also be permitted to sell advanced chips.

The White House seems to believe that allowing the sale of powerful but not leading-edge chips will generate revenue for U.S. firms that can be put toward research and development while preserving U.S. leadership at the frontier of AI research. The Trump administration also reasons that continued Chinese reliance on U.S.-designed hardware and software—particularly Nvidia’s CUDA platform—will enable the United States to influence programming frameworks, development tools, and data-center architectures used by Chinese AI firms. Another motivation seems to be the conviction that selling chips that outperform China’s domestic alternatives could reduce Beijing’s incentives to speed up indigenous development of advanced AI chips.

The risks of selling H200 chips to China, however, outweigh the benefits. Depending on the number of H200 chips that ultimately reach China and how efficiently they are used, the United States could lose its massive advantage in compute capacity. According to analysis by the Institute for Progress, if the United States exported no advanced chips to China, its compute capacity in 2026 would be more than ten times that of China’s. With aggressive H200 exports, however, the U.S. advantage could dwindle to the single digits—or, under some scenarios, disappear. In other words, with unrestricted H200 exports, Chinese AI labs could build supercomputers approaching the performance of top U.S. systems, albeit at a higher cost.

Just as important, exporting H200s is unlikely to slow China’s efforts at making its own advanced chips in the long run. China’s domestic chip production is constrained by manufacturing bottlenecks, not by lack of demand. Since Trump’s December announcement, Chinese firms have already placed orders for more than two million H200s—far exceeding what Huawei or other Chinese companies can currently produce. As a result, U.S. chip sales are likely to add to, rather than substitute for, China’s total available compute. Moreover, there are some signs that Beijing may require potential buyers of the H200 chips to justify why domestic alternatives will not suffice, suggesting that Chinese authorities are prepared to maintain artificial demand for homegrown chips through procurement mandates and restrictions on foreign hardware in sensitive sectors.

The United States still enjoys a clear advantage at the cutting edge of AI.

The decision to export H200 chips to China also risks eroding the broader export controls that the United States has negotiated with its allies. In 2019, the Netherlands—home to ASML, the world’s leading manufacturer of advanced lithography equipment—agreed to restrict exports of its most sophisticated tools to China, recognizing that these machines are essential for producing leading-edge semiconductors. Dutch officials are now asking why they should continue to limit exports of critical manufacturing equipment when U.S. firms are allowed to sell the finished chips produced using the same equipment. If the Netherlands or other key allies, such as Japan and South Korea, were to loosen their export controls, China’s ability to domestically produce high-end chips could improve sharply—eventually undercutting not only Nvidia but also U.S. data center companies that rely on sustained hardware advantages.

The implications of the Trump administration’s export reversal, however, extend beyond China’s domestic market. Chinese firms such as Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent are increasingly building and operating—or partnering to expand—data center infrastructure in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Even if Beijing restricts H200 imports for domestic use, these companies could deploy U.S.-designed chips overseas, offering subsidized, vertically integrated AI infrastructure bundled with power, connectivity, and talent programs.

China is already skilled at disseminating its technology to other countries. U.S. labs typically rely on proprietary, closed-weight models that are accessed through cloud services. They are powerful and easy to use but tightly controlled by their developers and difficult for customers to modify. Chinese firms, by contrast, have embraced open-weight models, which are appealing because they are cheaper, can be more easily tailored to specific industries or languages, and can be run through local rather than U.S.-based cloud providers—which, in turn, reduces concerns about data localization and foreign dependence. Although these open-weight models are generally less reliable than leading U.S. systems, China’s approach embeds its AI in global AI ecosystems.

The Trump administration is keen to promote the global diffusion of an American AI technology stack in which U.S. data centers, chips, and models are bundled together and the world remains dependent on U.S. hardware, software, and services. But in the wake of the H200 decision, Chinese firms are likely to build data centers in foreign countries using advanced U.S. chips running attractive Chinese open-weight models. This is not an American AI stack; it is a U.S.-enabled Chinese one.

AI, ROBOT

Even if the United States continues to lead at the AI frontier—and even if U.S. cloud providers remain the backbone of global AI services—it may not be sufficient to beat China in the AI race. This is because beyond models, compute, and diffusion lies another dimension of the race that may prove decisive: embodied AI. Unlike models that generate text or images, embodied AI systems integrate sensing, perception, control, and decision-making to operate in physical environments. They underpin industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent machines that learn by interacting with the world.

Here, China may be particularly well positioned. Beijing has explicitly elevated embodied AI as a national priority. Central government plans have identified intelligent manufacturing and humanoid robotics as critical emerging industries, while local governments have offered grants, tax incentives, subsidized land, and preferential procurement to firms deploying AI-enabled automation. Beijing, Guangdong, Hubei, Shanghai, and Zhejiang are piloting large-scale programs focused on humanoid robotics and industrial automation, often pairing research institutes with manufacturing partners to accelerate real-world testing and deployment.

These efforts are already translating into productivity gains. AI-enabled automation has helped Chinese factories reduce defect rates, shorten production cycles, and operate continuously with fewer workers. According to the International Federation of Robotics, China’s stock of industrial robots exceeded two million in 2024. That year, Chinese factories installed roughly 300,000 new robots—more than the rest of the world combined—whereas U.S. factories put in place just 34,000. Some Chinese factories for electronics and electric cars are already operating with minimal human supervision.

In the years to come, the benefits of AI will not only depend on making smarter models but also on turning bits into atoms—that is, translating the gains from greater intelligence into economic productivity, industrial competitiveness, and novel military capabilities. All of this hinges on the ability to embed intelligence into machines that act in the real world and shape the real economy—areas in which China is well positioned to dominate.

A GRUELING DECATHLON

Taken together, these trends point toward an emerging end state that defies simple narratives of victory or defeat. The AI race is no longer a sprint toward a single finish line nor is it even a marathon. Instead, the United States and China are competing in an AI decathlon and the United States must shift its strategy accordingly. As AI bipolarity comes into view, the United States must lean into its strengths where they matter most, disseminate its technology, and accept the necessity of sustained AI dialogue with Beijing even amid intensifying rivalry.

For starters, Washington should avoid further eroding its advantages in computing power—the bedrock of global AI leadership. If the administration is unwilling to reverse its H200 decision, and Congress does not intervene, the Commerce Department should approve licenses for H200 exports slowly and apply heightened scrutiny to Chinese firms with close ties to China’s national security agencies.

At the same time, the Trump administration must follow through on the pledge it made in its AI action plan to rigorously enforce remaining export controls—most notably on high-bandwidth memory, advanced lithography equipment, and other critical semiconductor manufacturing and packaging tools needed to produce top-tier chips. These controls remain among the few ways Washington can influence the tempo and scale of China’s progress in AI.

To compete with China’s “good enough” AI infrastructure and open-weight model strategy, the administration should direct the International Development Finance Corporation and the Export-Import Bank to fund AI projects in countries across the so-called global South to compete with subsidized, state-backed Chinese alternatives—and work with Congress to secure expanded legal authorities and financial resources to do so. Absent such efforts, Chinese AI ecosystems are likely to become the default option in many developing countries, providing Beijing new levers of influence and entrenching AI models and standards that normalize surveillance and censorship.

Simultaneously, the administration must work with Congress to prepare for the domestic economic shocks that AI bipolarity is likely to intensify. As the United States comes to dominate services on the frontier of AI, a growing number of white-collar jobs—particularly entry-level positions—will probably be displaced by machine intelligence. Meanwhile, China’s dominance of the industrial applications of AI risks further hollowing out U.S. manufacturing and creating new dependencies on Chinese goods and supply chains.

These trends cannot be reversed, but their risks can be mitigated. The administration should work with Congress to invest more in STEM education, vocational training, and midcareer retraining and should encourage the adoption of AI systems that complement rather than replace human labor. Washington must also update labor laws, regulations, and safety guidelines to account for the ways AI is likely to reshape the workforce and deploy AI aggressively in health care, education, and government to make public services more efficient, accessible, and affordable. At the same time, reducing dependence on China will require supporting AI-enabled manufacturing in the United States, strengthening supply chains with trusted partners, and ensuring that productivity gains from automation translate into durable economic capacity at home.

Although AI bipolarity will likely intensify tensions between the United States and China, it also strengthens the case for sustained superpower dialogue. In a bipolar AI ecosystem, neither side can fully insulate itself from the risks generated by the other. Both countries therefore have strong incentives to manage those risks, including by coordinating efforts to prevent nonstate actors from using AI for catastrophic cyber or biological attacks—something Trump’s AI action plan warns is a growing danger. They also share an interest in ensuring that increasingly advanced AI remains under human control, even if Washington and Beijing disagree profoundly on the values those systems should reflect. In a world where the AI race is multifaceted and where neither side is likely to emerge as a clear winner, avoiding a destabilizing race to the bottom remains more important than ever.

Foreign Affairs · More by Colin H. Kahl · January 12, 2026

22. How Greenland Falls: Imagining a Bloodless Trump Takeover

Summary:

Trump’s second term turns Greenland from a joke into a test case for quiet imperialism. Rather than invade or buy the island, Washington uses money, contractors, legal ambiguity, and supply dependence to make Greenland functionally American while it remains formally Danish. A $10 billion “development” push, targeted municipal aid, media funding, and covert political grooming create reliance on U.S. logistics, security, and governance. Nuuk drifts into a compact of free association without a popular mandate, while Denmark, Europe, and critics mostly protest rhetorically. Shapiro calls this template “geo-osmosis,” a bloodless model that others, including Beijing and Moscow, could copy.

Excerpts:

Decades later, the Greenland gambit would be studied as the prototype for a new form of state expansion, one that blurs the lines between consent, coercion, and capitulation. The Trump administration showed that territory need not be seized when it can be absorbed. It affirmed a simple truth of twenty-first-century geopolitics: in the absence of coherent international resistance, norms matter little; facts on the ground suffice. Commentators drew a direct line from the Trump team’s effort in Greenland to the later Russian absorption of Georgia and, of course, the Chinese takeover of Taiwan.

It also redefined the nature of international order and sovereignty. Manufactured dependence was no longer considered a form of imperialism; they became a method for building fraternal ties. Indigenous populations no longer determined sovereignty; supply chains did. And, perhaps most tellingly, the unimaginable became more than just possible. It became marketable.

Comment: I thought our fundamental American values were respect for sovereignty and the right of self-determination of government.

If "geo-osmosis" becomes normalized, how far can great powers erode sovereignty through supply chains, finance, and contractors before the international system ceases to be meaningfully rules-based at all?

How should small, strategically vital territories like Greenland, Palau, or Caribbean states harden themselves against “motivated alignment” that exploits their dependence, their elites, and their infrastructure gaps?

What cognitive warfare, narrative, and legal tools could the United States, its allies, and indigenous communities use to deter copycat geo-osmosis campaigns by China or Russia without legitimizing Trump’s Greenland precedent? Are we letting the genie out of the bottle with a Greenland action?

How Greenland Falls

Foreign Affairs · More by Jeremy Shapiro · January 12, 2026

Imagining a Bloodless Trump Takeover

Jeremy Shapiro

January 12, 2026

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-greenland-falls

A fjord in western Greenland, September 2025 Guglielmo Mangiapane / Reuters

JEREMY SHAPIRO is Research Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Print Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Save Sign in and save to read later

What follows is a work of speculative fiction. Any resemblances to actual future events are purely coincidental. This scenario is plausible, but certainly not inevitable. It is offered in the modest hope that it will inspire and inform efforts to prevent the disastrous outcome described here.

It is January 2028. Looking back, the Americans did not “take” Greenland—not in any concrete sense. There was no invasion, no purchase, not even a plebiscite. But in the shadowy corridors of Arctic politics, Washington moved deliberately to confound its opponents. The Americanization of Greenland transcended brute imperial force in the Russian mold.

Two years earlier, in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s showy military ouster of Venezuela’s leader, Nicolás Maduro—and Trump’s insistence that he intended to take over Greenland next—foreign policy analysts had been scrambling to imagine how he might seize the island. Would he force Denmark to sell its semiautonomous territory? Send in the troops, effectively attacking a NATO ally? But Trump didn’t have to do either. Instead, his administration pioneered a new form of twenty-first-century imperialism in which sovereignty over territory is imposed less by force than by function, through investments, contractors, and legal ambiguities. In the process, Trump’s Greenland gambit rewrote the rules of international order and created a template that Beijing, Moscow, and others soon followed. Now known as “geo-osmosis,” what follows is the story of how it happened.

FROM TROLLING TO TRUTH

Trump originally floated the idea of acquiring Greenland in his first term. The 2019 revelation that he had inquired about purchasing the territory from Denmark was met with global bemusement and a curt “Greenland is not for sale” response from the Danish and Greenlandic governments. Few in Brussels, Copenhagen, or Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, took the threat seriously. After all, Trump had long trafficked in hyperbolic bombast.

Seasoned Trump observers noted, however, that the idea of territorial acquisition had long held a special place in Trump’s worldview. Greenland grabbed Trump’s attention as “essentially, a big real estate deal,” as he put it, an accomplishment that the journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser note in a 2022 book “might give him a place in American history like William Seward’s purchase of Alaska from Russia.”

Early in his second term, Trump revived the proposal and gave it a geopolitical rationale. His argument that the United States should control Greenland had three pillars: It would help the country secure critical resources—the island is estimated to have enormous oil and gas reserves as well as troves of rare-earth minerals such as cobalt, graphite, and lithium. It would expand the U.S. military’s reach in the Arctic. And it would limit Chinese and Russian influence in a territory key to U.S. national security.

But when Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen offered to give the U.S. president more or less anything he wanted short of sovereignty to achieve those goals, Trump simply refused. It became clear that he was not actually interested in Arctic security. Rather, Greenland became the first in a series of Trumpian territorial ambitions that included Canada, the Panama Canal, and even the Gaza Strip—acquisitions that he apparently believed might secure his place on Mount Rushmore.

As was so often the case with Trump, it was difficult to separate the trolling from the truth. But it soon emerged that Greenland was a genuine target. With a more loyal second-term team ready to carry out his whims and a supine Congress, his administration was able to create a plan to make his desire a reality.

ABSORB AND CONQUER

In Greenland, the Trump administration lifted a few elements from its Venezuela template: for instance, the administration directed U.S. spy agencies to step up efforts to identify people in Greenland and Denmark who could support their objectives for the island, just as it leaned on the CIA to help overthrow Maduro. But Trump’s apparatchiks quickly concluded that the best way to control Greenland was not to follow the Venezuela model or to buy Greenland. Regardless of its immediate success, overt military action against a NATO ally would only ignite local and global opposition and limit the United States’ ability to assert sovereignty over the island. But they could control it by cleverly exploiting its supply dependencies.

The administration understood that Greenland was economically and politically fragile. At 56,000 people, its population was 500 times smaller than Venezuela’s. Manhattan’s East Village had more residents. A mostly uninhabitable ice sheet a quarter of the size of the U.S. mainland, its people were scattered and its infrastructure spotty; with only 93 miles of roads, many Greenlandic communities could reach the others only by boat, small plane, snowmobile, or dogsled, and less than 70 percent of the population used the Internet. Greenlanders had long resented Danish rule and accused the Danish government of keeping them poor and dependent. The island’s semiautonomous government, limited budgetary sovereignty, and simmering independence movement—most Greenlandic political parties ostensibly wanted the territory to gain full autonomy—made it highly susceptible to external influence. Add to this a thin institutional infrastructure and a lack of indigenous wealth, and you had an ideal laboratory for what Trump officials at the time termed “motivated alignment.”

A planning cell in the White House began drafting what was euphemistically titled the Northern Strategic Realignment Initiative. With information from U.S. spy agencies in hand, in May 2026, the Trump administration announced a $10 billion “strategic development initiative” for Greenland, ostensibly to upgrade infrastructure and promote the exploitation of the island’s natural resources.

The Americans did not need the Greenlandic population’s consent.

Washington moved through proxies. A patchwork of development consortiums, disaster response teams, nongovernmental organizations, consultants, and Arctic energy forums, almost all boasting loose ties to Trump-aligned donors or U.S. government funding, descended on Greenland in the summer of 2026. The activities of these polite people were ostensibly civilian: installing broadband, training local officials, or building roads, small airports, and health centers. Investment was deployed not nationally but municipally. Coastal communities received critical supplies, construction contracts, and digital infrastructure grants. The money came with no overt political strings, but it did have an accompanying series of technical agreements and memorandums that quietly shifted local loyalties and forced budgetary dependence.

This flurry of help and investment did not fool most Greenlanders. As early as January 2025, a survey jointly commissioned by Danish and Greenlandic newspapers showed that over 85 percent of the island’s residents opposed Greenland’s incorporation into the United States, and those numbers never changed very much. Greenlanders feared the erosion of their culture and autonomy, not to mention having to navigate the nightmare of the U.S. health-care system. But some of Greenland’s government officials and community leaders, long frustrated by Copenhagen’s paternalism and budget constraints, found themselves tempted by these American offers.

Thus, the U.S. efforts set the terms of Greenland’s next political phase. The Americans funded local media. They offered fellowships to emerging political leaders. Washington pushed a framing of Greenlandic identity in opposition to Danish “colonialism”—and as compatible with U.S. patronage. Ultimately, the Americans did not need the population’s consent. They just needed a few collaborators amid a general sense of fatigue and cynicism with politics as usual—an attitude Trump’s team is skilled at seeding.

FEALTY FOLLOWS FUNCTION

The sovereignty campaign was therefore not one of persuasion. It was one of circumvention and absorption. Trump’s advisers understood that Greenland’s democratic mechanisms could be rerouted by fragmenting the elite, creating greater economic dependence, and generating a need for emergency governance. Danish resupply routes began to face delays as ships were stopped and searched at sea. Fuel shortages, medical supply bottlenecks, and bureaucratic “miscommunications” caused by unexplained electricity and Internet outages pushed municipalities toward the only actors offering an alternative: the Americans.

Around 150 U.S. service members had already been stationed at Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland. But acting on humanitarian grounds, the U.S. military rapidly expanded its footprint. Emergency logistics hubs became new de facto bases. U.S. contractors took over local security training. By October, several Greenlandic lawmakers had formed a “Sovereign Future Caucus,” signaling their openness to “alternative security and economic partnerships.” One Trump adviser described it as “the Taiwan model in reverse: build deep ties first and let the sovereignty claims follow.”

By early 2027, Greenland was operating in a sovereignty twilight. Formally, it was still part of the Danish realm, but it had become functionally dependent on a U.S. presidential administration that had not even bothered to try to secure Greenlandic popular support.

Greenland’s democratic mechanisms could be rerouted.

To move from de facto integration toward de jure sovereignty, the U.S. Justice Department assembled a legal framework that invoked historical precedent. Drawing on the 1917 U.S. purchase of the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands), and citing Greenland’s right to self-determination under the UN Charter, Trump administration lawyers constructed what they called a sovereignty transition plan.

The Trump team avoided a national referendum, knowing it would fail. Instead, the administration encouraged the Greenlandic parliament to adopt a declaration of “provisional autonomy” and offered Washington’s recognition of Greenlandic sovereignty in principle. It was a phrase loaded with possibilities and devoid of obligations. A letter of support from pro-American Greenlandic officials, signed in July 2027, set the plan in motion. The U.S. then formally began stationing U.S. security forces in Nuuk, using the letter to claim that they had been invited by the Greenlandic parliament, even though no vote had been held.

In October 2027, Greenland’s parliament declared provisional autonomy and an “interim sovereignty transition.” The United States raised its flag over new “civil-military liaison offices” in Nuuk and Greenland’s three next-largest towns. Negotiations to grant Greenland a compact of free association, akin to those the United States has with Micronesia or the Marshall Islands, began immediately afterward.

EXPRESSING GRAVE CONCERN

These efforts, of course, ignited a firestorm in Denmark. The Danish government declared the sovereignty transition plan a “hostile act” and withdrew its ambassador from Washington. The European Union denounced it as a violation of international law. The French president called it “a colonial anachronism wrapped in nationalist theatrics.” But Denmark had little military or economic leverage to wield. And the EU, more focused on managing other elements of its strained relationship with the United States, was unwilling to do anything beyond “monitoring the situation.”

Meanwhile, Russian bombers conducted patrols near Greenlandic airspace. Chinese state media outlets declared the United States a “rogue imperialist actor,” even as many of their diplomats took notes. But these efforts only strengthened Trump’s case that the United States needed to control Greenland to protect it—and shore up U.S. national security.

The Greenland gambit divided American public opinion: MAGA conservatives hailed Trump’s move as a “strategic masterstroke,” while critics likened it to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and warned that the United States’ global credibility had suffered irreparably. But the administration’s media machine lurched into action, launching a public relations campaign called “America’s Frozen Frontier,” and Fox News aired segments with AI-generated images of Greenlandic children waving U.S. flags. Maps were redrawn. Trump rallies in Michigan and Pennsylvania featured chants of “Make Greenland Great Again.” The Trump Organization announced plans to make the island the “biggest, most beautiful winter resort” in human history, with fjord-based heli-skiing and extensive glamping opportunities.

Denmark challenged the United States’ moves at the International Court of Justice, but the case languished in procedural purgatory, and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed it as “nonsense.” Indigenous Greenlandic voices remained split: although some elites embraced U.S. investments, most residents warned of coming environmental degradation and cultural erasure. None of that mattered. U.S. contractors continued to deliver services. Washington concluded its association compact with Nuuk, assumed full authority over Greenland’s defense and security affairs, and asserted a claim that Greenland represented a U.S. “special economic zone.” Trump declared victory.

THE COLD BENEATH THE ICE

Decades later, the Greenland gambit would be studied as the prototype for a new form of state expansion, one that blurs the lines between consent, coercion, and capitulation. The Trump administration showed that territory need not be seized when it can be absorbed. It affirmed a simple truth of twenty-first-century geopolitics: in the absence of coherent international resistance, norms matter little; facts on the ground suffice. Commentators drew a direct line from the Trump team’s effort in Greenland to the later Russian absorption of Georgia and, of course, the Chinese takeover of Taiwan.

It also redefined the nature of international order and sovereignty. Manufactured dependence was no longer considered a form of imperialism; they became a method for building fraternal ties. Indigenous populations no longer determined sovereignty; supply chains did. And, perhaps most tellingly, the unimaginable became more than just possible. It became marketable.

Foreign Affairs · More by Jeremy Shapiro · January 12, 2026

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

https://apstrategy.org/

Executive Director, Korea Regional Review

https://www.upi.com/Korea-Regional-Review/

Editor-at-large, Small Wars Journal

https://smallwarsjournal.com/

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

Company Name | Website