​Quotes of the Day:

"Take anything and everything seriously except yourselves." 

– Rudyard Kipling

"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there." - Clare Boothe Luce

"If you are able to state a problem, it can be solved." 

– Edwin H. Land 

1. Exclusive | The U.S. Is Actively Seeking Regime Change in Cuba by the End of the Year

2. Inside Trump’s Head-Spinning Greenland U-Turn

3. Opinion | Mr. Trump and the Davos Divide

4. Davos and the Unraveling of the U.S. Collective Security Framework

5. In Cuba’s swamps, Trump has raised spectres of the Bay of Pigs

6. Trump admin sought redactions on key China war game report warning of US military readiness gaps

7. The Greenland Crisis Won’t Break NATO: But It Could Weaken It Where It Matters Most

8. The Chinese Spy Machine Infiltrating Taiwan’s Military

9. Despite Trump’s Pressure, $40 Billion in Military Money Is Stalling in Taiwan

10. Drawing the Digital Line

11. The Davos Crowd Gets the World Wrong Again

12. An Opportunity for Success: Don’t Repeat Iraq’s Catastrophic Mistakes in Venezuela

13. The Archaic Defensive Doctrine Continues to Plague Post-Soviet States Today

14. Can China Win Round Two of the Trade War?

15. What Would Have Happened If the Green Berets Helped Ukraine?

16. The Real Reasons Greenland Matters

17. How the Iranian Regime Breaks

18. Greenland meltdown: what does Trump’s quest mean for the global order and China?

19. Why China is playing the long game in Iran despite Trump’s fresh threats

20. Timeless Leadership, Timely Expertise: Winning Tomorrow’s Wars Starts Here (West Point)

21. ALLFARE: CHINA’S WHOLE-OF-NATION STRATEGY (although last this is certainly not least - very much worth the read)

1. Exclusive | The U.S. Is Actively Seeking Regime Change in Cuba by the End of the Year

​Summary:

POTUS wants regime change in Cuba by end-2026 and is using Venezuela’s Maduro raid as proof that insider fractures can be exploited fast, and as an implicit threat to Havana. The pressure plan is mainly economic: choke off Venezuelan oil that keeps Cuba running and target overseas medical missions that bring hard currency. Yet officials lack a clear post-regime blueprint and are hunting for a Cuban insider willing to deal. Cuba is a tighter security state than Venezuela, with weak civil society, harsh repression, and over 1,000 political prisoners.

Comment: Can an effective unconventional warfare campaign create a credible internal partner under such surveillance? (or has one already (hopefully) been developed?) Can coercion split elites without hardening control? What prevents collapse from producing chaos, not transition?

Exclusive | The U.S. Is Actively Seeking Regime Change in Cuba by the End of the Year

WSJ

After ousting Venezuela’s leader, the Trump administration is searching for Havana insiders who could cut a deal to end Communist rule

By

José de Córdoba

in Mexico City,

Vera Bergengruen

in Washington and

Deborah Acosta

in Miami

Jan. 21, 2026 9:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/the-u-s-is-actively-seeking-regime-change-in-cuba-by-the-end-of-the-year-1d0f178a?mod=hp_lead_pos7

Cuba’s Parliament in Havana. The regime has withstood decades of U.S. pressure. Ramon Espinosa/Associated Press

Emboldened by the U.S. ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration is searching for Cuban government insiders who can help cut a deal to push out the Communist regime by the end of the year, people familiar with the matter said.

The Trump administration has assessed Cuba’s economy as being close to collapse and that the government has never been this fragile after losing a vital benefactor in Maduro, these people said. Officials don’t have a concrete plan to end the Communist government that has held power on the Caribbean island for almost seven decades, but they see Maduro’s capture and subsequent concessions from his allies left behind as a blueprint and a warning for Cuba, senior U.S. officials said.

“I strongly suggest they make a deal. BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE,” President Trump stated in a Jan. 11 social-media post in which he said “NO MORE OIL OR MONEY” would be going to Cuba.

In meetings with Cuban exiles and civic groups in Miami and Washington, they have focused on identifying somebody inside the current government who will see the writing on the wall and want to cut a deal, one U.S. official said.

The Jan. 3 raid to capture Maduro was helped by an asset within the Venezuelan leader’s inner circle, administration officials have said. The U.S. military operation in Caracas killed 32 Cuban soldiers and intelligence operatives in Maduro’s security detail.

While the U.S. hasn’t publicly threatened to use military force in Cuba, Trump officials privately say the brazen raid that extracted Maduro should serve as an implicit threat to Havana.

U.S. intelligence assessments have painted a grim picture of the island’s economy, plagued by chronic shortages of basic goods, medicines and frequent blackouts, according to people familiar with the analysis.

Cuba’s fate has long been entwined with Venezuela: subsidized Venezuelan oil has been a mainstay of its economy since shortly after Hugo Chávez took power in Venezuela in 1999. Washington intends to weaken the regime by choking off that oil, which has kept Cuba’s lights on, senior U.S. officials said. Cuba could run out of oil within weeks, bringing the economy to a grinding halt, according to economists.

The administration is also taking aim at Cuba’s overseas medical missions, Havana’s most important source of hard currency, including through visa bans targeting Cuban and foreign officials accused of facilitating the program.

Trump and his inner circle, many of whom have Florida ties, see toppling Cuba’s Communist regime as the defining test of his national-security strategy to remake the hemisphere, according to officials. Trump sees the U.S. arrangement with Venezuela as a success, citing the cooperation of acting President Delcy Rodríguez as evidence that the U.S. can dictate terms.

Posters on a building in Havana bears the images of Venezuela’s deposed President Nicolás Maduro, its late leader Hugo Chávez, and Cuba’s former President Raúl Castro. Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty Images

“Cuba’s rulers are incompetent Marxists who have destroyed their country, and they have had a major setback with the Maduro regime that they are responsible for propping up,” a White House official said, reiterating that Cuba should “make a deal before it’s too late.”

In a statement, the State Department said that it is in America’s national security interests for Cuba “to be competently run by a democratic government and to refuse to host our adversaries’ military and intelligence services.”

Some Trump officials said the president rejects regime-change strategies of the past. Instead, he looks to make deals where possible and to take advantage of opportunities as they come up, a senior Trump official said. As in Venezuela, this could look like escalating pressure while indicating the White House is open to negotiating an off-ramp, the official said.

Many Trump allies expect no less than the end of Communist rule in Cuba. But the ouster of the penniless government could lead to the kind of turbulence and humanitarian crisis that Trump was eager to avoid in Venezuela, where he opted to keep top loyalists in place.

The regime has withstood years of intense U.S. pressure, from the Central Intelligence Agency-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 to a punishing embargo imposed in 1962 that became more strident over time. The two countries became adversaries shortly after the Castro brothers descended from Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountains with a motley crew of guerrillas in 1959.

This leaves the U.S. searching for a clear plan for what comes next and who could replace the current regime, these people said. The Venezuela model may be harder to replicate in Cuba. Cuba is a single-party Stalinist state that bans political opposition, and where a civil society barely exists, while Venezuela has an opposition movement, once-frequent protests and elections.

“These guys are a much tougher nut to crack,” says Ricardo Zúñiga, a former Obama administration official who helped negotiate the short-lived detente between the U.S. and Cuba from 2014 to 2017. “There’s nobody who would be tempted to work on the U.S. side.”

Over its nearly 70-year history, the Cuban regime has never been willing to negotiate regarding changes to its political system, and only implemented fitful and minor economic changes.

Trump believes that ending the Castro era would cement his legacy and do what President John F. Kennedy failed to do in the 1960s, said a U.S. official who worked on the issue in Trump’s first term. It has long been a stated goal for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who came to Florida in 1956.

In Miami, where politicians have long argued that the road to regime change in Havana leads through a change in government in Caracas, Maduro’s ouster has set off jubilation and the ardent expectations that Cuba is next. Prominent Trump allies and U.S. lawmakers have shared AI-generated videos showing a post-Communist utopia, with boats arriving from Miami, family reunions, and Trump and Rubio driving a 1950s convertible past the gleaming hotels of a liberated Cuba.

“The regime has to make a choice to step down or to better provide for its people,” Jeremy Lewin, the State Department’s acting undersecretary for foreign assistance, said last week as he highlighted $3 million of hurricane relief supplies sent to Cuba through the Catholic Church in boxes stamped with a U.S. flag.

Cuba’s former president, Raúl Castro, center, and its current president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, right, at a celebration in Havana last year. AFP/Getty Images

Havana has publicly rejected that premise. Cuba’s government is still dominated by Raúl Castro, 94 years old, the younger brother of Fidel, while President Miguel Díaz-Canel, 65, an unpopular apparatchik, runs day-to-day affairs.

“There is no surrender or capitulation possible nor any kind of understanding based on coercion or intimidation,” Díaz-Canel, dressed in green military fatigues, said at a recent memorial for the Cuban security forces personnel killed in Caracas while protecting Maduro.

The Cuban government has been masterful at repressing dissent in an impoverished population. It has faced only two widespread protests: in 1994 in Havana, and in 2021 when tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets across the island. Human-rights groups estimate that the government holds more than 1,000 political prisoners.

As tensions with the U.S. rise, Cuba held a national day of defense Sunday. Cubans practiced for a “war of all the people” to repel invaders.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Is the administration’s goal of a regime change in Cuba by the end of 2026 realistic? Join the conversation below.

Television broadcasts showed elderly people firing worn AK-47 rifles, and others planting mines. “It’s theater,” said Joe García, a Cuban-American and former Democratic congressman from Florida with contacts to the Cuban leadership. “This is a country that can’t pick up its garbage and is making believe it’s getting ready for a conflict with the superpower next door.”

At night, with no electricity and little gasoline to get around, the streets of Havana are dark and quiet, except for the occasional din of wooden spoons clanging against pots—an anonymous form of protest that comes from open windows, balconies and rooftops late at night, when the power has been out all day and desperation mounts.

“You can’t tell who it is. They don’t yell or anything. It’s just that—banging on pots,” said Rodolfo Jiménez, a retiree who has lived on the same street in Havana his entire life. “They only do it at night. People are afraid of being snitched on.”

Write to José de Córdoba at jose.decordoba@wsj.com, Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com and Deborah Acosta at deborah.acosta@wsj.com

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

WSJ

2. Inside Trump’s Head-Spinning Greenland U-Turn

​Summary:

POTUS arrived at Davos with Europe braced for tariffs and confrontation over Greenland, then reversed course after back-channel talks with NATO’s Mark Rutte and European leaders. He ruled out force, paused proposed tariffs, and signaled a framework focused on Arctic security cooperation, expanded basing access in Greenland, and investment controls to block Russia and China, possibly via U.S. right of first refusal on minerals. Europeans claim unity forced de-escalation; U.S. officials claim pressure produced leverage. Relations remain shaken, with allies questioning U.S. reliability. 

Comment: Did coercion of allies work? Is coercive bargaining strengthening deterrence or accelerating NATO fragmentation for Washington’s global posture over time?

Inside Trump’s Head-Spinning Greenland U-Turn

WSJ · DELOITTE

President rules out using force to take control of Greenland and calls off promised tariffs on European nations

By Alex Leary

Follow

, Daniel Michaels

Follow

, Bertrand Benoit

Follow

 and Robbie Gramer

Follow

Updated Jan. 21, 2026 7:03 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/a-piece-of-ice-for-world-protection-trump-demands-europe-cut-deal-on-greenland-cc1014f6?mod=hp_lead_pos1

Members of President Trump's administration listen to him speak Wednesday in Davos, Switzerland. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

DAVOS, Switzerland—When President Trump arrived in the snow-covered Swiss Alps on Wednesday afternoon, European leaders were panicking that his efforts to acquire Greenland would trigger a trans-Atlantic conflagration. By the time the sun set, Trump had backed down.

The about-face followed days of back-channel conversations between Trump, his advisers and European leaders, including NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, according to people close to the talks. The Europeans, who stood united in their opposition to Trump acquiring Greenland, employed a mix of enticements, such as offers to boost Arctic security, and warnings, including about the dangers to the U.S. of a deeper rupture in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

After a meeting with Rutte on Wednesday, Trump called off promised tariffs on European nations, contending that he had “formed the framework of a future deal” with respect to the largest island in the world.

The exact contours of the framework are still in flux, but negotiations are expected to center on several areas, according to officials in Europe familiar with the discussions. They include a potential U.S. agreement with Denmark about stationing forces at bases in Greenland and expanded European efforts to boost security around the Arctic. The U.S. could receive a right of first refusal on investments in Greenland’s mineral resources—a veto aimed at preventing Russia and China from tapping the island’s wealth—and in exchange Trump would take tariff threats off the table, the officials said.

Speaking to reporters, Trump called the framework “really fantastic,” but offered few details. He said he assumes Denmark, which controls Greenland, had been informed about the potential deal.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and President Trump in Davos, Switzerland. Evan Vucci/AP

The White House declined to comment on the details of the proposed framework and a Trump administration official said the scope of the negotiations hadn’t been set in stone. “If this deal goes through, and President Trump is very hopeful it will, the United States will be achieving all of its strategic goals with respect to Greenland, at very little cost, forever,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

There were early signals on Wednesday that Trump was open to a deal. During an hourlong speech at the World Economic Forum, the U.S. president said he wouldn’t deploy the military to take control of Greenland.

It was a stark shift in tone for Trump, who just days earlier had declined to rule out using the military to secure ownership of Greenland and posted an image online of the territory with an American flag plastered across it.

The pivot was a welcome relief to European leaders, who faced the prospect of economy-rattling tariffs and a standoff with Trump that could have threatened the stability of NATO. Last weekend, Trump said he would hit eight nations with 10% tariffs starting next month if a deal wasn’t reached to acquire Greenland. The tariffs would increase to 25% in June.

In a Truth Social post Wednesday night, Trump said he would hold off on the tariffs so that his top advisers—Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff—could negotiate a deal on Greenland.

“The day is ending on a better note than it began,” Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said.

Some of Trump’s own advisers had privately harbored concerns that the president’s harsh rhetoric had made it harder to strike a deal with Denmark. In recent days, administration officials have discussed compromise proposals that would give the U.S. access to minerals and land for military bases, a Trump administration official said. Some outside allies of the president were concerned Tuesday after stocks fell sharply following Trump’s Greenland-related tariff threats.

U.S. and European officials drew conflicting lessons from the Greenland episode.

U.S. officials argued that Trump’s aggressive posture had forced European officials to the negotiating table after they had for months refused to indulge the president’s campaign to take control of Greenland. European officials contended that maintaining a united front of opposition could help convince Trump to reach a deal that fell short of acquiring the territory.

Trump and Rutte on Wednesday “discussed the critical significance of security in the Arctic region” to the U.S. and other NATO members, according to an alliance spokesman. Talks about the proposed framework will focus on how NATO members can work together to ensure Arctic security, the spokesman said. More-specific negotiations between Denmark, Greenland and the U.S. will aim to ensure “that Russia and China never gain a foothold—economically or militarily—in Greenland,” the spokesman said.

Rutte has drawn mockery for his sometimes-fawning approach to Trump. At NATO’s summit in June, he referred to the president as “daddy” and has repeatedly lavished praise on him. But Trump and Rutte have built a strong working relationship, U.S. and European officials said.

Members of the audience during Trump’s speech in Davos, Switzerland. Markus Schreiber/AP

In his speech earlier Wednesday, Trump delivered pointed criticism of longtime U.S. allies as representatives from those countries looked on. He described Europe as unrecognizable from an earlier era and headed in the wrong direction. He rebuked Denmark as ungrateful. He said Switzerland wouldn’t have a country if not for the support of the U.S. And he mocked French President Emmanuel Macron for wearing aviator sunglasses at the event.

But Trump also sought to de-escalate, calling for immediate negotiations to discuss the U.S. bid to acquire Greenland. “I don’t have to use force,” he said. “I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force.”

Trump suggested that NATO members have an obligation to support the U.S. acquisition of Greenland because of America’s central role in bolstering the trans-Atlantic alliance. “We give so much, and we get so little in return,” he said.

WSJ’s Alex Leary reports from the World Economic Forum. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“We want a piece of ice for world protection, and they won’t give it,” Trump said of his desire to acquire Greenland from Denmark. “You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. Or you can say no, and we will remember.”

Trump was met with a muted response from the room of global elites that packed the main conference hall for his speech, drawing some light applause but also many blank stares and spurts of nervous laughter as he made some of his most-strident claims.

Leaders of the European Union’s 27 countries are set to meet in Brussels on Thursday evening for a hastily organized summit. While they no longer need an immediate game plan for a trade war, they now must assess battered trans-Atlantic relations.

Europeans had been seeking ways to bolster Arctic security while showing Trump that they aren’t ceding Greenland. France on Wednesday proposed extending Danish-led multinational military exercises now ongoing in Greenland.

Trump’s advisers said he had been emboldened by the U.S. operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. In the aftermath of the raid, Trump has put renewed emphasis on his efforts to exert control over the Western Hemisphere.

Trump’s Greenland ambitions triggered an unprecedented diplomatic crisis for the U.S.’s closest NATO allies, who are already grappling with Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and geopolitical competition with China. Some of Washington’s closest historic allies have questioned how much longer they can count on the U.S.

“Every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great-power rivalry,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said during a speech at Davos earlier this week. “That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.”

Newsletter Sign-up

What’s News

Catch up on the headlines, understand the news and make better decisions, free in your inbox daily. Enjoy a free article in every edition.

Subscribe

In Davos, those tensions were at times on display behind the scenes.

Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, walked out of a Tuesday dinner during a speech by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in what some attendees viewed as a sign of mounting tensions in trans-Atlantic relations. Lutnick, addressing an invitation-only dinner of VIP guests, blasted Europe’s energy policies and criticized what he described as the continent’s declining competitiveness on the world stage, according to people who attended.

Some guests at the dinner applauded Lutnick’s remarks highlighting the U.S.’s power in comparison with Europe, and others booed, attendees said. “We have no comment to add,” an ECB spokesperson said by email Wednesday morning. A Commerce Department spokesperson said that “during Secretary Lutnick’s three-minute speech, no one left hastily. Only one person booed, and it was Al Gore.” Gore, the former U.S. vice president, responded by saying that he listened to Lutnick’s speech and “didn’t interrupt him in any way.”

Write to Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com, Daniel Michaels at Dan.Michaels@wsj.com, Bertrand Benoit at bertrand.benoit@wsj.com and Robbie Gramer at robbie.gramer@wsj.com

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the January 22, 2026, print edition as 'Trump, With Deal in Sight, Backs Off Greenland Threats'.

WSJ · DELOITTE

3. Opinion | Mr. Trump and the Davos Divide

​Summary:

The editorial argues that POTUS’s Davos speech delivered a jolt to “Davos Man” and exposed Europe’s dependence on U.S. power. Even after he backtracked on using force for Greenland and later paused tariff threats after announcing a NATO-linked “framework,” the episode still humiliated Europe by underscoring its limited capacity to defend Greenland and its broader security reliance on Washington. The piece faults Europe’s energy and welfare choices for hollowing out growth and defense readiness, then warns POTUS’s bullying risks needless alienation, domestic backlash, and strategic distraction from Ukraine. China and Russia, it says, benefit from any Atlantic rupture. 

Comment: The question persists: Can coercive rhetoric produce allied burden-sharing without corroding alliance cohesion? Will we become the dispensable nation? "Why can't we all just get along?"

Opinion | Mr. Trump and the Davos Divide

WSJ · Mr. Trump and the Davos Divide

He backtracked on using force on Greenland but still embarrassed Europe.

By The Editorial Board

Follow

Jan. 21, 2026 5:51 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-davos-speech-greenland-nato-europe-mark-carney-183168ae

President Donald Trump attends the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday. Lian Yi/Xinhua/ZUMA Press

Those of a religious bent might accuse stereotypical “Davos Man”—immense fortune, private jet, outrageous hypocrisy, spine-tingling pomposity—of the sin of pride. In which case President Trump’s speech Wednesday to the World Economic Forum at Davos felt like a form of divine retribution.

It was a wild day, with Mr. Trump berating Europe even as he said he won’t invade Greenland after all. America’s allies (and their many friends in the U.S. Congress) have been reeling since Mr. Trump on Saturday threatened to impose tariffs on a handful of countries if they obstruct his effort to buy the arctic island from Denmark.

Opinion: Potomac Watch

The Supreme Court's Big Cases on Fed Independence and Gun Rights

Donald Trump's effort to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, citing an alleged mortgage violation, goes before the Justices, who have already signaled they see the Fed as different from other independent agencies. Plus, the Court also hears a challenge to Hawaii's law banning guns by default in many private stores.Read Transcript

What a difference a market rout on Tuesday makes. U.S. stock indexes soared Wednesday on word that he won’t invade. And they climbed again when several hours later Mr. Trump announced he won’t impose the tariffs after he had reached a “framework of a future deal” on Greenland with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Details to come.

Yet how embarrassing for Europe in particular. Mr. Trump pointed out that Denmark and other European allies would struggle to defend Greenland from the U.S. or anyone else. “It’s the United States alone that can protect this giant mass of land, this giant piece of ice, develop it and improve it,” he said. Which is true.

This followed a long riff about Europe’s many economic dysfunctions, especially on energy policy. He referred to the European Union’s flagship Green New Deal climate policies as the “green new scam,” chastised Britain for failing to tap more North Sea oil, and mocked the “catastrophic energy collapse which befell every European nation” in recent years. Also all true.

***

Call it the Davos disconnect. The bien pensant political and business leaders who show up to these confabs espouse a “liberal order” of democracy and free markets. But they then rely on the U.S. to enforce their values around the world while also generating sufficient global prosperity to allow them to fund their growth-killing welfare states and climate pieties at the expense of their own militaries.

As Mr. Trump reminded them, European leaders required sustained U.S. prodding before they ramped up defense spending to provide for their own security. They depend on the U.S. to lead them in supporting Ukraine as it fends off a Russian invasion that Europe was unable to deter or end.

Mr. Trump harps to an unhelpful degree on this helplessness, and his insults and bullying threats over Greenland have alienated Europe to a needless extent. His Greenland threats also aren’t playing well in Congress or with American voters.

But the barbs hit hard among the Davos crowd because they know they depend on the U.S. more than they’d like, and they know it’s their own fault. Yet even now that Mr. Trump is calling into question American support for allies, many of them assume the only alternative is to cozy up to China, at least economically.

Witness Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who won plaudits for his Davos speech Tuesday that mourned the end of the “rules-based order” and calling on middle powers such as Canada to form new, realpolitik alliances to stand up to the great powers.

“In a world of great-power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for favor or to combine to create a third path with impact,” Mr. Carney said—days after he traveled to Beijing to compete for favor from the Communist regime. Canada, with abundant natural resources including oil and a famously well-educated population, nonetheless has been a habitual defense-spending laggard within NATO (it barely meets the 2%-of-GDP target). “Middle power” indeed.

***

The hypocrisy would be amusing if the deepening rift between the U.S. and its allies weren’t so dangerous. But China and Russia are watching. They see how easily Mr. Trump can be goaded into antagonizing staunch allies such as NATO partners, and how vulnerable those allies are. Our enemies would like nothing better than to see Greenland become the cause of a permanent Atlantic rift that blows up NATO.

They also see how distractible all these parties are. As NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned Wednesday, the Greenland fiasco is diverting attention from the more urgent problem of Ukraine.

The West needs statesmen who can settle the Greenland dispute in a way that enhances U.S. security and NATO. Let’s hope Mr. Trump’s “framework” begins to close the Davos divide.

An Editor at Large: Satire from columnist Gerry Baker detailing how the U.S. easily won the 2026 Battle of Greenland, but the consequences proved convulsive for all. Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the January 22, 2026, print edition as 'Mr. Trump and the Davos Divide'.

WSJ · Mr. Trump and the Davos Divide

4. Davos and the Unraveling of the U.S. Collective Security Framework

​Summary:

Davos highlights a drift from alliance based order toward transactional leverage. The essay argues the post 1945 system relied on consent, institutions, and predictable intent, not territorial acquisition. At Davos, POTUS ruled out force on Greenland, yet framed alliances as a poor bargain, which allies hear as conditional commitment. The Venezuela raid, conducted without shared architecture, deepens fears that outcomes now justify methods. The Greenland threat was retracted, but the logic of control over partnership remains. Result: allies hedge, competitors test, and Ukraine risks distraction while NATO cohesion erodes over time, restoring credibility will require clarity, consultation, and disciplined restraint.

Excerpts:

Credibility erodes not because warnings are too severe, but because they are too frequent and inconsistently applied. The risk is that when deterrence truly matters—when a real wolf appears—Europe, Asia, and the Americas may no longer rush to the field. Not out of defiance, but out of habit. They will have learned that American warnings fluctuate, commitments shift, and reassurance is temporary.

Deals can be renegotiated.

Trust cannot.

And once collective security gives way to coercion, leverage, and ownership—whether by accident or design—the world doesn’t become safer. It becomes more familiar.

History has already shown us where that road leads.

Comment: As PM Carney said this is the great rupture in international relations but unraveling is another descriptor for those who subscribe to these ideas. 

What is the U.S. theory of victory for collective security if trust becomes a variable, not a constant?

Davos and the Unraveling of the U.S. Collective Security Framework

How Transactional Power Is Fraying Eight Decades of Alliance-Based Order

The Old and Bold

Jan 21, 2026

https://vaberet.substack.com/p/davos-and-the-unraveling-of-the-us?r=7i07&utm

For nearly eighty years, the United States pursued a deliberate, often painstaking strategy to replace the instability of great-power rivalry with a network of collective security arrangements. This system—built after World War II and refined through the Cold War—was not accidental. It was designed to prevent the very dynamics that had twice plunged the world into catastrophic conflict: spheres of influence, coercive territorial ambition, and the normalization of unilateral force.

The architecture was imperfect, but it worked. The United States led not by owning territory, but by underwriting stability; not by coercion, but by consent; not by extracting tribute, but by embedding power in institutions, alliances, and shared rules.

What is now unfolding under the Trump administration places that legacy at risk.

President Trump’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos was meant to de-escalate. After weeks of rhetoric suggesting the United States might take Greenland “the hard way,” the President publicly ruled out the use of military force. “I won’t use force. I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force,” he said, repeating the point for emphasis. In isolation, that clarification mattered. It removed the most alarming interpretation of earlier remarks.

But Davos did not restore confidence. It highlighted a deeper concern: the United States appears to be stepping away from the logic that made collective security credible in the first place.

What allies heard was not reassurance, but grievance. What competitors heard was not restraint, but opportunity. And what the world has yet to hear is a coherent explanation for why Washington appears willing to trade leadership for leverage.

A System Built on Deliberation—Now Treated as Disposable

At Davos, Trump again framed alliances as a cost imbalance rather than a strategic asset. “We give so much, and we get so little in return,” he told the audience, questioning whether allies would “be there for us.” This language, widely interpreted as another swipe at NATO burden-sharing, landed not as tough love but as conditionality.

That framing ignores how collective security actually works.

European allies do not “free ride” in any meaningful operational sense. Much of their contribution comes through host-nation support, access, basing, infrastructure, intelligence integration, and the political legitimacy that enables U.S. power projection. Germany alone provides billions annually in host-nation support—housing U.S. forces, maintaining infrastructure, subsidizing utilities, enabling training, and serving as a logistical hub for U.S. operations across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Poland has funded major rotational infrastructure and new facilities in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually in some years. The United Kingdom provides privileged access to air and naval bases, deep nuclear cooperation, and intelligence integration whose strategic value is far greater than what can be captured in a budget line.

These are not symbolic gestures. They are the scaffolding of U.S. global reach.

When the President questions whether allies would “be there for us,” European leaders do not hear a bookkeeping dispute. They hear a signal that decades of shared risk, political sacrifice, and operational integration are being discounted—or treated as provisional. And that concern goes to the heart of collective security. Alliances do not function on tone or goodwill. They function on confidence in intent.

Davos left that intent unresolved.

Enforcement Without Architecture: Venezuela and the Credibility Problem

Davos was unsettling not only because of what was said, but because it followed a recent use of force that allies still cannot place within a shared framework.

The January 3, 2026 U.S. operation in Venezuela—Operation Absolute Resolve—remains central to how partners interpret American behavior. The administration’s counter-narcotics justification has been met with skepticism outside Washington. As one Latin American foreign minister put it bluntly, “Everyone here understands this was not about drugs. That’s what makes it dangerous.”

What unsettled allies was not simply the use of force. It was the absence of a shared explanation rooted in law, consultation, or regional consensus. At Davos, Trump cited Venezuela as proof of decisive leadership. He did not explain how the operation fit within a broader collective framework. An EU diplomat summarized the concern succinctly: “If outcomes justify methods now, then rules only apply when convenient.”

That perception is corrosive. When enforcement is decoupled from architecture—when action replaces explanation—collective security gives way to precedent. And precedent, once set, cannot be easily contained.

Greenland: The Threat Retracted, the Logic Intact

Trump’s rejection of military force against Greenland was welcomed—but narrowly.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen reiterated that “Greenland is not for sale,” while NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte reminded the world that Arctic defense is already a collective responsibility. Their message was consistent: no security vacuum exists that requires ownership to fill it.

What continues to alarm allies is not the threat of force, but the underlying premise—that access without control is insufficient, that ownership is the guarantor of security. A senior German official put it plainly: “Security based on acquisition is not collective security.”

That distinction matters. Once security is defined by possession rather than partnership, the system begins to resemble the very models the postwar order was designed to replace.

Two Explanations—and Neither Is Safe

At this point, the world is left with two plausible explanations for what the United States is doing. Neither one is comforting.

If this isn’t deliberate, it’s still dangerous.

If this isn’t strategy, then it’s recklessness: the United States pulling apart a system it spent generations building, without offering a credible replacement.

America has used strategic ambiguity before, and sometimes it worked. During the Cold War, ambiguity around escalation thresholds or response options helped deter adversaries while keeping allies steady. But it wasn’t free-floating. It was anchored by clear intent, institutional commitments, and a track record of reliability. Allies knew the guardrails. Adversaries knew the consequences. The uncertainty existed inside a framework of trust.

That’s not what we’re seeing now.

Today’s ambiguity comes bundled with public shots at allies, a transactional view of commitments, and unilateral action explained after the fact. In that environment, ambiguity doesn’t deter—it destabilizes.

When allies think U.S. commitments are conditional, they hedge. They diversify relationships, build independent capability, and position themselves so they’re not hostage to Washington’s mood swings. It rarely looks dramatic, but over time it weakens the cohesion collective deterrence depends on.

Competitors don’t hedge—they test. When U.S. intent is unclear and allied unity looks shaky, adversaries probe for seams. That’s how miscalculation happens: not because anyone wants a crisis, but because signals stop being clean and credible.

So even if dismantling collective security isn’t the plan, it’s becoming the outcome.

If this is deliberate, the implications are worse.

If the United States is consciously moving away from a rules-based order and toward transactional power, bilateral coercion, and spheres of influence, that isn’t adaptation. It’s regression.

The pattern also makes it hard to confront in real time: maximalist threats and provocation, followed by partial walk-backs and tactical reversals. Supporters call it negotiating. Critics call it chaos. Either way, it creates fog—space for strategic boundaries to shift while allies argue about whether anything “real” is happening.

The result is permissiveness. Allies start treating U.S. statements as theater even as trust erodes. Competitors assume the most aggressive interpretation of U.S. intent because reassurance no longer restores confidence.

If this is intentional, confusion becomes a tool: uncertainty is used to test how far unilateral pressure can go before collective resistance forms. That logic isn’t new. It’s an older model of power—where coercion replaces legitimacy, alliances become conveniences, sovereignty becomes negotiable, and security is imposed rather than shared.

History is pretty consistent on where that road leads. A great power may gain freedom of action in the short term, but it accelerates balancing, resistance, and eventual overextension. It teaches others to hedge against it, align against it, or imitate it—and normalizes coercion until it no longer controls how the system gets used.

Competitors Are Calm, Allies Are Nervous—Two Sides of the Risk Coin

Davos made one thing unmistakably clear: allies are uneasy, while competitors appear calm—even satisfied. At first glance, that contrast might look like de-escalation. In reality, it’s two sides of the same risk coin—because competitor calm and allied nervousness both increase the odds of miscalculation, just through different pathways.

Competitors being calm is dangerous because it usually means they think the trend line is moving their way. Chinese state media welcomed Trump’s remarks as evidence that “the era of U.S.-led globalism is ending,” framing the moment not as instability, but as transition. Russian officials described NATO less as an alliance than as a unified front, and more as a collection of bargaining positions. Neither reaction conveyed alarm. What they heard was not chaos—it was permission.

For Beijing, Greenland is not the prize. Taiwan is. China doesn’t need Arctic acquisitions to benefit from a United States that looks willing to trade alliance cohesion for transactional leverage. If Washington is signaling—even inadvertently—that collective security commitments are conditional or negotiable, Beijing’s calculus shifts. Calm, in this context, doesn’t mean restraint. It can mean confidence: confidence that the United States is narrowing its coalition base, weakening deterrence, and making any future crisis easier to isolate and manage.

That kind of calm doesn’t produce peace. It produces patience. A perception that U.S. leadership is eroding doesn’t compel immediate action; it encourages waiting for the moment when deterrence is weakest and alliance resolve is most fractured.

Russia’s composure follows the same logic. Moscow’s calm isn’t necessarily a reduction in tension. It may be breathing room. A United States focused on bilateral leverage rather than alliance coherence gives Russia time to recalibrate politically, economically, and militarily—while continuing to probe NATO’s seams and prepare to roll back the post–Cold War security order. Revisionist powers rarely sprint. They advance in increments, exploiting ambiguity until resistance becomes fragmented or too slow to form.

Allied nervousness is dangerous for a different reason: nervous allies hedge. They don’t usually announce a break. They adapt quietly—diversifying partnerships, investing in independent capabilities, and positioning themselves so they’re not dependent on uncertainty. As one Asian security official observed, “We are not choosing against the United States. We are choosing not to depend on uncertainty.” That sentiment is increasingly echoed, if less publicly, in Europe and beyond.

Put those two dynamics together and you get the real problem: competitors grow more confident and methodical, while allies grow more cautious and hedged. The system doesn’t collapse with a bang. It erodes through drift. And the collective security framework—built on shared assurance—starts hollowing out from the center.

That’s why competitor calm isn’t comforting, and allied nervousness isn’t just “understandable.” They’re both warning signs. They’re the two sides of the risk coin—and together they make deterrence less reliable and crisis stability harder to sustain.

Conclusion: A Warning Eight Decades in the Making

President Trump’s speech at Davos removed one immediate danger—the explicit threat of military force against Greenland. “I won’t use force,” he said, clearly and repeatedly. That clarification mattered, and it deserved to be acknowledged.

But it does not resolve the deeper strategic risk.

Trump argues the United States must “own” Greenland to secure it against a potential Russian threat. That logic reverses reality. Greenland is most secure precisely because it is embedded in NATO. Deterrence comes from collective defense—the political commitment and combined capability that makes any Russian move in the Arctic a confrontation with the alliance as a whole.

If Greenland were genuinely vulnerable, the remedy would be clearer alliance commitments and a stronger NATO posture in the Arctic—not coercive demands that weaken alliance trust. By framing Greenland’s security as dependent on U.S. ownership, Trump risks doing the one thing that would actually make Greenland less secure: fracturing NATO cohesion.

That distinction matters. A Greenland defended by NATO presents Moscow with a unified front. A Greenland defended by the United States alone—after an alliance rupture triggered by coercion against Denmark—presents a far more tempting target. Not because Russia suddenly becomes stronger, but because the problem shifts from “Russia versus NATO” to “Russia versus a politically isolated United States.” In that scenario, Trump’s approach doesn’t deter the threat he invokes; it helps create the conditions under which it becomes plausible.

Nearly eighty years of deliberate work went into building a system designed to prevent exactly this dynamic: a return to unilateral leverage, transactional security, and normalized instability. Whether through recklessness or intent, that system is now being weakened by the very nation that once sustained it.

There is one final danger layered atop all the rest. Based on long experience, I believe much of President Trump’s bluster is not backed by coherent strategic intent. But strategy is judged by perception, not private belief. The repeated cycle of threat, partial retreat, and renewed threat is starting to resemble the boy who cried wolf. Allies hear the alarm, look for follow-through, see it partially withdrawn, and gradually stop reacting with urgency.

Credibility erodes not because warnings are too severe, but because they are too frequent and inconsistently applied. The risk is that when deterrence truly matters—when a real wolf appears—Europe, Asia, and the Americas may no longer rush to the field. Not out of defiance, but out of habit. They will have learned that American warnings fluctuate, commitments shift, and reassurance is temporary.

Deals can be renegotiated.

Trust cannot.

And once collective security gives way to coercion, leverage, and ownership—whether by accident or design—the world doesn’t become safer. It becomes more familiar.

History has already shown us where that road leads.

5. In Cuba’s swamps, Trump has raised spectres of the Bay of Pigs

​Summary:

The Times returns to Cuba’s Bay of Pigs coastline and Zapata swamps to show how 1961 still governs Cuban perceptions of U.S. pressure. Witnesses describe midnight flights into jungle caves, swift defeat of CIA trained exiles, and how the fiasco pushed Havana toward Moscow and the 1962 missile crisis. Washington’s later Operation Mongoose sabotage and assassination plots failed, while the embargo persisted and often radicalized attitudes even as it deepened scarcity. In 2026, POTUS’s post Venezuela coercion revives intervention fears, but Cuba now faces decay, blackouts, disease, and mass migration. Many doubt it would work again without triggering another backlash.

Comment: What happens when America does not follow through. Extensive photos at the link. Cuba is frozen in time. It is still 1961 there.

Can unconventional warfare generate decisive elite splits when the Bay of Pigs memory makes “U.S. backed” a political toxin?

If pressure worsens daily life, does UW catalyze organized resistance, or does the pressure cause the regime to expand control through fear, rationing, and counterintelligence?

In Cuba’s swamps, Trump has raised spectres of the Bay of Pigs

As Washington once again threatens to take over the island, those who fled into the jungle as children describe how the disastrous 1961 invasion shaped their lives

Catherine Philp

, Playa Giron

Monday January 19 2026, 4.19pm GMT, The Times

https://www.thetimes.com/article/10be0c3e-a78c-473f-b6b3-7587584a1adf?shareToken=df04af6b5a41f5cc77a7ea5989de2918

In Cuba’s swamps, Trump has raised spectres of the Bay of Pigs

As Washington once again threatens to take over the island, those who fled into the jungle as children describe how the disastrous 1961 invasion shaped their lives

Catherine Philp

Monday January 19 2026, 4.19pm GMT, The Times

Share this article

It was the middle of the night and the three boys were fast asleep in their home in the Zapata swamp when the CIA-trained paramilitaries burst through the door.

“They said don’t put on any lights, just leave and go to the forest now,” Orlando Plascencia Exposito, then 12, recalled of the moment the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion began. “We fled immediately, even though we had no shoes.”

When militiamen loyal to Fidel Castro appeared at the cave where the boys were sheltering two nights later and told them it was safe to come out, they emerged to a changed world. Tiny, scrappy, Cuba had repelled America’s attempted overthrow of Castro’s communist regime using Florida-based Cuban exiles in just three days.

Orlando Plascencia Exposito

JASON P HOWE FOR THE TIMES

The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a monumental failure for the US and emboldened the socialist regime in Cuba

ALAMY

It was an undisputed foreign policy disaster that would take the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse within a year and a half, after a fearful Havana turned to Moscow for protection, delivered in the form of Soviet nuclear missiles.

The 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco and the subsequent 1962 Cuban missile crisis would give way to Operation Mongoose, a scheme to sabotage the island’s economy with a punishing blockade and a series of increasingly bizarre assassination plots to decapitate the Castro regime.

Now, having snatched Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro from his bed and claimed control over the country’s oil reserve, President Trump has named Cuba as his next target, whether through military intervention or crushing economic pressure. Whether Cuba indeed proves to be the next domino in Trump’s drive to purge “our hemisphere” of left-wing regimes or just another questionable chapter in America’s history of Latin American interventions is yet to be seen.

La Cienaga (the swamp), the Caribbean’s vastest wetland, was chosen for the invasion because its remote position on Cuba’s south coast suggested it would be hard to defend. It was only the first catastrophic American miscalculation, both a hazard of reliance on partisan exile advice and of John F Kennedy’s reluctance to embark on the plan at all, inherited from the outgoing Eisenhower administration.

A billboard near the Bay of Pigs reads: “This is as far as the mercenaries got”

JASON P HOWE FOR THE TIMES

Cuban militiamen and soldiers gather in a launch belonging to captured mercenaries to celebrate their victory over the US at Playa Giron

KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES

Plascencia and his brothers were alone in their shack, their parents having gone to hawk charcoal down the coast, when, on the morning of April 15, they heard Nicaraguan aircraft dropping bombs on Cuban airfields.

At a funeral for seven airman the next day, Castro defiantly doubled down on Cuba’s future as a socialist state. It was two nights later when the the first of the 1,400 Cuban exiles trained by the US in Guatemala and Nicaragua made landfall at Playa Larga and Playa Giron.

“The idea was that the people were going to turn against the government and support those who were invading,” says Lázaro Vinola, who owns a guesthouse close to the landing site in Playa Larga on the shore of the Bay of Pigs. “But it wasn’t like that. They didn’t have the support of the people.” It was an absurd mistake. Castro had spent Christmas Eve 1959 in the swamp with the charcoal burners in what he declared “the first supper of the revolution”. Castro came to Soprillar to spend Christmas with the country’s “most humble people”, announcing far-reaching social and infrastructure projects to improve their lives, including the development of the area’s first tourism.

Playa Larga today

JASON P HOWE FOR THE TIMES

Fidel Castro giving a speech in Havana to armed revolutionaries the day before the Bay of Pigs invasion

RAUL CORRALES/ALAMY

Plascencia and his brothers fled to the jungle and sheltered in a cave storing sugar sacks along with thirteen other people. “There was a large, fat woman who stood at the mouth of the cave holding a figurine of a saint and praying,” Plascencia recalled. “Then there was an explosion and she dropped the saint and ran away.”

One of the men in the cave had fought in the Spanish Civil War and showed the boys how to keep their mouth open with a small stick to mitigate the lung-bursting pressure of blast waves generated by the explosions. Beyond, Castro was personally assembling and commanding a 20,000-strong militia force to hunt down the invaders. Within three days, the invasion was over.

Among their many mistakes, including Kennedy’s refusal to unleash American airpower, the administration had miscalculated the strength of popular support for Castro and hatred for the US-backed military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista that Castro’s revolution had overthrown.

John F Kennedy confers with his brother, Robert Kennedy, weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962

AP

The Women Strike for Peace organisation protest outside the United Nations in New York City in 1962

ALAMY

Plascencia, born in 1949, had lived through the privations of life in the remote swamp under Batista and saw the rapid changes already under way two years into Castro’s rule. “There were no teachers, no doctors, no roads back then,” he said. “Things changed very fast after the revolution.”

Plascencia, then illiterate, would soon learn how to read, thanks to Castro’s national literacy programme and the mobile libraries and the quarter of a million teaching volunteers who spread out across the country.

The World Bank still puts Cuba’s adult literacy rate at over 99 per cent, among the highest in the world. It is perhaps the most enduring legacy of the revolution. Sixty-seven years on, many others are far more questionable. Doctors and teachers are part of the mass migration of human capital from Cuba, leaving behind entire towns of the old and infirm. Roads are crumbling into dust. “When Fidel won the revolution, 95 per cent of the people were with him,” Plascencia said. “Now, I don’t know.”

Things soon returned to normal in La Cienaga. “People just went back to their lives,” Plascencia said. Electricity arrived in 1974. Plascencia, who ran away in fear when he first saw a television, became a teacher, then a writer. In retirement, unable to survive on his state pension or his writing, he started work in a small shop.

A beach near where the landings took place

JASON P HOWE FOR THE TIMES

The Cuban Missile Crisis de-escalated when Moscow withdrew its missiles, but its relationship as Havana’s Cold War sponsor endured.

Operation Mongoose’s lurid assassination plots, including the infamous plan to kill Castro with an exploding cigar, did not succeed in toppling the communist regime the US was forced to coexist with on its doorstep. Kennedy was forced to lift his punishing blockade momentarily to retrieve the captured exiles.

John F Kennedy signing the order of a naval blockade of Cuba in 1962

AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Castro settled for $53 million in baby food and medicine in return for the captives’ release. The effects of the blockade were temporarily eased by President Obama’s normalisation process, which brought a flood of American tourists. But he lacked the power to lift it, a move in only Congress’ gift.

After almost seven decades, it is the longest-lasting such embargo in geopolitical history, despite its failure to topple the Cuban regime. Washington’s refusal to accommodate a left-wing neighbour have had geopolitical consequences that reverberate to this day.

“A decisive battle for victory was fought here”

JASON P HOWE FOR THE TIMES

“Girón: the first great defeat for Yankee imperialism in Latin America”

JASON P HOWE FOR THE TIMES

“The policy to Cuba actually radicalised the people and made the country get closer to the Soviet bloc,” Omar Everleny Pérez Villanueva, a Cuban economics professor, said. “The weapons to repel the invasion were Soviet and so we got into their orbit.” Cuba’s biggest post-revolutionary crisis came when the Soviet Union collapsed, robbing it of its Cold War sponsor. “So after that we looked to other ways to assert ourselves in the world and turned to Venezuela and China and Mexico.”

Trump’s decision to abduct Venezuela’s Maduro and block its sanctions-busting oil exports cut a potential lifeline to Cuba. Yet even before the US raid on Caracas on January 3, Cuba’s dependence on Venezuelan oil had ebbed, replaced by shipments from Mexico. Despite Trump’s vow that “there will be no more oil or money going to Cuba — zero”, Chris Wright, the US energy secretary, confirmed last week that Mexican shipments of oil to Havana would be allowed to continue unhindered.

Outside Playa Giron a vast billboard announces its claim to fame. “Giron: the first great defeat for Yankee imperialism in Latin America.” A small museum plays host to the Cuban narrative of the invasion known here simply as Giron. “After Giron all the people of the Americas were a little bit freer” the exhibit announces.

There are just a few tourists: two Danes, Elsa-Maria and Marianna, escaping headlines back home about Trump’s determination to own Greenland (“I don’t want to talk about him,” Marianna mutters); and Dan, an Chicago native who organises American tour groups to Cuba, who once dined with Castro himself and dismisses the paralysing power cuts as inconvenient “brown-outs”.

Elsa-Maria and Marianna visiting the Museo Giron, a museum dedicated to the Bay of Pigs invasion

JASON P HOWE FOR THE TIMES

Playa Giron has always loomed large in revolutionary history. Nemesia Rodriguez Montano, 78, was 13 when Nicaraguan planes bearing false Cuban insignia strafed La Cienaga, killing her mother and injuring her younger brother. A replica of the white shoes her mother only allowed her to have in 1960, when a paved road became a prospect, sits in the museum.

Her tiny home in Soprillar is still a shrine to Castro. “Take it, I can’t afford to feed it,” she says of a small black kitten born in her home three weeks ago. What happened here in 1961 “was a good lesson to the Americans, but things have changed a lot”. She isn’t sure it could be repeated in the current era. “Things have changed a lot,” she said. “They are more modern”.

Nemesia Rodriguez Montano at her home, showing a photograph of herself with Castro towards the end of his life

JASON P HOWE FOR THE TIMES

Cuba’s regime still reveres Playa Giron’s place in history but many visitors simply pass by the museum on their way to diving sites Castro developed. “Tourists now are less bothered about the history: they come for the nature,” Vinola says. “But I like the history because you can learn from the past and because of it, I understand the present better.” But visitor numbers have plummeted since Trump’s reimposition of the terror designation, complicating both American and Europeans visits.

Mosquito-borne diseases, like dengue and chikungunya, are rising with the collapse of government fumigation programmes. Hungry locals trap songbirds for food. Boats slide out of the mangroves, no longer gathered to make charcoal, in pursuit of illegal catches of turtles.

Fishing at Playa Larga

JASON P HOWE FOR THE TIMES

Fears of a new kinetic American intervention in Cuba appear to be receding after an anxiety spike following the US operations in Venezuela. Trump’s takeover of Venezuela’s oil industry, a kind of gunboat capitalism, has revived memories of the capture of Cuba’s economy by American mafiosos and conglomerates in the first half of the 20th century.

The periodo capitalista began after American troops intervened to help Cuban freedom fighters defeat the Spanish colonialists and established a de facto protectorate over Cuba in 1898, an extreme invocation of the Monroe Doctrine intended to stop European powers moving back into newly independent former colonies.

It ended with the 1959 revolution and the nationalisation of the Cuban operations of American companies such as Texaco and Bacardi. That spurred the American embargo, tightened after the missile crisis in an attempt to strangle the regime.“If the objective of the blockade was to impoverish the Cuban people, it succeeded,” Perez said. “Otherwise, nothing.”

Castro addressing the Cuban Missile Crisis during a press conference

KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES

After he stepped down, Castro also himself admitted his own hand in Cuba’s impoverishment, saying in 2010: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” The most concrete product has been the flood of Cuban migrants to America.

One of them is Plascencia’s own adult son, who left with his family two years ago amid economic collapse after the market for the beehives he built dried up. “There was nothing for him here,” Plascencia. “The children weren’t going to learn anything here. Better they go.”

6. Trump admin sought redactions on key China war game report warning of US military readiness gaps

​Summary:

Fox News says the Trump administration requested redactions to Heritage’s TIDALWAVE report, even though it used open-source, unclassified data, because officials feared the findings could help adversaries exploit vulnerabilities or close U.S. advantages. The model runs thousands of AI-enabled iterations and argues a Taiwan war is decided in the first 30 to 60 days. It warns U.S. forces culminate within weeks due to platform losses, fragile logistics, concentrated basing, and thin industrial surge. Forward bases in Japan and Guam are exposed to missile strikes; munitions run short within days; fuel throughput, not fuel supply, becomes decisive. The economic shock could reach $10 trillion.

Excerpt from the Report:

This public version of the TIDALWAVE report has been selectively redacted at the discretion of the authors to reduce the risk of harm to U.S. national security and allied operational effectiveness. Redactions were made at the request of the U.S. government to prevent disclosure of information that could reasonably enable an adversary to (1) re mediate or "close" critical vulnerabilities that the United States and its allies could otherwise exploit, or (2) identify or exploit U.S. and allied vulnerabilities in ways that could degrade operational endurance, resilience, or deterrence. 

In exercising this discretion, the authors sought to preserve the report's ability to guide and inform actions that strengthen U.S. resilience and leverage adversary vulnerabilities, while limiting the public release of details that would function as operationally actionable guidance for a capable adversary. An unredacted version has been provided to authorized U.S. government recipients for their internal use. 

Comment: The redacted report can be accessed at the Heritage website here: https://static.heritage.org/-2025/SR324_TIDALWAVE_REDACTED.pdf

If open-source modeling reveals "brittle endurance," (note "brittle is the one of the most used words in the report) what does that imply about deterrence credibility in the Asia-Indo-Pacific right now?

Is dispersal and hardening of bases enough, or is the core problem an industrial and logistics architecture that cannot scale under fire?

If a Taiwan war consumes U.S. capacity fast, how should strategy account for opportunistic action by Russia, Iran, or north Korea elsewhere?

Trump admin sought redactions on key China war game report warning of US military readiness gaps

foxnews.com · Morgan Phillips Fox News

AI-driven war game analysis projects catastrophic US losses in a high-intensity conflict with China

By Morgan Phillips Fox News

Published January 20, 2026 3:26pm EST

Video

China’s military buildup hides major weaknesses: expert

Defense analyst Seth Jones says China suffers from corruption, poor coordination and no real war-fighting experience.

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

FIRST ON FOX: The Trump administration asked for redactions to a sweeping new Heritage Foundation report modeling a potential U.S.–China war over Taiwan, even though the analysis relied entirely on publicly available, unclassified data, according to the report’s authors.

The redacted report, TIDALWAVE, warns that the United States could reach a breaking point within weeks of a high‑intensity conflict with China — conclusions that the authors say prompted senior national security officials to seek redactions over concerns adversaries could exploit the findings or use them to identify U.S. and allied military vulnerabilities.

Those conclusions include warnings that U.S. forces would culminate far sooner than China, suffer catastrophic losses to aircraft and sustainment infrastructure in the Pacific, and still fail to prevent a global economic shock estimated at roughly $10 trillion, nearly a tenth of global GDP.

According to the report's authors, the AI‑enabled model drew exclusively on open‑source government, academic, industry and commercial information. An unredacted version of the report was provided to authorized U.S. government recipients for internal use.

Unlike traditional tabletop war games, TIDALWAVE employs an AI‑enabled model that runs thousands of iterations, tracking how losses in platforms, munitions, and fuel compound over time and drive cascading operational failure early in the conflict.

According to a Heritage spokesperson, the report had been shown to "high-level national security officials" who requested some of the specifics be crossed out in black ink before its release to the public. The report still details how quickly U.S. forces could reach a breaking point and why the conflict would carry global consequences.

"Redactions were made at the request of the U.S. government to prevent disclosure of information that could reasonably enable an adversary to (1) re mediate or ‘close’ critical vulnerabilities that the United States and its allies could otherwise exploit, or (2) identify or exploit U.S. and allied vulnerabilities in ways that could degrade operational endurance, resilience, or deterrence," the report said.

A Department of War spokesperson declined to comment on discussions surrounding TIDALWAVE's publication, but added: "The Department of War does not endorse, validate, or adjudicate third-party analyses, nor do we engage publicly on hypothetical conflict modeling. As a general matter, we take seriously the protection of information that, if aggregated or contextualized, could have implications for operational security."

The White House could not be reached for comment.

The war is decided early

A New Heritage Foundation report on an AI-powered war game has a dire warning for a U.S.-China conflict scenario.

According to the report’s redacted findings, the U.S. would culminate in less than half the time required for the People's Republic of China in a high-intensity conflict. Culmination is defined as the point at which a force becomes incapable of continuing operations due to the loss of platforms, ammunition and/or fuel.

The report is explicit that the first 30 days to 60 days of a U.S.-China war determine its long-term shape and outcome, as early losses in aircraft, ships, fuel throughput and munitions rapidly compound and cannot be recovered on operationally relevant timelines.

The report concludes that the U.S. is not equipped nor arrayed to protect and sustain the Joint Force in a conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific. Rapid platform attrition, brittle logistics, concentrated basing and insufficient industrial surge capacity combine to force an early operational breaking point for American forces.

Catastrophic losses in the Pacific

The report warns that U.S. reliance on a few large, concentrated forward bases — particularly in Japan and Guam — leaves American airpower dangerously exposed to Chinese missile forces.

In multiple scenarios, up to 90% of U.S. and allied aircraft positioned at major forward bases are destroyed on the ground during the opening phase of the conflict, as runways, fuel depots, command facilities and parked aircraft are hit simultaneously.

Munitions collapse within days

The report finds that critical U.S. precision‑guided munitions — including long‑range anti‑ship missiles, air‑to‑air interceptors and missile‑defense systems — begin to be unavailable within five to seven days of major combat operations. Across most scenarios, those critical munitions are completely exhausted within 35 days to 40 days, leaving U.S. forces unable to sustain high‑tempo combat.

Fuel emerges as the most decisive vulnerability of all. The report makes a critical distinction: the U.S. does not run out of fuel in most scenarios — it loses the ability to move fuel under fire.

Chinese doctrine explicitly prioritizes attacks on logistics vessels, ports, pipelines and replenishment tankers. Even limited tanker losses, port disruptions or pipeline severance are sufficient to drive fuel throughput below survivable levels, forcing commanders to sharply curtail air and naval operations despite fuel remaining in aggregate stockpiles.

The report gamed out how a war with China in defense of Taiwan, whose army is pictured above, would play out. (Daniel Ceng/Anadolu via Getty Images)

China endures far longer

By contrast, China is assessed as capable of sustaining high‑intensity combat operations for months longer under the modeled assumptions.

Chinese ammunition stockpiles of critical munitions begin to be depleted after approximately 20 days to 30 days of major combat operations. However, substitution effects extend China’s ability to sustain combat operations out to months — well beyond the point at which U.S. forces culminate, according to the report.

A $10 trillion global shock

The consequences extend far beyond the battlefield.

The redacted report concludes the U.S. is highly unlikely to prevent massive global economic fallout once a Taiwan conflict begins.

Disruption of shipping lanes, destruction of critical infrastructure and the collapse of Taiwan’s semiconductor production would trigger a global economic shock estimated at roughly $10 trillion, with enduring ripple effects across financial markets, manufacturing and global trade.

The report warns that U.S. reliance on large, concentrated forward bases leaves American airpower dangerously exposed. (Seaman Abigail Reyes/U.S. Navy/Handout via Reuters)

Wartime footing for rebuilding the industrial base

The report comes amid years of concern over U.S. military readiness and industrial capacity, as China rapidly expands its naval forces and shipbuilding base.

The U.S. Navy operates a smaller fleet than planned, while American shipyards face workforce shortages, aging infrastructure and chronic delays — even as China, the world’s largest shipbuilder, continues to outpace the U.S. in producing new naval hulls.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth and other military leaders have vowed to put the Pentagon on a wartime footing for industrial capacity.

Deterrence at risk

Perhaps most alarming, TIDALWAVE warns that the scale of losses in the Indo‑Pacific would leave the U.S. unable to deter or respond effectively to a second major conflict elsewhere in the world.

A war over Taiwan could open the door to follow‑on aggression by adversaries such as Russia, Iran or North Korea, fundamentally destabilizing the global security order.

The report is blunt in its assessment: existing Pentagon programs and congressional funding are too slow, too fragmented and too modest to address the scale of the challenge. In many cases, the timeline required to fix critical vulnerabilities exceeds the likely timeline to conflict.

The call to action

To avoid what the authors describe as a strategic defeat, the report urges Congress to immediately expand munitions stockpiles, strengthen fuel reserves and distribution infrastructure, harden and disperse forward bases, and accelerate sustainment and logistics reforms. Without rapid action, the authors warn, the U.S. risks entering a conflict it is structurally unprepared to fight or sustain.

With intelligence warnings mounting that China could move on Taiwan before the end of the decade, TIDALWAVE cautions that the window to correct these deficiencies may be closing faster than Washington is prepared to act.

foxnews.com · Morgan Phillips Fox News

7. The Greenland Crisis Won’t Break NATO: But It Could Weaken It Where It Matters Most

​Summary:

Latham argues Greenland will not break NATO, but it can weaken deterrence. NATO’s institutions are resilient, yet Article 5 depends on belief that U.S. support is automatic. If Washington pressures Denmark over Greenland through legal access, basing, or economic leverage, allies may start to treat collective defense as negotiable. That doubt would show up quietly in planning, consultations, and deployments, and it would invite adversaries to test for hesitation. The risk travels beyond the Arctic, especially to the eastern flank, where time and clarity matter most in crisis. He urges restraint and quiet deals, since public coercion corrodes credibility fast.

The Greenland Crisis Won’t Break NATO: But It Could Weaken It Where It Matters Most

19fortyfive.com · Andrew Latham · January 20, 2026

Greenland is unlikely to fracture NATO as an institution, but it could weaken what matters most: deterrence credibility. If Washington applies visible pressure on Denmark over access, basing, or authority—especially in a way that looks coercive inside the alliance—partners may begin to treat collective defense as politically conditional rather than automatic. That shift wouldn’t announce itself through treaty drama; it would appear in quiet hedging: slower planning timelines, more reassurance-seeking, more cautious signaling, and greater hesitation in crisis decision-making

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/01/the-greenland-crisis-wont-break-nato-but-it-could-weaken-it-where-it-matters-most/

Greenland Won’t Break NATO, But It Could Make Article 5 Feel Conditional

NATO will not fracture over Greenland. Framing this issue as an existential showdown is misguided. The Alliance is too entrenched to unravel over one disagreement—even one connected to Arctic strategy and territorial sovereignty. The real danger lies elsewhere and is easy to miss.

Eurofighter Typhoon Aircraft NATO. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

A Portuguese Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon takes off during a Baltic Air Policing Rotation in Estonia.

Baltic Air Policing is a peacetime mission in which NATO Allies deploy fighter jets to cover the airspace of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Image Credit: NATO.

If a U.S. president pushes hard enough on Greenland, the fallout will not take the form of a treaty crisis or, worse, US withdrawal. Instead, allies will start to question whether collective defense is automatic or if it now hinges on political buy-in with Washington. Deterrence will begin to erode the moment that doubt takes root—whether NATO survives intact or not. Greenland should concern us not because it could break up the alliance, but because it could make Article 5 seem conditional.

This distinction matters because alliances rarely collapse in a single moment. They weaken as confidence erodes, often long before any treaty is questioned. Greenland does not put NATO’s institutional survival on trial. It probes whether Article 5 still operates as a functional commitment, or whether it has begun to feel negotiable under pressure.

NATO’s Strength Is Institutional. Deterrence Is Not.

Because NATO membership is founded on deep habits of cooperation, robust embedded command structures, and underwritten by American military might, it has withstood shock after shock. Rifts over Suez, Vietnam, Iraq, and burden-sharing failed to fracture the Alliance. NATO survived the ugliness of Trump’s first term, too, even as alliance rhetoric became openly transactional. From an institutional perspective, it’s shockproof.

Deterrence, however, works differently. It depends on expectation, not endurance; on credibility, not convention. It requires that adversaries and allies believe commitments will be honored without hesitation or reinterpretation at the moment of crisis. Once hesitation enters that equation, deterrence weakens even if the alliance flag keeps flying.

This is why debates about NATO “breaking” miss the point. The question is not whether member states withdraw under Article 13 of NATO’s founding treaty or if the treaty is torn up altogether. The question is whether decision makers begin to hedge their bets regarding how the United States will respond when the stakes are high and time is short.

Greenland and Intra-Alliance Pressure

Greenland sits at an awkward intersection of geography, sovereignty, and power. It is strategically central to North American defense and Arctic access. It is also formally tied to Denmark, a small ally that depends on the United States for its ultimate security. That imbalance matters.

Were Washington to press Copenhagen on basing arrangements, access, or political authority in Greenland, much of that pressure would unfold within the bounds of existing treaty rights rather than through overt force. The United States already enjoys significant legal access under long-standing defense agreements, which would make any escalation appear administrative rather than aggressive. No tanks would cross borders. No Article 5 debate would be triggered.

Yet the signal would still be unmistakable: American power can be applied coercively inside the alliance, even when formal legal authorities are respected, when interests collide sharply.

A U.S. Air Force F-35A Lightning II participating in NATO exercise Ramstein Flag 24 flies over the west coast of Greece, Oct. 4, 2024. Over 130 fighter and enabler aircraft from Greece, Canada, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and United States are training side by side to improve tactics and foster more robust integration, demonstrating NATO’s resolve, commitment and ability to deter potential adversaries and defend the Alliance. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Emili Koonce)

A U.S. Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker aircraft, assigned to the 100th Air Refueling Wing, refuels a Hellenic Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft during exercise RAMSTEIN FLAG 2024 while flying over the coast of Greece, Oct. 4, 2024. RAFL24 demonstrates NATO unity and strength, as Allies across the Euro-Atlantic area train side by side in defensive and offensive air operations scenarios in support of the enduring commitment to shared values and ability to adapt to the emerging environment. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Edgar Grimaldo)

NATO was never designed to manage that problem. It has no internal mechanism to restrain its hegemon. Its rules assume benign leadership rather than contested authority. Greenland would expose that structural gap in a way few other issues could.

How Article 5 Becomes Conditional Without Changing a Word

Article 5 does not require formal revision or deletion to render collective defense meaningless. It simply needs to be seen as conditional. Once allies believe that American commitments are conditioned on political will, obedience or acquiescence in unrelated conflicts, collective defense becomes a gamble.

That recalibration shows up first in process rather than policy. Defense planners hedge timelines. Political leaders seek reassurance that once seemed unnecessary. Military signaling becomes more cautious, not because threats have changed, but because expectations have. None of this is dramatic or declaratory. It is administrative, procedural, and quiet. Yet it alters how allies prepare for crisis and how adversaries judge alliance resolve.

That shift has practical consequences. Contingency planning grows cautious. Consultations become slower. Forward deployments invite more debate. None of this requires public dissent or formal objections. It emerges through quiet adjustments made by officials who no longer treat American response as a given.

For deterrence, this is corrosive. Adversaries do not need proof that Article 5 will fail. They only need reason to suspect delay, disagreement, or hesitation. Once that suspicion takes hold, the alliance’s most valuable asset—credibility—starts to thin. That is how a legal guarantee of collective defense continues to exist on paper even as the collective deterrence it underwrites begins to fray.

Why the Effects Would Travel Beyond the Arctic

What happens in Greenland won’t stay in Greenland. Allies already on NATO’s eastern flank concerned about escalation management and U.S. staying power will be watching closely how Washington treats smaller allies when interests conflict. An overt episode of intra-alliance coercion would be viewed as precedent, not aberration.

This is how localized disputes reshape broader expectations. The issue is not Denmark’s fate. It is whether other allies conclude that security guarantees are less automatic than they once believed. Deterrence does not require panic to fail. It fails through recalibration.

A Restraint Case for Cooling the Issue

From a restraint perspective, this is precisely the kind of confrontation to avoid. The United States gains little by turning Greenland into a public loyalty test. Strategic access can be negotiated quietly. Sovereignty disputes can be managed without spectacle. Pressure applied behind closed doors preserves leverage without broadcasting conditionality.

Escalating publicly does the opposite. It raises stakes, hardens lines and encourages allies to characterize it as a matter of principle rather than interest. Where the resulting outcome is positive, there is still a strategic cost because doubt remains about how the alliance functions when force is applied clumsily.

Restraint here is not passivity. It is discipline. The goal is preserving deterrence rather than asserting dominance for its own sake.

NATO’s Real Vulnerability

NATO will not shatter over Greenland. Its buildings will stand. Its forces will continue to work together. Its communiqués will be issued on schedule. That is precisely why the deeper risk is easy to miss.

Alliances decay before they collapse. They lose effectiveness long before they lose form. If Greenland becomes a case where American pressure appears to bend alliance relationships to unilateral ends, the damage will not announce itself. It will surface later, in hesitation, in miscalculation, and in adversaries willing to test what no longer feels automatic.

NATO’s future does not hinge on a single Arctic dispute. It hinges on whether collective defense remains a rule that operates without bargaining. Greenland matters only because it could blur that line. And once blurred, it will be difficult to restore.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.

19fortyfive.com · Andrew Latham · January 20, 2026

8. The Chinese Spy Machine Infiltrating Taiwan’s Military

​Summary:

China’s espionage in Taiwan is accelerating and increasingly targets the armed forces. Taiwan says nearly two-thirds of those charged in 2024 and the first nine months of 2025 were active or retired military. Recruiters use messaging apps, online loan traps, and small cash payments to exploit debt and access. Cases range from photographing documents and bypassing security apps to filming loyalty pledges to Beijing. Officials warn this is not just intelligence collection, but preparation to aid an attack and to erode public confidence, allied trust, and unit cohesion across the Asia-Indo-Pacific.

Comment: This is not a new phenomenon. I have told this anecdote before but when I was in Taiwan in 2017 for an Asymmetric Warfare conference the Taiwa Chief of Staff of the Army address us. There were about 100 personal in the room tha included about 20 Americans. He said that right now in this room there are PLA officers who have infiltrated his Army. It was a pretty incredible statement and one that has stayed with because of his frankness and because of the implications. So this makes us ask questions:

How resilient is Taiwan’s military and security services if low-cost recruitment can penetrate presidential security and cyber units?

Which countermeasure matters most: financial vulnerability mitigation, tech controls on phones, or culture and discipline? (all of the above I think)

The Chinese Spy Machine Infiltrating Taiwan’s Military

WSJ

Beijing entices island’s military personnel to share intelligence and pledge allegiance to China

By Joyu Wang

Follow

Updated Jan. 21, 2026 10:57 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/taiwan-military-china-spy-network-a56ec8da

Taiwan has warned its soldiers to be wary of Chinese agents. Ritchie B Tongo/EPA/shutterstock

TAIPEI—Sgt. Lai Chung-yu had almost everything a Chinese spy recruiter could want in a Taiwanese asset.

As a member of the military police battalion tasked with guarding the offices of the president and many senior officials, he knew the security personnel and measures used to protect them.

He was also in debt and short on cash. So when he searched online for a loan to keep himself afloat, a Chinese agent hooked him with an opportunity for easy money. All the sergeant had to do was snap some photos of sensitive security details with his cellphone.

Lai, according to Taiwan authorities, was a cog in an extensive Chinese spy machine that has infiltrated Taiwan’s armed forces and political establishment, funneling intelligence to Beijing.

As China’s adversaries around the world labor to shut the door on Beijing’s espionage operations, nowhere is the threat of infiltration greater. Taiwan officials fear that agents already in place on the island would aid a military attack by China, which claims Taiwan as its own and has threatened to seize it by force.

China’s spying operations are rapidly advancing, using complex operations and new technology that together pose “a potential serious threat to our national security,” Taiwan authorities said in a recent assessment.

A campaign launched in March by Taiwan President Lai Ching-te to combat Chinese espionage and influence has yielded some high-profile arrests that shed new light on China’s strategy to undermine the island from within.

President Lai Ching-te has called China a 'foreign adversary.' Cheng-Chia Huang/Zuma Press

Particularly unsettling for Taiwan: Many of the suspects charged with national-security violations since the start of 2024 were actively serving in the military or were army veterans.

In October, a retired lieutenant general was given a 7½-year prison sentence for accepting Chinese funds to establish an armed organization in Taiwan that would target military bases.

Taiwanese military investigators, law-enforcement authorities and prosecutors interviewed for this article described a trend in China’s effort: the increasing use of messaging apps and online loan offers to target low-ranking members of Taiwan’s armed forces.

In one example cited by a military officer, a Facebook post claiming to represent a podcast offered the equivalent of up to around $125 to any interview subject with a military background willing to share information.

“China has been taking advantage of democratic Taiwan’s freedom, diversity and openness to recruit gangs, the media, commentators, political parties and even active-duty and retired members of the armed forces and police to carry out actions to divide, destroy and subvert us from within,” Taiwan’s president said in March.

Paying lower-ranking soldiers small amounts for their cooperation is “good value for the money,” said David Hsu, the deputy head of Taiwan’s investigation bureau.

Posters displayed at military campuses around Taiwan warn soldiers to be wary. Chinese agents, they say, will charm you through social media, offer money and business opportunities and even provide sexual favors.

The posters feature illustrations and descriptions of the people who are particularly vulnerable: “Those who lead indulgent lifestyles off-duty, frequent inappropriate venues, gamble, or are preoccupied with online dating and extramarital affairs.” Hotline numbers are provided to report suspicious activity.

Beijing is “not just benignly collecting information. It’s all being used in preparation for annexing Taiwan,” said Kerry Gershaneck, a former U.S. counterintelligence official and author of a book on combating China’s “political warfare.”

Hearts and minds

China is also trying to undermine Taipei with messages to the Taiwanese public that the island’s leadership is corrupt and its military unwilling to defend them.

In one example, prosecutors charged a Marine sergeant this month with undermining national security by allegedly recording a video of himself pledging allegiance to the Beijing government while holding a Chinese flag—and getting paid by someone in China over $6,000 for doing it. He earned a few hundred dollars more by providing information about Taiwan’s weapons and amphibious vehicles, prosecutors said. No legal representative for the accused could be reached.

Such “cases subtly undermine the trust that the Taiwanese can have in themselves” and “the trust of the allies and partners of Taiwan,” said Peter Mattis, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst who is president of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation.

“It’s less of an intelligence war and more like cognitive warfare,” Taiwan Defense Minister Wellington Koo said in a May interview.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Prosecutors in Taiwan filed charges in 2024 against 64 people in 15 cases of alleged Chinese espionage, compared with three cases in 2021, according to Taiwan’s National Security Bureau. In the first nine months of last year, 24 people were charged.

Nearly two-thirds of the people charged during those periods were military personnel, active or retired. Nearly 90% of the military cases came from internal tips, Koo said Monday.

Jet fighters approach for landing at an air base in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Ritchie B Tongo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

One challenge for Taiwan is new spy tech—what government watchdog the Control Yuan has described as “China’s rapid advancements in defense and intelligence technologies.”

In one example, an air-force sergeant used a Chinese-developed phone app to bypass military security software and photograph classified documents, according to Control Yuan officials.

In another, a Taiwan businessman used mapping technology to survey roads, documenting buildings, distances and other data that investigators said could be used to support Chinese wargames or military planning.

Sophisticated tools aren’t always necessary. Smartphones, with their built-in cameras, have made spying easier and stopping it more complicated, investigators and military officers said.

Spying at the presidential offices

Sgt. Lai’s battalion was responsible for security at the entrances and throughout the hallways of the presidential office building. The sprawling Taipei landmark also houses the offices of the vice president, the National Security Council and its chief, and other officials.

In April 2022, when former President Tsai Ing-wen was in office—and identifying the island as a democracy distinct from China, a position that infuriated Beijing—Lai began delivering photographs of documents to Chinese agents in return for payment in the cryptocurrency Tether.

Lai later brought a member of the Taiwan Defense Ministry’s cybersecurity and electronic-warfare command into his spying activities.

When Lai was eventually rotated out of the presidential-offices detail and risked losing access to lucrative intelligence, he recruited another sergeant and a corporal in his battalion to take over.

The more sensitive the files, the more they were paid.

Over the course of two years, the unit provided China with names and headshots of government officials who worked in the building, rosters of guards and their call signs, and the training materials that guided how they performed their jobs, according to court documents.

Such information could be assembled by China “to complete a big puzzle,” said Lin Ying-yu, a security expert who teaches at Taiwan’s Tamkang University.

The operation continued through the January 2024 election of President Lai, who has deepened the divide with Beijing, labeling China a “foreign adversary.”

In August 2024, a soldier tipped off authorities about the spying enterprise at the presidential office building. Sgt. Lai and three others were arrested that December. By March, they had been convicted. Lai was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Over the course of Lai’s spying enterprise, prosecutors estimate that he received the equivalent of about $15,000. The other three received similar pay.

“Sometimes it baffles us,” said chief prosecutor Hsing Tai-chao. “It wasn’t even a significant amount.”

Write to Joyu Wang at joyu.wang@wsj.com

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the January 22, 2026, print edition as 'Taiwan Chips Away at Chinese Spying'.

WSJ

9. Despite Trump’s Pressure, $40 Billion in Military Money Is Stalling in Taiwan

​Summary:

Taiwan’s legislature has stalled President Lai Ching-te’s eight-year, $40 billion military spending plan, even as POTUS presses Taipei to pay more for its defense against China. The dispute reflects deeper political fractures over strategy: Lai’s party argues for stronger defense and tighter U.S. alignment, while the opposition favors more engagement with Beijing and doubts Lai’s approach. The standoff is sharpened by budget and constitutional fights, rejected court nominees, and opposition demands for disclosure that the government says would harm security. Critics also cite delayed U.S. weapons deliveries as proof Taiwan is paying without timely capability.

Comment: A fudnamental question: Can Taiwan sustain credible deterrence if domestic politics keeps defense mobilization hostage to partisan bargaining? Or is this the challenge of most democratic systems today?

Despite Trump’s Pressure, $40 Billion in Military Money Is Stalling in Taiwan

NY Times · Amy Chang Chien · January 21, 2026

By Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien

Reporting from Taipei

Jan. 21, 2026

Taiwan’s domestic gridlock is revealing a deep-seated fracture over how the island should defend itself and how much it can depend on the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/world/asia/taiwan-trump-military-gridlock-china.html

President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan inspecting an F-16 fighter jet cockpit during his visit to an air base in Taitung, Taiwan, in 2025. Mr. Lai’s proposal to increase military spending has come under fire from opposition party members. Credit...Ritchie B Tongo/EPA, via Shutterstock

Jan. 21, 2026

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

A political quagmire in Taiwan has stalled plans by its president, Lai Ching-te, to sharply increase military spending, even as President Trump has pressed the island to pay more for its own defense against China’s campaign to bring it under its control.

Opposition lawmakers who dominate the legislature have blocked Mr. Lai’s ambitious proposal to spend $40 billion across eight years on military equipment from moving forward without concessions from Mr. Lai.

For Taiwan, the impasse is more than just a domestic political fight. It could raise questions about Taiwan’s ability to strengthen its defenses at a time when Mr. Trump is urging America’s allies and partners to shoulder more of the burden for their own security. Mr. Lai has pledged to lift military and security outlays to more than 3 percent of Taiwan’s economy this year to mollify the United States, the island’s chief security backer against Beijing.

But Mr. Lai’s plan is caught in a tangle of budgetary and legal disputes between his party and the opposition parties. Both sides have used hardball tactics and accused the other of acting unlawfully.

Breaking with longstanding practice, Mr. Lai’s premier refused to sign off on a law passed by the opposition-controlled legislature that would shift some tax revenues from the central government to local administrations. Opposition lawmakers, in turn, denounced the premier’s move to stymie the revenue law as unconstitutional. They have also called Mr. Lai a dictator and moved to impeach him, an effort that is largely symbolic.

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

“We have never experienced such a massive crisis of constitutional rule of law as we have right now,” Weng Hsiao-ling, a lawmaker from the Nationalist Party, the main opposition party, said in an interview. “Executive power is not operating according to the law.”

Members of Mr. Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party, for their part, say that the opposition is trying to paralyze his administration. They accuse some opposition politicians of taking their cues from Beijing and of endangering Taiwan’s security by holding up defense spending. They are frustrated that the opposition has twice rejected Mr. Lai’s nominations to Taiwan’s constitutional court, effectively sidelining the body that could help defuse such disputes.

Su Chiao-hui, a lawmaker from the Democratic Progressive Party, said that the opposition’s blocking of nominees damaged Taiwan’s ability to resolve conflicts. “They changed the rules, and the referee is gone,” she said.

The friction reflects growing divisions in Taiwan over whether to hold tight to its relationship with the United States or try rapprochement with Beijing.

Mr. Lai’s party says that Taiwan is its own country and that stronger defense and deeper ties with the United States are the way to protect Taiwan against China.

The Nationalist Party, however, favors expanded ties with Beijing. Some of its leaders, including its chairwoman, Cheng Li-wun, have suggested that Mr. Lai’s strategy will escalate tensions with China. They have said that they generally support military spending to protect Taiwan, but have emphasized their skepticism about Mr. Lai’s plans.

“There’s an increasingly clear partisan divide of perception in Taiwan in terms of views of the U.S., views of China,” said Wei-ting Yen, a political scientist at Academia Sinica, a Taiwanese research academy.

Tensions between the two sides grew last year after Mr. Lai’s party backed a recall campaign to oust dozens of Nationalist Party legislators, which ultimately failed.

Nationalist lawmakers are not in a “terribly good mood to make further compromises with Lai,” said Alexander C. Huang, an international security expert who was formerly that party’s director of international affairs.

Opposition lawmakers have blocked deliberations on Mr. Lai’s military spending plan, as well as the annual budget, demanding, among other things, that Mr. Lai first appear before the legislature for questioning. The opposition has also pointed to what it says are unacceptably long delays in deliveries of U.S. weapons, including F-16 fighter jets.

“We’ve paid up, but the weapons are nowhere to be seen,” Fu Kun-chi, a Nationalist Party leader, said last month. “We support national defense, but don’t support being fleeced in arms purchases.”

Compromise may still be possible. The Nationalists have pushed for more public disclosure of details; the government has said that revealing some details would compromise security, but gave lawmakers a private briefing this week and released more information.

The U.S. representative in Taipei, Raymond Greene, has backed Mr. Lai’s military spending proposals and urged the parties to work together, while the State Department pledged to work with industry to deliver equipment more quickly.

Some officials from Taiwan’s governing party hope that lawmakers from a smaller opposition party, the Taiwan People’s Party, will break with the Nationalists, giving Mr. Lai the votes to pass his plans. He appears buoyed after Taiwan and Washington signed a framework agreement to reduce Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

Washington may increase pressure on the opposition, aware that a public breach with the United States would be politically fraught for any party in Taiwan.

“The opposition Nationalists naturally hope to keep a balance between China and the U.S.,” said Su Tzu-chiao, a political scientist at Soochow University in Taipei, “but they cannot directly oppose the U.S.”

Chris Buckley, the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues.

Amy Chang Chien is a reporter and researcher for The Times in Taipei, covering Taiwan and China.

10. Drawing the Digital Line

​Summary:

Jadyn Ocampo argues U.S. policy needs a firm, selective definition of cyber warfare to reduce escalation risk and end inconsistent responses. The author grounds the threshold in Clausewitz: cyber warfare should require a political purpose, violence or coercive physical effects, and capable actors, typically state-level. Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s view of cyber war as information-centered military operations supports treating some non-kinetic attacks as war if they reliably produce lethal or coercive outcomes. The essay uses Estonia 2007 to show gray-zone paralysis: major disruption, uncertain attribution, and no direct deaths kept it below war. It recommends clear criteria plus subcategories for sabotage and espionage.

Excerpts:

It is of paramount importance that the United States establish a clear definition of cyber warfare that definitively states the need for a political motive, violence, and conflict between two political actors. This definition would allow the U.S. to provide a consistent framework for identifying, classifying, and responding appropriately to cyber incidents across the spectrum of conflict. It would also position the U.S. to be proactive, rather than reactive, in its foreign policy decision-making.

As cyberspace continues to evolve at a rapid rate, states are often left managing the aftermath of malware, rather than actively preventing it. Preemptive definitional clarity allows the U.S. to systematically distinguish different types of cyberattacks and respond to them in a strategic and proportional manner. Having clear protocols for managing cyberattacks, based on whether a cyberattack qualifies as warfare or not, strengthens the U.S. military’s confidence that its response will be coordinated across government agencies and highly competitive.

Ultimately, a unified definition of cyber warfare is a safeguard against miscalculation and strategic paralysis in an era where the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds are becoming increasingly blurred. A rigid definition based on strict Clausewitzian criteria provides policymakers with a clear framework for assessing a cyber incident, accurately identifying whether it is warfare or not, and then properly classifying it in a subgroup that determines how to respond proportionally. Through the metrics of political purpose, presence of violence, and capable actors, the United States can set a clear and distinct threshold that separates lesser cyberattacks from genuine acts of cyber warfare. Doing so reaffirms America’s capacity to be a great power in the cyber domain.

Comment: Ah... the definition problem. Yes we need to get our terminology right (or just not too wrong as the late Michael Howard would say).

Drawing the Digital Line

by Jadyn Ocampo

|

01.22.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/22/drawing-the-digital-line/

Introduction

As many different aspects of governance, including military operations, become increasingly integrated with cyberspace, policymakers must decide how to characterize and define cyberattacks. Cyber technology is a novel aspect of warfare. Its inherent unprecedentedness and asymmetrical nature complicate the systematic characterization of cyber actions as acts of war. This ambiguity leads to inconsistencies in our responses, which in turn increases the risk of miscalculation and escalation. To address these issues, a clear definition must be developed that distinctly states what cyber warfare is and, by default, what it is not. In doing so, it simplifies, streamlines, and standardizes the process of identifying which cyberattacks are genuinely warfare. This definition must establish clear parameters and qualifications to distinguish cyber warfare from other, less extreme, cyberattacks. Where we draw this line matters. It will set a threshold for the difference in how the United States responds. The U.S. should develop a selective definition grounded in rigorous criteria that defines cyberattacks as warfare based on whether they achieve a clear set of qualifications.

Conceptual Foundation

When contemplating how cyberattacks should be defined and whether they align with warfare’s definition, it is important to understand what warfare objectively entails. There is an inherent challenge in applying an objective concept to subjective and niche experiences, as war manifests itself under a wide variety of diverse circumstances. However, a trenchant and rigid definition of warfare is essential, as it determines the threshold that distinguishes between the U.S. responding with limited statecraft or overt force. The difference between these two is consequential to both the U.S. domestically and to the greater international community. While stringent definitions come with limitations, they must be firm, as the costs of mischaracterizing a cyberattack can be having to compensate for a lack of defenses or overstepping and causing an escalation crisis. Either way, both are devastating, hence why a definition is needed to clearly delineate between different types of cyberattacks so that the United States to respond optimally to cyberattacks according to their severity.

Carl von Clausewitz’s foundational argument that war is a purposeful effort that pursues a political goal, involves violence, and is done between two capable actors sets the foundation for my argument. The framework this paper advocates for is focused on his broader argument that war is a purposeful and organized effort. It will be argued that the three premises of an attack being in the pursuit of a political goal, involving violence, and being between two actors capable of engaging, are the key elements through which to ground a definition of cyber warfare. Later, a discussion on how it is possible for clear definitions of cyber warfare can still permit complexity, and within this space, more of Clausewitz’s work can be integrated. Furthermore, as the nature of cyber warfare evolves, definitions can shift to more accurately depict the current state of cyber warfare. An attack must be in pursuit of a political goal, involve violence, and be between two actors capable of engaging. These would be the three core areas of criteria in which to base the definition.

 John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt define cyber war as, “Conducting, and preparing to conduct, military operations according to information-related principles… It means turning the ‘balance of information and knowledge’ in one’s favor, especially if the balance of forces is not.” This aligns with Clausewitz, as non-kinetic modes of attack still have the ability to incite violence, for a political objective, and involve organized and capable actors. For example, disrupting software that controls hospitals or transportation services could result in patients dying from equipment malfunctions or travelers being severely injured in an accident. It is entirely possible for cyberattacks to have a political motive, and there have been examples of this in recent years, especially in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, where Russia has launched a wave of DDoS and disruption attacks on Ukraine’s cyberspace.

In defining cyber warfare, there is some gray area in the context of whether a cyber action can be linked to incited violence, if it inspires the violent actions, but did not directly cause the violence itself. If a charged social media post, inspired by a person who viewed it to act violently, is the social media post liable, to an extent, for the violence inflicted? This uncertainty underscores the need for a definition that could clearly define accountability and when cyber actions truly incite violence, and could therefore be considered warfare. Since in this example the social media post was not the direct source of violence, it would not be considered warfare, based on a Clausewitzian definition.

Potentially, one of the more difficult characteristics to meet would be that the attack occurred between two capable actors. A rogue hacker spreading malware in a civilian’s private network would not be considered warfare because the conflict would have been between two individuals. Furthermore, the problem of attribution and the anonymity that the internet allows makes it difficult to identify cybercriminals and accurately attribute their crimes to them. If this were to happen, then the attack would not qualify as warfare and would not be treated as such. However, if a state agency like the CIA sanctioned a cyberattack on another sovereign state’s cyber systems, that would indeed be warfare.

In attempting to define cyber warfare by these three metrics, it is true that cyber actors can never fully anticipate the outcome of their actions. Due to the interconnected nature of the online ecosystem, a single line of malicious programming intended for a specific target may cascade across a multitude of systems it connects with, yet was never initially intended to. If this attack was designed to target an adversary’s military network, yet also impacted civilian digital infrastructure, classifying it as definitively warfare instead of negligence becomes difficult. This unpredictability further underscores the need for definitional clarity on cyber warfare. Violence, capable actors, and political goals provide a structured lens through which cyber incidents in their totality, from their inception to their consequences, intentional or not, can be evaluated and accurately classified. Intentions may change the nature of how cyber incidents are understood, but intentions do not fundamentally change the outcome of a situation. While a cyberattack may include accidental technical mishaps, if it were carried out by political actors for the sake of a political goal and incited violence, that would be considered warfare.

In this sense, the essence of war in the digital realm can be understood and properly approached. Cyberattacks conducted for political purposes, incite violence, and are done between state actors should be recognized as warfare, just as a conventional attack that meets those requirements would. The method of attack and form of weapons may be different, but principally speaking, if a cyberattack meets these metrics, it constitutes warfare.

Potential for Criticism

 Some may argue that creating a rigid definition that imposes a binary response, only allowing cyberattacks to be classified as either warfare or not. Critics may also add that cyberattacks are too multidimensional and nuanced to fit into a binary system of classification. While there are many different types of cyberattacks, such as “botnets…logic bombs…trojan horses…viruses…worms…[and] zombies”, all definitions are in and of themselves binary. They clearly state what the parameters of something are, and by default, what they are not. However, a definition being decisively clear is not mutually exclusive with the propensity that the definition can have to account for depth.

A way to understand cyber’s multifaceted nature and accurately describe it could be to create different levels or types of cyberattacks, subgroups that an attack could fall into after its initial analysis against the warfare definition. For example, espionage and sabotage are “kinds of aggression that do not rise to the level of war”. The act of spying on or sabotaging another country may lack overt violence or political motive. While they should not be ignored, simply because they are not warfare, they do not warrant the military response that warfare would. It is also important to consider that, along with the variety of cyber incidents, there can be a variety in how states decide to respond. While something may be classified as warfare, states have the autonomy to approach resolution from the perspective of soft or hard power. Something being classified as warfare doesn’t lock states into a certain response; rather, a clear cyber definition allows states to have a clear understanding of the situation at hand and optimally positions them to craft a strategic response. Using a strict definition, with a structural integrity grounded in the three key Clausewitzian principles, provides the U.S. with a clear threshold for what attacks rise to the level of war, and even if they do not, how to still take them seriously and respond appropriately.

A rigid definition provides the initial test that defines what a cyberattack is, and then allows for a more accurate categorization based on the rejection or acceptance of warfare status. The goal is to accurately assess the level of severity and intensity of a cyberattack, then respond to that attack strategically and proportionately. Military operations exist on a wide spectrum of varying levels of violence. A definition would draw a clear line on this spectrum to delineate where cyber war begins. While this threshold is critical for national security, it does not diminish the complexity of cyber warfare. Rather, there is room for incidents like espionage and sabotage to be classified as a serious threat or potential conflict that requires proportional enhanced focus. This definition allows for every act of aggression against the United States, regardless of whether they are warfare or not, to be understood, properly prioritized, and countered appropriately.

Case Study

The 2007 Estonia cyberattack is a case study that exemplifies the ambiguity of cyberattacks and why firm definitions are needed to provide strategic clarity and stability. The Estonian government decided to move a bronze statue that initially represented the defeat of the Nazis by the Soviet Union. Over time, for those native to Estonia, the statue became a hurtful reminder of Soviet oppression. The decision incited intense backlash from Russian sympathizers who felt the moving of the statue was disrespectful and an insult to how they conceptualize that historical moment. Some of these groups took to action and began a wave of DDoS cyberattacks on critical Estonian infrastructure, including banks, media outlets, and government websites. DDoS attacks are denial-of-service attacks that overwhelm their target and compromise its ability to operate normally. With their cyberspace paralyzed, Estonian society fell into chaos, facing the massive repercussions of digital malware, with many citizens not having access to their money, news, or government.

This attack demonstrated the vulnerability that comes with intense interconnections between the cyber and physical worlds, and how harm in one realm prompts harm in the other. While this attack undoubtedly caused a harmful disruption in the lives of innocent Estonian citizens, it does not meet the requirements for warfare. Although it was politically motivated by pro-Russian groups, Russia was never definitively attributed with enabling this attack. Furthermore, no one died as a direct result of the cyberattack, resulting in no violence or coercive action occurring. While the Estonia case cannot be classified as warfare, it revealed the danger of the gray zone between sabotage and full-on war, and how aggression that lacks definitional clarity leaves states uncertain about how and when to respond.

The inconsistent responses from different international organizations, like the European Union (EU) and NATO, show a lack of coordination on cyber strategy, reflecting the harm that comes from the absence of a clear definition of cyber warfare. Cyberattacks look different from other previous methods of war, and this “unusual look of our forces may have less of an “intimidation effect” on our future adversaries, thereby vitiating crisis and deterrence stability”. When states cannot clearly articulate what constitutes cyber warfare, their response to cyberattacks is weakened, which signals inconsistency and allows adversaries to exploit these blind spots. This also denies them the ability to establish a consistent standard of response that, over time, would show coordination, strength between allies, and credibility on the international stage. The Estonia case is an example of the urgent need for a rigid definition of cyber warfare, based on criteria to ensure that states can form unified, strategic, and coordinated responses proportional to the incident at hand.

Final Recommendations

It is of paramount importance that the United States establish a clear definition of cyber warfare that definitively states the need for a political motive, violence, and conflict between two political actors. This definition would allow the U.S. to provide a consistent framework for identifying, classifying, and responding appropriately to cyber incidents across the spectrum of conflict. It would also position the U.S. to be proactive, rather than reactive, in its foreign policy decision-making.

As cyberspace continues to evolve at a rapid rate, states are often left managing the aftermath of malware, rather than actively preventing it. Preemptive definitional clarity allows the U.S. to systematically distinguish different types of cyberattacks and respond to them in a strategic and proportional manner. Having clear protocols for managing cyberattacks, based on whether a cyberattack qualifies as warfare or not, strengthens the U.S. military’s confidence that its response will be coordinated across government agencies and highly competitive.

Ultimately, a unified definition of cyber warfare is a safeguard against miscalculation and strategic paralysis in an era where the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds are becoming increasingly blurred. A rigid definition based on strict Clausewitzian criteria provides policymakers with a clear framework for assessing a cyber incident, accurately identifying whether it is warfare or not, and then properly classifying it in a subgroup that determines how to respond proportionally. Through the metrics of political purpose, presence of violence, and capable actors, the United States can set a clear and distinct threshold that separates lesser cyberattacks from genuine acts of cyber warfare. Doing so reaffirms America’s capacity to be a great power in the cyber domain.

Check out all of Small Wars Journal’s great content.

Tags: Carl von Clausewitz, Cyber warfare, information warfare, national security

About The Author

• 
  
• Jadyn Ocampo
• View all posts 

11. The Davos Crowd Gets the World Wrong Again

​Summary:

Tyler Cowen argues Davos elites misread the moment: globalization is not retreating, it is shifting and may be accelerating. Even as the United States embraces tariffs, others are expanding trade links. Canada opening its market to Chinese electric cars and the EU pursuing major free-trade deals, including Mercosur and a potential agreement with India, signal continued integration. The larger driver is AI. Faster AI timelines, the spread of American and Chinese systems into governments, firms, and education, and the implausibility of a coordinated global pause all point to deeper interdependence. Davos speeches, he says, were mostly domestic political theater, not a break with global integration.

Comment: There is no putting the globalization genie back in the bottle. And we would not have the economic development we have today without it. But globalization is just one more boogeyman that supports "exaggerated grievance, communicated well." (perhaps the biggest boogeyman used by authoritarian rulers and populists alike). I think Professor Cowen is more right than most analysts.

The Davos Crowd Gets the World Wrong Again

thefp.com

Reports of globalization’s death are greatly exaggerated, argues Tyler Cowen.

By Tyler Cowen

01.21.26 —

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-davos-crowd-gets-the-world-wrong

Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and also faculty director of the Mercatus Center. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987. His book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better was a New

The big story from Davos is that globalization is in swift retreat. And that may well be what the insiders are saying to each other in speeches and at exclusive private parties. From the world outside the peaks of Switzerland, though, what I am seeing is that globalization, all things considered, is likely accelerating.

Take free trade. Though Donald Trump seems to be calling off his latest trade war, the United States has indeed retreated from free trade with a new era of tariffs. It’s a development I rue. But Canada just opened its market to Chinese cars. So Trump did in fact find the recipe to nudge an oft-protectionist Canada toward freer trade, though it is the opposite of what he might have been wishing for. Soon, Canada will have access to better and cheaper electric cars than what we can get in the United States. And even if you think that spyware could make those cars a security risk in Washington, D.C., due to spying possibilities, I am less worried about their proliferation in Quebec and Nova Scotia. Keep them out of Ottawa if need be.

The European Union just concluded a free trade agreement with Mercosur, a trade bloc encompassing hundreds of millions of people in South America, a region that is likely to be more economically important in the future. The EU also announced it is likely to strike a free trade agreement with India, the most populous nation in the world and one of its fastest-growing economies. However imperfect these agreements may turn out to be, has there been any recent short period with so much progress in free trade?

I hope other nations, not wanting to be left out, will scurry to write their own free trade deals with those regions and others. I can even imagine that the United States, with or without President Trump in power, feels the same pressures and responds accordingly.

Perhaps the most telling signal about globalization at the World Economic Forum came from artificial intelligence creators. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, announced an acceleration of his AI timelines. He thinks that within a year AIs will be able to manage most coding tasks on their own. That in turn will accelerate the development of AI itself, and may hit the point of what Amodei calls “self-improving.”

How does that relate to globalization? Well, American and possibly Chinese systems will spread throughout the world at a more rapid pace. American AI will have crucial roles in the central banks, treasuries, governments, companies, and education systems of many countries. I am not saying that everyone will like this approaching form of globalization, but globalization it will be.

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google’s DeepMind lab, said he might favor a pause in the development of AI systems if all countries and major interested parties would agree to get on board. What is he really saying? Implicitly, it’s that only a (completely impossible) collective agreement can stop AI-led globalization, and the spread of American soft power carried with it.

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s speech on Tuesday garnered a lot of attention, but I think for the wrong reasons. He proclaimed the ability of “middle powers”—that is, Europe and countries like his own—to stand their ground against America and China, but he mentioned AI only in passing. He had no solution to an immediately pending world where Canada is quite dependent on advanced AI systems from American companies (often, incidentally, developed by Canadian researchers in the U.S.). That is likely to be the next major development in this North American relationship, and it will not increase the relative autonomy of Canada or of any other middle powers.

Carney has garnered praise for staking out such bold ground and standing up to Trump. The deeper reality is that Carney can “talk back” in the North American partnership because he knows America will defend Canada, including against Russia, no matter what. Most European countries cannot relax in the same manner, and thus they are often more deferential. What the reactions from Carney and the Europeans show is not any kind of growing independence for the middle powers, but rather a reality where you are either quite tethered to a major power—as Canada is to America—or you live in fear of being abandoned, which is the current status of much of Europe.

And what about Trump’s own speech? Well, he is the only American president since Bill Clinton to come to Davos, and now he has done it twice. For an avowed protectionist, he is oddly obsessed with global affairs, and indeed he has spent much of his life trying to build up an international business empire. I do not agree with most of his attacks on Europe, as my view of the continent is more positive than his, but his perseverations about Europe’s decline and pending collapse reflect how much he thinks and cares about global affairs. As the second Trump term progresses, he is seeking more and more of his victories abroad—in Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, and possibly Cuba to come. To top it off, soon after his Davos speech, Trump announced that he was canceling his threatened tariffs on Europe after reaching the “framework of a future deal” about Greenland.

When you sum this all up, what kind of uprising did we actually see against globalization at Davos? Surprise, surprise: Most of the politicians were playing to their domestic audiences. The sunglasses-wearing Emmanuel Macron of France wanted to seem cool and in charge (though he blamed a burst blood vessel for the reflective shades). Carney wanted to stand up to Trump, who is massively unpopular in Canada. And Trump went on and on about domestic immigration and ICE, again topics largely for American voters.

Our world continues to globalize, and more rapidly than we might think from many media reports. It is our politicians who remain stuck in the older world of creaky, inflexible nationalism.

12. An Opportunity for Success: Don’t Repeat Iraq’s Catastrophic Mistakes in Venezuela

​Summary:

Scott Rutter argues Venezuela’s transition could succeed if Washington avoids Iraq’s post-2003 errors. He credits the Maduro removal for restraint, limited violence, intact institutions, and no U.S. occupation. He warns the danger window is the next six to twelve months, when legitimacy is unproven and security vacuums form. Venezuela’s core risk is a narco-terrorist ecosystem embedded in state structures, plus quiet influence by Cuba, Iran, Russia, and China. He urges synchronized DIMEFIL action, especially law enforcement, finance, intelligence, and governance support, to dismantle networks and sustain public confidence fast.

Excerpts:

Iraq taught me what failure looks like when we over-rely on military power and neglect other instruments: years of war, thousands of lives lost, trillions spent, limited success. Venezuela offers the opportunity to demonstrate what success looks like: smart application of all elements of American power, adequately resourced and sustained over years, achieving strategic objectives through comprehensive engagement rather than massive military commitment.

The opportunity is in front of us. The risks are clear. The lessons are known. The instruments of power are available. Venezuela can succeed, but only if we commit to employing all instruments of national power in synchronized fashion. Anything less, and we risk repeating Baghdad’s catastrophic mistakes in a new theater, with consequences that will haunt American security for decades.

Venezuela can succeed, but only if we commit to employing all instruments of national power in synchronized fashion.

An Opportunity for Success: Don’t Repeat Iraq’s Catastrophic Mistakes in Venezuela

by Scott Rutter

|

01.22.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/22/an-opportunity-for-success/

A Battlefield Commander’s Warning: Venezuela’s Political Transition Offers Hope, But the Shadows of Iraq Reveal Risks We Cannot Ignore

In April 2003, I commanded Task Force 2-7 when we destroyed the Iraqi Republican Guard at Baghdad International Airport and reinforced 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division in their decisive attack into Baghdad. After the invasion, my task force secured downtown Baghdad and Iraq’s Al Rashid banking district during those critical early weeks, giving me a front-row seat to both America’s swift military victory and the catastrophic failures that followed.

The lessons from Iraq offer crucial insights into risks that may not be immediately obvious from Washington.

As Venezuela transitions to new leadership under President Edmundo González Urrutia, I’m watching with cautious optimism but growing concern. The Trump administration has orchestrated a remarkable diplomatic achievement: Nicolás Maduro’s departure with limited shots fired, existing Venezuelan government structures remaining largely intact, and no American boots on the ground. But as someone who witnessed how quickly political transitions can collapse into chaos, I see warning signs that demand attention.

The administration’s restraint is commendable. By avoiding direct military intervention, Washington has sidestepped the catastrophic error we made in Baghdad when we dissolved Iraq’s military and attempted to rebuild a nation from scratch. But restraint alone does not guarantee success. The lessons from Iraq offer crucial insights into risks that may not be immediately obvious from Washington.

Beyond Military Force: The Complete Spectrum of National Power

One of Iraq’s most critical failures was our over-reliance on military power while neglecting other instruments of national influence. Venezuela offers the opportunity to get this right from the beginning, applying what national security professionals call DIMEFIL: Diplomatic, Informational, Military, Economic, Finance, Intelligence, and Law Enforcement instruments of power.

The beauty of the current Venezuela situation is that military force, while available if needed, is not the primary instrument. But this requires deliberate, coordinated application of each element, something we failed to do in Iraq until years into the conflict when the cost became tragically apparent.

The Iraq Experience: What We Didn’t See Coming

The conventional narrative about Iraq focuses on obvious mistakes: disbanding the military, too few troops, mismanagement. These were real failures, but my experience revealed something more insidious: how quickly security vacuums emerge in transitions, even when political structures appear stable.

In those early weeks after Baghdad fell, there was dangerous euphoria. Saddam was gone, government ministries stood intact, and Iraqi civilians cheered. It felt like success. But beneath that surface calm, three dynamics were already emerging that would shape the next two decades of war.

First, criminal networks filled security gaps faster than anyone anticipated. Within days, organized looting stripped government buildings and infrastructure. These networks would later provide logistics and financing for insurgent groups.

Second, existing power structures proved remarkably resilient. Ba’athist networks didn’t disappear, they went underground and reorganized. The assumption that removing Saddam meant dismantling his power structure proved dangerously naive.

Third, the gap between regime change and legitimate governance created a void where foreign actors, Iran, Syria, jihadist networks, exploited the window to establish influence. By the time we recognized what was happening, these networks were too entrenched to eliminate.

Iraq taught me that the most dangerous period in any political transition isn’t the moment of regime change, it’s the six to twelve months afterward, when the old order is gone but new legitimacy hasn’t solidified.

Venezuela’s Unique Vulnerabilities

Venezuela faces similar dynamics with complications that make Iraq look straightforward. The administration’s decision to leave existing structures intact avoids some pitfalls but creates others.

The Narco-Terrorist Time Bomb

Venezuela has become one of the world’s major narco-terrorist states. Under Maduro, the country became a primary cocaine transit hub, with regime officials, including senior military leaders, directly profiting from drug trafficking. The ELN and FARC dissidents operate freely, running sophisticated operations. This isn’t peripheral criminality, it’s a parallel economy rivaling the legitimate government.

Here’s the critical question: With Maduro gone but institutional structures intact, what happens to these narco-terrorist networks? Many military officers, security officials, and government administrators who facilitated drug trafficking under Maduro remain in positions of authority. The infrastructure enabling the drug trade didn’t disappear when Maduro left.

Without direct American involvement on the ground, the new Venezuelan government faces the challenge of dismantling these networks using the very institutions that were compromised by them. The risk isn’t immediate failure, it’s that narco-terrorist networks will adapt to the new political reality, maintaining operations while offering surface cooperation.

The danger for the United States is that a year from now, Venezuela might be politically stable enough that intervention seems unwarranted, but narco-terrorist networks remain intact and operational, continuing to flood American communities with cocaine while we lack justification for direct action.

Foreign Actors: The Quiet Infiltration

Iraq taught me that foreign adversaries are most dangerous when they operate quietly during transitions. Iran’s intelligence services didn’t announce their presence, they cultivated relationships, funded militias, and positioned assets while we focused on immediate security challenges.

Venezuela faces similar exposure with multiple adversaries: Cuba has intelligence operatives deeply embedded in Venezuelan security services; Iran has established relationships with Venezuelan military and intelligence officials; Russia has economic and military interests; and China has massive investments in Venezuelan oil infrastructure and debt holdings.

The Trump administration’s diplomatic achievement likely required accommodations with some of these actors. But without American presence on the ground to monitor and counterbalance this influence, foreign actors have opportunities to quietly expand their positions. Venezuelan leaders, desperate for international support and economic assistance, face temptations from Cuban intelligence offering “technical assistance,” Chinese companies promising infrastructure investment, and Russian energy experts offering to restore oil production.

The Legitimacy Gap

Political legitimacy takes time to establish, but threats don’t wait. González’s advantage is that he’s Venezuelan, elected through a process most Venezuelans recognize as legitimate, and unburdened by association with foreign occupation.

But legitimacy is conditional. González’s government will be judged on its ability to deliver tangible improvements: personal security, economic opportunity, basic services, and justice for Maduro-era crimes. If the new government struggles to meet expectations, narco-terrorist groups and foreign actors can position themselves as necessary alternatives.

Without sufficient international support, economic assistance, security cooperation, technical expertise, the González government will struggle to meet expectations, creating space for dangerous actors to fill the void.

Applying DIMEFIL: What Success Requires

Venezuela needs comprehensive application of all instruments of national power, delivered quickly and sustained over years:

Diplomatic: Senior presence in Caracas immediately, coordinating with Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina to create unified hemispheric approach, and counterbalancing Chinese, Russian, Cuban, and Iranian diplomatic efforts.

Informational: Technical assistance establishing independent media, countering disinformation, building communications infrastructure, and actively exposing hostile information operations.

Military: Military-to-military relationships, security cooperation agreements, training assistance for counter-narcotics operations, and liaison officers providing planning expertise. The goal is enabling Venezuelan forces to succeed, not fighting their battles.

Economic: American energy companies can restore Venezuelan oil production, but need security guarantees and rule-of-law protections. USAID, Export-Import Bank, and Commerce Department must coordinate to make Venezuela attractive for American business while ensuring investments serve Venezuelan recovery.

Finance: Treasury expertise for identifying and freezing narco-terrorist financial networks, seizing assets stolen by Maduro-era officials, establishing anti-money-laundering frameworks, and providing technical assistance to rebuild Venezuela’s financial systems.

Intelligence: Provide Venezuelan government with intelligence on narco-terrorist networks, foreign operative activity, and regime holdouts, while providing U.S. government with ground truth about what’s actually happening.

Law Enforcement: DEA expansion for counter-narcotics; FBI expertise in investigating corruption and organized crime; U.S. Marshals training for fugitive apprehension; and assistance professionalizing Venezuelan police forces. This law enforcement surge can dismantle criminal networks while building Venezuelan institutional capacity.

Coordination: The Missing Element

The challenge isn’t lacking these capabilities, it’s coordinating them effectively. The National Security Council must establish a Venezuela coordination mechanism, perhaps a senior director specifically responsible for synchronizing DIMEFIL elements, ensuring they support rather than contradict each other.

The Window Is Closing

Political transitions have momentum. In the early weeks and months, there’s energy, hope, and willingness to accept difficult changes. But this window closes as competing interests organize and initial enthusiasm fades. In Iraq, we had perhaps six months when truly transformative changes were possible.

Venezuela is in that critical window now. Narco-terrorist networks are vulnerable because they’re uncertain about the new government’s intentions. Foreign actors are calibrating their approaches. Venezuelan institutions are malleable, open to reform. Venezuelan people are hopeful.

But this window is already closing. Every day that narco-terrorist networks operate without serious challenge, they grow more entrenched. Every week that foreign actors engage without American counterbalance, their influence deepens. Every month that economic conditions don’t improve, popular support erodes.

Every week that foreign actors engage without American counterbalance, their influence deepens.

Conclusion: Choose Success Through Comprehensive Power

I’ve seen what happens when Washington treats post-conflict transitions as afterthoughts, relying on military force while neglecting other instruments that determine long-term success. But I’ve also seen what American power can achieve when properly applied.

Venezuela is achievable, but only if we employ the full DIMEFIL spectrum in coordinated fashion. The tools exist. The lessons have been learned, painfully. The question is whether we have the wisdom to apply them comprehensively and the discipline to sustain attention when Venezuela fades from headlines.

The administration’s approach, regime change without military occupation, was the right call. But that decision creates obligations. Having orchestrated Maduro’s departure and helped install González, the United States now has moral and strategic responsibility to help ensure this transition succeeds using all instruments of national power.

This isn’t nation-building fantasy. It’s cold strategic calculation: investing now in Venezuela’s stability through comprehensive application of American power is far cheaper in blood and treasure than dealing with Venezuelan state failure later. It’s counter-narcotics enforcement through law enforcement and financial tools rather than military occupation. It’s great power competition using diplomatic and economic instruments to prevent China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran from consolidating influence in a resource-rich nation in America’s backyard.

Iraq taught me what failure looks like when we over-rely on military power and neglect other instruments: years of war, thousands of lives lost, trillions spent, limited success. Venezuela offers the opportunity to demonstrate what success looks like: smart application of all elements of American power, adequately resourced and sustained over years, achieving strategic objectives through comprehensive engagement rather than massive military commitment.

The opportunity is in front of us. The risks are clear. The lessons are known. The instruments of power are available. Venezuela can succeed, but only if we commit to employing all instruments of national power in synchronized fashion. Anything less, and we risk repeating Baghdad’s catastrophic mistakes in a new theater, with consequences that will haunt American security for decades.

Venezuela can succeed, but only if we commit to employing all instruments of national power in synchronized fashion.

Tags: Lessons from Iraq, U.S. Intervention Venezuela, US Foreign Policy

About The Author

• 
  
• Scott Rutter
• LTC Scott Rutter, USA (Retired), is the former Commander of Task Force 2-7 Infantry, 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized), during Operation Iraqi Freedom I. He is the CEO of the Valor Network of Glassboro, NJ. Find his forthcoming book Damn Fine Soldiers (Simon & Schuster) on July 2026.
• View all posts LTC, USA (Retired)

13. The Archaic Defensive Doctrine Continues to Plague Post-Soviet States Today

​Summary:

Julien McBride argues that several post-Soviet militaries still carry a Soviet defensive inheritance that is maladapted to modern warfare. The doctrine prizes holding ground, rigid timelines, centralized control, and frontal assaults that accept heavy losses, and it is reinforced by weak intelligence culture and distorted reporting up the chain. He contrasts NATO’s emphasis on air superiority, technology, and junior-leader initiative with forces that remained in Russia’s orbit. Armenia in 2020 is his warning case: drones and ISR punished static defense, while top-down command and poor air defense accelerated collapse. Ukraine’s manpower crisis, he argues, is worsened when leaders hold untenable positions too long and constrain adaptation.

Excerpt:

The Soviet military doctrine might have been more proficient in WWII and the former Warsaw Pact, but keeping elements of the USSR’s battlefield tactics has led to unnecessary and avoidable mass military casualties, as seen with wars in Armenia previously and Ukraine today. Protecting human resources, mitigating the tendency to hold positions for too long, becoming proficient in maneuver warfare, and giving field officers and NCOs greater freedom to act will be needed for all countries that wish to diverge from the old Soviet vanguard tactics.

Comment: "Doctrine and demographics." The ghost of Soviet doctrine. Is “Soviet doctrine” the culprit? Does Soviet doctrine hinder effective force design, ISR and strike balance, electronic warfare, logistics depth, and political risk tolerance? It would appear so.

The Archaic Defensive Doctrine Continues to Plague Post-Soviet States Today

by Julian McBride

|

01.22.2026 at 06:00am

From its beginning to its collapse, the USSR relied on overwhelming its enemies with superior manpower and firepower. Soviet forces rarely withdrew from untenable positions. Instead, they held positions, used armored columns, and launched frontal assaults as seen in WWII. The Warsaw Pact continued this approach.

Amid the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and USSR, the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia all integrated with the West. As a result, they adopted NATO doctrine on air superiority, technological advances, and autonomy for field officers to make critical decisions. In contrast, countries still in Russia’s orbit did not have the opportunity to adapt. Consequently, countries such as Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, and, in some instances, Ukraine remain influenced by outdated Soviet doctrine. In many 21st-century conflicts, significant losses might have been averted, or outcomes improved, with a more effective doctrine. The Second Karabakh War showed the disadvantage of persisting with Soviet doctrine, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine highlighted additional reasons to adopt modern approaches.

The Soviet Military Doctrine

To understand Red Army and Warsaw Pact tactics, we must access Soviet military doctrine. Declassified CIA files show this doctrine changing over time, reflecting strategic priorities as warfare evolved. CIA documents show that the Soviets saw themselves as defensive, which was a contradiction. Stalin’s Red Army fought offensively in Finland and Poland in WWII and occupied the Baltic and parts of Romania. The Kremlin steadily maintained this mentality.

High-mobility operations were prioritized to negate any counteroffensive or defensive posture by enemy forces. For example, during the collapse of the Axis flanks around Stalingrad, the German Sixth Army was completely encircled. According to retired Marine Corps Major Bevilacqua, Soviet commanders wanted to maintain battles at their own tempo and pace. This approach aimed to hinder an opposing commander from creating conditions favorable to their own terms, reflecting the Soviet emphasis on operational control.

Soviet doctrine required creating surprise in attacks. Personnel, armor, logistics, and aircraft had to move quickly into key sectors and strike before the enemy could react. The USSR expected commanders to meet Kremlin-set deadlines. During WWII and the Afghan War, Moscow fired commanders who failed to meet them. Early Nazi German success in Barbarossa followed Stalin’s purges of experienced commanders. Inexperienced lower officers failed under heavy enemy fire. To achieve an objective within a key timeline, intelligence gathering and reporting need to be accurate. The Soviet Union failed at this through false reporting or a lack of confidence in command decision-makers. During WWII, Stalin ignored reports of a massive German buildup on the Soviet border. This error proved costly for poorly equipped, unfortified troops.

“The Soviet military doctrine in the 21st century is nearly incompatible with modern warfare. For example, despite initially taking 20% of Ukraine during the surprise invasion, Russia has barely moved forward since, with near-frozen lines while trading 1% of the Russian population in grueling and cataclysmic frontal assaults.”

Additionally, the Soviet Union often used frontal assaults, sending troops and columns, with or without support, to seize ground and accepted heavy casualties to take positions. Other Soviet republics also had high losses before technology reduced these risks; now, such losses are disastrous. For example, losing key demographic groups that sustain the labor force weakens a country’s economy and population growth.

Modern Russia still adheres to much of Soviet doctrine and continues to fail in intelligence. For example, Putin received false reports from the generals and intelligence agencies. He expected little resistance in Ukraine, but Russian forces took heavy casualties, lost thousands of tanks, and one-third of the Black Sea Fleet. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Second Karabakh War both show how conflicts shape demographics in Armenia, Ukraine, and Russia. Each of these countries uses some form of Soviet doctrine.

How the Soviet Doctrine Played a Critical Role in the Second Karabakh War

In the Second Karabakh War, Armenia faced major disadvantages. Azerbaijan increased its UAVs, intelligence, and artillery capabilities and procured weapons from Turkey and Israel. Armenia’s leaders neglected reforms and relied on Russia. Yerevan left its military doctrine unchanged and kept the older Soviet system.

For decades, Azerbaijan and Armenia were deadlocked over Karabakh’s status. Clashes followed Armenia’s victory in the First Karabakh War. Azerbaijan did not make a significant military move until the late 2010s, when an opportunity arose. Following the Velvet Revolution, which ousted the pro-Russian government, the Kremlin reassessed its relations with Armenia, as Russia viewed Armenia as it had Georgia and Ukraine after their revolutions. These newly strained relations gave Azerbaijan a chance to strike.

The Second Karabakh War began in late September 2020 as Azerbaijani airstrikes, artillery fire, and ground incursions opened the conflict. Armenian defenders immediately halted these attacks. When Azerbaijan suffered heavy armor losses, Baku then deployed Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones to break through Armenian defensive lines. Armenia then had older Soviet-made air defense systems, but these struggled to track and down TB2s. Lacking electronic countermeasures, Armenian forces could not stop Azerbaijani drone strikes, which broke through defensive lines.

The Armenian command decided to defend on flat ground around Fuzuli and Jabrayil. This choice followed the Soviet doctrine of holding untenable positions. As a result, Yerevan lost critical equipment and manpower. The losses were devastating for a country with a small population.

“The Soviet doctrine relied on top-down orders, leaving field officers and NCOs with little authority. This flaw weakened Armenian defense in the Karabakh mountains, including Hadrut and Shushi.”

The Soviet Union absorbed losses across many republics, but Armenia, with just 3 million people, cannot afford such losses. This is especially true among Millennials and Generation Z, who are vital to its future workforce.

In the mountainous areas of Karabakh, Azerbaijan’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities proved less effective due to the rugged terrain and harsh weather. This gave Armenia much-needed cover from TB2s. Nevertheless, Armenia continued to suffer from bureaucratic constraints imposed by the military and political high command, which ultimately sealed the war’s fate.

The Soviet doctrine relied on top-down orders, leaving field officers and NCOs with little authority. This flaw weakened Armenian defense in the Karabakh mountains, including Hadrut and Shushi. TB2 and Harop drone strikes nearly cut Yerevan’s communications, and Armenian field officers and NCOs lacked autonomy on defense. Azerbaijani special forces exploited the Armenian command’s poor outreach. Azerbaijani special forces used steep cliff sides to catch Armenian defenders in Shushi off guard. The Armenian command assumed the mountain cliffs were impassable and prepared only limited defenses. Furthermore, Armenia’s command was absent, leaving inexperienced field officers and conscripts with few orders. The failed defense led to a capitulation favorable to Baku.

Ukraine’s Critical Manpower Shortages are Intertwined with the Soviet Union’s Doctrine

The Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) demonstrated resilience against Russia’s overwhelming manpower, artillery, and air attacks. Kyiv’s strong defenses limited Russian offensives to small gains and high attrition.

Ukraine’s strong defenses bought time for defenders to improve fortifications, rebuild military branches, and reduce Russian logistics. However, some of the General Staff’s Soviet-based doctrine led to neglect and unnecessary losses. This resulted in rising absenteeism and desertion. General Oleksandr Syrskyi, Commander-in-Chief of the AFU, led major victories, including the 2022 Kharkiv Offensive and the pushback against Russian forces in Kyiv. But Ukrainian troops criticize him for micromanagement and for following outdated Soviet doctrine. Troops particularly cite holding on to lost positions for too long. Ukraine cannot afford such an approach, due to demographics, as is the case in Armenia.

Some of Ukraine’s key battles sometimes turned into disasters, worsening infantry shortages. At Bakhmut, the AFU held the city under Syrskyi’s orders for far longer than necessary, in line with Soviet doctrine. During the Battle of Bakhmut, the AFU inflicted heavy casualties on Russian forces and their then Wagner Group allies. But after Russia’s capture of Soledar, the flanks of the AFU positions in the city became precarious. Instead of ordering a gradual withdrawal to the heights and canals of Chasiv Yar, Syrskyi gave a Soviet-style holding ground order and swelled the city with more units.

A Ukrainian soldier firing an anti-tank grenade launcher at a front line near Bakhmut (photo and caption courtesy BBC News)

The results of Bakhmut would be felt today, as not only did it end in a Russian victory, but also Ukraine wasted tens of thousands of troops unnecessarily when fortified lines of defense were right behind the city. Furthermore, the majority of Russian forces who took part in the fighting were mercenaries and convicts from Wagner, whereas the AFU lost some of their best brigades and troops that could have been used for the spring counteroffensive later in 2023. Syrskyi would be nicknamed “General 200” by disenfranchised troops and military bloggers by turning the battle into an avoidable bloodbath for the AFU.

Ukraine under Syrskyi’s command would repeat the same mistakes in both Kursk and the critical fronts of the Donetsk oblast in 2025. Initially catching the Kremlin and Russian forces off guard by the surprise offensive at Kursk, the AFU’s positions gradually diminished as North Korea directly intervened. The offensive was meant to draw Russian troops away from the Donbas region, but instead, Moscow did not take the bait, and Ukraine’s reserves were stretched thin while Russia advanced along the critical Pokrovsk sector.

Instead of gradually withdrawing troops and equipment to reinforce embattled fronts in early January, the AFU would instead withdraw hastily in March under an uncoordinated retreat. Ukrainian forces lost valuable Western equipment in a chaotic withdrawal from the Kursk oblast as Syrskyi once again held onto the territory for far too long.

As previously mentioned, General Syrskyi uses a strict micromanagement style that, at times, impedes frontline field officers’ critical decision-making. Ukraine has struggled with staffing and allocating units within logistics—sometimes creating unnecessary brigades rather than strengthening existing ones, a hallmark of prior Soviet strategy.

Policy Recommendations and Lessons

The Soviet military doctrine in the 21st century is nearly incompatible with modern warfare. For example, despite initially taking 20% of Ukraine during the surprise invasion, Russia has barely moved forward since, with near-frozen lines while trading 1% of the Russian population in grueling and cataclysmic frontal assaults.

Simultaneously, Russia can withstand the loss of human life and resources due to its large population, albeit the effects will be felt for generations. Armenia and Ukraine, like many other countries, have aging populations and need to minimize the loss of essential military personnel and avoid becoming trapped in older Soviet-style doctrine.

Regarding the Ukrainian Armed Forces, some of the AFU’s most trusted and respected commanders are the younger, seasoned officers such as Colonel Denys Prokopenko, Brigadier General Andriy Beiletsky, and Major General Mykhailo Drapatyi. All three officers utilize and maximize resources by exploiting key terrain and employing maneuver warfare, resulting in minimal necessary troop losses. Ukraine is going through a reshuffle amid scandals arising from internal corruption probes, and a potential reshuffle of the general staff could occur again. If this happens, the AFU can deploy the most Western-trained up-and-coming officers and give them greater autonomy to react and command troops in the field, thereby mitigating casualties that could be avoided, as seen in Bakhmut and Kursk.

For Armenia, a complete reinvigoration of its military doctrine is paramount. Geographically situated between Turkey and Azerbaijan, Armenians have had numerous conflicts and plights with both, and a fragile peace has mitigated large-scale regional fighting. Yerevan needs to maximize its resources without overcommitting to a war of attrition it cannot win, as seen in the 2020 and 2023 wars. Armenia is taking steps to distance itself militarily from Russia and the Kremlin-created Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which is meant to be a counter to NATO but failed to militarily back Armenia in the 2020s.

Instead, Armenia has grown defensive partnerships with India and France, along with a strategic partnership with the United States that helps reconstitute the Armenian Armed Forces. The U.S. National Guard is assisting Armenia in reinvigorating its NCO corps and instilling confidence among field officers, but other problems remain. The lack of trust in the Armenian army’s neglectful leadership is a significant problem that must be addressed and rooted out, with the current government in Yerevan taking steps to relieve the older, corrupt officers who commanded the 2020 disaster.

Conclusion

The Soviet military doctrine might have been more proficient in WWII and the former Warsaw Pact, but keeping elements of the USSR’s battlefield tactics has led to unnecessary and avoidable mass military casualties, as seen with wars in Armenia previously and Ukraine today. Protecting human resources, mitigating the tendency to hold positions for too long, becoming proficient in maneuver warfare, and giving field officers and NCOs greater freedom to act will be needed for all countries that wish to diverge from the old Soviet vanguard tactics.

Check out all of Small Wars Journal’s great content.

Tags: NATO vs Russia, Post-Soviet States, Russia-Ukraine War, Second Karabakh War, Soviet Military Doctrine, Soviet Union

About The Author

• 
  
• Julian McBride
• Julian McBride is a former US Marine, forensic anthropologist, and independent journalist born in New York. His bylines can be found in Byline Times, 19FortyFive, Heritage Daily, The Defense Post, Journal of Forensic Psychology, Modern Warfare Institute, Manara Mag, The Strategist, Pacific Forum, E-International Relations, Global Taiwan Institute, NKInsider, Modern Diplomacy, Small Wars Journal, and UK Defence Journal.

14. Can China Win Round Two of the Trade War?

​Summary:

Salman Rafi Sheikh argues China “won” the first trade-war phase because U.S. tariffs reshaped trade routes but did not derail China’s export engine. China absorbed reduced U.S. demand by expanding sales elsewhere, sustaining growth and producing a record trade surplus, driven by its role in global value chains, a weaker yuan, and “China+1” production shifts. He claims round two shifts from tariffs to hard power: control of energy, chokepoints, and strategic geography. In that contest, he argues the United States holds the edge through global basing and force projection, enabling coercion over resources and routes that China’s primarily economic tools cannot offset.

Comment: Did China "win?" I guess where you stand depends on where you sit. I think the jury is still out.

Can China Win Round Two of the Trade War?

asiasentinel.com · Jan 21, 2026

China won round one

Jan 21, 2026

By: Salman Rafi Sheikh

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/can-china-win-round-two-trade-war?publication_id=23934&utm

For nearly a decade, Washington has bet that economic pressure could slow China’s rise. Tariffs were supposed to discipline Beijing, weaken its export engine and restore US leverage. That bet failed. China, driven to export partly by domestic over-investment and weak internal demand, absorbed the shock and adjusted, recording an unprecedented US$ 1.19–1.20 trillion trade surplus, the largest ever for a major economy.

But the more important story is what comes next. As trade barriers lose their coercive power in a fragmented, multipolar economy, the US is shifting the battlefield. Power is moving away from tariffs and toward force, from trade rules to direct control over geography, resources and security. This shift exposes a deeper imbalance between the two powers. China’s strengths remain overwhelmingly economic; America’s comparative advantage lies elsewhere. The first round of competition was fought with tariffs. The second will be fought with force.

The Trade War That China Didn’t Lose

When the US first imposed sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports in 2018–19 under President Donald Trump, Washington proclaimed a new era of economic warfare. The goal was straightforward: use protectionist levies to shrink China’s export engine, squeeze Beijing’s growth and force strategic concessions in technology, intellectual property, and market access. What transpired, however, was far different. In 2025, China effectively won the economic round.

In 2025, China recorded a striking rebuke to the notion that tariffs could derail Beijing’s export juggernaut. Washington’s tariffs on Chinese goods undeniably dented shipments to the US, with exports to the US falling by about 20 percent. Yet, exports overall rose by roughly 5.5–6.6 percent, powered by surging demand elsewhere and propelling China into a record surplus.

How did this happen? China’s exporters responded to Washington’s tariffs by rewiring global trade routes and deepening commercial ties far beyond North America: Exports to Africa jumped by 26 percent. Shipments to Southeast Asia (ASEAN) increased by 13 per cent. Exports to the European Union, despite tensions, grew by 8 percent, and to Latin America by 7 percent. This expansion enabled China to absorb the tariff shock and continue expanding sales abroad. These numbers reveal the central irony: tariffs may have changed the geographic contours of Chinese trade, but they didn’t stop its growth.

Several structural factors explain China’s resilience. Beijing not only supplies cheap and accessible goods, but it also has a deeply entrenched position at the centre of global value chains, which means its manufacturing remains indispensable worldwide. A relatively weaker yuan has bolstered competitiveness, and Chinese firms have become adept at leveraging “China+1” production strategies to reduce tariff impacts. The result: rather than contracting under US pressure, China’s export-led growth helped sustain its official GDP expansion near 5 percent in 2025.

Round Two: Hard Power and the Shift from Tariffs

Going forward, however, China’s success appears to be the target of a much bigger force than tariffs: hard power. China’s continued economic resilience appears to have pushed Washington to shift the contest from tariffs to non-tariff instruments. If Round One was about trade barriers and export flows, Round Two is increasingly about security leverage, military reach and control over strategic geography. The objective remains unchanged: constraining China’s economic momentum while preserving US leverage. But the means are evolving. Energy and chokepoints have become central targets. US efforts to reassert control over Venezuelan oil threaten to deprive China of discounted crude and weaken its economic footprint in Latin America, while a forced regime change in Iran would disrupt one of Beijing’s most critical energy relationships and expose its dependence on vulnerable maritime corridors.

China imports roughly 13 million barrels per day (bpd), with 470,000 to over 600,000 from Venezuela in 2025, with another average of 1.38 million bpd from Iran. Losing those sources would cost China a considerable but replaceable 15.2 per cent of its daily supply. Together, these moves underscore a broader shift from economic coercion to power-backed control over resources and supply routes—a domain where the US holds a decisive advantage and China’s economic tools offer limited protection.

Tariffs bite at commerce. Force can secure access to resources and channels of trade. In recent months, the US strategy has increasingly merged economic and military objectives. The Trump administration has signalled a willingness to use hard power explicitly in pursuit of economic ends. This approach reflects Washington’s belief that control of strategic physical space — chokepoints, sea lanes, mineral supplies, and critical infrastructure — is central to safeguarding economic interests in an era of geopolitical rivalry.

Washington can pursue this strategy because it already holds a vast global military footprint that China lacks. According to some estimates, the US maintains approximately 750–800 overseas military sites in some 80 countries, constituting the bulk of global foreign military presence.

These installations — from naval bases in Japan, the Middle East, and Europe to airfields in the Indo-Pacific — provide Washington with unparalleled power projection. They enable rapid deployment of forces, logistical sustainment, and intelligence sharing with allies across continents. In contrast, China’s overseas military footprint is far smaller, limited primarily to a few logistics outposts (e.g., Djibouti) and minor arrangements abroad.

This hard power asymmetry matters for two reasons. First, it gives the US a vast and largely unchallenged operational reach. The US forces can respond quickly to crises in nearly every region from the Persian Gulf to Eastern Europe to the Western Pacific, far beyond Washington’s shores. China’s military, while modernizing and expanding, still largely focuses on regional deterrence and defense of its periphery.

Second, America’s military footprint gives it strategic leverage – at least for now, with deep concern growing over imperial overstretch and a national debt of US$43.2 trillion, with total debt to GDP of a worrying 133.2 percent, requiring interest payments of US$1.2 trillion annually. For now, at least, overseas bases underpin Washington’s network of alliances and security guarantees, which in turn help shape economic partnerships, energy routes, and diplomatic alignments. Unlike tariffs, this form of coercive leverage does not rely on changing prices; it rests on presence and potential force.

These factors were on display in 2025: despite China’s deep economic and diplomatic ties with Iran, Beijing was not the principal deterrent inhibiting US and Israeli military action against Tehran. Beijing’s economic weight didn’t translate into comparable geopolitical leverage in 2026 as well, when the US came very close—once again—to bombing Iran to bring regime change.

This dynamic underscores a key vulnerability: China may be able to sell to the world, but it lacks the hard power to defend those economic interests globally in the same way the US can defend its interests (or hurt Chinese interests).

Therefore, while China won Round One of the trade war by outmaneuvering US tariffs, Round Two is unfolding along different lines. The US is transitioning from economic tools to security levers.

Beijing’s strengths remain economic and diplomatic; it has little to no real equivalents to Washington’s global force projection. Though China continues to modernize its military and extend its influence, it cannot yet match the strategic footprint the US wields from Europe to the Middle East to East Asia. There is virtually no power that can match the US footprint. In this sense, China’s victory in Round One may be complete, but Round Two favors the side that controls not just markets, but oceans and the bases that dominate them.

asiasentinel.com · Jan 21, 2026

​

15. What Would Have Happened If the Green Berets Helped Ukraine?

​Summary:

Brian Petit argues his 2024 proposal to deploy Green Beret A-Teams to Ukraine for train, advise, and assist remains militarily feasible and politically shrewd, but political will in Washington has collapsed. He contends the 2023–2024 window, amid Russian setbacks and strong coalition pressure, offered leverage to reset Moscow’s calculus; small SOF deployments would not win the war but would raise costs, stiffen Ukrainian performance, and strengthen U.S. bargaining power. He criticizes stop-start aid and direct U.S.-Russia talks that yield no concessions while Russia continues attacks. He views European peacekeeping pledges as symbolically bold but insufficient for enforcement without U.S. power, and he still favors “horizontal escalation” to create negotiable leverage.

What Would Have Happened If the Green Berets Helped Ukraine?

Brian Petit

January 21, 2026

https://warontherocks.com/2026/01/what-would-have-happened-if-the-green-berets-helped-ukraine/

In 2024, Brian Petit wrote, “Send in the A Team: A Graduated Response for Ukraine,” where he argued for sending the Green Berets into Ukraine for training and assistance to the Ukrainian armed forces. We asked Brian to revisit his argument after talks of a peace deal have yet to produce fruitful change.

Image: Sgt. Patrik Orcutt via DVIDS

In your 2024 article, “Send in the A Team: A Graduated Response for Ukraine,” you argue that sending the Green Berets to Ukraine to help train, advise, and assist Ukrainian troops “requires little imagination, no adaptation, and few modifications. It does require political will and a fresh calculation of risk.” Do you still hold that same assessment today? How has both the political will and the risk calculus of the United States changed since you wrote this article? 

In 2026, America’s political will to aid Ukraine and to meaningfully contest Russia is on life support. My 2024 article gave a military-policy prescription that offered a controlled escalation path, detailing an indirect option to limit provocations. The argument holds up well but the political will is absent. The United States had a window to reset President Vladimir Putin’s calculations in that June 2023 to June 2024 period, when Russia was taking hits internally and externally. Recall the facts: Ukrainian front-line units holding or counter-attacking aided by U.S. Patriot missile systems, High Mobility Artillery Rockets, and European weapons; the Prigozhin mutiny; the sacking and killing of so many Russian generals; Ukraine sinking one third of Russia’s Black Sea fleet; 50+ countries supporting the Ukraine Contact Group; and sanctions starting to show effects. The Kremlin responds to power and to pressure. Adding American A-teams to that pressure cooker would not have won the war, but it would have reset the political landscape as a precursor to negotiations. We built the United States special operations to deliver strategic effects — this was a ready-made option.

We recently interviewed a Russian strategy and tactics scholar who believes bolder actions by the United States in Ukraine would actually garner more attention and respect from Putin than it would escalate tensions between the two countries. What is your response to this assertion, and does your proposed solution support this notion of bolder action in Ukraine, given the current status of the war as well as diplomatic relations between Presidents Trump and Putin?

U.S. support to Ukraine is a stop-and-start affair that signals weakness. Recently, the United States has brushed Ukraine and Europe aside and is negotiating directly with Russia to end the war. What are we negotiating with? This feels like a replay of the Afghanistan negotiations in 2020 when we loudly promoted our haste to leave, revealed our red lines, shrunk our methods of pressure, and then embarked upon negotiations. In 2026, United States negotiators are sitting across from Putin, who is benefitting from these performative overtures and photo ops, yet Russia has not retracted one demand and is homicidally battering Ukraine. Let’s engage in alternative endings. Imagine if the United States was still leading the Ukraine Contact Group and supported European material, political, and diplomatic pressure. Imagine if the flow of weapons to Ukraine was unaffected by political infighting, and imagine if we had horizontally escalated inside of Ukraine with 30 special forces A-Teams training and advising Ukrainians. American negotiators would have more cards to play, pressures to add or subtract, pain dials to twist. We have little of that, so we are exacting zero concessions from Russia. They are playacting in negotiations while hammering Ukraine day and night.

Now that France and the United Kingdom have signed an agreement with Ukraine promising the deployment of troops to Ukraine after a ceasefire is signed, how does your original argument change? Are American boots on the ground necessary if Europe is willing to send their forces? 

Europe is exhibiting diplomatic courage by committing to peacekeepers, but there is no peace to keep, so it is a mere symbolic gesture at this point. Europe can field quality forces to hold a tenuous peace, but peace enforcement is probably the mission, and it is hard to see Europe managing that, long-term, without American power. In the early 1990s, Europe forayed into the Balkans war with the United Nations Protection Force, and it did not go well for the (mostly) Europeans or those they aimed to protect. The United States salvaged that effort with the Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke, and Gen. Wesley Clark triumvirate, backed by American forces. That effort worked, but it was against a third-rate Serbian military. The United Kingdom, France, Poland, and other European states are admirably stepping up inside and outside of Ukraine, to stave off defeat. They will need to do more, because the political winds are clear: The United States has little appetite for hard power options against Russia and no interest in troop commitments.

Finally, with the benefit of hindsight, what would you change about your original argument?

I stand by the argument. I whiffed on the political dynamic, of course, but it was a long shot. Options from D.C. policy spaces start to homogenize over time, so I offered up special operations contributions in a “different meter” that are less well understood. Horizontally escalating is shrewd political play in these stalemated conflicts, and the United States has a deep special forces capability for the very purposes of partnering with allies, friends, proxies, or surrogates, and changing adversary calculations. Unquestionably, it would have generated more public-facing European commitments inside Ukraine, instead of the undeclared operatives, irregular adventurists, volunteer battalions, etc. If we were playing to win or simply increasing our leverage to bring Russians to the negotiating table, this argument would have garnered more serious considerations.

***

Brian Petit, a retired U.S. Army colonel, teaches and consults on strategy, planning, special operations, and resistance. He is a part-time advisor and instructor for the Joint Special Operations University and the Irregular Warfare Center. 

Image: Pfc. Kirsti Anne Beckett via DVIDS

16. The Real Reasons Greenland Matters

​Summary:

The episode argues Greenland’s strategic value is no longer abstract. Heather Conley links Cold War geography to today’s Arctic thaw, new sea lanes, and mineral access, making the island a pivot in U.S., China, and Russia competition. POTUS’s “buy Greenland” push tests allied cohesion and exposes territorial instincts under stress.

Comment: Worth the 40 minutes to listen. Dr. Conley covers a lot of ground and provides excellent information useful to experts and laypersons alike.  She makes a point I have heard only sporadically. The Chinese and Russian threats are operating in the North Pacific Arctic more so than in the North Atlantic. This was conducted before POTUS' Davos speech but it is still very relevant, especially for understanding Greenland's geostrategic importance. 

The Real Reasons Greenland Matters

January 22, 2026

Coleman Hughes

39M

Trump’s focus on Greenland invites a deeper question about what the White House believes is at stake.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-real-reasons-greenland-matters

Greenland—a vast, frozen island most Americans could barely place on a map—has suddenly found itself at the center of a rapidly intensifying global contest. In this episode, I’m joined by Heather A. Conley, an authority on Europe, NATO, and Arctic security, to discuss how Greenland became one of the most strategically important places on Earth.

Heather explained to me how the island’s location made it indispensable during World War II and the Cold War—and why that same geography has become increasingly important as melting ice opens new shipping lanes and exposes vast mineral wealth. What was once a remote outpost is now a linchpin in the emerging competition between the United States, China, and Russia.

When President Donald Trump began suggesting that the United States should “buy” Greenland, Heather argues, it revealed something serious about American strategic instincts, the fragility of allied relationships, and the way great powers think about territory.

As the president continues to demand that Greenland become American, and European leaders coalesce in opposition, the question remains: What does Greenland’s future look like?

This interview was recorded prior to President Trump’s speech and meetings at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday, in which he stated that the United States would not use military force to pursue control of Greenland and announced that, following discussions with NATO partners, he would not move forward with previously threatened tariffs on NATO countries.

17. How the Iranian Regime Breaks

​Summary:

Ostovar argues Iran looks unified in public even as the system rots inside. Protests are large, diverse, and costly, and the regime’s legitimacy is collapsing across youth, conservative areas, and bazaaris. Yet elites still coordinate repression. He contends fracture will arrive quietly, then rapidly, most plausibly through an IRGC-led coup meant to preserve power, not deliver democracy. Outcomes hinge on who moves first: an older, corruption-rich guard that may trade foreign restraint for sanctions relief, or younger officers who may relax social controls yet stay hawkish abroad. External decapitation could topple Tehran but risks prolonged chaos.

Excerpts:

Regardless of what faction is behind it, a coup is unlikely to turn Iran into the democracy that its people seek. In fact, preventing that would be the point. A coup would be pursued first and foremost to keep elements of the existing system in place and better insulate them from internal and external pressures, not to fundamentally restructure the regime.

But the splintering of the system’s elite would be one more step in the Islamic Republic’s dissolution. Khamenei’s leadership has clearly failed the Iranian people and kept the regime mired in crisis, and the cumulative stress of persistent conflict, sanctions, and societal unrest is undoubtedly creating friction behind the scenes. A break within the present regime, however it arrives, would at a minimum further weaken the foundations of the theocracy. It would be an admission from insiders that this system is sick and unable to heal itself through constitutional processes.

It would also be a sign that the pressures amassed against the Islamic Republic have, indeed, chipped away at it, bit by bit. Most importantly, it would usher in an era of change—less the preservation of the Islamic Republic than the beginning of its downfall.

Comment: How should U.S. policy read “gradual then sudden” elite fracture without triggering premature crackdown or rally-around-the-flag effects? If an IRGC coup is likely, what incentives and off-ramps shape a successor regime’s nuclear, missile, and proxy choices? How effective is unconventional warfare in Iran in 2026, given IRGC penetration, counterintelligence capacity, and the risk that external support delegitimizes the street movement?

How the Iranian Regime Breaks

Foreign Affairs · More by Afshon Ostovar · January 22, 2026

Elite Fracture Will Come Gradually and then Suddenly

Afshon Ostovar

January 22, 2026

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iran/how-iranian-regime-breaks

An Iranian police officer at a pro-government rally in Tehran, January 2026 West Asia News Agency / Reuters

AFSHON OSTOVAR is an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and the author of Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East.

Print Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Save Sign in and save to read later

Over the last few weeks, the Iranian regime has faced remarkable challenges—and displayed remarkable unity. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians have taken to the streets to protest the Islamic Republic in what has become the most significant internal challenge the state has faced in its 47-year history. But the elite has not yet fractured. Instead of squabbling over how to handle the demonstrations, Iran’s reformist and hardline leaders have worked together to suppress them. To date, none of the regime’s elites objected to the killings of thousands of innocent civilians by security forces. In fact, figures from across the political spectrum have all outwardly (and falsely) blamed the violence on foreign infiltrators.

But behind the scenes, the picture is undoubtedly more tense. Unless they exclusively watch state television and believe their own false narratives, Iranian officials understand that the domestic system is under existential stress. They are aware that U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to attack Tehran and topple the government. And most of them probably know that the forces driving the protests—including an economic crisis and decades of corruption—cannot be fixed by the country’s obstinate, reactionary leadership. As a result, Iranian officials who want to save themselves have an incentive to remove Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei from power.

If Iran’s elites do move on Khamenei, they will likely act quickly. There will be no sign to outsiders that a coup is coming. And if they succeed, a range of outcomes are possible. The Iranian apparatus has a stark divide between its older and younger generation, and so the character of the next government would depend on which cohort ends up leading it. If the old guard is behind a successful coup, Iran’s next regime will probably remain theocratic at home but become less ambitious abroad. If younger officials take over, Iran will likely grow less religious at home but remain assertive internationally.

Neither camp is likely to bring about democracy. The reason that either group would depose Khamenei, after all, is to preserve its influence. An internal move against the supreme leader would still evince the further erosion of the Islamic Republic. But the uncomfortable truth is that democracy and freedom in Iran will require either external support or that factions inside the ruling system, backed by a segment of the armed forces, join with the Iranian people. Short of that, any political change in Tehran is more likely to be about preserving aspects of the status quo.

ROTTING AWAY

For decades, predicting the end of the Islamic Republic has been a fool’s errand. The regime has faced all kinds of crises—wars, mass protests, high inflation—without cracking. Its theocratic system steadily isolated the country, destroyed its economy, and subjected its people to stifling social restrictions. But it retained a powerful security apparatus, and thus proved capable of repeatedly quelling even widespread dissent.

So far, Iran has been able to use its military and police to tamp down on the most recent round of demonstrations. But these protests have, nonetheless, weakened the ruling system. The sheer size, energy, and diversity of this popular uprising—combined with the immense toll of the crackdown—has further rubbished any claim to legitimacy that the Islamic Republic might have hoped to retain among Iran’s people. The regime has now lost the support not only of the country’s young but also of traditionally conservative cities and regions. It has alienated one of its most important constituencies, the small merchant class, or bazaaris. And unlike others in the not so distant past, these protests have come at a time when Iran is weak. The country’s once-vaunted network of regional allies has been greatly degraded, and its economy is suffering from chronic shortages and persistent inflation. The regime, meanwhile, has shown no ability or willingness to make the hard decisions needed to either restore the country’s security or improve its economy.

Change will come to Iran; the question is what kind of change it will be. The most obvious transition, and the one that would mirror the desires of the masses who took part in the protest movement, would be a popular revolution that dismantled the Islamic Republic’s theocratic system, removed its corrupt elite, and fundamentally transformed Iran’s political, economic, and social landscape. Yet for a popular revolution to work, segments of the regime would need to defect to the people’s side and support the Islamic Republic’s destruction. And, for now, the forces preserving the status quo remain united.

A coup would likely come without warning and be lightning fast.

Another way to buoy a popular revolution would be for the world to provide external pressure. As people take to the streets, the United States and its allies could either kill or capture Iran’s core leadership, destroy much of the regime’s repressive infrastructure, and then install a caretaker government. Such a scenario is the only way to remove the regime from power if its elites refuse to enact change on their own. But although the Trump administration may yet decide to take such a route, a regime change operation carried out by the United States would likely require a substantial commitment by the American military, and so no one should count on it happening. There is also a risk that such an operation might fail to produce a stable, new government even if it succeeds in ousting the old one, and lead to prolonged conflict in the country—particularly if elements of Iran’s security forces remain armed and committed to the Islamic Revolution.

That leaves a coup d’état as the most plausible way Iran’s present system might fall, at least in the near term. Iranian officials may have a seemingly endless ability to repress their people, but even they cannot escape the uncomfortable truth that the regime has hit a low point and that Khamenei and his chief advisers lack the decisiveness and vision needed to chart a pathway forward. The regime is at risk, but the current leaders are incapable of making fixes. It is exactly at times such as these that elites in authoritarian countries start thinking about saving themselves by deposing their leaders.

Right now, there are no outward signs that regime officials will try to take down Khamenei. There are rumors that certain reformist elites have been taken into custody, but they have not yet been substantiated. Even if conditions worsen and the regime’s grasp grows more precarious, some elites will seek to preserve what they have rather than try to effect change: their money will flow to foreign bank accounts, and their extended families will move to vacation homes abroad. But other, more ambitious insiders might start to plot against their superiors.

Such plotting is unlikely to be visible from the outside. The regime is deeply paranoid and constantly hunts for elite schemes that don’t exist. But if there were an actual, coordinated effort that had a chance of succeeding, it would likely come without warning and be lightning fast. The ruling apparatus, in other words, would collapse gradually, and then suddenly.

THE TIES THAT DIVIDE

If Iran experiences a coup, it will most likely be carried out by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the most powerful branch of the Iranian military and the strongest actor inside the country. There would be an irony in such a move, because the IRGC serves as the principal guardian of the theocratic system and has benefited the most from Khamenei’s tenure. But the corps also has the most to lose if Khamenei is toppled through a popular uprising or through foreign intervention. As a result, should IRGC commanders decide that the supreme leader’s power is slipping or that it presents an obstacle to relieving pressure on the regime, they might opt to take ownership of political change in order to preserve their vaunted position.

The IRGC is a sprawling institution, so what happens in the wake of its coup would depend on who leads it. If officials from the corps’s intelligence office, whose primary mission is internal security, ended up in charge, the state might turn inward and become even more repressive and paranoid. If a coup originated in the Quds Force, whose primary mission is foreign operations, Iran’s external interests would be prioritized.

But the IRGC’s most important fault line is less organizational than generational: the institution is divided between its top command and its younger middle-ranking officers. The former are mostly appointees of the supreme leader who gained their positions through their loyalty to Khamenei and their ideological orthodoxy. They got their start soon after Iran’s 1979 revolution and bonded on the frontlines of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. They are part of the Islamic Republic’s first generation and remain committed to its founding principles, including its Islamist social ordinances and an ideological foreign policy. They have benefitted greatly from their insider status, growing rich through endemic corruption. Their families lead easy lives, often abroad, and they have enjoyed immense influence within the system.

The younger generation, by contrast, started their careers during Iran’s post-2003 rise to regional prominence. They are veterans of conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, which gave them a taste of what Iran’s power could achieve. Though they are not secular, they have a more pragmatic view of social issues and are thereby less wedded to the social strictures that have defined the Islamic system. They are also more hawkish on foreign policy, more committed to restoring Iran’s power, and less hesitant to use military force in the region. But they have not yet had the opportunity to cash in on their status through lucrative command positions and have therefore not materially benefited from systemic corruption to the same degree as their leaders.

A coup is unlikely to turn Iran into the democracy that its people seek.

If an IRGC coup is led by the organization’s elite inner circle, the resulting government might prove willing to compromise on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs—both already badly damaged—in exchange for sanctions relief from Western countries. Such a move could assuage Iran’s small merchant class, which is concerned about the economy above all else, as well as international actors (including Washington). It might also sap energy from the protests, making them easier to crush. But this old guard would not end Islamic rule nor address the corruption that underlies Iran’s economic volatility. Rather, such coup leaders would be acting purely out of self-interest. Their goal would be to safeguard their status in the system and to buy time.

The IRGC’s middle-ranking officers, by contrast, would pursue a coup primarily out of ambition. If they stood by and the Islamic Republic ended up collapsing, they would have neither grown fat from corruption nor had a chance to lead the state. Their careers would be cut short. Their prospects under a populist takeover would be dim. A coup would provide them the opportunity to take the reins of the Islamic system and remold it.

The IRGC’s younger cohort does have a stake in the present system; its members, too, have benefited financially and politically from their positions. But they do have more reasons to be disillusioned with the supreme leader and his apparatus, which have made terrible decisions that undid the corps’s hard-fought regional wins. If they were to lead a coup, the changes to the regime could therefore be more sweeping. These leaders would also probably be more willing to abandon some of the sacred totems of the Islamic system—the role of the supreme leader first and foremost, but also social laws that have radicalized Iran’s youth against the regime. They would instead place a greater focus on Iranian nationalism and military might.

But that doesn’t mean they would abandon Iran’s foreign policy. In fact, as a generation that came up during Iran’s rise, they might be even more committed to transforming Tehran into a formidable and respected power than their superiors. The way they do so, however, might shift away from the narrow conception of anti-Western resistance favored by Khamenei. They could remain antagonistic to Israel and retain Iran’s focus on regional policy but be more pragmatic in dealing with the United States and less inclined to shore up Tehran’s flailing proxies. Moving beyond a foreign policy fixated on backing terrorist groups would help facilitate an expansion in Iran’s military power through more conventional means, particularly its evolving ties with China.

MEET THE NEW BOSS

Regardless of what faction is behind it, a coup is unlikely to turn Iran into the democracy that its people seek. In fact, preventing that would be the point. A coup would be pursued first and foremost to keep elements of the existing system in place and better insulate them from internal and external pressures, not to fundamentally restructure the regime.

But the splintering of the system’s elite would be one more step in the Islamic Republic’s dissolution. Khamenei’s leadership has clearly failed the Iranian people and kept the regime mired in crisis, and the cumulative stress of persistent conflict, sanctions, and societal unrest is undoubtedly creating friction behind the scenes. A break within the present regime, however it arrives, would at a minimum further weaken the foundations of the theocracy. It would be an admission from insiders that this system is sick and unable to heal itself through constitutional processes.

It would also be a sign that the pressures amassed against the Islamic Republic have, indeed, chipped away at it, bit by bit. Most importantly, it would usher in an era of change—less the preservation of the Islamic Republic than the beginning of its downfall.

Foreign Affairs · More by Afshon Ostovar · January 22, 2026

18.Greenland meltdown: what does Trump’s quest mean for the global order and China?

​Summary:

SCMP frames Greenland as an Arctic hinge with global spillover: critical minerals, sea lanes, and Pituffik’s missile warning anchor U.S. access, yet POTUS elevates ownership as the only acceptable end state. That posture risks turning an internal NATO dispute into a credibility problem, making collective defense feel conditional while inviting Beijing to pose as a counterweight to U.S. coercion. The linkage to the Asia-Indo-Pacific is direct: if Europe doubts U.S. reliability, coalition responses to a Taiwan contingency weaken, sanctions coordination frays, and China gains room to divide partners on minerals and technology controls. Greenland becomes a test of alliance cohesion.

Comment: PM Carney calls this the rupture of the international system. There is no more rules based international order which of course is what the revisionist and rogue powers have been trying to achieve (along with the degradation of the US alliance system).

Greenland meltdown: what does Trump’s quest mean for the global order and China?

South China Morning Post

Shi Jiangtao

Published: 6:00am, 22 Jan 2026Updated: 11:28am, 22 Jan 2026

Dispute over the Danish territory has strained Europe’s relationship with the US and it could force the EU to recalibrate ties with China

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3340715/greenland-meltdown-what-does-trumps-quest-mean-global-order-and-china?utm

Greenland’s mineral wealth, especially in rare earth deposits, has long generated interest, with Trump saying in 2019 that the territory’s acquisition would be “strategically nice” for the US. But realising this potential has been impeded by logistical challenges, environmental considerations and opposition from residents.

People attend a protest in Nuuk, Greenland, on Saturday against US President Donald Trump’s push for acquiring the autonomous territory from Denmark for America’s use and control. Photo: Reuters

Overlooking key North Atlantic and Arctic shipping lanes, Greenland’s importance has grown as Washington and its Group of Seven partners have sought to reduce their dependence on China’s dominance in processing critical minerals.

In addition, melting sea ice resulting from global warming has opened possibilities for shorter trade routes to Asia and made it easier for the extraction and transport of those untapped deposits of rare earths.

Under a 1951 defence agreement with Denmark, the US already enjoys extensive rights to station troops and operate military bases in Greenland, including the Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base), which underpins American missile warning and space surveillance operations.

In framing Greenland as essential for countering Russian and Chinese influence in the Arctic, Trump has doubled down on his long-voiced desire to acquire the world’s largest island, insisting that anything short of US ownership would be “unacceptable”.

While China aims to become a “polar great power” by 2030, as Beijing stated in a 2018 white paper, its presence in the Arctic, especially militarily, has been modest, despite growing joint coastguard operations there with Russia since the Ukraine war started in 2022.

SCMP Plus is a new premium news platform that gives you an

all-inclusive edge to stay ahead on China news.

To access our exclusive content you’ll need to subscribe.

Already a subscriber?

LOG IN

China has established scientific research stations in Iceland and Norway and invested in projects such as Russian liquefied natural gas and a Swedish railway line. It also operates a few icebreakers equipped with deep-sea mini-submarines and satellites for Arctic observation, which it claims are for scientific research.

Cui Hongjian, head of European Union studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, dismissed Trump’s warnings about China’s Arctic ambitions, instead describing them as “normal economic activities conducted on a mutually beneficial basis, not the ‘threat’ that America claims”.

For Washington, even hypothetical future Chinese control would be intolerable, pushing the US towards a “control first, use later” approach, said Cui, a former diplomat. He called Trump’s insistence on acquiring Greenland “imperialist expansion”, unconstrained by alliance ties or international law.

“This reveals the fundamental starting point of Trump’s foreign policy, the supremacy of strength. How far one can go depends entirely on hard power,” Cui added.

He urged China to show its principled stance towards Europe and reassure the international community with “certainty and stability”.

“The international community urgently needs a balancing force to check US hegemony and imperial thinking,” Cui said. “We cannot allow the US to continue its current course.”

“China needs to balance managing relations with America with standing firm on principle,” he added. “Its stance on Greenland should take into account both US and European factors and serve as part of its global governance agenda.”

Analysts said a US takeover of Greenland would effectively dismantle Nato, a view echoed by Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who warned that a US attack on Greenland “would be the end of Nato”.

With mutual trust in the transatlantic security alliance at its lowest point in decades, a US attack on Denmark would plunge most European countries into a political crisis and mark “the final step of decoupling the US and Europe”, according to Andreas Osthagen, research director for Arctic and ocean politics at Norway’s Fridtjof Nansen Institute.

Constanze Stelzenmueller, director of the Centre on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution, agreed that outright military coercion would fundamentally violate Nato’s principles, but called it “the least likely” scenario.

Instead, Stelzenmueller described a “broad grey zone” of milder coercion, including “reopening and staffing abandoned US military bases”, economic suasion, political pressure and propaganda campaigns.

“That would not necessarily constitute a violation of the letter of the Nato treaty, but it would still violate its spirit, with expectable consequences,” she added.

Amid the risk of “a crisis in the transatlantic alliance”, Gabor Csizmazia, a research fellow at Ludovika University in Budapest, expressed less concern, citing Nato’s resilience seen in past crises and Europeans’ accommodating approach towards the Trump administration on defence spending, trade relations and arms to Ukraine.

Csizmazia said the Greenland issue could be resolved diplomatically between Washington and Copenhagen, with neither side abandoning collective defence cooperation.

But other analysts warned that, for Europe, Greenland had transcended a sovereignty dispute, becoming a stress test of how far the US was willing to go in the Arctic and how much strain the transatlantic system could bear.

Cui said that if the transatlantic disagreement over Greenland were to spiral out of control and force Europe to bend to American pressure, Brussels could reassess its alignment with Washington on Beijing, creating opportunities for selective cooperation on climate, minerals and supply chains.

As the US sought to isolate China, Europe might not follow suit, perhaps even “moderately aligning itself with China, using China as a card against the US”, he added.

A deeper rift between the US and Europe could create diplomatic openings for China and contribute over time to a more multipolar, less “Western-centred” order, Cui said.

In the short-run, multipolarity increases volatility and raises the costs for all major powers, including Beijing, which must navigate multiple contentious relationships at once, he added, and “the diversion of US attention may reduce concentrated pressure on China in the longer term”.

For China and Russia, the crisis is double-edged, according to many analysts.

Moscow and Beijing would be expected to exploit “cracks in the Western alliance and try to widen them”, Csizmazia said, yet he cautioned that their increased military activities in the Arctic would likely elicit “unease in Europe” and could ultimately strengthen Western coordination.

Others pointed to the irony that Trump’s push for Greenland coincided with US pressure on allies to curb their dependence on China, a contradiction that could hasten Europe’s dual de-risking from the great powers.

The inconsistency in American policy could bring Europeans to reflect critically on their relations with both the US and China, realising that overreliance on Washington’s security guarantees carried political risks, including pressure on their sovereignty.

According to Osthagen, Trump’s coercive approach, which he said was fuelled by a “skewed and irrational idea of strategic interests” and diplomacy, risked driving Europe to develop its own security and industrial capabilities more assertively and undermining coalitions for disengaging from China.

Other European analysts said that while the Greenland crisis had accelerated Europe’s pursuit of strategic autonomy, it was unlikely to draw Brussels closer to Beijing, given the bloc’s wariness of China’s influence.

Andreas Boje Forsby, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, noted that Europe’s existing efforts to de-risk from China did not stem mainly from US pressure but from deep concerns about Beijing’s ties to Moscow and its role as a “strategic enabler” of Russian aggression in Ukraine.

“China, just like the US under the Trump administration, resorts to coercive diplomacy to pursue its own core interests,” Forsby said. “While Europe is certainly drifting away from Washington in its pursuit of strategic autonomy, it will remain highly sceptical of Beijing for these reasons.”

Analysts largely agreed about Greenland’s strategic value.

Cui from Beijing framed the Greenland drive as part of Washington’s “western hemisphere strategy”.

He said he saw Greenland as “about defining the boundary of the ‘western hemisphere’”, a “strategic fulcrum” that extended US dominance into the Arctic, where Russia was the dominant military power and China was seen as a “poor developer” whose investments supposedly threatened America’s advantage.

Meanwhile, Stelzenmueller said the rationale behind Trump’s claims had been “changing all the time”.

She said one rationale was that Greenland was needed as a site for US radar to track intercontinental ballistic missiles coming from the Eurasian continent, adding that this was a right “the US already has”.

Stelzenmueller also highlighted an “underdiscussed rationale” regarding Greenland’s vast exclusive economic zone, which offers vital maritime access to both the Arctic and North Atlantic, as well as future seabed resources for mining and critical infrastructure.

Danish soldiers disembark at the port in Nuuk, Greenland, on Sunday. Photo: EPA

Csizmazia similarly stressed Greenland’s enduring strategic value.

“Greenland was important for basing US forces during World War II and the Cold War, and today’s great-power competition for the Arctic only adds to the island’s geographic importance,” he said, linking it to the Trump administration’s ambition to develop the so‑called Golden Dome missile defence system.

Other analysts argued that Trump’s latest insistence that the US must “own” Greenland “whether they like it or not” was tied to his personal style and political symbolism.

Forsby argued that “this has little to do with security” since Washington already had military access to Greenland through the 1951 agreement.

“Trump’s persistent demands can ultimately be reduced to his idiosyncrasies, specifically his obsession with ownership, expansionism and hemispheric dominance,” he said.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll last week showed that only 17 per cent of Americans supported Trump’s efforts to acquire Greenland, with more than 70 per cent opposing the use of military force against a Nato ally.

Forsby questioned Trump’s repeated assertions linking his push to a claim that, without US intervention, Greenland would have “Chinese destroyers and submarines all over the place”.

He noted that since the 2018 release of China’s Arctic policy in which the country called itself a “near-Arctic state”, China’s presence in the region “has been on the wane as the Arctic states have actively terminated or prevented Chinese projects and investments”.

Forsby said the reduced interest in engaging Beijing stemmed partly from fears of validating Trump administration narratives that used China as a pretext for acquiring Greenland.

Osthagen echoed this view, saying that discerning Trump’s thinking remained difficult and indicated a gap between Washington’s ambitions and diplomatic realities.

“If I had to choose, I’d say it is about symbolism, legacy and a miscalculated policy approach to both the Arctic and to European allies,” he said.

Osthagen added that despite China’s interests in Greenland and the Arctic, Chinese ships mainly sailed to and from Russia with raw materials and that many Chinese-invested projects “have been put on hold for security reasons”.

South China Morning Post

19. Why China is playing the long game in Iran despite Trump’s fresh threats

​Summary:

Beijing is playing for endurance, not drama. It condemns U.S. coercion in Iran and Venezuela in words, then avoids moves that trigger secondary sanctions or force China into a security role it does not want. The logic is commercial and strategic. China buys most of Iran’s exported oil, but it has diversified supplies to manage political risk and it can tolerate Iran operating in the gray zone through shadow shipping. Beijing also assumes any post-crisis leadership in Tehran will still need China’s market, even if it reopens to the West. 

Excerpts:

Liu Xu, a research fellow of the National Academy of Development and Strategy at Renmin University of China, said that “for now, Iran’s instability has not significantly disrupted energy cooperation”.

“Unless the situation escalates to something like a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, or internal turmoil severely disrupts Iran’s oil industry, the impact remains manageable,” Liu added.

He said Iran was likely to keep operating at the margins of Western sanctions, relying on shadow fleets and the grey-zone maritime trade.

Comment: If Tehran pivots toward Washington to ease pressure (unlikely I think but perhaps) , what specific leverage does China retain beyond discounted oil? Oil, commerce, the gray zone. But if a Hormuz shutdown is an unstated "red line" what does China do then? Inquiring minds want to know.

Why China is playing the long game in Iran despite Trump’s fresh threats

South China Morning Post

Cao Jiaxuanin Beijing

Published: 7:00pm, 22 Jan 2026

Beijing is balancing vital energy interests with long-standing diplomatic principles and a cautious Middle East recalibration, analysts say

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3340787/why-china-playing-long-game-iran-despite-trumps-fresh-threats?utm

“This is not limited to Iran,” Zhang said, pointing to China’s responses to America’s military operation in Venezuela to abduct leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife to face narcoterrorism charges in the United States.

“Beijing mainly condemns hegemonic behaviour verbally – actions that violate international law and infringe on other countries’ sovereignty – while also making it very clear that it believes solutions ultimately depend on cooperation between governments and their own people.”

That approach, analysts said, reflected China’s long-held principle of non-interference in internal affairs, a cornerstone of its diplomacy since the early years of the People’s Republic of China.

According to Li Weijian, a researcher at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, China’s policy towards Iran “does not hinge on whether hardliners or reformists are in power because these are domestic matters”.

“Even if there is a normal political transition, China’s policy will remain consistent and cooperation agreements will continue, unless a new leadership adopts a clearly anti-China stance,” Li said.

Beijing’s restraint is also based on hard economic realities and sanctions risks.

According to 2025 data from analytics firm Kpler, China remains Iran’s most important energy buyer, purchasing more than 80 per cent of Iran’s exported oil. China is also the world’s largest crude oil importer.

Washington reinstated economic sanctions on Tehran in 2018 after Trump decided to withdraw the US from the Iran nuclear deal. Since Trump’s return last year to the White House, the US has imposed several new rounds of sanctions.

And according to a 2025 policy brief by the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, any overt Chinese political or security involvement in the situation in Iran could trigger further Western penalties.

Still, Zhang said, Beijing had long factored those risks into its calculations on Tehran.

“China has spent decades diversifying its energy sources precisely because it understands the political risks of being the largest buyer,” he added.

Liu Xu, a research fellow of the National Academy of Development and Strategy at Renmin University of China, said that “for now, Iran’s instability has not significantly disrupted energy cooperation”.

“Unless the situation escalates to something like a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, or internal turmoil severely disrupts Iran’s oil industry, the impact remains manageable,” Liu added.

He said Iran was likely to keep operating at the margins of Western sanctions, relying on shadow fleets and the grey-zone maritime trade.

Analysts said Iran’s heightened risks did not rule out a shift towards global market integration – a path that could ultimately complement, rather than undermine, China’s interests.

Li suggested that the country’s unrest had created an impetus for domestic reform and, if the leadership changed, it would not necessarily harm Beijing’s interests.

“If a more pragmatic or reform-oriented leadership engages with the US, China will not lose out,” he said. “Thinking that China must back hardliners or suffer losses is a cold war mindset.”

Historically, China has maintained cooperation with Iran even at the height of international sanctions.

In 2006, after UN Security Council sanctions began, many Western firms withdrew, but China continued limited energy imports and infrastructure projects. Following the 2015 nuclear deal, Chinese participation in Iran’s economic reconstruction expanded further.

Now, as China faced direct pressure from the US, it “does not expect nor need more countries to oppose Washington on its behalf”, Li said.

Other analysts agreed that even a more westward-leaning Iran would still value China.

Ni Lexiong, a political science professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, said Beijing’s economic losses would be limited in such a situation, mainly involving the loss of discounted oil prices.

“Iran depends on oil, and no country can replace China’s market size,” Ni added. “Any future government will still see China as indispensable.”

According to Liu, Iran as a major power in the Middle East did not align itself with any single bloc, instead maintaining strategic autonomy and seeking balanced relations, including with China.

More broadly, Beijing is regarded as standing at a strategic crossroads.

Zhang said China was weighing whether to confront what it saw as increasingly “out-of-line” US actions with direct countermeasures or continue relying on verbal opposition while avoiding escalation.

That ambiguity reflects a wider reassessment.

A report last year by TOChina Hub, an academic platform linked to Italy’s Torino World Affairs Institute, described China’s Middle East strategy as being in a phase of “repositioning”, marked by diplomatic caution even after military strikes involving Iran.

An analysis by India’s Observer Research Foundation aligned with that view, noting that while China’s role in the Middle East was expanding amid a relative decline in US sway, Beijing was still focused on economic and energy engagement rather than assuming security responsibilities.

South China Morning Post

20. Timeless Leadership, Timely Expertise: Winning Tomorrow’s Wars Starts Here

​Summary:

West Point began as terrain, then became a factory for competence. Washington chose the Hudson chokepoint, but Kosciuszko supplied the engineering that made the position real. BG Reeves argues that same bargain still defines the academy: character without expertise is brittle, and expertise without character is dangerous. Thayer’s reforms fused discipline and rigorous academics, producing officers who could absorb industrial change and, at times, drive it. The canal, the Pentagon, and the Manhattan Project stand as proof that technical mastery can decide strategic outcomes. Today’s equivalents are cyber, autonomy, hypersonics, robotics, and AI with embedded ethics. The warning is simple. Armies that fail to adapt bleed.

Comment: I did not go to West Point (only the trade school of Benning's School for Boys). But I strongly believe in West Point and fully support it. And I think the SOSH Department (where I have had the most interaction) has been one of the thought leaders of our Army. Someone should do a network analysis of all the SOSH professors and their impact.

Timeless Leadership, Timely Expertise: Winning Tomorrow’s Wars Starts Here - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · Shane R. Reeves · January 22, 2026

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

In 1779, General George Washington, looking to stifle British attempts to divide the colonies, chose to headquarter the Continental Army at the “West Point” of the Hudson River, just below the town of Newburgh. The geography was perfect for defending the river. The river narrowed, allowing for a great chain to be pulled from one shore to the other, steep hills provided for artillery overwatch, and the tidal waters forced ships to slowly navigate the channel. Today, West Point retains its strategic importance—not because of its unique place on the Hudson River—but because it is home to the United States Military Academy.

The United States Military Academy at West Point is often called the premier leadership institution in the world. Academy graduates have led our Army, helped build the nation, explored space, and mastered industry. But what is often overlooked about West Point is its equally critical and historic obligation to provide professional military expertise in areas of strategic importance. In fact, this was one of the primary reasons for the creation of a military academy. During the Revolutionary War, the fledgling United States demonstrated little proficiency in several critical fields, such as military engineering and artillery. The lack of technical know-how led to a reliance on European experts. So while Washington understood the geographic advantages of West Point, it took the Polish General Thaddeus Kosciuszko to fulfill Washington’s vision by designing and overseeing construction of West Point’s fortifications.

The newly formed government recognized the national importance of addressing these knowledge gaps, and the responsibility to correct these deficiencies fell to West Point. Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, the fifth superintendent of the United States Military Academy, was instrumental in effectuating the Founders’ vision of a national military academy dedicated to both leadership and technical education. During his tenure from 1817 to 1833, Thayer professionalized West Point by emphasizing discipline, character development, and rigorous academics. Cultivating the expertise so desperately needed by the young nation had a tremendous impact on the United States’ rise as a global power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The officers educated under Thayer’s system recognized and adapted to revolutions in military affairs unleashed by the industrial era. From railroads and telegraphs to rifled artillery and airplanes, officers who understood the implications of technological and social change kept abreast of new developments and, in some cases, were themselves the innovators and initiators of change.

Although West Point graduates, such as Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, are frequently remembered for their military and leadership abilities, many have also drawn on their technical expertise to support and advance the strategic interests of the United States. For example, Colonel George Washington Goethals served as chief engineer of the Panama Canal. President Theodore Roosevelt considered the construction of a transisthmian route to be one of critical strategic importance, and under Goethals’s supervision, the canal was completed nearly two years ahead of schedule. Decades later, a different President Roosevelt approved another project of urgent significance to the United States. The Manhattan Project, the highly complex research and development program that produced the world’s first atomic bombs, was led by Brigadier General Leslie Groves. Groves finished fourth in his class at West Point, commissioned as an engineer officer upon graduation, and later oversaw the construction of the Pentagon.

The academic program at West Point not only taught graduates like Goethals and Groves to think deeply and analytically about problems, but also provided them with the substantive knowledge needed to excel in their disciplinary fields. This approach to education remains the bedrock of West Point’s academic program today. Just as earlier generations of cadets learned by studying and experimenting with the instruments and technologies of the time, today’s cadets gain a strong foundation in small classrooms with attentive faculty. All cadets learn a broad range of subjects, from engineering and cyber foundations to law and military history, in the academy’s core curriculum. Project-based learning is also key to the educational experience. Last academic year, cadets and faculty designed and launched hypersonic rockets, remotely mapped buildings using robots without the aid of GPS, and integrated ethics protocols into artificial intelligence and machine learning models. The integration of new disciplines, including cyber science, bioengineering, aerospace engineering, and war studies, further acknowledges and anticipates the next evolution of warfare.

In recent years, it has become commonplace to describe the value of a college education in monetary terms and to evaluate academic majors based on their return on investment in the postbaccalaureate job market. At West Point, the calculus is very different. West Point graduates are expected to embody the values of the academy’s motto—“Duty, Honor, Country”—and to apply their knowledge and expertise in service to the nation, initially as commissioned officers in the armed forces. This sense of purpose is a driving force that lends direction and focus to the education of cadets. A graduate’s worth is measured by the desire and potential to serve, not earning power.

The academy produces timeless leaders of character by imbuing cadets with the ethic to serve and pushing them to excel militarily, physically, and academically. The violent and chaotic nature of warfare is constant, and so must be West Point graduates’ unyielding tenacity to fight and win our nation’s wars. However, because the character of warfare is ever changing, the academy also produces timely leaders of character. This is done in two parts: first, by exposing them to the latest innovations in science and technology; second, by creating environments that enable cadets to be the innovators and thinkers we expect them to be upon graduation. Both timeless and timely characteristics are needed to anticipate and overcome the complex realities of the modern battlefield and to lead effectively within the world’s most lethal fighting force.

History offers sobering reminders of how failure to adapt can be catastrophic. At the dawn of World War II, many military leaders underestimated the impact of airpower on naval warfare. The sinking of the HMS Prince of Wales and the HMS Repulse by Japanese aircraft shattered the belief that battleships were invulnerable to air attack. Nations that internalized this lesson and shifted to carrier-based operations gained the upper hand in the Pacific. Conflicts raging today offer similar lessons about the lethality of new capabilities like drones and the significance of streamlining manufacturing and procurement processes. These inflection points teach us an enduring truth: Intellectual stagnation is dangerous; innovation and adaptation are vital.

The Founders understood that the nation needed not just principled leaders but also technical experts when they conceived of the United States Military Academy. Education in disciplines relevant to leadership and military art was a national security imperative. Early graduates quite literally shored up the national defense by designing fortifications and strengthening coastal defenses. Succeeding generations used their technical expertise to build bridges, construct canals, and design some of the most devastating weapons ever imagined, all in service to the nation. Today, West Point continues to equip cadets with the knowledge and skills needed to dominate on the battlefield across current and emerging operational environments.

West Point’s mission—to develop leaders of character for the Army and the nation— remains as important today as it was in 1802. Equally important is West Point’s proficiency at educating cadets in disciplines of strategic importance to national security. Driven by duty, honor, country, West Point graduates understand what is expected of them, and they stand ready to serve, as generations have before them, to project lethality and obtain victory in winning the battles for our nation.

Brigadier General Shane Reeves serves as the fifteenth dean of the Academic Board of the United States Military Academy. He previously served as head of the Department of Law at West Point, and he has written extensively on the law of armed conflict and national security issues. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is the founder of the Lieber Institute for Law and Warfare.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Jorge Garcia, US Military Academy (modified by MWI)

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

mwi.westpoint.edu · Shane R. Reeves · January 22, 2026

​21. ALLFARE: CHINA’S WHOLE-OF-NATION STRATEGY

​Summary:

Margolius argues that PRC pressure on the West is not a set of stovepiped instruments but a fused campaign he calls “allfare.” In his frame, party and state organs, proxies, and illicit networks operate as one adaptive system that exploits Western legal boundaries, bureaucratic seams, and open societies. The point is not constant violence. It is constant shaping, using lawfare, influence, cyber, supply chains, corruption, and criminal markets to create distraction, degrade cohesion, and pre-position access for crisis. “Allfare” is less a new tactic than a warning about our habit of misreading linkage as coincidence.

Excerpt:

Just as U.S. irregular warfare doctrine calls for the use of proxies with established placement and access, these PRC initiatives—or those simply tolerated by the CCP—provide the PLA and other operatives with exploitable strategic positioning.

Comment: I think I will adopt "Allfare" as a much easier shorthand. Allfare is a living system as one of my long time friends and colleagues might describe it. Is our US "living system" capable of out-playing China's? Specifically:

If “allfare” is real, what standing authority and interagency architecture lets the United States act at the speed of networked malign activity without undermining rule of law?

What are the decisive “tripwires” that would justify treating illicit, sub-state activity as strategic coercion by Beijing rather than as disconnected crime? Think Fentanyl, cyber enabled economic warfare, unattributable infrastructure attacks, disinformation campaigns, election interference, just to name a few from the Unrestricted Warfare playbook.

ALLFARE: CHINA’S WHOLE-OF-NATION STRATEGY

warroom.armywarcollege.edu · 

 Michael Margolius  January 22, 2026

Michael Margolius argues the PRC has moved beyond traditional models to "allfare"—a whole-of-nation strategy. By integrating state power with proxies and criminal actors, the CCP targets the West through social engineering and illicit trades.

 https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/allfare

To analyze how states exert their influence, scholars often compartmentalize actions into rigid analytical frameworks, which obscures the holistic scope of the challenge.

Current paradigms of understanding the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) actions against the West typically use the DIME framework or even the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)’s own “Three Warfares.” However, these frameworks that bin actions into discrete categories fail to encapsulate the totality of the PRCs activities targeting the west. While the United States hesitates to admit its “competition” with the PRC is conflict, the PRC appears to leverage all forms of warfare short of kinetic operations in daily affairs. To analyze how states exert their influence, scholars often compartmentalize actions into rigid analytical frameworks, which obscures the holistic scope of the challenge. By decomposing actions and analyzing them through the common frameworks, analysts fail to appreciate the interconnectedness across all elements of national power, particularly clandestine and sub-state illicit activities. These disadvantages call for a new model of analysis.

Adopting the concept of “allfare,” which captures every potential vector of malign action, provides a better appreciation for the strategic scope of PRC activities. Allfare encourages perceptions of linkages and cross-organizational intentions across the entire network, including official party and state instruments, proxies, and even seemingly disparate criminal actors. This last element, the illicit actors that ultimately advance CCP interests are entirely absent from traditional analytical frameworks. These activities are, at minimum, accepted by the party, and are very probably intentionally exploited. Since 2015, U.S. national security strategies have identified a rising Communist China as a threat to the liberal international order and continued American influence, yet policymakers still fail to grasp the broader whole-of-society grey-zone warfare the CCP conducts against the United States. Though they call for countering Chinese actions, the PRC continues their malign actions with no symmetrical or discernable asymmetrical response.. Allfare provides that aperture to see and then effectively defend against these multifaceted threat vectors. Through both planned and opportunistic actions, the CCP is waging Allfare against the West. Some examples include saber-rattling and confronting ships in the international waters of the South China Sea, inciting anti-Western sentiment through pervasive presence in citizen’s social and digital lives, confounding Western initiatives through vetoes and legal maneuvering in international organizations, cyber-attacks, tolerance of narcotics production for distribution to the West, and positioning for irregular warfare.

China’s perception of its own history sets the conditions that embolden a new military powerhouse to potentially reclaim territory it feels is being kept from it. Historically China sees itself as the chosen nation, greater than all others in virtue: the “Middle Kingdom” between Heaven and Earth. However, the “century of humiliation” marred this perception. Now that the PRC possesses the means to reshape the region, it believes it should do so by any means necessary against the corrupt West.

Sun Tzu’s venerated principle of achieving victory without direct military engagement has, for millennia, shaped Chinese military thinking and appears to be a core rationale driving the PRC’s actions to strategically weaken the West. Xi himself stated that “Resolving the Taiwan question and realizing China’s complete reunification is a historic mission and an unshakable commitment of the Communist Party of China.” This reunification with Taiwan would end the century of humiliation and extend the PRC’s ability to project power deeper into the second island chain, establishing itself as the true hegemon in the Pacific. The formidable challenges inherent in a cross-strait invasion for a largely untested People’s Liberation Army necessitate that the CCP meticulously consider non-kinetic or preparatory alternatives. If the PRC can negate the support of any allies of Taiwan and foment divisions within Taiwan’s own citizenry prior to commencing their reunification (through violence or other coercion), greater assurance of success exists.

In a 2018 War on the Rocks article, Peter Mattis highlighted the PRC’s ‘Three Warfares’: opinion, influence, and legal. The CCP has built a formidable information operations enterprise through which it uses pervasive social media engineering to shape Americans’ opinions and influence U.S. domestic politics. This is all the more frightening when one considers that China is more than willing to partner with allies like Russia and North Korea in this endeavor and is unconstrained by any moral or ethical boundaries. Regarding influence within U.S. politics, the Council on Foreign Relations reported in 2022 that the PRC sought to leverage pro-PRC politicians who would support their agenda in the Pacific Rim and beyond. The expenditure of over $200 million in registered electoral influence raises significant concern regarding the magnitude of their investment in unregistered and clandestine election funding.

The PRC is also attempt to shape the international environment to its benefits through international agreements and governing bodies, such as the Antarctica Treaty and the Arctic Council. China witnessed how fellow Security Council member Russia vetoed the United Nations resolution condemning its own invasion of Ukraine. With that precedent, it is not unlikely that China will feel emboldened to move against Taiwan or other sovereign territory, secure in the knowledge that it can prevent any UN action through its own veto power. While the PRC possesses many legal and appropriate national serving interests for involvement in Antarctica, the Arctic, and elsewhere, the potential for increased dual use presence in strategic lines of communication presents great risks for free trade and navigation.

By attempting to capture an action and force it to conform to a set logical framework, such as DIME or the “Three Warfares,” analysts can miss the interconnectedness of one action to another. Worse, through structural boundaries in U.S. code, such categorization could prohibit national security professionals from working with other agencies to mitigate cross-organization risks. Post-Snowden leaks, restrictions on the intelligence community have opened loopholes in EO12333 for adversaries to exploit, especially in signal intelligence. Organizations like joint interagency task forces and fusion cells exist, are not enough; many in the government may not know they exist. These organizations also cannot overcome a lack of authorities. An adversary unbounded by those same constraints can operate with freedom.

Just as U.S. irregular warfare doctrine calls for the use of proxies with established placement and access, these PRC initiatives—or those simply tolerated by the CCP—provide the PLA and other operatives with exploitable strategic positioning.

The very attributes of transparency, minimal censorship, inclusiveness, and free speech that define an open society also make them vulnerable to PRC efforts to influence open states from within their societal and commercial infrastructure. Though now mostly closed, the United States Department of State designated the Confucius Centers at many colleges and universities as Chinese missions due to their connections with the PRC government. Through telecommunications infrastructure like Huawei, ubiquitous technological surveillance in smart cities around the globe, or commercial and private real estate investments, the pervasiveness of the PRC presence requires acknowledgement, understanding, and appreciation for the scope and risk. Through these initiatives, they possess access for triple-use business initiatives (legal/legitimate, illegal/illegitimate, and options for irregular war). Organizations with a valid legal justification for existence can still be used as fronts for criminal activities or to achieve access for later hostile actions. Just as U.S. irregular warfare doctrine calls for the use of proxies with established placement and access, these PRC initiatives—or those simply tolerated by the CCP—provide the PLA and other operatives with exploitable strategic positioning.

Chinese nationals are purchasing Maine marijuana farms, raising legitimate security concerns, especially considering previous attempts to develop a corn processing plant in the vicinity of Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. These farms provide a telling example of leveraging legal and illegal business opportunities to further smuggling opportunities into the United States. Through established human trafficking networks, the PRC possesses the potential not just for criminals (who destabilize communities), but for future operatives to wage an irregular war inside the United States should the PRC need U.S. attention diverted from its actions elsewhere. These farms provide opportunities for money-laundering, funding other illicit activities. For southern Maine and New Hampshire, the proximity to ship building and repair facilities either at Bath Iron Works, or Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, both of which are critical in a protracted war with the PRC. The proximity of these farms (and numerous other initiatives) to military or other civil sector infrastructure creates additional security requirements and burdens on the United States.

Separate from the marijuana business, the PRC traffics fentanyl precursor chemicals that work their way into the United States, overwhelming medical capabilities and distracting law enforcement agencies from other illicit activities. The sheer scope of the fentanyl epidemic within the United States presents the PRC with a low-cost weapon of mass destruction.

Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web as well as Israel’s campaign inside of Iran highlight the risk of covert actions deep within a nation’s borders. When freedom of movement permits proximity access to sensitive locations, adversaries possess the ability to launch small uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS) which overwhelm defenses. While that seems infeasible, the PRC’s advantage is that disruption of domestic activities regardless of services provided creates a target list bounded only by imagination. Disruptions of hospitals, sewage, traffic, educational, financial, or other institutions present options to curtail American will and ability to counter the PRC actions globally. The deep polarization within the United States makes it likely that a Pearl Harbor or other September 11th event may not unify Americans into action as in the past. Indeed, in such an event the levels of domestic distrust, amplified by social media manipulation, could exacerbate society’s fragmentation within the United States. Seeing the draconian treatment of their own citizens—for example, the Uyghur persecutions or the abusive COVID lockdowns—analysts are concerned about the lengths the CCP will go to in the event of a regional conflict. The convergence of commercial and illicit activities gives the CCP strategic and operational flexibility that it can exploit. When Chinese malign actions are taken as discrete and compartmentalized examples, planners fear them as daunting challenges. When looked at from the Allfare holistic approach, the picture proves far scarier. Rather than a defendable underbelly as defined by borders or avenues of approach, the United States must defend its global flank across all domains and through all facets of society as threats exist wherever U.S. interests exist. The disparate threats of cyber-attacks, illicit trafficking, infrastructure sabotage, civil unrest, racial divides, further pandemics, and more present opportunities or tools for the PRC to leverage in their Allfare campaign to garner advantage without exposing the PLA to great risk. Western planners must prepare to counter a total Allfare campaign intended to create chaos and discontent as a precursor to any attempt to forcibly reassimilate Taiwan. Preserving the PLA as a strong deterrent while executing their campaigns though Allfare means is providing the PRC with the greatest flexibility to achieve victory. The United States and other concerned nations must acknowledge the nature of Allfare and leverage the diversity of Western thought for ways to create challenges to the PRC short of armed conflict.

Michael Margolius is a commander in the U.S. Navy and a faculty instructor in the Department of Distance Education at the U.S. Army War College where he graduated in June of 2024. Previously, he served as the J3 Operations Branch Chief, Joint Personnel Recovery Agency where he oversaw JPRA support to active PR cases, the Non-Conventional Assisted Recovery Program, the DoD Blood Chit Program, engaged with the Inter-Agency as well as allies on operational support matters. He also coordinated the Post Isolation Support Activities for a Canadian Citizen held hostage in Africa, and was the Agency COVID-19 Task Force Commander.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.

Photo Credit: Created by Gemini

warroom.armywarcollege.edu · Michael Margolius

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