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1. Field Observation: Where the United States Tests Against Chinese Military Technology
2. Operation Absolute Resolve: Anatomy of a Modern Decapitation Strike
3. What the Venezuela Attack Means for China
4. How the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ Reinforces Xi’s Vision of Power in Asia
5. Exclusive | Russia Sends Submarine to Escort Tanker the U.S. Tried to Seize Off Venezuela
6. Venezuela issues 90-day order to ARREST anyone backing US attack as armed motorcycle gangs hunt down Trump supporters in Caracas
7. After US raid on Venezuela, analysts weigh lessons about Russian air defenses
8. Aldrich Ames, most damaging CIA traitor in agency history, dies at 84
9. U.K. and France Agree to Set Up Military Hubs Across Ukraine After Cease-Fire
10. Alarm Spreads Among U.S. Allies Over Trump’s Demand for Greenland
11. Opinion | Invade Greenland? Why?
12. Pentagon will begin review of 'effectiveness' of women in ground combat positions
13. Rubio Has Long Dreamed of Changing Latin America. Embracing MAGA Opened the Door.
14. Philippine Navy scrambles to shield vital undersea cables from spies
15. Lockheed Martin to Increase Patriot Missile Production Under Pentagon Deal
16. Three Reasons We Can’t Get Enough of LinkedIn
17. How Google Got Its Groove Back and Edged Ahead of OpenAI
18. Three Wicked Problems in the Antarctic Commons: Biological Prospecting, Meteorite Hunting, and Mineral Exploration
19. The Transactional Trap: How Foreign Policy Dealmaking Can Sow Violence
21. Gamified War in Ukraine: Points, Drones, and the New Moral Economy of Killing
22.
1. Field Observation: Where the United States Tests Against Chinese Military Technology
Summary:
Erika Lafrennie argues Venezuela may matter less as a political crisis and more as a live test environment for U.S. forces learning to operate against Chinese-designed military relevant systems without fighting China directly. She notes Beijing’s deep integration into Venezuela’s telecoms, energy infrastructure, port logistics, and surveillance architecture, which together shape the “ambient terrain” for security operations. The U.S. buildup in the Caribbean, she suggests, looked oversized for counternarcotics or regime pressure, but fits a different logic: exercising amphibious, naval, submarine, and fifth-generation capabilities in dense littoral and urban settings while probing resilience under Chinese-linked networks.
Comment: Venezuela is not a large-scale combat operation (LSCO) that is sustained over time. Yes, there were likely many weapons systems and capabilities employed (tested?) very successfully that will likely be applied in large scale combat operations but we should not be misled and think that this success in Venezuela will equate to operations against China which will have much greater defensive and offensive capabilities (and mass) than Venezuela.
Field Observation: Where the United States Tests Against Chinese Military Technology
Why Venezuela May Matter Less as a Crisis and More as a Test Environment
Erika Lafrennie
Jan 07, 2026
https://www.xinanigans.com/p/venezuela-us-tests-against-chinese-military-technology?utm
Note from the author: This field observation examines recent events through a pattern-recognition lens, not as a claim of intent or attribution.
Back in September, I wrote about where Beijing was most likely to test new military technologies, identifying peripheral theaters where operational learning could occur without triggering direct confrontation with the United States.
Recent events suggest a useful mirror question:
Where is the United States most likely to test its ability to fight against Chinese military technology without fighting China directly?
The answer may be Venezuela.
For months, the US military buildup in the Caribbean appeared excessive if evaluated narrowly through the lens of counternarcotics, Venezuela-specific regime pressure, or regional deterrence. The scale, composition, and duration of forces deployed exceeded what those missions alone would seem to require.
Viewed through a different lens, however, the logic becomes clearer.
Venezuela represents a Chinese-enabled operational environment. Over the past decade, Beijing has embedded itself deeply in the country’s critical systems—particularly telecommunications infrastructure, energy production and transmission, port logistics, and state surveillance architecture. Chinese-built cellular networks, satellite links, and grid-adjacent technologies are not add-ons; they form part of the ambient operating terrain for both civilian governance and security forces.
That makes Venezuela not just a political problem, but a technologically relevant one.
At the same time, it offers something the Indo-Pacific cannot: distance from direct US–China escalation. Operations conducted in the Caribbean allow the United States to observe, stress, and adapt to Chinese-linked systems under real-world conditions without crossing thresholds that would be unavoidable in the South China Sea or Taiwan Strait.
The military activity itself reinforces this interpretation. The force package deployed—amphibious units, naval strike assets, submarines, and fifth-generation aircraft—closely resembles the configuration required for future littoral operations in contested environments. These are capabilities the US military has not exercised extensively in dense coastal and urban settings over the past two decades, having been oriented instead toward counterterrorism campaigns in landlocked or permissive theaters.
From an analytical standpoint, such an environment would plausibly support a range of learning objectives: urban ISR penetration in sensor-dense cities; command-and-control resilience under foreign-designed network conditions; littoral access and force movement under persistent surveillance; and joint integration where civilian infrastructure is tightly interwoven with state security systems.
From this perspective, Venezuela begins to look less like an outlier and more like a test case: a live environment in which to evaluate modern joint operations against systems shaped by Chinese design choices and governance assumptions.
This interpretation does not require intent to be proven to be analytically useful. Strategic behavior often reveals logic before it reveals explanation. The convergence of a Chinese-enabled battlespace, a permissive legal and political pretext, and a force posture well-suited to future great-power competition is at least worth noting.
If this lens is correct, Venezuela may not be unique. It may instead represent an emerging pattern in how major powers prepare for future wars: testing systems, doctrines, and integration in indirect theaters where failure is survivable, escalation is bounded, and lessons can be gathered quietly.
The more important question, then, may not be why Venezuela, but where the next test environment appears.
2. Operation Absolute Resolve: Anatomy of a Modern Decapitation Strike
Summary:
Operation Absolute Resolve is framed as a modern “decapitation strike” executed with joint precision: Delta Force, inserted by 160th SOAR into Caracas, captured Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, and exfiltrated in roughly three hours with minimal U.S. casualties. The analysis highlights five months of CIA pattern-of-life collection, then a short kinetic phase enabled by wide-area suppression of Venezuelan air defenses and electronic effects that degraded radar and command-and-control. The author treats the raid as asymmetric warfare in practice: intelligence patience, kill-chain compression, and integrated ISR, EW, air superiority, and direct action. The key claim is that targets without peer defenses now face radically compressed decision space.
Operation Absolute Resolve: Anatomy of a Modern Decapitation Strike
by SWJ Staff
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01.06.2026 at 03:12pm
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/06/operation-absolute-resolve-anatomy-of-a-modern-decapitation-strike/
Check out “Operation Absolute Resolve: Anatomy of a Modern Decapitation Strike” at RealClear Defense.
This article by Josh Luberisse provides a detailed operational analysis of “Operation Absolute Resolve,” the U.S. military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026. The mission involved Delta Force operators inserted by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment into Caracas, successfully extracting Maduro in under three hours with minimal casualties. Luberisse examines the operation through the lens of asymmetric warfare, highlighting the five-month intelligence preparation by CIA ground teams, the comprehensive suppression of Venezuelan air defenses using over 150 aircraft, and the precision coordination that enabled special operations forces to achieve complete surprise despite conducting the raid during a full moon. The author frames the operation as a masterclass in modern joint military capabilities, demonstrating how the integration of human intelligence, stealth surveillance, electronic warfare, and special operations forces has compressed decision spaces for targets lacking peer-level defensive capabilities.
Key Takeaways from The Article:
The Intelligence Foundation
“The CIA had maintained a clandestine ground team in Venezuela since August 2025—five months of patient intelligence collection. This team provided what one source described as extraordinary insight into Maduro’s pattern of life that made grabbing him seamless.”
“An RQ-170 Sentinel—the same stealth drone platform that overflew Abbottabad before the Bin Laden raid—was observed returning to Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Puerto Rico after the operation.”
Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses
“Helicopter assaults into defended airspace are among the most dangerous operations in modern warfare. Venezuela’s air defenses, while not advanced by peer-competitor standards, included S-300VM systems, Buk-M2 medium-range SAMs, and extensive man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS). The 160th SOAR’s MH-60M Black Hawks and MH-47G Chinooks are extraordinarily capable, but they’re still helicopters—vulnerable to anything that can put metal in the air.”
“Trump’s cryptic reference to the lights of Caracas being turned off due to a certain expertise points to attacks on power infrastructure—likely targeting military communications and radar systems dependent on the grid.”
The Direct Action Component
“The 160th SOAR’s helicopter force began ingress at 0601 UTC (0201 local) and was back over water by 0820 UTC—a ground time of approximately two hours including flight time into and out of Caracas.”
“One helicopter was damaged by ground fire but remained operational. Trump noted that ‘a couple of guys were hit’ but there were no U.S. fatalities. The low casualty count in a deep urban penetration against a defended target is remarkable and reflects both the effectiveness of the SEAD campaign and the precision of the intelligence that guided the assault.”
Doctrinal Implications
“The primacy of intelligence. Five months of patient collection enabled a three-hour operation. The ratio is instructive: the intelligence preparation phase was roughly 1,200 times longer than the kinetic phase. This is consistent with historical patterns in high-value target operations.”
“The compression of the kill chain. From intelligence confirmation to capture was measured in hours, not days. This tempo compression is the product of forward-positioned ISR assets, pre-approved strike authorities, and rehearsed assault teams.”
Historical Parallels
“Delta Force’s history with head-of-state captures includes Manuel Noriega (Panama, 1989), Saddam Hussein (Iraq, 2003), and now Maduro.”
“What distinguishes Absolute Resolve is the scale of the supporting SEAD campaign. Neither the Bin Laden nor al-Baghdadi raids required suppression of integrated air defense systems.”
“Operation Absolute Resolve demonstrates the current state of U.S. direct action capability: the ability to integrate persistent ISR, electronic warfare, air superiority, and ground special operations to achieve effects that would have been impossible a generation ago.”
Tags: 160th SOAR, asymmetric warfare, Delta Force, electronic warfare, Nicolás Maduro, Operation Absolute Resolve, U.S. Special Operations
About The Author
- SWJ Staff
- SWJ Staff searches the internet daily for articles and posts that we think are of great interests to our readers.
3. What the Venezuela Attack Means for China
Summary:
Palmer argues Beijing will condemn the raid as illegal and “hegemonic,” but will likely avoid costly action to restore Maduro, despite the “all-weather” label. China’s priority is stabilizing ties with Washington because its economy is fragile and it wants the trade cease-fire to hold. Beijing has already been reducing direct support to Caracas while securing debt repayment, and Venezuelan oil, though dominant in Venezuela’s exports, is marginal in China’s total imports. Still, the optics of U.S. coercion can feed China’s anti-imperial narrative and could accelerate Chinese security outreach in Latin America, including air defense sales, without changing China’s Taiwan calculus.
Comment: There are different ways to interpret the effects of our actions. Here is one: If China will not materially defend an “all-weather” partner under U.S. pressure, what credibility does that signal to other states considering deeper alignment with Beijing? Can we exploit this?
What the Venezuela Attack Means for China
Foreign Policy · James Palmer
Beijing’s response will test its “all-weather” partnership with Caracas.
January 6, 2026, 4:32 PM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/01/06/venezuela-china-maduro-capture-trump-attack-oil-taiwan/
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: China reacts to the U.S. attack on Venezuela, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a New Year’s Eve address, and China announces new export restrictions amid its standoff with Japan.
China Reacts to U.S. Strike on Venezuela
Last Friday, hours before he was seized by U.S. forces, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro met with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s special envoy to Latin America. While Qiu Xiaoqi’s visit was not unusual, its proximity to the U.S. attack may put Xi on edge.
According to Venezuela, the visit reaffirmed the “unbreakable nature of the brotherhood” between the two countries. In 2023, China upgraded its relationship with Venezuela to an “all-weather” partnership, a distinction typically reserved for allies such as Pakistan.
However warm China-Venezuela relations may be, Beijing’s initial reaction to the U.S. attack was limited and predictable. The Chinese foreign ministry issued a brief statement condemning the United States for “hegemonic acts” that violated international law and Venezuelan sovereignty.
Moving forward, it is likely that China will make a lot of noise—particularly over the illegality of Maduro’s capture—but offer little practical intervention on Venezuela’s behalf. Though the U.S. attack provides hard-liners in Beijing with justification for severing ties with Washington, such a break is doubtful.
Xi has invested considerable effort in stabilizing China’s bilateral relationship with the United States, including the trade cease-fire negotiated with U.S. President Donald Trump last year—on terms largely favorable to Beijing. Given China’s precarious economic position, it more likely will continue to hedge its bets rather than inflame tensions.
In the last year, China has consistently condemned U.S. sanctions and seizures of Venezuelan tankers, even as Beijing has gradually reduced direct assistance to Caracas, focusing instead on securing repayment of existing debts.
This approach could change if the Trump administration attempts to cast Maduro as a scapegoat for the United States’ fentanyl problems during his trial and wraps in China. Interestingly, the U.S. indictment against Maduro unsealed on Saturday makes no mention of fentanyl, focusing instead on cocaine trafficking.
Another area to watch is oil. On Saturday, Trump attempted to make an overture to Beijing by suggesting that under U.S. control, Venezuelan oil exports to China would grow. However, this supply matters little to China: Though it purchases roughly 68 percent of Venezuela’s oil exports, that is a negligible share of overall Chinese oil imports.
What may prove more influential in shaping China’s involvement is its long-standing ideological commitment to anti-imperialism in the developing world, rooted in ties forged with socialist-leaning states in Latin America and Africa during Mao Zedong’s rule. Venezuela, however, only entered China’s orbit after former President Hugo Chávez was elected in 1998.
Nevertheless, the overtly imperial character of the latest U.S. military operation could resonate with Xi’s generation, which was raised on the narratives of anti-colonial struggle and Third World solidarity. To be sure, China is often hypocritical, patronizing, and even racist toward its supposed socialist siblings. Yet the belief system persists, particularly among older Chinese leaders.
However, it’s unlikely that the U.S. attack on Venezuela will alter China’s strategy on Taiwan. China’s leadership sees Taiwan as an internal issue and has no trouble reconciling its support for Venezuelan sovereignty with its contempt for Taiwan’s.
The crisis in Venezuela may spur deeper Chinese engagement across Latin America. One development to watch will be Chinese air-defense sales to countries such as Cuba and Colombia, which are unsettled by Trump’s increasingly expansive threats.
What We’re Following
New Year’s Eve address. China traditionally marks a new year with the Spring Festival, or Lunar New Year, which falls on Feb. 17 this year. Though major policy documents typically follow that event, Xi’s Western New Year’s Eve speech has taken on outsized importance.
The speeches themselves are always banal, despite extensive mandatory coverage by Chinese state media. Xi typically lists his achievements of the last year, often highlighting the places he’s visited. His comments on Taiwan always garner attention, but they don’t waver: He asserts that reunification is inevitable—the same language Beijing has used for decades.
This year’s speech followed the same pattern as previous ones, highlighting China’s technology innovations and cultural soft-power successes in 2025, including the Black Myth: Wukong video game and the blockbuster movie Ne Zha 2.
Japan tensions. The standoff between Tokyo and Beijing continues over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s repeated remarks that Japan could aid Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is attempting to garner South Korean support by invoking Seoul’s historical grievances with Tokyo, but this is unlikely to gain traction.
China has so far avoided the kind of street-level mobilization seen in past confrontations, opting instead for quieter measures such as banning Japanese artists, discouraging tourism, and issuing diplomatic protests. On Tuesday, China announced a ban on exports of certain dual-use goods, including some rare earths, to Japan.
Meanwhile, a senior Japanese official seemed to call for an independent nuclear arsenal last month, prompting Tokyo to reaffirm its no-nuclear-weapons pledge. As neither side shows any sign of backing down, the rift appears at risk of becoming something more permanent.
FP’s Most Read This Week
Tech and Business
Restaurant woes. Chinese spending on dining out fell sharply in recent months, reflecting yet another sign of the country’s economic malaise. Restaurants have been closing at record rates since the COVID-19 pandemic, and spending per meal has fallen by 24 percent since 2023. Young people, financially strapped and often unemployed, have especially cut back.
Eating out in China is far cheaper and more routine than in the West, with small, often family-run restaurants on nearly every street. Some of the sector’s contraction reflects the rise of delivery platforms, which exploit cheap labor. Facing weak domestic demand, Chinese restaurant chains are attempting overseas expansion in search of growth.
Tax crackdown. China has been collecting more taxes from online vendors since October, when a new law closed long-standing tax loopholes that helped fuel China’s e-commerce boom. China’s tax system is often poorly coordinated between local and central authorities, and digital transactions have proved especially difficult to trace.
But it wasn’t just legitimate taxes that many online sellers were evading. Operating online also made new businesses harder for officials to detect, limiting opportunities for routine extortion. In contrast, more visible enterprises, such as restaurants, typically have to bribe multiple agencies—from health inspectors to the fire department—just to operate.
By formalizing tax collection, the central government has created a new dilemma: Once local officials know what businesses are operating in their jurisdictions, these businesses become targets for extortion, expanding the potential scope of corruption.
Foreign Policy · James Palmer
4. How the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ Reinforces Xi’s Vision of Power in Asia
Summary:
The article argues that the U.S. raid on Venezuela reinforces Xi Jinping’s worldview that great powers dominate their own regions and others step back. Washington’s embrace of a modernized Monroe Doctrine weakens global norms against force, undercuts U.S. criticism of China’s coercion in Asia, and may divert American attention from the Asia theater. Beijing was embarrassed by the timing of the raid during a Chinese envoy’s visit, exposing limits of China’s influence beyond its neighborhood. Yet the logic ultimately favors Xi’s vision of spheres of influence, where power, not rules, determines outcomes.
Comment: Thucydides: "The strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must."
But ... If Washington normalizes regional spheres enforced by force, how can it credibly deter China in Asia without validating Beijing’s claim that Taiwan and the South China Sea are simply China’s “near abroad”?
How the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ Reinforces Xi’s Vision of Power in Asia
NY Times · David Pierson · January 6, 2026
The U.S. assault on Venezuela points to a world where big powers seek to call the shots in their regions, an idea Beijing knows well.
By David Pierson
Reporting from Hong Kong
Jan. 6, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/world/asia/venezuela-china-trump-taiwan.html
Xi Jinping, China’s leader, with President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, in Caracas in 2014.Credit...Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters
Jan. 6, 2026Updated 10:34 a.m. ET
Leer en español阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版
Just hours before American commandos seized President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in a daring raid, a senior Chinese official had met the Venezuelan leader at the presidential palace, a show of support for one of Beijing’s closest partners in the Western Hemisphere.
The speed with which U.S. forces acted afterward to capture Mr. Maduro sent a blunt message to Beijing about the limits of its influence in a region that Washington treats as its own. China now risks losing ground in Venezuela after Saturday’s assault in Caracas, despite decades of investment and billions of dollars in loans.
But the assault also reinforces a broader logic that ultimately favors President Xi Jinping’s vision of China and its status in Asia: when powerful countries impose their will close to home, others tend to step back.
The White House has framed the Maduro operation as part of an updated Monroe Doctrine, or as President Trump describes it, the “Donroe Doctrine.” A globe carved into spheres of influence — with the United States dominating the Western Hemisphere and China asserting primacy across the Asia-Pacific — and where might makes right, regardless of shared rules, could benefit Beijing in a number of ways.
Stephen Miller, a top aide to Mr. Trump, articulated this doctrine in an interview with the CNN host Jake Tapper on Monday. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
A U.S. airstrike in Catia La Mar, a coastal area west of Caracas and near the airport, hit a three-story apartment complex.Credit...The New York Times
It could keep the United States and the brunt of its military forces away from Asia. And it could undercut Washington’s criticism of Beijing when Chinese forces elbow their way across contested waters of the South China Sea and menace Taiwan, the island democracy China claims as its own.
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The assault on Caracas “does further erode the norms against great power use of force that have steadily weakened in the last two decades, which works just fine for Beijing,” said Rush Doshi, a China expert at Georgetown University and the Council on Foreign Relations. “More important, if it distracts the United States by tying us up in Venezuela, all the better for Beijing too.”
Beijing has long railed against what it calls America’s strategy of containing China, which includes stationing troops in Japan and South Korea, and deploying U.S. naval ships in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. And it has criticized Washington’s moves to deepen security ties with India and help Australia develop nuclear-powered submarines.
Mr. Xi has depicted China as a reliable and powerful pillar in the region, in contrast to the United States, as he sought to court neighbors to his side in a trade war with President Trump.
In a speech at a high-level Communist Party conference on regional diplomacy, Mr. Xi called for the region to be governed by “Asian values,” Asian supply chains and an Asian security model where countries shared “weal and woe.”
President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea, left, taking a selfie with Mr. Xi and their wives during a visit to China on Monday.
On Monday, Mr. Xi once again appeared to underscore the contrast between the Trump administration’s assault and China’s “neighborhood diplomacy” in a meeting with President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea in Beijing. Mr. Xi, casting China as a benevolent major power, said Beijing and Seoul were able to achieve “harmony without uniformity” by “resolving differences through dialogue and consultation.”
In fact, China has not hesitated to use its massive economic power for coercion and its ample modern military to intimidate its neighbors.
Just last week, China fired more than two dozen long-range rockets into waters around Taiwan and surrounded the island with bombers, fighter jets and warships in a two-day show of force aimed at intimidating the island’s leadership. China has also punished Japan economically for showing support for Taiwan.
None of this means Beijing is calibrating its approach to Taiwan based on events in Venezuela. Chinese leaders have long treated the island as a domestic issue to be resolved on their own terms, independent of U.S. actions elsewhere.
China has sometimes been explicit about how it sees its power in its own neighborhood. At a meeting with Southeast Asian officials in 2010 over the South China Sea, China’s then-foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, said: “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”
China fired rockets last week from Pingtan, an island in the eastern Chinese province of Fujian, close to Taiwan, as part of two days of exercises aimed at pressuring Taiwan.
That blunt view of power helps explain both China’s confidence in Asia and its vulnerability farther afield, as Venezuela has made clear.
China will not easily give up on Latin America, a region where Beijing has been expanding its economic and political influence for years, buying soybeans and minerals and investing in ports, telecommunications networks and space infrastructure. It has aligned itself with Brazil, Colombia and, of course, Venezuela, in being willing to stand up to Washington’s bullying.
Led by socialist strongmen who dared to defy the United States, Venezuela shared an ideological kinship with China’s communist leaders. The South American nation has been the region’s largest recipient of Chinese loans and the largest buyer of Chinese military equipment. In 2023, Beijing elevated bilateral relations with Caracas to one of its highest tiers, known as an “all-weather strategic partnership.”
China’s stake in the country, which includes around $10 billion in outstanding loans, could now be at the mercy of the Trump administration, which indicated on Sunday that it would assert leverage on Venezuela’s leadership by imposing a military “quarantine” on the country’s oil exports.
For Beijing, the timing of Saturday’s strike only compounded the blow. China’s special envoy for Latin American affairs, Qiu Xiaoqi, had met with Mr. Maduro in Caracas at Miraflores, the presidential palace, earlier in the day on Friday, their meeting shown on local broadcasts.
Qiu Xiaoqi, China’s special envoy for Latin American affairs, meeting with President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela on Friday, in a photo released by the Venezuelan government. They met hours before American commandos seized Mr. Maduro in a raid.Credit...Marcelo Garcia/Miraflores Palace, via Reuters
“The United States took such action at a time when China’s delegation was visiting Venezuela. For China, it is very embarrassing,” said Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. He said that the attack would affect relations between Washington and Beijing.
That it took place during the Chinese delegation’s visit also pointed to a potential failure of China’s intelligence services and its diplomats, said Ja Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore.
Beijing has condemned the U.S. strike and said that it was “deeply shocked” by the “blatant use of force.” In what appeared to be his first remarks on the matter, Mr. Xi on Monday criticized what he called “unilateral bullying actions” that he said were “severely undermining the international order.”
It is unclear how much contact Beijing has had with Caracas since Mr. Maduro was deposed. Even as the two administrations remained close, China had grown frustrated by corruption and the mismanagement of the country’s resources by the Maduro government, which came to power in 2013, analysts say. As billions of dollars in unpaid loans racked up, China effectively stopped lending to Caracas more than eight years ago.
“Venezuela is a headache now for China, but it’s a headache worth having,” said Ryan C. Berg, director of the Americas Program and head of the Future of Venezuela Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Beijing saw Maduro as a complete clown, but in many ways, he was their clown as long as he remained in power.”
Berry Wang contributed reporting.
David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 7, 2026, Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Assault on Venezuela Reinforces Xi’s Vision of Power
See more on: Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Lee Jae Myung
NY Times · David Pierson · January 6, 2026
5. Exclusive | Russia Sends Submarine to Escort Tanker the U.S. Tried to Seize Off Venezuela
Summary:
Russia escalated tensions with Washington by dispatching a submarine and naval assets to escort the oil tanker Marinera, formerly the Bella 1, which the United States Coast Guard has pursued for evading sanctions linked to illicit oil trade near Venezuela. The tanker’s sudden registration under the Russia flag complicates U.S. legal authority to board it and raises the risk of retaliation if force is used. The episode underscores how sanctions enforcement against the shadow fleet is colliding with great-power rivalry, as Moscow signals willingness to protect even marginal assets to defend its energy lifelines amid strained U.S.-Russia relations.
Comment: Does U.S. sanctions enforcement against illicit energy flows risk becoming a direct trigger for naval confrontation with Russia and its partners, and where is Washington’s threshold for escalation at sea?
Exclusive | Russia Sends Submarine to Escort Tanker the U.S. Tried to Seize Off Venezuela
WSJ
Move raises the stakes over the Trump administration’s attempt to seize the Bella
By Shelby Holliday
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Jan. 6, 2026 7:29 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-sends-submarine-to-escort-tanker-the-u-s-tried-to-seize-off-venezuela-4bd78dc7
The tanker, formerly known as the Bella 1, has been trying to evade the U.S. blockade of sanctioned oil tankers near Venezuela. Hakon Rimmereid/UGC/Reuters
- Russia dispatched naval assets to escort an empty oil tanker, formerly the Bella 1, now the Marinera, which the U.S. Coast Guard has pursued.
- The tanker, initially stateless and sanctioned for carrying illicit oil, registered with Russia, complicating U.S. legal justification for boarding.
- Experts suggest a U.S. attempt to forcibly board the Russian-registered vessel could lead to retaliation from Russia and its allies.
An artificial-intelligence tool created this summary, which was based on the text of the article and checked by an editor. Read more about how we use artificial intelligence in our journalism.
- Russia dispatched naval assets to escort an empty oil tanker, formerly the Bella 1, now the Marinera, which the U.S. Coast Guard has pursued.
Russia has sent a submarine and other naval assets to escort an empty, rusting oil tanker that has become a new flashpoint in U.S.-Russia relations, according to a U.S. official.
The tanker, formerly known as the Bella 1, has been trying to evade the U.S. blockade of sanctioned oil tankers near Venezuela for more than two weeks. The vessel failed to dock in Venezuela and load with oil. Although the ship is empty, the U.S. Coast Guard has pursued it into the Atlantic in a bid to crack down on a fleet of tankers that ferry illicit oil around the world, including black-market oil sold by Russia.
The vessel’s crew repelled an effort by the U.S. to board the vessel in December and steamed into the Atlantic. As the Coast Guard followed it, the crew sloppily painted a Russian flag on its side, changed its name to the Marinera and switched its registration to Russia.
Russia has been concerned by U.S. seizures of tankers that ferry its illicit oil around the world and power its economy, and it has made the unusual move of allowing the tanker to register in Russia without an inspection or other formalities, experts say.
Russia has asked the U.S. to stop pursuing the vessel, according to three other U.S. officials. On Tuesday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said it was monitoring “with concern” the situation surrounding the tanker, according to state news agency RIA.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment, but the U.S. military’s Southern Command said on social media Tuesday that it was ready to “stand against sanctioned vessels and actors transiting through this region.”
The Coast Guard has continued to trail the ship into the Eastern Atlantic, where it is now sailing about 300 miles south of Iceland toward the North Sea, according to AIS positioning.
Russia’s state-controlled foreign media outlet RT posted a video apparently taken from the deck of the oil tanker showing the U.S. Coast Guard cutter trailing the vessel. In a separate post on social media, the outlet said the U.S. was attempting to intercept the tanker, bound for Murmansk, Russia, despite its “clear civilian status.”
The tanker flare-up comes as Washington and Moscow have engaged in diplomatic wrangling on Ukraine, threatening to complicate the talks. Russia has yet to accept a peace framework the U.S. and Ukraine have put forward.
“I’m not thrilled with Putin. He’s killing too many people,” said Trump on Saturday, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The U.S. has already apprehended two very large crude carriers, the Skipper and the Centuries, which are part of the fleet that transports illicit oil, and officials have said more seizures could come.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—and the Western sanctions that followed—sparked a rapid expansion of the global dark fleet, an armada of more than 1,000 tankers with obscure ownership and no Western insurance, according to some analysts. The vessels conceal their role in shipping oil by using deceptive tactics, such as switching off their radio signals to obscure their movements and transferring cargo to other vessels in poorly monitored waters. Most of these tankers are over 15 years old, prompting fears of major spills and collisions.
The Kremlin didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Moscow has previously rejected characterizations that it uses a shadow fleet and has called Western sanctions illegitimate.
A shadow fleet of oil tankers is forging closer ties between Russia, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. WSJ explains how oil-rich nations in the Middle East are facilitating Russia’s oil trade despite Western efforts to curb the Kremlin’s energy revenues. Photos: Planet Labs PBC
At the time the U.S. began pursuing the tanker, the Bella 1 was a stateless vessel flying a false flag and subject to a judicial seizure order, according to the White House. The U.S. had sanctioned the Bella 1 for allegedly carrying black-market Iranian oil on behalf of U.S.-designated terrorist organizations aligned with Tehran.
However, the ship’s new Russian registration now complicates the U.S. legal justification for boarding it, experts say.
“Once it’s legitimately registered, it gets the protection of the flag” under international law, said retired Rear Adm. Fred Kenney, former director of legal affairs and external relations at the International Maritime Organization. “It’s not retroactive, you can’t say it was stateless two weeks ago so we’re going to say it’s stateless now.”
A U.S. move to forcibly board the vessel could also open the door for retaliation by Russia and aligned nations like Iran, the experts say.
“Will Russia step in and protect the dark fleet on a regular basis? That would undercut the argument that they have legitimate ties to the vessels,” said William Baumgartner, former judge advocate general and chief counsel for the Coast Guard. “If they repeat this, it does raise the question of whether this is a legitimate change in registry, or if it appears to be done for nefarious reasons.”
Write to Shelby Holliday at shelby.holliday@wsj.com, Costas Paris at costas.paris@wsj.com and Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com
Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the January 7, 2026, print edition as 'Russia Sends Submarine to Escort Tanker'.
WSJ
6. Venezuela issues 90-day order to ARREST anyone backing US attack as armed motorcycle gangs hunt down Trump supporters in Caracas
Summary:
Venezuela’s interim authorities have reportedly declared a 90-day state of emergency and ordered security services to “search for and capture” anyone accused of promoting or supporting the U.S. attack that seized Nicolás Maduro. In parallel, reporting describes a tightening internal security posture in Caracas, including ad hoc checks and phone searches, alongside a sharp crackdown on media. Rights groups say at least 14 journalists were detained and later released, underscoring how quickly emergency powers can be turned into intimidation and narrative control.
Comment: Hmmm... Accurate reporting or disinformation(or misinformation as the first report is often/always wrong). But if accurate it begs some questions:
If POTUS wants durable influence, what matters more: coercive leverage over oil and security, or a legitimacy strategy that prevents the new order from collapsing into insurgency and regional backlash?
What is the fastest path to strategic failure: overreach that pushes partners toward China and Russia, or restraint that signals the United States cannot consolidate gains after a high-risk strike?
What is the most feasible, acceptable, and suitable course of action going forward that will sustain, protect, and advance US interests in the near and long term? (and I hope we will focus on the long term versus short term gains that are not sustainable).
Venezuela issues 90-day order to ARREST anyone backing US attack as armed motorcycle gangs hunt down Trump supporters in Caracas
Published: 01:00 EST, 7 January 2026 | Updated: 01:47 EST, 7 January 2026
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15440735/Venezuela-motorcycle-gangs-hunt-Trump-supporters.html
Gangs of armed men on motorcycles are patrolling the streets of Caracas, looking for supporters of Donald Trump and his military operation in Venezuela with the support of at least one key government official.
The Colectivos are a group of paramilitary militias that still support deposed leader Nicolas Maduro and have been searching vehicles at checkpoints.
The bikers, many of them masked and armed with Kalashnikovs, have searched phones and cars looking for evidence of people backing Trump's action in Caracas as an unofficial tool of the state.
In the wake of Maduro's arrest, a 90-day state of emergency put in place by the Venezuelan government orders police to 'immediately begin the national search and capture of everyone involved in the promotion or support for the armed attack by the United States.'
They have already arrested 14 journalists, 11 of whom come from out of the country, while others remain missing, The Telegraph reported.
Many of the members of Colectivos have been seen posing with Maduro's Interior, Justice and Peace Minister Diosdado Cabello, who still clings tight to the notion that Maduro is the nation's lawful president.
'Here, the unity of the revolutionary force is more than guaranteed, and here there is only one president, whose name is Nicolas Maduro Moros. Let no one fall for the enemy's provocations,' Cabello said in a statement through the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.
A video of Cabello - who has a bounty of $50million on his head in the US for drug trafficking - with the militia members that has circulated on social media sees them chanting a slogan that translates to: 'Always loyal, never traitors.'
Gangs of armed men on motorcycles are patrolling the streets of Caracas, looking for supporters of Donald Trump and his military operation in Venezuela with the support of at least one key government official
The Colectivos are a group of paramilitary militias that still support deposed leader Nicolas Maduro and have been searching vehicles at checkpoints
Other videos show them calling Americans and supporters of Trump 'pigs' who will steal the nation's resources.
Their presence has many frightened to leave their homes, with one anonymous anti-Maduro citizen saying they're scared she could have their phone searched and imprisoned for going against the government.
Nobel Peace Prize winner and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado told Fox News Monday that the Colectivos are 'really alarming.'
Interim President Delcy Rodriguez, who served as Maduro's vice president, had struck a more conciliatory tone in a statement on Sunday.
'We extend an invitation to the US government to work together on a cooperation agenda, aimed at shared development, within the framework of international law, and to strengthen lasting community coexistence,' she said in her statement.
The president has openly stated that the military operation to depose leader Nicolas Maduro this past weekend was, in part, an attempt to extract some of oil-rich Venezuela's stock.
'I am pleased to announce that the Interim Authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 50 MILLION Barrels of High Quality, Sanctioned Oil, to the United States of America,' he posted to Truth Social.
Join the debate
Does this order show Maduro is ruling through fear rather than law?
The bikers, many of them masked and armed with Kalashnikovs, have searched phones and cars looking for evidence of people backing Trump's action in Caracas as an unofficial tool of the state
Members of the Colectivos, guard the entrance to a neighborhood in Caracas
Other videos show them calling Americans and supporters of Trump 'pigs' who will steal the nation's resources
Colectivos members guard the entrance to a Caracas supermarket
In addition to the vice presidency, Rodriguez previously served as Maduro's Minister of Petroleum and Hydrocarbons.
Trump also announced that he will be in control of the money made off sales - which at market price, could be worth up to $2billion according to Reuters - of the oil.
'This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!'
Trump has placed Energy Secretary Chris Wright in charge of executing the plan which is scheduled to begin immediately.
'It will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States,' he wrote.
Separately, the White House is organizing an Oval Office meeting Friday with oil company executives regarding Venezuela, with representatives of Exxon, Chevron and ConocoPhillips expected to attend, according to a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to discuss the plans.
Trump said Monday it will cost 'a lot of money' to rebuild the South American country's energy infrastructure but thinks the US can do it ahead of that 18 month timeline.
However, he added that the American taxpayers may be on the hook for it, as the oil companies may receive assistance to do so.
A member of the militia group known as 'Colectivos' takes part in a march calling for release of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro
Many of the members of Colectivos have been seen posing with Maduro's Interior, Justice and Peace Minister Diosdado Cabello (pictured), who still clings tight to the notion that Maduro is the nation's lawful president
Many have led marches to free deposed leader Nicolas Maduro
Interim President Delcy Rodriguez, who served as Maduro's vice president, had struck a more conciliatory tone in a statement on Sunday
'I think we can do it in less time than that, but it'll be a lot of money,' he told NBC News.
'A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent and the oil companies will spend it, and then they'll get reimbursed by us or through revenue.'
When asked if Trump's 'America First' base would stand for nation-building overseas, the president backed himself to maintain the support of his voters.
'MAGA loves it. MAGA loves what I'm doing. MAGA loves everything I do. MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too,' he said.
Trump also told NBC News that the project could take the next 18 months before Venezuelans elect a new president.
'We have to fix the country first. You can't have an election. There's no way the people could even vote,' Trump said.
'No, it's going to take a period of time. We have — we have to nurse the country back to health.'
Daily Mail · STEPHEN M. LEPORE, US SENIOR REPORTER
7. After US raid on Venezuela, analysts weigh lessons about Russian air defenses
Summary:
Analysts caution that Venezuela’s failure to down a single U.S. aircraft says less about “Russian systems don’t work” and more about how the United States fights when it chooses to dominate the air. Venezuela fields Russian-made Igla-S MANPADS, S-300VM long-range SAMs, and Buk-M2E medium-range systems, plus Su-30s, yet the United States reportedly layered cyber, electronic attack, anti-radiation strikes, and massed airpower to clear corridors for the raid force. The takeaway is deterrence fragility: advanced gear cannot compensate for exposed emitters, static launchers, thin training, and an adversary that can close the kill chain at scale.
Comment: Again this was not LSCO, but it is useful to note that most north Korean air defense systems are based on Russian technology. We should not get cocky but we should exploit this from an information warfare perspective, for example:
If the United States can routinely suppress Russian-derived IADS at distance, what new deterrent signal can Moscow credibly offer allies and clients that does not collapse the moment U.S. air and cyber effects arrive?
After US raid on Venezuela, analysts weigh lessons about Russian air defenses - Breaking Defense
Venezuela's air defenses failed to down a single American aircraft, though experts said that could be more credit to US proficiency than the systems' own failures.
By Lee Ferran on January 06, 2026 11:57 am
breakingdefense.com · Lee Ferran
https://breakingdefense.com/2026/01/after-us-raid-on-venezuela-analysts-weigh-lessons-about-russian-air-defenses/
WASHINGTON — Ostensibly speaking about the US industrial base, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth took a short detour on Monday to take a victory lap regarding the surprise US military operation to snatch Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in a daring nighttime raid over the weekend.
“And then we saw three nights ago in downtown Caracas in Venezuela, as nearly 200 of our greatest Americans went downtown in Caracas. Seems those Russian air defenses didn’t quite work so well, did they?” Hegseth said to some applause during a visit to shipbuilders at Newport News.
That Venezuela was guarded by Russian-provided tech was well known; Maduro himself boasted in October that he had 5,000 Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles at “key air defense positions.”
Maduro was referring specifically to Russian Igla-S man-portable (MANPAD) systems in that quote, but Venezuela was known to also employ at least two S-300VM long-range surface-to-air missile systems, an older version of Russia’s current S-400, and an “unknown number” of Buk-M2E SA-17 Grizzly medium-range surface-to-air missile systems, according to Ralph Savelsberg, a missile defense specialist at the Netherlands Defence Academy. (A US Army database of foreign weapon systems lists other systems and variations as well, though that database appears dated to around 2018.) And then there’s the Venezuelan air force, which flies some older American-made F-16s and more modern Russian-made Su-30 fighter jets.
“Tactical operating system” for warfighters has evolved to provide more situational awareness of the battlefield.
In the wake of the US successful operation — in which President Donald Trump said one helicopter was struck by fire but not a single American aircraft was shot down and no Americans were killed — the question has been raised: How good are Russian-supplied air defenses, especially after similar systems used in Iran were ineffective against US and Israeli strikes last year?
While many details have yet to emerge, Savelsberg and other analysts cautioned that in this case it could be less of a matter of the air defenses’ failings, and more the overwhelming nature of the American multi-layered electronic and kinetic assault. After all, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said the US employed 150 aerial assets in the operation to “layer effects for a single purpose, to get an interdiction force into downtown Caracas while maintaining the element of tactical surprise.”
As Savelsberg put it, “The success of this raid is not solely a reflection of the quality, or lack thereof, of the equipment. Quantity has a quality all its own: The aircraft involved in this mission vastly outnumbered the defenses.”
Center for Strategic and International Studies analyst Mark Cancian said that “of course” going up against the US is the “most demanding scenario that these systems would face.”
“Now, to be fair to the Russians, in the Ukraine war they’ve been reasonably effective because they aren’t facing a[n] adversary as sophisticated as the United States,” Cancian said in a CSIS webinar on Monday.
Speaking on The Break Out video series by Breaking Defense, Cancian told Editor-in-Chief Aaron Mehta, “The United States probably took [Venezuelan air defenses] out several ways. Cyber might’ve been one piece of it. The United States of course has anti-radiation missiles to take out the radars themselves. We certainly used some missiles to take out the air defense facilities. Flares, chaff, self-defense systems also probably played a role.
“But the bottom line was that these systems could not face a high level air attack such as the United States can mount, and the Israelis can mount,” he said.
Savelsberg, a frequent Breaking Defense contributor, theorized that lessons from the war in Ukraine may have tipped the American advantage even further.
“Furthermore, while the Venezuelan surface-to-air missile systems are reasonably advanced, they are also used by Russia in the Ukraine war, so it is possible that the US gained considerable intelligence on their operation and, consequently, on effective electronic countermeasures,” he said in an email.
“Lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war may offer another hint,” he continued. “In its 2022 attack on Ukraine, Russia succeeded in destroying a significant fraction of Ukraine’s surface-based air defenses but failed to destroy the systems that Ukraine had moved just prior to the attack. In the subsequent war, Ukraine’s air defenses never stay in the same location for very long, to prevent their destruction on the ground. Unless Venezuela frequently moved its surface-to-air missile launchers prior to the attack, the US would have known exactly which locations to strike.”
Carlton Haelig, a fellow with the Center for a New American Security, echoed the point, saying the “optimum capability” of any air defense system is going to be limited by how well it’s employed and how well-trained its operators are.
“If they hadn’t been moved, that makes them relatively easy to find and fix. You just have to close the kill-chain and destroy them,” he said.
“Ultimately,” Haelig said, “the ability to draw too much in terms of, ‘Well does that mean Russian air defenses are not that good?’ from this, or even the Iranian operations … is, to me in my mind, a little bit limited.”
Still, Cancian said the back-to-back failures in Iran and Venezuela could cause other nations, many of whom are desperate for air defenses, to think twice about purchasing from Moscow.
“I think prospective buyers have to wonder whether these systems are really capable of standing up the highest level of attack,” Cancian said on the CSIS webinar. “[If] I were a purchaser, I’d be scratching my head about just how good these systems are.”
breakingdefense.com · Lee Ferran
8. Aldrich Ames, most damaging CIA traitor in agency history, dies at 84
Summary:
Aldrich H. Ames, a longtime CIA officer who spied for Moscow from 1985 until his arrest in February 1994, died on January 5 at the federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland. He was 84. The breach is widely described as the CIA’s most damaging, tied to the exposure of many Soviet and Warsaw Pact sources and the deaths of at least 10 recruited agents. Ames said money drove him, but also a habit of compartmentalizing loyalty and consequence. He received more than $1 million, lived lavishly, pleaded guilty in 1994, and served life without parole.
Comment: One of our very worst traitors. I know what the experts say about the psychology of traitors but it still boggles my mind that anyone could be a traitor like this (a naive thought I know but I just can't put myself in his shoes - how do you "compartmentalize loyalty and consequence?").
We probably still are learning lessons from our counterintelligence failures here.
Aldrich Ames, most damaging CIA traitor in agency history, dies at 84
Washington Post · Walter Pincus
Yesterday at 6:43 p.m. EST
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2026/01/06/aldrich-ames-dead-cia-traitor/?location=alert&utm
Aldrich H. Ames, the CIA officer whose spying for Moscow was the most damaging breach in the agency’s history, reportedly causing the deaths of at least 10 recruited CIA or allied intelligence agents, died Jan. 5 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland. He was 84.
His death was recorded in the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ inmate database, which did not say how he died, and confirmed by a spokesman for the agency.
“Financial troubles, immediate and continuing,” Mr. Ames said matter-of-factly, were what led him to spy for the Soviet Union and to remain a double agent for nine years, until the moment of his arrest in February 1994. He had continued to spy for Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in late 1991.
But money, he said, was not the only reason he could justify to himself what became the Central Intelligence Agency’s worst security loss in its then 47-year history.
When Mr. Ames was interviewed by The Washington Post at the jail in Alexandria, Virginia, nine weeks after his arrest, he calmly attributed his willingness to undertake what prosecutors described as “a crime that caused people to die” to a mentality shaped long before he began his work for the Soviets.
He had been in the spy and counterspy business for 31 years, usually disguised as a State Department official while working undercover as a CIA operative. That dual existence had caused him to compartmentalize his thinking, said Mr. Ames, who would plead guilty in court the next day.
Asked how he could sell sensitive secrets, given his loyalty oaths and his feelings about his country and his family, Mr. Ames replied, “I tend to put some of these things in separate boxes, and compartment feelings and thoughts.”
He added, “I felt at least the way I’m selling these guys down the river, I’m exposing myself to the same fate.”
Mr. Ames turned over to Moscow the names of recruited Soviet and Warsaw Pact agents and information about hundreds of intelligence operations. In return, he received more than $1 million in cash and was promised at least another $1 million and property in Russia.
Russian officials told author Pete Earley, who wrote a book about Mr. Ames, that the money Moscow owed Mr. Ames would be delivered to his wife and son in some way.
On April 28, 1994, in front of a packed courtroom that included his weeping wife, Rosario, and some former CIA colleagues, Mr. Ames said he “betrayed a serious trust,” but then he tried to play down the damage caused by what he had done as a double agent.
“These spy wars,” Ames said dryly, “are a sideshow which have had no real impact on our significant security interests over the years.”
In his plea agreement, Mr. Ames admitted to giving his KGB handler the names of “virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me” along with a “huge quantity of information on United States foreign, defense and security policies.”
In a typically ironic turn of phrase, Mr. Ames added: “For those persons in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere who may have suffered from my actions, I have the deepest sympathy, even empathy. We made similar choices and suffer similar consequences.”
A certain pride
Mr. Ames clearly took pride in what he offered the Soviets. During the interview the day before his court appearance, he said that in 1985, when he started selling secrets, he was “one of the most knowledgeable people in the intelligence community on the Russian intelligence service. And my access to information and my knowledge of the Soviets was such that I could get virtually anything I wanted.”
“There was this strange transfer of loyalties,” he said. “It wasn’t to the Soviet system, which I believe was a beastly, inhuman, nasty regime.” Instead, he suggested, that he had become disillusioned with U.S. intelligence and had shifted his loyalty to a way of life and a world he considered above the petty concerns of governments.
At the time, Mr. Ames was in the middle of a divorce with his first wife, the former Nancy Segebarth, another CIA officer, and had fallen in love with Maria del Rosario Casas. They met in Mexico City, where she worked in the Colombian Embassy and he was meeting regularly with a KGB officer as they attempted to recruit each other.
While in Washington in April 1985, he walked into the Soviet Embassy and offered up the names of two CIA-recruited agents, for which he was later given $50,000. Some months after that, he followed up with the names of all the Soviet and Warsaw Pact agents he knew the CIA and FBI had recruited, without immediately asking for money. The Soviets, intrigued, told him that he would eventually receive up to $2 million.
A year later, CIA transferred him to Rome, where he continued to hand over documents on a regular basis. Back in Washington in 1989, he began making document transfers, using hiding places in obscure areas and signals left on mailboxes and utility poles.
Although the CIA and FBI were aware that secrets were being stolen — as their Russian agents began to disappear — it took years to focus on Mr. Ames. His lifestyle in the Washington area, a Jaguar and a $540,000 house bought for cash in Virginia, had raised no questions.
Mr. Ames was 52 when he was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole. He pleaded guilty as part of an agreement that provided leniency to his then-41-year-old wife, Rosario, who had been charged as a participant in the spying.
At the time, their son Paul was 5 and had gone to live with his grandmother in Colombia. Rosario was sentenced to five years and three months in prison, but she was released after four years, in part so she could return to her home in Bogotá and to her son.
At the Allenwood, Pennsylvania, maximum security prison, Mr. Ames studied law in the prison library and filed several lawsuits. In 1998, he went before a federal judge in Pennsylvania to fight a $404,392 tax bill from the Internal Revenue Service, which was seeking back taxes and penalties on the more than $1 million he received from Moscow for espionage between 1989 and 1992. He lost the case.
In prison, Mr. Ames met with Robert Benedetti, a film producer who was an acquaintance from their time together at the University of Chicago. Benedetti interviewed Mr. Ames in prison, and the result was a 1998 movie that aired on the Showtime cable network: “Aldrich Ames: Traitor Within,” with Timothy Hutton as Mr. Ames.
Aldrich Hazen Ames was born in River Falls, Wisconsin, on May 26, 1941. His father, Carleton, was a professor at what is now the University of Wisconsin at River Falls. His mother, the former Rachel Aldrich, taught English at the local high school.
In 1952, the family moved to the Virginia suburbs, and his father went to work for the CIA’s clandestine service. Carleton Ames retired in 1967 at age 62.
Meanwhile, in 1957, young “Rick” Ames got a summer job at the CIA marking classified documents for filing after his sophomore year at McLean High School. He returned to the CIA job the following two summers before going to the University of Chicago to major in drama.
He dropped out of college, worked in Chicago for a year and then returned to the Washington area and a clerk-typist job at the CIA. He spent five years getting a degree from George Washington University and, in 1967, he was accepted in the CIA Career Trainee Program, which led to his becoming a CIA case officer.
Despite repeated reports of a drinking problem, he was assigned in the early 1990s to CIA’s Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group, where he had access to the names of double-agent operations.
In September 2015, some 170 letters that Mr. Ames sent to his sister Nancy describing his 11 years in Allenwood were put up for auction. In them, according to a sales brochure, Mr. Ames describes “plans for legal appeals with his attorney, reports on a serious prison guard threat, arranges for newspaper and television interviews, and reveals a lengthy and very cultivated accounting of the books and magazines he reads in prison.”
The auction house put an estimated price on the hundreds of handwritten pages at $10,000 to $12,000. A subsequent news column reported that they sold for $4,000.
Over the years, Mr. Ames kept up with events that interested him. In 2000, he sent a handwritten letter to Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, commenting on Aftergood’s article on polygraphs in Science magazine.
Mr. Ames began caustically, “Having had considerable experience with the polygraph (well beyond that which you referred to),” and went on to critique the practice and practitioners, saying, “Like most junk science that just won’t die (graphology, astrology and homeopathy come to mind), because of the usefulness or profit their practitioners enjoy, the polygraph stays with us.”
Years earlier he had beaten the polygraphers, and he did not want anyone to forget that.
Washington Post · Walter Pincus
9. U.K. and France Agree to Set Up Military Hubs Across Ukraine After Cease-Fire
Summary:
Britain and France say they will establish military hubs across Ukraine and build protected facilities to produce weapons and equipment if a cease-fire is reached. The hubs are meant to organize allied support, speed sustainment, and make Ukrainian forces harder to outlast. The plan sits inside a wider package under discussion: long-term military commitments, legally binding pledges to aid Ukraine if Russia attacks again, and U.S. monitoring and a possible U.S. “backstop” that could include logistics, surveillance, and, if war resumes, additional military help. Territory remains the central obstacle to any deal.
Comment: If Russia can pause, rearm, and probe again, what specific trigger and enforcement mechanism makes these hubs a deterrent, not just a promise?
U.K. and France Agree to Set Up Military Hubs Across Ukraine After Cease-Fire
WSJ
Commitments would come as part of a potential agreement to end war with Russia that Western allies are discussing
By Laurence Norman
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and Noemie Bisserbe
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Updated Jan. 6, 2026 3:45 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/u-k-and-france-agree-to-set-up-military-hubs-across-ukraine-after-ceasefire-3d69c8fc?mod=hp_lead_pos11
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer met Tuesday in Paris. Tom Nicholson/Getty Images
The U.K. and France will set up military hubs across Ukraine and build protected facilities to produce weapons and military equipment for the country if a cease-fire agreement is reached between Kyiv and Russia, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Tuesday.
The commitments, which offer some of the clearest details so far of the security guarantees Western allies will offer Ukraine, come as the U.S. continues its push for an end to the fighting between Russia and Ukraine.
On Tuesday, leaders and senior officials from Europe, the U.S. and other partners met in Paris to discuss two of the issues at the heart of peace talks: security guarantees to protect Ukraine from a future Russian attack and a U.S.-led economic package to help Kyiv recover from the war.
European leaders and their allies in Canada, Australia and elsewhere committed to taking part in U.S.-led monitoring and verification of a cease-fire, as well as long-term commitments to Ukraine’s military and legally binding pledges to support Ukraine in the face of a future Russian attack.
A separate Anglo-French agreement with Ukraine spelled out additional help those countries would provide Kyiv following a cease-fire. While Britain and France have said they were prepared to form the core of a reassurance force in Ukraine after the war, the specifics around that support hadn’t previously been set out.
The size of the reassurance force and how many countries would take part remains unclear. Tuesday’s meeting in Paris was called in part because some European countries that had signaled they were prepared to participate in security guarantees for Ukraine appeared to grow nervous about making specific commitments.
Territory has emerged as the central stumbling block to a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. The initial U.S.-led proposal calls for Kyiv to surrender the “Fortress Belt,” the fortified strip of land that forms the backbone of the country’s defenses. Ukraine’s leaders cannot accept this. Illustration: Jason Boone Illustration: Jason Boone
Trump administration officials have made clear that a backstop role for the U.S. is dependent on clear commitments of support from Ukraine’s European allies, according to diplomats involved in discussions.
“American support and participation are very important to many countries,” French President Emmanuel Macron said.
European officials have said they hope the White House will in coming days publicly commit to a U.S. backstop role.
The role of the Anglo-French military hubs in Ukraine will be to provide channels through which the work of Ukraine’s allies can be organized and coordinated, a French official said.
Russia has opposed the presence of forces from North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries in Ukraine after the war, although President Trump and senior U.S. officials have said they are confident they can persuade the Kremlin to agree. Starmer said that Russia’s continued attacks against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure suggest Russian President Vladimir Putin wasn’t willing to compromise.
The U.S. role to backstop the European security guarantees is still to be fully set out but diplomats have said it would include logistical support, technology to monitor the cease-fire and additional military help, including possibly U.S. air power, if Russia resumed the fighting.
In recent days, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that his country still needed greater clarity about how the security guarantees would work in the event of a future Russian invasion. Washington has committed to send to Congress the U.S. backstop to the security guarantees, something Zelensky has pressed for.
On Tuesday, Zelensky called the latest work on security guarantees “good steps forward” but said Kyiv hoped to see the pledges converted into formal documents backed by Western parliaments. “It’s still not enough,” he said.
Speaking alongside Zelensky and British and German leaders, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff said he thought Ukraine’s partners “are largely finished with security protocols” to give Kyiv assurances.
“The president strongly, strongly stands behind security protocols,” Witkoff said. “Those security protocols are meant to A, deter any attacks, any further attacks in Ukraine and B, if there are any attacks, they are meant to defend. And they will do both. The president does not back down from his commitments.”
Witkoff said Ukraine, the U.S. and other partners were “very, very close to finishing up” robust economic support for postwar Ukraine.
The meetings Tuesday, which also included Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, come during fresh turbulence in the trans-Atlantic relationship amid concerns about Washington’s talk of taking over Greenland, an autonomous territory in the Kingdom of Denmark. European leaders brushed aside questions on the issue.
Zelensky and Witkoff said work needs to be done to line up the U.S., European and Ukrainian teams on the peace terms they want to put to Russia. Both said there still needs to be discussion on what territory Kyiv will need to cede as part of a peace deal, which is by far the most controversial aspect of an agreement.
Russia is demanding Ukraine cede well-fortified territory in its eastern Donbas region that Kyiv still controls.
Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com and Noemie Bisserbe at noemie.bisserbe@wsj.com
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Appeared in the January 7, 2026, print edition as 'U.K., France Plan to Set Up Military Hubs in Ukraine'.
WSJ
10. Alarm Spreads Among U.S. Allies Over Trump’s Demand for Greenland
Summary:
Alarm is spreading across Europe as POTUS Trump revives demands to bring Greenland under U.S. control, framing it as a national security necessity after the Venezuela operation. Denmark and key NATO allies warn that any coercive move against a Danish territory would shatter alliance cohesion and accelerate a shift toward spheres of influence politics. European leaders, already reluctant to confront Washington because of dependence on U.S. power against Russia, fear this episode could irreparably damage NATO’s credibility and the rules-based order. Greenland has become a test case for whether alliance norms still restrain great-power behavior.
Comment: Frankly, I am having trouble grasping this. I mean I get the geo-strategic importance of Greenland especially when we study the maps from an arctic view. But is Greenland at risk from China or Russia? What is the real benefit to us owning versus a NATO ally providing the US complete and unfettered access to it?
If allies conclude that U.S. power now overrides alliance consent, what incentive remains for them to trust NATO as a collective security system rather than hedge against Washington itself?
Alarm Spreads Among U.S. Allies Over Trump’s Demand for Greenland
WSJ
European leaders, reluctant to criticize Trump over Venezuela, fear irreparable damage to NATO if he seizes the Danish territory
By
Marcus Walker
in Rome and
Matthew Dalton
in Paris
Jan. 6, 2026 10:27 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/alarm-spreads-among-u-s-allies-over-trumps-demand-for-greenland-2235f65c?mod=hp_lead_pos2
President Trump has framed his desire to control Greenland as a matter of national defense. Oscar Scott Carl for WSJ
President Trump’s embrace of military interventionism in Latin America has led to the diplomatic equivalent of embarrassed coughing from the U.S.’s allies in Europe. But his renewed designs on the Danish territory of Greenland are causing growing alarm.
Since Saturday’s U.S. military raid on Caracas that captured Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, Trump has threatened to use force elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere and redoubled his demand for a U.S. takeover of Greenland.
Denmark has urged the U.S. to stop threatening the territory of a historic ally and warned that any U.S. military operation to seize Greenland would spell the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Major European NATO members rallied to Denmark’s side, calling on the U.S. to choose cooperation, not coercion, in a joint statement on Tuesday.
The past few days have renewed fears in Europe that the Western alliance is fracturing. Trump’s growing taste for big-stick diplomacy in the Americas is adding to fears among traditional allies that the U.S. is actively dismantling the post-World War II international order, based on principles such as protecting the sovereignty of states and limiting the use of military force.
In its place, allies fear, is a division of the world into great-power spheres of influence, with the U.S., China and Russia becoming regional hegemons while curtailing the sovereignty of smaller countries.
President Trump speaks with reporters aboard Air Force One. Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
French President Emmanuel Macron Thomas Padilla/Associated Press
Faced with that specter, European governments’ instinct has been to try to salvage what’s left of the West, including by taking an emollient line on U.S. intervention in Venezuela to avoid angering Trump.
In European capitals, the message has been good riddance to Maduro—but that Trump’s way of removing him maybe wasn’t ideal.
French President Emmanuel Macron initially said Venezuelans could rejoice at Maduro’s fall. A spokeswoman later said the president didn’t support the method of military intervention. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer avoided taking a view on whether the U.S. raid on Caracas violated international law.
European leaders’ caution drew widespread criticism at home, with politicians and commentators saying the continent is failing to stand up for the rules-based international order, at the same time as it is trying to defend that order against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“Europeans are afraid of Trump,” said Pascal Boniface, director of the Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, a think tank in Paris. “I think this fear will fuel the aggressive Donald Trump more than it will calm him down.”
A Danish military ship in Nuuk, Greenland. Oscar Scott Carl for WSJ
Russia’s war on Ukraine and its broader assault on Europe’s post-Cold War order are the main reasons for the continent’s reluctance to criticize Trump, many officials and analysts say.
Europe’s democracies are reviving their military spending after years of neglect, but still aren’t capable of containing an expansionist Russia without U.S. military might.
But Trump’s first year back in power has already led to a crisis of trust in the trans-Atlantic alliance, leading critics in Europe to wonder why governments are still desperate to avoid angering him.
The White House’s proposals to end the war in Ukraine, widely seen as favoring Russia, were followed by the publication of a new U.S. National Security Strategy that defines Europe’s immigration policies—but not Russian revanchism—as a problem for U.S. security.
In contrast with their reticence on Venezuela, European governments saw little choice but to speak out on Greenland.
Trump has framed his desire to control Greenland as a matter of national defense. “We need Greenland from a national security situation. It’s so strategic,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday.
After military action in Venezuela, President Trump turned his attention to the rest of the hemisphere, calling an operation against Colombia “good to me” and repeating his desire for Greenland. Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
European alarm has grown further as other administration officials echo Trump’s rhetoric. Top White House aide Stephen Miller questioned Denmark’s right to control Greenland in an interview with CNN on Monday, saying Greenland should “obviously” belong to the U.S. because the U.S. was the dominant power in NATO. He declined to rule out a military operation, adding that nobody would fight the U.S. military for Greenland.
Denmark has said there is no need for the U.S. to take over Greenland to protect American security. The U.S. already has a military base on the island and can work with Greenland and Denmark to expand its presence under existing treaties.
On Tuesday the leaders of France, Germany, the U.K., Italy, Poland and Spain backed Denmark’s position in a joint statement, calling for respect for territorial integrity and cooperation with the U.S. on Arctic security. Only Danes and Greenlanders can decide their own fate, the statement said.
Whether Trump moves on Greenland could depend on how the U.S. intervention in Venezuela pans out, said Nathalie Tocci, a former diplomatic adviser to the European Union and a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
If Trump succeeds in securing the obedience of Venezuela’s remaining leadership and U.S. control of its oil production, “then in that scenario the appetite for intervention can only grow, whether it’s in Greenland, Mexico or Colombia,” said Tocci.
“But if the U.S. gets bogged down in a Latin American mess, then the appetite and capacity to intervene in other parts of the world will diminish,” she said.
Write to Marcus Walker at Marcus.Walker@wsj.com and Matthew Dalton at Matthew.Dalton@wsj.com
Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the January 7, 2026, print edition as 'President’s Greenland Demand Spreads Alarm Among Allies'.
WSJ
11. Opinion | Invade Greenland? Why?
Summary:
The WSJ editorial argues POTUS Trump is right about Greenland’s strategic value but wrong to let the issue drift into coercive “invade” rhetoric. Greenland matters for Arctic access, submarine lanes, U.S. missile defense radars, and rare-earth potential, and the paper says Washington can secure more presence through consent, not threats. Denmark has reportedly accepted requests to expand U.S. military activity, and the U.S. can rebuild Cold War era posture, deepen Arctic partnerships, and pursue mining and infrastructure with allies. The core warning is that bullying Denmark fractures NATO and hands Russia a wedge.
Comment: I just cannot figure out a good answer to the question: Why?
Opinion | Invade Greenland? Why?
WSJ · Invade Greenland? Why?
Trump can gain more access to the island without the bullying.
By The Editorial Board
Follow
Jan. 6, 2026 5:46 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-greenland-stephen-miller-nato-62b166e2?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
Icebergs float in the water off Nuuk, Greenland. Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Americans are trying to figure out President Trump’s goals in Venezuela, but spare a thought this week for Greenland. The President has good strategic instincts about the world’s largest island, so it’s regrettable that his interest is devolving into a self-defeating exercise in U.S. bullying.
“We need Greenland,” Mr. Trump said on Air Force One this weekend. “It’s so strategic. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”
Opinion: Potomac Watch
Tim Walz Bows Out of Re-Election / The Pentagon Censures Mark Kelly
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz ends his campaign for a third term, as the scandal of his state's welfare fraud continues to snowball. Plus, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the Pentagon will censure Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly for a video in which he and other Democrats told the military to refuse “illegal orders."Read Transcript
The U.S. does need to hedge against future Russian and Chinese inroads in the Danish territory. Nearby are vital submarine lanes, and the island hosts U.S. missile-defense radars that protect the homeland. Beneath the ice are reserves of rare-earth minerals. Liberals booed Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton in 2019 when he suggested buying the island, but he had a point.
Yet the operative word was buy—a free agreement among the U.S., our NATO ally Denmark, and Greenland’s 56,000 people. This week presidential adviser Stephen Miller, in one of his familiar beat-the-press showdowns, declined to rule out military force. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” A White House statement Tuesday said Mr. Trump is considering several options, including use of the military.
The invasion talk is probably Trumpian bluster to prod a negotiation to buy the island or end up with some other expanded U.S. presence. But even the suggestion of force is damaging America’s interests across the Atlantic.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen was candid that “if the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything will come to an end,” including NATO. The truth of that statement is what makes military action from Mr. Trump hard to take seriously.
But feuding with friends over Greenland is giving Vladimir Putin another wedge to divide America from Europe to his benefit. That means less U.S. leverage for driving a good and durable Ukraine settlement.
Nothing precludes Mr. Trump from shoring up America’s position on Greenland, including mining to reduce U.S. reliance on China. A bipartisan statement from U.S. lawmakers Tuesday noted that Denmark has accepted “every request to increase our military presence on the island.”
The U.S. could restore its larger military footprint on Greenland from the Cold War—and perhaps ensure enduring access even if Greenland someday changes its political relationship with Denmark.
Mr. Trump could also continue leveraging U.S. relationships as a force multiplier in the Arctic. An under-appreciated Trump Administration achievement is a deal last fall to build 11 icebreakers with Finland. The Danes spent 3.2% of their economy on defense last year, up from 1.15% in 2014, so they can contribute. These alliances are better for U.S. interests than grabbing a new territory—and its domestic politics—against the will of the locals.
Mr. Trump has enough on his hands elsewhere that the Greenland spat may blow over. But Mr. Miller’s line in the same interview that the world is “governed by power” and force is revealing. The left is deploying absurd false equivalences to accuse Mr. Trump in Venezuela of violating international law, which exists only as long as civilized nations exist. Western military power is indispensable.
But the corollary is that successful U.S. presidents don’t reduce America’s role in the world to might-makes-right. Maybe the Greenland affair is merely what now passes for online MAGA entertainment. But Mr. Trump would help his own cause in every hemisphere if he dropped the invade-Greenland routine.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz ends his campaign for a third term, as the scandal of his state's welfare fraud continues to snowball. Plus, the Pentagon will censure Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly for telling the military to refuse “illegal orders."
Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the January 7, 2026, print edition as 'Invade Greenland? Why?'.
WSJ · Invade Greenland? Why?
12. Pentagon will begin review of 'effectiveness' of women in ground combat positions
Summary:
The Pentagon has ordered a six month review of whether women in ground combat roles improve or degrade unit “operational effectiveness,” a decade after the last restrictions were lifted. Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel Anthony Tata directed the Army and Marine Corps to provide data on readiness, training performance, casualties, and command climate, plus any internal studies on integration, to the Institute for Defense Analyses by mid-January. Pentagon spokespeople frame the effort as enforcing elite, sex-neutral standards and rejecting quota driven policy. Critics argue the review is designed to justify excluding women, while proponents cite prior findings that qualified women perform comparably.
Comment: Is it worth the time and resources to do another study? Or are we just seeking a certain desired outcome?
If standards are already sex-neutral, what new evidence would justify changing who is eligible rather than how standards are enforced?
Is “effectiveness” being measured at the individual level, or at the unit design level where cohesion, injury rates, and replacement pipelines may drive outcomes?
Pentagon will begin review of 'effectiveness' of women in ground combat positions
NPR · Tom Bowman · January 6, 2026
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/06/nx-s1-5667583/pentagon-review-women-in-ground-combat-roles
United States Marine Corps recruits from Lima Company, the first gender integrated training class in San Diego, receive a safety briefing on April 21, 2021 at Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, California. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
The Pentagon is mounting a six-month review of women in ground combat jobs, to ensure what it calls the military "effectiveness" of having several thousand female soldiers and Marines in infantry, armor and artillery, according to a memo obtained by NPR.
Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel Anthony Tata wrote in a memo last month that the effort is to determine the "operational effectiveness of ground combat units 10 years after the Department lifted all remaining restrictions on women serving in combat roles."
Tata requested Army and Marine leaders to provide data on the readiness, training, performance, casualties and command climate of ground combat units and personnel. The services are to provide points of contact no later than January 15th to the Institute for Defense Analyses, a non-profit corporation that assists the government on national security issues. The memo says the data should include "all available metrics describing that individual's readiness and ability to deploy (including physical, medical, and other measures of ability to deploy.)"
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Moreover, the seven-page memo calls for any internal research and studies — not publicly available — on "the integration of women in combat."
"We should not have women in combat roles"
Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson wrote in an e-mail to NPR that the study is to "ensure standards are met and the United States maintains the most lethal military. Our standards for combat arms positions will be elite uniform, and sex neutral because the weight of a rucksack or a human being doesn't care if you're a man or a woman. Under (Defense) Secretary (Pete) Hegseth, the Department of War's [sic] will not compromise standards to satisfy quotas or an ideological agenda—this is common sense."
Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, opposed women in ground combat units while he was a Fox News host and author. "I'm straight up saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn't made us more effective. Hasn't made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated," he said in a November 2024 podcast hosted by Shawn Ryan. But during his confirmation hearing last year he softened his stance, saying women can serve in combat roles as long as they meet the same standards as men.
Pete Hegseth speaks to senior military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Sept. 30, 2025 in Quantico, Va. In his remarks, Hegseth told admirals and generals that women must meet the "highest male standard." Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
During a September address to admirals and generals at Marine Base Quantico in Virginia, Hegseth announced that women must meet the "highest male standard."
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"Any place where tried and true physical standards were altered, especially since 2015, when combat standards were changed to ensure females could qualify, must be returned to their original standard." But he did not say he was barring women from ground combat roles.
"When it comes to any job that requires physical power to perform in combat, those physical standards must be high and gender neutral," Hegseth said. "If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is. If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it. That is not the intent, but it could be the result."
Women currently in ground combat units
Of all soldiers serving in combat units in the Army, women make up a small fraction: a total of some 3,800 women serve in infantry, armor and artillery. Among them are more than 150 women who completed the arduous Ranger training. A small number of women — around 10 or so — passed Green Beret training. The Marines have about 700 females in these ground combat jobs. And in all these jobs, women must meet the same standards as their male counterparts.
Ellen Haring, a senior research fellow at Women in International Security, is a West Point graduate and retired Army colonel with 30 years in uniform, dismissed the Pentagon review as a way to exclude women from ground combat.
"It's exactly what [Hegseth] said all along," she said. "He's against women in combat and he's going to get them out. It's going to be an effort to prove women don't belong."
Meanwhile, Khris Fuhr, also a West Point graduate who worked on gender integration for the Army Forces Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, said an Army study between 2018 to 2023 found that women performed well in ground combat units, and in some cases had higher scores than male soldiers. She called the upcoming Pentagon study, "a solution for a problem that doesn't exist."
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Then Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced at a Pentagon press conference in 2015 that women would be admitted to all ground combat positions, saying it made no sense to exclude half the population from serving in those jobs.
"As long as they qualify and meet the standards," Carter said, "Women will now be able to contribute to our mission in ways they could not before."
But the decision was a controversial one, especially among the Marine Corps. Then Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Joe Dunford, didn't attend the press conference and instead put out a statement saying "my responsibility is to ensure his decision is properly implemented."
Marines privately bristled at the announcement. They conducted a training exercise in the Mojave desert in 2015 that found gender-integrated units were slower, less lethal and more prone to injury than all-male units. Marine officers also said accepting women would lead to greater risk, meaning more Marine combat casualties. Carter said he saw it differently.
While the Marine exercise found that teams that included women were overall less effective, Defense Secretary Carter pointed out that the study failed to focus on individual achievement. Advocates of women in combat say the exercise failed to consider high-achieving women in those combat roles.
NPR · Tom Bowman · January 6, 2026
13. Rubio Has Long Dreamed of Changing Latin America. Embracing MAGA Opened the Door.
Summary:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has become the public face of POTUS’s Venezuela strategy after the Jan. 3 raid that captured Nicolás Maduro. Once a Trump critic, Rubio has moved into the MAGA inner circle, working closely with senior White House officials and presenting the operation as tied to core priorities like migration, drugs, and reasserting U.S. dominance in the hemisphere. He has served as the main conduit to interim leader Delcy Rodríguez, laying out U.S. demands on oil, outside partnerships, and commercial terms, while trying to prevent the raid from becoming an open-ended nation-building project that could damage his future ambitions.
Comment: But did he dream of becoming the "Viceroy of Venezuela?"
Rubio Has Long Dreamed of Changing Latin America. Embracing MAGA Opened the Door.
WSJ
Once a Trump critic, the secretary of state has become one of president’s closest advisers
By Robbie Gramer
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, Vera Bergengruen
Follow
and Alex Leary
Follow
Jan. 7, 2026 5:30 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/rubio-has-long-dreamed-of-changing-latin-america-embracing-maga-opened-the-door-5a7912e4
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has emerged as the public face of U.S. policy on Venezuela. Tom Williams/Zuma Press
WASHINGTON—Hours after U.S. special-operations forces captured the Venezuela strongman Nicolás Maduro, Marco Rubio issued a warning to the South American nation’s allies: “Don’t play games.”
The secretary of state, standing alongside President Trump at Mar-a-Lago, warned that Cuba and other countries hostile to U.S. interests shouldn’t test the president. “It’s not going to turn out well,” he said.
Rubio’s remarks, delivered with Trump-like bravado, represented the culmination of a decadelong evolution from an establishment conservative to a MAGA disciple that landed him at the center of Trump’s biggest foreign-policy gamble yet. The moment also marked a victory for the son of Cuban immigrants who has long sought to confront the hemisphere’s strongmen.
Rubio is now saddled with perhaps the riskiest assignment of his career. He must keep the daring operation that deposed Maduro from turning into a calamitous nation-building mission that could threaten his political ambitions.
Rubio has emerged as the public face of Trump’s Venezuela strategy, defending the president on television, working to reassure angry lawmakers of both parties and communicating Washington’s demands to Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez.
The secretary of state became the administration’s main conduit to Rodríguez as the U.S. worked to establish an open line to Caracas in the raid’s chaotic aftermath. He has conducted his several calls with Rodríguez in Spanish to limit the risk of miscommunication, according to administration officials.
Demonstrators in Miami last weekend celebrated the U.S. raid of Venezuela. Cristóbal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA/Shutterstock
In those calls, he has laid out White House demands, that Venezuela distance itself from Russia, Iran and China, halt the sale of oil to U.S. adversaries and agree to a range of favorable terms for American oil companies, according to people familiar with the discussions.
In his attempts to articulate the rationale behind the operation, Rubio has left lawmakers wanting more information—and he has at times been contradicted by his boss. He hasn’t publicly detailed how or whether the U.S. will push long term for a democratic transition in Venezuela or how long it will continue working with the security establishment that brutally enforced Maduro’s rule.
On Sunday, Rubio appeared to walk back Trump’s assertion that the U.S. would run the country, saying the administration is instead “running policy” using sanctions on oil shipments to and from Venezuela as leverage. Hours later, Trump offered a different assessment: “We’re in charge.”
Over the past year, Rubio has become one of the president’s most-trusted advisers, according to administration officials, winning over Trump allies who once dismissed the former Florida senator and presidential candidate as a neoconservative and a globalist. It is a remarkable shift for Rubio, who once called Trump a “con artist” who was hijacking the conservative movement. Trump hit back at “little Marco.”
Rubio, 54 years old, has White House ambitions of his own, according to his allies, and Trump has stoked competition between Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, who is seen as the MAGA movement’s likely successor. Rubio has privately said he wouldn’t challenge Vance for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028, and people close to him have said he is open to running on the ticket, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
Rubio was one of the administration’s most forceful proponents of removing Maduro from power, according to U.S. officials. Working with homeland security adviser Stephen Miller, Rubio cast Maduro’s ouster as central to the priorities Trump campaigned on: curbing the flow of drugs into the U.S., deporting migrants and reasserting U.S. dominance in the region.
“Mr. President Donald Trump, watch out, because Mr. Rubio wants to stain your hands with blood,” Maduro said in September.
President Trump with Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan at Mar-a-Lago last month. Alex Brandon/AP
Last weekend’s incursion vaulted Rubio into viral stardom in Latin America, where AI-generated images depicted him as “Capitán América” and “San Rubio,” his face emblazoned on a Catholic prayer candle. Right-wing influencers have widely shared video of Rubio singing along with a Pitbull song on New Year’s Eve.
“He’s finally achieving his life’s work,” said Carlos Trujillo, a Rubio ally who served as ambassador to the Organization of American States in the first Trump administration.
Rubio’s ascendance in the MAGA world has infuriated some of his former colleagues in the Senate, which confirmed him as secretary of state by a 99-0 vote, including Democratic lawmakers who hoped he would restrain Trump. “I think he’s had a full MAGA lobotomy,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.) said last year at a hearing.
Rubio has been focused on Venezuela for nearly two decades. In the Florida Legislature and later the U.S. Senate, he built his political brand by pushing U.S. pressure campaigns against authoritarian leftist governments in Latin America.
During Trump’s first term, Rubio worked with the White House to orchestrate a diplomatic campaign to pressure Maduro from power after he was widely accused of stealing Venezuela’s elections. The campaign failed.
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The week after he won a second term, Trump announced Rubio as his pick to run the State Department. He became the first Hispanic American to hold the post.
Those who hoped Rubio would use his deep experience to reshape Trump’s foreign policy have seen him instead embrace and implement the president’s impulses with a zeal that has surprised even some allies.
Despite being a longtime advocate of foreign aid, Rubio backed the dismantling of USAID and adopted Trump’s combative posture toward allies he once reassured. He has imposed visa bans on Europeans he accused of censoring free speech, threatened retaliation if Panama resisted Trump’s demands over the canal and warned that the president’s interest in annexing Greenland is “not a joke.” The onetime architect of immigration overhaul has become an enforcer of Trump’s agenda, negotiating a deal to imprison U.S. deportees in El Salvador.
“He has adopted the Trump transactional view of foreign policy, which is certainly not the view he took in the Senate,” said Elliott Abrams, who served in foreign-policy positions in three Republican administrations, including for Trump.
Rubio has established a rapport with Trump, administration officials said. He spends little of his time at the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom, instead working out of the White House within arm’s reach of the president. The two share a love for sports and have common allies, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, a fellow Floridian.
In confronting Maduro, Rubio found an ally in Miller, who as a Senate aide attacked bipartisan immigration legislation Rubio helped craft. In 2023, Miller helped with a book launch for Rubio, and the two men developed a closer working relationship.
Rubio gave Latin America and the Caribbean unusual attention for a U.S. secretary of state, traveling to 10 countries in the region in his first year. Rubio’s focus on Latin America put him on a collision course with Ric Grenell, a special envoy whom Trump had dispatched to Caracas to negotiate with Maduro, and who had been passed over for the secretary of state job.
Grenell favored a different approach, advocating for the White House to work with Maduro to secure the release of U.S. detainees, negotiate deportation flights and open Venezuela’s oil-and-mineral reserves. Ultimately, Grenell was sidelined as the harder line that Rubio advocated for took shape, according to administration officials.
By late summer, senior officials were drawing up options to remove Maduro from power. Rubio began to meet regularly with Miller, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe and Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to discuss the potential military operation.
When Maduro refused the offramps, Rubio and other senior aides concluded he wasn’t willing to negotiate seriously, according to administration officials. After Maduro rejected an offer Dec. 23 to leave for exile in another country, Trump decided to launch the military operation.
As news and video footage first emerged of the raid in the early hours of Jan. 3, some Republican lawmakers who have criticized what they call presidential overreach in foreign wars voiced apprehension about the capture of a foreign leader. Rubio quickly intervened.
In a social-media post shortly after 3 a.m., Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah questioned “what, if anything, might constitutionally justify this action.”
At roughly 5 a.m., Rubio called Lee directly to address his concerns. By that evening, Lee was posting memes of Rubio in Latin American military regalia.
Write to Robbie Gramer at robbie.gramer@wsj.com, Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com and Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com
Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
WSJ
14. Philippine Navy scrambles to shield vital undersea cables from spies
Summary:
The Philippine Navy has intensified patrols and monitoring to protect undersea communication cables that carry the bulk of the Philippines’ internet and financial data. Officials warn the cables are vulnerable to espionage, sabotage, and coercion as strategic competition sharpens, particularly near contested waters. The navy is coordinating with civilian agencies, telecom providers, and allies to improve domain awareness, deploy sensors, and rehearse rapid response to disruptions. The effort reflects growing concern that gray-zone operations targeting critical seabed infrastructure could paralyze economies without a single shot fired, making cable security a frontline national defense issue.
Comment: I do not think most of us recognize the huge threat that China (and others) pose to these cables. But I also do not know what alternative there is. I do not think all that data cannot be transmitted by satellite.
Philippine Navy scrambles to shield vital undersea cables from spies
Defense News · Leilani Chavez
MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine Navy is exploring ways to monitor subsea cables as part of larger efforts to protect underwater infrastructure from sabotage and spying.
Numerous submarine cables crisscross the Philippines’ underwater domain, including cables that connect Southeast Asia to the United States, India and Hong Kong. Data that passes through these channels is vital for economics, trade and communications.
Navies across Southeast Asia have raised concerns over cable-cutting incidents reported in the Taiwan Strait, the Red Sea and the Baltic Sea.
For Philippine authorities, the sheer volume of reported incidents “exceeds the scope of accidents that are expected to be natural or incidental,” said Nestor Gerico, deputy director general of the Philippines’ National Security Council.
“These incidents are not random,” Gerico said. “These are potential acts of aggression.”
High-level policy discussions between the government and the country’s security forces about countermeasures have already begun, according to Navy inspector general Rear Adm. Roy Vincent Trinidad. Ultimately, the responsibility of protecting subsea infrastructure will fall under the purview of the sea service.
While specific capabilities have not been disclosed, Trinidad said that surveillance would entail capturing detailed imagery of underwater terrains to establish seabed profiles and monitor environmental changes over time.
“That would give us further reasons to focus on specific areas,” Trinidad said. “It is still in the exploratory stages, but we have been conducting exercises on this with other navies, especially with our defense treaty ally, the United States,” he added.
In 2024, the Philippines acquired four MANTAS T-12 unmanned surface vessels from the United States to boost maritime surveillance. The small, electric, submersible drones are capable of monitoring underwater territories and are equipped with cameras, sonars, lidars and modems.
Besides the outright destruction of seafloor lines of communication, the Philippine Navy is wary of another threat: adversaries hacking or tapping into the cables to steal data flowing through them.
Although reports are limited, submarine cable tapping has taken place in the Mediterranean Sea, and according to Trinidad, this could also happen in the Philippines.
Forensic investigations of underwater drones discovered along key maritime corridors could be linked to the apprehension of suspected sleeper agents and espionage operations across the archipelago in previous years, he said.
“There are ways to listen to what is being transferred in different undersea cables. And hostile groups could tap into those cables,” Trinidad said.
Lawmakers here have claimed to have information on a large network of sleeper agents from China and the presence of members of the People’s Liberation Army within the country.
The Chinese Embassy in Manila called the allegations“baseless speculation and accusation.”
Unclaimed drones
After a pivot to external defense, the Philippines has undertaken several measures to protect critical infrastructure. In 2024, the defense department and the military banned the use of Chinese social media apps among soldiers, a prelude to a long-running crackdown on espionage activities.
Local courts are currently adjudicating cases involving 13 Chinese nationals, along with five Filipino and one Cambodian accomplice, who have been apprehended on suspicion of espionage.
Suspects were caught taking photos of critical military infrastructures in Luzon and of American ships docking in Subic Bay.
The underwater domain faces similar threats, authorities say, after six to seven drones with Chinese markings were washed ashore and collected by fishermen in previous years.
The Navy had received reports of drone activities as early as five years ago, but incidents only raised suspicions in 2023 after a drone was sighted in the Kalayaan Island Group, a chain of Philippine-controlled maritime features including Pag-asa Island (Thitu Island) in the South China Sea.
Drones have also been collected from the Philippine Sea in the country’s east, which flows into the East China Sea and the Pacific. The waterways saw increased traffic from Chinese research vessels and warships, including the PLA Navy’s Liaoning aircraft carrier.
Forensic investigation indicates that one of these drones sent information to a private firm in China. The naval drones collect dual-use information which could be used for research. But experts believe they are being released in Philippine waters to map out major mobility corridors for military use.
That data is a prerequisite for naval assets, like submarines, to safely enter Philippine waters, Rommel Jude Ong, professor at the Manila-based Ateneo de Manila University, told Defense News. Ong is a former rear admiral of the Philippine Navy and retired as vice commander in 2019.
“If the drones are for scientific purposes and launched without malice, operators should have claimed them after military reports, but nobody came out and claimed the drones, so it’s not for scientific reasons — these are covertly released for naval and military reasons,” Ong said.
In recent years, the Navy here has increased surveillance and monitoring operations and has steadily expanded its surface fleets and missile systems. The military has developed drone units and officials mentioned plans to acquire counter-drone tech, but specifics are sparse.
The defense department did not disclose planned acquisitions in the ongoing third phase of its modernization plan. But Trinidad said the shopping list includes both manned and unmanned platforms for subsea monitoring since the “underwater domain is a necessary capability.”
About Leilani Chavez
Leilani Chavez is an Asia correspondent for Defense News. Her reporting expertise is in East Asian politics, development projects, environmental issues and security.
15. Lockheed Martin to Increase Patriot Missile Production Under Pentagon Deal
Summary:
Lockheed Martin reached a seven-year framework deal with the Pentagon to surge production of Patriot PAC-3 MSE interceptors, aiming for about 2,000 missiles per year by the end of 2030, up from roughly 600 annually. The company says it has already lifted output more than 60% over the past two years and delivered a record 620 interceptors last year. The arrangement reflects the Pentagon’s push for multi-year munitions capacity to prepare for simultaneous contingencies, but it still depends on congressional appropriations. Lockheed plans a “full-court press” of factory expansion, advanced tooling, workforce growth, and added automation, with provisions to reimburse some investments if future orders change.
Comment: Seems to be good news.
Lockheed Martin to Increase Patriot Missile Production Under Pentagon Deal
WSJ
Defense contractor pledges to more than triple Patriot missile output
By Drew FitzGerald
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and Connor Hart
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Updated Jan. 6, 2026 5:26 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/lockheed-martin-to-raise-pac-3-capacity-in-defense-department-deal-a1e11e5f
A Lockheed Martin PAC-3 MSE model at a military fair in Poland. kacper pempel/Reuters
Lockheed Martin LMT 2.05%increase; green up pointing triangle committed to surging its Patriot missile output to roughly 2,000 interceptors a year in response to demand from Pentagon officials gearing up for conflicts on multiple fronts.
The defense contractor said Tuesday it reached an agreement with the Defense Department to sharply boost production of PAC-3 MSE interceptors over the course of seven years. The company said it was well positioned to hit the target after increasing production by more than 60% over the past two years and delivering a record 620 of the missiles last year.
“There is going to be a full-court press across all the elements and inputs to production,” Lockheed Martin Chief Executive Jim Taiclet said in an interview. “We’ll be putting in new advanced tooling lines. We’re going to be adding both people and automation.”
Shares of Lockheed closed 2% higher at $522.04 Tuesday.
The agreement still requires funding from Congress, which hasn’t yet appropriated the money to support a full seven-year contract. The timing of the Pentagon’s upsized munitions funding request late last year has triggered bipartisan pushback, including from some hawkish lawmakers who generally support increased weapons production.
Patriot interceptors are hit-to-kill munitions used to thwart airborne threats such as ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and enemy aircraft. Ukrainian forces have heavily relied on Patriot batteries to help protect their cities against Russian missile and drone barrages, forcing the U.S. and its European allies to reshuffle their own air-defense deployments.
Pentagon officials have spent most of the past year urging weapons makers to dramatically increase missile production rates to better prepare for a potential future conflict with China, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Defense contractors have responded with new investments but stopped short of making big bets without the multiyear government orders that experts say are needed to justify them.
Lockheed Martin is developing new technology to allow F-35 fighter pilots to control drones. WSJ toured the company’s Fort Worth, Texas, facility to see the jets and futuristic tech. Photo: Lockheed Martin
The proposed production blitz has triggered tense talks between Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg and the chiefs of major weapons suppliers, including Lockheed, over who will foot the bill for the required capital investments, the Journal has reported. President Trump last month said he wanted defense contractors to spend more cash on factory upgrades instead of buying back their own stock.
Lockheed had previously said it was exploring more investments in Patriot missile production and expected to overshoot its stated capacity for the next several years. Defense contractors including Lockheed have been adding workers, widening factory floors and growing spare-parts inventories as demand continues to grow.
In September, the Army awarded Lockheed almost $10 billion to make nearly 2,000 PAC-3 MSEs between fiscal years 2024 and 2026. The agreement announced Tuesday would allow the company to pump out that quantity each year by the end of 2030.
Officials described the latest deal as a framework, with specific details still under discussion. The plan encourages Lockheed to make large investments upfront without crimping its closely watched cash flows year-to-year. It would also reimburse the company for certain investments if future administrations modify the government’s missile orders.
Write to Drew FitzGerald at andrew.fitzgerald@wsj.com and Connor Hart at Connor.Hart@wsj.com
Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the January 7, 2026, print edition as 'Pentagon Deal Set To Lift Lockheed Missile Production'.
WSJ
16. Three Reasons We Can’t Get Enough of LinkedIn
Summary:
LinkedIn is pulling people in for three main reasons. First, growth and habit: revenue rose from $7 billion in 2020 to $17 billion in 2025, membership reached 1.3 billion, and more Americans now check it multiple times a day. Second, real names change behavior. Users self-censor because recruiters and colleagues are watching, which reduces the incentive for rage and performs accountability. Third, product choices. LinkedIn adopted feeds and video, but its algorithm reportedly favors constructive, career-relevant posts that users save and share, rather than outrage. As moderation and fact-checking weakened on rival platforms, LinkedIn’s lower-toxicity, higher-reputation environment became the trade many professionals prefer.
Comment: I have to admit that I find LinkedIn to be useful and the least stressful. I think it shows that most people can be professional, especially when they communicate in true name.
Three Reasons We Can’t Get Enough of LinkedIn
WSJ
Data show people are scrolling longer on the site. Its secret is a founding principle that curbs toxicity.
By
Stu Woo
Jan. 6, 2026 11:00 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/three-reasons-we-cant-get-enough-of-linkedin-31333eff?st=kAgR4J&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
LinkedIn has lured people as content moderation and fact-checking declined at X and Facebook. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
It isn’t just you. A lot of people are spending more time on LinkedIn.
For years, the Microsoft-owned site was primarily a place to hunt for jobs—and a punchline. It was a wasteland of corporate buzzwords, 4 a.m. wake-up routines and stories about overcoming workplace adversity with a little something called grit.
Some of that remains, but the vibe has shifted. At 22, an eternity in social-media years, LinkedIn has become a bigger part of the lives of many professionals and a thriving business.
Revenue jumped to $17 billion in 2025 from $7 billion in 2020, and membership doubled to 1.3 billion. Users stick around too: Americans checking LinkedIn more than once a day climbed to 4.7% last year from 3.9% in 2020, according to research firm GWI.
Design plays a part. The site emulated Facebook and TikTok by adding a news feed and videos. However, some new fans argue that the real attraction lies in the features LinkedIn hasn’t changed—in particular, the requirement that users provide their real names.
Research shows real names curb toxicity. While not immune to misinformation and scams, LinkedIn lured people leaving X and Facebook as content moderation and fact-checking there declined. Many concluded it was worth trading rage bait on other platforms for earnest monologues about why getting laid off was a blessing in disguise.
Here are three reasons why LinkedIn is winning people over.
Self-discipline
Even before Elon Musk gutted X’s content moderation, James Bailey was tired of the shouting. “It’s like a cursed artifact that gives you great power to keep up with what’s going on, but at the cost of subtly corrupting your soul,” said the 38-year-old Providence College economics professor.
He retreated. This year, he realized he was spending five to 10 minutes a day on a site he used to ignore. The reason lies in LinkedIn’s oldest and stodgiest rule.
LinkedIn has always required real names, though that idea wasn’t always untouchable.
“I cannot tell you how many times we’ve had internal debates on: Should we add handles?” said Gyanda Sachdeva, the company’s head of consumer experience. It stuck with real identities to preserve trust.
The policy makes users more careful. “They don’t want to put something on LinkedIn that a recruiter might look at,” Sachdeva said.
Science backs this up, with studies spanning more than a decade consistently showing that anonymity breeds aggression. A 2013 analysis of online newspaper forums found that 53% of anonymous comments contained attacks or vulgarity, compared with 29% from users who had to identify themselves.
The study’s author, Prof. Arthur Santana, concluded that when people can’t hide behind an alias, they are much more likely to remain civil.
Smartest person in the room
The real-name rule doesn’t just stop jerks. It also pressures people to perform.
LinkedIn users will be familiar with the saccharine positivity of users explaining how their latest promotion or honor makes them feel humbled and grateful.
But the need to look professional has a hidden upside: smarter conversations.
Consider a recent study of a stock-investment forum in China. Before requiring registration with government identification, it was a rumor mill. But afterward, the researchers observed that posts about short-term betting declined, replaced by discussions about business fundamentals. The comments became better at predicting future stock returns.
Even though users didn’t have to post under real names, the mere fact that the platform knew who they were improved discourse, said Kanyuan Huang from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the study’s co-author.
This appeals to the economist Bailey, who now routinely finds insightful posts on LinkedIn. “It can be a good place for people to share their writing now,” he said.
Gentler algorithm
LinkedIn hasn’t sat still. To justify Microsoft’s 2016 purchase price of $27 billion, the platform evolved from a digital Rolodex into a daily destination. It added fun features and tried to reduce obnoxiousness.
It overhauled its news feed in 2017 and added TikTok-style vertical videos in early 2024. Sachdeva said the algorithm doesn’t promote hot takes but emphasizes posts that create “economic opportunity” and get saved or shared.
“It’s almost never coming from a place of controversy,” she said. “It’s usually very constructive.”
Sachdeva said LinkedIn is even using artificial intelligence to attack a top complaint: “You don’t even know this person and they show up in your feed with humblebrags. We don’t want that.”
But the filter has its limits. If a dad framing his toddler’s screamfest as a lesson in conflict resolution is a personal connection of yours, the algorithm might let it through.
“We believe that deserves to be a candidate for your feed,” she said.
Write to Stu Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com
Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
WSJ
17. How Google Got Its Groove Back and Edged Ahead of OpenAI
Summary:
Google’s AI comeback came from persistence, money, and chips. After ChatGPT surged, Google rushed Bard and stumbled, then reorganized Brain and DeepMind and pushed Gemini, trained across text, code, audio, images, and video. It rebuilt search with AI Overviews and AI Mode while guarding ad revenue. A late-night upload of a fast image model, nicknamed “Nano Banana,” topped LM Arena and helped drive Gemini downloads. Sergey Brin returned, pushed fixes, and helped recruit top talent. Google’s custom TPUs and newer chips lowered inference costs and let it scale, even as OpenAI kept the larger user base.
How Google Got Its Groove Back and Edged Ahead of OpenAI
WSJ
After ChatGPT dominated early chatbot market, Google staged comeback with powerful AI model; biggest search-engine overhaul in years
By Katherine Blunt
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Jan. 6, 2026 9:00 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-ai-openai-gemini-chatgpt-b766e160
In the wee hours of an August morning, an artificial-intelligence project manager at Google loaded the newest creation from its DeepMind lab onto a platform that ranks AI models.
Google GOOG -0.87%decrease; red down pointing triangle had fallen behind in the AI race, while its rival OpenAI had attracted hundreds of millions of users to its ChatGPT chatbot. Google researchers were hoping that a new feature—a lightning-fast image generator—would give the search titan an edge in a weak spot for ChatGPT.
Naina Raisinghani, known inside Google for working late into the night, needed a name for the new tool to complete the upload. It was 2:30 a.m., though, and nobody was around. So she just made one up, a mashup of two nicknames friends had given her: Nano Banana.
Within days, Nano Banana had the top spot in performance rankings on the platform LM Arena, was trending on X and had far exceeded Google’s usage expectations. By September, Google’s Gemini AI app had become the most downloaded app in Apple’s app store.
Two months later, Google launched its most powerful Gemini model yet, which surged past competitors to become the most capable AI chatbot. With that, the Alphabet-owned company had leapfrogged OpenAI to the front of the AI pack.
Google’s deep roots in science and research, willingness to pour billions of dollars into developing custom hardware, and leadership changes in recent years that cleared the way for faster experimentation are now paying off. It also has managed to protect its all-important search business—at least for now—from the surging popularity of chatbots, which are changing how consumers use the internet.
Google’s AI work has begun generating substantial revenue through search ads, paid versions of Gemini for consumers and business and sales of new computer chips developed in-house. The November release of Google’s latest Gemini model outperformed ChatGPT on a variety of measures, sending Alphabet’s stock soaring and triggering a Code Red inside OpenAI. That company has since narrowed the race with the launch of a more powerful version of ChatGPT, which still has far more users than Google’s Gemini.
Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai talked up the magnitude of the company’s AI push on the day the new Gemini model launched. “Love to see that we’re launching at the scale of Google,” he told employees in an internal memo.
When Pichai rose to the top job at Google in 2015, AI was a technology of keen interest to computer science researchers and almost no one else. The following year, he declared that the company known to consumers for its search engine, maps and productivity tools was going all in on AI.
In a memo posted to the company’s blog, Pichai wrote that the previous decade had been all about a smartphone-oriented world. “But in the next 10 years,” he predicted, “we will shift to a world that is AI-first, a world where computing becomes universally available.”
Google already had laid the foundation with an AI research division called Google Brain, which was co-founded in 2011 by Jeff Dean, a computer scientist who helped develop the neural-network technology that underpins today’s large language models. A few years later, Google acquired DeepMind, the London-based AI research lab co-founded by Demis Hassabis, a chess prodigy who would later share a Nobel Prize for work on an AI system that aids biomolecular research.
In a move that drew less attention at the time, Google also started designing its own AI chips, believing it would need vastly more computing power to support applications such as voice recognition. Those chips, called tensor-processing units, or TPUs, were designed to draw less power than the central-processing units in computers or the graphics-processing units in videogame cards. They would prove a game changer, for Google and the industry.
Google started designing its own AI chips. One of the company’s tensor-processing units in 2021. Michael Nagle/Bloomberg News
Early on, though, the company took a cautious approach to developing its own chatbots. Some of its executives and researchers had concerns about the safety of such technology, which has the potential to produce inaccurate, biased or otherwise problematic information.
Julia Winn, a former Google Brain employee, said chatbots weren’t initially seen as core to the company’s broader AI ambitions, and that in tests of early models, it proved easy to prompt racist or sexist responses.
“Those kinds of risks Google just took way more seriously than any place I’ve worked, and for understandable reasons,” she said. Such caution frustrated a number of company researchers, some of whom decamped.
In August 2022, Google introduced a chatbot model with a range of conversational abilities, making it available to a limited number of people through an app called AI Test Kitchen, a proving ground of sorts. Google named it LaMDA and allowed users to test three functions: “Imagine It,” “List It,” and “Talk About It (Dogs Edition),” which enabled users to have a conversation only about dogs.
ChatGPT challenge
Three months later, OpenAI made ChatGPT available to the public following its own multiyear effort to create a chatbot that could not only engage in dialogue but produce stories, jokes, computer code and more.
Within five days, a million people signed up to test it. Unlike with Google’s LaMDA, users didn’t face significant restrictions in how they used it.
Some Google employees who had spent years working on the technology seethed at being lapped. Others were stunned at how quickly the public engaged with ChatGPT.
Analysts and investors wondered whether Google was missing technology’s next big wave. They were asking how quickly the company could launch its own AI products, and whether the rise of chatbots would erode Google’s search and advertising businesses, which had brought in $254 billion in revenue in 2022.
When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a million people signed up within days to test it. The chatbot was promoted at a trade show in Tokyo in 2023. richard a. brooks/AFP/Getty Images
Dean and Hassabis, Google’s two veteran AI scientists, and James Manyika, a roboticist who joined in 2022, worked to unite the DeepMind and Brain divisions in training AI. In January 2023, they presented to Alphabet’s board of directors their plan for building the company’s smartest model yet.
In the meantime, Google needed a chatbot to offer users—and fast. The following month, it launched Bard, built off its LaMDA model. It botched the introduction.
In a video promoting Bard, Google showed it responding to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope. The chatbot inaccurately responded that the telescope took “the very first pictures” of a planet outside the solar system. The stumble sent Alphabet shares down 8%.
Around that time, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who had recently retired, was at a party chatting with a researcher from OpenAI named Daniel Selsam, according to people familiar with the conversation. Why, Selsam asked him, wasn’t he working full time on AI. Hadn’t the launch of ChatGPT captured his imagination as a computer scientist?
ChatGPT was on its way to becoming a household name in AI chatbots, while Google was still fumbling to get its product off the ground. Brin decided Selsam had a point and returned to work.
For much of 2023, Google executives labored to coordinate and align its AI development efforts. The cultures of the Brain and DeepMind divisions were different, with the former more focused on research and the latter on building products, according to former employees, creating tension after they were combined.
Still, Google possessed one overwhelming advantage over its big rival. OpenAI had to raise money from investors; Google could fund research and development out of its multibillion-dollar profits. But Google also had to find a way to keep generative AI from killing its golden goose—its 90% share of the web search market, the foundation of its advertising business.
Project Magi
To figure out what AI-driven search should look like, the company began a multiteam effort called Project Magi, led by Liz Reid, who became Google’s vice president of search in 2024. The group’s challenge, she explained in an interview, was to figure out how to revamp the search system to quickly present a clear answer to a question when the answer wasn’t contained on a single webpage.
“People don’t just use search, they rely on search,” she said. “If you screw up, you’re going to hear from your mom, you’re going to hear from your friend, you’re going to hear from your child.”
Liz Reid, now Google’s vice president of search, led a multiteam effort to figure out what AI-driven search should look like. camille cohen/AFP/Getty Images
Google released its first Gemini model before the end of 2023. While OpenAI initially had trained ChatGPT primarily on text, Google had trained Gemini on text, code, audio, images and video, which is one reason it took longer to develop, former employees said.
The first version of Gemini still lagged behind ChatGPT in many ways, but Google’s technically more ambitious approach would pay dividends over time, just as its early research in neural networks had.
“I do think we still have benefited from that long history,” Brin observed in December at a Stanford University event.
Much of Brin’s work since his return has involved spotlighting problems with Gemini that need fixing. Brin also helped bring AI researchers Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer back to Google in 2024 through a $2.7 billion acquisition of their startup. The two have since helped lead work on Gemini.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, right, spoke with Demis Hassabis, head of the company’s DeepMind division, at the annual developer conference in May. jeffrey dastin/Reuters
During an onstage interview at Google’s I/O conference in May, Brin said he stayed very involved. “I tend to be pretty deep in the technical details,” he said, “and that’s a luxury I enjoy.”
‘I want to use this’
In May 2024, Google introduced AI Overviews—short, AI generated summaries that often appear at the top of search results. The company found that users began doing more complex searches.
What followed was the biggest overhaul of Google’s search engine in years: the development of AI Mode, a search option that answers queries in a chatbot-style conversation. Internally, demo after demo showed what could be possible, but also how difficult it was to reprogram search to become chatbot-like while retaining speed and quality, Reid said.
Finally, after many iterations, Reid said, she and others on the team began seeing enough value to roll it out publicly. “We started to see ourselves seek it out, not just for testing, but being like, ‘Oh, I want to use this,’” Reid recalled.
Google launched AI Mode last May. It also introduced Gemini 2.5, a more powerful version of its AI model, but it didn’t generate as much buzz as many employees expected. Alphabet’s share price, which had fallen since the start of the year, continued to languish over the summer.
Conference attendees trying out activities that highlight Google's Gemini AI. camille cohen/AFP/Getty Images
The threat that AI posed to Google’s search dominance proved to have a silver lining. In August 2024, a federal judge ruled that Google had an illegal monopoly in online search and search advertising. The ruling said a deal under which Google paid Apple $20 billion annually to be the default search in the iPhone maker’s Safari browser was anticompetitive.
Google’s lawyers argued that the company’s monopoly had effectively ended with the advent of AI chatbots as a popular new form of search. Earlier this year, the judge accepted the argument and ruled that the Apple deal could continue with only minor amendments, helping Google avoid more extreme remedies.
That ruling, combined with the August introduction of Nano Banana, boosted Google’s shares.
Josh Woodward, who oversees the Gemini app as well as Google Labs—a proving ground of sorts for new AI applications—called the launch of Nano Banana a “success disaster.” When people around the world began generating millions, and then billions, of images, Google was hard-pressed to find enough computing power to meet the demand. The company, he said, used emergency loans of server time to get more computing capacity.
By October, Gemini had more than 650 million monthly users, up from 450 million in July.
The November launch of Gemini 3 triggered another bottleneck in computing capacity. It is a problem that Google has been anticipating for more than a decade, and its solution—the AI computer chips it developed—is looking like a competitive edge. Its latest chip, called Ironwood, has helped significantly reduce the cost of running its AI models.
The news in late November that Google was in talks to sell Meta billions of dollars worth of the chips for its own AI efforts was enough to sink shares of Nvidia, the world’s leading chip maker, by 7% that day.
In an internal memo to employees this December, Pichai sounded a triumphant note. “We’re ending 2025 in a great position,” he wrote. “Thinking back to where we were as a company even just a year ago, it’s incredible to see the progress.”
Write to Katherine Blunt at katherine.blunt@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
By October, Gemini had more than 650 million monthly users. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that by October Gemini had more than 650 monthly users. (Corrected on Jan. 7)
WSJ
18. Three Wicked Problems in the Antarctic Commons: Biological Prospecting, Meteorite Hunting, and Mineral Exploration
Summary:
Walsh and Rémont argue Antarctica is a soft target for gray zone activity because dual-use infrastructure can mask coercive or illicit extraction. They flag three “wicked problems” that lack clear definitions yet carry high strategic and commercial value: biological prospecting, meteorite hunting, and mineral exploration. Although the Madrid Protocol bars mineral resource activity other than science south of 60°S, and maritime rules constrain seabed mining, they warn incentives are growing as climate change eases access and 2048 raises revision pressure. Their core claim is blunt: monitoring is thin, enforcement is weaker, and governance needs a hard rethink now.
Three Wicked Problems in the Antarctic Commons: Biological Prospecting, Meteorite Hunting, and Mineral Exploration
by Michael Walsh, by Anaïs Rémont
|
01.07.2026 at 06:00am
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/01/07/three-wicked-problems-in-the-antarctic/
Introduction:
Remote areas are particularly susceptible to a wide range of unlawful and legal gray zone activities involving the dual use of fishing fleets, offshore installations, research stations, and tourism infrastructure. In the context of Antarctica, such infrastructure could be usefully transformed into platforms for conducting activities of concern such as biological prospecting, meteorite hunting, and/or mineral exploration. These problematic activities should be on the minds of policymakers who are responsible for the Antarctic Treaty System. The current governance structures, legal rules, and control mechanisms are not well-designed to mitigate these kinds of challenges to the global commons.
Three Wicked Problems:
The lack of conceptual clarity will make it difficult for policymakers to craft solutions to that complex challenge. Biological prospecting, meteorite hunting, and mineral exploration do not admit to standard definitions. The only option is to turn to working definitions. However, that is problematic. Consider these examples. The Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition defines biological prospecting as “exploration of natural areas in search of native organisms that can be used in commercial products,” the U.S. Bureau of Land Management suggests that meteorite hunting is the collection of “natural objects originating in outer space that survive impact with the earth’s surface” for commercial, educational, and scientific purposes, and ScienceDirect defines mineral exploration as ”discovery and acquisition of new mineral deposit amenable to economic extractive operations now or in future.” None would naturally roll off the tongues of the unanointed.
Putting that conceptual problem aside, there is a real need for more international policy discussions about these complex challenges. In the Antarctic context, these sorts of activities could be of high value to a range of state and non-state actors. Mineral exploration holds potential value because Antarctica is expected to have large mineral deposits that have yet to be exploited. Meteorite hunting carries potential value because Antarctica is known to be one of the most prolific sources of meteorites in the world, particularly in the blue ice areas. And, biological prospecting carries potential value because polar environments provide “an opportunity to discover novel organisms” and “novel bioactivities” that could prove useful to commercial industries. These sorts of realities provide a strong motivation for some state and non-state actors to violate international norms to advance their own interests.
To be clear, there is a complex set of legal rules and regulatory constraints that would make it costly to conduct these sorts of activities. For example, The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty explicitly prohibits “all activities relating to Antarctic mineral resources, except for scientific research” in the area south of 60 degrees South latitude, while the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention stipulates that no mineral mining can take place “in areas beyond national jurisdiction” without a “seabed mining exploration and exploitation contract” from the International Seabed Authority. These legal regimes place severe limits on commercial mining exploration in Antarctica and its immediate vicinity. However, the impacts of climate change and the desire of independent states to secure new sources of mineral resources are starting to erode those constraints, especially with the 2048 date approaching and the possibility of revising the Madrid Protocol on the table.
Rethinking Governance in a Climate-Altered Antarctica:
Given these realities, there is an increasing risk that deviant actors will seek to violate the existing legal prohibitions on biological prospecting, meteorite hunting, and mineral exploration through covert, unlawful activities and legal gray zone activities. To avoid detection, those actors might try to carry out those unlawful activities in the shadows of fishing fleets, offshore semi-permanent installations, research stations, and/or tourism infrastructure that are already operating in Antarctica. In the context of current intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capacities in the Low South, there is a good chance that such dual-use activities would evade third-party detection and, by extension, the risk of imposition of international sanctions.
In our opinion, this is not a state of affairs that should be tolerated. There is a clear and pressing need for the International Community to come together and re-evaluate the fitness of the current governance structures, legal rules, and enforcement mechanisms with respect to biological prospecting, meteorite hunting, and mineral exploration in and around Antarctica. Otherwise, there is a serious risk that there will be a significant increase in harmful biological prospecting, meteorite hunting, and mineral exploration as climate change makes Antarctica more accommodating to human presence and economic exploitation.
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Tags: climate change, Gray Zone, Mineral Exploration, United Nations
About The Authors
- Michael Walsh
- Michael Walsh is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He conducts research on the strategic, operational, and tactical gaps that exist in American foreign policy. Mr. Walsh is best known for his policy-relevant contributions to the alignment of governance, foreign aid, and military posture with regional realities, particularly in the Arabian Peninsula, Northern Africa, the Pacific Islands, Southeastern Europe, and Southern Africa. His scholarship tends to bridge the theoretical and applied policy realms, akin to Richard Haass’s pragmatic diplomacy, Graham Allison’s decision-making frameworks, and Susan Strange's structural dynamics. At the Lasky Center, Mr. Walsh is working on his PhD project on the quality characteristics of American foreign policy planning, with a particular focus on the implications for public perception and the collective good. Publications related to this project have appeared in Orbis.
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- Anaïs Rémont
- Anaïs Rémont is a doctoral researcher at the Australian National Center for Ocean Resources and Security at the University of Wollongong in Australia.
19. It’s Not About Drugs—Or Even Venezuela: Signaling and Strategic Competition
Summary:
Diallo argues the counternarcotics framing is a cover story for something larger. Venezuela is not the main production hub, and most U.S.-bound cocaine runs through Mexico, so the scale of U.S. military activity suggests a different purpose. He reads Caracas as a venue for signaling in great-power competition, especially against China’s expanding footprint in ports, logistics, telecoms, and extractive sectors across Latin America and the Caribbean. These projects look commercial but carry dual-use leverage over access and supply chains. He draws a parallel to sub-Saharan Africa, where infrastructure footholds become political influence. The Maduro raid, he notes, validates the signaling logic.
Comment: If Venezuela is a test bed for escalation dominance, what is the measurable end state that proves deterrence rather than drift? So is the bigger project to eject Chinese influence from the region? The Monroe/Donroe doctrine? A message to China: get out while you can?
It’s Not About Drugs—Or Even Venezuela: Signaling and Strategic Competition - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · Ibrahima Diallo · January 7, 2026
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/its-not-about-drugs-or-even-venezuela-signaling-and-strategic-competition/
Recent rhetoric surrounding the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro has framed US policy primarily through the lens of counternarcotics. This framing and the emphasis on Venezuela, however, risks obscuring a more consequential development vis-a-vis China’s expansion and growing influence across vital maritime and logistical corridors around the world.
If reinvigorating the war on drugs was the principal objective, Venezuela would be a suboptimal focal point. It is a secondary transit node, not a production hub. Cocaine is produced primarily in Colombia while the majority of US-bound flows transit through Mexico rather than the Caribbean. The scale of Venezuelan flows alone is out of proportion with the level of military activity seen in recent months. This discrepancy suggests that drugs are a tactical concern nested within a broader context.
Despite being the primary transit point for US-bound flows, Mexico is managed through bilateral frameworks, not overt military signaling. This divergence between the US relationships with Mexico City and Caracas is illustrative of the more subtle realities of modern statecraft. Where economic interdependence and cooperative mechanisms exist (e.g., integration under USMCA), Washington pursues risk-managed engagement; where they do not, signaling and coercive presence become the de facto tools. This distinction reinforces conclusions that Venezuela’s importance may be less about mainstream narcotics talking points than its utility within global competition shaped by access, influence, and great-power posturing throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
Chinese state-owned enterprises have invested heavily in ports, logistics infrastructure, extractive industries, and telecommunications across the region. These investments are described as commercial, but their dual-use potential is difficult to ignore, as port access, infrastructure control, and supply-chain leverage provide valuable advantages without the visibility and friction of formal basing or kinetic action. From this perspective, US military operations in and around Venezuela appear less about the shortcomings of the Maduro regime itself and more about signaling control and preserving maneuverability in a key region for global trade and US security. The Caribbean serves as a hub for energy and commercial flows; therefore, demonstrating the ability to rapidly deploy and utilize lethal force in this theater signals escalation dominance while actively stymieing Beijing’s advances.
China has implemented a similar approach in sub-Saharan Africa. Chronic instability in the “coup belt” has pushed illicit flows toward the coast, where Beijing’s investments along the Gulf of Guinea and into the Sahel have expanded under weak maritime governance and deteriorating regional security. Over time, these economic footholds translate into political leverage and influence, privileged access, and latent dual-use advantages that reshape the operational landscape not through conventional warfare, but through asymmetric dominance in the gray zone. The lesson is not that Africa and the Caribbean are identical, but that contemporary competition increasingly turns on who controls access, infrastructure, and logistics in contested but formally sovereign spaces.
Through this comparative lens, Venezuela is better understood as circumstantial rather than central. Its historic alignment with Russia and increasing dealings with China, combined with permissive geography and fragmented sociopolitical environment, makes it a convenient venue for signaling and presence operations. But treating Venezuela as the core problem risks overemphasizing its importance while underestimating the cumulative effect of China’s big-picture approach. Reactive policy distracts from the systemic challenge unfolding across multiple regions simultaneously. Washington does not face a Caracas problem so much as a competition problem—one defined by access and influence in spaces where competition falls largely below the threshold of open conflict but is still critical to long-term strategic positioning. Venezuela is a test bed for influence, maneuver, and escalation posture on a broader scale.
Clear strategy requires distinguishing signal from substance. Counternarcotics operations and pressure on authoritarian regimes should remain grounded in achievable objectives. Therefore, policymakers and analysts must be wary of narratives that elevate certain regions to center stage while competition across other decisive theaters continues largely out of the public view.
All of the above was written prior to the military operation in Caracas. News of the targeted strikes and the capture and extraction of Maduro from Venezuela broke as I finalized this analysis on January 3. In many ways, the operation proves the framework described above for conceptualizing the strategic competition context in which military action takes place. Official statements remain limited, but the strikes illustrate how narratives of authority, escalation, and justification transcend intent and hinge on perception and precedent. While there remain more questions than answers at this early stage, near-peer adversaries and regional actors will certainly observe what has occurred and how it was framed and justified in revision of their own frameworks. The significance of these events far outweigh Maduro’s fate and will inform how power is exercised and contested globally.
Ibrahima Diallo is an analyst whose work focuses on great-power competition and gray zone dynamics. He has conducted research in support of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the US Army Nuclear and Countering WMD Agency. He holds a master of global affairs with a specialization in conflict and security from George Mason University.
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: The White House
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mwi.westpoint.edu · Ibrahima Diallo · January 7, 2026
20. The Transactional Trap: How Foreign Policy Dealmaking Can Sow Violence
Summary:
Michael Brenes argues the “rules-based order” is giving way to values-neutral dealmaking, first modeled at scale by China and now embraced by POTUS. He warns that transactional diplomacy looks pragmatic but tends to intensify extraction, sharpen rivalry, and export violence, much like nineteenth-century imperial politics where trade interdependence coexisted with coercion and “small wars” that later escalated. In today’s more multipolar world, he adds, smaller states have greater leverage through minerals, institutions, and alignment choices, so pure dealmaking will not stabilize spheres of influence. It will fracture cooperation on climate, pandemics, and supply chains.
Excerpts:
Even if the aim were to return to a nineteenth-century model of world order, doing so would not be possible. The twenty-first century has its own special conditions, particularly those that give smaller nations much more influence than their nineteenth-century counterparts: today’s most strategic minerals, such as coltan and lithium, are more concentrated and often not located in great powers’ territory. In the coming decades, climate change will wreak havoc on many U.S. and Chinese trading partners in the global South, forcing both countries to respond to the economic fallout. The threat of pandemics continues to loom and will mean that the concerns of smaller states cannot be easily ignored.
These new, twenty-first-century challenges will demand international frameworks. The diffusion of resources in a multipolar world presents policymakers with the potential to reframe a world order around the concerns of weaker states that are also vital economic partners. And they must do so: the truth is that today, the absence of any international order, even if imperfect, would be a problem for global stability. A world premised on one-off transactions between nations will prevent the development of the kind of long-term, grand strategic thinking required to ensure that the exploitation, imperialism, and violence of the nineteenth century does not simply resurface—or even reemerge in a worse form.
Comment: What enforces any deal when power shifts and memory is short? When security is bought transaction by transaction, who pays the cost when the bargain fails?
The Transactional Trap
Foreign Affairs · More by Michael Brenes · January 7, 2026
How Foreign Policy Dealmaking Can Sow Violence
January 7, 2026
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/transactional-trap
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, Busan, South Korea, October 2025 Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters
MICHAEL BRENES is Co-Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Senior Lecturer in Global Affairs at Yale University.
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The post–World War II order is dead. In its place, countries are fast adopting a values-neutral, transactional approach toward foreign policy. China was the progenitor of this approach to international relations: for over a decade, Beijing has pursued quid pro quo arrangements with countries around the world to create new markets and enhance its economic reach, generating diplomatic ties with both autocratic and democratic states. It has established itself as a great power through a model of state-capitalist economic development that eschews universal human rights or concerns about its trading partners’ system of government. Its lending practices may be predatory, but the recipients of Chinese loans and infrastructure projects have willingly, if sometimes begrudgingly, participated in its model.
The United States has, in recent months, pursued its own version of a transactional foreign policy. During his second term, President Donald Trump has rejected the framework of great-power competition. Washington has punished allies, partners, and enemies alike with exorbitant tariffs in order to gain diplomatic leverage, extract resources, and win concessions on trade. And he has pursued deals with countries as varied as Argentina, China, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea, without regard to those countries’ regime form, and relentlessly attacked the institutions (such as NATO) that undergirded the rules-based order. Most recently, after capturing and extraditing the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, he appears eager to secure deals with Maduro’s successor to benefit U.S. oil companies.
The future into which China and the United States are leading the world resembles the past—specifically, the nineteenth century, in which a handful of empires competed for economic spheres and resources and territorial control in the absence of effective multilateral institutions and international law that could constrain avaricious and authoritarian behavior. But world leaders should think twice before they resurrect that century’s transactional politics, whose fundamental instability created the urgent need for a better world order. As the historian Odd Arne Westad has argued, conflict between great powers, and the prospect of it, loomed large over the nineteenth century. And nineteenth-century-style politics cannot simply be superimposed onto the twenty-first century. The world is much more multipolar now than it was then, with smaller states exerting greater influence on the global stage. A transactional approach to foreign affairs will yield not stable spheres of influence but instability characterized by competition over who can extract the most from the international system in terms of trade and resources—and it will inhibit the development of solutions to global problems that demand collective engagement.
THE TRADE-OFFS OF TRANSACTIONALISM
The values of the Enlightenment formed the basis of the vision of the rules-based order. But for centuries, those values—democracy, human rights, and the rule of law—did not actually undergird international order. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia emphasized stability, sovereignty, and great-power alliances above other aims. Enlightenment values came second, if they were considered at all. European powers’ quest to achieve a balance of power led them to openly exploit communities in Africa, the Americas, and Asia.
The 1814–15 Congress of Vienna envisioned a so-called concert of Europe in which five empires—Austria-Hungary, the United Kingdom, France, Prussia, and Russia—generally agreed to respect each other’s sovereignty following the devastating Napoleonic Wars. But it is a mistake to imagine that this agreement, or the subsequent explosion of international trade in the second half of the nineteenth century, brought stability to the world. It failed to prevent wars beyond Europe’s metropoles, and it encouraged sea skirmishes that often led to conflagrations on land. The nineteenth century was, in fact, characterized by a form of multipolarity: the parochial interests of empires—their wish to extract resources from colonies, mostly—drove foreign affairs. No universal laws yet governed their conduct. As the historian Jürgen Osterhammel has written, “there was no sign yet of world government or of supranational regulatory institutions.”
British and French leaders had begun to speak of their empires as liberal, geared toward spreading a “civilizing mission” and individual rights around the globe. But they saw no contradiction in repressing populations in Algeria, India, Kenya, and Vietnam. The more openly illiberal empires of Prussia and Russia held territories in Africa and North America respectively, even if they were minimal and less profitable. Even after the Ottoman Empire ceded many of its European territories to the Austro-Hungarians, it retained control of Iraq and Syria.
The nineteenth century’s race to empire yielded instability.
This “age of empire” empowered transactional trading relationships, and the prioritization of economic interests blurred lines between competitors and partners. The British and Dutch had long been rivals, but starting in the 1820s, they became cooperative trading partners who mutually recognized each other’s colonies in Asia. The 1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty, which historians consider the first modern free trade agreement, led the United Kingdom and France to lower tariffs on commodities and consolidate their imperial holdings and overseas markets. After Germany’s 1871 victory in the Franco-Prussian War, France and Germany became especially bitter rivals, but even so, the two countries became reliant on each other’s manufactured goods.
This liberalization of trade, however, yielded its own uncertainty and instability. Transactional economic exchange and military belligerence coincided with and reinforced each other, and suspicion and animosity ran deep. Every great or rising power knew they needed access to the products and markets controlled by their rivals, yielding economic nationalism and self-serving, short-term diplomatic arrangements. The deepening trade relationship between France and the United Kingdom, for instance, dialed up their competition over Sudan and other African colonies. So-called small wars to suppress colonial uprisings metastasized into widespread violence in Africa and Asia. As the century drew to a close, Japan embarked on its own imperial project, colonizing Taiwan and then Korea. The United States acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam after the Spanish-American War of 1898, solidifying its imperial status.
This “race to empire” helped lead to the devastation of World War I. Nationalism, protectionism, expansionism, and racial supremacy returned in the 1930s, and the Axis powers brought the world into war again. Both of these world wars finally made it clear that an order premised on more universal rights, sovereignty, and emancipation from territorial acquisition was badly needed. It is true that the benefits conferred by the postwar rules-based order proved elusive for many countries, particularly those in the so-called global South. The United States dominated its institutions, and Washington’s actions in the Vietnam War, the Iraq war, and most recently, the conflict in Gaza have rightly called into question its dedication to upholding the order’s values. But it nevertheless provided the potential for interstate cooperation and collaboration with U.S. institutions to effectuate outcomes that benefited global democracy.
TURNING BACK THE CLOCK
But in the broader sweep of history, the notion that values ought to undergird a global order is an aberration. And the world now appears to be returning to a nineteenth-century model in which it is supposed that economic relationships and short-term diplomatic and financial deals can undergird interstate stability. Like the empires of the nineteenth century, the United States and China are both competitors and partners—reluctant economic rivals who fear war just as much as they prepare for it.
Both nations are seeking to independently strengthen their global and regional influence while acknowledging their reliance on one another. China’s internal and external development projects, including the Belt and Road Initiative, reflect a familiar nineteenth-century imperial effort focused on regional hegemony, even if these imperial means are directed toward domestic ends. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has again made the Western Hemisphere a focus of U.S. national security and revived the rhetoric of “Manifest Destiny,” preoccupying itself with the southern border and suspected drug boats in the Caribbean.
Perhaps it is no surprise that the United States and China are behaving as great powers often do. More interesting is how many other states appear to be acquiescing to the end of the post–World War II rules-based order and accommodating a more transactional, nineteenth-century model of world affairs. Consider two of the United States’ closest allies, Canada and France. Both countries now seek to maintain their long-standing economic and diplomatic ties with the United States while recalibrating their relationship to China. Although French President Emmanuel Macron has put new tariffs on China, he has also encouraged fresh Chinese investment in Europe and pushed for the loosening of restrictions on Chinese tech imports to the European Union. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, meanwhile, announced a new approach to trade and diplomatic relations with China.
A transactional world order tends to stymie regional cooperation.
Other U.S. partners have also shifted into a more transactional mode. India is projected to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, and it will remain a key exporter and trading partner of the United States. But it has sought closer cooperation with China and Russia in recent months. India’s actions channel its historical commitment to nonalignment but are adapted for a multipolar order in which interests override values and ideology has less hold on world affairs. They also reflect an acknowledgment that internal autocracy increasingly aligns with external growth.
In the global South, African states such as Nigeria and South Africa are also adjusting to a new reality. Trump’s claim to ideological beefs with each country—with South Africa, for purportedly pursuing “woke” domestic policies, and with Nigeria, for allegedly condoning the “mass slaughter” of Christians—obscures the reality that both remain close trading partners with the United States. At the same time, South Africa remains dependent on Russia for oil and fertilizer, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has touted new Chinese commitments and investment in his country’s economy; Nigeria is also strengthening its relationship with China, whose technology is powering Nigeria’s push to build large-scale solar power installations and mine materials for future technologies.
As it did in the nineteenth-century imperial order, transactionalism tends to stymie regional cooperation. Nigeria and South Africa are well positioned to increase their collaboration on trade, but their dependence on great-power dynamics between China and the United States is inhibiting them from doing so. The same dynamic is at play in the relationship between the Philippines and Vietnam. The two countries are deepening their defense cooperation and trade relations, but each remains most focused on how to manage the U.S.-Chinese rivalry to their benefit. Trump’s trade war has pushed Vietnam closer to China, but it continues to rely on the United States for security and an export market; exports to the United States constitute 30 percent of Vietnam’s GDP. Like other countries in a transactional order, Vietnam is trapped between two powers that cannot fully serve its interests. The Philippines is in a similar situation, declaring to U.S. officials that Manila and Washington face a “common threat” in Beijing while striving to avoid outright confrontation with China, on whose markets it depends.
Even countries that try to resist a transactional age are forced to succumb to it. Under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil sought to elevate its status as a leader of a new global order. Yet it cannot afford to give up its economic partnerships with either the United States or China, and it lacks the economic clout to create countervailing institutions in which middle powers can collectively overcome the dominance of great-power rivalry.
BRASS TACKS YIELD BRASS KNUCKLES
Many analysts—not only Trump—seem to believe that a “transactional” approach to foreign affairs may yield even more peace than an idealistic one, presuming that costly fighting is not in most countries’ economic self-interest and that the reality of global trade ties will keep great powers from outright enmity. They tend to assume that transactionalism engenders pragmatism, which will mitigate conflict, and that nuclear deterrence will prevent new world wars. This year, Chinese leader Xi Jinping convinced Trump to back down on his plan to place exorbitant tariffs on Chinese goods. The United States struck deals with China over access to strategic minerals. Parochial interests forced an end to a looming U.S.-Chinese trade war, suggesting that a transactional era could sustain peace.
But it is far from clear yet that a new transactional age will be more peaceful than the nineteenth century was. Already, the regional wars, naval skirmishes, and imperial violence that defined the nineteenth century are resurfacing. India, for instance, has already proved willing to take on more risk, a stance highlighted by its seven-day conflict with Pakistan last May (the first time it used cruise missiles against its western neighbor) and its growing border conflicts with China. The United States attacked Venezuelan ports and boats, overthrew Venezuela’s president, and now threatens to annex Greenland and preemptively attack Iran. China, for its part, stepped up military drills around the coast of Taiwan after Washington’s decision to send an aid package worth more than $11 billion package to the island, even as Trump has praised Xi Jinping and touted his personal relationship with the Chinese leader.
In the nineteenth century, small powers forced to acquiesce to Western dominance violently resisted empire. But instability does not take only the form of outright violence. Resistance now takes multiple forms—for instance, backing revanchist Russian-led de-dollarization projects, lawfare through the International Court of Justice, or seeking membership in BRICS+ or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. These actions may not directly mirror the nineteenth century’s violent resistance against colonialism, but they do reflect a growing ability possessed by smaller powers to push back against greater ones through institutional means.
Even if the aim were to return to a nineteenth-century model of world order, doing so would not be possible. The twenty-first century has its own special conditions, particularly those that give smaller nations much more influence than their nineteenth-century counterparts: today’s most strategic minerals, such as coltan and lithium, are more concentrated and often not located in great powers’ territory. In the coming decades, climate change will wreak havoc on many U.S. and Chinese trading partners in the global South, forcing both countries to respond to the economic fallout. The threat of pandemics continues to loom and will mean that the concerns of smaller states cannot be easily ignored.
These new, twenty-first-century challenges will demand international frameworks. The diffusion of resources in a multipolar world presents policymakers with the potential to reframe a world order around the concerns of weaker states that are also vital economic partners. And they must do so: the truth is that today, the absence of any international order, even if imperfect, would be a problem for global stability. A world premised on one-off transactions between nations will prevent the development of the kind of long-term, grand strategic thinking required to ensure that the exploitation, imperialism, and violence of the nineteenth century does not simply resurface—or even reemerge in a worse form.
Foreign Affairs · More by Michael Brenes · January 7, 2026
21. Gamified War in Ukraine: Points, Drones, and the New Moral Economy of Killing
Summary:
Ukraine is building a points-based war economy that turns verified combat outputs into procurement power. Drone teams upload strike videos into the DELTA situational-awareness system; after validation, they receive “ePoints” that can be spent on Brave1 Market, a state-backed marketplace for drones, electronic warfare kits, and other gear. The system increasingly assigns higher value to actions that preserve life, such as evacuating wounded comrades or capturing enemies, than to killing. The article argues this is not a metaphor but an operating architecture that shapes behavior, status, and resourcing. It raises a core risk: when metrics become targets, units may optimize for points over operational effect.
Comment: Fascinating analysis. I had no idea this was taking place.
Gamified War in Ukraine: Points, Drones, and the New Moral Economy of Killing
warontherocks.com · January 7, 2026
Hadi Al-Majdalani
January 7, 2026
https://warontherocks.com/2026/01/gamified-war-in-ukraine-points-drones-and-the-new-moral-economy-of-killing/
On a screen somewhere near the front, a drone operator scrolls through a catalog that looks uncannily like an e-commerce site. Instead of headphones or phone chargers, the tiles display first-person-view drones, electronic warfare kits, and evacuation robots. The unit has just uploaded verified strike videos into Ukraine’s DELTA situational-awareness system. A few hours later, “ePoints” appear in their account and can be redeemed on Brave1 Market, a government platform already dubbed an “Amazon for war,” where frontline units select equipment using combat points rather than credit cards. The same architecture now allocates higher point values to evacuating wounded comrades than to killing enemies, so that casualty evacuation and capture are rewarded more generously than destruction.
This scene condenses several trajectories that are usually treated separately. For two decades, militaries and media have accustomed audiences to remote interfaces, streaming strike footage and “militainment.” Ukraine is the first major war in which these logics converge in a systematic way in the conduct of hostilities. Gamification here is not a metaphor but a set of concrete architectures that allocate attention, rewards, and equipment in a live theater of war.
Ukraine’s experiment with gamified war is best read as a new configuration of labor, violence, and digital platforms that reorganizes who participates in war, how killing is recorded, and how military labor is valued. Once battlefield action is translated into scores, dashboards, and leaderboards, it allocates attention, routes resources, and decides whose risks are worth taking. Rather than asking only whether such systems are “good” or “bad,” it is more productive to approach them as sites where new forms of subjectivity and accountability are being produced for drone operators at the front, coders in co-working spaces, and officials and donors watching the numbers from afar. Once these systems are embedded, they can harden into an operating model that shapes how commanders picture the fight and how outside supporters read what is happening on the ground. Points and dashboards start to influence which units receive scarce equipment and which tactics circulate through the force, while other forms of labor and risk become harder to see and to reward. In that setting, decisions about what the game counts, how it weighs different actions, and who can change the rules become strategic choices in their own right.
BECOME A MEMBER
From Militainment to Operational Gamification
Gamification is commonly defined as the use of game elements in non-game contexts. In commercial settings, it wraps mundane activities in feedback and rewards to keep users engaged. Points and progress bars are not neutral ornaments. They render behavior legible to a platform and then return it to the user in stylized form. In security and defense, this logic remained at a distance from combat operations. It animated recruitment games, training simulators, and an expanding ecosystem of war-themed entertainment, while the decision to use force still lay within conventional chains of command.
Ukraine’s war with Russia marks a shift from that first generation of “militainment” to something closer to operational gamification. A significant layer of wartime participation now passes through interfaces that look and feel like games and that are explicitly designed to make participation easier, more satisfying, and more trackable. The pattern is visible first in the civilian and cyber domain.
Browser-based projects such as Play for Ukraine, a reworked version of the puzzle game 2048, invite players to slide tiles on a familiar grid while the underlying code directs traffic towards distributed denial-of-service attacks on Russian websites. Critical analysis of the game describes it as “wargaming as resistance pleasure” that transforms individual enjoyment into a modest but symbolically powerful contribution to cyber resistance. The IT Army of Ukraine, crowdsourced by the Ministry of Digital Transformation at the start of the invasion, organizes volunteers through open-task lists and time-boxed “operations” and has been described as the most prominent example of crowd-sourced cyber operations to date. Participation here is not remunerated in money but in missions completed, status within online communities, and the affective satisfaction of “raids” that look and feel like cooperative gameplay.
The same pattern extends into Ukraine’s state digital infrastructure. The Diia app, initially built as an e-government portal, now authenticates users for bots such as eVorog, which allow citizens to report the movement of Russian troops and equipment. Those reports are validated and passed into DELTA, a situational-awareness platform that integrates multiple sources of reconnaissance into a common operational picture and that has been showcased as a model for networked war. What appears to users as the familiar satisfaction of sending a geolocated report from a smartphone is, in this configuration, the first step in a process that may end in artillery fire or a drone strike on the icon that was just placed on the map.
These examples matter because they show that gamification is not a cosmetic layer on top of war. It scripts participation, distributes agency, and generates data. Web-based interfaces such as Vezha and Ochi link intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance feeds to frontline units in near real time, while many Ukrainian formations coordinate movement and fire through Discord and other commercial platforms borrowed from gaming cultures. Civilian volunteers, remote coders, and app users are not merely amplifying traditional military action from the sidelines. They are being enrolled into a hybrid field in which the boundaries between play, political solidarity, and direct participation in hostilities are increasingly difficult to parse.
Points, Drones, and the Architecture of Reward
Drones render these dynamics even more visible. First-person-view drones have become emblematic of the Ukraine war, both as instruments of destruction and as aesthetic objects in a constant stream of footage on Telegram and X. They are also central to the Army of Drones Bonus program, a points-based reward system launched in 2025 by the Ministry of Digital Transformation. Journalistic and official accounts converge on the same core description. Units upload video evidence of successful strikes into DELTA. After verification, they receive points that can be spent on Brave1 Market, a government platform linking frontline units to Ukrainian defense start-ups and manufacturers. A destroyed tank is worth more points than an enemy soldier. Capturing an enemy alive now yields more points than killing him. Evacuating wounded comrades in an uncrewed ground vehicle is rewarded more generously than hitting an infantry position.
In effect, the program condenses three functions that are often treated separately. First, it generates battlefield data, since every claim must be supported by a video that can be archived, analyzed, and cross-checked. Second, it reorganizes procurement, since it allows small units to channel verified needs to a marketplace that can respond more quickly than a central bureaucracy. Finally, it regulates recognition, since units compare their tally of points and appear on informal leader boards that circulate on social media. Gamification here is not decoration. It is the principle that links proof of violence, internal legitimacy, and access to material resources.
Official rhetoric surrounding the program stresses that it is a motivational system rather than a game, designed to get new technology to the battlefield quickly and with less bureaucracy, and increasingly to reward missions that save lives and reduce risk to personnel, such as using unmanned ground vehicles to deliver ammunition and evacuate the wounded. That insistence already acknowledges an unease that many observers feel when confronted with a system in which human lives and pieces of equipment are assigned point values and displayed on a digital scorecard. Yet framing this as a matter of “efficiency” alone does not exhaust what is at stake. Once operational success is quantified, and attached to an interface, it becomes difficult to disentangle tactical judgement from score-chasing: Is grinding down enemy assets counted as success in itself, or only when it advances specific operational effects, and what kinds of behavior does the points system really reward?
Critical social science has long described a version of this dilemma through Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Transposed into a gamified battlespace, this suggests that any points-based reward system risks generating unintended effects. Units may privilege point-rich targets even when they are tactically marginal or already being serviced by other teams. Drone pilots may accept riskier missions and stack multiple platforms against the same target in pursuit of incremental gains on the leaderboard, burning scarce munitions on duplicate kills. In that sense, a metric designed to capture effectiveness can generate operational inefficiencies as score-chasing behavior pulls resources away from less-visible but necessary tasks, a dynamic analysts have already linked to Goodhart’s law in the Ukrainian “Army of Drones” program.
Civilians as Players, Law as Interface
These architectures also pose questions for international humanitarian law. Legal frameworks still hinge on a distinction between combatants and civilians and on the idea that civilians are protected “unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.” Crowd-sourced distributed denial of service campaigns, authenticated reporting apps, and points-based drone rewards complicate this picture in several ways.
Play for Ukraine illustrates the problem in miniature. At one level, the experience is indistinguishable from solving a casual puzzle game. At another level, the game generates a stream of requests that contribute to disabling Russian websites, some of which may be linked to government or infrastructure. Commentators have already asked whether this exposes players to countermeasures or legal claims. The more interesting question is how it reshapes their own sense of what they are doing.
A similar ambiguity surrounds the IT Army of Ukraine. Analytical reports describe it as a hybrid formation that sits between hacktivist culture and state direction, with tasks issued through Telegram channels and a mix of official encouragement and plausible deniability. Volunteers are told that they can “fight” without leaving home and that their keyboard is a weapon. In such a setting, the difference between legitimate digital protest, criminal intrusion, and acts that qualify as direct participation in hostilities is not easily communicated, especially when participation is framed through the language of play.
The Diia-eVorog-DELTA chain raises a different set of questions. Government communications explicitly encourage citizens to submit information and highlight the number of reports received. Such reporting is integrated with other feeds to generate enhanced situational awareness. From a critical perspective, what matters is not only whether this infrastructure satisfies formal legal tests, but how it configures the relationship between seeing, reporting, and striking. When civilians are invited to tag enemy movements on a map, they are positioned as sensors in a distributed targeting apparatus. The interface does not display the downstream consequences of that click. It presents an apparently clean act of witnessing, without the messy temporality through which reports are investigated, weighed, and possibly ignored.
In each of these cases, gamification operates as a translator between complex legal and ethical questions and simple, rewarding user journeys. Law appears less as an external constraint and more as a set of design choices that shape what actions are possible within the system. To put it differently, legal and ethical considerations migrate into the interface. They are present insofar as the system requires authentication through Diia, filters out obviously unlawful targets, and channels reports to trained analysts. They are absent insofar as they do not register on the screen of the volunteer, who sees themself as playing a role in a collective drama of defense and resistance.
Reading Gamified War Critically
A critical war studies approach as developed by scholars like Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, starts from how wars are organized, experienced, and justified — asking who benefits and who bears the risks of new ways of fighting, and whose labor and vulnerability are made visible or expendable — rather than assuming that gamification is either inherently corrupting or emancipatory. Instead, it treats gamified architectures as sites where broader dynamics of militarization, platform capitalism, and subject formation condense into visible form.
Gamified war foregrounds the extent to which contemporary conflict is organized through platforms. Ukraine’s digital resistance infrastructures sit at the intersection of state ministries, private technology companies, volunteer communities, and international donors. Open-source technologies, domestic start-ups, and foreign platforms such as Starlink and major social media services all play a role in keeping these systems running. Audrey Kurth Cronin has argued in these pages that open-source technology and public-private innovation are central to Ukraine’s strategic resilience. Gamification adds an additional layer, in which platform logics of engagement and retention migrate into the conduct of hostilities.
At the same time, these architectures invite a reconsideration of military labor and responsibility. In the conventional understanding of war, combatants and non-combatants are clearly separated, and labor that is recognized as “military” is performed in uniform within a formal hierarchy. In Ukraine’s case, a significant share of useful labor is performed by coders, system administrators, and volunteers who work from apartments and co-working spaces, and whose reward is symbolic rather than contractual. Even within the armed forces, the points-based drone economy overlays traditional hierarchies with a parallel economy of status in which the most visible labor is that which is easiest to quantify.
For observers outside Ukraine, it is tempting to treat the Army of Drones Bonus or Play for Ukraine as creative responses to an extraordinary situation that will not outlast this war. Yet reports already indicate that allied militaries and defense establishments are studying Ukraine’s experience closely, including its gamified procurement systems and its crowdsourced cyber formations. The normative language around these schemes is still cautious: Officials talk about an “innovation ecosystem” and “agile acquisition.” On the surface, this sounds like a simple attempt to get more out of limited crews, drones, and shells. In practice, tying rewards to a points table forces the system to decide what it is really trying to maximize. Is success any destroyed equipment, or only strikes that change a frontline or break up an attack? It also fixes who counts as “performing”: units that produce impressive tallies; those holding exposed positions; or those doing slower work such as reconnaissance, repair, and resupply. As units adapt to what the system can see and reward, they risk organizing around the game rather than around operational priorities. When the rules and metrics change, that specialization can suddenly sit out of step with what war demands.
Conclusion
Gamification in Ukraine is less a curiosity than a diagnostic window into how contemporary wars are organized and fought. The points that flow from DELTA to Brave1, the tiles that slide in Play for Ukraine, and the mission lists that scroll past on IT Army channels are not trivial embellishments. They are mechanisms through which participation is invited, violence is rendered countable, and life and death are folded into the familiar rhythms of digital interaction.
These architectures mobilize civilians and volunteers through playful interfaces, organize drone operations through a points-based marketplace, and reconfigure legal and ethical responsibility through platform design. In Ukraine, this experiment is unfolding under the pressure of a dense web of external suppliers, conditions that both enable and limit what these systems can do in practice. For outsiders tempted to imitate the model, the uncomfortable question is whether a similar architecture would steer behavior toward their own operational priorities once points, dashboards, and leaderboards begin to stand in for judgment.
For commanders, planners, and donors, the practical task is to test whether the behaviors rewarded by points schemes genuinely serve operational aims, and to keep sight of the labor and risk that the metrics struggle to see. Any change to how points are assigned or redeemed should be treated as a strategic decision and debated, not left to quiet tweaks in the code. To understand the future that is emerging here, it is not enough to count drones or lines of code. It is necessary to study the interfaces, metrics, and incentives through which war is being gamified and, in the process, subtly reorganized.
BECOME A MEMBER
Hadi Al-Majdalani is a graduate student in critical security studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. His research focuses on the strategic use of digital and sensory, non-ocular technologies in contemporary warfare, and how they reshape the organization of violence and everyday life in protracted conflicts.
Image: ArmyInform
warontherocks.com · January 7, 2026
22. How to Save the Fight for Women’s Rights: The Backlash Against Democracy Calls for New Strategies
Summary:
Three decades after the 1995 Beijing Platform, the women’s rights agenda is stalling under democratic erosion, shrinking civic space, and a better-funded, transnational “antigender” countermobilization. The article argues that the post Cold War playbook, anchored in multilateral forums and elite legal reform, no longer matches a world of aid cutbacks, sovereignty-first politics, and culture-war framing. It calls for coalitions of the willing on specific issues, heavier investment in locally rooted organizing and culturally resonant messaging, and deliberate engagement of men and boys, especially online, to blunt radicalization and rebuild broad legitimacy for practical reforms.
Comment: Does anyone think the culture wars being fought by both political extremes are of any value to the common person?
If the enabling conditions of the 1990s are gone, what is the new center of gravity for power in this fight: institutions, markets, networks, or communities?
Can messaging that ties women’s rights to family well-being broaden support without ceding ground on autonomy and equality?
Will coalitions of the willing scale fast enough to offset authoritarian repression and the funding asymmetry, or do they risk becoming islands of progress in a widening rollback?
How to Save the Fight for Women’s Rights
Foreign Affairs · More by Saskia Brechenmacher · January 7, 2026
The Backlash Against Democracy Calls for New Strategies
January 7, 2026
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/how-save-fight-womens-rights
At a protest against femicide and gender-related violence, São Paulo, Brazil, December 2025 Tuane Fernandes / Reuters
SASKIA BRECHENMACHER is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a co-author, with Katherine Mann, of Aiding Empowerment: Democracy Promotion and Gender Equality in Politics.
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Three decades after the Beijing Platform for Action, the groundbreaking UN declaration that affirmed that women’s rights are human rights, the global movement for gender equality and women’s empowerment is under strain. Adopted in 1995 and signed by 189 governments, the ambitious framework spurred a generation of legal reforms, gains in political representation, and consolidation of norms around gender equality. Today, however, that momentum is faltering. Although some countries continue to make steady progress, a UN report released in March 2025 found that one in four countries is experiencing a backlash against gender equality. Around the world, 270 million women lack access to modern contraception, one in three women experiences gender-based violence, and women are systematically underrepresented in countries’ political and economic leadership.
It is tempting to blame the current impasse on specific leaders. U.S. President Donald Trump and his cabinet are openly hostile to domestic and international gender equality commitments, dismissing efforts to promote gender equity as “woke” overreach. Hungarian President Viktor Orban, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Russian President Vladimir Putin have all built their strongman images by dismissing feminism as radical and corrosive.
Yet these leaders’ hostility toward gender equality is only one symptom of a broader shift. The core assumptions that powered the global women’s movement after the end of the Cold War—that the world was becoming more democratic, more multilateral, and more liberal—no longer hold. Democratic erosion, from El Salvador to Thailand, is shrinking the political space for women to organize. Multilateral institutions that once served as engines for advocacy face funding shortfalls and diminished global relevance as conservative actors promoting national sovereignty and traditional gender norms gain power.
The strategies that were successful 30 years ago are no longer sufficient. Faced with a prolonged democratic recession, gridlocked international institutions, and a surge in conservative countermobilization, proponents of gender equality and their governmental supporters need a new template for action. Multilateral forums will remain an important arena for advancing progress and protecting existing achievements. But rather than being solely technical and elite-driven, reformers committed to the women’s rights agenda must expand their efforts, focusing on more collaboration at the local level, investing in initiatives that include men and boys, and connecting messaging about women’s empowerment to family well-being, community resilience, and economic stability.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
The post–Cold War period brought rapid breakthroughs in women’s rights. Countries across the world adopted new gender quotas to boost women’s political representation, passed laws against gender-based violence and discrimination, and reformed their constitutions to enshrine equality guarantees. This surge in activity built on decades of activism and coalition building. But it was also enabled by three important features of the post–Cold War order.
First, advocates and organizations benefited from a wave of democratic expansion. Across Africa, eastern Europe, and Latin America, authoritarian regimes were losing their grip, creating new channels for women to organize. Women’s groups whose operations had been subject to strict state control gave way to more politically autonomous networks. From El Salvador to South Africa, women took advantage of political transitions and constitutional negotiations to press for more rights and inclusion. And they were successful.
Gender equality activists face not only entrenched resistance but also well-resourced countercampaigns.
The end of bipolar great-power competition also allowed multilateral institutions to play a more decisive role in global governance. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the United Nations had emerged as an important forum for building norms around gender equality through landmark women’s conferences and multilateral agreements such as the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. These efforts intensified after the end of the Cold War, when UN gatherings on topics ranging from human rights, in Vienna, in 1993; population, in Cairo, in 1994; women, in Beijing, in 1995; and social development, in Copenhagen, in 1995, rapidly expanded international commitments to advancing gender equality. The European Union, the UN Development Program (UNDP), the World Bank, and other multilateral bodies all began integrating gender more systematically into their work, driven by new research and policy thinking that framed gender equality not only as normatively desirable but also as a catalyst for economic growth, good governance, and democratic consolidation. Gender equality advocates, connected through frequent transnational gatherings, used these expanded international frameworks to press for domestic reforms, often invoking universal human rights. In 1996, for example, feminist activists in Nicaragua used the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence Against Women, which their government had ratified, to pressure Managua to pass a domestic violence law.
Gender norms also appeared to be liberalizing across different regions. Women entered higher education and the workforce in greater numbers. As women’s organizations multiplied and advocates won important legal and political victories, feminist ideas gained greater legitimacy and visibility in public discourse. Particularly in the Western world, the end of the Cold War further reinforced the belief that liberal values, including individual rights and equality, had triumphed.
This is not to say that there was no pushback. Conservative religious movements had already begun organizing more systematically and gaining greater political influence in India, Iran, the United States, and across parts of Africa. In much of the global South, women’s rights activists still confronted entrenched religious and traditional institutions that enforced patriarchal norms. Some women’s groups in developing countries also objected to what they saw as a Western-influenced feminist agenda, arguing that its emphasis on individual rights overlooked structural economic inequalities and communal identities. Still, the overall trajectory, underpinned by new forms of regional and transnational solidarity, seemed favorable.
LOSING GROUND
Today, those enabling conditions have eroded. Democracy is no longer on the march. Instead, the world is more than a decade into a prolonged democratic recession, and the space for women to organize for political change is shrinking across all regions. Data from the Varieties of Democracy Institute show that the repression of civil society, media freedom, and free expression has increased in 41 countries since 2014.
Women’s rights activists are frequent targets in countries where democracy is eroding. In India, women peacefully protesting the government’s new citizenship law have been jailed under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the country’s primary counterterrorism law. Egyptian feminists have been subjected to protracted judicial proceedings after being accused of illegally receiving foreign funding. The Nicaraguan government, under the autocratic leadership of Daniel Ortega, has shut down dozens of women’s groups that have supported marginalized communities, labeling them as “foreign agents.” Autocratization is making it harder for women’s groups to build coalitions, influence policy, or secure resources without risking surveillance, harassment, and prosecution.
This closing of civic space is exacerbated by a subset of conservative autocrats and far-right populist leaders who have seized on gender equality, feminism, and LGBT rights as potent symbols of liberal overreach by unaccountable, globalist elites. Many autocrats once paid lip service to women’s rights to appear pro-democratic and attract Western donor support. But today, some illiberal leaders—such as Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and Kais Saied in Tunisia—see gender as a useful wedge issue that allows them to position themselves as defenders of tradition against foreign or elite interests.
Focusing only on democracy to improve gender equality would be misguided.
Activists who once turned to international institutions for resources and political backing find this avenue increasingly fruitless. Most prominently, the Trump administration has denounced the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, withdrawn from the World Health Organization, halted all gender-related foreign assistance, and declared its intention to no longer fund several UN institutions. U.S. officials now even oppose references to the term “gender” in international negotiations. Facing a funding crunch, UN Women, alongside dozens of other UN offices, has been asked to develop a proposal to cut 20 percent of its staff. Rather than stepping up, other donor governments once seen as reliable supporters of women’s rights, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, are also cutting back their aid budgets.
At the same time, conservative governments and nongovernmental organizations are asserting themselves within these institutions, promoting national sovereignty, religious freedom, and socially conservative gender norms and challenging language related to gender. Governments that are resisting pressure from women’s organizations can now turn to alternative norm-building initiatives such as the 2020 Geneva Consensus Declaration, which asserts that decisions around abortion and reproductive health are the exclusive prerogative of national governments and not international treaties and bodies.
The assumption that activism and generational change would inevitably drive gender norms in a more liberal direction has proved flawed. The Gender Social Norms Index, published by the UNDP in 2023, indicated that the share of people holding biased gender norms—for example, that men make better political leaders than women—decreased by only two percent between 2014 and 2022, from 86.9 to 84.6 percent. Among younger generations, IPSOS survey data from 30 countries published in early 2025 show a growing gender divergence: young women are increasingly feminist, whereas young men are more likely to agree that gender equality efforts have gone too far.
Reinforcing this trend is an increasingly well-organized and well-funded transnational movement promoting traditional gender norms. What began as decentralized religious activism has evolved into coordinated campaigns shaping policy and public discourse, often through strategic messaging centered on protecting the family, parental rights, and religious freedom. Groups including CitizenGO, a conservative Catholic advocacy organization, operate across continents to oppose LGBTQ rights and the liberalization of abortion laws. These actors draw on existing social conservatism but have also mobilized broader public support by spotlighting highly contentious issues, particularly sexual minority and transgender rights, using them to weaken the entire policy and legal infrastructure focused on gender equality and casting progressive advocates as dogmatic and out of step with popular opinion. As a result, gender equality activists face not only entrenched resistance but also well-resourced countercampaigns.
ZEROING IN
What does this altered landscape mean for gender equality advocacy? Holding the line in multilateral negotiations remains essential to preventing the erosion of existing norms and mobilizing resources to mitigate the devastating impact of abrupt aid cuts on women and girls, particularly in conflict zones. But these efforts should be accompanied by issue-focused “coalitions of the willing”: smaller circles of governments, civil society groups, and private sector actors that collaborate to tackle specific hurdles to gender equality.
One recent example is the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse, a coalition of governments, tech companies, and civil society groups collaborating to combat technology-facilitated gender-based violence, such as the nonconsensual sharing of intimate images and deepfakes. Similar efforts could focus on expanding access to reproductive health care, improving childcare and eldercare systems, tackling young men’s online radicalization, and ensuring artificial intelligence tools are designed and deployed with attention to their different effects on women and men. Regional institutions could also serve as effective loci for such efforts, as could partnerships among major cities or subnational governments to share effective ideas for reform.
Funders and governments committed to advancing gender equality also need to act more strategically and with greater urgency to counter movements against gender equality. Given the importance of civic freedoms and political space to meaningful progress for women, strengthening democratic institutions will be an important element of this. Yet focusing only on democracy while neglecting specific initiatives to improve gender equality would be misguided.
For one, widespread democratic renewal appears unlikely in the short term. Many countries are stuck in the gray zone between liberal democracy and autocracy, and preventing concrete harms to women and girls in these hybrid contexts is paramount. Moreover, illiberal and antidemocratic actors intentionally use gender to polarize the public and delegitimize broader human rights and equality norms. This reality makes it all the more important for democratic policymakers and civil society actors to build broad-based support for gender equality measures as common-sense investments in welfare and prosperity while avoiding rhetoric that further reinforces cultural divides.
Between 2019 and 2023, organizations involved in antigender activism in Europe received over $1.1 billion.
In practice, building such support requires funding context-specific advocacy campaigns and legislative outreach alongside popular education, cultural production, and coalition building—including with constituencies such as conservative politicians, faith communities, and media influencers who may not agree with the most progressive stance on every issue related to gender. One of the downsides of the professionalization and internationalization of women’s organizations that occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s is that many of these groups now have specialized policy expertise but lack popular and digital reach. They are also underresourced: according to data collected by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, the median annual budget for feminist and women’s rights organizations in 2023 was only $22,000, with most of that funding taking the form of short-term project grants lasting 18 months or less. Meanwhile, between 2019 and 2023, over $1.1 billion in funding went to 276 organizations involved in antigender activism in Europe alone. To address this imbalance, supportive governments and private funders need to shift more resources toward creative, culturally resonant communication and on-the-ground organizing for gender equality. The 2018 referendum in Ireland that approved the legalization of abortion offers one example of what such campaigns might look like: advocates won by building alliances with doctors, midwives, and faith leaders; investing in grassroots outreach; and focusing their messaging on health and compassion.
An important priority should be to frame women’s rights and empowerment as central to strengthening families, communities, and societies. Over the past decade, some conservative actors have cast policies on sex education, reproductive rights, and protections against gender-based violence as threats to family values imposed by “radical feminists” or out-of-touch elites. The typical response from women’s rights advocates—countering with public statements citing scientific evidence or appealing to individual rights—often fails to resonate with broader publics for whom family, religion, and tradition are core reference points. Particularly in more socially conservative societies, campaigns that leverage women’s roles as caregivers and community leaders, highlighting the importance of gender equality to shared goals such as families’ economic security and children’s well-being, could help broaden support for practical reforms and depolarize public debates.
Finally, engaging men—especially young men—must be a core part of any strategy. Parts of the gender equality movement have hesitated to do so, fearing that addressing men’s concerns might inadvertently echo the narratives of the far right or the so-called manosphere. Yet ignoring men’s experiences of social isolation, the lack of positive male role models, and decreasing economic opportunities gives more space to extremist actors. Antifeminist content already saturates male-dominated online spaces, drowning out narratives that promote mutual care and respect. To address these challenges, governments and private funders should expand their support for initiatives targeting men and boys that focus on mental health, digital literacy, vocational training, and fatherhood, among others. Such investments would complement, rather than replace, programs serving women and girls. Coaching Boys Into Men, for instance, partners with high school sports coaches to engage young male athletes on healthy relationships and nonviolence, in coordination with local domestic or sexual violence prevention agencies. The goal of these efforts should be to counter negative messaging about masculinity with an affirmative sense of belonging, identity, and purpose—one that makes men stakeholders rather than enemies in the struggle for gender equality.
If organizations promoting gender equality and women’s rights fail to update their strategies to today’s global political environment, there is a real risk that many of the hard-won legal, social, and political gains for women will be slowly hollowed out. This may not happen in dramatic reversals but gradually, under the weight of attrition and neglect.
Foreign Affairs · More by Saskia Brechenmacher · January 7, 2026
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Executive Director, Korea Regional Review
Editor-at-large, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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