Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men."

– Plato

"I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was good thought; the second, a good word; and the third a good deed."

– Friedrich Nietzsche

"The strength of society lies in the moral integrity of its citizens."

– John Locke

1. The Day Amazon Broke the Internet for Millions of Americans

2. Marco Rubio Is Leading Trump’s Pressure Campaign Against Venezuela

3. What Does the Fall of He Weidong Mean for the PLA?

4. U.S., Australia Deal Advances Critical Minerals Ambitions, While Detail Light

5. Russia and Ukraine Are No Closer to Cease-Fire After Trump’s Pressure on Zelensky

6. Trump Signals Support for Selling Submarines to Australia

7. Japan Gets Its First Female Leader, a Conservative Who Favors a Stronger Military

8. Japan Has a New Leader, and She’s a Heavy Metal Drummer

9. U.S. Rushes to Shore Up Fragile Gaza Cease-Fire

10. China Has Another Lever to Pull in Showdown With Trump: Factory Lines

11. I worked for Biden. Here’s the gold in Trump’s foreign policy.

12. China accuses US of cyber breaches at national time centre

13. Why leading Chinese scientist warned public against ‘hubris’ over country’s advances

14. Book Review | On Character: Choices That Define a Life (Book by McChrystal, review by Ken Gleiman)

15. Maximizing The Reciprocal Benefits of International Military Education

16. Interest in American M.B.A. Programs Shrinks, but Schools Across Asia Are Booming

17. Policing the Pacific: How China Expands Influence Where the US Looks for Allies

18. Colombia Is Struggling to Keep Up With A Criminal Air Force

19. The Stagnant Order And the End of Rising Powers

20. The New Supply Chain Insecurity – Fortress America Is Not a Safer America

21. China Against China – Xi Jinping Confronts the Downsides of Success

22. Meet Leonidas, the Drone-Killing Microwave Weapon Ukraine Has Its Eye On

23. ‘He lost us:’ Generals, senior officers say trust in Hegseth has evaporated

24. Trump is going to Asia — what happens next is anyone's guess

1. The Day Amazon Broke the Internet for Millions of Americans

So just an accident or glitch? (Or is that what the Chinese want us to think?).

Do we have too many eggs in one basket?

Are we nearing a single point of failure?

A wakeup call?

Excerpts:

The trouble started a few hours after midnight on the East Coast.

A minor update to what’s called the Domain Name System—the kind of software tweak that happens millions of times a day on the internet—sent the well-oiled machine that underpins the modern web careening toward a crash.

DNS acts as a kind of telephone directory for the internet, instructing machines on how to find each other. The faulty update gave the wrong information for DynamoDB, an Amazon Web Services product that has become one of the world’s most important databases.

Suddenly, machines on the East Coast that tried to process trillions of requests were getting the internet’s equivalent of a wrong number.

Amazon services were some of the first to feel the effects.

The Day Amazon Broke the Internet for Millions of Americans

The prolonged outage offered a reminder of the fragility of global internet connectivity and Amazon’s role underpinning much of online infrastructure

https://www.wsj.com/tech/aws-outage-impact-what-happened-becce0e7

By Robert McMillan

, Belle Lin

and Sean McLain

Oct. 20, 2025 9:02 pm ET

Emil Lendof/WSJ

Quick Summary

A minor update to the Domain Name System caused a widespread Amazon Web Services outage, affecting numerous internet services.View more

A glitch with an obscure Amazon AMZN 1.61%increase; green up pointing triangle database disrupted life for millions of people across the U.S. as core internet services failed to function for an array of companies.

Alexa devices couldn’t hear. Corporate Slack messages wouldn’t post. Students couldn’t turn in assignments or access materials from courses. Financial trades were impossible on certain platforms. Users of Zoom, Venmo, Instacart and a host of other services faced prolonged outages that rippled through homes and businesses.

The trouble started a few hours after midnight on the East Coast.

A minor update to what’s called the Domain Name System—the kind of software tweak that happens millions of times a day on the internet—sent the well-oiled machine that underpins the modern web careening toward a crash.

DNS acts as a kind of telephone directory for the internet, instructing machines on how to find each other. The faulty update gave the wrong information for DynamoDB, an Amazon Web Services product that has become one of the world’s most important databases.

Suddenly, machines on the East Coast that tried to process trillions of requests were getting the internet’s equivalent of a wrong number.

Amazon services were some of the first to feel the effects.

At around 2 a.m. on Monday morning, the systems that help Amazon sort packages onto trucks and guide drivers on the road went down, according to an internal message viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

By 3 a.m., the outage’s blast radius had spread far beyond Amazon, cascading across the internet, delaying more than 4,000 flights, knocking out news websites such as The Wall Street Journal, affecting financial transactions and extending into everyday life.

The episode, which turned into one of the most prolonged daily outages for Amazon Web Services, offered a reminder of the fragility of global connectivity, which has gone dark a number of times in recent years after seemingly minor software updates. By late afternoon Monday, Amazon said it had restored much of the service that had been knocked offline.

“Even if just briefly, major providers like AWS going down represent vulnerabilities in what have become critical infrastructure for organizations and, in some cases, governments globally,” said Jacob Bourne, an analyst at research firm eMarketer. “As cloud reliance and workloads expand, these outages could hit industries harder.”

Another outage for AWS in 2021 similarly disrupted business and personal activities across the economy for most of a day. Amazon controls about a third of the public cloud-computing market, the core infrastructure of the modern internet.

An hour into the outage, Amazon seemed optimistic. “We continue to observe recovery across most of the affected AWS Services,” the company wrote. A half-hour later, at around 3:30 a.m., it acknowledged that customers weren’t out of the woods. Customers were having problems starting up new cloud-computing servers—the backbone of AWS’s operations.

The problems with DynamoDB were cascading. Soon, they would render AWS virtually unusable for customers dependent on Amazon’s East Coast data centers. By the end of the day, 142 AWS products would be affected, including the software the company uses to spread computing demand over its network of data centers, and the content-delivery software it uses to display websites to internet browsers.

So many East Coast services were affected that customers who wanted to simply pull up and move their computing operations to another part of Amazon’s cloud found themselves unable to migrate.

At 4 a.m. Monday, the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase told customers that it was aware that many of them couldn’t get into their accounts because of the Amazon outage and was working to get them access.

Some customers said that the outage left them unable to close their trades. “A crypto exchange brought down by a centralized cloud. You can’t preach decentralization and still depend on AWS to stay online,” wrote one.

Around the same time, the trading platform Robinhood also said the AWS outage had knocked it offline. On X, the company said issues persisted through the day on Monday but were ultimately resolved.

While it is too soon to have a complete understanding of the cost of the outage, other companies have faced multimillion-dollar claims and lawsuits when their services were at the root of global disruptions.

Last year, a software patch from CrowdStrike knocked nearly 10 million computers offline, affecting hospitals, restaurants, media companies and beyond. Although the acute impact from that event was related to laptops using Microsoft software that were rendered unusable, the cloud also played a role.

Digital-disruption insurance provider Parametrix said the CrowdStrike event caused $5.4 billion in losses for the Fortune 500, excluding Microsoft.

A Delta employee assisting a traveler in July 2024 amid a widespread computer outage. Michael Nagle/Bloomberg News

When Will Mauldin tried to print shipping labels for the weekend orders at his woodworking company in Rockville, Md., on Monday, he couldn’t log in to the fulfillment system run by a third-party software provider. Later in the day, Mauldin discovered that he couldn’t send coupons to new customers, because of downtime at another vendor.

“We’re not getting our orders today and we’re not getting anything out,” he said. “I had no idea that the loss of one web cloud service would chip away at my small business and give me a Monday morning from hell.”

Carlos Naudon, chief executive of Ponce Bank, said he couldn’t charge his electric vehicle on Monday morning, as the charging network uses AWS. Ponce, a New York-based bank, doesn’t rely on the cloud for core banking services, but the outage delayed transactions and cost an estimated $50,000 to $100,000, he said.

“Honestly, it’s more unsettling than anything else,” Naudon said. “You can’t assume that something like that is going to be foolproof and nothing can happen.”

The Amazon Web Services outage is poised to accelerate a push among many executives to diversify their cloud services, analysts said. Doing so can make it easier to respond and adjust to disruptions, but software executives cautioned that problems can occur on other cloud platforms as well.

Some companies that have diversified managed to avoid the chaos others faced throughout the day.

Shaun Hunt, chief information officer of McKenney’s, said the Atlanta-based construction services firm didn’t go down completely because the firm uses several cloud platforms and runs on its own data centers. “We have a strategy to diversify our risk,” he said.

Over the past decade, DynamoDB has come to not only power Amazon’s retail operation, but also, increasingly, store the data used by AWS computing services themselves, according to Adrian Cockcroft, a former AWS executive who is now a technology adviser.

“But if you can’t reach it because the DNS is down, then all sorts of things are not working,” he said. “It’s like you’re trying to visit a website and it’s not there.”

DNS-related outages have taken companies and the internet offline in recent years, including Facebook in 2021 and a large chunk of the internet in 2016.

Write to Robert McMillan at robert.mcmillan@wsj.com, Belle Lin at belle.lin@wsj.com and Sean McLain at sean.mclain@wsj.com

2. Marco Rubio Is Leading Trump’s Pressure Campaign Against Venezuela

What is our objective and strategy? What are we trying to achieve and how can we achieve it?

Marco Rubio Is Leading Trump’s Pressure Campaign Against Venezuela

Secretary of state and national security adviser is at the forefront of the Trump administration’s push to weaken country’s leader

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/marco-rubio-trump-venezuela-policy-afe1ab2c

By Lara Seligman

, Vera Bergengruen

and Kejal Vyas

Oct. 20, 2025 10:00 pm ET

Marco Rubio at the White House earlier this month. andrew caballero-reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

Quick Summary

Marco Rubio is leading an aggressive campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, expanding from counternarcotics.View more

For more than a decade in the Senate, Marco Rubio sought the ouster of Venezuela’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro. Now as President Trump’s national security adviser, Rubio is finally getting his chance to squeeze the strongman.

Rubio has been the top official executing an aggressive Trump administration campaign that began as a counternarcotics operation but has expanded into a broad effort to use sanctions and the threat of military force to pressure Maduro, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. While Trump’s primary aim is to stop the flow of drugs into the U.S., the hope is that the pressure campaign will also convince Maduro he can no longer remain in power, U.S. officials said.

In recent months, Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who served as the Republican senator from Florida from 2011 to 2025, has been quietly discussing a more aggressive stance on the Maduro regime with other senior administration officials, the people said. Trump has long been critical of Maduro and has tasked Rubio, along with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, chief of staff Susie Wiles and Attorney General Pamela Bondi with implementing the pressure campaign, said one senior administration official.

He has taken an unusually domestic focus for a secretary of state: striking deportation deals, revoking visas on ideological grounds and encouraging the use of lethal force against “narco-terrorists” he accuses of waging war against Americans.

“The President is the one who drives and determines our foreign policy,” said State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott. “It is the job of the cabinet to implement. Secretary Rubio is honored to be a part of the President’s team.”

The U.S. has ramped up lethal strikes on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean over recent weeks and has deployed nuclear-capable B-52 bombers just off Venezuela’s shores. The bombers are conducting training flights as part of a continuing exercise but are also collecting intelligence and serve as a show of force, according to another U.S. official.

The pressure campaign against Maduro is at the center of a “Venn diagram of interest” among Trump’s top lieutenants, one of the people said. Wiles and Bondi are from Florida, where anti-Maduro sentiment is strong among Republicans. In August, Bondi doubled the U.S.’s bounty on Maduro to $50 million, accusing him of working with criminal organizations such as Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro at an event in Caracas in October. federico parra/AFP/Getty Images

“Nicolás Maduro is a narco-terrorist and fugitive from American justice who has deputized terrorist organizations to stay in power. His reign will not last forever,” Bondi said through a spokesman.

Miller is also an integral player in the discussions, the people said. For Miller, the campaign is a way to halt the flow of drugs into the U.S. and potentially enable the deportation of more immigrants who are living in the country illegally, according to one person.

Trump, who also tried to oust Maduro during his first administration, sees the more aggressive campaign as a foreign-policy win that could be an economic boon for the U.S. given Venezuela’s vast reserves of oil and other natural resources. He also sees Maduro’s removal as a domestic-policy win, as it would result in fewer drugs coming into the U.S., fewer drug-related deaths and safer communities, the senior administration official said.

The campaign has a heavy military element. The Pentagon has moved eight Navy warships, an attack submarine, F-35B jet fighters, P-8 Poseidon spy planes and MQ-9 Reaper drones into the region. In recent weeks, the department also deployed the elite special operations forces, including the Army’s secretive 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the “Night Stalkers,” near Venezuela’s shores for training.

In response to the U.S. military buildup, Venezuela is moving troops into position and mobilizing its militia.

U.S. MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles at Rafael Hernandez Airport in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, last week. Ricardo arduengo/Reuters

“From the secretary of state’s perspective, it’s extremely smart because if his objective is ultimately continuing to pressure Maduro, justifying it in a way that the MAGA base can understand, is incredibly important,” said Ryan Berg, director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Rubio has framed the pressure campaign as “tantamount to defending the homeland, because [Maduro] is such a cancer in the Western Hemisphere,” Berg said.

In his unusual double role as Trump’s top diplomat and national security adviser, Rubio has been able to execute quickly on policies he has been advocating for over a decade. After years in the procedural grind of Capitol Hill, he has found the authority to move quickly “freeing,” says a senior adviser.

But he has also been laying the groundwork for an escalating pressure campaign on Maduro since he arrived at the State Department in January. His inaugural trip was a five-country spin through to Central America and the Caribbean, an unusual region for America’s top diplomat. Behind closed doors, he often spoke to foreign officials in Spanish and made it clear that the Trump administration would reward allies in the region if they aligned with the U.S.

“One of my priorities is to ensure that U.S. foreign policy sends a signal that it’s better to be a friend than an enemy,” he said during a stop in Costa Rica in February where he called Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua “enemies of humanity.”

“It’s better to be an ally than a troublemaker,” he said.

In the first months of his term, Rubio tangled with Trump’s special envoy Ric Grenell, who led direct talks with Maduro and advocated for a pragmatic deal that would reopen the country’s oil and mineral sector to U.S. companies in exchange for the release of political prisoners and economic reforms. Many policymakers and American investors had been betting on engagement and negotiations between Maduro and Trump, who in his first administration had led a failed effort to topple the regime in Caracas.

When Grenell visited Maduro in January and secured a deal to free American hostages and restart deportations of Venezuelans, many in the pro-rapprochement crowd thought the U.S. would soften its position on the regime.

But by mid-July, Grenell had been sidelined and Venezuela policy was firmly in the hands of Rubio, whose team that month led a swap of 252 Venezuelans held in El Salvador for 10 Americans held in Caracas. Soon after, the U.S. ratcheted up its allegations that Maduro is leading a drug cartel and followed up with a military buildup in the Caribbean to target suspected narco vessels.

Rubio allies and fellow hard-liners on Venezuela have cheered the escalation.

“President Trump trusts him because he knows Rubio truly understands the cancer of socialism and the need to eradicate it,” said Rep. Maria Salazar (R., Fla.)

For his part, Maduro has accused Rubio of engineering the pressure campaign, calling him the “lord of war.”

“President Donald Trump, you must be careful because Marco Rubio wants to stain your hands with blood,” he said last month.

Write to Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com, Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com and Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com

3. What Does the Fall of He Weidong Mean for the PLA?

Excerpts:

The official confirmation of He Weidong’s downfall marks a watershed moment in Xi’s PLA purges. As the first sitting CMC vice chairman from a career military background to be purged since the Cultural Revolution, He’s ouster has reduced the CMC to its smallest size since the People’s Republic’s founding. It reveals that conflict within the CMC has reached a boiling point and Xi could no longer tolerate even his long-time loyalists.

While the PLA remains a formidable military, turbulence at the top of its command structure inevitably affects the entire organization’s cohesion and readiness. Looking ahead, it would be interesting to keep an eye on the successor to He’s seat, who is likely to be a passive and politically reliable officer, confirming Xi’s preference of loyalty over expertise. In the meantime, remaining CMC members face heightened vulnerability. Should Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia – the last of Xi’s old comrades at the CMC – be purged, a PLA leadership crisis could ensue, with far-reaching consequences for China’s stability and military effectiveness.

What Does the Fall of He Weidong Mean for the PLA?

Conflict within the CMC has reached such a state that Xi Jinping could no longer tolerate even his long-time loyalists.

https://thediplomat.com/2025/10/what-does-the-fall-of-he-weidong-mean-for-the-pla/

By Zi Yang

October 20, 2025

Credit: Depositphotos

Months after his disappearance from public view, news has finally surfaced regarding the fate of Central Military Commission (CMC) Vice Chairman He Weidong. On October 17, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of National Defense announced that He – who has not been seen since March – had been expelled from the Chinese Communist Party and stripped of his military ranks, ostensibly on corruption charges.

He’s downfall marks a major development in People’s Liberation Army (PLA) politics, as he is the first sitting CMC vice chairman with a professional military background to be purged since the Cultural Revolution.

Insights into PLA Politics

The PLA is, above all, a highly politicized institution; therefore, purges are not unexpected. However, the current scale and reach of ongoing purges within the PLA are definitely concerning.

Although the official justification often cites anti-corruption efforts, it is important to recognize that purges at the CMC level are rarely about corruption alone. Instead, political considerations are usually the dominant factor.

Long regarded by China watchers as a loyalist of Xi Jinping, He’s rise to the top mostly depended on Xi’s patronage. Consequently, his fall carries several significant implications.

The relationship between Xi and He dates back decades, when both served in the province of Fujian. Despite He’s elevation to the CMC vice chairmanship under Xi’s endorsement, they likely fell out due to a serious breakdown of trust. Xi may have come to perceive He as no longer a loyal subordinate, but as a potential threat. As a result, He was stripped of all power to ensure Xi’s personal and political security.

Looking in from the outside, the precise cause of this rupture remains unclear. However, what is evident is that conflict within the CMC – the inner sanctum of the PLA’s power structure – reached a critical point that culminated in He’s downfall.

He’s appointment as CMC vice chairman had been part of Xi’s strategy to consolidate control over the CMC by promoting loyalists. But the fall of He and another sitting CMC member, Miao Hua, suggests that Xi may now feel uneasy even among his own acolytes.

This partial failure of Xi’s consolidation strategy not only has consequences for the PLA’s internal politics, but also for its ability to fulfill its primary mission of warfighting.

External Implications

History offers many examples of how purges adversely affect military effectiveness. Stalin’s purges of the Red Army turned it into a stumbling giant, exhibited by its awful performances during the Winter War of 1939 and Operation Barbarossa of 1941. In 1978, Pol Pot’s purge of the Eastern Zone’s military commanders led to the rapid collapse of Khmer Rouge defenses in the war with Vietnam. In highly centralized military systems, conflicts at the top of the hierarchy inevitably undermine morale and discipline throughout the officer corps.

Beyond personal ties, another factor that likely contributed to He’s promotion to vice chairmanship was his extensive experience leading troops in Fujian – the primary staging ground for potential Chinese military operations against Taiwan. It was once conceivable that, given his background, He was being prepared to lead such an operation.

Yet, the purge of a sitting CMC vice chairman indicates that despite its rapid modernization, the PLA’s leadership quality is deteriorating. Senior commanders are likely spending more time navigating the pitfalls of the widening purge than preparing for external threats. With the fall of He, it is certain that his associates will also be targeted and detained.

While the PLA will continue its assertiveness in gray-zone operations, the likelihood of war in the Taiwan Strait has temporarily decreased, as PLA internal instability continues to spread. The atmosphere within the CMC is likely quite tense and fraught with intrigue, distrust, and fear – conditions that are now seeping down to lower ranks.

What to Look for Next

A key question on the horizon is: who will replace He Weidong as CMC vice chairman? Presently, four CMC members – Chairman Xi Jinping, Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia, and CMC Members Liu Zhenli and Zhang Shengmin – are responsible for making decisions that affect over 2 million PLA members, an unsustainable arrangement in the long term.

Nonetheless, in the six months since He’s absence, there have been no signs of a successor. Xi appears comfortable in running the CMC without a replacement for He. This may reflect a shortage of ideal candidates, or suggest Xi enjoys a greater concentration of power in his hands. Whoever eventually assumes the role is likely to be a pliant figure who obeys Xi unquestionably, rather than someone with genuine military expertise or high standing among commanders. The rise of such a figure would further diminish the competence and autonomy of the PLA’s senior leadership.

Beyond the issue of He’s replacement, the remaining CMC members are now in a precarious position. Following the downfall of Miao Hua and He Weidong, remaining CMC members Liu Zhenli, who also leads the Joint Staff Department, and Zhang Shengmin, the PLA anti-corruption chief, could find themselves on the chopping block. However, if Zhang Youxia were to fall, it could trigger a crisis within the PLA. Zhang, a childhood friend of Xi who provided significant aid in managing the PLA, has been instrumental to Xi’s control over the military. His sudden removal would indicate that purges have entered an unprecedented phase and absolutely no one is safe.

Conclusion

The official confirmation of He Weidong’s downfall marks a watershed moment in Xi’s PLA purges. As the first sitting CMC vice chairman from a career military background to be purged since the Cultural Revolution, He’s ouster has reduced the CMC to its smallest size since the People’s Republic’s founding. It reveals that conflict within the CMC has reached a boiling point and Xi could no longer tolerate even his long-time loyalists.

While the PLA remains a formidable military, turbulence at the top of its command structure inevitably affects the entire organization’s cohesion and readiness. Looking ahead, it would be interesting to keep an eye on the successor to He’s seat, who is likely to be a passive and politically reliable officer, confirming Xi’s preference of loyalty over expertise. In the meantime, remaining CMC members face heightened vulnerability. Should Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia – the last of Xi’s old comrades at the CMC – be purged, a PLA leadership crisis could ensue, with far-reaching consequences for China’s stability and military effectiveness.

Authors

Guest Author

Zi Yang

Dr. Zi Yang is an associate research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. His research interests include civil-military relations, military disintegration and defection, China’s armed forces, and Chinese intelligence history.

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4. U.S., Australia Deal Advances Critical Minerals Ambitions, While Detail Light

Based on my limited understanding, I believe it is the refining capabilities that are the long pole in the tent.

Excerpts:

Many miners are struggling to secure buyers outside China for new mineral supplies, and “just throwing billions at it isn’t going to solve the problem,” said Lian Sinclair, an economic geographer in the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences. “The major gap is the midstream industry, so we need our allies to build out their manufacturing base.”

The Western mining industry also faces headwinds from skilled-worker shortages, strict environmental standards and often opposition from communities or indigenous groups.

“The notion that we can develop these supply chains that we have exited over multiple decades, to rebuild them in years not decades, it just can’t happen,” said Julian Kettle, vice chairman of metals and mining at Wood Mackenzie. “These processes are complicated.”

Still, Kettle called the agreement a “really good start. It’s a little short on detail at this stage in terms of exactly how it’s going to work, but that’s natural,” he said.

Pittsburgh-based aluminum giant Alcoa is among the beneficiaries of the deal. The U.S. and Australia plan to invest into the development of a gallium plant at Alcoa’s Wagerup alumina refinery in Western Australia in exchange for supply, Alcoa said.

Australia will provide up to $200 million in financing, while the U.S. would also make an investment, Albanese said. The value of the potential U.S. contribution wasn’t disclosed.

Gallium, a byproduct of bauxite processing, is rarely recovered outside China because it isn’t especially profitable.

Alcoa’s proposed project—a joint venture with Japanese trading house Sojitz and Japan’s government—hasn’t yet been approved by company officials. Japan has provided 50% of the project’s funding so far, Albanese said.

The planned Alcoa plant would produce about 100 metric tons of gallium a year, or up to 10% of global supply.

Securing new sources of gallium became a priority for policymakers after China introduced export restrictions in 2023 on the mineral, which is vital to semiconductors, defense technologies, and other applications. China accounts for 99% of global gallium output, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

U.S., Australia Deal Advances Critical Minerals Ambitions, While Detail Light

The two governments governments intend to invest more than $3 billion combined in critical mineral projects over the next six months

https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/u-s-australia-deal-advances-critical-minerals-ambitions-while-detail-light-d731e823

By Rhiannon Hoyle

Oct. 21, 2025 6:01 am ET

U.S. President Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed a new critical minerals deal in Washington. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

A new critical minerals deal between the U.S. and Australia sparked a rally in mining stocks, as investors bet the alliance would pave the way for projects that could loosen China’s grip on commodities vital to defense and modern technologies.

While politicians hailed the agreement as a landmark, miners, analysts and academics cautioned that the plan remains short on detail, and that breaking Chinese dominance in the sector that was built over decades is unlikely to happen overnight.

Shares in companies that aim to produce obscure minerals—including dysprosium, used in high-performance magnets, and magnesium, which strengthens aluminum alloys—rose by as much as 20% in Sydney on Tuesday after U.S. President Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed the deal in Washington.

The U.S. and Australian governments intend to invest more than $3 billion combined in critical mineral projects over the next six months, the White House said. The Export-Import Bank has issued seven letters of interest totaling more than $2.2 billion in financing.

Among those was Latrobe Magnesium, which received a letter from the Ex-Im Bank for up to $122 million in potential financing. Shares jumped more than 15%.

Latrobe is developing a magnesium metal plant in Australia’s Latrobe Valley in Victoria state. Chief Executive David Paterson noted that roughly 90% of the world’s magnesium comes from China, with another 6% coming from Russia.

“There is a long way to catch up,” Paterson said in an interview. “And China, in this space, can send you out of business.”

Since the 1990s, China has used aggressive tactics to build and maintain its dominance over critical minerals, providing financial support that has helped Chinese producers outlast competitors elsewhere.

The U.S.-Australia agreement sends a signal the West will continue to seek to diversify away from Chinese supplies, UBS analysts said in a note to clients. Still, they warned that “it does raise questions on long-term implications with potentially uneconomic projects being subsidized into production.”

They also questioned how quickly new supply sources could be introduced. In announcing the deal, Trump said, “in about a year from now, we’ll have so much critical mineral and rare earth that you won’t know what to do with them.”

The UBS analysts countered that “typical project timelines have us think it will take a little longer.” Mines typically take years if not decades to develop.

Latrobe’s Paterson said the alliance could nevertheless provide a tailwind for smaller miners seeking funding. Despite growing demand for critical minerals, “there hasn’t been funding for a lot of people,” he said.

Analysts at Canaccord Genuity said that financing support is among the most important elements of the deal, and that planned floor prices could further benefit rare-earths producers.

Rebuilding critical-mineral supply chains won’t be easy, analysts and academics say.

Many miners are struggling to secure buyers outside China for new mineral supplies, and “just throwing billions at it isn’t going to solve the problem,” said Lian Sinclair, an economic geographer in the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences. “The major gap is the midstream industry, so we need our allies to build out their manufacturing base.”

The Western mining industry also faces headwinds from skilled-worker shortages, strict environmental standards and often opposition from communities or indigenous groups.

“The notion that we can develop these supply chains that we have exited over multiple decades, to rebuild them in years not decades, it just can’t happen,” said Julian Kettle, vice chairman of metals and mining at Wood Mackenzie. “These processes are complicated.”

Still, Kettle called the agreement a “really good start. It’s a little short on detail at this stage in terms of exactly how it’s going to work, but that’s natural,” he said.

Pittsburgh-based aluminum giant Alcoa is among the beneficiaries of the deal. The U.S. and Australia plan to invest into the development of a gallium plant at Alcoa’s Wagerup alumina refinery in Western Australia in exchange for supply, Alcoa said.

Australia will provide up to $200 million in financing, while the U.S. would also make an investment, Albanese said. The value of the potential U.S. contribution wasn’t disclosed.

Gallium, a byproduct of bauxite processing, is rarely recovered outside China because it isn’t especially profitable.

Alcoa’s proposed project—a joint venture with Japanese trading house Sojitz and Japan’s government—hasn’t yet been approved by company officials. Japan has provided 50% of the project’s funding so far, Albanese said.

The planned Alcoa plant would produce about 100 metric tons of gallium a year, or up to 10% of global supply.

Securing new sources of gallium became a priority for policymakers after China introduced export restrictions in 2023 on the mineral, which is vital to semiconductors, defense technologies, and other applications. China accounts for 99% of global gallium output, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The proposed cash injection would fund final feasibility studies and, if approved, construction of the project, which could begin production as early as next year, Alcoa said. Shares in Alcoa rose by more than 8%.

Write to Rhiannon Hoyle at rhiannon.hoyle@wsj.com

5. Russia and Ukraine Are No Closer to Cease-Fire After Trump’s Pressure on Zelensky

Perhaps the biggest influences on the outcome:

Fear, honor, and interest.

Passion, reason, and chance.

Russia and Ukraine Are No Closer to Cease-Fire After Trump’s Pressure on Zelensky

U.S. president wants swift end to conflict, but both sides are digging in over the region in Ukraine’s east

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/russia-and-ukraine-are-no-closer-to-cease-fire-after-trumps-pressure-on-zelensky-7e3548f2

By Laurence Norman

in Berlin, Matthew Luxmoore

in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Alexander Ward

in Washington

Updated Oct. 21, 2025 5:09 am ET

A Ukrainian apartment building damaged in a Russian drone strike. Anatolii Stepanov/Reuters

Quick Summary

Russia and Ukraine remain far from a peace deal, despite President Trump’s recent efforts to mediate a settlement.View more

Russia and Ukraine signaled Monday they were far apart on a peace deal, days after President Trump’s latest push to reach a settlement in a tense Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Trump was blunt with Zelensky during the meeting and at times expressed frustration, at one point refusing to look at the battlefield maps brought by the Ukrainians, according to U.S., European and Ukrainian officials.

Trump told Zelensky that his main priority was ending the war and made it clear he wasn’t wedded to any specific territorial outcome, the officials said, in a message that echoed comments he made publicly after the meeting. Trump told Zelensky that Ukraine shouldn’t expect to receive long-range Tomahawk missiles soon, according to two U.S. officials.

Trump acknowledged Monday that he has found it far more difficult to bridge the divide between Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin than he had expected. Trump spoke to Putin in a phone call Thursday before his meeting with Zelensky.

“It’s turned out to be nasty, because you have two leaders that truly hate each other,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “It makes it actually a little bit difficult.”

Trump has turned his attention back to the Ukraine war after reaching a deal in the Middle East for a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of Israeli hostages after two years of war. He is planning to meet with Putin in Budapest as he renews his efforts to bring the conflict to an end.

Trump: We Would Rather End the War in Ukraine Than Send Tomahawks

Play video: Trump: We Would Rather End the War in Ukraine Than Send Tomahawks

President Trump met with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House a day after discussing peace plans with Russian President Vladimir Putin, marking his renewed effort to end the war. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Trump’s travails thus far have left the conflict careening toward a fifth year with a growing death toll, increasingly powerful aerial strikes in Russia and Ukraine and a rising financial cost to Ukraine’s Western allies.

At the center of the talks have been gnarly territorial disputes—in particular, the fate of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. Moscow’s forces have been steadily grinding forward in the Donbas at a tremendous cost in Russian lives. The Kremlin has previously tied a possible cease-fire to Ukraine surrendering the rest of the region, and the White House has at times appeared open to that proposal.

Ukrainian and European officials consider such a concession unacceptable. Ukraine says it won’t give up areas of the region that Russia hasn’t taken by force, in part because Ukrainian officials say Moscow will just come back for more.

In Trump’s meeting Friday with Zelensky—details of which were earlier reported by the Financial Times—the U.S. president said it wasn’t a priority to return the Donbas region to Ukraine, noting Russia already holds much of the territory, officials briefed on the meeting said. Trump told Zelensky he was eager to reach a quick settlement on the war, regardless of the fate of the region, the officials said.

“What they should do is just stop at the lines where they are,” he said Sunday on Fox News. “The rest is very hard to negotiate.”

In comments released Monday by his office, Zelensky backed Trump’s attempts to end the war quickly, but said that Putin was blocking the efforts by demanding Ukraine give up territory that Russia’s army had failed to take by force—and would use any handover of land as a springboard to reinvade.

On Tuesday, Zelensky and his European allies released a joint statement echoing support for an immediate cease-fire as proposed by Trump. “The current line of contact should be the starting point of negotiations,” said the leaders of France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. among others. They added that they remained committed to the principle that international borders mustn’t be changed by force, and that the Russian economy and defense industry should be pressured “until Putin is ready to make peace.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has pushed unsuccessfully for the U.S. to provide Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles. UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE/AFP/Getty Images

“Trump wants a quick victory—an end to the war—and that would be a victory for all reasonable people,” Zelensky said Monday. “Putin, however, wants the total occupation of Ukraine.”

Zelensky said Putin had demanded of Trump that Ukraine withdraw completely from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that make up the Donbas.

The Ukrainian leader said he had made it clear to Trump “that Ukraine’s stance in this context remains unchanged.”

The Kremlin, meanwhile, said its position hadn’t changed, apparently rejecting Trump’s proposal to freeze battle lines. “The consistency of the Russian Federation’s position remains unchanged,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Russia is holding about one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory but recent advances have been at glacial speed. Trump has declined to place new financial restrictions on Russia or provide heavy weaponry to Ukraine of the kind that could tip the scales in Kyiv’s favor and force Putin’s hand in negotiations.

Trump, who cast himself as the “mediator president” on Friday, entertained the idea that Putin might be manipulating him into giving Moscow more time to continue attacking Ukraine. Asked if he was worried that he was being played, the president said, “I am.” He added, “You know, I’ve been played all my life by the best of them, and I came out really well.”

Russian and U.S. officials have agreed to speak in the coming days to prepare a summit in Budapest between Trump and Putin. A meeting between the two leaders in Alaska in August failed to result in a commitment from Russia toward a cease-fire.

Zelensky has objected to the Hungarian capital as a venue for talks because that country’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has expressed support for Russia throughout the war.

Hungary could also pose problems for Moscow. Hungary is a member of the European Union, and Putin’s aircraft would need to cross the bloc’s airspace to reach the summit, something which is barred under current sanctions.

The EU would be unlikely to scuttle a Trump-Putin meeting, but French officials on Monday suggested that they would seek to get Russia to agree to a cease-fire in exchange for granting permission for Putin’s plane to travel to Hungary.

“The presence of Vladimir Putin on the territory of the EU only makes sense if it enables an immediate and unconditional cease-fire,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot told reporters at a meeting of EU foreign ministers Monday in Luxembourg.

If the summit does go ahead, Zelensky said he would attend to meet both leaders or Trump in a bilateral meeting. He has repeatedly called for a meeting with Putin, but the Russian leader has said such a meeting can only take place when the two sides’ positions are more aligned.

On Sunday, the Ukrainian leader cautioned that his country wouldn’t agree to any deal made without its involvement.

“If the configuration is one where America is in the middle, that’s one story,” Zelensky said. “But if it’s one where all the pressure is placed solely on Ukraine, no one will come out a winner.”

Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com, Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com and Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com

6. Trump Signals Support for Selling Submarines to Australia

AUKUS on? AUKUS off?

Trump Signals Support for Selling Submarines to Australia

President says the deal serves as a deterrent against China

https://www.wsj.com/world/trump-signals-support-for-selling-submarines-to-australia-64545485

By Mike Cherney

Oct. 21, 2025 5:24 am ET

President Trump greeted Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the White House Monday. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Quick Summary

President Trump offered his strongest endorsement yet the $240 billion plan to sell nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, calming fears about the Biden-era deal.View more

SYDNEY—President Trump offered his strongest endorsement yet of a roughly $240 billion plan to sell nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, calming fears that his administration would pull out of the Biden-era deal that seeks to deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific.

“It was made a while ago and nobody did anything about it and it was going too slowly,” Trump said when asked if he supported the arrangement. He added, “I think it’s really moving along very rapidly, very well.”

The deal, signed in 2021, created a three-way defense pact between Australia, the U.K. and the U.S.—known by the acronym Aukus. It involves Australia acquiring up to five U.S. Virginia-class attack submarines from the early 2030s, to tide it over until a new generation of nuclear-powered submarines are built by the alliance.

The aim was to have the three countries work more closely together on advanced submarines and other emerging technologies, as the U.S. shored up its network of alliances to counter Beijing. Having nuclear-powered submarines operated by U.S. ally Australia, which has fought alongside the U.S. in previous major conflicts, would complicate any effort by Beijing to use its growing military to expand its influence.

Trump made the comments during a meeting with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Washington on Monday. He also agreed the pact serves as a deterrent against China, which has beefed up its military in preparation for a possible move against Taiwan, the self-governing island that Beijing claims. Trump said the U.S. is going “full steam ahead building” submarines.

Some administration officials had previously questioned whether the U.S. could afford to sell the submarines to Australia when Washington is trying to bulk up its own fleet. The Defense Department, unofficially called the Department of War, launched a review of the arrangement a few months ago, saying it wanted to ensure the deal aligned with Trump’s “America first” agenda.

“Trump sent the clearest possible presidential signal to the Pentagon and the U.S. system that he wants Aukus to proceed at pace,” said Michael Fullilove, executive director at the Lowy Institute think tank in Sydney. “If you’re a skeptic of Aukus within the Trump administration, I think it’s time to concentrate on other files.”

A U.S. Navy Virginia-class attack submarine in Rockingham, Australia. Colin Murty/Press Pool

Despite Trump’s endorsement, questions remain about the pact’s viability. U.S. shipbuilding has been sluggish, and Australia needs to recruit submariners to operate the boats. A recent analysis from the Congressional Budget Office said the U.S. has been building 1.2 attack submarines a year, when 2.33 a year are needed to increase U.S. forces and replace submarines sold to Australia.

The plan also has its detractors in Australia, including some former prime ministers. Critics have argued Australia could end up with no subs because the U.S. simply won’t have the industrial capacity to build them, even if the political will is there now. Some also contend the deal has unnecessarily antagonized China, Australia’s main trading partner.

The Aukus pact also commits the three allies to work together on technologies such as hypersonic missiles, quantum computing and undersea weapons, all of which could be crucial if there is a conflict over Taiwan. The pact had come under strain in recent months, though, as the Trump administration pressured allies to increase military spending and placed tariffs even on close friends, including Australia.

But Trump took a warm tone during Monday’s meeting. He said it is a great honor to have the Albanese as his friend, and that although he would like Australia to do more on military spending, “you can only do so much.”

The two allies signed a framework for cooperation on rare earths, an area that China has dominated, and they intend to invest more than $3 billion together in critical minerals projects in the next six months, according to the White House.

“The bottom line is that Australia is a good deal for the United States,” said John Blaxland, a professor of international security at the Australian National University. “For a transactional president who is into the art of the deal, this is unquestionably a good deal.”

Proponents of the Aukus pact argue it is favorable for both the U.S. and Australia. Nuclear-powered subs have greater range and endurance than Australia’s current fleet of diesel-electric subs. They would enhance Australia’s ability to patrol far from its shores, an important capability for a country reliant on shipping.

The U.S. also gets rotational access to an Australian submarine base in the country’s west, and Australia is making a financial contribution to the U.S. industrial base to help with submarine construction.

There could still be some tweaks to the plan as the Pentagon completes its review, perhaps to the timing of the submarine deliveries or the size of investments into the industrial base, analysts said.

Charles Edel, the Australia chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the key question for Aukus is whether it is additive or subtractive it will bring more naval assets online more quickly than without it, or whether it is a zero-sum game.

“President Trump seems to have made the determination that, at this point, Aukus will add to U.S. and Australian and British capabilities, enhance the U.S. regional presence, and increase the number of submarines operating in the Indo-Pacific region,” Edel said.

Write to Mike Cherney at mike.cherney@wsj.com

7. Japan Gets Its First Female Leader, a Conservative Who Favors a Stronger Military

Japan Gets Its First Female Leader, a Conservative Who Favors a Stronger Military

Sanae Takaichi wins parliamentary vote just ahead of possible Trump visit

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/japan-elects-first-female-prime-minister-who-favors-a-stronger-military-6cc7cab4

By Jason Douglas

Updated Oct. 21, 2025 2:30 am ET

Sanae Takaichi has voiced support for more spending to improve Japan’s military capabilities. philip fong/AFP/Getty Images

Quick Summary

Sanae Takaichi was confirmed as Japan’s first female prime minister, giving the country a leader who advocates close U.S. ties and a stronger Japanese military.View more

TOKYO—Sanae Takaichi was confirmed as Japan’s first female prime minister in a parliamentary vote, giving the country a new leader who advocates close ties with the U.S. and a stronger Japanese military.

Her election as prime minister comes days ahead of a possible visit to Japan by President Trump, with whom she shares conservative views and a hawkish stance on China.

Tokyo hopes that affinity will help heal ties that have been strained by Trump’s push to reorder global trade. Under the terms of an agreement struck in July, Japanese imports to the U.S. now face a tariff of 15% and Tokyo agreed to invest some $550 billion in the U.S. over the next few years.

In parliamentary voting for prime minister Tuesday, the 64-year-old Takaichi won a slim majority in the lower house on her first try with help from her new partner in government, the Japan Innovation Party. But she needed a runoff to prevail in the upper house after falling just short of a majority in the first vote.

Who is Japan’s New Female Prime Minister?

Japan Has a New Leader, and She’s a Heavy Metal Drummer

Sanae Takaichi, a fan of Iron Maiden, had an improbable rise to power. Like her mentor, Shinzo Abe, she is expected to lead Japan to the right.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/world/asia/sanae-takaichi-japan-prime-minister.html

Listen to this article · 9:26 min Learn more

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By Javier C. Hernández

Javier C. Hernández went to Nara Prefecture to trace Sanae Takaichi’s rise to power, interviewing classmates, supporters and acquaintances.

Oct. 21, 2025
Updated 4:05 a.m. ET

As a young woman in the late 1970s, Sanae Takaichi commuted six hours a day by bus and train from her parents’ home in western Japan to attend university. She was a fan of heavy metal music and Kawasaki motorcycles who yearned to move out. But her mother insisted at first that she stay home, forbidding her from living in a boarding house before marriage.

“I dreamed of having my own castle,” Ms. Takaichi wrote in a 1992 memoir.

On Tuesday, Ms. Takaichi won election as Japan’s prime minister, the first woman to do so in the nation’s history. It was the pinnacle of an improbable rise in politics and a milestone in a country where women have long struggled for influence.

A poster of Sanae Takaichi in her electoral district in Nara Prefecture in Japan, where she grew up.CreditCredit...Noriko Hayashi For The New York Times

Ms. Takaichi, 64, who grew up near the ancient Japanese capital of Nara, defies easy labels. She once spoke bluntly about the challenges of working in politics as a woman in Japan, yet she is now the leader of the traditionalist, male-dominated Liberal Democratic Party. She has expressed concern about Japan’s reliance on the United States, but has also said she hopes to work closely with President Trump. She is an amateur drummer who idolizes bands like Iron Maiden and Deep Purple, yet she also wears blue suits to pay homage to her other hero, the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

Ms. Takaichi, a protégé of Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, who was assassinated in 2022, is expected to move Japan farther to the right, responding to a recent populist wave that bears some similarities to Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement. She has embraced hawkish policies on China; pushed the message that “Japan is back”; played down Japan’s atrocities during World War II; and promised to more strictly regulate immigration and tourism.

“She wants to make Japan strong and prosperous for the people of Japan and for the world,” said Yoshiko Sakurai, a prominent journalist and activist who has supported Ms. Takaichi. “She is open to the outside world. But she also understands that we have to be really good Japanese. We have to know our own culture, traditions, philosophy and history.”

Ms. Takaichi will face her biggest test yet as she deals with fresh uncertainty about Japan’s military and economic alliance with the United States. She is expected to meet next week in Tokyo with Mr. Trump, who has rattled Japanese officials with tariffs and suggestions that the country should pay more for the presence of American troops in the region.

While many Japanese politicians come from wealthy, elite circles, Ms. Takaichi grew up in humble circumstances in Nara Prefecture, an area teeming with temples, shrines, dense forests and rolling green hills. Her mother worked for the police department, and her father worked at a car parts maker.

Image

Kashihara City in Nara, where Ms. Takaichi spent her childhood.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Motoko Shimada, a childhood friend of Ms. Takaichi’s, recalled her pigtailed classmate sharing homemade onigiri, or rice balls, and rolled omelets with students who had forgotten their lunchboxes on a school trip.

“She was very smiley and very reserved,” Ms. Shimada said. “She didn’t have this strong-woman image. But she was able to notice when someone was not blending in well or struggling, and she was able to help them.”

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From a young age, Ms. Takaichi seemed aware of the pressures facing Japanese women. Her mother told her to be a “crimson rose,” Ms. Takaichi recalled in a 2024 biography by Eiji Ohshita, asking her to “retain feminine grace while possessing the thorns to confront wrongdoing.”

Her parents pressured her to attend Kobe University, a state school about 50 miles northwest of her hometown, even though she had won admission to elite private institutions in Tokyo. They felt their daughter did not need a university education because she was a girl, Ms. Takaichi has said in interviews, and they wanted to save up to support her younger brother. (Ms. Takaichi declined, through a representative, to be interviewed for this article.)

After graduation, Ms. Takaichi attended the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management, a renowned training ground for young politicians and business leaders. In the late 1980s, she took an interest in the United States, Japan’s chief economic competitor at the time, securing an internship in the office of former Rep. Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, a Democrat and ardent feminist.

Ms. Takaichi had been moved by Ms. Schroeder’s tearful speech in 1987 announcing she would not run for president. Ms. Takaichi sent Ms. Schroeder a telegram, encouraging her to run again someday and offering her help.

In Washington, Ms. Takaichi was an energetic presence, peppering aides with questions about the inner workings of Congress and American foreign policy — and developing a love of peanut butter. There was no hint of her conservative views on defense or social issues at the time, said Andrea Camp, a former aide to Ms. Schroeder.

When she returned to Japan, Ms. Takaichi worked as an author and a television personality, developing a reputation as a pugnacious debater. In 1993, she began her political career, winning election to Parliament as an independent from Nara on a platform of political reform. Her father put his retirement savings toward her campaign.

In the Diet, Japan’s Parliament, Ms. Takaichi soon discovered the isolation of being a woman in politics. Her male colleagues were sometimes dismissive, she recalled, and they often conducted business at saunas and social clubs, where it wasn’t feasible to meet with female lawmakers.

“It’s really difficult for a woman to meet a man one-on-one,” she told The Associated Press in 1993. “People are watching, and I don’t want some strange scandal being invented. We can’t use the hours after 5 p.m.”

Image

Ms. Takaichi celebrating with supporters in Nara in 1993 after being elected to Parliament.Credit...The Asahi Shimbun, via Getty Images

During her early years in Parliament, she forged an enduring alliance with Mr. Abe, a lawmaker from an elite family with a nationalistic worldview. The two found common ground on issues like increasing military spending and adding a more patriotic tone to history textbooks.

When Mr. Abe was elected to his first stint as prime minister in 2006, he appointed Ms. Takaichi to his cabinet, making her one of the most visible women in Japanese politics. He reappointed her in 2012, at the beginning of his second term, which lasted eight years. She became a fierce defender of his policies, including efforts to revise Japan’s Constitution to unfetter its military after decades of postwar pacifism, and his economic program, which emphasized cheap cash and government stimulus efforts.

Ms. Takaichi tried to persuade Mr. Abe to run again in 2021, but he declined. When she entered the race, he threw his support behind her. “Ms. Takaichi is the true star of the conservatives,” Mr. Abe said at the time. She lost that race and fell short in another bid in 2024.

When Mr. Abe was assassinated outside a train station in Nara, while giving a stump speech, Ms. Takaichi was devastated. She said at the time that she had “never felt so physically and mentally down.”

“I have to work very hard from today,” she wrote on social media, “otherwise I’d have to apologize to him.”

Image

Ms. Takaichi with Shinzo Abe, left, in 2014. The two found common ground on issues like increasing military spending and revising Japan’s textbooks to provide a more nationalistic view of World War II.Credit...Toru Hanai/Reuters

When Shigeru Ishiba announced in September that he would resign as prime minister, after a series of embarrassing electoral defeats for the L.D.P., Ms. Takaichi raised her hand again to lead her party. She beat four men, riding a wave of support among rank-and-file party members with a message about turning people’s “anxieties into hope.”

As her profile has risen, Ms. Takaichi’s private life has come under scrutiny. She married Taku Yamamoto, another L.D.P. politician, in 2004. They divorced in 2017 — Ms. Takaichi has said that the couple had heated political arguments at home — before remarrying in 2021. That time, Mr. Yamamoto took Ms. Takaichi’s surname, a rare gesture in Japan’s patriarchal culture.

In Kashihara City in Nara, Ms. Takaichi’s hometown, which has a population of about 125,000, her friends and supporters have celebrated her ascent, praying for her success at local temples and sending white orchids to her district office.

Nara has featured prominently in her political life. During the recent campaign, she accused tourists of kicking the cherished deer of Nara Park. She drew criticism for the remark, which some saw as xenophobic.

Image

Yukitoshi Arai, Ms. Takaichi’s former hairdresser, pioneered the cropped hairstyle that she made famous.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Yukitoshi Arai, Ms. Takaichi’s former hairdresser in Nara, helped pioneer the cropped hairstyle that she has made famous. He said he wanted her eyes and ears to be visible to show that she was seeing and hearing the people she met. He said he felt that Ms. Takaichi retained the qualities of people from the Kansai region in central Japan: humor and humility. He once gave her a bottle of shampoo that Ms. Thatcher was said to have liked while visiting Tokyo.

“I don’t think she’s an ‘iron lady,’” he said, referring to a nickname given by the British media to Ms. Thatcher. “Her vibe is that of a Kansai woman.”

After her victory this month in the L.D.P.’s leadership election, Mr. Arai texted his former client to remind her to take care of herself.

Ms. Takaichi responded two days later. “The battle begins now,” she wrote.

Kiuko Notoya contributed reporting from Nara Prefecture and Hisako Ueno from Tokyo.

Image

Ms. Takaichi’s constituency office in Yamatokoriyama City, Nara Prefecture.Credit...Noriko Hayashi for The New York Times

Javier C. Hernández is the Tokyo bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Japan.

See more on: Liberal Democratic Party (Japan), Shinzo Abe, Margaret Thatcher

9. U.S. Rushes to Shore Up Fragile Gaza Cease-Fire

U.S. Rushes to Shore Up Fragile Gaza Cease-Fire

Witkoff, Kushner in Israel following exchanges of fire in recent days

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-violence-spills-into-another-day-testing-cease-fire-deal-5fed431c

By Feliz Solomon

in Tel Aviv and Lara Seligman

in Washington

Updated Oct. 20, 2025 12:22 pm ET

Smoke rises over Gaza as flare-ups in fighting continue. Stringer/Reuters

Quick Summary

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Israel to help maintain a fragile cease-fire in Gaza.View more

Senior U.S. officials are heading to Israel, hoping to keep a fragile cease-fire and peace process for Gaza on track after repeated clashes between Hamas and Israel.

President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner arrived Monday in Israel, where Central Command chief Adm. Brad Cooper was already on hand trying to calm tensions, U.S. officials said. Vice President JD Vance is due to visit Israel on Tuesday, according to one of the officials and the Israel Airports Authority, which said preparations were under way for his arrival.

Officials were leaning on both sides to lower the temperature and keep the cease-fire intact, a U.S. official said.

“We have a little situation with Hamas, and that will be taken care of very quickly if they don’t straighten it out themselves, because they’re in violation of the agreement,” Trump said Monday at the White House.

The diplomatic flurry followed a weekend flare-up in which Israel launched strikes against dozens of Hamas targets, saying the militant group had killed two of its troops in an attack previously. The skirmishing continued Monday, with the Israeli military saying it shot at two groups of militants that crossed to its side of the “yellow line” defining its area of control and approached its troops.

Hamas didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Roughly 200 U.S. troops were in Israel on Monday setting up a civil-military coordination center to monitor the cease-fire and facilitate the flow of humanitarian aid and logistical and security assistance into Gaza, according to a Pentagon official. International partners are expected to arrive to help with coordination in the coming days and weeks.

Families in Tel Aviv Call for the Return of All Dead Hostages

China Has Another Lever to Pull in Showdown With Trump: Factory Lines

In Washington, China hawks say its economy is too weak to withstand a tariff shock. In the city of Yiwu, factories are showing why, for now, that may be a miscalculation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/business/trump-china-tariffs-exports-yiwu.html

In Yiwu, home of the world’s biggest wholesale market, sellers are stuffed into complexes that span multiple city blocks. Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

By Alexandra Stevenson

Alexandra Stevenson, who covers Chinese business and economics, reported from Yiwu in eastern China.

Oct. 21, 2025

Updated 5:21 a.m. ET

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

With trade hostilities between the world’s two economic superpowers back on, China has sent the unmistakable message that it is ready to fight. A week ago, it invoked its grip over virtually the entire global supply of critical materials, breaking a delicate trade détente between the two countries.

Beijing feels it has another ace card: its booming factories. Even in the face of sky-high tariffs by President Trump, China’s manufacturing sector is helping to maintain growth and give the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, a stronger hand to face down the United States.

The strength is on display in the city of Yiwu, home of the world’s biggest wholesale market, where sellers peddling toys, home electronics and drones are stuffed into complexes that span multiple city blocks. Last week, Yiwu unveiled another trade center, a facility the size of hundreds of football fields to house exporters and “showcase China’s hard-core manufacturing power to the world.”

Like many vendors in Yiwu, Gong Hao used to sell his plastic Hawaiian leis, party streamers and bunny ears to Americans. This year, he lost his U.S. customers but gained new buyers in Europe and Southeast Asia.

“American customers have little impact on us,” Mr. Gong said.

China’s factory prowess, helped by the government, is part of a tectonic shift taking place in the economy and hitting shores near and far as China sends more of what it makes to more places. Its trade surplus with the world this year — over $875 billion — is marching toward a record. Those exports accounted for as much as one third of China’s economic growth over the past year, a development that experts say will be hard to sustain.

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Gong Hao, like many Yiwu vendors, has lost many customers from the United States and sought new buyers in Europe and Southeast Asia this year.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Image

China’s trade surplus with the world this year — over $875 billion — is marching toward a record. Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The strategy is both necessary and perilous. The surging exports are flashing a warning sign about the broader Chinese economy, which is going through what economists call a deflationary shock. Data released on Monday showed that growth was stagnant over the summer as retail sales faltered. And China’s strategy to trade more with the rest of the world comes with the risk that other economies throw up their own barriers.

“Trade is effectively what’s keeping the lights on for China’s economy,” said Han Lin, the country director for the Asia Group, a consulting firm, and a former senior Wells Fargo banker in China.

Nearly a quarter of Fiona Zhou’s rubber chickens, ducks and other squeeze toys go to the United States. Her company, Kaqu Toys, delivered full-year orders for American importers in July and August, when Mr. Trump’s record-high tariffs on China were on a 90-day pause. She said she had given her customers a 5 percent discount to soften the blow of the higher costs caused by the tariffs. Now, with tariffs back on, Ms. Zhou is redirecting products once popular with Americans to Southeast Asia and South Africa.

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At the Global Digital Trade Center, where she and dozens of other toy companies recently moved in, officials let vendors use internet that bypasses China’s Great Firewall so they can hawk their goods on platforms that are banned everywhere else in China, like TikTok and YouTube, Ms. Zhou said.

Image

About a quarter of Fiona Zhou’s rubber toys go to the United States. Her company rushed to fill American orders this summer during a 90-day pause in Mr. Trump’s record tariffs.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Image

Ms. Zhou offered customers a 5 percent discount during the tariff pause and is now shifting some U.S.-bound products to Southeast Asia and South Africa.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

The whiplash of Mr. Trump’s on-and-off tariffs is a headache, Ms. Zhou said. “It’s like your friend arguing with you all the time — what can you do?”

China needs to keep exporting overseas because it can’t find buyers at home.

Ye Chaoli sells snaggletoothed Labubu dolls, plush cartoon character toys and Hello Kitty rhinestone paraphernalia. Half of her business is devoted to selling in China, the rest to foreign markets like Russia.

Our economics reporters — based in New York, London, Brussels, Berlin, Hong Kong and Seoul — are digging into every aspect of the tariffs causing global turmoil. They are joined by dozens of reporters writing about the effects on everyday people.

Here’s our latest reporting on tariffs and economic policy.

“Business is getting worse,” Ms. Ye said. “Because of the current economic downturn, especially after the Covid-19 pandemic in China, the economy has been struggling.”

A grinding property crash in China that began four years ago has destroyed most household savings and continues to weigh heavily on sentiment. To soften the blow of the economic downturn, the government is subsidizing manufacturing.

The signs of stress are everywhere. People are anxious about their incomes and cautious about spending money. Households instead have been saving nearly as much as they did during the pandemic, when people faced indefinite lockdowns with no end in sight.

Prices across the economy are also plunging, and there is little prospect that they will turn around. Youth unemployment is high. Urban wages have slowed to a record low, and in some industries they are shrinking. The cost of land, critical for local government revenues, has tumbled.

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China’s export boom, fueled by state-backed factory power, is driving global ripple effects.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

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At the Global Digital Trade Center, officials told toy vendors they can sell on platforms like TikTok and YouTube, normally blocked in China.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

China’s renminbi currency, tightly managed and pegged to the U.S. dollar, has also weakened against many of its trading partners this year, though last week China’s central bank boosted the currency by setting its benchmark rate at its highest level in a year. The cost of capital is down as the central bank continues to cut rates.

Yet while these are all bad signs for the economy at home, they are making China’s exports overseas even more attractive.

“As things get worse at home, their exports get more competitive,” said Christopher Beddor, deputy director of China research at Gavekal Dragonomics. “The bottom line is that between the deflationary shock and depreciation in currency, China’s exports are just mechanically becoming way more competitive compared to many other countries.”

China’s exports in September grew at the fastest pace in six months to $328.6 billion, the largest monthly total this year, according to data released last week by the General Administration of Customs. Shipments to the United States dropped 27 percent, but they are surging just about everywhere else.

But China’s dependence on the rest of the world for its resilience in the trade war hangs on other countries’ staying open to its exports. It is already being met with resistance in some countries, including in Southeast Asia, where Chinese shipments have increased more than anywhere else in the world.

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China’s September exports hit nearly $330 billion, the year’s highest monthly total, with U.S. shipments down 27 percent but with strong growth elsewhere.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

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Samples at Sunnytad Toys & Crafts in Yiwu. China’s strategy to trade more with the rest of the world comes with the risk that other economies throw up their own barriers.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Still, the demand for competitive Chinese goods is strong. The Yiwu International Trade City, one of the city’s six sprawling complexes for foreign trade, was buzzing one day last week, as dozens of buyers haggled over prices with stall owners. A toy drone buzzed near bystanders, and a robot dog sat upright, waiting for its bone. Two men sat in camping chairs shooting plastic AK-47 guns with rubber pellets.

Among the chaos, Rhoda Nghelembi, 26, an entrepreneur from Tanzania, was looking at metal bangles and earrings. She has visited the city from her hometown, Dar es Salaam, seven times over the past three years, taking back goods to sell not just at home but in Kenya, Uganda and Congo.

“I see my future growing so big and rich because of China,” Ms. Nghelembi said. “China has many many opportunities.”

Li You contributed research.

Alexandra Stevenson is the Shanghai bureau chief for The Times, reporting on China’s economy and society.

11. I worked for Biden. Here’s the gold in Trump’s foreign policy.

TThe subtitle explains it. Praise? Or only faint praise? Will the next administration learn lessons from this one?

Opinion

I worked for Biden. Here’s the gold in Trump’s foreign policy.

The president leverages America’s power well and ignores domestic criticism.

https://wapo.st/4ovA6mv

October 20, 2025 at 6:30 a.m. EDTYesterday at 6:30 a.m. EDT

5 min

977

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi and U.S. President Donald Trump sign a Gaza ceasefire agreement on Oct. 13 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

By Ned Price

Ned Price served in the Biden administration as deputy to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and as a senior adviser and spokesperson in the State Department.

President Donald Trump’s brokering of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has elicited praise from across the political spectrum — and deservedly so. For his critics, this is a rare, perhaps singular, bright spot in a feckless foreign policy otherwise defined by impulse and improvisation.

The best of The Post’s opinions and commentary, in your inbox every morning

Far from ending Russia’s war against Ukraine on day one of his presidency, Trump has taken nearly every position imaginable as the invasion has only intensified. Rather than securing an enduring nuclear deal with Tehran, he ordered U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities — setting back its program only temporarily, risking a wider conflict and leaving the specter of an Iranian nuclear weapon looming. All the while, he has eviscerated the institutions the United States needs to confront the world’s challenges and seize opportunities — from the National Security Council, to the State Department and to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Nevertheless, those of us who care about America’s global power and influence in the coming years are obligated to resist reflexive across-the-board condemnation of Trump’s approach. And a closer look at his record reveals at least a few tactics that future administrations would be wise to adapt and adopt.

Follow Trump’s second term

First, Trump seems to understand that diplomacy is about engaging with the world as it is, not as we’d like it to be. His administration has employed the diplomatic adage that countries negotiate peace with their enemies, not with their friends. And the administration has spoken with plenty of adversaries — including Hamas, Iran, the Houthis, Russia and Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro.

In some cases, doing so continued dialogues undertaken during the Biden administration, during which I served in senior State Department roles. We typically managed the conversations far more discreetly. Nevertheless, the current administration is right not to keep these talks shrouded in secrecy; there’s virtue in signaling to the world that America is prepared to speak with anyone if it has the potential to resolve differences.

Additionally, Trump has used America’s leverage effectively. His evolving approach to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is instructive. The administration initially squandered the ceasefire it inherited from the Biden White House, taking a hands-off approach as Netanyahu resumed Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip in the spring. Washington then did little as the prime minister implemented a policy tantamount to forced starvation, blocking nearly all humanitarian supplies from entering Gaza.

That changed, however, after the botched Israeli attack targeting Hamas leaders in Qatar. The attempt to kill negotiators seemed to finally convince Trump that his counterpart was not serious about negotiations, causing Trump to exert the leverage that neither he nor, in fairness, his predecessor had applied. Within days, Trump forced Netanyahu to apologize directly to his Qatari counterpart and released a photo of the call from the Oval Office, a not-so-subtle reminder of who held the cards. More consequentially, he pressed Netanyahu to accept his 20-point ceasefire plan, just as Arab partners leaned on Hamas. The choreography was an overdue reminder that the U.S. is the superpower in the relationship.

Finally, the Trump administration has acted on its foreign policy agenda largely impervious to potential political criticism. Take, for example, the decision to engage Hamas directly, a fraught choice given the terrorist group’s heinous decades-long track record, including most notoriously on Oct. 7, 2023. The administration’s envoy for hostages was the target of political attacks when his direct talks with Hamas leaders, part of an effort to free the then-remaining American hostages, became known earlier this year. And yet, Trump’s Middle East special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reportedly met with Hamas more recently to secure the broader ceasefire notwithstanding the potential for similar blowback.

Trump’s grip on his base gives him maneuverability that few, if any, of his predecessors have enjoyed. But his willingness to weather such criticism serves as a reminder that presidents need not be stymied by domestic political pressures from Capitol Hill and special interest groups.

These successes do not mean Trump’s approach to foreign policy has made America safer; the opposite is true, in part because the administration has failed to nest these few admirable tactics within a coherent broader strategy. For example, while the White House authorized direct talks with Iran, Trump ultimately squandered the opportunity to seize an emerging diplomatic deal by directing the Pentagon to join Israel’s military campaign against Iran. Similarly, despite early administration engagement with Maduro, the White House has mounted a military buildup in the Caribbean that might foreshadow a costly campaign against his regime.

All of this is legitimate fodder for criticism of this administration. As we think about America’s next chapter, however, it would be a mistake not to learn from the few elements Trump has gotten right. The challenge for the next administration will be to pair those instincts with principle and purpose, pursuing a foreign policy that consistently delivers for the American people.

12. China accuses US of cyber breaches at national time centre

Did we do this or is this only a typical counter accusation to deflect criticism? Did they think we were trying to steal their time? (okay a poor attempt at humor, I know).

China accuses US of cyber breaches at national time centre

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-accuses-us-cyber-breaches-national-time-centre-2025-10-19/

By Liz Lee

October 20, 20255:16 PM EDTUpdated 14 hours ago

MSS (Ministry of State Security) logo and Chinese flag are seen in this illustration taken May 6, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

BEIJING, Oct 19 (Reuters) - China has accused the U.S. of stealing secrets and infiltrating the country's national time centre, warning that serious breaches could have disrupted communication networks, financial systems, the power supply and the international standard time.

The U.S. National Security Agency has been carrying out a cyberattack operation on the National Time Service Center over an extended period of time, China's State Security Ministry said in a statement on its WeChat account on Sunday.

The Reuters Tariff Watch newsletter is your daily guide to the latest global trade and tariff news. Sign up here.The ministry said it found evidence tracing stolen data and credentials as far back as 2022, which were used to spy on the staff's mobile devices and network systems at the centre.

The U.S. intelligence agency had "exploited a vulnerability" in the messaging service of a foreign smartphone brand to access staff members' devices in 2022, the ministry said, without naming the brand.

The national time centre is a research institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences that generates, maintains and broadcasts China's standard time.

The ministry's investigation also found that the United States launched attacks on the centre's internal network systems and attempted to attack the high-precision ground-based timing system in 2023 and 2024.

The U.S. embassy in Beijing did not address the accusations directly but said cyber actors based in China have compromised major U.S. and global telecommunications providers' networks to conduct broad significant cyber espionage campaigns.

"China is the most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks," an embassy spokesperson told Reuters in an email.

China and the U.S. have increasingly traded accusations of cyberattacks in the past few years, each portraying the other as its primary cyber threat.

The latest accusations come amid renewed trade tensions over China's expanded rare earths export controls, and the U.S. threatening to further raise tariffs on Chinese goods.

13. Why leading Chinese scientist warned public against ‘hubris’ over country’s advances

Excerpts:

In the viral interview, Zhao described himself as a missile trajectories “pioneer” after spending more than 60 years working in the field.

His forthright comments were a stark contrast to the typically reserved and discreet behaviour of Chinese scientists, and prompted social media jokes that he was speaking out publicly now because his confidentiality terms with his employer had expired.

The September 3 parade in Beijing, held to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, saw more than a dozen cutting-edge weapons making their first public appearances.

But Zhao said the public should be patient with regard to China’s satellite and missile development. “We should work harder and harder. A lot of effort is needed [to produce breakthroughs],” he said.

China's military weapons

China Military

Why leading Chinese scientist warned public against ‘hubris’ over country’s advances

Rocket specialist Zhao Ruian has urged the Chinese people to remain calm about hi-tech weapons because ‘true breakthroughs lie in 2050’

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3329774/why-leading-chinese-scientist-warned-public-against-hubris-over-countrys-advances?utm

Jane Caiin Beijing

Published: 5:00pm, 21 Oct 2025Updated: 5:59pm, 21 Oct 2025

The Chinese people have been urged to stay “calm and objective” about the country’s advances in cutting-edge weapons by a veteran rocket scientist, who warned that “a lot of effort” was still needed.

An array of advanced rockets, including intercontinental ballistic missiles, featured in last month’s Victory Day parade in Beijing along with other hi-tech weapons. The spectacle generated considerable public enthusiasm.

In an interview for a popular video account, Zhao Ruian, 84, a former researcher with the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, said the country had gained an advantage in some areas of aerospace technology but warned people not to let their expectations get too high.

“We’ve made strides, but overall, sustained effort is essential,” Zhao said in the video. “View progress calmly and objectively – our true breakthroughs lie [ahead] in 2050, not hubris today.”

While Zhao gave no explanation for the year, it echoes President Xi Jinping’s strategic objective of “building a world-class military by the middle of this century”.

The informal interview with the “Beijing Daming” vlog, which has around 2 million followers on the social media platform Douyin, was carried out in a park in the Chinese capital.

At the start, Zhao was asked to introduce himself and list some of his achievements.

Zhao Ruian was interviewed in a park in Beijing for a popular vlog. Photo: Handout

He replied that he had set out a theoretical framework for missile defence systems such as the Golden Dome network in his 2008 book Space Weapon Orbital Design.

The Golden Dome is a proposed multilayer defence system for the United States, intended to detect and destroy various foreign threats – including ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles – before they launch or while in flight.

In May, President Donald Trump announced plans for the network, which would be a much larger and more comprehensive version of Israel’s Iron Dome system. However, so far no practical details of how it would work have been produced by the Pentagon or US defence contractors.

Zhao also referred to his work on space technology, including his book Deep Space Exploration Orbital Design and Analysis published in 2018, which discussed areas such as Mars exploration and rocket propulsion for deep space missions.

He also co-authored an acclaimed monograph, Nonlinear Optimisation: Theory and Methods, published in 1992 and written with Wu Fang – a student of the celebrated mathematician Hua Luogeng.

The theory led to the development of the launch vehicle for the Shenzhou crewed space programme, according to the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science.

In the viral interview, Zhao described himself as a missile trajectories “pioneer” after spending more than 60 years working in the field.

His forthright comments were a stark contrast to the typically reserved and discreet behaviour of Chinese scientists, and prompted social media jokes that he was speaking out publicly now because his confidentiality terms with his employer had expired.

The September 3 parade in Beijing, held to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, saw more than a dozen cutting-edge weapons making their first public appearances.

But Zhao said the public should be patient with regard to China’s satellite and missile development. “We should work harder and harder. A lot of effort is needed [to produce breakthroughs],” he said.

Jane Cai

Jane Cai, CFA, is the Beijing Bureau Chief of the Post. She has been covering China's economic, financial, business and political news since the early 2000s.

14. Book Review | On Character: Choices That Define a Life (Book by McChrystal, review by Ken Gleiman)

Book Review | On Character: Choices That Define a Life

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/10/21/on-character-choices-that-define-a-life/

by Jan Gleiman

10.21.2025 at 06:00am

On Character: Choices That Define a Life Stanley McChrystal, New York: Penguin Press, 2025. ISBN 978-0-593-655-120, pp. 304, $30.00

INTRODUCTION

When Stanley McChrystal commanded my battalion and later our regiment, he set a standard of discipline, focus, training, and leadership that shaped my early years as an officer. Like many who served under him, I felt anger and disappointment when his public career seemed to end abruptly in 2010. Yet the years that followed revealed something more enduring than position or power. McChrystal’s steadiness, humility, and intellect remained intact, and even strengthened by his reputation and example he set. His latest book, On Character: Choices That Define a Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2025. ISBN 978-0-593-655-120), feels like the culmination of that long process of reflection.

BACKGROUND

The project began as private essays written to clarify his own thinking, but the result reads as a public meditation on what it means to live with integrity in a restless age. McChrystal presents a simple formula. Character = Convictions × Discipline. But that formula is anything but simplistic and as the book goes on, it feels incomplete. He argues that convictions are the deeply held beliefs that give direction to one’s life, while discipline is the daily act of living according to them. When united, they form character, which he calls “the only metric that matters.” The book is not a memoir (though his personal stories are key) or a manual. It is closer to a modern Meditations as a collection of concise reflections that challenge the reader to measure belief against behavior.

REVIEW

It is difficult to read On Character without recalling the ancient Stoics whom McChrystal frequently cites. Like Marcus Aurelius, he writes not to impress but to remind himself what right conduct requires. His voice is quiet, but ultimately his challenge is not. He asks whether our actions reflect the principles we claim to hold, if we can be circumspect and disciplined in testing those convictions, and whether we have the courage to live by them when the cost is high. For readers of Small Wars Journal, this is not an abstract question. As a journal that speaks both from and to practitioners of irregular warfare, strategy, and the human dimensions of war and conflict, it is one that reaches to the heart of service and command, where the burdens of leadership are moral before they are strategic.

McChrystal’s formula, “Character = Convictions × Discipline,” appears deceptively simple. It offers the neat precision of an equation, but its implications are morally unsettling. If convictions are the deeply held beliefs that drive human action, and discipline is the consistency with which one acts upon them, then the formula suggests that anyone who believes deeply and acts with rigor possesses character. By this framework, a terrorist who acts with unwavering devotion to a destructive cause might exhibit more “character” than a well-intentioned but undisciplined citizen. It is a jarring notion, and McChrystal does not shy away from it. Instead, he invites the reader to confront it.

This is where the book’s challenge begins. The equation forces an uncomfortable introspection, not about who is good or evil, but about who is consistent and who is not. Importantly though, McChrystal argues that true character requires something more than belief and action alone. It demands that convictions be “pressure-tested” through reflection, experience, and circumspection. The disciplined pursuit of false or unexamined beliefs leads not to virtue but to fanaticism. For McChrystal, character therefore becomes a moral crucible forged by the constant tension between conviction and humility.

McChrystal’s formula captures a central paradox of the profession of arms. The same qualities that enable courage, loyalty, and sacrifice can also sustain cruelty, fanaticism, and self-deception. The difference lies not in conviction or discipline alone, but in the willingness to subject both to reflection. It is a challenge to look inward and outward with equal honesty. McChrystal calls this moral posture that resists both self-righteousness and complacency “circumspection.” In this sense, On Character is not a celebration of integrity as a fixed trait but an invitation to ongoing moral work. It may even have the great benefit of developing what another famous retired General (H.R. McMaster) called, “strategic empathy” or the ability to understand adversaries without mirror imaging.

Across his essays, McChrystal returns to a few consistent themes: the primacy of character over reputation, the unity of conviction and discipline, and the necessity of reflection in leadership. He revisits familiar terrain from Leaders and Risk, but with a quieter intensity. Where those books examined how organizations and teams function, On Character explores how individuals must govern themselves. The reflections are brief and invite the reader to pause rather than rush ahead. It is the kind of book that can be read one essay at a time, at night or during a morning commute, and still leave a residue of thoughtfulness that lasts throughout the day.

RECOMENDATION

For those in the profession of arms or public service, McChrystal’s reflections are a mirror more than a map. They do not tell the reader what to do but rather ask who they are, and whether their daily actions align with their deepest convictions. In that sense, the book fits naturally within the ethos of Small Wars Journal: it calls for disciplined thought about the moral dimensions of irregular warfare, where decisions are rarely clear and the consequences are always human.

The book’s great strength lies in its consistency of tone and its clarity of purpose. McChrystal writes with the economy of a soldier and the care of a teacher. The prose is accessible yet meditative, with each short essay offering a distinct lens through which to examine conviction, humility, or discipline. The cumulative effect is powerful but incremental. One can return to a single section and find something new each time. It is a book meant not just to be read, but to be lived with.

Yet the book’s restraint also exposes its limits. McChrystal seldom addresses examples of bad character or moral failure except his own, perhaps intentionally. The reader senses an unspoken foils throughout, but McChrystal never names them. Instead, McChrystal speaks in generalities about the absence of character being glaringly evident in our culture. He seems intent on writing a book that endures beyond the contemporary moment. One that can be read without partisan baggage. Still, that restraint leaves the darker half of the moral spectrum underexplored. The book tells us much about virtue but little about vice, and sometimes the study of one sharpens understanding of the other.

For readers of Small Wars Journal, this omission may be both a limitation and a challenge. The world of disciplined conviction and circumspect reflection that McChrystal describes is not the world we always inhabit. The practitioners who read this journal grapple daily with ethical gray zones: when does conviction justify deception? When does discipline cross into rigidity? Is it acceptable to employ disinformation in service of policy? When is a cause legitimate enough to merit violence, and who decides? These are not theoretical questions. They shape decisions on the battlefield, in policy rooms, and in the information space. McChrystal does not provide answers, but he frames the questions in a way that forces the reader to hold the mirror closer.

CONCLUSION

In the end, On Character is a quiet but enduring companion. Its brevity invites return, its simplicity rewards reflection, and its moral seriousness reminds the reader that leadership demands a life of deliberate thought. It is a book to be revisited as one’s own convictions evolve, and as the demands of service test the discipline to live by them.

When my son left for his first year at a service academy, he was allowed to take only two personal books. I gave him my weathered copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and my review copy of McChrystal’s On Character. One ancient, one modern. Both written by men who wrestled with the burden of command and the pursuit of integrity. I told him that if he could live the questions those two books ask, he would have done well. For those of us who continue to lead, teach, or serve in the irregular realm, McChrystal’s reflections offer the same quiet challenge: to match our convictions with discipline, our discipline with humility, and our actions with the character we claim to uphold.

Tags: Book review, Character, irregular warfare, leadership, Marcus Aurelius, military ethics, moral courage, On Character: Choices That Define a Life, Profession of Arms, Reflection and Discipline, Small Wars Journal, Stanley McChrystal, Stoicism, strategic leadership

About The Author

Jan Gleiman
Jan K. Gleiman (Ken) is the Editor-in-Chief of the new Small Wars Journal. He is a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University and the Associate Director for Irregular Warfare at ASU's Future Security Initiative (FSI). He is the co-author of Winning Without Fighting: Irregular Warfare and Strategic Competition in the 21st Century. (Cambria Press 2024)
View all posts Editor-in-Chief

15. Maximizing The Reciprocal Benefits of International Military Education

All good points in the essay. I want to reinforce their emphasis on the "intangible" of relationships. You never know how the investment in relationships will pay off over the long term. I will provide one personal anecdote.

In 1985 at the (then) Infantry Officers' Advanced Course at Fort Benning, a classmate of mine was CPT Alexander Yano of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. One of our small group instructors was then CPT Joe Votel. Every time I went to the Philippines he asked about Joe Votel. One month after 9-11 we conducted the Terrorism Coordination and Assistance Visit (TCAV) and he was waiting for then-COL Fridovich and me as we walked off the ramp of an MC-130 in Zamboanga. Then-COL Yano was Commanding Task Force Zamboanga and immediately requested one of our SF teams to provide advice and assistance to his Task Force. Just a few years later when I was commanding JSOTF-P, General Yano was the Chief of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Needless to say our long friendship/relationship was mutually beneficial for our missions. No one could have predicted this in 1985 when we met. And of course this is just one anecdote among many. There are a multitude of similar experiences with almost every officer who has attended PME with international students.

Maximizing The Reciprocal Benefits of International Military Education

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/10/21/international-military-education-benefits/

by Allison Abbe, by Stephen Trynosky

10.21.2025 at 06:00am

Photo from US Army War College's public Flickr page. The appearance of US Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.

An extensive network of alliances and partnerships has provided the United States (US) with a strategic advantage over competitors for decades. Amid the growth of China’s influence in the economic sphere, US military alliances remain a strength. Although the current administration approaches these relationships differently, emphasizing burden sharing to a greater degree than past administrations, reliance on allies and partners has been one area of continuity in US defense strategy. One way that the United States has maintained and expanded partnerships is through the education and training of international military personnel alongside their American counterparts. Educating allies and partners is not simply a military aid and assistance program; it advances US security interests globally and directly benefits US military personnel through their sustained exposure to international colleagues.

Since 1976, the Department of State and the Department of Defense have collaborated to implement the formal program for these efforts, known as the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program. The aims of IMET largely focus on influencing service members of ally and partner nations: increasing partner capabilities, supporting security sector reforms, and advancing both democratic norms and human rights. IMET also exposes participants to the range of US instruments of national power. These outcomes provide immediate benefits to partner nations and delayed benefits for the US, by increasing interoperability after international students return home and enhancing the appeal of the United States as a strategic partner.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is similarly investing in professional military education (PME) for international partners. Advancing its economic and military partnerships, the PRC now offers both intermediate- and senior-level officer education and master’s degree programs to international officers from nations in Africa and the South Pacific. These efforts expand strategic competition to the arena of PME, as the PRC’s international education includes ideological aims and rejects democratic norms of civil-military relations.

Consequently, in strategic competition, IMET makes important contributions to US strategic alliances and partnerships. Interoperability yields critical advantages in an era marked by multipolarity. Investments in IMET can yield outsized payoffs through more effective multinational collaboration at the interpersonal level, which can sustain the traditional US position as the partner of choice.

Benefits of IMET to US Military Personnel

IMET offers additional benefits that are both near and long-term. The program not only professionalizes and helps forge alignment among multinational partners, but it also professionally develops US forces, particularly through sustained interactions in PME. Lasting reciprocal benefits are most likely to emerge from resident officer PME programs with extended curricula—the intermediate-level staff colleges and senior-level war colleges—where students are immersed in an educational setting for ten months.

First, the duration of resident PME programs allows for deepening and broadening professional networks through meaningful relationships built on trust. PME alumni in senior leader roles who return to the institutions they attended often report that the relationships they formed were instrumental in facilitating collaboration later. The relatively low-pressure and immersive PME environment lends itself to cementing foundational relationships before graduates are confronted with the fast-paced demands of high-stakes command and staff positions.

Second, the relatively large student populations in resident PME programs present opportunities to connect with many nations, personnel, and professional experiences. This functional mix helps build the profession’s shared expertise and expands officers’ perspectives. A profession consists of jurisdiction over specific functions, legitimacy, and expertise. Whereas jurisdiction and legitimacy are mutually constituted between the military profession and the society and government it serves, expertise is largely defined by the members of the profession. International military education ensures the domains of military expertise include multinational dimensions.

International officers selected to attend resident PME courses in the United States are often among the top-performing officers in their nations.

Third, interactions with international students build US students’ interpersonal and cognitive skills. In particular, strategic empathy and creativity benefit from multinational experiences, skills that become increasingly important at more senior ranks. Collaboration with international partners replaces simplistic stereotypes with more accurate understanding and appreciation of common professional identity. Research has also shown increases in creativity following multicultural experiences, from experiences as varied as having foreign friends to living in a foreign culture. These experiences challenge assumptions and established problem-solving approaches, expanding students’ use of alternative and more flexible approaches.

International officers selected to attend resident PME courses in the United States are often among the top-performing officers in their nations. At the US Army War College, 60% of international fellows are subsequently promoted to General Officer, and many go on to serve as Chiefs of Defense or in civilian senior leadership roles after their military service. As a result, US students not only have the opportunity to build relationships with the very personnel they will encounter in operational settings later, but also to interact with the sharpest military minds from other nations.

High levels of international participation in PME can therefore provide US students a more challenging environment for their own development. The adult learning model of senior service college centers on dialogue and experiential learning events, which provide the kind of contact conducive to collaboration with multinational peers. Research on the contact hypothesis indicates that the conditions necessary to benefit from multinational contact include common goals, cooperation, and equal status. Resident PME is well-positioned to set these conditions, thereby ensuring that multinational collaboration contributes to intellectual overmatch, as the JCS Vision for PME and Talent Management has directed.

Recommendations

The following recommendations will help maximize the benefits of international military education for both the US and our international partners. Within IMET, security vetting and education in democratic values have rightly received increased attention. The recommendations outlined here will further improve IMET’s contributions to US strategic goals.

Align IMET with strategic defense priorities. IMET seat allocation at resident PME programs currently seems to favor the broad dispersal of stagnant funding across many different countries. This approach may reflect hedging against strategic uncertainty by signaling some small commitment to many military partners, but the trade-off of this approach is an inability to align scarce IMET resources with strategic priorities. For example, the clear designation of the PRC as the strategic pacing challenge should result in corresponding shifts in IMET seat allocations, e.g., prioritizing countries whose capabilities and locations are most important to the United States in the INDOPACOM Area of Responsibility. Combatant Command input should still play a role in IMET resourcing decisions, but ultimately, the alignment of training seats to national strategy should take precedence. Officers from those nations ranked lower for strategic IMET prioritization in 10-month courses could be afforded shorter-duration educational opportunities through IMET.

Sustain resources for IMET. While the scale and complexity of multinational military exercises like Talisman Sabre and Cobra Gold have grown in response to the strategic environment, IMET spending has remained largely unchanged. Funding for IMET has remained flat since at least 2000, adjusted for inflation. Although a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report from 2012 indicated that IMET funding had increased 70% from 2000 to 2010, it does not account for inflation.

IMET’s reach has even retracted. Though the number of nations participating in IMET remained stable from FY2000 to FY2022 (125 to 121, respectively), the number of individual participating students has significantly declined from about 9,000 to 5,000, according to Foreign Military Training reports compiled by the Department of State. Further reducing throughput in IMET may provide small cost savings but would degrade the educational experience for US personnel.

Sending high-potential US officers to university-based fellowships within the United States, in lieu of resident SSC, represents a missed opportunity for greater interoperability.

To expand or even simply maintain current numbers of international students, the Department of Defense must sustain the prioritization of 10-month resident PME curricula for IMET resources. Similarly, the Services should avoid making budget cuts that compromise the number and quality of faculty and the supporting academic infrastructure. The benefits outlined here depend on sustaining small class sizes. Smaller class sizes better lend themselves to active learning methods, including graduate-level dialogue and experiential learning, which are needed for proficiency in the art and science of warfare.

Evaluate both US and international outcomes of IMET. Program evaluation for IMET demands dramatic improvement in light of China’s extensive prioritization of similar programs for international military engagement, especially in the Global South. The current annual reports account for throughput but do not address measures of effectiveness. PME institutions that host IMET students are tracking some outcomes for their alumni, and those fragmented efforts should be compiled to help evaluate IMET more broadly. In a 2014 Joint Force Quarterly article, Thacker and Lambert noted the absence of clear responsibility for tracking IMET outcomes and international alumni. Ensuring a feedback pathway for evaluating outcomes against program aims will help inform funding decisions.

Ensure English language proficiency of IMET students. For resident PME courses, international students must be sufficiently proficient in English to integrate into graduate-level education and seminar dialogue with high-potential US military leaders. This may require expanding opportunities for more students to receive English instruction in advance of the 10-month curriculum. Teaching English language courses at PME institutions would allow IMET students to get a head start before US students arrive for a fall start and ease their acculturation to the United States. English courses within resident PME would also ensure that the vocabulary students learn is appropriate to the technical context and operational level of the academic program. US and IMET students do not get the full benefit of the educational experience if the international students cannot fully participate in the graduate classroom setting or meaningfully contribute in wargames and practical exercises.

Align talent management of US students. For resident senior-service college (SSC) slating, the Services should prioritize selecting officers with demonstrated promotion potential for General Officer/Flag Officer to maximize their opportunity to build meaningful multinational networks. Sending high-potential US officers to university-based fellowships within the United States, in lieu of resident SSC, represents a missed opportunity for greater interoperability. IMET partner nations are sending their high-potential officers to US SSCs; the Services should capitalize on this opportunity for their officers to build relationships with peers they will work with in future multinational operations. Of course, this consideration should be weighed against the potential benefits of US university-based fellowships, including access to unique civilian education opportunities, exposing US domestic academic audiences to high-quality officers, and the US officers’ own goals for family stability or other preferences.

Design US-international integration into PME curricula. Faculty and instructors should intentionally design opportunities for international participation in PME. For example, programs should use classified instruction for US students sparingly in their core curricula to keep the US and IMET cohorts learning together during the formative months of resident PME. US-only classified instruction is more appropriate later in the academic year when students select their individualized learning paths. Instructors may also benefit from faculty development to promote joint and multinational perspectives throughout the program.

This integration should extend to the social environment. Education and training programs can design social activities that require international learning by US students, not just provide US experiences for the international students. IMET intentionally exposes international students to the US way of life as part of inculcating democratic values. US students would likewise benefit from learning about other nations, especially their military personnel practices, professional development pathways, and civil-military relations. This US-international integration is a key point of contrast with the PRC’s international military education, which tends to separate much of the education of African officers from that provided to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Conclusion

In our own experiences in the classroom, international participation provides critical perspective on security strategy that cannot be replicated without the much greater expense of sending US officers abroad for extensive international travel. Though there is no substitute for immersion in another country to better understand the range of challenges and perspectives partner nations face, bringing international officers into the PME classroom is a critical asset to developing strategic leaders ready for strategic competition. Prioritizing IMET will help the United States preserve intellectual overmatch.

Tags: IMET, International Military Education, Professional Military Education, US Army War College

About The Authors

Allison Abbe
Allison Abbe is a professor of organizational studies and the Matthew B. Ridgway Chair of Leadership Studies at the US Army War College. Her research focuses on the development of leadership and intercultural skills in national security personnel. She has previously worked as a research psychologist and program manager in defense and intelligence organizations and holds a PhD in social and personality psychology.
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Stephen Trynosky
Colonel Stephen Trynosky is the John Parker Chair of Reserve Component Studies at the US Army War College and a Visiting Scholar with the National Security Studies Program at the George Washington University. He has held a range of command and staff assignments in the Army Reserve and Regular Army. COL Trynosky most recently served as a Senior Advisor for Professional Military Education in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

16. Interest in American M.B.A. Programs Shrinks, but Schools Across Asia Are Booming

I think America is no longer the destination of choice for education for foreign students. Can anyone foresee the long term impact of this?

Interest in American M.B.A. Programs Shrinks, but Schools Across Asia Are Booming

Visa restrictions, worries about job security put a damper on applications to U.S. business schools

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/interest-in-american-m-b-a-programs-shrinks-but-schools-across-asia-are-booming-d2fb6258

By Ray A. Smith

Oct. 21, 2025 5:30 am ET

The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School saw a decline in interest from foreign prospects this year. Charles Mostoller/Reuters

Quick Summary

Interest in M.B.A. programs in the U.S. dropped 1% this year, while applications to schools in Europe, India and Asia increased.View more

Applications to U.S. business schools slumped this year as many international students, worried about tighter visa restrictions, opted for schools closer to home.

Interest in M.B.A. programs in the U.S. dropped 1% in 2025, while applications to schools in Europe, India and Asia rose, according to a new survey of schools by the Graduate Management Admission Council, a nonprofit that tracks application trends.

That is a significant about-face from last year, when applications to U.S. business schools surged as American professionals who were frustrated by the white-collar job market tried to wait out sluggish hiring by going back to school. This year, many American professionals appear to be hanging on to the jobs they have.

Several renowned U.S. business schools, including the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago and NYU’s Stern School of Business, continued to see increases in applications for their full-time M.B.A. programs. Most of the drop in interest occurred at schools outside the top 30 to 50 ranked programs, said Joy Jones, chief executive of GMAC.

Some highly ranked M.B.A. programs, including the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, booked an increase in overall applications, but a decline in interest from foreign prospects. Others, like the Yale School of Management, saw greater applications from both American and international prospects.

Duke University’s campus Cornell Watson/Bloomberg News

Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University Joe Buglewicz/Bloomberg News

At Wharton, overall M.B.A. applications rose 4% to 7,613 for the incoming class this fall, but the percentage of international applications as part of that pool fell to 26%, down from 31%.

Total applications to the University of California, Davis, Graduate School of Management’s full-time M.B.A. program fell 7%, while international applications declined 4%.

Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business hit a record number of M.B.A. applications for the Class of 2027 at 4,032 prospects, but the share of interest from international applicants was down.

“Visa uncertainty is a challenge,” said Shari Hubert, Fuqua’s associate dean for admissions, who added the school saw more applicants from a diverse set of industries who were seeking cross-sector opportunities and leadership preparation.

While international applications to U.S. business schools were down 3% in the latest survey of nearly 1,200 programs at 326 business schools located in 41 countries, the drop was more pronounced in Canada and the U.K., where visa requirements became stricter.

The number of international candidates applying to business schools in Canada was 46% lower this year than last, and in the U.K., international applications dropped 5%. It was the second straight year of declines as the job markets in those countries also weakened.

“There’s a question about the employment opportunity in all of those markets,” Jones added, referring to the U.S., the U.K., and Canada.

By contrast, international applications were up 42% for schools in Asia, including China, up 26% for programs in India and up 9% in Europe.

Write to Ray A. Smith at Ray.Smith@wsj.com

17. Policing the Pacific: How China Expands Influence Where the US Looks for Allies

This essay reinforces my long time assessment that China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions through subversion. It takes a long term approach, employing unrestricted warfare and its three warfares to set conditions and achieve objectives, with the main objective being the unification of China (i.e., the recovery of Taiwan).

Recognize. Understand. Expose. Attack.

Regnizie the strategy.

Understand the strategy.

EXPOSE the strategy.

Attack the strategy with a superior political warfare strategy.

Excerpt:

Ultimately, the contest for influence in the Pacific will not be won alone through military might but through trust, responsiveness, and respect for local priorities. China has recognized that in nations where police, not soldiers, are the face of security, offering policing assistance is a way in. For the United States, matching this approach means expanding military—military cooperation to build durable, values-based partnerships rooted in transparency and community safety. By investing in regional policing initiatives and supporting locally driven messaging campaigns, Washington can both counter Beijing’s reach and strengthen the sovereignty and resilience of Pacific Island nations.

Policing the Pacific: How China Expands Influence Where the US Looks for Allies

irregularwarfare.org · Imran Bayoumi

Editor’s Note: This article was submitted as part of the Irregular Warfare Initiative’s 2025 Writing Contest, in which authors were invited to explore how the United States and its partners can use irregular warfare to strengthen security cooperation, build trust, and enhance resilience among Indo-Pacific nations. This article stood out for its innovative examination of how China leverages police partnerships, rather than traditional military power, to expand influence in the Pacific Islands, and for its clear-eyed recommendations on how the United States can adapt to compete in this gray-zone domain.

As Sheena Greitens observed earlier this year for IWI, the United States secures allies through defense cooperation, while China builds influence through policing. In the Pacific Islands (where few nations have militaries), this divergence gives Beijing an opening to expand its reach, using law enforcement ties to cultivate dependence and erode sovereignty.

With only three Pacific Island Countries (PICs) having standing militaries (Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga), security and defense responsibilities fall on police forces in many states. The PRC has recognized that advancing police partnerships with PICs is an effective way to grow its influence at the expense of host nation sovereignty. For the United States, security cooperation outside of traditional military-to-military engagements is often an area where traditional approaches from Washington are not well suited to compete. To remain competitive, the United States must adapt its security assistance model—shifting from military-first engagement to a strategy that empowers local police forces, amplifies regional voices, promotes local law enforcement and legal regimes, and undermines Beijing’s use of policing as a tool of influence.

With the United States reconsidering how it approaches foreign aid, leveraging cost-effective solutions that can counter PRC influence while delivering real impacts in countries is crucial. In the Pacific, the United States can bolster regional security and strengthen its influence by strengthening policing cooperation programs that already exist. Washington can further counter PRC influence by leveraging social media campaigns and trusted local messengers to counter common narratives about the value of PRC policing while building local alternatives and grassroots opposition to these endeavors.

China’s Policing Partnerships in the Pacific

The PRC has engaged with six different PICs to provide policing support in some capacity, ranging from sending Fijian police officers to China for training to deploying Chinese police officers on patrol in Kiribati[KB1] . In Samoa, the PRC funded a police academy, and in 2022, the Solomon Islands signed a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement with China that included police cooperation. Some analysts have argued that the PRC’s overseas police presence is more effective than military presence in influencing local elites, government, and local populations.

For many Pacific nations, there is an urgent need to address real security challenges. Illegal fishing—often by China—is a persistent threat, and drug trafficking is a growing problem. Through policing assistance, the PRC addresses such security challenges while laying the groundwork for Beijing to gain influence over the national security strategy of these countries. In 2018, the PRC gifted Papua New Guinea 200 surveillance cameras and a Chinese EXIM bank loan to build a Huawei data center. Though the data center was too expensive for Port Moresby to maintain, it was later revealed to be highly vulnerable to remote access, with its information accessible by the PRC. In Fiji and Vanuatu, the PRC carried out extraditions of Chinese nationals in 2017 and 2019, respectively, raising questions about due process and the rule of law in each of these countries.

The PRC also uses its police presence on these islands to undertake the extraterritorial policing of Chinese citizens abroad. These actions have raised concerns that the presence of the PRC within local police systems will shift the focus of these forces from protecting community interest to ensuring leadership survival. Even without a formal police presence, the PRC works with criminal groups to establish an informal police presence. In Italy and Spain, individuals with suspected criminal ties helped to set up secret overseas Chinese police stations. According to a ProPublica investigation, Beijing protects the criminal actors involved in setting up and running these stations, turning a blind eye to their illegal activities in exchange for them acting as overseas enforcers.

A Two-Pronged Approach: Partnership and Public Awareness

The United States should counter the PRC’s policing influence in two ways. First, it should work with regional partners, namely Australia, to develop viable policing alternatives that align with Washington and Canberra’s shared interests. Here, the Pacific Policing Initiative is one such initiative that should be carried forward and supported to deliver lasting change and promote US and allied interests in the region.

The Pacific Policing Initiative is not enough on its own and would need a targeted information campaign on social media to highlight the very real risks posed by China’s police presence. A combination of factors has led to Pacific Island Countries having some of the highest rates of citizens connected to the internet in the world, making a social media campaign likely to have high engagement.

There is already a recognition by Pacific Island Nations of the danger posed by China’s overseas policing apparatus. Fiji, which once signed a security agreement with China, has since decided that Chinese officers will not be deployed within its police force. Papua New Guinea has paused plans to pursue a policing deal with the PRC. In Papua New Guinea, the first PIC to sign onto China’s Belt and Road Initiative, there has been vocal pushback at the local level against China’s economic dominance, and the United States should tap into this related sentiment and help raise awareness of the danger posed by China’s police presence.

There are risks associated with this approach. Pacific Island States have agency; political elites and citizens in these countries are rightly concerned about the very real security challenges that they face. It is not enough for the United States to launch a messaging campaign to dislodge the PRC; Washington should work to provide tangible security assistance that can effectively blunt criminal groups. One way to do so would be by providing financial support and expertise to the Australian-led Pacific Policing Initiative, which includes a regional training facility in Brisbane and is valued at $271 million. In September, the US State Department announced that the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs plans to provide a resident advisor from the Department of Homeland Security Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers to support development and recruitment in Papua New Guinea. The State Department should look to replicate this partnership with other PICs, establishing an ‘on the ground’ presence across the region.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the contest for influence in the Pacific will not be won alone through military might but through trust, responsiveness, and respect for local priorities. China has recognized that in nations where police, not soldiers, are the face of security, offering policing assistance is a way in. For the United States, matching this approach means expanding military—military cooperation to build durable, values-based partnerships rooted in transparency and community safety. By investing in regional policing initiatives and supporting locally driven messaging campaigns, Washington can both counter Beijing’s reach and strengthen the sovereignty and resilience of Pacific Island nations.

Imran Bayoumi is an associate director with the GeoStrategy Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. From 2024 to 2025, he served as a policy advisor at the US Department of War.

Main Image: Samoan Police officers. Photo by Claire McGeechan, AusAID. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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

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

18. Colombia Is Struggling to Keep Up With A Criminal Air Force

Excerpts:

Colombia could learn valuable lessons from Ukraine’s rapid field innovations, demonstrating that scrappy and lean innovation is possible, that layered defenses can be built at scale if procurement is reformed and industry partnerships are expanded, and all backed by a national sense of urgency.

However, the response to the drone challenge need not be solely Colombia’s responsibility. It should also involve international partners. American support should move beyond counter-narcotics to counter-drone capacity building, including technology transfers, embedded advising, financing for doctrine development, and access to lessons learned from Ukraine and across the NATO nations.

Moreover, the use of criminal-insurgent drones should be treated as a regional challenge. Ideally, Colombia should work with Ecuador and Venezuela to develop a collective response. Cooperation with Ecuador is plausible, given shared security concerns and recent cross-border coordination, but genuine cooperation with Venezuela is highly unlikely. The Maduro regime has consistently harbored and sponsored armed groups such as the National Liberation and dissident Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia factions, both of which maintain bases of operation inside Venezuelan territory. In this context, Colombia should prepare for the absence of good-faith collaboration by pursuing unilateral action to strengthen border defenses, interdicting drone shipments, and working with willing partners such as Brazil and the United States to contain or mitigate the threat.

The incorporation of drones into criminal-insurgent operations may lead to other innovations. Know-how and lessons learned could be transferable to other types of autonomous capabilities, including unmanned underwater vehicles, which drug traffickers have already started using. As U.S. strikes on “go-fast” boats continue to increase, traffickers may see submersibles as an alternative delivery method to U.S. and European markets. The challenge now is to recognize that the war has taken flight, and to respond before the power balance tips irreversibly against the Colombian government.

Colombia Is Struggling to Keep Up With A Criminal Air Force

Alfonso Camacho-Martinez

October 21, 2025

warontherocks.com · October 21, 2025

Armed groups in Colombia have built an air force — and it flies on cheap, store-bought drones.

In late August 2025, the National Liberation Army claimed responsibility for an ambush that left 13 police officers dead and four wounded. Initially reported as a drone strike, investigators later concluded that planted explosives destroyed the helicopter at a routinely used landing site. Two days later, a Colombian Navy ship was struck by a drone carrying improvised explosives, tearing through the crew deck and killing one marine. A similar attack in the same region in early August killed three infantrymen. These were not isolated incidents.

These attacks are more than tactical surprises: they reveal the integration of drones into combined arms operations, forcing security forces into dilemmas where defending against one threat opens vulnerabilities to another. Once limited to ambushes and roadside bombs, criminal and insurgent groups now use drones for reconnaissance and direct strikes. Police stations, army patrols, and even naval vessels have been targeted, with the August helicopter incident underscoring how quickly suspicion now falls on drones. Colombia now faces a “poor man’s air force” — cheap, expendable systems that enable insurgent-criminal networks to impose costs on a state already strained to defend outposts and convoys, even in urban centers.

To combat the challenge, Colombia should pair doctrine with execution by creating a unified counter-drone command, consolidating procurement under a single authority, and ensuring that every brigade operating in high-risk regions fields counter-drone specialists trained in detection, jamming, and electronic warfare. Ultimately, Colombia should build an integrated, self-sustaining counter-drone ecosystem — one that aligns doctrine, acquisition, and training with domestic industry and regional coordination.

BECOME A MEMBER

An Operational Step Change

The proliferation of drones among criminal groups carries larger implications. President Gustavo Petro’s Paz Total (Total Peace) initiative, meant to freeze conflict and open space for negotiations, has instead created permissive conditions for innovation. Ceasefires gave armed groups time to recruit, rearm, and adapt. In southern Colombia, minors have been trained as pisasuaves — stealthy assault units — and as drone operators, with captured fighters describing weeks of instruction in payload assembly, night operations, and integration of aerial surveillance into ground maneuvers. The shift is not purely offensive. It has logistical and operational effects as well. In the Cañón del Micay, a major cocaine hub, dissident commanders now use drones in both trafficking and combat. In northeastern and south-central Colombia, National Liberation fronts have woven drone training into existing guerrilla warfare courses, treating it as an organic part of their new fighting capabilities.

What has emerged is not a mere tactical upgrade but an operational step change. When combined with long-standing improvised explosive device know-how, drones enable criminal groups to contest Colombia’s skies. This was unthinkable at the height of Plan Colombia, a decade-long, multi-billion dollar security cooperation initiative that forced armed groups to demobilize, and that allowed U.S.-supplied helicopters and gunships to operate without having to think about threats.

The pace of escalation is staggering. According to the Colombian government’s internal security assessments armed groups have carried out more than 320 drone attacks since April 2024, using over 700 improvised explosives and grenades. These attacks have caused more than 225 casualties, including 17 deaths. Strikes have targeted police patrols, field hospitals, schools, and even crowded town squares. Colombia now endures a drone attack every 38 hours, often delivered in swarms designed to overwhelm defenses. This marks a stark reversal of dominance: Where the state once deployed troops into any ravine, its mobility is now constrained by cheap, disposable drones bought online or smuggled across porous borders.

The expansion of drone attacks closely traces the most profitable corridors for drug trafficking, illicit gold mining, and other criminal economies. Incidents cluster in Cauca, Catatumbo, Arauca, and southern Bolívar, all in enclaves near the borders with Venezuela or Ecuador. These places represent a criminal Goldilocks sweet spot: far enough away from developed areas to avoid authorities, but with ample open space and riverine access to flourish. For only a few hundred dollars — less than a modern rifle — armed groups can kill, wound, and terrorize with little risk to a drone operator. In El Plateado, drones struck army patrols, a hospital, a school, and a town square on consecutive days in February 2025. In Catatumbo, dissidents and National Liberation fighters now turn drones on each other, using explosive drops and surveillance flights in clashes that displace thousands of civilians.

A Weak Response

So far, the Colombian government’s response has been improvised and inadequate. Current air defense batteries are more than 80 years old, and asymmetric air defenses are virtually nonexistent. Soldiers stationed in remote places away from urban centers admit their main countermeasure is firing rifles in volleys, hoping to hit drones. Government forces have used drones offensively, but without a doctrine or rules of engagement, these efforts are typically ineffective.

Procurement follows the same troubled pattern as past military acquisitions: It took five administrations to approve the purchase of new fighter jets to replace an obsolete 3.5-generation fleet, and counter-drone systems are unlikely to move faster. Nor is there a national doctrine for drone warfare or a legal framework to govern its use, leaving military commanders hesitant, exposed to accusations of misuse, and vulnerable to legal action.

While there is some progress in Colombia’s counter-drone acquisition effort, programs remain decentralized and incoherent. There is no institutional effort with consistent government backing, only bottom-up attempts that are fragile and subject to the whims of local politics. The systems now under testing — such as commercial jammers, direction-finding platforms, and offensive drones — have been acquired in response to the recent rise of attacks, rather than as part of long-term acquisition strategy. Since most Colombian systems are off-the-shelf and imported at high prices, they risk becoming rapidly outdated. According to government officials, armed groups are modifying cheap multi-rotor or agricultural drones to drop 60mm grenades, shifting frequencies, or flying autonomously to evade jamming.

Legal and institutional shortcomings are another problem. Colombian military lawyers interpret existing law of armed conflict provisions narrowly, seeking to protect units from judicial risk rather than prioritizing their mission. This limits effectiveness and generates hesitation in operational use. Together with unclear doctrine, this legal ambiguity reduces confidence and slows deployment. Although some doctrine is being generated in some units, particularly within elite army, air force, and national police units, it remains tactical in nature, a product of necessity, and not an all-encompassing general directive. Current air defense coverage remains minimal — current systems protect only key bases and airports — while funding for maintenance and updates is uncertain. Without contractual guarantees for software updates, modular architectures, or domestic technical capacity, Colombia risks deploying systems that will be obsolete by the time they are widely implemented. Addressing these weaknesses requires mixing rapid acquisition with sustained capability, which involves investing in modular, upgradable architectures, embedding legal clarity and operational doctrine, and integrating detection, attribution, and electronic defeat within a unified national counter-drone framework.

Regional enablers compound this adaptation gap, as is the case with much of the supply of weaponry to criminal actors in Colombia. Nowhere is the convergence of insurgency, crime, and technology more evident than in the Catatumbo conflict, fought on the Colombia-Venezuela border. The National Liberation Army has waged an aggressive campaign to wrest control of the region from a splintered faction of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, following the 2016 peace accord. Although both groups coexisted for years, that balance collapsed in early 2025, igniting fighting that displaced more than 56,000 civilians and exposing Venezuelan complicity in Colombia’s internal violence. The National Liberation Army and former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia fighters move freely across the border, sourcing weapons and counter-drone systems from Venezuelan suppliers to sustain their offensive. Meanwhile, Ecuador has emerged as an important transit hub of consumer drones and components, enabling the possibility of training links with Mexican cartel operators and advisors, experienced in adapting explosives for aerial delivery. The result is a permissive regional environment where Colombian armed actors will likely be able to sustain drone operations even if they were to face increased domestic pressure.

Developments elsewhere place Colombia’s current challenge within a broader context. The Islamic State has used armed drones in Mosul, the Houthis have conducted long-range drone strikes against Saudi oil infrastructure in Yemen, and Mexican cartels have adopted using first-person view drones. Colombia is now part of a continuing global trend of non-state actors incorporating technological advances to outpace government responses.

What Can Be Done?

Colombia should move from improvisation to doctrine — recognizing that criminal-insurgent drones are no longer an emerging threat but a daily national security challenge. Any serious effort to address the issue should include a comprehensive counter-drone strategy that clarifies the rules of engagement, streamlines acquisition, and prioritizes training as much as hardware.

Establishing a unified counter-drone command would consolidate fragmented responsibilities across the army, air force, and national police, creating a single operational framework to coordinate intelligence, electronic warfare, and procurement. Such a command should seek to improve interoperability, accelerate response times, and ensure that intelligence, training, and technology flow across services — forming a coherent national defense posture.

Colombia could learn valuable lessons from Ukraine’s rapid field innovations, demonstrating that scrappy and lean innovation is possible, that layered defenses can be built at scale if procurement is reformed and industry partnerships are expanded, and all backed by a national sense of urgency.

However, the response to the drone challenge need not be solely Colombia’s responsibility. It should also involve international partners. American support should move beyond counter-narcotics to counter-drone capacity building, including technology transfers, embedded advising, financing for doctrine development, and access to lessons learned from Ukraine and across the NATO nations.

Moreover, the use of criminal-insurgent drones should be treated as a regional challenge. Ideally, Colombia should work with Ecuador and Venezuela to develop a collective response. Cooperation with Ecuador is plausible, given shared security concerns and recent cross-border coordination, but genuine cooperation with Venezuela is highly unlikely. The Maduro regime has consistently harbored and sponsored armed groups such as the National Liberation and dissident Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia factions, both of which maintain bases of operation inside Venezuelan territory. In this context, Colombia should prepare for the absence of good-faith collaboration by pursuing unilateral action to strengthen border defenses, interdicting drone shipments, and working with willing partners such as Brazil and the United States to contain or mitigate the threat.

The incorporation of drones into criminal-insurgent operations may lead to other innovations. Know-how and lessons learned could be transferable to other types of autonomous capabilities, including unmanned underwater vehicles, which drug traffickers have already started using. As U.S. strikes on “go-fast” boats continue to increase, traffickers may see submersibles as an alternative delivery method to U.S. and European markets. The challenge now is to recognize that the war has taken flight, and to respond before the power balance tips irreversibly against the Colombian government.

BECOME A MEMBER

Alfonso Camacho-Martinez is a National Security Fellow at the Middlebury Institute for International Studies. His work focuses on geopolitical risk, threat assessment, and satellite imagery analysis.

Image: Midjourney

warontherocks.com · October 21, 2025

19. The Stagnant Order And the End of Rising Powers

Excerpts:

If a world without rising powers proves calmer geopolitically, economics may also be brighter than expected. Even without another industrial revolution, new technologies are improving daily life, and humanity is healthier and more educated than ever. Slower productivity growth and aging populations may temper GDP, but they need not prevent a quieter revolution in living standards, creating a future in which societies grow richer in knowledge and healthier in body even as they grow smaller in population.

Another source of optimism lies in today’s demographic asymmetry. Advanced economies are capital-rich but labor-poor, while much of the developing world—especially Africa—has the reverse profile. In principle, this sets the stage for a new division of labor: aging societies supply savings and technology, and younger ones supply workers, creating a symbiosis that could sustain global growth even as individual nations slow. The flow of remittances, skills partnerships, and cross-border investment are early signs of this new relationship, and digital platforms are easing coordination. Yet none of this is automatic. The politics of trade and migration are turning inward, and absorbing large migrant flows without disrupting societies remains a daunting challenge. Without careful management—rules-based migration channels, secure borders, worker protections, and new models of remote collaboration—what could be a growth pact may instead collapse into backlash. The opportunity is real, but so are the obstacles.

Forecasting is a perilous business. Demography can be measured, but technology and politics often surprise, and today’s certainties may look naive a generation or even a few years from now. What can be said with confidence is that for two and a half centuries, global politics was driven by the rapid rise of great powers, and the forces that made such ascents possible are now receding. That does not guarantee stability, but it does mark a profound shift: the familiar struggle between living and dying powers is winding down, and another story, its outlines still obscure, is beginning to unfold.

The Stagnant Order

Foreign Affairs · More by Michael Beckley · October 21, 2025

And the End of Rising Powers

Michael Beckley

November/December 2025 Published on October 21, 2025

Anuj Shrestha

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In 1898, as the United Kingdom joined other powers in carving up the once mighty Qing empire, British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury warned a London audience that the world was dividing into “living” and “dying” nations. The living were the rising powers of the industrial age—states with growing populations, transformative technologies, and militaries of unprecedented range and firepower. The dying were stagnant empires, crippled by corruption, clinging to obsolete methods, and sliding toward ruin. Salisbury feared that the ascent of some, colliding with the decline of others, would hurl the world into catastrophic conflict.

Now, that era of power transitions is ending. For the first time in centuries, no country is rising fast enough to overturn the global balance. The demographic booms, industrial breakthroughs, and territorial acquisitions that once fueled great powers have largely run their course. China, the last major riser, is already peaking, its economy slowing and its population shrinking. Japan, Russia, and Europe stalled more than a decade ago. India has youth but lacks the human capital and state capacity to turn it into strength. The United States faces its own troubles—debt, sluggish growth, political dysfunction—but still outpaces rivals sinking into deeper decay. The rapid ascents that once defined modern geopolitics have yielded to sclerosis: the world is now a closed club of aging incumbents, circled by middle powers, developing countries, and failing states.

This reversal carries profound consequences. Over the long run, it may spare the world the ruinous cycle of rising powers—their quests for territory, resources, and status that so often ended in war. In the near term, however, stagnation and demographic shocks are spawning acute dangers. Fragile states are buckling under debt and youth bulges. Struggling powers are turning to militarization and irredentism to stave off decline. Economic insecurity is stoking extremism and corroding democracies, while the United States drifts toward thuggish unilateralism. The age of rising powers is ending, but its immediate aftermath may prove no less violent.

THE AGE OF ASCENT

Despite the fad of likening China to a rising Athens and the United States to a threatened Sparta, true “rising powers” are a modern phenomenon. They emerged only in the last 250 years, with the Industrial Revolution, when coal, steam, and oil freed societies from the Malthusian trap, in which every bit of new wealth was swallowed by more mouths, keeping living standards stuck at subsistence. For the first time, wealth, population, and military might could expand in tandem—compounding rather than offsetting one another—allowing countries to amass power on a steady upward trajectory. This transformation rested on three forces: technologies that turbocharged productivity, burgeoning populations that swelled workforces and armies, and military machines enabling rapid conquest.

The preindustrial world had none of these dynamics. From the year 1 to 1820, global income per person rose barely 0.017 percent annually, or just under two percent per century. With poverty the norm, shifts in power came only in fits and starts, usually by squeezing scarce resources. Chinese and Indian empires eked out agricultural surpluses, Venice and the Ottomans taxed trade, Spain and Portugal plundered silver, and the Habsburgs and Bourbons expanded through dynastic marriages. Military breakthroughs—cavalry under the Mongols or gunpowder under the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires—reshaped the balance for a time, but rivals eventually adapted. Even the United Kingdom’s vaunted fiscal-military state simply wrung more from scarcity.

The Industrial Revolution broke scarcity’s grip and made productivity the foundation of power, vaulting societies from medieval to modern in under a century. A Briton born in 1830 entered a world of candles, horse carts, and wooden ships; by old age, that same person could ride a railroad, send a telegraph, and walk streets lined with electric lights, factory goods, and indoor plumbing. In one lifetime, per capita energy use multiplied five- to tenfold.

This upheaval produced the first modern rising powers. In the nineteenth century, per capita income growth expanded at 30 times its preindustrial pace, and the gains were concentrated among a handful of states, creating vast asymmetries in power. The United Kingdom, the United States, and the German states jumped from furnishing less than ten percent of global manufacturing in 1800 to more than half by 1900, while their per capita incomes roughly tripled. China’s and India’s shares, by contrast, fell from over half of world output to under ten percent, and the Habsburgs, Ottomans, and Russians remained largely agrarian, their industries swamped by imports. By 1900, populations in leading industrial nations earned about eight to ten times more per person than China or India, and several times more than those in Russia and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. What had once been rough parity became the so-called Great Divergence between the West and the rest.

Productivity gains unleashed a population boom. Preindustrial societies had barely grown, with populations doubling only once in a thousand years. Industrialization shattered that ceiling: in the nineteenth century, the global population grew about ten times as fast as it had, on average, from year 1 to 1750. Mechanized farming, sanitation, electricity, refrigeration, and new medicines lifted global average life expectancy by more than 60 percent from 1770 to 1950, allowing populations to double every generation or two. Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States led this surge, followed by Japan and Russia, while China, India, and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires lagged behind. By World War I, armies that had once numbered in the tens of thousands could muster millions.

Productivity is slowing, populations are shrinking, and conquest is growing harder.

Manpower fueled industrial militaries—the third ingredient of rising power. Preindustrial warfare was brutal but limited. Armies were generally small, seasonal, and parasitic, living off the land and moving only as fast as hoof or sail allowed. With crude weapons and poor logistics, wars were frequent but indecisive, often dragging on for decades. Industrialization upended that world. Railroads, steamships, and telegraphs made mass mobilization possible, while rifles, machine guns, and heavy artillery multiplied killing power. By the early twentieth century, industrial empires controlled four-fifths of the globe, turning the map into a patchwork dominated by a handful of rising powers.

Together, these economic, demographic, and military revolutions pulled every region into a single arena. The value of global trade expanded tenfold from 1850 to 1913, and even long-insulated empires such as Tokugawa Japan and Qing China were forced into the fray. For the first time, nations confronted a stark choice: industrialize or be dominated. From that scramble emerged a small roster of great powers, each forged through a few exceptional routes.

One was national consolidation, in which the first industrializing region of a fragmented land conquered the rest. Prussia hammered Germany together, Satsuma and Choshu built modern Japan, Piedmont spearheaded Italian unification, and the industrial North in the United States crushed native nations, defeated the secessionist, slave-holding South, and expanded westward. Another route to power was totalitarianism, as former empires pursued breakneck industrialization under ruthless dictators—Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Mao Zedong’s China—at staggering human cost. A third route was to become a protectorate. China, having watched postwar Germany and Japan rebuild under U.S. protection, leaned toward Washington beginning in the 1970s to extract capital and know-how before breaking away in this century to pursue primacy. These were the doors into the rising power club—and all opened under the extraordinary technological, demographic, and military conditions of the industrial age.

FROM TAILWINDS TO HEADWINDS

Those doors are now closing. Productivity is slowing, populations are shrinking, and conquest is growing harder. Today’s technologies, remarkable though they are, have not remade life as the Industrial Revolution did. An American apartment from the 1940s, with a refrigerator, gas stove, electric lights, and telephone, would feel familiar today. By contrast, an 1870s home, with an outhouse, water well, and fireplace for cooking and heat, would seem prehistoric. The leap from 1870 to 1940 was transformative; the steps since, far less so.

Transport speeds have flatlined: just 66 years separated Kitty Hawk from the moon landing, yet half a century later, cars and planes still move at twentieth-century velocities. The energy sector has shown similar inertia, with fossil fuels still providing more than 80 percent of global supply—virtually unchanged since the 1970s, despite trillions invested in renewable energy sources. Longevity has plateaued as life expectancy gains in advanced economies have slowed or even reversed. The number of scientists has risen more than fortyfold since the 1930s, yet research productivity has declined by roughly the same margin, now halving every 13 years. Business R & D has more than doubled as a share of GDP since 1980, but productivity growth and startup formation have each fallen by half in advanced economies. Even the digital revolution has proved fleeting; after a brief surge in the late 1990s, productivity growth sank back to historic lows.

Today’s technologies have not remade life as the Industrial Revolution did.

Some forecasts claim that artificial intelligence will turbocharge global output by 30 percent per year, but most economists expect it to add only about one percentage point to annual growth. AI excels at digital tasks, yet the toughest labor bottlenecks are in physical and social realms. Hospitals need nurses more than they need faster scans; restaurants need cooks more than ordering tablets; lawyers must persuade judges, not just parse briefs. Robots remain clumsy in real-world settings, and because machine learning is probabilistic, errors are inevitable—so humans must often stay in the loop. Reflecting these limits, roughly 80 percent of firms using generative AI reported that it had no material effect on their profits, in a McKinsey Global Survey on AI.

Even if AI keeps advancing, major productivity gains may take decades because economies must reorganize around new tools. That offers little relief for today’s struggling economies. Global growth has slowed from four percent in the first decades of the twenty-first century to about three percent today—and to barely one percent in advanced economies. Productivity growth, which ran at three to four percent annually in the 1950s and 1960s, has fallen close to zero. Meanwhile, global debt has swollen from 200 percent of GDP 15 years ago to 250 percent today, topping 300 percent in some advanced economies.

The demographic outlook is equally bleak. Today, nearly two-thirds of humanity lives in countries with birthrates below replacement levels. Most industrialized nations are literally dying powers, shrinking by hundreds of thousands each year—some by millions—and emerging markets are not far behind. Only sub-Saharan Africa still has high fertility, and rates are declining even there. Recent estimates suggest that the global population will begin falling in the 2050s.

The implications for national power are stark. As labor forces contract and retiree ranks swell, growth in major economies is projected to decline by at least 15 percent over the next quarter century, and for some, the hit will be several times worse. Making up that loss would require productivity gains of two to five percent a year—the breakneck pace of the 1950s—or longer workweeks, neither of which is realistic amid slowing innovation and mass retirement. Demographic decline also rules out any phoenix-like recovery. In the industrial era, even countries shattered by war could roar back: Germany after World War I, the Soviet Union and Japan after World War II, and China after its “century of humiliation” all returned bigger and stronger within a generation. Today, as populations shrink, lost power may be gone for good.

At the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, September 2025 Jeenah Moon / Reuters

With neither economic growth nor demographic revival to count on, conquest might seem the last path to rising power. Yet that route, too, is narrowing. The spread of industrial technologies—railroads, telegraphs, and electrification—facilitated state building and decolonization, quadrupling the number of nation-states in the world since 1900. Since then, more than 160 foreign occupations have been mired in insurgencies, as cheap rifles, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades turned villages into kill zones. Nuclear weapons raised the risks of conquest to existential levels, while precision-guided munitions and drones now allow even ragtag militias such as the Houthis to cripple ships and tanks. Meanwhile, the spoils of conquest have shrunk: land and minerals once enriched empires, but today nearly 90 percent of corporate assets in advanced economies are intangible—software, patents, and brands that cannot be plundered.

For aspiring great powers in the developing world, the climb is steeper still. Multinational companies from wealthy states dominate capital and technology, while global production has become modular, consigning latecomers to low-value roles—assembling goods or exporting raw materials—without a chance to build globally competitive firms of their own. Foreign aid has dwindled, export markets are contracting, and protectionism is spreading, pulling up the export-led ladder that past risers once climbed.

Historical churn has slowed dramatically. With few exceptions, the countries that were rich and powerful in 1980 remain so today, while most of the poor have stayed poor. Between 1850 and 1949, five new great powers stormed onto the scene, but in the 75 years since, only China has. And it may be the last.

MIND THE GAP

As the world’s preeminent power, the United States sets the pace against which others rise or fall—and at the start of the twenty-first century, that pace was abysmal. In 2001, the country suffered the deadliest attack on its homeland. Over the next decade, it fought two of the three longest wars in its history, costing hundreds of thousands of lives, including those of thousands of Americans, and spending $8 trillion, without securing victory. In 2008, it suffered the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, other economies closed the gap. Between 2000 and 2010, China’s GDP in dollar terms—the clearest gauge of a country’s purchasing power on international markets—jumped from 12 percent to 41 percent of U.S. GDP. Russia’s share quadrupled; Brazil’s and India’s more than doubled; and Europe’s major economies also made meaningful gains. To many observers, these shifts heralded an epic power transition—what the writer Fareed Zakaria memorably called “the rise of the rest,” ushering in an allegedly “post-American world.”

China may be the last new great power to storm onto the scene.

But the tide soon turned. In the 2010s, most major economies fell back. Brazil’s and Japan’s shares of U.S. GDP were cut roughly in half. Canada, France, Italy, and Russia each lost about a third of their relative economic weight, while Germany’s and the United Kingdom’s shares contracted by about a quarter. Only China and India continued to climb.

The 2020s have been harsher still. India is the only major economy still keeping pace with the United States. From 2020 to 2024, China’s GDP fell from 70 to 64 percent of U.S. GDP. Japan’s plunged from 22 to 14 percent. The economies of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom all slid further, while Russia’s is sputtering after a brief wartime bump. The combined economies of the countries of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia have also shrunk—from about 90 percent of U.S. GDP a decade ago to just 70 percent in 2023. “The rise of the rest” has not merely slowed; it is reversing.

Nor is a comeback likely. The apparent rise of new powers in the early years of the twenty-first century was always misleading because GDP is a crude measure of strength. What matters more are the foundations of a robust economy—productivity, innovation, consumer markets, energy, finance, and fiscal health—and on those fronts, most challengers are faltering. Over the past decade, only India and the United States have gained in total factor productivity, which measures how efficiently a country translates labor, capital, and other inputs into economic output. Japan has stagnated while others have slid backward, throwing in more inputs but producing less growth. In advanced industries, the gap is wider: U.S. firms capture more than half of global high-tech profits; China barely manages six percent.

The United States’ advantages extend further. Its consumer market is now larger than China’s and the eurozone’s combined. It is the world’s second-largest trader, yet it is among the least trade-dependent, with exports making up just 11 percent of GDP—one-third of which goes to Canada and Mexico—compared with 20 percent for China and 30 percent globally. In energy, it has vaulted from net importer to top producer, enjoying prices far below those of rivals. And the dollar continues to dominate reserves, banking, and foreign exchange. Total public and private debt in the United States is enormous—about 250 percent of GDP in 2024 and likely to climb with the extended tax cuts Congress passed in July—but still lower than that of many peers: in Japan, it exceeds 380 percent; in France, 320 percent; and in China, it tops 300 percent once hidden local government and corporate liabilities are included. Moreover, from 2015 to 2025, debt in the United States edged down slightly, while it rose nearly 60 percentage points in China, more than 25 in Japan and Brazil, and nearly 20 in France.

“The rise of the rest” has not merely slowed; it is reversing.

Demographics will further drag down U.S. rivals. Over the next 25 years, the United States will gain about eight million working-age adults (a 3.7 percent increase), while China will lose roughly 240 million (a 24.5 percent decline)—more than the entire labor force of the European Union. Japan will shed about 18 million workers (25.5 percent of its labor force), Russia more than 11 million (12.2 percent), Italy around 10 million (27.5 percent), Brazil another 10 million (7.1 percent), and Germany over 8 million (15.6 percent). Aging will compound the pain. During the same period, the United States will add about 24 million retirees (a 37.8 percent increase over today), but China will add more than 178 million (an 84.5 percent increase). Japan, already saturated with seniors, will gain 2.5 million retirees (a 6.7 percent increase). Germany will add 3.8 million (up 19 percent), Italy 4.3 million (up 29 percent), Russia 6.8 million (up 27 percent), and Brazil 24.5 million (up a staggering 100 percent). For two centuries, rising powers were propelled by swelling youth populations; today, major economies are losing workers while piling up retirees—a double blow that no challenger has ever faced.

Besides the United States, only India—the world’s most populous country, with a workforce projected to grow into the 2040s—seems to be partly shielded from demographic decline, raising its hopes to be the next rising power. Yet India suffers from a crippling dearth of skilled workers. As of 2020, nearly a quarter of working-age adults had never attended school, and among those who did, four out of five lacked basic math and science skills. In total, nearly 90 percent of young people fall short of essential literacy and numeracy. The problem is magnified by brain drain: India sends more skilled migrants to advanced economies than any other country. One study tracking the 2010 cohort of India’s Joint Entrance Examination takers—the gateway to elite technology institutions—found that within eight years, more than a third of the top 1,000 scorers had moved abroad, including over 60 percent of the top 100.

The Indian economy amplifies these weaknesses. Labor and industry remain constrained: more than 80 percent of workers are in the untaxable informal sector, and nearly half of all industrial sectors have contracted since 2015. Infrastructure and trade are also limited: India’s busiest port handles only one-seventh the volume of China’s, and a quarter of the country’s trade with Europe and East Asia must pass through foreign hubs, adding three days in transit and roughly $200 to the cost of every container. Finally, the heralded services sector is narrow, with growth concentrated in IT firms that cannot absorb a vast labor force, leaving about 40 percent of college graduates in their 20s unemployed. India will remain consequential—its market large, its military strong by regional standards, its diaspora influential—but it lacks the foundations for true great-power ascent.

CHINA’S GAMBLE

If any country can defy today’s headwinds, it is China. It produces a third of the world’s goods and turns out more ships, electric vehicles, batteries, rare-earth minerals, solar panels, and pharmaceutical ingredients than the rest of the world combined. Industrial hubs such as Shenzhen and Hefei can take a design from prototype to mass production in days, powered by the planet’s largest electric grid and a vast robot workforce. Beijing bankrolls research, directs firms, and stockpiles resources, while its AI strategy prizes rapid, low-cost deployment. Scale gives China leverage. It can flood markets to bankrupt competitors, as it did with solar panels, and churn out strategic goods—from drones to ships to rare earths—faster than any rival. On the asset side of the ledger, China looks unstoppable.

On the liability side, however, China’s position is far weaker. Its growth model rests on three perilous bets: that gross output matters more than net returns, that a few showcase industries can substitute for broad economic vitality, and that autocracy can deliver more dynamism than democracy. These gambles have generated spectacular output, but at mounting costs—and history shows that such liabilities are usually decisive.

Over the past two centuries, states with deeper net resources—what remained after providing for their people, sustaining their economies, and securing their homelands—prevailed in 70 percent of disputes, 80 percent of wars, and every great-power rivalry. Nineteenth-century China and Russia looked imposing on paper, with the largest economies in Eurasia, but their liability-ridden empires were repeatedly outmatched by smaller, more efficient rivals: Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union funneled vast resources into strategic sectors, spending nearly twice as much as the United States on R & D as a share of GDP and employing nearly twice as many scientists and engineers, while pumping out steel, machine tools, nuclear technology, and oil, gas, and other raw materials. It built giant dams and railways and leapt out to an early lead in the space race. Yet these feats produced islands of excellence in a sea of stagnation, and the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed not for lack of megaprojects but because its broader economy rotted away.

Visitors at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, September 2025 Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

China today is running into a similar trap. Its investment-driven model relies on ever-larger inputs to generate ever-smaller returns, with each unit of output now requiring two to three times more capital and four times more labor than in the United States. To keep headline growth going, Beijing has flooded the system with credit, creating more than $30 trillion in new bank assets since 2008. By 2024, its banking system had swollen to $59 trillion—equal to three times its GDP and more than half of global GDP.

Much of this debt is sunk in empty apartments, loss-making factories, and bad loans—assets that look like wealth on paper but are really IOUs that may never be paid. Property and construction, once nearly 30 percent of the economy, have imploded, erasing an estimated $18 trillion in household wealth since 2020. The blow to Chinese citizens has been harsher than that which hit Americans in 2008 because Chinese families had invested more than twice as much of their net worth in real estate. With many middle-class households stripped of their life savings, disposable income has stalled at $5,800 per person and consumption at 39 percent of GDP—roughly half the U.S. level and far below what Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan sustained during their industrial booms. Demand has cratered, and prices have now dropped for nine straight quarters, the longest deflationary slump any major economy has suffered in decades.

Another liability is human capital. While Beijing lavished funds on infrastructure, it neglected its people. Only one-third of working-age adults have finished high school—the lowest share among middle-income countries. By contrast, when South Korea and Taiwan were at China’s income level in the late 1980s, roughly 70 percent of their workers had high school degrees, a foundation that enabled them to move from assembly lines into advanced industries and achieve high-income status. In rural China, malnutrition and poverty push many children to drop out by middle school. The result, as the economist Scott Rozelle has shown, is hundreds of millions of young workers unprepared for a modern economy, just as the low-skill construction jobs that once absorbed them disappear.

Demographics and fiscal strain compound the pressure. If China’s elderly formed a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest and fastest growing—nearly 300 million today, projected to exceed 500 million by 2050. By then, just two workers will support each retiree, down from ten in 2000. Yet the safety net is threadbare. Pensions cover only half the workforce and will run dry by 2035. Eldercare is weaker still. China has only 29 nurses per 10,000 people, compared with 115 in Japan and 70 in South Korea. And a withering workforce is shrinking the government’s revenue base: tax receipts have fallen from 18.5 percent of GDP in 2014 to under 14 percent in 2022—less than half the average among countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

What looms is a reprise of some of the worst aspects of the twentieth century.

Beijing hopes to boost its economy by subsidizing strategic industries. But those sectors are too small to offset the collapse of real estate—electric vehicles, batteries, and renewables together made up barely 3.5 percent of GDP in 2023—and many are becoming liabilities themselves. Subsidies have spawned gluts, price wars, and “zombie” industrial zones reminiscent of the ghost cities of the property bust. China’s automakers churn out twice the number of cars the domestic market can absorb, and nearly triple the number of EVs. Solar firms added 1,000 gigawatts of capacity in 2023—five times the rest of the world combined—pushing prices below cost. High-speed rail has piled up about a trillion dollars in debt, with most lines running at a loss. Nearly a quarter of Chinese industrial firms are now unprofitable, the highest share since 2001 and almost double the share a decade ago, while the country’s top five tech giants have shed $1.3 trillion in market value since 2021.

And despite more than a trillion dollars in subsidies over the past decade, China still depends on the United States and U.S. allies for 70 to 100 percent of some 400 critical goods and technologies. Semiconductor chips, for example, have surpassed crude oil as the country’s largest import, yet domestic production covers less than one-fifth of demand. At the cutting edge, China is almost entirely reliant on foreign suppliers. After Washington’s 2022 export controls on AI chips, the U.S. share of global AI computing power jumped nearly 50 percent while China’s was cut in half, leaving the United States with a fivefold lead. That episode underscored what the scholars Stephen Brooks and Benjamin Vagle have called “excludable commercial power”: across R & D–intensive industries, the United States and its allies capture more than 80 percent of global revenues. In normal times, that dominance yields market power; in a crisis, it becomes a weapon—China could lose 14 to 21 percent of GDP in a trade cutoff, compared with just four to seven percent for the United States.

These vulnerabilities are compounded by China’s political system. The Chinese Communist Party has turned autocracy into an economic straitjacket, tightening its grip on the private sector and steering capital toward politically connected firms. Venture-backed startups have plunged from roughly 51,000 in 2018 to barely 1,200 in 2023, according to reporting by the Financial Times. Foreign investment has dropped to a three-decade low, while capital flight has risen, with tens of thousands of millionaires and hundreds of billions of dollars leaving each year. The result is a brittle economy—formidable assets on the surface, but festering liabilities below.

GATHERING STORMS

The age of rising powers is ending, and the fallout is already fueling conflict. One threat is that stagnating states are militarizing to reclaim “lost” territories and maintain great-power status. Russia has already rolled the dice in Ukraine and, if unchecked, could set its sights on wealthier neighbors such as the Baltic States or Poland. China might attempt something similar against Taiwan. For these once rising powers now facing stagnation, conquest can look tempting—a way to seize resources and respect, absorb populations in some cases nearly twice as wealthy per capita as they are, and allow their leaders to pose as empire builders rather than stewards of decline. Fear sharpens the impulse, as Western prosperity threatens to lure away borderlands and incite unrest at home. Both Russian President Vladimir Putin, haunted by the Soviet collapse in the 1990s, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, wary of a repeat of the 1989 nationwide protests that culminated in the Tiananmen Square crackdown, stoke anti-Americanism and revanchism to shore up their rule—and with success. Russians endure staggering losses in Putin’s war in Ukraine for cash payouts and patriotic spectacles, while China channels unemployed youth into nationalist boycotts and celebrations of Xi’s promised rejuvenation.

Meanwhile, Russia and China have quintupled military spending relative to the United States and its allies since 2000, echoing earlier cases when embattled powers—Depression-era Germany and Japan, the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s—poured resources into arms, betting that if they could no longer buy influence with growth, they could bludgeon their way to dominance instead. Precision weapons and drones give small states new tools of defense, but they may also convince Putin and Xi that quick victories are possible. In a dictator’s echo chamber, what looks suicidal to ordinary people can feel like destiny.

Another threat is rampant state failure among debt-ridden countries with fast-growing populations. In the nineteenth century, industrialization turned demographic growth into economic dividends by moving peasants into factories. That path is now closed. Manufacturing is commodified, automated, and dominated by incumbents, leaving latecomers stuck in low-value niches. Sub-Saharan Africa still has only 11.5 percent of its workforce in industry, barely more than it had three decades ago. India’s 2014 “Make in India” campaign promised a manufacturing takeoff, but the sector’s share of GDP has stalled at around 17 percent, and its share of jobs has shrunk. In the Middle East, oil rents have funded urban modernization but not broad-based industrialization.

At a Nippon Steel plant in Kimitsu, Japan, May 2025 Issei Kato / Reuters

Many poor countries have reaped the life-expectancy gains of modernity but without an economic revolution, turning population growth into a liability. The UN has estimated that 3.3 billion people now live in countries where interest payments on debt exceed investment in health or education. Since 2015, GDP per capita has flatlined across much of Africa and the Middle East, savings and investment have collapsed, and youth unemployment tops 60 percent in some countries. These pressures are fueling turmoil: roughly a third of African states are in active conflict, and jihadist violence in the Sahel has exploded since 2015, with extremist groups such as Boko Haram and affiliates of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (or ISIS) operating across more than a dozen countries. As people flee from the turmoil, migration has soared. As of June 2024, the UN Refugee Agency counted more than 120 million people forcibly displaced worldwide.

The spiral of state failure could magnify a third threat: the advance of antiliberalism within democracies themselves. After the Syrian war drove nearly a million refugees to Europe, ethnonationalist parties surged across the continent. A similar shift has unfolded in the United States amid record migration at the southern border during the Biden administration. Public trust in government has collapsed—falling in the United States from nearly 80 percent in the 1960s to about 20 percent today—while automation and inequality have hollowed out middle classes and inflamed identity politics. Authoritarian powers exploit these fissures: Russia bankrolls and amplifies extremist movements, China exports surveillance tools, and both flood their Western adversaries with disinformation. Liberal democracy has historically thrived in eras of growth, opportunity, and cohesion. It is far less clear whether it can withstand an age of stagnation, mass migration, and digital subversion.

As liberal democracy corrodes at home, liberal internationalism is unraveling abroad. In a world without rising powers, the United States is becoming a rogue superpower, with little sense of obligation beyond itself. During the Cold War, U.S. leadership was one part virtue, three parts self-interest: protecting allies, transferring technology, and opening up the U.S. markets were the price of containing a rising rival. Allies publicly accepted U.S. primacy because the Red Army loomed nearby and communism commanded hundreds of millions of adherents. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, the demand for U.S. leadership collapsed with it. Today, with no Red Menace to fight and only an amorphous liberal order to defend, the phrase “leader of the free world” rings hollow even to American ears.

As a result, U.S. strategy is shedding values and historical memory, narrowing its focus to money and homeland defense. Allies are discovering what unvarnished unilateralism feels like, as security guarantees become protection rackets and trade deals are enforced with tariffs. This is the same logic of raw power that helped spur two world wars, and the consequences are already visible. Multilateral institutions are paralyzed, arms control regimes are collapsing, and economic nationalism has surged.

What looms is not a multipolar concert of great powers sharing the world, but a reprise of some of the worst aspects of the twentieth century: struggling states militarizing, fragile ones collapsing, democracies rotting from within, and the supposed guarantor of order retreating into parochial self-interest.

SILVER LININGS

If today’s dangers can be managed, however, the end of rising powers could ultimately produce a brighter future. For centuries, the rise and fall of great powers unleashed the bloodiest wars in history. Without new challengers, the world may finally gain reprieve from the most destructive cycle of all: hegemonic rivalry.

As the political scientist Graham Allison has noted, in the past 250 years there have been ten cases of a rising power confronting a ruling one. Seven ended in carnage. One can debate his case selection, but the basic pattern is clear: rising powers have sparked a catastrophic war roughly once a generation.

A world without rising powers will not end conflict, but it may lift the specter of those system-shattering struggles. Violence will persist—stagnation and state collapse could even make local conflicts more frequent—but such clashes are unlikely to carry the global scope, ideological zeal, generational duration, and apocalyptic potential of hegemonic contests. Shrinking populations and slowing economies could sap the ambition and capacity for continental conquest—or for a rebound, once faltering powers stumble. A less dynamic world may also yield a more pragmatic contest between liberal and authoritarian-kleptocratic systems rather than the totalizing crusades of fascism and communism, which emerged from industrialization’s upheaval and sought to remake humanity. History will not end, but its most catastrophic chapter might.

That restraint may be reinforced by what the political scientist Mark Haas calls a “geriatric peace.” Aging societies face ballooning welfare costs, shrinking pools of military-age recruits, and risk-averse electorates. On the eve of World War I, the median age of the major powers was in the mid-20s. Today, it exceeds 40 in every great power except the United States (which is just under 40), and within a decade, a quarter or more of their citizens will be seniors. A century ago, young societies stormed into world wars; in the twenty-first, gray powers may be too weary and wise to try.

Awaiting public transit in San Diego, California, March 2025 Mike Blake / Reuters

If a world without rising powers proves calmer geopolitically, economics may also be brighter than expected. Even without another industrial revolution, new technologies are improving daily life, and humanity is healthier and more educated than ever. Slower productivity growth and aging populations may temper GDP, but they need not prevent a quieter revolution in living standards, creating a future in which societies grow richer in knowledge and healthier in body even as they grow smaller in population.

Another source of optimism lies in today’s demographic asymmetry. Advanced economies are capital-rich but labor-poor, while much of the developing world—especially Africa—has the reverse profile. In principle, this sets the stage for a new division of labor: aging societies supply savings and technology, and younger ones supply workers, creating a symbiosis that could sustain global growth even as individual nations slow. The flow of remittances, skills partnerships, and cross-border investment are early signs of this new relationship, and digital platforms are easing coordination. Yet none of this is automatic. The politics of trade and migration are turning inward, and absorbing large migrant flows without disrupting societies remains a daunting challenge. Without careful management—rules-based migration channels, secure borders, worker protections, and new models of remote collaboration—what could be a growth pact may instead collapse into backlash. The opportunity is real, but so are the obstacles.

Forecasting is a perilous business. Demography can be measured, but technology and politics often surprise, and today’s certainties may look naive a generation or even a few years from now. What can be said with confidence is that for two and a half centuries, global politics was driven by the rapid rise of great powers, and the forces that made such ascents possible are now receding. That does not guarantee stability, but it does mark a profound shift: the familiar struggle between living and dying powers is winding down, and another story, its outlines still obscure, is beginning to unfold.

Foreign Affairs · More by Michael Beckley · October 21, 2025

20. The New Supply Chain Insecurity – Fortress America Is Not a Safer America

Conclusion:

The United States needs secure supply chains, and for that it needs to encourage cross-border manufacturing with countries it can count on, not blanket tariffs that drive domestic prices up and foreign partners away. Separating the country from global commerce is a path to increased inflation and slowing innovation and growth that will result in U.S. manufacturers struggling to compete for global consumers. Such a path will ultimately leave the United States less wealthy. The security costs of protectionism are just as dire. U.S. defense suppliers will lose many of their current market advantages as foreign contracts unravel and competitors abroad begin to look like safer geopolitical bets. A shrinking American defense industry is not just an economic blow; it also undermines the United States’ ability to field and equip a world-class military. In the Trump administration’s wishful thinking, building a “Fortress America” may seem like a way to protect the country’s wealth and raise its defenses. But in reality, dismissing the United States’ partners degrades its sources of strength.

The New Supply Chain Insecurity

Foreign Affairs · More by Shannon K. O’Neil · October 21, 2025

Fortress America Is Not a Safer America

Shannon K. O’Neil

November/December 2025 Published on October 21, 2025

Matt Murphy

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In a matter of months, the Trump administration has rewritten the rules of U.S. trade policy. It has imposed blanket tariffs on nearly every country, starting at ten percent and rising as high as 50 percent. Levies on a host of products, such as steel, aluminum, cars, and car parts, have raised these trade barriers even further. At an average effective rate of around 18 percent, U.S. import taxes are now the highest they have been in nearly a century.

“China beats you with trade, Russia beats you with war,” U.S. President Donald Trump mused in August, quoting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Protectionism is Trump’s answer to both challenges. He sees the revenue from tariffs as a way to win at the cash register; he sees the boost to the domestic production of military equipment and the minerals, materials, and technology that go into it as a path to dominating on the battlefield.

The administration’s levies will likely have some of their desired effects. They will fundamentally change the United States’ position in the world economy, untangling the country, at least in part, from global supply chains. Consumer goods companies will make more of their products in the United States to capture a slice of its consumer market, which is still the largest in the world. Suppliers of steel, aluminum, minerals, and other strategic materials will expand their U.S.-based operations to take advantage of rising domestic prices.

But the damage that tariffs will inflict will be far greater than the benefits they bring. Over the last 50 years, the United States’ integration into global supply chains has fueled economic growth. Detaching from these supply chains will raise costs and reduce quality, limiting growth and competitiveness. The U.S. defense industry will not be spared the effects of higher prices, lost suppliers, and dwindling foreign markets. Producing weapons and military equipment—and building new factories—in the United States will become more expensive. U.S. allies, eager to strengthen their own defense industries and mistrustful of trade with the United States, could choose to spend less on American weapons. Worryingly, U.S. companies face these threats to their business models just as Washington, contemplating a future of drone- and AI-driven warfare, needs their innovation more than ever.

There is no replacing the advantages of supply chain cooperation with reliable partners. The more Washington tries to go it alone, the easier it will be for friends and foes alike to prevail over the United States—today in trade and tomorrow, perhaps, in war.

CEDING THE ADVANTAGE

In an August New York Times op-ed, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer described the Trump administration’s aim in imposing tariffs and seeking foreign investment deals as no less than to lay “the foundation for a new global trading order.” In the administration’s theory of the case, tariffs will ignite domestic reindustrialization, create jobs, turn trade deficits into surpluses, and reduce U.S. dependence on adversaries for strategic and mainstream goods alike. This, the administration believes, will reverse the trends of manufacturing job losses, rising deficits, and growing dependence that it ascribes to decades of “unfair” liberal trade policies.

Early numbers show the tariffs are having effects, but not promising ones. According to the nonprofit Institute for Supply Management’s Purchasing Managers’ Index, U.S. manufacturing has been contracting for the past six months. Jobs in manufacturing have fallen by 78,000 this year.

Meanwhile, inflation is ticking up. Both July and August saw spikes, as imported goods, now subject to tariffs, hit shelves with higher price tags. American-made goods have also become more expensive to produce, as manufacturers pay more for foreign inputs; roughly 45 percent of imports are materials used in U.S. production. In response to high prices and general economic uncertainty, spending by low-income consumers has flatlined over the past few months. The U.S. goods trade deficit did shrink from the first to the second quarter of this year, largely because of a downturn in imports, particularly from China. Exports, meanwhile, mostly leveled off, which is likely one of several reasons employment numbers softened.

The rest of the world has responded by trading even more. Foreign companies are beginning to reroute their goods and supply chains to bypass the United States. Trade negotiators are traveling not just to Washington but to other capitals, too, in pursuit of new deals. The EU is seeking agreements with India and Indonesia, pushing forward another with the South American trade bloc Mercosur, holding trade talks with China, and considering joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement signed in 2018 that now includes a dozen countries together representing nearly 15 percent of global GDP. Brazil, China, India, and the United Kingdom are all negotiating new trade accords with a variety of partners.

Where this activity will leave the U.S. economy will not be clear for some time. Investment may pick up as tariff rates settle, removing uncertainty, and as Japan, South Korea, and the EU follow through on the pledges included in the trade deals they signed with the Trump administration. Many companies could find the increased prices in a highly protected U.S. market attractive, encouraging them to expand their operations in the United States.

The world will remain wary of trade with the United States.

Yet tariffs also create significant obstacles to U.S. economic growth. Levies on steel, aluminum, lumber, copper tubing, and other construction materials and machinery increase the startup costs for companies that might consider reshoring manufacturing. These costs make it more expensive for firms to build new factories and assembly lines in the United States and for local governments to expand electric grids to supply them. Such costs could keep some foreign investors away and limit the impact of the money that does arrive. Because the prices of American-made goods will rise, they will become less competitive beyond U.S. shores, where billions of consumers reside.

U.S.-based suppliers will also be at a disadvantage. Of the $2 trillion or so in goods that American companies export every year, nearly two-thirds are inputs that feed into global supply chains and products made in other countries. As these goods become more expensive, foreign manufacturers will seek alternatives.

Even if few countries retaliate tit for tat to U.S. tariffs and many agree to deals that lower trade barriers for American exporters, the world will remain wary of trade with the United States. Other countries will not wholly abandon the voracious American consumer, whose roughly $20 trillion in annual spending drives some 70 percent of the U.S. economy. But they could choose to treat the U.S. market differently from the way they treat the rest of the world. For years, companies have treated the Chinese market differently, manufacturing goods for Chinese consumers in China while maintaining separate, diversified operations for other markets. They could now follow the same playbook in the United States, supplying U.S. consumers from within but locating production for clients in the rest of the world elsewhere, limiting the economic benefits the United States reaps from protection.

The Trump administration’s tariffs exclude the United States from the overall economic boost global supply chains provide. Over the last 50 years, cross-border production has vastly expanded, powering prosperity in emerging and advanced economies even as it widened inequalities in the United States and elsewhere. Global trade in goods grew from $2 trillion in 1980 to $24 trillion today, roughly 55 percent of which represents inputs for making other things. The trade historian Douglas Irwin surveyed nearly a dozen studies and found that the economies that opened up during this period grew much faster than those that did not, in good part because they linked into supply chains.

International supply chains supercharge production by providing scale and stimulate innovation by enabling specialization. Even the United States, with its vast, dynamic economy, cannot reproduce those advantages. Unless American companies can buy parts from foreign firms at a reasonable cost and locate some of their operations in other countries, they will struggle to make products as well, as cheaply, and as quickly as competitors abroad that are still deeply connected to global supply chains.

GLOBALIZED DEFENSE

The U.S. defense industry will not be immune to these effects. Throughout the postwar period, American companies have been the largest exporters of defense equipment, accounting for more than a third of the global market. They are the best-known providers of cutting-edge military technologies such as guided missiles, stealth aircraft, reconnaissance systems, and nuclear-powered vessels. For decades, Europe has bought roughly 40 percent of its military kit from the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia have turned to the United States for an even greater percentage of their arms purchases. Japan and South Korea rely on American producers for their missile systems, fighter jets, and other military hardware. When a government buys new equipment from a U.S. company, it is also committing to pay that company for maintenance, replacement parts, and system upgrades for the next several years. American defense companies have secured these lucrative deals not just because of the quality and sophistication of their products but also because the U.S. government approves the sales as part of its security alliances and agreements.

The U.S. defense industrial base has never had to go it alone. Defense companies and the American military itself have always had global sources, especially in times of war. During World War II, the United States imported significant portions of the nickel, copper, tungsten, manganese, and other minerals and materials that drove its victorious war machine. During the Korean War, Japan-based manufacturers supplied U.S. troops across the Sea of Japan with refurbished tanks, bomber jets, and artillery. In conflict after conflict, U.S. military strength has come from the country’s ability to access and marshal supplies from around the world.

The expansion of international supply chains has increased the speed of innovation and lowered the costs of production in the defense industry. Decades of work go into collecting these benefits—building a supply chain is not as simple as signing a contract. Legal agreements ensure compatibility, reliability, and quality. But supply chains for sophisticated defense products typically resemble long-term partnerships, with American companies and foreign firms engaged in joint ventures and shared research and development. Suppliers and manufacturers form strong working relationships as they navigate regulations, security protocols, and geopolitics together.

A rare-earth mine in Mountain Pass, California, January 2020 Steve Marcus / Reuters

The U.S. government has played a key role in building such supply chains. The Pentagon oversees approval processes for suppliers of crucial components, as it does, for example, in the U.S. defense firm Northrop Grumman’s partnership with Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to design hypersonic missile defense systems. Diplomatic agreements and treaties establish joint defense projects, such as the 2021 AUKUS agreement among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which includes plans to design and manufacture a new class of nuclear-powered attack submarines. Technical agreements that set joint standards and facilitate interoperability and technology sharing enable companies from multiple countries to make parts, components, and systems for one another. After years of the U.S. government constructing such partnerships, American defense companies rely on foreign providers for basic materials and, often, sophisticated components of military equipment.

Cross-border sourcing makes the defense industry more resilient. When U.S. companies work with multiple international suppliers, they limit their exposure to problems that may arise in any given geographic location. Concentrated domestic production, meanwhile, creates vulnerability, as the United States has experienced firsthand. When Hurricane Maria shut down factoriesin Puerto Rico in 2017, for instance, the U.S. mainland faced an acute shortage of medical supplies. Manufacturing 155-millimeter artillery shells in just one plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania, led to dangerous gaps in U.S. defenses in 2022, when the U.S. Army raced to supply Ukraine after Russia’s invasion while also replenishing U.S. arsenals at home. (It has since placed orders with multiple sites in the United States and Canada.)

The proliferation of dual-use technologies has meant that companies producing crucial defense components are operating on a scale that small-batch manufacturers could never achieve. Today, the same semiconductors power smartphones and missiles, the batteries in laptops and electric cars also drive drones, artificial intelligence used for school assignments also directs uncrewed weapons, and satellites navigate both civilian traffic and troop movements. The companies that produce these goods are massive, their growth enabled by the purchases of everyday customers alongside defense clients. And they make enormous profits from commercial applications—profits that fund the research and development that accelerates defense innovation, which in turn benefits the U.S. Department of Defense.

GOING IT ALONE

Crafting international supply chains does create economic dependencies on foreign countries, and sometimes those dependencies can be dangerous. Because of this, the United States has a strong case to cut its foes out of supply chains critical to national security. A rival power can weaponize Washington’s reliance on the goods its companies provide. China, which controls a host of critical defense inputs, has done just that. In the trade war with the United States, it has limited exports of gallium, tungsten, germanium, antimony, graphite, and other minerals used to produce drones, bullets, F-35 fighter jets, Tomahawk missiles, and night-vision goggles, as well as exports of rare-earth magnets critical to electric vehicles and advanced weapons systems. Beijing has also banned the sale of components to California-based drone maker Skydio, ostensibly because the company signed a contract with the government of Taiwan but also to undermine an emerging competitor to Chinese firms.

But cutting friends out of supply chains, as well, as Trump’s blanket tariffs do, weakens Washington’s ability to project power rather than strengthening it. Tariffs, for one, will make defense production more expensive. Many final products are already made in the United States to meet stringent legal requirements regarding the sourcing of certain specialty components. But these contractors will now have to pay higher local prices for domestically made steel, aluminum, copper, and semiconductors because tariff protections allow U.S. producers to charge more.

Tariffs will also make it more difficult to expand domestic industries. Take shipbuilding. Less than one percent of all vessels in the world are manufactured in the United States since it is already more expensive to build there than in China, Japan, or South Korea. Tariffs make investment in this industry even less attractive because U.S. shipyards will have to pay 50 percent more than their global competitors for the tons of steel and aluminum that go into constructing each vessel.

For U.S. defense companies to be economically viable, they must be assured of customers. Making weapons and military hardware is highly capital-intensive. The firms producing sophisticated equipment and systems need huge research and development budgets, specialized manufacturing facilities, and advanced machinery. Long production timelines mean that filling an order takes years, and these companies produce only a small number of units. Traditionally, U.S. defense contractors have been able to defray these enormous upfront costs because they have a loyal customer base built into the U.S. alliance structure. In 2024, foreign allies purchased over $300 billion in arms and defense equipment from U.S. makers through U.S. government–approved contracts, compared with roughly $445 billion these companies received from Pentagon contracts. International customers account for roughly ten to 40 percent of total sales for the top U.S. defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX.

The U.S. defense industrial base has never had to go it alone.

But this previously reliable source of demand for American defense products could now be in jeopardy. Trump has long insisted that U.S. allies should depend less on the United States, and his tariff announcements have only reinforced that message. The U.S. president has railed against fellow NATO members for free-riding on American defense spending and demanded that Japan and South Korea pay more to host U.S. troops and bases in their countries.

Australia, Japan, South Korea, and NATO allies have announced meaningful increases to their defense budgets, and many of them have committed to spending some of this money on purchases from U.S. firms. But it is not assured that they will all follow through on the latter pledge. Many have ambitions to expand their own defense industrial bases—and have sold increased defense outlays to their publics on the basis that the money will boost domestic industry. Seeing their exports slapped with U.S. tariffs, moreover, feeds their growing hesitancy about relying too much on a volatile, transactional United States. French President Emmanuel Macron, long an advocate of “buy European” practices, has called on EU members to trade U.S.-made Patriots and F-35s for French-Italian SAMP/T missiles and French Rafale fighter jets. Some are now doing so. Denmark recently chose Europe’s models over American ones for its $9 billion air defense system upgrade. Spain has nixed plans to buy American F-35s with its $7 billion earmarked budget and is looking into European alternatives. Purchases using the EU’s new $176 billion defense fund, furthermore, are restricted to European companies and companies from countries that have formal security deals with the EU—a list that does not include the United States.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, meanwhile, has vowed to seize a “once in a generation” dividend by channeling defense investment into domestic jobs and industrial growth. Japan is intent on boosting domestic producers of hypersonic missiles, drones, and fighter planes with its own spending surge and is negotiating an agreement to share classified information with the EU and a formal defense dialogue to connect Japanese industry with European defense supply chains. And South Korean President Lee Jae-myung has expressed his hope that the defense industry “becomes one of Korea’s future growth engines.”

Frustration with American tariff policies among foreign publics may also make it harder for allies to continue spending big on U.S. defense products. A Pew Research Center poll conducted between January and April saw favorable views of the United States plummet by eight to 32 percentage points across 15 of the 24 countries surveyed. The sense of betrayal after Trump announced tariffs has already led to boycotts of U.S. goods in Canada, India, and Europe. With their constituents refusing to buy Kentucky bourbon or Levi’s jeans, governments may redouble their search for alternatives to Patriot and Tomahawk missiles, F-35 fighter jets, and Black Hawk helicopters.

There is already evidence that U.S. allies and partners are distancing themselves from the United States. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has made it a defense priority to “achieve independence” from the United States, and talk in Europe has increasingly focused on the continent’s “strategic autonomy.” India, facing particularly high U.S. tariffs, paused its purchase of American weapons rather than meet Trump’s demand to give up its imports of Russian oil. Brazil, another country whose exports face 50 percent tariffs, declined to join military exercises with the United States in September but has stepped up military representation in its Beijing embassy this year to match that in Washington. Beijing, indeed, has benefited from the world’s discontent with Trump’s hard-nosed tactics. A year ago, China was facing a global backlash for its own coercive trade practices and aggressive diplomacy. Yet in the past few months, officials from Brazil, India, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union, feeling spurned or neglected by Washington, have all taken steps, with varying success, to mend their frayed ties with China.

THAT’S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR

This is a particularly dangerous time for the U.S. defense industry to lose favored access to global suppliers and, potentially, buyers. As the fights taking place on the battlefields of Ukraine and in the shipping lanes of the Red Sea have demonstrated, the future of war is one not of aircraft carriers, tanks, and artillery but of drones, robots, and AI. The United States does not yet produce this equipment domestically in sufficient amounts or have the flexible procurement processes to acquire it quickly. Instead, the country depends on China, its most significant adversary, for the basic material inputs and the physical components of drones, robots, and next-generation radar systems. On the technological side, Washington is locked in a competition for dominance—a competition that it could lose to Beijing.

With tariffs raising the costs of production and making investment in U.S. industries less attractive, it will be more difficult for the United States to gain the same edge in the new warfare that it had in the old. American defense companies cannot simply bring their entire supply chains home; even those with government contracts need the scale and profits that international trade enables to make their businesses viable. They will also need access to cutting-edge innovation, much of which comes from abroad. China has already become a peer competitor to the United States in hypersonic weapons, integrated air defense systems, cybertools, and space capabilities. The United States alone cannot match the pace and scale that China has achieved. That will be possible only if U.S. efforts incorporate the innovation and production know-how of allies including Japan, South Korea, and countries in Europe.

There is a place for ramping up domestic production to ensure that the United States has the equipment it needs to defend itself and good reason to purge U.S. adversaries from critical defense supply chains. Yet blanket tariffs make those tasks harder, not easier. If Washington were to pivot to targeted tariffs, focusing only on strategic industries and inputs, it would encourage the manufacturing that matters most for national security without incurring unnecessary costs. And by scaling back or eliminating tariffs on countries it trusts, giving “friend shoring” a real chance as part of a wider strategy to revitalize key industries, Washington could reap gains from geographic diversification and access to new markets and innovations.

Inside a steel factory in Blytheville, Arkansas, March 2025 Karen Pulfer Focht / Reuters

Part of that strategy must involve U.S. subsidies. This will be especially important in industries in which markets have failed, such as the battery industry; Chinese subsidies have built up battery manufacturing capacity to the point that it far outstrips total global demand. Subsidies will also be critical in industries that are vulnerable to manipulation, such as mineral refining and processing. China is so dominant in these fields that it can create global shortages or flood markets to drive foreign companies into bankruptcy. The U.S. government has already found success using subsidies to draw in private investment. Billions of dollars in loans and grants to semiconductor makers in recent years have expanded U.S. production capacity, which will reduce the country’s reliance on manufacturing concentrated in Taiwan. In a deal signed in July with the American rare-earths firm MP Materials, the U.S. government set a price floor for U.S.-mined rare earths, and the company committed to building a factory to produce magnets from them, which should reduce U.S. dependence on China when the plant comes online in 2028.

Future outlays should focus on jump-starting vital production and creating commercially viable businesses over the long term. And potential subsidy recipients should not be limited to U.S. companies or U.S.-based operations. Instead, Washington should use subsidies to diversify the suppliers in critical industries and the regions they come from and to boost access to technologies and innovations from friendly countries. Strengthening international supply chains for critical minerals should start with an effort to revive and put real money behind the Minerals Security Partnership, set up in 2022, which brings together more than a dozen U.S. allies and partners to facilitate cross-border minerals projects. Congress should also pass the Critical Minerals Security Act, which would direct the U.S. government to work with allies on the mining, refining, processing, and recycling of vital defense inputs. Likewise, the United States should protect existing agreements with allies, such as AUKUS, to jointly produce weaponry and defense equipment and pursue new deals along similar lines.

Opening funding to others does not have to come at the expense of American companies and contractors. Diplomacy is key. Negotiating a formal security agreement with the EU would make U.S. contractors eligible to bid for public contracts offered as part of Europe’s new defense fund. Agreements with other allies could deliver similar opportunities to U.S. defense contractors, and technical accords that ensure interoperability could open the door to U.S. providers securing maintenance contracts with militaries abroad and supplying future platform additions. Building the U.S. defense industrial base and allied defense industrial bases together, so that they complement rather than compete with each other, will not only help the United States and its allies better coordinate their militaries—it will also yield commercial benefits.

The United States needs secure supply chains, and for that it needs to encourage cross-border manufacturing with countries it can count on, not blanket tariffs that drive domestic prices up and foreign partners away. Separating the country from global commerce is a path to increased inflation and slowing innovation and growth that will result in U.S. manufacturers struggling to compete for global consumers. Such a path will ultimately leave the United States less wealthy. The security costs of protectionism are just as dire. U.S. defense suppliers will lose many of their current market advantages as foreign contracts unravel and competitors abroad begin to look like safer geopolitical bets. A shrinking American defense industry is not just an economic blow; it also undermines the United States’ ability to field and equip a world-class military. In the Trump administration’s wishful thinking, building a “Fortress America” may seem like a way to protect the country’s wealth and raise its defenses. But in reality, dismissing the United States’ partners degrades its sources of strength.

SHANNON K. O’NEIL is Senior Vice President, Director of Studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg Chair at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author of The Globalization Myth: Why Regions Matter.

Foreign Affairs · More by Shannon K. O’Neil · October 21, 2025

21. China Against China – Xi Jinping Confronts the Downsides of Success

Excerpts:

Chinese officials and analysts also have an increasingly rich trove of evidence to draw on for their assessment of U.S. dysfunction and decline. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has badly mishandled just about every national crisis it has faced. Each of these has diminished public confidence in the United States, both at home and abroad. In response to the 9/11 attacks, the United States launched, on false pretenses, a destructive and costly war in Iraq that sapped the country of the appetite or ability to deal with more formidable future challengers such as China. In its response to the 2008 financial crisis, Washington rescued the financial sector but not its victims, worsening inequality and generating public disillusionment. And in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite having some of the most esteemed public health institutions in the world, the U.S. government bungled its response, further feeding suspicion and undermining public trust. Despite its repeated missteps, the United States remains a global superpower. But it is relying on the luxury of its inherited privilege: like a spoiled child, the United States can afford to make epic mistakes without suffering the devastating consequences that other countries would face if they acted similarly.

While strategists in Washington debate whether China has peaked, their counterparts in China are having an analogous debate about the United States—and reaching strikingly similar conclusions. China’s state media has diagnosed the United States with “hegemonic anxiety,” suggesting that Washington cannot cope with the possibility that it must face a multipolar world. And whereas U.S. thinkers such as Hal Brands have argued in their analyses of China that a power that has peaked is likely to lash out in violent ways, Chinese observers independently conclude that it is Washington that is anxious about preserving its position—and is increasingly willing to employ any means necessary to sustain its preeminence.

In the early years of the Cold War, the strategist George Kennan worried that the United States might lose confidence in its own system if the democracies of Europe succumbed to the Soviet Union. Today, the challenge is just the opposite: declining American confidence in its own system could be a cause rather than the result of the United States losing the competition with China. In contrast, Xi’s counterreformation—including the continuous purges and fallout from the property sector’s collapse—has not produced a crisis of confidence in China. Instead, if anything, Xi has gained confidence because he can point to tangible results in the form of technological breakthroughs. And Xi can afford to be patient because his is a long-term project, and he does not face the erratic fluctuations of an unstable political system swinging from one extreme to the other.

Indeed, a growing number of officials in Washington employ Cold War–style rhetoric when discussing China yet demonstrate little appetite to take on the difficult and expensive tasks, such as refurbishing the defense industrial base and shoring up key supply chains, that would help the United States outcompete China. If this dynamic continues, the United States will be left pursuing what might be called a “Reverse Roosevelt” strategy: speaking loudly about American power while wielding an ever-smaller stick. While Xi has been disciplined and methodical in his efforts to bolster China’s strategic position, the United States has been distracted and incoherent. Misreading Xi Jinping is, ultimately, part of the failure to address the problems facing the United States itself.

China Against China

Foreign Affairs · More by Jonathan A. Czin · October 21, 2025

Xi Jinping Confronts the Downsides of Success

Jonathan A. Czin

November/December 2025 Published on October 21, 2025

Joe Gough

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Thirteen years after Xi Jinping ascended to the top of China’s leadership hierarchy, observers in Washington remain deeply confused about how to assess his rule. To some, Xi is the second coming of Mao, having accumulated near-total power and bent the state to his will; to others, Xi’s power is so tenuous that he is perpetually at risk of disgruntled elites ousting him in a coup. Xi’s China is either a formidable competitor with the intent, resources, and technological prowess to surpass the United States or an economic basket case on the verge of implosion. Depending on whom one asks, China’s growth model is either dynamic or moribund, relentlessly innovative or hopelessly stuck in the past.

Attempts to analyze Xi’s project have become even more convoluted in the wake of China’s slow recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. When Xi suddenly ended China’s draconian pandemic controls and reopened the country in late 2022, Wall Street did not debate whether China’s economy would come roaring back, but rather what letter of the alphabet—a V or a W—the graph charting the upward path of the recovery would resemble. When the economy sputtered, some in Washington concluded the opposite extreme: that China had peaked, its governance structure had failed, and that it would start to decline relative to the United States.

This analytic confusion has shaped U.S. policy toward China. At the start of the second Trump administration, officials claimed that China was the greatest threat to the United States yet seemed to believe that China’s economic strains were so severe that it would immediately cave in a trade war—a viewpoint reminiscent of Mao’s famous declaration that the United States was a “paper tiger” that appeared threatening but was in fact weak and brittle. The attempt to pressure China with tariffs failed. Beijing responded to Washington’s trade escalation in April 2025 by imposing retaliatory levies and cutting off the U.S. supply of rare-earth magnets. The Chinese economy’s ability to weather the trade shocks endowed Beijing with newfound confidence.

Since the weight of a closed, illiberal system dragged down the Soviet Union, the United States has attributed much of its own resilience to its political system’s ability to recognize problems, propose solutions, and correct course. The painful irony for the United States is that under Xi, China’s opaque polity, in which officials have every incentive to obfuscate rather than admit mistakes, has proved adept at frankly acknowledging many of its weaknesses and taking steps to remedy them—arguably even more adept than the supposedly supple and adaptive American system. China’s rise under Xi is challenging not just American power, but a foundational tenet of America’s open society—that openness to debate and inquiry is the foundation of a self-correcting system.

For Xi, China’s most glaring weaknesses are the side effects of four decades of economic reform. Rapid growth brought wealth and power but also indecision, corruption, and dependence on other countries. However one assesses his leadership, Xi has identified many of China’s vulnerabilities and marshaled the resources to try to make the country more resilient. Beijing’s success in rebuffing Washington’s trade war suggests that Xi’s strategy is working.

REFORM REVERSED

When Xi took the reins of the Chinese Communist Party, in 2012, many observers inside and outside China were frustrated with the stalled reforms of his predecessor, Hu Jintao. They embraced Xi as a potential savior who could rescue the CCP’s ailing project of “reform and opening up” that Deng Xiaoping began in the late 1970s. These observers, mostly with more liberal instincts, hoped Xi would promulgate market-oriented policies, further reduce state intervention in the economy, and potentially even allow more political contestation. Xi had the makings of a reformer: he had served in leadership positions in three of China’s most prosperous coastal provinces, which were among the primary beneficiaries of the shift toward markets. Many thought that Xi, the scion of a revered revolutionary and proponent of economic reform, would have the clout and the will to effect change, which his predecessor had lacked.

In reality, however, the moment of Xi’s ascension was the beginning of the end of the reform era. What Xi saw when he returned to Beijing in 2007 as Hu’s heir apparent was not endless prosperity and a stable leadership structure but deeply rooted dysfunction. Hu rose to power by deferring to party elders and promoting collective leadership, which prevented him and others from acting decisively. Even if Hu had wanted to assert himself, his predecessor Jiang Zemin had boxed him in by surrounding him with cronies loyal to Jiang. Without full control of many of the party’s key nodes of power, Hu’s attempts to reorient policy—including efforts to address the glaring inequalities he saw emerging from China’s modernization—largely failed to gain traction. Meanwhile, corruption became endemic, pervading even the police and the military, which were supposed to be the bulwark of the party’s grip on power.

Xi has focused his considerable political power on enhancing China’s resilience.

From Xi’s perspective, the rickety collective leadership model that Deng bequeathed was the source of many of the party’s maladies. With power diffused among top leaders and their allies in the bureaucracy, party discipline was slack. Xi seems to have further judged that China’s prosperity had made the party’s cadres soft. Opening to the outside world had propelled China’s economy, but it had also created vulnerabilities in the form of liberal values, which threatened core communist beliefs. China was also increasingly dependent on other economies, especially that of the United States, whose tightening trade restrictions on many Chinese goods since 2018 made clear to Xi the very real risks of economic interdependence.

In response, Xi has not only tried to address the symptoms of the problems that germinated in the era of reform and opening. He has also tried to cure what he sees as the underlying ailment by reversing liberalization altogether. Xi’s tenure can be described as what the scholar Carl Minzner calls a counterreformation—stripping the party down to its Leninist core of political and social control and rewiring it for neither revolution nor reform, but for a disciplined march toward technological-industrial and military might to enhance China’s geopolitical position.

For most outside observers, this counterreformation is dangerous because it shunts aside the tried-and-true playbook that brought China from poverty to power and introduces new political risks from strongman rule. But Xi’s actions are rooted in his recognition of the most pressing weaknesses that party leaders see as threatening China—most notably, internal corruption and the uncomfortable role of China’s chief rival, the United States, in supporting China’s prosperity. Rather than push for more economic opening, Xi has instead focused his considerable political power and resources on enhancing China’s resilience to threats that have emerged in part from past reforms. It is these deeply ingrained problems, not excessive state intervention or authoritarian politics, that Xi sees as stymieing China’s progress in catching up to the United States.

BURST BUBBLES

Many elements of China’s current dysfunction are the pathologies of its own prosperity. After Mao’s death, CCP leaders lacked a road map for how to lead China toward openness without abandoning their commitment to communism. They had made bitter sacrifices in China’s revolution and were still suspicious of capitalism and its depredations. Yet at the same time, they did not want to lead China back to the chaos of the Mao era. Many of these party leaders guiding China in the 1980s, including Xi Zhongxun, Xi Jinping’s father, had themselves been purged in the power struggles that unfolded under Mao.

After more than a decade of toggling between opening and retrenchment, economic reform triumphed. In the aftermath of the 1989 military suppression of protesters in Tiananmen Square, Deng—who had the fortune to outlive other party elders bent on constraining liberalization—set China on a course toward a more open economy. Deng’s so-called Southern Tour, in which he delivered a series of speeches endorsing a greater role for markets, resuscitated economic reform initiatives that had been sidelined after the Tiananmen crackdown. To secure his legacy, Deng handpicked not just his immediate successor, Jiang Zemin, who took control of the party in 1989, but also his heir’s heir, Hu Jintao. In a new political environment in which none of the new leaders could claim to be revolutionary founding fathers, Deng’s blessing hallowed Jiang and Hu and helped ensure that each survived the vicissitudes of succession politics. Both Jiang and Hu stepped aside peacefully, setting a fragile precedent for transferring power.

This leadership stability and the quickening pace of economic reforms produced astounding results. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, China regularly registered double-digit GDP growth, averaging over ten percent per year from 1992 (when Deng launched his Southern Tour) to 2012, the year Xi ascended to power. China’s rapid modernization was palpable everywhere: new high-rises dotted the skylines of cities like Shanghai, and roads penetrated deep into the countryside to connect previously isolated villages to the rest of the country. Deng also promulgated a successful foreign policy that eschewed geopolitical confrontation to give China time to develop its economy, issuing instructions that China should “hide its capabilities and bide its time”—an approach better known as “hide and bide.”

Unfinished buildings in Shijiazhuang, China, February 2024 Tingshu Wang / Reuters

Reform brought economic growth and geopolitical breathing room but also corruption, iniquity, and inequality. No single sector more vividly illustrates China’s interwoven political and economic dysfunction than real estate, in which prices soared to unprecedented heights but have cratered since 2021. In the late 1990s, Chinese leaders began allowing urban residents to secure long-term leases on property that they could sell on the private market as part of liberalizing reforms designed to spur economic growth. This policy change unleashed a torrent of pent-up demand for property and launched a nationwide real estate boom, one of the largest in history. Local governments, which legally own all urban land, sold their land to developers to fill their coffers. When Hu abolished China’s two-thousand-year-old agricultural tax in 2005—a policy that lightened the burden on China’s poor rural farmers but removed a major source of local government revenue—officials relied even more on land sales to balance their budgets, in many cases violently evicting farmers to reap the profits.

In the ensuing years, an enormous housing bubble formed—and with so much of the country’s wealth tied up in it, other leaders hesitated to stop its growth. But in 2020, after halting efforts over much of his first two terms to deflate the market gradually, Xi popped the real estate bubble by imposing restrictions on property developers’ borrowing that undercut the core of their business model. Property sales have fallen from 18 percent of GDP in mid-2021 to seven percent in 2025, and new housing construction has dropped 70 percent. The crash has been a leading cause of China’s sluggish economic growth, wiping out much of the wealth of many Chinese families and dampening consumer sentiment at a time when the economy desperately needs more consumption. Yet Xi, wary of the costs that a bloated housing sector could bring, has remained reluctant to intervene to prop up the market.

The arc of China’s real estate sector illustrates the dynamics at the heart of China’s reform efforts. Even when China’s leaders successfully pass a much-needed reform, such as commercializing the real estate sector or abolishing the oppressive centuries-old agricultural tax, they create nearly as many problems as they solve. The system’s endemic corruption only makes the challenges more difficult because local officials resist reforms or find new opportunities for self-dealing. Since Xi came to power, he has prioritized cleaning up the messes that he inherited from his more liberal predecessors, no matter the cost or potential backlash. These unprecedented moves have generated much grumbling and dismay but no real political fallout for Xi, suggesting the strength of his position.

IN SEARCH OF RESILIENCE

Political analysts as far back as Aristotle have noticed that oligarchies tend to oscillate between the pull of centrifugal forces, in which power is shared and spread widely, and centripetal forces, in which rule is centralized. Indeed, to Xi and many party leaders, the diffusion of power in China’s political system had enervated Hu’s leadership and threatened the party’s ability to effectively govern. Concentrating power in Xi’s hands was the obvious corrective. Xi has used his centralized power to move away from policies that would further liberalize China’s economy and toward efforts to enhance China’s economic and political resilience.

The military and security services have been crucial to Xi’s centralization of power and his counterreformation. Xi has used his aggressive anticorruption campaign, which he launched in 2012, to throttle the military and the security apparatus into submission. Xi has uprooted powerful officials and their networks and, to eliminate any doubt about his total control, has often purged the successors he chose to replace them. This campaign has reduced some of the pervasive corruption in party institutions; even more important, it has kept leaders uncertain and obedient, increasing Xi’s hold over them.

Despite purging the leaders of the military and the domestic security services, Xi, like his predecessors, has continued to fund those institutions handsomely. China supports the police and security forces at nearly the same level as the military. Xi has encouraged them to harness emerging technologies to systematically build out their capacity for surveillance and repression. In his first years in power, Xi circulated “Document 9,” an internal memorandum warning of the dangers of Western values. The leaked document reversed the party’s growing tolerance for outside ideas and ushered in an era of repression of civil society. Xi was clear that he sought to protect China from what he sees as foreign subversion—and thereby remedy one of the problems created by the prior decades of reform.

Xi’s centralized system of control has so far been able to alter course when needed.

Reform and opening also brought dependence on foreign economies, and Xi has made it a priority to insulate China from global economic volatility. In 2020, Xi proposed the idea of a “dual circulation” strategy: China would structure more of its economy around domestic markets—the “internal circulation” of goods, services, and technology—while promoting the “external circulation” of international trade and investment. By taking advantage of China’s colossal domestic market, Xi’s strategy seeks to minimize reliance on the outside world while enhancing international dependence on China’s economy. The brief trade war in April and May 2025, at the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, suggests that China has successfully hardened itself against U.S. tariffs. Xi has been able to refrain from offering costly stimulus packages, instead providing the minimum support needed to stave off the worst effects on the economy and the export-oriented industries that have borne the brunt of the tariffs. Moreover, Beijing has figured out how to weaponize Washington’s dependence on China for important materials, such as rare-earth magnets, which many American manufacturers require for their products.

Xi has also sought to increase resilience by single-mindedly focusing economic policy on building China’s high-tech manufacturing prowess. Xi has pumped up China’s technology and industrial sectors by pouring resources into them while slighting the macroeconomy. The process has not been efficient, but it has been effective. According to a Bloomberg analysis of 13 key technologies, China leads or is globally competitive in 12 of them. If anything, China has been too successful in areas such as green energy, in which the proliferation of Chinese companies harnessing these emerging technologies has led to vicious price wars that have contributed to deflationary pressure on the economy.

Xi has also dispensed with Deng’s low-key foreign policy of “hide and bide” in favor of an approach that could well be called “show and go.” This change, too, stems from the perceived failures of Western-led economic models in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. With China able to weather the crisis more effectively than Western powers, many CCP leaders believed that China should take on a more prominent global role. Whereas Hu sidestepped calls for a major shift in foreign policy, making only piecemeal concessions such as adding that China should “actively accomplish something” to Deng’s “hide and bide” formulation, Xi harnessed China’s growing self-confidence when he took power. He established his nationalistic bona fides in his first term in office by aggressively asserting China’s territorial claims along its periphery—most conspicuously by reclaiming more than 3,000 acres of land in the South China Sea. This gave him political cover when he purged leaders from the military high command and insulated him from internal criticism when the demands of diplomacy required a more conciliatory approach. But it is also likely that Xi genuinely believed that the time had come for China to embrace its status as a great power. This reflects a natural generational change and a reformulation of what really ails China: Xi is the first Chinese leader whose political career began in the reform era. His career trajectory has coincided with the untrammeled economic growth—and growing pains—of the post-Mao years.

CONFIDENCE IN CONFIDANTS

In the course of remedying the problems he inherited, Xi has created new problems for himself and the party. Most notably, he has undone one of the signature achievements of the post-Mao era: the institutionalization of a process to peacefully transfer power to a successor. Xi abolished term limits on the presidency and transformed the vice presidency from a de facto apprenticeship for the top position into a sinecure for retiring officials. He has also refused to allow any other civilian to serve on the party’s supreme military body. Without the opportunity to cultivate supporters in the military by serving in this body, Xi’s eventual successor will struggle to maintain power, and his tenure is likely to prove short-lived.

Autocratic regimes are especially vulnerable to succession crises. The Soviet Union never solved the succession puzzle: previous Soviet leaders either died in office or were purged, or, in the case of Mikhail Gorbachev, steered the system to its demise. The central challenge for Xi is how to empower a successor enough so that he can survive in office after Xi’s departure without endowing the heir apparent with enough clout to threaten Xi while he remains in charge. Even if Xi designates a potential successor at the next party congress, in 2027, getting the balance right will continue to be a challenge. Nor is it guaranteed that his choice will survive as the leader in waiting. Before Hu, many of the presumptive heirs apparent were purged, arrested, ousted, or wound up dead before they could make it to the top of the CCP.

The succession challenge will be difficult, but it is unlikely to cause the collapse of the CCP, which has survived much more profound crises such as the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. The real question is whether Xi’s counterreformation has undercut the party’s ability to learn from its errors. The CCP has a sordid history of extravagant, cataclysmic mistakes, such as the Great Leap Forward industrialization campaign, which resulted in widespread famine from 1959 to 1962. But in the post-Mao era, the party has demonstrated itself to be an incredibly effective learning institution. Although it still makes serious mistakes, such as failing to prepare health-care infrastructure to deal with the surge in infections following the widespread rollback of COVID-19 restrictions, it seldom makes the same mistake twice. Party leaders were caught flat-footed when Trump launched his first-term trade war, forcing them to scramble to respond; when Trump unveiled his so-called Liberation Day tariffs at the beginning of his second term, in 2025, however, Beijing was ready with a flurry of countermeasures that it could unleash in response.

Roads near the Temple of Heaven, Beijing, September 2025 Tingshu Wang / Reuters

Although the personalization of power could limit China’s ability to correct its mistakes, Xi’s centralized system of control has so far been able to alter course when needed. Part of Xi’s inheritance as the son of a revolutionary leader seems to be an intuitive understanding that everyone around him has an incentive to tell him what he wants to hear. This may be why he has installed officials he knows and trusts in positions across the top echelon of the party hierarchy: these confidants can tell him the truth in discreet ways that do not challenge his power. Somewhat counterintuitively, the perilous political atmosphere Xi has created offers another potential avenue for soliciting accurate feedback. As other effective authoritarian leaders have done, Xi can use the mistrust he has instilled among subordinates to play aides off one another and triangulate accurate information from otherwise unreliable sources.

Bolstering Xi’s confidence in his counterreformation is the inability of the United States to perform even the most basic governance functions, such as passing a federal budget on time. The Trump administration, similar to Xi, argues that executive power has become too diffuse and has undertaken aggressive efforts to centralize and personalize executive authority in the president. The increasingly unchecked and unbalanced executive power in the United States resembles that of other troubled and polarized republics led by populists that ruled Latin America for much of the twentieth century. But whereas Trump’s project deviates from how the U.S. system is designed to function, Xi’s power consolidation is consistent with the CCP’s operational DNA, which tends to empower rather than constrain the top leader. The result is that Trump is generating policy volatility and political turmoil that undermines U.S. capacity, whereas Xi’s centralization has buttressed Chinese resilience.

These developments are not lost on Xi and his peers, who, channeling Lenin, are already prone to see the United States as decadent and in decline. The party’s chief ideologist for the last quarter century has been Wang Huning, a political theorist whose visit to the United States in the late 1980s inspired him to write a book, titled America Against America, about the contradictions he observed. Wang detected what he called “undercurrents of crisis” in the United States and highlighted the corrosive effects of American individualism and the isolation it produces. Xi shares many of these concerns himself and has described Western countries as suffering from “chronic diseases such as materialism and spiritual poverty.” These worries are at the heart of what Xi sees as the pathologies of reform that he has sought to address.

While Xi has been disciplined and methodical, the United States has been distracted and incoherent.

Chinese officials and analysts also have an increasingly rich trove of evidence to draw on for their assessment of U.S. dysfunction and decline. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has badly mishandled just about every national crisis it has faced. Each of these has diminished public confidence in the United States, both at home and abroad. In response to the 9/11 attacks, the United States launched, on false pretenses, a destructive and costly war in Iraq that sapped the country of the appetite or ability to deal with more formidable future challengers such as China. In its response to the 2008 financial crisis, Washington rescued the financial sector but not its victims, worsening inequality and generating public disillusionment. And in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite having some of the most esteemed public health institutions in the world, the U.S. government bungled its response, further feeding suspicion and undermining public trust. Despite its repeated missteps, the United States remains a global superpower. But it is relying on the luxury of its inherited privilege: like a spoiled child, the United States can afford to make epic mistakes without suffering the devastating consequences that other countries would face if they acted similarly.

While strategists in Washington debate whether China has peaked, their counterparts in China are having an analogous debate about the United States—and reaching strikingly similar conclusions. China’s state media has diagnosed the United States with “hegemonic anxiety,” suggesting that Washington cannot cope with the possibility that it must face a multipolar world. And whereas U.S. thinkers such as Hal Brands have argued in their analyses of China that a power that has peaked is likely to lash out in violent ways, Chinese observers independently conclude that it is Washington that is anxious about preserving its position—and is increasingly willing to employ any means necessary to sustain its preeminence.

In the early years of the Cold War, the strategist George Kennan worried that the United States might lose confidence in its own system if the democracies of Europe succumbed to the Soviet Union. Today, the challenge is just the opposite: declining American confidence in its own system could be a cause rather than the result of the United States losing the competition with China. In contrast, Xi’s counterreformation—including the continuous purges and fallout from the property sector’s collapse—has not produced a crisis of confidence in China. Instead, if anything, Xi has gained confidence because he can point to tangible results in the form of technological breakthroughs. And Xi can afford to be patient because his is a long-term project, and he does not face the erratic fluctuations of an unstable political system swinging from one extreme to the other.

Indeed, a growing number of officials in Washington employ Cold War–style rhetoric when discussing China yet demonstrate little appetite to take on the difficult and expensive tasks, such as refurbishing the defense industrial base and shoring up key supply chains, that would help the United States outcompete China. If this dynamic continues, the United States will be left pursuing what might be called a “Reverse Roosevelt” strategy: speaking loudly about American power while wielding an ever-smaller stick. While Xi has been disciplined and methodical in his efforts to bolster China’s strategic position, the United States has been distracted and incoherent. Misreading Xi Jinping is, ultimately, part of the failure to address the problems facing the United States itself.

JONATHAN A. CZIN is Michael H. Armacost Chair in Foreign Policy Studies and a Fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution. He was Director for China at the National Security Council from 2021 to 2023 and previously served as a member of the Senior Analytic Service in the Central Intelligence Agency.

Foreign Affairs · More by Jonathan A. Czin · October 21, 2025

22. Meet Leonidas, the Drone-Killing Microwave Weapon Ukraine Has Its Eye On

More than Ukraine I hope. Taiwan, Korea, and Israel, etc.

Excerpts:

Epirus, a US defense company, announced results from an August 26 live-fire demonstration in which its Leonidas HPM system engaged 61 unmanned aerial vehicles across five operational scenarios. Company statements say the system achieved a 100% success rate, according to Forces News on October 2.

The event showcased Leonidas’ ability—under controlled conditions—to disable large, mixed swarms using a single, low-collateral electromagnetic burst.

Epirus says the demonstration validates the system’s core concept: disable hostile UAVs by frying their electronics rather than expending expensive kinetic interceptors.

Meet Leonidas, the Drone-Killing Microwave Weapon Ukraine Has Its Eye On

https://united24media.com/latest-news/meet-leonidas-the-drone-killing-microwave-weapon-ukraine-has-its-eye-on-12178#

united24media.com · Vlad Litnarovych

Dubbed after the Spartan king who held the pass at Thermopylae, Leonidas is a high-power microwave (HPM) system designed to “burn out” drone electronics. Kyiv—which has invited manufacturers to prove gear in combat conditions—sees systems like Leonidas as a potential game-changer against the waves of FPV and loitering munitions that have reshaped modern battlefields.

Oct 03, 2025 16:27 Updated Oct 03, 2025 17:44

5 min read

Authors

News Writer

Epirus, a US defense company, announced results from an August 26 live-fire demonstration in which its Leonidas HPM system engaged 61 unmanned aerial vehicles across five operational scenarios. Company statements say the system achieved a 100% success rate, according to Forces News on October 2.

The event showcased Leonidas’ ability—under controlled conditions—to disable large, mixed swarms using a single, low-collateral electromagnetic burst.

Epirus says the demonstration validates the system’s core concept: disable hostile UAVs by frying their electronics rather than expending expensive kinetic interceptors.

What Leonidas is—and how it works

Leonidas is a software-defined, long-pulse high-power microwave weapon built around Gallium Nitride (GaN) semiconductors. The basic operational idea is simple: project directed microwave energy that disrupts or permanently damages the electronic systems of unmanned platforms.

Leonidas can deliver area effects (broad pulses that blank electronics within a radius) or narrow pulses targeted at specific threats. In addition, the system is modular: towed trailers, vehicle-integrated variants (Leonidas Mobile), podded versions (Leonidas Pod), and expeditionary packages (ExDECS) exist to meet different deployment needs.

Epirus brands Leonidas as cost-effective: the company claims the “cost per shot” is just 0.05 cents—a striking contrast with expensive kinetic interceptors.

Introducing our next-generation high-power microwave system, with increased power and a gimbal for 360-degree coverage. Follow Epirus to learn more about our software-defined approach to HPM that allows us to achieve positive effects against a variety of targets at long ranges. pic.twitter.com/AgTjCwDN7O

— Epirus (@epirus) April 11, 2022

US Army buys the GEN II upgrade

The Army awarded Epirus a $43.5 million contract to modernize first-generation IFPC-HPM systems into IFPC-HPM GEN II variants. Under the deal, four initial systems will be upgraded and two GEN II units delivered. According to Epirus, upgrades will:

more than double the system’s maximum effective range compared with Gen-1;
increase peak power output by roughly 30%;
extend pulse durations and add a high-duty burst mode to better handle simultaneous targets;
improve waveform/polarization techniques and battery endurance.

Category

The Ukrainian angle: battlefield testing and rapid iteration

Ukraine has publicly invited Western developers to test counter-drone systems in combat conditions — a blunt but valuable real-world test bed. Epirus says it is “ready to answer the Army’s call and quickly begin mass production.”

Category

Why are militaries excited

Leonidas’s ability to disable many platforms in one pulse addresses a core problem of modern drone warfare—saturation attacks that overwhelm kinetic defenses. In addition, low “cost per shot” and lack of expendable interceptors make HPM attractive for static site defense and logistics hubs.

Pod and mobile variants let forces layer Leonidas into existing air-defense architectures. And lastly, as long as the system has power and cooling, it doesn’t run out of “rounds” the way missile interceptors do.

Leonidas Expeditionary - high-power microwave for austere conditions and forward deployment. Developed in partnership with ONR, JCO & USMC, Epirus' latest HPM system will support the Marines' Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) and CUAS missions ~ Epirus #GaN pic.twitter.com/1PQnZjdTaM

— AirPower 2.0 (MIL_STD) (@AirPowerNEW1) December 21, 2024

Why Leonidas is not a silver bullet

Talking about the cons, directed energy needs a clear path to the target; terrain, buildings, or low clouds can reduce effectiveness. Also, rain, fog, or snow degrade microwave propagation and effective range.

Another disadvantage is that heavier drones with metal frames, carbon composites blended with shielding, or hardened electronics can blunt HPM effects (albeit at higher cost/weight). Some broad pulses can influence friendly systems if deconfliction isn’t flawless; the software must discriminate friend from foe.

Category

War in Ukraine

Why Russia’s Shahed Drones Are Now Deadlier and Harder Than Ever to Stop

Sep 17, 2025 15:51

Fielding, doctrine, and a contested future

Epirus’ GEN II roadmap and Army evaluations are the immediate milestones. If the upgraded systems deliver the promised range and reliability in Army tests, procurement could follow—although timelines remain vague.

For Ukraine, systems like Leonidas represent hope: an economically sustainable way to protect infrastructure, logistics hubs, and forward maneuver units from massed drones.

But Kyiv’s adoption will hinge on availability, integration into air-defense networks, and the system’s resilience to real-world countermeasures.

Earlier, American startup Allen Control Systems signed a contract with the US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) to supply its Bullfrog autonomous anti-drone turrets.

The Bullfrog system is described as a modular turret that can transform conventional machine guns into autonomous counter-UAV platforms. According to Defense One, the system is intended to defeat drones across NATO’s Group I to Group III classifications, ranging from micro-UAVs to large systems weighing over 600 kilograms.

Official presentation footage shows Bullfrog engaging aerial targets resembling Iranian Shahed-type long-range drones and their Russian variants, Geran.

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Author
Vlad Litnarovych
Category
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united24media.com · Vlad Litnarovych

23. ‘He lost us:’ Generals, senior officers say trust in Hegseth has evaporated

Troubling essay.

‘He lost us:’ Generals, senior officers say trust in Hegseth has evaporated

Secretary's critics worry Pentagon at risk of enduring damage amid firings, resignations and early retirements of high-ranking staff

washingtontimes.com · Ben Wolfgang

Exclusive

By - The Washington Times - Updated: 7:16 p.m. on Monday, October 20, 2025

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has lost the trust and respect of some top military commanders, with his public “grandstanding” widely seen as unprofessional and the personnel moves made by the former cable TV host leading to an unprecedented and dangerous exodus of talent from the Pentagon, said current senior military officers and current and former Defense Department officials.

Numerous high-ranking officers painted Mr. Hegseth’s Sept. 30 speech to hundreds of generals and admirals gathered at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia as a turning point in how his leadership style, attitude and overall competency are viewed in the upper echelons of the U.S. armed forces.

“It was a massive waste of time. … If he ever had us, he lost us,” one current Army general told The Washington Times.

The Quantico speech — described by other sources as “embarrassing” and theatrical to a degree that “is below our institution” — seemed to crystallize beliefs about Mr. Hegseth that had taken root among some senior officers, including the view that the secretary operates with a junior officer’s mentality that has led him to micromanage policies about issues such as military facial hair standards and press access to the Pentagon, sometimes at the expense of the much broader portfolio of a typical defense secretary.

“Mainly what I see from him are not serious things,” a current senior officer said. “It’s, ’Why did this service member tweet this?’ Or internal politics and drama. That’s mostly what I see.”

Mr. Hegseth clearly does not care about such criticism. At Quantico, he told any officer who disagreed with his priorities and his laserlike focus on a return to what he calls the military’s “warrior ethos” to resign.

Some analysts are quick to point out that military recruiting has surged since Mr. Hegseth took his post earlier this year. Supporters cite that as clear evidence that Mr. Hegseth’s approach is resonating with at least a subsection of young Americans and in the process is strengthening the armed forces. Separately, some defense industry sources stress that the Pentagon under Mr. Hegseth’s leadership is driving the development and fielding of small tactical drones in huge numbers, among other successes.

High-level sources said that they believe Mr. Hegseth is simultaneously doing deep damage to the military, both from a public relations standpoint and structurally behind the scenes, that may not be fully apparent until months or even years from now. They say Mr. Hegseth’s insistence that the Pentagon will embrace a color- and gender-blind meritocracy is at odds with reality inside the Defense Department, which President Trump has given the secondary title “War Department.”

They argue that the firings, early retirements and resignations that have amassed over the past eight months will fundamentally weaken the military.

“Across the services, we are bleeding talent, talented generals and flag officers, for what appears to be the opposite of a meritocracy,” another current senior officer said. “There are people being held back from promotions, or being fired, or removed for sometimes unknown reasons, often for favoritism, or just simple relationships.”

The officer stressed that there is strong support for some of the policy changes Mr. Hegseth laid out at Quantico, including tougher fitness standards, reforms to the Pentagon inspector general’s office and changes to how complaints against officers are filed and investigated, with an understanding in the ranks that sometimes false or trumped-up accusations of racism, for example, have been used to unfairly damage careers.

The delivery of those policy changes was widely viewed as unprofessional.

“The theater of it all is below our institution,” the officer said. “Several of these changes are being made already by the services. And they could be made by any secretary. … They don’t have to be announced on stage in public in this grandstanding kind of way.”

“It seems like it’s all about one guy here,” the officer said of Mr. Hegseth, giving voice to a common refrain expressed by multiple sources.

The sources interviewed for this article were granted anonymity to speak freely because of their concern that they would be fired for providing their honest assessments. In a statement to The Times, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said they should consider stepping down.

“Secretary Hegseth’s speech [at Quantico] cemented a new but familiar culture we refer to as the warrior ethos. His message was simple: promotions and combat assignments will be given based on merit and ability, not diversity quotas. The war on warriors is over; political correctness has no home at the Department of War,” Mr. Parnell said. “Physical fitness standards will be high, uniform and sex-neutral, ensuring our warriors are prepared to fight and win in any arena, no matter the circumstances. These core principles have been the foundation of our force for generations and drive our entire institution.

“The anonymous general and senior officer quoted in your article should put their names to their comments if that’s what they truly believe in and consider resigning from their post. Our warriors deserve senior leaders who support the mission and put warfighting first,” Mr. Parnell said.

Constant controversy

Mr. Parnell’s comments echo what has become a guiding principle of the Pentagon under Mr. Hegseth: Those not on board with the policies of the Trump administration, and with Mr. Hegseth’s warrior ethos, should step down.

“If the words I’m speaking today are making your heart sink, then you should do the honorable thing and resign,” Mr. Hegseth said during his Quantico address. “We would thank you for your service. But I suspect, I know, the overwhelming majority of you feel the opposite.

“You are hereby liberated to be an apolitical, hard-charging, no-nonsense constitutional leader that you joined the military to be,” he said.

The warrior ethos, as Mr. Hegseth and his aides describe it, has included a concerted push to eliminate left-wing social policies, woke initiatives and political correctness that critics say have eroded the effectiveness of the military. It also includes the drive to ensure that military fitness and capability standards are gender neutral and that diversity quotas and gender goals are not factors when determining promotions.

Although the theatricality of Mr. Hegseth’s Quantico speech fell flat among many senior officers, it hardly came as a surprise in some ways. The 45-year-old Mr. Hegseth, who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Army officer and was awarded two Bronze Stars, spent nearly a decade as a Fox News personality, including as the host of the station’s “Fox and Friends Weekend” program.

To some audiences, likely including the commander in chief, Mr. Hegseth’s showmanship is a feature, not a bug. At the Special Operations Forces Week convention in May in Tampa, Florida, for example, he delivered a convincing and well-received impersonation of Mr. Trump.

“Pete, you’re gonna have to be tough as s—-,” he said, imitating Mr. Trump and recounting a conversation the two men had shortly after Mr. Hegseth’s nomination. “They’re gonna come after you.”

That warning turned out to be true. Mr. Hegseth’s nomination was nearly derailed by allegations of personal misconduct, including sexual assault, excessive drinking, spousal abuse and financial mismanagement of two veterans organizations he ran. Mr. Hegseth fiercely denied those accusations even as Mr. Trump reportedly considered dropping his nomination in favor of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Ultimately, Mr. Hegseth was able to convince most Republicans that he was the victim of a political smear campaign. He narrowly cleared Senate confirmation in January by a vote of 51-50, with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking a tie in the chamber.

Since then, analysts say it’s clear his overall approach has rubbed many the wrong way, especially his seeming obsession with reversing the woke military policies of past administrations. Still, they argue that he may deserve credit for a messaging shift that has helped improve recruiting. They say he has been a vocal defender of some key U.S. alliances, has promoted responsible budgeting inside Department of Defense offices and has helped advance ambitious national security goals such as Mr. Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile shield.

“Secretary Hegseth’s proclivity to pursue the so-called culture wars at the Department of Defense is a distraction and is causing considerable anxiety among many. He overstates the supposed fixation of earlier administrations on wokeness and distorts the effect that bringing women into more combat positions has had on the U.S. military,” said Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow and director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

“However, in fairness, we have not yet seen substantial negative effects on recruiting or retention,” Mr. O’Hanlon told The Times. “Encouragingly, Hegseth has been rather stalwart in defense of Asia-Pacific alliances in particular. His springtime planning exercise requiring the military services to show how they could repurpose 8% of their budgets was potentially useful, at least as a brainstorming device.”

Among other controversies, Mr. Hegseth faced intense criticism for his involvement in the Trump administration’s high-level Signal chat, in which key national security officials discussed U.S. military strikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels using the publicly available Signal app.

’Unprecedented’ chaos

Inside the Pentagon, Mr. Hegseth’s tenure has been tumultuous. The level of turnover among high-ranking officers and civilian officials has not been seen in recent history. Sources described an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, with hirings and firings sometimes seeming to come out of nowhere.

“Leadershipwise in the building, I can tell you the level of chaos is unprecedented. Even the teams that I was on, people were fired overnight for no given reason,” said one former Defense Department official who departed several months into the Trump administration.

“New people were brought to the team with no clear role,” the former official said. “There was just a lot of backbiting and mistrust and general unprofessionalism going on. And quite frankly, that’s carried through, and I think you saw that in the large number of civilians who left the department.”

Mr. Hegseth’s inner circle has had a dramatic level of turnover. In the spring, he fired Colin Carroll and other top Pentagon officials amid an investigation into leaks coming out of his office. Former top Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot resigned in April. A former key adviser to Mr. Hegseth, Justin Fulcher, left in July.

Sources say the number of people trusted by Mr. Hegseth has become progressively smaller. Because of that, they say that unlike past secretaries, he is not taking advantage of the wealth of experience and expertise across the Pentagon when crafting policy or making key personnel decisions.

“My understanding is now he has very much insulated himself with Sean Parnell, his wife, his brother [Phil], those couple of advisers, and isn’t really utilizing the Pentagon as previous defense secretaries have to fully vet decisions before they go through,” one former Defense Department official said.

The highest ranks of the military, and key Pentagon offices, have also had an unprecedented level of change.

Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown, a Black man, and former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti were removed from their posts in February, just weeks into Mr. Hegseth’s tenure. Overall, more than a dozen senior generals and admirals have been fired since Mr. Hegseth assumed office. Others have resigned or announced retirements far earlier than is typical.

Gen. David Allvin, the Air Force chief of staff, said he will retire next month, about halfway through his four-year term. Doug Beck, the former director of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, resigned in August.

Most recently, Adm. Alvin Holsey, the commander of U.S. Southern Command, said he will retire less than a year into what is normally a three-year posting. He announced his retirement amid the administration’s controversial military strikes targeting alleged drug cartel boats in the Caribbean and speculation that the U.S. could launch strikes on Venezuela.

Junior officer mentality

Numerous sources, including military officers and current and former civilian officials in the Defense Department, described Mr. Hegseth as viewing the job through the lens of a junior officer, which has often led him to fixate on issues that otherwise could be left to the services or lower-ranking officials. For example, some generals and admirals came to Quantico expecting to hear about a major new strategic initiative, doctrinal shift or some other important announcement.

“Not about f——— haircuts,” the current Army general told The Times, referring to Mr. Hegseth’s deep focus on grooming standards, a view expressed by numerous sources.

Another source described it as “the mentality of a midgrade officer” who is deeply focused on fitness, grooming standards and other issues that typically don’t reach the desk of the defense secretary.

Other retired officers and military analysts have expressed similar sentiments publicly. Retired Marine Corps Col. Mark Cancian, now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote a lengthy analysis of Mr. Hegseth’s Quantico speech that examined why some issues made it into the address and others did not.

“Hegseth’s focus on fitness, weight and appearance reflects his experiences as a junior officer. These are perennial challenges at the small unit level; anyone who has commanded a small unit in the military understands where he’s coming from,” Mr. Cancian wrote. “However, if his military experience had been at higher levels, he would have discussed strategy, threats and warfighting at the operational level. As it was, these topics were nearly absent from his remarks.”

Sources familiar with the matter say Mr. Hegseth was a driving force behind the Pentagon’s new highly restrictive rules about press access to the complex. Those rules led nearly all reporters with Pentagon credentials to turn in those press passes last week rather than sign a document acknowledging they could be considered a security threat for soliciting information from sources. The Washington Times did not sign the document and, as a result, lost its desk in the Pentagon. Mr. Hegseth’s former employer, Fox News, also rejected the policy.

The New York Times also did not sign. When the outlet posted to social media a statement regarding its decision, Mr. Hegseth responded with a hand-waving emoji.

That policy has been met with harsh criticism, including from commentators on Mr. Hegseth’s former network.

“What they’re really doing, they want to spoon-feed information to the journalists, and that would be their story. That’s not journalism. Journalism is going out and finding the story and getting all the facts to support it,” retired Army Gen. Jack Keane said on Fox News last week.

The policy on journalists’ access could be reversed by a subsequent defense secretary, as could a host of other policies and initiatives.

“I hope all of this is temporary,” one current officer said of Mr. Hegseth. “Who knows how long he’ll be in the position and how much damage he can do.”

• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.

washingtontimes.com · Ben Wolfgang

24. Trump is going to Asia — what happens next is anyone's guess

A lot of potential? Is the plate too full?

Trump is going to Asia — what happens next is anyone's guess

By CHRIS MEGERIAN

Updated 3:40 AM EDT, October 21, 2025

https://apnews.com/article/trump-xi-jinping-china-asia-8f21df3df6fa3f51ca4ab4dfcf7669ba

AP · October 21, 2025

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is expected to leave for Asia at the end of the week, betting that an around-the-world journey will help him untangle big issues that he can’t afford to get wrong.

At stake is nothing less than the future of the global economy, which could hinge on whether he’s able to calm trade tensions during an expected meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. A misstep could send shock waves through American industries that have already been rattled by Trump’s aggressive tariffs, government layoffs and political brinkmanship.

Trump’s strategy of improvisation has had both hits and misses since he returned to office in January. Hamas returned hostages to Israel but the ceasefire in the Middle East remains fragile; a trade war with China has ebbed and flowed this year; and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hasn’t slowed down despite Trump’s efforts to resolve the conflict.

There’s been some mystery around Trump’s trip, with no official announcements from the White House about much of his itinerary. The president said Monday that he plans to go to Malaysia, which is hosting a regional summit, then Japan, where he’s trying to nail down foreign investment.

He’ll also visit South Korea, where he’s working on more trade issues and expects to sit down with Xi. Beijing has yet to confirm that they’ll meet, and the two leaders have recently exchanged threats of tariffs and export restrictions.

“I have a very good relationship with President Xi of China,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday. He offered to lower tariffs but “they have to give us some things too,” including buying U.S. soybeans, reducing the flow of fentanyl ingredients and ending limits on rare earth minerals that are critical for high-tech manufacturing.

Trump expressed even more confidence on Monday, saying, “I think we’re going to end up having a fantastic deal with China” and “it’s going to be fantastic for the entire world.”

This will be Trump’s first trip to Asia in his second term

With just days to go before Trump leaves, there’s an unusual level of ambiguity even for a president who loves to keep people guessing about his next move.

“The whole trip has seemed so uncertain from the beginning,” said Bonnie Glaser, a managing director at the German Marshall Fund, a Washington-based think tank.

It’s Trump’s first trip to Asia since returning to office. Although he’s hosted leaders from the region at the White House, he hasn’t forged the kind of foundational relationships that he has on other continents.

Anna Kelly, a spokesperson for the president, responded to a list of questions about Trump’s plans by saying he “will participate in meetings and events in Asia that will result in many great deals for our country.” She added, “Stay tuned!”

Trump’s approach to Asia has focused on using tariffs to realign what he describes as unfair trade practices, unnerving countries that depend on the United States as the world’s largest market for exports. There’s also anxiety about Trump’s meeting with Xi, and the potential that a feud between the two leaders could send the international economy into a tailspin.

“There will be some appreciation for the fact that he’s there, but I don’t think it will go far enough to quell the doubts that are pervasive in the region,” Glaser predicted.

The Republican president has downsized his foreign policy team since his first term, eschewing the typical array of advisers at the National Security Council in favor of a core group of loyalists.

“There’s not very many White House staff to do this kind of work,” said Rush Doshi, who worked on China policy under President Joe Biden. “All of this puts us in uncharted waters.”

Michael Green, who worked on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council and now leads the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia, said there’s been no clear Asia strategy from Trump.

“Everyone is waiting to see where he’s going to come down on all of this,” he said.

Others say Trump’s approach is paying off. Anthony Kim, a research fellow in international economic affairs at the Heritage Foundation, said Japan and South Korea are eager to work with the administration to solidify partnerships.

The message from them has been “let’s sit down, talk about relevant details to make a deal,” Kim said.

Trump’s plans remain in flux as the trip approaches

Malaysia is hosting the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, an annual summit that Trump attended only once during his first term, even skipping it when it was held virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, this year the summit offers an opportunity to highlight Trump’s peacemaking efforts, which he’s made central to his foreign policy agenda.

Thailand and Cambodia skirmished along their disputed border over the summer, and Trump threatened to withhold trade deals with each country if they didn’t stop fighting.

“They were willing to come together and talk to avoid more economic pain,” said Ja Ian Chong, a political science professor at the National University of Singapore.

Malaysia and the U.S. have been working toward securing an expanded ceasefire. The Malaysian foreign minister said Trump “looks forward” to the signing of an agreement at the summit.

Trump’s next stop is Japan. Washington and Tokyo reached a trade agreement earlier this year, which included the promise of $550 billion of investments in U.S. projects.

Japan is in a moment of political transition, with Sanae Takaichi elected Tuesday to be the country’s first female prime minister.

Takaichi is a protégé of Shinzo Abe, a former prime minister who was assassinated after leaving office. Trump was close with Abe during his first term, and Green said Takaichi “has the potential to also play that role.”

Working with Trump and keeping him committed to U.S. alliances “requires a level of interaction and trust that none of the Asian leaders have,” Green said.

South Korea is Trump’s final stop on his trip

The climax of the president’s journey will likely be South Korea, which is hosting this year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. Trump has said he’ll sit down with Xi while he’s there.

Tensions have increased in recent weeks, particularly with China’s announcement of restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals. Trump threatened to retaliate with tariffs so high that he admits they would be unsustainable.

Doshi, the former Biden adviser, said there are three potential outcomes from Trump’s meeting with Xi — “deal, no deal or disaster.” He said China is emboldened after Trump backed down on an earlier tariff announcement when Beijing restricted the export of rare earth magnets.

“The Chinese feel they have President Trump’s number,” Doshi said. “They feel that if they push on this, he’ll fold.”

Trump said Monday that China has “treated us with great respect” since he’s been in office. He said “I could threaten them with many other things,” but “I want to be good to China.”

Another open question will be Trump’s trade negotiations with South Korea, which is facing U.S. tariffs that could undermine its auto industry. However, Seoul has balked at Trump’s demand for a $350 billion investment fund similar to the one in Japan.

“There’s some momentum to the talks,” said Wendy Cutler, who spent more than two decades as a U.S. trade negotiator and is now senior vice president at the Asia Society. “But I don’t want to overstate it, because there are some fundamental differences about this fund that need to be sorted out.”

She said it’s not unusual for talks to go down to the wire, but this time “there are so many balls in the air.”

___

Associated Press writer Josh Boak contributed to this report.

AP · October 21, 2025

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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