Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"If asked for a brief explanation, I would say that the existential vacuum derives from the following conditions. Unlike an animal, man is not told by drives and instincts what he must do. And in contrast to man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions and values what he should do. Now, knowing neither what he must do nor what he should do, he sometimes does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, he wishes to do what other people do - which is conformism - or he does what other people wish him to do - which is totalitarianism."

– Dr. Viktor E. Frankl

"Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know."

– William Saroyan

"We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witchhunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist."

– E. B. White

1. Trump, Xi to Discuss Lowering China Tariffs for Fentanyl Crackdown

2. Trump Tells Asia Allies: It’s Your Turn to Boost Military Spending

3. Trump outmaneuvers China in the battle for rare earth power

4. US military officials required to sign NDAs tied to Latin America mission, sources say

5. The U.S. Army prepares to withdraw its new Typhon missile launch system from Japan

6. Trump’s Asia Gambit: Can the US Really Overtake China?

7. Trump Expects to Sign China Trade Deal at Xi Summit

8. After Demolishing the U.S.-China Relationship, Trump Is Rebuilding It His Way

9. Washington’s Oil Dilemma Returns: How to Hurt Moscow Without Raising Gas Prices

10.The U.S. Is on Track to Lose a War With China

11. Trump Hails Golden Era in Japan Relations

12. Setting The Force: 10 Steps for Resolving The Special Forces “Identity Crisis”

13. Why Xi and Trump are set to talk in Busan, away from South Korea’s Apec events

14. Israel Says Cease-Fire Is Back on After Gaza Strikes

15. America Needs to Make Its Own Chips. James Proud Says He Knows How.

16. Will Israel’s Algorithmic Counter-Insurgency Proliferate to the West?

17. How Trump will avoid falling into Xi’s trap, according to his China adviser

18. Which service did best in the military recruiting boom? The numbers are in

19. Is China’s Near Monopoly in Rare Earths Really a Chokepoint in the Global Economy?

20. The ‘New Normal’ Is Not Deglobalization, It’s Reglobalization

21. Ukrainian forces say small Russian infiltration teams are increasingly appearing out of nowhere and sowing chaos in their lines

22. Allied shipbuilding is Asia’s next strategic supply chain

23. 1st US heavy rare earths separation facility planned in Louisiana

24. The Military-Narrational Complex – What Stories Do in an Age of Conflict

25. Structure Trumps Agency in the U.S.-China Relationship – Why the Competition is Here to Stay

1. Trump, Xi to Discuss Lowering China Tariffs for Fentanyl Crackdown

What is the "enforcement" mechanism for this? How do we know CHina will not turn a blind eye to smuggling these precursor chemicals for fentanyl?

If we assess that in the context of strategic competition one line of effort for the Chinese is to conduct subversion within US society, fentanyl seems to be the ideal method for doing so.

But the key to getting the percentage "right" is properly quantifying it with all the direct and indirect defense expenditures and costs.

"America First. Allies Always" and America must remain decisively engaged throughout Eurasia to secure its global interests and protect the homeland.

Trump, Xi to Discuss Lowering China Tariffs for Fentanyl Crackdown

If Beijing takes action to cut export of chemicals that make fentanyl, U.S. would cut in half the 20% fentanyl-related levies on Chinese goods

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/trump-xi-to-discuss-lowering-china-tariffs-for-fentanyl-crackdown-8094fe83

By Lingling Wei

, Hannah Miao

and Gavin Bade

Updated Oct. 28, 2025 10:29 pm ET

President Trump is set to discuss a trade framework with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Thursday. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images

Quick Summary

The U.S. may cut its 20% fentanyl-related tariff on Chinese goods by up to 10 percentage points if China curbs fentanyl precursor exports.View more

President Trump said that the U.S. expects to lower tariffs on China in exchange for cooperation in cracking down on the export of chemicals used to produce fentanyl.

Trump said that he would discuss such an agreement when he meets with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea on Thursday.

“I expect to be lowering that because I believe that they’re going to help us with the fentanyl situation,” Trump told reporters during a flight from Tokyo to Gyeongju, South Korea, on Wednesday. “They’re going to be doing what they can do.”

China is expected to commit to more controls on the export of so-called precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, a synthetic opioid blamed for hundreds of thousands of drug-overdose deaths in recent years. In return, the U.S. could cut its 20% fentanyl-related tariff on Chinese goods by as much as 10 percentage points, according to people familiar with the talks. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the plan.

The expected agreements are subject to change and dependent on the meeting of the two leaders. Details are expected to be hammered out in subsequent negotiations.

If the U.S. were to lower the fentanyl-tariff on Chinese goods to 10%, it would bring the average tariff on most Chinese imports—currently around 55%—to about 45%. That would put China’s average tariff rate closer to those of other trading partners, potentially reducing the price competitiveness of goods manufactured outside of China and raising the relative attractiveness of Chinese-made products to U.S. buyers.

Goods from India and Brazil face 50% tariffs, and the Trump administration has said Chinese goods shipped through Southeast Asian nations would face 40% tariffs—much higher than the 19%-20% rate for other goods from the region. The administration reached two trade agreements and two frameworks with Southeast Asian nations this week that included provisions to prevent China from exporting goods through their economies at below-market prices.

Bringing the tariffs on China closer to the 40% levies threatened on Southeast Asian nations would reduce the incentive for Chinese companies to ship goods through those economies to the U.S., while potentially motivating more direct trade between China and the U.S.

The fentanyl negotiations address a longstanding issue between Washington and Beijing. It is part of a larger trade framework developed over the weekend between high-level Chinese negotiators and a U.S. team led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who called the framework “very successful.”

Under the framework, China is also expected to commit to significant purchases of American soybeans, Bessent said in a CBS News interview on Sunday, potentially bringing relief to U.S. farmers hit hard by the loss of Chinese buyers this year.

Chinese negotiators have insisted that China won’t resume purchases of American soybeans until the U.S. removes its fentanyl-related tariffs. Rory Doyle/Bloomberg News

Beijing imposed retaliatory tariffs on U.S. soybeans earlier this year in response to the 20% fentanyl-related levies placed on Chinese goods. Chinese negotiators have insisted that China won’t lift its retaliatory duties and resume purchases of American soybeans until the U.S. removes the fentanyl tariffs.

If agreed to, the framework would ease market-rattling tensions between the world’s two biggest economies. Earlier this month, China tightened controls on rare earths, a sector it dominates, potentially jolting global supply chains that rely on them to manufacture everything from electric vehicles to jet fighters. In turn Trump threatened another 100% tariffs on China.

Now, under the new framework, the U.S. expects China to delay the new rare-earths rules.

“I believe that they are going to delay that for a year while they re-examine it,” Bessent said in an interview with ABC News on Sunday.

The expected deferral of China’s latest rare-earth controls means Trump’s threat to impose a 100% tariff on all Chinese goods by Nov. 1 is now “effectively off the table,” Bessent told CBS News.

Chinese negotiators are also expecting the U.S. to freeze potential new policy actions deemed as harmful to China, such as controls on exports of products made with U.S. software, said the people familiar with the negotiations. Bessent told CBS News on Sunday that there have been no changes to U.S. export controls.

The port in Qingdao, China. The U.S. and China are expected to reduce port fees on each other’s ships, according to people familiar with negotiations. AFP/Getty Images

It is unclear how the framework would affect a different set of rare-earths restrictions that Beijing announced in April. The established licensing system suggests authorities could ramp up rare-earth restrictions again if the U.S. were to impose new trade policies deemed harmful to China.

The U.S. and China are also expected to reduce port fees on each other’s ships, said the people familiar with negotiations.

Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Li Chenggang, a senior member of China’s trade delegation, said the two sides have reached “preliminary consensus” on issues including export controls, reciprocal tariffs, fentanyl-related tariffs, cooperation on fentanyl, an expansion of bilateral trade and port fees. Both sides will then go through domestic approval processes, he said.

“The current turbulences and twists and turns are the ones that we do not wish to see,” Li said.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel is set to travel to Beijing to discuss the fentanyl issue with Chinese authorities, said people familiar with the matter.

Write to Lingling Wei at Lingling.Wei@wsj.com, Hannah Miao at hannah.miao@wsj.com and Gavin Bade at gavin.bade@wsj.com

Appeared in the October 29, 2025, print edition as 'Fighting Fentanyl Would Buy China a Tariff Cut'.

2. Trump Tells Asia Allies: It’s Your Turn to Boost Military Spending

I think POTUS is pushing on an open door. Our Asian allies are taking the threats seriously.

But I wish there was a better metric than simply percentage of GDP. But that is the only one that is easily communicated and that people can rally around. But it is hardly a true and sufficient measure of capability and will.

But the key to getting the percentage "right" is properly quantifying it with all the direct and indirect defense expenditures and costs.

Trump Tells Asia Allies: It’s Your Turn to Boost Military Spending

During six-day tour of a region facing threat of Chinese aggression, Trump reiterates a message that was largely heeded by European nations

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/after-chastising-europe-trump-tells-asia-allies-to-spend-more-on-militaries-c1eb38d5

By Alexander Ward

, Dasl Yoon

and Lara Seligman

Oct. 29, 2025 5:08 am ET

President Trump at a ceremony in Gyeongju, South Korea, on Wednesday. andrew caballero-reynolds/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Quick Summary

President Trump urged Asian allies to increase military spending amid rising Chinese aggression and North Korean threats.View more

GYEONGJU, South Korea—Amid the pageantry and backslapping, President Trump’s weeklong Asian swing drew attention to a sour point for allies: The U.S. demand that they spend more to respond to a rising threat of Chinese aggression.

Washington first pressured Europeans to boost their military budgets shortly after Trump took office in January. That push ultimately proved successful, with many allies pledging to increase spending.

Now on Trump’s first visit to the region during his second term, it is Asia’s turn to feel the heat.

Trump aimed to improve security and economic ties with Southeast Asian nations during a summit of leaders in Malaysia last weekend. Then, while standing aboard a U.S. warship docked near Tokyo, he heaped praise on new Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi for her plans to sharply boost military spending. And Trump was expected to urge South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in this ancient city to spend more on the military and for the upkeep of the nearly 30,000 American troops stationed in his country.

The threats are rising, as are concerns that the U.S. is turning its attention away from Asia to focus on priorities closer to home. Beijing will “never promise to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy that China claims as its own, according to Wednesday remarks by a spokesman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office.

China has showcased in recent drills how it would encircle and strangle Taiwan by cutting off its life-sustaining shipping lanes—not just exercises rehearing a full-scale invasion. It has bulked up its maritime militia in the South China Sea, carried out unprecedented naval drills close to Japan and erected large steel structures near South Korea.

Meanwhile, North Korea, whose nuclear arsenal is expanding with little pushback from the outside world, test-fired cruise missiles a day before Trump’s Wednesday arrival to South Korea. Leader Kim Jong Un spurned Trump’s offer for a hasty get-together.

Trump is scheduled to meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Thursday in South Korea, then head back to Washington. But after Trump leaves the region, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, already in Tokyo, plans stops across Southeast Asia and South Korea, where allied spending is expected to be a point of discussion.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth spoke aboard the aircraft carrier USS George Washington in Yokosuka, Japan, on Tuesday. Kim Kyung-hoon/Reuters

Hegseth, at a Wednesday press conference, said he didn’t discuss military spending with his Japanese counterpart—because he said he didn’t need to. “We both look out the window and see the threat of a Chinese military buildup,” Hegseth said.

But U.S. messaging on the China military threat has been muddied by Trump’s own approach, which is viewed by some regional and U.S. officials as far warmer than in the first term, when Trump made great-power competition with Beijing a cornerstone of his national-security strategy. This time, Trump is more focused on cooperation and dealmaking with Beijing, seeking trade agreements while refusing to ban the Chinese social-media app TikTok in the U.S.

Trump insists he has good personal ties with Xi that can supersede any larger challenges between the world’s two superpowers. But some security experts say Xi doesn’t likely see things the same way.

“Trump may feel like he has a cozy relationship with Xi, but I can assure you that’s not how Xi thinks. He’s purely a power player,” said Charles Boustany, a former Republican lawmaker who is now a trade lobbyist with Capitol Counsel, a firm that has represented the Chinese government. “Whatever transactions he’s going to make have to be perceived as favorable to China.”

On Wednesday, Trump told reporters on Air Force One he expected to lower tariffs in exchange for China’s help in curbing the export of the chemicals used to make fentanyl into the U.S. after his Thursday meeting with Xi.

China’s President Xi Jinping inspects troops during a military parade in Beijing. greg baker/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

In keeping with Trump’s “America First” vision, senior Pentagon officials have proposed the new National Defense Strategy, the department’s guiding doctrine, give priority to protecting the homeland and the Western Hemisphere, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Others, including many in the Trump administration, have advocated for a more full-throated mobilization to prepare for potential war with China.

A draft of the NDS is with Hegseth’s office for review, but there is still disagreement on the final document between senior Pentagon civilians and the military’s Joint Staff, the people said.

As the policy takes shape, Washington wants to see allies shoulder more responsibility for their own defense.

Trump has frequently claimed that allies are shortchanging the U.S. on security, particularly Japan and South Korea, which host roughly 60,000 and 28,500 American personnel in their countries respectively.

Seoul has already pledged to significantly raise its defense budget next year, with the goal of spending 3.5% of its gross domestic product on defense by 2035. Ahead of summit talks, Lee told Trump that South Korea’s military spending was 1.4 times the size of North Korea’s entire economy, and vowed to significantly boost Seoul’s defense capabilities to help reduce Washington’s defense burden.

Lee also asked Trump to supply fuel for nuclear-powered submarines to allow South Korea to better track Chinese and North Korean submarines, which would lighten the burden for the U.S. military.

Elsewhere, Trump and members of his administration have suggested Taiwan should spend as much as 10% of GDP on defense—a tall order for Taiwan when the figure has long hovered around 2%.

Taiwan has sought to show the U.S. that it is committed to spending more on defense. In August, Taiwan proposed its largest-ever military budget, which aims to reach 3.32% of its GDP for next year, using NATO’s definition of military spending that include costs for coast guard and veteran pensions. President Lai Ching-te has said he hopes to push the figure to 5% by 2030.

A Taiwanese soldier crews a U.S.-made Abrams tank during a live-fire exercises. Ann wang/Reuters

Members of Japan’s military take part in an exercise in Okinawa, Japan. Philip fong/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The problem for Trump is that Washington’s Asian allies face several political and economic constraints in quickly raising their defense budgets, likely keeping them reliant on the U.S. for their security for the foreseeable future.

But Markus Garlauskas, director of the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, said the Trump administration is essentially “pushing on an open door” for its partners in the Indo-Pacific, including Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei and Manila, who were already inclined to raise their military spending.

Standing aboard the USS George Washington warship on Tuesday, Takaichi, the Japanese prime minister, addressed U.S. troops and vowed to heed Trump’s call. She plans to raise Japan’s military spending to 2% of gross domestic product by the end of the fiscal year in March 2026. Spending was 1.4% of GDP in the 2024 fiscal year and had been projected to reach around 1.6% this year.

“We are facing an unprecedented security environment,” Takaichi said, speaking through an interpreter and with Trump looking on. “Peace cannot be protected by words alone.”

Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com, Dasl Yoon at dasl.yoon@wsj.com and Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com

3. Trump outmaneuvers China in the battle for rare earth power

We are missing the real issues being worked in Asia this week. The biggest successes will be the fentanyl agreement with China and as the title says here "outmaneuvering" China on rare earth metals. While we focus on tariffs we are missing the forest for the trees. There is so much more than tariffs. (Not my assessment here - I had a private meeting with a very experienced China hand yesterday who enlightened me on many issues and rare earths and fentanyl were two of them.)

Trump outmaneuvers China in the battle for rare earth power

foxbusiness.com · Elizabeth MacDonald

video

Aclara Resources CEO explains how his company will help the US break China's grip on rare earth minerals

Aclara Resources CEO Ramón Barúa Costa addresses how his company is joining the U.S.' push for rare earth independence from China on 'The Claman Countdown.'

Call it "The Art of the Rare Earth Deal." President Trump has embarked on bold new rare earths diplomacy to reduce China’s global dominance in the rare earth supply chain needed to power industries worldwide. And to do it, Trump is moving to strike rare earth gold in a new global mineral blitz to outflank Beijing, with new deals from Asia to Australia.

Rare earths are the foundation materials for much of modern technology and defense systems. Without these elements, production of EVs, iPhones, F-35 fighter jets, and even MRI machines would stall.

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Barry launches a Tomahawk cruise missile from the ships bow. Barry is currently supporting Joint Task Force Odyssey Dawn. (U.S. Navy photo by Lt.j.g. Monika Hess / DVIDS)

For defense, they're used for precision-guided missiles, radar, jet engines, satellites, drones and night-vision systems. For consumers, smartphones, flat-screens, hard drives, lasers.

TRUMP, JAPAN SIGN BLOCKBUSTER RARE EARTH MINERALS DEAL

Michael Grabinski, two weeks old is slid into a MRI machine Dr. David Brumbaugh at The Children's Hospital in Aurora, Colo. Aug. 23, 2010 during a research study on obesity in infants. The overall theme of the study is to understand the continuum of (Rick Wilking/Reuters / Reuters)

For the medical sector and factories, they're needed for MRI contrast agents and catalytic converters. For clean energy, they're needed for electric-vehicle motors, wind-turbine magnets.

Each EV motor needs about 1 kg of neodymium magnets.

Drivers charge their Teslas in Fountain Valley, Calif., on Wednesday, March 20, 2024. (Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images / Getty Images)

China currently controls 60–70% of rare-earth mining and over 85–90% of global refining capacity. This gives Beijing massive leverage over supply chains, especially since refining rare earths involves toxic waste and complex chemistry that many countries outsourced to China decades ago.

TRUMP CALLS XI’S RARE EARTH MOVE A ‘BAD MOMENT’ — WHY IT MATTERS FOR US NATIONAL SECURITY, CHINA TIES

But China has threatened and implemented tighter export controls on rare-earth elements and related materials, using them as leverage in trade and geopolitical negotiations.

Because these minerals are so critical, export controls or bans (like China’s in 2025) can cripple industries in the U.S., Japan, or Europe.

So what did President Trump and his team do? At least four major deals with Australia, Japan, plus in Southeast Asia. Plus President Trump is getting the EU, and allies to diversify their rare earth supply chains with Australia, Canada, and Southeast Asia.

US President Donald Trump, right, and Anthony Albanese, Australia's prime minister, during a meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Monday, Oct. 20, 2025. Trump says the AUKUS pact between the U.S., Australia and (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Just this month, President Trump signed a deal with Australia and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for critical minerals and rare-earth supply chains, committing at least $1 billion each in projects worth about $8.5 billion. He also struck a U.S.–Japan rare-earths minerals partnership with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

And the President just signed broader trade and critical-minerals deals with Southeast Asian nations Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Plus there are new extraction projects in Texas, Canada, and Africa. Plus the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act and the U.S. Defense Production Act are funding domestic processing.

foxbusiness.com · Elizabeth MacDonald

4. US military officials required to sign NDAs tied to Latin America mission, sources say

Is this something nefarious or is this simply people being read on to compartmented programs because they now have a need to know to support ongoing operations? Do people believe this is an attempt to prevent leaks or is this simply something that is required by regulation when being read on to a classified program? Is someone making a bigger deal out of this than it really is?

US military officials required to sign NDAs tied to Latin America mission, sources say

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-military-officials-required-sign-ndas-tied-latin-america-mission-sources-say-2025-10-28/

By Phil Stewart

October 28, 2025

WASHINGTON

U.S. military officials involved with President Donald Trump's expanding operations in Latin America have been asked to sign non-disclosure agreements, three U.S. officials say, a development that raises new questions about a military buildup that Venezuela fears may lead to an invasion.

The step is highly unusual, given that U.S. military officials are already required to shield national security secrets from public view, and comes as lawmakers in Congress say they are being kept in the dark about key aspects of the mission.

The officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity did not know how many members of the U.S. Defense Department had been asked to sign the agreements and did not offer further details on the scope of the NDAs.

While the Defense Department has turned to NDAs from time to time since Pete Hegseth became defense secretary in January, the Pentagon's use of non-disclosure agreements specific to activities in Latin America has not been previously reported.

The Pentagon announced last week the deployment of the Gerald Ford aircraft carrier group to Latin America, escalating a military buildup that experts say far exceeds any requirement for counter-narcotics operations -- the stated intent of the U.S. mission so far.

The U.S. military has carried out at least 13 strikes against alleged drug vessels, mostly in the Caribbean, since early September, killing about 57 people. The Pentagon has provided few details about the people targeted but has acknowledged some of them include people from Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador.

The carrier strike group adds another roughly 10,000 troops and enormous firepower to a buildup that already includes guided missile destroyers, F-35 fighter jets, a nuclear submarine and around 6,500 troops.

The Pentagon has not explained why such firepower is required for the counter-narcotics operations.

Hegseth has taken a series of steps to try to control the flow of information since taking over the Pentagon in January. He told Pentagon staff they must obtain permission before interacting with members of Congress, according to an Oct. 15 memo. He has also launched leak investigations and demanded Pentagon-based journalists sign a new press access policy, taking away the credentials of those who did not.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

DRUG TRADE

Trump's administration has been tying the governments of Venezuela and, more recently, neighboring Colombia directly to the drug trade, allegations denied by both governments. The claims, however, have raised concerns that the U.S. military might be tasked with carrying out attacks in both countries.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a senior Republican lawmaker with close ties to Trump, suggested in a television interview on Sunday Trump would soon outline to Congress "future potential military operations against Venezuela and Colombia."

Washington in August doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro's arrest to $50 million, accusing him of links to drug trafficking and criminal groups that Maduro denies.

Tensions between the United States and Venezuela's neighbor, Colombia, have also spiked in recent days, with Trump accusing Colombian President Gustavo Petro of being an "illegal drug leader" and a "bad guy" - language Petro's government says is offensive. Washington on Friday imposed sanctions on Petro.

US sanctions Colombia's president, accuses him of allowing expansion of ...

It accused him of allowing an expansion of the drug trade.

Graham said Trump had all the authority he needed to carry out operations in Latin America.

"These military assets are moving forward to deal with a country that's got blood on its hands when it comes to Americans by flooding our country with drugs from Venezuela and Colombia," Graham told CBS News' "Face the Nation" with Margaret Brennan.

"So, I hope Maduro would leave peacefully, but I don't think he's going to stay around much longer."

Reporting by Phil Stewart; additional reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by Nick Zieminski

5. The U.S. Army prepares to withdraw its new Typhon missile launch system from Japan

Would this be more like a normal deployment for an exercise and then a return to home station?

Is this media outlet trying to spin this to make it appear that we are removing the system because of China pressure or as a concession to China. Maybe we have effectively used an exercise with a key system to influence China. If that is so, then perhaps the ambiguity helps.

Excerpt:

In response to China’s “strong opposition,” expressed through its foreign affairs ministry, Japan’s Ministry of Defense even deemed it necessary to clarify that an indefinite deployment was not in Tokyo’s plans, and that the missile launch system had only been received on its territory for the aforementioned exercise. Moreover, it was stated that Washington also did not intend to keep the Typhon in Japan permanently and that this had already been conveyed to Japanese authorities, easing concerns on the matter.

The U.S. Army prepares to withdraw its new Typhon missile launch system from Japan

https://www.zona-militar.com/en/2025/10/27/the-u-s-army-prepares-to-withdraw-its-new-typhon-missile-launch-system-from-japan/

zona-militar.com · Redacción · October 27, 2025

After completing a new bilateral exercise, the U.S. Army is preparing to withdraw its new Typhon missile launch system from Japan, which was capable of reaching targets even in neighboring China. The news was confirmed to the media by Japan’s Ministry of Defense, which stated that during activities conducted as part of the Resolute Dragon 25 exercise, the system had been deployed at the Marine Corps Air Station located in the Japanese city of Iwakuni.

In this regard, the defense ministry stated: “The Ministry of Defense has received an explanation from the United States that the U.S. Forces in Japan are preparing for the withdrawal of the Typhon. We refrain from commenting on when this will occur, as it relates to the details of U.S. operations.” It is worth noting that some local media, such as Shimbun Akahata, had already begun expressing concerns in recent weeks about whether the deployment would have an end date, or whether, on the contrary, the Typhon system would remain there indefinitely.

The matter is by no means minor, considering that the local government had been informed that the system would be withdrawn one week after the completion of the joint U.S.-Japan training activities, which ran from September 11 to 25, with most field activities taking place from the 17th onward. For those concerned that the Typhon system might remain in Japan—given its implications regarding the Asian Giant—the circumstances seemed reminiscent of the situation in the Philippines, where the system was deployed in April for military exercises but was later kept for a considerably longer period with no withdrawal date currently scheduled.

In response to China’s “strong opposition,” expressed through its foreign affairs ministry, Japan’s Ministry of Defense even deemed it necessary to clarify that an indefinite deployment was not in Tokyo’s plans, and that the missile launch system had only been received on its territory for the aforementioned exercise. Moreover, it was stated that Washington also did not intend to keep the Typhon in Japan permanently and that this had already been conveyed to Japanese authorities, easing concerns on the matter.

It is important to recall that on September 16, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian stated during a press conference: “The United States and Japan must seriously respect the security concerns of other countries and contribute positively to regional peace and stability, rather than the opposite. We urge Japan to carefully reflect on its history of aggression, follow the path of peaceful development, and act prudently in the military and security fields.”

China’s concerns centered primarily on the Typhon system’s ability to deploy missiles capable of reaching the country’s east coast, a capability achievable through the use of Tomahawk missiles with a range exceeding 1,200 kilometers, while it can also launch shorter-range SM-6 missiles. As such, the Typhon system has been designed precisely as a platform to counter China’s growing naval deployments in the Indo-Pacific, positioning them at various strategic points to support the containment strategy outlined by Washington.

Images used for illustrative purposes.

zona-militar.com · Redacción · October 27, 2025

6. Trump’s Asia Gambit: Can the US Really Overtake China?

Presence. (and patience and persistence)

Is it really about "overtaking?" Or is this a battle between two of the most competitive countries in the world? (Something else I learned yesterday - Armeiccans are like Chinese and Chinese are like Americans - two of the most competitive people in the world).

Excerpts:

None of this is easy. China’s geographic proximity, integrated supply chains, and the sheer scale of its markets give it an advantage that a president’s tour alone cannot erase. But the trip matters for what it signals: Americans can still shape outcomes in the region if they commit resources, institutional continuity, and credible economic alternatives. For now, the balance of influence remains tilted toward Beijing; Trump’s tour nudges the needle but does not yet upend the scoreboard.

That should temper both triumphalism and fatalism. Policymakers in Washington should treat the tour as a start line, not a finish line. Southeast Asia will not choose a partner in a binary, Cold War-like sense; it will continue to hedge, i.e., extract benefits from both Beijing and Washington. The long game for the US, therefore, must be to not only make hedging harder to justify by offering reliable, deep, and institutionalized alternatives but also play it so that hedging remains in its favor. Absent that, even the most dramatic diplomatic moments will remain exactly that: dramatic, ephemeral, and unable to displace a regional order largely built on China’s economic gravity.

Politics

Trump’s Asia Gambit: Can the US Really Overtake China?

Presence matters; leaders take global powers seriously who show up

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/trump-asia-gambit-can-usa-overtake-china?utm

Oct 29, 2025

By: Salman Rafi Sheikh

The chairman shuffles

President Donald Trump’s recent sprint across Southeast Asia – a flurry of reciprocal-trade announcements, a high-profile ceasefire ceremony between Thailand and Cambodia, and the promise of talks with Xi Jinping in South Korea – was intended to do one thing loudly: show that the US still matters in Asia.

With Trump dancing to performances in Malaysia and assuring the region “that the United States is with you 100 percent and [that] we intend to be a strong partner for many generations,” the optics and the rhetoric have been undeniable even if the trade terms negotiated are onerous. But the deeper question raised by the trip is structural rather than rhetorical: can this kind of transactional diplomacy reverse China’s deep economic lead in the region?

The empirical backdrop matters. The Lowy Institute’s 2025 Asia Power Index finds China to be Asia’s largest economic player, with the strongest economic relationships and broad investment networks across Southeast Asia. Most importantly, Beijing, even with its surveillance state and bullying tactics in the South China Sea, has overcome the US in terms of popularity. Although the Lowy Institute report shows China’s lead by a tiny margin of just 1 percent, China’s rise has been palpable, translating into a visible structural advantage measured in trade volume, infrastructure finance, and persistent supply-chain integration.

In short, China’s footprint in the region is not merely political theatre; it is baked into how Southeast Asian economies function. Plus, Beijing’s engagement is multilateral, which aligns with regional associations like Asean’s own largely regional and global outlook. The region is known more for thinking regionally than extra-regionally, a policy vision that China understands more than the US. It is for this lack of understanding that Trump, for instance, withdrew from the Trans-Pacific treaty in 2016 and why he didn’t attend the Asia Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) meeting in South Korea on this visit.

Still, Washington’s primary objective remains to tackle China. So what is Trump’s strategy? In practice, it has three visible strands: spectacle, leverage, and hedging. The spectacle is the president showing up – the photo ops, the signing ceremonies, the public mediation of a border ceasefire – that seeks to reassert the US presence after years when many in Asia felt Washington had been distracted. By brokering peace, even if more performance than reality, the drudgery having been accomplished by local players, Trump wants not just to win the Nobel Peace Prize next year, but he also wants to indicate Washington’s continued geopolitical relevance in the region.

The leverage is being reinforced by tying, at least rhetorically, trade access and tariff relief to political cooperation on issues from critical minerals to export controls. The White House framed new reciprocal trade pacts as conditional carrots offered in exchange for market openness and cooperation.

The hedging element of Trump’s strategy may be his smartest play yet and the one Beijing should worry about most. Southeast Asian leaders have been trying to perfect the art of strategic hedging, staying close to China for growth while relying on the US for security. By reasserting Washington’s presence through deals and diplomacy, Trump isn’t just returning to the region; he’s giving Asean capitals something they crave: leverage vis-à-vis Beijing. When states like Malaysia sign new trade accords with the US or countries like Thailand join a US-brokered peace process, they demonstrate to Beijing that Southeast Asia still has options.

This visibility matters: it lets governments negotiate with China from a position of strength rather than dependency. The risk, of course, is that Washington remains a tool rather than a partner. In fact, the strategy risks reducing Washington’s presence to merely a convenient counterweight, not a cornerstone. But as the Lowy Institute’s 2025 Asia Power Index shows, with China’s dominance nearly entrenched, even acting as Beijing’s counterweight may be enough for the US to keep the balance from tipping permanently and irreversibly in Beijing’s favor.

Those moves have immediate strengths. First, presence matters in diplomacy; leaders take global powers seriously who show up and broker outcomes. Trump’s role in the Thailand-Cambodia ceasefire, which commits both sides to withdraw heavy weapons and place observers on the border, translated symbolic leadership into a tangible stability dividend at a volatile moment. Second, the trade commitments create short-term incentives for ASEAN economies to diversify suppliers and buyers, and to align some regulatory standards more closely with the US market. Third, the combination of security signaling and economic offers revives the old US playbook of being a balancer rather than simply a rival.

But these strengths sit beside significant weaknesses. Many headline announcements are frameworks or reciprocal-trade agreements in principle, not fully negotiated and/or ratified treaties. Implementation will require time, congressional buy-in, and budgetary commitments — the kind of sustained statecraft that has been uneven in US policy toward Asia. Trump, therefore, faces the uphill—but possible—task of translating the optics and symbolism of his visit into concrete policy frameworks that are actually implemented.

The ceasefire, for all its welcome effects, is fragile: border conflicts are notoriously difficult to resolve without persistent monitoring and confidence-building measures. Most crucially, US economic credibility is hamstrung by an inconsistent mix of protectionist rhetoric and selective liberalization; Southeast Asian states remember how quickly US commitments can change with domestic politics and administrations.

There is also an arithmetic problem. China’s advantage is structural and cumulative. Decades of trade integration, large-scale infrastructure finance via the Belt and Road and other mechanisms, and a contiguous manufacturing ecosystem make China not just a buyer or investor but the operating system for much of regional trade. Reversing requires building comparable economic architecture – not headline-driven deals – in areas such as ports, connectivity, long-term investment funds, and production networks. That is expensive, slow, and politically demanding, even for Trump.

If the goal is to overtake China as the region’s primary external partner, Washington will need to move from episodic spectacle to structural strategy. Practically, that means three interlocking priorities. First, Washington must actively convert frameworks into durable pacts. Negotiations must be deepened so that the so-called reciprocal agreements are legally binding and include dispute-settlement, investment protections, and clear implementation timelines. Short headlines are useless without durable institutions.

Second, the US needs to offer competitive and predictable financing for ports, power, and digital infrastructure, not merely policy papers. That requires public-private vehicles, strong multilateral coordination (including with and through regional development banks), and political willingness to underwrite long horizons. Third, Southeast Asian partners prize predictability. A US Asia strategy that survives elections and domestic turbulence, backed by a transparent roadmap and multiyear funding, will be far more persuasive than a single tour. From the Obama era “Asia Pivot” to Trump’s latest visit, inconsistency towards the region has been the hallmark of the US policy.

None of this is easy. China’s geographic proximity, integrated supply chains, and the sheer scale of its markets give it an advantage that a president’s tour alone cannot erase. But the trip matters for what it signals: Americans can still shape outcomes in the region if they commit resources, institutional continuity, and credible economic alternatives. For now, the balance of influence remains tilted toward Beijing; Trump’s tour nudges the needle but does not yet upend the scoreboard.

That should temper both triumphalism and fatalism. Policymakers in Washington should treat the tour as a start line, not a finish line. Southeast Asia will not choose a partner in a binary, Cold War-like sense; it will continue to hedge, i.e., extract benefits from both Beijing and Washington. The long game for the US, therefore, must be to not only make hedging harder to justify by offering reliable, deep, and institutionalized alternatives but also play it so that hedging remains in its favor. Absent that, even the most dramatic diplomatic moments will remain exactly that: dramatic, ephemeral, and unable to displace a regional order largely built on China’s economic gravity.

Dr Salman Rafi Sheikh is an Assistant Professor of Politics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. He is a long-time contributor on diplomatic affairs to Asia Sentinel.

7. Trump Expects to Sign China Trade Deal at Xi Summit

A trade deal is merely a stepping stone to a bigger project.

Trump Expects to Sign China Trade Deal at Xi Summit

Bringing manufacturing to the U.S. has been a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s negotiations with other nations

https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trump-expects-to-sign-china-trade-deal-at-xi-summit-66512555

By Jihye Lee and Fabiana Negrin Ochoa

Oct. 29, 2025 2:52 am ET

Bringing manufacturing to the U.S. has been a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s negotiations with other nations. Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

Quick Summary

President Trump anticipates signing a trade deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday, aiming to de-escalate tensions.View more

President Trump said he expects to sign a trade deal with China when he meets Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday, potentially paving the way for a de-escalation in tensions between the two sides.

“President Xi of China is coming tomorrow here, and we’re going to be, I hope, making a deal, I think we’re going to have a deal, I think it’ll be a good deal for both,” Trump said in a speech at the APEC Summit on Wednesday in Gyeongju, South Korea.

“I think it’s going to be a great deal,” he said ahead of a planned meeting with Xi.

Trump and Xi’s highly anticipated meeting is expected to cover a wide range of topics, including the export of chemicals used to produce fentanyl. The president has said the U.S. expects to lower tariffs on China in exchange for cooperation in cracking down on the export of chemicals used to make the synthetic opioid.

In the speech, he said that his administration will end “unfair trade barriers” and overhaul “weak, pathetic” supply chains, touting agreements signed during his Asia trip.

“On this trip alone, I’ve signed groundbreaking agreements with Malaysia, Cambodia, Japan, our deal with the Republic of Korea,” Trump said, adding that Seoul and Washington will be working together in shipbuilding. “Around the world we’re signing one trade deal after another, to balance our relationships on the basis of reciprocity.”

In a wide-ranging speech, he also listed a number of companies that have agreed to invest in the U.S. since the start of his term—saying that TSMC has pledged $100 billion, Hyundai $26 billion, Micron $200 billion, and “over $500 billion” from SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle, without elaborating further.

Trump added that his trade policies are “bringing back all pharmaceutical businesses” to the U.S. In September, he posted on Truth Social that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on any branded pharmaceutical product, unless a company is building plants in the U.S., without providing details.

Bringing manufacturing to the U.S. has been a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s negotiations with other nations, with trade talks often involving pledges to invest more in America.

He reiterated in his Wednesday speech: “If you build your factory in the U.S., there are zero tariffs.”

A slew of companies have announced billions in investments in America since Trump’s election. That could in theory mean a reprieve from tariffs, but a lot remains unclear about how the trade deals the U.S. has struck will implemented. Details around investment packages are particularly vague, and have been a sticking point in talks with Tokyo and Seoul.

Tokyo and Washington on Tuesday released a fact sheet outlining billions in investment projects in certain sectors pertaining to the $550 billion Japan said it would invest in the U.S. months earlier.

But without details on execution, it remains to be seen which companies are doing what.

“We don’t know what’s in there. It’s perfectly possible that those numbers include things that were going to happen anyway,” said Stefan Angrick at Moody’s Analytics. “How is this all going to be financed? How’s the profit sharing to work?”

“There’s not a lot of substance there. It’s just really big numbers.”

Write to Jihye Lee at jihye.lee@wsj.com and Fabiana Negrin Ochoa at fabiana.negrinochoa@wsj.com

8. After Demolishing the U.S.-China Relationship, Trump Is Rebuilding It His Way

I think we are starting to see the bigger picture revealed.

Perhaps five of the most important words to POTUS:

Demolition, disruption, and destruction, and building and re-building.

World
China

After Demolishing the U.S.-China Relationship, Trump Is Rebuilding It His Way

A summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping marks renewed engagement in a long-term superpower rivalry

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/trump-us-china-relationship-153a994a

By Lingling Wei

Oct. 28, 2025 11:00 pm ET

President Trump is also expected to travel to Beijing early next year. Francis Chung/Press Pool

Quick Summary

U.S. and Chinese trade negotiators reached a framework agreement in Kuala Lumpur, setting the stage for a major deal between President Trump and Xi Jinping.View more

President Trump blew up America’s decadeslong engagement with China during his first term. Now, he is poised to relaunch the kind of engagement with Beijing embraced by predecessors from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama—but on Trump’s terms.

Top trade negotiators for the U.S. and China, wrapping up two days of tense talks in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday, said they arrived at a framework agreement that sets the table for Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to agree on a major deal when they meet Thursday in South Korea.

The deal itself appears to be a transactional truce, potentially involving China resuming purchases of U.S. soybeans and delaying new controls on rare-earth minerals. On the table for the U.S. is shelving new tariffs, rolling back the 20% levy on China over its role in the fentanyl crisis in the U.S., and potentially refraining from taking new policy actions against China.

But there is more to the agreement than just a temporary cease-fire. It is the first plank in a newly structured, high-level dialogue, intended to lock in a full year of leader-led diplomacy. The schedule is ambitious: Trump is expected to travel to Beijing early next year followed by a reciprocal visit from Xi later that year.

For Trump, it’s a stunning reversal.

“The first Trump presidency put the U.S. and China on a pathway toward long-term, unquestionable competition, if not confrontation,” said Evan Medeiros, a former senior national-security official in the Obama administration and now a professor at Georgetown University. “Now it appears that Trump is flipping his own script on China, initiating a new phase of more and higher-level engagement.”

Beyond high-level diplomacy, the truce sets the stage for a tactical stabilization of the relationship over the next year.

Washington’s Oil Dilemma Returns: How to Hurt Moscow Without Raising Gas Prices

Enforcing tough measures against one of the world’s top oil producers risks triggering a supply shock

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-sanctions-oil-prices-cf56bcac

By Georgi Kantchev

and Laurence Norman

Oct. 28, 2025 11:00 pm ET

Analysts expect Moscow’s oil revenues to take a hit but that its oil exports will continue for now. Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg News

Quick Summary

The U.S. imposed new oil sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil producers, Rosneft and Lukoil, aiming to reduce Moscow’s war chest.View more

The Trump administration’s recent oil sanctions have revived a dilemma for the West: how to hurt Moscow’s war chest without inflicting economic self-harm.

Even after last week’s sanctioning of Russia’s two biggest oil producers, Rosneft and Lukoil, the U.S. has still more tools at its disposal to squeeze Moscow’s oil exports. Those range from blacklisting Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers to using secondary sanctions on banks, traders and refiners in other countries such as China or India.

But enforcing all these measures against one of the world’s top oil producers would risk triggering a supply shock and driving oil prices up. Squeezing Moscow is particularly fraught for Washington at a time when President Trump’s tariff policies have injected uncertainty into inflation trends and midterm election season is approaching.

“They are trying to thread a needle. They have clearly been given instructions not to blow up the global economy, so that does mean they are going to be using sanctions against third or fourth league targets,” said Richard Nephew, a former senior U.S. State Department sanctions official. “Based on what we have seen so far, they are basically doing a signaling operation with the hope of inflicting some damage.”

The sanctions are already reverberating across Europe, where Rosneft and Lukoil still hold supply contracts and own facilities. Germany and several Eastern European states have pushed for exemptions. Lukoil on Monday said it plans to sell its international assets due to the sanctions.

Moscow’s oil revenues will likely take a hit as tougher logistics and payment hurdles cut into profits and force deeper discounts, but for now analysts expect that exports will hold steady. Experience suggests Russia will turn to its shadow fleet, obscure networks of intermediaries and nondollar financial channels to sidestep the sanctions.

The Russian oil sector has also been under pressure from Ukrainian strikes targeting refineries and other energy infrastructure, heightening concerns about global oil supply and prices.

Since Western sanctions were first imposed at the start of the war, Russia has been playing a game of cat and mouse with the U.S. and Europe.

The European Union and the U.K. have imposed tough sanctions, but the lion’s share of enforcement power lies with the U.S. The Treasury Department has a powerful enforcement arm with decades of experience tracking sanctions evasion and has levied hefty fines on foreign violators. The EU and U.K. lack such centralized oversight, leaving enforcement to individual EU member states.

Unlike Europe, the U.S. frequently deploys secondary sanctions that penalize non-U.S. entities for dealings with sanctioned parties—effectively forcing compliance by threatening access to the U.S. financial system. Brussels has used similar measures only sparingly.

“The fear of being frozen out of U.S. dollar payment networks is very real,” said Robin Brooks, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

At the same time, the U.S. and Europe aren’t fully aligned in their sanctions policies.

According to a tally by Brooks, the EU has targeted over 550 vessels from Russia’s shadow fleet and the U.K. around 500, measures that include freezing assets and penalizing the owners and operators of the vessels. They are also banned from European ports. The U.S. has targeted some 216 tankers.

The Trump administration has also largely disengaged from an oil price cap, imposed by the Group of Seven nations, that sought to permit Russian oil to be traded with non-Western countries only if the amount paid was below a cap, currently set at $47.60. The U.S. could also go after intermediary financial institutions, nondollar payment networks and banks that handle Russian oil transactions to disrupt Moscow’s ability to bypass dollar-based sanctions.

Those gaps in the sanctions regime provide an opportunity for Moscow to continue stable exports. A January sanctions round by the outgoing Biden administration offers a case in point.

At the time, Washington blacklisted Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegas, the third and fourth-biggest Russian producers. But analysts at J.P. Morgan say that while documented exports from these companies fell, overall Russian seaborne volumes were maintained by using newly established entities not legally connected to the sanctioned companies as well as shadow shipping. Iran’s oil has been under major sanctions for years, and yet it has still managed to keep exports high.

Meanwhile, only about 5% of Russia’s oil exports are currently settled in dollars, a sharp drop from 55% before the invasion of Ukraine, according to J.P. Morgan. The ruble now accounts for 24% and the Chinese yuan dominates at 67% of payments, putting most Russian barrels outside the U.S. financial system.

“So far, exports of Russian [and other sanctioned] crudes have been surprisingly robust in the face of sanctions,” analysts at Morgan Stanley said in a Monday report to clients.

Still, the dollar’s reach is long. Key parts of commodities trading—including logistics, freight and insurance—rely on it. Losing access to the dollar system makes every stage of the process slower and costlier.

The new U.S. sanctions also raise the risks for refiners in China and India—Russia’s main buyers—which analysts say will prompt them to demand deeper discounts. Reliance on shadow tankers and intermediary traders further inflates shipping costs for Russian exporters.

Russian energy revenues were already down this year amid low global oil prices. In September, Russia’s monthly fossil fuel export revenues fell to their lowest level since the invasion, contributing to a rising budget deficit.

“I think the Europeans are intending to do damage but they are doing so in a very nervous way. I think the jury is out as to whether the U.S. are really trying to do damage” to Russia’s economy, said Nephew, the former State Department sanctions official.

Write to Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com and Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com

10. The U.S. Is on Track to Lose a War With China

Hmmm... Provocative or clickbait title? Yes, it caught my attention.

Hyperbole aside, there are some insights in this essay.

But the valor AND values of the individual fighting person - whether wielding a bayonet, on the bridge of a warship, in the cockpit of an aircraft, sitting at a keyboard controlling cyber space and space AND those (and perhaps especially those) who are working the production lines of our defense industrial base will always carry the day.

Excerpts:

In modern warfare, though, most battles are not contests for control of areas of immense strategic importance, and they almost never destroy equipment in quantities that determine the outcome of wars. Rather than deciding wars, individual battles reveal a war’s course by showing how different militaries are generating forces and adapting to changing conditions. Today’s wars are decided less by the military capabilities that each side has at the start than by the participants’ ability to generate new forces, adapt to new technologies, and work in coordination with allies.

...

In the past three and a half years, both sides have constantly had to build up new forces with new weapons and keep them supplied in the field. The armies of 2025 now bear little resemblance to the armies of 2022. Initially, drones were mostly an afterthought, and both sides deployed tanks, armored personnel carriers, and in some cases massed infantry near the front. The Ukrainians have used drones and missiles to sink many of Russia’s largest surface vessels in the Black Sea and driven the rest back to port. And both countries are bombarding each other almost nightly with long-range drones. By the time the war is ultimately decided, both militaries will have been destroyed and reconstructed many times. This is exactly what happens in most wars.

...

Controlling shipping in the Pacific Ocean would likely be the first task for the U.S. military. But the U.S. mostly lacks a shipbuilding industry. In 2024, for instance, the United States built 0.1 percent of world ship tonnage, according to a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis; Chinese shipyards built more than 50 percent. The U.S. has allowed its shipyards to close and lost generations of shipbuilding-engineering expertise, and it now has hardly any experienced shipbuilding workers outside of a few shipyards that supply the U.S. Navy. It would have to re-create all this expertise, which would take years, before it could start producing ships at a fraction of Chinese output.

...

Hegseth might well prefer to imagine that the valor of American soldier-warriors can overcome any other disadvantage, including a diminished military industrial base and fractured alliances. Instead of boasting about its superiority in hand-to-hand combat, the U.S. should be preparing its military for an onslaught of Chinese drones and a conflict that could last for years. Otherwise, it might win the opening battles—but it will probably lose the long war.

The U.S. Is on Track to Lose a War With China

Modern warfare is decided by production capacity and technological mastery, not by individual valor.

By Phillips Payson O’Brien

The Atlantic · Phillips Payson O’Brien · October 28, 2025

In his address to generals and admirals late last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vividly described his vision of how wars are won. Soldiers and sailors are prepared to ship out “in the dead of night, in fair weather or foul, to go to dangerous places to find those who would do our nation harm, and deliver justice on behalf of the American people in close and brutal combat if necessary,” Hegseth said. “In this profession,” he went on, “you feel comfortable inside the violence so that our citizens can live peacefully. Lethality is our calling card, and victory our only acceptable end state.”

This stress on bravery and lethality in hand-to-hand fighting evoked Spartan and Roman warriors who stared their enemies in the eye and killed them with spears or swords. But the U.S. military is not going to confront the Athenians or Carthaginians in its next war, and the results of that war will not be determined by individual valor. Indeed, if the United States goes to war with China, its closest competitor and greatest geopolitical challenger, the bravery of soldiers on both sides will be largely irrelevant. Since the beginning of the 20th century, industrial-scale wars have been won through superiority in production capacity, logistics, and technological mastery.

Read: What Pete Hegseth doesn’t understand about soldiers

If Hegseth and other U.S. military planners think they are going to defeat China through ferocity in close combat, they are fooling themselves. The course of Russia’s war on Ukraine—which looks more and more like the prototype for wars of the near future—is being determined not by the valor or lethality of the average infantryman, but by the ability of Ukraine and its allies to inflict pain on the Russian economy, and to waste Russian battlefield and home-front resources through the manufacture of millions of drones, artillery shells, and long-range weapons systems. Such equipment is now being used to attack oil refineries, power plants, and other targets hundreds or thousands of miles behind the front lines.

As I argue in my new book, War and Power: Who Wins Wars—And Why, generations of military leaders in powerful nations have long made fundamental errors in thinking about what prepares a state to win a war. Many of those mistakes reflect what we might call a “battle-centric” understanding of conflict—an assumption that outcomes are determined by what happens when troops meet in the field. In this line of thinking, a war may turn on a decisive battle, often in the war’s early stages, in which one side suddenly renders the other’s position untenable.

In modern warfare, though, most battles are not contests for control of areas of immense strategic importance, and they almost never destroy equipment in quantities that determine the outcome of wars. Rather than deciding wars, individual battles reveal a war’s course by showing how different militaries are generating forces and adapting to changing conditions. Today’s wars are decided less by the military capabilities that each side has at the start than by the participants’ ability to generate new forces, adapt to new technologies, and work in coordination with allies.

At the start of World War I, many major European powers presumed that they could quickly end the conflict by overwhelming their enemy in early battles. Most famously, Germany’s Schlieffen Plan was based on the premise that the German army could swiftly defeat the French army and seize Paris, driving France out of the war and allowing the Germans to turn the mass of their army on imperial Russia. Events did not work out that way. Instead of ending before Christmas 1914, as parties on both sides of the hostilities had predicted, a war of attrition went on for more than four years, drew in soldiers from around the globe, and killed many millions of people.

In World War II, individual battles, even those remembered as the most important, rarely destroyed much equipment relative to how much was being produced at the time. In 1943, for instance, the German and Soviet armies fought the largest tank battle of the war at Kursk—an event frequently described as a turning point in the war. Yet during the most intense phase of the engagement—the opening 10 days—Germany lost only approximately 300 tanks, most of which were older, less efficient models. At that time, Germany was producing tanks at a pace of 11,000 a year. The obsolescent models destroyed at Kursk were soon replaced by more modern tanks, increasing the average quality of the German tank fleet.

Anne Applebaum: The Pentagon’s preferred propaganda model

What decided World War II in the end was that over the course of several years, the Soviet Union and its key allies, the United States and Britain, were together able to generate and sustain better forces than Germany could ever hope to match.

Like World War II, the war in Ukraine has turned into a long, brutal struggle of force generation and destruction. Before launching its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Russia, as well as many outside analysts, believed that its superior stocks of tanks, warships, and other vehicles would crush the Ukrainians in short order. The war might be effectively decided in hours and could end in a few days, with the Russians in control of Kyiv and Ukrainian leaders fleeing for their lives. This was a tragic misunderstanding of war. Instead, Ukraine fought back effectively, the war lengthened and metastasized, and it led to more than 1 million casualties for Russia alone.

In the past three and a half years, both sides have constantly had to build up new forces with new weapons and keep them supplied in the field. The armies of 2025 now bear little resemblance to the armies of 2022. Initially, drones were mostly an afterthought, and both sides deployed tanks, armored personnel carriers, and in some cases massed infantry near the front. The Ukrainians have used drones and missiles to sink many of Russia’s largest surface vessels in the Black Sea and driven the rest back to port. And both countries are bombarding each other almost nightly with long-range drones. By the time the war is ultimately decided, both militaries will have been destroyed and reconstructed many times. This is exactly what happens in most wars.

These dynamics do not bode well for the United States in a long war with China. Right now, the U.S. has what appears to be the more capable military, and certainly the more battle-tested and technologically advanced one. It might inflict disproportionately higher losses on the Chinese at first. But because of its diminished production capacity, the U.S. would struggle to make up even a small part of the battlefield losses that it would inevitably suffer. China—which is as much the workshop of the world today as the United States was in World War II—could churn out replacement weaponry at an impressively quick pace.

Read: Trump hands the world to China

Controlling shipping in the Pacific Ocean would likely be the first task for the U.S. military. But the U.S. mostly lacks a shipbuilding industry. In 2024, for instance, the United States built 0.1 percent of world ship tonnage, according to a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis; Chinese shipyards built more than 50 percent. The U.S. has allowed its shipyards to close and lost generations of shipbuilding-engineering expertise, and it now has hardly any experienced shipbuilding workers outside of a few shipyards that supply the U.S. Navy. It would have to re-create all this expertise, which would take years, before it could start producing ships at a fraction of Chinese output.

Shipbuilding is just one industry in which U.S. production would struggle to keep up. China, for instance, controls 90 percent of the world’s commercial-drone production, and supplies many of the components that are being put into both Ukrainian and Russian drones today. American wealth helps only so much: States cannot simply throw money at a problem and create productive strategic industries in a short period. To compound the issue for the U.S., its allies are even less prepared militarily, and Washington is currently going out of its way to alienate them instead of fostering the cohesion necessary to deter or fight China.

Hegseth might well prefer to imagine that the valor of American soldier-warriors can overcome any other disadvantage, including a diminished military industrial base and fractured alliances. Instead of boasting about its superiority in hand-to-hand combat, the U.S. should be preparing its military for an onslaught of Chinese drones and a conflict that could last for years. Otherwise, it might win the opening battles—but it will probably lose the long war.

The Atlantic · Phillips Payson O’Brien · October 28, 2025

11. Trump Hails Golden Era in Japan Relations

The PM looks very enthused in the video with POTUS.

These are some powerful words from POTUS. It almost sounds like a blank check. They are certainly words every ally would like to hear.

Excerpts:

“I have such respect for Japan as a country, and now I have a really great respect for the new and incredible prime minister,” Trump said.

...

Yet there were no signs of any strains when the two leaders met in Tokyo.

“Everything I know from Shinzo and others, you will be one of the great prime ministers,” Trump said.

“I want to just let you know anytime you have any question, any doubt, anything you want, any favors you need, anything I can do to help Japan, we will be there,” Trump said.

Takaichi thanked Trump for his enduring friendship with Abe and his gracious hospitality in welcoming Abe’s widow, Akie, to his Mar-a-Lago estate late last year. Akie Abe also attended Trump’s January inauguration at his invitation.

Trump Hails Golden Era in Japan Relations

President heaps praise on Japan’s first female prime minister as the two leaders pledge to renew alliance aboard U.S. aircraft carrier

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/trump-hails-golden-era-in-japan-relations-63888687

By Meridith McGraw

and Jason Douglas

Updated Oct. 28, 2025 11:24 pm ET

WSJ Tokyo Bureau Chief Jason Douglas explains how Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s summit with President Trump secured a new ‘golden age’ for the U.S.-Japanese alliance. Photo: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters Photo: Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters

Quick Summary

President Trump and Prime Minister Takaichi pledged enhanced security and trade cooperation, reinforcing the U.S.-Japan alliance.View more

ABOARD THE USS GEORGE WASHINGTON—President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi pledged to usher in a new era of cooperation on security and trade, reinvigorating an alliance that Trump described as the foundation of peace in the Pacific.

Surrounded by 6,000 U.S. service personnel on the USS George Washington, a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier docked at Yokosuka Naval Base near Tokyo, Trump said “the cherished alliance between the U.S. and Japan is one of the most remarkable relationships anywhere in the world.”

He also heaped praise on Takaichi, a conservative who became prime minister only last week.

“I have such respect for Japan as a country, and now I have a really great respect for the new and incredible prime minister,” Trump said.

The two leaders’ visit Tuesday to the U.S. Navy’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier came in the middle of Trump’s six-day, three-country tour that began in Malaysia, continued to Japan and will wrap up in South Korea, where he is expected to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Trump’s visit has centered on strengthening economic, business and diplomatic ties in Asia, a signal to Beijing that the U.S. won’t cede influence in the region to its superpower rival ahead of a high-stakes meeting with Xi aimed at easing tensions over trade.

For Japan, Trump’s presence side-by-side with Takaichi on a centerpiece of American power in the Pacific, its Japan-based aircraft carrier, sent a potent message of reassurance on the U.S.’s commitment to the region’s defense, amid some anxiety throughout Asia over how far Trump is prepared to go to defend America’s allies.

Earlier Tuesday, Trump and Takaichi met in Akasaka Palace in Tokyo. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

They were later welcomed by U.S. Navy personnel aboard the Washington. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Takaichi hosted Trump for a summit earlier in the day in Tokyo, where Takaichi hailed a “golden age” of U.S.-Japan relations. The pair also spoke of their mutual affection for Shinzo Abe, the late Japanese prime minister who bonded with Trump during the U.S. president’s first term and who was a political mentor to Takaichi.

With Trump at her side aboard the Washington, Takaichi pledged to beef up Japan’s military and take on a bigger role ensuring stability in Asia, an ambition in tune with Trump’s desire to see U.S. allies spend more on defense to counter threats from adversaries including Russia, China and North Korea.

“We are facing an unprecedented security environment,” Takaichi said, speaking through an interpreter. “Peace cannot be protected by words alone.”

Relations between the two countries had been strained by Trump’s quest to refashion global trade, which culminated in Japan accepting tariffs of 15% on autos and other exports in exchange for a pledge to invest $550 billion in the U.S. during Trump’s second term. Takaichi had floated the idea of revisiting the deal when running for president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, reflecting anxiety in some quarters that the deal was too lopsided in the U.S.’s favor.

Yet there were no signs of any strains when the two leaders met in Tokyo.

“Everything I know from Shinzo and others, you will be one of the great prime ministers,” Trump said.

“I want to just let you know anytime you have any question, any doubt, anything you want, any favors you need, anything I can do to help Japan, we will be there,” Trump said.

Takaichi thanked Trump for his enduring friendship with Abe and his gracious hospitality in welcoming Abe’s widow, Akie, to his Mar-a-Lago estate late last year. Akie Abe also attended Trump’s January inauguration at his invitation.

The prime minister praised Trump’s efforts to end a border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia and broker a cease-fire and hostage-release deal between Israel and Hamas in the Middle East.

Takaichi presenting Trump with golf-themed gifts in a photo provided by Trump aide Margo Martin. Reuters

While Takaichi doesn’t play golf as Abe did, she used some sports diplomacy during her meeting with Trump. Takaichi said their summit got off to a late start because they were watching the World Series baseball game between the Toronto Blue Jays and Los Angeles Dodgers. Star baseball player Shohei Ohtani, a Japanese national, has made the Dodgers particularly popular in Japan. And she presented the president with Abe’s putter and a golf bag signed by Japanese professional golfer Hideki Matsuyama.

The prime minister said Japan plans to give the U.S. 250 cherry blossom trees to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary and fireworks from Akita Prefecture for the July 4 display.

In Takaichi, Japan has a hawkish new leader who is eager to build up Japan’s military with new weapons and capabilities. Trump said Tuesday that he approved the sale of a first batch of missiles for the Japan Self-Defense Force’s F-35 warplanes.

In her inaugural speech as prime minister last week, Takaichi vowed to lift spending on defense to 2% of Japan’s gross domestic product by the end of the fiscal year through March, from around 1.4% the previous fiscal year, accelerating a timetable that previously aimed to hit that goal in 2027. She also pledged to speed a review of Japan’s overarching security strategy, bringing it forward by one year to 2026.

At a working lunch, the U.S. and Japanese delegations ate American rice and beef paired with Japanese ingredients. Takaichi presented Trump with a map of the major investments Japan is making in the U.S. Japanese officials arranged for U.S. vehicles, including a gold-hued Ford F-150 pickup truck, to be stationed outside Akasaka Palace, where Trump and Takaichi met.

The two leaders signed an agreement to work together on securing supplies of rare earths and other critical minerals, including investing in mining and processing facilities, mapping promising deposits and stockpiling resources for future use. Rare-earth supplies have come up frequently during Trump’s Asia tour, after China—the world’s dominant producer—tightened its control over exports.

Japan’s Ministry of Finance also published a list of potential projects that could be part of the $550 billion investment portion of the trade deal. They included projects related to artificial intelligence, infrastructure, energy and critical minerals.

During his address aboard the Washington, Trump said the Japanese prime minister told him that auto giant Toyota would be investing some $10 billion in U.S. auto plants.

“Go out and buy a Toyota,” Trump told the assembled troops.

A senior Toyota executive, Hiroyuki Ueda, told reporters in Tokyo on Wednesday the company will continue to invest in plants and jobs in the U.S. but hasn’t made an explicit commitment to invest $10 billion. That was the sum Toyota invested during Trump’s first term, he said.

Write to Meridith McGraw at Meridith.McGraw@WSJ.com and Jason Douglas at jason.douglas@wsj.com

Appeared in the October 29, 2025, print edition as 'Trump, Japan’s Premier Vow to Boost Ties'.

12. Setting The Force: 10 Steps for Resolving The Special Forces “Identity Crisis”

An important essay from Bob Jones

The one thing I strongly disagree with is the idea that we are trapped by the exploits of the Jedburghs. Yes it is true that there are those narrow minded people who may think we should just mirror image the Jedburghs or think that is the only way to conduct UW. But those who can study and apply history can learn lessons and take inspiration from the Jedburghs without being trapped by the model. I would say do not criticize the Jedburghs but only those who cannot effectively adapt the lessons of the Jedburghs to the modern era and modern UW.

In my simple mind the essence of UW has always been about solving or contributing to solving complex political military problems for our nation and creating dilemmas for our enemies by working through, with, and by indigenous forces and populations.

I strongly agree with Bob's conclusion here:

Conclusion

In conclusion, I do not believe our Special Forces community is suffering a crisis because our soldiers are confused about their identity. I believe we are suffering a crisis of not telling our soldiers what we need them to be and then empowering them accordingly. Too often, we cast as “soldier problems” what are more accurately failures of leadership. This crisis is such a case. Good leaders armed with the certainty of experience and knowledge, and doing things right, brought us to where we currently are. It will be an uncertain path, probing the realms of possibility that take us to where we need to be. Our moral courage, patience, and risk tolerance will be put to the test. Arming leaders with concepts that pass the test of being logical, simple, scalable, repeatable, and helpful will be essential to our success. If we cannot tell our story to those who give us permission to act, we will sit idle or end up doing mundane things.

The reality is that our special operators are frustrated because we send them out year after year on infeasible operations in support of impossible policies. Their sacrifice and tactical successes are squandered. The force is frayed because there is no end to problematic symptoms, and our solutions to address those symptoms invariably serve to exacerbate underlying problems, despite our best efforts. The SOF community is not a victim. It is on us that we didn’t push back against overly conventional perspectives. It is on us that we did not offer and insist upon allowing our SOF experts on population-based conflicts to inform policymakers of what the problem was, rather than the other way around.

T.E. Lawrence famously called for operations that were “more sophisticated than a bayonet charge,” and William “Wild Bill” Donovan sought “Ph.Ds. who could win a bar fight.” From where I sit, we’ve got the right people—we just owe them a little more sophistication and a few less bayonet charges.

Essay| The Latest

Setting The Force: 10 Steps for Resolving The Special Forces “Identity Crisis”

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/10/29/solving-special-forces-identity-crisis/

by Robert C. Jones

10.29.2025 at 06:00am

The Evolution of the Special Forces ODA. Courtesy US Army magazine Veritas, Vol. 19, No.1 (2023).

If Special Forces has an “identity crisis,” it is because we misunderstood and mislabeled the problems we were sent to resolve, and applied solutions rooted in how the problems were labeled and defined, rather than for what they were. The world had changed, and revisionist actors of every ilk had stolen a march on those overly wedded to an obsolete playbook. For true change, we, as a Regiment, must first reframe the problem and then set out to reimagine more durable solutions.

The same changes fueling frustrating challenges and expanding threats reveal new insights as well. It is easy to write our struggles off as a result of complexity. It is easy to accept reactive, symptomatic measures as the best we can offer. Mitigate the violence, disrupt or defeat threats, and we’ve done our job. In addition to our own unilateral prowess, we excelled at training and equipping others to be tactically better as well. These are missions we excel at, and we are providing our nation with the special operations forces (SOF) that civilian leadership desires. But are we producing positive and enduring strategic results? Are we giving our nation the SOF it needs?

In my own experience, which includes engagements with literally thousands of senior SOF NCOs over 15 years of Joint Special Operations University Enlisted Academy engagements, I believe that a deep sense of frustration is likely at the heart of our “crisis.” With reframed problems and reimagined solutions, however, I believe strongly that the Special Forces Regiment can potentially become one of the most important tools in our nation’s policy toolkit. This is not a fix to be installed at the bottom of the formation. These are changes that demand support from key leaders at the General Officer level.

The reality is that our special operators are frustrated because we send them out year after year on infeasible operations in support of impossible policies.

Amid this chaos of rapid change and infinite variables, human nature is the one source of certainty we can rely upon. Baked into the human genome are forces we do not fully understand, but whatever it is, human nature is a virtual constant, providing a solid foundation for strategic concepts. Fortunately for us, the primary missions of Special Forces are all deeply rooted in the human dynamics of governance, conflict, and warfare. Accurately understanding these interactions of situational variables and human constants is the cornerstone of sound strategy in general and essential to the optimal employment of SOF. With my operational days behind me, I will leave the practical, tactical details for others to address. Instead, I will offer a strategist’s perspective to help guide those efforts.

To reset Special Forces for the modern world, we must first clarify our understanding of the human dynamics unique to our missions, and then ensure that our doctrine guides, rather than constrains, our actions. Unfortunately, in far too many cases, neither of those things are true. Many of the challenges we face are overly defined yet poorly understood. I sometimes quip that while we often define our way into frustration, it is incumbent upon us now to understand our way to greater success. And yet, too often the inertia of history holds us back. Too often, a bias born of situation, position, and emotion serves to cloud our understanding. Too often, our doctrine becomes overly descriptive of how some activity might look or act—or overly fixated on who might participate and why—all while losing sight of what the pure nature of an activity is once freed of these situational characteristics.

The obstacles to change are also significant. Too often, flawed definitions and overly encumbered doctrine are jealously guarded by a wide array of gatekeepers and experts—many holding key positions and serving at the highest levels. Challenges are met with resistance, and this is a form of resistance that typically prevails. But I enjoy a good challenge, so here are ten areas I would address first to help resolve our crisis. The first seven are substantive, related to each other, and fully within the control of SOF leadership. Two are procedural and demand decisions beyond our ranks. The last is simply a friendly piece of advice.

Ten Steps for Setting the Force:

Clarify our understanding of insurgency.
Free unconventional warfare from the burdens of our storied past.
Shift the focus of SOF Intelligence from knowing threats to understanding grievances.
Empower and employ ODA-level (Operational Detachment-Alpha) operators to identify and develop opportunities.
Ensure every action is designed to convey an intended narrative through its execution.
Center the ‘X’ on the minds of our adversaries and focus our effects on that space.
Campaign persistently and globally, shifting focus as necessity or opportunity presents.
Free SOF from Service personnel systems, make Special Forces joint to the ODA level.
Make ‘SOF for life’ a well-funded reality.
Provide the Regiment with a refined purpose and missions relevant to modern challenges.

Clarify our understanding of insurgency.

The history of insurgency showcases the tremendous diversity of ideologies, forms, and purposes this family of conflict assumes. However, once one gets past the bias of the authors and the overwhelming facts of how every insurgency is unique, a very different picture emerges. Strategy is not found in how these conflicts are all situationally unique, but in how they all rhyme in their shared human nature. In fundamental terms, insurgency is quite simple. Insurgency invariably requires only three factors and comes in two broad yet distinct types. Insurgency must be based within some population perceiving itself in conditions of legally irreconcilable political grievance. Insurgency must be political in its primary purpose. Lastly, insurgency must be illegal under the laws of the governance being challenged. If any one of those factors are missing one is dealing with a completely different form of problem, even if looks and acts in a very similar fashion. But we are not here to treat symptoms, we are here to solve problems.

The two distinct types are internal revolutionary insurgency and external resistance insurgency. The first only differs from democracy in its illegality of action. Revolution is best thought of as an exercise in illegal democracy and cannot be cured or defeated through warfare. The second is the illegal efforts of a population to coerce change upon some external source of governance. This is indeed a form of warfare as it is between two actors rather than within one. Relationships matter. Both forms can, and often do, occur in hybrid form within the same time, space, and populations. Doctrine ignores these distinctions, and policy and strategy failing to account for the unique nature of each is unlikely to succeed. The days of simply suppressing the symptoms of insurgency through some blend of bribery and force (repeating as necessary) are behind us.

Free unconventional warfare from the burdens of our storied past.

In many ways, Unconventional Warfare (UW) is trapped by the exploits of Jedburgh Teams in occupied Europe. Our definition of UW is overly narrow and descriptive. By emphasizing key aspects of historic UW operations, we paint ourselves into a very tight corner of an incredibly broad playing field. We also over-emphasize the most extreme examples of why one might engage in UW. When we speak of denied areas and the overthrowing of foreign regimes, we portray a line of effort that is very easy to say “no” to. As with insurgency, when cast in fundamental terms, UW is simple, powerful, and incredibly flexible in both approach and purpose.

Maj. Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan when he headed the Office of Strategic Services. Courtesy CIA archives.

Fundamental UW is any action to leverage the latent or active insurgency within a population governed by another to advance one’s own interests. UW can be employed anywhere there is a political grievance and can be used to foster positive influence, create powerful new lines of deterrence, or disrupt actors like the Islamic State. Yes, it can indeed be employed to coerce or overthrow some foreign regime, but that is perhaps the worst, not best, example. For example, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have conducted UW since inception, and as such are quite resilient to counterterrorism. The credible threat of UW is perhaps the best way to deter the illicit challenges of state actors like China, Russia, or Iran. Ultimately, UW is far more than Jedburghs and Horse Soldiers.

Shift the focus of SOF Intelligence from knowing threats to understanding grievances.

For Special Forces, threats are typically problematic symptoms to manage, and not the actual problem to resolve. The energy in the system, the center of gravity, if you will, is invariably some population perceiving itself to be in conditions of legally irreconcilable political grievance. The special operations intelligence community has become masterful in its analysis of threats and in guiding the reactive, elite, counterterrorism operations that have defined the post-9/11 era. Sustain those skills. Now we need you to shift focus to identifying and understanding political grievances. This is the common operating picture (COP) we need to guide the special operations required to advance and secure our interests today. This needs to be a holistic effort, not just grievance towards adversaries we seek to deter or disrupt, but grievance towards our partners, allies, and ourselves as well.

Treat every operation as an influence operation first.

Empower and employ ODA-level operators to identify and develop opportunities.

High-risk counterterrorism operations demanding vast arrays of enabling capabilities also demanded large footprints, large headquarters, and massive bureaucracies. The insurgency-based, UW operations needed now are executed best through the actions of small teams working among well-understood populations far from bases of military support. Sometimes this will be clandestine and lethal, but most often it will be transparent and benign. Even historic mechanisms like JCETs (Joint, Combined Exchange Training) overly tie our teams to specific partners and locations. Sustain our traditional approaches, but going forward, we must evolve to accept greater risk, employ greater trust, and create innovative mechanisms allowing our forces to get to where they need to be and do what they need to do. Establish the guardrails and permissions, then step back and let our small units amaze us with their energy and creativity.

Ensure every action is designed to convey an intended narrative through its execution.

Treat every operation as an influence operation first. Both as a noun, to foster a relatively positive influence for the US, and as a verb, to clearly convey through actions taken the specific themes tied to the policy goals and strategic focus of a campaign. When we fixate on achieving tactical goals in ways that are clearly contrary to policy goals, our efforts become strategically counterproductive. In past operations, we became incredibly skilled at taking down specific targets, but those operations rarely conveyed strategic themes through their execution, such as the sovereignty of the host nation or the appropriateness of our actions in their country. Unless control of the target is essential, make the narrative the top priority. Our words should echo and reinforce what our actions already said. We burn valuable influence when they are misaligned.

Center the “X” on the minds of our adversaries and focus our effects on that space.

Actions are local, but effects are global. Unlike the conventional force, SOF need not place the “X” on a specific piece of terrain. Ultimately, we are conducting subtle psychological warfare to create negative effects within the minds of adversary leaders. We also operate to foster relative positive influence among friendly audiences, and that too occurs within the minds of a wide range of relevant populations. Free the force from the artificial constraints of terrain. Instead, empower the entire force to pursue challenges and opportunities globally, developing a scalable array of options tailorable to a wide range of potential situations. SOF’s strategic advantage lies in these global efforts to create a thousand doubts in the minds of adversaries, and to foster friendly confidence in equal measures. If war comes, a portion of the force will ride to the sound of the guns – but most of the force should disperse to those globally distributed pockets of adversary-caused grievance, and live large in adversary minds as they wonder what trouble we might cause.

Campaign persistently and globally, shifting focus as necessity or opportunity presents.

Have each Theater SOC coordinate global campaigns for the challenges that manifest within their boundaries, but free the force from those artificial constraints to operate wherever opportunity exists. Indirect approaches and higher-order thinking should dominate SF activities. Global campaign plans and persistent efforts—even if intermittent—are necessary to optimize the efforts of our Special Forces teams. Teams should have specific areas of responsibility that they are free to visit for weeks at a time and multiple times a year, in the pursuit of understanding populations, risks, and opportunities. Ambassadors and senior Commanders around the world should view these grievance-based conversations with our teams as a routine highlight that is essential to informing their broader responsibilities.

Nigerian Armed Forces train convoy operations alongside a 20th SFG Detachment. Courtesy DVIDS, US Army.

Free SOF from Service personnel systems, make Special Forces joint to the ODA level.

Procedurally, SF, like mankind, cannot serve two masters. As the military shrinks, it makes sense to open Army Special Forces to members of every service to volunteer for assessment and selection. Then, once qualified, it also makes sense to separate those soldiers from the rules, standards, and regulations of the conventional force and to place them within full control of a Special Operations personnel system designed to optimize their talent and careers and to empower the force.

Make “SOF for life” a well-funded reality.

This is not a new idea, but it is an unrealized capability. Keep every willing former Special Forces soldier on a small retainer. Maintain a global network and be able to employ them in whatever role they are willing to play. At a minimum, this greatly expands the psychological effects of the force. We’ll let our adversaries worry about what the optimal effects might be. The regular interaction of current ODAs with former/retired SF personnel in an operational context will also help to expand appreciation of what “normal” or “real” special operations consist of.

Provide the Regiment with a refined purpose and missions relevant to modern challenges.

Special Forces work is serious business—but it should also be deeply rewarding. Everyone should aspire to earn the right to wear the Green Beret. Inevitably, some will question why small groups of Special Forces soldiers spend several months a year in relatively unfettered engagements in their respective areas of responsibility. These criticisms often come from a place of misunderstanding or are viewed through a lens shaped by conventional perspectives. Ultimately, we are not the same.

Why are these soldiers entrusted with such operational autonomy while others operate under tighter constraints? The classified answer is that information is “need-to-know.” The unclassified answer is simple: “Apply for selection, and if you have what it takes, you may one day earn the privilege to understand for yourself.”

Conclusion

In conclusion, I do not believe our Special Forces community is suffering a crisis because our soldiers are confused about their identity. I believe we are suffering a crisis of not telling our soldiers what we need them to be and then empowering them accordingly. Too often, we cast as “soldier problems” what are more accurately failures of leadership. This crisis is such a case. Good leaders armed with the certainty of experience and knowledge, and doing things right, brought us to where we currently are. It will be an uncertain path, probing the realms of possibility that take us to where we need to be. Our moral courage, patience, and risk tolerance will be put to the test. Arming leaders with concepts that pass the test of being logical, simple, scalable, repeatable, and helpful will be essential to our success. If we cannot tell our story to those who give us permission to act, we will sit idle or end up doing mundane things.

The reality is that our special operators are frustrated because we send them out year after year on infeasible operations in support of impossible policies. Their sacrifice and tactical successes are squandered. The force is frayed because there is no end to problematic symptoms, and our solutions to address those symptoms invariably serve to exacerbate underlying problems, despite our best efforts. The SOF community is not a victim. It is on us that we didn’t push back against overly conventional perspectives. It is on us that we did not offer and insist upon allowing our SOF experts on population-based conflicts to inform policymakers of what the problem was, rather than the other way around.

T.E. Lawrence famously called for operations that were “more sophisticated than a bayonet charge,” and William “Wild Bill” Donovan sought “Ph.Ds. who could win a bar fight.” From where I sit, we’ve got the right people—we just owe them a little more sophistication and a few less bayonet charges.

Tags: insurgency, Special Forces, Unconventional Warfare, US Army Special Operations Command

About The Author

Robert C. Jones
Robert C. Jones is a retired US Army Special Forces Colonel and a senior strategist at United States Special Operations Command. He is currently on loan to Defense Security Cooperation University, serving as the US Joint Special Operations Expert to the Ministry of Defense, Tunisia. He holds a Juris Doctorate from Willamette University College of Law and a Master’s in Strategic Studies from the US Army War College. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the position of United States Special Operations Command, Defense Security Cooperation University, or the Department of Defense.

13. Why Xi and Trump are set to talk in Busan, away from South Korea’s Apec events

US-China relations

China Diplomacy

Why Xi and Trump are set to talk in Busan, away from South Korea’s Apec events

Chinese foreign ministry confirms leaders to ‘exchange views on bilateral relations and issues of mutual interest’

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3330734/why-xi-and-trump-are-set-talk-busan-away-south-koreas-apec-events?utm

Alyssa Chenin Gyeongju

Published: 4:26pm, 29 Oct 2025

Highly anticipated talks between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump on the sidelines of the Apec summit are set for Thursday in Busan, South Korea – some 85km (53 miles) from the forum’s main events in Gyeongju – and security considerations could explain why as the two seek to make headway on issues that have left bilateral ties strained.

On Wednesday, the Chinese foreign ministry announced that Xi and Trump would meet in Busan to “exchange views on bilateral relations and issues of mutual interest”.

Guo Jiakun, a foreign ministry spokesperson, said the two leaders would engage in in-depth discussions on “strategic and long-term issues” concerning bilateral relations, as well as major topics of mutual interest.

“We are willing to work with the US side to ensure positive outcomes from this meeting, providing new guidance and injecting fresh momentum into the stable development of China-US relations,” Guo added.

Chinese President Xi Jinping (left) and US President Donald Trump last met in person in 2019. Photo: AFP

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Wednesday morning, Trump said he expected to discuss with Xi fentanyl flows into the US and American farmers.

Trump’s remarks followed a Wall Street Journal report on Tuesday suggesting that Washington might reduce the 20 per cent fentanyl-related tariffs on Chinese exports by half in exchange for Beijing’s crackdown on the export of chemicals used to produce fentanyl.

“I expect to be lowering that because I believe that they’re gonna help us with the fentanyl situation,” Trump said on Wednesday. “They’re gonna be doing what they could do.”

Answering media questions regarding fentanyl, Guo said Beijing had provided help in this regard with positive results and was “open to continuing cooperation”.

“The US should take concrete actions to create the necessary conditions for cooperation,” added Guo, calling China’s stance on the issue consistent and clear.

When asked about a possible one-year pause in Beijing’s rare earth export controls and whether it could lead to further concessions, Trump said: “We haven’t talked about the timing yet, but we’re gonna work out something.”

Trump voiced optimism about reaching a “great deal” with China in his talks with Xi as he spoke to business executives on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

The American president said he believed a deal would benefit both the US and China and be “something very exciting for everybody”.

Last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump would fly to Busan and meet his Chinese counterpart there on Thursday before departing for Washington.

South Korea is the final leg of Trump’s Asia trip, which began on Sunday and took him to Malaysia and Japan. He is expected to leave South Korea on Thursday, while Xi is scheduled to arrive on Thursday and leave on Saturday.

Meanwhile, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung was scheduled to hold separate summits with Trump on Wednesday and Xi on Saturday, both in Gyeongju. Trump was to skip the main events of the Apec summit, only delivering keynote remarks at a CEO lunch and attending a working dinner with Apec leaders.

As for Busan, the reception hall at the city’s Gimhae International Airport, known as Narae Maru, was renovated recently and mentioned as a possible venue to host the meeting between Xi and Trump, according to South Korean reports.

Narae Maru is situated within a South Korean air force base that is home to the country’s 5th Tactical Airlift Wing.

Kang Jun-young, a professor of Chinese studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, said the airbase might have been chosen as the venue owing to security and intelligence considerations.

“The air force base is a highly secure location where ordinary personnel cannot easily enter or exit, ensuring a higher level of safety. In fact, the venue also hosted a high-level summit in 2005,” Kang said of Narae Maru, site of a 2005 Apec meeting.

Highly secure and inaccessible to the general public, Narae Maru also served as a reception room during a 2019 summit between South Korea and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, according to local media.

Kang highlighted concerns about possible anti-China and anti-US protests, suggesting that this also played a role in the airbase being considered for the Xi-Trump talks.

Chinese leaders have a recent history of arriving at American airbases en route to attending major meetings.

In 2011, for instance, former president Hu Jintao landed at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington for his state visit, while his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, arrived at Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base near Houston for his 2002 trip to the US.

That said, there is no precedent of Chinese leaders taking part in a global summit at a military base.

But such is not the case for other world leaders. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks at Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, in August.

The expected summit between Xi and Trump would be their first since 2019 and come after China-US trade talks in Kuala Lumpur over the weekend that yielded a preliminary framework deal and an agreement to extend their tariff truce.

Speaking to reporters after the talks, Chinese trade negotiator Li Chenggang said a “preliminary consensus” had been reached and would be submitted for domestic approval by both sides.

On Monday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a phone call with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, telling him that Beijing and Washington should “meet each other halfway” to solve disputes through dialogue instead of exerting pressure.

Additional reporting by Orange Wang

Alyssa Chen

Alyssa joined the Post in 2023 as a reporter on China desk to cover diplomacy. Her interests lie in cross-strait relations and Sino-Japan relations. Previously, she was the Asia Correspondent for the Japan Times, and graduated from the University of Hong Kong.

14. Israel Says Cease-Fire Is Back on After Gaza Strikes

Israel Says Cease-Fire Is Back on After Gaza Strikes

Netanyahu ordered strikes after Israel’s military said Hamas killed a soldier on Tuesday and held up returning the bodies of deceased hostages

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-says-cease-fire-back-on-after-round-of-gaza-strikes-cdd3ea05

By Anat Peled

Oct. 29, 2025 4:45 am ET

People mourned over the bodies of Palestinians in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Wednesday. Ramadan Abed/Reuters

TEL AVIV—The Israeli military said on Wednesday it would return to upholding a cease-fire in Gaza after launching dozens of airstrikes in what it said was retaliation for Hamas violations of the deal, including killing an Israeli soldier.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday said he ordered “forceful” strikes on the Gaza Strip in retaliation for what the military said was a Hamas attack on troops stationed in Israeli-controlled territory in southern Gaza. One soldier was killed in the shooting, the military said.

Israel said it targeted 30 combatants. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society said it received nine dead and treated dozens of people for injuries.

Gaza’s civil-defense agency said the strikes were “documented crimes that add to the ongoing record of violations against our people.” It called for an “immediate and comprehensive cease-fire.”

Israel also said Hamas had returned additional remains of a hostage whose body had previously been recovered from Gaza, which it called a violation of the terms of the cease-fire agreement in which the group is meant to return 15 bodies of deceased hostages. The military also released drone footage it said showed Hamas staging the recovery of the body.

Hamas has blamed Israel for the slow return of bodies, saying Israel is preventing the entry of heavy equipment needed to retrieve bodies buried under rubble.

The Israeli government gave the U.S. advance notification of the attacks, a U.S. official said. The official said that the U.S. expected the strikes to be targeted and that Israel isn’t looking to upend the cease-fire.

Write to Anat Peled at anat.peled@wsj.com

15. America Needs to Make Its Own Chips. James Proud Says He Knows How.

Not potato chips.

From what I have heard it would take more than two decades to recreate the infrastructure, facilities, tools, supply chain, and human capital to develop the nano chips that only TSMC can build in Taiwan.

But maybe we can. I hope we can. And if we can, it would obviously be strategic game changer.

Excerpts:

“The new lithography is lower cost, which enables simpler manufacturing, which enables a much lower-cost foundry to exist,” he said. (Foundry is chip-speak for factory.) Moreover, Proud says that by building its own production tools, Substrate has radically lowered the costs involved in production while ensuring their factories can rapidly adapt to new advances in chip design. The lower production costs also mean that Substrate can manufacture chips for a wider range of American clients—not just the behemoths that can afford to contract TSMC.

“If it is truly the undergirding technology for all advanced chips, which then undergirds all of AI and basically all U.S. economic growth right now, we should own that thing end to end,” said Proud, who believes that chip production, not chip design, is what will really matter.

“Toward the end of the decade, the AI models will actually be designing the majority of these chips,” he said. “And if that happens, then the number of possible semiconductors we can build will explode, and then the real bottleneck will actually be the foundries themselves.” By 2028, Proud wagers that Substrate will have the foundries to accelerate production of even the most sophisticated, AI-designed chips.

AI-designed computer chips that will power further advances in AI—this is the technological century that Proud says his factories will help America dominate.

For now, Substrate says it is searching for a site to build its first chip foundry in America, to put its new technology to use.

Proud stressed that he saw Substrate as standing on the shoulders of decades of research by American scientists at National Labs. “Americans funded these labs for decades,” he said. “Now, we’re able to actually take some of this knowledge and this work, and apply it to what I believe to be the most pressing technology problem that this country has.”

America Needs to Make Its Own Chips. James Proud Says He Knows How.

A Silicon Valley start-up that was a closely kept secret until today claims it has found a way to make semiconductors faster and more cheaply in the U.S. Its founder talks to The Free Press.

By Sean Fischer

10.28.25 —

Tech and Business

https://www.thefp.com/p/america-needs-to-make-its-own-chips

Coverage of Silicon Valley and beyond, with a curious eye.

thefp.com

Inside our smartphones and cars and missiles are chips the size of a fingernail. Each contains billions of tiny components called transistors—microscopic gates that open and close, the communication channels that act as a computer’s brain. They are the smallest things ever built by man.

Once made and perfected, they are plugged into the devices and data centers that power every facet of modern life. Our AI labs, defense systems, and hospitals all depend on them, as do our tractors, dishwashers, coffee makers, air conditioners, and factory equipment. They are the brain of all electronic devices, and in 2024, the U.S. imported $156 billion worth of them. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the fate and resilience of the entire global economy—not to mention America’s ability to remain a dominant geopolitical superpower—hinges on access to these chips.

And yet, only one company is able to make advanced chips at scale. And it’s in Taiwan.

The U.S. is where many of the world’s most sophisticated chips are designed, by engineers at Nvidia and Apple and Qualcomm. But we are almost totally dependent on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to make them. None of the world’s most advanced chips are made in the U.S., despite the fact that our infrastructure, computing power, and AI dominance all rely on them. China, meanwhile, is investing more in its chip industry than any other country in the world—positioning itself for an age where technological supremacy will determine the global order.

The seriousness of the challenge is a rare point of consensus in Washington. In 2022, President Joe Biden passed the CHIPS and Science Act, which called for a $53 billion investment in semiconductor manufacturing, research, and development. In June, President Donald Trump secured a $200 billion investment from private companies to build manufacturing facilities across the country. Although one such facility went live in 2024 in Arizona, it likely won’t be able to produce the most advanced chips until 2028—and even then, at extraordinary expense and not at a volume sufficient to reduce America’s dependence on Taiwan. Taiwanese law also forbids TSMC from building its most advanced technology outside of the country—so chips made stateside will consistently be at least one generation behind. In short, the picture is bleak.

Enter Substrate, a Silicon Valley start-up that has been operating secretly since 2022 but is coming out from the shadows today. The company is making a bold claim: It says it has developed innovations that will allow it to manufacture the most sophisticated chips in the world on U.S. soil. This morning, Substrate announced that it has invented a manufacturing process that it says will bring large-scale, advanced chip production to the United States by 2028—and also bring down the immense cost involved.

Backed by Founders Fund, Allen & Company, and other leading tech investors, Substrate says it has raised over $100 million in private funding and is currently valued at over $1 billion.

James Proud says they have invented a novel production method that will enable chips to be made rapidly at scale—for dramatically less than the current cost. If he is right, his new company will have changed the economics of perhaps the most important manufacturing process in the world.

Days before the start-up announced itself publicly, I spoke to its founder, British-born tech prodigy James Proud. “This is the thing that everyone regards as impossible to do,” he told me. “People didn’t expect this to be possible.”

Over the past three years, Proud assembled a team of over 50 leading scientists and engineers from TSMC, Google, IBM, and the U.S. National Laboratories—including researchers who, three decades ago, developed the underlying technology for today’s chip production. Proud, 34, says they have invented a novel production method that will enable chips to be made rapidly at scale—for dramatically less than the current cost. If he is right—a big if, obviously—his new company will have changed the economics of perhaps the most important manufacturing process in the world.

The complexity of building on the atomic level makes the cost of manufacturing chips astronomical. Semiconductors are built atom by atom on pristine silicon disks (the ones that gave San Francisco its nickname). The process requires such precision—printing designs that are 10 times smaller than the Covid virus—that anything, dust, air, vibrations from ocean waves tens of miles away, can disrupt it. A single misplaced atom can render a chip useless.

Because of this precision, the factories that make them are some of the most expensive in the world. A single TSMC fabrication plant—or fab, as they are called—can cost upward of $20 billion to build. Individual tools in the chip production process can cost more than $350 million apiece. Compounding these costs is the fact that whenever major advances in chip designs are made (roughly every two years), an entirely new factory has to be built to accommodate a new manufacturing process.

“It requires incredible precision and control to be able to create them,” Proud explained, sitting in front of a whiteboard scribbled with equations and diagrams. “Because of that, the tools required are so complex, so precise, so expensive, that it has basically led to an explosion in the costs of the actual semiconductor fabs that build these chips.”

Faced with these staggering costs, American tech companies like Apple and Nvidia outsourced and offshored the production of the chips they designed—leading to the rise of an entire chip-manufacturing economy in Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. (The U.S. is able to produce only older-generation chips that aren’t used for AI, smartphones, and cutting-edge defense tech.)

It wasn’t always this way; back in the 1990s, the leading chip manufacturer was Intel. The process of off-shoring “was an evolutionary process,” said Chris Miller, author of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology. Moving chip manufacturing abroad “had both economic and technological benefits to us and our tech companies.”

In Taiwan especially, he added, “They have the workforce, the chemical suppliers, the gas suppliers, the materials suppliers, the people who fix tools when they’re broken. The entire ecosystem is impossible to copy and paste overnight.”

Faced with staggering costs, American tech companies like Apple and Nvidia outsourced and offshored the production of the chips they designed—leading to the rise of an entire chip-manufacturing economy in Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.

Is it possible to build a brand-new ecosystem from the ground up, inventing and building new tools and methods along the way? And can it be done with a team of American scientists—scientists who had pioneered this technology decades ago?

Most experts didn’t think it was—and that still may turn out to be the case. But Proud wants to reduce the “ecosystem” to a single company, betting that doing everything in-house, instead of relying on tens of international suppliers, changes the game. “Having that beginner’s mindset for semiconductors and really looking at this from a first principles point of view enabled us to do things that previously most didn’t think possible,” explained Proud.

“These chips are the smallest things that humanity is able to create and print,” said Proud. “A lot of tech guys like to speak about how we don’t know how to build cathedrals anymore. It’s like, no. These are modern-day cathedrals.”

If chips are modern cathedrals, then Proud is an unlikely mason. Born in South London to a mom who worked night shifts stacking grocery store shelves, Proud spent hours hunched over his family’s clunky IBM PC, teaching himself how computers worked. By the age of nine, he was a proficient coder—and dreamed of moving to Silicon Valley.

In 2011, Proud joined the first class of Thiel Fellows, receiving a $100,000 grant to build a start-up in exchange for dropping out of college, which is required of all Thiel Fellows. He moved to San Francisco, and raised over $40 million to found a sleep-tracking hardware start-up called Hello in 2012. Among his funders was Peter Thiel himself, who put in $2 million. “I owe Peter a lot,” he said. The firm shut down in 2017, but Proud credits the time he spent developing hardware for his interest in reindustrialization.

Proud says he became “very focused on manufacturing being important in the United States.” He also told me that he has since given up his British citizenship. “I see myself only as an American,” he said.

If chips are modern cathedrals, then James Proud is an unlikely mason.

“I wanted to contribute in any way that I can to ensure that we have another American century,” he said. In his view, our reliance on foreign chips poses a grave threat to an American future, so that is where he decided to direct his energy.

“Rebuilding all the capacity in the U.S., yes, it would take us decades and trillions of dollars to do that with the current model. On the other hand, we’re told that if we lose access to the Pacific”—by which he means the chip manufacturers in Taiwan—“we could be destroyed as an economy.”

Proud was convinced there was a way out of this bind.

“The art of making transistors and semiconductors is all physics and chemistry,” said Proud. “And America still, by far, has the best physicists, the best chemists, the best engineers in the world.” While manufacturing know-how “has certainly atrophied,” Proud was confident the muscle could be retrained.

“The United States invented the transistor. We invented all of this stuff. I think the fact that we are not in a dominant leadership position today is a historical aberration and not the norm. We see our work as returning to what the norm is: The United States invents the future and we commercialize it.”

So what is the innovation Proud says changes the game? Substrate’s breakthrough is, as you might expect, quite technical.

To print the intricate, microscopic designs on the silicon disks, very short wavelengths of light are used to sculpt the material—light that is well beyond what the human eye can see. This process is called extreme ultraviolet lithography. It has allowed companies like TSMC to manufacture designs on the smallest scale imaginable. The smaller the chips get, the more powerful they become. The goal is to “pack more transistors more densely together,” Proud explained. “For the area used, you then have more performance.”

As chips need to be manufactured on a smaller and smaller scale to meet the needs of advanced computing power, new tools need to be developed that are capable of doing so.

Proud says that in their San Francisco lab, Substrate’s team of scientists have invented one such tool. They say it will enable Substrate to etch designs at a significantly smaller scale than what is currently possible. Their tool is called X-ray lithography, and can sculpt designs under 2 nanometers, the width of a single DNA molecule. Currently, the most advanced chips have features between 3–5 nanometers. “We’ve gone from the ultraviolet spectrum to the X-ray spectrum of light, which allows you to actually print even finer features.”

But what does Proud’s apparent breakthrough actually mean for America’s ability to make the chips it depends on?

“The new lithography is lower cost, which enables simpler manufacturing, which enables a much lower-cost foundry to exist,” he said. (Foundry is chip-speak for factory.) Moreover, Proud says that by building its own production tools, Substrate has radically lowered the costs involved in production while ensuring their factories can rapidly adapt to new advances in chip design. The lower production costs also mean that Substrate can manufacture chips for a wider range of American clients—not just the behemoths that can afford to contract TSMC.

“If it is truly the undergirding technology for all advanced chips, which then undergirds all of AI and basically all U.S. economic growth right now, we should own that thing end to end,” said Proud, who believes that chip production, not chip design, is what will really matter.

“Toward the end of the decade, the AI models will actually be designing the majority of these chips,” he said. “And if that happens, then the number of possible semiconductors we can build will explode, and then the real bottleneck will actually be the foundries themselves.” By 2028, Proud wagers that Substrate will have the foundries to accelerate production of even the most sophisticated, AI-designed chips.

AI-designed computer chips that will power further advances in AI—this is the technological century that Proud says his factories will help America dominate.

For now, Substrate says it is searching for a site to build its first chip foundry in America, to put its new technology to use.

Proud stressed that he saw Substrate as standing on the shoulders of decades of research by American scientists at National Labs. “Americans funded these labs for decades,” he said. “Now, we’re able to actually take some of this knowledge and this work, and apply it to what I believe to be the most pressing technology problem that this country has.”

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

thefp.com

16. Will Israel’s Algorithmic Counter-Insurgency Proliferate to the West?

Can AI help us influence minds and will?

Excerpts:

Critics will object that none of this binds action in real wars. But policy changes default incentives. Defense bureaucracies respond to what is measured and mandated. If licensing requires audit trails, audit trails will exist. If legal sign‑off cannot be waived for residential strikes, commanders will plan around it. If civilian harm reviews trigger material consequences, targeting cells will adjust behaviors that generate excessive harm. Conversely, if battle‑tested AI is rewarded in the market without conditions, Gaza’s model will spread: first to other battlefields, then into domestic security.

There is a final strategic reason for discipline: Algorithmic counter-insurgency does not solve the problem it claims to solve. The premise is that more data and faster fusion will close the gap that enabled the Oct. 7 attacks. But surprise is political before it is computational: It emerges from organizational blind spots, adversary deception, and the false comfort of metrics that stand in for judgment. Project Maven’s promise of accelerated triage is real, and so too are Israel’s networked command and control gains. Yet Gaza suggests that acceleration can yield not foresight, but faster error. The tragedy is not only civilian death at staggering scale — it is that tools meant to restore intelligence superiority can corrode the moral and political foundations of security itself.

Israel’s campaign will shape procurement and doctrine for a decade. Allies and adversaries are watching. The question is no longer whether AI will infuse targeting — it already has — but whether democracies can harness it without hollowing out the ethical core of the laws of war or the strategic insight that comes from real understanding. The answer lies in policy choices available now: export controls that bite, audits that reveal, rules that restrain, investigations that correct, and international commitments that set a floor under human judgment. Gaza should not be a template. It should be the warning that finally forces governments to bring machine power under disciplined human control.

Whether AI becomes a force for restraint or escalation will depend less on code than on the courage of governments to keep moral judgment in the loop.

Will Israel’s Algorithmic Counter-Insurgency Proliferate to the West?

Muhanad Seloom

October 29, 2025

https://warontherocks.com/2025/10/will-israels-algorithmic-counter-insurgency-proliferate-to-the-west/

warontherocks.com · October 29, 2025

Israel’s recent campaign in Gaza marks a turning point in modern warfare: the fusion of counter-insurgency and artificial intelligence. Will Western states, with different traditions of counter-insurgency that emphasize legitimacy and population control, be influenced by Israel’s algorithmic model? This question carries high stakes. If Israel’s approach, which is characterized by automation, scale, and attrition, becomes a template for liberal democracies, it could normalize a form of warfare that values computational efficiency over human judgment.

To answer this question, it is important to understand how Israel has approached countering militant groups and how the war that followed the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks led to the application of more advanced technologies. For decades, Israel has managed Gaza and the West Bank through coercive stability: blockades, surveillance, and calibrated violence designed to deter rather than reconcile. Its security doctrine has prioritized physical and economic control and containment over resolution. The current war amplifies this philosophy through algorithmic systems that accelerate every phase of targeting and reduce deliberation to data.

To prevent automation from eroding the human legal and ethical limits of warfare, I offer five concrete policy measures designed to discipline the technology: tightening export controls, enforcing auditability, re-anchoring proportionality, institutionalizing civilian harm assessments, and codifying international rules for AI in targeting.

BECOME A MEMBER

Counter-Insurgency and Algorithmic Warfare

Israel’s counter-insurgency practice has long rested on the logic of domination. In the West Bank and Gaza, it fused military pressure, intelligence collection, and economic dependency to suppress threats while avoiding prolonged occupation. Past operations such as Cast Lead in 2008 and Protective Edge in 2014 relied on vast surveillance networks and heavy firepower to achieve deterrence at a high human cost. The pattern was clear: intelligence saturation and kinetic response substituted for political solutions.

The current conflict represents a qualitative leap. AI systems such as Lavender and Gospel, developed by Unit 8200, now automate the identification, nomination, and timing of targets. These programs merge data from phone records, social networks, and intercepted communications to generate kill lists, sometimes with minimal human review. Algorithmic counter-insurgency redefines suspicion as quantifiable risk scores, prioritizing comprehensive surveillance coverage over precise intent analysis. This philosophy erodes core principles of armed conflict law, undermining distinction by expanding combatant definitions through associations and bending proportionality into operational throughput.

This shift enabled an unprecedented tempo of strikes — 15,000 in the first 35 days — resulting in over 67,000 Palestinian deaths by October 2025, with a significant proportion being women and children, amid loosened rules of engagement and contested adherence to international humanitarian law. The exact figures will remain disputed; the scale of harm will not. While Israeli officials insist on human-in-the-loop protocols, reports from whistleblowers and investigations suggest that reviews frequently devolve into rubber-stamping, shifting moral responsibility to algorithms and raising concerns over errors in distinction and proportionality under international humanitarian law.

In this sense, algorithmic counter-insurgency does not replace Israel’s historical doctrine. It perfects it. The tools of occupation and deterrence have evolved into a self-learning infrastructure of perpetual surveillance and precision killing. Whether Western militaries, rooted in different ethical and strategic traditions, adopt this model will determine if Gaza is an exception or a prototype for the wars of the democratic world.

The Case for AI in Targeting

While algorithmic counter-insurgency introduces distinct risks, it is instructive to compare it with human-led targeting in historical operations, which frequently resulted in disproportionately high civilian casualties. For example, during Operation Cast Lead (2008 to 2009) roughly 1,400 Palestinians, of whom approximately 773 were civilians, were killed compared with 13 Israelis. In Operation Protective Edge (2014) about 2,251 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians, were killed alongside 72 Israeli fatalities. These figures suggest that, in these instances, human-led operations were accompanied by high civilian tolls, influenced by factors such as operational stress, retaliation motives, and expansive rules of engagement.

AI, in contrast, does not suffer from human biases like emotion or exhaustion and can process vast data for more precise identifications — potentially reducing errors if trained on accurate assumptions. Militarily, AI offers utility by enabling efficient targeting at scale, hitting more threats faster with fewer resources. Though absolute casualties are higher in the current conflict due to its intensity, the relative trade-offs suggest AI could yield positive outcomes compared to purely manual approaches, provided rules of engagement are strict and assumptions sound.

Israel is not unique in pursuing this trajectory. The U.S. Project Maven (formally the Algorithmic Warfare Cross‑Functional Team), established in 2017, institutionalized the automation of object detection to accelerate targeting decisions, and recent reporting shows its expanding use across theatres. In China, the People’s Liberation Army is migrating from “informatization” to explicitly seeking algorithmic acceleration of the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop and AI‑enabled “kill webs.” In Russia’s war in Ukraine, analysts document a rapid evolution of sensor‑to‑shooter processes and growing use of drones and automation, even as integration and doctrinal challenges persist. The underlying theory across great power militaries is that faster fusion of more data yields better decisions. Gaza shows the missing piece: Speed without understanding is not judgment.

Proponents reply that these are decision support tools, that commanders remain accountable, and that adversaries’ embedding in civilian areas leaves tragic but lawful choices. Even taken at face value, Gaza reveals three structural fragilities inherent to AI’s integration, though some overlap with historical issues amplified by technology.

Compression Risk

As the interval between detection and strike collapses, human review devolves into checkbox compliance, confirmation rather than deliberation. This rapid approval process is a key concern, as whistleblower accounts from +972 Magazine indicate approvals in as little as 20 seconds for AI-nominated targets, often without deep scrutiny of underlying data or alternatives. Such speed can entrench errors, as humans under pressure default to trusting the machine, especially in high-tempo operations where delays risk missing opportunities. Expanding oversight, like requiring secondary reviews for high risk targets or mandatory pauses for residential strikes, could mitigate this, but current practices suggest automation outpaces human capacity for meaningful intervention.

Scale Risk

Mass nomination normalizes lower evidentiary thresholds, especially when operational tempo is measured in effects delivered per day. However, mass nomination predates AI: Historical counter-insurgency often used broad lists based on human intelligence. AI does not inherently lower thresholds but can magnify poor inputs, such as permissive rules of engagement allowing 15-20 civilian deaths per junior militant or assumptions like “military-age male = militant,” which echo U.S. drone practices in Afghanistan (where civilian deaths were initially underreported) and broader counter-insurgency history. If bad assumptions are fed in, AI scales them efficiently — but with better data and models, it could raise standards by demanding more evidence before nomination.

Error Externalization

Model biases, skewed training data, and crude proxies such as “male=militant” generate false positives that are hard to contest inside wartime bureaucracies. The proxy problem is not unique to AI: It has been a human heuristic in conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Permissive rules of engagement, rather than AI itself, drive much of the harm — though AI’s scale enables more strikes under those rules, potentially increasing total casualties.

Each fragility magnifies civilian harm in dense, data‑saturated cities where modern counter-insurgency unfolds. These are well‑known tendencies in human‑automation interaction, and Gaza is their wartime instantiation.

Gaza also illustrates how this model, once perfected for war, migrates inward. The same architectures that link sensors to shooters in wartime can link cameras to detention squads in peacetime. States with dense closed-circuit television systems, International Mobile Subscriber Identity catchers, biometrics, and social media monitoring can repurpose machine-assisted analytics for domestic security through bulk suspicion scoring, network-based arrests, and predictive policing. Vendors already market such counter-insurgency AI platforms for internal use. Without governance and oversight, algorithmic counter-insurgency abroad risks mutating into algorithmic authoritarianism at home.

Will the West Adopt Israel’s Methods?

The question of proliferation to Western nations hinges on existing technological, military, and economic ties. Israel has long positioned itself as a global exporter of defense technologies, with systems like Rafael’s Fire Weaver, a sensor-to-shooter AI platform, already deployed in North America, Europe, and Asia. Close U.S.-Israel collaboration amplifies this potential: Israeli innovations, including AI-powered warfare solutions, have directly enhanced U.S. military capabilities from tank protection to intelligence analysis. For instance, U.S. tech giants such as Palantir, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft provide cloud and AI services that fuel Israel’s operations in Gaza, creating a feedback loop where battlefield-tested algorithms could refine Western systems. Palantir’s involvement in Lavender’s data mining for target selection is particularly notable, as the company also contracts with the U.S. and U.K. militaries for similar predictive analytics.

Evidence of early adoption is already visible. In the United States, elements of Israeli-developed AI and targeting software have been integrated into counter-terrorism systems, with analysts describing Gaza as a “laboratory” for algorithmic warfare whose lessons are shaping military practice in theatres such as Ukraine. Across the United Kingdom and Europe, Israeli surveillance technologies, most notably facial recognition systems first deployed in the West Bank, have influenced domestic policing and border security architectures. Human Rights Watch and U.N. agencies caution that the opacity of such systems risks unlawful civilian harm and could normalize mass surveillance in liberal democracies, gradually eroding civil liberties under the banner of security. Yet within defense and industry circles, advocates argue that these tools enhance precision, tempo, and decision speed, framing algorithmic targeting as a necessary adaptation to the data-saturated battlefields of modern warfare.

Proliferation appears likely, driven by geopolitical alignments and market incentives. Western militaries face similar pressures to achieve network-centric dominance against asymmetric threats, while Israel’s growing export success, even amid embargoes from states such as Spain, illustrates persistent demand for AI-enabled targeting and surveillance systems. Although ethical and legal debates may slow adoption, and the United Nations has called for new governance frameworks for military AI, shared intelligence ecosystems such as the Five Eyes facilitate technology transfer and doctrinal convergence. If left unchecked, this trajectory could entrench algorithmic decision-making in Western operations, amplifying risks of bias and civilian harm while diminishing human accountability. Public discussions, including those on platforms such as X, increasingly highlight the role of U.S. technology firms — specifically Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Palantir — in enabling Israel’s AI systems and the potential feedback loop into domestic policing and defense applications. Ultimately, while not yet ubiquitous, the trend points toward diffusion through alliance networks and the perceived efficiency of AI in managing persistent low-intensity conflicts.

What Should Be Done?

The answer is not to ban AI from military use, nor to accept a glide path to automated war. The task is to discipline the technology with law, policy, and verifiable practice, starting with five concrete moves.

First, tighten export controls and end‑use conditions on targeting‑relevant AI. The United States, European Union, and their partners should update Wassenaar‑style controls and Missile Technology Control Regime‑like lists to capture target development software and sensor‑to‑shooter orchestration modules whose foreseeable uses include mass nomination of human targets from bulk personal data. Licenses should require auditable human‑in‑the‑loop thresholds, model‑risk documentation, and civilian harm mitigation plans. Credible evidence of violations, such as casualty audits or rule changes that permit high collateral thresholds, should trigger suspension. The early Gaza experience shows how quickly permissive configurations scale harm.

Second, mandate model and data pipeline auditability wherever AI influences lethal decisions. If an AI score nudges a strike, post hoc reconstructability must be guaranteed via structured logs (features used, confidence intervals, human overrides), bias testing (e.g., “male = militant” proxies), and independent red teaming under realistic adversarial conditions. International humanitarian law cannot be meaningfully applied to black box recommendations. Human Rights Watch’s 2024 Questions and Answers on Israel’s digital tools offers a baseline concern set, and policy should now operationalize those concerns into audit duties.

Third, re‑anchor proportionality to validated military advantage, not throughput. Early phase rules accepting double‑digit civilian casualties to neutralize junior operatives invert proportionality’s burden. Defense ministries should codify default civilian harm ceilings that tighten when model confidence is low or data is stale, require independent legal sign‑off for strikes in residential structures, and bar model‑nominated strikes in family homes absent direct, real‑time hostile activity. Investigations by +972 and later wire services indicate a loosening of rules at the outset. The corrective is to make exceptions costly and traceable.

Fourth, create a standing, independent civilian harm assessment mechanism for AI‑enabled operations. Borrow from U.N. methodologies and high‑quality civil society practice (e.g., Airwars) to field joint fact‑finding cells combining forensic imagery, blast analysis, ground casualty verification, and access to strike logs. Findings should drive immediate tactical adjustments (weapon selection, aimpoint policy) and strategic accountability (compensation, command review). With Gaza’s death toll reported in the tens of thousands, permanent assessment is not a luxury, but a condition for legitimacy.

Fifth, negotiate an AI in targeting addendum in existing humanitarian law forums. Rather than wait for a grand bargain on autonomy, states should use ongoing processes (e.g., Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons meetings, International Committee of the Red Cross expert meetings) to codify minimum obligations when AI contributes to lethal decision‑making. These should include preserved human judgment with meaningful review time, provenance constraints on bulk personal data, independent auditability, and public reporting on civilian harm metrics and remedial actions. The International Committee of the Red Cross’s position on autonomy provides a strong foundation for such an instrument.

Critics will object that none of this binds action in real wars. But policy changes default incentives. Defense bureaucracies respond to what is measured and mandated. If licensing requires audit trails, audit trails will exist. If legal sign‑off cannot be waived for residential strikes, commanders will plan around it. If civilian harm reviews trigger material consequences, targeting cells will adjust behaviors that generate excessive harm. Conversely, if battle‑tested AI is rewarded in the market without conditions, Gaza’s model will spread: first to other battlefields, then into domestic security.

There is a final strategic reason for discipline: Algorithmic counter-insurgency does not solve the problem it claims to solve. The premise is that more data and faster fusion will close the gap that enabled the Oct. 7 attacks. But surprise is political before it is computational: It emerges from organizational blind spots, adversary deception, and the false comfort of metrics that stand in for judgment. Project Maven’s promise of accelerated triage is real, and so too are Israel’s networked command and control gains. Yet Gaza suggests that acceleration can yield not foresight, but faster error. The tragedy is not only civilian death at staggering scale — it is that tools meant to restore intelligence superiority can corrode the moral and political foundations of security itself.

Israel’s campaign will shape procurement and doctrine for a decade. Allies and adversaries are watching. The question is no longer whether AI will infuse targeting — it already has — but whether democracies can harness it without hollowing out the ethical core of the laws of war or the strategic insight that comes from real understanding. The answer lies in policy choices available now: export controls that bite, audits that reveal, rules that restrain, investigations that correct, and international commitments that set a floor under human judgment. Gaza should not be a template. It should be the warning that finally forces governments to bring machine power under disciplined human control.

Whether AI becomes a force for restraint or escalation will depend less on code than on the courage of governments to keep moral judgment in the loop.

BECOME A MEMBER

Muhanad Seloom, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of critical security studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and an honorary research fellow at the University of Exeter. He is the author of the forthcoming book Labelling Ethno-Political Groups as Terrorists: The Case of the PKK in Türkiye (Routledge, 2025) and “Veiled Intentions: Hamas’s Strategic Deception and Intelligence Success on 7 October 2023” in Intelligence and National Security (in-press, 2025).

Image: Midjourney

warontherocks.com · October 29, 2025

17. How Trump will avoid falling into Xi’s trap, according to his China adviser

The architect behind rebuilding the US relationship with China: Michael Pillsbury. He is providing us with more insight into how POTUS is thinking about and approaching China.

How Trump will avoid falling into Xi’s trap, according to his China adviser

Meeting between two leaders on Thursday in Busan comes at critical moment

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2025/10/29/how-trump-will-manage-xi-according-to-his-china-adviser/

Rob Crilly

Chief US Correspondent, in Seoul

Which service did best in the military recruiting boom? The numbers are in

https://www.sandboxx.us/news/which-service-did-best-in-the-military-recruiting-boom-the-numbers-are-in/

By Hope Seck
October 27, 2025

sandboxx.us · October 27, 2025

Ever since November 2024, military recruiting has enjoyed a remarkable tailwind. Though the community is divided about the cause of a burgeoning recruiting boom – with the White House and Pentagon leader Pete Hegseth crediting a “Trump bump” and the hard line the Defense Department has taken on lethality and “warrior ethos,” and the services focusing on a changing economy and their own efforts to reach young people – it came as no surprise that the services exceeded their targets.

But how did the services stack up amid near-historic accessions? Now that the fiscal year is over and the numbers are in, we have the answers.

Army

The recruiting woes of a few years ago now seem to be truly in the past for the Army. After announcing in June that it had met its accessions goal of 61,000 soldiers four months early, the service continued to press its advantage. In the active component, the Army recruited 58,011 Soldiers against a goal of 52,400 for a total of nearly 111% of the target, or more than 5,000 surplus, according to the latest numbers, released in August.

That gives the service the highest accessions percentage of all for 2025. And with that momentum, the service is already adjusting some of the efforts it launched in recent years to grow the recruiting pool. The Future Soldier Preparatory Course, a program that lasts up to 90 days and aims to increase prospective recruits’ fitness and academic performance to within Army eligibility parameters, is changing to restrict entry to those who fall short of either physical or scholastic qualifications, but not both.

While it’s not clear if recruiting will remain as strong as it has over the last year, the outlook for the Army stands to stay bullish for a while. According to testimony from Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, the service started Fiscal Year 2026 with some 25,000 soldiers in the Delayed Entry Program, or nearly half of the annual recruiting mission.

Navy

Recruits take the Naturalization Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America during a naturalization ceremony inside the Recruit Memorial Chapel at Recruit Training Command (RTC) on October 16, 2025. Training at RTC is approximately nine weeks, and all enlistees in the U.S. Navy begin their careers at the command. More than 40,000 recruits train annually at the Navy’s only boot camp. (U.S. Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Mykala Keckeisen)

The Navy also reached its recruiting target with three months to spare, a dramatic turnaround after missing the goal entirely in 2023. As of August, the service had recruited 39,936 future sailors from its goal of 37, 049, for a total of nearly 108%, the second-highest total. In all components, the Navy recruited 44,096 future Sailors against a goal of 40,600 – the highest recruiting total since 2002.

In a round-table with reporters just before the end of the fiscal year, Rear Adm. James Waters, head of Navy recruiting command, cited a plus-up of Navy recruiters and efforts to cut red tape and help them bring in recruits faster as components of the service’s success. Like the Army, the Navy is taking steps to tighten up its standards too, pulling significantly back on the numbers of low-scoring recruits it had brought in for remedial training. It will, however, keep a small number of these recruits to provide a broader opportunity to serve.

“Many times, these young people that are scoring [lower] were disadvantaged in how they were educated and developed and come from difficult personal situations,” Waters told Navy Times. “It’s important to me and it’s important to the recruiters, more importantly, that we continue to provide this opportunity for young people.”

Space Force

As the newest service and the smallest by far, Space Force has never had the recruiting squeezes that have hit other branches in recent years. In fact, as Military Times reported in August, the service is partnering with the Washington Nationals, Washington, D.C.’s Major League Baseball team, to fine-tune its talent-scouting protocols in an effort to become even more selective.

But in this year’s recruiting boom, it placed third in active accessions, recruiting 819 troops from a goal of 795, for a total of 103.02%, or 24 Guardians over the goal, as of August. Of note, these numbers do reflect the recruiting strategies of the services, and the bandwidth they have to recruit beyond their stated mission.

While Space Force wants to finesse its process to ensure it will receive the most qualified recruits and the best fit for its mission, numbers won’t be a problem for next year, either. Lt. Col. Jason Cano, recruiting branch chief for the Space Force, said in an August interview with Military Times that the service was “about to stamp the table before it even starts” for Fiscal 2026 recruiting, meaning it had enough prospects in its delayed entry pool to meet next year’s goal already.

Air Force

Recruits from the 317th Recruiting Squadron raise their right hands while taking the Oath of Enlistment during the Memorial to Memorial Ride at the Fredericksburg Nationals Stadium in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Sept. 20, 2025. The ceremony provided families, riders, and the local community with the opportunity to witness the transition of 68 recruits from civilian life to military service. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Skylar Ellis)

The Air Force wrapped the recruiting year with a bit over 100% of its active recruiting goal, but a historic number of potential recruits in its delayed entry program. The roughly 19,000 prospective airmen in the Delayed Entry Program would get the service to about half of its 2026 recruiting target directly out of the gate, Task and Purpose reported in September.

In addition to hitting its recruiting target three months early, the Air Force opted to stop offering selective retention bonuses in mid-May, another signal of confidence that its recruiting and retention prospects will stay strong.

But like the Space Force, the Air Force is taking pains to ensure that it’s getting the right recruits, rather than just filling seats at basic military training. Officials in July published a new announcement about the Stars and Stripes programs, which offer airmen and Guardians medals and even promotions for referring future troops who make it into the Delayed Entry Program or ship to training.

Marine Corps

The Marine Corps, which alone among the services hasn’t missed an active-duty recruiting target in recent years, proved it was a consistent recruitment performer in good times and bad. According to the Associated Press, the service exceeded its total recruiting target of 30,536 Marines by just one. According to the report, though, the service did move back boot camp shipping dates until after September for about 500 recruits to avoid overshooting authorized levels.

In keeping with its “We Don’t Promise You a Rose Garden” unabashedly tough and exclusive image, the Marine Corps has done the least shapeshifting of any of the services. Officials continue to credit the challenge the service levels to prospective recruits with its perennial success in making its numbers.

“Everywhere I’ve been in the country, the American people know the Marine Corps has very high standards and that we stick to them,” Lt. Gen. William Bowers, head of Marine Corps recruiting, told the AP. “If you try to appeal to everybody, you won’t get the people you maybe really want.”

Coast Guard

U.S. Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Keegan Harden, a Company Commander, instructs recruits on Manual of Arms movements, Feb. 22, 2024, at U.S. Coast Guard Training Center Cape May. Recruits are tested on the Manual of Arms movements in the seventh week of training. (U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Gregory Schell)

Of all the military services, the Coast Guard has had the longest-enduring recruiting challenges, having fallen short of its enlisted accessions target every year from 2019 to 2023. But earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Coast Guard had exceeded its Fiscal Year 2024 recruiting target, bringing in 4,422 enlisted Coasties over a goal of 4,200.

While the service inconsistently self-reports its own recruitment data, the Department of Homeland Security announced in May that the Coast Guard was on pace to exceed 2025 recruitment goals by 110%, and had already brought in 4,250 recruits, beating the previous year-to-date number by 1,200. DHS pegged the increase in Coast Guard recruitment success – which it said aligned with a 200% increase in applications to the Secret Service – to a Trump administration order to triple Coast Guard presence at the U.S. maritime border and to focus more sharply on drug interdiction and human smuggling.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to include the data for the Coast Guard.

Feature Image: U.S. Army Recruits and Soldiers with the New Jersey National Guard’s Recruit Sustainment Program physical training at the National Guard Training Center in Sea Girt, N.J., July 20, 2025. The Recruit Sustainment Program is a program of the United States Army National Guard designed to introduce new recruits to the fundamentals of the U.S. Army before they leave for Basic Combat Training and Advanced Individual Training. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Seth Cohen)

Is China’s Near Monopoly in Rare Earths Really a Chokepoint in the Global Economy?

Overcoming China’s dominance over rare earths is just a question of political will – and Beijing’s moves might provide just that.

https://thediplomat.com/2025/10/is-chinas-near-monopoly-in-rare-earths-really-a-chokepoint-in-the-global-economy/

By Ramiro Castellón

October 29, 2025

Credit: Depositphotos

On October 9, Beijing expanded its rare earth export controls. China’s government now requires foreign firms to obtain approval to ship magnets containing as little as 0.1 percent Chinese‑sourced material or produced with Chinese extraction, refining, or specialized technology. The move, ironically, mirrors the U.S. Foreign Direct Product Rule, which restricted third‑party semiconductor exports to China.

China’s new controls are a continuation of a policy that Beijing implemented last April after U.S. President Donald Trump decided to raise tariffs to 54 percent on many Chinese goods. At that time, China decided to implement a new licensing system requiring companies to acquire government-issued permits to export seven medium and heavy rare earth elements – samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium – and their derivative forms. Beijing expanded that list earlier this month.

The conventional wisdom on the topic believes that China’s near monopoly in rare earths constitutes a critical chokepoint in the global economy, which Beijing is trying to exploit to gain some leverage in the upcoming China-U.S. negotiations. The reasoning is very straightforward: China has almost half of the global reserves and accounts for approximately 71 percent of mining, 87 percent of processing, and 91 percent of refining. In addition, China produces around 90 percent of the world’s rare earth permanent magnets, which are key to the defense, semiconductor, automotive, and green energy industries. Because of this dominance, China can weaponize rare earth exports to disrupt global supply chains. Hence, the chokepoint.

Not all chokepoints are the same, however, and not all bear the same risks. In geography, a choke point is a strategic location that is essential for passage. Applied to economics, a chokepoint represents a vulnerable point in a supply chain that can be disrupted, leading to significant economic consequences.

The Strait of Malacca constitutes a paradigmatic example in the most literal sense. This is particularly true for China: because most of the country’s sea lines of communication (SLOCs) pass through the strait, a blockade or disruption could freeze trade and energy supply, severely affecting its supply chains. Consequently, the “Malacca dilemma,” as phrased by China’s previous president, Hu Jintao, can partially explain both China’s unprecedented attempts to increase its blue waters military capabilities and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which intends to make China’s links to the world economy through both land and sea infrastructure more resilient.

ASML’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines are another chokepoint, this one more metaphorical. These are the only machines that can produce the most advanced semiconductor chips in the world, and are currently impossible to replicate by anyone but the Dutch company. This is due to the high complexity of the machines not only in terms of what they do, but how they are made, as they have over 100,000 components from more than 5,000 suppliers. Because of U.S. restrictions and pressures on the Dutch government, ASML cannot sell its EUV machines to China, which holds back the latter from producing cutting-edge semiconductor chips.

Understanding these two examples is key to grasping the impact of China’s recent rare earth restrictions.

To return to the Malacca Strait example, Beijing’s expansion of maritime capabilities reflects an ambitious effort to secure its SLOCs. At the same time, the BRI aims to diversify and reinforce alternative supply routes. Together, these measures illustrate China’s strategy for mitigating chokepoint risks: reducing supply chain vulnerability not only through military strength, but also through long‑term – and not always immediately profitable – investments in supply line diversification. In the context of the rare earth market, the West should do the same: commit to creating a reliable alternative to the Chinese industry.

By contrast, in the case of EUV lithography machines, despite Beijing’s efforts no significant progress has been made when dealing with U.S. restrictions on ASML’s exports. The reason is of paramount importance: due to the singular features and high complexity of the technology, no Chinese company is capable of replicating it today or in the near future – and because China cannot buy it from its sole manufacturer, diversification is impossible. This is the worst possible scenario when it comes to dealing with a chokepoint, as there is no visible, realistic way to mitigate its impact. However, this is not the case when it comes to the rare earth conundrum.

To begin with, rare earths are not as rare as their name suggests. The United States, for example, possesses substantial light rare earth element deposits, primarily associated with carbonatite systems such as Mountain Pass. Even the scarcest elements – mainly heavy rare earths, such as dysprosium or terbium – can be found in many countries apart from China, among them Australia, Madagascar, Vietnam, and Brazil. Furthermore, China is not the only country that can produce rare earth magnets. As a matter of fact, the U.S. and Japan were the first two countries to produce them last century.

China’s monopoly is one of efficiency: they dominate the market because they can produce at scale and export at minimum costs. The profit margins are far from spectacular. Beijing’s rationale for gradually absorbing this originally American industry was more geopolitical than it was economic.

The absence of a similar mindset is exactly what left the West vulnerable to China’s rare earth controls today. As long as profits overshadow strategic needs, the West will be at China’s mercy, since building up an alternative supply chain from scratch will take time, coordination, a lot of money, and subsidies with no immediate economic return.

Nonetheless, if framed as a state necessity rather than a profit endeavor, the rare earth market becomes contestable. Therefore China’s pressure transforms into a double-edged sword: if the government weaponizes rare earth exports, Beijing will incentivize the creation of an alternative supply chain, which will reduce their dominance in the long run.

According to economic theory, the rare earths market should not be contestable. Its high financial, technological, and environmental costs are by no means a low barrier to entry. Developing refining capabilities requires significant sunk investments, and China’s ability to flood the rare earths market and depress prices is a real deterrent. Nevertheless, because of the existence of multiple potential players and the generous geographical distribution of the elements, these other factors are secondary if there is enough political will to frame supply chain diversification first as a strategic imperative based on geopolitical conviction, and only then as a long-term profitable endeavor.

Ideally, creating an alternative supply chain would be both strategic and significantly profitable for the West. However, it is unlikely that this will be the case. A difficult decision will have to be made, yet the prospect of having a decision to make in the first place is a fortunate thing, which China does not have in the EUV technology market.

Even if it is a real threat due to its short and medium-term impact on global supply chains, China’s dominance and export controls in the rare earth market should not be overstated. Quite on the contrary, Beijing might have overplayed its cards by dealing a non-crippling blow and incentivizing the rest of the world to seek more reliable partners.

Authors

Guest Author

Ramiro Castellón

Ramiro Castellón is an OSINT Manager at Global Weekly’s East Asia Desk. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the upcoming Journal of Strategic Affairs of the University of Belgrano, and editor at the King’s College London Intelligence & Security Society’s (KCLISS) London Security Review. He holds an MA in International Conflict Studies from King's College London's Department of War Studies.

20. The ‘New Normal’ Is Not Deglobalization, It’s Reglobalization

Will the US remake the structures in a re-globalized world? Or will we be left out?

Gprahics at the link.

The ‘New Normal’ Is Not Deglobalization, It’s Reglobalization

In places like Uzbekistan, policymakers have doubled down on economic liberalization and internationalization despite Western narratives of global conflict and economic decoupling.

https://thediplomat.com/2025/10/the-new-normal-is-not-deglobalization-its-reglobalization/

By Frank Maracchione

October 28, 2025

Credit: Depositphotos

At the moment of writing, the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is only four months away. At the same time, Israel has resumed bombing Gaza after the failure of a weak U.S.-brokered peace agreement. The deal had briefly interrupted what a commission of United Nations has defined as a genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, Palestine. In the meantime, the world is entering the seventh year since the start of the China-U.S. trade war and related policies.

In this troubling context, commentators across Western media now urge audiences to adapt to what they describe as a conflictual “new normal.”

This “new normal,” in the dominant Western reading, describes a world in which conflict, disruption, and overlapping crises have become, not an exception, but the standard of global politics. The supposed rupture of the global liberal order and the failure of its institutions is leading to the end of liberal “peace,” economic globalization, and the birth of a conflict-prone multipolar system.

But this narrative of global conflict and economic decoupling is both misleading and Eurocentric. What we are witnessing instead is not deglobalization but reglobalization: the re-entry of the Global South as an engine of economic integration.

In places like Uzbekistan, policymakers have doubled down on economic liberalization and internationalization, courting investment from East and West alike, including from supposedly pariah states like Russia. In Tashkent, globalization is still very much a reality.

The Eurocentric Myth of Deglobalization

I first developed this argument last June while recording a live episode of “SPERI Presents…“ at the British International Studies Association conference in Belfast, an evocative city for any discussion about the political economy of war. There, I examined how the war in Ukraine, a local or at most regional conflict, came to be narrated in the West as a world-historical rupture heralding deglobalization, the supposed end of the era of the global economy toward some sort of new Cold War.

This narrative is partial and profoundly Eurocentric. First, European and U.S. efforts to decouple from Russia have been neither total nor consistent, repeatedly undermined by energy dependence, electoral shifts, and Russophile far-right leaders. Meanwhile, the Global South has adopted a far more measured stance toward the war. The deglobalization storytelling erases the vitality and complexity of South–South economic linkages and the growing agency of Asian, African, and Latin American economies.

In regions once under Russian imperial control, like Central Asia, there was initial sympathy for Ukraine, often couched in anti-colonial language around sovereignty. Yet solidarity did not translate into full alignment with Western sanctions. In parallel, most Asian economies, including China and India, filled the gap left by Europe, becoming primary destinations for Russian hydrocarbons and/or hubs for re-export. Businesses in Russia’s neighboring countries, like Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, became key facilitators of sanction evasion through logistical services, informal finance, and joint ventures. Trade turnover between Asian countries and Russia has grown amid the war. China and India together represented in 2023 the source or destination of around 52.2 percent of Russia’s goods.

Figure 1 – Growth of Russia’s trade turnover (percentage of total) with the People’s Republic of China, India, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan amidst the war in Ukraine (2018-2023). Data: OEC.

Reglobalization and Uzbekistan’s Global Turn

Uzbekistan has an interesting position due to its largely untapped potential in terms of foreign investment. Tashkent’s economic strategy, as I argue in my recent article for Studies on Central Asia and the Caucasus, illustrates a far more credible story of the present global economy than the deglobalization narrative. The government has sought to attract a wide array of foreign investors, including Asian firms and companies from both the EU and Russia, into production sectors ranging from automotive to textiles and green energy.

A flagship project is the BYD-UzAuto joint venture and its electric vehicle factory in Jizzakh. It symbolizes Uzbekistan’s ambition to join high-tech global manufacturing chains, as well as its opening to the world economy. China’s BYD is one of the few companies to challenge the UzAuto-General Motors joint venture, whose Chevrolets have dominated the Uzbekistani market for decades.

Equally symbolic is the new visa-free travel regime between China and Uzbekistan, designed to promote both business and tourism. In a world where the European Union is re-erecting borders and populist right-wing nationalism demonizes mobility, such South–South openness stands out as a radical gesture of trust. China has given this trust to a growing number of countries in the Global South, as well as (unreciprocated) to the European Union.

Contrast this with the West and you will find that U.S. President Donald Trump’s mercantilism, revived and expanded in his second term, has entrenched protectionism as the default of U.S. foreign economic policy. Europe, for its part, has followed suit with tariffs targeting Chinese electric vehicle imports, imposed on October 4, 2024 and never lifted despite many rounds of negotiation.

The contrast is striking. While a fearful and divided West retreats from the global market it once championed, the Global South is weaving a new web of integration. As WTO Director-General Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala aptly put it, we are entering an age of “reglobalization,” an expansion of globalization to include regions historically excluded from its benefits.

Western Hegemony in Crisis

This shift exposes a profound contradiction. The international economic system built by the United States and Europe in the aftermath of World War II was meant to cement their dominance. Instead, it has generated new centers of power and capital. Faced with that reality, Western governments, media, and publics, have responded by projecting the U.S. and Europe’s own economic and identity crises as global disruptions, using both public narratives and economic coercion to sustain influence. The war in Ukraine provides a telling example.

Western policymakers have struggled to reconcile moral condemnation of Russia with the pragmatic necessity of Central Asian cooperation. Western reactions to Central Asia’s ongoing economic connections to Russia have been mild, with more attention focused on maintaining warm ties with Central Asian leaders than the enforcement of sanctions. Uzbekistan’s news agency Daryo reported in 2024 that:

European Council President Charles Michel reassured Central Asian leaders that the European Union does not intend to impose sanctions on their countries for bypassing the existing sanctions regime.

European leaders have not only refrained from reacting to clear sanction-busting measures, but they have doubled down on a charm offensive to solidify relations with Central Asian leaders. Since 2022, Central Asia has seen an unprecedented surge in high-level European visits, including by EU officials and leaders from France, Italy, and Germany, reflecting Europe’s renewed effort to strengthen ties with the region after years of limited engagement. Yet, notwithstanding the engagement, Western normative power amid the war in Ukraine has been at its lowest.

The pattern repeats elsewhere. The Israeli invasion of Gaza following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack has become a defining event for the erosion of Western credibility. The glaring disparity between European elites’ outrage at Russia’s crimes and EU leaders’ complicity in Israel’s genocide has reinforced China’s narrative of Western double standards. By endorsing Israel’s illegal invasion and invoking a limitless “right to self-defense,” Western leaders, including both most recent U.S. President Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, have undermined the legitimacy of international law and the institutions, such as the International Criminal Court, that once symbolized human rights’ universality.

Meanwhile, domestic repression of pro-Palestine activism in the West, often justified through counter-terrorism legislation, has further eroded Western liberal credentials. As reported by The Guardian, a report by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) highlights how governments in the U.K., U.S., France, and Germany have allegedly used counterterrorism laws and measures against antisemitism as tools to stifle dissent and silence advocacy for the end of genocide, and for Palestinian sovereign rights in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Reglobalization from the South

The narrative surrounding the two conflicts reveal the fallacy and provincialism of “global” narratives of crisis. Far from fragmenting, the world economy continues to operate through global circuits of production, trade, and finance, only with new beneficiaries and shifting geographies. The perceived necessity for Western political and economic communicators to engineer selective decoupling is, in reality, an attempt to reassert control over a system it no longer commands.

What we are witnessing instead is a “reglobalization.” Across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, governments and businesses are forging new trade corridors, financial mechanisms, and digital infrastructures that bypass Western intermediaries. Supply chains in electric vehicles, renewable energy, and pharmaceuticals increasingly run through hubs such as Shenzhen, Mumbai, Jakarta, São Paulo, Astana, and Tashkent.

These developments are not simply economic. They represent the emergence of a different political imaginary, one that values interdependence without hierarchy. South-South visa-free travel agreements, regional payment systems, and local-currency trade are important signs of change if not yet a coherent alternative to the dollar-centric order. For sure they mark a tangible shift in aspiration.

For Western policymakers, the choice is stark. They can either join this new round of global integration, adapting to a genuinely multipolar economy, or become obstacles to it.

The Political Economy of the “New Normal”

Ultimately, the “new normal” is not a structural inevitability but a political choice. Deglobalization, protectionism, and confrontation are decisions made by leaders who perceive loss and react with fear. Reglobalization, openness, and South–South cooperation are equally choices, driven by leaders who see opportunity in change. The agency of these actors, rather than any abstract law of history, determines the shape of the global order to come.

The crisis of Western hegemony need not translate into global segregation and war; it can become the starting point for a fairer and more inclusive international economy. The current moment, between war and disintegration, and cooperation and renewal, demands intellectual creativity and openness. The myth of deglobalization comforts those unable to imagine a world beyond Western centrality and coloniality, precisely the horizon that current processes of reglobalization are beginning to redraw.

This essay draws on two of my recent academic publications that critique the notion of deglobalization and develop the alternative concept of reglobalization in Globalizations and Studies on Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Authors

Guest Author

Frank Maracchione

Dr Frank Maracchione is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Kent and SPERI Sheffield.

21. Ukrainian forces say small Russian infiltration teams are increasingly appearing out of nowhere and sowing chaos in their lines

The Ukrainian military reminds of this quote:

When the hour of crisis comes, remember 40 selected men can shake the world. -Yasotay 1220 AD

Ukrainian forces say small Russian infiltration teams are increasingly appearing out of nowhere and sowing chaos in their lines

Small Russian units are seemingly appearing out of nowhere and infiltrating front-line Ukrainian positions.
Ukrainian soldiers said that the Russians' goals are to take positions and cause chaos.
The tactic is becoming increasingly more common.

Business Insider · Jake Epstein, Sinéad Baker

Military & Defense

By Jake Epstein

Russia is sending small infiltration units to breach Ukrainian front-line positions. Thomas Krych/Anadolu via Getty Images

2025-10-28T13:12:56Z

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Small Russian units are seemingly appearing out of nowhere and infiltrating front-line Ukrainian positions.
Ukrainian soldiers said that the Russians' goals are to take positions and cause chaos.
The tactic is becoming increasingly more common.

Guided by drones while attempting to stay hidden from enemy eyes, small Russian infiltration teams are creeping across the front lines and stirring up trouble for Ukrainian forces already exhausted and stretched thin.

Ukrainian soldiers told Business Insider the tactic causes chaos and is becoming increasingly problematic. They said that the Russian teams often consist of just a few troops and are treated as expendable.

The Russian infiltrators have different missions. Some try to seize key positions and hold them until reinforcements arrive, while others focus on disrupting Ukrainian defenses by exposing drone operations or planting mines near their positions.

The infiltration tactic isn't new, said Artem, an officer in Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps, who requested to be identified only by his first name for security reasons, but now, what used to be a rarer occurrence is happening more often.

Soldiers say that it's becoming the norm. The incursions have "become the main battle tactic" in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, an area of heavy fighting, said Dimko Zhluktenko, a drone operator with Kyiv's Unmanned Systems Forces.

He called the tactic "troublesome" because it is effective and allows Russia to push deeper into Ukrainian territory.

Viktor Fridshon/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

'Problematic'

The front line stretches for some 800 miles across eastern and southern Ukraine, making it difficult to consistently monitor in every direction, even with the constant surveillance provided by drones. Manpower shortages make it difficult to cover every inch, creating opportunities for surprise enemy incursions.

Artem, a former deputy commander in Ukraine's 3rd Assault Brigade and the current head of military partnerships at the independent Snake Island Institute, described instances where Russia would send out just a few soldiers at a time, wearing hunting coats or employing tents to hide and avoid detection.

Their movements are guided by commanders who watch through an overhead drone and relay critical information via radio. Once they slip past the front lines, the Russian infiltrators start causing problems. Ukrainian special operations forces do the same thing.

Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP

Artem said that the infiltration units go from one point to another as their commander instructs. Once they arrive unnoticed at a location, they can accumulate more soldiers at that spot. Follow-on action then forces Ukraine to divert troops from other areas of the front line to deal with the incursion, which appears to form out of nowhere.

He recalled a situation in which Ukrainian forces were trying to maintain control of about 6 miles of the front but lacked the ability to cover all of it. The Russians seized the opportunity, and at one point, the Ukrainians were scrambling to respond to and repel Russian incursions in 14 different locations simultaneously.

He said that there have also been cases where a Russian soldier breaches the front line without carrying any guns, just an anti-tank mine. Their sole purpose was to drop the mine into Ukrainian positions and blow them up.

Tykhyi, a Ukrainian officer who requested to be identified only by their call sign for security reasons, said that in addition to infantry forces, Russia also uses motorcyclists for its incursions.

Ukrainian drone operators can respond to these incursions, but when they do, they give away their positions. Russia — watching — can identify bases and launch areas, they said.

Zhluktenko, the drone operator, said Russian infiltration teams sometimes start their missions several miles from the front on foot. They hide in the tree lines or in abandoned homes as they hike toward their objectives. Some soldiers survive, but many of them are killed by drones or artillery strikes.

TETIANA DZHAFAROVA/AFP via Getty Images

He said that Russian losses are "enormous" and soldiers are treated as "expendable resources." It's "problematic," he said. "There are hundreds of Russians who are ready to die in those pointless assaults every day, and it's never-ending."

Russia's defense ministry and its US embassy did not respond to a request for comment.

Russian forces have used costly infiltration, probing, and human-wave tactics throughout the war, with some of the most brutal cases being documented in eastern Ukraine, long a point of intense fighting.

Some of these tactics have even extended to the North Koreans who deployed to fight with Russia against Ukraine in Kursk. The US said at the time that Pyongyang's troops were being used in largely ineffective human-wave assaults.

Business Insider · Jake Epstein, Sinéad Baker

22. Allied shipbuilding is Asia’s next strategic supply chain

We need JAROKUS:

A Japan-ROK-US Shipbuilding consortium.

Allied shipbuilding is Asia’s next strategic supply chain - Asia Times

New investment in production capacity by Japan, South Korea and the US could anchor a more resilient global supply chain

https://asiatimes.com/2025/10/allied-shipbuilding-is-asias-next-strategic-supply-chain/

asiatimes.com · Jeffrey M. Voth · October 28, 2025

This article was originally published by Pacific Forum. It is republished with permission.

Sparks flying from Japanese and South Korean shipyards capture how the region’s industrial powerhouses are repositioning their economies to balance risk and trade.

With tensions between Washington and Beijing setting the tone for this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, South Korea finds itself hosting the most closely watched diplomatic gathering in years. For Japan, South Korea and the United States, the question is whether new investment in production capacity, beginning with shipbuilding, can anchor a more resilient global supply chain.

That question sits squarely at the heart of APEC’s 2025 agenda, centered on sustainable growth and supply-chain stability. The post-pandemic recovery has exposed the vulnerabilities created by offshoring and just-in-time production, while surging freight costs have tightened financial conditions across the region.

For APEC members, demonstrating progress toward reindustrialization and diversified trade networks will be as important as any communiqué on tariffs or investment liberalization. The industrial frameworks now emerging among major Pacific economies could provide a roadmap for others seeking to combine efficiency with resilience.

Tokyo’s new trade accord with Washington, which includes a $550 billion strategic investment framework, shows how Japan is turning diplomacy into industrial leverage. The agreement channels Japanese capital into US shipbuilding, semiconductors, and energy projects while securing predictable returns and long-term supply-chain access. For investors, it signals that the world once again treats Japan’s manufacturing expertise as a global asset and that economic security is shifting from policy debate to measurable action.

Seoul is pursuing a similar path, although on different terms. About $150 billion of its $350 billion US trade deal commitment will fund Make America Shipbuilding Great Again investments to upgrade US yards with South Korean capital and digital shipbuilding know-how. The rest targets energy, semiconductors, and other strategic sectors.

South Korea’s exposure is heavier than Japan’s because its reserves are smaller and its currency less liquid. President Lee Jae Myung has warned that withdrawing large sums without a dollar-swap line could strain the won and revive memories of 1997-style volatility. Even so, Seoul views the plan as vital for tariff relief.

Japan and South Korea are moving in parallel toward deeper industrial partnerships with Washington. Their investment frameworks cover shipbuilding, semiconductors, energy and other strategic sectors, reflecting a shared emphasis on rebuilding production capacity after years of offshoring.

Shipbuilding stands out because Chinese yards now produce more than half of global output and dominate commercial exports by value, shaping freight costs and vessel availability across global trade.

The United States, by contrast, has only a few major yards remaining. Expanding that capacity with allied capital and expertise could help steady shipping costs, ease bottlenecks and strengthen resilience in global supply chains.

If these investments materialize, their influence will extend well beyond the three partner nations. Southeast Asian economies are already expanding port infrastructure to accommodate new shipping capacity, while Australia is deepening maritime cooperation under its own shipbuilding programs.

Allied financing could open opportunities for regional ship-component suppliers and logistics firms, especially if standards for transparency and sustainability are aligned.

For the broader Indo-Pacific, where energy transport and commercial shipping underpin nearly every trade route, stronger allied production networks could serve as a stabilizing counterweight to market volatility.

As both agreements move ahead, they could redefine how capital, technology and talent flow through Asia’s high-end manufacturing networks. For lenders and investors, the projects show that supply-chain resilience is becoming a tangible source of value.

Japan’s participation gives its trading houses and banks deeper exposure to US industrial assets, while South Korea’s role reinforces demand for its advanced engineering and digital-production systems. Together, these developments highlight how Asia’s leading shipbuilders, already second and third globally (behind China), are extending their strengths into new markets and proving that industrial cooperation can be an engine of regional stability.

For policymakers, the coming APEC meetings will test whether these bilateral industrial frameworks can inspire a broader multilateral approach.

Beyond funding, governments will need to align standards for workforce development, technology transfer and compliance. Establishing a transparent mechanism to track outcomes, from shipyard productivity to export performance, could help convert political commitments into measurable progress. These are practical steps that fit APEC’s tradition of voluntary cooperation while addressing the region’s pressing need for economic security.

As leaders prepare to meet at APEC, attention will turn to how nations translate economic partnerships into practical results. For Japan and South Korea, progress on their new investment frameworks would mean capital flowing into US shipyards, facilities breaking ground and early gains in throughput, workforce training and technology transfer.

Expanding shipbuilding and related industries offers a model for steady growth built on technology, finance and trust. The message from APEC is simple: Shared investment can still drive shared prosperity.

Jeffrey M. Voth (jeff.voth@jlha.com) is an engineering and technology executive focused on strengthening the US defense industrial base and allied cooperation. He has written extensively on the strategic, economic and business implications of spending across the aerospace and defense sectors in publications ranging from World Politics Review and Breaking Defense to the Journal of Business Strategy.

asiatimes.com · Jeffrey M. Voth · October 28, 2025

23. 1st US heavy rare earths separation facility planned in Louisiana

As it has been explained to me, refining is the long pole in the rare earth metals tent.

1st US heavy rare earths separation facility planned in Louisiana - Asia Times

Challenging China’s processing near-monopoly, Canadian firm to mine South American deposits for shipment to Vinton port refinery

https://asiatimes.com/2025/10/1st-us-heavy-rare-earths-separation-facility-planned-in-louisiana/

asiatimes.com · Wesley Muller · October 27, 2025

A Canadian mining company plans to build a facility in Louisiana’s Calcasieu Parish to refine rare earth metals used in a variety of motors and electronics in the consumer, technology and defense industries.

Aclara Resources Inc., headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, announced a $277 million investment to construct the first US heavy rare earth separation facility at the Port of Vinton, according to a news release from Louisiana Economic Development.

The company plans to mine deposits of rare earth metals in South America and ship them to Louisiana for processing at its proposed facility in Vinton. The facility will use hydrochloric acid to extract and separate the metals from the clay mineral deposits.

Rare earth elements — such as dysprosium, neodymium, praseodymium and terbium — are considered critical materials for many industries. Some are used as high-powered magnets in wind turbine motors, vehicle alternators and heat-seeking missiles, according to ScienceNews. Others are used as high-temperature alloys in aircraft engines and nuclear reactors, or as signal amplifiers in fiber optic cables, among other applications.

Neodymium, a rare earth element, is used in tiny high-powered magnets such as these. Photo: Wes Muller / Louisiana Illuminator

Aclara’s Louisiana facility is expected to directly employ 140 people. It will occupy an L ED Certified Site at the Port of Vinton, prequalified for industrial development through environmental and engineering reviews.

“Louisiana provides ready access to the key reagents we depend on, helping ensure operational reliability and lower transportation costs,” Aclara Resources CEO Ramón Barúa said in the news release. “The state’s world-class chemical industry and highly skilled workforce made the decision even more compelling. Simply put, Louisiana has everything we were looking for.”

The state is giving Aclara a $3 million grant to pay for infrastructure and an additional job-creation grant for as much as 22% of wages paid. Additionally, the company will be eligible for the state’s lucrative Industrial Tax Exemption Program through which it will be largely exempt from property taxes in Calcasieu Parish.

Construction is expected to begin in 2026 and be completed in 2027.

Aclara boasts what it calls a sustainable mining process that uses no explosives, milling or wastewater ponds. The company says it recirculates 95% of the water it uses for mining and plants trees after razing the land. It plans to begin its mining operations in Chile in 2027 and in Brazil in 2028, according to the company’s website.

This article, originally published by Louisiana Illuminator, is republished under a Creative Commons license.

asiatimes.com · Wesley Muller · October 27, 2025

24. The Military-Narrational Complex – What Stories Do in an Age of Conflict

Narratives are critical. When will we learn to lead with influence?

As an aside:

What is the difference between a fairy tale and a war story?

A fairy tale begins with:

"Once upon a time."

A war story begins with:

"This is no sh*t."

(apologies for the attempt at humor)

Excerpts:

All this would have little bearing on war today were it not the case that real-life warriors have, for millennia, found inspiration in the hawkish Homeric version of events, and not the dovish alternative. Soldiers, whether they believe it to be fact or legend, have held up Homer’s world as an ideal against which to measure their own behavior. The figure of Achilles, a warrior who singlehandedly choked a river with dead enemies before taking on the river god himself, provided a model for Alexander the Great and persists in contemporary popular entertainment, political speech, and military culture in celebrations of shock and awe. The ideal of the Achillean warrior lives on as a touchstone for anyone attempting to understand or reinvent military culture. The better story won a long time ago and froze into a myth with present-day repercussions. Loving Achilles is an Achilles’ heel.

The alternative story of Helen’s Egyptian detour invites a more critical examination of the relationship between war and story by highlighting the degree to which humans have been conditioned by a narrative that presents war as the ultimate stage for personal and national glory. That old story survived the reevaluation of war that took place during the Enlightenment; the transformation of the modern battlefield by mass mobilization and factory-scale killing in the twentieth century; and now, the separation between killer and target facilitated by technology.

What then does this mean for the practitioner, the policymaker, and the prognosticator, and for all those who produce, participate in, or hungrily consume war stories? Peter Brooks proposes that novelists “have recognized that life needs to be shaped and understood through narrative. But they have also understood the limits to the order that fiction can impose on life.” Novelists—those modern counterparts to the epic poets—have something to teach all those constituencies. Narrative has a seemingly relentless, ungovernable momentum, but humans retain a control over war stories that does not extend to war itself. War is a realm of chance, accident, and volatility over which its participants can only ever hope to work a small measure of influence, as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace reminds us. The prudent way forward ought then to be to read today’s many swirling war stories with greater acuity—or even to learn how to write an altogether different story. The Council on Foreign Relations currently tracks almost 30 conflict zones around the world, including both internecine and international struggles. Meanwhile, someone is surely already working on the story of the next war. Savvy readers might recognize that the story of that brewing war is just that, a story—and not yet an inevitability

The Military-Narrational Complex

Foreign Affairs · More by Elizabeth D. Samet · October 29, 2025

What Stories Do in an Age of Conflict

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/military-narrational-complex

Elizabeth D. Samet

October 29, 2025

The U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, Arlington, Virginia, March 2025 Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Elizabeth D. Samet is the author of Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness and Professor of English at West Point. The views expressed here are her own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

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Since 1989, an estimated four million people have died as a result of armed conflicts around the globe—740,000 between 2021 and 2024 alone. A thorough understanding of these violent decades and of today’s persistent geopolitical volatility demands policy expertise, of course, but it also calls for a perspective beyond the realm of political science, which for all its rigor does not always account for certain human elements of war: desire for glory, thirst for vengeance, and other irrational passions that shape the belligerence of warriors and nations. In other words, the stuff of literature.

Nations weave myths out of victories and erase defeats with the promise of future triumphs. They tend to calibrate “bad” wars against “good” ones while memorializing the latter with a wistfulness that lures them into vainglorious and ultimately inglorious quests for new conflicts.

There are a few things to know about stories. First, humans have fed on them for millennia, from the Bible and the epic in ancient times to the nineteenth-century novel and the twenty-first-century Marvel franchise. Second, the hard-nosed realists and instrumentalists who are most contemptuous of the worth of stories, in particular of fictional ones, and wary of the enterprise of literary study are often the most gullible consumers of fables, swept away by the power of fictions yet ignorant of their limits, constraints, and capacity to delude. Third, the story has become many people’s primary way of understanding the world. As the literary theorist Peter Brooks argues in his 2022 book Seduced by Story, “Narrative seems to have become accepted as the only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs.” In the process, Brooks observes, story has eclipsed rational argument as the dominant purveyor of social, political, and historical truths.

We operate in a world in which the teller of the best story triumphs over the one who reasons most clearly. The most successful stories attain the quality of myth, at which point, as Brooks writes, “their status as fictions . . . is forgotten and they are taken as real explanations of the world.” In the face of this “narrative takeover,” Brooks exhorts readers “to oppose critical and analytical intelligence to narratives that seduce us into the acceptance of dominant ideologies.” What listeners and readers need, he urges, is “to resist a passive narcosis of response.”

Given the ubiquity of stories and humanity’s vulnerability to them, citizens today would be wise to practice the skills of literary analysis, the very techniques routinely derided and devalued in a world committed to technology and tribalism. So many seem eager to be rid of the labors of thought and expression—the very labors that define them as free and autonomous human beings—by ceding them to generative artificial intelligence.

One way to think about the current state of the world is to imagine it occupying the intersection of story and war. The story has gained ascendancy as a vehicle for understanding the world while the ability to interpret narrative has atrophied. At the same time, the present era is an epoch in which wars go on seemingly forever—now simmering, now boiling—without end. In the absence of definitive ends and conclusive victories, we crave a good war story.

There is of course a strict sense in which fighting and storytelling are opposed: stories create, wars destroy. At crucial moments, however, one force surrenders to the other to produce an ambiguous collaboration. Writers have long boasted that the soldier is nothing without them: the poet and the novelist keep the soldier’s exploits alive for posterity. It is likewise axiomatic that the writer is nothing without the soldier: no war, no epic; no war, no war movie; no war, no War and Peace.

Anticipating and preparing for war leads quite naturally to accepting its inevitability.

Competing stories tempt people and nations into war. Once embroiled in conflict, participants and spectators layer on more stories to make sense of their relationship to its violent cauldron. The postwar period offers fertile ground for narratives about war’s origin, prosecution, and conclusion. Storytelling is an individual and a collective enterprise. Personal remembrance becomes interwoven with political fiction, historical fact, and mythological distortion in the flood of stories that customarily follows a war.

U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower introduced the concept of the “military-industrial complex” decades ago, in his 1961 farewell address. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” he warned. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” One can debate whether the president was describing a new phenomenon or simply naming an old relationship between the public figures who authorize wars and the private actors who stand to profit from them. But he was also telling a story about how and why wars start: one that linked war-making with a pathological condition (a “complex”). This narrative was at odds with the supremely heroic story, which he helped to write, of World War II—the “good war” that made him famous.

More than six decades later, what has emerged is a military-narrational complex, in which war presents too good a story not to tell, over and over again. States, and now nonstate actors, have been engaging in wars of various kinds almost constantly since World War II. Each time, they seem to search for a story that yields the narrative satisfactions associated with that war: just causes, clear and powerful story lines of liberation and righteous vengeance, unambiguous heroes and villains, definitive ends. Yet not one of the sequels to World War II has measured up to the original tale.

PAGE TURNERS

Humans are always drafting and revising war stories, even when they aren’t actively fighting. Indeed, they routinely write themselves into and out of wars. Anticipating and preparing for war leads quite naturally to accepting its inevitability. The historian Odd Arne Westad offers an example of this dynamic in the British-German antagonism that precipitated World War I. “It wasn’t structural pressures, important as they were, that sparked World War I,” Westad argued in Foreign Affairs, in 2024. “War broke out thanks to the contingent decisions of individuals and a profound lack of imagination on both sides.” Westad also discerns a resemblance between this early-twentieth-century doom loop and the current attitudes toward U.S.-Chinese relations: “Any opening for cooperation, even on key issues, gets lost in mutual recriminations, petty irritations, and deepening strategic mistrust.”

This is the domain of grand tragedy. Potential adversaries interpret political action in zero-sum terms; see malice and evil design in mere blunders and coincidence; trumpet necessity rather than navigate choice; and, in extreme cases, invent pretext or promise profit to make more palatable a dubious cause. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, his 1886 novel about a man who attempts to outflank the great error of his past, the English writer Thomas Hardy offers an interpersonal version of the geopolitical misconstructions Westad articulates. Individuals tend to misunderstand each other’s motives, Hardy writes, because “we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or in our friends.”

When it comes to violent conflict, the costs of this tendency are supremely high. With stunning celerity, possibility becomes probability and then certainty, as readers reject the quiet, circuitous, and unglamorous narratives of prudential compromise, ambiguous diplomacy, or incremental progress. The journalist and critic Carlos Lozada has called attention to the hawk’s “narrative advantage” over the dove. “It is unfair, but tales of war tend to be more exciting than stories of peace,” Lozada wrote in The New York Times in 2023. “Dire scenarios of risk and escalation are almost always more captivating than those dissenting voices that explain how to avoid a fight.” Hawks might whip up enthusiasm by waving a bloody shirt or recalling a stab in the back. Sometimes the case for war’s inevitability is couched in expressions of rue and reluctance. U.S. Air Force General Mike Minihan, now retired, followed that pattern when, as commander of Air Mobility Command, he began a 2023 memo on China: “I hope I am wrong” before revealing, “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025.”

War stories work because it is, quite simply, much easier to define oneself against an enemy than it is to look within. They win because can-do cultures, such as those within the military, require objectives and need to believe that victory is achievable. War stories have acquired even greater momentum since railroads and military staff colleges emerged in the late nineteenth century, when states committed themselves to the business of planning—a serious work that nevertheless entails playing war games and imagining scenarios. Preparing to meet a host of contingencies entails writing a series of scripts that predict the future.

It is much easier to define oneself against an enemy than it is to look within.

The British military historian John Keegan revealed the hazards of this kind of planning in his anatomy of the Schlieffen Plan, the German strategy for fighting a two-front continental war that was devised, in 1905, by the chief of the army’s general staff, Alfred von Schlieffen. Schlieffen grounded his plan in the “mathematical realities” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also, as Keegan notes, in “wishful thinking.” After all, Keegan continues, “plans do not determine outcomes.” Schlieffen’s fixation on the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s masterful envelopment of the Romans at Cannae, combined with a desire to reproduce the German victories of the Franco-Prussian War, distorted his math: “The dream was of a whirlwind,” Keegan observes; “the calculations warned of a dying thunderstorm.” The German army’s general staff largely ignored the frank acknowledgment, buried deep in the plan, that the Germans were “too weak” to bring it to fruition. In the end, Keegan writes, when Kaiser Wilhelm II “might have put brakes to the exorable progression of the Schlieffen Plan, he found he did not understand the machinery he was supposed to control, panicked and let a piece of paper determine events.” Once written, the script’s fantastic promise distracted its readers from the fatal holes in its plot.

As soon as a battle or a war has been fought, victors and losers alike begin to tell different stories. Official stories have a deliberate, not necessarily sinister, design. The rise of the PowerPoint “storyboard” in the U.S. military during the global “war on terror,” for example, helped ensure that every engagement would be recorded a particular way. One need only search the web for a “U.S. Army storyboard template” to see how institutionalized narratives can homogenize experience by molding episodes into a particular form or genre until all content starts to look and sound alike.

It is a truism that history is written by the winners, yet it is often the losers who tell the better story—an “if only” myth that has endless permutations: If only the bad weather had held off. If only the radio hadn’t malfunctioned. If only the colonel hadn’t been sick. If only the general hadn’t been quite so ambitious. If only our hands hadn’t been tied. If only we had the resources of our enemy, or the requisite political will. At war’s end, the narrative that develops valorizes physical courage, glorifies battlefield heroics, and vilifies hubris. It distorts the relationship between war and politics while also devaluing two decidedly unromantic virtues that can prevent war—prudence and restraint—and ignoring the role of chance and disorder. The Confederate “lost cause” narrative that developed in the wake of the American Civil War, which romanticized the antebellum Southern way of life and turned the conflict into chivalric tragedy, offers a case in point. So, too, does the obsession, during the Reagan and first Bush administrations, with winning a war (even a cold one) in order to “kick” the Vietnam syndrome that had seemingly eclipsed the victorious story of World War II.

ORIGIN STORY

Numerous works of literature illuminate the stakes of weaving and consuming war stories, but for many people, there is no more definitive beginning than the Trojan War—the founding war story of Western literature and, for some, the original conflict between East and West (in this case, Greece and Asia). The version of events found primarily in the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Homeric epics that narrate the war and its aftermath, respectively, serves as a template for how many people continue to imagine war, honor, heroism, and a whole set of related issues to this day. This story retains a hold on people to a degree that most are likely scarcely aware of. It is the ultimate hawk’s tale.

Those who have read Homer’s Iliad—even those who haven’t—think they know the story of the Trojan War. In a nutshell, the Trojan prince Paris sails to Sparta to capture Helen, the beautiful wife of the king of Sparta, Menelaus. Recruiting a coalition of Greeks to get Helen back from Troy, Menelaus and his brother lead a war that lasts ten years. The Iliad tells the story of the Greeks’ greatest warrior, Achilles, who sulks in his tent for most of the poem before rejoining the fight and turning the tide. The epic ends with the death of Troy’s champion, Hector, but the war carries on.

As various ancient sources recount, after Achilles is killed by Paris, the Greeks resort to deception. Odysseus, the Ithacan warrior who is as celebrated for craftiness as Achilles is for brute strength, devises a clever ruse in which the Greeks place a giant wooden horse outside Troy’s walls and pretend to sail away. After the duped Trojans wheel the horse inside their impregnable fortress, the warriors hiding within spearhead the attack. The Greeks raze the city, slaughter many of its inhabitants, and enslave those who survive. Helen returns with Menelaus to Sparta. In the Odyssey, Homer depicts Helen and Menelaus’s reunion as uneasy and sometimes tearful, after years of estrangement. While entertaining in their palace, Helen drugs the wine—the poet calls it “magic to make us all forget our pains”—so that for one evening at least, no one will cry for a world ruined by war.

Loving Achilles is an Achilles’ heel.

But there is also a radically different, comparatively dovish version of the story. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, who composed his glorious amalgamation of legend and fact in the fourth-century BC, Helen never even reached Troy because Paris’s ship was blown off course. Instead, the pair landed in Egypt, where a local king named Proteus reprimanded Paris for being such an ungrateful guest and sent him packing while holding both Helen and the stolen treasure in trust for Menelaus. Herodotus reasoned that had Helen in fact been within the walls of Troy instead of in Egypt, the Trojans would surely have surrendered her to the Greeks rather than allow their city to be destroyed. Herodotus recruits evidence from passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey to show that Homer himself knew at least fragments of this tale yet opted to tell another, better yarn.

The values Homer elevated, especially those of male honor and female duplicity, established parameters for the war story (and not only the war story) for centuries to come. But in the less-known version, the Greeks have no legitimate reason to fight at Troy, while the Trojans try to repel irrational aggressors who do not realize, do not care, or simply refuse to believe that Helen isn’t living with Paris behind Troy’s walls. In the words of one critic, Herodotus effectively calls into doubt “the whole concept of the causation of the war itself.”

Other Greek writers further embellished the tale. In the Athenian Euripides’s play Helen, for example, Menelaus discovers that he has retrieved a phantom rather than the real Helen only after sailing away from a sacked Troy. When he then encounters the genuine Helen in Egypt, the revelation that he has spent a violent decade hunting a shadow—a simulacrum of a cause—does nothing to alter his attitude toward his expedition to Troy, which remains heroic in his eyes. Indeed, the preservation of the honor and glory he won at Troy remains Menelaus’s favorite subject throughout the play. His victory loses none of its luster by being severed from its ostensible cause: prowess in battle proves a satisfying end unto itself.

Euripides’s play unsettles assumed truths of martial heroism and battlefield glory by contrasting “the hellish world of Troy,” as the classicist Charles Segal describes it, with a fantastic “Egyptian never-never land” from which Helen and Menelaus escape to return home to Sparta. The play’s deep ambivalence to war and conventional heroism certainly owes something to its historical moment. It was performed in 412 BC, in the wake of the Athenians’ catastrophic expedition in Sicily, an ill-conceived and poorly executed invasion that showed Athens the true cost of arrogant martial ambition and from which the city did not recover.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

All this would have little bearing on war today were it not the case that real-life warriors have, for millennia, found inspiration in the hawkish Homeric version of events, and not the dovish alternative. Soldiers, whether they believe it to be fact or legend, have held up Homer’s world as an ideal against which to measure their own behavior. The figure of Achilles, a warrior who singlehandedly choked a river with dead enemies before taking on the river god himself, provided a model for Alexander the Great and persists in contemporary popular entertainment, political speech, and military culture in celebrations of shock and awe. The ideal of the Achillean warrior lives on as a touchstone for anyone attempting to understand or reinvent military culture. The better story won a long time ago and froze into a myth with present-day repercussions. Loving Achilles is an Achilles’ heel.

The alternative story of Helen’s Egyptian detour invites a more critical examination of the relationship between war and story by highlighting the degree to which humans have been conditioned by a narrative that presents war as the ultimate stage for personal and national glory. That old story survived the reevaluation of war that took place during the Enlightenment; the transformation of the modern battlefield by mass mobilization and factory-scale killing in the twentieth century; and now, the separation between killer and target facilitated by technology.

What then does this mean for the practitioner, the policymaker, and the prognosticator, and for all those who produce, participate in, or hungrily consume war stories? Peter Brooks proposes that novelists “have recognized that life needs to be shaped and understood through narrative. But they have also understood the limits to the order that fiction can impose on life.” Novelists—those modern counterparts to the epic poets—have something to teach all those constituencies. Narrative has a seemingly relentless, ungovernable momentum, but humans retain a control over war stories that does not extend to war itself. War is a realm of chance, accident, and volatility over which its participants can only ever hope to work a small measure of influence, as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace reminds us. The prudent way forward ought then to be to read today’s many swirling war stories with greater acuity—or even to learn how to write an altogether different story. The Council on Foreign Relations currently tracks almost 30 conflict zones around the world, including both internecine and international struggles. Meanwhile, someone is surely already working on the story of the next war. Savvy readers might recognize that the story of that brewing war is just that, a story—and not yet an inevitability.

Foreign Affairs · More by Elizabeth D. Samet · October 29, 2025

25. Structure Trumps Agency in the U.S.-China Relationship – Why the Competition is Here to Stay

Yes, competition is here to stay. But I am not sure Dr. Rapp Hooper understands POTUS intent and strategy based on a number of articles of late to include many from today.

Are the laws of international relations ruthless? Perhaps only if you follow them. I am not sure POTUS wants to follow the conventional rules of international relations THEORY.

Excerpts:

But Trump should not make unrequited concessions in pursuit of narrow, short-term wins, as such concessions come with significant opportunity costs and could foster long-term instability. If Trump reverses U.S. semiconductor export controls and investment restrictions, for instance, future administrations will struggle to reconstruct them. The damage to American technological and economic prowess might also be significant. Washington should not want China to get access to the American semiconductors it needs to create more sophisticated, indigenous artificial intelligence systems. Likewise, if China ends up blockading Taiwan because it believes that Washington won’t interfere, officials the world over will wish the United States had maintained a strong deterrent posture instead. Preventing a blockade or attack, after all, is far easier than stopping one once it is underway.

Trump has had his best intentions thwarted by a strongman counterpart before. His efforts could go the way of his outreach to Putin. Since launching his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump promised to repair relations with Russia and end the war in Ukraine. But despite his entreaties, including meeting with Putin in Alaska, floating sanctions relief, and threatening to cut off aid to Kyiv, the Russian president has refused to be charmed into giving up on his invasion. As a result, the two sides remain far apart, and Moscow remains heavily sanctioned.

The United States and China have singular leaders who each see reasons to negotiate. But the laws of international relations are ruthless. No matter what happens at their meeting, China’s ambitions will still pose the same long-term risks to American interests, American allies, and American power. The question is whether the bipartisan architects of Washington’s China consensus will act swiftly enough to protect the system they helped create.

Structure Trumps Agency in the U.S.-China Relationship

Foreign Affairs · More by Mira Rapp-Hooper · October 29, 2025

Why the Competition is Here to Stay

Mira Rapp-Hooper

October 29, 2025

The Chinese flag, in Beijing, August 2025 Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

MIRA RAPP-HOOPER is a Partner at The Asia Group and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She was Senior Director for East Asia and Oceania and Director for Indo-Pacific Strategy at the U.S. National Security Council during the Biden administration. She is the author of Shields of the Republic: The Triumph and Peril of America’s Alliances.

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In the United States, bipartisan consensus is painfully hard to achieve—except on the issue of China. Even as American political polarization has intensified over the last eight years, both Republicans and Democrats have agreed that an increasingly powerful Beijing poses an economic, technological, and security threat to Washington and its close allies.

This consensus is, in part, Donald Trump’s achievement. During the president’s first term in office, his officials raised alarms about Beijing’s growing technological prowess, its military buildup, and its dominance over the critical minerals industry. They slapped sanctions on Chinese entities, imposed tariffs on U.S. imports of Chinese goods, placed some restrictions on the country’s access to semiconductors, and even labeled Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang a genocide against the Uyghur people. Upon taking office, the Biden administration kept and, in many cases, expanded on these policies and positions. It took the Trump team’s diagnosis and built a government-wide strategy to comprehensively address the China challenge through domestic investment, cooperation with allies, and hard-nosed diplomacy. When Trump returned to office four years later, China was one of the only areas in which analysts expected continuity.

Yet Trump has dashed these expectations. In fact, since starting his second term, the president and his closest advisers appear determined to build a commercially based détente with Beijing. The president imposed crippling tariffs on China in April but then quickly lowered them. He has loosened multiple export restrictions at the behest of Beijing. And he has sought a leader-level meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in hopes of moving the two countries closer to a trade deal and overall rapprochement. The two are now set to talk this week, on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in South Korea.

But those hoping for a major shift in U.S.-Chinese relations may be disappointed. Despite his attempt to court Xi, and Xi’s own desire to take maximum advantage of Trump’s overtures, any truce will probably be temporary. China is highly unlikely to adjust its global aims, and there are many ways an attempted détente could unravel. Trump and Xi may want to calm the waters in the short term. But structural realities mean that U.S.-Chinese competition is here to stay.

DECADE IN THE MAKING

Presidents before Trump worried about growing Chinese influence. Barack Obama, for example, began a pivot to Asia in part to address concerns about China’s assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region. But it wasn’t until the first Trump administration that Washington’s long-standing effort to shape China’s behavior through engagement was replaced with an effort to check Chinese assertiveness where it impinged on American interests. After more than 15 years of preoccupation with counterterrorism and the Middle East, Trump’s National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy refocused U.S. policy on great-power competition. His officials at the time, including Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger, made Beijing their main priority. They called attention to China’s unfair trade practices, its use of economic and diplomatic coercion, its growing desire to dominate the Indo-Pacific militarily, and its troubling efforts to gain international leverage through foreign investment, theft of intellectual property, and state-directed technology strategies. Congress embraced this approach on a bicameral, bipartisan basis.

But although Trump gave his stamp to these China policies, his personal instincts lay elsewhere. The president valorized autocratic strongmen, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and Xi. After China’s president dismantled term limits in 2018, for instance, he praised the move as “great.” In fact, Trump’s gripes with Beijing were mostly limited to the amount of goods China purchased from the United States, and so much of his attention was spent on direct negotiations with Xi that tried to address the trade deficit. Beijing, meanwhile, gained control of Hong Kong.

In January 2020, Trump and Xi made a seeming breakthrough, striking their “phase one” trade deal. In this pact, China agreed to make large agricultural and energy purchases and strengthen commitments to protect intellectual property and technology. In exchange, the United States lowered some of its tariffs. But the Chinese side lagged on targets for the purchase of American goods and services. The president’s diplomatic efforts were further derailed by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Trump labeled the “China virus.” Tough-minded American policies toward China thus intensified over the course of 2020.

When Biden took office, he largely accepted the Trump administration’s geopolitical diagnosis, and his team built much of its foreign policy around the China challenge. The Biden National Defense Strategy and National Security Strategy were animated by competition with Beijing, and its Indo-Pacific Strategy laid out a blueprint for a more robust U.S. role in Asia. The White House also redoubled American attention on Indo-Pacific partnerships and alliances, like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (better known as the Quad), the AUKUS alliance with Australia and the United Kingdom, and the U.S.-Japanese-Korean trilateral partnership. And it sharpened Washington’s ability to go toe to toe with China through a stronger military posture, targeted technology controls, and tough diplomacy. Congress supported all of these measures and tried to boost the United States’ competitiveness through legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act, which poured federal money into strategically significant industries. By the time Biden left office, the China consensus seemed so strong that it resembled something of a ratchet. With Xi’s China continuing to press its advantage around the world, the pressure for the United States to compete could only increase.

COMMERCE FIRST

When Trump returned to office, he seemed destined to take an even tougher stance. On April 2, the president announced an initial tariff rate on China of 34 percent, which ballooned in subsequent days to 125 percent. China, in turn, imposed new strangling restrictions on the export of seven rare earth minerals.

But by the beginning of May, in part because of Beijing’s critical minerals leverage, the Trump administration paused many of these tariffs. It then pivoted to negotiations, quickly declaring that it was interested in a trade deal with Beijing. As the spring wore on, it became clear that the Trump team was pursuing a narrow deal that would lower tariffs in exchange for large Chinese purchases of U.S. goods and, potentially, new investment in the American economy. The United States, in turn, would make major concessions on critical technologies and, perhaps, geopolitics. Trump’s aims, in other words, were commercial and appeared to forsake many of his first administration’s highest priorities.

To many analysts, this shift might have seemed baffling. Why, after all, would Trump turn his back on the system he helped build? The answer, in part, is that there are now far fewer constraints on Trump’s instincts. Before 2025, U.S. policy toward China was made through a whole-of-government approach, with officials across different agencies drawing up plans for managing Beijing. The process was coordinated by a White House National Security Council staffed by experts who were increasingly concerned about the way Beijing used its power and intent on counterbalancing it where they could. But in May, Trump emptied out the NSC and vested power in a small number of officials, most of whom supported his drive for short-term economic agreements and reducing trade deficits. As global bond markets heated up in April, for example, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent began to call for de-escalation in order to stabilize them, even as Beijing indicated its willingness to stand firm. Trump then tapped Bessent to serve as his primary channel to Beijing and to lead negotiations. The White House technology adviser David Sacks also wields significant influence, and he has criticized prior administrations for their “overzealous” technology controls and argued in favor of selling high-end chips to China.

There are still some officials in Trump’s orbit who, historically, have had more traditional beliefs, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But when Trump returned to power, Beijing was substantially better prepared to push back against confrontational policies than it was in 2017. During Trump’s first term, the president’s unpredictability and willingness to embrace seemingly inconsistent approaches appeared to baffle China. This time, Beijing had a strategy for using its leverage and was resolved to follow it. Nowhere was this more apparent than in April, when China decided to restrict sales of critical minerals (of which it processes most of the world’s share)—a key chokepoint it had never wielded so decisively. In exchange for allowing rare earths to begin to flow again, Beijing then sought and received an assurance from the Trump administration that Washington would not apply any new technology export controls, such as those the Trump and Biden administrations had previously applied on semiconductors, while Trump and Xi were negotiating over trade. Beijing, in other words, got Washington to forswear one of its best economic tools just as China was wielding its own leverage.

As negotiations have dragged on, moreover, Beijing’s appetite has grown. Its aims have expanded from the economic sphere to the geopolitical one, again with little resistance from Washington. Most notably, Beijing has pushed for the United States to reduce its support for Taiwan. Trump, it seems, may be listening. The administration has withheld routine forms of assistance from Taiwan—including by downgrading a defense dialogue with the island, denying Taiwanese President William Lai the ability to briefly visit the United States while traveling elsewhere, and blocking a major arms sales package. Trump may hope these choices will create a climate in which Xi wants to strike a deal. Chinese negotiators, in turn, are probably working to persuade Trump that he should withdraw even more support from Taiwan. Beijing might then demoralize Taipei, making it easier for Xi to eventually seize control of the island.

SHAKY GROUND

In the short term, Trump will probably maintain his charm offensive toward Beijing. When the American president and Xi meet, they will likely announce progress toward a trade deal. China could pledge new investments in the American economy, despite years of U.S. restrictions, and new efforts to halt the export of fentanyl precursors, ingredients that have helped fuel the U.S. opioid epidemic. The two sides will probably commit to continuing their dialogue and to stabilizing relations. Given that he believes he is seizing a moment of opportunity, Xi has every reason to keep Trump talking.

Yet there is reason to be skeptical that Trump and Xi will ever truly reset ties. Republicans in Congress have been remarkably quiet as Trump takes a business-first approach to China, but both the House and Senate are full of lawmakers who have been instrumental in constructing the economic, technology, and defense policies designed to help Washington compete against Beijing. If Trump ultimately welcomes new Chinese investment or lifts more chip controls, they will face pressure to respond. And although Trump may have sidelined many of the bureaucracy’s China hands, agencies like the Department of Commerce have prepared new lists of export controls to implement should Trump come away disappointed. And there is a good chance that he will: Trump has already wavered on détente. This month, after China introduced sweeping new critical minerals restrictions, he threatened new tariffs and export controls and, briefly, canceled his meeting with Xi.

Beijing’s behavior is likely to keep disappointing Trump, just as it did during his first term. Xi will not stop China’s use of widespread economic subsidies or alter the other policies that have flooded American and allied markets with its goods. In fact, China’s president will not make any concessions that cut against his preexisting strategic plans—he will make deals only to advance them. Xi will likely continue using Beijing’s stranglehold on critical minerals to coerce the United States and others. He will press Trump to back away from Washington’s longstanding commitment to Taiwan. He will direct the People’s Liberation Army to continue harassing U.S. treaty allies, such as Japan and the Philippines. And he will ensure that China does not become dependent on critical American technology, even as he pushes Trump to further loosen export restrictions on cutting-edge chips.

Because of these conflicts, it is possible that Trump and Xi will never conclude any kind of formal U.S.-Chinese trade deal. If they do, it may only go partially filled. Xi, for instance, could agree to invest more in the American economy in exchange for reduced tariffs and rhetorical gains over Taiwan. But he could then overreach elsewhere, such as by taking new measures on critical minerals, causing Trump to respond. The two sides, now locked into competitive postures, might also simply grow exasperated with each another and announce new trade restrictions out of the blue.

Trump has had his best intentions thwarted by a strongman before.

This is not to say that there is no space for a good deal. If Beijing and Washington reach an agreement to meaningfully lower tariffs, for example, Americans will experience less economic pain. If the Chinese truly agree to keep the supply of critical minerals flowing on an ongoing basis, the world will win. Both outcomes might also blunt the risk of further great-power escalation in this deeply chaotic geopolitical time. No one should wish for competition for its own sake.

But Trump should not make unrequited concessions in pursuit of narrow, short-term wins, as such concessions come with significant opportunity costs and could foster long-term instability. If Trump reverses U.S. semiconductor export controls and investment restrictions, for instance, future administrations will struggle to reconstruct them. The damage to American technological and economic prowess might also be significant. Washington should not want China to get access to the American semiconductors it needs to create more sophisticated, indigenous artificial intelligence systems. Likewise, if China ends up blockading Taiwan because it believes that Washington won’t interfere, officials the world over will wish the United States had maintained a strong deterrent posture instead. Preventing a blockade or attack, after all, is far easier than stopping one once it is underway.

Trump has had his best intentions thwarted by a strongman counterpart before. His efforts could go the way of his outreach to Putin. Since launching his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump promised to repair relations with Russia and end the war in Ukraine. But despite his entreaties, including meeting with Putin in Alaska, floating sanctions relief, and threatening to cut off aid to Kyiv, the Russian president has refused to be charmed into giving up on his invasion. As a result, the two sides remain far apart, and Moscow remains heavily sanctioned.

The United States and China have singular leaders who each see reasons to negotiate. But the laws of international relations are ruthless. No matter what happens at their meeting, China’s ambitions will still pose the same long-term risks to American interests, American allies, and American power. The question is whether the bipartisan architects of Washington’s China consensus will act swiftly enough to protect the system they helped create.

Foreign Affairs · More by Mira Rapp-Hooper · October 29, 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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Conclusion

Setting The Force: 10 Steps for Resolving The Special Forces “Identity Crisis”

Ten Steps for Setting the Force:

Clarify our understanding of insurgency.

Free unconventional warfare from the burdens of our storied past.

Shift the focus of SOF Intelligence from knowing threats to understanding grievances.

Empower and employ ODA-level operators to identify and develop opportunities.

Ensure every action is designed to convey an intended narrative through its execution.

Center the “X” on the minds of our adversaries and focus our effects on that space.

Campaign persistently and globally, shifting focus as necessity or opportunity presents.

Free SOF from Service personnel systems, make Special Forces joint to the ODA level.

Make “SOF for life” a well-funded reality.

Provide the Regiment with a refined purpose and missions relevant to modern challenges.

Conclusion

About The Author

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PAGE TURNERS

ORIGIN STORY

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Structure Trumps Agency in the U.S.-China Relationship

Why the Competition is Here to Stay

Mira Rapp-Hooper

DECADE IN THE MAKING

COMMERCE FIRST

SHAKY GROUND