Quotes of the Day:

"I wish our nation to become the most beautiful nation in the world. I do not necessarily wish for the nation to become the world's richest or strongest. Since I have suffered all too well the pain of foreign invasion, I do not wish my nation to invade another. Our national strength will be sufficient as long as our wealth makes our lives abundant and our military strength repels others' invasions. But the one thing I seek in infinite quantity is the power of a highly developed culture. This is because the power of culture brings happiness and meaning to our lives and, by extension, to the lives of others."

– Kim Koo, My Wish (for Korea) 1876-1949

“I’m here to contribute. We all depend on each other. I depend on people in generations prior to me. People in generations after me will depend on me.” 

– Bryan Nwafor

"Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories." 

– Polybius

1. Dan Driscoll’s Army of One

2. Exclusive | Secret U.S. Memo Authorizing Drug-Boat Strikes Cites Chemical Weapon Threat

3. VIDEO: Dr. James Giordano-The Brain is the Battlefield of the Future (& The Future is NOW)

4. How American and Chinese Drone Arsenals Stack Up

5. China Tells Citizens to Avoid Japan as Taiwan Spat Deepens

6. Are US Special Forces Getting Ready to Attack Venezuela?

7. Authoritarian reach and democratic response: A tactical framework to counter and prevent transnational repression

8. Digital platforms pose a threat to democracy worldwide

9. Scholars Must Recognize the Role of Affect and Emotion in Disinformation

10. A New Map of the Arctic 

11. Reflections from the Manila Dialogue

12. China’s Upgraded Lawfare in the South China Sea

13. The End of China’s Old Guard – Why Party Elders Can’t Save the Country From Xi

14. How Washington Should Manage Its Most Complicated Relationships

15. From Saigon to the Pentagon: Hung Cao's Journey and the Transformation of Pacific Defense

16. How Asia Is Navigating America’s Fading Financial Control

17. A Glimpse of the Future of China-US Relations

18. Trump blocked from gutting Voice of America collective bargaining rights

19. The US military’s plan to revive old bases in Latin America

20. The War to Break American Truth

21. Naturalized US citizens thought they were safe. Trump's immigration policies are shaking that belief

1. Dan Driscoll’s Army of One

Summary:

Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll has become a powerful, untouchable figure inside the Trump Pentagon, largely due to his close personal friendship with Vice President J.D. Vance. This has fueled intense tension with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who cannot fire Driscoll even amid a broader military purge. While ambitious and seen as a likely future SecDef, Driscoll maintains a “nice-guy” persona and has focused on bipartisan acquisition reform, pushing innovative Army modernization efforts with Silicon Valley-style approaches. Many of these ideas originated with Army Chief of Staff Randy George. Despite speculation, Hegseth retains stronger top-cover from Trump.

Excerpts:

The widespread assumption that Driscoll is positioning himself for Hegseth’s job has naturally created tensions with his combative, polarizing boss. “Whenever there’s an article that Hegseth is going to be fired, the next sentence is that Driscoll could replace him,” a former defense official told me. A second former senior defense official pointed out that, when Hegseth’s confirmation was on the rocks earlier this year, the consensus was that Driscoll would be the replacement. “So Hegseth is always looking over his shoulder at Dan, and not in a good way,” the first official said. “Because he thinks that Dan is gunning for his job—and he is.”

...

Given his background, Driscoll has decided that he will modernize the Army by bringing Silicon Valley—as well as some V.C.-inflected thinking—to the Pentagon. (The first to do that was Barack Obama, who launched the Pentagon’s DIUx, or Defense Innovation Unit, in Mountain View.) Famously, of course, about three-quarters of V.C.-backed firms fail—not necessarily a great stat if you’re gambling with taxpayer money. But Driscoll has said his measure of success would be one of the five defense behemoths, or “primes”—Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman—going out of business in the next two years.

...

It’s worth noting that, as both Driscoll’s fans and detractors point out, not all of these apparently revolutionary ideas are his own. Many were actually nurtured by General George over the years, and workshopped with Driscoll when he was living in Fort Myer by himself and going over to the Georges’ for dinner. Afterward, Driscoll and George would have long talks over bourbon and beer on the general’s porch. According to a person familiar with the situation, George is happy to have such a well-connected, politically savvy supporter finally pushing his ideas from the drawing board to reality, just as Driscoll doesn’t mind Hegseth taking the ideas and trying to implement them across the entire American military. They see it as a natural and symbiotic process, and people are happy that Hegseth has put his personal political capital behind it. “It’s one thing to change the Army,” said a senior defense official. “It’s another thing to change the whole department.”

Comment: A lot of inside baseball. A lot of this is partisan but we have to set that aside and try to discern what is really happening. Hard to know what is accurate. Also in terms of next SECDEF I heard from some defense insiders this week that despite being seemingly on the outs (and not mentioned in this piece) is that Bridge Colby is supposedly trying to position himself as the next SECDEF.

Dan Driscoll’s Army of One

J.D. Vance’s man in the Pentagon is a rare Trump appointee who commands bipartisan respect and affection. Naturally, this doesn’t sit well with his boss, Pete Hegseth, who doesn’t.

Julia Ioffe

November 13, 2025

https://puck.news/meet-the-one-man-pete-hegseth-cant-fire/

puck.news · Latest Articles

Last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth summoned two men into his office at the Pentagon: Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll and General Randy George, the Army chief of staff. After a tumultuous nine months of axing generals and admirals from across the armed forces, Hegseth had yet another burning personnel decision that he wanted the men to implement: Push out General James Mingus, the current vice chief of the army, and replace him with Hegseth’s own trusted advisor, Lt. Gen. Christopher LaNeve.

Maybe this was an inevitable part of the Trump Pentagon purge. During the Commander-in-Chief Inaugural Ball, the president had hailed LaNeve as straight from “central casting,” adding, “If I’m doing a movie, I pick him to play my lead.” For his part, Mingus was widely respected, had more stars than LaNeve, and had been in the job for less than two years. But he was tainted in the eyes of the administration for having served under former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley as the J3 (director of operations for the Joint Chiefs). Worse, he was seen as one of Milley’s protégés.

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George didn’t like the idea of ending Mingus’s career prematurely, and pushed back. At that point, according to two Pentagon sources with knowledge of the meeting, Hegseth made one thing clear to the men sitting in front of him: If they didn’t comply, he could easily exact revenge—but only on one of them. He could certainly fire George, he said, but he couldn’t touch Driscoll. Left unsaid was the reason: Driscoll, as everyone knows, is close personal friends with J.D. Vance. On October 20, Congress received LaNeve’s nomination for the role.

The episode underscored the tension between Hegseth and Driscoll, which has become one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington. As much as Hegseth has demanded absolute loyalty—he is said to spend unusual amounts of time on social media, trawling for evidence of its absence—Driscoll is the one person at the Pentagon whom he can’t threaten to fire, as he regularly does with others in the building.

And if you don’t know that Driscoll is Vance’s close personal friend, Driscoll will be happy to tell you. Several sources told me that Driscoll tends to slide this fact into conversations early. One senior Pentagon source told me that Driscoll “humbly jokes that there’s one reason he’s secretary of the Army, and that’s because he’s best friends with J.D. Vance. He’s very matter-of-fact about it.”

When Driscoll was asked on former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan’s popular manosphere podcast how he got his current job, he responded by telling two stories. First, he recalled how he’d met Vance. Driscoll, a simple, outdoorsy kid from the mountains of North Carolina, fresh out of the Army and a tour in Iraq, showed up at Yale to start law school. A second-year law student named J.D., who had also served in Iraq, took him and a few other vets out for pizza. Over some pies, Vance gave them advice that was as much about himself as the new guys. “I know a lot of you guys are going to be self-conscious, you’ve been out of school for a while,” Driscoll recounted the future vice president telling them. “You’re going to feel like you’re less than and not smart enough to keep up. But if you can just give it a couple months, you’ll get your bearings and you’ll figure it out, and you’ll find out that you belong here.”

Fast forward—past law school, a stint in venture capital, and an unsuccessful run for Congress (he lost in a primary to Madison Cawthorn)—to July 2024 and Driscoll’s rendezvous with destiny. This was the second story. Driscoll was having dinner in Zurich while on vacation with his wife, Cassie, his high-school sweetheart and a plastic surgeon—when his phone rang. It was J.D., breaking the news that he’d been tapped to be the Republican vice presidential nominee. The next morning, Driscoll was on a plane to Chicago, and, after a pit stop at an outlet mall to buy himself a suit, headed to Milwaukee to help his law school buddy campaign for the White House. The rest, as he described it, was a yearlong “adventure.”

Driscoll isn’t shy about telling this story, which is why it has made the rounds in Washington, including the part about Driscoll and Cassie being high-school sweethearts, and the part about him being a simple, outdoorsy kid from the mountains of North Carolina, and the part about picking up J.D.’s fateful call and joining him on the campaign trail and then in the administration. But all of Washington knows something else about Driscoll, too: that Hegseth hates him—in part because he’s protected by his relationship with Vance, and because the talk of the town is that Driscoll will be the next SecDef, just as soon as Hegseth is out.

That is not a coincidence. Driscoll is very ambitious, and he knows how to work the system. He’s known as a “soldier-secretary” and “a cross between a Baptist preacher and a jihadist,” both monikers he invented—and pushed—himself. “Part of his strategy to rise is to generate this narrative,” a former senior defense official noted. “He’s very accessible. He talks to reporters. He’s constantly texting with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. These are very important constituencies, and he knows that they’re human beings, and if you can get them to like you, that’s half the battle.”

The widespread assumption that Driscoll is positioning himself for Hegseth’s job has naturally created tensions with his combative, polarizing boss. “Whenever there’s an article that Hegseth is going to be fired, the next sentence is that Driscoll could replace him,” a former defense official told me. A second former senior defense official pointed out that, when Hegseth’s confirmation was on the rocks earlier this year, the consensus was that Driscoll would be the replacement. “So Hegseth is always looking over his shoulder at Dan, and not in a good way,” the first official said. “Because he thinks that Dan is gunning for his job—and he is.”

In response to a request for comment, the Pentagon press shop sent a statement that they attributed to Driscoll. “There has been no stronger partner for the Army than Secretary Hegseth,” it said. “Secretary Hegseth and I are 100 percent aligned on transforming the Army, reforming the archaic acquisition process, and putting Soldiers first. This is false reporting that could not be further from the truth.” A statement attributed to Hegseth read: “This story is completely false. The President and I have put together a cohesive team that is focused on protecting the homeland, deterring adversaries, and ushering in a new era of Peace Through Strength. I’m grateful that Army Secretary Driscoll is part of our team.”

The Pentagon’s Mr. Rogers

Unlike Hegseth, people on both sides of the aisle actually like Driscoll and see him as a serious, thoughtful, competent person. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, reached out to Dems across Washington ahead of Driscoll’s confirmation hearings to vouch for the guy. (Both Sullivan and his wife, Maggie Goodlander, now a congresswoman from New Hampshire, are Yale Law alums. Driscoll and Goodlander have a close friend in common.)

It also helps that Driscoll looks likeable. His face is boyish and innocent, with ruddy cheeks and what always seems like a smile. He has a bright-eyed earnestness that makes whatever he’s saying sound not just reasonable, but downright wonderful. “What’s so cool about the National Guard is you can be deployed abroad for the security of your country,” he told Ryan about the Guard’s now indefinite deployment to D.C., “but you can be used to help improve and secure your own community.” It was as if Mister Rogers were a Yale-trained Republican politician who was totally fine with using U.S. troops to police his fellow Americans.

This aw-shucks affability has also helped him separate himself from Hegseth, whose aggressive culture war crusade in the Pentagon has alienated a huge swath of both the command and the policy folks. People from both camps told me that they suspect that Driscoll isn’t a fan of Hegseth’s purge of the military, either. “He’s not into firing people because of some big concept,” the second former senior defense official told me.

On the other hand, there’s no evidence that Driscoll has actually done anything to protect commanders from being forced into early retirement because the SecDef perceives them as being disloyal—or, even worse, a D.E.I. hire. In fact, Driscoll has had to take a scalp for MAGA himself. He was the one who rescinded West Point’s job offer to Jen Easterly, a West Point alum and retired Army lieutenant colonel, and head of CISA under Biden, after Laura Loomer singled her out as having supposedly censored right-wingers.

Still, the nice guy persona has its downsides, especially if your foil also happens to be your (very paranoid) boss. “He’s not stupid,” said the first former defense official about Driscoll. “He knows he can’t have his boss mad at him. Driscoll is in this position where he might like to save some of these generals whose careers are being ended, but he can’t cross Hegseth openly.” Or, as someone who knows him put it, “I think Dan is fundamentally a decent person, but he’s not someone who’s going to light himself on fire in the current context.”

“Good Luck to Him”

Instead, Driscoll has cleverly found a rare bipartisan issue to make his own: reforming the slow and ossified system through which the American military purchases its equipment. “It’s one of the few areas where there’s a very strong bipartisan consensus that we’re not doing it right,” said Jerry McGinn, the director of the Center for the Industrial Base at C.S.I.S., a national-security think tank, pointing to a Senate hearing on the issue that brought rare agreement between Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott. In Washington terms, railing about the need to fix Pentagon acquisitions is a bit like pushing tax reform: Most everyone wants to do it, but for whatever reason, no one’s figured out how to get it done. “Good luck to him for trying,” a third former senior defense official quipped, not insincerely.

Given his background, Driscoll has decided that he will modernize the Army by bringing Silicon Valley—as well as some V.C.-inflected thinking—to the Pentagon. (The first to do that was Barack Obama, who launched the Pentagon’s DIUx, or Defense Innovation Unit, in Mountain View.) Famously, of course, about three-quarters of V.C.-backed firms fail—not necessarily a great stat if you’re gambling with taxpayer money. But Driscoll has said his measure of success would be one of the five defense behemoths, or “primes”—Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman—going out of business in the next two years.

Driscoll has surprised doubters by moving quickly and innovatively. He has started talks with the private sector, including private equity firms, to reinvigorate America’s defense industrial base by building defense manufacturing facilities on all the fallow land that the Army owns. He’s working to put small nuclear reactors on Army installations to make them energy independent. He’s made a deal for the Army to buy a million drones while embracing a “two-to” approach: Two producers compete to bring their drones to production, thus encouraging competition, efficiency, and savings throughout the system—at least in theory. And, given his origins in the North Carolina mountains, he has inked a partnership between U.S. Ski & Snowboard and his former unit, the 10th Mountain Division. He’s also created “portfolio acquisition executives”—civilians who, in McGinn’s words, “are closer to the actual war fighter but have a broader portfolio. They can make trades, see what’s working, what isn’t.”

There are still lots of ifs—like if Congress will allow programs they specifically funded to be swapped for others they haven’t. But to see so much movement in such a reform-resistant field, well, for its grizzled experts and veterans, “it’s all pretty exciting,” McGinn confessed.

Which is why, last Friday, it was Hegseth who delivered an hourlong, jargon-packed speech about how he was taking a lot of these move-fast-and-break-shit reforms department-wide—perhaps a bid for some of the love that D.C. defense dorks seem to have for Driscoll, the nice guy he can’t remove. “I think this is something that isn’t partisan and it’s popular, and because of that, Hegseth jumped on it,” said the second former senior defense official. “I mean, Hegseth has to do more than just fire Black people and women. He’s going to run out of them.” (“Having known Secretary Hegseth for well over a decade, I can attest that he has been a leader at the forefront of acquisition reform for 10-plus years, and those in the Pentagon see him as a leader on this issue as well,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement. “Anyone who suggests he is not an authority on acquisition reform simply isn’t paying enough attention.”)

It’s worth noting that, as both Driscoll’s fans and detractors point out, not all of these apparently revolutionary ideas are his own. Many were actually nurtured by General George over the years, and workshopped with Driscoll when he was living in Fort Myer by himself and going over to the Georges’ for dinner. Afterward, Driscoll and George would have long talks over bourbon and beer on the general’s porch. According to a person familiar with the situation, George is happy to have such a well-connected, politically savvy supporter finally pushing his ideas from the drawing board to reality, just as Driscoll doesn’t mind Hegseth taking the ideas and trying to implement them across the entire American military. They see it as a natural and symbiotic process, and people are happy that Hegseth has put his personal political capital behind it. “It’s one thing to change the Army,” said a senior defense official. “It’s another thing to change the whole department.”

Who’s Got the Most Top Cover?

In his speech on Friday, Hegseth started by reading what he later revealed was, verbatim, a speech that Donald Rumsfeld gave on revolutionizing Pentagon acquisitions in 2001. Hegseth’s point, of course, was that the disruptive Trump administration would be successful where Rumsfeld and the Bush administration had failed. But for people who have spent decades in the field, including those who have tried every which way to reform the Byzantine process, the analogy didn’t quite land. “Rumsfeld had a bunch of experience,” said one such veteran of these acquisition reform wars. “He was a sharp-elbowed operator, and he was really smart. And he couldn’t get it done. Now you have this idiot, who doesn’t know shit about Washington, and doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. How do you think that’s going to end?”

There’s a quiet hope that Driscoll might be better suited to the task. Which is also why he’s been at pains to show that he respects Hegseth and his authority, and is willing to give him as much credit as he wants to take. Because as much as Washington likes speculating that Driscoll will be the next SecDef, Hegseth would first have to vacate the spot. And it’s very clear that Hegseth isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. After all, his top cover is even better than Driscoll’s.

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2. Exclusive | Secret U.S. Memo Authorizing Drug-Boat Strikes Cites Chemical Weapon Threat

​Summary:

A classified Justice Department memo justifies Trump administration military strikes on drug-smuggling boats by labeling cartels terrorist organizations and framing fentanyl as a potential chemical weapon. It leans on commander-in-chief authority, collective self-defense and nominternational armed conflict, but faces bipartisan criticism over legality, congressional authorization, civilian targeting, and international norms.

Excerpts:

But the brief also asserts the U.S. is involved in a noninternational armed conflict with the cartels, a legal term denoting one within the territory of a single state. Since it is a legal fight, the memo argues, U.S. military personnel involved are acting lawfully and wouldn’t be subject to future prosecution, several people who have read it say. The immunity argument was previously reported by the Washington Post.

The document also invokes the president’s powers as commander in chief under Article II of the Constitution and under the statute allowing military action for as long as 60 days before congressional approval is required for the continued use of force, according to lawmakers.

Critics, mainly Democrats and law-of-war experts, have pointed to multiple problems with the legal arguments and analysis presented in the memo

Comment: When I read the headline I immediately thought what chemical weapons are coming from South America and for what purpose? I did not expect (but I supposed I should have) that we were classifying fentanyl as a "chemical weapon."

Exclusive | Secret U.S. Memo Authorizing Drug-Boat Strikes Cites Chemical Weapon Threat

WSJ

Brief outlines the Trump administration’s legal case for military action against alleged drug-carrying boats in the Caribbean, Pacific

By Alexander Ward

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, Lara Seligman

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 and Michael R. Gordon

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Updated Nov. 14, 2025 5:34 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/justice-department-drug-boat-strike-memo-83711582?mod=hp_lead_pos3

The Justice Department in Washington, D.C. Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

• A Justice Department brief authorizes strikes on drug-smuggling boats, describing fentanyl as a potential chemical weapons threat.
• The Trump administration’s legal justification for military operations targets drug cartels as legitimate military targets.
• The Pentagon has conducted 20 known strikes against suspected drug boats, resulting in at least 80 fatalities.

An artificial-intelligence tool created this summary, which was based on the text of the article and checked by an editor. Read more about how we use artificial intelligence in our journalism.

• A Justice Department brief authorizes strikes on drug-smuggling boats, describing fentanyl as a potential chemical weapons threat.

WASHINGTON—A classified Justice Department brief authorizing strikes on drug-smuggling boats describes fentanyl as a potential chemical weapons threat, according to a House member and another person familiar with the memo.

The lengthy document by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel outlines the Trump administration’s still-secret legal justification for the continuing military operation, which has sparked sharp criticism from Democrats and some Republicans since the strikes began in September.

The mention of fentanyl is one of many points in the brief, which was drafted over the summer to justify the use of military force against drug traffickers. It notes that fentanyl has been weaponized in the past. In 2002, Russia used aerosolized fentanyl to quell a hostage crisis at a Moscow theater, killing more than 100 of the roughly 700 people being held in the rescue attempt.

The legal case for military action doesn’t rest on concerns about chemical-weapons use by drug organizations, a Justice Department spokesman said. “The opinion explicitly states it doesn’t rely on the counterproliferation argument,” the spokesman said.

The main argument in the memo is that President designation of drug cartels as foreign terrorists makes them legitimate military targets, asserting that the groups are smuggling drugs to fund deadly and destabilizing actions against the U.S. and its allies, according to lawmakers and others who have read it.

Venezuela, a base for one of the criminal groups designated as a terrorist organization, has long been a transit route for Colombian cocaine. There is no evidence it produces or traffics fentanyl, which is typically made in Mexico and smuggled over land, experts note.

In September, WSJ explained how the heightened rhetoric and military moves by the Trump administration and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro could escalate. Photo: Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images; Francis Chung/CNP/Zuma Press

“It is an incredible stretch,” said Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser to the State Department during the Obama administration and first Trump administration, of the memo’s warning about fentanyl.

In 2018, the Justice Department issued an opinion justifying U.S. strikes on the former regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after it attacked civilians with chemical agents, which it said were chlorine gas and in some instances the nerve agent sarin.

The Pentagon has carried out 20 known strikes against boats it claims are carrying illegal drugs in the Caribbean and the Pacific, killing at least 79 people, but it hasn’t made public evidence supporting claims about the vessels since the attacks began Sept. 2.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a social-media post Thursday that the military campaign “removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people. The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood—and we will protect it.”

The memo uses multiple legal arguments, according to lawmakers interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, public statements by others who have read it and people familiar with the contents.

“Much of it is geared toward making a financial argument about what the drugs are providing in terms of monetary resources” to the groups designated by the administration, said Sen. Andy Kim (D., N.J.), who served in multiple senior national security roles in Democratic and Republican administrations.

Kim said the foreign-terrorist organization designation is typically used to justify sanctions against such groups. “But they are trying to use that now to create a lethal kinetic justification, which is not what that designation is for and has never been done before,” he said.

The brief cites the right to militarily aid other countries facing threats, arguing that the doctrine of collective self-defense applies because drug organizations clash with authorities in Latin American countries allied with the U.S., according to the lawmakers.

But the brief also asserts the U.S. is involved in a noninternational armed conflict with the cartels, a legal term denoting one within the territory of a single state. Since it is a legal fight, the memo argues, U.S. military personnel involved are acting lawfully and wouldn’t be subject to future prosecution, several people who have read it say. The immunity argument was previously reported by the Washington Post.

The document also invokes the president’s powers as commander in chief under Article II of the Constitution and under the statute allowing military action for as long as 60 days before congressional approval is required for the continued use of force, according to lawmakers.

Critics, mainly Democrats and law-of-war experts, have pointed to multiple problems with the legal arguments and analysis presented in the memo.

Some legal experts have described the attacks on boats as illegal, arguing that the military cannot lawfully target civilians, including criminal suspects, who don’t pose an imminent threat and aren’t participating in hostilities. Drug cartels aren’t purposefully launching attacks on Americans with narcotics because the groups have no incentive to kill their customer base, they say.

“It isn’t the effect of the substance that makes it an armed attack,” said Geoffrey Corn, a former military lawyer who now directs the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University.

In the brief, the DOJ claims that the drug smugglers are enemy combatants, while also arguing that the U.S. isn’t engaged in hostilities with them, precluding the need to seek congressional approval for continued military operations, said lawmakers who read the document.

Some Republicans have questioned the administration’s claim that it doesn’t need congressional approval to use force against drug organizations. The White House has said the operations don’t rise to the level of “hostilities” and don’t endanger U.S. servicemembers.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Does the characterization of cocaine as a chemical weapon support or undermine the drug boat attacks in Venezuela? Join the conversation below.

“The president had the right to take initial actions, but should seek Congressional authorization for continued strikes,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R., Neb.), a House Armed Services Committee member who reviewed the opinion.

On the U.S. argument that it is coming to the aid of allies, key partners such as Colombia and Mexico have criticized the boat strikes and said they weren’t consulted about the shift in U.S. tactics or had even requested such assistance.

“This is a memo where the decision was made, and someone was told to come up with a justification for the decision,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It is a lot of legal mumbo jumbo.”

Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com, Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com and Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com

Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the November 15, 2025, print edition as 'Secret Memo Lays Out Case for Boat Strikes'.

WSJ

3. VIDEO: Dr. James Giordano-The Brain is the Battlefield of the Future (& The Future is NOW)

​Comment: Dr. Giordano is brilliant. I was fortunate to hear him lecture at Georgetown and the Army's Mad Scientist program. He is really one of the best when it comes to understanding those six inches between our ears or "cognitive warfare."

VIDEO: Dr. James Giordano-The Brain is the Battlefield of the Future (& The Future is NOW)

by SWJ Staff

|

11.13.2025 at 11:59pm

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/11/13/video-dr-james-giordano-the-brain-is-the-battlefield-of-the-future-the-future-is-now/

Oct 29, 2018

Dr. James Giordano, Chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program and Scholar-in-Residence in the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University, speaks to cadets and faculty about how advancements in neuroscience and neurotechnology will impact the future of war. This event was hosted by the Modern War Institute at West Point.

*There are more slides in the video*

Tags: Ajit Maan, biodefense, Biological Weapons, biosecurity, Cognitive Domain, Cognitive Warfare, ethics, Georgetown University, Information and influence activities, Information environment, information warfare, irregular warfare, James Giordano, military ethics, Modern War Institute at West Point, nanoscience, Nanotechnology, narrative strategies, narrative warfare, synthetic biology, weaponized narratives, West Point

About The Author

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

4. How American and Chinese Drone Arsenals Stack Up

​Summary:

China has caught or pulled ahead of the U.S. across most drone categories, from stealth reconnaissance and strike systems to loitering munitions and cheap FPV quadcopters. Beijing’s scale, speed, and Taiwan-focused planning drive its edge, while U.S. efforts are slowed by bureaucratic cost, procurement delays, reliability challenges, and innovation gap.

​Comment: Graphics at the link.

How American and Chinese Drone Arsenals Stack Up

WSJ

By Jason French

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, Josh Chin

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, Jemal R. Brinson

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 and Liza Lin

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Nov. 14, 2025 5:30 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/china-america-military-drones-compared-7c56be7a?st=otxyEp&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

The U.S. is falling behind China in one of the defining technologies of the modern battlefield.

Drones have proven indispensable in conflicts like Ukraine, where troops rely on them to destroy tanks, lay mines, evacuate wounded fighters, and deliver food and medication. Advances in artificial intelligence increasingly allow unmanned systems to operate with minimal human direction, such as tracking and attacking targets on their own.

For years, the U.S. led in quality while China won on quantity. But across the spectrum, from stealth drones capable of flying at the edge of space to cheap foldable quadcopters that fit in a soldier’s backpack, Chinese technology has either drawn even with the U.S. or nudged ahead. Here’s how the two sides stack up:

China

U.S.

Animate drones

Long-range strike drones—loaded with cutting-edge weapons—are the type the U.S. used to clearly dominate, but China is catching up fast.

The American MQ-20 “Avenger” can carry 3,000 pounds of munitions and has undergone experimental piloting with AI. But China has two strong competitors: The WJ-700 “Falcon,” which can evade radar and is versatile enough to attack both ships and land-based forces, and the TB-001 “Twin-Tailed Scorpion,” an agile system that can carry up to 2,600 pounds of munitions.

China is also flying even with the U.S. in cutting-edge spy drones.

The American RQ-4 Global Hawk, whose sensors can see through clouds and produce sharp images from more than 100 miles away, has been operational since 2001 in Iraq and elsewhere. Its closest Chinese equivalent is the WZ-9 “Divine Eagle,” which carries powerful radar that can track stealth aircraft. China’s WZ-8 can evade air defenses by flying at hypersonic speeds along the edge of Earth’s atmosphere and has no American equivalent.

The U.S. clearly lags behind in suicide (exploding) and loitering drones, which function like intelligent cruise missiles.

The U.S. Switchblade 600, with its 33-pound payload, can be set up and launched from a tube by a single soldier in 10 minutes. China’s similar CH-901 carries a smaller warhead but can fly farther.

The Chinese ASN 301 is similar to the Shahed drones Russia has used to attack Ukraine. With double the payload and more than three times the range of the Switchblade, it’s ideal for attacking air-defense systems. The U.S. currently has no serious competitor.

The loyal wingman is a type of AI-powered drone designed to operate in tandem with manned fighter jets and other aircraft, providing reconnaissance and carrying extra weapons.

China has two in development: the GJ-11 “Sharp Sword,” for deep strike or reconnaissance missions, and the FH-97A, a stealth attack drone intended to support the manned J-20 fighter. Both travel at high subsonic speeds, around 600 mph.

The most well-known U.S. version is the prototype XQ-58A Valkyrie, designed to provide unmanned escort for F-35s and F-22s.

China’s biggest advantage is in first-person view, or FPV, quadcopters: small, inexpensive drones that are often foldable and easily deployed by individual soldiers.

The U.S. Skydio X10D is designed for military use, especially to conduct reconnaissance in battlefield conditions. At $15,000, it costs three times as much as a similar Chinese drone.

The DJI Mavic is a consumer drone used by Chinese paramilitary and military troops, mostly for reconnaissance. DJI doesn’t release sales figures, but is likely capable of producing more than a million Mavics per year, while Skydio is in the thousands.

Both sides are testing the limits of the technology with experimental drones.

A mosquito-like drone produced by China and the U.S.’s Black Hornet are tiny, hard-to-detect machines built for close surveillance missions.

China’s Jiutian is the opposite—a massive “mothership” that can carry, deploy and control a swarm of smaller suicide drones.

China’s drive to pursue drone dominance is fueled by the possibility of conflict with the U.S. over Taiwan, according to military analysts. Footage of an urban combat exercise aired last year by China’s state broadcaster showed soldiers working with teams of drones and robot dogs in a simulated assault on the Taiwanese city of Taoyuan.

“In order to minimize casualties on the PLA side, they have to use robotic systems as a first wave of attack,” said Sunny Cheung, an open-source intelligence expert at the Washington think tank Jamestown Foundation. “They’re quite explicit about that.”

Loyal wingman drones would likely be essential in any such conflict, according to Michael Horowitz, who served as U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense in charge of emerging capabilities under the Biden administration.

“Air dominance will be critical to whomever would emerge victorious in the context of a war fight in the Indo-Pacific,” said Horowitz, noting that China could be the first to field such a drone, with both the FH-97A and GJ-11 in advanced stages of development.

In 2023, Horowitz helped launch a Pentagon initiative to increase American production of cutting-edge military drones. The program struggled to field drones that were reliable, cheap and interoperable enough to meet the demands of the Defense Department, which led it to move the drone work under new leadership this fall. Part of the problem, according to Horowitz, is that the U.S. military’s budget process moves too slowly to fund the rapid advances needed to keep pace with China.

“China is not constrained by these kinds of issues,” he said.

Graphics sources: Sunny Cheung, Jamestown Foundation; John Van Oudenaren, BluePath Labs; China Aerospace Studies Institute

Write to Jason French at jason.french@wsj.com, Josh Chin at Josh.Chin@wsj.com, Jemal R. Brinson at jemal.brinson@wsj.com and Liza Lin at liza.lin@wsj.com

WSJ

5. China Tells Citizens to Avoid Japan as Taiwan Spat Deepens

​Summary:

After Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi warned a Chinese move on Taiwan could trigger Japanese involvement in war, Beijing erupted, denounced her remarks and urged Chinese citizens to avoid travel to Japan. The spat further chills China-Japan ties and complicates U.S. efforts to balance relations with both countries at once.

​Comment: A spat? The PM issued a strong realistic statement and the CCP responded with insults and the beginning of economic warfare perhaps. Balance relations between Japan and China?  I hope we in the US know which side of the scale we are on.

China Tells Citizens to Avoid Japan as Taiwan Spat Deepens

WSJ

Beijing is furious with Japanese prime minister after she said Japan would defend itself if China moved to seize the island

By Jason Douglas

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Nov. 14, 2025 3:26 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/china-tells-citizens-to-avoid-japan-as-taiwan-spat-deepens-714f3faf?mod=hp_lista_pos2

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi kazuhiro nogi/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

• Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested that a Chinese push to seize Taiwan could pose a grave threat to Japan.
• China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged its citizens to avoid travel to Japan and asked those residing in the country to be extra vigilant, citing Takaichi’s comments as a threat to their safety.
• The diplomatic dispute has strained relations between Beijing and Tokyo, occurring just weeks after Takaichi met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

An artificial-intelligence tool created this summary, which was based on the text of the article and checked by an editor. Read more about how we use artificial intelligence in our journalism.

• Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested that a Chinese push to seize Taiwan could pose a grave threat to Japan.

A week ago, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested that a Chinese push to seize Taiwan would represent such a grave threat to Japan that it could be dragged into a war.

Beijing’s response: Fury.

In a sharp escalation of the diplomatic spat, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Friday urged its citizens to avoid travel to Japan and asked those residing in the country to be extra vigilant, saying Takaichi’s comments threaten their safety.

The statement followed a week of vitriol in which Takaichi was repeatedly denounced by Chinese officials and told to stay out of what Beijing says are purely Chinese affairs.

The fracas has brought relations between Beijing and Tokyo to a new low just weeks after Takaichi, a conservative who became prime minister last month, met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a regional leaders’ summit in South Korea.

For the U.S., the breakdown comes at a delicate time, when President Trump is pursuing his goal of forging a trade agreement with China while also strengthening ties with Japan and other Asian allies.

Still, the abuse directed at Takaichi in one instance drew a rebuke from U.S. Ambassador to Japan George Glass. China’s consul-general in the Japanese city of Osaka on Monday posted a message on X saying “the dirty neck” that lunges at China should be cut off, referring to Takaichi’s comments.

“The mask slips—again,” Glass said, adding that China should behave like the good neighbor in Asia it professes to be.

Relations between China and Japan are frequently frosty, in part a legacy of Japan’s brutal imperial past for which many in Beijing feel Tokyo hasn’t sufficiently apologized. Japan, meantime, is wary of its much larger neighbor’s economic and military clout.

Speaking to lawmakers in parliament on Nov. 7, Takaichi said that a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims as its own, would threaten Japan’s survival. Under Japan’s largely pacifist constitution, the nation would be permitted to mobilize its defense forces to defend Japan with military force if it faced such a severe threat.

“If it involves the use of warships and the exercise of force, I believe this is a case that could unquestionably constitute a crisis threatening the nation’s existence,” she said in response to questions on defense policy. Takaichi added that Japan’s longstanding position is that issues concerning Taiwan should be resolved peacefully.

The comments triggered anger in Beijing. Chinese state-media editorials have accused Takaichi and Japan of sliding back toward the militarism that fueled Japanese atrocities in Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. Chinese officials variously described Takaichi’s remarks as “extremely egregious” and “blatantly provocative.”

The language is a throwback to China’s aggressive “wolf warrior” style of diplomacy of a decade ago that Beijing had in recent years toned down. Beijing called on Takaichi to retract her remarks, which she hasn’t done.

Analysts say the Japanese leader’s remarks, while unusually candid, reflect the reality of the risks Japan would face in the event the sea lanes vital to its economy were disrupted in case of conflict over Taiwan.

“What Takaichi has done is say the quiet part out loud,” said William Chou, deputy director of the Japan Chair at the Hudson Institute, a conservative-leaning Washington, D.C., think tank.

Write to Jason Douglas at jason.douglas@wsj.com

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WSJ

6. Are US Special Forces Getting Ready to Attack Venezuela?

​Summary:

U.S. special-operations aircraft such as a C-146A Wolfhound and SOF helicopters have flown conspicuously close to Venezuela amid a broader Trump administration military buildup. Though transponders were on and no incursions occurred, the activity signals pressure on Maduro. Analysts see deterrent posturing, not imminent attacks, but note risks of mixed signals and perceived U.S. weakness.

​Comment: It will probably take a little more than some Special Forces (or special operations forces) to attack Venezuela. (note my sarcasm).

Are US Special Forces Getting Ready to Attack Venezuela?

The National Interest · Brandon J. Weichert · November 13, 2025

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/are-us-special-forces-getting-ready-to-attack-venezuela-bw-111325

Topic: Air Warfare

Blog Brand: The Buzz

Region: Americas

Tags: Caribbean, South America, Special Forces, US Army, and Venezuela

November 13, 2025

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A recent C-146A Wolfhound flight near the Venezuelan coastline has raised suspicions of covert activity, even though the Wolfhound had its transponder on.

The Trump administration continues its buildup along the coastline of Venezuela, despite rumors abounding that the 47th president is backing away from his original decision to escalate his administration’s attacks against the regime of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

Reports have been coming in over the last week that American special forces units were spotted in the areas near Venezuela. This comes on the heels of the Trump administration authorizing the CIA to conduct covert operations in the country.

What’s Going on in the Skies Near Venezuela?

A C-146A Wolfhound, which is a specialized transport plane used by the United States Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), was tracked on a route near Venezuelan airspace while en route to Colombia. This comes after several American bombers, such as the B-1B Lancer and B-52H Stratofortress, also flew missions in the Caribbean Sea close to the Venezuelan coast.

What’s more, helicopters associated with US Special Operations aviation (such as MH-6 Little Birds and MH-60 Black Hawks) were spotted operating in Caribbean waters less than 90 miles away from Venezuela. It is assumed that these elements were conducting training or mission-preparation flights (or both).

Defence Blog, which was among the first to report the aforementioned C-146A Wolfhound flight, described that flight as being “low-profile” and on a route that brought it along the northern coastline of South America, passing very near to Venezuelan territory (while still maintaining its flight over international waters). The C-146A is the perfect vehicle for the kind of stealthy missions that American special forces operators routinely engage in, especially when the country is on the brink of a potential war—such as we appear to be as of this moment.

What Does the Army Use the C-146A For, Exactly?

The C-146A is used for discreet mobility, infiltration and exfiltration of special operations forces, and supporting missions in austere conditions. The proximity of these flights to Venezuelan airspace (which can come as close as tens of miles) raises questions about the Pentagon’s strategic signaling, readiness for operations, or deterrence posture toward the Maduro regime of Venezuela.

These were obviously not clandestine operations, though. The transponders on these planes and helicopters were all active, and were using callsigns that would have been immediately recognizable as belonging to Special Forces units. It was clear that these movements were instead part of a broader signaling campaign undertaken by the Trump administration to compel cooperation from Maduro’s regime.

So, while these flights have basically been blatant, there are no indications that any incursions into Venezuela have occurred. Thus far, it appears to be basically smoke and mirrors. The precise mission of the C-146A flight and the other sorties remains unknown.

What Game Is Trump Playing in Venezuela?

So, yes, Special Forces-linked aircraft have been observed flying in the Caribbean Sea near Venezuela. These flights appear to form part of a broader American posture of increasing aerial and maritime presence in the region—ostensibly for counternarcotics, but interpreted by observers as strategic warning or deterrence to the Venezuelan government.

It remains to be seen if any of these flights amount to anything substantive, or if they are just more posturing from the Trump administration.

Right now, the United States looks weak. While the United States should avoid a war, the fact that the Trump administration has been beating its chest and baring its teeth at Maduro’s regime, with no real interest in following through on those threats, means that it comes off as indecisive and weak.

About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert

Brandon J. Weichert is a senior national security editor at The National Interest. Recently, Weichert became the host of The National Security Hour on America Outloud News and iHeartRadio, where he discusses national security policy every Wednesday at 8pm Eastern. He is also a contributor at Popular Mechanics and has consulted regularly with various government institutions and private organizations on geopolitical issues. Weichert’s writings have appeared in multiple publications, including The Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, MSN, and the Asia Times. His books include Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His newest book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine is available for purchase wherever books are sold. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

The National Interest · Brandon J. Weichert · November 13, 2025

7. Authoritarian reach and democratic response: A tactical framework to counter and prevent transnational repression

​Summary:

Authoritarian regimes increasingly target dissidents and diaspora communities abroad through surveillance, cyberattacks, disinformation, lawfare, and intimidation. These cross-border coercive tactics undermine sovereignty and democratic institutions. The Atlantic Council report urges a unified, whole-of-society framework to identify, disrupt, and prevent transnational repression, protect vulnerable communities, and coordinate democratic responses to this growing gray-zone threat.

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

Download the 31 page report here: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/authoritarian-reach-and-democratic-response.pdf

Authoritarian reach and democratic response: A tactical framework to counter and prevent transnational repression

atlanticcouncil.org · Report

Digital Policy

October 27, 2025

By Marcus Kolga, Sze-Fung Lee, Iria Puyosa, Kenton Thibaut, and Lisandra Novo

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/authoritarian-reach-and-democratic-response-a-tactical-framework-to-counter-and-prevent-transnational-repression/

Bottom lines up front

• Foreign interference (FI) and transnational repression (TNR) represent a fundamental challenge to the international rules-based order by employing tactics that exist below the threshold of armed conflict while violating national sovereignty.
• Beyond national borders, authoritarian states have targeted policymakers, elected officials, researchers, journalists, activists, and diaspora communities worldwide to advance their political objectives.
• These TNR tactics encompass cross-domain operations, including surveillance, cyberattacks, disinformation, legal and judicial harassment, and physical and psychological assault.

doWnload pdf

Transnational represssion (TNR) represents a growing threat to democratic societies worldwide, as authoritarian regimes extend their repression beyond borders, utilizing covert and overt influence operations to advance their political objectives. Over the past decade, the term “transnational repression” has been used to describe the actions of states that seek to control populations living outside their borders. University of Notre Dame Professor Dana M. Moss coined the term to refer to “the repression of diasporas by home-country regimes,” which aims to “punish, deter, undermine, and silence activism in the diaspora,” thereby preventing these populations from completely exiting authoritarian control.

State, state-affiliated, and non-state actors employ a range of coercive strategies to silence critics, alienate opposition, and control diaspora communities via intimidation. TNR manifests into a sophisticated blend of operations, including surveillance, cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, legal and judicial harassment (sometimes called lawfare), and even physical and psychological assault. As these operations often exist in legal gray zones, they exploit vulnerabilities within liberal democracies, challenging the international rules-based order below the threshold of major pushback from the international community. Despite growing efforts and attention toward the issue, democracies have struggled to counter these extraterritorial repression tactics effectively.

When foreign governments conduct surveillance, intimidation, or enforcement actions—including through the exercise of extraterritorial police power by authoritarian regimes inside the nations they target—they undermine state sovereignty and threaten to erode public trust in institutions, representing a significant national security threat.

A strategic framework on transnational repression is urgently needed to confront this rapidly evolving global threat. While the body of research and policy responses has been slowly developing over recent years, these actions remain largely fragmented, reactive, and uncoordinated. What is lacking is a unifying, practical framework that consolidates these efforts and provides a comprehensive, proactive approach to understanding, disrupting, preventing, and countering transnational repression.

As resources to support activists, journalists, and diaspora communities targeted by TNR come under increasing strain— exacerbated by the growing absence of sustained US leadership and funding in this domain—the need for a common strategic framework is more urgent than ever. In this context, a unified framework to guide Western democratic allies will foster greater coherence and coordination, while also supporting the accelerated development, implementation, and effectiveness of policies and countermeasures. By providing a shared foundation for identifying threats, protecting vulnerable communities, and confronting the foreign regimes that engage in TNR, such a framework would strengthen collective democratic resilience at a time when it is most critically needed. Ultimately, the goal is to establish a global, whole-of-society approach that fosters collective responses across like-minded democracies.

Rather than reinventing an entirely new architecture, the objective of this framework is to extend and enhance the utility of existing frameworks by tailoring their components to the specific dynamics of global TNR. This includes integrating elements that account for current policy gaps, diaspora vulnerability mapping, coordinated policy responses, and civil society resilience.

By understanding the objectives and TTPs of transnational repression, this project aims to propose actionable countermeasures to disrupt, deter, and prevent future TNR operations at various stages through a comprehensive framework.

Read the full report

About the authors

Marcus Kolga is a journalist, human rights activist, and a Canadian analyst of foreign disinformation and influence operations. Kolga founded DisinfoWatch.org in 2020 to monitor and analyze foreign disinformation targeting Canada. He is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute Center for Advancing Canada’s Interests Abroad, The CDA Institute, and the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights.

Sze-Fung Lee is an independent researcher specializing in Chinese hybrid warfare, including Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), Grand Strategy, Gray Zone Tactics, and Cognitive Warfare. Zir research also focuses on Indo-Pacific security policy, challenges posed by emerging technologies, and the politics of Hong Kong.

Iria Puyosa is a senior research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Democracy+Tech Initiative. She specializes in the complex interplay between technology and political dynamics. For over a decade, Puyosa has investigated information operations that undermine democratic institutions and fuel political instability. Her work uncovers the multifaceted threats of digital authoritarianism and contributes to a deeper understanding of the challenges facing democracies in the digital age.

Kenton Thibaut is a senior resident China fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), where she leads China programming for the Democracy + Tech Initiative, and a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Indo-Pacific Security Initiative (IPSI) at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Lisandra Novo is the senior law & tech advisor for the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council. The Strategic Litigation Project works on prevention and accountability efforts for atrocity crimes, human-rights violations, terrorism, and corruption offenses around the world.

8. Digital platforms pose a threat to democracy worldwide

​Summary:

Digital platforms increasingly distort democracies, amplifying extreme views, disinformation, and foreign influence. Examples include Musk’s intervention in German politics and TikTok-driven electoral manipulation in Romania. Algorithms reward polarizing content, creating echo chambers and radicalization. The EU’s Digital Services Act requires transparency and risk mitigation, but experts stress media literacy such as Finland’s model, as essential. Collaborative regulation, platform accountability, and societal education together offer the best hope against worsening digital manipulation.

Digital platforms pose a threat to democracy worldwide – DW – 11/07/2025

DW

Ines Eisele

11/07/2025November 7, 2025

https://www.dw.com/en/digital-platforms-pose-a-threat-to-democracy-worldwide/a-74668315

In January 2025, Elon Musk conducted an interview on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany's far-right AfD party, some regional branches of which are considered right-wing extremist by German intelligence services.

"Only the AfD can save Germany. End of story," he said in an undisguised interference by a powerful social network in Germany's election campaign.

In Romania in 2024, the far-right presidential candidate Calin Georgescu won the first round of the elections to the surprise of many: The political outsider had not participated in any TV debates and had not invested any money in his campaign. His success came mainly through the video platform TikTok; his videos were very prominent in the feeds of many Romanians.

Suspicions quickly arose that social bots (automated accounts) and trolls (human users who are sometimes paid to act on behalf of a foreign body or government agency) must have been involved. The election was annulled. It is also known that bots and trolls have been used to manipulate public opinion in many other digital discussions and topics, such as Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Disinformation was used to advocate pro-Brexit attitudes before Britain left the EU Image: Belanga

Social media: Extreme positions and vocal minorities get most attention

What happens in the digital sphere can have a huge influence on public opinion. At a conference entitled "Big Tech and digital democracy: How much regulation does public discourse need?" organized by DW and the University of Cologne as part of a series of events on Global Media Law, media and constitutional law expert Dieter Dörr stated that "democracy is under serious threat."

Established and respected media outlets are present on these platforms and use Instagram, YouTube and others as channels for their content. But there are also numerous other players. They don't even have to be bots or trolls: There are many accounts that do not maintain certain standards, andincite hatred against others, spread false claims or use artificial intelligence (AI) to manipulate and generate images and videos.

The algorithms used by social media to decide what content is displayed when and shown to whom reward this kind of behavior.

"Extreme opinions, which have a wide-reaching scope, are pushed to the top," said Dörr, explaining that this is what keeps users on platforms for longer, allowing for more money to be earned from them.

Renate Nikolay said that the EU was not against social media platforms but wanted to work with them Image: Boris Geilert/DW

EU's Digital Services Act offers glimmer of hope

Social media platforms have become an important, if not the only, source of information for many people. Politicians and researchers have long recognized that the power wielded by these platforms is a problem. But can anything be done about it?

The European Union (EU) has stepped up efforts in recent years to regulate the digital world, primarily through its Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force in February 2024. It requires major online platforms and search engines such as Amazon, Google, X and Facebook to provide greater transparency and protection for users.

Renate Nikolay, the deputy director-general of the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT) at the European Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the Digital Services Act, says: "We are pursuing three principles: First, platforms must assess and minimize systemic risks. Second, we are strengthening users' rights, for example by providing complaint mechanisms. Third, we demand transparency in algorithms and require platforms to give researchers access to their data."

This sounds like a big step forward: Platforms have to provide information on their algorithms and even offer users the option to disable personalized content or advertising. After all, algorithms tend not only to disadvantage moderate and differentiated content. Ultimately, they also create filter bubbles or echo chambers, in which users are mainly surrounded by content and other users that reflect their own views. This puts them at risk of falling into a spiral of radicalization.

The TikTok algorithm is particularly notorious. A recent study by the University of Potsdam and the Bertelsmann Foundation showed that during the last German election campaign, political parties were not equally visible in the TikTok feeds of young users. Videos from official party accounts on the political fringes, especially the AfD, were played more frequently than those from the accounts of more centrist parties.

During the period under review, the AfD uploaded 21.5% percent of all the videos, but these accounted for 37.4% of videos that appeared in feeds. The AfD's videos were therefore overrepresented. For its part, the center-right CDU/CSU party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz uploaded 17.1% of all party videos, but these accounted for only 4.9% of videos in feeds.

When asked about this at the conference, Tim Klaws, Director of Government Relations and Public Policy for DACH, Israel and BeNeLux at TikTok, gave an evasive answer. He said that digital platforms had no interest in operating in an environment full of disinformation and populism, and were trying to minimize "fake news", hate speech, etc. with the help of AI and their staff members.

Finland promotes media literacy from kindergarten

Incidentally, apart from the DSA, there are other laws that regulate digital platforms, such as the European Media Freedom Act, which supplements the first by granting special status to recognized media outlets on large platforms — so that their content is treated transparently and cannot be removed without good reason.

Something else that experts say is important besides regulation: media literacy. People need to understand digital media better and use them more responsibly. Ultimately, users are the ones who post, consume, share and comment on content.

"Finland is exemplary in this regard, and we can learn something from them," says Nikolay.

Indeed, Finland has put in place a national strategy to promote media literacy, which starts as early as kindergarten and has resulted in Finns being very good at critically examining content and recognizing disinformation.

Only a combination of all the available measures can combat social media influence and online manipulation. But some experts such as Dörr remain skeptical: "There's not much that can be done against this tsunami." Particularly considering the fact that new challenges are constantly emerging, such as AI chatbots that provide false or biased information.

At the end of the DW conference, Nikolay made it clear that Europe was not "against the platforms," but wanted to work with them to "change business models so that they promote democracy rather than endanger it."

She said that one example of good cooperation was this year's parliamentary elections in Moldova. In the run-up to the polls, EU representatives, the Moldovan authorities, civil society actors and the operators of platforms such as Google, Meta, and TikTok had sat down together to counter disinformation and protect the electoral process.

This was apparently successful: A Russian disinformation campaign against the pro-European ruling Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) did not have a decisive impact on the election results. PAS emerged as the election winner.

This article was translated from German.

DW

9. Scholars Must Recognize the Role of Affect and Emotion in Disinformation

​Summary:

Modern disinformation works because it targets emotion, not just logic. Scholars argue that propaganda, trolling, and algorithm-driven outrage exploit affect fear, anger, desire, and identity to overwhelm critical thinking. Facts and media literacy alone cannot counter this. Instead, educators, journalists, and researchers must cultivate “equipment for living”: emotional awareness, tolerance for ambiguity, and critical reflection on how symbols and narratives manipulate feeling. Trolling strategies from neo-Nazi networks to Steve Bannon and Trump-era memes aim to exhaust, enrage, or discourage citizens. Effective resistance requires pairing truth and logic with rhetorical understanding, emotional resilience, and attention to how desire and the unconscious shape susceptibility to manipulation.

Scholars Must Recognize the Role of Affect and Emotion in Disinformation | TechPolicy.Press

techpolicy.press

Calum Matheson / Nov 11, 2025

https://www.techpolicy.press/scholars-must-recognize-the-role-of-affect-and-emotion-in-disinformation/

This perspective is part of a series of provocations published on Tech Policy Press in advance of a symposium at the University of Pittsburgh's Communication Technology Research Lab (CTRL) on threats to knowledge and US democracy.

Shutterstock

In a “post-truth” era defined by “alternative facts” and “fake news,” calls for media literacy have gained new urgency but face technological, social, and institutional headwinds. Meanwhile, the sources of disinformation adapt and multiply. Interventions designed to help the public process information and better evaluate logic are necessary but not sufficient because the issues we face are not confined to information or logic problems. Modern thought distortion—targeted propaganda, misinformation, conspiracism, and so on—is, above all, a problem of affect. “Affect” refers to the predispositions, intensities, and attachments that condition how we respond emotionally to stimuli.

Although affect by definition resists direct observation, actors such as Cambridge Analytica have long recognized that motivated reasoning, cognitive heuristics, and confirmation bias are all magnified by feeling. We—academics, educators, journalists, and activists—must help to cultivate what literary theorist Kenneth Burke called “equipment for living” accessible to anyone targeted by persuasion at the intersection of emotion and media, whether it be speech, text, images, or video. Doing so requires that we formulate responses even when our objects of study are difficult to pin down with certainty.

The tactics of digital emotional manipulation are many and varied, but many of the most prominent exploit frustration and rage. Social media algorithms may reward engagement indiscriminately—traffic driven by anger still seems to generate at least as much attention as that driven by pleasure, and companies have shown unwillingness to police themselves in the past. Trolling culture is now generalized online and used at the highest levels of government in the United States. Trolling exploits sincerity through provocations which spark either an emotional reaction, which is then mocked and cast as evidence of instability or stupidity, or a refusal to “feed the trolls,” which lets the attack stand and may move the Overton window.

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This tactic is used by some who have been identified as neo-Nazi online trolls, like Andrew Auernheimer, but also prominent figures such as Steve Bannon. The ambiguous nature of the message always allows the troll to dance around condemnation, claiming selectively that they are “just joking” with irony, satire, or hyperbole. Enraging a target group may cause them to over-focus and miss other serious issues, as Bannon alleges in his strategy of “flooding the zone.” It produces exhaustion, shame, or a sense of hopelessness. Audiences friendly to the troll can latch on to their enemy’s distress as a source of sadistic pleasure and in-group bonding.

The Trump administration has used this strategy to great effect. For example, a series of AI-generated videos has caused massive uproar. These include shorts depicting a “Trump Gaza,” Russell Vought as the Grim Reaper, and Trump himself wearing a crown and dropping feces on American protestors from a fighter jet. Bracketing the psychoanalytic implications of these videos, none had a tangible effect on policy. However, they may cause “resistance fatigue.” Those who respond are cast as unhinged victims of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used by Trump’s supporters to counter accusations of their own cult-like behavior. Mocking discomfiture on the left is perhaps the only universal binding agent among the GOP. Meanwhile, those who do not feel strongly invested in politics may be prompted by divisive rhetoric to disengage further, a result that could benefit Trump even if his trolling otherwise fails.

How can educators, broadly defined, respond to the dangers of affective propaganda without falling into its traps? We must not abandon our defense of truth, expertise, and critical thinking, but we must learn to be more comfortable with concepts like affect, desire, and the unconscious that are meant to help us speculate about what we cannot directly observe. We must accept that better information processing skills are insufficient without new qualitative ways of being in the world. Alongside better logic and evidence evaluation, we must support emotional mindfulness, critical reflection on affect, and attitudes that accept uncertainty and ambiguity, both for those exposed to disinformation and those who study it. Journalists and academics base public outreach primarily around quantifiable data as evidenced in fact-checking, education about logical fallacies, and media literacy campaigns around news quality identification. But agents of disinformation rely on “reality-based communities” bogging themselves down meticulously studying data while the pace of lies overwhelms them.

The ancient discipline of rhetoric was developed for precisely this reason as a means to understand persuasion in situations where action is necessary but definitive answers are elusive. Rhetoricians argue that we frequently act with limited evidence and therefore should be reflective about contingency, ambiguity, and multiple meanings, not to mention the passions that mislead us. Critical rhetoric’s equipment for living is an attitude, not just an applied skill, according to Burke. Invoking ancient rhetorical traditions and contemporary scholarship, French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan argued that affect is inextricable from the cultural forces that condition what we desire and the language and symbols we use, a point validated by modern studies.

While there are some promising starts, more of our efforts to inure vulnerable people (read: everyone) to manipulation must concentrate on how symbols activate emotion. We must continue to ask what content is meant to achieve, who makes it, and to what ends. But we must reflect more on our susceptibility to affective mechanisms and perhaps look anew on concepts such as desire and the unconscious meant to help us speculate about their operation when better solid data eludes us. Propaganda does not rely entirely on unassailable evidence and impeccable logic to discipline its targets. Neither can the response.

techpolicy.press

10. A New Map of the Arctic

​Summary:

China and Russia are rapidly expanding joint use of the Northern Sea Route, transforming it into a major Arctic trade corridor as Western traffic has collapsed since 2022. China now accounts for nearly all non-Russian transit, including crude oil, bulk commodities, and experimental container service. Their cooperation is formalized through joint NSR committees and infrastructure plans. Rising Sino-Russian dominance raises governance challenges, especially where Russia’s EEZ overlaps with poorly defined Arctic airspace and mismatched flight-information regions. Growing traffic will heighten disputes over airspace control and surveillance. Washington’s move to elevate an Arctic ambassador reflects recognition that the region is becoming strategically contested.

Comment: An important and effective strategic move for the US? How much power, authority, and influence will our Arctic Ambassador have?

A New Map of the Arctic 

geopoliticalfutures.com

A U.S. diplomatic post just became much more important.

By Antonia Colibasanu -

November 14, 2025

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/a-new-map-of-the-arctic/?tpa=OGYyYzg3OTE2OGU0NGJiM2U4N2U3ZDE3NjQyNTg3OTNlZGEzYTg

U.S. lawmakers are reportedly moving this week to formally establish a senior diplomatic role known as ambassador-at-large for Arctic affairs – a position created in 2022 but rarely filled – to better coordinate federal policy on Arctic strategy, security, environmental protection and Indigenous engagement. The legislative push seems to have begun in the final week of October, coinciding with the announcement of a landmark agreement between China and Russia to jointly develop and commercialize shipping along Russia’s Northern Sea Route. The deal will enhance Sino-Russian cooperation in the region and, in theory, turn the NSR into a major Asia–Europe trade corridor. Russia’s nuclear icebreaker operator, Rosatom, will lead infrastructure efforts to keep the route navigable. Beijing has also ramped up Arctic research, sending icebreakers on long expeditions to study sea-ice patterns and improve operational efficiency.

It’s a matter of fact that Western shipping activity along the NSR plummeted after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The decline owes partly to operators’ desire to avoid sanctions and partly to the fact that they relied too heavily on Russian icebreaker escorts and ports to do business. What wasn’t immediately clear was just how quickly China and Russia took advantage of the void left by Western firms. After a brief hiatus in 2022, transit shipping rebounded in 2023 to record levels entirely because of Chinese demand. The NSR saw 75 transit voyages carrying 2.1 million tons of cargo in 2023 – a sharp recovery from virtually no transit traffic the year before. Today, China is the predominant international user of the NSR. More than 95 percent of all transit cargo in the region in 2023 traveled to or from China, according to data from the Center for High North Logistics. China accounted for almost all non-Russian NSR activity: Bulk carriers, tankers and a new Chinese-operated “Arctic Express” container service were virtually the only foreign-linked voyages that returned to the route.

The surge in traffic was due in large part to the shift in energy trading. After the EU banned imports of Russian crude oil in December 2022, Russia redirected some oil exports to Asia via the NSR. In the summer of 2023, Russia began to send Arctic crude shipments eastward through the polar seas to China. At least 14 laden oil tankers transited the NSR in 2023, delivering about 1.5 million tons of Russian crude oil to Chinese ports. These Arctic oil convoys – unprecedented in scale – resulted in China, now the principal buyer of Russian oil, effectively replacing the lost European market. The shipment of other resources followed a similar pattern: Iron ore and coal cargoes that once might have gone to Western markets were instead shipped to Asia via NSR routes. By 2024, the trend had accelerated; preliminary figures showed a record 3 million tons of transit cargo moved through the NSR, of which 95 percent came to or from Russia and China. In other words, nearly all international transit on the NSR was bilateral Sino-Russian commodities trade.

Beyond bulk commodities, China has also spearheaded a renewed push for Arctic container shipping with Russia. In 2023, China’s new Polar Silk Road ambitions yielded experimental container voyages along the NSR. Chinese logistics firms ran a series of pilot container ship transits from East Asia to the European side of Russia via the Arctic in 2023. A total of seven NSR container ship trips were completed in 2023. By 2024, this figure doubled. While still modest, these forays demonstrate Beijing’s intent to establish a regular China-Russia Arctic transport link, reducing the time it takes for goods to transit the Suez Canal.

Beijing and Moscow have also formalized their cooperation on NSR development. In March 2023, during President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Beijing, they issued a joint statement pledging to “work together to develop the Northern Sea Route” and even set up a joint committee on NSR coordination. By August 2024, this had evolved into a dedicated sub-commission for NSR cooperation, under which an action plan was approved to increase Arctic shipments.

Washington’s move to appoint an ambassador-at-large for the region indicates that the U.S. is taking this development seriously. The reconfiguration of international trade routes notwithstanding, Russo-Chinese cooperation in the Arctic also raises serious questions over governance. The entire NSR lies within Russia’s exclusive economic zone, yet there is an interesting feature with regard to how the skies above the NSR are mapped. The western entry corridor of the NSR, particularly around the Kara Gate and eastern Barents Sea, runs near the “no-man’s-land” airspace between the Norwegian Bodo flight information region and the Russian Murmansk flight information region.

Flight information regions are airspace zones in which a state is responsible for providing air traffic services under the framework of the International Civil Aviation Organization. FIR boundaries are set for aviation safety and efficiency, not for the delineation of sovereign territory. An FIR can extend over international waters or into another state’s maritime zones because, at heart, it is a delegated zone of responsibility for civil aviation regulation, not an expression of territorial control. By contrast, an exclusive economic zone is a maritime zone up to 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) from a nation’s shores. It is defined by the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which Russia and China ratified but interpret to fit their own interests. Beijing interprets EEZs through the lens of “historic rights,” especially in the South China Sea, while Moscow wants an extended continental shelf in the Arctic, claiming areas such as the Lomonosov Ridge as extensions of its continental margin. Within its EEZ, a state has sovereign rights to exploit marine resources – fish, oil, gas, etc. – but does not possess sovereignty over the waters or in the airspace beyond the 12 nautical mile territorial area. In fact, UNCLOS explicitly notes that the EEZ has “no legal consequences for aviation.” Put differently, the airspace above an EEZ is open airspace for anyone to use.

Because of these differing legal regimes, FIR boundaries and EEZ boundaries don’t always align. Ordinarily, it’s never much of a diplomatic problem. But in strategically sensitive regions – particularly where states contest sovereignty or resources – a mismatch between who controls the EEZ and who manages the skies can introduce complications.

The Arctic exemplifies these complications. For more than 40 years during the Cold War (and after), Oslo and Moscow sparred over 175,000 square kilometers of maritime area – a contested zone rich in fish and potentially vast oil and gas reserves (the Shtokman gas field). They ended the dispute in 2010 when they signed a treaty delimiting an EEZ boundary. But the treaty didn’t clarify FIR responsibilities. A large area of international airspace over the Barents Sea – from about the 70th parallel north to the North Pole – was historically unassigned to any FIR. This left a strip of unresolved airspace between the Norwegian and the Russian FIRs roughly above the once-disputed waters. Flights that cross the high Arctic have to coordinate with both Norwegian and Russian authorities and obtain ad hoc clearances to transit the gap.

This is why the unresolved airspace above the NSR is a challenge for both Russia and China. So far, bilateral cooperation has been relatively frictionless. But Beijing and Moscow understand that as NSR traffic grows, so too will the number of supporting flights for navigation, logistics and surveillance. If they continue to jointly operate, control of the airspace for route monitoring and operational support will likely be contested, particularly if third-party aircraft transit the same corridor.

The mapping of FIRs and EEZs is more than mere bureaucratic drudgery; it will determine who controls, monitors and secures critical domains. In moments of crisis or conflict, these invisible lines can define escalation risks, influence freedom of movement and shape strategic postures. The failure to strictly define, say, the FIR over the Barents was inherently political: Neither side wanted to cede airspace management in a zone crucial for hydrocarbons exploration and, if push came to shove, nuclear bombers. The same logic applies to the recent U.S. initiative to formalize the ambassador-at-large for Arctic affairs. Though it may seem a symbolic post in times of peace, the timing of the appointment reveals Washington’s awareness that the Arctic is no longer peripheral. It signals a recognition that Russia and China’s deepening cooperation in Arctic development has strategic implications far beyond trade.

geopoliticalfutures.com

11. Reflections from the Manila Dialogue

Summary:

The Manila Dialogue showed the Philippines remains defiant against Chinese coercion in the South China Sea, and its transparency campaign has won global support though less so in Southeast Asia. Yet transparency alone cannot deter Beijing, which ignores reputational costs and selectively invokes international law. UNCLOS offers Manila and other maritime states their strongest legal footing, but enforcement is weak. The Philippines and Vietnam are aligning domestic laws with UNCLOS to strengthen the rules-based order. As ASEAN chair in 2026, Manila has a rare chance to rally regional unity. Australia’s strong legalistic framing is useful but insufficient; countering China requires deterrence beyond law alone.

Comment: Another form of "tyranny of proximity?" Those who are in closer proximity to China are less supportive of the Philippines' stance against China? For fear of retribution by China?

Reflections from the Manila Dialogue | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · Euan Graham · November 14, 2025

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/reflections-from-the-manila-dialogue/

Last week’s Manila Dialogue demonstrated that the Philippines is far from cowed or isolated in the face of China’s continued bullying in the South China Sea. But it also highlighted the limitations of transparency as a stand-alone strategy against Beijing’s maritime encroachment. The dialogue’s focus on international law has broader relevance for Australia.

This annual meeting about the South China Sea is a fairly new addition to the regional conference scene. Last week’s iteration, which I attended, was only the second.

It serves, in part, to promote the transparency campaign led by the Philippine Coast Guard, which for more than two years has systematically publicised China’s sustained harassment of Philippine vessels and aircraft within Manila’s exclusive economic zone. Dialogue participants included practitioners and experts from around the region, including several non-government representatives from China.

The transparency campaign has been highly effective at generating international sympathy and support for the Philippines as it grapples with encroachment and harassment by Chinese paramilitary and military forces on a daily basis. In the court of global public opinion, the campaign has provided an effective informational counter to Beijing’s bullying tactics, which are designed to subdue the Philippines and other Southeast Asian states into a state of strategic quiescence.

Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and several European countries have stepped up security cooperation with Manila under the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos. In parallel, Manila seeks to build up the Philippines’ conventional defences while deepening military cooperation with like-minded partners. On 2 November, Canada became the latest country to sign a visiting forces agreement with the Philippines. By providing for the presence of signatories’ forces on each other’s territory, such agreements strengthen military cooperation and deterrence.

Sympathy and support for Manila’s plight have been in conspicuously shorter supply in Southeast Asia. Next year, however, the Philippines will host the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit and other meetings as the grouping’s rotating chair. This gifts Manila a decadal, diplomatic opportunity to channel intra-mural support for its frontline stand in the South China Sea. ASEAN’s external credibility will ride on the grouping’s ability to maintain unity on this internally divisive issue.

At the same time, the Philippines can be under no illusions that transparency has dented China’s determination to continue pressing its claims. In early August, the fratricidal collision of a Chinese destroyer and coast guard vessel in close proximity to a Philippine patrol ship off Scarborough Shoal confirmed Beijing’s willingness to pressure Manila to a reckless degree. Even in the face of clear video evidence to the contrary, poker-faced Chinese participants at the Manila Dialogue maintained that China was exercising restraint, merely reacting to the provocations of others. China is unswayed by reputational damage, relying instead on demonstrations of power and dominance.

A related conference theme was the tension between the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), as a legal and normative framework that supports the Philippines’ sovereign equities in the South China Sea, and China’s might-over-right approach despite the illegitimacy of its dashed-line claims. One of UNCLOS’s guiding principles, that land dominates the sea, naturally favours Southeast Asia’s maritime geography over China’s as a basis for jurisdiction in the South China Sea. International law gives maritime Southeast Asia its best shot at inoculation from the alternative of an expansionist China dominating its strategic future.

The key shortcoming of international law is weak enforcement. Even without a law-of-the-sea police force to patrol the South China Sea, littoral states in Southeast Asia can still improve their position by bringing national laws into conformity with UNCLOS. Vietnam has already made progress here. So too has the Philippines, last year enacting two new laws delineating its maritime zones and designating sea lanes for international passage through its archipelago. These laws involved compromises on the part of Vietnam and the Philippines, as coastal states. But conformity with international law enhances their collective stake in the rules-based order and simplifies the problem of enforcement for national agencies, and potentially for international partners.

The defence of international law and UNCLOS have become key points in Australia’s strategic policy and regional narrative—something that resonates with Minister for Defence Richard Marles. Close partners such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Fiji and Papua New Guinea, as archipelagic states, owe not only their exclusive marine resource rights, but their basic territorial integrity and sovereignty over water, to UNCLOS’s existence. UNCLOS is a key pillar of the regional rules-based order, not only for Western countries interested in freedom of navigation, but also for developing, formerly colonised states for which maritime porosity was historically their main strategic weakness.

This helps to explain why Australia emphasises UNCLOS to the extent that it does in its definition of the regional order. As a signatory to UNCLOS, China doesn’t ignore it. Rather, Beijing picks the principles that suit its national interests and ignores the parts that don’t. If China tramples on the sovereignty of large, archipelagic states, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, it could face a more concerted response than it has bargained for.

However, just as the Philippines needs to think beyond its transparency campaign, Australia should be careful not to wrap its strategic narrative too tightly around international law. Coercive and destabilising behaviour can still be consistent with international law. China’s military air and sea patrols around Taiwan have demonstrated this, along with its near-encirclement of Australia earlier this year. Applying a law-enforcement or excessively legalistic mindset to a strategic problem such as China may be a losing game from a deterrence perspective.

aspistrategist.org.au · Euan Graham · November 14, 2025

12. China’s Upgraded Lawfare in the South China Sea

​Summary: 

China has intensified its “lawfare” against the Philippines, pushing legal counter-narratives that portray Manila as a regional provocateur to delegitimize Philippine actions and muddy UNCLOS-based norms. After the Philippines enacted laws aligning maritime zones and sea lanes with UNCLOS—and incorporating the 2016 arbitral ruling—China declared straight baselines around Scarborough Shoal and claimed Filipino actions were “illegal.” Simultaneously, Beijing escalated harassment at sea and in the air, violating COLREGS and aviation safety rules while blaming Manila. China’s strategy seeks to normalize encroachment, justify coercive actions, and erode support for the Philippines, but has gained little international backing and remains legally weak.

​Excerpt:

China is stepping up its lawfare activities in the South China Sea. Its targets in this effort are the Philippines’ recently passed laws concerning its own maritime zones and archipelagic sea lanes, and the Philippines’ maritime law enforcement activities in and around Scarborough Shoal and the Spratlys. China’s strategy is clear: undermine the Philippines’ actions by claiming these are inconsistent with international law and/or China’s lawful rights, followed by stronger retaliatory responses from China justified by a supposed need to appropriately react to Philippine’s “trouble-making.” However, China’s strategy has thus far proven to be ineffective.   

China’s Upgraded Lawfare in the South China Sea

China is stepping up its legal narratives targeting the Philippines.

By Jacqueline Espenilla

November 15, 2025

https://thediplomat.com/2025/11/chinas-upgraded-lawfare-in-the-south-china-sea/

In this image released by the Philippine Coast Guard, a China Coast Guard vessel fires a water cannon at a boat from the Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources in the vicinity of Thitu Island in the South China Sea, Oct. 12, 2025.

Credit: X/Jay Tarriela

In recent months, China has been doubling down on the narrative that the Philippines is the regional “troublemaker” that repeatedly engages in unlawful behavior and provokes conflict and confrontation. This labelling is part of China’s systematic efforts to promote legal counterfactuals that undermine established international law in order to complement and support its South China Sea agenda.

This is an act of “lawfare,” a term that Charles Dunlap famously defined in 2008 as “the strategy of using – or misusing – law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve an operational objective.” Over time, the meaning of lawfare has broadened to go beyond simple equivalence to kinetic war. Zakhar Tropin argued in 2021 that the term should also apply to “the use of law aimed at delegitimizing the actions of an opponent (or legitimizing one’s own) and to tie up the time and resources of the opponent and achieve advances in military activity or in any sphere of social relations.”

Let’s delve more deeply into China’s legal narratives regarding the Philippines and the South China Sea. First is the claim that the Philippines’ recent legislative enactments are unlawful and unsupported under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

In November 2024, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed two important pieces of legislation: the Philippine Maritime Zones Act (MZA) and the Philippine Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act (ASLA). They enshrine in domestic law the Philippines’ continuing adherence to the UNCLOS in the determination of its maritime zones, as well as its rights and obligations in relation to those zones. Notably, the MZA formally incorporates the outcome of the 2016 Philippines vs China UNCLOS Arbitration into Philippine law. The adoption of the MZA and the ASLA are both sovereign actions of the Philippines and are compliant with its international legal obligations under UNCLOS. Indeed, many other Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries have enacted similar legislation over the years.  

Just two days after the MZA and ASLA were signed, China declared straight baselines around Scarborough Shoal, from which a territorial sea demarcation can be based. The apparent purpose of the declaration was to lay the basis for engaging in stricter enforcement actions in the area, including stepping up maritime patrols. 

From a legal perspective, China’s declaration didn’t really do much to change the status quo on the ground. The Philippines still considers its laws as active and in force, noting that China’s position does not in any way change the legally valid character of the MZA and ASLA – a fact that was also affirmed by the numerous countries that backed the Philippines in this matter. China’s baselines declaration did not receive similar international support. 

What, then, did China want to accomplish with its protests and declaration of straight baselines around Scarborough Shoal? First, China’s objective was to cast doubt on the legality of the two Philippine laws. In the case of the MZA, China repeatedly stated that it “violates international law” because it “unlawfully” includes Scarborough Shoal within the Philippine territory, and “aims to further solidify the illegal arbitral award.” These statements were deliberately made in order to advance its narrative that the Philippines does not respect the rule of law, that it acted arbitrarily, and that its actions warrant a strong legal response. 

The 2016 South China Sea Arbitral award classified Scarborough Shoal as a rock fully within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and continental shelf under UNCLOS. As such, it is not entitled to anything more than a territorial sea and cannot generate its own EEZ projected from these baselines. Furthermore, the Award explicitly required Scarborough Shoal to be open and accessible to traditional fishers, whether they be Filipino or Chinese, regardless of who has sovereign control of the shoal. Despite this, China has engaged in access and area denial in that area since 2012, though Filipino fisherfolks have still managed to fish along the exterior of the reef. 

China is now resorting to lawfare to label the Philippines’ adoption of MZA and ASLA as a pretext to embark on stricter enforcement actions to the further exclusion of Filipino fisherfolks on the basis of the new baselines. This is a violation of the Arbitral Award as well as UNCLOS and international law, upon which the award is based. 

Alongside the specific framing of Scarborough Shoal, China also repeatedly claims that Philippine vessels, aircraft, and personnel have been engaging in unsafe and provocative behavior near disputed maritime features. Yet China itself is guilty of exactly this behavior. From January 2025, there has been a noticeable uptick in Chinese air and sea activities that are clearly meant to harass and intimidate the Philippine government. 

First, there have been an increasing number of incursions by Chinese vessels into Philippine jurisdictional waters. Not only have Chinese vessels maintained an almost constant presence within 80 to 90 nautical miles off the coast of Zambales province since early January, but they have also been venturing deeper and deeper into Philippine archipelagic waters. China’s goal may be to normalize archipelagic transit passage where there wasn’t any before. This would lay the basis for claiming that Chinese vessels’ unusual new pathways are normal passage routes for international navigation and overflight and thus should be included in the Philippines’ ASL designations. One news outfit has labelled this silent presence in non-routine waters as “loitering with intent” – maintaining physical presence in an effort to reinforce and normalize its claims. 

Second, China has continued to engage in dangerous and unsafe behavior in the South China Sea. In August 2024, a collision happened between Philippine Coast Guard (PCG)and China Coast Guard (CCG) vessels near Sabina Shoal. The Philippine vessels were in the middle of a standard rotation and re-supply mission when the Chinese vessels dangerously approached and eventually rammed the PCG vessel, tearing a 3-foot wide hole in it. This was particularly distressing since the incident occurred after a provisional agreement for the safe conduct of Philippine rotation-and-re-supply missions was agreed upon by the two countries in July. 

In April 2025, a 99-meter CCG vessel sailed dangerously close to a 44-meter PCG vessel and even cut off its navigation route. The PCG vessel was conducting a routine patrol off the coast of Zambales, some 36 nautical miles south of Scarborough Shoal. On May 21, two CCG vessels shadowed, fired water cannons, and sideswiped a civilian Bureau of Fisheries vessel that was conducting marine scientific research activities near Sandy Cay, which is located within the territorial sea of the Philippines’ Pag-Asa Island. Most recently, Chinese vessels rammed one another while in the middle of chasing away and harassing a PCG vessel. 

These encounters all demonstrate China’s continued non-compliance with the 1972 Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS), which, as clarified by the South China Sea Arbitral Tribunal, is binding on China as a state party to that instrument and also because the COLREGS are incorporated into the UNCLOS via Article 94. The Tribunal also stated that “where the operational requirements of law enforcement ships stand in tension with the COLREGS, the latter must prevail.” Even if China asserts that its vessels are engaged in what it believes are law enforcement actions, this is still no excuse to set aside its COLREGS and UNCLOS obligations. 

Third, China has been engaging in unsafe aerial maneuvers near the Spratlys and Scarborough, exponentially increasing the risk of a deadly collision in the skies. There were two dangerous encounters this year. The first was when a Chinese military helicopter flew and hovered within the unsafe distance of 10 feet of a small Philippine Bureau of Fisheries plane carrying journalists while conducting a maritime domain awareness flight. The Philippine plane issued at least 19 radio challenges but these were all ignored. 

The second incident occurred when three Philippine aircraft – again on routine surveillance missions – were harassed by Chinese military aircraft engaging in dangerous maneuvers, this time over the Spratlys. These two incidents pick up from the August 2024 aerial incident where Chinese aircraft dropped flares on the flight path of a Philippine military patrol plane conducting a routine surveillance mission near Scarborough Shoal. These maneuvers are blatant violations of customary Air Rules, including those issued by the International Civil Aviation Organization. 

Despite China’s clear violations of international law and custom, it still insists on employing lawfare to claim that Philippine behavior in and around Scarborough Shoal and the Spratlys is provocative and dangerous, while doubling down on the claim that it was effectively forced to “take all necessary measures in accordance with international law” to respond. China’s assertions are, however, non-specific and deliberately vague. They are not anchored on any particular provision of international law. In other words, the apparent goal of these claims is simply to muddy the legal water and undermine the Philippine response. China wants to cast the Philippines in the role of regional provocateur, perhaps hoping that other ASEAN countries think twice about any support they might offer. 

Conclusion

China is stepping up its lawfare activities in the South China Sea. Its targets in this effort are the Philippines’ recently passed laws concerning its own maritime zones and archipelagic sea lanes, and the Philippines’ maritime law enforcement activities in and around Scarborough Shoal and the Spratlys. China’s strategy is clear: undermine the Philippines’ actions by claiming these are inconsistent with international law and/or China’s lawful rights, followed by stronger retaliatory responses from China justified by a supposed need to appropriately react to Philippine’s “trouble-making.” However, China’s strategy has thus far proven to be ineffective.    

Authors

Guest Author

Jacqueline Espenilla

Jacqueline Espenilla is an assistant professor at the University of the Philippines College of Law and a senior fellow at the University of the Philippines Law Center - Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea (UPLC-IMLOS).

13. The End of China’s Old Guard – Why Party Elders Can’t Save the Country From Xi

​Summary:

Rumors about weakened authority aside, Xi Jinping faces no real constraints from China’s once-powerful party elders. Xi has dismantled the informal networks, military ties, and institutional channels that previously allowed retired revolutionaries to influence policy. Today’s elders lack moral authority and clout, leaving Xi’s rule more centralized, insulated, and vulnerable to misjudgment as internal checks erode.

Excerpts:

Of the partial substitutes that have emerged to replace the ballast once provided by party elders, only external pressure—chiefly the impacts of U.S.-Chinese competition and confrontation—has significantly limited Xi’s power. Aggressive tariffs and export controls have forced Xi to adapt his economic approach by diversifying China’s trade partners and even embracing some domestic private-sector companies that can contribute to Xi’s goal of technological self-reliance. Internal stressors, such as high unemployment and financial fragility, may also constrain Xi’s options to pursue his goals, but so far they have merely slowed, rather than stalled, his agenda. Yet overall, Xi’s decision-making is getting more insular as he relies ever more on a tight inner circle of confidants, heightening the risk of misjudgment that could turn manageable challenges into systemic risks.

Many outside observers who recognize that elders have lost power treat that fact as a footnote to Xi’s consolidation of power. But it is much more consequential. A system that relies on the fusion of rigid bureaucratic rules and strong personal leadership is much more fragile than one that relies on an unwritten balance of power because it lacks substantive ways of constraining leaders. And even if a future leader after Xi sought to rule more collectively, party elders will still lack the stature or the networks necessary to act as a check on power. Far removed from the halcyon days of revolution, China must hope that a combination of imperfect substitutes—and some good luck—will limit Xi and stop preventable crises before they spin out of control.

The End of China’s Old Guard

Foreign Affairs · More by Deng Yuwen

Why Party Elders Can’t Save the Country From Xi

Deng Yuwen

November 14, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/end-chinas-old-guard

Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing, September 2025 Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

DENG YUWEN was Deputy Senior Editor at the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Party School from 2002 to 2013 and worked as a political affairs consultant at Eurasia Group from 2023 to 2025.

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For the past year, an increasing number of rumors about Chinese leader Xi Jinping have been swirling around Beijing. Some sources privately claim that Xi has lost real power and been sidelined. Others whisper that Xi’s health has deteriorated; the politician appearing in public, they say, is merely a lookalike, while a group of the party’s most venerable elder statesmen are actually calling the shots. Still other stories even imagine an alliance of unlikely bedfellows—once powerful liberal political reformers and conservative generals from the People’s Liberation Army, for instance—who are teaming up to admonish Xi or to replace him.

Such fanciful rumors are common in authoritarian systems, especially in the lead-up to major political events—such as the Chinese Communist Party’s fourth plenum, which took place in October, and whose outcomes are expected to set the country’s developmental direction for the next five years. With few clear signals about who has influence and how decisions are made, the halls of power in Beijing are fertile ground for political conjectures. The shared thread in all these rumors is the idea that a powerful group of party elders with access to insider information—leaders and high-level cadres who have usually stepped back from active political roles but remain influential behind the scenes—still hold enough clout to overrule Xi and shape China’s political course.

This particular idea has gained traction in part because such elder statesmen have, in fact, played a central role in the party’s history. Citizens disillusioned with Xi’s rule hold out hope that a group of hidden arbiters might intervene, just as Deng Xiaoping did to steer China away from radical politics in the late 1970s and to overrule more conservative leaders and insist on market-oriented economic reforms in the 1990s. Elder politics provides a convenient way to interpret and analyze the opaque inner workings of the country’s most powerful elite.

But in truth, in today’s China elders have largely lost their power. Xi has systematically dismantled the channels of influence through which elders previously operated, including the ability to appoint personnel and their ties within the military. Moreover, the current crop of party elders does not carry the moral authority that the first generation of elders earned from fighting in the communist revolution. The institutional checks on power that have replaced party elders cannot constrain incumbent leaders as effectively as the elders once did, leaving little to rein Xi in as he remolds the party and country.

IN WITH THE OLD

During the first 30 years of communist rule in China, Mao Zedong had unrivaled revolutionary stature, a firm grip on the military and propaganda systems, and control of the party hierarchy. He was the supreme elder statesman. After Mao died, in 1976, however, the party faced a leadership vacuum. Cadres who had survived war and political upheaval alongside Mao but who had been purged or sidelined during the Cultural Revolution returned to the center of politics. These leaders included Deng; Chen Yun, a senior economic planner; and Ye Jianying, a founding marshal of the People’s Liberation Army.

The authority of these political figures derived from seniority and from their direct contributions to the communist revolution. They were not merely leaders but also founders of the state. They had powerful patronage networks, including deep ties to the military. And as the custodians of the party’s history, they could define the party’s official narrative and frame how and why the party was pursuing its policy choices.

In the early 1980s, to formalize their role, party leaders under Deng’s initiative established the Central Advisory Commission, a kind of upper chamber that gave elders an institutional platform to influence personnel and policy decisions. Party leaders chose who was on the commission, and they limited membership to veteran officials who had a long record of serving the party.

Yet elders’ real power lay in how they leveraged their unimpeachable authority in informal spaces throughout the rest of China’s political system. These elders privately consulted with leading officials, military commanders, and senior bureaucrats to guide their decision-making and, at times, signal their disapproval. They also released public statements that were timed to influence current leaders at critical moments, including debates about who should lead the party and what policies they should pursue. In 1979, the first generation of party elders, including Deng Xiaoping, pushed aside Hua Guofeng, Mao’s chosen successor, by exploiting widespread discontent with Hua’s insistence on preserving Mao’s political direction. A decade later, these same elders supported the decision to deploy military force against protestors in Tiananmen Square. These were not ceremonial gestures; they were acts of real power.

TERMINAL DECLINE

The conditions that empowered these elders also eventually led to their marginalization. Their role arose to provide balance during the transition from Mao’s personal rule to a more collective style of leadership. In that transitional stage, which lasted roughly from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, elders stabilized Chinese politics by checking the power of the top leaders. They could halt dangerous policy experiments or dismiss leaders who they felt were pursuing the wrong priorities or failing to recognize shifting political winds.

As communist China’s revolutionary generation grew old and passed away, no new elders had the historical prestige or military leverage to inherit their authority. The party elders who succeeded them—the second and third generations—were mainly administrators whose authority derived from their former positions of power, not from revolutionary credentials. The Central Advisory Commission was quietly abolished in 1992. Party leaders also established clear term limits and retirement ages for cadres, curtailing the political options available to leaders who wanted to remain influential after they aged out of office.

Changes in the military further eroded elders’ influence. Many of China’s early revolutionaries were soldiers who had trained their own protégés. Administrative reforms such as the 1985 reduction in troops, however, weakened the entrenched networks through which elders exercised their power within the military hierarchy. In 2015, Xi carried out another round of sweeping reforms, which, by reorganizing the armed forces into regional commands, effectively severed the ability of any senior military leaders to build their own coherent internal factions. Xi also concentrated authority in the Central Military Commission, which he directly controls.

But what fully ended elders’ power was Xi’s systematic attack on personal networks. Xi’s anticorruption campaign, which he launched soon after taking the reins of the party, in 2012, cut the informal bonds that once linked current and retired elites. He methodically dismantled alternate power centers in the security services, the military, and strategically important sectors such as energy and finance. At the same time, Xi increased oversight of retired senior cadres and introduced new rules prohibiting them from publicly commenting on the country’s leaders or their policies. Xi even reclassified dinners among elders as potential matters of political security, which meant that they could no longer visit one another freely. If elders wished to influence Xi, their avenues of influence dried up.

Party elders have not vanished from public life in the Xi era. They still appear at national ceremonies, occupy front row seats at important meetings, deliver anodyne remarks when called upon, and receive briefings behind closed doors. But they lack power. With Xi’s consolidation of control and the natural evolution of China’s political system, elders no longer have the capacity to mobilize a coalition that fuses personnel leverage, military clout, procedural know-how, and moral authority in a way that could seriously check the current leadership.

NO PERFECT SUBSTITUTE

Without powerful elders, China’s party-state must rely on other mechanisms to constrain top leaders. A more institutionalized bureaucracy can slow decision-making and resist the personal whims of individual leaders by subjecting them to lengthy formal processes. For instance, some universities and research institutes have pushed back on Xi’s attempt to relocate their campuses to a brand-new, futuristic metropolis in Xiong’an, about 75 miles south of Beijing, and the project has proceeded far more slowly than was laid out in original plans. Elites also still have self-preservation instincts, which means that they tend to avoid risky decisions that could jeopardize their careers. And external shocks that shape domestic politics, such as financial stress or trade pressure, can limit leaders’ choices. Yet none of these checks is as direct, swift, or effective at balancing personal power as elders’ intervention once was.

The difference lies in the logic of power symmetry. In prior eras, elders and incumbent leaders often stood on roughly equal ground. The admonitions of the first generation of revolutionaries carried the weight of superiors addressing subordinates. Even the second generation of elders could still counterbalance the sitting party secretary. After Jiang Zemin, Deng’s successor, stepped down, in 2002, and handed the reins of the party to Hu Jintao, he continued to wield influence behind the scenes. Jiang effectively diluted Hu’s authority and cemented his own power by expanding the Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s top decision-making body, from seven members to nine, and installing several of his protégés in key positions.

The new arrangement under Xi presupposes the absence of rivals. Stability is maintained not through horizontal checks but through vertical, one-way channels of power. The bureaucracy can stall Xi’s directives, but it cannot veto them. Economic officials can advise, but they cannot compel leaders to change course. Generals may express concern, but they cannot voice public dissent. Interactions that were once equal deliberations are now more like a pipeline in which information flows up and orders flow down. Elder politics was opaque and personalistic, but its power symmetry made it possible for other elites to address the top leader as an equal and speak candidly about the problems that the party faced.

In today’s China, party elders have lost their power.

China’s troubled response to the COVID-19 pandemic reveals the dangers of this new situation. A group of powerful elders could not have prevented the outbreak. But it might have limited the damage by making it easier for information to flow to decision-makers. Elders could have pushed leaders to heed early warning signs when the virus first started spreading, in 2020, and forced Xi to relax his draconian policies sooner as the pandemic dragged on into its second and third years. The presence of elders creates space among the party’s upper echelons that allows internal debate in times of crisis and makes it possible for more experts to convey their knowledge to top leaders.

Of the partial substitutes that have emerged to replace the ballast once provided by party elders, only external pressure—chiefly the impacts of U.S.-Chinese competition and confrontation—has significantly limited Xi’s power. Aggressive tariffs and export controls have forced Xi to adapt his economic approach by diversifying China’s trade partners and even embracing some domestic private-sector companies that can contribute to Xi’s goal of technological self-reliance. Internal stressors, such as high unemployment and financial fragility, may also constrain Xi’s options to pursue his goals, but so far they have merely slowed, rather than stalled, his agenda. Yet overall, Xi’s decision-making is getting more insular as he relies ever more on a tight inner circle of confidants, heightening the risk of misjudgment that could turn manageable challenges into systemic risks.

Many outside observers who recognize that elders have lost power treat that fact as a footnote to Xi’s consolidation of power. But it is much more consequential. A system that relies on the fusion of rigid bureaucratic rules and strong personal leadership is much more fragile than one that relies on an unwritten balance of power because it lacks substantive ways of constraining leaders. And even if a future leader after Xi sought to rule more collectively, party elders will still lack the stature or the networks necessary to act as a check on power. Far removed from the halcyon days of revolution, China must hope that a combination of imperfect substitutes—and some good luck—will limit Xi and stop preventable crises before they spin out of control.

Foreign Affairs · More by Deng Yuwen

​14. America’s Quasi Alliances – How Washington Should Manage Its Most Complicated Relationships

​Summary:

Quasi allies, those partners heavily supported by Washington but lacking formal defense treaties, offer strategic advantages but create recurring dilemmas. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza show how divergent interests, differing risk tolerances, and limited U.S. leverage complicate wartime cooperation. Ukraine seeks escalation to survive; Israel often pursues policies counter to U.S. preferences. Washington must support quasi allies without becoming entangled or enabling destabilizing choices. Effective management requires clear objectives, private alignment mechanisms, calibrated military assistance, credible leverage, and disciplined public messaging. These lessons are vital for a potential Taiwan crisis, where shared planning, escalation management, and aligned war aims will be essential.

Excerpts:

Careful public messaging can make all of this easier. It is crucial to project strong support for quasi allies and explain that support to the American public without creating commitments that become politically costly to walk back. Too often, critics of Biden’s sound Ukraine policy seized on the difference between his soaring rhetoric and his well-founded escalation concerns. Adhering to a policy that there should be “no daylight” between the United States and its quasi ally is a mistake because it creates an impossible choice between burying disagreement and absorbing the political blowback associated with a public break.

An even more consequential conflict involving a quasi ally could be lurking on the horizon: war between China and Taiwan. The United States could quickly become a direct combatant in such a conflict, assuming far more risk but also exerting much greater influence over the course of the war and its outcome. But even if the United States intervenes outright on Taiwan’s behalf, quasi-alliance dilemmas would resurface: divergent interests and domestic-political incentives, especially given Taiwan’s highly polarized politics; escalatory steps by Taipei that could undercut Washington’s efforts to carefully manage risk; and the difficulty of finding a mutually acceptable endgame. These challenges all place a premium on quiet peacetime coordination between Washington and Taipei to build alignment on notional military plans and war aims, procedures for escalation management and signaling to Beijing, and conditions for terminating a war.

Leaders cannot wish away close friends such as Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine that straddle combustible geopolitical fault lines—nor would it benefit the United States to do so. But to advance U.S. interests, Washington needs better answers to the strategic dilemmas inherent in managing quasi alliances. Only by grappling with recent successes and failures can policymakers develop a better playbook.

Comments: Should we formalize any of these relationships into treaty allies? Or do we just need more effective messaging? How do we effectively sustain our valuable silk web of friends, partners, and allies to protect and advance our interests?

America’s Quasi Alliances

Foreign Affairs · More by Rebecca Lissner

How Washington Should Manage Its Most Complicated Relationships

Rebecca Lissner

November 14, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/americas-quasi-alliances

U.S. President Donald Trump meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington, D.C., October 2025 Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Rebecca Lissner is a Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. She was Deputy Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Adviser to the Vice President during the Biden administration.

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During his successful 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, Donald Trump assured voters that he would end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, perhaps even before taking office. But both conflicts dragged on at great human cost, and diplomacy proceeded only in fits and starts. Nine months into his presidency, Trump finally brokered a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas—but only after presiding over the breakdown of the truce he inherited from President Joe Biden and an escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The war in Ukraine, meanwhile, continues unabated.

These challenges are not unique to Trump; they bedeviled Biden, too. Indeed, the difficulty of bringing both wars to an end illustrates the strategic dilemmas facing the United States in managing a small but critical subset of its partners: so-called quasi allies. Quasi allies—which, since the end of World War II, the United States has cultivated as it has built its alliance system—are more than partners but less than treaty allies. They have special status in Washington, but they lack the feature of an alliance that matters most: a formal U.S. security guarantee.

The recent wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have put quasi allies at the center of U.S. foreign policy. The United States has supported Ukraine in resisting Russia’s attempt at subjugation, sending billions of dollars’ worth of advanced weaponry to its armed forces. Ukraine has maintained its sovereignty and political independence, whereas Russia has suffered more than a million military casualties and significant materiel losses—results achieved without direct conflict between Moscow and Washington. In the Middle East, the United States has enabled an Israeli-led campaign that set back Iran’s nuclear program and broke its regional network of armed proxy groups, even as those operations also deepened the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. This record points to the advantages of supporting strong quasi allies at the frontlines of geopolitics: these relationships allow the United States to advance its interests in consequential regions through indirect, less costly means.

But the United States’ attempts to manage its role in these wars have also highlighted strategic dilemmas endemic to quasi alliances and particularly pronounced in wartime. If Trump is to fulfill his goal of bringing peace to the Middle East and Europe, his administration needs to better manage these dilemmas. And Washington’s experience with Ukraine and Israel should inform planning for a high-stakes contingency involving Taiwan, another quasi ally in a perilous neighborhood.

More Than Friends

Within its vast network of relationships around the globe, the United States categorizes most of its friends as either allies or partners. Washington is bound to its allies by legally codified treaties featuring mutual defense clauses. This pledge that an attack on one is an attack on all backstops allies’ security and extends the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Partners, by contrast, may receive security assistance from the United States but do not presume that the U.S. military would come to their aid if they were attacked.

Quasi allies represent an awkward third category. These are states through which the United States sees opportunities to advance its interests. They may receive significant military training and assistance, host a large U.S. troop presence, and coordinate closely with Washington. Some even enjoy a confusing designation, conferred by the president, as a “major non-NATO ally,” which does not entail a security commitment. And unlike partners, the scope and scale of Washington’s investment in their security creates ambiguity around whether and to what extent the United States would intervene to defend quasi allies if they were attacked. Indeed, the United States has occasionally come to the defense of its quasi allies, as when it helped Israel defeat Iranian aerial attacks twice in 2024 and again during the Iran-Israel war in June. But there tend to be good reasons why the United States stops short of extending the kind of mutual defense commitment that would cement a treaty alliance—including concerns about becoming entangled in a turbulent region, provoking an adversary, or pledging to defend a partner that may not pursue Washington’s preferred policies. This ambiguity makes quasi alliances weaker tools of deterrence and reassurance than formal alliances, and it helps explain why quasi allies are more vulnerable to external aggression than treaty allies.

Despite Washington’s deep investment in these relationships, quasi allies often have interests that diverge from those of the United States. Quasi ally leaders have their own agendas and domestic politics, especially when their country is at war. The United States has repeatedly experienced these dynamics with Ukraine and Israel, a challenge I witnessed firsthand as a senior official in the Biden White House. In both cases, U.S. policy sought to enable quasi allies to pursue common objectives while managing disagreements over diplomatic and military strategy.

Quasi allies have special status in Washington.

During Ukraine’s 2022 counteroffensive campaign against Russia, Ukrainian and U.S. military leaders jointly developed a strategy to punch through Russian defensive lines in Kherson and take territory that would enable Ukrainian forces to break the land bridge connecting Crimea with occupied Ukraine. Yet this plan foundered when confronted with Ukraine’s understandable loss aversion—breaching Russian defenses would have been an exceptionally bloody endeavor—and distracting rivalries among Ukrainian commanders and political leadership. Despite careful joint planning, U.S. policymakers could do little to compel Ukraine to see the campaign through. Domestic political imperatives have similarly prevented Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky from taking the painful but necessary step of lowering the draft age from 25 to 18 to address manpower shortages, which in turn has exacerbated demand for military materiel from the United States and Europe.

The dilemma of divergent interests has also challenged U.S. policymaking toward Israel since October 7, 2023. Hamas’s heinous attack came at a moment when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was politically vulnerable and facing serious corruption charges. He has deftly managed to stay in power, often by taking steps opposed by Washington: restricting humanitarian aid into Gaza, expanding West Bank settlements, and escalating attacks on Iran and Hezbollah, its Lebanese proxy militia. The past two years have thus exposed real policy differences, as well as the limits of U.S. influence over Israeli decision-making.

Skin in the Game

The United States may also diverge from its quasi allies on how to assess or manage the risk of escalation. Although Washington may have a strong strategic interest in the outcome of wars involving quasi allies, it can choose to calibrate its involvement. For the quasi ally, the stakes are always higher and often existential. They may be more willing to gamble on steps that could lead to significant escalation, including actions that could draw their sponsors into direct conflict. And in some cases, entanglement is the point.

Kyiv’s greater risk tolerance has created friction in the U.S.-Ukrainian relationship from the early months of Russia’s invasion. During the Biden administration, Ukrainian leaders had a perennial wish list of ever more capable weapons systems. Long-range missiles known as ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System) topped the list, and unlike some other sophisticated systems the Ukrainians requested, these promised real military utility. But Biden officials believed that providing these missiles carried risks in terms of U.S. military readiness and the potential for escalation. The subsequent years-long push and pull between Kyiv and Washington distracted from other policy debates and Ukrainian military imperatives. By the time Biden authorized the shipment of a limited number of ATACMS to Ukraine in April 2024, with clear restrictions on their use, the weapons provided tactical benefits but did not generate a strategic breakthrough. A similar dynamic played out, albeit less publicly, as Ukraine repeatedly sought permission to use U.S. equipment to strike Russian territory. Ukraine ultimately won the United States’ limited acquiescence.

In both cases, Ukraine was willing to gamble to score military or even morale-boosting wins and would likely have welcomed direct U.S. military intervention, whereas Washington sought to both meet Kyiv’s military needs and avoid the kind of escalation that would draw the United States or NATO directly into the war. Attempts to resolve this tension resulted in suboptimal policies for both sides: Washington accepted more risk than it wanted to, but not enough to deliver Ukraine a decisive boost.

The United States has managed similar tensions with Israel in its recent wars with Hezbollah and Iran. In the days immediately following October 7, Biden dissuaded Israel’s leadership from launching a preemptive strike on Hezbollah and parried Netanyahu’s request for U.S. military participation in the strike by arguing that it would trigger a regional firestorm at a time when Israel was ill prepared for a multifront war. In April 2024, after Iran launched its first aerial attack on Israel, Biden told Netanyahu that the United States would not support an Israeli counterattack against Iran, urging him to take the unsuccessful nature of the Iranian salvo as a win, thanks to joint defensive operations. Netanyahu partially accepted this advice, hitting a strategic air defense site inside Iran without claiming public credit for the strike.

When Trump took office, he clearly signaled a strong preference to address Iran’s nuclear program via diplomatic means. Israel nevertheless launched a military campaign against Iran. The fact that only the U.S. military had bombs capable of penetrating Iran’s nuclear facilities meant that Netanyahu was betting on Washington’s ultimate involvement, a gamble that paid off in June, when Trump authorized U.S. strikes. Of all the points on which interests diverge between the United States and its quasi allies, escalation and risk tolerance are the highest-stakes areas because the danger of entanglement is the greatest.

The Limits of Leverage

If relative power and material dependence translated neatly into influence, the United States would have overwhelming leverage over its quasi allies, resulting in an ability to manage tension through coercive means, such as withholding weapons, and to dictate wartime decisions. But the reality is more complicated. The relationship between the United States and its quasi ally is itself a center of gravity, especially during wartime: if the relationship frays, the break advantages the adversary.

When quasi allies fight enduring wars, the most effective way for the United States to secure its desired outcome is either to help its partner win the war outright or to convince the adversary that support will continue to flow until a favorable negotiated settlement is reached. These dynamics make it difficult to withhold vital military support as leverage in shaping how a quasi ally fights and what peace it will accept. And it makes wars involving support to quasi allies challenging to end.

In his bid to end the war in Ukraine, Trump calculated that Ukraine’s dependence on the United States meant that he could browbeat Kyiv into a negotiated settlement that heavily favored Moscow. Trump tested this hypothesis by publicly berating Zelensky in the Oval Office, then cutting off military and intelligence assistance. Rather than coercing Ukraine into war-ending concessions, however, this gambit only spotlighted the frailty of the bonds between Kyiv and Washington under the Trump administration and led the Kremlin to double down on its strategy of diplomatic recalcitrance and intensified military pressure.

Biden took the opposite approach. In 2022, the United States and its G-7 allies declared their intent to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” This commitment and the consistent support that followed bolstered Ukraine’s will to fight and telegraphed that time was not on Russia’s side. But it obscured two difficult realities: that Congress would not indefinitely sustain billions of dollars in support to Ukraine and that ending the war would inevitably require pressuring Kyiv to step back from its unattainable near-term objective to restore its pre-invasion border.

Washington needs better answers to these strategic dilemmas.

The United States’ efforts to use its leverage to moderate Israel’s maximalist war aims and to end the war in Gaza were always fraught and only grew more so as the humanitarian calamity in Gaza deepened. The Biden administration continually wrestled with the question of whether and how to condition military support to Israel at a time when Israel remained under threat from Iran and Hezbollah. It came closest to doing so in May 2024, in anticipation of major Israeli military operations in Rafah. Concerned that this move would endanger nearly a million civilians and undermine prospects for a cease-fire, Biden proclaimed he would not supply the weapons for the offensive and paused the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs. Biden officials ultimately succeeded in persuading Israel to downscale its Rafah operation, one of several modest successes in using pressure to improve humanitarian outcomes in Gaza, and never resumed the delivery of 2,000-pound bombs. But the administration’s concern about limiting support to Israel while it faced other regional threats constrained the options for further restrictions.

Trump has taken a very different approach. During his first nine months in office, he largely gave Israel free rein to conduct its Gaza operations as it wished, effectively backing its decision to restart the war in March after a cease-fire, stop humanitarian aid deliveries, and push into Gaza City. But after Israel attempted to kill Hamas negotiators with a September airstrike in Qatar, Trump changed tack and pressured Netanyahu to agree to a cease-fire. With a credible, if seemingly nonspecific, threat of abandonment, Trump compelled Netanyahu to accept elements of a peace plan he had previously opposed and pause the war. Although the United States’ relationship with Israel is the most politically charged, the United States will always face tradeoffs between the strategic benefits of fulsome support to quasi allies and the temptation to parlay that support into meaningful influence over military and diplomatic decision-making.

Threading the Needle

The strategic dilemmas that quasi alliances pose are endlessly frustrating to policymakers. But they are here to stay. Ending the war in Ukraine on favorable terms and preserving a fragile truce in Gaza will require deft navigation of these dilemmas. Several lessons emerge from the United States’ recent experience with Ukraine and Israel. First, leaders face a temptation to paper over differences and exaggerate the convergence of interests, especially when helping to defend a close partner against brutal aggression. But Washington should commit to support quasi allies in wars only if they have clearly defined objectives that closely correspond with its own. Once the United States decides to undertake such support, it should build mechanisms to align priorities and privately manage disagreements. Models include U.S.-Ukrainian military planning channels and the national security adviser–led U.S.-Israeli strategic dialogue on Iran. And clear leader-level communication is paramount.

Policymakers should also design credible forms of leverage to shape quasi allies’ behavior. Security assistance should be strategically calibrated—a reframing that emphasizes U.S. interests rather than the coercive connotations of aid conditionality. Such a process begins with conveying clear expectations in writing, such as end-use restrictions on U.S. military equipment. Even minor violations should be addressed early to create an expectation of enforcement. If the White House keeps up a regular cadence of reviews of U.S. arms deliveries, it can better ensure that the pace and content of these transfers are aligned with policy objectives and legal requirements, not conducted on autopilot. Congress is an essential partner: it can legislate restrictions itself as well as help preserve leader-level relationships by deferring blame to Capitol Hill.

Careful public messaging can make all of this easier. It is crucial to project strong support for quasi allies and explain that support to the American public without creating commitments that become politically costly to walk back. Too often, critics of Biden’s sound Ukraine policy seized on the difference between his soaring rhetoric and his well-founded escalation concerns. Adhering to a policy that there should be “no daylight” between the United States and its quasi ally is a mistake because it creates an impossible choice between burying disagreement and absorbing the political blowback associated with a public break.

An even more consequential conflict involving a quasi ally could be lurking on the horizon: war between China and Taiwan. The United States could quickly become a direct combatant in such a conflict, assuming far more risk but also exerting much greater influence over the course of the war and its outcome. But even if the United States intervenes outright on Taiwan’s behalf, quasi-alliance dilemmas would resurface: divergent interests and domestic-political incentives, especially given Taiwan’s highly polarized politics; escalatory steps by Taipei that could undercut Washington’s efforts to carefully manage risk; and the difficulty of finding a mutually acceptable endgame. These challenges all place a premium on quiet peacetime coordination between Washington and Taipei to build alignment on notional military plans and war aims, procedures for escalation management and signaling to Beijing, and conditions for terminating a war.

Leaders cannot wish away close friends such as Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine that straddle combustible geopolitical fault lines—nor would it benefit the United States to do so. But to advance U.S. interests, Washington needs better answers to the strategic dilemmas inherent in managing quasi alliances. Only by grappling with recent successes and failures can policymakers develop a better playbook.

Foreign Affairs · More by Rebecca Lissner

15. From Saigon to the Pentagon: Hung Cao's Journey and the Transformation of Pacific Defense

​Summary:

Hung Cao’s rise from Vietnamese refugee processed on Guam in 1975 to Under Secretary of the Navy symbolizes a transformed Pacific security landscape. His early trips to Guam and Vietnam highlight U.S. emphasis on distributed operations, expanded Marianas basing, and maritime cooperation with Hanoi amid Chinese coercion. Vietnam’s capacity building and Guam’s evolving hub role reflect a broader shift toward a resilient, networked Asia-Indo-Pacific defense architecture. (like a silk web)

From Saigon to the Pentagon: Hung Cao's Journey and the Transformation of Pacific Defense | Defense.info

defense.info

11/14/2025By Robbin Laird and Edward Timperlake

https://defense.info/featured-story/2025/11/from-saigon-to-the-pentagon-hung-caos-journey-and-the-transformation-of-pacific-defense/

We had the opportunity to sit down with the Under Secretary of the Navy earlier this week in his office to discuss his recent visit to Vietnam with the Secretary of War as well as his focus on the Guam defense challenge.

On October 3, 2025, Hung Cao was sworn in as Under Secretary of the Navy. Very soon thereafter, on October 21, 2025, he visited Guam in his capacity as the Senior Defense Official for Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, signaling the urgency and priority the island has as a critical hub of American power projection.

Cao’s connection to the region runs far deeper than his official portfolio. Fifty years ago, as a four-year-old refugee fleeing the fall of Saigon in 1975, he was processed on Guam before entering the United States. His return to Vietnam alongside Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on November 2, 2025, represents not merely a diplomatic mission, but a profound full-circle moment in American-Vietnamese relations and a symbol of the broader transformation reshaping Pacific security dynamics.

The Personal and the Strategic Converge

Hung Cao’s biography embodies the complex interweaving of American immigration history with contemporary defense policy. Born in Vietnam, he fled the country as a child refugee during the fall of Saigon in 1975 and arrived in the United States, starting a new life which has shaped his perspectives and career. His journey from Vietnamese refugee to Navy Captain to senior Pentagon official represents a uniquely American narrative, but one that carries particular resonance in the current geopolitical moment.

Before his appointment as Under Secretary, Cao had a distinguished military career serving in special operations as a Navy Deep Sea Diver and Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer, including deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. He is known for his leadership in high-risk environments and for taking a practical, safety-focused approach to missions. Former colleagues respected his judgment and his concern for the well-being of his subordinates in combat situations. He retired from active duty at the rank of Captain.

For Vietnam generation Americans, Cao’s ascent to this position carries profound symbolic weight. The fact that a senior U.S. defense official of Vietnamese origin is now helping to shape the bilateral security relationship represents a genuine end to one era and the beginning of another. As a Vietnamese American who has become one of the most prominent Asian Americans to achieve a senior civilian post in the Department of the Navy, his presence in Hanoi alongside Secretary Hegseth was warmly received by Vietnamese officials, a reception that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago and remains remarkable even today. The war that divided both nations for so long has given way to a pragmatic partnership built on shared interests and mutual concerns about regional stability.

Maritime Security: The New Foundation of U.S.-Vietnam Relations

The central focus of Cao’s work in Vietnam centers on maritime security, safety, and the joint commitment both nations share to maintaining an open and free Pacific. This is not abstract diplomacy. Vietnam, like the Philippines, has experienced repeated aggressive actions by Chinese maritime forces against civilian vessels, including fishing boats and other commercial craft operating in waters Vietnam considers within its legitimate maritime zone.

Chinese government vessels, including law enforcement and maritime militia, have regularly attacked and harassed Vietnamese fishing vessels in the South China Sea, particularly near the disputed Paracel and Spratly Islands. Documented incidents include beatings of crew members, use of iron bars and water cannons, ramming and sinking of vessels, confiscation of fishing equipment and catches, and even detainment of fishermen.

These acts have led to international protests by Vietnam, injury and financial loss among Vietnamese fishermen, and serve as part of China’s broader effort to assert its maritime claims in the South China Sea in disregard of internationally recognized Exclusive Economic Zones. This pattern of aggression has created genuine alarm in Hanoi and has driven Vietnamese interest in enhancing their capacity to monitor, patrol, and defend their maritime approaches.

The United States has responded to these concerns through concrete capability transfers. Over the past several years, Washington has transferred three Hamilton-class cutters from the U.S. Coast Guard to the Vietnamese Coast Guard. These vessels, decommissioned as the Coast Guard transitions to its new National Security Cutters, have been refurbished before transfer to ensure they remain operationally effective.

By enhancing Vietnamese maritime domain awareness and patrol capability, the United States strengthens the collective capacity of regional states to resist coercion and maintain the freedom of navigation that benefits all Pacific nations. Cao emphasized that this cooperation represents the core of what Vietnam and the United States are working toward together: both nations, as Pacific powers, share a fundamental interest in keeping the Pacific open and free for commercial shipping, trade, and peaceful economic activity.

It is important to understand that Vietnam’s deepening security cooperation with the United States operates within carefully defined parameters. Vietnamese leadership has articulated four key limitations in its allied engagement policy, commonly referred to as the Four Nos. These form the foundation of Vietnam’s defense and foreign policy strategy, aiming to maintain autonomy and strategic balance amid major power competition, especially between the United States and China.

The Four Nos policy includes these principles: no participation in military alliances; no aligning with one country to oppose another; no foreign military bases in Vietnamese territory or use of its territory to counter other countries; and no use of force or threat to use force in international relations. Vietnamese officials regularly reaffirm their commitment to these principles, both in regional forums such as the Shangri-La Dialogue and within their defense white papers. This policy is sometimes also termed bamboo diplomacy, reflecting the flexible yet resilient balancing act Vietnam maintains amidst major power rivalry.

As Vietnam has deepened relations with the United States, European Union, Japan, and Australia, as well as continued pragmatic relations with China and Russia, the Four Nos remain central. The Hamilton-class transfers are emblematic of a broader approach that sees capability building in partner nations as force multiplication for American interests, respecting Vietnam’s need for autonomy while addressing shared security concerns.

Guam: From Strategic Triangle to Distributed Hub

When our book Rebuilding American Military Power in the Pacific: A 21st Century Strategy was published in 2013, it included graphics illustrating what we called a strategic triangle and a strategic quadrangle. The strategic triangle identified Hawaii, Guam, and Japan as the three foundational bases from which the United States projected military power throughout the Pacific. The strategic quadrangle expanded this framework to include Australia and South Korea, with the maritime and aerial domains serving as the connective tissue enabling power projection across this vast geography. The strategic quadrangle was conceptualized as the area from Japan to South Korea, to Singapore to Australia and identified as the engagement zone.

If those graphics were redrawn today, they would look fundamentally different. The transformation reflects not a diminution of these locations’ importance but rather an evolution in how American military power operates in the twenty-first century. Guam and the surrounding areas have become increasingly correlated with the broader shift toward distributed maritime operations, agile combat employment, and the Marine Corps’ emphasis on Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. Rather than serving primarily as a fixed base from which forces deploy, Guam is increasingly conceptualized as a node in a distributed network, a place from which capabilities can be rapidly dispersed throughout the region in response to specific crises or contingencies.

This shift reflects hard-learned lessons from decades of defense analysis. Concentration of forces and capabilities creates vulnerability, particularly in an era of precision strike and advanced targeting. By distributing capabilities across a wider geographic area, by emphasizing mobility and rapid repositioning, and by building the infrastructure to support dispersed operations, the United States makes itself a more difficult target while simultaneously enhancing its ability to respond flexibly to emerging challenges.

Cao explained that the goal extends beyond Guam itself to encompass the broader Mariana Islands, which would significantly expand the area available for supporting what he describes as a hub for force protection and force projection or, alternatively, as a distributed engagement zone. Adding the Northern Mariana Islands to Guam for U.S. military operational purposes increases the total land area by more than 80 percent. Guam itself has a land area of approximately 212 square miles, while the Northern Mariana Islands, which include Saipan, Tinian, Rota, and other islands, have a collective land area of about 179 square miles.

This expanded operational space provides multiple advantages: it complicates adversary targeting, creates redundancy in critical capabilities, enables forces to operate from unexpected vectors, and provides depth for logistics and sustainment operations.

Guam sits at the center of this transformation, not as a single target but as a coordinating hub within a broader distributed network. Its substantial infrastructure, strategic location, and established logistics capabilities make it invaluable for supporting distributed operations throughout the region. But its value comes not from concentrating everything in one place but from enabling operations everywhere else.

The transformation of Guam’s role and the deepening of U.S.-Vietnam maritime cooperation are not isolated developments but parts of a broader reconfiguration of Pacific security architecture. The visits Cao has made to Guam and Vietnam in his first weeks in office reinforce U.S. capabilities throughout the region to address security and defense challenges. More importantly, they demonstrate a clear commitment to working with allies and partners as the foundation of American strategy.

This alliance-centric approach reflects a fundamental reality: the United States cannot unilaterally ensure Pacific security. The region is too vast, the challenges too diverse, and the resources required too substantial for any single nation to manage alone. But the United States does not operate alone. It benefits from an unmatched network of allies and partners, many of whom share American concerns about coercion, aggression, and the erosion of the rules-based international order.

Vietnam’s evolution from adversary to partner represents one of the more remarkable transformations in this alliance network. The relationship remains carefully calibrated, with both sides conscious of historical sensitivities and domestic political considerations. But the trajectory is unmistakable. Shared concerns about Chinese maritime behavior, mutual interest in free trade and open sea lanes, and complementary strategic perspectives have created genuine common ground. The United States gains a partner with local knowledge, geographic proximity, and legitimate regional standing. Vietnam gains access to advanced capabilities, operational experience, and the implicit deterrent value of American partnership.

This pattern repeats throughout the region. The Philippines, after a period of strained relations, has reinvigorated its alliance with the United States, granting access to additional bases and expanding defense cooperation. Australia has committed to unprecedented defense integration, including hosting U.S. rotational forces and cooperating on advanced capabilities. Japan continues to expand its defense capabilities and operational cooperation with American forces. South Korea, despite periodic friction over burden-sharing, maintains its fundamental alliance commitment.

The strategic quadrangle of the 2013 analysis has become something more complex and more resilient: a network of overlapping partnerships, each calibrated to specific circumstances but collectively creating a web of relationships that enhances regional stability. This network does not depend on any single node; it distributes both capability and strategic commitment across multiple nations and locations.

The Symbolic and the Strategic

Hung Cao’s rapid engagement with Guam and Vietnam in his first weeks as Under Secretary illustrates the integration of symbolic and strategic dimensions in contemporary defense policy. His personal story resonates throughout the region, particularly in Vietnam, where his presence communicates respect, partnership, and the possibility of transformation. But symbolism alone accomplishes nothing without substantive policy to back it. The Coast Guard cutter transfers, the expansion of operational space in the Marianas, the emphasis on distributed operations, these are concrete expressions of strategic commitment.

The transformation of U.S. policy in the Pacific reflects the region’s changing dynamics. The comfortable American dominance of the post-Cold War era has given way to genuine strategic competition. China’s rise, however one evaluates its ultimate trajectory, has created new challenges that demand new responses. The distributed operational concepts, the emphasis on alliance capability building, the focus on presence and engagement rather than episodic intervention, all represent adaptations to this changed environment.

For those who remember the fall of Saigon in 1975, Hung Cao’s presence in Hanoi fifty years later as a senior American defense official cannot help but prompt reflection on how profoundly the world has changed. The transformation of U.S.-Vietnam relations from bitter conflict to security partnership represents one of the more remarkable shifts in modern international relations. That this partnership now focuses on maritime security and resistance to coercion adds another layer of historical irony and strategic logic.

The Pacific remains what it has always been: vast, diverse, economically vital, and strategically crucial. How the United States engages with this region will shape global security for decades to come. Under Secretary Hung Cao’s early emphasis on Guam and Vietnam signals that this engagement will be grounded in both strategic realism and an appreciation for the region’s complexity. His personal journey from refugee to defense leader adds a human dimension to these strategic imperatives, reminding us that policy is ultimately made by people whose experiences shape their understanding of what is at stake.

As the distributed operations concept matures, as alliance partnerships deepen, and as the maritime security cooperation with Vietnam expands, the framework for Pacific security continues to evolve. This evolution is not predetermined or guaranteed to succeed, but it represents a serious effort to adapt American strategy to contemporary realities while maintaining core commitments to allies, partners, and the principles of open and free maritime commerce that have underwritten Pacific prosperity for generations.

In this transformation, Guam stands at the center not as a fixed point but as a dynamic node in a flexible network, much like Under Secretary Cao himself, whose career trajectory embodies the intersection of personal history and strategic necessity that defines this new era in Pacific security.

Robbin Laird is editor of Defense.info and Edward Timperlake is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy 1969, received 2 campaign stars from the Vietnam War and is the former CO of VMFA-321.

The featured photo was taken during his October 20 and 21 to Guam and is credited to Joint Region Marianas.

defense.info

16. How Asia Is Navigating America’s Fading Financial Control

​Summary:

Asia is embracing “multialignment,” relying on the U.S. dollar while reducing dependence on U.S. leadership. China, India, BRICS, and Gulf states are developing alternative financial channels to hedge against U.S. sanctions risk. Dollar dominance endures, but its political pull is weakening. Washington must adapt, leveraging cooperation, not coercion to retain influence in a diversified global order.

​Excerpts:

For U.S. policymakers, the challenge is not imminent decline but strategic adaptation. Relying on financial centrality as a substitute for political leadership risks complacency. The United States’ enduring strengths – deep capital markets, the rule of law, innovation – still make the dollar indispensable. But the legitimacy of that dominance depends on how it is exercised. A system built primarily on coercive leverage cannot indefinitely sustain consent.

In the emerging Asia-centered global economy, stability will come less from hierarchy and more from managed interdependence. Washington remains best positioned to shape that framework, if it can lead through credible institutions and cooperation rather than compulsion. The next phase of globalization will likely be defined by financial gravity coexisting with strategic fragmentation. The dollar will remain the world’s currency, but not necessarily its consensus.

If the United States adapts to this reality, it can still serve as a stabilizing force in an increasingly plural world. If not, the system it built will continue to rely on its currency – but no longer on its leadership.

How Asia Is Navigating America’s Fading Financial Control

Across Asia, governments are learning to live with U.S. financial dominance – without depending on it.

By Elkhan Nuriyev

November 14, 2025

https://thediplomat.com/2025/11/how-asia-is-navigating-americas-fading-financial-control/

Credit: Depositphotos

For decades, global order rested on a simple premise: U.S. economic and military supremacy structured the system, and others adjusted. From the Bretton Woods institutions to the post-Cold War unipolar moment, Washington stood at the center of both the global economy and its security architecture.

That model is now under strain. The United States continues to dominate the world’s financial plumbing: the dollar accounts for about 58 percent of official foreign-exchange reserves, roughly half of global trade invoicing, and more than 40 percent of cross-border debt issuance. The Federal Reserve remains the world’s de facto central bank, and dollar liquidity still sets the rhythm of global markets. Even governments that oppose U.S. policy – China, Russia, Iran – remain dependent on the dollar’s gravitational pull for trade and reserves.

Yet financial supremacy no longer translates into political alignment. The illusion that economic globalization and U.S. leadership were mutually reinforcing has faded. Globalization has not collapsed – it has simply diversified. What was once a single, U.S.-anchored system has become a network of overlapping regional and functional orders.

Across Asia, the logic of “multialignment” is taking root. China has built a parallel financial and connectivity infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and regional digital platforms that challenge Western models. India, the Gulf states, and much of Southeast Asia are hedging – maintaining security ties with Washington while deepening trade, energy, and technology links with Beijing and Moscow. Even U.S. partners such as Japan and South Korea are exploring limited autonomy through regional financial cooperation and local-currency initiatives.

This pattern reflects a deeper shift: countries now view U.S. financial leverage as both indispensable and risky. Dependence on the dollar remains, but it has become a strategic calculation rather than an automatic choice. China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), India’s rupee-denominated trade arrangements, and BRICS proposals for alternative settlement mechanisms are not yet serious competitors to the dollar. But their political purpose is clear – to build options.

Washington’s use of the financial system as an instrument of statecraft has reinforced the dollar’s reach while revealing its vulnerability. The sweeping sanctions against Russia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine demonstrated U.S. financial power, but they also exposed its limits. Many governments now recognize that access to the dollar can be withdrawn overnight. What once provided stability is increasingly seen as a potential liability.

This paradox defines the new era: the world still depends on the dollar but resists the hierarchy it implies. The United States can still constrain rivals through liquidity, regulation, and market access, but it can no longer assume those tools will generate political alignment. Even close partners are recalibrating – the EU’s pushback against U.S. industrial policy, the Gulf’s balancing act between Washington and Beijing, and ASEAN’s neutral diplomacy all point in the same direction.

For U.S. policymakers, the challenge is not imminent decline but strategic adaptation. Relying on financial centrality as a substitute for political leadership risks complacency. The United States’ enduring strengths – deep capital markets, the rule of law, innovation – still make the dollar indispensable. But the legitimacy of that dominance depends on how it is exercised. A system built primarily on coercive leverage cannot indefinitely sustain consent.

In the emerging Asia-centered global economy, stability will come less from hierarchy and more from managed interdependence. Washington remains best positioned to shape that framework, if it can lead through credible institutions and cooperation rather than compulsion. The next phase of globalization will likely be defined by financial gravity coexisting with strategic fragmentation. The dollar will remain the world’s currency, but not necessarily its consensus.

If the United States adapts to this reality, it can still serve as a stabilizing force in an increasingly plural world. If not, the system it built will continue to rely on its currency – but no longer on its leadership.

Authors

Guest Author

Elkhan Nuriyev

Dr. Elkhan Nuriyev is a senior fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He previously served as a Fulbright Scholar at The George Washington University and has held senior positions at leading think tanks and research institutions in the United States and Europe.

17. A Glimpse of the Future of China-US Relations

​Summary:

By 2028, U.S.-China rivalry hardens into permanent conflict: dueling tariffs, mirrored sanctions, bifurcated tech ecosystems, higher supply-chain costs, and constant military and cyber tensions. Mistrust deepens as deterrence dominates. Scholars warn fatalism is driving escalation; narrowing coercive tools, restoring diplomacy, and expanding cooperation on shared risks are essential to prevent inevitable confrontation.

Excerpts:

Reducing the scope of coercive tools and improving cooperation can prevent the United States and China from moving to the brink of confrontation in the next few years. This downward spiral of sharp rhetoric, punitive measures, retaliation, worsening public opinion, and contracting options must be halted, not least of all because it has failed to resolve the basic issues. It has merely institutionalized mistrust. 

Changing course will require discipline in measuring policy violation versus compliance, creating off-ramps that reward positive actions, and engaging in practical joint work where interests align. Such steps will not erase rivalry between the two powers, but they can turning the prospect of confrontation from an assumed inevitability into a risk to be managed.

Comment: Sober assessment with some optimism? Or a little wishful thinking?

A Glimpse of the Future of China-US Relations

If the current trajectory holds, the rivalry will harden into a permanent conflict in the next few years. But it’s not too late to change course.

By Sara Hsu

November 15, 2025

https://thediplomat.com/2025/11/a-glimpse-of-the-future-of-china-us-relations/

Credit: Depositphotos

It’s the year 2028, and the China-U.S. rivalry has hardened into a permanent conflict. The economic relationship between the United States and China remains, but has become more expensive, complex, and defined by mistrust. In the U.S., Section 301 tariffs and entity lists remain in place; in China, reciprocal tariffs, export-licensing regimes, and punishing counter-sanctions continue. Each new rule results in a mirror reaction.

Business continues to flow, but supply chain costs are higher, lead times are longer than in previous years, and firms carry more inventory due to higher risk levels. The technology industry – once a shared sphere of innovation – has split into rival ecosystems, with either side facing the constant threat of losing access to critical parts or resources from their counterpart. Beijing has mobilized massive state funding and engineering talent to narrow the technological gap. Two incompatible technology stacks arise, with diverging cloud and AI toolchains. Major global firms are required to maintain dual compliance tracks for U.S. and Chinese standards.

Military and cyber defense often default to deterrence, but there is a constant risk of an accident at sea or in the air, which could rapidly escalate conflict. Both nations continue to modernize their defense industries, including expanding their nuclear arsenals. China continues to expand its security involvement overseas, while the U.S. maintains its presence and patrolling operation in the Indo-Pacific. Cyber-espionage and gray-zone tactics are daily occurrences, as both sides search for weaknesses they could exploit in the event of ratcheting conflict.

The world of 2028 is not a world at war between the two great powers, but misunderstandings have increased the potential for a face-off. Past cooperation feels more like a faint memory, as unfavorable views between both political leaders and the populace of either nation rising to an all-time high. Neither side views the other as a friend, but as a potential outright enemy.

The world of 2028 is merely an extension of today’s rivalry, both in words and deeds. At his Senate confirmation hearing, Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio called China “the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.” Meanwhile, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin has repeatedly branded U.S. conduct as “hegemonic, domineering and bullying.”  

Section 301 tariffs and entity listings by the U.S. on Chinese firms, as well as reciprocal actions by China on U.S. firms, act as a foundation for future hostilities, despite attempts to de-escalate new threats. Cooperation on the underlying issues of technology competition, divergent economic models, and security fears remains largely absent.

Scholars like the late Joseph Nye and Susan Shirk have warned that Washington should engage more seriously in diplomacy and resist the drift toward fatalism in its China policy. While their views are in the minority in the present hawkish environment, there is a true need to avoid the confrontational narrative that continues to shape both current government policies and the populace’s attitudes. Rather than broadly framing the other nation as a “rival,” “adversary,” or even “enemy” that is an existential threat, both the United States and China must attempt to narrow the scope of conflict by examining the specific underlying issues.

Many analysts have indicated that coercive tools should be narrowed, and cooperation expanded. For example, technology restrictions should have clearly defined risk thresholds, reasons for sanctions should be made public, and restrictions should be given periodic review. At present, conflicts are poorly managed and easily escalated; this needs to change, with clear off-ramps provided for policy compliance.

Cooperation can be expanded on several issues, including fentanyl precursor enforcement, illicit finance monitoring, climate work, and pathogen surveillance. To reduce the potential for crisis, drills to avoid air and sea incidents – with the goal of ensuring fewer unsafe incidents – should be practiced. Early warnings for food or pharmaceutical tariffs or trade curbs should be provided, along with humanitarian carve-outs.

Reducing the scope of coercive tools and improving cooperation can prevent the United States and China from moving to the brink of confrontation in the next few years. This downward spiral of sharp rhetoric, punitive measures, retaliation, worsening public opinion, and contracting options must be halted, not least of all because it has failed to resolve the basic issues. It has merely institutionalized mistrust. 

Changing course will require discipline in measuring policy violation versus compliance, creating off-ramps that reward positive actions, and engaging in practical joint work where interests align. Such steps will not erase rivalry between the two powers, but they can turning the prospect of confrontation from an assumed inevitability into a risk to be managed.

Authors

Contributing Author

Sara Hsu

Dr. Sara Hsu is an expert in Chinese fintech, economic development, informal finance, and shadow banking. She is the author of “China’s Fintech Explosion.”

​18. Trump blocked from gutting Voice of America collective bargaining rights

​Summary:

A federal judge blocked President Trump’s attempt to cancel collective bargaining rights for Voice of America and U.S. Agency for Global Media employees, calling it unlawful retaliation. The court rejected claims that the agencies have “primary national security” roles and warned the unions faced an “existential threat.” Prior efforts to dismantle VOA were also halted.

Comment. I really wanted to be able to say I told you so. No one can counter my argument that VOA has "a primary national security function" because the Trump administration has stated that that is exactly the case. However, I guess Judge Friedman ruled it does not since he rejected the Administration's argument. 

But regardless please bring back my beloved Korean service.

Trump blocked from gutting Voice of America collective bargaining rights

A federal judge rejected the president’s assertion the U.S. Agency for Global Media had a “primary national security function” necessary to exempt employees from union representation.

courthousenews.com · Ryan Knappenberger · November 14, 2025

https://www.courthousenews.com/trump-blocked-from-gutting-voice-of-america-collective-bargaining-rights/

WASHINGTON (CN) — A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration’s effort to cancel collective bargaining agreements for U.S. Agency for Global Media and Voice of America employees, slamming the move as clear retaliation for the workers’ efforts to halt Trump’s dismantling of the news outlet.

Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman found President Donald Trump’s Aug. 28 executive order, “Further Exclusions from the Federal Labor-Management Relations Program,” wrongfully tried to classify the independent media agencies as having a “primary national security function” to strip their employees of union representation.

Other agencies targeted by the order included NASA, the National Weather Service, the International Trade Commission, the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service and the Office of the Commissioner for Patents.

The Bill Clinton appointee issued his ruling from the bench, noting he has ruled similarly in several near-identical cases challenging Trump’s March 27 executive order that aimed to exclude approximately two-thirds of the federal workforce from their collective bargaining agreements.

Friedman added the chief executive is not entitled to the “presumption of regularity” — a legal doctrine that affords the executive branch a certain amount of deference based on the assumption officials follow the law — due to his pattern of retaliating against his perceived enemies.

“This presumption is based on the assumption that the president will obey their official duties, but this has not been what’s happened since Jan. 20. It’s just not,” Friedman said.

The suit was brought by the American Federal Government Employees Union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Voice of America Employees Union and the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s employee union on Sept. 19.

Friday’s ruling is the latest in an eight-month campaign by the Trump administration to dismantle the Voice of America, which Trump has slammed as the “Voice of Radical America,” starting with a March 14 executive order requiring its “nonstatutory components and functions” be eliminated to the “maximum extent.”

A coalition of VOA journalists and editors, led by White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara, challenged the March order, leading Senior U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to issue an injunction blocking the outlet’s shuttering, which he noted “silenced VOA for the first time ever.”

John Pellettieri of Bredhoff Kaiser and representing the unions, argued Friday that the administration’s conduct following the March 14 executive order — including efforts to circumvent Lamberth’s order that led to a show cause order and the deposition of acting Voice of America CEO Kari Lake — along with Trump’s pattern of retaliation necessitated a preliminary injunction.

Without one, Pellettieri said, the employees would lose their union representation and could potentially face looming reduction-in-force orders on their own.

He noted that on Aug. 29, the day after Trump’s executive order, Lake emailed U.S. Agency for Global Media employees stating that their collective bargaining agreements were canceled, and included a file explicitly referencing further reduction-in-force orders.

Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, has also stayed the reduction-in-force orders, blasting Lake’s “concerning disrespect” for court orders and suggesting that contempt proceedings may be on the table.

Pellettieri pointed to the recent government shutdown and the fact that only seven of the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s 500 employees remained on the job, while the remainder were furloughed, as proof the government’s national security claims were inconsistent.

Only certain members of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting remained on the job due to certain national security interests.

The government’s claims that the global media agency has a primary national security function “just cannot be squared with the idea the agency should be closed,” Pellettieri said, adding the seven non-furloughed employees are further proof any such function is minimal.

Tyler Becker from the Office of the Assistant Attorney General argued that the only question Friedman must answer is whether Trump in fact targeted the global media agency in retaliation for the unions’ resistance, or if he would have issued the executive order anyway.

Becker further suggested the unions cannot claim the August executive order would irreparably harm them, as the reduction-in-force orders remained suspended by Lamberth’s order and thus any harm is speculative.

Friedman rejected that theory, saying the local unions face an “existential threat” and would no longer exist if the global media agency is fully dismantled and its employees all terminated.

The D.C. Circuit is set to hear arguments in three consolidated cases challenging Trump’s March executive order on Dec. 15.

Categories / Courts, Employment, Government, Media, Politics

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courthousenews.com · Ryan Knappenberger · November 14, 2025

19. The US military’s plan to revive old bases in Latin America

Summary:

The U.S. is exploring a return to Ecuador’s Manta base as part of a broader effort to revive former military sites across Latin America. As Ecuador votes on allowing foreign basing, Washington is already renovating facilities in Puerto Rico and Panama and expanding regional operations under Joint Task Force–Southern Spear, aiming to boost counter-narcotics and wider strategic capabilities amid rising regional tensions.

Comment: I know the boys in 7th Group's Red Empire will be happy about this.

The US military’s plan to revive old bases in Latin America

taskandpurpose.com · Nicholas Slayton

Deactivated bases in Panama, Puerto Rico, and potentially Ecuador are coming back to life as the U.S. military builds up forces in the region.

Nicholas Slayton

Published Nov 14, 2025 4:41 PM EST

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/us-bases-latin-america-revived/

In the near future, U.S. troops could once again be based out of Ecuador after leaving 16 years ago. Ecuador is set to vote this weekend on a constitutional assembly that could allow foreign militaries to operate bases in the country, including the United States.

The Trump administration and Ecuador have been discussing security cooperation in recent months, including the possibility of once again basing American troops in the port city of Manta. Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem visited the site with Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, as well as another military installation, according to Noboa’s office. The Pentagon has not said if it plans to send forces back to the country if allowed, but the referendum could open the door for an American footprint in the country.

The potential return to Manta is part of a wider move by the U.S. military to reactivate and revive several bases around Latin America that it previously turned over or deactivated. The move comes as the military shifts away from the Middle East and into the western hemisphere. The Pentagon is actively working on rebuilding its infrastructure in the Caribbean and Central America at the same time it is deploying a large number of forces to the region under the auspices of tackling drug trafficking. The United States has carried out 20 announced strikes on small ships in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific accused of trafficking drugs, killing at least 79 people according to official White House and Pentagon statements. But the infrastructure being revived would be capable of more than just airstrikes on small boats.

Alongside the potential return to Ecuador, U.S. troops and contractors have renovated bases inside American territory in the region — at Naval Station Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico — and outside of it, such as the former Fort Sherman in Panama. Roosevelt Roads, deactivated in 2004 after a nearby munitions range closed, came to life again this fall when the Pentagon sent F-35B fighter jets to Puerto Rico. Since then, satellite imagery and photographs have captured major renovations on the base’s airstrip, a surge in tents for construction and a general overhaul of the base’s infrastructure. Meanwhile, in Panama, conventional troops including U.S. soldiers and Marines, began training in a new jungle warfare school using the previously abandoned base, 25 years after it was handed over to the Panamanian state.

The U.S. base in Ecuador, part of the Eloy Alfaro International Airport in Manta, was home to American forces starting in 1999. The U.S. military left Manta in 2009 after a decade of operations, when Ecuador banned foreign militaries inside the country. The potential return to Manta is notable because it would give the U.S. a presence on the Pacific side of Latin America, after it began strikes on ships in the eastern part of the ocean in recent weeks. A Pentagon official told Task & Purpose that the Department of Defense was aware of the request by Ecuador for American assistance and that the U.S. provides training and education to the country.

US Marines offload supplies from a V-22 aircraft at Naval Station Roosevelt Roads in Ceiba, Puerto Rico. Photo by Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/AFP via Getty Images

Rebuilding old bases would likely give the United States military greater operational capabilities in the region. Thousands of sailors and Marines were moved into the Caribbean over late summer and early fall, but most are on ships deployed to the region. Extant U.S. Southern Command bases are operational in Puerto Rico and Honduras, where the forward-deployed Joint Task Force-Bravo is based. As part of the buildup, the U.S. is relying on nearby neighbors. Several U.S. Air Force and special operations planes have been spotted at air bases in El Salvador.

Reviving old bases and airfields isn’t a new strategy, either. As part of a pivot to the Pacific after two decades in the Middle East, the military reactivated and updated several island outposts. Those range from World War II airfields, including one on Peleliu, to potential ones in the cold Aleutian Islands.

A Marine makes a water filtration device during jungle warfare training in Panama. Army photo by Trey Woodard

The referendum and Noem’s visit to Ecuador come as the Pentagon formalized its forces in the Caribbean under a new task force last month (renamed Joint Task Force-Southern Spear this week) and announced a counter-narcotics plan dubbed Operation Southern Spear. The base in Manta, for instance, was used primarily for actions against drug traffickers.

This week, Venezuela’s government announced it was mobilizing its military in a show of force against the growing U.S. military presence — and in that same period of time, the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier and its strike group entered into SOUTHCOM’s area of responsibility, increasing U.S. naval power in the region.

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Nicholas Slayton

Contributing Editor

Nicholas Slayton is a Contributing Editor for Task & Purpose. In addition to covering breaking news, he writes about history, shipwrecks, and the military’s hunt for unidentified anomalous phenomenon (formerly known as UFOs).

taskandpurpose.com · Nicholas Slayton

​20. The War to Break American Truth

​Summary:

AI-driven foreign influence operations are surging, with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea deploying deepfakes, fake news networks, and bot swarms to divide Americans and corrode trust. The article argues that “foreign influence” must be understood as three threats such as economic coercion, political coercion, and information corruption with the last being the most dangerous because it undermines courts, journalism, science, and shared truth itself. Without action, elections, markets, and institutions will face cascading legitimacy crises. The author proposes a three-part national strategy: a voluntary cognitive defense network, an NSC-level cognitive warfare center, and a public-private authentication industry to verify information at scale.

Comment: This is why we need the DISRUPT Act Congress has drafted.

Congress eyes whole-of-government plan to disrupt growing cooperation between US adversaries

https://defensescoop.com/2025/11/07/congress-disrupt-act-china-russia-iran-north-korea/

The War to Break American Truth

The National Interest · Saeed Ghasseminejad November 15, 2025

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-war-to-break-american-truth

Region: Americas

The War to Break American Truth

November 13, 2025

Combatting foreign influence in US society and politics requires a comprehensive and proactive strategy.

New York City’s mayoral race offered a preview of what’s coming: AI-generated ads, doctored robocalls, and deepfaked endorsements. Just weeks earlier, Washington had quietly withdrawn from several international agreements aimed at combating foreign disinformation. The retreat came after Microsoft uncovered more than 200 state-linked disinformation campaigns from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—twice the number from the previous year and ten times the number from the year before that.

The campaigns used AI to generate convincing news clips, phony anchors, and complete networks of fake accounts. They focused on domestic issues that divide Americans, but not because they cared about the facts of the case. What mattered was the opportunity to inject narratives, pour fuel on an American fire, and watch it burn.

The intelligence community tracks it, journalists probe it, universities study it, and politicians blame it. Foreign influence is part of our new front line, but the phrase is failing us. “Foreign influence” has become a catch-all, a bucket into which some have thrown cyber operations, espionage, trade secret theft, and transnational repression. That may work as casual shorthand, but it is useless for developing a strategy. To truly understand what is happening, we need clarity. Strip away the noise, and only three activities remain under the label of foreign influence: economic coercion, political coercion, and information corruption. Each targets a different foundation of our national life.

Economic Coercion

When Australia called for an independent inquiry into COVID-19’s origins, Beijing retaliated by slapping tariffs and restrictions on Australian wine, beef, barley, and coal. When Lithuania deepened ties with Taiwan, China blocked its exports. Moscow cut off gas to Poland and Bulgaria in 2022 as punishment for supporting Ukraine. The playbook has coalesced over the years: weaponize markets, resources, and supply chains for political concessions.

The United States is not immune. Chinese diplomats have quietly pressured American companies that rely on Chinese manufacturing to lobby Washington against stricter restrictions on Beijing. Energy markets, especially LNG and refined products, remain exposed to Russian manipulation. Economic coercion is not a distant phenomenon. It reaches directly into American boardrooms, supply chains, and investments. Both China and Russia wield their markets for geopolitical hegemony.

Political Coercion

In Eastern Europe, Russian intelligence has used kompromat on politicians for decades, flipping elections and silencing critics. In Australia, PRC-backed “United Front” groups have cultivated candidates, donors, and diaspora organizations to shape political debate. In the United States, it has so far been more subtle but no less real. Chinese consulate officials in New York met with local candidates to sway municipal elections, offering support in exchange for sympathetic positions. Diaspora organizations linked to Beijing have mobilized in American cities to pressure local leaders on issues from Tibet to Taiwan. And in 2016, Russian operatives tried to infiltrate political campaigns directly, using false identities and cutouts.

These are not anomalies. They are the visible edge of a much larger strategy: transactional capture, where money, kompromat, and leveraging the diaspora are deployed for geopolitical goals. The United States has treated such cases as isolated crimes. They are not. They are probes, testing the seams of an open system. Political coercion is not rare; it is the natural exploitation of American vulnerabilities: porous finance, unlimited access to politics, and almost no guardrails against covert foreign pressure. Left unaddressed, it will become increasingly common, more blatant, and much harder to root out.

Information Corruption

Economic and political coercion matter. They change markets and governments. Yet, there is a third, and most dangerous, category of foreign influence: information corruption. It attacks us at a fundamental level, and if we don’t address it, the foundations of everything else will collapse.

Moscow calls it “information confrontation.” Beijing calls it “cognitive warfare.” Both believe they are curating the US information space to shift our choices. But it is not mere propaganda. It is a system of tactics, including deepfakes, inauthentic amplification networks, bot swarms, front “media” outlets, selective leaks, and algorithmic manipulation, designed to flood, fragment, and rot the information environment. Russia and China’s influence agents do not simply post memes. They orchestrate thousands of fake accounts that reach (and inflame) millions of Americans.

Economic coercion breaks markets. Political coercion bends governance. Information corruption corrodes the private sphere, the individual minds, and shared institutions on which pluralism depends.

Intent vs. Effect

Here is the paradox. Tactically, Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran jump on every opportunity, an activist’s killing, a natural disaster, a leak timed before an election. Facts don’t matter. What matters is seeding narratives that spread. Strategically, they believe these injections add up to curating the American information environment, the way propaganda does in their closed systems. But in our open system, their efforts do not curate; they corrode. They widen fractures, accelerate discord, and degrade the institutions we depend on to decide what is true.

As detailed previously, the line between foreign and domestic has vanished. Tools first deployed by adversaries overseas have been adopted by domestic political actors, activists, and opportunists. A campaign seeded in St. Petersburg is picked up by a PAC in Washington. An American advocacy group repurposes a narrative crafted in Beijing. What begins abroad becomes domestic material; the cycle feeds itself. They pour gasoline; our politics light the match.

This is not an abstraction. It plays out repeatedly: doctored videos on the evening news cycle; selective leaks that ruin reputations regardless of their truth; algorithmically tailored feeds that lock citizens into silos of self-confirming “facts.” The result is not only skepticism about democracy or capitalism as ideas but also the degradation of the institutions we rely on to settle what is true: courts, the press, the scientific community, and even markets.

If We Do Nothing

The consequences are already visible. Left unchecked, the erosion accelerates.

Near term: Every election cycle is plagued by fabricated videos and forged leaks. Results are contested before votes are even counted. Courts are overwhelmed as attorneys dispute the authenticity of evidence, turning trials into arguments about whether anything is real. Financial markets face rolling shocks from spoofed announcements and counterfeit statements. Permanent doubt becomes the condition of American life.

Medium term: Society fractures into smaller and smaller groups, each with its own facts, experts, and proofs. Journalism collapses under universal suspicion. Verification becomes a boutique service for elites. Governments falter as legislatures and courts face repeated legitimacy crises.

Long term: Institutions built on evidence (law, journalism, science, commerce) lose authority altogether. Our democracy sputters because there is no shared process for deciding what is true. Power flows to whoever can enforce a narrative through coercion, platform dominance, or loyalty networks. In a crisis abroad (Taiwan, the Baltics, Poland), information corruption and the confusion it causes will buy adversaries 48–72 hours of American paralysis. That window may be all they need to consolidate military gains while Washington argues with itself about what is real.

What We Must Build

We can’t censor our way out of this. Closed systems, such as Russia and China, use control; open systems must use proof. The solution is not to shrink openness but to harden it—to make truth verifiable, fast, and public. In an earlier essay, I argued for two steps: universal cognitive defense training and an NSC-level cognitive warfare unit. Those remain essential, but we need one additional step: a national program to build authentication tools. Together, these form the core of a real strategy. The United States should move on these fronts, coordinated but voluntary, wherever possible.

First, build a national cognitive defense network, a voluntary effort across society to raise resilience. Citizens must have tools to protect themselves. Schools should teach verification and manipulation detection as part of digital literacy. Public servants and civic leaders should be trained to recognize influence tradecraft. Cognitive defense should be as routine as cyber hygiene (even if that is still wanting in many organizations). Participation would be voluntary but open to all, creating shared professional standards for verifying images, videos, and documents before they enter the information stream.

Second, create a centralized national effort for defense and offense. Establish an NSC-level body that can catalogue operations, defend against them, and go on the offensive to raise costs for Russia, China, Iran, and any others that care to play. Without a central node, every response will remain fragmented and slow. It would unite defense, intelligence, law enforcement, and regulatory agencies under a single framework, equipped with clear playbooks for four recurring tactics: election interference, market manipulation, national emergencies, and evidence forgery.

Third, build an authentication industry—a public-private effort to make proof a feature of everyday life. The United States should accelerate the development of technologies that can establish verifiable provenance: watermarking, secure capture on devices, and unbroken digital chains of custody. Federal procurement should require these standards for official communications, courtroom evidence, and market disclosures, creating demand that drives private innovation.

The goal is not a government monopoly on truth but a commercial ecosystem—tools that courts, journalists, schools, scientists, and businesses can use to authenticate information as easily as they now share it. The country that builds the architecture of verification will set the standard for the next information age.

These three elements are not optional. They are the necessary tools needed to restore and deter adversaries who erode our institutional foundations with impunity.

The Next War

Foreign influence is not what we think it is. Economic coercion undermines markets. Political coercion corrupts governance. Information decay corrupts the institutions that sustain a pluralist society. All three erode democracy, but only information corruption threatens to collapse the system itself.

This is where we have to start—at the fundamentals, the building blocks of an open society. If we don’t get this right, nothing else will matter. The next war may not be decided by armies or economies, but by whether citizens in democracies still believe anything can be true.

About the Author: Holden Triplett

Holden Triplett is a Co-Founder of Trenchcoat Advisors, the preeminent human-driven risk advisory firm. He has extensive experience in national security and intelligence matters, both internationally and domestically, particularly in their impact on business and private enterprises. In addition to his work at Trenchcoat, Holden is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he teaches a course on Chinese Intelligence, Security, and Influence, as well as an adjunct at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, where he teaches a course on Private Sector Intelligence and Insider Risk.

Image: Marko Aliaksandr / Shutterstock.com.

21. Naturalized US citizens thought they were safe. Trump's immigration policies are shaking that belief

​Summary:

Many naturalized U.S. citizens now fear that the security they believed citizenship guaranteed is eroding under President Trump’s aggressive immigration overhaul. Refugee advocate Dauda Sesay describes feeling betrayed as policies expand deportations, threaten birthright citizenship, increase denaturalization efforts, and even target naturalized public officials. Reports of citizens detained in raids, questioned at borders, or misidentified as undocumented deepen anxiety. Some now carry passports domestically or limit travel. Community leaders note unprecedented fear among naturalized residents who once felt fully protected. Historians emphasize that American citizenship has long expanded and contracted politically, but for many, today’s uncertainty feels like a broken promise.

Comment: Troubling. My wife, a naturalized citizen for decades, does not feel comfortable traveling outside the US no matter how much I try to reassure her. She refuses to accompany me to overseas conferences. 

Naturalized US citizens thought they were safe. Trump's immigration policies are shaking that belief

AP · DEEPTI HAJELA · November 15, 2025

https://apnews.com/article/naturalized-citizens-immigration-fears-116b8bb3dd4444abf4bdcbc266bed48c

NEW YORK (AP) — When he first came to the United States after escaping civil war in Sierra Leone and spending almost a decade in a refugee camp, Dauda Sesay had no idea he could become a citizen. But he was told that if he followed the rules and stayed out of trouble, after some years he could apply. As a U.S. citizen, he would have protection.

It’s what made him decide to apply: the premise — and the promise — that when he became a naturalized American citizen, it would create a bond between him and his new home. He would have rights as well as responsibilities, like voting, that, as he was making a commitment to the country, the country was making one to him.

“When I raised my hand and took the oath of allegiance, I did believe that moment the promise that I belonged,” said Sesay, 44, who first arrived in Louisiana more than 15 years ago and now works as an advocate for refugees and their integration into American society.

But in recent months, as President Donald Trump reshapes immigration and the country’s relationship with immigrants, that belief has been shaken for Sesay and other naturalized citizens. There’s now fear that the push to drastically increase deportations and shift who can claim America as home, through things like trying to end birthright citizenship, is having a ripple effect.

What they thought was the bedrock protection of naturalization now feels more like quicksand.

What happens if they leave?

Some are worried that if they leave the country, they will have difficulties when trying to return, fearful because of accounts of naturalized citizens being questioned or detained by U.S. border agents. They wonder: Do they need to lock down their phones to protect their privacy? Others are hesitant about moving around within the country, after stories like that of a U.S. citizen accused of being here illegally and detained even after his mother produced his birth certificate.

Sesay said he doesn’t travel domestically anymore without his passport, despite having a REAL ID with its federally mandated, stringent identity requirements.

Immigration enforcement roundups, often conducted by masked, unidentifiable federal agents in places including Chicago and New York City, have at times included American citizens in their dragnets. One U.S. citizen who says he was detained by immigration agents twice has filed a federal lawsuit.

Adding to the worries, the Justice Department issued a memo this summer saying it would ramp up efforts to denaturalize immigrants who’ve committed crimes or are deemed to present a national security risk. At one point during the summer, Trump threatened the citizenship of Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist mayor-elect of New York City, who naturalized as a young adult.

The atmosphere makes some worried to speak about it publicly, for fear of drawing negative attention to themselves. Requests for comment through several community organizations and other connections found no takers willing to go on the record other than Sesay.

In New Mexico, state Sen. Cindy Nava says she’s familiar with the fear, having grown up undocumented before getting DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that protected people brought to the U.S. as children from being deported — and gaining citizenship through her marriage. But she hadn’t expected to see so much fear among naturalized citizens.

“I had never seen those folks be afraid ... now the folks that I know that were not afraid before, now they are uncertain of what their status holds in terms of a safety net for them,” Nava said.

What citizenship has meant, and who was included, has expanded and contracted over the course of American history, said Stephen Kantrowitz, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said while the word “citizen” is in the original Constitution, it is not defined.

“When the Constitution is written, nobody knows what citizenship means,” he said. “It’s a term of art, it comes out of the French revolutionary tradition. It sort of suggests an equality of the members of a political community, and it has some implications for the right to be a member of that political community. But it is ... so undefined.”

American immigration and its obstacles

The first naturalization law passed in 1790 by the new country’s Congress said citizenship was for any “free white person” of good character. Those of African descent or nativity were added as a specific category to federal immigration law after the ravages of the Civil War in the 19th century, which was also when the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution to establish birthright citizenship.

In the last years of the 19th century and into the 20th century, laws were put on the books limiting immigration and, by extension, naturalization. The Immigration Act of 1924 effectively barred people from Asia because they were ineligible for naturalization, being neither white nor Black. That didn’t change until 1952, when an immigration law removed racial restrictions on who could be naturalized. The 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act replaced the previous immigration system with one that portioned out visas equally among nations.

American history also includes times when those who had citizenship had it taken away, like after the 1923 Supreme Court ruling in U.S. vs. Bhagat Singh Thind. That ruling said that Indians couldn’t be naturalized because they did not qualify as white and led to several dozen denaturalizations. At other times, it was ignored, as in World War II, when Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps.

“Political power will sometimes simply decide that a group of people, or a person or a family isn’t entitled to citizenship,” Kantrowitz said.

In this moment, Sesay says, it feels like betrayal.

“The United States of America — that’s what I took that oath of allegiance, that’s what I make commitment to,” Sesay said. “Now, inside my home country, and I’m seeing a shift. ... Honestly, that is not the America I believe in when I put my hand over my heart.”

AP · DEEPTI HAJELA · November 15, 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