|
Quotes of the Day:
"Psychological Warfare has always rested as an uneasy activity in democracies, even in wartime. It is partly to do with the suspicion that using the mind to influence the mind is somehow unacceptable. But is it more unacceptable to shoot someone's brains out rather than to persuade that brain to drop down their weapon and live?"
– Dr. Phillip M. Taylor, Author of "Munitions of the Mind", Manchester University Press, 1995
“The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions--even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do. Revolutionaries sometimes do intend to destroy institutions all at once. This was the approach of the Russian Bolsheviks. Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it.”
– Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
“Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of the body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
–Thomas Jefferson
1. The Case for Caution: Why the U.S. Military Shouldn't Organize Around AI… Yet
2. The Pentagon and A.I. Giants Have a Weakness. Both Need China’s Batteries, Badly.
3. U.S. Bans New China-Made Drones, Sparking Outrage Among Pilots
4. China’s Sprint for Tech Dominance Can’t Hide an Economy Full of Holes
5. ‘Kyiv Isn’t Losing, Moscow Is’ – Senators Call for US to Double Down
6. To stop drug boats, GOP lawmakers want to license privateers
7. Rand Paul says seizure of oil tankers in Caribbean a 'prelude to war'
8. What We Know About The Trump Class "Battleship"
9. The Bondi Attack And a False Narrative
10. Civility and Confidence: A Resolution for 2026
11. China ‘preparing to fight and defeat Taiwan by 2027’
12. Exclusive: China likely loaded more than 100 ICBMs in silo fields, Pentagon report says
13. China’s War Clock: ICBMs Deployed, Taiwan Invasion Set for 2027
14. Russia could keep Europe busy if China attacks Taiwan, warns NATO chief
15. Trump's second term marks a significant departure from his first term, analysts say
16. The Affordable Mass the Air Force Is Looking For Is Hiding in Plain Sight
17. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Limits of Terrorist Designations
18. US Arms Sales to Taiwan Signal Policy Continuity
19. Can Germany Afford to Be Europe’s Protector?
20. Gaza’s New Normal: Persistent Limited Conflict Is More Likely Than Peace
21. The One Chart That Explains Everything (AI)
1. The Case for Caution: Why the U.S. Military Shouldn't Organize Around AI… Yet
Summary:
The Pentagon should adopt AI pragmatically but avoid reorganizing the force around it, for now. The author warns that “transformational tech” cycles often drive premature doctrine and force design bets, citing the Pentomic Army, the 1990s RMA hype, and Future Combat Systems as costly overcorrections. Today’s AI remains brittle in combat-relevant ways: hallucinations, susceptibility to deception, dependence on clean data, and failure under contested conditions. Instead of an AI-driven redesign, the piece urges targeted use in intel, logistics, training, and administration, plus IT modernization, rigorous safety certifications, red teaming, and field experimentation.
Excerpts:
While it waits for the revolution that many promise, the Department of Defense should use AI today where it makes the most sense and is proven: intelligence and data analysis, logistics optimization, training, and administration. These are the places where AI has already yielded gains in the commercial sector and where the cross-over application into the daily work of the Pentagon is most salient. These evolutionary gains will strengthen the military’s warfighting capabilities now, while buying time for the technology to mature to the point where revolutionary change becomes not just possible but necessary.
But if the AI revolution arrives, it will do so on its own timeline — not that of the Joint Staff’s PowerPoint decks. The job of Congress, and senior leaders at the Department of Defense, is to ensure that when that moment finally comes, the American military is ready for it. This readiness shouldn’t be obtained because the Defense Department reorganized early, but rather because it prepared wisely. AI policy is complicated, but preparing for AI adoption at the Department of Defense doesn’t have to be. The old U.S. Special Forces adage is both helpful and instructive here: Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Until the revolution gets here, this wisdom should guide the decisions of policymakers and practitioners alike.
The Case for Caution: Why the U.S. Military Shouldn't Organize Around AI… Yet
warontherocks.com
Morgan Plummer
December 22, 2025
https://warontherocks.com/2025/12/the-case-for-caution-why-the-u-s-military-shouldnt-organize-around-ai-yet/
Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series exploring key AI policy choices faced by the Department of Defense and Congress. Please also read the first,
Whenever the U.S. national security community becomes anxious about a new “transformational” technology, the plot tends to be a familiar one. Pundits warn that America will fall behind without serious, additional investment. Military and civilian leaders at the U.S. Department of Defense argue that doctrine must adapt to match the newly emerging character of war. Congressional staffers ping the Pentagon with questions about why it’s not moving faster. Before long, the entire defense establishment convinces itself that a revolution is underway, and it’s one that is both inevitable and necessary.
AI may be the latest chapter in this recurring story. Many insist that AI will fundamentally reshape warfare by enabling autonomous swarms that will blot out the sun, real-time targeting from the tactical to strategic levels of warfare, or autonomous undersea platforms that make the oceans transparent and can operate indefinitely. If the United States buys this vision of AI-enabled warfare, there is only one logical conclusion: The Pentagon must engage in the hard slog of building new formations, updating doctrines and operating concepts, and fundamentally redesigning the U.S. military around AI. If Pentagon senior leaders fail to do these things, the United States risks falling behind adversaries and competitors who realize the promise of AI sooner, move faster, and adopt it throughout their military formations more aggressively.
But this framing is as unhelpful as it is utterly binary. On one side sits evolutionary adoption that includes incremental modernization, which improves intelligence, logistics, and the “back office” administration that define large bureaucracies, including the Pentagon. On the other side sits a revolutionary redesign of the U.S. national security apparatus driven by the assumption that AI is about to change the nature of war — or already has. As with most things, the truth is probably both more nuanced and complicated. There can be little doubt that AI has revolutionary potential, but the Department of Defense should be relieved that it’s not yet revolutionary in practice. History seems to suggest that when the Pentagon bets its force design and doctrinal decisions on specific technologies that appear transformative, it usually overcorrects. The results are often costly, destabilizing, and difficult to unwind. The Pentagon’s current approach, which one might describe as “slow and steady,” may primarily be the result of bureaucratic inertia, but it’s not a bureaucratic flaw. Indeed, it may be the only thing saving the Pentagon from its own enthusiasm.
The Graveyard of American Defense Revolutions
Although few would call the Department of Defense an early adopter, its modern history is littered with examples of redesigning itself around technologies that promised to alter the essence of warfare, only to discover that the underlying assumptions were wrong, or at least vastly overstated. Few of these examples are more illustrative, or more cautionary, than the Pentomic Army of the 1950s.
A product of Cold War doctrine, the Pentomic concept fundamentally reorganized the U.S. Army around the belief that the distribution and employment of tactical nuclear weapons would define the next war. The traditional, regimental-based system was scrapped and replaced by five “atomic-ready” battle groups that were optimized for dispersion and survivability. The Army rewired command relationships, developed completely new logistical systems, and revised its entire warfighting concept around tactical nuclear technology. The challenge, of course, was that the technology did not, and could not, deliver the battlefield effects that the Army assumed. Thankfully, tactical nuclear weapons proved politically unusable, strategically incoherent, and operationally complicated and their usage was soon abandoned by the United States. The Army briefly considered retaining its new force design but soon realized it was untenable: Battle groups were too small to sustain prolonged combat operations and command posts were too fragmented to effectively direct maneuvering units. In short, the Army discovered it had sacrificed core fighting capability in pursuit of an imagined future. As a result of the Defense Department’s Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process, the Pentomic transformation took nearly a decade and left the Army less ready to meet real-world missions during that time. Capability shortfalls from the Pentomic years were so severe that they shaped debates about the proper design of U.S. ground forces well into the Vietnam era.
Sadly, the Pentomic story is not a unique one. Several decades later, the “revolution in military affairs” of the 1990s promised a sensor-to-shooter revolution that would change everything known about warfare. Instead, while precision-guided munitions enabled both airpower and targeted strikes, early operational concepts and doctrinal shifts predicated on these technologies had to be scrapped. In a tragic redux of its Pentomic efforts, the Army started making massive force design alterations in the early 2000s to meet its Future Combat Systems vision of automated and unmanned formations. This technology simply did not mature, and the eventual cancellation of Future Combat Systems cost tens of billions of dollars and left a conceptual vacuum that some argue the Army is still trying to fill. Even Air-Land Battle, which was arguably one of the most successful doctrinal updates in modern American history, was premised on assumptions about deep-strike capabilities and synchronized maneuver that were only really relevant to a single operational theater and materialized more in ornate PowerPoint diagrams than they ever did on the battlefield.
Each of these efforts shared a common flaw: They were built around a technology or series of technologies that appeared revolutionary, but whose actual battlefield utility failed to live up to theoretical hype. The risk today isn’t that the Pentagon will ignore AI — all evidence points to the contrary. The real risk is that the Department of Defense will indulge, yet again, in its modern habit of prematurely organizing around a technological future that doesn’t yet exist.
Revolutionary Redesign Requires Revolutionary Confidence
To use AI to justify a reorganization of the U.S. armed forces, Pentagon leadership should require extraordinary confidence. This confidence should include both assurance of the revolutionary potential of AI and its near-term reliability under wartime conditions. That confidence doesn’t exist among senior defense leaders today. Nor should it.
AI models currently display brittleness in ways that matter both tactically and operationally. Large language models, which currently proliferate throughout the Department of Defense, famously hallucinate with shocking levels of self-confidence. Computer vision systems tend to fail when exposed to simple, adversarial camouflage. In one test, marines advanced on an autonomous weapon system in a cardboard box and remained undetected by its sensors. Autonomous systems, by their very nature, require exquisite sensor fidelity and clean data streams, which are two things no battlefield can guarantee. Even commercial AI systems, which have the benefit of abundant cloud computing, troves of clean data, and uncontested environments can suffer failure modes that are unacceptable in combat.
For those sitting outside the Pentagon, rapid adoption of AI by the commercial sector is often cited as evidence that the Department of Defense is falling behind, must move faster, and is not keeping up with emergent commercial tools that would vastly improve its warfighting mission. But commercial uptake only demonstrates how useful AI can be in predictable, data-rich environments where failure modes are measured in lost time or revenue. Modern combat simply does not mirror these requirements for success. Data is messy or absent, targeted sensor deception is not just routine, but a practiced art, and system failures could result in American service members traveling back to the United States in flag-draped coffins. Given this, Pentagon leaders could be easily forgiven for their skepticism that tools optimized for marketing analytics or driving click rates will seamlessly transfer to kill chains and fire control systems.
There is no question that AI will meaningfully accelerate intelligence analysis, logistics forecasting, and administrative workflows, both in the Pentagon and on the battlefield. But these gains, while important, are evolutionary. They do not justify new force structures nor warrant upending the deeply ingrained service cultures which guide current force design and doctrinal choices. There may yet be sufficient cause to reorganize the American military when a technology — like AI — is so reliable, mature, and operationally decisive in combat that avoiding these difficult design choices would constitute strategic malpractice. Before AI becomes that technology, it needs additional time to incubate. Counterintuitively, that may very well prove advantageous for the United States.
Transforming Time into an Advantage
The Department of Defense should harness AI aggressively wherever it is ready for adoption but move deliberately whenever it is not. To do so, the Pentagon will need more than speeches about responsible adoption or principles to guide procurement. The U.S. military will require legislative, structural, and bureaucratic choices that help prepare for an AI revolution rather than try to incite one.
In next year’s National Defense Authorization Act, Congress should create a new program of record to modernize the Defense Department’s information technology architecture to prepare for AI adoption. More than another flashy AI provision from Congress in next year’s annual policy bill, the Pentagon needs to get about the unglamorous and necessary work of replacing brittle and siloed information technology systems that cannot safely host advanced models. If the AI revolution ever comes, it won’t be able to arrive inside the 1970s-era mainframes or balkanized service networks that constitute the vast majority of the Defense Department’s information technology systems. This AI Readiness and Integration Fund should include multi-year funding to ensure that projects do not stall out as Pentagon leadership rotates and priorities shift.
Additionally, Congress should require safety and security-by-design certifications for any AI system procured by the Department of Defense as part of next year’s National Defense Authorization Act. Articulating the specifics of these certifications to make them operationally relevant will likely require consultation with industry experts, but they should include repeatable, standardized testing and evaluation regimes for AI under contested conditions. This should include testing resilience to operational deception challenges, electronic warfare stress tests, and cyber-resilience. No AI system should enter a kill chain without passing an independent, red-team evaluation that actively attempts to break the model the Pentagon is considering for purchase.
Finally, the Trump administration should direct increased and iterative field experimentation and operator testing of AI systems by the military services and combatant commands. These experimental pockets should deploy new AI systems that help warfighters conceptualize what future doctrinal changes might be required when, and if, the AI revolution arrives. They should also use these pilot efforts to expose failure modes before acquisition decisions lock in ill-founded assumptions about promised capabilities. In the interim, the secretary of defense and the secretaries of the military departments should slow-roll any proposal that attempts to reorganize the services or the joint force structure around AI until operators demonstrate trust and familiarity with these new tools.
When the prevailing wisdom is “more AI, all the time,” these steps might seem timid. But they are not — they are prudent. These actions help create time and space to prepare for a future moment when AI may yet revolutionize modern warfare and they recognize that the U.S. military’s most important resource is not technological novelty, but rather operational reliability. AI adoption should accelerate when, and only when, the infrastructure is prepared, the nation’s warfighters are confident, and the technology is as reliable as possible. Until then, there’s lots of work to be done to prepare for the revolution that isn’t quite here yet.
Slow Is Smooth, and Smooth Is Fast
The Pentomic Army isn’t a relic of history — it’s a warning. If there’s anything that a trip through the graveyard of failed defense revolutions teaches the careful observer, it’s this: When the United States rushes to engineer a technological revolution in warfare, it tends to get the timing wrong, the concepts wrong, or both. The slow-and-steady approach doesn’t reject the promise of AI-enabled warfare but rather helps prepare for it.
While it waits for the revolution that many promise, the Department of Defense should use AI today where it makes the most sense and is proven: intelligence and data analysis, logistics optimization, training, and administration. These are the places where AI has already yielded gains in the commercial sector and where the cross-over application into the daily work of the Pentagon is most salient. These evolutionary gains will strengthen the military’s warfighting capabilities now, while buying time for the technology to mature to the point where revolutionary change becomes not just possible but necessary.
But if the AI revolution arrives, it will do so on its own timeline — not that of the Joint Staff’s PowerPoint decks. The job of Congress, and senior leaders at the Department of Defense, is to ensure that when that moment finally comes, the American military is ready for it. This readiness shouldn’t be obtained because the Defense Department reorganized early, but rather because it prepared wisely. AI policy is complicated, but preparing for AI adoption at the Department of Defense doesn’t have to be. The old U.S. Special Forces adage is both helpful and instructive here: Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Until the revolution gets here, this wisdom should guide the decisions of policymakers and practitioners alike.
Morgan C. Plummer is currently a vice president at Americans for Responsible Innovation, a non-profit public advocacy group based in Washington. He previously served as a professor of practice at the U.S. Air Force Academy, a defense and security expert at Boston Consulting Group, and a senior defense official at the U.S. Department of Defense. He is a former U.S. Army officer and served in various command, staff, and Pentagon assignments and deployed multiple times to Iraq. He can be reached at morgan@ari.us.
**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Image: Sgt. Andrew King via DVIDS.
warontherocks.com
2. The Pentagon and A.I. Giants Have a Weakness. Both Need China’s Batteries, Badly.
Summary:
China’s dominance in lithium ion batteries now threatens U.S. AI and defense, not just EVs. Northern Virginia data centers need massive batteries for backup power and to prevent “silent data corruption,” and tech firms are poised to spend billions on them. The Pentagon, watching Ukraine, expects soaring battery demand for drones, radios, night vision, lasers, and other systems. Govini says Chinese supply chains touch roughly 6,000 battery components across weapons programs. After early freezes of battery grants, the administration is reframing batteries as strategic, while experts note rebuilding non-China supply chains will take years today.
Comet: What is our plan? Can we de-risk or delink from China on battery technology and production? When will it take for us to no longer be dependent on batteries from China? As an aside, how many of our critical supply chains from the defense industry to technology to pharmaceuticals and more are dependent on China? What happens to America when China fully executes its unrestricted warfare strategy?
The Pentagon and A.I. Giants Have a Weakness. Both Need China’s Batteries, Badly.
As warfare is reinvented in Ukraine, and Silicon Valley races to maintain its A.I. lead, China’s battery dominance is raising alarms far beyond the auto industry.
NY Times · Harry Stevens · December 23, 2025
By Hiroko TabuchiBrad Plumer and Harry Stevens
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/23/climate/pentagon-weapons-ai-artificial-intelligence-china-batteries.html
Power ︎ Moves
As warfare is reinvented in Ukraine, and Silicon Valley races to maintain its A.I. lead, China’s battery dominance is raising alarms far beyond the auto industry.
A data center in Ashburn, Va. Immense batteries are critical to protect sensitive A.I. computer software.
Listen to this article · 13:24 min Learn more
In Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley, windowless buildings the size of aircraft hangars are powering America’s artificial intelligence industry, which is locked in a race against China.
Yet, these data centers are increasingly reliant on China, America’s geopolitical rival, for a vital technology: batteries.
These facilities can use as much electricity as a small city, straining local power grids. Even flickers can have cascading effects, corrupting sensitive A.I. computer coding.
To cope, tech giants are looking to buy billions of dollars of large lithium-ion batteries, a field in which “China is leading in almost every industrial component,” said Dan Wang, an expert on China’s technology sector at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. “They’re ahead, both technologically and in terms of scale.”
A short drive from the data centers, at the Pentagon, military officials are sounding similar warnings, for different reasons. Military strategists, watching as modern warfare is reinvented in Ukraine, say the armed forces will need millions of batteries to power drones, lasers and countless other weapons of the future.
Many of those batteries, too, come from China.
Chinese battery dominance has long been a problem for industries like auto manufacturing, but now is increasingly being viewed as a national security threat. Currently, U.S. military forces rely on Chinese supply chains for some 6,000 individual battery components across weapons programs, according to Govini, a defense analytics firm.
Most U.S. battery imports come from China
Customs value of U.S. imports of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, quarterly
Note: Chart shows top three importing countries. Data through September 2025. Source: U.S. Census Bureau
“The reality is very stark,” Tara Murphy Dougherty, Govini’s chief executive, told a recent gathering of top defense and industry officials in California. “There are foreign parts in 100 percent of our weapon systems and military platforms.”
China understands the importance of these batteries. On Oct. 9, amid growing trade disputes, China threatened to limit exports of some of its most advanced lithium-ion technologies, including fundamental components like graphite anodes and cathodes.
The Trump administration is facing a dilemma.
When President Trump came to office, his administration initially froze billions of dollars in Biden-era federal grants for battery manufacturing, lumping batteries in with electric vehicles, solar farms, wind turbines and other clean energy technologies Mr. Trump had sought to de-emphasize. Mr. Trump has been scornful of electric cars, calling them a “scam.”
Yet more recently, the administration has come to see battery technology as pivotal for many of the things it cares most about, including A.I. and defense. In interviews, more than a dozen battery-industry executives, lobbyists, military experts and others close to the administration said the White House had taken a growing interest in fostering a domestic battery industry disentangled from China.
Inside an installation of lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, batteries, a preferred technology that China dominates.
In recent weeks the White House has held high-level meetings on the battery supply chain, according to three people familiar with the matter. The National Energy Dominance Council, which Mr. Trump established to coordinate energy policy, has been meeting with battery companies. The Energy Department has quietly allowed many Biden-era grants for battery makers to proceed. It also recently announced up to $500 million for battery materials and recycling projects.
The administration has started investing in companies that develop battery components or critical minerals, including Eos, a next-generation battery company. As part of a trade deal, officials prodded Japan to promise to invest billions of dollars in U.S. battery manufacturing. And the National Defense Authorization Act, passed this month, includes Pentagon restrictions on battery purchases from “foreign entities of concern,” primarily China.
The administration is saying “we don’t like electric vehicles, but we do need batteries for drones and data centers and A.I.,” said Samm Gillard, executive director and co-founder of the Battery Advocacy for Technology Transformation Coalition, a trade group. “They’re recognizing that China’s stranglehold on the battery supply chain is undermining our national security.”
Want to stay updated on what’s happening in China? , and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said President Trump was “deploying all aspects of the government to work closely together” to “ensure the U.S. is the global leader in critical mineral and battery production.”
Experts say that building an industry not dependent on China will be enormously difficult. China is dominant in lithium iron phosphate batteries, or LFP, preferred for both E.V.s and for stationary storage.
China’s battery supply chain dominance
How much China controls each step of the process to make lithium iron phosphate batteries, the type most commonly used for energy storage
Note: Data for 2024. Source: International Energy Agency
The Pentagon and A.I. Giants Have a Weakness. Both Need China’s Batteries, Badly. - The New York Times
In 2024, China made 99 percent of the world’s LFP cells and more than 90 percent of the main components, according to the International Energy Agency. That dominance extends to the refining of raw materials like lithium and graphite, as well as to fundamental components like cathodes and anodes that drive the movement of electrons within batteries.
The United States has its own lithium deposits and battery start-ups. But experts say it may take a coordinated effort and government support to compete against heavily subsidized Chinese competitors. Refining critical minerals can also be a hazardous process and American environmental standards could make the process much more expensive than in China.
Analysts estimate it would take at least half a decade for U.S. manufacturers to produce enough LFP cells to meet domestic demand, and much longer to create supply chains for underlying components.
Fatih Birol, the I.E.A.’s executive director, likened the world’s reliance on China to Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas. After Russia attacked Ukraine, there were concerns that Moscow would cut supplies.
“Reliance for a strategic commodity or a technology on one single country, one single trade route,” Mr. Birol said, “is always risky.”
Tools like night vision goggles rely on batteries to the extent that the average soldier carries as much as 25 pounds of batteries on a standard patrol.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The dilemma represents a shift in the A.I. race, which increasingly hinges on a nation’s electrical infrastructure — its ability to reliably deliver vast amounts of electricity to power-hungry data centers — as much as on computing chips.
“Electricity is not simply a utility,” the A.I. giant OpenAI said in an October letter. “It’s a strategic asset that will secure our leadership on the most consequential technology since electricity itself.”
Battery dominance is a big part of China’s growing lead in power generation overall, including renewable energy. China has long seen batteries as an industrial and military priority, according to Mr. Wang, the Hoover Institution expert.
A.I. experts say U.S. companies still lead in computing capacity. Yet there is a rising concern that China’s advantage in energy infrastructure could help the country pass the United States.
“I’ve called A.I. ‘Manhattan Project 2,’” Chris Wright, the energy secretary, said in September, referring to America’s effort in the 1940s to make nuclear weapons. If “China got meaningfully ahead of us in A.I., we’d become the secondary nation of the planet,” he added.
Why data centers want batteries
The engineers who keep data centers humming refer to the “five nines” of reliability. That is, they strive to keep the facilities online 99.999 percent of the time.
Doing so demands reliable power. Tech giants have been scrambling for energy from natural gas or existing nuclear plants, which can run at all hours, and are making bets on nascent technologies like smaller reactors or advanced geothermal plants.
“It’s get what you can get,” said Justin Gruetzner, an executive with Burns & McDonnell, a data center engineering firm.
Batteries are increasingly critical: Most data centers rely on them for backup. Batteries can provide instantaneous power in an outage while generators fueled by natural gas or diesel fire up, helping ensure that data isn’t lost.
A.I. has particularly immense energy needs. An A.I. query can require about 10 times the electricity of traditional internet searches, the Electric Power Research Institute estimates. And the vast computing power can cause significant fluctuations in energy demand.
The National Defense Authorization Act includes restrictions on the Pentagon’s purchase of batteries from “foreign entities of concern.”Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Power “can fluctuate dramatically multiple times a minute,” said Chris Brown, chief technical officer at the Uptime Institute, a data-center advisory body. At scale, these swings can amount to tens or hundreds of megawatts and even damage power grid infrastructure, Microsoft researchers have warned.
Even minor disruptions can lead to what’s known as “silent data corruption,” an emerging concern where A.I. hardware produces calculation errors. During one experiment, “a silent data corruption error actually broke the model,” said Jeffrey J. Ma, lead author of a paper on the phenomenon.
The lithium-ion batteries that China dominates are becoming increasingly prevalent. In February Google said that it had installed more than 100 million cells across its data centers and had started to replace diesel generators with batteries. Microsoft said it aimed for its data centers to eliminate diesel fuel for backup by 2030 to meet environmental goals.
Batteries and the realities of war
A soldier in Ukraine practiced flying a drone last September. Tiny agile drone weapons are transforming warfare. Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Among the lessons from the horrors of Ukraine is a daunting realization: The future of military power rests with batteries.
Many battlefield drones are powered with lithium batteries that rely on materials and technology from China. Within Ukraine, Chinese export controls have slowed production and tripled the prices for some components, according to defense analysts.
“Every Chinese export restriction since 2022 has reverberated directly onto the battlefield,” said Catarina Buchatskiy, a defense expert at the Snake Island Institute, which focuses on military technology. The U.S. could soon face the problem, she said, adding that the kinds of components Ukraine has struggled to secure “are embedded across Western defense programs.”
Russia and Ukraine buy most of their batteries from China
Imports of rechargeable batteries in 2023
Hover to explore the data
The Pentagon and A.I. Giants Have a Weakness. Both Need China’s Batteries, Badly. - The New York Times
Lasers, hand-held radios, night vision goggles, satellites and drones use advanced batteries. The average soldier carries as much as 25 pounds of batteries for a standard 72-hour patrol.
And the shift toward stealthier vehicles, unmanned systems, electronic warfare and constellations of small satellites have swelled demand, said Jeffrey Nadaner, who was deputy assistant defense secretary for industrial policy during the first Trump administration. Shoring up America’s battery industry, he said, merits an effort on par with “the Apollo space program.”
The Pentagon is paying attention. The 2025 National Defense Authorization Act mandated a new battery strategy, and in a white paper published this year, the Defense Logistics Agency said the department should treat battery technology as mission-critical.
Elaine K. Dezenski, an expert on geopolitical risk and supply-chain security at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said, “When we think about the future of manufacturing and defense, and how we should be protecting critical supply chains, the chips are the brain, and batteries are the heart.”
Battery companies go to Washington
Testing of LFP battery packs at Our Next Energy, a start-up in Michigan.Credit...Rebecca Cook/Reuters
In 2024, the start-up Group14 Technologies won a $200 million Biden administration grant to build a factory in Moses Lake, Wash., to produce a substitute for graphite, a key material that today mostly comes from China. But after Mr. Trump took office, Group14’s grant got tied up in a broader effort by the administration to freeze clean energy funding.
After an extensive review, the Energy Department allowed many battery grants to move forward “because the administration recognized that this isn’t about left versus right or green versus not green,” Rick Luebbe, Group14’s chief executive, said.
Still, he said, the factories that Group14 is building will be able to displace only a fraction of Chinese materials. To compete with China’s industrial subsidies, Washington would need to do more. “I see more tolerance for battery projects. What I don’t see is investment,” he said.
Other battery companies have noticed the administration’s new receptiveness. “The Biden administration liked our sustainability story,” said Judy Brown, head of external affairs at South32, a company that has received federal support to develop an Arizona mine for manganese, a key battery material. “The Trump administration likes the national-security story.”
One question, experts say, is whether the United States can sustain a domestic industry, even as sales of electric vehicles slow, undermined by Mr. Trump’s policies.
Trump officials have “softened their tone on batteries,” said Noah Gordon, an expert on sustainability and geopolitics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But the policy is still incoherent” because of its hostility toward E.V.s, he said. “They’re trying to boost battery manufacturing while also undermining the biggest sources of demand.”
Hiroko Tabuchi covers pollution and the environment for The Times. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years in Tokyo and New York.
Brad Plumer is a Times reporter who covers technology and policy efforts to address global warming.
Harry Stevens is a Times reporter and graphics editor covering climate change, energy and the natural world.
NY Times · Harry Stevens · December 23, 2025
3. U.S. Bans New China-Made Drones, Sparking Outrage Among Pilots
Summary:
U.S. regulators moved to block new drones and key components from Chinese makers DJI and Autel, citing national-security risks and FCC action. The restriction would stop import, marketing, and sale of new equipment, though existing stock and already owned models are not immediately covered. DJI dominates the U.S. market, roughly 70 to 90 percent across commercial, local government, and hobby use, so pilots and small businesses are stockpiling aircraft, batteries, and parts. A survey of 8,000 pilots found 43 percent expect severe, even business-ending impact. Washington is boosting domestic production through a $1.1B “Drone Dominance” effort for 2026 and beyond.
Comment: I had no idea China was this dominant. I wonder what they have that they are not selling commercially overseas? What classified advances have they made? Is $1.1 billion enough for us to achieve "drone dominance" is that just another buzz phrase??
U.S. Bans New China-Made Drones, Sparking Outrage Among Pilots
WSJ
American customers hoarding products in anticipation of restrictions against popular Chinese manufacturer DJI and a smaller competitor, Autel Robotics
By Heather Somerville
Follow
Dec. 22, 2025 8:46 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/u-s-bans-new-china-made-drones-sparking-outrage-among-pilots-1624e32a?mod=hp_lead_pos4
DJI drones. Matt Cardy/Getty Images
- The FCC banned drones and components from Chinese manufacturers DJI and Autel Robotics due to national-security risks.
- DJI accounts for 70% to 90% of commercial, local-government, and hobbyist drones in the U.S., leading to concerns among pilots.
- A survey of 8,000 commercial drone pilots found 43% anticipate an “extremely negative” or “business-ending impact” from the ban.
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.
- The FCC banned drones and components from Chinese manufacturers DJI and Autel Robotics due to national-security risks.
U.S. officials have made efforts for nearly a decade to ban popular China-made drones used by government agencies and hobbyists alike, citing national-security concerns. This week, Washington is getting what it wants.
The Federal Communications Commission on Monday banned all drones and critical components made in a foreign country, and all communications and video-surveillance equipment from major Chinese drone manufacturers SZ DJI Technology and Autel Robotics. The designation means the companies, their subsidiaries and partners won’t be able to import, market or sell new drone equipment in the U.S.
The FCC decision doesn’t cover models currently in stores or already purchased—although the commission does have the ability to retroactively add older models to its list of barred equipment.
The push to outlaw Chinese drones goes back to at least 2017, when the Army ordered soldiers to stop using DJI drones due to cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Washington has over the years flagged risks that the Chinese Communist Party could access data collected by DJI drones and potentially manipulate or interfere with the drones. Federal officials cautioned utility operators against using DJI drones to inspect dams and power grids, and the Defense Department labeled DJI a Chinese military company, a designation DJI unsuccessfully sued to get revoked.
The FCC said that a White House-led group informed the commission on Sunday that drones from foreign countries posed “unacceptable risks,” prompting Monday’s ban.
DJI has said the company welcomes a national-security review, and that independent reviews, including those from U.S. government bodies, have found its drones are secure. Its users can fly the drones without an internet connection and any collected images and data are stored locally.
In a statement Monday, DJI said it was disappointed in the FCC decision and reiterated the security of its products. “Concerns about DJI’s data security have not been grounded in evidence and instead reflect protectionism, contrary to the principles of an open market,” the statement said. Autel didn’t respond to a request for comment
Eric Ebert, founder of Falcon Unmanned Systems in Indiana. Falcon Unmanned Systems
The ban has been met with uproar from large swaths of the nearly half a million certified American commercial drone pilots. DJI accounts for around 70% to 90% of commercial, local-government and hobbyist drones in the U.S.
Many pilots are hoarding DJI drones and parts, sending last-ditch letters to their congressional representatives and the White House, and forecasting the demise of their livelihoods that rely on China-made drones for which they say there is no Western replacement.
“I am American-made through and through. I drive a Chevy pickup truck,” said Eric Ebert, a Dyer, Ind.-based owner of the construction-site monitoring firm Falcon Unmanned Systems. “But American drones can’t compete.”
Drone pilots have gone on buying sprees for aircraft, batteries and spare parts to try to extend the life of their fleets. Ebert has a team of seven drone pilots who monitor the construction of solar and wind-turbine installations across thousands of acres. His company stocked up on three dozen drones and related equipment “knowing what 2026 looks like for us.”
Buying DJI products has been more challenging in the past several months as U.S. Customs and Border Protection has held up DJI shipments at ports due to concerns about the company using forced labor in its manufacturing. DJI denies the allegation.
Greg Reverdiau, co-founder of the Pilot Institute in Prescott, Ariz., recently collected survey responses from 8,000 drone pilots about the DJI ban. Among the findings: About 43% of pilots said a ban would have an “extremely negative” or “potentially business-ending impact” on their companies, and around 85% said they could stay in business for only two years or less.
“People are not buying the [DJI] drone because it’s a Chinese drone, they are buying the drone because it is available, it’s highly affordable and it’s capable,” Reverdiau said.
Jason Colip is the owner of Elevate Media Productions in Mississippi. Savanna Knight/Believe Social
Jason Colip works with about 300 real-estate agents to take aerial photos and video of properties. “Me, the little guy flying drones in south Mississippi over pine woods and houses, why limit those kinds of things?” he said. “For me as a small-business owner, what alternatives are we going to have available? And we really don’t have an answer for that right now.”
A Pentagon program called Drone Dominance aims to spend $1.1 billion on U.S. dronemakers to procure hundreds of thousands of the systems by 2027. That initiative stemmed from an executive order in June in which President Trump called for easing restrictions on drones and more investment in U.S. manufacturers.
Brinc Drones, a Seattle-based manufacturer of unmanned aircraft that can break windows, fly indoors and capture floor-plan renderings from a building, sells its drones to more than 700 public-safety agencies. The company stands to benefit from regulators sidelining DJI, whose dominance has been fueled by Beijing subsidies, said founder Blake Resnick.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Should the U.S. help subsidize a domestic drone-manufacturing industry? Join the conversation below.
“It is hopeless for any organization that isn’t state sponsored to compete with DJI,” Resnick said.
Meanwhile, U.S. retailers and vendors with ties to DJI are looking for ways to salvage their businesses.
In November, XTI Aerospace, which makes vertical takeoff helicopters, acquired DJI reseller Drone Nerds and Anzu Robotics, which builds drones licensing DJI technology. As part of the deal, drone-parts manufacturer Unusual Machines invested $25 million. President Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is an Unusual Machines shareholder and sits on the advisory board.
Allan Evans, chief executive of Unusual Machines, said the deal is designed to give the company access to businesses that would need to find new suppliers post-ban.
Write to Heather Somerville at heather.somerville@wsj.com
Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the December 23, 2025, print edition as 'U.S. Bans Foreign Drones In Blow To Hobby'.
WSJ
4. China’s Sprint for Tech Dominance Can’t Hide an Economy Full of Holes
Summary:
China is pushing hard for tech self-sufficiency and narrowing gaps with the U.S., but the effort is exposing structural weaknesses and costly waste. R&D spending surged nearly 50% from 2020 to 2024, fueling advances in sectors like EVs, robotics, chips, and military modernization. Yet the broader economy remains fragile: property prices have fallen about 17% since the pandemic, youth unemployment is high, and local government debts have ballooned. Heavy state subsidies and directed investment keep weak firms alive, creating gluts, including dozens of EV brands and a crowded humanoid-robot field. The IMF estimates industrial policy support can shave up to 2% from GDP and cost roughly $800B in 2023.
Comment: Will our push for our own self-sufficiency create our economic holes and waste. We forget the basic economic principle that the market will create efficiencies. That is what globalization did. It created efficiencies and dependencies. Now we are going to protect ourselves from the dependencies and we will have to sacrifice efficiency to do that.
I am reminded of the old Winston cigarette commercial (that only us Boomers will remember) - "what do you want, good grammar or good taste?" Today it is "what do you want, self sufficiency or efficiency?"
China’s Sprint for Tech Dominance Can’t Hide an Economy Full of Holes
WSJ
Self-sufficiency push has made China a tougher competitor to the U.S., but it comes with enormous waste
By Brian Spegele
Follow
Dec. 22, 2025 9:00 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-gap-tech-advance-970296f1?mod=hp_lead_pos1
Beijing has earmarked strategic sectors such as EVs for state support. Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News
- China’s R&D spending increased by nearly 50% between 2020 and 2024, enhancing its technological innovation and global competitiveness.
- Despite technological advancements, China faces economic challenges, including a 17% drop in home prices since the pandemic and rising national debt.
- State aid to businesses, including subsidies and tax breaks, reduced China’s overall GDP by as much as 2% and cost around $800 billion in 2023.
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.
- China’s R&D spending increased by nearly 50% between 2020 and 2024, enhancing its technological innovation and global competitiveness.
BEIJING—In cities and small towns across China, two seemingly contradictory facts are simultaneously true: China is closing the gap with the U.S. for global technological dominance, and yet big parts of its economy are a mess.
Locally pioneered electric cars zip past deserted apartment blocks. Factory robots run by artificial intelligence churn out products that jobless college graduates cannot afford. State technology funds throw billions of dollars at money-losing startups even as the national debt surges to unprecedented levels.
The emergence of AI startup DeepSeek earlier this year showed China can challenge the U.S. in some of the world’s most competitive technologies.
But Beijing’s gains are coming at a steep cost, with the state’s heavy-handedness in directing investments wasting colossal amounts of money. The hundreds of billions of dollars China spends each year on domestic technology also eats away at the money for rural education, reinforcing the social safety net and other programs economists say are needed to put growth on a firmer footing.
“There is just massive misallocation that runs through the economy in multiple dimensions,” said Loren Brandt, an economist at the University of Toronto.
There are simply too many money-losing companies, with investments by local governments helping prevent weak ones from going under. Of the 129 brands selling electric cars and plug-in hybrids in China as of last year, only 15 are expected to be financially viable by 2030, according to consulting firm AlixPartners.
China now has more than 150 humanoid robot companies, a Chinese official said last month, warning against a glut in that industry.
Robots perform at the Shenzhen Science and Technology Museum. Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News
Customers at a market in Xi'an, China. Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News
China’s strategy is to boost self-sufficiency in critical sectors as insurance against adversaries cutting off access to foreign technologies. Leaders are signaling that the high costs of doing so are worth it, especially as relations with Washington remain volatile. U.S. limits on selling advanced semiconductors to slow down China’s AI development have added to Beijing’s urgency.
President Trump’s announcement to allow Nvidia to export its H200 chip to China is unlikely to significantly alter China’s self-reliance strategy. The government has already urged big tech firms to shun some Nvidia chips over cybersecurity and other concerns.
China’s spending on research and development jumped nearly 50% between 2020 and 2024, and by many metrics, it is becoming more innovative.
At sea, China’s navy launched its most advanced aircraft carrier this year, whose electromagnetic launch system brings China closer to U.S. capabilities. On land, its factories are installing more robots than any other country. In space, China is racing to land its first astronauts on the moon by 2030, the same year its Tiangong space station is expected to become the only permanent outpost in Earth’s orbit when the International Space Station retires.
Unpleasant truths
Despite its advances, China looks vulnerable. Home prices are down 17% since the pandemic, according to the Bank for International Settlements, and uncertainty over China’s economic future has many people pinching pennies.
That has forced companies to cut back on hiring and left wages depressed. Per capita disposable income in cities is less than $700 a month, while in the countryside as many as several hundred million people subsist on just a few dollars each day.
In Mianchi County, in the central province of Henan, officials spend more on science and technology than on the police.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
How and when do you think China might bridge the gap in performance between its technological development and its faltering economy? Join the conversation below.
Between 2022 and 2024, Mianchi’s spending on science and technology rose nearly 50%, even as government revenue fell more than 10%. An industrial park for the robotics industry is in the works, while state investment funds in the area are taking stakes in tech companies, such as one making chips for automobiles.
Yet some government workers aren’t getting paid. In recent months, local teachers, sanitation workers, college interns and others have been demanding answers from officials about outstanding wages through a public message board on Mianchi government’s website.
“In recent years, affected by multiple factors such as an economic downturn, Mianchi County has encountered unprecedented difficulties,” the county government wrote in response to one message from a substitute teacher in September.
It promised to gradually pay back money it owed, without specifying when. “We wish you a pleasant life!” it added.
Missed opportunities
Government debts across China are estimated to have roughly doubled between 2019 and 2024, hitting as much as $23 trillion, including debts tied to local government investment arms. At the same time, productivity growth is slowing—an ominous trend when the country’s population is falling.
The International Monetary Fund has estimated that state aid, such as cash subsidies, tax breaks and cheap credit to businesses, has reduced China’s overall GDP by as much as 2%, and cost around $800 billion in 2023 based on exchange rates at the time.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva recently urged Beijing to shift its economy away from investment and exports toward consumption, kick-starting a new source of growth. In a city where many once-buzzing restaurants are now half empty or closed, Georgieva told Chinese journalists at a press conference to spread the word: “It’s patriotic to spend money,” she said.
Throttling back state support for companies would allow the market to play a bigger role in more efficiently directing China’s money to where it is needed, she said.
It would also free up funds to help address another fundamental problem in China’s economy: A relatively thin social safety net that leaves many people focused on saving rather than spending what they earn.
“It’s a great opportunity,” Georgieva said. “Seizing it requires brave choices.”
Digging in
For now, though, leader Xi Jinping’s course looks clearly charted. Instead of upending China’s economic model, the government has been determined to export its way out of trouble.
The country’s trade surplus topped $1 trillion in goods for the first time in the year through November, demonstrating the resilience of China’s manufacturing ecosystem in the face of Trump’s tariffs.
The pursuit of self-reliance through state spending has deep roots in China. Chairman Mao Zedong championed technological independence in the 1950s and 1960s as relations deteriorated with the Soviet Union. His relentless pursuit of steel production at the expense of farm work during the Great Leap Forward contributed to a famine, causing as many as tens of millions of deaths.
One key difference now is that China has vastly more resources to achieve its self-reliance goals, from many of the world’s leading scientists and engineers to the foreign capital flowing in from its trade surpluses.
Money pits
The outlines of China’s push were clear even before Trump first took office, with Beijing earmarking strategic sectors such as biotechnology, robots and electric vehicles for state support. Provincial officials poured tens of billions of dollars into government-favored sectors. Much of it has gone to waste, however.
In the city of Hefei, 250 miles west of Shanghai, EV manufacturer NIO announced in 2020 it was getting roughly $1 billion from state-linked investors. From 2020 through 2024, NIO lost more than $10 billion, with investors agreeing to kick in another roughly $500 million last year. NIO’s performance has improved somewhat in 2025, but it still lost around $500 million in the third quarter.
Government debts across China are estimated to have roughly doubled. Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News
Economic uncertainty has many people pinching pennies. Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News
A more fundamental problem is that tech investments and state subsidies are flowing to sectors that aren’t creating nearly enough jobs. One out of six young people in Chinese cities is out of work.
SMIC, China’s largest chip foundry and a key beneficiary of state support, has around 20,000 employees. A leading humanoid robotics maker, UBTech, had 2,272 workers as of June 30, 259 more than at the end of 2023.
Beijing is aware of the problems, though officials say self-reliance will remain crucial over China’s next five-year plan.
“Scientific and technological self-reliance and self-strengthening are the foundation for the nation’s prosperity,” wrote Guo Yuewen, Communist Party secretary of the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences, in a state newspaper commentary last month, “and the key to its security.”
Grace Zhu contributed to this article.
Write to Brian Spegele at Brian.Spegele@wsj.com
Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the December 23, 2025, print edition as 'China Is Making Gains in Tech, But Holes in Economy Remain'.
WSJ
5. ‘Kyiv Isn’t Losing, Moscow Is’ – Senators Call for US to Double Down
Summary:
Kyiv Post reports that Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Mitch McConnell argue in a Washington Post op-ed that Ukraine is holding Russia back and U.S. support should expand, not taper. They say Moscow has failed to seize key objectives and is pursuing attrition, while paying heavy costs in lives, equipment, and revenue. The senators fault early U.S. hesitation on jets, air defenses, and long-range weapons, claiming faster delivery could have shortened the war. They urge Congress to tighten sanctions, curb Chinese help to Russia, use frozen Russian assets, and expand security assistance to sustain Ukraine and the U.S. defense industrial base.
Comment: This is reporting on the WAPOST OpEd here. Can Congress force POTUS' hand on support to Ukraine?
Russia isn’t winning. Putin wants to fool you.
Putin’s hope is that U.S. will somehow convince itself that Ukraine can’t succeed. Don’t fall for it.
December 22, 2025 at 6:00 am.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/12/22/putin-russia-trump-war-ukraine/
‘Kyiv Isn’t Losing, Moscow Is’ – Senators Call for US to Double Down
kyivpost.com · Alex Raufoglu · December 23, 2025
‘Kyiv Isn’t Losing, Moscow Is’ – Senators Call for US to Double Down
Leading US lawmakers say Ukraine’s resilience is holding Russia back and urge Congress to expand military and economic support to secure a lasting strategic advantage.
by Alex Raufoglu | Dec. 23, 2025, 7:18 am
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/66759
The sun rising over the US Capitol in Washington DC on June 10, 2024 (Photo by Alex Raufoglu / Kyiv Post)
WASHINGTON DC – Bipartisan leaders in the US Senate are sending a clear message: Russia is failing in Ukraine, and the US cannot afford to waver.
In a Washington Post op-ed published Monday, Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the longest-serving former Republican leader, argued that Ukraine has repeatedly exceeded expectations, while Moscow has paid enormous military, economic, and human costs.
“Kyiv is not losing, and Moscow is not winning,” the Senators wrote, adding, “It is up to Washington to match Ukraine’s resolve with the clarity this moment demands.”
The op-ed comes as the war stretches into its fourth year anniversary and as debates intensify in Washington over the scale, timing, and strategic direction of US military and economic assistance.
A senior Senate aide, speaking to Kyiv Post on the condition of anonymity, described the op-ed as “a deliberate effort to send a clear, bipartisan message to the administration: continued support for Ukraine is not optional, it is strategically essential.”
The aide added, “By framing this as both a security imperative and a signal of US credibility, Senate leaders are trying to create momentum in Congress for early, decisive action.”
Putin’s strategy: attrition, not victory
According to the op-ed, Russian President Vladimir Putin is relying on a strategy of attrition rather than battlefield victories.
Other Topics of Interest
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he does not understand what was meant by a “breakthrough” in Ukraine negotiations, adding such talks cannot be conducted publicly.
Moscow has failed to seize Kyiv, consolidate control over major southern cities, or dominate eastern Ukraine, all while suffering staggering human and material losses.
The Senators noted that Russia has lost roughly one-third of its strategic bombers and over one million soldiers and personnel.
Russian oil and gas revenues have dropped by more than 30 percent, and about a quarter of Russian companies are bankrupt or at risk.
Ukrainian forces, by contrast, have shown remarkable resilience despite delays in receiving advanced US and allied weapons.
“Putin is trying to grind down the West and test our resolve,” said a senior Republican aide familiar with Senate defense strategy.
“These Senators are reminding their colleagues that yielding to attrition is exactly what Russia wants – and that we have tools on hand to prevent it,” the aid told Kyiv Post.
Lessons from US hesitation
The op-ed critiques early US miscalculations. In the initial stages of the war, Kyiv requested fighter jets, long-range weapons, and air defense systems – requests that were largely delayed.
The Senators argue that earlier, robust assistance could have tipped the scales in Ukraine’s favor and shortened the conflict.
“It is more than plausible that the Ukrainians could have achieved a decisive victory and lasting peace if they were simply granted the fighter jets, air defenses, and long-range weapons when they initially requested them,” the op-ed reads.
A senior Democratic aide called the piece “a strong rebuke of the caution that characterized early US assistance – and a warning that policymakers cannot repeat those mistakes.”
The aide added, “It also sends a signal to Capitol Hill that bipartisan unity on Ukraine is possible – and necessary – if we want to shape the outcome rather than react to it.”
Why US support matters
Beyond immediate battlefield implications, the op-ed frames US support for Ukraine as a strategic investment in long-term security.
Strengthening Ukraine’s defense capabilities bolsters European allies, reinforces democratic governance, and sustains the US defense industrial base.
The Senators highlighted congressional tools to pressure Russia: tightening sanctions, curbing Chinese support for Moscow, and repurposing frozen Russian assets for Ukrainian reconstruction and defense.
They also called for expanding the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which funds both Ukrainian defense needs and US military industrial preparedness.
A senior Senate aide in the Republican office told Kyiv Post, “Investing in Ukraine isn’t charity – it’s strategy. It strengthens the US position globally, supports European allies, and ensures that our defense industry remains capable of meeting both current and future threats.”
Rare moment of bipartisan unity
The op-ed represents a rare instance of high-profile bipartisan cooperation in foreign policy messaging.
Shaheen and McConnell warn that abandoning Ukraine – or accepting Russian gains that it cannot achieve militarily – would not bring lasting peace. They frame US support for Ukraine as a broader investment in global security, European stability, and the American defense industrial base.
Senate Foreign Relations leaders – representing opposite ends of the political spectrum – united to signal that support for Ukraine transcends party lines, and that abandoning Kyiv would carry severe consequences for US credibility, European security, and the rules-based international order.
“Rarely do you see Senators of this stature and ideological distance publish a joint op-ed on a matter of such urgency,” said a senior Democratic aide. “It’s a calculated move to preempt a policy vacuum in Washington and make it clear that the path forward is support, not retreat.”
For US policymakers, the message is clear: sustaining and, where necessary, increasing support for Ukraine is not just about the immediate conflict – it is about shaping the balance of power in Europe, deterring future Russian aggression, and signaling to global competitors that the US remains a reliable partner.
As Shaheen and McConnell put it bluntly, the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of support – and Washington can no longer afford to hedge its bets.
To suggest a correction or clarification, write to us here
You can also highlight the text and press Ctrl + Enter
Please leave your suggestions or corrections here
Alex Raufoglu
Alex Raufoglu is Kyiv Post's Chief Correspondent in Washington DC. He covers the US State Department, regularly traveling with US Secretary of State. Raufoglu has worked extensively in the South Caucasus and Black Sea regions for several international broadcast outlets, such as VoA, BBC, RFE/RL, etc. He holds an MA in Interactive Journalism from American University, Washington DC.
6. To stop drug boats, GOP lawmakers want to license privateers
Summary:
GOP lawmakers want to revive “letters of marque” to let private citizens seize cartel-linked vessels at sea. Sen. Mike Lee’s “Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act” would authorize POTUS to commission privateers to target ships tied to cartels or their conspirators outside U.S. territory. The proposal comes as U.S. forces have intensified maritime counterdrug operations in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, with strikes on suspected smuggling boats and a larger regional naval posture, including the carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. Supporters argue it adds a constitutional tool under Article I, Section 8, last used in the War of 1812, but it would require passage by Congress before any commissions.
Comment: Sounds good in theory. What happens when there are innocents killed on the high seas? How does accountability work? Or would the letter of marque include the consequences for illegal actions or activities? Would the US then be able to hold these privateers accountable for their actions outside the letter of marque? And then how do we shape the narrative on this? (While countering the obvious negative narratives that will be developed in response?) Does Senator Lee's proposal include developing a supporting narrative line of effort so that we can effectively fight in the cognitive warfare space? And perhaps an effective narrative could actually create a deterrent effect on these drug traffickers if they know the US is going to let slip the (sea) dogs of war.
To stop drug boats, GOP lawmakers want to license privateers
Washington Post · Tobi Raji
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/12/19/us-privateers-pirates-trump-letters-of-marque-bill/
As President Donald Trump ramps up tensions with Venezuela, U.S. lawmakers have introduced legislation to bring back a scourge of the high seas banished from Atlantic and Pacific waters since the age of sail: privateers, authorized by government-issued letters of marque to ply the trade of piracy in service of their country by targeting enemy ships.
These modern-day privateers, under a bill introduced Thursday by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), would receive authorization from Trump as private individuals to seize foreign vessels from anyone who “is a member of a cartel, a member of a cartel-linked organization, or a conspirator associated with a cartel or a cartel-linked organization.”
“Cartels have replaced corsairs in the modern era, but we can still give private American citizens and their businesses a stake in the fight against these murderous foreign criminals,” Lee, who is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement announcing the bill. “The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act will revive this historic practice to defend our shores and seize cartel assets.”
Corsairs, whom Lee references in his statement, were themselves French privateers, although the term was also used in reference to Barbary privateers and raiders, and various pirates through the ages.
Since September, U.S. forces have launched strikes on at least 26 suspected drug smuggling boats, killing at least 99 people in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. To justify the strikes, Trump has said the United States is in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels.
The U.S. has amassed a vast array of warships, surveillance craft and aircraft in the Caribbean, including the USS Gerald R. Ford — the Pentagon’s largest aircraft carrier. Thousands of soldiers, including elite Special Forces units, have also been deployed to the region.
Under Lee’s “Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025,” ordinary American citizens could join them in plying the seas for vessels to intercept.
The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier leaves Naval Station Norfolk in June. (John Clark/AP)
Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to “declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.” Letters of marque and reprisal authorize private citizens, or privateers, to attack and capture foreign vessels. During the 18th century, the U.S. authorized privateers to fight in the American Revolutionary War against the British, whose Royal Navy was unrivaled at the time. Roughly 1,700 letters were issued during the war and nearly 600 British ships were captured or destroyed. The last time the U.S. commissioned private citizens was during the War of 1812.
Over the years, congressional lawmakers have proposed legislation that would authorize privateers to seize the property of Osama bin Laden and any other individual responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; target Somali pirates; and capture yachts owned by Russian oligarchs.
Thursday’s bill, which is pending before the Foreign Relations Committee, authorizes Trump to commission privateers to seize cartel property and people located “outside the geographic boundaries of the United States and its territories” on land or sea.
Authorizing privateers would be a creative approach that “gives the president some constitutional power to go after bad people and not wait on Congress to give their permission,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee) told The Washington Post.
“It’s just another tool in the box,” he said. “I think Trump’s the right one to activate it.”
Burchett introduced a version of the bill in the House in February. It is before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Before boat owners of Florida eager for a high-risk side hustle take to the seas, they should take heed: The bill would need to come to a vote, pass and be signed into law before any letter of marque could be issued.
“You’re not going to get a bunch of guys down at the local beer joint” to “sign up,” Burchett said. “There’s certain legal criteria that will have to be met.”
He said he envisioned “operators” and “first tier people” taking on the job as a second career. “They’re just a little older now.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the bill. The Pentagon said it does not comment on pending legislation.
Washington Post · Tobi Raji
7. Rand Paul says seizure of oil tankers in Caribbean a 'prelude to war'
Summary:
Sen. Rand Paul warned on ABC’s This Week that the Trump administration’s seizures of oil tankers in the Caribbean are “a provocation and a prelude to war” off Venezuela. He rejected confiscating ships or attacking unarmed vessels suspected of drug trafficking. Paul also called the policy “bizarre and contradictory,” questioning why some alleged narco figures are targeted while others are released or treated differently.
Comment: Video at the link (and he covers other topics below)
Rand Paul says seizure of oil tankers in Caribbean a 'prelude to war'
ABCNews.com · ABC News
The Republican senator called the seizures "provocative."
ByNicholas Kerr
December 21, 2025, 11:15 AM
Republican Sen. Rand Paul on Sunday criticized President Donald Trump's military mission off Venezuela's coast, calling the seizures of multiple oil tankers in the Caribbean Sea "a provocation and a prelude to war."
"I'm not for confiscating these liners. I'm not for blowing up these boats of unarmed people that are suspected of being drug dealers. I'm not for any of this," Paul told ABC News' "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl.
Paul also described the administration's policy of handling suspected drug traffickers as "bizarre and contradictory."
"And then why is the former president [Juan Orlando] Hernandez of Honduras, who was in jail for 45 years, why is he released?" Paul asked. "So, some narco-terrorists are really OK and other narco-terrorists we're going to blow up. And then some of them, if they're not designated as a terrorist, we might arrest them."
Sen Rand Paul walks through the Senate subway on Capitol Hill, on Dec. 11, 2025, in Washington, D.C.
Heather Diehl/Getty Images
Here are more highlights from Paul's interview:
On Erika Kirk and Marco Rubio's 2028 Vance endorsement
Karl: Is JD Vance the heir apparent here?
Paul: I think there needs to be representatives in the Republican Party who still believe international trade is good, who still believe in free market capitalism, who still believe in low taxes. See, it used to separate conservatives and liberals that conservatives thought it was a spending problem. We didn't want more revenue. We wanted less spending. But now all these pro terror protectionists, they love taxes, and so they tax, tax, tax, and then they brag about all the revenue coming in. That has never been a conservative position. So I'm going to continue to try to lead a conservative free market wing of the party, and we'll see where things lead over time.
Karl: And that's not JD Vance.
Paul: No.
On retaliatory strikes in Syria
Paul: You know, it's hard not to want to hit back when they kill some of our own. But I would like to go back, really, to the first Trump administration when he said he didn't want the troops there. There's like 900 troops, maybe a thousand, maybe 1,500. They're not enough to fight a war. They're not enough to be an effective strategic force. What they are is a target and a tripwire.
So we've done this retaliatory strike. Now, now, Donald Trump ought to do what Donald Trump proposed in the first administration, what Ronald Reagan did after the 1983 bomb. He left. There's no reason for us to be in Syria. We need to leave Syria and not be a trip wire to getting back involved in another war.
On the potential for a one-year extension for ACA subsidies
Paul: Look, we have health care in our country for poor people. It's called Medicaid. All of the rest of this stuff has not worked. Obamacare has been a failure. President Obama said it would bring premiums down. Premiums gone through the roof. Every time we give more subsidies, the premiums go higher. I have a plan that says everybody in this marketplace, and it's only about 4%, everybody in this marketplace should be able to go to Amazon or Costco or Sam's Club and as a group, a large group -- millions of people in the group -- negotiate with Big Insurance to bring prices down. It's the only proposal out there that -- that has a chance of bringing prices down.
ABCNews.com · ABC News
8. What We Know About The Trump Class "Battleship"
Summary:
TWZ reports POTUS unveiled a proposed Trump class “battleship” program within a broader “Golden Fleet” plan. The first ship would be USS Defiant. Displacement is described as 30,000 to 40,000 tons, roughly triple an Arleigh Burke destroyer. Armament concepts include large VLS arrays for Standard missiles, Tomahawks and IRCPS hypersonics, plus a planned SLCM-N nuclear cruise missile, railguns and lasers, alongside 5-inch guns. The ships would also serve as C2 hubs for crewed and uncrewed forces. The article flags major uncertainties: cost, schedule, industrial capacity, and operational logic versus buying more smaller warships. It notes past Navy programs often shrink.
Comment: Seems like a pretty powerful platform though I will leave it to the naval experts to assess. I suppose "Golden Fleet" is a better name than the "Great White Fleet." (remmeber our history)
What We Know About The Trump Class "Battleship"
twz.com · Joseph Trevithick, Tyler Rogoway
The USS Defiant would be the first Trump class battleship, but major questions remain about affordability and logic of such a massive design.
Joseph Trevithick, Tyler Rogoway
Published Dec 22, 2025 9:08 PM EST
https://www.twz.com/sea/what-we-know-about-the-trump-class-battleship
Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy.
President Donald Trump has rolled out plans for new Trump class large surface combatants for the U.S. Navy. These are to be armed with a wide array of missiles, including nuclear-armed and hypersonic types, as well as electromagnetic railguns, laser directed energy weapons, and more. Trump says the goal now is to build at least two of these vessels, the first of which will be named USS Defiant, but that the fleet size could grow to 10 hulls or more. The 30,000-to-40,000-ton displacement ships are the centerpiece of a larger naval shipbuilding initiative called the Golden Fleet.
Trump, flanked by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State and acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, and Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, unveiled the Trump class at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. The vessels are currently being referred to as “battleships,” a term historically applied to large warships with gun-centric armament and heavily armored hulls. The Navy decommissioned its last true battleships, the World War II-era Iowa class USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin, between 1990 and 1992. By which time they had been heavily upgraded. TWZ had highlighted the possibility of the Navy pursuing a warship in the general vein of the design shown today after the President had first teased this plan back in September.
President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago just before unveiling the Trump class warship plan. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
“From [President] Theodore Roosevelt, [and] the Great White Fleet … to the legendary [Iowa class] USS Missouri, whose massive guns helped win World War II, America’s battleships have always been unmistakable symbols of national power,” Trump said. The Trump class “will be the flagships of the American naval fleet, and there has never been anything built like them.”
All four of the Iowa class battleships that were built seen sailing together. USN
“American strength is back on the world stage, and the announcement of the Golden fleet, anchored by new battleships, the biggest and most lethal ever, … marks a generational commitment to American sea power across the entire department,” Secretary Hegseth said. “New and better ships will provide that deterrent today and for generations to come.”
“We’re going to make battle groups great again,” Secretary Phelan added. “The USS Defiant battleship will inspire awe and reverence for the American flag whenever it pulls into a foreign port. It will be a source of pride for every American.”
pic.twitter.com/BbcNTo5b07
— Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan (@SECNAV) December 23, 2025
“As we forge the future of our Navy’s Fleet, we need a larger surface combatant and the Trump class Battleships meet that requirement,” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Daryl Caudle also said in a separate Navy press release. “We will ensure continuous improvement, intellectually honest assessments about the requirement to effectively deter and win in the 2030s and beyond, and disciplined execution resulting in a Fleet unparalleled in lethality, adaptability and strength.”
If all goes to plan, “when a conflict arises, you [the President] are going to ask not one, but two questions, where are the carriers and where are the battleships,” Phelan said today.
A rendering of a Trump class warship as seen from the side. White House/USN
Otherwise, the salient details about the Trump class shared today at Mar-a-Lago, as well as in the Navy’s release, are as follows:
- 30,000 to 40,000 displacement (the Iowa class battleships had displacements of around 57,540 tons with a full load).
-
Roughly three times the size of an Arleigh Burke class destroyer, the current workhorse of the Navy’s surface fleets, according to the service (this appears to be based at least in part on the stated displacement of the newest Flight III Arleigh Burke subvariant).
-
Intermediate-Range Conventional Prompt Strike (IRCPS) hypersonic missiles, electromagnetic railguns, and laser directed energy weapons will be part of the ship’s armament package.
-
The Trump class ships will also be armed with a new nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile, or SLCM-N, now in development.
- Renderings displayed at the event at Mar-a-Lago show a design with three large Vertical Launch System (VLS) arrays, two at the bow end and one at the stern.
- One of the renderings, seen below, depicts the ship firing what looks to be an IRCPS missile, a Tomahawk cruise missile, and a member of the Standard Missile family.
USN
-
They also show what look to be multiple turreted 5-inch naval guns and other conventional guns.
- In addition to their extensive armament, Trump class ships will also be command and control platforms, overseeing crewed and uncrewed platforms.
- Unspecified artificial intelligence-driven capabilities will be part of the design, according to Trump.
-
The Trump class will be part of a high-low naval force mixture that also includes the future FF(X) frigates and new fleets of uncrewed vessels.
- Focus first on the construction of two ships out of an expected initial batch of 10.
- The Trump class could eventually grow to 20 to 25 hulls.
- Trump said that the ships will be built in shipyards in the United States.
-
The president also alluded to the possible involvement of foreign-owned, but U.S.-based yards.
- Secretary Phelan specifically highlighted the expected role of “new, non-traditional defense partners,” as well.
- Overall, the Navy will leverage a base of “1,000 suppliers in nearly every state in America” to build the ships.
- The Navy, in cooperation with industry, will lead the design of the ships.
- Trump will also be directly involved in the design process, “because I’m a very aesthetic person.”
To the last point here, it is worth pointing out that Trump’s interest in naval shipbuilding, especially from an aesthetic perspective, is well established at this point. He has claimed to have personally made key design decisions in the past. Trump has also been outspoken for years in his desire to see battleship-type vessels, specifically, return to the Navy’s fleets.
This appears to be the first time a class of Navy ships has been named after a sitting U.S. President. The Navy has often drawn criticism in the past for naming ships after living individuals, in general. It is unusual for the lead ship in a class of U.S. Navy vessels not to bear the name of that class (USS Defiant here instead of something like USS Trump or USS Donald J. Trump), as well.
Major questions about the plans for the Trump class do remain, including when the USS Defiant might be launched, let alone enter service. What these ships might cost to produce, as well as operate and maintain, is another important open question.
Despite the comments at Mar-a-Lago today, the unveiling of the Trump class is still likely to prompt much new analysis and general discussion about the expected utility of these ships, including from TWZ. We already did a deep dive into the feasibility, as well as the operational relevance, of Trump’s “battleship” proposal after his remarks in September. As we noted at the time, a concept along the lines of what was shown today offers a compromise of sorts that could help justify its complexity and cost. Similar ‘arsenal ship’ concepts for the Navy have been put forward on several occasions over the past few decades. This includes a proposal from Huntington Ingalls Industries in the early 2010s for a derivative of the San Antonio class amphibious warfare ship with 288 VLS cells and otherwise optimized for the ballistic missile defense mission.
Artwork from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency showing a notional arsenal ship dating back all the way to the 1990s. DARPAA rendering of the proposed San Antonio class-derived ballistic missile defense ship. HII/MDA
At the same time, what capabilities the Trump class might truly be able to bring to bear will be dependent on a host of factors, especially if they are only ever fielded in relatively smaller numbers. And regardless of how capable any warship is, it can only ever be in one place at one time, which is more often than not in port.
This all comes at a time when the Navy is stressing its glaring need for more surface warships, overall, not super capable ones built in small quantities.
On the other hand, there is a concerning VLS cell gaps that are fast approaching on the horizon. The service is set to retire the last of its Ticonderoga class cruisers, each one of which has 122 VLS cells, at the end of the decade. The Navy will also need to make up for the impending loss of the huge missile launch capacity offered by its four Ohio class nuclear guided missile submarines, which are also set to be decommissioned before 2030. The Trump class will clearly feature a massive set of VLS arrays that could help offset some of this deficit.
The general length of time it takes to design and produce large warships creates additional uncertainty for any naval shipbuilding endeavor, as well. Since the end of the Cold War, the Navy has seen a number of major warship programs be severely truncated, or outright cancelled, for a variety of reasons. As one prime example, the service originally planned to acquire 32 Zumwalt class stealth destroyers before slashing that number to just three and drastically watering-down their capabilities. The Trump administration also just recently axed the Constellation class frigate program, which had turned into a major boondoggle, as you can read more about here.
The Trump class “battleship” announcement notably comes on the same day the Navy confirmed to TWZ that the first of its future FF(X) frigates will be delivered with the glaring omission of a Vertical Launch System (VLS) and are clearly meant to be produced a cheaply and quickly as possible. At least the first ships will have the same armament of the much-derided Littoral Combat Ship.
The Navy insists it is taking steps to avoid past pitfalls going forward, and to help revitalize America’s shipbuilding industry in the process, but there continue to be challenges on the horizon.
All this will prompt major debate about how the Navy is using its pool of resources that it constantly says is too small to meet its future obligations. Investing so much in a small number of hulls while stripping out capabilities of those ships that will be built in larger numbers will surely be a hot topic on Capitol Hill in the months to come.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com
Deputy Editor
Joseph has been a member of The War Zone team since early 2017. Prior to that, he was an Associate Editor at War Is Boring, and his byline has appeared in other publications, including Small Arms Review, Small Arms Defense Journal, Reuters, We Are the Mighty, and Task & Purpose.
Editor-in-Chief
Tyler’s passion is the study of military technology, strategy, and foreign policy and he has fostered a dominant voice on those topics in the defense media space. He was the creator of the hugely popular defense site Foxtrot Alpha before developing The War Zone.
twz.com · Joseph Trevithick, Tyler Rogoway
9. The Bondi Attack And a False Narrative
Summary:
Tom Smith argues the Bondi Beach attack reporting quickly inflated one thin fact, that the father and son suspects visited the Philippines, into a familiar but misleading “terror camp” narrative. Local reporting from Davao suggested a mundane stay in a budget hotel with no obvious meetings, and Philippine authorities publicly said there was no evidence of training while investigations continue. Smith says the “Mindanao as jihad hub” trope persists because it offers a neat global template, exotic imagery, and political utility, even as violence there is shaped more by Moro conflict dynamics, clan politics, and criminal economies than exportable “global jihad” infrastructure. He warns the trope distorts policy toward militarized responses, stigmatizes communities, and lets Australia avoid uncomfortable domestic drivers of radicalization.
Comment. But it does not answer the question of what they were doing in Duterte's city (i.e., Davao City where the Duterte Dynasty rules). And of course they did not need to go to training camps. Could this be just like the hotel room in Manila in 1995 that had an AQ cell operating in it? The raid recovered their laptops with the plans to assassinate POTUS and the Pope, blow up aircraft in flight (e.g., Northwest Airlines emergency landing in Okinawa) and fly passenger planes into US buildings. Go figure. Bojinka. (The Bojinka plot in the Philippines (planning in Manila, the Philippine Airlines Flight 434 test bombing, and how the concept informed later al Qaeda tradecraft), is described in The 9/11 Commission Report (Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States) https://www.nycourts.gov/reporter/webdocs/fullreport.pdf?utm)
And we know in the past AQ members have gone on "R&R" to Bangkok and Manila and other locations in Asia.
Did planning for Bondi take place in Davao City or were they just tourists on vacation perhaps having their last pleasure trip before their tragic attack? (I might have chosen somewhere other than Davao City for that).
Defense/Security
The Bondi Attack And a False Narrative
The recurring myth of “terror training camps” in the Philippines
Dec 22, 2025
https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/bondi-attack-false-narrative?utm
By: Tom Smith
Photo from AFP/Getty Images
In the days after the Bondi Beach attack, in which 15 people attending a Hannukkah celebration were gunned down by father-son gunmen Sajid and Naveed Akram, one detail travelled fast. The suspects had been to the Philippines. Within hours, that fact started doing a lot of work in headlines and commentary. The trip was quickly framed as “training.” Some reports suggested a camp. Others hinted at a hidden network. Then the local reporting arrived. It was far less cinematic.
According to hotel staff in Davao City on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, the two men spent most of November in a budget hotel. They stayed largely in their rooms. They went out briefly each day and were never met by individuals or vehicles. They left rubbish from fast-food meals. They asked where to buy durian. Police later checked the room and asked for CCTV, but the hotel’s system only stored a week of footage. In other words, this may not have been the neat story many people wanted.
The shooters’ Davao hotel
Philippines becomes a “plot device”
Philippine authorities, in a public statement, said there is no evidence that the two received any military or terrorist training during their visit. Officials added that investigations into their travel are ongoing in coordination with Australia, rejecting claims that the southern Philippines remains a hotspot for extremist training. This pattern is not new. For two decades, parts of the southern Philippines have been described in the language of global terrorism: “hotbed,” “safe haven,” “sanctuaries,” “breeding grounds.” After 9/11, Mindanao was even branded a “second front” in the global war on terror.
The problem was not that violence didn’t. It did, and it still does. The problem was how quickly complex, local conflict was squeezed into a simple international template. A few movements of people. A rumor about funding. A reported “link” and suddenly, a whole region is treated as if it is a single, coherent terrorist infrastructure.
There is also something else going on. The Philippines has often been used to exoticize jihadism. It is the “tropical” setting. The idea of jungles and island hideouts. The sense of a far-flung outpost where the global jihad can be made to look bigger than it is. The jungle-camp trope makes great headlines.
That exotic framing serves two audiences at once. For international media and political debate, it turns a messy reality into a story with clear geography and clear menace. It offers a map with arrows. It makes jihadism look like a single roaming network, hopping from the Middle East to Southeast Asia to the West. For jihadist propaganda, it can also be useful. A new “province” or “wilayah” sounds grand. A distant battlefield suggests momentum. Local actors can borrow those brands to look more powerful, to recruit, and to scare rivals and communities.
Jihadism in the Philippines has repeatedly tried to go global in branding and propaganda. Yet it remains tethered to the Moro conflict, clan politics, criminal economies, and long-running grievances against the state. Those realities are not as exportable as headlines. But they are far more important.
As I told CBS News, established insurgent movements like the MILF and MNLF have their own political logic and territorial control — and it would be highly unusual for them to host outsiders seeking jihadist credentials.
What the Bondi trip actually tells us
Let’s be careful with what we know. Reuters reported the suspects arrived on November 1 and left on November 28, traveling via Manila to Davao and back. CBS reported police were still trying to establish what they did during that period, while Philippine officials publicly rejected claims of confirmed training. MindaNews then filled in crucial details: they appear to have stayed put, in one hotel, for almost the entire month.
“I was surprised to see [the Akrams] in the news. But they were here for tourism, not terrorism,” Emelyn Lorenzo, a massage therapist at the local market, told The Guardian. Authorities have made clear that the investigation into their activities is ongoing and the exact reason for their visit is still unknown.
That should force a reset. A month in a hotel is not nothing. It could still matter. People can meet contacts in cities. They can consume propaganda online anywhere. They can plan in private spaces. But it is not what “terror training camp” implies. And it is certainly not proof that the Philippines was the engine room of the attack.
Why the “camp” story keeps winning
“Terror training in the Philippines” is a familiar script. It has been used again and again to make violence elsewhere feel connected, coordinated, and inevitable. Part of the reason is how terrorism “expertise” has often worked in practice. Certain claims get repeated because they sound plausible and dramatic. They then become self-reinforcing. A phrase like “al-Qaeda-linked” can harden into a default label that few people feel able to challenge. Another reason is that “Mindanao” becomes shorthand. It becomes a single word that stands for danger. But Mindanao is huge. It includes major cities, trade hubs, and universities. Risk is uneven, and it changes over time.
And then there is the policy aftershock. When the Philippines is treated mainly as a node in a global terror web, the “solution” tends to follow the same logic: bigger labels, bigger enemies, bigger military responses. That can mean missing the slower work that actually determines long-term security: governance, justice, community trust, peace processes, and credible local policing.
The post-Marawi period shows what gets lost when the focus narrows. Even when strategies evolve, attention can become fixated on a small number of high-profile jihadist groups and territories, while broader problems and other forms of violence are sidelined. Meanwhile, heavy operations can alienate the very populations the state needs onside, and unresolved “open wounds” like Marawi’s recovery continue to shape trust in government.
There is also a social cost beyond policy. These narratives stigmatize Filipino Muslims and southern communities abroad. They turn ordinary travel into suspicion. They encourage a lazy association between “the Philippines” and “terror” that lingers long after the facts change. Lastly, the tendency to connect the dots elsewhere away from Australia to foreign lands, does the like of Australia no favors. We need to recognize the discomfort in looking inwards for answers on attacks like Bondi before we look outside for simple and false narratives.
Tom Smith, PhD, is academic director of the UK’s Royal Air Force College, Associate Professor in International Relations, Portsmouth Military Education Team, University of Portsmouth, and a researcher on political violence and counterterrorism narratives in Mindanao and Thailand’s deep south
10. Civility and Confidence: A Resolution for 2026
Summary:
H.R. McMaster argues that a bruising 2025 should not end in despair. Tragedy also revealed resilience and compassion. With the 250th anniversary of the Republic approaching, he urges a resolution for 2026: restore civility and strategic confidence through civic education, public service, and a renewed focus on shared constitutional liberties. He warns that partisan rancor signals weakness to friends and foes while micro-identities and victimhood sap national pride. He calls for honest teaching of failures placed in context and for welcoming immigrants who embrace rule of law. Citizens should act locally now so the nation can compete abroad and heal together.
Comment: Very much worth reflecting on as we head into 2026.
Civility and Confidence: A Resolution for 2026
H.R. McMaster
Dec 22, 2025
https://historywedontknow.substack.com/p/civility-and-confidence-a-resolution?utm
“The inference to which we are brought, is, that the causes of faction cannot be removed; and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”
James Madison, Federalist 10
We might all agree that 2025 was a difficult year. A highlight reel of tragedies might include:
- a deadly mid-air collision over the Potomac River
- devastating fires in California and flash floods in Texas
- costly wars in Europe, Africa, Myanmar, and the Middle East
- hate-based violence in New Orleans, Utah, Minneapolis, and Sydney, Australia
Those and other natural and man-made traumas could leave us pessimistic about our future. But many people in the United States and abroad demonstrated tremendous resilience and humaneness in the response to loss and hardship. Acts of courage and compassion in response to tragedy should give us confidence in our ability to work together to promote peace and harmony.
In 2026, as Americans commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of our Republic we might resolve to do our part to strengthen our nation. Civil discourse about opportunities to build a stronger nation for the next 250 years holds potential for arresting the growing vitriol in politics and strengthening our confidence in our common identities as Americans. The following is from the last few paragraphs of Battlegrounds written six years ago, pp. 443-445:
Partisan vitriol among America’s political leadership gives friends and foes alike the impression that the United States is incapable of competing effectively based on a bipartisan foreign policy. As the late professor and philosopher Richard Rorty observed, “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.” If we lack national pride, how can we possess the confidence necessary to fight effectively in war or implement a competitive foreign policy? In the United States, civics education might try to reverse the shift toward micro-identities and the focus on victimhood to foster what political scientist Francis Fukuyama describes as “broader and more integrative identities.”1 Every time Americans talk or tweet about issues that divide them, they might devote at least equal time to what unites them—especially our commitment to the fundamental individual liberties contained in our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights. The academy’s role in restoring our confidence and national pride may include a review of history, literature, and philosophy curricula to ensure that they contain not only self-criticism and a broad range of cultural perspectives, but also an acknowledgment of the nobility and accomplishments of our great unfinished American experiment in democracy and liberty. There is important work to do in primary and secondary education to rekindle in our youth an understanding of our history, including not only the contradictions and imperfections in our experiment, but also the virtues and great promise of America. Our teachers should not overlook blights on our history—the profound failures in the forcible subjugation of Native Americans, in slavery, in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, in institutionalized racism, in inequality for women, or in the mistreatment of other minorities—but they might place those stories in context. They might offer a progressive narrative that illuminates the advantages and resiliency of an American Constitution that placed sovereignty in the hands of the people and extended equal rights to previously excluded communities consistent with the nation’s founding principles.2 Besides education, public service is another means of strengthening strategic confidence and national pride. Working to eliminate opportunity inequality through educational and economic reforms is integral to the fight to defend the free world, as confidence in our democracies and free-market economies is essential to maintaining our will to compete.3
Immigrants have been and remain one of America’s greatest competitive advantages. Oppressed peoples who come to the United States, a self-selecting group, have the intrepidity to start a new life and are appreciative of the freedom and opportunity in America. A way to help overcome fractures in our society would be to talk less about who we do not want to come to America and more about whom America needs. Those who believe in our Constitution, the rule of law, and the opportunity to work hard to create a better life should be welcomed and assimilated into our liberal-democratic culture.
An effort to restore confidence must extend to other free and open societies. Gains made in representative government and economic reform in the Western Hemisphere should not be taken for granted. And because Europe is particularly important to U.S. security, supporting its effort to overcome its struggle with identity politics and with Russia’s attempt to sow dissention within and among European nations should remain a top priority for U.S. diplomats.
I wrote this book on the eleventh floor of the Hoover Tower at the center of the Stanford University campus. Herbert Hoover founded the institution that bears his name a century ago after witnessing the horrors of the Great War. Hoover, an orphan who graduated from Stanford University’s inaugural class and who would later become America’s thirty-first president, led a massive relief effort at the end of World War I in Belgium that was credited with saving more than ten million people from starvation.4 It was there that he bore witness to the horrors of war and resolved to do all he could to help prevent another one. The experience of World War I, a conflict that took the lives of more than sixteen million people, highlighted the need to understand the political and historical basis for violent conflict as critical to preserving peace and ending wars. Hoover founded the Hoover Wall Collection, later named the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, as a place where scholars might study past wars to prevent future conflicts. As we know, however, the “war that was to end all wars” was instead the first of two world wars that marked the bloodiest century in modern world history. The tower that contains the vast Hoover Library and Archives, a collection meant to provide scholars with materials that might help explain the origins of wars and uncover prospects for peace, was completed in 1941, the year the United States entered World War II. It is in the spirit of that archive that I wrote this book, in an effort to use the study of the past to illuminate the present as the best way of influencing the future.
As historian Zachary Shore observed, “the greatest source of national strength is an educated populace.”5 It is my hope that this book will make a small contribution to the strength of our nation and other nations of the free world. Writing it was a continuation of my own education. I will judge it to have been worthwhile if it inspires vibrant, thoughtful, and respectful discussion of how we can best defend the free world and preserve a future of peace and opportunity for generations to come.
America’s founders were concerned about the problem of “faction.” But they knew that suppressing divisions would mean suppressing liberty. Instead, they designed a republican form of government that would make it difficult for any single faction or party to form a durable majority. Competing parties would have to compromise as structural safeguards such as separation of powers and a federal system of governance prevented the consolidation of power. The founders also knew that effective governance required civic norms that encouraged spirited, but respectful debate. In 2026, we might encourage politicians to remember the founders’ wise council. But we need not wait for the politicians. There is much that we can do in our communities to restore confidence in our ability to work together and strengthen our Republic. The founders understood that our nation’s continued “good health” required the active, informed, and virtuous involvement of the people.
Thank you for reading History We Don’t Know. I wish all of our readers the best for the Holidays and the New Year.
H.R. McMaster
Stanford, California
1
Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 165–66.
2
Fukuyama, Identity, 170-171.
3
For the connection between income inequality and opportunity inequality and the importance of education, see Robert D. Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), esp. 227–61.
4
Paul Reynolds, “History’s Other Great Relief Effort,” BBC, January 11, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4164321.stm
5
Zachary Shore, “The Spirit of Sputnik: Will America Ever Fund Education Again?” Medium, September 3, 2018, https://medium.com/@zshore/the-spirit-of-sputnik-881b8f720736
11. China ‘preparing to fight and defeat Taiwan by 2027’
Summary:
A Pentagon assessment, cited by Reuters and reported by The Telegraph, says China expects to be able to fight and win a war over Taiwan by the end of 2027. The report argues Beijing is sharpening “brute force” options, including long-range strikes out to roughly 2,000 nautical miles that could disrupt U.S. forces in the Asia-Indo-Pacific. It also says China has likely loaded more than 100 DF-31 solid-fueled ICBMs across three new silo fields and remains uninterested in arms control talks. China’s stockpile is described as in the low 600s in 2024, trending toward 1,000 by 2030.
Comment: The Davidson Window. Is it a thing? Did Admiral Davidson create a self fulfilling prophecy?
China ‘preparing to fight and defeat Taiwan by 2027’
The Telegraph · Susie Coen
23 December 2025 12:36am GMT
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2025/12/23/china-taiwan-conflict-pentagon-report/
Beijing sharpening its military options to seize disputed island ‘by brute force’, US report finds
Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, pictured with military officers in Beijing this week Credit: Li Gang/Xinhua
Susie Coen US Correspondent23 December 2025 12:36am GMT
China expects to be able to fight and win a war on Taiwan by the end of 2027, a US report has found.
Beijing is refining its military options to take the territory by “brute force” via tactics that could include launching strikes up to 2,000 nautical miles from China, the Pentagon said.
The report into Chinese military ambitions, obtained by Reuters, noted that Beijing has probably loaded more than 100 intercontinental ballistic missiles across its new three silo fields.
The findings will probably raise concerns in Washington after a US government assessment in November found that China would defeat the US military in a war over Taiwan.
China, which views Taiwan as its own territory, has never ruled out using force to “reunify” with the island.
Beijing has described reports of a military build-up as an effort to “smear and defame China and deliberately mislead the international community”.
But the Pentagon report found that “China expects to be able to fight and win a war on Taiwan by the end of 2027”, adding that strikes “could seriously challenge and disrupt US presence in or around a conflict in the Asia-Pacific region”.
The draft document also did not identify a potential target for the more than 100 solid-fuelled DF-31 ICBMs in silo fields close to China’s border with Mongolia. The Pentagon had previously reported the existence of the fields but not the number of missiles loaded.
Anti-ship missiles YJ-19 at Tian’anmen Square during China’s V-Day military parade this year Credit: Visual China Group
Last month, Donald Trump, the US president, said he may be working on a plan to denuclearise with China and Russia. However, the report said Beijing did not appear to be interested in cooperating.
“We continue to see no appetite from Beijing for pursuing such measures or more comprehensive arms control discussions,” it said.
It added that China’s nuclear warhead stockpile was still in the low 600s in 2024, which reflected “a slower rate of production when compared to previous years”.
But it noted that China’s nuclear expansion was ongoing and it was on track to have over 1,000 warheads by 2030.
China has said it adheres to a “nuclear strategy of self-defence and pursues a no-first-use policy”, and Mr Trump has said he wants the US to resume nuclear weapons testing.
Joe Biden and Mr Trump, during his first term, sought to engage China and Russia in negotiations on replacing New START with a three-way strategic nuclear arms control treaty.
The 2010 New START treaty, the last US-Russia nuclear arms control accord, which limits both countries to deploying 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads on 700 delivery systems, is set to expire in less than two months.
China has significantly expanded its arsenal of short, medium and intermediate-range missiles, which means it could destroy many of the US’s advanced weapons well before they could reach Taiwan.
Last year, Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, said that “we lose every time” in the Pentagon’s war games against China, and predicted the Asian country’s hypersonic missiles could destroy aircraft carriers within minutes.
The Telegraph · Susie Coen
12. Exclusive: China likely loaded more than 100 ICBMs in silo fields, Pentagon report says
Summary:
A draft Pentagon report seen by Reuters says China likely loaded more than 100 DF-31 solid-fueled ICBMs into three new silo fields near the Mongolia border and shows little interest in arms control, despite POTUS saying he wants to denuclearize with China and Russia. The report puts China’s warhead stockpile in the low 600s in 2024 but projects it will exceed 1,000 by 2030. It also argues Beijing is refining “brute force” options against Taiwan, including strike packages out to 1,500 to 2,000 nautical miles that could disrupt U.S. presence in the Asia-Indo-Pacific.
Comment: A leak or are we controlling the narrative?
Exclusive: China likely loaded more than 100 ICBMs in silo fields, Pentagon report says
Reuters · Idrees Ali
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-likely-loaded-more-than-100-icbms-silo-fields-pentagon-report-says-2025-12-22/
- Summary
- Pentagon had reported new silo fields but not missile loading
- Draft report says Beijing has no desire for arms control talks
- Trump says he aims to denuclearize with China and Russia
- China disputes reports of a military buildup
WASHINGTON, Dec 22 (Reuters) - China is likely to have loaded more than 100 intercontinental ballistic missiles across its latest three silo fields and has no desire for arms control talks, according to a draft Pentagon report which highlighted Beijing's growing military ambitions.
China is expanding and modernizing its weapons stockpile faster than any other nuclear-armed power, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a Chicago-based non-profit. Beijing has described reports of a military buildup as efforts to "smear and defame China and deliberately mislead the international community."
The Reuters Tariff Watch newsletter is your daily guide to the latest global trade and tariff news. Sign up here.
Advertisement · Scroll to continue
Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump said that he may be working on a plan to denuclearize with China and Russia. But the draft Pentagon report, which was seen by Reuters, said Beijing did not appear to be interested.
"We continue to see no appetite from Beijing for pursuing such measures or more comprehensive arms control discussions," the report said.
In particular, the report said that China had likely put in more than 100 solid-fuelled DF-31 ICBMs in silo fields close to China's border with Mongolia - the latest in a series of silo sites. The Pentagon had previously reported the existence of the fields but not the number of missiles loaded.
The Pentagon declined to comment.
China's embassy in Washington D.C. said China has "maintained a defensive nuclear strategy, kept its nuclear forces at the minimum level required for national security, and abided by its commitment to a moratorium on nuclear testing."
The draft Pentagon report did not identify any potential target of the reported newly placed missiles. U.S. officials noted that the report could change before it was sent to lawmakers.
The report said China's nuclear warhead stockpile was still in the low 600s in 2024, which reflected "a slower rate of production when compared to previous years."
But the report added that China's nuclear expansion was ongoing and it was on track to have over 1,000 warheads by 2030.
China has said it adheres to a "nuclear strategy of self-defense and pursues a no-first-use policy."
Trump has said he wants the United States to resume nuclear weapons testing, but it is unclear what form that will take.
Former U.S. President Joe Biden and Trump, during his first term, sought to engage China and Russia in negotiations on replacing New START with a three-way strategic nuclear arms control treaty.
The wide-ranging Pentagon report detailed China's military buildup and said that "China expects to be able to fight and win a war on Taiwan by the end of 2027."
China, which views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, has never renounced use of force to "reunify" with the island.
Beijing was refining its military options to take Taiwan by "brute force," the report said, adding that one option could include strikes 1,500-2,000 nautical miles from China.
"In sufficient volume, these strikes could seriously challenge and disrupt U.S. presence in or around a conflict in the Asia-Pacific region," it added.
The report comes less than two months before the expiration of the 2010 New START treaty, the last U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control accord, which limits the sides to deploying 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads on 700 delivery systems.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Biden extended the pact for five years in February 2021, but its terms do not allow for a further formal extension.
Many experts fear that the expiration of the pact could fuel a three-way nuclear arms race.
"More nuclear weapons and an absence of diplomacy will not make anyone safer, neither China, Russia, or the United States,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association advocacy group.
ANTI-CORRUPTION PURGES
Chinese President Xi Jinping has undertaken a broad corruption crackdown, with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) being one of the main targets.
The report said the purge could impact short-term nuclear readiness but also set the stage for "long-term PLA improvements overall."
Revenues at China's giant military firms fell last year as corruption purges slowed arms contracts and procurement, according to a leading conflict think tank.
China's weapons revenue fell despite three decades of rising defense budgets in Beijing's growing strategic rivalry with the United States, Asia's traditional military power, and tensions over Taiwan and the hotly disputed South China Sea.
In the past 18 months, at least 26 top and former managers in state-owned arms companies have been investigated or removed from their positions, the Pentagon report said.
"Investigations have expanded from a 2023 focus on procurement of rockets and missiles industry to most of China’s defense industry, including China’s nuclear and shipbuilding industry," it added.
Reporting by Idrees Ali. Additional reporting by Jonathan Landay; editing by Philippa Fletcher and Stephen Coates
Idrees Ali
Thomson Reuters
National security correspondent focusing on the Pentagon in Washington D.C. Reports on U.S. military activity and operations throughout the world and the impact that they have. Has reported from over two dozen countries to include Iraq, Afghanistan, and much of the Middle East, Asia and Europe. From Karachi, Pakistan.
Reuters · Idrees Ali
13. China’s War Clock: ICBMs Deployed, Taiwan Invasion Set for 2027
Comment: Short summary based on the Reuters report.
China’s War Clock: ICBMs Deployed, Taiwan Invasion Set for 2027
Pentagon report reveals China loaded over 100 solid-fueled DF-31 ICBMs in silo fields near Mongolia's border.
Rameen Siddiqui
December 22, 2025
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/12/22/chinas-war-clock-icbms-deployed-taiwan-invasion-set-for-2027/
NEWS BRIEF
China has likely loaded more than 100 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) across three silo fields near its Mongolian border and shows no interest in arms control talks, according to a draft Pentagon report highlighting Beijing’s accelerating nuclear expansion. The report revealed China’s nuclear warhead stockpile remains in the low 600s but is on track to exceed 1,000 warheads by 2030, while also warning that Beijing expects to be able to fight and win a war on Taiwan by the end of 2027.
WHAT HAPPENED
- Pentagon report reveals China loaded over 100 solid-fueled DF-31 ICBMs in silo fields near Mongolia’s border.
- Beijing shows “no appetite” for arms control discussions despite Trump’s mention of potential denuclearization plans with China and Russia.
- China’s nuclear warhead stockpile remains in low 600s with slower production rates but is on track to exceed 1,000 by 2030.
- Pentagon warns China expects to fight and win a Taiwan war by end of 2027, refining options for brute force strikes up to 2,000 nautical miles.
WHY IT MATTERS
- China is expanding its nuclear arsenal faster than any other nuclear-armed power, fundamentally altering global strategic balance.
- Beijing’s rejection of arms control talks eliminates diplomatic pathways to manage nuclear competition between superpowers.
- The 2027 Taiwan invasion timeline provides specific warning window for U.S. and allies to prepare deterrence measures.
- China’s long-range strike capabilities could seriously challenge U.S. military presence across the entire Asia-Pacific region.
IMPLICATIONS
- Nuclear arms race accelerates without diplomatic constraints as China pursues parity with U.S. and Russian arsenals.
- Taiwan faces existential threat with less than three years before China believes it can successfully execute invasion.
- U.S. military presence in Asia-Pacific becomes increasingly vulnerable to Chinese missile strikes across vast distances.
- Global strategic stability deteriorates as China builds offensive capabilities while rejecting transparency and arms control mechanisms.
This briefing is based on information from Reuters.
14. Russia could keep Europe busy if China attacks Taiwan, warns NATO chief
Summary:
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned that if China attacks Taiwan, Russia could try to keep Europe “busy” by escalating pressure on the continent. In an interview with Germany’s Bild, he said Beijing and Moscow are aligned and China could lean on Putin to divert NATO’s attention. Rutte argued NATO must urgently strengthen deterrence because Russia will absorb heavy losses, claiming Putin would sacrifice 1.1 million people and has gained less than 1% of Ukrainian territory this year. He said keeping Ukraine strong is vital and troop contributions are being discussed, while praising POTUS for backing talks and urging action.
Comment: The CRInK is connected. What happens in one region or theater will be shaped or supported by activities in other regions or theaters.
Russia could keep Europe busy if China attacks Taiwan, warns NATO chief
aa.com.tr
Europe
NATO must urgently strengthen its deterrence, Moscow remains prepared to absorb heavy losses, says Mark Rutte
Necva Tastan Sevinc | 22.12.2025 - Update : 22.12.2025
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/russia-could-keep-europe-busy-if-china-attacks-taiwan-warns-nato-chief/3777347
ISTANBUL
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has warned that Russia could attempt to keep Europe "busy" if China launches a military attack on Taiwan.
Speaking in an interview with Germany’s BILD newspaper on Sunday, Rutte said Beijing and Moscow were closely aligned and that any escalation in the Indo-Pacific could have direct consequences for European security.
"We also see the global connection between China and Russia. China is looking at Taiwan. And I am convinced that if China takes military action there, it will pressure its junior partner, Russia, under Putin’s leadership, to keep us busy here in Europe," he said.
Against that backdrop, Rutte said NATO must urgently strengthen its deterrence, warning that Moscow remains prepared to absorb heavy losses.
"The reason is Putin. He is prepared to sacrifice 1.1 million of his own people. And this year he has made very little progress – minimal territorial gains, less than 1% of Ukrainian territory compared to the beginning of the year," he added.
Rutte underlined that keeping Ukraine strong was central to European security.
"If Russia were to gain control of all of Ukraine, it would have massive repercussions for NATO – and we would have to spend far more than what we agreed upon in The Hague," he said.
He confirmed that discussions were ongoing about potential troop contributions. “Several European countries have indicated that they would be willing to contribute troops, if desired,” he said, adding that the structure of such a deployment was still being worked out.
Rutte also rejected speculation that Washington might disengage from Europe, praising US President Donald Trump’s role.
"I have to say: Trump is absolutely committed to this issue. He is focused on ending this war. He is the only one who was able to bring Putin to the negotiating table – and the only one who can ultimately force him to make peace," he stressed.
Anadolu Agency website contains only a portion of the news stories offered to subscribers in the AA News Broadcasting System (HAS), and in summarized form. Please contact us for subscription options.
15. Trump's second term marks a significant departure from his first term, analysts say
Summary:
Analysts say POTUS’s second term represents a sharper break from his first, marked by greater speed, confidence, and ideological clarity. Unlike his initial presidency, which was constrained by internal resistance and institutional learning curves, the second term reflects a leadership team more aligned with his priorities and willing to act decisively. Policy moves on trade, defense, immigration, and energy show fewer compromises and a stronger emphasis on national sovereignty and industrial power. Critics warn this approach risks heightened polarization and friction with allies, while supporters argue it delivers strategic focus and follow-through absent in the first term. The result is a presidency less reactive, more deliberate, and more disruptive by design.
Excerpts:
STEWART PATRICK: Trump's second term in office has represented a significant departure from Trump 1.0. It's far more of a revolutionary approach to international order, and the upheaval that he's created is just monumental.
LORI ESPOSITO MURRAY: I think it is really clear that the perceptions of America First as isolationist at the beginning of his administration was clearly wrong.
MURRAY: He's not hesitating to use force, but they're really carefully calculated situations - Iran, enabling Ukraine for long-range strikes into Russia, bombing the Houthis - they're carefully calculated use of force but definitely not hesitating to use U.S. military force to achieve his goals.
BENJAMIN GEDAN: President Trump views the world in spheres of influence, this old-fashioned idea that's become in style again, that you divide up the globe amongst major powers, and for the United States, we're the major power in the Western Hemisphere. And he's really acted on that.
GEDAN: One thing that's notable is that China became a competitor to the United States and Latin America not by moving an aircraft carrier into the region, but through trade and investment in infrastructure and being an appealing partner for all these countries.
Comment: The five excerpts above are the most succinct description of POTUS' unconventional diplomacy (and an important PRC comparison) and foreign affairs and national security philosophy that I have read. No judgement. Just objective statements
Trump's second term marks a significant departure from his first term, analysts say
December 22, 20255:16 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
Franco Ordoñez
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/22/nx-s1-5640005/trumps-second-term-marks-a-significant-departure-from-his-first-term-analysts-say
President Trump's first year of foreign policy in his second term surprised many — for a lot of different reasons.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
From the first days of his second term, it was clear President Trump had an aggressive approach to how he would wield American power abroad. He's used tariffs as a weapon against allies, secured the release of hostages from Gaza, cozied up to Russian President Vladimir Putin and launched a pressure campaign against the Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro. NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez has more on Trump's busy year and how he's reshaped U.S. foreign policy.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Ladies and gentlemen, the president-elect of the United States, the Honorable Donald John Trump.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: On his first days in office, President Trump threatened to take back control of the Panama Canal, seize Greenland and turn Canada into the 51st state - reflections of his fascination with expansionism and foreshadowing his determination to carve up the world between the three major powers.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on Earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world. A short time from now, we are going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
ORDOÑEZ: Unlike those who came before him, Trump rarely speaks about America's responsibilities of global leadership. He disdains alliances and paints European allies as weak. Stewart Patrick served in the George W. Bush State Department and is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He says Trump's taken aim at the global systems that he's long complained were unfair to the U.S. taxpayer.
STEWART PATRICK: Trump's second term in office has represented a significant departure from Trump 1.0. It's far more of a revolutionary approach to international order, and the upheaval that he's created is just monumental.
ORDOÑEZ: Those shifts have stunned Western partners who have struggled to balance maintaining transatlantic ties while defending their own interests. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, has complained that, quote, "the West as we know it no longer exists."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
URSULA VON DER LEYEN: Europe did not start this confrontation. We think it is wrong.
ORDOÑEZ: Trump has also had to push back against domestic allies who have accused him of spending too much time abroad and straying from his America First priorities. The White House told me Trump's acting on his campaign promises to advance American interests, delivering fair trade deals, pushing allies to increase defense spending, killing narco terrorists - those are their words - while also ending global conflicts to make the world safer.
LORI ESPOSITO MURRAY: I think it is really clear that the perceptions of America First as isolationist at the beginning of his administration was clearly wrong.
ORDOÑEZ: Lori Esposito Murray is a veteran in diplomatic circles who has advised both Republican and Democratic leaders. She says the main goal of America First is not to withdraw but to engage, to use American economic power to reshape global trade to press partners to carry their own weight. It's also about using American military power.
MURRAY: He's not hesitating to use force, but they're really carefully calculated situations - Iran, enabling Ukraine for long-range strikes into Russia, bombing the Houthis - they're carefully calculated use of force but definitely not hesitating to use U.S. military force to achieve his goals.
ORDOÑEZ: And perhaps nowhere is the link between Trump's domestic goals and foreign policy as intertwined as it is in the Western Hemisphere, where Trump has positioned a historic level of military acid.
BENJAMIN GEDAN: President Trump views the world in spheres of influence, this old-fashioned idea that's become in style again, that you divide up the globe amongst major powers, and for the United States, we're the major power in the Western Hemisphere. And he's really acted on that.
ORDOÑEZ: Benjamin Gedan led the Venezuela portfolio in the Obama White House. He says it's clear that the U.S. seeks to reassert its dominance in the region over other actors who have gained influence, such as Russia and China.
GEDAN: One thing that's notable is that China became a competitor to the United States and Latin America not by moving an aircraft carrier into the region, but through trade and investment in infrastructure and being an appealing partner for all these countries.
ORDOÑEZ: He says the U.S. should be working to be the partner of choice and not the partner who is feared.
Franco Ordoñez.
Copyright © 2025 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
16. The Affordable Mass the Air Force Is Looking For Is Hiding in Plain Sight
Summary:
Ben McNally argues the Air Force’s “affordable mass” problem is not solved by first-increment Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which he says will be too immature, too costly, and too slow to field at meaningful scale this decade. He contends the answer is DARPA’s LongShot, an air-launched vehicle that carries and fires air-to-air missiles. LongShot, he writes, requires simpler autonomy, should be cheaper than uncrewed fighter-like platforms, and can plug into existing tactics and support structures. Because it can be launched from fighters, bombers, and cargo aircraft, LongShot could expand missile-carrying capacity fast and complicate adversary targeting. He urges adopting LongShot as CCA’s second increment and accelerating fielding before 2030.
Excerpt:
LongShot is a simpler, less complicated capability than the first-increment collaborative combat aircraft, which makes it a less expensive aircraft that will quickly provide greater effective capacity. If the Air Force truly wants to prepare to fight and win an air war against China before 2030 by fielding large numbers of attritable, missile-launching aircraft and increasing the ranges at which it can engage enemy fighters, then LongShot is the right call for the Air Force. It’s time to adopt LongShot as the second increment of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program.
The Affordable Mass the Air Force Is Looking For Is Hiding in Plain Sight
warontherocks.com · December 23, 2025
Ben McNally
December 23, 2025
https://warontherocks.com/2025/12/the-affordable-mass-the-air-force-is-looking-for-is-hiding-in-plain-sight/
The U.S. Air Force faces a compelling and capable adversary in China’s air force. The U.S. Air Force cannot overcome this adversary’s range and numbers solely by buying more crewed combat aircraft. Having recognized this, the Air Force has taken to experimenting with “affordable mass” in the form of autonomous combat aircraft.
The largest component of the effort to achieve affordable mass is the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, with the first increment of collaborative combat aircraft entering flight testing this year. The first increment of candidates for the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program are highly unlikely to make any difference in the Air Force’s ability to effectively project power and gain air superiority before the end of the decade. They are too technologically immature, will be too expensive to be bought in the numbers the Air Force needs, and will require a significant amount of effort to be integrated into the combat Air Force.
As such, the Air Force ought to look to other capabilities.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s LongShot program, which is developing air-launched vehicles that can carry and launch air-to-air missiles, will provide a credible and lethal solution to the problems of range and numbers. The Air Force should adopt a variant of LongShot as the second increment of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program and make every effort to accelerate the adoption of the capability into the combat Air Force.
BECOME A MEMBER
Affordable Mass
Compared to the U.S. Air Force, China can field larger numbers of combat aircraft that will carry missiles that have significantly longer ranges than the ones carried by Air Force fighters. If tasked to defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion this decade, which the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy considers a top priority the U.S. Air Force will face a numerically superior adversary taking shots before its pilots can shoot back.
The Air Force has proposed fielding “affordable mass” in the form of large numbers of autonomous combat aircraft to address current shortcomings in three ways. First, aircraft providing the “mass” will fly ahead of crewed platforms and fire air-to-air missiles, mitigating the missile-range problem posed by China. Second, fielding more combat aircraft forces adversaries to contend with more targets, complicating their decision-making and targeting. Third, it will allow the Air Force to absorb the kinds of losses that it cannot currently sustain.
Championed by former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has listed collaborative combat aircraft among his 17 priorities sheltered from budget cuts and is committed to fully funding the program. Last year, the Air Force selected two vendors to build prototype aircraft for the first increment of the program. Unlike previous uncrewed combat aircraft, collaborative combat aircraft will maneuver more like fighters and carry air-to-air missiles. This increases survivability, makes them harder to distinguish from crewed fighters, and complicates an adversary’s targeting. Their carriage of missiles forces adversaries to expend valuable missiles against them and provides a platform that effectively increases the standoff range of crewed fighters. The program has correctly identified key objectives: increase the number of available combat aircraft and the standoff range of crewed fighters at first-shot opportunity.
It is exceedingly improbable that the first increment of collaborative combat aircraft will provide the capability and capacity needed to fight an air war with China this decade. The Air Force is pursuing relatively complex aircraft with the first increment of the program: First-increment aircraft are the first unmanned U.S. military aircraft to ever receive a fighter designation. The decision to seek complexity will drive higher costs as well as long development, testing, and adoption timelines.
The technical challenge of tactical autonomy faces three inescapable barriers: a perception problem, a training data problem, and fragility to adversarial attacks. This is not to say that the companies in the first increment of the program are incompetent, incapable, or lacking in talent and technological prowess. They are working earnestly to accomplish an extremely ambitious task: field uncrewed, autonomous combat aircraft to be commanded by a human operator, controlled by sophisticated software, and reliably perform missions that the best fighter pilots in the world spend years training to execute with proficiency. Flight test campaigns may eventually mitigate or retire these barriers. However, flight tests for these aircraft have just begun.
While fighter aircraft do require critical life support functions, including ejection seats and environmental control systems, most of the cost of building a fighter aircraft does not come from accommodating a pilot in a cockpit. An uncrewed fighter aircraft will still need to fly at a high rate of speed for relatively long distances, carry weapons, host sensors that can detect friendly and enemy aircraft, sustain dynamic maneuvers that stress the airframe, contain countermeasures needed to defeat enemy sensors and weapons, have some degree of radar-absorbing materials, and house exquisite communications systems and computing power needed to function without pilots. These features will still cost a lot of money. Cost estimates for first-increment aircraft have varied from just over $˚20 million to $30 million or more. Last year, then-Secretary Frank Kendall said that the second increment of collaborative combat aircraft could cost 20 to 30 percent more than the first, making them about as expensive as Block 50 F-16s.
Once first-increment aircraft achieve key programmatic milestones, the Air Force will face a series of new challenges in developing the tactics, organization, training, and logistics required to operate these aircraft. First, it will have to figure out how to tactically employ the aircraft. It will also have to discover how frequently the aircraft need to be flown for pilots, maintainers, and others to gain and maintain proficiency in flying with and maintaining them. Additionally, it will need to develop training curricula to teach others how to employ, operate, and maintain the aircraft. Finally, it must determine supporting functions needed for these aircraft to integrate into the combat Air Force, including the frequency of required, programmed depot maintenance and software updates for algorithms piloting the aircraft. If the program achieves the nearly unprecedented feat of costing less than expected and are delivered on schedule, 100 operational first-increment aircraft by 2029 will not provide the numbers needed for a conflict with China.
Maj. Gen. Joe Kunkel — the Air Force’s director of force design, integration, and wargaming — has called for fielding a lower-end, less expensive capability for the second increment of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program. In his analysis, the Air Force needs an aircraft that can solve the range problem by flying ahead of a crewed fighter aircraft to fire missiles but cost little enough to provide the numbers needed to complicate an adversary’s targeting calculus while accepting losses.
To field this capability before the end of the decade, the Air Force should look for an asymmetric improvement to currently fielded capabilities that allows airmen to utilize existing tactics, organizations, training, and logistics.
Fortunately, the same organization that pioneered stealth technology, the internet, and global-positioning satellites is building such an aircraft.
LongShot
The LongShot platform, built by General Atomics, is an air-launched vehicle that can carry and launch air-to-air missiles. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing the platform and designing it to launch from a variety of aircraft. The program is currently undergoing testing and is uniquely positioned to deliver the affordable mass that the Air Force needs this decade for four reasons.
First, the LongShot platform is a simpler and more narrow application of autonomy than the first increment of collaborative combat aircraft. First-increment aircraft must take off and recover semi-independently from and to remote airfields in the Pacific, rejoin with airborne fighters, and cooperate with them during the fight in a tactically effective way without imposing excessive cognitive load on the pilots that command them. They also require the development of complicated schemas for transfer of custody. While thrilling to imagine, this level of autonomy simply does not exist today. Like first-increment aircraft, LongShot will operate autonomously after launch, executing various behaviors selected by the crewed aircraft operator. Unlike a first-increment aircraft, LongShot will be air-launched at a particular, tactical moment and operate continuously forward of its crewed counterparts, executing a one-way mission. Thus, LongShot requires only rules-based, expert-system autonomy of the kind that has been convincingly demonstrated on the X-47.
Second, LongShot is a much less expensive platform than first-increment aircraft of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program. Depending on the final cost of a production first-increment aircraft, the Air Force will be able to field five to ten times as many LongShot platforms, which would enable the combat Air Force to field much higher numbers of combat aircraft in the event of a conflict. Crucially, because LongShot also carries air-to-air missiles, this cost reduction delivers a greater targeting dilemma to the adversary, as enemy fighters would also have to expend air-to-air missiles against LongShot or risk getting shot down themselves.
Third, as an air-launched platform that carries air-to-air missiles, LongShot resembles a two-stage air-to-air missile, as opposed to first-increment aircraft, which are essentially uncrewed fighter aircraft. Aside from the technological progress needed to deploy tactical autonomy that helps rather than hinders crewed aircraft, the need to develop new tactics, organizations, training, logistics, and other supporting functions makes the first increment a much more complicated capability for the Air Force to adopt quickly and effectively. This complexity and technological optimism will likely result in delays. Adopting LongShot is a much simpler endeavor, as it will use many of the existing tactics, employment concepts, and support infrastructure required by air-to-air missiles.
Indeed, American fighter aircraft have recently started carrying two-stage missiles. Last year, U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornets were seen carrying a large missile revealed to be an air-launched version of Standard Missile-6: the AIM-174. Standard Missile-6 was originally developed as a defensive, ship-launched missile that was later re-engineered into an offensive missile by the Defense Department’s Strategic Capabilities Office. Unlike previous air-to-air missiles like the AIM-7 and AIM-120, the AIM-174 is a two-stage missile, with two rocket motors that give it a much longer range than any other operational air-to-air missile currently fielded. LongShot could potentially have a similar range and has a distinct advantage over two-stage missiles. If a fighter aircraft launches a two-stage missile, the enemy will be forced to expend countermeasures in the form of chaff or flares to disrupt the missile’s tracking and guidance systems. By contrast, if a LongShot is launched, it will present a two-dimensional targeting dilemma: The enemy will have to expend an air-to-air missile to shoot it down, and if the LongShot launches a missile, they will also have to expend countermeasures to defeat the missile. A first-increment aircraft will provide the same two-dimensional targeting dilemma. However, because LongShot is a physically smaller platform than a first-increment aircraft, it will be easier for engineers to minimize LongShot’s radar cross-section, thereby making it harder for enemy aircraft to sense, detect, and track LongShot.
Fourth, LongShot is designed to launch from fighter, bomber, and cargo aircraft, which could drastically expand the capacity of the Air Force to project power and gain air superiority in the event of a conflict with China. The scale of the threat from China and sclerotic state of today’s Air Force demands creative exploitation of the latent capacity in operational aircraft that airmen already know how to employ effectively. In fielding a capability that can be launched by fighter, bomber, and cargo aircraft, the Air Force can enable hundreds of additional aircraft to carry and launch an attritable aircraft that carries and launches air-to-air missiles.
There are two arguments frequently made against LongShot. First, LongShot is a runway-independent, air-launched platform, and as such, detractors assert that it violates the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment concept. This objection appeals to technological optimism by way of logistical illiteracy. At present, the agile employment of collaborative combat aircraft requires the aircraft to be pre-positioned on the first island chain in the Western Pacific, lying dormant until they are commanded to launch and autonomously prosecute combat operations. This concept of employment would require delivering hundreds of novel, unmanned aircraft to bases in the Pacific; maintaining, refueling, and resupplying them; providing software updates; launching and recovering them with a dedicated team of airmen; and solving for command and control via complex chains of custody. This logistical, operational, and tactical complexity presents more problems than it solves. By contrast, air-launched systems — including air-to-air missiles and miniature air-launched decoys — have been employed effectively for decades. Compared to a first-increment aircraft, LongShot requires a fraction of the logistical infrastructure developments and intermittent upgrades.
Second, detractors object that LongShot is wasteful because it is non-recoverable. This ignores the context of LongShot in combat. If a pilot chooses to launch a LongShot, it is exceedingly probable the pilot urgently needs its effects. Additionally, because a LongShot platform costs a fraction of a first- increment collaborative combat aircraft, the choice to expend a LongShot during an air battle would be no more costly than expending a two-stage missile like the AIM-174.
Like most aircraft, the most expensive component of LongShot will be the engine. In recent years, supply chain issues have hampered the ability of manufacturers to build aircraft engines, including engines for combat aircraft. LongShot’s smaller size and weight will require a far less powerful engine than other proposed designs for a second-increment aircraft, streamlining the production and manufacturing of the platform.
In short, as an air-launched platform that carries air-to-air weapons, LongShot is an asymmetric improvement to currently fielded capabilities that can be much more quickly developed, adopted, and employed by the Air Force.
Capability, Capacity, and Constraints
If the Air Force wants to successfully field affordable mass in the form of collaborative combat aircraft, it should once again recognize that there is an inverse correlation between capability and capacity. A fully operational first-increment collaborative combat aircraft that has undergone rigorous testing and validation would be a more capable and versatile platform than a LongShot. However, additional capability invariably requires additional cost, and as such, the Air Force will trade capacity for capability. More importantly, the additional complexity will drive lengthy development and test timelines exacerbated by the program’s software intensiveness and technological optimism.
First-increment aircraft could eventually make an impact on the ability of the Air Force to prevail in future air battles. However, they will almost certainly not achieve the technological maturity needed to impact the ability of the Air Force to prevail in any major conflict before the end of this decade. There are a litany of engineering challenges that will need to be overcome before fielding a performant first-increment aircraft. Developing the autonomy needed for first-increment aircraft will require far more extensive testing and development than current timelines allow. It will also require a complete remaking of the support structures and tactics that deploy and enable the aircraft.
With its upper-$30M target for the first increment, the Air Force aspired toward a highly capable aircraft that would require revolutionary leaps in technology, as well as new tactics, ways of organizing, training curricula, and logistical infrastructure. It can continue to pursue such ambitious objectives for the long term.
At the same time, when the Air Force selects a second increment for collaborative combat aircraft, it should select a platform that provides a capability this decade that is an asymmetric improvement to current systems that can be quickly fielded in significantly larger numbers and at lower cost.
LongShot is a simpler, less complicated capability than the first-increment collaborative combat aircraft, which makes it a less expensive aircraft that will quickly provide greater effective capacity. If the Air Force truly wants to prepare to fight and win an air war against China before 2030 by fielding large numbers of attritable, missile-launching aircraft and increasing the ranges at which it can engage enemy fighters, then LongShot is the right call for the Air Force. It’s time to adopt LongShot as the second increment of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program.
BECOME A MEMBER
Ben McNally works as an analyst for JAB Innovative Solutions, a firm that provides professional and information technology services federal, state and local government agencies. He has worked as a consultant in the defense technology industry, and led events, programming, and outreach for the Center for Defense Innovation at the Capital Factory in Austin, Texas. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a fellow at the Clements Center for National Security.
**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
warontherocks.com · December 23, 2025
17. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Limits of Terrorist Designations
Summary:
Jeff Breinholt argues that trying to brand the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist entity runs into legal and conceptual limits because it is a decentralized, country-by-country movement, not a single command structure. He notes POTUS ordered Treasury and State to review whether specific chapters in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan merit designation, rather than designating the whole network. Breinholt’s core warning is that recent U.S. practice has stretched terrorism tools toward edge cases, including state organs, cartels, and loosely defined domestic movements, and the real risk shows up later in court when prosecutors must fit atypical actors into statutes built for foreign terrorist organizations. Targeted, chapter-level designations may be viable, but overreach erodes coherence.
Excerpt:
These are some of the challenges that might be faced by the Trump administration as it continues to engage in adventurism in the designation process. Eleven years ago, I described the material support statute as “an indispensable counter-terrorism tool.” There is no reason to doubt that assessment today, although we may be critical of efforts to stretch it too far in further terrorism designations. Meanwhile, the administration appears poised to treat fentanyl as weapon of mass destruction, which is really a loose fit, and should be a wake-up call for those who worry about mixing apples and oranges in terrorism designations.
The Muslim Brotherhood and the Limits of Terrorist Designations
warontherocks.com · December 23, 2025
Jeff Breinholt
December 23, 2025
https://warontherocks.com/2025/12/the-muslim-brotherhood-and-the-limits-of-terrorist-designations/
The United States has signaled that it wants to take a fresh look at the legal tools used to identify and prosecute terrorist groups. Its most recent move concerns the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational organization that — despite the violent and destabilizing activity of some of its national branches — would not usually be designated in its entirety as a terrorist organization. Rather than announcing a decision outright, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing the secretaries of treasury and state to examine whether specific national chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan should be placed on the government’s list of foreign terrorist organizations or treated as specially designated global terrorists. But this move is not a mere procedural exercise. It reflects a broader trend in which the administration has pushed terrorist designation authorities into new and sometimes untested territory, raising questions about how far these tools can be stretched before they lose coherence.
Over the past few years, the U.S. government has designated several groups as terrorist organizations that would once have been considered unlikely candidates for the label — from domestic self-proclaimed anti-fascist activists to powerful drug cartels. These decisions carry legal and political consequences that extend far beyond the act of designation itself. Once a group is named, the machinery of criminal prosecution begins to grind forward, which is where the risks sit. The most troubling implications do not lie in the symbolic act in designating a new group as a foreign terrorist organization or as specially designated global terrorists, but in the cases that follow in federal court, where prosecutors must apply a statutory framework built for national security threats to actors that do not fit the traditional mold.
The recent consideration to expand terrorist designations on select national chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood fits within this broader context. It also exposes the difficulty of trying to apply a single terrorism label to a movement across the Middle East with different forms, histories, and levels of state repression faced. The government has already designated Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, as both a foreign terrorist organization and as specially designated global terrorists. It remains unclear what practical value would come from adding other national chapters, or what such a step would mean for the future of the designation process itself.
BECOME A MEMBER
What Is the Muslim Brotherhood?
The Muslim Brotherhood began in Egypt in the late 1920s as a religious and social movement that sought moral renewal, political reform, and resistance to foreign influence. From its inception, the group combined preaching, charitable work, and political activism to achieve its goals. Over several decades, it grew into a decentralized network of national branches, political parties, and affiliated entities with varying levels of activity across the Middle East and North Africa, but it never became a single unified body.
Each national chapter has developed its own leadership, priorities, and relationship with the state. In some countries, Muslim Brotherhood chapters have engaged in political life through lawful means and participated in elections. In others, chapters have been accused of supporting violence and working through clandestine networks, sometimes even operating underground in the face of harsh repression.
This wide variation makes it difficult to speak of the movement as if it were a single organization with a clear chain of command. It also makes any broader effort to designate the Muslim Brotherhood in its entirety as a foreign terrorist organization or as specially designated global terrorists both legally and conceptually fraught, since the movement’s identity depends heavily on where it operates and how the surrounding government treats it.
What Authorities Can the Government Use?
The United States uses two principal authorities to identify groups involved in terrorist activity: the foreign terrorist organization and specially designated global terrorist designations. The first triggers broad criminal and immigration consequences, while the latter focuses on economic isolation. The government can use both together or select only one. Understanding how each designation works is essential to judging any proposal to widen their use.
In 1996, Congress established the Department of State’s authority to identify a foreign group that engages in terrorism and threatens U.S. national security. To meet the legal criteria for designation under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, a group must be a foreign organization, engage in terrorist activity or retain the capability and intent to do so, and such activity must threaten the security of U.S. nationals or national security of the United States.
Once a group is labeled a foreign terrorist organization, criminal penalties are triggered that make it more difficult for terrorists to plan or carry out an attack in the United States. One such penalty is the material support statute, which makes it a federal crime to provide support, resources, or services to a foreign terrorist organization. Additionally, after being designated as a foreign terrorist organization, its members are barred from entering the country, and financial institutions must block any funds that fall under American jurisdiction. This combination is what gives the foreign terrorist organization designation its force. Without the label, the penalties do not apply.
The specially designated global terrorist authority is used to disrupt the financial support network for terrorist organizations. Derived from Executive Order 13224 and issued after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, this tool empowers the Department of the Treasury — through the Office of Foreign Asset Control — to identify individuals or entities as specially designated global terrorists and exert increased financial pressure. This terrorist designation authority freezes associated assets in the United States and prohibits nearly all financial dealings with associated groups, with civil and criminal penalties for violations — though they arise from the sanctions regime itself instead of the material support statute, and operate through financial law rather than immigration or membership rules.
Understanding how these tools operate — and the consequences they trigger — is essential to assessing proposals to widen their scope.
How Authorities Have Been Applied
In his first and second term, Trump has sought to apply terrorist designation authorities in new and unconventional ways. In particular, the Trump administration has sought to broaden the scope of the kinds of groups that can be targeted using the material support statute, including state entities, transnational criminal organizations, and domestic extremists.
As someone who spent 25 years at the Justice Department working with the material support statute — including overseeing the nationwide terrorist financing enforcement program from 2001 to 2008 — I am often asked for thoughts on these developments.
From my perspective, the history of the material support statute has been one of general government success. Since the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality over First Amendment challenges in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010), it has been an indispensable counterterrorism tool. Using the foreign terrorist organization designation and the material support statute, the Department of Justice has successfully prosecuted supporters of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hizballah, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, al-Shabaab, and the Islamic State for supporting terrorist activity.
Virtually every terrorism indictment returned today includes a material support count. These successes reflect a statutory scheme carefully tethered to foreign terrorist organization designation authority — an anchoring principle that risky expansions now threaten.
We should be wary of efforts that stretch these authorities beyond their intended national security purpose.
So What About the Trump Administration?
Before turning to the Muslim Brotherhood, it is worth reflecting on how terrorist designation authorities have been used in recent years. The most consequential developments have not involved traditional foreign terrorist groups but efforts to extend designation authorities to actors that sit at the margins of the statutory framework, including state militaries, transnational criminal organizations, and loosely defined domestic movements. Each of these cases tests a different boundary built into the designation system, and each illustrates the same underlying risk: When tools designed for clearly defined foreign terrorist organizations are stretched to cover entities that do not fit that model, the legal coherence and prosecutorial reliability of the system begin to fray. It is against this backdrop that the current debate over the Muslim Brotherhood should be understood.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
In April 2019, the first Trump administration designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, despite the fact that it was not a subnational entity but rather an instrumentality of the Iranian state. To be sure, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been directly involved in funding and supporting terrorist activity that threatens U.S. national security around the world, but its official status as a branch of the Iranian military makes it a nontraditional foreign terrorist organization.
Recall that the Taliban’s quasi-state character, for example, has prevented its foreign terrorist organization designation despite efforts to do so, as concerns arose it would complicate U.S. and Afghan efforts to make diplomatic contact with the group, if needed. However, the Taliban are considered a specially designated global terrorist group.
The practical effects of this expansion are already visible. Following its designation as a foreign terrorist organization, federal prosecutors brought a material support case against individuals affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, something we would not otherwise have seen without the designation. The United States. v. Pahlawan case is a key example of this. The typical material support prosecution involves private persons who are accused of providing support to subnational groups that are designated, rather than instrumentalities of a country, which makes this an atypical case involving official Iran.
Drug Cartels as Terrorists?
On Feb. 20, 2025, the State Department designated certain Mexican and Venezuelan drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood review, there was no “pause and consider” stage — the cartels were designated through standard procedures.
There is nothing standard, however, about sweeping drug trafficking into the traditional counter-terrorism apparatus. Doing so takes foreign terrorist organization designations further away from their national security focus and into unchartered territory.
The issue is not spoiling the U.S. terrorism designation “brand name” by including drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which I don’t see as a realistic concern. In many ways, the shoe fits — these cartels plainly use violence against relevant civilian populations. The problem instead lies with the notion that opening material support liability to drug traffickers risks pulling unrelated criminal activity into a system designed for more traditional threats to U.S. national security.
These cases raise practical concerns as well. Will these cases be handled by lawyers in the Justice Department’s National Security Division? Will they be fed by intelligence generated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act? Material support cases are typically handled by Assistant U.S. Attorneys and National Security Division attorneys who have gone through exhaustive training and have security clearances, because the cases are so complex and difficult. They often involve the Classified Information Procedures Act, a federal statute that governs how classified information is handled in criminal prosecutions — allowing cases involving national security secrets to proceed while protecting sensitive intelligence from public disclosure — as well as experts who are difficult to find once one gets away from the National Security Division.
Broadening the statute in this direction strains the institutional infrastructure that has made material support prosecutions to date so effective.
Antifa
Perhaps the furthest reach the Trump administration has taken to apply terrorist designation authorities is in its labeling of Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, which set aside the whole machinery of terrorist designation authorities in favor of this expedient move. The designation, made on Sept. 22, 2025, was issued via a standalone executive order rather than the standard legal framework traditionally used by the secretary of state under the Immigration and Nationality Act. This aspirational legal tool was described in the Trump administration’s Strategy on Domestic Terrorism, highlighting the broadening scope of what it deems to be terrorist entities.
This case matters because terrorist designation authorities are designed to operate against identifiable foreign organizations, not fluid domestic ones — raising First Amendment concerns. Part of the problem is defining the group. Is Antifa a true ideology, as some have claimed? Is it sufficiently organized for prosecutors to define as a terrorist designee? The answers to these questions will be revealed in court, assuming the Trump administration takes the next step of charging individuals with Antifa associations, but it raises serious questions about whether it is sufficiently organized to qualify as a prosecutable entity.
If this occurs, the charges will presumably will not be for material support to a foreign terrorist organization, since Antifa is a domestic organization. The administration could rely on Section 2339A of the material support statute, which criminalizes providing material support for specific terrorist acts, rather than Section 2339B, which makes it a crime to provide support to a designated foreign terrorist organization as such.
But the case highlights a central risk underpinning recent designation efforts: When terrorism authorities are extended beyond the organizational and statutory limits that give them legal coherence, they invite constitutional challenge and weaken the prosecutorial reliability upon which the counter-terrorism system depends.
The U.S. Government Considers the Brotherhood
This brings us back to the Muslim Brotherhood. The U.S. government has debated how to handle the Muslim Brotherhood for years. This is definitely the closest it has come to formally designating the Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, but it is not the first time groups affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood have been in Washington’s crosshairs.
In what was perhaps the single most successful terrorist financing case in the “Global War on Terror,” federal prosecutors succeeded in convicting several charitable fundraisers raising money in the United States for Hamas — the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee. These crimes were committed with the help of a Texas-based charity known as the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. In the course of the trial, the history of Hamas and its affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood (and the corresponding history of the Holy Land Foundation) was treated extensively. The Holy Land Foundation case, which culminated with a 2008 jury conviction of the charity’s top officials as well as the charity itself, was based on years of FBI surveillance that was predicated on the theory that the Holy Land Foundation was a U.S.-based front for Hamas. Much of the investigative take consisted of official communiques between the various Muslim Brotherhood offices located in the United States and around the World, which could strengthen the case to designate additional Muslim Brotherhood national chapters as foreign terrorist organizations. The prosecutors submitted in court an extensive list of unindicted co-conspirators, which included the U.S.-based Council for Islamic American Relations, which was founnded as a Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood front.
Looking back, one can say that the prosecution of a Muslim Brotherhood front in the United States was a high-water mark for U.S. counter-terrorism financing efforts. But as we think about possible designation actions against the organization, we must recognize that the United States has a history of being tough with Hamas, and thus the Brotherhood itself. Further designation of certain Muslim Brotherhood national offices might not be such a radical step after all.
The Trump Administration Targets the Brotherhood … Maybe
The process adopted by the Trump administration — directing two cabinet members to consider wider designation action — perhaps reflects the conceptual challenges inherent in the Muslim Brotherhood case, given the difficulty of designating such a large and far-flung organization. Although the United States has designated Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization since 1997, it’s unclear what these additional Muslim Brotherhood designations would add operationally. That may explain the announcement of this working group rather than announce immediate designations for additional Muslim Brotherhood chapters.
To be sure, taking steps to designate the Muslim Brotherhood is not the only sign that the Trump administration is engaging in aggressive terrorist designation actions.
The Muslim Brotherhood-related designations, if they occur, will not be as radical of a step that, for example, designating the Global Muslim Brotherhood would be. If opting for the latter, the United States would be accepting a conceptual challenge: It is far from clear whether the Global Muslim Brotherhood, like Antifa, has a definable existence that could make it subject to designation. Experts claim that the Muslim Brotherhood operates differently depending on where it is located and levels of repression faced, which would complicate claims of that a top-down command exists across the movement.
The United States might also only target the Muslim Brotherhood chapters in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan, which would be akin to the designation of Hamas, and not nearly as far-fetched as designating the Global Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization would be.
Conclusion
These are some of the challenges that might be faced by the Trump administration as it continues to engage in adventurism in the designation process. Eleven years ago, I described the material support statute as “an indispensable counter-terrorism tool.” There is no reason to doubt that assessment today, although we may be critical of efforts to stretch it too far in further terrorism designations. Meanwhile, the administration appears poised to treat fentanyl as weapon of mass destruction, which is really a loose fit, and should be a wake-up call for those who worry about mixing apples and oranges in terrorism designations.
BECOME A MEMBER
Jeff Breinholt retired from the National Security Division of the Department of Justice in January 2024 following a distinguished 34-year career. Between 2001 and 2008, he served as nationwide coordinator for terrorist financing nationwide criminal enforcement. He is an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Law School. The opinions in this article are his own.
Image: Justice Department
warontherocks.com · Joseph Wehmeyer · December 23, 2025
18. US Arms Sales to Taiwan Signal Policy Continuity
Summary:
Rowan Allport argues recent U.S. moves signal continuity on Taiwan rather than a dramatic shift. He cites the 2025 National Security Strategy’s focus on denying any PRC attempt to seize Taiwan, plus NDAA 2026 provisions like $1 billion in aid and joint drone work. The State Department’s notified arms package, up to $11.1 billion, reinforces Taiwan’s place in U.S. strategy, even amid trade diplomacy and earlier reports of paused support. The mix emphasizes asymmetric defense, especially HIMARS, ATACMS, drones, and anti armor missiles, while noting funding politics in Taipei, delivery timelines, and unanswered gaps.
US Arms Sales to Taiwan Signal Policy Continuity
While the Trump administration’s approach to Taiwan is continuing to coalesce, current signs indicate no dramatic departure from long-standing positions.
By Rowan Allport
December 19, 2025
https://thediplomat.com/2025/12/us-arms-sales-to-taiwan-signal-policy-continuity/
A HIMARS system operated by Taiwan’s 58th Army Artillery Command.
Credit: Office of the President, ROC (Taiwan)/ Wang Yu Ching
The last month has seen a quickfire series of developments that outline the Trump administration’s plans for the handling of the security of Taiwan. While the 2025 National Security Strategy soft-pedals the overall U.S. defense posture toward China compared to the previous two editions, reinforcing the ability to “deny any attempt to seize Taiwan or achieve a balance of forces so unfavorable to us as to make defending that island impossible” is the most notable military commitment put forward in the document.
Additionally, the recently passed 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) contains initiatives to support Taiwan, including $1 billion in military aid and a requirement for Washington and Taipei to collaborate on drone and counter-drone development.
Most recently, the decision by the Trump administration to notify Congress of its greenlighting of a series of arms sales worth up to $11.1 billion also points to the island’s central position in U.S. strategy – despite perceived moves to placate Beijing (reportedly including a pause on military aid to Taiwan earlier this year) as part of trade negotiations.
While fears exist of a U.S. deal with Beijing that sells out Taiwan in exchange for a more favorable relationship with China, this was always unlikely. As my book “War Plan Taiwan: OPLAN 5077 and the U.S. Struggle for the Pacific” outlines, Taiwan has long been recognized as a key strategic territory in the region, and its fate – real and imagined – has informed a century of U.S. defense policy and planning. The 2025 NSS’ assertion that “there is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan… mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters” is only the latest manifestation of this.
There was, of course, a dramatic rupture in relations between Washington and Taipei in 1979 when the U.S. switched official recognition of what constituted China from the Republic of China (ROC) to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). But even following this, provisions under the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) and other initiatives sustained links, and Department of Defense contingency plans were maintained to defend Taiwan. Importantly, the TRA obliges the U.S. to furnish Taipei with sufficient weapons for its defense. Today, geography and more contemporary issues – most notably, Taiwan remains the West’s leading supplier of the advanced semiconductors critical to the AI revolution – have once again positioned the country on the front line.
We are currently awaiting the publication of the updated U.S. National Defence Strategy (NDS) and, eventually, a public summary of a new National Military Strategy (NMS). However, the direction of travel is clear. While the security of the U.S. homeland and Western hemisphere lead, the 2025 NSS lists “deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch” and “denying aggression anywhere in the First Island Chain” as priorities. Although fears of a subtle alteration in language related to the U.S. position on the island – a shift from “we oppose” any unilateral change in the status of Taiwan in the 2022 NSS to the less forthright statement in the 2025 edition that the U.S. “does not support” such change – have prompted concern, the administration has reportedly stated that there has been no policy change.
However, the current NSS also makes clear that U.S. allies and partners must do much more to support regional security. For Taiwan, this means improving its ability to counter PRC aggression, including the most extreme scenario of an invasion of Taiwan.
The arms sales authorizations approved by the State Department on December 17, 2025, seek to address a recognized need for Taiwan’s forces to adopt an asymmetric approach to its defense – that is, avoiding countering Beijing’s forces head on owing to China’s vastly greater overall power, and instead using weapons and tactics designed to exploit the People’s Liberation Army’s weaknesses. Many have perceived the push for such an approach as being derailed by the ROC Armed Forces’ desire for traditional military platforms.
On this measure, the 60 M109A7 Paladin self-propelled artillery systems are the weakest link in this set of authorizations, given their relatively limited firing range, size and vulnerability from the air – issues that have contributed to past U.S. reluctance to sell them to Taiwan. Yet such artillery has frequently proven decisive in battles in Ukraine, including during the defense of Kyiv. Additionally, the supply of 4,080 precision guidance kits for the system’s 155 mm shells would allow for accurate targeting of enemy forces with only short bursts of fire, improving platform survivability by limiting exposure and detection time.
The new authorization to sell HIMARS multiple rocket launchers and ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles fired from them seeks to help address shortfalls of force mass. Previous sales, including 29 HIMARS and 84ATACMS, were meaningful, with the latter’s 300 km range providing a conventional precision strike capability against mainland China. Yet the limited numbers counted heavily against Taiwan, given the opposition’s dense air and missile defenses. If fully realized, the additional 82 HIMARS and 420 ATACMS on offer would provide a genuine challenge to the PLA.
Furthermore, the proposed sale of 756 GMLRS unitary rocket pods and 447 GLMRS alternative warhead rocket pods – together holding a total of 7,218 guided rockets with a range of over 70 km – for the HIMARS would allow for the targeting of Chinese forces that made it ashore on Taiwan. In Ukraine, HIMARS-launched munitions have seen their effectiveness degraded by Russian air and missile defenses and electronic warfare efforts, but lessons learned from this experience will doubtless be incorporated in plans for their use in the Western Pacific.
The most classically asymmetric systems authorized for supply are drones – in this case, the ALTIUS-700M loitering munition and ALTIUS-600 ISR UAVs. The 1,050 Javelin and 1,545 TOW anti-armor missiles signed off on, which add to Taiwan’s existing stockpiles, also fall into this category. The list of potential sales is rounded off with support for already-owned Harpoon anti-ship missiles, spare and repair parts for SuperCobra attack helicopters, as well as the purchase of a new communications system.
Three issues arise with these arms package authorizations. The first is financial. Taiwan’s government has pledged to increase defense spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2030 – although it appears only 3.5 percent will be traditional defense expenditure, and even this will now incorporate the costs of things such as the Coast Guard and veteran’s benefits. Part of this budget – including money for this set of purchases – is intended to come in the form of a $40 billion “Special Budget for Strengthening Defense Resilience and Asymmetric Combat Power” the Lai ching-te administration is attempting to pass. However, the China-leaning Kuomintang and its allies are currently blocking the passage of the funding in the Legislative Yuan, and getting cooperation from them will be challenging. That the United States has approved these potential sales by no means guarantees they will go ahead.
The second issue is the delivery timeline. Arms packages for Taiwan authorized in recent years have been subject to notorious delays, in large part due to U.S. industrial capacity constraints. Here, the situation today is more positive: the Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered increased production rates of HIMARS, GMLRS, and Javelins. While this is no guarantee of prompt delivery, it does provide cause for optimism.
However, there are questions as to whether even an expedited timeline will be sufficient. The United States has identified 2027 as the date by which China’s leadership has tasked the PLA with developing the ability to take Taiwan. My book’s case study of what an invasion and U.S. counteraction could look like is set in 2029. While it is not clear that Beijing has any fixed timeline – capability does not equal intent – it is vocal in considering unification with Taiwan as an indispensable part of the “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”
Finally, there is the issue of what isn’t featured in the sales authorization. Shortly after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, it was reported that Taiwan was planning an arms spending spree. Most of the systems mentioned at the time were non-asymmetric, including the F-35 combat aircraft and E-2D airborne early warning and control aircraft. These do not feature in the latest batch of sales authorizations – likely a sign that the administration has warned Taiwan off such procurements in favor of capabilities that are more survivable. The absence of other items, such as additional NASAMS air defense systems that Taiwan reportedly wishes to procure, is more curious, but the most sensible explanation is that these will come in the near future.
None of the above should take away from the fact that despite the absence of a formal U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan, direct U.S. military support would be vital to resisting a sustained assault on the island by the PRC. Even unofficially, that is not locked in. Unlike former President Joe Biden, President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed skepticism over the viability and value of defending Taiwan, and has refused to make any explicit commitments. Tariffs imposed on Taiwan also indicate a lack of sympathy to the island. This leaves a major question mark above U.S. resolve until at least January 20, 2029.
However, leaving that aside, Beijing’s ability to interdict attempts to support the island means that at least for the opening phase of a major war, the forces already in theater would have a critical role. While the U.S. is bolstering its own Indo-Pacific presence, Taiwan’s own armed forces will be indispensable.
Authors
Guest Author
Rowan Allport
Rowan Allport is a deputy director at the Human Security Centre, a London-based foreign policy think tank. He has previously worked as a lobbyist for Whitehouse Communications in Westminster, and as a senior analyst for RAND Europe’s Defence, Security and Infrastructure team. He is the author of the book “War Plan Taiwan: OPLAN 5077 and the U.S. Struggle for the Pacific,” published by the Naval Institute Press.
19. Can Germany Afford to Be Europe’s Protector?
Summary:
Sudha David-Wilp and Liana Fix argue Germany can lead Europe only if it restores economic strength alongside rearmament. Chancellor Friedrich Merz loosened the debt brake to fund unlimited defense outlays and a 500 billion euro infrastructure push, then pledged five percent of GDP for defense by 2035 while backing Ukraine. Abroad, that signals leadership, but at home voters see stagnation, coalition infighting, and uneven reform. Weak growth, China’s industrial pressure, and U.S. tariffs strain Germany’s export model, fueling AfD gains and attacks on a “war economy.” The authors warn Merz must deliver Agenda 2030 reforms, rebuild industry, and trim unsustainable welfare, or Germany’s European role will falter.
Excerpts:
Germany is pro–free trade by default, but it must better coordinate its industrial policy with the rest of the EU to help insulate against the worst effects of U.S. tariffs and Chinese overcapacity by seeking new trading partners and building competitive European producers. And with moribund growth and an aging population, Berlin cannot afford to prop up the country’s current levels of social spending. For Germany to remain economically competitive, it must raise its retirement age to alleviate budgetary pressures. Investment in innovation and future technologies cannot be given short shrift compared with social spending.
Such reforms will not magically make the AfD disappear. In fact, they might make the party stronger in the short term. Like other established Western democracies, Germany now has a far-right party embedded in its political system, chipping away at the mainstream parties. But Merz and his coalition can diminish the AfD’s legitimacy by showing voters that providing for European security and investing in Germany’s defense will also trigger a new era of economic growth and competitiveness. To handle the transatlantic relationship with Trump, deter Russian aggression, address economic pressure from China, and ease worries at home, Germany needs Merz’s centrism, not the AfD’s extremism.
Comment: Economic issues and reforms aside: If Germany becomes the "protector," won't they become like the US and the rest of the nations will then be called "freeloaders" and Germany will then be demanding defense increases from NATO countries, and the cycle just begins again? It seems to me that the bedrock is mutual defense with all contributing to the defense ways that optimize nations' strengths and mitigate weaknesses. But if one is designated the "protector" that creates the same old dynamic of demands for "tribute" because the natural inclination of others is to be a freeloader.
Can Germany Afford to Be Europe’s Protector?
Foreign Affairs · More by Sudha David-Wilp · December 23, 2025
A Stronger Military Requires a Stronger Economy
December 23, 2025
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/can-germany-afford-be-europes-protector
A tank operating in Munich, November 2025 Angelika Warmuth / Reuters
SUDHA DAVID-WILP is Vice President of External Relations and a Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
LIANA FIX is Senior Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University.
Print Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.
Save Sign in and save to read later
Before Friedrich Merz won Germany’s parliamentary elections in February of this year, the country faced a money dilemma: Germany’s economic stagnation required significant reform and investment to revitalize industry, and the United States demanded more spending on collective defense. The budgetary dispute over how to simultaneously address these conflicting priorities had led to the collapse of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government. To avoid the same fate, lawmakers in Merz’s grand coalition, comprising the center-right Christian Democratic Union and the center-left Social Democratic Party, as well as the Greens, agreed to leverage debt to finance its dual obligations. Suddenly, Germany was flush with money.
Seven months in, however, Merz’s government has still been unable to chart a course for economic reform and persuade voters that better days lie ahead. Merz’s bold moves on defense spending have confirmed Germany’s leadership role in Europe but at a cost to his domestic popularity. Merz’s expenditure of significant political capital at international summits to manage U.S. President Donald Trump and defend Ukraine has left him vulnerable to accusations that he is focusing too much on foreign policy and not enough on domestic issues. The right-wing, Russia-friendly Alternative for Germany party (AfD) is channeling economic anxiety to profit in the polls, criticizing Merz’s government for squandering German wealth to build a “war economy.” And although Merz’s efforts on defense have won him praise from the White House, the Trump administration is steadily undermining him by normalizing the AfD and—in the words of the newly released National Security Strategy—other “patriotic European parties.”
Merz’s government does not have much time to hedge against growing discontent within the electorate. Failing to pursue reforms to revitalize and grow Germany’s economy could jeopardize public support for Merz’s centrist coalition. If the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats cede more ground to the AfD, they may also lose their ability to build viable future coalitions. If the grand coalition proves unable to pursue a path of economic reform and growth, it could break up the government prematurely and reverse Germany’s long-awaited leadership role in Europe, to the detriment of U.S. interests.
Angela Merkel, Germany’s former leader and Merz’s chief rival, became chancellor in 2005 by sidelining Merz and other candidates. She then managed to stay in power for 16 years by avoiding potentially disruptive reforms. This is not a formula that Merz can afford to follow.
MONEY MOVES
Merz entered office with a mandate to build up Germany’s defense capabilities and improve its economy. To avoid the guns versus butter debate haunting many European governments, Merz bucked his party’s traditional preference for fiscal discipline and pushed the parliament to loosen Germany’s debt brake. Established in 2009, the brake caps deficit spending at 0.35 percent of GDP. Soon after this year’s federal election, the German parliament amended the debt brake to allow for unlimited deficit spending on defense and avoid significant cuts in areas such as social welfare. Merz also agreed to earmark an unprecedented 500 billion euros to invest in Germany’s crumbling infrastructure.
At the same time, Berlin has sought to fulfill the country’s obligations to European security. During the NATO summit at The Hague in June, Germany pledged to increase spending on defense to five percent by 2035, with 3.5 percent of that covering core defense requirements. Merz has taken advantage of a degree of fiscal flexibility that Germany’s European peers cannot match: France, for example, is already heavily indebted, whereas the debt brake has afforded Germany a more balanced budget and therefore more room to maneuver. Under pressure, too, from Trump, Merz has already announced a massive increase in Germany’s military spending; the country is projected to meet its NATO pledge well ahead of schedule. Germany’s defense budget—projected at 650 billion euros in total over the next five years—is now the largest in the European Union. Approximately 8.5 billion euros per year is earmarked for support for Ukraine.
Merz also helped secure the sale of U.S. weapons to Ukraine after the Trump administration formally ended its military assistance. He worked out a deal with the American president whereby Berlin and other European countries would purchase Patriot missile systems from Washington and send them to Kyiv. In July, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte praised Germany’s leadership and resolve to ensure Europe’s shared security.
DEVIL IN THE DETAILS
Such high marks, however, remain elusive at home. Before entering the chancellery, Merz knew that the efforts he had to make to address security demands and domestic economic challenges could conflict and risked prompting a populist backlash to his agenda. A majority of Germans support increased military spending financed through debt. But many would also like to see the government make debt-financed investments in other priorities, such as industry, pensions, and education.
Germany’s industrial growth has been stagnating since 2019. The German Council of Economic Experts has estimated that the country’s economy will grow by a dismal 0.2 percent in 2025 and 0.6 percent in 2026. Europe’s economic powerhouse is clearly underperforming in comparison with its G-7 peers. Germany’s export-oriented market has also suffered from an influx of inexpensive, state-subsidized high-tech goods from China, which threatens the German auto industry and its millions of jobs. A lack of domestic investment since the adoption of the debt brake in 2009, coupled with Washington’s new tariff regime and Chinese overcapacity, has rendered Germany’s economic model defunct.
Now, with the reform of the debt brake, Merz’s grand coalition has access to sufficient budgetary resources to both increase defense spending and make economic reforms—a position previous governments have not enjoyed. Historically, Germans have opposed deficit spending. Merz’s government is therefore pressed to better justify this change in policy and put its unprecedented additional funds to good use instead of wasting them. Merz is trying to implement an economic reform plan he calls “Agenda 2030,” which includes tax cuts and deregulation as well as some reductions in social welfare benefits. This plan alone, however, has thus far proved inadequate for the scale of Germany’s economic problems. It addresses problems with traditional economic instruments instead of focusing on China’s challenge to German and European industry. In addition, infighting within the coalition over how to spend the 500 billion euro infrastructure fund has raised concerns that coalition members will use deficit spending as a Band-Aid on legacy problems and as a way to service their voter bases rather than create economic opportunities.
Merz has been unable to persuade voters that better days lie ahead.
Failure to deliver has helped the opposition AfD thrive. In 2021, during Merz’s campaign for party leader, he vowed to cut the AfD’s support in half. Today, the AfD enjoys record-high support: a December Forsa Institute poll that asked Germans which party they would vote for showed the AfD above Merz’s conservative camp. Although Germany’s far right supports more defense spending in principle, it opposes financing it through debt and has attacked Merz’s government for relaxing the debt brake. The AfD’s views on defense spending are deeply rooted in a nationalistic conception of German military power outside of constraining institutions such as the EU and NATO.
Putting money on the table for defense has helped Merz manage his relationship with Trump, but members of the U.S. MAGA movement, such as Vice President JD Vance and Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican from Florida, have found common cause with the AfD and are encouraging closer cooperation. This poses a real threat to Merz, who prides himself as a transatlanticist and is trying to keep the postwar German conservative movement’s center of gravity intact against the extremist AfD. Trump’s new National Security Strategy, which officially embraces nationalist conservative parties and even seeks to instigate political change in European countries like Germany, is a further blow to Merz’s efforts.
In the 1980s, Franz Josef Strauss, the legendary chair of the Christian Social Union (the Christian Democrats’ sister party in Bavaria), warned that far-right parties must not be permitted to become the flank of mainstream conservatism. The Christian Social Union should serve as the movement’s outer band. Germany’s political spectrum has since changed, and the AfD is firmly in place as a particularly radical far-right party in Europe. This past May, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution deemed the party extremist. And yet it has become the most successful far-right party in Germany’s history since World War II.
GROWING PAINS
Merz faces a predicament. The dangers of U.S. retrenchment and Russian aggression require increased defense spending and international shuttle diplomacy. The chancellor understands the stakes, and he has tried to make the case that foreign policy and domestic prosperity are interlinked. But as Helmut Kohl, Germany’s chancellor during German reunification, experienced, foreign policy prowess does not guarantee electoral success.
After his first hundred days in office, Merz had become even more unpopular than his predecessor Scholz, who was the first German chancellor in decades to serve a single term. According to a Forsa poll from early December, 76 percent of Germans are dissatisfied with Merz’s performance as chancellor.
Merz may also become the victim of an internal power struggle. Many conservatives are grumbling about dismantling the debt brake. A younger cohort desires reform of the pension system, which the Social Democrats oppose. Moreover, some in Merz’s caucus are not wedded to sustaining the firewall against the AfD and envision cooperation with the far-right party, an idea Merz absolutely rejects.
Despite the conflicting priorities of the center right and the center left, Merz’s coalition is managing to hold together because another snap federal election could bring the AfD closer to power. Even without a snap vote, however, the grand coalition will face a test in German state elections next year. The AfD enjoys solid support across the country and is polling ahead by double digits in some former East German states. If the AfD wins big in the next federal election, centrist coalition building will become even more difficult. Merz’s tenure as well as Germany’s leadership role in Europe could be short-lived.
EVERYTHING IN MODERATION
Undertaking challenging reforms is nothing new for Germany, and it has generally made the country stronger. Forging East and West Germany into one country after the fall of the Berlin Wall brought economic hardship and fostered resentment among former East Germans, who felt like second-class citizens. Anti-immigrant sentiment dogged Germany in the 1990s, requiring policies for integration. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Agenda 2010 tackled loosening the country’s tight labor market and paved a path of economic reform.
Merz must now deliver on his promise for renewal with his Agenda 2030. With more than a trillion euros committed to defense and infrastructure projects over the next four years, Merz has the fiscal means to reboot Germany’s economy and maintain its political center. Germany’s export-led economic model needs to be refashioned to stimulate domestic demand in Germany and Europe. More investments must be made in the defense industrial base to create jobs to replace the ones that Germany’s traditional manufacturers are currently losing because of Chinese exports. The true scope of the Chinese economic threat is only now becoming clear to German leaders.
Failure to deliver has helped the AfD thrive.
Germany is pro–free trade by default, but it must better coordinate its industrial policy with the rest of the EU to help insulate against the worst effects of U.S. tariffs and Chinese overcapacity by seeking new trading partners and building competitive European producers. And with moribund growth and an aging population, Berlin cannot afford to prop up the country’s current levels of social spending. For Germany to remain economically competitive, it must raise its retirement age to alleviate budgetary pressures. Investment in innovation and future technologies cannot be given short shrift compared with social spending.
Such reforms will not magically make the AfD disappear. In fact, they might make the party stronger in the short term. Like other established Western democracies, Germany now has a far-right party embedded in its political system, chipping away at the mainstream parties. But Merz and his coalition can diminish the AfD’s legitimacy by showing voters that providing for European security and investing in Germany’s defense will also trigger a new era of economic growth and competitiveness. To handle the transatlantic relationship with Trump, deter Russian aggression, address economic pressure from China, and ease worries at home, Germany needs Merz’s centrism, not the AfD’s extremism.
Foreign Affairs · More by Sudha David-Wilp · December 23, 2025
20. Gaza’s New Normal: Persistent Limited Conflict Is More Likely Than Peace
Summary:
Dan Byman argues Gaza has settled into a grim equilibrium: major fighting has stopped, aid is flowing more steadily, and a cease-fire that began Oct. 10 has produced large prisoner and hostage exchanges. Yet the political end state is stalled. He expects persistent, limited conflict rather than peace because disarming Hamas and creating a credible alternative government both look implausible. An international stabilization force is central to the plan but politically toxic for Arab partners, operationally risky, and unlikely to materialize. Israel will keep striking to prevent Hamas reconstitution, and Hamas will use violence to enforce control and resist marginalization. As attention fades and U.S. focus drifts, the “yellow line” posture hardens and Gaza’s misery endures.
Excerpt:
As the parade of senior U.S. visitors suggests, the Trump administration is proud of its role in creating a cease-fire and would like to make Gaza a success story. Doing so, however, would require constant pressure and patient diplomacy, neither of which are hallmarks of Trump foreign policy. It would also involve Washington deploying U.S. troops as part of a stabilization force or cajoling capable allies into participating. Trump himself would have to press Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders to withdraw from parts of Gaza, despite the uncertain security situation, and coordinate continued pressure from Arab and Muslim partners on Hamas. Without the headlines generated by war and starvation in Gaza, the administration is unlikely to sustain its efforts. And without such near-constant efforts by the United States, Israel and Hamas are likely to settle into an uneasy relationship that avoids all-out war but is nevertheless characterized by constant conflict, a lack of reconstruction in Gaza, and little or no political progress toward lasting peace.
Gaza’s New Normal
Foreign Affairs · More by Daniel Byman · December 23, 2025
Persistent Limited Conflict Is More Likely Than Peace
DANIEL BYMAN is a Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
December 23, 2025
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/gazas-new-normal
Israeli soldiers in the southern Gaza Strip, December 2025 Nir Elias / Reuters
DANIEL BYMAN is a Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and Director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Print Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.
Save Sign in and save to read later
Gaza has reached a new equilibrium. Unsurprisingly, it is an ugly one. The good news is that the intense fighting is over and humanitarian relief is steadily entering the strip. Since the cease-fire began on October 10, Israel has released almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, and Hamas has returned all living hostages as well as most of the bodies of those killed, in keeping with the Trump administration’s 20-point peace plan. Israel has reopened the Kerem Shalom, Kissufim, and Zikim border crossings and promised to allow 600 trucks per day into Gaza, carrying both aid and commercial goods for sale, which it has begun. The Israel Defense Forces has also withdrawn to a “yellow line” that limits its presence to around 53 percent of the strip, although several of the specific boundaries are disputed.
Plans for a more extensive resolution, however, are stalled, and the relations between Hamas and Israel today are characterized by limited but persistent conflict, not progress toward peace. Israel’s policies, Hamas’s refusal to lose more power, and the Trump administration’s poor attention span are likely to foil the peace proposal’s more ambitious plans for Gaza’s rehabilitation. Fundamentally, further progress depends on the creation of an International Stabilization Force to police Gaza, disarm Hamas, and eventually train a new, vetted, non-Hamas Palestinian police force that would assume control over Gaza. The IDF would then withdraw to 40 percent of the strip and eventually to 15 percent, as local security conditions improved. At the same time, a technocratic and apolitical Palestinian government would emerge to govern Gaza, reporting to what U.S. President Donald Trump has called a “Board of Peace,” which would be officially headed by Trump and run on a day-to-day basis by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank, is supposed to undertake major reforms while preparing to eventually take on a major role in governing the strip.
The United States is making some efforts to move the ball forward. The U.S. military has created a Civil-Military Coordination Center in Israel to monitor the cease-fire and disbursement of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Senior U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and senior adviser (and Trump’s son-in-law) Jared Kushner, have visited Israel in recent weeks to demonstrate the U.S. commitment to the cease-fire agreement. But the vagueness surrounding statements and plans for important next steps to improve security; the Trump administration’s reluctance to take a bigger, more direct role in Gaza’s reconstruction; and the hesitation from potential partners to offer greater support to such efforts all make it less likely that the more aspirational parts of the Trump plan—namely, disarming Hamas and creating a new Palestinian government in Gaza—will be implemented soon, if ever.
Meanwhile, violence persists, leading to the deaths of a number of IDF soldiers and an even larger number of Palestinians, both fighters and civilians. Reports of cease-fire violations are difficult to verify, but the Government Media Office in Gaza, which Hamas controls, claims that Israel has violated the cease-fire agreement at least 282 times; the IDF, for its part, claims that Hamas has violated the agreement 24 times. As this limited fighting continues, 90 percent of the population in Gaza remains displaced, with 1.5 million people needing emergency shelter assistance. Despite Israel’s promise to allow 600 trucks of aid per day to enter Gaza, the United Nations has reported that the daily figure has averaged less than 120. Heavy rainfall and cold weather have added to Gazans’ misery.
This status quo—marked by improvised policies, hasty U.S. efforts to put out fires, and ongoing civilian suffering—may seem unstable. Yet something like the current situation may represent Gaza’s future: limited but persistent violence and mini crises rather than progress toward development, peace, and greater stability.
HOT POTATOES
Establishing a long-term stabilization force is one of the most vital tasks for progress toward peace, but it will also be one of the most difficult. For Israel, such a force is necessary to stop Hamas from returning to power and to oversee the group’s disarmament. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, has assured his cabinet that Israel will hold veto power over which countries are part of the force.
The United States, although it has championed the idea of a stabilization force, has declined to participate. So have other U.S. partners, despite their often supportive rhetoric. Even sympathetic Arab and Muslim states have hesitated, recognizing that on the ground, such a force would suppress Palestinians on behalf of Israel—political poison for their governments, especially if there is no clear path to a Palestinian state that might justify their cooperation with Israel in the short term. Still others seek a UN mandate for the overall effort, which would be difficult to achieve given China and Russia’s opposition, which they are employing to showcase support for Palestinian sovereignty and hostility to U.S. influence in the Middle East. Even if boots could be put on the ground, counterinsurgency is difficult, particularly in an urban environment, and requires aggressive rules of engagement, skilled forces, and a willingness to take casualties—a rare combination in the best of circumstances.
As scrutiny recedes, pressure on both sides to make painful concessions will diminish.
Demilitarizing Gaza and disarming Hamas are similarly challenging tasks. The Trump plan calls for ensuring that Hamas’s weapons are “permanently beyond use” and that, in general, all “military, terror, and offensive infrastructure” is destroyed. Considering how firmly Hamas has resisted disarmament in the past, it is likely to continue to do so in practice, despite its hypothetical acquiescence to the 20-point plan. Ideologically, Hamas sees itself as a resistance organization, and a resistance group without weapons is not credible. More practically, Hamas’s military power preserves its control of Gaza, allowing it to suppress its rivals and protecting it from revenge attacks by its many enemies. Shortly after the cease-fire began, for example, Hamas attacked members of the powerful Doghmush clan—a large family centered primarily in Gaza City that has fought against Hamas and, according to various media outlets, worked with Israel to do so—to ensure that the clan, and other Gazans, knew that Hamas was still in charge.
Outside states are also not eager to reconstruct Gaza. The Trump administration has promoted ambitious visions of what a future Gaza would look like, proposing as one of its 20 points an “economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza . . . by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.” Trump put the onus on “Muslim and Arab nations” to finance the rebuilding of Gaza—which will require an estimated $70 billion. But so far, there has been far more rhetoric than dollars in support of this end. Continued fighting, even if low level, will frighten away investment and reconstruction funds.
Perhaps the biggest difficulty is the unsolved question of who will govern Gaza in the long term. Language about “technocrats” or a “reformed” Palestinian Authority masks the reality that there is currently no obvious or even plausible alternative to Hamas rule or direct Israeli military occupation, the two realities in Gaza today. Hamas has already begun repairing its damaged reputation among Gazans simply by being the only credible force that can provide basic law and order. And to avoid being bypassed by Israel or shot at by Hamas, any future government will need to be acceptable to both, a feat currently hard to fathom. Without such a government and competent security force in place, Israel will continue to feel the need to strike Gaza to prevent Hamas from rebuilding.
NOBODY WANTS THIS
Israel does not seek a return to full-scale fighting. As the war dragged on, Israel’s military operations suffered diminishing returns, a problem compounded by the accumulating damage to its international reputation. The costs to Israeli society also grew as the war disrupted the country’s economy and imposed an unequal burden on families, given the exemptions from conscription that ultra-Orthodox and Israeli Arab communities historically enjoyed. Now, renewed fighting would risk angering Trump, if he blamed Israel for the collapse of one of his signature achievements. Most Israelis have thus welcomed the cease-fire.
But Israelis remain unwilling to accept Hamas leadership in Gaza, both out of a fear that the events of October 7, 2023, will be repeated and a broader anger at the militant group for the devastation and humiliation the attack wrought on Israel. Right-wing Israeli leaders oppose any deal that benefits the Palestinians in general, believing that Palestinians should not “win” in any way because of October 7. And Israelis are broadly suspicious of the Palestinian Authority. At an operational level, this means Israel would be hesitant to pass off security to an International Stabilization Force, let alone Palestinian forces, unless it were fully confident that the force would suppress Hamas—a confidence that may never come. Although these Israeli attitudes may not prompt the resumption of outright war, they are likely to lead to regular Israeli strikes on Gaza in the future. If Hamas openly consolidates power in parts of Gaza, it is plausible that Israel would try to kill the Hamas leaders who emerged, to ensure the group remained on its back foot.
Hamas, like Israel, does not want a return to full-scale fighting, but it, too, has strong incentives to carry out limited acts of violence. The brutal war following October 7 left much of Hamas’s leadership dead and its command and control weakened. Hamas’s particular excuses for the recent attacks on the IDF may be plausible, as local commanders may at times strike on their own. But the organization will almost certainly continue to use violence to put down those that defy its rule and may at times attack Israeli forces, either out of a desire for revenge or to send a message to its supporters that it remains strong enough to resist Israel.
When the time comes to implement the aspects of the Trump plan that would greatly weaken Hamas’s power and destroy it as a political actor, Hamas is also likely to violently resist, both for ideological reasons, given that it still seeks to control Gaza and the Palestinian national movement, and out of fear that rival Palestinians would take revenge if Hamas could not defend itself. Hamas attacks on the IDF and the inevitable massive Israeli response would, in turn, discredit any technocratic or Palestinian Authority government, revealing its inability to protect Gazans and making it more likely that such a government would be seen as a collaborator. This would be a political win for Hamas even if its leaders, and Gazans in general, suffered from the Israeli retaliation.
NOT GONE BUT FORGOTTEN
Today, Israeli forces vigilantly patrol the yellow line laid out by the cease-fire, shooting at Gazans who try to cross it—killing dozens—and building physical barriers with concrete blocks to mark it. It is easy to see how such a temporary line could become semipermanent. Amid this reality, some U.S. efforts to promote reconstruction have already been dashed. In November, for example, the United States tried to create “Alternative Safe Communities” where Israeli-vetted Palestinians could live on the Israeli side of the separation line in Gaza. But this proposal stalled almost immediately in the face of difficult questions about whether Palestinians in these communities could cross freely between parts of the strip respectively controlled by Israel and Hamas. The effort, which remains in limbo, is a warning that even seemingly benign proposals have political consequences that one or both sides might oppose.
Over time, international attention to Gaza will fade, particularly if limited violence does not become massive and if the humanitarian situation is miserable rather than catastrophic. As scrutiny recedes, pressure on both sides to make painful concessions will diminish, and Israel will face lower potential diplomatic costs for military strikes.
As the parade of senior U.S. visitors suggests, the Trump administration is proud of its role in creating a cease-fire and would like to make Gaza a success story. Doing so, however, would require constant pressure and patient diplomacy, neither of which are hallmarks of Trump foreign policy. It would also involve Washington deploying U.S. troops as part of a stabilization force or cajoling capable allies into participating. Trump himself would have to press Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders to withdraw from parts of Gaza, despite the uncertain security situation, and coordinate continued pressure from Arab and Muslim partners on Hamas. Without the headlines generated by war and starvation in Gaza, the administration is unlikely to sustain its efforts. And without such near-constant efforts by the United States, Israel and Hamas are likely to settle into an uneasy relationship that avoids all-out war but is nevertheless characterized by constant conflict, a lack of reconstruction in Gaza, and little or no political progress toward lasting peace.
Foreign Affairs · More by Daniel Byman · December 23, 2025
21. The One Chart That Explains Everything (AI)
Summary:
Howard Yu argues one chart captures the AI mood gap: an Ipsos scatter plot with “excitement” on one axis and “nervousness” on the other. The U.S. and Western Europe cluster as anxious, while China and parts of Asia cluster as optimistic. Yu says the difference is not model quality. It is social contract. In the U.S., decades of inequality and platform “rent extraction” make new technology feel like another round of displacement and mistrust, not shared uplift. In China, visible state-driven building and a belief that government can curb corporate excess make progress feel tangible, even if work is harsh. AI attitudes, he concludes, are a referendum on whether ordinary people feel invited into the future.
Comment: It goes without saying: We have to get AI right. Graphic at the link.
The One Chart That Explains Everything
And the seven books that make sense of America's AI Anxiety and China's AI Optimism
Howard Yu
Dec 23, 2025
https://howardyu.substack.com/p/the-one-chart-that-explains-everything?utm
If one chart captures the global mood as the holidays arrive, it isn’t a stock index, an inflation line, or a defense budget.
Here is a scatter plot mapping the world’s emotional response to artificial intelligence.
Source: Ipsos AI Monitor (APAC)
On the X-axis, you have excitement; on the Y-axis, nervousness. The world splits into two distinct clusters.
You have the United States and much of Western Europe in one cluster: wary, anxious, bracing for impact. In the other, China and its Asian neighbors: optimistic, eager, racing to adopt.
This divergence made no sense to me for the longest time. Why would the United States, birthplace of the silicon chip and home of OpenAI, Google, and the modern internet, be the most terrified of its own creation?
Why would China, a nation the West sees as rigidly controlled, be the most buoyant amid technological chaos?
I couldn’t understand it until I started reading.
My own collection
Seven books I binged this year finally gave me the answer. They took me from factory floors in Shenzhen to a designer’s desk in Spain, from an Amazon merchant lost in the maze to a Beijing delivery driver chasing hope. In their lives, I saw what the scatter plot never could: two worlds, the same technology, and utterly opposite dreams.
The answer has nothing to do with benchmarks, parameters, or whether the next model hallucinates less. What matters are the stories societies tell themselves about work, worth, and who gets to win.
When people answer the question, “How do you feel about AI?”, they aren’t talking about software.
They are asking: when this wave hits, who does it lift?
Progress and its Discontents
History reminds us that progress is not automatic, and it certainly does not trickle down.
MIT economists and Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson comb through a thousand years of technological change in their book Power and Progress.
The conclusion they reach is unforgiving: most innovation has made a small group of people fabulously rich, while leaving everyone else behind.
In medieval Europe, better plows boosted harvests. Lords got richer; peasants did not. During the early Industrial Revolution, textile machines transformed productivity. Factory owners built estates; workers died in slums.
There is one glaring exception: the mid-20th century. But shared prosperity wasn’t the natural outcome. It was fought for with unions, strikes, and policy battles.
That brings us to today. Each new AI tool promises efficiency while erasing the bottom rung of the career ladder. No junior analysts, no first-year associates, no training ground at all. Gen Z may be wrong about the details, but they are right about the feeling. The game feels rigged.
Acemoglu and Johnson throw in one hopeful example. In the 1970s, ATMs arrived, and everyone predicted the death of the bank teller. The opposite happened: teller numbers grew. Why? Because machines took over the dull work, like counting cash, and freed tellers to become financial advisors, relationship builders, and problem solvers. The job got better.
Then there’s the other path.
I thought about this last autumn, standing in an Amazon Go store. The technology was flawless. Cameras tracked my move. Algorithms calculated my bill. No lines, no cashiers, no friction, and also no people. Just me, alone, in a perfectly optimized box.
Acemoglu and Johnson call this “so-so automation.”
Technology that displaces workers without meaningfully improving anyone’s life.
It’s capital-intensive, soul-crushing, and highly profitable.
Here’s the choice. One path treats technology as human augmentation. The other treats it as profit extraction. The trend is unmistakable. Since the 1980s, America’s top 10% have pulled sharply away from the median. For low-income men, real earnings have fallen, with lower pay and fewer hours worked.
That’s why when Americans look at AI, they aren’t asking, “What can this technology do?” They are asking, “Who’s going to rob me this time?”
When Tech Breaks Trust
In 2014, a barber from East Lansing, Michigan, named Douglas Mrdeza started selling hair products on Amazon. The fees were reasonable: about 19 cents on every dollar. He was grateful for the traffic.
By 2017, Amazon’s cut had climbed to 26%; by 2018, 30%. Mrdeza didn’t panic. He scaled. He hired forty employees and leased four warehouses. His company, Top Shelf Brands, hit $25 million in annual revenue and landed on Inc. Magazine’s list of America’s fastest-growing private companies.
Then he opened his seller dashboard and did the math. Amazon was now taking 46 cents of every dollar he earned. After paying suppliers, only 13 cents remained to cover employees, rent, insurance, and everything else. Top Shelf Brands was bleeding red.
Source: Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local Self-Reliance
By 2022, Top Shelf Brands filed for bankruptcy. But here is what makes my jaw drop.
Mrdeza couldn’t even escape by selling cheaper on his own website. Amazon forbade it. They used algorithms to surveil off-platform prices. If you sold a bottle of shampoo for $1 less on Walmart.com or on your own site, Amazon punished you. Your search ranking tanked. Your “Buy Box” vanished.
This is the playbook Cory Doctorow calls Enshittification.
- Seduce: Be generous. Subsidize users. (In 2014, Amazon took only 19%.)
- Lock-in: Become essential. Make leaving painful.
- Squeeze: Raise fees, degrade service, extract rent.
- Defend: Build moats so high that competition dies in the desert.
Amazon ran this playbook. So did Facebook. “Trust us with your data.” Then came the micro-targeting. “Trust us with your news.” Then came the rage-bait algorithms. “Trust us with your attention.” Then came the infinite scroll, engineered by the same psychology that designs slot machines.
We know the platform is degrading. We know the ads are multiplying. And yet, “we can’t leave,” Doctorow admits. Our friends are there. Our customers are there. Our photos, our history, our identity.
I’m not here to call Amazon evil. Maybe this is just efficient capitalism doing its job. But when people watch enough scrappy startups transform into rent-seeking empires, trust erodes.
Once trust collapses, every innovation arrives pre-loaded with suspicion.
Every “We’re here to help” sounds like a con.
So, when AI arrives—the most powerful technology since electricity—the average American doesn’t feel wonder. They think, “Here we go again.”
The Coming Unbundling
By now, the dread had set in. Still, I didn’t grasp how trapped even the tech giants feel until I cracked open Sangeet Paul Choudary’s Reshuffle.
Choudary’s core idea is deceptively simple: AI isn’t just a faster tool or a smarter assistant. You should think of it like a solvent. It dissolves the glue that holds companies together. His most unsettling case is Shein, the Chinese fast-fashion company that seemed to materialize out of thin air.
Here’s what Shein does. Forget the old model: designers sketching collections in a loft, buyers flying to Milan, warehouses stuffed with unsold inventory.
Instead, Shein monitors real-time search data and TikTok feeds to spot micro-trends the moment they pop up. Then it fragments the work among thousands of small suppliers who crank out clothing in batches of fifty, sometimes twenty. An AI-driven system orchestrates who makes what, routing orders like air traffic control. The right designs hit Shein’s app at lightning speed. Popular items get reordered within days. The flops vanish.
The result? A $66 billion company built overnight.
According to a recent survey, 64% of professionals feel overwhelmed by how quickly work is changing, and 68% are looking for more support to keep up. If you enjoyed this article and it brought you clarity, could I ask a quick favor?
Subscribe now. It’s free and takes just seconds to sign up.
You’ll join tens of thousands of other ambitious managers and CEOs receiving exclusive, research-backed insights delivered straight to their inboxes. Let’s keep you one inch ahead.
From a business perspective, it’s terrifyingly brilliant. If brands like Zara, H&M, Adidas, and Nike want a future, they’ll have to imitate parts of Shein’s playbook.
But what happens to the people who used to hold those jobs? The fashion buyers, the merchandisers, the retail planners, even the designers.
In Shein’s model, expertise is splintered across a network so diffuse that no single worker is vital. The system doesn’t make designers more productive, the role of “designer” has been rendered irrelevant.
A job used to be a whole, but AI turns it into tasks.
Tasks get routed. Routed work gets commoditized.
Choudary warns this is the future of knowledge work. AI breaks a job that once belonged to one person into a hundred tasks, coordinated by an algorithm. The spoils go to the platform owners. The professionals? The knowledge workers? They become interchangeable parts. That includes coders at Google, scientists at Pfizer, and even (God forbid!) professors at business schools.
“The value of higher productivity hasn’t flowed to the workers,” Choudary writes. “It is captured almost entirely by aggregators.”
If you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you have no choice but to embrace this “reshuffle,” even if it means gutting your own organization before someone else does. Refuse, and your board will find another CEO who is willing to make the change.
I closed the book and just sat there for a while. If you’re feeling vertigo at this point, you’re not alone.
What happens to the people left behind?
The Teenager Who Almost Jumped
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” In The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong takes us to a decaying New England town to meet Hai.
Hai is nineteen. A college dropout and recovering addict, he spends his days wiping down tables at a Boston Market-style restaurant, the smell of artificial gravy clinging to his skin. One summer evening, he stands on the edge of a bridge. He is ready to jump.
He’s trapped in a place with no jobs, no prospects, no way out. He lies to his mother that he’s going away to college because the truth, that he’s ladling gravy for minimum wage, would break her heart. He’s stuck in the “low-wage service sector,” the very sector economists cheerfully tell us is the future of American employment.
Fear is what happens when you stop believing society will catch you.
Hai is saved. Not by a government program, not by a tech startup, and certainly not by AI. He’s saved by Grazina, an 82-year-old widow with dementia.
An accidental bond forms between these two lonely souls discarded by the “efficient” market. He becomes her caretaker. In washing Grazina’s soiled clothes, listening to her fragmented memories of Lithuania, and holding her fragile hand as she falls asleep, Hai finds a reason to exist.
He finds redemption, but he does not find economic progress. This is the tragedy haunting the American scatter plot. For a huge segment of the population, dignity is now divorced from the economy. Hai finds meaning, but he is still poor, still stuck, no matter how hard he tries.
Vuong leaves us with a lingering question: is a society successful if it creates trillion-dollar companies but leaves its children so hopeless they want to die in a Boston Market parking lot?
And if this is the emotional baseline of the Anglosphere—progress without protection, innovation without trust—then nervousness on that chart makes perfect sense.
Now, spin the globe. If you look across the Pacific, the mood shifts instantly. Why is China so excited?
The Engineering State
Let’s stop asking, “Who has the best AI?” and instead we’ll ask, “Where does progress feel visible?”
Dan Wang’s book Breakneck argues that China behaves like an Engineering State—relentlessly building—while the U.S. behaves like a Lawyer Society—endlessly debating. Whether you agree or not, it’s a powerful lens.
In 2008, California approved a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. That same year, China broke ground on the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed railway.
Sixteen years later, California’s train is still trapped in lawsuits and environmental reviews. Not a single passenger has boarded. China’s line was finished in three years. Today, it moves millions of people a day at 217 mph between the nation’s two biggest cities.
While California argued over paperwork, China poured concrete.
Bridges in Guizhou turn four-hour drives into twenty-minute glides. Power lines drag wind energy from Xinjiang to Shenzhen.
The smog in Beijing, once gray and choking, has cleared thanks to an aggressive shift to EVs and nuclear power.
For the average Chinese citizen, “technology” is the reason they can visit their parents for the weekend. It’s the reason they can book a doctor on WeChat in seconds. The excitement on that survey chart comes from this tangible reality. Progress is concrete. It’s steel; it’s speed. You can see it, touch it, ride it. It breeds a public expectation that the future is being built, and I’ll get a piece of it, even if I’m not one of the elites.
But how did China get so good so fast? Apple in China by Patrick McGee reveals an irony: American capitalism taught them how.
For decades, U.S. companies outsourced to China to cut costs. Apple was the master. Through ruthless demands and on-site engineering, Apple trained a generation of Chinese factories to meet impossible standards. Think of the unibody aluminum MacBook. The unbreakable Gorilla Glass. Those seams so perfect you can glide a fingernail across and feel nothing. Apple became a trillion-dollar company on the back of Chinese suppliers, achieving cost structures and margins it could only dream of if it kept manufacturing in California.
Those capabilities didn’t stay locked inside Apple. Once a supplier can build the impossible for Tim Cook, building for everyone else is easy. Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo: China is simply turning that hard-won manufacturing wizardry into world-class smartphones and gadgets of their own.
Then came Tesla. Elon Musk built the Shanghai Gigafactory in under a year, from muddy field to rolling cars. Tesla singlehandedly provided a template for speed and scale that local EV makers gawked at. Before long, companies like BYD, Xpeng, and Li Auto were cranking out competitive electric cars, powered by that shared knowledge of how to get things done fast.
China’s optimism is largely a lived experience.
It is waking up to new skylines, new trains and bridges, and new gadgets in your hand.
The Courier’s Reality
But this isn’t a utopia. I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan brings us back down to earth.
Hu is the Chinese counterpart to Ocean Vuong’s Hai. He is a gig worker, a courier in the relentless machine of Chinese e-commerce. His story is a catalog of humiliations: arbitrary fines from the delivery app, brutal 14-hour days, customers who treat him like he’s invisible.
He writes about the “algorithms of control.” The app barks orders, telling him which alley to turn down, exactly how many seconds to make the drop. If he’s 60 seconds late (ping!), money is deducted from his account. It is the “Shein-ification” of logistics.
And yet... there is a difference. Unlike Hai, who feels trapped in a dead end, Hu feels like part of a rising tide. There is a frenetic energy to his struggle. He has worked 19 different jobs across six cities over two decades. He’s always hustling, always convinced that there’s an angle to work, a ladder to climb. Shenzhen burns you out? Try your luck in Chengdu. Didn’t find your fortune in e-commerce? Maybe a solar panel factory boomtown will suit you better.
It’s a brutal sort of optimism, perhaps, but it is optimism, nonetheless. Hu is suffering, but he’s suffering in a system that’s moving.
Crucially, the Chinese state isn’t shy about cracking the whip on the winners. In China, nothing is too big to rein in, nothing too big to jail. Remember when Alibaba’s finance arm, Ant Group, was about to launch the biggest IPO in history?
The government slammed on the brakes, effectively saying, “Not so fast.“ Jack Ma, once China’s most flamboyant billionaire, disappeared from public view. The message didn’t need explaining: no tech company stands above the state. If a trillion-dollar company starts to threaten shared prosperity, it can be cut down to size.
For many Chinese people who came from the countryside to work in the megacities, that was reassuring.
No corporation is invincible. No CEO is untouchable.
Once I saw all this, that original U.S.–China AI attitude chart stopped being a mystery. When people feel like their society is on an upward trajectory, they welcome an accelerant like AI. When people feel stuck or cheated, they fear the shake-up.
This isn’t an argument for China’s system. But it does explain how different systems make people feel about the future.
The Referendum on Feeling Invited
When I look back at the year through these seven books, I stop thinking about technological rivalry. Beneath it all, something far more consequential is at stake: a rivalry of social contracts.
- In one social contract, call it the American one, people assume progress will be captured by a few, while everyone else is told to “reskill” on their own dime and do it fast, on a runway that is already on fire.
- In the U.S., too many people open the same apps and reach the same conclusion: we are being monetized. They have seen this movie before. They know who gets rich in the end.
- In the other social contract, the Chinese may not enjoy Western-style political freedoms, but they do see a state that can still build for the masses, one that is willing to yank the leash when private power runs too far ahead.
- There is a lived belief that the gains of progress might reach regular people, or at least that the government will not let tycoons run completely amok.
That difference, the belief about who captures the value of progress, shows up as fear or excitement long before anyone fully understands a new technology. It’s a referendum on whether people feel invited into the future or not.
So, if you’re a business leader reading this, let’s not just ask “How do we adopt AI faster?” We must also consider, “How do we deploy AI in a way that makes people believe the future includes them?”
Because no one can market their way out of deep distrust.
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
| 
