Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.”

– Joanne Harris, Runemarks

“It was badly received by the generation to which it was first addressed, and the outpouring of angry nonsense to which it gave rise is sad to think upon. But the present generation will probably behave just as badly if another Darwin should arise, and inflict upon them that which the generality of mankind most hate—the necessity of revising their convictions. Let them, then, be charitable to us ancients; and if they behave no better than the men of my day to some new benefactor, let them recollect that, after all, our wrath did not come to much, and vented itself chiefly in the bad language of sanctimonious scolds. Let them as speedily perform a strategic right-about-face, and follow the truth wherever it leads.”

– Thomas Henry Huxley

“If you don't have a righteous objective,eventually you will suffer. When you do the right thing for the right reason,the right result awaits.”

– Chin-Ning Chu

1. A short review of something you don't need to read - “Why the US is Losing the Cognitive Competition.”

2. Trump Discloses Christmas Day Strike Against ISIS in Nigeria

3. U.S. Strikes ISIS in Nigeria After Trump Warned of Attacks on Christians

4. Coast Guard Tracks Down Runaway Oil Tanker Linked to Iran and Venezuela

5. China Sanctions Boeing, Other U.S. Companies Over Taiwan Arms Sale

6. China may see full attack as best unification option: Pentagon

7. Container Ship Turned Missile Battery Spotted in China

8. Why has Beijing turned down the heat in the Taiwan Strait in the second half of 2025?

9. Trump’s Inner Circle Sees Russia as an El Dorado for Business, but Pitfalls Abound

10. F3EAD: SOF Specific Targeting in the Intelligence Cycle

11. Trump’s military restraint on Venezuela: power play with eye on China or weakness?

12. Opinion | Hamas Is Loving Its Revival

13. 5 Biggest Military Mistakes Donald Trump Could Make in 2026

14. All hail the Panama Canal, a frontline in the US-China trade war

15. The Geopolitical Logic for Latin American Intervention

16. Japan Accelerates Defense Buildup With Record Budget and Expanded Unmanned Capabilities

17. How China Carved Up Myanmar

18. How to Secure the Sky: America Needs a Defense Against Drones

19. 2026: The mother of all battles by Maria Ressa

1. A short review of something you don't need to read - “Why the US is Losing the Cognitive Competition.”

Summary:

Matt Armstrong’s abbreviated review argues the “cognitive warfare” article he critiques is thin, ahistorical, and trapped in a recurring genre error: it treats “cognitive competition” as a military problem and offers tactical fixes while ignoring the broader political, economic, cultural, and administrative levers adversaries use. Armstrong says defining the challenge as a subset of irregular warfare invites a Pentagon-centric approach that concedes the initiative, because influence contests occur before, and often instead of, military action. He criticizes the article’s call for SOF to lead, its neglect of existing capabilities like Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs, and its misuse of Kennedy-era references. His bottom line is a leadership and strategy failure, not a budget or structure gap.

Comment: Matt Armstong is an excellent scholar and one of our nation's foremost authorities on everything surrounding psychological warfare to public diplomacy. One thing that I find most consistent about his research and critiques is that he recognizes the critical importance of leadership and strategy, but leadership first (and second, and third). And yes, I am guilty of misusing JFK's quotes.

As an aside I think we need to bring back (or try again with) the Freedom Academy (referenced below). Interestingly Asha Rangappa teaches an online course call the Freedom Academy

The Freedom Academy with Asha Rangappa

https://asharangappa.substack.com/

And lastly, but most importantly, we should all read (and re-read ) and save for posterity (and future use) the excerpt called "The Kinds of Education Need for Effective Leadership." Since it is an image that may not come through in the email, please go to the link below to read it.

A short review of something you don't need to read

I read it so you don't have to

Matt Armstrong

Dec 26, 2025

https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/a-short-review-of-something-you-dont?utm

Below is an abbreviated review of a recent article titled, “Why the US is Losing the Cognitive Competition.” In the general genre of “cognitive warfare” and related literature, it’s not terrible, provided you don’t read too closely or possess any historical knowledge of the subject. Bottom line: the article lacked substance. This brief review is published solely because the piece served as a prompt for a broader discussion on “cognitive warfare” in a separate post.

Typical of the genre—whether labeled “cognitive warfare,” “information warfare,” or “bring back USIA”—this article offers reactive, tactical prescriptions while neglecting the broader strategic picture. By failing to engage with the full socio-political and economic spectrum our adversaries target, the author effectively surrenders the initiative. This oversight grants the enemy a strategic monopoly, leaving their primary avenues of approach entirely uncontested.

For example, the introduction of “Why the US is Losing the Cognitive Competition” is striking—not for its insight, but for its profound failure to grasp historical precedent or the full extent of adversarial doctrine and actions.

In order for the US to successfully compete for global influence against its adversaries and to avoid a kinetic fight, we must excel at cognitive warfare; that is military activities designed to affect attitudes and behaviors. This type of warfare is a subset of irregular warfare (IW) and combines sensitive activities to include information operations, cyber, and psychological operations to meet a goal.

Defining “cognitive warfare” as a military activity is virtually akin to straightening picture frames while the house is burning. The competition for “global influence” takes place before military forces, irregular or regular, are engaged, or instead of military force.

The glaring absence of any acknowledgement that “cognitive warfare” is fundamentally about employing means other than military force to achieve political objectives, including undermining an adversary’s willingness and ability to deploy military countermeasures, is stunning.

Though the author made fleeting references to China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Confucius Institutes, these token acknowledgements only highlight the article’s myopia. The glaring absence of the broader economic, resource, cultural, and political dynamics—including, for example, buying an insurance company—that are actually involved in the normal course of waging what the author and others attempt to label as “cognitive warfare” results in proposed solutions that are incomplete and fundamentally flawed.

While it is absurd to suggest the author of “Why the US is Losing the Cognitive Competition” intends for the Pentagon to take over or otherwise oversee the diplomacy, trade, public communications, and the gamut of scientific, cultural, and educational collaborations conducted by the United States government, what other conclusion is possible? Because text fails to frame military action as a subset of a larger national policy, it implicitly argues that the military should become the sole proprietor of US global engagement. The author argued that Special Operations Forces should lead the nation’s response to “cognitive warfare” because SOF members are the military’s “most creative members.”

This absurdity highlights a systemic failure common to this article and the broader genre: the inability to situate the military within a larger national strategy. Preventing a kinetic fight demands instruments far beyond the Department of Defense. The reality is stark: if the military is tasked with leading the defense against “cognitive warfare,” the adversary has already seized the initiative.

For example, the author wrote, “Russia uses IW to attempt to ensure the battle is won before military operations begin and to enhance its conventional forces.” Placing the Defense Department in charge of preemptively denying or reactively reducing Russian “IW” requires a substantial redelegation of authorities among executive departments and agencies.

Like so many others, this article tries to solve a leadership problem by offering tactical band-aids for a failure of strategic leadership. “US architects,” the author wrote, “of [Information Warfare] seem to primarily focus on oversight structures and budget, and less on how to develop an enduring capability.”

The omission of this context is not merely an oversight; it is symptomatic of a pervasive, decades-long myopia within the national security community, including schools, analysts, and policymakers.

The attention on SOF even comes up short. As I pointed out in “Cognitive Warfare Fails the Cognitive Test,” the silence in not calling for Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs troops and Foreign Area officers is deafening. Perhaps, in the author’s view, these fall under the “HUMINT [human intelligence] experts,” but that’s unlikely based on the context, suggests the intelligence community would provide the “regional experts [to] equip SOF operators with the nuanced understanding required to navigate the complexities that make up the ‘prior to bang’ playing field.” In a glaring omission, the author overlooks existing forces, despite calling for the capabilities they possess: “We need expertise to be able to decipher the stories, motives, and aspirations that make cognitive warfare unique.”

The author’s invocation of the Kennedy Administration betrays a shallow grasp of history—a misunderstanding likely born of received wisdom rather than individual ignorance. A review of the 1962 record reveals that the Kennedy White House actively resisted the notion that Russian and Chinese political warfare demanded a preemptive, holistic response. Rather than neutralizing these threats at the root, the administration’s policy effectively allowed problems to metastasize, responding only then with sporadic covert actions. By that point, the struggle for minds and wills had already been lost. Consequently, the military was deployed not as a preventative force, but as a reactive cleanup crew for a crisis that political inaction had allowed to fester.

This historical amnesia traps us in a strategic Groundhog Day, with a crucial distinction: we are unknowingly re-litigating old arguments, blind to the reasons they failed before. Paradoxically, we would be better served by excavating proposals from six and seven decades ago—many of which require only the barest tweaks to address modern challenges.

In short, our adversaries are flanking the US security architecture—a military-centric Maginot Line built by a leadership class that historically fails to grasp the spectrum of modern conflict.

Some years ago, the US Army recognized the issues at work today:

It is necessary to remember, in the first place, that this war is not one that is being fought by the military forces alone. There are economic, psychologic, social, political and even literary forces engaged, and it is necessary for us in order to defeat the enemy, to understand fully the strength of each. Nor can the investigation stop with the forces of the enemy: it must extend to each country in the world and to every people. The question of winning the war is far too complicated and far too delicate to be answered by a study of only the powers and resources of the nations in arms.

The author pointed to an instance of Presidential leadership, but the critical context is ignored. In 1962, President Kennedy did say to West Point graduates that there was “another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin,” which would require “a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force,” and that these forces “are too unconventional to be called conventional forces.” The author did not accurately quote Kennedy, however. Instead, they reordered and mashed together what he said. Here is what Kennedy said (the bold is the author’s source for their mashup):

To cite one final example of the range of responsibilities that will fall upon you: you may hold a position of command with our special forces, forces which are too unconventional to be called conventional, forces which are growing in number and importance and significance, for we now know that it is wholly misleading to call this “the nuclear age,” or to say that our security rests only on the doctrine of massive retaliation.

Korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the Second World War. Men have fought and died in Malaya, in Greece, in the Philippines, in Algeria and Cuba and Cyprus, and almost continuously on the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. No nuclear weapons have been fired. No massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate. This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin--war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been strangely called “wars of liberation,” to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.

But I have spoken thus far only of the military challenges which your education must prepare you for. The nonmilitary problems which you will face will also be most demanding, diplomatic, political, and economic…

Above all, you will have a responsibility to deter war as well as to fight it. For the basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible of a final military solution. While we will long require the services and admire the dedication and commitment of the fighting men of this country, neither our strategy nor our psychology as a nation, and certainly not our economy, must become permanently dependent upon an ever-increasing military establishment…

It is crucial to acknowledge that Kennedy was focused on conflicts that turned hot and a military-based response. He was not discussing a whole-of-government response to “cognitive warfare.” The venue dictated his framing. Kennedy was addressing a military audience at a military facility to inaugurate a school dedicated to military solutions. By stripping away this context, the author misrepresents the scope and intent of the President's words.

Even then, the “type of war” was not new. The US recognized for the prior fifteen years that the Soviet Union—and then China—were waging a sustained campaign of political warfare against the interests of the US and allies. The reference to Kennedy is consistent with the author’s framework, precisely because it is limited to the military and intelligence communities, excluding broader societal and governmental levers.

The snippet below from a much longer discussion on “Military Cold War Education” in May 1962 could seem to buttress the author’s claims above. It doesn’t, however, and not just because of the explicit focus on the military here. At the same time, the Kennedy administration was actively opposing “widening the scope” of training for non-military foreign affairs personnel, a proposal then referred to as the Freedom Academy. Strangely, this program—introduced years prior—had been effectively stiff-armed by the Eisenhower administration, dismissed as a mere distraction. Under Kennedy, however, this rejection escalated. The State Department went so far as to lie, falsely claiming it already provided the training that the proposed Freedom Academy would offer. The most remarkable aspect of this saga is not that the effort existed, but that it has been completely erased from memory. This collective amnesia is baffling, given that the initiative enjoyed significant public backing and years of consistent, favorable coverage on the front pages and editorial sections of the nation’s press. That discuss is for another time.

Snippet of testimony from Lieutenant Colonel Samuel V. Wilson before a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, May 16, 1962.

2. Trump Discloses Christmas Day Strike Against ISIS in Nigeria

Summary:

POTUS disclosed that the U.S. conducted Christmas Day strikes against Islamic State targets in northwest Nigeria, framing the action as protection for Nigeria’s Christian population amid rising sectarian violence. A Defense Department/War Department official said Nigeria’s government approved the operation and worked with U.S. forces. U.S. Africa Command stated the strike hit known ISIS camps using intelligence shared by U.S. and Nigerian forces, but no casualty or battle-damage details were released. Defense/War Secretary Pete Hegseth reinforced the message that killings of Christians must end. The strike follows POTUS’s earlier warning of possible “guns-a-blazing” action and threats to halt aid, alongside reinstating Nigeria’s “country of particular concern” designation.

Trump Discloses Christmas Day Strike Against ISIS in Nigeria

WSJ

President previously said he would move to protect country’s Christian population

By Sadie Gurman

Follow and Lara Seligman

Updated Dec. 25, 2025 8:48 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/trump-announces-christmas-day-strike-against-isis-in-nigeria-5881a344?mod=hp_lead_pos1

President Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida on Wednesday. Alex Brandon/AP

“The United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight there was.”

The strike comes after Trump said last month that he had instructed the Pentagon to prepare for possible military action in Nigeria. The U.S. could go in “guns-a-blazing” with the goal of wiping out Islamist militants in the country, he said.

Trump also threatened to halt all aid and assistance to the country if it “continues to allow the killing of Christians.”

A Defense Department official said Nigeria’s government approved the Christmas Day strikes and worked with the U.S. to carry them out. Trump’s post offered no further details about the action, including how many people were killed.

“The President was clear last month: the killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria (and elsewhere) must end,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted on X after Trump’s announcement.

U.S. Africa Command, which conducted the strike, said it was directed at militants “in known ISIS camps in Nigeria” and used intelligence from U.S. and Nigerian forces.

Nigeria has a population of 237 million people, roughly split between Muslims, who are predominant in the north, and Christians. Violence against Christians has escalated in northern Nigeria during the past decade, as Islamic extremists such as Boko Haram wage an insurgency against the country’s secular government and expand their influence in the region.

Trump’s base within the U.S. Christian political right has been calling for America to take action against the killings of Christians in Nigeria, including by reinstating Nigeria’s designation as a “country of particular concern,” which Trump also did last month.

Some activists have referred to the killings as a “Christian genocide,” though the White House hasn’t used that language. Nigerian officials have said the strife is more complicated than that.

Write to Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com and Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com

Appeared in the December 26, 2025, print edition as 'U.S. Strikes Islamic State Targets in Nigeria'.

3. U.S. Strikes ISIS in Nigeria After Trump Warned of Attacks on Christians

Summary:

POTUS announced U.S. strikes on ISIS targets in northwest Nigeria after ordering the Defense/War Department in November to prepare options to protect Christians from Islamist violence. A U.S. official said more than a dozen Tomahawk missiles were launched from a Navy ship in the Gulf of Guinea, hitting two ISIS camps in Sokoto State, coordinated with the Nigerian military. U.S. Africa Command said its initial assessment found multiple ISIS fighters killed and emphasized expanded counterterrorism cooperation with Nigeria and regional partners. Nigeria’s government publicly confirmed coordination and stressed that terrorist violence harms all communities, Christians and Muslims alike.

U.S. Strikes ISIS in Nigeria After Trump Warned of Attacks on Christians

NY Times · Eric Schmitt · December 25, 2025

The attack comes after President Trump ordered the Defense Department last month to prepare to intervene militarily in Nigeria to protect Christians from Islamic militants.

Listen to this article · 5:49 min Learn more

Gunmen attacked the Christ Apostolic Church in Kwara State, Nigeria, in November.Credit...Abdullahi Dare Akogun/Reuters

Dec. 25, 2025

The United States launched a number of strikes against the Islamic State in northwestern Nigeria, President Trump announced on Thursday, the latest American military campaign against a nonstate adversary — in this case, Islamic jihadis who the president asserts have been slaughtering Christians.

Mr. Trump said in a post on Truth Social that “the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!”

The strike involved more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles fired off a Navy ship in the Gulf of Guinea, hitting insurgents in two ISIS camps in northwest Nigeria’s Sokoto State, according to a U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. The operation was done in coordination with the Nigerian military, the official said.

In a statement, U.S. Africa Command said its initial assessment concluded that “multiple” ISIS terrorists were killed in the strike.

“U.S. Africa Command is working with our Nigerian and regional partners to increase counter terrorism cooperation efforts related to ongoing violence and threats against innocent lives,” Gen. Dagvin Anderson, the commander of U.S. Africa Command, said in a statement. “Our goal is to protect Americans and disrupt violent extremist organizations wherever they are.”

The New York Times

The attack occurred in a region along the border with Niger, where a branch of ISIS called the Islamic State-Sahel has been attacking both government forces and civilians, according to Caleb Weiss, a counterterrorism analyst and editor with FDD’s Long War Journal.

What you should know. The Times makes a careful decision any time it uses an anonymous source. The information the source supplies must be newsworthy and give readers genuine insight.

Learn more about our process.

The U.S. operation inside Africa’s most populous nation followed months of growing allegations by Christian evangelical groups and senior Republicans that Christians were being targeted in widespread violence.

An insurgency there has gone on for more than a decade, killing thousands of Christians and Muslims across sectarian lines. The Nigerian authorities have rejected allegations of a Christian genocide, noting that the web of violent armed groups, with different motives and spread across the country, kills as many Muslims as Christians.

However, Nigerian officials have stepped up engagement with the U.S. in recent weeks, after Mr. Trump ordered the Defense Department in November to prepare to intervene militarily in Nigeria to protect Christians.

The Christmas Day attack came after the U.S. had been conducting intelligence-gathering surveillance flights over large parts of Nigeria since late November, according to the military official.

On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote in a post on social media, “The President was clear last month: the killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria (and elsewhere) must end.”

“The @DeptofWar is always ready, so ISIS found out tonight — on Christmas,” he added. “More to come…”

Kimiebi Ebienfa, the spokesman for Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a post that “the precision strikes on terrorist targets in Nigeria were carried out in coordination with the Nigerian government.”

President Trump had ordered the Defense Department last month to prepare to intervene in Nigeria to protect Christians.Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times

“Terrorist violence in any form — whether directed at Christians, Muslims, or other communities — remains an affront to Nigeria’s values and to international peace and security,” he added.

The strikes in Nigeria mark the second time in a week that Mr. Trump has ordered American military retaliation against a branch of the Islamic State. Last week, the United States carried out dozens of airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria, fulfilling the president’s vow to avenge the deaths of two Army soldiers and a civilian interpreter killed in a terrorist attack there earlier in the month.

U.S. Africa Command, responding to Mr. Trump’s orders, in November drew up options for targeting insurgents in Nigeria and forwarded them to the Pentagon and the White House. The options included airstrikes on the few known compounds in northern Nigeria inhabited by militant groups, officials said.

But even as the plans were being drawn up, American military officials said it was doubtful they would have much long-term impact because of the entrenched nature of the conflict.

The violence in the northwest region, where the strikes occurred, is driven in large part by armed bandits and gangs kidnapping for ransom. The insurgency is concentrated in the northeast, where jihadist groups like the notorious Boko Haram and its now more powerful splinter, the Islamic State West Africa Province, an affiliate of the Islamic State group, have killed tens of thousands of civilians over the past decade.

Nigeria is not officially at war, but more people are killed there than in most war-torn countries. More than 12,000 people were killed by various violent groups this year alone, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a conflict monitoring group.

On Wednesday, a suspected suicide bomber detonated an explosive device during evening prayers in a mosque at a market in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, in the northeast of Nigeria. Nigerian government officials said five were killed and dozens injured, though local media said at least 12 people were buried on Thursday, citing residents.

Mr. Trump, in his Truth Social post, said that “under my leadership, our Country will not allow Radical Islamic Terrorism to prosper.” He added: “May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.”

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.

Saikou Jammeh is a reporter and researcher for The Times based in Dakar, Senegal.

Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.

NY Times · Eric Schmitt · December 25, 2025

4. Coast Guard Tracks Down Runaway Oil Tanker Linked to Iran and Venezuela

Summary:

The U.S. Coast Guard is pursuing the Bella 1, a large oil tanker sanctioned for allegedly moving black market Iranian and Venezuelan oil tied to U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. U.S. officials say the ship refused boarding, executed repeated U-turns, and has been fleeing in the Atlantic for more than five days. Washington is assembling additional forces, including a Maritime Special Response Team, to conduct a forcible boarding under a judicial seizure order. The case is a major escalation in a new U.S. maritime quarantine targeting Venezuela’s oil revenue and sanctioned “shadow fleet” logistics, with heightened risk of confrontation and possible Iranian retaliation if a high-seas seizure proceeds.

Comment: Flashbacks to Gulf of Tonkin? Not a perfect analogy but will this lead to escalation? What happens if shots are fired by Iranians? (I know what the military will and must do, but what happens after the military response?). The providerial question is "what comes next?" And are we ready for what comes next?

Coast Guard Tracks Down Runaway Oil Tanker Linked to Iran and Venezuela

WSJ

U.S. is gathering more manpower and weaponry to seize the sanctioned Bella 1 as it flees in the Atlantic

By Sadie Gurman

Follow and Lara Seligman

Updated Dec. 25, 2025 8:48 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/coast-guard-tracks-down-a-runaway-oil-tanker-linked-to-iran-and-venezuela-32f7660c

A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter flying over Puerto Rico last week. Eva Marie Uzcategui/Reuters

A Coast Guard vessel was slicing through the Atlantic Ocean, with its target in sight just a half mile away, when a realization set in. The crew was going to need backup, U.S. officials said.

The Bella 1, an oil tanker far larger than any Coast Guard ship, has been fleeing the U.S. blockade of sanctioned vessels heading in and out of Venezuela. Sanctioned for allegedly shipping oil to U.S.-designated terrorist organizations, the Bella 1 made an unusual move last weekend, executing a U-turn, refusing to be boarded and racing away from Venezuela at full speed.

Now, more than five days into the pursuit, the Coast Guard and U.S. military are assembling more manpower and weapons to forcibly board the vessel, the U.S. officials said. Among the units they are moving to the area is a Maritime Special Response Team, an elite force trained to board hostile ships, the officials said.

The hunt for the Bella 1 marks potentially the most dangerous moment yet for the U.S. in its nascent quarantine of the Venezuelan oil industry, part of a campaign to squeeze the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, whom the Trump administration accuses of flooding the U.S. with drugs. Maduro denies the charges and accuses Washington of naval piracy and trying to steal his country’s natural resources.

The U.S. military has built up considerable firepower in the Caribbean for the first time in decades, conducting deadly strikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs and now targeting oil tankers.

The U.S. has seized two tankers carrying Venezuelan oil since Dec. 10, aiming at Maduro’s most important source of revenue. Neither crew resisted.

It isn’t publicly known why the Bella 1 is refusing the Coast Guard’s demands. The Bella 1’s owner, Turkey-based Louis Marine Shipholding Enterprises, didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Most commercial seafaring vessels, even those carrying illicit products, are staffed by crews with little incentive to disobey the orders of the U.S. armed forces.

The U.S. has sanctioned it for allegedly carrying black-market Iranian oil on behalf of U.S.-designated terrorist organizations aligned with Tehran—the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and the Houthis, the rebels who have controlled swaths of Yemen for more than a decade. The U.S. Treasury Department says the Bella 1 has links to the Quds Force, the foreign arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a powerful paramilitary and business entity.

“They are probably getting orders from somewhere,” retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, a former judge-advocate general in the Coast Guard, said of the unusual behavior of the ship’s crew. “These are owned by very bad people trying to make money in a particular manner.”

The U.S. says the Bella 1 is part of a vast fleet of aging oil tankers, with murky ownership, that connect U.S.-sanctioned oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela to buyers in China, Cuba and India, among others.

The Bella 1 has long used tactics associated with the so-called shadow fleet, including switching off its transponders—which alert other ships to its location—for long periods, and conducting dangerous ship-to-ship oil transfers on the high seas, according to Kpler, a tanker tracking firm. Those sorts of ship-to-ship transfers, U.S. officials say, are usually done to conceal the oil’s illicit point of origin. Like other shadow-fleet ships, the Bella 1 alo sailed under a false flag, saying it was registered in Guyana when it isn’t, U.S. officials said.

Before heading toward Venezuela, empty of oil, the Bella 1 loaded crude in Iran in early September, Kpler said, and then turned off its transponder near the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway linking the oil-rich Persian Gulf to the world. It went dark for two months, and when it came back online close to the same spot, it was no longer carrying oil, Kpler said, suggesting it had unloaded the cargo to other vessels.

The Bella 1 then headed west, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar and into the open Atlantic in early December, according to Kpler. It signaled a destination of Curaçao, just off the coast of Venezuela, but then suddenly reversed course on Dec. 15, Kpler said, after the U.S. seized its first ship of the quarantine. It then turned back toward Venezuela, Kpler said, but made another U-turn when engaged by a Coast Guard vessel.

There is no rush to conduct an operation against the Bella 1, a slow-moving vessel that can’t outrun U.S. forces now that its location is known, U.S. officials said. That has given the U.S. time to deploy the appropriate units, explaining why the chase has stretched over several days.

In addition to relocating elite forces, Baumgartner said, the Coast Guard might also be bringing in a captain qualified to pilot a ship of such vast size—about three football fields long and almost 20 stories tall.

Once everything is in place, he said, the U.S. would have the right under international law to use force to board the Bella 1, beginning with a graduated series of warnings that could include warning shots.

“They will have multiple helicopters, they will fast-rope into the tanker, and they’ll go up to the bridge, and they’ll take control of the vessel,” he said about a likely scenario.

The White House said the Bella 1 was under a judicial order allowing the U.S. to seize it, part of a Justice Department strategy to take the dark fleet of oil tankers out of operation. Assuming the ship is ultimately seized, the U.S. plans to escort it to American waters and take the oil, officials said.

That follows a similar pattern to how the U.S. has treated other seized tankers. The Centuries, a tanker carrying about two million barrels of Venezuelan oil, was seized last week and is now headed toward Galveston, Texas, where its oil will be unloaded, officials said. Trump said the U.S. would keep the oil and the ships.

Countries can legally seize vessels in their territorial waters under rules set by the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations maritime regulator. Seizures on the high seas are far rarer—especially when vessels are tied to Iran—because Tehran has a record of retaliating by detaining Western ships.

A U.S. military helicopter flies over the Centuries oil tanker, which was intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard. Department of Homeland Security/Handout/Reuters

Write to Shelby Holliday at shelby.holliday@wsj.com, Costas Paris at costas.paris@wsj.com and Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com

Appeared in the December 26, 2025, print edition as 'Coast Guard Intensifies Its Pursuit of Oil Tanker'.

WSJ

5. China Sanctions Boeing, Other U.S. Companies Over Taiwan Arms Sale

Summary:

China announced sanctions on Boeing and several other U.S. defense firms in retaliation for a new U.S. arms sale to Taiwan, underscoring Beijing’s use of economic coercion to contest American security cooperation with the island. The measures reportedly restrict business activity, trade, and investment involving targeted companies, though their practical impact may be limited given existing controls. Beijing framed the sale as a violation of its sovereignty claims over Taiwan and warned Washington against further military support. The move signals China’s intent to raise costs on U.S. industry while reinforcing deterrence messaging toward Taipei, even as arms transfers proceed under longstanding U.S. policy commitments.

Comment: Symbolic or substantive sanctions? What is our next action? Will we sustain our support to Taiwan? If we do not and if we give in to PRC/CCP economic coercion then the consequences could be dire not only for Taiwan but US national security more broadly.

China Sanctions Boeing, Other U.S. Companies Over Taiwan Arms Sale

WSJ · DELOITTE

Beijing responds to Trump administration’s approval of large weapons package for Taipei with restrictions on firms and executives

Stu Woo

Dec. 26, 2025 6:53 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-sanctions-boeing-other-u-s-companies-over-taiwan-arms-sale-ef6032a4?mod=hp_lead_pos2

Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, was among the executives targeted by China. Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg News

SINGAPORE—The Chinese government imposed sanctions on 20 U.S. defense companies and 10 of their executives on Friday in retaliation for the Trump administration’s approval of a large package of weapons for sale to Taiwan.

The targets include Northrop Grumman, Boeing’s St. Louis-based defense unit and Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries. Preparing for a potential conflict with China has been a major focus for Luckey and his startup, which owns three of the sanctioned companies.

Beijing said it would freeze the assets of the sanctioned entities, ban them from Chinese transactions and prohibit the executives from entering mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau.

The move is largely symbolic because U.S. defense contractors generally do little business in China. It emphasizes Beijing’s claim over Taiwan, the democratically ruled island that it has vowed to take by force if necessary.

In announcing the sanctions, China’s Foreign Ministry said that the U.S. weapons approval “interferes in China’s internal affairs, and seriously undermines China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

The U.S. has sold Taiwan arms for years. Last week, Washington approved a $11.1 billion package that includes Himars missile launchers and howitzers designed to help Taiwan slow a Chinese attack.

The Trump administration’s approval of the sales addressed concerns among U.S. lawmakers who worried about President Trump’s deepening ties with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The two are scheduled to meet in April.

The U.S. is committed to providing Taiwan with defensive weaponry under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, and every administration since then has complied.

Write to Stu Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com

WSJ · DELOITTE

6. China may see full attack as best unification option: Pentagon

Summary:

A newly released Pentagon report says Beijing is refining multiple military options to compel unification with Taiwan, from coercion short of war to a full-scale joint island landing campaign. The report judges PLA capabilities are improving, but Chinese leaders remain uncertain about readiness to seize the island while countering possible U.S. intervention. It outlines three lower-intensity options: coercive pressure using economic, informational, diplomatic, and cyber tools; a joint firepower strike campaign using missile and air attacks against key targets; and a joint blockade campaign to cut imports and pressure Taipei over time. Despite the risks, the report says Beijing could conclude invasion is the only “prudent” option.

Comment. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

China may see full attack as best unification option: Pentagon

https://focustaiwan.tw/cross-strait/202512250004

12/25/2025 01:16 PM

Washington, Dec. 24 (CNA) Beijing could eventually see a full amphibious invasion of Taiwan as the only "prudent" way to bring about unification, the United States Department of Defense said in a newly released annual report to Congress.

The Pentagon's "Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China 2025," was in many ways similar to the 2024 report but reorganized the analysis of the options China has to take over Taiwan.

Generally, according to the report, Chinese leaders view the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) capabilities for a Taiwan campaign as improving, but they remain uncertain about its readiness to successfully seize the island while countering potential U.S. involvement.

The report said Beijing is busy refining several military options to force unification with Taiwan, ranging from coercive actions short of war to a full-scale joint island landing campaign (JILC).

A landing campaign involving a large-scale amphibious invasion of Taiwan would be the most decisive and riskiest option, the report said.

It would require highly complex, coordinated operations to "break through Taiwan's shore defenses and establish a beachhead that allowed the PLA to build up enough combat power to seize key targets or territory to force unification," the report said.

Yet despite the risks and Beijing's preference for less dramatic options, "it is preparing for a JILC and could determine that it is the only prudent option for compelling unification," the report said.

"We lack information about whether Beijing has determined the viability of other unification options, and the decisiveness of a JILC will probably make it an increasingly more appealing option as the decision space for other options is constrained," the report said.

The three less dramatic options, also covered in the 2024 report, were coercion short of war, a joint firepower strike campaign and a joint blockade campaign.

Over the past year, the report said, the PLA has conducted operations exercising key elements of these options, including drills focused on blockading key ports, striking sea and land targets, and countering possible U.S. military intervention.

Coercion consists of combining escalating military pressure with economic, informational and diplomatic tools to compel Taipei's capitulation and could include cyberattacks, electronic warfare or conventional strikes against Taiwan's political, military and communications infrastructure.

The goal would be to instill fear and degrade public confidence, with the aim of forcing negotiations on Beijing's terms without launching a full invasion, the report said.

The success of that option would depend heavily on Taiwan's resilience and will to resist Chinese coercion, as well as external support from the United States and others.

A joint firepower strike campaign would involve missile and air strikes against key government and military targets "to degrade Taiwan's defenses, decapitate its military and political leadership or undermine the public's resolve to resist."

Such operations would require complex coordination across PLA services, potentially limiting their effectiveness, according to the report.

A joint blockade campaign would employ maritime and air blockades to cut off Taiwan's vital imports over weeks or months while conducting missile strikes and possible seizure of Taiwan's offshore islands "to compel Taiwan to negotiate or surrender."

But the report did not offer any assessment of the factors that would determine the potential success or failure of a blockade strategy.

(By Chung Yu-chen and Evelyn Kao)

Enditem/ls

7. Container Ship Turned Missile Battery Spotted in China

Summary:

Naval News reports imagery of a Chinese civilian container ship apparently modified into a missile-armed platform, with containerized vertical launch system modules, containerized sensors, decoy launchers, and a Type-1130 CIWS near the bow. The outlet says it confirmed the vessel’s presence in Shanghai via satellite imagery. Photos suggest at least 48 VLS cells arranged in multiple container rows, plus a Type-344 fire-control radar and an additional flat-faced array that may be an AESA sensor. The specific missile loadout is unknown, but the article cites possible anti-ship and land-attack missiles and, if universal VLS is used, potential surface-to-air missiles.

Comment: Talk about hiding in plain sight. How many thousands of container ships are on the seas? What do you do about this type of threat? (other than develop your own capabilities to do this). What do you do about container ships loaded with missiles and drones operating around the world?

Container Ship Turned Missile Battery Spotted in China

Published on 25/12/2025
By Ethan Gossrow
In News

The Chinese Container Vessel fitted with containerized VLS, containerized sensors, as well as Decoy Launchers and a CIWS towards the bow. Image from via Weibo.https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/12/container-ship-turned-missile-battery-spotted-in-china/

Earlier on Christmas Day of this year, images of a Chinese shipping vessel carrying several containerized vertical launch cells systems appeared online. The basis of the Vessel in question appears to be a standard civilian container carrier, further augmented with radars, Vertical Launch Systems, and other systems.

Naval News was able to independently confirm the existence of the vessel as satellite images show it present in Shanghai.

The otherwise unremarkable vessel features several sets of containerized Vertical Launch Cells, numbering at least 48, split into 3 rows of 16 with what appears to 4 cells per container with each row 4 containers wide. The vessel in question also is fitted with a Type-1130 Close in Weapons system and at least 3 decoy launchers (presumably six when accounting for the possibility of mountings facing the opposite direction) towards the bow.

Sensors have also been fitted within shipping containers, in addition to carried decoys and weaponry with both sensors mounted towards the bridge to the stern of the ship. A Type-344 Fire Control Radar is visible in the foreground, as the array is a standard PLAN sensor built for guiding radar-controlled guns of various calibers up to 130mm, with it usually present on destroyers to assist in prosecuting targets with the main cannon.

An unknown, flat faced, likely AESA array is also mounted slightly to the port and one container higher in height relative to the Type-344, possibly for additional air search or missile guidance capability.

Potential Munitions

Chinese warships and submarines are armed with modern missiles and weapons. Pictured here is the YJ-18 anti-ship and land attack cruise missile. (Gordon Arthur)At present, the types of missiles to be carried still remains largely a mystery, although the VLS cells housed within the containers are likely to be able to fire the standard suite of Chinese anti-ship and land attack missiles. Munitions could potentially include the already ship borne CJ-10 land attack cruise missile, the YJ-18 series of anti-ship/land attack cruise missiles, and the YJ-21 anti-ship ballistic missile.

The container ship’s capability to leverage surface to air missiles is also presently unknown, although the capability may be present if the GJB 5860-2006 universal Vertical Launch System and cells are used, potentially allowing for the use of the HHQ-9 series of SAMs.

Containerized Missiles Around the Globe

USS Savannah (LCS 28) conducts a live-fire demonstration in the Eastern Pacific Ocean utilizing a containerized launching system that fired an SM-6 missile from the ship at a designated target.Throughout the past decade, containerized missile systems have begun to be proliferated around the globe due the flexibility afforded by their use. One of the most notable systems would be the Club-K containerized missile system developed in Russia. The concept detailed that 4 VLS cells would be stored in each container, with the main munition being the Kalibr series of land attack/anti-ship cruise missiles.

The United States has also pursued similar capabilities, with Lockheed’s MK-70 MOD 1 containerized vertical launch system already tested. The MK-70 utilizes 4 strike length Vertical Launch Cells housed in a large container, granting the ability to fire munitions such as the RIM-156 SM-3, the RIM-174 SM-6, and the Tomahawk land attack cruise missile from land or sea platforms.

The U.S Army has also developed a currently designation-less system, featuring the ability to fire 2 HIMARS pods out of a standard size container, shorter than the that of the MK-70. HIMARS PODs and their use entails munitions such as the standard GMLRS or GMLRS-ER series of guided rockets (6 to a pod), to tactical ballistic missiles in the MGM-140 ATACMS (1 to a pod) or the upcoming PRSM (2 to a pod).

Ethan Gossrow

Ethan Gossrow is an undergraduate student at American University studying International Relations. He is also currently a freelance writer based in Washington D.C. with an interest in Naval developments in the United States.

8. Why has Beijing turned down the heat in the Taiwan Strait in the second half of 2025?

Summary:

Overall PLA air activity around Taiwan rose modestly in January to November, but aerial pressure fell sharply after July and Beijing held no second large scale exercise, the first such year since 2022. From July to November, Taiwan recorded 2,209 PLA sorties near the island, down 14 percent year on year, with the steepest drop in October. In contrast, coast guard presence increased, suggesting a shift toward gray zone pressure and blockade preparation. Analysts link the pattern to reduced U.S.-China friction, Taipei’s domestic political setbacks, and Beijing’s preference for sustained coercion that avoids triggering backlash while keeping pressure high.

Comment: Hmmm... Have they really turned down the heat? For some reason this does not track in my mind based on the reporting that I recall from the media. Is this accurate or I am a victim of media hype? I suppose I am conflating the reporting on gray zone activities with overt war preparations. Are they separate actions and activities or are they related and linked? So let's think about unrestricted warfare and the three warfares and how they can be used to defeat a superior power.

Why has Beijing turned down the heat in the Taiwan Strait in the second half of 2025?

PLA warplanes and ships have been less active around the island in the second half of the year, Taiwanese data shows

How Beijing’s strategy shift explains decreased PLA activity in the Taiwan Strait

South China Morning Post

In the 11 months to November this year, the number of warplanes flying near the island rose slightly by 5.8 per cent from the same period last year, according to the South China Morning Post’s analysis of data from Taiwan’s defence ministry.

But since July, the PLA has turned down the pressure with a significant drop-off in aerial activity and has not held a large-scale exercise – a trend that may reflect the wider backdrop of events, including an easing of tensions with the United States and Lai’s political woes at home.

Between July and November, Taiwan counted a total of 2,209 sorties by PLA aircraft near the island, a drop of 14 per cent compared with the same period last year.

The absence of any large-scale drill also means that this year is the first time since 2022 that there has been only one exercise of this kind.

However, the number of coastguard ships operating around the island was significantly higher than the same period last year, with no signs of activity dropping off in the second half.

These vessels would play a key role in the event of a blockade.

Analysts said such trends reflected Beijing’s wider political and strategic thinking as well as its response to events.

While they agreed that the immediate risks of a full-blown war were low, they said Beijing was increasingly preparing for a blockade of the island.

“Our actions will be determined by the evolving situation in Taiwan, including Lai’s provocative moves, as well as the activities of external countries,” said Fu Qianshao, an analyst and former member of the PLA Air Force.

Sorties by warplanes had become routine and now constituted “a comprehensive set of training measures”, Fu added.

Taiwan has reported daily PLA activity around the island since late 2020. In August 2022, a visit by then US House speaker Nancy Pelosi triggered a large-scale military exercise around the island.

Since then, Beijing has intensified the pressure despite its repeated insistence that it favours peaceful reunification.

Beijing views Taiwan as part of China to be reunited by force if necessary. Most countries, including the US, do not recognise it as an independent state, but Washington opposes any attempt to take the self-ruled island by force and is legally bound to provide arms to help it defend itself.

Spikes in PLA activity usually follow perceived provocations from Taipei, such as statements viewed by Beijing as leaning towards independence.

The pressure stepped up considerably last year, when Lai, whom Beijing regards as a “troublemaker” and independence advocate, was sworn in.

Between January and November this year, a total of 4,976 PLA aircraft sorties were detected around Taiwan, compared with 4,703 over the same period last year, the Post’s analysis found.

This year, 3,508 of these flights crossed the median line, the unofficial boundary that splits the 180km (112-mile) Taiwan Strait, accounting for just over 70 per cent of operations, compared with around 60 per cent last year.

The decline in operations in the latter part of the year included July and August, typically one of the peak periods for PLA exercises. But this year the number of sorties detected crossing the median line in those months dropped by nearly 15 per cent from the same period in 2024.

The sharpest drop, 40 per cent, was recorded in October, with 222 operations recorded compared with 370 last year.

Trump downplays Taiwan dispute in China talks

Chang Ching, an analyst at Taiwan’s Society for Strategic Studies, said the figures released by Taipei were partly for local voters and may not give the full picture.

“We must assume that certain activities might go undetected. All such statistics should be treated with caution,” he added.

Mainland analysts have also said some stealth aircraft may be able to escape detection.

Taiwan started to release information about the PLA’s activities near the island in 2020, but it remains unclear whether Taiwan discloses all information, a possible tactic to keep Beijing in the dark about its detection capabilities.

Lyle Goldstein, director of the China Initiative at Brown University, said the drop may have been the result of Washington reportedly stopping Lai from making a transit in the US and the Taiwanese leader’s humiliation at home after he backed a failed attempt to unseat opposition lawmakers.

Lai has still not visited the US mainland since taking office in May 2024 – the first Taiwanese leader in recent decades not to make a visit during their first year in office – although he did make a transit in Hawaii late last year.

Lai also suffered a political blow for failing to recall any one of the 32 opposition politicians targeted in a months-long recall campaign.

02:41

All 24 opposition Kuomintang lawmakers in Taiwan survive mass recall campaign

“It’s quite conceivable that these two events combined to boost China’s confidence and thus cause it to pull back on military pressure, at least to a small extent,” Goldstein said.

October also saw the meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump in Busan, South Korea, where, breaking decades of precedent, there was no mention of Taiwan in the statements issued after the summit.

Earlier that month, Lai delivered a speech on the Double Tenth public holiday, the anniversary of the revolution that led to the founding of the Republic of China, traditionally a major political set piece.

Despite condemnation from Beijing, Lai’s speech was seen by observers as having been toned down compared with the previous year.

There was also no obvious response from the PLA, which meant that the only large-scale drill of the year was one staged in April soon after Lai announced a series of security measures, including reinstating military trials, in which he described mainland China as a “hostile force”.

Last year, the PLA staged two major exercises, one after Lai’s inauguration speech in May and one after his Double Tenth speech. On both occasions he said that Taiwan and the mainland were “not subordinate to each other” which Beijing saw as highly provocative.

The US has also grown quieter on the number of transits made by its warships in the Taiwan Strait, a move some analysts believe is designed to dampen down tensions with Beijing. Such transits were announced regularly while Joe Biden was US president.

There have only been three confirmed operations of this type since Trump returned to the White House earlier this year. In each case, this confirmation was in response to media questions and no statements were released by the US military.

Chang said a second large-scale PLA exercise was unlikely this year.

“Beijing’s diplomatic charm offensive since 2025 has been effective, so there is no need to disrupt the positive atmosphere,” he said.

“With Trump expected to visit China in April, Beijing may avoid actions that provoke negative US public opinion and disrupt the broader strategic environment.”

Beijing is trying for a kind of ‘Goldilocks’ solution here: not too big and not too small, in order to maintain high pressure, but not spark a backlash

Lyle Goldstein, director, China Initiative, Brown University

Goldstein said it was “significant” that 70 per cent of this year’s sorties had crossed the median line.

“In general, I think the PLA is stepping up the pressure, as it sees this as quite an effective tool in the overall political landscaping – particularly for messaging elite audiences in both Taipei and Washington, but also Tokyo, Seoul etc,” he said.

“My guess is that Beijing is trying for a kind of ‘Goldilocks’ solution here: not too big and not too small, in order to maintain high pressure, but not spark a backlash, since it sees current trends as generally favourable.”

Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin University, said financial reasons may partially explain the recent reduction in aerial sorties as the mainland economy continues to face headwinds.

PLA cost controls were included in the Communist Party’s proposals for the next five-year plan released in October.

Qiu Yang, deputy director of the General Office of the Central Military Commission, China’s top military command body, wrote in an article explaining the proposals that the PLA should be prepared to live a “tight life” and cut costs in multiple areas, including training and equipment support.

The PLA’s exercises are becoming increasingly “combat-oriented”. Photo: CCTV

There is also an ongoing anti-corruption campaign targeting the PLA’s top brass, which has brought down several generals with extensive experience in Fujian, the province facing the Taiwan Strait.

They include Lin Xiangyang, former head of the Eastern Theatre Command, which is responsible for the Taiwan Strait. He has been expelled from the party and charged with corruption.

But analysts said the anti-corruption campaign was likely to have a limited impact on operations around Taiwan.

“I doubt that corruption issues are playing into this,” Goldstein said.

Chang agreed, saying the removal of top commanders was unlikely to affect PLA exercises, adding that it already trained for situations where units were understaffed.

The Eastern Theatre Command also has a new leadership in place, with Yang Zhibin taking over the role of commander and being promoted to full general this week in the wake of the anti-corruption drive.

Compared with navy and air force operations, the use of the coastguard is a more recent phenomenon and became more frequent after it joined the May 2024 drills, training alongside PLA warships.

Taipei said it had detected 259 official vessels from the mainland – a category that includes both coastguard and scientific exploration ships – near Taiwan in the first 11 months of this year.

Taiwan only started releasing data on these ships in July last year, and recorded 84 ships in the area up to the end of November – a figure that rose to 134 once December’s total was included. The vast majority of the vessels detected were coastguard ships.

This year it recorded 107 ships between July and November, a 27 per cent increase on the same period last year.

Meanwhile, a total of 2,358 PLA vessels were detected up to November, compared with 2,271 over the same period last year – a modest increase compared with the increased use of coastguard vessels.

However, some analysts have argued that the use of the coastguard is less provocative than the navy and could be used to keep up the pressure without escalating matters.

“Taiwan is an internal matter. It is natural for our coastguard to enforce the law in the surrounding waters and their presence will inevitably increase,” Fu said.

“In any future blockade, the coastguard cannot be underestimated, as it is backed by the powerful PLA.”

Goldstein said the increased use of coastguards may reflect Beijing’s wish to use even more forces to pressure Taiwan, but it may also indicate it is increasingly leaning towards a blockade.

South China Morning Post

9. Trump’s Inner Circle Sees Russia as an El Dorado for Business, but Pitfalls Abound

Summary:

Key figures in POTUS’s inner circle, including envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, see postwar Russia as a major commercial opportunity and argue reintegration could profit U.S. investors while stabilizing Moscow’s ties with Ukraine and Europe. Russia’s fundamentals and governance make that bet hazardous. Analysts cite weak growth prospects, demographic decline, and increasing dependence on harder-to-extract energy reserves. Veteran investors warn of acute rule-of-law risk: contract revision, expropriation, and personal legal jeopardy in an autocratic system. Sanctions relief may mainly enable low-commitment exports, while serious capital investment faces persistent geopolitical uncertainty and the likelihood that sanctions and hostility could return.

Comment: An irreverent comment: George Carlin had a famous bit connecting war and business, pointing out that "B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S" has "U" and "S" in the middle, implying Americans are always selling out or fighting for the "US" (America), often for profit.

Trump’s Inner Circle Sees Russia as an El Dorado for Business, but Pitfalls Abound

WSJ

Veteran U.S. investors say Putin’s Russia will remain a treacherous business environment

By Marcus Walker

Follow and Georgi Kantchev

Dec. 25, 2025 10:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/trumps-inner-circle-sees-russia-as-an-el-dorado-for-business-but-pitfalls-abound-84ae2d16

For Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s billionaire envoys working on a deal to end the Ukraine war, Russia is a land of vast natural resources and rich business opportunities.

Welcoming it back into the world economy will make money for American investors and stabilize Moscow’s relationships with Ukraine and Europe, according to their public comments and people familiar with their thinking.

They aren’t the first U.S. business people to view Russia as a land of bounty—nor the first to advocate for peace through profits.

But many veterans of its volatile economy are skeptical that the country will handsomely reward U.S. capital, or that many American investors will flock to Vladimir Putin’s regime as soon as Washington lifts sanctions.

“Russia is not the Emerald City or El Dorado,” said Charles Hecker, a geopolitical risk analyst who spent four decades working in the Soviet Union and Russia. “The size of the prize is smaller than some people think.”

Russia’s $2.5 trillion economy—the same size as Italy’s—suffers from weak long-term growth prospects, a shrinking population, declining reserves of oil that can be easily extracted, and a lack of growth drivers beyond energy, say economists.

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, and U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff. Liesa Johannssen/Reuters

What’s worse, say experienced U.S. investors in Russia, is the risk of losing your assets—and even ending up in jail—in an increasingly autocratic and nationalistic regime that lacks the rule of law, rewrites the terms of deals, seizes property and views the West with deep suspicion.

Hecker, who also wrote “Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia,” said that even a settlement in Ukraine wouldn’t break the cycles of hostility toward the West, saddling foreign companies with persistent geopolitical uncertainty.

“The general animus of Russia towards the West will stay as long as Putin is in the Kremlin and arguably even longer,” he said. “It’s unwise to assume that now, all of a sudden, the red carpet comes out for Western companies.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov suggested as much this fall. “Everyone should be allowed back in,” he said at an economic forum. “But it will be very expensive for them to come back here.”

Risky business

The notion of companies flocking back to Russia is empty talk, said Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central bank official who is now a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. “For any ordinary foreign investor, Russia is still uninvestable,” she said.

If sanctions are lifted, exporters who can sell goods to Russia without investing much there will likely return—although many will find themselves up against Chinese imports that now dominate many Russian markets, from vehicles to smartphones.

Investors whose assets were expropriated after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine might seek to claw back some of their money. Exxon Mobil has held talks with Russian energy executives about returning to the Sakhalin oil and gas project, where it took a $4.6 billion write-down after Russia launched its war in 2022.

Gas flares off at a liquefied natural gas plant on Sakhalin island, Russia. NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty Images

“If there are unique assets, such as extraordinary gas fields in the Arctic, I wouldn’t be surprised if companies moved to secure an option to access those,” said Michael Calvey, chairman of private-equity firm Baring Ventures, who worked as a financier in Russia for three decades.

“But I’d be surprised if anyone starts sinking billions into real investments for years,” he said.

One deterrent, said Calvey, is that sanctions could return because of renewed war in Ukraine and Russian hybrid war with Europe. Then there are more the personal dangers of doing business in Russia.

Calvey was one of the most prominent U.S. business people in Russia. His firm Baring Vostok financed tech companies such as Yandex, Russia’s answer to Google. In 2019, after getting into a business dispute with Kremlin-connected investors, Calvey found himself arrested and jailed by the FSB, Russia’s internal intelligence agency.

His court conviction for misappropriating funds, widely seen as concocted, was later canceled, but he left Russia after the invasion of Ukraine and says he has no plans to return.

Russia does have valuable natural resources, as well as gifted tech entrepreneurs, Calvey said. “But it also has systemic risks of the kind that I was a victim of,” he said.

Michael Calvey, while leaving a hearing at a court in Moscow in 2021. yuri kochetkov/Shutterstock

Since launching the war, the Kremlin has tightened its grip on Russia’s economy, confiscating property from foreign and domestic investors and handing them to business people loyal to Putin. Some $49 billion in assets have been seized as of this summer, according to Moscow-based law firm Nektorov, Saveliev & Partners. The pace of nationalizations is accelerating.

Any deals that Putin approves involving U.S. investors might only be upheld while President Trump is in power, said Pavel Khodorkovsky, a U.S.-based nonprofit executive and son of Mikhail, Russia’s richest oligarch until he was arrested and jailed in 2003 after clashing with Putin. “Putin will honor his word only to the person he gives it to,” he said.

Capital-intensive foreign investments in the Russian Arctic or elsewhere would involve heavy initial costs and bring returns only years later, he said. Investors would have to be confident of long-term friendly behavior from the Kremlin.

“Anything that involves infrastructure, physical assets—I just don’t think this is going to be an acceptable level of risk,” he said.

Others say there is potential to make money. “The question is should you do business with them at this time,” said Alan Bigman, a Houston-based energy executive who was finance director of Russian oil producer TNK for years.

“Of course, Russia should eventually be reintegrated into the world economy. If you have a nonaggressive Russia, then that economic linkup makes a lot of sense. But not at a time when they’re invading and threatening their neighbors,” said Bigman. He noted that Putin used past trade with the West to build up his military. Most Russia experts predict he’ll do so again.

A history of hope

Russians queue at a McDonald’s restaurant in Moscow in April 1990. Grzegorz Galazka/Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images

As Communism was ending, U.S. brands moved in to satisfy Russians eager for a taste of the American lifestyle—such as with the first McDonald’s restaurant, which opened on Moscow’s Pushkin Square in 1990.

But Russia adopted capitalism without the institutions that make it work in the West, such as functioning regulations or protections for property rights, and chaos ensued.

“I thought we can make money if this place goes from terrible to bad,” said Bill Browder, an Anglo-American financier whose firm Hermitage Capital Management ran the biggest foreign investment fund in Russia. “You could lose all your money or multiply it 20 times—and the chance was fifty-fifty,” he said.

In 2005 Browder was expelled from Russia after clashing with the authorities over corruption. His lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in a Russian police cell, leading the U.S. to pass the Magnitsky Act, sanctioning Russian officials involved.

As Putin’s rule became increasingly autocratic, the predictability of Russia’s business environment “went from bad back to horrible, and it’s been horrible ever since,” said Browder.

Despite mounting tensions, Western Europe, led by Germany, stuck to its belief that trade and investment could eventually tame Russia’s repression at home and revanchism toward its neighbors.

Germany’s theory of “Wandel durch Handel,” or change through trade, survived even Russia’s seizure of Crimea and covert invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014. Only the full-scale invasion almost four years ago led to sweeping Western sanctions and a mass exodus by Western companies.

Frozen prospects

In wooing the White House, Moscow has talked up opportunities for joint ventures in the Arctic, which holds massive untapped energy resources, as well as for exploring Russia’s rare-earth metals deposits. But many of Russia’s deposits are in remote, hard-to-access environments.

Russia ranks among the world’s top three oil producers, alongside the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. But even before the war, many of Russia’s main oil fields in western Siberia and the Volga-Urals were depleting, forcing producers to shift to more complex and costly oil deposits in the far north and east.

Workers at an oil rig in Siberia in 2004. Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images

The share of Russia’s oil reserves classified as hard-to-recover is expected to climb to 80% by 2030, from 59% today, according to Russia’s Energy Ministry. As a result, some projections foresee output falling by at least 10% by the end of the decade.

Russia’s best years of growth came between 2000 and 2008, when global oil prices were rising continually. It was one of the original BRICs—the acronym championed by Goldman Sachs to highlight the promise of fast-growing emerging economies—alongside Brazil, India and China. Its performance has been patchy since then. “The motor petered out after commodity prices stopped growing,” said Elina Ribakova, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.

The U.S. shale gas boom contributed to Russia’s stagnation, she said. Faced with falling popular support, Putin shifted the narrative to nationalism.

As a foreign investor, said Ribakova, “you’re coming to a midsized European economy that’s slowing down and dependent on arms spending. Why?”

Write to Marcus Walker at Marcus.Walker@wsj.com and Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com

WSJ

10. F3EAD: SOF Specific Targeting in the Intelligence Cycle

F3EAD: SOF Specific Targeting in the Intelligence Cycle

by SWJ Staff

12.26.2025 at 01:55pm

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/12/26/f3ead-targeting-irregular-warfare-lsco/

Grey Dynamics’ “F3EAD: SOF-Specific Targeting in the Intelligence Cycle” reframes the familiar Find–Fix–Finish–Exploit–Analyze–Disseminate model as more than a relic of the GWOT era, arguing that its real value lies in how it fuses intelligence and operations to generate tempo in ambiguous, human-centric fights. In irregular warfare, F3EAD excels because it treats targets as nodes in networks—social, financial, operational—where exploitation and analysis matter as much as the “finish,” enabling SOF to adapt continuously inside an adversary’s decision cycle.

Its implicit relevance to large-scale combat operations (LSCO) is that this logic still applies, but at scale: F3EAD-style targeting can inform how SOF enables conventional formations by turning tactical actions into operational-level insight, deep fires, shaping maneuver, and revealing adversary intent across domains.

The challenge going forward is not whether F3EAD is obsolete, but whether its IW-honed discipline of rapid learning and dissemination can be institutionalized for LSCO without sacrificing the precision, restraint, and intelligence rigor that made it effective in the first place.

Tags: F3EAD, Intelligence Cycle, irregular warfare, Joint Operations, large-scale combat operations, Ops-Intel Integration, Special Operations Forces (SOF)

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

11. Trump’s military restraint on Venezuela: power play with eye on China or weakness?

Summary:

POTUS’s reluctance to authorize direct military intervention in Venezuela reflects constraint and recalibration, not simple weakness. Analysts point to legal limits requiring congressional authorization for offensive action, high domestic political risk, and lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. Washington is still applying maximum pressure through sanctions, a naval buildup, and an oil “quarantine” under Operation Southern Spear, while keeping military options in reserve. China and Russia condemn the seizures at the UN, and Beijing views the campaign through the lens of broader U.S. competition in Latin America. Observers warn the strategy may strain Venezuela’s economy but also bolster Maduro’s nationalist support.

Comment: Fairly objective analysis I think.

Trump’s military restraint on Venezuela: power play with eye on China or weakness?

Hesitation does not equal lack of courage, observers caution, citing legal and domestic constraints and a likely pivot to ‘risk avoidance’

Shi Jiangtao

Published: 10:00pm, 26 Dec 2025

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3337845/trumps-military-restraint-venezuela-power-play-eye-china-or-weakness?module=top_story&pgtype=section

President Donald Trump’s reluctance to authorise direct military intervention in Venezuela underscored the US dilemma of how to reassert dominance in its traditional sphere while managing escalation risks in multipolar rivalry with China and Russia, observers said.

But they cautioned against seeing US hesitation as weakness, noting intensified sanctions, naval blockades and diplomatic pressure from Washington, alongside a recalibrated strategy to sustain influence without overcommitment against China’s growing economic footprint in Latin America.

The Trump administration has pursued a “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro under “Operation Southern Spear”, framed as a crackdown on drug trafficking and what Washington has labelled a “foreign terrorist organisation regime”.

More than a dozen US warships and some 15,000 troops have been deployed across the Caribbean. While the White House insisted military options remained on the table, its primary focus had been sanctions “to the maximum extent” to deprive Maduro of resources, US ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz told the Security Council on Tuesday.

According to Reuters, US forces have been ordered to enforce a “quarantine” on Venezuelan oil for at least the next two months, targeting all sanctioned tankers entering or leaving the country. Trump said on Monday that it would be “smart” for Maduro to step down.

Bloomberg reported that US forces had boarded a non-sanctioned ship known as Centuries, owned by a Hong Kong-based entity, last weekend.

Caracas denies involvement in drug trafficking, arguing that Washington seeks to overthrow Maduro in order to seize Venezuelan oil reserves, the largest in the world.

US seizes oil tanker off Venezuela

China, Venezuela’s biggest creditor and top crude importer and a key Maduro ally, joined Russia in condemning US actions at the UN.

Foreign Minister Wang Yi last week denounced them as “acts of unilateralism and bullying”, while pledging Beijing’s firm support for Caracas during a phone call with Venezuelan counterpart Yvan Gil.

According to Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, legal and domestic constraints remain central to Trump’s cautious approach.

“According to the US Constitution, any offensive military action against Venezuela requires congressional authorisation,” he said. Given the divisions in Congress, where even some Republican lawmakers were dissatisfied with Trump and Democrats firmly opposed, “there is little chance of gaining approval”, he said.

Shi noted any military action taken by the president without congressional consent would “inevitably be limited in scale and unlikely to counter Maduro’s hundreds of thousands of troops and militias”.

The legislative constraints reflected lessons learned from the costly interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, he added.

“To truly topple the Venezuelan regime would require congressional authorisation, which is unlikely. Therefore, the US can only pursue smaller‑scale military operations,” he said.

Even such limited actions, he argued, “are enough to put pressure on Venezuela and the countries that still maintain oil trade with it”.

Jiang Shixue, director of the Centre for Latin American Studies at Shanghai University, emphasised the challenge of justifying Trump’s regime-change efforts against Maduro without ground troops or a high likelihood of victory.

“Overthrowing the Maduro government will not be easy for the US. Even military bombardment would be hard to justify,” he said.

“Venezuela is not comparable to Afghanistan or Iraq. The US spent 20 years in Afghanistan without success; how could it easily subdue Venezuela? This is precisely why the US has hesitated to send ground troops.”

The US pressure campaign may yield mixed results, Jiang argued.

“On the one hand, it will pose greater challenges and difficulties to the Venezuelan economy … On the other hand, US pressure may, to some extent, boost President Maduro’s prestige. The US’ actions are perceived as hegemonic and predatory, thus fuelling anti‑American sentiment and strengthening support for the Maduro government.”

US backing could also embolden Maduro’s opponents to act more aggressively, he warned.

Shen Dingli, a Shanghai-based professor of international relations, expressed similar scepticism about the effectiveness of the “maximum pressure” strategy.

“After all, Washington’s decades-long attempt to contain Cuba also failed,” he noted.

Today’s America was “weak against the strong, strong against the weak”, Shen said, suggesting Venezuela’s resilience complicated US calculations.

“The White House is wary of domestic backlash and is also mindful of reactions from Latin America and the broader international community. Lacking a high degree of certainty of victory, Washington is unwilling to launch direct military action,” he added.

Other Chinese experts cautioned that Trump’s unusual restraint did not necessarily signal decline or weakness.

Rather, according to Xu Yanran, an associate professor at Renmin University’s School of International Studies, US hesitation in Venezuela is likely to be the product of structural constraints and strategic recalibration, signalling a broad pivot towards pragmatic “risk avoidance”.

In an article published on a social media account affiliated with the state-controlled Beijing Daily, Xu argued that lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, global distractions in the Middle East and Indo‑Pacific, regional opposition, and domestic polarisation all contributed to Trump’s cautious approach.

“The US is not seeking absolute control through high‑intensity intervention but aims to maintain rough regional stability with limited deterrence, diplomacy, and economic means, preventing the region from becoming a ‘troublemaker’ disrupting its global layout,” she wrote.

Xu emphasised that Latin America was now treated as a strategic buffer zone rather than a target for conquest, reflecting a deeper transformation in US national security thinking, aligned with the White House’s National Security Strategy released earlier this month.

“In conclusion, the regional tensions surrounding Venezuela do not signify an absolute decline in the US’ intervention capabilities, but rather reflect an adjustment in the methods of military sanctions employed by hegemonic powers in contemporary international politics,” she wrote.

“Of course, we cannot ignore the possibility that if internal divisions emerge in Venezuela, or if external aid fails to arrive in time, the US military might abandon its ‘maximum pressure’ approach and launch immediate military action. Therefore, for Venezuela, the key lies in whether it can ‘delay’ and ‘stabilise’ the situation.”

China’s Xi Jinping urges countries to ‘stand united’ in face of global trade war

Washington’s actions, particularly the blockade of Venezuelan oil, has heightened scrutiny of China’s growing ties with Venezuela and Latin America.

While Trump’s pressure campaign is not directly aimed at China, experts agree that Beijing inevitably views this as part of a broader US strategy to undermine Chinese interests in the region.

As part of its regional approach, China has invested heavily in Venezuela, extending loans and facilitating projects in exchange for oil, positioning itself as a key ally to both Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez.

Amid the US–Venezuela stand-off, Beijing this month released its third Latin America and Caribbean Policy White Paper, framing the region as a vital partner in building a “community with a shared future” and pledging cooperation “not targeted at, not excluding, and not subject to any third party”.

“The US policy of containing Venezuela is not specifically aimed at China,” Shen said. “Even if China were to withdraw from Venezuela, Washington would still pursue containment.”

Yet, because of Beijing’s close political and economic ties with Caracas, US actions “appear to be targeting Beijing”, he argued.

“In reality, while containing Venezuela, the US will also inhibit other Latin American countries from developing and deepening their relations with China, rather than promoting such relations.”

Shi at Renmin voiced concerns about China’s mounting risks in Venezuela despite its significant economic interests.

“China’s oil trade with Venezuela has always been highly risky,” he said. “From Chavez to Maduro, Venezuela’s domestic economy has been in chaos, with issues of defaulting on payments.”

He warned that US seizures of tankers from Hong Kong made continued crude shipments “reckless”.

“China should in fact stop attempting to transport Venezuelan crude. After all, China has ample external oil supply channels, and there is no need to ‘walk into the line of fire’,” he advised.

But Shi cautioned against assuming US pressure would push regional countries closer to China.

“Latin American countries have historically been opportunistic,” he noted. “Under US pressure, they are reluctant to provoke Washington but also unwilling to surrender before being forced. Countries including Cuba are cautiously probing, ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’, in pursuit of a balance between external pressure and their own autonomy.”

Jiang at Shanghai University was more confident about China’s long‑term appeal in the region despite US efforts to sow discord.

While citing Washington’s use of “various underhanded tactics and dirty tricks … using both carrots and sticks”, he concluded that China’s ties with the region would remain strong in spite of American efforts to isolate or exclude China.

“US actions cannot drive Latin American countries away from China, because China’s economic and trade cooperation with the region is genuine and solid.”

Shi Jiangtao

A former diplomat, Shi Jiangtao has worked as a China reporter at the Post for more than a decade. He's interested in political, social and environmental development in China.

12. Opinion | Hamas Is Loving Its Revival

Summary:

The Wall Street Journal editorial argues Hamas is benefiting from the October cease-fire because it has neither disarmed nor relinquished control, yet is being treated as a durable negotiating partner. It says the Trump team, through envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, has effectively dignified Hamas by engaging indirectly while regional actors, including Egypt, shape postwar governance plans that presume Hamas’s de facto constraints. The board highlights alleged violations of POTUS’s Gaza peace plan, including delayed hostage returns and no demilitarization, tunnels, or weapons surrendered. It criticizes Washington for pressing Israel to keep responses limited and for scolding strikes on senior Hamas leaders, warning this legitimizes Hamas and weakens U.S. resolve.

Comment: A sober warning?

Opinion | Hamas Is Loving Its Revival

WSJ · Hamas Is Loving Its Revival

The Trump team has come to treat the Gaza terrorists with deference.

By The Editorial Board

Dec. 25, 2025 2:15 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/hamas-ceasefire-trump-administration-jared-kushner-steve-witkoff-israel-gaza-414c00e5

Teams affiliated with Hamas military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, and officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) along with heavy machinery belonging to Egypt conduct search operations in the Zeitun neighborhood of Gaza City Zuma Press

Is U.S. policy legitimizing Hamas? That’s the question to ask nearly three months after the October cease-fire, as the terrorists show no sign of disarming. Instead Hamas negotiates with White House envoys and regional powers as it settles in for the long haul.

Hamas has made a mockery of President Trump’s Gaza peace plan, but the Administration dignifies Hamas as a continuing negotiating partner. Egypt works with Hamas on the list of Palestinian technocrats Cairo will propose to govern Gaza. Whoever ultimately agrees to send peacekeepers will first be sure to reach an understanding with Hamas to avoid conflict—by respecting the terrorist group’s boundaries.

It’s worth recalling some terms of Mr. Trump’s 20-point peace plan. “Gaza will be a deradicalized terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbors.” So far, no progress. “Within 72 hours of Israel publicly accepting this agreement, all hostages, alive and deceased, will be returned.” Months later, Hamas still holds one dead hostage.

“Hamas and other factions agree to not have any role in the governance of Gaza. . . . There will be a process of demilitarization of Gaza under the supervision of independent monitors, which will include placing weapons permanently beyond use.” Hamas governs half of Gaza and has surrendered neither a single tunnel nor a single weapon since the cease-fire.

In the face of these violations, the Trump Administration pressures Israel to sit on its hands. When Hamas attacks or kills Israeli troops, U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner urge Israel to keep its responses minimal.

When Hamas misses those targets, the old argument that any substantial Israeli reply is “disproportional” rears its head—as if Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, changed nothing. When the Israelis occasionally strike senior Hamas terrorists, including those responsible for the Oct. 7 massacre, the White House scolds Jerusalem for threatening the peace.

Every day Hamas fails to disarm and surrender power is a cease-fire violation. Accepting it legitimizes Hamas’s presence, as does treating the killing of a terrorist the same as killing a soldier. Mr. Trump’s comments throughout the war suggest he understands that there can be no peace so long as Hamas is in power—de jure or de facto. But his envoys seem willing to press ahead and trust that economic development alone will save Gaza.

This has been tried and failed. Whatever gets built is knocked down in the next war that Hamas starts before hiding behind or underneath its civilian population. The region knows this well, and allies and enemies will judge U.S. resolve accordingly.

Will the Trump envoys be remembered as the team that saved the hostages or the team that saved Hamas? The verdict is still out.

Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Joe Sternberg, Allysia Finley, and Kim Strassel.

WSJ · Hamas Is Loving Its Revival

13. 5 Biggest Military Mistakes Donald Trump Could Make in 2026

Summary:

The United States will retain unmatched military power in 2026, but with little margin for error, and he warns a second Trump administration is more likely to overreach than hesitate. He identifies five avoidable mistakes: escalating in the South China Sea in ways that create an escalation ladder with Beijing; neglecting gray zone campaigns that erode deterrence through normalization; pushing alliance burden-sharing faster than partners can build real capacity, creating dangerous transition gaps; confusing volatility with effective signaling, which blurs credibility for allies and rivals; and treating Venezuela as a military problem to solve, inviting costly entanglement, regional backlash, and strategic distraction from higher-priority theaters.

Comment: By bias is showing: I am kind of partial to the gray zone though I am also very concerned about alliance issues.

The Five:

Mistake One: Treating Escalation as Leverage in the South China Sea

Mistake Two: Ignoring Gray-Zone Conflict as the Main Arena of Competition

Mistake Three: Pressuring Allies Without Sequencing the Transition

Mistake Four: Confusing Unpredictability with Effective Signaling

Mistake Five: Treating Venezuela as a Strategic Problem to Be Solved Militarily

5 Biggest Military Mistakes Donald Trump Could Make in 2026

19fortyfive.com · Andrew Latham · December 24, 2025

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/12/5-biggest-military-mistakes-donald-trump-could-make-in-2026/

Key Points and Summary – In 2026, the United States will still field unmatched military power—but with almost no margin for error. A second Trump administration is far more likely to overreach than to hold back, and the real danger lies in five avoidable mistakes.

-Escalating too hard in the South China Sea could trap Washington on an escalation ladder with Beijing. Ignoring gray-zone pressure, mishandling alliance burden-sharing, and confusing volatility with strength would steadily erode deterrence.

A U.S. Air Force 5th Bomb Wing B-52 Stratofortress approaches a U.S. Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker, assigned to the 909th Air Refueling Squadron, to perform aerial refueling over the Pacific Ocean, Oct. 27, 2022. Aerial refueling allows friendly aircraft to continue their mission without needing to return to the base for fuel. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman Alexis Redin).

-Treating Venezuela as a military problem to “solve” would drain resources and legitimacy. Power, this piece argues, is spent by impatience—and preserved by disciplined restraint.

5 Military Mistakes Trump Can’t Afford to Make in 2026

In 2026, the United States will still command unmatched military force, global reach, and a defense budget its competitors can only envy. What it will not enjoy is margin for error. The strategic environment is already crowded with unfinished wars, persistent pressure short of open conflict, and rivals skilled at exploiting impatience and miscalculation. In that setting, a second Trump administration is unlikely to falter by acting too cautiously.

The greater danger is that it moves too quickly and commits a series of avoidable military mistakes—mistakes that burn through American power and narrow Washington’s room to maneuver at precisely the moment when, in this era of great-power competition, it can least afford to do so.

Mistake One: Treating Escalation as Leverage in the South China Sea

The most dangerous mistake President Trump could make in 2026 would be treating escalation as a form of leverage rather than what it is: a binding strategic commitment. Nowhere would that mistake carry greater risk than in the South China Sea.

Trump could find himself in the middle of a crisis sparked by an aggressive Chinese maritime move—a collision, a boarding, or the imposition of a temporary exclusion zone around a disputed feature. His response might be a visible surge meant to demonstrate resolve: expanded freedom-of-navigation operations, surface combatants pushed deeper into contested waters, and highly publicized bomber deployments across the region.

SOUTH CHINA SEA (March 20, 2020) The Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords (LCS 10) patrols the South China Sea, March 20, 2020. Gabrielle Giffords, part of Destroyer Squadron (DESRON) 7, is on a rotational deployment, operating in the U.S. 7th Fleet area of operations to enhance interoperability with partners and serve as a ready-response force.(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Brenton Poyser/Released)

The intent would be deterrence through strength. The effect would be entrapment. Once forces are committed publicly and at scale, prestige attaches. Beijing would respond incrementally—shadowing vessels, tightening enforcement zones, daring Washington to climb another rung.

What begins as signaling would become a ladder of escalation with narrowing off-ramps. In a theater where neither side is inclined to blink, escalation would not create leverage. It would lead to a standoff that could easily slide into kinetic conflict.

Mistake Two: Ignoring Gray-Zone Conflict as the Main Arena of Competition

A second mistake Trump could make in 2026 would be focusing on dramatic military gestures while neglecting the quieter forms of competition that shape outcomes over time. The defining contests of the year would not arrive with declarations of war. They would unfold through interference, disruption, and coercion designed to remain below the threshold that triggers decisive response.

Trump could confront a pattern of persistent anomalies across the Arctic and North Atlantic: GPS interference along key sea lanes, unexplained satellite disruptions, intermittent damage near undersea cable junctions.

U.S. Air Force Maj. Kristin “BEO” Wolfe, F-35A Lightning II Demonstration Team pilot and commander, flies an aerial performance for the 2021 Arctic Lightning Air Show, July 30, 2021, Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska. The F-35 Demonstration Team utilized F-35s from the 354th Fighter Wing in order to showcase the combat capability of the Pacific Air Force’s newest F-35 units. (U.S. Air Force photo by Capt. Kip Sumner)

If his administration treated each incident as a discrete technical problem to be investigated, condemned, and compartmentalized—rather than as the hybrid threats they are—it would miss the campaign-level intent. Insurance premiums would rise. Commercial routes would shift. Allies would invest in national workarounds rather than collective resilience. Deterrence would erode not through defeat, but through normalization.

By the time Washington recognized the pattern, the operating environment would already have changed – and not to America’s benefit.

Mistake Three: Pressuring Allies Without Sequencing the Transition

Alliance management would present a third trap. The case for greater allied responsibility—especially in Europe—is sound. The mistake Trump could make would be forcing the outcome faster than reality allows.

In 2026, Trump might decide to draw down U.S. rotational forces in Eastern Europe and withdraw key American enablers from the region, framing the move as a long-overdue correction to European free-riding. The strategic objective—rebalancing burden-sharing—would be defensible.

Since testing at U.S. Army Cold Regions Test Center, the Department of Defense’s lone extreme cold natural environment testing facility, began in January 2020, the M1A2 System Enhancement Package version 3 main battle tank was driven more than 2,000 miles in rugged conditions across three seasons of sub-Arctic weather, fired hundreds of rounds for accuracy in extreme cold, and underwent testing of its auxiliary power unit.

Though the platform was extensively tested at U.S. Army Yuma Test Center prior to being put through its paces in Alaska, the sub-zero temperatures brought forth glitches that would have been unimaginable in the desert.

The error would lie in the sequencing. European states would not be able to generate integrated air defenses, logistics, and sustained readiness on demand. In the transition gap, deterrence would thin. Russia would not need to invade to exploit the moment; a “shadow war” involving calibrated airspace violations, hybrid pressure, and selective intimidation would suffice to test resolve.

Allies would hedge rather than invest. A move intended to accelerate responsibility would instead produce strategic drift at precisely the moment deterrence depends on clarity.

Mistake Four: Confusing Unpredictability with Effective Signaling

Running through all of these errors is a fourth mistake Trump could make in 2026: confusing volatility with strength. In domestic politics, surprise can disrupt opponents and generate momentum.

In military affairs, it often has the opposite effect. Deterrence rests on disciplined signaling—messages that are stable enough to be read, weighed, and acted upon over time. Allies require clarity to plan and commit. Adversaries require clarity to calculate risk.

When posture and rhetoric begin to swing too freely, signaling degrades, credibility blurs, and the space for misinterpretation widens.

Trump could allow U.S. signaling in the Western Pacific to swing erratically during a crisis. One week might bring public warnings and demonstrations of resolve; the next, conciliatory rhetoric aimed at de-escalation—both reinforced by visible but easily reversible force movements.

ROC/Taiwan Soldier. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

The intent would be flexibility. The effect would be confusion. Beijing would probe to see which signals matter. Allies would struggle to plan around a posture that keeps shifting. Markets would react to uncertainty rather than resolve. What is meant to unsettle an adversary would instead invite testing, increasing the risk of escalation on terms Washington does not control. This, too, could potentially lead to war.

Mistake Five: Treating Venezuela as a Strategic Problem to Be Solved Militarily

A fifth and distinct mistake Trump could make in 2026 would be treating Venezuela as a military problem to be solved rather than a strategic challenge to be managed. Frustration with the Maduro regime, its ties to external adversaries, and its role in regional instability could tempt Trump to attempt a more dramatic solution than the problem requires.

Trump might opt for regime change through force, framing a limited invasion as a way to restore order, secure energy infrastructure, or end a criminalized state on America’s doorstep. The initial military phase could succeed quickly.

Ford-Class Aircraft Carrier. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

The strategic costs would not. An invasion would entangle the United States in occupation, legitimacy disputes, and long-term stabilization in a region poorly suited to external control. It would strain relations across Latin America, divert attention and resources from higher-priority theaters, and hand rivals a powerful narrative about American coercion in the hemisphere. Power applied this way would not solve the problem it targets. It would multiply it.

Power Is Spent, Not Displayed

These five mistakes share a common root: impatience cloaked as resolve. Military power is not preserved through theatrics. It is preserved through sequencing, restraint, alliance cohesion, and disciplined signaling. None of these are glamorous. All of them are decisive.

The United States does not need to prove in 2026 that it can act forcefully. That is already understood. The real test is whether President Trump avoids the most damaging errors—escalating where restraint would preserve leverage, ignoring gray-zone pressure until it becomes normalized, destabilizing alliances during transition, substituting noise for clarity, and mistaking regime change for strategy.

Power burned this way fades quickly. Power used deliberately shapes the balance long after the headlines pass.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.

19fortyfive.com · Andrew Latham · December 24, 2025

14. All hail the Panama Canal, a frontline in the US-China trade war

Summary:

Urban Lehner argues the Panama Canal is a strategic choke point in US-China economic rivalry, even if most Americans notice it only when disrupted. He recounts how the 2023 drought sharply cut canal transits, driving up shipping costs and hitting U.S. agricultural exports that heavily rely on the route. The piece also stresses the canal’s engineering and human cost, and why control remains politically charged. It links today’s tension to port ownership at both ends by a Hong Kong-based firm, a U.S. bid to purchase those ports, and China’s reported insistence on a majority Chinese stake. The canal’s sovereignty history, including the 1977 Carter treaties and 1999 handover, frames the current dispute.

Comment: Perhaps this is why the "Trump Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine is important.

All hail the Panama Canal, a frontline in the US-China trade war - Asia Times

asiatimes.com · Urban C. Lehner

Latest reason not to take it for granted: Hong Kong owner of Panama ports may ditch sales deal unless a Chinese firm keeps majority ownership

by Urban C. Lehner

December 26, 2025

https://asiatimes.com/2025/12/all-hail-the-panama-canal-a-frontline-in-the-us-china-trade-war/

To a farmer in Nebraska or a retailer in New York, the Panama Canal is like air – noticed mainly when missing. Farmers noticed it in 2023.

Drought lowered water levels in the canal. Ships carrying American ag exports couldn’t use it. By some estimates, 25% to 30% of United States grain exports normally pass through the canal. During the drought almost none did. Shipping costs soared, farm-gate prices slipped.

Eventually the rains returned, the waters rose and ships resumed transiting. The canal went back to being taken for granted.

That’s too bad – and not just because the canal confers so many economic benefits. What’s especially under-appreciated is the herculean effort it took to build it. The canal is, without doubt, one of the greatest engineering and construction feats of all times.

My wife and I recently returned from a 10-day trip to Panama. The country is a birder’s paradise and during our six-day birding tour we saw 139 species we’d never seen before, including the wonderfully named Keel-billed Toucan, Mustached Antwren and Southern Beardless Tyrannulet.

But the day we spent watching locks lift ships 85 feet above sea level and other locks lower them back down was in many ways the highlight of the trip.

In preparation for the tour, we read David McCullough’s 1977 book The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914.

McCullough starts the epic tale with detailed accounts of France’s failed 20-year attempt at construction and the political battle in Washington over where and what kind of canal to build. Only then does he detail the grueling 10 years it took to make the canal a reality.

Between 1904 and 1914, more than 232 million cubic yards of dirt and rock were excavated, 25 million cubic yards just to compensate for the continuing landslides. At one point the excavators had to dig down nearly 300 feet.

The three sets of locks the Americans built were a structural triumph. These big water elevators operate by gravity, not pumps, using tunnels to move the water. Their massive miter gates can open and close in just two minutes.

To create the artificial lake that feeds the system, they built what was then the world’s largest earthen dam. The 2 million cubic yards of concrete poured for just the set of locks nearest the Caribbean Sea could have built a solid wall eight feet thick, 12 feet high and 133 miles long.

The work cost $352 million (roughly $10.8 billion in today’s money) and killed 5,600 – mostly black workers from the Caribbean islands.

As terrible as those casualties sound, the French effort had taken 20,000 lives. That death toll was a big reason for France’s failure. (Another was its unrealistic plan for a sea-level canal, without locks, through Panama’s mountainous terrain.)

One reason for the American success was the ability of a doctor from Alabama, William Gorgas, to eradicate yellow fever and control malaria.

Thanks mainly to the organizational ability of Major General George Washington Goethals, the project’s third chief engineer, the canal was finished ahead of schedule and $23 million under budget. The work was so good that the original locks and control system are still in use today. (Between 2007 and 2016, Panama built a new, parallel set of locks to accommodate today’s largest ships.)

In addition to a canal, the US helped build a nation – Panama. The Panamanian isthmus had been part of Colombia. When Colombians negotiating with the US proved recalcitrant, an impatient President Theodore Roosevelt sent warships in support of the Panamanians’ declaration of independence.

Many in Congress, including the chair of the key Senate committee, wanted the canal built in Nicaragua. William Cromwell, an American lawyer representing French interests, and Philippe-Jean Bunau-Varilla, the key French investor, intervened with Roosevelt to get it built in Panama. This classic piece of lobbying saved the French company’s bacon. The US bought its assets in Panama.

Trump reopened controversy earlier this year by talking of taking the canal back, in part because the ports at both ends are owned by a Hong Kong-based company. A US investment company is bidding to buy the ports. China is demanding that a Chinese company have a 51% stake.

This wasn’t the last controversy connected with the canal. The Panamanians were unhappy with the US controlling the canal and the 10-mile-wide canal zone. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty putting Panama back in control in 1999.

President Donald Trump reopened that controversy earlier this year by talking of taking the canal back, in part because the ports at both ends are owned by a Hong Kong-based company. A US investment company is bidding to buy the ports. China is demanding that a Chinese company have a 51% stake.

Businesses may take the Panama Canal for granted. For the world’s two superpowers it’s very much front of mind.

Former longtime Wall Street Journal Asia correspondent and editor Urban Lehner is editor emeritus of DTN/The Progressive Farmer.

This article, originally published on December 22 by the latter news organization and now republished by Asia Times with permission, is © Copyright 2025 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved. Follow Urban Lehner on X @urbanize

asiatimes.com · Urban C. Lehner

15. The Geopolitical Logic for Latin American Intervention

Summary:

George Friedman argues the new U.S. National Security Strategy implies a shift from heavy exposure in the Eastern Hemisphere toward stronger control of the Western Hemisphere, with the goal of greater regional stability and growth that reduces U.S. dependence on low cost Asian supply chains and eases migration pressures over time. He links the U.S. military buildup and tanker seizures near Venezuela to a campaign aimed at weakening narcotics networks and unlocking Venezuela’s economic potential in service of U.S. interests. He notes the force posture looks sized for coercion rather than occupation, and he frames Cuba as the strategic priority because of its ties to Russia and its role in sustaining Maduro.

The Geopolitical Logic for Latin American Intervention

By George Friedman -

December 22, 2025

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/the-geopolitical-logic-for-latin-american-intervention/ Open as PDFThe U.S. National Security Strategy released earlier this month contained a couple of related priorities that have informed recent U.S. actions abroad: reducing U.S. exposure to the Eastern Hemisphere and focusing on its strategy for the Western Hemisphere. Since the U.S. cannot fully disengage from the Eastern Hemisphere, it must end or at least improve hostile relationships that have drawn Washington into several costly and failed wars there – all while maintaining critical economic relations. Efforts toward that end are underway but far from final.

As important, the new strategy tacitly demands more active engagement in the Western Hemisphere, the point of which is to assert U.S. security dominance and dramatically enhance the economic capabilities of Latin America so that the U.S. can disengage from the Eastern Hemisphere. For that to happen, Latin American nations must become more politically stable and economically productive.

After World War II, the U.S. based its national security on the reconstruction of Eastern Hemisphere countries in Europe and Asia. There was a security component to its strategy, of course, rooted as it was in Cold War logic, but it also evinced a less conscious reality: Successful, developed economies will eventually incur higher wages and higher costs such that national economic growth doesn’t necessarily mean economic well-being for its people. To keep costs down, countries import cheaper products from less developed economies. Such was the case for Europe and Japan. “Made in Japan” made consumption more affordable in much of the Western world, but as Japan matured and prices rose, China became the go-to source for lower-cost production. Coupled with U.S. investment, this fueled China’s economic rise. This was not so much a conscious policy but a matter of fiduciary responsibility.

Wealthy economies need low-cost imports from less prosperous countries, but excessive dependence on those imports gives the exporters political leverage as they evolve economically and geopolitically. As China has matured, the U.S. addiction to Chinese goods is now more dangerous and more damaging to the U.S. economy.

In this context, Washington’s renewed military focus on Venezuela is thus linked to an unintended evolution of not only the military dimension of geopolitics but also the economic. The geopolitical logic is that greater economic growth in Latin America will reduce vulnerabilities in the Eastern Hemisphere and, in time, could moderate immigration to the United States. This would require greater political stability in certain Latin American countries.

The broad imperative, to a great extent, is clear. The tactical imperative – that is, what steps Washington needs to take to achieve its goals – is not. Even if Latin American countries benefit from this in the long term, their political systems will be substantially unstable in the short term. One may ask what right the U.S. has to impose itself on Latin America. That is not an unreasonable question, but human history is the history of such impositions.

Some Latin American political economies are based on the export of narcotics, and the exporters – the cartels – have created economic and political systems that make broader economic evolution impossible. Aside from its impact on American life, the drug trade undermines the development of more diverse and powerful economies.

The ongoing military operations in the Caribbean are a first step toward that end. A massive U.S. military force has been deployed to weaken and destroy cartels and thus their military and economic power. The focus on the cartels is intended both to stop the flow of narcotics into the U.S. and to allow the implicit wealth of Venezuela to emerge – not as an act of kindness but as an act of U.S. interest.

But there is an oddity in the tactics being used. The amount of force deployed in the Caribbean is far more than is necessary to blockade Venezuela. It is also far less than would be required to invade and occupy Venezuela, a necessary precursor to destroying the production of drugs in the Venezuelan hinterlands. But the deployment can be understood by considering another dimension of the American problem: Cuba. Cuba has been a potential problem for the U.S. for about 65 years, ever since Fidel Castro established a communist regime. In moving to reshape Latin America, Washington must address the Cuban problem. When the U.S. was considering sending long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, for example, Russia was in the process of signing a new defense agreement with Cuba. The message was clear: If the U.S. delivered Tomahawks, Russia might send similar munitions to Cuba. The forces deployed in the Caribbean, then, have two uses: unseating Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and thus disrupting the cartels, and threatening Cuba.

(click to enlarge)

Cuba became an economic disaster marked by massive failures of its electrical system and frequent scarcity in many basic necessities. But for all its failure, Cuba poses a real strategic threat to the U.S., given its relationship with Russia – which to some extent is shared by Venezuela. The potential (if hard to imagine) presence of Russian forces in Cuba is a threat to U.S. trade routes and national security.

If the U.S. wants to energize Latin American economies, it must deal with Cuba, which continues to carry out operations in Latin America, despite its economic hardships, and has a loose relationship with Venezuela. Cuba’s intelligence services help protect the Maduro government, and Caracas is by far Cuba’s largest supplier of oil. The recent seizure of oil tankers shows American intent to sever these supplies and thus disrupt both economies.

There is a strategy emerging in Washington and, with it, a more detailed tactic the government plans to use to achieve its goals. If this analysis of U.S. strategy is correct, then the strategy requires dealing with Cuba, toward which the blockade of oil from Venezuela is a rational step. For the strategy to move forward, Cuba, not Venezuela, should be the priority because it would address the potential, if unlikely, threat of a significant Russian presence close to the U.S. mainland.

The shift in U.S. attention to the Western Hemisphere and the extension of the oil tanker blockade of Venezuela, along with the size of the U.S. deployment, seem to be tactical movements in a much broader plan that was stated in the National Security Strategy. Washington has announced its intentions, and now it’s following through.

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George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures. Dr. Friedman is also a New York Times bestselling author. His most recent book, THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, published February 25, 2020 describes how “the United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.” The decade 2020-2030 is such a period which will bring dramatic upheaval and reshaping of American government, foreign policy, economics, and culture. His most popular book, The Next 100 Years, is kept alive by the prescience of its predictions. Other best-selling books include Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, The Next Decade, America’s Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Dr. Friedman has briefed numerous military and government organizations in the United States and overseas and appears regularly as an expert on international affairs, foreign policy and intelligence in major media. For almost 20 years before resigning in May 2015, Dr. Friedman was CEO and then chairman of Stratfor, a company he founded in 1996. Friedman received his bachelor’s degree from the City College of the City University of New York and holds a doctorate in government from Cornell University.

16. Japan Accelerates Defense Buildup With Record Budget and Expanded Unmanned Capabilities

Summary:

Japan’s cabinet approved a draft FY2026 defense budget of 9.04 trillion yen (about $58B), up 3.8 percent and the 12th straight record, as Tokyo responds to pressure from China, north Korea, and Russia and U.S. calls for higher allied spending. It is year four of the 2023 to 2027 Defense Buildup Program and front-loaded outlays could bring the 2 percent of GDP goal forward. The plan emphasizes unmanned capabilities, including 100.1B yen for “SHIELD” and additional MQ-9B purchases. It also funds stand-off strike with upgraded Type 12 missiles, hypersonic weapons, space and cyber initiatives, next-generation fighter work with the UK and Italy, and continued Izumo-class carrier conversion for F-35B operations.

Comment: Japan appears to be stepping up.

Japan Accelerates Defense Buildup With Record Budget and Expanded Unmanned Capabilities

The draft defense budget sets a new spending record for the 12th straight year amid mounting regional threats and U.S. alliance pressure.

By Takahashi Kosuke

December 26, 2025

https://thediplomat.com/2025/12/japan-accelerates-defense-buildup-with-record-budget-and-expanded-unmanned-capabilities/

The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s second Izumo-class helicopter carrier JS Kaga, whose bow has been modified to a rectangular shape to enable operations of the stealth F-35B fighter.

Credit: JMSDF

Japan is accelerating its defense buildup amid rising geopolitical tensions, driven by mounting military pressure from three nuclear-armed neighbors — China, North Korea, and Russia — and calls from the United States for higher defense spending.

On December 26, the cabinet of Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae approved a draft defense budget for fiscal year 2026 totaling 9.04 trillion yen ($58 billion), including expenditures related to the realignment of U.S. forces in Japan. The nation’s fiscal year begins in April.

The budget represents a 3.8 percent increase from the previous year, marking the first time Japan’s defense spending has exceeded 9 trillion yen and extending its record-high trajectory to a 12th consecutive year. Compared with the initial budget request submitted in August, which stood at 8.85 trillion yen, the total was increased by about 190 billion yen. The move underscores the Takaichi administration’s policy emphasis on accelerating Japan’s defense buildup.

Japan’s fiscal year 2026 budget plan, expected to be approved by the country’s bicameral legislature in the coming months, marks the fourth year of the Defense Buildup Program — a five-year framework covering fiscal years 2023 through 2027 that allocates a total of 43 trillion yen ($275 billion) in defense-related spending. Under the program, the Japanese government has set a goal of raising defense-related expenditures to 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by fiscal year 2027, including not only the Ministry of Defense’s budget but also defense-related outlays by other government agencies.

However, under the Takaichi administration, the supplementary budget for the current fiscal year 2025 — the first compiled during her tenure and passed and enacted by the Diet earlier this month — includes roughly 1.1 trillion yen in additional security-related spending, including defense expenditures.

As a result, Japan is on track to reach its 2 percent-of-GDP defense spending target two years ahead of schedule. This front-loading of defense outlays underscores the administration’s determination to accelerate the country’s defense buildup amid a deteriorating regional security environment, in line with demands from the Trump administration in the United States for allies to boost defense spending.

As in the past three years, the budget plan lists seven key pillars of “necessary efforts to drastically strengthen Japan’s defense capabilities.”

These include (1) “stand-off defense capabilities,” such as mass production of longer-range missiles; (2) “comprehensive air and missile defense capabilities” to respond to increasingly diverse and complex airborne threats, including missiles; (3) “unmanned asset defense capabilities,” such as the use of drones; (4) “cross-domain operational capabilities” in space, cyberspace, and electromagnetic domains; (5) “command and control and intelligence-related functions”; (6) “maneuvering and deployment capability” to send troops and supplies to the front line of a conflict; and (7) “sustainability and resiliency.”

Of these seven pillars, the latest draft defense budget places a strong emphasis on the third pillar: strengthening unmanned asset defense capabilities.

The Defense Ministry was allocated 100.1 billion yen to establish an overall coastal defense system called “SHIELD” by fiscal year 2027, utilizing a massive fleet of unmanned vehicles in the air, sea, and underwater. The name stands for “Synchronized, Hybrid, Integrated and Enhanced Littoral Defense.”

The ministry said that it will acquire an unspecified number of small attack unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), surface ship-launched UAVs, small ship-based UAVs, small multirole unmanned surface vessels (USVs), and small multirole unmanned underwater vessels (UUVs) for the three branches of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) – Ground (GSDF), Maritime (MSDF), and Air (ASDF) – to build SHIELD.

Defense officials said the plan would involve purchasing existing UAVs and USVs, primarily from foreign manufacturers. Most notably, the Defense Ministry secured 76.5 billion yen to acquire four more MQ-9B SkyGuardian UAVs, which have already been decided for deployment to the MSDF.

In addition, the Defense Ministry was allocated 2.2 billion yen to conduct demonstration tests for simultaneous control of a large number of various unmanned assets.

As one of the major projects, the ministry also secured 104.3 billion yen to build the sixth ship of the upgraded Mogami-class multirole frigate of the MSDF, known in Tokyo as the “New FFM” or 06FFM. The lead ship of the New FFM class is scheduled to be laid down in fiscal year 2025 and commissioned in fiscal year 2028. According to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, if construction proceeds smoothly, all 12 vessels are expected to be in service by fiscal year 2032.

On stand-off defense capabilities, the Defense Ministry was allocated 177 billion yen to acquire a new upgraded ground-based version of the Type 12 surface-to-ship missile (SSM) and its related ground equipment. The SSM is part of the country’s development of counterstrike capabilities – formerly known as “enemy base strike capabilities.”

The ministry announced it will start to deploy the new missile, which has an extended range of about 1,000 km, to the GSDF 5th Surface-to-Ship Missile Regiment at Camp Kengun in Kumamoto Prefecture on Kyushu Island during fiscal 2025 and 2026, and to the GSDF Fuji Artillery School Unit at Camp Fuji in Shizuoka Prefecture during fiscal 2027.

The ministry also secured 35.7 billion yen to acquire the long-range, ship-launched, improved version of the Type 12 SSM.

Japan began mass production of the improved Type 12 ship-launched SSM in the current fiscal year. It said the JMSDF will begin operating this new missile on the refurbished JS Teruzuki (DD-116) in fiscal 2027.

In addition, the Defense Ministry said the upgraded air-launched version of the Type 12 SSM is scheduled to enter service in fiscal 2027 at ASDF Hyakuri Air Base in Ibaraki Prefecture, where it will be operated by the upgraded F-2 fighter.

The Ministry of Defense will begin mass production of hypersonic guided missiles, which can fly at more than five times the speed of sound, from the next fiscal year. For the first time, the ministry has secured a budget of 30.1 billion yen for the acquisition of these missiles and ground equipment.

As for the fourth pillar of enhancing “cross-domain operational capabilities,” the ministry secured about 174 billion yen to strengthen the security infrastructure for outer space. It plans to reorganize the Air Self-Defense Force into the Air and Space Self-Defense Force during the next fiscal year.

The ministry’s Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Agency (ATLA) earmarked 160.2 billion yen to keep developing its next-generation fighter program in partnership with the United Kingdom and Italy. It plans to continue developing a basic design for the future fighter’s fuselage and the detailed engineering of its engines. A Defense Ministry official said the first flight of the next-generation fighter jet is scheduled for around 2030.

In addition, it secured 4.8 billion yen for research and development of unmanned aircraft to be used in conjunction with this next-generation fighter jet. Specifically, it will carry out the conceptual design of a collaborative unmanned aircraft that utilizes artificial intelligence to enable autonomous situational and flight decisions and other behavioral decisions.

The MSDF also earmarked 28.5 billion yen to continue modifying its two Izumo-class helicopter carriers – JS Izumo and JS Kaga – into aircraft carriers capable of enabling Lockheed Martin F-35B fighter operations.

As for the Izumo, the defense official said 900 million yen was allocated to install deck status lights on the ship, which allow deck workers to share the status of the deck, and to cover the test cost of the landing guidance system on the Izumo.

As for the Kaga, 27.6 million yen was allocated for hull　modifications, including upgrades to hangar facilities.

The Ministry of Defense said JS Izumo‘s modification is scheduled to be completed in fiscal 2027, and JS Kaga‘s in fiscal 2028.

Authors

Contributing Author

Takahashi Kosuke

Takahashi Kosuke is Tokyo Correspondent for The Diplomat.

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17. How China Carved Up Myanmar

Summary:

Amara Thiha argues China has adapted to Myanmar’s post-2021 fragmentation and now seeks to manage, not resolve, the civil war by creating stability through dependence. Beijing is cultivating ties with both the junta and powerful ethnic armed organizations, using conditional aid, cross-border leverage, and pressure to shape local compliance while pushing negotiations on China’s terms. The coming December 28 election is framed as a tool to institutionalize a hybrid system that preserves military rule behind civilian procedures, giving Chinese firms more durable legal cover for contracts and permits. China’s interests center on heavy rare earth supply from border regions and the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor to Kyaukphyu, reducing Malacca Strait vulnerability. The approach carries collapse risks.

Excerpt:

This limited Chinese reach creates room for other regional and international actors to play a role in Myanmar and balance China’s outsize influence. India and Thailand are deeply involved in Myanmar’s west and south because they coordinate border security with both the central government and rebel groups operating along their borders, facilitate cross-border trade, and manage humanitarian access points for refugees fleeing Myanmar. In addition to Thailand, members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations can promote quiet political dialogue among opposition groups and then collectively with the junta without aligning with any side. The United States and its allies, meanwhile, can help build local administrative capacity, deliver emergency medical services and food aid, and reinforce safe humanitarian channels beyond China’s primary zones of engagement.

By piecing together a patchwork of negotiated local arrangements, China is seeking a pragmatic alternative to propping up a single unified national power. The pieces are in place for China to succeed, but there is a high risk of turbulence spiraling out of control. The more that China strikes to deals to empower rebel groups along its border, the more it erodes the central government’s authority. If the central government is weakened too much it could trigger a total state collapse, which would result in a surge in cross-border crime, refugee flows, and unchecked ethnic rivalries and violence. Ultimately, Beijing is betting that it can sustain a delicate balance to get what it wants in Myanmar despite ongoing disorder.

Comment: How are US interests in the region affected?

How China Carved Up Myanmar

Foreign Affairs · More by Amara Thiha · December 26, 2025

Beijing’s Strategy to Create Stability Through Dependence

Amara Thiha

December 26, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/asia/how-china-carved-myanmar

Chinese leader Xi Jinping meeting with Myanmar generals in Tianjin, China, August 2025 ANDRES MARTINEZ CASARES / Pool / Reuters

AMARA THIHA is a Nonresident Fellow with the China Program at the Stimson Center.

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Nearly five years after a military coup in 2021 unseated its civilian government, Myanmar has become extremely fragmented. A civil war flared after the coup, killing thousands and leaving upward of 18 million people in need of humanitarian aid. Today, the central government under the military junta effectively controls less than half of the country’s territory. A variety of ethnic armed organizations and other rebel groups jostle for land, resources, and sway, running large regions of the country on their own terms.

Such a fractured political landscape could produce endless instability that might threaten investments in Myanmar or even spill beyond the country’s borders. But China, Myanmar’s most powerful and influential neighbor, no longer fears this fragmentation. Instead, Beijing believes this turmoil is here to stay—and that it can manage the chaos. For much of the civil war, Beijing reluctantly worked with both the military junta and local armed groups near its border while holding out hope for the junta to emerge dominant and unify the country, which would stabilize Myanmar and make it easier for China to operate there. Now, Beijing seeks to actively maintain its influence by simultaneously providing the junta with conditional economic and humanitarian aid and pressuring ethnic armed organizations on its border into compliance. China is using its massive economic leverage to force rival groups to the negotiating table on its terms.

Myanmar’s election, which begins on December 28, is unlikely to produce a democratic transition. Although domestic political parties and local elites hope that the election creates an opening for some loosening of political restrictions, most external observers have already dismissed the elections as obviously unfree and unfair. But leaders in China view the polls as a crucial step toward their goal of managing the country. The election provides an opportunity to formalize a hybrid political system in which the military junta maintains its political authority behind a veneer of civilian administration. Military leaders will retain the symbols of state power, but the elected civilian parliament will process budgets and sign contracts. This will grant China the necessary administrative reliability it needs to invest in projects in Myanmar: whereas the junta’s decrees are fragile because they are subject to leadership turnover, territory loss, or sanctions, civilian-ratified procedures offer more continuity and provide legal leverage for Chinese firms regardless of which local group claims dominance in a part of the country.

The election will not solve fragmentation in Myanmar. Instead, it will help China institutionalize it in a way that reduces risk for itself. Beijing believes it can tolerate a divided Myanmar so long as the main power holders remain dependent on China for trade, energy, and administrative coordination. This means that no single group can secure access to key resources, cross-border channels of commerce, or official approvals without running it by Beijing first. Chinese diplomatic, security, and economic agencies support this approach because they believe they have the tools to adjust pressure on competing groups effectively enough to limit the risk that this managed chaos will devolve into wider instability. If this strategy succeeds, it represents a new pathway for China to operate in one of the world’s most volatile countries.

DISUNITED NATION

Even before the 2021 coup, numerous ethnic armed organizations ruled various parts of Myanmar. Since then, the civil war has fragmented the country even further. The military junta in the administrative capital of Naypyidaw retains international recognition and occupies most major cities, while strong ethnic armed groups, such as the Arakan Army and the United Wa State Army, exercise de facto administrative, military, and economic control over large, strategically vital territories.

In late 2023 and 2024, a joint military offensive of antigovernment rebels and ethnic armed groups, known as Operation 1027, seized more than 40 major towns and administrative centers. The government’s counteroffensive, which started in early 2025 and was supported in part by agreements brokered by China, enabled the military to regain some areas it had lost. But according to the think tank ISP-Myanmar, the junta has regained only about 11 percent of the territory previously ceded in northern Shan State, on China’s southwestern border. In much of the country, the government at best maintains isolated garrisons near key natural resource extraction sites and transport corridors.

But the junta’s weakness is no guarantee of rebel success. The various opposition groups are too disunited to mount a decisive national takeover. These groups include the National Unity Government, the political leadership in exile composed of elected officials deposed in the 2021 coup; bands of militias known as the People’s Defense Forces, some of which operate under the command of the National Unity Government; and a variety of other autonomous ethnic armed organizations that also oppose military rule. This motley resistance has been hampered by its divided political and command structures and a lack of weapons. Although Operation 1027 displayed impressive coordination among opposition groups, the ongoing infighting among rebels, including over natural resources and their attendant revenues, has undercut any attempt at forming and executing a collective strategy to topple the junta.

DIVIDE AND CONCUR

China sees utility in this fractured political landscape. It has cultivated direct ties to both the military junta and the most capable armed organizations around the country. This strategy of befriending all sides serves important Chinese material goals: securing access to Myanmar’s deposits of critical minerals and routes overland to the Indian Ocean.

In 2023, Myanmar became China's largest external supplier of heavy rare earths. These elements, such as dysprosium and terbium, are key components in electric vehicles, defense systems, and advanced electronics. In 2023, China imported about 41,700 metric tons of heavy rare earths from Myanmar—more than 90 percent of China’s overall supply.

But Myanmar’s central government does not possess these mineral resources. The richest deposits are located almost exclusively in northern Kachin and Shan States, within the de facto jurisdictions of various ethnic armed organizations. Groups such as the Kachin Independence Organization and the United Wa State Army exercise authority over key mining hubs and operate these sites beyond the reach of the junta. Only by working with these ethnic armed organizations can China ensure its supply chain.

Beijing also wants maritime access to the Indian Ocean by promoting the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor from Kunming, the capital of China’s Yunnan province, to the Chinese-backed Kyaukphyu deep-sea port and gas pipelines in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. China currently relies on exporting goods and importing energy through the Malacca Strait in Southeast Asia, a narrow waterway that is vulnerable to a naval blockade and where adversaries could cut off supplies to China in a regional crisis. Having direct access to the Indian Ocean via Myanmar will strengthen China’s energy security and strategic autonomy in the Indo-Pacific.

Only by working with ethnic armed organizations can China ensure its supply chain.

Although the central government in Naypyidaw formally operates the Kyaukphyu deep-sea port, the Arakan Army, an ethnic armed organization, has functional control because its territory encircles the project and its allies dominate the lengthy inland pipeline route stretching from China to the Indian Ocean. But China retains leverage over the Arakan Army because Beijing is the principal external sponsor of the port and the main source of future investment, financing, and decision-making connected to its development. It uses this leverage to effectively compel the Arakan Army to protect Chinese infrastructure even as the group battles the central government for regional dominance.

Its dealings in Myanmar have taught China that transactional dealmaking with competing local authorities is unavoidable in a fragmented political environment. But China has also learned that without more legal cover, temporary agreements with local armed groups are too fragile to support long-term investments. China wants standardized contracts, national-level permits, and legal guarantees, which protect its investments in case local power holders try to arbitrarily revise terms or a new group seizes power. Only a central state, even a weak one, can provide the basis for these national frameworks.

This combination of local rule and national administrative authority makes the junta and local ethnic armed groups dependent on one another, and, in turn, on Beijing. Central leaders in Naypyidaw need the revenue that projects such as mining and infrastructure partnerships bring, which encourages them to negotiate access and profit sharing agreements with the groups that physically govern the territory. Ethnic armed organizations, meanwhile, need national-level administrative approvals from central officials that will grant them Beijing’s endorsement. China thus uses procedural demands and the promise of future investments to secure stable and workable arrangements with different groups.

Given how dispersed power is in Myanmar, any attempt to bring all groups together in a unified coalition, such as through attempts to broker national peace, is a distant dream. Instead, if Beijing can manage these relationships by creating interdependencies, it can get what it wants without slow and politically fraught national peace talks.

MIRROR IMAGE

China’s internal bureaucratic structure makes it more likely that it can carry out this strategy in Myanmar. The division of labor between powerful central agencies in Beijing and experienced local authorities near the border mirrors and reinforces Myanmar’s fragmented political order, allowing China to more easily engage both the junta as a sovereign national authority and armed organizations as de facto power holders. By separating responsibility for national and local issues into different parts of its own bureaucracy, China can stabilize economic corridors in Myanmar and protect investment projects on a case-by-case basis without needing full political consolidation.

Central institutions in Beijing, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and the People's Liberation Army, handle state-to-state diplomacy and cultivate ties with their counterparts in Myanmar’s military leadership in Naypyidaw. The MFA, for instance, secures formal agreements, such as the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation, a Chinese-led initiative to coordinate development and infrastructure among countries in the Mekong River basin. The MFA is also responsible for the diplomatic legwork necessary to carry out major infrastructure projects, including signing sovereign agreements to formalize state participation and reduce risk for Chinese state-owned enterprises operating in Myanmar.

The junta and local ethnic armed groups are dependent on one another, and, in turn, on Beijing.

Although the MFA has the ultimate diplomatic authority to represent Beijing, it does not and cannot enforce peace in the borderlands. Instead, most stabilizing operations are carried out on the ground in Myanmar by local police and intelligence agencies headquartered in Yunnan, the southwestern province that borders Myanmar. The Yunnan branches of the Ministry of Public Security, China’s national law enforcement agency, and the Ministry of State Security (MSS), its intelligence agency, have decades-long relationships with ethnic armed groups. They have deep knowledge and experience of how to manage and coerce Myanmar’s ethnic armed organizations that their counterparts in Beijing lack. The Yunnan branch of the MSS, for instance, analyzes the political and security situation on the ground and mediates between Myanmar’s government and non-state actors.

These local divisions of China’s security and intelligence agencies broker cease-fire agreements, conduct anti-scam operations, and provide stability. They rely on China’s economic leverage to ensure that local groups support its interests. Ethnic armed organizations that run customs operations and infrastructure in northern Shan and Kachin states, the site of much critical minerals extraction, rely on Chinese logistics, currency, and banking systems to function. Chinese agencies operating out of Yunnan province are able to selectively open and close trade routes; regulate groups’ access to fuel, electricity, and financing; and provide incentives to encourage cease-fires among competing groups when necessary.

Each of these local institutional branches implements its mission independently, which frequently generates friction inside China’s massive bureaucracy. Conflict occurs most often when the mandates of the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of State Security overlap. But the agencies are broadly aligned with Beijing’s strategic objectives, and the Chinese Special Envoy for Asian Affairs—a top diplomat appointed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who has the authority to coordinate between agencies and meet with both official and nonstate groups—can step in to mediate between separate wings of the bureaucracy to prevent China’s own bureaucratic fragmentation from undercutting its larger goals.

POWER ARRANGERS

The central question in Myanmar no longer whether the military junta in Naypyidaw or the exiled democratic government can restore national unity but whether Beijing can sustain a system built on permanent fragmentation. After the election, Beijing’s projected succession plan would keep the country’s current leader, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, as interim president while shifting responsibilities to a group of senior commanders. This aims to ensure that no single figure can emerge as an heir apparent, which Beijing hopes will prevent the possibility that a competing power base inside Naypyidaw could grow large enough to disrupt a future leadership transition and break China’s carefully crafted balance.

Beijing has shown that it is willing to use direct mediation tactics, economic leverage, and joint monitoring mechanisms to shape the internal power dynamics of Myanmar—going further than it has anywhere else in the world. Even if this approach works, however, China’s influence remains geographically limited. Much of China’s focus is on the strategic northern and western borderlands of Myanmar, which is where China needs to mine critical minerals for its supply chain and secure port access for energy security. And the local security and intelligence agencies based in Yunnan, which make it possible for China to work with volatile ethnic armed organizations on the ground, have the bandwidth and experience only to deal with areas that directly touch on their provincial interests. Their influence does not extend to the central plains and the eastern and southern border states.

This limited Chinese reach creates room for other regional and international actors to play a role in Myanmar and balance China’s outsize influence. India and Thailand are deeply involved in Myanmar’s west and south because they coordinate border security with both the central government and rebel groups operating along their borders, facilitate cross-border trade, and manage humanitarian access points for refugees fleeing Myanmar. In addition to Thailand, members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations can promote quiet political dialogue among opposition groups and then collectively with the junta without aligning with any side. The United States and its allies, meanwhile, can help build local administrative capacity, deliver emergency medical services and food aid, and reinforce safe humanitarian channels beyond China’s primary zones of engagement.

By piecing together a patchwork of negotiated local arrangements, China is seeking a pragmatic alternative to propping up a single unified national power. The pieces are in place for China to succeed, but there is a high risk of turbulence spiraling out of control. The more that China strikes to deals to empower rebel groups along its border, the more it erodes the central government’s authority. If the central government is weakened too much it could trigger a total state collapse, which would result in a surge in cross-border crime, refugee flows, and unchecked ethnic rivalries and violence. Ultimately, Beijing is betting that it can sustain a delicate balance to get what it wants in Myanmar despite ongoing disorder.

Foreign Affairs · More by Amara Thiha · December 26, 2025

18. How to Secure the Sky: America Needs a Defense Against Drones

Summary:

Theodore Bunzel and Tom Donilon argue the United States lacks a comprehensive defense against drones, despite recent executive and legislative steps. They cite Ukraine’s “Operation Spiderweb” as a warning of how cheap, covertly deployed drones can inflict strategic damage, and they note rising unexplained incursions over U.S. military sites and critical infrastructure. The authors call for an integrated national system to detect, identify, attribute, and respond in real time, stronger enforcement or replacement of FAA Remote ID, and mandatory geofencing over restricted areas. They urge major new funding for layered counterdrone defenses, including directed energy and electronic warfare, prioritized for airports, mass gatherings, and AI data centers. They also stress reducing supply chain exposure to China’s dominant drone market.

Excerpt:

The drone threat is no longer theoretical. It is here, it is accelerating, and it will only grow more challenging. The United States still has the means to shape the environment before a crisis forces its hand, but the window is closing. The federal government must act fast to eliminate regulatory gaps, build a layered defense, and find the political will to fund and deploy counterdrone systems at scale. If it does not take these steps by choice, it will be forced to take them—and more—in the wake of a preventable tragedy.

Comment: I am surprised there have been so few articles calling attention to Operation Spiderweb and the potential for similar operations in the US.

How to Secure the Sky

Foreign Affairs · More by Theodore Bunzel · December 26, 2025

Theodore Bunzel and Tom Donilon

America Needs a Defense Against Drones

December 26, 2025

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-secure-sky

A German soldier demonstrating a drone jammer, Hamburg, Germany, September 2025 Lisi Niesner / Reuters

THEODORE BUNZEL is Managing Director and Head of Lazard Geopolitical Advisory. He has worked in the Political Section of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and at the U.S. Treasury Department.

TOM DONILON served as U.S. National Security Adviser to President Barack Obama. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations.

On June 1, Ukraine’s security services launched a covert strike on five air bases across Russia. More than 100 attack drones smuggled into Russia in plywood cabins on trucks driven by unsuspecting Russians destroyed bombers sitting on tarmacs as far away as the Belaya air base in Siberia, around 3,000 miles from Kyiv. According to Ukrainian government sources, the strikes took out about one-third of Russia’s long-range bomber force and cost Moscow roughly $7 billion. Dubbed Operation Spiderweb, it was one of the most spectacular and daring attacks to date of the war in Ukraine. It was also a dramatic warning of a growing threat to American soil.

In an essay in Foreign Affairs in January 2022, one of us (Donilon) warned of this threat. Back then, America’s vulnerability to this possibility seemed to be a “failure of imagination,” echoing the 9/11 Commission’s famous conclusion about the United States’ failure to anticipate the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. Today, the drone threat is no longer difficult to imagine. States can use them to sow economic disruption or to spy on sensitive sites, lone-wolf actors can use them for political violence, and hobbyists can accidentally crash them into critical infrastructure.

Both the Biden and Trump administrations have taken steps to protect the country from drones, such as specifying federal roles and responsibilities, banning drone flights over certain sensitive sites and special events, and investing in counterdrone technology and its deployment. Recent legislation goes even further to close jurisdictional gaps. But despite this progress, the United States has not kept pace with the threats. Vulnerabilities remain, including inadequate systems for identifying and restricting drones in U.S. airspace, limited funding for advanced counterdrone systems capable of protecting sensitive infrastructure and mass gatherings of people, and supply chain risks tied to China’s dominance of the global drone market.

The United States, in other words, still lacks a comprehensive drone defense. The good news is that the country and its partners have the means and ability to mitigate the domestic threat from drones, and there is bipartisan consensus in Washington for doing so. They just need the bureaucratic and political will to act before a crisis forces them to.

SWARMING SKIES

The risk from drones has evolved dramatically since 2022. Russia’s war against Ukraine has demonstrated the lethality of drones, which according to Ukrainian government estimates are now responsible for 70 percent of all casualties. The war in Ukraine has also served as a testing ground and innovation accelerant for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), including the mass production of first-person-view drones, the development of fiber-optic drones that can travel for miles and cannot be thwarted by radio frequencies, and long-range strike drones that are ever more capable of effectively hitting targets such as energy and civilian infrastructure. Skilled drone pilots can guide their payloads into the open hatch of a tank and have been recording such attacks to score propaganda points for Kyiv or Moscow. Ukraine is manufacturing some four million drones a year—by some estimates more than all NATO countries combined—while Russia is making around two million per year. Mounting a defense, meanwhile, has been difficult, with neither Russia nor Ukraine able to find scalable and broad countermeasures to protect itself against the onslaught.

During this time, drones have become ever more present in U.S. skies as well. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, more than 800,000 drone operators are registered in the United States. But the number of actual drones is far higher because of the many hobbyists operating small drones that fall below registration thresholds and because operators can use a single registration to fly multiple drones.Drones are now being used for everything from monitoring crop health to assisting firefighters and law enforcement. And the day when drones deliver goods to your front door may not be far off: in 2024, Amazon’s Prime Air service secured FAA approval for its drones to fly beyond the operator’s visual line of sight, laying the foundation for the company to scale such operations.

Yet while drones can deliver major economic benefits, their proliferation heightens the risk of accidents and complicates the ability of law enforcement agencies to distinguish legitimate activity from potential threats. The United States has already experienced a series of confusing drone-related incidents. In December 2023, Langley Air Force Base in Virginia experienced 17 consecutive nights of mysterious drone flyovers that forced the temporary relocation of F-22 Raptor aircraft and the suspension of training operations. Witnesses described formations as long as 20 feet traveling at 100 miles per hour. But despite weeks of investigation, the FBI, the Pentagon, and NASA were not able to identify the operators. Over the following year, more than 350 drone incursions were detected across 100 different U.S. military installations.

Last December, meanwhile, a wave of drone sightings concentrated in New Jersey set off a media frenzy. The governor reported nearly 50 sightings in a single night as the FAA imposed restrictions on flights around critical infrastructure. Once again, authorities were unable to determine the origin of the drones or even corroborate the sightings. These incidents highlight the challenge of identifying who is responsible for unknown UAS—and, just as important—determining which authorities are responsible for dealing with them.

Part of the problem is that drones are easily accessible to dangerous actors as varied as lone wolves, criminal organizations, and adversarial states. In the hands of individuals, cheap drones can be tools for terrorist acts. In July 2024, for instance, a 20-year-old used one to survey the rally grounds in Butler, Pennsylvania, before taking aim at Donald Trump during a campaign appearance. States, meanwhile, can deploy drones to cause economic disruption: consider recent hybrid attacks in Europe, which European officials attribute to Russian intelligence. In September, unusual drone activity forced temporary closures of the main airports in Copenhagen and Oslo. The next month, similar incidents near the Munich airport derailed flights for more than 3,000 travelers. Russian authorities denied involvement, but the incidents cost millions. Such examples show how hostile actors in a moment of future tension could employ drones to surveil sensitive sites, destroy commercial or military targets, or conduct plausibly deniable economic disruption in the United States.

FRIEND OR FOE?

American policymakers have taken several steps to address the drone challenge. In 2022 the Biden administration released a plan that recommended—but did not universally implement—measures such as creating a national database to track incidents, training counterdrone operators, enlisting state and local law enforcement in counterdrone activities, investing in new technology, and passing legislation to clarify which authorities would be responsible for what. In June, Trump issued an executive order, “Restoring American Airspace Sovereignty,” which directed the FAA to tighten regulations on drone flights over sensitive sites and expanded law enforcement powers and funding to counter unauthorized drone activity.

This month, Congress passed legislation, provisions of which had been supported by both the Biden and Trump administrations, to enhance and extend federal agencies’ authorities to use defensive measures against drones. It also grants new authority to state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies to protect certain sites, including sports arenas and concert venues, once their employees are trained and certified by the Department of Justice. These actions deserve credit and will help close some of the jurisdictional gaps that have impeded an effective threat response. Yet several challenges remain that require additional and prompt action.

A U.S. soldier holding a device designed to counter drones, El Paso, Texas, July 2025 Jose Luis Gonzalez / Reuters

Most urgently, the United States needs an integrated national system for detecting drones, identifying and attributing potential threats, and executing a response in real time. The FAA tried to address part of this issue with its Remote ID Rule, which became fully enforceable in March 2024 and requires registered drones to fly with a “digital license plate” that broadcasts their identification and location information. Compliance has been slow, and enforcement has been tepid, however: a Government Accountability Office report found that in many cases, state and local law enforcement were not even aware of the Remote ID requirement. The federal government should provide greater resources to the FAA to facilitate full implementation. Still, given the limits of the Remote ID technology and its integration with state and local systems, the more advisable path may be to replace the program altogether with a new, more agile technology developed in collaboration with industry.

To complement identification efforts, the FAA, in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security, should establish a single catalogue of restricted airspace and institute “hard” geofencing requirements—software guardrails built into every drone—that would automatically block them from flying over these sensitive areas. The European Union requires drone manufacturers to incorporate geo-awareness systems that warn or restrict operators from flying into prohibited zones, but in the United States such measures remain voluntary and depend on the manufacturer’s discretion. In fact, in January 2025, DJI, a Chinese company and the world’s largest drone manufacturer, rolled back geofencing software that had previously prevented U.S. drones from flying in FAA-restricted areas. By making hobbyist and commercial drones easier to identify and barring them from sensitive areas, authorities will be able to more quickly distinguish inadvertent disruptions from nefarious threats.

DRONE DEFENSE

The United States also needs to double down on counterdrone measures. Today, the most advanced of these systems use directed-energy weapons—high-powered lasers and microwaves that disable or destroy drones—that complement existing electronic warfare tools, including GPS spoofing, radio-frequency jamming, and remote takeover technologies that can neutralize drone swarms. But these systems can run into the tens of millions of dollars. By contrast, the drones they are combating often cost just a few hundred dollars—an unsustainable asymmetry.

The Defense Department should thus boost funding and R & D to develop agile and innovative counterdrone technologies. The Pentagon has already earmarked significant resources for the effort, and Congress recently ordered the formation of a joint interagency task force to better coordinate acquisition and deployment. But the government needs to allocate billions of dollars more to make it scalable. Because large numbers of drones can overwhelm even the most sophisticated air defense systems, an effective strategy will rely not just on one device or system but on intentionally layered defenses that integrate physical, electronic, and kinetic counterdrone measures.

The United States will then need to focus on deploying these counterdrone systems where they are most needed, such as around critical infrastructure. Airports are an obvious target: the FAA recorded 411 illegal drone incursions at airports in the first quarter of 2025 alone, an increase of more than 25 percent over the same period in 2024. Mass gathering sites, such as stadiums and concert venues, will also need their own enhanced defenses, particularly ahead of the 2026 World Cup games and the United States Semiquincentennial on July 4, 2026. The FBI has reported that it is only able to protect around 0.05 percent of the more than 240,000 events eligible for its oversight. This is an unacceptable gap that puts the American public at risk.

Data centers are the new frontier in this domain; as firms invest hundreds of billions of dollars into the build-out of artificial intelligence, these sites are increasingly becoming national security assets. With plans to build new AI data centers approaching the size of Manhattan, major tech companies previously focused on cyber defenses will need strong policy incentives and assistance to protect such sites from physical attacks, including from drones.

AN OPPORTUNITY TO ACT

At the same time that the United States is working on its drone defenses, it also needs to play offense and develop a whole-of-government strategy to address the supply chain risks from Chinese dominance of the drone market. Today, 80 percent of the U.S. consumer drone market is held by a single Chinese company. This dominance opens the risk that Chinese drones could transmit sensitive information back to Beijing—as well as the possibility that they might be remotely hacked to sow disruption. In late December, the Federal Communications Commission placed all foreign drone companies on its Covered List, effectively banning new models of foreign drones in the U.S. market. This will help address the vulnerability from new Chinese drones in U.S. airspace, but it will not affect foreign drones already in widespread use or restrict the import and sale of drones previously approved for the U.S. market. And even with the ban, it will take time to diversify away from Chinese manufactured drones. The United States will need greater incentives to encourage both manufacturing and non-Chinese drone use if it wants to develop a competitive drone market.

The United States should also lean into the opportunity to learn from partners on the frontlines of drone warfare, including Ukraine, Israel, and now, several of its European NATO allies. Ukraine has been at the vanguard of creating lower-cost counter-drone methods, such as interceptor drones that can ram hostile counterparts, to help defend itself against relentless Russian attacks. Israel, which has faced recurring drone attacks from Iran and its proxies over the last several years, has invested in advanced systems to identify, track, and intercept drone threats in crowded airspace. And NATO recently proposed a “drone wall” to detect and intercept threats along its eastern flank. The United States should coordinate with NATO on counterdrone initiatives and form working groups with Ukraine and Israel to exchange technology and best practices. These discussions should include not just representatives of the U.S. military but also the Department of Homeland Security, the FAA, the FBI, and other authorities.

Given the urgency of the threat and the magnitude of the legal, technical, and policy challenges at hand, Congressional leaders should also convene a blue-ribbon commission to examine recent domestic and international incidents; develop an integrated system for identifying, tracking, and mitigating drone threats that spans civilian and military applications; devise a way to adequately fund the development and deployment of drone detection and mitigation technology; and address critical vulnerabilities in U.S. supply chains for drones. The commission should be small, with no more than five members and a well-resourced staff working in both classified and unclassified dimensions, and it should be charged with delivering concrete recommendations within 12 months on how to strengthen the U.S. counterdrone posture across the government as a whole. Such a commission is typically created after an attack or major disaster, but the United States can seize the moment now.

The drone threat is no longer theoretical. It is here, it is accelerating, and it will only grow more challenging. The United States still has the means to shape the environment before a crisis forces its hand, but the window is closing. The federal government must act fast to eliminate regulatory gaps, build a layered defense, and find the political will to fund and deploy counterdrone systems at scale. If it does not take these steps by choice, it will be forced to take them—and more—in the wake of a preventable tragedy.

Foreign Affairs · More by Theodore Bunzel · December 26, 2025

19. 2026: The mother of all battles by Maria Ressa

Summary:

Maria Ressa argues that 2026 will be a decisive test of character because the fight has shifted from capturing attention to controlling intimacy and trust. She says Big Tech and political leaders stripped away guardrails in 2025, accelerating lies, intimidation, and democratic backsliding, while journalists and young people pay the price. She pairs stark metrics on autocracy and violence against reporters with a case for “radical collaboration,” citing Rappler’s community networks and alliances as proof alternatives can scale. She warns journalism’s business model may collapse within months and that POTUS policy now resists democratic platform regulation. Her prescription is civic resolve, values-based action, and information integrity.

Comment: Our good friend Maria Ressa knows how to fight for freedom. She has argued that the Philippines has been a bellwether on the use of social media and Big Tech by authoritarian rulers. So we should pay attention. New media organization, Rappler, should be studied.

2026: The mother of all battles

by Maria Ressa

https://api-esp-ap.piano.io/story/estored/130/38498/495762/5883035/274142/vib-cmjmj2mr6031201bh8ncbh13d?sig=c4fa69b5574879cdaeec3bcf75225567effcfe787a8eb5c7125fee73af5e4d9d&order=0

Character is built on the small decisions we make. 2026 will demand great — even greater — character. Or we lose it all.

That was my waking thought on Christmas Day. If 2024 was the tipping point year for democracy, when half the world voted with fewer safeguards than ever before, 2025 taught us what happens when we don’t #HoldTheLine, when we don’t fight for our rights.

If the battle that began more than a decade ago was for our attention, today, the battle is for intimacy.

Trust has been systematically destroyed and our youth crippled, battling for meaning against incredible odds. Some have paid with their lives, from Sewell Setzer, 14, whose mother, Megan Garcia is suing Character.AI and Google for causing his suicide, to our own Emman Atienza, whom I watched grow as a baby and whose untimely death at 19 sparked the “Emman Atienza Bill” to protect our youth.

From the Vatican to Manila

In January, 2025, I kicked off the Jubilee at the Vatican, standing before the massive “Resurrection” sculpture inspired by Hiroshima. I reminded the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics of what I said in the Nobel lecture: that an atom bomb has exploded in our information ecosystem.

The late Pope Francis sat in front of the “Resurrection” sculpture at the 6,300 seater Paul VI Audience Hall, shortly after Maria Ressa delivered her speech to kick off the Jubilee on January 25, 2025. Photo by Maria Ressa

From the Vatican to keynotes in Warsaw, Athens, Paris, to New York, where I helped open the 80th UN General Assembly, to Munich, where thousands of young leaders gathered under flags from every nation, to Manila and Rappler’s Social Good Summit with Amal and George Glooney, this year taught me that 2026 is when we either turn this around or watch democracy (and journalism) crumble.

At the Olympic Hall in Munich for the One Young World Summit on November 3, 2025. Photo by Maria Ressa

What 2025 showed us

Big Tech stopped pretending, wielding political power to take off any guardrails on their platforms. Mark Zuckerberg abandoned fact-checking, declaring that lies and facts deserve equal standing. Elon Musk and DOGE attacked the US government bureaucracy at its core. As I told the Vatican, the men who control transformative technology wield godlike power, but they lack the wisdom of God.

The brutal statistics:

72% of the world now lives under autocratic rule.
More than 240 journalists killed in Gaza alone since the October 7 attacks — more than World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia combined
Lies spread at least six times faster, turbocharged by generative AI and the transformation of Twitter to X.
Romania became the first country to void elections because of social media manipulation; a nation finally acted to protect electoral integrity.

But 2025 also proved that radical collaboration works and may be the only way forward.

At Rappler, our Matrix protocol chat app became the largest news community in the Philippines. In September, we federated with the 65-member Philippine Press Institute, SunStar Cebu, and the Daily Guardian. We’re showing you can build alternatives to Big Tech. Now we’re working with regional news organizations.

At our Social Good Summit in November, the Clooneys set concrete plans to use AI for good (and filled our hall with love — yes, they did), Oleksandra Matviichuk, whose Center for Civil Liberties won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, made us all cry and brought Ukraine’s war home to Manila. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Carole Cadwalladr and Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister, outlined the problems and satisfied our country’s hunger for solutions.

That became clear in Rappler’s anti-corruption investigations, when our community came together both virtually and in public protests, to hold government officials accountable.

I joke that the Philippines has moved from hell to purgatory, but Western democracies can learn much from what we have gone through. There is no silver bullet. In the worst of times, you live by your values, taking your family, your community with you. Building character choice by choice - but it’s not easy.

When I look at Europe, I see its democratic leaders standing on wood being eaten by termites. If they do nothing, that wood will rot and break. Right now, they still have strength and laws, some of which have yet to be implemented. But pressure is building.

Why time is running out

Every indicator shows that journalism has six to eight months before our business model collapses and our communities splinter further. Democracy follows within a year: not a line, but a gradual death by a thousand cuts.

The Trump administration’s December National Security Strategy abandons democracy promotion and treats alliances as purely transactional. Days ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio banned five Europeans from entering the US, including Thierry Breton, architect of the EU’s Digital Services Act, and leaders of organizations fighting against disinformation. The US government now treats democratic regulation of platforms as “extraterritorial censorship.”

American platforms shape global information ecosystems, but now American policy actively opposes democratic governance of these systems. When governments try to regulate Big Tech for public safety, they face US sanctions.

If America falls, the world tilts.

What happens in America in 2026 determines information integrity globally, but its citizens are starting to fight back. Americans are pushing Trump approval ratings to record lows, handing significant wins to Democrats in the November off-year elections.

I see the shift in my own experience: speaking with Jon Stewart in a special show after the cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show in September 2025. It became the line in the sand for free speech, triggering outrage. In March, How to Stand Up To A Dictator, my book published in 2022, hit #10 on the New York Times bestseller list; by October, it was number 3. Citizens around the world want to know how to protect their rights.

The mother of all battles

Crisis is opportunity. When governments abdicate, citizens step up. I’ve seen it in daily protests in Georgia (393 days as of December 26), in Romania’s courage, in the countless struggles at the front lines - whether in academe, civil society, or government.

This time last year, the Nobel Women’s Initiative held a private zoom with Narges Mohammadi, the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner, temporarily released from Iranian prison. She was smiling, resolute. “Women. Life. Freedom.”

Rappler won all its cases. Me? 11 criminal cases down to one. From hell to purgatory. That’s progress - proof that we can #HoldTheLine and #ReclaimOurRights.

So don’t be overwhelmed. Don’t be depressed. Don’t disengage.

Every authoritarian system depends on our exhaustion and resignation. They want you to believe that nothing you do matters.

They’re wrong. We held the line in the Philippines with the support of so many here and abroad. Join Rappler+ if you are not yet a member. Or consider a year end donation for journalism that looks for systemic solutions.

We are not alone. In Brazil, Bolivia, Moldova, Zambia, South Korea, their democracies bounced back. It starts with knowing the difference between facts and lies — with information integrity.

For 2026, the mother of all battles is Information integrity. Win this, and we can win the rest. Lose this, and we lose everything. So build character in every choice in 2026. It’s what this year demands.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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