Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

– George Orwell

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

― Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."

– William O. Douglas

1. Pentagon may bar tuition aid for top universities in Hegseth’s crackdown on ‘biased’ schools

2. Exclusive | Pentagon Used Anthropic’s Claude in Maduro Venezuela Raid

3. Pentagon's use of Claude during Maduro raid sparks Anthropic feud

4. Inside the Debacle That Led to the Closure of El Paso’s Airspace

5. Rubio Seeks to Reassure European Allies in Munich Speech

6. What We Lost When We Lost U.S.A.I.D.

7. Kari Lake is making Trump’s job harder in Iran

8. Russia’s sabotage campaign is becoming bolder

9. US withdraws newly updated list of firms allegedly aiding China's military

10. The Objective Should Be a Secular and Moderate Iran

11. Field Observation: Rectification as Readiness (China)

12. Report | Who Are China's Diplomats? Beyond "Wolf Warrior" Hype

13. Atlantic Chokepoint, Cognitive Front: Russian Influence Operations and the GIUK Gap

14. No time to lose: Liberal democracies can win the cognitive and hybrid war against authoritarians

15. Trump’s National Defense Strategy: Paleoconservatism Through Force

16. Drones and Border Cartels

17. Researcher skeptical of ‘Havana syndrome’ tested secret weapon on himself

18. The Age of Defensive Democracy

19. Harnessing the People: Mapping Overseas United Front Work in Democratic States

20. Rubio's speech to European allies takes a softer tone but sticks to Trump's firm stance

21. China remains undeterred in the grey zone

1. Pentagon may bar tuition aid for top universities in Hegseth’s crackdown on ‘biased’ schools

Summary:

CNN reports SECDEF/WAR Hegseth is moving to restrict DoD-funded graduate education at Harvard starting in 2026–2027 and directing the services to review Ivy League and other schools he argues undermine military values or involve adversaries, leaving troops uncertain about tuition aid for law, medical, and technical programs.

Excerpts:

A preliminary list of at-risk schools compiled by the Army for troops enrolling in law school and reviewed by CNN characterizes the following schools as being at “moderate to high risk” of being banned: American University, Boston College, Boston University, Brown University, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western University, Columbia University, College of William and Mary, Cornell University, Duke, Emory, Florida Institute of Technology, Fordham, Georgetown, George Washington University, Harvard, Hawaii Pacific University, Johns Hopkins University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, MIT, Northeastern University, Northwestern University, New York University, Pepperdine, Princeton, Stanford, Tufts, University of Miami, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Washington University in St Louis, and Yale.

Comment: What are we really trying to accomplish here? What are we afraid of? Is it that we are afraid of the Academy or that we just hate what the Academy stands for? Are we really afraid that our personnel are so easily "indoctrinated" with ideas that are not approved of by the Department of War?

This weaponizes education as culture policy. It risks talent retention by shrinking education options. It could narrow strategic thinking when the force needs heterodox minds.

What evidence defines “bias”? Who adjudicates “adversary involvement”? (the IC?) What does the military lose if it stops sending its best to places it does not fully control?

In my nearly 7 years at Georgetown following retirement from the Army one of the consistent things I heard from students was the positive influence military students had on broadening their thinking. Their eyes were opened and that allowed them to look past their preconceived notions of the military caricature. Of course that is not a reason for sending military personnel to civilian schools but I do think that what we are doing by actions like these is further separating (or segregating?) the military from American society.

Pentagon may bar tuition aid for top universities in Hegseth’s crackdown on ‘biased’ schools | CNN Politics

CNN · Natasha Bertrand, Haley Britzky · February 13, 2026

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/13/politics/us-military-top-universities-tuition-assistance

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends a cabinet meeting at the White House on January 29, 2026.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images/File

See all topics

Link Copied!

Military officers could soon find dozens of top colleges and universities across the United States abruptly off limits for tuition assistance as part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s campaign against schools he describes as being biased against the US military and sponsoring “troublesome partnerships with foreign adversaries.”

The uncertainty about tuition assistance and eligible programs for Defense Department funding has led to confusion and concern amongst service members who have already applied or been accepted to these schools. Officials also said they were concerned it amounted to an attempt to purge diversity of thought from the military.

The policy was rolled out in a memo signed by Hegseth last week saying that beginning with the 2026-2027 school year, the Pentagon would be severing its relationship with Harvard University and discontinuing all graduate-level professional military education, fellowships and certificate programs there for active-duty service members.

Hegseth ordered the military services to “evaluate all existing graduate programs for active-duty members at Ivy League universities and any other universities that similarly diminish critical thinking and have significant adversary involvement, and determine whether they deliver cost-effective, strategic education for future senior leaders when compared to public universities and military masters programs,” according to a source familiar with the memo.

The guidance’s broad terminology has injected confusion and concern into the military branches, who have begun to compile lists of colleges and universities that may have a moderate to high risk of being impacted, meaning the Pentagon wouldn’t fund any service members’ higher education there.

A preliminary list of at-risk schools compiled by the Army for troops enrolling in law school and reviewed by CNN characterizes the following schools as being at “moderate to high risk” of being banned: American University, Boston College, Boston University, Brown University, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western University, Columbia University, College of William and Mary, Cornell University, Duke, Emory, Florida Institute of Technology, Fordham, Georgetown, George Washington University, Harvard, Hawaii Pacific University, Johns Hopkins University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, MIT, Northeastern University, Northwestern University, New York University, Pepperdine, Princeton, Stanford, Tufts, University of Miami, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Washington University in St Louis, and Yale.

A source familiar with Hegseth’s guidance told CNN that the implication is that “graduate programs for highest performing officers and non-commissioned officers are almost certainly at risk.” This source and a military official added that it has created extensive uncertainty within the services about how to proceed with applying for advanced civil schooling, including top law programs, medical programs, and nuclear engineering programs.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense referred CNN to the services for comment. The Army did not respond to a request for comment.

Several top political appointees at the Pentagon, including Hegseth himself, are graduates of Ivy League schools or other top universities. Hegseth attended Princeton and Harvard; Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg attended Princeton; Army Secretary Dan Driscoll obtained his law degree from Yale; Navy Secretary John Phelan holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and completed a general course degree in economics and international relations at the London School of Economics

The guidance was first mentioned publicly in a video Hegseth posted on social media last week, in which he bashed Harvard and other American universities that have “pervasive institutional bias” saying they “no longer live up to their founding principles, as bastions of free speech, open inquiry, and committed to the American values that make our country great.”

“In two weeks time, components of all of our departments — Army, Navy, and Air Force — will evaluate all existing graduate programs for active duty service members at all Ivy League universities, and other civilian universities,” Hegseth said.

Educational programs and opportunities are a key recruiting and retention tool for the military services, often exchanging mandatory years in uniform for tuition assistance to top schools in the country. Graduate programs have been lauded as a way to academically sharpen US military personnel, keeping the best and brightest in uniform, while also allowing them to invest in their futures after they’ve left military service.

Eligible schools are often those accredited by the major associations for those specialties. For qualifying service members who wish to go to law school, for example, schools are typically considered eligible for the Army to pay for them if they are accredited by the American Bar Association. The Armed Forces Health Professions Scholarship Program covers tuition for medical, dental, nursing, and psychology students in return for one year of active-duty service for each year of support. For medical programs, the military typically requires that the school is accredited by the American Medical Association or American Osteopathic Association.

The vagueness of the memo has also raised concern that tuition assistance could be impacted, which active-duty service members can use for other graduate or certification programs in their off-duty time that are not necessarily related to their day-to-day jobs. Service members can enroll in business administration courses, for example, or communication and marketing.

But the military also has extensive partnerships with various universities and colleges for professional military education opportunities. The Space Force, for example, announced in 2023 a partnership with Johns Hopkins, which was included on the Army’s tentative list of universities that are considered at risk.

The military official said the guidance was akin to prohibiting officers from obtaining a top tier education, and said it amounted to the Pentagon “attempting to purge intellect, diversity of thinking, and critical thought from the military.”

“The overall concern is that we want military officers and non-commissioned officers to have the ability to critically think and challenge ideas … and some of these institutions are great places to do that whether you agree with liberal or conservative thought or not,” said the source familiar with the matter. “It seems both very delicate — oh these words and ideas scare me, so I’ll preclude people from engaging — but also short-sighted and is generating confusion.”

Hegseth has been intensely focused on reshaping the culture of the military since taking office last year, which has involved everything from adding a secondary title for the Department of Defense as the “Department of War” to policy shifts that have deeply impacted servicemembers, like a ban on transgender troops and an evaluation of whether women should service in combat roles.

Last year, he also ordered all military academies to identify and remove books from their libraries that deal with issues such as race, gender ideology, and other “divisive concepts” that are now considered “incompatible with the department’s core mission,” according to a memo he signed at the time.

Hegseth’s latest war on Harvard and other top universities has also mirrored one waged by President Donald Trump, who over the last year has targeted federal funding, research grants, and student visas at elite universities across the country — beginning with Harvard— unless they comply with his demands to dismantle Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs and crackdown on pro-Palestine student protesters and antisemitism on campuses.

CNN · Natasha Bertrand, Haley Britzky · February 13, 2026

2. Exclusive | Pentagon Used Anthropic’s Claude in Maduro Venezuela Raid

Summary:

The Wall Street Journal reports that Anthropic’s AI model Claude was used via Palantir tools in a U.S. military operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. People familiar with the matter said the mission included bombing several sites in Caracas last month and aimed to capture Maduro and his wife. Anthropic’s usage guidelines prohibit facilitating violence, weapon development, or surveillance, and Anthropic said any use must comply with its policies, while declining to comment on specific operations; the Defense Department also declined to comment. Anthropic’s concerns have pushed administration officials to consider canceling a Pentagon contract worth up to $200 million. Anthropic was the first AI model developer used in classified DoD operations.

Comment: AI is no longer a back-office tool in the Pentagon, because it is now tied to an operation described as kinetic and politically explosive. The Palantir channel is becoming the practical doorway through which commercial models enter classified defense workflows. The $200 million contract has turned “usage policy” into leverage, because the dispute is now framed as a clash between guardrails and a low-regulation AI strategy.

Exclusive | Pentagon Used Anthropic’s Claude in Maduro Venezuela Raid

WSJ

Use of the model through a contract with Palantir highlights growing role of AI in the Pentagon

By Amrith Ramkumar

and Keach Hagey

Updated Feb. 13, 2026 6:45 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-used-anthropics-claude-in-maduro-venezuela-raid-583aff17?mod=hp_lead_pos2

Gabby Jones/Bloomberg News

Anthropic’s artificial-intelligence tool Claude was used in the U.S. military’s operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, highlighting how AI models are gaining traction in the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter.

The mission to capture Maduro and his wife included bombing several sites in Caracas last month. Anthropic’s usage guidelines prohibit Claude from being used to facilitate violence, develop weapons or conduct surveillance.

“We cannot comment on whether Claude, or any other AI model, was used for any specific operation, classified or otherwise,” said an Anthropic spokesman. “Any use of Claude—whether in the private sector or across government—is required to comply with our Usage Policies, which govern how Claude can be deployed. We work closely with our partners to ensure compliance.”

The Defense Department declined to comment.

The deployment of Claude occurred through Anthropic’s partnership with data company Palantir Technologies PLTR 1.77%increase; green up pointing triangle, whose tools are commonly used by the Defense Department and federal law enforcement, the people said. Anthropic’s concerns about how Claude can be used by the Pentagon have pushed administration officials to consider canceling its contract worth up to $200 million, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Palantir didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Anthropic was the first AI model developer to be used in classified operations by the Department of Defense. It is possible other AI tools were used in the Venezuela operation for unclassified tasks. The tools can be used for everything from summarizing documents to controlling autonomous drones.

Adoption by the military is seen as a key boost for AI companies that are competing for legitimacy and seeking to live up to their enormous valuations from investors.

Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei and other CEOs have been publicly grappling with the power of their models and the risks they could pose to society. Amodei has broken with many other industry executives in calling for greater regulation and guardrails to prevent harms from AI. The safety-focused company and others in the industry have lost workers who have described them as giving priority to growth over responsible technology development.

At a January event announcing that the Pentagon would be working with xAI, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the agency wouldn’t “employ AI models that won’t allow you to fight wars,” a comment that referred to discussions administration officials have had with Anthropic, the Journal reported.

The $200 million contract was awarded to Anthropic last summer. Amodei has publicly expressed concern about AI’s use in autonomous lethal operations and domestic surveillance, the two major sticking points in its current contract negotiations with the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter.

The constraints have escalated the company’s battle with the Trump administration, which includes accusations that Anthropic is undermining the White House’s low-regulation AI strategy by calling for more guardrails and limits on AI chip exports.

Amodei and other co-founders of Anthropic previously worked at OpenAI, which recently joined Google’s Gemini on an AI platform for military personnel used by some three million people. The company and Defense Department said the custom version of ChatGPT would be used for analyzing documents, generating reports and supporting research.

Appeared in the February 14, 2026, print edition as 'Maduro Raid Involved Anthropic’s Claude'.

Amrith Ramkumar is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Washington covering tech and crypto policy. He previously covered clean energy and was a Journal markets reporter in New York who wrote about special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, when SPAC mergers were a popular alternative to traditional initial public offerings. He also previously wrote about stocks and commodities, including battery metals such as lithium and cobalt.

Amrith joined the Journal as a markets intern after graduating from Duke in 2017.

Keach Hagey is a reporter at The Wall Street Journal covering the intersection of media, technology and power. Her reporting explores how institutions and individuals wield influence in the new information economy, with a current focus on artificial intelligence and OpenAI.

She is the author of "The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future" (W. W. Norton, 2024) and "The King of Content: Sumner Redstone’s Battle for Viacom, CBS and Everlasting Control of His Media Empire" (Harper Business, 2018).

She was part of the team that broke the Facebook Files, a series that won a George Polk Award for Business Reporting, a Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting and a Deadline Award for public service. Her investigation into the inner workings of Google’s advertising-technology business won recognition from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (Sabew).

Previously, she covered the television industry for the Journal, reporting on large media companies such as 21st Century Fox, Time Warner and Viacom. She led a team that won a Sabew award for its coverage of the power struggle inside Viacom.

Before joining the Journal, Keach covered media for Politico, the National in Abu Dhabi, CBS News and the Village Voice. She has a bachelor’s and a master’s in English literature from Stanford University. She lives in Irvington, N.Y.

WSJ

3. Pentagon's use of Claude during Maduro raid sparks Anthropic feud

Summary:

Axios reports that the U.S. military used Anthropic’s Claude during the operation to capture Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, according to two sources. After the reporting, a senior administration official said the Pentagon would reevaluate its partnership with Anthropic, arguing that any company that could jeopardize operational success should be reconsidered. Anthropic denied making a call to the Department of War about the raid and reiterated it cannot comment on specific operations, saying any use must follow its Usage Policies. Axios could not confirm Claude’s precise role, but sources said it was used during the active operation. Tensions center on Pentagon flexibility versus Anthropic limits on surveillance and autonomous weapons.

Pentagon's use of Claude during Maduro raid sparks Anthropic feud

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/13/anthropic-claude-maduro-raid-pentagon

Nicolás Maduro arrives at a Manhattan helipad after his capture. Photo: XNY/Star Max/GC Images

The U.S. military used Anthropic's Claude AI model during the operation to capture Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, two sources with knowledge of the situation told Axios.

Now, the blowback may threaten the company's business with the Pentagon.

The latest: After reports on the use of Claude in the raid, a senior administration official told Axios that the Pentegon would be reevaluating its partnership with Anthropic.

"Anthropic asked whether their software was used for the raid to capture Maduro, which caused real concerns across the Department of War indicating that they might not approve if it was," the official said.
"Any company that would jeopardize the operational success of our warfighters in the field is one we need to reevaluate our partnership with going forward."
An Anthropic spokesperson denied that: "Anthropic didn't make any such call to the Department of War."

Why it matters: The episode highlights the tensions the major AI labs face, as they enter into business with the military while trying to maintain some limitations on how their tools are used.

Breaking it down: AI models can quickly process data in real-time, a capability prized by the Pentagon given the chaotic environments in which military operations take place.

Axios could not confirm the precise role that Claude played in the operation to capture Maduro. The military has used Claude in the past to analyze satellite imagery or intelligence. The sources said Claude was used during the active operation, not just in preparations for it.
No Americans were killed in the raid. Cuba and Venezuela both said dozens of their soldiers and security personnel were killed.

Friction point: The Pentagon wants the AI giants to allow them to use their models in any scenario so long as they comply with the law.

Anthropic, which has positioned itself as the safety-first AI leader, is currently negotiating with the Pentagon around its terms of use. The company wants to ensure in particular that its technology is not used for the mass surveillance of Americans or to operate fully autonomous weapons.
The company is confident the military has complied in all cases with its existing usage policy, which has additional restrictions, a source familiar with those discussions told Axios.

What they're saying: "We cannot comment on whether Claude, or any other AI model, was used for any specific operation, classified or otherwise," the Anthropic spokesperson said.

"Any use of Claude — whether in the private sector or across government — is required to comply with our Usage Policies, which govern how Claude can be deployed. We work closely with our partners to ensure compliance."
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has leaned into AI and said he wants to quickly integrate it into all aspects of the military's work, in part to stay ahead of China.

Senior Pentagon officials have expressed frustration with Anthropic's posture on ensuring safeguards, a source familiar with those discussions said.

The big picture: Anthropic is one of several major model-makers that are working with the Pentagon in various capacities.

OpenAI, Google and xAI have all reached deals for military users to access their models without many of the safeguards that apply to ordinary users. It's unclear if any other models were used during the Venezuela operation.
But the military's most sensitive work — from weapons testing to comms during active operations — happens on classified systems. For now, only Anthropic's system is available on those classified platforms.
Anthropic also has a partnership with Palantir, the AI software firm that has extensive Pentagon contracts, that allows it to use Claude within its security products. It's not clear whether the use of Claude in the operation was tied to the Anthropic-Palantir partnership.

What to watch: Discussions are ongoing between the Pentagon and OpenAI, Google and xAI about allowing the use of their tools in classified systems. Anthropic and the Pentagon are also in discussions about potentially loosening the restrictions on Claude.

Editor's note: The headline and story were updated based on comments from a senior U.S. official.

4. Inside the Debacle That Led to the Closure of El Paso’s Airspace

Summary:

Pentagon officials briefed Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg last spring on plans to use high-energy lasers to defeat cartel drones near the border, but the plan required coordination with FAA and Transportation. After a recent fatal helicopter, passenger jet collision near Reagan National, safety scrutiny was high. DHS Customs and Border Protection used the laser near El Paso this week without FAA authorization, prompting FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford to order a 10 day airspace closure, then rescind it under White House pressure. Emails show FAA warnings on Feb. 6 and Tuesday citing a “grave risk of fatalities,” while Pentagon insisted coordination sufficed. A party balloon was hit, not a drone.

Comment: I do not think I have ever read about an interagency "fight" on this level.

Inside the Debacle That Led to the Closure of El Paso’s Airspace

NY Times · Tyler Pager · February 14, 2026

The F.A.A., citing “a grave risk of fatalities” from a new technology being used on the Mexican border, got caught in a stalemate with the Pentagon, which deemed the weapon “necessary.”

By Karoun Demirjian Kate Kelly Eric Schmitt and Tyler Pager

Reporting from Washington

Feb. 14, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/us/politics/el-paso-airspace-closure-faa-pentagon.html

Steve Feinberg, center, the deputy secretary of defense, during a meeting at the Pentagon in July. Credit...Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Last spring, in the early months of Steve Feinberg’s tenure as deputy defense secretary, Pentagon staff members briefed him on plans to employ new high-energy laser weapons to take out drones being used by Mexican cartels to smuggle drugs across the southern U.S. border.

But their use was conditioned on getting a green light from aviation safety officials.

The law, the staff members at the Pentagon explained to him, required extensive coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Transportation Department, which could slow the testing of the system. Transportation officials could even block the system’s use if they determined that it posed risks to aviation safety.

Two people with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss sensitive matters, said they recalled that Mr. Feinberg felt the Pentagon had the authority to proceed anyway. Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, denied their account, saying it was “a total fabrication.”

The meeting took place at an especially sensitive time for those regulating air safety as well as for the Pentagon. Just months earlier, an Army helicopter collided with a passenger jet near Ronald Reagan National Airport above Washington, killing 67 people and putting the military’s safety protocols under intense scrutiny.

Now the question of whether the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security followed proper procedures and the law in deploying the laser weapon has become a flashpoint within the Trump administration. Working alongside military personnel, agents from Customs and Border Protection, which is part of the Homeland Security Department, used the weapon this week not far from El Paso International Airport, prompting fury inside the F.A.A. and a brief shutdown of the airport and airspace in that region.

Late Tuesday night, the F.A.A. administrator, Bryan Bedford, caught off guard that the system was being used without authorization and concerned for public safety, believed he had little choice but to close the airspace for 10 days, according to more than a half-dozen people. It was an extraordinary decision that surprised the flying public and local officials.

The security entrance after an abrupt closure and reopening of El Paso International Airport and surrounding airspace on Wednesday.Credit...Paul Ratje for The New York Times

Under pressure from the White House, Mr. Bedford rescinded the order on Wednesday, setting off a bout of finger-pointing within the administration that continued throughout the week. Administration officials told reporters that the F.A.A. did not warn the White House or the Pentagon that it was about to severely limit flights over a city of nearly 700,000 residents.

But internal government communications reviewed by The New York Times tell a very different story.

In one email, dated Feb. 6, the F.A.A.’s top lawyer warned a Pentagon official that deploying the laser system without restricting flights created “a grave risk of fatalities or permanent injuries” to Americans traveling through that airspace.

Another email, dated Tuesday, shows that the lawyer gave official notification to 14 government employees — including senior officials in the Defense Department as well as staff members of the White House’s National Security Council — of the F.A.A.’s intention to close the airspace above the Army base adjacent to El Paso because the laser technology had been used without its approval.

Publicly, the administration has yet to acknowledge that a departmental standoff over those weapons led to the airspace closure. Even the rationale for deploying the laser system is in dispute.

Senior administration officials described the incident as having been prompted by a drone crossing into the United States from Mexico, an explanation repeated by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy this week.

White House officials declined to comment on Friday, and referred to a social media post from Mr. Duffy, published on Wednesday, that said the administration “acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion.”

But that narrative was disputed by multiple people familiar with the situation who said the border protection unit ended up shooting down a party balloon, rather than a drone. Military service members were present during the incident, the people said.

For the better part of the last year, Mr. Duffy and F.A.A. leaders have been locked in a war of wills with their national security counterparts over aviation safety.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy visited Reagan National Airport near Washington in November.Credit...Andrew Leyden for The New York Times

The aftermath of the midair collision at National Airport exposed the fractious nature of the relationship between the F.A.A. and the Defense Department, as Mr. Duffy scrambled to put safety restrictions in place and the military maneuvered to sidestep them.

For much of that same time frame, the F.A.A. and the Pentagon were also engaged in discussions over the military’s plan to begin testing counter-drone lasers against cross-border threats from drug cartels. The Pentagon had insisted to the F.A.A. that the lasers would not pose a risk to civilian aircraft, but the F.A.A., unconvinced, had asked for the military’s data and an opportunity to conduct its own tests, according to three people with knowledge of those discussions.

The requests were not satisfied.

In late January, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved a request from the Department of Homeland Security to allow border protection agents to use the Pentagon’s new anti-drone laser technology.

It was around that same time that Mark Roosevelt Ditlevson, a principal deputy assistant defense secretary specializing in homeland defense, sent an email to the F.A.A.’s chief counsel, William McKenna, informing aviation officials of the military’s desire to start using the technology.

“We have operationalized a stationary laser system” near El Paso, Mr. Ditlevson wrote, according to a Jan. 23 email reviewed by The Times.

The Pentagon knew that the F.A.A. was still conducting an internal review of the weapons, he added, but national security and Homeland Security Council officials “are aware of this,” he added, “and agree that it makes sense” for the Defense Department “to do what we feel is necessary.”

On Feb. 6, Mr. McKenna wrote back, detailing the F.A.A.’s concerns about the potential for death or injuries to passengers and offering to put up flight restrictions in the areas where the Defense Department “proposes to deploy” the lasers.

Mr. McKenna declined to comment for this article.

Then in the dark morning hours of Feb. 9, members of a C.B.P. tactical unit, who had been trained how to use the counter-drone lasers by the Army, decided to deploy one, while members of the military looked on. They aimed the laser at what they thought was a drone flying near the Army’s Fort Bliss, though it turned out to be a metallic balloon.

It was the first known domestic use of the weapon by federal officials outside of a controlled environment, according to two people with knowledge of the technology, and it was done without the F.A.A.’s approval, in a possible violation of the law.

At 5:16 p.m. that same day, hours after the laser system had been used, Mr. Ditlevson responded to the F.A.A. lawyer that the Pentagon was not changing its position on its use.

“While I can appreciate your concerns, we feel we have met the statutory requirement to coordinate with your organization,” he wrote to Mr. McKenna, copying senior Pentagon officials as well as staff members from the National Security Council.

He noted that he “looked forward” to an upcoming meeting to discuss the lasers.

Officials at the F.A.A. were furious, according to multiple people familiar with the fallout.

Agency officials asked to move up a risk mitigation meeting that had been planned for Feb. 20, in which the F.A.A. had hoped to gain information that would satisfy their remaining concerns.

It did not happen.

It is unclear precisely when or how the F.A.A. learned about the shot-down balloon.

But at least by Tuesday afternoon, the agency’s top officials were clearly aware and had made up their minds: Concerned that the system could be used again without F.A.A. clearance, they would close the airspace above El Paso for 10 days. The significance of that length of time is still unclear.

The agency notified Mr. Duffy, who was in favor of the plan, according to three people who were briefed on the matter.

Mr. McKenna then dispatched a written notification to Mr. Ditlevson that was copied to more than a dozen counterparts at the White House and the Defense Department, according to a document reviewed by The Times.

“I’ve discussed this with the F.A.A. administrator,” Mr. McKenna wrote. Given that the Pentagon had now “operationalized” a high-energy laser, he wrote that he had directed the issuance of temporary flight restriction “to ensure aviation safety in the area.”

In other words, by 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in Washington, the F.A.A. had explicitly warned the Pentagon and the National Security Council that it would be shutting down the airspace above Fort Bliss until they could iron things out.

The restriction was to begin seven hours later.

But it is unclear whether those warnings ever made their way to Mr. Hegseth, President Trump or his senior-most staff. The interagency process has atrophied under Mr. Trump, who has dramatically shrunk the size of the National Security Council during his second term, even as the portfolio of international crises has grown.

And when the F.A.A. made its move, many in Washington were asleep.

It was 10:32 p.m. on the East Coast when the F.A.A. issued orders that all flight traffic under 18,000 feet would be banned beginning at 11:30 p.m. El Paso time. The order covered not only the airspace for Fort Bliss, but also that pertaining to El Paso International Airport and a desolate area in New Mexico west of the Army base.

By Wednesday morning, Susie Wiles, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, had ordered the F.A.A. to reopen the airspace, and the blame game had already begun.

Despite the war of words, the F.A.A. has already won at least one concession, according to two people briefed on the matter: The new lasers have been taken out of commission for the moment.

On Friday, when asked about Mr. Duffy, the president said he was “doing a great job.”

Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.

Kate Kelly covers money, policy and influence for The Times.

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.

Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.

NY Times · Tyler Pager · February 14, 2026

5. Rubio Seeks to Reassure European Allies in Munich Speech

Summary:

At the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended American power and pursuit of national interests while portraying POTUS’s disputes with Europe as “tough love.” He argued the postwar global order built on free trade regimes and minimization of national identities was a “foolish idea” and should be reshaped. Rubio said the U.S. wants allies who can defend themselves and accept urgency and reciprocity. He reassured Europeans that the U.S. would remain an ally and that Europe’s fate is intertwined with America’s. He did not mention Greenland, despite the annexation push. Some Europeans still voiced doubts over Ukraine and alliance stability.

Excerpt:

In a speech at the Munich Security Conference, an annual trans-Atlantic gathering, Rubio said that the current global order, with its free-trade regimes and minimization of national identities, was a “foolish idea” that the U.S. and its allies must work to reshape.

Comment: SECSTATE tried to reset the mood without changing the terms, because reassurance came wrapped in a demand for reciprocity and self defense. Silence on Greenland signals the issue is radioactive, so he aimed to calm the room while leaving the hardest dispute untouched. If the U.S. calls the old order “foolish” yet promises enduring partnership, what concrete bargain will replace it, and who pays first when tariffs, Ukraine terms, and Greenland all test the same alliance? I do think that the shift from "burden sharing" to "burden owning" will be good for the long run. But I fear throwing the baby out with the bath water on our alliances.

Rubio Seeks to Reassure European Allies in Munich Speech

WSJ

Secretary of state addresses tensions over tariffs and Ukraine at trans-Atlantic security conference

By Alexander Ward

and Robbie Gramer

Feb. 14, 2026 4:45 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/rubio-seeks-to-reassure-european-allies-in-munich-speech-e46f8805?mod=hp_lead_pos3

Secretary of State Marco Rubio made no mention of Greenland. Sven Hoppe/dpa/ZUMA Press

MUNICH—Secretary of State Marco Rubio made an unapologetic defense for American might and pursuit of national interests Saturday while seeking to recast President Trump’s sharp disputes with Europe as a form of tough love with the U.S.’s closest allies.

In a speech at the Munich Security Conference, an annual trans-Atlantic gathering, Rubio said that the current global order, with its free-trade regimes and minimization of national identities, was a “foolish idea” that the U.S. and its allies must work to reshape.

“We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength,” Rubio said. “We do not want allies to rationalize the broken status quo rather than reckon with what is necessary to fix it. For we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”

Rubio sought to address Trump’s approach to U.S. allies, which has fueled mounting anxiety in Europe over trans-Atlantic ties including tariffs and his overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin in his bid to end the war in Ukraine.

“This is why we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel,” Rubio said. “This is why President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe. The reason why, my friends, is because we care deeply.”

Rubio made no mention of Greenland after Trump’s repeated efforts to annex the Arctic island from close ally Denmark triggered a diplomatic crisis between the U.S. and Europe.

Rubio, the highest-ranking U.S. official at the conference, touched upon similar conservative themes that Vice President JD Vance discussed in his address to the conference last year, including deriding mass migration as a threat to Western civilization. But Rubio couched those remarks within a broader message: The U.S. would always remain Europe’s ally.

“Our destiny will always be intertwined with yours,” he said to applause from an audience of global national security elites. “We know that the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own.”

Rubio’s remarks received a standing ovation from the audience of European dignitaries. Wolfgang Ischinger, a former senior German diplomat, immediately told Rubio on stage, “Mr. Secretary, I am not sure you heard the sigh of relief through this hall when we heard what I would interpret as a message of reassurance and partnership.”

Rubio held a meeting on Ukraine with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Liesa Johannssen/Reuters

Rubio’s remarks received a standing ovation. Alex Brandon/Pool/Associated Press

Yet, several senior European officials said the speech didn’t allay all their concerns about the alliance, which has been deeply shaken by Trump’s efforts to acquire Greenland and the prospect of the U.S. brokering a peace deal in Ukraine that could favor Russia.

Rubio at the conference skipped a high-level meeting with European allies over future support for the war in Ukraine but held separate meetings on Ukraine with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and other senior European officials, including a brief meeting with the prime ministers of Denmark and Greenland. Rubio is also slated to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday.

Trump is steadily continuing his efforts to end the war in Ukraine, Rubio said. The president boasted before entering office that he could solve the war on “day one.” “We don’t know if the Russians are serious about ending the war, they say they are,” Rubio said. “But we’re going to continue to test it.”

“I don’t think anybody in this room would be against a negotiated settlement to this war, so long as the conditions are just and sustainable, and that’s what we aim to achieve,” Rubio added.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

What is your reaction to Marco Rubio’s remarks at the Munich Security Conference? Join the conversation below.

Rubio’s remarks provided a contrast to Vance’s keynote address last year that roiled relations between the Trump administration and Europe. The vice president accused European governments of suppressing free speech and the will of voters on migration before meeting with the leader of Germany’s far-right party, Alternative for Germany.

That speech confirmed what many European officials then feared: The U.S. under Trump would be a different kind of ally, one that would reduce its military presence on the continent, impose new tariffs and force Ukraine to make an unsavory peace deal with Russia. Trump’s quest to own Greenland—seizing it from longtime ally Denmark—reaffirmed concerns that the U.S. was willing to risk severing trans-Atlantic ties, as did Washington’s insistence that its priority would be the Western Hemisphere.

But Rubio framed those pursuits as signs of a stronger U.S. acting in its own interests, not a heralding of “the end of the trans-Atlantic era.”

“Let it be known and clear to all that this is neither our goal nor our wish, because for us Americans, our home may be in the Western Hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe,” Rubio said.

Alexander Ward is a national security reporter covering the White House and State Department for The Wall Street Journal in Washington. Alex’s reporting focuses in particular on the inner workings of the National Security Council and how top players in an administration formulate and execute foreign policy.

Alex was previously the White House and national security reporter at Politico, where he was also the first author of its "National Security Daily" newsletter. Before that, he was Vox's White House reporter covering foreign policy and worked at the Atlantic Council think tank covering national security and military affairs.

Alex has won numerous awards for his reporting and was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist along with Politico colleagues for Supreme Court coverage.

In February 2024, Alex published his first book, "The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump." He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Robbie Gramer is a national security reporter at The Wall Street Journal in Washington. He previously worked at Politico, where he was a reporter and the lead author of the newsletter NatSec Daily.

Robbie has reported from over two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, South America and the Middle East. He has reported from the halls of Congress, remote research stations in the Amazon rainforest and aboard Norwegian coast guard cutters high in the Arctic Circle. He was also the host of Foreign Policy magazine’s award-winning podcast, “After Hotel Rwanda,” about the kidnapping of a Rwandan human-rights activist and U.S.-led efforts to free him.

Before his career in journalism, Robbie was associate director of transatlantic security at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. Robbie graduated from American University with a degree in international relations.

WSJ

6. What We Lost When We Lost U.S.A.I.D.

Summary:

Jeremy Konyndyk argues that the closure of U.S.A.I.D. under POTUS’ second term produced immediate humanitarian and strategic damage. He cites aid reaching 25 million fewer people than in 2024, over 2,000 health clinics closing, global food aid funding falling 40% from 2024 to 2025, and millions losing H.I.V. treatment and testing. After Secretary of State Marco Rubio canceled more than 80% of relief and development programs, U.S. humanitarian spending dropped from over $14 billion in 2024 to $3.7 billion in 2025. He says documented deaths and destabilizing survival strategies followed, while aid became politicized and extractive.

Excerpts:

For 80 years, the legacy of World War II pushed the world toward greater collaboration. That larger philosophy unlocked the greatest period of security and economic growth in world history. U.S.A.I.D. was founded in recognition that moral U.S. leadership is a positive-sum endeavor: Doing good in the world will also do well by the American people.

Ultimately, American foreign assistance policy is a reflection of who our country wants to be in the world and of the kind of world we seek to build. Ten years from now, a world shaped by Mr. Trump’s aid policies will be meaner and more opaque — one where hunger, preventable diseases and desperation spread. It will be a world in which America stands isolated and friendless.

Comment: The cuts did not just reduce relief, they signaled a new theory of power, because the author ties cruelty abroad to weaker influence and shaken alliances. When aid shifts from partnership to leverage, people die first, and then legitimacy bleeds out, because the author links program collapse to famine patterns and rising instability. If foreign assistance once served both American values and national security, what replaces that function when aid is cut sharply and then used to extract concessions instead of building partnerships?

What We Lost When We Lost U.S.A.I.D.

Feb. 8, 2026

Credit...Ricardo Tomás

By Jeremy Konyndyk

Mr. Konyndyk is the president of Refugees International.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/08/opinion/usaid-humanitarian-aid-america.html

Last February, Elon Musk boasted of “feeding USAID into the woodchipper” as President Trump kicked off his second term with an unanticipated assault on the agency. A year later, the brutal fallout is coming into focus. Humanitarian aid last year reached 25 million fewer people than in 2024, despite rising global need. More than 2,000 health clinics have closed in crisis zones around the world. Global food aid funding dropped by 40 percent from 2024 to 2025. Millions of people have lost access to critical H.I.V. treatment and testing.

This damage is severe on its own merits. But it also previewed something larger about America’s engagement with the world under an “America first” foreign policy. An administration that began its tenure by abandoning aid recipients has proceeded to alienate treaty allies over Greenland and launch legally dubious military strikes. In retrospect, U.S.A.I.D.’s early demise looks like a canary in the geopolitical coal mine, heralding a dark shift in America’s values.

The brutality of U.S.A.I.D.’s closure and the disregard for the human toll betrayed a vision of a crueler, meaner, more insular world — one in which America aspires not to any pretense of moral leadership but simply to naked power, dominance and extractive self-interest. U.S.A.I.D., after all, was not only a humanitarian endeavor; it was also a symbol of what America seeks to be in the world and the sort of world America seeks to build. Mr. Trump’s new order, inaugurated with his assault on U.S.A.I.D., is corroding America’s influence and standing and leaving global leaders with little choice but to treat the United States as an erratic adversary rather than a stable ally.

The impact of U.S.A.I.D.’s demise also provides a preview of the shattering toll of this approach to global affairs on other countries and communities, particularly those living in humanitarian crises. After Secretary of State Marco Rubio canceled more than 80 percent of U.S. relief and development programs, total U.S. spending on lifesaving humanitarian relief dropped from over $14 billion in 2024 to just $3.7 billion in 2025. Withholding $10 billion for global relief amounts to a rounding error in federal budget terms (not to mention a pittance relative to the estimated $300 billion increase in Mr. Musk’s net worth last year). But those funds are critical to sustaining people’s lives in crisis zones, from Sudan to Bangladesh to Gaza to refugee camps in Kenya and Chad.

Mr. Rubio has tried to argue that no one has died from these cuts, and his department has claimed that the United States can achieve more good with less funding. Those fanciful claims have been debunked thoroughly. Numerous cases of such deaths have been documented: refugee children dying of starvation in Kenya after food aid cuts, other people dying of treatable diseases after health programs closed. And disruptions to H.I.V. programming have resulted in children being born needlessly with H.I.V.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

Beyond the avoidable deaths that are already visible, something ominous is happening below the surface in crisis zones. Households are being forced to adopt devastating survival strategies akin to the patterns often observed before a large-scale famine. People first cope by resorting to increasingly damaging tactics: selling off their few remaining assets, skipping meals, going deep into debt, selling sex, consuming next year’s seed stocks and other practices that leave them more and more vulnerable. Over time, as these survival strategies are exhausted, deaths begin to rise.

Evidence from multiple crises around the world points to such a trend. In Somalia, Doctors Without Borders reports that admissions for children with severe malnutrition have risen by 73 percent since 2024. At one hospital, the rate of malnutrition deaths among children has nearly doubled. Among refugees in Bangladesh, rates of child marriage are rising as families cope with the burden of dwindling aid. In Kenya, ration cuts for refugees have prompted mass protests in camps and have been directly linked to starvation deaths. Vulnerable refugee families have struggled to pay for food because local merchants ended informal credit after the aid cuts were announced, forcing families to sell off assets. In Afghanistan, services for women and girls are collapsing, and some women are reducing the number of meals they eat to prioritize food for the males in their families. In South Sudan, deaths from cholera are at a record high after the closure of health and sanitation programs.

Meanwhile, Mr. Rubio’s State Department has found ample funding for politicized boondoggles. Under pressure from the Israeli government, the department waived nine federal procurement requirements and circumvented credible humanitarian organizations to give $30 million to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an entity observers say contributed to the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians by sending aid seekers on dangerous routes and that was found to be recruiting personnel from an Islamophobic American motorcycle gang before shutting down amid a wave of global criticism.

The State Department also diverted $7.5 million of funding intended for refugee aid to the notoriously corrupt government of Equatorial Guinea in order to secure its agreement to accept third-country nationals deported from the United States. Even some more benign aid policy changes — like shifting some health aid directly to government ministries — have taken place under a cloud of U.S. demands for access to mineral resources and pressure to accept noncitizen deportees.

This kind of politicized, wasteful use of aid dollars is far removed from the vision President John F. Kennedy articulated when he started U.S.A.I.D. in 1961 with the explicit dual purpose of showcasing American values and advancing American national security. Through its six decades of work, U.S.A.I.D. was grounded in a belief that those two American aims were aligned, even overlapping. Shifting aid leadership from U.S.A.I.D. to the State Department has led to aid policy that seeks to extract concessions, not build partnerships.

For 80 years, the legacy of World War II pushed the world toward greater collaboration. That larger philosophy unlocked the greatest period of security and economic growth in world history. U.S.A.I.D. was founded in recognition that moral U.S. leadership is a positive-sum endeavor: Doing good in the world will also do well by the American people.

Ultimately, American foreign assistance policy is a reflection of who our country wants to be in the world and of the kind of world we seek to build. Ten years from now, a world shaped by Mr. Trump’s aid policies will be meaner and more opaque — one where hunger, preventable diseases and desperation spread. It will be a world in which America stands isolated and friendless.

Kari Lake is making Trump’s job harder in Iran

She has gutted America’s ability to get good information to the Iranian people in a conflict.

m. ESTYesterday at 6:00 a.m. EST

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/02/13/kari-lake-voa-radio-farda-trump-iran-strike-messaging/

February 13, 2026 at 6:00 a.

Kari Lake, senior adviser for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, leaves a House committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Feb. 10. (Tom Brenner/AP)

If President Donald Trump takes military action in Iran, he will need help from the Iranian people. The U.S. military can decapitate the regime from the air. But what happens on the ground will be up to Iranians, who bravely took to the streets this winter to demand their freedom — and are now waiting for the bombing to return and finish the job.

The conversations animating the Editorial Board, delivered to your inbox every Tuesday

To play their part, they will need access to information they can trust about the U.S. military campaign and what is happening in their country. The regime knows this and will seek to deny Trump the ability to communicate directly with ordinary Iranians.

Unfortunately, Iran’s leaders have an unwitting ally inside the U.S. government — Kari Lake, the hapless acting head of U.S. Agency for Global Media. For a year, Lake has worked tirelessly to cripple the U.S.-backed “freedom radios” — including Voice of America and Radio Farda — that broadcast into Iran to counter regime propaganda. As an unpaid volunteer member of the board of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which operates Radio Farda, I have seen the chaos she’s unleashed up close.

To succeed, kinetic warfare must be accompanied by information warfare. The United States needs a plan to surge news and messages into Iran through multiple means: Medium wave AM radio broadcasts to reach Iranians in their cars and homes; shortwave radio broadcasts over multiple channels; satellite news transmissions; and virtual private networks and other tools that allow Iranians to defeat the regime’s internet censorship and communicate with each other and the world safely through secure messaging. The goal should be to overwhelm the regime’s ability to keep people in the dark.

Follow Trump’s second term

In an interview Wednesday, Lake told me: “We’re ready for whatever the president does in Iran, we are ready to tell that story.” Unfortunately, the facts speak otherwise. Instead of developing a plan to break the regime’s information blockade, Lake has done the opposite: She has undermined the ability of VOA and Radio Farda to reach the people of Iran. Here is the troubling timeline:

In March, Lake put all of VOA’s Persian service staff on administrative leave. That decision backfired three months later, when in June the United States and Israel launched their military campaign to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Lake scrambled to recall roughly 40 terminated staff in the Persian division, but the damage was done. During Operation Midnight Hammer, Axios reported, VOA “broadcast just 75 minutes of content targeted to its audience in Iran over … 72 hours.” Before Lake’s arrival, VOA broadcast in Iran 24/7. “We may not be doing as many hours, but the hours we’re doing are impactful,” Lake said.

Radio Farda, which Lake was stopped from dismantling in court, helped fill the void — despite her withholding of congressionally appropriated funds that forced it to furlough half its staff.

In March, Lake abruptly cut off Radio Farda’s access to U.S.-owned transmission facilities in Kuwait — facilities Congress funded for decades specifically for this purpose — and then denied it permission to use appropriated funds to contract with private vendors for shortwave capacity.

Radio Farda still managed to broadcast via shortwave using non-grant funds. Its social media teams also flooded key channels with news, videos, and statements from Trump and reached millions of Iranians via Instagram — debunking Iran’s false narratives about Trump’s historic military operation, exposing regime propaganda and informing the Iranian people about America’s motives in striking Iran’s nuclear weapons program and personnel.

After undermining Trump during one of the most courageous moments of his presidency, Lake ought to have been chastened. Not so. When mass protests erupted across Iran, Radio Farda continued to be denied access to the U.S. transmitter in Kuwait. Despite that, it was able to broadcast statements from Trump on the internet. During the height of the protests. Radio Farda’s Instagram content was viewed at least 30 million times per day — until internet access was cut off by the regime.

After three weeks, Radio Farda was finally given access to one shortwave frequency from the Kuwait transmitter (multiple frequencies are needed to overcome jamming) but was still denied access to medium wave AM radio frequencies. But by then, the protests had died down.

In our conversation, Lake insisted that she did not deny Radio Farda access to the Kuwait transmitter. “The transmitting station has been shut down,” she said, “so it wasn’t like we’re blocking RFE/RL. As it’s been open, we’ve allowed them to use it.” Asked how many of the last 11 months it was not operating, she said, “It might have been 10 or whatever.” In July, however, USAGM officials told RFE/RL, “USAGM does not agree to the use of the tower or for grant funds to be used for this purpose.” At no point over the past 11 months did her agency inform RFE/RL that the transmitting station was down, and RFE/RL officials told me that the entire station has not been offline due to technical issues during Lake’s tenure.

Lake promised to get back to me with specific dates the transmitter was supposedly down. But 24 hours later, she instead texted a statement that said, “Trying to recycle last year’s narrative is misleading, outdated, and grossly inaccurate. USAGM is stronger and more efficient today than it was under the previous administration. VOA Persian has expanded operations and recently added an hour of programming, and Radio Farda is actively broadcasting through the USAGM transmitter in Kuwait.”

I also asked Lake about that single shortwave frequency for Radio Farda. Lake answered that she would be willing to give it more for a fee. “I’ve told my team that if they’re willing to pay the expense of it, to let them have access to it.” Let’s see if she follows through.

Lake is also throttling the ability of Radio Farda to reach the Iranian people through virtual private networks supported by the Open Technology Fund (OTF), a U.S. nonprofit authorized and funded by Congress in 2021 to help America’s freedom radios overcome internet censorship.

Over 90 percent of Radio Farda’s Iranian audience get their content through OTF-supported VPNs. To help keep these critical channels open, Republican Sens. James Lankford (Oklahoma) and Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) recently worked with the State Department to identify $10 million in additional funds that could be transferred to support millions of VPN users in Iran. The State Department asked Lake to transfer the funds to OTF using a well established channel — an interagency agreement used for years to get resources to OTF.

But according to OTF officials, Lake would not accept the funds from State and insisted that OTF pay for Iran operations through an advance on its existing regular budget — which would require it to cut VPN access in China and Cuba to provide it in Iran. Without the additional money, OTF said it will have to start cutting off Iranian users this month.

Lake denies she is an impediment to giving OTF the money. “That is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. “If the State Department wants to give $10 million to OTF, I run this agency. Marco Rubio runs the State Department. … You need to be on the phone with them.” But OTF officials said that State Department officials met with USAGM on Feb. 2 to arrange transfer of the money, and Lake wouldn’t agree. An OTF official tells me Lake has made clear that they will have to find a way around her.

In Lake’s telling, the operational limits hamstringing these critical tools have nothing to do with her. So I asked her to share her plan to surge information into Iran and get Trump’s message to the Iranian people. “We have been surging,” she insisted, but added, “I’m not in the Department of War.”

“We have given Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Network, as well as the Open Technology Fund, every single penny that was appropriated to them,” she said. “Every. Single. Penny.” She leaves out that this is only because she was forced to do so in court.

Getting accurate information to the Iranian people could mean the difference between the success and failure of a military strike. But if Kari Lake has her way, millions of Iranians will be left in an information vacuum and at the mercy of regime propaganda. If Trump decides to act, he might want a new director of U.S. Agency for Global Media who is serving his interests rather than unwittingly serving the interests of the regime he is trying to topple.

Perhaps Marco Rubio needs another job?

correctionAn earlier version misstated the day of a meeting between officials at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for Global Media to discuss funding to support virtual private network users in Iran.

What readers are saying

The conversation explores the role of information warfare in supporting military actions, particularly focusing on the actions of Kari Lake and the Trump administration's influence on the Voice of America (VOA) and other communication outlets. Many participants criticize Lake's... Show more

This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.

Comments 532

By Marc A. Thiessen

Marc Thiessen writes a column for The Post on foreign and domestic policy. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush.follow on X@marcthiessen

8. Russia’s sabotage campaign is becoming bolder

Summary:

The Economist reports that Poland faced a major escalation in Russia-linked hybrid activity when cyber-attacks hit 30 energy facilities on December 29th as temperatures fell. Dragos says intruders targeted combined heat and power plants and systems distributing wind and solar energy, and they gained control of operational technology and damaged some equipment beyond repair. The attack was stopped before it caused widespread harm, and a correction notes Poland’s grid operator found no blackout risk. The piece argues Russia’s campaign is broadening beyond Ukraine and beyond war-linked targets, and that Polish officials and specialists suspect the FSB, not the GRU’s Sandworm, was involved.

Comment: If the FSB is now willing to disrupt, not just spy, then Europe should assume quiet access already exists in places it has not found. At what point does sabotage become an act of war or can it remain below the "threshold of war?"

Russia’s sabotage campaign is becoming bolder

Hacks against Polish energy plants suggest the FSB is involved

Photograph: Getty Images

Feb 9th 2026

4 min read

https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/02/09/russias-sabotage-campaign-is-becoming-bolder

N RECENT years Poland has become accustomed to provocations linked to Russia: railway sabotage, arson plots and drone incursions. The latest shots in this so-called hybrid war were fired on December 29th, when cyber-attacks hit 30 energy facilities just as temperatures plummeted. They marked a serious escalation of Russia’s digital subversion in Europe beyond Ukraine.

The intrusions in December targeted combined heat and power facilities, as well as systems that manage the distribution of energy from wind and solar sites, according to Dragos, a cyber-security firm. Poland gets 29% of its energy from renewables. The intruders gained control of operational technology—the interface between a computer network and a physical system—and damaged some equipment beyond repair. The attack was halted before it could cause a power outage which might have affected nearly half a million people.

The incident is notable for two reasons. One is that it marks an intensification of Russia’s cyber campaign in Europe. Russian hackers have long breached European computer networks to steal secrets and to probe infrastructure for signs of weakness. They have gone much further in Ukraine, conducting audacious attacks on the power grid there in 2015 and 2016. But beyond Ukraine they have moved more carefully.

That is now changing. In 2023 Russian-linked hackers sent commands to railway signal sites in north-west Poland, causing 20 trains to come to a halt. The next year they repeated that effort against Czech signalling systems. In both cases, the targets were on routes over which aid is sent to Ukraine. But Russia’s campaign has since widened to include civilian targets with no direct link to the war. In 2024 hackers disrupted a small private French water mill, possibly mistaking it for a much bigger dam. And last year they attacked a dam in south-west Norway, causing the uncontrolled flow of water for four hours.

The Polish attack also marks a shift in a second respect. Earlier sabotage incidents were probably carried out by Sandworm, the name cyber-security researchers have given to a unit of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, or by “hacktivist” groups that serve as fronts for the agency. The GRU has long had a reputation as a loud, aggressive and clumsy cyber actor, prioritising mayhem over stealth. For that reason, the Polish attacks were initially thought to be its handiwork.

Yet it turned out, according to Polish officials and cyber-security specialists, the perpetrators were probably hackers from the FSB, Russia’s state security service. This unit is sometimes dubbed “Berserk Bear” in the colourful nomenclature of cyber-threat companies. The FSB’s cyber operations, aimed mostly at espionage, have historically been slow, quiet and cautious. “They never showed the actual intent to disrupt—just to lay and wait for that order,” says John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google’s Threat Intelligence Group. “This is the first time they’ve done that in 12 years of digging in.”

This raises questions about Russia’s foothold in European infrastructure elsewhere. Berserk Bear’s hackers “regularly disappear, and generally, when they come back, they’re retooled”, says Mr Hultquist. “We could not have possibly found them in all the places they had targeted. I’m concerned now that we have an actor that has a history of getting into critical infrastructure across the globe—and they almost certainly have some access that we do not know about.” He warns that the Winter Olympics in Italy could be a target: Russia has been excluded from the event, and it previously attacked the Pyeongchang games in 2018 and the ones in Paris in 2024. On February 5th, as the games began, Italy said it had blocked Russian attacks on websites linked to the games.

Besides cyber-sabotage, there is plenty of the regular physical kind going on. On February 3rd German police arrested two men, from Romania and Greece, on suspicion of sabotaging naval vessels in Hamburg last year, including puncturing water lines and pouring gravel into an engine. Germany has not yet pointed the finger at Russia. But things are likely to get worse, says Chelsea Cederbaum, a former CIA analyst who works at Recorded Future, an intelligence firm. She says Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, sees a window of opportunity to increase pressure while America and Europe are split, notably over Greenland, and before America’s presidential election in 2028, which could install a less Russophile president. “I’ve seen Putin’s risk tolerance just skyrocket,” she says. ■

Correction (February 10th 2026): An earlier version of this article said that the cyber-attacks on December 29th could have caused a blackout. In fact an analysis by Poland’s grid operator found no such risk. Sorry for the error.

To stay on top of the biggest European stories, sign up to Café Europa, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.

9. US withdraws newly updated list of firms allegedly aiding China's military

Summary:

The U.S. withdrew a newly updated Pentagon list of Chinese firms allegedly aiding Beijing’s military shortly after it appeared in the Federal Register. The briefly posted document added major tech firms including Alibaba and Baidu, plus BYD, WuXi AppTec, and RoboSense, but it also removed key memory chipmakers CXMT and YMTC, drawing criticism from China hawks who worry their chip expertise could strengthen China’s military. The Federal Register noted an agency letter requested withdrawal, without stating why. Pentagon and White House officials did not comment. Reuters links the episode to a softer recent U.S. line toward Beijing after an October trade truce.

US withdraws newly updated list of firms allegedly aiding China's military

Reuters · Michael Martina

By Michael Martina and Alexandra Alper

February 13, 20268:08 AM ESTUpdated 17 hours ago

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/us-expected-add-alibaba-others-list-firms-allegedly-aiding-chinas-military-2026-02-13/

WASHINGTON, Feb 13 (Reuters) - The U.S. withdrew an updated list of Chinese firms allegedly aiding Beijing's military shortly after it was posted on Friday with the addition of some of China's biggest tech companies, including Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab and Baidu (9888.HK), opens new tab.

The document -- posted for about an hour -- had also removed China's top memory chipmakers CXMT and YMTC from the list, drawing fire from China hawks in Washington who fear the firms' growing chipmaking expertise could help supercharge China's military.

The Reuters Inside Track newsletter is your essential guide to the biggest events in global sport. Sign up here.

Advertisement · Scroll to continue

"An agency letter requesting withdrawal of this document was received after placement on public inspection," the Federal Register posted in an editorial note, without providing a reason.

The Pentagon and the WHite House did not respond to requests for comment.

"Hopefully, (The Pentagon) pulled the document because removing CXMT and YMTC was an error," said Chris McGuire, a former White House National Security Council official under President Joe Biden, who said that would only make sense, given the addition to the list of many other companies critical to the Chinese AI stack, like Alibaba and Baidu.

Advertisement · Scroll to continue

Other additions on the withdrawn Friday document included automaker BYD (002594.SZ), opens new tab, biotech firm WuXi AppTec (603259.SS), opens new tab and AI-driven robotics technology company RoboSense Technology Co Ltd (2498.HK), opens new tab.

The publication and hasty withdrawal of the list comes as the Trump administration has sought to avoid antagonizing Beijing following a trade truce reached by China's Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump in October.

Since then, the administration has taken a softer line on Beijing, giving Nvidia a greenlight to export its second most advanced AI chips to China and postponing a rule that would have barred thousands of Chinese firms from buying U.S. technology.

On Thursday, Reuters reported it had shelved a number of national security measures aimed at Beijing, including a ban on China Telecom's U.S. operations and restrictions on sales of Chinese equipment for U.S. data centers.

Trump is expected to travel to China in April, though dates for the visit have yet to be set.

Though the Pentagon list does not formally impose sanctions on Chinese firms, under a new law, the department will be prevented in coming years from contracting and procuring from companies on the list.

Being added to the list also sends a message to Pentagon suppliers and other U.S. government agencies about the U.S. military's opinion of the firms, some of which have sued the U.S. over their inclusion.

An Alibaba spokesperson said there was no basis for its inclusion and threatened legal action. "Alibaba is not a Chinese military company nor part of any military-civil fusion strategy."

The list already includes major Chinese firms such as Tencent Holdings (0700.HK), opens new tab, one of China's largest tech companies, and CATL, a major battery maker in the electric vehicle industry.

Reporting by Michael Martina and Alexandra Alper; editing by Philippa Fletcher, Nick Zieminski, William Maclean and Chizu Nomiyama

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Michael Martina is a Washington-based foreign policy correspondent who covers U.S.-China relations and the global impact of the two countries' diplomatic, technology, and military competition. He was a member of the Reuters team that won the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting in 2025 for uncovering fentanyl supply chains, and previously reported from Beijing for more than a decade as a senior correspondent for the news agency.

Reuters · Michael Martina

10. The Objective Should Be a Secular and Moderate Iran

Summary:

Frank Schell argues the primary U.S. objective toward Iran should be a secular, moderate Iran, not a strike plan. He says Iran is wounded and militarily weakened, citing Israeli destruction of some air defenses and U.S. B-2 strikes on nuclear infrastructure at Natanz, Fordo, and Isfahan, while Russia, China, and north Korea stayed on the sidelines. He claims the regime fears its people and cites estimates of at least 30,000 demonstrators killed. He warns nuclear talks were futile and a deal could preserve the regime unless it ends repression and proxy adventurism. He cautions military action could widen war and strengthen hardliners, and urges supporting an Iranian-led transition with incentives and targeted sanctions.

The Objective Should Be a Secular and Moderate Iran

spectator.org · Frank Schell

Not plans for a military strike.

by Frank Schell

February 12, 2026, 10:07 PM

https://spectator.org/the-objective-should-be-a-secular-and-moderate-iran/

Iranian civilians protest the regime in Tehran on Jan. 9, 2026 (VahidOnline telegram channel/CC-PD/Wikimedia Commons)

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been wounded. And now, something has got to give.

President Trump has a historic opportunity to reverse decades of enmity toward “The Great Satan,” and end the exportation of terrorism to Europe, the United States, and Israel through the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — known to have provided weapons and training to the defeated Hamas and Hezbollah, and to other proxies in Syria.

Iran has been militarily and politically weakened. Some of Iran’s Russian and indigenously made air defense systems were destroyed by the Israeli Air Force last June, and later that month, American B-2 aircraft successfully struck and destroyed Iranian nuclear infrastructure in Natanz, Fordo, and Isfahan. Iran’s traditional allies, Russia, China, and North Korea, were observers on the sidelines. Moreover, the Islamist regime is afraid of its own people, having recently killed at least 30,000 demonstrators according to estimates appearing in The Guardian and Time, both quoting local health sources. (RELATED: US–Iran Talks Only Lead to Uncertainty)

Increasing pressure on Iran, in late January, the carrier strike group led by the Nimitz-class USS Abraham Lincoln arrived from the Indian Ocean and is now on station in the Arabian Sea, off the southern coast of Oman. Typically, a strike group comprises a nuclear-powered carrier, an air wing, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, a squadron of several Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, a nuclear attack submarine, and support ships — in this case, however, the U.S. Naval Institute does not mention a cruiser. On Wednesday, there were reports of a second carrier strike group ordered to prepare to deploy to the region.

Unlike predecessor presidents who did not enforce a red line … President Trump has not flinched about the use of force.

Unlike predecessor presidents who did not enforce a red line in Syria over the use of chemical weapons, and who spent many years trying to negotiate with Iran to limit its development of enriched uranium, President Trump has not flinched about the use of force. The exfiltration in early January of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, said to require over 150 aircraft and about 20 bases, and the destruction of Iranian nuclear sites, demonstrate that the commander in chief will act decisively to support the core security interests of the United States. (RELATED: America SOARs at Night)

Much has been written about various alternatives: a renegotiated nuclear deal to limit development of fissile material and impede Iran’s ballistic missile capability; military strikes on nuclear and missile infrastructure, the leadership of the Revolutionary Guard, the Kharg Island oil terminal, the Bandar Abbas naval base, and other government targets; and regime change. (RELATED: Two Regimes, One Reality)

However, before a course of action can be defined, there must be a well-communicated primary objective — and that objective should be the development of a secular and moderate Iran. Iran was once the West’s gendarme in the Persian Gulf, assuring oil supplies and functioning as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism, while maintaining good relations with Israel before the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Iran has an accomplished scientific establishment, and among the OPEC oil producers, the most diversified industrial economy, with emphasis on the mining and automotive sectors. A secular and moderate Iran could inhibit the spread of Islamist jihad and serve as a stabilizing force in a region seething with well-armed factionalism. Culturally, the affinity of Iran’s intelligentsia for France is well known.

Direct and indirect nuclear negotiations among the United States, Iran, and the International Atomic Energy Agency of Vienna proved to be a colossal waste of time, facetiously evoking the phrase about the definition of insanity, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Through apparent subterfuge, Iran simply used the negotiations to buy time to enrich nuclear material with U-235 to near weapons grade.

A nuclear deal, implying that Iran is expected to live up to commitments, would also probably mean continuation of the present regime. However, the Trump administration is known to presently want a deal with Iran. If that were the case, it should include more than dismantling of nuclear development and limitations on missiles — an end to adventurism and support of chaos, an end to violent suppression of dissent, and integration with the West should be on the agenda. The Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear accord with Iran had no such linkages and accordingly, was badly flawed — and about three years later, President Trump repudiated it.

The military option would not give much help to the opposition, nor would it necessarily mean a transition in government from theocracy to a genuine republic. It could also result in the ascent of even more anti-Western hardliners in the inner circle of the ayatollahs. Worse, it could result in a wider conflict against the U.S., Europe, and Israel.

Iran’s arsenal of missiles is still formidable, with a recent Israeli estimate of 1,500, down from a CENTCOM figure of 3,000 a few years ago. Iran is believed capable of hitting targets in Europe, and U.S. bases in the Middle East, such as the CENTCOM installation in Qatar and the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Iran also has a submarine fleet, mostly in the mini category, with several diesel electric attack subs, along with asymmetric assets such as drones and missile patrol boats that can swarm U.S. warships. Above all, the American public is not mentally prepared for a major conflict with Iran, having seen only spectacularly focused limited operations against Venezuela and Iran, involving no American deaths.

Although it may still take more time, supporting the Iranians to transition to a new government, led by an Iranian face with Iranian fingerprints on it, would be the wisest course. Operation Ajax, in which the U.S. and Great Britain engineered the ouster of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, was a source of protracted anti-Western resentment in Iran, as it was an obvious foreign intrusion that installed the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. A U.S.-managed covert action seems logistically difficult and a bad idea.

Iran has a long, proud history extending over 2,500 years to the reign of Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century B.C. Iran has had its own parliament, the Majlis, since the early 20th century, although it has generally not been the locus of power. Now is the time to support the Iranian people, with assurances of economic aid to rebuild their energy industry, ending sanctions and isolation from the West, once the current regime is ousted. Now is also the time to intensify sanctions against companies and individuals and to encourage moderate elements in the Iranian government and military to act.

Field Observation: Rectification as Readiness

What to watch inside the PLA after overt recruitment signaling

Erika Lafrennie

Feb 14, 2026

https://www.xinanigans.com/p/rectification-as-readiness?utm

In February 2026, the CIA publicly released a Mandarin-language video targeting potential informants within China’s military. The video depicted a disillusioned mid-level officer and framed internal suspicion and political elimination as risks to personal security. The release followed the investigation and removal of senior PLA leadership, including CMC Vice Chair Zhang Youxia, amid continued coverage of military rectification campaigns. US officials stated that the campaign had previously reached Chinese audiences despite internet restrictions and would continue offering channels for secure contact.

Surface-level analysis will likely focus on recruitment yield, public denunciation, or potential counterintelligence sweeps. Those indicators may matter tactically, but they are unlikely to be the most revealing signal.

The more consequential variable will be whether Beijing continues — or intensifies — the recent reframing of political rectification as combat readiness doctrine.

In the weeks following Zhang’s removal, state and military media emphasized “grassroots political work” as the foundation of combat effectiveness. Reporting linked ideological steadiness, loyalty, and discipline directly to readiness milestones and long-term force construction, language consistent with recent PLA Daily emphasis on political work as “combat capability construction.” Rectification was not framed as crisis management. It was framed as operational enhancement, a durable shift in how political discipline is integrated into readiness logic.

That framing is structurally significant.

When political reliability is fused with readiness doctrine, discipline ceases to function solely as ideological enforcement. It becomes integrated into the logic of warfighting capability. In such an environment, external signaling — including overt recruitment efforts — interacts less with public narrative than with institutional reflex.

The question is whether the PLA’s response environment further embeds rectification within readiness structures.

The most consistent pattern would be quiet doctrinal reinforcement beneath whatever public messaging occurs. External-facing denunciation from MFA or MND is likely and largely performative. The meaningful signal lies in how internal political work guidance and supervision mechanisms adjust. Governance systems under consolidation may respond rhetorically, but their consequential adjustments occur administratively.

If political work coverage continues at its current pace — steady emphasis on ideological reliability as a combat prerequisite — that confirms baseline consolidation. Acceleration, especially tighter linkage between loyalty campaigns and operational benchmarks, would indicate heightened internal sensitivity. Explicit integration of foreign subversion into readiness language would reflect something further: a perceived interaction between external pressure and internal discipline significant enough to formalize.

Such adjustments are marginal. They do not produce visible disruption. But marginal tightening affects institutional elasticity. Increased loyalty monitoring, expanded political education cycles, or heightened internal vetting reduce informal trust density and increase risk aversion. In stable environments, that may enhance cohesion. In succession-ambiguous environments, it can narrow feedback loops and increase rigidity.

Rigidity is not instability. It is a structural condition in which decision processes become more centralized and more disciplined, but also less adaptive, raising the risk of delayed problem recognition and overcentralized decision-making under stress rather than near-term regime fragility. The degree matters. Incremental shifts accumulate.

Overt intelligence signaling, even when public and bounded, interacts with administrative terrain — the governance structures, political networks, and institutional processes that shape decision-making before operations begin — rather than mass psychology. The visible action forces internal assessment. Political departments, command structures, and propaganda organs evaluate vulnerability and required adjustment. The institutional reflex — not the public reaction — becomes the analytic object.

If rectification continues to be operationalized as readiness infrastructure, then political discipline is no longer episodic campaign activity. It becomes embedded within force construction logic. That embedding shapes how external pressure is absorbed. It defines how quickly information moves upward, how initiative is evaluated, and how dissent is filtered.

In governance competition, such dynamics precede crisis. Administrative systems shape military choices long before operational plans are executed. Overt signaling does not need to destabilize in order to matter. It needs only to interact with consolidation cycles already underway.

The revealing indicator is doctrinal continuity. Watch whether political rectification remains explicitly tied to combat readiness benchmarks in the weeks ahead. Watch whether grassroots political work continues to be framed as the stabilizing foundation of operational capability. Watch whether external messaging — loud or muted — is paired with reinforcement internally.

In modern competition, the decisive terrain is often institutional rather than kinetic. Readiness is shaped not only by hardware and joint integration, but by how governance mechanisms define reliability, trust, and authority inside the force. External actions probe that terrain. Internal adjustments reveal its contours. The visible event may fade quickly. The administrative reflex will endure longer.

12. Report | Who Are China's Diplomats? Beyond "Wolf Warrior" Hype

Summary:

The ISD Georgetown report asks whether “wolf warrior diplomats” is an accurate label and examines who China’s diplomats are under Xi Jinping. It notes that quantitative studies of contemporary PRC diplomats are rare, so the authors profile two tiers of senior officials. The first tier, “diplomats-in-chief,” includes top CCP leaders who supervise the MFA and manage embassies, and who were engaged in foreign policy in 2023. The second tier examines ambassadors, using a dataset of 169. Key takeaways argue the MFA functions as the CCP’s diplomatic arm, professionalization has grown, and “wolf warrior” is a CCP tactic, not a generational descriptor. Diplomats are urged to act as a “civilian army” with loyalty and discipline.

Comment: The 52 page report can be downloaded here: https://georgetown.app.box.com/s/v0mx6zpykudijtgxh5q3pkz8u8pn8736

If “wolf warrior” is a tactic and the MFA is the Party’s arm, then Beijing can dial aggression up or down without changing the kind of people it sends abroad. If ambassadors are increasingly professionalized but still treated as a “civilian army,” where is the real limit on initiative: in training and language skills, or in Party discipline and loyalty demands?

Report | Who Are China's Diplomats? Beyond "Wolf Warrior" Hype - ISD

isd.georgetown.edu · adm295 · February 13, 2026

ISD is grateful to Professor Andrew Scobell and his co-authors for partnering with ISD to publish this report.

Diplomats from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have attracted considerable attention and notoriety because of combative rhetoric and aggressive actions. This has led to Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) personnel being labeled “wolf warrior diplomats.” How accurate is this term? Who are China’s diplomats? Quantitative studies of contemporary PRC diplomats are surprisingly rare. In this report, Professor Andrew Scobell, Dr. Yi Li, and Allison McFarland identify and describe the key characteristics of two tiers of PRC senior officials with primary responsibility for China’s diplomacy under Xi Jinping.

Click here to read the report.

The first tier of diplomats are top echelon political leaders charged with supervising the work of the MFA and career officials responsible for managing PRC embassies around the world. These are individuals who were actively engaged in the formulation and execution of PRC foreign policy in 2023. We label this group “diplomats-in-chief.” The second tier examined consists of ambassadors operating on the frontlines of PRC diplomacy. While detailed biographical information on MFA personnel is not readily available, Beijing’s ambassadors serving in embassies around the world are the exception. This report taps a unique data set of 169 PRC ambassadors compiled by the authors and draws the following key takeaways:

China’s MFA is most accurately described as the diplomatic arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rather than constituting the diplomatic corps of the PRC.
Professionalization is the dominant trend in Chinese diplomacy as successive generations of MFA career diplomats have become better educated and more proficient in foreign languages.
“Wolf warrior” is best understood as a long-standing CCP diplomatic tactic rather than a descriptor for PRC diplomats or a label for a rising generation of Chinese foreign policy professionals.

China’s diplomats-in-chief are all top tier CCP leaders, some of whom have little if any experience with foreign affairs or diplomacy. Senior PRC diplomats possess an enduring ethos of military-like discipline and ironclad loyalty to the CCP. Diplomats-in-chief Xi Jinping and Wang Yi stress to PRC diplomats that they are a “civilian army,” demonstrate absolute loyalty to the Party and iron discipline, and exhort them to tirelessly struggle to defend and advance Chinese interests.

isd.georgetown.edu · adm295 · February 13, 2026

13. Atlantic Chokepoint, Cognitive Front: Russian Influence Operations and the GIUK Gap

Summary:

Rachel Butler argues Russia is using deniable, adaptive influence operations to target independence movements in Greenland and Scotland to weaken NATO cohesion and erode control of the Greenland Iceland United Kingdom gap, a maritime chokepoint that constrains Russia’s Northern Fleet and helps protect nuclear stability. She frames the Arctic as shifting from cooperative “zone of peace” dynamics to renewed militarization as warming opens routes and resources. The article claims Russia prefers covert cognitive tactics over direct confrontation, exploiting historical grievances between allies to create discord, complicate governance, and weaken monitoring of the gap. It warns subtle administrative and social fractures can degrade deterrence, force diversion of U.S. naval assets, and raise escalation risks.

Comment: If Moscow can keep the fight political and deniable, it can pressure the GIUK gap without crossing a military threshold that unites NATO fast. If independence debates become the attack surface, then alliance cohesion becomes an operational variable, not a background condition. If small narrative shifts can strain Denmark Greenland and UK politics, then the cheapest Russian tool may yield the highest leverage against second strike stability.

If deterrence in the North Atlantic now depends on cognitive resilience as much as submarines and sensors, who owns the mission to defend cohesion, and what is the trigger to treat influence as an attack on nuclear stability?

Do we need a concept of "cognitive civil defense?"

Atlantic Chokepoint, Cognitive Front: Russian Influence Operations and the GIUK Gap

By Rachel Butler

February 10, 2026

https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/atlantic-chokepoint-cognitive-front-russian-influence-operations-giuk-gap/

The nuclear submarine Kazan has arrived at a permanent base in the Northern Fleet in May 2021. Photo: Ministry of Defense of Russia

Russia is increasingly deploying information influence operations to target independence movements in Greenland and Scotland as part of a broader effort to weaken NATO’s strategic posture in the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) gap. These multi-layered operations are characterized by their adaptability and deniability, making them both difficult to detect and combat. Their covert nature allows Russia to plausibly deny involvement, making it a persistent challenge to establish direct links to official Russian institutions, which allows for continued interference without clear accountability. Evaluating these operations offers policy and decision‑makers actionable insights for confronting Russia’s information influence campaigns and developing strategies to safeguard national security, build population resilience, and ensure nuclear stability.

“Zone of Peace”

In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev described the Arctic as a “zone of peace,” underscoring the region’s spirit of cooperation amid global power competition. Challenges such as climate change and the harsh Arctic environment have promoted a collaborative spirit, exemplified by the Arctic Council. Established in 1996, the Council places special emphasis on protecting the Arctic environment and promoting sustainable development. The Council’s role in fostering cooperation between Russia and NATO countries is particularly noteworthy, given the Cold War tensions and recent military buildup in the region.

While the Council’s commitment includes promoting “peace and stability in the region”, it has explicitly excluded military matters from its mandate.1) However, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the seven Arctic NATO nations issued a joint statement that they would be “temporarily pausing [Russia’s] participation in all meetings of the Council and its subsidiary bodies” due to its violations of the “core principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity”.2) Two years on from the invasion, the Arctic Council has resumed narrow channels of engagement with Russia. Although it remains the sole body where Russia and NATO states still cooperate, it is restricted to working‑group functions,3) reflecting a sharply reduced relationship. Tensions in the region have further escalated as climate change reveals previously untapped resources and alternative sea routes, leading to an Arctic “space race.”4)

The Arctic, once thought to be insulated from global power competition, is now increasingly exposed to it. Russia is modernizing its military presence in the region by reactivating Soviet-era installations and enhancing its Northern Fleet, including its nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), a crucial component of its strategic deterrent.5)

However, NATO controls the crucial Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) gap, which restricts Russian fleet access to the North Atlantic. NATO’s monitoring and anti-submarine capabilities make Russian activities unlikely to go undetected, effectively limiting Russia’s second-strike options and making control of the gap essential for maintaining nuclear stability during wartime.

Russia has been indirectly supporting independence movements in Greenland and Scotland to undermine NATO’s control over the GIUK gap.6) Through information influence operations, Russia aims to fragment these regions to gain fleet access to the North Atlantic. If NATO were to lose control over the gap, its deterrence capabilities would be weakened as Russian SSBNs could pass through covertly. Furthermore, other regional conflicts could escalate as increased Russian threats in the gap might force the U.S. to redeploy its naval assets from the Indo-Pacific, ultimately undermining its deterrent posture against China.

Global Dominance Through the Arctic

Having served as a platform for cooperation among global adversaries, the Arctic is often mischaracterized as irrelevant or immune to conflict. During the Cold War, it emerged as a strategic focal point with vital sea routes and missile deployment capabilities, providing the most direct airborne route from Russia or China to North America.7) Both the United States and the Soviet Union militarized the region with missile sites and early warning systems crucial for deterrence. However, after the Cold War, nations shifted their focus to other national security concerns.

As the Arctic warms at four times the global rate, the potential for new sea routes and opportunities for resource extraction has triggered a second wave of militarization.8) The Northern Sea Route has become an attractive line of communication for many nations that are affected by the rising cost of insurance for transiting through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, as Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen continuously target commercial vessels.9) Additionally, untapped resources provide an opportunity for nations that have struggled with energy security following Russia’s halt of exports to Europe.10)

Both NATO Arctic nations and Russia are actively rebuilding the Arctic’s Cold War military footprint by expanding on their legacy installations, with a strong emphasis on missile deployment and storage sites. Russia has also begun building ground bases and positioning potential invasion forces near its borders with Norway, Finland, and Sweden. This increase in military presence comes amid heightened concerns over Russia’s disregard for territorial boundaries, as seen by its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Unlike Ukraine, which experienced weeks of Russian troop mobilization at its border prior to invasion, NATO Arctic nations may lack the same lead time due to the proximity of Russian forces.

The warming of the Arctic, combined with Russia’s disregard for the sovereignty of other nations, has refocused global security concerns towards this region. Russian dominance poses a risk of invasion, nuclear instability, and irreparable harm to deterrence efforts, especially given its collaboration with China (which recently declared itself a “near-Arctic state”).11) NATO Arctic nations must safeguard and enhance their strategic positions, starting with the GIUK gap.

The GIUK gap plays a crucial role in limiting Russian activities on a global scale. Russia’s Northern Fleet—the home of Russia’s sea-based nuclear deterrent, and surface vessels such as destroyers, battlecruisers, and icebreakers—resides on the Kola Peninsula. This base lies north of the GIUK gap along the Northern Sea Route, and only 125 miles from the Finnish border.12)Although the fleet benefits from a year-round ice-free environment due to the North Atlantic Current and operates from a Soviet-era base, NATO nations flank the only passage this fleet has to the North Atlantic.13)

NATO has shown its capability and willingness to use the gap as a strategic choke point against Russia through patrols and exercises. Recently, Danish and Icelandic forces conducted drills in the Denmark Strait, officially aimed to improve their skills in Arctic conditions and “increase situational awareness”.14) Collaboration among Arctic nations, coupled with vague rationales for military exercises, enables NATO forces to patrol and project strength without directly engaging Russia. Consequently, the GIUK gap poses a strategic challenge to Russia’s nuclear capabilities and its global strength projection. Rather than directly confronting NATO forces—an approach that could escalate into open war—Russia has opted for a multi-layered, deniable strategy to enhance its operational reach in the GIUK gap by deploying information influence operations in Greenland and Scotland.

Russian Information Influence Operations

Russia is increasingly utilizing what can best be categorized as information influence operations, “where information plays a key role to exert power, erode the target’s willpower, confuse and constrain the target’s decision-making, and influence public opinion.”15) The RAND Corporation connects information operations, information warfare, and influence operations, describing them as soft power projection, involving both intelligence collection and propaganda dissemination.16) Such operations are executed covertly, employing a multi-layered strategy with adaptable narratives that respond to geopolitical shifts, thereby allowing for deniability and making them challenging for targeted nations to identify and combat.17)

There is no global consensus on effectively addressing these operations, which vary widely in execution. For example, in September 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice seized 32 domains used by Russian-sponsored campaigns to spread propaganda against Ukraine and influence elections, including the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election.18) This approach, deployed against the U.S., contrasts with the methods Russia used in Lithuania in 2017, where false claims were made about German soldiers allegedly raping underage girls. This disinformation, sent through email to various Lithuanian news outlets and the president of the Lithuanian Parliament, was soon disproven by local authorities,19) with NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges, Ambassador Sorin Ducaru, stating, “This is a clear example of information manipulation with a sense of weaponization.”20) This operation is believed to have been aimed at disrupting NATO’s enhanced forward presence in its Eastern territories, of which German troops in Lithuania were a central component.21)

As Russia navigates the constraints of the GIUK gap while seeking to avoid direct conflict with NATO, it has turned to targeting independence movements through information influence operations in nations that flank the GIUK gap. A 2024 NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence report notes an increase in these operations in the Nordic-Baltic area, as Russia attempts to establish dominance in the Arctic through covert division.22)

Read the remainder of the report at this link: https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/atlantic-chokepoint-cognitive-front-russian-influence-operations-giuk-gap/

14. No time to lose: Liberal democracies can win the cognitive and hybrid war against authoritarians

Summary:

ISD argues democracies recognize hybrid and cognitive warfare by authoritarian regimes like Russia, China, and Iran, but remain reactive, siloed, and weak at prevention, deterrence, and building their own hybrid toolkit. The purpose of hybrid acts, from cyber and disinformation to sabotage, is to erode citizens’ psyches, undermine trust in institutions, divide societies, and weaken bodies like the EU and NATO. Technology enables targeting at scale, while democratic information ecosystems rely on U.S. and Chinese tech infrastructure, deepening vulnerability and “epistemic corrosion.” ISD proposes a policy sprint and three starting moves: a counter-hybrid doctrine with flexible responses, holistic government coordination and coalitions, and strategic communications that attribute, explain impacts, and mobilize civil society.

Comment: Do we need to develop a concept of cognitive civil defense? If the aim is the mind, then every silo is a seam to pry open, and the authoritarians will keep working those seams until democracies act like one system. If democracies rely on foreign-owned platforms to defend their own cognitive space, then sovereignty becomes conditional, and deterrence becomes negotiation with private gatekeepers. If strategic communications is treated as an add-on, then the public never consents to risk, and without consent, no doctrine can be sustained.

If hybrid war is designed to corrode trust, what is the minimum proof a government must show its citizens to justify asymmetric responses without feeding the same distrust it seeks to stop?

If the information ecosystem is dominated by U.S. and Chinese firms, what does “digital independence” mean in practice: new infrastructure, new rules, or new alliances with industry, and who pays the political cost?

If democracies want an “own hybrid toolkit” while staying ethical, where is the bright line between legitimate influence and the very manipulation they condemn in authoritarian campaigns?

Cognitive civil defense? How do we develop it?

The Cyber Underground – Resistance to Active Measures and Propaganda: “The Disruptors” - Motto: “Think For Yourself”

https://archive.smallwarsjournal.com/index.php/jrnl/art/the-cyber-underground-%E2%80%93-resistance-to-active-measures-and-propaganda-%E2%80%9Cthe-disruptors%E2%80%9D-mot-0

From POTUS' 2017 NSS:

"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 the 2017 NSS HERE

No time to lose: Liberal democracies can win the cognitive and hybrid war against authoritarians

isdglobal.org · Sasha Havlicek

Sasha Havlicek, David Salvo and Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven

February 12, 2026

https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/no-time-to-lose-liberal-democracies-can-win-the-cognitive-and-hybrid-war-against-authoritarians/

Democracies have woken up to the scale of hybrid warfare being waged by authoritarian regimes like Russia, China and Iran. But they have yet to move from recognizing and exposing the threat, to systematically preventing its impacts, mounting effective deterrents or developing their own hybrid toolkit. Over the next year, ISD will convene leading voices from different countries and sectors of society in a “policy sprint” initiative, designed to provide actionable recommendations to counter hybrid warfare holistically and outcompete authoritarianism. This Dispatch kicks off the policy sprint, framing the urgency of the challenge facing democracies and providing initial recommendations to begin operationalizing a more effective counter-hybrid strategy.

Authoritarian regimes’ use of hybrid warfare has increased precipitously over the past decade. A recent ISD report reveals the range of hybrid attacks experienced across all 27 member states of the EU since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022 – from cyber and information operations to political and societal subversion, to kinetic operations like sabotage, arson and targeted killings.

While government response remains largely reactive and siloed across different departments and ministries, the overarching purpose of these seemingly isolated hybrid attacks is unified. The ultimate aim – the design of every drone incursion, ransomware attack or deepfake – is to prey on citizens’ psyches bit by bit. This contributes to the broader strategy of undermining trust in democratic institutions, political parties and governance, dividing liberal societies and weakening the international institutions undergirding the post-Cold War international order (EU, NATO etc.).

It’s working.

Though anti-democratic sentiment has its own domestic origins, hybrid attacks have capitalized on and contributed to declining confidence in democracy and a rise in illiberal forces around the globe. In many countries, societal cohesion and resilience is fraying.

The cognitive domain has become increasingly prone to manipulation. Rapidly evolving technology now offers authoritarian actors the ability to target citizens at unprecedented scale and precision. Adding to the challenge, the dominant information ecosystem in democracies is digital – and the infrastructure supporting that ecosystem is dominated by companies based in the United States and China. That imbalance makes countries’ attempts to defend against cognitive warfare at least in part reliant on the good will of foreign industry and political attitudes of foreign governments. Overcoming this overreliance and building the digital infrastructure and information ecosystem that aligns with democratic principles like individual rights, privacy, freedom of speech, transparency and accountability will require a generation of serious investment by democracies. In the meantime, they must use every tool in the policy toolbox to address the fact that authoritarians are using a suite of deceptive tactics including exploiting platforms’ algorithmic systems and, increasingly, AI data voids to manipulate citizens at the macro and micro levels, leading to epistemic corrosion.

Paradoxically, while national governments and multilateral institutions like the EU and NATO have been increasingly cognizant and publicly vocal about cognitive and hybrid threats, the current defensive strategy does not deliver results. Nations may take a whole-of-government approach but they largely address this strategic challenge with siloed, tactical responses rather than proactive measures that raise the costs on adversaries. Indeed, democracies have yet to shift from recognizing and exposing the threat, to systematically preventing its impacts, mounting effective deterrents or developing their own hybrid toolkit.

The urgency of the situation demands immediate course correction. Authoritarian regimes will never stop their hybrid warfare, but democracies must make major changes if they are to counter their adversaries. At stake is the future of liberal democracy.

Here are three recommendations for democracies to start to operationalize a more effective strategy to combat hybrid and cognitive warfare. Such a strategy will ultimately have to push the envelope of conventional practice in the counter-hybrid field but must still adhere to democratic norms and ethics.

1. Establish a counter-hybrid doctrine that demonstrates a willingness to win.

Nations need a comprehensive strategic plan to successfully counter a multi-vectored threat designed to erode the fabric of democracy. Without an overarching strategic vision, it will continue to be difficult for governments to mobilize resources to raise the costs on adversaries, assume more appetite for risk and make the case to the public that combating authoritarian interference operations is in their direct interest and requires the participation of all sectors of society. A counter-hybrid doctrine should contain the following elements:

A declaratory policy that a nation will respond to hybrid attacks in a manner of its choosing, using flexible, asymmetric responses that involve all instruments of state power and national resources, reserving the right to escalate and de-escalate as necessary. This is not a novel concept. During the Cold War, the West relied on asymmetry to offset Soviet nuclear and conventional dominance in the European theatre. Rather than match the Soviet Union by putting thousands of tactical nuclear weapons on European soil, the United States deployed soldiers and conventional forces to Europe to defend NATO allies, making a full-scale attack too risky for the Soviet Union to wage.
An assertion that developing reactive and offensive capabilities in the domains where authoritarian regimes target democracies may be necessary to identify and neutralize sources of hybrid warfare in authoritarian countries. This is an area Ukraine has excelled at, but it is also something the Biden administration and the first Trump administration did to combat Russian threats to U.S. elections in the cyber and information domains. Offensive capabilities may also be needed to address kinetic operations like undersea cable cutting, drone incursions and other attacks on military and critical infrastructure.
A direction to government agencies to map adversaries’ vulnerabilities and pressure points, just as they do to us, and find the appropriate methods to exploit them. This would also entail an examination of adversaries’ weaknesses in the cognitive domain and a commitment to develop a more proactive approach to engaging citizens in authoritarian nations
A commitment to a strategy that adheres to and defends democratic principles like freedom of speech and rule of law while taking steps to foster greater digital independence from the tech architecture and infrastructure that creates the conditions for authoritarians’ cognitive warfare to thrive.

2. Organize government to address hybrid warfare holistically and build flexible coalitions of the willing with allies and across sectors.

Despite all the attention given to hybrid threats, most governments still address the challenge in silos. A fragmented approach to addressing hybrid warfare across government badly misunderstands the interconnectivity of the threat domains and only reinforces a piecemeal, tactical response. Meanwhile, in the EU and NATO, not only are there similar silos but getting consensus on more proactive strategies to counter hybrid warfare will likely prove challenging given allies’ varying perceptions of the threat, appetite for risk and national capabilities. Across the transatlantic community, there have at least been efforts to improve coordination by creating information sharing and rapid response mechanisms, but these are mostly focused on information threats and results have been mixed. A limitation has often been that information sharing is itself siloed – government to government, civil society to civil society – and efforts at a more multi-stakeholder approach have faced resource and bureaucratic constraints. To address these shortcomings, governments should:

Appoint a lead agency on combating hybrid warfare or a hybrid threat policy coordinator to wrangle different bureaucratic equities from the military, foreign offices digital and interior ministries, among others, to one table. This would also signal buy-in from the very top of political leadership.
Establish a similar hybrid coordinating function within the intelligence services to ensure that threat information from across threat domains – cyber, information, financial, infrastructure, etc. – is being analyzed holistically.
Partner with likeminded allies, even if that means working outside traditional EU and NATO channels. Countries that have more appetite for risk should bring their own tools to the table in informal coalitions around specific responses – exacting economic leverage, conducting cyber operations, defending critical infrastructure, taking a more proactive approach to messaging to citizens in authoritarian regimes, to name a few. The leading European nations with the greatest capacity and therefore the most at stake – Germany, France, the UK and Poland – should develop a framework for such cooperation, inviting the participation of other likeminded allies like the Baltic States, Ukraine, Canada and even out-of-area partners like Australia and Japan.
Support the establishment of a Hybrid Warfare War Room that brings together diverse subsections of society – the military-industrial complex, banks, local governments, think tanks, and academic institutions, among many others – to formulate strategic responses to hybrid warfare, share threat intelligence, address crises jointly and conduct long-term preparedness exercises. This body would be modelled on the multi-stakeholder information sharing and analysis centers (ISACs) in the United States and EU – cross-sector membership organizations that protect critical infrastructure from cyber-attacks.

3. Put strategic communications at the forefront of the strategy to outcompete authoritarianism.

Democracies are losing the narrative battle with authoritarians in many regions of the world. Domestically, illiberal forces are gaining political power. There has been a collective failure to enlist the messengers most likely to build a big-tent coalition against authoritarianism. Internationally, there has been insufficient pushback against authoritarians’ propaganda and lies they tell their own citizens and message to foreign audiences. Weak efforts by democracies to project power and undermine authoritarians’ narratives only emboldens adversaries to double down on their hybrid and cognitive warfare and allows them to gain more supporters. Therefore, democracies should:

Trumpet the successes of countering hybrid threats. As Peter Pomerantsev argues, Russia does an excellent job of selling its purported victories even when claiming victory is either badly overstated or completely unjustified – whether on the battlefield in Ukraine or on the hybrid battlefield in countries like the United States and Denmark. In the process, it peels off more supporters for its growing cohort of democracy skeptics. Democracies must do the same. Americans, for example, are very concerned about Russian and Chinese cyber-attacks targeting critical infrastructure. Democracies must attribute specific hybrid operations to specific threat actors more consistently. They must communicate to their own citizens and those who live in adversarial nations that democracies have taken concrete measures to strengthen defenses and degrade authoritarians’ capabilities. That helps to secure trust in democratic institutions’ ability to protect their people in ways authoritarian regimes perpetually jeopardize.
Similarly, make the case to citizens that hybrid warfare affects their lives and livelihoods. British Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat artfully outlines the human costs of adversaries’ hybrid attacks – critical services like hospitals and health care are paralyzed, citizens’ private data are siphoned for nefarious purposes, and personal and commercial assets are put at risk. If democracies are going to build more of a big-tent coalition to counter authoritarians’ surreptitious attempts to destabilize society, key voices will have to articulate how these threats impact citizens in their daily lives.
Adapt best practices from related fields. For example, the Counter-Daesh Coalition, in particular their Communications Cell, supported, mobilized and coordinated efforts to disrupt the nefarious online infrastructure/networks of hostile states. They worked with a range of partners to expose and counter their messaging, using several innovative tactics at home and abroad. These included leveraging mainstream voices, as well as those who travelled to and lived in areas controlled by Daesh, all of whom could be trusted messengers to counter Daesh’s ideology among vulnerable populations. In addition, there need to be efforts to expose and shame the western networks hired or coopted to do the bidding of authoritarian states, and best practices from whole-of-society efforts to unmask Russia’s sanctions-evasion enablers should be studied.
Empower civil society with the resources to implement a meaningful whole-of-society approach to countering hybrid and cognitive warfare. This would involve enlisting the national and local figures most equipped at transcending political party lines and most adept at speaking to both broad and narrow audiences – mayors, faith-based leaders, and online influencers, to name a few – to raise awareness of the threat from hostile states, get buy-in for counter-hybrid initiatives and relegate support for authoritarianism to the fringes of society.
Finally, to message more effectively in authoritarian information environments, leverage technology and platforms to meet audiences where they are. Offsetting authoritarian propaganda will require more creative instruments than states’ global media apparatuses from a bygone era. Democracies will have to consider less overt means of winning the cognitive battle overseas, while staying true to democratic ethics. This will require engaging audiences in the online subcultures and environments that malign actors systematically target. To the previous point about empowering civil society, government is likely not the best actor or messenger to reach these audiences.

isdglobal.org · Sasha Havlicek

15. Trump’s National Defense Strategy: Paleoconservatism Through Force

Summary:

Hamza Zaman argues the 2026 National Defense Strategy reflects paleoconservatism, pairing America First priorities with a readiness to use force to protect vital interests. He says the strategy centers homeland security, curbing illegal immigration, stopping narcotics, protecting the economic interests of U.S. citizens, and pressing allies to carry more burden. He frames paleoconservatism as opposing neoconservative, universalist missions and defending middle-class economic and cultural interests, including through tariffs and renewed Monroe Doctrine focus on the Western Hemisphere to counter China’s influence. He contends the document’s willingness to employ limited, precise military operations supports this tradition, because the rationale is protection rather than nation building or ideological export.

Trump’s National Defense Strategy: Paleoconservatism Through Force

By Hamza Zaman

February 12, 2026

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2026/02/12/trumps_national_defense_strategy_paleoconservatism_through_force_1164389.html

The Trump administration released its 2026 National Defense Strategy, highlighting President Trump’s untethered focus on homeland security, protecting the economic interests of the U.S. and its citizens, as well as urging the allies to bear a greater share of the burden. The strategy also highlights a discernible disposition for force in order to protect vital American interests. The contours of the document, juxtaposed with the administration’s current policies, indicate the most vivid application of paleoconservatism across the American policy landscape, both at the domestic and foreign policy milieus.

Paleoconservatism, a term coined by Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming in the 1980s, represents the normative views aimed at reinvigorating the Old Right and opposing the messianic aspirations of neoconservatism. The paleoconservatives charge neoconservatism with deviating from the path of humanistic Christian traditions in its attempt to modernize and revitalize the conservative tradition. The managerial class had dominated the statecraft and formulated policies that aimed at enforcing universalist and cosmopolitan ideas all across the globe.

In its disdain for a globalist foreign policy, paleoconservatism advocates the preeminence of American values and rejects messianic ambitions to export these ideals, especially through force as advocated by neoconservatives. In addition, paleoconservatism emphasizes the protection of the economic interests of the American middle class from huge taxes, big governments, unabated regulations and foreign economic coercion, while protecting their cultural interests by curbing rampant, and especially illegal, immigration.

President Trump’s National Defense Strategy categorically outlines the significance of homeland security and deems it vital to American sovereignty. Upholding the tenet of America First, it demonstrates an unapologetic approach towards curbing illegal immigration. Resultantly, it aims to secure the cultural interests of American citizens from alien cultures and nuances that are antithetical to American values. The document also manifests an unwavering resolve against the exorbitant influx of narcotics into American society. This highlights the Trump administration’s adherence to paleoconservatism in its true essence. The primacy of American citizens and the preeminence of American values appear to be the topmost priority of the Trump administration, much aligned with the principles enshrined by the paleoconservative tradition.

Another manifestation of paleoconservative doctrine in the 2026 National Defense Strategy is upholding the economic interests of the U.S. and its citizens. Paleoconservatism is rooted in protecting the economic stakes of its citizens and securing them from its own government’s messianic tendencies as well as from foreign actors, involving foreign countries, intergovernmental organizations and MNCs. In order to further American economic interests, tariffs are wielded as a potent tool by the Trump administration, whereby they are employed to tilt the trade balance in the American favor.

President Trump’s reinforced commitment to the Monroe Doctrine and solidifying American clout in the Western Hemisphere highlights the underlying concerns for the economic security of American citizens. China, in the last few years, has deeply penetrated into Latin America, becoming the 2 ^nd largest trading partner in the region. Its stakes in the Panama Canal and aspirations for exploring Greenland’s mineral wealth not only pose a serious threat to American economic interests but also undermine American regional predominance and stature. In order to reestablish American economic clout in the region and to ensure unrestrained access to the region’s resources, the reinstatement of the Monroe Doctrine is essential, as highlighted in the strategy.

This approach is multifaceted in character as it aims to diminish China’s economic engagement in the Western Hemisphere while increasing American trade with the Latin American countries. Consequently, this will boost the American economy through increased trade and access to natural resources, thus leading to greater employment opportunities for the American middle class. This debilitation of a foreign country's economic shackles to ascertain the American layman’s interests is synchronous with paleoconservative tradition being spearheaded by President Trump.

The intention of an increased engagement in the Indo-Pacific is also linked with countering China’s strength in that area of immense commercial significance. China’s possible blockage of Indo-Pacific Sea lines will be lethal to American trade routes and its economic interests. The Trump administration’s intent at militarizing a key strategic location like the Indo-Pacific and deterring China through strength stems from the very paleoconservative motivation to safeguard American commercial interests.

In order to prioritize the American taxpayer and limit American patronage of its allies, President Trump’s National Defense Strategy stresses the need for American allies to carry a bigger share of the burden. The document highlights the need for American allies in Europe, the Middle East and Indo-Pacific to amplify their military budgets, which will reduce the strain on American resources and, resultantly, the American middle class. The U.S. will remain the net security provider for its allies; however, not at the cost of its taxpayers.

A striking feature of the National Defense Strategy is its categorical inclination towards maintaining and, wherever needed, employing military force. This aspect, on the surface, appears divergent from classical paleoconservative tenets, which refrain from overseas military engagement. A more nuanced and in-depth reflection on the rationale for military engagement demonstrates a paleoconservative argument for such actions.

The paleoconservative tradition underscores American supremacy, exceptionalism and unilateralism. It only rejects the messianic proliferation of its higher ideals to others as vividly expressed in the 2026 document released by the Department of War. It, nevertheless, maintains an unequivocal regard for American defense and the protection of its citizens and their interests, be they economic, social, or cultural. The Trump administration’s rationale for the employment of military force draws from the same paleoconservative ideals that prioritize the safeguard of American citizens’ interests.

Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran was conducted to avenge the blood of American citizens and protect U.S. allies as well as its commercial interests. Operation Rough Rider was carried out against the Yemeni Houthis to deter their attacks on American shipping lanes. Likewise, Operation Absolute Resolve was conducted in Venezuela to counter narco-terrorism emanating from the Latin American state and devastating American society, while simultaneously ousting Chinese influence from the region. All these military engagements were limited in scope, carrying precise objectives, refraining from nation-building interventionism and undertaken primarily to protect American economic, societal or cultural interests.

It can be argued that the enforcement of the military option insinuates a sway towards neoconservatism. It can also suggest the emergence of a new branch of paleoconservatism. The former argument can be disregarded, given the paleoconservative rationale behind the use of force by the Trump administration. The latter argument, however, indicates that the paleoconservative tradition may be going through a phase of evolution. The rationale for the use of force rests on the paleoconservative argument, yet the use of force itself is a relatively new phenomenon in the broader rubric of paleoconservatism. At present, the labeling of this new tradition, or even calling it a new tradition, might be premature. Nevertheless, the use of force by the Trump administration, backed by the rationale of America First, demonstrates a vivid enforcement of paleoconservatism in the American policy spectrum.

Hamza Zaman holds an M.Phil. degree in International Relations from Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He works as an assistant research associate at the Islamabad Policy Research Institute, Pakistan.

16. Drones and Border Cartels

Summary:

Federal officials blamed a 10 day closure of El Paso airspace on cartel drone incursions, but George Headley reports aviation officials were more concerned about a new laser being tested to shoot down drones. The shutdown disrupted flights and surprised local leaders, then was lifted in under eight hours on Feb. 11. Cartel drone use is rising for surveillance, attacks, and smuggling. CBP said it detected 34,682 drone flights within 500 meters of the U.S. Mexico border in FY 2025, versus 7,678 on the Canada border. Examples include explosive drones in Tijuana and tether drops in Yuma County. DHS is expanding counter drone procurement, and the SAFER SKIES Act in the 2026 NDAA broadens authority and training for drone takedowns.

Cronkite Fellowship News| El Centro| The Latest

Drones and Border Cartels

by George Headley

02.13.2026 at 10:27pm

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/13/drones-and-border-cartels/

WASHINGTON – Federal officials blamed the abrupt order to close airspace around El Paso, Texas for 10 days on an incursion by Mexican cartel drones, though it quickly became clear that civil aviation authorities were more worried about a new laser being tested to shoot down such threats.

The closure disrupted flights and took state and local officials by surprise, along with airlines.

The restrictions were lifted in less than eight hours on Feb. 11. But that was long enough to draw national attention to the growing threat of drone activity at the Southwest border, where drug cartels have embraced the technology for surveillance, attacks on each other and deliveries of contraband.

“Cartels are nothing if not innovative,” said Henry Ziemer, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The border is only secure as its weakest point, and drones dramatically help these groups in identifying those weak points and plotting out new routes for smuggling.”

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection official told Cronkite News that 34,682 drone flights were detected within 500 meters of the U.S.-Mexico in fiscal year 2025 – a figure not previously disclosed. That compares to 7,678 along the border with Canada.

In October, three explosive-laden drones struck a government building in Tijuana, Mexico, that houses the state attorney general’s office, just a mile from the California border.

In Arizona’s Yuma County, Sheriff Leon Wilmot, in office since 2013, recalls an uptick around 2020 when string started to show up on roads, sometimes hundreds of feet worth in blue and red.

Those turned out to be tethers left behind when Mexican controllers dropped payloads into nets in residential backyards.

“It’s a significant public safety threat that needs to be addressed,” Wilmot said, “because the cartels have unlimited budget, and they’re going to do what they need to do to get their product across, and they do not value human life.”

Lately, the sheriff said, the county gets three or four incursions across the border per week that he knows of.

Some drones are big enough for “a large dope drop,” he said. Others are small and quiet, ideal for scouting for law enforcement and to provide overwatch for the coyotes who smuggle people across the border.

For a small department like his, stretched thin across a county the size of Connecticut, drone mitigation is nearly impossible. So they mostly leave that to federal law enforcement.

“We’ve always been behind the eight ball with the cartels, because they’ve got the money we don’t,” the sheriff said.

Drone use by cartels

Criminals operating at the Southwest border began using drones to spot law enforcement in 2019, according to the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, which cited an incident in El Paso in which a Border Patrol agent saw a small drone surveying the border for a group crossing into the U.S.

Drone use has increased steadily since then, according to a CSIS report by Ziemer. Within Mexico, cartels have used drones to attack law enforcement and rival gangs.

The cartels have used the Ukraine-Russia war for training.

Last July, Intelligence Online reported that cartels had sent “volunteers” to pitch in with Ukraine’s war effort. Their real goal, authorities said, was to gain advanced drone warfare expertise, in particular in the use of first-person view (FPV) drones, which are incredibly quick and maneuverable.

Ukrainian counterintelligence investigated at least one Mexican national who arrived in March 2024 using Salvadoran papers and the alias “Águila-7.” The man completed training in Lviv, where instructors became suspicious because he already had a high level of expertise.

Investigators determined that Águila-7 had been part of an elite Mexican special forces unit known as GAFE. Deserters from that unit founded the Zetas, an especially violent cartel.

Last July, Steven Willoughby, now the executive director of the Department of Homeland Security counter-drone program, testified in Congress that DHS tracked over 27,000 drones within 500 meters of the Southwest border in the last six months of 2024.

At a July 2024 hearing, Carl Landrum, vice president of civilian programs and strategy at Dedrone – a supplier of counter-drone systems – cited CBP data showing 37,000 drone sightings at the border in the previous nine months.

According to the International Narcotics Control Board’s 2024 annual report, drones are used to smuggle drugs from Morocco to Spain, at the India-Pakistan border and elsewhere.

Mexican authorities issued the first warnings about drug traffickers using unmanned aircraft in 2010. U.S. authorities detected 150 such aircraft crossing the border from 2012 to 2014.

In the second half of 2024, CBP seized more than 1,200 pounds of methamphetamine and other narcotics being transported by drone from Mexico, according to Willoughby’s testimony. In October 2023, CBP seized a drone carrying 3.6 pounds of fentanyl pills, enough to kill tens of thousands of people, he told lawmakers.

The International Narcotics Control Board reported that traffickers have shifted to custom-made drones capable of transporting up to 100 kilograms, or 220 pounds.

Like hobbyists in the U.S., many cartels started with off-the-shelf quadcopters, most of which are made by DJI, a leading Chinese manufacturer. By last May, at least one was using an FPV, according to a widely-cited social media post that purported to show the first such use by a cartel in Mexico.

That drone was identified as a DJI Avata 2, which sells for about $600 each. It was attributed to the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, or Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

The CJNG has its own “Drone Operators” unit. From 2021 to 2025, it was responsible for roughly one in five cartel drone attacks linked to a particular cartel – 42 incidents that resulted in 21 deaths, according to a report from the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center.

That was more than any other cartel, according to the report, which uses information from Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a monitoring group.

By September, the Sinaloa cartel was also using FPVs as part of an arms race with the CJNG, according to a report from Stephen Honan, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Counterterrorism Project.

“In the criminal world, there is no intellectual property,” said Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School focused on border security. “Once somebody does something effectively, everybody else will copy.”

While the cartels have used drones to attack each other, the violence has not spread to the U.S. side so far.

“We think they’re too afraid to ever attempt something like that against us, military or police forces,” Nieto-Gomez said. “We are depending on their self-restraint to keep our agents safe, and that’s, for me, an unacceptable situation.”

Why drones are so difficult to stop

The Border Patrol uses radars, radiofrequency sensors and infrared cameras to detect drones along the border.

Intercepting a drone spotted on the U.S. side, though, is tricky.

Options include shooting a net to capture it or entangle its propellers, though net guns have limited range; flooding the radio frequencies that connect the operator and drone; and jamming to disrupt a drone’s satellite link.

Local law enforcement agencies like the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office typically don’t have such tools.

DHS does, and it’s planning to get more.

On Jan. 12, the department announced a $115 million plan to speed procurement of counter-drone technology in time for the World Cup and the celebrations related to the nation’s 250th birthday.

“This will help us continue to secure the border and cripple the cartels, protect our infrastructure, and keep Americans safe as they attend festivities and events,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said in a press release.

On Dec. 30, DHS announced that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had awarded $250 million to the 11 states hosting FIFA World Cup events this year. It was FEMA’s biggest non-disaster grant ever.

The use of a military laser in El Paso shows the risk of trying to shoot down unmanned aircraft over urban areas.

The FAA ordered the 10-day ground stop at the city’s international airport out of concern for commercial flights.

“The challenge of securing the border from drones is the fact that there’s so much civilian presence there,” Ziemer said.

There’s also the risk that debris might fall on someone across the border.

“There’s real potential for a miscalculation that creates an international incident,” he said.

The SAFER SKIES Act, part of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act signed into law in December, eases restrictions on disabling or destroying drones. Under previous law, only federal law enforcement was allowed to do so. Going forward, trained state and local law enforcement will be authorized to protect public gatherings, critical infrastructure and prisons against drones.

The act directs the departments of homeland security, defense and transportation to provide counter-drone technology and training.

An Arizona law from early 2025 provides immunity against lawsuits when a peace officer shoots down a drone within 15 miles of the border, if they suspect it was being used in smuggling or other illicit activity.

Lauren Bresette, the senior manager of government relations for the Security Industry Association, called the new federal law a “huge step forward” in recognizing drones as a national security threat.

But, she said, the training will prioritize local law enforcement agencies working on major events like the World Cup over agencies along the border.

“There’s so many ways that you can DIY a drone and then load it with any packages you want,” she said. “There’s YouTube videos that teach you how to do that. So as this technology has advanced and become way more widely acceptable to anyone, it’s become more and more of a threat that we need to keep our eyes on for homeland security purposes.”

Tags: border security, cartels, Counter-Drone Technology, DHS, drones, El Paso, FAA, homeland security, Mexican Cartels, US-Mexico Border

About The Author

George Headley
George Headley is a student at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He is the Washington correspondent for Small Wars Journal, and he has worked with numerous media outlets, such as KJZZ, the Arizona State Press and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.

17. Researcher skeptical of ‘Havana syndrome’ tested secret weapon on himself

Summary:

A Norwegian government scientist, known as a skeptic of “Havana syndrome,” secretly built a device that emitted powerful pulsed microwave energy and tested it on himself in 2024 to show it was harmless. He instead developed neurological symptoms resembling Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs). Norway informed the CIA, prompting at least two 2024 visits by Pentagon and White House officials to examine and discuss the device. Sources say the experiment does not prove a foreign adversary caused AHIs, and the symptoms were not a “classic” case, but it strengthened arguments that pulsed-energy devices can affect biology and may be pursued by adversaries.

Comment: I guess this gives new meaning to human subject testing. I wonder if he received approval from the IRB? Did he sign a waiver?

Researcher skeptical of ‘Havana syndrome’ tested secret weapon on himself

In 2024, a Norwegian researcher skeptical that pulsed-energy weapons could do damage to human brains built a device and tested it on himself. It didn’t go well.

Updated

February 14, 2026 at 9:18 a.m. ESTtoday at 9:18 a.m. EST

Washington Post · Warren P. Strobel

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/02/14/havana-syndrome-cia-norway-experiment/

Working in strict secrecy, a government scientist in Norway built a machine capable of emitting powerful pulses of microwave energy and, in an effort to prove such devices are harmless to humans, in 2024 tested it on himself. He suffered neurological symptoms similar to those of “Havana syndrome,” the unexplained malady that has struck hundreds of U.S. spies and diplomats around the world.

The bizarre story, described by four people familiar with the events, is the latest wrinkle in the decade-long quest to find the causes of Havana syndrome, whose sufferers experience long-lasting effects including cognitive challenges, dizziness and nausea. The U.S. government calls the events Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs).

The secret test in Norway has not been previously reported. The Norwegian government told the CIA about the results, two of the people said, prompting at least two visits in 2024 to Norway by Pentagon and White House officials.

Those aware of the test say it does not prove AHIs are the work of a foreign adversary wielding a secret weapon similar to the prototype tested in Norway. One of them noted that the effects suffered by the Norwegian researcher, whose identity was not disclosed by the people familiar, were not the same as in a “classic” AHI case. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity.

But the events bolstered the case of those who argue that “pulsed-energy devices” — machines that deliver powerful beams of electromagnetic energy such as microwaves in short bursts — can affect human biology and are probably being developed by U.S. adversaries.

“I think there’s compelling evidence that we should be concerned about the ability to build a directed-energy weapon that can cause a variety of risk to humans,” said Paul Friedrichs, a retired military surgeon and Air Force general who oversaw biological threats on the White House National Security Council under President Joe Biden. Friedrichs declined to comment on the Norway experiment.

The Trump administration took office promising to pursue the AHI issue aggressively. But there has been little apparent movement. A review ordered by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is expected to focus mostly on the Biden administration’s handling of the issue, and its release has been delayed, people familiar with the issue said.

In a separate development that has become public in recent weeks, the U.S. government covertly purchased at the end of the Biden administration a different foreign-made device that produces pulsed radio waves and which some experts suspect could be linked to AHI incidents, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The device is being tested by the Defense Department. It has some Russian-origin components, but the U.S. government still has not determined conclusively who built it, said one of the people.

The U.S. acquisition of the device was first reported last month by independent journalist Sasha Ingber and CNN, which said it had been purchased for millions of dollars by Homeland Security Investigations, part of the Department of Homeland Security.

The device that the scientist constructed in Norway was not identical to the one that the U.S. government covertly acquired, one of the people familiar with the events said. The Norwegian device was built based on “classified information,” suggesting it was derived from blueprints or other materials stolen from a foreign government, this person said.

At about the same time the U.S. became aware of the two pulsed-energy machines, two spy agencies altered their previous judgment and concluded that some of the incidents involving AHIs could be the work of a foreign adversary, delivering that verdict in an updated U.S. intelligence assessment issued in January 2025 during the Biden administration’s final weeks.

“New reporting,” the assessment said, led the two agencies “to shift their assessments about whether a foreign actor has a capability that could cause biological effects consistent with some of the symptoms reported as possible AHIs.”

One was the National Security Agency, which intercepts and decodes foreign electronic communications, several people familiar with the issue said. The other, said two of those people, was the National Ground Intelligence Center, a U.S. Army intelligence agency in Charlottesville that produces intelligence on foreign adversaries’ scientific, technical and military capabilities.

The majority of U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA and four others, said they continued to judge it “very unlikely” that the attacks were the result of a foreign adversary or that a foreign actor had developed a novel weapon. In conversations intercepted by U.S. spy agencies, American adversaries were heard expressing their own surprise at the AHI incidents and denying involvement, U.S. officials have said.

The CIA declined to comment on the Norwegian test or how it impacted the agency’s analysis. Norway’s embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Some former officials and AHI victims have pointed to Russia as the prime suspect in the AHI incidents because of its decades of work in directed-energy devices. So far, no conclusive proof has publicly emerged, and Moscow has denied involvement.

Taken together, the two known directed-energy devices along with other research appear to have prompted a reconsideration by some of the causes of Havana syndrome, so named because of the mysterious 2016 outbreak of symptoms reported by personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Havana.

In subsequent years, U.S. personnel reported hundreds of cases globally, in China, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. A top aide to then-CIA Director William J. Burns reported symptoms while traveling in India in 2021.

At a conference in Philadelphia earlier this month, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Chris Schlagheck, at times his voice breaking, said he was hit five times in 2020 in his home in Northern Virginia, where a Russian family lived across the street. It was not until last year that a doctor told him his symptoms were the same as those reported from Havana a decade earlier.

Much about the Norway test remains obscured by its highly classified nature. People familiar with the events declined to identify the scientist or the Norwegian government agency he worked for.

The results were all the more shocking because the Norwegian researcher had earned a reputation as a leading opponent of the theory that directed-energy weapons can cause the type of symptoms associated with AHIs, those familiar with the events said. Trying to dramatically prove his point, with himself as a human guinea pig, he achieved the opposite.

“I don’t know what possessed him to go and do this,” one of the people said. “He was a bit of an eccentric.”

A delegation of Pentagon officials traveled to Norway in 2024 to examine the device. In December of that year, a group of intelligence and White House officials also went to Norway to discuss the issue, those familiar with the events said.

In January 2022, the CIA produced an interim assessment that concluded a foreign country was probably not behind Havana syndrome. It emerged weeks before a major panel of government and nongovernment experts produced a report commissioned by the director of national intelligence and deputy CIA director that came to a markedly different conclusion.

That panel concluded in February 2022 that pulsed electromagnetic energy, particularly in the radio-frequency range, ‘‘plausibly explains the core characteristics of reported AHIs,” although it acknowledged many unknowns. “Information gaps exist,” it reported.

The conclusion marked the first time a report issued publicly by the U.S. government acknowledged that the symptoms could be caused by man-made, external events.

The IC Experts Panel, as it was known, interviewed several people who had suffered accidental exposure to electromagnetic energy, said David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist who chaired the panel.

But the CIA interim assessment overshadowed the expert panel’s report. Then, in March 2023, the full intelligence community issued an assessment that unanimously concluded that it was unlikely that a foreign adversary was behind the incidents. “There is no credible evidence that a foreign adversary has a weapon or (intelligence) collection device that is causing AHIs,” the unclassified version of their report said, citing secret intelligence data and open-source information about foreign weapons and research programs.

U.S. intelligence agencies “essentially ignored” the experts panel’s work, Relman told the conference in Philadelphia. The agencies, particularly the CIA, “had developed a very firm set of conclusions, world view that caused them I think to become dug in,” he said.

By late 2024, senior White House officials in the Biden administration had come to question the absolutist position taken by U.S. intelligence agencies in their 2023 assessment.

There were some officials, including within the intelligence community, who insisted that “there was nothing here” — that every reported case could be explained by some environmental or medical factor, said one person familiar with the administration’s views.

The more “responsible” view, the person said, was to admit “we don’t know the answers” and that it was “plausible that pulsed electromagnetic energy could account for some subset of cases.”

After the November 2024 election, White House officials who were working on an AHI brief for the incoming Trump administration invited several victims to a meeting to offer their input. The officials also wanted to reassure the victims that they realized the intelligence community assessment called into question the very real health issues they experienced and what caused them.

At one point, an official turned to the victims who were gathered in the Situation Room and said, “We believe you.” The White House wasn’t yet certain it was a foreign actor but believed it was plausible that the symptoms had been caused by external factors, said the person familiar with the administration’s views.

Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer and AHI victim who attended the unclassified meeting, said, “It was clear to the victims, but also unsaid, that new information had come into the NSC that had caused them to make such a statement.”

Dan Lamothe and Greg Miller contributed to this report.

Washington Post · Warren P. Strobel

18. The Age of Defensive Democracy

Summary:

Bequelin argues the core contest is no longer democracy’s spread but its survival. Liberal democracy’s post 1945 “safe world” was a historical exception, built into the UN system, Bretton Woods, and rule sets that constrained overt predation while advantaging open economies. After decades of democratic decline, he says most people now live under autocracy, and the United States under POTUS has reduced the external scaffolding that helped democracies endure. Autocracies may not replace the order, but they can hollow out its liberal content, especially human rights and civil society access. The answer is “defensive democracy”: preserve institutions, build coalitions, and treat domestic resilience as strategy.

Comment: Autocracies do not need a new system; they can win by degrading liberal guardrails inside the old one. Democratic backsliding at home is now a national security vector, not a side issue."Accommodation” abroad risks importing illiberal habits into democratic governance.

Can democracies harden information space and anti corruption rules without creating their own instruments of coercion?

Which institutions matter most for survival: courts, media markets, parties, or alliances?

The Age of Defensive Democracy

Foreign Policy · Nicholas Bequelin

What is at stake today is not whether democracy can spread but whether it can survive at all.

February 13, 2026, 3:15 PM

By Nicholas Bequelin, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center and the former Asia-Pacific director of Amnesty International.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/02/13/defensive-democracy-authoritarianism-history-liberalism/

Is the world condemned to autocracy?

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s famous justification for asking Congress to declare war on Germany in 1917—“the world must be made safe for democracy”—has long been criticized as having pushed the United States down the slippery slope of internationalism and a century of ill-advised foreign interventions.

Is the world condemned to autocracy?

Often left out is how little democracy there was in the world at the time. Liberal democracies were the exception, and the few that existed aside from the United States, such as Britain and France, ruled colonial empires that were anything but democratic. Wilson’s concern was less a call to spread democracy than a recognition that liberal states couldn’t afford to remain passive in a world overwhelmingly populated by regimes that are threatening to democratic forms of rule.

That insight is newly urgent as the postwar order fractures and democracy recedes. After all, throughout history, the default political form has always been some variant of authoritarian rule—never democracy.

What is at stake today is no longer whether democracy can spread, but whether it can survive at all. Donald Trump’s return to the White House has brought this reality into sharp relief, as he abandons Washington’s role as the main sponsor of liberal democracy in the world. As democracies now confront both internal autocratizing pressures and the erosion of liberal constraints at the global level, they must pivot toward a diplomacy of defense and preservation—grounded in the recognition that regime competition between authoritarianism and democracy operates within states as much as between them.

A large group of men in plain uniforms sit at desks with books in front of them.

German prisoners at a special POW camp in England are taught about democratic politics on April 6, 1946. Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The window of time when liberal democracies flourished was a product of unique historical circumstance. While the post-Wilsonian interwar period saw the U.S. public turn back to isolationism, the outbreak of World War II and the need to mobilize allies around the world led Washington to conclude as early as 1941 that planning for a postwar order was imperative. The largely U.S.-designed international system established after the Allies’ victory was chiefly concerned with maintaining peace and security, but it also aimed to prevent the return of militaristic regimes in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan.

Embedding democracy and human rights in the United Nations Charter and its institutions was seen as an important safeguard. In parallel, the Bretton Woods financial institutions reflected a deeply held belief that liberal democracy and capitalism reinforced one another, thereby embedding those preferences into the structure of the postwar order.

This democratic encoding of the postwar institutions did not guarantee that states would always abide by liberal principles. Most European powers quickly plunged into anti-decolonization wars, while the United States adopted an ends-justify-the-means approach to the Cold War. But by and large, it provided a framework that proved exceptionally propitious to democratic regimes. Decolonization led to a surge in the number of democratic states from the 1950s to the 1970s, and a so-called third wave of democratization then spread through southern Europe, Latin America, and Asia—and ultimately reached large swathes of the former Soviet bloc.

By the mid-1990s, roughly 60 percent of the world’s states were electoral democracies. This is not to say that benevolence governed world politics—far from it. But the international system undeniably worked to the advantage of democratic regimes. It enforced gatekeeping mechanisms that limited the influence of non-democracies in key institutions and promoted a set of values—human rights, the rule of law, political and economic freedoms—that could be instrumentalized to undercut rival states. On every continent, democracies proved economically more successful than their authoritarian counterparts. In sum, the postwar system succeeded in one critical dimension: It made the world safe for democracies.

This is no longer the case.

Donald Trump shakes hands with Victor Orban as he whispers something in the man's ear next to an American flag.

U.S. President Donald Trump greets Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as he arrives at the White House on Nov. 7, 2025. Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

Following 25 years of continuous democratic decline, nearly three out of four people now live under autocratic rule, the highest proportion since 1978. The number of democratic countries has fallen to its lowest point since 1996, and their share of the global economy is the smallest it’s been in more than 50 years.

What was a few years ago described as democratic backsliding has now evolved into a seemingly unstoppable autocratic wave. Even well-established democracies face powerful internal contestation from illiberal movements that seek to weaken checks and balances and dispense with the constraints of international institutions.

By far the most consequential setback has been the United States’ abandonment of its long-standing policy of favoring democratic allies over autocratic ones. Regardless of whether or not the radical turn of U.S. foreign policy under Trump turns out to strengthen U.S. power, there is little doubt that it is making the world far more hospitable for autocracy. Democracy promotion, support for human rights, safeguards against disinformation, and anti-corruption measures are significantly weakened. Multilateral institutions, the authority of international law, and even military rules of engagement are devalued. Territorial acquisition by force—whose prohibition was the cornerstone of the postwar order—is no longer taboo.

Trump has also conferred new respectability on some of the world’s most notorious autocrats, expressing admiration for leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—even as they pursue policies hostile to the United States and its democratic allies. Trump’s presidency appears to be the first in U.S. history to exhibit overt indifference to regime type when dealing with a country or its leader.

This shift has been best exemplified by Trump’s recent decision to leave untouched the government of Venezuela following the capture of its president, Nicolás Maduro, despite the democratic opposition’s convincing victory in the 2024 presidential elections. The same logic was reflected in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, published at the end of 2025, which puzzlingly declined to identify Russia or China as actors pursuing policies adversarial to U.S. interests. Instead, the document singled out European countries, castigating their “unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition” as an obstacle to ending the war in Ukraine.

These new geopolitical realities present autocratic states with an opportunity to refashion the international order away from the preferences of its architects and self-interested stewards of the last 80 years. As Western hegemony wanes, so-called endism has become fashionable among policymakers and commentators alike as they decry (or celebrate) “the end of the rules-based order,” “the end of multilateralism,” “the breakdown of international law,” “the end of the age of NGOs,” or “the end of human rights.” Predictions for radical changes include “a return to great-power diplomacy,” “the law of the jungle,” a “Chinese world order,” or even a tripartite globe.

The reality is likely to be less dramatic, though no less challenging for democracies. International orders tend to unfold through gradual erosion rather than abrupt rupture, for political institutions are inherently sticky. The U.N.—the institutional core of the postwar order—is likely to remain central because it validates the most precious attribute of statehood: internationally recognized sovereignty. While the organization’s authority and relevance are likely to decline further as U.S. support recedes, none of the permanent members of the Security Council has an interest in seeing it displaced from its position at the apex of the international order.

Likewise, international law will endure as the shared language through which states justify their actions, condemn those of their rivals, and craft agreements with each other, regardless of compliance with its norms. The grammar of diplomatic practice among sovereign states—who meets who, when, and where—is even more deeply entrenched and will persist well beyond any particular world order. The most likely scenario is that core postwar institutions and their practices are here to stay, even as they risk increasing debilitation and contestation.

Nor are autocracies poised to construct a durable rival world order. For one, they share very little in common aside from what is essentially a negative agenda: rolling back the rules, mechanisms, and institutional dispositions that structurally favor liberal democracies. And, crucially, the capacity of authoritarian powers to erect or sustain international institutions is limited by structural features.

First, they struggle to form lasting alliances. Democracies tend to coalesce easily thanks to the openness of their political and economic systems and the relative transparency of their institutions. But autocracies are idiosyncratic and have few common points beyond their repressive character. Their political systems rest on unique foundations that are specific to their national context: Iran, China, Venezuela, and Eritrea have little in common—intimate knowledge of one offers no meaningful insight into the functioning of the others.

People stand inside inside booths that are partly covered by curtains in red, white, and blue stripes. Because of the curtains, only the voters' lower legs and feet are visible.
People stand inside inside booths that are partly covered by curtains in red, white, and blue stripes. Because of the curtains, only the voters' lower legs and feet are visible.

The Problem With Representative Democracy

What if elections aren’t the be-all and end-all?
An illustration shows a silhouetted figure pulling on the spiraling edge of a white column, representing unraveling institutional norms.
An illustration shows a silhouetted figure pulling on the spiraling edge of a white column, representing unraveling institutional norms.

America’s Drift Toward Constitutional Authoritarianism

Trump has shown how democracy can be neutralized without being destroyed.

Second, autocracies are inherently distrustful of anything that could tie their hands domestically. Secrecy is the hallmark of authoritarian rule, and unpredictability is central to its functioning. These conditions are hardly conducive to dependable cooperation between states. Indeed, the risk of conflict among nominally aligned autocracies is never remote. Georgia’s membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States did not dissuade Russia from invading in 2008; shared membership in the Gulf Cooperation Council did not prevent a Saudi-led blockade of Qatar in 2017; and decades of membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations did little to prevent deadly border clashes between Cambodia and Thailand last year.

Democracies, by contrast, almost never go to war with one another. As a result, democratic partners can afford to invest more in each other, which makes them more interdependent over time.

Third, autocracies are hampered in providing the glue for building and maintaining global or even regional orders. They are structurally reluctant to submit to the constraints of international agreements or international law, which ultimately rely on a willingness to subject state power to institutions such as international courts and arbitration and dispute-settlement bodies. Autocratic states also struggle to develop effective global organizations, since no member can allow another to assume real leadership, fearing that such authority could come at their own expense.

Finally, succession issues make autocratic regimes unpredictable. Transitions inevitably trigger questions about loyalty and direction, leading to score-settling, purges, or abrupt policy reversals. These conditions are not conducive to building rules-based systems among sovereign states.

This does not mean that autocracies cannot cooperate, coordinate, or come to one another’s aid when their interests align. Yet much of what is cited as proof of their ambition to build new world orders is little more than a growing ability to frustrate Western-led global governance—by evading economic sanctions, shielding wayward regimes, trading outside established systems, and using multilateral forums to denounce the inequities and failures of Western hegemony.

A photo taken from below shows a bright ceiling with white lights and a red star and a man in uniform playing a brass instrument.

Members of the People’s Liberation Army band perform following a speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the National People’s Congress in Beijing on March 20, 2018. In his first public address since the abolishment of term limits, Xi spoke confidently of China’s determination to take its place as a world leader and bring Taiwan under its control. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

The case of China is instructive. It undeniably has the attributes of a superpower: It is the world’s largest military power, the second-largest economy, a science and technology leader, and a manufacturing juggernaut. Beijing’s capacity to challenge Western democracies and coerce smaller neighbors is growing, and its diplomacy has become markedly more assertive. It has cast itself as a champion of the global south at the U.N., and it can no longer be sidestepped in multilateral negotiations on climate, debt relief, or emerging industrial standards in space and artificial intelligence. And although China’s partnership with Russia may have begun as a marriage of convenience, it has hardened into a consequential alignment.

China has established a range of international institutions that parallel existing ones, such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, modeled after the World Bank, and the newly created International Mediation Court, which is positioned as an alternative forum to the International Court of Justice. Above all, China is the driving force behind two groupings challenging Western hegemony: the BRICS+ bloc and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, whose membership stretches from China to Iran.

Still, one would be hard pressed to find instances in which China does not couch its actions within the confines of the existing world order, affirming the central role of the U.N., emphasizing respect for international law, and appealing to principles that on paper differ little from those enshrined in the postwar order. Take China’s most recent position on global governance reforms: “The purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter are universally recognized basic norms of international relations. They must be upheld unwaveringly,” it reads. “Staying committed to international rule of law [is] the fundamental safeguard for global governance.” Beijing also insists that it does not seek to displace the United States.

Should China’s reassurances be taken at face value? Probably not. But neither should one accept the frequent claim that Beijing’s revisionist intentions are plainly visible in its official pronouncements, if only one knows how to decode them. Such decoding rests on analytical cherry-picking: Statements that can be read as challenging the West are treated as revealing China’s true intentions, while language that is cooperative, forward-looking, or norm-affirming is dismissed as deceptive propaganda. A simpler explanation is that China does not seek to overturn the architecture of the international order but is instead intent on challenging its liberal elements and its hierarchy. In this, it is likely to find a growing number of supporters.

This is where the danger to democracies lies. The threat is not the wholesale replacement of the system but the evisceration of its liberal components by increasingly assertive autocracies. These components, often overlooked as insignificant factors in international relations, are essential to democratic survival in an undemocratic world.

Among the three pillars of the U.N.—peace and security, development, and human rights—the last has become a primary target. Though it accounts for barely 5 percent of the U.N.’s budget, the human rights pillar represents a profound challenge to autocratic rule and repudiates absolute sovereignty. Violations of human rights are illegitimate even when committed by a legitimate state authority, making them effectively a supranational matter.

Under Chinese and Russian leadership, efforts to weaken the U.N. human rights machinery are beginning to bear fruit. In the U.N.’s Fifth Committee, which oversees the organization’s budget, a coalition of autocracies and compliant allies has worked to cut the budgets of both the Human Rights Council and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Meanwhile, China and Russia routinely vote against or obstruct resolutions addressing acute humanitarian and human rights crises, from Sudan to Myanmar, and block Security Council items with rights-related components.

Authoritarian regimes also seek to limit the participation of civil society organizations in intergovernmental processes—both because such groups represent autonomous political forces and because they serve as independent channels of information. The same logic drives their attempts to delay or derail international agreements on global governance issues ranging from climate change to arms control. To preserve maximum political agency, autocracies resist broad binding accords that might compel changes or impose costs for non-adherence.

This insistence on sovereignty is paradoxical given that authoritarian regimes are more likely than not to be willing to violate those principles in pursuit of their interests. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is a telling example of how sovereignty is invoked in principle but breached in practice. When collective action might protect sovereignty—such as defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity—or preserve peace and security by preventing conflicts from festering, these same states oppose intervention, citing respect for domestic jurisdiction.

The result is a system in which autocracies claim to defend sovereignty while hollowing out its meaning. Reflecting its own authoritarian aspirations, the Trump administration has brushed aside traditional deference to territorial sovereignty in discussing the acquisition of territories including Canada, Gaza, Greenland, and Panama—not to mention the claim to be running Venezuela.

Two men in camouflage uniforms and helmets look through binoculars while seated on metal risers.

South Korean and U.S. soldiers take part in a joint military exercise at the Rodriguez Live Fire Complex in Pocheon, South Korea, on Aug. 31, 2022. South Korean Defense Ministry/Getty Images

Democracies face an unsavory dilemma. They can choose to defend multilateral institutions that, while increasingly obsolete and often ineffectual, still serve democratic interests better than autocratic ones. Or they can opt to relinquish the liberal elements of the system to accommodate non-democratic powers—preserving the architecture, if not the spirit, of the postwar order. Put differently: Could the price of preserving the international liberal order be to make it less liberal?

The pragmatic appeal of accommodation is undeniable. But it risks unintended consequences back home for democratic governments. The tension between democracy and autocracy is not merely an external feature of international competition. No democratic country is entirely free of autocratizing pressures, and no autocratic regime is without latent or overt demands for democratization. Domestic and international politics are therefore inseparable: They continuously shape one another, influencing not only how states act, but also what they seek to achieve.

Autocracies must constantly mobilize against the risk of democratization—hence their relentless suppression of political opposition and the press, manipulation of the judiciary, and control over civil society. Democracies must guard against the gradual drift toward autocratization, often advancing through corruption and the capture of public institutions by private interests. These domestic dynamics inevitably extend to the international arena, where opposing states are bound together in mutual dependence yet locked in systemic rivalry. Democracies seek to insulate their political systems through investing in international institutions, mechanisms of international accountability, and promoting democracy and human rights. Though such efforts may appear modest, they are perceived by autocracies as profoundly subversive.

Indeed, no matter how close a partnership a democracy may forge with an authoritarian power, its security would ultimately be better served if that partner became a democracy—as Latin America’s transitions in the 1980s and Eastern Europe’s in the 1990s suggest. Autocratic regimes are aware of this ever-present peril and deploy disinformation, corruption, coercion, and destabilization to weaken democratic states and lower the risk of so-called color revolutions and democratic contagion.

Regime competition is not a binary contest; it is a tension that runs through every type of political system, orienting it in one direction or the other depending on which of the two forces predominates at that time. U.S. President Joe Biden was correct to warn in 2021 that the world is standing at an “inflection point” in the struggle between democracy and autocracy. Yet his administration’s failure to recognize that this struggle is as domestic as it is global meant that his democracy agenda quickly ran aground: It proved impossible to draw clear lines between those belonging to the democratic camp and everyone else, while inescapable geopolitical trade-offs between interests and principles—from cooperation with Saudi Arabia and Egypt to support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza—exposed the policy to charges of hypocrisy and double standards.

To navigate an age of democratic decline, liberal democracies must urgently shift to a diplomacy of preservation—anchored in a defensive posture that recognizes the continuum between the international and domestic dimensions of the authoritarian threat. Hard power remains indispensable, but it can be matched by autocracies. Democratic principles—and the protection they afford individuals and economic agents against state predation—cannot, and therein lies their enduring strategic advantage.

Democracies should reinforce the rules-based system through like-minded coalitions: issue-based partnerships on technology standards, supply-chain resilience, anti-corruption enforcement, and global public goods. Strategic coordination with non-democratic but rule-abiding states should not be taboo when it serves to uphold openness and restraint in the use of power. Democracies should also reinvest in the connective tissue of the liberal order—development banks, multilateral funds, and trade regimes—and ensure that participation rewards transparency, accountability, and adherence to agreed norms. In practice, this means coupling value-based alliances with pragmatic outreach, recognizing that preserving a liberal system requires working with authoritarian powers—but with a view to operating under liberal rules.

Above all, democracies must resist the temptation to trade away the liberal entry barriers of international organizations and decision-making centers to non-democratic regimes in the hope that this will yield smoother coexistence. They should instead be confident that no “axis of autocracies” can assemble coherent, attractive alternatives to existing international institutions. And while the era when democracies believed they could out-moralize autocracies has passed, they must nonetheless elevate human rights, democracy, and the rule of law as their most enduring strategic assets. The world runs better on democratic software, and this is true for all participants.

Democratic societies must also shed their illusions about the extent to which autocracies are able to exploit interdependence asymmetrically through corruption, disinformation, and political disruption. Governments must abandon naive informational laissez-faire, establish funds for public media, and prevent the over-concentration of media ownership through anti-trust mechanisms. As long as such measures are supervised through democratic oversight, they are far less dangerous than leaving the door wide open to autocratic manipulation. They should also be understood as constitutive elements of a realist foreign policy, not as marginal or purely domestic concerns as they are now.

A bright light from a camera flash against a window is pictured above Donald Trump, who is seated at his desk in the Oval Office as boom microphones appear in the top-right corner.

Trump speaks with reporters in the White House Oval Office on Feb. 4, 2025, after signing an executive order withdrawing the United States from a number of United Nations bodies, including the Human Rights Council.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

In his confirmation hearing last year, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio flatly declared that the “postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us.” This was more than a complaint that the international system no longer served U.S. interests; it was an implicit admission that the liberal international order does constrain non-democratic behavior—and was therefore viewed as an obstacle to the Trump administration’s goal of autocratizing the U.S. political system. (Trump aide Stephen Miller’s recent assertion, following the attack on Venezuela, that the United States has the right to override “international niceties” with its use of force should be understood in the same light.)

The Trump administration’s conduct has in many ways offered a reverse illustration of the defensive strategy liberal democracies should adopt to preserve themselves. In the last year, the United States has alienated traditional democratic allies, undermined collective-security norms, and upended global trade and multilateral cooperation. It has withdrawn from the U.N. Human Rights Council, rolled back domestic anti-corruption and transparency safeguards, disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, dismantled the State Department’s framework for countering foreign information manipulation, and pressured allies against regulating U.S. social media companies. The fact that democratic regulation of Big Tech has itself become an object of autocratizing pressure underscores that these measures lie at the very core of democratic self-defense.

If the 20th century was about making the world safe for democracy, the 21st is about making today’s democracies safe in the world. For all their flaws, postwar institutions remain the scaffolding on which democratic resilience still depends. Their inadequacy lies less in their design than in the political will of their members, and no credible alternative is likely to emerge anytime soon.

It is even more likely that the United States—after its current experiment in retrenchment from liberal norms—will once again recognize that its own interests are best served within the community of democracies, if only to balance its sole true geopolitical rival, China. In the meantime, democracies must resist surrendering their comparative advantage by colluding in the dilution of the very standards that allow democracy to endure in an undemocratic world. “Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles,” Wilson famously argued. Abandoning those principles would be the surest way to abandon democracy itself.

This post appeared in the FP Weekend newsletter, a weekly showcase of book reviews, deep dives, and features. Sign up here.

This post appeared in FP's The Reading List newsletter. Sign up here.

19. Harnessing the People: Mapping Overseas United Front Work in Democratic States

Summary:

Cheryl Yu argues the CCP’s overseas united front system has built a mobilizable network of more than 2,000 organizations across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. The network grows through long co-optation of diaspora and civic groups, then uses them to shape local politics and condition elites to anticipate Beijing’s sensitivities. The report also asserts some united front linked entities have supported illicit tech transfer, espionage, talent recruitment, voter mobilization, and transnational repression against dissidents and minorities. It concludes transparency and education can reduce entanglement because much activity is visible in open societies.

Comment: Download the 27 page report at this link: https://jamestown.org/wp-content/uploads/Jamestown_UF_Report.pdf

If much is openly observable, then persistent surprise reflects weak information sharing and weak due diligence more than adversary brilliance. I am going to beat the drum: we need congitive civil defense.

Harnessing the People: Mapping Overseas United Front Work in Democratic States - Jamestown

jamestown.org · Cheryl Yu

02.11.2026

Cheryl Yu

https://jamestown.org/harnessing-the-people-mapping-overseas-united-front-work-in-democratic-states/

Harnessing the People: Mapping Overseas United Front Work in Democratic States

Executive Summary:

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has created a global network of individuals and organizations as part of its united front system. In four democratic states—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany—this network includes more than 2,000 organizations. These constitute latent capacity that the Party can mobilize to advance the Party’s agenda.
Beijing’s network is the product of protracted co-optation of existing civil society organizations overseas and the global expansion of domestic united front elements. The Party has spent decades assiduously cultivating overseas Chinese community organizations, co-opting local leaders and institutions to embed its preferences within civil society. Even groups that previously spent decades supporting the Republic of China (Taiwan) now fly the flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The Party leverages this global network to support its primary goal of national rejuvenation. According to the Party’s definition, rejuvenation entails unification with Taiwan and making the PRC the global leader in terms of national power. United front work supports this goal by contributing to the PRC’s diplomatic, economic, scientific, and even military development, as well as the Party’s ability to respond to crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
This includes engaging in malign and illegal activities in foreign countries. Overseas groups with ties to the united front have directly supported illicit technology transfer, espionage, talent recruitment, and voter mobilization on Beijing’s behalf. These groups also engage in transnational repression, monitoring, harassing, and/or intimidating dissidents, ethnic minorities, and other critics of the Party.
In democratic countries, these groups influence political decision-making by conditioning stakeholders to consider Beijing’s interests and sensitivities. United front organizations have been instrumental in shaping the approaches of local governments and political actors, particularly where oversight is weak. They have influenced legislation and public statements, and managed official engagements with the PRC.
Where the CCP encounters opposition, the united front functions as a political weapon to isolate, neutralize, or counter Beijing’s critics. The united front system leverages its network of organizations to remove impediments to the achievement of core CCP ambitions through influence, subversion, co-optation, and coercion. These goals include building support for and neutralizing resistance to the annexation of Taiwan.
Constraining the CCP’s ability to interfere in democracies requires active transparency. Much of the CCP’s united front activity is at least partially visible in democratic societies. Better education and information sharing could help officials and the general public recognize risks and avoid entanglement. United front groups are rarely listed in existing foreign agent registration systems, limiting the ability of governments to monitor or investigate them.

United Front-Linked Organizations Identified by Country

Introduction

Today, over 2,000 groups are helping the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) achieve its goals across the United States, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

These are part of a global network that likely numbers in the tens of thousands, according to some CCP sources. Their efforts help shape a global environment that is more hospitable to CCP interests. The United Front Work Department (中共中央统一战线工作部), a functional department under the Party’s Central Committee, directs these efforts. Internationally, it coordinates and carries out work in power centers outside the Party’s direct purview, including by mobilizing groups to further the Party’s ambitions. Foremost among these ambitions is “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (中华民族伟大复兴).According to the Party, achieving national rejuvenation includes replacing the United States as the dominant global power. In the words of a 2021 People’s Daily editorial, “the key to national rejuvenation lies in winning the initiative in the competition for comprehensive national power” (在综合国力的竞争中赢得先机是民族复兴的关键).

This sentiment has been echoed by other academics and political advisors in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). National rejuvenation also entails securing the CCP’s territorial claims by annexing Taiwan.Former Party general secretary Mao Zedong described united front work as “unifying our real friends to attack our real enemies” (团结我们的真正的朋友，以攻击我们的真正的敌人).

Deng Xiaoping later expanded the definition, framing united front work as “unifying those who can be unified, neutralizing those who can be neutralized, and dividing those in the enemy camp who can be divided” (团结一切可能团结的人，中立一切可能中立的人，分化敌人营垒中一切可能分化的人).In democratic countries, the Party has assiduously cultivated a network of organizations that act in ways that align with the fundamental principles of united front work. These organizations—mainly overseas Chinese community organizations—have ties to the united front system, a network of party and state agencies responsible for influencing groups outside the Party.

While they have vertical connections to the united front system, they do not necessarily have horizontal connections to each other. In important ways, these groups represent the voice of the Party.The Party’s process for co-opting overseas organizations into the overseas united front system typically starts with identification by the United Front Work Department. Once an organization is identified as a target, officials within the united front system initiate contact, set up meetings, and invite the organization’s leadership to visit the PRC. Over several months or years, the Party builds stronger bonds with and increases its support for the organization. Gradually, Party narratives start to appear in the organization’s programming and materials, even if the organization’s stated objectives do not differ widely from its original aims. Party handlers then start to make requests, which escalate depending on the organization’s level of acquiescence. These could include asking the organization’s members to protest a visit by a Taiwanese president, or to harass those speaking out against CCP human rights abuses. These activities are framed externally as a local nonprofit organization exercising its rights to the freedoms of expression and assembly. The Party’s role is obfuscated.

The Party’s overseas mobilizational capacities were clear in August 2023, when hundreds of organizations voiced “strong opposition” as then-Taiwan vice president Lai Ching-te (賴清德) transited through the United States.

The protests that took place were not spontaneous. They were a result of a years-long process of building connections and influence. The Party tapped all of the groups that participated. These included “old friends of the Chinese people” (中国人民的老朋友), various elites, and the wider overseas Chinese community. The incident was not an isolated one, but rather a prominent and successful example of the Party’s ongoing overseas united front work in the United States.This report proceeds in six sections. The first section outlines the history of the Party’s overseas united front work and traces its evolution, showing how it has expanded in scope and ambition over time. The following section explains the report’s research methodology. It discusses the open-source data collection process, the criteria used to identify united front organizations, and why the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany were selected as the focus for this report. The third section presents an overview of the more than 2,000 organizations assessed to have connections to the Party’s united front system across these four democratic states. It categorizes them by type and function and examines how the Party views them and why they are useful. This is followed by an analysis section, which outlines four common characteristics of united front organizations, drawing on examples from the United States and Germany to illustrate key patterns. A series of case studies then illustrates how the Party builds and exploits its network of united front organizations. These include examples of the Party penetrating civil society organizations, influencing local governance, engaging in economic espionage, enforcing transnational repression, engineering emergency mobilizations, and collaborating with criminal groups. The report concludes by highlighting the importance of building transparency to better understand and counter malign influence in democratic states.

Continued at this link: https://jamestown.org/harnessing-the-people-mapping-overseas-united-front-work-in-democratic-states/

20. Rubio's speech to European allies takes a softer tone but sticks to Trump's firm stance

Summary:

At Munich, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to steady European allies while keeping POTUS’s demands intact. He framed the United States as permanently tied to Europe, citing shared sacrifice from Kapyong to Kandahar, yet pressed for “seriousness and reciprocity.” Rubio criticized what he called a climate “cult” and mass migration, and rejected post Cold War “end of history” assumptions about borderless globalism. European leaders welcomed the softer tone but warned against complacency, urging greater European defense capacity and “digital sovereignty.” Greenland stayed in the background, with talks continuing, and Denmark signaling the issue is not resolved.

Comment: Damage control?

Rubio's speech to European allies takes a softer tone but sticks to Trump's firm stance

AP · MATTHEW LEE

By MATTHEW LEE, EMMA BURROWS and GEIR MOULSON

Updated 10:12 AM EST, February 14, 2026

https://apnews.com/article/munich-security-conference-rubio-4a26cfa8ebb54643be98405e896433d1

MUNICH (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a reassuring message to America’s allies on Saturday, striking a less aggressive but still firm tone about the administration’s intent to reshape the trans-Atlantic alliance and push its priorities after more than a year of President Donald Trump’s often-hostile rhetoric toward traditional allies.

Reminding his audience at the annual Munich Security Conference about America’s centuries-long roots in Europe, Rubio said the United States would remain forever tied to the continent even as it pushes for changes in the relationship and the institutions that have been the bulwark of the post-World War II world order.

Rubio addressed the conference a year after Vice President JD Vance stunned the same audience with a harsh critique of European values. A series of Trump administration statements and moves targeting allies followed, including Trump’s short-lived threat last month to impose new tariffs on several European countries in a bid to secure U.S. control of Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.

On Friday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had opened this year’s gathering by calling for the U.S. and Europe to “repair and revive trans-Atlantic trust together,” saying that even the U.S. isn’t powerful enough to go it alone in an world whose old order no longer exists. But he and other European officials made clear that they will stand by their values, including their approach to free speech, climate change and free trade.

‘A child of Europe’

While offering a calmer and more reassuring tone, Rubio made clear that the Trump administration is sticking to its guns on policy. He denounced “a climate cult” and “an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies.”

Rubio argued that the “euphoria” of the Western victory in the Cold War led to a “dangerous delusion that we had entered ‘the end of history,’ that every nation would now be a liberal democracy, that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood ... and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world.”

“We made these mistakes together and now together we owe it to our people to face those facts and to move forward to rebuild,” Rubio said.

“This is why we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel,” he said. “This is why President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe.”

Rubio said that an end of the trans-Atlantic era “is neither our goal nor our wish,” adding that “our home may be in the Western hemisphere, but we will always be a child of Europe.”

He acknowledged that “we have bled and died side-by-side on battlefields from Kapyong to Kandahar,” a contrast with disparaging remarks by Trump about NATO allies’ troops in Afghanistan that drew an outcry. “And I’m here today to make it clear that America is charting the path for a new century of prosperity. and that once again, we want to do it together with you, our cherished allies and our oldest friends.”

U.S. officials accompanying Rubio said his message was much the same as Vance’s last year but was intended to have a softer landing on the audience, which they acknowledged had recoiled at much of Trump’s rhetoric over the past year.

Europeans reassured but not complacent

The president of the European Union’s executive commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said Rubio’s speech was “very reassuring” but noted that “in the administration, some have a harsher tone on these topics.”

In her speech to the conference, she stressed that “Europe must become more independent,” including on defense. She insisted on Europe’s “digital sovereignty” — its approach to hate speech on social media.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that “we shouldn’t get in the warm bath of complacency. He said the U.K. must reforge closer ties with Europe to help the continent “stand on our own two feet” in its own defense, and said there needs to be investment that “moves us from overdependence to interdependence.”

Hanno Pevkur, the defense minister of EU and NATO member Estonia, said it was “quite a bold statement to say that America is ‘a child of Europe’.”

“It was a good speech, needed here today, but that doesn’t mean that we can rest on pillows now,” he told The Associated Press. “So still a lot of work has to be done.”

Rubio didn’t mention Greenland. After last month’s escalation over Trump’s designs on the Arctic island, the U.S., Denmark and Greenland started technical talks on an Arctic security deal.

The secretary of state met briefly in Munich on Friday with the Danish and Greenlandic leaders, a meeting Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen described as constructive.

But Frederiksen suggested Saturday that, although the dispute has cooled, she remains wary. Asked whether the crisis has passed, she replied: “No, unfortunately not. I think the desire from the U.S. president is exactly the same. He is very serious about this theme.”

Asked whether she can put a price on Greenland, she said “of course not,” adding that “we have to respect sovereign states ... and we have to respect people’s right for self-determination. And the Greenlandic people have been very clear, they don’t want to become Americans.”

___

Moulson reported from Berlin. Associated Press writer Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.

AP · MATTHEW LEE

21. China remains undeterred in the grey zone

Summary:

Sam Mullins argues China’s gray zone campaign intensified in 2025 across the Asia-Indo-Pacific, using military intimidation, economic pressure, cyber and information operations, and calibrated shows of force. Taiwan is the focal point, highlighted by a late-2025 blockade-style exercise and record levels of air and cyber pressure, but similar coercion shows up around the Senkakus, the South China Sea, the Yellow Sea, and even the Tasman Sea. He concludes deterrence is failing because responses stay fragmented and reactive, and he calls for connected networks, a shared operating picture, and a more proactive, cross-domain counter-hybrid strategy.

Excerpts:

Enhanced military cooperation is important, but it is also unlikely to deter China’s grey zone aggression by itself. It is critical that these new forms of cooperation employ the full spectrum of national power in a coordinated fashion. Military cooperation is likely to be more effective when combined with diplomatic, economic and informational measures.

More fundamentally, this emerging network of multilayered deterrence must be grounded in a shared, common operating picture and an accompanying counter grey zone strategy. This would be greatly aided by the establishment of a multi-national Indo-Pacific Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, not unlike the NATO–EU institution that exists in Europe.

Comment: Beijing is testing alliance latency, betting that slow, stove-piped reactions create permissive space for creeping escalation. A “center of excellence” concept signals the region is converging on institutionalized hybrid defense, not ad hoc crisis management.

What concrete costs can allies impose in the gray zone without inviting rapid vertical escalation? Who owns the shared operating picture when intelligence, law enforcement, and militaries classify their information by default?

China remains undeterred in the grey zone

eastasiaforum.org · Sam Mullins ·

Published: 14 February 2026

Reading Time: 6 mins

Sam Mullins

Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies

https://eastasiaforum.org/2026/02/14/china-remains-undeterred-in-the-grey-zone/

In Brief

In 2025, China escalated its grey zone coercion across the Indo-Pacific, with Taiwan at the centre but not the limit of Beijing’s ambitions. Through military intimidation, economic pressure, cyber and information operations and calibrated shows of force from the Senkaku Islands to the Tasman Sea, China has steadily pushed Indo-Pacific boundaries. This incremental strategy is reshaping the regional order and exposing the faults of fragmented, reactive deterrenThe final days of 2025 saw Taiwan surrounded by Chinese warships, aircraft and coast guard vessels in what the Chinese Ministry of Defence described as a serious warning to ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces and foreign interference. ‘Justice Mission 2025’, the sixth major military exercise to simulate a blockade of Taiwan since 2022, came closer to the island’s shores than previous drills, reflecting China’s strategy of creeping escalation.

In 2025, Chinese incursions into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone reached their largest number yet — more than 3700 — coupled with record-high cyberattacks. The year was further marked by continued allegations of espionage and cutting of undersea cables, reports of rising disinformation and the first instance of Chinese law enforcement opening an investigation into a sitting Taiwanese lawmaker for ‘criminal activities aimed at splitting the nation’.

Reunification with Taiwan is deemed an essential component of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s vision of ‘national rejuvenation’, so it is targeted more frequently and with greater intensity than anywhere else in the Indo-Pacific. Yet it is far from the only victim of Chinese grey zone aggression.

The Chinese coast guard set a new record of 335 consecutive days spent in the waters around the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands in 2025, shattering the previous year’s record of 215. Japan was further subject to military intimidation, punitive economic measures and information warfare after Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi remarked that an invasion of Taiwan would threaten Japan’s survival and might force it to act in self-defence.

In the South China Sea, China continued to gradually turn up the level of aggression against the Philippines, resulting in a dramatic collision between two Chinese vessels in August. Similarly, Chinese aircraft continued to challenge Australian and Philippine air patrols using unsafe manoeuvres and other dangerous tactics. There were also multiple standoffs between the Chinese coast guard and South Korean vessels in the Yellow Sea, where China has been unilaterally deploying maritime infrastructure and declaring ‘no-sail zones’.

Further afield, the People’s Liberation Army Navy conducted shock, live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea, in an unprecedented display of power projection that rattled Australia and New Zealand. Elsewhere, China continued the quiet build-up of dual-use infrastructure along its border with India, and in strategic locations in the South Pacific.

This is not simply ‘business as usual’ in the Indo-Pacific. China has been increasingly assertive for many years now. But as each year goes by, and boundaries are pushed a little further, the region is being incrementally reshaped in the process. This is occurring despite repeated condemnations and efforts to expose and defend against Chinese expansionism. In short, deterrence in the grey zone is failing.

Indo-Pacific countries must begin by explicitly recognising that their challenges are not isolated problems, but part of a broader pattern of cross-domain Chinese aggression. The region must also be far more willing to call out China for its actions and offer diplomatic, if not material, support to other victims of Chinese bullying and subversion.

All too often — as in the ongoing spat between China and Japan — countries must weather their respective storms alone. Despite the mushrooming patchwork of minilateral initiatives in recent years, responses have tended to be reactionary, fragmented and risk averse. And they have ultimately failed to change China’s behaviour.

If the United States and its partners and allies across the region hope to change China’s cost-benefit calculus in the grey zone, they will have to take a more decisive stand, and they will have to do so together.

Encouragingly, momentum is building in this direction. Japanese Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi has called on ‘like-minded’ Indo-Pacific nations to enhance defence collaboration and strengthen deterrence in the face of routinised military coercion and what he referred to as the ‘weaponisation of everything’. In this vision, existing networks would be connected so ‘when some nations face harassment or coercion, the region as a whole will be able to respond collectively’.

This idea presents a more near-term, workable alternative that better aligns with current regional realities than a formal ‘Pacific Defense Pact’. It is also consistent with the US Strategy to Strengthen Multilateral Defense in the Indo-Pacific, which aims to bolster security cooperation with allies and partners, while stopping short of a formal alliance.

Enhanced military cooperation is important, but it is also unlikely to deter China’s grey zone aggression by itself. It is critical that these new forms of cooperation employ the full spectrum of national power in a coordinated fashion. Military cooperation is likely to be more effective when combined with diplomatic, economic and informational measures.

More fundamentally, this emerging network of multilayered deterrence must be grounded in a shared, common operating picture and an accompanying counter grey zone strategy. This would be greatly aided by the establishment of a multi-national Indo-Pacific Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, not unlike the NATO–EU institution that exists in Europe.

Efforts to deter Chinese grey zone aggression must also assume a more proactive posture. Though this may require the use of potentially escalatory tactics and a greater appetite for risk, only real costs are likely to change China’s calculus.

Winning back the initiative and establishing deterrence in the grey zone will be no easy task. But in the absence of a more strategic, coordinated and robust approach to Chinese grey zone aggression, China will continue to incrementally advance its strategic and territorial aims at the Indo-Pacific’s peril.

Sam Mullins is Professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, US Department of War.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s, and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies or the US Department of War.

https://doi.org/10.59425/eabc.1771106400

EAF | China | China remains undeterred in the grey zone

eastasiaforum.org · Sam Mullins ·

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

https://apstrategy.org/

Executive Director, Korea Regional Review

https://www.upi.com/Korea-Regional-Review/

Editor-at-large, Small Wars Journal

https://smallwarsjournal.com/

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

Company Name | Website

Pentagon may bar tuition aid for top universities in Hegseth’s crackdown on ‘biased’ schools | CNN Politics

Exclusive | Pentagon Used Anthropic’s Claude in Maduro Venezuela Raid

Use of the model through a contract with Palantir highlights growing role of AI in the Pentagon

Pentagon's use of Claude during Maduro raid sparks Anthropic feud

Inside the Debacle That Led to the Closure of El Paso’s Airspace

Rubio Seeks to Reassure European Allies in Munich Speech

Secretary of state addresses tensions over tariffs and Ukraine at trans-Atlantic security conference

What We Lost When We Lost U.S.A.I.D.

Kari Lake is making Trump’s job harder in Iran

Russia’s sabotage campaign is becoming bolder

Hacks against Polish energy plants suggest the FSB is involved

US withdraws newly updated list of firms allegedly aiding China's military

The Objective Should Be a Secular and Moderate Iran

Not plans for a military strike.

Field Observation: Rectification as Readiness

What to watch inside the PLA after overt recruitment signaling

Report | Who Are China's Diplomats? Beyond "Wolf Warrior" Hype - ISD

Atlantic Chokepoint, Cognitive Front: Russian Influence Operations and the GIUK Gap

“Zone of Peace”

Global Dominance Through the Arctic

Russian Information Influence Operations

No time to lose: Liberal democracies can win the cognitive and hybrid war against authoritarians

Drones and Border Cartels

Drone use by cartels

Why drones are so difficult to stop

About The Author

Researcher skeptical of ‘Havana syndrome’ tested secret weapon on himself

The Age of Defensive Democracy

What is at stake today is not whether democracy can spread but whether it can survive at all.

Read More

The Problem With Representative Democracy

America’s Drift Toward Constitutional Authoritarianism

Harnessing the People: Mapping Overseas United Front Work in Democratic States - Jamestown

Harnessing the People: Mapping Overseas United Front Work in Democratic States

Rubio's speech to European allies takes a softer tone but sticks to Trump's firm stance

‘A child of Europe’

Europeans reassured but not complacent

China remains undeterred in the grey zone