Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism."

– George Washington

"We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution."

– Abraham Lincoln

"The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."

– Alexis de Tocqueville

1. The Art of War, the Science of Bias: DEI is a Warfighting Necessity

2. The Hottest Job in a World at War: Gun-for-Hire

3. Is this the end of NATO?

4. The Trump Shock Comes to Europe

5. European Defense Stocks Rise on NATO Remarks on Military Spending Boost

6. China Sends Message to Its Tech Leaders: We Need You

7. UK offers peacekeeping troops to Ukraine ahead of Paris talks

8. Trump Administration Officials to Meet With Russian Counterparts on Ukraine War

9. ED and USAID Are Batting Practice: The Pentagon Is the Challenge

10. Nato at odds with Ukraine over Soviet-style tactics

11. US Army’s next-gen HIMARS missile destroys SCUD, radar, rotary wing targets in test

12. USAID Really Does Protect Americans and Save Money By James Stavridis

13. Is NATO Falling Apart?

14. The Fatal Flaw of the New Middle East

15. The New War on Drugs

16. Russia’s War in Ukraine Has Brought Iran and Belarus Closer Together

1. The Art of War, the Science of Bias: DEI is a Warfighting Necessity

Here is a thought provoking perspective.

This will be panned by the anti-woke faction. But this describes the importance of diversity that is not viewed as important by the woke faction. I fear neither extreme will grasp (or even read) this essay since both sides are hardened in their biases for and against DEI. But there are those in the middle...

Of course what Mr. Wang describes is what some of us would call cultural understanding and most important, cultural respect, which is something I recall growing up with among my Special Forces brothers - those who were specifically assessed and selected because they want to live and work among foreign indigenous cultures.

Excerpts:

We need a military of diverse backgrounds and mindsets; we need cultural competency training; we need to root stereotypes and biases out of the heads of our warfighters and our war planners as meticulously as we would clear a minefield. Neither you nor I believe that a typical service member consciously holds racist beliefs. But everyone is liable to have unconscious biases, and unconscious biases are an equal if not greater liability – because without countermeasures, we’re blind to the very fact we have them.

As just one example, East Asians in the United States are consistently perceived as less creative than people of other ethnicities. It’s not a belief founded in fact, but it is an enduring one, and our warfighters and war planners are as susceptible to it as anybody—in the absence of DEI measures like the unconscious bias trainings you’ve terminated. Our greatest rival in the decades to come will be an East Asian state: the People’s Republic of China. How will a military that systematically underestimates the creative thinking of its adversaries fare in battle against them? Certainly not as well as one that heads into conflict with a clear and objective assessment of its enemies.

Please note:

(Editor’s Note: Small Wars Journal always prioritizes the publication of counterpoints to open letters. At Small Wars Journal we value discourse at the speed of relevance.)

Opinion / Perspective| The Latest

The Art of War, the Science of Bias: DEI is a Warfighting Necessity

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/02/17/the-art-of-war-the-science-of-bias-dei-is-a-warfighting-necessity/

by Dan Wang

02.17.2025 at 06:00am

29th Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Official Portrait (DoD photo by Chad J. McNeeley)

Dear Secretary Hegseth,

You have inflicted tangible harm to American national security by interfering with our military’s ability to assess our adversaries objectively. I’m not talking about anything that’s happened at the Defense Intelligence Agency, but rather DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). History’s greatest military failures weren’t just the result of poor strategy or bad luck – they were rooted in prejudice, in systemic mischaracterization of the enemy that has cost countless lives and toppled entire empires. And yet, with your order to eliminate all DEI programs in the military, you’ve made sure that America’s war planners and warfighters will enter the battlefields of the future with the very same self-inflicted handicap.

The two worst military downfalls in history, those of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, were both the result of wars their leaders opted into, confident that the ethno-racial qualities of their adversaries guaranteed victory. Adolf Hitler wrote at length about the inferiority of the Slavic people (the untermenschen) and promised the swift conquest of the Soviet Union. Five million German soldiers died in the ensuing war, and in the end it was Germany that was conquered.

On the other side of the globe, Japanese war planners assumed that Americans didn’t have the spiritual fortitude to fight a prolonged war like their own people, and that a decisive blow such as Pearl Harbor would be followed by a quick U.S. exit from the war. Yet we stayed in the fight through the bleakest days of the Pacific War, went the distance with the Japanese Empire, and in due course prevailed over it.

If the Japanese truly knew the American character, they would have had every reason to foresee this. They would have known that Americans don’t back down: we’re the ones who fought to the last man at the Alamo; who rebelled against the most powerful empire in the world in 1775—and then had the audacity to go back for a rematch in 1812. But the Japanese Empire stereotyped and underestimated American society, sowing the seeds of its own demise.

We as Americans are far from immune to making these same mistakes ourselves. A pervasive atmosphere of racially-tinged skepticism that a unified Vietnam could maintain political autonomy from the Soviet Union accelerated Washington’s escalation of the Vietnam War. On the ground, the dehumanization of the Vietnamese as “mere gooks” disinhibited American G.I.s from civilian massacres like My Lai, each crime of war causing more and more Vietnamese to turn against the U.S. and towards North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. By striking DEI programs from the military, you’ve set us up to repeat the failures of the past.

We need a military of diverse backgrounds and mindsets; we need cultural competency training; we need to root stereotypes and biases out of the heads of our warfighters and our war planners as meticulously as we would clear a minefield. Neither you nor I believe that a typical service member consciously holds racist beliefs. But everyone is liable to have unconscious biases, and unconscious biases are an equal if not greater liability – because without countermeasures, we’re blind to the very fact we have them.

As just one example, East Asians in the United States are consistently perceived as less creative than people of other ethnicities. It’s not a belief founded in fact, but it is an enduring one, and our warfighters and war planners are as susceptible to it as anybody—in the absence of DEI measures like the unconscious bias trainings you’ve terminated. Our greatest rival in the decades to come will be an East Asian state: the People’s Republic of China. How will a military that systematically underestimates the creative thinking of its adversaries fare in battle against them? Certainly not as well as one that heads into conflict with a clear and objective assessment of its enemies.

For the sake of our nation and our soldiers, I ask you: restore the military’s DEI programs immediately.

See you at the reunion,

Dan Wang

(Editor’s Note: Small Wars Journal always prioritizes the publication of counterpoints to open letters. At Small Wars Journal we value discourse at the speed of relevance.)

2. The Hottest Job in a World at War: Gun-for-Hire

Interesting read. I had no idea.

Excerpts:

Fighters such as Pinilla are part of a burgeoning market for veterans from poorer countries chasing a paycheck. These days, it is truly combat pay. Most war dogs cut their teeth in low-intensity or sporadic fights, such as chasing drug runners and human traffickers.

Battles in Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa, in contrast, now rage with lethality not seen for decades. Colombian fighters hired last year by intermediaries in the United Arab Emirates have died fighting for rebel forces against the Sudanese government.

Yet the danger hasn’t stopped them from signing up. On Ukraine’s front lines, the flow of veterans from far-flung conflicts has helped sustain the war. The arrival of foreign volunteers has also turned trenches into a babel of foreign tongues. Ukraine says 20,000 international soldiers have joined its ranks. They come from the nearby Caucasus and as far afield as the Indian subcontinent, East Asia and South America.

The Hottest Job in a World at War: Gun-for-Hire

A new breed of veterans from Latin America and Asia patrols front lines for a salary, idealism or the thrill of combat

https://www.wsj.com/world/the-hottest-job-in-a-world-at-war-gun-for-hire-360ab035?st=t7J14F&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Benoit Faucon

and Kejal Vyas

Updated Feb. 17, 2025 12:08 am ET

Soldiers-of-fortune are back in force—manning Ukraine’s front lines, filling Gulf monarchies’ barracks and fighting Africa’s civil wars. Colombia, racked by decades of conflict, is a top source of hired guns.

Jhonny Pinilla had battled guerrillas in his country’s jungles for a decade. But the frenzied, close-quarter combat that he experienced there seemed like a vacation compared with his panicked escapes from Russian artillery fire after he volunteered to join the Ukrainian army.

“I had no idea if I was going to live or die,” recalled the 40-year-old.

Add to that not just a foreign language but a strange alphabet, and subzero temperatures replacing his accustomed tropical heat. Yet Pinilla sees no alternative to a life of combat. “War is the only trade I know,” he said while resting in another country.

Fighters such as Pinilla are part of a burgeoning market for veterans from poorer countries chasing a paycheck. These days, it is truly combat pay. Most war dogs cut their teeth in low-intensity or sporadic fights, such as chasing drug runners and human traffickers.

Battles in Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa, in contrast, now rage with lethality not seen for decades. Colombian fighters hired last year by intermediaries in the United Arab Emirates have died fighting for rebel forces against the Sudanese government.

Wounded Colombian veterans, who joined Ukrainian armed forces to help the country fight Russia, receiving treatment in a hospital in Ukraine in 2023. Photo: Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press

Yet the danger hasn’t stopped them from signing up. On Ukraine’s front lines, the flow of veterans from far-flung conflicts has helped sustain the war. The arrival of foreign volunteers has also turned trenches into a babel of foreign tongues. Ukraine says 20,000 international soldiers have joined its ranks. They come from the nearby Caucasus and as far afield as the Indian subcontinent, East Asia and South America.

Recruits include Argentines once deployed in Haiti, Brazilians who fought narco-traffickers, and Algerians and Kenyans who battled al Qaeda in Africa, according to interviews and social-media profiles. In Pinilla’s own formation, a veteran of the Taiwanese army, which faces threat of invasion by China, died in October 2022, according to the government in Taipei.

Some mercenaries are adrenaline junkies. Others are driven by a hint of idealism. Pinilla said he and many comrades want to support “the country that really needs help” against Russia. If mercenaries were just after money, he said, “they would go to Mexico” and join drug cartels.

Thousands of volunteers flocked to Ukraine in the early days of the war, including U.S. and European veterans, to fight for democracy or the thrill of battle, but the number of Westerners has dwindled as the war has become a slog.

Most soldiers of fortune are different from Russian private military company Wagner, the soldiers North Korea recently sent to fight for Russia against Ukraine and U.S. contractor Blackwater, founded by mercenary tycoon Erik Prince. Those forces act to varying degrees as extensions of their governments’ foreign policies and are deployed to serve national interests.

Moscow has also enlisted tens of thousands of freelance foreign soldiers to fight Ukraine. Among them are Yemenis recruited by pro-Iranian Houthi rebels, Nepalese soldiers who once fought Maoist guerrillas at home and Cubans lured by the promise of Russian passports and high pay.

Foreign fighters attending a training with a Ukrainian brigade in 2024. Photo: Maria Senovilla/Shutterstock

Soldiers of fortune were common across Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the rise of the modern nation-state around the 1600s.

Itinerant fighters’ ranks shrank in the modern era and were largely replaced by conscripts and career soldiers. But they never disappeared. Some fought for ideology in the Spanish Civil War. Most were ex-soldiers seeking a paycheck during the Cold War. WatchGuard International, among the first private military companies, was formed by British special forces veterans in 1965. Now, proliferating conflicts have stoked demand for hired guns.

Colombia, with a hefty stock of veterans from decades of drug wars, has become a gold mine for mercenary recruiters. Mounting deaths of its citizens abroad and messy diplomatic entanglements have become so problematic for leftist President Gustavo Petro that his government is working on a law to ban Colombians from mercenary work.

For many, it is just a job—though one with dangers on and off the battlefield. Colombian veteran José Aron Medina enlisted in Ukraine to pay for his parents to leave their farm in a violent part of the country, said his sister. Last summer, Medina and a comrade, with whom Pinilla had trained, flew home via Venezuela. Authorities in the Russia-friendly country grabbed them as they changed planes and sent them to Russia, where they now sit in jail. The Kremlin has posted videos of them complaining of mistreatment by Ukrainians, ruing their work there and urging others not to make their mistake.

José Aron Medina is now in a Russian jail after fighting for Ukraine. Photo: Joaquin Sarmiento/AFP/Getty Images

Pinilla for 12 years fought in Colombia’s jungles against Marxist insurgents. In 2014, he retired from the army and tried to join other Colombians applying for a new mercenary posting. After passing a first cut, he spent three months training before some men in the group bribed a doctor to pass a medical exam. The recruiter found out and rejected them all, Pinilla said. For almost a decade, he scraped by as a security escort for wealthy businessmen.

Pinilla, undaunted by his stumble, kept looking for overseas work. Scrolling through a WhatsApp group of Colombian veterans in mid-2023 he spotted a job offer: Ukraine’s army was recruiting experienced fighters at $3,300 a month when in combat deployment, compared with $500 for a Colombian officer. He decided to go.

Colombian soldier Jhonny Pinilla got better pay in the Ukrainian forces. Photo: Natalia Kepesz for WSJ

The first hurdle was leaving Colombia. The government has monitored veterans’ departures since at least 20 of them were implicated in the assassination of Haiti’s president in 2021. It also opposes recruitment of fighters for Ukraine. To fly out of Bogotá, “we just told the authorities we were going as tourists to Poland,” Pinilla said.

In case of questions on landing in Madrid, Pinilla carried an official Ukrainian letter stating his enlistment. From Spain he flew to Warsaw, took a train to Poland’s eastern border and walked into Ukraine. “They checked my passport, and then I went to war,” he said.

Ukraine put Pinilla in command of a 30-man reconnaissance unit and assigned them a translator, though a lot of communication is done through smartphone translation apps, he said. The Colombians were soon sent for training on military essentials such as first-aid, in a sunflower field about 40 miles from the front. Suddenly, it was the battlefield.

A drone buzzing overhead distracted Pinilla. He assumed it was Ukrainian. It was Russian and began dropping grenades about 60 feet from the group. Then came an artillery barrage.

“You could really feel the explosive waves, the earth trembling, the houses shaking,” he said. “I had never experienced that in my life.”

The Colombian fighters ran away, feeling defenseless on the open field. “We didn’t have anything, not even a bulletproof vest,” just a notebook and a pencil case, Pinilla recalled. In his panicked race for cover, he spotted Ukrainian farmers nearby, plowing the land as if nothing were happening. “The saddest part is that there are people in Ukraine who got used to living like this,” he said.

Weeks later, Pinilla and his men were stationed in an abandoned school in a town whose name he can’t recall. “They’re all weird names,” he said. One day, he heard a deafening blast. The windows imploded in a spray of glass. A Russian airstrike, he assumed.

“We were surprised to be alive,” he recalled thinking when quiet returned. He later learned that a Ukrainian jet fighter had been trying to shoot down a big Russian drone.

A Colombian visits the makeshift memorial commemorating Ukrainian and foreign fighters in Kyiv. Photo: Roman Pilipey/AFP/Getty Images

A Ukrainian flag patch is attached to the uniform of Jhonny Pinilla. Photo: Natalia Kepesz for WSJ

Pinilla’s unit was sent near enemy lines to observe their positions and direct artillery fire. Although he’s in a reconnaissance unit, combat and the prospect of death always loomed near the front. “It was so intense you couldn’t stay posted in the same locations for more than two days,” he said.

One day a Ukrainian commander told Pinilla that intercepted Russian communications indicated his unit might find itself battling other Colombians, and asked what he would do. Pinilla said his men would fight them because anyone siding with Russia is the enemy, “whether he is from our country or not.”

Reality was more complex. One young Colombian in Pinilla’s unit soon after witnessed two Colombians on Russia’s side jump into a Ukrainian trench and kill two Peruvians with grenades. “He couldn’t do anything. He had to hide,” Pinilla said of his compatriot. Within a month, he was gone, telling comrades he couldn’t stomach Colombians killing Peruvians, Pinilla said.

Other jobs are rarely better, even if they appear so. A Colombian recruiter working for a U.A.E. client last summer listed drone-operator positions paying up to $6,000 a month, working for a Libyan warlord backed by Russia. Colombians who took the job only transited through Libya to Sudan, where some were killed in November as they shipped weapons for a faction in the country’s civil war.

They joined a growing list. Colombia’s Foreign Ministry has received requests to bring home the bodies of 186 soldiers slain in Ukraine, giving it among the highest death tolls for foreign fighters in the war. Another 122 are deemed missing in combat, according to the ministry.

Pinilla knows he, too, may die on the job. “I believe in God. For me, that’s not the end of it,” the devout Catholic said of death. If he survives and Ukraine reaches a peace deal, Pinilla sees other opportunities. “I will try to go and fight in Israel,” he said.

Write to Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com and Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com

3. Is this the end of NATO?

Woe is me...

Is the sky falling?

Or is this an opportunity? As I read this excerpt (and the entire essay) I can't help but think maybe this is a positive inflection point for NATO. It seems that some in NATO are willing to admit their mistake and are not willing to commit the necessary resources for their own defense? If they are willing to correct their mistakes and right the ship, why would we (the U.S.) want to abandon that ship now?

Will we someday appreciate Trump's tough love for NATO?

Excerpts:

Former German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger told POLITICO that “maybe Europe needed to be tasered,” to be shocked into being more forward-leaning and self-reliant.

His position is that European leaders are partly to blame for the situation they’re now bemoaning. They had ample warning about what the U.S. president’s second term might entail, and yet moved far too slow to increase their own defense spending and share of the transatlantic burden.

Landsbergis’s successor Kęstutis Budrys agrees that Europe has been laggardly. “We are late, really. We have to speed up and show that we have real defense, and that we are ready and capable and trained to fight,” he told POLITICO.

But Budrys hopes this isn’t a “Munich moment” like 87 years ago. “The fact we mention 1938 shows we have an awareness and it is a sign we are seeking to avoid that. Yes, there’s the risk that some elements might be repeated, but we can also see how to avoid it,” he said. And that will require all the allies to share “the seriousness of the situation we are facing,” if they want to preserve NATO.

But others wonder if this is all too late and fear the Trump administration isn’t a friend but a foe. One senior EU diplomat, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said: “We’ve now got an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe.”

“The transatlantic alliance is over.”

Is this the end of NATO?

Politico · by Jamie Dettmer · February 15, 2025

“We’ve now got an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe,” one diplomat said.

What would Britain’s iconic wartime leader Winston Churchill make of the Munich Security Conference in 2025? | Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images

Unpacked

February 15, 2025 4:00 am CET

MUNICH — U.S. President Donald Trump is a longtime fan of Winston Churchill. But what would Britain’s iconic wartime leader make of the Munich Security Conference in 2025?

“You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” Those are the words Churchill thundered when then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain left this Bavarian city 87 years ago, clutching a piece of paper that turned out to be meaningless.

Would that be Churchill’s reaction to Trump’s drive to end the war in Ukraine, with terms that Kyiv and its European allies fear will be favorable to Moscow and only mean another bigger war down the road?

The word “appeasement” is on European lips here, and for the more historically sensitive — like Britain’s former Defense Minister Ben Wallace — the echo of Munich circa 1938 seems an obvious reference point.

As they gathered for the summit today, European officials were still reeling from the readout of Trump’s 90-minute phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, as well as U.S. Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth’s mid-week remarks in Brussels. For former Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis, the most overlooked and chilling line that came from Hegseth was his warning that “realities” will prevent the U.S. from being Europe’s security guarantor.

In other words — no U.S. backstop.

Like others, Landsbergis senses an end of an era. “It may well mark the advent of the twilight of NATO,” he said. “Especially when you combine it with what I think Washington will soon announce — the withdrawal of 20,000 U.S. troops from Europe.”

As the Lithuanian spoke with POLITICO in Munich, Hegseth was in Warsaw, foreshadowing a troop draw down and warning already frazzled Europeans that “now is the time to invest because you can’t make an assumption that America’s presence will last forever.”

Much like it’s been in the U.S., the Trump administration’s nonstop, fast-moving shock-and-awe announcements have been overwhelming and disorienting in Europe too — as the strategy is, no doubt, designed to be. Wrong-footing opponents and critics, giving them little time to draw breath and reorient.

And U.S. lawmakers attending the summit have been trying to offer some reassurance to an anxious Europe — though not to much avail.

Among them was Senator Roger Wicker, chairman of the powerful Senate armed services panel, who told POLITICO that Hegseth made “a rookie’s mistake” in Brussels: “I don’t know who wrote the speech — but it could have been written by Tucker Carlson. Carlson is a fool,” he said, soothingly reassuring that there are plenty of serious people around Trump who he heeds.

Wicker also noted that Hegseth had already walked back some of his harsher remarks, but admitted he hadn’t yet done so when it comes to Europe losing the U.S. security guarantee — which undermines NATO’s Article 5 committing alliance members to collective defense.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain during his visit to Germany for the Munich conference in September 1938. | Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

And it is that line, more than any other, that’s setting European teeth on edge — along with harsh lines like: “Make no mistake, President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into ‘Uncle Sucker.’“

“Trump’s direct approach to Putin, combined with Secretary of Defense Hegseth informing allies in Brussels that the U.S. is preemptively acquiescing to some of Russia’s core demands before talks have even begun is a double blow — not only to Ukraine but to the future of Europe,” remarked Chatham House’s Keir Giles.

“[Accepting] that the aggressor can retain the territory it has seized in exchange for a plea for peace — the parallels with 1938 could only be clearer if Trump had held up a note and said Mr Putin had assured him he had no further territorial ambitions in Europe.”

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance’s Munich speech, focused on criticizing democratic practice in Europe, is doing nothing to ease European qualms — nor those of pro-NATO Americans.

It was received stonily, with only occasional smatterings of applause and a few politely shaking heads, when he started talking about migration as a threat to European civilization. “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia. It’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within,” he said.

“Consider the audacity of someone who ran on a ticket with a man who inspired a riot against our Congress in 2020, to come to Europe and say, ‘You guys have got problems with democracy,'” said academic and former U.S. diplomat Michael McFaul. “And we’ve got a constitutional crisis going on right now with executive overreach and the health of American democracy.”

Vance also ignored the elephant in the room — the Ukraine war. “He could have used the speech to clarify their negotiating position and he chose not to. This speech was for people back home, not for people at the summit,” McFaul added. Not that McFaul gives European democracy a clean bill of health — but this was neither the time nor the place for the considerable chutzpah on display, he said.

Three years ago, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine seemed to make NATO more relevant than it had been — gone was the search for a raison d’être in a post-Cold War world. But it was hard here, on the summit’s first day, to shake the feeling that we’re witnessing the start of a cleaving. Sure, the summits during Trump’s first term also had a “U.S. vs. Europe” feel, but his former national security team would smooth things out. Feathers would be ruffled — not plucked.

And for Europe, the U.S. remains the exceptional nation, the indispensable one to summon in times of trouble. Who else is there to turn to now?

Maybe oneself.

Former German diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger told POLITICO that “maybe Europe needed to be tasered,” to be shocked into being more forward-leaning and self-reliant.

“You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.” | Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

His position is that European leaders are partly to blame for the situation they’re now bemoaning. They had ample warning about what the U.S. president’s second term might entail, and yet moved far too slow to increase their own defense spending and share of the transatlantic burden.

Landsbergis’s successor Kęstutis Budrys agrees that Europe has been laggardly. “We are late, really. We have to speed up and show that we have real defense, and that we are ready and capable and trained to fight,” he told POLITICO.

But Budrys hopes this isn’t a “Munich moment” like 87 years ago. “The fact we mention 1938 shows we have an awareness and it is a sign we are seeking to avoid that. Yes, there’s the risk that some elements might be repeated, but we can also see how to avoid it,” he said. And that will require all the allies to share “the seriousness of the situation we are facing,” if they want to preserve NATO.

But others wonder if this is all too late and fear the Trump administration isn’t a friend but a foe. One senior EU diplomat, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said: “We’ve now got an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe.”

“The transatlantic alliance is over.”

Politico · by Jamie Dettmer · February 15, 2025

4. The Trump Shock Comes to Europe

In 20 and 50 and 100 years will we (and our children's children's children) be studying this period as the major historical turning point in the 21st Century? Will it be for better or worse?

The Trump Shock Comes to Europe

The allies receive bracing, if not always helpful, warnings from the U.S.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-trump-shock-comes-to-europe-war-defense-spending-ukraine-national-security-2bf22e18?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

By The Editorial Board

Feb. 16, 2025 12:51 pm ET

European Defense Stocks Rise on NATO Remarks on Military Spending Boost

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said the alliance’s spending target would be considerably more than 3% of GDP

By Cristina Gallardo

Updated Feb. 17, 2025 5:42 am ET

NATO secretary general Mark Rutte at the Munich Security Conference. Photo: Johannes Simon/Getty Images

European defense stocks are on the rise following remarks from North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies about the need to boost Western defense budgets significantly to continue to support Ukraine and deter Russia from any potential attacks against NATO territory.

Shares in Germany’s Renk Group jumped 12% to 28.08 euros in early trade Monday, while Rheinmetall’s rose 8.4% to 885.8 euros, and Hensoldt’s were up 6.5% at 43.33 euros.

In the U.K., BAE Systems advanced 5.25% to 12.93 pounds, while QinetiQ rose 3.4% to 3.81 pounds. In France, shares in Thales grew 3.75% at 171.55 euros, and in Dassault Aviation AM 4.75%increase; green up pointing triangle rose 3.8% 227.20 euros. Italy’s Leonardo was up 4.3% at 33.05 euros and Sweden’s Saab also gained, up by 6.5% at 260.5 Swedish krona.

The rises came after comments made during the Munich Security Conference, which signaled that NATO could be set to commit to a much higher defense spending target when it meets in The Hague for its annual summit on June 24-25.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said the alliance’s spending target would be “considerably more than 3%” of GDP, up from its current target of 2% agreed upon in 2014, and that its members would need to commit to a “strong timetable” at The Hague summit.

A new NATO spending target would trigger an expansion of Europe’s defense industry, with the continent’s leaders likely to aim to buy and develop European weapons and platforms, and resist calls to order many more U.S.-made systems, Citi analyst Sam Burgess said.

Shares in defense companies have rallied since Russia launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as investors took the view that the conflict would persuade governments to invest in their own armies. Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said that Rutte’s comments confirm this line of thinking and have acted as another share price catalyst.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, meanwhile, told the conference that the 27 members of the EU currently spend a combined 2% of their GDP on defense, but this would need to increase by “hundreds of billions of euros” in additional investment every year.

She said the EU’s executive arm wants to exempt defense from EU government spending limits, and proposed a package of tailor-made solutions to help member states address specific barriers preventing them from boosting their defense expenditure.

Von der Leyen’s announcements are good news for global defense stocks, but not such great news for bonds, as investors weigh up the impact of increased military spending on Europe’s debt pile, Kathleen Brooks, research director at XTB, said.

Defense stocks were also boosted by an emergency meeting of key European leaders in Paris on Monday, convened by French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss defense capabilities in Europe and what their governments could offer Ukraine as security guarantees in the event of a cease-fire in its war against Russia.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Saudi Arabia on Monday, where he is set to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday, after the pair held a weekend phone call. On Sunday, Rubio downplayed the significance of this week’s talks in an interview with CBS, saying that Ukraine and Europe would be part of any “real negotiations” to end the war.

Macron is expected to be joined at the Paris meeting by the leaders of Germany, the U.K., Italy, Poland, Denmark, Spain, and the Netherlands as well as Rutte, the EU’s von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa.

Ahead of the discussions, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he would be prepared to send British troops to Ukraine if there were a ceasefire deal with Russia. Writing in the Telegraph newspaper, the Labour leader also restated his government’s multiyear commitment of delivering 3 billion pounds ($3.78 billion) of military support to Ukraine.

Write to Cristina Gallardo at cristina.gallardo@wsj.com

6. China Sends Message to Its Tech Leaders: We Need You

Is the full sentence: "We need you for strategic competition to win against the US?"

China Sends Message to Its Tech Leaders: We Need You

Xi Jinping signals crackdown is over by inviting Alibaba’s Jack Ma and CEOs to meeting

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-sends-message-to-tech-leaders-we-need-you-e03eb3db?mod=latest_headlines

By Raffaele Huang

Updated Feb. 17, 2025 6:36 am ET

Alibaba founder Jack Ma spoke at a conference in Hangzhou, China, in 2017. He has largely been absent from public view in recent years. Photo: Cfoto/Zuma Press

Chinese leader Xi Jinping signaled to leading technology entrepreneurs and CEOs that he needed their help to deliver economic growth and self-sufficiency, more than four years after a crackdown by Beijing that dented confidence.

Many of China’s most prominent businesspeople gathered in Beijing to meet Xi on Monday, taking notes as Xi spoke to them from the front of the room, according to a video shown on state television.

It was both a demonstration of fealty by the corporate chiefs to China’s most powerful leader in decades, and an acknowledgment by Xi that he needed private entrepreneurs to keep the economy humming—including those who battled state-owned enterprises to build their own businesses.

According to an official account of the meeting, Xi pledged that private companies would be protected when competing in the market in the same way as state enterprises. He also told companies to follow Beijing’s policies to overcome difficulties, which he didn’t detail.

The most striking face at the meeting was Jack Ma, co-founder and longtime leader of e-commerce and cloud-computing company Alibaba, who sat in the front row of the business executives. The once-outspoken Ma was largely absent from public view in recent years after giving a speech in October 2020 that angered Xi, and his companies were at the forefront of Beijing’s yearslong clampdown on the country’s tech sector.

Shortly after that 2020 speech, Xi scuttled the $34 billion-plus initial public offering of Ant Group, an Alibaba financial-services affiliate. Other moves followed against private companies, especially those in the tech industry, where regulators criticized what they called disorderly expansion.

Many tech leaders stepped away from the public eye and some relinquished titles at their companies.

The crackdown led to concerns that the heavy hand of the state was chilling investment and discouraging entrepreneurs from taking chances on new businesses. Xi himself last May wondered why the number of new unicorns—startups valued at $1 billion or more—was dwindling in China, according to the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily.

Alibaba’s shares rose 4.3% on the New York Stock Exchange in Friday trading after Reuters reported that Ma was likely to meet the Chinese leader.

Since last fall, Beijing has been signaling support for the private sector and has announced repeated measures to boost market confidence. The economy has been sluggish owing in part to troubles in the property market.

The government is also pushing tech companies to help China achieve self-sufficiency in areas such as semiconductor manufacturing and artificial intelligence.

Monday’s meeting came after President Trump imposed an additional 10% tariff on Chinese goods. In late 2018, during the U.S.-China trade war in Trump’s first term, Xi met Chinese entrepreneurs to voice support for the private sector and shore up confidence.

Xi’s decision to summon business leaders again, with a new trade war brewing, was a “strong gesture to tell the market and hesitant local officials that these are our champions that we need to unwaveringly support in light of all the risks,” said Feng Chucheng, founding partner of Beijing advisory firm Hutong Research.

“With many of these entrepreneurs having significant stakes in the U.S., Beijing needs a united front also to prevent major capital flight,” Feng said.

Zhang Jiang, former internet analyst at UBS, cautioned that the meeting doesn’t necessarily mean Beijing is ready to lift its tight control over emerging technologies, especially strategically important areas such as AI. “The bigger question is whether there is sustainability in Beijing’s positive shift of attitude,” he said.

Monday’s meeting represented an attempt to showcase areas where Chinese private-sector companies are global leaders. Attendees included Wang Chuanfu of electric-vehicle maker BYD, Robin Zeng of battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology, Lei Jun of smartphone maker Xiaomi and Pony Ma of videogame leader Tencent.

Executives from prominent AI startups also attended, including Liang Wenfeng, founder of DeepSeek, which recently surprised Silicon Valley and Wall Street with its state-of-the-art AI programs developed with less-advanced chips.

Also present was Ren Zhengfei of telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies. Sanctioned by Washington since 2019, Huawei has become a national champion for Beijing, playing a central role in its ambition of eliminating reliance on U.S. technologies. It has expanded into new businesses and found ways to curb its dependence on American suppliers.

Write to Raffaele Huang at raffaele.huang@wsj.com

7. UK offers peacekeeping troops to Ukraine ahead of Paris talks

UK offers peacekeeping troops to Ukraine ahead of Paris talks

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/fast-moving-ukraine-diplomacy-means-europeans-must-do-more-official-says-2025-02-17/?utm

By John Irish, Elizabeth Pineau and Andrew Macaskill

February 17, 20255:32 AM ESTUpdated an hour ago

Item 1 of 3 Servicemen of the 24th Mechanized brigade, named after King Danylo, of the Ukrainian Armed Forces fire a BM-21 Grad multiple-launch rocket system toward Russian troops, on a front line, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, near the town of Chasiv Yar in Donetsk region, Ukraine February 15, 2025. Oleg Petrasiuk/Press Service of the 24th King Danylo Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo

[1/3]Servicemen of the 24th Mechanized brigade, named after King Danylo, of the Ukrainian Armed Forces fire a BM-21 Grad multiple-launch rocket system toward Russian troops, on a front line, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, near the town of Chasiv Yar in Donetsk region, Ukraine February 15, 2025. Oleg... Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab Read more

Summary

UK could send peacekeeping troops to UkraineSweden says it would consider joining a peacekeeping forceEuropean leaders to meet in ParisFrench official says Europe must do more

LONDON/PARIS, Feb 17 (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has become the first European leader to say he is ready to put peacekeeping troops in Ukraine, making the commitment ahead of an emergency leaders' meeting in Paris to discuss Europe's role in a ceasefire.

Starmer's comments underlined a growing realization among European nations that they will likely have to play a larger role in ensuring Ukraine's security as Washington works alone with Russia on a potential end to the three-year conflict.

Sweden would consider contributing to post-war peacekeeping forces in Ukraine, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said on Monday, adding that negotiations would need to progress before any such decision was taken.

U.S. President Donald Trump stunned Ukraine and European allies last week when he announced he had held a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, without consulting them, to discuss bringing an end to war.

That effort was due to advance with talks this week in Saudi Arabia between U.S. and Russian officials.

Trump's Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, said on Saturday Europe would not have a seat at the table for any peace talks. Washington sent a questionnaire to European capitals to ask what they could contribute to security guarantees for Kyiv.

At Monday's summit in Paris, President Emmanuel Macron was to host leaders from Germany, Italy, Britain, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, which will represent Baltic and Scandinavian countries, along with the European Union leadership and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

A French presidency official said the discussion would look at "the security guarantees that can be given by the Europeans and the Americans, together or separately," with peacekeepers being just one element of the security guarantees.

Starmer, who is expected to travel to Washington to meet Trump next week, said on Sunday that Europe was facing a "once in a generation moment" for the collective security of the continent, and it must work closely with the United States.

He said Britain was ready to play a leading role in delivering security guarantees for Ukraine, including being ready to put "our own troops on the ground if necessary".

"The end of this war, when it comes, cannot merely become a temporary pause before Putin attacks again," he wrote in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

The European meeting in Paris is taking place after dozens of similar summits have shown the 27-nation EU to be unable to come up with a cohesive plan to end the Ukraine war. Britain is not an EU member but has been a leading supporter of Ukraine.

EUROPE NEEDS 'TO DO MORE, BETTER'

A Ukrainian official told Reuters last week that only Britain and France had so far signalled any willingness to send troops at some point. However, that could be changing.

Sweden's Kristersson said on Monday there was "absolutely a possibility" of sending peacekeeping forces.

"There needs to be a very clear mandate for those forces and I don't think we can see that until we have come further in those negotiations," he said on the sidelines of a military exercise in Stockholm.

A peacekeeping force would raise the risk of a direct confrontation with Russia and would stretch European militaries, whose arms stocks have been depleted supplying Ukraine, and who are used to relying heavily on U.S. support for major missions.

The French presidency official said Europe needs "to do more, better and in a coherent manner for our collective security." However, some countries were unhappy that the Paris meeting was not a full EU summit, EU officials said.

The French presidency official said the meeting would facilitate future discussions in Brussels and at NATO.

The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here.

Reporting by John Irish and Elizabeth Pineau in Paris and Andrew MacAskill in London Writing by Kate Holton and Gabriel Stargardter Editing by David Holmes and Frances Kerry

8. Trump Administration Officials to Meet With Russian Counterparts on Ukraine War

Is Riyadh the 21st Century Yalta? Will they reshape Europe? (not a perfect analogy of course).

Trump Administration Officials to Meet With Russian Counterparts on Ukraine War

This week’s meeting in Saudi Arabia follows on heels of the U.S. president’s call last week with Vladimir Putin

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/trump-administration-officials-to-meet-with-russian-counterparts-on-ukraine-war-ced03b97?mod=latest_headlines

By Michael R. Gordon

, Maggie Severns

and Tarini Parti

Updated Feb. 17, 2025 5:28 am ET

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Monday. Photo: evelyn hockstein/Reuters

Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Saudi Arabia on Monday ahead of talks between top U.S. officials and Russian envoys on how to end the war in Ukraine, discussions that signal the Trump administration is eager to push for an agreement.

Talks with U.S. officials would be “devoted primarily to restoring the entire complex of Russian-American relations,” the Kremlin said.

“We’re moving along,” President Trump told reporters in Florida on Sunday of the coming talks. “We’re trying to get peace with Russia, Ukraine, and we’re working very hard on it.”

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, confirmed that he was traveling Sunday with national security adviser Mike Waltz to Saudi Arabia. Rubio, who was in Jerusalem over the weekend, is also expected to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Monday for discussions on the Middle East. The trip comes as Arab leaders have pushed back against Trump’s plan to move Palestinians out of Gaza, and the prospects for extending the cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas remain in the balance.

The arrangements for the U.S.-Russia meeting were firmed up following a Friday call between Rubio and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, which Moscow said was at the initiative of the Americans. The State Department said that the two diplomats had discussed “the opportunity to potentially work together on a number of other bilateral issues.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Lavrov and Yuri Ushakov, a foreign-policy adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, were heading to Riyadh on Monday and expected to meet with U.S. officials the following day. According to the Kremlin, talks between them would involve, among other things, preparations for negotiations on the Ukrainian settlement, Russian state news agency TASS said.

ED and USAID Are Batting Practice: The Pentagon Is the Challenge - The American Spectator |

spectator.org · by Frank Schell · February 15, 2025

America Ripe for Reform

ED and USAID Are Batting Practice: The Pentagon Is the Challenge

Restructuring the Pentagon to make it more efficient and accountable and rebuilding America’s industrial base will take years.

February 15, 2025, 10:20 PM

Tverdokhlib/Shutterstock

By attacking the Department of Education and the United States Agency for International Development, President Trump and special government employee Elon Musk are simply hitting fungos at spring training — like a crack baseball team, anxiously awaiting the first pitch of the season. Their batting practice will be quite useful in taking on the Pentagon.

The value added by the Department of Education has been questioned for decades, certainly since the Reagan Administration. At issue is whether its responsibilities would be better executed by the states, with parents and teachers having a greater say than unelected bureaucrats.

Further, the U.S industrial base is far from where it should be to sustain a major high intensity conflict.

The Department of Education also carries with it a perceived woke culture, sponsoring programs that enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) — an approach viewed by many as discriminatory and that is now being eliminated in government, academia, and corporate America. The Department of Education is the smallest cabinet level department, with 4,100 employees and a FY 2024 budget of about $270 billion representing four percent of the federal budget.

USAID is much smaller, with FY 2023 annual appropriations of over $40 billion, with a work force of more than 10,000 in dozens of countries. The issue with USAID is that it resembles a parallel Department of State, not consistently aligned with U.S. foreign policy objectives. Recently confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that USAID has committed insubordination and is not responsive or cooperative, thinking it works for the world and not the for the U.S. Rubio envisions appropriate programs continuing, but under the aegis of the Department of State.

The Department of Education and USAID are easy to pick on. Trump and Musk are warming up for a much bigger target: the Department of Defense. Rightsizing the Pentagon and improving its efficiency would be the dream of leading consultancy firms of the world. There are several issues for Trump and Musk to face at the Pentagon, a massive structure with six zip codes, nearly 18 miles of corridors, and 6.5 million square feet of office space — and an annual budget of over $800 billion and a global work force of nearly 3 million.

Culture of the Pentagon

The Pentagon has several cultural and strategic issues to be addressed, not just by Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but also by recently named Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Part of Hegseth’s mandate is to eliminate a woke culture that allegedly benefitted the careerism of top brass, to the perceived detriment of maintaining and enhancing a fighting machine that can win wars. Accountability for the Afghan withdrawal debacle and protracted U.S. deployment there will be another area of inquiry for Hegseth and a way for him to punish failure.

The Pentagon’s financial travails are well known: It has been unable to obtain a clean (unqualified) audit opinion for seven consecutive years, with the possibility of one by only 2028. Accounting may be seen as a dull subject by the American people, relatively uninterested in balance sheets, P&L statements, fund flow statements, and copious footnotes.

Fiscal Mismanagement

However, this is strongly suggestive of fiscal mismanagement, with due disregard for the American taxpayer and the safety and soundness of a major institution. Anyone with private sector experience knows that such display of financial insouciance would result in boards of directors and management being fired, perhaps after one year, and certainly after two — shareholders would initiate class actions and federal regulators would swoop in with forensic accounting firms in tow.

Looking to the future, the Pentagon commits expense and capital resources to maintain legacy platforms. For example, there are carrier strike groups, long range bombers such as the B-52, and some mechanized assets — at a time when adversaries are investing heavily in drones, hypersonic missiles, and in space, cyber, and electromagnetic warfare. Again, there is the question of the right balance of resource allocation and moderating what has been of benefit in the past, recognizing that quantity is still important.

Further, the U.S industrial base is far from where it should be to sustain a major high intensity conflict. U.S. stocks of artillery shells and battlefield systems have been depleted by the Russia-Ukraine war. It takes 32 months by one estimate to deliver the highly successful Javelin anti-tank system, manufactured by a joint a venture of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, to replenish our inventory to an appropriate readiness level.

With respect to relatively low-tech 155 millimeter artillery shells, the current manufacturing infrastructure of the U.S. has been deemed inadequate. Prior to the Russia-Ukraine war, U.S. production was 14,400 per month, yet the future target is a rate of 100,000. Army sources advised that 55,000 was the expectation by 2024 year-end.

The Future Industrial Base

Shipbuilding is another part of the industrial base where the U.S. has fallen short. In recent years, the country has built 1.2 Virginia class submarines per year; a 30-year shipbuilding plan approved in 2022 called for five per year by 2028, an exceptionally aggressive target, particularly noting that the shipbuilding workforce at General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls is believed too small. China’s shipbuilding capacity is stunningly greater than that of the U.S. — one shipyard alone, Jiangnan, has more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined.

Restructuring the Pentagon to make it more efficient and accountable, achieving the right balance of high tech and legacy platforms, and building America’s industrial base to prepare for a possible conflict with China will take years — and time is a constraint, not a resource.

This is no time for partisanship. However, it would be naïve to think that restructuring or terminating ineffective government programs unaligned with our national interest, eliminating inefficient or duplicative effort in government, and redirecting resources of the Pentagon to maintain and strengthen the best fighting machine in the world should appeal equally to both our political parties.

Nato at odds with Ukraine over Soviet-style tactics

British defence sources have accused Zelensky’s troops of wasting expensive weapons and equipment

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/16/nato-ukraine-soviet-battlefield-tactics-squandered-weapons/

Daniel Hardaker

US Army’s next-gen HIMARS missile destroys SCUD, radar, rotary wing targets in test

The missiles were put through their paces as part of the Army’s continuous efforts to bolster its long-range precision strike capabilities.

Updated: Feb 14, 2025 04:28 PM EST

https://interestingengineering.com/military/us-armys-next-gen-himars-missile

Kapil Kajal

US Army HIMARS.

US Army

On February 12, 2025, the U.S. Army achieved a significant milestone in its Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) program by successfully conducting two flight tests of the Increment 1 variant. These tests were carried out using the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, widely recognized as HIMARS.

The missiles were put through their paces as part of the Army’s continuous efforts to bolster its long-range precision strike capabilities.

Destroys SCUD, radar, rotary wing targets

Both PrSM Increment 1 missiles adhered closely to their predicted trajectories and ranges during the tests, successfully engaging various targets.

These included a surrogate SCUD missile, radar installations, and rotary wing platforms.

The performance metrics for both missiles met expectations in terms of range, time of flight, accuracy, and detonation height, indicating that the system is on track to fulfill operational requirements.

The PrSM represents the next leap in long-range precision strike capabilities and is designed to effectively disrupt, neutralize, suppress, and destroy enemy targets.

This advancement aligns with the broader military strategy of integrated joint operations across various domains. Increment 1 will replace the existing Army Tactical Missile System, promising enhanced range and lethality for field artillery units.

Next-gen HIMARS missiles

Lockheed Martin, the contractor responsible for producing the initial rounds of Increment 1, reported that these missiles can strike targets over at least 500 kilometers.

As part of the ongoing development, the Army has also been investing in future increments of the missile system, including Incidents 2 and 3.

Increment 2 will introduce a multimode seeker, the Land-Based Anti-Ship Missile (LBASM) seeker, expanding the missile’s versatility. Meanwhile, Increment 3 aims to enhance the missile’s effectiveness by integrating improved payload options.

In addition, the Army has initiated efforts for Increment 4 designs, collaborating with teams from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman.

These competing concepts are targeted to achieve ranges exceeding 620 miles (1,000 kilometers), effectively doubling the capabilities of current missile technologies.

620-mile missile

At a recent gathering hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army, military officials announced the progression towards a fifth iteration of the PrSM for HIMARS.

This upcoming version is noteworthy for its intended compatibility with autonomous launch systems, allowing strikes on targets more than 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) away.

Brigadier General Rory Crooks, who directs the Long-Range Precision Fires Cross-Functional Team, elaborated on the status of this fifth increment, indicating it remains in the science and technology phase.

This initial stage focuses on exploration and development to create a missile capable of being launched from autonomous platforms.

Crooks explained the potential design, likening it to the Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) pods measuring about 13 feet long.

He noted that an autonomous vehicle could support a larger missile configuration without needing a traditional cab.

The emphasis on expanding missile range capabilities aims to achieve operational objectives that have previously been deemed challenging.

The Admiral may be missing a few things...Critique of USAID Really Does Protect Americans and Save Money

James Temple

Assoc. Dean, College of Language and Intelligence

February 16, 2025

I'm definitely not in favor of completely disregarding the positive work that USAID has done. However, the analysis seems to suggest that the beneficial aspects of USAID's work would disappear entirely. While the analysis briefly mentions USAID’s critics, it primarily compares its budget to that of the Department of Defense (DoD) while touting a few activities USAID has supported. This comparison is misleading because the functions and capabilities of these two agencies are vastly different. In reality, USAID relies heavily on logistical support from the DoD to carry out its mission. Throughout my career, I have witnessed firsthand the critical logistical support provided by the DoD to ensure aid and supplies reach their intended destinations.

The analysis also fails to address the significant issues of inefficiency and bureaucratic bloat that USAID has been criticized for, and there's mounting evidence to support these claims. For an agency with such a relatively small budget, it raises questions about the need for such a large workforce. Are we really suggesting that the budget is so insignificant that efficiency doesn’t matter?

That said, it's important to recognize that the valuable work USAID does, especially in terms of promoting soft power won’t vanish. These efforts will likely be absorbed by the Department of State and the DoD, and the essential missions will continue under their stewardship. We shouldn't adopt an alarmist stance suggesting that all of USAID’s good work will disappear—this work will evolve, but it won’t vanish.

USAID Really Does Protect Americans and Save Money

In Afghanistan, Colombia, Haiti and elsewhere, aid workers have been the military’s soft-power partners.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-02-12/trump-is-wrong-usaid-protects-americans-and-saves-money?sref=hhjZtX76

February 12, 2025 at 10:17 AM EST

By James Stavridis

James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a retired US Navy admiral, former supreme allied commander of NATO, and vice chairman of global affairs at the Carlyle Group.

Can it still be saved?Photographer: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Throughout my nearly four decades in uniform, I frequently worked alongside the professionals of the US Agency for International Development. From my first forward deployment, as a junior officer detailed to painting orphanages in the Philippines, I deeply admired these dedicated civil servants.

Especially toward the end of my career — as senior military assistant to Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, as a four-star admiral in command of US Southern Command, and then as supreme allied commander at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — I relied on USAID for short- and long-term reasons. In combat areas, USAID workers helped create security for my troops in the field. Over the long term, they provided stability by helping prevent disease outbreaks, famine and more — and the fights and chaos that so often follow.

What USAID does is not charity. While its actions almost always have humanitarian benefit, ultimately the agency is all about helping the men and women of the Departments of Defense and State do their jobs and get home safely. Defense, diplomacy and development — the “three Ds” — work best together.

Last week, President Donald Trump essentially canceled USAID. The administration ceased almost all funding, put thousands of workers on leave and ordered those based abroad to return to the US within 30 days. (A federal judge has partially blocked Trump’s orders.) Now, Bloomberg News reports, the administration is considering shifting USAID’s taxpayer funds to invest in private-sector projects overseas alongside institutional investors.

While the agency’s critics cite inefficiency and waste, the amount of money and people is actually tiny — a budget of less than $40 billion and 10,000 workers (compared to the Defense Department’s $850 billion and nearly 3 million active, reserve and civilian employees). By shutting down the agency to trim a small amount of spending, the administration risks incurring significant long-term costs.

Why do I feel so strongly about this? I could provide hundreds of examples, but here are three that stick in my mind, from the war-torn and turbulent countries of Colombia, Iraq and Haiti.

During my tenure in the late 2000s at US Southern Command, in charge of all military activity south of the US, Colombia was at the top of my worry list. The massive flow of cocaine and other drugs was killing tens of thousands of Americans either through overdoses or gang violence.

Over time, we delivered security in Colombia not by sending hundreds of thousands of US troops, but by using a small number of forces (typically less than 1,000 at a time) and hundreds of USAID employees. Slowly, the efforts of development workers did more than the military to dismantle cartel influence.

USAID affected the battlefield by reintegrating more than 13,000 demobilized guerilla fighters back into Colombian society. I saw child soldiers who had been kidnapped by the guerrillas reunited with their families. Aid workers helped increase the stability of the eventual peace deal by helping bolster economic development and the rule of law, so that 1.2 million hectares of land could be returned to rightful owners. USAID helped reduce rural poverty by 30% and gave people alternatives to fighting or exporting drugs.

Those successes in turn helped US security by undermining drug gangs, improving economic conditions with a strong trading partner (the US has a trade surplus with Colombia) and shrinking the flow of cocaine to North America — all without massive US spending or significant Department of Defense engagement.

Or consider Iraq. After US forces deposed the dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, we found a society in complete turmoil, with massive internal divisions. Simply walking away was not an option: because of a moral imperative to help average Iraqis, the enormous oil reserves of the country, and the likelihood it would become a breeding ground for further terrorist organizations.

In order to help the nascent Iraqi military, the Pentagon needed not only training missions, but also to help develop governance, human rights and rule of law. So, we turned to USAID, and again found a willing and capable partner.

On my visits to the NATO training mission in Baghdad (working with my US Army 3-star subordinate), I saw firsthand the results of the work done by the Iraq Governance and Performance Accountability directorate. It leveraged USAID-sponsored classroom and practical exercises to improve the behavior of the Iraqi government and military, and provided a model we later used in Afghanistan.

It was hot, dusty work in unglamorous conditions, but today the Iraqi security forces — while far from perfect — are credible partners with US Central Command in the fight against the remnants of the Islamic State.

Finally, Haiti is a strong example of direct benefit to the US. In the 1980s, massive boatlifts brought tens of thousands of Cuban and Haitian refugees to Florida. Fleeing instability, criminality and failing infrastructure of their islands, they were willing to risk dangerous voyages on unstable rafts to make it to our shores. This put considerable strain on Florida’s economy.

When a massive 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti in early 2010, I had just departed as head of US Southern Command. From a distance I watched with immense pride as the US military and USAID stepped up together. Some 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings — as well as most government ministries and the headquarters of the UN stabilization mission — were flattened. The risk of human catastrophe, one that could have spilled into Florida and the rest of the US, was real.

Almost every military senior responder — starting with the on-the-ground commander, General Ken Keen — will tell you the real heroes were from USAID. Their efforts were integral in preventing a mass exodus, and the costs were pennies on the dollar compared to caring for Haitian migrants who would have flooded into south Florida.

“In Haiti, the USAID team worked seamlessly with American military partners from Lieutenant General Keen down to more junior officers and enlisted service members across the island,” Rajiv Shah, then the agency’s administrator, said later. “The same was true in Afghanistan during the war, Liberia during the Ebola pandemic, and elsewhere.” He’s right.

I could continue to provide example after example — in Africa, the Philippines, the Balkans and elsewhere — to make the case for keeping USAID. Should there be vigilance to reduce waste, abuse or frivolous projects? Of course. But dismantling an organization this vital to US national security will damage our standing in the world and negatively affect us at home.

Here’s the bottom line: If you want to try to save money by cutting USAID, you will only end up spending more on costly Pentagon programs. Like smart preventative medicine, the work of USAID nips problems in the bud before they need very expensive major surgery. Maintaining a strong and capable USAID is both the right thing to do and the smart one.

Stavridis is dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University . He is on the boards of Aon, Fortinet and Ankura Consulting Group, and has advised Shield Capital, a firm that invests in the cybersecurity sector.

Is NATO Falling Apart?

19fortyfive.com · by Andrew Latham · February 16, 2025

For decades, the Munich Security Conference (MSC) has served as the premier venue for transatlantic leaders to reaffirm their shared commitment to collective security. It has been a forum where American presidents and European policymakers could, even in times of political turbulence, restate the enduring strength of NATO and the transatlantic alliance.

This year, however, the tone is different.

New Global Order: Is This the Beginning of the End for NATO?

The 2025 MSC is taking place at a moment of profound geopolitical transition, where the old certainties of the post-Cold War order are eroding.

The North Atlantic security framework, long anchored in U.S. leadership and European dependence on American military power, is coming under mounting strain—perhaps fatally. Two key forces are accelerating this transformation.

The first is the geopolitical shift to multipolarity, where American hegemony is no longer unchallenged and Europe must navigate a world in which power is more dispersed and contested. The second is the rise (or return) of the “sovereigntist” strategic vision – which I will call “sovereigntism” – a strategic vision that has taken hold in the United States, particularly under the Trump administration, and is mirrored in the growing strength of right-wing nationalist movements in Europe.

These forces are converging to unravel the foundations of NATO and the broader North Atlantic security order. At Munich 2025, the divisions between Washington and its European allies are no longer just points of diplomatic friction; they are signs of a deeper structural transformation that may render the alliance itself obsolete.

The Transition to Multipolarity: The Erosion of U.S. Strategic Primacy

For most of its history, NATO existed within the framework of an American-led international order. First as a Cold War bulwark against Soviet power, and later as a tool of U.S. global primacy in the unipolar era, the alliance was sustained by Washington’s belief that European security was central to American interests. That assumption is now being called into question.

The shift to a multipolar world is undeniable. The rise of China as a global power, Russia’s persistent military assertiveness, and the growing influence of middle powers like India, Turkey, and Brazil mean that the strategic playing field is no longer dominated by the United States. Washington is increasingly preoccupied with China, economic competition, and domestic political priorities, leaving Europe with the realization that the transatlantic security framework is no longer America’s primary concern.

At Munich 2025, this shift is palpable. European leaders have arrived with the expectation that the United States will reaffirm its NATO commitments, yet the American delegation is making it clear that the era of unconditional security guarantees is over. The U.S. is still engaged in European security, but not as NATO’s unquestioned leader. Instead, it is acting more selectively, pursuing strategic priorities based on national interests rather than alliance obligations.

This change is not merely a product of the Trump administration’s policies—it reflects a deeper structural reality. As the United States adjusts to a more competitive international system, its willingness to subsidize European security is diminishing. The question that haunts this year’s MSC is whether Europe is prepared for a future in which American military leadership in NATO is no longer guaranteed.

Sovereigntism and the Transformation of U.S. Strategy

The geopolitical shift to multipolarity is compounded by a political transformation within the United States itself: the rise of sovereigntism as the dominant American strategic vision.

Unlike traditional isolationism, which advocates for retreat from global affairs, sovereigntism does not reject international engagement but insists that every aspect of U.S. foreign policy must be explicitly transactional, serving immediate American interests rather than abstract commitments to allies or institutions. This vision treats alliances like NATO not as permanent fixtures of global security but as tools to be wielded—and, if necessary, discarded—depending on the perceived costs and benefits.

Under Trump, sovereigntism has become the defining approach to U.S. grand strategy. At Munich 2025, the consequences are clear. American officials are no longer discussing NATO in terms of shared responsibility or collective security; instead, they are making stark demands. If European countries do not meet their defense spending obligations and prove their strategic value, the U.S. will scale back its commitments—or, potentially, exit the alliance altogether.

This approach is consistent with other recent moves by the Trump administration, which has sought to leverage American military and economic power in purely transactional terms. From exploring the strategic acquisition of Greenland to using economic pressure against Panama for geopolitical advantage, the administration has demonstrated that it does not see U.S. global engagement as a matter of long-term strategic stability, but as a series of deals to be made on a case-by-case basis.

For NATO, this represents an existential challenge. If Washington no longer sees the alliance as a cornerstone of U.S. security but rather as a burden unless it produces immediate benefits, then NATO’s long-term viability is in serious doubt. The message at Munich is clear: unless European states dramatically increase their military investments and prove their strategic utility, they cannot assume that NATO as it currently exists will survive.

The Rise of Right-Wing Nationalism in Europe: A Parallel Shift

While the shift toward sovereigntism in the U.S. is reshaping transatlantic relations from one side, a parallel transformation is unfolding within Europe itself. Right-wing nationalist movements are gaining ground across the continent, and many of them share the Trump administration’s skepticism of NATO and transatlantic cooperation.

Across key European states, political parties that were once marginal now wield real influence. In France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, nationalist movements are challenging the very premise of European integration and questioning the necessity of traditional alliances. Many of these parties reject the idea that European security should be tied to NATO, preferring a more fragmented, nation-state-based approach to defense.

At Munich 2025, this shift is being felt in conversations among European leaders. While some still advocate for reinforcing NATO and strengthening ties with the U.S., others are beginning to align with the sovereigntist view—arguing that European states should prioritize their own national interests over collective security arrangements.

This internal division weakens Europe’s ability to respond to the geopolitical changes reshaping the transatlantic order. If Europe is itself divided on the future of NATO, then it cannot present a united front in response to Washington’s shifting priorities. The alliance, once held together by a common sense of purpose, is now fragmenting under the weight of both external and internal pressures.

The End of the North Atlantic Security Order?

The 2025 Munich Security Conference is not just another gathering of diplomats and policymakers—it is a moment of reckoning for the future of the transatlantic alliance. The geopolitical transition to multipolarity, combined with the rise of sovereigntism in the U.S. and nationalist movements in Europe, is placing NATO under unprecedented strain.

For Europe, the message from Washington is unmistakable: the days of unquestioned American security guarantees are over.

The U.S. is still willing to engage, but only on terms that maximize its own strategic advantage. For European states that have long relied on NATO as a given, this is a wake-up call—either they dramatically increase their defense capabilities and redefine their security priorities, or they risk being left strategically adrift.

For the U.S., the question is whether the sovereigntist approach will produce a more sustainable and effective foreign policy, or whether it will accelerate the breakdown of the security order that has governed the North Atlantic for more than seven decades.

U.S Army troopers assigned to 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division fire the M1A2 SEPV3 Main Battle Tanks as part of gunnery qualification, Sept. 22, 2022, on Mielno Tank Range, Drawsko Pomorskie Training Area, Poland. Training like this ensures the units readiness in order to provide combat-credible forces in support of NATO allies and regional security partners. (U.S. Army Photo by Staff Sgt. Charles Porter)

If European leaders leave Munich still assuming that NATO will function as it always has, they are making a historic miscalculation. The old security order is breaking down, and what replaces it remains uncertain. As the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote in the inter-war period, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.”

The transatlantic alliance, as it has existed since the Cold War, may not survive the forces now reshaping the world. Whether what comes next is an era of greater strategic autonomy or geopolitical fragmentation remains to be seen—but one thing is certain: the postwar security order will not return.

Now, indeed, is the time of monsters.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. Andrew is now a Contributing Editor to 19FortyFive, writing a daily column. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.

19fortyfive.com · by Andrew Latham · February 16, 2025

14. The Fatal Flaw of the New Middle East

Excerpts:

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE

In the Middle East, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to ending conflicts or rebuilding what was lost. The wars plaguing the region share many characteristics, but because they have been going on for years, they have developed their own dynamics. In Lebanon, for example, the challenge is not just rebuilding what was destroyed by the conflict with Israel. It is also about rebuilding a broken political system, trying to get Hezbollah to finally disarm, and strengthening weakened national institutions. Syria, totally ravaged by war, needs an entirely new political settlement. But Syria must not recentralize power, as it did during the Assad era. Whatever resolution emerges has to be supported across the country. It needs to account for local dynamics that materialized during the conflict.

For Gaza, the challenges are even more profound. There may be historical precedent for the scale and scope of the territory’s destruction. Yet unlike other places reduced to ruin, Gaza is not a country. It does not control its borders. It is under siege, cut off from external markets. It lacks all kinds of basic resources, including water, food, and land for agricultural or industrial production. Under such conditions, it cannot be made habitable, let alone economically viable. And there is no clear plan for who will take the lead in rebuilding and then governing it. In the near term, Gaza may need to be administered by a transitional authority established by the UN Security Council: a mechanism that was used to help rebuild parts of the Balkans and Cambodia in the 1990s, when local governance capacity was destroyed. Eventually, it will need to be governed by Palestinians who command democratic support. But right now, no short- or long-term solutions are on offer.

Without political settlements, even doling out reconstruction funds will be difficult. In fact, the provision of assistance could create tension. Domestic and regional actors often manipulate aid deliveries, creating a skewed economy that leaves some people embittered and others emboldened. Political groups could also use aid to empower themselves at the expense of governments.

None of these challenges mean that humanitarian aid groups shouldn’t flood the Middle East’s many shattered places—particularly Gaza—with support. The region has millions of people who are homeless. It has millions more who are starving or require medical care. They need whatever help they can get, and they need it fast.

There is certainly a new Middle East in the making. Yet without a political solution, reconstruction will do little over the long term. It cannot fix the power imbalances, ethnic tensions, or broken institutions that cause ongoing bloodshed. It will not get foreign powers to work together, instead of at cross-purposes. It may help people literally rebuild their homes, stores, and schools. But until there’s a durable peace, those buildings might just come crashing back down when conflict inevitably returns.

The Fatal Flaw of the New Middle East

Foreign Affairs · by More by Maha Yahya · February 17, 2025

Gaza, Syria, and the Region’s Next Crisis

Maha Yahya

February 17, 2025

Palestinians returning home, Rafah, Gaza, January 2025 Ashraf Amra / Anadolu / Getty Images

MAHA YAHYA is Director of the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center.

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Over the last 15 years, the Middle East has been racked by war, destruction, and displacement. Hundreds of thousands of people have died as fighting raged in Gaza, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Millions more have fled. The violence has rolled back gains in education, health, and income while laying waste to homes, schools, hospitals, roads, railways, and power grids. The war in Gaza has proved especially devastating, setting back the territory’s socioeconomic indicators to 1955 levels. The World Bank and UN organizations have estimated that rebuilding the Middle East and providing enough humanitarian aid will cost between $350 and $650 billion. The UN Development Program has estimated that at least $40 to $50 billion is needed to rebuild Gaza alone.

Offering these shattered societies humanitarian and monetary assistance is critical for the survival of millions, especially in the near term. It is thus deeply concerning that multiple Western governments, including Washington, are curtailing foreign aid and humanitarian assistance. But ultimately, the main obstacle to the Arab world’s reconstruction will not be the lack of funds. It will be political disputes and grievances. The region is filled with failing states. It features competing powers that work to leverage this chaos to their geopolitical advantage. Together, these problems make permanent peace impossible.

The region’s most powerful actors know this. Iran, Israel, the United States, and the Arab Gulf countries have all spent decades trying to shape the region to their liking without addressing the root causes of conflict, and they have repeatedly failed. They have sought security over peace and ended up with neither. And yet their current plans are strikingly similar, at least in spirit, to past efforts. All these countries are committing again to visions of a new regional order in which reconstruction takes place without political settlements. They have put forth lofty proposals—Israeli-Saudi normalization, an economic pact between Iran and the Gulf states—without considering political realities, local dynamics, or other, broader consequences. As a result, their plans will not put an end to cyclical violence. If anything, they will fuel it.

To achieve stability, the war-torn Middle East must shift course. Its powers must stop papering over regional and local divisions and instead do the hard work of addressing them. They need to help fractured societies come together. They must create accountable political institutions and promote systems of transitional justice. They need to support a reconstruction that is part of a broader peace-building agenda. They must create a political framework that actually recognizes the right of Palestinians to self-determination. And they need to figure out how to resolve, or at least better manage, their own differences. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter how much the world spends on reconstruction. The region will remain broken.

PROBLEM DODGING

In 1945, Europe lay in ruins. Tens of millions of people had been killed in six years of war. Millions more had been driven from their homes. Many of the continent’s most prosperous cities had been demolished by bombs or shattered by artillery. Regional currencies had collapsed, reducing people to begging and bartering.

In response, the Truman administration called on Washington to dedicate itself to rebuilding the continent. Following the advice of U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, Congress began passing massive aid packages for Europe’s peoples and communities, spending $13.3 billion (over $170 billion in today’s dollars) on the region. But this money came with conditions. Recipients had to remove most barriers to trade with other European states. They had to adopt policies that increased their exports to the United States and made them take in more American goods. The goal was not merely to reconstruct Europe’s homes, roads, and bridges. It was to bring the continent into the emerging U.S.-led liberal order.

The strategy worked. The recipients of Marshall Plan funds joined the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization, committing to collective defense. They enmeshed their economies, paving the way for the European Union. Thanks to these decisions, Europe not only economically recovered from the destruction of World War II but, after centuries of fighting, became one of the world’s most peaceful and prosperous regions.

The scale of devastation across the Middle East today resembles that of Europe in 1945. The death tolls are staggering, if not quite as high. Entire economies have been wiped out. National currencies have lost most of their value: the Yemeni riyal has lost 80 percent of its value since 2014. The damage is most visible in Gaza, where, as of late January, the official death toll is over 47,000—likely an underestimate—and where Israeli bombardment reduced around 70 percent of its buildings to rubble in a little over a year. (The UN has projected that it will take more than a decade just to remove the wreckage.) But other countries have suffered similar losses. The 14-year Syrian civil war displaced 12 million people and killed over 600,000; over 90 percent of the country’s residents now live below the international poverty line. In Yemen, more than half the population is now impoverished. Nearly 20 million people there need direct humanitarian assistance. Economic mismanagement and predatory practices have further contributed to economic decline, especially in Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon.

Israel and the United States cannot bring about peace by sidestepping the Palestinians.

The Middle East needs a Marshall Plan. But unlike in post–World War II Europe, no country is stepping up. There is no single champion for the region, and there is no consensus on how to bring the area out of its quagmire. On the contrary, the Middle East is plagued by disunity and rivalry. The only thing the various American, Iranian, Israeli, Turkish, and Gulf proposals have in common is that they neglect fundamental challenges.

Consider, first, the American approach. Washington believes the foundations of a better Middle East involve weakening Iran, the United States’ primary regional rival, and normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia in the hope of unlocking new investments. Washington does want to contribute to the rebuilding of Gaza, although it believes the funds should largely come from Arab countries. But the American plan calls for reconstruction to take place without any horizon for a political solution for the Palestinians. Today, Washington’s imaginary Gaza is either a space ethnically cleansed of Palestinians or an ungoverned political vacuum that would somehow remain stable.

The Israelis share this fantasy. But some of them want to be even more belligerent when it comes to Tehran and the Palestinians. Israelis are broadly supportive of the war in Gaza, and even after the January cease-fire, many want to return to bombing. The bellicosity of Israeli leaders has been boosted by their success in weakening Iran and Hezbollah—the Lebanese militia Tehran backs. Israel wants to reconstruct Gaza only after Palestinians have been, in the words of former Israeli security officials Amos Yadlin and Avner Golov, “deradicalized” and have demonstrated they are capable of “effective governance.” Some Israeli officials don’t want to reconstruct it at all.

The Israeli vision is ethically wrong: the Palestinians have an unequivocal right to self-determination. It is also unworkable. Try as they might, Israel and the United States cannot bring about peace by sidestepping the Palestinians. In fact, attempting to do so is what got them here. During Donald Trump’s first term as president, the United States coaxed Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) into normalizing relations with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords, creating what Trump hoped would be an Israeli-led security, trade, and investment compact. Israel, meanwhile, ramped up settlement construction, increased repression, and expanded its authority over the Palestinian territories. In response, Hamas launched its horrific October 7, 2023, attack. “All the normalization and recognition processes, all the agreements that have been signed [with Israel], can never put an end to this battle,” said the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, in explaining the assault.

An Hayat Tahrir al-Sham brigade celebrating the ouster of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Damascus, December 2024 Yamam al Shaar / Reuters

The attack sparked a furious Israeli response, which halted progress toward an Israeli-Saudi agreement and prompted Iran and its nonstate partners to jump into the fray. Israel had prevented this “axis of resistance” from causing substantial damage, and the Israel Defense Forces weakened Iran itself. But the Islamic Republic has responded with a peace proposal designed to undermine its nemesis, offering to join with its Arab neighbors in a nonaggression and economic pact aimed, in part, at isolating Israel.

It is true that many in the Arab world view the Islamic Republic as a regional force they need to engage with. And following the Israeli bombing campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, the region’s people now see Israel as the Middle East’s most radical and destructive actor. But this does not make Iran’s vision any more realistic. It papers over Iran’s disruptive behavior across the region, including its sponsoring of violent nonstate actors and the resulting lawlessness and state failure. Iran’s scheme does recognize the right to Palestinian self-determination. But Arab countries want an end to regional anarchy, not just an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Then there is a vision put forward by the Arab Gulf states—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—through the Gulf Cooperation Council. It is perhaps the most aspirational. The council’s proposals involve the Gulf countries deepening their own economic integration, establishing joint defense mechanisms, and then somehow resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a now practically impossible two-state solution. The proposal, like the Iranian one, at least acknowledges that an end to that conflict is the key to achieving regional security. But it lays out no plausible mechanism for reaching a deal. The Gulf state plan also says very little about the other conflicts in the region or how to address them.

At best, these various visions will accomplish little. At worst, they will generate even more conflict, as did the Abraham Accords. By focusing so much on security, they have turned peace into a matter of economic development and force. The Middle East’s powers seem to think that war-torn peoples will be satisfied with new construction—no need for justice, accountability, or good leadership. If people are not satisfied, they can be dealt with through violence: Israel, for example, can arrest and kill Palestinians who demand equal rights. Such assumptions are both dangerous and wrong.

CHAOS REIGNS

At the heart of the region’s troubles are questions of governance. Many countries have fractured or collapsed, with competing centers of power often dominated by particular ethnic or political groups. Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in Syria, where years of war have weakened relations between the country’s center and its periphery and given rise to a variety of local rulers. Some places are controlled by Kurds. The places where Assad maintained the highest levels of backing were those populated by his community of Alawites. The south is controlled by the so-called Southern Operations Room, a coalition of rebel factions that emerged in 2011 and tend to be less Islamist than other groups. The organization that ultimately drove Assad from power, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is composed of Sunni former jihadists that include non-Syrian combatants. They claim that they will not discriminate against other groups. But since they took Damascus, the country has seen an uptick in revenge killings and mob violence targeting Alawites. Without an inclusive political process, Syria will remain riven by all kinds of divisions.

International involvement has hardened, and will continue to harden, such rifts. The Middle East’s main powers perpetually compete for more regional influence, so when wars occur, those powers often back different groups. In Syria, for instance, Turkey supports HTS and other factions in the north. The United States is helping the Kurds. Jordan and the United Arab Emirates have considerable sway over Syria’s Southern Operations Room. Israel is trying to bolster its ties with Syria’s Druze community and has used the power vacuum to occupy some 155 square miles of Syrian land.

For now, Syria’s factions are keeping the peace. Indeed, in a January 29 meeting, key groups involved in the overthrow of Assad came together to appoint the HTS leader Ahmad al-Shara as the country’s new president. But although Ahmed al-Awda, the leading figure in the Southern Operations Room, sent a representative to this meeting, Awda did not attend. The Kurd and Druze factions boycotted it altogether. With their shared enemy gone, Syrian militias could turn on each other. If they do, Syria’s future might look like Somalia’s present, with different factions controlling various patches of territory. Or it might look like nearby Libya. Syria and Libya are very different countries, but Libya, too, experienced an Arab Spring revolution that pitted multiple armed groups against a longtime dictator. These groups succeeded in toppling Muammar al-Qaddafi in 2011. But once Qaddafi was gone, they began fighting each other for dominance with the support of external actors, including Turkey, the UAE, and a number of European states. Today, rival authorities in eastern and western parts of the country are each backed by different patrons.

Reconstruction cannot fix broken institutions.

After more than ten years of civil war, Yemen, much like Libya, is politically divided between two main rival authorities: the Houthis in the north and the Presidential Leadership Council. (The Houthis control a third of the country’s area and two-thirds of the population.) Here, too, competition between outsiders has furthered conflict. Iran supports the Houthis. Saudi Arabia hosts the Presidential Leadership Council. But the Presidential Leadership Council is itself factious, and external competition leads to contention within it. The UAE, for instance, backs a group that, although part of the council, wants the southern part of Yemen to secede. Emirati-Saudi tensions over the oil-rich Yemeni province of Hadramawt have created further schisms, with Saudi Arabia generally controlling the province’s interior and the UAE dominating the coast. Proxies affiliated with both powers have clashed, and the conflict between them could turn more violent in the months ahead. This chaos has, in turn, enabled al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and other terrorist groups to expand their operations in Yemen’s east and south.

Foreign meddling in the Middle East’s conflicts is clearly bad for peace. But there is a silver lining to all the external involvement. Because the warring parties rely on international patrons, outside actors can push for resolutions. As a result, rapprochement between regional powers—such as the 2023 normalization agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia—might help tamp down conflict.

But to be effective mediators, regional actors must more thoroughly settle their own differences. The escalating rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the UAE over which of them will be the Middle East’s main Arab political and economic hub is one point of tension, especially when it comes to conflicts in Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Qatar and Turkey’s support for Islamist actors is creating problems with Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. And although the Iranian-Saudi rapprochement has softened sectarian divisions, it has not curtailed Iran’s support for repressive nonstate actors. As a result, it can do little to promote regional tranquility.

Even if these countries could fully sort out their rivalries, they could not ensure peace. They would still need to get local powers to implement settlements that rebuild states, ensure the safe return of displaced peoples, and mend torn social fabrics. And there is no guarantee that these actors, hardened by years of war, would comply. The issue of transitional justice, in particular, will be tricky. After fighting, some degree of forgiveness is required for societies to heal. Yet there cannot be broad amnesty, particularly for those responsible for human rights atrocities. At the end of its civil war, Lebanon opted to issue a blanket pardon for all atrocities committed during the 15-year conflict. Doing so, leaders thought, would quickly secure peace and allow the country to rebuild. They also hoped to protect themselves from prosecution. Instead, Lebanon has experienced periodic civil unrest as grievances from the war continue to fester, sometimes at the behest of the conflict’s old leaders. To avoid the same fate, Syria’s new leaders will have to hold key Assad officials accountable for the horrors committed over 54 years of autocratic rule. Failing to do so will only further encourage individual acts of vengeance—which will, in turn, make it hard to secure a durable, peaceful resolution.

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE

In the Middle East, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to ending conflicts or rebuilding what was lost. The wars plaguing the region share many characteristics, but because they have been going on for years, they have developed their own dynamics. In Lebanon, for example, the challenge is not just rebuilding what was destroyed by the conflict with Israel. It is also about rebuilding a broken political system, trying to get Hezbollah to finally disarm, and strengthening weakened national institutions. Syria, totally ravaged by war, needs an entirely new political settlement. But Syria must not recentralize power, as it did during the Assad era. Whatever resolution emerges has to be supported across the country. It needs to account for local dynamics that materialized during the conflict.

For Gaza, the challenges are even more profound. There may be historical precedent for the scale and scope of the territory’s destruction. Yet unlike other places reduced to ruin, Gaza is not a country. It does not control its borders. It is under siege, cut off from external markets. It lacks all kinds of basic resources, including water, food, and land for agricultural or industrial production. Under such conditions, it cannot be made habitable, let alone economically viable. And there is no clear plan for who will take the lead in rebuilding and then governing it. In the near term, Gaza may need to be administered by a transitional authority established by the UN Security Council: a mechanism that was used to help rebuild parts of the Balkans and Cambodia in the 1990s, when local governance capacity was destroyed. Eventually, it will need to be governed by Palestinians who command democratic support. But right now, no short- or long-term solutions are on offer.

Without political settlements, even doling out reconstruction funds will be difficult. In fact, the provision of assistance could create tension. Domestic and regional actors often manipulate aid deliveries, creating a skewed economy that leaves some people embittered and others emboldened. Political groups could also use aid to empower themselves at the expense of governments.

None of these challenges mean that humanitarian aid groups shouldn’t flood the Middle East’s many shattered places—particularly Gaza—with support. The region has millions of people who are homeless. It has millions more who are starving or require medical care. They need whatever help they can get, and they need it fast.

There is certainly a new Middle East in the making. Yet without a political solution, reconstruction will do little over the long term. It cannot fix the power imbalances, ethnic tensions, or broken institutions that cause ongoing bloodshed. It will not get foreign powers to work together, instead of at cross-purposes. It may help people literally rebuild their homes, stores, and schools. But until there’s a durable peace, those buildings might just come crashing back down when conflict inevitably returns.

MAHA YAHYA is Director of the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Maha Yahya · February 17, 2025

15. The New War on Drugs

Excerpts:

Even before Washington threatened tariffs, Sheinbaum appeared far more prepared than her predecessor to work collaboratively with the United States. By asking for the right deliverables, the Trump administration can strongly reinforce this inclination. Canada has also promised to expand its law enforcement actions to avert tariffs. Among other measures, the country increased its budget to combat fentanyl, dedicated more personnel and assets to patrolling the U.S.-Canada border; and launched a U.S.-Canadian Joint Strike Force to tackle organized crime, fentanyl, and money laundering—all useful actions that will help fight organized crime.

The drug crisis demands a more collaborative approach.

But Trump is fast losing any valuable leverage his threats had given him by refusing to accept his targeted countries’ offers to change. He has already said that Canada’s panoply of responses to his complaints are not enough to avert the reimposition of tariffs in March. Mexico’s promise to send another 10,000 troops to the U.S. border is apparently not enough, either. Despite both countries’ efforts to placate Trump and respond swiftly to reasonable requests, Trump did not exempt them from his harsh 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum. If governments are punished no matter whether they comply with U.S. demands, why bother trying to fulfill them?

In 2024, China, too, showed that it is willing to do business with the United States on confronting the drug crisis. Washington should further engage with Beijing on how to close legal loopholes and ramp up the prosecution of drug and chemical smugglers, money launderers, and organized crime syndicates before ramping up tariffs. In the unlikely scenario that China manages to stop the export of most synthetic drug precursors and their sourcing relocates elsewhere (most likely to India), the United States could remove China from the official U.S. list of major drug producing and transshipment countries (known as the Majors’ List), something Beijing badly wants.

But asking China to reduce the outflow of drugs and precursor chemicals to nothing—a demand Washington has explicitly made—is useless, because it is technically impossible. The standard to which Washington should instead hold China should be that Chinese authorities respond in a swift and sustained way to U.S. investigations, consistently monitor their supply chains for leakage into the illegal trade, and proactively prosecute of Chinese individuals and companies that do business with drug-trafficking groups.

If Beijing fails to deliver, Washington can always return to more punitive actions. Beyond retaining China on the Majors’ List, it could determine that China has been noncooperative in U.S. counternarcotics efforts, a finding that could trigger various economic sanctions and penalties. The United States could also increase its sanctions against and prosecutions of Chinese pharmaceutical companies, brokers of chemical products, and smuggling and money-laundering networks. Washington could even expand visa denials to Chinese government officials and business leaders.

The U.S. drug epidemic is a crisis with transnational dimensions, demanding strong teamwork between a variety of countries—an approach that has already shown its efficacy. The United States has learned the lesson that the right response to drug epidemics is not to launch a “war.” It would be a tragedy to have to learn this lesson again, this time with far more agonizing consequences.

The New War on Drugs

Foreign Affairs · by More by Vanda Felbab-Brown · February 17, 2025

Why the Fentanyl Crisis Requires a More Comprehensive Strategy Than Threats and Tariffs

Vanda Felbab-Brown

February 17, 2025

Mexican troops in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, February 2024 Jose Luis Gonzalez / Reuters

VANDA FELBAB-BROWN is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Initiative on Nonstate Actors at the Brookings Institution. She also directs the Brookings Institution’s program on the Fentanyl Epidemic in North America and the Global Reach of Synthetic Opioids.

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Between January 20 and February 1, U.S. President Donald Trump signed several executive orders declaring national emergencies on the U.S. southern and northern borders, thanks, in part, to the “the sustained influx of illicit opioids and other drugs” into the United States. Citing the public health crisis imposed, in particular, by fentanyl—as well as concerns about undocumented migrants—he then imposed a 25 percent tariff on most imports from Canada and Mexico and a ten percent tariff on Chinese goods. Although Canada and Mexico managed to negotiate a month-long postponement of their new tariffs, in early February the tariff on Chinese imports went into effect.

These showy moves should not come as a surprise. Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump focused on the threats posed by the illicit drug trade, promising to “end the drug war” by executing drug dealers. He vowed to punish countries responsible for manufacturing and smuggling drugs and the chemicals used to make them with tariffs and other retributions. After the November election, his pick for “border czar,” Tom Homan, pledged to send special operations troops to Mexico to “take out” drug cartels—a threat that other Republican politicians and Trump associates also made throughout 2024.

Trump is right to focus on the drug crisis. Opioids, predominantly fentanyl, have killed more than half a million Americans since 2012. During the epidemic’s worst two years—2021 and 2022—more than 100,000 people in the United States died annually from drug overdoses. But many of the president’s proposals are fraught with grave risks. Along with threatening tariffs and military strikes against Mexico, Trump launched a process to designate drug cartels and other criminal organizations as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs); the full list will be announced in the second half of February. Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden—as well as Trump himself, during his first term—already considered such a designation and decided against it, realizing that it would do more harm than good.

The threat to apply tariffs and FTO designations did create leverage to pressure the Mexican government to resurrect its own law enforcement efforts and collaborate more closely with U.S. law enforcement, two shifts that were sorely needed. But the actual implementation of the tariffs for a substantial time—and the application of the FTO designation—will harm the U.S.-Mexico relationship as well as the U.S. economy. Resorting to unilateral military strikes against the cartels would constitute a death blow to cooperative law enforcement efforts between the United States and Mexico.

When it comes to Canada, the Trump administration’s heavy-handed approach jeopardizes the existing law enforcement collaboration that the United States needs to strengthen. And placing punitive tariffs on China needlessly resets the clock with Beijing; collaboration between U.S. and Chinese law enforcement had, in fact, begun to make some real progress in 2024. If Trump’s administration really wants to weaken the criminal networks that pump lethal drugs into the United States and and generate a wide variety of other threats—and the damage that opioid use disorder causes to the country’s public health, national security, economy, and productivity—it must calibrate its threats and actions much more carefully.

DEADLY EMBRACE

Improving access to overdose medication and medication-based treatment remain a policymaker’s most effective tools to reduce the costs of drug use to public health and the economy. But strong law enforcement cooperation between the United States and supply and transshipment countries is essential, too. Two major Mexican drug cartels—the Sinaloa Cartel and Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación—account for a very large portion of the traffic in fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine, and other illicit drugs into the United States. Given that these groups have also deeply infiltrated the Mexican government and economy and thoroughly debilitated the rule of law, however, they also threaten U.S. national interests in many more indirect ways.

During Felipe Calderón’s tenure as Mexico’s president, from 2006 to 2012, U.S. law enforcement agents based in Mexico could partner up with their Mexican counterparts to do intelligence gathering, operation design, anticorruption investigations, and institutional reforms. These collaborations clocked real successes in degrading the power of Mexican criminal groups, but violence continued to escalate. Reducing it was a critical priority, but that had to be done without handing the country over to the narcos.

Yet that’s effectively what Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador did. Beginning in 2019, López Obrador gutted and hamstrung this law-enforcement cooperation—at the same time as the two predominant Mexican cartels were fast replacing China as the leading suppliers of fentanyl to the United States. His “hugs, not bullets” approach to Mexican criminal syndicates only worsened the country’s criminality and violence. It encouraged Mexican law enforcement to focus on sporadic high-value arrests and drug lab busts to placate the United States instead of tackling the cartels systematically. The cartels’ power to intimidate, intrude on legal businesses, and impose criminal rule over swaths of the country expanded significantly.

Mexican cartels gravely threaten U.S. supply chains.

Biden tried to encourage Mexico to strengthen its law enforcement efforts, but his administration’s sotto voce approach drove little productive change. And the United States did not dare push Mexico too hard on the cartels because it needed the country’s cooperation to stem migration flows. Washington was also unwilling to jeopardize its economic ties with Mexico as it worked to decouple its supply chains from China. López Obrador persistently used his ability to increase or decrease law enforcement cooperation on migration as leverage to deflect Washington’s demands for stronger law enforcement action against the cartels.

The Biden administration did intensely target the Chapitos, a group that heads one branch of the Sinaloa Cartel, by persuading Mexico to arrest some of its top leaders and hit men. This may have motivated the Chapitos to export less potent fentanyl in 2024 to the United States, helping to reduce lethal overdoses. But the cartels diversified into a wide variety of other activities, such as human smuggling and trafficking, illegal logging and fishing, wildlife trafficking, cyberscams, and the imposition of extortion fees onto much of Mexico’s economic activity and daily life.

As the cartels infiltrate and take over legal businesses in Mexico, their activities directly threaten U.S. interests. In 2024, the United States and Mexico traded around $800 billion in goods and services, making Mexico the United States’ largest trading partner. The cartels’ hijacking of trucks and the blockading of ports of entry, however, are now jeopardizing the safety of U.S.-Mexican supply chains, which in turn gravely imperils the U.S. strategic objective to de-risk its supply chains from dependence on China.

FATAL DOSE

In June 2024, Mexican voters elected Claudia Sheinbaum—López Obrador’s handpicked successor—to be their president. Unlike López Obrador, however, Sheinbaum has expressed interest in restoring a more meaningful collaboration with the United States against cartel activity, for instance by refocusing law enforcement on the entire structures of Mexican criminal groups, not just their top commanders. Washington cannot afford to waste this precious opportunity.

On Trump’s first day in office this January, he signed an order tasking the executive branch to designate some cartels and criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations As of February 12, the State Department’s working list included six Mexican groups: the Sinaloa Cartel, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, the Northeast Cartel, La Familia Michoacana, Carteles Unidos, and the Cartel del Golfo. On the surface, this might seem like a strong move. “Trump’s decisive action on cartels,” an analyst wrote in a Hill op-ed, “already makes his presidency one of the most consequential in a generation, even if he accomplishes nothing else for the next four years.”

Press coverage of the FTO designation has emphasized the authority it would give the president to order U.S. military strikes on Mexican soil, but this is not the most meaningful way in which it empowers the U.S. government. Previous presidents have launched military strikes on groups such as the Houthis in Yemen without an FTO designation. Rather, the designation expands the U.S. Department of Defense’s ability to gather intelligence on an organization and can encourage U.S. prosecutors to investigate and charge a much wider range of cartel associates in both Mexico and the United States—including middle managers such as logistics staff, money launderers, and people who supervise hit men.

Targeting cartels with FTO designations and threatening tariffs, however, would be valuable leverage only if Trump asks for the right responses from the Mexican government. Asking Mexico to completely halt all fentanyl flows across the U.S. border is an unachievable demand. The Trump administration also risks being too easily placated by anti-migration measures or occasional strikes against individual cartel leaders or labs. And if the designation became a stepping stone to launching flashy unilateral military strikes on Mexican soil, the battle against fentanyl smuggling would suffer a tremendous setback. For one thing, Mexico would consider this act an invasion, and whatever law enforcement cooperation that does exist would grind to a halt. Moreover, such strikes would almost certainly fail to destroy the cartels; replacements for leaders who were killed would quickly be found in the cartels’ thick middle-management layer. The cartels have repeatedly demonstrated a capacity to re-create damaged drug labs within days.

Designating cartels as terrorist groups will fail to destroy them.

Threatening to apply an FTO designation was vastly more useful than actually applying it, because implementation carries so many risks. The FTO designation also has a broad clause making it illegal to knowingly provide material support to a designated group. That carries huge drawbacks for the United States. Providing even a pencil, a toy, or a cup of coffee can trigger severe criminal and financial penalties. It does not always matter if a person or company was forced to provide an FTO-designated group support; paying extortion fees under the threat of death would also violate the clause. If Mexican drug cartels are hit with an FTO designation, U.S. companies that do any business with Mexican firms that pay extortion fees would immediately have to cut their ties with these firms or risk prosecution. And the designation has no territorial limitation. The Justice and Treasury Departments could investigate, prosecute, and sanction any entity in the world that deals with FTO-designated cartels.

The designation could also significantly reduce the flow of remittances into Mexico from the United States, which in 2023 amounted to $63.3 billion, or some five percent of Mexico’s GDP. Financial institutions may refuse to process remittance payments out of the fear that some of the money will end up in the cartels’ hands—and put them on the hook, legally speaking. But Mexicans living in the United States will continue to send remittances, and so a far greater proportion of the payments will likely begin to flow through Chinese underground banking systems.

Given how widespread extortion is in Mexico—and that tens of thousands of people there work for cartels, either willingly or under duress—the designation would dramatically dampen U.S. trade with the country if the United States resorts to mounting large-scale prosecutions. Deepening, not hindering, trade with Mexico is a crucial component of any effort to de-risk American supply chains. Inward-looking and autarky-inclined, the Trump administration may assume that it doesn’t matter if these trade links are severed. But U.S. automakers, supermarket chains, medical service providers, and many other businesses—as well as American consumers—will notice as they are forced to pay higher prices, cope with disruptions in supply, and source goods elsewhere. China would undoubtedly take advantage, strengthening its trade and influence with Mexico. And U.S. gunmakers as well as many American individuals—from drug to money launderers American drug dealers—could also be charged with terrorism in what may easily become a massive legal mess.

A POINTLESS PRESCRIPTION

A similar dynamic applies with China. Trump is wielding a big stick, presenting the country as intransigent, when there is evidence that a more nuanced approach that involves collaboration can yield fruit. In fact, during 2024, U.S.-Chinese counternarcotics collaboration picked up significantly after years of virtually no cooperation. In 2018, bilateral bargaining between Beijing and Washington led China to put the entire class of fentanyl-type drugs under strict legal controls, in the expectation that the United States would reduce its tariffs on China. When even the Biden administration did not dial tariffs back and amped up its competition with Beijing in many strategic domains, China ended all law enforcement cooperation.

But by the end of 2023, adroit U.S. diplomacy had resurrected counternarcotics cooperation between the two countries. China imposed new legal restrictions on the manufacturing, sale, and export of dozens of chemicals, including various substances that can be synthesized into fentanyl and nitazenes, an even more potent class of synthetic opioids. Beijing also engaged China’s chemical industry to discourage the smuggling of fentanyl precursors; subsequent journalistic investigations showed that these actions may have impeded Mexican labs’ ability to source their chemicals.

Much more, however, is needed. Loopholes in Chinese law make it difficult to prosecute the sellers of nonscheduled chemicals, even when they knowingly sell their products for illegal purposes or to Mexican criminal groups. Some precursor chemicals still flow freely out of the country. And differences in the Chinese and U.S. anti-money-laundering regulations also hamper Beijing’s ability to prosecute Chinese money launderers that service Mexican cartels.

In 2024, only 0.2 percent of the fentanyl that entered the United States came in from Canada.

In 2024, thanks to efforts made by the resurrected joint U.S.-Chinese counternarcotics working group, for the first time in years, Chinese law enforcement actively collaborated with the United States to combat money laundering and found creative ways to indict Chinese nationals who collaborated with Mexican cartels. Any large and prolonged tariffs on China would damage all of this fragile and limited but real progress. (And Trump’s decision to pardon Silk Road kingpin Ross Ulbricht further weakens the authority of any U.S. demands that other countries step up to dismantle online drug smuggling.)

Trump’s hard-line moves against Canada make even less sense than his shows of force against China and Mexico. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in 2024, only 0.2 percent of the fentanyl that entered the United States came in from Canada—only 43 pounds were seized at the U.S.-Canada border. Meanwhile, 882 pounds of fentanyl were seized while making their way over the U.S. border to Canada.

Yet Canada is, in fact, facing serious organized crime and money laundering challenges, as is the United States. The presence of Mexican cartels there is growing, not just in money laundering but also, possibly, in drug production. Chinese and Indian organized crime groups are deeply entrenched in Canada; as well as expanding their contraband smuggling and money laundering operations, they are increasingly making themselves available to do foreign governments’ dirty work. But the United States is grappling with the same threats, and isolating Canada with punitive tariffs will only deepen the problem facing both nations. Intensified law enforcement cooperation in a friendly atmosphere would benefit the United States by enhancing its abilities to gather intelligence and shut down transnational criminal networks.

THE RIGHT ANTIDOTE

There are powerful tools that Washington can use to combat the production and exportation of fentanyl-related products beyond its borders and to dismantle dangerous transnational criminal groups. Implementing terrorist designations, military strikes, and sky-high tariffs are not in that arsenal. Rather than mounting extensive FTO-related prosecutions, hampering trade, or engaging in military actions in Mexico, Trump should carefully use the threat of their implementation to encourage Sheinbaum to resurrect meaningful law enforcement cooperation with Washington.

Mexico is already reacting to the threat: to delay tariffs, the Mexican government promised to deploy an additional 10,000 Mexican National Guard troops to the U.S. border to help stop the flow of migrants and drugs, on top of the 15,000 it sent there in 2019 in response to pressure from Washington. Secretary-level talks between U.S. and Mexican officials are underway to hammer out further deliverables from Mexico. Washington should insist that Mexico permit U.S. law enforcement agents vastly expanded access to the country and participate intensively in the execution of joint law enforcement projects, as it did during the Calderón administration.

The United States must play its part by committing to combating money laundering and weapons smuggling into Mexico. Acknowledging the need to reduce Mexico’s spiraling violence, the United States should help design new law enforcement strategies that focus on dismantling the middle operational layers of Mexico criminal groups—their main hit men, logisticians, bribe runners, and money launderers. Simply capturing or killing the cartels’ top bosses exacerbates violence and leads to the groups splintering and reconstituting themselves. This middle-level targeting should be combined with a more careful sequencing of law enforcement operations, coupled with advance deployment of law enforcement forces, to weaken the cartels’ influence in an expanding ring of contiguous territories. The United States must also help Mexico build its own investigative capacities and insulate its prosecutors and judges from corruption and threats. If Mexico is unwilling to unravel the disastrous 2024 change it made to its constitution mandating that all judges be elected, the United States should at least insist on and help Mexico establish effective protection for judicial officials.

Even before Washington threatened tariffs, Sheinbaum appeared far more prepared than her predecessor to work collaboratively with the United States. By asking for the right deliverables, the Trump administration can strongly reinforce this inclination. Canada has also promised to expand its law enforcement actions to avert tariffs. Among other measures, the country increased its budget to combat fentanyl, dedicated more personnel and assets to patrolling the U.S.-Canada border; and launched a U.S.-Canadian Joint Strike Force to tackle organized crime, fentanyl, and money laundering—all useful actions that will help fight organized crime.

The drug crisis demands a more collaborative approach.

But Trump is fast losing any valuable leverage his threats had given him by refusing to accept his targeted countries’ offers to change. He has already said that Canada’s panoply of responses to his complaints are not enough to avert the reimposition of tariffs in March. Mexico’s promise to send another 10,000 troops to the U.S. border is apparently not enough, either. Despite both countries’ efforts to placate Trump and respond swiftly to reasonable requests, Trump did not exempt them from his harsh 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum. If governments are punished no matter whether they comply with U.S. demands, why bother trying to fulfill them?

In 2024, China, too, showed that it is willing to do business with the United States on confronting the drug crisis. Washington should further engage with Beijing on how to close legal loopholes and ramp up the prosecution of drug and chemical smugglers, money launderers, and organized crime syndicates before ramping up tariffs. In the unlikely scenario that China manages to stop the export of most synthetic drug precursors and their sourcing relocates elsewhere (most likely to India), the United States could remove China from the official U.S. list of major drug producing and transshipment countries (known as the Majors’ List), something Beijing badly wants.

But asking China to reduce the outflow of drugs and precursor chemicals to nothing—a demand Washington has explicitly made—is useless, because it is technically impossible. The standard to which Washington should instead hold China should be that Chinese authorities respond in a swift and sustained way to U.S. investigations, consistently monitor their supply chains for leakage into the illegal trade, and proactively prosecute of Chinese individuals and companies that do business with drug-trafficking groups.

If Beijing fails to deliver, Washington can always return to more punitive actions. Beyond retaining China on the Majors’ List, it could determine that China has been noncooperative in U.S. counternarcotics efforts, a finding that could trigger various economic sanctions and penalties. The United States could also increase its sanctions against and prosecutions of Chinese pharmaceutical companies, brokers of chemical products, and smuggling and money-laundering networks. Washington could even expand visa denials to Chinese government officials and business leaders.

The U.S. drug epidemic is a crisis with transnational dimensions, demanding strong teamwork between a variety of countries—an approach that has already shown its efficacy. The United States has learned the lesson that the right response to drug epidemics is not to launch a “war.” It would be a tragedy to have to learn this lesson again, this time with far more agonizing consequences.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Vanda Felbab-Brown · February 17, 2025

16. Russia’s War in Ukraine Has Brought Iran and Belarus Closer Together

Excerpts:

The United States and its allies should also diminish the efficacy of Iranian drone technology on the battlefield by strengthening Ukraine’s hand. This can be done in two ways. First, by providing more ground and air-based interference systems to enhance Ukraine’s electronic warfare capabilities and disable drones under Russian control. As of December 2024, Ukrainian forces have effectively used “spoofing” tactics to successfully repel or redirect drone attacks. Second, by providing increased intelligence support and additional fighter aircraft, in conjunction with recent efforts by Denmark and France. Washington may also wish to supply additional air defense missiles, which Ukraine has gone through quickly in response to persistent Russian air operations.

Additionally, the United States should assist in Ukraine’s own drone innovation efforts. The $800 million that Washington agreed to provide in October 2024 to produce attack drones was a step in the right direction, but the United States should consider directly contributing to Ukrainian efforts to develop AI-enabled first-person view drones, among other defense technology initiatives.

The threat posed by cooperation on defense production between Iran and Belarus underscores the importance of continued material support for Kyiv from both Europe and the United States. Countering cooperation between these two regimes will require an intensification of diplomatic pressure, in conjunction with new efforts to enhance Western-led deterrence. With shifting strategic considerations, what began as a pragmatic relationship based on shared animosity toward and isolation from the West has evolved into a consequential international challenge, revealing the increasingly significant role of a Russian-led “multi-pariah order.”

Russia’s War in Ukraine Has Brought Iran and Belarus Closer Together - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Jack Roush · February 17, 2025

Belarus and Iran have developed a growing strategic partnership since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. What began as a pragmatic association rooted in mutual economic and political isolation from the United States and its European allies has evolved into a more intimate relationship based on shared security concerns as well as rhetorical and material support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Recent developments in joint defense production stand to enhance this bilateral relationship, while demonstrating how Russia integrates like-minded states into non-Western structures of partnership and allegiance. As the burgeoning security partnership between Belarus and Iran deepens, it could provide a secure flow of critical drone technology to Russian forces in Ukraine, with shorter supply lines and less vulnerable production sites.

To prevent this critical enabler from developing further, the United States and its allies should take action. While economic sanctions on Belarus and Iran are crucial, additional steps are likely needed to impede the two countries’ support of Russia’s war effort. These measures include disrupting Iranian drone development and proliferation by interdicting shipments to Belarus as well as potentially threatening to strike drone production facilities within Iran. The United States and Europe should also continue providing Ukraine with military aid to counter the persistent threat posed by Iranian drones, while supporting Ukraine’s ability to advance its indigenous drone and air defense capabilities.

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A Growing Association

The partnership between Belarus and Iran has been many years in the making.

After efforts to normalize relations between Belarus and the European Union broke down in 1997 due to reported human rights violations, Belarus entered a period of relative diplomatic and economic isolation from Europe. Seeking new international partners, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko began courting Iran in the following year, visiting Tehran and establishing direct diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic — having previously used Kyiv as an intermediary. Iran was receptive to the outreach, and in 2004 then-president Mohammad Khatami visited Minsk and held bilateral talks on expanding commercial ties.

As regime hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad assumed the presidency in 2005, Iran adopted a “Look to the East” policy of strengthening ties with non-Western powers such as Russia and other states dissatisfied with what they perceived as an international order dominated by the United States. The policy signified a reversal of Khatami’s efforts to seek closer association with the West. Under this new approach, the relationship between Russia and Iran flourished. Meanwhile, cooperation between Tehran and Minsk tightened and became more overtly ideological, based on a shared animosity of the West as well as common concerns over political stability and regime survival.

Following a 2007 summit, the two regimes formed a strategic partnership, granting Belarus access to Iranian oil while affirming Iran’s access to Belarusian nuclear expertise. Facing intensifying mutual isolation from the West, Belarus backed Iran’s nuclear ambitions based on the principle of the right to national self-determination. In return, Ahmadinejad promised to support Minsk’s opposition to what they perceived as U.S. attempts to maintain a unipolar world in which the dominant power exercised double standards in its relations with other countries. For his part, Lukashenko embraced the anti-West and particularly anti-U.S. rhetoric of the Islamic Republic, proclaiming that Iran and Belarus had the “will and strength” to oppose so-called “arrogant powers.”

Despite the friendly rhetoric and shared national interests, the relationship between Tehran and Minsk reached a high-water mark under Ahmadinejad. With his successors, mutual support for shared “independent” policies and opposition to Western sanctions continued, accompanied by repeated pledges to bolster economic cooperation. Nevertheless, both regimes softened their rhetoric in the following years in pursuit of better relations with the West. Although these changes in tone were not reflected in meaningful reforms, they enabled Belarus to thaw ties with the European Union for brief periods in 2008 and 2015. Meanwhile, Iran successfully negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with the United States, several European powers, Russia, and China (the United States subsequently withdrew from the pact in 2018). While bilateral trade between Belarus and Iran grew in the decades following Khatami’s initial visit — with new agreements frequently implemented — total volume remained relatively insignificant and was impeded by a lack of demand and now-lapsed United Nations sanctions.

The Emergence of Shared Security Interests

Iran and Belarus initially struggled to develop a significant military partnership in conjunction with their mutual diplomatic support and efforts to expand trade relations. Though Belarus reportedly transferred arms to Iran in early 2006, such activities were curtailed as the United Nations Security Council, including Russia, began to enforce arms embargoes on Iran in late 2006 and 2007. In the years following the implementation of the arms embargoes, Russia distanced itself from Iran on security issues, supporting further punitive measures by the United Nations in 2010.

The Lukashenko regime made an abortive attempt to support research and development for the Iranian ballistic missile program in 2011, resulting in international sanctions against Belarus. As a result, efforts to form a military partnership with Iran based on the strategic partnership were abandoned, bringing Belarus into alignment with Russia’s posture toward the Islamic Republic. Ultimately, in the decade following the reported 2006 arms transfer, security cooperation between Iran and Belarus was limited to mutual support for the Assad regime in the Syrian Civil War, though Belarusian involvement was minimal.

Military ties between Iran and Russia underwent a reversal toward direct collaboration in 2016, as their alignment in Syria intensified. That year, Iran also resumed open procurement of Russian arms following the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. However, a similar change did not occur in Iranian-Belarusian relations. Rather, Minsk and Tehran remained focused on boosting economic ties and continuing to bolster diplomatic relations. In addition, Belarus emerged as a major arms supplier to Azerbaijan from 2018 to 2022. This supported Russia’s efforts to play both sides in the unresolved conflict between Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. However, it placed Belarus at odds with Iran, which continued its longtime support for Armenia and opposition to external meddling in the South Caucasus.

The stale strategic partnership between Iran and Belarus was transformed into a more definitive military relationship through shared support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since the beginning of the war, both regimes have emerged as two of Moscow’s staunchest partners, treating the United States and its European allies as shared adversaries. Belarus harbors Russian nuclear weapons, hosts military exercises on its territory, and has sent groups of migrants into E.U. territory as part of Russia’s so-called “hybrid warfare” strategy against the West. Iran, eager to expand its military reach and deepen ties with Russia, has provided it with weapons, including drones and ballistic missiles. While Belarus and Iran may have differing motivations for these moves, both countries have proven critical in sustaining the Russian war effort. Shared support for Russia has pushed Iran and Belarus to create a more meaningful security relationship, as shown by the exchange of military attachés for the first time, bilateral meetings between the Iranian and Belarusian general staff, invitation of Iranian observers to military exercises in Belarus, and the implementation of a more comprehensive memorandum of understanding on defense in 2023. Additionally, in 2022, Iran and Belarus became members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a loose security arrangement that includes Russia, China, India, and a number of Central Asian states.

Furthermore, Russia has urged its friends to pursue economic integration as a geostrategic priority to challenge the power of the U.S. dollar and reduce the efficacy of Western-led international sanctions. As a result, Iran and Belarus have sought to revitalize their ineffectual trade relationship, with Russia facilitating this process. In 2024, Tehran and Minsk agreed to establish permanent trade offices to optimize the exchange of goods, and established a framework for trade using local currency rather than the dollar. Iran’s pending ratification of a free trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union in 2025 is also expected to enhance commercial ties with Belarus, which is a member of the bloc. While these measures will not radically alter the economic position of either regime, they demonstrate the extent to which relations between Iran and Belarus have shifted dramatically in recent years, within a broader Russian-led international framework.

Cooperation on Defense Production

The most consequential element of the deepening partnership between Iran and Belarus is nascent cooperation on defense production. Factors including Iran’s strategic considerations and Russia’s continued influence over both Tehran and Minsk are creating the conditions to produce Iranian drones on Belarusian soil, offering clear battlefield advantages for Russia’s war effort.

In April 2024, Ukrainian forces struck the only confirmed site where Iranian-designed drones are produced in Russia. With the United States lifting its ban against Ukrainian strikes on targets inside Russia using U.S. missiles, Moscow’s supply chains may be even more at risk. Even if a production site lies outside of striking distance, the drones remain vulnerable while in transit or cached. Key transfer points for drones coming directly from Iran are also at high risk of missile attack. In the long term, such factors could ramp up pressure on Russia to diversify its supply chains and defense production. Iran’s acceleration of plans to produce drones in the Gomel region in southeastern Belarus, bordering both Ukraine and Russia, would be an ideal solution for Russia. This would decrease the time from production to deployment, shorten supply chains, and shield production sites from Ukrainian attacks. At present, the Ukrainian government does not consider Belarus a combatant in the war with Russia.

For its part, Belarus has sought to produce Iranian military technology domestically over the past two years. Producing Iranian drones could allow Minsk to profit off the surging global demand for Iranian-designed hardware, and an opportunity to rectify its own defense inadequacies. Furthermore, producing the Shahed-136 drone and providing them to Russia would offset pressure for Belarus to send troops into Ukraine – a demand Putin may be hesitant to make due to the potential for blowback by the Belarusian public against Lukashenko.

The 2023 bilateral defense memorandum between Belarus and Iran reportedly included provisions for the former to begin producing the Shahed-136, the model of drone that has been critical to Russia’s battlefield capabilities in Ukraine. In July 2024, Belarusian military officials unveiled Kochyovnyk – an ostensibly locally designed drone strikingly similar to the Shahed-136. The Ukrainian government reported that, in fact, Belarusian factories were simply repainting drones produced elsewhere. Currently, there is no conclusive evidence that Belarus is independently producing the Iranian drone technology. It appears Iran has stalled the process of outsourcing production since 2023, sending only one confirmed delegation of engineers to assess production sites.

Iran’s calculus on outsourcing drone production has been more complicated. On the one hand, such measures could extend the country’s reach as a major global arms producer. Since 2022, Iranian technology has become integral not only for Russia’s military, but those of other friends, including Sudan, Venezuela, and Ethiopia. Iran has already used outsourced production as a means of expanding exports, as demonstrated by its decision to open a drone factory in Tajikistan in the summer of 2022. On the other hand, Iran likely stalled plans to initiate production in Belarus out of concerns that it could diminish Tehran’s leverage with Moscow or throw a wrench in its pursuit of sanctions relief.

However, Iran’s strategic considerations are in flux, as its network of partners and proxies has begun to unravel. In particular, Hizbollah’s weakening in its conflict with Israel, the collapse of Syria’s Assad regime, and expectation that the United States will return to a “maximum pressure” approach toward Iran have given the latter the impetus for strategic recalibration. With a shifting posture, Iran will likely see it necessary to further align its interests with Russia, one of its few remaining partners. This is perhaps best shown by its recent partnership agreement with Russia, which includes provisions for security and intelligence cooperation. Under the agreement, Russia may pressure Iran to accelerate the production of drones in Belarus. Russia could offer other incentives, like an expansion to the North-South Transport Corridor, accelerating the sluggish delivery of Russian aircraft, or allowing Iran to produce additional Russian hardware.

As a result of these considerations, there has been recent movement on the issue of joint production. In November 2024, a high ranking Belarusian military delegation visited an Iranian defense staff university involved in drone research and development. Further military engagement between Tehran and Minsk is expected this year.

Potential Western Reactions

To oppose the growing partnership between Iran and Belarus, the United States and its allies should counter Moscow’s overtures with adequate deterrence. Though economic sanctions have succeeded in preventing the involvement of some third-party states, they have not stopped Iran and Belarus from enabling Russia’s war. Moscow’s efforts to promote economic integration between its partners will also likely enhance resilience against sanctions, even if the economies of Russia’s close associates remain beset by significant challenges.

Even given these considerations, sanctions remain an important tool of deterrence, particularly by working to deny Iran and Belarus key resources and financial assets. There is also room for improvement with sanctions enforcement, by closing loopholes and ensuring that violations do not go unchecked. Ultimately, sanctions are only one tool that should be used to complement a broader strategy focused on disrupting collaboration between Iran, Belarus, and Russia.

Beyond sanctions, the clearest way to deter Belarusian production of Iranian drone technology would be for Ukraine to threaten Belarus with retaliation against production sites, as it has done in Russia. Ukraine has already issued similar warnings to Belarus against amassing forces on the border, and has made clear its conditions for defensive strikes, which can be broadened. These actions should be taken in conjunction with efforts to assist the Belarusian people in resisting the Lukashenko regime, by rescinding international recognition of his presidency and supporting activism among non-governmental organizations and the Belarusian diaspora.

Adequately deterring Iran will require further actions by the United States to disrupt its drone development and proliferation efforts, by interdicting shipments where possible, imposing sanctions on third-party states that import Iranian drone technology, and by pressuring its European partners to scrap ongoing talks with Tehran. In conjunction with a renewed “maximum pressure” campaign, the Trump administration may seek to directly threaten Iranian drone production sites with kinetic strikes if the technology is further used to attack U.S. military personnel. This would not be wholly unprecedented. In February 2024, the Biden administration authorized strikes against Iranian forces in Iraq and Syria in response to an attack using an Iranian-produced drone that killed three U.S. servicemembers in Jordan. Furthermore, Trump has reportedly begun a review of U.S. military strike options against Iran, indicating he may see this as a plausible course of action.

The United States and its allies should also diminish the efficacy of Iranian drone technology on the battlefield by strengthening Ukraine’s hand. This can be done in two ways. First, by providing more ground and air-based interference systems to enhance Ukraine’s electronic warfare capabilities and disable drones under Russian control. As of December 2024, Ukrainian forces have effectively used “spoofing” tactics to successfully repel or redirect drone attacks. Second, by providing increased intelligence support and additional fighter aircraft, in conjunction with recent efforts by Denmark and France. Washington may also wish to supply additional air defense missiles, which Ukraine has gone through quickly in response to persistent Russian air operations.

Additionally, the United States should assist in Ukraine’s own drone innovation efforts. The $800 million that Washington agreed to provide in October 2024 to produce attack drones was a step in the right direction, but the United States should consider directly contributing to Ukrainian efforts to develop AI-enabled first-person view drones, among other defense technology initiatives.

The threat posed by cooperation on defense production between Iran and Belarus underscores the importance of continued material support for Kyiv from both Europe and the United States. Countering cooperation between these two regimes will require an intensification of diplomatic pressure, in conjunction with new efforts to enhance Western-led deterrence. With shifting strategic considerations, what began as a pragmatic relationship based on shared animosity toward and isolation from the West has evolved into a consequential international challenge, revealing the increasingly significant role of a Russian-led “multi-pariah order.”

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Jack Roush is a doctoral candidate affiliated with the Iranian History Initiative at the London School of Economics, and a research associate at United Against Nuclear Iran. Find him on X @RoushJackW.

Image: khamenei.ir via Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Jack Roush · February 17, 2025

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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