Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Prejudices are what fools use for reason."

– Voltaire

To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart."

– Eleanor Roosevelt

"It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too."

– Alexis de Tocqueville

1. Trump Tilts Toward a Ukraine Sellout

2. Trump’s attack on Zelensky stirs fear of major U.S. shift on Russia

3. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, February 19, 2025

4. Iran Update, February 19, 2025

5. Trump’s Attack on Zelensky Signals New World Order Taking Shape

6. China Uses US Chaos to Reset European Ties

7. Making Trump’s Middle East ‘deal’ a reality

8. Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Draw Up Plans for Cuts

9. Pentagon orders budget revamp to reinvest $50 billion into Trump defense priorities

10. The American Who Went Undercover in Ukraine—for Moscow

11. What We Mean When We Call Something an Intelligence Failure

12. The Strategic Use of Plausible Deniability in Proxy Wars Azerbaijan’s Proxy War (1988–1994)

13. The Guardian view on Trump’s diplomacy: when the US knows the price and ignores values

14. Why We’re Obsessed with JFK Conspiracies

15. ‘Unsafe and irresponsible’: US weighs in on China-Philippines aerial encounter over shoal

16. Race for AI supremacy: Chinese-born scientists in Musk’s Grok squad line up against China

17. The Real China Trump Card

18. The US must reform an arms sales process that invites dawdling

19. The New Meaning of ‘Munich’

20. Still not confident enough: China isn’t likely to move on Taiwan in 2025

1. Trump Tilts Toward a Ukraine Sellout

Conclusion:

The better strategy than beating up Ukraine is making clear to Mr. Putin the arms and pressure he’ll face if the Russian doesn’t wind down the war to accept a durable peace. As it stands now, Mr. Trump’s seeming desperation for a deal is a risk to Ukraine, Europe, U.S. interests—and his own Presidency.

Trump Tilts Toward a Ukraine Sellout

He puts more pressure on Kyiv for a deal than he does on the Kremlin.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-10464d9c?mod=hp_opin_pos_0

By The Editorial Board

Updated Feb. 19, 2025 7:38 pm ET

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gives a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025. (Tetiana Dzhafarova, Pool Photo via AP) Photo: Tetiana Dzhafarova/Associated Press

One challenge in the Trump era is distinguishing when the President is popping off for attention from when his remarks indicate a real change in policy and priorities. President Trump’s rhetorical assault on Ukraine in recent days appears to be the latter, and perhaps it is a sign of an ugly settlement to come.

Mr. Trump on Tuesday mimicked Russian propaganda by claiming Ukraine had started the war with Russia and that Kyiv is little better than the Kremlin because it hasn’t held a wartime election. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky replied on Wednesday that Mr. Trump was living in a “disinformation space,” which may have been imprudent but was accurate.

Mr. Trump escalated on Wednesday, as he usually does, calling Mr. Zelensky a “dictator,” and suggesting Ukraine’s leader snookered the U.S. into supporting a war “that couldn’t be won, that never had to start.” Mr. Zelensky “refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle.’”

It’s tempting to dismiss this exchange as mere rhetoric, but it has the feel of political intention for Mr. Trump. He may be trashing Ukraine’s democracy to make voters think there’s no real difference between the Kremlin and Kyiv. He may think this will make it easier to sell a peace deal that betrays Ukraine.

We doubt most Americans will overlook his false moral equivalence. Mr. Putin’s war of conquest started three years ago this month when Russian troops rolled over the border and tried to capture Kyiv. The war began not because Mr. Putin had legitimate security fears—but because the aging former KGB agent wants to reassemble most of the Soviet empire he saw crumble as a young man.

Ukraine has delayed elections while it is operating under martial law and fighting a war for survival. Its constitution allows this, and Britain under Nazi siege didn’t hold an election during World War II. Was Churchill a dictator?

Ukraine’s democracy is fragile and would be stronger if it could affiliate with Western institutions like the European Union. The only dictator in the war is Mr. Putin, who poisons exiled Russians on foreign soil and banishes opponents to Arctic prison camps. Call us when he holds a free election.

Mr. Trump may also think he can turn Ukrainians against Mr. Zelensky. But the irony is that Mr. Trump’s lashing may have the opposite effect, especially if they see Mr. Zelensky opposing a bad deal forced on them by a U.S.-Russia pact that includes no credible security guarantee against future Russian marauding.

The U.S. has a profound interest in denying Mr. Putin a new perch on more of the NATO border, which is the real reason America has been right to arm Ukraine. A deal that amounts to Ukrainian surrender will be a blow to American power that will radiate to the Pacific and the Middle East. It would be the opposite of Mr. Trump’s promise to restore a golden age of U.S. prestige and world calm.

The oddity so far is that Mr. Trump seems to want a “peace” deal more than Mr. Putin does, which is the opposite of leverage in any negotiation. Mr. Trump wants to be able to claim he brought peace as he promised as a candidate, but a cautionary tale is Joe Biden.

President Biden tried to wash his hands of Afghanistan, but instead his retreat set in motion a chain of global crises that defined his Presidency. Mr. Biden tried to sell his withdrawal as a triumph of military logistics, but the public knew better. Americans may have a similar reaction if they see Russia emerge triumphant and realize this wasn’t the peace they had in mind.

Last week Mr. Trump said Ukraine can’t join NATO and must give up much of its territory to Russia—concessions to Mr. Putin with nothing in return. Mr. Putin’s response this week has been more drone attacks on Ukraine. And here we thought Mr. Trump doesn’t like being played.

The better strategy than beating up Ukraine is making clear to Mr. Putin the arms and pressure he’ll face if the Russian doesn’t wind down the war to accept a durable peace. As it stands now, Mr. Trump’s seeming desperation for a deal is a risk to Ukraine, Europe, U.S. interests—and his own Presidency.

Trump’s Attack on Zelensky Signals New World Order Taking Shape

From alienating allies to praising adversaries, Trump appears set to abandon decades of American foreign policy

https://www.wsj.com/world/trump-zelensky-foreign-policy-world-alliances-a3592bc4?mod=hp_lead_pos1

By Alexander Ward

Feb. 19, 2025 9:00 pm ET

Then-candidate Donald Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in New York City in September. Photo: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

President Trump has dramatically shifted the direction of U.S. foreign policy in four short weeks, making the U.S. a less reliable ally and retreating from global commitments in ways that stand to fundamentally reshape America’s relationship with the world.

His top envoys have floated concessions to Russia in peace talks that stunned European allies, followed by Trump calling Ukraine’s leader a dictator, and he kept Europeans at arms length as the negotiations began. He has dismantled the leading U.S. aid agency providing assistance to the developing world where China aims to establish a foothold. Trump’s plan to own Gaza and remove Palestinians from the enclave erased decades of Washington’s efforts to broker a two-state solution. And his plans to increase tariffs heralded an end to American-fueled globalization.

No one expected Trump to handle global affairs like his predecessors. But few expected him to move so rapidly to reorient U.S. foreign policy away from the course it has charted since 1945.

Since the end of World War II, the American-led system of alliances has bolstered U.S. power, most foreign policy experts say. By vowing to defend allies in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the U.S. more than any other country took on the role of global guarantor of free trade and stability, a mission that included countering first the Soviet Union and, more recently, China.

China Uses US Chaos to Reset European Ties

As the Trump administration breaks with the EU, China steps in

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/china-uses-usa-chaos-reset-european-ties?utm

Feb 20, 2025

By: Salman Rafi Sheikh

Right this way, Mr Wang. After you, my dear Olaf

With President Donald Trump’s rearrival in the White House, China is skillfully exploiting Europe’s growing rift with the United States to seek out European leaders willing to step back from the protectionism they began to build during the Biden era to shield themselves against Chinese economic dominance. That the tone is changing both in Beijing and Europe was evident during the many discussions that China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, had during his latest tour to Europe earlier this month.

Wang reminded EU foreign secretary Kaja Kallas that “There is no fundamental conflict of interest or geopolitical conflicts between China and the EU.” Thus the message is loud and clear: China is willing to sort out any outstanding issues, using both bilateral and multilateral channels. In turn, Kallas ensured the EU’s willingness to continue to “dialogue and cooperate” with China.

Wang Yi’s outreach is both timely and a stark contrast to US Vice President JD Vance’s scathing remarks about European countries in the speech he delivered at the February 14-16 Munich security conference. Leading European papers described Vance’s remarks as “disturbing.”

Vance ruled out that the EU was facing any external threats. “What I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance said. He criticized European leaders for being afraid of the voices of their own people, accusing them of imposing “digital censorship.” It was clearly understood that Vance was alluding to the far right, including the AfD in Germany, which traces its origins to Naziism. Vance blistered the EU for not treating the issue of migration as a security matter as the Trump administration is doing. Vance drew a clear line between the EU and the US insofar as the latter does not see the former ‘right’ enough.

Vance later on met with the leader of the AfD, confirming the Trump administration’s preference for the far right. Vance declined to meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz despite an invitation. But before Vance delivered his speech, the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, had already said in his speech that “the new American administration holds a worldview that is very different from our own. One that shows no regard for established rules, for partnerships or for the trust that has been built over time.” Later, the German chancellor described Vance’s remarks as unacceptable.

Enter China

In the ongoing peace talks between Russia and the US over Ukraine, EU stands completely excluded, as is Ukraine itself. Not only is the EU not present on the table, but talks are taking place in Saudi Arabia, demonstrating both the geographical and political distances that are already there between the US and the EU.

Wang Yi used his speech at the conference to hit where it hurt the most. Ordinarily, one would expect Chinese positions over Ukraine to align with Russia’s. But this was not the case. Wang instead backed EU’s position, saying, “we hope that all parties and stakeholders directly involved participate in the peace talks in due course.” As the war is taking place on European soil, he said, “it is all the more necessary for Europe to play its part for peace, to jointly address the root causes of the crisis, to find a balanced, effective and sustainable security framework, and to achieve long-term peace and stability in Europe.”

Without necessarily risking its ties with Moscow, Beijing is pursuing a purely pragmatic approach informed by realpolitik. By proposing a role for the EU in the talks, Beijing is not necessarily complicating Russia’s positions, for a US decision to withdraw its military support for Ukraine would end the conflict in Russia’s favor whether EU likes it or not. But by taking a pro-EU position, China hopes to only further the transatlantic wedge being created by the Trump administration, ultimately hoping to wean the EU away from the US as much as possible and minimizing chances for a transatlantic alliance to emerge, let alone consolidate, against China.

Wang, therefore, delivered a message of following an overall “pragmatic” approach. For Beijing, this pragmatism holds dual significance. First, there is little denying that China is the EU’s largest import partner. The message was delivered to the EU’s largest economy also because Germany had voted against EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EV) last year. (The German decision was also informed by a desire to avoid Chinese tariffs on German car exports to China.) Still, China’s message has implications for the entire EU, both in the context of the EU-US state of affairs and the EU’s increasing, logical focus on keeping its interests, including reviving its global position, up front. Last year, the 2024 Draghi report on European competitiveness, whose author is Italy’s former prime minister, made clear the critical changes EU needed to make to stay competitive. Wang made sure to convey China’s willingness to German, EU, and French leaders to deepen “all-round cooperation”.

Second, by offering a pragmatic approach, China hopes to isolate the US position on geopolitical issues like Taiwan. On February 16, the US State Department quietly changed its factsheet on US-Taiwan relations, deleting its long-standing phrase that said the US does “not support Tawain independence.” Trump has already caused jitters in Taipei when he said last week that Taiwan, the world’s leading maker of semiconductors, had taken the chip business away from the US and that he wants it to come back, and declaring that Taiwan is rich enough to pay for its own defense.

Multipolarity

By seeking to wean the EU away from the US, China ultimately hopes for a more multipolar world order. “A multipolar world is not only a historical inevitability; it is also becoming a reality,” Wang said in his Munich speech. This is where both China and Russia find their interests converging and this is why Russia is unlikely to have any serious issues with China quietly supporting a place for the EU at the negotiating table. Ultimately, Russia sees the US-backed NATO as a threat. If the EU ultimately opts for a European security system, Russia stands to gain from it. More balanced ties between EU and Russia in the future can also revive Russian economic ties with the continent.

In the long run, therefore, the plan is to remove the US from the European equation. The UK pushed itself out through Brexit. If the US is no longer there as a dominant player, it will only further the Chinese (and Russian) position globally, not just in Europe, to the US’s growing disadvantage.

Dr. Salman Rafi Sheikh is an assistant professor of politics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. He is a long-time contributor to Asia Sentinel.

7. Making Trump’s Middle East ‘deal’ a reality

Excerpts:

Finally, there must be a logical progression toward autonomy for Gaza once the Palestinians are ready for self-governance. That will not be months but rather years. There are generations of hatred that must be resolved. That means decades of demonstrated peace before Gaza residents will be trusted not to resume their conflict with Israel. Egypt and Jordan have shown that peace can be attained. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s Abraham Accords hold much promise for expanding peace in the Middle East. Further integrating the accords with the efforts of an international protectorate can foster peace and prosperity for Gaza. It may even persuade the recalcitrant Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to follow suit.

In all of this, Mr. Trump has the opportunity to elevate hopes for peace in the Middle East. To do it well, he must find the elusive intersection between the art of the deal and the art of the possible.

Making Trump’s Middle East ‘deal’ a reality

A Gaza protectorate plan could succeed where Trump's relocation dreams fall short

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/feb/19/making-trumps-middle-east-deal-reality/

Israel and peace in the Middle East illustration by Linas Garsys / The Washington Times more >

Commentary

By L. Scott Lingamfelter - Wednesday, February 19, 2025

OPINION:

Standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Feb. 4, President Trump did the predictable: be shockingly aspirational. His announcement that the U.S. would seek ownership of the war-torn Gaza Strip was a thunderclap, further declaring that the Palestinians would have to settle elsewhere. Mr. Netanyahu must have thought he had just won the Powerball lottery.

Mr. Trump’s redevelopment plan for the 1.9 million Palestinians in Gaza — a population hovering between that of Phoenix and Houston — is a stretch. Moreover, his presumption that other Arab states would offer up the territory was an unattractive proposition for them. Neither Jordan nor Egypt were enthralled with that idea. They, like other Arab countries, view the Palestinians as a troubled and obdurate population that doesn’t coexist well with anybody.

Even threats to withhold defense aid from Jordan and Egypt are unlikely to persuade them to permanently accommodate the Palestinians. At best, they might be persuaded to provide temporary housing and humanitarian aid until new accommodations can be arranged in Gaza. Yet, despite Arab hesitation, the president’s abilities in artful dealmaking to attain solutions may have real possibilities.

A better approach would be to administer Gaza as a demilitarized and civil Israeli neighbor. Such a solution should involve the U.S. and trusted Western allies, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, in a coalition protectorate to promote economic recovery and rational self-governance for Gaza. That requires diplomacy, not sweeping rhetoric.

First, there must be a new framework for Gaza. The “two-state solution” is dead. Hamas drove a stake in the heart of that idea while butchering 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 250 others on Oct. 7, 2023. Yet Palestinians must have a place to permanently live. The challenge is settling them in a manner that doesn’t threaten Israeli security. That requires a demilitarized territory devoid of Hamas and populated with Palestinians willing to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Moreover, Gaza residents must end anti-Zionist indoctrination in their schools and demonstrably renounce terrorism toward any nation.

Second, a balanced and effective coalition protectorate must preside over Gaza until Palestinian people show themselves worthy of peaceful coexistence with Israel. The coalition’s mission must be to rehabilitate the Gaza population, rebuild homes and businesses, and create an economy that fosters peace and prosperity. This will take many years.

Joining the Arab partners above, the U.S., Canada, France and Sweden — all of which have extensive experience in Middle East peacekeeping — would comprise an interim government. To initially pacify Gaza, all members of the coalition protectorate would contribute a peace enforcement military task force to ensure armed Palestinian elements will not be permitted among the population.

The coalition would supervise and implement the reformation effort, including monitoring funding, establishing a domestic police force, and forming a judiciary to bring about lawful societal order. However, no one with a known connection to Hamas should be permitted to return to Gaza. They lost that right with the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre.

Third, Israel’s role in this arrangement must be that of an observer state. Arab states would unwelcome its membership in the formal coalition protectorate. Yet Israel does have a profound national interest in ensuring that the coalition does not stray toward policies and measures that would jeopardize Israeli security or renew radicalism in Gaza. In that regard, the presence of the U.S. as a prominent protectorate member should be a sufficient guarantee. Observer status for Israel will be necessary to reassure their concerns about this arrangement.

Fourth, the role of the protectorate should diminish over time as the Palestinian people demonstrate in word and deed their willingness to live peacefully beside their Israeli neighbors. This will require confidence-building measures that could include cultural and business exchanges between Israel and Gaza. Moreover, the process must not be artificially rushed but evolve based on outcomes and not arbitrary projected dates.

Finally, there must be a logical progression toward autonomy for Gaza once the Palestinians are ready for self-governance. That will not be months but rather years. There are generations of hatred that must be resolved. That means decades of demonstrated peace before Gaza residents will be trusted not to resume their conflict with Israel. Egypt and Jordan have shown that peace can be attained. Indeed, Mr. Trump’s Abraham Accords hold much promise for expanding peace in the Middle East. Further integrating the accords with the efforts of an international protectorate can foster peace and prosperity for Gaza. It may even persuade the recalcitrant Palestinian Authority in the West Bank to follow suit.

In all of this, Mr. Trump has the opportunity to elevate hopes for peace in the Middle East. To do it well, he must find the elusive intersection between the art of the deal and the art of the possible.

• L. Scott Lingamfelter is a retired Army colonel and combat veteran (1973-2001) and former member of the Virginia House of Delegates (2002-2018). He is the author of “Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War” (University Press of Kentucky, 2020) and “Yanks in Blue Berets: American U.N. Peacekeepers in the Middle East” (UPK, 2023).

8. Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Draw Up Plans for Cuts

As the old (er...new) saying goes: DOGE or be DOGE'd

Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Draw Up Plans for Cuts

The defense secretary has told senior leaders to prepare to trim 8 percent from the budget over each of the next five years, officials said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/us/politics/hegseth-military-cuts.html

By Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt

Reporting from Washington

Feb. 19, 2025

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered senior military and Defense Department officials to draw up plans to cut 8 percent from the defense budget over each of the next five years, officials said on Wednesday.

Mr. Hegseth said in a memo issued on Tuesday that a number of branches within the military and the Pentagon should turn in budget-cutting proposals by next Monday, two officials said. The memo listed some 17 exceptions to the proposed cuts, including military operations at the southern border.

One senior official said the cuts appeared likely to be part of an effort to focus Pentagon money on programs that the Trump administration favors, instead of actually cutting the Defense Department’s $850 billion annual budget.

For example, the Pentagon is already spending more money on the Trump administration’s efforts at the southern border, including on military flights that have taken migrants in the United States to countries as far away as India.

Mr. Hegseth has vowed to use thousands of active-duty U.S. troops to help stem the flow of migrants across the border, a top priority for President Trump. But illegal crossings, which reached record levels during the Biden administration, slowed significantly before Mr. Trump took office last month.

In a statement on Wednesday, Robert G. Salesses, the acting deputy defense secretary, said the president’s “charge to the department is clear: to achieve peace through strength.”

He added that the Pentagon was undertaking the budget cuts with an aim of bolstering other priorities. “To achieve our mandate from President Trump,” he said, “we are guided by his priorities, including securing our borders, building the Iron Dome for America and ending radical and wasteful government D.E.I. programs and preferencing.”

In the memo issued on Tuesday, which The Washington Post reported earlier, Mr. Hegseth repeated a phrase he uses often about the need for the military to focus on “the warrior ethos.” He called for a rejection of “excessive bureaucracy” and unnecessary spending.

Any cuts to the defense budget may face opposition in Congress, where lawmakers often focus on budget cuts that could affect their districts.

The Pentagon is also bracing for proposed cuts to its work force, and has already been asked to hand over to the Trump administration lists of probationary employees who could be laid off.

A senior military official said on Wednesday that Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency had expressed interest in moving full-time Pentagon employees to contract positions so that they would be easier to fire.

On social media on Tuesday, Mr. Hegseth shared a post from Mr. Musk’s team saying that it was looking forward to eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse.”

“DOGE the waste; Double-Down on warriors,” Mr. Hegseth wrote.

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent. More about Helene Cooper

Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times, focusing on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism issues overseas, topics he has reported on for more than three decades. More about Eric Schmitt

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 20, 2025, Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Hegseth Orders Plans to Cut 8% of Defense Budget for Each of Next 5 Years. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

9. Pentagon orders budget revamp to reinvest $50 billion into Trump defense priorities

One problem with this statement is that China is not in a single geographic location and not even just in the Indo-Pacific theater. Can we not see that it is conducting malign activities in every region of the world?

Excerpt:

Hegseth has said publicly that the Pentagon's focus is on U.S. border security and threats posed by China. He has said the U.S. can no longer be "primarily focused on the security of Europe".

Pentagon orders budget revamp to reinvest $50 billion into Trump defense priorities

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-looks-8-defense-budget-cut-each-next-5-years-washington-post-reports-2025-02-19/

By Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart

February 19, 20256:55 PM ESTUpdated 9 hours ago

The Pentagon building is seen in Arlington, Virginia, U.S, April 6, 2023. REUTERS/Tom Brenner/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

SummaryCompanies

Budget review takes aim at Biden-era programsCould help Hegseth prioritize Asia, border security missionElon Musk has called F-35 fighter jet wasteful

WASHINGTON, Feb 19 (Reuters) - The Pentagon said on Wednesday it was directing military leaders to draw up a list of potential cuts totaling about $50 billion from the upcoming budget for fiscal year 2026 to be redirected into President Donald Trump's priorities for national defense.

The review could set the stage for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to follow through with goals to invest more in the Asia-Pacific and prioritize securing the U.S. border with Mexico, along with other reforms.

It was unclear how the effort would square with other cost-savings initiatives led by Elon Musk's government downsizing teams, which have started working from the Pentagon as civilian employees brace for job cuts.

Robert Salesses, performing the duties of the deputy defense secretary, said the military would develop a list of potential savings after examining the budget drawn up by the previous administration of President Joe Biden.

"The offsets are targeted at 8% of the Biden administration's FY26 budget, totaling around $50 billion, which will then be spent on programs aligned with President Trump's priorities," Salesses said.

The statement clarifies a memo reported on Wednesday by Reuters from Hegseth, who asked some parts of the military to propose what could be cut as part of a potential 8% spending reduction for them over each of the next five years, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

There was a long list of exemptions, including U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, funding for the military's mission along the U.S. border with Mexico, as well as missile defense and autonomous weapons, one of the officials said.

The military's commands that oversee operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were not exempt.

The Pentagon's budget is approaching $1 trillion per year. In December, then-President Joe Biden signed a bill authorizing $895 billion in defense spending for the fiscal year ending September 30.

Hegseth has said publicly that the Pentagon's focus is on U.S. border security and threats posed by China. He has said the U.S. can no longer be "primarily focused on the security of Europe".

As Musk's teams start their review, some civilian employees in the military said they had started receiving emails on Thursday saying they could be separated from the government since they were hired less than a year ago.

Leaders from across the political spectrum have long criticized waste and inefficiency at the Defense Department. But Democrats and civil service unions have said Musk, the world's richest person, lacks the expertise to restructure the Pentagon, and the efforts of his team risk exposing classified programs.

Attempting to cancel defense programs could trigger pushback from lawmakers to defend spending in their electoral districts, a fact defense contractors are well aware of.

The F-35 fighter jet, for example, has suppliers located in all 50 U.S. states, a point Lockheed makes with a map on its website detailing the economic value derived from production of the jets. https://www.lockheedmartin.com/f35/about/economic-impact.html, opens new tab

Musk, himself a major U.S. defense contractor, has a particular disdain for certain defense projects, especially the F-35. He has posted on X that "Some U.S. weapons systems are good, albeit overpriced, but please, in the name of all that is holy, let us stop the worst military value for money in history that is the F-35 program!"

Get weekly news and analysis on U.S. politics and how it matters to the world with the Reuters Politics U.S. newsletter. Sign up here.

Reporting by Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart. Additional reporting by Chris Sanders and Jasper Ward; Editing by David Gregorio

10. The American Who Went Undercover in Ukraine—for Moscow

Needless to say this came as a surprise to me. The idea in this excerpt shocks my sensibilities.

Excerpts:

To Martindale, Russia symbolized the traditional values that he believed his own country had forsaken. “I realized that I want to be in Russia if World War III starts,” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I did not want there to be any chance that I would be fighting on the wrong side.”

While his actions may have been extreme, Martindale’s view of Russia as a sanctuary from a Western world he believed had lost its way underscores a shift among some American ultraconservatives. Once deriding Russia for its chaos and venality, they now idealize it as the one major power willing to oppose the U.S. and its allies, while arguing that the West provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin into attacking Ukraine.

The American Who Went Undercover in Ukraine—for Moscow

Daniel Martindale’s decision to become a spy comes amid a growing ultraconservative embrace of Russian values

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/russia-ukraine-american-spy-daniel-martindale-fc7b51f5?st=JmCRnx&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Brett Forrest

Follow and Vera Bergengruen

Feb. 19, 2025 9:03 pm ET

As Russian troops poured across Ukraine’s border in the opening hours of the February 2022 invasion, Daniel Martindale pedaled through Kyiv, weighted down with supplies—and a secret.

Riding a scavenged mountain bike, the red-bearded 31-year-old from Indiana was planning to offer his services to Russian troops on the front line.

At first, he didn’t get far. Ukrainian security agents on high alert in Kyiv detained the unusual visitor, letting him continue his ride east the next morning only after deciding he was no saboteur.

It was the beginning of a high-risk descent into espionage and betrayal for the self-described Christian missionary. The journey would land Martindale in Moscow after he worked undercover in eastern Ukraine for more than two years, secretly calling in Russian attacks on Ukrainian troops and border towns.

To Martindale, Russia symbolized the traditional values that he believed his own country had forsaken. “I realized that I want to be in Russia if World War III starts,” he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I did not want there to be any chance that I would be fighting on the wrong side.”

While his actions may have been extreme, Martindale’s view of Russia as a sanctuary from a Western world he believed had lost its way underscores a shift among some American ultraconservatives. Once deriding Russia for its chaos and venality, they now idealize it as the one major power willing to oppose the U.S. and its allies, while arguing that the West provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin into attacking Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Photo: roman pilipey/AFP/Getty Images

This worldview migrated from the fringe this week as the Trump administration opened bilateral talks with Russia in Riyadh Tuesday, putting a dramatic end to three years of diplomatic isolation for Moscow and opening a yawning rift with Ukraine. At a news conference, President Trump blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war and failing to pursue a peace deal.

When Zelensky shot back that Trump was parroting a Russian propaganda narrative, Trump took to social media to call his counterpart a “dictator” whose country had stolen U.S. aid. This about-face from the White House, casting Russia as a partner for peace, was celebrated across far-right media channels.

Putin’s outreach

Moscow has cultivated Western conservatives like Martindale in recent years, presenting itself as an ideological ally to Americans disaffected with their own country.

In August, Putin established a temporary-residency visa for anyone who opposes the “destructive neoliberal ideological agenda” in their countries and shares “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” According to Russian state statistics, nearly 5,000 Westerners have received temporary residency in the country since the beginning of 2022, a sharp increase over preceding decades.

A new “Welcome to Russia” office has been set up to help clear their path to a new life and showcase Western families that have emigrated to the country. The effort is headed by Russian parliamentarian Maria Butina, who was convicted in U.S. federal court of acting as an unregistered foreign agent in 2018.

“There is a place in this world where you can live traditional family values, like your best vision of 1950s America,” said Joseph Rose, a YouTuber from Florida who moved to Russia in 2022 and lives in Moscow with his wife and four children. “That place exists right now, and it’s here in Russia.”

When Daniel Martindale was young, his family visited the region around the Russian port city of Vladivostok. Photo: Yuri Smityuk/TASS/Zuma Press

‘Homesick’

Daniel Martindale grew up riding tractors on farms in upstate New York and Indiana. His parents, Jim and Sandy, instilled in their seven children a deep suspicion of the U.S. government over policies they believed were “defiling” the country. Dan was home-schooled with his siblings, and started classes with a prayer.

In 2001, the family moved to rural China after Jim Martindale began working with a Christian missionary group that helped refugees from North Korea. He took a job building a dairy farm to employ the refugees near the city of Hunchun, wedged between North Korea and Russia, he said.

Living in China enabled the American family to pursue their interest in working the soil while preaching the Gospel—a life they call “marketplace evangelism.”

They befriended a neighbor who said he had been a Russian military-intelligence officer. The former spy and his wife took the Martindales over the border into Russia’s Far East and extolled the country’s supposed support of Christian values and the purity of its agriculture.

They showed the American family abandoned collective farms with vast tracts of land near the port city of Vladivostok, which they said could be leased for 25 cents an acre. The experience sparked in Dan Martindale a deep attraction to Russia.

Even after the family returned to Indiana, “his heart was in Russia,” his father said. “And his goal was to live there, marry a good Russian woman, and farm.”

Martindale says he went through a transformation watching the 2005 documentary “Loose Change,” which claimed falsely that Washington was responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq left him even more disillusioned with his country.

“Washington is my enemy,” he later wrote in a blog post. “They literally are at war with their own citizens since 2001.”

He studied mechanical engineering and worked with his father selling farm equipment. After saving up for years, Dan took the step he had long dreamed of and moved to Russia in 2018. Returning to the Far East, he studied Russian in Vladivostok and taught English in his spare time.

Four years earlier, the Kremlin had annexed Crimea and fomented a war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. Eight time zones away, Martindale immersed himself in local life.

A year into Martindale’s stay, Russian authorities deported him for violating labor laws for foreign students and banned him from returning for five years, according to his father. “That was heartbreaking, honestly,” Martindale said.

Desperate to find a way to return, he enrolled in 2020 at a veterinarian school in Belarus but was turned away by authorities at an airport in Minsk. He moved to southern Poland, teaching English and living in a church at the invitation of priests during the Covid-19 pandemic.

He was homesick “not for the USA, but for Russia,” he wrote on a blog years later. When Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border in early 2022, he decided to act.

Russian armored vehicles are loaded onto railway platforms not far from Russia-Ukraine border in 2022. Photo: Associated Press

Crossing over

After finding a mountain bike in a trash heap near Krakow, Martindale crossed the Ukrainian border in early February 2022. He rode against a flow of Ukrainians fleeing their country on foot, some carrying no more than a change of clothes.

Daniel told people he encountered that he was on a Christian mission. From Lviv, near Ukraine’s western border, Martindale hitched a ride to Kyiv.

As the car approached the Ukrainian capital, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was just beginning.

Tank columns poured south from Belarus. Russian attack helicopters landed commandos at a military airfield near Kyiv, igniting a battle for its control. Paratroopers jumped into the capital’s outskirts, where Ukrainian forces decimated them. In Moscow, military commanders watched their plans to seize Kyiv crumble, auguring a protracted war.

Martindale contacted Russian forces by phone via an account on the Telegram messaging app that was meant to lure Ukrainian soldiers to surrender.

“I asked them for an opportunity to meet up with Russian troops,” he said in an interview. “They encouraged me to travel east further. And so that’s what I did.”

At night, Ukrainian air defense batteries launched missiles at incoming barrages, raining debris on residential buildings and setting them alight. Civilian casualties mounted. By day, Martindale pedaled his bike eastward, wearing several coats and pairs of pants against the cold and carrying homemade peanut butter treats to share with future hosts.

On the road, he read Russian-language social-media postings and spoke with locals who crossed his path. Martindale came to believe that the U.S. had financed Ukraine’s split from Russia and that Kyiv had no right to subdue its breakaway regions.

“Washington is pushing every button it can to make the Russian people angry,” he later wrote.

Martindale justified mounting evidence of Russian atrocities committed against Ukrainian civilians, reasoning that the Kremlin was “dealing with criminals that have to be dealt with.”

He arrived in eastern Ukraine after a nearly two-month journey by bike, train and car. Martindale was closer than ever to Russian-controlled territory, but as a citizen of a country that opposed Moscow, he would have to earn his way across to their side of the war.

A pockmarked sign in Martindale’s one-time home reads, ‘I Love Bohoyavlenka.’ Photo: yasuyoshi chiba/AFP/Getty Images

A village named ‘Epiphany’

He moved into a single-story home in a Ukrainian-held village 30 miles west of Donetsk. The house was made of brick and cinder block, with insulating straw. In a small barn in the back, Martindale accumulated a menagerie of chickens, ducks, goats, and a trio of cows left behind by fleeing Ukrainians.

The name of the village, Bohoyavlenka, translated roughly to “epiphany,” and Martindale felt called to live there, he said, in “one of those religious moments.”

At times, the village was less than 10 miles from the front line, close enough to hear artillery fire. Martindale recycled a neighbor’s discarded dog tag, embossed his name and blood type, and wore it on a chain around his neck.

In his yard, he planted carrots, sweet potatoes and corn. He bought eggs from one villager, milk from another. He helped gather and distribute firewood and repair roofs damaged by Russian shelling. Locals who invited Martindale to birthday and holiday celebrations speculated that he was an international observer of the war or a mercenary gathering intelligence, he said.

They weren’t far off.

Martindale was tracking Ukrainian troop movements and positions, including the location of a brigade command-and-control center, and transmitting the information to his Russian contacts.

“I had no clear idea about whether the intelligence I relayed was useful or not,” he later wrote.

His parents shipped medical supplies from Indiana, along with prayer books in Ukrainian and Russian. The village had no church, and Sandy Martindale encouraged her son by texting him passages from “They Knew Their God,” a book about Christians who had endured ordeals for their faith. He sent back videos of his farmwork and his efforts to aid elderly neighbors.

His parents were unaware of his espionage, they said in an interview with the Journal, though they shared their son’s view that Russia was fighting a just war. Jim Martindale said he believed that the Central Intelligence Agency had “orchestrated regime change” in Ukraine and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “a paid actor.”

Alone in his house at night, Martindale watched the news on Russian state TV and prayed aloud to aid the fight against Ukraine and protect Russian troops.

When a battalion of Ukrainian troops billeted in Bohoyavlenka, a pair of medics moved in with Martindale, testing his ability to conceal his espionage and allegiance.

Daniel Martindale settled in the town of Bohoyavlenka, just 30 miles west of Donetsk, where he planted carrots, sweet potatoes and corn.

Daniel Martindale

“My Russian self had to die and be buried for a while,” he later wrote. “I had to be careful about my every word and facial expression.”

In the evenings, he recited the Lord’s Prayer in Ukrainian with the medics, whose wariness abated with time.

“They had a bad habit of telling me things that were useful for Russian intelligence,” Martindale wrote.

A lengthy struggle for the village of Vuhledar began in mid-2022 and later spilled over into Bohoyavlenka, which was struck repeatedly by GRAD missiles. Blasts shook Martindale’s house, jolting him awake in the middle of the night. A direct hit on a school near Martindale killed a number of soldiers.

When the Ukrainians struck back, they pounded Russian positions with artillery supplied by the U.S., infuriating Martindale.

“What the Ukrainian army was doing, killing Russian troops, was unpleasant,” Martindale said. “But the fact that it had come from my country made it all the more bitter.”

He responded by constructing a homemade bomb, intending to use it against one of the U.S.-made Ukrainian artillery pieces. But as he attempted to assemble the components using explosives he had collected from Ukrainian firing positions, he instead ignited a fire in his house. The village fire brigade rushed to his aid and extinguished the blaze.

The longer he remained in Bohoyavlenka, the more suspicion he aroused. An agitated Ukrainian soldier with a rifle arrived at Martindale’s house one afternoon, claiming that the American helped Russian forces carry out strikes on military positions. Martindale’s neighbors defended him, “saving my life,” he later wrote.

After two years of sending intelligence to his Russian handlers, Martindale’s phone was failing last summer. His contacts dropped him a new one from a drone.

His family in Indiana monitored the progress of the war online as the front line neared Martindale’s village. “He couldn’t go to Russia, but it appears that Russia is coming to him,” his brother Christian joked, according to his father.

After helping residents evacuate Bohoyavlenka as advancing Russian troops neared the village last fall, he stayed behind. In late October, he received a message to prepare for extraction.

He freed his animals and texted the Russians a photo of his house. Following their instructions, he huddled in his basement, living on canned meat and dried bread.

Four days later, Russian troops poured into Bohoyavlenka, and Martindale heard someone call out his name. Emerging from the basement, he found Russian soldiers in his yard.

They led him out of the village and into Russian-held territory.

A view of central Moscow earlier this month. Photo: maxim shemetov/Reuters

A new life

Under escort, Martindale moved southeast in the direction of the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, he said, and spent the night in a hotel before taking a lie-detector test. He felt like a prisoner, he said, someone to be exchanged for a high-value Russian captive in Ukrainian custody.

“I was prepared for that,” he said. “That kind of ending.”

His minders installed Martindale in an apartment in a location he has declined to share. In early November, he was dispatched to Moscow, catching glimpses of the capital through the window of a car.

In a press conference there, a state-media representative introduced Martindale to reporters, confirming him as a spy for the Kremlin. Holding up his battered and burned U.S. passport, Martindale said he was ready to trade it for a Russian one “yesterday.”

His family watched the event on a YouTube streaming channel. It was their first glimpse of him since he had left Bohoyavlenka. They were unaware that Daniel had been spying for Russia, yet they weren’t surprised. “He had announced to us many years ago that his goal was to live out his life in Russia,” Jim Martindale said.

They say they share his dark and suspicious view of the U.S. government, and his belief that without the support of U.S. intelligence services, Ukraine wouldn’t exist. “There is no such thing as Ukrainian,” his father says.

Martindale has been sharing his views on the war and his role in it on social-media channels under the name “Shepherd at War.” He worries Trump won’t be hard enough on Ukraine as the peace talks proceed. “Kiev must be brought to its knees,” he posted on Feb. 16. “If Washington wants a deal, let them gather up the criminals from Kiev and fly them to Moscow for trial.”

But the dream of returning to Russia’s Far East and living on a farm has eluded Martindale so far. While he has secured temporary political asylum, allowing him to apply for Russian citizenship, he said he has been told the decision can take two years.

For now, he said he lives under the close watch of a security detail and is told where he can and can’t go. “I’m not 100% a free man,” he said.

Write to Brett Forrest at brett.forrest@wsj.com and Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com

11. What We Mean When We Call Something an Intelligence Failure

Yes. In my mind, an intelligence failure is usually a decision maker not heeding the intelligence assessment.

Excerpts:

Conclusion

The concept of intelligence failure continues to be the subject of a complex discussion that is connected to the equally complex concept of intelligence success. For example, the 1962 intelligence estimate that concluded the Soviet Union would not place missiles in Cuba also advised that surveillance be maintained in case the missiles were placed in Cuba. By conventional definition, this would be an intelligence failure because intelligence did not predict the placement of missiles, but also an intelligence success because it was U.S. intelligence that detected and identified the missiles in Cuba. Another intelligence estimate in 1990 accurately assessed that a post-Warsaw Pact Yugoslavia would dissolve amidst violent ethnic clashes. Still, that assessment had no apparent impact on U.S. policy, and U.S. policymakers seemed surprised when the violence began. By conventional definition, this would be an intelligence success because of an accurate “prediction” but also an intelligence failure because policymakers failed to act. These scenarios highlight the need for plain language clarity in the discourse and explanations of intelligence failure and success.

Over the past 75 years, the term intelligence failure has experienced a form of semantic drift known as broadening, where the meaning of a word becomes more inclusive than the original definition. Intelligence failure has become a binary catchphrase that misrepresents the capabilities of intelligence and the complex relationship between intelligence analysis, warning, and policymaker decision-making. Impulsive claims of intelligence failure immediately after a surprise event provide cognitive closure and instantaneous, focused, causal attribution. It offers “intelligence screwed up” as a simple explanation that “appeals to the yearnings of the general public then colors discussion and debate among even the more sophisticated.”

Accepting that intelligence services cannot predict every future event can leave policymakers and the public feeling naked and vulnerable. In her seminal case study on the Pearl Harbor attack, Roberta Wohlstetter concluded that it is only human to want unique and univocal guarantees from intelligence. But in a cautionary note, she added, “if the study of Pearl Harbor has anything to offer for the future, it is this: We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and learn to live with it.” Ambiguity, uncertainty, and surprise are characteristics of the world. Labeling surprise events as simply an intelligence failure cannot alter this reality.

What We Mean When We Call Something an Intelligence Failure - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Gary Gomez · February 20, 2025

When most people hear the words “intelligence failure,” they think of a surprise event that an intelligence service failed to predict.

But what if that’s all wrong?

Are the assumptions surrounding that term based on an inaccurate understanding of the capabilities of intelligence? Has the term evolved to include problems beyond the scope of intelligence community responsibilities? Is it premature to immediately label a surprise attack an intelligence failure?

To address these questions, I seek to critically review what we mean by intelligence failure and how the term is used and perceived in the public sphere. Our country would be better off if this point of view moved beyond intelligence organizations and the academy, into the halls of Congress and newsrooms, whose perspectives are swayed by the narratives generated by the intelligence failure moniker. This diverse group’s more enlightened understanding of the capabilities and influence of intelligence can positively impact reform initiatives about the mission, structure, funding, and use of intelligence.

Become a Member

Defining the Term Intelligence Failure

Intelligence failure is one of the most researched topics in intelligence studies. To be sure — intelligence has and will make errors. Faulty analysis can result from mistakes in intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination. In 1962, U.S. intelligence assessments incorrectly assessed that the Soviet Union would not place missiles in Cuba. Before the Yom Kippur War in 1973, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies assessed that Arab armies would not attack despite having intelligence showing military activity consistent with an attack; and in 2004, U.S. and other Western intelligence services relied too heavily on the information of an unreliable Iraqi defector regarding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

But amid the plethora of intelligence failure case studies, no single, commonly agreed-upon definition of intelligence failure appears to exist. These case studies also revealed three attributes associated with intelligence failure that deserve critical review — a failure to predict, a policymaker’s failure to act on intelligence, and failures from other government organizations.

Realistic Expectations of Intelligence

Intelligence studies scholar Mark Lowenthal suggests that the real intelligence failure is failing to adequately explain the role of intelligence and its limitations to the public. Many assumptions about the intelligence community are rooted in flawed expectations about intelligence capabilities. One of those expectations associated with intelligence failure is the ability to predict the date and time of a surprise event or a military attack. In the case of public pronouncements of intelligence failure, the definition of prediction must be understood from the perspective of the policymaker, journalist, and public.

The U.S. intelligence community explicitly states it does not engage in prediction. Prediction is not mentioned in the National Intelligence Strategy that defines the type of analysis provided to policymakers. And even though intelligence practitioners and seasoned policymakers would consider it a self-evident truth that intelligence cannot predict, the expectation for the intelligence community to predict events remains part of the political, journalistic, and public discourse. Immediately following the 9/11 attacks, Porter Goss (who would later become director of the CIA) said that “the job of the intelligence community is prediction,” and former general counsel of the CIA, Jeffrey Smith, agreed that “the CIA’s job is to predict.” However, the issue is not whether intelligence should predict an event on a specific date and time — the issue is that the world is fundamentally unpredictable.

The connotation of prediction in this sense is that intelligence should have known specifically the who, how, when, and where of an attack or surprise event. However, prediction is based on analyzing trends with a linear, progressive, and repeatable course. Yet human activity rarely behaves that way. Complexity science suggests that a complex system, like the international system, comprises many interacting components whose emergent global behavior is more complex than can be predicted. And retrospective coherence theory suggests that in an unordered information environment, patterns that emerge can be perceived as they happen, but they cannot be predicted. Even casual observation would show that the current world structure behaves nonlinearly, has uncertain cause and effect dynamics, and is not predictably repeatable. Two purported intelligence failures illustrate how an unforeseeable act can precipitate an unpredictable and chaotic chain of events.

The event that precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall was an impromptu press conference on Nov. 9, 1989 where a novice East German bureaucrat made ambiguous statements about proposed border crossing policies that many interpreted as indicting an immediate policy change.. Within hours, crowds of people flocked to gated checkpoints along the wall, and East German guards began to allow people to pass unchecked. This unscripted and unplanned event triggered a cascade of subsequent actions that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Labeling this event as an intelligence failure presumes that U.S. intelligence agencies could predict that a low-level official would utter words that, unbeknownst even to that official, would spark a public reaction that resulted in the destruction of portions of the Berlin Wall that same day.

On Aug. 15, 2021, Kabul fell to Taliban forces hours after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. Within hours of the fall of Kabul, news outlets, cable news, and national security experts labeled it an intelligence failure. But what was the failure of intelligence? It could not be considered a surprise given the numerous warnings in preceding months that the Afghan government would most likely collapse in the immediate wake of a U.S. military withdrawal. Claims of a failure to predict cannot be substantiated given there were no indications that the Afghan president would flee the country and that the Afghan army would collapse when it did. Indeed, even the Taliban was surprised by the rapid collapse of the Kabul government.

Stating that intelligence does not predict does not relieve it of the mission to provide warning of attacks or other surprise events. The 2019 U.S. National Intelligence Strategy states that anticipatory intelligence looks to the future as foresight (identifying emerging issues), forecasting (developing potential scenarios), or warning. The differences between these types of intelligence are a blurred overlap and not always distinctive. For example, the literature on estimates and warning indicates that the value of intelligence warning depends on variables like the credibility of sources, probability of judgments, the proximity of warning to the probable event, and individual policymaker decision-making styles. However, the distinction between prediction, as used with intelligence failure, and estimative anticipatory intelligence is stark.

The zero-sum nature of “failure to predict” commands the immediate narrative and is engrained in the national discussion as the single cause of the surprise. It sets a tone that prejudices subsequent reviews. It requires subsequent discourse to explain why intelligence did not predict instead of a thoughtful examination of how the entire national security enterprise performed. Eliminating the presumption of prediction in public discourse can help thwart erroneous assumptions about intelligence capabilities and blunt the inertia of a misleading narrative.

Failure to Act on Intelligence

The intelligence failure label has also been applied to instances where policymakers fail to “act” on intelligence. This includes a failure by decision-makers to act on intelligence appropriately and a failure to make sound policy based on intelligence. This is not about whether a surprise event was an intelligence failure or a policy failure. The issue is that when policymakers fail to “act,” it is also considered an intelligence failure.

For example, one author argued that the coronavirus was the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history. However, the author also noted that the intelligence community issued a steady drumbeat of warnings about a coronavirus outbreak far enough in advance to allow for better preparation. Despite these warnings, the author concluded that the crisis was overwhelmingly the sole responsibility of the White House. It was also suggested that these alerts had little impact on senior administration officials, implying that there was likely nothing the intelligence community could have told the White House that would have made any difference.

Another article refers to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack as an intelligence failure, even though Israeli leaders were unwilling to listen and heed the warnings of the predictive intelligence they received from their intelligence system. Reporting also emerged that months before the attack, Israeli military leaders deemed intelligence assessments that Hamas military training activity was indicative of a large scale attack as “fantasies”. Reports also revealed that more than a year before the attack, Israeli leadership had the Hamas battle plan for the Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

The term “acting on intelligence” is ill-defined and subjective. Policymakers can delay decisions because of contradicting policy advice, political considerations, waiting for more information, or personal uncertainty. The information can also be ignored due to cognitive bias or powerful institutional bias. These can be considered “pink flamingo” events, where the “known knowns” are ignored in spite of the information resembling a bright and ugly bird. While intelligence is obligated to ensure the policymaker fully understands the analysis, efforts by intelligence analysts to persuade, convince, or “push harder” on the policymaker can come perilously close to if not actually advocating for a specific policy. An uncomfortable truth is that policymakers are free to disagree with or completely disregard intelligence assessments. Given this, it is unclear how policymakers’ failure to “act” or create a “sound” policy can be considered a failure of intelligence.

Whole of Government Failures

Decades of case studies on intelligence failures show that intelligence is rarely the sole reason we are surprised or unprepared for an attack or other event. Instead, problems with foreign policy, defense policy, and other government activities often contribute to unpreparedness and the element of surprise. While this is commonly understood in intelligence and national security studies circles, the dominant intelligence failure moniker suppresses that knowledge among junior civilian and military policy staff, journalists, and the general public. This is not a matter of distinguishing between policy failures and intelligence failures — it highlights that shortcomings in government organizations beyond the intelligence community can also lead to a lack of anticipation and preparedness.

For example, the congressional review of the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack faulted the intelligence offices of the War and Navy Departments for failing to recognize the significance of intercepted diplomatic messages from Tokyo to Honolulu. It also cited supervisory, administrative, and lack of coordination between the two commands as contributing factors to being surprised by the attack.

The 9/11 Commission concluded that a lack of imagination that airplanes would be used as weapons against targets is principally associated with the intelligence community but was part of a shared view in other elements of the U.S. government. The report also argued that the failure of previous U.S. policy in response to previous al-Qaeda attacks may have signaled that such attacks are risk-free. The commission also concluded that the most severe weaknesses in agency capabilities were in the domestic arena, explicitly calling out the Federal Aviation Administration’s inability to take aggressive, anticipatory security measures. The report also stated that one of the more significant contributing factors was how policymakers set intelligence priorities and allocated resources.

After the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, credible reporting indicated that in 2021, the Israel Defense Forces considered the possibility of infiltration into Israeli communities or an invasion as negligible and directed the focus of intelligence away from Hamas personnel and toward the threat of rockets launched from Gaza. The Israeli military also reasoned that the border barrier between Israel and Gaza denied Hamas the possibility of invading Israel. In addition, Israeli political leadership focus was on the West Bank and had directed the transfer of Israeli units from the Gaza border to the West Bank. If accurate, these reports could indicate that political leadership and military preparedness contributed to systemic anomalies similar to other purported intelligence failures.

Conclusion

The concept of intelligence failure continues to be the subject of a complex discussion that is connected to the equally complex concept of intelligence success. For example, the 1962 intelligence estimate that concluded the Soviet Union would not place missiles in Cuba also advised that surveillance be maintained in case the missiles were placed in Cuba. By conventional definition, this would be an intelligence failure because intelligence did not predict the placement of missiles, but also an intelligence success because it was U.S. intelligence that detected and identified the missiles in Cuba. Another intelligence estimate in 1990 accurately assessed that a post-Warsaw Pact Yugoslavia would dissolve amidst violent ethnic clashes. Still, that assessment had no apparent impact on U.S. policy, and U.S. policymakers seemed surprised when the violence began. By conventional definition, this would be an intelligence success because of an accurate “prediction” but also an intelligence failure because policymakers failed to act. These scenarios highlight the need for plain language clarity in the discourse and explanations of intelligence failure and success.

Over the past 75 years, the term intelligence failure has experienced a form of semantic drift known as broadening, where the meaning of a word becomes more inclusive than the original definition. Intelligence failure has become a binary catchphrase that misrepresents the capabilities of intelligence and the complex relationship between intelligence analysis, warning, and policymaker decision-making. Impulsive claims of intelligence failure immediately after a surprise event provide cognitive closure and instantaneous, focused, causal attribution. It offers “intelligence screwed up” as a simple explanation that “appeals to the yearnings of the general public then colors discussion and debate among even the more sophisticated.”

Accepting that intelligence services cannot predict every future event can leave policymakers and the public feeling naked and vulnerable. In her seminal case study on the Pearl Harbor attack, Roberta Wohlstetter concluded that it is only human to want unique and univocal guarantees from intelligence. But in a cautionary note, she added, “if the study of Pearl Harbor has anything to offer for the future, it is this: We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and learn to live with it.” Ambiguity, uncertainty, and surprise are characteristics of the world. Labeling surprise events as simply an intelligence failure cannot alter this reality.

Become a Member

Gary Gomez is a research fellow with the foreign policy think tank fp21, focusing on the intelligence-policy relationship. His research in the field, 22 years as an intelligence consumer, and 20 years of intelligence community experience have resulted in unique perspectives on how non-intelligence professionals perceive and utilize intelligence.

Image: Midjourney

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Gary Gomez · February 20, 2025

12. The Strategic Use of Plausible Deniability in Proxy Wars Azerbaijan’s Proxy War (1988–1994)

The Strategic Use of Plausible Deniability in Proxy Wars Azerbaijan’s Proxy War (1988–1994)

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/02/20/the-strategic-use-of-plausible-deniability-in-proxy-wars/

by Natalia Tellidou

02.20.2025 at 06:00am

The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh (1988–1994) was deeply intertwined with the dissolution of the USSR, as the collapse created a power vacuum and widespread instability across the Caucasus region. Following the USSR’s dissolution in 1991, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) declared its independence, becoming a contested state. This declaration came during a volatile period. Many former Soviet Republics, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, were grappling to define their national security and assert their sovereignty for the first time since they joined the USSR in 1922 as part of the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. The political and security turmoil of this transitional era heightened the tensions between the NKR and Azerbaijan. This was due in large part because during the Soviet period, the NKR was part of Azerbaijan. The tension between the two actors eventually led to a conflict that symbolized the broader struggles of the post-Soviet states to assert their sovereignty and control.

In this volatile environment, the ongoing conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh takes on a central role in the new regional power dynamics, soon drawing the attention and involvement of external states. The proxy war that followed is an early post–Cold War example of how states leverage plausible deniability to advance their interests. Armenia, as the primary supporter of the NKR and its insurgency against Azerbaijan, used plausible deniability as a means to an end Armenia used NKR to gain regional influence without the negative consequences of a strong international condemnation. On the other hand, Türkiye took a contrasting approach by openly communicating its support and involvement in the proxy war. This dichotomy between Armenia’s denial and Türkiye’s transparency highlights how states strategically employ plausible deniability to advance their interests, while in other cases, states may opt for open acknowledgment of their involvement in proxy wars.

In a recent article, I argued that claims of plausible deniability are becoming increasingly challenging for states to sustain. During a recent podcast with Amos Fox, we explored how this trend traces back to Cold War-era proxy wars. In this essay, I delve deeper into how, even in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, states like Türkiye and Armenia adopted distinct approaches to plausible deniability. Türkiye’s overt support for Azerbaijan against the NKR posed a direct challenge to the post-Soviet regional order, where the USSR had long been the dominant power. This case exemplifies how regional powers navigate the complex and shifting dynamics of the post-Cold War proxy wars.

The Proxy War Actors

Consistent with the literature, I argue that Armenia, Russia, and Türkiye supported proxies in the civil war (Table 1). It is important to note that while external actors engaged in mediation efforts and provided humanitarian aid, these actions are distinct from the support coded for this proxy war and therefore their humanitarian aid efforts should be viewed separately from their proxy war strategies.

Another critical aspect is that certain actors, particularly Russia and Türkiye, shifted their regional policies over time. Before and after 1994, these states supported different sides in the conflict, which aligns with the broader argument that their involvement was driven by a desire to secure influence in the region rather than loyalty to a specific proxy.

State Sponsors in Azerbaijan's Proxy War

EditStateLevel of SupportProxyTurkeyLowGovernmentArmeniaHighNKRRussiaLowNKR

A notable limitation of this study is the lack of U.S. support for Azerbaijan compared to the humanitarian aid provided to Armenia and Azerbaijan. Under the New Independent States (NIS) program, the US extended significant support to Armenia and Azerbaijan. Consequently, the US aid and policy for on Armenia and Azerbaijan fall outside the purview of this research.

Plausible Deniability and Armenia’s strategy in the proxy war

Armenia’s role as the primary supporter of the NKR aimed to coerce Azerbaijan into recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh as an independent state. Armenia sought to leverage its ethnic ties and shared interests with the NKR to gain regional influence. However, Azerbaijan, in a series of letters to the United Nations, argued that Armenian armed forces had crossed their borders and occupied Azerbaijani territory. In response, Armenia consistently denied any military involvement, asserting that its armed forces were not responsible for the attacks. Instead, Armenia maintained that any Armenians fighting in the conflict did so voluntarily, without state direction or authorization.

UN resolutions adopted a more cautious narrative, referring to “influence” over the NKR rather than referring to Armenia’s military support as a direct military intervention. Indeed, Armenia never formally admitted to intervening militarily in Azerbaijan, emphasizing instead its sovereign right to secure its borders and denying any territorial claims against Azerbaijan. This ambiguity aligns with the broader argument that states often seek to obscure their support in conflicts to maintain plausible deniability to prevent condemnation from the international community. Still, evidence from the UCDP database suggested that Armenia was more active in the civil war because they deployed secondary troops to support the NKR.

This case closely mirrors the concept of sovereign defection in foreign policy. As Vladimir Rauta argued in the context of Russian actions in Ukraine, Armenia’s approach shares similar characteristics—denying military involvement despite contrary evidence while pursuing regional objectives through indirect means. Armenia’s support for the NKR, coupled with its denials of direct involvement and reliance on diplomatic efforts to influence the outcome of the conflict, reinforces the classification of this as a proxy war where the state involved relies on plausible deniability rather than outright military intervention. Indeed, Armenia’s support for the NKR was multifaceted, encompassing technical and economic assistance as well as limited ground and air support.

We should keep in mind that Armenia and Azerbaijan were newly independent states with suboptimal military equipment, largely inherited from the collapsing USSR. It is telling that when Azerbaijan declared its independence it requested from the USSR’s troops to remain in key areas until it could establish a national guard. Meanwhile, the region was engulfed in insecurity. By 1991, the Georgian civil war was in full swing, further destabilizing a region where Armenia and Azerbaijan shared borders with an increasingly fragile neighbor. The two nations were locked in a constant security competition without the constraints of Cold War-era bipolar security dilemmas and with the foreign policies of previous decades rendered obsolete, both nations faced unprecedented challenges.

Turkish Strategy in the Proxy War: Opting in Acknowledging Supporting a Proxy

Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Özal adopted a clear and assertive stance regarding Azerbaijan during this period. Türkiye viewed the region as a strategic opportunity to challenge Russia’s longstanding dominance, and Özal made public statements condemning Armenia’s actions while pledging Türkiye’s allegiance as a trusted ally of Azerbaijan. In fact, the Azeri government rejected Iran’s offer of support, favoring instead the more welcome backing from Türkiye. On 9 November 1991, Türkiye became the first state to recognize the Republic of Azerbaijan, which declared its independence on 30 August 1991.

Türkiye’s open support for Azerbaijan was deeply tied to its strategic ambitions in the Caucasus, a region bordering Central Asia with significant geopolitical importance. By abandoning plausible deniability and openly backing the Azeri government, Türkiye sent a clear message about its intent to expand its sphere of influence—particularly in opposition to regional powers such as Iran and Russia. This stance was further reinforced through key diplomatic actions, including Türkiye’s decision to close its border with Armenia following the Armenian capture of Kalbajar in 1993, a city located outside the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. Turkish policymakers also consistently advocated for the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, underscoring Türkiye’s commitment to aligning itself with Azerbaijan’s strategic goals and asserting its influence in the region.

However, despite the initial enthusiasm, Turkish proxy war strategy ultimately fell short of Azerbaijan’s expectations. By 1992, cracks began to appear in the relationship, as Azerbaijan grew increasingly critical of Türkiye’s limited involvement. Elchibey, the then Head of State of Azerbaijan, expressed frustration, stating that Türkiye had not provided substantive aid apart from diplomatic support. While this may have come as a disappointment to the Azerbaijani government, Türkiye’s cautious approach was consistent with its broader strategic priorities. Entering a new geopolitical era, Türkiye was unwilling to take significant risks in a region that did not rank high among its political priorities.

Türkiye’s engagement in the proxy war was ultimately limited, focusing more on advancing its economic interests in the region rather than on security or military objectives. By the end of 1994, Türkiye’s contributions to Azerbaijan were confined to limited technical and economic assistance, falling far short of the full-scale support Azerbaijan had hoped for.

The Role of the Former Superpower in the Region

With the collapse of the USSR, Russia’s military leadership decided to provide military and financial support to the newly independent states emerging from the Union. In the cases of Armenia and Azerbaijan, both nations reportedly received similar amounts of military equipment. Meanwhile, Russia deployed a limited force to Armenia in 1992 under a bilateral agreement, ostensibly to provide security amid the ongoing civil war in Georgia and effectively providing security against Armenia’s role in the proxy war in Azerbaijan. This deployment offered Armenia a significant advantage by securing an active ally within its territory while simultaneously sending a clear message to Azerbaijan and Türkiye: Armenia remained within Russia’s perceived sphere of influence.

By 1992, regional dynamics shifted as Russia openly competed with Iran and Türkiye for influence in the South Caucasus. This competition was mirrored in Armenia’s reliance on Russia as a credible ally, which emboldened Armenia to push for more aggressive actions in its proxy war with Azerbaijan. By 1993, Armenia supported the NKR in intensifying military operations against Azerbaijani forces. With Armenia’s full backing, the NKR made significant territorial gains beyond its enclave, especially capturing the city of Kalbajar.

Tensions in the region were on the rise, with the absence of an active US role creating opportunities for regional powers to vie for dominance. However, Russia, facing its own internal challenges after the dissolution of the USSR, was not in a position to escalate the proxy war further.

The Epilogue of the Proxy War

Russia’s waning influence in the region and military fatigue marked a critical turning point in the proxy war. By 1993, Türkiye limited its role to diplomatic support, withdrawing from direct engagement in Azerbaijan’s proxy war. Similarly, Russia—now grappling with reduced military effectiveness and growing concerns over rogue elements within its armed forces—shifted its focus toward economic interests and avoided further escalation. By early 1994, Iran and Türkiye were supporting Azerbaijan solely through diplomatic efforts. Eventually Russia through the Bishkek Protocol brokered a ceasefire contributing to the eventual de-escalation of the conflict.

The contrasting approaches of Armenia and Türkiye during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict illustrate that plausible deniability is not a fixed feature of proxy wars. Rather, plausible deniability is a strategic tool that provides policymakers with a range of options which are shaped by a state’s broader objectives and chosen proxy war strategy. Armenia leveraged plausible deniability as a means to avoid direct accountability while advancing its support for the NKR, framing its involvement as non-military despite significant evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, Türkiye adopted an open and public stance, using its overt support for Azerbaijan to signal its ambitions to expand regional influence and challenge rival powers like Iran and Russia. These examples demonstrate that plausible deniability is not synonymous with proxy wars but operates as one of several strategies that states employ to manage risks, shape perceptions, and send signals to other actors in the conflict and the broader region. The choice of whether to conceal or reveal involvement ultimately depends on the strategic goals of the state, underscoring the need to view proxy wars as dynamic phenomena where covert and overt actions coexist, driven by the military and political objectives of the states sponsors.

Tags: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh, plausible deniability, proxy war, proxy warfare, Soviet Union, strategy, Turkey, USSR

About The Author

Natalia Tellidou
Natalia Tellidou is a Research Associate at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy in Athens. She earned her Ph.D. in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute and has worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Democratic Institute of Central European University, as well as a Global Teaching Fellow at the West University of Timisoara. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Muenster’s Cluster of Excellence on Religion and Politics. She received a Master’s degree in International Studies from the University of Macedonia. Her research focuses on civil wars, international relations, and non-state actors, with special interest in conflicts in the Global South. Natalia has contributed to projects as a country expert with the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies and was awarded a DAAD pre-doctoral fellowship at the University of Trier. Her research has been published in Conflict Studies Quarterly, International Interactions, Civil War Paths, Political Studies Forum. She has taught at universities across Europe.

13. The Guardian view on Trump’s diplomacy: when the US knows the price and ignores values

A severe critique to which some Americans might respond, "who cares what the Guardian thinks."

Conclusion:

Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to capitalise on Mr Trump’s economic transactionalism by offering access to Ukraine’s resources, notably minerals, in exchange for security. He got Mr Trump’s attention – but the terms of the resulting US demand make it look less like diplomacy than extortion. The US president prices up everything and knows the value of nothing. Others must now endeavour to show him that his plans will not come as cheaply as he believes.

The Guardian view on Trump’s diplomacy: when the US knows the price and ignores values

Editorial

US talks with Russia over Ukraine’s future, like the president’s prescription for Gaza, highlights how business and foreign policy merge

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/18/the-guardian-view-on-trumps-diplomacy-when-the-us-knows-the-price-and-ignores-values

Tue 18 Feb 2025 13.30 EST

he Trump administration did not take red lines on Ukraine to its talks with Russia in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday: it cares about the bottom line. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, underscored that when he said the two sides would create a team, not only to support Ukraine peace talks but also to explore the “incredible opportunities” to partner with Moscow geopolitically “and, frankly, economically” that might result.

Kyiv and other European capitals are still reeling at the full extent of Donald Trump’s cynicism when it comes to world affairs, and callous disregard for the people caught up in them. But it should be no surprise that business dealings were high on the agenda. Vladimir Putin would dearly love to end his country’s economic isolation. Russia is making the case that American energy firms and others could profit handsomely by doing business with it again.

For Mr Trump, his two key interests – money and power – are not only interrelated but fungible, just as US goals and his personal interests often appear indistinguishable to him. (This is a man who launched his own cryptocurrency token days before returning to the White House, and as he sought to ease regulation of the industry).

When he talks of the future of Ukraine or Gaza, he speaks not of human rights and security, lives and homes, but of laying US hands on $500bn of minerals and a “big real-estate site” respectively. He believes in cutting deals, not making peace. At the heart of his foreign policy team is Steve Witkoff, not a diplomat but a billionaire real-estate developer and golf buddy. Mr Witkoff was first appointed as Middle East envoy and then dispatched to negotiate with Moscow. The head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, was also in Riyadh – while Ukraine and European allies have been denied a seat.

Mr Trump’s merging of wealth and strength were obvious even before he took office the first time. He suggested he could use Taiwan as leverage with China on issues including trade. John Bolton, who became his national security adviser, later said (though Mr Trump denied it) that the president pleaded with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, to ensure he would win the next election, “stress[ing] the importance of … increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome”.

Mr Trump’s Middle East policy is not only pleasing to his evangelical Christian supporters. His repugnant proposal to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza, allowing the construction of an American-owned “Riviera”, is shocking but in many ways builds upon ideas long held by businessman friends as well as Israeli settlers. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a former real-estate developer charged with overseeing Middle East policy in Mr Trump’s first term, suggested last year that Gaza’s “waterfront property” could be “very valuable”. (Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, incidentally, became a major investor in Mr Kushner’s private equity firm after he left the administration.)

Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to capitalise on Mr Trump’s economic transactionalism by offering access to Ukraine’s resources, notably minerals, in exchange for security. He got Mr Trump’s attention – but the terms of the resulting US demand make it look less like diplomacy than extortion. The US president prices up everything and knows the value of nothing. Others must now endeavour to show him that his plans will not come as cheaply as he believes.

14. Why We’re Obsessed with JFK Conspiracies

Excerpts:

Meanwhile, Posner, the author of Case Closed—the most persuasive book that Oswald alone killed Kennedy, is keen to find out everything the CIA and FBI knew about Oswald when he visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico. “It’s not that there necessarily is a plot to kill the president, but maybe the CIA knew more about Oswald’s unhinged behavior at the Cuban and Soviet missions,” Posner told The Free Press.

“We had to have a lot of surveillance on those two enemy missions in the middle of the Cold War. And then what they should have done, of course, is share the information. When Oswald comes dejected back into the United States, 10 days later … an open investigation on that would have made the case a priority and potentially would have stopped the assassination.”

So, there is a chance that maybe, perhaps, we might discover some kind of conspiracy.

I welcome the sunshine. I want to know the remaining state secrets. But I also wonder if even this dramatic moment will ever satisfy the beautiful minds and the dot connectors. Because once you go through the looking glass, it’s hard to come back out.

If you believe in conspiracy theories, then why wouldn’t Trump and his allies be in on it, too? Or perhaps the documents proving who really had JFK murdered were destroyed long ago? You get the picture. When black is white and white is black, anything is possible and nothing is real.

Why We’re Obsessed with JFK Conspiracies

Donald Trump says he’ll declassify all the files about the assassination. We’d never have got to this point if it weren’t for a weird ’90s film.

By Eli Lake

02.19.25 — Breaking History

https://www.thefp.com/p/why-we-are-obsessed-with-jfk-conspiracies

(Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images, illustration by The Free Press)

284

114

Today we’re bringing you the third episode of Breaking History, a new podcast in which I go back in time in order to make sense of the present. The last episode was about the long history of progressives derailing California’s politics. In this episode, I explain how, exactly, the assassination of John F. Kennedy gave birth to so many wild conspiracy theories. If you want to understand why President Donald Trump recently ordered the director of national intelligence to plan how to release all the files relating to that dark day, you can listen to the episode below—or keep scrolling to read a print adaptation of it.

If you enjoy either, follow Breaking History on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Every now and again, a work of art is so profound that it reaches into the real world and actually affects current events.

Consider, if you will, the most politically resonant piece of American pop culture produced in the last 50 years: the 1991 film JFK.

It was a full frontal attack on the American state: a three-hour video essay explaining just how and why the U.S. government, up to and including a former president, colluded to murder John F. Kennedy. It was explosive, including a long scene analyzing the famous Zapruder film—amateur footage of the assassination—meaning that audiences were forced to watch Kennedy’s head being blown off by a bullet again, and again, and again, and again.

JFK’s hero was played by the biggest movie star on earth, Kevin Costner, and given lines like: “President Kennedy was murdered by a conspiracy that was planned in advance at the highest levels of our government.”

And it was directed by the most celebrated filmmaker in America at the time, Oliver Stone—a dazzling Oscar winner, a traumatized Vietnam vet, a political firebrand, and a total crank.

The conspiracy he puts forth in JFK is vast. And yet, he was given $40 million to put it on the big screen. And the film wasn’t quashed by hidden political forces. No, it was nominated for eight Academy Awards, an insane endorsement of a wild accusation.

And JFK went on to change the course of history. There had always been Americans who believed that Lee Harvey Oswald hadn’t acted alone, or even shot Kennedy at all. But by the end of the Cold War, the conspiracy theorists were considered fringe and paranoid.

The release of JFK marked the moment conspiracy theories went overground, at the dawn of the internet age. Tinfoil hats were no longer just for oddballs, they were for moms and dads and me and you.

Stone had dressed JFK trutherism in Hollywood finery, and once the nation heard these accusations accompanied by a swirling John Williams score, the assassination was codified as a conspiracy in the minds of the American people.

You found it on Seinfeld; Jerry said: “I’m saying that the spit could not have come from behind. There had to have been a second spitter.”

And on The Sopranos; Tony said: “My cousin acted alone. I did not sanction this,” and Johnny Sack replied: “Lone gunman theory.”

You also found it in Congress. JFK was so significant that in 1992, just four months after its release, Stone gave testimony before the House. He hypothesized two interlocking conspiracies: first, about the role of the CIA and the Pentagon in the murder of JFK; and second, about a vast cover-up involving Lyndon B. Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination. In Stone’s mind, the twentieth century is a crime scene and the U.S. government is holding the murder weapon.

His testimony—and his film—were so influential that, in 1992, Congress passed a law ordering the government to release thousands of secret CIA files.

The question Stone asked is one that Americans still can’t get off their minds. And it seems, in 2025, like Trump is going to try to answer it. If this film about the deep state killing a president had never been made, we would not have arrived where we are today, with Trump ordering the declassification of the remaining files on the assassinations of JFK, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.

I can’t help but think of the eeriest quote from JFK: “We’re through the looking glass here, people. White is black, and black is white.”

Personally, I believe that it’s almost certain that Oswald acted alone. But at the same time, I can understand why people think otherwise. It isn’t as crazy as the conspiracy that the Earth is flat. The murder of John F. Kennedy is a really strange chapter of American history, full of mysteries, coincidences, and lies. And it’s a chapter in which the government squandered its most precious asset, the trust of the American people.

So, what happened on that day, November 22, 1963? What happened to send the nation down a rabbit hole it has never been able to climb out of?

First came the terrible news from Walter Cronkite, live on CBS: “From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official. President Kennedy died at 1 p.m.”

Next, Dallas police arrested Oswald, who, during his perp walk, both protested his innocence and revealed a curious detail about his life.

When a reporter asked: “Did you shoot the president?” Oswald responded: “No, they’ve taken me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union. I’m just a patsy. “

The Soviet Union? Wait, what?

Imagine what is going through the heads of the American people. How could a rational person not suspect that something sinister was going on?

And then, two days later, on live TV, Oswald was killed, depriving America of a trial. His murderer was a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby. When asked why he did it, Ruby’s motive didn’t seem solid. He did it, he claimed, because he just loved Jack Kennedy that damn much. He wanted to be a hero. But as the press dug into Ruby, it turned out that he was part of the Dallas underworld.

And so Ruby unlocked the first genre of JFK conspiracies: The mob did it.

The Mafia theory has largely faded in recent years, but it goes like this: The mob helped get Jack Kennedy elected in 1960, with the expectation that he would support the toppling of Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba—which would mean the Mafia would get their Havana casinos back. But the new president refused to support an invasion of Cuba and appointed his brother Bobby Kennedy as attorney general. Bobby had been waging a vendetta against organized crime for years.

So the Mafia decided to kill the president.

I don’t buy it myself. There has been no evidence linking Oswald to the Mafia, and Gerald Posner, the author of the classic evaluation of the JFK assassination, Case Closed, has shown conclusively that Oswald fired the shot that killed the president.

But don’t worry, there are plenty of other conspiracy theories to choose from.

As the country reeled from Kennedy’s murder, more information came out about Oswald. He’s a very strange guy. A former Marine—he served for three years—Oswald was nicknamed Osvaldovich when he was stationed in Japan from 1957 to 1958, in part because he would talk incessantly about Marxism. An oddball with delusions of grandeur, at the end of his tour he began ordering Russian language newspapers to base.

After obtaining an early discharge on September 11, 1959 from the Marines, Oswald hopped a ship across the Atlantic and wound up in Helsinki, Finland. There, he walked up to the Soviet embassy, renounced his American citizenship and obtained a Soviet visa. When he arrived in Moscow on October 15, the KGB believed they had hit pay dirt. But within a few days, the Soviets realized Oswald knew nothing that could really help them—and told him they would not be granting him citizenship. Oswald was devastated; he went back to his hotel and slit his wrists. The KGB discovered him there and rushed him to a hospital.

After that, Oswald was sent to Minsk, now the capital of Belarus, where he was given a job in a radio factory. The KGB kept tabs on him. We know this because both Norman Mailer and later my Free Press colleague Peter Savodnik got access to reams of the KGB’s actual files. They include mundane details about Oswald’s eating habits, how often he masturbated, and what he discussed in the break room of the factory.

But while the Soviets knew everything about Oswald, when he was shot by Ruby in 1963, the CIA and the FBI claimed to know very little.

At the time of his death, Oswald was something of a political activist. He was a member of the Fair Play For Cuba Committee, a left-wing organization composed of many prominent intellectuals like Gore Vidal and James Baldwin. Oswald had become a spokesman for the group and even engaged in debates with anti-Castro émigrés. In a 1963 interview on a local television station in New Orleans, Oswald declared he was a Marxist.

Not a few months before he murdered Kennedy—having just tried and failed to kill a retired far-right general named Edwin Walker—Oswald took a trip to Mexico City and met with officials at the Cuban and Soviet embassies there, ostensibly to get a visa to travel to Cuba.

What the American authorities saw, in the man who’d just killed the president, was a communist defector to the Soviet Union who had returned to America and attacked its leader. Surely it was logical that he had been ordered to do so by the KGB?

It’s a fair question, and one that obsessed the leaders of our government. JFK’s successor, Johnson, was consumed by the idea that it could have been a Communist plot—and he was even more concerned by what that would mean for the future of planet Earth.

While recruiting people to serve on the Warren Commission, which was then being set to investigate the assassination, Johnson made it clear that he did not want anyone to blame the Cubans or the Russians.

For instance, on November 29, 1963, just a week after the assassination, Johnson called his former mentor, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, and tried to cajole his old friend to serve. “We got to take this out of the arena where they’re testifying and [Nikita] Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that,” he said, “kicking us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour.”

Johnson asked Russell to join the commission to deflect attention away from the country’s enemy, the Soviet Union. He knows that the Cold War is on a knife edge and an accusation against the Soviets could tip into thermonuclear war.

This reminds me of Plato’s concept of the noble lie, when a leader has to practice deception in public for a greater good. But this noble lie would come to haunt America, because the deception helped undermine the American people’s trust in the story their leaders were feeding them.

Indeed, in his last televised interview, LBJ admitted to Cronkite that he could not bring himself to believe the official story. In 1975, two years after Johnson’s death, the full tape was revealed:

Lyndon B. Johnson: I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever been completely relieved of the fact that there might have been international connections.

Walter Cronkite: You mean you still feel that there might have been?

LBJ: Well, I have not completely discounted.

WC: That would seem to indicate that you don’t have full confidence in the Warren Commission report?

LBJ: I think the Warren Commission study, first of all, is composed of ablest, most judicious bipartisan men in this country. Second, I think they had only one objective, and that was the truth. And third, I think they were competent and did the best they could. But I don’t think that they, or me, or anyone else, is always absolutely sure of everything that might have motivated Oswald or others that could have been involved.

Absolutely wild! After years of being told to believe the Warren Commission Report’s assertion that Oswald acted alone, here was a former president of the United States suggesting that he never could “completely discount” that Oswald had been part of a great, unrevealed conspiracy.

This is why I approach anyone who doubts the official line on the assassination with humility and charity. They are not crazy; in fact, they are in illustrious company. Because here we have evidence that Kennedy’s own vice president—who many conspiracy theorists blame for a cover-up—entertains the idea of a conspiracy himself.

Back in the ’60s, inside the corridors of power, Johnson was not the only one doubting the official narrative. James Jesus Angleton, chief of the counterintelligence directorate of the CIA, also figured Oswald was engaged in a conspiracy with the Russians. He believed this even after a defector by the name of Yuri Nosenko told the CIA that the Soviets had nothing to do with it. Angleton was convinced that Nosenko was a double agent sent to America to feed him disinformation.

But with Stone’s JFK, conspiracy theories turned on America itself, pointing the finger at the deep state operating within the government. A seed was planted by former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, who was the inspiration for the main character of Stone’s movie—the man played by Costner. The real-life Garrison openly declared his belief that the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s murder and linked the assassination to the government’s escalation of the war in Vietnam.

These views were catnip to the anti-war, anti-establishment Stone, who portrayed Garrison as the last Boy Scout, the brave soul willing to take on the American government.

Today, most JFK assassination researchers have dismissed Garrison as a charlatan. To buy into Garrison’s elaborate concoction, you have to start thinking of the world around you as an elaborate deception, where white is black and black is white.

For example, for Garrison, the fact that Oswald was a spokesman for a pro-Castro organization—the Fair Play for Cuba Committee—was actually evidence that he was deeply anti-Castro, like the CIA. His theory was that Oswald was actually a military intelligence agent, sent to Moscow, then allowed to return in order to build a credible backstory of Soviet involvement. It was the CIA who had organized the murder, said Garrison—and the CIA who made sure Oswald was perfectly placed to be blamed, and labeled a Soviet assassin.

The case made by the rogue district attorney, and partially co-signed by Stone, requires Oswald to play a part in something called Operation Mongoose—a very real, top secret CIA program, which, when you hear the details, sounds like an absurd fantasy. Operation Mongoose dreamed up ways to kill and discredit Castro. One plot would place a chemical in his shoes that would cause his beard to fall out. Another was to booby trap a seashell. Exploding cigars? They pitched it. The Bugs Bunny ideas never really went anywhere, but they were part of a serious, broad campaign to eliminate Castro.

Why is it so implausible that this wacky bunch trained Oswald to kill Jack Kennedy? Well, the man who oversaw Operation Mongoose was unlikely to want JFK dead, given that he was JFK’s own brother: the attorney general, Bobby Kennedy.

Garrison remained a gadfly for years, but lived long enough to advise Stone on the film that revived his own reputation.

You could say the movie was an inside job.

Such was the power of Stone’s JFK that, in direct response to the film, Congress passed a law requiring the government to release the remaining files related to the assassination by 2017.

And, in 2017, Trump complied with that law—up to a point. But even the most unpredictable president drew a line at releasing them all.

Back in October 2024 though, Trump went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and explained that he would be opening the rest of the JFK files in his second presidency. And last month, he ordered the director of national intelligence to come up with a plan to do so.

Today, on the brink of a potentially monumental reveal of secret CIA files, can we expect any of these conspiracy theories to be validated?

For what it’s worth, Trump’s former CIA director, Mike Pompeo, does not think the coming declassification will shed much light on what we already know.

“The news value of them is grossly overrated,” he told TV presenter John Stossel. “I think we released—I can’t remember on our watch, 140,000, 180,000 pages of those documents while I was the CIA director.” And of the remaining documents, he said, “There’s less there than meets the eye.”

Author and journalist Jefferson Morley, who is among the most credible skeptics of the official narrative about the JFK assassination, told The Free Press he is hopeful there will be revelatory files in the release.

“Did the CIA find out that one guy killed the president for no reason and another guy came along and killed him for no reason? Or did they find out something else? Okay. The answers are overdue. Let’s just put it that way.“

Meanwhile, Posner, the author of Case Closed—the most persuasive book that Oswald alone killed Kennedy, is keen to find out everything the CIA and FBI knew about Oswald when he visited the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico. “It’s not that there necessarily is a plot to kill the president, but maybe the CIA knew more about Oswald’s unhinged behavior at the Cuban and Soviet missions,” Posner told The Free Press.

“We had to have a lot of surveillance on those two enemy missions in the middle of the Cold War. And then what they should have done, of course, is share the information. When Oswald comes dejected back into the United States, 10 days later … an open investigation on that would have made the case a priority and potentially would have stopped the assassination.”

So, there is a chance that maybe, perhaps, we might discover some kind of conspiracy.

I welcome the sunshine. I want to know the remaining state secrets. But I also wonder if even this dramatic moment will ever satisfy the beautiful minds and the dot connectors. Because once you go through the looking glass, it’s hard to come back out.

If you believe in conspiracy theories, then why wouldn’t Trump and his allies be in on it, too? Or perhaps the documents proving who really had JFK murdered were destroyed long ago? You get the picture. When black is white and white is black, anything is possible and nothing is real.

15. ‘Unsafe and irresponsible’: US weighs in on China-Philippines aerial encounter over shoal

‘Unsafe and irresponsible’: US weighs in on China-Philippines aerial encounter over shoal

State Department calls on Beijing to ‘refrain from coercive actions and settle its disputes peacefully’

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3299413/unsafe-and-irresponsible-us-weighs-china-philippines-aerial-encounter-over-shoal?utm

Zhao Ziwen

Published: 2:56pm, 20 Feb 2025Updated: 6:02pm, 20 Feb 2025

The US has accused China of “unsafe and irresponsible” action during a close encounter between a PLA helicopter and a Philippine plane over the South China Sea on Tuesday.

In a statement on Wednesday, Washington also pledged continued support for American allies to ensure a “free and open Indo-Pacific”.

“The United States stands with its ally the Philippines to condemn the unsafe and irresponsible actions by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army-Navy to interfere with a Philippine maritime air operation in the vicinity of Scarborough Reef,” State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce said.

“Reckless Chinese actions such as these are a threat to navigation and overflight in the South China Sea, and we will continue to support our allies and partners to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific. We call on China to refrain from coercive actions and settle its disputes peacefully in accordance with international law.”

Chinese military helicopter and Philippine patrol plane in close encounter over Scarborough Shoal

The US statement comes in the wake of a tense stand-off on Tuesday between China and the Philippines above the disputed shoal, which is known in China as Huangyan Island in China and as Panatag Shoal or Bajo de Masinloc in the Philippines.

A Chinese navy helicopter flew alarmingly close – within 3 metres (10 feet) – of a Philippine patrol plane during a 30-minute encounter.

The PLA’s Southern Theatre Command said it “expelled” the Philippine aircraft – a C-208 utility plane – after naval and air forces “legally tracked, monitored and warned the aircraft to leave”.

“The actions of the Philippines seriously violated China’s sovereignty and relevant international laws and Chinese regulations,” command spokesman Tian Junli said.

The Philippine Coast Guard condemned the Chinese navy’s actions as “reckless” and warned that they posed “a serious risk to the safety of the pilots and passengers” while emphasising that the government fisheries aircraft was engaged in a “maritime domain awareness flight”.

China claims rights over the vast swathes of islands and rocks and their adjacent waters in the South China Sea. However, these claims overlap significantly with those of several neighbouring nations, particularly the Philippines.

This latest stand-off occurred just days after Australia accused China of releasing a flare near an Australian military plane conducting a flyover of the Paracel Islands – known as the Xisha Islands in China. The incident on February 11 led to a flurry of accusations between the two nations.

The US statement mentioned the Beijing-Canberra tension, saying China’s manoeuvres were “unsafe and unprofessional” and had endangered the Australian aircraft’s “routine maritime patrol” in the South China Sea.

Philippines and China trade blame over confrontation in South China Sea

US Secretary of State Mark Rubio has maintained close communication with his Philippine counterpart – their most recent discussion occurred last week on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.

“Secretary Rubio not only reaffirmed US commitment to the United States-Philippines Alliance, but noted his enthusiasm for building an even more invested and enduring relationship” in the Munich meeting, the White House said.

In its statement on Wednesday, the State Department also referred to a defence agreement between the two nations, asserting that the 1951 United States-Philippines Mutual Defence Treaty “extends to armed attacks on Philippine armed forces, public vessels or aircraft – including those of its coastguard – anywhere in the South China Sea”.

Zhao Ziwen

Ben Zhao Ziwen covers China diplomacy. He majored in Arabic studies and journalism. He worked for Caixin in Beijing and spent a year in the UAE.

16. Race for AI supremacy: Chinese-born scientists in Musk’s Grok squad line up against China

Race for AI supremacy: Chinese-born scientists in Musk’s Grok squad line up against China

Media in China is taking notice of the large number of key developers, researchers and scientists born and educated in China at work in US

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3299470/race-ai-supremacy-chinese-born-scientists-musks-grok-squad-line-against-china?utm

Victoria Bela

Published: 5:57pm, 20 Feb 2025Updated: 6:19pm, 20 Feb 2025

After Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up xAI unveiled Grok 3, its latest chatbot, on Tuesday, the presence of a large number of Chinese developers at the company came under the spotlight.

The United States and China continue to release new AI models in a bid to outperform each other. The victor in the global AI race may be determined by the efforts of Chinese computer scientists and engineers on either side.

During a live stream on X announcing the release, Musk said Grok 3 outperformed Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s default V3 model and US-based OpenAI’s GPT-4o on science, maths and coding benchmarks.

Chinese media quickly took notice, releasing articles highlighting the Chinese talent on the xAI team, including a core member who went to Zhejiang University – the university DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng also attended.

Does the arrival of China’s low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia’s chip dominance?

Around one-third of the founding members of xAI are reportedly of Chinese heritage, with two members present during the live stream to introduce the model to the world.

“Loving Elon’s international team of engineers, I think I hear German, Chinese and American,” author and AI entrepreneur Nina Schick posted on X on Tuesday.

Several posts on X expressed similar sentiments. A user called “seclink” posted in Chinese to more than 20,000 followers that in the field of large language models “a group of Chinese in the US and a group of Chinese in China are competing with each other”.

According to the MacroPolo Global AI Talent Tracker, a product of the Paulson Institute think tank in Chicago, China was the country of origin for 38 per cent of top-tier AI researchers working in the United States in 2022, compared to 37 per cent of US origin.

DeepSeek founder Liang graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from Zhejiang University in the city of Hangzhou, where the company is headquartered.

When xAI was unveiled in 2023, research scientist Zhang Guodong – who graduated from Zhejiang University with a bachelor’s degree in information engineering in 2017 – was among the 12 founding members.

Zhang moved to Canada to pursue a doctorate in machine learning at the University of Toronto while also serving as a research intern at Google Brain and DeepMind, where he became a full-time research scientist after graduating in 2022. As an undergraduate, Zhang won Chinese and international contests in modelling in which competitors solve open-ended application problems.

Zhang is the pretraining lead for xAI, tasked with the initial training of models with large data sets for general learning. Following the unveiling of Grok 3, Zhang posted on X: “While most of the companies focus either on intelligence or efficiency, we want both.”

Fellow founding members Jimmy Ba and Yuhuai “Tony” Wu also studied at the University of Toronto, with the two appearing as authors on separate research papers alongside Zhang.

Both Ba and Wu were present at the live stream unveiling of Grok 3 with Musk and lead engineer Igor Babuschkin.

Ba studied under AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, and is one of the top AI scholars while Wu, a co-founder of xAI, is a core developer of Grok with a particular interest in AI mathematics and building machines that can reason.

The founding team also includes mathematician Greg Yang who was born in Hunan province in central China and moved to the US in high school. Yang graduated from Harvard University before starting a role at Microsoft Research with a focus on AI and theoretical computer science.

He received an honourable mention for outstanding undergraduate mathematics research in the 2018 Morgan Prize, an annual award for superior mathematics research.

Zihang Dai, another founding member of xAI and a former research scientist at Google, completed a bachelor’s degree in business administration at Tsinghua University in 2013 before becoming an intern at the Baidu Institute of Deep Learning. Dai moved to the US to attend the Pennsylvania-based Carnegie Mellon University, where he received a doctorate in computer science in 2020.

The South China Morning Post found that beyond the founding members, a number of other technical staff at xAI are from China, with many having been at Google and Microsoft before joining the team.

Juntang Zhuang joined xAI as a technical staff member in January last year after leaving a full-time position at OpenAI, where he was a co-author of GPT-4.

Trump: Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek’s strong showing a ‘wake-up call’ for US tech sector

Zhuang, who is the lead of the Grok 2 and Grok 3 mini models, completed a bachelor’s degree in engineering at Tsinghua University and received a doctorate in biomedical engineering at Yale University in 2022.

Xiao Sun, a technical staff member at xAI since September 2023, received a bachelor’s degree in microelectronics from Peking University before completing a doctorate in electrical and electronics engineering at Yale in 2012. Sun worked as a researcher at IBM for more than six years, and then as a research scientist at Meta before arriving at xAI.

Technical staff member Lianmin Zheng joined xAI in March last year, completing a doctorate in computer science from the University of California Berkeley the same year. Zheng graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University with a degree in computer science in 2019.

Musk has been a vocal proponent of H-1B visas which allow skilled foreign workers to work in the US. In a post on X in December he said “critical” individuals such as himself were in America because of the visa.

During his first term, US President Donald Trump was not in favour of the visa programme, which he called “unfair” to US workers. His position on the programme during the second term has yet to be officially outlined, though he has said he is in favour of the visas.

Victoria Bela

Prior to joining SCMP in 2023, Victoria received her Bachelor’s degrees in Environmental Health and Environmental Studies from the University of Rochester, where she also worked in a Biochemistry lab. She holds a Master's in Public Policy from Peking University.

17. The Real China Trump Card

Excerpts:

Although Washington’s allies would be far more exposed in an economic cutoff of China, the United States is hardly free of vulnerabilities. Certain American industries would be greatly harmed by a broad economic decoupling—most notably the agricultural sector, which exports a significant amount of goods to China. It would be wise for Washington to plan not just how to protect its partners’ economies but also how to protect its own. This planning would be vital to the smooth provision of government assistance to vulnerable industries in the event of a cutoff, and it would reassure leaders in those industries that they can survive a decoupling.

One important way to protect U.S. industries is by stockpiling more natural resources. It is the key area in which China has major economic leverage over the United States. But that is only because Washington has chosen to leave itself exposed, a problem it can and should rectify. The Department of Defense has a reserve of critical resources for use in national emergencies: the National Defense Stockpile. But this is intended to offset supply disruptions only in defense and vital civilian sectors—not in the economy overall. To protect the country more broadly, the United States needs to increase its natural resources stockpile to Cold War levels, roughly ten times as large as it is now. Such a step would have enormous strategic benefits and will cost relatively little, probably not much more than the price of a new aircraft carrier. At the same time, Washington needs to better incentivize the development of substitutes for natural resources now sourced from China, such as the rare-earth metals gallium and germanium. And where possible, the United States should augment the domestic extraction and processing of critical natural resources.

Washington would also be wise to identify additional areas in which the country is vulnerable to supply cutoffs from China and push forward with appropriate remediation steps—as it eventually did with respect to personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. government will need to hire more officials to examine their country’s ever-changing economic vulnerabilities. In fact, Washington should create a new institutional structure to foster more long-term planning and coordination regarding economic security issues. It could, for example, create new, dedicated economic security groups within the Treasury and Commerce Departments and the National Security Council that are each overseen by a political appointee—as has been suggested by Justin Muzinich, the former deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

These new officials and institutions might finally recognize that China is far from leveling the balance of economic power with the United States and that Washington has vast economic leverage over Beijing. If the United States expends this leverage in peacetime, it could jolt China into acting on its territorial ambitions while costing Washington vital friendships. But if the United States holds this leverage in reserve, it could help keep Chinese revisionism in check. In doing so, it could narrow the range for catastrophic miscalculation between Beijing and Washington.

The Real China Trump Card

Foreign Affairs · by More by Stephen G. Brooks · February 20, 2025

The Hawk’s Case Against Decoupling

Stephen G. Brooks and Ben A. Vagle

February 20, 2025

Daniel Stolle

STEPHEN G. BROOKS is Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and a Guest Professor at Stockholm University

BEN A. VAGLE is a policy analyst at the U.S. Treasury. The views expressed here are his own.

This article is adapted from their forthcoming book Command of Commerce: America’s Enduring Economic Power Advantage Over China (Oxford University Press, 2025).

More by Ben A. Vagle

Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Print Subscribe to unlock this feature or Sign in.

Save Sign in and save to read later

The geopolitical competition between China and the United States is the defining issue in international politics. It is a contest between the world’s largest economies. It pits two dramatically different political systems—one democratic, the other authoritarian—against each other. And it is taking place in almost every region.

According to most American analysts, this competition will be close. Although the pace of China’s rise has slowed, the conventional view in Washington is that China is already a peer, or at least a near peer, in economic power. “If we don’t get moving, [the Chinese] are going to eat our lunch,” quipped former U.S. President Joe Biden soon after his 2021 inauguration. In the same year, Elbridge Colby, whom current U.S. President Donald Trump nominated to be undersecretary of defense for policy, warned that “China’s economy is almost as large [as] or perhaps larger than America’s already.”

Yet the view that China is close to leveling the balance of economic power is incorrect. Chinese government statistics may indicate that the country is almost an equal of the United States. But if the economic power of the two countries is measured correctly, the United States still has a commanding and durable advantage. Its GDP is around twice as large as China’s. Its firms and the firms of its allies dominate global commerce and own or control much of China’s output, especially when it comes to advanced technologies. As a result, the United States has enormous leverage over Beijing. With that leverage, Washington could carry out a broad economic cutoff alongside its allies—in practice, a rapid decoupling—that would devastate China while doing far less short-term damage and almost no long-term damage to itself.

This fact has major strategic implications. The analysts who oppose a decoupling from China typically stress that doing so will impose massive, long-term economic disruptions on the United States. They are wrong. But it does not follow that decoupling now would be right. A peacetime decoupling would cost Washington one of the strongest tools it has to deter Chinese aggression. It might prompt China to lash out, starting conflicts that it would otherwise avoid. And it may fail to achieve its purpose: For an economic cutoff to cause disproportionate harm to China, the United States’ allies must participate; yet if Washington tries to move forward with a cutoff during peacetime, they will likely balk. U.S. policymakers must understand the United States’ real position in its competition with China—and keep its leverage intact for a crisis rather than undercutting one of the best weapons it has.

The Potemkin Economic Superpower

China’s economy has grown impressively over the past several decades. It is now unquestionably the world’s second largest, and it has become far more innovative than it once was. But it is not nearly as mighty as commonly purported in part because Beijing directly manipulates key economic metrics, including GDP.

According to official statistics, China’s gross domestic product is nearly $20 trillion, or just shy of two-thirds of U.S. GDP. But metrics that have not been artificially altered suggest it is far smaller. Consider nighttime satellite images of lights in the country—arguably the best approach for approximating Chinese GDP. Studies that look at such imaging reliably find less light concentration than one would expect if China’s official statistics were accurate. Indeed, an aggregation of the most rigorous of these studies indicates that China’s GDP is now overstated by around a third, which means the country’s GDP is only around half the size of that of the United States. By comparison, the Soviet Union reached a peak of 57 percent of U.S. GDP in 1975.

Experts in and outside China have long understood that China’s official GDP statistics are not credible. Li Keqiang, who served as China’s premier from 2013 to 2023, said in 2007 that he did not trust China’s “manmade” GDP figures, which were for “reference only.” Logan Wright and Daniel Rosen, China experts at the Rhodium Group, were even more damning. “In almost two decades of professional experience in this field,” they wrote in 2019, “we have never met a Chinese official who professed privately to actually believe the GDP data.”

Beijing directly manipulates key economic metrics, including GDP.

Much of the inflation of China’s GDP is caused by the singular nature of its development model. The country is uniquely dependent on heavy investment to fuel growth; according to the economist Michael Pettis, such investment has averaged over 40 percent of China’s GDP for the past 30 years. But much of this spending has no productive effect. For example, China now has the highest housing vacancy rate in the world, at 20 percent. A huge proportion of China’s infrastructure projects will end up costing more to build than they will ever generate in economic returns. According to the Wall Street Journal reporter Brian Spegele, for example, Beijing’s 30,000-mile high-speed rail network (an amount that could encircle the globe) has generated more than $1 trillion in debt and features many routes that are barely used. Such nonperforming investments, however, continue to buoy China’s GDP. In advanced economies, by contrast, if an investment cannot be paid off, it is frequently written off as a decrease in income, thus reducing GDP.

Even if Beijing’s GDP estimates were reliable, they would overstate China’s economic power. Many analysts are impressed by China’s vast economic output in manufacturing. But look beneath the surface, and much of this output is simple or not really under the country’s control. Production is far more intricate and far more globalized than in previous eras, especially in complex industries such as semiconductors and jet aircraft. As a result, the large multinational corporations at the top of global production chains command outsize influence in the global economy. And these firms are overwhelmingly based in the United States and allied countries, not in China.

This fact is illustrated by looking at the profits generated by the 2022 Forbes 2000—the world’s 2,000 largest companies. Profits are the preferred measure of economic power because if a firm in a sector is generating them, it likely means there are barriers preventing competitors from entering the market and cutting into that company’s margins. They thus best capture the chokepoints of the world economy. And U.S. firms generated 38 percent of global profits, while firms headquartered in allied countries generated 35 percent. Chinese firms, including those in Hong Kong, generated just 16 percent.

A closer look at the 27 industries in the Forbes 2000 makes the U.S. lead over China even clearer. China leads in three of these industries. The United States, meanwhile, leads in 20 of them, almost always by double digits. In three of the seven industries in which the United States is not the leader, an American ally is. Together, the United States and its allies and partners make up all the top five countries in terms of profit share in five industries: aerospace and defense, drugs and biotechnology, media, semiconductors, and utilities.

The United States’ edge is especially pronounced in high-technology sectors such as aerospace and defense, drugs and biotechnology, and semiconductors, in which U.S. firms generate 55 percent of profits, and the firms of American allies generate 29 percent. Chinese high-technology firms, by contrast, generate a mere six percent of profits worldwide—just slightly larger than the share generated by those of South Korea. Profits from Chinese firms are overwhelmingly concentrated in domestically focused sectors that lack geopolitical significance, notably banking, construction, and insurance.

U.S. companies and those of allied nations do, of course, make many of their products in China. But for Beijing, this is precisely the issue: much of China’s advanced manufacturing consists of output that is created and designed by foreign firms, including Apple, Bosch, Panasonic, Samsung, and Volkswagen. When these firms do not set up their own factories in China, they often hire other foreign firms—such as Taiwan’s Foxconn—to do so on their behalf. And regardless of who owns the advanced manufacturing in China, the country’s output is typically heavily dependent on technologies, expertise, and parts from the United States and its allies.

To see this dependence in action, consider the production of the iPhone 14, for which comprehensive manufacturing data is now available. The iPhone is assembled in China, so it counts as a Chinese export in official measurements and consequently adds many billions of dollars a year to the U.S. trade deficit (an estimated $10 billion in 2018). But it makes no sense to count the iPhone as a Chinese export because Chinese firms constitute a relatively insignificant part of its production. The phone is designed in California. It is assembled in factories owned by a Taiwanese company. And Chinese firms contribute just four percent of the value of its components. Ahead of China’s contribution are South Korea (25 percent), Japan (11 percent), and Taiwan (7 percent). Number one is the United States, which contributes 32 percent of the value of the iPhone’s components.

From an economic welfare standpoint, whether China’s production is owned or controlled by foreign firms does not matter. As long as it occurs in China, it contributes to the growth of China’s economy and the well-being of its citizens. But from a geopolitical standpoint, this distinction is vital. Foreign companies are not obligated to operate in China if it is no longer in their interest or if their home governments force or incentivize them to leave. The same is true for foreign suppliers of parts. They, too, cannot be forced to continue selling their wares in China if they see it as disadvantageous or if their governments prevent them from doing so.

MEANS OF PRODUCTION

So far, Washington’s attempts to cut off China have been highly targeted in nature, focusing on technology restrictions. But to determine what would happen if the United States and its allies imposed a broad economic cutoff, we carefully modeled the costs of decoupling, designing 12 hypothetical scenarios by varying three parameters: whether Taiwan was still part of the global economy or was taken out via Chinese conquest, blockade, or bombardment; the degree to which China’s trade with the United States and its allies was cut off; and the extent of the damage these trade disruptions inflicted on global supply chains.

We tested these scenarios to estimate the damage of trade disruptions in the short run—the weeks and months following their onset. In all 12, we found that China would suffer economic pain massively disproportionate to that of the United States. At the low end, the near-term economic disruptions to China would be around five times as large as the disruptions to the United States. At the high end, they would be around 11 times as large.

This translates to stomach-turning, Great Depression–like upfront costs for China, with its short-run economic disruptions affecting between 15 and 51 percent of the country’s GDP (depending on the scenario). In our baseline model in which all of China’s maritime trade is restricted via a distant naval blockade, for example, 39.9 percent of China’s GDP would be disrupted, but only 3.6 percent of U.S. GDP would be. Beijing, in other words, could sanction every single American industry and person, and the damage to the U.S. economy would, at most, be a tiny fraction of the damage that Washington and its allies can inflict on China.

China can be cut off only once.

To determine the long-term consequences of reduced economic interchange, we also modeled how global trade would eventually settle after the initial shock of decoupling, and how this new equilibrium would shape each state’s growth trajectory. In doing so, we found that Washington’s position would become even more comparatively favorable. The United States and almost all of its allies would return to their baseline level of growth. China’s economic trajectory, however, would permanently decline.

The key reason for this enduring imbalance is simple. China’s economy greatly depends on foreign firms producing goods within its borders or subcontracting with Chinese firms that do. The cutoffs would rip that production away. American companies and the companies of U.S. allies, meanwhile, are not so reliant. U.S. and allied trade and production would face short-term logistical troubles after a decoupling, but they can be rerouted away from China as firms find alternative factories to make their wares and locate other sources for basic parts. (Although some of China’s lost production might one day return, much would remain elsewhere once foreign companies went through the trouble of creating new supply lines.)

In fact, American firms and the firms of U.S. allies operating in China are already pursuing diversification. If a broad wartime economic cutoff were imposed on China, many companies would simply hasten this process. And because all Western firms would simultaneously face pressure to diversify from China, their concerns over being placed at a disadvantage by moving production before their competitors would be negated.

TIME, PLACE, AND MANNER

Former U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration sought to pursue a “small yard, high fence” approach to its economic relationship with China: greatly curtailing interchange only in the sectors most critical to national security, such as semiconductors. This strategy was motivated by the desire to, in the words of Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, “maintain as large a lead as possible” in the most crucial high-technology areas while otherwise benefiting from trade relations with China.

Yet this approach was not aggressive enough for many China hawks. To them, using a scalpel to “de-risk” supply chains will not adequately protect Americans from the dangers China poses; they believe the economies of the United States and China should instead be thoroughly decoupled. They claim that significant economic interchange with China presents intolerable risks—whether by strengthening Beijing, harming industrial communities within the United States, or causing generalized tension between the U.S. free-market system and the Chinese state-controlled one. These advocates now have a receptive audience in the White House. On the campaign trail, U.S. President Donald Trump proposed 60 percent tariffs on Chinese imports. He has suggested erecting even more drastic barriers, or even a complete shutdown if Beijing attacks Taiwan.

Undertaking a broad economic cutoff in response to Chinese territorial revisionism would be sensible. But using this approach in peacetime is altogether different and strategically unwise. China can be cut off only once, and doing so in the absence of conflict would squander vital leverage for constraining military aggression by Beijing. Unlike Russia, China is heavily integrated into global markets. It enjoys massive economic benefits from globalization that will be costly to forgo. With a substantial economic relationship left intact, Washington can signal to Beijing that it will benefit if it refrains from challenging the status quo but that China would incur massive economic retaliation should it tread the path of aggression. The United States should thus keep its economic powder dry until a moment of true crisis.

Assembly engineers at the Dutch technology company ASML in Veldhoven, Netherlands, June 2023 Piroschka van de Wouw / Reuters

Decoupling preemptively could also cause exactly the U.S.-Chinese conflict policymakers want to avoid. If the United States initiates large-scale peacetime cutoffs, and China believes it cannot effectively replicate many of the goods and technologies it stands to lose, it may sense that its window of opportunity to attack Taiwan is closing. That may prompt it to decide to use force quickly—especially since it would have less at risk if its global economic access were already set to be curtailed.

Finally, a broad peacetime decoupling might fail. To inflict massive, disproportionate harm on China, Washington needs its allies to participate in cutoffs; if the United States decouples by itself, the short-term disruptions to China’s GDP would be between just five and seven percent, only a hair above the four to five percent disruption to U.S. GDP under those circumstances. And in the absence of a crisis, Washington’s partners will likely be reticent to join in. Although the United States may suffer relatively little from cutting off China, many of its partners would pay a hefty price. Germany, for instance, would see around twice the level of economic disruption as the United States, Japan would see around three times as much damage, Australia around five times, and South Korea around seven times.

The United States could, of course, try to force its allies to cooperate by deploying secondary sanctions or using its naval assets to restrict China’s trade. But even if successful, such an effort would likely be penny-wise and pound-foolish, leading U.S. allies to turn away from Washington in the long term. The United States’ alliances are an incredible power resource, and its actions should not undermine them.

Washington should therefore stick to a de-risking approach and deploy a broad economic cutoff against China only if Beijing makes a severe, economically costly breach of the status quo. If China blockades or invades Taiwan, the short-term economic disruptions to the United States and its allies would be large enough to rival the losses caused by a broad decoupling. The additional pain from cutting off China might then appear marginal and strategically worthwhile to U.S. allies, particularly if Washington is pushing them.

SAFETY IN NUMBERS

To be ready to meet such a moment, however, the United States and its allies need a shared economic strategy. And at present, their coordination on economic statecraft is essentially ad hoc. Washington and allied governments began extensively planning how to sanction Russia after they learned, in October 2021, of its intent to invade Ukraine. But with China, they may not have as much notice, and whatever aggression they confront could be less blatant. Just as NATO undertakes preparatory actions over the long term—training, planning, allocating resources, and so on—to ensure effective military cooperation, Washington and its allies should now coordinate on how to wage economic war.

There are many ways to facilitate such collaboration. The best would be to create a formal economic alliance via a new intergovernmental organization. A vital function of this alliance would be to reduce uncertainty about whether its members would conduct a joint decoupling in response to Chinese territorial revisionism. Given that the costs of a broad cutoff vary greatly across countries, it is reasonable to wonder whether the most vulnerable ones would participate. Thoughtful planning within the alliance would reduce this uncertainty, in part by finding ways to assist the states that could suffer the most. For example, the alliance could plan for countries with large stockpiles of key resources to distribute them to more exposed members. To that end, Washington and its allies should strive to understand which of them can best disburse stockpiles or surge production of goods now supplied by China. They should plan how such a surge would occur and how such production would be distributed.

The alliance could also consider even more extensive forms of cooperation. It might, for example, plan how to coordinate fiscal and monetary policies during a crisis or how to seize and distribute the assets of countries (including China) that breach the territorial status quo. They could establish a collective financial reserve fund that members would draw on to mitigate the most severe damage of a cutoff. The reserve could even help resolve difficult questions about whether Washington’s allies spend enough money on defense. U.S. officials could offer to treat such contributions to a reserve fund, for example, as an alternative to an increase in defense spending.

Decoupling preemptively could cause exactly the war policymakers want to avoid.

Washington’s investment in a new economic alliance, however, cannot come at the expense of its existing security alliances, especially with Europe. An increasing number of politicians seem to think protecting Asia from China is mutually exclusive with protecting Europe from Russia. Vice President JD Vance, for example, has criticized the American military presence on the continent by arguing that resources invested there would be better used to constrain China’s capacity for military aggression. But this reasoning falsely assumes that constraining China is an objective achieved exclusively via military means. Shaping China’s security behavior and capabilities also requires economic tools, which means the United States needs Europe. The continent is home to a large share of the world’s leading firms, and any economic cutoff of China will be ineffective unless European countries participate.

The Biden administration’s effort to deny China advanced semiconductors is a case in point. For this restrictive policy to be effective, Washington had to obtain the cooperation of the Dutch firm ASML, the only company that makes the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines essential for manufacturing advanced semiconductor chips. ASML eventually agreed to American demands that it cease exporting these machines to China. But in the absence of a strong U.S. security role in Europe, it is doubtful that Washington’s intense lobbying campaign would have been successful.

Washington would therefore be wise to sustain its investment in NATO. It can even treat that commitment as the basis for a new understanding of the transatlantic bargain. In it, Europe would continue to receive needed military assistance from the United States concerning Russia, especially with respect to capabilities that would be too costly or politically difficult for the continent to develop on its own—such as a nuclear deterrent and cyberweapons. In exchange, Washington would receive Europe’s help with respect to economic policies constraining revisionism by Beijing.

READY, SET, . . . GO?

Although Washington’s allies would be far more exposed in an economic cutoff of China, the United States is hardly free of vulnerabilities. Certain American industries would be greatly harmed by a broad economic decoupling—most notably the agricultural sector, which exports a significant amount of goods to China. It would be wise for Washington to plan not just how to protect its partners’ economies but also how to protect its own. This planning would be vital to the smooth provision of government assistance to vulnerable industries in the event of a cutoff, and it would reassure leaders in those industries that they can survive a decoupling.

One important way to protect U.S. industries is by stockpiling more natural resources. It is the key area in which China has major economic leverage over the United States. But that is only because Washington has chosen to leave itself exposed, a problem it can and should rectify. The Department of Defense has a reserve of critical resources for use in national emergencies: the National Defense Stockpile. But this is intended to offset supply disruptions only in defense and vital civilian sectors—not in the economy overall. To protect the country more broadly, the United States needs to increase its natural resources stockpile to Cold War levels, roughly ten times as large as it is now. Such a step would have enormous strategic benefits and will cost relatively little, probably not much more than the price of a new aircraft carrier. At the same time, Washington needs to better incentivize the development of substitutes for natural resources now sourced from China, such as the rare-earth metals gallium and germanium. And where possible, the United States should augment the domestic extraction and processing of critical natural resources.

Washington would also be wise to identify additional areas in which the country is vulnerable to supply cutoffs from China and push forward with appropriate remediation steps—as it eventually did with respect to personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. government will need to hire more officials to examine their country’s ever-changing economic vulnerabilities. In fact, Washington should create a new institutional structure to foster more long-term planning and coordination regarding economic security issues. It could, for example, create new, dedicated economic security groups within the Treasury and Commerce Departments and the National Security Council that are each overseen by a political appointee—as has been suggested by Justin Muzinich, the former deputy secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

These new officials and institutions might finally recognize that China is far from leveling the balance of economic power with the United States and that Washington has vast economic leverage over Beijing. If the United States expends this leverage in peacetime, it could jolt China into acting on its territorial ambitions while costing Washington vital friendships. But if the United States holds this leverage in reserve, it could help keep Chinese revisionism in check. In doing so, it could narrow the range for catastrophic miscalculation between Beijing and Washington.

STEPHEN G. BROOKS is Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and a Guest Professor at Stockholm University

BEN A. VAGLE is a policy analyst at the U.S. Treasury. The views expressed here are his own.

This article is adapted from their forthcoming book Command of Commerce: America’s Enduring Economic Power Advantage Over China (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Foreign Affairs · by More by Stephen G. Brooks · February 20, 2025

18. The US must reform an arms sales process that invites dawdling

Yes. No more dawdling.

Conclusion:

To that end, we should replace the current Tiered Review with a more transparent, predictable process that can serve the interests of all stakeholders and more rapidly advance U.S. security goals.

The US must reform an arms sales process that invites dawdling

Defense News · by Charles Hooper and Mira Resnick · February 19, 2025

Last month, the State Department announced a record high in defense sales. When President Trump left office in 2021, defense sales totaled just over $175 billion. Defense exports saw an 81% increase from 2020 to 2024. If the second Trump administration wants to keep pace, it will have to re-think how it works with the various stakeholders to improve the timeline for delivery of weapons sales to our partners.

One important change is to partner with Congress to ensure that decisions on arms transfers are timely, sustainable and efficient.

In 2012, the State Department established a process, dubbed the “Tiered Review System,” whereby the State Department would “informally” preview prospective defense article transfers and licenses to the congressional committees of jurisdiction (Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee) before initiating the formal notification that is required under the Arms Export Control Act.

This process is not statutory and is memorialized by an exchange of letters between Congress and the State Department, thereby allowing changes without having to pass a law. Both sides of the aisle have a specific amount of time – depending on the country – to ask questions and share views on the prospective sale. This process has also allowed for the identification of potential problems or challenges prior to the public announcement that accompanies “formal” notification. Hierarchical ranking of countries determines the review duration and cost for consideration, e.g., shorter review periods and higher cost thresholds for NATO countries.

This process was based on the belief that identifying and resolving potential problems prior to formal review and public notification could avoid a Joint Congressional Resolution of Disapproval of the sale, which would be harmful to the bilateral relationship and embarrassing for all stakeholders. Bipartisan buy-in for defense transfers – particularly transfers that take years to deliver – helps U.S. security cooperation partners have confidence that both political parties will support the transfer throughout the 20–30-year life cycle of the system.

Congress plays a vital role in foreign policy and in building our security relationships, and U.S. partners and industry need to see the signal from Congress of commitment to the longevity of the transfer. The Tiered Review process was meant to provide a mechanism to demonstrate that commitment.

In practice, the Tiered Review process has evolved into a way for a single member of Congress to exercise a veto over weapons sale or technology transfer for reasons that may not have anything to do with foreign or defense policy. Though the process was designed with expedience in mind, the end result has been complications and delays.

Congress is not receiving the information it needs; the defense industry is not receiving the certainty it needs; the executive branch is not receiving the efficiency it needs; and some security cooperation partners are not receiving the weapons they need.

Weapons sales that were meant to move forward in a month’s time have been stalled for years, resulting in frustration for all the U.S. stakeholders and our allies and partners. In a rapidly evolving global security environment, we can no longer afford to delay the transfer of military capabilities to our allies and partners. In their frustration, some may turn to our economic and security rivals.

The answer is not to just abandon the Tiered Review process, as some have suggested. Weapons sales are, at their core, a foreign policy tool, and members of Congress must have a role in shaping key elements of this policy. All stakeholders, U.S. and foreign, still need the certainty that comes from a supportive Congress. Completely abandoning the informal notification process would deprive the process of this essential support and is therefore unacceptable. That said, it is long past time to replace the current Tiered Review process with a new process that restores the working partnership between Congress, the executive branch, and the defense industrial base. We need a process that strengthens the confidence of our allies and partners and strikes a balance between due diligence and speed.

We believe our recommendations would help this process get back on track.

Under a new process, which we call the Arms Transfer and Export Review Series (ATER Series), the State Department would continue to preview potential transfers and licenses to Congressional committees of jurisdiction before formal notification. This process would continue to be informal in that it would not be written into law to allow for flexibility and changes. All requirements of the Arms Export Control Act would still apply.

For ATER Series 1 cases, (most NATO allies and our closest partners, as well as maintenance and sustainment cases for transfers that have already been adjudicated) the administration should be able to move more seamlessly through the process. The administration and Congress should work collaboratively to produce the exact list of countries in Series 1. The administration will send a weekly informal notification that these sales will be formally and publicly notified the following week. No formal clearance would be required before formal notification, but the Arms Export Control Act would still allow for congressional opposition via Joint Resolutions of Disapproval. This would also allow congressional staff and members of Congress the time to focus on more complicated cases.

For ATER Series 2 cases (most other countries), Congress would receive informal notification of transfers and would have 20 days to review before these transfers move ahead to formal notification. Once questions from a chairman or ranking member of the committee of jurisdiction are sent to the State Department, the review period should be paused while the executive formulates a response. Each chairman and ranking member would have one opportunity during the time period to ask questions, and then the review period would resume.

The 30-day clock could stop up to four times – once for each ranking member or chair to ask their questions. The review period could be a time when the committee and the executive branch share views on conditionality or leverage with respect to a certain transfer. The clock will resume once the executive branch responds to the question(s). This review period ensures that Congress is well informed and avoids the scenario of the executive violating a congressional “hold.” Once the review period has expired and the executive determines it wants to proceed with formal notification to the full Congress, a member of Congress can only seek to stop a sale through a Joint Resolution of Disapproval pursuant to the Arms Export Control Act.

ATER Series 3 would follow a similar method as Series 2; 30 days for review, with applicable pauses – but would also include the analysis for how the transfer would affect Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge, which is required by law. This will allow lawmakers to consider how transfers to the Middle East would impact Israel’s security, according to the law.

Security cooperation is one of the most important tools that the United States has to build alliances and partnerships, encourage burden sharing, increase interoperability, grow U.S. jobs, and protect U.S. competitiveness and technological superiority. Congress can and should play a key role in deciding how this tool is used in accordance with the law. That said, we must find the right balance between congressional due diligence and meeting the needs of our allies and partners in a timely fashion.

To that end, we should replace the current Tiered Review with a more transparent, predictable process that can serve the interests of all stakeholders and more rapidly advance U.S. security goals.

Charles Hooper is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and former director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. Mira Resnick is the former deputy assistant secretary of State for regional security in the Bureau of Political Military Affairs.

19. The New Meaning of ‘Munich’

Another fierce critique of the Vice President's Speech and more.

Excerpts:

Graham believes that Putin only wants to exert direct control over the “Slavic core” of the old Russian empire, including Belarus, parts of Ukraine, and perhaps parts of Kazakhstan. “He’s not interested in the Baltics,” Graham said. “He may want continuing influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia, but he doesn’t want outright control.”

Kupchan, the Georgetown scholar and a specialist in trans-Atlantic relations, agreed in part. “In a sense, what Trump is doing needs to be done. I think a bilateral dialogue between Russia and the United States is overdue,” said Kupchan, who served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council.

“I just wish they knew what they were doing. They keep giving away the store before the negotiations even begin,” Kupchan added. “And the insults are so unnecessary. To have the vice president of the United States show up and insult his hosts and tell them they need to start dealing with a party that has its roots in National Socialism is outrageous.”

Trump’s approach to China and Asia—and whether the United States will seek to retreat from a possible defense of Taiwan, as Trump has sometimes hinted—remains to be seen.

In the face of Washington’s retreat, the world is clearly returning, to some degree, to the balance of power geopolitics that has reigned since ancient times. What we don’t know yet is what happens when this balance of power is reinforced by nuclear deterrence—and, perhaps, enforced by cyberdeterrence and other new tech threats.

How stable might it be? The next four years will tell.

The New Meaning of ‘Munich’

After J.D. Vance’s bizarre speech, a word synonymous with appeasement may now signal the voluntary surrender of global hegemony.

February 19, 2025, 3:04 PM

A pencil drawing of the headshot of Michael Hirsh

Michael Hirsh

By Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy.

Foreign Policy · by Michael Hirsh

For more than eight decades, the word “Munich” has meant one thing in international relations: a catastrophic policy of appeasement. Now, “Munich” may soon take on a fresh—and possibly even more fraught—meaning: the voluntary surrender of global hegemony.

In a series of remarks leading up to the just-ended Munich Security Conference, senior Trump administration officials—including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—signaled that the United States is substantially retreating from the greatest alliance in history, NATO, and that China and Russia could have what they’ve long sought: a “multipolar world,” in Rubio’s words. This was capped by a blustery, insulting speech in Munich by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance—remarks that some European officials interpreted as “the opening salvo in a trans-Atlantic divorce proceeding,” according to foreign-policy analyst Richard Fontaine.

Rubio, accompanied by President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Waltz, then flew to Saudi Arabia to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov—all without European or Ukrainian participation. The object: to pursue a peace settlement in the Russia-Ukraine war and, as Rubio said Tuesday, to “unlock the door” to “incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians geopolitically.”

Trump even said that he wanted to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin, who faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court over allegations of war crimes, back into the G-8 group of nations.

Marco Rubio shakes hands with Abdulmajeed al-Smari as they stand together outdoors on a sunny day. Other people mill about behind them.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (left) is received by Saudi Arabia Deputy Minister for Protocol Affairs Abdulmajeed al-Smari upon his arrival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Feb. 17.Evelyn Hockstein/AFP via Getty Images

Astonishingly, Trump later appeared to echo Russian talking points by blaming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—who complained about being left out of the Russia talks in Saudi Arabia—for starting the war, which was begun by Putin in 2022.

“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” Trump told Zelensky in remarks to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort. And all this is on top of the new tariff war that Trump just launched against the United States’ closest friends in the European Union.

Little of this comes as a complete surprise. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement has been signaling such a shift for months, if not years. And the U.S.-orchestrated global order—which, for most of the past 80 years since World War II, U.S. officials of both political parties fully supported—was starting to fall apart even before Trump began suggesting that he was no longer interested in being leader of the free world.

But by brazenly treating some of Washington’s key allies as adversaries—and its autocratic adversaries as partners—Trump may be administering the death blow to a once-stable world system in which Washington served as overseer of a powerful alliance of democracies. As another Munich attendee, Georgetown University scholar Charles Kupchan, put it to me: “The atmosphere in Munich was that of a funeral.”

United States and Ukrainian flags hang behind a table surrounded by a seated group that includes J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Volodymyr Zelensky. The table is covered in a white tablecloth, and each attendee has a name card, green water bottle, and glass in front of them.

U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance (far right), U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (second from right) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (far left) meet on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Feb.14. Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images

How far could the unwinding of the U.S.-led global system go? It’s not yet clear. Moving at breakneck speed, Trump appears to be doing far more damage than expected only a month into office.

Also, one of the messages that Europe took from Vance’s appearance in Munich on Valentine’s Day was not just the decidedly unloving content of his speech—in which the vice president openly embraced far-right European politics while ostensibly defending free speech—but the implicit staying power of that message given Vance’s youth.

Europe can no longer pretend, in other words, that U.S. politics has been briefly hijacked by a 78-year-old huckster (as many of them see Trump) who will soon depart the scene. Vance is just 40 years old and perceived as the heir to the neo-isolationist America First movement (though Trump himself is not quite ready to grant him that title).

And the veep and his MAGA supporters have as little love as Trump does for what they see as an all-too-leftist Europe. The fact that Vance could visit Dachau one day and meet the next day with Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party (which has been criticized for its connections with openly neo-Nazi groups) —all without betraying any sense of historical irony—suggests that the postwar trans-Atlantic consensus may really be over. It’s noteworthy that Vance’s speech to the same Munich conference a year ago, when he was still a U.S. senator, was titled: “Europe Must Stand on Its Own Two Feet on Defense.”

Indeed, Vance’s bizarre speech on Feb. 14—which had nothing to do with security and everything to do with culture and politics—should probably be seen mainly as an appeal to his MAGA home audience and perhaps the effective start to his 2028 presidential campaign.

“There are folks inside the administration who are simply thrilled to be bringing tears to the eyes of the Europeans,” said one Republican international relations expert familiar with the Trump officials’ thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “There is a lingering anger from Trump’s first term toward the bien-pensant crowd in Brussels who openly criticized Trump’s domestic politics and came out against the Dobbs decision.” (That was the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion.)

Moreover, says this expert, there is an emerging dominance of “restrainers” or realists in the new administration who want to scale down the United States’ global presence. The Defense Department is already developing plans to remove all remaining U.S. troops in Syria, and it will possibly shift some of the troops deployed in Europe to the U.S. southern border, the expert said.

Here are 10 steps European leaders can take now to bolster the continent’s defenses without U.S. help.

It is striking that even Rubio, once considered a traditional Republican hawk—that is, a stalwart believer in U.S. global hegemony—appears to be surrendering to a new global status quo. In a Jan. 30 interview with conservative pundit Megyn Kelly, Rubio effectively conceded to Russia and China what both nations had long been seeking: that we now live in a multipolar world and that Washington’s unipolar power had merely been “an anomaly.”

“It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multigreat powers in different parts of the planet,” Rubio said.

The problem, however, is that Trump often behaves in ways that suggest that he thinks the United States is still the global hegemon.

“He thinks America’s bargaining position is incredibly strong, that we can get massively better deals at better cost,” said William Wohlforth, an international relations scholar at Dartmouth College. “So that’s not really consistent with this idea of multipolarity,” he added.

It’s fashionable to write that Trump just makes policies up as he goes along, such as his seemingly immoral—and monumentally ahistorical—idea of ridding Gaza of Palestinians and turning it into the “Riviera” of the Middle East. But in fact, Trump has been remarkably consistent in his view that Washington has no business being caretaker to the world—going back to the late 1980s, when as a real-estate magnate, he took out a full-page New York Times ad that said, “The world is laughing at American politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

In some ways, Trump is a reversion to the pre-World War II norm of Republican geopolitics. In recent weeks, much has been made of the 47th president’s 19th-century approach to power—stemming from his bid for greater hemispheric primacy over Greenland and the Panama Canal, as well as his embrace of the tariff policies similar to those of former President William McKinley.

But he also represents a return to the early-to-mid 20th century Taft Republicanism, named for Sen. Robert Taft. Once known as “Mr. Republican,” Taft fought the New Deal and backed the America First Committee, the pre-World War II version of Trump’s movement. Former President Dwight Eisenhower silenced that isolationist wing of the GOP 70 years ago as the Cold War got underway. Now it seems to be back, redefined as “national conservatism.”

Former President Joe Biden worked hard to restore the U.S. role as the supposed overseer of the global order and portray Trump, and his disruptive first term, as an outlier. But the main message of the 2024 election was that it was Biden, not Trump, who was the interlude from history. The advent of Trump II—and the way that he’s upended Washington and the world order in just a month—shows that history is returning with a vengeance.

The question is, how much of that history will return? Without U.S. leadership, will we revert to the old-style balance-of-power geopolitics that ruled for centuries, including for part of the Cold War, in which weaker powers join together to counterbalance the strong?

Emmanuel Macron and Donald Tusk embrace as they stand together outside in front of a French honor guard dressed in formal military attire and standing at attention.

French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to the Ukraine and European Security Summit in Paris, France, on Feb. 17.Benoît Durand/AFP via Getty Images

Much now depends on the European nations in NATO, many of which are pledging a new independence in the wake of Munich—perhaps even a balancing against what some now see as a rogue U.S. power.

“But they don’t know yet what to do about it,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a research director for the European Council on Foreign Relations. He added: “The extent of their dependence in security, economic, and energy terms on the U.S. means that they are currently almost helpless in the face of a predatory American administration. Even if they now have a broader consensus about the problem, they have little consensus on the solution.”

That became clear on Monday, when French President Emmanuel Macron, in his latest bid to drive Europe toward “strategic autonomy,” called an emergency meeting in Brussels. On the agenda was developing a strategy to protest Washington’s decision to leave European leaders out of the negotiations with Russia. As Politico described it, “Leaders came up with no new joint ideas, squabbled over sending troops to Ukraine, and once again mouthed platitudes on aiding Ukraine and boosting defense spending.”

Many defense experts believe that, even with an all-out effort, it would take more than a decade for European countries to develop the intelligence and logistical capabilities, as well as cross-border defense industries, to come close to replacing the United States.

Moreover, to adapt a saying by the great Scottish economist Adam Smith, there is “a great deal of ruin” in an international system. It takes a long time, in other words, to destroy 80 years of institution building, much less a post-World War II globalized economy still held together by an iron law: Countries must take part in it to prosper. Meanwhile, Russia is badly weakened and drained by its bloody three-year debacle in Ukraine, and China is not close to being on par with either Washington’s power or its alliance system.

Thus, while what we are witnessing is clearly something more than a simple reset of relations—especially with European nations still seething over the rebukes they got from Vance and Hegseth last week—it is also probably something less than a return to a state of nature. Even in a multipolar world, the United States is still the dominant power.

“I don’t see it going all the way back to pure spheres of influence or a balance of power system, in which barriers to territorial conquest are lowered,” said Wohlforth, the Dartmouth scholar. “The U.S. has alliances with countries that possess 70 percent of world GDP. This means that any revisionist power still has to contemplate an unbelievably high cost if it wants to transform the status quo through territorial change.”

Putin has found that out with the loss of hundreds of thousands of troops and a great deal of status since he invaded Ukraine on Feb. 22, 2022. “He’s probably sacrificed 2 percent of his GDP for the next 10 years,” Wohlforth said. “He’s sacrificed modernization and diversity of his export portfolio, and he’s sacrificed his autonomy, since he’s dependent on help from China, Iran, and North Korea. I doubt that other powers [such as China] will want to emulate that experience.”

Some Russia experts believe that if Trump handles relations right, he can actually restabilize Europe and induce Putin to stop where he is with partial control of eastern Ukraine, without further threatening any Central European countries.

“The world is a much more dangerous place when the world’s two leading nuclear powers don’t have a substantive dialogue ongoing, and that’s been true for the last three years,” said Thomas Graham, a Russia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who once worked for U.S. President George W. Bush.

“Restarting the dialogue is extremely important. One reason Russia has welcomed this engagement by the Trump administration is that it validates Russia as a great power. And in a strange way, Russia’s own sense of itself is dependent on recognition from the United States. That is a point of leverage for the United States if you know how to play it.”

Graham believes that Putin only wants to exert direct control over the “Slavic core” of the old Russian empire, including Belarus, parts of Ukraine, and perhaps parts of Kazakhstan. “He’s not interested in the Baltics,” Graham said. “He may want continuing influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia, but he doesn’t want outright control.”

Kupchan, the Georgetown scholar and a specialist in trans-Atlantic relations, agreed in part. “In a sense, what Trump is doing needs to be done. I think a bilateral dialogue between Russia and the United States is overdue,” said Kupchan, who served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council.

“I just wish they knew what they were doing. They keep giving away the store before the negotiations even begin,” Kupchan added. “And the insults are so unnecessary. To have the vice president of the United States show up and insult his hosts and tell them they need to start dealing with a party that has its roots in National Socialism is outrageous.”

Trump’s approach to China and Asia—and whether the United States will seek to retreat from a possible defense of Taiwan, as Trump has sometimes hinted—remains to be seen.

In the face of Washington’s retreat, the world is clearly returning, to some degree, to the balance of power geopolitics that has reigned since ancient times. What we don’t know yet is what happens when this balance of power is reinforced by nuclear deterrence—and, perhaps, enforced by cyberdeterrence and other new tech threats.

How stable might it be? The next four years will tell.

This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration. Follow along here.Foreign Policy · by Michael Hirsh

20. Still not confident enough: China isn’t likely to move on Taiwan in 2025

Of course Sun Tzu said, "Never assume your enemy will not attack. Make yourself invincible."

Still not confident enough: China isn’t likely to move on Taiwan in 2025 | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · by Joe Keary · February 19, 2025

Despite China’s rapid military improvements, it’s unlikely to use large-scale force against Taiwan in 2025. The Chinese leadership’s concerns over the quality of military command, economic weakening, uncertain social stability and effects of the Trump administration will likely forestall any large scale military manoeuvre.

However, China will continue to ramp up pressure against Taiwan across 2025.

On 6 January, the United States’ new defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, told the Senate Armed Services Committee he believed a Chinese Communist Party fait accompli invasion of Taiwan was the pacing risk scenario for the Department of Defense. He reminded the committee that ‘Xi Jinping has openly expressed his intention to annex Taiwan to mainland China’ and ‘has told his military to be prepared to use force to achieve such an outcome by 2027’.

Like its successes in artificial intelligence, improvements in China’s military should not be underestimated. In several areas, China’s military is now reaching standards typical of the US military. China’s navy is transforming rapidly and by the end of 2025 is expected to have 395 ships, including three operational aircraft carriers. China is also improving its amphibious fleet, acquiring assault ships that can carry large numbers of landing craft, troops, fixed wing drones, armored vehicles and helicopters. In early 2025, there were reports of China building special barges that would support Taiwan landings.

China’s military now has the largest aviation force in the region, with new fighters and stealth aircraft that expand its ability to operate farther from its shores. It is also increasing its inventory of nuclear weapons and now has the world’s leading arsenal of hypersonic missiles. The army has increased the number of troops along the Taiwan Strait and improved its firepower, mobility, and rapid strike capabilities.

Throughout 2024, China’s military and coast guard continued to exercise Taiwan invasion and blockade scenarios. In May, following the inauguration of Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te, Beijing launched large-scale military exercises, surrounding Taiwan within two days. In October, it undertook a second series of drills, taking just one day to implement a mock blockade or quarantine of Taiwan. In December, China staged its largest show of force in decades, showing the world how it could repel a foreign force approaching Taiwan.

The military has dramatically improved its ability to conduct a blockade or invasion, but Beijing will still have doubts. During the release of the 2024 China Military Power Report, senior Pentagon officials said, ‘despite its rapid progress, the force has not yet demonstrated the type and scale of sophisticated urban warfare or long-distance logistic capabilities that would likely be required for operations against Taiwan’. A lack of combat experience is a significant imposition for a force wanting to undertake complicated operations across the Taiwan Strait. Exercising will only get you so far.

Serious questions have also been asked about China’s officer corps and their ability to ‘judge situations, understand higher authorities’ intentions, make operational decisions, deploy troops, and deal with unexpected situations’. Corruption also remains an endemic issue, with China’s military experiencing a new wave of corruption-related scandals over the past two years that has led to the removal of two defence ministers and a high-ranking member of China’s Central Military Commission.

Domestic factors will also influence any decision to use military force. China is facing adverse demographic trends, including an aging population and low birth rates. There are other internal struggles, such as a trend of rising violence, following a string of indiscriminate mass attacks throughout 2024.

China is also seeking to manage a faltering economy, worsened by ballooning local government debt, a loss of investor confidence and the gradual collapse of its real estate sector. Beijing has struggled to stimulate domestic consumption, relying on its growing share of global exports to drive the economy. Researchers at Rhodium Group estimated that China’s GDP was only 2.4 to 2.8 percent higher in 2024 than a year earlier, well below official claim of 5.0 percent growth.

China’s trade surplus reached a new high of nearly US$1trillion in 2024. Beijing will be wary of the impact of a potential trade war with the United States. It will want to strengthen its trade relationships with other partners to reinforce its economy. China has already sought to recalibrate ties with Japan, India and Australia, while doubling down on its engagement with the Global South. Within this context, China will want to perform a careful balancing act over Taiwan. It will not want to damage international relationships by taking unnecessarily aggressive military actions.

Amid the problems, the leadership nonetheless probably has growing confidence that, if called upon, the military will be able to ‘resolve the Taiwan issue’. However, Xi probably hasn’t yet decided to use force against Taiwan.

2027 almost certainly remains a short-term goal for military modernisation, not a date for a Taiwan invasion. Concerns over the economy and social stability will remain as key priorities for China’s leadership.

Xi will also want to carefully assess the Trump administration’s resolve on the Taiwan issue. Trump has hinted at a more transactional approach to Taiwan, suggesting it contribute more to its own security while still supporting Taipei’s right to self-defence. Trump is already threatening tariffs on Taiwan’s semiconductors.

In 2025, China’s military will continue to undertake exercises around Taiwan as part of a broader coercion campaign against Taipei. However, the likelihood of large-scale use of force against Taiwan in 2025 remains low.

aspistrategist.org.au · by Joe Keary · February 19, 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

Company Name | Website