​Quotes of the Day:

"History does not entrust the care of freedom to the weak or timid." 

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Future shock [is] the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time." 

– Alvin Toffler

"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't. It's knowing where to go to find out what you need to know; and it's knowing how to use the information you get." 

– William Feather

1. Going on the Offensive: Rethinking US SOF’s Mission Set for the Age of Strategic Competition

2. American Power Without Fiscal Alignment Is Not Sustainable Power

3. In a First, U.S. Deploys Combat Jets to Israel for Potential Wartime Mission in Iran

4. F-16 Pilot’s Narrow Escape in Missile Attack Shows Risks of a New Mideast War

5. Is China flexing its intelligence muscle by tracking US military moves near Iran?

6. Can China and Philippines replace ‘disputes with cooperation’ after years of tension?

7. US to keep China trade tariffs steady ahead of key Trump-Xi meeting: Greer

8. Greenland: Defense Agreements with Denmark | SOF News

9. Scoop: Pentagon takes first step toward blacklisting Anthropic

10. Assessing Xi’s Unprecedented Purges of China’s Military: Key Developments and Potential Implications

11. ‘We don’t have infantry’: Ukraine’s war machine evolves into machine war

12. Ukraine Is Losing the War

13. America Needs an Alliance Audit

14. Voice of America is covering Iran’s protests, but not its best-known dissident

15. For Iran’s Regime, Better to Take a Beating than Capitulate

1. Going on the Offensive: Rethinking US SOF’s Mission Set for the Age of Strategic Competition

​Summary:

Pullan and Young argue that in strategic competition the United States is losing in the gray zone, where adversaries pursue political objectives below the threshold of war. They contend US Special Operations Forces remain burdened with legacy missions such as counterinsurgency and foreign humanitarian assistance that dilute strategic focus. The authors propose adding Persistent Gray Zone Operations as a core activity. PGZO would lower attribution thresholds for proxy actors, expand Military Information Support Operations, and foment insurgency in regions such as Central Asia and Myanmar to impose asymmetric costs on China and Russia. The aim is proactive deterrence without triggering nuclear escalation.

Comment: Another new acronym: "PZGO." I guess the new acronym would be pronounced "pizz-go." (that would be according to the joint acronym control officer). But on a more serious note...

The proposal assumes escalation can be carefully managed even when sponsoring or enabling insurgent attacks against Chinese or Russian interests. That presumes adversaries will accept calibrated pain without widening the conflict.

Shifting SOF toward offensive gray zone campaigns implies establishment of actual political warfare authorities. It would require tighter integration with intelligence, cyber, and diplomatic tools, and greater tolerance for risk and plausible deniability.

Removing counterinsurgency and humanitarian assistance from SOF’s core activities suggests a return to an unconventional warfare centric identity. This would narrow SOF’s mission set but deepen its focus on strategic competition rather than crisis response. Note that COIN was only recently added to the list of SOF activities. Prior to 9-11 COIN was not a SOF activity. However, Foreign Internal Defense was (and is) and that is the appropriate mission for SOF. And all forces must contribute to humanitarian assistance whenever necessary. As an example we have conducted a lot of operations in support of disaster relief (hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes, etc). I don't think that requirement will ever go away. But it doesn't need to be listed as a core activity.

Questions that practitioners, scholars, and officials may ask:

If the United States lowers the threshold for attributing proxy actions to adversary states, how will it respond when China or Russia apply the same standard to US partners or aligned nonstate actors?

Can fomenting insurgency against nuclear armed competitors remain below escalation thresholds, or does such action risk miscalculation in the absence of robust crisis communication?

Does redefining gray zone competition as warfare strengthen deterrence, or does it normalize continuous conflict and erode the legal and moral boundaries that have long underpinned US strategy?

Going on the Offensive: Rethinking US SOF’s Mission Set for the Age of Strategic Competition

by Daniel Pullan, by Joshua Young

02.26.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/26/going-on-the-offensive/

Executive Summary

In an era of strategic competition, America’s adversaries are engaged in persistent operations against US interests in a spectrum of low-intensity conflict frequently referred to as the “gray zone”. The legal and bureaucratic limitations for the use of power that have served America well in the past are being effectively exploited by peer and near-peer adversaries. The US should proactively aim to divert, distract, and degrade enemy capabilities through restructuring the US Special Operations Forces’ (SOF) mission set to operate against its adversaries in the gray zone. Counterinsurgency and Foreign Humanitarian Assistance should be removed from SOF’s Core Activities and given to other entities, and Persistent Gray Zone Operations (PGZO) should be added to SOF’s Core Activities. PGZO will seek to deter enemy provocations by lowering the threshold for attribution of subnational actors’ operations to the foreign states whose interests they serve, increasing SOF’s information warfare capability to project US messaging into adversarial countries, and fomenting instability in diverse regions where the US seeks to gain an asymmetric advantage over its adversaries.

Wars Between Nuclear Powers

The development of the nuclear bomb brought with it an onslaught of academic thought on how this newfound power should be used. Theories of mutually assured destruction, second strike, and nuclear triad became prominent, bringing with them an era of tense peace between nuclear powers. Today, as the US sits on the verge of potential conflict with China and Russia engages in a land war that may one day spill into Eastern Europe, that same academic fervor for the question of how wars between nuclear powers should occur is disturbingly lacking. The world no longer seems to bat an eye at the idea of American and Chinese forces fighting head-to-head — and to merely hope that such a situation will not end in nuclear disaster in the absence of arms control agreements and reliable nuclear hotlines is both dangerous and naive. This reality would make the great nuclear strategists of the Cold War turn in their graves.

So, how should wars between nuclear powers be fought? The adage regarding the recipe for frog provides a clever solution to this question. The saying goes that a frog placed directly in boiling water will jump out of the pot, but a frog that is placed in cold water that is slowly heated to boiling will stay in the pot until dead. The water reaches a boiling point in both cases, yet the difference in result is due to the absence of inflection points. The lack of sudden changes deadens the frog’s sensitivity to its perilous situation and removes natural decision points that would otherwise demand drastic action; its insensitivity to slow and persistent changes leads to its destruction.

Enemies of the West seem to have already realized a range of use cases for this theory. They actively pursue and achieve political goals while limiting inflection points through the use of a spectrum of low-intensity conflict, commonly referred to in the West as the “gray zone”. The US must retool its military ways and means to compete effectively in this space and to protect its status as a hegemon in an era of strategic competition.

Force-on-force conflict with nuclear opponents is neither inevitable nor desirable. Proactive, offensive actions in the gray zone can create intense pressure on America’s opponents while avoiding inflection points that could drive uncontrolled escalation. Changes in the US’s approach to the gray zone will allow it to establish deterrence in this space and push its enemies from a cycle of proaction to reaction. There is no time to waste; the US is currently being boiled without protest like the proverbial frog. It is high time that the US went on the offensive.

A Narrow Continuum of Force

Analysis of Russian and Chinese military doctrine reveals that both countries have a broader acknowledged continuum of force than that of the United States. Though Russia and China do not share the US’s terminology for the gray zone, they are doctrinally well-equipped to conduct these kinds of activities. Russian military doctrine emphasizes fighting asymmetrically, placing high value on tools such as cyber and information warfare. China’s military doctrine follows the tenets of Mao and Sun Tzu, seeking to win without fighting through codified tactics like that of the “Three Warfares”. From Russia’s “little green men” of 2014, the cutting of underwater cables, and the use of hacktivist groups, to China’s maritime militia and decades of strategic intellectual property theft, America’s opponents seek to obfuscate attribution and put the US in a state of delayed reaction while pursuing and achieving political goals.

Definitions for gray zone activities vary, but generally agree that these actions are designed to fall below the threshold of a kinetic response, rely on obfuscation of the source to make attribution difficult, and use technology to target specific audiences for maximum effect. Writing on the subject often describes the gray zone as “neither peace, nor war”. Defining this realm of conflict as such is dangerous. It creates room for the West to pursue lackluster responses to overt provocation by actors with known but intentionally unclear links to adversarial nations. Warfare in the gray zone is warfare; China and Russia actively accomplish political goals through these activities. Make no mistake, if the enemies of the West are winning without fighting, then the West is actively losing without fighting.

One of the major difficulties of US responses to gray zone provocations is that the US military is not doctrinally tooled to succeed in this fight. US policy makers need a broader array of responses to incursions in the gray zone to enable them to establish consistent deterrence to adversarial actions. This toolbox should go beyond merely establishing deterrence and seek avenues for the US to act decisively and offensively in the gray zone. This will require the careful and fluid alignment of multiple instruments of national power. Grand strategy demands that the US move to a state of proaction, forcing the enemies of the US to react as America molds the battlefield, choosing when, where, and how to fight rather than allowing the enemy to determine the same.

The perfect tool for this expanded mission is America’s SOF. US SOF are flexible, adaptable, and have funding and procurement systems that will allow them to retool their mission set at a rapid pace. SOF are also more experienced at conducting low attribution activities and running operations parallel to US intelligence agencies. In order to retool SOF for the era of strategic competition, they must be unburdened of their current excessive set of responsibilities and given a new range of tasks that will allow them to focus on winning at the strategic level through asymmetric warfare in the gray zone.

Rethinking US SOF’s Mission Set

Modern SOF is the result of several decades of painful evolution and reinvention. This evolution is an ongoing and sometimes uncomfortable process, but it remains crucial to mission success. There is a clear desire within US SOF to achieve an ideal balance of authorizations and responsibilities, and to apply those changes to future problems. SOF must reject institutional rigidity and become more unpredictable to potential adversaries by becoming more proactive – and by embracing their roots of small, foreign, unconventional operations to remain relevant in the current strategic environment.

SOF is well positioned to leverage many instruments of national power, such as cyber warfare, information dominance, military action, and diplomacy in ways that the larger conventional military is not. These unique skills and authorizations contribute heavily to mission success. The US should slightly alter SOF’s authorizations and mission with a goal of driving slow and persistent increases in pressure on adversarial nations through operations in the gray zone. If SOF were authorized and enabled to conduct persistent, disparate, small-scale gray zone operations across diverse geographic areas, the US could steadily increase the resource and cognitive burden on its adversaries, allowing it to proactively combat adversarial operations in this space. This would compel America’s enemies to become more reactive and shift the balance of power noticeably in favor of US objectives.

The list of SOF core activities is oversized, and historical trends suggest that without intervention, they will continue to grow unconstrained. In the modern political and economic environment of limited resources, SOF capabilities will either have to proportionally decrease with the addition of new mission directives, or they will have to eliminate legacy missions to make room for the new. A potential solution to this problem is to remove Counterinsurgency and Foreign Humanitarian Assistance from SOF’s core activities to make room for a new task — PGZO.

Counterinsurgency is an exceedingly difficult mission that requires the use of long-term economic and diplomatic instruments of national power, and is better suited to the conventional military and other non-military organizations due to its complexity and significant manpower requirements. Foreign Humanitarian Assistance, though admirable, does not contribute to SOF’s warfighting mission and is an additional strain on SOF’s limited budget, personnel, and capabilities. If SOF were to eliminate these activities from its mission requirements, it could reallocate its limited resources towards conducting strategic-level, offensive PGZO.

PGZO will have three core tenets discussed in more detail below. The first will be to lower the threshold for attribution of subnational organizations’ provocative activities to the foreign states whose interests they serve. The second will increase SOF’s information warfare capabilities, allowing them to push information favorable to the US to the populations of adversarial countries in support of operations. The third will be to conduct or foment insurgency and unconventional warfare against adversaries in diverse regions where the US seeks an asymmetric advantage. With statutory authorizations and resources devoted to SOF to accomplish this task, SOF is ideally positioned to obfuscate attribution and to drive change at the strategic level.

Policy Recommendations for Enacting PGZO

Direct Attribution of Obfuscated Groups:

Gray zone activities thrive when subnational actors’ affiliations to the state are unclear. Obfuscated affiliations do not need to be extensive to be effective. As long as they slow the US cycle of attribution, they can delay its reaction time to provocations enough that a response is too far removed from the incident to be feasible. The US feeds into this cycle by allowing adversaries to disavow themselves from the actions of subnational groups that actively work to accomplish their strategic objectives. The US should hold adversarial nations accountable for the actions of subnational actors within their borders. Responses against the state for the actions of subnational actors — whether financial, cyber, or kinetic — would establish consistent deterrence, negate the advantage gained by obfuscating these ties, and encourage states to rein in malign actors that are truly unaffiliated.

Increase US SOF’s MISO Capability

US SOF should invest heavily in increasing its Military Information Support Operations (MISO) capability. MISO is currently one of SOF’s core activities, providing US SOF a tentative information warfare capability. Increased MISO operations are central to increased US kinetic activity in the gray zone. MISO operations should not only counter Russian and Chinese information warfare, but also project US narratives in support of SOF gray zone operations into target countries. Utilizing third countries to drive desired narratives into heavily controlled internet and communication environments will be vital to shaping the information environment in ways that will favor the US.

Fomenting Insurgency, Central Asia

Central Asia is rife with PGZO opportunities that America could leverage. The presence of Chinese nationals and corporations in the region pursuing the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) are ideal political targets that would force a reaction from Beijing if attacked. The persecution of Uyghur populations in Xinjiang is a severe point of discomfort for Muslims throughout Central Asia, though government response to these violations has been lukewarm. Terrorist and insurgent groups in the region, such as the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), the Taliban, and the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), are all ideally positioned and motivated to carry out attacks against Chinese and other foreign interests. These organizations are also exploitable due to their lack of financial resources and diplomatic recognition.

A key political player that could assist the US in projecting power and supplying foreign militaries is India. India has a long adversarial history and ongoing border disputes with China. If America and India were to align their anti-China goals by leveraging PGZO in Central Asia, the results could drastically change the political landscape of the region. An anti-China India-America partnership could exploit Central Asian insurgency organizations against Chinese interests by offering intelligence, military, financial, and other resources to them, as well as diplomatic recognition. SOF should be the primary US military asset leading this effort.

Fomenting Insurgency, Myanmar

Myanmar is another area where the US should seek to gain an asymmetric advantage over China. China is heavily invested in the Kyaukpyu Deep-Sea Port, located in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. The port is a central piece of China’s BRI land corridor through Myanmar, intended to give China access to the Indian Ocean and provide an alternative to passage to the narrow Strait of Malacca. Myanmar has been embroiled in a civil war since 2021, when Myanmar’s military, the Tatmawdaw, removed the democratically elected Aung San Suu Kyi from office. Myanmar is now torn between ethnic armed organizations under Suu Kyi’s National Unity Government (NUG), the Tatmawdaw, and a wide range of unaffiliated groups.

Arms could be smuggled to NUG-aligned militias to support their fight against the Tatmawdaw in exchange for attacks on Chinese nationals, ports, or oil infrastructure within the country. The goal of these attacks would be to draw a Chinese response within the state. China would likely rely first on the United Wa State Army (UWSA), situated in the autonomous Wa State on the Chinese border, to regain control. The UWSA is armed and trained by China, and acts as a generally neutral lynchpin to drive Chinese policy within Myanmar through violence when necessary. US SOF-backed operations to dismantle the UWSA would likely draw additional Chinese security forces into the country to secure the land route and protect their investments.

Once the UWSA is dismantled and China commits additional resources to the country, US-backed attacks would subside for a time, allowing the Chinese a brief victory. This lull in combat would be paired with SOF MISO operations to project nationalist narratives into China regarding their victories in Myanmar. Once this narrative becomes widespread within the country, China will have decreased political ability to divest itself from its Myanmar operations without embarrassment. The US will then drastically increase the intensity of its attacks against Myanmar-based Chinese interests through its established partners, drawing China in. China will be forced to commit ever-increasing resources to the fight to save face. Myanmar could easily become China’s Afghanistan or Vietnam; the war they never desired, but the one that bled them dry.

Conclusion

Pivoting any organization towards unproven ideas is difficult under normal conditions, let alone within the anarchic and often deadly playing field of international relations. With the right political will and economic support, US SOF could bend the future to its will, unlike any other organization in American military history. The US must begin proactively meeting its opponents in the spectrum of warfare that they have chosen to fight in. America can now either seize the day or continue to play the doomed role of the boiled frog. SOF is perfectly positioned to go on the offense for America — and America can no longer afford to wait.

Tags: Deterrence, Gray Zone, Gray Zone Warfare, information warfare, irregular warfare, nuclear deterrence, Special Operations, Special Operations Forces (SOF), Strategic Competition, Unconventional Warfare

About The Authors

• 
  
• Daniel Pullan
• Daniel Pullan is an experienced military intelligence professional and intelligence community contractor. His areas of focus include strategic competition, emerging technology, counterterrorism, and the EMEA region. Daniel is currently a graduate student in Security Policy Studies at George Washington University.
• View all posts 
• 
  
• Joshua Young
• Josh Young is an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team leader and veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, as well as a civilian EOD contractor. Josh is currently a graduate student at George Washington University, focusing on security policy and weapon development.

2. American Power Without Fiscal Alignment Is Not Sustainable Power

​Summary:

Michael Greif argues that American power cannot endure if strategy ignores the federal balance sheet. He notes that the fiscal constraint is structural: most spending is pre committed through mandatory programs and rising net interest, leaving a shrinking slice for discretionary choices where defense competes with domestic investment. Social Security faces a looming funding gap, yet the public rejects benefit cuts, while interest costs already rival defense outlays and will likely grow. Greif contends unilateralism is not cheaper because alliances provide access, basing, support, and legitimacy that the United States would otherwise have to buy. Sustainable leadership demands revenue reform, mandatory financing fixes, and defense reprioritization.

Comment: This should be a BFO (blinding flash of the obvious). But apparently it is not. This needs to be emphasized and understood by leaders and all Americans.

American Power Without Fiscal Alignment Is Not Sustainable Power

by Michael Greif

02.26.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/26/american-power/

The United States is increasingly tempted by a blunt proposition: that it can disengage from allies, act unilaterally, and still preserve its global dominance through sheer scale. The argument is usually implicit rather than explicit, but it rests on a simple assumption—that American power is so overwhelming it does not require careful fiscal alignment.

That assumption is no longer credible.

Power that cannot be financed sustainably is not strength; it is leverage drawn against a shrinking balance sheet.

The Fiscal Constraint Is Structural, Not Cyclical

The United States has entered a decade in which much of the federal budget is effectively pre-committed before Congress even debates annual priorities.

In FY 2024, total federal outlays were approximately $6.75 trillion. Of that total, roughly $3.8 trillion (≈56%) was mandatory spending, and another $0.88 trillion (≈13%) was net interest—leaving less than one-third of the budget subject to annual discretionary choice.

Three realities define the constraint.

First, Social Security Faces an Automatic Policy Cliff

Under current law, the Social Security trust fund can pay 100% of scheduled benefits until 2033. After that point, incoming payroll tax revenues are projected to cover only about 77% of promised benefits absent legislative action. In FY 2024, Social Security outlays totaled approximately $1.46 trillion, representing more than one-fifth of all federal spending.

The public has made clear—across parties and across decades—that it will not accept benefit cuts. In a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 79% of U.S. adults said Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way, with 77% of Republicans and 83% of Democrats opposing reductions; similarly, 77% of Americans oppose cutting benefits for current and future retirees according to recent public polling.

In practical terms, that means financing must change.

Second, Interest on the National Debt has Become a Dominant Budgetary Force

Net interest outlays of approximately $880 billion in FY 2024 was roughly equal to total national defense spending of approximately $850–875 billion. That is larger than any domestic discretionary category. Interest costs are projected to exceed $1 trillion annually within the decade as higher interest rates interact with a federal debt stock now exceeding $34 trillion.

Unlike defense or domestic programs, interest is not subject to annual appropriations decisions. It is the unavoidable cost of accumulated debt at prevailing rates—and it crowds out discretionary choices dollar for dollar.

Third, Discretionary Spending is a Shrinking Share of Total Federal Outlays

Discretionary spending accounted for roughly between 26–27% of federal outlays in FY 2024. Within that discretionary portion, national defense ($850–875 billion) consumed close to one-half.

This structure matters because nearly every serious proposal to rebuild infrastructure, invest in productivity, or programs to reverse the shrinkage of the middle class rely on discretionary funding. That inevitably puts domestic priorities into direct competition with defense.

The Political Constraint Is Binding

The fiscal math is reinforced by a clear political reality.

The public broadly rejects two ideas:

• Cutting Social Security payments, which are earned, contributory compensation financed jointly by employees and employers over a working lifetime, and which remain modest (average monthly payments under $2,000).
• Maintaining tax preferences that disproportionately benefit ultra-high-income households, particularly when combined with calls for domestic austerity.

Taken together, these positions substantially narrow the available policy menu. They also force a conclusion many policymakers avoid: if benefits are protected and regressive tax preferences are politically untenable, then strategy must adjust to resources—or revenues must rise.

There is no other option that avoids tradeoffs.

Why Unilateralism Is More Expensive Than Alliance Leadership

The belief that the United States can simply “do less diplomacy and more dominance” misunderstands the economics of power.

In FY 2024, the United States’ own defense budget accounted for roughly two-thirds of total defense spending across NATO countries—a reflection of the United States’ unique global force posture, not a simple function of allied underinvestment.

At the same time, allied nations provide substantial in-kind, shared, and host-nation support that the United States would otherwise have to replicate on its own, such as:

• forward basing and access,
• host-nation financial support,
• logistics and infrastructure,
• intelligence integration,
• operational interoperability, and
• political legitimacy for collective action.

If the United States weakens or abandons alliances while attempting to maintain the same global posture, it must either:

• spend more directly to replace those advantages (additional basing, lift, force rotation, and readiness costs), or
• accept reduced presence, slower response times, and higher deterrence risk.

Neither option is fiscally neutral over time. In a period when net interest costs already rival defense outlays and domestic investment needs remain unmet, unilateral primacy is more expensive, not less.

The Core Tradeoff Cannot Be Avoided

The United States is attempting to sustain:

• a comprehensive social insurance system,
• growing domestic investment demands tied to productivity, infrastructure, and household economic stability, and
• a globe-spanning military posture,

without the revenue structure or demographic tailwinds—such as a rapidly growing workforce and a high worker-to-retiree ratio—that once made this combination easier.

For context, the United States collects roughly 25% of GDP in taxes, well below the 30s to mid-40s percent typical of peer advanced economies such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

That tension was manageable when debt was cheap, the workforce was expanding, and discretionary spending was a larger share of the budget. Those conditions no longer exist.

There is, in principle, a more radical strategic path: the United States could choose to relinquish its role as the primary guarantor of collective defense among the world’s democratic alliances.

No democracy in the post–World War II era has ever assumed the fiscal burden of underwriting global security across multiple theaters. But this choice would represent not merely budgetary retrenchment, but a structural change in the international order—fewer forward commitments, diminished deterrence, weaker alliance cohesion, and a transfer of strategic influence to powers willing to fill the resulting vacuum.

Irrespective of the pathway the current or any future administration may choose to pursue, American power must be evaluated not by its scale alone, but by its alignment with what the country is willing to finance over decades rather than election cycles.

What Fiscal Seriousness Requires

A credible strategy requires honesty about the available levers:

1. Revenue reform, particularly at the top of the income distribution and above the Social Security wage cap, if benefits are to be protected.
2. Mandatory program financing reforms, focused on sustainability rather than blunt benefit reductions.
3. Defense reprioritization, meaning tighter alignment between commitments and long-term fiscal capacity—not withdrawal, but realism.

Pretending that defense posture can remain untouched while everything else adjusts is not prudence. It is denial.

Conclusion

American leadership has never rested on military capability alone. It has rested on the ability to convert economic strength, domestic legitimacy, and alliances into durable influence.

A strategy that assumes unlimited freedom of action while ignoring fiscal constraints is not assertive—it is fragile.

Sustainable power requires alignment between ambition and the balance sheet.

Tags: American power, collective security, defense economics, Defense Spending, fiscal alignment, global dominance, global security, host-nation support, unilateralism

About The Author

• 
  
• Michael Greif
• Michael T. Greif is an attorney with over 45 years of experience in law, business, and governance. His writings apply legal and institutional analysis to strategic and security contexts, with prior publications in Small Wars Journal.

3. In a First, U.S. Deploys Combat Jets to Israel for Potential Wartime Mission in Iran

​Summary:

U.S. forces deployed F-22 Raptors to Israel, the first time Washington has based American combat jets there for a potential wartime mission tied to Iran. The aircraft are positioned to help defend Israeli territory and U.S. forces from Iranian retaliation, and they also add a credible strike and escort option if POTUS chooses to hit Tehran’s nuclear and missile programs. The move signals deeper U.S.-Israeli integration after the Abraham Accords and Israel’s shift into CENTCOM’s area. It also reflects basing constraints, since Saudi Arabia and the UAE reportedly declined support for attack operations.

Comment: Does the path to redeploying back these aircraft to home station run through Tehran? What is the narrative that should be created around this deployment?

In a First, U.S. Deploys Combat Jets to Israel for Potential Wartime Mission in Iran

WSJ

In prior years, the U.S. took pains to avoid highlighting how closely it worked with Israel

By Michael R. Gordon and Lara Seligman

Updated Feb. 26, 2026 11:25 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/in-a-first-u-s-deploys-combat-jets-to-israel-for-potential-wartime-mission-in-iran-c739d870

A U.S. F-22 Raptor jet fighter. Deploying the jets will work to extend U.S. and Israeli military cooperation. Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters

The U.S. has sent top-of-the-line fighters to Israel, marking the first time it has deployed combat aircraft to the country for a potential wartime mission as the two nations prepare to square off against Iran.

The deployment of the F-22 Raptors this week will enable the U.S. to better defend Israeli territory and American forces in the Middle East from Iranian retaliation should President Trump proceed with his threats to strike Tehran’s nuclear and missile programs. It will also provide the U.S. with an aircraft that could carry out offensive operations.

The move marks a major step toward deepening U.S. and Israeli military cooperation. Yet it isn’t the first U.S. military deployment there. The U.S. has sent Army troops to Israel to operate the Thaad antimissile system and has previously stationed ballistic-missile defense-equipped destroyers near Israel to help protect the country from missile and drone attacks.

Taken together, these deployments mark a sea change in the American military posture following the Abraham Accords during the first Trump administration, which led to the normalization of Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and others. For decades prior to the accords, U.S. forces in the Middle East had sought to avoid the impression that they were closely integrated with the Israeli military.

“Operating aircraft from Israeli bases is a first,” said Dennis Ross, a former senior U.S. official who has worked for Republican and Democratic administrations.

The Trump administration hasn’t officially announced the deployment, and U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military forces in the region, declined to comment. Videos of the aircraft arriving in Israel, however, began appearing on social media Tuesday.

The F-22 deployment comes as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have said they won’t let the U.S. use their airspace or territory for an attack on Iran, limiting American options for basing the hundreds of aircraft necessary for a major operation.

WSJ’s Shelby Holliday explains the massive U.S. military presence in the Middle East as President Trump amps up pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. Illustration: Ryan Trefes

The use of Israeli air bases will enable the U.S. to disperse its warplanes among a variety of bases, rather than concentrating all of its air power in a handful of regional airfields, U.S. officials say. Many of the U.S. aircraft that have been sent to the region as Trump puts pressure on Tehran to agree to a nuclear deal are parked at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan.

Last year, F-22s escorted B-2 bombers during their attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. “The F-22 is the world’s premier fighter,” said Charles Corcoran, a retired Air Force major general and a former F-22 pilot. “It can be used to conduct strikes, escort bombers and in a defensive role against cruise missiles and one-way attack drones.”

Nearly a dozen F-22s have arrived at the Ovda air base in southern Israel, according to Chinese commercial satellite photos and experts familiar with the longstanding plans.

A report issued last year by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America says the Ovda base has been also used by American aircraft during exercises with the Israelis and can accommodate more than 100 aircraft, including refueling tankers. Built in the early 1980s, the base has shelters for aircraft, fuel bunkers and ammunition dumps. The report was written by Corcoran, two other retired U.S. Air Force generals and Jonathan Ruhe of the institute.

The issue of working with Israel’s military had been sensitive for decades. Before 2021, the U.S. military’s responsibility for Israel fell under its European Command. That arrangement made it easier for American generals in the Central Command area to deal with their Arab counterparts without interacting with Israel, which was considered a foe by much of the Arab world at the time.

After the Abraham Accords were announced, Trump directed that Israel be placed under Central Command’s area of responsibility.

The F-22 deployment “is the product of two developments: the growing cooperation between the United States and Israel, and the refusal of so many countries to allow the U.S. to use their bases,” said Elliott Abrams, who held senior positions in several Republican administrations and has been a strong supporter of Israel. “I have to wonder if, over time, Americans will wonder why we have bases in countries that don’t cooperate when we ask.”

The U.S. military made strenuous efforts to distance itself from Israel when it mounted its Desert Storm campaign in 1991 to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait. When Israel contributed badly needed mine-clearing equipment for the operation, a U.S. Marine Corps officer had the gear repainted with the American service’s markings. Then it was loaded onto American C-5 cargo planes that flew over the Mediterranean before turning toward Saudi Arabia, bolstering the ruse that it was American equipment that was being delivered from the U.S.

The U.S. also sent Patriot antimissile batteries that year to Israel to defend the country from the Scud missile attacks then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had ordered. The goal was to prevent Israel from taking military action inside Iraq to try to stop the missile launches, a step Washington feared could roil the Arab members of its coalition.

Now the situation is somewhat reversed and it is Israel’s antimissile defenses that will help protect the F-22s based in the country.

“If I was going to put a very high value asset somewhere, I totally would want to go for a country that has pretty robust air and missile defense,” said Douglas Birkey, executive director for the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the February 26, 2026, print edition as 'U.S. Sends Combat Aircraft To Israel'.

Michael R. Gordon is a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. He has covered seven wars and reported on the State Department and the Pentagon. He is the author of “Degrade and Destroy: the Inside Story of the War Against the Islamic State, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump.” He is also the co-author, along with the late Lieutenant General Bernard E. Trainor, of three definitive histories of U.S. wars in Iraq: “The Endgame,” “Cobra II,” and “The Generals' War.”

He previously worked for 32 years for the New York Times, where he was posted in Moscow, London and Washington.

Lara Seligman is a national security reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Washington, where she covers the White House and the Pentagon. She previously spent four years at Politico as a defense reporter.

Lara's reporting on the military and the defense industry has taken her around the world, with time spent covering geopolitics in real time in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Lara previously covered the Pentagon and national security for Foreign Policy. She also has written for publications including the Washington Post and Defense News.

WSJ

4. F-16 Pilot’s Narrow Escape in Missile Attack Shows Risks of a New Mideast War

​Summary:

U.S. air and naval forces learned in Yemen that even a lesser foe can impose real risk, and that risk scales fast if a wider war follows. During Operation Rough Rider, Houthi fighters nearly downed two U.S. F-16s by springing a “SAMbush,” waiting to light radars late and firing multiple surface-to-air missiles, forcing high G evasive maneuvers and a dangerous low fuel recovery. At sea, relentless drone and missile defense drove fatigue that helped set conditions for deck mishaps, including an F/A-18 lost overboard and a snapped landing cable incident. As POTUS weighs action against Iran, the lesson is friction, chance, and depletion.

Comment: If I learned anything from John Boyd is that it is the superior pilot that wins, not the machine. But our adversaries are learning organizations as well.

F-16 Pilot’s Narrow Escape in Missile Attack Shows Risks of a New Mideast War

WSJ

For 15 hair-raising minutes, the pilots struggled to evade a half-dozen surface-to-air missiles, spraying countermeasures and executing a series of high-G maneuvers. A Houthi missile shot past Parks and exploded over the canopy of Blea’s jet.

The missile passed “right underneath my left wing, close enough I can hear the rumble,” Parks said of the near miss, which occurred 12 days into Operation Rough Rider, the first major military operation of Trump’s second term.

As President Trump weighs launching another major operation in the Middle East—this time against Iran—the details of the fight against the Houthis show the risks that are involved in a large and sustained military operation.

Even less-sophisticated adversaries can pose a serious threat to U.S. forces. And fatigue among overworked soldiers, sailors, aircrews and Marines can lead to costly mistakes.

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Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has warned the White House that a fight with Iran, particularly if prolonged, risks American casualties and could deplete munitions needed for a future conflict with an adversary like China while further overstretching U.S. forces.

The military pulled off a complex operation to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in Caracas in January without losing a single American life or aircraft. But in the more extensive campaign against the Houthis a year ago, things didn’t go as smoothly.

Trump launched Operation Rough Rider last March threatening the Houthis would be “annihilated” if they didn’t halt attacks on shipping in the vital Red Sea trade route.

He poured forces into the region including two aircraft carriers, half a dozen B-2 bombers, a squadron of advanced F-35 fighters, and destroyers armed with guided missiles.

A Greek-registered oil tanker on fire in the Red Sea following a Houthi attack in 2024. eunavfor aspides/Reuters

The Houthis proved resilient. In addition to nearly shooting down the two F-16s, they knocked more than a half-dozen Reaper drones out of the sky. A missile attack on the USS Harry S. Truman in April forced the carrier to make a hard turn that sent an F/A-18 rolling into the Red Sea. Another plane slid off the deck the next month when its landing cable snapped, because sailors exhausted by weeks of combat likely left off a washer that held it in place.

No Americans were killed. But the incidents showed the unpredictable role of luck in conflicts with a determined adversary. This time, the U.S. force would face Iran, which backs the Houthis and has an even more extensive arsenal of missiles and drones.

“In war, there is always friction and always an element of chance, and you never have perfect awareness of the environment,” said Sean MacFarland, a retired three-star Army general who commanded the U.S.-led coalition that defeated Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. “It is really hard to win in combat if you are not going to take any risks.”

A Houthi surprise

Trump administration officials were in a celebratory mood the night of the first Rough Rider attack, according to text messages on Signal that were inadvertently shared with a reporter. “Amazing job,” wrote Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser at the time.

The U.S. force had a huge edge over the militant group. Part of that was the “Wild Weasels,” the name for F-16 units, like Parks and Blea’s, charged with suppressing enemy air defenses. They were equipped with HARM missiles that lock on to the signal from enemy radars to knock them out.

Smoke rises over buildings following U.S. airstrikes in Yemen’s capital, San’a, last March. osamah yahya/Shutterstock

But the Houthis had developed a network to track American warplanes with observers, optics and infrared sensors whose intricacy U.S. officials didn’t entirely understand. That enabled them to flick on their air-defense radars at the last moment, so U.S. pilots would have little time to react—a tactic pilots came to call a “SAMbush.”

Parks and Blea took off in their F-16s from a base in the region with orders to destroy Houthi air defenses near the Yemeni capital of San’a and distract the militants from stealthy B-2s that would strike missile-production facilities elsewhere, people familiar with the operation said.

As they flew toward their target, Parks and Blea were followed by an undulating stream of flashes they said looked like fireworks. Some military officials believe it was a signaling system.

The main strike went off without a hitch, and everything was quiet as they turned back. They were about to be “feet wet” over the Red Sea when a missile warning rang out. Parks, with just seconds to react, turned his jet toward the missile, an emergency tactic aimed at making the missile overshoot.

The missile missed but streaked directly toward the nose of Blea’s F-16. Blea watched through his center-mounted head-up display as the projectile shot just in front of his jet and exploded over his canopy. It took him a fraction of a second to realize that he was still flying—and alive.

“Hey, the missile missed me,” Blea called out. “Let’s go!”

The Houthis fired more missiles. Parks and Blea flipped on their afterburners and went through a series of tight turns to avoid being downed over the mountainous terrain.

The maneuvers worked but left the pilots critically low on fuel. Commanders in Qatar ordered one of the tankers over the Red Sea to fly closer to the F-16s, putting the slower plane in range of Houthi air defenses. Blea, lowest on fuel, rushed to fill up.

The pilots got the Silver Star, while the tanker crew will be presented with the Distinguished Flying Cross next month.

U.S. Air Force Maj. Michael Blea also was awarded the Silver Star. Senior Airman Sydney Franklin/U.S. Air Force

Friendly Fire

The problems for the Navy’s confrontations with the Houthis began even before Trump took office. Around Christmas, the Truman was bringing its planes back from a strike on the Houthis—and a battle with the drones and cruise missiles the militants launched in retaliation—when one of the last pilots to return saw an American destroyer open fire.

“Holy f—!” the pilot thought as the missile arced toward the American jet just in front of him, according to the Navy’s incident report. The lead jet’s two-person crew ejected seconds before the plane exploded.

The F/A-18 pilot, who wasn’t named in the report, looked back at the destroyer and saw another missile take off, this one aimed right at him.

“We dive for the deck, accelerate, and try to beam the missile,” the pilot wrote in an account to friends included in the Navy report, hitting the afterburners and making a hard turn to outmaneuver it.

He was about to eject when he saw the missile’s rocket motor burn out as it passed right behind him, shaking the jet before exploding in the ocean.

Growing Exhaustion

Back in the Red Sea at the end of April, the Navy was growing increasingly frayed by the need to constantly fight off the Houthi drones and missiles.

Sailors in the Truman’s hangar bay were working before dawn to get aircraft in position for the next day’s mission, when the carrier detected an inbound ballistic missile.

The giant ship swerved to the right. An F/A-18 that was being pulled into position was whipsawed by the maneuver and “departed the hangar bay,” the Navy’s incident report said. The sailor assigned to man the brakes in the cockpit and another who was towing the jet had to jump off at the last second.

An F/A-18 landing on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman during a NATO exercise in 2022. andreas solaro/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The Navy found the stress of repeatedly fighting off drones, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, along with numerous combat operations, had contributed to the incident.

Sailors on the USS Gerald R. Ford, which did duty in the fight with Venezuela at the beginning of this year before being redirected to the Middle East this month, are already stretched by a long deployment that began in June.

In the end, with Operation Rough Rider, Trump was more interested in securing freedom of navigation for U.S. ships than in open-ended pursuit of regime change. He concluded the U.S. had done enough.

A cease-fire deal was cemented on May 6. Under the terms of the agreement, the U.S. would stop its strikes, and the Houthis would end their attacks on U.S. ships.

The Pentagon touted the accomplishments of its 53-day fight. The U.S. had hit more than 1,000 targets and killed senior Houthi missile and drone officials. But the U.S. never decapitated the top Houthi leadership. Israel, whose Ben Gurion Airport was the target of a Houthi missile attack the day before the cease-fire, wasn’t included in the deal.

“Rough Rider did a significant amount of damage to the Houthis,” said Gregory Johnsen, a fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute think tank. “But it didn’t defeat the Houthis or degrade them to the point where they are unable to carry out future attacks in the Red Sea.”

Yemenis checked the rubble of a building hit during U.S. strikes in the country's north last year. AFP/Getty Images

Iran’s regime, like the Houthis, is dug in and preparing for an existential fight. America’s goals—and whether military action can accomplish them—are less clear. The risk is that a conflict drags on or spirals into something the U.S. didn’t bargain for.

“Many outcomes could be unpredictable,” Danny Citrinowicz, a senior fellow at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Strategic Studies, said on social media. “And not necessarily favorable to U.S. interests.”

WSJ

5. Is China flexing its intelligence muscle by tracking US military moves near Iran?

​Summary:

A South China Morning Post report says a Chinese commercial intelligence firm, MizarVision, has drawn attention by posting unusually detailed tracking of U.S. military deployments around Iran. The firm has increased the frequency and granularity of its public updates, citing high definition satellite imagery to list aircraft types, counts, and air and missile defense systems at bases in places like Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Greece, and Diego Garcia. Analysts quoted describe the disclosures as capability signaling and marketing, while also implying China’s expanding space and AI enabled reconnaissance can monitor U.S. posture well beyond East Asia.

Comment: How does the deterrence by denial strategy work against China in the MIddle East? Are we too geographically focused on China in the Asia-Indo-Pacific? How is contesting that first island chain helping us now?

Is China flexing its intelligence muscle by tracking US military moves near Iran?

Unusually detailed posts by commercial firm MizarVision about America’s deployments in the Middle East are grabbing attention

Yuanyue Dangin BeijingandAmber Wangin Beijing

Published: 10:00pm, 25 Feb 2026

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3344638/china-flexing-its-intelligence-muscle-tracking-us-military-moves-near-iran?utm

Yuanyue Dangin BeijingandAmber Wangin Beijing

Published: 10:00pm, 25 Feb 2026

A Chinese private company has drawn the attention of security watchers after detailing US military deployments near Iran, a move experts say underlines Beijing’s intelligence abilities.

MizarVision, a Chinese commercial intelligence analysis firm, has consistently published monitoring posts regarding American military movements on social media over the past two years.

But it has attracted fresh attention in the past month with an increase in the frequency and granularity of its posts and by including detailed deployments of various US military assets across Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Greece and Qatar.

Amid escalating tensions in Iran and possible military action by Washington, the updates have detailed the exact numbers and models of US jets parked at the facilities, as well as their air defence systems.

MizarVision’s latest update on Wednesday followed the arrival of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, at Crete, Greece’s largest island.

The carrier is believed to be part of America’s biggest military build-up in the Middle East and its vicinity since the Iraq war in 2003.

In a post on Tuesday, the firm said: “High-definition satellite imagery indicates a reduction in both tanker and transport aircraft at Al Udeid Air Base, though air defence and anti-missile systems remain deployed.”

It referred to the US military base in Qatar that withstood an Iranian missile strike in June last year, located 35km (22 miles) southwest of Doha.

MizarVision also monitors the US military base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, deemed a vital installation to support America’s operations and logistics in the Middle East.

On Sunday, the company posted that data indicated US C-17 transport aircraft formations “were still crossing the Atlantic to deliver military supplies to the Middle East”.

American media reports suggested the US military was poised to launch strikes against Iran over the past weekend. US President Donald Trump was reportedly considering a limited strike to force Tehran to agree to abandon its nuclear programme.

On Tuesday, during the first State of the Union address of his second term, Trump said he preferred “to solve this problem through diplomacy. But one thing is certain, I will never allow the world’s number one sponsor of terrorism … to have a nuclear weapon.”

Iran has maintained that its programme is peaceful, denied developing nuclear weapons and threatened retaliation should it be attacked.

It is highly unusual for a Chinese private commercial entity to disclose such sensitive intelligence, and it is happening as Beijing calls for Washington and Tehran to de-escalate tensions and exercise restraint.

Dennis Wilder, a former senior American intelligence official and now professor of practice at Georgetown University, raised the unusual disclosures in a social media post.

“What is Beijing’s purpose in allowing these photos to be published? Is it trying to prove its intelligence capabilities after the failure to detect the US extraction of [Nicolas] Maduro?” he wrote on Wednesday, referring to the special military operation in January that deposed the former Venezuelan leader.

Yue Gang, a retired Chinese colonel, said the analysis could add to the progress of China’s intelligence.

Such practices could “provide non-classified, low-threshold intelligence support services for domestic research institutions, overseas-operating enterprises, shipping groups and other entities with such requirements”, he added.

Yue said MizarVision’s “intelligence collection and analysis capabilities can supplement China’s national intelligence capacities”, representing “a beneficial exploration contributing to China’s development as an intelligence powerhouse”.

He said the move was legal and permitted by China’s regulations.

However, Yue argued that MizarVision’s work was not expected to affect the Middle East situation.

Military commentator and former People’s Liberation Army instructor Song Zhongping said the company’s monitoring of US military movements “demonstrates capability and is advertising”.

This approach “also symbolises the strength of a nation and an enterprise”, Song added.

MizarVision’s website described the company as “specialising in geographic business intelligence analysis through artificial intelligence (AI) technology”.

Its services include “fully automated multi-source vessel identification, feature classification and change detection, [and] scene and data pattern recognition”, according to the website.

In a social media post marking its fourth anniversary in March last year, the company said that “over these years, we have collectively witnessed our clients’ remarkable achievements”, though neither client identities nor specific successes were disclosed.

MizarVision, a Chinese private company, describes itself as specialising in geographic business intelligence analysis through artificial intelligence technology. Photo: Handout

MizarVision previously revealed multiple sensitive developments involving the PLA.

In 2024, amid heightened tensions in the South China Sea, it released satellite imagery showing a Chinese aircraft carrier patrolling waters near the Philippines. The warship was widely identified as the Shandong, China’s first domestically built aircraft carrier.

MizarVision also appears to have supplied military-related information to Chinese media.

In 2023, a US Navy P-8A anti-submarine patrol aircraft flew over the sensitive Taiwan Strait. The PLA Eastern Theatre Command said it had “monitored and tracked the aircraft throughout its flight, handling the situation in accordance with law and regulations”.

Global Times, affiliated with the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, said at the time it had obtained an audio recording captured by MizarVision via publicly accessible radio channels.

The recording revealed PLA pilots calling out to the American pilots and demanding their immediate departure, Global Times reported.

Also in 2023, MizarVision provided Global Times with a report alleging that in recent years the US had deployed various military assets, including high-altitude balloons, to conduct frequent reconnaissance and espionage activities around China.

It came as Beijing and Washington were embroiled in a diplomatic dispute over a balloon shot down by the United States, which Washington claimed was spying for China. Beijing denied the claim.

China’s space reconnaissance abilities are expanding rapidly, with its AI-driven satellite networks capable of continuously and precisely tracking important US military assets far beyond East Asia.

In the Middle East, Chinese commercial firms have used high-resolution satellite imagery to monitor the extent of destruction in the Gaza Strip.

Yuanyue Dang

Yuanyue reports on Chinese politics, defence and foreign affairs from Beijing. Prior to joining the Post in 2022, he was a feature writer in Chinese. He studied journalism in Hong Kong and anthropology in London.

Amber Wang

Amber Wang is a reporter for the China desk, and focuses on Chinese politics and diplomacy. She joined the Post in 2021, and previously worked for The New York Times and Southern Metropolis Daily.

6. Can China and Philippines replace ‘disputes with cooperation’ after years of tension?

​Summary:

China and the Philippines may launch joint coastguard patrols in the South China Sea as early as late March, according to Philippine senator Erwin Tulfo after meeting China’s ambassador Jing Quan. Tulfo said cooperation could include joint patrols, search and rescue, and environmental cleanups, a confidence-building shift after years of dangerous encounters, including water-cannon incidents. Analysts say durability hinges on details: which waters are covered, whether patrols become institutionalized, and whether information-sharing and supervision mechanisms exist. Beijing has not confirmed the plan. Observers link the thaw to ASEAN code-of-conduct talks, while warning past Manila–Beijing initiatives have fizzled.

Comment: For the Philippines will cooperation mean capitulation?

Can China and Philippines replace ‘disputes with cooperation’ after years of tension?

Senator says the two sides might start joint patrols in the South China Sea by the end of next month

Alyssa Chen

Published: 7:26pm, 25 Feb 2026Updated: 8:29pm, 25 Feb 2026

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3344626/can-china-and-philippines-replace-disputes-cooperation-after-years-tension?utm

Alyssa Chen

Published: 7:26pm, 25 Feb 2026Updated: 8:29pm, 25 Feb 2026

China and the Philippines may soon start joint coastguard patrols in the South China Sea after years of tensions over the disputed waters, according to a Philippine senator.

Erwin Tulfo, chairman of the Senate’s foreign relations committee, met Chinese ambassador Jing Quan on Monday, and said afterwards that the two countries’ coastguards were expected to sign a memorandum of agreement by the end of March.

He added that rather than “having disputes there … there will be cooperation”, such as joint patrols, search and rescue operations or environmental clean-ups. “That was what Ambassador Jing mentioned,” he said.

Ships from the two countries have repeatedly clashed around disputed features in the South China Sea in recent years, with some incidents involving water cannons.

The confidence-building initiative comes ahead of the next round talks between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) to agree on a code of conduct for the South China Sea by the end of the year, although analysts are sceptical whether any deal will stick given the failure of previous efforts.

They said that the specific operational terms for joint patrols could determine whether they proved to be temporary or permanent.

Chester Cabalza, founder and president of the International Development and Security Cooperation think tank in Manila, described the move as “a breath of fresh air” that would “be celebrated as the most successful goodwill and amity of the two nations”.

He added: “Major and middle powers are already fed up with the maritime squabbles of claimant states in the region. Only China and the Philippines are in a better position to fix their own mess in the region.”

Beijing has not confirmed whether such an agreement is in the pipeline, and its embassy in the Philippines has not responded to a request for comment.

Bao Yinan, an associate research fellow at the Huayang Centre for Maritime Cooperation and Ocean Governance in Hainan, said: “There are several factors to consider regarding the sustainability of this patrol initiative.

“Key factors among them are the specific maritime areas covered, whether the pact is temporary or institutionalised, and if it establishes a supervision mechanism and channels for information sharing and communication.”

According to Bao, Beijing would welcome the coastguard cooperation as “better than nothing”, though he expressed doubts about whether it would come to fruition.

He said a similar initiative – the Joint Coast Guard Committee on Maritime Cooperation, agreed in 2016 under former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte – “ultimately fizzled out with no follow-up” after 2020.

The agreement was signed just months after the arbitration ruling by an international tribunal at The Hague that struck down Beijing’s historic claims to the waterway.

China consistently refused to recognise the ruling, arguing that the tribunal did not have the jurisdiction to rule on sovereignty disputes.

Bao said that 10 years on it was hard to imagine Manila “letting this date pass without making a fuss” and said he was sceptical about whether joint patrols would help ease tensions in the long term.

Lucio Blanco Pitlo, president of the Philippine Association for Chinese Studies, said that if the joint patrols went ahead, it would be the first time the two countries had conducted such operations.

“Where and whether it will be regularised like the Vietnam-China joint patrols in Beibu Gulf [also known as the Gulf of Tonkin] remains to be seen,” Pitlo said.

The joint patrols began in 2006, six years after the two countries officially agreed on their maritime border in the waterway that separates them. However their dispute over other parts of the South China Sea continues.

Pitlo said the latest push for cooperation was a conscious effort to dial down tensions and create a climate conducive to agreeing on a South China Sea code of conduct.

Manila, currently the chair of Asean, is leading the push to finalise a deal to manage maritime incidents in the disputed waters. The latest talks are due to start in Singapore this week.

“Lowering the temperature in the maritime hotspot and showing openness to pragmatic cooperation are positive signals. Parties understand that a major violent incident this year may disrupt the momentum and foil desires to finalise the much-anticipated document,” Pitlo said.

New collision of Chinese-Philippine ships in South China Sea

Dai Fan, director of the Centre for Philippine Studies at Jinan University in Guangzhou, said both Beijing and Manila had an urgent need to start rebuilding trust.

He cited increasing political instability at home and the growing reluctance of the United States to get involved in the dispute as among the factors motivating the Philippines.

Dai added: “These patrols will not fundamentally resolve territorial disputes, but they serve as crucial confidence-building measures that benefit the broader relationship.”

Alyssa Chen

Alyssa joined the Post in 2023 as a reporter on China desk to cover diplomacy. Her interests lie in cross-strait relations and Sino-Japan relations. Previously, she was the Asia Correspondent for the Japan Times, and graduated from the University of Hong Kong.

7. US to keep China trade tariffs steady ahead of key Trump-Xi meeting: Greer

​Summary:

Jamieson Greer says the U.S. will keep China tariffs where they are, generally 35 to 50 percent depending on the product, as Washington seeks “continuity” after the Supreme Court struck down last year’s IEEPA-based tariffs. He says the administration will rebuild its tariff posture using other legal tools, while signaling more Section 301 style probes tied to issues like forced labor and overcapacity. The policy is framed ahead of POTUS’s Beijing trip, scheduled for March 31 to April 2, 2026.

US to keep China trade tariffs steady ahead of key Trump-Xi meeting: Greer

Trade envoy confirms levies on Chinese goods to remain within range of 35 per cent to 50 per cent depending on the product as tensions ease

Xinmei Shenin Washington

Published: 7:11am, 26 Feb 2026Updated: 7:18am, 26 Feb 2026

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3344658/us-keep-china-trade-tariffs-steady-ahead-key-trump-xi-meeting-greer?utm

Xinmei Shenin Washington

Published: 7:11am, 26 Feb 2026Updated: 7:18am, 26 Feb 2026

Washington will keep China tariffs at their current level as the Trump administration seeks “continuity” after the Supreme Court struck down the levies it imposed last year, according to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, weeks ahead of a high-stakes meeting between the two countries’ leaders.

The US will keep in place current China tariffs, which have varied from 35 per cent to 50 per cent depending on the product, since the countries “de-escalated” the trade war last year, Greer said on Wednesday in an interview with Fox Business.

“We don’t intend to escalate beyond that,” Greer said. “We intend to really stick to the deal that we had before.”

Greer’s remarks came days after Supreme Court justices blocked the sweeping tariffs US President Donald Trump imposed last year using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), effectively invalidating a powerful tool the White House has used to launch its global trade war.

‘We have a deal’: Trump claims breakthrough after ‘12 out of 10’ talks with Xi Jinping

Trump last week quickly responded to the Supreme Court’s decision by saying that he had “great alternatives” that would allow him to “take in more money”. He pledged to invoke Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to impose 10 per cent global tariffs, then announced on social media that he was actually increasing them to 15 per cent, the maximum rate allowed under the law.

US trading partners have scrambled to understand the Trump administration’s detailed plans to maintain its tariff regime with the new tool while upholding its global trade agreements.

Greer, Trump’s tariffs architect, said on Bloomberg on Wednesday that global tariffs would be raised to 15 per cent “where appropriate”, and that the president will sign a proclamation “in the coming days”.

“So we want to have the 10 per cent, and we’re looking [at] how to implement the 15 per cent that the president indicated, because we want to have continuity,” Greer said. “We want the countries, we want the companies, we want people to understand that, what we were doing before, we’re going to reconstruct with alternative tools.”

China’s Ministry of Commerce said that it was reviewing its trade countermeasures as the Trump administration’s new global tariffs take effect on Tuesday. It also said that it would soon hold a new round of high-level trade talks with Washington, which is expected to pave the way for Trump’s state visit to China in late March.

The White House confirmed last week that Trump’s upcoming trip to Beijing will take place from March 31 to April 2. Analysts have said that the Supreme Court’s IEEPA ruling has weakened Trump’s hand going into his meeting with Xi and strengthened China’s position.

But Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 remains in the Trump administration’s toolbox in its trade negotiations with China.

The US launched a Section 301 investigation into China’s compliance with the Phase One Trade Agreement last October, which, along with an investigation into Brazil launched last year, is still ongoing, according to Greer.

“And we have many others that we are preparing right now,” he said. “We expect to launch in the coming days and weeks, such as [those] related to forced labour in supply chains, industrial excess capacity, or unfair trading practices with respect to fishing or seafood or rice or subsidies for certain products.”

Xinmei Shen

Xinmei Shen joined the Post in 2017 and is a technology reporter. She covers content, entertainment, social media and internet culture. Previously, she was with the Post’s tech news site, Abacus. Before that, she was a reporting intern at The Information whilst studying at the University of Hong Kong.

8. Greenland: Defense Agreements with Denmark | SOF News

​Summary:

Greenland’s value is structural, not rhetorical. Its geography supports early warning for missile launches, controls access around the GIUK Gap, and gains new weight as Arctic sea routes and resources open. The article traces U.S. presence from World War II through Cold War peak basing to today’s small footprint at Pituffik Space Base, sustained by U.S.-Denmark defense agreements dating to 1941, 1951, and the 2004 Igaliku amendment. It rejects the practicality of “buying” Greenland and warns that coercion would fracture NATO. The prudent path is updated agreements, more access, and steadier North Atlantic posture.

Comment: Useful background for intelligent discussions of this critical issue. Grpahics and images at the link.

Greenland: Defense Agreements with Denmark | SOF News

sof.news · SOF News · February 25, 2026

https://sof.news/defense/us-agreements-with-denmark/

Greenland is situated at the “top of the world” and has a very strategic geographic location. (SOF News, Jan 14, 2026) Its high latitude provides for early warning (map) of intercontinental ballistic missile launches from adversaries like Russia. Greenland is part of the Greenland-Iceland-United-Kingdom (GIUK) Gap maritime chokepoint (map), important for surface and sub-surface naval activities. Its position in the Arctic Circle (map) gives it access to the Arctic passages (map) of commercial shipping and for military vessels. With the continued climate change the Arctic region is providing more access to natural resources – minerals, natural gas, and oil.

President Trump and other administration officials have asserted that Greenland is vital to U.S. national security. The U.S. needs to have a robust presence on the island to counter Russian and Chinese expansion (SOF News, Nov 6, 2025) in the Arctic and to bolster U.S. missile defense. The island was a Danish colony for over 200 years until it was incorporated into the Kingdom of Denmark in 1953. Over the past several decades the Greenlanders, numbering over 56,000, have become increasingly self-governing.

Pituffik Space Base is currently the only U.S. military base in Greenland. (NPR, March 26, 2025) Pituffik operates today through mutual defense agreements between the U.S. and Denmark. It was previously known as Thule Air Base. Pituffik was built after the U.S. and Denmark signed the Defense of Greenland Treaty in 1951.

Past U.S. Presence. The U.S. military footprint in Greenland has fluctuated over time. In April 1940, Denmark was invaded and occupied by the Germans. In May 1940 the U.S. became involved with the affairs of Greenland, establishing a political and military presence. The U.S. Coast Guard had the lead in Greenland [1] until it was passed to the U.S. Navy in May 1941. During World War II there were an estimated 5,000-10,000 personnel on airfields, weather stations, and bases associated with North Atlantic convoy protection. The occupation by U.S. troops ensured that the island didn’t fall into the hands of Germany.

At the end of WW II the presence of U.S. troops was drastically reduced. During the Cold War, this number rose once again – some estimates saying as much as 17,000 on seventeen military bases and installations. The United States and Canada operated the Defense Early Warning (DEW) radars from 1957 to 1985 to provide warning of Soviet missile and bomber attacks. The DEW system transitioned to the North Warning System (NWS). After the fall of the Soviet Union, the number of U.S. military personnel dropped significantly; presently (2026) about 150 personnel are on Pituffik Space Base.

Options: Updated Agreement, Buying, or Taking Greenland

Buying Greenland? Not for sale. There is a long history of the United States wanting to buy Greenland, and there is a long history of Denmark saying no. In 1946, the U.S. made an offer to buy Greenland for $100 million but Denmark rejected the offer. When President Trump, during his first term in 2019, proposed buying Greenland most of the world just shook their heads and dismissed the notion. The current government of Denmark says this is not an option. The people who inhabit Greenland are overwhelmingly not in favor of becoming part of the United States. In March 2025 Greenland had a general election and 75% of them voted for the current government which opposes American designs on the island.

Taking Greenland by Force? Several members of the Trump administration have threatened military action to ‘take Greenland’ if Denmark does not agree to sell the island. The administration has repeatedly said that the U.S. may exercise the ‘military option’. This could carry significant alliance and diplomatic risks. It puts the NATO alliance at risk, will alienate our relationships with security partners around the world, and paints the United States as an aggressor nation. This aggressive posture by the U.S. has modified; with less talk of using military force. During the World Economic Forum (WEF) conference in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump walked back his comments of taking Greenland by military force.

Past, Current, and Future Agreements with Denmark

1918 Lansing Agreement. After decades of negotiations, the United States bought the Danish West Indies from Denmark (US Virgin Islands) in 1917. In return, the US Secretary of State – Robert Lansing, signed a guarantee on August 4, 1916, regarding Greenland. The agreement would later be officially known (Office of the Historian, DoS) as the “Convention between the United States and Denmark for cession of the Danish West Indies”. This stipulated that Denmark would cede the US Virgin Islands to the U.S. in exchange for US $25,000,000 in gold and recognition of Denmark’s status over Greenland. The US Senate approved the treaty and President Woodrow Wilson ratified the treaty. Image below found on bottom of page 10 of the agreement. (govinfo.gov)

1941 Agreement. The United States has a defense agreement with Denmark about the defense and utilization of Greenland. The agreement entitled “Defense of Greenland” (web.archive.org, PDF, 7 pgs) was brought about by the advent of World War II. The Germans invaded and occupied Denmark in April 1940. Denmark and the United States made an agreement that the U.S. could occupy Greenland with troops and build up defenses. During this wartime period the U.S. built about 13 Army bases and four Navy bases with almost 6,000 military personnel.

In the agreement, Article I (image below) states that the “Government of the United States of America reiterates its recognition of and respect for the sovereignty of Denmark over Greenland.”

1951 and 2004 Greenland Defense Agreement. In 1951 the U.S. acquired very robust military rights in Greenland based on the 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement. The Thule Air Base was constructed between 1951 and 1953 by thousands of construction workers. In 2004, both countries entered into a new agreement (state.gov, PDF, 14 pgs) that amended and supplemented the 1951 agreement. The new 2004 Igaliku amendment reflected a transition to post-Cold War framework and narrowed the defense posture of the United States in Greenland.

Image: A radar dome belonging to the 23rd Space Operations Squadron Detachment 1 at Pituffik Space Base, Greenland, April 4, 2023. Det. 1 falls under Space Delta 6 – Space Access and Cyberspace Operations. The detachment’s extreme northern location allows contact with polar orbiting satellites 10-12 times per day. (U.S. Space Force photo by Senior Airman Kaitlin Castillo)

2023 U.S.-Denmark Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA). In 2023, the Biden administration signed an agreement that expanded military cooperation beyond the narrow confines of Greenland and the old Cold War era legal basis. This agreement was part of an effort to increase NATO cooperation, regional security, and U.S. access to military infrastructure in the North Atlantic and Arctic. It gave the U.S. forces more rights to operate from Danish-controlled air bases and facilities in Denmark and other areas controlled by Denmark. The access was granted to Aalborg Air Base, Skrydstrup Air Base, and Karup Air Base; all in Denmark. This agreement applies to Denmark proper, not to Greenland.

Denmark Provides More Access. This past June 2025, Denmark’s parliament approved a bill (vote was 94 to 11) to allow U.S. military bases on Danish soil. (AP News, June 11, 2025) The current agreement provides the United States with extensive access and freedom of action.

Denmark – A Dependable Ally. Since the early beginnings of the Cold War, Denmark has been a reliable NATO partner and an ally of the United States during Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq), in Syria, and Libya. It has provided special operations and other military units to both OEF, OIF, and other conflicts – demonstrating that it is willing to put its soldiers in harm’s way.

Denmark’s Jaeger Corps and Frogmand Corps, special operations units, were early participants in Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). In addition, the Danes provided air support, medical support, and more during their almost 20 year involvement in the Afghan War. The last Danish troops were withdrawn in June 2021, just two months before the U.S. pulled out its remaining military forces in August 2021.

The country of Denmark suffered significant casualties in the Afghan War as a result of its deployment to areas of Afghanistan that saw some of the fiercest fighting. In OEF, the Danes suffered the second highest rate of casualties among nations contributing forces to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and the Resolute Support Mission (RSM). This casualty rate (7.82 deaths per million) was second only to the United States (7.96 deaths per million). Most of Denmark’s combat troops deployed to Helmand province (map) working with the British contingent.

The Danish forces also participated in the early years of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). The country deployed about 500 troops to conduct stabilization and security operations – many based in Basra working with the British forces. It began withdrawing forces in 2007. When the Islamic State seized large parts of Iraq in 2014, Denmark rejoined the coalition under Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR). The country provided F-16 fighter jets, special operations forces, military trainers, and radar and surveillance capabilities for the fight against ISIS during the 2014-2016 timeframe. After the ISIS fight, Denmark continued to be engaged in Iraq under the NATO Mission in Iraq – providing trainers for capacity building in the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), staff personnel for the NATO headquarters in Baghdad, and military education at the institution level for the ISF. During part of this latest period Denmark provided the top commander of the entire NATO training mission.

Future Agreements? In the past several years we have seen the world witness a Cold War 2.0. National security pundits are now relearning the strategic importance of Greenland in this “second” Cold War. It may be time to update the agreements with Denmark to ensure the United States has continued access to Greenland for national security purposes and to recognize the status of Greenland as a semi-autonomous region of Denmark.

On January 14, 2026, a meeting took place (SOF News, Jan 18, 2026) between the Danish Foreign Minister, Greenland Foreign Minister, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Not much was resolved during this meeting. President Trump, while addressing the Davos, Switzerland conference on January 21, 2026, stated that he wanted immediate negotiations. The U.S. administration, shortly after the conference, stated that negotiations would occur soon.

If requested, the semi-autonomous government of Greenland and government of Denmark would likely agree to increase the U.S. military presence under the current agreements already in place. If existing treaties or agreements need to be updated, then certainly that is achievable. A renegotiated bilateral agreement would allow more U.S. military facilities, expanded permanent bases, and broader operational rights beyond the current agreements in force.

**********

Related Articles:

“Trump on Greenland: No Military Option, Reaches Deal?”, SOF News, January 21, 2026.

“Greenland, Tariffs, and NATO Response”, SOF News, January 18, 2026.

“Strategic Importance of Greenland”, SOF News, January 14, 2026.

“Competition in the Arctic”, SOF News, November 5, 2025.

“Greenland’s Dog Sled Patrol”, SOF News, January 28, 2026.

Endnotes:

[1] The Long Blue Line: Greenland – Coast Guards Arctic combat zone of World War II, 1940-1941″, United States Coast Guard, March 3, 2023. Read article here.

sof.news · SOF News · February 25, 2026

9. Scoop: Pentagon takes first step toward blacklisting Anthropic

​Summary:

Axios reports the Pentagon has begun laying groundwork to potentially label Anthropic a “supply chain risk” by querying major defense primes, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, about their exposure to Claude. That step matters because Claude is described as the only AI model currently operating inside U.S. classified systems, so a blacklist would be disruptive and unusual for a leading U.S. tech firm. The clash centers on Anthropic’s refusal to loosen safeguards that block mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapon use, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demands “all lawful purposes” access by a Friday deadline.

Comment: This is coercive leverage as much as risk management, signaling to Anthropic that the Pentagon can pressure its revenue through primes even if it keeps Claude in place short term. It also foreshadows a rapid vendor pivot toward rivals willing to accept broader use, which could shift the defense AI ecosystem toward fewer guardrails.

Question: As an aside, Is having ethical principles "woke?" But if Anthropic is not hypocritical then it should withdraw itself from supporting Department of Defense/War activities. If it is truly standing by its principles it should cut away on its own and not be "coerced." However, the US and DOD/W cannot be coerced by Anthropic either. It seems we have created quite a conundrum by getting in bed with Anthropic in the first place.

Scoop: Pentagon takes first step toward blacklisting Anthropic

Axios · Dave Lawler,Colin Demarest,Maria Curi · February 25, 2026

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/25/anthropic-pentagon-blacklist-claude

• Using it to punish a leading American tech firm, particularly one on which the military itself is currently reliant, would be unprecedented.

Driving the news: The Pentagon reached out to Boeing and Lockheed Martin on Wednesday to ask about their exposure to Anthropic, two sources with knowledge of those conversations said.

• A Boeing spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
• A Lockheed spokesperson confirmed the company was contacted by the Defense Department regarding an analysis of its exposure and reliance on Anthropic ahead of "a potential supply chain risk declaration."
• The Pentagon plans to reach out to "all the traditional primes" — meaning the major contractors that supply things like fighter jets and weapons systems — about whether and how they use Claude, a source familiar told Axios.

The big picture: Claude is currently the only AI model running in the military's classified systems. It was used during the operation to capture Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, through Anthropic's partnership with Palantir, and could foreseeably be used in a potential military campaign in Iran.

• The Pentagon is impressed with Claude's performance, but furious that Anthropic has refused to lift its safeguards and let the military use it for "all lawful purposes."
• Anthropic insists, in particular, on blocking Claude's use for the mass surveillance of Americans or to develop weapons that fire without human involvement.
• The Pentagon insists it's unworkable to have to clear individual use cases with Anthropic.

Friction point: During a tense meeting on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei a deadline to agree to the Pentagon's terms: 5:01pm on Friday.

• After that, Hegseth warned, the administration would either use the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to tailor its model to the military's needs, or else declare the company a supply chain risk.
• While Anthropic could theoretically challenge it in court, invoking the DPA would let the military maintain access to Claude.
• Wednesday's outreach suggests the military is leaning toward a supply chain risk designation.

What they're saying: An Anthropic spokesperson said the meeting between Amodei and Hegseth had been a continuation of the "good-faith conversations about our usage policy to ensure Anthropic can continue to support the government's national security mission in line with what our models can reliably and responsibly do."

• The spokesperson did not comment on the potential supply chain risk designation.
• The Pentagon told Axios it was "preparing to execute on any decision that the secretary might make on Friday regarding Anthropic."
• Referring to the possible supply chain risk designation earlier this week, a senior Defense official told Axios: "It will be an enormous pain in the ass to disentangle, and we are going to make sure they pay a price for forcing our hand like this."

Reality check: Asking suppliers to analyze their own reliance on Claude and report back to the Pentagon is a lot different than immediately forcing them to cut ties. It's possible this is more brinksmanship on the Pentagon's side to try to convince Anthropic to fold.

• But Anthropic has been insistent up to now that it will not back down on surveillance or autonomous weapons, two areas Amodei has personally raised when discussing the dangers of AI.

The intrigue: Aside from the Pentagon feud, Anthropic has been on a hot streak: raking in new funding, elbowing out competitors and burrowing itself deeper into the workflows of major corporations.

• The supply chain risk designation could be a significant blow if a number of companies that work with the government remove Claude from their operations.
• However, Anthropic could see some benefit in being viewed by potential customers and staffers as the company that stood its ground amid concerns of an AI arms race.

What to watch: Elon Musk's xAI recently signed a deal to move into the military's classified systems, under the "all lawful use" standard that Anthropic has rejected.

• Google and OpenAI, whose models are already available in unclassified systems, are also in negotiations about moving into the classified space.
• One source familiar with those discussions described Claude as the most capable model in a number of military use cases, but described Google's Gemini as a strong alternative.
• The Pentagon insists Google and OpenAI would have to lift their safeguards to get those contracts.

What's next: The Friday deadline is fast approaching.

Editor's note: This story has been updated with company comments.

Axios · Dave Lawler,Colin Demarest,Maria Curi · February 25, 2026​

10. Assessing Xi’s Unprecedented Purges of China’s Military: Key Developments and Potential Implications

Summary:

CSIS’s China Power work argues Xi has carried out the most sweeping purge in PLA history, reaching far beyond headline cases to hollow out the senior leadership bench. Since 2022, more than 100 senior officers have been dismissed, investigated, or disappeared, including key Central Military Commission figures and service and theater command leaders, with particular damage to the Rocket Force and joint staff functions. The report frames the purge as Xi’s bid to crush corruption and patronage networks while hardening political loyalty to the “chairman responsibility system.” The near-term effect is leadership churn and degraded readiness, even as long-term outcomes could be a more loyal, technically competent force. 

Read the endite report at the link or download the PDF here: https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2026-02/260224_Lin_Xi_Purges.pdf?VersionId=JwvU3rl5SpP74Ly.LrjCZps.Hn_CByZq

Assessing Xi’s Unprecedented Purges of China’s Military: Key Developments and Potential Implications

csis.org

https://www.csis.org/analysis/assessing-xis-unprecedented-purges-chinas-military-key-developments-and-potential

Available Downloads

• Download the Full Report 1110kb

Introduction

On January 24, 2026, China’s Ministry of National Defense announced that the military’s top general, Zhang Youxia, and the chief of the Joint Staff Department, Liu Zhenli, had been placed under investigation for serious disciplinary and legal violations. The downfall of these two senior generals marks the most dramatic move yet in Xi Jinping’s years-long campaign to gut the leadership of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The removal of Zhang, Liu, and several other generals from the Central Military Commission (CMC) has left only one general, Zhang Shengmin, serving on China’s top military decisionmaking body alongside Xi. However, the purges within the CMC are only the tip of the iceberg. Since 2022, over 100 senior PLA officers from across virtually all areas of the armed forces have been swept aside or gone missing, amounting to an unprecedented purge of China’s military.

The scope and depth of these purges showcase Xi’s resolve to renovate the PLA, root out corruption, eliminate obstacles to his ambitious military modernization objectives, and ensure absolute political loyalty. The purges raise serious questions regarding the current state of PLA readiness and what the future might hold for the force. This report brings together leading experts on the PLA to address some of these most critical questions, with the recognition that our understanding of what is unfolding is at best partial. The analyses in this report draw on a groundbreaking 2026 CSIS Database of Chinese Military Purges developed by the CSIS China Power Project with significant contributions from Suyash Desai and support from Jonathan A. Czin, Allie Matthias, and John Culver from the Brookings Institution.

11. ‘We don’t have infantry’: Ukraine’s war machine evolves into machine war

​Summary:

Ukraine’s ground war is being reshaped by a manpower crisis, and commanders say some brigades are operating at half strength or less. In places, tiny teams hold long stretches of front that once would have required dense infantry formations. The response is substitution, not supplementation: drones, ground robots, sensor networks, minefields, and artillery cued by unmanned systems now carry much of the fight. Units like Lazar’s Group and new unmanned battalions report drones delivering the majority of strikes in their sectors, with one operator doing the work of a squad. Ukraine is building doctrine around this “machine war,” even as weather, batteries, and Russian electronic warfare impose hard limits.

Comment: As an aside I wonder if all the countries with demographic challenges (i.e., manpower shortages) can and will learn from this. How can you win a war without sufficient infantry?

‘We don’t have infantry’: Ukraine’s war machine evolves into machine war

Defense News · Katie Livingstone Feb 25, 2026, 05:01 AM

https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2026/02/24/we-dont-have-infantry-ukraines-war-machine-evolves-into-machine-war/

KYIV, Ukraine — The army that stopped Russia’s march on Kyiv four years ago no longer exists.

Outmanned and outgunned by a nuclear power in the largest land war in Europe since 1945, Ukraine’s front line is increasingly held not by soldiers, but by machines and the skeleton crews that control them.

Commanders describe brigades hollowed out to half strength or worse. Frontline units often operate at 50% to 60% of authorized manning, some as low as 30%.

In some sectors, a maximum of 12 fighters hold 5 to 10 kilometers of front, far below what Cold War-era NATO planning assumed for high-intensity defense.

The numbers tell the story of an army running out of people. The average frontline soldier is 43 to 45 years old, according to Bloomberg.

Roughly 200,000 troops are absent without leave, and around 2 million men are evading mobilization, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov told CNN in January, with Western and Ukrainian analysts estimating the overall shortfall at 300,000 personnel.

Ukraine is no longer just supplementing its infantry with tech — it is replacing infantry in many cases with drones, ground robots, sensor networks, minefields and artillery cued by unmanned systems.

Soldiers test land drones in Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, Jan. 26, 2026. (Andriy Andriyenko/Ukraine's 65th Mechanized Brigade via AP)

The battlefield revolution was not born simply of necessity, but as a war strategy of a smaller nation against a much larger enemy.

In the Donetsk region alone, Russian losses reach 156 soldiers per square kilometer, Fedorov said in an address marking the fourth anniversary of the full-scale invasion.

Ukraine’s benchmark: more than 200 casualties per square kilometer — “a level of losses at which further advance becomes impossible,” Federov told reporters on Monday.

Over the past year, Military Times interviewed dozens of drone operators, robotics engineers and defense officials across Ukraine to understand how the country is bridging its manpower shortage — and what an increasingly unmanned army looks like.

As a correspondent who has covered this war since the first hours of the full-scale invasion, I have never seen the battlefield transform this rapidly.

Inside Lazar’s Group, a National Guard special forces formation that has claimed more than 40,000 targets destroyed since the full-scale invasion, the substitution is already operational architecture.

The roughly 1,700-person drone unit, according to its commanders, stations a ground crew every 10 kilometers along the front, an ISR team every 20, with FPV pilots and interceptor crews filling the gaps.

Commanders say its strike drones now account for 60% to 70% of all hits in its sector.

In practice, that means a single operator hunched over a tablet in a basement can toggle between three FPV feeds while sending one drone into a trench line as two more orbit overhead waiting for targets — one pilot doing the work of a squad.

“More drones, more Russians killed,” “Phoenix,” the operational head of Lazar’s Group, told Military Times at the Kyiv International Cyber Resilience Forum in February.

Ukraine's Security Service officers stand by Sea Baby drones during a demonstration at an undisclosed location in Ukraine, Oct. 17, 2025. (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)

Military Times agreed to refer to all active duty soldiers by their nom de guerre for operational security.

Russia does not face the same constraint — and is not pushed to innovate as quickly or dramatically as a result.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last year that Moscow was recruiting 40,000 to 45,000 troops per month, compared to Ukraine’s 25,000 to 27,000.

Ukrainian military intelligence data suggests the actual pace is around 30,000 to 35,000 new Russian contract soldiers per month, according to the Kyiv Independent — still enough to outpace Ukraine’s intake by a widening margin.

Deputy Defense Minister Lt. Col. Yuriy Myronenko, a former infantry officer and combat drone unit commander who now helps oversee Ukraine’s unmanned systems strategy, told Military Times, “This is the only chance to win for us. There is no other chance.”

So, the military is adapting.

The 28th Brigade’s newly formed Unmanned Systems Battalion “Flash” is Ukraine’s first international UAV unit — a foreign-heavy drone force where English fluency, not combat experience, is the entry requirement.

“Infantry is dead,” “Scooby,” a Polish Flash operator who had just returned from his first mission with Flash, told Military Times earlier this month.

The 28th Brigade has already shifted 70% of frontline logistics to robotic systems, its commanders told Military Times.

Designed as a replicable model for how Ukraine wants to restructure force composition, the unit runs FPV strikes, drone-on-drone air defense and ground robot operations. The substitution is happening in layers.

His description matches what drone operators across multiple units described to Military Times: units are exponentially increasing their kill rates by investing a majority of their strategic resources on autonomous and unmanned tech.

According to internal Ukrainian estimates and government data published by Reuters, drones accounted for 69% of strikes on Russian troops and 75% on vehicles and equipment in 2024.

By the end of 2025, drones were responsible for more than 80% of all enemy targets destroyed, with 819,737 video-confirmed hits logged that year.

A turret of a destroyed Russian tank sticks out of a swamp in the Ukrainian village of Shandryholove on March 1, 2023. (Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images)

Twelve drone operators with enough airframes can now do the work of dozens of infantry — a ratio that inverts the traditional calculus of ground combat.

In the 12th Azov Brigade’s sector, commander “Kil” has described areas where there is “absolutely no Ukrainian infantry” — defense maintained largely through UAV surveillance, artillery strikes and minefields, according to NV.

Drones spot targets, artillery fires on them, mines block movement — and infantry enters only for specific tasks.

“Our battalion is an unmanned systems battalion,” Ash, head of Flash’s medical and MPZ — the unit’s morale and psychological support program — told Military Times. “It means we don’t have infantry.”

After four years of mixed battlefield tactics blending muddy trench warfare with kamikaze drones and ballistic missiles, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has already become the drone war of the future — fought almost autonomously from a distance, strength, brute strength and numbers matter less than robotic force multipliers and electronic warfare.

“We do drones. We kill with drones. We save with drones. We liberate with drones.”

Integrating unmanned systems into the core of its military fabric is no longer improvisation in Ukraine. It is doctrine.

After taking office in January, Fedorov outlined a government plan built around what he called “the mathematics of war” — from completing corps-level reform to transforming command systems through data-driven management.

Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, a standalone military branch established in 2024 and now commanded by Maj. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, encompasses more than a dozen strike and reconnaissance units, including the 414th “Magyar’s Birds” Brigade, the top performer on the military’s verified combat-rating leaderboard.

These USF units have destroyed thousands of enemy targets each week in February, according to Ukrainian Defense Ministry data.

Brovdi’s philosophy for the force: “People think — machines do the work.”

Ukrainian soldiers strap munitions to a Vampire drone. (Nikoletta Stoyanova)

The Ukrainian military has separately set the goal of establishing a 15-kilometer unmanned “kill zone” along the front lines, a project dubbed the Drone Line.

And the supply chain is catching up to the doctrine.

Alona Zhuzha, director of digitalization at Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency, told Military Times that drone delivery times have dropped from two to three months to an average of 10 days — and in some cases, one day from order to frontline delivery.

But the ambitious model still faces challenges.

A historic winter has hammered battery-powered drones. Temperatures across the 1,200-kilometer front line plunged to their lowest of the entire four-year war — hitting minus 20 Celsius — with cameras icing over, batteries dying mid-flight and short-circuits grounding entire fleets, AFP reported.

Troops have resorted to unorthodox solutions for airframe insulation.

“We just put lard on them, and it takes off. I’m laughing, but it’s how it is,” Denys Shtilierman, chief constructor at Fire Point, a company making Ukraine’s first long-range drones, told AFP.

Russia is adapting in parallel, scaling its own FPV production and using heavy electronic warfare to jam and burn down Ukrainian drone swarms.

Robots are still a long way from warring autonomously.

“There’s no such thing as replacing infantry,” Jesse Nuese, a former U.S. Army paratrooper and Afghanistan veteran who co-founded Forward Horizon Group to facilitate reconstruction and technology transfer between the U.S. and Ukraine, told Military Times in Kyiv. “Unmanned systems cannot hold ground alone.”

He may be right — for now.

But on a stretch of front east of Pokrovsk, a tracked robot with a 12.7mm machine gun holds a position for weeks without a crew — and somewhere behind it, a single operator toggles between three feeds, doing the work of a squad.

And battlefield dynamics continue to evolve at lightning speed.

“One pilot, three drones now,” Phoenix said. “It would already be 10 with more funding.”

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Defense News · Katie Livingstone Feb 25, 2026, 05:01 AM

12. Ukraine Is Losing the War

​Summary:

Michael C. Desch argues Ukraine is losing the war and should accept a land-for-peace bargain while it still can. He says Russia’s manpower, weapons stocks, defense industry depth, and larger economy let Moscow sustain a long fight, while Ukraine’s smaller population, conscription strain, desertions, and shortages make its goals of restoring 1991 borders unattainable. He contends Western weapons have not been decisive, and Russia is adapting faster in drones, artillery targeting, and small-unit infiltration tactics. Desch concludes Kyiv should trade territory for a cease-fire, rebuild forces and fortifications, tackle corruption, and preserve an independent, westward-looking Ukraine.

Excerpts:

The Ukrainians and their allies must now ask themselves what another year of war will achieve and at what price. There is evidence of a growing sense among senior Ukrainian officials, including Kirill Budanov, the presidential chief of staff and former head of military intelligence, that although Ukrainian deep strikes and attacks on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers—the unmarked vessels Russia uses to evade sanctions—hurt Russia, they will not end the war any time soon.

With its larger objectives out of reach, Ukraine faces the prospect of ceding territory, which would be painful for Kyiv. But it does not have to mean the end of Ukraine as an independent country. A Ukraine shorn of its eastern regions could continue Kyiv’s westward-looking state-building project. Even before the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine was already shifting its economic center of gravity away from the rust-belt Donbas and toward the postindustrial center and west. And with comprehensive political and economic reforms; a serious anticorruption effort, especially in the military sector; and a campaign to construct defensive positions optimized for drones and low-density warfare and to invest substantial funds and organizational effort into battlefield innovations, Ukraine could be in a stronger position to protect itself were it attacked again. Accepting a bad peace deal now would at least give Kyiv this chance at a better future. Rejecting one now would only prolong a costly and losing war.

Ukraine Is Losing the War

Foreign Affairs · More by Michael C. Desch · February 26, 2026

With Moscow Pressing Its Advantage, Kyiv Should Trade Land for Peace

Michael C. Desch

February 26, 2026

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russia/ukraine-losing-war?utm

Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, February 2026 Iryna Rybakova / Ukrainian Armed Forces / Reuters

MICHAEL C. DESCH is Packey J. Dee Professor of International Relations at the University of Notre Dame and founding Brian and Jeannelle Brady Family Director of the O’Brien Notre Dame International Security Center.

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With Moscow Pressing Its Advantage, Kyiv Should Trade Land for Peace

Michael C. Desch​

Four years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Trump administration is pressing Kyiv to agree to painful territorial concessions as the price for peace. In a draft peace agreement first reported by Axios in November, the administration proposed that the entire regions of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk be recognized as de facto Russian territory and that Russia retain control of the parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia its forces now occupy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is pushing back, refusing to do anything that would violate his country’s territorial integrity. Yet the realities of the battlefield are not on his side.

Ukraine has been putting up valiant resistance, but its determination cannot disguise the fact that it is losing the war. Russia controls a large swath of Ukrainian territory, and Kyiv has little chance of dislodging it, as Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive in 2023 demonstrated. To be sure, recent Russian gains have come very slowly and at significant cost; over the last three years, Russia has taken a mere one percent of additional Ukrainian territory. But that does not change the reality that Russia now holds almost a fifth of the land within Ukraine’s 1991 borders—or that Russia’s greater resources and population mean that Moscow can fight on for years to come. Overcoming those Russian advantages and clawing back lost land on the battlefield would require time and investment that Ukraine doesn’t have. Current circumstances are therefore pushing Kyiv toward a compromise peace—one that will necessarily include the surrender of Ukrainian territory.

FALLING BEHIND

Judging by sheer numbers, the trajectory of the war does not favor Ukraine. The rates of battlefield losses on each side are one example. The Russian media outlet Mediazona tracks Russian military deaths using social media, obituaries, and official government notices and provides the most reliable estimates. (Estimates by Western intelligence agencies vary dramatically and often correlate with government policy preferences.) As of the end of 2025, Mediazona’s analysts identified 156,151 Russians who have been killed in the war and, because not every death is publicly reported, used population data to estimate a total of 219,000 dead. The Ukrainian nongovernmental organization UA Losses, employing a similar methodology, has reported 87,045 Ukrainians killed in action and 85,906 missing in action, a figure that likely includes unacknowledged deaths and desertions.

Although Ukraine is suffering fewer losses in absolute terms, the war is depleting a greater proportion of its manpower. Ukraine’s population today is just under 36 million, which is about 26 percent of Russia’s population of 140 million. Ukraine has just under 9.5 million men between the ages of 25 and 54, and it has lost between one and two percent of that cohort. For Russia, which has a little over 30.2 million men in the same age group, somewhat higher losses account for just 0.5 to 0.7 percent of the total. Ultimately, Russia, with its much larger population, can sustain larger total losses than Ukraine can.

Moreover, Russia is fighting mostly with contract soldiers—people who have volunteered—and keeping conscripts away from the front. The result is more motivated Russian soldiers. So far, Moscow is not having much trouble meeting recruitment needs. Ukraine, in contrast, relies heavily on conscription. Recent recruitment shortfalls and desertions have prompted increasingly draconian efforts to meet conscription a goal of 30,000 men per month. These include “busification,” the practice of grabbing men off the street and taking them in minivans to the local recruitment office. In addition to being unpopular, harsh methods are netting mostly older, less healthy, and clearly unwilling soldiers, many of whom desert at the first opportunity. Those who remain contribute little to the war effort.

When it comes to major weapons systems, Ukraine is outgunned across the board. As of 2025, Russia’s tanks outnumbered Ukraine’s at a ratio of nearly five to one, including the equipment Moscow has in storage. Russia had more than three times as many infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers as Ukraine. It had 670 pieces of towed artillery to Ukraine’s 543. It had five times as much mobile artillery, nearly ten times as many multiple launch rocket systems, and nearly five times as many mortars. Russia had 163 combat aircraft; Ukraine had 66. Although Russia’s huge advantage rests, in part, on older, stored equipment, much of the Western equipment sent to Ukraine is also old, coming from partner countries’ stockpiles. But even excluding stored equipment, in most categories, Russia’s stocks are at least double Ukraine’s.

Economic power is foundational to military power, and Russia has an advantage there, too. Russia’s 2024 GDP (measured by purchasing power parity) was almost $7 trillion. Ukraine’s, in contrast, was almost $657 billion, less than ten percent of Russia’s. Nominal measures show the same substantial gap. Spending around seven percent of GDP, Russia can allocate $484 billion to defense. Even if Ukraine spends 30 percent of its GDP, it will be able to muster a defense budget of only $197 billion, less than half of Russia’s.

Admittedly, this figure underestimates Ukraine’s long-term military capacity because it excludes the substantial financial and in-kind assistance the country has received from western Europe and until recently the United States. But Ukraine is more dependent on foreign partners than Russia is. Russia has a large indigenous defense industry and massive military stockpiles, although it, too, has come to rely to some extent on allies, including China and North Korea. Russia may not have all the cards, but it has big battalions and deep pockets.

Finally, consider each side’s strategic objectives. Although there is debate about what Russia’s goals may be, statements by members of the government emphasize two: control of some or all of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia and keeping Ukraine out of NATO.

The Russian government has long sought to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO on the grounds that Ukrainian membership in the alliance would constitute a military threat to Russia. At times, it has even seemed as if that objective outweighed larger territorial ambitions. When Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, it clearly wanted control of that territory. Russian-aligned militants, with varying levels of Russian support, took up arms in Donetsk and Luhansk, which together form the Donbas, to break away from Ukraine at about the same time. But Russia then supported the Minsk agreements, which ended the fighting but included no further territorial demands on Ukraine. One possible explanation is that by conceding that Donetsk and Luhansk would remain in a federalized Ukraine, Moscow hoped the pro-Russian regions would keep Kyiv from joining NATO or otherwise tilting toward the West. Indeed, Russia formally recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent only on the eve of its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In a September 2022 presidential speech and subsequent parliamentary action, Russia formally annexed those two regions, plus Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Russia now holds almost a fifth of the land within Ukraine’s 1991 borders.

Today, Russia controls 99 percent of Luhansk, 76 percent of Kherson, 74 percent of Zaporizhzhia, and 72 percent of Donetsk. Russian forces are advancing in Zaporizhzhia, low-level fighting continues in Kherson, and Moscow is conducting limited operations in the north to secure a buffer zone in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions. But Russia’s positive response to the Trump administration’s 28-point peace plan—which would deliver Moscow all of Donetsk and Luhansk but only parts of Ukraine’s other eastern regions—suggests that complete control of the Donbas is Moscow’s most consistent territorial objective. Its most consistent political objective remains keeping Ukraine out of NATO. In their ideal world, Russian leaders might entertain more ambitious territorial and political goals. After four years of grueling war, however, these more limited achievements appear to be all Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks he can get.

In contrast, Ukrainian leaders have been adamant that their goals remain the restoration of control over territory defined by the country’s 1991 borders, which includes Crimea, and the defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty, especially the freedom to join any alliance Kyiv wishes. But Ukraine has neither the military resources for a successful offensive nor the political will for a robust defense.

Given the length of the current frontline and Ukraine’s manpower problems, most Ukrainian units have to remain on the defensive. In June 2023, the Russian military broke the Ukrainian counteroffensive with its so-called Surovikin Line, a system of well-built fortifications supported by massive artillery and other indirect fire weapons. The Ukrainians, by contrast, have only belatedly begun digging similar defenses. Ukraine’s ambitious objective of territorial liberation has left its army few incentives to fortify the frontline or areas behind it. The provision of advanced Western weaponry may also have convinced the Ukrainians they could substitute technology or more Western support for operational innovation. And rampant corruption has undermined all aspects of Ukraine’s war effort, including the construction of fortifications. Russia is by no means free from corruption itself, but its size and economic advantages make the effects less damaging.

UKRAINE OUTMANEUVERED

Russia’s objectives seem reasonably compatible with its capabilities and trends on the battlefield. Ukraine’s objectives, in contrast, seem beyond its reach. The Ukrainian armed forces are stretched so thin along the 620-mile-long line of control that they cannot effectively defend it. Ukraine has only about 300,000 troops on the frontline, or 483 troops per mile. During the Cold War, Western planners thought that a successful defense of the border between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would require approximately one division (25,000 soldiers) per 16 miles, or some 1,500 soldiers per mile. By that rule of thumb, Ukraine has less than half the number of soldiers it needs to successfully defend the frontline.

Conversely, the Russian force in the occupied territory of Ukraine now numbers more than 700,000, which could provide a density of at least 1,129 troops per mile. By taking the offensive, Russia can further concentrate forces where it chooses and defend the rest of the line with lower numbers. Being on the defensive, Ukraine has to spread its forces relatively evenly along the entire frontline or risk having inadequate forces at a point Russia might attack. Ukraine must also keep an eye on the 674 miles of its border with the Russian ally Belarus, stretching its forces even thinner.

Military technology has not given Ukraine a clear edge, either. Working to modernize its military to NATO standards since 2015, Ukraine has relied on various sophisticated weapons, especially since the war began in 2022. The West has sent Ukraine everything from antitank guided missiles to multiple launch rocket systems to long-range cruise missiles, Patriot air defense missiles, and fighter aircraft. None have proved decisive, with the partial exception of first-person-view attack and reconnaissance drones.

When it comes to major weapons systems, Ukraine is outgunned across the board.

To be sure, the deployment of drones on both sides of the frontline has changed the nature of the fight dramatically. Roughly six miles on either side of the front has become a “kill zone” in which vehicles and large formations of troops can be spotted quickly and attacked relentlessly, reducing mobility under fire. But lately, there has been a dramatic shift in the balance of innovation. Western analysts have consistently questioned Russian military adaptability, but it is the Ukrainians who are now falling behind. Russia has greater capacity to scale up drone technology, resulting in an estimated ten-to-one advantage in the number of drones produced and deployed to the battlefield.

Superior Russian tactical innovation has had even more serious consequences for Ukrainian forces. The watershed came during the Ukrainian invasion of Russia’s Kursk region in 2024. In response to that incursion, Russian forces started operating differently. They substituted fiber-optic guidance systems once Ukraine developed the capacity to jam radio-controlled drones, negating a potential Ukrainian advantage in antidrone electronic warfare. They began attacking Ukrainian logistics and drone operators rather than individual soldiers on the frontlines, making far more efficient use of their drones than before. And reconnaissance drones enhance Russia’s traditional advantage in artillery (and in other indirect fire systems such as guided bombs) by providing much more effective fire correction—direction for how to aim at a target—than observers on the ground can provide. This capability enables Russian forces to substantially weaken Ukrainian defensive positions and interdict Ukrainian forces far behind the frontline.

A related Russian innovation involves infantry tactics that resemble the infiltration tactics developed by the Germans late in World War I to break the stalemate on the western front. Small numbers of Russian troops—typically assault groups consisting of three or four storm troopers or slightly larger sabotage and reconnaissance groups—increasingly penetrate Ukrainian lines through the drone-infested kill zone. Penny packets of soldiers, unlike tanks or infantry fighting vehicles, are not attractive targets, and the Russians have learned to use bad weather and darkness to evade Ukrainian reconnaissance during their infiltrations. The Ukrainians have tried to adopt similar tactics, but given their smaller numbers, they remain heavily reliant on highly visible and vulnerable armored vehicles to deliver troops, limiting their effectiveness.

LEAST BAD OPTION

Ukraine’s European backers have urged Kyiv to reject Russia’s demand to cede all of the Donbas. Kaja Kallas, the EU high representative for foreign affairs, has called trading Ukrainian territory for peace a “trap.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have repeatedly declared that “international borders must not be changed by force.” Some worry that giving in to Putin now will, as happened after a previous generation of European leaders made a deal with Hitler in Munich in 1938, only whet the Russian leader’s appetite for more Ukrainian and even NATO territory down the road.

A more reasonable objection is that the remaining Ukrainian-held Donbas “fortress cities” of Kramatorsk and Slavyansk constitute critical links in Ukraine’s defense. Urban warfare is costly, making cities highly defensible, and in today’s drone-dominated battlefield, they offer cover and protection as concentration points for troops. Given Ukraine’s manpower woes, defending fortified islands may seem like a good option. But preserving the Donbas fortress cities is no reason to continue the war. It is possible to protect territory farther behind the frontline without them with dedicated fortifications. Russia has also demonstrated that even fortress cities can be surrounded, isolated, and cleared through the infiltration of small units, as it has done recently in Chasiv Yar, Huliapole, Pokrovsk, and Siversk—and may yet succeed in doing in Kostiantynivka and Kupyansk.

The loss of the rest of Donetsk, although assuredly a blow to Ukrainian self-esteem, would not necessarily open the door to Kyiv for Moscow. Between October 2024 and October 2025, the Russians took control of 1,703 square miles of Ukrainian territory. The remainder of unoccupied Ukraine east of the Dnieper River consists of 57,066 square miles of territory. At last year’s rate of Russian advance, it would take more than 30 years for Moscow to complete such a conquest.

Western European panic notwithstanding, Russia essentially claiming victory in the Donbas would pose little threat to the rest of the continent. The Donbas is not the Sudetenland because the current Russian tactics are nothing like the blitzkrieg, which garnered Nazi Germany huge chunks of territory very quickly. It would take Russia decades to conquer the rest of Ukraine, so any direct threat to most other countries in Europe would manifest itself far into the future.

Rampant corruption has undermined all aspects of Ukraine’s war effort.

Yet there can be little doubt that Russia can achieve more limited aims by force of arms. Roughly 2,866 square miles of Donetsk remain under Kyiv’s control. If Russian forces continue at last year’s rate of advance, they could take it in a year and a half, a reasonable time frame. They may also grab more chunks of Kharkiv, Sumy, and Zaporizhzhia. Doing so would cost Russia additional blood and treasure, to be sure, but it would impose greater relative costs on Ukraine, which Kyiv can ill afford.

The Ukrainians and their allies must now ask themselves what another year of war will achieve and at what price. There is evidence of a growing sense among senior Ukrainian officials, including Kirill Budanov, the presidential chief of staff and former head of military intelligence, that although Ukrainian deep strikes and attacks on Moscow’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers—the unmarked vessels Russia uses to evade sanctions—hurt Russia, they will not end the war any time soon.

With its larger objectives out of reach, Ukraine faces the prospect of ceding territory, which would be painful for Kyiv. But it does not have to mean the end of Ukraine as an independent country. A Ukraine shorn of its eastern regions could continue Kyiv’s westward-looking state-building project. Even before the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine was already shifting its economic center of gravity away from the rust-belt Donbas and toward the postindustrial center and west. And with comprehensive political and economic reforms; a serious anticorruption effort, especially in the military sector; and a campaign to construct defensive positions optimized for drones and low-density warfare and to invest substantial funds and organizational effort into battlefield innovations, Ukraine could be in a stronger position to protect itself were it attacked again. Accepting a bad peace deal now would at least give Kyiv this chance at a better future. Rejecting one now would only prolong a costly and losing war.

Foreign Affairs · More by Michael C. Desch · February 26, 2026

13. America Needs an Alliance Audit

​Summary:

Christopher Chivvis argues the United States should “audit” alliances rather than reflexively restore the Cold War system after POTUS has strained it. He says the strategic environment has changed, with China as a peer competitor in East Asia, Russia as a persistent threat in Europe, and north Korea able to strike the U.S. homeland. Alliances can still multiply power through supply chains, technology standards, basing, and legitimacy, but they also raise war risk and force expensive two theater planning. He urges pruning lopsided ties like the Philippines, reassessing South Korea, doubling down on Japan and Australia, and pushing Europe to lead on Russia while cooperating on China.

Comments: All alliances are not transactional (or should not be). Financial considerations are not everything. There are intangibles and future returns on investment that cannot be calculated at present. I hope someday we never have to say I wish we still had an alliance with X nation, because we should need them now.

America Needs an Alliance Audit

Foreign Affairs · More by Christopher S. Chivvis · February 25, 2026

Not All Partnerships Are Worth Sustaining

Christopher S. Chivvis

February 25, 2026

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/america-needs-alliance-audit

A U.S.-South Korean joint exercise in Yeoju, South Korea, August 2025 Kim Hong-Ji / Reuters

CHRISTOPHER S. CHIVVIS is Director of the American Statecraft Program and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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Not All Partnerships Are Worth Sustaining

Christopher S. Chivvis​

President Donald Trump is laying waste to the United States’ long-standing system of alliances. By extorting old friends for short-term gain, threatening to annex allied territory, and applying tariffs indiscriminately, he has squandered decades of cooperation that has served U.S. interests worldwide. When Trump eventually leaves office, the next president will have to decide whether to try to restore these ties. If that successor is a Democrat, the instinct may be to revive the alliance framework that existed during the Cold War. But that would be the wrong approach.

The world has changed since Washington built most of its alliances. After World War II, the United States established an alliance system to contain communism in Asia and Europe. When the Soviet threat collapsed, many analysts assumed Washington would scale back its commitments in favor of greater independence. Instead, the United States maintained its obligations and, in Europe, even expanded them. That was easy to do in a world in which the United States had no peer competitor and the risk of having to fight on behalf of an ally was low.

That world is gone. China now poses the first serious challenge to U.S. economic primacy in a century. In East Asia, its military capabilities rival those of the United States. Russia, meanwhile, has emerged from two decades of weakness to invade its neighbors and harass NATO members. And North Korea now has nuclear weapons that can strike the mainland United States.

Washington therefore needs to reassess its alliances and recalibrate them to suit these new realities. It should judge its partners on whether they strengthen U.S. competitiveness with regard to China and on the low likelihood that they could involve the United States in a war that does not serve its interests. Some current U.S. allies pass this test, but not all of them. As future U.S. leaders try to revive cooperation, they must be hard-nosed. An uncritical reembrace of old allies could weaken the United States and even lead to war.

DON’T SETTLE

The right allies can make up for the fact that the United States’ relative economic and military power has declined since the 1990s. They can help the United States withstand economic coercion from Beijing by diversifying important supply chains, such as for semiconductors and critical minerals. By building their digital economies around U.S. software and hardware, they can help ensure that Washington, not Beijing, sets technological standards across the globe. Allies can also reduce U.S. defense burdens, either by contributing military capabilities directly or by offering the use of their infrastructure and territory to amplify the reach of U.S. power overseas. Diplomatically, the right allies can back U.S. initiatives in multilateral organizations and complement U.S. efforts to sustain influence across the so-called global South.

But such advantages must be weighed against costs. Treaty alliances are not just diplomatic agreements; they also oblige the United States to go to war, and in today’s world, that commitment is more dangerous than ever. China and Russia are much more confident in their ability to deter or defeat U.S. forces than they were 20 years ago, and hence more inclined to clash with U.S. allies, potentially drawing the United States into a conflict. Alliances also require the Pentagon to prepare for major wars in multiple theaters at once, an expensive pursuit.

When it comes to alliances, more is not always better. A tangle of alliances, after all, helped transform what might have been a small conflict between Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire into World War I. Defensive alliances can be misread as offensive ones, triggering the very aggression they were meant to prevent. Or they can embolden minor partners to act more recklessly, potentially ensnaring bigger countries into an unwanted fight. Washington must be particularly careful not to fall into such traps in Asia.

It would also be wise for the United States to limit its commitments to those that the American people are prepared to follow through on. It is, for example, bound by treaty to defend South Korea from external aggression, but in a 2025 poll from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, only a slim majority of Americans said they would support using U.S. troops to defend their ally from a North Korean attack. If the United States fails to follow through on a defense pledge in a crisis, its credibility will suffer.

TRIM THE FAT

Some alliances require recalibration. Consider the Mutual Defense Treaty between the United States and the Philippines, which was established in 1951. The deal made sense when the United States dominated East Asia militarily, but now that China has become more powerful in its surrounding waters, the pact deserves much more scrutiny. Yet both the Biden and the second Trump administrations rushed to deepen ties with the Philippines by sending it advanced missile systems, deploying U.S. Marine forces there on a rotational basis, and launching a large-scale infrastructure development project near Luzon.

Pentagon planners argue that the Philippines provides an important springboard for attacking mainland China and defending Taiwan, but the utility of Philippine geography and capabilities is overstated. A handful of undefended U.S. equipment sites and rotational Marine deployments are unlikely to deter China from attacking Taiwan. And the marginal military gains offered by Manila must be weighed against the Philippines’ weaknesses: its military is decades behind those of its regional peers, and the country has little to offer the United States economically, technologically, or diplomatically in its long-term competition with China. By recommitting to this lopsided partnership, Washington risks emboldening Manila to take harder lines in the South China Sea, potentially dragging the United States into a conflict over disputed reefs that have limited bearing on core U.S. interests.

The United States should halt the expansion of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, a 2014 pact granting U.S. forces access to Philippine military bases, and ensure that U.S. rotational deployments in Luzon do not evolve into permanent military bases that unnecessarily heighten tensions with China. Behind closed doors, Washington should stress to Manila that it does not intend to fight a war over disputed islands in the South China Sea.

Defensive alliances can be misread as offensive ones.

The United States’ relationship with South Korea is more structurally sound than that with the Philippines, but it is still worth reassessing. South Korea is a major economy and a leading producer of advanced microchips, both good reasons for the United States to maintain close ties. Yet the military risks of aligning with South Korea are rising.

When the United States first committed to defending South Korea during the Cold War, North Korea had no way to attack U.S. soil. Now, however, the balance of risk is radically altered: the Kim regime could destroy a U.S. city with nuclear weapons. And although South Korea hosts nearly 30,000 American troops, Seoul has resisted discussing whether U.S. forces based in the country, or South Korea’s own forces, could be used to deter or intervene in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

To reduce the risk of a North Korean attack on U.S. soil, Washington should scale back its forces in South Korea, even if doing so might, as some analysts argue, spur Seoul to pursue nuclear weapons. (Washington can try to head off such an outcome by strengthening South Korea’s conventional forces and reminding Seoul of the economic and diplomatic costs of withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.)

BANG FOR YOUR BUCK

Other alliances, such as the one with Japan, have only become more worthwhile in the twenty-first century. With its advanced digital technologies and stakes in companies that extract and process critical minerals abroad, Japan can help the United States compete with China in artificial intelligence. Tokyo is dedicated to its alliance with the United States and has dramatically increased defense spending. It also has major diplomatic weight across the Indo-Pacific and is the world’s fourth-largest economy.

Theoretically, the United States could get caught up in a war with China over the Senkaku Islands (known in China as the Diaoyu Islands) on Japan’s behalf, but Beijing will probably avoid coming to blows with the second most powerful country in East Asia. Japan should therefore remain the central pillar of U.S. power in the Indo-Pacific. Washington should redouble its efforts to cooperate with Tokyo in securing critical supply chains, developing advanced technologies, and reforming global institutions, while also strengthening Japan’s capacity for deterrence and self-defense.

The rationale for the U.S. alliance with Australia also remains strong, in part because the risks are low, even if Canberra brings less to the table than does Tokyo. Australia is a large economy, and it has rich reserves of critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and rare-earth elements needed to make electric vehicles and certain advanced weapons. It is a valuable military and intelligence partner, especially because of its location: in the Indo-Pacific but outside the range of most Chinese missiles. Australia has now firmly oriented itself toward the United States and away from China. The AUKUS treaty, a 2021 security pact between the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, merits further investment.

Alliances can embolden minor partners to act more recklessly.

The United States’ long-standing alliances in Europe—now under immense strain from the Trump administration—still have high potential, but they are not delivering on it. When it comes to China, European capitals have never fully aligned with Washington. They cooled on China after Beijing supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the Trump administration’s erratic treatment of European allies has reinforced their tendency to hedge between Washington and Beijing. Over the past few months, leaders of historic U.S. allies, including France and the United Kingdom, have even flocked to China to reset their ties.

Although European countries are unlikely to play much of a military role in the Indo-Pacific, they can take the lead in their own defense against Russia—thus freeing up U.S. resources to balance China. A reformed transatlantic alliance should ensure that Europe steps up to defend itself, while preserving a U.S. commitment to collective defense through NATO. The shift to a NATO led by Europe should be the product of a deliberate transatlantic strategy, not of neglect or coercion.

A renewed transatlantic alliance should also include more diplomatic and industrial cooperation. Combined, the United States and Europe’s economic heft far outstrips China’s. With sustained diplomacy—and flexibility in Brussels—the United States and Europe can cooperate to develop trusted AI infrastructure, coordinate export controls, and jointly process and stockpile critical minerals. This cooperation would go a long way toward preventing China from setting global AI standards or dominating the development of advanced weapons and clean energy.

Europe also retains influence in regions of the world where the United States is comparatively weak, such as Africa. China has been working for well over a decade to develop deep economic and political connections across that continent. U.S. projects such as the Lobito Corridor, an infrastructure project connecting critical minerals mines in Congo and Zambia to a port in Angola on Africa’s western shore, are only beginning to compete. Europe’s relationships can help balance China’s influence.

TIME FOR AN AUDIT

To regularly audit its alliances, Washington will need new bureaucratic mechanisms. Today, it is largely up to regional bureaus at the State Department, the Defense Department, and intelligence agencies to track how allies serve U.S. needs. These regional bureaus bring valuable expertise but can struggle to evaluate the usefulness of the countries in their portfolio through a global lens. Washington should therefore set up a functional office to oversee its partnerships with all foreign capitals, regardless of geography. This office would assess the costs, risks, and domestic political support for alliances. It would also identify opportunities to deepen relationships with key partners, such as India, around shared interests. In addition, it could clarify, publicly or privately, the conditions under which the United States would use force to defend an ally, and what each ally is expected to commit to in return.

The U.S. Congress should play a bigger role, too. Under the Constitution, the Senate has the power to approve or reject treaties. Lawmakers should therefore require the undersecretary of state for political affairs to provide an annual net assessment of the costs, risks, and returns of each major treaty commitment.

Revamping alliances will be controversial, both in Washington and overseas. Depending on how Trump governs throughout the rest of his term, some historic allies may hesitate to renew their bonds with the United States. As Washington adjusts, it owes its partners greater predictability and fairer treatment than Trump has given them. The goal should not be to restore the Cold War–era alliance system out of nostalgia but to build partnerships on a clear-eyed assessment of current realities. The world will be safer if U.S. alliances are tailored to future challenges and the needs of the American people.

Foreign Affairs · More by Christopher S. Chivvis · February 25, 2026

14. Voice of America is covering Iran’s protests, but not its best-known dissident

​Summary:

Voice of America’s Persian service is covering Iran’s protests but, critics say, is largely avoiding mention of Reza Pahlavi, the shah’s son and a prominent opposition figure. The Washington Post reports guests and staff allege a new internal rule discourages naming Pahlavi, with at least one interviewee saying her live segment was later suppressed from social reposting after she referenced him. USAGM leadership under Kari Lake and Persian chief Ali Javanmardi argues the policy aims to avoid elevating any diaspora opposition faction and to center protesters inside Iran. Staffers counter that omitting chants and meetings involving Pahlavi distorts coverage and undermines VOA’s credibility.

Comment: I will leave the discussion about Pahlavi to the Iran experts to assess. But VOA should be allowed to function in accordance with its charter. It should not be perceived as a propaganda arm of the government.

Voice of America is covering Iran’s protests, but not its best-known dissident

The U.S. government broadcaster, overseen by Kari Lake, hardly mentions the name of Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed shah. Some critics accuse it of censorship.

February 25, 2026 at 5:00 a.m. ESTFebruary 25, 2026

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/25/reza-pahlavi-iran-protests-voa/

By Scott Nover

When Sahar Tahvili, a professor at a Swedish university, sat for an interview with Voice of America’s Persian service on Jan. 9, she discussed the security concerns for Iranian viewers using Starlink satellites to circumvent the government’s internet blackouts.

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But it was a greeting at the start of the interview that crossed a line with the company’s top brass. She thanked the network for having her before invoking the name of Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s deposed shah: “Let me first pass my greetings to our compatriots in Iran, a nation that, by standing on the right side of history and by responding in the millions to Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi’s call, is shaping historic days for the freedom of our country.”

Later that day, Tahvili received a phone call from the VOA producer who arranged her interview, complaining that she had violated Voice of America’s new policy barring mentions of Pahlavi’s name — which she said she didn’t know about.

“He called me in a very angry way and said, ‘Why did you mention his name?’” Tahvili, adjunct associate professor of AI industrial systems at Sweden’s Mälardalen University, said in an interview. “No one is allowed to mention Pahlavi’s name.” Because she had mentioned him, Tahvili said she was told her interview, which aired live, would not be reposted to social media and she would no longer be welcome on the network.

Critics including Tahvili allege that since the mass protests broke out in the final days of last year, the U.S. government has systematically censored the best-known Iranian opposition figure by banning his name from its broadcasts. They also claim that, in the process, U.S. Agency for Global Media Deputy CEO Kari Lake and the new head of the Persian service, Ali Javanmardi, have exerted control over a government broadcaster that’s long been editorially independent of the U.S. government.

In a January interview with Reuters, President Donald Trump questioned whether Pahlavi has enough support to take over in Iran, but said “that would be fine with me” if he wins over the majority of Iranians. “He seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country,” Trump said.

In the same interview, he remained noncommittal about efforts to pressure regime change in Iran either, saying, “Whether or not it falls or not, it’s going to be an interesting period of time.”

The push to excise Pahlavi’s name was first reported by the Hill.

Lake and Javanmardi, a former VOA contractor recently brought in to run the Persian service, have defended their new rules, saying that they are simply clamping down on an effort by VOA employees eager to see one opposition group prevail over another at a time when Iran’s regime under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is on shaky ground. They say it applies to all opposition leaders, not just Pahlavi.

“We are not in the business of selecting Iran’s political leadership,” Lake said in a statement. “That decision belongs solely to Iran’s 93 million citizens, who have a right to self-determination. Right now, the story should be about them, not the numerous opposition groups outside Iran. Elevating external opposition figures over voices inside the country risks externalizing the conflict in ways that would only benefit the cruel regime and undermine protesters on the ground.”

In a separate statement, Lake called Javanmardi “a respected and fearless journalist” with deep experience reporting on Iran and the region. “His commitment is to journalistic responsibility, truth, and ensuring coverage that aligns with American policy interests and centers the voices of the Iranian people in support of their right to freedom and self-determination.”

The spokesperson did not make Javanmardi available for an interview.

Javanmardi has voiced opinions, however, about Pahlavi on-air, saying in a recent VOA appearance, “The United States government is not going to replace a dictator inside Iran with another totalitarian one who has threatened all his opponents even before coming to power with death and elimination.” In recent months he has also described other media as engaging in “propaganda engineering” and “artificial magnification” of issues in Iran.

Javanmardi has also called out Iranians for not participating in the recent protests. “We should all participate in identifying the mercenaries who did not join the people and are involved in suppressing the people,” he said in one broadcast. “Let’s participate so that they do not have immunity, both inside and outside Iran.”

Under Lake, Voice of America has undergone massive staff cuts. The broadcaster, first set up in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda abroad, suspended most of its programming after Trump issued an executive order in March. Then, Lake cut hundreds of contractors and placed hundreds of full-time staffers on paid administration leave. A federal judge blocked Lake from firing the employees and instructed the agency to uphold its statutory obligations for broadcasting. As a result, Lake brought back broadcasting in a few languages mandated by law, including Farsi.Ask The Post AI

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In January, Congress rejected requests from Lake and the White House to zero out the agency’s budget, approving a $653 million budget. Lake said she was “disappointed” at the move.Ask The Post AI

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VOA’s Persian service, once among its largest divisions, has maintained a skeleton crew since this summer, when Lake briefly ordered staff back and called for some broadcasts amid escalating military tensions between Iran and Israel. Many of those recalled staffers were put back on administrative leave when the conflict simmered.

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But when popular uprising broke out in late December, Lake once again ramped up its staffing, bringing back a few dozen employees and contractors.

She also tapped Javanmardi, who years earlier worked as a VOA correspondent based in Irbil, Iraq, to lead the charge. He quickly became a divisive figure among staffers and viewers because of his close control over broadcasts. So far, more than 58,000 people signed a Change.org petition to have him removed, saying, “Ali Javanmardi’s biased approach silences the Iranian struggle and betrays the trust of those who depend on honest journalism.”

In an email, a USAGM spokesman defended the new policy regarding opposition figures. “Mr. Reza Pahlavi himself, as well as the leaders of other political groups, have been invited to speak on the Voice of America,” he said.

Despite the invitation, Pahlavi has not appeared on the network. Pahlavi did not respond to a request for comment.Ask The Post AI

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Several VOA staffers working on the broadcasts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said that Javanmardi appeared to target Pahlavi. The staffers said he personally approves all guests before they appear on air and has instructed staff not to book anyone who sympathizes or promotes Pahlavi.

“He completely censors his name, his activity and everything,” one staffer said, noting that Javanmardi has refused to play audio of protesters in Iran shouting Pahlavi’s name. “All the people chanting in Iran — nothing. He censors everything.”

Holly Dagres, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute who writes a Substack newsletter called “The Iranist,” said that many Iranians have indeed chanted Pahlavi’s name during the protests. “While this may seem surprising to outside observers, nostalgia for the pre-1979 era has grown in recent years,” she said. “Many Iranians — particularly Gen Zers who weren’t alive during that period — perceive life before the revolution as a better time.”

She added that omitting this detail “erases a key element of the uprising — including the motivations of some of the protesters who have risked, and in some cases lost, their lives in the name of freedom.”

Another staffer said that no pro-Pahlavi content can appear on the network. “If anything ever has been published or broadcast, it’s because we missed it,” the staffer said.

Another employee said that the approach has hampered reporting, such as when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) met with Pahlavi and Javanmardi instructed the staff not to cover it.

However, one VOA staffer defended the policy, saying that without it, the service and the United States could be labeled having interfered in Iran’s internal affairs.

And Arash Azizi, a lecturer at Yale University who writes about Iran for different publications, also said he is “at least partially favorable” to VOA’s approach because Pahlavi leads “one political faction” of the opposition.

“No country in the world should recognize Mr. Pahlavi as the leader of the Iranian opposition because he has absolutely no legitimacy for that position,” Azizi said. “I think it’s good for VOA to have effectively pulled the brake and say, look, you’re nobody’s leader. You can’t just appoint yourself the leader and then expect us to treat you as one.”

Navid Mohebbi, a former political prisoner in Iran now advising the National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI), which supports Pahlavi, said in a statement that VOA is effectively the “only major Persian-language diaspora outlet” that has avoided covering Pahlavi’s calls for demonstrations in Iran and protesters shouting pro-Pahlavi slogans.

“This level of censorship is striking, particularly when even Iranian regime media and outlets hostile to the United States acknowledged the existence of these slogans,” he said.

For Tahvili, who grew up watching VOA in Iran, the experience of being banned from the network was painful.

“For us, for my generation, we grew up with the Voice of America,” she said. “It was the only channel, the only Persian-language news source that we had at that time. Freedom of speech. Professional journalism. It really hurts to see how it changed from that to this.”

Yeganeh Torbati contributed to this report.

15. For Iran’s Regime, Better to Take a Beating than Capitulate

​Summary:

The authors argue that extreme pressure often hardens, not softens, authoritarian resolve because capitulation can be more dangerous than absorbing punishment. They use Saddam Hussein’s refusal to quit Kuwait in 1991 as the template: withdrawing under ultimatum risked humiliation, elite defection, and a coup, so he chose war and tried to raise U.S. political costs. They claim Iran’s Supreme Leader faces the same trap today. Concessions to U.S. demands could fracture regime legitimacy and unsettle the Revolutionary Guards, so endurance becomes the safer political play. The piece warns Washington that firepower rarely delivers fast political outcomes in the Persian Gulf.

Comment: A coercion strategy that offers no face-saving off ramp can lock Tehran into defiance even when leaders expect military loss. If Iran’s best option is political survival, it may prioritize inflicting limited U.S. casualties and economic disruption over protecting infrastructure.

For Iran’s Regime, Better to Take a Beating than Capitulate

warontherocks.com ·February 26, 2026

Tanya Goudsouzian and Ibrahim al-Marashi

February 26, 2026

https://warontherocks.com/2026/02/for-irans-regime-better-to-take-a-beating-than-capitulate/

It seems natural to assume that relentless pressure will force authoritarian leaders to yield, yet the opposite is often true. When survival is at stake, backing down can be more dangerous than standing firm. This counterintuitive logic has played out repeatedly in the Persian Gulf. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein refused to leave Kuwait in 1991 to avoid humiliation, defections and the threat of a coup. Today, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei faces a similar trap, as giving in to U.S. pressure could weaken his hold at home. History shows that extreme pressure can embolden defiance and absorbing blows can be politically safer than capitulation.

During his State of the Union Speech on Feb. 24, U.S. President Donald Trump boasted that the June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Yet, just the weekend before, Steve Witkoff — his special envoy to the Middle East — inadvertently revealed on Fox News that the program had not been entirely destroyed, and asked in frustration why Iran’s leaders “haven’t capitulated … with the amount of naval power over there” and why they haven’t simply declared they do not seek a nuclear weapon. Trump’s Republican predecessors, Presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush, asked the same question. Saddam might have the answer.

In 1991 and 2003, massive American military forces were arrayed in the Persian Gulf to compel Saddam to abandon his alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and, in the earlier case, withdraw from Kuwait. Yet, Saddam stayed in Kuwait after the U.N. deadline passed on Jan. 15, 1991, despite facing a U.S.-led coalition of more than 40 nations far superior to his forces. Withdrawing under an ultimatum would have signaled weakness at home and risked a coup from his inner circle.

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Iran faces a similar dilemma today. If Khamenei were seen as yielding, it could erode his authority not only among protesters on the streets but also within the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. As a New York Times headline noted on Feb. 23, “For Iran’s Rulers, Refusing U.S. Demands Is a Risk Worth Taking,” with the clerical leadership viewing concessions as a greater threat to regime survival than the prospect of war. In both cases, the logic of survival makes punishment politically safer than surrender. Saddam chose to fight rather than retreat, hoping to inflict U.S. casualties, prolong the conflict and raise political costs for Washington.

Captured documents from Iraq demonstrate that prior to the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam admitted that the Iraqi military could not stand up against the superior military assets of the U.S.-led coalition, particularly its stealth fighters and aircraft carriers. Political elites in Iran have surely come to the same realization after facing the brunt of U.S. military strikes during the 12-Day War of June 2025.

Back in 1991, Saddam calculated it was better to fight, with even a slim chance of inflicting fatalities on U.S. forces, than to withdraw in the face of American intimidation. His ultimate strategy relied on war weariness. By raising the cost in American lives, public opinion might turn against the conflict, as it had decades earlier in Vietnam.

In the same way, Iran may see it as preferable to weather another round of strikes rather than succumb to Trump’s demands. Even though U.S. threats today are of greater scale and scope, they also present the possibility for Iran to inflict casualties, while prolonging the conflict drives up oil prices and complicates Trump’s political standing ahead of the midterms.

Prolonging the conflict may offer tactical or symbolic advantages, but it also illustrates that even last minute diplomacy is constrained by the same survival logic that makes backing down politically dangerous. In January 1991, talks in Geneva between Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker sought to avert war, yet the United States refused to offer any concessions — including lifting sanctions — that might have allowed Saddam to save face.

Today, similar dynamics are at play between the U.S. and Iran, with negotiations in the same city offering no real relief from the existing sanctions that have already battered the Iranian economy. Just as neither side could yield in 1991 without risking domestic or strategic collapse, it seems unlikely in 2026 that either Tehran or Washington can make the first move, reinforcing why withstanding pressure may be politically safer than backing down.

History ought to serve as an oracle for Washington. After the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam declared “dignified victory” despite a military defeat. He had survived, while Bush faced a recession at home, failing to win reelection against Bill Clinton who swept to victory with the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Even with Iraq’s armed forces devastated, Saddam framed this military defeat as success because a coalition of more than 40 nations could not unseat him.

Again, Khamenei faces a similar dynamic. The scale of damage to Iran’s military or nuclear program matters less politically than survival itself. U.S. sanctions strain the economy, but as in Iraq, elites can manage or even benefit, while the population bears the costs. While the Islamic Republic is facing a nationwide protest movement combined with the threat of military strikes, Saddam endured six weeks of air strikes, a ground invasion, and then an uprising that swept through 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces in 1991 and still prevailed. Military might alone does not guarantee regime change. Interventions in the Persian Gulf, whether in 1991 or today, risk prolonged conflict, regional destabilization and economic disruption. Washington may possess unmatched firepower, but history shows the outcome is the same. Force rarely produces rapid, decisive political outcomes in the Persian Gulf.

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Tanya Goudsouzian is a Canadian journalist who has covered Afghanistan and the Middle East for more than two decades. She has held senior editorial roles at major international media outlets, including serving as opinion editor at Al Jazeera English.

Ibrahim al-Marashi is an associate professor of Middle East history at California State University, and visiting faculty at the American College of the Mediterranean and the Department of International Relations at Central European University. His publications include Iraq’s Armed Forces: An Analytical History (2008), The Modern History of Iraq (2017), and A Concise History of the Middle East (2024).

Image: khamenei.ir via Wikimedia Commons

warontherocks.com · Daisy Johnston · February 26, 2026

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

https://apstrategy.org/

Executive Director, Korea Regional Review

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

Editor-at-large, Small Wars Journal

https://smallwarsjournal.com/

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com