Quotes of the Day:

"War is what happens when language fails."

– Margaret Atwood

"You'll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do."

– David Foster Wallace

"Poetry is the lens we use to interrogate the history we stand on and the future we stand for."

– Amanda Gorman

1. Taiwan Doubles Down on U.S. Partnership, Even as America’s Alliances Fray

2. China’s Disappearing Generals

3. North America’s top computer vision scientist Liang Jie returns to China

4. ‘Kill chains’ are the future of war. Humans may not be

5. An internal document shows the Vietnamese military preparing for a possible American war

6. Rubio And The Future Of American Diplomacy – OpEd

7. Trump Administration to Create $12 Billion Rare-Earth Stockpile to Counter China

8. Taiwan’s Rare Earths Security Challenge

9. China eyes reshaping global order as US influence wanes

10. Opinion | The ‘Deal’ in Iran Is Regime Change

11. It’s Time to Play Foreign Policy Hardball

12. Beyond Deterrence: How China Turned Taiwan Into a Governance Testbed

13. Greenland’s Worth a Fight and Russia’s Trying to Start One

14. The Predatory Hegemon: How Trump Wields American Power

15. Google Is Spending Big to Build a Lead in the AI Energy Race

16. Social Media Manipulation for Sale: 2025 NATO Experiment on Platform Capabilities to Detect and Counter Inauthentic Social Media Engagement

17. Small Wars in the Strategic Transition: U.S. Hemispheric Assertiveness and the Global Gray Zone

18. How the United States Lost a Nuclear Device and Recovered an Indian Friend

19. Schrödinger's Security Partner: The Paradox of Measuring Security Force Assistance

20. The S-500 Factor: India’s Missile Defence Ambitions and the New Asian Security Dilemma

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1. Taiwan Doubles Down on U.S. Partnership, Even as America’s Alliances Fray

​Summary:

The article argues that Taiwan is choosing deeper reliance on the United States even as many U.S. partners hedge amid uncertain American policy. President Lai Ching-te pledged to strengthen trade and security ties with Washington, emphasizing AI, drones, critical minerals, and non-China supply chains. U.S. approval of $11.1 billion in arms sales in mid-December reinforced Taipei’s confidence, despite tariffs under POTUS Trump and U.S. strategy language that softened its focus on China. Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang advocates closer economic ties with Beijing, while many in Taiwan believe only U.S. support can deter or defeat a Chinese invasion.

Comment: Does Taiwan have a choice? How else can it deter and defend against China? But if Taiwan believes U.S. military support is indispensable, how resilient is deterrence when alliance confidence depends on arms sales and shifting U.S. political signals?

As Taiwan deepens non-China supply chains, does economic alignment with Washington strengthen security, or does it further harden Beijing’s incentives to act?

What lessons should South Korea draw if Taiwan’s opposition seeks accommodation with China while the government doubles down on the U.S. amid ​"alliance​" or partnership uncertainty?

Taiwan Doubles Down on U.S. Partnership, Even as America’s Alliances Fray

WSJ

China threat and U.S. weapons underpin a reliance on Washington

By Joyu Wang

Follow

Feb. 3, 2026 3:48 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/taiwan-doubles-down-on-u-s-partnership-even-as-americas-alliances-fray-a37f8120

Taiwan President Lai Ching-te promises to double down on ties with the U.S. Ritchie B Tongo/EPA/Shutterstock

TAIPEI—Many of America’s longtime trade and security partners, contending with a new era of uncertain U.S. relations, have looked to hedge their reliance on Washington, in some cases warming up to Beijing.

For Taiwan, as with other U.S. security partners in Asia, giving up on America isn’t an option.

Taiwan’s president pledged Tuesday to double down on trade and security ties in an upbeat speech that clearly staked out what it means to count on the U.S. and be wary of China.

Taiwan is committed to deepening its economic and strategic ties to Washington, with a focus on artificial intelligence, drones, critical minerals and supply chains that exclude China, Taiwan President Lai Ching-te said.

Lai’s comments followed economic discussions in Washington last week that he described as “of great significance to Taiwan-U.S. relations,” a partnership that could be one of “mutually beneficial prosperity.”

While President Trump’s tariffs have tested Taiwan, as they have with other trading partners, tensions eased last month with an agreement to lower tariffs in exchange for investment to boost American production of semiconductors.

The pledge of allegiance from Taipei on Tuesday contrasted with shifting winds in the West, where U.S. tariffs and other threats have nudged partners to seek alternatives.

Many U.S. trade partners are considering deeper trade ties with Beijing—though even North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries that pushed back against Trump’s bid to control Greenland still count on the U.S. for security, exports and technology.

In Asia, U.S. partners are carving their own paths when possible. Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has made reducing reliance on China for essential parts and raw materials a cornerstone of her economic policy—while preparing investments to cement Japanese strengths in industries such as semiconductor technology, an effort aimed in part at ensuring Japan is economically indispensable to the U.S.

Tokyo is also hedging its economic bets by building alliances with the European Union, Australia and others, remaining committed to multilateralism and free trade, which the U.S. under Trump now rejects.

South Korea, whose relationship with the U.S. is fundamental to national security, has had rough spots with Washington—primarily when hundreds of South Koreans were detained in an immigration raid at a Hyundai Motor plant in Georgia in September.

But President Lee Jae Myung has praised Trump and repeatedly asked for Washington’s help to restart dialogue with North Korea—while Lee has also looked to boost economic cooperation with China, South Korea’s largest trading partner.

The prevailing view in Taiwan, from military strategists to the local population, is that the island’s military would struggle against an invasion by China’s much larger armed forces, and that only with U.S. help could the island be kept out of Beijing’s hands. China, which claims the democratic, self-ruled island as its own territory, has threatened to use force to seize it.

Taiwan has had to swallow Trump’s public softening toward Beijing, which include his display of warmth toward leader Xi Jinping at an October trade summit and his administration’s national-security strategy in December, which no longer singled out China as the U.S.’s greatest challenge.

In mid-December, Trump seemed to answer concerns that he could give China a pass, as his administration approved $11.1 billion in arms sales for Taiwan. The U.S.-Taiwan tariff deal in January reinforced Taiwan’s confidence.

An F-16 jet fighter during exercises in Taiwan. An Rong Xu/Bloomberg News

The Lai administration, hearing Trump’s message that traditional U.S. partners must do more to deserve American support, has also pushed for significant increases in U.S. weapons purchases.

Lai’s speech on Tuesday, which followed the first face-to-face meetings of the U.S.-Taiwan Economic Prosperity Partnership Dialogue in Washington last week, called attention to the political challenge of improving relations with the U.S. Opposition lawmakers in Taiwan have stalled approval of the Lai administration’s proposed defense budget, which includes the latest U.S.-approved weapons purchases.

As Lai spoke, a delegation from Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, was across the Taiwan Strait in Beijing for meetings with Chinese Communist Party officials.

Kuomintang Vice Chairman Hsiao Hsu-tsen called for building a stronger economic relationship with China as a hedge against exploitation, without naming the U.S.

“We should cooperate across the strait to earn money from the world, rather than letting confrontation allow other foreign countries to ‘reap the spoils,’” said Hsiao. “We cannot let them exploit or hollow out Taiwan’s resources.”

Lai pleaded Tuesday for the legislature to approve the tariff deal, arguing that “walking into the world” hand-in-hand with the U.S. and other like-minded countries is more beneficial for Taiwan’s economic development than accepting China’s embrace.

Watch: New Chinese Ships Are Troubling Sign for Taiwan

Beijing’s new ships can land on beaches and link to form massive mobile piers. Analysts say they’re intended to rapidly offload military equipment, setting the stage for a D-Day-style invasion of Taiwan. Photo Illustration: WSJ

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

Joyu Wang is a Taipei-based reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering Taiwan politics and general news, with a focus on defense and security issues.

She was previously Asia’s social media editor for the Journal in Hong Kong, where her work earned several journalism awards, including a Scripps Howard Award for digital innovation and a Human Rights Press Award for her reporting on the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

Joyu graduated from the University of Missouri with a dual degree in journalism and linguistics, and began her career as an intern in the Journal's Hong Kong bureau.

WSJ

2. China’s Disappearing Generals

​Summary:

The article describes sweeping purges by Xi Jinping that have reshaped China’s top military leadership since March 2023. Every officer shown serving under him on the Central Military Commission in 2023 has been ousted or investigated except one. The latest removed is Zhang Youxia, described as Xi’s top general, alongside Liu Zhenli, stripping the commission of key “operational” leaders. A New York Times review finds nearly all of at least 30 senior generals and admirals from early 2023 have disappeared or been expelled, leaving only seven apparently active. The remaining commission general is Zhang Shengmin, tied to political discipline and the Rocket Force. Purges hit theater commands, including the Eastern Theater.

Comment: At the link is the photo "scorecard" to keep track.

China’s Disappearing Generals

NY Times · Chris Buckley · February 3, 2026

Feb. 3, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/02/03/world/asia/china-xi-military-purge.html

These were the commanders serving under Xi Jinping on the Central Military Commission in 2023.

Mr. Xi has since ousted every officer on this stage except for one.

Mr. Xi’s extraordinary purges over three years have left a void at the top of the world’s second-most powerful military.

Pool photograph by Greg Baker

China’s military leadership stood before the nation in March 2023, an image of unity behind Xi Jinping. After nearly a decade in power, Mr. Xi had installed the high command that he wanted: loyalists hand-picked to make the People’s Liberation Army a world-class force.

But not even Mr. Xi’s loyalists have been spared from his sweeping campaign to clean up the military — with purges that are ostensibly focused on corruption but are also about fealty to him. One by one, members of the Central Military Commission have been dismissed and put under investigation. The latest was Gen. Zhang Youxia, Mr. Xi’s top general.

Mr. Xi has also removed dozens of other senior military officials in just under three years, a level of upheaval unmatched in modern Chinese history. Here is a picture of the likely extent of the purges across the military forces, based on a New York Times analysis of Chinese state media reports and official announcements.

China had at least 30 generals and admirals at the start of 2023 who ran specialized departments and theater commands.

Nearly all of them have been expelled or have disappeared during Xi Jinping’s sweeping purge.

In some cases, Mr. Xi appointed new generals as replacements.

But many of those have also vanished from public view.

Our review identified only seven generals who appear to remain in active roles.

The purges are a demonstration of Mr. Xi’s extraordinary power, but have also created a leadership vacuum across the military.

The fall of General Zhang and of another commander who was ousted with him, Gen. Liu Zhenli, has stripped the Central Military Commission of the leaders who prepare the forces for battle. While a slew of less senior officers are also involved in practical planning for major military actions, the abrupt loss of the top two “operational” commanders could for a while undercut Mr. Xi’s confidence in the readiness of the People’s Liberation Army.

The sole remaining general in the commission is Zhang Shengmin, who has overseen Mr. Xi’s military purges and now appears responsible for maintaining political discipline and loyalty. General Zhang spent much of his career as an antigraft and political discipline inspection officer in the Rocket Force, which controls China’s nuclear and conventional missile programs. Mr. Xi promoted him last year to a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission.

The dismissals have also reached deep into nearly all the other wings of the armed forces. That includes the Rocket Force as well as the navy.

The five theater commands — the regions that Mr. Xi created in 2016 to manage the armed forces — have also been eviscerated, including the Eastern Theater Command, which is responsible for operations around Taiwan. Late last year, Mr. Xi appointed a new commander for the Eastern Theater.

Much of the military command is vacant or new to the job

Note: This chart does not include every organization within the People’s Liberation Army. Positions are shown as vacant when generals have been officially removed or suspended and no successor or acting appointment has been announced.

Since General Zhang’s downfall, the official newspaper of the Chinese military has urged officers and soldiers to support the decision and rally around Mr. Xi. It also acknowledged that the dismissals and disruption were causing “short-term hardships and pain.”

Ultimately, the paper said, an even stronger Chinese military would emerge.

First, though, Mr. Xi must find another clutch of trustworthy generals he can trust as the 72-year-old leader sets his sights on a fourth term as China’s Communist Party secretary-general from 2027, which he will almost certainly get.

NY Times · Chris Buckley · February 3, 2026

3. North America’s top computer vision scientist Liang Jie returns to China

​Summary:

The article reports that Liang Jie, a leading computer vision and image compression expert, has returned to China after two decades in North America. Liang helped develop core technologies at Microsoft later embedded in Windows Media Video Player and Blu-ray standards, then built an academic career in Canada and founded AltumView, an AI firm focused on elderly care sensors. In January, he joined Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo as a chair professor. His move aligns with China’s talent recruitment push in AI, semiconductors, and applied research.

Comment: Brain drain from the US and the west? What does Liang Jie’s return suggest about China’s success in reversing long-term scientific brain drain in advanced AI and sensing technologies?

How should the United States and its allies assess the national security implications when dual-use research talent migrates back into China’s state-supported innovation system?

If China is systematically attracting globally trained scientists into new institutes like EIT, what competitive advantages does this create in future AI-enabled civilian and military applications?

North America’s top computer vision scientist Liang Jie returns to China

Brain behind leading Microsoft tech products used by millions across the globe and sensor systems for elderly care joins Chinese university

Shi Huang

Published: 10:00am, 2 Feb 2026Updated: 3:28pm, 2 Feb 2026

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3341662/north-americas-top-computer-vision-scientist-liang-jie-returns-china

Shi Huang

Published: 10:00am, 2 Feb 2026Updated: 3:28pm, 2 Feb 2026

Twenty years ago, technologies developed by Liang Jie at Microsoft were incorporated into products like the Windows Media Video Player and Blu-ray discs used by millions worldwide.

A decade on, while a professor in Canada, Liang ventured into entrepreneurship, developing an intelligent sensor system for elderly care to address global population ageing.

Today, he brings his top-tier expertise in image and video compression back to China.

According to the Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo (EIT), he joined the university in January as a chair professor at its School of Electronic Science and Technology.

Liang was admitted to the special programme for gifted students at Xian Jiaotong University in 1988, transferring to the electrical engineering programme in 1989.

He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there in 1992 and 1995. This unique programme, one of only two in China at the time, enrolled junior high graduates, allowed free choice of major and offered direct progression to master’s studies.

Liang then earned a master’s in electrical engineering from the National University of Singapore in 1998 and a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2003.

From 2003 to 2004, he worked in the Windows Media video compression team at the Microsoft headquarters. His research contributions were later adopted into industrial products and international standards, including the Windows Media Video Player and Blu-ray format.

China creates analogue AI chip said to be 1,000 times faster than Nvidia GPU

In 2004, he joined the faculty at the School of Engineering Science at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, rising to the rank of tenured professor in 2015. He also served as the school’s associate director (2015 to 2018) and graduate programme chair (2012 to 2015).

Liang’s research spans signal processing, multimedia communication, computer vision, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and smart healthcare.

He has served on the editorial boards of six international journals and on three Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) technical committees, publishing over 200 papers and holding more than 20 US patents.

In 2016, Liang founded the AI company AltumView, leading development of the Sentinare intelligent sensor system for ageing populations. He installed it in the home of his mother, who was then 80.

“I began to notice changes in her daily activity,” Liang said. “A few months later, her condition worsened, and she was diagnosed with dementia.”

“I then realised Sentinare could potentially help identify some symptoms earlier,” he told Canadian healthcare publication Hospital News in 2022.

The product was a Consumer Electronics Show 2021 Innovation Award nominee, integrated into Amazon’s Alexa Together, and is sold in the United States, Canada, China, Japan, Australia and Europe.

In June 2022, Liang was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE), among 47 honorees recognised for contributions to research, education and industrialisation. The CAE, established in 1987, is a leading engineering advisory body whose members are elected by peers.

EIT in Ningbo was launched last year with significant backing from a Chinese semiconductor entrepreneur. The university’s strategy focuses on “gathering talent”, actively recruiting researchers from postdoctoral to chair professor levels.

The South China Morning Post has reached out to Liang for comment.

Shi Huang

Shi is a science reporter based in Beijing, primarily covering life sciences, medicine, and frontier research. Previously, he worked for Sanlian Lifeweek and DXY.

4. ‘Kill chains’ are the future of war. Humans may not be

​Summary:

The article argues that AI is shrinking “kill chains” by fusing sensors, command systems, and weapons faster than humans can process. It says that AI-assisted drones, accelerated by the Russia-Ukraine war, are now indispensable and that militaries are moving from talk of autonomous weapons toward an “intelligent kill web” that compresses the OODA loop. It describes Western tests where AI modules detect and label targets, suggest actions, and assess strike results, and it cites reported U.S. Air Force trials in which machines were far faster and scored higher on “tactical viability” than officers. It warns that data overload, legacy IT, and automation bias could reduce “human in the loop” to a rubber stamp and raise error risks.

Comment: Accurate, far-fetched, or a sober warning? If kill chains contract to seconds, what concrete decision points must remain human-owned, and which can be delegated without turning oversight into a ritual?

‘Kill chains’ are the future of war. Humans may not be

thetimes.com · Oliver Moody, Berlin

Oliver Moody

, Berlin

Saturday January 31 2026, 4.35pm GMT, The Sunday Times

AI will soon be able to meld weapons systems faster than armies’ commanders can think

https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/kill-chains-future-warfare-human-ai-wwntgxbtr

Oliver Moody

, Berlin

Saturday January 31 2026, 4.35pm, The Sunday Times

By the end of January Grok, the artificial intelligence program developed by Elon Musk’s X platform, will be plunging its digital tentacles into some of the Pentagon’s most heavily classified computer systems and intelligence databases, harvesting “all appropriate data” to provide American war planners with fresh insights.

Opening a back door into the world’s most powerful military for Musk — whose Grok tool is being investigated by the European Union for generating sexual deepfake images — may sound eccentric at best and foolhardy at worst.

But it is only one of the conundrums of a profound but little-heralded revolution that is unfolding at the top of armed forces across the West and beyond.

After years of abstract and largely futile discussion about the prospect of autonomous weapons being used in war, the Russian onslaught in Ukraine has made AI-assisted drones an indispensable tool. And they are only the most visible part of something much broader.

Advances in AI, network technology and computing power have finally made it possible to start implementing an idea known in military theory as the “intelligent kill web”. This is where the commander notionally sits like a spider at the centre of a vast array of sensors and weapons that speak to each other faster than the speed of thought. In January the French army, which has traditionally used homegrown military AI, upgraded its command software to SitaWare, which provides a real-time picture of battlefields using AI analytics.

Today’s battlefields are crawling with tens of thousands of electronic devices that feed an overwhelming volume of data back to headquarters. The ability to combine, analyse and act on this torrent of information faster and more effectively than the enemy is decisive.

“You need to be able to collect information, to process information, to write and disseminate your order faster than your opponent,” said Yvan Gouriou, a newly retired French army general who is now a strategy adviser to the defence software firm Systematic Defence, headquartered in Denmark.

The increasingly sophisticated use of AI for these purposes raises the prospect of wars in the near future that unfold at unprecedented speed, with “kill chains” — the process of finding a target, assessing it, hitting it and examining the results — contracting to a matter of seconds.

This is the dawn of the age of algorithmic warfare, according to a dozen current and former western military officers, defence industry sources and analysts who have spoken to The Sunday Times over the past few weeks.

An augmented reality table map is used to scan enemy bases

GETTY IMAGES

The introduction of AI to defence is in a league “akin to the introduction of electricity”, said one figure at a European arms manufacturer. However, it also raises questions about how much control human commanders will one day exercise over a battlefield bristling with AI-driven autonomy.

The technology is moving beyond merely sifting through the data. It is starting to sit on commanders’ shoulders as a digital intelligence analyst and tactical adviser. It identifies and suggests targets. It provides minute assessments of the battlefield terrain based on the weather. It can even assess plans of action against the other side’s movements in real time. “You can ask it to check if your plan for the enemy is corroborated by the intel that is coming back to you,” said Gouriou.

Until now, the US has led the field. Its armed forces routinely describe data as the “new ammo” and give some military units a great deal of latitude to tinker around with new uses for AI.

To the untutored eye, recent exercises on the scrubby plains of Colorado by the US army’s 4th Infantry Division would have looked pretty much like any other land warfare drills in the past few years. Drones circled, artillery roared and an assortment of old Soviet T-72 tanks were reduced to superannuated scrap metal.

But the revolutionary element of the wargames, given the name “Ivy Sting”, was incorporeal: a lattice of interlaced AI modules that detected the enemy, identified and labelled potential targets for the gunners and even compared before-and-after pictures to determine whether the strikes had been successful.

The 4th Infantry Division during Ivy Sting

This was the first test of the $100 million prototype for the army’s next-generation command and control (NGC2) system, assembled by Anduril and incorporating software from the aristocracy of American defence tech, including Microsoft and Palantir.

The wreckage of a Shahed drone, fired by Russia at Kharkiv last year

SUNDAY TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL

The US air force has gone further still with its “Dash” experiments, which challenge various AI chatbot-style tools to plan an aerial attack better than seasoned human officers.

As recently as last summer, the results were still modest. The chatbots were significantly faster but tended to produce subtle errors such as choosing the wrong sensors for the weather conditions.

In early January, however, the air force presented new data showing that the best machines were not only well over a hundred times quicker than the officers but also performed drastically better, achieving a 97 per cent “viability and tactical viability” rate compared with the humans’ 48 per cent.

Military and arms industry figures insist there will always be a “human in the loop” who still calls the shots. Under the intense time pressure and overwhelming volumes of incoming data, though, the potential for mistakes is significant.

“The problem with this is we know the ‘human in the loop’ doesn’t work in a high-speed environment, because you just can’t keep up,” said Thomas “TX” Hammes, who served in the US Marine Corps for 30 years and researches the future of war at the National Defence University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies in Washington.

This is a patch of military terra incognita where even the war in Ukraine — a frontier for new military technology — provides little guidance. Since the middle of 2022, the Ukrainian army has been using a situational awareness system called Delta, which fuses information from a huge variety of sources ranging from American spy satellites to first-person-view drones.

But Kyiv’s military has yet to start using the full potential of the technology, and any potential future Nato-Russia war would probably unfold at a much more dizzying pace, according to one military adviser who has spent a long time in Ukraine.

In the jargon of the armed forces, the new technology is all about drastically shortening the “Ooda” (observe, orient, decide, act) loop — the precious window of time from spotting a development to doing something about it.

The transformation has been in the making for the best part of a decade. In 2017 the first Trump administration started a programme known as Project Maven, where Silicon Valley tech companies were invited to bring machine-learning techniques to bear on warfare.

The objective was to create a “single pane of glass”, a system that could use AI to process input from tens or hundreds of thousands of sensors so effectively that it would condense the results into a useable form on one screen.

Machine-learning techniques are already beginning to transform warfare

GETTY IMAGES

The project has been supercharged with gigantic amounts of battlefield data from Ukraine. At the same time, smaller units routinely carry “edge” devices — tablets or other computers that constantly exchange information with the mothership in headquarters.

One recently retired US military commander likened the results to playing a computer game. On one naval air defence mission, he said, he was able to track the ammunition stocks on warships halfway around the world in real time.

Now, though, militaries are starting to bolt other kinds of AI on to the basic command and control (C2) and intelligence-management systems.

One example is drones. In September, Systematic, the Danish software firm, signed a deal to wire intelligent drone swarms made by the German-British AI company Helsing into its SitaWare C2 system. This software is used across the higher command levels of the British Army and many of its European allies, and is soon to be adopted by the French army. The Helsing link would, in effect, pave the way for flocks of autonomous drones to be controlled by a commander alongside all the other conventional assets at their disposal.

A drone pilot operating a Helsing system

ALAMY

One of the most striking areas of experimentation, however, is in prediction. The value of being able to forecast your logistical needs (what supplies may be needed and where) — or, indeed, the enemy’s — can hardly be overstated.

Systematic and other European companies are also looking at using AI to try to anticipate the other side’s movements. “Based on some of the information you might have about your enemy, such as … his normal ways of working, you can look at what else you’re likely to find and where it would be relative to your sensors or equipment,” said Andrew Graham, a senior vice-president at Systematic.

Against the backdrop of Trump’s second term and the recent crisis over Greenland, European countries are moving to build their own capabilities and move away from reliance on Palantir Technologies, a US firm which has a vast share of the market. Some European sources expressed reservations about how much control Palantir is really willing to cede over its systems, and deep misgivings about the ideology and ambitions of the figures behind the company, including the billionaire Peter Thiel, who is connected with the Trump administration.

Insiders say the UK has also quietly been catching up through an AI-assisted warfare programme known as Project Asgard, which has been tested by British troops on the Nato eastern flank in Estonia. It is an integral part of the army’s ambition to increase its “lethality” — crudely, the damage it can inflict on the enemy for each unit or asset deployed — by 900 per cent over the next decade.

There are some important caveats to the hype. One is that while these processes might sound seamless in theory, structuring such prodigious and diverse data is often challenging in practice.

A senior figure at Palantir said predicting logistics involved so many variables that it tested the limits of the firm’s software.

Graham said Systematic faced similar problems: “This is a constant challenge because the amount of information is growing, not shrinking, and it will continue to grow with the number of sensors and automated systems.”

Another difficulty is that no matter how good the software is, it often runs up against military computer systems created 30 or 40 years ago that make data hard to digest.

One source in the German military complained that some information had to be transferred between databases by hand.

Kateryna Bondar, an expert on defence AI at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, said this was also the biggest hurdle for the US. “A lot of this stuff is obsolete, from the beginning of the Nineties,” she said. “The biggest challenge is not to analyse this data or develop a model and use AI. It is to actually make the systems talk to each other.”

A deeper and potentially more troubling problem is the risk that AI could end up exercising ever more influence over military decisions. Some security figures are asking what keeping a “human in the loop” will actually mean once vast parts of the analysis are automated. Commanders facing snap decisions under intense time pressure will be flooded with information.

Some sources are unperturbed, arguing that high-ranking officers have always had to do this. But others have been rattled by the recent Israeli campaign in Gaza, where a series of deadly strikes on civilians have been blamed on the military’s use of AI systems called Gospel and Lavender to generate lists of potential targets.

There is a danger that the “human in the loop” may ultimately amount to little more than a rubber stamp on a plan conceived and planned almost entirely by AI.

thetimes.com · Oliver Moody, Berlin

5. An internal document shows the Vietnamese military preparing for a possible American war

​Summary:

An AP report says an internal Vietnamese Defense Ministry document from August 2024, titled “The 2nd U.S. Invasion Plan,” depicts the Vietnam military preparing for a possible U.S. “war of aggression” and calling the United States a “belligerent” power, despite upgraded ties in 2023. Cited by The 88 Project and author Ben Swanton, the documents stress fear of a “color revolution” and accuse Washington of using democracy and human rights to alter Vietnam’s socialist system. Analysts quoted say regime security, not China, is the core anxiety, while Hanoi balances trade realities and strategic hedging under To Lam.

Comment: It would seem the new NSS should relieve the Vietnamese leadership since the administration no longer prioritizes democracy or human rights. It would be interesting to read their updated assessment of the new US administration. 

If Vietnam’s military treats the U.S. as an existential regime threat while Hanoi publicly elevates partnership and trade, what is the most likely trigger that turns internal distrust into an overt policy break, and how would that reshape alignment in the Asia-Indo-Pacific?

Then again good militaries plan for a range of threats but that does not mean the political leadership wants to act on those plans. Good militaries anticipate threats to provide options to their political leaders.

An internal document shows the Vietnamese military preparing for a possible American war

AP · DAVID RISING · February 3, 2026

By  DAVID RISING and ANIRUDDHA GHOSAL

Updated 11:28 PM EST, February 2, 2026

https://apnews.com/article/vietnam-us-war-planning-china-115c4f9bc69d91e7afe6b4dba7dc460f

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — A year after Vietnam elevated its relations with Washington to the highest diplomatic level, an internal document shows its military was taking steps to prepare for a possible American “war of aggression” and considered the United States a “belligerent” power, according to a report released Tuesday.

More than just exposing Hanoi’s duality in approach toward the U.S., the document confirms a deep-seated fear of external forces fomenting an uprising against the Communist leadership in a so-called “color revolution,” like the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, or the 1986 Yellow Revolution in the Philippines.

Other internal documents that The 88 Project, a human rights organization focused on human rights abuses in Vietnam, cited in its analysis point to similar concerns over U.S. motives in Vietnam.

“There’s a consensus here across the government and across different ministries,” said Ben Swanton, co-director of The 88 Project and the report’s author. “This isn’t just some kind of a fringe element or paranoid element within the party or within the government.”

‘The 2nd U.S. Invasion Plan’

The original Vietnamese document titled “The 2nd U.S. Invasion Plan” was completed by the Ministry of Defense in August 2024. It suggests that in seeking “its objective of strengthening deterrence against China, the U.S. and its allies are ready to apply unconventional forms of warfare and military intervention and even conduct large-scale invasions against countries and territories that ‘deviate from its orbit.’”

While noting that “currently there is little risk of a war against Vietnam,” the Vietnamese planners write that “due to the U.S.'s belligerent nature we need to be vigilant to prevent the U.S. and its allies from ‘creating a pretext’ to launch an invasion of our country.”

The Vietnamese military analysts outline what they see as a progression over three American administrations — from Barack Obama, through Donald Trump’s first term, and into Joe Biden’s presidency — with Washington increasingly pursuing military and other relationships with Asian nations to “form a front against China.”

Vietnam balances diplomatic outreach with internal fears

In his term, Biden in 2023 signed a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” with Vietnam, elevating relations between the nations to their highest diplomatic level on par with Russia and China as “trusted partners with a friendship grounded in mutual respect.”

In the 2024 military document, however, Vietnamese planners said that while the U.S. views Vietnam as “a partner and an important link,” it also wants to “spread and impose its values regarding freedom, democracy, human rights, ethnicity and religion” to gradually change the country’s socialist government.

“The 2nd U.S. Invasion Plan provides one of the most clear-eyed insights yet into Vietnam’s foreign policy,” Swanton wrote in his analysis. “It shows that far from viewing the U.S. as a strategic partner, Hanoi sees Washington as an existential threat and has no intention of joining its anti-China alliance. ”

Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry did not answer emails seeking comment on The 88 Project report or the document it highlighted.

The U.S. State Department refused to comment directly on the “2nd U.S. Invasion Plan,” but stressed the new partnership agreement, saying it “promotes prosperity and security for the United States and Vietnam.”

“A strong, prosperous, independent and resilient Vietnam benefits our two countries and helps ensure that the Indo-Pacific remains stable, secure, free and open,” the State Department said.

Documents offer a window into internal thinking

Nguyen Khac Giang, of Singapore’s ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute research center, said the plans highlighted tensions within Vietnam’s political leadership, where the Communist Party’s conservative, military-aligned faction has long been preoccupied with external threats to the regime.

“The military has never been too comfortable moving ahead with the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with the United States,” Giang said.

Tensions within the government spilled into the public realm in June 2024, when U.S.-linked Fulbright University was accused of fomenting a “color revolution” by an army TV report. The Foreign Ministry defended the university, which U.S. and Vietnamese officials had highlighted when the two countries upgraded ties.

Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington, said the Vietnamese military still has “a very long memory” of the war with the U.S. that ended in 1975. While Western diplomats have tended to see Hanoi as most concerned by possible Chinese aggression, the document reinforces other policy papers suggesting leaders’ biggest fear is that of a “color revolution,” he said.

Further undermining trust between the U.S. and Vietnam were cuts made to the U.S. Agency for International Development by President Donald Trump’s administration, which disrupted projects such as efforts to clean up tons of soil contaminated with deadly dioxin from the military’s Agent Orange defoliant and unexploded American munitions and land mines.

“This pervasive insecurity about color revolutions is very frustrating, because I don’t see why the Communist Party is so insecure,” said Abuza, whose book “The Vietnam People’s Army: From People’s Warfare to Military Modernization?” was published last year.

“They have so much to be proud of — they have lifted so many people out of poverty, the economy is humming along, they are the darling of foreign investors.”

While China and Vietnam have been at odds over territorial claims in the South China Sea, the documents portray China more as a regional rival than a threat like the U.S.

“China doesn’t pose an existential threat to the Communist Party (of Vietnam),” Abuza said. “Indeed, the Chinese know they can only push the Vietnamese so far, because they’re fearful that the Communist Party can’t respond forcefully to China (and will) look weak and it will cause a mass uprising.”

China is Vietnam’s largest two-way trade partner, while the U.S. is its largest export market, meaning Hanoi needs to perform a balancing act in keeping up diplomatic and economic ties, while also hedging its bets.

“Even some of the more progressive leaders look at the United States, saying, ‘Yes, they like us, they’re working with us, they are good partners for now, but given the opportunity if there were a color revolution, the Americans would support it,’” Abuza said.

Trump’s second administration softens some concerns, but raises more

Under Vietnamese leader To Lam, who became Communist Party general secretary at around the same time the document was written, the country has moved to strengthen ties with the U.S., especially under Trump, Giang said.

Lam was reappointed general secretary last month and is expected to also assume the presidency, which would make him the country’s most powerful figure in decades.

With Lam at the helm, Trump’s family business has broken ground on a $1.5 billion Trump-branded golf resort and luxury real estate project in northern Hung Yen province. The Vietnamese leader almost immediately accepted Trump’s invitation to join the Board of Peace, which Giang said was an unusually swift decision given that foreign policy moves are typically calibrated with close attention to Beijing’s possible reaction.

But Trump’s military operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro have given Vietnamese conservatives fresh justification for their unease about closer ties with Washington. Any U.S. military action involving Hanoi’s ally Cuba could upset Vietnam’s strategic balance, Giang added.

“Cuba is very sensitive,” he said. “If something happens in Cuba, it will send shock waves through Vietnam’s political elites. Many of them have very strong, intimate ties with Cuba.”

Overall, the first year of Trump’s second term is likely to have left the Vietnamese happy about the focus on the Western Hemisphere but wondering about other developments, Abuza said.

“The Vietnamese are going to be confused by the Trump administration, which has downplayed human rights and democracy promotion, but at the same time been willing to violate the sovereignty of states and remove leaders they don’t like,” he said.

_____

Rising reported from Bangkok.

AP · DAVID RISING · February 3, 2026

6. Rubio And The Future Of American Diplomacy – OpEd

​Summary:

The op-ed argues that Marco Rubio has restored strategic seriousness to American diplomacy after years of drift and uncertainty. The author contends Rubio rejects popularity-driven foreign policy and instead emphasizes power, deterrence, alliances, and moral clarity. He is portrayed as realistic about threats from China, Russia, and Iran, direct in naming authoritarian behavior, and focused on prevention rather than reckless escalation. Rubio is compared favorably to George Shultz, James Baker, and Henry Kissinger for treating diplomacy as a disciplined craft. Critics caution that his firm moral language and reliance on pressure may reduce flexibility and complicate engagement with imperfect partners.

Comment: A relatively favorable assessment for the most part. If Rubio’s clarity and pressure restore deterrence but narrow diplomatic space, how should the United States decide when firmness strengthens stability and when restraint better serves long-term American interests?

Rubio And The Future Of American Diplomacy – OpEd

 February 3, 2026  0 Comments

By Arab News

By Dalia Al-Aqidi

https://www.eurasiareview.com/03022026-rubio-and-the-future-of-american-diplomacy-oped/?utm

For much of the past decade, American foreign policy has felt confused, cautious and often reactive. Allies were unsure where the US stood. Adversaries tested limits. Too often, decisions seemed driven by short-term political pressures rather than a clear long-term strategy, creating a vacuum in global leadership. In that space, rivals like China, Russia and Iran moved more aggressively to expand their influence, while partners in Europe and the Middle East began questioning whether Washington was still willing and able to lead.

In this context, a strong argument can be made that Marco Rubio is emerging as one of the most effective secretaries of state in modern American history. Not because of dramatic gestures or media attention but because he has brought back something essential to US diplomacy: strategic seriousness.

Rubio understands a basic truth that many policymakers lost sight of: foreign policy is not about being liked. It is about power, security and responsibility. The purpose of American diplomacy is not to seek applause but to defend national interests, stand with allies and stop threats before they turn into conflicts.

The world Rubio faces is more dangerous than at any time since the end of the Cold War. China is expanding its economic and military reach across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Russia continues to challenge the global order through aggression and coercion. Iran fuels instability across the Middle East through proxy militias and ideological warfare. At the same time, international institutions are weaker, global trust is lower and conflicts spread faster than before.

The Florida politician, who has spent more than half his life in public service, does not rely on wishful thinking to confront global challenges. His approach is grounded in realism: that power cannot be ignored, threats must be faced directly and lasting peace is built through strength and clear-eyed judgment, not comforting illusions.

One of Rubio’s most notable qualities is clarity. He speaks about authoritarian regimes without hiding behind vague diplomatic language. He calls out Beijing’s strategic ambitions, not as competition but as a long-term challenge to democratic systems. He treats Tehran not as a misunderstood actor but as a revolutionary regime that uses violence, ideology and intimidation to expand its influence. He recognizes that Moscow is not simply reacting to Western policy but actively seeking to weaken the rules-based international order. This clarity is not about confrontation for its own sake. It is about honesty. Rubio understands that diplomacy built on false assumptions leads to failed policies. You cannot negotiate effectively if you refuse to admit what you are negotiating against.

At the same time, the American official has shown that strength does not mean recklessness. He does not seek endless wars or military escalation. Instead, he focuses on prevention: making clear that aggression will be costly, while keeping diplomatic channels open for serious negotiation. This balance, firmness without chaos, is one of the most difficult skills in foreign policy and one of the most valuable.

Rubio also restores moral clarity to American diplomacy. For years, the US hesitated to speak firmly about its values. Human rights were applied unevenly and democracy often sounded more like a talking point than a real commitment. Rubio brings the focus back to a simple belief: that freedom, the rule of law and human dignity are not special privileges for the West but fundamental rights people everywhere want and deserve. This matters deeply for international audiences. When the US speaks with moral uncertainty, authoritarian regimes fill the vacuum with their own narratives. When America is clear about what it stands for, it gives courage to reformers, dissidents, journalists and civil society actors across the world.

Rubio’s support for democratic allies is not symbolic. He understands that alliances are not acts of charity; they are strategic assets. He treats partners in Europe, Asia and the Middle East as force multipliers that strengthen global stability. Whether in supporting NATO, strengthening ties with Indo-Pacific democracies or reinforcing partnerships in the Middle East, he has made it clear that the US does not lead alone, but it must still lead.

To understand Rubio’s place in history, it helps to compare him with some of the most respected Republican secretaries of state.

George Shultz, who served under Ronald Reagan, believed that effective diplomacy must be built on strength. In the Cold War, he pushed back firmly against the Soviet Union while still maintaining open lines of communication. His calm and consistent leadership helped shift the world from constant tension toward meaningful arms control and stability.

James Baker, under President George H.W. Bush, managed the end of the Cold War with rare skill. He built international coalitions, maintained alliances and navigated the collapse of the Soviet system without triumphalism or chaos. His diplomacy was pragmatic, disciplined and effective.

Henry Kissinger, though controversial, changed global diplomacy by accepting how power really works. He believed that ideals mean little without a clear strategy and that American interests must stay at the center of foreign policy choices.

What Rubio shares with these figures is not their personality or era but their seriousness. Like them, he treats foreign policy as a discipline, not a performance.

However, Rubio’s main weakness, according to critics, is that his strong moral view of global politics can limit the flexibility of diplomacy. In many parts of the world, especially in the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia, Washington must often work with imperfect partners to prevent larger crises. Rubio’s preference for firm language, sanctions and public pressure, while powerful tools, can at times narrow diplomatic options and harden positions. Critics argue that an overreliance on pressure risks pushing hostile regimes closer to rivals like China and Russia and closing channels that could be useful for de-escalation.

In simple terms, Rubio is excellent at drawing clear lines but real diplomacy often takes place in the gray areas, where patience, compromise and discreet engagement are also necessary.

The international community does not need a perfect America but it does need a clear and steady one. When US policy is uncertain, global instability grows. When it is grounded, consistent and guided by principles, nations can plan ahead, work together and manage conflicts with greater confidence.

In a world marked by rising authoritarianism, weak institutions and growing insecurity, these are not luxuries. They are necessities.

• Dalia Al-Aqidi is executive director at the American Center for Counter Extremism.

Arab News

Arab News is Saudi Arabia's first English-language newspaper. It was founded in 1975 by Hisham and Mohammed Ali Hafiz. Today, it is one of 29 publications produced by Saudi Research & Publishing Company (SRPC), a subsidiary of Saudi Research & Marketing Group (SRMG).

7. Trump Administration to Create $12 Billion Rare-Earth Stockpile to Counter China

Summary:

The article reports the Trump administration plans a roughly $12 billion critical-minerals stockpile, “Project Vault,” to reduce U.S. reliance on China and cushion manufacturers against future shortages. Officials said it would combine about $1.67 billion in private capital with a $10 billion, 15-year loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank to acquire minerals from automakers, manufacturers, and tech firms. The move follows Chinese licensing requirements on rare-earth magnets that can constrain supply for defense and automotive sectors. The stockpile is framed as analogous to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and may include rare earths plus minerals such as gallium and cobalt. Participating firms include GM, Stellantis, and Google.

Comment: Seems like a wise move. We cannot allow China to continue to dominate. But I will defer to the economists and other experts. If Project Vault is meant to offset China’s processing leverage, what measurable threshold of supply disruption or coercive signaling should trigger releases, and who should control that decision so it supports both industrial resilience and national security?

Trump Administration to Create $12 Billion Rare-Earth Stockpile to Counter China

WSJ · DELOITTE

President’s move comes after Beijing used its dominance over the minerals supply chain to squeeze U.S. industries

By

Ken Thomas

and

Gavin Bade

Updated Feb. 2, 2026 6:08 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-administration-to-create-12-billion-rare-earth-stockpile-to-counter-china-1189228e

President Trump met with company officials on the plan. andrew caballero-reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is developing a roughly $12 billion stockpile of critical minerals aimed at helping U.S. manufacturers navigate future supply shortages and overcome future reliance on China for rare earths and metals.

President Trump, members of his cabinet and senior White House officials said the expected stockpile—called Project Vault—will be the fruition of roughly $1.67 billion in private capital along with a $10 billion loan from the U.S. Export-Import Bank to assemble the minerals from automakers, manufacturers and tech companies.

“Over the past year, my administration has taken extraordinary steps to make sure the United States has all of the critical minerals and rare earths that we need,” Trump said in the Oval Office after a meeting with members of Congress and industry leaders.

The announcement of the project comes after the Chinese government has used its dominance over the supply chain for critical-minerals processing to squeeze key U.S. industries. Last year, Beijing imposed licensing requirements for U.S. companies to purchase rare-earth magnets made with critical minerals, allowing it to limit the supply of the critical components for the defense and automotive sectors. China currently controls about 90% of the processing capability for rare-earth minerals, according to the International Energy Agency.

“Just like ‘drill, baby, drill,’ you said, ‘mine, baby, mine,’ ” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who joined the president for the announcement.

President Trump rated his highly anticipated sit down with Chinese leader Xi Jinping a 12 out of 10. WSJ’s Alexander Ward explains why. Photo: Yonhap/EPA/Shutterstock

As part of the effort, Trump met Monday with General Motors Chief Executive Mary Barra, and Robert Friedland, the founder and executive co-chairman of Ivanhoe Mines. Barra said that “having a resilient supply chain is critical for our nation, and it’s critical for all industry, especially the auto industry.”

Friedland said the effort would “do something for not only our national security but for the re-industrialization of the country.”

The venture was earlier reported by Bloomberg.

The critical-minerals stockpile would be comparable to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a large stockpile of crude oil first established during the 1970s energy crisis to help guard against supply disruptions. The so-called Project Vault is expected to include rare earths and critical minerals, including gallium and cobalt.

More than a dozen companies have agreed to participate in the project, the White House official said, including GM, Stellantis and Alphabet’s Google. A GM official declined to comment.

Ex-Im is an independent executive-branch agency that helps facilitate the export of U.S. goods and services through loans. Ex-Im’s board voted Monday to authorize the 15-year loan to establish the project, providing long-term financing to the partnership between the manufacturers and private-sector capital providers, the board said.

Write to Ken Thomas at ken.thomas@wsj.com and Gavin Bade at gavin.bade@wsj.com

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

Appeared in the February 3, 2026, print edition as 'U.S. Will Stockpile Critical Minerals'.

WSJ · DELOITTE

8. Taiwan’s Rare Earths Security Challenge

​Summary:

Taiwan’s high-tech economy is exposed by near-total dependence on imported rare earths and critical metals. Taiwan imports about 3,000 tonnes of rare earth elements annually, produces none, and more than 95 percent reportedly comes from China, with limited local refining capacity. Export controls on gallium, germanium, and processing technologies highlight the risk to semiconductors, green energy, and defense systems. ANZCham’s Taiwan White Paper says Taiwan lacks a coordinated government-industry framework for critical minerals, with past efforts fragmented. A proposed response is two-pronged: near-term cooperation with the U.S. and Japan and outreach to Australia and Canada, and a long-term “urban mining” strategy leveraging high e-waste collection, ITRI recycling R&D, and private recyclers like Solar Applied Materials.

Taiwan’s Rare Earths Security Challenge

asiasentinel.com · Feb 02, 2026∙ Paid

Sourcing ultimately depends on Chinese-refined feedstock

By: Jens Kastner

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/taiwan-rare-earths-security-challenge?publication_id=23934&utm

Recycling from scrap. Taipei Times photo

While Taiwan dominates global high-tech manufacturing, it faces a serious upstream vulnerability: a near-total reliance on imported Critical Metals and Rare Earth Elements (REEs). Taiwan imports approximately 3,000 tonnes of rare earth elements annually but produces none domestically. Only a handful of local companies participate in any refining or processing of these materials. The strategic risk is precariously concentrated, as more than 95 percent of these imports originate from China. Recent export controls on gallium, germanium, and rare earth processing technologies that have made headlines amid warnings that millions of jobs depend on the sector have underscored the urgency of this vulnerability.

The backbone of Taiwan’s economy is anchored by high-tech industries, specifically information and communications technology, which account for nearly 70 percent of the island’s exports. Critical metals like gallium and indium are vital for chip fabrication and optoelectronics, while REEs are essential for the manufacturing equipment itself.

“A disruption in supply would not merely affect a single sector; it could paralyze the ecosystem that positions Taiwan as a key node in the global economy,” said Kei Hasegawa, Partner and Office Manager for Hong Kong & Taiwan at YCP Group. “Without a stable supply, Taiwan’s green energy infrastructure build-out faces severe bottlenecks, and as geopolitical tensions rise, the ability to maintain defense readiness depends on the uninterrupted flow of these critical inputs.”

Hasegawa went on to explain that powering Taiwan’s 2050 net-zero commitment relies heavily on electrification and renewable energy, both of which are REE-intensive. According to YCP, an average offshore wind turbine requires roughly 600 kg of rare earth materials for its generator. High-efficiency EV motors, for their part, require neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) magnets, which each EV containing an estimated 2–5 kg of these magnets. Similarly, REEs are strategic commodities for national defense, being integral to guidance systems in missiles, jet engines, radar absorption (stealth) capabilities, and night-vision systems.

In early December, the Australia New Zealand Chamber of Commerce (ANZCham) released its Taiwan White Paper delving deeper into Taiwan’s rare earths and critical metals dilemma, labelling the economic and strategic stakes for Taiwan “enormous.” China’s 2023 export controls on gallium, for instance, triggered a 27 percent surge in global prices for the critical material for advanced chips, the White Paper noted.

ANZCham asserted that in the face of these risks, Taiwan lacks a coordinated framework to secure and diversify critical mineral supplies, standing in contrast to other strategic sectors. In semiconductors and energy, government and industry have collaborated on risk mitigation and supply security – for instance, through national science parks and semiconductor task forces that marshal resources for chipmaking, or through energy stockpiles and diversified fuel procurement.

ANZCham writes: “No comparable government–industry mechanism exists for critical minerals. Efforts to date have been ad hoc: in 2018, private and academic stakeholders formed the Taiwan Rare Earths and Rare Resources Industry Alliance to promote a domestic REE supply chain, and agencies like the EPA and MOEA have backed small-scale recycling research. Yet these initiatives remain fragmented and limited in scale.”

But Hasegawa of YCP said Taiwan is actually doing something: it is engineering a two-pronged strategy to survive the REE crisis. Under what Hasegawa calls “the Short Game,” Taiwan is joining frameworks with the US and Japan to coordinate sourcing and share technological expertise, while intensifying dialogues with resource-rich nations like Australia and Canada to diversify raw material imports.

And there is “the Long Game” to ultimately transform Taiwan into an “urban mining” hub, leveraging its high e-waste collection rates to create a closed-loop supply chain. Taiwan has a very efficient e-waste collection system with a collection rate of around 80 percent against a global average of only 22.3 percent documented as properly collected and recycled. Citizens receive a small financial compensation for disposing of old devices at numerous collection points, which provides a strong incentive. This collected scrap is shredded and processed using various mechanical and chemical methods to recover valuable metals such as copper, gold and silver.

“By viewing waste as ‘misplaced resources,’ Taiwan aims to refine recycled materials to industrial-grade purity, reducing reliance on virgin mining,” said Hasegawa. “Policies are shifting from mere waste management to the development of advanced domestic refining capabilities, ensuring that critical materials remain within the Taiwanese economy.”

Hasegawa singled out the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) as the main player serving as the R&D engine. ITRI has successfully developed processes to refine rare earths from waste to 99.9 percent purity (3N) and has produced magnet alloys entirely from recycled content. For an example of a leading private sector player, Hasegaw a singled out Solar Applied Materials, which sources ~80 percent of its raw materials through recycling, leveraging Taiwan’s circular-economy capabilities, and operates end-to-end collection, refining, and ultra-high-purity (99.99 percent) material production in Taiwan to serve semiconductor, display and other high-tech customers.

And there are the universities and research institutes that collaborate on separation technologies and material analysis. Civil society groups such as the Circular Taiwan Network facilitate cross-sector dialogue to ensure these technical solutions align with broader sustainability goals.

“Successfully scaling recycling to meet 33 percent of demand will insulate Taiwan from price shocks and geopolitical coercion, and Taiwan has the potential to become a regional hub for critical material recycling, exporting not just high-tech goods but also the ‘green’ materials and processing IP required to make them,” Hasegawa said. “However, success is not guaranteed, with key challenges including competing with cheaper Chinese-mined rare earths, technical complexity in recovering diffuse materials, and environmental constraints regarding waste treatment in a densely populated island.”

asiasentinel.com · Feb 02, 2026∙ Paid

9. China eyes reshaping global order as US influence wanes

​Summary:

 China is seeking to reshape parts of the global order as U.S. influence recedes through withdrawal from multilateral institutions. Beijing is amplifying calls for a “multipolar world” while remaining active in global bodies the United States has left, gaining visibility and support, especially from the Global South. Analysts say China’s strategy relies on economic resilience, exports beyond U.S. markets, and selective diplomacy through tools like the Belt and Road Initiative, now scaled back to manage risk. Coordination with Russia and north Korea strengthens voting alignment in forums like the UN, though these ties remain transactional. Ultimately, China’s core objective is regime survival and reducing U.S. influence, particularly in Asia-Indo-Pacific, not wholesale global replacement.

Excerpts:

Pushing US out of Asia

Analysts say this selective engagement underscores Beijing's broader aim — not to dominate the global system, but to reduce US influence in regions China views as strategically vital, notably the Asia-Pacific.

In recent months, China has intensified military activity around Taiwan and in the South China Sea, where tensions have flared with the Philippines over territorial claims from both sides.

"Beijing would be extremely pleased if they could just do whatever they want in Asia," said Mokry, adding that the US engagement in the region remains so "fundamental" that "it's not that easy to change."

Comment:  If China is not trying to replace the global order but to hollow out U.S. influence selectively, where should Washington concentrate its remaining multilateral leadership to deny Beijing strategic space?

If regime survival, not global dominance, drives Beijing’s actions, how might this shape China’s risk tolerance around Taiwan and U.S. presence in Asia-Indo-Pacific?

​I stand by my long standing assessment: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions through subversion. It takes a long term approach, employing unrestricted warfare and its three warfares to set conditions and achieve objectives, with the main objective being the unification of China (i.e., the recovery of Taiwan).

China eyes reshaping global order as US influence wanes

DW · Yuchen Li

Yuchen Li in Taipei

22 hours ago22 hours ago

As the Trump administration pulls the US back from international institutions, China is stepping up its diplomatic outreach while pursuing leadership roles in selected areas.

https://www.dw.com/en/china-eyes-reshaping-global-order-as-us-influence-wanes/a-75770594

In January, the same month the United States announced its withdrawal from 66 multilateral organizations, China hosted leaders from Canada, Finland and Britain.

"The international order is under great strain," Chinese leader Xi Jinping told British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, calling for efforts to "build an equal and orderly multipolar world," as the two met in Beijing on January 29.

The message is not new in China's diplomatic rhetoric, but it has grown more pronounced amid US disengagement from multilateral institutions.

The US is notably abandoning many initiatives focusing on climate change, labor and migration — areas President Donald Trump has characterized as "woke" initiatives "contrary to the interests" of the country.

At the same time, China remains a member of most of these multilateral organizations and gaining broader global recognition.

A recent international survey found that respondents across 21 countries, including 10 from the European Union, expect China's global influence to grow over the next decade, according to the European Council on Foreign Relations.

"The power gap [between China and the US] was much clearer in the past… but now it's getting closer and closer," said Claus Soong, an analyst at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS).

"The US is still the most powerful nation in the world, but China is catching up very quickly," he told DW.

China preparing to announce next 5-year-plan

China's efforts to gather support from Global South

The Global South, which encompasses developing and emerging economies around the world, has long played a central role in China's global strategy.

One of the most visible efforts is China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in 2013 as a vast infrastructure investment program to expand the country's influence across Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America.

"A leader needs followers to support or to justify its leadership," Soong said, adding that support from Global South is "the breaking point" for China in the face of Western containment.

Earlier this year, China released a series of data pointing to economic resilience despite growing pressure from the United States under the second Trump administration.

The figures include 5% economic growth in 2025 and a record trade surplus in the same year. The positive numbers were reportedly driven in large part by exports to non-US markets, particularly across Southeast Asia.

But Beijing's strategy also comes with risks and limitations.

In recent years, China has scaled back the BRI from large, capital-intensive infrastructure projects to smaller, more targeted investments as financial risks rise and partner countries worry about taking on too much debt.

"Economy is a key question. How sustained was China's economy? What else is China ready to give in to other countries?" Soong said.

Could China take over as the world's climate leader?

Authoritarian coordination on the global stage

China's close ties with Russia and North Korea have also raised concerns about the impact of deepening authoritarian partnerships on the world stage.

Xi met with Russian and North Korean leaders during a military parade in Beijing last year, underscoring Beijing's political and security alignment with the two neighboring nations.

Sabine Mokry, a researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, said each of China's authoritarian partners serves a different purpose.

"The Chinese government is trying to assess what it can get from each regime," she said.

One tangible outcome of such coordination can be seen during the United Nations General Assembly, as there has been an increase of China and its allies voting in alignment, particularly on the topics of human rights and Ukraine-related resolutions.

Still, Mokry noted that the partnership remains largely transactional, driven more by shared opposition to the US rather than by a value-based alignment.

"If there's an opportunity to portray the fact that they work together, they will obviously take it. But on real substance, there is still deep-seated mistrust," she told DW.

How China is reining In its tech titans

China not rushing to replace the US

Beijing has been leaning hard into a narrative in recent years that it is a responsible stabilizing power, especially contrasted with what it calls the US "hegemonism."

But analysts believe Beijing's ultimate goal is not to replace the US-led world order with a Chinese version. Instead, the main goal of the Chinese government seems to be that the Chinese Communist Party stays in power.

"It's not a take-over-the-world kind of ambition," Mokry told DW, emphasizing that China's motive "always has to be seen from the lens of regime survival."

She took Trump's first presidency from 2016 to 2020 as an example, where the US also withdrew from a number of international organizations. Back then, despite expectations that China would step in to fill the leadership vacuum, Beijing largely refrained from claiming those positions.

Soong, the researcher at MERICS, shared a similar view.

He told DW that it is unlikely for China to take over leadership across all institutions the United States has exited, except where doing so aligns directly with its national security interests.

Taiwan holds military drills amid tensions with China

One example is China's influence within the World Health Organization, where Taiwan — the island China claims as its own territory — remains excluded. The US has repeatedly cited the exclusion of Taiwan, especially during the 2019 COVID pandemic, as part of the reason for its withdrawal from the UN agency.

Pushing US out of Asia

Analysts say this selective engagement underscores Beijing's broader aim — not to dominate the global system, but to reduce US influence in regions China views as strategically vital, notably the Asia-Pacific.

In recent months, China has intensified military activity around Taiwan and in the South China Sea, where tensions have flared with the Philippines over territorial claims from both sides.

"Beijing would be extremely pleased if they could just do whatever they want in Asia," said Mokry, adding that the US engagement in the region remains so "fundamental" that "it's not that easy to change."

Edited by: Srinivas Mazumdaru

DW · Yuchen Li

10. Opinion | The ‘Deal’ in Iran Is Regime Change

​Summary:

The WSJ editorial board argues that POTUS’ renewed pursuit of Iran talks is misguided because circumstances changed after early June 2025. It claims Israeli and then U.S. strikes badly damaged Iran’s nuclear program and senior military leadership, revealing Iranian weakness and vulnerability. It further claims that protests in December and January sought an end to the regime, and that the regime later killed thousands despite Trump warnings. The piece says U.S. forces and air defenses, including THAAD and Patriot, have moved into the region, implying Washington seeks leverage beyond talks. It notes envoy Steve Witkoff’s trip and reported talks in Turkey, but urges prioritizing support to protesters over sanctions relief or new bargains.

Comment: If the editorial is right that Iran’s nuclear concessions are now “far less meaningful” while sanctions relief would stabilize repression, what concrete U.S. objective could negotiations still serve that is not better achieved by supporting internal pressure on the regime? Or asked another way, can negotiations lead to an acceptable durable politica arrangement that will protect, sustain, and advance U.S. national security interests in the region and around the world?

Opinion | The ‘Deal’ in Iran Is Regime Change

WSJ · The ‘Deal’ in Iran Is Regime Change

Much has happened since June. The time to barter has passed.

By The Editorial Board

Follow

Feb. 2, 2026 5:47 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-iran-talks-steve-witkoff-regime-change-ayatollah-ali-khamenei-f362676e?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

An F/A-18E Super Hornet attached to Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 151 launches from the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) in the Arabian Sea on Jan. 28. Zoe Simpson/US NAVY/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

It’s back to the future with Iran talks for President Trump, with the important difference being all that has happened since early June 2025 that makes this search for a deal a dubious quest.

First, in June Iran’s nuclear program and top military echelon were devastated by Israeli and then U.S. strikes, which exposed Iran’s weakness, penetration by Israeli intelligence, and vulnerability by air. Second, in December and January the Iranian people rose up to demand an end to their regime’s failed rule. Third, the regime subsequently massacred its own people by the thousands despite Mr. Trump’s repeated demands not to do so.

Opinion: Potomac Watch

Donald Trump’s ‘Central Casting’ Pick for the Federal Reserve

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“If they start killing people like they have in the past, we will get involved,” Mr. Trump had warned. “You better not start shooting because we’ll start shooting too.” As regime thugs later opened fire, the President assured Iranians that “help is on its way.”

It took time, but an American armada has arrived in the region. Also moving into place are Thaad and Patriot air defenses to protect U.S. bases and allies in Israel and the Gulf from any Iranian retaliation. In June Iran’s threats didn’t amount to much, but the U.S. is quietly establishing overmatch on offense and defense. All of this carries a cost, and we doubt Mr. Trump is paying it for nothing.

Nonetheless, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff is heading back to the Middle East on Tuesday. Mr. Trump is sending mixed signals but says he is open to a deal. Iran says talks are set for later this week in Turkey, though the crucial question is what is left to talk about?

Before June’s 12-day war, Mr. Trump gave Ayatollah Ali Khamenei two months to dismantle his nuclear program. The Supreme Leader refused, so Jerusalem and Washington did it for him, burying Iran’s nuclear material deep underground. Concessions now on the enrichment of nuclear fuel—if the regime is even willing to make them—are far less meaningful.

Tehran presumably would demand sanctions relief in return, but that would help the regime shore up its power with more money to fund repression. What message would that send to the Iranian people after so many risked their lives to protest?

The U.S. has also been demanding limits on Iran’s missile program and an end to its support for terrorist proxies. Both are fine ideas, but they would amount to paper promises that the ayatollah would be unlikely to honor. As Iranians know, this regime is willing to impoverish and endanger its own country to pursue a “death to America” and “death to Israel” foreign policy. It is a regime bent on spreading revolution, not on living peacefully with its neighbors.

Any sanctions relief now would break faith with the protesters, who relied on Mr. Trump’s promises, and extend their regime a lifeline while it totters on the brink of becoming a failed state. It would also tell the region that the U.S. President blinked, which would have damaging implications for the next three years of Mr. Trump’s Presidency.

Ask Barack Obama about the red line against chemical-weapons use in Syria that he failed to enforce. Russia jumped into the vacuum the U.S. left in Syria, then moved into Ukraine, and the result was more bloodshed and tragedy as U.S. deterrence was seen as feckless.

There is a better way for President Trump: Help the protesters topple the ayatollah and his enforcers. Don’t crush the Iranian people’s hopes; give them the confidence to keep pushing against a regime that has no answer but bullets to any of their problems. If Iran’s revolutionary regime falls, the whole region gets better. China and Russia lose the third spoke in their axis of U.S. adversaries.

The price of oil is lower today than it was at the start of the 12-day war in June, and the U.S. has options to mitigate disruptions. Iran’s regime and its proxies are at their weakest, and its people are waiting. Mr. Trump has forged his opportunity, and this is his moment to seize it.

Journal Editorial Report: Paul Gigot interviews Gen. Jack Keane. Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images/Ali Khaligh/ZUMA Press

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

Appeared in the February 3, 2026, print edition as 'The ‘Deal’ in Iran Is Regime Change'.

WSJ · The ‘Deal’ in Iran Is Regime Change

11. It’s Time to Play Foreign Policy Hardball

​Summary:

U.S. military power once rested on weapons built at home, but globalization pushed even basic ammunition and complex systems like the F-35 into opaque supply chains that include China, creating strategic vulnerability. He says China has moved faster and more coherently, citing the PLA’s shift to the domestically produced WS-20 engine for the Y-20, which expands airlift and refueling capacity and could undercut U.S. air superiority assumptions tied to deterring an amphibious assault on Taiwan. Meanwhile, the next-generation adaptive propulsion engine is reportedly delayed by supply disruptions. He calls for “hardball” using reshoring, trusted partners, tariffs, and smarter spending to rebuild the defense-industrial base and remove Chinese inputs.

Comment: The NDS directs us to "supercharge the Defense Industrial Base." Is this a path to doing so?

It’s Time to Play Foreign Policy Hardball

intpolicydigest.org · Michael Stelzig · February 1, 2026

https://intpolicydigest.org/it-s-time-to-play-foreign-policy-hardball/

America’s historic military advantage rested on a simple premise: the weapons that defended the nation were built at home. For decades, that industrial self-reliance underwrote U.S. power. But globalization steadily eroded this foundation, pushing the Pentagon to source parts and components from across the world, including from China.

Today, everything from low-tech, medium-caliber ammunition to highly complex systems like the F-35 depends on sprawling, opaque supply chains that stretch far beyond U.S. borders. The result is an unacceptable level of strategic vulnerability—one that Washington can no longer afford to tolerate.

The urgency is heightened by the speed and coherence with which America’s adversaries are advancing. China, in particular, has moved decisively to consolidate a fully domestic defense supply chain. The People’s Liberation Army is now replacing the engines on its Y-20 military transport aircraft with the more powerful, domestically produced WS-20. That upgrade significantly expands China’s airlift capacity, enabling the transport of heavy platforms, such as the T-99 main battle tank, and other large-scale warfighting systems. It also enhances aerial refueling capabilities for the J-20 and J-35 fighters, undercutting a core pillar of U.S. strategy: maintaining air superiority to blunt a major amphibious assault on Taiwan. One advanced jet engine has materially altered the strategic balance.

By contrast, America’s own efforts to stay ahead in the air are faltering. The prototype for the next-generation adaptive propulsion (NGAP) engine—intended to deliver a step-change in jet propulsion—is reportedly delayed by at least two years due to supply-chain disruptions. These delays are not merely technical setbacks; they reflect deeper failures of industrial strategy and national prioritization.

Each slip gives Beijing reason to believe that it can narrow, or even close, the military gap. Reasserting U.S. advantage will require both reducing exposure to foreign risk and making far wiser use of taxpayer dollars. Access to U.S. markets and disciplined public investment must once again become instruments of power.

States manage competition through a blend of tools often described as the instruments of national power: diplomacy, information, military force, and economics. The Cold War was won not through battlefield victory but through the coordinated application of all four. The United States used diplomacy and information to isolate the Soviet Union economically, starving it of the resources needed to sustain its military ambitions. Henry Kissinger’s embrace of realpolitik in 1972—opening diplomatic relations with China—reoriented global trade patterns and severed Beijing’s economic dependence on Moscow. Deprived of meaningful access to foreign markets, the Soviet Union eventually could not finance its system and collapsed under its own weight.

Since the end of the Cold War, however, Washington has largely abandoned this integrated approach. U.S. leaders leaned heavily on military deployments and blunt economic sanctions, while neglecting the strategic use of diplomacy, information, tariffs, and market access. The result has been incoherence rather than leverage.

Nowhere was this clearer than in America’s approach to China. Policymakers assumed that exporting U.S. manufacturing jobs and nurturing Chinese economic growth would produce a middle class that would, in turn, demand political liberalization. That theory failed. While Washington allowed its own production base to hollow out, Beijing poured state subsidies into domestic defense manufacturing—investing heavily in stealth technology, advanced engines, and artificial intelligence. Revenues from global trade were funneled not toward liberalization but into a more formidable security state, one that is increasingly repressive at home and assertive abroad.

It is time to acknowledge that this strategy did not merely fall short—it backfired. The United States needs a new “Kissinger moment,” one that reshapes the international playing field rather than passively adapting to it. That begins with rebuilding a robust domestic defense-industrial base and ending reliance on a strategic competitor that supplies components embedded throughout America’s military systems. Renewed investment in critical technologies such as NGAP must be paired with sustained support for skilled labor, advanced research, and the systematic removal of Chinese inputs from U.S. defense supply chains.

The first step is reshoring. Every element of the military supply chain should be brought home or relocated to trusted allies and partners. For years, there was little financial incentive for firms to move production out of China. That changed with the 2025 U.S. import tariffs on Chinese-produced goods. Tariffs remain an underused but potent economic lever. When applied strategically, they can push companies to relocate manufacturing to the United States, delivering a double dividend: weakening a competitor’s revenue stream while restoring American industrial capacity and independence.

Second, Washington must spend more intelligently. Taxpayer dollars are finite, and they should not be squandered on bloated civilian staffing levels or obsolete programs sustained by wasteful consulting contracts and grants. Redirecting these funds could fully support mission-critical efforts such as NGAP, which suffered a 23 percent funding cut in the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Trump last December. That reduction risks slowing development, inflating long-term costs, and eroding U.S. technological superiority. The administration’s forthcoming FY27 budget request offers an opportunity to correct course by prioritizing modernization while trimming genuinely unnecessary expenditures.

Reshoring America’s military supply chain and enforcing discipline in research and development spending could together constitute a modern Kissinger moment. Done in concert, these measures would restore supply-chain independence, reinforce technological leadership, and reassert U.S. power in an era of renewed great-power competition.

intpolicydigest.org · Michael Stelzig · February 1, 2026

12. Beyond Deterrence: How China Turned Taiwan Into a Governance Testbed

​Summary:

Taiwan is miscast as a deterrence problem when it is a live test of "governance competition". Beijing treats Taiwan as administratively owned territory under temporary “governance interruption,” tying the issue to Chinese Communist Party legitimacy. Because Taiwan is claimed but not controlled, sovereign but not widely recognized, defended but not allied, Beijing can apply legal, diplomatic, economic, and narrative pressure below traditional deterrence thresholds. The piece says conflict is continuous, escalation is administrative, and success is measured by legitimacy and narrative acceptance more than force ratios. Taiwan’s response shifts toward civilian resilience, identity, and institutional endurance to resist “pre-war collapse.”

Comment: "A struggle for legitimacy among relevant populations?" Where have I read that before? I think this analysis implies that statement. If Beijing’s advantage comes from exploiting legal ambiguity and staying below deterrence thresholds, what specific forms of recognition, institutional access, or narrative discipline would most quickly deny China the “gray zone” where "governance warfare" works?

Beyond Deterrence: How China Turned Taiwan Into a Governance Testbed

Why Taiwan Reveals the Limits of Deterrence and the Reality of Governance Competition

Erika Lafrennie

Feb 03, 2026

https://www.xinanigans.com/p/beyond-deterrence-taiwan-governance-testbed?utm

Taiwan dominates American strategic thinking as the ultimate deterrence problem. Pentagon war games model invasion scenarios. Think tanks debate force ratios. Analysts calculate escalation ladders. The conversation assumes deterrence is being tested.

That assumption is wrong—not because deterrence is failing, but because it was never the organizing logic shaping outcomes in Taiwan. Taiwan is not where deterrence is being tested. Taiwan is where governance competition is being made visible.

This is not a war plan or a Taiwan policy piece. It is a close examination of how modern power actually operates. The conflict most analysts fear is already happening.

Taiwan’s Position in China’s Governance System

Taiwan sits inside Beijing’s sovereignty narrative in ways that fundamentally distinguish it from other territorial disputes. Beijing does not treat Taiwan as foreign territory to be conquered, but as administratively owned territory experiencing a temporary governance interruption. The distinction shapes every interaction.

The island cannot be isolated from China’s internal legitimacy logic because Beijing’s domestic authority depends on resolving what it frames as administrative incompleteness. Taiwan’s continued separate governance represents more than territorial loss to Beijing—it represents systemic failure. The Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy narrative requires demonstrating that Chinese administrative authority is both inevitable and superior to alternatives.

Taiwan functions as a continuous governance contest across diplomatic, economic, legal, and narrative domains. Beijing develops governance techniques through live application in contested zones, refining methods where outcomes carry immediate consequences.

Taiwan provides the clearest signal of methods that will appear elsewhere because the island’s legal status creates permissive conditions for governance warfare experimentation. Beijing can apply administrative pressure, narrative saturation, and jurisdictional claims without triggering formal alliance obligations or crossing established deterrence thresholds.

The island’s unique exposure stems from its precise position in the international system: claimed but not controlled, sovereign but not recognized, defended but not allied, prosperous but not secure. These ambiguities create ideal laboratory conditions for governance warfare techniques that require legal gray zones to operate effectively.

Beijing can experiment with legitimacy narratives that frame Taiwan as naturally Chinese without appearing to violate international law. Beijing can apply jurisdictional pressure through international organizations without triggering mutual defense treaties. Beijing can pursue economic integration that creates dependencies without constituting economic warfare. The ambiguity is strategic.

Taiwan reveals governance warfare in pure form precisely because traditional deterrence metrics do not apply cleanly. Military force ratios matter less than narrative acceptance. Economic costs matter less than administrative precedent. Alliance commitments matter less than jurisdictional recognition. The competition occurs in the space between peace and war, where administrative power accumulates faster than kinetic capability mobilizes.

The Limits of Deterrence in Continuous Competition

Deterrence assumes conflict is an event, escalation is a decision, force is the primary signal, and time is episodic. Each assumption fails when applied to Taiwan’s actual conditions.

Conflict is continuous rather than triggered. Beijing applies pressure through legal interpretations, diplomatic isolation, economic dependencies, and narrative saturation daily. No single action constitutes “aggression.” The accumulation reshapes possibility space without crossing deterrence thresholds.

Escalation is administrative, not kinetic. Beijing increases pressure by adjusting bureaucratic classifications, trade regulations, diplomatic protocols, and legal frameworks. These escalations occur at administrative speed through civilian mechanisms that military planning cannot easily register or counter.

Legitimacy and inevitability matter more than force ratios. Beijing’s strategy depends on convincing audiences that Taiwan’s current status is temporary and abnormal. Success is measured by acceptance of Beijing’s framing rather than military dominance. Force serves legitimacy rather than replacing it.

Time is cumulative and asymmetrical. Beijing operates on administrative time scales that extend beyond electoral cycles or deployment rotations. Each interaction establishes precedent. Each precedent normalizes the next pressure application. Deterrence calculates moments. Governance warfare accumulates conditions.

How Beijing Uses Taiwan to Test Governance Control

Beijing is not testing whether it can take Taiwan militarily. Military capability is assumed rather than questioned, even as visible exercises periodically reinforce that assumption. Beijing is testing whether the world will accept the conditions under which Taiwan is already taken administratively.

Beijing tests narrative saturation through systematic historical interpretation, linguistic standardization, cultural claims, and educational influence that frame Taiwan as naturally and inevitably Chinese. Success is measured by international acceptance of Beijing’s historical narrative rather than military submission. When foreign governments, media outlets, or academic institutions repeat Beijing’s framing uncritically, the narrative test succeeds incrementally.

Jurisdictional normalization proceeds by consistently treating Taiwan as a province in international forums, excluding Taiwan from multilateral institutions, and requiring third parties to acknowledge Beijing’s sovereignty claims as preconditions for engagement. Each diplomatic accommodation establishes precedent that makes the next accommodation easier to secure. International organizations that accept Beijing’s One China formulations participate in jurisdictional normalization whether they intend to or not.

Legal ambiguity serves Beijing’s strategy by exploiting the gaps between Taiwan’s de facto independence and de jure sovereignty status. Taiwan’s unclear international legal position allows Beijing to claim authority while denying Taiwan the protections that recognized statehood would provide. The ambiguity creates operational space that benefits Beijing’s patience strategy while constraining Taiwan’s response options.

Cognitive erosion operates through creating information environments where Taiwan’s separate identity becomes increasingly difficult to maintain over time. Economic integration programs, demographic pressure applications, bureaucratic coordination requirements, and cultural exchange initiatives gradually normalize Beijing’s authority claims within Taiwan itself. The goal is voluntary accommodation rather than forced submission.

Systematic persistence maintains pressure simultaneously across multiple bureaucratic channels that exceed Taiwan’s capacity to respond comprehensively. Trade restrictions, diplomatic isolation campaigns, military pressure applications, and legal challenge processes create a comprehensive governance environment that constrains Taiwan’s choices without requiring invasion.

Escalation management calibrates pressure applications to remain below deterrence thresholds while accumulating strategic effects. Each pressure increment stays within acceptable bounds individually while contributing to systematic degradation of Taiwan’s position collectively. The technique requires precision timing and careful measurement of international response capacity.

None of this requires invasion. None of this triggers established deterrence thresholds. All of it reshapes the decision space systematically long before crisis decision points emerge.

Taiwan’s Shift from Deterrence to Governance

Taiwan’s defense planning has shifted from preventing attack to governing resilience. The transition reveals that Taiwan’s leaders recognize the actual nature of the competition.

Taiwan now emphasizes psychological readiness over force ratios. Civil defense programs prepare citizens for administrative pressure, information warfare, and economic coercion rather than solely kinetic attack. The shift acknowledges that the decisive battle occurs in civilian domains.

Civic conditioning has replaced military deterrence as Taiwan’s primary focus. Educational programs, cultural preservation initiatives, and democratic participation mechanisms strengthen Taiwan’s separate identity against narrative integration pressure. The response treats governance as the decisive terrain.

Narrative continuity takes precedence over tactical advantage in Taiwan’s strategic planning. Historical education, international outreach, and cultural diplomacy maintain Taiwan’s distinct identity in the face of Beijing’s historical claims. The competition occurs in the domain of legitimacy rather than capability.

Administrative endurance supersedes deterrent threats in Taiwan’s defense conception. Institutional resilience, economic diversification, and international integration create governance alternatives to Beijing’s administrative claims. The defense is structural rather than kinetic.

Taiwan is not resisting invasion. It is resisting pre-war collapse.

Shared Governance Logic, Divergent Political Ends

Beijing governs inevitability to dominate. Taiwan governs inevitability to survive. Same logic, same terrain, but different values.

Beijing shapes conditions to make resistance appear futile, accommodation appear rational, and integration appear inevitable. Taiwan shapes conditions to make independence appear normal, resistance appear justified, and integration appear forced.

Beijing uses administrative authority to constrain Taiwan’s options. Taiwan uses democratic legitimacy to maintain international support. Beijing exploits legal ambiguity. Taiwan exploits moral clarity. Beijing emphasizes historical claims. Taiwan emphasizes current realities.

The methods mirror each other because both sides understand the competition’s actual nature. Governance warfare is not authoritarian by nature. It is structural. Democratic systems can employ governance warfare when they understand the terrain.

Both sides govern inevitability because both understand that perception shapes reality in governance competition. The side that successfully establishes its vision as inevitable wins without requiring victory in traditional terms.

Implications for Contemporary Strategic Competition

This governance warfare model will appear elsewhere because the conditions that make it effective are spreading rapidly across the international system. Legal ambiguity, jurisdictional complexity, and legitimacy contests now characterize multiple theaters of strategic competition.

Deterrence frameworks will keep misfiring because they assume kinetic logic applies to administrative competition. Force ratios become irrelevant when decisive action occurs in civilian bureaucracies, legal systems, and narrative frameworks. Military capability provides context but not determination in governance competitions.

Military-first responses will keep arriving late because they address effects rather than causes. By the time kinetic deterrence becomes relevant, the administrative battle has already shaped terrain in ways that constrain military options and predetermine escalation costs.

The pattern extends beyond territorial disputes. Economic competition, technological standard-setting, and institutional influence campaigns all operate according to governance warfare logic rather than deterrence assumptions. Infrastructure projects create governance terrain. Technical standards determine competitive advantages years before deployment. International organizations become competitive terrain rather than neutral forums.

Taiwan is not teaching us how to deter China. It is teaching us what kind of competition we are already in and how poorly prepared we are to recognize it. The competition most analysts fear has been underway for years through mechanisms that deterrence theory cannot register.

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13. Greenland’s Worth a Fight and Russia’s Trying to Start One

​Summary:

Greenland’s remote location masks high strategic value for U.S. and NATO naval intelligence and missile defense. They say Russia is exploiting the Trump-Denmark dispute to push disinformation aimed at weakening Euro-Atlantic cohesion, citing deepfakes and spoofed “think tank” videos on X that frame Ukraine support as costing Europe Greenland and predict NATO collapse. Strategically, they stress the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap as a chokepoint for detecting Russian submarines leaving the Kola Peninsula and highlight China-Russia Arctic coordination as a multiplier of risk. They also emphasize Pituffik Space Base radars for early warning against ICBMs and future hypersonic routes, linking this to “Golden Dome” underlayer needs.

Comment: If Russia’s goal is alliance rupture through Greenland narratives, what single, shared NATO message and practical step would most quickly neutralize the disinformation while preserving the island’s missile warning and undersea surveillance mission?

Greenland’s Worth a Fight and Russia’s Trying to Start One

 02 February, 2026

By Emma Overell

Project coordinator at the Center on Cyber & Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD)

By Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery

Senior Director at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery is a senior director at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He directs CSC 2.0, which works to implement the recommendations of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Montgomery is a principal member of the Cyber Initiatives Group.

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/greenlands-worth-a-fight-and-russias-trying-to-start-one?utm

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — The “quickest way for Russia to penetrate our naval defenses is steaming from the Arctic to the North Atlantic.” The Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom (GIUK) Gap is the last place allied forces “have any hope of detecting a Russian sub before it’s in the vast Atlantic barreling toward New York.” These insightful comments were spoken not by President Donald Trump but by fictional President Grace Penn in Netflix’s The Diplomat. By contrast Trump’s rhetoric and attempts to gain leverage on Denmark have been appalling and unhelpful. But Trump and “President Penn” are both right about one thing — although the Arctic island is remote, Greenland’s location makes it fundamental to U.S. and NATO naval intelligence and missile defense missions.

Russia knows this as well and is using the Trump-inspired kerfuffle to drive a disinformation narrative intended to further weaken Euro-Atlantic relations. Kremlin-aligned sources have been circulating social media posts suggesting that Western aid to Ukraine has weakened European countries and that weaponry committed to Kyiv may be redistributed to Greenland. A deepfake of a Danish newscaster stating that Denmark plans to recall all F-16s given to Ukraine to be redeployed to Greenland was circulated by Russian influence accounts and received over 45.3K views on X.

Another video, which received over 254.3K views on X, imitated the Institute for the Study of War and claimed that Europeans siding with Ukraine in 2022 is costing them Greenland now and that NATO will be destroyed soon, thereby forcing Europeans to align with Moscow. This Russian tactic of riffing off legitimate think tanks and news channels to validate Russian lies is essential to making their false pro-Kremlin narratives appear more credible and increase the likelihood of their posts spreading across social media.

Moscow is trying to use the divide between the United States and Europe to sow confusion, degrade support for Ukraine, and rupture NATO. What Putin forgets is that disagreements between allies are common and constructively overcoming them builds stronger relationships. The strategic importance of Greenland demands the alliance work through its disagreement.

There are significant reasons why Russia is trying so hard to split NATO over Greenland. Nuuk holds significant naval intelligence value. Moscow’s Northern Fleet and nuclear submarine HQ are on the Kola Peninsula, located near the Russia-Finland border. For Russian (RU) forces to reach the North and Baltic Seas, and beyond into the North Atlantic Ocean, RU submarines must transit through the GIUK Gap; making the two stretches of water critical for monitoring RU subsea activity, just as “President Penn” demonstrated.

related

Trump’s Power Doctrine: A $1.5 Trillion Military, Greenland Ambitions, and a World Ruled by Force

Arctic Worries: Melting Ice, and a Russia-China Partnership

Moreover, the growing partnership between Beijing and Moscow in the Arctic and China’s increasing interest in the region over the past decade should raise red flags for NATO. In 2018, China released their first Arctic white paper, in which they called themselves a “near-Arctic state” and detailed a desire to establish a “polar silk road.” Since then, China and Russia have performed numerous joint air and naval patrols in Arctic waters. Coordination between U.S. adversaries in the High North places an even higher value on NATO Arctic maritime intelligence capabilities.

Greenland is also strategically important for missile defense operations. Nuuk is a prime location for American early warning systems to track intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with trajectories that arch over the High North. The Pentagon currently operates a variety of early warning radars and communications systems at Pituffik Space Base in Greenland. These radars work in tandem with systems in Alaska and Canada to provide essential early warning capabilities for U.S. missile defense.

ICBMs launched by Moscow can reach the United States in approximately 40 minutes, offering the Pentagon’s command and control centers, and the president himself, extremely limited time to detect, decide, and respond. This mission set will expand as Russia develops long-range conventional hypersonic missiles that will also use a High North flight route.

Prioritizing and expanding U.S. military radar and communication systems in Greenland will certainly be part of the “underlayer” elements of the Golden Dome missile defense effort, allowing for Russian missiles of all varieties to be detected earlier and provide U.S. and Canadian warfighters additional reaction time.

Russia will always be a malevolent actor and adversary in the High North, and the Kremlin will utilize any advantage and division among Arctic allies to sow disinformation, destabilize alliance efforts, and advance its own interests. Although the political particularities of Nuuk lie in the hands of Greenland, Denmark, and the United States, the geostrategic and deterrence value of the island is shared among all NATO allies; and should be a factor that unifies and strengthens the alliance, not something that divides Western partners and advances adversarial interests.

Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery (U.S. Navy, ret.) is the Senior Director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation and Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Emmerson Overell is a project coordinator.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief, because national security is everyone’s business.

14. The Predatory Hegemon: How Trump Wields American Power

​Summary:

Stephen M. Walt argues POTUS' second-term strategy is best understood as “predatory hegemony,” using U.S. market and security leverage to extract concessions, tribute, and deference from allies and adversaries in a zero-sum way. Walt contrasts this with Cold War “benevolent hegemony” and post Cold War hubris, then claims predation is ill-suited to today’s lopsided multipolarity where China is a peer and states have options. He cites tariffs, linkage of protection to economic demands, pressure on institutions, territorial talk such as Greenland, and personal monetization and ritualized flattery. He concludes this approach will spur hedging, resentment, and eventual U.S. decline.

Excerpts:

Hard power is still the primary currency in world politics, but the purposes for which it is used and the ways it is wielded are what determine whether it is effective in advancing a state’s interests. Blessed with favorable geography, a large and sophisticated economy, unmatched military power, and control over the world’s reserve currency and critical financial nodes, the United States has been able to build an extraordinary array of connections and dependencies and gain considerable leverage over many other states during the past 75 years.

Because exploiting that leverage too openly would have undermined it, U.S. foreign policy was most successful when American leaders exercised the power at their disposal with restraint. They worked with like-minded countries to create mutually beneficial arrangements, understanding that others would be more likely to cooperate with the United States if they did not fear its appetite. No one doubted that Washington had a mailed fist. But by cloaking it in a velvet glove—treating weaker states with respect and not trying to squeeze every possible advantage out of others—the United States was able to convince the world’s most consequential states that aligning with its foreign policy was preferable to partnering with its main rivals.

Predatory hegemony squanders these advantages in pursuit of short-term gains and ignores the long-term negative consequences. To be sure, the United States is not about to face a vast countervailing coalition or lose its independence—it is too strong and favorably positioned to suffer that fate. It will, however, become poorer, less secure, and less influential than it has been for most living Americans’ lifetimes. Future U.S. leaders will operate from a weaker position and will face an uphill battle to restore Washington’s reputation as a self-interested but fair-minded partner. Predatory hegemony is a losing strategy, and the sooner the Trump administration abandons it, the better.

Comment: If leverage comes from networks of trust and dependence, how long can a coercive, transactional approach extract gains before it destroys the very leverage it spends?

If allies respond by diversifying trade, finance, and security ties, what concrete indicators would show the shift from “gradual” erosion to the “sudden” break Walt warns about?

If China can present itself as the steadier ​and more reliable actor in institutions while the U.S. plays bilateral hardball, what would prevent Beijing from translating that institutional presence into strategic advantage in Europe and the Asia-Indo-Pacific?​ May not be hard for China to do with the US withdrawal from so many institutions.

The Predatory Hegemon

Foreign Affairs · More by Stephen M. Walt · February 3, 2026

How Trump Wields American Power

Stephen M. Walt

March/April 2026 Published on February 3, 2026

Adam Maida

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Ever since Donald Trump first became U.S. president, in 2017, commentators have searched for an adequate label to describe his approach to U.S. foreign relations. Writing in these pages, the political scientist Barry Posen suggested in 2018 that Trump’s grand strategy was “illiberal hegemony,” and the analyst Oren Cass argued last fall that its defining essence was a demand for “reciprocity.” Trump has been called a realist, a nationalist, an old-fashioned mercantilist, an imperialist, and an isolationist. Each of these terms captures some aspects of his approach, but the grand strategy of his second presidential term is perhaps best described as “predatory hegemony.” Its central aim is to use Washington’s privileged position to extract concessions, tribute, and displays of deference from both allies and adversaries, pursuing short-term gains in what it sees as a purely zero-sum world.

Given the United States’ still considerable assets and geographic advantages, predatory hegemony may work for a time. In the long run, however, it is doomed to fail. It is ill suited for a world of several competing great powers—especially one in which China is an economic and military peer—because multipolarity gives other states ways to reduce their dependence on the United States. If it continues to define American strategy in the coming years, predatory hegemony will weaken the United States and its allies alike, generate growing global resentment, create tempting opportunities for Washington’s main rivals, and leave Americans less secure, less prosperous, and less influential.

APEX PREDATOR

Over the past 80 years, the broad structure of world power has gone from bipolarity to unipolarity to today’s lopsided multipolarity, and U.S. grand strategy has shifted along with those changes. In the bipolar world of the Cold War, the United States acted as a benevolent hegemon toward its close allies in Europe and Asia because American leaders believed their allies’ well-being was essential to containing the Soviet Union. They used American economic and military supremacy freely and sometimes played hardball with key partners, as President Dwight Eisenhower did when Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt in 1956 or as President Richard Nixon did when he took the United States off the gold standard in 1971. But Washington also helped its allies recover economically after World War II; created and, for the most part, followed rules intended to foster mutual prosperity; collaborated with others to manage currency crises and other economic disruptions; and gave weaker states a seat at the table and a voice in collective decisions. U.S. officials led, but they also listened, and they rarely tried to weaken or exploit their partners.

During the unipolar era, the United States succumbed to hubris and became a rather careless and willful hegemon. Facing no powerful opponents and convinced that most states were eager to accept American leadership and embrace its liberal values, U.S. officials paid little attention to other states’ concerns; embarked on costly and misguided crusades in Afghanistan, Iraq, and several other countries; adopted confrontational policies that drove China and Russia together; and pushed to open global markets in ways that accelerated China’s rise, increased global financial instability, and eventually provoked a domestic backlash that helped propel Trump to the White House. To be sure, Washington sought to isolate, punish, and undermine several hostile regimes during this period and sometimes paid scant attention to other states’ security fears. But both Democratic and Republican officials believed that using American power to create a global liberal order would be good for the United States and for the world and that serious opposition would be confined to a handful of minor rogue states. They were not averse to using the power at their disposal to compel, co-opt, or even overthrow other governments, but their malevolence was directed at acknowledged adversaries and not toward U.S. partners.

Under Trump, however, the United States has become a predatory hegemon. This strategy is not a coherent, well-thought-out response to the return of multipolarity; in fact, it is exactly the wrong way to act in a world of several great powers. It is instead a direct reflection of Trump’s transactional approach to all relationships and his belief that the United States has enormous and enduring leverage over nearly every country in the world. The United States is like “a big, beautiful department store,” said Trump in April 2025, and “everybody wants a piece of that store.” Or as he said in a statement shared by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the American consumer is “what every country wants that we have,” adding, “To put it another way, they need our money.”

During Trump’s first term, more experienced and knowledgeable advisers such as Defense Secretary James Mattis, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster kept Trump’s predatory impulses in check. But in his second term, his desire to exploit other states’ vulnerabilities has been given full rein, empowered by a cadre of appointees selected for their personal loyalty and by Trump’s growing if misplaced confidence in his own grasp of world affairs.

DOMINANCE AND SUBMISSION

A predatory hegemon is a dominant great power that tries to structure its transactions with others in a purely zero-sum fashion, so that the benefits are always distributed in its favor. A predatory hegemon’s primary goal is not to build stable and mutually beneficial relations that leave all parties better off but to ensure that it gains more from every interaction than others do. An arrangement that leaves the hegemon better off and its partners worse off is preferable to an arrangement in which both sides gain but the partner gains more, even if the latter case yields larger absolute benefits for both parties. A predatory hegemon always wants the lion’s share.

All great powers engage in acts of predation, of course, and they invariably compete for relative advantage. When dealing with rivals, all states try to get the better end of any deal. What distinguishes predatory hegemony from typical great-power behavior, however, is a state’s willingness to extract concessions and asymmetric benefits from its allies and adversaries alike. A benign hegemon imposes unfair burdens on its allies only when necessary, because it believes that its security and wealth are enhanced when its partners prosper. It recognizes the value of rules and institutions that facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation, are perceived as legitimate by others, and are enduring enough that states can safely assume that those rules will not change too often or without warning. A benevolent hegemon welcomes positive-sum partnerships with states that have similar interests, such as keeping a common foe in check, and may even allow others to reap disproportionate gains if doing so would leave all participants better off. In other words, a benign hegemon strives not only to advance its own power position but also to provide what the economist Arnold Wolfers called “milieu goals”: it seeks to shape the international environment in ways that make the naked exercise of power less necessary.

By contrast, a predatory hegemon is as likely to exploit its partners as it is to take advantage of a rival. It may use embargoes, financial sanctions, beggar-thy-neighbor trade policies, currency manipulation, and other instruments of economic pressure to force others to accept terms of trade that favor the hegemon’s economy or to adjust their behavior on noneconomic issues of interest. It will link the provision of military protection to its economic demands and expects alliance partners to support its broader foreign policy initiatives. Weaker states will tolerate these coercive pressures if they are heavily dependent on access to the hegemon’s larger market or if they face still greater threats from other states and must therefore depend on the hegemon’s protection, even if it comes with strings attached.

Protesting U.S. tariffs in front of the U.S. embassy in Brasília, August 2025 Mateus Bonomi / Reuters

Because a predatory hegemon’s coercive power depends on keeping other states in a condition of permanent submission, its leaders will expect those within its orbit to acknowledge their subordinate status through repeated, often symbolic, acts of submission. They might be expected to pay a formal tribute or be called on to openly acknowledge and praise the hegemon’s virtues. Such ritual expressions of deference discourage opposition by signaling that the hegemon is too powerful to resist and by portraying it as wiser than its vassals and therefore entitled to dictate to them.

Predatory hegemony is not a new phenomenon. It was the basis for Athens’s relations with weaker city-states in its empire, a dominion that Pericles himself, the preeminent Athenian leader of his time, described as a “tyranny.” The premodern, Sinocentric system in East Asia rested on similar relations of dependence, including the payment of tribute and ritualized subservience, although scholars disagree about whether it was consistently exploitative. The desire to extract wealth from colonial possessions was a central ingredient in the Belgian, British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial empires, and similar motives influenced Nazi Germany’s one-sided economic relations with its trading partners in central and eastern Europe and the Soviet Union’s relations with its Warsaw Pact allies. Although these cases differ in important ways, in each one a dominant power sought to exploit its weaker partners to secure asymmetric benefits for itself, even if its efforts did not always succeed and if some clients cost more to acquire and defend than they provided in wealth or tribute.

In short, a predatory hegemon views all bilateral relations as inherently zero-sum and seeks to extract the greatest possible benefits from each one. “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is negotiable” is its guiding credo. Existing agreements have no intrinsic value or legitimacy and will be discarded or ignored if they do not yield sufficient asymmetric benefits. Some predatory efforts may fail, of course, and there are limits to what even the most powerful states can extract from others. For a predatory hegemon, however, the overriding objective is to push those limits as far as possible.

UPPING THE ANTE

The predatory nature of Trump’s foreign policy is most evident in his obsession with trade deficits and his attempts to use tariffs to redistribute economic gains in Washington’s favor. Trump has repeatedly said that trade deficits are a “rip-off” and a form of looting; in his view, countries that run surpluses are “winning” because the United States pays more to them than they pay to Washington. Accordingly, Trump has either imposed tariffs on those countries, ostensibly to protect U.S. manufacturers by making foreign goods more expensive (even though the cost of a tariff is mostly paid by Americans who purchase imported goods), or threatened such tariffs to force foreign governments and firms to invest in the United States in exchange for relief.

Trump has also used tariffs to force others to alter noneconomic policies that he opposes. Last July, he levied a 40 percent tariff on Brazil in a failed attempt to pressure its government into pardoning former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally. (In November, he lifted some of those tariffs, which had contributed to higher food prices for U.S. consumers.) He justified raising tariffs on Canada and Mexico by claiming that they were not doing enough to halt fentanyl smuggling. And in October, he threatened Colombia with higher tariffs after its president criticized the U.S. Navy’s controversial strikes on more than two dozen boats in the Caribbean, which, according to the Trump administration, had been targeted for smuggling illegal drugs.

Trump is as likely to coerce traditional U.S. allies as acknowledged adversaries, and the on-again, off-again quality of his threats underscores his desire to extract as many concessions as possible. Trump believes unpredictability is a powerful bargaining tool, and his endlessly shifting set of threats and demands is intended to force others to keep searching for new ways to accommodate him. Threatening to impose a tariff costs Washington very little if the target caves quickly, but if the target stands firm or if markets are spooked, Trump can defer action. This approach also keeps attention riveted on Trump himself, helps the administration portray any subsequent agreement as a victory regardless of its precise terms, and creates obvious opportunities for corruption that benefit Trump and his inner circle.

Predatory hegemony contains the seeds of its own destruction.

To maximize U.S. leverage, Trump has repeatedly linked his economic demands to allied dependence on U.S. military support, largely by raising doubts about whether he would honor alliance commitments. He has insisted that allies should pay for American protection and suggested that the United States might leave NATO, refuse to help defend Taiwan, or abandon Ukraine completely. But his goal is not to make U.S. partnerships more effective by getting allies to do more to defend themselves—and, in fact, drastically increasing tariff levels will damage partners’ economies and make it harder for them to meet higher defense spending targets. Instead, Trump is using the threat of U.S. disengagement to extract economic concessions. This strategy has paid some short-term dividends, at least on paper. In July, EU leaders accepted a one-sided trade deal in the hope of convincing Trump to keep backing Ukraine, and Japan and South Korea got their tariff levels lowered, in deals signed in July and November, respectively, by pledging to invest in the U.S. economy. Australia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, and Ukraine have all sought to solidify U.S. support by offering the United States access to or partial ownership of critical minerals located in their territory.

A predatory hegemon prefers a world where, in Thucydides’s famous phrase, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” That is why such a country will be wary of norms, rules, or institutions that might limit its ability to take advantage of others. Not surprisingly, Trump has had little use for the United Nations; has been happy to tear up agreements negotiated by his predecessors, such as the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal; and has even reneged on agreements that he negotiated himself. He prefers to conduct trade talks bilaterally rather than deal with institutions such as the EU or the rules-based World Trade Organization because dealing one-on-one with individual countries further enhances U.S. leverage. Trump has also sanctioned top officials of the International Criminal Court and launched a furious assault on an emission pricing scheme developed by the International Maritime Organization. The IMO proposal sought to slow climate change by encouraging shipping companies to use cleaner fuels, but Trump denounced it as a “scam” and deliberately sabotaged it. After his administration threatened tariffs, sanctions, and other measures against those who supported the measure, the vote on its formal approval was postponed for a year. The U.S. delegation was “behaving like gangsters,” one IMO delegate said in October. “I’ve never heard anything like it at an IMO meeting.”

No discussion of Washington’s predatory hegemony would be complete without mentioning Trump’s expressed interest in territory that belongs to other states and his willingness to intervene in other countries’ domestic politics in violation of international law. His repeated desire to annex Greenland, and his threats to impose punitive tariffs on European states that oppose this action, is the most visible example of this impulse. As Danish military intelligence warned in its annual threat assessment, released in December, “The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies.” Trump’s musings about making Canada the 51st state or reoccupying the Panama Canal zone suggest a similar degree of geopolitical avarice and opportunism. His decision to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—an act that sets a dangerous example for other great powers to follow—reveals a predator’s disregard for existing norms and a willingness to exploit others’ weaknesses. The predatory impulse even extends to matters of culture, with the administration’s National Security Strategy declaring that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure” and that U.S. policy toward the continent should include “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” In other words, European states will be pressured to embrace the Trump administration’s commitment to blood and soil nationalism and its hostility to nonwhite and non-Christian cultures or religions. To a predatory hegemon, no issue is off-limits.

Trump is also using the United States’ privileged international position to obtain benefits for himself and his family. Qatar has already gifted him a plane, which will cost U.S. taxpayers several hundred million dollars to refurbish and may end up at his presidential library after he leaves office. The Trump Organization has signed multimillion-dollar hotel development deals with governments seeking to curry favor with the administration, and influential figures in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere have purchased billions of dollars of tokens issued by Trump’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency operation—around the same time that the UAE secured special access to high-end chips that are normally subject to strict U.S. export controls. No president in American history has managed to monetize the presidency to anywhere near the same extent or with such obvious disregard for potential conflicts of interest.

A view of Nuuk, Greenland, January 2026 Marko Djurica / Reuters

Like a Mafia boss or an imperial potentate, Trump expects foreign leaders seeking his favor to engage in demeaning shows of deference and grotesque forms of flattery, much as members of his cabinet do. How else can one explain the cringeworthy behavior of NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who told Trump that he “deserves all the praise” for getting NATO members to increase their defense spending, even though such increases were well underway before Trump was reelected, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was at least as important in spurring this shift? Rutte also declared, in March 2025, that Trump had “broken the deadlock” with Russia over Ukraine (which was manifestly not true); lauded U.S. airstrikes on Iran in June as something “no one else dared to do”; and likened Trump’s peace efforts in the Middle East to the actions of a wise and benevolent “daddy.”

Rutte is not alone: other world leaders—including in Israel, Guinea--Bissau, Mauritania, and Senegal—have publicly endorsed awarding Trump the Nobel Peace Prize, with the president of Senegal tossing in gratuitous praise for Trump’s golf game. Not to be outdone, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung gifted Trump with an enormous gold crown during his recent visit to Seoul and capped off an official dinner by serving him a dish labeled “Peacemaker’s Dessert.” Even Gianni Infantino, the president of soccer’s global governing body, has gotten into the act, creating a meaningless “FIFA Peace Prize” and naming Trump as its first recipient at a gaudy ceremony in December 2025.

Demanding shows of fealty is not solely a product of Trump’s apparently limitless need for attention and praise; it also serves to reinforce compliance and discourage even minor acts of resistance. Leaders who challenge Trump get a dressing down and threats of harsher treatment—as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has experienced on more than one occasion—while leaders who shamelessly flatter Trump get gentler handling, at least for the moment. In October 2025, for example, the U.S. Treasury extended a $20 billion currency swap line to bolster Argentina’s peso, even though Argentina is not an important U.S. trading partner and was supplanting U.S. soybean exports to China (which had been worth billions of dollars before Trump launched his trade war). But because Argentine President Javier Milei is a like-minded leader who openly praises Trump as his role model, he got a handout instead of a list of demands. Even convicted drug traffickers, including former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, can win a presidential pardon if they appear to be aligned with Trump’s agenda.

Efforts to curry favor by flattering Trump are akin to an arms race, as foreign leaders compete to see who can dish out the most praise in the least time. Trump is also quick to hit back at leaders who depart from the script. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi learned this when, weeks after he rejected Trump’s claim to have halted border clashes between India and Pakistan, India was hit with a 25 percent tariff (later raised to 50 percent to punish India for purchasing Russian oil). After Ontario’s provincial government broadcast a TV advertisement criticizing Trump’s tariff policy, Trump promptly raised the tariff rate on Canada by another ten percent. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney soon apologized, and the ad immediately vanished from the airwaves. To avoid such humiliations, many leaders have chosen to bend the knee preemptively—at least for now.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Trump and his supporters see these acts of deference as evidence that playing hardball brings the United States significant tangible benefits. As Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, put it in August, “The results speak for themselves: the president’s trade deals are leveling the playing field for our farmers and workers, trillions of dollars in investment are flooding into our country, and decades-long wars are ending. . . . Foreign leaders are eager for a positive relationship with President Trump and to participate in the booming Trump economy.” The administration appears to believe it can prey on other states forever, and that doing so will make the United States even stronger and further increase its leverage. They are mistaken: predatory hegemony contains the seeds of its own destruction.

The first problem is that the benefits touted by the administration have been exaggerated. Most of the wars Trump claims to have ended are still underway. New foreign investment in the United States falls well short of trillions of dollars and is unlikely to fully materialize. Apart from data centers fueled by the mania over artificial intelligence, the U.S. economy is not booming, partly because of the headwinds created by Trump’s economic policies. Trump, his family, and his political allies may be benefiting from his predatory policies, but most of the country is not.

Another problem is that China’s economy now rivals the United States’ in many respects. China’s GDP is smaller in nominal terms but larger in terms of purchasing power parity, its growth rate is higher, and it now imports nearly as much as the United States does. Its share of global goods exports has risen from less than one percent in 1950 to roughly 15 percent today, whereas the U.S. share has fallen from 16 percent in 1950 to just eight percent. China has a lock on the market for refined rare-earth elements on which many others, including the United States, depend; it is rapidly becoming a leading player in many scientific fields; and many other actors, including U.S. farmers, want access to its markets. As Trump’s recent decisions to suspend the trade war with China and to shelve plans to sanction China’s Ministry of State Security for a cyber-espionage campaign targeting U.S. officials have demonstrated, he cannot bully other great powers the way he has bullied weaker states.

Trump outside the White House, Washington, D.C., January 2026 Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Moreover, although other states still want access to the U.S. economy and its wealthy consumers, it is no longer the only game in town. Shortly after Trump raised the tariff rate on Indian goods to a draconian 50 percent, in August 2025, Modi flew to Beijing to participate in a summit meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. In December, Putin visited Modi in New Delhi, where the Indian prime minister described his country’s friendship with Russia as “like the North Star” and the two leaders set a target of $100 billion in bilateral trade by 2030. India wasn’t formally aligning with Moscow, but Modi was reminding the White House that New Delhi has options.

Because rearranging supply chains and trade arrangements is costly and time-consuming, and habits of cooperation and dependence do not vanish overnight, some countries have chosen to appease Trump in the short term. Japan and South Korea convinced Trump to lower tariff rates by agreeing to invest billions in the U.S. economy, but the pledged payments will be strung out over many years and may never be fully realized. In the meantime, Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean officials held their first trade negotiations in five years in March 2025, and the three countries are considering a trilateral currency swap intended to “bolster the region’s financial safety net and deepen economic cooperation amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war,” according to the South China Morning Post. Over the past year, Vietnam has expanded its military ties with Russia, reversing previous efforts to move closer to the United States. “The unpredictability of Trump’s policies has made Vietnam very skeptical about dealing with the United States,” according to one analyst quoted in The New York Times. “It’s not only trade but the difficulty of reading his mind and actions.” Trump’s vaunted unpredictability has a clear downside: it encourages others to look for more reliable partners.

Other states are also working to reduce their dependence on the United States. Carney has repeatedly warned that the era of ever-closer cooperation with the United States is over, set a goal to double Canada’s non-U.S. exports within a decade, signed his country’s first-ever bilateral trade deal with Indonesia, is negotiating a free trade pact with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and made a fence-mending visit to Beijing in January. The European Union has already signed new trade deals with Indonesia, Mexico, and the South American trading bloc Mercosur, and as of late January was close to finalizing a new trade pact with India. If Washington keeps trying to take advantage of other states’ dependence, such efforts will only accelerate.

BUY NOW, PAY NEVER?

U.S. allies tolerated a certain amount of bullying in the past because they were highly dependent on American protection. But such tolerance has limits. The level of predation practiced in Trump’s first term was limited, and U.S. allies had reason to hope that his time in office would be an isolated episode that would not be repeated. That hope has now been shattered, especially in Europe. The administration’s National Security Strategy, for example, is openly hostile to many European governments and institutions. Together with Trump’s renewed threats to seize Greenland, it has raised additional doubts about NATO’s long-term viability and shown that European leaders’ efforts to win Trump over by accommodating him have failed.

Moreover, threats to withdraw American military protection will cease to be effective if they are never implemented, and they cannot be implemented without eliminating U.S. leverage entirely. If Trump keeps threatening to disengage but never actually does so, his bluff will be called and will lose its power to coerce. If the United States does withdraw its military commitments, however, the leverage it once had over its former allies would evaporate. Either way, using the promise of American protection to extract a never-ending series of concessions is not a sustainable strategy.

Neither is bullying. Nobody enjoys being forced to engage in demeaning acts of fealty. Leaders who share Trump’s worldview may relish the opportunity to sing his praises in public, but others undoubtedly find the experience galling. We will never know what foreign leaders forced to kiss Trump’s ring were thinking as they sat mouthing flowery platitudes, but some of them undoubtedly resented the experience and went away hoping for an opportunity to deliver a little payback in the future. Foreign leaders must also reckon with public reaction back home, and national pride can be a powerful force. It is worth remembering that Carney’s electoral victory, in April 2025, owed much to his anti-Trump “elbows up” campaign and to voter perceptions that his Conservative Party rival was Trump lite. Other heads of state, such as Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have seen their popularity soar when they defied Trump’s threats. As humiliation builds, other world leaders may find that pushing back can make them more popular among their electorates.

Trump cannot bully great powers the way he has bullied weaker states.

Predatory hegemony is also inefficient. It eschews reliance on multilateral rules and norms and instead seeks to engage with other states on a bilateral basis. But in a world of nearly 200 countries, relying on bilateral negotiations is time-consuming and certain to produce hasty and poorly designed agreements. Moreover, imposing one-sided deals on dozens of other countries encourages shirking because they know it will be difficult for the hegemon to monitor compliance and enforce all the agreements it has reached. The Trump administration appears to have belatedly realized that China never purchased all the U.S. exports it agreed to buy in the Phase One trade deal it signed with the United States in 2020, during Trump’s first term, and launched an investigation into the matter in October. Multiply the task of monitoring compliance across all of Washington’s bilateral trade arrangements, and it’s easy to see how other states can promise concessions now but renege on them later.

Finally, renouncing institutions, downplaying common values, and bullying weaker states will make it easier for U.S. rivals to rewrite the global rule book in ways that favor their interests. Under Xi, China has repeatedly tried to portray itself as a responsible and unselfish global power seeking to strengthen global institutions for the benefit of all mankind. The confrontational “wolf warrior” diplomacy of a few years ago, which saw Chinese officials routinely insult and bully other governments to no good purpose, is out. With rare exceptions, Chinese diplomats are now an increasingly energetic, active, and effective presence at international forums.

China’s public declarations are obviously self-serving, but some countries see this posture as an appealing alternative to an increasingly predatory United States. In a survey of 24 major countries, published by the Pew Research Center last July, majorities in eight countries held a more favorable opinion of the United States than they did of China, whereas respondents from seven countries viewed China more favorably. The two powers were viewed similarly in the remaining nine. But the trends are in Beijing’s favor. As the report notes, “Views of the U.S. have become more negative while views of China have turned more positive.” It is not hard to see why.

The bottom line is that acting as a predatory hegemon will weaken the networks of power and influence on which the United States has long relied and which created the leverage that Trump is now trying to exploit. Some states will work to reduce their dependence on Washington, others will make new arrangements with its rivals, and more than a few will yearn for a moment when they have an opportunity to get back at the United States for its selfish behavior. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but a backlash could come with surprising swiftness. To quote Ernest Hemingway’s famous line about the onset of bankruptcy, a consistent policy of predatory hegemony could cause U.S. global influence to decline “gradually and then suddenly.”

A LOSING STRATEGY

Hard power is still the primary currency in world politics, but the purposes for which it is used and the ways it is wielded are what determine whether it is effective in advancing a state’s interests. Blessed with favorable geography, a large and sophisticated economy, unmatched military power, and control over the world’s reserve currency and critical financial nodes, the United States has been able to build an extraordinary array of connections and dependencies and gain considerable leverage over many other states during the past 75 years.

Because exploiting that leverage too openly would have undermined it, U.S. foreign policy was most successful when American leaders exercised the power at their disposal with restraint. They worked with like-minded countries to create mutually beneficial arrangements, understanding that others would be more likely to cooperate with the United States if they did not fear its appetite. No one doubted that Washington had a mailed fist. But by cloaking it in a velvet glove—treating weaker states with respect and not trying to squeeze every possible advantage out of others—the United States was able to convince the world’s most consequential states that aligning with its foreign policy was preferable to partnering with its main rivals.

Predatory hegemony squanders these advantages in pursuit of short-term gains and ignores the long-term negative consequences. To be sure, the United States is not about to face a vast countervailing coalition or lose its independence—it is too strong and favorably positioned to suffer that fate. It will, however, become poorer, less secure, and less influential than it has been for most living Americans’ lifetimes. Future U.S. leaders will operate from a weaker position and will face an uphill battle to restore Washington’s reputation as a self-interested but fair-minded partner. Predatory hegemony is a losing strategy, and the sooner the Trump administration abandons it, the better.

Foreign Affairs · More by Stephen M. Walt · February 3, 2026

​15. Google Is Spending Big to Build a Lead in the AI Energy Race

​Summary:

The article reports that Google plans to spend about $4.75 billion to secure electricity for its expanding AI data-center network, including a pending acquisition of Intersect, a wind and solar developer. This would make Google the only major tech firm to own power-generation assets outright. The move reflects a broader strategy to control energy supply through renewables, geothermal projects, small modular nuclear reactors, and demand-response programs that reduce usage during grid stress. As U.S. power systems strain under data-center growth, regulators increasingly favor companies that bring their own power. Energy access, not algorithms alone, is emerging as a decisive factor in the AI race.

Comment: If energy security now shapes AI leadership, should governments treat large data centers less as commercial facilities and more as strategic infrastructure central to national power and resilience?

A friend of mine offered this comment that I think is relevant: "Amateurs talk data; Professionals talk judgment."  

Google Is Spending Big to Build a Lead in the AI Energy Race

WSJ

Deal to buy wind and solar developer Intersect is the latest in a series of moves that have left Google prepared for data-center power crunch

By Katherine Blunt

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Feb. 2, 2026 10:00 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/google-is-spending-big-to-build-a-lead-in-the-ai-energy-race-a8b5734a

Google data center in Midlothian, Texas. Jonathan Johnson/Bloomberg News

Google plans to spend $4.75 billion to help solve a problem stymieing the AI race: finding enough electricity to run an ever-larger fleet of data centers.

The company’s pending deal to buy Intersect, a wind and solar developer, would make it the only tech giant to own a power company. That could give it a significant advantage over rivals as power officials favor tech companies prepared to bring their own electricity sources online and the Trump administration presses them to avoid passing on power costs to consumers.

The deal is the latest in a series of bets Google has made to develop a soup-to-nuts strategy for accessing vast amounts of power. Among its competitors, Google was first to strike deals to develop advanced nuclear and geothermal plants designed to operate constantly. It was first to experiment with how it can reduce data-center power use during times of strain on the grid. And with the acquisition of Intersect, Alphabet GOOGL 1.68%increase; green up pointing triangle will be the first to incorporate within its business the means to build its own electricity sources for Google data centers.

“The energy system, I would say globally, is no longer fit for purpose, for serving the demands of AI,” said Amanda Peterson Corio, Google’s global head of data center energy. “What we’re trying to do is really think proactively.”

The acquisition has the potential to help Google better navigate the challenging process of bringing data centers online as regulators and legislators increasingly worry about electricity supply shortages. Tech companies are seeking to build data centers far more quickly than new power plants can be built to serve them.

Within PJM Interconnection, a 13-state power market stretching from New Jersey to Kentucky, that dynamic has already resulted in higher electricity prices and concerns that there won’t be enough power to go around during times of extreme demand. The Trump administration has proposed that PJM hold an emergency power auction this year in which tech companies would have to cover the cost of building new plants.

Intersect, which is already working on several Google projects, pivoted in recent years from developing stand-alone wind and solar farms to building them to support data centers. The company, which has $15 billion in assets online or under construction, is now finishing construction of a solar farm with battery storage to supply a Google data center in West Texas.

“It’s quite a smart move on the part of Google,” said Oliver Kerr, managing director for North America at consulting firm Aurora Energy Research. “Just as Google brought in house some of the elements around chip design to reduce reliance on Nvidia, I think it makes sense that they’re also bringing the power-generation piece in house.”

Having on-site power is becoming a strategic advantage for tech companies. Regulators and power officials in many regions are considering whether data centers built alongside new power sources should be afforded a faster connection to the grid because they will be less reliant on it. Data centers supplying themselves with electricity require fewer investments in centralized power plants and transmission lines to serve them, though most still seek a grid connection to draw power as needed.

Intersect Chief Executive Sheldon Kimber said energy has become core to companies’ efforts to develop more powerful AI models.

Intersect CEO Sheldon Kimber Intersect

“You don’t even get a seat at the table here without being a big, big player in physical infrastructure,” he said.

The AI race stemming from the 2022 launch of ChatGPT put fast-moving tech companies somewhat at odds with utility and power companies unaccustomed to the prospect of huge demand growth, much less having to accommodate it quickly. Until recently, U.S. power demand had long been mostly flat, and in some regions, older power plants have gone out of service more quickly than new ones are coming online.

The supply challenge became more acute as each of the tech giants ramped up infrastructure spending plans to support larger data centers, some of which require the same amount of power as a midsize city. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have all struck deals to draw power from existing plants and pay power companies to build new ones.

For tech companies, nuclear plants are often seen as the holy grail for their carbon-free, round-the-clock output. But historically, efforts to build such plants in the U.S. have run billions of dollars over budget and taken many years longer than expected. Many have closed in recent years for economic reasons.

In response, nuclear proponents have pinned their hopes to scaled-down plants known as small modular reactors, arguing they can be built faster and more cheaply than larger ones.

Google in 2024 was first to sign a deal to support commercial construction of seven SMRs built by nuclear-energy startup Kairos Power. Amazon and Meta have since struck SMR deals with other companies. Each is expected to take years to come to fruition.

Google was also early to bet on what could be a faster solution to supplying data centers with clean, constant power. The company in 2021 signed the first corporate agreement to develop a pilot geothermal project with startup Fervo Energy. It came online in 2023.

Fervo reached a milestone last year with a $462 million funding round in which Google invested. The company, which uses hydraulic fracturing technology to tap the earth’s heat, now has larger projects in the works, including one in Utah that is slated to start producing power this year.

Rig operators connect drills to access reservoirs of heat at a geothermal project site in Beaver County, Utah. AP

Meanwhile, the sheer amount of data centers seeking to connect to the grid has lately threatened to overwhelm the system. Wait times have lengthened as power officials study whether there is enough power to support them while keeping the lights on for other customers, especially during heat waves and cold snaps when electricity demand surges.

In addition to faster connection for data centers with on-site power, regulators have also considered affording that opportunity to ones that can reduce their electricity consumption or disconnect from the grid altogether when supplies are scarce. That idea has been controversial within an industry seeking access to round-the-clock power.

Google, however, years ago became the first tech giant to begin studying how its data centers might use less power during times of strain on the grid. The company now has pilot programs with several utilities in which it reduces data-center power use in exchange for payment, a tactic known as demand response.

“The demand side is an area that’s been not fully tapped at all,” said Michael Terrell, Google’s head of advanced energy.

Google recently hired Tyler Norris, a former renewable-energy developer who, as a Ph.D. student at Duke University, made waves in the power sector last year with widely discussed research showing that if data centers reduce power use for brief periods as needed, the grid could much more easily accommodate them.

The company also hired Doug Lewin, a former energy consultant in Texas, to lead the company’s energy market development there as huge numbers of data centers seek to connect to the system. Texas lawmakers last year passed legislation establishing conditions for cutting off data centers from the grid when power demand threatens to exceed supply.

“There’s no free lunch, there’s no magic wand that makes all the problems go away,” said Fervo CEO Tim Latimer. “That’s something I think Google internalized a lot sooner than the rest of their peers, because they’ve just been at this for longer and have hired folks that really understand how the power sector works.”

Write to Katherine Blunt at katherine.blunt@wsj.com

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

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16. Social Media Manipulation for Sale: 2025 NATO Experiment on Platform Capabilities to Detect and Counter Inauthentic Social Media Engagement

​Summary:

A new NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence report, published January 30, 2026, describes a 2025 experiment testing how major social media platforms detect and counter commercially purchased inauthentic engagement. The sixth annual evaluation (running since 2019) created non-political inauthentic posts and bought fake engagement and ads across seven platforms. NATO StratCom COE says over 30,000 inauthentic accounts produced more than 100,000 interactions with limited detection. It argues manipulation remains cheap and scalable, including inside advertising systems, and that AI-enabled bots are shifting from obvious spam to low-volume, credible participation in real conversations. Defenses are uneven, crypto payments sustain the market, and detection must move toward behavioral, cross-platform, conversation-level analysis.

Social Media Manipulation for Sale: 2025 NATO Experiment on Platform Capabilities to Detect and Counter Inauthentic Social Media Engagement

by SWJ Staff

|

02.03.2026 at 05:09am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/03/social-media-manipulation-for-sale-2025-nato-experiment-on-platform-capabilities-to-detect-and-counter-inauthentic-social-media-engagement/

Social Media Manipulation for Sale: 2025 Experiment on Platform Capabilities to Detect and Counter Inauthentic Social Media Engagement is a new report recently published by the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence on January 30, 2026.

“This sixth annual evaluation of social media, conducted since 2019, tests the resilience of major social media platforms against manipulation by commercial service providers. The experiment measures platforms’ ability to detect and remove inauthentic engagement that is commercially purchased for deliberately created inauthentic posts in non-political scenarios.”

Download the report here.

NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence has this to say about it on Linkedin:

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗱𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗲𝘁𝗹𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆 𝗯𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗹𝘆 𝗹𝗼𝘄.

We have just released our latest experiment on social media manipulation, offering the most comprehensive evidence to date of how commercially available inauthentic engagement continues to exploit systemic platform vulnerabilities. Despite regulatory advances and improved enforcement, the study shows that manipulation remains cheap, accessible, and increasingly sophisticated, with AI-enabled bots now blending seamlessly into real conversations rather than acting as obvious spam.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁: in 2025 we tested seven major platforms by purchasing fake engagement and advertising, revealing that over 30,000 inauthentic accounts generated more than 100,000 interactions with limited detection. While some platforms improved account and engagement removal, commercial manipulation is still widely available at low cost, including within paid advertising systems. Most concerningly, AI-driven bots now embed themselves into authentic discussions, making manipulation harder to detect and more persuasive.

𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀:

𝗠𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗽𝘂𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗳𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲: For a few hundred euros, actors can generate tens of thousands of fake interactions including through ads.

𝗔𝗜 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝗮𝗺𝗲: Bots are shifting from high-volume spam to low-volume, high-credibility engagement inside real conversations.

𝗣𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺 𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘂𝗻𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻: Enforcement has improved, but transparency and routine detection remain inconsistent across platforms.

𝗙𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆: Cryptocurrency-based payment infrastructures keep the manipulation economy resilient and largely opaque.

𝗗𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗺𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗲: Behavioural, cross-platform, and conversation-level analysis is now essential to protect information integrity.

𝗕𝗼𝘁𝘁𝗼𝗺 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲: the infrastructure for influence-as-a-service is mature and defending the digital public sphere now requires systemic, financial, and behavioural counter-measures, not just content moderation.

Read the full experiment report below or follow the link in comment section!

Authors: Gundars Bergmanis-Korāts, Tetiana Haiduchyk, Bohdan Smolts

Trementum Research

Tags: AI, Algorithmic Manipulation, Algorithmic Warfare, algorithms, Cognitive Domain, Cognitive Warfare, Human Domain, information operations, narrative, narrative warfare, NATO, NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, Psychological Operations (PSYOP), social media, weaponized narratives

About The Author

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

17. Small Wars in the Strategic Transition: U.S. Hemispheric Assertiveness and the Global Gray Zone

​Summary:

Joe Funderburke argues the 2025 NSS and 2026 NDS signal a strategic shift toward restraint, hemispheric priority, and allied burden-sharing, but that early 2026 shows a familiar pattern: when great powers signal restraint in some theaters, rivals intensify gray-zone pressure elsewhere. He cites four near-simultaneous episodes, a U.S. special operations raid that captured Nicolás Maduro, rising coercive friction over Greenland access, escalatory signaling tied to Iran’s nuclear reconstitution and unrest, and the first U.S.-Russia-Ukraine trilateral talks. His claim is that these are not isolated actions but the operational face of a new framework that prizes selective assertiveness, especially in the Western Hemisphere, while pushing partners to carry more load. The warning is stark: the gap in the strategy is gray-zone design, and absent tailored tools, the era ahead will be defined by proliferating small wars and ambiguous contests.

Excerpts:

The next National Military Strategy, combatant command plans, and force development initiatives must address what the National Defense Strategy omits: concrete frameworks for gray-zone competition, hybrid warfare, and limited conflicts. Without such frameworks, the United States risks achieving restraint in form while suffering erosion in substance – winning the wars we prepare for while losing the conflicts we face.

The strategic truth remains: deterring small wars requires different capabilities than deterring large ones. Attribution mechanisms, rapid decision-making, multi-domain integration, allied coordination for hybrid threats, and response options across the spectrum of conflict – these are the tools needed for the world we face. The question is whether the United States will build them before the proliferation of small wars reshapes the global balance of power.

President Trump’s approach – decisive limited operations, aggressive burden-shifting, transactional alliances, and willingness to exploit gray-zone tactics – represents one answer to this challenge. Whether that approach proves sufficient depends on whether competitors are deterred by American assertiveness or emboldened by the spaces American restraint creates. The events of January 2026 suggest both dynamics are at work simultaneously. The decade ahead will reveal which proves dominant.

Small Wars in the Strategic Transition: U.S. Hemispheric Assertiveness and the Global Gray Zone

by Joe Funderburke

|

02.03.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/03/strategic-transition-us-hemispheric-assertiveness/

Abstract

The 2025 National Security Strategy and the 2026 National Defense Strategy represent a fundamental reorientation of American power toward restraint, hemispheric prioritization, and allied burden-sharing. The opening weeks of 2026 have validated a central strategic truth: when major powers signal restraint in some theaters, competitors intensify gray-zone operations globally to test boundaries and exploit perceived withdrawal. Recent U.S. actions in Venezuela, ongoing tensions with Iran, pressure on Greenland, and the first trilateral negotiations over Ukraine reveal both the opportunities and risks inherent in this strategic transition. The United States must prepare not for one type of conflict, but for a proliferation of small wars, limited operations, and ambiguous contests that will define the balance of power in the years ahead.

Introduction: The Strategic Revolution of January 2026

Within three weeks of January 2026, the United States executed a special operations raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, threatened military intervention against Iranian nuclear reconstitution, pressured Denmarkover Greenland access, and facilitated the first trilateral talks between Russia and Ukraine. These events – simultaneous, aggressive, and deliberately calibrated – signal more than tactical opportunism. They represent the operational implementation of the strategic framework outlined in the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) and codified in the 2026 National Defense Strategy (NDS) released January 23.

The 2026 National Defense Strategy makes explicit what previous administrations implied: the United States will prioritize homeland defense, deter China in the Indo-Pacific, demand greater burden-sharing from allies, and revitalize the defense industrial base. What the strategy does not address – and what recent events illuminate – is the escalating competition in the gray zone, the space between peace and war where adversaries probe, coerce, and reshape regional orders below the threshold that triggers major U.S. intervention.

History demonstrates an uncomfortable pattern: when great powers attempt to avoid large wars through strategic restraint, they frequently encounter a proliferation of smaller ones. The limited conflicts of the early Cold War, proxy campaigns across Asia and Africa, and the incremental salami-slicing of territorial boundaries all emerged precisely when major powers signaled an unwillingness to escalate. Today’s environment mirrors that dynamic. As the United States signals restraint in some theaters while asserting dominance in its hemisphere, competitors are adjusting – not by avoiding confrontation, but by exploiting forms of coercion designed to evade direct conflict.

The Trump Corollary and Operation Absolute Resolve

On January 3, 2026, U.S. special operations forces conducted Operation Absolute Resolve, striking Venezuelan military infrastructure and capturing President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. The operation, months in planning and involving CIA intelligence teams on the ground in Venezuela, represented the most audacious use of U.S. military force in Latin America in decades. President Trump justified the action as a law enforcement operation against narco-terrorism, stating the United States would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”

The operation exemplifies what the National Defense Strategy calls the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” – a reassertion of U.S. prerogatives throughout the Western Hemisphere that goes beyond traditional notions of influence to include direct military action. The NDS explicitly states: “We will guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to key terrain, especially the Panama Canal, Gulf of America, and Greenland. We will provide President Trump with credible military options to use against narco-terrorists wherever they may be.”

Operation Absolute Resolve validates several strategic principles while simultaneously exposing critical gaps. On the positive side, the operation demonstrated U.S. capability for rapid, decisive action against clearly defined threats. The multi-month intelligence preparation, use of mockups for training, similar to the bin Laden raid, and flawless execution showcased American special operations excellence. The operation also signaled to hemispheric actors that the United States is willing to use military force unilaterally when its interests are threatened.

However, the operation’s aftermath reveals the challenges inherent in translating tactical success into strategic advantage. With Maduro removed but his regime largely intact – including Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, whom President Trump elevated despite her alleged narcotics connections – Venezuela faces uncertain political transition. The United States dismissed opposition leader María Corina Machado, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, creating friction with democratic forces and raising questions about whether regime decapitation achieves lasting change. As one analysis noted, the operation may prove “managed authoritarianism” rather than democratic transition, leaving in place the coercive apparatus that enabled Maduro’s rule.

The Venezuela operation also sparked regional backlash. Colombian President Gustavo Petro condemned the intervention, prompting Trump to threaten similar action against Colombia. This escalatory dynamic – where decisive action in one country generates new confrontations with neighbors – illustrates how small wars proliferate. What begins as a focused operation against narco-terrorism expands into broader regional contestation, exactly the pattern this analysis predicts will characterize the coming decade.

The Greenland Crisis: Hemispheric Security and Alliance Stress

Parallel to Venezuela, January 2026 witnessed escalating U.S. pressure on Greenland. Trump’s demands for control over the Danish territory – framed as essential for Arctic security, mineral access, and the Golden Dome missile defense system – triggered what observers termed a “crisis” in U.S.-European relations. The president initially refused to rule out military force, threatened 25% tariffs on European goods, and questioned Denmark’s legal rights to the territory.

The episode illuminated several aspects of the emerging strategic environment. First, it demonstrated the National Defense Strategy’s prioritization of “key terrain” throughout the Western Hemisphere, defined expansively to include the Arctic. The strategy states: “We will secure Key Terrain in the Western Hemisphere… We will provide the President with credible options to guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to key terrain from the Arctic to South America, especially Greenland, the Gulf of America, and the Panama Canal.”

Second, the Greenland confrontation revealed how strategic restraint in one area – Europe’s conventional defense – can create leverage opportunities in another (Arctic control). By signaling that European allies must assume primary responsibility for deterring Russia, the United States reduced its own dependency on European goodwill, enabling more aggressive pursuit of Greenland access. As one NATO official noted, Trump’s approach “damaged the US standing in the world and how allies see the US in the long term,” yet ultimately produced a “framework deal” that may give the United States expanded military access.

Third, the episode demonstrates gray-zone tactics applied by the United States itself. Rather than invade or purchase Greenland outright, the Trump administration employed what Danish intelligence characterized as “covert marketing campaigns,” influence operations, and legal maneuvering. American influencers distributed money in Nuuk, the capital. The appointment of special envoys, public pressure campaigns, and threatened tariffs all fall below the threshold of armed conflict yet aim to reshape political outcomes. Denmark responded by summoning the U.S. ambassador, increasing military presence in Greenland, and coordinating with Germany, Sweden, and Norway to demonstrate resolve.

The “framework deal” announced at Davos on January 21 – following Trump’s meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte – illustrates how limited conflicts resolve. Trump backed off military threats and tariffs while securing vague commitments about expanded U.S. military access, Golden Dome deployment, and mineral rights. Denmark maintained sovereignty but likely accepted greater U.S. presence. Both sides claimed victory, the crisis de-escalated, and the new status quo expanded U.S. strategic position without war. This is precisely the type of outcome small wars and gray-zone operations aim to achieve: incremental advantage without escalation.

Iran: The Test Case for Gray-Zone Reconstitution

Iran’s response to the June 2025 U.S.-Israeli strikes on its nuclear program provides the clearest example of how adversaries exploit the space between restraint and confrontation. Operation Midnight Hammer, which the National Defense Strategy celebrates as proof that “no other military in the world could have executed an operation of such scale, complexity, and consequence,” successfully destroyed Iran’s enrichment capabilities and killed nuclear scientists. Trump declared Iran’s nuclear program “effectively buried.”

Yet by January 2026, satellite imagery confirmed Iran was actively reconstituting capabilities at multiple sites. At the Taleghan 2 facility, Iran reconstructed a large cylindrical chamber used for nuclear weapons experiments. At Natanz, Tehran erected privacy covers to assess whether highly enriched uranium survived the strikes. At Esfahan, workers cleared debris and fortified tunnel entrances. At Pickaxe Mountain, Iran continued construction of a deeply buried facility not targeted in the original strikes.

This reconstitution effort demonstrates several principles about modern limited conflict. First, even overwhelming tactical success – destroying Iran’s nuclear program – does not prevent strategic reconstitution. Second, adversaries exploit ambiguity about what constitutes “rebuilding” to complicate response options. Is clearing debris an act of aggression? What about fortifying entrances or conducting assessments? Third, reconstitution activities fall below the threshold for major military response yet cumulatively shift strategic balances.

Iran’s approach also illustrates the simultaneity problem that gray-zone competition creates. While reconstituting its nuclear program, Iran faces massive domestic protests –with hundreds killed and thousands detained – threats of U.S. military intervention if protests are suppressed violently, and warnings from both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu against missile program reconstitution. Tehran must manage multiple crises simultaneously, exactly as the United States must manage Venezuela, Greenland, Ukraine, and Iran concurrently.

The Trump administration’s response reveals both strengths and limitations of the new strategic approach. On one hand, repeated threats to strike Iran if nuclear work resumes establish a clear red line. Trump’s January 2 warning that the U.S. is “locked and loaded and ready to go” if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters” demonstrates willingness to link internal repression to external consequences. On the other hand, the administration has ruled out negotiations while repression continues, eliminating the diplomatic track. And as critics note, supporting Iran’s protesters while pursuing regime change risks empowering the very coercive apparatus that enabled repression in the first place – a dynamic similar to Venezuela’s uncertain transition.

Ukraine: Trilateral Talks and the European Burden-Sharing Test

The first trilateral talks between the United States, Ukraine, and Russia – held January 23 and 24, 2026, in Abu Dhabi – represent the most consequential diplomatic development in the nearly four-year war. Following Trump’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Davos and his envoys’ marathon session with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, the technical-level talks tackled the core territorial question: Russian control of the Donbas.

The Ukraine negotiations illuminate how the burden-sharing logic of the National Defense Strategy operates in practice. The NDS states explicitly: “The war in Ukraine must end. However, as Trump has said, this is Europe’s responsibility first and foremost. Securing and sustaining peace will therefore require leadership and commitment from our NATO allies.” European allies are expected to take “primary responsibility for Europe’s conventional defense with critical but more limited U.S. support.”

This framework creates both opportunities and risks. The opportunity is sustainable long-term deterrence: if Europe develops the capability to deter Russia independently, the United States can focus resources on China and homeland defense. European NATO’s combined GDP dwarfs Russia’s, and the 5% of GDP defense spending commitment agreed at the Hague Summit would generate substantial military power. The risk is a transition period during which Russia exploits allied under-preparation through hybrid operations, territorial fait accompli, and political coercion.

The Ukraine talks also reveal how small wars and limited conflicts define modern great power competition. Rather than directly confronting NATO, Russia invaded a non-member state, carved out separatist regions, and framed its actions as limited aims. Rather than full-scale invasion of Western Europe, Russia employs cyber operations, infrastructure sabotage, political interference, and paramilitary Wagner deployments across Africa. These methods allow Russia to reshape regional orders without triggering Article 5, exactly the pattern this analysis identifies as characteristic of strategic restraint eras.

At Davos, Zelenskyy delivered a searing critique that encapsulates the strategic dilemma: “Instead of taking the lead in defending freedom worldwide, especially when America’s focus shifts elsewhere, Europe looks lost trying to convince the U.S. president to change.” He continued: “President Trump loves who he is, and he says he loves Europe, but he will not listen to this kind of Europe.” The message was clear: European allies must develop independent strategic capability or accept diminished influence. The question is whether they can build that capability faster than adversaries can exploit the transition gap.

The Davos Address: Assertiveness and the New Strategic Framework

Trump’s January 21 speech at the World Economic Forum synthesized the strategic themes driving U.S. policy. The hour-long address oscillated between triumphalism about American power and criticism of allies who have “screwed us for 30 years.” Trump declared “The USA is the economic engine of the planet” and reminded Europeans “without us, right now you’d all be speaking German and a little Japanese, perhaps.”

On Greenland, Trump insisted “no nation or group of nations is in any position to be able to secure Greenland other than the United States” but backed off military threats, stating “I won’t use force.” On Ukraine, he emphasized territorial pragmatism: Russia is “a great power” while “Ukraine is not” and “they may lose the Donbas, but they’ll have peace.” On NATO, he reiterated that the alliance “treats the United States very unfairly” and demanded the 5% GDP defense spending.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered perhaps the most significant allied response, arguing for what he called middle power unity: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. The middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” This framing – smaller powers banding together to resist superpower coercion – represents exactly the type of alliance reconfiguration that accompanies major strategic shifts.

The Davos gathering also saw Trump launch his “Board of Peace” for Gaza, demanding $1 billion contributions from permanent members and threatening exclusion for non-compliance. The initiative – mixing public diplomacy, economic coercion, and alliance management – typifies the transactional approach that defines the new strategic era.

The National Defense Strategy’s Gray-Zone Gap

The 2026 National Defense Strategy succeeds in articulating a coherent vision for major war deterrence while largely ignoring the gray-zone competition that recent events demonstrate is intensifying. The strategy’s four lines of effort – defend the homeland, deter China, increase burden-sharing, and supercharge the defense industrial base – are logical and necessary. However, the document contains virtually no discussion of hybrid warfare, limited conflicts below conventional war, or response frameworks for ambiguous aggression.

This gap is particularly striking given the strategy’s own description of adversary behavior. On Russia, the NDS acknowledges Moscow “possesses…undersea, space, and cyber capabilities that it could employ against the U.S. Homeland.” On China, the strategy notes Beijing’s “historic military buildup” but focuses almost exclusively on conventional denial defense along the First Island Chain. On Iran, the document celebrates degrading the nuclear program but says little about proxy networks, maritime harassment, or reconstitution activities.

What the strategy lacks is guidance for the scenarios most likely to unfold:

• Russian hybrid operations in Eastern Europe during the transition to European-led defense. If Russia conducts cyberattacks against Baltic states, employs paramilitary Wagner forces in Moldova, or sabotages infrastructure in Poland, what is the U.S. response? The NDS implies these are now European problems, but provides no framework for managing escalation if European responses prove inadequate.
• Chinese incremental coercion in the Indo-Pacific. If Beijing imposes a maritime blockade on Taiwan without firing a shot, seizes undefended Philippine-claimed features in the South China Sea, or uses cyber operations to disrupt Taiwanese elections, what constitutes an adequate U.S. response? The focus on denial defense may deter invasion but offers little guidance for coercion short of armed attack.
• Iranian proxy operations and reconstitution. As demonstrated by January 2026 events, degrading Iran’s nuclear program through kinetic strikes does not prevent reconstitution. The strategy celebrates past operations but provides no framework for managing the months-long process of rebuilding that is now underway. Similarly, Iran’s proxy networks – Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthi militias – operate in the gray zone between terrorism and state-sponsored warfare.
• Simultaneous small wars across theaters. The National Defense Strategy addresses the “simultaneity problem” entirely in terms of major conventional conflicts. But what if the United States faces Russian hybrid operations in Eastern Europe, Chinese salami-slicing in the South China Sea, Iranian reconstitution and proxy attacks, and Venezuelan instability simultaneously? None requires major U.S. military intervention individually, but collectively they could reshape regional balances while America focuses on China and homeland defense.

Recent events suggest this simultaneous gray-zone competition is not hypothetical but current reality. Within three weeks of January 2026, the United States conducted operations in Venezuela, pressured Denmark over Greenland, threatened Iran over protests and reconstitution, and facilitated Ukraine talks – all while maintaining focus on China. None of these situations involved major conventional warfare, yet each required high-level attention, resource commitment, and strategic risk calculation.

Strategic Implications and Recommendations

The convergence of strategic restraint – as outlined in the NSS and NDS – and assertive limited operations – as demonstrated in Venezuela and elsewhere – creates a distinctive operating environment. The implications extend across three time horizons:

Near-Term (2026-2027)

The immediate challenge is managing the gap between strategic announcement and allied capability development. When the United States signals that Europe must lead its own defense, Russia has months or years to exploit European under-preparation through hybrid operations. When the United States demands 5% GDP defense spending, allies require years to build the necessary forces. During this transition period, adversaries will test boundaries through:

• Probing operations: Small-scale hybrid attacks designed to assess U.S. response thresholds
• Political coercion: Using economic leverage, energy supplies, and disinformation to reshape allied political alignments
• Incremental advantage: Seizing small territorial gains or establishing gray-zone control over disputed areas
• Reconstitution activities: Rebuilding capabilities degraded by previous U.S. or allied operations

The Venezuela operation demonstrates one approach: decisive unilateral action against clear threats. However, not all gray-zone challenges permit such clarity. Iranian nuclear reconstitution, Russian Wagner deployments in Africa, and Chinese incremental advances each require more nuanced responses.

Recommendation: Develop explicit response frameworks for gray-zone aggression, including pre-planned options, delegation of authority for time-sensitive responses, and criteria for escalation. The absence of such frameworks invites paralysis when adversaries conduct ambiguous operations.

Medium-Term (2028-2030)

The critical question is whether allied burden-sharing succeeds faster than adversaries exploit the transition. European NATO must develop not just conventional forces but integrated hybrid defense capabilities. South Korea must assume primary responsibility for deterring North Korea. Middle Eastern partners must lead against Iran. If this burden-sharing succeeds, the result is a more sustainable global posture. If it fails, the United States faces strategic collapse across multiple theaters.

Success requires more than military capability. It demands:

• Political cohesion: Allies must maintain domestic support for defense spending increases and strategic autonomy
• Operational integration: NATO must develop the command structures, intelligence sharing, and joint planning to operate without U.S. leadership
• Industrial capacity: European and Asian partners must build defense industrial bases capable of sustained production
• Credible deterrence: Allied forces must convince adversaries that aggression will be met with effective resistance, even without U.S. participation

Recommendation: Establish measurable milestones for allied capability development with clear timelines. If allies fail to meet these milestones, the United States must either adjust its strategy or accept greater regional risk.

Long-Term (2030-2035)

If the strategic transition succeeds, the result is a multipolar world where regional powers manage their own security with selective U.S. support. If it fails, the decade will be defined by exactly what this analysis predicts: a proliferation of small wars, accumulated territorial changes, eroded U.S. credibility, and potential major power conflict emerging from unresolved gray-zone competition.

The historical parallel is instructive. During the early Cold War, American attempts to avoid nuclear confrontation led to limited wars in Korea, proxy conflicts in Latin America, and subversion campaigns across Asia and Africa. Each conflict remained “small” in the sense that it avoided direct U.S.-Soviet combat. Collectively, they shaped the global balance of power for decades. Today’s gray-zone competition mirrors that pattern with updated tools: cyber operations replace covert action, disinformation replaces propaganda, economic coercion replaces aid conditions.

Recommendation: Build enduring institutions for managing gray-zone competition. This includes attribution capabilities across all domains, rapid response forces trained for ambiguous scenarios, allied coordination mechanisms for hybrid defense, and industrial capacity to sustain long-term competition below the threshold of major war.

Conclusion: Preparing for the World We Face

The 2026 National Defense Strategy represents a necessary recalibration of American strategy toward homeland defense, China deterrence, and allied burden-sharing. The opening weeks of 2026 demonstrate both the opportunities and challenges inherent in this transition. Operation Absolute Resolve proved U.S. capability for decisive limited action. The Greenland framework showed how pressure below war can achieve strategic objectives. Iran’s reconstitution revealed how adversaries exploit the gap between operations and enduring change. The Ukraine talks illustrated the burden-sharing logic in practice.

What these events collectively demonstrate is that strategic restraint – however necessary – invites gray-zone competition. When the United States signals it will not police the international system alone, competitors do not simply accept a new equilibrium. They probe, coerce, and exploit the space between American commitments and capabilities. The result is not the absence of conflict but its proliferation in limited, ambiguous forms.

The choice is not between preparing for major wars or small wars. The National Defense Strategy rightly prioritizes deterring major conflicts. The question is whether the United States will simultaneously prepare for the small wars that historically accompany restraint. History offers an uncomfortable lesson: great powers that seek to avoid large wars through strategic retrenchment often find themselves mired in a series of smaller ones. From the limited conflicts of the early Cold War to today’s hybrid campaigns, adversaries consistently exploit the perceived unwillingness to escalate.

The next National Military Strategy, combatant command plans, and force development initiatives must address what the National Defense Strategy omits: concrete frameworks for gray-zone competition, hybrid warfare, and limited conflicts. Without such frameworks, the United States risks achieving restraint in form while suffering erosion in substance – winning the wars we prepare for while losing the conflicts we face.

The strategic truth remains: deterring small wars requires different capabilities than deterring large ones. Attribution mechanisms, rapid decision-making, multi-domain integration, allied coordination for hybrid threats, and response options across the spectrum of conflict – these are the tools needed for the world we face. The question is whether the United States will build them before the proliferation of small wars reshapes the global balance of power.

President Trump’s approach – decisive limited operations, aggressive burden-shifting, transactional alliances, and willingness to exploit gray-zone tactics – represents one answer to this challenge. Whether that approach proves sufficient depends on whether competitors are deterred by American assertiveness or emboldened by the spaces American restraint creates. The events of January 2026 suggest both dynamics are at work simultaneously. The decade ahead will reveal which proves dominant.

Tags: National Defense Strategy, National Defense Strategy analysis, National Security Strategy analysis, small wars, U.S. foreign policy

About The Author

• 
  
• Joe Funderburke
• Dr. Joe Funderburke is a national security and government affairs consultant, retired Army Colonel, and former Director of Strategic Planning for the National Security Council during the Biden Administration. He has also served as Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as a senior strategist within both the Pentagon and Congress. Dr. Funderburke teaches graduate-level courses on strategy, policy, leadership, and military operations at Georgetown University and Syracuse University. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

18. How the United States Lost a Nuclear Device and Recovered an Indian Friend

​Summary:

In 1965, CIA and India’s Intelligence Bureau tried to place a 123-lb plutonium-powered SNAP-19C sensor on Nanda Devi to watch China after its 1964 nuclear test. Bad weather forced a retreat and the device was cached, then lost, sparking fears of river contamination that later testing did not confirm. The story resurged in 1978; Morarji Desai publicly acknowledged India’s role, easing blame-shifting and smoothing ties with Jimmy Carter.

Excerpts:

In revisiting Operation High Altitude Test in December 2025, the New York Times faced some criticism from within India. The article, Indian critics suggested, added little new to what was already a very well-known story in the subcontinent. Other fuller and more expansive accounts of the CIA’s collaboration with the Indian Intelligence Bureau were already available, it was noted, including a compelling account, Spies in the Himalayas: Secret Missions and Perilous Climbs, which Capt. Kohli himself had co-authored with the American historian Kenneth Conboy in 2003. While fundamentally correct, if somewhat ungenerous, critics of the Times’ journalism invariably miss an important point about a country’s capacity to overlook its own intelligence history. An incredible tale of Cold War intelligence bravado and, perhaps, hubris, the operation has been extensively debated in India for many decades. Conversely, it is much less familiar to Americans and, more broadly, in the West. Unearthing Operation High Altitude Test is therefore welcome. It retains currency and continues to offer salutary lessons for policymakers and intelligence practitioners.

In his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, British author Salman Rushdie has the stuttering Indian character Whisky Sisodia articulate a theory of the limitations of the English imagination. “The trouble with the Engenglish,” Sisodia observes wryly, “is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means.” Whisky Sisodia has a point. In the context of the Nanda Devi caper, perhaps the New York Times deserves some credit for helping Americans avoid a similar trap.

How the United States Lost a Nuclear Device and Recovered an Indian Friend

warontherocks.com  · February 3, 2026

Paul McGarr

February 3, 2026

https://warontherocks.com/2026/02/how-the-united-states-lost-a-nuclear-device-and-recovered-an-indian-friend/

It started at a Washington cocktail party, when an Air Force general listened to a mountaineer describe the view from Mount Everest — and decided the United States should put a surveillance device on a Himalayan summit.

That offhand idea soon became a real-world operation.

Late last year, ahead of the holidays, the New York Times ran a weekend article titled, “How Did the CIA Lose a Nuclear Device?” The story recounted a secret 1965 CIA mission carried out at the height of the Cold War with India’s Intelligence Bureau.

This story’s roots, as with many espionage adventures, lay in a chance encounter at a Washington cocktail party. Here, Gen. Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, met Barry Bishop, a National Geographic photographer and accomplished mountaineer. LeMay listened as Bishop described his Everest ascent and the panoramic view from the summit, stretching over the Tibetan plateau and into western China. An idea formed: Could a surveillance device on a Himalayan peak allow the United States to observe China’s nuclear sites? LeMay consulted the CIA, which responded encouragingly. The outcome was Operation High Altitude Test.

The operation aimed to emplace a 123-lb plutonium-powered SNAP-19C telemetry unit on Nanda Devi, the second-highest mountain in the Indian Himalayas. The mountain rises nearly 26,000 feet above sea level in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli Garhwal district, posing major challenges for elite climbers due to its isolation and treacherous terrain. Considered technically harder to climb than Everest, Nanda Devi offered a vantage point safely inside Indian territory from which the CIA intended to monitor China’s nascent nuclear and missile program following its first atomic test in October 1964.

To conduct the operation inside India, the CIA partnered with India’s Intelligence Bureau. While India was officially non-aligned, its 1962 border war with China led to closer intelligence cooperation with the United States. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s administration adjusted its stance, accepting American security and intelligence assistance.

BECOME A MEMBER

While the Sino-Indian border war facilitated the expansion of cooperation between the two countries’ intelligence services, Indian and American intelligence agencies had worked together before 1962. During the 1950s, the CIA implemented a covert action campaign to destabilize and remove a communist state government in Kerala in southern India. The CIA did so with the knowledge and support of powerbrokers in India’s ruling Congress Party and central government. In addition, New Delhi decided to look away when CIA aircraft violated Indian airspace in support of CIA-sponsored resistance activities in Chinese-controlled Tibet. Still, it was only after India’s war with China that intelligence ties between New Delhi and Washington became broader, deeper, and more formal. Collaboration included forming the Special Frontier Force — modelled on U.S. Army Special Forces — to monitor Chinese movements in Tibet; improving information flow across India’s security establishment; basing American U-2s at Charbatia airfield in Odisha, eastern India, to collect imagery on Tibet and Western China; and conducting offensive disinformation campaigns against China. The United States and India also set up a joint unconventional warfare task force in New Delhi and a joint unconventional warfare operations base at Hasimara, near Bhutan, for Tibetan missions. United by concern over China, India approved Operation High Altitude Test.

In the fall of 1965, the operation was launched, but problems quickly arose. A team of Indian and American mountaineers led by Capt. Manmohan Singh Kohli — an Indian naval officer with Indo-Tibetan border police experience — had trained on Mount McKinley (Denali) in Alaska. They arrived at Nanda Devi by helicopter, aware that summer climbing weather had already ended. With little time to acclimatize, even seasoned climbers suffered altitude sickness. The ascent was brutal: Deep crevasses, crumbling snow bridges, and constant whiteouts driven by blizzards. Near the summit, worsening weather forced Kohli’s team to retreat. They cached the nuclear device before it could be installed.

Several attempts to return to Nanda Devi and recover the device failed. Between 1966 and 1968, at least three efforts to secure the plutonium-powered telemetry unit were fruitless. In 1967, another mission installed a monitoring device near the summit of Nanda Kot, a 22,000-foot peak nine miles southeast of Nanda Devi. That unit returned data for several months before failing. In the summer of 1968, a climbing team recovered this device.

Concerns grew that the lost Nanda Devi device might leak radioactive material into the Himalayan watershed and contaminate the Ganges river. Tens of millions of Hindus seek spiritual purification in the river each year. It provides drinking water to nearly half of India’s population and irrigates agriculture in a basin critical to food production. The Indian government conducted extensive ground and aerial searches of radioactive leaks but found nothing. Water from the Nanda Devi range was tested until 1970, and its quality was monitored for years thereafter. No contamination was found. Officials concluded the lost device was likely buried by an avalanche or lost in a crevasse.

In 1969, the CIA and India’s Intelligence Bureau ran one last joint Himalayan mission. They installed two monitors, one in Ladakh (300 miles northwest of Nanda Devi) and one in Arunachal Pradesh (at the eastern end of the Himalayan range, 1,000 miles away). Both were powered by gas and solar energy instead of plutonium. Codenamed Operation Gemini, it aimed to intercept Chinese communications and yielded useful data on missile tests. By the early 1970s, satellite reconnaissance made such ground sensors obsolete, thereby ending these operations.

It seemed that the details of Operation High Altitude Test and related missions would remain buried in classified files at CIA headquarters and at New Delhi’s Central Secretariat South Block, then home to India’s intelligence services. This changed when Howard Kohn, a journalist who broke the Karen Silkwood story in Rolling Stone in 1975, brought the subject back into the light. In April 1978, Kohn published an article titled “The Nanda Devi Caper” in Outlook magazine. His reporting, leaked by a congressional aide, shocked officials in Washington and New Delhi. The article contained several inaccuracies: It claimed the Central Bureau of Investigation, not the Intelligence Bureau, oversaw Operation High Altitude Test. It also suggested Indian prime ministers were kept in the dark at the CIA’s insistence, giving the CIA full control over the mission.

Although impossible to disprove while the archives of India’s intelligence services remain closed, the notion that the Intelligence Bureau would “go rogue” and conduct a major covert operation in collaboration with the CIA and absent political top cover is fanciful. Such a scenario was directly and explicitly contradicted by India’s premier, Morarji Desai, in a remarkably candid statement he made on the operation to India’s lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, on April 17, 1978. Believing that candor was the best way to defuse a media storm that had developed following the publication of Kohn’s article, Desai ignored U.S. government advice not to comment on intelligence matters and came clean with an astonished Indian public. Confirming that the substance — if not all the details of Kohn’s expose — was correct, Desai acknowledged that the Indian government had sanctioned a highly secret joint mission with the CIA to place nuclear-monitoring devices in the Himalayas. He confirmed that one device had been lost on Nanda Devi and that the environmental threat posed by the lost device was uncertain. The Indian people should remember, Desai cautioned, that their leaders had approved Operation High Altitude Test at a time when the nation appeared to face an existential threat from China.

Back in Washington, President Jimmy Carter’s administration came to see Desai’s handling of the Operation High Altitude Test bombshell as essentially correct. Having urged Indian leaders to avoid public comment, Robert Goheen, the U.S. ambassador to India, changed his mind and concluded that, in this case, sunlight had been the best disinfectant. Desai’s transparency — or at least the appearance thereof — defused what risked becoming an increasingly emotional row between an incredulous Indian public and a tight-lipped CIA. By confirming that India was a willing and equal partner in the Nanda Devi operation, Desai sucked the oxygen from left-wing Indian critics eager to vilify the CIA for unwarranted interference in the nation’s domestic affairs. Moreover, by refraining from the temptation to use the CIA as a convenient scapegoat for actions the Indian government itself was responsible for — something his predecessor, Indira Gandhi, had singularly failed to do — Desai secured Carter’s admiration and respect. India’s prime minister, the Carter administration concluded, could be trusted. He was an individual with whom Washington could do business. Under Desai and Carter, U.S.-Indian relations became closer, warmer, and more productive than at any point since the early 1960s. This was reflected in a series of agreements that improved bilateral exchanges in education, business, agriculture, and green technology.

In revisiting Operation High Altitude Test in December 2025, the New York Times faced some criticism from within India. The article, Indian critics suggested, added little new to what was already a very well-known story in the subcontinent. Other fuller and more expansive accounts of the CIA’s collaboration with the Indian Intelligence Bureau were already available, it was noted, including a compelling account, Spies in the Himalayas: Secret Missions and Perilous Climbs, which Capt. Kohli himself had co-authored with the American historian Kenneth Conboy in 2003. While fundamentally correct, if somewhat ungenerous, critics of the Times’ journalism invariably miss an important point about a country’s capacity to overlook its own intelligence history. An incredible tale of Cold War intelligence bravado and, perhaps, hubris, the operation has been extensively debated in India for many decades. Conversely, it is much less familiar to Americans and, more broadly, in the West. Unearthing Operation High Altitude Test is therefore welcome. It retains currency and continues to offer salutary lessons for policymakers and intelligence practitioners.

In his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, British author Salman Rushdie has the stuttering Indian character Whisky Sisodia articulate a theory of the limitations of the English imagination. “The trouble with the Engenglish,” Sisodia observes wryly, “is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means.” Whisky Sisodia has a point. In the context of the Nanda Devi caper, perhaps the New York Times deserves some credit for helping Americans avoid a similar trap.

BECOME A MEMBER

Paul McGarr is a lecturer in intelligence studies at King’s College London. He is the author of two monographs, The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent, 1945-1965 (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Spying in South Asia: Britain, the United States and India’s Secret Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2024). The latter examines interventions made by the intelligence and security services of Britain and the United States in post-colonial India.

warontherocks.com · Joseph Wehmeyer · February 3, 2026

19. Schrödinger's Security Partner: The Paradox of Measuring Security Force Assistance

​Summary:

Metrics in security force assistance can become theater. Advisors teach to the scorecard, partners rehearse for the inspection, and headquarters gets tidy numbers that hide politics, corruption, and brittle institutions. The authors liken this to Schrödinger’s Cat and to Goodhart’s Law: measurement changes the thing measured, so the report can be “true” and still wrong. They argue the current AM&E machinery pushes short-term, countable outputs, a McNamara-style fallacy, while real capacity is qualitative, relational, and revealed under shock. They propose hypothesis-testing, elevating advisor narrative, and measuring strategic alignment over tactics.

Comment: I had no idea. This was not my experience with Foreign Internal Defense.

If our metrics reward compliance, are we building partners or building performances?

What do we know from numbers that we cannot know from seasoned advisor judgment, and what do we lose when we ignore that judgment?

I want seasoned advisor judgement over numbers based on long experience operating with partners.

Schrödinger's Security Partner: The Paradox of Measuring Security Force Assistance

irregularwarfare.org · Jahara Matisek, Robert Schafer · February 3, 2026

https://irregularwarfare.org/articles/schrodingers-security-partner-the-paradox-of-measuring-security-force-assistance/

In quantum mechanics, Schrödinger’s Cat is often mischaracterized as a simple problem of observation. In reality, the thought experiment illustrates something more unsettling: a system can exist in multiple states simultaneously, and the act of observation collapses that complexity into a single, misleading outcome. Security force assistance (SFA) suffers from an analogous problem. Partner forces are complex institutional systems shaped by politics, incentives, institutions, leadership, and threats. When the United States chooses metrics to observe its security partners, complexity collapses into a simplified performance snapshot that obscures more than it reveals.

This dynamic is related to Goodhart’s Law, but more severe. When a measure becomes a target, it is a “self-defeating exercise despite its necessity.” When a measure reshapes behavior, it ceases to describe reality at all. As with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, precision in one dimension comes at the expense of understanding another. A training metric may reveal marksmanship proficiency while simultaneously masking leadership failure, political interference, or institutional fragility. What is measured is not merely recorded: it is produced.

These dynamics distort U.S. advising missions. Once a higher headquarters, such as a combatant command, designates a metric, advisors teach to that metric and partners rehearse for it. Training becomes performative. Assessments become affirmation. Many advisors we interviewed report teaching to the test, making sure partner forces “perform” so the advisor can report up-the-chain their own instructional effectiveness. Unfortunately, this does not translate into partner absorptive capacity, resilience, or will to fight. Instead, advisors are left with a manufactured, curated version of reality aligned with headquarters’ reporting requirements and funding cycles. This is the McNamara Fallacy in action, where decisions are based on quantitative metrics like body counts while ignoring qualitative observations.

This long-standing issue now meets the Trump Administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy. The administration’s skepticism of foreign aid and demand for burden sharing intensify pressure for returns on investment as some policies reduce security assistance. The pattern of prioritizing easily quantifiable outputs over genuine institutional growth is a systemic challenge in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. Given this assessment paradox, we offer improved approaches to assessing partnerships before a crisis opens the box and reveals the dead cat inside.

Measurement Distorts Advising: How a Linear System Fails in a Complex World

The security assistance enterprise is built to measure—and is required to do so under the 2017 NDAA. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency manages programs, combatant commands select indicators, and advisors teach to the requirements. In turn, partner forces alter their behavior, and staffs optimize “logic models” and spreadsheets for reporting systems. The result is measurement bias being hardwired into advising itself.

Per Risa Brooks, military effectiveness is tied to political legitimacy, elite cohesion, and the state’s ability to monopolize violence and authority—variables difficult to quickly resolve in an irregular warfare context. Tactical proficiency rarely determines outcomes. Yet SFA assessments continue to privilege what is most visible and countable, even when those indicators say little about whether a partner force can sustain operations, resist elite capture, or survive political shock.

Policy, despite its best intentions, hardens this bias. The Pentagon’s Assessment, Monitoring, and Evaluation (AM&E) framework was created in 2017 to improve accountability. In practice, however, it doubles down on the McNamara Fallacy by pushing the system toward visible, countable, and short-term outputs. Such a framework treats SFA as a linear engineering problem where inputs like money and training should produce predictable outputs. This fails to treat the partner force as a complex adaptive system, where small changes can have unpredictable, cascading effects. Enduring results such as a partner’s ability to demonstrate initiative, plan independently, or adapt without advisors, become tertiary concerns because they mature off-cycle and resist quantification.

Assessment must be redesigned. Effective evaluation in irregular warfare must shift from proof-seeking to hypothesis-testing, elevate qualitative judgment alongside quantitative indicators, and align measurement with strategic competition rather than tactical output. These changes are not cosmetic. They are prerequisites for building partner forces that endure beyond the reporting cycle. For years, U.S. officials gave optimistic assessments of rising troop numbers and readiness rates in Afghanistan and Iraq, while Inspector General Reports showed numerous failures. These metrics masked “ghost soldiers,” systemic corruption, and a crippling dependence on contractors.

Across the Sahel, the U.S. spent over $3 billion on security assistance, yet the region became a “global epicenter of jihadist violence,” according to a Congressional report. In countries such as Chad and Mali, U.S. security assistance emphasized tactical counterterrorism outputs like elite unit readiness, raid proficiency, and partner participation in joint operations. While showing progress, this security assistance masked deeper institutional decay. American-trained units became competent enclaves within militaries hollowed out by patronage, coup-proofing, and political fragmentation. Rather than stabilizing the state, assistance inadvertently empowered officers who later seized power, while insurgent groups expanded their reach and Russian advisors displaced Western partners. The metrics reflected tactical success but the reality was a strategic failure.

Even the seemingly successful case of security assistance to Ukraine highlights the measurement dilemma. The focus of Western efforts has been the output of aid: over $200 billion appropriated and a hodgepodge of weapon systems delivered. These are easily counted and reported. Measuring the actual outcome can also be asserted and tested as a false positive: Ukraine wasn’t conquered by Russian military forces so assistance obviously worked.

Without Western military advisors on the ground, assessments rely on remote data, ISR, intercepted Russian communications, and Ukrainian self-reporting. While Ukraine’s remarkable battlefield adaptation is evident, Western military organizations struggle to measure the specific effectiveness of their training versus Ukraine’s own impressive capacity for innovation. According to internal European Union reports one author had access to, significant questions remain concerning how well Western-led training has actually translated to the battlefield. The metrics show a firehose of support, but they cannot fully capture the nuances of battlefield impacts or long-term institutional absorption.

A Strategic Misalignment: Measuring for the Wrong War

Some argue that security cooperation deserves a fairer evaluation. They contend critics focus on high-profile failures like Iraq and Afghanistan, while ignoring quiet, incremental successes like the access and influence gained, relationships built, and conflicts deterred. From this perspective, the problem is not the tool itself, but a lack of partner political will, something beyond American control. They call for more nuanced evaluation, not abandonment.

This argument, however, overlooks a more fundamental problem, identified not by outside critics, but by the Pentagon. A 2021 Pentagon evaluation of security cooperation revealed profound strategic misalignment. The entire security cooperation enterprise, including its assessment architecture, remained overwhelmingly focused on counterterrorism, not great power competition.

The evaluation highlighted a fundamental disconnect between the National Defense Strategy’s goals and the actual implementation and measurement of security cooperation programs. The metrics for success in the counterterrorism era are tactical and unit-focused: the number of raids conducted, the proficiency of a partner’s special operations forces, or their ability to clear insurgents from a village. These same metrics proved misleading in the Sahel, where tactical proficiency failed to translate into strategic stability.

Success in strategic competition requires a different set of indicators. Tactical proficiency should matter less, as SFA should seek political and strategic alignment. Key questions include whether the partner chooses U.S. equipment over Chinese alternatives, which may enhance interoperability. Does their officer corps attend U.S. professional military education, internalizing democratic norms? Do they resist political and economic coercion from strategic competitors? Measuring tactical proficiency while ignoring these strategic choices creates false confidence, encouraging complacency.

Conclusion: Opening the Box

Security force assistance practitioners struggle to produce desired results because the United States measures the wrong things. With the wrong strategic ends, the ways distort everything that follows. Washington keeps trying to collapse partner development into clean indicators, forgetting that the act of measuring shapes the reality it claims to reveal. Partner forces learn to perform; advisors learn to report; headquarters learn to believe a fabricated picture. The system is self-reinforcing, confident in its progress until a crisis reveals a choreographic army.

This measurement obsession was highlighted in a 2025 DoD Inspector General report on the efficacy of Security Force Assistance Brigades. This report, like many others, demands quantifiable proof that SFA is working. But this mentality fundamentally misunderstands advising because there is no rigid checklist for effective military advising. In terms of metrics, the advisor’s personality is critical to effectively working with a foreign military because advising is deeply relational, culturally embedded, and politically sensitive.

Fixing measurement obsessions means redesigning evaluations with logic and strategic focus.

First, models must shift from “proof-seeking” to “hypothesis-testing.” A hypothesis-testing approach reframes assessment around institutional behavior rather than performance theater. Consider a partner force engaged against an insurgency where vehicle readiness constrains patrolling abilities. Instead of counting the number of mechanics trained, advisors might test the hypothesis that mentoring a partner logistics battalion over 18 months will improve independent maintenance and parts distribution resulting in sustained vehicle availability. If readiness does not improve, the result is not program failure but diagnostic insight about corruption in the supply chain, interference with assignments, or misaligned incentives. Success in irregular warfare sometimes depends more on identifying constraints than validating SFA programs.

Second, qualitative judgments must be elevated to stand equally with quantitative indicators. The system must formally structure and empower a seasoned advisor’s narrative observations. Insights into leadership quality, unit morale, and institutional culture are often the most accurate instruments available. Reporting systems must be created to treat advisor narratives not as “color commentary,” but as key evidence. SOCIUM tracks U.S. security cooperation inputs as a classified system of record, but advisor unit inputs end up in this black hole. Finding a way to convert these into meaningful measurements will ensure the next SFA mission is effective based on trends analysis. Additionally, SOCIUM inputs must be better standardized across the joint force as 2023-2024 interviews with active duty military advisors, led to perceptions that National Guard troops were overreporting foreign military advising engagements to justify their deployments.

Third, the U.S. must measure for strategic competition, not just counterterrorism. The metrics for success against a peer adversary are not tactical but political and institutional. Key questions are not about raid proficiency but a partner’s strategic alignment, resistance to rival influence, and commitment to democratic norms. The AM&E framework must be reoriented to answer these questions.

Finally, advisors should privilege indicators that partners cannot fake. Valuable indicators for irregular warfare practitioners should look beyond graduation rates, scripted exercises, and staged evaluations. U.S. policymakers must accept what experienced advisors already know: real partner capability is not a tallied list but is instead something that is witnessed. Complex human systems cannot be captured by metrics designed to simplify them.

Schrödinger’s Cat endures in physics because it captures a paradox: observation changes the thing observed. Security force assistance suffers from the same logic. Washington’s choice of what to measure shapes how partners learn and how advisors teach. When measuring performance, performance results. When measuring bureaucracy, bureaucracy results.

If the United States wants a return on SFA investment, partner forces that can fight, then the Pentagon must stop treating measurement as truth and start treating it as a tool. Only then can we open the box without discovering yet another partner force that looked seemingly alive only until the moment we observed that they were not at all.

Jahara “FRANKY” Matisek, PhD, (@JaharaMatisek) is a U.S. Air Force command pilot and nonresident research fellow at the U.S. Naval War College, Payne Institute for Public Policy, Resilience Initiative Center, and Defense Analyses and Research Corporation. He has published over one hundred and fifty articles on national security issues and is a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University and a Co-Principal Investigator for a Defense Security Cooperation University research project.’

Robert Schafer is a strategic plans analyst at the Center for Army Lessons Learned and publishes extensively on irregular warfare-related topics, such as security force assistance and civil affairs operations. He is also a PhD candidate in international relations at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI.

Main image generated by ChatGPT using DALL·E, OpenAI (January 2026).

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Naval War College, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, or Department of Defense. Material is based upon work supported by the Defense Security Cooperation University research program under Grant/Cooperative Agreement No. HQ0034241006.

20.  The S-500 Factor: India’s Missile Defence Ambitions and the New Asian Security Dilemma

​Summary:

India is again weighing Russia’s S-500 to cap a layered air and missile defense stack that already includes the S-400. The argument is deterrence by denial and added protection for cities, bases, and strategic nodes as missile and air threats grow. The politics are harder than the physics. A move toward S-500 deepens Moscow ties and stresses Washington, with CAATSA risk, interoperability fears, and doubts about sharing sensitive U.S. systems. Regionally, Pakistan is likely to seek offense overmatch through saturation, cruise missiles, decoys, and electronic attack, while China adjusts planning and tightens links with Pakistan. The result is a classic offense defense spiral in the Asia-Indo-Pacific.

The S-500 Factor: India’s Missile Defence Ambitions and the New Asian Security Dilemma

by Tahir Azad

|

02.03.2026 at 06:00am

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/02/03/the-s-500-factor/

India is steadily modernizing its military capabilities and expanding its air defense network, entering a potentially transformative phase. After buying advanced fighter jets and multi-layer missile defense systems such as the S-400 missile system, India is once again focusing on the Russian S-500 missile system, which is at the top of the list for air and missile defense. The timing is important because the renewed push comes at a time when strategic competition is getting worse in Asia, threats from both conventional and non-conventional weapons are rising, and the global order is changing quickly. Vladimir Putin’s visit to India in 2025 has given this goal more energy by starting up talks again about buying high-end weapons and making weapons together.

This paper examines the potential benefits for India regarding a prospective S-500 acquisition, its integration into India’s overarching military modernization efforts, the anticipated responses from regional powers—particularly Pakistan and the People’s Republic of China—and the apprehension with which the United States is monitoring this strategic realignment.

Putin’s 2025 India Visit: A Strategic Reset

Putin’s visit to India in December 2025, which was his first in four years, came at a very important time. Reuters says that the visit was meant to strengthen energy and defense ties that had been strained by Western pressure after Russia’s war in Ukraine. Before the summit, there were credible reports that India was going to try to get new arms deals. It was interested in the S-500 missile defense shield and Russian fighter jets, in addition to more long-range surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems. The joint statement that came out after the summit did not finalize any deal for the S-500 or confirm the purchase of a new S-400/S-500 package. However, the fact that these high-end systems were even being talked about shows where India’s strategic thinking is going. The summit focused on a broader shift instead of just a buyer-seller contract. Both sides agreed to work together on making military hardware, spare parts, and co-production under India’s “Make-in-India” or “self-reliance” model.

Putin’s visit could be a turning point because it could lead to more than just renewing old deals. It could also lead to a new way of working together, where India gradually builds up its own capabilities while still getting high-end Russian technology.

Why the S-500 Matters for India: Strategic Gains and Doctrinal Shifts

Filling the Upper Tier of a Layered Defense Shield

The S-500 is often called Russia’s next-generation “upper-tier” air and missile defense system. It is meant to stop a wide range of aerial threats, including planes, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and even some near-space threats like hypersonic glide vehicles and low-orbit satellites. On paper, it can hit targets hundreds of kilometers away, making it one of the best long-range surface-to-air and anti-ballistic missile systems in the world. India already has the S-400 missile system, which is a bit older. They signed a contract in 2018 for five regiments, three of which have been delivered and the two remaining regiments are scheduled for delivery in 2026. The S-500 would be on top of or next to this network, giving India a real multi-layered air and missile defense system. With threats on the rise, like ballistic missiles being developed in Islamabad and China’s growing strategic arsenal, the S-500 would strengthen India’s top-tier defense, protect important hubs (cities, military bases, and major installations) better, and make it more expensive for an enemy to even think about a high-altitude, long-range strike.

Enhancing Deterrence, Not Just Defense

Acquiring the S-500 missile defense system is more than just a defensive move. In strategic theory, a robust defensive shield can facilitate deterrence by denial, thereby diminishing confidence in an adversary’s capacity to cause harm. In South Asia, where India, Pakistan, and increasingly China all have nuclear weapons, improving missile defense can act as a hedge by making limited conventional or even nuclear strikes riskier and less appealing to enemies.

Also, a strong air and missile defense shield gives India more operational flexibility as it upgrades its air force (for example, by modernizing its current fleet of fighter jets and getting new platforms) and expands its naval capabilities. It might let India think about being more aggressive, like with naval task forces or forward bases, because it would be better protected against air and missile attacks.

Signaling Strategic Autonomy and Great-Power Posture

A possible S-500 deal would also send a bigger message: India does not want small improvements. It wants the best technology available. The fact that voices are rising about the S-500 deal in 2025, when competition between great powers is growing, shows that India wants to stay independent while deepening its ties with the West. The recent summit also stressed working together to produce and share technology, which shows a desire to move from being a buyer to a co-developer, which is a sign of a rising defense power. This fits with India’s bigger goal of showing off its power not just in the region, but sometimes even around the world, so it can protect its most important interests and deal with new threats as they come up.

Regional Fallout: How Pakistan and China Might React

Pakistan: From Defensive Angst to Offensive Compensations

Pakistan may consider India’s interest in the S-500 as a developing challenge. In the past, Pakistan has seen India’s purchase of advanced SAMs, like the S-400, as a threat to stability. When India signed the S-400 deal, Pakistan formally criticized it and suggested ways to fight back. As India looks at the S-500 and maybe more SAM regiments, Pakistani strategic planners may have to speed up the modernization of their strike and deterrent capabilities even more. This could manifest in several ways:

• Doubling down on the development of ballistic missiles, including systems with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), to break through or saturate missile defenses.
• Investing in stealthy cruise missiles, hypersonic or quasi-ballistic systems, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), decoys, or electronic warfare—tools that can get through or overwhelm layered air-defense networks.
• Looking for more technological cooperation with China (or even other countries) to make better strike systems.

This kind of response could make the region even less stable. Every time India upgrades its defenses, Pakistan responds in a way that is not equal, keeping the offense-defense spiral going.

China: Strategic Calculations, Not Panic — Yet

China is considering India’s plans for the S-500 as a new layer to the region’s deterrence dynamics, albeit as less existential than they are for Pakistan. China already has advanced SAMs and has advantages in many areas, such as numbers, range, airpower, and space-based assets. But if India gets the S-500, it could make planning for the PLA more difficult in some situations:

• Airpower: Long-range SAMs like the S-500 would make it more dangerous for planes to fly over or strike India from the air. Chinese assets that are very important, like bombers, surveillance platforms, and stand-off munitions, might have to change their routes or depend more on stand-off or space-based platforms.
• Escalation control: Both sides have nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. If India has a strong missile shield, it could give New Delhi more confidence, which could change China’s calculations about when to escalate.
• Strengthening the “arms triangle” between India, Pakistan, and China: China may increase military cooperation with Pakistan and speed up technology transfers (cruise missiles, hypersonic weapons, UAVs, cyber and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or ISR) to make sure its South Asian ally has a strong deterrent.

China is unlikely to see India’s purchase of S-500s as a direct threat to its existence, though. Instead, China might see it as just one more piece in a complicated web of deterrence, competition, and power projection across South Asia and the larger Indo-Pacific.

The United States’ Dilemma: Partnership, Pressure, and Strategic Ambiguity

India’s purchases from Russia put the US in a strategic bind. America sees India more and more as a key part of its Indo-Pacific architecture on one hand. On the other hand, US laws like the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) punish countries that make big arms deals with Russia, especially ones that involve advanced systems.

India’s purchase of the S-400 in 2018 caused a lot of debates in the US. Some people were worried that Russian radars and air-defense systems could make US-made platforms sold or leased to India less safe in the future.

The Indo-Russia summit in 2025 makes things even more complicated. As Russia and India work together to make things and produce things, the risk of technology spreading or at least being seen grows. This could make the US less likely to share advanced platforms (like stealth fighters, advanced surveillance, and electronic warfare systems) with India.

US policymakers are also probably keeping a close eye on whether Russia gets a stronger foothold in India’s defense sector. This could threaten US strategic influence in South Asia and the Indo-Pacific in the long term. However, the US is also likely to be very careful about how it responds in the near future. Punitive actions could put at risk the growing cooperation between the US and India on maritime security, intelligence sharing, and strategies against China. The balancing act could make Washington more involved in diplomacy while quietly pushing New Delhi towards “Western-aligned” or “indigenization” purchases.

Why, for Now, the S-500 Remains a Prospect — Not a Done Deal

Even though there is new interest, there are still major problems that make it impossible to buy the S-500 right away:

• No formal contract was signed: There was no MoU or procurement agreement for the S-500 (or any other S-400/Su-57 deals) in the joint statement after the 2025 summit. The main agreements were about making things together, making spare parts, and making trade and energy ties stronger.
• Sanctions, payments, and money problems: Normal arms deals in US dollars are still hard to do because of international sanctions on Russia. Analysts say that before India can place big strategic orders, it needs to either increase its exports to Russia or find strong ways to trade and pay in rupees and rubles.
• Trade-offs in terms of strategy and the economy: Getting and keeping S-500s (or even more S-400s) is expensive and would require a lot of money for logistics, maintenance, and training. New Delhi seems to want to cut down on its reliance on foreign supply chains by supporting joint manufacturing and “Make in India”. However, this approach takes time and can’t replace short-term capability.

So, the S-500 is still a top priority, not something that has already happened. The argument over it—whether India sees it as necessary, desirable, or a way to protect itself—says a lot about India’s changing strategic position.

Conclusion

Talk of high-end arms purchases, joint production, and deeper defense integration has come back up since Putin’s visit to India in 2025 and the subsequent summit reaffirmation of India’s special strategic partnership with Russia. The S-500, which is a symbol of next-generation air and missile defense, is probably the most important thing that analysts are informally talking about. If the S-500 were to be bought or made together, it would make India’s layered air and missile defense system stronger, make it harder for enemies to attack, and give India more power to defend itself and project power in a region that is always changing. It would be a big transformation for India’s defense capabilities and send a message to not only Pakistan and China, but also to the US and other major world powers. But the S-500 also highlights a long-standing strategic problem: every time a country improves its defenses, its enemies tend to respond with offensive measures, which could lead to an arms race instead of making the region more stable. Pakistan could speed up the development of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, or hypersonic missiles. China could also work more closely with Pakistan on technology and strategy or focus more on asymmetric strike and surveillance capabilities. From Washington’s point of view, the S-500 raises big worries about technology transfer, compatibility, and long-term strategic alignment. India is trying to find a balance between keeping its defense ties with Russia and strengthening its ties with the US. The road ahead is not easy. The S-500 deal isn’t just about hardware; it is also about doctrine, deterrence, and the future of security in Asia. It is clear what India’s strategic goals are. But whether that goal leads to stable deterrence or an arms race that is hard to predict will depend on how New Delhi handles the timing of acquisitions, reactions in the region, and outside pressures, especially from the US.

Tags: India, India Defense Strategy, Missile Defense

About The Author

• 
  
• Tahir Azad
• Dr. Tahir Mahmood Azad is currently a research scholar at the Department of Politics & International Relations, the University of Reading, UK. He previously served as an Affiliate Researcher at King’s College London and held fellowships at Sandia National Laboratories (USA), the University of Bristol, the University of Georgia USA, the Graduate Institute Geneva, ISDP Stockholm, and PRIF Germany. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Leicester and holds a PhD in Strategic & Nuclear Studies from National Defence University (NDU), Pakistan. Azad also worked as a Research Fellow and Programme Coordinator at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI), Pakistan. His research focuses on nuclear politics, missile proliferation, China’s military modernisation, politics & security in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East regions, and South Asian strategic affairs.

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