Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine capacity to feel for their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."

– G. M. Gilbert (psychologist who interrogated Nazis that were being prosecuted in Nuremberg)

“The old world is dying. And a New World struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

– Antonio Gramsci

"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their own selfish purposes."

– Andrew Jackson

1. US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms

2. U.S. Is Added to Human Rights Watchlist

3. Secretary of State Rubio says purge of USAID programs complete, with 83% of agency's programs gone

4. A bane for tyrants abroad, U.S.-funded networks fear fate under Kari Lake

5. A New Deal With Moscow?

6. Ukraine Hits Moscow With Biggest Drone Attack of the War

7. Taiwan Stronger: Ramping Up Defense Resilience to Counter China

8. Is Trump’s Mineral Deal Unprecedented? Not Exactly.

9. Rethinking the Response to Russian Aggression: Command, Management, and Leadership

10. Interview with David Ochmanek

11. Nickels And Dimes: Trump’s Defense Cuts Are Unrealistic By: Michael O’Hanlon

12. Jüri Saar: Opposing theories behind the Russo-Ukrainian War

13. US vetoes G7 proposal to combat Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers

14. The Shifting World Order: "Trump and Vance Have Contempt for the Europeans"

15. Philippines Arrests Former President Rodrigo Duterte on ICC Warrant

16. Why the U.S. Keeps Losing to China in the Battle Over Critical Minerals

17. A Personal Explanation of Why I Don’t Vote By George Friedman

18. DOD civilian employees given $1 spending limit for travel cards

19. Exposing China’s Legal Preparations for a Taiwan Invasion

20. America's Eroding Airpower

21. The End of Pax Americana – Can Trump 2.0 Confront China Alone?

22. The ICE Detention of a Columbia Student Is Just the Beginning

23. Senator Mark Kelly Urges Continued U.S. Support After Visiting Ukraine. Musk Calls Him a ‘Traitor.’

24. Oh, the Places You'll Go! – Harding Project

1. US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms

I look forward to the counterarguments that explain why this is completely wrong.

Excerpts:

Mandeep Tiwana, co-secretary general of Civicus, said that the watchlist “looks at countries where we remain concerned about deteriorating civic space conditions, in relation to freedoms of peaceful assembly, association and expression”.

The selection process, the website states, incorporates insights and data from Civicus’s global network of research partners and data.

The decision to add the US to the first 2025 watchlist was made in response to what the group described as the “Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms and global cooperation”.

In the news release announcing the US’s addition, the organization cited recent actions taken by the Trump administration that they argue will likely “severely impact constitutional freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression, and association”.

...

Civicus described Trump’s actions since taking office as an “unparalleled attack on the rule of law” not seen “since the days of McCarthyism in the twentieth century”, stating that these moves erode the checks and balances essential to democracy.

“Restrictive executive orders, unjustifiable institutional cutbacks, and intimidation tactics through threatening pronouncements by senior officials in the administration are creating an atmosphere to chill democratic dissent, a cherished American ideal,” Tiwana said.

In addition to the watchlist, the Civicus Monitor classifies the state of civic space in countries using five ratings: open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed and closed.

Currently, the US has a “narrowed” rating, which it also had during the Biden administration, meaning that while citizens can exercise their civic freedom, such as rights to association, peaceful assembly and expression, occasional violations occur.

US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms

Civicus, an international non-profit, puts country alongside Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia

The Guardian · by Anna Betts · March 10, 2025

The United States has been added to the Civicus Monitor Watchlist, which identifies countries that the global civil rights watchdog believes are currently experiencing a rapid decline in civic freedoms.

Civicus, an international non-profit organization dedicated to “strengthening citizen action and civil society around the world”, announced the inclusion of the US on the non-profit’s first watchlist of 2025 on Monday, alongside the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Italy, Pakistan and Serbia.

The watchlist is part of the Civicus Monitor, which tracks developments in civic freedoms across 198 countries. Other countries that have previously been featured on the watchlist in recent years include Zimbabwe, Argentina, El Salvador and the United Arab Emirates.

Mandeep Tiwana, co-secretary general of Civicus, said that the watchlist “looks at countries where we remain concerned about deteriorating civic space conditions, in relation to freedoms of peaceful assembly, association and expression”.

The selection process, the website states, incorporates insights and data from Civicus’s global network of research partners and data.

The decision to add the US to the first 2025 watchlist was made in response to what the group described as the “Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms and global cooperation”.

In the news release announcing the US’s addition, the organization cited recent actions taken by the Trump administration that they argue will likely “severely impact constitutional freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression, and association”.

The group cited several of the administration’s actions such as the mass termination of federal employees, the appointment of Trump loyalists in key government positions, the withdrawal from international efforts such as the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, the freezing of federal and foreign aid and the attempted dismantling of USAid.

The organization warned that these decisions “will likely impact civic freedoms and reverse hard-won human rights gains around the world”.

The group also pointed to the administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters, and the Trump administration’s unprecedented decision to control media access to presidential briefings, among others.

Civicus described Trump’s actions since taking office as an “unparalleled attack on the rule of law” not seen “since the days of McCarthyism in the twentieth century”, stating that these moves erode the checks and balances essential to democracy.

“Restrictive executive orders, unjustifiable institutional cutbacks, and intimidation tactics through threatening pronouncements by senior officials in the administration are creating an atmosphere to chill democratic dissent, a cherished American ideal,” Tiwana said.

In addition to the watchlist, the Civicus Monitor classifies the state of civic space in countries using five ratings: open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed and closed.

Currently, the US has a “narrowed” rating, which it also had during the Biden administration, meaning that while citizens can exercise their civic freedom, such as rights to association, peaceful assembly and expression, occasional violations occur.

For part of Trump’s first term, Tiwana said, the US had been categorized as “obstructed”, due to the administration’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests and restrictive state laws that were enacted limiting the rights of environmental justice protesters, and other actions.

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Under Joe Biden, the classification went back to “narrowed”, Tiwana, said, but as of Monday, the US has been placed on the watchlist as the group says it sees “significant deterioration” in civic freedoms occurring.

Tiwana noted that the US is again seemingly headed toward the “obstructed” category.

While the Trump administration often say they support fundamental freedoms and individual rights, like free speech, Tiwana believes that the administration seem “to be wanting to support these only for people who they see as agreeing with them”.

Historically, Tiwana said, the US has been “considered the beacon of democracy and defense of fundamental freedoms”.

“It was an important pillar of US foreign policy, even though it was imperfect, both domestically and how the US promoted it abroad,” he added.

But Tiwana believes that the recent actions and statements made by this US administration could empower authoritarian regimes around the world, undermine constitutional principles, and embolden those who “want to accumulate power and increase their wealth and their ability to stay in power for as long as possible”.

Tiwana says that he and the organization want to draw attention to the fact that those in power in the US are, in his view, engaging in a “zero-sum politics game” that is eroding “constitutional principles and frankly, engaging in, anti American behavior”.

“We urge the United States to uphold the rule of law and respect constitutional and international human rights norms,” said Tiwana.

The Guardian · by Anna Betts · March 10, 2025

2. U.S. Is Added to Human Rights Watchlist

Interestingly, but not surprisingly none of the major mainstream media outlets have picked this up. I am sure it will be disregarded by most as the report comes from a foreign source.

But I look forward to the analysis that demonstrates that this report is not accurate.

Excerpts:

The "narrowed" category also reflects CIVICUS’ assessment that while there is an existing free press, there may be restrictions due to regulation or political pressure on media owners.

This comes at a time when the editorial decisions made by major media organizations and governing bodies have prompted much discussion.

In February, the Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation into NPR and PBS due to concerns that they were “violating federal law by airing commercials,” which both newsroom CEOs deny. The FCC chair also spoke out against public funding for the two news sites.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and owner of the Washington Post, directed the organization to change the scope of its opinion pages in February, informing the team that they will be writing “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”

“We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others,” Bezos said in his note to the Post team.

U.S. Is Added to Human Rights Watchlist

TIME · by Solcyré Burga

The United States was added Sunday to the CIVICUS Monitor Watchlist, a research tool that publicizes the status of freedoms and threats to civil liberties worldwide.

The move comes amid President Donald Trump’s “assault on democratic norms and global cooperation,” said CIVICUS—a global alliance and network of civil society groups, including Amnesty International, that advocates for greater citizen action in areas where civil liberties are limited—in a press release. The organization also cited the Administration’s cut of more than 90% of its foreign aid contracts and its crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)—which Trump called “illegal and immoral discrimination programs”—through executive action.

“The Trump Administration seems hellbent on dismantling the system of checks and balances which are the pillars of a democratic society,” said Mandeep Tiwana, Interim Co-Secretary General of CIVICUS, in a press release. “Restrictive Executive Orders, unjustifiable institutional cutbacks, and intimidation tactics through threatening pronouncements by senior officials in the Administration are creating an atmosphere to chill democratic dissent, a cherished American ideal.”

Other countries on the watchlist include the Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Pakistan, and Serbia.

CIVICUS outlines the state of civil rights through five categories—open, narrowed, obstructed, repressed, and closed. “Open” is the highest ranking, meaning all people are able to practice liberties such as free speech, and the lowest is “closed.” Per CIVICUS, instances that result in a “decline in open civic space” include “repressive legislation that curtails free speech and dialogue, obstacles to civil society activities and operations and crackdowns on civil disobedience and peaceful demonstrations.”

The U.S. has been classified as “narrowed.” The “narrowed” label is CIVICUS’ assessment that while most people are able to exercise their rights of expression, free speech, and assembly, there are some attempts to violate these rights by the government. For example, CIVICUS cited crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protestors during the Biden Administration, after advocates took to the streets and staged college encampments to voice their discontent with the military assistance and funding the U.S. was sending to Israel. Students participated in demonstrations to demand their schools divest from any companies that profit from or have a relationship with Israel.

“We urge the United States to uphold the rule of law and respect constitutional and international human rights norms,” said Tiwana. “Americans across the political spectrum are appalled by the undemocratic actions of the current Administration.”

The White House did not immediately respond to TIME’s request for comment.

The "narrowed" category also reflects CIVICUS’ assessment that while there is an existing free press, there may be restrictions due to regulation or political pressure on media owners.

This comes at a time when the editorial decisions made by major media organizations and governing bodies have prompted much discussion.

In February, the Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation into NPR and PBS due to concerns that they were “violating federal law by airing commercials,” which both newsroom CEOs deny. The FCC chair also spoke out against public funding for the two news sites.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and owner of the Washington Post, directed the organization to change the scope of its opinion pages in February, informing the team that they will be writing “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”

“We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others,” Bezos said in his note to the Post team.

That same month, the White House announced its press team will pick the reporters who participate in the press pool—a move the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said is about “restoring power back to the American people, who President Trump was elected to serve.” However, many journalism advocates criticized the act. “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States. It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps,” the White House Correspondents’ Association said in a statement on Feb. 25.

The White House is also currently ensnared in a lawsuit brought forward by the Associated Press. The news organization has sued three Trump Administration officials—including Leavitt—after it was barred from access to the White House press briefings because it refused to change its editorial style and refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” after Trump renamed it in an Executive Order he signed in January.

TIME · by Solcyré Burga

3. Secretary of State Rubio says purge of USAID programs complete, with 83% of agency's programs gone

While many Americans cheer this it hardly makes a dent in the debt. There is no doubt the debt needs to be reduced. It is arguably the greatest long term national security issue. It is probably necessary to reduce foreign aid before the administration starts cutting entitlements which is the main cause of our debt. Now that this is done the Administration can attack the real problems: Social Security, medicare, and medicaid and other entitlement programs.

Secretary of State Rubio says purge of USAID programs complete, with 83% of agency's programs gone

By ELLEN KNICKMEYER

Updated 11:51 PM EDT, March 10, 2025

AP · by ELLEN KNICKMEYER · March 10, 2025

Follow live updates on President Donald Trump and his new administration.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday the Trump administration had finished its six-week purge of programs of the six-decade-old U.S. Agency for International Development and he would move the 18% of aid and development programs that survived under the State Department.

Rubio made the announcement in a post on X, in one of his relatively few public comments on what has been a historic shift away from U.S. foreign aid and development, executed by Trump political appointees at State and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency teams.

Rubio in the post thanked DOGE and “our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform” in foreign aid.

President Donald Trump on Jan. 20 issued an executive order directing a freeze of foreign assistance funding and a review of all of the tens of billions of dollars of U.S. aid and development work abroad. Trump charged that much of foreign assistance was wasteful and advanced a liberal agenda.

Rubio’s social media post Monday said that review was now “officially ending,” with some 5,200 of USAID’s 6,200 programs eliminated.

Those programs “spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Rubio wrote.

“In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18% of programs we are keeping ... to be administered more effectively under the State Department,” he said.

Democratic lawmakers and others call the shutdown of congressionally funded programs illegal, saying such a move requires Congress’ approval.

USAID supporters said the sweep of the cuts made it difficult to tell what U.S. efforts abroad the Trump administration actually supports.

“The patterns that are emerging is the administration does not support democracy programs, they don’t support civil society ... they don’t support NGO programs,” or health or emergency response, said Andrew Natsios, the USAID administrator for Republican former President George W. Bush.

“So what’s left”?” Natsios asked.

A group of former U.S. diplomats, national security figures and others condemned what it said was an opaque, partisan and rushed review process and urged Congress to intervene.

“The facts show that life-saving programs were severely cut, putting millions of people in allied countries at risk of starvation, disease and death,” while giving Russia, China and other adversaries opportunities to gain influence abroad as the U.S. retreats, the group, the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, said.

The Trump administration gave almost no details on which aid and development efforts abroad it spared as it mass-emailed contract terminations to aid groups and other USAID partners by the thousands within days earlier this month. The rapid pace, and the steps skipped in ending contracts, left USAID supporters challenging whether any actual program-by-program reviews had taken place.

Aid groups say even some life-saving programs that Rubio and others had promised to spare are in limbo or terminated, such as those providing emergency nutritional support for starving children and drinking water for sprawling camps for families uprooted by war in Sudan.

Republicans broadly have made clear they want foreign assistance that would promote a far narrower interpretation of U.S. national interests going forward.

The State Department in one of multiple lawsuits it is battling over its rapid shutdown of USAID had said earlier this month it was killing more than 90% of USAID programs. Rubio gave no explanation for why his number was lower.

The dismantling of USAID that followed Trump’s order upended decades of policy that humanitarian and development aid abroad advanced U.S. national security by stabilizing regions and economies, strengthening alliances and building goodwill.

In the weeks after Trump’s order, one of his appointees and transition team members, Pete Marocco, and Musk pulled USAID staff around the world off the job through forced leaves and firings, shut down USAID payments overnight and terminated aid and development contracts by the thousands.

Contractors and staffers running efforts ranging from epidemic control to famine prevention to job and democracy training stopped work. Aid groups and other USAID partners laid off tens of thousands of their workers in the U.S. and abroad.

Lawsuits say the sudden shutdown of USAID has stiffed aid groups and businesses that had contracts with it totaling billions of dollars.

The shutdown has left many USAID staffers and contractors and their families still overseas, many of them awaiting back payments and travel expenses to return home.

In Washington, the sometimes contradictory orders issued by the three men — Rubio, Musk and Marocco — overseeing the USAID cuts have left many uncertain who was calling the shots, and fueled talk of power struggles.

Musk and Rubio on Monday, as Trump had last week, insisted relations between the two of them were smooth.

“Good working with you,” Musk tweeted in response to Rubio’s announcement.

“Tough, but necessary,” Musk wrote of Rubio’s announcement on the cuts.

AP · by ELLEN KNICKMEYER · March 10, 2025

4. A bane for tyrants abroad, U.S.-funded networks fear fate under Kari Lake

While DOGE may be doing a lot of good at identifying fraud, waste, and abuse and using data and the balance sheet to make decisions, this is one area where their ignorance of national security will do a lot of damage.

Musk is displaying his ignorance here:

Excerpt:

A month ago, Elon Musk called for Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty to be shut down, tweeting: "It's just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money."

This is an agenda and not informed analysis. I doubt he or any of the wiz kids have any understanding of what VOA, et. al., does and how important it is to advancing US interests with foreign target audiences. Do we really want authoritarian/dictators completely controlling the narratives in their country? If so then I guess we should eliminate these organizations especially if you think it is "just radical left crazy people talking to themselves." But that statement shows that Musk has no idea what he is talking about. I know some of the most professional journalists who are committed to tell the truth about the US around the world while also telling the truth about dictators and authoritarian regimes around the world. These organizations stand up for and are one example of one of our most cherished civil liberties, a free press.

A bane for tyrants abroad, U.S.-funded networks fear fate under Kari Lake

NPR · by David Folkenflik · March 10, 2025

Kari Lake, U.S. President Donald Trump's choice to lead Voice of America, is shown speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel And Convention Center on Feb. 21, 2025 in Oxon Hill, Maryland. Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images

A month ago, Elon Musk called for Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty to be shut down, tweeting: "It's just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money."

It's in keeping with Musk's DOGE initiative, prompting the administration to slash jobs, cut programs and even seek to sever funds for contracts already in progress throughout the federal government.

In the weeks since, Trump administration officials have asserted greater control over the Voice of America's parent, the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Several DOGE aides have been sent to the agency, which has commenced an initial batch of firings of probationary employees at Voice of America. And leaders at other U.S.-funded networks that broadcast overseas fear Musk's grander wish — for a full shutdown — may be coming true.

Those outlets include such storied networks as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, started up to counter Communist propaganda.

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These institutions, unlike the government-owned Voice of America, are separate not-for-profit entities. Yet they are fully funded by the U.S. government through the same federal parent agency.

Were the government to withhold money for any appreciable length of time, "We would bleed out," an official at one of the international broadcast networks said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

(NPR has no affiliation with the U.S. Agency for Global Media and typically receives about 1% of its annual budget from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.)

This account is based on interviews with 12 people with knowledge of developments at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which is the federal agency that oversees all these international broadcasters and distributes money to them. All spoke on condition they not be named for fear of recrimination, given the backdrop of government firings and budget cuts. The agency did not reply to two requests for comment for this story.

Soft diplomacy versus hardline regimes

The networks' mission is to deliver news coverage and cultural programming to places where a free press is threatened or doesn't exist. They are also designed as a form of soft diplomacy, by modeling independent journalism that incorporates dissent from government policy. Together, according to the agency, the networks reach 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week.

That comes with diplomatic complications. The reporting of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has vexed autocratic-minded leaders in Russia and Hungary as well as their allies. The networks' journalists have been imprisoned or detained in Russian-controlled Crimea, Belarus, Azerbaijan and Russia itself.

The network's Farda news service reports intensely on life in Iran and is a thorn in the side of the regime there. The Iranian government, a sworn enemy of the U.S. and frequent irritant to President Trump, is allied with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In December, the regime sentenced former Radio Farda reporter Reza Valizadeh to 10 years in prison for "cooperating with a hostile government."

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"Clearly, this regime feels threatened by the forces of freedom, including independent journalism," Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty chief Steve Capus said at the time. "It's why Radio Farda's mission of providing uncensored news and other programming to the Iranian people is more important than ever. Journalism is not a crime."

Similarly, Radio Free Asia's reports on the oppression of Uighur Muslims by Chinese authorities helped to bring their plight to international attention. In 2020, North Korean officials executed the owner of a fishing fleet for secretly listening to broadcasts by Radio Free Asia while at sea, the network reported. Authorities brought in 100 of his peers to watch the execution as a warning of the dangers of tuning in.

Networks monitoring aid programs

According to six people with knowledge, officials at the international broadcasters are closely monitoring deep cuts at the U.S. State Department to international relief efforts for which money has already been contracted. (Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.)

They also see parallels to the financial crisis at the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit organization that awards grants to strengthen democracy in 100 countries. Like the networks, it receives a direct appropriation annually from Congress.

The endowment is suing the Trump administration, saying the White House has unlawfully withheld nearly $240 million in congressionally approved funding, the bulk of it already obligated.

No concrete proof of such broad intentions at USAGM has publicly surfaced. The question of whether the agency could cut off funding for the networks is further complicated by two countervailing facts: Congress directly appropriates money for them, granting the agency only a small degree of latitude to redirect funds; on the other hand, Congress has not passed a budget for the current year in progress, and the current stop-gap measure is set to run out on Friday.

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Trump officials push to overhaul agency

Trump has announced he wants Kari Lake, a former Phoenix local TV news anchor turned two-time unsuccessful MAGA political candidate, to be the next director of Voice of America; hers, by law, is not a presidential appointment. She legally must await the Senate confirmation of Trump's pick to lead USAGM — the conservative media critic Brent Bozell III. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has not yet set a date for a confirmation hearing. Then Lake has to be approved by a bipartisan board overseeing the network; the White House fired its members upon Trump taking office.

In the meantime, Lake is helping to lead the agency as a senior adviser to Trump. She has made conciliatory remarks to the journalists and networks in her official communications, while signaling changes and cuts may be in store.

"I understand the challenges faced by those who cover news both in front of and behind the camera, and I have immense respect for the men and women who do the job with honesty and integrity," Lake wrote in a memo to staff obtained by NPR.

"Sadly, journalism is experiencing dark days right now," she continued. "The public has lost almost all trust in the media. For those reading this — it is critical we recognize our agency is funded by hardworking American taxpayers, many of whom are struggling to make ends meet."

"I am committed to quickly reforming and modernizing the agency into something the American people are willing to support," she wrote.

In outside statements, Lake has been blunter. "We won't become Trump TV," she said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, "but it sure as hell will not be 'TDS TV.' You can find all the Trump Derangement Syndrome that you want over on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, 60 Minutes, The Washington Post and The New York Times."

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That said, journalists throughout the agency's networks say she has not met to talk substance or her plans with their newsrooms or senior executives. (They spoke on condition of anonymity given a climate of fear.)

Following the DOGE game plan

Following the DOGE playbook, the U.S. Agency for Global Media has demanded that agency and VOA employees give weekly updates of their accomplishments, in correspondence reviewed by NPR. Several VOA staffers, speaking on condition of anonymity due to fears of repercussions, say there have been offers of buyouts, which they believe will be followed by broader layoffs.

In addition, the agency has also fired nine journalists at Voice of America who held probationary status. The agency also fired two journalists from the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which is similarly fully owned by the U.S. government and runs Radio and TV Martí. The agency did so over the objections of Voice of America's senior management, according to three people with knowledge of events, speaking on condition they not be named for fear of reprisal. Voice of America did not reply to requests for comment.

Ostap Yarysh, a host and correspondent for the Ukrainian language service of the Voice of America, was among those fired. He tells NPR that he was pulled in a few hours before his show last Thursday and told not to do any more work. Yarish says the network hired him as a contractor in 2019, but promoted him in 2023 to a full-time employee. He says he was still in the last legs of a two-year probationary period, and hence vulnerable.

"I was given no notice, basically," Yarysh says. "There's speculation this was political retribution. I don't think that was the case. It was just a probationary employee directive and they got everyone."

He said the U.S. Agency for Global Media first tried to fire him two weeks earlier but Voice of America leaders objected, designating him as an employee critical to its mission. This time, Yarysh says, he received a termination notice saying he had not been designated as mission-critical - despite what news executives at Voice of America said.

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Return of a Project 2025 author

During the final year of Trump's first presidential term, his appointee as chief executive of the U.S. Agency for Global Media similarly tried to upend it and its networks. Many of the efforts of then-CEO Michael Pack were overturned in court and found to have broken laws.

Pack's acting vice president of legal, compliance and risk was cited by a 2023 federal investigative report as having failed to observe federal law in several instances. That executive, Mora Namdar, wrote the chapter on USAGM and international broadcasting in Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation's suggested blueprint for Trump's second term. Though Trump disavowed it during the campaign, many of his administration's actions have closely hewed to its suggestions.

In her chapter for Project 2025, Namdar called for consolidation of many of the foreign language services, stricter scrutiny of visas for journalists who are citizens of other countries, and the scrapping of many "firewall" provisions intended to protect the journalists who work for the networks from political meddling.

In fall 2020, Pack assigned two political appointees at the agency to investigate senior White House correspondent Steve Herman; it was decried as a witch hunt and found by a federal judge to be an unconstitutional breach of the firewall's free speech protections. Similarly, in early 2021, veteran reporter Patsy Widakuswara had been shifted from her assignment after pressing then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo over the January 6th siege of the U.S. Capitol.

Two weeks ago, Herman, was suspended and is being once more investigated over his social media posts of articles critical of the Trump administration. The network also reassigned Widakuswara from her beat covering the White House.

Both moves were said to have been done by the network's news leaders, not political appointees at the agency; VOA's director, Michael Abramowitz is a veteran editor at the Washington Post and former head of Freedom House, the free speech and journalism advocacy organization.

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As of this month, Namdar appears to be back on board, spotted last week at USAGM, according to four people with knowledge who spoke on condition they not be named, citing fear of retribution. Namdar is said to be advising Lake.

USAGM did not respond to NPR's questions about Namdar's role at the agency.

NPR · by David Folkenflik · March 10, 2025

5. A New Deal With Moscow?

Excerpts:

Mr. Trump isn’t the first American president to set aside morality to make a deal with Moscow. Franklin D. Roosevelt, believing he would need Soviet help against Japan if the Manhattan Project failed to deliver a war-ending weapon on time, traveled to Yalta in the closing months of World War II hoping to enlist Joseph Stalin in the Pacific fight. Bogged down in Vietnam and contemplating the collapse of the Bretton Woods financial system, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger reached out to Leonid Brezhnev with an offer of détente.

Whether the rest of us like it or not, Mr. Trump intends to hammer out a third pragmatic compromise between Moscow and Washington. The president’s supporters claim this is nothing new. Both the Yalta agreements and Nixon’s détente sacrificed human rights to cold-blooded realpolitik.

From Team Trump’s perspective, a pragmatic understanding with Russia, even if the handshake takes place over the bleeding corpse of Ukraine, is part of a strategy to reset the balance of power worldwide. It could pull Russia away from China and enlist Russian help in getting Iran to accept a serious nuclear agreement.

...

Given this history, the Kremlin will see any agreements with Mr. Trump as a temporary truce rather than a permanent peace. That limits the value of a deal. Moscow won’t accept permanent restraints on its behavior in exchange for temporary promises from Washington.

Meanwhile, a bargain with Russia may pose more problems than benefits for the MAGA movement in years to come. If Russia fails to honor the bargain scrupulously, as is likely, American opinion is likely to turn against a failed bargain, as happened with the Yalta agreements. And if the deal succeeds in restoring American power as détente did, the political pressure in the U.S. to return to a more ideologically assertive foreign policy will intensify—as happened in the Ford, Carter and Reagan years.

A New Deal With Moscow?

Trump’s bid for a pact with Putin recalls the efforts of FDR and other presidents.

By Walter Russell Mead

March 10, 2025 5:27 pm ET

President Donald Trump in Washington, Feb. 11, and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Feb. 6. Photo: saul loebkristina kormilitsyna/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The true nature and the full price of President Trump’s Russia and Ukraine policies has become clear in recent days. Mr. Trump believes that improved relations with Russia are necessary for the American revival he hopes to lead, and he is willing to pay a high, even stupefying, price in moral authority, alliance relations and Ukrainian territory to get his deal. Vladimir Putin understands this and will charge the U.S. accordingly.

Mr. Trump isn’t the first American president to set aside morality to make a deal with Moscow. Franklin D. Roosevelt, believing he would need Soviet help against Japan if the Manhattan Project failed to deliver a war-ending weapon on time, traveled to Yalta in the closing months of World War II hoping to enlist Joseph Stalin in the Pacific fight. Bogged down in Vietnam and contemplating the collapse of the Bretton Woods financial system, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger reached out to Leonid Brezhnev with an offer of détente.

Whether the rest of us like it or not, Mr. Trump intends to hammer out a third pragmatic compromise between Moscow and Washington. The president’s supporters claim this is nothing new. Both the Yalta agreements and Nixon’s détente sacrificed human rights to cold-blooded realpolitik.

From Team Trump’s perspective, a pragmatic understanding with Russia, even if the handshake takes place over the bleeding corpse of Ukraine, is part of a strategy to reset the balance of power worldwide. It could pull Russia away from China and enlist Russian help in getting Iran to accept a serious nuclear agreement.

It is tempting but wrong to attack this strategy primarily on moral grounds. Curbing Beijing’s rise without risking a war between the U.S. and China is both a great and a deeply moral goal. If Trump policy were to end in a grand bargain with Russia that facilitated a long-term understanding with China, future historians might praise a strategy that contemporary observers largely condemn.

The more relevant question is about effectiveness. How likely are the results of this strategy to justify its extremely high upfront costs? The outlook here is mixed. In offering Mr. Putin explicit recognition of a sphere of interest in portions of the former Soviet Union including Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Armenia, Mr. Trump is making larger and more consequential concessions than his 21st-century predecessors tried in their own failed attempts to reach an understanding with Mr. Putin. And in offering to abandon American support for democracy promotion, Mr. Trump is returning to the studied silence on human rights that characterized Nixon-era détente.

If Mr. Putin is gettable, Mr. Trump has laid out tempting offers. Further, in making his gestures unilateral, with no Russian concessions asked in return, Mr. Trump is minimizing, as far as possible, any distrust on the Russian side about his intentions.

The question isn’t whether Mr. Putin will accept Mr. Trump’s generous opening moves. He will take all he is given. The question is what comes next. Will both Russia and the U.S. honor Mr. Trump’s proposed grand bargain? Will these sweeping concessions produce the results Mr. Trump hopes they will?

Here, the history isn’t encouraging. If one goes back far enough, democratic America and authoritarian Russia managed to coexist peacefully for long stretches of time. Russian expansionism in North America early in the 19th century helped prompt James Monroe to issue his famous doctrine, and the brutal antisemitism that drove hundreds of thousands of desperate Russian Jews into American exile led to more friction as the century neared its end. Even so, the intervening years saw solid bilateral relations, despite Russia’s record of repression at home and abroad. And the U.S. got Alaska out of the deal.

As both sides became global powers in the 20th century, agreement proved more elusive. Harry S. Truman regretted the Yalta agreements as early as the spring of 1945. Both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan built successful campaigns on opposition to the perceived amorality of Nixonian realpolitik and détente.

Given this history, the Kremlin will see any agreements with Mr. Trump as a temporary truce rather than a permanent peace. That limits the value of a deal. Moscow won’t accept permanent restraints on its behavior in exchange for temporary promises from Washington.

Meanwhile, a bargain with Russia may pose more problems than benefits for the MAGA movement in years to come. If Russia fails to honor the bargain scrupulously, as is likely, American opinion is likely to turn against a failed bargain, as happened with the Yalta agreements. And if the deal succeeds in restoring American power as détente did, the political pressure in the U.S. to return to a more ideologically assertive foreign policy will intensify—as happened in the Ford, Carter and Reagan years.

Ukraine Hits Moscow With Biggest Drone Attack of the War

Strikes come hours before Ukrainian and U.S. officials are set to meet in Saudi Arabia

https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-hits-russia-with-major-drone-attack-hours-before-talks-d3f1de98?mod=latest_headlines

By Georgi Kantchev

and Isabel Coles

Updated March 11, 2025 5:15 am ET

A damaged apartment building following a drone attack in the Moscow region. Photo: tatyana makeyeva/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Ukraine launched its biggest drone attack on Moscow, targeting the Russian capital and other regions hours before a Tuesday meeting where senior U.S. and Ukrainian officials were set to discuss ways to bring an end to the war after more than three years of fighting.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said it had downed more than 300 Ukrainian drones, 91 of which had targeted Moscow. Another 126 were shot down over the Kursk region, the ministry said, where the Ukrainian army has carved out a small toehold in Russian territory. Senior Ukrainian officials were silent on the attack.

The attack came as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other U.S. officials were preparing to meet their Ukrainian counterparts in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in the first high-level talks between Washington and Kyiv after a tense Oval Office meeting between President Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky.

After the meeting, Trump accused Zelensky of being unwilling to negotiate a peace deal with Moscow, halted arms deliveries and limited intelligence sharing with Kyiv. Russia has since ramped up drone and missile strikes across Ukraine, killing at least two dozen people in aerial attacks in recent days, according to Ukrainian officials.

Ahead of Tuesday’s meeting between Ukrainian and U.S. officials, Russia fired a ballistic missile and 126 one-way attack drones overnight on Monday, Ukraine’s air force said. The missile and 79 of the drones were intercepted, it said.

Zelensky has maintained he is ready to engage in peace negotiations, and Ukrainian officials have proposed a cease-fire on Russian and Ukrainian air and naval attacks as a first step. Zelensky, however, has emphasized Ukraine’s need for Western security guarantees to ensure the stability of any potential agreement. Trump has been hesitant to offer such a guarantee.

On Tuesday, Moscow authorities said that the attack led to at least one death and injured 14 people. Several Moscow airports were closed and flights diverted, officials said. In the region of Belgorod, power lines were damaged, leaving dozens of homes without electricity, local authorities said.

“The most massive attack of enemy unmanned aerial vehicles on Moscow has been repelled,” Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin wrote in a post on Telegram.

Andriy Kovalenko, an official at Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said drones had also reached Russia’s Dyagilevo military airfield, in the city of Ryazan, southeast of Moscow.

A damaged apartment building following a Ukrainian drone attack in Moscow. Photo: maxim shipenkov/Shutterstock

Facing relentless aerial attacks, Ukraine has responded by launching drone strikes within Russia, targeting oil refineries, airfields and other targets. It has targeted Moscow several times before. With supplies of Western long-range weapons limited, Ukraine has been rapidly developing its own drone and missile capabilities.

Ukraine had since the start of the year stabilized much of the 800-mile front line inside Ukraine, stalling Russian advances and counterattacking around the embattled eastern cities of Toretsk and Pokrovsk, which Russia had been on the verge of seizing.

Russia, however, has intensified its offensive in Kursk aimed at regaining territory and depriving Kyiv of a potential bargaining chip in any negotiations. Russian and North Korean troops in recent days seized several villages in the region and used overwhelming drone power to largely cut supply routes to the main Ukrainian force in the city of Sudzha.

In one of the deadliest recent aerial attacks, Russian missiles killed 11 people in a town near the front line in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. A second strike hit rescue workers as they arrived on the scene in Dobropillia to attend to the victims of the first missile strike, which damaged residential buildings and a shopping center.

Russia is “not thinking about how to end the war, but how to destroy and capture more while the world allows them to continue,” Zelensky said following the strike.

Rubio said Monday that the U.S. might restart intelligence and military support to Kyiv if the Jeddah talks make progress. While the U.S. has put enormous pressure on Ukraine’s armed forces by stopping military aid and reducing intelligence, it has allowed some support to continue.

On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia should resist being overly optimistic about its talks with Washington. Last month, high level U.S. and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia and agreed to appoint teams to negotiate a settlement to the war in Ukraine.

“There is no need to rush to put on rose-colored glasses now,” Peskov said. “You should always hope for the best, but still be prepared for the worst. And we must always be ready to defend our interests.”

Write to Georgi Kantchev at georgi.kantchev@wsj.com

7. Taiwan Stronger: Ramping Up Defense Resilience to Counter China

Conclusion:

Washington has recently called out Taipei for being reluctant to shoulder the burden of resourcing its own defense and looking to the U.S. to make up any shortfall. It appears that Taiwan is starting to get the message. A polity’s military capabilities and defense resilience are broader and larger than the sum of the firepower of weaponry and the size of its armed forces. The will of soldiers, sailors and airmen to fight is dependent on good training, leadership, and a firm belief that they are fighting to defend something precious. Also crucial is to instill within Taiwan’s robust civil society a will to resist and a will to prepare for major political-military crisis or invasion. Although still in its early stages with much more still to be done, the island is taking meaningful steps toward strengthening defense resilience and, in the process, is making Taiwan stronger.

Taiwan Stronger: Ramping Up Defense Resilience to Counter China

Monday, March 10, 2025

By: Andrew Scobell, Ph.D.; Naiyu Kuo

https://www.usip.org/publications/2025/03/taiwan-stronger-ramping-defense-resilience-counter-china

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

Taiwan is ramping up defense resilience to counter the growing threat from China.

Taiwan’s defense resilience requires whole-of-government and whole-of-society initiatives.

This resilience is critical in and of itself but can also be important in signaling deterrence to China.

usip.org

Monday, March 10, 2025

/ READ TIME: 8 minutes

Getting Serious about Strengthening Defense Resilience

Taiwan has long been criticized for not doing enough to provide for its own defense. Most recently, President Donald Trump’s nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, chided Taiwan for spending less than three percent of its GDP on defense and opined that Washington should “properly incentivize” Taipei to allocate “more like 10 percent” of its GDP. Debates about “how much is enough” in defense spending by any government are extremely difficult to resolve. Nevertheless, while the administration of President Lai Ching-te has been vigorously engaged in ramping up Taiwan’s military preparedness and defense resilience, there is widespread agreement that much more remains to be done.

Building on the previous administration of Tsai Ing-wen, which established the All-Out Defense Mobilization Agency in early 2022 and announced the extension of the conscription period from four months to one year in late 2022, the current Lai administration has raised defense resilience to a national priority by forming the Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience (WOSDR) Committee one month after taking office in May 2024. The committee, placed directly under the Presidential Office, comprises leaders from the government, private sector and civil society organizations and meets every three months to formulate strategies to enhance societal resilience.

The Lai administration has identified five key pillars of WOSDR, including civilian force training and utilization; strategic material preparation and critical supply distribution; energy and critical infrastructure operations and maintenance; social welfare, medical care and evacuation facility readiness; and information, transportation and financial network protection.

On March 4, Lai emphasized his administration’s commitment to coordinating among central and local governments to strengthen governmental and societal resilience through an array of exercises and initiatives.

Defense Resilience is More than Military Preparedness

Military capabilities and preparedness are crucial in their own right — but Taiwan needs to do much more given the scale of the threat China poses. Disappointingly, Taiwan’s opposition-led legislature approved last month an unprecedented $6.32 billion (NT$207.5 billion) reduction in this year’s central government budget. This included significant cuts to the defense budget and the freezing of some key line items including Taiwan’s submarine program, which Defense Minister Wellington Koo warned would significantly affect the scale of overseas military training and the operations of the military. But President Lai pledged to raise the defense budget to more than 3% of GDP this year by prioritizing advancing a special budget.

Yet, even if the defense budget rises, this will not be enough. Strengthening Taiwan’s resilience to counter Chinese aggression also means concerted efforts beyond the defense establishment to build defense resilience across the entire government, the business community and within Taiwan’s vibrant civil society.

Strengthening defense resilience means boosting society's confidence and ability to counter China’s gray-zone tactics, such as ongoing disinformation campaigns aimed at eroding public trust in Taiwan’s government. A recent example of gray-zone attacks is a series of undersea cable cuts intentionally carried out by malign Chinese actors. A resilient society is better equipped to recognize and counter these sometimes subtle and non-conventional military forms of aggression that may not lead to immediate capitulation but could erode Taiwan's societal cohesion, strain its resources and weaken its resolve over time, which makes it more vulnerable to eventual coercion.

The goal of WOSDR is to build a resilience system to ensure society's self-sufficiency and self-confidence during a major cross-strait political-military crisis or in time of war. This will allow the military to focus fully on frontline operations without diverting attention or resources to Taiwan’s home front. What is also necessary to address is the critical challenge of significantly improving coordination between the military establishment and counterpart civilian systems.

Fighting, Resisting, Preparing

When assessing Taiwan’s capability and determination to defend itself against China’s armed aggression, a concept frequently referenced is the ‘‘will to fight.” While this term is rarely defined, it may best be understood as referring to the military’s readiness and disposition to fight and persevere. In other words, it is about morale: the determination of Taiwan’s armed forces to fight on day one and sustain the fight over subsequent days, weeks and even months to defend their island home against an external aggressor.

The "will to resist” is another related but analytically distinct term. This encompasses the unity of purpose and societal solidarity that emerges when a country is attacked without provocation. Societies tend to rally when brutally attacked or occupied by an external power.

Yet, the will to fight and the will to resist do not magically appear out of the ether. Rather, determination tends to emerge when the defense establishment, the civilian authorities and society possess a sense of common purpose and have prepared for a major political-military crisis or war. In short, the will to fight and will the resist develop out of a will to prepare. Successful individuals, teams and organizations tend to be those who train hard and carefully prepare for their roles and missions. Versions of the following quote haves been attributed to numerous legendary sports coaches: “The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win.” That this quote is embraced by so many successful team leaders is not surprising; after all, dedicated preparation fuels an indomitable spirit and mindset of resilience.

Today, Taiwan military and civilian leaders are, along with individuals and organizations in civil society, rising to the challenge to prepare for an extreme eventuality. Yet the pace of all these efforts is incremental and the task has only just begun.

Enhanced Preparedness Can Signal Deterrence

Deterrence is difficult even in the best of circumstances. It is hard to signal and tough to assess its effectiveness. Deterrence is in the eye of the beholder: just because one side aims to send a deterrence message, this does not mean the other side interprets the message as a deterrence signal. Moreover, just because the other side does not attack does not constitute confirmation of successful deterrence. In short, deterrence is a tricky business.

In the case of China and Taiwan, it may not be possible to deter Beijing from launching an attack against Taipei under all circumstances. Be that as it may, all military operations involve an element of risk. Political and military leaders can never be 100 percent sure that a military operation will succeed. This is especially true when the situation is as complex as a full-scale attack on Taiwan across 90 miles of ocean, and the Chinese military that would undertake this complicated maritime operation has not conducted major combat operations in 50 years nor executed a comparable amphibious operation in 75 years. Indeed, senior leaders of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) assess that their forces as not ready to conduct such an operation. According to the PLA’s own modernization goals, the military will not be adequately prepared for another 10 years. Moreover, commander-in-chief Xi Jinping’s recent actions, such as a series of purges of PLA generals ostensibly for corruption, suggest he does not have high confidence in his military leadership.

If Taiwan is able to signal enhanced defense resilience across the Taiwan Strait … this can contribute to deterrence.

All this suggests that for the foreseeable future, China should be deterrable. If Taiwan is able to signal enhanced defense resilience across the Taiwan Strait — making Chinese leaders think that taking Taiwan by force will take too long, be too hard and much too costly — this can contribute to deterrence. But finding the right approach and messaging to communicate this defense resilience without being escalatory may be tricky. Beijing may be prone to perceive that Taiwan is pushing ever further in the direction of de facto or de jure independence and could react with increased hostility.

Something Called ‘Defense Resilience’

Washington has recently called out Taipei for being reluctant to shoulder the burden of resourcing its own defense and looking to the U.S. to make up any shortfall. It appears that Taiwan is starting to get the message. A polity’s military capabilities and defense resilience are broader and larger than the sum of the firepower of weaponry and the size of its armed forces. The will of soldiers, sailors and airmen to fight is dependent on good training, leadership, and a firm belief that they are fighting to defend something precious. Also crucial is to instill within Taiwan’s robust civil society a will to resist and a will to prepare for major political-military crisis or invasion. Although still in its early stages with much more still to be done, the island is taking meaningful steps toward strengthening defense resilience and, in the process, is making Taiwan stronger.

PHOTO: Taiwanese soldiers participate in a military exercise in the Bali District of Taiwan, July 27, 2023.. (Lam Yik Fei/The New York Times)

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s).

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8. Is Trump’s Mineral Deal Unprecedented? Not Exactly.

As I have wondered, I thought the maternal deal would be followed by security guarantees to protect our access to the minerals.

Is Trump’s Mineral Deal Unprecedented? Not Exactly.

For lessons on the president’s offer to Ukraine, look back at FDR.

By Ed Conway

03.10.25 — History

https://www.thefp.com/p/is-trumps-mineral-deal-unprecedented

President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill on the deck of the HMS Prince of Wales in 1941. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

0:00

-7:40

When you read about the mineral agreement at the heart of negotiations between the U.S. and Ukraine, you might be left with the impression that the deal, in which the U.S. would gain the rights to a stream of profits from the sale of Ukrainian minerals—everything from rare earths and lithium to other newly mined resources—is totally unprecedented.

Some frame this as a form of expropriation or extortion, imperial in its scope. Others ask questions along the lines of: “Would Franklin D. Roosevelt ever have asked something like this of Churchill?!”

To which the answer is: very possibly, yes.

We know as much because something quite similar did happen before. So let’s travel back in time to early 1941—Britain’s darkest hour. As most of the continent succumbed to Hitler and Churchill clung doggedly on, a handful of men gathered in the White House to discuss what they could expect to plunder from the UK in exchange for economic support.

One idea was to take possession of the crown jewels. Another was that Britain should be forced to share Hong Kong with America. FDR went so far as writing a memo to his Treasury secretary asking him to look into getting hold of rare books and paintings from the British Library for the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress.

The president was formulating Lend-Lease, the set of loans and support that would keep Britain afloat and fighting over the coming years—a package described by Churchill as “the most unsordid act in the whole of recorded history.” Yet there is a forgotten side to that history, one that is worth recounting today as Ukraine gets close to signing this deal with America—committing it to vast repayments for aid in the form of mineral contracts in future years.

In case you think I’m making this up, below is the memorandum FDR sent to Henry Morgenthau, his Treasury secretary, about taking books and artworks from the British Library in exchange for Lend-Lease.

Nor were the crown jewels and precious books and artworks the only items to come up in the discussions about “considerations” for Lend-Lease aid. Another asset pondered by the Americans was the Magna Carta. Actually, British officials, conscious of the extraordinary generosity of American aid, pondered volunteering the Magna Carta themselves. One copy from Lincoln Cathedral was on tour in the U.S. at the time. “May we give you—at least as a token of our feelings—something of no intrinsic value whatever: a bit of parchment, more than seven hundred years old, rather the worse for wear,” wrote a Foreign Office official in a memo. “You know what it means to us; we believe it means as much to you.”

Of course, the Lincoln copy of the Magna Carta was returned to England. The crown jewels stayed in Britain too (some of the prize gemstones were stored in biscuit tins in Windsor Castle). But don’t be fooled into thinking Lend-Lease came entirely for free. The UK was forced, under some duress from the Americans, to sell one of the prized corporations of the chemicals sector. American Viscose, the man-made fabric company, was forcibly sold off by its owner Samuel Courtauld for around $50 million: less than half its estimated value.

But perhaps more significant than any strict repayment agreement were the principles Britain agreed to sign up to when taking Lend-Lease support. Most significantly, the UK signed up to Article VI of Lend-Lease, which committed it to free trade and to helping repair the international monetary system after the war. And since this meant dismantling the imperial preference system, that made it nearly impossible for Britain to maintain its empire after WWII.

Most people have forgotten about Article VI these days, but at the time it represented an extraordinary economic sacrifice for Britain, signed up to with gritted teeth and bemoaned for much of the war.

In the event, Lend-Lease was structured in a way that gave the president a wide discretion about actual repayments. Broadly speaking, it was left up to FDR. And so on the war went, Lend-Lease playing a key role in helping Britain defend itself from the Nazis. But then, in 1945, FDR died and everything changed. Harry Truman had a very different attitude. Within days of the Japanese surrender, Lend-Lease was cut off—far more abruptly than anyone in the UK had expected. Suddenly any support for Britain, now a civilian country, would have to be repaid, something that was pretty disastrous for the war-torn country.

When, eventually, the UK negotiated a postwar loan with America, the terms were far more onerous than expected. This might have had something to do with the fact that the main negotiator for the British side, John Maynard Keynes, was in such poor health he was dosed up on a heart medication whose main side effect was that it was a truth serum. But it was just as much a product of a more hostile White House, determined now not to provide any more financial assistance to the UK than was necessary.

In a sense, this mirrors the experience Ukraine has had in the past six months, as one president, inclined to provide almost limitless amounts to the country, was replaced with another president with a different international policy and a determination to withdraw American support.

This time around in Ukraine the amounts given by the U.S. are a tiny fraction of Lend-Lease. Nor are there any crown jewels to barter, so the U.S. is instead aping China, which has for decades been trading aid and infrastructure for investments in mining companies, especially in African nations like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Ukraine has minerals (although perhaps less world-changing amounts than some might assume). So in much the same way as the greatest assets the UK had to trade back in the 1940s—beyond the crown jewels—were its international businesses like American Viscose and the Empire, Ukraine’s best assets might be seen as its minerals and its NATO ambitions. Both are now on the block.

None of this is to say the deal is proportionate, or to guess who it most benefits (it will be some time before we learn that, and much depends on the contours of any eventual peace deal). Certainly, it’s worth saying that while FDR was much more interested in repayment than is remembered these days, Lend-Lease was nonetheless extraordinarily generous—far more than the support America has provided to Ukraine.

Still, this whole episode is yet another reminder, if it were needed, that even in a world getting less enthusiastic about net zero, minerals still matter enormously. If the U.S. and other nations are going to deliver all the infrastructure we need in coming years for green technology or data centers for artificial intelligence, they will need enormous quantities of battery minerals, not to mention old-fashioned stuff like copper, iron, and sand too. They have to come from somewhere—be it Ukraine or Greenland or, for that matter, America itself.

Ed Conway is a columnist for The Times of London and the economics editor for Sky News. He is the author of Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future. This article was first published on Ed’s Substack, which you can subscribe to here.

9. Rethinking the Response to Russian Aggression: Command, Management, and Leadership

Excerpts:

Of course, tired, perpetual Munich analogies still continue, but rather than judging past decisions through the simplistic lens of strength versus appeasement, Western policymakers should assess crises as matters of judgment, where trade-offs and unintended consequences must be carefully considered. The assumption that earlier escalation would have deterred Russia ignores historical complexities and the risks associated with military confrontation.

Instead, leadership in this context demands a sophisticated, adaptive strategy—one that blends deterrence, engagement, and a long-term vision for regional stability. The goal should not be merely to project strength but to exercise strategic foresight, shaping responses that are both forceful and effective in fostering a more stable international order.

As the West continues to navigate its response to Russia, it should avoid the trap of framing policy in purely reactive terms. Instead, it should cultivate a proactive strategy that anticipates potential flashpoints, builds resilient alliances, and strategically engages adversaries. Success lies not in rigidly adhering to a singular approach but in dynamically adapting to the evolving realities of global power politics.

Rethinking the Response to Russian Aggression: Command, Management, and Leadership

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/03/11/rethinking-the-response-to-russian-aggression-command-management-and-leadership/

by Siamak Naficy

03.11.2025 at 06:00am

Introduction

A persistent argument has resurfaced in Western foreign policy circles—one that suggests Russia’s pattern of aggression in Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), and Ukraine (2022) resulted from Western weakness and appeasement. Advocates of this view assert that stronger, more immediate responses to Russia’s earlier incursions could have deterred future aggression. However, history suggests a more nuanced interpretation, one that aligns well with a framework of command, management, and leadership in addressing different types of problems. Rather than viewing Russian expansionism through a narrow lens of strength and weakness, a more adaptive approach—one informed by the realities of wicked problems—may be necessary.

The conceptual distinction between command, management, and leadership has roots in both military and business traditions. But, its conceptual separation evolved over time through various disciplines, including military strategy, organizational theory, and leadership studies. Command is the oldest of the three, originating in military history. It refers to authority to give orders and enforce obedience. Ancient military theorists like Sun Tzu (The Art of War) and Carl von Clausewitz (On War) emphasized command as the ability to make decisive orders in combat. Leadership in a military context emerged as distinct from command, as effective generals not only commanded but also inspired and led their troops (e.g., Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar). Management in the military developed later with the rise of large bureaucratic armies, particularly in the Napoleonic era and beyond, focusing on logistics, planning, and organization (e.g., Prussian military reforms under Helmuth von Moltke the Elder). The U.S. military and organizations like NATO formalized the distinction between command (authority in structured environments), management (resource allocation and planning), and leadership (inspiring and guiding people).

The Command Approach: Crisis and Military Intervention

Command is the domain of crisis, where decisive action and authority are required. Hardline critics argue that the West should have taken a more command-driven approach in 2008 and 2014—perhaps through military intervention, direct deterrence, or rapid NATO expansion. This view suggests that a firm show of strength at earlier stages would have prevented Russian President Vladimir Putin from continuing his expansionist policies.

However, the historical record complicates this assumption. Military confrontations do not always deter aggressors; they can escalate conflicts, especially when the adversary has a high stake in the outcome. Russia’s interventions in Georgia and Ukraine were driven by long-term strategic and security interests, not merely opportunism. The assumption that an earlier show of force would have averted later conflicts neglects the risk of premature escalation, particularly when dealing with a risk-accepting nuclear power. Moreover, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars demonstrated that prolonged military entanglements can weaken Western resolve, reducing future appetite for direct interventions. The belief that military deterrence alone prevents war is overly simplistic—history has shown that both weakness and belligerence can provoke conflict.

The Management Approach: Sanctions and Bureaucratic Solutions

Management deals with tame problems—those that are complicated but solvable through standardized, bureaucratic solutions. Western responses to Russia’s aggression have often taken a management-oriented approach, relying on economic sanctions, arms provisions, and diplomatic isolation.

While these measures imposed costs on Russia, they have not fundamentally altered its behavior. The assumption that economic sanctions alone could deter a nation willing to endure hardship for strategic gains underestimates the resilience of authoritarian regimes. Russia is a country, not merely a risk-averse economy. Additionally, while Ukraine was not in NATO, NATO was in Ukraine. Arming and training Ukraine strengthened its defense, but it may have also hastened Russia’s 2022 invasion by reinforcing Kremlin narratives that the West was encroaching on Russia’s sphere of influence.

Consider then the argument made by ex-NATO Chief Jens Stoltenberg that if only NATO had managed to provide more arms even earlier, Ukraine’s forces would have been stronger and Russia could have been deterred—that it “could even have prevented the invasion.” This argument overlooks this crucial issue: the growing flow of weapons and NATO-Ukraine security cooperation were key factors triggering the 2022 invasion. Arming Ukraine sooner would not have deterred conflict but likely would have accelerated it, leading to an even earlier war. That, in turn, would have been an even worse alternative—with the U.S. and its allies still entangled in Afghanistan, and years of vital international training disrupted, such as Operation Interflex, which later proved essential in helping Ukrainian forces resist Putin’s re-invasion. This alternative history paints a darker, bloodier, and grimmer picture, with Russia striking earlier and advancing further in its brutal assault.

The Leadership Approach: Wicked Problems and Adaptive Strategy

Leadership is required for wicked problems—those that lack clear solutions and involve evolving, interconnected factors. Russian aggression is not simply a problem of deterrence; it is part of a larger geopolitical dynamic that involves historical grievances, either real or perceived, NATO expansion, energy politics, and regional security calculations.

A leadership approach would recognize that no single response—whether military intervention or sanctions—would have definitively prevented Russian expansion. Instead, it would emphasize:

Strategic deterrence combined with measured concessions—as seen in John F. Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where confrontation was tempered by diplomatic negotiation.
Recognizing trade-offs—such as the costs of prematurely accelerating NATO expansion, which may have provoked Russian insecurity rather than deterring aggression.
Framing Western responses beyond binary choices of strength vs. weakness—acknowledging that diplomacy, economic pressure, and selective military aid must be used in concert, rather than assuming that any single approach guarantees deterrence.

Rethinking the Past, Informing the Future

Of course, tired, perpetual Munich analogies still continue, but rather than judging past decisions through the simplistic lens of strength versus appeasement, Western policymakers should assess crises as matters of judgment, where trade-offs and unintended consequences must be carefully considered. The assumption that earlier escalation would have deterred Russia ignores historical complexities and the risks associated with military confrontation.

Instead, leadership in this context demands a sophisticated, adaptive strategy—one that blends deterrence, engagement, and a long-term vision for regional stability. The goal should not be merely to project strength but to exercise strategic foresight, shaping responses that are both forceful and effective in fostering a more stable international order.

As the West continues to navigate its response to Russia, it should avoid the trap of framing policy in purely reactive terms. Instead, it should cultivate a proactive strategy that anticipates potential flashpoints, builds resilient alliances, and strategically engages adversaries. Success lies not in rigidly adhering to a singular approach but in dynamically adapting to the evolving realities of global power politics.

Tags: european security, NATO, NATO Expansion, Russia-Ukraine War, Ukraine

About The Author

Siamak Naficy
Siamak Tundra Naficy is a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Department of Defense Analysis. An anthropologist with an interdisciplinary approach to social, biological, psychological, and cultural issues, his interests range from the anthropological approach to conflict theory to wicked problems, sacred values, cognitive science, and animal behavior. The views expressed are the author’s and do not reflect those of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army, or the Naval Postgraduate School.

10. Interview with David Ochmanek

"what are some contemporary methods for projecting power in proximity to mature Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) powers to effectively counter aggression in the absence of air, maritime, information or space superiority?"

Interview with David Ochmanek

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/03/11/interview-with-david-ochmanek/

by Octavian Manea

03.11.2025 at 06:00am

CSDS-SWJ STRATEGY DEBRIEFS • 9/2025

Interview with David Ochmanek, by Octavian Manea

This interview is part of a collaborative initiative with the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy.

The most recent US national defense strategies and decades of wargames have underscored the obsolescence of the American expeditionary approach to warfare, which marked the post-Cold War era. In light of this, what are some contemporary methods for projecting power in proximity to mature Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) powers to effectively counter aggression in the absence of air, maritime, information or space superiority? This Strategy Debrief examines some of these potential new ways with David Ochmanek, a senior international and defense researcher at RAND, and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Development from 2009 to 2014.

Octavian Manea: How would you define the legacy approach to warfare practiced by US in the post-Cold War era?

David Ochmanek: If we think back to Desert Storm and all the interventions we have had since then – against Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya – there are parallels across those. What I call the legacy American approach to war, which carried us through the post-Cold War era, was characterised first by its expeditionary approach. The bulk of the force that was required to achieve our objectives had to be deployed to the theatre from elsewhere after the decision to intervene. The second feature of it is that it was sequential. What did we do for the first four days of Desert Storm? It was devoted to gaining dominance over the battle space. We attacked air defenses and military Command and Control (C2) so that we could create an environment where the rest of the joint and combined force could operate – if not with impunity – at least with freedom of action.

In our early wargames where our adversaries were either China or Russia, our Blue Teams representing NATO or a coalition in the Pacific tried to apply that basic model. And they lost every time. The expeditionary approach fails because these are adversaries that would not give you five months to build an iron mountain of materiel in the theatre before you are ready to conduct operations. These are adversaries that would disrupt your deployment with at least non-kinetic cyber means before hostilities begin. And the sequential approach fails because of the robustness of the enemy’s A2/AD and C2 capabilities. So this notion that you can spend the first phase of the war creating a more permissive environment before attacking the enemy’s center of gravity is false.

In our wargames, the Red Teams in Baltic scenarios sometimes have armored forces on the outskirts of Tallinn and Riga within 60-72 hours. This is, of course, a Russian military before it was massively degraded by the hostilities in Ukraine. Prudent planners have to assume that Russia will at some point reconstitute its conventional force. It is the same thing with a Taiwan scenario. If you give the Chinese 5 to 10 days they will have tens of thousands of troops on the island of Taiwan before you are going to be able to engage. So how do you reach into that highly contested environment, before you have gained air superiority, when your bases are under attack, to locate, track, engage and neutralize the operational center of gravity, namely, the invasion force?

Octavian Manea: Can we pinpoint an identifiable center of gravity of the Blue Team?

David Ochmanek: We think about centers of gravity at different levels of warfare. At the strategic level our center of gravity is probably our will to fight as a society and our alliance cohesion. Milosevic in the 1990s was trying to attack the alliance’s cohesion (during Operation Allied Force).

Secondly, at the operational level, certainly our dependence on the ability to project and sustain power over distance is an Achille’s heel for the Blue Team, and the Red Team understands that. The Chinese do not call their strategy A2/AD, but counter-intervention for a reason. In this sense, they purposefully built a force that can disrupt the flow of forces, it can disrupt the sustainment of those forces and generally disrupt the generation of combat power within the theatre. They can reach as far as Guam and the second island chain to attack repeatedly our centers for power projection. Broadly speaking, the center of gravity at the operational level is associated with the set of dependencies of the Blue Team: the transportation links between our nation and the theatre and the ability to generate combat power within a theatre.

Thirdly, what we know from the People’s Liberation Army doctrine is that they place great emphasis on information superiority as the key to success in modern warfare. They are determined to deny us information about the battle space and to secure it for themselves. That explains their investment in anti-satellite weapons (both kinetic and non-kinetic), in cyber-weapons and in electronic warfare (EW) capabilities.

As a non-expert, I would nominate these three dependencies as centers of gravity for the Blue Team.

Octavian Manea: You have run so many wargames over the past two decades – you are basically “Mr. Wargames”. What was your conclusion in terms of the feasibility of the (or the preferred) American Way of War as we have seen it practiced in the 1990s and early 2000s? Why are we at an inflection point?

David Ochmanek: That legacy approach to warfare that the US has operated under relies on – if not superiority – at least a measure of dominance. If we do not have that dominance in a domain at the outset of hostilities, we work to achieve it before we are prepared to pursue the rest of our objectives. We did not try to roll back Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait until we established air superiority, maritime and information superiority while at the same time degrading the morale and will to fight of that force before we engage. That is the American way of war. And if you cannot achieve that dominance in a time frame that is consistent with your objectives then you have to find a different way to achieve those objectives.

We emerged from the Cold War with forces that were qualitatively and quantitatively superior to those of our adversaries. A whole generation of officers and professional military people in our armed forces have become used to that world. It has created a sense of complacency among the force itself and among the policymakers that sent that force repeatedly to war. We are confronting a very different situation today. When you fight in the backyard of an adversary he has the geographic advantages: he will have the initiative from the outset of hostilities and that changes the game.

The legacy American way of war is predicated on having qualitative superiority over the adversary. And in our experience, the adversary’s capability to disrupt the deployment of our combat power and the generation of our combat power has been quite limited. For all the obsession with the SCUD missile problem, Saddam Hussein only had about 200 ballistic missiles. They were useful in terrorizing Tel Aviv and Riyadh, but they were not significant military assets. That is completely changed vis-à-vis China and Russia and indeed in relation with countries like Iran and North Korea.

Octavian Manea: Based on the recent wargames that you have conducted, what are some of the new ways to project power in the proximity of the mature A2/AD powers? What do they tell us about the associated new operational concepts? In short, what are the building blocks of a new US approach to warfare?

David Ochmanek: I like to remind people that in the 1980s we also faced an inflection point with regard to the credibility of our deterrent against the Soviet Union. In that context, we came up with a new operational concept called “Air-Land Battle”. That operational concept told commanders that they are going to fight differently in the future – particularly by finding ways to deal with the flow of the forces to the forward line of troops by attacking the second and third echelons. Both the Army and the Air Force bought into that and it not only guided the preparation of operational plans, it also guided the development of military capabilities – this is how we got stealth, ATACMS and JSTARS. It is the generation of capabilities that worked so well in the post-Cold War world. We need an analogue to Air-Land Battle today. We do not have it yet, but the building blocks are beginning to emerge from wargaming and analysis. They suggest turning the legacy approach to warfare on its head. Instead of thinking about weeks to months to prepare for war, we have to think about days. That means changing our posture, it means having more combat power available more quickly in the advent of hostilities becoming probable.

In a world where the enemy has a massive amount of firepower to bring to bear in the theatre, simply putting more F-15s at Kadena is not going to be the answer. Our posture has to be hardened, has to be dispersed, has to be defended and increasingly needs to be mobile. We are learning from Ukraine that if you are stationary on the modern battlefield you are not likely to survive. If you are concentrated on the modern battlefield, you are not likely to survive. There is a certain amount of innovation that has to take place such that we have combat power readily available, but not targetable. In the future that increasingly means mobility for land forces and subsurface for maritime forces. That is not to say that F-35 and destroyers are obsolete. They have a role to play, but the employment of those assets has to be changed.

Breaking the expeditionary mindset is the number one requirement. Number two is getting at this question about sequential operations – finding a way to reach into the contested battle space from the opening hours of the hostilities to locate the enemy invasion force and bring lethality to bear. In a Baltic scenario you might have 40-50-60 battalion tactical groups committed to an offensive against NATO. That means several thousand armored vehicles. They will be mixed with trucks, cars and other vehicles, creating a very confusing battlefield situation. As we begin to come up with concepts for readily generating combat power to attack that center of gravity, we must also ensure that we can use our combat power effectively and not waste it on false targets. This is what drives us to novel concepts for sensing and targeting over the battlespace.

Our strike systems must be more survivable, more mobile and less targetable by the enemy and our sensing capabilities must be able to operate even in the presence of an undegraded air defense, heavy jamming and cyber-attacks. So how do you do that? JSTARS is not going to help you. It cannot get close enough to do its work. Global Hawk, Predator, AWACS – all these systems simply cannot survive in this environment. Space will provide some opportunity, particularly with the proliferation of lower orbit assets for sensing and communications. It is no longer possible for the enemy to think about killing a dozen or two dozens of satellites and taking out our eyes. That having been said, our sensors are still jammable and there is the question of getting the data off the birds and down to the warfighter who needs it.

We want to supplement those space assets with land, maritime and with airborne unmanned systems. Recent technological trends indicate the potential for establishing a ubiquitous and resilient sensing and targeting grid using a large number of unmanned platforms. In the European theatre, there is no reason why we could not have thousands of unattended ground sensors ready to be deployed along the expected main axes of advance hours and days prior to the expected Russian invasion. Those sensors have the capability to transmit digital data to a grid for edge processing, providing real-time information on the identity and location of high-value targets. That information can be fed both to operation centers in the rear if the communications links can be sustained, but also to incoming weapons. So I have launched a precision missile from Germany and its headed into the concentration of Russian forces in Belarus. The sensing grid provides real-time updates on the movement of a target to the incoming missile, indicating any displacement in its location. In that way you are ensuring that the combat power you are generating is accurately and effectively applied.

Octavian Manea: It seems there is a real effort to bring mass back, while adding precision. The “Hellscape” as well as “Replicator” initiatives seem to be about that. What is the role of the Replicator Initiative, of the Hellscape, of the “cats and kittens” concept in the overall US Indo-Pacific posture?

David Ochmanek: Some of the ideas about the “Hellscape” were inspired by Ukraine. The Ukrainians have inflicted serious damage on the Russian Black Sea Fleet without a navy. They have shown to us that sensing and striking in a contested battle space without an air force is possible using proliferated, inexpensive but smart machines (drones). My understanding is that this is the spirit behind the Hellscape. If you try to defend Taiwan, you can still fly B-52 bombers from Alaska, but you can also make Taiwan into a very tough “porcupine” by putting large numbers of expendable, smart machines there prior to the commencement of hostilities. We want a mixed portfolio of capabilities that includes “traditional” things (like our superb undersea force), but you can only get a certain amount of mass from a limited number of expensive platforms. It makes sense to complement them with large numbers of inexpensive and expandable machines.

The term “cat” comes from the LCAAT – low cost attritable aircraft technology. This is a very interesting system because it can be launched from a mobile platform, fly a 1,000 miles with a 1,000-pound payload, deliver that payload and come home and land with a parachute. If your air bases have been decimated, you are still able to conduct operations. We are very interested in that capability or things like it that can be more robust in terms of sustaining combat operations in the face of attack. We want to complement it with things that are smaller and cheaper that can dwell on the battle space.

Again, the LCAAT can deliver 1,000 pounds of ordnance into the battle space and come home. But those weapons have to be told where to go. We do not want a 3 million dollar platform like the LCAAT to be hanging around the battle space searching for targets. That is where “the kittens” come in – we want thousands of small, much less expensive UAVs, also runaway independent, that can dwell on the battlespace, that expect to be shot at in order to exhaust the enemy’s supply of readily available anti-aircraft missiles and guns, and still do the mission. That drives you to small inexpensive platforms with commercial off-the-shelf sensors that can be built in the thousands and stored in prepositioned locations in the theatre years prior to the hostilities. That combination of posture, mass and runaway-independence gives you a way to reverse this structural dependence on an expeditionary approach, vulnerable fixed bases and a sequential approach to warfare.

Octavian Manea: When talking about reinventing the expeditionary approach and thinking about new ways of projecting power, the US Marine Corps (USMC) seems to be at the forefront of this journey. How do you see the reinvention of some parts of the USMC as a first island chain-centric force? Their stand in forces display mobility, flexibility and dispersion traits and are repurposed for sea denial missions. Is this transformation in line with a much needed new approach to warfare?

David Ochmanek: Certainly it is in that environment. When are we going to learn the value of mobility? We have sent hundreds and hundreds of sorties looking for the SCUDs in the Iraqi desert where we had complete air superiority and we found very few. There is nothing we can do about the dozens of battalions of mobile missiles that the PLA Rocket Force will be deploying on mainland China. Why cannot we create the same problem for China? They know where our bases are. They will not know where elements of the Marines Littoral Regiment are in the islands around Japan because they are small, mobile and they take advantage of concealment and cover. We need more of this portfolio.

Octavian Manea: Having in mind what we have seen in Ukraine, should we prepare for fighting and deterring decisive sharp wars or protracted extended campaigns?

David Ochmanek: We cannot assume that our adversaries will sue for peace, but if you do not win the first battle you will not have the chance to fight the second battle. The priority must be to create that blunting force to create a credible deterrent for the first battle. At the same time the Ukraine war is a brutal reminder that if the enemy is not ready to capitulate or even negotiate you can be drawn into a very ugly protracted battle. In that context, the centre of gravity of political will can be threatened and there are profound implications for our industrial base.

Our wargames concentrate overwhelmingly on the first battle because it is necessary, albeit not necessarily sufficient for victory. Everything we might say on the distinctive requirements of a protracted battle would be much more speculative. In the old days once you achieved your superiority in the theatre, you had it. The last time an American soldier was killed by an enemy airplane was in Korea in 1952. That assurance is disappearing because of the UAS problem. You can destroy your enemy’s air force and still not be assured of preventing the enemy from doing observation and strike in your rear areas as we are seeing in Ukraine – large numbers of inexpensive things can ruin your whole day. Thinking both about the blunting battle and the protracted battle we also have to think about defense: counter unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) is going to be a very important mission in both phases of the fight and across the spectrum of warfare.

Octavian Manea: In the recent past there was a lot of talk about the Air-Sea Battle. What happened with the Air-Sea Battle construct? It was completely purged from the lexicon. Was it more of a top down, imposed, construct rather than a bottom-up, organically developed, concept having in mind the specificities of the theatre and adversary?

David Ochmanek: My understanding is that the Air-Land Battle was both bottom-up and top-down. The Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) initiated the process and brought the Air Force onboard. Together they began fleshing out the concept. At the same time the leadership in the Department of Defense on the civilian side understood it, especially Harold Brown and William Perry. From their end they were able to accelerate investments in the development programmes that would create the capabilities needed to implement the concept. There was teamwork between the civilians in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Army and the Air Force at the operational level.

Air-Sea Battle did not manifest that way. It was basically done in the Air Staff in the Office of Naval Operations in the Pentagon. I do not think it had buy-in from the field operating commanders of those two services and there was no evident connection to the development community. I actually wrote the guidance in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) that said go out and develop an Air-Sea Battle concept, but at the time the Secretary of Defense was saying that our priority is to “win the wars we are in today”, namely, Iraq and Afghanistan.

So we faced some headwinds and it took a while for people to understand that the threat from highly capable state adversaries was no longer over the horizon, but rather was a here-and-now problem.

Octavian Manea: Why is parity (particularly of peer competitors that are on the verge of achieving parity in Precision Guided Munitions and theatre-level battle networks) perceived as a danger? Is it something to be avoided at all costs? There seems to be always a push for overmatch.

David Ochmanek: Having comprehensive overmatch versus one’s principal opponents is, obviously, a good thing for deterrence and, if deterrence fails, a good thing for warfighting. Given the experience of the post-Cold War era, I think that many American strategists implicitly assume that one can only have a credible deterrent if one’s forces enjoy a degree of overmatch in key domains of military operations. What our research shows is that, vis-à-vis China, US forces have lost overmatch in the key domains of air, sea, information and maybe space and that it is difficult to see how we might regain it. This realisation has led us to seek ways to defeat enemy aggression in the absence of air, maritime, information or space superiority. The good news is that wargames suggest that this can be done.

By pursuing approaches such as Replicator, preparing to flood the battlespace with sensors, posturing the bomber force for high-tempo, long-range operations and taking other steps to enable a new approach to power projection, US and partner forces can confront an adversary with the prospect of severe attrition from the outset of hostilities, even if that adversary has some measure of domain superiority.

Octavian Manea: There are many observers that point out that the emergence of meshed civil-military sensor nets is transforming warfare and our discussion makes a similar point. These meshed civil-military sensor nets are essential to what it becomes a new approach to warfare and deterrence in the first island chain or on the Eastern Flank. But if these ways of warfare and deterrence are so dependent on the meshed civil-military sensor nets, almost like an operational center of gravity, how do we make sure to/can we protect the integrity of the targeting and sensing mesh against disruptions?

David Ochmanek: The sensing mesh, or what I prefer to call the sensing and targeting grid, will support operations on at least two levels:

First, at the engagement level, it can help to ensure that shooters – aircraft, ships, missile firing units – are apprised of the battlefield situation and are attacking the appropriate targets. Even after those agents have launched their weapons, the grid can monitor changes in the location and disposition of their targets and update the weapons in-flight, guiding them to the desired points of impact. This can provide a level of robustness to targeting in the presence of GPS jamming and other enemy countermeasures.

Second, at the theatre level, the information developed by the grid can support personnel at operations centers charged with orchestrating the operation and allocating forces to specific missions.

Given the importance of these two functions, it will be essential that our forces be able to keep the grid working even in the face of intensive enemy countermeasures, such as air defenses, anti-satellite weapons, electronic jamming, and cyber intrusions. Our analysis suggests that overcoming these threats is possible.

One key to overcoming them is mass. At the most basic level, our forces will need to be able to populate the battlespace with sensors at rates that exceed the enemy’s ability to shoot them down. This implies that the platforms carrying those sensors, whether they be airborne, on the surface, or in space, must be affordable so that they can be purchased and prepositioned in forward areas in large numbers. And the teams that operate the sensor platforms must themselves be survivable on the modern battlefield, which means, increasingly, that they must have small signatures and be mobile.
Mass helps in another way: The denser the array of sensors, the greater assurance one has that they will be able to communicate with one another in the presence of heavy communications jamming. Picking the right frequencies, power levels, and antenna types for the data links helps with this as well.
My colleagues at RAND have also explored options for hardening the grid against cyber intrusions. They conclude that exploiting techniques such as those used in blockchain protocols can be effective in this regard.

Tags: global security

About The Author

Octavian Manea
Octavian Manea is a PhD Researcher at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS) that he joined in October 2021. He is interested in the changing character of conflict and the implications of such alterations for the US-led alliance system. Octavian is also broadly interested in strategic studies, transatlantic relations and security issues. He worked for many years as a journalist, and is currently a contributor at the Romanian weekly 22 and the Small Wars Journal. In addition, Octavian was the managing editor of the Eastern Focus Quarterly in Bucharest and was affiliated with the Romania Energy Center (ROEC). Octavian was a Fulbright Scholar at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where he received an MA in International Relations and a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Security Studies. He also holds a BA and an MA in political science and international relations from the University of Bucharest.

11. Nickels And Dimes: Trump’s Defense Cuts Are Unrealistic By: Michael O’Hanlon

Excertps:

Using sources like the Congressional Budget Office, estimated possible savings from the following reforms may total up to $20 billion annually. Indeed, it is a large sum, but nowhere near eight percent of the current budget. Such reforms could include:

1) Conduct another round of base closures ($3 billion a year in eventual savings).

2) Eliminate platforms DoD wants to retire ($4 billion).

3) Hold Intelligence Community flat in real terms ($3 billion).

4) Adopt “Performance-Based Logistics” more widely ($3 billion).

5) Use procurement approaches with less red tape for some weapons systems ($1 to $5 billion).

6) Impose a ten percent reduction on civilian headquarters staff ($2 billion).

Nickels And Dimes: Trump’s Defense Cuts Are Unrealistic

The Trump administration’s hawkish attitudes towards foreign powers, adversarial and allied, conflict with the desire to make grand budget cuts in the Department of Defense.

Throughout Donald Trump’s second term, the President has talked about cutting the nation’s military budget in half if China and Russia would do the same.

March 10, 2025

By: Michael O’Hanlon

The National Interest · · March 10, 2025

Topic: Security

Blog Brand: The Buzz

Region: Americas

March 10, 2025

Throughout Donald Trump’s second term, the President has talked about cutting the nation’s military budget in half if China and Russia would do the same.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has asked the military services to show how they might cut 8 percent annually from current budgets each over the next five years, perhaps to reduce the defense budget, but more likely to create substantial new military capabilities like an Iron Dome for the entire United States.

Practically, in today’s turbulent 2020s, the United States would do well to limit the growth of annual defense spending to a few tens of billions of dollars, even without an Iron Dome.

Military Budget Cuts Of Times Past

Such significant cuts in the military’s budget only occurred after the fall of the USSR, marking the end of the Cold War. Secretaries of Defense Dick Cheney, Les Aspin, and William Perry, along with careful congressional stewards of the armed forces, reduced the military from 2.2 million active-duty uniformed personnel to 1.4 million and gave weapons manufacturers a not-so-desired “procurement holiday.”

Alas, more typical was the experience after World War II, when steep cuts after 1945 led to the Task Force Smith debacle in Korea in 1950, wherein underfunded and under-equipped American units experienced bazooka rockets bouncing off of North Korean tanks. Another famous example being the rapid downsizing of our army and navy after World War I, allowing Japan to become a legitimate rival to the U.S. in the Pacific.

The United States maintains just 1.3 million active-duty personnel today, even as the world becomes much more dangerous than in the 1990s.

Yes, the national defense budget is almost $900 billion. However, that is because we are maintaining high readiness, sustaining a high-quality all-volunteer force, and not taking any procurement holiday in the face of challenges from China and Russia.

Relative to the size of the economy, the U.S.’ defense spending for 2025 will be 3.2 percent of GDP, which is modest compared to typical Cold War levels of 5 to 10 percent. Yes, there is wasteful spending at the Department of Defense (DoD), but finding savings in the Pentagon’s budget is difficult because the fat is marbled into the muscle, so to speak.

Also, waste is sometimes in the mind of the beholder. A second or third hypersonic weapons program may be redundant from one perspective but a good insurance policy from another. Further, restructuring organizations or bases often costs money in the short term, even if it can save money in the long term.

Using sources like the Congressional Budget Office, estimated possible savings from the following reforms may total up to $20 billion annually. Indeed, it is a large sum, but nowhere near eight percent of the current budget. Such reforms could include:

1) Conduct another round of base closures ($3 billion a year in eventual savings).

2) Eliminate platforms DoD wants to retire ($4 billion).

3) Hold Intelligence Community flat in real terms ($3 billion).

4) Adopt “Performance-Based Logistics” more widely ($3 billion).

5) Use procurement approaches with less red tape for some weapons systems ($1 to $5 billion).

6) Impose a ten percent reduction on civilian headquarters staff ($2 billion).

Maintain Strength In The Face Of Military Budget Cuts

Trump might be tempted to cut back on the Army, given that its force structure is partly driven by commitments he finds unfair. These include helping South Korea defend itself against North Korea and helping NATO fend off possible Russian aggression.

However, the Army is already the least expensive of the three big services. It has already reduced its active-duty ranks by 10 percent in recent years, primarily due to recruiting challenges. There may be more possible savings here, but they won’t be huge.

Whatever the potential for savings, however, there are also unmet needs which the DoD will likely add to the defense budget, such as:

1) Deterring war in several theaters at once by ensuring the United States can help regional allies in Europe, the western Pacific, and the Middle East fend off opportunistic attacks by their neighbors. This can be done with small but well-chosen “hold and defend” forces that are permanently stationed in forward locations, even in the event of war somewhere else. Adding the limited force structure required for this strategy could cost $10 billion to $25 billion a year.

2) Strengthening the U.S. defense industrial base, stockpiling more munitions and spare parts, and improving surge capacity for additional production in the event of a crisis or conflict, with an added average cost of $10 billion a year.

3) Acquiring new technologies, largely unmanned systems, and developing more hardened basing infrastructure in the Western Pacific, will improve regional deterrence capabilities. More attack submarines and long-range strike aircraft should also be built, with an estimated annual average cost of $10 billion to $15 billion for this shopping list.

4) Even if an impenetrable national shield is unrealistic, a modest expansion of air, missile, and drone defense for the United States, beyond the minimal system now deployed in California and Alaska and oriented against North Korea, makes sense, even with added expenditures in the low billions a year, not the tens or hundreds of billions that an actual national dome would entail.

Trump and Hegseth are right to want to reduce the U.S. defense budget where possible. However, they need to remain realistic about the possibilities—and the need to buttress some U.S. defense capabilities in pursuit, as Mr. Trump likes to say, of “peace through strength.”

About The Author: Michael O’Hanlon

Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow and director of research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He directs the Strobe Talbott Center on Security, Strategy and Technology, and the Defense Industrial Base working group. He is the inaugural holder of the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy. He co-directs the Africa Security Initiative as well. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia, Georgetown, and George Washington universities and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He also serves as a member of the Defense Policy Board at the U.S. Department of Defense. O’Hanlon was a member of the external advisory board at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2011-12. O’Hanlon’s latest book, “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars Since 1861” (Brookings and Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) was published in January 2023.

Image Credit: Shutterstock/Zhong Xinyashi.

The National Interest · by Lake Dodson · March 10, 2025

12. Jüri Saar: Opposing theories behind the Russo-Ukrainian War

Excerpts:

As the course of the Russia-Ukraine war has already demonstrated, Putin's assessment of Russia's military and economic capabilities was overly optimistic. The blitzkrieg that was supposed to last only a few days and end with Ukraine returning to Russia's "friendly" embrace never materialized. The so-called second most powerful army in the world turned out to be a massive bluff and its actual capabilities have proven to be far below any reasonable expectations.

Looking at and evaluating the current situation in Russia, it is likely in the midst of its final, rather desperate attempt to turn the tide of this war. It is more than certain that in behind-the-scenes negotiations, the Kremlin is making all sorts of fantastical promises to Washington — its primary goal being to convince the United States to withdraw its support for Ukraine and end its direct assistance.

Even if assessed objectively, the situation would not be favorable for Russia, even if it were left alone to face Ukraine, which enjoys full economic and military backing from Europe. Russia could only achieve total victory in this war if the United States were to join Russia in fighting against Ukraine and Europe. But such an outcome is nothing more than the fevered dream of Kremlin elites — one with virtually no chance of ever coming true.

Jüri Saar: Opposing theories behind the Russo-Ukrainian War

news.err.ee7 min

March 10, 2025

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Jüri Saar, University of Tartu professor emeritus, research fellow at the Estonian Academy of Security Sciences

Donald Trump's willingness to accommodate Russia would amount to a temporary attempt to save the country from yet another smuta — a period of decline, chaos and disorder — that is bound to come sooner or later, as it is inherent in the trajectory of Russia as a totalitarian empire, writes Jüri Saar.

The war between Russia and Ukraine in Europe is in its fourth year, with no end in sight. This is somewhat logical because wars always conclude when one side acknowledges its defeat. Formally, wars end at the negotiation table, where peace treaties are signed along with their terms, usually involving a compromise since neither side fully achieves what it originally sought. Total capitulation is a different scenario, governed by the principle of woe to the vanquished (vae victis!).

To understand the nature of this war, we must first ask: who is fighting whom? The simplest answer is that Russia and Ukraine are at war, with Russia having attacked its neighboring country, whose sovereignty and territorial integrity it had previously recognized. Russia is currently fighting to expand its empire, which shrank significantly in 1991 along with what it called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe." Empires, as we know, cannot remain within fixed borders; they either expand as long as they have the strength to do so or contract until they collapse. There is no third option.

Ukraine, on the other hand, is fighting against the expansion and restoration of the Russian empire, as well as for its own statehood and the survival of the Ukrainian people. In reality, this war has given birth to Ukrainians as a state-forming nation — a people who want nothing more than to live within their national borders and develop their own country. From Ukraine's perspective, this is essentially a war of independence, much like the one we fought against Bolshevik Russia between 1918 and 1920. Similarly to our historical situation, a Ukrainian defeat in this war would have fatal consequences.

From Russia's perspective, this war has another distinctive feature: it is a religious war. Not in the sense that Russians have collectively become devout Orthodox believers whose faith is under some terrible threat. No, before launching this war, Russia was not facing any existential danger. Rather, the Kremlin leadership concluded that it had accumulated sufficient resources to resume waging war once again.

The slogans put forth by Vladimir Putin, claiming that neither Ukraine nor Ukrainians exist, clearly reflect this approach. Particularly telling are the remarks made by one of the Kremlin's trusted figures, Vladislav Surkov, in a 2020 interview. His statements reflect an extreme — if not outright Russian fascist (Rashist) — contempt toward Ukraine and Ukrainians: "Ukraine does not exist. There is Ukrainianness, a peculiar brain dysfunction... A bloody provincial outlook. Darkness instead of a state. There is borscht, Bandera and the bandura, but there is no nation... The only proven effective method for dealing with Ukrainianness is forcing them into brotherly relations with Russians by means of coercion."

From the Kremlin's perspective, Ukrainians are traitors who have denied the fact that they are actually Russians, albeit with some minor variations. Ukrainians, however, are completely opposed to this imperial mindset, and by now, they have proven their stance both in words and actions.

According to the ideology of religious wars, a holy war ends only when the enemy is eradicated worldwide. This principle also applies to traitors — in this case, Ukrainians. The only thing that can interrupt an active holy war is the exhaustion of a state's capacity to fight, which may result in its complete collapse. In 1991, the then-Russia — meaning the Soviet Union — ran out of strength, which made it necessary to resort to a temporary phase of less active and less costly warfare methods.

Throughout its history, Russia has waged religious wars and has yet to transition to a new understanding of warfare, even in the early 21st century. The Western approach to warfare is based on Carl von Clausewitz's famous definition: war is the continuation of politics by other means. War is not an instinctive urge nor a divine duty imposed from above, as the Kremlin still seems to believe.

However, over the course of the 20th century, another fundamental principle of international law emerged: the prohibition of military intervention in the affairs of another country. This principle — the non-intervention rule — worked relatively well for several decades.

What is happening in Ukraine, therefore, is something far more global than just a stronger and larger country attacking a smaller and weaker one. This is a proxy war, in which two value systems, two civilizations, have clashed: the Western Christian world and the Russian Orthodox world. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also acknowledged this proxy war between America and Russia.

These two worlds differ entirely in their approach to warfare — from the underlying ideology (religious war vs. political warfare) to the rules of engagement (warfare follows rules and even one's own soldiers can be punished for war crimes vs. everything is permitted in war and only the defeated are punished).

As a result, what is at stake in this war is nothing less than the future of the world order. If Russia emerges victorious, the existing world order that has been in place since 1945 will cease to exist. Most likely, the world will revert to realpolitik, where events are determined by the interests of states — primarily those of the strongest and most powerful. In such a world, the powerful will do whatever they please, while the small and weak will do whatever they must to survive.

The hypothesis regarding the differences between American and European war theories, as formulated by Mikk Salu, concerns only the tactical level of warfare. In highlighting the distinctions between American and European approaches, the author failed to account for the perceptions of the most important and active participant in this war: Russia. If anyone in the White House in Washington seriously believes that Americans can strike a genuine deal with the Russians — one that benefits both sides — then they are making a profound and tragic mistake.

For Moscow, America has always been the Great Satan, the leader of the Western world, and it will remain so. This attitude is immutable, almost archetypal, and from Russia's perspective, the sin of the Western world — and America in particular — is simply its existence. As recently as 2004, one of the Kremlin's chief ideologists, Aleksandr Dugin, wrote without any pretense: "We hate America simply because we hate it. We want it not to exist. We want to hide it away, to remove it, to lock it in a distant box, sealed with bolts of two oceans. Anti-Americanism is a serious thing."

Any deal between Donald Trump and Putin that results in ending the war on terms favorable to Russia will benefit only Russia and, in every case, harm the United States. Consider how America helped Stalin's Soviet Union industrialize in the 1930s and later supported it with the Lend-Lease program during World War II. Yet, in the end, the two still clashed in the Cold War, because in Moscow's worldview, America was the leader of class enemies. All concessions and accommodations made to Stalin were seen as nothing more than "the enemy's secret machinations."

Trump's concessions to Russia would amount to an attempt to temporarily save Russia from yet another smuta — a period of decline, chaos and disorder — which, sooner or later, is inevitable. This trajectory is embedded in the very nature of Russia as a totalitarian empire. One should not be misled by the vast size of Russia's territory on a map. The Soviet Union appeared even larger on the map, yet it ultimately collapsed under its own weight. Similarly, Putin's Russia is internally much weaker than the fearsome image the Kremlin has tried to project, both to its domestic audience and to foreign observers.

As the course of the Russia-Ukraine war has already demonstrated, Putin's assessment of Russia's military and economic capabilities was overly optimistic. The blitzkrieg that was supposed to last only a few days and end with Ukraine returning to Russia's "friendly" embrace never materialized. The so-called second most powerful army in the world turned out to be a massive bluff and its actual capabilities have proven to be far below any reasonable expectations.

Looking at and evaluating the current situation in Russia, it is likely in the midst of its final, rather desperate attempt to turn the tide of this war. It is more than certain that in behind-the-scenes negotiations, the Kremlin is making all sorts of fantastical promises to Washington — its primary goal being to convince the United States to withdraw its support for Ukraine and end its direct assistance.

Even if assessed objectively, the situation would not be favorable for Russia, even if it were left alone to face Ukraine, which enjoys full economic and military backing from Europe. Russia could only achieve total victory in this war if the United States were to join Russia in fighting against Ukraine and Europe. But such an outcome is nothing more than the fevered dream of Kremlin elites — one with virtually no chance of ever coming true.

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Editor: Marcus Turovski

13. US vetoes G7 proposal to combat Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers

Why would we do this? What is the strategic rationale for vetoing this?

Excerpts:

US diplomats briefed their G7 counterparts that the move was because of Washington’s “re-evaluation of its position in multilateral organisations, rendering it unable to join any new initiatives”, according to the Bloomberg report.

US vetoes G7 proposal to combat Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers

US pushes to remove references to sanctions and Russia’s war in Ukraine from a Canadian draft statement

The Guardian · by David Connett · March 8, 2025

The US has rejected a Canadian proposal to establish a task force that would tackle Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” of oil tankers, according to reports last night.

Canada, which has the current Group of Seven presidency, proposed the measure ahead of a meeting of G7 foreign ministers in Quebec later this week.

In negotiations to agree a joint statement on maritime issues, the US is pushing to strengthen language about China while watering down wording on Russia, the reports said.

The “shadow fleet” refers to ageing oil tankers, the identities of which are hidden to help circumvent western economic sanctions imposed on Moscow since it launched its full-scale military invasion of Ukraine at the start of 2022.

As well as vetoing Canada’s proposal to establish a task force to monitor sanctions breaches, the draft G7 statement seen by Bloomberg News shows the US pushed to remove the word “sanctions” as well as wording citing Russia’s “ability to maintain its war” in Ukraine by replacing it with “earn revenue”.

G7 communiqués are not final until they are published through consensus. Further talks could still result in changes to the end-of-summit statement.

US diplomats briefed their G7 counterparts that the move was because of Washington’s “re-evaluation of its position in multilateral organisations, rendering it unable to join any new initiatives”, according to the Bloomberg report.

European countries are discussing plans that will let them carry out seizures of Moscow’s oil-exporting tankers in the Baltic Sea.

The proposals include using international law to allow them to take control of vessels on environmental or piracy grounds.

The Guardian · by David Connett · March 8, 2025

14. The Shifting World Order: "Trump and Vance Have Contempt for the Europeans"

Of all the international relations theories realism remains arguably relevant and somewhat predictive. But none of the international relations theories are as explanatory and useful as Thucidides fear, honor, and interest (which is of course the foundational for realism) and Clausewitz' passion, reason, and chance. But I think Clausewitz' "chance" is most likely why none of the international relations theories ever truly work.

Excerpts:

DER SPIEGEL: Is the current U.S. administration merely "largely indifferent” to Europe, as German Chancellor-designate Friedrich Merz put it? Or is it now openly hostile towards Europe?

Mearsheimer: President Trump and Vice President Vance have contempt for the Europeans. When Trump was elected in 2016 and took office in 2017, he had two principal foreign policy goals. One was to abandon engagement and adopt a containment policy toward China – in other words make a 180-degree turn. The second goal was to fundamentally change relations with Russia and particularly with President Vladimir Putin. He was successful in changing our policy toward China. But he was unsuccessful regarding our policy toward Russia. He basically continued the policy on Ukraine and Russia that his predecessors had pursued. He’s going to do now – in his second term – what he was unable to do in the first.

"It was the presence of the United States, which provided security in the form of NATO that allowed the EU to flourish."

...

DER SPIEGEL: Your theory of "offensive realism” is notorious for taking a particularly sober, almost cynical view of the world. Do you feel vindicated by current events?

Mearsheimer: I don't want to sound like I'm full of myself. That wouldn’t be appropriate. But during the so-called Unipolar Moment, which ran from roughly 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed until Trump's first inauguration in 2017, many people argued that I was a dinosaur. My realist ideas, it was said at the time, were outdated, they were relevant in the 18th century, but they no longer applied. Today it is quite clear that realism is alive and well.

The Shifting World Order: "Trump and Vance Have Contempt for the Europeans"

Political scientist John Mearsheimer on the campus of the University of Chicago: "The Trump administration is bent on fundamentally changing America’s relations with its European allies."

Spiegel · by Bernhard Zand, DER SPIEGEL

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Mearsheimer, will the beginning of Donald Trump's second presidency go down in history as the turning point when the bond between America and Europe was broken?

Mearsheimer: I think the answer is yes. The Trump administration is bent on fundamentally changing America’s relations with its European allies and greatly reducing the U.S. role in NATO, if not pulling the U.S. out of NATO.

DER SPIEGEL 11/2025

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 11/2025 (March 7th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.

SPIEGEL International

DER SPIEGEL: What does the behavior of Trump and Vice President JD Vance during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's visit to the White House tell us about the future of the trans-Atlantic alliance?

Mearsheimer: Trump and Vance’s confrontation provides stark evidence that the trans-Atlantic alliance is in deep trouble. It shows that both Ukraine and Europe have a fundamentally different view than the Trump administration on how to end the Ukraine war and more generally how to deal with Russia. Trump wants to have good relations with Russia; Europe does not. It is hard to see how those two views can be reconciled.

About John Mearsheimer

Photo montage by students at the University of Pennsylvania depicting Mearsheimer as a follower of the Florentine diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli on the occasion of a speech to the Philomathean Society

Foto:

Marwane Pallas / The Philomathean Society

John J. Mearsheimer, 77, is seen as both a pioneer and an enfant terrible of U.S. political science. A founder of the so-called "offensive realism" school, he views global politics as an anarchic space where great powers thirst for control. Mearsheimer was born in Brooklyn and attended the U.S. Military Academy in West Point. He has been teaching at the University of Chicago since 1982. His books, including "Conventional Deterrence" (1983) and "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" (2001) are considered classics in the field of political theory. His 2007 bestseller "The Israel Lobby," written together with Stephen M. Walt, generated controversy, as have his provocative ideas about the background of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

DER SPIEGEL: Do you believe that Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty – the article of NATO’s founding agreement that holds that an attack on any alliance member is an attack on NATO as a whole – is currently valid? Would Trump deploy the U.S. military if Russia were to occupy part of Estonia, Latvia or Finland?

Mearsheimer: Article 5 never said that the United States would axiomatically use military force to come to the rescue of a fellow NATO country. But almost everyone believes that to be the case. It was essential to say just that during the Cold War. West Germany was the frontline state, and it had no nuclear weapons. The Germans were deeply concerned that the U.S. would not use its nuclear weapons to defend them if they were in dire straits. So, the U.S. emphasized Article 5 in a way that made it sound like we would automatically use nuclear weapons in such a case. In fact, both former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said after they were out of office that they would not have used nuclear weapons to defend Germany. They did not say that while they were in office.

DER SPIEGEL: And you believe that the United States would not defend Estonia or Finland today?

Mearsheimer: That’s too strong. I think it’s likely that now, the United States would come to the defense of a Baltic state if it were attacked. But that commitment is eroding quickly. Five years from now, I’m not even sure there will be a meaningful Article 5 guarantee left.

Swedish troops at a military exercise in the Finland in 2024. "Five years from now, I’m not even sure there will be a meaningful Article 5 guarantee left."

Foto: Leon Neal / Getty Images

DER SPIEGEL: Is the current U.S. administration merely "largely indifferent” to Europe, as German Chancellor-designate Friedrich Merz put it? Or is it now openly hostile towards Europe?

Mearsheimer: President Trump and Vice President Vance have contempt for the Europeans. When Trump was elected in 2016 and took office in 2017, he had two principal foreign policy goals. One was to abandon engagement and adopt a containment policy toward China – in other words make a 180-degree turn. The second goal was to fundamentally change relations with Russia and particularly with President Vladimir Putin. He was successful in changing our policy toward China. But he was unsuccessful regarding our policy toward Russia. He basically continued the policy on Ukraine and Russia that his predecessors had pursued. He’s going to do now – in his second term – what he was unable to do in the first.

"It was the presence of the United States, which provided security in the form of NATO that allowed the EU to flourish."

DER SPIEGEL: On your website, you introduce yourself with an ironic self-portrait as an adherent of the philosopher and diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli – as an arch-realist who believes "that the great powers dominate the international system, and they constantly engage in security competition with each other.” Do you consider Europe to be a great power?

Mearsheimer: Europe is a constellation of states, even though we often talk about Europe as if it were a single country. Some European leaders once dreamed that they would eventually end up with a United States of Europe. That never happened and now it looks like the American pacifier is leaving Europe. As that happens, those powerful centrifugal forces that exist in Europe will begin to manifest themselves. It was the presence of the United States, which provided security in the form of NATO that allowed the EU to flourish. When the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize, I considered this a fundamental mistake. NATO should have won the peace prize.

DER SPIEGEL: Under the protective umbrella of the United States, the EU has become one of the three major economic powers in the world. Is it at all conceivable that Europe could become a great power in your sense?

Mearsheimer: No. The EU member states have both conflicting interests and common interests. When the Europeans are operating in a world where the Americans are in charge, they basically do what the Americans want, and then it looks like Europe is a nation state of its own. But this is a mirage.

Mearsheimer in his office in Chicago: "If you are interested in facts and logic and look in a cold and calculating way at Russia's capabilities, however, you see that there’s no serious threat to Germany from Russia."

Foto: Jamie Kelter Davis / DER SPIEGEL

DER SPIEGEL: Friedrich Merz said that his "top priority” will be to "strengthen Europe so that we can gradually achieve independence from the United States.” Would Donald Trump mind if Germany weakened its ties to America?

Mearsheimer: He’d be enthusiastic. Trump wants European states like Germany to be responsible for their own security. His basic view is: I’m going to work out a deal with Putin to shut down the war in Ukraine. If the Europeans and Ukrainians don't like that, we'll leave. Then you Europeans can work out an arrangement with the Russians yourselves. Good luck with that. It's quite clear that the Trump administration wants a divorce. And I think the new German chancellor understands that.

DER SPIEGEL: Is it ultimately in vain, therefore, when European politicians such as French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and soon Friedrich Merz make pilgrimages to Washington?

Mearsheimer: This breakup is going to take time. The Europeans want to gauge, face to face, exactly what Trump thinks about relations with the EU, about his relationship with Russia and about how to settle the war in Ukraine. From their point of view, this makes perfect sense. But I bet they know that there’s no way to change Trump's mind and to repair this relationship.

DER SPIEGEL: Trump declared NATO "obsolete” as early as 2016. But in the end, he didn't withdraw any significant number of troops from Europe. Could the same thing happen again?

Mearsheimer: I thought this was a possibility – until February 12. On that day, President Trump announced that he had had a phone conversation with President Putin, and then Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a remarkably revealing speech in Brussels …

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer (second from left) in the Oval Office: "I bet they know that there’s no way to change Trump's mind and to repair this relationship."

Foto: Carl Court / AFP

DER SPIEGEL: ... in which he said that the United States would no longer be the primary guarantor of security in Europe.

Mearsheimer: Yes, and two days later, JD Vance gave his famous speech at the Munich Security Conference. After that, it was clear that Trump was pursuing a radical policy toward Europe. This was all carefully crafted, and it was designed to humiliate the Europeans and put them in their place. I’m sure that Vance was a key player here. He has long been committed to ending the war in Ukraine and to greatly reducing the U.S. footprint in Europe.

DER SPIEGEL: In the early 1990s, you warned that if Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons, it would become a victim of Russian aggression. And you raised the question of whether Germany could one day become a nuclear power. Should Germany aspire to nuclear status?

Mearsheimer: What I said at the time was that if the Soviets pulled out of Eastern Europe and the United States pulled out of Western Europe, then Germany was likely to develop nuclear weapons. We ultimately stayed in Europe after 1989 because our fear was that if we pulled out, the Germans might go down that road. We're now hypothesizing a situation where the United States is likely to leave Europe...

DER SPIEGEL: ... which could lead to the very scenario you wrote about over 30 years ago. So should the Germans acquire their own nuclear weapons?

Mearsheimer: That would be largely a function of how they assess the Russian threat. Given that the Germans have convinced themselves – erroneously, I would add – that the Russian army is poised to overrun Europe, there’s a high likelihood that they’ll get nuclear weapons. If you are interested in facts and logic and look in a cold and calculating way at Russia's capabilities, however, you see that there’s no serious threat to Germany from Russia. Therefore, a good case can be made that there’ll be no need for Germany to acquire nuclear weapons in the near or medium term.

"When you think about Putin, you want to ask two questions. One, what are his intentions? And two, what are his capabilities?"

DER SPIEGEL: Would it make sense to create a European nuclear umbrella together with the British and the French?

Mearsheimer: If you’re Germany and you feel that you need nuclear deterrence – can you depend on the French and the British?

DER SPIEGEL: You mean if people like the right-wing populists Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage come to power in France or in the United Kingdom one day?

Mearsheimer: If I were the German chancellor facing a serious threat, I would get my own nuclear weapons. Not because I'm interested in being aggressive or using those nuclear weapons for coercive purposes. It’s because nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrent.

DER SPIEGEL: Other U.S. allies such as South Korea and Japan are also considering acquiring nuclear weapons. In South Korea, 70 percent of the population are in favor of it, according to surveys.

Mearsheimer: South Korea and Japan both face two serious threats – from North Korea and China. If I were in Tokyo or Seoul, I’d be deeply concerned about whether the American nuclear umbrella provides sufficient security. Germany's present situation cannot be compared to this.

A mothballed Titan II missile in its launch duct at the Missile Museum in Sahuarita, Arizona

Foto: Titan Missile Museum / AP

DER SPIEGEL: Yet unlike China and North Korea, Russia has already invaded other countries, not only Ukraine, but also Georgia in 2008. Aren't you underestimating the danger that Putin poses?

Mearsheimer: When you think about Putin, you want to ask two questions. One, what are his intentions? And two, what are his capabilities? As for his intentions, we have no evidence that he is an imperialist who wants to conquer all of Ukraine and create a Greater Russia, let alone additional territories in Eastern Europe.

DER SPIEGEL: Didn't his troops attack Kyiv, Bucha and Irpin in 2022? Isn't he still bombing targets throughout Ukraine, even in Lviv, fewer than 60 kilometers from the Polish border? Isn’t that a threat?

Mearsheimer: There's no question about that. But the cause of these wars was NATO expansion – not Putin's supposed imperialism. Besides, Putin is in no position to conquer the whole of Ukraine, nor other countries in Eastern Europe, and certainly not in Western Europe. His army has spent the past three years struggling to conquer the eastern fifth of Ukraine.

"I care greatly about Ukraine. I don't want to see it destroyed."

DER SPIEGEL: If a majority of people in Ukraine want their country to join the EU or NATO, what gives you the right to deny them that wish?

Mearsheimer: I understand the Ukrainian people's desire. But Russia is a great power, and it has made clear that it would rather destroy Ukraine before it will let that happen. I care greatly about Ukraine. I don't want to see it destroyed. That is precisely why my argument in the early 1990s was that Ukraine should keep its nuclear weapons and why I have argued for years that it should under no circumstances try to join NATO. If the Ukrainians had followed my advice, Ukraine would be intact today.

DER SPIEGEL: You have long warned against liberal "delusions” about the state of the world. Donald Trump is not interested in NATO, the UN or other international institutions many liberals cherish. Is he not the kind of politician you like?

Mearsheimer: No. Realists like institutions. The U.S. created many important institutions during the Cold War, including NATO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. If you’re the United States and you must wage the Cold War or you want to run the world, you can't do it without institutions. You need rules. I think Trump is making a mistake by trashing institutions, as well as treating allies with contempt.

"With NATO's expansion and the resulting war in Ukraine, we have foolishly driven Russia into the arms of the Chinese."

DER SPIEGEL: He is treating the leaders of the two nations that were most recently seen as America's rivals relatively well at the moment – Putin and China's leader Xi Jinping. Are these three men in the process of dividing the world into three spheres of influence?

Mearsheimer: That perspective applies to U.S.-Russian relations. Trump has no problem with Russia controlling a large slice of territory in Ukraine. But it's a different story in East Asia. China is a peer competitor that wants to dominate East Asia. We are also in an intense competition with the Chinese in terms of developing artificial intelligence, supercomputers and quantum microchips. In recent years, the United States hasn't been able to pay much attention to China and East Asia because we were pinned down in Ukraine and the Middle East, supporting Israel in its various wars. If we get out of Europe and the Ukraine conflict is settled, there is reason to believe that the intensity of the military competition between China and the United States will increase.

DER SPIEGEL: Do you see Trump's turn towards Putin as an attempt to drive a wedge between Russia and China?

Mearsheimer: Trump wants to pull U.S. military forces out of Europe so he can pivot to Asia. And he wants the Russians on America's side of the ledger and not on China's. With NATO's expansion and the resulting war in Ukraine, we have foolishly driven Russia into the arms of the Chinese. Trump is trying to at least get the Russians into a neutral position – or ideally get Russia lined up with us against China.

DER SPIEGEL correspondent Bernhard Zand with John Mearsheimer (left) in his office in Chicago

Foto: Jamie Kelter Davis / DER SPIEGEL

"Today it is quite clear that realism is alive and well."

DER SPIEGEL: How should Europe behave in this constellation?

Mearsheimer: European countries should – and probably will – do what’s in their own interest. The Americans have made it clear that there were certain things that Europe should not do vis-a-vis China. Most importantly: not trade sophisticated technologies with the Chinese. If the Americans pull out of Europe, we will lose leverage with Europe on this very important issue.

DER SPIEGEL: How would the Trump administration react if the Europeans moved closer to China?

Mearsheimer: The smart thing for Trump to do would be to tell the Europeans that the U.S. will keep military forces in Europe as long as the Europeans don't trade with China in ways which are detrimental to the United States, which mainly means helping China develop cutting-edge technologies. We had a similar problem during the Cold War, by the way. The Germans were keen to do business with the Soviets, which made the U.S. unhappy. Back then, though, we had a lot of influence; after all, we were ensuring Germany's security.

DER SPIEGEL: Your theory of "offensive realism” is notorious for taking a particularly sober, almost cynical view of the world. Do you feel vindicated by current events?

Mearsheimer: I don't want to sound like I'm full of myself. That wouldn’t be appropriate. But during the so-called Unipolar Moment, which ran from roughly 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed until Trump's first inauguration in 2017, many people argued that I was a dinosaur. My realist ideas, it was said at the time, were outdated, they were relevant in the 18th century, but they no longer applied. Today it is quite clear that realism is alive and well.

DER SPIEGEL: Mr. Mearsheimer, thank you for this interview.

Spiegel · by Bernhard Zand, DER SPIEGEL

15. Philippines Arrests Former President Rodrigo Duterte on ICC Warrant

Couldn't happen to a more deserving national leader (except for Kim Jong Un, Putin, etc).

Philippines Arrests Former President Rodrigo Duterte on ICC Warrant

Human-rights groups say more than 12,000 people were killed in antidrug operations between 2016 and 2022

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/philippines-arrests-former-president-rodrigo-duterte-on-icc-warrant-53a1e2f5?mod=latest_headlines

By Gabriele Steinhauser

and Bella Perez-Rubio

Updated March 11, 2025 2:17 am ET

Why the U.S. Keeps Losing to China in the Battle Over Critical Minerals

The West got its hands on one of the world’s best graphite mines—then things started going off the rails

https://www.wsj.com/business/china-us-critical-minerals-fight-50b5cbda?mod=latest_headlines

By Jon Emont

| Photographs by Annie Flanagan for WSJ

March 10, 2025 11:00 pm ET

When mining executive Shaun Verner first visited his company’s graphite deposit in Mozambique in 2017, he felt sure he had a winner.

His goal: to challenge China’s dominance over the world’s supply of a critical mineral used in everything from electric vehicles to submarine hulls.

Backed by more than a hundred million dollars of U.S. government financing, Verner and his Australia-based company, Syrah Resources, opened the Mozambique mine and built a graphite-processing plant in Louisiana, the first of its type in the U.S. It also signed a sales deal with Tesla, which has historically bought graphite for car batteries from China.

Then things started going off the rails.

China, which provides more than 90% of the world’s battery-grade graphite supply, jacked up its production, flooding the market and driving prices so low that Syrah couldn’t mine profitably. Last May, the Biden administration delayed new rules that would have penalized U.S. users from buying Chinese graphite. In Mozambique, farmers resettled from Syrah’s mine staged protests, shutting down the mining.

Syrah’s Louisiana plant, now open for a year, has yet to make its first commercial sale. Syrah’s stock has plunged by around 90% since the start of 2023.

The company’s challenges help show why, in the David-versus-Goliath battle for the world’s critical minerals, China, the Goliath, keeps winning.

The U.S.’s desperate need for critical minerals—which includes resources such as nickel, lithium and cobalt in addition to graphite—has been underscored by the Trump administration’s aggressive push for greater access in Ukraine and Greenland, rattling allies. In December, Beijing said it would ban certain mineral exports to the U.S. and conduct stricter reviews of graphite sales, in response to U.S. restrictions on semiconductor exports to China.

Syrah Resources CEO Shaun Verner Photo: Syrah Resources

Yet with its thumb on many of the best resources, China can dictate prices. Washington’s policy flip-flops keep blowing up miners’ plans. And many Western mining companies struggle to navigate higher-risk countries where critical minerals—all needed for green technologies and national defense—are prevalent, leaving them flat-footed when unrest erupts.

Jervois Global, the only dedicated cobalt miner in the U.S., suspended operations in 2023, five months after local dignitaries attended the opening of its Idaho mine. The company, which received Pentagon funding, blamed surging Chinese cobalt production for pummeling prices. In January, Jervois declared bankruptcy.

BHP, one of the world’s top miners, shut down its Australian nickel operations last year, amid a deluge of Chinese production from Indonesia. Albemarle, the largest U.S. lithium producer, is cutting its workforce and delaying new processing facilities after a surge in Chinese lithium supply cratered prices.

There is considerable debate in mining circles over whether China is intentionally overproducing to put Western companies out of business. It is also possible Chinese companies are just trying to maximize production and earnings, since they can be profitable at lower prices than Western competitors.

Natural graphite production and reserves, 2024

China

1.23M tons

Production

Brazil

1M tons

73K

Madagascar

Mozambique

500K

100K

96K

100K

Reserves

50K

0 tons

Source: United States Geological Survey

Roque Ruiz/WSJ

China’s Foreign Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Either way, China’s control over certain metals is proving hard to break.

The share of the world’s refined lithium produced in China or by Chinese owners abroad hit 71% last year, up from 49% in 2017. Over the same span, the country’s control of refined nickel rose to 55% from 38%, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Most of the world’s graphite mining takes place in China or in Africa.

Graphite customers “have ultimately made the economically rational, but strategically dangerous decision to essentially go all in on China’s supply,” said Verner.

Showered with money

Syrah, a small Australian firm, broke into the big leagues in 2011 when it purchased a company that owned mineral rights throughout East Africa, including the Balama graphite deposit in northern Mozambique. Verner, who had spent 20 years at BHP, became Syrah’s chief executive in 2017.

The company seemed destined for success. Decades of heavy mining in northern China had depleted some of the country’s graphite, and new alternatives were needed.

A Credit Suisse analyst predicted that Syrah’s mine, dug out of a forested area, was a global standout that could “provide 100% of the world’s current requirements for natural graphite for about 1,000 years.”

Syrah Resources' graphite mine in Mozambique.

Syrah Resources

Syrah wanted to do more than just mine the stuff. Company leaders also wanted to process the graphite they mined to unlock more profit, even though such work is expensive and complicated, with much of the world’s expertise in China.

Undeterred, Syrah licensed processing technology from a Chinese producer and began working out the kinks of “spheroidization,” a complex process that turns graphite into tight balls, which are jam-packed into the anodes of EV batteries to boost energy density and performance.

Syrah’s ambitions dovetailed with the goals of the Biden administration, which wanted to use EV manufacturing to rebuild U.S. industrial strength.

In July 2022, Syrah was awarded a $102 million Energy Department loan to build up the Louisiana graphite-processing facility, creating nearly 100 high-skilled operations jobs. That August, Congress established a $7,500 subsidy for EV purchases to boost demand. A couple of months later, the Energy Department announced a $220 million grant to Syrah to quadruple output in Louisiana.

“Congrats on getting showered with the money,” an analyst said on a call with Syrah company leadership.

Syrah’s graphite-processing plant in Louisiana has yet to make its first commercial sale.

Sleeping giant

China wasn’t sitting still. Hoping to cash in on an EV boom and revive fading industrial regions, Chinese companies cranked up their graphite production.

State-owned mining giant China Minmetals began pumping out enormous quantities in 2022 from a huge new mine in northeast China. Chinese companies also built new factories to make synthetic graphite, an industrially-produced alternative for natural graphite that is also used in EV batteries.

The surge in Chinese graphite production sent spherical graphite prices plummeting from $3,650 dollars a metric ton in April 2022 to $2,400 a year later.

Competition among Chinese producers was so intense that many companies sold at prices below their costs, said Verner.

In response, Syrah halted mining in Mozambique for four months in 2023. It later restarted, but at reduced levels. Verner said the company wouldn’t produce at a loss.

Syrah was awarded a loan to build up its Louisiana facility that was expected to create nearly 100 high-skilled jobs.

The company still had one significant thing going for it: A 2022 law signed by then-President Biden that penalized the use of Chinese graphite. The idea was to push carmakers to buy graphite from U.S. or allied sources such as Syrah, even if it was costlier.

But in May 2024, the Biden administration said it would waive the planned penalties for two years. More work needed to be done to set up a reliable mechanism for tracing graphite’s origins, it said.

Sen. Joe Manchin, chairman of the Senate energy committee, and other critics said the Biden administration was more concerned with keeping EVs cheap than with supporting upstream manufacturers in the U.S. such as Syrah. One company that had been considering buying Syrah’s graphite decided it wasn’t interested, Verner said.

Last October, the U.S. government lent Syrah $150 million more, this time to support the Mozambique mine. But things weren’t rosy there, either.

During a chaotic election season in Mozambique, farmers who had been resettled from their lands near the mine held protests, forcing Syrah to halt operations. The protests came amid a wave of unrest after Mozambique’s longtime ruling party declared a victory that was questioned by the opposition and European Union election observers.

In December, Syrah announced that protests at its mine had put it in default on its loan agreements with the U.S., because of the prolonged operations interruptions. The company said it spent $18 million more than it earned in the last three months of 2024.

Hanging on

Despite the challenges, Verner says Syrah’s best days are ahead. He hopes that once Mozambique’s government is settled, it will be able to resolve the protests and the company will restart mining, though when that will happen remains uncertain.

Automakers are currently “qualifying” its products to confirm they meet quality standards, and the company expects to make its first graphite-anode sales from the Louisiana plant later this year. The $200 million plant now sprawls over nearly 40 acres on the Louisiana-Mississippi border, where technicians work out the kinks of grinding down graphite spheres and coating them with carbon.

Graphite at Syrah’s Louisiana facility before it is processed.

Syrah says the Trump administration is a wild card: It could help the company’s prospects by hiking tariffs on Chinese graphite imports, or hurt its prospects by removing subsidies for people to switch to EVs.

In January, the Department of Commerce said it would go ahead with an investigation into Chinese trade practices after Syrah and other North American graphite producers petitioned the U.S. government to investigate Chinese graphite prices.

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Tesla opposed the industry’s antidumping petition. A Tesla employee said in a legal filing that it relies on high-purity graphite materials that are predominantly produced in China. It can exit its agreement with Syrah if it doesn’t “qualify” their materials in 2026.

“To most U.S. automakers, their economic incentives are to say the product doesn’t qualify so they don’t have to buy them,” said Jigar Shah, director of the U.S. Department of Energy loans office under former President Biden that approved the initial $102 million loan to Syrah.

Shah said that Syrah remained an important project, despite its challenges.

In February, Syrah announced a small-scale offtake agreement with carmaker Lucid, which is also subject to product qualification. Syrah is waiting to tap its $220 million federal grant and expand its facility until production contracts are settled.

“They are a critical project by all means, it has just proven more challenging than people thought,” said Georgi Georgiev, a battery raw materials analyst for Fastmarkets, a data provider.

Syrah’s chief executive says the company’s best days are ahead.

Write to Jon Emont at jonathan.emont@wsj.com

17. A Personal Explanation of Why I Don’t Vote By George Friedman

Excerpts:

It is my job to forecast events. So I must see as clearly as I can and suppress my own feelings. The passions of the time are not indicators of much. So far, I think I understand what Trump is doing, and in doing it, he reveals that the norms and guardrails of the last epoch have collapsed from old age. Remember that the Founding Fathers smashed through the rotted guardrails of their time and were loathed by the vast mass of American loyalists to the English Crown. This is the nature of America, and it is how my model told me that the norms and guardrails rot every 50 years (a regularity I have no explanation for), and it was time for a president like George Washington or Franklin Roosevelt to storm through them. I saw it coming but had no idea of the name that would be coming with it. And I knew that whoever was president would be both loved and hated by a divided nation. As for Trump himself, I am neither for him nor against him. I would say only that he is not violating the guardrails or norms as much as recognizing that they have outlived their usefulness and that new ones must be built. In my work on the United States, I have found that each cycle destroys the old cycle’s norms and replaces them with a new set. The defenders of the old cycle are outraged, and the defenders of the new cycle are pleased.

Mark Twain said, “history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Trump is a product of American history and, as such, should have been expected, even if the new norms he ushers in are unknown. But emerge they will as they always do in U.S. cycles.

A Personal Explanation of Why I Don’t Vote

By George Friedman -

March 10, 2025

Open as PDF

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/a-personal-explanation-of-why-i-dont-vote/?tpa=ODA0ZTlhYjExOWUyMTIzYTNjNjE4MDE3NDI0ODU3OTIxOWIzNTg&utm_content

I must confess that I have not voted in an election, other than local ones, since I left my life in academia and government 30 years ago. I chose to pursue my passion – geopolitical modeling and forecasting – as a business and so created a company that was my own Office of Net Assessment. (I’d encourage you to look this title up online.) Academic and government life constrained my ambitions. I sensed there were fewer constraints on ideas, and what it takes to develop them, in the private sector. I was too arrogant to imagine that I could fail, despite my ignorance of entrepreneurship.

And so off my wife and I went into business, producing and selling geopolitical forecasts and explanations of national behavior. It sounded like snake oil to some and boring to others. But the move left me free to pursue my passion and my wife (as crazy as I was) loved the challenge. She had no desire to be a professor’s wife. So we started this business by sending free articles to friends, and they forwarded them to others, until my wife told me to stop the free stuff and charge money. She was and is my business manager.

My idiosyncratic view of things boiled down to the idea that leaders do not make policy and that outside forces compel leaders to do what must be done, regardless of their intent. It is not ideology that shapes nations but national imperatives, constraints and capabilities. Watching politicians compete is a sideshow. History is impersonal.

Our marketing strategy was to be right more often than we were wrong so that, in time, the word would spread. To achieve this, we had an intellectual, business and moral imperative. I had to control the urge to express my own wishes regarding the outcomes in history and see instead what is and must be. My goal was to call the play-by-play of history, not to be a player in it. So I decided not to vote in national elections. I must force myself to be clinically distant from political personalities and their ideas. I must focus on the forces that create them, shape their actions and determine their fates.

This was not as difficult for me as it might be for others. At the heart of my model was an insistence to focus not on the behaviors of leaders but on the forces that call them to action. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt had radically different political beliefs, and both had their share of critics, but neither would have become president without an unsentimental and ruthless understanding of how to win elections, and neither could govern with an equally unsentimental and ruthless understanding of the world. Each crafted his personality to the task. This is true in democracies and dictatorships alike.

I can’t suppress my love of my country or the New York Yankees. I won’t put money on them if they don’t have two good relievers. So I must discipline myself on the things I can disregard. This came up in a recent video interview, in which I mentioned that I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I received many comments from Trump supporters who thought this meant I voted for Kamala Harris. But the truth is I didn’t vote for Harris either. I write this piece today because of that confusion. My job is to explain what Trump is doing in his capacity as president. But as with all presidents, who are the products of history rather than its masters, I care more about forces that shape his actions. This is because I think leaders, more often than not, do what they must or what they can. Leaders emerge because they have personalities that adapt to what is necessary. They craft their actions and personalities to suit the situation. If they can rise to leadership of a country, they have the wit and will to recognize what is necessary and possible. And if that’s the case, they must be ruthless and cunning to some degree. For some, their personality is what the times command. Others craft the personality they need. They make errors, of course, but they have gained an overwhelming ability to avoid errors in their climb to power.

I do not know if Trump’s persona is genetic or crafted, and I don’t care. In my thinking, we do not know the vices and deep thoughts of successful leaders. Leaders can see more clearly than I can what’s at stake, what’s necessary and what’s possible. If they cannot, they will be crushed by their enemies or by history. What I do know is that Trump understood what he must do to become president, and that taught him much about the principles of geopolitics.

It is my job to forecast events. So I must see as clearly as I can and suppress my own feelings. The passions of the time are not indicators of much. So far, I think I understand what Trump is doing, and in doing it, he reveals that the norms and guardrails of the last epoch have collapsed from old age. Remember that the Founding Fathers smashed through the rotted guardrails of their time and were loathed by the vast mass of American loyalists to the English Crown. This is the nature of America, and it is how my model told me that the norms and guardrails rot every 50 years (a regularity I have no explanation for), and it was time for a president like George Washington or Franklin Roosevelt to storm through them. I saw it coming but had no idea of the name that would be coming with it. And I knew that whoever was president would be both loved and hated by a divided nation. As for Trump himself, I am neither for him nor against him. I would say only that he is not violating the guardrails or norms as much as recognizing that they have outlived their usefulness and that new ones must be built. In my work on the United States, I have found that each cycle destroys the old cycle’s norms and replaces them with a new set. The defenders of the old cycle are outraged, and the defenders of the new cycle are pleased.

Mark Twain said, “history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Trump is a product of American history and, as such, should have been expected, even if the new norms he ushers in are unknown. But emerge they will as they always do in U.S. cycles.

George Friedman

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/author/gfriedman/

George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures.

Dr. Friedman is also a New York Times bestselling author. His most recent book, THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, published February 25, 2020 describes how “the United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.” The decade 2020-2030 is such a period which will bring dramatic upheaval and reshaping of American government, foreign policy, economics, and culture.

His most popular book, The Next 100 Years, is kept alive by the prescience of its predictions. Other best-selling books include Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, The Next Decade, America’s Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Dr. Friedman has briefed numerous military and government organizations in the United States and overseas and appears regularly as an expert on international affairs, foreign policy and intelligence in major media. For almost 20 years before resigning in May 2015, Dr. Friedman was CEO and then chairman of Stratfor, a company he founded in 1996. Friedman received his bachelor’s degree from the City College of the City University of New York and holds a doctorate in government from Cornell University.

18. DOD civilian employees given $1 spending limit for travel cards

Does this include political appointees? So, as an example, people like the ASD SO/LIC and his staff will not be visiting Tampa anytime soon.

Excerpts:

The spending limit for the government-issued travel cards of federal civilian employees was officially reduced to $1.00, per the instructions.

The memo exempts DOD civilian employee travel that directly supports military operations or a permanent change in station.

Trump’s executive order — entitled “Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Cost Efficiency Initiative” — called for a “transformation in federal spending” by cutting costs and harnessing the power of the increasingly controversial DOGE agency to do the heavy lifting.

DOD civilian employees given $1 spending limit for travel cards

militarytimes.com · by Riley Ceder · March 10, 2025

The Defense Department effectively barred its civilian employees from using their government-issued travel charge cards, according to a DOD memo.

The new spending rules, spelled out in a March 5 memorandum signed by Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Darin Selnick, came a week after President Donald Trump issued a Feb. 26 executive order outlining government cost-saving initiatives, including some that targeted federal workers’ spending habits.

“DOD civilian employees must cancel all future non-exempted official travel reservations, and those currently on non-exempted travel must return to their respective permanent duty stations as soon as feasible,” the DOD memo read.

Pentagon touts $80M in DOGE cuts, but public receipts don’t add up

The Pentagon refused to provide a full list of cuts, and publicly available data — including "receipts" listed on DOGE's site — total around $25 million.

Two tenets of the executive order, “non-essential travel justification” and “credit card freeze,” provided more detailed instructions.

Agencies will be tasked with installing a technological system in which approvals for federally funded travel for “conferences and other non-essential purposes” are logged. Employees will not be allowed to travel unless the head of that agency submits a written justification through the system.

Federal employees’ credit cards will also be frozen for 30 days, save for credit cards tied to disaster relief or natural disaster response benefit assistance.

Elon Musk, the Trump-appointed special government employee who leads DOGE and is the CEO of automotive company Tesla, has faced criticism for the substantial firings his agency has made in the name of cost savings. Cuts have impacted a long list of federal agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Energy, the National Parks Service and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is planning to cut 80,000 employees.

DOGE has also received backlash for emails it sent out requiring federal employees, including DOD civilians, to reply with a detailed list of their professional accomplishments for the week in an attempt to assess productivity.

About Riley Ceder

Riley Ceder is a reporter at Military Times, where he covers breaking news, criminal justice, investigations, and cyber. He previously worked as an investigative practicum student at The Washington Post, where he contributed to the Abused by the Badge investigation.

19. Exposing China’s Legal Preparations for a Taiwan Invasion

Excerpts:

Additionally, the United States, along with other nations and international bodies, should back growing opposition to China’s distortion of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 2758, while making clear that the resolution merely recognizes the People’s Republic of China as the representative of China at the United Nations without resolving Taiwan’s status. A recently proposed U.S. Senate resolution reflects bipartisan momentum on this issue, which could be harnessed into a whole-of-government campaign.

Part of that campaign should focus on dismantling the legal arguments underlying China’s position, including Beijing’s false assertion that the Cairo and Potsdam Declarations (1943/1945) affirm its sovereignty over Taiwan, despite these proclamations predating the founding of Communist China and bearing no legal relevance to the current regime. More pertinent to Taiwan’s status is the San Francisco Peace Treaty (1951), which confirmed Japan’s renunciation of sovereignty over Taiwan after World War II without designating a successor state. This omission was no accident. It left Taiwan’s legal status open pending a future resolution — an enduring ambiguity that China ignores. Furthermore, the reality of Taiwan’s de facto autonomy contradicts China’s claim that Taiwan is purely an internal matter and reinforces the opposing view that international law governs China’s actions in cross-Strait relations. In other words, the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the use of force bars cross-Strait aggression, and Taiwan, as a peaceful, self-governing entity, retains an inherent right to self-defense, regardless of formal statehood.

To facilitate dialogue on these legal considerations, counter-lawfare strategies should break the China-imposed Taiwan taboo in international engagement by ensuring Taiwan has a meaningful voice in global forums, including international legal conferences. This does not equate to granting statehood, but rather acknowledges that Taiwan’s perspective deserves to be heard, and that its security experts can offer valuable insights to foster strategic empathy and inform cross-Strait policies. Practically, Taiwan’s participation in international bodies remains essential, as Taiwan continues to play a key role in global governance, from air traffic control to international trade, despite China’s opposition.

As China attempts to isolate Taiwan internationally, the growing number of nations — including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom — exercising navigational freedoms in the Taiwan Strait is a positive step toward preventing China from achieving air and sea dominance over Taiwan. Militaries should continue this drive by engaging in combined activities in the strait, potentially expanding their operations beyond simple transit to include other lawful uses of the sea and airspace. This would signal to Beijing that unilateral attempts to alter the legal status of the Taiwan Strait will not be tolerated. Moreover, it would reaffirm international commitment to operating in this vital waterway to the fullest extent permitted by international law, possibly undermining Beijing’s confidence in its counter-intervention strategy.

In support of the actions outlined above, officials should exercise combined legal vigilance as a core tenet of counter-lawfare. This entails continuous monitoring and assessment of the legal environment to ensure early detection of significant changes — ranging from subtle shifts in China’s national mobilization framework to overt declarations under the Anti-Secession Law. With fluency in Mandarin and a deep understanding of Beijing’s bureaucratic and legal discourse, Taiwan’s security experts are uniquely positioned to assist international partners in this area. By jointly developing legal indicators and warnings, integrating them into intelligence collection, and strengthening interorganizational cooperation, information sharing, and capacity building, Taiwan and its international partners can enhance readiness and response capabilities. These efforts depend on strong partnerships to project strength in numbers, reinforce deterrence, and safeguard peace and security in the Western Pacific.

Exposing China’s Legal Preparations for a Taiwan Invasion - War on the Rocks

Cheng Deng Feng and Tim Boyle

warontherocks.com · by Cheng Deng Feng · March 11, 2025

China is systematically building a legal framework for a potential invasion of Taiwan. How can Taiwan’s friends, partners, and allies push back?

We come together as a unique writing team: military lawyers from the U.S. and Taiwanese armed forces. We seek here to explore China’s ongoing legal preparations for the use of force against Taiwan and uncover likely legal maneuvers Beijing will employ in the lead-up to an invasion. On that basis, we outline key steps for Taiwan’s international supporters to strengthen deterrence, including dismantling China’s legal pretext for aggression and implementing coordinated counter-lawfare strategies to challenge Beijing’s lawfare campaign.

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Why Does a Legal Framework for War Matter?

Legal frameworks shape the way conflicts are justified, perceived, and responded to — both domestically and internationally. By crafting a legal basis for war, China is not only preparing its domestic landscape for a Taiwan invasion but also seeking to influence global narratives, erode Taiwan’s international support, and reduce the likelihood of foreign intervention.

Beijing understands that modern warfare extends to the legal domain, where the struggle for perceived legitimacy is paramount. By embedding this mindset into its military strategy, China aims to frame an invasion as a lawful internal matter, fostering diplomatic ambiguity that could deter international opposition and delay collective security responses. This is particularly critical in an era where legitimacy plays a central role in shaping geopolitical alignments and the willingness of nations to take decisive action. Through legal instruments like the Anti-Secession Law, Beijing is setting conditions for the use of force by normalizing its legal claims, asserting jurisdictional control, and criminalizing resistance. This incremental approach to lawfare seeks to shift the strategic environment in China’s favor before conflict, making an eventual invasion seem like a reasonable and legally justified course of action.

Countering China’s legal preparations for war is therefore essential to preserving peace and security in the Western Pacific and ensuring that international law remains a bulwark against aggression, rather than a weapon used to facilitate it. The more China’s lawfare is exposed and opposed, the harder it becomes for Beijing to legitimize aggression against Taiwan, both at home and abroad.

China’s Legal Case for Taking Taiwan

China leverages its “one China principle” as a purported legal justification for a Taiwan invasion, labeling the issue an “internal matter” exempt from the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. Amid rising geopolitical tensions over the past two decades, Beijing has intensified efforts to promote its one China principle internationally. Simultaneously, Beijing has institutionalized its one China principle domestically by establishing a legislative framework rooted in its 1982 constitution, which designates Taiwan as an inseparable part of the People’s Republic of China.

In 2005, after Taiwan reelected a president viewed by Beijing as pro-independence, China enacted the Anti-Secession Law to signal its resolve and willingness to use force. Notably, the law mandates “non-peaceful means” if Beijing identifies undefined “major incidents” entailing secession, or deems peaceful “reunification” unachievable. Since its enactment, the Anti-Secession Law has become a cornerstone of Beijing’s lawfare campaign against Taiwan, providing a domestic pretext for escalating coercion and military threats.

Throughout the 2000s, as Taiwan sought to deepen ties with democratic partners and expand its global presence, China reinforced the Anti-Secession Law with additional domestic laws that framed foreign engagement with Taiwan as a violation of its sovereignty. Among these, the National Security Law (2015) and National Defense Law (2020) authorize military action to defend China’s claimed territory, incorporating Taiwan-related preparations into a broader national security structure aligned with Xi Jinping’s push for modernization of the People’s Liberation Army (hereafter, Chinese military) and centralized war powers.

By 2021, as U.S. and allied naval operations increased in the Western Pacific, China enacted the Coast Guard Law and Maritime Traffic Safety Law, granting its maritime forces sweeping authority to regulate and control so-called jurisdictional waters. In Beijing’s view, this includes not only Taiwan’s territorial sea but also areas of the Taiwan Strait where international law guarantees high-seas freedoms to all nations. A series of maritime notices and coast guard regulations have since expanded domestic enforcement powers even further, enabling Chinese authorities to exclude, detain, and use force against foreign vessels. Meanwhile, in the airspace above the Taiwan Strait, China implemented modified civilian flight routes, creating opportunities for military aircraft to blend with civilian air traffic and strain Taiwan’s air defenses. Together, these legal maneuvers strengthen the Chinese military’s counter-intervention strategy by masking potential cross-Strait aggression within routine activity, buying time and space to amass forces for conflict without foreign interference.

Building on this foundation, China has adopted an increasingly aggressive and sustained posture in the Taiwan Strait, catalyzed by perceived provocations — most notably, former U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan. Since then, China has worked to normalize large-scale joint operations, routine centerline crossings, and persistent air and naval patrols near, and sometimes within, Taiwan’s claimed territorial sea and airspace. This pattern reached new heights with last year’s Joint Sword exercises, featuring unprecedented blockade and invasion rehearsals staged in response to Taiwan’s election of President William Lai, whom Beijing labels a separatist. Joint Sword also showcased Beijing’s military-civil fusion strategy, with the Chinese military integrating commercial roll-on/roll-off ferries in amphibious formations — intentionally blurring the legal distinction between civilian and military objects to obscure aggression and complicate decision-making by law-abiding adversaries.

Consistent with its military-civil fusion strategy, Beijing’s recent institutional reforms under the National Defense Mobilization Act (2010), Cybersecurity Law (2017), and National Defense Transportation Law (2017) support rapid force expansion during conflict by ensuring military access to dual-use technologies and infrastructure, such as commercial shipping, civil aviation, and artificial intelligence. The National Intelligence Law (2018) reinforces this approach by compelling Chinese companies and foreign firms to assist in intelligence gathering, potentially weaponizing foreign data against Taiwan’s supporters. Reports of newly developed, purpose-built landing barges reflect emerging dual-use threats on the front lines, as the Chinese military harnesses whole-of-society power to enhance critical capabilities for an invasion.

In addition to conventional force rehearsals during Joint Sword, Beijing seized on Lai’s election to escalate its lawfare campaign. Shortly after his inauguration, Beijing introduced 22 new rules to bolster enforcement of the Anti-Secession Law, criminalizing support for Taiwan independence and expanding its authority to prosecute alleged “separatists.” These measures, which allow trials in absentia and, in some cases, the death penalty, signal an intensified effort to pressure Taiwan’s leaders, businesses, and civil society into submission.

By strengthening its legal foundation for invasion, Beijing aims to achieve what the Chinese military’s “three warfares” strategy calls “legal principle superiority” — a position of strategic dominance intended to legitimize escalating coercion and potential aggression. A recent Lowy Institute report highlights progress toward this goal, revealing that nearly half of U.N. member states now endorse Beijing’s one China principle and all efforts toward unification. Crucially, this support comes without explicit conditions for peaceful resolution, arguably signaling tacit consent for Chinese military aggression. Indeed, Beijing’s strategic use of lawfare appears to be gaining ground in preparing both the legal and physical environments for potential conflict.

What’s Next? Anticipated Legal Maneuvers

China has already laid its legal groundwork for a Taiwan invasion, but we expect further legal maneuvers as Beijing aims to solidify its position and establish legal principle superiority. Accelerated efforts to advance Beijing’s one China principle will remain central, building on the trend highlighted in the Lowy Institute report. This will include coercive measures to secure international endorsements and embed Beijing’s one China principle in international instruments, as seen in China’s secret memorandums of understanding with U.N. organizations. In the information environment, Beijing will continue framing its one China principle as a “universal consensus,” while perpetuating the false assertion that U.N. General Assembly Resolution 2758 (1971) establishes Taiwan as subordinate to Communist China under international law. By shaping global perceptions of the legality of its one China principle, Beijing will seek to create a permissive environment that maximizes decision space for Party leadership.

Meanwhile, China will continue leveraging global development to foster complacency and suppress dissent. When there is resistance, including among the 12 nations maintaining official ties with Taiwan, China will weaponize domestic laws — such as the Foreign Relations Law (2023) and the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law (2021) — to impose economic costs while shielding itself from sanctions in the event of an invasion. Internally, Beijing will advance military-civil fusion implementation, issuing incremental legal and regulatory mandates as necessary to swiftly mobilize resources and enhance military readiness.

To further tighten the noose in the Taiwan Strait, China may publish straight baselines around Taiwan under the guise of Article 16 of the Law of the Sea Convention, mirroring the legal strategy it used to assert control over the Paracels, Senkakus, and, more recently, the Gulf of Tonkin and Scarborough Shoal. In tandem with this, China will step up implementation of its Coast Guard Law and Maritime Traffic Safety Law, potentially through more frequent and closer patrols — like those near Kinmen and Matsu in 2024 — ultimately leading to enforcement within Taiwan’s claimed territorial sea and airspace. Leveraging its increasingly robust assertions of jurisdiction, China could establish unlawful exclusion zones, not only during exercises like Joint Sword but also amid everyday maritime activities. China’s law enforcement authorities previewed this tactic in April 2023, when they initiated a “special joint patrol and inspection operation,” permitting officials to board and inspect vessels in the Taiwan Strait.

Lastly, in line with the Anti-Secession Law and China’s 2022 white paper, Beijing may introduce a “One Country, Two Systems” model for Taiwan, similar to the construct in Hong Kong. China’s enactment of a “Basic Law” for Hong Kong in 1990 — seven years before the handover of sovereignty — could foreshadow similar preemptive legal measures for Taiwan. Some Chinese scholars have proposed a “Taiwan basic law” loosely modeled after the Hong Kong version, which outlines Taiwan’s purported autonomy under Communist China’s rule.

As part of a broader carrot-and-stick strategy, a basic law could serve as propaganda to weaken resistance in Taiwan — offering amnesty to those who comply alongside arrest warrants for designated “separatists.” If Taiwan rejects a basic law, Beijing could cite this as evidence that peaceful measures have been exhausted, or alternatively, use the law to justify declaring a “major incident” following a perceived provocation, thus triggering the mandatory use of force under the Anti-Secession Law. For Taiwan’s supporters, the potential for China to strengthen its position through such legal maneuvers highlights the need to not only expose these actions but also actively challenge them, while evaluating the implications for both the possibility of an invasion and the effectiveness of deterrence strategies.

Conclusion and Recommendations

While an invasion of Taiwan is neither inevitable nor tied to a specific timeline, China’s establishment of legal principle superiority could raise the risk of conflict by lowering the perceived costs of aggression for Beijing. Conversely, securing the legal high ground and denying China the veneer of legitimacy associated with legal principle superiority could reduce the likelihood of conflict. To achieve this deterrent effect, policymakers should recognize the legal environment as a battleground and implement coordinated counter-lawfare strategies to challenge China’s lawfare campaign. U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s counter-lawfare initiative exemplifies an approach that others can replicate. Though not a panacea, counter-lawfare can bolster broader deterrence efforts.

Effective counter-lawfare requires confronting the two main pillars of China’s legal framework: the one China principle and the Anti-Secession Law. Strategic communications should go beyond standard talking points to expose the legal flaws and aggressive implications of Beijing’s stance. Whether in high-level dialogues or through security cooperation and legal diplomacy at the tactical level, officials should work to eliminate confusion surrounding national one China policies, distinguishing them from Beijing’s one China principle, and explaining why this distinction is crucial for peace and security. Notably, the recent United States-Japan-Republic of Korea trilateral statement opposing unilateral efforts to alter the status quo by force or coercion marked a significant show of solidarity — one that should be broadly echoed, particularly by those countries that, like the United States, “acknowledge,” “take note of,” or “respect” (but do not endorse) Beijing’s claim over Taiwan.

Additionally, the United States, along with other nations and international bodies, should back growing opposition to China’s distortion of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 2758, while making clear that the resolution merely recognizes the People’s Republic of China as the representative of China at the United Nations without resolving Taiwan’s status. A recently proposed U.S. Senate resolution reflects bipartisan momentum on this issue, which could be harnessed into a whole-of-government campaign.

Part of that campaign should focus on dismantling the legal arguments underlying China’s position, including Beijing’s false assertion that the Cairo and Potsdam Declarations (1943/1945) affirm its sovereignty over Taiwan, despite these proclamations predating the founding of Communist China and bearing no legal relevance to the current regime. More pertinent to Taiwan’s status is the San Francisco Peace Treaty (1951), which confirmed Japan’s renunciation of sovereignty over Taiwan after World War II without designating a successor state. This omission was no accident. It left Taiwan’s legal status open pending a future resolution — an enduring ambiguity that China ignores. Furthermore, the reality of Taiwan’s de facto autonomy contradicts China’s claim that Taiwan is purely an internal matter and reinforces the opposing view that international law governs China’s actions in cross-Strait relations. In other words, the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the use of force bars cross-Strait aggression, and Taiwan, as a peaceful, self-governing entity, retains an inherent right to self-defense, regardless of formal statehood.

To facilitate dialogue on these legal considerations, counter-lawfare strategies should break the China-imposed Taiwan taboo in international engagement by ensuring Taiwan has a meaningful voice in global forums, including international legal conferences. This does not equate to granting statehood, but rather acknowledges that Taiwan’s perspective deserves to be heard, and that its security experts can offer valuable insights to foster strategic empathy and inform cross-Strait policies. Practically, Taiwan’s participation in international bodies remains essential, as Taiwan continues to play a key role in global governance, from air traffic control to international trade, despite China’s opposition.

As China attempts to isolate Taiwan internationally, the growing number of nations — including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom — exercising navigational freedoms in the Taiwan Strait is a positive step toward preventing China from achieving air and sea dominance over Taiwan. Militaries should continue this drive by engaging in combined activities in the strait, potentially expanding their operations beyond simple transit to include other lawful uses of the sea and airspace. This would signal to Beijing that unilateral attempts to alter the legal status of the Taiwan Strait will not be tolerated. Moreover, it would reaffirm international commitment to operating in this vital waterway to the fullest extent permitted by international law, possibly undermining Beijing’s confidence in its counter-intervention strategy.

In support of the actions outlined above, officials should exercise combined legal vigilance as a core tenet of counter-lawfare. This entails continuous monitoring and assessment of the legal environment to ensure early detection of significant changes — ranging from subtle shifts in China’s national mobilization framework to overt declarations under the Anti-Secession Law. With fluency in Mandarin and a deep understanding of Beijing’s bureaucratic and legal discourse, Taiwan’s security experts are uniquely positioned to assist international partners in this area. By jointly developing legal indicators and warnings, integrating them into intelligence collection, and strengthening interorganizational cooperation, information sharing, and capacity building, Taiwan and its international partners can enhance readiness and response capabilities. These efforts depend on strong partnerships to project strength in numbers, reinforce deterrence, and safeguard peace and security in the Western Pacific.

Become a Member

Cheng Deng Feng (鄭登峰) is an officer in the armed forces of the Republic of China (Taiwan). He is currently serving as an operational law advisor with Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense. He has previously coordinated unofficial legal engagement with the U.S. Defense Institute of International Legal Studies and the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

Tim Boyle is an officer in the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps and was previously the head of operational law at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. His next assignment will be as staff judge advocate for the U.S. Seventh Fleet. He has extensive experience working on and writing about strategies to counter China’s lawfare.

The views expressed in this post are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policies or positions of the Taiwan Ministry of Defense, the Taiwan government, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Image: Midjourney

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Cheng Deng Feng · March 11, 2025

20. America's Eroding Airpower

Excerpts:

U.S. policymakers should study today’s wars for lessons in modern combat. But they should also remember that a conflict between China and the United States would look different. It would be devastating and sophisticated. Many targets would need to be repeatedly attacked. To have a chance at success, the United States would need more low-end drones and missiles that can provide it with mass. But it would also need more high-end aircraft, including stealthy fighters, bombers, and drones, that can be sent on multiple missions and take on Chinese air defenses and advanced fighter jets.

The United States must therefore pair initiatives to produce cheap drones with ones aimed at making survivable and reusable airpower, especially stealthy planes. Today, the only U.S. stealth aircraft in production are the F-35 and B-21. Washington will also need to figure out how to use these aircraft in conjunction with cheap systems, compounding their utility. For instance, F-35s could eventually be used to control drones that will accompany them in flight, and B-21s could deliver drone swarms close to their targets behind enemy defenses, enabling them to independently hunt for multiple enemy targets.

Building such a well-balanced fleet won’t be cheap. Unless the Department of Defense makes significant cuts in other domains, such as closing bases it doesn’t need, investments in its airpower will likely require larger defense budgets. But that may be the price of American air supremacy. For decades, the United States took this dominance for granted. Now, it must carefully invest in a mix of airpower to maintain its edge.

America's Eroding Airpower

Foreign Affairs · by More by Stacie L. Pettyjohn · March 10, 2025

Washington Must Upgrade Its Fleet of Planes, Drones, and Missiles

Stacie L. Pettyjohn

March 10, 2025

A B-2 Spirit Bomber in Nevada, January 2024 Carlos Barria / Reuters

STACIE L. PETTYJOHN is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security.

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For more than 80 years, a cornerstone of the United States’ military strength has been its unparalleled ability to project power through the air. Washington has the most sophisticated fleet of combat aircraft in the world. Because these planes can be refueled by the country’s many tankers, they have global reach. From domestic bases, stealthy bombers can fly through heavily defended airspace unmolested and destroy multiple targets in one mission. American short-range fighter aircraft can drop bombs and take out enemy planes and surface-to-air missiles.

But the U.S. fleet is shrinking, and its airpower advantage appears to be eroding. Rivals such as China and Russia have invested in air defenses that deny the United States superiority over the skies and force it to rely on expensive standoff missile strikes—that is, attacks launched far enough away to be beyond the reach of enemy defenses. China, the United States’ main rival, unveiled two new stealth aircraft designs in December, demonstrating surprising progress in its fighter technology. Other adversaries have produced large numbers of cheap drones and missiles that allow for low-cost airstrikes.

The effects of inexpensive drones are evident in today’s conflicts. In Ukraine, both Kyiv and Moscow try to overwhelm the other’s air defenses by bombarding them with disposable drones. Traditional planes have stayed in safer airspace behind the frontlines, while cheaper uncrewed systems strike deep into enemy territory. In the Middle East, Iran and its proxies have used drones and missiles to launch standoff attacks against Israel, commercial shipping, and U.S. forces. Although these attacks have not caused widespread damage, they are expensive to interdict. Cumulatively, the U.S. Navy has spent more than $1 billion on munitions to stop them, far more than the attacks cost. The United States, for example, has been firing AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles—worth more than $1 million each—to shoot down Iranian-made drones that cost $50,000.

From these conflicts, the Pentagon appears to have learned that it needs to invest more in cheap drones. In August 2023, it launched the Replicator Initiative, which aims to field thousands of expendable autonomous systems within two years to counter China’s growing military. In 2024, the U.S. Air Force awarded initial contracts for another program designed to produce a thousand advanced drones that fly alongside crewed fighter jets. But this bet on cheap drones seems to be coming at the expense of high-end planes. The navy and air force have delayed their next-generation fighter programs, and the Trump administration is likely to continue this pause. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has exempted drones from his planned budget cuts.

That is unfortunate, because not all future wars will look like the ones in Ukraine or the Middle East. A U.S.-Chinese war, in particular, would be radically different. The belligerents would be separated by the Pacific Ocean, so their weapons would need to have longer ranges than most drones provide. The United States would also face unusually fierce air defenses, which cheap drones lack the ability to penetrate. Washington instead would need large numbers of sophisticated aircraft.

There are other drawbacks to neglecting traditional planes. Most of the long-range kamikaze drones and missiles employed in recent conflicts have been shot down; those that get through tend to inflict little damage on their targets. Moreover, because affordable systems rely on saturation to overwhelm defenses, the United States could build a massive drone fleet that would be used only once. In contrast, more survivable and expensive aircraft, crewed or uncrewed, could be sent on multiple missions. They would thus prove to be more cost effective, especially in a protracted conflict. The Pentagon will still need more affordable aircraft and missiles. But it must build a well-rounded fleet, not go all in on cheap drones.

MASS APPEAL

The United States retains the most sophisticated aircraft and missiles in the world. But quality alone is not enough. The United States also needs what former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Horowitz has called “precise mass”—or large numbers of accurate weapons. And today, Washington’s resources are spread too thin to attain it. In 2023, the U.S. Air Force had 2,093 attack aircraft and 141 bombers, about half the size of its fleets in 1991. Consequently, the Pentagon is struggling to provide enough aircraft to support crises and operations in Europe and the Middle East while remaining prepared for a large-scale conflict with Beijing. The Pentagon has also failed to stockpile adequate numbers of high-end conventional weapons, such as stealthy standoff cruise missiles, because Congress and the Department of Defense have historically preferred funding large platforms, such as ships, aircraft, and tanks. In a war game run by the Center for a New American Security, a think tank, for the House Select Committee on China, U.S. forces used more than 80 percent of their long-range missiles within a week of the outbreak of war over Taiwan.

These supply issues have been 30 years in the making. After the Cold War ended, the Pentagon focused on building planes and missiles with stealth and precision—an expensive pursuit because they are difficult to develop and require exotic materials and subcomponents. As a result, Washington could afford fewer planes and bombs. The Pentagon also downsized its inventories because it no longer faced an enemy that matched its power. The Defense Department slashed modernization programs for aircraft, including the B-2 bomber, and canceled orders for F-22 fighters. At the same time, the Pentagon bet heavily on its technological superiority as a way of offsetting Washington’s remaining enemies—an approach that was successfully debuted in the first Gulf War against Iraq. U.S. advancements in targeting, stealth, precision, and information sharing enabled the United States to hit the same number of targets with fewer aircraft and weapons. These improvements gave birth to a warfighting strategy premised on the idea that a small number of accurate attacks against critical enemy nodes could force an adversary to rapidly capitulate.

This strategy was never truly put to the test, however, because the United States spent nearly three decades fighting small-scale conflicts against adversaries with little airpower. Uncontested air superiority was critical to fights against terrorists and insurgents: drones and crewed aircraft patrolled the skies searching for enemies on the ground and then dropped small, accurate weapons against them from close range. But without a real challenge, the Pentagon’s faith in capability over capacity never wavered—even when the United States repeatedly found its small stockpiles of precision-guided munitions seriously depleted by long-running, low-intensity wars.

Then Russia attacked Ukraine, leading to a drone war unlike anything else in human history. Over the course of the last three years, Kyiv and Moscow have launched and lost millions of unmanned aerial vehicles in the fighting. Doing so has allowed them to identify targets, seize positions, and even knock out expensive weapons, such as tanks and surface-to-air missiles. The inescapable conclusion is that mass—that is, having more forces or materiel than an enemy—is important. As a result, the Pentagon has begun shifting course, emphasizing drone programs instead of advanced aerial weapons.

PUNCHING HOLES

The Pentagon is right to build large quantities of cheap drones. Defeating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would require airstrikes against thousands of Chinese military targets that are geographically dispersed across the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and the Chinese mainland. The Pentagon has too few aircraft and weapons to achieve this goal. It will need more inexpensive uncrewed aircraft and missiles to repel China’s military, which is bigger than that of the United States.

Yet cheap airpower, whether it be cruise missiles or kamikaze drones, will be useful only against a subset of Chinese targets. Standoff attacks must be complemented by stand-in strikes delivered by stealth aircraft that penetrate enemy defenses and deliver multiple large weapons. In October 2024, for instance, the United States was able to destroy Houthi weapons facilities hidden deep underground, but only by having stealthy B-2 bombers fly through contested airspace. Lloyd Austin, then the U.S. secretary of defense, described the B-2 attack on Yemen as a “unique demonstration of the United States’ ability to target facilities that our adversaries seek to keep out of reach, no matter how deeply buried underground, hardened, or fortified.” Drones and conventional missiles fired from long range cannot carry the large payloads required to significantly damage hardened or sprawling targets like the ones in Yemen. They would struggle even more to reach targets inside China.

Kyiv and Moscow have launched and lost millions of drones.

In addition to being too small to have a sizable impact, cheap missiles and drones lack range. For drones to provide air support to Taiwanese forces and potentially strike targets on the Chinese coast, they would need to fly to the strait from bases hundreds of miles away in Japan, the Philippines, or Guam. Today’s cheap drones and missiles could not make the trip. They would also likely be intercepted by China’s air defenses. Ukraine, for example, expects about 85 percent of its kamikaze drones to be shot down. A country must have very large salvos, therefore, to ensure that even a fraction of their weapons reach their targets, and the cost per weapon must be very low to create necessarily massive stockpiles. This cost-benefit calculus would not be favorable for the United States, especially in the early days of a war with China when the country’s air defense network is fully operating. Drones could help eat up some of China’s ground-based air defense interceptors. But ultimately, this system is simply too effective and well stocked to be exhausted by cheap drones. It certainly would not let many cheap drones through.

Saturation strikes may be more effective against Chinese ships that have a limited number of surface-to-air missiles. But penetrating China’s ground-based air defense network requires stealth aircraft. Stealth bombers, which carry big bombs and can fly many missions, are thus a better option for taking out mainland targets protected by air defenses. Today, these bombers have a pilot, but in the future, they may be remotely piloted or fully autonomous.

Stealth aircraft are also necessary to take out air defense systems themselves, which will then allow cheap weapons to work. Israel used such a two-pronged approach when it sent 100 aircraft to attack Iran in October 2024. Israeli stealth fighters destroyed most of Iran’s long-range air defenses, leaving Tehran exposed to follow-on attacks by older aircraft carrying long-range missiles. American aircraft will not be able to entirely dismantle China’s expansive and sophisticated air defenses before conducting other offensive operations. But they can punch holes in those defenses that less capable weapons can then exploit.

QUALITY AND QUANTITY

U.S. policymakers should study today’s wars for lessons in modern combat. But they should also remember that a conflict between China and the United States would look different. It would be devastating and sophisticated. Many targets would need to be repeatedly attacked. To have a chance at success, the United States would need more low-end drones and missiles that can provide it with mass. But it would also need more high-end aircraft, including stealthy fighters, bombers, and drones, that can be sent on multiple missions and take on Chinese air defenses and advanced fighter jets.

The United States must therefore pair initiatives to produce cheap drones with ones aimed at making survivable and reusable airpower, especially stealthy planes. Today, the only U.S. stealth aircraft in production are the F-35 and B-21. Washington will also need to figure out how to use these aircraft in conjunction with cheap systems, compounding their utility. For instance, F-35s could eventually be used to control drones that will accompany them in flight, and B-21s could deliver drone swarms close to their targets behind enemy defenses, enabling them to independently hunt for multiple enemy targets.

Building such a well-balanced fleet won’t be cheap. Unless the Department of Defense makes significant cuts in other domains, such as closing bases it doesn’t need, investments in its airpower will likely require larger defense budgets. But that may be the price of American air supremacy. For decades, the United States took this dominance for granted. Now, it must carefully invest in a mix of airpower to maintain its edge.

STACIE L. PETTYJOHN is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Stacie L. Pettyjohn · March 10, 2025

21. The End of Pax Americana – Can Trump 2.0 Confront China Alone?

The key question in the subtitle.

I would argue we need our allies for force projection, defense in depth (which contributes to defense of the homeland), deterring conflict, and winning in both the gray zone of strategic competition and large scale combat operations.

We cannot go it alone. Nor should we what to.

Opinion

The End of Pax Americana

Can Trump 2.0 Confront China Alone?

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/end-pax-americana?r=7i07&utm

Mar 09, 2025

∙ Paid

By: Khanh Vu Duc

Graphic by Cimsec

For decades, Pax Americana – the global order shaped by US leadership – has ensured relative stability, economic prosperity and military deterrence. This system, built on alliances with Europe and Asia, allowed the US to maintain global influence. But with Donald J. Trump returning as the 47th President of the United States, the unraveling of this order has accelerated.

Trump’s America First approach has already alienated key allies. His willingness to abandon Ukraine in search of a deal with Russia sends a clear signal to US partners in Asia: America under Trump is not a reliable security guarantor. If Washington is unwilling to stand by Kyiv, why should Taiwan, Japan, or South Korea believe that Trump will defend them against Beijing?

Without allies, Trump’s strategy to confront China becomes significantly weaker. His push for economic decoupling and military posturing may not be enough to counter China’s rise—especially if the world, disillusioned by US unpredictability, begins to build a new order without Washington.

Trump’s Vision: Lone America Against China?

Trump doesn’t see China as just a rival. He sees it as the greatest threat to American economic dominance. His first term was defined by trade war tariffs and tech restrictions, but Trump 2.0 is likely to go even further. His strategy is focusing on economic warfare – expanding tariffs, banning Chinese firms from US markets, and pressuring American companies to relocate supply chains; military posturing in the Indo-Pacific – increasing arms sales to Taiwan and pushing US naval operations in the South China Sea; a transactional approach to alliances – demanding Japan, South Korea, and other allies pay more for US military protection or risk losing it altogether.

The problem is that without allies, these efforts may backfire. If countries in Asia-Pacific see US security commitments as unreliable, they may begin seeking alternative arrangements including closer ties with China.

The Ukraine Factor

Trump’s refusal to support Ukraine has set a dangerous precedent. If Washington is willing to abandon a European democracy under attack, why should any country in Asia believe the US will stand firm against China?

This credibility crisis could have major consequences:

Taiwan’s growing uncertainty – If Taipei doubts US support, it may be forced to reconsider its strategic calculations, potentially pursuing diplomatic negotiations with Beijing rather than relying on an unpredictable America.
Japan and South Korea’s strategic autonomy – Both nations may deepen defense cooperation with Europe, India, or even pursue independent military capabilities rather than trust Washington.
Southeast Asia’s hedging strategy – Nations like the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia may move closer to China, seeking stability rather than betting on an unreliable U.S.

Trump’s insistence that allies pay up for protection is also dangerous. Security commitments are not mere financial transactions; they are strategic partnerships that amplify American power. By treating them as business deals, Trump risks dismantling the very alliance structure that has contained China’s rise for decades.

Economic War Without Allies

In Trump’s first term, his trade war with China was offset by the fact that US allies in Europe and Asia continued trading with Beijing. This time, however, things could be worse. If Trump isolates the US from the global trade system by imposing tariffs on allies as well as adversaries, China will emerge as the preferred economic partner for many nations.

The EU, already wary of Trump’s isolationism, may deepen economic ties with China rather than follow US decoupling policies. A weakened Indo-Pacific strategy – Without Japan, South Korea, or Australia fully aligned, China could dominate regional trade and technology standards. As Trump alienates countries in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, China will continue expanding its economic and political influence in the Global South. Without a coordinated effort among allies, US economic pressure on China could end up isolating America more than it isolates Beijing.

Can the US Counter China Alone?

Even if Trump wants to take a tougher military stance on China, doing so without allies is extremely risky. The US Navy and Air Force are powerful, but China has been rapidly modernizing its military, and a conflict in the Indo-Pacific would require strong regional partnerships.

Trump’s rhetoric suggests he may increase arms sales to Taiwan or even support its formal independence. But without full allied backing, a US-China conflict over Taiwan would be a disaster. Would Japan and South Korea risk war alongside an unreliable America? If not, China may feel emboldened to act aggressively.

The South China Sea: Lost Front?

US freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea rely on support from regional partners. If the Philippines and Vietnam decide Washington is no longer a dependable ally, China’s dominance in the region could become irreversible.

If Trump’s isolationism continues, China could expand its nuclear arsenal and regional military presence without serious opposition. Without NATO, Japan, or Australia fully committed, US deterrence efforts would be significantly weakened.

Will Trump’s Isolationism Hand China Victory?

If Trump alienates US allies while pursuing a direct confrontation with China, he may inadvertently accelerate Beijing’s rise. The world, seeing America as an unreliable leader, could start building a new order—one where China has far greater influence.

Scenario 1: Fractured West, Stronger China. As Europe and Asia hedge their bets, China consolidates economic and political control over key regions. The Belt and Road Initiative expands, and more countries align with Beijing, making US sanctions ineffective.

Scenario 2: A New Cold War Without an American Bloc. Unlike the original Cold War, where the US had a united Western alliance against the Soviet Union, Trump’s second term could create a Cold War where China faces no strong opposition. The US may remain powerful, but it will be operating in isolation.

Scenario 3: Crisis Forces Trump to Re-engage. If tensions over Taiwan or another flashpoint escalate into war, Trump may be forced to seek allies again. But by then, trust in American leadership could be too damaged to repair.

The Decline of Pax Americana

Trump’s second term is accelerating the decline of Pax Americana. His rejection of alliances makes it harder for the US to contain China. While America remains a superpower, its ability to lead is in question.

The end of Pax Americana is not necessarily the rise of Pax Sinica, but without US alliances, China’s dominance will grow. The world may not see a single superpower replacing the U.S., but rather a fractured system where America, China, and other regional players compete without clear leadership.

In the end, Trump’s biggest challenge is not China itself. It is whether he can confront Beijing without the alliances that made American power so effective in the first place. If he cannot, his second term is likely to mark the true end of US global leadership.

Khanh Vu Duc is a lawyer and part-time law professor at the University of Ottawa who researches on Vietnamese politics, international relations, and international law

22. The ICE Detention of a Columbia Student Is Just the Beginning

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" – Voltaire

The ICE Detention of a Columbia Student Is Just the Beginning

A White House official says that Mahmoud Khalil posed a ‘threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.’ And that his case is a blueprint for more arrests.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-ice-detention-of-a-columbia-student

By Gabe Kaminsky, Madeleine Rowley, and Maya Sulkin

03.10.25 — U.S. Politics

Mahmoud Khalil, second from left, at a protest at Columbia University on October 12, 2023. (Yuki Iwamura via AP Photo)

0:00

On Saturday evening, federal immigration authorities arrested an anti-Israel activist who helped lead protests against the Jewish state on Columbia University’s campus after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack. As progressive activists and free speech advocates protested the move to revoke Mahmoud Khalil’s green card over civil liberties concerns Monday, President Donald Trump warned that Khalil’s arrest would be the first “of many to come.”

Indeed, a White House official told The Free Press that the basis for targeting Khalil is being used as a blueprint for investigations against other students.

Khalil is a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States,” said the official, noting that this calculation was the driving force behind the arrest. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” said the official.

“He was mobilizing support for Hamas and spreading antisemitism in a way that is contrary to the foreign policy of the U.S.,” said the official, noting the Trump administration reviewed intelligence that found Khalil was a national security risk.

The official suggested more arrests at other schools were coming. “I suspect we’ll have other schools roped into this,” said the official.

Perhaps. But first, the Trump administration needs to contend with a federal judge in the Southern District of New York who, on Monday afternoon, blocked the deportation of Khalil, who is being held at an ICE detention facility in Louisiana. He is expected to appear in court Wednesday morning. The deportation of a lawful permanent resident such as Khalil generally requires the approval of an immigration judge.

Khalil’s case has thrown into dramatic relief debates over the limits of protected speech and what constitutes a legitimate response to the explosion of antisemitism on campuses across America since October 2023.

Born in Syria, Khalil is a permanent U.S. resident and has been in the country since 2023. Until December, he was a graduate student at Columbia, where he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. His arrest comes as the Trump administration, per an executive order from the president in his first days in office, works to punish those who allegedly engaged in “antisemitic harassment and violence” following Hamas’s attack.

The move to revoke Khalil’s green card—and the basis for the decision—has prompted sharp criticism from pro–free speech groups across the political spectrum, all of whom warn that a crackdown on student protesters threatens their First Amendment rights.

“We’ve got an administration that is taking action against antisemitism and has not always drawn a clean line between protected political speech that may well be antisemitic, and unlawful discriminatory harassment,” Will Creeley, the legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told The Free Press. FIRE sent a letter to the administration Monday demanding answers on Khalil’s arrest. The letter, addressed to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and other agency heads, requested “the specific legal and factual basis for Mr. Khalil’s detention.”

Creeley added, “The lack of clarity results in a chill on protected political expression. We’ve got concerns here.”

“It’s disturbing,” David Keating, president of the right-leaning Institute for Free Speech, told The Free Press.

Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education, and politics for the left-leaning think tank Third Way, said it’s important to keep in mind that lawful permanent residents—like Khalil—have rights that are protected by the U.S. Constitution. “What they’re trying to do is make people afraid,” argued Erickson.

But students who have faced antisemitic hostility on campus since October 7, 2023, see things differently. Shoshana Aufzien, a Barnard freshman, says Khalil’s deportation is completely reasonable. Aufzien, who is Jewish, says she hasn’t been able to attend many of her classes “because protesters physically impeded us from doing so or because professors have jumped on the bandwagon.”

“I don’t think anybody who is fomenting pro-terror, antisemitic, anti-American rhetoric, who isn’t a US citizen, has any inherent right to be here,” said Aufzien.

In a statement on Monday, Trump reiterated that “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity” will not be tolerated, noting that many protesters on campuses are “paid agitators.” (The Department of Homeland Security and the White House declined to comment on further actions at any other schools or how many arrests may be made in the coming weeks.)

This weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted that the State Department would be revoking the student visas and green cards of Hamas supporters. But exactly how this policy will be carried out remains unclear. Axios reported that the government will use AI for its new “Catch and Revoke” program to scan the social media accounts of students who are studying in the U.S. on visas to help identify those who support Hamas and other terrorist organizations.

Mark Goldfeder, head of the National Jewish Advocacy Center and a constitutional law expert, told The Free Press that there are several strong legal arguments for the revoking of visas.

For starters, Turner v. Williams, a Supreme Court case from 1904, set the precedent that aliens can be deported if they are engaging in specific dangerous activities or if they have certain dangerous views that those “who hold and advocate them would be undesirable additions to our population.”

“The Supreme Court has been clear that the First Amendment might apply with some conditions to foreigners, and there [are] over 120 years of Supreme Court precedent saying that this is literally one of those conditions,” Goldfeder said.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, passed in 1952, a visa holder who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support[s] a terrorist organization” can be deported. This statute, Goldfeder says, could survive what’s called “strict scrutiny” under the First Amendment.

“The statute would have to protect a compelling governmental interest and be narrowly tailored to protect that interest,” said Goldfeder. “Because free speech is so incredibly important, in order to survive strict scrutiny, there would have to be an additional constitutional imperative weighing on the other side. What would that be? National security.”

The arrest of the anti-Israel activist comes as Columbia is being investigated by the Department of Education for antisemitism. Last week, as The Free Press first reported, agencies cut off $400 million in federal funding to the university, claiming it has failed to take steps to confront antisemitism. The Trump administration has not said which programs are affected, and Columbia has vowed to “work with the federal government to restore Columbia’s federal funding.”

“We take Columbia’s legal obligations seriously and understand how serious this announcement is and are committed to combating antisemitism and ensuring the safety and well-being of our students, faculty, and staff,” said a spokesperson for the university—which saw several students face arrest last week for storming a building at Barnard College in protest against Israel.

Gabe Kaminsky

Gabe Kaminsky is an investigative reporter at The Free Press.

Madeleine Rowley

Madeleine Rowley is an investigative reporter covering immigration, financial corruption, and politics. She is a 2023-2024 Manhattan Institute Logos Fellow with previous bylines in The Free Press, City Journal, and Public. As a U.S. Army spouse for almost a decade, she's lived in six states and spent two years in Jerusalem, Israel. She currently resides on the East Coast with her husband and daughter.

Maya Sulkin

Maya Sulkin is a reporter and assistant editor. Before that, Maya was chief of staff at The Free Press. She started as an intern in 2021 while a student at Columbia University.

23. Senator Mark Kelly Urges Continued U.S. Support After Visiting Ukraine. Musk Calls Him a ‘Traitor.’

I guess I must apply this equally to Musk even if his speech is distasteful (and petty, immature, disrespectful, insulting, ill-informed and ignorant). What would happen to a military member or a government official if they made such comments about an elected official?

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" – Voltaire

Senator Mark Kelly Urges Continued U.S. Support After Visiting Ukraine. Musk Calls Him a ‘Traitor.’

Senator Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat and former astronaut, visited Ukraine over the weekend and said the United States could not give up on the people there as they fight Russia. Musk responded on X.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/us/politics/musk-mark-kelly-traitor.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Open modal at item 1 of 2

Open modal at item 2 of 2

Elon Musk, left, and Senator Mark Kelly, right, have exchanged barbs on X, the social media platform owned by Mr. Musk.

By Karoun Demirjian

Reporting from Washington

March 10, 2025

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and one of President Trump’s top advisers, on Monday accused Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, of being a “traitor” after he visited Ukraine and said the United States should keep supporting its war against Russia.

Mr. Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and Navy pilot who flew combat missions during Operation Desert Storm, visited Ukraine over the weekend, meeting with members of the Ukrainian military, nurses and others, concluding in a social media post that what he saw “proved to me we can’t give up on the Ukrainian people.”

In reply, Mr. Musk wrote: “You are a traitor.”

And with that, one of the president’s powerful supporters equated a policy disagreement with one of the most serious crimes against the United States.

On Monday, Mr. Kelly hit back at Mr. Musk.

“Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do,” he wrote on X, which Mr. Musk owns.

Their public spat comes less than two weeks after Mr. Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office, telling him that he had not been grateful enough for U.S. support in its war against Russia’s invasion and seeking to pressure him into making a peace deal on U.S.-dictated terms.

Mr. Kelly’s original posts also directly accused President Trump of “trying to weaken Ukraine’s hand” in his pursuit of a peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow. On Monday, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said Ukraine would have to be willing to give up territory in any peace deal with Russia.

Mr. Trump’s antagonism toward Ukraine while bolstering Russia has been criticized by Democrats as well as some Republicans. During the Biden administration, members of both parties in Congress approved sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine as it fought Russia’s invasion.

Mr. Musk and Mr. Kelly have butted heads before, though Mr. Kelly once served as a member of an independent safety advisory panel for SpaceX, another company owned by Mr. Musk.

In February, Mr. Musk said during a joint interview with Mr. Trump on Fox News’s Sean Hannity Show that NASA astronauts had been left stuck aboard the International Space Station “for political reasons.” Mr. Musk also called Mr. Kelly a “Dem donor shill” in a post criticizing him, his twin brother, Scott Kelly — also a former astronaut who once commanded the International Space Station — and Andreas Mogensen, a Danish astronaut who had also criticized Mr. Musk’s comments.

“Hey @ElonMusk, when you finally get the nerve to climb into a rocket ship, come talk to the three of us,” Mr. Kelly retorted.

Theodore Schleifer contributed reporting.

Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for the The Times. More about Karoun Demirjian

24. Oh, the Places You'll Go! – Harding Project

Harding Project Substack

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

https://www.hardingproject.com/p/oh-the-places-youll-go-1c2?utm

Zachary Griffiths

Mar 11, 2025

Last night, I fell down a rabbit hole of old Infantry magazines—because what else would you do on a Monday night? Flipping through the 1990 issue, I noticed something surprising in the "Tactics and Techniques" section of the article index.

It wasn’t just the topics that stood out. It was the names.

Subscribed

Lt. Gen. Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck and Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti. As field grade officers, these future general officers collaborated on “Deep Operations” in the Jul-Aug issue. Their article explored how 1-87 Infantry successfully infiltrated the Bavarian Alps during REFORGER 90. Hagenbeck rose to command 10th Mountain Division during Operation Anaconda in the early days of the war in Afghanistan, while Scaparrotti retired as the US European Command Commander. These names struck me, as Hagenbeck was the Superintendent and Scaparrotti the Commandant when I was a cadet at West Point.

Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry. In this early post-Cold War article, then-Lt. Col. Eikenberry described how his battalion enhanced American deterrence in Europe that visibly patrolled NATO’s frontier in the Jul-Aug issue. After retiring as a lieutenant general in 2009, Eikenberry was immediately confirmed as the ambassador to Afghanistan where he oversaw the surge from 2009 – 2011. The bio accompanying his article notes that he “has written several articles for publication in military journals” including “Water Resupply and Heat Casualty Prevention” in the Nov-Dec issue.

General (ret.) William E. DePuy. Based on remarks from the previous fall to Infantry captains, DePuy’s “Infantry Combat” in the Mar-Apr issue (p8-13) charts the evolution of the Infantry and draws on his own experience in World War II, Vietnam, and as the first TRADOC Commander.

Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata. With his battalion commander, then-Cpt. Tata explored the merits of splitting the tanks in the attack of a combined arms company in the May-Jun issue (p16-19). Tata retired as a brigadier general in 2009 and has been nominated to serve as the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness.

And then there was this gem: a letter to the editor in the Jul-Aug issue (p4) from a then-2nd Lt. Bill Ostlund, debating the Expert Infantryman’s Badge. He’d go on to serve for 36 years retiring as a colonel, mentor countless officers (myself included), and feature prominently in Wes Morgan’s book on Afghanistan.

The Profession of Arms (and the Pen)

None of these officers wrote for Infantry because they knew they’d become generals. They wrote a field grade or junior officers because they were part of the profession of arms; they valued engaging in ideas, sharpening doctrine, and pushing the Army forward.

Professional writing helps us think, teach, and lead. These guys weren’t just ticking boxes on the way to the top; they shaped the Army long before they pinned on stars.

Which brings me to why clean archives matter. If the Army’s journals weren’t preserved or accessible, this discovery wouldn’t have happened. While there remains room for improvement, one of the goals of the Harding Project is to ensure that the insights of today’s officers and NCOs remain available—not just for nostalgia, but for those who will lead the Army decades from now.

Strengthen the profession: write.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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Oh, the Places You'll Go!

The Profession of Arms (and the Pen)