Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Neither Thucydides, nor Clausewitz would have gone so far; both perceived a much larger chasm, between the rough-and-tumble of peacetime, competition, and the violent, blood-soaked reality of war. But Thucydides, whose writings greatly influenced Hobbes, also portrayed the core of international relations as the naked exercise of power. As his Athenians say to the Spartans in 432 BC: we have done nothing extraordinary, nothing contrary to human nature, in accepting an empire when it was offered to us, and then in refusing to give it up. Three very powerful motives prevent us from doing so – security, honor, and self-interest. And we were not the first to act this way. Far from it. It has always been a rule that the week should be subject to the strong; and, besides, we consider that we are worthy of our power. Up till the present moment you, too, used to think that we were, but now, after calculating your interest, you are beginning to talk in terms of right and wrong."

– Williams and Maury, Alvin, Bernstein, at, el.,, The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War

"A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own."

– Aldous Huxley

1. 'Bloody Saturday' at Voice of America and other U.S.-funded networks

2. Voice of America channels fall silent as Trump administration guts agency and cancels contracts

3. Trump Order Aims to Dismantle Voice of America, Other Programs

4. Voice of America bias inquiry sparks concerns of political meddling

5. China Is Unhappy With BlackRock’s Panama Ports Deal

6. Trump’s New World Order Tests the Dollar

7. Inside the Chinese Region That Has Become a No-Go for Western Companies

8. DOGE representatives visit US Institute of Peace, are turned away

9. Russia Overpowers Bold Ukrainian Military Venture in Kursk

10. VIDEO: “Zero Day” TV Series Illustrates What A Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Could Look Like

11. Chinese Ships Are Carrying America’s Cargo. The U.S. Wants to Reverse That.

12. RFA Operations at Risk of Disruption as Federal Grants End

13. Beyond Resilience: A Nuanced Framework for Conceptualizing Resistance Networks

14. President Trump 2.0, China, And Southeast Asia: Security Challenges And Strategic Dilemmas

15. ASEAN’s Response To Trump 2.0: An Analysis Of Problems And Challenges

16. Hegseth shuts Pentagon 'think tank' analyzing future conflicts

17. Nervous about Trump, international tourists scrap their U.S. travel plans

18. The best way to curb the cruelty of the world’s worst regimes

19. Europe thinks the unthinkable on a nuclear bomb

20. America’s bullied allies need to toughen up

21. Niall Ferguson: A User’s Guide to Wrecking the Global Financial System

1. 'Bloody Saturday' at Voice of America and other U.S.-funded networks

We have ceded the political warfare battle space to China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea. This is one of the most incredible national security mistakes that we could make.

What do we have in the government arsenal to compete in the information space after we eliminate Voice of America et. al.?

I am sure some people are pleased with this. I certainly am not.

Some of the best national security journalists I know are in the Korean service of VOA and RFA.

These organizations are the most powerful media outlets to inform the world and explain administration policies. The Trump administration has no other means now to broadcast public US messages and information directly to the people and leaders in north Korea (or China, Russia, or Iran for that matter). The Trump administration cannot can rely on private media to provide objective information to foreign target audiences.

This is one of the most incredible national security mistakes that we could make.

Note that the US Agency for Global Media is the parent organization of Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. It so saddens me to see them under attack by what frankly are people who have no clue what they do or the effects they achieve (which unfortunately are for the most part intangible and very long term) and who have never worked with them or even listened to their reporting. What they know about VOA, et.al., is a result of political attacks on them (because they are certainly not listening to those who know about the organizations or objectively support them).

On the possibly optimistic side of this is that it appears that they are paring down the organizations to only what is statutorily required. It is hard to argue that you should only be doing what is statutorily required. It may be a valid critique that these organizations have grown beyond their statutory functions. But this is a gray area. I am sure the DOGE wiz kids will be interpreting the statutes literally and strictly and force what they believe to be any extraneous activity to be eliminated.

However, organizations conduct continuous mission analysis and identify the specific tasks (statute based) as well as implied tasks. These implied tasks may be necessary to support the specified tasks. It appears that the opportunity exists for these agencies to justify their activities in accordance with the statutes that govern their existence. The problem is that the algorithm of the DOGE wiz kids may not be sufficient to assess the effects of these agencies or understand the necessity of implied tasks that go into ensuring the statutory tasks are properly executed. But of course the counter to that argument is that these agencies have just expanded and become bloated and have decided to undertake functions that are not specifically authority directed.

If this is all done on good faith we could actually have a chance improve governance while improving our stewardship of taxpayer dollars. That is the ideal goal. But I fear the DOGE wiz kids are hell bent on not only cost savings but also elimination of functions with which they have political and philosophical disagreement. (And sometimes worse, elimination of functions for which they have no understanding).

And on the other hand I fear these organizations are going to do what all bureaucracies do and that is to follow their prime directive and protect their force structure (manpower) and budget slice of the pie. They must protect the organization's equities above all else. This is where good leadership is necessary both in overseeing the entire process to achieve the public good and within agencies to make the hard calls to justify whatever is critical to accomplishing their statutory requirements.

The question is who is going to act in good faith in this process?

'Bloody Saturday' at Voice of America and Radio Free Asia

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/15/nx-s1-5329244/bloody-saturday-voiceofamerica-radio-free-asia-europe-trump-kari-lake

'Bloody Saturday' at Voice of America and other U.S.-funded networks

UPDATED MARCH 15, 20254:46 PM ET

David Folkenflik

President Trump's late-night decree Friday led to orders gutting the Voice of America and other U.S.-funded international broadcasters.

Andrew Harnik/AP

Journalists showed up at the Voice of America today to broadcast their programs only to be told they had been locked out: Federal officials had embarked on indefinite mass suspensions.

All full-time staffers at the Voice of America and the Office for Cuba Broadcasting, which runs Radio and Television Martí, were affected — more than 1,000 employees. The move followed a late Friday night edict from President Trump that its parent agency, called the U.S. Agency for Global Media, must eliminate all activities that are not required by law.

In addition, under the leadership of Trump appointees, the agency has severed all contracts for the privately incorporated international broadcasters it funds, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

2. Voice of America channels fall silent as Trump administration guts agency and cancels contracts

This is the most idiotic, insulting, ignorant, and ill-informed statement I have ever heard. Musk must have never spoken with anyone from China, Russia, Iran, or north Korea or anyone else who lived in an authoritarian country who turned to VOA, RFA, RFE/RL, et.al. for the truth not only about the outside world and America but also the truth about their own countries.

Excerpts:

Trump’s order said affected agencies should stop performing all work that is not statutorily mandated, and do the rest with as few people as possible.

The order was in line with Elon Musk’s declaration in February that government-funded international broadcasters should be shut down altogether.

“Nobody listens to them anymore,” Musk posted on X. “It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”

This is an important statement. Congresswomen Kim knows the incredible value of Voice of America and the strategic contribution it makes in the political warfare fight with north Korea. The question is will Congress act to right this huge national security strategic error?

Advocates for the outlets strongly disagree, pointing to the broadcasters as a bulwark for democracy. Those voices include Republican lawmakers.

“Gutting Radio Free Asia and other U.S. Agency for Global Media platforms counters the principles of freedom our nation was founded on and cedes leverage to the Chinese Communist Party, North Korea and other regimes,” Rep. Young Kim, a California Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on East Asia and Pacific, told Politico last week.

It is unclear what will happen next to the USAGM’s various platforms.

Voice of America channels fall silent as Trump administration guts agency and cancels contracts | CNN Business

CNN · by Brian Stelter · March 15, 2025

Voice of America headquarters in Washington, DC, on February 14, 2025.

Francis Chung/Politico/AP

CNN —

The Voice of America may not live up to its ambitious name for much longer.

Michael Abramowitz, the director of VOA, said in a Facebook post on Saturday that he was placed on leave, along with “virtually the entire staff” of 1,300. The announcement comes one day after President Trump signed an executive order to gut VOA’s parent agency.

Some of VOA’s local-language radio stations have stopped broadcasting news reports and switched over to music to fill the airtime, according to listeners.

Even top editors at VOA have been ordered to stop working, so employees expect the broadcaster’s worldwide news coverage to grind to a halt, according to half a dozen sources who spoke with CNN on the condition of anonymity.

“The Voice of America has been silenced, at least for now,” a veteran correspondent said.

Voice of America is part of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which also runs networks like Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks. Those networks are also on Trump’s chopping block, as networks’ contracts with the operators have been terminated.

While Trump allies argue that the broadcasters are bloated and outdated, advocates say that by dismantling the networks, the United States is ceding the airwaves to China and other world powers, thereby harming American interests abroad.

The United States has been funding international news and current affairs coverage intended for global audiences for decades. Both Republican and Democratic leaders have supported the attempts to promote accurate news — and democratic values — in places that are saturated by foreign propaganda.

The agency’s mission statement, codified in law, is to “inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.”

But the Trump administration has different expectations. An internal memo earlier this month said the mission is to “clearly and effectively present the policies of the Trump Administration around the world.”

Trump appointed conservative media critic Brent Bozell III to run the parent agency and tapped election-denying former TV anchor Kari Lake to run VOA. Bozell’s Senate confirmation hearing is months away, with Lake serving as a “senior adviser.” Lake signed some of the emails announcing Saturday’s cuts.

Lake tweeted that the dismantling was taking effect because “the president has issued an Executive Order titled Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy.”

Trump’s order said affected agencies should stop performing all work that is not statutorily mandated, and do the rest with as few people as possible.

The order was in line with Elon Musk’s declaration in February that government-funded international broadcasters should be shut down altogether.

“Nobody listens to them anymore,” Musk posted on X. “It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”

Advocates for the outlets strongly disagree, pointing to the broadcasters as a bulwark for democracy. Those voices include Republican lawmakers.

“Gutting Radio Free Asia and other U.S. Agency for Global Media platforms counters the principles of freedom our nation was founded on and cedes leverage to the Chinese Communist Party, North Korea and other regimes,” Rep. Young Kim, a California Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on East Asia and Pacific, told Politico last week.

It is unclear what will happen next to the USAGM’s various platforms.

In addition to the employees who were put on leave Saturday, some contractors who were working for VOA were told to hand in their badges.

Other staffers went to VOA offices on Saturday to gather their belongings because they feared being locked out altogether, sources said.

But in a recent memo, before Trump signed his order, Lake made it sound like the broadcasters will continue to exist in some fashion going forward.

“It is critical we recognize our agency is funded by hardworking American taxpayers, many of whom are struggling to make ends meet,” Lake wrote earlier this month. “That means we have an added responsibility to restore their trust while working efficiently and honestly to cover this consequential moment in our nation’s history.”

Lake said she would modernize the agency “into something the American people are willing to support.”

Abramowitz said in his Facebook post that “VOA needs thoughtful reform, and we have made progress in that regard,” but sidelining the staff means that VOA won’t be able to carry out its mission.

“That mission is especially critical today,” he wrote, “when America’s adversaries, like Iran, China, and Russia, are sinking billions of dollars into creating false narratives to discredit the United States.”

The American Foreign Service Association released a statement Saturday that it “will mount a vigorous defense of USAGM and the Foreign Service professionals whose expertise is indispensable to its mission.”

CNN · by Brian Stelter · March 15, 2025

3. Trump Order Aims to Dismantle Voice of America, Other Programs

We have ceded the political warfare battle space to China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea. What do we have in the government arsenal to compete in the information space after we eliminate Voice of America et. al.? We should keep in mind that one of the primary functions of VOA , in addition to providing the news around the world, is to explain US policies to foreign target audiences. When Biden was in office they explained Biden policies. With Trump in office they have begun explaining Trump policies (as they are developing) to foreign target audiences. They explain these policies from the point of view of various experts across the political spectrum. And foreign target audiences trust VOA for news. Without VOA how are these foreign target audiences going to learn about US policies and the US in general? Are they going to only get that information from the Chinese, Russia, Iranian, and north Korean information services? How does the Trump administration propose to compete in the information and political warfare battlespace?

Trump Order Aims to Dismantle Voice of America, Other Programs

The president’s move gives offices one week to comply, part of his effort to scale back government

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-issues-executive-order-to-dismantle-several-programs-including-voice-of-america-d9676cda?st=VWXWV1&utm

By Natalie Andrews

March 15, 2025 12:41 pm ET

The Voice of America building in Washington. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

WASHINGTON—President Trump ordered the dismantling of seven government offices, including the parent of Voice of America and another focused on solving homelessness, part of his continuing mission to reduce the size of the federal government.

The late Friday executive order stands to test the bounds of presidential power, as Congress created most of the small offices through statute. The order instructs the offices to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”

One of the offices that the executive order seeks to eliminate is the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which is the parent for Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Those organizations were established to emphasize democratic values by providing news in countries where a free press is threatened, including Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and Ukraine. The organizations employ thousands of journalists.

Trump selected Kari Lake as his top adviser for the agency. Lake is a former Arizona journalist who ran unsuccessfully for governor and Senate, adopting Trump’s bold style and consistently criticizing the media that covered her race. Lake on Saturday posted a link to the order on social media, saying on X: “If you are an employee of the agency please check your email immediately for more information.”

Liberty’s CFO Joseph Lataille terminating federal grant funding.

The other offices included in Trump’s order were: the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, formed to ease labor-management conflicts; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a think tank; the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provides grants to libraries and museums; the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness; the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which promotes access to capital and local economic growth; and the Minority Business Development Agency, which is housed under the Commerce Department.

The Trump administration has moved to rapidly reduce the size of the federal government, throwing the workforce into tumult, with thousands of people losing their jobs—and then in some cases getting them back through court order. There are roughly 2.3 million Americans working for the federal government in civilian jobs.

While relatively obscure, the offices were largely established with bipartisan support. The Woodrow Wilson Center, for example, describes itself as “fiercely nonpartisan” on its website and was established by Congress in 1968.

The limiting of services could have local impacts. The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the largest source of federal funding support for library services in the country, according to its website.

Write to Natalie Andrews at natalie.andrews@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

Employees of VOA on Saturday received an email saying that they are being put on administrative leave. An earlier version of this article said that their employment was terminated. (Corrected on March 15)

4. Voice of America bias inquiry sparks concerns of political meddling

Steve Herman is the example that sits in people's minds about VOA. This is how VOA gets accused of bias. The actions of one reporter who asked hard questions that some do not like. VOA is supposed to be the exemplar for freedom of the press. One of the only countries in the world who runs a media organization (UK's BBC also comes to mind) that allows complete freedom of the press to report on anything, good or bad, to tell the news stories and explain US government policy through media reporting to overseas foreign target audiences.

But all that most Americans know about VOA comes from reports like these where they see someone ask hard questions that the administration does not like.

As I reflect on the actions so far things are becoming clear. The Trump administration and Musk and the DOGE wiz kids are opposed to soft power because it is perceived as weak. They are taking the expression peace through strength literally to mean that we can only be strong and we should not be using any tools that are soft (and therefore, by definition perceived as weak). We do not need any "weak" policies, only strong ones.

And I think it goes deeper than that. I think the core policy is to stop immigration. And the problem with organizations like VOA and USAID is that they inform the world about American values and goodness which contributes to the old view of America as a "city on a hill" and beacon of hope for people who desire to be free. So by getting rid of them we are no longer using soft power to attract those who want to be free. We do not want to advertise our values and freedoms anymore for fear it would attract immigration (and I know the argument is that we only want to stop illegal immigration not all immigration, but the perception is different). Ultimately this is about rolling up the American welcome mat and erasing the words on our beloved Statue of Liberty:

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

When there is "perceived bias" against any administration (and that bias can only be defined like porn - I will know it when I see it said Justice Potter) we would do well to remember the words of Theodore Roosevelt:

“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”

– Theodore Roosevelt in The Kansas City Star, published on May 7, 1918

Voice of America bias inquiry sparks concerns of political meddling

NPR · by David Folkenflik · March 1, 2025

File photo shows the Voice of America building in Washington. Andrew Harnik/AP

The Voice of America embarked this week on a formal review of a chief national correspondent's social media postings for potential bias against the Trump administration, sparking concerns of a new burst of political interference at the federally funded international broadcaster.

Steve Herman was placed on paid "excused absence" and told colleagues he expected to lose his job. He confirmed his status Friday evening but declined comment.

Voice of America is overseen by the U.S. Agency for Global Media. VOA relies on the USAGM for human resources services. In a memo sent to Herman that was reviewed by NPR, the agency cited several policies in explaining the grounds for the review of his work including an executive order by President Trump titled "One Voice for America's Foreign Relations." Among the elements of that executive order: "Failure to faithfully implement the President's policy is grounds for professional discipline, including separation."

Sponsor Message

Additionally, on Friday afternoon, VOA shifted a veteran reporter who covers the White House, Patsy Widakuswara, to another beat. Journalists at the network said a clear rationale was not offered.

This account is based on interviews with five people at the network with knowledge of events who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Agency for Global Media did not respond to requests for comment.

The New York Times first reported on the investigation of Herman, and the reassignment of Widakuswara, who had been the White House bureau chief.

During the final year of President Trump's first term in office, political appointees at the U.S. Agency for Global Media similarly investigated Herman for bias. A federal judge found that then USAGM chief Michael Pack acted unconstitutionally in assigning aides to investigate Steve Herman, the national correspondent being reviewed once more.

USAGM also oversees other international broadcasters funded by the federal government, such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Radio Television Martí. The networks are charged with providing straight news for societies where independent news coverage is either repressed or financially unfeasible and with modeling the value of pluralistic political debate within that coverage.

Sponsor Message

It serves 427 million listeners in 100 countries and 64 languages every week.

This week, USAGM hired two-time unsuccessful Arizona MAGA candidate and former local television news anchor Kari Lake as an adviser. Trump publicly announced she was his choice to lead the VOA but she can't start until Trump's nominee to be chief executive of USAGM is approved by the Senate. Lake would then require the approval of a bipartisan advisory board.

Lake has said the network is rife with liberal bias and she simply wants to make it fair to Trump and his views.

The new investigation of Herman does not appear to trigger the legal issues cited by the federal judge, Beryl Howell, back in 2020. She ruled in fall of that year that then USAGM chief Michael Pack — who had promised to "drain the swamp" at the VOA — had violated Herman's First Amendment rights and breached a firewall set up to protect the newsroom from editorial interference.

A federal investigation found Pack also repeatedly abused the powers of his office, broke laws and regulations, and engaged in gross mismanagement as he turned the agency and the international broadcasters it oversees upside down.

In this instance, by contrast, the investigation was initiated by journalistic leaders at the VOA itself. It is being conducted by John Featherly — who is acting senior programming director — and it received the blessing of VOA's director, Michael Abramowitz. He is a former veteran editor of The Washington Post and former president of Freedom House, an advocacy and research group dedicated to promoting journalism and free expression.

Abramowitz was named director by then President Joe Biden's chief of the U.S. Agency for Global Media and is not seen as an ideological figure.

But journalists at the network said they are fearful of pressures, explicit and otherwise, from Trump administration officials, including Lake.

Sponsor Message

In 2020, the White House had objected to several stories prior to the inquiry, which focused on Herman retweeting posts that involved stories that reflected critically on the Trump administration.

The Voice of America leaders have told associates they are simply basing the review of Herman's work on journalistic concerns. Similarly, they have internally cited the pace and intensity of Herman's retweets, which focus primarily on controversies encompassing the Trump administration.

Earlier this year, Ric Grenell, named by Trump to be the interim head of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, called for Herman to be fired over his tweets relaying news reports of deep cuts in U.S. international aid programs.

"Why are you working against President Trump's reform plans for the U.S. budget?" Grenell asked. "It isn't too much to suggest this is treasonous."

Lake, who is poised to be the next director of VOA, has repeatedly posted on behalf of the President and his causes — including as recently as Friday.

NPR · by David Folkenflik · March 1, 2025

5. China Is Unhappy With BlackRock’s Panama Ports Deal

Perhaps we can use this as an example to wrest control of other sports around the world that China has assumed control of through its companies.

This would certainly seem to undercut Chinese strategy in strategic competition.

China Is Unhappy With BlackRock’s Panama Ports Deal

Shares of Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison sink on critique; ‘betraying and selling off’ the Chinese people

https://www.wsj.com/business/ck-hutchison-shares-drop-after-beijing-signals-unhappiness-over-panama-ports-deal-94c02730?mod=asia_news_article_pos1

By Kimberley Kao

and Jack Pitcher

Updated March 14, 2025 2:35 pm ET

The agreement will result in the sale of most of CK Hutchison’s port businesses outside China. Photo: bobby yip/Reuters

Beijing has signaled its displeasure over CK Hutchison Holdings’ 1 -6.38%decrease; red down pointing triangle agreement to sell its majority controlling stake in Panama ports to a BlackRock BLK 3.14%increase; green up pointing triangle-led consortium, sending shares in the Hong Kong-based company sharply lower.

A commentary by Chinese state-owned Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao criticized the deal, saying it would result in the Panama Canal being used for political purposes, restricting China’s shipping and trade. The opinion piece cited unnamed individuals critical of CK Hutchison as saying the sale is “profit seeking” and a move “betraying and selling off” all Chinese people.

Relevant companies should carefully consider which “side they should stand on,” the article said.

The piece was republished Thursday by the joint official website of the Chinese Communist Party’s Hong Kong and Macao Work Office and the State Council’s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office. It was also reposted by China’s liaison office in Hong Kong.

Shares in CK Hutchison fell 6.7% in Friday afternoon trading, on track for their biggest one-day percentage drop in about five years. The benchmark Hang Seng Index rose 2.2% on Friday.

Investors appear concerned that pressure from Beijing could cause the BlackRock Hutchison deal, which hasn’t yet been finalized, to fall apart.

Trump’s New World Order Tests the Dollar

Investors are more optimistic about Europe while tariffs cloud the U.S. outlook

https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/trump-trade-tariffs-us-dollar-value-814cbe37?st=UJEqmS&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Sam Goldfarb

and Justin Baer

March 15, 2025 11:00 pm ET

Trump's policies challenge the dollar's dominance, raising concerns about global investment flows and trans-Atlantic tourism.
A weaker dollar could boost domestic manufacturing but also increase inflation and make it harder for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates.
Europe's increased military spending and fiscal relaxation have boosted the euro against the dollar, potentially leading to a more durable shift in currency dynamics.

President Trump has launched an unprecedented challenge to a geopolitical order that has prevailed for decades. One potential victim: the U.S. dollar.

In just weeks, a steep increase in tariffs and uncertainty over trade have sparked fears that U.S. growth will slow. At the same time, major shifts in U.S. foreign policy have led to a surge in optimism about the European economy—driving the dollar down sharply against the euro, sending stocks in Europe to records and spurring the biggest jump in German bond yields since just after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The WSJ Dollar Index has declined seven of the past nine weeks, nearly erasing gains made since the Nov. 5 election.

Such financial upheaval, if sustained, could have ramifications for everything from global investment flows to the direction of trans-Atlantic tourism.

For generations, U.S. political leaders have generally embraced the dollar’s primacy in the global financial system, in part because it has led to cheaper government borrowing. The country’s spending on defense has helped bolster that position by driving up the budget deficit, financed in large part by foreign investors, who hold about a third of U.S. debt.

Now, though, Trump and some of his advisers are making it clear that they want to expend fewer resources protecting allies. And they are saying they want a weaker currency to boost domestic manufacturing, by making goods cheaper to foreign buyers.

“When you look at these policies in a macro way, they have a method to them,” said Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. “The risk to the markets is dislocation in the short term. But I think our republic will be better off if we spend a few thousand dollars more for a car in return for having a workforce that can make things and can afford what they make.”

Many on Wall Street, however, fear the downside of such changes. A weaker dollar would make imports more expensive, boosting inflation and making it harder for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. Outflows from U.S. assets that depress the dollar could also drive down stock prices and lead to higher U.S. borrowing costs.

Few believe that a huge decline in the dollar is imminent, partly because U.S. interest rates are higher than almost anywhere else in the developed world, promising continued foreign investment.

Still, “what’s happened over the last several weeks has the potential to be a game-changer,” said Katie Nixon, chief investment officer at Northern Trust Wealth Management.

The recent decline in the dollar has caught investors off guard. Many had long thought that Trump would mostly govern as a traditional Republican: focusing on cutting taxes and rolling back regulations.

Forecasts for faster economic growth, coupled with modestly higher tariffs, initially helped drive stocks and the dollar higher after Trump’s election win.

Uncertainty about tariffs is a worry for many Wall Street traders. Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg News

Investors are now rethinking those assumptions. Trump has already slapped major tariffs on goods from America’s largest trading partners and threatened more—prompting immediate retaliation from Canada and China. His administration has moved to lay off thousands of federal workers. Talk of tax cuts has largely faded to the background.

All of that has dragged down expectations for U.S. growth, with investors worried almost as much about the uncertainty surrounding tariffs as the levies themselves, which promise to push up consumer prices.

Meanwhile, hopes for Europe have jumped. That is partly attributable to a run of better data, but also stems from Europe’s move to boost military spending after Trump’s public clash with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House in late February.

Worried that they could no longer count on the U.S. to help defend their interests, German leaders announced days later that they would break with decades of history by freeing up borrowing to fund a buildup in their military. European Union officials also outlined a plan to raise hundreds of billions of euros for defense, and a relaxation of fiscal rules at the national level.

For investors, the crucial feature of these announcements was that they promised sustained investments.

The euro has temporarily gained against the dollar at other times in recent decades. But this time the move could be durable because what Europe is promising is “not just a one-off thing, like the Covid stimulus,” said Sonu Varghese, global market strategist at Carson Group, a financial advisory firm.

So far, the decline in the dollar’s value has been modest, hardly enough to make a major difference for U.S. exporters.

Even so, the move has caught Wall Street’s attention because it is consistent with Trump’s long-held ambitions. Trump has often argued that the dollar should be weaker, claiming last year that the currency’s strength was “a disaster for our manufacturers.”

Council of Economic Advisers chair Stephen Miran has suggested placing a user fee on foreign buyers of Treasurys. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg News

Stephen Miran, the recently confirmed chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, put forward several unorthodox ideas in a paper last year about how Trump could weaken the dollar. They included putting a user fee on foreign buyers of Treasurys.

Some on Wall Street are taking such ideas seriously. One reason the dollar has weakened recently is that investors know what the administration is aiming for, said Eric Stein, head of investments at Voya Investment Management.

Others, however, are doubtful that Trump’s policies will play out as intended.

For one thing, Trump’s commitment to tax cuts likely means that the federal budget deficit will remain large, said Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The need for more borrowing to fund the deficit should keep U.S. Treasury yields elevated and put upward pressure on the dollar, as global investors seek out high-yielding assets.

In another scenario, the dollar could continue to weaken and Trump could achieve his goal of shrinking the gap between U.S. exports and imports, but only because the U.S. economy is suffering, Setser added.

Foreign investors might be tempted to shift money out of U.S. assets. But the alternatives, including Europe, have problems of their own.

“All of this is creating uncertainty,” said Robert Rubin, who served as Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration and once co-led Goldman Sachs. “On the other hand, where else do foreign companies and investors go?”

Write to Sam Goldfarb at sam.goldfarb@wsj.com and Justin Baer at justin.baer@wsj.com

7. Inside the Chinese Region That Has Become a No-Go for Western Companies

This is of course excellent reporting. Will the reporting get into China? Of course not because the great firewall of China will prevent it. Nor would we ask the Wall Street Journal to try to penetrate the Great Firewall of China because there is no profit in it so it makes no business sense. But if we think it is important for the people in China to know the truth about the outside world and about what their own government is doing to them then perhaps we need an organization that is mission focused on that and not working solely for profits as private companies should and must

It would be nice to have a capability to broadcast into China:

Here are just a few headlines from VOA's Uygher news that will no longer be broadcast into China. Let's find the bias in these reports.

Uyghur News

https://www.voanews.com/p/8920.html

Fate of 8 Uyghurs in Thailand in limbo after 40 deported to China

A TikTok logo is displayed on a smartphone in this illustration.

TikTok’s sponsorship of UK Muslim event sparks criticism

FILE - Uyghur Abduweli Ayup poses for a photo in Bergen, Norway, May 8, 2022.

Uyghur linguist's presentation dropped at UNESCO summit, igniting fears of Beijing's sway

This photo provided by Thailand's daily web newspaper 'Prachatai' shows trucks with black tape covering the windows leave a detention center in Bangkok, Thailand, Feb. 27, 2025.

Sorrow, frustration as US condemns deportation of Uyghurs to China

This photo provided by Thailand's daily web newspaper Prachatai shows a vehicle with a load of unidentified passengers leaving the immigration detention center in Bangkok, Thailand, on Feb. 27, 2025.

Outcry builds as Thailand deports Uyghurs to China after 10 years in detention

FILE - A farmer walks past government propaganda depicting ethnic minority residents reading the constitution with a slogan that reads, "Unity, Stability is fortune, Separatism and Turmoil is misfortune," near Kashgar in Xinjiang, northwestern China, on March 19, 2021.

UN report: China expands forced labor in Xinjiang, Tibet

FILE - Uyghur children play while their relatives rest outside their house, which is decorated with Chinese lanterns and barbed wire, at the Unity New Village in Hotan, in western China's Xinjiang region, on Sept. 20, 2018.

Uyghurs mark 28 years since Ghulja violence, condemn ongoing repression

FILE - This photo shows an immigration detention center where Uyghur detainees are held in Bangkok, Jan. 11, 2025. The detainees say they are facing deportation back to China, where they fear persecution.

US pressure mounts on Thailand over 48 Uyghur detainees as hunger strike continues

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio testifies in Washington before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on his nomination to be Secretary of State, Jan, 15, 2025.

Rubio vows to oppose Thai Uyghur deportations as US secretary of state

Inside the Chinese Region That Has Become a No-Go for Western Companies

Projects are dead and surveillance is omnipresent in Xinjiang, which once lured Western companies such as Volkswagen

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-xinjiang-economic-investment-development-3ffb5d7b?mod=latest_headlines

Xinjiang is home to millions of Muslims. Photo: Pedro Pardo/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

By Yoko KubotaFollow

March 15, 2025 11:00 pm ET

URUMQI, China—About a decade ago, some Western companies answered Beijing’s calls to invest in Xinjiang, an underdeveloped region in the country’s remote west. Some were drawn by the natural resources there. Others eyed the political points they could score with China.

Today, many of those projects are dead or have been sold off. A visit by a Wall Street Journal reporter earlier this year to Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, found that the site of German carmaker Volkswagen—which was especially eager to invest in the region a little over a decade ago—sits lifeless. The factory, in Urumqi’s Toutunhe economic development zone, was recently sold. The carmaker and its joint venture partner SAIC Motor’s names have been scraped from the gate, leaving a blurry mark.

As the reporter approached the site and turned onto an empty side street, a white car trailed her movements—surveillance that continued throughout her trip in Urumqi.

The demise of what was the most prominent Western project there shows how toxic association with Xinjiang is for Western companies, and how those companies’ ambitions in China can collide with political and geopolitical realities. The investments into relatively minor projects in a remote area ended up morphing into a yearslong international headache.

Over the years, Xinjiang, home to millions of Turkic-speaking Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities, has become synonymous to some in the West with Beijing’s ruthless clampdown on ethnic minorities. The Chinese government has targeted the minorities in Xinjiang with mass-detention internment camps and omnipresent surveillance as part of a forcible assimilation campaign. China portrays the campaign as an effort to fight religious extremism and terrorists.

A government billboard in Xinjiang evokes a shared Chinese national identity. Photo: Pedro Pardo/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Since 2022, a U.S. law called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act—supported by Secretary of State Marco Rubio while he was a senator—has virtually banned imports from Xinjiang. In 2020, Beijing barred Rubio from entering China, partly in response to his criticism of the mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.

From clothing companies to automakers, businesses have shunned Xinjiang.

“Xinjiang has not only become a place not to invest, but even bidding on projects there or otherwise selling into the market there has become off limits,” said William Zarit, a senior counselor at business consulting firm Cohen Group and a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China.

China uses Xinjiang to signal Beijing’s discontent with governments. In February, as the U.S. and China ratcheted up their trade war, Beijing placed PVH, the owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, on an “unreliable entities list” over allegations that it boycotts cotton products from Xinjiang. PVH said it complied with relevant laws and regulations and was working to find a positive resolution.

The Western opprobrium continues to sting Beijing. A senior Xinjiang official said in January that U.S. sanctions had hit operations at more than 100 local companies and resulted in layoffs. “The U.S.’s unreasonable actions are essentially aimed at undermining Xinjiang’s prosperity and stability, containing China’s development, and violating international trade rules and market order,” a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry said.

In recent years, surveillance of foreign reporters in Xinjiang has become the norm, including monitoring the Journal reporter’s visit to Urumqi in January. The reporter was followed throughout the visit, by car or by foot, by several men who appeared to be plainclothes security officials. At one point, as the reporter emerged from a Tesla showroom, police stopped to check her ID and inquire why she was in Urumqi.

Volkswagen recently sold its factory in Urumqi, Xinjiang. Photo: Dake Kang/Associated Press

Surveillance is commonplace throughout China, but the scale is far larger in Urumqi. Security, including surveillance cameras and special police outposts that have mushroomed in recent years, is heavy throughout the city. Sign posts bearing the local emergency services number, along with a six-digit number identifying the location, stand in front of mosques and other spots, so police can respond immediately to calls. Shoppers entering a large market in the city center were subject to airport-like searches.

Continued control of the Muslim population is evident. At a mosque in the center of Urumqi, the patriotic slogan “Love the Country, Love the Religion” was affixed to the building. Nearby, a red banner hung, which read in Chinese “Love the Party, Love the Country, Love Socialism.”

A swath of desert and mountains, Xinjiang accounts for one-sixth of China’s land mass and is home to some 26 million people, or about 2% of China’s population. While China’s eastern coast rapidly developed, Xinjiang lagged behind.

In 2000, China launched its “Go West” development policy, seeking to develop the western region including Xinjiang. Beijing positioned Xinjiang as a key hub for trade routes to Central Asia and Europe that would thrive under China’s giant Belt and Road infrastructure and trade initiative. Chinese authorities dangled tax breaks and cheap land to lure foreign investment.

Xinjiang’s climate also made the region a major supplier of wheat, cotton, tomatoes and hops for Western companies. In 2011, coal giant Peabody Energy said it would pursue a coal mine project in Xinjiang with the local government. France’s Air Liquide said it would build an industrial gas production facility around 2013, while German chemical giant BASF started to produce chemicals with a joint venture partner in Xinjiang’s Korla in 2016.

In 2012, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and German Chancellor Angela Merkel celebrated at Volkswagen’s headquarters in Germany as executives signed a deal to build a car plant in Urumqi. The relatively small Xinjiang factory was among one of the many sites in China for Volkswagen. It was positioned to serve as a manufacturing and export hub for the broader region.

Meanwhile, long-simmering separatist sentiment among Uyghurs spilled over. In 2014, authorities blamed a surge in deadly terrorist attacks around the country on Xinjiang-based militants.

Surveillance and policing intensified in the region. Beijing also began to target the Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities with mass internment camps. Human-rights groups and Western researchers have alleged that the government forced these groups to work at factories around the country.

A Coca-Cola bottling plant is still running in Xinjiang. Photo: Yoko Kubota/The Wall Street Journal

Tesla has a showroom in Xinjiang. Photo: Yoko Kubota/The Wall Street Journal

Beijing has denied using forced labor and described the camps as vocational training facilities. It has said programs to transfer mostly Muslim minority laborers are part of poverty-alleviation programs.

Multinational firms soon came under pressure to eliminate forced labor from their supply chains. Volkswagen’s investment in Xinjiang came around a time when the company was expanding in China.

But as Beijing’s crackdown on Xinjiang became apparent, Volkswagen came under pressure. Top executives tried to strike a balancing act. At home, they sought to avoid reputational blowback from investors, consumers and an influential trade union, which holds a seat on the company’s supervisory board.

In China, Volkswagen sought to avoid upsetting Beijing and Chinese consumers. By 2020, Volkswagen’s Xinjiang plant was in the process of ending car production and was transformed into a center for quality control and testing. In 2023, Volkswagen hired auditors and said it found no evidence of human-rights abuses at the plants. Nonetheless, trade union officials and investors increasingly pressured Volkswagen to pull out of the region.

In November, Volkswagen said it would sell the Urumqi plant to a state-backed car inspection business. By then, Volkswagen had been surpassed in sales by Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD.

BASF is in the process of divesting two plants in Xinjiang, a process that dragged on for a year. Air Liquide’s project there was canceled before it was implemented. Peabody Energy stopped referring to its Xinjiang project in its financial filings after 2014, when it said it intended to advance projects in Asia including “studies underway in Xinjiang.” The company declared bankruptcy in 2016 as tumbling prices crushed the American coal industry, then exited Chapter 11 a year later. It declined to comment.

Some Western companies, mostly in retail, still operate there on a limited scale.

On a January afternoon, people were browsing a Tesla showroom that opened in 2021. Outside, Tesla vehicles—which can be found occasionally on the streets of Urumqi—were charging. Ford, Toyota and Mercedes, among others, also have authorized dealerships in Urumqi. Coca-Cola and its joint venture’s bottling plant there is still running.

Precise data on how much and from where foreign investment is still flowing into Xinjiang is hard to come by. Unlike most other regions in China, Xinjiang’s official annual statistical yearbook hasn’t been updated since 2022, which contains 2021 data, and details on the origin of foreign investments are patchy.

Despite Beijing’s earlier calls, foreign investment in Xinjiang remained a tiny portion of the investments flowing into China, dipping to as low as 0.1% of the nationwide total in 2021 before bouncing back up in 2023 again to 0.4%, the same ratio as in 2013.

The most recent data available show that in 2023, foreign direct investment into Xinjiang hit a high of $681 million. Data on foreign investment show a decline in the number of Western entities in Xinjiang in recent years, while Kazakhstan and Turkey had dozens of entities in 2021, the latest data available.

These days, China is turning to Central Asia for investment in Xinjiang. The Toutunhe economic development zone, which once touted the Volkswagen investment as a leading project, is busy these days hosting potential investors from Central Asia. Authorities have been building a financial services center in the zone, targeting Central Asian firms.

Last year, authorities signed a memorandum of cooperation with a Kazakh business chamber. In January, officials from Uzbekistan signed a technology and talent exchange cooperation agreement with several Chinese companies in the zone.

Security is heavy throughout the city of Urumqi. Photo: Yoko Kubota/The Wall Street Journal

Write to Yoko Kubota at yoko.kubota@wsj.com

8. DOGE representatives visit US Institute of Peace, are turned away

But did they turn them away peacefully and without violence? Did they negotiate a peace treaty between USIP and DOGE?

Lame attempt at humor I know. But this begs the question, how much do the DOGE wiz kids understand about government organizations?

And is this another attempt to undo US Soft power capabilities? Is that the agenda? There is starting to be a pattern.

Is this because someone perceives that USIP does not somehow find into the "Peace Through Strength" paradigm?

DOGE representatives visit US Institute of Peace, are turned away

by Ashleigh Fields - 03/15/25 4:18 PM ET

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5196963-doge-representatives-visit-us-institute-of-peace-are-turned-away/?utm

U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) officials said several members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) arrived unannounced with FBI agents on Saturday but were denied access to the building after being approached by their counsel.

“They were met at the door by the Institute’s outside counsel who informed them of USIP’s private and independent status as a non-executive branch agency. Following that discussion, the DOGE representatives departed,” Gonzo Gallegos, USIP’s director of communications, said in a statement to The Hill.

DOGE has ordered mass firings at a wide range of federal agencies and departments while working to cancel government contracts in an effort to reduce spending levels.

USIP is a national non-partisan organization created by Congress and dedicated to protecting U.S. interests by helping to prevent violent conflicts and broker peace deals abroad according to their website.

It uses federal funding to perform its mission and works closely with the Department of Defense.

A Senate-confirmed Board of Directors made up of the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense and President of the National Defense University governs the USIP in an effort to align with each presidential administration and their national security efforts.

“As an independent, non-profit organization established by Congress, USIP remains committed to the cooperation and comity with the Trump Administration it has exhibited in its work with seven administrations since its founding under President Ronald Reagan,” Gallegos said after the DOGE visit.

“This includes ensuring the responsible use of taxpayer funds, aggressively pursuing its ongoing efforts to modernize and make all aspects of its operations more efficient,” he added.

Tags DOGE mass firings Ronald Reagan U.S. Insitute of Peace usaid

9. Russia Overpowers Bold Ukrainian Military Venture in Kursk

Russia Overpowers Bold Ukrainian Military Venture in Kursk

Ukraine’s retreat from most of Russian region deprives it of a bargaining chip in peace talks

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/russia-overpowers-bold-ukrainian-military-venture-in-kursk-5a95b48a?st=Tyti55&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

VIDEO: “Zero Day” TV Series Illustrates What A Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Could Look Like

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/03/15/video-zero-day-tv-series-illustrates-what-a-chinese-invasion-of-taiwan-could-look-like/

by SWJ Staff

03.15.2025 at 06:47am

Zero Day is a Taiwanese TV series that premiers May of 2025. Please watch the riveting 17 minute trailer below.

Yimou Lee, Angie Teo, and Fabian Hamacher had this to say for Reuters:

“We thought there is freedom in Taiwan but in film and TV production we are restricted by China on many levels,” said Cheng Hsin Mei, the showrunner on “Zero Day”…

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Cheng said creators in free and democratic Taiwan, however, are indirectly confined by Beijing’s powerful state censorship…

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For the “Zero Day” crew, confronting such a sensitive topic means facing difficulties, from funding and casting to finding places to film. Cheng said more than half of the “Zero Day” crew asked to remain anonymous on the crew list, and some people including a director pulled out of the production at the last minute, due to worries it might jeopardise their future work in China or concerns about the safety of their families working there. “Our freedom is hard-earned,” Cheng said, adding people should not give in easily due to fears over China. “The People’s Liberation Army has launched substantial incursions against us and they are getting closer and closer,” she said. “We should look at this directly rather than pretending that it is not happening.”

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The drama focuses on several scenarios Taiwan might face in the days leading up to a Chinese attack, including a global financial collapse, the activation of Chinese sleeper agents and panicked residents trying to flee the island.

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“Without freedom, Taiwan is not Taiwan,” the actor who plays a fictional Taiwan president says in a televised speech, urging unity after declaring war on China, in the show’s trailer. The live broadcast then gets abruptly cut off, replaced by a feed of a Chinese state television anchor calling for Taiwanese to surrender and to report “hidden pro-independence activists” to Chinese soldiers after their landing in Taiwan.

ㅤ

Milton Lin, a 75-year-old Taipei resident, said he was grateful the TV series was putting a spotlight on the threats by China. “It helps Taiwanese to understand that we are facing a strong enemy trying to annex us and how we should be on guard with unity to face such an invasion.”

A short summary of the trailer (spoilers):

The 17-minute trailer for the upcoming Taiwanese TV series “Zero Day” offers a compelling portrayal of a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan, providing valuable insights. The narrative commences with the disappearance of a Chinese anti-submarine aircraft near Taiwan’s southern waters, an incident China leverages as a pretext to impose a comprehensive naval blockade around the island.

This blockade precipitates a cascade of destabilizing events:

Economic Disruption: The blockade halts international shipping, leading to a stock market crash and widespread bank runs. The ensuing panic sees both citizens and foreigners scrambling to evacuate the island.
Cyber and Psychological Warfare: Taiwan’s infrastructure suffers under coordinated cyberattacks, disrupting essential services like water, electricity, and communications. The populace faces a bombardment of disinformation from China. Social media influencers and other means aim to eroding public trust and morale. Chinese hackers infiltrate Taiwanese media, deploying AI-generated deepfakes of the Taiwanese president declaring war on China. This sows confusion and panic among the populace in the series.
Internal Sabotage and Unrest: Chinese operatives and local collaborators orchestrate prison breaks, releasing convicts who, alongside armed fifth columnists and gang members, create internal chaos by blocking roads and disrupting civil order.
Military Engagement: Amidst the turmoil, People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) commandos initiate assaults on strategic locations, including the outlying island of Kinmen, signaling the commencement of direct military actions.

The trailer perfectly illustrates the multifaceted nature of modern hybrid warfare. It blends conventional military tactics with cyber operations, psychological manipulation, and exploitation of societal vulnerabilities. “Zero Day” illustrates the diverse strategies that might be employed in a contemporary conflict scenario involving Taiwan and China.

By illustrating the potential rapid escalation from political tension to full-scale invasion, the series emphasizes the critical importance of preparedness, resilience, and resistance. The ability to counteract both physical and informational threats are vital in safeguarding national sovereignty.

About The Author

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

11. Chinese Ships Are Carrying America’s Cargo. The U.S. Wants to Reverse That.

We need to consider a JAROKUS Shipbuilding consortium (Japan - ROK - US).

Chinese Ships Are Carrying America’s Cargo. The U.S. Wants to Reverse That.

Beijing’s support helps its shipbuilding industry capture more than half the global market

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-cargo-ship-trump-shipbuilding-823b1c9c?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=1&utm

By Stu Woo

March 14, 2025 3:06 pm ET

The Jinling shipyard in the Chinese city of Nanjing. Photo: Cfoto/DDP/Zuma Press

SINGAPORE—In 2002, with China’s shipyards producing just 8% of global commercial tonnage, then-Premier Zhu Rongji challenged his nation. “China,” he said, “can hope to become the world’s No. 1 shipbuilding superpower.”

He was right.

Last year, Chinese shipyards delivered 53% of global tonnage, according to Clarksons Research. With so many goods in the U.S. imported from overseas, that means Chinese-made ships are essential to keeping American store shelves well-stocked.

As it did in building its high-speed rail network and Olympic venues, Beijing flexed its top-down power to make a national priority happen. It set concrete targets, cleared red tape and poured, by one estimate, more than $90 billion in subsidies into Chinese shipbuilders.

China’s dominance has spurred President Trump and a bipartisan group of lawmakers to form a plan that would make America a shipbuilding power again.

Step one in the plan: hurt China.

Beyond Resilience: A Nuanced Framework for Conceptualizing Resistance Networks

4 hours ago

17 min read

STRATEGY CENTRAL

For and By Practitioners

By Maurice "Duc" Duclos & Chad Machiela - March 16, 2025

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/beyond-resilience-a-nuanced-framework-for-conceptualizing-resistance-networks?utm

“The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists.”

— Japanese Proverb

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

— Charles Darwin

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Introduction

The Resistance Operating Concept (ROC), published by the United States Special Operations Command Joint Special Operations University (USSOCOM JSOU) and the Swedish Defence University in 2020, advanced resistance planning discourse. However, its conceptualization of building resilience as primarily a preparatory activity presents critical limitations. While the ROC provides essential frameworks for understanding how societies can prepare for and carry out resistance operations when conventional deterrence and defense measures fail, it offers an incomplete picture for assessing and preparing the operational environment through network development.

The language used to describe resistance capabilities shapes how capabilities are evaluated, developed, and employed. When planners and practitioners lack precise terminology to distinguish between organizational qualities, strategies may be incomplete, and valuable resources may be misaligned. A more nuanced vocabulary and assessment framework enables a more effective assessment of strengths and vulnerabilities, precise development of specific capabilities, and more effective employment of resistance networks. Critical gaps may remain unaddressed without precision, and scarce resources may be allocated to redundant capabilities.

Some planners equate resilience solely with a society's psychological "will to resist" occupation (Fiala, 2020. p. 5). While societal determination and a population at the mobilization threshold certainly contribute to resistance potential, assessing resilience primarily as a psychological measure overlooks the structural and operational capabilities required of resistance networks. Rather than a precondition to resistance, societal resilience should be evaluated as a resource that can simultaneously support deterrence, defense, and resistance efforts. The will to resist must be evaluated further to distinguish between psychological resilience or readiness and the practical capabilities needed for resistance networks to function effectively under pressure. While assessing the will to resist is essential, the resulting measures will not address resilience operational requirements, which must be evaluated separately.

Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion (where resistance occurs in concert with conventional defense) and ongoing tensions in regions like the South China Sea (where nations face incremental territorial encroachment rather than violent seizure) demand a more sophisticated analytical framework for measuring and developing resilience. Russia's "creeping annexation" in Georgia, China's island-building in the South China Sea, and Russia's tactics in eastern Ukraine, where specific territories are occupied rather than complete national conquest, demonstrate the requirement for nations to develop resistance capabilities to complement conventional military defense.

These “gray zone” activities short of war (Lin, et al., 2022), or what may be termed "micro-occupations," involve the capture of strategically valuable territory, critical infrastructure, or terrain from which to exert further influence. In this context, resistance should not be viewed merely as the final phase in a linear progression. Instead, nations must cultivate multidimensional capabilities encompassing the entire spectrum of conflict, with resistance elements potentially activating before or alongside conventional operations or in areas where traditional defense has faltered.

Resilience should not be viewed as merely a preparatory phase for resistance, nor as a catch-all term for the varied organizational attributes required for resistance networks to survive and thrive under pressure. Biology, sociology, and other fields provide concepts useful in assessing network characteristics ranging from individual psychology to group behavior in complex adaptive systems and provide valuable parallels that can enhance understanding of how resistance networks function, adapt, and even strengthen through adversity.

Effective resistance requires three distinct qualities: resilience, robustness, and antifragility. Each quality describes a distinct network quality requiring different development requirements. Organizational theory, complex adaptive systems research, and historical resistance case studies demonstrate how distinguishing between these critical attributes may give scholars and practitioners more precise conceptual tools for resistance planning.

Theoretical Foundations

While resilience, robustness, and antifragility are sometimes used interchangeably in security literature (Fiala, 2020, p. 1), for network and social movement theorists, these terms carry significantly different implications for how resistance networks should be designed, trained, and operationalized.

In ecology, Holling (1973) defined resilience as a system's ability to absorb change while maintaining its essential function and structure. This concept was later expanded by Walker and Salt (2012), who distinguished between engineering resilience (the speed of return to equilibrium) and ecological resilience (the magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed). Organizational theorists like Weick and Sutcliffe (2007) explored resilience as high-reliability organizations' capacity to maintain operations during crises through mindfulness and adaptation. In military contexts, resilience traditionally focuses on a force's ability to absorb attacks, recover quickly, and continue functioning despite adversity.

Robustness, often conflated with resilience, has distinct characteristics relevant to resistance planning. Jen (2005) defines robustness as a system's ability to maintain its basic functionality across various conditions without the requirement to adapt or recover. In network theory, Albert, Jeong, and Barabási (2000) demonstrated how some network structures exhibit robust characteristics against random and targeted attacks through redundancy and distributive properties. Doyle et al. (2005) further distinguished robustness from resilience by noting that robust systems "do not change significantly under perturbation," whereas resilient systems may change substantially while maintaining core functions. In defense planning, robustness emphasizes hardened systems that resist compromise through structural characteristics rather than recovery capabilities.

Antifragility, introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012) describes systems that endure stress and benefit and improve. Robust networks endure stress without fragmentation, and resilient networks recover quickly from stress and damage. Antifragile systems strengthen and grow when subject to stressors. Weightlifting exercises, for example, stress the human body by tearing muscle fibers, which recover and grow to make the body capable of lifting more weight. Antifragile systems thrive in disorder. Johnson and Gheorghe (2013) applied antifragility to military systems, suggesting that forces can be designed to enhance their effectiveness through systematic exposure to adversity. Antifragility provides a groundbreaking approach for resistance movements encountering conventional superiority where pressure from occupying forces becomes a catalyst for organizational strengthening rather than degradation.

These three qualities describe a network’s reaction or vulnerability to external pressure: robust systems resist shock, resilient systems recover from shock, and antifragile systems improve after shock (if these systems have sufficient robustness to survive the shock). Each represents a distinct organizational characteristic that resistance network planners must cultivate to operate effectively against often better-equipped conventional forces. Understanding these distinctions enables resistance planners to develop comprehensive preparation strategies that address all three qualities rather than focusing exclusively on the ability to recover quickly.

Resilience: Adaptation and Recovery

Resilience in resistance networks manifests as the capacity to recover quickly from shocks, adapt to changing conditions, and recover operational effectiveness following setbacks. This attribute focuses specifically on flexibility and regenerative capabilities—how networks reconstitute themselves after significant disruption.

European resistance movements during World War II demonstrated resilience while recovering from devastating security breaches. The Norwegian resistance rebuilt itself multiple times following Gestapo penetrations in 1942-43, developing increasingly sophisticated compartmentalization protocols after each wave of arrests. Similarly, Danish resistance networks reconstituted their leadership structures and communication channels following the German roundup of resistance leaders in 1944, resuming sabotage operations within weeks.

More recently, Syrian opposition networks demonstrated remarkable resilience during the civil war, reconstituting command structures and adapting operational methods following the effective regime targeting of leadership figures in 2012-2013. Despite losing entire command cells in Damascus and Homs, these networks reestablished operational capabilities through pre-planned succession mechanisms and distributed decision-making authority.

Resilient resistance networks develop specific mechanisms that enable recovery from disruption:

1. Reorganization protocols allow networks to restructure compromised cells while preserving unaffected components, often through decentralized decision-making units that activate after leadership losses and information-sharing processes that connect specific knowledge of changing tactical conditions with decision-makers.

2. Alternative capabilities include backup systems, redundant communication channels, and contingency plans that provide operational continuity during organizational stress.

3. Learning processes that extract lessons from failures and translate this knowledge into adapted tactics, techniques, and procedures.

For resistance planners, increasing resilience requires establishing distributed leadership development programs, creating effective information sharing systems, and implementing regular "stress test" exercises that simulate network disruption and practice recovery procedures. These investments must occur during peacetime to ensure recovery mechanisms function effectively under occupation. Planners must, however, balance the increased effectiveness of responsive communication systems against the decreased operational security inherent in centralized networks. Too many connections between cells increase the vulnerability of all cells if one resistance cell is compromised.

The French Resistance exemplified resilience after the catastrophic arrests of key leaders in 1943. Rather than collapsing, the movement reorganized into smaller, more distributed networks, adapted communication procedures, and ultimately emerged with improved operational security. Similar patterns appeared in the Lithuanian Forest Brothers' resistance against Soviet occupation, where the movement repeatedly adapted its structure and tactics despite overwhelming pressure.

Robustness: Structural Integrity Under Pressure

While resilience describes recovery and adaptation after shock or disruption, robustness describes a resistance network's ability to withstand pressure without fragmentation and continue functioning. Planners building resilience assume that damage to a network will occur and create recovery processes. Planners building robustness create processes, structural design, and redundant systems, allowing a network to maintain function despite shocks.

Robust networks maintain their core functionality through structural characteristics that minimize vulnerability to disruption. These networks can be assessed through several metrics, including the number of nodes that must be neutralized to disable critical functions, the degree of redundancy in command and communication systems, and the network's ability to maintain operational tempo despite adversary operations (Zeng, Gao, Lim et al., 2022).

The cellular structure pioneered by communist underground movements and refined by numerous resistance organizations demonstrates robustness in practice. These networks create inherent protection against cascading failure following security breaches by compartmentalizing information and limiting connections between cells. This organizational design ensures that the compromise of one cell does not automatically lead to the exposure of others, enabling continued operations despite partial network penetration (USASOC, 2015).

Redundant systems—duplicating leadership, communication channels, and resource caches—prevent single points of failure from compromising the entire network. This redundancy appears in physical resources and capability distribution, where multiple cells possess similar operational skills, allowing the network to maintain functionality even when specific units are neutralized.

Since 2014, Ukrainian volunteer networks have demonstrated exceptional robustness through their decentralized logistics systems, which continued delivering critical supplies to frontline units despite Russian targeting efforts. Their use of multiple, independent supply chains with minimal central coordination created inherent robustness against disruption. Similarly, Hezbollah's development since the 1980s illustrates organizational robustness. Its layered security measures, distributed command structure, and redundant communication systems allowed it to maintain operational continuity despite intensive Israeli targeting efforts.

Physical manifestations of robustness include the extensive tunnel complexes and dispersed supply caches maintained by the Viet Cong, which provided material robustness that sustained the movement through years of American offensives. These hardened infrastructures—both physical and organizational—reduce vulnerability to detection and neutralization.

Robustness is particularly crucial during the initial phases of occupation when counterinsurgency forces typically launch their most intensive efforts to prevent resistance from establishing itself. Without inherent structural protection, nascent resistance networks may be eliminated before developing the resilience mechanisms needed for long-term survival and effectiveness.

The distinction between robustness and resilience carries significant implications for resistance planning. While resilience involves developing procedures for recovery after disruption, robustness requires fundamental structural decisions about network architecture, communication protocols, and resource distribution that must be implemented before a crisis occurs. Procedures for developing resilience and robustness must consider associated changes in operational security and network efficiency. Resistance networks require both qualities, but planners must recognize that resilience and robustness require balanced approaches.

Antifragility: Converting Adversity to Advantage

Ideal resistance networks exhibit antifragility—not merely withstanding or recovering from disruption but leveraging it to become stronger. A resilient network will recover quickly from an adversary’s disinformation attack. A robust network will maintain operations despite an adversary’s disinformation attack. An antifragile network will incorporate the adversary’s disinformation into its information operations and use its messages to mobilize support from the populace and target the adversary’s delivery method. An antifragile network converts adversary pressure into organizational advantages.

Antifragile resistance networks develop four critical capabilities that transform adversity into strength. First, they implement rapid tactical learning cycles that allow innovations to emerge and disseminate throughout the network in response to enemy actions. Second, they utilize staged escalation protocols that activate increasingly sophisticated capabilities as pressure intensifies. Third, they establish stress-triggered growth mechanisms where recruitment, popular support, and operational legitimacy increase during heightened repression. Finally, they maintain a distributed innovation system where tactical and strategic improvements emerge organically from field units rather than relying solely on centralized authority.

History offers many examples. The mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation demonstrated remarkable antifragility, developing increasingly sophisticated tactics and weapons systems in response to Soviet operations. Each Soviet offensive generated new tactical innovations that spread throughout the resistance. Initial Soviet armor attacks prompted the development of advanced ambush techniques; subsequent Soviet air mobility operations triggered new counter-helicopter tactics; and later, Soviet counterinsurgency sweeps accelerated the mujahideen's transition to more mobile operational structures. Rather than degrading the resistance, each Soviet adaptation inadvertently strengthened it.

Similarly, the Irish Republican Army's evolution during the Troubles demonstrated organizational antifragility, as British security measures paradoxically accelerated the IRA's transformation into a more secure, cell-based structure. The introduction of internment without trial in 1971 dramatically increased recruitment and popular support, while enhanced surveillance operations prompted the development of counterintelligence capabilities that significantly improved operational security. By 1977, British pressure had transformed the IRA from a conventional military structure into a sophisticated cellular organization with greatly enhanced resilience and robustness.

The Taliban's evolution against NATO forces provides a compelling contemporary example. Rather than being degraded by coalition operations, the movement continually adapted and improved over two decades. Coalition targeting of leadership figures accelerated their development of distributed command systems. Surveillance and signals intelligence operations drove innovations in communications security. Counter-IED efforts prompted the development of more sophisticated explosive devices and trigger mechanisms. By 2021, the Taliban possessed greater tactical sophistication and improved command and control systems. They exercised more territorial influence than before NATO’s intervention, demonstrating that pressure can paradoxically strengthen resistance movements with antifragile characteristics.

Antifragility is the most challenging quality to cultivate, as it depends upon organizational culture and information-sharing processes rather than easily codified hierarchical structures. However, its potential strategic value is immense—the ability to systematically convert adversary pressure into organizational advantage fundamentally alters the traditional calculus of asymmetric conflict. While conventional wisdom suggests that superior forces should eventually degrade resistance movements, antifragile networks invert this assumption by growing stronger through adversity.

Nietzsche observed, "What does not kill me makes me stronger," a principle that applies as much to resistance organizations as to individuals. By developing antifragile characteristics, resistance movements can transform the strategic landscape, converting the occupier's primary advantage—superior conventional force—into a potential liability that inadvertently strengthens the resistance it aims to defeat.

Implications for Resistance Planning

These distinctions between resilience, robustness, and antifragility carry significant practical implications for nations developing resistance frameworks. Rather than focusing exclusively on resilience as conceptualized in the ROC, planners must cultivate network attributes through distinct preparation strategies that balance network effectiveness against operational security and distributed decision-making against effective mission command and resource management.

Developing resilience requires investing in leadership succession planning, distributed knowledge management, and systematic learning processes. Training programs should emphasize adaptability to rapidly changing circumstances and procedures for reconstitution following network disruptions. Exercises must regularly practice recovery from simulated network compromise, allowing operators to develop experiential knowledge of how to rebuild damaged organizational components. Most importantly, resilience development requires creating an organizational culture that expects disruption rather than being paralyzed by it—one that views recovery as a standard operational function rather than an exceptional circumstance.

The Norwegian Home Guard's creation of "stay-behind" networks during the Cold War exemplifies effective resilience planning. These networks established multiple leadership succession plans, distributed operational knowledge across numerous independent cells, and conducted regular exercises simulating network penetration scenarios. Similarly, Baltic resistance preparations include detailed planning for leadership continuity and knowledge preservation under occupation conditions.

Building robustness requires careful consideration of organizational design, especially cellular structures with connections between units that balance effectiveness against operational security. Centralized, well-connected networks often operate more quickly and effectively than decentralized networks, with efficient resource allocation. This effectiveness and efficiency come at a cost: vulnerability to detection and interdiction. Network architecture must maximize effectiveness while managing the network's vulnerability to cascading failure. Effective implementation of security protocols, counterintelligence capabilities, and redundant systems necessitates significant investment during peacetime. Physical infrastructure, including secure communication systems, resource caches, and covert facilities, must be established before a crisis occurs. This infrastructure requires time to develop, test, and rehearse securely and cannot be rapidly created during occupation.

The Swiss resistance preparation model demonstrates effective robustness planning through its distributed resource caching, redundant communication systems, and carefully designed organizational compartmentalization. Finland's comprehensive security approach emphasizes robustness through physically hardened infrastructure and distributed command capabilities.

Cultivating antifragility may pose the most significant challenge to military planners due to their familiarity and comfort with their own units' hierarchical structure and processes. Counter to standard US mission command, where authority is often maintained at the operational level to manage risk and resources rather than delegated to tactical commanders, resistance planners must create an environment where innovation, hazard mitigation, and risk acceptance are implemented at the tactical level. Planners must develop systems to capture and share successful adaptations across the network and establish recruitment mechanisms that trigger during increased pressure to take advantage of rising anti-occupation sentiment within the populace and external actors. Perhaps most importantly, antifragility requires developing leaders who view pressure as an opportunity for organizational evolution rather than merely a hazard to be mitigated.

Taiwan's whole-of-society resistance preparations incorporate elements of antifragility by emphasizing dispersed innovation capacity and mechanisms to accelerate capability development under crisis conditions. Similarly, Ukrainian territorial defense planning includes provisions for expanding recruitment and capability development in response to occupation pressures.

Resistance preparation requires the intentional development of resilience, robustness, and antifragility, recognizing the complementary nature of these attributes. Resilience without robustness creates recovery-dependent networks that waste resources on continuous reconstitution. Robustness without resilience produces brittle networks that collapse without recovery capability once compromised beyond their inherent protection thresholds. Robust, resilient networks without antifragility condemn resistance movements to gradual degradation against persistent adversaries.

Conclusion: A More Sophisticated Framework

The language and conceptual frameworks used to understand resistance preparation require greater precision than the broad term "resilience" allows. By distinguishing between resilience, robustness, and antifragility, planners can develop more sophisticated resistance frameworks tailored to the complex challenges of modern conflict. This refined vocabulary facilitates more targeted capability development, more accurate vulnerability assessment, and more effective preparation and operational deployment of resistance networks.

The Resistance Operating Concept has contributed to our understanding of resistance preparation, particularly by highlighting the criticality of pre-crisis planning. To build on this foundation, we must expand our conceptual framework to address the complex organizational needs of effective resistance networks. The network attributes discussed in this analysis provide complementary yet distinct strategies for maintaining operational effectiveness under pressure: resilience allows recovery from disruption, robustness averts disruption through structural characteristics, and antifragility transforms disruption into organizational advantage.

Recent conflicts highlight the critical importance of a more nuanced understanding of networks. Russia's operations in Ukraine have shown how resistance functions alongside conventional defense rather than merely supporting it. China's gray zone activities in the South China Sea demonstrate how territorial encroachment and loss of territory occurs through limited "micro-occupations" instead of full-scale conquest. In both scenarios, resistance requires capabilities beyond mere resilience; it demands strong operational security against sophisticated surveillance and the antifragile ability to turn escalating pressure into improved capabilities.

Assessing Capabilities: Practical Metrics

For resistance planners seeking to evaluate their current preparedness, specific metrics can provide valuable assessment tools for each attribute:

Resilience can be measured through:

Recovery time following leadership compromise (how quickly can command functions be restored)
Knowledge retention rate after network disruption (percentage of operational knowledge preserved)
Adaptation speed (time required to implement new tactics following adversary countermeasures)

Robustness can be assessed via:

Network fragmentation threshold (percentage of nodes that must be compromised before critical function loss)
Communication redundancy ratio (number of alternative communication pathways per critical connection)
Resource distribution index (geographical distribution of caches versus operational requirements)

Antifragility indicators include:

Innovation diffusion rate (speed at which tactical innovations spread throughout the network)
Pressure-triggered recruitment ratio (increase in recruitment during periods of heightened repression)
Tactical adaptation frequency (rate at which new techniques emerge in response to adversary actions)

These metrics provide concrete starting points for resistance planners to evaluate their capabilities and identify areas requiring further development.

Limitations and Challenges

While the three-part framework offers valuable analytical tools, several challenges merit acknowledgment. First, deliberately cultivating antifragility is difficult, as this quality is created by setting conditions rather than structured development. Resistance planners may find that antifragile characteristics appear unexpectedly or cannot be reliably generated through training alone.

Second, tension may exist between optimizing different attributes in resource-constrained environments. Investments in robustness (physical infrastructure, redundant systems) may limit resources available for resilience development (training, leadership succession). Balancing these competing priorities requires careful consideration of specific threat scenarios and operational contexts while further balancing gains in network resilience or robustness against the potential decreased operational security resulting from the same network refinements.

Finally, antifragility is hard to measure quantitatively without stress; ideally, network stressors are consistent with what the adversary might impose. While resilience and robustness lend themselves to quantitative assessment by counting discrete infrastructure or assessing performance measures during exercises, antifragility's emergent nature makes precise measurement difficult without specific knowledge of the adversary’s capabilities and intentions. Developing applicable models of adversarial capabilities, intentions, and indicators is essential for developing antifragility.

Strategic Implications and Policy Relevance

Beyond academic interest, these conceptual distinctions profoundly affect national security policy and defense planning. For smaller nations facing threats from conventionally superior neighbors, the difference between resilience, robustness, and antifragility may determine whether resistance capabilities serve as a credible deterrent. When potential aggressors recognize that occupation will trigger not merely persistent resistance but resistance that systematically strengthens during occupation, delaying consolidation and increasing costs, the strategic calculus fundamentally changes.

This framework demands reconsideration of defense resource allocation as a matter of policy. Traditional deterrence based primarily on conventional capabilities may be supplemented—or partially replaced—by investments in robust, resilient, and antifragile networks. Such investments may prove cost-effective for nations with limited defense budgets facing adversaries holding significant conventional advantages.

Incorporating these distinctions into defense planning enables more precise capability development and burden-sharing for alliances such as NATO. Nations with geographical vulnerability to rapid occupation might prioritize robustness and antifragility, while allied partners focus on supporting resilience through external assistance capabilities.

Future research should explore the practical implementation of this framework across different regional contexts and threat scenarios. Identifying additional metrics to assess network component attributes and measure improvement would provide valuable tools for resistance planners to prepare the environment and identify capability gaps. Examining how these qualities interact in specific historical and contemporary resistance movements would offer insights into their relative importance under different occupation scenarios.

For nations facing the threat of external aggression, particularly those concerned with territorial defense against conventionally superior adversaries, these distinctions may determine whether resistance efforts succeed or fail. By adopting this more precise framework, resistance planners can develop preparation strategies that address the qualities of effective networks rather than focusing exclusively on resilience. This approach recognizes that effective resistance demands not just the will to resist but the organizational capabilities to translate that will into sustained, effective opposition against superior conventional forces—capabilities that must be deliberately cultivated through distinct development strategies tailored to each attribute's unique requirements.

As irregular warfare and limited territorial encroachments become increasingly significant features of the international security landscape, this refined understanding offers both practitioners and scholars a more nuanced framework for analyzing and developing resistance capabilities that match the complexity of contemporary conflicts.

References

Albert, Réka, Hawoong Jeong, and Albert-László Barabási. "Error and Attack Tolerance of Complex Networks." Nature 406, no. 6794 (2000): 378-382.

Bērziņš, Jānis. "The Theory and Practice of New Generation Warfare: The Case of Ukraine and Syria." The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 33, no. 3 (2020): 355-380.

Doyle, John C., David L. Alderson, Lun Li, Steven Low, Matthew Roughan, Stanislav Shalunov, Reiko Tanaka, and Walter Willinger. "The 'Robust Yet Fragile' Nature of the Internet." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102, no. 41 (2005): 14497-14502.

Fiala, Nathan D. "Resistance Operating Concept." MacDill Air Force Base, Florida: Joint Special Operations University Press, 2020.

Holling, Crawford S. "Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems." Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4, no. 1 (1973): 1-23.

Jen, Erica. "Robust Design: A Repertoire of Biological, Ecological, and Engineering Case Studies." Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Johnson, John, and Adrian V. Gheorghe. "Antifragility Analysis and Measurement Framework for Systems of Systems." International Journal of Disaster Risk Science 4, no. 4 (2013): 159-168.

Kilcullen, David. The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Liang, Qiao, and Wang Xiangsui. Unrestricted Warfare. Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999.

Lin, B., Garafola, C. L., McClintock, B., Blank, J., Hornung, J. W., Schwindt, K., . . . Chambers, J. (2022). Competition in the Gray Zone. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation.

Molnar, Andrew R., Jerry M. Tinker, and John D. LeNoir. Human Factors Considerations of Undergrounds in Insurgencies. Washington, DC: Special Operations Research Office, American University, 1966.

Motus, Kelly, Otto C. Fiala, and Ryan D. Kertis. "Resistance Dynamics: Assessing Potential Flashpoints in Great Power Competition." Joint Force Quarterly 105 (2022): 56-64.

O'Neill, Bard E. Insurgency & Terrorism: Inside Modern Revolutionary Warfare. Washington, DC: Brassey's Inc., 1990.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. New York: Random House, 2012.

U.S. Army Special Operations Command. Human Factors Considerations in Undergrounds and Insurgencies, 2nd Edition. Fort Bragg, NC, 2013.

Walker, Brian, and David Salt. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2012.

Weick, Karl E., and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe. Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

Zheng, J., Gao, M., Lim, EP. et al. On measuring network robustness for weighted networks. Knowledge and Information Systems 64, 1967–1996 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-022-01670-z

About the Authors

CW5 Maurice "Duc" DuClos currently serves as a Guest Lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California. His professional background includes various positions at the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) Joint Special Operations University (JSOU), the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School (USAJFKSWCS), 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) and 2/75th Ranger Battalion.

Chad Machiela is a faculty research associate at the Naval Postgraduate School. He retired from the Army as a Special Forces warrant officer with over 30 years of special operations experience working throughout the Indo-Pacific, Central, and European Commands.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Special Operations Command, Joint Special Operations University, or the Naval Postgraduate School.

14. President Trump 2.0, China, And Southeast Asia: Security Challenges And Strategic Dilemmas

Excerpt:

In conclusion, the convergence of President Trump 2.0’s assertive policies, China’s regional posture, and Southeast Asia’s strategic recalibrations in 2025 creates a complex security dilemma that is both challenging and instructive. The emerging data highlight growing military tensions, economic dependencies, and shifting alliance structures that compel regional actors to rethink traditional security paradigms. As Southeast Asian nations navigate this turbulent period, the imperative balance for multilateral approaches becomes ever clearer. Only through a combination of strategic diversification, economic prudence, and robust diplomatic engagement can the region hope to mitigate the risks of superpower rivalry to secure a prosperous, stable future.

President Trump 2.0, China, And Southeast Asia: Security Challenges And Strategic Dilemmas – OpEd

eurasiareview.com · by Simon Hutagalung · March 15, 2025

In the evolving landscape of global politics, the emergence of a leadership style reminiscent of President Donald Trump—now often referred to as President Trump 2.0—has created a seismic shift in international security strategies, particularly within Southeast Asia.

As 2025 unfolds, the intertwined relationship between a reassertive United States under a nationalist banner, an increasingly assertive China, and the multifaceted security facing challenges in Southeast Asia forms a complex web of geopolitical contestation. This essay examines critically these emerging issues, arguing that President TRUMP 2.0’s recalibrated policies, China’s aggressive regional posturing, and Southeast Asia’s adaptive responses collectively represent both significant a challenge and a pivotal moment in redefining regional dynamics security.

The reemergence of a Trump-inspired approach in American leadership signals a renewed emphasis on nationalist policies, the recalibration multilateral of alliances, and an unpredictable foreign policy that frequently prioritizes economic protectionism over traditional diplomatic engagement. Recent data from early 2025 indicates that U.S. defense spending has risen by approximately 3% compared to the previous year, reflecting a deliberate shift toward bolstering military capabilities to counterbalance China’s burgeoning influence. This strategic pivot is particularly significant in Southeast Asia, where nations balance their lucrative economic ties with China against the need for security guarantees traditionally provided by Washington. The dynamic illustrates a broader recalibration in which security considerations are increasingly interwoven with economic imperatives.

China’s rise as a dominant regional power has not only altered economic relationships but also intensified military territorial disputes. In 2025, the Asia-Pacific Security Summit revealed that over 60% of ASEAN member states now regard China as the primary threat to their territorial integrity and economic sovereignty. Beijing’s aggressive maneuvers in the South China Sea—including the militarization of disputed islands and the use of economic coercion—have exacerbated longstanding regional tensions. As Southeast Asian countries face dual pressures of maintaining economic growth and securing national sovereignty, the security landscape has become increasingly volatile. The increase reported in naval encounters—up 15% in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the previous period—further underscores the precarious nature of maritime security and the risk of unintended escalation.

Complicating this already volatile situation is President Trump 2 0’s assertive policy, which embraces unilateral actions and a confrontation with China. The administration’s recent imposition of trade tariffs, coupled with aggressive military patrols in contested waters, has strained Sino-American relations to levels unseen in recent years. This confrontation is not merely symbolic; it actively reshapes the calculus strategy of regional actors who now find themselves forced to choose between alignment with a traditionally supportive but increasingly unpredictable U.S. and a dominant economic China that uses coercive diplomacy. The uncertainty has spurred many Southeast Asian nations to diversify their security strategies and partnerships beyond the binary of U.S. and Chinese influence.

In response to these multifaceted pressures, Southeast Asian governments have embarked on a course of strategic diversification. Countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia are investing in modernizing their naval capabilities while simultaneously deepening ties with alternative security partners like Japan, India, and even the European Union. A survey among ASEAN defense officials conducted in mid-2025 revealed that nearly 72% support a more diversified security framework that reduces overreliance on any single power. This trend not only reflects a pragmatic reassessment of regional vulnerabilities but also signals an emerging consensus that long-term stability will require flexible multilateral cooperation. In an era marked by asymmetrical power competition, Southeast Asia’s adaptive strategies focus not only on pursuing strategic autonomy but also on hedging risks.

The economic dimension of this security dilemma is equally significant. China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has woven Southeast Asia into a vast network of infrastructural investments and trade agreements, fostering growth while simultaneously engendering dependencies. Recent estimates suggest that BRI-related investments have contributed to a 5% annual growth in infrastructure across the region. However, these economic gains come at a cost. The increased indebtedness and reliance on Chinese capital can compromise the bargaining power of host nations, making them more vulnerable to political and strategic pressures. This economic entanglement directly impacts national security as financial dependencies often translate into diminished strategic autonomy—a dynamic that President TRUMP 2.0’s policies seek in part to counterbalance.

As 2025 progresses, the interplay between President Trump 2.0’s nationalist policies, China’s assertive ambitions, and Southeast Asia’s evolving security strategies reveals a region at a critical crossroads. The challenges are manifold: the risk of military miscalculation amid heightened maritime tensions, the economic vulnerabilities stemming from overreliance on Chinese investments, and the political complexities of navigating a bipolar strategic environment. The data highlight a sobering reality: without concerted efforts to promote multilateral dialogue and establish resilient, diversified security architectures, the potential for conflict remains significant. The task ahead for Southeast Asia is not simply to survive in a contested space but to actively shape a security order that is equitable, balanced, conducive, and sustainable development.

In conclusion, the convergence of President Trump 2.0’s assertive policies, China’s regional posture, and Southeast Asia’s strategic recalibrations in 2025 creates a complex security dilemma that is both challenging and instructive. The emerging data highlight growing military tensions, economic dependencies, and shifting alliance structures that compel regional actors to rethink traditional security paradigms. As Southeast Asian nations navigate this turbulent period, the imperative balance for multilateral approaches becomes ever clearer. Only through a combination of strategic diversification, economic prudence, and robust diplomatic engagement can the region hope to mitigate the risks of superpower rivalry to secure a prosperous, stable future.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own.

References

Kaplan, Robert D. The Return of Geopolitics: Power Struggles in the Indo-Pacific. New York: Random House, 2023.
Mearsheimer, John J. Great Power Politics in the 21st Century: The U.S., China, and Global Stability. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.
Storey, Ian. China’s Rise and Security in Southeast Asia: Strategic Responses and Challenges. London: Routledge, 2023.

eurasiareview.com · by Simon Hutagalung · March 15, 2025

15. ASEAN’s Response To Trump 2.0: An Analysis Of Problems And Challenges

Is President Trump's approach to foreign policy unpredictable? I do not think so. I think he practices unconventional diplomacy that is not bound by the traditional theoretical norms of international relations theory. But that doesn't make him unpredictable. Perhaps though his predictability is that he wants to seem unpredictable.

Excerpt:

Trump’s unpredictable approach to foreign policy adds a layer of complexity, making it imperative for ASEAN to bolster its resilience through diversified partnerships and strengthened internal coordination. If ASEAN fails to shape its regional strategies proactively, it risks being sidelined in an increasingly volatile Indo-Pacific order. The coming years will test the bloc’s ability to navigate one of its most complex diplomatic landscapes to date, demanding a recalibrated and pragmatic approach to ensure its continued relevance and stability.

ASEAN’s Response To Trump 2.0: An Analysis Of Problems And Challenges

eurasiareview.com · by Simon Hutagalung · March 15, 2025

The return of Donald Trump to the White House in 2025 presents a complex geopolitical challenge for the Association of Asian Southeast Nations (ASEAN). Trump’s previous tenure demonstrated a clear departure from multilateralism, a prioritization of bilateral transactions, and an unpredictable engagement with global allies.

ASEAN, a bloc reliant on diplomacy, economic integration, and strategic neutrality, now finds itself at a critical juncture. Trump likely brings resurgence economic uncertainty, security dilemmas and a potential erosion of ASEAN’s diplomatic unity. This essay presents a deeper analysis of the problems ASEAN faces and challenges it must navigate for Trump 2.0.

Trump’s first presidency (2017-2021) reshaped global diplomatic norms, retreating from multilateral institutions and shifting U.S. engagement toward a transactional interest-based approach. Unlike Biden’s administration, which sought to rebuild alliances, Trump 2.0 could see ASEAN further marginalized in favor of individual, deal-driven engagements. The erosion of ASEAN’s collective leverage weakens its ability to negotiate favorable terms with the U.S, ultimately creating internal strategic divisions and dilemmas among its member states. If Trump dismisses ASEAN-centric frameworks such as the ASEAN-U.S. Summit and the East Asia Summit bloc, regional influence may wane, making it vulnerable to external pressures from both Washington and Beijing.

Economic ramifications are among the most pressing concerns. Trump’s initial tenure was marked by an aggressive trade war with China, severely disrupting global supply chains and creating economic ripples throughout Southeast Asia. The potential for renewed economic hostilities in 2025 poses a threat to ASEAN’s economic stability, which is deeply intertwined with both the U.S. and Chinese markets.

While ASEAN sought to mitigate these risks through agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a Trump-led U.S. could impose new trade barriers or renegotiate deals favoring American interests, leaving ASEAN economies susceptible to external economic shocks. Moreover, Trump’s preference for bilateral over multilateral trade deals undermines ASEAN’s negotiating power, potentially isolating smaller economies and exposing them to predatory economic practices.

Security in the Indo-Pacific is another significant challenge. Trump’s previous presidency displayed a wavering commitment to regional security frameworks, which, if repeated, could leave ASEAN member states exposed to China’s increasing assertiveness in the South China Sea. The Biden administration reinforced freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) and reaffirmed support for ASEAN’s territorial claims, but Trump’s return deprioritize might these efforts favor in striking of trade or investment deals with Beijing. If the U.S. scales back its military presence, China could seize the opportunity to escalate its militarization of disputed waters, further pressuring ASEAN claimants such as the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia. The lack of a strong U.S deterrence could force ASEAN states into strategic difficult recalibrations with some potentially yielding to Chinese influence to ensure economic and security guarantees.

Moreover, ASEAN’s ability to maintain autonomy is strategic U.S.; amid tensions, China will be tested severely. Trump’s with the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) comprising the U.S. Japan, India, and Australia were inconsistent during his first term. A second Trump presidency could either revive an aggressive Indo-Pacific posture or result in further disengagement, depending on his administration’s priorities. Both scenarios present challenges: an intensified Indo-Pacific strategy could pressure ASEAN states to choose between aligning with the U.S. and maintaining neutrality, while a disengaged Trump administration could leave ASEAN diplomatically stranded, exposing it to Beijing’s influence. The principle of ASEAN neutrality, long regarded as stabilizing a force in the region, may come under increasing strain as the bloc struggles to navigate shifting geopolitical dynamics.

Institutional limitations within ASEAN also pose challenges in responding to a changing U. S foreign policy landscape. The bloc’s consensus-based decision-making model, while promoting unity, often slows responses to geopolitical crises. Trump’s preference for direct bilateral negotiations could widen divisions within ASEAN, particularly between states aligned more closely with U.S. interests (such as Singapore and the Philippines) and those economically dependent on China (such as Cambodia and Laos). A lack of ASEAN-coordinated response would weaken its influence in Washington, reducing its ability to shape U. S. policies that affect the region.

Political ramifications are also a significant challenge for ASEAN. During Trump’s first term, there was a noticeable reluctance to prioritize democratic norms and human rights, with a greater emphasis on economic and security-based transactions. If this trend persists, ASEAN leaders grappling with internal legitimacy issues—like Myanmar’s junta or Thailand’s military-backed government—may experience reduced scrutiny from Washington. Conversely, democracies like Indonesia, which value strong relations with the U. S based on governance and human rights, could see their ties strained. This disparity may further fragment ASEAN’s internal cohesion as different member states navigate Trump’s foreign policy priorities through diverging strategies.

Despite these hurdles, ASEAN has opportunities to counterbalance the uncertainty of a Trump 2.0 Presidency. Strengthening intra-regional economic cooperation through RCEP and fostering deeper trade ties with the European Union could help Japan and India reduce their overreliance on U.S. markets. ASEAN can strengthen its defense initiatives through the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting-Plus (ADMM-Plus), allowing for a degree of stability that is independent of U.S. military engagement. Engaging China strategically while maintaining ASEAN’s collective stance in territorial disputes will be crucial in ensuring that regional sovereignty is not undermined.

Ultimately, ASEAN’s response to Trump 2.0 must be characterized by adaptability, unity, and strategic foresight. The bloc faces formidable challenges, including economic uncertainty, instability, security, and the erosion of multilateral diplomatic engagement. The primary obstacle remains ASEAN’s cohesion—without a unified strategy, individual states may be forced into difficult concessions that undermine regional stability.

Trump’s unpredictable approach to foreign policy adds a layer of complexity, making it imperative for ASEAN to bolster its resilience through diversified partnerships and strengthened internal coordination. If ASEAN fails to shape its regional strategies proactively, it risks being sidelined in an increasingly volatile Indo-Pacific order. The coming years will test the bloc’s ability to navigate one of its most complex diplomatic landscapes to date, demanding a recalibrated and pragmatic approach to ensure its continued relevance and stability.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own.

References

Heydarian, Richard Javad. The Shifting Sands: Duterte, the Philippines, and ASEAN’s Evolving Relations with the DPRK. Routledge, 2024.
Mahbubani, Kishore. Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir. PublicAffairs, 2024.
Pitakdumrongkit, Kaewkamol, and Shay Wester. Navigating US-ASEAN Economic Relations After the 2024 US Presidential Election. RSIS Publications, 2024.

eurasiareview.com · by Simon Hutagalung · March 15, 2025

16. Hegseth shuts Pentagon 'think tank' analyzing future conflicts

On social media and in some reporting the underlying reason for this action is speculated to be ONA's alleged connection to the "Russia Hoax" of 2016. So I asked AI to determine what are the connections between ONA and the so-called Russia Hoax. Here is the response.

There is no publicly available evidence that the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) played a direct role in the so-called "Russia Hoax," a term often used to describe allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

However, ONA has been linked to certain figures involved in the broader Trump-Russia investigation:

1. Stefan Halper – ONA awarded contracts to Halper, a Cambridge academic and longtime intelligence operative. He reportedly served as an FBI informant and had contact with Trump campaign associates like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Some speculate that his ONA funding may have been used as cover for his intelligence work.

2. Pentagon Inspector General Investigation – In 2019, the Pentagon IG investigated whether ONA misused funds in its payments to Halper. The concern was that ONA contracts may have been a front for intelligence-gathering efforts against Trump associates.

3. James Baker (ONA Director) – Not to be confused with FBI’s James Baker, the ONA’s director at the time was James H. Baker, a former Army officer. There is no clear evidence linking him to the Russia investigation.

While these connections are intriguing, there is no conclusive proof that ONA played a coordinated role in the Russia investigation or the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion claims. The extent of ONA's involvement remains a topic of speculation among some conservative commentators and investigators.

Recent developments indicate that the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) has been disestablished. On March 13, 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum directing the closure of ONA, citing the need to align resources with pressing national security challenges while maintaining accountability and efficiency. All ONA personnel are to be reassigned to mission-critical roles within the Department of Defense, and existing contracts associated with ONA are to be terminated. reddit.com+5breakingdefense.com+5defense.gov+5 foxnews.com+3defense.gov+3freebeacon.com+3

This decision follows years of scrutiny and criticism of ONA's operations. Notably, Senator Chuck Grassley has been a vocal critic, highlighting concerns about ONA's contracting practices and its involvement in activities unrelated to its core mission. Grassley specifically pointed to contracts awarded to Stefan Halper, who was implicated in the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Grassley praised the decision to disband ONA, stating that it would save American taxpayers over $20 million annually. foxnews.com+2grassley.senate.gov+2freebeacon.com+2

The restructuring of ONA underscores the Department of Defense's commitment to focusing on the most pressing national security challenges while ensuring accountability and efficiency in its operations.

Hegseth shuts Pentagon 'think tank' analyzing future conflicts

Office of Net Assessment studied balance of power with China decades down the road

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Trump-administration/Hegseth-shuts-Pentagon-think-tank-analyzing-future-conflicts?utm

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivers recorded remarks from his office at the Pentagon. (Department of Defense)

KEN MORIYASU

March 15, 2025 02:04 JST

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has instructed the closure of a specialized unit often referred to as the Pentagon's "internal think tank," a group that focuses on evaluating the future of American military capabilities relative to potential rivals like China.

Hegseth has directed the "disestablishment" of the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) and ordered the development of a plan to rebuild the office in alignment with the department's strategic priorities, chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement Thursday night.

All ONA personnel will be reassigned to "mission-critical" roles within the department, the statement said.

The Pentagon remains committed to conducting "rigorous, forward-looking strategic assessments that directly inform defense planning and decision-making," Parnell said.

The ONA has had only two directors since its establishment in 1973. For four decades, the office was led by legendary strategist Andrew Marshall, who served eight presidents from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. Since 2015, the office has been led by James Baker, a retired Air Force colonel who holds four graduate degrees.

Marshall was known for his analysis of military capability advancements known as a revolution in military affairs (RMA). One such RMA he studied was precision strike, which he predicted would change the conduct of war in the following decades.

Marshall was credited for accurately assessing the vulnerability of the Soviet Union. At a time when the Central Intelligence Agency overrated Soviet economic power, Marshall had come to the conclusion, through observing economic statistics, that the adversary was on its ropes.

"ONA was one of the first organizations in the Department of Defense to recognize the looming military challenge from China, at a time when most of the U.S. military's attention was focused on counterterrorism," Tom Shugart, a retired naval officer who served as military adviser to the ONA in 2019-20, told Nikkei Asia. "In the years since, its efforts have been crucial in determining the scale and scope of the China challenge, as well as how best to grapple with it."

Rush Doshi, a former deputy senior director for China and Taiwan on the National Security Council during the Biden administration, called Hegseth's move an enormous mistake.

"When I was at the NSC, ONA produced some of the best analysis anywhere in the [U.S. government] and had enormous and even historic policy impact," he wrote on X. "No other institution presently can do what it did."

China was "obsessed" with it, he wrote, noting that the People's Liberation Army studied Marshall's RMA theories exhaustively.

Japanese diplomats in Washington have visited the Office of Net Assessment regularly since the early 2000s, discussing the future rise of China and how Japan should respond.

Kunihiko Miyake, a former Japanese diplomat and research director at The Canon Institute for Global Studies in Tokyo, told Nikkei Asia that March 13 will be remembered as the "funeral day" for the U.S. long-term strategic analysis community.

"While Andy Marshall's disciples may continue their work in consultancies, the opportunity for them to directly impact U.S. military strategy will be significantly reduced." he said. "Ten years, 20 years down the road, U.S. strategies will have much less long-term thinking. If the ONA is not reinstalled, I fear the U.S. will shift from being a superpower to a mediocre power."

Meanwhile, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, released a statement welcoming the move, saying he was "thrilled" that President Donald Trump is "abolishing this wasteful and ineffective office."

On Feb. 7, Grassley had sent a letter to Hegseth asking for the disclosure of all contracts ONA had issued over the past 10 years, the title of each funded project, the recipient of taxpayer money and the total cost of each contract to the taxpayer.

One contract Grassley took issue with was a paper titled, "A Technical Report on the Nature of Movement Patterning, the Brain and Decision-Making," which focused on Russian leader Vladimir Putin's neurological development and potential Asperger's syndrome.

"These have nothing to do with ONA's core mission, which is to produce a net assessment that measures our military capabilities against our foreign adversaries," Grassley said.

But many in the strategic community defend ONA for conducting out-of-the-box thinking.

One topic the office has continued to study is whether China under President Xi Jinping is more likely or less likely to engage in kinetic war -- a euphemism for combat, as opposed to cyber warfare or information warfare. Though Xi is widely considered more "hawkish" than his predecessor, Hu Jintao, he has taken no kinetic military action during his 12 years in office.

While China has narrowed the gap with the U.S. in terms of gross domestic product and defense spending in past years, it is highly questionable that Beijing can sustain its current 7% growth in defense spending for decades to come, analysts say.

Drawing on input from outside analysts, ONA analyzes China's national power five years, 10 years and 20 years down the road and offers reports to the defense secretary.

17. Nervous about Trump, international tourists scrap their U.S. travel plans

As my mentor says, actions have consequences.

And there are always 2d and 3d order effects.

See the employment chart at the link.

Nervous about Trump, international tourists scrap their U.S. travel plans

The Trump administration’s hard stance on tariffs and other international policies has some travelers rethinking where they vacation.

March 16, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDTToday at 6:00 a.m. EDT

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/16/international-tourism-travel-trump-canada/

An Air Canada plane passes the American Airlines terminal at LaGuardia Airport in New York last week. (Sarah Yenesel/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

By Abha Bhattarai

International travelers concerned about President Donald Trump’s trade policies and bellicose rhetoric have been canceling trips to the United States, depriving the U.S. tourism industry of billions of dollars at a time when the economy has started to appear wobbly.

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Canadians are skipping trips to Disney World and music festivals. Europeans are eschewing U.S. national parks, and Chinese travelers are vacationing in Australia instead.

International travel to the United States is expected to slide by 5 percent this year, contributing to a $64 billion shortfall for the travel industry, according to Tourism Economics. The research firm had originally forecast a 9 percent increase in foreign travel, but revised its estimate late last month to reflect “polarizing Trump Administration policies and rhetoric.”

“There’s been a dramatic shift in our outlook,” said Adam Sacks, president of Tourism Economics. “You’re looking at a much weaker economic engine than what otherwise would’ve been, not just because of tariffs, but the rhetoric and condescending tone around it.”

The number of overseas visitors to the United States fell 2.4 percent in February from a year earlier, government data shows, with the biggest drops in travelers from Africa (down 9 percent), Asia (7 percent) and Central America (6 percent). Meanwhile, travel from China — a frequent target of the president’s ire — is down 11 percent.

Penelope Poole, who lives in the Philippines, is scrapping plans for a family cruise in Florida with her 90-year-old mother. Instead, she and nearly 30 relatives are heading to a lakeside resort in Canada.

“My siblings and I decided that given the early volatility and hostility of this administration, we couldn’t take a chance,” the 66-year-old said, adding that some relatives would be traveling from Indonesia and Mexico. “We were increasingly concerned about personal safety.”

This moment isn’t without precedent. Sacks notes that international tourism slowed sharply during the first Trump presidency, amounting to roughly $20 billion in unrealized revenue, even before covid-related disruptions. Back then, it was tourists from Mexico, China and the Middle East who were pulling back, deterred by the administration’s travel bans, tariffs and tough talk on immigration.

This time, Canada — the top source of international travel to the United States — is poised to lead the way. Trump has for weeks said he wants to make the country a “51st state.” In response, Canada’s former prime minister, Justin Trudeau, urged Canadians not to vacation in the United States.

They appear to have listened: The number of Canadians driving back from visits to the United States fell by 23 percent in February, while air travel from the United States was down 13 percent compared with a year earlier, according to government figures from Statistics Canada.

Altogether, Tourism Economics expects a 15 percent decline in travel from Canada this year, translating to $3.3 billion in lost spending.

Bertha Lopez, who is from Mexico and lives near Toronto, used to cross the U.S. border every few weeks to buy staples like butter and cheese. This year, she’s stopped all of that — and vows not to set foot in the United States for at least a few years. She recently canceled a trip to Arizona to visit a longtime friend whose husband is ill; instead, she’s buying her friend a ticket to visit her in Canada this summer.

“All of this talk of making Canada the 51st state has been upsetting. It’s just incredibly offensive,” the 54-year-old said. “So I’m doing what I can: No more Tide. No more Coca-Cola. No more Disney. And barring a funeral or someone in the hospital, I am not going to the United States.”

Canada’s retreat comes at a tough time for the U.S. tourism industry, which is facing pressures of its own at home. U.S. airlines last week warned that demand is slowing, with Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines all revising down their forecasts for the first three months of the year. Government and business travel are waning, and hotel and travel company executives say Americans — especially those with lower incomes — are cutting back on vacations because of economic uncertainty.

“People are cautious and they’re pulling back a little bit on travel,” Delta CEO Edward Herman Bastian said in a presentation on Tuesday. Travelers, he said, are “kind of waiting to see what’s going to transpire, whether it’s trade and tariff challenges or macroeconomic policy changes.”

Notably, the hospitality and leisure industry has posted two months of job losses at a time when the broader labor market is growing.

At the Vacationeer, a Disney-focused travel agency in Florida that works almost exclusively with domestic travelers, bookings are up more than 5 percent from a year ago. But owner Jonathan de Araujo is nervous about whether people will stick to their plans — many plunk down $200 deposits on their credit cards, thinking they’ll make a final decision down the line. And with the stock market’s recent slide and increased recession worries, he says he won’t be surprised if a “big cancellation wave” is around the corner.

“When there’s trouble in the economy, the first thing people cut is their travel budget,” he said. “They wait until it’s time to pay in full, and they say, ‘Actually I can’t afford this.’ That’s what I’m worried about.”

Economic red flags have been piling up in recent weeks. New tariffs are reigniting concerns about price increases, and policy uncertainties from Trump and Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service have made it tougher for businesses and households to plan for the future. Americans soured on the economy for the third straight month in March, with consumer sentiment declining to the lowest level in more than two years. And although CEOs are feeling better about their prospects than they have in years, small businesses are starting to report worries about economic uncertainty. Financial markets have been jittery, too, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average posting its worst week in two years.

Consumer spending, which makes up about 70 percent of the U.S. economy, has been driving much of the country’s recent growth, but some of the country’s largest retailers, including Walmart and Target, have recently said they expect Americans to pull back in the coming months.

“The fog is just too thick — we can handle bad news, but consumers can’t handle uncertainty, and that’s what we have,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, who says there’s a 35 percent chance of a recession this year, up from 15 percent a couple of weeks ago. “Things have gotten very serious, very quickly.”

That’s also the case overseas, as Europeans and others face pointed attacks from the White House. Trump last week threatened a 200 percent tariff on European wine and alcohol after calling the European Union “one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the World.”

Travel from Western Europe, which made up more than one-third of overseas travel last year, could be hard-hit by those comments. Tariffs on Europe and the Trump administration’s new friendliness toward Russia could also hurt tourism from Europe, researchers at Tourism Economics wrote in a recent report.

Jens Muellers and his father were preparing to travel to Seattle from Germany this summer for a road trip through Olympic, Mount Rainier and Glacier national parks. But after the administration’s attacks on Europeans and its efforts to downsize the national parks system, Muellers said they changed their plans. They are heading to Canada.

“It’s a real shame and breaking my heart to see what is happening with the national parks and [its] employees right now,” the 31-year-old said, adding that it would have been his fifth trip to the United States. “We won’t come back to the U.S. until things change significantly.”

What readers are saying

The comments express a strong sentiment that the decline in international tourism to the U.S. is largely attributed to dissatisfaction with President Trump's administration and its policies. Many commenters indicate that Trump's actions and rhetoric have damaged America's... Show more

This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.

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By Abha Bhattarai

Abha Bhattarai is the economics correspondent for The Washington Post. She previously covered retail for the publication.follow on X@abhabhattarai

18. The best way to curb the cruelty of the world’s worst regimes

Some very useful advice.

This is why we need a human rights upfront approach.

Interesting that there is no mention of north Korea here.

If you would like to get your facts straight about north Korean human rights I recommend you visit the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. https://www.hrnk.org/ It painstakingly digs up the truth about north Korean human rights abuses. Its research is cited extensively by the US Department of State and the United Nations.

Excerpts:

The key to shaming powerful wrongdoers, Mr Roth argues, is to avoid name-calling and “stigmatise with facts”. Researchers at HRW are told “that their top priority is accuracy”, and that it is better to come home empty-handed than to publish inaccurate information. They dig up the truth painstakingly, by interviewing victims and combing through tedious official documents. Even if their reporting achieves nothing in the short run, it can furnish evidence for future prosecutions.

Despots fear exposure. Otherwise they would not devote such vast resources to hiding their abuses, sometimes ineptly. When China blanked out its Uyghur prison camps on online maps, it made it easier for researchers to find them–by looking for unexplained blank spots.

An activist must know which levers to pull. If a head of government is genuinely unaware of abuses, simply proving them may be enough, especially in a democracy. In 2011 Mr Roth sat down with Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, to discuss a report on “disappearances” and summary executions meted out by the Mexican army in its “war on drugs”. Previously Mr Calderón had insisted that his troops were innocent. But after Mr Roth went through the report with him paragraph by paragraph, the president admitted he was wrong and adopted some of Mr Roth’s suggested remedies, such as no longer interrogating suspects on military bases.

First get your facts straight, argues Kenneth Roth, a top human-rights campaigner

https://www.economist.com/culture/2025/03/13/the-best-way-to-curb-the-cruelty-of-the-worlds-worst-regimes

Photograph: Getty Images

Mar 13th 2025

Listen to this story

Righting Wrongs. By Kenneth Roth. Knopf; 448 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £30

doctor in Syria under Bashar al-Assad was forced to sedate 63 prisoners. Not to ease the pain caused by shackling, but to ensure they did not complain about it when a UN delegation visited the hellish prison where they were being held. At first glance, the moral of this story is obvious: despots spit on human rights. But Kenneth Roth, a former head of Human Rights Watch (HRW), sees another, more hopeful lesson. Even the vilest rulers care about their reputations, and so try to hide at least some of their abuses. This gives human-rights campaigners an opening: by exposing horror, they can sometimes shame governments into perpetrating less of it.

This task is not straightforward. Those who rule by fear are hard to shame. Exposing their cruelty may actually bolster their power for a while, by reminding their subjects of the dangers of disobedience. However, ruling by fear alone “is risky, because a disgruntled public is always on the lookout for a way to oust the tyrant”. (As Mr Assad, pictured, discovered in December, when his overthrow sparked jubilation in Damascus’s streets.) So most dictators want to appear to serve the public good.

Having run one of the world’s most effective human-rights groups for three decades, Mr Roth has sparred with more nasty regimes than most people could name. In “Righting Wrongs” he distils his hard-earned insights. With warlords carving up Sudan, Russia kidnapping Ukrainian children and America’s president musing about ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the book could hardly be more timely.

The key to shaming powerful wrongdoers, Mr Roth argues, is to avoid name-calling and “stigmatise with facts”. Researchers at HRW are told “that their top priority is accuracy”, and that it is better to come home empty-handed than to publish inaccurate information. They dig up the truth painstakingly, by interviewing victims and combing through tedious official documents. Even if their reporting achieves nothing in the short run, it can furnish evidence for future prosecutions.

Despots fear exposure. Otherwise they would not devote such vast resources to hiding their abuses, sometimes ineptly. When China blanked out its Uyghur prison camps on online maps, it made it easier for researchers to find them–by looking for unexplained blank spots.

An activist must know which levers to pull. If a head of government is genuinely unaware of abuses, simply proving them may be enough, especially in a democracy. In 2011 Mr Roth sat down with Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, to discuss a report on “disappearances” and summary executions meted out by the Mexican army in its “war on drugs”. Previously Mr Calderón had insisted that his troops were innocent. But after Mr Roth went through the report with him paragraph by paragraph, the president admitted he was wrong and adopted some of Mr Roth’s suggested remedies, such as no longer interrogating suspects on military bases.

To shame nastier regimes, more skill is required. Rulers who feel no guilt about tearing out dissidents’ thumbnails may simultaneously crave international respectability. After America overthrew Saddam Hussein, another Arab dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, was eager to avoid the same fate. As well as publicly giving up a nuclear-weapons programme, his regime invited Mr Roth to visit Libya.

Photograph: Getty Images

Mr Roth seized the chance and shared a list of 131 political prisoners, demanding their release. Mid-level officials exploded with rage and “seemed to think they could bludgeon us into not publishing [the findings] at all”, Mr Roth recalls. He let them hyperventilate for a while, and then gave them a choice. HRW was going to hold a press conference in Egypt a few days later. When journalists asked about their meetings in Tripoli, they could say: “All they did was yell at us.” Or: “The conversations were productive, and they promised various reforms.” Which would it be? The next day the officials apologised, and soon all 131 political prisoners were freed.

Defending human rights is getting harder. Russia has gone completely rogue. The two most powerful democracies, India and the United States, have leaders who care little for human rights. And China under Xi Jinping has become what Mr Roth calls the greatest “threat to the global human-rights system”, constantly seeking to undermine it in international forums.

Meanwhile, some Western progressives have lost their common sense. Some embrace the ridiculous notion that for Westerners to criticise oppression in the global south is a form of imperialism. Others talk self-righteous guff. Mr Roth recalls an adviser urging HRW to campaign against “structural racism, patriarchy and classism embedded in the design of Western public-health systems”. Such rhetoric is likely to repel “the moveable middle”—the people campaigners need to win over. Far better to focus on things that more or less everyone agrees are wrong, such as torture.

The gripes of Roth

As the world polarises, human-rights campaigners must be seen to be impartial. This is hard. Nasty regimes often accuse them of being agents of foreign powers. Other abusive regimes try to change the subject: what about America’s crimes? Mr Roth’s response is to arrive with a stack of HRW reports on America and “place them with a good thump” on the whataboutery-spouting official’s desk.

After he retired from HRW in 2022, Mr Roth was cancelled. An invitation to take up a human-rights fellowship at Harvard was vetoed, allegedly because donors objected to his “anti-Israel” bias. The objection rang hollow: Mr Roth is Jewish, his family fled from the Nazis and he is a stern critic of brutality everywhere. After an outcry, Harvard backed down.

The world needs more watchdogs like Mr Roth: principled yet worldly, insanely hard-working and resolutely non-tribal. It probably helps that he never took an academic course on human rights. Rather than nitpicking about the minutiae of international law, he tells human stories, like that of the Syrian anaesthetist, that shock the listener into fury. It is stories, more than theories, that help humans comprehend tyranny. And as the mighty fill the world’s small screens with falsehoods, someone needs to tell true tales. ■

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This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “How to shame a dictator”

19. Europe thinks the unthinkable on a nuclear bomb

Excerpts:

In the worst-case (which few officials think is likely), if America were to cut off support, Britain could hang on to the missiles in its possession, probably for some years. But its future warhead and submarine plans would no longer be viable. One option for Britain would be to revive the idea of co-operation with France. In the 1970s France proposed selling submarine-launched missiles to Britain and, in the 1980s, suggested co-developing a nuclear-capable cruise missile.

That would be a dramatic step. Mr Macron’s “strategic debate” is at an early stage. For now, says Héloïse Fayet of the IFRI think-tank in Paris, “there are no talks about putting French nuclear weapons outside French territory”, let alone diluting French authority to use them. “The idea is more to advance on the political side,” says Ms Fayet, “trying to find, at a very high level, shared vital interests between, for example, France and Sweden, or France and Germany”, as well as expanding allied involvement in French nuclear exercises. “There are plenty of ideas, but we are lacking French political guidance.” That might disappoint the likes of Mr Tusk, who see a crisis brewing. Even so, Mr Trump has sparked Europe’s most profound nuclear debate since the 1950s.

Europe thinks the unthinkable on a nuclear bomb

Poland wants co-operation with France on a nuclear deterrent. That could take many forms

https://www.economist.com/international/2025/03/12/europe-thinks-the-unthinkable-on-a-nuclear-bomb

Photograph: Getty Images

Mar 12th 2025

Listen to this story

“W

E WOULD BE safer if we had our own nuclear arsenal,” Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, told his country’s parliament on March 7th. The reason he gave was the “profound change of American geopolitics”, a euphemism for Donald Trump’s diplomatic arson, which also required Poland to expand its conventional armed forces.

Mr Tusk was not proposing a Polish nuclear bomb—at least not immediately: “The road to that would be very long and there would have to be a consensus.” Instead, he was responding to a call by Friedrich Merz, Germany’s incoming chancellor, for talks with Britain and France on “supplementing the American nuclear shield”. On March 5th Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, announced a “strategic debate on using our deterrence to protect our allies on the European continent”.

That debate will need to confront two problems: credibility and capability. For nearly 80 years America has held a nuclear umbrella over Europe. Yet extended deterrence is a strange and unnatural thing. One country must promise to use its nuclear forces—and thereby risk nuclear annihilation—on behalf of another. The difficulty of making that promise credible is what drove America to build a huge arsenal and to scatter it across the world. Britain’s nuclear forces, though modest, are also “assigned” to the defence of NATO. Though only the prime minister can authorise their use, the implicit promise is that they would be used to defend allies such as Finland, Romania or Turkey.

France has a more complicated relationship to extended deterrence. It pursued an independent nuclear deterrent in the 1950s precisely because it believed, to a greater extent than Britain, that America’s umbrella was not dependable. France did not join and still does not take part in the Nuclear Planning Group (NPG), a NATO forum in which 31 allies discuss nuclear policy. “The idea is really to keep options open for the president,” explains Emmanuelle Maitre of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. “There is a kind of reluctance to commit…to anything that could limit [his] freedom of action.”

Yet France’s leaders have also said its vital interests have a “European dimension”. In 1995 Britain and France agreed that “the vital interests of one could not be threatened without the vital interests of the other equally being at risk”—an implicit expansion of the horizon of French deterrence. The same language was used in the Franco-German Aachen treaty 24 years later. Even Jordan Bardella, the leader of the far-right National Rally party, recently acknowledged that French nuclear weapons “protect, by definition, certain neighbours and certain European partners”.

The question is what this means in practice. In 2022 Mr Macron said he would “evidently” not respond in kind if Russia used nuclear weapons in Ukraine. French vital interests were “clearly defined”, he claimed, confusingly, and “these would not be at stake if there was a nuclear ballistic attack in Ukraine”—or, he added, unwisely, “in the region”. That phrase seemed to exclude eastern European EU and NATO allies from protection. Since then Mr Macron has taken a hawkish turn, successfully rebuilding ties to eastern European states. But even France’s closest allies have private doubts as to whether successive presidents in the future will be willing to risk nuclear war to support them.

European allies are now asking how far Mr Macron might be prepared to go. “I would like to know, first of all, in detail what it means in terms of power to use these weapons,” Mr Tusk told journalists, seeming to hint at a model in which Poland would be vested with some launch authority. “If we were to decide on this, it would be worth making sure it is in our hands and we make the ultimate decisions.”

La bombe, c’est la mienne

That carries echoes of the proposed Multilateral Force, a 1950s concept for a jointly owned and operated pan-European nuclear force. The idea was that 25 ships would each carry eight Polaris missiles, with the crew of each one drawn from at least three NATO countries. Later, in the 1960s, Britain proposed an Atlantic Nuclear Force that would put British and American nuclear forces under international command, with national vetoes.

Those plans largely fizzled and are unlikely to find favour today. Mr Macron appears to have ruled out any movement towards joint launch authority. France’s nuclear deterrent is “sovereign and French from start to finish”, he insisted. The decision to use nuclear weapons “has always been, and will always be, up to the president and commander-in-chief of France”. There are legal obstacles, too. If Britain or France were to transfer custody and control of their own nuclear weapons, or if non-nuclear states were to build new ones, they would have to leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—or violate it.

There are other options, though. Peter Watkins, a former British defence official who oversaw nuclear policy, proposes that France could join NATO’s NPG as an observer rather than participant. A punchier option would be for France to publicly clarify the European dimension of its interests. Bruno Tertrais, a French nuclear expert, has suggested that France could simply make it clear that Article 42.7 of the Lisbon treaty, the EU’s mutual-defence clause, “could be exercised by any means, thus including nuclear weapons”.

Map: The Economist

Another course would be to borrow from America’s approach to extended deterrence. The United States has long stationed 180 or so B61 tactical nuclear bombs in Europe. They remain under American control. But the air forces of Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey practise carrying and delivering them using dual-capable aircraft. Other air forces contribute conventionally armed aircraft to support those missions, performing tasks such as jamming enemy radars and refuelling (see map).

Britain would find it tricky to mimic those nuclear-sharing arrangements. Since the 1990s all its nukes have been on submarines whose whereabouts remain secret. Subs can be used for signalling—in early 2022, soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, France took the unusual step of putting three of its four nuclear-armed boats to sea—but you cannot sail one up the Rhine or Vistula to reassure allies.

Planes are a different matter. France possesses air-launched nuclear weapons to send a “final warning” to an enemy, before it fires submarine-launched missiles at, presumably, Russian cities. In its Poker exercise, the French air force practises long-range nuclear bombing raids four times a year. In 2020, after the shock of Mr Trump’s first term, Mr Macron invited allies to “associate” with French nuclear drills. Voilà, in 2022 an Italian tanker refuelled French aircraft in one such exercise. In recent days, other allies have offered to take part, says a person familiar with those talks.

The question is how much further this might go. French nuclear-capable aircraft increasingly take part in conventional exercises abroad, including with Lithuania and Germany last year. In 2018 Mr Tertrais suggested that France could eventually rotate unarmed nuclear-capable Rafale fighter bombers to eastern European air bases “to demonstrate its solidarity”. That would not be just a political signal. It would also extend the range at which France could strike Russia and safely return its aircraft. In more extreme scenarios, Mr Tertrais writes, France could base tens of air-launched missiles in Germany, allow these to be carried by allied jets or even convene “a European nuclear maritime task-force”.

The problem with all this is scale. America’s arsenal is large enough, notes Mr Watkins, “that it is plausible that it could employ some weapons in response to [an] attack on an ally while still having plenty in reserve…to deter an attack on the US homeland.” In Britain’s case, he adds, using a single missile at lower levels of escalation—say, in response to Russia’s use of a tactical nuclear weapon—“could compromise the location of the sole deployed submarine”. These problems are hardly insurmountable. Britain raised its cap on warheads in 2021 and could do so again. Moreover, if it built five rather than four Dreadnought-class submarines, the first of which is expected in the early 2030s, it could put two boats out to sea at once.

Assuming, that is, it could build more. The very threat which necessitates these schemes—Mr Trump’s hostile attitude towards allies—might also complicate the response. Britain depends intimately on America for the design, manufacture and maintenance of nuclear weapons. The Trident missiles that carry them are leased and held in America. Their British warheads must fit inside an American “aeroshell”. And the tubes which hold the missiles in the Dreadnought class are the same as those in America’s Columbia-class subs.

A new entente cordiale

In the worst-case (which few officials think is likely), if America were to cut off support, Britain could hang on to the missiles in its possession, probably for some years. But its future warhead and submarine plans would no longer be viable. One option for Britain would be to revive the idea of co-operation with France. In the 1970s France proposed selling submarine-launched missiles to Britain and, in the 1980s, suggested co-developing a nuclear-capable cruise missile.

That would be a dramatic step. Mr Macron’s “strategic debate” is at an early stage. For now, says Héloïse Fayet of the IFRI think-tank in Paris, “there are no talks about putting French nuclear weapons outside French territory”, let alone diluting French authority to use them. “The idea is more to advance on the political side,” says Ms Fayet, “trying to find, at a very high level, shared vital interests between, for example, France and Sweden, or France and Germany”, as well as expanding allied involvement in French nuclear exercises. “There are plenty of ideas, but we are lacking French political guidance.” That might disappoint the likes of Mr Tusk, who see a crisis brewing. Even so, Mr Trump has sparked Europe’s most profound nuclear debate since the 1950s. ■

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20. America’s bullied allies need to toughen up

So tough love has worked. Allies are spending more on defense. Allies now understand how the President thinks and works. They are ready to cooperate with him. He could be pushing on an open door with most allies. Why must the ally bashing continue?

Leaders | Trump’s foreign policy

America’s bullied allies need to toughen up

To avoid being crushed, they need a better plan than flattery and concessions

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/03/13/americas-bullied-allies-need-to-toughen-up

Mar 13th 2025

Listen to this story

or decades America has stood by its friends and deterred its enemies. That steadfastness is being thrown upside down, as Donald Trump strong-arms allies and seeks deals with adversaries. After freezing all aid to Ukraine on March 3rd, his administration restored it when Ukraine agreed in principle to a 30-day truce. It is unclear how hard the White House will press Vladimir Putin to accept this. On the same day, Mr Trump briefly slammed even more tariffs on Canada. Its new prime minister, Mark Carney, warned that a predatory America wants “our water, our land, our country”. And don’t forget Asia. The president has just raised doubts about the value to America of the US-Japan defence treaty, which Eisenhower signed in 1960. Around the world, allies fear that America First means they come second, third or even last.

Mr Trump and his supporters believe his frenetic actions enhance American power, breaking deadlocks and shaking up deadbeat or parasitic allies. The proposed ceasefire in Ukraine is evidence that he can change countries’ behaviour. But at what cost? His trade war is panicking financial markets. The 40-odd countries that have put their security in America’s hands since 1945 are suffering a crisis of confidence. They dread Team Trump’s inconsistency and short-termism: a ceasefire in Gaza that is rather like the Ukrainian one may soon collapse. At home, Mr Trump faces checks and balances. Abroad, much less so. Allies are asking whether they are certain that Mr Trump or a President J.D. Vance would fight alongside them if the worst happens. Unfortunately, the answer is: not certain enough.

This loss of faith also reflects a dawning realisation that coercing allies is an inevitable consequence of the MAGA value-free agenda. Allies’ interdependence means that America has more leverage over them than over foes such as Russia or China. For decades Canada, Europe and parts of Asia have trusted America’s “superpower stack”—defence treaties, trade deals, nuclear weapons, the dollar banking system—because it is mutually beneficial. Tragically Mr Trump sees it as a liability.

The administration’s economic nationalism and the repudiation of its global security role may go further. Foreign firms are being bullied to shift capital to America. Some White House advisers want reciprocal tariffs, a radical form of protectionism. On Wall Street there is talk of schemes to depress the dollar. Elon Musk says America should quit NATO; although Mr Trump has not gone that far, he has not contradicted him. Europeans are exploring new, once-unthinkable risks: does America have kill switches for F-35 fighter jets? Might it refuse to maintain Britain’s nuclear deterrent?

Asian allies worry that Mr Trump will turn on them next. Australia, Japan, South Korea and others hope his hostility to China runs deep enough that he will not abandon them. But his grievances over trade and defence treaties do not have geographic limits. Given his determination to avoid world war three with Russia over Ukraine, negotiations with China or North Korea could see him offering concessions that weaken allies and make Taiwan more vulnerable.

If you admire America and its transatlantic and Pacific alliances, this shift is so extreme and unfamiliar that it is tempting to deny it is happening and to assume that Mr Trump must backtrack. However, when your people’s safety is at stake, denial is not a plan. America’s allies have a GDP of $37trn, but they lack hard power. Sucking up in the Oval Office and offering to Buy American gets them only so far. Making concessions can encourage more demands, as Panama has found. If allies are unable to defend themselves, some will seek an accommodation with China or Russia.

America’s allies should try to avoid that dismal outcome, starting today. One idea is to deter America from mutual harm. That means identifying unconventional retaliatory measures while calibrating their use to avoid a 1930s-style downward spiral. One option is to slow co-operation on extraterritorial sanctions and export controls. Allies could use their “choke-points” in trade, which we reckon account for 27% of America’s imports, including nuclear fuels, metals and pharmaceuticals. Hidden in the semiconductor-production chain are firms such as Tokyo Electron and ASML in Europe, which are crucial suppliers to America’s tech giants. Smart retaliation against foolish tariffs worked for Europe in the first Trump term. Allies should also identify military pressure-points, such as radars and bases, though they should stop short of exploiting them except in extreme circumstances.

As an insurance policy allies will have to build up their own economic and military infrastructure in parallel to America’s superpower stack. Creating this option will take years. Europe is highly likely to issue more joint debt to finance extra defence spending, and it may keep its own sanctions on Russia even if Mr Trump lifts America’s. All this could split American and European capital markets and ultimately boost the euro’s role as an international currency. In defence, Europe is scrambling to fill gaps in its forces. It is also discussing a continental nuclear deterrent involving France and perhaps Britain. In Asia, South Korea and perhaps Japan may move closer to the nuclear threshold, in order to deter China and North Korea.

The new night watchmen

Last, America’s allies should seek strength in numbers. Europe needs a plan to take over the leadership of NATO, join the CPTPP, an Asian trade deal, and co-operate with Japan and South Korea more closely on military and civilian technology. That would create scale and help manage rivalries. It would also preserve an alternative liberal order, albeit vastly inferior to the original. Allies should be ready to welcome back America under a new president in 2029, though the world will not be the same. Nuclear proliferation may have been unleashed, China will have grown stronger and America’s power and credibility will have been gravely damaged. For its allies, there is no point whingeing: they need to toughen up and get to work.■

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21. Niall Ferguson: A User’s Guide to Wrecking the Global Financial System

Excerpts:

Keynes was right that the return to the gold standard would be painful for 1920s Britain. The economic consequences of Mr. Churchill were nasty. But it is at least arguable that, by restoring confidence in what was then the world’s reserve currency, Britain found it easier to manage both the huge war debt it had accumulated and to cope with the Depression when it struck.

The economic consequences of Mr. Trump will surely be calamitous if he insists on returning average tariff rates to 1930s levels—especially if he tries to combine those with a weaker dollar, along the lines of the putative Mar-a-Lago Accord.

Yet deregulation was one of the keys to the success of the first Trump term. More of it is coming—and it cannot come too soon after the red-tape expansion of the Biden years. Fiscal reform is the other crucial piece, although it remains to be seen just how much Elon Musk’s DOGE can do to curb the growth of federal spending.

Keynes’s heirs today—led by Larry Summers—have already written off Trump 2.0. But, like Keynes in 1925, I’ll give Trump the benefit of two years.

Niall Ferguson: A User’s Guide to Wrecking the Global Financial System

Ordinary Americans elected Trump because they expected him to make things better. Did they realize they were getting a reactionary economic project?

By Niall Ferguson

03.16.25 — U.S. Politics

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-donald-trump-wreck-global-financial-system?utm

Illustration by The Free Press.

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It is exactly a century since John Maynard Keynes published “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill,” a devastating takedown of the policies of the Conservative government in which Winston Churchill served as Chancellor of the Exchequer—the British equivalent of Treasury Secretary.

Keynes predicted—correctly—that the government’s decision to return the pound to the gold standard would lead to “unemployment and industrial disputes,” “great depression in the export industries,” and “credit restriction.”

“It will not be safe,” he ironically advised Churchill, “politically to admit that you are intensifying unemployment deliberately in order to reduce wages. Thus you will have to ascribe what is happening to every conceivable cause except the true one. … About two years may elapse before it will be safe for you to utter in public one single word of truth.”

The economic objectives of Mr. Trump are somewhat different from the deflationary goals of Churchill and his colleagues, who sought to restore the British economy, by an immense feat of collective belt-tightening, to where it had been on the eve of World War I. But the project of making America great again by means of protectionist tariffs risks having economic consequences painfully similar to those experienced by Britons a hundred years ago.

The economic consequences of policy really matter. I have just read a lively debate between the national conservative N.S. Lyons and classical liberal Noah Smith about whether or not Trump represents the magnificent end of the “long twentieth century,” a “rejection of the neurotic, confrontation-avoidant post-war consensus,” and the restoration of “the strong gods.” Smith’s critique of what he calls Trump’s “Metternich-Lindbergh Theory”—the idea that the United States should cynically extricate itself from most foreign commitments and focus on its own hemisphere—struck me as compelling.

Then I looked at the stock market and emitted a bitter laugh.

Ordinary Americans did not vote for either strong gods or Metternich-Lindbergh Theory. They elected Trump to punish the Democrats for 9 percent inflation at the mid-2022 peak and net migration of 8 million in four years, most of it illegal. They may not fully believe him when the president promises “the golden age of America,” as he did in his State of the Union address on March 4. But they do expect things to get better. Or they did until last week.

What few Trump voters appreciated last year was that they were voting not just for lower inflation and higher border security but for a radical project to turn back the economic clock that is in many ways more ambitious than Churchill’s in 1925. The British Conservatives just wanted to go back 11 years. The Trump administration aims to reverse at least four decades of American economic history.

In an important speech to the Economic Club of New York on March 6, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the international economy as “a web of relationships—military, economic, political. . . . This is how President Trump sees the world, not as a zero-sum game, but as interlinkages that can be reordered to advance the interest of the American people.”

What is wrong with today’s international system, then? According to Bessent, “The United States finds itself subsidizing the rest of the world’s under-spending in defense. … [It] also provides reserve assets, serves as a consumer of first and last resort, and absorbs excess supply in the face of insufficient demand in other country’s domestic models. This system is not sustainable.”

Two questions follow: How to change this? And: How much will that change cost? Bessent offered a clue: “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.”

A more explicit answer to my two questions was provided last year by Stephen Miran, Trump’s choice to head the Council of Economic Advisers. He wrote it in a Hudson Bay Capital paper with the catchy title, “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System.”

Miran’s recommendation for addressing the imbalances identified by Bessent was to impose “sweeping tariffs and . . . shift away from strong dollar policy.” These measures, he argued, would cause only “transitory” inflation because, as in the first Trump term, higher tariffs would mostly be offset by weaker foreign currencies. Yes, this might cause some financial market volatility, but not if the tariffs were “gradually implement[ed] . . . at a pace not too different from 2018-2019.” Finally, the United States would force its creditors (holders of large reserves of U.S. dollars) to accept a weaker dollar by “impos[ing] a user fee on foreign official holders of Treasury securities, for instance withholding a portion of interest payments on those holdings . . . say 1% of interest remittances.”

It is on the basis of this paper that some commentators have dreamed up the notion of a “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” by analogy with the Plaza Accord of 1985 or the Smithsonian Accord of 1971, both of which were agreements between the major industrial economies to weaken the dollar, mainly by strong-arming the Germans and Japanese.

Two things should immediately be obvious. First, Miran’s plan is not what is happening: There has been nothing gradual about Trump’s tariff hikes, and the dollar is weakening without the need for any quasi-default on the U.S. Treasury’s commitments to foreign creditors. Second, it is very good that it is not happening, because Miran’s paper is in reality “A User’s Guide to Wrecking the Global Financial System.”

In the words of economists Steven Kamin and Mark Sobel, such an attempt to combine protectionism with currency depreciation would be “pointless, ineffectual, destabilizing, and only lead to the erosion of the dollar’s preeminent role in the global financial system.” Indeed, “an effort to force a Mar-a-Lago Accord on resistant trading partners could trigger a global financial crisis,” because it could undermine foreign confidence in the dollar as a reserve currency and the 10-year Treasury bond as the ultimate safe asset.

In any case, Trump has other ideas. Far from gradually raising tariffs, as Miran recommended, or merely using them as quasi-sanctions designed to elicit political concessions, as Bessent would clearly prefer, Trump is contemplating turning the clock of U.S. trade policy back either to 1943 or 1937. For those unfamiliar with the economic history of that era, that was a time when international trade had all but collapsed because of protectionism, depression, and war. Those were the last years the effective U.S. tariff rate was as high as it would be if Trump had retained his 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico, or if he goes ahead with imposing “reciprocal” tariffs on the whole world on April 2.

Trump is nothing if not consistent on this one issue. He’s been arguing for tariffs and tougher terms for American allies for nearly 40 years, one of a tiny group of economic policy dissidents on the margins of both parties who never accepted the arguments for free trade, globalization, and the United States as custodian of “the liberal international order.” And for many of his supporters that is precisely what makes Trump appealing, as Free Press contributor Batya Ungar-Sargon explained to Bill Maher on Friday night.

This view is not wholly insane. Trump is right that the U.S. has an asymmetrical advantage: Trade wars tend to hurt America’s trading partners more than the United States itself, because the U.S. economy is simply less reliant on foreign trade than they are. But tariffs must mean some inflation—up to 1.3 percentage points if Trump goes all the way on April 2, according to Fidelity—and calling it “transitory” seems ill-advised after what happened in 2022. What’s more, even if you don’t impose the tariffs, or impose them and then take them off, you are still going to hurt the economy by cranking up uncertainty, which is the sworn enemy of investment.

“The U.S. doesn’t have Free Trade,” ranted Trump on Truth Social Thursday morning. “We have ‘Stupid Trade.’ The Entire World is RIPPING US OFF!!!”

But how smart is it really to slap tariffs on Canada, a country with whom (as Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations noted) the United States runs a goods trade surplus? These tariffs aren’t even popular. According to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll, 60 percent of those polled were against the 25 percent tariffs on Canada. As for the linkage between economics and geopolitics, Trump’s trade war against our northern neighbor has rescued the Canadian Liberals, who now have, in the former central banker Mark Carney, a prime minister with unrivaled understanding of the international financial system. The law of unintended consequences is history’s most powerful statute.

Of course, the biggest unintended consequence of all this has to be the stock market correction. At the Thursday close, the Nasdaq was down 14 percent from its peak earlier this year, the S&P 500 was down 10 percent, and the Dow Jones was down 9 percent. Friday’s modest rally was a response only to the avoidance of a government shutdown. The big tech stocks are still down this month by between 5 percent (Microsoft) and 30 percent (Tesla). By contrast, stocks in China and Germany—to name two countries whose leaders have responded caustically to Trump’s second-term opening plays—are up since January 1.

Meanwhile, the number of lights flashing red on the U.S. macro dashboard is, by my count (based on Tej Parikh’s survey for the Financial Times), 17: delinquencies on credit card balances (up), household spending after tariffs are imposed (down), consumer confidence (down), inflation and unemployment expectations (both up), real consumption (down), an index of sales, new orders, exports and employment (down), manufacturing construction spending (down), capex intentions (down), small businesses’ hiring plans (down), employment in government, healthcare, and social assistance (likely down), effect of such spending cuts as Elon Musk can achieve (negative), effect of falling stocks on consumption (negative), reaction of foreign investors to Mar-a-Lago talk (negative), effect of falling tax revenues on deficit (negative), risk that Federal Reserve delays rate cuts (negative), effect of front-running tariffs on first-quarter gross domestic product (negative).

These don’t necessarily add up to a recession. But they do add up to a marked slowdown this year. And, unlike in late 2018—when Trump’s last trade war triggered a stock bear market—this time he can’t blame the Fed for hiking rates. As for the theory that Trump somehow wants a recession in order to bring down interest rates because the debt has reached unsustainable levels, I believe this to be the purest cope.

And yet. And yet.

One cannot argue that the trajectory of the Biden-Harris administration was sustainable. It was not, any more than that of the Carter administration was. Ronald Reagan’s first term—which I once vainly hoped would give Trump at least some inspiration—started with a painful recession. The need for fiscal reform today is far greater than in 1981, and fiscal reform is never painless. And Bessent is right that there are some encouraging signs. Oil prices are down. So are long-term rates.

The gravest doubts I have relate more to the geopolitical than to the geoeconomic elements of Trump’s strategy. Pulling a “Reverse Nixon”—meaning you somehow lure Russia away from China by giving Vladimir Putin most of what he wants from Ukraine— may sound smart. But what if you just end up with “Reverse” because China just goes ahead and blockades Taiwan anyway?

The coming weeks and months will be a bull market only in a few things: gold, German defense stocks, Chinese AI companies—and “I-told-you-so” criticism of Trump by the usual suspects. Those—and I include myself—who cheered the president’s victory will have cause to ask ourselves the old British-English question: “Ever been had?”

Keynes was right that the return to the gold standard would be painful for 1920s Britain. The economic consequences of Mr. Churchill were nasty. But it is at least arguable that, by restoring confidence in what was then the world’s reserve currency, Britain found it easier to manage both the huge war debt it had accumulated and to cope with the Depression when it struck.

The economic consequences of Mr. Trump will surely be calamitous if he insists on returning average tariff rates to 1930s levels—especially if he tries to combine those with a weaker dollar, along the lines of the putative Mar-a-Lago Accord.

Yet deregulation was one of the keys to the success of the first Trump term. More of it is coming—and it cannot come too soon after the red-tape expansion of the Biden years. Fiscal reform is the other crucial piece, although it remains to be seen just how much Elon Musk’s DOGE can do to curb the growth of federal spending.

Keynes’s heirs today—led by Larry Summers—have already written off Trump 2.0. But, like Keynes in 1925, I’ll give Trump the benefit of two years.

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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