Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Those who study the rise and fall of civilizations learn that no shortcoming has been as surely fatal to republics as a dearth of public virtue, the unwillingness of those who govern to place the value of their society above personal interest.”

– Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale

“Evil happens without effort, naturally, inevitably; good is always the product of skill.”

– Charles Baudelaire

“Beware of overconcern for money, or position, or glory. Someday you'll meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are.”

– Rudyard Kipling.

1. Trump Says He Will Talk With Putin Tuesday on Ending Ukraine War

2. Trump Revolutionizes Political Communication

3. The Unintended Consequences of Trump’s Firing Spree

4. Christopher Caldwell: Trump Has a Point on Trade. But He Is Losing the Argument.

5. Republika Srpska: the Next Potential Flashpoint in Europe

6. Trump tapped Kari Lake to run VOA. Then he dismantled it.

7. Voice of America staff put on leave, Trump ally says agency 'not salvageable'

8. Following outcry, Army republishes web article on 442nd Regimental Combat Team

9. Trump’s English language order upends America’s long multilingual history

10. ‘How gratifying’: Cheers in China as Trump dismantles Voice of America

11. Diplomat asks Trump to hear harrowing Havana Syndrome experience

12. Army’s 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force to get its own Typhon missile system

13. The end of nonproliferation?

14. Chokepoints Are The Focus Of A New Cold War

15. President Trump Is Not Weakening Our National Security or Our Military

16. The Key to Ukraine’s Survival

17. Can Iran Save Itself?

18. How Marcos Jr’s ICC gambit against Duterte reveals the dark art of Philippine politics

19. I’m in Ukraine’s Special Forces – This Is How I Feel When I Have to Kill Putin’s Soldiers

20. Russian gains in Kursk open possibility of redirecting North Korean troops to Ukrainian front

21. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 16, 2025

22. DOGE’s war on American veterans has begun

23. China’s observatory in Chile in doubt as US raises concerns about potential military use

24. Save Infantry Leaders From Bias by Removing Ranger Tabs

25. The Bolduc Brief: Restoring Respect - A Call to Reinstall General Milley’s Portraits in the Pentagon

1. Trump Says He Will Talk With Putin Tuesday on Ending Ukraine War

Excerpts:

“We’ll be talking about land. We’ll be talking about power plants,” Trump told reporters when asked about concessions that the U.S. would seek from Russia in a peace deal.

“I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides, Ukraine and Russia,” Trump said. “We are already talking about that—dividing up certain assets.”

Russia has secured steady gains on the battlefield and largely dislodged Ukraine’s toehold in the region of Kursk, the slice of Russian territory it took last August that Ukrainian officials had hoped would give them extra leverage in any talks.

Trump Says He Will Talk With Putin Tuesday on Ending Ukraine War

Moscow hasn’t signed on to a cease-fire after Kyiv agreed to the proposal

https://www.wsj.com/world/trump-says-he-will-talk-with-putin-tuesday-on-ending-ukraine-war-2f4ed5e4?mod=hp_lead_pos2

By Chun Han Wong

March 17, 2025 4:00 am ET

President Trump said ‘a lot of work’ had been done over the weekend ahead of Tuesday’s talks. Photo: kevin lamarque/Reuters

President Trump said he plans to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday as the U.S. pushes to end the war in Ukraine.

“We want to see if we can bring that war to an end,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One late Sunday, according to a video published by the Associated Press. “Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but I think we have a very good chance.”

Trump said “a lot of work” had been done over the weekend ahead of Tuesday’s conversation, which would include discussions on terms for ending a conflict that recently entered its fourth year.

U.S. and Russian officials have been in talks on Ukraine over recent weeks, an effort that gathered pace after Washington reached an agreement with Kyiv last week on a 30-day cease-fire proposal. Putin has so far rejected that proposal and renewed calls for discussions on a permanent end to the war.

“We’ll be talking about land. We’ll be talking about power plants,” Trump told reporters when asked about concessions that the U.S. would seek from Russia in a peace deal.

“I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides, Ukraine and Russia,” Trump said. “We are already talking about that—dividing up certain assets.”

Russia has secured steady gains on the battlefield and largely dislodged Ukraine’s toehold in the region of Kursk, the slice of Russian territory it took last August that Ukrainian officials had hoped would give them extra leverage in any talks.

Moscow in the past has ruled out a temporary cease-fire and insisted that a lasting agreement to halt the fighting would take time to negotiate. It has insisted that it holds on to at least the 18% of Ukrainian territory it already controls, an area roughly equivalent in size to Virginia. It also expressed its intention to reverse policies that have sidelined Russian cultural influence in Ukraine and preclude the country’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com

2. Trump Revolutionizes Political Communication

But how are we doing at influencing foreign target audiences? Or is that not a priority or even a consideration? He certainly understands the domestic target audience (or he at least understands his political base). But do we have the same understanding of foreign target audiences? Will these techniques that seem to work so well domestically have any traction international influence? Or does it no longer matter as we retrench behind hard power and peace through strength?

Excerpts:

Mr. Trump chose senior officials who could sell the administration’s message to voters. Most have extensive on-air experience, and it shows. They consider media appearances a vital part of their jobs, not a distraction. They want to do interviews and do them live, whenever possible. And they deliver their messages with enthusiasm and without apology. They are willing, indeed eager, to confront opponents head on.

Mr. Trump provides the model. He answered more than 1,000 questions in his first month, seven times as many as his predecessor. President Biden’s visibility declined in tandem with his health.

Mr. Trump’s goal is far more ambitious than differentiating his administration from Mr. Biden’s. And he isn’t trying to win approval from the mainstream media, whose opposition he takes for granted. His real goal is to sustain public support for his bold agenda. He wants to use that support to corral congressional Republicans and keep Democrats on the defensive. So far, it’s working.

Trump Revolutionizes Political Communication

To an unprecedented extent, he and his cabinet are speaking directly to voters and bypassing traditional media.

https://www.wsj.com/world/trump-says-he-will-talk-with-putin-tuesday-on-ending-ukraine-war-2f4ed5e4?mod=hp_lead_pos2

By Charles Lipson

March 16, 2025 2:14 pm ET

Elon Musk and President Trump meet the press at the White House, March 11. Photo: Molly Riley/White House/Zuma Press

Donald Trump has broken so much crockery so fast that one thing he’s doing is underappreciated. No administration has communicated with voters as often or as directly as his.

Not only are top officials on TV and social media constantly; they are bypassing all the usual media filters to do it. They do live interviews, podcasts and social-media posts and videos. Every day, many senior officials appear on camera, controlling their message by doing live spots that can’t be edited.

Their presentations are as blunt as their policies. A recent example was Vice President JD Vance’s speech to a shocked Munich audience. Mr. Vance’s approach, and that of the entire Trump staff, matches that of the boss, who clearly emphasized media savvy in choosing his cabinet and White House aides. That criterion was second only to loyalty to Mr. Trump and his agenda.

The administration’s strategy takes full advantage of new communications channels while playing down older outlets that routinely oppose Mr. Trump. The biggest advantages of this approach are greater control over the message and increased effectiveness. The word comes directly from policymakers, not their spokesmen or anonymous sources.

Previous administrations made top officials available only intermittently. Even telegenic presidents like Barack Obama were far less visible than Mr. Trump. Cabinet secretaries and White House aides typically spoke to journalists behind the scenes and without attribution.

Mr. Trump chose senior officials who could sell the administration’s message to voters. Most have extensive on-air experience, and it shows. They consider media appearances a vital part of their jobs, not a distraction. They want to do interviews and do them live, whenever possible. And they deliver their messages with enthusiasm and without apology. They are willing, indeed eager, to confront opponents head on.

Mr. Trump provides the model. He answered more than 1,000 questions in his first month, seven times as many as his predecessor. President Biden’s visibility declined in tandem with his health.

Mr. Trump’s goal is far more ambitious than differentiating his administration from Mr. Biden’s. And he isn’t trying to win approval from the mainstream media, whose opposition he takes for granted. His real goal is to sustain public support for his bold agenda. He wants to use that support to corral congressional Republicans and keep Democrats on the defensive. So far, it’s working.

Democratic confusion has helped. Still reeling from the loss in November, they lack a positive program, compelling vision or effective spokesman. The more moderate older generation has disappeared from view. Today, their most visible—and voluble—media faces are also their most strident progressives. That may be a winning stance in Connecticut; it’s a loser in Kansas. It won’t help win back the swing states Mr. Trump captured in 2024.

Democrats have lost the messaging wars in another way. They have repeatedly taken the unpopular side on high-profile issues, such as closing the border, deporting violent illegal aliens, barring men from women’s sports, and slashing the size of federal agencies. You can’t build a winning national coalition by embracing the 20% side of 80/20 issues.

Meanwhile, the Trump team is constantly on the air hammering home its views. Take Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who skipped the entire Washington news corps and posted a brief video address online on the need to build a lethal fighting force, deter wars and cut administrative bloat. It was a polished, effective presentation, and he promised many more. Mr. Hegseth’s colleagues are doing the same thing, setting a pattern future administrations are likely to follow.

This kind of transparency limits the power of journalists, who often used to be the main pathway between government officials and the public. We are witnessing a wholesale change in how senior officials connect to voters and how journalists cover them. The Trump administration is the first to grasp this change and take advantage of it. The trillion-dollar question is whether their policies will work as well as their marketing.

Mr. Lipson is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago and author of “Free Speech 101: A Practical Guide for Students.”

The Unintended Consequences of Trump’s Firing Spree

From veterans hospitals to national parks, rapid cuts to federal workers are eating into services

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/government-firings-service-cutbacks-865c2da2?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Lindsay EllisFollow

March 16, 2025 9:00 pm ET

At Veterans Affairs facilities in Detroit and Denver, staff reductions have led to canceled health programs and left homeless veterans without their dedicated coordinator to help them find an apartment and line up a deposit.

In Alabama, job cuts at the Education Department have slowed efforts to get disabled children access to classrooms.

And in California, Yosemite National Park paused new reservations for more than 500 campsites during peak summer months because of staffing uncertainty.

An unprecedented effort to shrink the federal labor force is impeding work at government sites across the country and spawning unintended consequences for services Americans rely on.

The U.S. government is America’s largest employer, with 2.4 million civilian workers as of January, excluding the postal service. The Trump administration has started cutting tens of thousands of jobs through a plan encouraged by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency that aims to reduce the size of government by $1 trillion this fiscal year, roughly 15% of last year’s spending. The goal is to cull a workforce that President Trump has said includes many people who aren’t doing their jobs. Oxford Economics, a data provider and consulting firm, estimates there will be 200,000 fewer federal workers by the end of 2025.

In the private sector, employment attorneys say, major companies can spend months analyzing workers’ job performance, position and skills before making big cuts. They enlist senior leaders to recommend which workers to keep, pore over union rules and smooth the process of applying for unemployment benefits for fired workers. Such forethought is key to ensuring the employees who remain can still get the work done, they say.

The Trump administration has adhered to few of those norms so far.

Managers say essential staff have been cut, and that the administration hasn’t followed detailed rules on how to enact widespread layoffs. Government agencies have granted voluntary buyouts to tens of thousands of people, fired probationary workers—a term for those who were hired or promoted in the past year or two—and are planning for deep reductions in the next few months. So far, many cuts haven’t taken into account workers’ performance or the necessity of their roles.

Protesters march during a national day of action against firings of National Park Service employees at Yosemite National Park. Photo: Stephen Lam/SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE/Associated Press

Two judges on Thursday blocked the firings of probationary workers at agencies including the departments of Agriculture, Energy and Veterans Affairs. Probationary workers have fewer protections against layoffs. Still, the firings need to go through the proper legal avenues, said U.S. District Judge William Alsup in California.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration will immediately fight Alsup’s order. While some probationary employees are expected to return to their jobs as a result of the rulings, their ability to retain those jobs remains uncertain given the continuing legal fight and plans for deeper agency cuts.

Supporters of the overhaul say the government’s workforce was due for reinvention, with the last major effort taking place under President Clinton. Republicans have criticized agencies for allowing federal employees to work remotely well past the pandemic, a practice they say has made them less accountable. Trump has ordered workers to return to the office.

Trump in the Oval Office told reporters this month that he wanted to terminate “the people that aren’t working, that aren’t showing up and have a lot of problems.” He said the government was experiencing “bloat like nobody’s ever seen before.”

In interviews, more than 60 current and former federal workers said the wide slashing has worsened services Americans receive and hindered remaining staff working on areas like improving healthcare and lowering energy bills. It also has discouraged top talent from working for the federal government.

From schools to campsites

Staff cuts have reduced or slowed services for health, education and even operations like weather forecasting.

After facing years of bipartisan criticism from Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services late last year hired a transplant surgeon to help implement fixes to the system that regulates organ transplants.

Dr. Jayme Locke, who left her post at the University of Alabama Birmingham for the federal job, was recently fired as a probationary worker. Transplant experts had hoped she would preside over a new era of making improvements instead of just studying them. Dr. Locke declined to comment. HHS didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Weather balloons, which capture information on temperature, humidity and wind, aren’t going up regularly in Albany, N.Y., or Gray, Maine, and launches have stopped altogether in Kotzebue, Alaska, due to staffing shortages at the National Weather Service.

National Parks and other federal lands are cutting hours at visitor centers. More than 700 Park Service employees took the government’s resignation offer, according to an email to supervisors seen by The Wall Street Journal. Roughly 1,000 probationary employees were fired, according to the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonprofit advocacy group.

A spokeswoman for the Department of the Interior declined to comment on personnel numbers, adding that the agency is improving fiscal responsibility and efficiency. Yosemite will begin taking summer reservations for some campground sites next week. More may become available if operational capacity allows, according to a Friday post from an official park account. People familiar with the delay attributed it to staffing uncertainty. The spokeswoman said the park expects to share more details about reservations later this year.

Oregon’s Yaquina Head, a Bureau of Land Management shoreline area, cut hours, halted lighthouse tours and may see closures at the black-stoned Cobble Beach after losing three of seven members of its permanent staff, said Sabrina Gorney, one of the laid-off probationary workers.

“Visitors are going to find that their services are really limited,” said Gorney, 24, who had worked at Yaquina Head as a seasonal employee and in August was promoted to a permanent role making $21.50 per hour.

Gorney’s termination letter, viewed by the Journal, said her abilities didn’t meet the department’s needs. She received three performance awards in less than a year.

Victoria DeLano, 52, worked as an equal-opportunity specialist for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. Based in Birmingham, Ala., she processed discrimination allegations against Southeast U.S. schools.

About a month after she was fired, OCR offices in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas and New York were eliminated as the Education Department cut about half of its workforce.

Complaints have piled up, slowing efforts to ensure school access for disabled children in an office where staff were already overworked, she said. “A child is not able to go to school right now until something is in place,” said DeLano, who has advocated against the cuts through her union, the American Federation of Government Employees.

OCR plans to use more mediation and a faster case-processing approach to address disability-related complaints and other harassment complaints, a spokesperson said.

“The dedicated staff of OCR will deliver on its statutory responsibilities,” said Madi Biedermann, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for communications.

Some offices have tried to hire back the fired workers. In March the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency, paused the terminations of about 5,900 probationary workers in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency said it would bring back those employees with back pay.

Visitors walk near Yaquina Head lighthouse in Newport, Ore. Photo: Amanda Loman for WSJ

Jeffrey Grant, deputy director for operations at an entity within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said 29 of his 82 fired employees were rehired—20 because of their specific responsibilities, the rest because they weren’t actually probationary. Some laid-off members of his team, he said, worked on improving the process of how Americans enrolled in insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

He retired in anticipation of mass terminations and later wrote to HHS’s acting chief human capital officer that “every one of these people had the ability, knowledge and skills that we require to accomplish our work.”

Not ‘safe’

In many parts of the country, the Trump administration’s job cuts have hit services and constituencies that Trump pledged to protect.

Chief among them is the Department of Veterans Affairs, which plans to cut about 70,000 positions and has already laid off thousands. The agency employs about 470,000 people.

Fewer VA staff are handling veterans’ claims that will get them treatment for military-service injuries and mental health conditions, two current employees said. This has already resulted in veterans waiting longer to get treatment in North Texas, one said.

Fifteen homeless veterans getting services at a VA community resource center in Denver are now without their assigned housing advocate, Brett Taylor, who was laid off from his role finding apartments for clients and making sure they had deposits. Remaining staff, he said, are overworked already.

“You would think it would make sense to add more providers, add more people, to make sure the veterans were taken care of,” said Taylor, a 37-year-old Army veteran who served in Iraq.

One VA hospital in Detroit canceled programs meant to improve patients’ stability and range of motion after the firings of probationary workers, including Kara Oliver, a 33-year-old Navy veteran leading classes and monitoring participants’ health and progress.

Brett Taylor, who worked for the VA in Denver helping homeless vets find apartments, was recently laid off. Photo: Rachel Woolf for WSJ

Oliver, whose salary was about $48,650, realized she was laid off when she went into the office on Feb. 25 and couldn’t access her computer. She said she didn’t receive her termination letter—useful for filing for unemployment benefits—until March 5.

“I want to be there for my veterans,” she said. But the instability of federal work is making her unsure if she would take a federal job in the future. “It just doesn’t feel safe.”

VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz said the agency has laid off 2,400 probationary employees in positions including publicists, interior designers and diversity, equity and inclusion officers. The positions amounted to half of one percent of the VA’s workforce, he added.

“The notion that these layoffs are causing issues across the department is false,” he said.

Performance reviews

Since Trump’s inauguration, the administration has gutted entire agencies, teams and categories of employees, only to add some back later. Early targets were the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Officials have tried to wind down the divisions’ work and lay off many staff.

The CFPB, created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, investigates complaints from Americans who say their banks charged them improper fees or falsely advertised interest rates.

Matthew Pfaff, chief of staff of the CFPB’s Office of Consumer Response, said in a court hearing that more than 16,000 complaints—unprecedented in his memory—piled up when the division was ordered to stop work for weeks.

Layoffs also cut into the work. Among the fired CFPB workers was Milo Chang, 22, who joined the CFPB in June through a program that recruited college graduates to the public sector who may have otherwise sought lucrative jobs in consulting, technology or finance. His team last year analyzed complaints from Missouri to Texas from Americans pressured to refinance their mortgages at higher interest rates after a divorce or the death of a spouse. He learned Sunday he would be rehired due to one of the Thursday rulings but said his future employment remains unclear.

Milo Chang, 22, pictured a week before being laid off, has been told he will be rehired.

Other agencies have cut probationary employees for performance reasons, without reviewing their performance.

Traci DiMartini, a human capital officer for the Internal Revenue Service, said in a court declaration that it would have taken weeks or months to evaluate 6,700 probationary workers’ performance.

That didn’t happen: “This fact was discussed openly in meetings,” she said.

She refused to sign the termination notices and was put on administrative leave pending termination, in part because she was “insubordinate and uncooperative with the DOGE employees,” according to her declaration. The IRS didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Keith Camire started in September at the IRS to streamline spending on IT. Photo: Ava Aston

Keith Camire, 48 years old, received one of those letters. He started in September at the IRS to streamline spending on IT. His co-workers, he said, are now scrambling to absorb the work.

Camire, in Milford, Penn., said he voted for Trump three times. He said he’s not opposed to downsizing the government but is against the indiscriminate manner in which the cuts are being made.

“Is it mission critical in the sense of police, fire, border security?” he said of the work he was doing. “No, but it’s essential to provide fiscal accountability and responsibility, which is what DOGE is about.”

Deeper cuts

Deeper cuts are expected in the coming months as agencies begin the next phase of the downsizing: a so-called reduction-in-force process that is a highly regulated exercise used infrequently in government. Agencies were told they had until last Thursday to outline how many positions would be cut through attrition, layoffs, a Trump-ordered hiring freeze and the proposed elimination of agencies’ functions.

One former senior government official described the process like baking a cake with 20-step directions and that leaders must read the rules countless times. Workers’ tenure, veterans status and performance must be taken into account during layoffs.

The Office of Personnel Management on Wednesday told agencies that collective-bargaining agreement provisions that “excessively interfere with management’s rights” to lay off employees aren’t enforceable. It urged agencies not to respond to every request for information from unions.

In a recent round of cuts, officials at the Energy Department could submit just 200 characters to justify positions, according to two people with knowledge of the process.

In February, teams identified probationary workers who were critical to public safety, the environment and health, or other mission-critical areas, a former official said.

Still, ultimately some fired probationary staff were essential to nuclear facilities, that person said. Though some were reinstated, the agency will now lean more on contractors.

A view of the lighthouse and Cobble Beach at Yaquina Head. Photo: Amanda Loman for WSJ

The DOE is finding ways to maximize efficiency while upholding its mission of “unleashing American energy dominance and strengthening our energy security,” said Andrea Woods, an agency spokesperson.

Write to Lindsay Ellis at lindsay.ellis@wsj.com

4. Christopher Caldwell: Trump Has a Point on Trade. But He Is Losing the Argument.

This seems to counter the WSJ article about the effectiveness of the administration's political communications.

Christopher Caldwell: Trump Has a Point on Trade. But He Is Losing the Argument.

There’s a legitimate case for tariffs. But the president needs to explain it to the public—in a way that makes great TV.

https://www.thefp.com/p/trump-has-a-point-on-trade

By Christopher Caldwell

03.16.25 —

U.S. Politics

0:00

-10:28

Journalists have always had a tendency to treat Donald Trump as a gold medalist in some kind of Olympics of Stupidity. But even for them, the trade war he has fitfully waged over the last two weeks has been dazzling in its illogic and arbitrariness. He has imposed tariffs, both on China and on his country’s nearest neighbors and closest allies. Then called them off. Then reimposed them.

Sowing ill will, repelling investors, decimating the 401(k) plans of those who once thought it was a good idea to vote for him, Trump appears to most newspapers readers as a mad king, or as the crazed naval captain Humphrey Bogart plays in The Caine Mutiny—someone from whom control ought to be wrested, and soon.

Yet there is powerful evidence behind certain Trump arguments. European and Chinese ambitions really do have something to do with abuses of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on free trade. The United States now imports half a trillion dollars in goods from Mexico every year—more than we import from China. That is because, since Trump left office in 2021, China has increased its manufacturing presence along the U.S. border, in order to take advantage of favorable trade terms in the USMCA. So have European companies. So have American ones, including Elon Musk’s Tesla.

Trump is no less correct that the present architecture of the global economy is unsustainable. In peacetime, this country runs large, permanent trade deficits not just with China, Europe, and Mexico but with the entire world, and has accumulated $36 trillion in debt in the process. That’s $323,000 per taxpayer.

It is a paradox that the United States, which dominates the world economy and writes its rules, should have wound up behind the globalist eight ball. There is a sophisticated body of economic and institutional thinking about how this has happened, regularly batted around in academic economics departments. It could be used to defend a protectionism such as Trump’s. Unfortunately for him, it has mostly been developed by leftists, who are unappreciated by and unknown to his voters.

Trump’s great misfortune in his second term is that he has lost the services of Robert Lighthizer, the sophisticated tariff enthusiast who was U.S. trade representative in his first administration. Lighthizer had mastered these theories and could debate them convincingly, even where he didn’t agree with them.

Much of the difficulty with trade is tied up with the power of the dollar. The Berkeley legal theorist David Singh Grewal, an authority on the architecture of globalism, notes that holding the reserve currency is not just an “exorbitant privilege,” as Valéry Giscard d’Estaing used to say. It can also be a burden. Every country that wants to participate in the global system has to hold dollars. This drives the dollar’s value up, up, up, to the point where American exports become uncompetitive. That is how the United States lost its industrial base. Orthodox free traders take solace that this trade deficit is balanced by a capital surplus: Our financial products have swept the world. Unfortunately, those products are T-Bills. Where China specializes in manufacturing, we specialize in debt.

Complicating matters, the dollar has a double function: “The supply of U.S. dollars must do more than mediate transactions within the U.S. economy,” Grewal writes; “it must also lubricate the growth of the globalized world economy as a whole.” When the world is starved for funds, we can either let it suffer by withholding dollars, or we can print money and endanger our own citizens through housing and other bubbles. Since the Clinton administration, it has comforted a lot of people to assume there is no contradiction between the dollar’s global and national functions. Those people did not vote for Donald Trump.

Trump believes America has gone uncompensated for services rendered. The Trump theory about America’s role in the global economy resembles that of certain second-wave feminists about women’s unwaged and unappreciated housework. America’s “chores” include security guarantees and serving as a global economy–stimulating consumer of last resort. By meekly assenting to such burdens, we’ve been ripped off. An economist keenly attuned to this argument is Yanis Varoufakis, the volatile former finance minister of Greece. As Varoufakis sees it, Trump is now pursuing a master plan, one that Varoufakis himself considers “solid—albeit inherently risky.” Its goal is not just to get better terms of trade but also “to shock foreign central bankers.” Writing a few weeks ago, Varoufakis expected it to be a hairy maneuver.

So it has proved. The S&P 500 is down more than 4 percent since the start of the year. Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has talked about a “detox period,” which implies a managed transition to a newer, healthier global economic regime, a weaning of sorts. That would be good. A gradually introduced tariff on Mexico might (whether one approves of the policy or not) incentivize the world’s investors to favor American factories over Mexican ones. But we have something less like detox and more like cold turkey. An out-of-the-blue 25 percent tariff risks subtracting value from the economy without any means of replacing it. The result, to pursue Bessent’s metaphor of detoxification, has been the economic equivalent of delirium tremens.

What is more, Trump is trying to use the same tariffs for three different things: 1) raising revenue, 2) transforming the economy to be more worker-friendly, and 3) sanctioning (or outright punishing) foreign countries. He frequently loses track of which he wants to achieve and winds up—in every case—settling on punishment.

This approach made a bit of sense when he was browbeating Gustavo Petro of Colombia into accepting deportees. But not in the case of Claudia Sheinbaum’s Mexico—which had already given the U.S. much of what it publicly sought on limiting migration and cracking down on fentanyl. To foreign voters this looks arbitrary—and they have rallied behind whichever of their leaders is sitting at the other side of the table from Trump. Sheinbaum has risen to 85 percent approval ratings in some polls. Even French president Emmanuel Macron has shot back up to 27 percent—high for him.

A couple of factors complicate Trump’s position. It is by no means clear that his authority to impose tariffs is even constitutional. Article I, Section 8 gives tariff authority to Congress, which in the old days maintained a “schedule” of tariffs that it could adjust this way and that. Congress delegated that power to the White House in the 1930s. So, oddly, the presidential tariffing authority that Trump is claiming is a building block of the very administrative state that Trumpism is supposed to stand against.

Now the president is claiming part of his authority to levy tariffs from the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. This may help explain why the administration has made such a big deal of paltry fentanyl seizures in Canada.

Another problem is that there is little public case being made for the tariffs. The tone of U.S. press reports always focuses on foreign anger (and thus on Trump’s vulnerability) and not on an equally present foreign fear (and thus on Trump’s strength). You have to sit till late in the newscast or read many paragraphs into the story to discover that Canada’s central bank, for instance, is dropping rates for fear of recession.

Whether such coverage is fair or not, Trump, like a shorn Samson, has thus far been unable to cut through it, even though he has a real case to make. The maquiladora system that spread in the free-trade dawn of the 1990s was a way for U.S. companies to avoid paying union wages when making T-shirts and a few primitive widgets. But now Mexico has transformed itself into a lightly regulated launching pad for sophisticated European and Chinese companies of all kinds, meaning that American workers must compete against Latin American labor across the entire spectrum of global-economy products that American consumers buy. While Americans certainly don’t want their retirement funds drained, they do want the country protected from a flood of Chinese automobiles.

The problem with trade policy is that injustices can be both glaringly evident and tedious to explain. Yet explain them Trump must, and in a way that will be entertaining on a television screen. If he cannot engage the public in the trade war that is turning into the biggest debacle of his second term, he will have a hard time persisting. If he can engage them, he may win, and may even deserve to.

5. Republika Srpska: the Next Potential Flashpoint in Europe

Note the author is from the Woodrow Wilson Center which was recently singled out by the Administration's federal bureaucracy reduction order.

Excerpts:

What is most concerning about the slow-motion crisis in Republika Srpska, is that separatists have a plausible basis for assuming secession can succeed. Republika Srpska is already an autonomous political entity, and Milorad Dodik’s recent attempts to separate the region from the legal institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina have lowered obstacles to true independence. Azerbaijan’s rapid seizure of Nagorno Karabakh in September 2023 also provides a recent supporting case that minor powers can resolve intractable territorial disputes through military force, even in the face of international peacekeepers.[lxxiii] Dodik has spoken admiringly of Azerbaijan’s success and signaled that he had taken inspiration from it, stating, “I am closely following happenings referring the situation in the region of Karabakh and want to say that settlement of the decades-long disputes, like in history of many other nations and states around the world, called for the courage and wisdom of a strong and wise leader.”[lxxiv]

If Dodik’s believes he is the strong and wise leader called to wage a full-fledged rebellion against the international mission to Bosnia, he will begin from a strategically advantageous position. In the event of war, the separatists in Republika Srpska will defend territory they already control. As a result, forcing the breakaway republic back into line will require an offensive military operation by international peacekeeping forces and the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The force needed to decisively beat any such insurrection may be beyond the capacity of the existing force on the ground. The single battalion of EUFOR troops deployed to the region would face off against as many as 6,000 official “gendarmeries” employed by the government of Republika Srpska, and the potentially thousands of other unofficial paramilitary forces which would likely rally to its support.[lxxv]

The credibility of the deterrence provided by this limited peacekeeping force is further undermined by divisions within the European Union. Hungary’s Viktor Orban is a friend of Milorad Dodik and proud recipient of the “Order of Republika Srpska.”[lxxvi] Objections by Orban could present significant obstacles to rallying a robust mission to defeat a rebellion. Orban could use control of Hungary’s shared border with Republika Srpska and its EU voting power to obfuscate a EUFOR response. Orban would likely grow more obstinately opposed to such a response the longer and bloodier the conflict becomes, as his record toward military support to Ukraine has recently demonstrated.[lxxvii]

Even if successful, a military campaign and counterinsurgency might be sufficiently costly to leave lasting instability in the region. Instability in another corner of Europe may be appealing to Russian leaders. A new security dilemma for Europe to cope with, one which saps resources and attention and stymies further European integration, would be seen by many in Moscow as just desserts for Europe over its support for Ukraine.

Republika Srpska: the Next Potential Flashpoint in Europe

by Dan White

03.17.2025 at 06:00am

Introduction

Decades of unresolved political disputes in the Balkans have created opportunities for Russia to attack the legitimacy of Western influence in the region. These opportunities have been exploited by pro-Russian actors who have promoted the restoration of a pan-Slavic civilization from the Balkans to Eastern Europe. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 catalyzed efforts by revisionists to turn these dreams into reality. Since then, groups, either inspired or directly supported by Russia, have attempted numerous covert actions to destabilize the Balkans.[i] The risk of conflict is quietly growing again in the wake of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Republika Srpska, the ethnic Serbian federal republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a potential flashpoint for future conflict between the carefully cultivated regional security architecture formulated by the West and revisionists supported by Russia.

Republika Srpska’s leader, Milorad Dodik, has intensified his often-bombastic threats to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina, with substantive attacks on the terms of the Dayton Peace Agreement. Dodik’s brinkmanship since 2023 is pushing his polity toward a confrontation with the international peacekeeping mission which has held the fragile peace in the Balkans together.[ii] This showdown could inadvertently precipitate a major conflict, as an array of powerful allies from Russia and Serbia, each with some interest in revising the regional order, line up behind Dodik.

This essay discusses the long and complex origins of this slow-moving crisis. It recounts the extensive historic interests Russia holds within the Balkans and how Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Republika Srpska emerged as a special outpost for Russian influence. It details the current support Russia and Russian aligned non-state actors have provided separatists in Republika Srpska. It proposes that this support has intensified amid heightened geopolitical tensions between Russia and Western Europe and in turn contributed to more brazen behavior by pro-Russian revisionists. This essay then concludes with a warning that political rifts in the European Union combined with an inadequately sized peacekeeping force in Bosnia and Herzegovina is eroding the deterrence needed to keep regional separatism in check. A miscalculation by separatists could escalate in ways that are difficult to control and lead to war. An increasingly resentful and militarized Kremlin might welcome and even encourage such a war to weaken and divide Western Europe.

Historical Origins of Russian Backed-Separatism in the Balkans

Russian interest in the Balkans stems from a combination of geopolitical considerations as well as religious and cultural affinities dating back to the Tsarist era. Located between the water ways connecting the breadbasket of Eastern Europe with the markets of Africa and Asia, the Balkans lay along one of the most important global trade routes for agricultural commodities.[iii] Today nearly 20% of the world’s cereal crops, including 30% of global wheat exports, pass through the Turkish straits which delineate the southeastern boundary of the region.[iv]

The geography of the Balkans has made it a historical converging point of empires, but its mountainous terrain has made it difficult for potential hegemons to establish enduring control of local populations. Great empires from Western and Eastern Europe and the Islamic world have all periodically washed over the region like flood tides. Each empire has left behind pockets of ethnic, religious, cultural, and political influence. This complex mosaic of peoples in the Balkans, while a wellspring of great cultural diversity and achievement, is also a source of significant obstacles to permanent regional unity. Foreign powers have utilized these cultural cleavages to their own claims to regional influence.

Instability in another corner of Europe may be appealing to Russian leaders.

Russia has been one of the most vociferous stakeholders in the Balkans since the 19th Century pan-Slavic movement. That movement promoted the reunification of ethnic Slavs and Orthodox Christians left behind in the region in the wake of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires with their kinfolk in Eastern Europe under the Russian Empire.[v] Pan-Slavism appealed to Russian nationalists interested in acquiring Constantinople to shore up Russia’s claims to the inheritance of the Roman empire.[vi] It also appealed to Orthodox communities in the Balkans seeking an alternative to dominance by Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey.[vii]

Russia’s appeal as a preferred patron continues in the region today, particularly among ethnic Serbs. Since the collapse of Yugoslavia, Serbia has emerged as a key Russian partner in the Balkans. Serbia received considerable sympathy, in addition to moral and material support from Russia amid the Balkan wars of the 1990’s.[viii] Putin and other Russian leaders continue to cultivate these sympathies, portraying Serbia as an early victim of post-Cold War Western triumphalism just like Russia.[ix]

The disappointing results of democratization and anxiety over the erosion of traditional values by liberalism, combined with the perceptions of overreach by Western powers have created lasting resentments among Serbs.[x] The NATO backed secession of Kosovo, the birthplace of Serbia’s most powerful national myth, convinced many Serbs of the illegitimacy of the region’s borders, and the need for Russia as a patron and protector. The need is felt particularly intensely among ethnic Serbs who feel insecure as ethnic minorities in other nations. A 2024 survey by the International Republican Institute found that 94% of Bosnian Serbs reported a positive view of Russia.[xi]

Insecurity and resentment have provided opportunities for radical politicians, influence entrepreneurs, and criminal organizations from Russia and Serbia to offer an alternative vision of regional order for the Balkans.[xii] These groups have on multiple occasions attempted to achieve their reordering of the Balkans through force, with failed coup attempts in Montenegro in 2016 and Moldova in 2023, aborted uprisings in Northern Kosovo, and attempted assassinations elsewhere.[xiii] Evolving conditions in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska suggest that the Serb enclave may be the next target of a violent test of the regional order.

Republika Srpska as a Strategic Frontier for Russia

On November 20, 2023, NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenburg warned that separatist activities in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s ethnic Serb region of Republika Srpska appeared to be encouraged by Moscow.[xiv] Months earlier, in June 2023, Milorad Dodik passed new laws rejecting the legitimacy of Bosnian law in the federal republic.[xv] These laws appeared to set conditions for de facto independence for Republika Srpska, a violation of the Dayton Peace Agreement which could reignite civil war.[xvi] Dodik was indicted for this breach of the Dayton Accords on August 24, 2023.[xvii] Dodik responded to this indictment by stirring protests along the ethnic boundaries of the Republika Srpska and threatening to arrest the Bosnian High Representative Christian Schmidt.[xviii] After several delays Milorad Dodik was officially put on trial in February 2024. Legal proceedings against Dodik are ongoing, with a verdict expected in 2025.[xix]

Putin’s repeated platforming of grievances about the West’s scuttling of the Dayton Accords bears eerie resemblance to similar litanies of complaints Putin levied against the Minsk Agreements before the start of the 2022 war.

Dodik’s surge of separatist agitating has coincided with Russia’s war in Ukraine, which he has openly supported. Some experts believe that Dodik has utilized the war to tap anti-Western sentiment among Serbs in the region, who might see parallels between Russia’s war in Ukraine and Serbia’s own wars in the 1990s, to chip away at the legitimacy of the internationally recognized government of Bosnia.[xx] The gambit appears to have worked. Dodik’s popularity has been bolstered by his legal conflict with the Bosnian government and its Western supporters, resulting in significant electoral gains for his Alliance of Independent Social Democrats in 2024.[xxi] The surge in popular support makes holding Milorad Dodik accountable for violating the terms of the Dayton Peace Agreement more fraught with the potential for conflict. Failure to defend the Dayton Peace Agreement from systemic violations also carries the risk of provoking a broader disintegration of the complex federal system constructed to maintain peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the 1990s.

The volatile situation fostered by Dodik has provided an opening for pro-Russian actors to resurrect a pan-Slavic vision for the region. Bosnia may be more vulnerable to the violent power plays which Russian supported groups attempted unsuccessfully in Montenegro in 2016 and Moldova in 2023. This vulnerability stems from a formidable network of support Dodik has cultivated from the Russian state, along with regional influence entrepreneurs, the Orthodox Church, and a number of paramilitary and criminal organizations from Russia and Serbia such as the Night Wolves and Serbian Honor.[xxii]

State Support for Separatist Activity in Republika Srpska

Milorad Dodik enjoys support at the highest echelons of the Russian and Serbian states, maintaining close relationships with the presidents and other top leaders of both countries. This support for Dodik as a regional leader has not historically translated into broad acceptance of independence for Republika Srpska, which would risk reigniting a regional war. Russia’s ongoing confrontation with the West, spurred by its 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine, may be changing the prevailing calculus, creating powerful incentives to provoke conflict.

Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić has been circumspect about independence for Republika Srpska. Vučić has repeatedly emphasized regional stability when confronted with questions of independence for Republika Srpska. Vučić underlined his preference for regional stability in a November 2024 interview with the BBC, stating, “Serbia’s stance has always been consistent—we respect Bosnia and Herzegovina’s territorial integrity as per international law, the UN Charter, and relevant resolutions.”[xxiii] Peace through a pragmatic balancing of relations between Russia and the European Union has been a cornerstone of Serbian foreign policy under Vučić.[xxiv] This has been exemplified by Serbia’s abstention from sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, happening simultaneously with its quiet cooperation with European nations to provide military assistance to Ukraine.[xxv]

Aleksandar Vučić’s delicate balancing of Serbia’s international relations reflects the divergent interests of his domestic political constituencies. These groups include Serbs interested in greater ties with Europe and Serbian nationalists who prefer partnership with Russia. A balance of interests, both domestically and internationally may be difficult to maintain indefinitely. Ideological proponents of revanchist ideas of a Greater Serbia incorporating Republika Srpska have gained political power since the Serbian elections of 2023.

In April 2024 a newly elected Serbian government appointed Aleksandar Vulin, the former director of Serbia’s intelligence service, as Deputy Prime Minister.[xxvi] The appointment of Vulin has sparked concern among international observers in the West, over his affinity for Russia, and his previous calls to form a united “Serb World.”[xxvii] Vulin’s ascension has elevated the issue of Republika Srpska as a Serbian foreign policy priority. Prior to being appointed Serbia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Vulin was given a seat on the Senate of Republika Srpska by Milorad Dodik.[xxviii] Vulin has shown support for separatist activity in his official capacity by attending Republika Srpska Day festivities, banned under the Dayton Peace Agreement, in Banja Luka in January 2025.[xxix]

Vulin’s formal political power, and ties to informal criminal networks, provides additional opportunities for Milorad Dodik to obtain money and arms through both Russia and Serbia. Vulin is known to have previously used his official positions to help facilitate illegal transnational shipments of arms, making him the subject of U.S. sanctions.[xxx] It has also been alleged by both Serbian and Ukrainian civil society groups that Vulin assisted the Wagner Group’s efforts to recruit Serbian citizens to fight in Ukraine after the Russian invasion in 2022.[xxxi]

Vulin’s affinity for Russia has the potential to unbalance Vučić’s carefully calibrated balancing act which has helped maintain regional stability amid Russia’s confrontation with the West over Ukraine. Since becoming Deputy Prime Minister, Vulin has repeatedly traveled to Russia to meet senior Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin.[xxxii] Putin used a September 2024 meeting in Vladivostok to prod Vulin for an update on the status of the Dayton Peace Agreement, which Vulin then suggested was threatened by unspecified legal revisions by the West.[xxxiii] The remarks mirrored complaints made by Milorad Dodik during a meeting with Putin in St. Petersburg in June 2024, less than a year after Dodik withdrew Republika Srpska from the jurisdiction of the Bosnian Constitutional Court.[xxxiv]

Under Putin, Russia has utilized support for Republika Srpska as a means of retaining influence in Serbia, and of preventing Bosnia and Herzegovina’s full integration into European institutions.[xxxv] Putin’s interest in preserving stability in the region may be changing as he eyes new and more aggressive means of applying pressure on the West as the war in Ukraine drags on into its third year. Putin’s repeated platforming of grievances about the West’s scuttling of the Dayton Accords bears eerie resemblance to similar litanies of complaints Putin levied against the Minsk Agreements before the start of the 2022 war.[xxxvi] Putin’s use of Aleksandar Vulin to allege that the Dayton Peace Agreement was being undermined by Western duplicity, mimicked a similar public denouncement Putin extracted from his Deputy Chief of Staff Dmitry Kozak regarding the Minsk Agreements two days before the start of the full scale invasion.[xxxvii]

Non-State Networks Supporting Separatism in Republika Srpska

Unlike with Ukraine, Russia does not share a border with either Serbia or Bosnia and Herzegovina. That geographical distance, combined with the presence of Western troops significantly reduces Russia’s ability to reshape regional borders through direct military intervention. Any attempts to dramatically alter the region would likely be facilitated through non-state networks running through Serbia.

One of Milorad Dodik’s key allies in Moscow outside of government is Konstantin Malofeev.[xxxviii] An ultra-religious Russian oligarch and culture warrior, Malofeev has been variously called “Putin’s Soros,” and “God’s Oligarch.”[xxxix] Malofeev’s star among the Russian elite has risen since the start of the war in Ukraine, culminating in his September 2024 marriage to Putin ally, Maria Lvova-Belova, the architect of Russia’s deportation and adoption program for Ukrainian children, due in part to his zealous commitment to Russian victory.[xl] Malofeev has used his wealth and business acumen to supply Russian militias, such as the Union of Donbas Volunteers; and wage an information war through a network of media organizations such as Tsargrad TV, charities including the Saint Basil the Great Foundation, and think tanks like Katehon.[xli]

The group’s fighters act as “spare people” to exhaust Ukrainian defenses to create opportunities for more specialized Russian military forces to exploit.

Years before the war in Ukraine, Malofeev honed his network of hard and soft power by pursuing his own geopolitical goals in the Balkans. Malofeev is known to have been involved in several major plots to destabilize the Balkans in the intervening years between Russia’s initial seizure of Crimea in 2014 and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Malofeev has been implicated in both the attempted assassination of Bulgarian industrialist Emilian Gebrev in 2015 and the attempted overthrow of the Montenegrin government in 2016. Both plots involved coordination with Russian military intelligence officers from GRU Unit 29155 with the latter coup attempt a joint operation with Serbian militants.[xlii]

It is unclear whether Malofeev has conducted these attempts to destabilize the Balkans at the behest of Vladimir Putin or has generally acted on his own initiative with some support from other influential power brokers. The latter scenario seems more likely due to Malofeev’s pan-Slavic advocacy, and deep resources to fund his own influence operations.[xliii] Dodik is one of the close relationships Malofeev has cultivated with pro-Russian and pro-Serbian political and civic leaders in the Balkans. Dodik’s connection with Malofeev links a constellation of paramilitary and criminal organizations which may be used to challenge the existing order in the Balkans.

Malofeev is a longtime supporter of The Night Wolves outlaw motorcycle gang.[xliv] The Night Wolves, founded by Alexander Zaldostanov of Russia and Sasa Savic of Serbia, has a significant presence in the Balkans. The group is known to have received funding from the Russian government and has fostered a cordial working relationship with Vladimir Putin who has taken part in at least one bike ride with the group.[xlv] The group played a small but important role supporting the invasion and annexation of Crimea by serving as a screening force to disrupt a Ukrainian response into the peninsula.[xlvi]

The Night Wolves have expressed interest in fomenting pro-Serbian violence and separatism in the Balkans. A December 2022 post on the Night Wolves Vkontake account emphasized the intertwined fates of Slavic people in Serbia, Kosovo, and Bosnia with the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine.[xlvii] In 2023 the Night Wolves members became a visible and menacing presence at rallies for Milorad Dodik.[xlviii] The Night Wolves are one of a broader coalition of paramilitary groups linking Malofeev and Dodik.

Malofeev has cultivated his own client paramilitary organization, the Union of Donbas Volunteers.[xlix] The group is a composite force of thousands of militia fighters led by Russian Duma Member Alexander Borodai which has fought in Ukraine since 2015.[l] A 2023 reorganization effectively integrated the Union of Donbas Volunteers with Russian GRU military intelligence.[li] According to Borodai, the group’s fighters act as “spare people” to exhaust Ukrainian defenses to create opportunities for more specialized Russian military forces to exploit.[lii]

The Union of Donbas Volunteers has served as a holding company for not only fighters employed by Malofeev but also for Serbian paramilitaries who have dedicated themselves to liberating Republika Srpska.[liii] These include Serbian Action and Serbian Honor. Serbian Action is a violent far-right extremist group dedicated to expelling liberal Western influences from Serbia and preserving the spiritual and racial purity of the Serbian people.[liv] Serbian Action maintains close ties with other violent far-right groups throughout Europe, including the Russian Imperial Movement, a U.S. designated global terrorist organization.[lv] Serbian Honor is a paramilitary group that is alleged to have been founded by Milorad Dodik.[lvi] The group is led by Bosnian Serb Bojan Stojković and Serbian national Igor Bilbija and draws its members heavily from criminal organizations.[lvii] Reports indicate that members of Serbian Honor have received military training in Russia and gained combat experience fighting alongside Russian backed forces in Ukraine prior to the 2022 invasion.[lviii]

Serbian Honor operates with a humanitarian relief organization, the Russian-Serbian Humanitarian Centre, in the Serbian city of Niš.[lix] The center was founded in 2012 and has been run in part by the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations.[lx] The center was planned during Sergei Shoigu’s long tenure as Minister of Emergency Situations, and founded just prior to his taking office as Minister of Defense.[lxi] Some experts have suggested that the center has served as a base for Russian intelligence operations.[lxii]

A Window of Opportunity for the Revisionists

Milorad Dodik has become more aggressive in asserting separatist ambitions for the region since 2023. Russia’s continued aggression in Ukraine has shattered assumptions about the stability of Europe and provided an ongoing example of the continued utility of military force to change borders. Wavering commitments to the defense of Ukraine by the West may also be emboldening Dodik to test the resolve of the international mission to Bosnia. Economic and diplomatic lifelines thrown to Dodik from Viktor Orban’s Hungary highlight cracks within the European Union’s vision for Balkan integration.[lxiii]

Peripheral instability and political disunity in Europe erode the credibility of the international mission which keeps the peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is especially troubling as the deterrent effect of European Union Forces (EUFOR) in the region depends on their credibility as disciplined fighting units, backed by nations committed to pursuing decisive military victory if necessary. With only a single multinational battalion of approximately 1,000 troops deployed, EUFOR is now only a small fraction of the 7,000 deployed two decades earlier.[lxiv] Perceptions of weakness in the European Union’s commitment to security in Bosnia may embolden Dodik to press for even greater independence for Republika Srpska under the assumption that it lacks the wherewithal to take aggressive action to enforce the Dayton Peace Agreement. Dodik may already be testing such an approach with changes of laws, threats of arrest of the Bosnian High Representative, and refusals to recognize the authority of the Bosnian Constitutional Court.

History provides good reasons for leaders in Russia, Serbia, and Republika Srpska to be skeptical of the commitment of peacekeeping forces in Bosnia. The United Nations (UN) peacekeeping mission did little to combat the most brazen acts of aggression during the Bosnian War. Serb forces completely disregarded the UN’s commitment to enforce safe areas during the war and routinely slaughtered Bosniak Muslims while UN peacekeepers looked on.[lxv] The worst of these depredations was in Republika Srpska itself, in the city of Srebrenica in 1995, where Serb forces massacred over 8,000 Bosniak civilians, who were under the protection of a force of 400 Dutch peacekeepers.[lxvi] The brazenness of Russia’s conduct in Ukraine, including the abduction of thousands of children, attacks on Ukraine’s grain exports, and casual threats of nuclear attack, have once again undermined the image of the UN and of peacekeeping more broadly.[lxvii]

It is not clear that Dodik actually intends to go to war over his separatist threats. Some experts including Zlatko Miletic, the former chief of Bosnia’s federal police, have suggested that Dodik’s aim is primarily self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment.[lxviii] However, Dodik’s brinkmanship could develop a momentum of its own and inadvertently precipitate a conflict. The consistent attacks on the legitimacy of the UN mission to Bosnia risk inflaming popular passions. A resulting crisis would incentivize ambitious influence entrepreneurs such as Russia’s Konstantin Malofeev and politicians like Serbia’s Aleksandar Vulin to probe for opportunities to advance their own interests.

A provocation designed for political effect could escalate in ways that are difficult to anticipate. Paramilitary groups like Serbian Honor could thrust themselves into action after misreading the political situation. This is what happened in September 2023, when a dispute over vehicle license plates in Northern Kosovo led to a gun battle between Kosovo police and Serb nationalists led by exiled Serb Kosovar leader Milan Radoicic.[lxix] The ensuing firefight between the two groups killed four people and resulted in a siege of a Serbian Orthodox monastery where the gunmen took shelter.[lxx]

The single battalion of EUFOR troops deployed to the region would face off against as many as 6,000 official “gendarmeries” employed by the government of Republika Srpska, and the potentially thousands of other unofficial paramilitary forces which would likely rally to its support.

A similar confrontation in Republika Srpska could scale quickly as Russian influence entrepreneurs, notably Konstantin Malofeev, could surge the provision of additional arms, men, and materials to prop up Dodik. Malofeev’s Union of Donbas Volunteers is already integrated into the Russian military intelligence apparatus and could be effectively supported and directed by Russian advisors already on the ground such as at the Russian-Serbian Humanitarian Center.

A fight, once initiated, could develop a momentum of its own, and override the ability of the region’s leaders to control. Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić, would come under enormous pressure, even from members of his own party, to support fellow Serbs in a fight should one be instigated. Furthermore, Russia could amplify support for the war with disinformation on supposed atrocities committed by Bosnian and Western forces. This is a tactic it employed with some success in mobilizing pro-Russian forces in the hybrid war for the Ukrainian Donbas region in 2014 and 2015.[lxxi] The popularity of Russian state media such as RT and Sputnik, agitprop outlets such as Konstantin Malofeev’s Tsargrad TV, and political alignment between the Russian and Serbian Orthodox Churches could create a formidable echo chamber of voices demanding war.[lxxii]

Conclusion

What is most concerning about the slow-motion crisis in Republika Srpska, is that separatists have a plausible basis for assuming secession can succeed. Republika Srpska is already an autonomous political entity, and Milorad Dodik’s recent attempts to separate the region from the legal institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina have lowered obstacles to true independence. Azerbaijan’s rapid seizure of Nagorno Karabakh in September 2023 also provides a recent supporting case that minor powers can resolve intractable territorial disputes through military force, even in the face of international peacekeepers.[lxxiii] Dodik has spoken admiringly of Azerbaijan’s success and signaled that he had taken inspiration from it, stating, “I am closely following happenings referring the situation in the region of Karabakh and want to say that settlement of the decades-long disputes, like in history of many other nations and states around the world, called for the courage and wisdom of a strong and wise leader.”[lxxiv]

If Dodik’s believes he is the strong and wise leader called to wage a full-fledged rebellion against the international mission to Bosnia, he will begin from a strategically advantageous position. In the event of war, the separatists in Republika Srpska will defend territory they already control. As a result, forcing the breakaway republic back into line will require an offensive military operation by international peacekeeping forces and the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The force needed to decisively beat any such insurrection may be beyond the capacity of the existing force on the ground. The single battalion of EUFOR troops deployed to the region would face off against as many as 6,000 official “gendarmeries” employed by the government of Republika Srpska, and the potentially thousands of other unofficial paramilitary forces which would likely rally to its support.[lxxv]

The credibility of the deterrence provided by this limited peacekeeping force is further undermined by divisions within the European Union. Hungary’s Viktor Orban is a friend of Milorad Dodik and proud recipient of the “Order of Republika Srpska.”[lxxvi] Objections by Orban could present significant obstacles to rallying a robust mission to defeat a rebellion. Orban could use control of Hungary’s shared border with Republika Srpska and its EU voting power to obfuscate a EUFOR response. Orban would likely grow more obstinately opposed to such a response the longer and bloodier the conflict becomes, as his record toward military support to Ukraine has recently demonstrated.[lxxvii]

Even if successful, a military campaign and counterinsurgency might be sufficiently costly to leave lasting instability in the region. Instability in another corner of Europe may be appealing to Russian leaders. A new security dilemma for Europe to cope with, one which saps resources and attention and stymies further European integration, would be seen by many in Moscow as just desserts for Europe over its support for Ukraine.

[i] Anna Caprile and Branislav Stanicek, “Russia and the Western Balkans: Geopolitical Confrontation, Economic Influence and Political Interference | Think Tank | European Parliament,” Briefing (European Parliamentary Research Service: European Parliament, April 18, 2023), https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BRI(2023)747096.

[ii] Stefano Fella, “Bosnia and Herzegovina: Secessionism in the Republika Srpska” (UK Parliament, April 29, 2024), https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10013/.

[iii] Rob Bailey and Laura Wellesley, “Chokepoints and Vulnerabilities in Global Food Trade,” Chatham House Report (Chatham House, May 16, 2023), https://www.chathamhouse.org/2017/06/chokepoints-and-vulnerabilities-global-food-trade.

[iv] Ramon Key et al., “Potential Climate-Induced Impacts on Trade: The Case of Agricultural Commodities and Maritime Chokepoints,” Journal of Shipping and Trade 9, no. 1 (April 23, 2024): 11, https://doi.org/10.1186/s41072-024-00170-3.

[v] Louis Levine, “Pan-Slavism and European Politics,” Political Science Quarterly 29, no. 4 (December 1, 1914): 664–86, https://doi.org/10.2307/2142012.

[vi] Levine.

[vii] Levine.

[viii] James McBride, “Russia’s Influence in the Balkans,” Council on Foreign Relations, November 21, 2023, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/russias-influence-balkans.

[ix] James McBride.

[x] Harun Karčić and Peter Mandaville, “Dislodging Putin’s Foothold in the Balkans,” United States Institute of Peace, June 1, 2023, https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/06/dislodging-putins-foothold-balkans.

[xi] Dimitar Bechev, “Between the EU and Moscow: How Russia Exploits Divisions in Bosnia,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 27, 2024, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/06/bosnia-between-russia-eu?lang=en; “Western Balkans Regional Poll | February –March 2024 | Full-Deck,” International Republican Institute, May 14, 2024, https://www.iri.org/resources/western-balkans-regional-poll-february-march-2024-full/.

[xii] James McBride, “Russia’s Influence in the Balkans.”

[xiii] Dusica Tomovic Pantovic Maja Zivanovic, Milivoje, “Bratislav Dikic: Alleged Mastermind of Montenegro’s ‘Coup,’” Balkan Insight, October 21, 2016, https://balkaninsight.com/2016/10/21/bratislav-dikic-alleged-mastermind-of-montenegro-s-coup-10-20-2016/.

[xiv] “NATO Secretary General Underscores Importance of Stability in the Western Balkans at the Start of His Visit to the Region,” NATO, November 20, 2023, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_220279.htm.

[xv] “Sud BiH potvrdio optužnicu protiv Milorada Dodika,” Radio Slobodna Evropa, September 11, 2023, sec. Bosna i Hercegovina, https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/sud-bih-dodik-potvrdjena-optuznica/32587843.html.

[xvi] Fella, “Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

[xvii] “Sud BiH potvrdio optužnicu protiv Milorada Dodika.”

[xviii] “New Protests Were Held in Support of Dodik and Lukic,” Sarajevo Times, September 22, 2023, https://sarajevotimes.com/new-protests-were-held-in-support-of-dodik-and-lukic/.

[xix] Azem Kurtic, “Bosnia in 2025: New Year, New Political Crisis,” Balkan Insight (blog), January 2, 2025, https://balkaninsight.com/2025/01/02/bosnia-in-2025-new-year-new-political-crisis/.

[xx] Emina Muzaferija and Gerard Toal, “Rallying to Russia from the Balkans: Milorad Dodik and the Invasion of Ukraine,” PONARS Eurasia, June 5, 2023, https://www.ponarseurasia.org/rallying-to-russia-from-the-balkans-milorad-dodik-and-the-invasion-of-ukraine/.

[xxi] Azem Kurtic, “‘Serb Superhero’: Sanctions and Trials Help Bosnian Serb Leader Win Big at the Polls,” Balkan Insight (blog), October 18, 2024, https://balkaninsight.com/2024/10/18/serb-superhero-sanctions-and-trials-help-bosnian-serb-leader-win-big-at-the-polls/.

[xxii] Wouter Zweers, Niels Drost, and Baptiste Henry, “Little Substance, Considerable Impact: Russian Sources of Influence in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Clingendael Report (Netherlands Institute of International Relations ‘Clingendael,’ August 2023), https://www.clingendael.org/pub/2023/little-substance-considerable-impact/russian-sources-of-influence-in-serbia-montenegro-and-bosnia-and-herzegovina/.

[xxiii] “Aleksandar Vučić: Is Serbia Looking to the West or Russia and China?,” HARDTalk (BBC News, November 25, 2024), https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct5t0k.

[xxiv] Florian Bieber, “Serbia’s Staged Balancing Act,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (blog), August 7, 2023, https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2023/08/07/serbias-staged-balancing-act/.

[xxv] Alec Russell and Marton Dunai, “Serbia Turns Blind Eye to Its Ammunition Ending up in Ukraine,” Financial Times, June 22, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/136ed721-fd50-4815-8314-d9df8dc67fd6?accessToken=zwAGG8pmp93Ikc8Tbtch_VBIFdODFNnfjcZ_1g.MEQCIEZ0_R0KCl17gqovvni0sDaqCp3AlF-NZwmYp6JeqwV3AiB7XpWKfPsLKFvIGhrvJB_OesSArkhMF5GHmhRXlwbnZg&sharetype=gift&token=c3583534-f5ef-41a6-8ee0-40bbb88ea96e.

[xxvi] “Serbia’s New Government to Include US-Sanctioned Ex-Intelligence Chief with Close Ties to Russia | AP News,” Associated Press, April 30, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/serbia-government-us-sanctions-russia-eb7e3e620ce3f038dddd2dbf26f5396e.

[xxvii] “Critics Condemn Minister’s Call to Unite ‘Serb World,’” Al Jazeera, July 19, 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/19/critics-condemn-ministers-call-to-unite-serbian.

[xxviii] “Dodik Appoints Aleksandar Vulin as a Senator of Republika Srpska,” Euronews Albania, December 27, 2023, https://euronews.al/en/dodik-appoints-aleksandar-vulin-as-a-senator-of-republika-srpska/.

[xxix] “Republika Srpska Holds Parade To Mark Banned Independence Day,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, January 10, 2025, sec. RFE/RL’s Balkan Service, https://www.rferl.org/a/republika-srpska-serbia-parade-independence-vulin-dodik/33270296.html.

[xxx] “Treasury Sanctions Official Linked to Corruption in Serbia,” U.S. Department of the Treasury, July 11, 2023, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1606.

[xxxi] “Pro-Ukrainian Activists in Serbia File Criminal Complaint against Wagner Group,” Reuters, January 19, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/pro-ukrainian-activists-serbia-file-criminal-complaint-against-wagner-group-2023-01-19/.

[xxxii] “Meeting with Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia Aleksandar Vulin,” President of Russia, September 4, 2024, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/75021; “Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s Opening Remarks at the Meeting with Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia Aleksandar Vulin on the Sidelines of the 2nd Minsk International Conference on Eurasian Security, Minsk, October 31, 2024,” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, October 31, 2024, https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1978461/; “Denis Manturov Meets with Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia Aleksandar Vulin,” The Russian Government, August 15, 2024, http://government.ru/en/news/52384/; “Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s Opening Remarks at the Meeting with Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia Aleksandar Vulin, Moscow, August 14, 2024,” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, August 14, 2024, https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1965566/.

[xxxiii] “Meeting with Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia Aleksandar Vulin.”

[xxxiv] “Meeting with President of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik,” President of Russia, June 6, 2024, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/74231.

[xxxv] Thomas de Waal, Dimitar Bechev, and Maksim Samorukov, “Between Russia and the EU: Europe’s Arc of Instability,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 30, 2024, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/05/bosnia-moldova-armenia-between-russia-eu?lang=en.

[xxxvi] Kurt Volker, “Don’t Let Russia Fool You About the Minsk Agreements,” Center for European Policy Analysis, December 16, 2021, https://cepa.org/article/dont-let-russia-fool-you-about-the-minsk-agreements/.

[xxxvii] “Security Council Meeting, February 21, 2022,” President of Russia, February 21, 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67825.

[xxxviii] Christo Grozev, “The Kremlin’s Balkan Gambit: Part I,” bellingcat, March 4, 2017, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2017/03/04/kremlins-balkan-gambit-part/.

[xxxix] Joshua Keating, “God’s Oligarch,” Slate, October 20, 2014, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/10/konstantin-malofeev-one-of-vladimir-putins-favorite-businessmen-wants-to-start-an-orthodox-christian-fox-news-and-return-russia-to-its-glorious-czarist-past.html.

[xl] “Russian Official Wanted by ICC Marries U.S.-Sanctioned Media Mogul – Reports,” The Moscow Times, September 9, 2024, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/09/09/russian-official-wanted-by-icc-marries-us-sanctioned-media-mogul-reports-a86307.

[xli] Isak Kulalic, “Russia’s Public Diplomacy in the Former Yugoslavia,” The Pardee Atlas Journal of Global Affairs, Back2School Initiative, 2021, https://sites.bu.edu/pardeeatlas/advancing-human-progress-initiative/back2school/russias-public-diplomacy-in-the-former-yugoslavia/; Fearghas O’Beara, “Russia’s War on Ukraine: The Kremlin’s Use of Religion as a Foreign Policy Instrument” (European Parliamentary Research Service: European Parliament, May 19, 2022), https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_ATA(2022)729430.

[xlii] Christo Grozev, “Balkan Gambit: Part 2. The Montenegro Zugzwang,” bellingcat, March 25, 2017, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2017/03/25/balkan-gambit-part-2-montenegro-zugzwang/.

[xliii] Wouter Zweers, Niels Drost, and Baptiste Henry, “Little Substance, Considerable Impact: Russian Sources of Influence in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

[xliv] Daniel J. White, “Vanguard Of A White Empire: Rusich, The Russian Imperial Movement, And Russia’s War Of Terror” (Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School, 2023), https://hdl.handle.net/10945/72291.

[xlv] Michael Birnbaum, “Russia’s Low-Cost Influence Strategy Finds Success in Serbia,” Washington Post, October 3, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russias-low-cost-influence-strategy-finds-success-in-serbia–with-the-help-of-fighter-jets-media-conspiracies-and-a-biker-gang/2018/10/03/49dbf48e-8f47-11e8-ae59-01880eac5f1d_story.html; Evan Pearce, “The Night Wolves Motorcycle Club,” The Journal of Intelligence, Conflict, and Warfare 1, no. 2 (November 16, 2018): 72–77, https://doi.org/10.21810/jicw.v1i2.646.

[xlvi] Pearce, “The Night Wolves Motorcycle Club.”

[xlvii] Night Wolves St. Petersburg, “nwmg_spb – 98895343_3015,” Wall Post, VKontakte, December 13, 2022, https://vk.com/nwmg_spb?w=wall-98895343_3015.

[xlviii] “Members Of Russia Motorcycle Group Night Wolves Take Part In Republika Srpska Celebration Day,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, January 9, 2023, sec. RFE/RL’s Balkan Service, https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-motorcycle-night-wolves-republika-srpska/32215945.html.

[xlix] СеVеро-СлавянZкая, “Читаем Лекцию По НВП Для Наших Друзей Из Мотоклуба ‘Ночные Волки – Санкт-Петербург’.,” Telegram, November 3, 2022, https://t.me/sevslavo/2084.

[l] White, “VANGUARD OF A WHITE EMPIRE,” 119–31.

[li] Yelizaveta Surnacheva et al., “The Redut Ruse: Inside Russia’s Fake Private Mercenary Company Fighting In Ukraine,” Schemes and Systems (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, October 10, 2023), https://www.rferl.org/a/redut-fake-russia-gru-pmc-ukraine/32708853.html.

[lii] Nikita Sologub, “‘Spare People’. Russian MP and ex‑DPR Leader Alexander Borodai Caught on Tape Describing Russian Volunteers as Expendable in Ukraine War,” Mediazona, November 4, 2024, https://en.zona.media/article/2024/11/04/borodai-trl.

[liii] Mladen Obrenovic, “As Ukraine Conflict Intensifies, Serb Volunteers Prepare for Battle,” Balkan Insight, April 16, 2021, https://balkaninsight.com/2021/04/16/as-ukraine-conflict-intensifies-serb-volunteers-prepare-for-battle/.

[liv] “Dangerous Organizations and Bad Actors: Serbian Action,” CTEC Publications (Middlebury Institute of International Studies, September 20, 2024), https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/ctec-publications/dangerous-organizations-and-bad-actors-serbian.

[lv] “Dangerous Organizations and Bad Actors.”

[lvi] Avdo Avdić, “UZ POMOĆ RUSKIH I SRBIJANSKIH SPECIJALACA: Milorad Dodik Formira Paravojne Jedinice u Republici Srpskoj!,” Žurnal, January 12, 2018, https://www.zurnal.info/clanak/milorad-dodik-formira-paravojne-jedinice-u-republici-srpskoj/20914.

[lvii] Avdo Avdić.

[lviii] Avdo Avdić.

[lix] Avdo Avdić.

[lx] “About Us,” Russian-Serbian Humanitarian Center, accessed February 9, 2025, https://www.ihc.rs/about-us/.

[lxi] “Putin Fires Defense Minister,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, November 6, 2012, sec. Russia, https://www.rferl.org/a/putin-fires-russia-defense-minister/24761953.html.

[lxii] “Hearing Before The Subcommittee On Europe And Regional Security Cooperation Of The Committee On Foreign Relations United States Senate One Hundred Fifteenth Congress First Session” (U.S. Government Publishing Office, June 14, 2017), https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/06 14 17 Southeast Europe Strengthening Democracy and Countering Malign Foreign Influence.pdf.

[lxiii] “Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban Receives a Medal from pro-Russia Bosnian Serb President Dodik,” Associated Press, April 5, 2024, sec. World News, https://apnews.com/article/bosnia-hungary-orban-medal-a89bb8f42cf1518565b65916d3cfa1e5.

[lxiv] “European Union Force in BiH – Multinational Battalion (MNBN),” European Union Force in BiH, accessed February 10, 2025, https://www.euforbih.org/index.php/multinational-battalion; Srecko Latal, “EU Doubles Bosnia Peacekeepers as Global Security ‘Deteriorates,’” Balkan Insight (blog), February 24, 2022, https://balkaninsight.com/2022/02/24/eu-doubles-bosnia-peacekeepers-as-global-security-deteriorates/.

[lxv] “The Fall of Srebrenica and the Failure of U.N. Peacekeeping” (Human Rights Watch, October 1, 1995), https://www.refworld.org/reference/countryrep/hrw/1995/en/77959.

[lxvi] Larisa Spahic, “Genocide in Srebrenica: 28 Years Later,” Trans European Policy Studies Association, July 7, 2023, https://tepsa.eu/analysis/genocide-in-srebrenica-28-years-later/.

[lxvii] Paul Niland, “Russia’s Ukraine Invasion Highlights the Need for Fundamental UN Reform,” Atlantic Council (blog), October 12, 2023, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russias-ukraine-invasion-highlights-the-need-for-fundamental-un-reform/.

[lxviii] Paula Erizanu, “Agent Saboteur. Who Is Milorad Dodik, Russia’s Man in Bosnia?,” Novaya Gazeta Europe, December 11, 2023, https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2023/12/11/agent-saboteur-en.

[lxix] “Kosovo Serb Politician Admits Role in Gun Battle That Killed Four,” Reuters, September 23, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kosovo-serb-politician-admits-role-gun-battle-that-killed-four-2023-09-29/.

[lxx] Marita Moloney, “Kosovo Monastery Siege Ends after Heavy Gun Battles,” BBC News, September 24, 2023, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66905091.

[lxxi] Elina Lange-Ionatamišvili, “Analysis of Russia’s Information Campaign Against Ukraine” (NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence, 2015), https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/russian_information_campaign_public_12012016fin.pdf.

[lxxii] “From Russia to Serbia: How RT Spreads the Kremlin’s Propaganda in the Balkans despite EU Sanctions | RSF,” September 30, 2024, https://rsf.org/en/russia-serbia-how-rt-spreads-kremlin-s-propaganda-balkans-despite-eu-sanctions; Vesko Garčević, “The Serbian Orthodox Church and Extreme-Right Groups: A Marriage of Convenience or Organic Partnership?,” Georgetown University, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, July 14, 2023, https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/posts/the-serbian-orthodox-church-and-extreme-right-groups-a-marriage-of-convenience-or-organic-partnership.

[lxxiii] Gabriel Gavin, “Azerbaijan Declares Victory in Lightning Nagorno-Karabakh Offensive,” POLITICO, September 20, 2023, https://www.politico.eu/article/azerbaijan-advance-nagorno-karabakh-conflict-armenia-military-offensive/.

[lxxiv] “From Milorad Dodik, President of the Republic of Srpska,” President of Azerbaijan Republic, September 26, 2023, https://president.az/en/articles/view/61275.

[lxxv] Hannah Lucinda Smith, “New Gendarmerie Stokes Fears in Breakaway Republika Srpska,” The Times, September 25, 2019, https://www.thetimes.com/article/new-gendarmerie-stokes-fears-in-breakaway-republika-srpska-ns07r7g58.

[lxxvi] “Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban Receives a Medal from pro-Russia Bosnian Serb President Dodik.”

[lxxvii] Vladimir Soldatkin and Anita Komuves, “Hungary’s Orban Talks Ukraine Peace with Putin, Stirring EU Outcry | Reuters,” Reuters, July 5, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/hungarys-orban-says-no-position-negotiate-between-ukraine-russia-2024-07-05/.

Tags: Balkans, Balkans War, empire, european security, Republic of Srpska, Russia, Russian Empire, Russian Federation, Russian threats, Srpska, Yugoslavia

About The Author

Dan White
Dan White is a program associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center's Kennan Institute. Dan is responsible for managing Kennan Institute programs and policy outreach. Dan's research focus includes US foreign policy toward Russia and Ukraine and geopolitics in Eurasia. Dan holds masters degrees from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the Naval Postgraduate School, and the University of Washington, and a bachelors degree from the University of Central Florida. Dan is a former officer in the United States Army and a veteran of the War in Afghanistan.

6. Trump tapped Kari Lake to run VOA. Then he dismantled it.

It is interesting to go to X/twitter and read Ms. Lake's string of tweets (@LariLake) that not only counter some of the reporting in this article but also get to the crux of the problem. https://x.com/KariLake

She is decrying the new 15 year lease for a new building for VOA calling it a waste of taxpayer dollars. Every one of her comments is about perceived fraud, waste, and abuse. There is no recognition of or discussion about the importance of the VOA mission and its contributions to national security.

Note this summary of comments (Of course they will be discredited because they come from Washington Post readers):

What readers are saying

The comments express strong disapproval of Trump's decision to dismantle Voice of America (VOA), viewing it as a move that undermines U.S. global influence and aids authoritarian regimes. Many commenters criticize the appointment of Kari Lake, suggesting she would have turned VOA into a propaganda tool. There is a sense of concern that this decision benefits adversaries like Russia and China, while also reflecting poorly on American democracy and its commitment to truth and journalism.

Trump tapped Kari Lake to run VOA. Then he dismantled it.

Lake had big plans to transform the outlet into a powerful “weapon” to fight an “information war.” Instead, the president has essentially shut it down.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/16/trump-voa-voice-of-america/?utm

March 16, 2025 at 12:44 p.m. EDTYesterday at 12:44 p.m. EDT

10 min

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Kari Lake gives an interview during the Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor in February. (Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post)

By Sarah Ellison, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Aaron Schaffer

During his first term, Donald Trump accused Voice of America of speaking “for America’s adversaries — not its citizens.” Over the weekend, he essentially dismantled it.

Late Friday, Trump issued an executive order that directed VOA and an array of federal offices to “be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” About 1,000 journalists were placed on indefinite leave. Those who showed up to work to broadcast their programs were locked out of the building.

It wasn’t exactly what Kari Lake was planning. The onetime candidate for Arizona governor and U.S. Senate whom Trump tapped to lead VOA had, like other MAGA loyalists, eagerly sought a role in the new administration. An ardent booster of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, Lake had also echoed Trump’s criticism of national media outlets and of the content at VOA. If confirmed to lead the organization, she had said, she would be able to transform the outlet into a powerful “weapon” to fight an “information war.”

But the rapid pace of events in recent days shows that Trump’s campaign to dismantle the federal bureaucracy and control U.S.-backed news content across the globe has effectively gutted VOA, potentially forcing it to go dark for the first time since it launched during World War II. It also reveals the uncertainty facing the people Trump installed to lead federal agencies — and the tension between their ambitions to be relevant and his own desire to cut those agencies out of existence.

Follow Trump’s first 100 Days

People like Lake.

Voice of America delivers news coverage to countries around the world where a free press is threatened or nonexistent. At its start, VOA told stories about democracy to people in Nazi Germany. VOA and affiliates such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia are designed as a form of soft diplomacy, a way to tout the United States’ free-press values in countries where antidemocratic forces prevail.

President Donald Trump and Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin speak to journalists ahead of meetings in the Oval Office on March 12. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Trump and his allies have attacked the federally run news outlet in the same way they have criticized mainstream media generally, accusing its journalists of publishing unfair and inaccurate reports. The outlet has also devoted significant attention to covering antidemocratic regimes, such as those in Russia and Hungary, that Trump regularly admires. It is another chilling sign of Trump’s desire to upend the United States’ relationship with the world, press freedom advocates say — and to eliminate the flow of information he doesn’t like. In this case, the impact is huge: VOA and its affiliates reach 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week.

Trump’s directive targeted the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, and severed contracts for privately incorporated international broadcasters the agency also oversees, including Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. All told, roughly 3,500 journalists and other media workers were affected by the moves.

Lake signed those termination notifications, according to four people familiar with the actions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.

“People in America don’t know a lot about USAGM and our networks because by law we can’t broadcast in the U.S.,” said Grant Turner, a former chief financial officer of the agency, who retired in January. “But our newsrooms are full of media stars with strong trust among overseas audiences who have little access to factual information. Kari Lake and the administration are just setting that all on fire.”

The head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Steve Capus, called the cancellations of the contracts “a massive gift to America’s enemies.”

A representative from VOA and the Agency for Global Media did not respond directly to a list of questions for this story. Instead, the representative responded with a message from Lake attacking The Washington Post.

Lake had quickly zeroed in on VOA as a next act after losing her 2024 bid for the Senate to Democrat Ruben Gallego. She was in touch with Trump, who had endorsed her campaign. At the time, Lake was being mentioned as a possible contender for ambassador to Mexico or as an agency spokesperson. Instead, the longtime local news anchor wanted a position that would put her decades of news experience to use.

“Kari really, really wanted VOA,” the person close to Lake recalled. “Shaping that voice to be more in line with President Trump’s vision and America First messaging.”

When Trump announced her as director of the organization on Dec. 11, he said she would “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.” But he and his allies have also been signaling their more dramatic intentions for weeks.

“It’s a relic of the past,” Richard Grenell, Trump’s special envoy for special missions, wrote on X in February. “We don’t need government paid media outlets.” Trump’s billionaire donor and government-cutting adviser Elon Musk agreed, writing on his social media platform: “Yes, shut them down … Nobody listens to them anymore.”

Initially, Lake pushed back. “I believe it is worth trying to save,” she told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in late February, just before she was named special adviser to the USAGM. Trump intends to install her as VOA director later this year. Lake said VOA “won’t become Trump TV. ” But, she added: “It sure as hell will not be T.D.S. TV,” referring to what she called “Trump derangement syndrome.”

Voice of America headquarters at 330 Independence Ave. SW in Washington in January. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Lake has spoken about the need for changes at VOA, according to an Arizona associate who had recently talked to her. But those changes sound more like operational shifts than wholesale revamping or downsizing. During one phone call, Lake said the outlet had not adapted with the times and needs to produce more digital-friendly content to expand its audience. She also spoke of a need to examine audience numbers, bureaus and content. Lake was pondering how to “rebuild audiences that have fallen off” and “shift resources,” the person recalled of the call.

Lake also said she wanted to leverage content the government already has, including footage created by NASA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and archival records at the Library of Congress, the person said.

As the scale of the U.S. DOGE Service’s ambitions have become more clear, however, Lake appears to have pivoted, and it is unclear whether her initial ideas will ever come to fruition.

More recently, her allies have claimed that there is no daylight between the Arizona Republican and Musk’s DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency and is leading the charge to reduce the federal bureaucracy on a massive scale. Lake came to the job with the mindset that she “would welcome the DOGE team to analyze” VOA operations and would support “whatever the Trump administration wanted to do,” a person close to Lake told The Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.

She arrived at the Agency for Global Media with several DOGE staffers at her side. She has circulated with Mora Namdar, who wrote a chapter in Project 2025 about Voice of America and its parent entity. Namdar pilloried the agency for “joining the mainstream media’s anti-U.S. chorus and denigrating the American story — all in the name of so-called journalistic independence.” She named veteran reporter Steve Herman as an example of a VOA reporter who was “personally insulting” to Trump during his first administration.

Herman was placed on paid “excused absence” while his bosses started a review of his social media posts to determine whether they were biased against the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the investigation. Herman confirmed his status to The Washington Post but declined to comment further.

The day before the executive order, Lake announced plans to cancel the news agency’s “expensive and unnecessary newswire contracts,” including with the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. She said the decision would save $53 million.

She also told her social media audience that she was shocked about another expense: the price of what she described as a swanky Biden-era building lease. She called the lease “a colossal waste of money.” She has also gone on conservative news outlets to encourage Trump allies to help her find fault with the outlets she oversees.

The message was “just full of lies and misrepresentations about the new headquarters building,” Turner said, “saying it was a bad deal when in fact, it saves the government over $150 million” over 15 years.

The existing USAGM building experienced frequent leaks, had bad HVAC and needed regular repairs to its systems, said Turner and a half-dozen staffers who backed his account and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The existing building is about 700,000 square feet, and the new building, at 300,000 square feet, constructed in the mid-2000s, shrinks the agency’s real estate footprint by more than half.

On Saturday, Lake underscored her support for Trump’s gutting of VOA and its parent, USAGM. She ticked off the “most egregious findings” she said she’d already found at the agency, including “massive national security violations” and “eye-popping self dealing,” though she did not mention a specific example of either. Musk appeared to approve of her rhetoric, retweeting her video Sunday.

Trump’s disdain for VOA made international news last week in a testy exchange with a VOA journalist in the Oval Office.

Patsy Widakuswara asked visiting Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin whether he and Trump would discuss “the president’s plans to expel Palestinian families” from Gaza.

“Nobody’s expelling any Palestinians,” Trump interrupted, then asked Widakuswara: “Who are you with?”

“Voice of America, sir,” she answered.

“No wonder,” Trump scoffed.

Widakuswara never published a story about the exchange. Though she had written a preview of the meeting the week before, no story from her appeared on the Voice of America website the evening of the meeting. Instead, VOA published a dispatch from Reuters.

Widakuswara confirmed via social media that she was among the journalists placed on administrative leave Saturday, but declined to comment further.

To take on the director role at VOA, Lake must wait for Trump’s pick to lead USAGM — the conservative media critic L. Brent Bozell III — to be confirmed by the Senate. Then, a bipartisan board overseeing the network must approve Lake’s position.

One complication: After Trump took office, the White House fired all members of the bipartisan board. Any replacements must also be confirmed by the Senate, leaving the timing of Lake’s appointment uncertain.

What readers are saying

The comments express strong disapproval of Trump's decision to dismantle Voice of America (VOA), viewing it as a move that undermines U.S. global influence and aids authoritarian regimes. Many commenters criticize the appointment of Kari Lake, suggesting she would have turned VOA into a propaganda tool. There is a sense of concern that this decision benefits adversaries like Russia and China, while also reflecting poorly on American democracy and its commitment to truth and journalism.

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

All comments 1148

By Sarah Ellison

Sarah Ellison is a national enterprise reporter for The Washington Post. Previously, she wrote for Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, where she started as a news assistant in Paris.follow on X@sarahellison

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez

Yvonne Wingett Sanchez writes about voting issues in Arizona for The Washington Post. She previously covered politics for the Arizona Republic.follow on X@yvonnewingett

By Aaron Schaffer

Aaron Schaffer is a researcher on The Post's News Research team.follow on X@aaronjschaffer

7. Voice of America staff put on leave, Trump ally says agency 'not salvageable'

Unsalvageable? It pains me to read such a comment especially from the person who was nominated to head the organization.

And as I learned today from a VOA journalist that they are all being terminated at the end of this month.

This makes the leadership in China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea very happy.

Excerpts:

Trump's directives look set to devastate an organization that serves as a rare source of reliable news in authoritarian countries.

Founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, VOA now reaches 360 million people a week. As a group, USAGM employs roughly 3,500 workers with an $886-million budget in 2024, according to its latest report to Congress.

VOA's Seoul Bureau Chief William Gallo said on Sunday he had been locked out of all company systems and accounts.

"All I've ever wanted to do is shoot straight and tell the truth, no matter what government I was covering. If that's a threat to anyone, so be it," he said on Bluesky.

Kari Lake, the former news anchor and Trump loyalist nominated to be director of VOA, issued a statement describing USAGM as "a giant rot and burden to the American taxpayer" and said it was "not salvageable." Lake, referring to herself as a USAGM senior adviser, said she would shrink the agency to its minimum possible size under the law.

Voice of America staff put on leave, Trump ally says agency 'not salvageable'

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/trump-signs-order-gut-voice-america-other-agencies-2025-03-15/

By Nathan Layne and James Oliphant

March 15, 202511:46 PM EDTUpdated a day ago

Item 1 of 3 A view of the exterior of the U.S. Agency for Global Media building, where government funded media company Voice of America is based, in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 14, 2022. To match Exclusive UKRAINE-CRISIS/RUSSIA-VPN REUTERS/Sarah Silbiger

[1/3]A view of the exterior of the U.S. Agency for Global Media building, where government funded media company Voice of America is based, in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 14, 2022. To match Exclusive UKRAINE-CRISIS/RUSSIA-VPN REUTERS/Sarah Silbiger Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

SummaryCompanies

Trump signed order gutting VOA's parent agencyRadio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia see funding cutConservatives have been critical of the news services

March 15 (Reuters) - - More than 1,300 Voice of America employees were placed on leave on Saturday and funding for two U.S. news services that broadcast to authoritarian regimes was terminated, one day after President Donald Trump ordered the gutting of the government-funded media outlet's parent and six other federal agencies.

Michael Abramowitz, Voice of America's director, said nearly his entire staff of 1,300 journalists, producers and assistants had been put on administrative leave, crippling a media broadcaster that operates in almost 50 languages.

"I am deeply saddened that for the first time in 83 years, the storied Voice of America is being silenced," Abramowitz said in a post on LinkedIn, saying it has played an important role "in the fight for freedom and democracy around the world."

VOA's parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), also terminated its grants to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which broadcasts to countries in Eastern Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, as well as to Radio Free Asia, which broadcasts to China and North Korea.

Trump's directives look set to devastate an organization that serves as a rare source of reliable news in authoritarian countries.

Founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, VOA now reaches 360 million people a week. As a group, USAGM employs roughly 3,500 workers with an $886-million budget in 2024, according to its latest report to Congress.

VOA's Seoul Bureau Chief William Gallo said on Sunday he had been locked out of all company systems and accounts.

"All I've ever wanted to do is shoot straight and tell the truth, no matter what government I was covering. If that's a threat to anyone, so be it," he said on Bluesky.

Kari Lake, the former news anchor and Trump loyalist nominated to be director of VOA, issued a statement describing USAGM as "a giant rot and burden to the American taxpayer" and said it was "not salvageable." Lake, referring to herself as a USAGM senior adviser, said she would shrink the agency to its minimum possible size under the law.

On its website, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty notes that it has been declared an "undesirable organization" by the Russian government and warns readers in Russia and Russia-occupied Ukraine that they could "face fines or imprisonment" for liking or sharing its content.

Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said Radio Free Europe had been a "beacon" for populations under totalitarian rule.

"From Belarus to Iran, from Russia to Afghanistan, RFE and Voice of America are among the few free sources for people living without freedom," he wrote on X.

The move follows Trump signing an executive order on Friday instructing USAGM and six other little-known agencies to reduce their operations to the minimum mandated by statutes, saying it was necessary to shrink bureaucracy.

FREE PRESS ADVOCATES CRITICAL

The president of the National Press Club in Washington, Mike Balsamo, released a statement saying the cuts at VOA undermined America's commitment to a free and independent press.

"For decades, Voice of America has delivered fact-based, independent journalism to audiences worldwide, often in places where press freedom does not exist," Balsamo said.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders also blasted the move, saying it "threatens press freedom worldwide and negates 80 years of American history in supporting a free flow of information."

Radio Free Asia's (RFA) president, Bay Fang, said the cancellation of its funding was "a reward to dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would like nothing better than to have their influence go unchecked."

Some Republicans have accused VOA and other publicly funded media outlets of being biased against conservatives, and have called for them to be shuttered as part of the efforts by tech billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the government.

So far, Musk's DOGE has cut more than 100,000 jobs across the 2.3 million-member federal civilian workforce, frozen foreign aid and cancelled thousands of programs and contracts.

On Saturday, Musk made light of the cuts to USAGM.

"While winding down this global government propaganda agency, it has temporarily been renamed the Department of Propaganda Everywhere (DOPE)," he wrote on X.

In addition to USAGM, Trump's order also targeted the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Minority Business Development Agency for cuts that would limit them to "the minimum presence and function required by law."

In a statement, the White House said his executive orders "will ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda," before listing various criticisms of VOA, including allegations of left-wing bias.

Reporting by Nathan Layne in West Palm Beach, Florida and James Oliphant in Washington; Additional reporting by Jason Hovet in Prague and Josh Smith in Seoul; Editing by Michelle Nichols, Mark Potter, Diane Craft, Rod Nickel, Deepa Babington and Lincoln Feast.

8. Following outcry, Army republishes web article on 442nd Regimental Combat Team

Thank you Army for doing the right thing.

Following outcry, Army republishes web article on 442nd Regimental Combat Team

After an outcry, the Army has republished a history of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team on its website.

https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2025/03/16/following-outcry-army-republishes-web-article-442nd-regimental-combat-team/

By Ben Gutierrez

Published: Mar. 15, 2025 at 8:27 PM EDT|Updated: 24 hours ago

WASHINGTON, D.C. (HawaiiNewsNow) - The U.S. Army has republished an article detailing the history of the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team on it’s website.

The article was republished Saturday, replacing the webpage that was taken down sometime earlier this month, triggering an outcry from relatives of members of the unit and others, including U.S. Congressmen Ed Case of Hawaii and Mark Takano of California, whose great uncle was a veteran of the 442nd.

The 442nd, combined with the 100th Infantry Battalion, remains the most decorated combat unit in history for its size and length of service. The World War II unit was made up mostly of second generation Japanese-Americans.

In a statement sent to Hawaii News Now Saturday, a U.S. Army spokesperson at the Pentagon said, “The 442nd Regimental Combat team holds an honored place in Army History and we are pleased to republish an article that highlights the brave Soldiers who served in the “Go-for-Broke” brigade.”

The emailed statement continued,:

“In accordance with a Presidential Executive Order and guidance from the Secretary of Defense, the Army recently took down the Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders Heritage webpage that featured content about the 442nd Infantry Regiment and Nisei Soldiers. The Army is tirelessly working through content on that site and articles related to the 442nd Infantry Regiment and Nisei Soldiers will be republished to better align with current guidance.”

The link to the original webpage still goes to the Army’s official homepage.

This story will be updated.

9. Trump’s English language order upends America’s long multilingual history

I just do not see the rationale for this order.

Paradoxically, many immigrants only want their children to learn and speak English. That is the case with my immigrant wife - she only wanted our daughter to learn English because she is an American (My wife came to the US in 1988 and said we can only buy American made goods because we live in America).

And this is troubling:

This new order also revokes a language-access provision contained in an earlier executive order from 2000 that aimed to improve access to services for people with limited English. Federal agencies now seem to have no obligation to provide vital information in other languages.

...

English has long functioned as a pragmatic lingua franca for the U.S. Yet an American tendency towards ideological monolingualism is gathering momentum.

The emergence of Spanish as the nation’s second language, with well over 40 million speakers, has generated a particular anxiety. During the last few decades, more than 30 American states have enshrined English as an official language.

...

Practically, it remains unclear what the order means for Spanish in Puerto Rico, the Indigenous languages of Hawaii and Alaska — which have received official recognition — for American Sign Language and for all the multilingual communities that make up the nation.

Language access can be a matter of life or death.

Interpretation in courts, hospitals and schools is a fundamental human right. No one should be barred from accessing vital services simply because they don’t speak English, whether that’s when dealing with a judge, a doctor or a teacher. The consequences of government agencies abandoning their already limited efforts at translation and interpretation could have huge ramifications.

Trump’s English language order upends America’s long multilingual history

Authors

Mark Turin
Associate professor, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia
Ross Perlin
Lecturer, Linguistics, Columbia University

Disclosure statement

Mark Turin receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo.

Ross Perlin has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

theconversation.com · by Mark Turin

Across its nearly 250-year history, the United States has never had an official language. On March 1, U.S. President Donald Trump changed that when he signed an executive order designating English as the country’s sole official language. The order marks a fundamental rupture from the American government's long-standing approach to languages.

“From the founding of our Republic, English has been used as our national language,” Trump’s order states. “It is in America’s best interest for the federal government to designate one — and only one — official language.”

This new order also revokes a language-access provision contained in an earlier executive order from 2000 that aimed to improve access to services for people with limited English. Federal agencies now seem to have no obligation to provide vital information in other languages.

Despite some reactions in the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere, it remains unclear whether Trump’s executive order will face legal or political challenges. Amid continual attacks from the Trump administration on established norms, this decree may pass with relatively little resistance, despite a deeper meaning that extends far beyond language.

Multilingual realities and monolingual fantasies

The U.S. has a long multilingual history, beginning with the hundreds of Indigenous languages indelibly linked to these lands. The secondary layer are colonial languages and their variants, including French in Louisiana and Spanish in the Southwest. In all historical periods, immigrant languages from around the world have added substantially to the linguistic mix that makes up the U.S.

Today, New York is one of world’s most linguistically diverse cities, with other U.S. coastal cities not far behind. According to data from the Census Bureau, one-fifth of all Americans can speak two or more languages. The social, economic and cognitive benefits of bilingualism are well-established, and there is no data to support the assertion that speaking more than one language threatens the integrity of the nation state.

A building in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City, which hosts speakers of diverse South Asian languages and their associations, April 17, 2017. (Ross Perlin)

English has long functioned as a pragmatic lingua franca for the U.S. Yet an American tendency towards ideological monolingualism is gathering momentum.

The emergence of Spanish as the nation’s second language, with well over 40 million speakers, has generated a particular anxiety. During the last few decades, more than 30 American states have enshrined English as an official language.

Linguistic insecurity

The March 1 executive order is a crowning achievement for the “English-only movement.” Trump has tapped directly into this sentiment and its xenophobic preoccupations, rooted in white fragility and white supremacy.

In 2015, during his first bid for the Oval Office, Trump reprimanded Jeb Bush, the bilingual former governor of Florida, during a televised debate, stating: “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.”

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2024, Trump gave voice to his own linguistic insecurity:

“We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language…These are languages — it’s the craziest thing — they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing.”

Beyond the brazen untruths and intentional exaggerations, such statements only reflect weakness and fear. The March 1 executive order states that “a nationally designated language is at the core of a unified and cohesive society.”

It is in fact a sign of strength that Americans have not needed such a mandate until now, effectively navigating their complex multilingual reality without top-down legislation.

English around the world

It’s instructive to compare the language policy of the U.S. with other settler colonial contexts where English is dominant.

In neighbouring Canada, the 1969 Official Languages Act grants equal status to English and French — two languages that were brought European migrants — and requires all federal institutions to provide services in both languages on request. Revealingly, only 50 years later did Canada finally pass an Indigenous Languages Act granting modest recognition to the original languages of the land.

While Australia’s constitution specifies no official language, the government promotes English as the “national language,” and then offers to translate some web pages into other languages.

Navigating the distinction between de facto and de jure, New Zealand has taken a more considered approach. Recognizing that English is unthreatened and secure, even without legal backing, New Zealand legislators have focused their attention elsewhere. Te reo Māori was granted official language status in 1987, followed by New Zealand Sign Language in 2006.

Even the colonial centre and origin point for the global spread of English, the United Kingdom assumes a nuanced position on language policy. Welsh and Irish have both received some official recognition, while in Scotland, the Bòrd na Gàidhlig continues to advocate for official recognition of Gaelic.

People walk past a sign encouraging them to order a coffee in Māori, during annual Māori language week in Wellington, New Zealand, in September 2024. (AP Photo/Charlotte GrahamMcLay)

Principle and practice

Trump’s recent executive order is both practical and symbolic.

Practically, it remains unclear what the order means for Spanish in Puerto Rico, the Indigenous languages of Hawaii and Alaska — which have received official recognition — for American Sign Language and for all the multilingual communities that make up the nation.

Language access can be a matter of life or death.

Interpretation in courts, hospitals and schools is a fundamental human right. No one should be barred from accessing vital services simply because they don’t speak English, whether that’s when dealing with a judge, a doctor or a teacher. The consequences of government agencies abandoning their already limited efforts at translation and interpretation could have huge ramifications.

Symbolically, Trump’s order is red meat for his MAGA followers. Associating national integrity with the promotion of one language above others might seem to reflect American exceptionalism, but it in fact destroys the cultural and linguistic diversity that makes the U.S. exceptional.

Ironically, this executive order brings the U.S. into alignment with most of the world’s other nation-states — albeit not the ones that speak English as their first language — which seek to impose the standardized language of an ethnic majority on all of their citizens. The consequences can be both polarizing and homogenizing.

Most of the world’s people are resolutely multilingual and are only becoming more so. Americans will not stop speaking, writing and signing in languages other than English because of an executive order. The linguistic dynamism of the U.S. is essential to the country’s social fabric. It should be nurtured and defended.

theconversation.com · by Mark Turin

10. ‘How gratifying’: Cheers in China as Trump dismantles Voice of America

The leaders in China (and Russia, Iran, and north Korea) are very pleased. The people in those countries are not cheering.

This might be called unilateral disarmament.

‘How gratifying’: Cheers in China as Trump dismantles Voice of America | CNN

CNN · by Nectar Gan · March 17, 2025

Inside the Voice of America studio in Washington, November 30, 2018.

Jason Andrew/The New York Times/Redux

Hong Kong CNN —

One nationalist influencer called it “truly gratifying.” Another said he was laughing his head off. And a state-media editorial hailed the demise of what it called the “lie factory.”

For years, the Chinese government and its propaganda apparatus have relentlessly attacked VOA and RFA for their critical coverage of China, particularly on human rights and religious freedom.

Chinese nationalists and state media could hardly contain their schadenfreude after President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday to dismantle Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Asia (RFA) and other US government-funded media organizations that broadcast to authoritarian regimes.

And now, the Trump administration is silencing the very institutions that Beijing has long sought to undermine – at a time when China is spending lavishly to expand the global footprint of its own state media.

In an editorial Monday, the Global Times, a pugnacious Communist Party-run newspaper, denounced VOA as a “lie factory” with an “appalling track record” on China reporting.

From its coverage of alleged human rights abuses in the far western Xinjiang region to reporting on South China Sea disputes, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the coronavirus pandemic and the Chinese economy, “almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it,” the editorial claimed.

“As more Americans begin to break through their information cocoons and see a real world and a multidimensional China, the demonizing narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughingstock of the times,” it added.

VOA’s China coverage stretches back decades. During the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy protests, its Chinese-language radio broadcasts became a critical source of uncensored information for the Chinese people. (VOA discontinued its Chinese radio broadcasts in 2011 but its Chinese language website remained online as of Monday.)

RFA, founded in 1996, broadcasts to China in English, Chinese, Uyghur and Tibetan-language services, catering to ethnic minorities whose freedoms the Chinese government has long been accused of suppressing.

RFA CEO Bay Fang called the US grant cutoff “a reward to dictators and despots, including the Chinese Communist Party, who would like nothing better than to have their influence go unchecked in the information space.”

The US Agency for Global Media website displays on a mobile phone with US Agency For Global Media (USAGM) visible in the background, in this photo illustration in Brussels, Belgium, on March 16, 2025. (Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto/Getty Images

On Chinese social media, nationalist influencers celebrated the demise of VOA, which has placed all 1,300 staff on administrative leave, and of RFA, which said it may cease operations following the termination of federal grants.

“Voice of America has been paralyzed! And so has Radio Free Asia, which is just as malicious toward China. How truly gratifying!” wrote Hu Xijin, a former editor-in-chief of the Global Times and prominent nationalist commentator.

“Almost all Chinese people know the Voice of America, as it is a symbolic tool of US ideological infiltration into China,” Hu wrote in a post on microblogging site Weibo, where he has nearly 25 million followers. “(I) believe that Chinese people are more than happy to see America’s anti-China ideological stronghold crumble from within, scattering like a flock of startled birds.”

Another nationalist commentator accused VOA and RFA of being “notorious propaganda machines for color revolutions,” referring to protests of the 2000s that toppled governments in the former Soviet Union and the Balkans.

“I’m laughing my head off!” they said.

Others cheered Trump, who during his first term in office was nicknamed “Chuan Jianguo,” or “Trump, the (Chinese) nation builder” by the Chinese internet, in a mocking suggestion that the US president’s isolationist foreign policy and divisive domestic agenda was helping Beijing to overtake Washington on the global stage.

“Thank you, Comrade Chuan Jianguo and Elon Musk, please take care and stay safe,” a Weibo user said on Monday.

Musk, the billionaire adviser to Trump who has been spearheading sweeping cuts to the US government, has used his social media platform X to call for VOA to be shut down.

“This news marks the end of an era,” said another comment on Weibo on Sunday.

The White House defended Trump’s executive order in a statement Saturday, claiming it “will ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.”

But as the US-funded stations dial down, China is busy amplifying its own messages to the world.

Under leader Xi Jinping, China has drastically expanded the reach and influence of its state media outlets as part of its push to gain “discourse power” in a world it sees as unfairly dominated by the Western narrative.

In 2018, Beijing announced the creation of a giant media conglomerate by merging three existing state-run networks aimed at overseas audiences to better combine resources. Its name? Voice of China.

CNN · by Nectar Gan · March 17, 2025

11. Diplomat asks Trump to hear harrowing Havana Syndrome experience

How long did it take for the government to recognize Agent Orange? Gulf War Syndrome? Burn Pits?

I do not hold much hope that our fellow Americans who are suffering will get help any time soon.

Diplomat asks Trump to hear harrowing Havana Syndrome experience

By LAURA PARNABY FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

Published: 02:10 EDT, 17 March 2025 | Updated: 02:10 EDT, 17 March 2025

Daily Mail · by LAURA PARNABY FOR DAILYMAIL.COM · March 17, 2025

As a US diplomat for the nation's consulate in southern China, Mark Lenzi was used to dealing with master-codes and confidential information every day.

But while was sitting at his desk in Guangzhou, the security engineering officer suddenly found his brain was so foggy he couldn't remember basic passwords.

Soon the New Hampshire native's head was pounding, the severe fatigue set in and even the office light seemed painfully blinding.

After struggling through the day, the longtime official found he could barely sleep at night at his government-provided high-rise located close to the Pearl River, around 75 miles northwest of Hong Kong.

It was the spring of 2018, and he didn't realize until later that the strange symptoms appeared to be sparked by something at the apartment, where he lived with his wife, daughter and son, then aged nine and four.

Now, in an exclusive interview with Daily Mail close to the Washington, DC, hospital where he is being treated, Lenzi, 50, has shared how one harrowing moment marked the start of what would be a lifetime affliction for his family.

State Department security engineering officer Mark Lenzi, 50, believes he suffered a false microwave attack by Russia while he was posted in China in 2018. (Pictured: the Lenzi family)

Pictured: the area of Guangzhou, China, where the Lenzis were staying in spring 2018

One of the sonic weapons that could cause Havana syndrome is said to be a smaller version of this 1990s Soviet microwave generator, which is kept at the University of New Mexico

Lenzi said the family's health troubles started with a single sound - an ominous 'clicking noise' emanating from the main bedroom which overlooked thousands of other buildings.

The strange audio seemed to trigger a visceral reaction for each member of the family, ranging from intense pressure in their heads accompanied by a wave of nausea to sudden severe nosebleeds.

‘My wife was giving the kids a bath in the Guangzhou apartment,' he said, remembering the upsetting incident from the spring of 2018.

'My wife heard the clicking sounds, and all of a sudden, both kids had bleeding noses so severely that the water turned red with blood.’

Lenzi is now listed among more than 300 US officials based abroad who have reported experiencing the strange set of symptoms linked to 'Havana Syndrome' - a condition first seen in 2016 among Americans posted in Cuba.

Many of those impacted by the illness, including Lenzi, believe that Russian military intelligence operatives are using pulsed microwave attacks to target Americans on their enemy list.

The official, who said Vladimir Putin kicked him out of Russia in 2002, explained that his family was promptly medevac'd out of China on June 6, 2018, after he and his wife failed State Department medical tests.

As shown in medical documents seen by the Daily Mail, UPenn scientists determined that Lenzi had 'experienced uncharacterized environmental exposure' while DC doctors diagnosed them with 'mild brain injuries'.

In further implicit recognition of their suffering, the federal government gave the Lenzis $1 million under the Havana Act Compensation Act - despite the White House never admitting that what they experienced was real.

After being 'ignored and gas-lit' by the Biden administration for the past seven years, Lenzi is now hopeful President Donald Trump will hear his story and take the threat that Havana Syndrome poses to Americans around the world seriously.

Pictured: Lenzi undergoing brain EEG at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Hospital in January 2025

Lenzi has been receiving treatment for a 'mild brain injury' diagnosis for the past few years

Lenzi has worked for the State Department in Russia, China and Finland for more than 22 years

State Department security engineering officer Lenzi believes he suffered a false microwave attack by Russia while he was posted in China in 2018. (Pictured: the Lenzi family)

Lenzi believes he was targeted because of his work with Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili in the former Soviet Union, a political enemy of Putin's who has since been imprisoned.

‘The fact that he (Putin) would do this to me is honestly the least surprising thing,' said Lenzi, who has worked for the State Department for 22 years.

'But I was surprised that my family was also being affected. That crossed a line.

'What was shocking was that my own government who I have worked for in Afghanistan and Iraq turned its back on me and my family the one time I asked them for anything. I never asked them for a goddamn thing.’

Lenzi said when his family first experienced 'Havana Syndrome' symptoms in the spring of 2018, he thought it may have been them simply adapting to the thick smog that blanketed the Guangdong province.

‘What I couldn’t explain though, was I was having severe short-term memory problems,' he told Daily Mail.

‘I have to have a lot of master-codes in my head and classified information for my job, but I couldn’t even remember the most basic passwords.

'The short-term memory loss for me was the most distressing.’

The Lenzi family lived next door to Catherine Werner, another US diplomat at the consulate, who said she also experienced the same odd symptoms. Her dog even began throwing up blood.

It took them a while to piece their cases together because, according to Lenzi, the US consulate 'was going to great lengths to have us not talk'.

'We were both experiencing the headaches, vertigo issues, sleep difficulties, and things like that,' he said.

Symptoms of Havana Syndrome include loud noise, ear pain, intense head pressure or vibration, dizziness, visual problems, and cognitive difficulties

Pictured: Lenzi's diagnosis of 'mild acquired brain injury'

The security official added that the symptoms were even worse for his then-four-year-old son, who was later diagnosed with severe working memory deficits.

‘My manager refused to listen to me. I was begging them,' Lenzi said, referring to State Department Diplomatic Security Regional Security Officer Eun 'Judy' Lim.

Lenzi said the most 'outrageous' part of the saga for him was when the US government denied treatment for his kids, claiming that children's brains were not impacted by the environment because their skulls weren't fully formed yet.

'They fed us a crock of s***,' he said. 'They didn't want to open that can of worms.'

This had devastating impacts for his young son, who is now aged 10.

‘One of the darkest days in my life was when I was at Walter Reed with my son and he was being put through all the balance tests,' Lenzi said.

'The doctors said, “This is really severe”. They said to me, “Why didn’t you get him treated right away?” The fact that he didn’t get treated right away means that his condition is even worse. I had tears streaming down my face. I have to live with this.’

Lenzi said the State Department 'grudgingly' gave them Havana Acquired Brain Injury Tests in April 2018 after 'dangerous levels of pulsed microwave radiation were measured' around the home where they were saying.

The family failed the tests, triggering their evacuation from China.

Pictured: State Department official Lenzi with his daughter, who is now 15 years old

Lenzi said his son was four years old and his daughter nine when they suffered the attacks

State Department security engineering officer Lenzi believes he suffered a false microwave attack by Russia while he was posted in China in 2018. (Pictured: the Lenzi family)

Lenzi said the State Department is well aware that the clicking sounds they heard were 'due to thermoelastic expansion of the inner ear', known in the science community as 'Frey Effect hearing', caused by pulsed microwave radiation.

The US government transferred the family to UPenn on June 8, 2018, where they were treated for 'concussion' symptoms.

Lenzi said the treatment did not help, so he sought help from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in May 2022 based on a recommendation from a friend.

He said doctors at the DC hospital 'made a breakthrough' after diagnosing him with 'mild brain injury' and advising him to sleep for at least 12 hours a day while limiting exercise to very light workouts only.

Lenzi emailed his diagnosis to his superiors at the State Department while letting them know he was finally getting effective medical care - but they were 'apoplectic', telling him he was 'supposed to stay at UPenn’.

‘The US Government knows exactly how to treat this injury, but they want us to be quiet about it,' Lenzi told the Daily Mail.

'I could swallow that if it was just me over in China on temporary assignment, but this impacts a lot of people and their families.’

‘The hell that I had to go through to get treated… that’s what got me,' he added. ‘The State Department continues to treat me horribly’.

Lenzi has worked for the State Department in Russia, China and Finland for more than 22 years

The State Department diplomat wants Donald Trump to hear his story in the hopes Havana Syndrome victims will be taken more seriously

Lenzi said it took the advocacy of his local New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen to allow Americans afflicted with Havana Syndrome finally to get access to the treatment they needed.

Shaheen sponsored the WiRe Act requiring the Department of Defense to provide government employees and their relatives 'timely access to Walter Reed for assessment if they are determined to be experiencing certain anomalous health conditions'.

His uphill battle also allegedly involved being gas-lit by the State Department while he was still in China.

Lenzi said the government gave him 'increased emotionality counseling sessions' to make him believe he was experiencing a mental or emotional issue rather than a physical response to a material attack.

'Lim (his manager) and US Consulate Guangzhou leaders were trying to intimidate me into being quiet about my symptoms because they knew that me and my neighbor were injured and wanted to suppress this,' he told the DailyMail.com.

While many of his colleagues afflicted by Havana Syndrome simply 'gave up' and medically retired, Lenzi refused to back down.

He approached the State Department Inspector General with documents he said proved a government 'cover up' in July 2018, and again in August 2024, by which time he was posted in Helsinki.

'This time they listened and designated me officially as a whistleblower,' Lenzi said.

He added that State Department officials responded by 'freaking out' and ultimately terminating his employment early, as shown in official documents seen by the the Daily Mail.

Though Lenzi officially retains his title of security engineering officer for the State Department, in practice he said he has been 'sidelined' to sending visa applications from DC, while his family remains in Helsinki due to his children's schooling.

Now, Lenzi wants acknowledgement of what he has been through from the White House.

'The Biden administration went to great lengths to cover up these false microwave attacks,' Lenzi said.

'I want to see Tulsi Gabbard and Marco Rubio visit me in Walter Reed and hear directly from victims and our doctors.

‘When congressmen are able to talk to my doctors and see my MRIs and hear directly from victims and see proof, see evidence, it’s very powerful.’

Daily Mail has contacted the State Department for comment.

Daily Mail · by LAURA PARNABY FOR DAILYMAIL.COM · March 17, 2025

12. Army’s 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force to get its own Typhon missile system

Army’s 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force to get its own Typhon missile system

defenseone.com · by Meghann Myers

U.S. Army 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force fires the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System on Pacific Missile Range Facility, Barking Sands, during Exercise Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2024, July 11. Japanese Ground Self Defense Force

The second Pacific MDTF has also joined Transformation in Contact, while building its way to 2,000 soldiers.

March 14, 2025

By Meghann Myers

Staff Reporter

March 14, 2025

The Army’s latest modern concept unit is getting a new capability in the next year or so, as it works its way up to full operational capability.

The Hawaii-based 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force is getting one of the two Typhon mid-range missile launcher batteries based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash., Col. Mike Rose, the unit’s commander, told reporters Friday.

“We're constantly looking for opportunities to exercise capability like that forward, in theater,” Rose said, though the Typhon hasn’t seen any live-fire exercises to date.

Both systems have been deployed to the Philippines since last year.

Two of the Army’s three existing MDTFs are based in the Pacific, as the centerpiece of the service’s efforts to deter and respond to conflict with China. The Army codified the units’ basic principles—integrating information, cyber, and electronic warfare with long-range fires under one commander—into doctrine in 2022, leaving behind the Global War on Terror’s siloed air, land, and information campaigns.

The 3rd MDTF stood up in September 2022 at Fort Shafter, Hawaii, and has been operating since May 2023. The Army is planning five of the task forces in all, with the fourth on track to stand up at Fort Carson, Colo., in 2027.

Recently, Rose said, the new unit became part of the Army’s Transformation-in-Contact effort, giving it access to the service’s rapid development and acquisitions program.

“Inside of that, we have been constantly working with and employing new program-of-record prototype capabilities, experimental capabilities ... to inform programs of record and requirements specific to our mission,” he said.

The unit is looking to fill some capability gaps, he added, like unmanned aerial systems, counter-UAS and command and control systems—capabilities the Navy and Marine Corps are also seeking.

To do so, the3rd MDTF plans to add a few hundred more personnel over the next year and a half to get to its eventually 2,000-soldier formation, with a headquarters and four battalions. That will include a long-range precision fires battalion, Rose said, and a sustainment battalion.

“So we're doing that and managing that growth and that capability development while also campaigning, so that it keeps us pretty busy,” he said.

Do you work in the national-security sphere? Tell us how these efforts are affecting you. Contact Meghann Myers by email at mmyers@defenseone.com or Signal at meghannmyers.55.

13. The end of nonproliferation?

The end of nonproliferation?

The United States' rejection of security commitments could lead to a spike in nuclear-armed states.

defenseone.com · by Glenn Chafetz

A 24-hour Yonhapnews TV broadcast at Yongsan Railway Station in Seoul shows a news broadcast of a test launch of new intercontinental ballistic missile at an undisclosed place in North Korea, Nov. 1, 2024. Kim Jae-Hwan / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images

The United States' rejection of security commitments could lead to a spike in nuclear-armed states.

March 16, 2025 08:00 AM ET

The Trump administration’s abandonment of alliances in favor of a transactional, unilateral foreign policy portends the end of the nuclear nonproliferation regime. The main reason that Germany, Japan, South Korea, other states have not developed independent nuclear forces is the U.S. security commitment. Now that the United States has weakened, questioned, or rejected those commitments, the rationale for nonproliferation has disappeared. U.S. policymakers should expect a rapid growth in the number of nuclear-armed states and a consequent increase in instability, insecurity, and conflict.

The nuclear nonproliferation regime was based on the consensus that a world full of nuclear-armed states would be more dangerous and less stable than a world in which only a few states possessed nuclear weapons. It is true that the United States and Russia, including in the Soviet period, never fought a direct armed conflict against each other, but neither did the possession of nuclear weapons eliminate each state’s fundamental sense of insecurity and threat. Deterrence likely prevented a third world war, but near-misses such as the Cuban Missile Crisis reinforced the idea that more states possessing more weapons created more risk of accidents, miscalculation, and war.

The impending age of nuclear proliferation will amplify this risk. The first wave of new nuclear states will include key American allies who face urgent security threats and possess many technical and financial resources: Germany, Japan, and South Korea. Others having the technical and financial resources to move quickly include Sweden, Poland, Turkey, Egypt, Canada, and Australia. Iran, of course, is well on its way, and a few countries—South Africa, Brazil and Argentina—that long ago gave up their nuclear-weapons programs could re-start quickly. Pakistan, India, and North Korea long ago demonstrated that strong motivation can overcome lack of funding and technology, and so other potential entrants into the nuclear club include Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Syria, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam.

The efforts of these aspirants to the nuclear club cannot remain hidden and will provoke reactions from both the existing nuclear powers and other states. During World War II, the Allies launched covert raids against Hitler’s nuclear program; since then, fears of new nuclear capabilities have led to violence on multiple occasions. These include Israel’s strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor, the Stuxnet cyber-attack on Iran’s nuclear program, and Israel’s strike against Syria’s covert reactor. During the Cold War, Moscow sought U.S. acquiescence for a Soviet attack on China’s nuclear program, and during the Clinton administration, the U.S. came close to military action against North Korea’s nuclear facilities.

In the same way, China, Russia, and North Korea will not idly accept Japan or South Korea as members of the nuclear club. The very idea of Germany or Poland as nuclear weapons states will rattle the Kremlin; and it is hard to imagine that the People’s Republic of China would tolerate Taiwan’s development of a nuclear option. Saudi officials have already warned that the Kingdom would acquire nuclear weapons if Iran acquires them—assuming Israel does not remove them first. These first-order conflicts will produce second-order unintended consequences, which could include everything from new alliances all the way up to hot war.

President Trump has created this new landscape of instability out of his belief that the existing post-Cold War global order was too costly. He has complained that allies were too expensive, and that previous administrations had exaggerated military threats, particularly from Russia. But as former allies seek security through new alliances and nuclear weapons, and adversaries and former adversaries take advantage to expand their power, the most likely outcome is a free-for-all comprising multiple nuclear-armed states. It is hard to see how this leads to greater security or wealth for the United States than the order it has rejected.

Glenn Chafetz is Director of 2430 Group, a nonprofit that researches state-sponsored threats to the U.S. private sector. He previously served in the CIA and State Department.

Zachary S. Davis is an author and former intelligence analyst and policy official.

14. Chokepoints Are The Focus Of A New Cold War

Excerpts:

For decades, America assumed that global trade was too big, too decentralized, too essential to be manipulated. That assumption is dead.

The fight for the world’s trade routes is already happening, not just with warships and missiles fired at Houthi militants, but also through economic pressure, port acquisitions, and regulatory chokeholds. And for the first time in decades, the U.S. is playing offense.

The Trump administration’s plan isn’t subtle. It’s not polite. But for the first time in a long time, it’s a strategy. A secret strategy.

It’s not a secret because Trump is hiding his actions (although clandestine actions under former Green Beret Mike Waltz cannot be ruled out). It’s a secret because shipowners and trade analysts are so busy with the Trump tariff news they have failed to see what’s going on. They have failed to report on the FMC’s broadening scope far from US shores. They fail to see that the new Maritime Desk at the White House is not run by a trade or economics professor at the National Economic Council. It’s run by a naval historian in the National Security Council.

The Navy and national security are in the lead. Not shipping and trade.

The question is whether it’s too little, too late.

Chokepoints Are The Focus Of A New Cold War

John Konrad

Total Views: 649

March 16, 2025

https://gcaptain.com/chokepoints-are-the-focus-of-a-new-cold-war/?mc_cid=96aec9e53c

Global Maritime Chokepoints. Image via US Navy

Chokepoints Are The Focus Of A New Cold War

John Konrad

Total Views: 649

March 16, 2025

How the Slow Strangulation of Global Trade Became the Defining Battle of a New Cold War

By Captain John Konrad (gCaptain) In 1883, Alfred Thayer Mahan laid out the brutal truth of global power: Whoever rules the waves rules the world. He wasn’t just talking about fleets of warships. He was talking about chokepoints—the narrow passages through which the vast majority of the world’s trade must pass. Control them, and you don’t need to launch an invasion. You can starve an economy and restrict military sealift without ever firing a shot.

For most of the past century, the United States understood this. Today, it acts as if it has forgotten. Its adversaries have not.

China, Russia, and Iran have spent the past two decades turning these strategic passageways into shadow war control points, quietly reshaping global trade in ways that benefit them and undermine the U.S. The Biden administration treated the problem like an abstraction. The Trump administration has recognized it as an emergency.

And now, the battle over the world’s shipping lanes is fully underway.

The Crisis No One Noticed

Last night President Trump published a strong statement of rebuke and commenced a large-scale military strike against the Houthis with the goal of reopening the Bab–el–Mandeb chokepoint to US ships and international trade.

But if history marks a turning point, it wasn’t a missile launch or a military standoff. It was an American-flagged oil tanker, limping into Gibraltar in July 2024, low on fuel after a transatlantic journey from Texas to Israel. A routine stop. A simple request for fuel by the captain of the M/V Overseas Santorini.

The British—ostensibly one of America’s closest allies—downplayed the incident, brushing it off as a bureaucratic non-issue. But within certain naval circles, particularly among those with an eye on great-power competition, the alarm bells were deafening.

This is the defining pattern of the new Cold War at sea: seemingly minor transgressions against American maritime interests are dismissed as isolated events—mere commercial hiccups in a complex global system. In the shipping world, particularly in Europe, these incidents are met with a shrug, chalked up to regulatory quirks or corporate discretion. But deep in the Pentagon, the calculus is different.

Someone is taking notes.

Because history doesn’t turn on dramatic declarations. It turns on the accumulation of small, ignored shifts—a denied refueling request here, a preferential port agreement there, a slow but steady reshuffling of maritime control. And by the time those patterns become impossible to ignore, the balance of power has already changed.

Officially, the M/V Overseas Santorini was not a crisis. The Keir Starmer UK government brushed it off, claiming it doesn’t dictate the decisions of private companies. But the decision, as later investigations showed, originated from a small faction of British parliamentarians who had their own pro-Palestine agenda. And the ship in question, Overseas Santorini, wasn’t just another commercial tanker. It was a U.S. military-designated strategic asset under the MARAD Tanker Security Program.

In the past, an incident like this would have sparked diplomatic uproar. The Biden administration let it pass, barely even acknowledging the problem.

Seven months later, history repeated itself—but this time, the response was different. When Norwegian bunker company Haltbakk Bunkers announced it would refuse to fuel U.S.-affiliated ships in protest of President Trump’s meeting with Zelensky, the White House immediately pushed back. Within hours, the Norwegian embassy issued a statement ensuring that U.S. vessels would have unrestricted access to bunkering services.

The contrast was staggering. If Norway could resolve the issue in a matter of hours, why couldn’t the UK address it at all? The answer was bigger than a single ship.

This wasn’t just a question of diplomatic foot-dragging. This was a test of leverage over global chokepoints—and America failed the first round.

The Weaponization of Chokepoints

Chokepoints aren’t just strategic concerns for military planners. They’re the fault lines of economic power, the pressure points that determine who controls the movement of oil, food, and raw materials.

China understands this. It has spent decades systematically acquiring stakes in ports, cutting long-term strategic deals, and building a navy capable of enforcing its economic dominance.

Iran and Russia understand it too. The threat isn’t just blockades—it’s disruption, slowdowns, and selective enforcement of unwritten rules. If a nation can’t move goods freely, its economy is at the mercy of whoever controls the lanes of transit.

Meanwhile, the United States, convinced that naval supremacy alone was enough, has allowed its merchant fleet to wither. The assumption that commercial shipping would always function as a neutral, market-driven force is collapsing under the weight of realpolitik.

The next global crisis won’t start with a missile strike or a naval battle. It will start when a strategic waterway is cut off, or when the slow grind of regulatory restrictions and hostile port policies make trade routes functionally unusable.

The Silent War on Trade

The new map of global maritime influence tells the story:

As President Trump took office China now controlled ports at both ends of the Panama Canal and held major stakes in terminals at the Suez Canal, the Bosporus, and the English Channel. It has placed a naval base at the entrance to the Red Sea, turning a critical corridor into contested waters.

In the Pacific, the Luzon Strait—one of the most vital shipping lanes in the world—is under near-constant surveillance by the Chinese Navy, Coast Guard, and maritime militia.

The Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil passes, is one Iranian move away from closure. The Korean Strait, the critical transit point between the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan, is well within missile range of North Korea’s erratic leadership.

At the same time, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), now heavily influenced by Panama, has begun reshaping global shipping regulations in ways that disproportionately favor China. The Biden administration – which closed the maritime desk at the NSC/NEC – largely ignored the problem. Trump’s advisers see it as economic warfare in disguise.

Chokepoints: Trump’s Global Maritime Counteroffensive

In Washington, the game is moving fast. The Biden years treated global shipping as a background concern, a tangle of free-market logistics left to self-regulate. The Trump administration sees something else entirely: a battleground.

The fight over chokepoints—the narrow straits and canals that dictate the flow of global trade—is no longer theoretical. It’s happening now, playing out in port buyouts, regulatory chokeholds, and economic warfare disguised as environmental policy. And this time, the White House isn’t sitting back.

A Maritime War Room in the West Wing

Trump’s National Security Council (NSC) has a new weapon in its arsenal: Jerry Hendrix, a naval historian with a deep understanding of Mahanian strategy—the doctrine that shaped America’s past dominance of the seas. Hendrix isn’t there to write think pieces. He’s there to provide National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with options and help the President draft the Executive Order to Make Shipbuilding Great Again, a document that, if signed, could be the biggest shift in U.S. maritime policy in decades.

Leaked details of the draft order, obtained by gCaptain, reveal an aggressive strategy aimed at breaking China’s economic grip on global shipping routes. This isn’t just about rebuilding American shipyards. It’s an international counteroffensive designed to erode Beijing’s hold over the world’s most vital waterways.

The core mandate of the executive order is simple: force allies to choose a side.

Under the new directive, the State Department will lean hard on treaty partners like the UK, Singapore, Taiwan and Egypt, to impose tariffs and trade restrictions on Chinese-built ships and cargo-handling equipment. The idea is to cripple China’s ability to manipulate global trade through port ownership and logistical strangleholds. The message to allies is clear: Get on board, or risk U.S. economic retaliation.

At the same time, the EO funnels revenue from new tariffs and port fees directly into a U.S. shipbuilding revival, ensuring that when the next global crisis hits, America has the ships to move goods without relying on foreign-controlled fleets.

The most controversial provision? A harbor tax on foreign cargo entering North America through Canada and Mexico—a move aimed at closing loopholes that have siphoned trade away from U.S. ports.

This isn’t just a protectionist maneuver. It’s a warning shot. And it comes at a moment when the stakes have never been higher.

The Real Front Lines: The Federal Maritime Commission Goes to War

If policy is a hammer, regulation is a scalpel.

On Friday, the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC) launched an investigation that could redraw the map of global shipping.

For decades, the FMC has been little more than a bureaucratic backwater—a slow-moving regulator focused on niche disputes between shipping firms. But under the Biden administration, it was radically expanded, and under Trump it’s being empowered to oversee not just U.S. ports but the entire global trade ecosystem.

Its new target? Foreign governments and corporations weaponizing maritime chokepoints.

The investigation focuses on seven of the world’s most critical chokepoints: The English Channel, Malacca Strait, Northern Sea Passage, Singapore Strait, Panama CanaL, Strait of Gibraltar, Suez Canal

Each of these corridors is a potential flashpoint, where geopolitics and economic leverage intertwine in ways that could cripple global commerce overnight.

The FMC’s mandate under Trump is to determine how foreign regulations, laws, and corporate policies create artificial constraints on U.S. trade. The commission is gathering testimony from shipping executives, bulk cargo operators, port authorities, and national security officials, looking for patterns of intentional trade disruption—whether through strategic slowdowns, hidden fees, or backroom agreements that grant Chinese and Russian interests preferential access to vital trade lanes.

What Comes Next?

For now, the FMC’s inquiry is in the fact-finding stage, and technically the FMC is non-partisan, but make no mistake: the potential consequences are massive.

If the commission determines that foreign governments or corporations are intentionally restricting U.S. trade, it has the power to issue retaliatory regulations, including:

• Banning vessels from U.S. ports if they’re registered in nations engaged in economic warfare.

• Levying penalties against shipping firms that participate in restrictive chokepoint practices.

• Imposing direct tariffs on cargo moving through specific foreign-controlled ports.

This kind of escalation hasn’t been seen in modern shipping history. But Trump’s White House seems to be betting that it’s better to fight now than wait for the noose to tighten further.

Chokepoints: The New Cold War’s Pressure Points

For decades, America assumed that global trade was too big, too decentralized, too essential to be manipulated. That assumption is dead.

The fight for the world’s trade routes is already happening, not just with warships and missiles fired at Houthi militants, but also through economic pressure, port acquisitions, and regulatory chokeholds. And for the first time in decades, the U.S. is playing offense.

The Trump administration’s plan isn’t subtle. It’s not polite. But for the first time in a long time, it’s a strategy. A secret strategy.

It’s not a secret because Trump is hiding his actions (although clandestine actions under former Green Beret Mike Waltz cannot be ruled out). It’s a secret because shipowners and trade analysts are so busy with the Trump tariff news they have failed to see what’s going on. They have failed to report on the FMC’s broadening scope far from US shores. They fail to see that the new Maritime Desk at the White House is not run by a trade or economics professor at the National Economic Council. It’s run by a naval historian in the National Security Council.

The Navy and national security are in the lead. Not shipping and trade.

The question is whether it’s too little, too late.

15. President Trump Is Not Weakening Our National Security or Our Military

I would like to see some objective analysis of the real impact of DEI on readiness. Not emotionally or politically charged rhetoric. My guess is that impacts on readiness are more likely caused by strategic decisions and resourcing priorities at the national (including Congressional) level. But DEI is a convenient tool for whipping up politically charged sentiment and can also be used for a long time to cover strategic decision making errors because everything can be blamed on DEI from the previous leadership.

But we should be able to see if "fixing DEI" leads to an improvement in readiness.

President Trump Is Not Weakening Our National Security or Our Military

By Larry Purdy

March 15, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/03/15/president_trump_is_not_weakening_our_national_security_or_our_military_1097771.html?mc_cid=96aec9e53c

President Trump Is Not Weakening Our National Security or Our Military; on the Contrary, He Is Ordering Changes That Will Strengthen Both

Thank you for allowing me to respond to retired Navy Admiral Dennis Blair’s commentary (“Pentagon purge a sign of dangerous times ahead”) which was first published in Breaking Defense (Feb. 27, 2025) and subsequently posted on a U. S. Naval Academy Class of 1968 class-wide email on March 2, 2025. (Note: Both Admiral Blair and I are members of the class of 1968.)

In his op-ed, Admiral Blair issues several harsh and, in my view, unwarranted criticisms of our Commander-in-Chief. He claims, for example, that “[t]he Trump administration’s recent Department of Defense leadership changes are unprecedented in their scale and riskiness.” He characterizes these changes as “most likely to weaken the combat effectiveness of the armed forces” and concludes these “are mistakes . . . that will endanger [our] national security . . .”

First, after Admiral Blair’s long and honorable service to our Navy and to our country, he has earned the right – held by every American – to freely express whatever opinions he may hold. But it is equally true that his opinions, particularly when they are openly critical of the current Commander-in-Chief, deserve careful scrutiny.

With that in mind, what is initially disappointing about Admiral Blair’s criticism of President Trump’s dismissal of two of our most senior military leaders (CJCS General C. Q. Brown, Jr., and CNO Admiral Lisa Franchetti) is his decision to create classic “straw man” arguments. For example, there was no need for Blair to point out what I assume is obvious to every member of our Naval Academy class, i.e., that “not all the best military leaders are white males.” Nor is there any dispute that females can become exemplary military officers. But suggesting that creating a “diverse” officer corps via the use of racial preferences – which Admiral Blair has long advocated for – with the goal of manipulating its racial demographics, is both morally and legally wrong. The same can be said of the effort by the previous Biden administration to manipulate the gender demographics of our military, particularly in the combat arms. These efforts, all under the guise of so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies, are based on a thoroughly unsubstantiated claim that by doing so our military will achieve “higher combat effectiveness.” It is often characterized by the soft-sounding phrase “diversity is our strength,” a popular claim DEI’s proponents routinely make; but unsurprisingly, there simply is no meaningful evidence to support it.

In response to my distinguished classmate’s commentary above, and in view of his decades-long history of advocating in favor of the use of race as a factor in college, university, and service academy admissions policies, allow me to offer a different perspective, particularly when it comes to the use of race in our military. Admiral Blair approves of it; I oppose it. In fact, I publicly addressed this issue directly to Admiral Blair over twenty years ago with views that, in my opinion, remain relevant today. They can be summarized as follows:

If we have learned nothing else from our tragic history with race, we should have learned this: dividing any collection of individuals by race – whether it be a platoon, a battalion, a brigade, or an entire nation – and assigning benefits or assessing penalties to members of the resulting groups, is fundamentally destructive. Perpetuating racial favoritism, and its opposite, racial discrimination, doesn’t heal a society. It poisons it. Policies that focus on race don’t lead to a cohesive and effective military; they undermine it. (For the full discussion of my comments respectfully directed to Admiral Blair in 2003, see https://www.nationalreview.com/2003/05/operation-racial-preferences-r-lawrence-purdy/)

Immediately following his inauguration on January 20, 2025, President Trump called for the end of DEI and the divisive use of race preferences throughout our society. In doing so, the President paid homage to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dr. King’s never-to-be-forgotten plea that we judge one another by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin. Once President Trump’s new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, was confirmed, both the Commander-in-Chief and his new SECDEF mandated the end of DEI in our military and called for rigorous adherence to a colorblind meritocracy. Why anyone, including a retired and highly distinguished four-star Admiral, would suggest that it would be harmful to our military is baffling to me. And it is particularly puzzling given that large majorities of our fellow citizens and millions of our fellow veterans, reaching across racial lines, profess opposition to using racial preferences to reward some and penalize others, which is the inevitable result any time race is a factor in decision-making.

Turning to the dismissal of Gen. Brown – who no one questions was a long-serving and patriotic American officer – I would respectfully direct Admiral Blair to Chapter 14 in Pete Hegseth’s book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men who Keep Us Free. Before ascending to his role as SECDEF, Mr. Hegseth wrote that Gen. Brown was responsible for developing various DEI "diversity and inclusion outreach" plans which sought to achieve specific (and almost certainly unconstitutional) racial quotas, particularly in our Air Force fighter-pilot community. As Hegseth noted, "at a time when . . . all branches [were missing their recruiting goals], General Brown believe[d] that now is the time to make skin color the primary factor for who should be admitted to the Air Force Academy, who should become officers, and who should be promoted." It’s as if our most senior military officer was unfamiliar with our historic civil rights laws – not to mention numerous long-standing military directives – that expressly prohibit this sort of focus on a service member’s race. (For a complete discussion of these issues, see my recent law review article, “We All Wear Green, We All Bleed Red, There is No Difference . . .,” found in Vol. 56 St. Mary’s Law Journal.

Finally, Admiral Blair rightly claims “the experience gained in a merit-based promotion system is crucial,” but then proceeds to falsely denigrate both Hegseth (described by eminent historian Victor Davis Hanson as “a decorated combat veteran who wrote a book on the Pentagon’s pathologies”) and President Trump’s nominee to be the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs – former Air Force Lt. Gen. Dan Caine – as “the least seasoned defense leadership team in modern history.” Admiral Blair’s assertion simply isn’t true. All I can assume is that Blair made no serious effort to familiarize himself with the reportedly exemplary background of Gen. Caine. As for comparing Pete Hegseth’s “seasoning” with, say, President Obama’s SECDEF Chuck Hagel (a former enlisted infantryman who served in Vietnam), or even with West Point graduate General Lloyd Austin, whose tenure as President Biden’s SECDEF could not have been more disastrous for our military, Hegseth represents a significant upgrade. As Professor Hanson recently noted, Biden and Austin bequeathed President Trump a U.S. military that is “far weaker, suffering from munitions shortages, massive recruitment shortfalls, DEI mandates, and dwindling public confidence.” Little more needs to be said.

As Admiral Blair surely knows, whenever any President loses confidence in an officer’s ability to carry out the Commander-in-Chief’s orders, that is sufficient cause to dismiss him. In the present case, President Trump has ordered the end of DEI in the military. In the eyes of millions of Americans and, more importantly, in the eyes of millions of military veterans, the President’s mandate to rid our military of divisive and destructive DEI policies represents a welcomed change. Thus, given Gen. Brown’s full-throated support for DEI, it became clear he was the wrong individual to carry out this mandate. That, and that alone, warranted his dismissal.

In my humble opinion, our military will be made stronger, and our Nation will be made safer under the leadership of our new SECDEF and a new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs who will carry out the President’s mandate. It is on these simple points where I strongly and respectfully disagree with my distinguished classmate’s contrary views.

Mr. Purdy is a 1968 graduate of the United States Naval Academy. After completing his military service obligation (which included a year-long tour in Vietnam), he graduated from William Mitchell College of Law (St. Paul, Minnesota) in 1977. While in private practice, he served as part of the pro bono trial and appellate team representing the plaintiffs in Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003) and Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). These cases challenged the race-conscious admissions systems at the University of Michigan's Undergraduate College of Law, Sciences & the Arts (Gratz) and the University of Michigan's Law School (Grutter). He has been an invited guest lecturer at colleges, universities, and bar associations across the country. He is the author of "Getting Under the Skin of 'Diversity': Searching for the Color-Blind Ideal" (2008), several law review articles, and numerous published essays. Between 2020 and 2024, Mr. Purdy served as a federally appointed member of the Minnesota State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Today, Mr. Purdy is a retired lawyer living in Minnesota.

16. The Key to Ukraine’s Survival

Excerpts:

Continued U.S. support is key to Ukraine’s long-term survival, but Kyiv and its European partners should not undersell their independent capabilities and concede too quickly to Russian demands during negotiations. By all indications, Europe has the determination to meet Ukraine’s defense requirements, and it could take up the task. Over the past three years, the standard flow of U.S. assistance sufficient to keep Ukraine supplied with ammunition, interceptors, rockets, and UAVs was valued at biweekly packages of $300 million to $400 million (the last two U.S. PDA packages were larger than usual, to prepare Ukraine for the likely uptick in Russian assaults in the spring and summer of this year). Although Europe is already spending a great deal on its own assistance to Ukraine, it still has additional financial, procurement, and industrial production means that could fill potential future gaps in Kyiv’s defense. In addition to drawing from its own weapons stocks and production capabilities, Europe can also procure ammunition and components for Ukraine on international arms markets, as the United States has done over the past three years.

A few billion euros to sustain Ukraine’s resources for active defense in 2025 is well within Europe’s means. In early March, the European Union announced plans to create new defense financing mechanisms that enable members to devote more resources to defense production and procurement, generating as much as 840 billion euros in defense spending that addresses domestic spending requirements and assistance to Ukraine. Individual European countries (including Norway and the United Kingdom in recent weeks) have also announced new aid packages and others are preparing to do so. Kyiv, for its part, has demonstrated significant resolve and capacity for innovation. Together, Europe and Ukraine can present a strong enough front in support of U.S.-led negotiations to push Putin to the table.

Ukraine and the United States will be in a better position to negotiate peace and to deny Russia’s unacceptable demands for a settlement with Washington committed diplomatically and financially to Kyiv’s defense. But if that path becomes lost, all will not be lost to Ukraine. After withstanding repeated Russian aggression that began in 2014, building an army that repelled Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, and maintaining a strong defense in the three years since, it seems very unlikely that Ukrainians will unilaterally surrender now. And with Europe heeding the call to a united defense, they may not need to.

The Key to Ukraine’s Survival

Foreign Affairs · by More by Celeste A. Wallander · March 17, 2025

How a United Europe Can Help Kyiv Keep Up the Fight

Celeste A. Wallander

March 17, 2025

Members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Kharkiv, Ukraine, March 2025 Oleksandr Klymenko / Reuters

During the Biden administration, CELESTE A. WALLANDER oversaw U.S. military assistance to Ukraine as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. She is a Senior Adviser at WestExec Advisors and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

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The United States’ sudden, though ultimately temporary, suspension of all security assistance to Ukraine in early March raised alarms about Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. A lasting suspension of the aid would have certainly changed the course of the war. But even a complete stop to U.S. assistance would not have reversed the progress that Ukrainians have made over the past three years. With its existing stocks and production, Ukraine would be able to sustain its defense for months on its own. Although U.S. aid is again flowing, at least for now, Ukraine does not need to surrender if Washington slows or pauses its support again.

But the pause in U.S. aid served as a dramatic wakeup call: the most crucial factor in determining how long and how effectively Ukraine will be able to defend against Russian attacks in the coming months will be the extent to which European powers step up to fill in any gaps.

No one country in Europe has the financial and industrial resources to replace the United States, but together they can add up to formidable support to Ukraine. With or without Washington, European powers will need to surge financing, procurement, and production of Ukraine’s most urgent resupply needs: ammunition and air defense interceptors. Denmark, Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and many others are already doing so. Over the past three years, Europe has increasingly provided Ukraine with capabilities that the United States has not, such as maritime strike assets, sustainable battle tanks, short- and medium-range air defense interceptors, cybersecurity systems, and industrial components. At the same time, Ukraine’s own production of strike drones and ammunition has expanded, accounting now for at least 40 percent of Ukraine’s daily operational requirements. Ukraine has also proved adept at fighting asymmetrically and capitalizing on Russian disadvantages, as demonstrated by its use of drones to find and destroy Russian units and equipment. Moreover, as Russian tactics have adapted, Ukraine has been ahead of the curve in building more lethal and silent drones within months and even weeks, rendering Russia’s adaptations rapidly out of date.

Even with limited U.S. assistance, Ukraine could, with Europe’s support, still achieve advantages that would strengthen its hand against Russia and thwart the Kremlin’s intention to outlast Ukraine and force Kyiv to surrender to Putin’s demands.

THE PAST IS PRESENT

The structure of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine over the past three years has ensured that the aid has not only supplied the country’s weekly battlefield needs but also helped strengthen its military force for the longer term. The aid has been funneled through three different programs, each authorized and appropriated by Congress. The most prominent program—and the most affected by the temporary U.S. hold on aid—is the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which Washington first employed to meet Ukraine’s urgent, immediate battlefield needs. PDA allows the Department of Defense to pull U.S. systems from its military stocks and deliver them swiftly to partners and allies in need—sometimes within weeks, sometimes within months. Ukraine is not the only recipient of PDA: the United States has used the authority to supply both Israel and Taiwan with weapons systems. But after the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine has become by far the largest recipient of this aid. Congress massively enhanced the scale of PDA support to Ukraine from $200 million in 2021 to a total of $33.3 billion for 2022 through 2024. In January 2022, U.S. weapons deliveries surged, with Javelin and Stinger missiles, armored personnel carriers, battle tanks, radars, UAVs, artillery systems, artillery rockets, ammunition, missiles, and air defense systems and interceptors all making their way to Ukraine. The donations—reinforced by comparable donations from European militaries—not only provided ammunition for immediate defense against Russia’s invasion and occupation but also enabled Ukraine to amass the core of a modern and durable NATO-style military.

In addition, in 2022, Congress authorized the creation of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), providing $33.3 billion in funding from 2022 to 2024 to defend Ukraine against the longer-term threats that Putin poses to European security. Unlike PDA, USAI does not draw from U.S. military stocks—it is a fund to contract and procure military capabilities for Ukraine that the United States itself does not have on hand to donate in sufficient quantities or exportable types. For example, USAI has funded the procurement of resources with longer lead times, including hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, hundreds of air defense interceptors, UAVs, coastal defense systems, and air defense systems. It has also funded investments in Ukraine’s defense industrial production and the maintenance and sustainment of military equipment that has already been donated, so that Ukraine can build on U.S. and European donations instead of driving them broken and useless into the ground, as Russia has been. Europe, for its part, has also invested in similar contracting and procurement of resources for Ukraine, with states participating in such efforts both individually and through the European Union.

Finally, the Foreign Military Financing program has strengthened Ukraine’s medium- to longer-term security. FMF allows the United States to work with partners across the globe on missions that address a host of defense issues, including counterterrorism and threats from common adversaries such as China, Iran, and Russia. A country’s FMF funding usually ranges in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, but since the full-scale Russian invasion began, Congress has provided Ukraine with $6.7 billion in funding through FMF. The funding has been used for new contracts and procurement from U.S. defense companies of big-ticket items, including air defense, armored vehicles, anti-armor systems, and radars.

These programs have massively boosted Ukraine’s defenses for the past three years—enough so that a temporary pause in assistance would not cripple the country’s military. Indeed, in late 2024, U.S. officials assessed that Ukraine’s existing stocks, the delivery of the fourth-quarter PDA packages and USAI contracts, European donations, and, most important, Kyiv’s own surging domestic production of ammunition and UAVs could sustain Ukraine’s plans for defense through mid-2025. Russia is a brutal aggressor, but its military method of relentless assaults, sacrificing masses of personnel and equipment, produces only incremental gains over weeks and months, and its targeting of civilian targets and critical infrastructure with missiles and UAVs has not broken Ukrainians’ will to continue fighting. Ukraine is suffering, but it is unlikely to face imminent defeat.

UNITED FRONT

Continued U.S. support is key to Ukraine’s long-term survival, but Kyiv and its European partners should not undersell their independent capabilities and concede too quickly to Russian demands during negotiations. By all indications, Europe has the determination to meet Ukraine’s defense requirements, and it could take up the task. Over the past three years, the standard flow of U.S. assistance sufficient to keep Ukraine supplied with ammunition, interceptors, rockets, and UAVs was valued at biweekly packages of $300 million to $400 million (the last two U.S. PDA packages were larger than usual, to prepare Ukraine for the likely uptick in Russian assaults in the spring and summer of this year). Although Europe is already spending a great deal on its own assistance to Ukraine, it still has additional financial, procurement, and industrial production means that could fill potential future gaps in Kyiv’s defense. In addition to drawing from its own weapons stocks and production capabilities, Europe can also procure ammunition and components for Ukraine on international arms markets, as the United States has done over the past three years.

A few billion euros to sustain Ukraine’s resources for active defense in 2025 is well within Europe’s means. In early March, the European Union announced plans to create new defense financing mechanisms that enable members to devote more resources to defense production and procurement, generating as much as 840 billion euros in defense spending that addresses domestic spending requirements and assistance to Ukraine. Individual European countries (including Norway and the United Kingdom in recent weeks) have also announced new aid packages and others are preparing to do so. Kyiv, for its part, has demonstrated significant resolve and capacity for innovation. Together, Europe and Ukraine can present a strong enough front in support of U.S.-led negotiations to push Putin to the table.

Ukraine and the United States will be in a better position to negotiate peace and to deny Russia’s unacceptable demands for a settlement with Washington committed diplomatically and financially to Kyiv’s defense. But if that path becomes lost, all will not be lost to Ukraine. After withstanding repeated Russian aggression that began in 2014, building an army that repelled Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, and maintaining a strong defense in the three years since, it seems very unlikely that Ukrainians will unilaterally surrender now. And with Europe heeding the call to a united defense, they may not need to.

CELESTE A. WALLANDER oversaw U.S. military assistance to Ukraine as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Biden administration. She is a Senior Adviser at WestExec Advisors and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Celeste A. Wallander · March 17, 2025

17. Can Iran Save Itself?

Excerpts:

Iran’s leaders hope that managing domestic stability through piecemeal reforms will create an atmosphere conducive to a national debate on major foreign policy issues, such as the nuclear standoff—one that it believes will result in national unity. The consensus among elites, at least, is that such a debate will enhance the government’s bargaining position as it pursues an agreement with the United States that could address Washington's concerns over the weaponization of the Iranian nuclear program but stop short of ending uranium enrichment, restricting conventional weapons, or weakening the axis of resistance. Domestic protests, after all, only create openings for adversaries such as the United States—which see cracks in Iran’s society as signs of weakness.

To Iranian leaders, forging such unity is especially important when facing Washington. The Biden administration, for example, sought to use the economic damage inflicted by Trump’s maximum pressure campaign to secure a “longer and better deal” than the original Iran nuclear deal, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. But Iran, bolstered by a measure of internal cohesion in the face of an external threat from the United States, adopted an even harder bargaining position than before. Given the Trump administration’s belief that Iran has been weakened since October 7, the president likely thinks he can secure a deal with Tehran that is even more favorable to the United States. If he can’t, Trump has floated using force. “There are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal,” Trump claims to have told Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in March. Trump has also said his administration is “down to the final moments with Iran.” For Iran, having a supportive public is essential to weathering this storm.

Trump’s threats, of course, could again be enough to create internal cohesion. But with the example of Assad seared into their minds, Iran’s leaders are leaving nothing to chance. “Think about this: On the day confrontation occurs, how united is Iranian society?” an adviser to Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the conservative speaker of Iran’s parliament, wrote on X. “Who is to blame for the problems in the eyes of the people? The answers to these questions determine what constitutes service and what constitutes betrayal.”

Tehran is determined to prevent domestic divisions from weakening the country’s ability to withstand pressure. Limited social and political openings serve as a calculated strategy to diffuse public frustration before it escalates into mass unrest. If past is prologue, this approach could allow the Islamic Republic to frame any conflict with United States not as a struggle for regime survival but as a sovereign nation’s resistance against external coercion. But it does not portend a shift in the regime’s core strategy. Tehran, in other words, is not about to cast aside decades of defiance.

Can Iran Save Itself?

Foreign Affairs · by More by Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar · March 17, 2025

The Islamic Republic Is Attempting Reform at Home—so It Can Withstand Pressure From Washington

Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar

March 17, 2025

People waving flags during the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Tehran, February 2025 Majid Asgaripour / West Asia News Agency / Reuters

MOHAMMAD AYATOLLAHI TABAAR is a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, Associate Professor of International Affairs at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, and a Fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. He is the author of Religious Statecraft: The Politics of Islam in Iran.

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Over the past year, Iran has grappled with a series of setbacks. Hamas and Hezbollah, Tehran’s long-standing nonstate regional allies, have been weakened by Israel. President Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria collapsed suddenly and spectacularly. The return of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, meanwhile, signals a revival of the maximum pressure policies that hobbled the Iranian economy starting in 2018. These looming challenges have led many U.S. officials and analysts to argue that the Islamic Republic is facing a strategic defeat. Richard Haass, writing in Foreign Affairs in January, suggested that “Iran is weaker and more vulnerable than it has been in decades, likely since its decadelong war with Iraq or even since the 1979 revolution.” According to this view, Iran has presented its opponents with an opportune moment to target its nuclear facilities or extract major concessions for a new nuclear deal.

The prevailing belief that Iran is now more susceptible to U.S. coercion or Israeli attack, however, is not shared by Tehran. The Islamic Republic views these external challenges as temporary setbacks, not signs of defeat. In Iran’s view, Hamas and Hezbollah, despite being badly beaten, have actually emerged as winners in their asymmetric conflict against Israel. They survived as guerrilla organizations against a powerful U.S.-backed conventional army. Critically, Hamas has retained at least some popularity in among Palestinians, and Hezbollah continues to enjoy the backing of Shiites in Lebanon. In Yemen, the Iran-aligned Houthis have solidified their role as a steadfast supporter of the Palestinian cause and a key member of Tehran’s so-called axis of resistance by attacking Israel and disrupting shipping in the Red Sea.

Still, Iran realizes that its network of partners is not as powerful today as it was before Hamas’s October 7 attacks. And it was alarmed by the sudden fall of the unpopular Assad. As a result, it has taken steps to shore up its domestic support by making limited internal concessions to a population fed up with authoritarian, theocratic governance. The regime has eased the enforcement of the mandatory dress code for women and relaxed restrictions on social media platforms, allowing increasingly critical discussions of the government’s policies. In doing so, the Islamic Republic hopes it can lessen the risk of domestic unrest and foster public trust.

But these domestic shifts should not be understood as harbingers of a grand reopening to the West. In fact, the goal of Iran’s measured (and reversible) social reforms is to consolidate support at home to resist pressure from abroad. Trump has suggested an openness to negotiations with Tehran but also a willingness to attack the country. With the public behind Tehran, or at least less opposed, the government hopes it can withstand whatever the U.S. president has in store.

A WARNING FROM DAMASCUS

Israel may be celebrating its military triumph over Hamas and Hezbollah. But Iran is relatively unconcerned about the two organizations. Despite the devastating losses each incurred, Tehran expects that Hamas and Hezbollah will rebuild themselves, bolstered by grassroots support and hatred of Israel. It even expects that the battlefield deaths of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah will reinforce the organizations’ ideological commitments and resonate with a sympathetic public for years to come.

But Assad’s fall is harder for Iran to shake off. Although the former Syrian president’s unpopularity was widely recognized, the rapid disintegration of the Syrian army caught even Iran’s leadership—Assad’s primary patron—off guard. According to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, the Islamic Republic intelligence community was “fully aware” of the imminent security threat against Assad. But Tehran was nonetheless surprised by the Syrian army’s complete inability to repel rebel forces. Iranian officials partially attribute the disintegration of Assad’s army to “psychological warfare” by external forces, including Israel, Turkey, and the United States. But Araghchi also pinned some of the blame on Assad’s disregard for public opinion. Iran, Araghchi claimed, had “consistently” advised Assad to boost military morale and “interact more with the people, as what ultimately secures a government is the people.” But Assad, Araghchi noted, had failed.

The sudden unraveling of Syria has prompted public anxiety within Iran, where persistent repression and corruption have also driven a wedge between the government and its populace (as has secularization). In January, Abbas Salehi, Iranian minister of culture and Islamic guidance, outwardly acknowledged that Tehran is facing a severe “social capital” deficit, as public trust in the government has fallen. Former President Mohammad Khatami warned that the Islamic Republic risks “self-subversion” by disregarding public resentment. Across the political spectrum, Iranian elites increasingly agree on the urgent need to build internal resilience.

Iran’s government has, accordingly, loosened some of its restrictions. Most notably, in December 2024, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council effectively paused the implementation of a controversial new veiling law that would impose financial penalties, prison terms, and other punishments, such as travel bans, on women who appeared in public without a headscarf or were judged to have worn “improper” attire. Despite calls from some ultraconservatives for strict enforcement of the country’s dress code—and occasional targeted crackdowns by the government to appease its religious base—women can now appear unveiled in public with less fear of harsh reprisal. And even the hardliners are not entirely united in their opposition: On March 15, conservative parliamentarian Mahmoud Nabavian acknowledged fears of Iran’s “Syrianization” as the motivation behind the suspension of the law, agreeing that it should be “put aside if it undermines the system.”

The sudden unraveling of Syria has prompted public anxiety within Iran.

This development reflects a tacit acknowledgment by the state that the veiling mandate is unpopular and, at least for now, impractical. It also comes three years after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of the morality police following her arrest for not properly wearing her veil. Amini’s death prompted mass street protests in 2022, which Iran snuffed out with unrelenting violence. Ultimately, the Islamic Republic temporarily removed the morality police from the streets to ease tensions. Now, Tehran seems increasingly willing to tolerate the relaxed enforcement of veiling laws, provided this shift does not escalate into a broader political movement challenging the regime itself.

In addition to this pause, the Islamic Republic is attempting to curry popular favor by allowing for relatively open and candid discussions on domestic media outlets. Social media platforms used in Iran now host a diverse array of commentators, including independent and dissident voices, both inside and outside the country. The government continues to quietly promote platforms connected to the state, and there are plenty of independent regime defenders. But online discussions about the veiling law, the collapse of Assad, and broader social, political, and economic issues are surprisingly frank and nuanced. Some commentators openly describe leadership as a disaster for the country.

At first, it might seem strange that Iran would let people hear anti-regime commentary for the sake of stability. But Tehran hopes that by opening domestic space, it can provide a safety valve for public frustration and diminish the appeal of satellite international media outlets such as the BBC—which is more critical of the Islamic Republic than Iranian voices. The regime has turned to this strategy at precarious moments before. At the height of the 2022 protests, it encouraged previously banned figures to appear on television, hoping that their criticisms would channel public discontent away from the streets. This time, Tehran believes that a relatively free flow of information, if carefully managed, could strengthen the regime’s own narrative on national security in the long term.

SETTING THE HOUSE IN ORDER

Iran’s leaders hope that managing domestic stability through piecemeal reforms will create an atmosphere conducive to a national debate on major foreign policy issues, such as the nuclear standoff—one that it believes will result in national unity. The consensus among elites, at least, is that such a debate will enhance the government’s bargaining position as it pursues an agreement with the United States that could address Washington's concerns over the weaponization of the Iranian nuclear program but stop short of ending uranium enrichment, restricting conventional weapons, or weakening the axis of resistance. Domestic protests, after all, only create openings for adversaries such as the United States—which see cracks in Iran’s society as signs of weakness.

To Iranian leaders, forging such unity is especially important when facing Washington. The Biden administration, for example, sought to use the economic damage inflicted by Trump’s maximum pressure campaign to secure a “longer and better deal” than the original Iran nuclear deal, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. But Iran, bolstered by a measure of internal cohesion in the face of an external threat from the United States, adopted an even harder bargaining position than before. Given the Trump administration’s belief that Iran has been weakened since October 7, the president likely thinks he can secure a deal with Tehran that is even more favorable to the United States. If he can’t, Trump has floated using force. “There are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal,” Trump claims to have told Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in March. Trump has also said his administration is “down to the final moments with Iran.” For Iran, having a supportive public is essential to weathering this storm.

Trump’s threats, of course, could again be enough to create internal cohesion. But with the example of Assad seared into their minds, Iran’s leaders are leaving nothing to chance. “Think about this: On the day confrontation occurs, how united is Iranian society?” an adviser to Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the conservative speaker of Iran’s parliament, wrote on X. “Who is to blame for the problems in the eyes of the people? The answers to these questions determine what constitutes service and what constitutes betrayal.”

Tehran is determined to prevent domestic divisions from weakening the country’s ability to withstand pressure. Limited social and political openings serve as a calculated strategy to diffuse public frustration before it escalates into mass unrest. If past is prologue, this approach could allow the Islamic Republic to frame any conflict with United States not as a struggle for regime survival but as a sovereign nation’s resistance against external coercion. But it does not portend a shift in the regime’s core strategy. Tehran, in other words, is not about to cast aside decades of defiance.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar · March 17, 2025

18. How Marcos Jr’s ICC gambit against Duterte reveals the dark art of Philippine politics

A national "rido" (clan warfare) on steroids.

How Marcos Jr’s ICC gambit against Duterte reveals the dark art of Philippine politics

By Dimsumdaily Hong Kong -

1:26PM Sun March 16, 2025

970

https://www.dimsumdaily.hk/how-marcos-jrs-icc-gambit-against-duterte-reveals-the-dark-art-of-philippine-politics/

16th March 2025 – (Manila) The dramatic arrest and swift extradition of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to The Hague marks a masterclass in political ruthlessness, demonstrating how Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr has weaponised international justice to neutralise his most formidable domestic rival. This calculated move, masked as compliance with international law, represents a stunning evolution in Philippine political warfare.

In a nation where political dynasties traditionally settle scores through more direct means, Marcos Jr’s exploitation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) shows remarkable sophistication. By maintaining public opposition to the ICC while quietly facilitating Duterte’s arrest, he has orchestrated what appears to be a perfect political assassination without firing a single shot.

The seeds of this betrayal were planted during the 2022 election when Marcos Jr formed an alliance with Sara Duterte, the former president’s daughter, in what now appears to have been a classic bait-and-switch operation. The younger Duterte, once considered a presidential frontrunner herself, was relegated to the vice presidency in what increasingly looks like a calculated move to neutralize the family’s political ambitions.

What makes this political chess game particularly fascinating is how Marcos Jr has managed to turn the elder Duterte’s own governing style against him. The former president’s infamous “war on drugs,” which human rights organisations estimate claimed up to 30,000 lives, has become the very instrument of his downfall. The irony of Duterte, who once boasted about personally killing criminal suspects, now facing international justice is not lost on political observers.

The timing of the arrest was masterful. By moving against Duterte while he was returning from Hong Kong, Marcos Jr’s administration eliminated the possibility of the former president barricading himself in his Davao stronghold. The speed with which he was transferred to The Hague – before the Supreme Court could issue a temporary restraining order – showed clinical efficiency in political elimination.

Sara Duterte’s response to her father’s arrest, claiming she had ordered a hit man to target Marcos Jr and his allies, only serves to underscore the deep-seated tensions between these powerful families. Her threat, while shocking in its directness, follows a tradition of Philippine political rhetoric where violence often lurks just beneath the surface of political discourse.

The political calculus behind Marcos Jr’s move becomes clearer when considering the upcoming May midterm elections. With multiple members of both the Marcos and Duterte clans on various ballots, the timing of the elder Duterte’s arrest appears designed to maximum electoral impact. The former president’s absence during this crucial campaign period could severely weaken his family’s political machinery.

Moreover, Marcos Jr has masterfully positioned himself as a defender of international law while simultaneously advancing his personal political agenda. By cooperating with the ICC – something he previously opposed – he has gained international credibility while removing his most significant domestic rival from the political chessboard.

The administration’s careful messaging around the arrest reveals sophisticated political stagecraft. By emphasising compliance with Interpol rather than direct cooperation with the ICC, Marcos Jr maintains plausible deniability while achieving his political objectives. This approach allows him to appear as merely following international law rather than actively pursuing a vendetta.

The broader implications for Philippine democracy are profound. This episode demonstrates how international institutions can be weaponised for domestic political purposes, raising questions about the intersection of international justice and national sovereignty. It also highlights how traditional Philippine political feuds are evolving in an increasingly interconnected world.

For the Duterte clan, the arrest presents an existential crisis. Beyond the immediate legal jeopardy facing the patriarch, the family’s political future hangs in the balance. Sara Duterte, already facing impeachment proceedings, now must navigate a political landscape where her family’s brand has been severely compromised.

The international community’s response has been notably muted, suggesting tacit approval of what effectively amounts to the judicial neutralization of a controversial political figure. This silence raises uncomfortable questions about the potential manipulation of international justice mechanisms for domestic political purposes.

Marcos Jr’s gambit also carries risks. By setting a precedent for ICC intervention in Philippine affairs, he may have created a dangerous precedent that could eventually be turned against other political figures – including himself. The Philippines’ withdrawal from the ICC under Duterte theoretically complicates the legal basis for the arrest, though this seems to have been conveniently overlooked.

This moment represents a significant evolution in Philippine political warfare. Traditional methods of eliminating rivals through direct action have been replaced by a more sophisticated approach leveraging international institutions. It’s a strategy that requires patience, careful timing, and plausible deniability – all elements Marcos Jr has demonstrated in abundance.

The ultimate irony is that Duterte, who once wielded state power with brutal efficiency, now finds himself ensnared by the very international legal mechanisms he sought to evade. His transfer to The Hague represents not just personal defeat but potentially the twilight of a particular brand of Philippine political leadership. Marcos Jr has elevated Philippine political machinations to a new level of sophistication. By using the ICC as his instrument, he has managed to achieve what might otherwise have required more direct and messier methods of political elimination. Whether this represents progress in Philippine political evolution or merely a more refined form of dynastic warfare remains to be seen.

19. I’m in Ukraine’s Special Forces – This Is How I Feel When I Have to Kill Putin’s Soldiers

I’m in Ukraine’s Special Forces – This Is How I Feel When I Have to Kill Putin’s Soldiers

With peace talks on the table, Lord Ashcroft meets a shadowy Ukrainian special forces operative whose men have undertaken some of the most risky and successful operations behind Russian lines.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/49031

by Lord Ashcroft | Mar. 17, 2025, 2:08 pm

Shaman, pictured here at a top secret location in Ukraine. (Image: Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC)

He is both sensitive and emotional when discussing his comrades who have been killed in battle. Yet he remains cold and dispassionate when talking about the numerous Russians he has “liquidated” during Special Forces operations deep behind enemy lines.

Welcome to the world of call-sign “Shaman” – a Ukrainian special forces operative who readily admits he regards those who serve with him, rather than his blood relations, as his closest “family”, such is his bond with his men.

Aged 35, broad shouldered, blue-eyed and bearded, with a black sense of humor, he is the commander of the eponymous “Shaman Battalion,” which he has led during the last three years of all-out war.

The scariest moments are always the few seconds before the start of the operation… Once you start firing, you just follow your instincts.

Many would argue it has been Ukraine’s most daring and successful Special Ops unit, which is why Shaman’s true identity is a closely guarded secret.

He has been the target of many assassination attempts by Russian agents. One saw attackers open fire on his car in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, wounding his driver.

It is therefore not surprising that, when it comes to photographing Shaman before our interview, he disappears to find a black balaclava and cap so that nothing of his face, other than his eyes, can be seen.

There is also a pistol on his desk throughout our interview, although Shaman later reassures me it was only a training weapon. I start by asking him which has been his most frightening moment of the war.

Russia Seeks Civilian Monitors in Ukraine as Part of Peace Deal

Russia proposes deploying an unarmed civilian mission in Ukraine as part of a peace deal to monitor its implementation and demands security guarantees, including Kyiv’s “neutrality.”

“The scariest moments are always the few seconds before the start of the operation, when the sound of the first gunfire is only a heartbeat away.

“Once you are in the helicopter, or once you start firing, you just follow your instincts and do what you are trained to do.

“I find it harder to coordinate a mission than to go on one because, when I am not there with my men, I know the emotions and fears they are going through.”

Shaman, who works for HUR, Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency, together with several of his former Special Forces colleagues, were well prepared on the morning of Feb. 24, 2022, when Russian leader Vladimir Putin ordered his all-out invasion of Ukraine.

The “band of brothers” had known the previous night that the attack was only hours away and were primed to go into action.

As explosions sounded and the airborne attack on the capital began, their first order was to defend Hostomel Airport on the northwestern outskirts of Kyiv, one of the main Russian strategic targets on the first day of the war. If Russia had held the airport, it would have been used as a bridgehead for the distribution of forces, including Russia’s elite paratroopers, armored vehicles and supplies.

As it was, a day of brutal fighting saw Ukraine’s forces stall the advance for long enough to prevent the capital city being seized. It was a key moment and, by early April, Russian forces had been forced to withdraw from the entire Kyiv district, including the city of Bucha, the scene of some of the worst atrocities of the war.

Despite all his Special Forces operations over the past 35 months, Shaman still considers this the finest achievement of his men. “Of all my operations, this is the one that gave me the most satisfaction and relief.

“Kyiv is only as it is today because of that successful operation. We only moved on to other missions from early April [2022] when we felt Kyiv was 100 percent safe,” he explains.

His comrades in Shaman Battalion – usually abbreviated to “Shamanbat” – then, like now, were a collection of Special Forces veterans motivated by a desire to protect their country. They work hand-in-hand with the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Since April 2022, the main role of Shamanbat has been to carry out Special Forces operations which have taken their inspiration and basic tactics from Britain’s SAS unit of the Second World War and beyond. Like the SAS, Shaman believes in the value of using small groups of men to go behind enemy lines for hit-and-run raids.

Their targets have included airfields, oil refineries, ammunition factories and the assassination of individuals.

They reach their destination either on foot, by helicopter or, occasionally, in military vehicles. In one of their most audacious raids, they were taken by a helicopter more than 60 miles behind Russian lines.

“At dawn, we flew into enemy-held territory. We didn’t land the helicopter but we used a variety of weapons to shoot and destroy military supply locations.

“The whole mission only took 40 minutes without the loss of any of our men, thank God,” he recalls.

In another operation in the summer of 2023, Shaman and his men played a key role in capturing Maj. Yuri Tomov, an enemy intelligence commander, in an operation into Russian-held territory close to the Dnipro river in southeast Ukraine.

Tomov had in his possession unencrypted minefield maps and a mass of confidential data on his phone. With typical understatement, Shaman tells me: “It was a very successful but very scary operation. Over a period of time, on the left bank of the river, we captured several officers and soldiers.”

Over the duration of the war, Shaman and his men have operated widely along most of the 620-mile frontline, including in the Donetsk and Kherson regions. “Some of the tasks we were given were the craziest ones,” he chuckles.

Although many of his missions have been shrouded in secrecy, he reveals he once spent an entire week behind enemy lines. However, on other occasions their operations lasted only hours, sometimes just minutes. The size of his raiding parties, depending on the task in hand, has ranged from 2 men to 30.

He who kills for pleasure is just a psychopath. He who kills for money is an assassin.

When I asked if it was true he always personally attends the funerals of all his fallen comrades, he stared at me sternly and asked if I had him under surveillance, before breaking into a wry smile.

Then he paused, his voice cracked, and he rubbed his tear-filled eyes as he spoke of his affection for his men, including those who have been killed on operations. “My saddest moments have been when my guys have died. You have to understand: my unit always stays together. We fight together and we bury our fallen comrades together.

“The children of the fallen fighters are the children of all of us.

“It is our duty, our moral obligation, to look after the families of our fallen comrades.

“We cannot fully replace a father, a husband, a brother or a son, but we aim to be there for those people.” Shaman, who has been widely decorated for his bravery and service, adds: “I know what love is but, without exaggeration, I regard my unit as my family – and that will be the case whether I get married or not.”

In contrast, I asked Shaman what he felt when he killed a Russian soldier and his reply hinted he does not lose a great deal of sleep over it. “Being a professional Special Forces officer, I do not want to discuss my emotions too deeply, but I can say one thing. The Underwater Demolition Teams [the predecessor to the US Navy seals] in Vietnam used to have a saying.

“‘He who kills for pleasure is just a psychopath. He who kills for money is an assassin. But he who kills for pleasure and money is a Special Forces operative.’”

Shaman has a reputation for never asking his men to take on a task he would not do himself. As a result, he has been wounded three times, including a serious injury to the head. Now, however, after his unit was expanded in size to operate in several locations, he can no longer go on every operation himself. “And I am an old man too,” he jokes. “The way I live my life, one year counts as three!”

The US-brokered peace talks currently underway in are for others to consider, he says. “As a professional soldier my job is to continue fighting to preserve the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine,” he states.

Finally, I ask Shaman if he wanted to comment on recent controversial comments made by US President Donald Trump, that Ukraine had started the war with Russia and President Zelensky was “a dictator.”

While normally straight-taking, Shaman indicates that, on balance, it might be prudent to keep his thoughts to himself, adding with typically dark humor: “It might not be wise for me to embark on a war with two nuclear powers rather than just one.”

Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC is an international businessman, philanthropist, author and pollster. For more information on his work, visit lordashcroft.com. Follow him on X/Facebook @LordAshcroft.

This article originally appeared in Express.co.uk

20. Russian gains in Kursk open possibility of redirecting North Korean troops to Ukrainian front

Will we see north Korean troops in Ukraine?

Russian gains in Kursk open possibility of redirecting North Korean troops to Ukrainian front

Senior Moscow diplomats in Pyongyang; mission unknown

washingtontimes.com · by Andrew Salmon

By - The Washington Times - Sunday, March 16, 2025

SEOUL, South Korea — A team of high-level Russian diplomats is visiting Pyongyang, but their mission in the North Korean capital is unknown.

The delegation arrived on Saturday, led by Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko, Ukrainian media UATV reported on Sunday.

The trip comes ahead of a possible U.S.-brokered ceasefire to halt the fighting in a war that has been underway since February 2022. UATV speculated that the Russians aimed to coordinate with North Korea on the ceasefire and discuss further military cooperation in the conflict.

The meeting comes at a time when Ukraine’s only salient on Russian soil, in Kursk Oblast, is shrinking, possibly collapsing. That may be significant for the future use of North Korean troops in the conflict.

North Korean troops have, so far, fought exclusively on Russian soil, per the terms of a 2024 bilateral treaty. If Russian terrain is fully recaptured, the possibility of North Korean troops fighting in Ukraine proper may come under discussion.

In Pyongyang on June 18, 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” that surprised analysts with both its scale and its commitments.

According to an in-depth South Korean analysis, Article 4 of the 23-article treaty states: “In case any one of the two sides is put in a state of war by an armed invasion … the other side shall provide military and other assistance with all means in its possession.”

The treaty adds that the clause is subject to Article 51 of the U.N. Charter. Article 51 grants states the right to national or collective defense if they come under armed attack.

For months after the treaty’s signing, North Korea supplied Russia with munitions and artillery, but not troops. That changed only after combat shifted from Ukrainian to Russian soil.

On Aug. 6, 2024, Kiev’s forces, in a surprise counterattack, stormed across the frontier into Russia’s Kursk Oblast. The lodgment embarrassed the Kremlin and forced it to deploy crack units — including airborne, marine, Chechen and spetsnaz units, and subsequently, fiberoptic drone operators.

North Korean soldiers also joined the counterattack. Kim’s troops began appearing in Russia in October 2024 and were in action in Kursk as winter descended.

They have fought exclusively in the Russian oblast, not in any other parts of the frontlines — which the Dupuy Institute estimated to be 1,050 miles long in 2024 — in Ukrainian territory.

For months, Kursk has seen some of the war’s most intense fighting, but current indications are that Kiev’s troops are retreating from their Russian lodgment.

”Russian forces continued offensive operations in Kursk Oblast,” U.S. think tank the Institute for the Study of War wrote on March 15. They have “not completely pushed Ukrainian forces out of the area as of this publication,” the ISW wrote, but Kiev’s troops are “in a difficult tactical situation.”

An estimated 12,000 to 13,000 North Koreans have been central to Russian operations in Kursk.

Not only are their numbers significant, but their units are also fresh and cohesive. That sets them apart from Russian units that have been constantly reinforced and reformed due to losses suffered in three years of fighting.

Multiple Ukrainian sources have stated that the North Korean soldiers are more motivated than Russians — almost always fighting to the death — are more physically fit and are better marksmen.

Used as shock troops and suffering from poor interoperability with Russian units, their casualties have been heavy, and they briefly withdrew from combat in January. But President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Feb. 8 that they had returned to the battlefield.

According to South Korean intelligence in February, the North’s units may have been reinforced.

Recent media attention has focused on an unorthodox Russian assault through a gas pipeline into Ukraine’s rear in Kursk. But frontline sources told The New York Times last week that it was North Korean assault units, together with improved Russian drone units, that were primarily responsible for Moscow’s advances.

The sources said that North Koreans had learned from their early battlefield experiences and improved their tactics. They have also added fire support from organic North Korean artillery units.

Ukrainian sources quoted by specialist media NK News called North Korean troops “pivotal” to the success of Russian operations in Kursk.

• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.

washingtontimes.com · by Andrew Salmon

21. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 16, 2025

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 16, 2025

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-16-2025

US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz stated on March 16 that Ukraine will receive unspecified security guarantees in exchange for unspecified territorial concessions. Waltz also stated that the United States is considering "the reality of the situation on the ground" in diplomatic talks when discussing an end to the war in Ukraine. It is not clear exactly what Waltz meant by "the reality of the situation on the ground." Russian officials have frequently used the narrative that any negotiations must consider the "realities on the ground" to refer to the current frontline in Ukraine and their claims of the inevitability of further Russian battlefield gains. Waltz's acknowledgement that Ukraine will receive unspecified security guarantees is a key aspect of achieving US President Donald Trump's stated goal of securing a lasting peace in Ukraine, but stopping hostilities on indefensible lines would limit the effectiveness of security guarantees.

The current frontlines do not provide the strategic depth that Ukraine will need to reliably defend against renewed Russian aggression. Russian forces are just across the Dnipro River from Kherson City, roughly 25 kilometers from Zaporizhzhia City, and 30 kilometers from Kharkiv City. Russian troops on the Dnipro River could use a ceasefire to prepare for the extremely difficult task of conducting an opposed river crossing undisturbed, significantly increasing the likelihood of success in such an endeavor. Stopping a well-prepared, major mechanized offensive cold is extremely rare in war, which means that a renewed Russian assault would likely threaten both Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia cities, as well as key cities in the Donetsk "fortress belt," almost immediately. Russia is constructing a large highway and railway aimed at connecting major cities in occupied Ukraine and Russia, which will reinforce Russia's hold on occupied Ukraine and Russia's ability to transport and supply Russian forces operating in Ukraine in the event of a future Russian offensive in southern Ukraine.

The US and Europe would likely need to provide military aid to Ukraine more rapidly, in much larger volumes, and at higher cost the closer the ultimate ceasefire lines are to the current frontline. Ukraine would likely need an even larger military with greater capabilities to play its critical role in deterring and, if necessary, defeating future aggression along current frontline (both within Ukraine and along Ukraine’s international border with Russia) that is over 2,100 kilometers long. Enforcing a ceasefire along the current frontline would also require the commitment of large numbers of Western forces. Helping Ukraine regain strategically critical territory, as Trump has suggested he intends to do, could significantly reduce the cost and difficulty of securing a future peace. A ceasefire along more defensible positions would also place Russian forces in a more disadvantaged position for renewed offensive operations, making future Russian aggression less likely.

Russian officials maintain their maximalist territorial claims over all occupied Ukraine and significant parts of unoccupied Ukraine, however. Senior Kremlin officials, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, have consistently demanded that Ukraine surrender the entirety of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts, including areas that Russian forces do not already occupy, and have reiterated these claims in recent weeks. Russian state media has also recently amplified similar sentiments from Kremlin-affiliated mouthpieces. Putin recently claimed that "Novorossiya" is an integral part of Russia, and Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov defined "Novorossiya" as all of eastern and southern Ukraine including Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, and Mykolaiv oblasts. Russia currently occupies a small portion of Kharkiv Oblast and the Kinburn Spit in Mykolaiv Oblast, and Russian forces are advancing towards the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast administrative border. Continued Kremlin statements demanding that Ukraine cede unoccupied Ukrainian territory indicate that the Kremlin and Putin remain committed to these territorial goals despite ongoing negotiations.

Russian officials have given no public indications that they are willing to make concessions on their territorial or security demands of Ukraine. Accepting Western-backed security guarantees for Ukraine would be a significant concession for Putin. Putin has repeatedly called for Ukraine to permanently abandon its goals of joining NATO or any security bloc and to reject future offers of foreign military assistance, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently claimed that Russia will reject the future deployment of any European peacekeepers to Ukraine and consider any such deployment as the "direct, official, undisguised involvement of NATO countries" in the war. Russian officials also appear to be generating increased support for their demands in Russian society despite the costs of Russia's protracted war effort, and Putin likely remains committed to securing a return for Russia's investment in the war he regards as sufficient. Putin and Kremlin officials have been regularly broadcasting their demands for Ukrainian territorial and security concessions beyond the current frontlines to the Russian people, underscoring how unlikely Putin is to abandon his ambitions in Ukraine even after a ceasefire.

Key Takeaways

US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz stated on March 16 that Ukraine will receive unspecified security guarantees in exchange for unspecified territorial concessions.

The current frontlines do not provide the strategic depth that Ukraine will need to reliably defend against renewed Russian aggression.

Russian officials maintain their maximalist territorial claims over all occupied Ukraine and significant parts of unoccupied Ukraine, however.

Russian officials have given no public indications that they are willing to make concessions on their territorial or security demands of Ukraine.

Russia continues to seize on diplomatic engagements with the United States to normalize its war demands.

The United Kingdom (UK) convened a virtual Coalition of the Willing summit on March 15 to reiterate support for Ukraine and discuss plans for peace.

Ukrainian forces recently advanced near Borova and Russian forces advanced in Sumy Oblast and near Velyka Novosilka.

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) continues efforts to posture as solving issues with the Russian military.

22. DOGE’s war on American veterans has begun

They are coming for us.

I wonder if we will see Bonus Marches on the mall someday when they slash support to veterans? (I am sure the DOGE wiz kids do not know the history of veterans not receiving benefits).

DOGE’s war on American veterans has begun

by Alec Emmert, opinion contributor - 03/13/25 11:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/5191033-musk-and-doges-war-on-american-veterans-has-begun/

Two recent essays should raise alarm bells within the veteran community.

The first, published in The Economist, is titled “American veterans now receive absurdly generous benefits.” As the title suggests, it questions the disability benefits that veterans receive. The second, published in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion section, urges Elon Musk and DOGE to eliminate SkillBridge, a Department of Defense program that provides crucial assistance in helping members of the military transition back into civilian life.

When viewed on their own, these pieces may appear as contrarian clickbait. But in the current climate, it seems that these articles in relatively conservative publications represent the initial attack in an effort to strip American veterans of their hard-earned benefits.

Military life is rough, with difficult training and frequent overseas deployments. Although patriotism and adventure are always motivators, a National Interest article highlights the fact that most Army enlistees joined for financial reasons: “the overwhelming majority of respondents had economic reasons for joining up; for most enlistees, military service appears to be a job first and a calling second.” If the military hopes to continue filling its ranks, it must provide recruits a compelling benefits package to do so.

Few veterans come from wealthy backgrounds; America’s affluent families do not like to send their children to war. Nevertheless, military service offers veterans opportunities for social mobility through its education benefits. Those who commit to a 20-year career can attain a certain level of financial stability through the military’s retirement package. Veterans injured in the line of duty can be confident that they will receive compensation for their disabilities. This system is equitable and provides many people with a genuine chance at the American dream.

While veterans have typically enjoyed public support and protection, recent DOGE cuts have had a disproportionately negative impact on the community. The indiscriminate firing of federal workers without regard for their veteran status is deeply troubling, as nearly one-third of federal workers served. These firings have included numerous disabled veterans with multiple overseas deployments, with no consideration of their sacrifice.

White House advisor Alina Habba recently implied that these veterans did not deserve their jobs at all. She said, “We are going to care for them in the right way, but perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment, or not willing to come to work.”

These remarks are callous at best, especially considering that Habba grew up in an affluent New York City suburb and never had to enlist to pay for her college education. Although the Trump administration claims to be pro-veteran, it has not condemned these remarks, nor has it done anything to protect veterans who are federal employees.

Even more concerning is the lack of response from the veteran community to defend our own. We are a vulnerable group. Only about 5 percent of the U.S. population has served, which is not enough to form a significant voting bloc, and few of us belong to the donor class. The memory of 9/11 has faded, and the yellow ribbon stickers on cars have gone away. So what is the incentive to take care of us veterans beyond altruism? It is only a matter of time until DOGE targets veteran disability, retirement and education benefits.

What should veterans do about it? The answer is simple: The veteran community needs to put partisanship aside, come together and look out for our own best interests. While billionaires are eliminating our jobs and considering cutting our benefits, we must make our voices heard.

Although few Americans have ever served, about 20 percent of Congress are veterans, so we should have powerful allies if the community and its supporters speak out. The demand to DOGE’s leaders should be simple: Don’t think about touching our benefits until you pay your fair share of taxes.

Alec Emmert is the CEO of Service to School, a national nonprofit that has mentored over 3,500 veterans to college matriculation. He is a former Navy submarine officer and consultant at McKinsey and Co.

23. China’s observatory in Chile in doubt as US raises concerns about potential military use

China’s observatory in Chile in doubt as US raises concerns about potential military use

Washington’s unease over ‘low-orbit satellites’ deployment could scuttle US$80 million project for Beijing’s astronomical research institute

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3302489/chinas-observatory-chile-doubt-us-raises-concerns-about-potential-military-use

Igor Patrickin Washington

Published: 5:45am, 15 Mar 2025Updated: 12:02am, 17 Mar 2025

A planned Chinese observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert is facing possible cancellation after US officials in recent months have raised concerns about its potential military applications.

The Chilean government is now reviewing the project and has not ruled out blocking the agreement between a local university and the National Astronomical Observatory of China (NAOC).

Estimated to cost around US$80 million, the observatory was to be built on Cerro Ventarrones, a prime site for astronomical studies in Antofagasta, northern Chile.

The project materialised through a partnership with Chile’s Universidad Católica del Norte and was to form a key part of China’s broader space strategy, which includes similar initiatives in Argentina and Venezuela.

A view of Las Campanas Observatory, managed by the US-based Carnegie Institution for Science, in the Atacama Desert near Vallenar, Chile, in 2021. Photo: Reuters

The plan was for the facility to host some 100 telescopes, focusing on tracking deep-space astronomical events and near-Earth objects such as asteroids and comets. Chilean scientists were to have limited access to the facilities but could engage in joint research with Chinese researchers.

Chile is a prime location for astronomical research. Its remote high-altitude terrain and clear skies have drawn international observatories from the US, Europe and Japan.

Analysts believe China’s presence in the region could shift the balance of influence there, giving Beijing a strategic foothold in Latin America’s scientific and technological infrastructure.

US officials have raised concerns about the project.

According to a March 6 report by AthenaLab, a Santiago-based think tank specialising in defence and national security, US Space Force officials suggested that the observatory was intended to “accelerate China’s space expansion, particularly the deployment of low-orbit satellites”.

Such equipment is commonly used for communications, climate monitoring, and military surveillance because it can provide high-resolution imaging and faster data transmission.

China in a statement last year to Newsweek denied any military intentions. The Chinese scientists leading the project, Jiasheng Huang and Gongbo Zhao, did not immediately respond to the Post’s requests for comment.

The issue was reportedly first raised with the Chilean government last December by Bernadette Meehan, then the US ambassador to Chile, who had been appointed by former US president Joe Biden.

Now, the observatory’s construction is in doubt, with Chilean media reporting that President Gabriel Boric has decided to cancel the project.

Officially, Chile’s foreign ministry said it was still reviewing the matter.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric speaks at La Moneda Palace in Santiago on March 5. Photo: EPA-EFE

The ministry “contacted the Catholic University of the North and the Chinese embassy” to obtain more information about the observatory and stated its “legal directorate is analysing the nature of the agreement”, according to its press release.

Speaking to El Mercurio, a Chilean newspaper, the university said it valued “transparency, being at the disposal of the government to provide all the documentation they have requested and may request” regarding its partnership with the NAOC.

The matter represents just the latest episode in a series of Sino-American tensions affecting Chile.

Previously, Washington publicly opposed the installation of a Huawei Technologies undersea internet cable connecting Santiago to Shanghai and threatened to cancel Chile’s visa-waiver programme with the US if Chilean authorities allowed a Chinese company to print the country’s passports.

Andres Borquez of the Millennium Nucleus on the Impacts of China in Latin America and the Caribbean, a research centre, said the project’s cancellation fit into a broader pattern of escalating US-China friction in the region.

Chile has long pursued a strategy of “scientific diplomacy” to attract international observatories, Borquez added, noting that such partnerships were becoming increasingly entangled in global rivalries.

“For years, Chile tried to maintain strategic ambiguity, balancing economic ties with China and security cooperation with the US,” he explained. “But as both powers become more assertive, it’s getting harder to navigate that middle ground.”

Borquez said the case highlighted a shift in Chile’s approach to hi-tech collaboration.

“What we’re seeing is a clearer alignment with US technology and security policies, especially in projects involving data and digital infrastructure,” he added.

Borquez said that while Chile remained open to trade and investment from China, authorities in Santiago appeared to be exercising greater caution about partnerships that could raise national security concerns.

Igor Patrick

Igor Patrick has worked in different media outlets in Latin America, mainly covering Brics and China. In addition to his bachelor's degree in journalism (PUC Minas), he holds two master's degrees from the Yenching Academy (Peking University) and Schwarzman Scholars (Tsinghu

24. Save Infantry Leaders From Bias by Removing Ranger Tabs

I have only seen this one time in my career. A brigade commander in Korea (in the 1980s) said he would only accept LTs with Ranger Tabs to his Brigade. The irony was he was an infantry officer without a Ranger tab himself.

I think this officer is making something more out of this issue than is necessary.

That said, the people I have the greatest respect for are those who do not make it through Ranger Schoolthe first time and then go back (once or even more). I had one friend who completed Ranger School in the summer but did not pass his last patrol so he did not graduate and he went back in the winter and earned his tab as a Winter Ranger.

Save Infantry Leaders From Bias by Removing Ranger Tabs

by SSD

By Matt Lensing, MTI Contributor

When you walk into a new unit you are tab checked. You have it or you don’t. You are a have or have not. You are a good or bad leader on day one. That is the fallacy infantry leaders believe, and one I have perpetuated in my career.

Every new lieutenant arriving from infantry basic officer leader course (IBOLC) is placed in a queue for platoon leadership. While not the only factor, a large determinant for getting a platoon ahead of peers is having a Ranger Tab. In my last battalion we had an LT arrive without a tab, and he was put to work in the operations (S3) shop until he had time to develop and eventually go to a platoon. The leadership assessed that he had a low ceiling for success because he did not graduate Ranger School. Fortunately he had another opportunity to go to Ranger School, and this time he graduated.

When he came back to the battalion he jumped ahead of peers and went into a Platoon almost immediately. His stock rose immensely and after only six months as a platoon leader he was selected to become a Company executive officer (XO), which is a position usually reserved for the top tier of a lieutenant cohort. When he departed the battalion two years later he was in the top of his peer group. What changed? Did 61 days at Ranger School provide him all he needed to become an effective combat leader? I doubt it.

What changed was how the battalion leadership viewed his potential. Individuals have implicit biases and Army leaders are no different. Despite the Army’s recent attempts to eliminate bias from promotion boards by removing photos more has to be done to change the culture of making snap judgements on leaders. Ways to remove biases when selecting individuals for leadership positions and career opportunities include:

Removing Ranger Tabs and skill identifiers from uniforms
Not looking at past evaluations when measuring current performance
Administering 360-degree assessments to leaders annually, or at least prior to promotions, to measure how peers, subordinates, and superiors rate their performance.

Remove Ranger Tabs, Skill Badges, and Identifiers

The military uniform provides immediate credibility to those who likely have no personal knowledge of the wearer’s abilities. Every time someone judges a Soldier positively because of a badge or skill tab they are succumbing to the halo effect. In the book, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” Daniel Kahneman describes the halo effect as, “the tendency to like (or dislike) everything about someone even the things you have not observed.” Anytime someone says that an individual is a good leader solely based on their Ranger Tab they are supporting this cognitive bias.

This bias is a shortcut for leaders to assess talent without directly observing someone in action. Young infantry LTs arrive to a battalion and have minimal credentials, so more emphasis is placed on physical appearance and their Ranger Tab, or lack thereof.

Removing the tab from everyday wear in the Army would force leaders to engage their analytical abilities to evaluate talent other than a biased judgement. However, it shouldn’t stop at the Ranger Tab; all skill badges and identifiers worn on uniforms encourage judgements about people, which may inflate other’s view of them. Conversely those who don’t have the same amount of flair as their peers are pre-judged as lacking the necessary leadership qualities. While the uniform tells a story it can become an impediment to assessing actual skill and talent, which can contribute to another bias, the anchoring effect.

Avoid Looking at Past Evaluations When Measuring Current Performance

Another concept from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Traversky’s research described in, “Thinking Fast and Slow,” is the idea of anchoring, which is when someone’s opinion is tied to a previous event or the first information received. Despite learning new facts individuals may still find themselves attached to earlier reports. In the Army people who perform well, or were rated high by previous bosses, will continue to perform well but hopefully its not solely because their last boss thought highly of them.

Superiors maybe susceptible to the anchoring effect when they ask junior officers to share their evaluations from previous jobs. While this practice is discouraged during the hiring marketplace it is still commonplace for senior raters to ask feedback on how someone was previously rated. The current boss runs the risk of anchoring their subordinates future performance to previous ratings. If a subordinate’s last boss rated them high then a rater will want to see their current performance in a similar manner because surely earlier raters wouldn’t be wrong. Conversely a previous negative evaluation will encourage raters to highlight their subordinate’s negative traits, which confirms their first piece of information they asked to see previous evaluations.

This practice can also encourage the hindsight bias. When a subordinate performs well, or poorly, the rater will think that they knew it all along since they had read it in a previous evaluation. Similarly knowing how former leaders viewed an individual will encourage current raters to view only the information that confirms their initial bias. To help avoid single sources of feedback that will determine an officers chance of promotion the Army should widely administer 360-degree feedback assessments.

Administer Annual 360-degree Feedback Assessments

If the Army wants to continue to eliminate bias when assessing leaders for performance and career opportunities they have to provide more methods to assess leadership ability. The anonymous feedback officers receive at Commanders Assessment Programs prior to battalion and brigade command is an option.

Previously officers were required to initiate a Multi-Source Assessment and Feedback (MSAF) survey at least annually, aligned to their officer evaluation reports. The feedback however was only released to the individual service member, so their was not much incentive to act on the results.

Recent Army talent management efforts emphasize leader feedback and professional coaching, but its currently only available to select audiences primarily promotable majors and lieutenant colonels with approximately 15 years of service. Providing mandatory feedback to leaders from the start of their career gives more data points to assess trends in an individual’s performance. Additionally this data should be tracked and tied to evaluations, which would reveal a more comprehensive view of an officers strengths and weaknesses as opposed to just what superiors write in an evaluation.

Conclusion

Blind promotion boards without photos were designed to eliminate race and gender biases, which may prevent qualified candidates from advancing in the ranks. This practice models the technique describe by Malcolm Gladwell in, “Blink,” when orchestras placed musicians behind screens during auditions to eliminate implicit biases that specifically disadvantaged women despite them having equal or superior talent to male counterparts.

Unfortunately removing biases from promotions won’t fix all the problems in the Army since a Soldier is judged by physical attributes daily. A fresh haircut is associated with discipline, and a clean and pressed uniform equated with attention to detail. Skill badges are representations of expertise and combat patches with experience. These physical decorations are surrogates for actual knowledge of an individuals capability.

As a leader I have to acknowledge my own biases to favor individuals with observable signs of accomplishment and force myself to seek first hand proof about their attributes. Leaders seeking to create a meritocracy in the Army should avoid relying on awards, credentials, and especially physical appearance to assess talent because they contribute to biased outcomes.

Matt Lensing is an active duty infantry officer who has served in the U.S. Army since 2007.

25. The Bolduc Brief: Restoring Respect - A Call to Reinstall General Milley’s Portraits in the Pentagon

It really does seem petty and vengeful and Kim Jong Un-like to remove portraits and try to erase history.

The Bolduc Brief: Restoring Respect - A Call to Reinstall General Milley’s Portraits in the Pentagon

sofrep.com · by Donald Bolduc · March 15, 2025

1 day ago