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Quotes of the Day:
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
–Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity."
– Thomas J. Watson
“An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions, which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion, and some sense or other to his advantage”.
– Karl Theodor Jaspers
1. Hegseth Cuts Pentagon Work on Preventing Civilian Harm
2. Trump Administration Readies Order to Bolster U.S. Shipbuilders, Punish China
3. By halting Ukraine aid, Trump courts personal defeat
4. At least one Pentagon agency has begun firing probationary workers
5. Fall of Taiwan Would Be ‘Disaster’ for US, Trump Pick Colby Says
6. Strategic Affairs no. 46 What is the Trump Foreign Policy?
7. Pentagon policy chief hearing highlights GOP foreign policy divide
8. Nominee for top DoD policy job sidesteps questions on Russian invasion of Ukraine
9. What Do Chinese Analysts Think of Trump’s China Policy Thus Far?
10. Zelensky Offers Terms to Stop Fighting, Assuring U.S. That Ukraine Wants Peace
11. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 4, 2025
12. Iran Update, March 4, 2025
13. Trump adviser Alina Habba says veterans fired by DOGE are perhaps 'not fit to have a job at this moment'
14. Trump Touts ‘Swift and Unrelenting’ Action on Border, Budget and Economy
15. 7 Takeaways from Trump’s Speech to Congress
16. Zelensky Calls Heated Meeting With Trump ‘Regrettable’ in Bid to Mend Ties
17. Watch Trudeau speak directly to Trump during blistering speech
18. Unpreparedness is a Choice
19. US Deputy Secretary of Defense Nominee: “Strong Alliance with Korea... Unclear Whether US-ROK-Japan Solidarity Will Continue”
20. Victor Davis Hanson: Can Trump Revolutionize America?
21. Testimony from Hell: Review of "I am André: German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy " book review by Juliana Geran Pilon
22. Civil Military Relations in the United States
23. Hal and Julia Moore's son 'saddened' and 'angered' over Fort Benning renaming
1. Hegseth Cuts Pentagon Work on Preventing Civilian Harm
Hegseth Cuts Pentagon Work on Preventing Civilian Harm
Employees at the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office were told their jobs would be eliminated, as would advisory posts at operational commands.
The ruins of Rafi Al Iraqi’s house in Mosul, Iraq. Airstrikes on his neighborhood on Jan. 6, 2017, killed 16 civilians.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
By John Ismay and Azmat Khan
John Ismay and Azmat Khan have spent years investigating civilian casualties from U.S. combat operations.
- March 4, 2025
- Updated 8:14 p.m. ET
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is moving to terminate Pentagon offices and positions that focus on preventing and responding to civilian harm during U.S. combat operations, according to three defense officials.
Employees at the Pentagon’s Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response office, which deals with policy matters related to limiting the risk to noncombatants, were informed on Monday that their office would be closed, the officials said.
They were also told that the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, which handles training and procedures, would close as well.
The Pentagon is likely to cut all positions at combatant commands around the world, like Central Command and Africa Command, that work to mitigate and assess risks to civilians during airstrikes and other military operations.
It is unclear whether Mr. Hegseth is rescinding the Pentagon’s policy instruction, which requires that possible risks to civilians are considered in combat planning and operations.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive policy changes.
If enforced, the decision would eliminate jobs for more than 160 Defense Department employees.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense referred questions about Mr. Hegseth’s decision to close these programs to the Army, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding those developments on Tuesday.
In President Trump’s first week back in office, the Army asked Pentagon leadership to rescind the policy instruction, relieve the service of its responsibility for the Center of Excellence and to ask Congress to abolish the office.
The laws of armed conflict require the protection of civilians in war zones, and senior commanders draft rules of engagement for their forces to comply with them.
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Long considered a bedrock of U.S. military culture, those principles are now under threat in the second Trump administration, as Mr. Hegseth repeatedly speaks about wanting to return “warfighting” and a “warrior ethos” to a military he insists has become soft and too bureaucratic.
During his Senate confirmation hearing, Mr. Hegseth answered questions about his past comments, including that “restrictive rules of engagement” briefed to him by a uniformed attorney known as a Judge Advocate General, or JAG, had made it more difficult to defeat enemies, as well as his use of the term “jagoff” to derisively refer to those officers.
Such rules of engagement, which establish guidelines for the use of deadly force in a military operation, are in fact signed by the senior officer in a given combat theater, not by JAG officers.
In a leadership purge at the Pentagon on Feb. 21, Mr. Hegseth fired the top uniformed lawyers for the Army and Air Force. The Navy’s top JAG, a three-star admiral, abruptly retired in December. His deputy, a two-star admiral, remains in place as the acting Navy JAG.
In a post on LinkedIn late Monday night, Matt Isler, a retired Air Force brigadier general who oversaw the combination of aerial surveillance, coalition air power and ground-based weapons in support of ground troops battling Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria, pushed back on the new Pentagon leadership’s decision.
“Some have recently argued that Defense Department efforts to mitigate civilian deaths in war inappropriately constrain U.S. forces,” he wrote. “This could not be farther from the truth.”
“Reducing risks of civilian harm focuses combat effects on the enemy, accelerates achievement of campaign objectives, preserves combat power, and protects warfighters,” he added.
Mr. Hegseth’s decision was heavily criticized by civilian harm protection advocates with whom the military worked in close consultation to develop policies.
“Repeal of these lifesaving policies would be a betrayal of the civilians who have borne the brunt of U.S. operations,” said Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “It would also be a betrayal of the war fighters and veterans Secretary Hegseth says he stands for, who have themselves worked to ensure the U.S. can learn from the grave mistakes and lessons of past wars.”
Eliminating these programs could also halt efforts to provide redress and payments to civilian victims of U.S. combat operations.
Joanna Naples-Mitchell, a human rights lawyer representing 30 families whose loved ones were injured or killed in U.S. combat operations in Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan between 2015 and 2024, said that eliminating these programs would exacerbate the trauma of civilian victims and moral injury among soldiers involved in the incidents.
Ms. Naples-Mitchell, whose clients include the relatives of victims who were the subject of New York Times reporting, said the changes would make the government less efficient.
“Killing innocent people is not only a moral stain,” she said, “but wastes government resources and makes Americans less safe.”
Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, also criticized Mr. Hegseth’s move.
“By revoking these policies, we increase the risk that U.S. weapons are deployed in a manner that undermines our interests and values — ultimately posing a greater threat to our national security,” he said. “Americans should be ashamed.”
The Defense Department’s civilian protection program was started during the first Trump administration by James N. Mattis, the secretary of defense at the time, in response to a Times report in November 2017 on civilians who were killed during airstrikes in Iraq.
In 2022, after a series of Times investigations that uncovered systemic failures to protect civilians, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III announced sweeping changes to military doctrine, planning and training aimed at mitigating the risk of civilian harm.
While these programs were heralded as making improvements to U.S. civilian harm policies, they faced criticism for not addressing operations the United States supports through military aid alone, such as Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
The Trump administration also recently rescinded Biden-era limits on counterterrorism drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional war zones, reverting to the looser set of rules the president used in his first term.
Since Mr. Trump took office, the U.S. military has launched several strikes in Iraq, Syria and Somalia, despite his earlier promises to end “endless wars.”
The most recent of those actions targeted Al-Shabaab fighters in Somalia on Saturday, according to a statement released by U.S. Africa Command.
On Feb. 23, U.S. forces launched an attack in northwest Syria that killed the senior leader of a terrorist organization affiliated with Al Qaeda, according to U.S. Central Command, which later released a video of the strike.
On Feb. 12, five ISIS fighters in Iraq were killed in an airstrike enabled by U.S. forces in the country, Central Command said in a statement days later.
John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy. More about John Ismay
Azmat Khan is an investigative reporter for The Times specializing in American warfare, weapons and the human costs of conflict. More about Azmat Khan
2. Trump Administration Readies Order to Bolster U.S. Shipbuilders, Punish China
Trump Administration Readies Order to Bolster U.S. Shipbuilders, Punish China
A draft order includes measures such as raising revenue from Chinese ships and tax credits and grants for shipyards
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-readies-order-to-bolster-u-s-shipbuilders-punish-china-d6a2749b?mod=latest_headlines
By Paul Berger
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March 4, 2025 7:01 pm ET
China is the world’s biggest producer of containerships, accounting for nearly 29% of vessels in service today when measured by container capacity. Photo: AFP/Getty Images
The Trump administration is preparing an executive order aimed at reviving U.S. shipbuilding and cutting Chinese dominance of the global maritime industry.
According to a draft summary reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the order includes 18 measures ranging from raising revenue from fees on Chinese-built ships and cranes entering the U.S., to establishing a new office at the National Security Council to strengthen the domestic maritime sector.
The measures also include raising wages for nuclear-shipyard workers and instructions to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to review government procurement processes, including the Navy’s.
The document is labeled as a draft and could change. Shipping-industry officials said the order could be announced as early as Tuesday night. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The measures draw on bipartisan proposals that have been circulating in Washington for several years. These include pending legislation in Congress aimed at restoring U.S. shipbuilding to proposals floated by the U.S. Trade Representative’s office that would charge fees on Chinese-flagged or Chinese-built ships calling at U.S. ports.
Many of those earlier proposals faced months of scrutiny or an uncertain political process. Trump could fast-track them with a stroke of his pen if implemented as an executive order.
One shipping-industry official said the executive order was influenced by Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, who as a member of Congress last year co-sponsored bipartisan legislation aimed at expanding the U.S.-flagged fleet and providing financial support and tax incentives to U.S. shipbuilders.
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China’s fleet of warships is eclipsing the U.S. As tensions between the two global powers grow, the U.S. is looking to South Korea, one of its biggest allies in Asia, to help increase its battleship supply. Photo: HD Hyundai Heavy Industries
National-security concerns have spurred members of both parties to increasingly give priority to the maritime industry amid fears that U.S. shipbuilding and the U.S. commercial fleet that would be needed to support wars overseas have fallen decades behind China.
The draft executive order includes measures that create Maritime Opportunity Zones and a Maritime Security Trust Fund to boost investments. It also says that revenue from fees on Chinese cranes and ships at U.S. ports would fund domestic maritime investments.
Ocean shipping companies based in Europe and parts of Asia outside China pushed back against the proposed fees on Chinese ships when they were floated last month by the U.S. Trade Representative’s office.
China is the world’s biggest producer of containerships. Almost 29% of vessels in service today when measured by container capacity were made in China, according to data firm Linerlytica. Chinese shipyards account for about 70% of new containership capacity on order.
Soren Toft, chief executive of the biggest container line in the world, Geneva-based Mediterranean Shipping, said if the Trump administration implements the fees, carriers will be forced to pull services from some smaller U.S. ports as it wouldn’t be worth the cost of unloading small volumes of containers.
Toft, speaking Monday at S&P Global’s annual TPM25 shipping conference in Long Beach, Calif., said the fees could raise shipping costs on some routes from Asia to the U.S. by up to $800 per 40-foot container. He said those costs would be passed on to importers and consumers.
Write to Paul Berger at paul.berger@wsj.com
Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the March 5, 2025, print edition as 'Executive Order to Boost American Shipbuilding'.
3. By halting Ukraine aid, Trump courts personal defeat
Excerpts:
While Trump may not be concerned with “advantage” over Moscow, securing a durable peace will, in fact, require leverage. That means both continuing military assistance and tightening sanctions on Russia. If Putin understands that more fighting won’t gain him anything and Russia’s economy cannot sustain the war, he might be more willing to compromise. Meanwhile, Washington should work with allies to develop plans to support European-led postwar military aid and security guarantees for Ukraine.
Washington and Kyiv first need to find a way to bury the hatchet. As Trump has demonstrated just within the past couple weeks — by calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” then inviting him to the White House days later — he clearly can let bygones be bygones when necessary.
Signing the minerals deal, the reason for Zelenskyy’s visit in the first place, could help get things back on track. The Ukrainian leader has reaffirmed his commitment to peace and made clear he’s ready to move on. Trump should be, too.
By halting Ukraine aid, Trump courts personal defeat
There’s still time to avoid emboldening America’s enemies—and a humiliation that dwarfs his predecessor’s Afghanistan withdrawal.
By John Hardie and Mark Montgomery
March 4, 2025 03:54 PM ET
defenseone.com · by John Hardie
President Donald Trump has suspended military aid for Kyiv following his contentious Oval Office meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. If not reversed, Trump’s decision will, at best, undermine his own efforts to achieve durable peace in Ukraine. At worst, a permanent end to U.S aid could eventually deliver the president a humiliation that dwarfs his predecessor’s Afghanistan withdrawal. Washington should urgently resume its assistance and engage with Kyiv to find a way to move forward. Trump will also need to be clear-eyed about Vladimir Putin’s ambitions and what it will take to check them.
During Friday’s Oval Office meeting, disagreement over whether Ukraine should accept a ceasefire absent security guarantees escalated into a war of words that ended with Zelenskyy booted from the White House without signing the minerals deal he came to finalize. “I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations,” Trump declared after the meeting. “I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE.”
The administration now says it is “pausing and reviewing” U.S. military aid until Kyiv demonstrates its commitment to peace talks. The suspension includes all American equipment and munitions currently in the delivery pipeline or on order for Ukraine. It remains unclear, at this writing, whether this decision affects other forms of U.S. assistance, such as intelligence-sharing and training.
Ukraine desires peace more than anyone. It simply needs that peace to be durable. The hard truth is that these negotiations are unlikely to resolve the fundamental question at stake in this war: whether Ukraine will be an independent country or a Russian vassal. Absent solid security guarantees, the risk of a follow-on war will remain high. European countries have discussed deploying a “reassurance force” in Ukraine but insist it will require a U.S. “backstop.” While the administration has ruled out putting American boots on the ground, Trump has left the door open to U.S. support of some kind. Kyiv and its European allies are pressing for a firm commitment.
Putin’s goal isn’t simply to grab some Ukrainian territory. Rather, as he affirmed on Thursday, the Russian leader seeks a “fundamental solution to the Ukraine crisis” — code for making Ukraine a vassal state — and a revision of the broader “European and global security system.” Moscow’s demands include not only barring Ukraine from joining NATO or hosting foreign troops but also strict limits on its military. In effect, Ukraine would be left at Russia’s mercy. Putin likely also hopes to widen the negotiations to include a pullback of NATO forces from Eastern Europe.
Trump insists Putin will honor any peace deal Trump negotiates. The Kremlin, too, demands a permanent resolution to the conflict — but with the catch that its maximalist terms must be met. Unless left with no other choice, no Ukrainian leader will submit to Russian authoritarian rule, not least because doing so would be political suicide.
Some may mistakenly think pressuring Kyiv to accept Russian terms offers the surest path to peace. Although Trump has said he expects concessions by both sides, he’s also admitted he doesn’t “care so much” about the specific terms so long as the killing stops. He argues Russia holds all the “cards” on the battlefield, suggesting Ukraine would have little choice but to go along if left without U.S. aid.
That assessment undervalues Ukraine’s resilience and determination. Without American aid, Ukraine’s military prospects, particularly its ability to defend its skies, certainly would suffer. Ukraine would probably lose land and soldiers at a faster pace and see more infrastructure destroyed. Still, thanks to European support, previously delivered U.S. assistance, and domestic weapons production, including Ukrainian-made drones that currently account for most Russian losses, Ukraine could likely fight on throughout 2025. Shortages would mount as time passes, though Russia itself will likely struggle to sustain offensive operations beyond 2025.
While a U.S. aid cutoff might not force Ukrainian capitulation, it would certainly make Putin even less willing to compromise and would diminish Trump’s ability to broker a deal. Fighting could drag on until it peters out into a semi-frozen conflict or an inconclusive ceasefire, setting the stage for another war.
And what if ending aid did eventually enable Russia to break Ukraine’s back? That’d spell greater disaster. It would embolden Moscow and its allies in Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang, heightening threats to U.S. interests globally even as America’s military already finds itself stretched thin. Trump would rightly be blamed by history, not to mention many American voters. Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan stained his foreign-policy legacy and caused an irrecoverable loss in voter confidence, something that might concern Vice President Vance as well.
While Trump may not be concerned with “advantage” over Moscow, securing a durable peace will, in fact, require leverage. That means both continuing military assistance and tightening sanctions on Russia. If Putin understands that more fighting won’t gain him anything and Russia’s economy cannot sustain the war, he might be more willing to compromise. Meanwhile, Washington should work with allies to develop plans to support European-led postwar military aid and security guarantees for Ukraine.
Washington and Kyiv first need to find a way to bury the hatchet. As Trump has demonstrated just within the past couple weeks — by calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” then inviting him to the White House days later — he clearly can let bygones be bygones when necessary.
Signing the minerals deal, the reason for Zelenskyy’s visit in the first place, could help get things back on track. The Ukrainian leader has reaffirmed his commitment to peace and made clear he’s ready to move on. Trump should be, too.
defenseone.com · by John Hardie
4. At least one Pentagon agency has begun firing probationary workers
Excerpts:
As of March 3, more than 25,000 federal employees had been dismissed during the second Trump administration, according to a count by GovExec.
Next up, according to Pentagon leaders: a hiring freeze, a scrub of “underperformers,” and, ultimately, the dismissal of up to roughly 60,000 workers.
At least one Pentagon agency has begun firing probationary workers
The Defense Logistics Agency has begun dismissing its share of the Defense Department’s 5,400 targeted employees.
By Lauren C. Williams and Bradley Peniston
March 4, 2025 08:42 PM ET
defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams
The Defense Logistics Agency has started firing civilian employees who were hired, transferred, or promoted within the last year or two, Defense One has learned, as part of a larger Pentagon workforce-reduction effort announced late last month, then temporarily put on hold.
“Beginning today, certain probationary employees have been separated from the Agency,” Defense Logistics Agency leaders told “all hands” in a Monday message reviewed by Defense One. “Prior to these actions, J1 and leadership from each MSC/J-D Code carefully reviewed the affected personnel to ensure mission continuity. We recognize and appreciate the contributions of those impacted and have provided them with resources to assist in their transition from federal service. Our commitment to supporting the workforce remains steadfast, and we will continue to provide updates as they become available. At present, J1 has not received further details from the Department of Defense regarding subsequent personnel actions (e.g., reduction in force).”
Defense officials have said they aim to fire a total of 5,400 probationary employees as the first step in what will ultimately be a 5- to 8-percent reduction in the Pentagon’s roughly 764,000-member civilian workforce. The Trump administration has ordered executive-branch departments to develop plans by March 13 to slash their workforces through layoffs.
One DLA employee said they were fired just after 1 p.m. Monday, when their supervisor called to deliver the news. The call was followed by an email from DLA’s director of human resources.
“I was told to report to the building and I had 15 minutes to get my things and turn in my computer/cell phone,” the employee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
They weren’t allowed to finish the workday.
“As we already know, these terminations were not performance-based. I am a veteran, I have received one group award and one on-the-spot award for my performance at the DLA, and my mid-year performance report was all 5’s—the best score you can receive,” the terminated employee said.
The Pentagon and DLA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
On Feb. 20, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced via video that the department is doing a "reevaluation of our probationary workforce." Such workers have fewer civil-service protections.
In his announcement, Hegseth said the effort is in response to President Trump’s executive orders and a directive from the Office of Personnel Management. He said the dismissals would “start with poor performers” and then “individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical.”
The following day, defense officials said Hegseth was looking to fire some 5,400 probationary employees. But the effort was reportedly put on hold because no one had done the analysis required by law before making broad cuts to the defense workforce.
Pentagon leaders then scheduled the firings to begin on Feb. 28, according to documents filed in court. But the effort was once again put on hold when a U.S. district court judge found that OPM had ordered the mass dismissal illegally. The judge ordered OPM to rescind the order, and specifically instructed Trump-administration lawyers to convey his judgment to the Defense Department.
On Tuesday, OPM revised its memo so it no longer requires the firings. But individual departments and agencies continued to dismiss large numbers of probationary employees over the weekend. DOD began to follow suit on Monday.
As of March 3, more than 25,000 federal employees had been dismissed during the second Trump administration, according to a count by GovExec.
Next up, according to Pentagon leaders: a hiring freeze, a scrub of “underperformers,” and, ultimately, the dismissal of up to roughly 60,000 workers.
Eric Katz contributed to this report.
defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams
5. Fall of Taiwan Would Be ‘Disaster’ for US, Trump Pick Colby Says
Did anyone ask him if the fall of South Korea would be a disaster for the US? I would like to know how he assesses the loss of South Korea if we focus solely on the defense of Taiwan.
Fall of Taiwan Would Be ‘Disaster’ for US, Trump Pick Colby Says
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-04/fall-of-taiwan-would-be-disaster-for-us-nominee-colby-says?sref=hhjZtX76
Elbridge ColbyPhotographer: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg
By Roxana Tiron (BGOV) and Tony Capaccio
March 4, 2025 at 1:40 PM EST
Taiwan’s fall to China “would be a disaster for American interests” and the island’s government must raise defense spending to deter Beijing, Elbridge Colby, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead Pentagon policy, said Tuesday during his Senate confirmation hearing.
The nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy told the Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that Washington needs to motivate Taiwan to avoid a conflict with China and that he’s “profoundly disturbed” about its perceived reluctance to raise defense spending closer to 10% of gross domestic product.
Colby, a China hawk who also served in the Pentagon in Trump’s first team, wrote in response to committee questions that “the military balance has deteriorated dramatically from Taiwan’s perspective” so it “should be dramatically increasing its defense capabilities focused on denying an invasion and riding out a blockade.”
“Taiwan, however, is not doing nearly enough of this,” he wrote.
Trump, who has accused Taiwan of “stealing” the US semiconductor industry and questioned America’s commitment to its security, suggested last year that the island’s government spend about 10% of GDP on its armed forces. Taiwan President Lai Ching-te pledged last month to boost military spending to 3% of GDP, from 2.45% for this year, aimed at showing Trump its committed to defending itself.
Read More: TSMC Unveils $100 Billion US Investment in Boost for Trump
Colby on Tuesday reiterated his views that America’s goal should be “denying China regional hegemony,” and that US military power must be focused overwhelmingly on countering China, which has pledged to bring democratic Taiwan under its control at some point.
If confirmed, Colby said he’d provide the president and the secretary “with the best military options to back up the policy of deterring and, if necessary, denying an attack on Taiwan at a reasonable level of cost and risk for the American people.”
Senators questioned Colby about some of his previous social media posts, including his assessment that Taiwan is “not existential for America,” which he reiterated. But he did warn a nuclear armed Iran would be an “existential danger” for the US, apparently distancing himself from an earlier comment that the only thing worse would be “consequences of using force to try to stop them.”
Read More: Putin Agrees to Help Trump Broker Nuclear Talks With Iran
Separately, Colby refused to be drawn into issues related to Russia’s war in Ukraine, repeatedly saying he didn’t want to do anything to weaken Trump’s efforts to end the fighting. He mostly evaded Democrats questions on whether Russia invaded, but acquiesced to Senator Mazie Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat, that it is “demonstrably true” Russian troops went into Ukraine in February 2022.
6. Strategic Affairs no. 46 What is the Trump Foreign Policy?
Excerpts:
As John Bolton and others have noted, the President believes that all foreign policy matters are about personal relationships. Authoritarian leaders can play him like a fiddle. His attitudes are those of the suitor who asks “does he like me,” rather than the statesman, the leader of the free world, who follows the rocky path toward the long-term national interest.
The President needs better advice and a more rigorously debated foreign and national security policy. In his first term, he resisted tough advice from stalwarts such as H.R. McMaster and John Bolton. He has good people on the National Security Council, but they are not helping the President to craft policy, they are only reacting to it. Trump may have unfailing instincts in publicity and media relations, but he sorely needs help on foreign and national security policy. As the President noted in the Oval Office, we are playing with World War III here.
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What is the Trump Foreign Policy?
https://josephcollins77.substack.com/p/strategic-affairs-no-46?utm
Joseph Collins
Mar 4
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Strategic Affairs no. 46
What is the Trump Foreign Policy?
March 5, 2025
How should we describe Trump’s Foreign Policy? It’s certainly unusual and atypical. It’s hard to say whom it pleases, or whether it will be successful. He’s off to a rocky start. His policy comes from his gut and not a well-examined policy process.
The guiding light of Trump’s foreign policy is America First. It is a neo-isolationist, mercantilist, fiscally-focused, short-term approach to the pursuit of the national interest. At its heart, it is also neo-imperial in its orientation. Allies should be obedient or sanctioned. The other Great Powers, China and Russia are not enemies, but other powers to be admired or reckoned with.
Some observations:
From the start, the White House has made a habit of picking on our allies and friends. Canada, Mexico, Panama, and Ukraine have all come in for harsh words, usually attributed to some bad behavior which is untrue or exaggerated. The President apparently believes, for example, that if you run a trade surplus with the United States, you are taking advantage of us. Sometimes, the President is reacting to something he heard, like China is running the Panama Canal and Panama is overcharging U.S. vessels.
Another behavior, unusual to say the least, is territorial acquisitiveness. In the past, the United States has been successful as a superpower because, while it sought influence and access to markets, it did not seek ownership or permanent occupation of any new territory. To the contrary, President Trump has talked about retaking the Panama Canal, buying Greenland, incorporating Canada as the 51st state, and somehow owning Gaza to establish a resort, a Riviera in the Middle East.
His approach to Ukraine also has an element of acquisitiveness. To facilitate U.S. involvement, Trump wants an ownership stake in certain minerals in Ukraine. The final deal remains unsigned due to the shoot out in the Oval corral.
A third behavior is respect for China and especially Russia. Trump sees the authoritarian leaders of these two powers in a favorable light. He admires their administrative skills, and one suspects, their ability to deal with their political opposition. One gets the impression that if he had his way, Trump might say alliances be damned, let’s have a great power condominium, a cooperative rule of the international order by the three greatest powers.
China doesn’t get the love that Russia does from the President. The trade deficit with the Middle Kingdom is too great, and the Chinese are much more powerful economically. Perhaps out of respect for Xi Jinping’s power, Trump has been lukewarm in his support to Taiwan, which he sees as another disappointing U.S. ally. The Chinese are skeptically parsing every line in State Department documents.
Trump in the past few weeks has expressed trust for Putin and in his first term famously took Putin’s word over that of U.S intelligence agencies on the issue of election interference. Trump is so stuck on Putin he can’t relate to the plight of Ukraine, bloodied but unbowed after the vicious attack by Russia. The White House sees this terrible war of Russian aggression, in Vance’s term, as an ethnic dispute, to be settled quickly with a deal, the end of which may be a Nobel Prize for President Trump. The loss of nearly a fifth of Ukrainian territory seems to be a given in the Administration’s calculations.
The Kremlin could not be happier. After the debacle in the Oval, Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov said “the new U.S. Administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely coincides with our vision.”
A fourth behavior is a disrespect for our traditional alliances, especially NATO, where he often suggests that the Allies have taken advantage of us and are free riding to security at our expense. He admits to little advantage to alliances, except to reciprocal payments. He doesn’t believe in collective security but sees an advantage to providing security, if we get paid for it.
Underlying Trump’s behaviors is his inability to understand nationalism. He is unable to empathize with other nations or cultures. His power at home is such that the GOP, once the party of national security and strong defense, has become the party of slavish devotion to its leader’s often outlandish rhetoric. Staunch anti-authoritarian hawks like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio daily contort their opinions to agree with the White House as it turns down the heat on Russia for its cyber offensives and its genocidal war in Ukraine.
The President is a transactionalist. Unlike Truman and Eisenhower, he is not a realist with an eye on supporting institutions that can provide peace and security for generations. Trump sees the world in terms of simple, short-term balance sheets. He sees close parallels with his real estate deals of old.
As John Bolton and others have noted, the President believes that all foreign policy matters are about personal relationships. Authoritarian leaders can play him like a fiddle. His attitudes are those of the suitor who asks “does he like me,” rather than the statesman, the leader of the free world, who follows the rocky path toward the long-term national interest.
The President needs better advice and a more rigorously debated foreign and national security policy. In his first term, he resisted tough advice from stalwarts such as H.R. McMaster and John Bolton. He has good people on the National Security Council, but they are not helping the President to craft policy, they are only reacting to it. Trump may have unfailing instincts in publicity and media relations, but he sorely needs help on foreign and national security policy. As the President noted in the Oval Office, we are playing with World War III here.
Joseph Collins is a retired Army Colonel and Dept of Defense civilian who spent 11 years in the Pentagon. He was educated at Fordham and Columbia universities and has written widely on war and peace issues. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
7. Pentagon policy chief hearing highlights GOP foreign policy divide
Okay this is partly good news as he offered his views on Korea. And the debate really must be about prioritizing. So what does prioritizing Taiwan over all others get us? Maybe we should figure out how to protect all our interests. Perhaps we need to depend on our allies even more.
Colby defended his priorities, arguing the U.S. couldn’t focus on everything at once — at least without putting the defense industrial base on steroids.
“I don’t want to abandon the Middle East; I don’t want a nuclear Iran; I don’t want Russia to run roughshod over Europe; I don’t want North Korea to take over South Korea,” he said. “But if we know as a factual, empirical matter that we can’t do all those things on even remotely concurrent timelines, don’t we need to have a credible plan for how to do so?”
But some Republicans have struggled with the administration’s reprioritizing, especially its advances toward Russia and Trump’s criticism of Zelensksyy.
Excerpts:
But he faced pushback from the more traditional wing of the party that advocates continued American involvement in those regions. The tension spotlighted the challenges some Republicans face in reconciling their views with Donald Trump’s unorthodox efforts to remake global alliances.
“It goes without saying that the elephant in this hearing room today is the recent developments with regard to Ukraine and Russia and this administration,” Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said. “I was disappointed and dismayed as I watched the televised meeting involving the president of the United States and President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy.”
Wicker warned the U.S. “cannot simply pivot” militarily between regions of the world, arguing China would see a pullback elsewhere as an opportunity.
“Beijing is not pivoting between theaters or among theaters,” he said. “Significant American withdrawal in Europe, Africa, South America or the Middle East will allow the Chinese Communist Party to overcome us.”
Pentagon policy chief hearing highlights GOP foreign policy divide
By Connor O'Brien and Joe Gould
03/04/2025 03:20 PM EST
Politico
Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker warned the U.S. “cannot simply pivot” away from Europe.
Vice President JD Vance greets his friend and President Donald Trump's nominee to be under secretary of defense for policy, Elbridge Colby, during Colby's confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, on March 4, 2025. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
03/04/2025 03:20 PM EST
A testy hearing for the Pentagon policy chief nominee on Tuesday underscored the increasingly public schism in the GOP over the administration’s treatment of Ukraine.
Elbridge Colby, who has for years supported shifting resources away from Europe and the Middle East to focus on China, sought to defend that perspective — hours after President Donald Trump froze aid to Ukraine.
But he faced pushback from the more traditional wing of the party that advocates continued American involvement in those regions. The tension spotlighted the challenges some Republicans face in reconciling their views with Donald Trump’s unorthodox efforts to remake global alliances.
“It goes without saying that the elephant in this hearing room today is the recent developments with regard to Ukraine and Russia and this administration,” Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said. “I was disappointed and dismayed as I watched the televised meeting involving the president of the United States and President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy.”
Wicker warned the U.S. “cannot simply pivot” militarily between regions of the world, arguing China would see a pullback elsewhere as an opportunity.
“Beijing is not pivoting between theaters or among theaters,” he said. “Significant American withdrawal in Europe, Africa, South America or the Middle East will allow the Chinese Communist Party to overcome us.”
Colby, a former Pentagon official during Trump’s first term, was the primary architect of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which refocused the military on competition with Russia and China. He has spent more than two decades in policy roles at the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community, and is known for his “realist” approach to foreign affairs.
And he’s a key figure in the White House’s “America First” worldview. The Trump administration is increasingly at odds with the Republican Party’s defense hawks, viewing them as barriers to policies more in line with American interests.
Trump officials, in the weeks leading up to the hearing, sought to ensure the divisions didn’t disrupt Colby’s confirmation. That continued Tuesday when Vice President JD Vance, in a rare move, introduced the nominee. Vance noted his views have “alienated” both parties but argued he “saw around corners that very few other people were seeing around.”
He told senators that Colby is “the type of perspective that we need so desperately at the Department of Defense.”
Colby defended his priorities, arguing the U.S. couldn’t focus on everything at once — at least without putting the defense industrial base on steroids.
“I don’t want to abandon the Middle East; I don’t want a nuclear Iran; I don’t want Russia to run roughshod over Europe; I don’t want North Korea to take over South Korea,” he said. “But if we know as a factual, empirical matter that we can’t do all those things on even remotely concurrent timelines, don’t we need to have a credible plan for how to do so?”
But some Republicans have struggled with the administration’s reprioritizing, especially its advances toward Russia and Trump’s criticism of Zelensksyy.
While the hearing was still going, news broke that Zelenskyy had made conciliatory remarks aimed at Trump following their Friday Oval Office blow up. Wicker read the comments in full before the proceedings ended. “Friends get over it, friends decide to move on, and I think we’re seeing that process today — I hope to heaven that is the case,” Wicker said.
Armed Services Democrats repeatedly pushed Colby on whether he would acknowledge Russia started the war in Ukraine. He wouldn’t bite.
“This is a very delicate diplomatic time,” he said in an exchange with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). “I would hate to be in a position of disrupting or inhibiting progress on peace.”
But he did say Russia invading Ukraine was “a factual reality that is demonstrably true.”
Democrats called Colby a hypocrite. “The problem is you tell us you’re going to tell truth to power,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said. “The most obvious truth is that Russia invaded Ukraine. And you won’t say it here today because it appears that you don’t want to offend the president.”
Lawmakers also challenged Colby’s past views favoring containment over intervention in Iran.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who critics accused of trying to tank Colby’s confirmation, confronted the nominee over his previous views that the U.S. might be able to tolerate and contain a nuclear-armed Iran — as opposed to trying to prevent the country from obtaining nuclear weapons at all.
Colby agreed Iran could evolve into an “existential threat” due to its work on intercontinental ballistic missiles. He said he would provide the president credible, realistic military options instead of, as Cotton said, “simply saying ‘we can give Israel some bombs and they can take care of it.’”
Cotton also pressed Colby over his “softened” stances on Taiwan. Colby had previously called for U.S. security guarantees for Taiwan and then reversed that stance, saying the island isn’t an essential interest.
Colby agreed that his view had evolved based on a worsening military balance with China and called for Taiwan to increase its defense spending.
“I’ve always said that Taiwan is very important to the United States, but as you said, it’s not an existential interest,” Colby said. “The core American interest is in denying China regional hegemony.”
Colby did manage to find common ground with defense hawks when he called for “revamping and restoring” defense manufacturing as part of a “broader reindustrialization.”
Politico
8. Nominee for top DoD policy job sidesteps questions on Russian invasion of Ukraine
Long time tenure in government? Barely 6 years, maybe 7.
In May 2017, Colby was appointed the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development, a role in which he served into 2018.[4] In this role, Colby was responsible for defense strategy, force development, and strategic analysis for policy for the Secretary of Defense.[3] Colby served as the primary Defense Department representative in the development of the 2017 National Security Strategy.[8]
His early career included over five years of service with the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and in the Intelligence Community, including a period of service with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2003.[3][5] Colby also served in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2005–2006.[5]
Excerpts:
Colby, whose longtime tenure in government includes positions such as the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for strategy and force development, is best known as one of the authors of the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which centered on great power competition with China and Russia over counterterrorism. Known within Washington circles as a foreign policy “realist,” Colby has advocated that the United States pare back its involvement in the Middle East and Europe — including its aid for Ukraine — to focus its resources against the Chinese threat.
Nominee for top DoD policy job sidesteps questions on Russian invasion of Ukraine - Breaking Defense
“I stand by my record, but at this point, I think there's a very delicate diplomatic process going on where the President is rightfully trying to resuscitate the peace process,” said Elbridge Colby, the nominee for the Pentagon's undersecretary of policy.
breakingdefense.com · by Valerie Insinna, Justin Katz · March 4, 2025
Elbridge Colby, then the Robert M. Gates senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, asks U.S. Air Force Gen. Paul J. Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a question during a National Defense University Center conference in Washington, Jan. 19, 2016. (DoD photo by Army Staff Sgt. Sean K. Harp)
WASHINGTON — Less than a day after President Donald Trump paused military aid to Ukraine, his pick for the top Pentagon policy job frustrated Democrats by refusing to state outright that Russia invaded Ukraine.
Elbridge Colby, who Trump nominated for the Defense Department’s undersecretary for policy in December, has previously stated that the invasion of Ukraine was “an evil act by the Russians.” However, during his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee today, Colby repeatedly sidestepped questions on the topic, citing the sensitivity of ongoing peace negotiations led by Trump.
“I stand by my record, but at this point, I think there’s a very delicate diplomatic process going on where the president is rightfully trying to resuscitate the peace process,” he said in response to questions by SASC top Democrat Sen. Jack Reed. He later dodged similar questions from other senators, including Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, Angus King, Ind.-Maine, Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill.
“It’s important to be discreet and say things at the appropriate time and place,” Colby told King.
“The problem is, you tell us you’re going to tell truth to power,” King said. “The most obvious truth is that Russia invaded Ukraine. Everybody in the world knows that, and you won’t say it here today, because it appears that you don’t want to offend the president.”
Duckworth said Colby’s refusal to state “a known fact” was tantamount to “saying you don’t know whether or not Hitler invaded Poland.”
Colby’s testimony comes days after a disastrous meeting between Trump, Vice President JD Vance — who introduced Colby during the hearing — and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House last week. The meeting was set for the parties to agree to a mineral-rights deal, but devolved into a public argument in which Trump and Vance accused Zelenskyy of being insufficiently thankful to the United States for billions of dollars in military aid. Numerous news outlets reported on Monday, citing White House sources, that Trump has paused military aid to Ukraine as a result.
Colby, whose longtime tenure in government includes positions such as the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for strategy and force development, is best known as one of the authors of the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which centered on great power competition with China and Russia over counterterrorism. Known within Washington circles as a foreign policy “realist,” Colby has advocated that the United States pare back its involvement in the Middle East and Europe — including its aid for Ukraine — to focus its resources against the Chinese threat.
In his opening comments, Reed said that Trump’s decision to cut military aid to Ukraine damages US relationship with its allies and could embolden China.
“The administration’s actions are doing great harm to America’s standing in the world, showing anyone who is paying attention that the United States can no longer be trusted,” he said. “President Xi will take note.”
However, Colby stood by his past statements that the US must prioritize a potential fight in the Asia-Pacific theater over its support of Ukraine.
“I don’t contest the fact that the Chinese are looking at what we’re doing in Ukraine at all,” Colby said. “But fundamentally, Senator, my view — and I think it should be of particular interest to this committee, sir — is that we have to have the military capabilities in Asia, or relevant to Asia, to be able to conduct a local defense of Taiwan at a cost and level of risk that the American people are prepared to tolerate, and that has been my main focus.”
“A longer term top priority for me would be, if confirmed, would be to revivify our defense industrial base, so that we are no longer in a position where our defense industrial base cannot produce at levels, where we can resource in multiple theaters at the level that we need,” he added.
Later in the hearing, Colby defended Trump’s actions on Ukraine, stating that the president is a “deal maker” whose unpredictability gives him leverage during negotiations.
“With President Trump, you have a very different dynamic. You don’t know what he’s going to do, but you can get a deal with him,” he said.
While Colby is likely to be confirmed, his nomination has come under scrutiny from some Republicans who have quietly questioned his noninterventionist stance on the Middle East, resulting in GOP heavy hitters like Vance and Elon Musk stepping in to defend his record, Politico reported last month.
However, only Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Dan Sullivan of Alaska asked pointed questions regarding Colby’s position in the Middle East, with both lawmakers interrogating the nominee on his position on Iran. Colby responded that a nuclear armed Iran — particularly one with access to intercontinental ballistic missiles — would be an existential threat to the United States, and that he would provide military options to the president to stop Iran from gaining access to nuclear weapons.
Multiple times throughout the hearing, Colby stated he would help support defense acquisition reform efforts, with Vance characterizing Colby as a “good guy” that would be willing to work with Democrats on such policy objectives.
“That means not just buying more weapons,” Vance said. “That means being smart about how we buy weapons in a way that enhances our technological edge and ensures that upstarts, not just the big five incumbents, but upstarts, can participate in the process of procurement and of giving our troops the weapons systems that they need.”
Colby’s reticence to assign blame for the Russia-Ukraine conflict echoed statements made by Stephen Feinberg, Trump’s nominee for deputy secretary of defense, during his nomination hearing last week.
Elsewhere on Capitol Hill this morning, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a confirmation hearing for two State Department nominees and the representative to NATO, where Democrats pressed nominees with similar questions about whether Russia invaded Ukraine.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., asked Christopher Landau, who has been nominated to be the State Department’s deputy secretary, “Do you think that Putin and Russia were the aggressors in Ukraine?”
“Senator, at this point, there are peace negotiations taking place across the world —” Landau responded before Van Hollen cut him off, and posed the same question to Matthew Whitaker, who is nominated to be the US representative to NATO.
“I’m not here to assign labels, but I would say that JD Vance on Friday said that Russia invaded Ukraine,” he responded.
“Ok, so you don’t know if they’re the aggressor,” the senator shot back.
9. What Do Chinese Analysts Think of Trump’s China Policy Thus Far?
Perhaps POTUS has China right where he wants them (and every other adversary as well if we are to believe this conclusion).
Conclusion:
Trump has been in office for over six weeks, and the establishment in Beijing seems clueless regarding the new U.S. administration’s thinking on China. They are far from alone.
What Do Chinese Analysts Think of Trump’s China Policy Thus Far?
thediplomat.com
Contrary to Beijing’s expectations, China seemed to have been let off easy in the early days of the Trump 2.0 presidency. Will that last?
By Hemant Adlakha
March 04, 2025
In this June 29, 2019 file photo, U.S. President Donald Trump (left) and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan.
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In a recent commentary, Zongyuan Zoe Liu of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations recalled what might be termed the “good old days” of China-U.S. relations – just over a decade ago in time, but seemingly far removed in sentiment. As Liu wrote:
Not long ago, American and Chinese people mostly liked each other. In 2011, polls showed that the majority in each country viewed the other favorably. That same year, the “Kung Fu Panda” series was a hit at the box office for the second time, offering a rare cultural touchpoint both nations shared. Economically, the United States and China seemed inseparable. The term “Chimerica” captured this dynamic: China produced and saved; the United States consumed and borrowed. The relationship was celebrated as the engine of global growth, helping the world recover from the 2007–08 global financial crisis.
Yet in the years since, the anti-China narrative has become lodged in the U.S. psyche. Today, the amiable era of “Chimerica” has been long forgotten, thanks to U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to launch a relentless campaign targeting China with tariff and tech restrictions. The last eight years of Washington-Beijing hostilities have turned the U.S. public consensus against China, and in dramatic fashion. As Liu noted, a 2024 Pew survey showed that 81 percent of Americans viewed China unfavorably, with 42 percent perceiving it as an “enemy” of the United States. Today China is more likely to be depicted as hostile and unfriendly in U.S. popular culture – as seen in the political tv drama thriller series “The Diplomat” (2023) – than be celebrated for its pandas and kung fu.
Just before the U.S. presidential election in November 2020, there was much discussion in China over whether a victory by the Republicans’ Donald Trump or the Democrats’ Kamala Harris would be less disadvantageous for China’s economic and national interests. In spite of the setbacks tariff and tech wars brought to China’s economic and technological growth, it was believed by some that the Trump 1.0 presidency had provided useful opportunities for China’s top leader Xi Jinping and the country’s military establishment. And the shift from Trump to President Joe Biden in 2021 didn’t exactly change the needle on Trump’s China policy.
When the “Cold War warrior” – a moniker the Chinese coined for Biden – entered the White House, Beijing hoped the Democratic president would steer the fraught China-U.S. relations toward improvement and at least avoid plunging the bilateral ties into a new Cold War. As Nanjing University scholar Zhu Feng put it in mid-2020: “Beijing should avoid any illusions that a Biden presidency will automatically change everything, but Beijing should be ready and recognize what sort of efforts China could step up and do.”
However, U.S. concern about China’s threat to its national security deepened further under Biden, and his administration went a step further in choking China’s tech industries with restrictions on investments and export controls. In China’s views, the Biden administration also exploited the “Taiwan card” – a “red line” issue in the U.S. relationship with Beijing.
As the U.S. presidential election 2024 neared in early November, the consensus in Beijing was that China-U.S. tensions would remain, regardless of who won. On October 31, days before the voting, when asked to comment on likely expectations of the Chinese Communist Party leadership regarding a Trump or Harris win, Shi Yinhong, an international politics professor at the Renmin University in Beijing said, “Whether Harris or Trump becomes the next U.S. president, the continuity in U.S. policy toward China will almost certainly outweigh any major shifts.”
That’s precisely why, despite the Chinese official media and social media playing full coverage of the 2024 U.S. election campaign, among the Chinese public interest in the two candidates and their policies appeared muted compared with 2016 and 2020 elections. “It doesn’t matter who wins,” one social media user wrote in a popular comment on China’s X-like platform Weibo. “Their containment of China won’t ease.”
Interestingly, despite Trump’s first four years in office having delivered huge economic and technological setbacks to China, he was popularly called Chuan Jianguo (川建国, meaning “nation-builder Trump”) in Chinese slang. A certain fondness for Trump on Chinese social media does not mean the leadership in Beijing preferred another Trump presidency, but it’s undeniable that Biden’s term in office did little to open space for negotiation between Washington and Beijing.
Still, Trump’s return to the White House was not expected to signal a meaningful shift in the already fraught and fragile bilateral relationship. Given the bipartisan consensus favoring an aggressive stance in the United States’ China policy – a rare constant over the past eight years – Beijing was well-prepared for the second Trump administration to stay the course, albeit with a more transactional and less predictable approach.
However, contrary to Beijing’s expectations, China seemed to have been let off in the early days of the Trump 2.0 presidency. Yes, Trump has implemented two rounds of tariffs on China – sparking reciprocal moves from Beijing – but U.S. allies and partners have received the same harsh treatment. There’s little to suggest a particular antipathy toward China in Trump’s tariff policy. It’s also been widely noted in China that Trump gave TikTok a reprieve from a Biden-era law that would have banned the popular app unless its Chinese parent company fully divested.
Thus a recent editorial in the pro-Beijing Chinese tabloid Global Times observed that after more than a month in office, China-U.S. relations under the new administration have had “a relatively mild and cautious start.”
Some U.S. sources have added strength to this argument. First, around the time when Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, Xi Jinping’s leading man responsible for China-U.S. economic ties, held his first phone conversation with Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on February 19, the New York Times ran an article proclaiming: “Trump Eyes a Bigger, Better Trade Deal with China.”
Second, many in China have followed with deep interest the news that Trump is seeking budget cuts to the U.S. Defense Department. One influential current affairs commentator pointed to the potential military spending cuts as proof that Trump “does not want to go to war with China.”
Despite the conflicting signals, the Chinese intelligentsia overwhelmingly still believes that the U.S. political elite is determined to strive for its twin objectives: stifling China’s economic growth and forcing regime change. But given Trump’s seeming disdain for traditional pillars of U.S. foreign policy, a massive shift on China policy is not impossible.
Trump has been in office for over six weeks, and the establishment in Beijing seems clueless regarding the new U.S. administration’s thinking on China. They are far from alone.
Authors
Guest Author
Hemant Adlakha
Hemant Adlakha teaches Chinese at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He is also vice chairperson and an honorary fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies (ICS), Delhi.
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10. Zelensky Offers Terms to Stop Fighting, Assuring U.S. That Ukraine Wants Peace
Zelensky Offers Terms to Stop Fighting, Assuring U.S. That Ukraine Wants Peace
“We are working on all possible scenarios to protect Ukraine,” said President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose country was looking to European allies for support.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/world/europe/ukraine-us-trump-military-support.html
Members of Ukraine’s 38th Separate Marine Brigade in the Pokrovsk region in November. It’s not clear how long Ukraine’s stockpiles will last before there are critical gaps on the front.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
By Marc Santora
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
- March 4, 2025
- Updated 4:46 p.m. ET
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Tuesday offered a course of action that he said could end the war, while trying to assure the Trump administration that his government was dedicated to peace.
“Our meeting in Washington, at the White House on Friday, did not go the way it was supposed to be,” Mr. Zelensky wrote on X. “It is regrettable that it happened this way. It is time to make things right.”
He was referring to an explosive meeting at the White House last week in which President Trump berated Mr. Zelensky and called him ungrateful. Mr. Trump followed up on Monday by announcing that he was pausing all U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
The Ukrainian leader said he was ready to release Russian prisoners of war, stop long-range drone and missile strikes aimed at Russian targets, and declare a truce at sea immediately — moves that he said would help establish a pathway to peace.
Only, however, “if Russia will do the same,” he added.
Mr. Zelensky’s proposal seemed clearly designed to shift the burden for ending the war onto Russia, which launched its invasion three years ago. The White House has claimed that the Ukrainian leader is the main obstacle to peace.
In his post, Mr. Zelensky offered effusive praise for American support, noting specifically “the moment when things changed when President Trump provided Ukraine with Javelins.”
“We are grateful for this,” he wrote. “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer,” he added. “My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts.”
There was no immediate reaction from the Kremlin to Mr. Zelensky’s proposal. Despite the ferocity of the fighting, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has shown a willingness to do side deals with Ukraine. The two countries have conducted numerous prisoner-of-war exchanges, and Russia and Ukraine had been set to participate in talks in Qatar last August about halting strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure. Moscow pulled out of the meeting after Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.
In recent weeks, however, Mr. Putin has offered no hint of being willing to de-escalate the war before winning major concessions from the West and Ukraine — like ruling out Ukrainian NATO membership, reducing the alliance’s footprint in Europe, limiting the size of Ukraine’s military and giving Russia influence over Ukraine’s domestic politics.
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“There is no evidence that Russia would be prepared to accept a deal, and what that would be,” said Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director general of the Royal United Services Institute, a research group in London. He said the decision by the United States to pause military aid would only encourage Putin to ask for more — including Ukrainian demilitarization and neutrality.
Mr. Zelensky sought to strike a careful balance in his statement. Aware of Mr. Trump’s stated desire to get a quick deal, he said Ukraine was “ready to work fast to end the war.”
At the same time, he suggested a staged process, similar to an idea raised by the French government, that could start immediately.
“We are ready to work fast to end the war, and the first stages could be the release of prisoners and truce in the sky — ban on missiles, long-ranged drones, bombs on energy and other civilian infrastructure — and truce in the sea immediately, if Russia will do the same,” he wrote. “Then we want to move very fast through all next stages and to work with the US to agree a strong final deal.”
His statement came as leaders in Kyiv assessed the political and military impact of the Trump administration’s decision to suspend aid, with military officials weighing how long Ukraine’s own stockpiles would last before the situation led to critical gaps on the front.
An emergency meeting in the Ukrainian Parliament was convened on Tuesday to assess the impact of the latest pressure from the Trump administration while soldiers in the trenches woke up to the news that an already grueling war could become even more challenging, and brutal.
Mr. Zelensky did not comment directly on the aid suspension but he convened senior civilian and military leaders to discuss “special issues concerning our national resilience.”
Image
President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Trump clashed at the White House last week, and the rupture may be hard to repair.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
In the streets and in the halls of Ukraine’s government on Tuesday, there were cries of betrayal at the American decision to pause the aid. Some Ukrainians passed around clips online of old speeches from previous American presidents vowing to stand by Ukraine, including offering protection in return for its decision to give up nuclear weapons under the Clinton administration.
But more than anger there was a sense of sadness and disbelief.
The first thing that came to mind upon hearing the news was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s phrase that “this date will go down in infamy,” Oleksandr Merezhko, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Parliament, said in an interview. “It was a kind of Pearl Harbor, a political Pearl Harbor, for us.”
It is all the more painful, Mr. Merezhko said, “when it comes not from your enemy, but from whom you consider to be your friend.”
Image
The aftermath of a drone attack in Odesa, Ukraine, on Tuesday.Credit...Oleksandr Gimanovoleksandr Gimanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
European leaders — who will convene in Brussels on Thursday to discuss both support for Kyiv and the urgent need for Europe to build up its own military capabilities — were quick to rush to Ukraine’s defense Tuesday morning.
Ursula von der Leyen, who heads the executive arm of the 27-nation European Union, said: “This is Europe’s moment and we must live up to it.”
Appearing in Brussels, she proposed a new program that would make loans valued at 150 billion euros (about $158 billion) to member states to fund defense investment.
The Kremlin, not surprisingly, rejoiced at the suspension of aid.
“It’s obvious that the United States has been the main supplier of this war,” Dmitry S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, told reporters. “If the U.S. stops those supplies, this will be the best contribution to peace, I think.”
However, some Ukrainians and Western military analysts said that rather than speeding the end of the war, the move could give Moscow even more incentive to keep fighting, since Mr. Trump is not applying any pressure on Russia to stop. They noted that it was Mr. Putin who started the war and whose army is on the offensive, albeit slowly.
Image
Ukrainian military vehicles in the country’s northern Sumy region traveling along a road close to the border with Russia’s Kursk region in January.Credit...Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times
The pause will halt the delivery of interceptor missiles for Patriot and NASAMS air defense systems, which have saved an untold number of lives as they provide the best shield for Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure from missile and drone attacks.
While military analysts and Ukrainian officials have said that Kyiv is in a better position to sustain its war effort than it was in late 2023, when Congress suspended assistance for months, the move would have cascading effects that will grow with time.
A former official in the Biden administration said Ukraine had enough key munitions to last into the summer because of the surge in deliveries the United States made before President Biden left office — shipments that included artillery rounds, rockets and armored vehicles to Ukraine. The official insisted on anonymity to discuss private arrangements.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky, said that the country had weathered suspensions of U.S. military aid in the past and that Ukraine was engaging in a comprehensive audit of its stockpiles, “examining what we have, what can be produced through partnerships, and what can be replaced.”
Image
European leaders at a summit in London on Sunday. Many were quick to rush to Ukraine’s defense on Tuesday.Credit...Pool photo by Justin Tallis
Despite the increasing tension with the Trump administration, Ukraine did not give up hope that the relationship between Kyiv and Washington could be salvaged.
The Ukrainian Parliament issued a statement directed at Mr. Trump, offering effusive praise and gratitude while imploring his administration to not abandon their country as it fights for its survival as an independent nation.
“We are convinced that the security and stable development of our nation are ensured by the unwavering support of the United States and reflect the values that have been the foundation of America’s historic success, inspiring millions of Ukrainians,” the lawmakers wrote.
Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said his government would do everything to maintain diplomatic ties with Washington and was prepared to sign an agreement granting America extraordinary access to Ukraine’s natural resources.
“This agreement has been approved by the government of Ukraine,” he said at a news conference. “We are ready to begin this cooperation at any moment.”
Ukraine worked diligently during the Biden administration to maintain bipartisan support in the United States, hoping that the courtship would influence Mr. Trump.
But soldiers and civilians alike have been bracing for this moment.
“Just as we start wearing them down, our weapons supplies get cut off,” said Jr. Lt. Oleh, a soldier fighting around Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine. Referring to the United States, he added: “This has happened before. For some reason, they don’t want to let Russia lose this war.”
Reporting was contributed by Anton Troianovski, Robert Jimison, Liubov Sholudko, Kim Barker, Jeanna Smialek and Stephen Castle.
Marc Santora has been reporting from Ukraine since the beginning of the war with Russia. He was previously based in London as an international news editor focused on breaking news events and earlier the bureau chief for East and Central Europe, based in Warsaw. He has also reported extensively from Iraq and Africa. More about Marc Santora
See more on: Russia-Ukraine War, European Union, Keir Starmer, Donald Trump, Ursula von der Leyen, Volodymyr Zelensky
Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine
How We Verify Our Reporting
11. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 4, 2025
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, March 4, 2025
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-4-2025
US President Donald Trump ordered a pause on US military aid to Ukraine on March 3, suspending the delivery of critical warfighting materiel. An anonymous White House official told the Wall Street Journal on March 3 that the United States is "pausing and reviewing" military aid to Ukraine until Trump "determines that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is making a good-faith effort towards peace negotiations with Russia." The White House official did not provide clarification about what conditions the White House is expecting Zelensky to meet in order to resume aid.
The United States had been providing Ukraine with artillery ammunition, armored vehicles, towed howitzers, Patriot air defense batteries, and long-range rocket and missile systems such as HIMARS and ATACMS — many of which are sophisticated systems that only the United States can supply Pauses in this aid will harm Ukraine's warfighting capabilities, although it will likely take from weeks to months for the suspension of US aid to affect the frontline. Western officials estimated in late February 2025 that Ukraine will be able to sustain its current pace of operations until about mid-2025 (roughly June 2025) as long as the United States continues to provide the aid contracted under the Biden administration on the previously anticipated timelines. A Ukrainian official told CNN on March 4 following the suspension that Ukraine may run out of US-provided artillery shells by May or June 2025 but warned that Patriot air defense missiles could run out "in a matter of weeks." Ukraine relies heavily on US Patriot systems for its air defense umbrella to protect against Russian missile strikes against Ukraine's rear areas. The shortage and eventual lack of Patriot missiles is likely to have severe impacts on the safety of Ukraine's critical, industrial, and civilian infrastructure, as Ukraine's other supporters lack an analogous system that can protect against Russian missile strikes, particularly those including ballistic missiles. As Ukraine runs short on Patriot missiles, Kyiv will have to make difficult decisions about which population centers to prioritize in terms of air defense protection. If it runs out of Patriots entirely then Ukrainian cities will lie open to Russian ballistic missiles.
Key Takeaways:
- US President Donald Trump ordered a pause on US military aid to Ukraine on March 3, suspending the delivery of critical warfighting materiel.
- The United States had been providing Ukraine with artillery ammunition, armored vehicles, towed howitzers, Patriot air defense batteries, and long-range rocket and missile systems such as HIMARS and ATACMS — many of which are sophisticated systems that only the United States can supply.
- The frontline in Ukraine does not risk imminent collapse, but the effects of the US aid pause will become more acute over time.
- The European Commission proposed a plan on March 4 that would enable EU member states to increase defense spending to support Ukraine and strengthen European security. European rearmament is vital for Europe's short- and long-term security, and Europe should pursue these efforts regardless of the status of US aid to Ukraine.
- Ukraine has significantly expanded its defense industrial production capabilities throughout the war in an effort to eventually meet its military needs independently, but Ukraine's ability to become self-sufficient in the long-term is contingent on continued support from partner states in the short- and medium-term.
- The Ukrainian Parliament (Verkhovna Rada) and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reiterated on March 4 Ukraine's commitment to work with the Trump Administration to achieve a sustainable and lasting peace in Ukraine.
- The high casualties in Russia's war in Ukraine are the direct result of Putin's determination to conquer all of Ukraine using horrific and costly tactics, and Putin can dramatically reduce this killing any time he chooses
- The Kremlin continues to express cautious optimism about the pausing of US military aid to Ukraine and advanced several narratives as part of efforts to impose additional demands on the United States.Russian forces recently advanced near Lyman, and Pokrovsk and in western Zaporizhia Oblast, and Ukrainian forces recently advanced near Pokrovsk.
- The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reportedly developing a plan to partially demobilize a limited number of mobilized personnel no earlier than July 2025, likely to address growing societal backlash over the lack of rotations and demobilization of Russian mobilized troops for over two years.
12. Iran Update, March 4, 2025
Iran Update, March 4, 2025
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-march-4-2025
Russia offered to mediate between the United States and Iran, according to unspecified sources speaking to Bloomberg. Russian mediation would reportedly cover Iranian nuclear activities and support for the Axis of Resistance. It is far from clear that Russia would help secure US interests through this mediation, however, especially regarding Iranian support for the Axis of Resistance. Russia has cooperated extensively with the Axis of Resistance over the past decade. This cooperation has included working with Iran and Iranian-backed militias to attack US forces in the Middle East. Russian and Iranian-backed forces conducted a combined attack on US forces in Syria in 2018, for example. Russia also supported the Axis of Resistance against Israel throughout the October 7 War. The Kremlin provided targeting intelligence to the Houthis to support attacks on international shipping and US vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Moscow and Tehran signed a strategic cooperation agreement in January 2025, underscoring further their close collaboration and their alignment in working to erode US global influence.
Russia’s support for the Axis of Resistance does not necessarily mean that Russia has leverage over its behavior. Russia has historically been the dominant partner in the Russo-Iranian relationship, but this relationship has become more balanced in recent years, particularly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russia relies heavily on Iranian military support, such as drones, to sustain its war against Ukraine. These shifting dynamics have made Iran a more equal partner in its strategic partnership with Russia. Moscow trying to coerce Tehran into curbing its regional activities would risk damaging their partnership, which is critical to sustaining Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Russian weapons experts traveled to Iran at least twice in 2024, likely to discuss their growing military cooperation. Reuters reported on March 4 that seven senior Russian weapons experts, including one with a background in advanced weapons development and one with a background in missile testing, traveled to Iran in April and September 2024. A senior Iranian defense ministry official stated that unspecified Russian missile experts conducted multiple visits to Iranian missile production sites, including at least two underground missile facilities, in 2024. The September 2024 visit notably occurred days after Iran began sending short-range ballistic missiles to Russia. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) struck Iranian mixing equipment used to produce solid fuel for ballistic missiles in October 2024, which could disrupt Iranian ballistic missile shipments to Russia in the near future.
The Russian weapons experts may have traveled to Iran in April 2024 to assess damage to Russian-made air defenses following an exchange of strikes between Iran and Israel. The visit occurred five days after the IDF struck the tombstone engagement radar of a Russian-made S-300 air defense system in Iran. The strike rendered the S-300 inoperable by destroying its ability to track and engage targets.
The IDF conducted its deepest incursion into Syria yet since the IDF launched ground operations in southern Syria in December 2024. Syrian media reported on March 3 that Israeli forces raided a former Syrian Arab Army (SAA) base on Tell al Mal, Quneitra Province. Syrian media reported that Israeli bulldozers destroyed infrastructure in the base. The IDF reportedly used helicopters during the raid, presumably to deploy an assault force. Tell al Mal is around 16 kilometers from the 1974 disengagement zone. Syrian media reported that Israeli forces separately patrolled Ruwaihaniya, Quneitra Province, on March 4.
Key Takeaways:
-
Russo-Iranian Cooperation: Russia offered to mediate between the United States and Iran, according to unspecified sources speaking to Bloomberg. Russian mediation would reportedly cover Iranian nuclear activities and support for the Axis of Resistance. It is far from clear that Russia would help secure US interests through this mediation, however, especially regarding Iranian support for the Axis of Resistance.
-
Russo-Iranian Cooperation: Russian weapons experts traveled to Iran at least twice in 2024, likely to discuss their growing military cooperation. The Russian weapons experts may have traveled to Iran in April 2024 to assess damage to Russian-made air defenses following an exchange of strikes between Iran and Israel.
-
Iraqi Parliamentary Elections: Iraqi State of Law Coalition head Nouri al Maliki reportedly supports the participation of Iraqi Shia nationalist cleric Muqtada al Sadr’s Shia National Movement in the October 2025 parliamentary elections in order to diminish Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al Sudani’s political influence.
13. Trump adviser Alina Habba says veterans fired by DOGE are perhaps 'not fit to have a job at this moment'
Does she think all veterans who are working in government jobs are just living off the government dole and are not productive contributors? Does she think they are unqualified but only given jobs because they are veterans and that veterans in the workforce just receive their jobs as handouts?
It is almost as if this person harbors a deep prejudice against a specific class of people and only knows that class by their common incorrect stereotype. It is alomst as if she thinks all veterans have PTSD or TBIs and are disabled requiring specifa accomodations.
Trump adviser Alina Habba says veterans fired by DOGE are perhaps 'not fit to have a job at this moment'
Emily Erroa, an Army veteran who was fired from the Energy Department last month, called Habba's comments "ridiculous" and "insulting."
March 4, 2025, 3:13 PM EST / Updated March 4, 2025, 7:13 PM EST
By Rebecca Shabad, Allan Smith, Megan Lebowitz, Tara Prindiville and Natasha Korecki
NBC News · March 4, 2025
WASHINGTON — White House adviser Alina Habba said Tuesday that military veterans affected by the DOGE-led layoffs of federal workers may not be "fit to have a job at this moment."
Speaking to reporters on the White House lawn, Habba was asked about fired workers whom Democrats have invited to President Donald Trump's joint address to Congress on Tuesday night. Habba defended the cuts and said she had no sympathy for the thousands of people who have lost their jobs.
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“I really don’t feel sorry for them,” Habba said. “They should get back to work for the American people, like President Trump and this administration.”
A reporter then noted that some military veterans have been part of that group.
"That’s something the president has always cared about — anybody in blue, anybody that serves this country. But at the same time, we have taxpayer dollars, we have a fiscal responsibility to use taxpayer dollars to pay people that actually work," she said.
"That doesn’t mean that we forget our veterans by any means," she added. "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. And we can’t, you know, I wouldn’t take money from you and pay somebody and say, 'Sorry, you know, they’re not going to come to work.' It’s just not acceptable."
Habba, who previously served as Trump's personal lawyer, said the president planned to highlight the cuts, spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency, in his speech Tuesday night.
The Department of Veterans Affairs and VA Secretary Doug Collins didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
We’re looking to hear from federal government workers who have been laid off. If you’re willing to talk with us, please email us at tips@nbcuni.com or contact us through one of these methods.
Habba's remarks drew swift backlash from some veterans.
Emily Erroa, an Army veteran who was fired from the Department of Energy last month alongside other employees who did not yet have full civil service protections, called Habba’s statement “ridiculous.”
"The narrative that remote/teleworkers do not work is not accurate and insulting," Erroa, who had recently taken a job at the Energy Department after spending three years at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said. "Especially when it comes to veterans that have [a] specific diagnosis due to fighting and serving the country."
Jesus Tony Ruiz, an Army veteran who was laid off from the VA last month, also criticized Habba's remarks.
"I lost my job in the VA thanks to Donald Trump," said Ruiz, who was invited to speak to lawmakers on Capitol Hill Tuesday by the progressive group VoteVets. "So what did I do for my country? I served my country, and now they fired me. So no, they’re not helping me out whatsoever.”
Another veteran, who requested anonymity because they still work in the federal government, called her remarks a "slap in the face to those who have served, sacrificed, and ... carry the scars both mental and physical from their service.
"Coming to work? It’s not always as simple as showing up. Some days, I can’t even stand up and the pain is excruciating," this person said, adding, "Does that make me unemployable in his [Trump's] eyes? Apparently so."
Alina Habba, counselor to the president, questioned whether veterans who were fired from their federal jobs were "fit" to work.Jim Watson / AFP / Getty Images
The Trump administration has fired thousands of federal workers over the last several weeks as part of the Elon Musk and DOGE-driven effort to find waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government and drastically cut federal funding across departments and agencies. The largest cuts were of probationary employees — people who were generally in their roles for less than two years, although some had much more experience in the federal government.
The heads of the White House budget and personnel offices informed federal agencies last week that they should start preparing for large-scale layoffs in the coming weeks and months.
Former workers, as well as a number of groups representing federal employees, have filed several lawsuits over the layoffs. A federal judge last week said that a memo from the Office of Personnel Management directing agencies to plan for mass layoffs was "illegal." The ruling did not reinstate the fired employees, though.
Military veterans work across the federal government and many work for the Department of Veterans Affairs. In February, the VA fired more than 2,400 employees, though it's unclear how many served in the military. On Monday, the VA terminated 585 "non-mission-critical or duplicative contracts."
NBC News · March 4, 2025
14. Trump Touts ‘Swift and Unrelenting’ Action on Border, Budget and Economy
Trump Touts ‘Swift and Unrelenting’ Action on Border, Budget and Economy
The State-of-the-Union-style address gave the president a chance to sell his agenda to the American public six weeks into his second term
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/donald-trump-speech-congress-32b8bda1?mod=latest_headlines
By Alex Leary
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and Tarini Parti
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Updated March 4, 2025 11:41 pm ET
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President Trump touted his achievements and reiterated his goals on immigration, tariffs, Ukraine, taxes and other issues, in a State of the Union-style speech to a joint session of Congress. Photo: Allison Robbert/AFP/Getty Images
WASHINGTON—President Trump put his disruptive return to power on full display during a prime-time address to Congress, offering a no-apologies assessment of his decisions to crack down on illegal immigration, slash the federal workforce and impose stiff tariffs on imports.
“I return to this chamber tonight to report that America’s momentum is back, our spirit is back, our pride is back, our confidence is back,” Trump said, standing in the House chamber five years after his last address to Congress, describing what he called a “swift and unrelenting” campaign to transform the country.
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The one-hour, 40-minute address—the longest of its kind in history—gave Trump an opportunity to sell his combative brand of governing to tens of millions of Americans in what was expected to be his largest audience since his inaugural address.
Trump presented a swaggering view of his administration, boasting of the dozens of executive orders he has signed and casting his first month in office as the most successful in history. He made few entreaties for unity, instead attacking Democrats as “radical left lunatics” and blaming his predecessor, Joe Biden, for the country’s problems.
“I look at the Democrats in front of me and I realize there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy,” he said. Democratic lawmakers held signs that read “false” and “Musk steals,” a reference to Trump’s ally Elon Musk and the efforts he has led to slash government spending
President Trump addressing a joint session of Congress on Tuesday. Photo: Win McNamee/Associated Press
Seven minutes into the speech, Rep. Al Green (D., Texas) was escorted out after rising from his seat and shouting at the president. The disruption prompted Trump to momentarily pause his remarks. Green later told reporters that the outburst was “worth it to let people know that there are some people who are going to stand up” to Trump.
Throughout the address, Trump defended his policies, which have sent shock waves across the globe, by invoking his election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in November. Democrats broke out in boos, as Republicans sought to drown those out with chants of “U.S.A.”
The public remains polarized and Trump has made some supporters second guess their choice, but Trump said he had a mandate to enact far-reaching change.
“The people elected me to do the job, and I am doing it,” Trump said.
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In his first major speech to Congress since his inauguration, President Trump was disrupted several times by Democrats before Speaker Mike Johnson called for order. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
He accused Biden of allowing the government to prosecute him, cases that withered as the president marched back to power. “How did that work out?” Trump asked. “Not too good.”
Trump showed off a theatrical side through the night. At one point he displayed an executive order that renamed a wildlife refuge in honor of Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old from Texas who was killed by two migrants. Trump pointed to a boy in the crowd with brain cancer and directed the head of the U.S. Secret Service to make him an honorary agent, fulfilling the boy’s dream of becoming a police officer and leading to roaring cheers in the chamber. And he announced a young man had been admitted to West Point.
The president also revealed during the speech that the U.S. had taken custody of an Afghan involved in planning the deadly 2021 suicide attack at the Kabul airport.
Six weeks into office, Trump has moved with lightning speed to put in place his policy proposals, leaving some Democrats struggling to mount a defense.
The president has removed thousands of federal workers from their posts, wound down the work of key federal agencies and put in place an adversarial foreign policy. On Tuesday, he imposed 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, rattling investors.
The Canada-U.S. border near the Peace Bridge in Fort Erie, Ontario. Photo: Christopher Katsarov Luna/Bloomberg News
The tariffs, paid for by U.S. importers, have triggered widespread concern about higher prices for consumers. Trump blamed Biden for high prices, including a rise in the cost of eggs. Trump said he is working to bring down costs by cutting federal spending and opening the door to more domestic energy production.
He touted the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, which has rocked Washington with job cuts. “He didn’t need this,” Trump said of the world’s richest man. Musk, who swapped his trademark T-shirt and MAGA hat for a suit, was in the audience for the speech—offering a salute at one point—as Trump ticked off what he said were some of the most absurd examples of federal spending.
Trump and his advisers have at times exaggerated the scale of the cuts they have made to government spending. In his speech, the president suggested that fraudulent Social Security payments were being made to dead people, rattling off people in the government’s database who are well over 100 years old. A 2023 inspector general report found that 18.9 million people born in 1920 or before were in the system but very few were actually receiving benefits.
The president asked Congress to move quickly to enact his legislative agenda, which includes steep tax cuts, and to pour vast new resources into securing the border. Trump pointed to a drop in border crossings, even as he privately hasn’t been happy with the pace of deportations.
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Speaking to a joint session of Congress, President Trump praised the work of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
He also talked about his plans to negotiate a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, just days after a tense Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump is still aiming to land an agreement to develop rare-earth minerals in Ukraine. Trump’s handling of the war has been criticized by Democrats and a handful of Republican lawmakers, and it has frustrated European allies, who worry he is cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Trump portrayed himself as a peacemaker. Hours before the speech, Zelensky said last week’s White House meeting was regrettable. “It is time to make things right. We would like future cooperation and communication to be constructive,” Zelensky wrote on social media. Trump said during his speech to Congress that he appreciated Zelensky’s comments.
Trump offered to welcome the people of Greenland into the U.S., pushing further on his talk of acquiring the land from Denmark. “We need Greenland for national security and even international security, and we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it,” Trump said. “And I think we’re going to get it one way or the other.” Officials in Greenland have said the self-governing island isn’t for sale.
Trump also said his administration “will be reclaiming the Panama Canal.” He has previously threatened to take control of the canal, potentially by military force.
Recent polls are mixed over whether voters hold a net positive or negative view of Trump’s actions so far, but the overall trend suggests that approval of his job performance has slipped.
Shortly after Trump took office, approval outweighed disapproval by more than 8 percentage points in an average of public polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight, which is run by ABC News. Since then, public opinion has turned more negative, and Americans are evenly divided over how Trump is handling his job, with about 48% approving and 48% disapproving.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) rehearsing the Democratic response. Photo: Paul Sancya/Associated Press
Trump’s speech came amid unfolding trade tensions prompted by his decision this week to move forward with tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico and to increase tariffs on Chinese imports. All three nations have said they plan retaliatory tariffs.
Trump has argued tariffs are necessary to boost American manufacturing, and he contends that the U.S. has been taken advantage of for decades. “It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it?” he said of tariffs, defending his duties on Mexico and Canada.
“There may be a little disturbance, but we’re OK with that,” Trump said.
Throughout the speech, Trump took jabs at Democrats. At one point, he referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) by the slur “Pocahontas.” During her 2012 Senate race, Warren faced accusations she had portrayed herself as part Native American to advance her academic career.
The Democratic response to the speech was delivered by Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a freshman who ran on a more moderate message focused on the economy.
Speaking from her home state, she criticized Trump’s economic policies and raised concerns about Musk’s work. “America wants change, but there’s a responsible way to make change and a reckless way—and we can make that change without forgetting who we are as a country and as a democracy.”
Democrats had brought as guests to the speech federal workers who lost their jobs following cuts made by Musk’s team, as well as small-business owners affected by tariffs. Some members boycotted the speech.
Write to Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com and Tarini Parti at tarini.parti@wsj.com
Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the March 5, 2025, print edition as 'Trump Touts ‘Swift and Unrelenting’ Actions on Border, Budget, Economy'.
15. 7 Takeaways from Trump’s Speech to Congress
The seven:
Doubled down on tariffs
‘Stop this madness’ in Ukraine
Selling Musk’s cost-cutting agenda
Biden blame
Democratic resistance
Ramping up deportations
A night of theatrics
7 Takeaways from Trump’s Speech to Congress
President marked his disruptive return to Washington with an unapologetic address
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-speech-sotu-style-address-takeaways-3629f158?mod=latest_headlines
By Tarini Parti
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March 4, 2025 11:38 pm ET
Trump spent a significant part of his address to a joint session of Congress discussing his trade agenda. Photo: win mcnamee/AFP/Getty Images
WASHINGTON—President Trump delivered a State of the Union-style speech Tuesday night, giving an unapologetic address to a joint session of Congress after his whirlwind early weeks back in the White House.
Here are the top takeaways from the roughly hour and 40-minute address, during which he declared “America is back”:
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Doubled down on tariffs
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In his address to Congress, President Trump reiterated the U.S. would impose ‘reciprocal tariffs’ on April 2 against countries who tax U.S. imports. Photo: Bill Clark/Zuma Press
Trump spent a significant part of his speech outlining his trade agenda, including his barrage of tariffs that rattled markets this week. Trump’s 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada took effect first thing Tuesday, along with an additional 10% tariff on Chinese imports. That was on top of another 10% levy imposed on China a month ago.
The president didn’t give any indication that he planned to roll back those levies. Earlier in the day, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Fox Business that Trump might “work something out” with Canada and Mexico.
Trump has declared that the illegal transit into the U.S. of migrants and drugs—chiefly fentanyl—is a national emergency, and he has targeted Mexico, Canada and China with tariffs to force them to halt the flow. “We need Mexico and Canada to do much more than they have done,” he said.
He also said he would move forward with his plan for reciprocal tariffs. In February, Trump ordered federal agencies to explore how to adjust U.S. tariffs to match those of other countries, a move that threatens international rules in place for decades.
“Whatever they tariff us—the other countries—we will tariff them,” he said. “Whatever they tax us, we will tax them.”
Trump made a brief reference to the prospect of higher consumer prices because of his tariffs, an outcome feared by economists and some Republicans in Congress. “There will be little disturbance,” he said. “We’re OK with that.”
‘Stop this madness’ in Ukraine
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In his address to a joint session of Congress, President Trump also said Russia has sent “strong signals” that it’s ready for peace. Photo: Win McNamee/Press Pool
Trump called for an end to the war in Ukraine, which he described as a “horrific and brutal conflict,” but he didn’t detail next steps in the peace process. “It’s time to stop this madness,” he said.
Ahead of the president’s speech, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to repair his relationship with Trump, calling his tense Oval Office meeting with Trump last week “regrettable.” He also said Ukraine was ready to sign a mineral-rights agreement with the U.S., which had been put on hold after the two leaders’ fiery meeting, and negotiate a peace plan.
Trump said he appreciated Zelensky’s comments. On Monday, the White House said it would pause all military aid to Kyiv until Trump determined that Zelensky was making a good-faith effort toward peace negotiations with Russia.
Selling Musk’s cost-cutting agenda
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Speaking to a joint session of Congress, President Trump praised the work of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Trump praised billionaire Elon Musk’s cost-cutting efforts with the Department of Government Efficiency, listing some programs he described as “appalling waste.”
“This is just the beginning,” Trump said, adding his administration was also looking into fraud in the Social Security program, pointing to people over the age of 100 still in the system. A 2023 inspector general report found that 18.9 million people born in 1920 or before were in the system but very few were actually receiving benefits.
The elimination of federal jobs, programs and contracts has alarmed some voters, who have questioned Republican lawmakers at town halls in their home districts.
Musk received a standing ovation and cheers from Republicans.
Biden blame
The president continued to blame his predecessor, who he called “the worst president in U.S. history,” for several of the complex problems facing his administration, such as inflation, the price of eggs and the war in Ukraine.
Trump had been highly critical of former President Joe Biden even after Kamala Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, and he continued to bash him Tuesday night.
“We inherited, from the last administration, an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare. Their policies drove up energy prices, pushed up the cost of groceries, and drove the necessities of life out of reach for millions of Americans,” he said.
The president defended his hard-charging early weeks in office by pointing to the rightward swing across the country in the 2024 election. Over boos from Democrats, he noted that he had won the popular vote and swept the seven most competitive states.
“The people elected me to do the job, and I am doing it,” he said.
Democratic resistance
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In his first major speech to Congress since his inauguration, President Trump was disrupted several times by Democrats before Speaker Mike Johnson called for order. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Roughly four minutes into Trump’s speech, some Democrats, including Rep. Al Green of Texas, began booing and heckling the president as he described the results of the 2024 election as a sweeping mandate.
Green, who waved his cane at Trump, was ejected from the chamber. “It’s worth it to let people know that there are some people who are going to stand up” to Trump, Green told reporters.
Several Democrats also held up paddle signs that read, “Musk steals” on one side and “False” on the other, and some walked out as the president criticized Biden.
When Trump criticized federal workers, saying the days of being ruled by unelected bureaucrats were over, several Democrats in the chamber pointed to Musk.
Ramping up deportations
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In his speech to Congress, President Trump touted his record on border security and immigration crackdown. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
Trump called on Congress to approve more funding for his deportation campaign and reiterated his plans to establish a “gold card” that would provide permanent U.S. residency in exchange for $5 million. But he also made clear the executive branch would play a large role.
“The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation to secure the border—but it turned out that all we really needed was a new president,” he said.
Since taking office, Trump has overseen far-reaching policy changes aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration. But Trump and top administration officials haven’t been satisfied with the pace of arrests by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Illegal border crossings along the southwestern U.S. border have declined during the first weeks of the Trump administration, accelerating a trend that started under Biden.
A night of theatrics
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During his address to Congress, President Trump appeared to surprise a young guest who has struggled with brain cancer by making him a U.S. Secret Service agent. Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
The speech was light on new policy announcements but Trump, who is known for his showmanship, created emotional moments using his guests during the speech. The address was the longest of its kind in history.
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The president stopped his speech to sign an executive order renaming a wildlife refuge after Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old girl who loved animals and was murdered by two immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. Her mother, Alexis Nungaray, who was one of Trump’s guests in the chamber, mouthed “thank you” to Trump.
Trump also made another one of his guests, DJ Daniel, a young boy suffering from cancer with dreams of becoming a police officer, an honorary member of the Secret Service. Daniel appeared stunned and delighted as Secret Service Director Sean Curran hugged him.
Write to Tarini Parti at tarini.parti@wsj.com
16. Zelensky Calls Heated Meeting With Trump ‘Regrettable’ in Bid to Mend Ties
Zelensky Calls Heated Meeting With Trump ‘Regrettable’ in Bid to Mend Ties
Ukrainian leader lays out vision for path to peace, aiming to repair relationship with U.S. president
https://www.wsj.com/world/zelensky-calls-heated-meeting-with-trump-last-week-regrettable-f4742e07?mod=latest_headlines
By Alexander Ward
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, Ian Lovett
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Updated March 4, 2025 11:32 pm ET
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Friday’s meeting with President Trump “regrettable” in a bid to mend the relationship with the U.S. Photo: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Planet Pix/Zuma Press
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called his heated White House meeting with President Trump last week “regrettable” and set out his vision of a path to peace in his most concerted public effort yet to repair his relationship with the U.S. leader.
“Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace,” Zelensky wrote Tuesday on social media. “Nobody wants peace more than Ukrainians.”
He said Ukraine was ready to sign a mineral-rights agreement with the U.S. and negotiate “under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts.”
Senior U.S. officials say it is unclear if Zelensky’s statement will be enough to convince Trump to restart U.S. military aid to Ukraine, which the White House halted Monday following his combative meeting with the Ukrainian leader three days earlier. U.S. officials said the pause will continue until Trump decides that Zelensky backs peace negotiations with Russia.
The National Security Council didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since the diplomatic implosion at the White House, European allies have been holding talks on plans to back Ukraine while pushing Zelensky to try to mend his relationship with Trump. European leaders and Zelensky have said that U.S. security guarantees for Kyiv are critical to any peace agreement. Trump has said he would only be willing to discuss such commitments after a cease-fire between Ukraine and Russia.
Volodymyr Zelensky and President Trump clashed Friday in Washington. Photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/Press Pool
Zelensky on Tuesday described steps Ukraine was prepared to take to de-escalate the war if Moscow agreed to reciprocal moves.
“The first stages could be the release of prisoners and truce in the sky—ban on missiles, long-ranged drones, bombs on energy and other civilian infrastructure—and truce in the sea immediately, if Russia will do the same,” Zelensky wrote. “Then we want to move very fast through all next stages and to work with the US to agree a strong final deal.”
Trump has been vague about the details of any peace plan, although he has said he has held a number of phone conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. At the Oval Office meeting last week Trump said “we’ve started the confines of the deal, and I think something can happen.”
During his speech to a joint session of Congress Tuesday night, Trump read a letter from the Ukrainian president, which is nearly identical to what Zelensky wrote on X earlier on Tuesday. But notably Trump didn’t say anything about striking a minerals deal with Ukraine.
Russia has said it is open to a cease-fire but is against U.S. and European security guarantees for Ukraine. The Kremlin applauded the U.S. aid halt, attacking Zelensky in crude terms.
“The Trump administration no longer wants to feed the Nazi mutt in Kiev,” Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president and now senior official in Moscow, posted to X on Tuesday morning about Ukraine’s president, who is Jewish. “The mad parasitic dog is dangerous. So, better to put it down quietly, without any suffering.”
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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said progress had been made in building a “coalition of the willing” after a meeting in London aimed at forging a Ukraine peace plan. WSJ’s Laurence Norman reports. Photo: Pool/ZUMA Press
Trump complained in recent private meetings that Zelensky had shown no intention of opening talks with Putin, officials said. The move to curtail aid temporarily was aimed at showing the Ukrainian leader that the White House was serious about brokering peace, they added.
Even signing a deal granting U.S. companies access to Ukrainian rare-earth minerals might not be enough to persuade Trump to resume aid, officials said.
David Shimer, a National Security Council official responsible for Eastern Europe and Ukraine in the Biden administration, said the U.S. should resume military aid in order to help Kyiv.
“The United States should be focused on strengthening, not weakening, Ukraine’s hand ahead of a negotiation,” Shimer said. “Halting security assistance will only make it more challenging for Ukraine to reach a just and lasting end to this war. It will reduce Ukraine’s leverage, weaken the Ukrainian military, and therefore undermine Ukraine’s negotiating position with Russia.”
European officials fear a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia won’t ultimately succeed in halting Moscow unless the White House agrees to guarantee Ukraine’s survival, with continued military aid and even military action, if necessary. Trump officials have ruled out putting U.S. forces in Ukraine.
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In his address to a joint session of Congress, President Trump also said Russia has sent “strong signals” that it’s ready for peace. Photo: Win McNamee/Press Pool
“Ukraine will not be able to defend itself without the support of the United States,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Unless Volodymyr Zelensky comes back to the negotiating table, the situation is going to be very tough.”
Zelensky portrayed the minerals deal giving U.S. companies access to untapped rare-earth materials as a signal of Washington’s support. “We see this agreement as a step toward greater security and solid security guarantees, and I truly hope it will work effectively,” he wrote in his post on X.
But he also pointed to failed previous agreements with Moscow that sought to halt the fighting after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and the Donbas.
“We need peace—real, fair peace—not endless war. And we need security guarantees,” he said in his nightly address on Monday. “It was precisely the lack of security guarantees for Ukraine 11 years ago that allowed Russia to start with the occupation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. Then, the absence of security guarantees allowed Russia to launch the full-scale invasion. And now, because there are still no defined security guarantees, it is Russia that is keeping this war going. The whole world sees this, the whole world acknowledges this.”
Ukrainian soldiers in the Donetsk region last year. Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ
He added that he has been “working with our European partners on a special diplomatic and security framework that can bring peace closer.”
Kostyantyn Batozsky, a political analyst in Kyiv, said Trump’s move to cut off aid to Ukraine won’t change Zelensky’s position or make him any more willing to sit down for a face-to-face meeting with Putin.
“Zelensky is not the type of person you can push into something,” Batozsky said. “Trump can’t tell Zelensky to do whatever he wants—Zelensky just won’t do it.”
Zelensky’s popularity inside Ukraine has grown since the disastrous meeting with Trump Friday, he added. Though Zelensky may sign the minerals deal, he is also making plans to continue fighting without the U.S. if necessary, Batozsky said. Ukrainian public opinion is firmly against any cease-fire without security guarantees, according to recent polling.
European governments are seeking to patch up relations between Trump and Zelensky, said Liana Fix, fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They will try to prevent a complete humiliation of Zelensky and try to talk to people around Donald Trump to convince him that Zelensky doesn’t have to apologize in front of the cameras and beg.”
Write to Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com, Ian Lovett at ian.lovett@wsj.com and Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com
17. Watch Trudeau speak directly to Trump during blistering speech
This is quite a speech and one I never thought I would hear. Take a few minutes to watch this. I am unclear as to what strategic effects we are trying to achieve with these actions toward Canada.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/04/world/video/justin-trudeau-tariffs-trump-speech-digvid?cid=ios_app&utm
Watch Trudeau speak directly to Trump during blistering speech | CNN
CNN · by Daniel Lewis · March 4, 2025
Watch Trudeau speak directly to Trump during blistering speech
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau outlined how his country will respond to the blanket 25 percent tariffs President Trump imposed on Canada and Mexico.
03:12 - Source: CNN
CNN · by Daniel Lewis · March 4, 2025
18. Unpreparedness is a Choice
Note Shawn's reference to the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Coincidentally, I spent yesterday afternoon at the Martin Luther King Jr Center in Atlanta for discussions on strategy with a team of young activists who are focused on the pursuit of a free and unified Korea. We examined the throughline of the 1919 March 1st Korean independence Movement through Gandhi's strategy in India which influenced King and provided the foundation for his Six Principles of Nonviolence and the Six Steps of Social Change. One of the things the people at the King center mentioned was how important it was to King to conduct assessments. He sent teams out to gather information and I had a thought that he was linking using what today USSOCOM summarizes as its design methodology, Appreciate the Context, Understand the Problem, and Develop an Approach.
- Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.
- Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding.
- Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.
- Nonviolence holds that suffering can educate and transform.
- Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate.
- Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice.
Information Gathering
To understand and articulate an issue, problem or injustice facing a person, community, or institution you must do research. You must investigate and gather all vital information from all sides of the argument or issue so as to increase your understanding of the problem. You must become an expert on your opponent’s position
Education
It is essential to inform others, including your opposition, about your issue. This minimizes misunderstandings and gains you support and sympathy.
Personal Commitment
Daily check and affirm your faith in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence. Eliminate hidden motives and prepare yourself to accept suffering, if necessary, in your work for justice.
Negotiation
Using grace, humor and intelligence, confront the other party with a list of injustices and a plan for addressing and resolving these injustices. Look for what is positive in every action and statement the opposition makes. Do not seek to humiliate the opponent but to call forth the good in the opponent.
Direct Action
These are actions taken when the opponent is unwilling to enter into, or remain in, discussion/negotiation. These actions impose a “creative tension” into the conflict, supplying moral pressure on your opponent to work with you in resolving the injustice.
Reconciliation
Nonviolence seeks friendship and understanding with the opponent. Nonviolence does not seek to defeat the opponent. Nonviolence is directed against evil systems, forces, oppressive policies, unjust acts, but not against persons. Through reasoned compromise, both sides resolve the injustice with a plan of action. Each act of reconciliation is one step closer to the ‘Beloved Community.’
https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/the-king-philosophy/
One of the fascinating aspects of our discussion was about King's strategic failures in such places as Chicago and Albany. As noted in Tom Rick's book, King was a brilliant strategist but the staff here in Atlanta said it is important to learn about his failures and not only his success.
I wish the Senate Armed Services Committee members had been able to read this before the DOD confirmation hearings. This could have provided a foundation for important lines of questioning. I would have liked to have heard responses to questions from Elbridge Colby based on this essay, though I think I know what his answers might have been: China, China, China and cut away everything else.
Excerpts::
Should the United States and the free world be forced to fight a protracted general war in the next decade, time is not on its side. Policy makers and those advising them might reflect on the wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr from his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail in regards to confronting danger head on through direct action, rejecting the myth that preparedness can wait or be achieved through moderation. “Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. … Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time …”
Now is the time to act. The United States must rearm, rebuild its national preparedness program, and re-establish its national mobilization architecture it assembled in the 1980s so that it can fight and win a protracted multi-theater general war against the autocrats if they elect to pursue aggression and war. Doing so will re-establish deterrence and reduce the likelihood of war even occurring by persuading the autocrats through strength, that today is not the day to start a war they will lose.
Essay| The Latest
Unpreparedness is a Choice
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/03/05/unpreparedness-is-a-choice/
by Shawn P. Creamer
|
03.05.2025 at 06:00am
The 2020s are markedly more volatile than at any time since the end of the Cold War, resembling more and more the combustible geopolitical world of the latter 1930s. Great Power rivalries and power politics are intensifying, with rank-and-file powers beginning to align into what appears to be the foundations of opposing war coalitions. While a Great Power war between the free world powers associated with and formally apart of the U.S. alliance system and the authoritarians is not inevitable, the winds of war are blowing in increasing intensity. Leon Trotsky’s amorphism continues to hold true, that we “may not be interested in war, but war is interested” in us. The risk of a general war breaking out with the United States and other core defenders of the free world on one side and the autocrats on the opposing side is growing. Failing to adequately prepare for a protracted, multi-theater general war is a choice.
A State of Unpreparedness
The United States should be very concerned about the present state and trajectory of the correlation of forces and means between America and its allies, and the opposing confederation of authoritarian powers, including the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation, North Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, etc. Over the last several decades the relative strength of the free world has been expended, eroded, or allowed to atrophy, resulting in ever thinner margins of strength and increasing areas of vulnerability, particularly if faced with a protracted general war. Achieving a to be developed wartime theory of victory will be very costly today, but the outcome of such a war five years hence would be in doubt based on current trends of America and its allies making slow incremental progress to improve their war preparedness, as if hoping the authoritarian threat will pass, while the authoritarian powers are aggressively pursuing rearmament programs that has already shifted the balance of power in key strategic locations such as the first island chain in the Indo-Pacific. One may dispute this assertion, but the United States needs to move beyond the misplaced belief that our American (and Western) exceptionalism will see us through and soberly face the facts as they are. The United States and its allies are unprepared for a multi-theater general war and our adversaries now have both a starter’s advantage and are better positioned for a grinding, protracted multi-theater general war that goes beyond one year.
In a multi-theater general war, victory ultimately hinges on the ability to maintain superior logistics and sustain the political will of the nation. While the United States is presently unique in its ability to project power globally, it projects this power under benign, relatively uncontested circumstances. The Homeland is no longer a sanctuary; America’s adversaries now possess an enormous suite of advanced capabilities to kinetically and non-kinetically attack civil and military targets within the continental United States, disrupting mobilization and force deployments, the transportation and banking systems, critical infrastructure, and adding friction across the entirety of the economic supply chain. Moreover, significant power projection capabilities currently in service and necessary to fighting a multi-theater general war, including Roll-On/Roll-Off shipping, Fleet Replenishment Oilers, Expeditionary Transport Docks, Army Watercraft, Amphibious Assault shipping, the Ready Reserve Force, the National Defense Reserve Fleet, etc., are aging out and rusting out at an ever-alarming rate with no coherent buy-back or replacement strategy in place. Absent a robust and resilient logistics and power projection capability we risk finding ourselves in a similar strategic position of the Japanese in the last great Pacific war, with forces withering on the vine across multiple theaters for want of basic logistics because the nation proved ill-suited to fight a protracted war.
Here in the West, defense practitioners in particular, all kind of chuckled in 2022 when it came to light that the Russians had resorted to stripping washing machines of their chips to feed their armaments industry. If we avoid preparing for protracted conflict, we could find ourselves doing the very same in a few short years. The state of multi-year backlogs in foreign military sales, the 2020 and beyond COVID supply chain problems, and the war in Ukraine have exposed the poor state of our logistics posture and our national industrial capacity for what it is – brittle and insufficient to provide surge production to meet the demands of a protracted, high-intensity war, and not what we’ve been panegyrically telling ourselves for the past several decades.
During World War II, General of the Army Omar Bradley once opined that “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics”. The modern corollary to this might be professionals talk logistics, while amateurs talk tactics. This is offered because the U.S. Armed Forces have regressed as a military profession over the last three decades, with an intellectual vacuum arising amongst the officer caste along with a corresponding erosion of competence by non-commissioned officers. We shouldn’t be surprised that the generational experiences of two decades of small wars has produced some very good brush-war tacticians and terrorist exterminators. However, those same skills and experiences found useful in counter-terror operations might not translate very well to sustained, high intensity large-scale combat against a peer adversary or coalition of powers.
Over the past 24 years of prosecuting the Global War on Terror campaign, the U.S. Joint Force has developed a counter-productive culture which places an almost myopic level of attention to all-things lethality. Close combat forces truly appreciate the value of firepower, but the lack of interagency planning and coordination, combined with the atrophy and lack of investments in power projection and logistics capabilities, puts the United States at strategic risk of not being capable of defending our national interests. The probability of the U.S. facing its own Suez moment is growing, where the U.S. Armed Forces are militarily incapable of force projection to secure lines of communication, support our allies, or defend American territory beyond the Continental United States.
Perhaps worse would be for the U.S. Armed Forces to have the capability (or be directed) to initially force project, but not be capable of sustaining the fight, and culminating in a protracted conflict for want of basic material needs. The United Kingdom risked such a predicament in 1982 in the Falklands War. British expeditionary power had appreciably declined in the decade prior to the Argentine invasion, but the British Armed Forces maintained a thin balance to pull off the campaign unilaterally. Within two years of the conclusion of that war the United Kingdom lacked any real unilateral expeditionary capability, and despite some recent investments to resurrect their carrier capability, is doubtful the British could field a Falkland-like force today.
In a protracted general war, the U.S. Joint Force and any allies fighting alongside will fight the first year with the force they have and the logistics already in hand or on order. Protracted wars are ultimately won by equipment that is produced after the war starts, and by forces not yet conscripted, trained and put into the field. The Department of Defense (DOD) has known for decades that nothing of consequence will be produced and delivered by industry inside of 12 months of surge production starting, confirmed since 2022 by the inability of industry to meet Ukrainian material war demands. At the end of the day, if the shelves are bare, the nation can’t just-in-time logistics, control supply rate or weaponeer our way to victory in a protracted Great Power war. If the United States expects the industrial base to deliver on any kind of timeline needed to fight a protracted general war, then the vehicle for realizing such an outcome will be investments made in the baseline industrial capacity today that extends beyond the roughly two percent of gross domestic product currently supporting the defense industrial base. At their peaks, the last two wars that required mobilization of the United State consumed over 40% of the economy during World War II and roughly 13% of the American economy during the Korean War.
One of the most valuable strategic positions of strength held by the United States has been and remains its network of alliances, followed closely by its ability to marshal the commercial sector for strategic ends. That said, the United States should be frank and honest that it is presently now over-reliant on both the commercial sector and international allies & partner nations to deploy and sustain the Joint Force. The United States must accept that not all commercial resources it has grown accustomed to power project and sustain the Joint Force will be available in a general war. As an example, for much of the last 20 years the United States has relied on contractors to provide critical support functions and foreign shipping and aircraft to power project forces, masking the significant sustainment and power projection gaps within the Joint Force.
Moreover, not all of America’s “friends” will be with it should the shooting start, and in a shooting war hash-tags and best wishes won’t be helpful. American historian and author Dr. Stephen Kotkin has succinctly pointed out the true state of many of America’s allies when he asserted that its most strategically important alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), “is an alliance of pacifist countries, with small defense budgets that don’t want to fight a war again.” Fully acknowledging this is another relatively uncomfortable prospect to consider, and some may also declare as heresy that not everyone in the alliance network or that American industry can be relied upon. Some of America’s own treaty allies question U.S. commitment, and opening talk of it in terms of risk, and what they might have to do should America not come to their aid in a time of need. The U.S. should have the same conversation internally, planning for allied operations, but preparing to go it largely alone with a much smaller group of committed allies if need be.
In the spirit of debate, the recent Houthi threat to Red Sea lines of communication is submitted as indicative, on a relatively small scale, to what the United States is likely to see in a Great Power war: lackluster free world support to defending the commons, and by extension, the international system, and second, the commercial sector reaction to opt out, avoiding involvement in the contested zone. As an example, what if international shipping lines, such as Maersk, elects to or is pressured to by our adversaries to sit out a Great Power general war as a neutral, and the United States is unable to compel their support as it is able to do with U.S. flagged shipping? Without permissive access to international shipping to support a war effort, the United States won’t have the capability to deploy, much less sustain even a third of its 19 Army and three Marine Corps Divisions.
It is a fallacy to believe that a war termination outcome in a general war favorable to the United States can be achieved largely through sea and air domains, augmented by special forces raids. Sizable ground forces will be required and serious fighting will occur to secure key and decisive terrain necessary to realize victory. Hoping to win on the cheap without ground forces is founded on an exaggerated and false understating of history and war. Therefore, if the United States desires to project power globally, it must have the shipping, the mariners to crew them, and a balanced, resourced Joint Force to protect it.
The United States (and the West) of 2025 are not a product of their circumstances. The strategic position they find themselves in are a result of their decisions. For much of the last 35 years the West’s post-Cold War strategic judgment has been poor, exacerbated by ahistorical naïveté that unipolarity and the absence of war on the European plain was a natural state. Peace is not the natural state of affairs, but it can be maintained through strength and preparedness. Our adversaries have communicated their intent and are actively preparing themselves for war through their unprecedented military build-ups and increasingly coordinated actions. Policy makers and those advising them should reflect on this moment and how history will judge them, the United States, and the West. If wishing away the authoritarian threat and half-measures are continued, the United States and the West will face the hard reality of our adversaries increasingly strong position at some point. We either get serious real fast and prepare for the next big conflict, or risk losing it all.
A Choice to Prepare
The road forward is challenging, but not insurmountable. Real preparedness is achievable through sustained and disciplined strategic vision and leadership. DOD cannot prepare the nation for a protracted general war alone. First and foremost, the executive and legislative branches must make national emergency preparedness a real priority as it did in the late 1970s and 1980s with senior official active involvement and budgetary follow-through. DOD has a very big part, for only DOD has the organizational capacity and institutional power to get national preparedness and mobilization established as a priority within the next National Security Strategy (NSS). However, while DOD will need to be a leader and do its part for the defense enterprise, the rest of the Federal Government has a critical role and must join the effort through aligning their legacy national security roles under the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). DOD must partner with FEMA, and together they can marshal the rest of the Federal Government to kick-start national mobilization planning and preparation.
With national mobilization established as a priority in the NSS, DOD must revisit the current National Defense Strategy to account for the prospect of a protracted, global general war, and consider returning to a resourced two-theater, or perhaps even a more realistic multi-theater, war strategy that includes the Homeland as one of the theaters. Such an approach will require both the executive and legislative branches of our government to reach a consensus on a National Security Council (NSC) 68 like grand strategy for a more complex environment. Such a national policy, at its heart, will involve intense rivalry, increasing crises and preparing the nation to fight multiple adversaries simultaneously, with the People’s Republic of China at the center as the designated primary opposing belligerent. Such a strategy must deal with significantly more complex economic issues than NSC 68 posited and confronted throughout the Cold War.
The 2030’s security environment will require a strategy that commits to resourcing a major program of rearmament here in the mid-2020s akin to, and perhaps greater than, the Reagan Administration build-up in the 1980s and likely beyond what the All-Volunteer Force can support. The nation is not yet ready for a discussion on rearmament or the need to return to conscription to support an expanded force, so the argument needs to be made for the debate to start. The nation will rise to meet the challenge if the case is properly made.
With national emergency preparedness established as a priority in the NSS, DOD should, through DHS, start an enduring, deliberate planning effort with FEMA. The DOD, DHS, and FEMA team should establish a crash planning effort to produce a Federal National Mobilization Plan (FNMP), as DOD and FEMA did in the 1980s, to marshal the nation’s resources for a protracted general war. The United States has not conducted interagency national mobilization planning since 1994, when FEMA followed DOD’s decision to move on from planning for global general war, eliminating the bulk of their mobilization planning infrastructure in the process. FEMA shifted its primary planning focus to disaster response, a natural response following the 1992 failure of the Federal Government’s response to Hurricane Andrew.
A general war against either Russia or China would require a unified campaign across most of the geographic Combatant Commands. As an example, war with the People’s Republic of China would require a global war plan that requires synchronized campaigns in the following geographic Combatant Commands: United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), United States Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM), United States Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM), United States Central Command (USCENTCOM), and the United States Africa Command (USAFRICOM). A war with China would likewise require integration of the functional Combatant Command’s war plans, including United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), and of course United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM). Therefore, DOD should direct the Joint Staff to lead global campaign planning akin to the inter-war color-coded “rainbow” plans conducted in the lead-up to World War II.
Contemporary rainbow planning must include developing plans for protracted war against a coalition of adversaries. Moreover, while the above recommended rainbow planning should focus on what the United States must prepare to do, including our core allies and their collective defense measures. The United States needs to remain committed to its treaty commitments, but America’s commitments need to be measured by both importance to the national interest and allied commitment to defending the international order. In short, the United States should cultivate and nurture core allies that demonstrate their commitment to collective defense of the international order, and minimize our reliance on the free riders who have off-shored their defense responsibilities onto the United States. We can’t do it all, nor should we care more about someone else’s defense than they do. Therefore, our defense planning may need to de-prioritize certain allied defense needs to focus on the strategic requirements and operational realities of a Great Power war in the Indo-Pacific.
In conjunction with a rainbow planning effort, the Joint Staff should develop a force expansion plan to prosecute the war over time. Using the Victory Plan of 1941 as the historical inspiration, the Joint Staff should develop a Victory Plan of 202X, which would frame out the basic structure required should the Joint Force be called to expand the force from its present size of two million troops to five or ten million required to fight and win a multi-year Great Power general war. A Victory Plan of 202X would serve as the foundation of most subsequent national mobilization planning, including the development of an industrial war plan, conscription planning, strategic reconstitution (e.g. Joint Force expansion), and the operational reconstitution of attritted forces. Without such a strategic framework, i.e. a victory plan, all Joint Force and national war planning would be aiming for targets in the dark, and anything that would come out would be of very limited value.
Should the United States and the free world be forced to fight a protracted general war in the next decade, time is not on its side. Policy makers and those advising them might reflect on the wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr from his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail in regards to confronting danger head on through direct action, rejecting the myth that preparedness can wait or be achieved through moderation. “Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. … Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time …”
Now is the time to act. The United States must rearm, rebuild its national preparedness program, and re-establish its national mobilization architecture it assembled in the 1980s so that it can fight and win a protracted multi-theater general war against the autocrats if they elect to pursue aggression and war. Doing so will re-establish deterrence and reduce the likelihood of war even occurring by persuading the autocrats through strength, that today is not the day to start a war they will lose.
Tags: conflict, Great Power Competition, Great Power Conflict, Military Preparedness, Military strategy, war
About The Author
- Shawn P. Creamer
- Shawn P. Creamer is a retired U.S. Army Colonel. He served as an infantry officer for more than 29 years, with more than fourteen years assigned to or directly working on Indo-Pacific security issues and more than five years working large scale mobilization. In retirement, Shawn Creamer is serving as a fellow with the Institute for Corean-American Studies, and as a non-resident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative, the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative, and the GeoStrategy Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
19. US Deputy Secretary of Defense Nominee: “Strong Alliance with Korea... Unclear Whether US-ROK-Japan Solidarity Will Continue”
This is a Google translation of a VOA report (which is why the headline is incorrect - the article is about the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy's testimony, it is Google's fault not VOA's).
This is reporting you will not find in the US mainstream media (or at least I have not found any substantive reporting on Bridge's comments on Korea). But VOA is doing its job, reporting on US policy issues to foreign target audiences. VOA also includes reporting on Bridge's submitted written testimony which helps provide a fuller picture of his views.
Except for his skepticism on an Asian NATO and his statement that JAROKUS (Japan-ROK-US) trilateral cooperation may not be sustainable, this report provides some positive views.
Excerpts:
In his written policy response submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee that day, nominee Colby also emphasized that South Korea is an important ally.
“The U.S.-ROK alliance is vital to U.S. interests and is the cornerstone of establishing America’s geopolitical position in Asia.”
This report has some encouraging comments from Bridge on Korea and alliances and he makes an especially interesting comment about Taiwan and Korea.
Excerpts:
He also said that Taiwan should follow South Korea's example.
“When we engage with Taiwan and offer policy advice, we have tried to get them to become as similar to South Korea as possible,” Colby said. “South Korea is a very viable model with a much stronger military.”
We could see OPCON transition during the Trump administration:
In response to the question of whether the U.S. should explore additional options to expand strategic cooperation with South Korea in response to the expansion of China and North Korea's nuclear arsenals, he said, "We should do so now."
Asked about the transfer of wartime operational control to South Korea, Colby said, “It’s a sensitive issue that needs to be carefully considered, but overall, President Trump’s foreign policy vision is to empower capable and motivated allies like South Korea, and I support efforts to strengthen South Korea’s role.”
US Deputy Secretary of Defense Nominee: “Strong Alliance with Korea... Unclear Whether US-ROK-Japan Solidarity Will Continue”
2025.3.5
Jo Eun-jung
https://www.voakorea.com/a/7997729.html
Elbridge Colby, the nominee for Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, has named South Korea as one of the countries that will play an active role in the alliance. Citing political trends in South Korea, he expressed doubts about the sustainability of the trilateral alliance between the US, South Korea, and Japan. Reporter Cho Eun-jung reports.
Elbridge Colby, the nominee for Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, emphasized on the 4th that the United States has a strong alliance with South Korea.
At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the same day, when asked about regional solidarity to check China in the Indo-Pacific, nominee Colby said, “We have very strong alliances with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.”
[Recording: Colby, nominee for Deputy Minister for Policy] “We have very strong alliances with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. I think we have an effectively a very strong security relationship with Taiwan, of course, Australia is very strong. And then I think we have a very deepening and important relationship with India that's directly proximate. I think we also could build, effectively on a partnership with Vietnam.”
He continued, “Our relations with Taiwan and Australia are also very strong,” and “We also have a very important and deepening relationship with India, and we can effectively build cooperative relations with Vietnam.”
“Allies’ Roles in Responding to North Korea, China, and Russia Need to Be Expanded”
He also said that the United States should work with its allies to respond to the "counter coalition" formed by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea and to deepen cooperation, and that allies should expand their roles in particular.
“Israel, India, South Korea, Poland are playing a big role, and Finland is doing quite well,” Colby said. “But many of the largest economies in the alliance network are not playing their part very well.”
He also said that Taiwan should follow South Korea's example.
“When we engage with Taiwan and offer policy advice, we have tried to get them to become as similar to South Korea as possible,” Colby said. “South Korea is a very viable model with a much stronger military.”
“Skeptical of Asian NATO”
Nominee Colby questioned the sustainability of the US-ROK-Japan alliance, citing the political situation in Korea.
When asked about his thoughts on an Asian version of NATO, Colby said he was “not against it, but skeptical.”
He said, “I visited Korea early last year, and while the tripartite solidarity among the U.S., Japan, and Korea was encouraging in some ways, looking at the political trends in Korea over the past six to eight months, it is not clear whether this will continue.”
[Recording: Colby, nominee for Deputy Policy Minister] “I'm not theologically opposed to it, but I've been skeptical. I was in Korea, earlier last year. There's the triangle with the United States, Japan and Korea. I think that's encouraging in some ways. But, you know, if we look at the South Korean political dynamics over the last 6 to 8 months, it's not clear that that's going to be enduring. And so I think there's a lot of spadework and political capital that's put into a multilateral organization, whereas I think something may be building up to have more multilateralization in the region, but not the huge ambition of an Asian NATO, especially because you've got Japan over here, India over here, Australia down here.”
“A lot of preparatory work and political capital goes into a multilateral organization,” he continued. “I think something is forming in the region that could strengthen multilateral cooperation, but I don’t think it’s some grand ambition like an ‘Asian NATO.’”
For example, he explained that Japan, India and Australia are far apart and their situations are quite different.
In his written policy response submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee that day, nominee Colby also emphasized that South Korea is an important ally.
“The U.S.-ROK alliance is vital to U.S. interests and is the cornerstone of establishing America’s geopolitical position in Asia.”
He continued, “It is important that these important alliances continue to be renewed to reflect the broader geopolitical and military situation facing the United States and South Korea.”
“We will realistically review extended deterrence”
When asked specifically about his stance on extended deterrence provided to South Korea, Colby said, “The United States and South Korea face the serious threat posed by North Korea together.”
[Written response] “I believe the US-ROK alliance is critical and that together we face a severe threat from North Korea. We must ensure the strategic posture deterring and defending on our behalf and South Korea's is credible and stout. Consistent with the President and Secretary's approach around the world, I believe we need to be clear-eyed, frank, and realistic with our allies about the nature of the threats we face and the allocation of responsibilities among ourselves, in the service of ensuring our alliances are best defended and strategically sustainable. If confirmed, I would review this matter carefully and approach this question in that spirit.”
He said, “We must maintain a reliable and firm strategic posture to deter and defend against threats for the United States and for South Korea.”
“Like the President and the Secretary of Defense have done around the world, we must be clear, honest, and realistic about the nature of the threat we face and the shared responsibility among our allies,” he said.
“This will help us best defend our alliance and make it strategically sustainable,” Colby said. “If confirmed, I will approach this issue with that spirit in mind and carefully consider it.”
In response to the question of whether the U.S. should explore additional options to expand strategic cooperation with South Korea in response to the expansion of China and North Korea's nuclear arsenals, he said, "We should do so now."
Asked about the transfer of wartime operational control to South Korea, Colby said, “It’s a sensitive issue that needs to be carefully considered, but overall, President Trump’s foreign policy vision is to empower capable and motivated allies like South Korea, and I support efforts to strengthen South Korea’s role.”
“Policy priority: containing China”
In his written response, Colby said his policy priorities should be to focus on the challenges posed by China and the territorial integrity of the United States, while at the same time the United States must be prepared to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and support NATO allies and South Korea.
At the hearing that day, nominee Colby also said, “Preventing China from gaining regional hegemony is critical to America’s core interests,” and “The military balance (between the U.S. and China) has deteriorated dramatically, and this is a change from the past.”
[Recording: Colby, nominee for Deputy Secretary of State for Policy] “It's very important to core American interests in denying China regional hegemony. What’s changed under we discussed is the dramatic deterioration of the military balance.”
Vice President Vance Urges Colby's Confirmation
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance visited the hearing room that day to personally introduce nominee Colby and urge the congressmen to confirm his nomination.
Vice President Vance said Colby “brings a perspective that the Department of Defense desperately needs,” and that “his role at the Department of Defense will be critical as we look to the next five and 10 years.”
[Recording: Vice President Vance] “I think that his role at the Department of Defense will be incredibly important in seeing around the corners of the next five years and the next ten years. And that’s one of the most important reasons why I think we should support his nomination at this great committee.”
“President Trump nominated him,” he continued. “We nominated him because we thought he would do a great job.”
In addition to nominee Colby, Vice President Vance also personally introduced Secretary of Commerce Howard Rutnick at his confirmation hearing.
This is Eun-Jeong Jo from VOA News.
20. Victor Davis Hanson: Can Trump Revolutionize America?
Excerpts:
The MAGA revolution that will now ensue in the four years of Trump’s second and last presidential term promises to remake America in ways only haphazardly realized four years ago. In Trump’s favor this time around are his past years of governance and his knowledge of the sort of opposition he will now face—after two impeachments, five weaponized civil and criminal court cases, repeated efforts to remove his candidacy from state ballots, two assassination attempts, and three brutal presidential campaigns.
The failed Biden years—the entrance of 12 million illegal aliens through a deliberately opened border, wars abroad, inflation, and soaring crime—helped propel the most spectacular political resurrection in American political history. The backroom Biden removal from the Democratic nomination, the subsequent listless Harris campaign, and the ever more radical trajectory of the increasingly unpopular Democratic Party have all put Trump in a far more powerful position than when he entered the presidency in 2017 or when he left office in 2021.
Trump’s success in resetting the United States will hinge not merely on outwitting the desperation of his enemies, but also on navigating the paradoxes of implementing his own MAGA agenda.
Victor Davis Hanson: Can Trump Revolutionize America?
Change is underway—at the border, in our federal government, and abroad. But several forces threaten to undermine success.
By Victor Davis Hanson
03.04.25 — U.S. Politics
https://www.thefp.com/p/victor-davis-hanson-can-trump-reset
Donald Trump holds a hat reading “Trump was right about everything” after signing an executive order in Washington, D.C., on February 25, 2025. (Jim Watson via Getty Images)
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The Trumpian agenda to “Make America Great Again” emerged during the 2015–16 campaign and ensured Donald Trump’s nomination and eventual victory over Hillary Clinton. This counterrevolutionary movement reflected the public’s displeasure with both the Obama administration’s hard swing to the left and the doctrinaire, anemic Republican reaction to it.
Although only partially implemented during Trump’s first term, MAGA policies nevertheless marked a break from many past Republican orthodoxies, especially in their signature skepticism concerning the goal of nation-building abroad and the so-called endless wars, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, that tended to follow. But like all counterrevolutions, there were intrinsic challenges in the transition from simply opposing the status quo to actually ending it.
There was a promising start during Trump’s first administration. Corporate interest in a porous border to ensure inexpensive labor was ignored; immigration was deterred or restricted to legal channels, and the border was largely secured. Deregulation and tax cuts, rather than deficit reduction, were prioritized. Selective tariffs were no longer deemed apostasies from the free market, but acceptable and indeed useful levers to enforce reciprocity in foreign trade. Costly middle-class entitlements were pronounced sacrosanct. Social Security and Medicare were declared immune from cost-cutting and privatization.
This “action plan to Make America Great Again” went hand in hand with an effort to transform the Republican Party. What had once been routinely caricatured as a wealthy club of elites was reinvented by Trump as a working-class populist movement. Racial chauvinism and tribalism were rejected. Race was to be seen as incidental to shared class concerns—notably, reining in the excesses of a progressive, identity politics–obsessed bicoastal elite. Athletes who in 2020 had bent a knee to express outrage at “systemic” racism were in 2024 celebrating their scores by emulating Trump’s signature dance moves.
Despite intense resistance from the media, the Democratic Party, and the cultural left, the first Trump term enjoyed success in implementing many of these agendas. After losing the 2020 election—in which nearly 70 percent of voters in key swing states voted by mail-in ballot—Trump left office without a major war on his watch. He had overseen a period with 1.9 percent annualized inflation, low interest rates, steady economic growth and, finally, after constant battles and controversy, a secure border with little illegal immigration.
Yet during the succeeding four-year Biden interregnum, the world became far more chaotic and dangerous, both at home and abroad. Biden’s general agenda was to reverse by executive order almost every policy that Trump had implemented. And while Trump was successfully reelected in 2024 after reminding voters that they had been far better off under the MAGA agenda than during Biden’s subsequent shambolic tenure, the changed conditions in 2024 will also make implementing that agenda even more difficult than after Trump’s first victory.
Trump has now inherited an almost bankrupt country. The ratio of debt to annual GDP has reached a record high of nearly 125 percent—exceeding the worst years of World War II. The nation remains sharply divided over the southern border. Trump’s own base demands that he address an estimated 12 million additional unvetted illegal aliens; diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates and racial quotas; and an array of enemies abroad who are no longer deterred by or content with the global status quo. The eight-year Obama revolution, in retrospect, did not change American institutions and policies nearly as much as the more radical four-year Biden tenure. And so often, when drastic remedies are proposed, their implementation may appear to the inured public—at least initially—as a cure worse than the disease.
Take the example of illegal immigration. Since Trump left office in January 2021, two major and unexpected developments followed during the Biden years. First, the border did not just become porous but virtually disappeared. Indeed, Biden in his first hours of governance stopped further construction of the Trump wall, restored catch-and-release policies, and allowed illegal immigrants to cross the border without first applying for refugee status.
Given the magnitude of what followed—as many as 12 million illegal aliens crossed the border during Biden’s tenure—the remedy of deportation would now necessitate a massive, indeed unprecedented, effort. The public has been increasingly hectored by the left to fear the supposedly authoritarian measures Trump had in mind when he called for “massive deportations.” Left unsaid was that such deportations would only be a response to the prior four years of lawless and equally “massive” importations of foreign nationals. And yet, while the 12 million illegal entrances over four years were an insidious process, the expulsion of most of those entrants will be seen as abrupt, dramatic, and harsh. In addition, it was much easier for felons and criminals to blend in to the daily influx of thousands than it will be to find them now amid a population of 335 million.
Second, in the 2024 election, Trump won a record number of Hispanic voters (somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, depending on how the term Hispanic is defined) in one of the most dramatic political defections from the Democratic Party in history. While voters’ switch to Trump can be largely attributed to the deleterious effects of the Biden-Harris open border on Hispanic communities, schools, and social services, no one knows what, if any, might be the paradoxical political effects of the mass deportation of many within these same Hispanic communities.
Will Hispanic voters continue to resent the ecumenical nature of illegal immigration across the southern border, which now draws millions from outside Latin America? Will they wish to focus primarily on violent criminals while exempting on a case-by-case basis Mexican nationals, many of whom have kinship ties to Hispanic U.S. citizens? In sum, no one yet knows the political consequences of deporting all—or even five to 10 percent—of the Biden-era illegal aliens, given their unprecedented numbers. Even if polls tell us that 52 percent of Americans support “massive” deportations, will that number still hold true if they eventually include friends and relatives or entail five or six million deportations?
Trump looks on after signing the Laken Riley Act in Washington, D.C., January 29, 2025. (Roberto Schmidt via Getty Images)
Trump’s fiscal policies pose similar known unknowns. During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised a number of large tax cuts to various groups. For example, eliminating taxes on service workers’ tips might cost the Treasury in excess of $10 billion a year. Trump’s call to make tax-free the incomes of police officers, firefighters, veterans, and active-duty military personnel would translate into at minimum a shortfall of $200 billion a year in federal tax revenue. Another $200 billion in annual revenue would be lost if, as promised, Trump once again allowed state and local taxes to be deducted from federal income taxes. Some $300 billion per annum would also vanish under Trump’s proposals to cease taxing hourly overtime pay. Other promises to eliminate taxes on Social Security income, cut corporate taxes to 15 percent, or re-extend his 2017 tax cuts could reach $1 trillion in lost federal revenue per year.
The 2024 yearly deficit was projected at about $1.83 trillion. So how would Trump reach his goal of moving toward a balanced budget if all the promised tax reductions were realized, with a yearly loss of at least $1 trillion in revenue added to the nearly $2 trillion currently borrowed each year? No one knows the precise increase in annual revenues that will accrue from greater productivity and economic growth due to Trump’s deregulatory and tax-reduction agendas. Furthermore, how much income can be expected from proposed reciprocal tariffs on foreign imports? And how much will realistically be gained in savings from Elon Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency and its promise to cut $2 trillion from the annual federal budget?
So far, Trump’s proposed radical tax cuts are quite popular, mostly transparent, and often detailed, while the commensurate massive reductions in federal spending are as yet none of the above. The political success of Trump’s tax and spending reductions will hinge on the degree to which he can eliminate massive unpopular waste, slash useless programs, increase federal revenue from targeted foreign tariffs, and through incentives, grow the size and incomes of the taxpaying public and corporations—without touching sacrosanct big-ticket items like defense, Social Security, and Medicare. It bears noting that no prior administration has been able to cut the annual deficit while also massively reducing federal income taxes.
Trump has also promised a radically new and different cohort to run his cabinet posts and large agencies. In his first term, Trump’s agenda was stymied by both his own political appointees and the high-ranking officials of the administrative state. Starting in 2017, they saw their new jobs as either warping MAGA directives into their own preferred policies or colluding to block a supposedly unqualified and indeed “dangerous” Trump. Almost monthly, his cabinet heads or agency directors—John Bolton, James Comey, John Kelly, James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Christopher Wray—were at odds with their politically inexperienced president.
Anonymous lower-ranking officials routinely claimed to the media that they were internally frustrating Trump initiatives and leaked embarrassing (and possibly fabricated) anecdotes about their president. One supposedly high-ranking Trump official known as “Anonymous”—later revealed to be a rather low-ranking bureaucrat named Miles Taylor—began a New York Times hit piece, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” He further boasted of how appointees deliberately tried to sabotage Trump policies and executive orders.
But paradoxes also arise from Trump’s 2024 remedies for this earlier internal obstruction. Given this past experience, only genuine outsiders appear immune to the compromises and careerism endemic among veterans of the administrative state. And yet such would-be reformers often lack the insider knowledge, expertise, and familiarity with the government blob needed to reduce or eliminate it.
The radical growth in the federal government, the surge in entitlements, the increases in regulations and taxes, and the soaring deficit and national debt were overseen by so-called experts in the bureaucracy as well as by traditional politicians on both sides of the aisle. In response, would-be reformers have talked grandly about the dangers of unsustainable national debt, the interest payments that now exceed $1 trillion per year, and the need to rein in nearly $2 trillion in annual budget deficits. But few, especially in Congress, may be willing to cancel the sacred-cow programs that have enriched their constituents, provided jobs for millions of Americans, and offered high-paying, revolving-door billets for retired politicians and their staffers.
For example, the general public, liberal and conservative alike, acknowledges vast waste and wrongheaded procurement at the Pentagon. Auditors quietly grant that massive subsidies and corporate welfare to pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness, and crony-capitalist wind- and solar-energy companies are near scandalous. An increasing number of voters now believes that the government needs to get out of the business of guaranteeing student loans that are nonperforming, stop funding boondoggles like high-speed rail, and dismantle the vast DEI commissar system at government agencies.
Yet those most familiar with these programs are their beneficiaries. And those who could most effectively discontinue them are precisely those who perhaps could least be trusted to do so. Therefore, outsiders are needed, even or especially those without the degrees and résumés customarily required to run these huge government entities.
Trump’s cabinet nominee Pete Hegseth, for example, a decorated combat veteran who wrote a book on the Pentagon’s pathologies, is by conventional standards unqualified to be the defense secretary. He is not a four-star officer, former Fortune 500 CEO, or prior cabinet official. Unlike his two predecessors, however, he would not revolve into the office from a post at a defense corporation with huge Pentagon contracts.
The FBI director nominee Kash Patel has a lengthy record of government service in Congress, the executive branch, and legal circles. But he also is a fierce critic of the FBI and was once himself a target of agency monitoring. Indeed, Patel wrote a book about FBI misadventures, incompetence, and political weaponization. He promises to move the agency outside of Washington, D.C., and to end its political contamination—which has earned him fierce opposition from within the bureau and its congressional and media supporters.
In rejection of the Republican establishment that obstructed him in his first administration, Trump has often opted for anti–big government picks who were once Democrats or who otherwise emphatically reflect the populist nature of the new Republican Party, such as Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Secretary of Health and Human Services), Dr. Marty Makary (head of the Food and Drug Administration), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (Director of the National Institutes of Health), or Lori Chavez-DeRemer (Secretary of Labor).
In sum, while it is not impossible for reformers to emerge from the status quo, it is precisely those “unqualified,” “firebrand,” or “dangerous” outsiders without “proper” experience in government, without prestigious degrees and credentials, and without sober and judicious reputations within the bureaucracies (indeed, they are sometimes the very targets of the agencies that they are tasked to reform or end) who are most immune to being compromised by those bureaucracies.
But it is abroad where the implementation of the MAGA agenda will be most severely stress-tested, particularly regarding China, Russia, Ukraine, and the Middle East. Trump’s first term was neither isolationist nor interventionist. He loathed nation-building, but he also ridiculed the appeasement strategies of prior administrations. Recalling the Roman military commentator Vegetius’s famous aphorism si vis pacem, para bellum (if you desire peace, prepare for war), Trump’s strategy in building up the nation’s defenses and reforming the Pentagon was not to fight elective ground wars or to democratize foreign nations, but to avoid future conflicts through demonstrable deterrence.
Trump listens to Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu speak during a press conference in Washington, D.C., on February 4, 2025. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds via Getty Images)
A good example is his first-term experience with radical Islamists in the Middle East. On January 3, 2020, the Trump administration killed by drone the Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani near the Baghdad airport. Soleimani had a long record of waging surrogate wars against Americans, especially during the Iraq conflict and its aftermath. After the Trump cancellation of the Iran deal, followed by U.S. sanctions, Soleimani reportedly stepped up violence against regional American bases in Iraq and Syria—most of which, ironically, Trump himself wished to remove.
A few days after Soleimani’s death, Iran staged a performance-art retaliatory strike of twelve missiles against two U.S. air bases in Iraq, assuming that Trump had no desire for a wider Middle Eastern war. Tehran had supposedly warned the Trump administration of the impending attacks, which killed no Americans. Later reports, however, did suggest that some Americans suffered concussions and that more damage was done to the bases than was initially disclosed. Nonetheless, this Iranian interlude seemed to reflect Trump’s agenda of avoiding “endless wars” in the Middle East, while restoring deterrence that prevented, rather than prompted, full-scale conflicts.
Yet in a second Trump administration, such threading of the deterrence needle may become far more challenging. The world today is far more dangerous than it was when Trump left office in 2021. The U.S. military is far weaker, suffering from munitions shortages, massive recruitment shortfalls, DEI mandates, and dwindling public confidence. The State Department is far less credible, and America’s enemies have been long nursed on Biden-era appeasement. Four years ago, for example, no one would have dreamed that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians would become casualties in a full-scale war on Europe’s doorstep.
Indeed, an inept Biden administration crippled U.S. deterrence abroad through both actual and symbolic disasters. In March 2021, Chinese diplomats brazenly dressed down newly appointed Biden administration diplomats in Anchorage without rebuke. The debacle in Afghanistan in August 2021 marked the greatest abandonment of U.S. arms and facilities in American military history. Six months later, an observant Vladimir Putin correctly surmised that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would likely face few countermeasures from a now humiliated and unsteady United States.
In late January 2023, the meandering and uninterrupted weeklong flight of a Chinese spy balloon across the American homeland seemed to exemplify the general disdain enemies now held for the Biden administration. Indeed, foreign foes assumed that there would be few Western consequences for their aggression, at least during a window of opportunity never before seen—nor likely to be repeated.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists, followed eagerly by a ragtag mob of Gazans, stormed into Israel. They murdered, tortured, raped, or took hostage some 1,200 Israeli victims, sparking a theater-wide war against Israel instigated by Iran and its surrogates.
The serial Houthi attacks on international shipping intensified to such a degree that the Red Sea joined the Black Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, the South China Sea, and the Eastern Mediterranean as virtual no-go zones for Western shipping, given the absence of visible American and NATO deterrents. By autumn 2024, Iran had launched 500 missiles, rockets, and drones at the Israeli homeland, with the United States loudly enjoining de-escalation and restraint on our Israeli ally.
By year’s end, tens of thousands of North Korean combat troops were fighting with Russians on the Ukrainian border. And by late 2024, the combined Russian and Ukrainian dead, wounded, and missing had passed one million, in the greatest European charnel house since the World War II battle for Stalingrad.
All these foreign wars and quagmires pose dilemmas for MAGA reformers. Again, Trump was not elected to be a nation-builder, globalist, or neoconservative interventionist. Conversely, he is no isolationist or appeaser, on whose watch the world would continue to descend into the chaos of the past four years. Yet Trump in 2024 is much more emphatic about the need to avoid such dead-end overseas entanglements, or even the gratuitous use of force that can lead to tit-for-tat entanglements. That caution may obscure his Jacksonian foreign policy and wrongly convince opportunists to test his frequent braggadocio and purported deterrence credentials.
In this regard, Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as vice president and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, along with Tucker Carlson and the once-Democratic pacifist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as close advisers—coupled with his announcements that the hawkish former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley would not be in the administration—may be misinterpreted by scheming foreign adversaries as proof of a new Trumpian unilateral restraint.
The Republican Party is now the party of peace, and Trump the most reluctant president to spend American blood and treasure abroad in memory. Trump broke with previous Republican interventionism largely because he damned past American misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq that cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars while they distracted from an unsustainable national debt, a nonexistent southern border, and a floundering lower middle class. Similarly, it is no wonder that the public often sees the use of force abroad as coming at the zero-sum expense of unaddressed American needs at home. Moreover, a woke, manpower-short military has disparaged and alienated the working-class recruits who disproportionately sought out combat units and fought and died in far-off Afghanistan and Iraq.
Recently, however, even as President Trump’s inner circle emphasized a stop to endless conflicts, Trump himself in November 2024 warned Vladimir Putin not to escalate his attacks against Ukraine. Yet that warning was followed by massive Russian air onslaughts against largely civilian Ukrainian targets—and further threats of tactical nuclear weapons deployed against Ukraine. Trump also instructed Hamas and Hezbollah to cease their wars against Israel, and advised the former to release the hostages, Americans particularly—or else.
Vladimir Putin no doubt took note, but he also may have wished to encourage America’s enemies to test Trump’s Jacksonian rhetoric against his campaign’s domestic promises to mind America’s own business at home. So, is there a way to square the circle of neither appeasing nor unwisely intervening?
Trump will have to speak softly yet clearly while carrying a club. For the first few months of his tenure, his administration will be tested as never before to make it clear to Iran and its terrorist surrogates, as well as China, North Korea, and Russia, that aggression against U.S. interests will swiftly incur disproportionate and overwhelming repercussions—in order to prevent wider wars that eventually might require the use of much larger forces.
Ukraine is, paradoxically, a case study of both the dangers of American intervention in distant foreign wars and the consequences of being regarded as weak, timid, and unable or unwilling to protect friends and deter enemies. The cauldron on the Ukrainian border, as already noted, has likely already caused between 1 and 1.5 million Ukrainian and Russian casualties, soldiers and civilians alike. There is no end in sight after three years of escalating violence. And there are increasing worries that strategically logical and morally defensible—but geopolitically dangerous—Ukrainian strikes on the Russian interior could escalate and lead to wider wars among the world’s nuclear powers. Joe Biden’s postelection decision to allow Ukraine to launch sophisticated American missiles deep into the Russian homeland was met by further Russian warnings of escalation to the use of nuclear weapons.
Many on the right wish for Trump immediately to cut off all aid to Ukraine for what they feel is an unwinnable war, even if that cessation would end any leverage to force Putin to negotiate. They feel the conflict was egged on by a globalist left, as a proxy conflict waged to ruin Russia to the last Ukrainian soldier. These critics see the war as conducted by a now undemocratic Ukrainian government, without elections, habeas corpus, a free press, or opposition parties, led by an ungracious and corrupt Zelensky cadre that has intrigued with the American left in an election year. Preferring negotiations that might cede Ukrainian territories already occupied by Russia for guarantees of peace, they point to polls revealing that less than half the Ukrainian people are confident of a full military “victory” that would restore the country’s 1991 borders.
French president Emmanuel Macron and Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky meet with Trump on December 7, 2024, in Paris, France. (Oleg Nikishin via Getty Images)
In contrast, many on the left see Putin’s invasion and the right’s weariness with the costs of Ukraine as the long-awaited proof of the Trump-Russia “collusion” unicorn and generally perfidious Trumpian Russophilia. They judge Putin, not China’s imperialist juggernaut, as the real enemy. And they discount the dangers of a new Russia-China-Iran-North Korea axis. To see Ukraine at last defeat Russia, recover all of the Donbas and Crimea, and destroy the Putin dictatorship, they are willing to feed the war with American cash and weapons—again, to the last Ukrainian.
Trump vowed to end the catastrophe within a day by doing what is now taboo—namely, calling up Vladimir Putin and making a deal that would do the seemingly impossible and entice Russia back inside its pre-invasion borders of February 24, 2022, thus preserving a reduced but still autonomous, and even secure, Ukraine. How could Trump pull this off?
Ostensibly, Trump would be following the advice of a growing number of Western diplomats, generals, scholars, and pundits who have reluctantly outlined a general plan to stop the slaughter. But how would the dictator Putin face the Russian people with anything short of an absolute annexation of Ukraine, after wasting a million Russian casualties?
Perhaps, after the deal, Putin could brag to Russians that he institutionalized forever his 2014 annexations of the majority-Russian Donbas and Crimea; that he prevented Ukraine from joining NATO on the doorstep of Mother Russia; and that he achieved a strategic coup in uniting Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea in a grand new alliance against the West and particularly the United States, with the acquiescence, if not support, of the NATO member Turkey and an ever more sympathetic India.
And what would Ukraine and the West gain from such an example of the Trumpian “art of the deal”? Kyiv might boast that, as the bulwark of Europe, Ukraine heroically saved itself from Russian annexation, as was envisioned by Putin in the 2022 attempt to decapitate Kyiv and absorb the entire country. Ukraine was subsequently armed by the West and fought effectively enough to stymie the Russian juggernaut and humiliate and severely weaken the Russian military—to the benefit of NATO and EU nations. Trump might then pull off the agreement if he could further establish a demilitarized zone between the Russian and Ukrainian borders and ensure EU economic help for a Ukraine fully armed to deter an endlessly restless Russian neighbor.
What would be the incentives for such a deal, and would they be contrary to the interests of the American people or antithetical to the views of the new Republican populist-nationalist coalition? First, consider that if Trump were to cut all support for Ukraine, it would likely soon be absorbed by Russia. The MAGA right would then be blamed for a humiliation comparable to the Kabul catastrophe. Indeed, the fallout would likely be worse, since the situation in Ukraine, unlike the Afghanistan mess, required only American arms, rather than lives. In contrast, if the conflict grinds on and on, at some point the purportedly humanitarian yet pro-war left will be permanently stamped as the callous party of unending conflict, and seen as utterly indifferent to the Ukrainian youth consumed to further its endless vendetta against a Russian people who also are worn out by the war.
Both Russia and Ukraine are running out of soldiers, with escalating casualties that will haunt them for years. Russia yearns to be free of sanctions and to sell oil and gas to Europe. The West, and the United States in particular, would like to triangulate with Russia against China and vice versa, in Kissinger style, and thus avoid any multi-power nuclear standoff.
Trump wants global quiet in order to increase and stockpile American munitions with an emboldened China on the horizon. He will inherit a U.S. military budget dangerously exhausted by wasteful procurement of overpriced systems like the F-22 aircraft and the littoral combat ship, by cuts in training for troops and maintenance of ships, and by massive aid to Ukraine and Israel. Accordingly, Trump prefers allies like Israel that can win with a few billion, rather than those that continue to struggle after receiving $200 billion, as Ukraine has done.
Last, Europe is mentally worn out by the war, and increasingly reneging on its once-boastful unqualified support for Ukraine, as it hopes the demonic Trump can both end the hated war and be hated for ending it.
The same challenge of forcefully dissuading bullies while avoiding exhausting wars will confront Trump in the Middle East. To restore deterrence, Trump will have to put the Houthis on notice that their attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea will earn them something more deleterious than the Biden administration’s passive deflections of shore-to-ship missile attacks. That passivity has so far cost the United States about $2 billion in munitions without achieving tangible results.
Iran, of course, is at the nexus of Middle Eastern tensions. Both fear of Tehran’s missiles and the Biden administration’s opposition paralyzed the Abraham Accords. Iran supplies all the terrorist organizations—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—that have attacked Israel since Trump’s departure. Accordingly, Trump will likely lift American restraints on Israel, supply the necessary heavy-duty ordnance should it wish to retaliate against Iranian attacks by taking out Iran’s nuclear program and oil-export facilities, and deter Russia and China from intervening to help their client Iran.
In sum, to ensure that there are no theater-wide conflicts in the Middle East as well as in Eastern Europe and beyond, Trump will have to use disproportionate force to dispel the image of the United States as indifferent to aggression due to fears of costly intervention.
The MAGA revolution that will now ensue in the four years of Trump’s second and last presidential term promises to remake America in ways only haphazardly realized four years ago. In Trump’s favor this time around are his past years of governance and his knowledge of the sort of opposition he will now face—after two impeachments, five weaponized civil and criminal court cases, repeated efforts to remove his candidacy from state ballots, two assassination attempts, and three brutal presidential campaigns.
The failed Biden years—the entrance of 12 million illegal aliens through a deliberately opened border, wars abroad, inflation, and soaring crime—helped propel the most spectacular political resurrection in American political history. The backroom Biden removal from the Democratic nomination, the subsequent listless Harris campaign, and the ever more radical trajectory of the increasingly unpopular Democratic Party have all put Trump in a far more powerful position than when he entered the presidency in 2017 or when he left office in 2021.
Trump’s success in resetting the United States will hinge not merely on outwitting the desperation of his enemies, but also on navigating the paradoxes of implementing his own MAGA agenda.
This piece has been reprinted with permission from The New Criterion.
21. Testimony from Hell: Review of "I am André: German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy " book review by Juliana Geran Pilon
Another fascinating book to read.
Testimony from Hell
by Juliana Geran Pilon (February 2025)
André, on the right, with his parents, Max and Regina, and an aunt at a café in Paris in 1939. Max and Regina were killed in Auschwitz in 1942. (USC Shoah Foundation)
A sepia-colored photograph of a handsome young man dominates the cover of I Am André. A warm yet slightly mischievous smile mirrors his kind eyes which seem filled with an ocean of unshed tears. The ghostly image intimates the improbably kaleidoscopic persona of its subject as captured in the subtitle: German Jew, French Resistance Fighter, British Spy. A French document, masterfully superimposed, reveals his birth date: January 28, 1915; and place: Munich. First name: Joseph. Last name: Scheimann. Actually, it was Scheinmann, but it didn’t matter—not many people knew his name.
Or, rather, names. After Joseph Scheinmann officially joined the resistance after the German occupation of France, British intelligence helped him obtain a certificate with a new name: André Peulevey. Citizenship: French. No one was to know that he was a Jew. He would not reclaim his real name until 1951.
He liked “André”; it was his preferred nom de guerre (he had others). It had served him well throughout his unique career, which had begun in his teens as a Jewish anti-Nazi rebel, in Munich. He was following in his father Max’s footsteps. A proud World War I veteran officer, starting in 1923, Max began speaking out in public meetings, travelling across Germany to rally veterans against Hitler. Luckily, he had the foresight to take out French visas for his family in 1924, which came in handy in 1933, when he realized there was no other choice but to leave. The family fled. Although his mother managed to save a few items, Max had been prepared to leave everything behind – money, stores, furniture. They would start a new life.
France had seemed safe, though ominous clouds were gathering fast. Then in 1939, Max accompanied his daughter Mady to the U.S., where Max’s parents and brothers had been living, to attend her wedding. He would then return to Paris to rejoin his wife Regina and son Joseph, who by then had joined the French army. The date was September 1. He must have had a premonition that he was sailing back into hell, and would never see America again.
Max didn’t know that Joseph had already begun his career as a spy and saboteur, but he could not have been surprised. After leaving the army, Joseph started working undercover as translator and liaison with the German high command at the Brittany headquarters of the French National Railroads. It proved a fortuitous assignment. From the summer of 1940 till February 1942, he learned what types of German troops were moving when and where, with what kind of armaments, as well as other information of vital importance to the British military, enabling them to inflict upon the Nazis massive physical and psychological damage. His position also provided an opportunity to recruit a wide network of agents willing to sabotage and spy for their country.
His work provided excellent cover as well for clandestinely crossing the Channel for training as an MI6 agent. Only after being betrayed by a careless comrade did that end. Tragically, he was arrested upon returning to France, in February 1942. To his relief, thanks to prudent spycraft and fast thinking, he had made all the documents in his possession disappear before falling into his captors’ hands. The Nazis learned nothing from him. Subjected to torture and interrogation, he admitted nothing. It saved his life.
But not his freedom; he was sent to concentration camp Natzweiler-Struth in Alsace, France, which the Nazis themselves considered Category 3, “the harshest.” Once again, his endless ingenuity, reinforced by providence and luck, saved him. He soon managed to secure a job as translator to the French inmates, which afforded him a host of opportunities to help fellow prisoners—and without in any way compromising their dignity. He even managed to mock the Nazi guards! Given his intimate understanding of German mentality, and without a trace of obsequiousness, he also gained a position of leadership that enabled him to recommend the most vulnerable inmates for placement in easier jobs. After befriending a sympathetic doctor, he also managed to send a few for brief hospital stays, to regain their strength. So when resistance comrades provided him an opportunity to escape and fight outside, he declined. He told them he could not leave his comrades “exposed to the punitive measures of the SS.” They understood.
Before being liberated, he would be transferred to two other camps, Allach and Dachau. The odds of survival in those notorious death traps were infinitely small. He credits his “upbringing, traditional Judaism and bourgeois habits” for keeping a positive attitude throughout, and never losing his self-esteem. He found that “humiliation was suffered by all nationalities, but was harder to bear by people of higher social standing,” who missed their privileges. “If one had no genuine identity in oneself and identified only with professional and social rank, to a caste or special group, he was lost—not only because of physical degeneration but because of mental destruction.” (155) Besides being morally commendable, preserving one’s dignity is lifesaving.
His parents meanwhile had been trapped inside Germany. Somehow, André kept hoping that that he would be able to save them. But unbeknownst to him, their application for visas to join their family in the U.S. had already been denied by the State Department on June 23, 1941. Exactly a year and a month later, they were gassed at Auschwitz.
He never forgave himself for their death. In his diary, he never mentions the infamous visa denial. Yet he must have known the Roosevelt Administration’s record of restricting Jewish emigration during the war to a mere trickle. He did not deflect responsibility from himself. And he loved America. That is where André spent the rest of his life, after eventually being able to recover his real identity. In 1952, he was finally able to join his sister Mady and the rest of his family in the U.S., bringing with him his wife, Claire Dyment. A fellow British spy later awarded the British War Medal for her war-time services, Claire had emigrated to England from Poland; she too had lost her parents, alongside the rest of her relatives, in the Holocaust. The two had a deeply loving marriage until her death in 1985.
In America, André continued to record as many of his wartime memories as possible. It would take decades to gather the necessary documentation. Then one day, in 1994, his son Michel introduced him to his old friend from Harvard, Diana Mara Henry, who Michel knew had been researching the Natzweiler camp. Would she like to meet a survivor? His father, he told her, was giving a speech nearby, perhaps she could hear him. She did. It changed her life.
André would later entrust her with his manuscript. It proved to be a goldmine. Undertaking her research pro bono, she moved close to André’s residence in Massachusetts, so she could consult with him regularly. Andre did not have to importune her, as he did in their last meeting, before his death in 2001, “to tell his story ‘for my comrades.’” (171) She ended up doing far more. The photojournalist-turned-Holocaust scholar would spend three decades collecting countless personal papers and incorporating newly declassified documents from both French and British national security archives. Indeed, much remains still to be studied. Having undertaken her research pro bono, she moved close to Andre’s residence in Massachusetts so she could consult with him regularly.
Her decision to add both an introduction and conclusion for a fuller context adds enormously to the story’s ultimate impact. While André had offered a remarkably thorough picture of local resistance forces brilliantly coordinating with De Gaule’s forces in exile and their indispensable allies, mostly British and later American, Henry was able to collect additional information. His friends and contacts had cut across all segments of the resistance, broadly understood. She thus learned how “[r]esistance, espionage and counter-espionage” were intertwined. They had been “bedfellows in the war for liberation from the Nazis, and not just in France, and not just in Britain.” (176) Resistance turned out to be widespread throughout Nazi-infested Europe.
The self-sacrificing heroism of countless ordinary people, however, complemented the no less unfathomable, outright sadistic cruelty of others, who seemed just as ordinary. Human nature is neither black nor white but susceptible to change in either direction; especially in extreme circumstances, some are able to overcome negative impulses, but others succumb. The concentration camp testimony that comes closest to taking a similar approach to the study of psychological responses to terror was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s iconic Gulag Archipelago. Having survived hell, they had both wished to describe all of its nine circles, memorialize the victims, and try to learn from it all for the benefit of future generations.
André was doubtless fortunate to have met Henry, who took pains to incorporate information not available until after his death. She discovered, for example, that his diary had failed to provide full details of his own struggles. It was only from a doctor’s report from after the war, and from other survivors’ writings about André, for example, that we read about his chronic life-long illnesses, most having been inflicted by camp guards. On one occasion, they had “flattened him to the wall,” causing excruciating pain. Another time, he was gravely mauled by one of their attack dogs. Equally unreported was a fall he incurred during parachute training—this at a time when, according to reports by another participant, “at least half of the parachutes didn’t open.” It caused him permanent back pain. “Till the end of his life he suffered from the injury,” reports Henry, “and typically he mentions nothing about that in his writings nor does he give details of the training.” (195)
Henry observes that other survivor accounts of life in these camps included far more gory details than did André’s. His main purpose was to convey “how he and his partners in courage struggled to see, after 12 years, the defeat of the ‘1,000-year Reich.’” But he had an enormous capacity for compassion and appreciated it in others. She remembers how in one of their conversations, André paused “for several silent sobs about the German career officer who spent twelve years in concentration camps rather than join the SS.” (12) He also singled out Abbot Bidaux, who also “never surrendered,” adding that “if there is such a thing as a saint, he was one … Men like him can bring people back to a belief in God, to be good and to believe in high ideals.” His memory, alongside that of Father Jean Legeay, who would be decapitated by the Nazis, “will always be alive in me. They were soldiers without the uniform.”
No ethnicity or religion has a monopoly on character; each of us is an individual. This, he knew, was America’s founding creed as well, which is why he was so fond of America. As he writes in the conclusion to his diary: “I have had no political ambitions and no longer take on noble causes, but I am happy to live in a country where men are free and can live according to their own convictions.” Observing that the world is still in turmoil, he has one message for the young generation: they must carry on, never taking their privilege for granted. “Freedom of mind and physical freedom are a must, yet only when we lose them do we value them. No matter what the odds, these are worth fighting for. Even if the fight seems impossible to win, one must never give up. This is why so many women and men went to the ends of the earth, never to come back. And we few survivors must make sure their sacrifice was not in vain.”
He traces the spiritual root of his convictions to discussions with his Jewish friends during the 1920s. It was then, he writes, that “I came to a deeper awakening to Zionism and to my place in Jewish history. Around the romantic campfires, I joined the nostalgic singing and I felt in my element, in my own milieu, a sense of belonging to my own people. Sure, there were divisions between the Eastern Jews and the assimilated German Jews, but just the same, we were entre nous (among intimates). Discussions touched on many subjects of Jewish life and history, including the heroes the Jewish people”(36), whose descendants we all are.
Or rather, can be—if we have the courage. Two decades later, Joseph Scheinmann became one of them. But so should any human being lucky to live in a civilized world. Jews had been meant—at least in principle, though unfortunately not always in fact—to serve as a moral beacon, defending not merely their own tribe but the biblical imperative of freedom. He ends the diary with this entreaty: “Never give up, even against all odds. Never give in to naked power and oppression. Live and help as much as you want others to.” Joseph/André did his part. It’s our turn.
Table of Contents
Juliana Geran Pilon is Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Her eight books include The Utopian Conceit and the War on Freedom and The Art of Peace: Engaging a Complex World; her latest book is An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and the American Left. The author of over two hundred fifty articles and reviews on international affairs, human rights, literature, and philosophy, she has made frequent appearances on radio and television, and is a lecturer for the Common Sense Society. Pilon has taught at the National Defense University, George Washington University, American University, and the Institute of World Politics. She served also in several nongovernmental organizations, notably the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), where as Vice President for Programs she designed, conducted, and managed programs related to democratization.
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast
22. Civil Military Relations in the United States
Excerpts:
While the number of firings are unprecedented, what is even more worrisome is that many, if not all, civilian candidates for senior positions within the Trump administration have had to pass a “purity test” that included questions such as who they voted for, what they thought of January 6, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. Although it is unclear whether such a policy would be applied to senior uniformed officers, given how many CMR norms have been violated already, it would certainly not be unrealistic to question the possibility. Trump’s own words about his choice for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lt. General John Dan “Razin” Caine, clouds, rather than clarifies the risk associated with such a possibility. According to President Trump, General Caine told him, “I’ll kill for you sir,” and then put on a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat, which, if accurate, would be a violation of the Hatch Act and of proper CMR norms. While Trump’s claims have been contradicted by others and Trump has made things up in the past, it is unarguable that Trump expects extreme loyalty from his subordinates. It would not be illogical to presume that Trump could extend such a purity test to his senior uniformed officers at some point, even if he has not done it yet.
That the administrations firings have included leaders, lawyers, and inspectors general should give additional pause, not only for the optics, but also for the impacts. Without a doubt the administration has the right to select military leaders that it believes are the most fit to execute its policies. But while the principle of civilian control of the military is sacrosanct, proper CMR requires a degree of respect between both entities in the relationship. It is, after all, a relationship. Removing multiple layers of military oversight creates the impression that the administration could be interested in eliminating any potential forces that would identify or oppose an illegal or unethical order. The specter that their replacements might have to preach the party line to acquire their positions gives further concern about the health of the CMR ecosystem.
Together, these dangers put the US CMR in a position which it has rarely faced. Uniformed officers are led by a presidential administration that, at the very least, questions the value of the rule of law and has proposed actions that would constitute illegal orders. The institutions that are meant to buffer officers from having to face such orders have potentially been damaged by the unprecedented firing of senior officers and military lawyers, along with the perception that senior leaders in the administration have to pass strict purity tests. For those reasons it is critical that the uniformed services have quiet, but professional discussions that wargame what illegal orders they might face and how to properly react to them. I am a secular person, but the danger that the Trump administration presents to permanently damaging the civil-military relations in our country is so grave that I have come to prayer for divine providence. I sincerely hope it does not come to that to achieve a favorable outcome, but all the indicators that I see now are pointing that it will be desperately needed.
Civil Military Relations in the United States
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/03/05/civil-military-relations-in-the-united-states/
by Frank Sobchak
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03.05.2025 at 11:21am
(Disclaimer: This article represents my own views and does not represent any organization or institution.)
I have taught the civil military relations (CMR) class in the security studies survey course at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy for seven years, and next term I will coteach a semester-long course on the same topic. When I began teaching CMR, it was a bland topic that mostly addressed the developing world. But over my teaching tenure, it morphed into an electrifying subject focused primarily on the U.S. Each time that I have taught the course, I have had to add new material to address the tectonic changes occurring in CMR reflecting the shocking erasure of US CMR norms that used to be sacrosanct. Who would have thought that a former President would accuse his own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of actions that should be punished with “DEATH!” But little did I know that I was only at the beginning of the wild CMR ride that would only accelerate during President Donald Trump’s second term.
The first weeks of Trump’s new term have been, to say the least, norm bending and chaotic. Department of Justice prosecutors resigned over administration orders, the President created a department to reform the government without congressional authorization or appropriation, and that new department shuttered another agency, potentially in violation of the law, among many other actions.
That chaos has started to arrive at the Department of Defense, and uniformed leaders will likely face difficult questions that run the knife’s edge of legality and ethicality, if not cross it. Some might even face real world instances of Sophie’s choice, terrible decisions that produce even worse consequences. Because of these possibilities, uniformed leaders should now, quietly and professionally, wargame their role in a series of potential scenarios in case they face such choices, or worse. Leaders should have clear courses of action developed for a variety of scenarios such as orders to shoot protestors or instructions to execute policy in a state where the governor defies presidential executive orders, among many others. This article will not provide any clear solutions to the problems that uniform leaders will face, and in some cases, it might create more questions than answers. But that is also the real objective of this piece: to initiate thought into possibilities that were once thought as impossible, for it is far better to think through potential courses of action when one has the time to do so rather than to do it during a crisis.
While the principle of civilian control of the military is sacrosanct, proper CMR requires a degree of respect between both entities in the relationship. It is, after all, a relationship.
Make no mistake, this article will not call for “resistance” or other opposition to the Trump administration from the US military. Such behavior would be a blatant assault against the norms of proper CMR that uniformed officers should practice towards civilian authorities. When faced with a legal and ethical order that they personally disagree with, uniformed officers have few choices. After offering their best military advice as part of an unequal dialogue, if they are not able to sway the decision of the civilian authority, they can execute that order to the best of their abilities or resign. From my standpoint, General Mark Milley’s decision, if indeed the reporting is accurate, that he would, “fight from the inside” against the Trump administration, would be far across the line of proper behavior. Likewise, the Army Band’s decision to play “One Day More” from Les Misérables during the Governors’ Ball represents another CMR violation, albeit on a smaller scale and more closely aligned with the Peter Feaver’s theoretical notion of a military “shirking” its duties.
The focus of this paper is not what uniformed officers should do if they face a legal and ethical order that they disagree with (the classic lawful but awful scenario), but what they should do if they face an illegal or unethical order in the environment of the second Trump administration. A series of questionable actions as well as disconcerting signals have now put that possibility, one which was nearly unthinkable just a few years ago, squarely into focus. In terms of actions, Trump attempted to unilaterally reverse longstanding legal interpretations of the 14th Amendment by presidential executive order. Administration officials ordered that corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams be dropped in exchange for his support of Trump’s immigration policies, prompting the resignation of more Justice Department officials (including Republican stalwarts who had clerked for Scalia, Kavanaugh, and Roberts) than during the infamous Watergate Saturday Night Massacre.
Likewise, the signals that the second Trump administration has sent about its respect for the rule of law have been deeply troubling. Less than a month after taking an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, Trump posted on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” referencing a quote sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. Nearly in parallel were posts from Trump and the official White House account that likened Trump to a king, with an imaginary magazine cover that depicted him in a crown, and a matching declaration of, “LONG LIVE THE KING!” Trump has also hinted at running for a third term, which would be a violation of the 22nd Amendment, and his Vice President has suggested ignoring court orders that counter administration policy. Uniformed officers would ignore these warnings at their, and our country’s peril. If our nation has learned anything from Trump’s first term, it should be that if he threatens to do something that is outside the realm of normal US statecraft or behavior, we should believe him at his word.
There are a variety of scenarios, some easy to imagine given past administration actions, others possible, but hopefully far-fetched, that could force uniformed military officers to face illegal or unethical orders. A handful could even put the military on the front row of a constitutional crisis where uniformed officers will have to make Solomonic decisions. It is critical that uniformed officers begin having quiet, but professional discussions on what they would do if they faced a variety of these scenarios. Because they aren’t in the realm of unimaginable nightmares anymore, they are potential destinations towards which we very well may be rocketing at unimaginable speed.
Perhaps the most possible scenarios would be ones considering violations of the laws of armed conflict, or more simply put, war crimes. Trump had previously suggested purposely killing the families of terrorists as an appropriate strategy, an obvious violation. While some supporters have argued that such talk was flippant, or “Trump being Trump,” the fact that he has granted pardons or given clemency to three war criminals should indicate that he has carried out policies that sent ambiguous signals about the longstanding legal norms of armed conflict.
It is critical that the uniformed services have quiet, but professional discussions that wargame what illegal orders they might face and how to properly react to them.
Another clear and present danger would be giving an order to fire on peaceful protestors, which according to former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, was exactly what Trump proposed in the summer of 2020. While Esper served as a brake to Trump’s worst impulses during his last administration, Trump’s current secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, seems open to carrying out that order. For those who claim such a possibility is preposterous, or would never happen in the US, the military has been used to forcefully break up protests in the past. While everyone knows of the Kent State shootings, in which the Ohio State National Guard opened fire on student demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine, a more accurate analogue to the danger posed by a president’s orders is of the 1932 Bonus Army. The Bonus Army was a group of thousands of World War I veterans and their families camped out in Washington, DC, protesting for the government to provide a financial bonus for their wartime service. President Herbert Hoover ordered his Secretary of War to “surround the affected area and clear it without delay.” The Army, led in part by General Douglas MacArthur, used tanks, cavalry, tear gas, and bayonets to carry out the task, burning protestors’ shanties to the ground, often with all of their property. In the ensuing chaos, two veterans were killed by police gunfire, hundreds were injured, and a child died from tear gas asphyxiation.
Unfortunately, there are other, more sinister perils that are within the realm of imagination, if not possibility. During the 2020 election, Trump administration lawyers drafted an executive order for the US military to seize ballot boxes. While the order was vetoed by others within the executive branch, that the order was written at all should be disquieting, to say the least. Other possibilities of extreme peril could include President Trump declaring martial law after an incident such as a terrorist or cyber-attack and then demanding his military arrest political leaders and protesters who oppose the action. Another hypothetical could be that, after such an attack, ordering the military to establish internment camps for Americans from the ethnic group that Trump believes was responsible, as was done during World War II with Japanese Americans. For more fundamental Constitutional issues, leaders should ponder what would the military’s role be in a hypothetical case where Congress passes a law by overriding a presidential veto, that the Supreme Court determines is legal, but Trump ignores? In a similar vein, what if Congress convicts the President or one of his senior leaders of impeachment and they ignore the order?
What will be critical in these discussions is not just how to react initially, but what the uniformed services will do in the long run to keep their honor intact and to carry out their oath to the Constitution. Every junior leader, down to and including brand new sergeants, knows that soldiers are required to refuse an illegal or unethical order. But what happens after that refusal? Most literature on the matter in military doctrine either doesn’t cover that, or is written from the perspective that, when challenged, those giving the illegal or unethical order will see the error of their ways and alter course towards righteousness.
But what happens if they don’t? In the case of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, administration officials gathered the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section in a room and told them they had an hour to decide who would carry out their order or else they would all be fired. It is not unrealistic to expect that such a tactic could be employed in one of the previous scenarios presented in this article, with administration officials firing a series of military officers until they find someone who is morally flawed enough to target civilians or to fire on protestors- or carry out even more dire actions. In that scenario, what should the first officer to be dismissed do, knowing he or she could be replaced with someone who might carry out the order? What should the fourth officer to be fired do? Any course of action in such a situation will have profound consequences, both personally and for the civil-military relations of our country. Because uniformed officers could face these questions in the near future, they should be discussing the possible courses of action now, and discussing the action- reaction- counteraction cycle of what could transpire.
What is perhaps one of the most disconcerting issues is that uniformed officers who could be facing such a terrible decision might not have the benefit of falling back on leaders within the chain of command, legal system, or even the inspector general corps to help support them. In a Friday purge, Secretary of Defense Hegseth fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and the three services’ senior Judge Advocate General. Those firings were preceded by the firing of the Commandant of the Coast Guard and succeeded by the dismissal of the three star Air Force general who served as his Senior Military Assistant. It appears that more firings are also on the way. While it has not been carried out in the military yet, in other departments the Trump administration has removed more than a dozen independent inspectors general.
While the number of firings are unprecedented, what is even more worrisome is that many, if not all, civilian candidates for senior positions within the Trump administration have had to pass a “purity test” that included questions such as who they voted for, what they thought of January 6, and whether they believed the 2020 election was stolen. Although it is unclear whether such a policy would be applied to senior uniformed officers, given how many CMR norms have been violated already, it would certainly not be unrealistic to question the possibility. Trump’s own words about his choice for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lt. General John Dan “Razin” Caine, clouds, rather than clarifies the risk associated with such a possibility. According to President Trump, General Caine told him, “I’ll kill for you sir,” and then put on a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat, which, if accurate, would be a violation of the Hatch Act and of proper CMR norms. While Trump’s claims have been contradicted by others and Trump has made things up in the past, it is unarguable that Trump expects extreme loyalty from his subordinates. It would not be illogical to presume that Trump could extend such a purity test to his senior uniformed officers at some point, even if he has not done it yet.
That the administrations firings have included leaders, lawyers, and inspectors general should give additional pause, not only for the optics, but also for the impacts. Without a doubt the administration has the right to select military leaders that it believes are the most fit to execute its policies. But while the principle of civilian control of the military is sacrosanct, proper CMR requires a degree of respect between both entities in the relationship. It is, after all, a relationship. Removing multiple layers of military oversight creates the impression that the administration could be interested in eliminating any potential forces that would identify or oppose an illegal or unethical order. The specter that their replacements might have to preach the party line to acquire their positions gives further concern about the health of the CMR ecosystem.
Together, these dangers put the US CMR in a position which it has rarely faced. Uniformed officers are led by a presidential administration that, at the very least, questions the value of the rule of law and has proposed actions that would constitute illegal orders. The institutions that are meant to buffer officers from having to face such orders have potentially been damaged by the unprecedented firing of senior officers and military lawyers, along with the perception that senior leaders in the administration have to pass strict purity tests. For those reasons it is critical that the uniformed services have quiet, but professional discussions that wargame what illegal orders they might face and how to properly react to them. I am a secular person, but the danger that the Trump administration presents to permanently damaging the civil-military relations in our country is so grave that I have come to prayer for divine providence. I sincerely hope it does not come to that to achieve a favorable outcome, but all the indicators that I see now are pointing that it will be desperately needed.
Tags: civil military relations
About The Author
- Frank Sobchak
- Dr. Frank Sobchak is a senior fellow at the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida and has taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Reichman University, Tufts University, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He holds a BS in Military History from West Point, a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and a PhD in International Relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He has been a frequent contributor to television, radio, and print interviews for topics such as Middle East security matters, defense reform, the impact of technology on intelligence and espionage, civil military relations, and special operations forces. He is also a contributor (Fellow) at the MirYam Institute, and has been published in Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal, The Jerusalem Post, Defense One, The Hill, War on the Rocks, Newsweek, Time, the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, Telem, and the Small Wars Journal. Frank’s latest book, Training for Victory: Special Forces Advisory Missions from El Salvador to Afghanistan, published in November 2024 and was selected for the War on the Rocks 2024 holiday reading list. His twitter handle is @abujeshua
23. Hal and Julia Moore's son 'saddened' and 'angered' over Fort Benning renaming
Hal and Julia Moore's son 'saddened' and 'angered' over Fort Benning renaming
Lt. Gen. Harold G. ‘Hal’ Moore led soldiers in the Battle of Ia Drang in Vietnam. Julia Moore helped establish the modern casualty notification system.
Jeff Schogol
Posted 18 Hours Ago
taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol
David Moore said his family is dismayed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent decision to change the name of Fort Moore, Georgia, which had been renamed in 2023 to honor his parents Lt. Gen. Harold G. “Hal” Moore and Julia Moore.
“We’re saddened; I’m personally angered that the secretary of defense in choosing the characteristics and qualities he wanted of the renaming, he chose to reject Hal and Julia Moore, and those very qualities and characteristics that they already represent,” Moore, a retired Army colonel, told Task & Purpose on Tuesday.
Hegseth announced on Monday that Fort Moore will once again be named Fort Benning, but now instead of being named for Confederate Brig. Gen. Henry L. Benning, the post would honor Army Cpl. Fred G. Benning, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism during World War I.
“CPL Benning was the living embodiment of the Infantryman’s Creed, as he never failed his country’s trust and fought to the objective to triumph for his unit and his country,” Hegseth wrote in a memo on Monday. “This directive honors the warfighter ethos and recognizes the heroes who have trained at the installation for decades and will continue to train on its storied ranges.”
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But Moore said that the base already celebrated the attributes that Hegseth cited by honoring the legacy of Hal and Julia Moore.
Hal Moore is best known for leading the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment during the first major battle of the Vietnam War in the Ia Drang Valley in November 1965. Despite being badly outnumbered, Hal Moore’s soldiers fended off relentless attacks and left more than 600 enemy dead. Hal Moore was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism during the fight.
Julia Moore helped establish the modern casualty notification system, according to the Army. During the Battle of Ia Drang, the Army was not prepared to deal with so many casualties, so it had taxi drivers deliver telegrams to the families of fallen soldiers. Julia Moore offered comfort to the wives of fallen soldiers, attended many funerals, and helped change Army policy so that uniformed soldiers would deliver next of kin notifications.
“I think that they have done a disservice to my parents in their zeal to rename Benning for the Benning name,” Moore said. “I don’t want to diminish anything that Cpl. Fred Benning achieved. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, as my father was, and that’s a great award for heroism. And so, I don’t take anything from him. I just adamantly, firmly believe that Secretary Hegseth already had what he sought, when you read the public announcement of renaming Fort Moore as Fort Benning. And it’s just very disappointing, saddening, and I guess to some degree, I’m angry that the secretary of defense was unwilling or unable to see the value of Hal and Julia Moore and Fort Moore and what it could mean to the future of the Army.”
Still, Hegseth’s decision to rename Fort Moore does not diminish Hal and Julia Moore’s contributions to the Army in any way, the younger Moore said.
The Defense Department declined to provide any comment for this story beyond Hegseth’s memo.
This is the second time that Hegseth has reversed changes to the names of nine Army posts that originally paid homage to Confederate leaders. In February, he announced that Fort Liberty, North Carolina, would again be named Fort Bragg as a tribute to Army Pfc. Roland L. Bragg — a paratrooper awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. The base had originally been named for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg.
All nine Army bases that bore the names of Confederates were renamed in 2022 and 2023 following recommendations by an official naming commission. Moore said that he was originally opposed to the idea of renaming Fort Benning in honor of his parents, but he later saw the name change as an opportunity for future generations to emulate Hal and Julia Moore’s commitment to the base, its soldiers, and their training.
“When the name was changed, that was what gave me energy, gave me hope that we’re creating a better future,” Moore said. “Better futures take time, and we weren’t afforded the time.”
Hegseth’s memo also ordered the Army to honor Hal and Julia Moore’s legacy “in a manner that celebrates their significant contributions to the local community and the Army,” but Moore said he has not yet heard from any military officials about exactly how that will be done.
“They had what they needed,” Moore said. “All they had to do was do nothing, and I think over time, we would have used the example of Hal and Julia Moore to raise great soldiers in the Columbus, Fort Moore area. So, if they have anything else in mind, the family hasn’t been contacted.”
CORRECTION: 03/04/2025; an earlier version of the story inaccurately reported that Fort Moore had been renamed Fort Bragg. It has been renamed Fort Benning.
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De Oppresso Liber,
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Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
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