​Quotes of the day"

“America is in even greater danger because of its cult of toughness, its hatred of sensitivity, and someday it may have to pay a price for this, because atrophy of feeling creates criminals.”

– Anais Non, April 1940

"It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because, in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation, consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the whole world gradually ​being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us, too, I can feel the sufferings of millions ​and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will ​all come right, that this cruelty to​o will end​, and that peace and tranquility will return once more."

– Anne Frank

"Caution in handling generally accepted opinions they claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history, but are actually nothing but desperate effort to escape responsibility.

– Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

​My politics and bias:

​Some people have called into question my politics on social media so I will clarify them.

I have never belonged to any political party. I am aligned with Madison and Federalist 10 and the danger of factions.

Since 1976 I have voted my conscience in every election (and did not always choose the victor).

My only ideological "leaning" is to support and defend the constitution of the United States and to live the Special Forces ideal of De Oppresso Liber which is best interpreted as "to help the oppressed free themselves."

I usually state my bias but make no mistake, my bias is for US alliances as I believe alliances are the "super sauce" that make the US a superpower.

When it comes to the national security of the US and US governance, I call balls and strikes as I see them without regard to politics or political leaders, as I believe every informed citizen has the responsibility to do.

​1. What Executives Need To Know About The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment From the U.S. Intelligence Community

2. What's in the ODNI's Threat Report?

3. The US Is Losing the Contest to Divide the World

4. Hegseth Reassures Asian Allies in Meetings at Tokyo and the Philippines but Skips South Korea

5. In the Competition Between the U.S. and China, Partnerships Will Decide Our Future

6. Pete Hegseth says U.S. is making Japan a 'war-fighting' base to deter China

7. China, Japan, South Korea will jointly respond to US tariffs, Chinese state media says

8. Ghost in the Machine: Coming to Terms with the Human Core of Unmanned War

9. The Nexus of Power | Water | Data: The Foundations of American Prosperity & National Security

10. China Says It Is Aiming to Coordinate Tariff Response With Japan, South Korea

11. Trump’s Greenland Gambit

12. Trump Says He Settled on ‘Liberation Day’ Tariff Plan, but Doesn’t Reveal It

13. U.S. Sanctions Chinese Officials, Citing Repression in Hong Kong and Tibet

14. Hegseth orders review of physical standards for military combat roles

15. Every Marine a Drone Operator? New Team Aims to Compete, Set Standards for Unmanned Aircraft Warfare.

16. The Hypersonic Threat

17. China launches military drills from ‘multiple directions’ around Taiwan, testing US resolve

18. The Convergence Conundrum: Achieving Mass in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

19. The Limits of Trump’s Hardball Diplomacy

20. Five Questions For A General Podcast: General Martin Dempsey and General Walter Sharp

​21. China leads relief for quake-hit Myanmar. But will civil war stymie aid efforts?

22. Local Forces and Counterinsurgency Campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq

23. What "the Global South" Really Means

24. America’s National Security Wonderland

25. Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader

26. The MIT Scientist Behind the ‘Torpedo Bats’ That Are Blowing Up Baseball

27. New U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier To Be Named USS Musk

28. DOGE Is Trying to Gift Itself a $500 Million Building, Court Filings Show

29. Beyond his bright blue suits, Pete Hegseth's unconventional style is 'operator casual'

30. Project 2025: Implementing Changes to the Department of Defense

31. 'Lives Are In Danger' After a Trump Admin Spreadsheet Leak, Sources Say

32. Competing visions of international order – Responses to US power in a fracturing world

1. What Executives Need To Know About The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment From the U.S. Intelligence Community

​A useful summary.

What Executives Need To Know About The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment From the U.S. Intelligence Community

https://oodaloop.com/analysis/decision-intelligence/what-executives-need-to-know-about-the-2025-annual-threat-assessment-from-the-u-s-intelligence-community/

Decision Intelligence

03/26/2025 | Written by: Bob Gourley

The Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, released annually by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), highlights the most pressing threats facing the United States.

At OODA, we closely analyze this assessment, quickly identifying critical developments and shifts that business leaders need to understand. This year, we’ve noted several key nuances worth your attention. (Download and read the full report here).

The 2025 assessment underscores significant threats from state adversaries—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—as well as from nonstate actors, including transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) and terrorist groups.

As you review the below keep in mind a big trend captured by the intelligence community. Russia, China and Iran are working closer together. They also underscore the dramatically rapid pace of technology development and call out several concerning examples of adversary use of automation including drones.

Strategic Challenges from State Actors:

China

• China is regarded as the most comprehensive threat, combining military power, advanced technology, and economic coercion. Business leaders should be particularly alert to China’s actions affecting global supply chains, especially in semiconductors and critical minerals such as rare earth elements, gallium, germanium, and antimony.
• China’s strategic goal is to dominate key global supply chains, making international economies dependent on Chinese-controlled inputs and processes. Businesses must develop diversified supply chains to mitigate disruptions caused by China’s economic policies and coercive measures.
• China’s advanced cyber capabilities, demonstrated by campaigns such as “Volt Typhoon,” pose significant risks to critical infrastructure and corporate networks, suggesting a crucial need for robust cybersecurity measures.
• The geopolitical tensions around Taiwan are especially significant due to Taiwan’s central role in semiconductor manufacturing. Businesses dependent on these technologies must prepare contingency plans for potential disruptions arising from regional instability.

Russia

• The Russia-Ukraine conflict has direct implications for NATO-aligned countries and the global economic environment, including disruptions in energy supplies and increased commodity prices. The war’s continuation exacerbates risks of escalation, including potential cyber and nuclear threats.
• Russia remains a potent cyber adversary, with experience integrating cyberattacks into broader strategic operations. This calls for continued focus on cyber resilience, especially firms involved in critical infrastructure, healthcare, and finance.
• Putin has never been in a stronger position internally, with very little chance of any opposition.
• Sanctions and economic isolation have driven Russia to deepen alliances with China, North Korea, and Iran, complicating geopolitical landscapes and posing additional indirect risks to Western businesses operating globally.
• Russia is developing a capability to deploy nuclear weapons in space as an anti-satellite system. A nuclear explosion in space would do far more than just take out satellites. It would have a devastating effect on the U.S. and global economy. Depending on altitude of detonation could unleash a decapitating EMP blast that fries IT systems.

Iran

• Iran’s advanced ballistic missile program and expanding cyber capabilities pose direct threats to regional stability and global commercial shipping, particularly through the Strait of Hormuz—a critical chokepoint for global oil supplies. Businesses reliant on Middle Eastern supply chains must maintain vigilant contingency strategies.
• Tehran’s alignment with Russia enhances risks to regional security and amplifies cyber threats targeting Western infrastructure and private-sector networks.

North Korea

• North Korea’s collaboration with Russia—particularly supplying munitions in return for technological support—reinforces the regime’s strategic capabilities and increases regional instability, notably impacting operations in East Asia.
• The country’s cyber capabilities remain significant, particularly in cryptocurrency theft and espionage aimed at defense and aerospace industries. Companies in these sectors should remain especially alert.

Nonstate Actors:

• Drug trafficking, particularly synthetic opioids like fentanyl, primarily sourced from China and trafficked via Mexico, remains a major health and safety risk, with implications for workforce productivity and healthcare costs.
• Human trafficking and forced labor operations by Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) pose ethical and compliance risks, particularly for businesses involved in agriculture, manufacturing, and logistics.
• Cybercriminals continue to target inadequately secured sectors, including healthcare, water infrastructure, and financial services, reinforcing the need for enhanced cybersecurity measures.

Market and Supply Chain Risks:

• The dominance of Chinese manufacturing in critical sectors like pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and electronics creates vulnerabilities in U.S. supply chains. Businesses should consider reshoring or friendshoring or diversifying their production and supply sources.
• Russia’s ongoing conflict and alignment with other adversaries amplify geopolitical risks, potentially affecting markets for energy, minerals, and agricultural commodities.
• Economic coercion by state actors, particularly China, through selective enforcement of regulations and trade barriers, can disrupt market access for foreign businesses, requiring adaptive market entry strategies.

Implications for Business Leaders:

To navigate these threats effectively, business executives have a great deal to consider:

• Strengthening cybersecurity frameworks and controls to defend against escalating cyber threats from both state and nonstate actors is not just a compliance drill, it can make the difference in survival in the modern age.
• This environment calls for diversifying supply chains, particularly reducing reliance on single-country sources for critical materials and products.
• Monitor geopolitical developments closely, particularly in East Asia and Eastern Europe, incorporating robust risk management and scenario planning practices. We recommend every company institute and formalize scenario planning processes.
• Increase resilience through robust incident response and business continuity plans addressing potential disruptions from geopolitical conflicts or cyber incidents.
• Ensure compliance and due diligence practices robustly address the risks associated with human rights abuses and forced labor within global supply chains.

By understanding and proactively addressing these threats outlined in the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, business leaders can better secure their operations, reduce vulnerabilities, and maintain competitive advantages in an increasingly complex global environment.

Tagged:

intelligence

About the Author

Bob Gourley

Bob Gourley is an experienced Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Board Qualified Technical Executive (QTE), author and entrepreneur with extensive past performance in enterprise IT, corporate cybersecurity and data analytics. CTO of OODA LLC, a unique team of international experts which provide board advisory and cybersecurity consulting services. OODA publishes OODALoop.com. Bob has been an advisor to dozens of successful high tech startups and has conducted enterprise cybersecurity assessments for businesses in multiple sectors of the economy. He was a career Naval Intelligence Officer and is the former CTO of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

2. What's in the ODNI's Threat Report?

​Al Mauroni, one of our nation's experts on WMD, assesses the Annual Threat Assessment from a WMD perspective.

What's in the ODNI's Threat Report?

https://almauroni.substack.com/p/whats-in-the-odnis-threat-report?utm

The assessment of adversary nations' nuclear and other WMD programs looks a little different this year

Al Mauroni

Mar 31, 2025

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was on the Hill last week with CIA Director John Ratcliffe, FBI Director Kash Patel, and the directors of the National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency to present the unclassified Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Much of the hearing focused on the recent Signal controversy involving Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldblum, but I’m more interested in the information as to the threat posed by nations with nuclear (and other WMD) programs.1 I won’t be talking about Signal Gate as others are more competently addressing that clusterfuck issue.

On the one hand, this 2025 report is a very general and short summary that, in its unclassified form, presents more questions than answers. Given the short narrative, it’s a guessing game to try to understand the degree of resolution on what exactly the challenge is and what requires a U.S. response. On the other hand, this is all we (non-governmental policy analysts and academics) have to source as official government information that may lead us to further discussions on what the U.S. government is and is not doing. Because this is a short report, the authors deliberately select certain words and emphasize particular sections that support the administration’s political agenda. For instance, it’s been noted that this ATA ignores the threat of climate change, which is the first time in over a decade that this has happened. Not a big surprise but disappointing in that you’d hope that the ODNI would have a more non-partisan approach to threats to U.S. national security. But these are not ordinary times.

So what do we have in this year’s report? What has changed from the 2024 ATA, other than it shrank from 40 pages to 30 pages? For one, the 2025 report flipped the order of the discussion, putting transnational actors before major state actors. The new report does not cover “contested spaces” that included disruptive technology and digital authoritarianism, and there is no “shared domains” section that covers health security or migration. Does the change of focus and choice of words matter? Let’s discuss.

One of the things that really jumped out at me is that the 2025 ATA has no discussion about the possibility of terrorists using CBRN hazards against U.S. national security interests. In 2024, we saw this under “Non-State Actor Issues":

Terrorists will maintain an interest in conducting attacks using chemical, biological and radioactive materials against U.S. persons, allies, and interests worldwide. Terrorists from diverse ideological backgrounds continue to circulate instructions of varied credibility for the procurement or production of toxic or radioactive weapons using widely available materials in social media and online fora.

Now this has been the general boilerplate language that the U.S. government has used for the past twenty years. It doesn’t tell us much, other than a terrorist CBR incident could happen, someday, maybe.2 I’ve always found it fascinating that the intelligence community does not say “terrorist WMD capabilities,” but they cite concern as to terrorists using “chemical, biological and radiological materials” instead. I find that entirely appropriate, that we ought to distinguish terrorist ambitions as going for CBR hazards and not seeking a WMD capability. The general desire to hype the terrorist threat as a monolithic, ever-present threat of terrorist nuclear fire has always been a distraction from those of us seeking to address this threat responsibly. But in the 2025 ATA, we see … absolutely nothing on terrorist CBR threats.3

Now to be fair, the 2025 ATA does have a section on “nonstate transnational criminal and terrorists,” but it stays on the administration’s priorities of illicit drug production and trafficking, and potential attacks on Americans using conventional weapons and explosives. Does that mean that the threat of domestic terrorist CBR incidents has vanished? Has the U.S. government successfully eliminated that capability from their arsenal? Doubtful. I don’t think that any particular U.S. programs will be cut as a result of the exclusion of any mention of terrorist CBR threats, but as anyone working in the Beltway understands, if your project isn’t mentioned in national security guidance documents, then you ought to be worried.

Both the 2024 and 2025 ATAs hit on the big four nation-state adversaries — Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. No surprise there, they’ve been the bad guys for a long time.4 In 2024, we saw this narrative about Russia:

Russia will continue to modernize its nuclear weapons capabilities and maintains the largest and most diverse nuclear weapons stockpile. Moscow views its nuclear capabilities as necessary for maintaining deterrence and achieving its goals in a potential conflict against the United States and NATO, and it sees this as the ultimate guarantor of the Russian Federation.

Moscow will continue to develop long-range nuclear-capable missiles and underwater delivery systems meant to penetrate or bypass U.S. missile defenses. Russia is expanding and modernizing its large and diverse set of nonstrategic systems, which are capable of delivering nuclear or conventional warheads, because Moscow believes such systems offer options to deter adversaries, control the escalation of potential hostilities, and counter U.S. and Allied conventional forces.

Russia will continue to pose a CBW threat. Scientific institutes there have researched and developed CBW capabilities, including technologies to deliver CBW agents. Russia retains an undeclared chemical weapons program and has used chemical weapons at least twice during recent years: in assassination attempts with Novichok nerve agents, also known as fourth-generation agents, against Russian opposition leader Aleksey Navalny in 2020 and against UK citizen Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yuliya Skripal on UK soil in 2018.

In the latest ATA, we now see:

Russia has the largest and most diverse nuclear weapons stockpile that, along with its deployed ground-, air-, and sea-based delivery systems, could inflict catastrophic damage to the Homeland. Russia has developed a more modernized, mobile, and survivable strategic nuclear force that is intended to circumvent or neutralize future augmented U.S. missile defense and ensure deterrence through reliable retaliatory strike potential. In addition, Russia’s vast arsenal of non-strategic nuclear weapons helps it to offset Western conventional superiority and provide formidable escalation management options in theater war scenarios.

Russia’s CBW threat is expanding. Russian scientific institutes continue to research and develop CBW capabilities, including technologies to deliver CBW agents. Russia retains an undeclared chemical weapons program and has used chemical weapons at least twice during recent years in assassination attempts with Novichok nerve agents, also known as fourth-generation agents, against Russian opposition leader Aleksey Navalny in 2020, and against U.K. citizen Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yuliya Skripal on U.K. soil in 2018. Russian forces almost certainly continue using chemicals against Ukrainian forces, with hundreds of reported attacks occurring since late 2022.

There are some interesting differences here. The discussion of Russia’s nuclear capabilities has been embellished, with language that includes “catastrophic damage to the Homeland.” There’s a change in focus from Russia as a competitor with the United States to Russia as an active aggressor. It implies that the United States is behind the curve and could be meant to justify an increased nuclear posture and national missile defense program. Similarly, the CBW threat has changed from “continue to pose” to “is expanding.” I don’t question that Russia has an undeclared chemical weapons program, but I am not clear that Russian use of riot-control agents in Ukraine constitutes an expansion of its program. Similarly, I haven’t seen any open-source discussion of Russian BW efforts.

There is a line in both reports that caution about the potential use of nuclear weapons as the Russia-Ukraine war continues. No surprise there, but it’s always a point of debate as to whether Putin is just saber-rattling or if he actually might use them.

China’s WMD section got a lot shorter between the two years. In 2024, we saw this:

China remains intent on orienting its nuclear posture for strategic rivalry with the United States because its leaders have concluded their current capabilities are insufficient. Beijing worries that bilateral tension, U.S. nuclear modernization, and the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) advancing conventional capabilities have increased the likelihood of a U.S. first strike. As its nuclear force grows, Beijing’s confidence in its nuclear deterrent probably will bolster the PRC’s resolve and intensify conventional conflicts.

China probably possesses capabilities relevant to chemical and biological warfare (CBW) that pose a threat to U.S., allied, and partner forces as well as civilian populations.

Compare this to the 2025 report.

China remains intent on modernizing, diversifying, and expanding its nuclear posture. China’s nuclear weapons and advanced delivery systems pose a direct threat to the Homeland and are capable of delivering catastrophic damage to the United States and threatening U.S. military forces here and abroad.

China most likely possesses capabilities relevant to chemical and biological warfare (CBW) that pose a threat to U.S., allied, and partner forces as well as civilian populations.

Again, we see a much stronger emphasis on the message that the threat of nuclear catastrophe is already here. There’s a difference between saying “China wants a nuclear deterrent so that it can do more conventional stuff” and “China poses a direct threat to the U.S. homeland.” I’m not sure that the heavy-handed language is justified other than to encourage more funding for a national missile defense program and more operational nuclear weapons. On China’s CBW threat, who knows, there’s no evidence here of Chinese use or intentions. No one really understands (in my opinion) what China intends to do with CB weapons, so we all point to the possibility that China COULD do something with CB weapons, but it’s all hypothetical.5 Russia had a clear history in CB warfare concepts and strategy. China doesn’t, so it’s hard to figure out what China wants to do with CB weapons.

What about Iran? It’s always interesting to see how the second-string WMD actors are doing. In 2024, we saw this:

Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device. Since 2020, however, Tehran has stated that it is no longer constrained by any JCPOA limits, and Iran has greatly expanded its nuclear program, reduced IAEA monitoring, and undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.

Iran probably aims to continue research and development of chemical and biological agents for offensive purposes. Iranian military scientists have researched chemicals, toxins, and bioregulators, all of which have a wide range of sedation, dissociation, and amnestic incapacitating effects.

In 2025, the assessment is not too different. This year’s ATA says:

We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so. In the past year, there has been an erosion of a decades-long taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public that has emboldened nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus. Khamenei remains the final decision-maker over Iran’s nuclear program, to include any decision to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran very likely aims to continue R&D of chemical and biological agents for offensive purposes. Iranian military scientists have researched chemicals that have a wide range of sedation, dissociation, and amnestic incapacitating effects, and can also be lethal.

It’s pretty similar language; we see the same concern about a potential increase of the threat that Iran poses in its game of “will he or won’t he build a nuclear device.” Interesting (unsurprising) how the 2025 ATA ignores the JCPOA issue. We see a change in the Iranian CBW as moving from “probably aims to continue R&D” to “is very likely to continue R&D.” Both assessments hit on the concern that Iran may be looking at central-nervous acting chemicals but doesn’t talk about the rationale or concept of use, i.e., is that for battlefield use or internal security operations?

This leaves with our perennial bad boy, Kim Jong Un. What’s going on in North Korea? In 2024, the ODNI said:

Kim remains strongly committed to expanding the country’s nuclear weapons arsenal, which serves as the centerpiece of his national security structure.

North Korea maintains its CBW capabilities, and Pyongyang may use such weapons during a conflict or in an unconventional or clandestine attack.

This hasn’t changed too much in this year’s report, other than adding a little more detail as to the possible ambitions of the Dear Leader.

Kim remains committed to increasing the number of North Korea’s nuclear warheads and improving its missile capabilities to threaten the Homeland and U.S. forces, citizens, and allies, and to weaken U.S. power in the Asia-Pacific region, as evidenced by the pace of the North’s missile flight tests and the regime’s public touting of its uranium enrichment capabilities. North Korea is probably prepared to conduct a nuclear test and continues to flight test ICBMs so Kim can threaten the Homeland. Russia is increasingly supporting North Korea’s nuclear status in exchange for Pyongyang’s support to Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

North Korea maintains its CBW capabilities and may use such weapons in a conflict or in an unconventional or clandestine attack against the United States or its allies.

The intelligence community’s assessment of NK CBW hasn’t changed at all. Hasn’t changed in over 20 years, which sometimes seems odd, boring even, considering that we do have U.S. troops in range of those delivery systems. Again, we see a stronger emphasis here describing a nuclear missile threat to the U.S. homeland. If only we could construct a magical “Golden Dome” over the entire United States that didn’t cost trillions of dollars to develop and operationalize. Ah well.

What does it all mean? There’s a lot of continuity between the two reports (as one might hope) but I think you can see a bit of politicization in the 2025 report. The intelligence community’s assessment supports the U.S. military’s planned nuclear modernization program. General Anthony Cotton, U.S. Strategic Command, talked about these threats in more detail just last week and why it was necessary to “maintain flexible nuclear capabilities and tailored deterrence strategies for potential adversaries that reflect our best judgment of their decision-making and perceptions to effectively deter across a spectrum of adversaries, threats, and conflicts.” The U.S. nuclear modernization program has had some significant cost/schedule slips over the past few years, and so it never hurts to point out that the bad guys have a significant nuclear capability that requires an effective (modernized) response. Damn the costs, this is about an EXISTENTIAL THREAT. Still a lot of details that could be debated as to how many nukes (and what kinds) are enough to deter, whether national missile defense is just a money sink or a necessary capability, and if the United States will ever get arms control back on the docket.

In terms of arms control, the intelligence community’s assessment of the Big Four’s CB warfare programs may be intended to justify the need for continued U.S. leadership in arms control and nonproliferation activities.6 While arms control and nonproliferation activities have, in general, faltered over the past decade and remain unsupported by a Republican-majority Congress, it remains vital to have U.S. representation on these issues to at least ensure that nuclear-weapon states in particular do not feel unconstrained in their development and use of CB weapons. By participating in international arms control discussions, the U.S. government can at least bring its significant political and diplomatic power to publicly examine and call out violations of treaty. These arms control and nonproliferation activities act to shape international norms and values.

It would be nice if leadership in the Department of Defense acknowledged that Russia and China had CB weapons capabilities designed for major conflicts, and asked some tough questions as to how the use of said weapons in a future military conflict might impact U.S. forces. I say this with some tongue in cheek, because while there is a chemical-biological defense community within the U.S. military that contemplates this possibility, certainly no one above the rank of colonel/captain does to any great effect.7 No think tanks are looking at this topic, although they seem to find time to talk about fighting Russia and China in conventional regional conflicts. The DoD CB Defense Program has had a relatively flat budget for quite a few years, while its leadership has decided to move funds into capabilities for countering natural disease outbreaks and pandemic preparedness. I hope that it will not take another crisis like the 1991 Persian Gulf conflict to recognize the challenges that the Department has in protecting its service members and bases from this continued threat.

1

Yes, the general format in this Annual Threat Assessment is exactly why I named my Substack newsletter what it is. Routinely, US govt agencies will create a “WMD threats” section in their reports and it will always focus on nuclear weapons, with a side glance at chemical and biological weapons. It’s a time-honored tradition that is particularly annoying.

2

The usual rationale behind this weak statement is that technical information and materials to craft toxic CBR hazards are more widely available as part of a global economy, so it’s possible that some terrorist group (no one in particular) could figure it out.

3

The 2025 ATA hits the issue of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids as “the most lethal drugs trafficked into the United States” but that’s a law enforcement issue and not a WMD issue. The 2024 ATA did the same. But fentanyl is not in and of itself a chemical weapon.

4

In these quotes, I’m leaving out some of the paragraphs that go into detail. I’m looking for more of a side-by-side comparison, and the extra wordage, while interesting, isn’t necessary for this thought experiment.

5

Again, I’m not going to speculate about China’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic or its biotechnology capabilities. That’s related to, but not specifically, biological warfare.

6

Then again, having the mentions of CB weapons in the ATAs may just be another rationale to why the U.S. military needs more nuclear weapons to deter unconventional weapons use.

7

I offered a few thoughts about envisioning a new strategy to counter great power use of WMD in 2022. Didn’t really get much traction, too cerebral for the acquisition community.

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By Al Mauroni · Launched 7 months ago

Examining the process by which the U.S. government develops policies and programs addressing unconventional weapons - made for generalists interested in how this topic fits into national security debates

3. The US Is Losing the Contest to Divide the World

​A tough critique from one of our nation;s experts on grand strategy, Hal Brands

Excerpts:

The fundamental problem is that the spheres-of-influence model rests on lousy assumptions about great-power behavior. If Putin and Xi were modest men, with middling ambitions, they might be satisfied with security buffers along their borders.

But they, like many revisionist powers, are driven by ideologies of greatness and quests for glory. Xi aims to make China the mightiest, most globally influential state. A divide-the-world approach might deliver temporary stability, as revisionist powers digest new gains — but only until they are ready to challenge the status quo again. In this future, spheres of influence aren’t the path to peace but the road to war.

This is all hypothetical, for the moment. But the outlines of a spheres-of-influence world are becoming more visible, as revisionist powers push ahead and America’s commitment to preventing such a world wanes. Unfortunately, that’s not a future Americans will ultimately enjoy living in, no matter how tempting it may, at the moment, sound.

Opinion

Hal Brands, Columnist

The US Is Losing the Contest to Divide the World

Splitting the globe into spheres of influence with China and Russia is more likely to lead to war than peace. 

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/features/2025-03-31/us-is-losing-the-contest-to-divide-the-world-to-russia-china?sref=hhjZtX76

March 31, 2025 at 6:00 AM EDT

By Hal Brands

Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

It was a “naughty document,” Winston Churchill admitted. In October 1944, the British prime minister proposed that he and Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin avert postwar conflict by splitting the Balkan Peninsula into separate spheres. Russia would reign supreme in Romania and Bulgaria; Britain in Greece; Hungary and Yugoslavia would be divided 50-50.

The proposal was scandalous enough that Churchill suggested burning the document that he and Stalin had just agreed on. It “might be thought rather cynical” to settle the fates of millions “in such an offhand manner,” he worried. “No, you keep it,” Stalin replied.

Churchill never showed that document to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was proclaiming America’s opposition to a peace based on spheres of influence. Yet the continent was soon divided, albeit along slightly different lines than Churchill had imagined. During the Cold War, Western Europe became an American sphere of influence; Eastern Europe was dominated by Moscow. Only when the Cold War ended, in a decisive Western triumph, was Eastern Europe freed.

Stalin and Churchill hatched a plot at Yalta in 1945.Source: Central Press/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

In the heady, unipolar era that followed, the world seemed to have left such unseemly geopolitical arrangements behind. Today, however, it’s fair to wonder if the great powers might divide the world among them again.

China, Russia and lesser revisionists have been seeking regional spheres of influence for years. Under Donald Trump, it’s possible to imagine a US president going along. To be sure, Trump’s intentions are often mystifying. It’s hard to say what mix of creation and destruction his presidency will leave behind.

Yet many of Trump’s gut instincts — his ambivalence about US alliances, his yearning for good relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping — are well suited to spheres-of-influence diplomacy. He doesn’t seem averse to striking great-power bargains at the expense of weaker states. So it’s worth exploring what a world divided into spheres of influence might look like, not least because it would be darker, and more dangerous, than its proponents believe.

Protection for Profit

A sphere of influence is an arrangement in which a strong country dictates the destiny of a weaker one. Sometimes, spheres of influence involve the construction of formal empires or the outright conquest of territory. In other cases, they involve looser arrangements that still provide influence over a country’s policies and politics.

In recent decades, spheres of influence have indeed been a naughty notion. But historically, they aren’t unusual. The Delian League gave Athens sway across much of the ancient Greek world. European nations built vast spheres of influence in the age of Western imperialism.

As I recount in my new book, The Eurasian Century, the world wars of the 20th century were essentially fights over whether aggressive autocracies would be allowed to establish huge Old World empires. Moscow’s ruthless hegemony in Eastern Europe was at the center of the Cold War. Relationships of control, even domination, are simply normal in a cutthroat world.

Spheres of influence are so common because they typically offer four advantages to great powers: protection (a geographic buffer against rivals); projection (a secure base from which to project power farther afield); profit (privileged access to resources and markets); and prestige in a status-conscious world. And if every sphere of influence is different, they all limit the freedom of action of smaller states. That’s why the US has long been an unusual, ambivalent participant in the spheres-of-influence contest, even as it has played the game better than anyone else.

America’s Secret Empire

The US established a massive sphere of influence in the first 150 years of its history. It expanded across North America, then evicted European powers from Latin America en route to building a proprietary hemispheric domain. “The United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition,” Secretary of State Richard Olney wrote in 1895 — a statement of imperial privilege if ever there was one.

Teddy Roosevelt taking the New World away from the Old World.Source: Bettmann via Getty Images

The US tied Latin American economies to its own; it meddled pervasively in their politics and conducted dozens of military interventions against actual or potential threats. And if America began by creating a regional sphere of influence, in the 20th century it would take that project global.

During the Cold War, Washington forged alliance blocs comprising key countries in Western Europe and East Asia. It established networks of partners, clients and proxies in Africa, the Middle East and other regions. The US never had much of a formal empire. But these arrangements gave it immense, unrivaled influence over the politics, economies and diplomacy of countries around the world.

No surprise, then, that foreign observers — Churchill included — rolled their eyes when American presidents lectured them about the evils of imperialism. But those presidents could make three decent arguments for why America’s project was different from the rest.

A Single Superpower

For one thing, it was more voluntary. The US could be a heavy-handed hegemon in the Americas. But in Europe and Asia, it was asked to exert preeminent influence by countries that were existentially fearful of predators nearby. America, the scholar Geir Lundestad wrote, constructed an “empire by invitation.” To this day, Ukraine and other front-line states are desperate to get into Washington’s sphere of influence, not to stay out.

Second, the rise of America’s sphere of influence ensured the decline of far more brutal empires. Dominance in the Western Hemisphere allowed the US to intervene decisively in both world wars, because it was relatively untroubled by security threats close to home. In the Cold War, the US alliance system contained and outclassed the Soviet Union, delivering a free-world victory that freed Eastern Europe, as well.

Finally, if some spheres of influence are brutal and economically extractive, America’s mostly wasn’t: The US pursued a form of global leadership that benefited many countries and many people. Washington cultivated democratic values in areas under its influence. It fostered a global economy that enriched its participants. Rather than seizing and annexing territory, it worked, even fought, to make conquest — the worst form of imperial cruelty — a thing of the past.

After the Cold War, US officials argued that everyone would be safer under the leadership of a single, enlightened hegemon. By maintaining “strengths beyond challenge,” President George W. Bush explained, America would avoid “destabilizing arms races” and “destructive national rivalries.” Perhaps a world with only one sphere of influence — America’s — would be the best world of all.

The Dictators Fight Back

Others disagreed. A system with “one master, one sovereign” was dangerous, Putin declared in 2007. “The United States has overstepped its national borders in every way.” American hegemony was denying once-and-future empires like Russia and China the geopolitical privileges and the ideological security they craved. So they tried to recreate a spheres-of-influence world.

Putin’s war in Ukraine is the acme of a 25-year project to revive Moscow’s primacy in what Russians call its “near abroad.” Xi is pursuing “Asia for Asians,” code for a region in which Beijing rules because Washington has been banished. Iran spent two decades building its own Middle Eastern empire, before it ran into an Israeli buzzsaw last year. A quasi-autocratic Turkey is trying to restore old Ottoman glories from North Africa to the Caucasus.

For years, the US resisted these efforts. “We will not recognize any nation having a sphere of influence,” then-Vice President Joe Biden said while visiting Ukraine in 2015. But resistance became harder as the balance of power shifted. And today, the US doesn’t seem entirely opposed to spheres of interest anymore.

Trump has indicated that Russia will, and perhaps should, dominate large parts of Ukraine. He and several advisers have suggested that Taiwan will inevitably become Chinese. Trump has long been conflicted about the US alliance commitments that prevent Beijing and Moscow from steamrolling weaker neighbors. He openly desires de-escalation with autocrats pushing to rule their regions.

Can Trump do it again?Source; Bettmann via Getty Images

Meanwhile, Trump’s team is trumpeting “Monroe Doctrine 2.0”: It is even threatening to use military or economic coercion to bring neighbors like Canada, Greenland and Panama to heel. A world where great powers make the rules, and force weaker powers to follow them, would probably suit Trump just fine.

It is difficult to know where this will lead. It certainly isn’t as easy to divide the world as it was in Churchill’s day. But the return of sordid deals and spheres of influence is becoming more plausible. What might their contours and implications be?

Will Trump Give In?

It’s easiest to imagine such arrangements in Europe, where Trump seems determined to end the war in Ukraine, and normalize ties with Russia, at almost any cost. If Trump forces Kyiv into a weak, unenforceable peace deal, Moscow will eventually gain control — whether militarily or politically — over most of that country. It could thereby turn what once looked like a losing war of aggression into a lesson for what awaits other disobedient post-Soviet states.

Putin would surely consolidate his mastery in Belarus. And if a Ukraine deal was accompanied by US force reductions on the continent — or maybe an eventual withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — it would hypercharge Russian intimidation of exposed Eastern European states. Today, it isn’t within Putin’s power — or Trump’s — to deliver half the continent to Russia. But a great-power deal could go a long way toward restoring Russian primacy on Europe’s eastern edge.

The counterpart could be a Chinese sphere in littoral Asia. Trump is an economic hawk, but a security dove, on China. If Beijing attacks Taiwan, he once profanely remarked, there’s nothing America can do.

A Sino-American bargain could bring reduced US support for Taipei, giving Beijing a clearer path to annexation. Likewise, a reduction in US presence in the Western Pacific would consolidate China’s dominance of the South China Sea. And should Trump, or a future president, withdraw from America’s Indo-Pacific alliances, countries from South Korea to Australia would struggle to resist Chinese coercion. Even if Beijing doesn’t aspire to physical dominance, it could demand far greater deference from the region.

Xi and Putin would thrive in a world divided.Photographer: Sergei Bobylyov/AFP/Getty Images

The American sphere of influence wouldn’t vanish in this scenario: It would retract to the Western Hemisphere. The US would redouble efforts to extirpate Beijing’s economic, technological and military influence, perhaps making Chinese retrenchment from the New World the price of Washington’s withdrawal from the Old. Monroe 2.0 could also include the use of far sharper pressures to lock in America’s dominance or even expand its territory — which, if Canada or Greenland were the targets, would probably finish off NATO and harden the new transatlantic divide.

The new spheres of influence would thus be structured by great-power deals, whether implicit or explicit. The US would pull back from the strategic frontiers of Eurasia, while consolidating its control of the Western Hemisphere. It would swap deep alliances with the advanced democracies for more ruthless, transactional ties to Moscow and Beijing. Those new ties could be consolidated through arms control agreements, of the sort Trump has touted, that would slash US military spending because America would no longer defend countries thousands of miles away.

Indeed, the attractions of this approach are obvious, particularly for a president who worries aloud about the risks of World War III. A spheres deal would limit the near-term danger of escalation in Ukraine or the Taiwan Strait. It would create greater distance, for a while, between the great powers. Little wonder that advocates of American restraint, and international relations “realists,” like such arrangements. But the costs, both obvious and hidden, would be severe.

Dividing the World Is Dangerous

“Spheres of influence” is a wonky, antiseptic term. But when the sphere in question is run by a violent, illiberal tyrant, it is simply a euphemism for the lethal suppression of freedom of choice. We know what horrors — torture, mass killings, forced Russification — await Ukraine if it falls to Moscow. Don’t expect Beijing to behave much better if it grabs Taiwan. Great powers invariably shape the politics of smaller powers, so expect a severe erosion of democratic norms and liberties in areas that Russia or China controls.

The global economy wouldn’t thrive, either. Some may hope that the US can trade away support for Taiwan in exchange for Beijing’s promise to keep the island’s high-end semiconductors flowing. But as ambitious powers come to rule their surrounding regions, they inevitably reorient their economies. Sooner or later, the US would be locked out of a Chinese-dominated East Asia, as trade and investment relationships pivoted toward Beijing.

These costs might pale compared with the benefits, if spheres of influence really created greater international stability and reduced the risks of war. Yet that claim deserves scrutiny.

Carving up the world is harder than it sounds, not least because the countries whose fates are being determined also get a say. Maybe Latvia or the Philippines can’t do much to escape encroaching great powers. But Poland and Japan aren’t impotent micro-states, and they won’t welcome life in regions ruled by bitter rivals. So they might well fight, or sprint for nuclear weapons, to preserve their security and independence.

A world apportioned among the great powers could be one in which nuclear proliferation runs rampant. Even for Washington, the dangers would be greater than they seem.

In hindsight, scholars often see the Cold War, with its rival Soviet and America spheres of influence, as an era of stability. That’s not how it really was. Shifts in the military balance produced high-stakes crises — in Korea, Berlin, Cuba and elsewhere — as the superpowers tested each other’s resolve to defend their respective domains. This history offers a warning of what might lie ahead.

Spheres-of-influence deals are not sacred. They are precisely as durable as the balance of forces that produces them. So if bargains with Moscow and Beijing simply give them stronger positions in vital regions, those deals might mark the beginning, not the end, of their quests to upend the existing order.

If Putin dominates Ukraine, why wouldn’t he use it as a stepping-stone to further advances? Once China controls Taiwan, why not press its advantage against other vulnerable states? And if China comes to rule the world’s most dynamic region, why wouldn’t it use the resulting power to challenge America in the Central Pacific? What would stop it from reneging on its commitment to steer clear of the Western Hemisphere?

America’s own history reveals the evanescence of great-power bargains: When James Monroe issued his eponymous doctrine, he pledged to stay out of Europe if Europe stayed out of the Americas, a promise that held exactly as long as it suited US interests.

The global superpower of the past.Source: Bettmann via Getty Images

The fundamental problem is that the spheres-of-influence model rests on lousy assumptions about great-power behavior. If Putin and Xi were modest men, with middling ambitions, they might be satisfied with security buffers along their borders.

But they, like many revisionist powers, are driven by ideologies of greatness and quests for glory. Xi aims to make China the mightiest, most globally influential state. A divide-the-world approach might deliver temporary stability, as revisionist powers digest new gains — but only until they are ready to challenge the status quo again. In this future, spheres of influence aren’t the path to peace but the road to war.

This is all hypothetical, for the moment. But the outlines of a spheres-of-influence world are becoming more visible, as revisionist powers push ahead and America’s commitment to preventing such a world wanes. Unfortunately, that’s not a future Americans will ultimately enjoy living in, no matter how tempting it may, at the moment, sound.

Brands is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the co-author of “Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China,” and a senior adviser to Macro Advisory Partners.

More From Hal Brands at Bloomberg Opinion:

• Every President Has a Foreign Policy. Trump Has Five
• The Man Who Predicted Today’s World Over a Century Ago
• Pete Hegseth Is Closing a Pentagon Office That Wins Wars

​​​​​Want more Bloomberg Opinion? OPIN . Or subscribe to our newsletter.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Hal Brands is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

4. Hegseth Reassures Asian Allies in Meetings at Tokyo and the Philippines but Skips South Korea

​The SECDEF is still getting his feet on the ground and is drinking from the fire hose on Asia since he has no experience there. He made a lot of good statements on the trip but he cannot please everyone (re:Korea)

Excerpt:

Mr. Hegseth, before leaving Washington did say Americans needed to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with their Korean as well as Japanese and Filipino allies but, to the chagrin of South Koreans, barely mentioned Korea in the Philippines and then Japan. It was up to Mr. Nakatani to affirm “multilateral cooperation with regional partners, including Australia, the Republic of Korea and the Philippines.”

Hegseth Reassures Asian Allies in Meetings at Tokyo and the Philippines but Skips South Korea

The trip was clearly intended to remove recurring questions on Taiwan, for which Congress last year approved the sale of $1 billion in arms and equipment.

DONALD KIRK

Published: Mar. 31, 2025 04:40 PM ETUpdated: Mar. 31, 2025 05:04 PM ET

nysun.com

SEOUL — Defense Secretary Hegseth is leaving no doubt about it: President Trump is as firmly “committed” as was President Biden to the defense of America’s Asian allies — and also the free island province of Taiwan that China’s President Xi has vowed to recover by 2027.

In stops in the Philippines and then in Japan, Mr. Hegseth has talked tough and unequivocally about the need to stand up to Communist China, just as his boss is doing in imposing steep tariff increases beginning Tuesday.

Winding up his first overseas trip as defense secretary in Tokyo, standing beside Japan’s defense minister, Gen Nakatani, Mr. Hegseth declared, “America is committed to sustaining robust, ready and credible deterrence in the Indo Pacific, including across the Taiwan Strait.” Japan, he said, “would be on the front lines of any contingency we might face in the western Pacific and we stand together in support of each other.”

That unequivocal assurance of America’s commitment was clearly intended to remove recurring questions as to whether Mr. Trump would be willing to go to war for Taiwan, for which Congress last year approved the sale of $1 billion in arms and equipment. If nothing else, Mr. Hegseth sought to dispel worries that Mr. Trump might prefer to appeal to America’s foes, notably President Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un, while abandoning allies and friends, such as South Korea and Ukraine.

“We have a robust alliance agenda that will strengthen our deterrence posture, keep the enemy guessing, creating dilemmas for them,” he said. Then, in a specific rebuff to China, he said America’s renewed commitment also meant “expanding access to key terrain in the first island chain, such as Japan’s southwest islands” — from the southernmost Japanese prefecture of Okinawa where American marines and air force planes are based, and extending to Taiwan and the South China Sea, claimed by China.

In one brief sentence, Mr. Hegseth hyped-up the possibility of more elaborate joint military exercises in defiance of China anywhere from Okinawa to the South China Sea where China has built naval and air bases on atolls and islets. Achieving that goal, he said with understated menace, “means exercising together at those critical locations.” To make it happen, America has begun “upgrading U.S. Forces Japan to a Joint Force Headquarters,” increasing “our readiness to respond to contingency or crisis” and “help Japan and U.S. forces defend this territory.”

Mr. Hegseth did not mention that the upgrade of the bond was initiated under the Biden administration. Nor did he refer to the alliance of “Australia, United Kingdom, and the U.S.” known as AUKUS, formed under Mr. Biden, but his remarks were the clearest affirmation yet that Mr. Trump might go further than Mr. Biden in defending an arc running from South Korea and Japan to the Philippines and on down to Australia and New Zealand.

The downside of Mr. Hegseth’s first overseas mission as defense secretary was that, like his predecessor, Lloyd Austin, he had to skip South Korea, ordinarily a “must” stop on top-level American missions to the region. Koreans suspect Mr. Hegseeth did not want to compromise Mr. Trump’s stated desire to renew acquaintances with Mr. Kim, with whom he has said he “fell in love” in their summit in Singapore in June 2018, but South Korea’s ongoing leadership crisis is to blame

Washington does not want to take sides or interfere in South Korean affairs while the constitutional court considers whether to approve or dismiss a motion passed by the national assembly to impeach the South’s conservative president, Yoon Suk-yeol. The court’s eight sitting justices are reportedly at odds with one another while the government is in the hands of the acting president, Han Duck-soo, a former ambassador to Washington who was prime minister when Mr. Yoon was impeached.

Mr. Hegseth, before leaving Washington did say Americans needed to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with their Korean as well as Japanese and Filipino allies but, to the chagrin of South Koreans, barely mentioned Korea in the Philippines and then Japan. It was up to Mr. Nakatani to affirm “multilateral cooperation with regional partners, including Australia, the Republic of Korea and the Philippines.”

nysun.com

5. In the Competition Between the U.S. and China, Partnerships Will Decide Our Future

​Excerpt:

In conclusion, the ongoing contest between the U.S. and China underscores the critical importance of a robust and united alliance network. As the world transitions into a more multipolar landscape, the continued relevance of NATO and other partnerships is paramount in upholding democratic values and countering authoritarian influences. The U.S. must demonstrate unwavering commitment to its allies, fostering a collaborative spirit that enhances global stability. By embracing its leadership role and prioritizing meaningful engagement with partners, the U.S. can effectively navigate the complexities of the current geopolitical climate. Ultimately, a united front with allies not only serves to bolster defense capabilities but also reinforces the shared vision of a world rooted in freedom, democracy, and respect for human rights. The path forward requires mutual trust, investment in partnerships, and a renewed commitment to the ideals that have historically shaped the international order.

Resilience and Resistance Strategies

32

In the Competition Between the U.S. and China, Partnerships Will Decide Our Future

https://robertburrell.substack.com/p/in-the-competition-between-the-us?r=7i07&utm

Robert Burrell, PhD

Mar 31, 2025

by Dr. Robert S. Burrell and Dr. Joseph E. Long

Figure 1: BRICS member states family photograph during the 16th BRICS Summit at Kazan Expo Center, in Russia on October 23, 2024 (source/wiki)

Retired Admiral William McRaven (the Navy SEAL who led the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011) often stated that “you can't surge trust.” What evolved into McRaven's colloquialism conveyed that partners require a constant U.S. commitment yet also underscored a reality that allies lay the foundation for the connected world we live in. Through several decisive outcomes in the 21st Century (including Task Force Dagger's defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan with only a few U.S. soldiers on horseback in 2002), Special Operations leaders appear to understand the importance of partners more than most. For example, during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a relatively small task force under then Special Forces Colonel Charles Cleveland mobilized over 50,000 Kurdish fighters to neutralize thirteen Divisions in the Iraqi north, making a U.S.-led invasion from the south possible. As the following photo of an Australian soldier rescuing twelve wounded U.S. soldiers in World War II portrays, allies matter, not only on the battlefield but in wide-ranging contests that decide the outcomes of wars and even the international order itself. As the author of Divided Armies Jason Lyall argued, partnerships are a strategic imperative. The world order is rapidly changing, and only a continued alliance of like-minded nations can preserve our values of equality, individualism, diversity, liberty, and self-government.

Figure 2. Australian Leslie “Bull” Allen Rescues U.S. Soldier in New Guinea, 1943 (source/Australian War Memorial)

This exposé builds on the documented reality that the United States has achieved its greatest successes alongside partners and that the complex nature of the changing world order relies on American leadership more than ever before. Not only has the post-Cold War era seen the rise (and even return) of a multipolar world of great power competitors, the greatest threat to the great American democratic experiment comprises more than economic and military parity with the Chinese Communist Party. China’s growing influence in the Global South, combined with America’s growing frustration with post-Cold War institutions, will require a new vision for global leadership that eschews current trends toward isolationism in favor of U.S leadership which promotes global stability rooted in American values rather than a world order shaped by authoritarianism.

There has been a lot of drama in the news about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and whether it's still relevant. The U.S. Secretary of Defense clarified on 12 February 2025, “The United States remains committed to the NATO alliance and the defense partnership with Europe…but the United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages a dependency.” The qualifier at the end of this statement caused implosions all over Europe, including a prevailing sentiment that the new U.S. administration has abandoned NATO and that this alliance is nearing its end.

The short-sighted fixation on how to solve the Ukraine crisis misses the forest for the trees. While the West remains fixated on the threat of Russia, China is making greater moves to shape the international world order in its favor irreversibly, and NATO remains more imperative than at any other stage in its history in the preservation of democracy. Rather than squabble over European defense requirements, the U.S. should instead accept its vital leadership role as “a shining city on the hill” by advancing democratic forms of governance and human rights through a robust network of partners and allies committed to traditional American values with a shared vision for the future. Advancing the strategic relevance of NATO has become essential for continuing the West and the U.S.’s global economic advantages in the shadow of a rising, yet underestimated, Chinese-led coalition.

NATO emerged in post-war 1949 to promote stability in the deepening Cold War between Western democracies and Soviet authoritarian communism. In response, the Soviet Union developed its own competing system of partners in the Warsaw Pact. However, since the 1991 fall of Soviet communism, political leaders and scholars have debated the purpose of the continuation of the NATO alliance, which remains focused on countering Russian militarism in Eastern Europe. Since the Soviet collapse, NATO has expanded from a twelve-nation alliance to its current thirty-two members by absorbing former Warsaw Pact member states. As NATO expanded, many academics argued that Europe was short-cutting defense spending under the U.S.-led umbrella to advance their domestic social welfare programs – creating a free-rider problem for many U.S. political leaders who argue that European governments took advantage of Americans.

Even if the free-rider narrative is correct, the global balance of power has continued transforming in the post-Cold War world into a new era of multipolar competition, marked by reductions in global Western power. As Joseph Nye argued in 1990, success in this new environment requires a new lens for understanding strategic power: a balanced blend of traditional state power based on the ability to force other states to act, coupled with soft power or the ability to attract rather than force specific international outcomes. With the continued changes to the global balance of power in the post-world war, post-industrial, post-technical, AI-driven world, recipes for global leadership require that states develop their ability to attract and persuade rather than merely coerce.

For continued American leadership, the ability to leverage both hard and soft power is where NATO's true potential lies. From a balanced power perspective, NATO represents more than just a military alliance; it embodies a shared commitment to democratic values, a rules-based international order, and a vision for a free and prosperous world, which remain the very values that China’s model of authoritarian capitalism seeks to undermine.

While the U.S. struggles to reconcile the value of NATO, global economic and population growth is shifting toward the East and South under China's ability to leverage soft power. In 2009, China tapped into the Global South’s continued frustrations with the U.S.-led world order and organized a counter-NATO structure (BRICS) that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (joined in 2010). Although BRICS remains in informal organization, the reality that the nations of BRICS would like to challenge the international system cannot be overlooked as it continues to expand with the recent additions of non-Western states, including Iran in 2023, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, and United Arab Emirates in 2024, and Indonesia in 2025.

Recent growth in BRICS demonstrates a pattern as Malaysia and Venezuela court membership, with an additional three dozen countries also expressing interest. The combined power of BRICS with additional members waiting in the wings, including Argentina, Algeria, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Saudi Arabia cannot be ignored as it has positioned itself in opposition to the current international order. This reality is evident by the exclusion of the United States, all of Europe, and U.S. partners like Japan, Australia, and South Korea. In short, as the prospective alliance power of BRICS continues to rise, the commitment of NATO remains in question, thus limiting the U.S. and the West's ability to sustain global cultural and economic stability in an uncertain and changing world order

Quite simply, no alliance or coalition in the world can challenge the growing collective diplomatic, informational, economic, or military (DIME) strength of BRICS other than NATO, thus making America and NATO's continued leadership of the global order more critical than ever before. To understand NATO's relative alliance power, we have modeled the relative influence of both alliance structures in Figure 3, measuring fifteen separate DIME indicators.

Figure 3. Comparison of NATO Members with BRICS in Alliance Power (source/authors)

However, Figure 3 also offers a cautionary story about BRICS's continuing expansion. As China and its conglomerate of BRICS continue to grow and challenge the modalities of the international order, the U.S. will be unable to stand against all of them alone, despite America's current military and economic power advantages. Only through the global cooperation of strong allies can the U.S. leverage the positive impacts of democracy, freedom, and human rights to counter authoritarian regimes. The United States must embrace its partners in Europe, encourage greater burden-sharing within the alliance, and adapt NATO to confront the evolving challenges of the 21st Century.

Figure 3 shows that the combined power of NATO (listed individually and collectively) approximately doubles BRICS' current partnership capacity. However, the dynamic nature of each alliance's temporal changes drives our cautionary warning about abandoning NATO in favor of renewed isolationism in a changing world order. Although NATO's sheer size dwarfs BRICS, NATO has only grown by 20 states since Greece and Turkey joined in 1952. Meanwhile, BRICS has more than doubled since its founding in 2009 and currently produces about 35% of global gross domestic product (GDP), over 40% of global population, 42% of global oil production, and over 25% of global exports. The growth potential for BRICS, compared to the current strength of NATO, should give pause to how America reflects upon is leadership role in the global community.

In conclusion, the ongoing contest between the U.S. and China underscores the critical importance of a robust and united alliance network. As the world transitions into a more multipolar landscape, the continued relevance of NATO and other partnerships is paramount in upholding democratic values and countering authoritarian influences. The U.S. must demonstrate unwavering commitment to its allies, fostering a collaborative spirit that enhances global stability. By embracing its leadership role and prioritizing meaningful engagement with partners, the U.S. can effectively navigate the complexities of the current geopolitical climate. Ultimately, a united front with allies not only serves to bolster defense capabilities but also reinforces the shared vision of a world rooted in freedom, democracy, and respect for human rights. The path forward requires mutual trust, investment in partnerships, and a renewed commitment to the ideals that have historically shaped the international order.

Dr. Joseph Long is a leadership scholar, Senior Policy Analyst and retired Green Beret officer. Joe is also a 2025 Irregular Warfare Initiative Non-Resident Fellow, Board Member with the Special Operations Association of America (SOAA), and former Professor of Leadership and Ethics at the Joint Special Operations University.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-joseph-long-9021821a/

Dr. Rob Burrell is an award-winning author, Senior Research Fellow at the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, and retired Marine. Rob is also a 2025 Irregular Warfare Initiative Non-Resident Fellow, former history professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, and former Professor of Irregular Warfare at Joint Special Operations University.

Website: https://www.robertburrell.com

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6. Pete Hegseth says U.S. is making Japan a 'war-fighting' base to deter China

​This is provocative but it is also necessary. The SECDEF is saying the quiet part out loud.

It will be interesting to see what pushback there is from the political factions in Japan that want to restrain their military as well as what actions will China take to demonstrate its displeasure over this.

Pete Hegseth says U.S. is making Japan a 'war-fighting' base to deter China

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also stressed the need for the U.S. and Japan to accelerate the strengthening of their military capability as the region faces a more assertive Beijing.

NBC News · by The Associated Press · March 31, 2025

TOKYO — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called Japan on Sunday an “indispensable partner” in deterring growing Chinese assertiveness in the region and announced upgrading the U.S. military command in Japan to a new “war-fighting headquarters.”

Hegseth, who is on his first Asia trip with Japan as his second stop, also stressed the need for both countries to do more to accelerate the strengthening of their military capability as the region faces China’s assertive military actions and a possible Taiwan emergency.

“Japan is our indispensable partner in deterring Communist Chinese military aggression,” Hegseth said at the beginning of his talks with Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani in Tokyo. “The U.S. is moving fast, as you know, to reestablish deterrence in this region and around the world.”

His comments come as an assurance at a time when Japan has been worried about how U.S. engagement in the region may change under President Donald Trump’s “America First” policy, Japanese defense officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity, citing protocol. Trump has also threatened to impose trade tariffs on Japan, a key U.S. ally, raising more concern.

The two sides agreed to accelerate plans to jointly develop and produce missiles such as Advanced Medium-Range Air to Air Missiles, or MRAAM, and consider producing SM-6 surface-to-air missiles, to help ease a shortage of munitions, Nakatani said. The ministers also agreed to speed up the process involving the maintenance of U.S. warships and warplanes in Japan to strengthen and complement Japanese and U.S. defense industries.

Japan and the U.S. decided in July to upgrade the command and control of the Japanese military as well as U.S. forces in the East Asian country, under the Biden administration, a major structural change aimed at bolstering joint operational and response capabilities. Japan is home to more than 50,000 U.S. troops.

Last week Tokyo launched the Japan Joint Operations Command, or JJOC, whose mission is to coordinate Japanese Ground, Maritime and Air Self-Defense Forces, in a significant action to further strengthen capabilities to respond to contingencies and better cooperate with the U.S.

Hegseth announced Sunday the upgrading of its current command, U.S. Forces Japan, by placing a unified operational commander to function as a joint force headquarters to liaise with its Japanese counterpart to serve as “war-fighting headquarters” to bolster speed and capability of their troops’ joint operations.

The Pentagon chief said the reorganization of U.S. troops is a step to better prepare for a possible conflict. America and Japan both work for peace, but “we must be prepared,” he said.

The Japanese defense officials say they are not expecting a significant change in their responsibilities or an increase in U.S. troops in Japan.

Hegseth and Nakatani told a joint news conference that they have also agreed on the need to beef up Japan’s defense posture on the Southwestern islands, which are in critical locations along disputed areas in the East China Sea and near Taiwan to further step up deterrence against China.

He stressed the need to have “sustaining, robust, ready and credible deterrence” in the Indo-Pacific, including across the Taiwan Strait, as “Japan would be on the frontlines of any contingency we might face in the western Pacific.”

China claims Taiwan as its own territory. The U.S. is obligated under a 1979 law to provide Taiwan with sufficient military hardware and technology to deter invasion, and its arm sales to Taiwan have always drawn strong opposition from Beijing.

On Saturday, Hegseth joined the U.S.-Japan joint memorial to honor the war dead in the Battle of Iwo Jima as they marked the 80th anniversary of the end of one of the fiercest battles of World War II, praising the strong alliance between the former enemies.

Before landing in Japan, Hegseth stopped in the Philippines where he also ensured Trump’s commitment to step up ties with the Southeast Asian country that faces maritime disputes with Beijing.

NBC News · by The Associated Press · March 31, 2025

7. China, Japan, South Korea will jointly respond to US tariffs, Chinese state media says

​So are we driving Korea and Japan into China's arms? Of course that is what the Chinese media would like to believe is true.

But it does beg the question: Why are we treating our friends and allies as badly as we are treating our enemies?

China, Japan, South Korea will jointly respond to US tariffs, Chinese state media says

https://www.reuters.com/world/china-japan-south-korea-will-jointly-respond-us-tariffs-chinese-state-media-says-2025-03-31/

By Reuters

March 31, 202510:37 PM EDTUpdated 13 min ago

Item 1 of 2 U.S. President Donald Trump makes an announcement about an investment from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 3, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Millis/ File Photo

[1/2]U.S. President Donald Trump makes an announcement about an investment from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 3, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Millis/ File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

BEIJING, March 31 (Reuters) - China, Japan and South Korea agreed to jointly respond to U.S. tariffs, a social media account affiliated with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said on Monday, an assertion that Seoul called "somewhat exaggerated."

The state media comments came after the three countries held their first economic dialogue in five years on Sunday, seeking to facilitate regional trade as the Asian export powers brace against U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs.

The Reuters Tariff Watch newsletter is your daily guide to the latest global trade and tariff news. Sign up here.Japan and South Korea are seeking to import semiconductor raw materials from China, and China is also interested in purchasing chip products from Japan and South Korea, the account, Yuyuan Tantian, said in a post on Weibo.

All three sides agreed to strengthen supply chain cooperation and engage in more dialogue on export controls, the post said.

When asked about the report, a spokesperson for South Korea's trade ministry said "the suggestion that there was a joint response to U.S. tariffs appears to have been somewhat exaggerated," and referred to the text of the countries' joint statement.

During Sunday's meeting, the countries' trade ministers agreed to speed up talks on a South Korea-Japan-China free trade agreement deal to promote "regional and global trade", according to a statement released after the meeting.

"The three countries exchanged views on the global trade environment, and as you can see in the joint statement, they shared their understanding of the need to continue economic and trade cooperation," the South Korean trade ministry spokesperson said.

Japan's foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The countries' trade ministers met ahead of Trump's planned announcement on Wednesday of more tariffs in what he calls "liberation day", as he upends Washington's trading partnerships.

Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo are major U.S. trading partners, although they have been at loggerheads amongst themselves over issues including territorial disputes and Japan's release of wastewater from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Reporting by Xiuhao Chen and Ryan Woo; Additional reporting by Joyce Lee in Seoul and John Geddie in Tokyo; Editing by Sharon Singleton and Jamie Freed

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

8. Ghost in the Machine: Coming to Terms with the Human Core of Unmanned War

​A long read.

Please go to the link below or download the PDF here to read the entire essay. 

https://tnsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/TNSR-Vol-8-Iss-2_FERGUSON.pdf

​Fear, honor, and interest is timeless.

​Excerpts:

Below, I advance three main arguments using the fear-honor-interest framework:

1. Western nations are overly invested in the belief that future wars will be governed by unmanned systems, not human mass. This faith reflects Western cultural bias more than it does the demands of twenty-first-century warfare.
2. The presence of these machines on the battlefield, coupled with fewer humans, will not create a uniquely “modern” war that is cost efficient, controllable, or more precise. Instead, human passions are likely to make machine wars easier to start, harder to finish, and just as messy for combatants and civilians.
3. Killing humans will still be the objective in smart wars because human suffering has the greatest effect on the political will that gives machines their raison d’être.

Vol 8, Iss 2 Spring 2025  | 27-46

https://tnsr.org/2025/03/ghost-in-the-machine-coming-to-terms-with-the-human-core-of-unmanned-war/

Artificial Intelligence | Military Strategy | Technology United States

https://tnsr.org/2025/03/ghost-in-the-machine-coming-to-terms-with-the-human-core-of-unmanned-war/

- 

Ghost in the Machine: Coming to Terms with the Human Core of Unmanned War

Michael P. Ferguson

The widespread assumption that the United States can achieve favorable outcomes in war with more machines and fewer humans must be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. This article challenges that assumption through a historical inquiry guided by the catalysts for war identified by Thucydides; it argues that the conditions of existential war and technological parity provoke reciprocal escalation that only large quantities of humans can reconcile. New military capabilities have always conjured illusions of control over war’s violent nature and elicited flawed theories of success in peacetime. The United States and many of its allies have once again embraced this tradition. As Western militaries grow more dependent on technological offsets, the United States must come to terms with the human face of its future wars.

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In times of peace and prosperity, both cities and individuals can have lofty ideals because they have not fallen before the force of overwhelming necessity.

— Thucydides1

Prior to the American Civil War, the US Military Academy at West Point was a school of engineering that produced more industrial tycoons than generals. The academy’s first superintendent, Maj. Jonathan Williams, was a scientist and grandnephew to Benjamin Franklin.2 Even under President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954, military history was “not taught as a separate course in the military schools and colleges of the United States Army.”3 A conversation in 1970 between journalist Ward Just and West Point’s history department chair, Col. Thomas E. Griess, might reveal the source of this trend. Griess described the army as a “highly technological” organization, which, to him, explained why there was still no required history course at the academy.4 He was and still is right. It is therefore no wonder that the United States invests so heavily in technological supremacy or “offsets” even after two decades of war in Afghanistan exposed the limits of that dominance.5

Since the beginning of that war, there has been no shortage of scholarship highlighting the dangers of political hubris that extend from technological superiority.6 Even so, unmanned systems are flooding modern battlefields in staggering quantities, giving credence to presentism in Western strategic thinking and devaluing the careful study of broader historical arcs that underscore the human element in war. Britain’s oldest think tank, the Royal United Services Institute, estimated in 2023 that Ukraine lost approximately 10,000 drones per month as it pushed back its Russian invaders.7 President Volodymyr Zelenskyy thus sought to produce one million drones for Ukraine in 2024.8 Russia is scrambling to meet the challenge by striking billion-dollar deals with Iran in an effort to build thousands of unmanned weapons domestically.9

As Western militaries clamber for drones and their machines grow more numerous and sophisticated, their human numbers are plummeting.10 The United States may witness its first true spectator war this century, one in which the preponderance of resources deployed to achieve military objectives cannot empathize with their biological targets—a mathematical enterprise devoid of emotion, with fewer casualties and less potential for human error, or so the world has been led to believe.11

One way of subjecting these predictions to scrutiny is by framing them within the historical context of what Thucydides describes as the human catalysts for war: fear, honor, and interest.12 This ancient passage is often quoted but rarely contextualized, namely because it is not attributed to Thucydides himself, but rather to a delegation of Athenian ambassadors speaking before a Spartan assembly prior to the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC).13 Their words, used to justify the Athenian empire’s expansion and to explain why they would fight to prevent its contraction, can inform discourse on something future war theorist Christopher Coker described as post-human warfare.14

This essay does not argue that the pursuit of more sophisticated unmanned weapons is futile—only that the extent to which that pursuit should be used to justify the depletion of human end strength must be weighed more judiciously to avoid unrealistic strategies in peacetime and sticker shock when the cost of war becomes apparent.

As Jon Lindsay recently noted in this journal, studies of future warfare generally address “the ways in which autonomous machines will behave in familiar wars,” but fail to imagine “the ways in which human societies will behave in unfamiliar futures.”15 Humankind’s interaction with the uncertainty of existential war and its causalities is a good place to start searching for answers—or at least evidence that leads to asking the right questions. This essay is not a study of the characteristics of unmanned systems or their neural networks, nor is it an analysis that frames the latest conflicts as unique windows into future military exigencies. Rather, it is an interdisciplinary synthesis of long-form historical analysis and realist theory that paints a clearer picture of what the next major war may demand from the United States. It peers into the stubborn and flawed nature of the ghosts that infuse machines with purpose: us.

Below, I advance three main arguments using the fear-honor-interest framework:

1. Western nations are overly invested in the belief that future wars will be governed by unmanned systems, not human mass. This faith reflects Western cultural bias more than it does the demands of twenty-first-century warfare.
2. The presence of these machines on the battlefield, coupled with fewer humans, will not create a uniquely “modern” war that is cost efficient, controllable, or more precise. Instead, human passions are likely to make machine wars easier to start, harder to finish, and just as messy for combatants and civilians.
3. Killing humans will still be the objective in smart wars because human suffering has the greatest effect on the political will that gives machines their raison d’être.

Despite the prophesied exodus of humans from the battlefield to reduce the cost of war and the political risk associated with waging one, war has never been an efficient enterprise because it springs from human passions that the horrors of armed conflict only inflame. Efforts to reduce the number of combatants in war are unlikely to make its conditions more manageable. The evidence suggests that such trends might increase risk to civilian populations, further disconnect military actions from political objectives, and make wars harder to stop once they have started—not despite human control of its machines, but because of it. These approaches contain the same risk identified by Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway when he cautioned against relying on air and naval assets to achieve military objectives in the 1950s: The allure of doing things the “cheap and easy way” can send the military situation on the ground spiraling into a void of control that only large numbers of foot soldiers can fill.16 Indeed, this point may be one of the hardest truths for the West to accept in 2025 after three years of supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia with every type of aid except ground forces. Amid a backdrop of worsening recruitment challenges, members of Congress, US national security officials, and senior military leaders must come to terms with this reality in their budget debates and particularly in their conversations with the American people about the potential cost of modern war.

The Great Exodus of Humans from the Battlefield

9. The Nexus of Power | Water | Data: The Foundations of American Prosperity & National Security

E​xcerpt:

The United States must invest sustainably and substantially in its national infrastructure to stay competitive. Without rebuilding and expanding its infrastructure, the U.S. is essentially choosing to cede its standing in Industry 4.0, and over time will increasingly be challenged to develop, produce, and resource an Armed Forces that can defend its global interests against the likes of the PRC. Two hundred years ago the United States completed the Erie Canal, a geoengineering project that harnessed water with transportation. It was the first of many infrastructure projects over the last two centuries that built America. Today, the nexus of power, water and data represents a similar transformative opportunity – not just for competition, but for ensuring enduring American economic and military dominance well into the future.

The Nexus of Power | Water | Data: The Foundations of American Prosperity & National Security

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/04/01/the-nexus-of-power-water-data-the-foundations-of-american-prosperity-national-security/

by Shawn P. Creamer

|

04.01.2025 at 06:00am

More than two thousand years ago, the Qin Chinese developed a concept to emphasize the relationship of national prosperity to state power and a strong armed forces through the idiom Fuguo Qiangbing, which roughly translates into English as Rich Nation, Strong Army. Meiji Japan adopted this slogan in the 19th Century as its model to guide the transformation of Japanese society and to increase the power of the armed forces and the Empire. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has again adopted this model to build its national power. Instrumental to the Chinese model has been significant investments in infrastructure and a mercantilist approach to supporting their economy. As an example, the Chinese state is planning to add 150 nuclear reactors and up to 300 coal power plants to power its growing economy and are investing more than $169 billion annually in its water infrastructure to support current and future industrial, agricultural and residential needs. The Chinese leadership is laying the foundation for Made in China 2025 and primacy during the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0).

As China has aggressively industrialized, during the last several decades the United States has transitioned to a service-based economy, with decreased support to American manufacturing industries, such as critical mineral mining and refinement, and the production of everything from medical supplies to plastics, to metals and chemicals, to machinery and electronics, etc. As American manufacturing was hollowed out through outsourcing, the nation significantly under-invested in its infrastructure ecosystem: Water (storage, treatment, distribution, and regeneration); Power (generation, storage, transmission and distribution); Transportation (roads, bridges, rail, and ports / waterways); and Communication (operational technology to support advances in information technology, data storage and processing, cyber defense, etc).

The generational infrastructure investments made in the 1950s and 1960s have in many cases reached “the end of their lifespan and are dangerously overstretched.” Without a major program to rebuild and expand infrastructure to meet the demands of Industry 4.0, the United States’ global standing, both economically and militarily, will erode. An America unable to compete in Industry 4.0 will lead to decreased domestic prosperity for future generations and the erosion of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, which together will have compounding negative effects on the U.S. economy’s ability to support a global military capable of defending the nation’s vital national interests.

The long-overdue $2 trillion in capital investments made through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), with the IIJA serving as a positive example of bipartisan collaboration, while the IRA was not. Together, the IIJA and IRA only provided a temporary fix for immediate infrastructure challenges. To stay competitive beyond the 2030s, America will need several trillion dollars in additional investment beyond the IIJA and IRA.

The new Trump Administration, with support from the Republican-controlled Senate and House, has a mandate to materially improve the lives of average Americans. President Trump is thus uniquely positioned to build upon the IIJA and IRA’s infrastructure investments and lay the foundations for American prosperity into the 21st century. However, despite holding a favorable political position, President Trump and the Republicans should not attempt this alone. Instead, they should engage the loyal opposition to create a joint plan for investing in America’s future, as was accomplished in 2021 with the passing of the IIJA.

Bipartisan consensus is essential to elevating infrastructure as a national priority, maintaining political focus as power transitions occur, and for the sustained resourcing of a multi-decade infrastructure strategy. American prosperity is built on a strong and modern infrastructure foundation. If the United States wants to remain economically and militarily competitive through the rest of the 21st Century, both leading political parties must work together to make infrastructure a priority and resource it accordingly.

While infrastructure investment is needed across all sectors – water, power, transportation, communication (data) – essential for economic prosperity, the next major infrastructure bill must simultaneously drive efficiencies and prioritize interconnected investments. One such area of opportunity is the nexus of power, water, and data, each a cornerstone for sustaining America’s global power.

United States will face an energy crisis within the next ten years. Unlike the petroleum energy crisis in the 1970s, the energy crisis of 2030-2035 will be electrical. Current forecasts predict the United States will require at least 38 gigawatts of more electricity in the next five years. Other estimates project that electricity demand in 2050 will be 27% higher than today. These assessments, however, underestimate the impact of growing energy demands and the implications of replacing aging fossil fuel power plants and nuclear reactors slated to go offline over the next decade. For example, the World Nuclear Association asserts that if “today’s nuclear plants retire after 60 years of operation, 22 GWe [gigawatt electric] of new nuclear capacity would be needed by 2030, and 55 GWe by 2035 to maintain a 20% nuclear share.” Furthermore, over 28% of the nation’s coal-fired power plants, which currently provide 20% of the country’s electricity, are scheduled to be retired by 2035.

The U.S. is facing a severe electricity shortage, endangering both economic growth and national security. Energy conservation measures and power management efficiencies are a part of the solution, but any savings gained over the coming years cannot off-set the expected increased energy demand. Likewise, there is no comprehensive plan to replace retiring coal plants and nuclear reactors in the coming decade. Even if these retiring capacities are replaced, the growing residential, industrial and digital economy demands driven by Industry 4.0 will remain unmet.

Wells Fargo predicts the power demand from artificial intelligence alone is expected to grow 8,050% by 2030, consuming over 652 terawatt hours of energy or “more than 16% of the current total electricity demand in the US.” Renewable energy resources, such as wind and solar, cannot offset current demands nor meet future requirements. Natural gas plants currently provide 40% of America’s electricity, but with rising global demand for LNG, the U.S. is uniquely positioned to leverage its considerable fossil fuel resources to increase the use of modern nuclear power alternatives. Fission and fusion nuclear power are the only viable options available to replace coal, meet future energy needs, and to establish the power foundations for a Fifth Industrial Revolution.

While the U.S. is naturally rich in freshwater resources, the water infrastructure is old and reaching a breaking point. To repair and upgrade the nation’s water pipes, treatment plants, and wastewater facilities, an additional $744 billion to $1 trillion is needed beyond what the IIJA and IRA have already allocated. Currently, half of the nation’s freshwater is too polluted for swimming, fishing, or drinking. Although U.S. households consume over 13 trillion gallons of water annually, this amount pales in comparison to the 47 trillion gallons used by the electric power sector. The Union of Concerned Scientists reports that 65 percent of U.S. electricity generation requires these large amounts of water to cool the power generators, accounting for “almost 40 percent of freshwater withdrawals in the United States”. Additionally, the rapid growth of data centers is depleting water tables, consuming over 175 billion gallons of water today, though as of 2021, only 51 percent of data center operators even tracked their water consumption. Total data center growth in the U.S. is forecasted at more than 9 percent compound annual growth rate through 2030, while during this same period hyperscale data center growth is expected to triple in the next five years, placing a significant added water table strain from data center water use by the end of this decade.

Today, 96 of the 204 water basins across the U.S. are under stress, and the system within a few decades will be unable to support residential, agricultural, and industrial demands. Water is symbiotically linked to the electric grid, and is essential for economic prosperity. To address this, the U.S. needs to augment and reinforce its freshwater supply, leveraging Industry 4.0 technologies to innovate water access methods. While conservation can help, it will only go so far. Industrial demands for water to support growing power generation capabilities, manufacturing, data center needs, if left unaddressed, will exacerbate the fragile state of the U.S. water system by depleting and further polluting fresh water sources essential to the agricultural economy and the residential sector. Desalination is a potential solution, but is both costly and challenging to scale on a continental level.

In addition to desalination, advances in atmospheric water generation (AWG), if stacked and industrially scaled, offers a promising approach to harvesting water from atmospheric rivers in the troposphere. Rising temperatures increase atmospheric water content by seven percent for every one degree Celsius increase in air temperature, which AWG technology can capture and deliver as clean, vector-free water to areas in need. This approach could help sustain the nation’s natural and artificial water basins, and if scaled, could support the filling of currently depleted basins or creating additional micro water basins across the United States to support local Industry 4.0 demands. Together, desalination and AWG present the U.S. with a modern opportunity akin to the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) envisioned six decades ago.

NAWAPA aimed to redirect “the excess water of the high yield watersheds of the far northwestern land masses by distributing it to the water deficient areas of Canada, the United States, and northern Mexico” through a network of “369 individual dams, canals, pipelines, tunnels, and pumping stations.” While its scale is likely infeasible today due to environmental and community impact concerns, the U.S. could adopt selective engineering elements of NAWAPA to deliver water where it will be most needed and help power America into the future.

The United States will continue to invest in its infrastructure. However the ultimate question for the nation and its future prosperity will be, does the nation continue the variable funding practice it has used since 1969, underinvesting across time with periodic surges as tools to prop up the economy in times of financial distress or to rebuild damaged infrastructure in response to natural disasters. The United States, in real per capita spending using 2009 cost figures, spent less on infrastructure in 2013 ($776) than it did in 1960 ($793), despite a trebling in gross domestic product (GDP) over this same period.

If America wants to remain competitive economically, it can’t keep spending 2.3 percent of its GDP on infrastructure. European nations spend 5 percent, while China is spending 8 percent. The nation needs an enduring, multi-decade infrastructure program that is funded above 4 percent of GDP annually to both repair and strategically build out the nation’s infrastructure to be more resilient and to meet future Industry 4.0 demands. Committing more than 4 percent is sustainable; the nation resourced more than 2.8 percent of its GDP for water and transportation infrastructure alone in the years 1959-1965.

There is a growing recognition within the United States that infrastructure is not just in a state of disrepair from under-investment, but that it is inherently fragile to severe disruption by natural and/or human generated threat vectors. The U.S. military has started working on making its military bases more resilient through assured energy projects such as large scale micro-grids and the implementation of the Defense Department’s Operational Energy Strategy. Industry is similarly getting on board to modernize the power grid by implementing virtual power plants (VPP), which are aggregations of distributed energy resources to better balance electricity demand and supply. While the above efforts are indeed commendable and heading in the right cardinal direction, they fall short of the mark. They are insufficient, because they continue to perpetuate the antiquated approach to infrastructure by concentrating too narrowly, focusing either on individual, stand-alone projects (i.e. Georgia’s Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant expansion) or as a single infrastructure category (i.e. power, water, transportation, etc).

The next infrastructure program put forward should be designed to maximize the investments made and focus on the larger strategic picture, such as where infrastructure investments may interconnect. Designing an infrastructure program that harnesses the nexus of power, water and data, if approached together, could provide a synergistic effect and ensure one leg of the nexus doesn’t outpace the others. For instance, if the power infrastructure category is built out to support big data growth, without commensurate investments in the water infrastructure, then the energy grid and data networks will irreparably damage the water supply and its ability to support residential and agricultural demands.

Therefore, in order to avoid the mono-infrastructure trap of past infrastructure programs, the United States should consider a more comprehensive approach that expands VPP efforts beyond the power domain. VPPs can be expanded by connecting and integrating AWG water generation and production with artificial intelligence capabilities to establish transformative virtual utility (VU) network ecosystems. VUs offer the assured capacity to deliver essential power, water and data resources for Industry 4.0. A United States, equipped with infrastructure that can support Industry 4.0 demands, provides the nation the economic foundation to equip and sustain a globally dominant military. Without the right infrastructure foundation, the American economy will be increasingly challenged to adequately and sustainably resource a military sized and capable of deterring aggression and defending its interests against rivals that have invested more wisely.

The United States must invest sustainably and substantially in its national infrastructure to stay competitive. Without rebuilding and expanding its infrastructure, the U.S. is essentially choosing to cede its standing in Industry 4.0, and over time will increasingly be challenged to develop, produce, and resource an Armed Forces that can defend its global interests against the likes of the PRC. Two hundred years ago the United States completed the Erie Canal, a geoengineering project that harnessed water with transportation. It was the first of many infrastructure projects over the last two centuries that built America. Today, the nexus of power, water and data represents a similar transformative opportunity – not just for competition, but for ensuring enduring American economic and military dominance well into the future.

Tags: Data, Domestic Investment, Great Power Competition, Infrastructure, national security, Power, Scarcity, Water

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.

10. China Says It Is Aiming to Coordinate Tariff Response With Japan, South Korea

​Again, the operative words: "China says." Hopefully China will not lure South Korea and Japan into an anti-American trade position.

But we need to work on alliance management and attacking our allies with tariffs hardly seems good alliance management. Then again, I fear that allies are not a priority any longer.

China Says It Is Aiming to Coordinate Tariff Response With Japan, South Korea

President Trump is expected to announce a new slate of broader, higher tariffs on Wednesday

https://www.wsj.com/economy/china-says-it-is-aiming-to-coordinate-tariff-response-with-japan-south-korea-c7a19540?mod=latest_headlines

April 1, 2025 4:52 am ET

Senior trade officials from the three Asian export hubs had held their first economic dialogue in five years on Sunday. Photo: str/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

China is seeking to coordinate its response to U.S. tariffs with Japan and South Korea, Chinese state media said Monday, as the world’s second-largest economy looks to bolster regional economic collaboration.

Japanese and Korean officials said there was no decision to coordinate action with Beijing, but said the countries have recently discussed trade issues amid three-way talks over the weekend, the first such dialogue in five years.

A social-media account run by China’s state broadcaster said in a Weibo post on Monday that the three countries will strengthen dialogue on supply-chain cooperation and export controls, and plan to conduct speedy negotiations toward a trilateral free-trade agreement.

According to the post, Japan and South Korea are hoping to import some semiconductor raw materials from China, while China is also interested in importing chip products from Japan and South Korea.

A South Korean trade ministry spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal that there were “some exaggerated aspects” in the Chinese social-media post.

“The three countries exchanged views on the global trade environment, and as you can see in the joint statement, you can understand that they shared an understanding of the need for continued economic and trade cooperation,” she said, referring to a statement published by the three countries on Sunday.

Japan’s trade minister Yoji Muto said at a news conference on Tuesday that the three countries exchanged opinions on the trade environment but added that they didn’t reach any agreement to take joint action against U.S. tariffs.

The comments come after senior trade officials from the three Asian export hubs held their first economic dialogue in five years on Sunday as they gear up for more tariffs from the U.S. this week. President Trump is expected to announce a new slate of broader, higher tariffs on Wednesday aimed at reducing trade deficits and bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.

All three are major trading partners of the U.S. running historically high trade surpluses. Japan and South Korea are among the top auto exporters and steel suppliers to the U.S.

Since taking office in January, Trump has slapped an extra 20% tariff on all Chinese imports. On top of in-effect levies on steel imports, he also announced new 25% tariffs on imported cars and auto parts last month, sending major auto-exporting nations into crisis mode.

In response to the auto tariffs set to take effect on April 3, South Korea said it planned emergency support for the auto industry, with trade minister Ahn Duk-geun saying the industry faced “considerable damage.”

Tokyo has said it will keep asking Trump for a tariff exemption, with Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba saying Japan will “thoroughly examine the impact on domestic industries and employment and take all necessary measures.”

Relations among Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo have been strained over the years by issues including territorial disputes. Some analysts say that Trump policies could shift relations between the three Asian countries, particularly as Japan and South Korea stand to be among the hardest hit by U.S. tariffs.

“We reaffirmed our conviction that trilateral efforts in the economic and trade sectors are essential for fostering the prosperity and stability of the regional and global economy,” according to a joint statement released by the three Asian countries after the Sunday meeting.

The countries also said Sunday that they will speed up negotiations for a trilateral free-trade agreement, which have been in process since 2012 but have yet to produce tangible results.

Write to Singapore Editors at singaporeeditors@dowjones.com

11. Trump’s Greenland Gambit

​When I study the geography, I am amazed by the relative size and location of Greenland. It makes a lot of geo-strategic sense. But what about the people of Greneland? There is always the battlefield of human terrain. 

I am not sure Professor Mead's hsitorical comparisons are as reelavent today.

Excerpts:

Lightly populated but strategically significant, Greenland is the kind of territory that, historically, Americans have liked to annex. At roughly one fourth the size of the continental U.S., Leif Erikson’s home island would be the largest American territorial acquisition ever, beating out the Louisiana Purchase by about 9,000 square miles. Its roughly 57,000 inhabitants give it a population about half as large as the estimated population of the lands Jefferson acquired. Greenland has long been an object of American interest. During World War II the Roosevelt administration declared the island a protectorate, fending off both Anglo-Canadian and Axis efforts to control it. In 1946 the Truman administration offered Denmark $100 million to buy it.

That Greenlanders object to American blandishments may matter less to American opinion than Trump critics expect. There was little enthusiasm among predominantly Afro-Caribbean Virgin Islanders for arch-segregationist Woodrow Wilson. Neither Native Americans nor French Creoles welcomed the Louisiana Purchase. The Mexican Cession, the Alaska purchase and the annexation of Hawaii were similarly opposed by many if not all of those affected.

Trump’s Greenland Gambit

U.S. history gives the president reason to believe the public will come around in time.

​https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trumps-greenland-gambit-foreign-policy-national-security-a8403412?mod=hp_opin_pos_6#cxrecs_s

By Walter Russell Mead

Follow

March 31, 2025 5:06 pm ET

Buildings in Sisimiut, Greenland, March 30. Photo: Juliette Pavy/Bloomberg News

“We can’t just ignore the president’s desires,” Vice President JD Vance told Americans stationed at Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland. And what is true of vice presidents is also true of your Global View columnist. Whether the topic is tariffs, territorial expansion, relations with Russia, the future of America’s alliances or the balance of power in the Middle East, understanding what President Trump really wants is the key to analyzing where American foreign policy is headed in this stormy and fateful year.

Disentangling Mr. Trump’s true intentions is difficult. The blizzard of foreign and domestic initiatives unfolding around the most hyperactive White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt and the extreme unconventionality of many of the Trump administration’s policies make this administration singularly difficult to analyze. The president’s approach to politics, intuitive rather than analytical and working from intellectual and moral foundations that largely reject the mainstream consensus of the post-Cold War era, adds to the complexity of the task.

The administration’s conscious use of shock and outrage as political tools makes cool, levelheaded assessment harder still. The president’s preternatural talent for baiting his adversaries into self-defeating, over-the-top responses to his provocations is a not insignificant factor in his meteoric rise.

And so we come to Greenland and the president’s desire to, in his words, get it. Mr. Trump’s interest in the territory should not be underestimated. As an acquisition, it would give him an enduring place in the history books. As an issue, it polarizes opinion in exactly the way the president likes, driving his critics into paroxysms of ridicule and rage, while potentially moving the national debate in a direction largely favorable to him.

For the bipartisan establishment, and for virtually everyone who believes that the maintenance of alliances, respect for international law and due regard for ethics should inform American foreign policy, Mr. Trump’s Greenland policy is a political absurdity and a moral monstrosity. By threatening military force to seize the self-governing territory from peaceful and democratic ally Denmark, the Trump administration is blowing up both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the whole framework of international laws and norms on which the trans-Atlantic diplomatic community has long believed that world peace depends.

To make matters worse, Denmark stands ready to comply with almost any American requests to base additional forces in Greenland. From the perspective of Trump critics, Washington’s attack on both NATO and the foundations of the rules-based order appears gratuitous, and the cost in damaged relationships and weakened alliances entirely unnecessary.

A Fox News survey conducted in March showed only 26% of respondents supporting the Trump plan for Greenland. Yet American history gives the president and his allies reason to believe that the public will ultimately come around. Three of the four men on Mount Rushmore promoted territorial expansion. (George Washington tried to conquer Canada, Thomas Jefferson acquired the vast Louisiana territory from France and Theodore Roosevelt grabbed the canal zone in Panama.) Even Abraham Lincoln used the possibility of an American attack on Canada as implicit leverage to keep Britain neutral during the Civil War. In 1917, worried about Denmark’s weakening grip on the Danish West Indies, Woodrow Wilson purchased what are now the U.S. Virgin Islands for $25 million.

Lightly populated but strategically significant, Greenland is the kind of territory that, historically, Americans have liked to annex. At roughly one fourth the size of the continental U.S., Leif Erikson’s home island would be the largest American territorial acquisition ever, beating out the Louisiana Purchase by about 9,000 square miles. Its roughly 57,000 inhabitants give it a population about half as large as the estimated population of the lands Jefferson acquired. Greenland has long been an object of American interest. During World War II the Roosevelt administration declared the island a protectorate, fending off both Anglo-Canadian and Axis efforts to control it. In 1946 the Truman administration offered Denmark $100 million to buy it.

That Greenlanders object to American blandishments may matter less to American opinion than Trump critics expect. There was little enthusiasm among predominantly Afro-Caribbean Virgin Islanders for arch-segregationist Woodrow Wilson. Neither Native Americans nor French Creoles welcomed the Louisiana Purchase. The Mexican Cession, the Alaska purchase and the annexation of Hawaii were similarly opposed by many if not all of those affected.

Opponents of the Greenland gambit have serious and cogent arguments to make. Even threatening a loyal if sometimes slack NATO ally with invasion is a radical step whose consequences will reverberate for decades. However much it welcomes the weakening of NATO, the Kremlin would inevitably view the annexation as a hostile step, undercutting Mr. Trump’s hopes to pry Vladimir Putin away from his colleagues in Beijing. But from the standpoint of both Trump supporters and swing voters, the case against annexation isn’t a slam dunk.

To be effective, Trump administration critics need to think more and rail less.

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Free Expression: Great-power theory would relieve the U.S. of some burdens, but poses risks to the national interest Photo: Xie Huanchi/Sergei Bulkin/CNP/Zuma Press

Appeared in the April 1, 2025, print edition as 'Trump’s Greenland Gambit'.

12. Trump Says He Settled on ‘Liberation Day’ Tariff Plan, but Doesn’t Reveal It

​Will this work? For all the arguments on both sides, we will never know until we try and the President is not afraid to try.

Trump Says He Settled on ‘Liberation Day’ Tariff Plan, but Doesn’t Reveal It

President wants to use tariffs to both raise revenue and negotiate with other countries

https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trump-tariffs-liberation-day-plan-46b3d82b?mod=hp_lead_pos1

By Gavin Bade

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, Brian Schwartz

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 and Vipal Monga

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March 31, 2025 9:00 pm ET

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President Trump said he isn’t worried the planned tariffs on other countries could push them toward China. ‘A lot of countries are going to be dropping their tariffs,’ he said. Photo: Francis Chung/Press Pool

WASHINGTON—President Trump said that he had settled on a plan for his latest batch of tariffs expected this week but didn’t reveal what he had decided, after his economic team struggled to coalesce around a remade U.S. trade strategy.

“I’ve settled, yeah,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday evening when asked whether he has decided on his “Liberation Day” plans, a term the president has used for tariffs to be announced by the self-imposed deadline of Wednesday.

Trump’s team has pitched him on several ideas of how to tariff other countries, including a 20% global tariff on virtually all imports. Throughout Monday, some of his aides were under the impression that he hadn’t committed to a particular path, according to people familiar with the matter. The people stressed that conversations remain fluid, and Trump’s comments that he had decided on an approach caught some White House advisers off guard.

The debate behind closed doors highlighted the conflicting priorities of the president. The biggest one: He wants to both raise revenue with tariffs and use them as leverage to get other nations to lower their own duties, or make other policy changes. But if tariffs are subject to negotiation, and could be lowered over time, that would raise doubts about how much revenue could ultimately be expected from their imposition. And while his team doesn’t want to seem as though they are backing down from Trump’s campaign promises, some aides are concerned about the effect tariffs could have on prices.

All eyes will be on what Trump has decided: whether to apply a universal tariff, of up to 20% on all imports, to virtually all U.S. trade partners, or levy individual tariff rates for all countries that could be subject to negotiation—the so-called reciprocal tariff approach.

Trump 2.0

How Trump’s Trade War Is Playing Out at Breakneck Speed

“A universal rate would be more in alignment with trying to rebalance the global trade deficit question and…even give a nod to using [tariffs] for revenue,” said Everett Eissenstat, former deputy director of the National Economic Council in Trump’s first term. But he added that the reciprocal approach “would be more aligned with trying to alleviate unfair trading practices country by country.”

In recent days, some advisers thought he was leaning toward the universal option, and had discussed a plan this weekend with a 20% across-the-board rate. But another top aide said on Monday afternoon he had a meeting with his team, and asked for more information.

Trump had backed an across-the-board tariff on the campaign trail before publicly pivoting to a country-by-country approach over the past month. In the final hours before the April 2 deadline, competing factions have been vying to convince him that their preferred approach is better for an “America-first” trade policy.

The president and his aides have said tariffs would be used to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., as well as raise revenue to offset the renewal of Trump’s signature tax cuts. White House adviser Peter Navarro, a supporter of universal tariffs, recently said that tariffs could raise $600 billion a year, which could be used to lower income taxes. 

At the same time, Trump and his allies have said that tariffs can also be used as a negotiating tool: leverage to get other nations to lower their own duties, or make non-trade policy changes, such as combating migration and drug trafficking. National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett has been a key proponent of the reciprocal, country-by-country tariff plan, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Those sets of goals can be contradictory, however, leading to a divide in the administration in recent days over how to proceed.

If reciprocal tariffs are subject to negotiation, it could also mean global companies are less likely to push new investments into the U.S., since they would have less certainty the duties would be in place over the long term.

Conversely, setting a long-term, flat tariff rate could lower the incentive for governments to negotiate with the U.S. on trade, tax and regulatory policies.

The administration publicly insists it can raise revenue and use tariffs as a negotiating tool at the same time. Even if some tariffs are in place permanently, as universal-tariff supporters envision, Trump has still been eager to impose additional tariffs on individual industries and countries. That was the plan he pitched on the campaign trail: an across-the-board levy of up to 20% on nearly all nations, plus higher tariffs on specific industries and adversarial countries such as China. 

One government official in Canada said there is hope that if the administration imposes a universal tariff, they may be able to negotiate down some other duties such as the 25% levies that Trump has threatened on Canada and Mexico for what he has said is related to the drug trade from those countries. The official said that Canada is nonetheless bracing for Trump to take a maximalist approach Wednesday, when Trump is planning an event at the Rose Garden to unveil his plans.

An inspection area at the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego. Photo: Ariana Drehsler/Bloomberg News

The Coalition for a Prosperous America, a protectionist advocacy group whose former chief executive is now associate director for economic policy at the Office of Management and Budget, has long championed an across-the-board levy. The group has pushed analysis to the administration in recent weeks touting how much revenue a universal tariff will raise, and argue it is the best way to ensure companies re-shore manufacturing to the U.S. 

“A reciprocal tariff strategy that prioritizes foreign countries lowering their trade barriers and market access is directly counter to President Trump’s goals of increasing domestic production and raising revenue to pay for pro-working class policies like no tax on tips,” said Nick Iacovella, executive vice president at the Coalition for a Prosperous America. Universal tariffs, combined with ones placed on sectors, would create a predictable business environment, he added.

Hassett, who was an outspoken tariff critic before joining Trump’s second administration, has been a leading proponent of a negotiable, reciprocal tariff plan behind the scenes. He has said on television that a number of nations have already approached the administration, offering to lower their tariffs in exchange for lenience from Trump on April 2. The hope of tariff skeptics in Trump’s orbit is that kicking off bilateral negotiations over U.S. tariff rates could result in global tariffs eventually going lower over time. 

Under a reciprocal tariff system, instead of a universal one, Trump “might very well create a system where tariffs are lowered, not raised,” said Stephen Moore, a first-term Trump senior economic adviser and tariff skeptic.

A middle-ground approach could include targeting a swath of countries with lower duties, while singling out a subset for higher rates, which could be individualized or imposed as a group. The administration previously considered plans for three tiers of tariffs—low, medium and high—before abandoning that plan in favor of individualized rates.

13. U.S. Sanctions Chinese Officials, Citing Repression in Hong Kong and Tibet

​Excellent. We must never be afraid to call out authoritarian regimes for their human rights abuses. But we must not neglect Xinjiang and the Uyghurs.

I hope POTUS will invoke President Reagan in his foreign policy when dealing with dictators: "Tear down this wall."

U.S. Sanctions Chinese Officials, Citing Repression in Hong Kong and Tibet

Sanctions signal an appetite in Trump administration for an approach to China that focusses on human rights concerns

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/u-s-sanctions-chinese-officials-citing-repression-in-hong-kong-and-tibet-58c36565?mod=latest_headlines

By Austin Ramzy

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Updated April 1, 2025 5:04 am ET

The sanctions are the first of Trump’s current term that target officials who handle Hong Kong policy. Photo: Lam Yik/Bloomberg News

The U.S. State Department imposed sanctions Monday on Chinese officials, citing a continuing political crackdown in Hong Kong—and efforts to extend that repression to people in the U.S.—and restrictions on access to Tibet.

The sanctions are the first of Trump’s current term on officials who handle Hong Kong policy, signaling an appetite in the new administration for an approach to China that places a priority on human rights concerns. The Biden administration and the first Trump administration previously levied penalties on dozens of top Hong Kong officials including the city’s current chief executive, John Lee, and his predecessor, Carrie Lam.

The six officials sanctioned on Monday included Raymond Siu, the Hong Kong police commissioner, and Paul Lam, the city’s justice secretary. The penalties include the freezing of assets in the U.S. and blocks on use of the U.S. banking system, which often makes it difficult to use international banks.

The sanctions “demonstrate the Trump Administration’s commitment to hold to account those responsible for depriving people in Hong Kong of protected rights and freedoms or who commit acts of transnational repression on U.S. soil or against U.S. persons,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.

Hong Kong imposed a sweeping national security law in 2020 following a year of large antigovernment protests across the city, a former British colony that had been promised 50 years of a “high degree of autonomy” upon its return to China in 1997.

Trump’s overall strategy for China remains unclear, as he has de-emphasized human rights while imposing tariffs and focusing on trade imbalances. Rubio by contrast is a longstanding China hawk who was himself sanctioned by Beijing in retaliation for previous U.S. actions against Chinese officials.

Many frictions remain in the U.S.-China relationship including Taiwan, the self-ruled island claimed by Beijing. China’s military said it was launching a new round of military drills near Taiwan on Tuesday as a warning to its president, Lai Ching-te, who has accused Beijing of hostile intentions.

Raymond Siu, the Hong Kong police commissioner, was among those sanctioned. Photo: Michael Ho Wai Lee/Zuma Press

Trump is also likely to include China in a new round of tariff increases this week, although details have yet to be revealed. Deals for a BlackRock-led consortium to acquire ports controlled by Hong Kong company CK Hutchison, including two near the Panama Canal, and for TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance to sell the short-video app to a non-Chinese buyer, both face deadlines this week.

The new sanctions on Monday add human rights concerns into the mix.

Hong Kong’s security law has been used to target pro-democracy Hong Kong activists, including some in the U.S., U.K. and Australia. The Hong Kong authorities have offered bounties for some of the exiled activists accused of violating the security law.

“Many of us have endured relentless pressure and threats,” Frances Hui, a Hong Kong activist who was granted asylum in the U.S. in 2022, said in a statement in response to the sanctions announced Monday. In December 2023, the Hong Kong government announced a $128,000 bounty for her and four other exiled activists, following similar rewards for eight others.

The Chinese government denounced the latest sanctions. “This is a gross interference in China’s internal affairs and Hong Kong affairs, and a serious violation of international law and basic norms governing international relations,” China’s embassy in Washington said in a statement.

The Hong Kong government said the sanctions “clearly exposed the U.S.’s barbarity under its hegemony, which is exactly the same as its recent tactics in bullying and coercing various countries and regions.”

The State Department didn’t name the officials penalized with visa restrictions for limiting access to Tibet. The U.S. considers visa information to be confidential and doesn’t typically release the names of officials who are barred from traveling to the U.S.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected U.S. criticism over access to Tibet, saying that the region had received more than 300,000 foreign tourists last year. Special measures for managing foreigners entering Tibet were necessary because of the region’s “special geographic and climatic conditions,” Guo Jiakun, a foreign ministry spokesman, said.

Write to Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com

14. Hegseth orders review of physical standards for military combat roles

​I think the paradox is that all women I have spoken with who themselves actually want to volunteer for combat arms MOS' do not want different standards and certainly not lowered standards. The only question is what are the right standards for the job regardless of gender.

Hegseth orders review of physical standards for military combat roles

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/03/31/hegseth-orders-review-of-physical-standards-for-military-combat-roles/?utm

By Leo Shane III

 Mar 31, 2025, 01:52 PM

Members of a platoon of female U.S. Marine Corps recruits gear up before training in hand-to-hand combat at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, S.C., in 2023. (Stephen B. Morton/AP)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Sunday ordered a 60-day review of military combat arms standards to ensure that exceptions are not being made for female troops to assume the physically demanding roles.

The review follows past concerns from Hegseth that military readiness has diminished since 2016, when combat roles were first opened to women. Roughly 4,800 women serve in Army infantry, armor and artillery jobs, according to data provided by the Defense Department late last year.

Although military leaders have testified that standards have not been lowered for entry into those combat posts, conservative groups have insisted that women are being subjected to lower physical fitness requirements than their male counterparts, and they demanded changes in the military’s approach.

Defense Department officials did not say whether the findings due in May could result in some of those female service members being asked to leave their current roles or being forced out.

RELATED

Women in combat ‘proficient,’ SecDef says, dismissing calls for changeAustin praised women in the military and said they should not be removed from front-line fighting posts.

By Leo Shane III and Noah Robertson

In a social media statement, Hegseth said the move was needed to ensure “the highest and equal standards” for all troops.

“For far too long, we allowed standards to slip, with different standards for men and women in combat arms. That’s not acceptable,” he said.

The memo ordering the review, released by Defense Department officials on Monday, calls for a redefinition of combat arms occupations and non-combat roles. It specifically lists three military specialties “which require heightened entry-level and sustained physical fitness.”

For ground combat operations, standards must include “the ability to carry heavy loads, endure prolonged physical exertion, and perform effectively in austere, hostile environments.”

For special operations forces, the standards will incorporate “advanced swimming, climbing, parachuting, and the ability to operate in extreme environments,” as well as “sustained peak physical performance.”

And for specialized operations, the memo calls for a focus on “proficiency in those unique and demanding tasks such as aquatic rescue, repair, and demolition.”

“All entry-level and sustained physical fitness requirements within combat arms positions must be sex-neutral, based solely on the operational demands of the occupation and the readiness needed to confront any adversary,” the memo states.

It continues, “In establishing those standards, the secretaries of the military departments may not establish standards that would result in any existing service member being held to a lower standard.”

Implementation of the new standards will happen over the next six months, according to department officials.

Under the direction of Hegseth, military offices have already begun removing some photos, stories and web pages detailing historic accounts of women’s contributions to the military. Department leaders have labeled the works as running afoul of new rules designed to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Women make up about 18% of the current active-duty force, according to department statistics. Female troops must meet different fitness standards for general occupations in the ranks than male service members, but they must pass gender-neutral standards for combat posts.

In an podcast appearance last November, Hegseth was critical of women in serving in any combat occupations, asserting that “everything about men and women serving together makes the situation more complicated, and complication in combat means casualties are worse.”

“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” Hegseth said. “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal. It has made fighting more complicated.”

Military leaders at the time pushed back against those statements. Then Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said female combat troops “add significant value to the finest and most lethal fighting force on Earth.”

About Leo Shane III

Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.

15. Every Marine a Drone Operator? New Team Aims to Compete, Set Standards for Unmanned Aircraft Warfare.

​This reminds me of the idea that country boys and Boy Scouts would make the best soldiers because of their outdoor experience and rifle marksmanship training.

However, in today's world, so many of our recruits may already possess drone skills (and first person view operational skills) when they enter the military. It may not be too far-fetched to say every Marine is a drone operator (in addition to still being a rifleman always).

But it will not be only the front line combat forces that can exploit drones. Those who have to pull security in rear area logistics sites and really at any military location could benefit from employing drones (and for also conducting counter-drone operations). Every cook, baker, and candlestick maker (to include military musicians who have the secondary mission of pulling headquarters security) can benefit from drone skills.

Every Marine a Drone Operator? New Team Aims to Compete, Set Standards for Unmanned Aircraft Warfare.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/03/31/every-marine-drone-operator-new-team-aims-compete-set-standards-unmanned-aircraft-warfare.html?utm

A Neros Archer first-person view drone sits on a case during a demonstration range at Weapons Training Battalion on Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, March 7, 2025.. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Joshua Barker)

Military.com | By Drew F. Lawrence

Published March 31, 2025 at 6:12pm ET

In mid-December, Col. Scott Cuomo, the commander of Marine Corps Base Quantico's Weapons Training Battalion, walked into a holiday party with senior service officials wearing an ugly Christmas sweater.

Within minutes and amid the holiday jubilation, he was confronted by a problem -- and subsequently a mission -- that has been top of mind for officials across the Marine Corps and the broader Department of Defense, especially as the war in Ukraine continues to rage on: drones.

"'We are way behind where we need to be on everything to do with drones,'" he recalled being told at the holiday party. "'How would you feel about taking on a drone team mission similar to what Weapons Training Battalion has done with the Marine Corps shooting team for 124 years?'"

Read Next: Bodies of 3 US Soldiers Recovered from Swamp in Lithuania; Search for Last Missing Soldier Ongoing

Just a few days after the New Year and nearly three weeks after Cuomo received his mission, the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team was born -- part of the service's response and now the ground-level epicenter in the effort to deal with the rapid proliferation of first-person view, or FPV, drones.

The Marine Corps announced the establishment of the team Monday, and said that the primary mission of its handful of members would be to internalize lessons learned from modern combat scenarios, provide feedback to the fleet on developing drone technologies, and compete in interservice, international and national contests to hone and showcase their skills.

The establishment of the team represents a watershed and urgent moment for the Marine Corps. It's a service-level attempt at answering broader implications of modern drone warfare while industry, academia and the overall military continue to grapple with and scale the capability for future conflicts.

Since the 1990s, drone production and technology had plugged along at a "steady diffusion," according to the Center for a New American Security. But the market that the U.S. and Israel once dominated was "long gone" after rivals such as China and Iran began developing their own low-cost drones.

The urgency only increased after Russia's renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when drone transfers skyrocketed and first-person videos of cheaply made "suicide" and reconnaissance drones launching across eastern Europe spread across social media -- and also into the minds of military planners who realized that the nature of combined warfare had changed dramatically.

"The general feedback of everyone who is associated with a unit that is going to be the first foot in the next fight is that we're in trouble if we don't figure out this drone thing," Nathan Ecelbarger, the president of the United States National Drone Association, said in an interview with Military.com on Monday.

The USNDA has been a critical aspect in the emergence of the Marine Corps' drone team by providing a mechanism through competitions where service members can bolster their competency with the equipment. It also offers a chance to test "tech vs. tech," where industry, academia and service leaders can meet and collaborate, Ecelbarger said, which would bear fruitful datasets in an industry that changes nearly "every three days."

The Marine Corps Attack Drone Team will take part in its first competition against the 75th Ranger Regiment starting in late June, an event hosted by the USNDA's Military Drone Crucible Championship in Florida.

"There are very few places in the U.S. where you can even test laser, counter-UAS [unmanned aircraft] systems that are being prototyped right now," he said. "Right now, I could take a credit card to Best Buy and buy a Chinese-made drone, and as a consumer, I own the airspace from zero to 400 feet. I don't need clearance; I don't need to request permission from air traffic control."

For service members, Ecelbarger said, the barriers for drone flight training are much higher because they are contending with military airspace deconfliction; frequency approvals; long certification processes; and policies that put drones in the same category as bigger aircraft, rather than something that is as expendable as a round of .556.

"We need to start thinking about UAS as rounds and not aircraft," Maj. Gen. Jason Woodworth, head of Marine Corps Installations Command, said earlier this month.

Another challenge is getting parts and integrating training -- and the service is working toward making it scalable. In a shop on Quantico earlier this month, Marine Corps machinists were toiling away at drone parts, soldering circuit boards and fixing wings onto support structures that would soon carry them buzzing into the air.

Holding up a drone he had built, Gunnery Sgt. Gregory Brown said that three weeks beforehand he "didn't know a single thing about soldering electronics and configuring radio telemetry," but was now "pretty confident that I can turn around and teach this skill to Marines to support our drone effort."

Currently, the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit has issued a "blue list" of companies -- and therefore parts -- meant to help the military choose "winners" in the drone game, Ecelbarger said. However, "it does leave a lot of room for emerging technologies" in an industry that changes so quickly, where a new prototype could be outpaced before it even gets to production.

"It's the question of should warfighters wait until something is on the blue list and it rolls over, maybe to a program of record in order to just start training on the tech that is emerging?" he said. "Because our adversaries are going to use [drones] whether it's on the list or not."

Pointing to the drones the Marines had built, Brown said "these were built for about $200-$300, it can do pretty much anything that we want it to do, and I can upgrade it. The catch is that this is made out of mostly Chinese components, because it was cheap and it's readily available, commercial."

He added that to keep compliant with current regulations, it would cost just under $1,000 to build, "which is still considered much cheaper than the alternative, which is many thousands of dollars."

On a range outside, the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team demonstrated its capability with a "blue list" approved Neros Archer first-person view drone, flying it out to a notional enemy machine gun emplacement and then sending another to drop its payload onto the target.

"It's a simple $2,000 for the system," Cuomo said after the demonstration, comparing it to the cost effectiveness and utility of the Javelin anti-tank missile system, where one round can cost upward of $200,000 with a range of 2,500 kilometers. This drone can reach upward of 15 kilometers, for a fraction of the cost and with anti-personnel, anti-materiel and anti-armor payloads, Cuomo said.

The service hopes to get scalable drone capabilities down to the squad level, and infrastructure around that effort, such as bolstering military occupational specialties toward drone users, is already underway.

"If they had a kinetic payload, they could just extend the range of a rifle squad times somewhere around 15 or 20," Cuomo added.

The Marine Corps hopes to mirror the development of the drone team after its tried and true history of marksmanship, specifically with the Marine Corps Shooting Team, which falls under Cuomo's command at Quantico.

So, it was not surprising when Cuomo recounted the landmark events at the Weapons Training Battalion earlier this month in a brief to senior service officials and Marines in a room that showcased the service's marksmanship excellence, lined with walls depicting crackshot marksmen over the last 100-plus years.

He outlined the two-fold mission of the drone team: First, putting a team together and building expertise. The second part is much more complicated: Making the effort scalable across the Marine Corps. Like its efforts on drone proliferation, the service, now widely known for its fanatical reverence for marksmanship, was not always the best at shooting.

"In 1899, our ninth commandant said we weren't very good at marksmanship," Cuomo said. "We had about 6,000 Marines in the Corps at the time; 80 of them were qualified in any way shape or form. So in 1901, he created a shooting team."

More than 100 years later, the service is relying on that method to develop expertise and create policy, manuals and training events to use drone technology on future battlefields, as well as imbue the systems into the Marine Corps in a way that changes the culture around it.

"How did we get good? How did we establish a culture of every Marine a rifleman?" Cuomo said. "Because we took the best shooters in the Corps, and we brought them all here."

Related: Marine Corps Wants Rifle-Mounted Jammers, 'Buckshot-Like' Ammo to Help Grunts Counter Drones

Related Topics: Military Headlines Marine Corps Topics Military Technology Drones Marine Corps Training

Drew F. Lawrence

About Drew F. Lawrence

Drew F. Lawrence is a reporter for Military.com, specializing in covering the Marine Corps. He hosts, writes and produces the publication's flagship podcast, Fire Watch, a program that tells impactful culture and accountability stories about service members, veterans and their families.  Read Full Bio

16. The Hypersonic Threat

​Excerpts:

There is, however, a serious risk that the Pentagon and Congress miss the crucial need for sustained hypersonic and counter-hypersonic funding. As hypersonic threats increase in sophistication in the 2020s, counter-hypersonic technology developed in the 2020s will become increasingly ineffective. The next defense budget should provide sustained support not only to offensive hypersonic deployment, but to long-term counter-hypersonic development and deployment as well.

The First Trump administration began a welcome shift in U.S. defense policy planning away from the unfocused concepts of its predecessor towards a paradigm of strategic competition. If the Second Trump administration is serious about this competition, its Defense Department must demand from the Congress sustained support for crucial technologies, most obviously hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, to ensure the United States retains a key deterrence advantage over China and its authoritarian partners. American adversaries understand the necessity of technological competition and are playing to win. Only strong leadership from the Executive on down can ensure the U.S. emerges in a sound military position by the end of the decade.

The Hypersonic Threat

By Seth Cropsey

March 31, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/03/31/the_hypersonic_threat_1100854.html?utm

At the beginning of this year, North Korea claimed to have tested a hypersonic weapon. While doubts remain about the program’s technical maturity, the North Korean test fits a broader trend: hypersonics are no longer emerging technologies, but a key element of modern military arsenals. Their complexity and cost, alongside the potential for diffusion between American adversaries, necessitates a focus on hypersonics and counter-hypersonics in U.S. defense procurement. The Pentagon ought to recognize that investments today are critical, not simply to field a small number of nascent hypersonics, but to build the foundation for a long-term U.S. hypersonic weapons program.

In technical terms, hypersonic weapons travel faster than Mach 5. To be sure, all intercontinental ballistic missiles break this threshold. However, they travel on a predictable trajectory, reducing the difficulty of interception. What makes modern hypersonics different is their speed and maneuverability. Whether a glide vehicle mounted on a ballistic missile or as an advanced cruise missile, a modern hypersonic accelerates at extremely high speed towards its target and follows an unpredictable flight trajectory. Modern missile interception technology is extremely advanced, but when fractions of a second determine the difference between an interception and a strike, a missile that can quickly change its flight path and elevation becomes a serious threat.

All hypersonic development timelines are long. Modern hypersonic weapons development in the West began in the 2000s with the Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research (SCIFiRE) program between the U.S. and Australia. This engineering rested on previous research throughout the Cold War and 1990s. It took another 17 years to translate this into an operational program, the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM), an air-launched weapon for U.S. and Australian use. The U.S.’ ground-launched weapon, the Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) ballistic missile mounted glide vehicle, was first tested in 2017, and is likely to be fielded this year in a limited capacity.

Initial hypersonic development has taken decades partly because of deficient budgetary focus in the early 2010s but also given of the technical complexity hypersonic weapons entail. When an object moves at very high speeds – traveling at least a mile every second – friction-generated heat increases, demanding specific, durable materials that can survive these temperatures.

However, the sheer number of hypersonic programs in or near deployment demonstrates that the major powers have solved several daunting technical challenges. China has fielded a medium-range missile mounted hypersonic glide vehicle, the DF-ZF, since 2019, and is close to fielding an intercontinental ballistic missile mounted glide vehicle on the DF-21. Russia has employed two hypersonic weapons against Ukraine, the Zircon cruise missile and Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile. India has several programs in advanced development stages, as does Japan. Iran allegedly has a medium-range hypersonic ballistic missile, the Fatteh-2. Although North Korean engineering has obvious gaps, its newfound relationship with Russia likely gives it access to advanced Russian military technology, making a North Korean hypersonic feasible within this decade.

The first generation of hypersonics has weak points. The Russian Kinzhal, for example, struggles to maneuver effectively given its relatively poor construction, while the Zircon slows down enough during its terminal phase for top-line Western missile defenses to intercept it. China’s hypersonics are likely for use against large, static targets, most notably valuable bases like Guam, but anti-ship ballistic missiles still have serious targeting issues.

The trouble is, hypersonics will improve quite rapidly as national militaries field and test them at scale. This has been true of almost every major military technology. The fighter aircraft and bombers of the 1920s and early 1930s were largely obsolete by the time the Second World War began. Polish investments in its high-wing fighter aircraft, for example, were obviated by 1939, when the Luftwaffe’s all-metal low-wing designs quickly gained air superiority. Similarly, the bomber technology of the 1930s, which the UK believed would serve as an insuperable deterrent against long-term aggression, could not conduct a strategic bombardment against Germany. Technology evolves – it is crucial not only to field an initially-viable weapon, but to guarantee uninterrupted development of newer, more modern variants over time.

For hypersonic attack, many heat-shielding problems will be solved by the 2030s, while new targeting methods will enable glide vehicles mounted on ballistic missiles to hit mobile targets. Moreover, although cost and sophistication will constrain hypersonic arsenals, a growing proportion of older weapons may well be devoted to nuclear delivery, increasing the stress on American and allied homeland missile defense systems.

This makes long-term hypersonic attack and defense crucial to U.S. strategy. The former has received far more public and Congressional support than the latter. In FY2025, the Pentagon requested nearly $7 billion for hypersonic weapons, two billion more than the previous fiscal year, and another $11 billion for long-range strike weapons that include hypersonic programs. By contrast, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) requested slightly under $200 million for hypersonic interceptor funding. In 2023, the Congress demanded the MDA deploy an initial Glide Phase Interceptor (GPI) system, the most advanced and mature U.S. counter-hypersonic, by 2029, several years earlier than anticipated. MDA has awarded a $500 million contract to accelerate deployment.

There is, however, a serious risk that the Pentagon and Congress miss the crucial need for sustained hypersonic and counter-hypersonic funding. As hypersonic threats increase in sophistication in the 2020s, counter-hypersonic technology developed in the 2020s will become increasingly ineffective. The next defense budget should provide sustained support not only to offensive hypersonic deployment, but to long-term counter-hypersonic development and deployment as well.

The First Trump administration began a welcome shift in U.S. defense policy planning away from the unfocused concepts of its predecessor towards a paradigm of strategic competition. If the Second Trump administration is serious about this competition, its Defense Department must demand from the Congress sustained support for crucial technologies, most obviously hypersonics and counter-hypersonics, to ensure the United States retains a key deterrence advantage over China and its authoritarian partners. American adversaries understand the necessity of technological competition and are playing to win. Only strong leadership from the Executive on down can ensure the U.S. emerges in a sound military position by the end of the decade.

Seth Cropsey is president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and deputy Undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of Mayday and Seablindness.

17. China launches military drills from ‘multiple directions’ around Taiwan, testing US resolve

​Excerpts:

Zhu Fenglian, a spokesperson for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, called the military exercises “a resolute warning to the Lai Ching-te administration’s rampant provocations for ‘independence.’”

Lai, who has long been a champion of Taiwan’s sovereignty, has called on China to cease its intimidation, but he has also spoken frequently of the importance of maintaining “peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.”

Polls consistently show people in Taiwan, a thriving and outspoken democracy, have no desire to be ruled by China, an authoritarian one-party state.

The latest drills follow a series of incidents that have ratcheted up tensions across the Taiwan Strait, including Taipei’s detention in late February of a cargo ship crewed by Chinese nationals it was investigating for allegedly cutting an undersea internet cable in the second such incident in a period of months.

Last month, Lai called China a “foreign hostile force” and ramped up national security measures to combat Chinese espionage and infiltration. Days later, Taiwan deported a Chinese influencer for backing a military takeover of the island democracy by Beijing.

Taiwan has long been seen as a potential flashpoint that could spark hot conflict between China and the United States.

The US maintains unofficial relations with Taipei and is bound by law to provide Taiwan with weapons for its defense. Washington has long maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity on whether it would come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of an incursion from China.

China launches military drills from ‘multiple directions’ around Taiwan, testing US resolve | CNN

CNN · by Simone McCarthy, Nectar Gan, Eric Cheung · April 1, 2025

This screenshot from a video of the drills released on April 1, 2025 by China's military shows a Type 054A frigate of the People's Liberation Army Navy.

PLA Eastern Theatre Command/Weibo

Hong Kong/Taipei CNN —

The Chinese military said Tuesday it had launched joint exercises involving its army, navy, air force and rocket force around Taiwan as a “stern warning,” days after US defense chief Pete Hegseth vowed to counter “China’s aggression” on his first visit to Asia.

China’s armed forces will “close in” on the self-governing island from “multiple directions” in the drills and practice maneuvers including “assault on maritime and ground targets” and “blockade on key areas and sea lanes” to test joint operations capabilities of the troops, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s Eastern Theater Command said in a statement on social media.

“It is a stern warning and forceful deterrence against ‘Taiwan Independence’ separatist forces, and it is a legitimate and necessary action to safeguard China’s sovereignty and national unity,” the statement added.

China’s latest military exercises come as Taiwan is looking on nervously as US President Donald Trump transforms Washington’s global relationships with his mercantilist “America First” foreign policy, discarding decades-old guarantees towards Europe and pushing long-standing Asian allies and partners to pay more for US protection.

Meanwhile, officials close to Trump have repeatedly emphasized the need for the US to focus its attention and resources on countering China’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific.

For Taiwan, a democracy of some 23 million people that sits just 80 miles from China at its nearest point, the drills are the latest reminder of the threat that comes from its giant Communist Party-run neighbor, which claims the island as its own and has vowed to seize it by force if necessary.

Taiwan officials have condemned the drills as “reckless” and “irresponsible.”

“It came without justification, violates international laws and is totally unacceptable. Democracies need to condemn China for being a troublemaker,” Joseph Wu, secretary-general of Taiwan’s National Security Council, said in a post on social platform X.

The Taiwanese Defense Ministry said it detected 71 Chinese military aircraft and 13 PLA navy vessels near Taiwan, as well as a group of warships led by China’s first domestically built aircraft carrier, the Shandong, in the West Pacific.

The ministry added that its troops are on “high vigilance” to respond to the situation.

Taiwan’s military dispatched its own aircraft and ships, and deployed land-based missile systems to closely monitor the situation and respond appropriately, the island’s Defense Ministry said in a statement about the Shandong aircraft carrier group.

The Eastern Theater Command released a video of the PLA taking part in the drills on Tuesday, showing Chinese frigates sailing, military aircraft taking off and missiles being erected into launch position.

Later in the day, it said it organized naval and air force formations to conduct exercises in the northern, southern and eastern waters surrounding Taiwan, in coordination with conventional missiles and long-range rocket artillery. It did not say how long the exercises would last.

The Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong is seen in a screenshot taken from a video eleased by the Eastern Theatre Command of China's People's Liberation Army on Tuesday, April 1.

Eastern Theatre Command/Handout/Reuters

Hegseth’s Asia trip

In Taiwan, government officials and experts view the Chinese drills as a signal to the Trump administration, where several key cabinet officials are hawkish on China, in particular Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

During his first trip to Asia as US defense secretary last week, Hegseth vowed to enhance America’s military alliance with the Philippines to “reestablish deterrence” to counter “China’s aggression” in the Indo-Pacific region, and called Japan an “indispensable partner in deterring communist Chinese military aggression,” including across the Taiwan Strait.

An internal analysis by the Taiwan government cited Hegseth’s visit as among the “external reasons” for China’s latest drills.

“They have reaffirmed the importance of security and stability in the Taiwan Strait, and confirmed that the US is shifting its security focus to the Indo-Pacific region. This has put great pressure on Beijing’s intentions,” according to the analysis, shared with CNN by a senior Taiwanese national security official.

“Faced with upcoming US-China trade talks and the expected measures against China, Beijing has opted for restraint to avoid actions that could be seen as directly confronting the US. Taiwan serves as the perfect pretext, prompting Beijing to launch these military drills immediately after the US Secretary of Defense left Asia,” the analysis added.

Su Tzu-yun, a director at the Institute for National Defense Security Research in Taiwan, said unlike the two “Joint Sword-2024” military drills China conducted last year, the latest exercises came as a “surprise” on Tuesday morning.

“I think Beijing is trying to show its signal to Washington,” Su said.

On Tuesday, China’s coast guard said it also launched “law-enforcement patrols” in waters surrounding Taiwan, carrying out drills including interception and detention of “unwarranted vessels.”

Rising tensions

The Chinese military has ramped up regular patrols as well as military exercises in the air and waters around Taiwan, part of a broader assertiveness of China’s territorial claims under Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Major exercises often serve as means for Beijing to express displeasure with the island – as well as to better understand how Taiwan monitors and responds to military pressure from China.

China’s military has in recent years launched drills encircling Taiwan and simulating a blockade of the island – one of the strategies that experts say could be used if Beijing ultimately decides to move to take control using military might.

Zhang Chi, a professor at the PLA’s National Defense University in Beijing, said Tuesday’s drills don’t have a specific codename because such military exercises have increasingly become routine.

“This largely indicates that the exercises we see today have become a new normal for the PLA and the Eastern Theater Command – it’s routine for them,” he told China’s state broadcaster CCTV.

Beijing has repeatedly accused Taiwan’s leaders of seeking “independence,” and views Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te as a “separatist,” launching large-scale drills days after Lai’s inauguration last year.

On Tuesday, the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command released a series of propaganda videos after announcing the latest drills, including one that depicts Lai as a green cartoon bug and calls him a “parasite” hollowing out the island.

Zhu Fenglian, a spokesperson for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, called the military exercises “a resolute warning to the Lai Ching-te administration’s rampant provocations for ‘independence.’”

Lai, who has long been a champion of Taiwan’s sovereignty, has called on China to cease its intimidation, but he has also spoken frequently of the importance of maintaining “peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.”

Polls consistently show people in Taiwan, a thriving and outspoken democracy, have no desire to be ruled by China, an authoritarian one-party state.

The latest drills follow a series of incidents that have ratcheted up tensions across the Taiwan Strait, including Taipei’s detention in late February of a cargo ship crewed by Chinese nationals it was investigating for allegedly cutting an undersea internet cable in the second such incident in a period of months.

Last month, Lai called China a “foreign hostile force” and ramped up national security measures to combat Chinese espionage and infiltration. Days later, Taiwan deported a Chinese influencer for backing a military takeover of the island democracy by Beijing.

Taiwan has long been seen as a potential flashpoint that could spark hot conflict between China and the United States.

The US maintains unofficial relations with Taipei and is bound by law to provide Taiwan with weapons for its defense. Washington has long maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity on whether it would come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of an incursion from China.

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNN · by Simone McCarthy, Nectar Gan, Eric Cheung · April 1, 2025

18. The Convergence Conundrum: Achieving Mass in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

​Excerpts:

By converging cyber, space, and physical maneuvers, these experiments will help future Army leaders understand how to synchronize effects at decisive points—generating modern mass through speed, precision, and broad information advantage. The result will likely be entirely new tactics and campaign concepts for fighting formations from the brigade to the corps. The Army should capture lessons learned across these experimental games—most of which will involve virtual and constructed environments—and use the results to refine both the algorithms and the doctrinal frameworks used to build a force capable of dominating in a complex, data-driven battlespace. This process has the potential to flatten combat development, better align schoolhouse experiments with doctrine writers, and identify and field new prototypes.

The Convergence Conundrum: Achieving Mass in the Era of Artificial Intelligence - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Benjamin Jensen · April 1, 2025

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Mass has long been a cornerstone of military strategy. Traditionally defined as the concentration of combat power at a decisive point to overwhelm the adversary, this principle remains as relevant to contemporary joint force planning as it was during the Napoleonic Wars. However, advancements in artificial intelligence are fundamentally reshaping how mass is generated, applied, and countered in modern warfare.

Mass now derives from converging effects across domains and aligning them against objectives. This process relies on synthesizing large volumes of information to support mission command and generating tempo in modern military operations.

What is Mass?

In war the principle of mass describes, as US Army doctrine puts it, the imperative to “concentrate the effects of combat power at the most advantageous place and time to produce decisive results.” The modern foundation for thinking about mass emerged from analysis of Napoleonic warfare in the early nineteenth century. In On War—particularly the book’s chapter on the “concentration of forces in space”—Carl von Clausewitz sees the concentration of force as an almost law-like principle governing how to win decisive battles. Antoine-Henri Jomini asserts that most fundamental principle of war is applying “strategic combinations [of] mass” on the “decisive points of a theatre of war.” These concepts became the principle of mass in modern war through J. F. C. Fuller’s attempts to formulate a science of war in the early twentieth century.

The definition of mass in modern military theory was never static nor strictly physical. Over time, the definition evolved to include not just the mass—or relative size—of units, but the volume of firepower they produced, a concept that still resides in the Lanchester equations for modeling combat. Multiple thinkers also saw critical factors shaping how units generated combat power ranging from morale and lines of communication to entire systems for combining arms based on capabilities and training. Even in Soviet doctrine, the correlation of forces and means analyzed multiple coefficients that affected the ability of a force to turn latent combat power into actual massed effects. And Fuller’s science of war called for thinking about the mental, moral, and physical spheres of war to capture key interactions that shape how armies concentrate forces in time and space.

At its core mass is about understanding the interaction of enemy forces, terrain, and friendly forces sufficiently to identify objectives where concentrating effects has the best chance of gaining an advantage in time and space. These objectives are decisive points, selected because they either hold enemy forces at risk or protect friendly forces. In the ideal, concentrating forces at these decisive points creates disproportionate gains in which the sum is worth more than its parts, a hallmark of complex systems, producing shock and dislocation a force can exploit through maneuver.

AI and Mass in Modern War

Artificial intelligence is ultimately about information in war. Through collecting data and training algorithms on underlying patterns, military organizations in theory gain a decision advantage. They can see fleeting opportunities where the interaction of enemy forces, terrain, and friendly forces creates decisive points. This information advantage rests on huge investment in computational infrastructure to process information and intelligence to collect enough data to identify tendency and potential in a system. According to former Army Chief of Staff General James McConville, AI has the potential to help soldiers sort through mass volumes of information to find the “the right arrow” to fire at the enemy. For current Chief of Staff General Randy George, this approach requires flattening network architectures to enable more data-centric approaches to mission command. It also includes simulating battlefield scenarios with AI to hone tactical judgment.

Many of these ideas have been evolving since the 1990s publication of Force XXI, which called for mastering technologies associated with a “digital battlefield,” advanced electronic warfare, and improved battle networks to simultaneously strike an opponent across the depth of the battlespace. The Army’s current operational concept—multidomain operations—extends this idea to multiple domains and dimensions with the concept of convergence, in which capabilities from multiple domains and echelons are arrayed against decisive points.

Mass now rests on information advantage and identifying when, where, and how to combine effects. Information becomes the key multiplier for generating combat power. Better understanding of your own forces and the ability to adapt to feedback from the environment creates tempo and the ability to make better decisions faster than the adversary can respond. This process rests on creating new approaches to aligning the best of human judgment with AI agents optimized to support mission command.

Generating Mass in Modern War

Mass in modern war is subject to diminishing marginal returns absent the ability to achieve information advantage. Witness Russia, which is destroying its economy and demographic future to gain hundreds of meters at a time and struggles to synchronize effects in time and space. Russian operational art is not able to generate modern mass—converging effects and combinations across multiple domains—leaving its army subject to blunt attritional calculations like human-wave attacks and long-range missile strikes uncoordinated with counterattacks.

AI can provide tremendous capability for massing both kinetic and nonkinetic fires in modern conflict. AI and machine learning algorithms’ ability to rapidly process vast corpuses of data to identify, track, and recommend targets while removing human bottlenecks will provide decision dominance to the using force. This was demonstrated by Israel’s use of systems known as “the Gospel” and “Lavender” to automate targeting of Hamas buildings and operatives, which—despite ethical and law of armed conflict concerns—demonstrated high operational tempo. The speed of identification created efficiencies that enabled the Israel Defense Forces to expand their target portfolio to include vast numbers of junior-level targets but reinforced the requirement to maintain humans on the loop to validate targets and avoid false positives.

Moving past the physical dimension, AI can also enable a force to achieve mass in the information dimension. AI provides a unique capability to analyze large volumes of information using techniques like natural language processing to help commanders visualize and describe sentiment, mood, and how the population is reacting to narratives. Used in line with the laws of war, this information flow can be adapted to support generating images and information tailored to audiences to shape perception and support military objectives, or to at least deny adversary use of computational propaganda. The flood of information is simply too much for any human or staff to address, placing a premium on using AI to support a mix of enduring ideas about information in war and new concepts like cognitive warfare.

The principle of mass will endure in war, but how formations generate and apply combat power is evolving as AI changes how commanders will process and analyze information. This condition calls for a new period of experimentation. The US Army—in coordination with the J7—should leverage the schoolhouse to explore how to generate mass using convergent effects across domains. This campaign will require investments in experimentation consistent with the Army’s new learning concept and initiatives in other services like the US Marine Corps Project Tripoli. Military professionals need to return education settings to what they were in the interwar period: forums for testing ideas about new tactics adapted to the changing character of combined arms.

This campaign of experimentation will also require novel methods for replicating highly sensitive and classified effects in space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Too often these effects are treated as exogenous in wargames, limiting the ability of players to understand how to generate modern mass using combined effects. While the Army is making the right investments in these areas, through entities like multidomain effects battalions, it will need to connect these capabilities to tactics and operational art. It will be impossible to turn every classroom or simulation center on military bases into a sensitive compartmented information facility, but it is possible to find creative ways of generating multidomain effects in wargames at the controlled unclassified information level that help officers learn about modern war level and don’t reveal sensitive capabilities.

By converging cyber, space, and physical maneuvers, these experiments will help future Army leaders understand how to synchronize effects at decisive points—generating modern mass through speed, precision, and broad information advantage. The result will likely be entirely new tactics and campaign concepts for fighting formations from the brigade to the corps. The Army should capture lessons learned across these experimental games—most of which will involve virtual and constructed environments—and use the results to refine both the algorithms and the doctrinal frameworks used to build a force capable of dominating in a complex, data-driven battlespace. This process has the potential to flatten combat development, better align schoolhouse experiments with doctrine writers, and identify and field new prototypes.

Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Jensen, PhD, holds a dual appointment as the Frank E. Petersen Chair at the Marine Corps University School of International Service and as the director of the Futures Lab at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Major General Jake S. Kwon is the director of strategic operations in the Headquarters, Department of the Army G-3/5/7.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Sgt. Zoe Morris, US Army National Guard

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Benjamin Jensen · April 1, 2025

19. The Limits of Trump’s Hardball Diplomacy

​A focus on our hemisphere but note the importance of China in our region.

Excerpts:

To start, the United States should not try to force Latin American countries to move away from China. They will not be persuaded by external pressure but by what drew them toward Beijing in the first place: self-interest. As such, the United States should help these countries recognize the dangers of deepening their dependence on Beijing, including how China’s aggressive trade practices can undermine local industries and how Beijing uses its diplomatic and economic partnerships for geopolitical leverage, specifically against U.S. interests. It is especially critical to convince Latin American countries that it is in their own interest to prevent China from developing military and defense capabilities in the Western Hemisphere that could challenge the region’s security dynamics.

To accomplish these aims, Washington could support the development of mechanisms tailored to each country’s needs that can screen investments for national security concerns. It could share intelligence on Chinese and Russian disinformation operations, establish early-warning systems for predatory trade practices, provide satellite and intelligence support to combat illegal fishing operations in territorial waters, and offer technical assistance to protect critical sectors from cyber-espionage. By delivering tangible value and expertise, the United States would position itself as a helpful partner safeguarding regional sovereignty.

This will take time. Most Latin American countries do not currently see Beijing as a threat to their economies, their democratic systems, or tthe security of their citizens, but as a source of investment, infrastructure, and export markets unencumbered by the historical baggage of U.S. interventionism. There is no doubt that Washington’s red lines will be a hard sell. Countries across the region are justifiably skeptical of any U.S. attempt to define the boundaries of their relationships with other powers. But unlike the current coercive approach, a strategy of persuasion demands genuine engagement and collaborative risk assessment. And its goal would be not to dictate terms but to help regional states recognize how unchecked ties with China could eventually undermine their strategic autonomy. Such an approach would require the United States to reimagine itself as a regional power committed to helping its neighbors preserve their independence.

If U.S. policymakers were willing to think more creatively, they might even contemplate cooperation with China in select areas—such as infrastructure development or climate resilience—that are of concern to both countries and to the region at large. For China, such cooperation would be a means of securing access to markets and resources without provoking a confrontation. For the United States, it would signal a shift from reactive coercion to proactive leadership. And Latin American states would not only escape the strains of great-power competition but alsobenefit from great-power collaboration. Although this approach demands policy coherence and diplomatic discipline—qualities in short supply in Trump’s Washington—it offers a far more credible path toward renewing U.S. influence in a region that will not be easily coerced into alignment.

The Limits of Trump’s Hardball Diplomacy

Foreign Affairs · by More by Matias Spektor · April 1, 2025

Why the Western Hemisphere Is Turning Away From America and Toward China

Matias Spektor

April 1, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump aboard Air Force One, Washington, D.C., March 2025 Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

MATIAS SPEKTOR is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo.

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No great power sustained as dominant a position over its neighboring region as the United States did during most of the twentieth century. But in recent decades, Washington has largely disregarded its neighbors. Since a free trade agreement with Canada and Mexico and a military initiative to help Colombia combat drug cartels were negotiated more than 25 years ago, United States policy in the Americas has consisted mostly of failed measures to stem flows of migrants and drugs across U.S. borders. This neglect has opened the door for China and Russia to exert increasing influence across the Western Hemisphere.

Since the beginning of his political career, U.S. President Donald Trump has signaled his intention to reassert U.S. dominance in the region. He hopes to resist China and Russia’s growing diplomatic, economic, and military engagement with countries that have traditionally been within the United States’ sphere of influence, and doing so while delivering on issues important to his base, including securing favorable trade terms and stopping flows of both migrants and fentanyl. During Trump’s first administration, these goals were largely aspirational. He and his officials frequently invoked the Monroe Doctrine, the 1823 declaration asserting exclusive U.S. influence in the Western Hemisphere, when they opposed Russian military cooperation with Latin American countries, say, or framed Chinese economic expansion in the region as a security threat. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, called the doctrine “as relevant today as when it was written.” Ultimately, these appeals amounted mostly to rhetorical posturing and, because of policy inconsistencies and incompetence, effected little concrete change. In his second term, however, Trump is accompanying radical rhetoric about regional hegemony with real action.

In a matter of weeks, he has discarded any pretense of transactional diplomacy and adopted a predatory approach. Taken aback by the thrust and speed of his initiatives, manycountries have bent the knee. Consider Panama, one of the countries in the Western Hemisphere that has historically been most supportive of the United States. In response to Trump’s threats of reclaiming the Panama Canal, which the United States controlled for much of the twentieth century, it immediately withdrew from China’s Belt and Road Initiative, resulting in the cancellation of several planned infrastructure projects. This represented a major blow to Beijing’s ambitious port diplomacy in the region. Panama also waived fees for U.S. Navy vessels and granted them priority passage through the canal, a significant concession. And U.S. pressure prompted a Hong Kong-based company to sell its ports at both ends of the canal to a consortium led by the American investment firm BlackRock, a move cast by the Trump administration as a strategic victory.

Mexico has faced the prospect of 25 percent tariffs and a U.S. designation of several Mexican-based cartels as foreign terrorist organizations—a branding that would allow the United States to launch cross-border military operations against those groups. It secured a temporary reprieve by deploying 10,000 of its national guard troops to the border and allowing U.S. marines to enter the country and train Mexican special forces. Trump proceeded with the terrorist designations anyway and continues to threaten Mexico with tariffs. El Salvador, for its part, agreed to take in migrants of any nationality who are deported from the United States in exchange for an extension of temporary protected ptatus for Salvadorans already in the United States.

These initial successes may support the perceptionthat Trump is building up U.S authority across the Western Hemisphere. But extracting a series of concessions from weaker neighbors is not an effective strategy in the long term, because it doesn’t take into account rapidly shifting regional dynamics that the United States is unwittingly accelerating with its belligerent behavior.

Many countries in the Western Hemisphere are shrewdly hedging their bets—neither turning away from the United States completely nor closing themselves off to U.S. competitors. China, in particular, has made significant inroads in Latin America, where it is often seen as a reliable source of the kinds of investment and diplomatic engagement that the United States no longer consistently provides.

Trump’s threats and intimidation tactics cannot provide a stable foundation for long-term U.S. primacy in the region. For a president who prides himself on “the art of the deal,” he has, in Latin America, made significant demands while offering few benefits in return. Far from rejecting transactional diplomacy, regional leaders crave genuine give-and-take relationships in which their priorities receive consideration. If the United States wants to counter China’s influence, it must offer tangible alternatives that address local concerns. The U.S. demander in chief must learn that real deals are predicated on mutual advantage. He must position the United States as a source of opportunity rather than one merely of pressure.

A DOOR LEFT OPEN

Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has taken its hemispheric dominance for granted, focusing on conflicts in the Middle East, European security, and Asian competition while offering the Americas little substantive engagement. This neglect created opportunities for China and Russia to advance their strategic interests while satisfying the region’s investment and partnership needs.

China has made widespread and durable inroads in Latin America to secure reliable supplies of energy, minerals, and various food products; identify targets for Chinese investment, such as hydroelectric dams in Ecuador and railway projects in Argentina; cultivate diplomatic support from the Latin America caucus in the United Nations; and gain leverage over the United States by showing that it can operate in Washington’s traditional sphere of influence. Today, China has displaced the United States as the primary trading partner for several major economies and persuaded most countries in the region to break off formal ties with Taiwan. Nascent programs for Chinese cooperation with police and military forces in Latin America have laid the groundwork for expanded security relationships. Crucially, China has achieved these pragmatic gains through diplomacy and without directly confronting the United States.

Moscow has pursued a narrower strategy focused on security relationships. Russia has built military ties with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, providing these states with weapons systems, military training, and intelligence support. It has also launched disinformation campaigns that exploit and inflame grievances with the United States. Although Russia’s presence in the region is less visible than China’s, its influence operations continue to frustrate the United States, and at little cost to the Kremlin.

Consensus is growing in Washington about the seriousness of these threats, as evidenced by bipartisan congressional statements and Pentagon assessments. General Laura Richardson, the commander of U.S. Southern Command from 2021 to 2024, recently warned that China is “playing chess” in the Western Hemisphere while the United States is “playing checkers”—a reference to the success of Beijing’s patient and holisitic approach to the region.

The U.S. demander in chief must learn that real deals are predicated on mutual advantage.

The first Trump administration and the Biden administration both failed to meaningfully diminish Beijing’s economic footprint or Moscow’s strategic presence. Cuba’s communist government, which maintains close ties with both China and Russia, kept its grip on power despite renewed U.S. economic restrictions that further damaged the Cuban economy. Washington’s recognition of an opposition candidate’s claim to the Venezuelan presidency in 2019 failed to dislodge Nicolás Maduro from power, and a botched coup attempt the same year led by former U.S. special forces members only complicated the relationship further. (The U.S. government denied involvement in the coup attempt.) In 2019 and 2020, the White House tried to exclude the Chinese technology giant Huawei from Latin American 5G networks by warning governments about security and surveillance risks. But it offered no incentives for compliance; Huawei remained the most cost-effective option, and the persuasion campaign failed.

Even apparent victories have proved hollow. The first Trump administration managed to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement into the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, but the intended effects—bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States and reducing the country’s trade deficit with Mexico—have hardly materialized. In 2020, the administration installed Mauricio Claver-Carone, a National Security Council official, as the first U.S. president of the Inter-American Development Bank, a significant funder of development projects in Central and South America. The purpose was to curtail China’s influence in the institution—an ironic move, given that a decade earlier, Washington had invited Beijing to help capitalize the bank in order to reduce U.S. operational costs. The move backfired: the bank’s board of governors, on which China remains an observer, removed Claver-Carone after allegations of improper behavior involving a subordinate. The gambit did nothing to reduce Chinese investment flows across the region.

Such failures arose from the first Trump administration’s toxic brew of ideological rigidity, bureaucratic incompetence, and interagency feuding. When the administration could agree on a Latin American strategy, it was almost always advanced via unilateral demands rather than through diplomacy with the relevant countries. The administration’s failure to grasp Latin America’s growing agency—its ability to pursue policies independent of the United States and despite U.S. pressure—resulted in diplomatic tone-deafness. Washington demanded that countries steer away from China without offering any meaningful economic or political alternatives, essentially asking them to forgo billions of dollars’ worth of critical investments and strategic partnerships while receiving nothing in return.

The second Trump administration appears more focused and is centering its regional policy on a few clear priorities: stopping migration, instituting tariffs, and preventing the trafficking of fentanyl. This time, U.S. neighbors are experiencing real effects. Deportation rates have surged. Punishing tariffs have been imposed on Brazil, Canada, and Mexico, disrupting established trade patterns. The administration has also placed unprecedented diplomatic and economic pressure on Mexico to curtail synthetic opioid manufacturing within its borders.But can such a predatory approach, however disciplined, succeed in realigning the Western Hemisphere with U.S. interests?

THE POWER TO CHOOSE

For many countries in the region, this newfound independence from the United States stems not from ideology but self-interest. Unlike in previous decades, Latin American countries have economic alternatives, and have found stable sources of capital, technology, and export markets in China, the European Union, and Gulf states. This economic pluralism has reshaped their geopolitical calculus: diversified economic and diplomatic relationships help mitigate the risks posed by the United States and embolden some countries to more confidently defy U.S. preferences.

Despite campaign rhetoric promising alignment with the United States, Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, has maintained excellentworking relations with China, which is his country’s second-largest trading partner. Brazil’s center-left president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has tried to vastly expand economic and diplomatic ties with China. Even Canada, the United States’ closest ally and largest trading partner, has developed its own hedging strategy. Despite deep economic integration with the United States through the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Ottawa has actively diversified its trading partners, signing agreements with the European Union and joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade accord with ten other countries in the Pacific. When Trump threatened to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement during his first term, Canada responded by accelerating those efforts and refusing to fully align with the United States’ China policy. And Ottawa’s targeted retaliations to Trump’s recent aluminum and steel tariffs further demonstrate that Washington’s economic coercion has at least partially alienated even its most integrated, codependent neighbors.

There’s a real threat of backlash to Trump’s heavy-handed approach. The more aggressively he attempts to reassert U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, the more likely it is that regional governments will redouble their efforts to develop alternative sources of support and investment. Trump’s bullying may therefore yield short-term concessions but undermine the kind of long-term influence he craves. Regional countries maintain relations with the United States when it is beneficial to them but have developed the capacity to turn elsewhere when the old regional hegemon becomes too threatening.

Trump’s leadership style may itself be a liability. Latin American leaders are accustomed to their own populists and are thus unlikely to be swayed by the U.S. president’s theatrics. When these experienced politicians watch Trump mix family business with state affairs, appoint relatives to positions of power, use his office to evade legal troubles, engage in bombastic self-promotion, demean his opponents, and display authoritarian impulses, they don’t see the leader of the free world—they see the gringo version of a familiar archetype. In seeking to make America great again, Trump has, from a Latin American lens, instead made it eerily familiar.

CROWD CONTROL

Renewed U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere requires something more durable than fear: measures that offer clear paths to prosperity and security. To be sure, the United States remains the region’s dominant power, capable of inflicting significant damage. But in an increasingly multipolar world, its primacy can no longer be taken for granted. And, ultimately, the United States needs to work with Latin America to manage transnational challenges—including migration and drug trafficking—that cannot be solved by walls or unilateral action alone. The path forward is a fundamental reimagining of the United States’ hemispheric relations. Washington must revamp its rules, its institutions, and its mindset to create conditions for mutually beneficial cooperation with its neighbors, particularly because many of them can now choose to withhold their cooperation. Coercion cannot substitute for meaningful political engagement.

To start, the United States should not try to force Latin American countries to move away from China. They will not be persuaded by external pressure but by what drew them toward Beijing in the first place: self-interest. As such, the United States should help these countries recognize the dangers of deepening their dependence on Beijing, including how China’s aggressive trade practices can undermine local industries and how Beijing uses its diplomatic and economic partnerships for geopolitical leverage, specifically against U.S. interests. It is especially critical to convince Latin American countries that it is in their own interest to prevent China from developing military and defense capabilities in the Western Hemisphere that could challenge the region’s security dynamics.

To accomplish these aims, Washington could support the development of mechanisms tailored to each country’s needs that can screen investments for national security concerns. It could share intelligence on Chinese and Russian disinformation operations, establish early-warning systems for predatory trade practices, provide satellite and intelligence support to combat illegal fishing operations in territorial waters, and offer technical assistance to protect critical sectors from cyber-espionage. By delivering tangible value and expertise, the United States would position itself as a helpful partner safeguarding regional sovereignty.

This will take time. Most Latin American countries do not currently see Beijing as a threat to their economies, their democratic systems, or tthe security of their citizens, but as a source of investment, infrastructure, and export markets unencumbered by the historical baggage of U.S. interventionism. There is no doubt that Washington’s red lines will be a hard sell. Countries across the region are justifiably skeptical of any U.S. attempt to define the boundaries of their relationships with other powers. But unlike the current coercive approach, a strategy of persuasion demands genuine engagement and collaborative risk assessment. And its goal would be not to dictate terms but to help regional states recognize how unchecked ties with China could eventually undermine their strategic autonomy. Such an approach would require the United States to reimagine itself as a regional power committed to helping its neighbors preserve their independence.

If U.S. policymakers were willing to think more creatively, they might even contemplate cooperation with China in select areas—such as infrastructure development or climate resilience—that are of concern to both countries and to the region at large. For China, such cooperation would be a means of securing access to markets and resources without provoking a confrontation. For the United States, it would signal a shift from reactive coercion to proactive leadership. And Latin American states would not only escape the strains of great-power competition but alsobenefit from great-power collaboration. Although this approach demands policy coherence and diplomatic discipline—qualities in short supply in Trump’s Washington—it offers a far more credible path toward renewing U.S. influence in a region that will not be easily coerced into alignment.

MATIAS SPEKTOR is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Matias Spektor · April 1, 2025

20. Five Questions For A General Podcast: General Martin Dempsey and General Walter Sharp

​The 30 minute podcast is at the link: https://mwi.westpoint.edu/five-questions-for-a-general-podcast-general-martin-dempsey-and-general-walter-sharp/

​Some very important commentary over a broad range of critical national security issues from the Indo-Pacific, Korea, and Europe, information, all volunteer military, defense industrial base and more.

Five Questions For A General Podcast: General Martin Dempsey and General Walter Sharp - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Charles Faint · March 31, 2025

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Welcome to Five Questions for a General, a new podcast from the Modern War Institute at West Point. The series features specially selected cadet hosts who are given an incredible professional development opportunity—to sit down with senior military officers and ask carefully crafted questions about everything from leadership to their unique experiences while serving to their expectations about the future of war.

This inaugural episode features a discussion with retired General Martin Dempsey and retired General Walter Sharpe. Both members of the West Point class of 1974, General Dempsey retired from the US Army after serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and General Sharpe culminated his Army career by serving simultaneously as the commander of United Nations Command, US Forces Korea, and ROK-US Combined Forces Command. Cadet Sebastian Witt hosts this episode and asks them about the military profession, emerging threats on today’s strategic landscape, and the changes that have taken place at West Point since their graduation in 1974.

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Charles Faint · March 31, 2025

21. China leads relief for quake-hit Myanmar. But will civil war stymie aid efforts?

China leads relief for quake-hit Myanmar. But will civil war stymie aid efforts?

China can play critical role in persuading junta and rebel groups to stop fighting to allow for relief work following devastating earthquake

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3304756/china-leads-relief-quake-hit-myanmar-will-civil-war-stymie-aid-efforts?module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article

Josephine Ma

Published: 5:09pm, 1 Apr 2025Updated: 6:45pm, 1 Apr 2025

Aid is pouring into Myanmar following the powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake that devastated the country on Friday, resulting in at least 1,700 deaths and thousands more people injured.

However, it is widely believed the final toll will be much higher because of poor communications networks and the fragmentation of the country that has resulted from years of civil war. Many roads and bridges have also collapsed, making it hard for equipment and rescuers to arrive. Many people have reportedly had to dig through the rubble with their hands.

The United States Geological Survey projected that there was a 24 per cent chance that total fatalities would be between 1,000 and 10,000, a 35 per cent possibility of 10,000 to 100,000 fatalities, and a 32 per cent chance that the death toll would exceed 100,000.

Images sent by China’s Gaofen satellites show that half of the buildings in Mandalay – Myanmar’s second-largest city and home to about 1.5 million people – have either completely collapsed or been severely damaged. Another 30 per cent had damage that was not as severe. Only 18 per cent of the buildings appeared to be intact.

The country was ill-prepared for a quake of such magnitude, and the head of the junta government made a rare plea to the international community for help.

Members of the Chinese Red Cross international emergency response team carry out rescue efforts in Mandalay, Myanmar on Monday. Photo: Xinhua

Many countries have offered help, especially Myanmar’s neighbours.

In addition to China, which was among the first to send rescuers and pledge aid, Russia, India, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines have sent rescuers, medical professionals and supplies to Myanmar.

The US pledged US$2 million and is sending an emergency response team from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which is undergoing major cuts, to Myanmar. It said the aid would be given to humanitarian organisations based in Myanmar.

China has been the biggest donor to relief efforts so far and sent its first round of US$13.9 million in emergency aid on Monday, according to state news agency Xinhua.

Chinese President Xi Jinping was also the first state leader to call Myanmar’s leader, General Min Aung Hlaing, after the quake. The junta chief has been isolated by the West since the country’s military seized power in a coup in 2021.

The golden 72-hour rescue window for finding survivors has already passed, though rescuers will continue to dig through the rubble.

Relief workers will soon face the grim reality of how to help the millions of people affected by the earthquake.

A big questions are who should the relief be given to for distribution, and who can provide the services needed? Who can help the reconstruction of the country?

Beijing appears to have sent the aid to the junta government for allocation as it said the aid was given to Myanmar at the request of the country’s government. China said it would send more aid upon further request by Myanmar’s government.

However, the junta’s opponents have accused the military government of being corrupt. The government’s ability to take on the enormous tasks of relief and reconstruction is questionable given its priority remains fighting the rebel groups that have reportedly taken control of up to half of Myanmar’s territory.

Of Myanmar’s many rebel groups, at least one has agreed to a temporary ceasefire and opened the area under its control to foreign humanitarian workers.

However, there have also been reports that the military has continued to bomb rebel-controlled areas. Some are concerned that the military might not allow aid workers to go to those areas

These political complexities will inevitably worsen the humanitarian crisis.

China – as a staunch supporter of the junta government, but one that also maintains a cosy relationship with many of the rebel groups – can play a crucial role in persuading the parties to agree to at least a temporary ceasefire to allow for relief work.

The best hope for the country now is to give long-term access to foreign aid workers, charity groups, and non-governmental organisations to help with relief and reconstruction in quake-hit areas. Hopefully, the door will remain open.

Josephine Ma

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Josephine Ma is China news editor and has covered China news for the Post for more than 20 years. As a correspondent in Beijing, she reported on everything from the 2003 Sars outbreak to

22. Local Forces and Counterinsurgency Campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq

​We must not neglect the lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan.

And these two publications from the guests are worth reading.

Iraq’s Unfinished War: Security in the Post-Saddam Era

 by Diane Zorri

https://www.fpri.org/article/2025/02/iraqs-unfinished-war-security-in-the-post-saddam-era/

The Rise and Fall of Afghanistan’s Local Defense Forces

 by Arturo Munoz

https://www.fpri.org/article/2025/01/the-rise-and-fall-of-afghanistans-local-defense-forces/

Local Forces and Counterinsurgency Campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq

https://www.fpri.org/multimedia/2025/02/local-forces-and-counterinsurgency-campaigns-in-afghanistan-and-iraq/

• February 21, 2025

Philip Wasielewski

Host

Diane Zorri

Arturo Munoz

In this edition of Overheard, Phil Wasielewski talks to Dr. Arturo Munoz and Dr. Diane Zorri about the academic papers they presented at last year’s FPRI-sponsored conference on Lessons Learned from post-9/11 Irregular Wars. The three will discuss how America used or improperly used local police and militia forces in counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq and now to do better in the future. 

Related reading: 

Iraq’s Unfinished War: Security in the Post-Saddam Era by Diane Zorri

The Rise and Fall of Afghanistan’s Local Defense Forces by Arturo Munoz

Related Program(s)

Center for Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare

23. What "the Global South" Really Means

​Excerpts:

The challenge of replacing “global South,” as well as its still more popular predecessor, “Third World,” is that people are loath to acknowledge how a racial logic continues to structure the modern world. As with any euphemism, replacing or abandoning “global South” will not erase the ugly racial history of the current global order. “Darker nations” may more accurately describe the grouping of countries that analysts seek to name, but with its invocation of skin color, it can feel retrograde.

Euphemisms are designed to obfuscate unpleasant truths. They can be useful to maintain a veneer of civility allowing those who use them to avoid the paralysis that can accompany any effort to acknowledge the trauma and violence that gave birth to the existing global order. But in their effort to offer a polite alternative, they sacrifice precision and ultimately can never escape the taint of their prior meaning.

But there is another reason to limit the use of “global South.” The twenty-first century has witnessed an extraordinary transformation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century-era racial thinking. Where once non-Western countries were viewed as stuck, it is increasingly common to think of countries in East and West Asia as representing the future. With gleaming new infrastructure and a zeal for technological progress lacking in the United States, these regions show that the West is no longer exceptional in its embrace of progress, contrary to what Maine once posited. The deracialization of the term can be seen as progress away from the racialized stereotypes that “global South” and its predecessors once invoked, but it also renders the term vacant, an empty cipher upon which political actors can project any meaning they prefer. Indeed, this may be the key reason for its ascendance.

The term “global South” does not appear to be diminishing in popularity any time soon, but analysts should still recognize the core historical logic that gave it birth, and qualify their usage accordingly. Racial hierarchies may be scrambling, but the reality that the existing global order was birthed to entrench racist beliefs cannot be erased. “Political language,” as George Orwell once wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” But the reader should not despair. As Orwell concluded in his essay, “One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits.” If and when a new order emerges, humanity may finally be able to shed the legacy of white supremacy and the distaste that can accompany the simple act of calling things as they are.

What "the Global South" Really Means

Foreign Affairs · by More by Zachariah Mampilly · April 1, 2025

What “the Global South” Really Means

A Modern Gloss for Old Divisions

Zachariah Mampilly

April 1, 2025

Voting in Johannesburg, South Africa, May 2024 Ihsaan Haffejee / Reuters

ZACHARIAH MAMPILLY is the Marxe Endowed Chair of International Affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College and is an affiliate faculty member at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is a co-author of Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change.

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In October 2024, at the most recent BRICS summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin urged the countries of the “global South” to build an alternative to the existing global order. Chinese President Xi Jinping, in his speech, called for “strengthening solidarity and cooperation among global South nations,” positioning BRICS—the grouping that was founded by Brazil, Russia, India, and China in 2009 but has grown considerably in the last decade—“as a vanguard for advancing global governance reform.” This was not the first time both leaders have hailed the global South. A joint statement issued in May 2024 repeated the phrase multiple times, claiming that the global South’s rise would “promote the democratization of international relations and international fairness and justice.”

Such invocations of the global South cause considerable angst. Joseph Nye, the American political scientist, for example, cautioned against using such a “misleading term,” due to its incoherence. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Comfort Ero, the head of the International Crisis Group, called the phrase “conceptually unwieldy,” warning that it should only be used with “particular care.” Others, including Sarang Shidore and Bilahari Kausikan, recognize its limitations but are not ready to abandon it. Shidore has argued for recognizing the global South as a “geopolitical fact,” although one defined negatively by the exclusion of its constituent countries from the institutions that underpin the international order. A former Singaporean diplomat, Kausikan suggests that “global South” “represents a mood that should be taken seriously”; whatever its conceptual coherence, it exercises an undeniable force in international relations, with China, Russia, and others seeking to harness it to advance their own agendas.

For a term that many have tried to cast as a common sense marker for the majority of the world, the global South remains remarkably ill defined. Taken literally, it refers to those countries located below the equator dividing the Northern Hemisphere from its southern counterpart. Such an approach would exclude much of Africa, the Caribbean, parts of South America, and all of South and Southeast Asia, even as it encompasses countries such as Australia and New Zealand that are considered part of the global North.

Despite those infelicities, the desire to capture the presumed shared experience of these countries remains. Looking at the origins of the term can help explain both its recent rise, as well as the discomfort with it. “Global South” is simply the latest iteration of the long-standing need to divide the world between white and nonwhite peoples. Projected onto these categories are a whole set of assumptions about what whiteness, and hence nonwhiteness, means when applied to the global order. Consider its predecessors: the civilized versus the barbarian (or savage), the modern versus the primitive (or traditional), the Occident versus the Orient, the West versus the East (or non-West), the colonizer versus the indigenous, settlers versus natives, the white world versus the darker nations, the developed versus the developing (or underdeveloped), and, of course, the First World versus the Third World.

These terms are often deployed literally. But they are also evocative, carrying with them a set of assumptions that revolve around three dimensions: race, values, and wealth. Take your pick. First Worlders are commonly imagined as wealthy, white liberals; so are global Northerners or Westerners, or indeed, settlers and even the “civilized.” But these dimensions are not equal. Race remains the fulcrum around which the others rotate. Put simply, “global South” is a euphemism, a seemingly innocuous substitute that allows those in polite society to avoid using the phrase they really mean: the nonwhite world.

FROZEN IN TIME

The persistence of “global South” and its predecessor terms owes much to the original desire to divide the world into digestible blocks. During the high point of European imperialism, toward the second half of the nineteenth century, colonial administrators faced a dilemma. Although the apex of European control of global territory was still several decades away, increased resistance from colonized peoples was becoming a threat to continued expansion. The 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, in India—where the uprising is called the Indian Rebellion—marked a turning point. A revolt led by Indian soldiers in the service of the ruling British East India Company, it threatened the stability of the European imperial project. In response, the British government, along with its French counterparts, began to reimagine the nature of colonial power. In India, the British government took direct control of the colony away from the East India Company and began experimenting with “indirect rule” to govern the subcontinent’s welter of so-called princely states.

Direct rule entailed European control over the legislative, executive, and administrative functions of a colony. Indirect rule, by contrast, involved the governing of colonies through the manipulation of existing authorities, or the appointment of “traditional rulers” where none previously existed. As Europe raced to secure control over the African continent at the close of the nineteenth century, indirect rule rapidly displaced direct rule as the preferred mode of colonial governance.

Frederick Lugard, the British high commissioner of northern Nigeria from 1900 to 1906, is known as the “father of indirect rule” for implementing the system in the lands once controlled by the Sokoto Caliphate, but its philosophical justification was drawn from the thinking of Henry Maine. As the Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Cambridge, Maine published his most famous work, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas, in 1861, four years after the Sepoy Mutiny.

At a wholesale flower market in Kolkata, India, January 2025 Sahiba Chawdhary / Reuters

For Maine, the United Kingdom’s inability to grasp the cultural sources of social order led to the Mutiny. Influenced by Charles Darwin’s work on evolution, Maine differentiated between a dynamic West that embraced the rights of individuals and a frozen non-West forever caught in the throes of kinship obligations. The former, in Maine’s view, was the exception to the rule. “Maine created a conceptual binary in which he distinguished between the West and non-West,” wrote the political scientist Mahmood Mamdani. “The former was progressive and was to represent universal civilization and the latter was stationary and was the custodian of custom.” Put simply, the non-West was always a vast category used to describe all the non-European populations of the world, whatever their differences.

Maine suggested that the United Kingdom had been blinded by the universal logic of direct rule, which presumed a singular route to modernization—the so-called “civilizing mission.” The United Kingdom mistakenly imposed foreign institutions, ideas, and values onto people for whom they could only stir resentment, and, ultimately, revolt. Instead, Maine championed a system of rule that would embrace and repurpose “primitive institutions” as the most stable route for sustained European rule. This shift from direct to indirect rule was most visible in the structure of colonial legal systems. While direct rule required a single legal order that governed both natives and settlers, indirect rule necessitated a dual legal system in which different systems of customary law applied to different groups. Issues such as marriage, inheritance, and even who could till the land were the domain of customary law and subject to the whims of traditional authorities, creating a legal apparatus that institutionalized the racial divide between the colonizer and the colonized.

The effect was to view non-European peoples as constitutionally bound by custom, impervious to progress, and inscrutable to the Western mind. Maine’s ideas would prove influential and were taught to a generation of budding colonial administrators at Oxbridge, where they prepared to embark on their service in far-flung colonies. His legacy was to shift the colonial project away from a universal civilizing mission that presumed all peoples could be transformed into Europeans, or “moderns,” toward one that, as Karuna Mantena, a political theorist who has written extensively on Maine, describes it, viewed non-Europeans “as naturally at home in his/her custom and thus resistant to reform, conversion, assimilation—in short, civilization.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Maine struck upon a deeply resonant divide that retains its power today. While colonial administrators imagined the West to be home to progress, order, and economic development, all of which were imagined as coterminous with whiteness, the East was imagined as its opposite. Maine’s racial division of the world created a hierarchy with whiteness on top and the “darker races” on bottom. This binary, racial division of the world, and the assumptions that gave it life, gained strength throughout the colonial period, bolstering the emerging global order and generating a broad intellectual consensus within the emerging field of international, or, as it could accurately be described, interracial relations. Yet, even as humanity has (mostly) moved beyond the crude and cruel racial logics that underpinned the European imperial enterprise, Maine’s racial sorting of the world continues to undergird, and confound, our attempts to divide the planet into intuitive categories.

As with most categories grafted onto a people without their consent, this hierarchical division of the world produced its own reaction. Colonized peoples subversively embraced and repurposed the division, fostering anticolonial and antiracist solidarity across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and even with minority populations in the imperial capitals. As early as 1881, Frederick Douglass condemned the naturalization of a “color-line” that divided the white world from the rest. W. E. B. DuBois popularized the term “color line” to describe post-slavery life in the United States. But like Douglass, his use of the term was meant to describe the global order. As he defined it in his most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America, and the islands of the sea.”

The emergence of the Soviet Union upended Maine’s binary vision by introducing the possibility that some “backward” countries could embrace progress. This transformation undergirded Alfred Sauvy’s famous tripartite division of humanity into First, Second, and Third Worlds. Sauvy, a French scholar of Catalonian descent, drew inspiration from “Third Estate,” the term used to describe the majority of the French population from peasant farmers to the bourgeoisie as opposed to the clergy (First Estate) and aristocracy (Second Estate). Writing at the dawn of the Cold War, Sauvy repeatedly refers to the Third World as “underdeveloped countries,” arguing that they could be the swing states that ultimately determine whether communism or capitalism would triumph.

Put simply, “global South” is a euphemism for the nonwhite world.

Despite nodding to ideological competition and economic development, like Maine, Sauvy’s division of the world was still fundamentally racial. The ideological war between capitalism (First World) and communism (Second World) was explicitly connected to the East/West civilizational divide: capitalism was inherently Western, in Sauvy’s conception, just as communism was Eastern. In other words, despite its seeming departure from Maine’s binary logic, the Second World was really a slice of the non-West that, contrary to expectations, embraced an explicitly secular and modernizing agenda: socialism.

Unlike “Third World,” which was eventually embraced by the people to whom it was ascribed, “Second World” never resonated politically or even culturally as a label. Instead, countries such as Cuba, Yugoslavia, and, most prominently, China—all firmly within the Second World, based on Sauvy’s criteria—sought to align with the Third World throughout the Cold War, much as Russia attempts to rally the global South today. China sent its premier, Zhou Enlai, to attend the Bandung Conference in 1955, which gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement—the Third World’s most famous political formation—while Yugoslavia hosted the NAM summit twice.

Inevitably, some countries always fit awkwardly, or not at all, into these schemes. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, with their centrality to American objectives in the Pacific Rim, were granted an honorary “white” status. The same was true for Israel and apartheid South Africa during the Cold War, despite their geographic location and racial makeup.

The tripartite division of the world could not withstand the fall of the Soviet Union. Combined with the decline of the secular modernizing statism of figures such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, the post–Cold War order reverted back to the colonial-era binary logic—albeit now with a newly discovered distaste for deploying racial terms to describe it.

BUILDING BLOCS

Despite its recent rise to prominence, the idea of a global South is not new. The term was first used in 1969 by Carl Oglesby, an American writer and activist. His short essay appeared in a special forum on the Vietnam War organized by the Catholic magazine The Commonweal. Oglesby served as President of the Students for a Democratic Society, one of the largest and most radical voices in the anti-Vietnam War movement. Under his direction, SDS overtly aligned itself with groups around the world fighting what they perceived as American imperialism.

Oglesby deployed the term interchangeably with better-known phrases such as “underdeveloped world” and “Third World.” His essay attempted to describe what he called “the world structure of power” and how to upend it. Oglesby concluded that Western activists had a “responsibility . . . to make the revolution more possible,” by seeking common cause with anti-imperialist movements around the world.

Although Maine, Sauvy, and Oglesby had very different politics, they were all interested in describing the vast majority of the world’s population in a way that could make it legible to the white world, and importantly, would support their own very different political projects in their home countries. Rather than organically sprouting from among the people these terms were meant to describe, all were coined by white men based in the West.

This is not a coincidence. It’s hard to imagine someone in Brazil, China, or Nigeria coming up with such an amorphous phrase to describe an imaginary unity among them. It also helps explain the enduring tension between “global South” and other supranational formations, such as Pan-Africanism and Pan-Islamism, that emerged from within the population described and more closely reflect the beliefs of the people involved.

Workers ahead of the Lunar New Year celebrations in Hanoi, Vietnam, January 2025 Athit Perawongmetha / Reuters

This is not to say that Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans have no use for the term. Indeed, many heads of state from countries in these regions jockey for the unofficial title of “leader of the global South.” Much like other racial slurs that have been turned back against the people who deploy them, there is power in embracing a label applied to you by the more powerful, even if it was originally derogatory. China, always an ambiguous member of this group, has staked its claim by hosting numerous summits for its global South counterparts. Not to be outdone, its longtime rival India plays the same game. Brazil and South Africa, and even Russia, have also sought the throne.

Each has levied a variety of strategies to buttress its claims, encompassing infrastructure deals, loan packages, humanitarian initiatives, and diplomatic and cultural overtures. Yet none has been able to consistently harness a global South bloc to advance its objectives on the international stage. During the Cold War, the Group of 77, a grouping of countries within the United Nations (originally 77 but now 134) that emerged out of NAM, did achieve limited success, particularly around mobilizing global action against apartheid South Africa. But the sheer size of the bloc, and the tendency of countries to pursue their own individual interests, undermined its ability to promote collective action on global issues. This is structural, suggesting that the real threat to global South relevance is the long-standing patterns of bilateral alliances and historical relationships that continue to shape the behavior of individual states on the international stage.

So where does that leave “global South”? Efforts to banish the phrase or limit its use are unlikely to work. Replacements are plentiful, but have done little to stunt the term’s rise. Neologisms, such as “W.E.I.R.D.” (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic), offer little advantage over older terms such as “the West” beyond articulating the assumptions embedded within. “Global majority” may better capture the demographic divide between the two halves, but has limited appeal outside of activist circles and nongovernmental organizations. BRICS has the advantage of naming a budding political entity that may play a role in shaping the future global order. Despite only recently growing to ten member states, it represents almost half the human population and 40 percent of global trade. But like its politically oriented predecessors in the twentieth century—most prominently NAM and the G-77—it is unlikely to overcome the substantial divisions between member states, inhibiting its ability to offer a cohesive alternative to the existing liberal order.

UNPLEASANT TRUTHS

The challenge of replacing “global South,” as well as its still more popular predecessor, “Third World,” is that people are loath to acknowledge how a racial logic continues to structure the modern world. As with any euphemism, replacing or abandoning “global South” will not erase the ugly racial history of the current global order. “Darker nations” may more accurately describe the grouping of countries that analysts seek to name, but with its invocation of skin color, it can feel retrograde.

Euphemisms are designed to obfuscate unpleasant truths. They can be useful to maintain a veneer of civility allowing those who use them to avoid the paralysis that can accompany any effort to acknowledge the trauma and violence that gave birth to the existing global order. But in their effort to offer a polite alternative, they sacrifice precision and ultimately can never escape the taint of their prior meaning.

But there is another reason to limit the use of “global South.” The twenty-first century has witnessed an extraordinary transformation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century-era racial thinking. Where once non-Western countries were viewed as stuck, it is increasingly common to think of countries in East and West Asia as representing the future. With gleaming new infrastructure and a zeal for technological progress lacking in the United States, these regions show that the West is no longer exceptional in its embrace of progress, contrary to what Maine once posited. The deracialization of the term can be seen as progress away from the racialized stereotypes that “global South” and its predecessors once invoked, but it also renders the term vacant, an empty cipher upon which political actors can project any meaning they prefer. Indeed, this may be the key reason for its ascendance.

The term “global South” does not appear to be diminishing in popularity any time soon, but analysts should still recognize the core historical logic that gave it birth, and qualify their usage accordingly. Racial hierarchies may be scrambling, but the reality that the existing global order was birthed to entrench racist beliefs cannot be erased. “Political language,” as George Orwell once wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” But the reader should not despair. As Orwell concluded in his essay, “One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits.” If and when a new order emerges, humanity may finally be able to shed the legacy of white supremacy and the distaste that can accompany the simple act of calling things as they are.

ZACHARIAH MAMPILLY is the Marxe Endowed Chair of International Affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch College and is an affiliate faculty member at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is a co-author of Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change.Foreign Affairs · by More by Zachariah Mampilly · April 1, 2025

24. America’s National Security Wonderland

​Conclusion (and we should all look in the mirror and reflect):

To a student of human history, the woeful state of America’s national security establishment does not appear as some sort of great mystery. It is far from unique; in fact, it might not even be noteworthy. It is just the normal stuff of human history, going back thousands of years. The USSR is still very much in living memory; what went on in that empire in its final decade wasn’t all that different from what is happening in America today. Despite all the hype, America’s empire is not actually very exceptional; it is far more similar to than different from history’s many other empires that have all risen to wealth and glory only to then fall away. The cancer eating away at the U.S. military is of a similar genus to that which once ate away at the Red Army; the oblivious and out-of-touch responses coming from elites inside Washington aren’t particularly different from the attitudes of Soviet elites of days past. Having foolishly succumbed to the slow-acting poison of an ideology that proclaims that America possesses the first and only nonideological military in the world, America’s civilian and military elites now find themselves trapped in a grim and decaying Wonderland of their own making.

America’s National Security Wonderland

By Malcom Kyeyune

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/02/americas-national-security-wonderland/?utm

“What did they live on?” said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking. “They lived on treacle,” said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two. “They couldn’t have done that, you know,” Alice gently remarked; “they’d have been ill.” “So they were,” said the Dormouse; “very ill.”

—Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland

T

he twenty-first century was supposed to be the new American century. The Soviet Union had been defeated, and the Western model of liberalism and free markets now stood without any serious ideological or political challengers. Yet today, a mere quarter into this once promising century, the wheels are coming off the wagon. In a remarkably short period of time, America has gone from being the sole superpower on the planet to facing very serious great power competition on multiple fronts. The counterinsurgency “forever wars” in the Middle East, once seen as the future of warfare in the era of global American dominance, are now remembered only as blunders. The war in Ukraine has marked a return to very old-fashioned industrial warfare between large-scale, conscript armies, something which few military planners in Washington ever saw coming before the fact. To add to these rising threats, China is now engaged in a process of naval rearmament that is putting the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century naval arms races to shame.

While America is battling exhaustion and political polarization at home, it is now facing something it’s never faced abroad: it is locked into a security competition against multiple opponents who, when taken together, are in fact vastly superior to America in terms of industrial capacity. This on its own would be an incredibly tough row to hoe, even at the best of times. The times, however, are not particularly good: the U.S. military currently finds itself in a state of acute crisis, beset by a number of intractable problems that neither the political nor military leadership have been able to solve.

The most striking aspect of this situation is that every major branch of the U.S. military is in crisis at the same time. All major branches are struggling with recruitment and retention targets, and the problem is particularly acute for the Army and the Navy. All major branches have serious sustainment and maintenance issues due to a combination of aging equipment and general rust inside the industrial base. All major branches are arguably also facing real problems trying to adapt and update institutionalized twenthieth-century thinking to experiences from twenty-first century battlefields (though the Marine Corps is at least undergoing a serious and controversial restructuring in an attempt to alleviate this).

Looming over all of this, of course, is the big elephant in the room: the budget contraints resulting from America’s massive fiscal deficts. Interest payments on the federal debt are devouring an increasing share of total federal revenues with each passing year. America is already running a World War II–style wartime fiscal deficit in what is officially a peacetime, near-full-employment economy. Though it’s a common refrain to bemoan waste and fraud inside the DoD budget, the simple reality is that a fifty-plus-year-old aircraft carrier hull like the USS Nimitz cannot be maintained forever. The carrier, just like every other military platform, requires somewhat regular replacement due to mechanical wear and tear over time.1 The U.S. military now has a massive backlog of such aging platforms, and there is simply not enough money to replace them.

For every single one of these particular problems, there are think tank reports and panel discussions aplenty to go around in Washington, with analysts and speakers often putting in genuine, even inspired, efforts into proposing solutions. It is probably accurate to say that the military crisis in America arguably has a costly, sprawling “solutions industry” of nongovernmental organizations dedicated to servicing it. Inside this industry, “policy wonks” of all kinds find ample opportunity to hone their craft: writing proposals for reforming submarine depot maintenance here, or reducing cruise missile overhead costs there. Though all of this activity is in some sense impressive, the uncomfortable reality today is that this “solutions industry” inside D.C. is doing about as well at tackling the military crisis as California’s sprawling NGO ecosystem is at ending that state’s homelessness problem. The “operations” may very well be succeeding, but the DoD “patient” never actually gets better: in the American national security forest, every single tree has a detailed fire mitigation plan, yet the forest as such is still burning down. Why, despite the very real attempts being made to right the ship, does nothing truly seem to work? Rather than add to the pile of à la carte policy solutions, this essay will instead examine why the task of reforming the American military today has become such a sisyphean endeavor.

The well-known world of civil society NGOs alluded to earlier can serve as an appropriate starting point for our queries, despite the obvous differences between liberal NGOs dealing with homelessness or drug addiction (who consume resources year after year and never seem to accomplish very much) and the DoD and its surrounding NGO ecosystem. There are at least two common explanations for the former’s unbroken record of good intentions, frenetic activity, and abject failure to accomplish the stated mission. Explanation number one is simple: solving the homelessness problem is very hard, and so failure is simply to be expected. To expect success is unrealistic, but even failure is presumably better than doing nothing. Thus, repeated failure doesn’t necessarily imply the need for structural reform. Explanation number two, however, is more subtle, and probably far more relevant to understanding the challenges facing the national security ecosystem. This explanation can be summed up by a simple principle: the true purpose of a system is what that system actually does.

What is the purpose of America’s national security apparatus? If one were to give the “official” answer to that question today, it would probably be something along the lines of physically defending America. The uniformed military exists to fight and win wars, the civilian leadership exists to give that military direction, and the greater ecosystem of NGOs and think tanks inside the Beltway exists to provide analysis and policy advice to both.

In reality, however, the ability of the U.S. military to wage physical warfare against peer competitors is in very serious doubt, and readiness and capability across all branches, across a wide variety of metrics, is in serious decline. Moreover, both the civilian and military leadership inside Washington have picked up some institutional habits that are either completely orthogonal to the purpose of kinetic warfare, or entirely harmful to it. Yet the habitual error of Washington’s reform-minded policy wonk is to continue to accept the official story about these institutions as simply true, and to treat the (increasingly numerous) cases that go against this story as either oddities, mistakes, or “bugs in the system” that can and should be “fixed.”

Waiting for Godot

Perhaps the most illustrative example of this mismatch can be found inside the Navy and its spectacularly dysfunctional shipbuilding programs. For several decades, the Navy has had an extremely long string of very bad luck, coupled with even worse decision-making. The larger history of the Navy’s erratic struggle to find its identity in the era after the Cold War is sadly beyond the scope of this essay, but it is probably useful to say that many of the Navy’s current problems at least partially flow from a real confusion as to what its purpose after 1991 would actually be. Both the Zumwalt destroyer program and the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program were once—for their own specific reasons—seen as natural steps toward a “new” Navy in the age of nation‑building and counterinsurgency warfare. Yet both these pro­grams have been catastrophic failures and have produced ship hulls that arguably cannot be used in combat. The Ford class of fleet carriers is so plagued with habitual delays, cost overruns, and reliability issues that they put the sustainability of the current number of carrier groups in question, and the various issues with the Navy’s submarines are also well known at this point.2 On top of this, the Navy is probably the worst hit among the services by the deeper structural problems facing America today, both in terms of the lack of industrial capacity and the ongoing recruitment crisis.3

The issues of the Navy, in other words, go both wide and deep: some of the issues might even be close to unfixable. Yet there is at least one serious issue plaguing the Navy that seems both genuinely irrational and extremely easy to fix, which is why it has garnered the attention of many reform-minded people inside Washington. This is the Navy’s incredibly costly and disruptive habit of ordering ships without working out the full design specs in advance, and then changing the specs in the middle of the process of constructing a hull. Most recently, this unfortunate habit has seriously compromised the Constellation class frigate program, meant to address the fact that the Navy at present lacks a modern, high-performance frigate design. Here, the Navy started with an already existing frigate, the Franco-Italian fremm (European Multi-Mission Frigate), which is a proven and reliable design at a reasonable price point. But rather than leaning into the benefits of working off an already proven design, Navy leadership quickly began making major and wide-ranging changes to it: at the time of writing, the current specs for the Constellation class share around 15 percent design commonality with the original fremm design. Rather than getting a proven ship on time and on budget, the Navy chose to monkey-wrench enough new design considerations into the fremm to turn it into a wholly new ship, arguably at greater cost and complexity than it would have required to design a ship from the ground up. As an added pinch of salt in the proverbial wound, the Navy has kept tinkering with the Constellation design even as the first hulls are being built, meaning it is now committed to either retrofitting the first batch of hulls into whatever the final design ends up being, or living with the added costs of having to operate several noninterchangeable designs. This model of continuously devel­oping a platform after the start of serial production—so-called concurrency—has involved catastrophic drawbacks in the case of the F-35 program, and so it is remarkable that the Navy would want to incorporate this particularly troublesome “feature” into its own programs.

At first glance, this seems like an eminently fixable problem for the Navy and for reformers inside the Beltway. The problem appears as both self-inflicted and deeply irrational when compared to the official goal of the Navy as an institution: fighting and winning kinetic wars. Finalizing a ship design before building it does not make the Navy worse at this task; in fact all recent evidence shows the exact opposite: concurrency costs money and delivers worse products for the DoD than the alternative. In theory, getting rid of this counterproductive habit should be as easy as waving a proverbial magical wand, because there is no reason for the habit to actually exist in the first place.

But how true is this really? Rather than sigh in relief that at least this problem seems easily fixable, the observant military reformer or analyst should here take a step back. What actually needs to be explained here is how this situation even occurred in the first place, and that requires some very serious questions about the nature of the Navy as an institution. If the Navy is habitually doing something that so obviously flies in the face of the logic that supposedly drives it (fighting and winning wars), and that problem seems so obviously and easily fixable, why isn’t the impetus for reform coming from inside the institution itself?

In reality, it is somewhat of an open secret that the Navy today has more than one purpose, and that warfighting is neither the only—nor perhaps even the most important—of its institutional imperatives. The underling issue that Navy leadership has to deal with is that the main scenario the Navy is supposed to prepare for—a kinetic war against China—is actually completely nonsensical, or at least it would have appeared as such to mid-twentieth century military planners. The Pentagon itself estimates that China’s shipbuliding capacity today is roughly 230 times greater than America’s. Many Japanese elites, most notably Admiral Yamamoto himself, were extremely skeptical of the idea that any sort of combination of tactics and strategy could make up for the gulf in industrial potential between Imperial Japan and America, and yet that advantage was an order of magnitude less than the advantage enjoyed by China today; it was far closer to ten to one than a hundred to one. To add insult to injury, one of the central themes of the ultimately disastrous Japanese doctrine of Kantai Kessen—decisive naval battle doctrine—was to leverage the vast size of the Pacific Ocean itself to partially make up for the difference in industrial capacity. The (ultimately vain) Japanese hope was that America would have to stretch its supply lines to the point where the Imperial Japanese Navy could still hope to engage in set piece battles under locally favorable conditions. The Japanese imagined themselves using the tyranny of distance to draw America into one or several confrontations in the mold of the battle of Tsushima, after which the American public or its military planners would hopefully conclude that a protracted war in the Pacific simply wasn’t worth it, resulting in a negotiated settlement where both sides recognized the other’s sphere of influence. The disastrous failure of many of the assumptions underpinning this doctrine would end up dooming the Japanese Empire, but at least the Japanese doctrine made some measure of basic sense. No Japanese planner, no matter how optimistic they were about Japan’s chances, even considered for a second the idea that a war with America was somehow going to be winnable if it had to be fought off the Californian coast.

Today, the Navy is fairly candid about the fact that it lacks enough vessels to actually escort sealift ships across the Pacific.4 For its part, Military Sealift Command is equally candid about the fact that there aren’t enough ships to actually resupply American forces anyway. Darkening the picture even further, the closure of the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility at Honolulu has left a large hole in America’s Pacific-facing logistical network, with no realistic replacement seemingly in the pipeline. Pacific wargame scenarios regularly have the American side running out of precision weapons weeks or days into the fighting, with almost no capacity to replenish stocks. This admitted inability to actually sustain munition logistics for the long haul probably doesn’t even matter, however, as American defense companies likely cannot source replacements to Chinese subcomponents and materials at anything approaching necessary scale.

In addition to these problems, the Navy today cannot even keep up with peacetime repair and maintenance demand on its vessels. With surge capacity and spare drydocks already close to nonexistent, the capacity to repair any significant number of vessels damaged in combat is simply beyond American capabilities at present. It is often said that wars are won through logistics, and this is doubly true when those wars are supposed to take place thousands of miles of open ocean away. Yet before the first shot has been fired in anger across the Taiwan strait, the American military has already admitted that it cannot build enough ships, cannot staff the ships that are being built, cannot repair ships that get damaged, cannot protect seaborne logistics, and cannot source enough sealift vessels for those seaborne logistics to matter, and in any case it currently lacks the sailors for those ships anyway. All of these points are not actually controversial in and of themselves: they are all regularly discussed inside the Beltway establishment. What is controversial and in fact incredibly sensitive, however, is to combine all these points of incontrovertible data into the kind of military conclusion that would have appeared as natural and indeed fully inevitable to any sane American or Japanese war planner in the 1930s.

Thus, what appears as a basic kind of “irrationality” inside the Constellation program actually makes a good deal of logical sense. The official premise of the Navy’s activity—preparing to fight China on the other side of the Pacific Ocean—is openly nonsensical and cannot realistically be achieved no matter what Navy leadership does or does not do. The fremm frigate design might be cheap, proven, and effective, but it is just a ship. The moment it is commissioned, it is a known quantity. For every fremm-like frigate America can roll out, China can realistically roll out ten, fifty, or even a hundred equivalents. On the most basic level of military analysis, it essentially doesn’t matter whether the Navy builds another frigate or not, because the math of the situation is simply too overwhelming. On top of that, some of the Navy’s obvious lack of urgency when it comes to getting more ships on the line as quickly as possible likely stems from the fact that it has its hands full just trying to find enough sailors and dry dock time for the ships it already has.

If one considers that the stated purpose of the Navy today is to build ships and win wars, the Constellation program is a disaster in the making. If, however, one considers that the actual purpose of the Navy is to project an image of credibility, then non-finalized, concurrent, ever-shifting designs that never get done and always seem to be just around the corner, just waiting for the inclusion of some “game changer” bit of technology, is actually rational and reasonable. The constant, obsessive fixation with various illusory “game changers” was never in much evidence in America in the 1930s and ’40s, when it enjoyed true industrial supremacy. Now, it is endemic to every branch of the U.S. military, and it makes complete sense given the institutional and ideological pressures that military leadership faces. For its part, given the impossibility of the military math it is faced with, Navy leadership is increasingly standing under the leafless tree and waiting for Godot. Sacrificing the ability to actually build ships on time is not such a great loss, after all, because no ships that can be built today have the power to upend a basic 200:1 ratio in favor of the enemy. Maintaining a narrative that the next American ship (whenever it appears) will have some sort of radical capability that will transform the basic calculus of war actually carries with it demonstrable benefits and a low amount of drawbacks, compared to all the other alternatives. Especially if the careers and self-image of people in Navy leadership are to be considered, it represents the safest and most reliable choice.

Mission: Impossible

This is hardly a point limited to the issue of shipbuilding contracts, or even to the Navy itself. In point of fact, the entire U.S. military today is mired in the same deadlock between an increasingly nonsensical and unfeasible “official” institutional purpose and the implicit demands placed on these institutions: the need to maintain ideological credibility, projecting an image of strength vis- à vis any peer competitor. The suicide epidemic inside the U.S. Army is just one good case study among many with regard to the costs of maintaining this front: it is no coincidence that the most suicide-prone units inside the Army today are the armor units. Both the Army Times and the New York Times have published reports depicting the massive strain these armor units are under today, as they are constantly rotated around the world in an effort to demonstrate that the U.S. military is ready and able to fight whenever and wherever it is called upon.5 Using increasingly ancient equipment that is prone to mechanical breakdown, with spotty and sometimes insufficient supplies of spare parts, the soldiers inside armor units regularly work truly nightmarish hours. This has predictable effects on these soldiers’ families, as well their own physical and mental health. The constant churn of deployments, exercises, and endless maintenance is rapidly wearing down both the vehicles and men inside units like the 66th Armor Regiment: this is not just a problem of growing malaise and bitterness among the soldiers, but one that has real implications for current and future Army retention.

Yet again, with respect to the official purpose of the Army, this habit of back-breaking, counterproductive exercise and deployment schedules seems like an irrational state of affairs. As long as we only consider the practical warfighting aspect of this situation, the “problem” seems entirely self-inflicted, and the “fix” is both obvious, simple, and free. If the grueling tempo of your exercises and rotations (ostensibly meant to improve or at least demonstrate unit readiness) is actually having a negative effect on your ability to fight, simply do fewer exercises and relax the operational tempo. But the point of an institution is what it actually does; for the Army, this means that it is more concerned with convincing the American public—and a gerontocratic, increasingly senile American leadership class—that it is still the same army as it was back in the good old days. Today, that adage is increasingly only true for the wrong reasons: M1A1 tank production ended all the way back in 1992, but the image of the high tech, cutting edge, materially superior U.S. military has carried on for decades. In 2025, nineteen-year-old mechanics are trying to keep thirty- or forty-year-old tanks running for yet another “show of force” deployment overseas, but the American political class is very obviously still stuck in their own timeless Neverland, still imagining that what was new in 1992 or 1978 is just as new and groundbreaking today. This outdated ideological belief, together with the reality of aging equipment and the changing requirements of warfare, means that all the services are now trapped, like Alice in Wonderland, by the curse of the Red Queen’s mirror: in order to stay in the same place and not move an inch, they must run faster and faster every year. The Air Force is saddled with maintaining bomber airframes whose production lines ended decades ago; the Army is cannibalizing its own motor pools and driving its own soldiers to quit the service or take their own lives in order to keep appearances going. The Navy now has fewer than three hundred total vessels in the fleet, but it is still being given the same amount of forward presence missions as when it had twice that number. It still deploys its carrier strike groups regularly across the world, but the actual number of ships deployed in those strike groups has shrunk dramatically since the 1990s.

Faced with this creeping crisis inside the military, the political class in Washington seems happy to contribute to it further by issuing increasingly out-of-touch demands and edicts. For example, the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) carried with it a new statutory requirement that the Navy maintain at least thirty-one “operational” amphibious warfare ships. Of course, this statutory demand arrives when the readiness of the Navy’s fleet of amphibious ships is already in steep decline.6 The likely result of Congress simply mandating a thirty-one “operational” ship requirement at a time when the Navy lacks the practical capacity to actually fulfill it is a situation often mocked in old jokes about the most dysfunctional parts of the Soviet Union. Going forward, the Navy will in all likelihood simply lie and pretend that non-seaworthy, de facto mothballed ships are actually “operational,” and Congress will mostly go along by pretending to actually believe the lie. Yet an even more glaring illustration of the gap between ideological projections and reality came more recently in the form of the military’s embarrassing and ultimately fruitless attempts at constructing an aid pier in Gaza.

Most coverage of that event focused on the political issues surrounding the pier, and the general geopolitical context of the Gaza crisis that the U.S. military was recklessly being thrust into. What fewer people picked up on, however, was that the mission was doomed to fail from the start, purely due to technical reasons: the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (jlots) system being put in place was simply not rated to handle the regular sea states in the area. The almost immediate scuttling of the Gaza pier due to damage from rough seas was not a freak accident, or attributable to some sequence of bad luck: it was a completely foreseeable and indeed inevitable outcome. The relevant point that needs to be made regarding the Gaza pier has nothing to do with the Gaza crisis itself; rather, it is that the military was made to expend real logistical assets (assets which are in increasingly short supply) on a mission that could not work even on paper. No one with relevant experience inside the military would have been ignorant of something so basic as looking up a sea state chart; yet at no point was the practical impossibility of the mission allowed to prevent it from going forward. To put it bluntly, the military was given a deeply ideological mission, one that would assuredly result both in failure and damage to or destruction of limited logistical assets. Military leadership, knowing which side their bread was actually buttered on, complied: the mission duly failed, and the limited equipment was damaged and destroyed.

The amount of fraud and deception that goes into maintaining this ideological, implicit institutional purpose of the American military is difficult to overstate. Nor is it even a real secret: as far back as 2015, the Army War College published a report on this very issue, in which the authors laid out their findings of widespread juking of stats and lying about requirements, personnel levels, and so on.7 This widespread epidemic of lying—already serious enough back in 2015—was not due to individual moral failings, nor “bugs in the system”; more ominously, most of the lying actually formed a sort of institutional grease that was increasingly becoming required just to keep the wheels turning. The more recent New York Times article on military suicides gives a particularly macabre example of how this works in practice: here, a unit commander compels a soldier with acute suicidal ideation to deploy overseas just so he can include that soldier in the readiness statistics. Once he arrives, he is then immediately sent back stateside again, as he cannot actually legally participate in the exercise or even be trusted in the presence of any loaded firearms.

Yet again, from a warfighting perspective, this behavior shouldn’t actually be happening. But it is happening, because within the institutional setting of the military—which is heavily shaped by the expectations set by a deeply ideological civilian and uniformed leadership—this sort of behavior not only makes sense, it is often required. To buttress this point with a non-Army example, a major theme covered in the reporting of the 2010s USS Fitzgerald and USS McCain collisions (which together led to the loss of seventeen sailors and constitute two of the most serious disasters the Navy has ever suffered in peacetime) was that ship captains were expected to sail even if their personnel situation or maintenance backlogs should not have allowed it; captains lied to their admirals who in turn lied to their political superiors. Rather than grapple with how lying had become an institutional requirement inside the Seventh Fleet, the Navy instead chose to blame these accidents on the ship captains themselves, even though the captains had repeatedly issued warnings to their superiors about the risk of serious accidents.8

A Fading Wonderland

Here, we must finally make a very basic critique of the entire national security establishment in America, and particularly of the people intending to bring about reform. No thinker, no policy wonk or international relations buff inside the Beltway, would have any problem whatsoever with the suggestion that the military apparatus inside a rival country like Russia, China, or Iran was in fact not a “pure” kinetic instrument but also a tool of ideology. Indeed, the suggestion that modern-day Russia possesses a “pure” military, completely shorn of any function as a tool of regime legitimacy and regime ideology, would typically be dismissed inside the Beltway. Of course the Russian military faces a steady flow of demands on its behavior conditioned by the Kremlin’s desire to appear credible and tough; of course this happens even in cases where this competes with the practical demands of warfighting. This dual nature of the Russian or Chinese militaries—both tools of kinetic warfare and tools of ideology—is simply accepted without argument in D.C., just as everyone willingly accepts, without the need for any particular evidence, that the tension between these two functions often results in a meaningful degradation of capability and readiness for these militaries. Yet for all this casual acceptance of the very real nature of this dangerous and destructive institutional dynamic abroad, America’s most serious thinkers generally display a shocking naïveté and lack of awareness about how this same sort of dynamic plays out inside America itself.

The purpose of an institution is what that institution actually does. The Army and Navy today both prepare for war, and also sacrifice their own resources and cannibalize their own readiness in order to maintain a Potemkin village of capability for public and congressional consumption. In the case where these two demands intersect, narrative maintenance tends to win over practical warfighting concerns. The Army unit commander who sends a suicidal soldier to Poland or Romania for thirty-eight hours in order to juke the stats is only punished if the media get ahold of the story; the commander who refuses to do so and voluntarily files poor readiness reports to his superiors is punished by default. America’s military brass regularly respond to impractical or nonsensical demands from the political leadership through lying or juking the stats. Army unit commanders and Navy ship captains, faced with similarly impossible requirements, lie to their superiors. Their subordinates, in turn, lie to their commanders, and so on it goes all the way down through the ranks. In this context, reform is impossible without first addressing why this entire sprawling network of institutionalized lying has come into being in the first place.

Criticizing the logic of the Navy endlessly waiting for Godot in terms of frigate design without ever examining the even more lopsided logic of how the Navy is supposed to use that frigate is self-defeating. Currently, the idea is that the Navy will use said frigate to fight a war on the other side of the Pacific, against an industrially superior power, while lacking the capacity to sustain logistics, replace casualties, or repair combat damage. No serious American military planner from the mid-twentieth century (back when the United States enjoyed a massive industrial advantage compared to the rest of the world) would consider this to be a coherent or practical goal to begin with. Let us thus put the real nature of the issue at stake in the most blunt terms possible: the Navy is being asked to maintain the dream of the American empire. Lacking a political class willing to seriously acknowledge or address the very real crisis this empire now faces, the burden of that political crisis is being shifted onto the shoulders of admirals and generals who were never intended to take on that role in the first place, nor do they have the capability to do so. Yet even so, by promising some unspecified, undefinable capability at some hazy point in the future, the Navy is, in its own peculiar way, doing the best job it can with the hand it has been dealt. This job cannot be done by delivering a handful of unremarkable Italian frigates, frigates the Navy cannot realistically repair in wartime nor fully crew in peacetime in any case. The Navy is not just building ships; it is trying to shield an increasingly fragile American leadership class from reality, and like the other services, it is paying a ruinous cost to do so.

The task facing the serious military reformer in 2025 is not actually to look for points of “irrationality” inside the Pentagon that can then be treated with various “quick fixes.” While there is much inside the American national security apparatus that is broken and in need of repair, efforts to do so will come to nothing unless the most basic question of all is answered first: what is the intended point of the U.S. military? Is it to fight wars and physically protect America? Is it to protect the ideological credibility and legitimacy of the current American political class? Is it some possible mix of the two? If you cannot answer which one of these purposes your “fixes” to the military are meant to address, your efforts at reform will invariably be defeated by institutional pressures for which you have no answer.

Additionally, “credibility” or “regime legitimacy” are in no way frivolous or unnecessary requirements. In the years leading up to the bankruptcy that sparked the French revolution, the controller-general of finances to Louis XVI consciously did not try to cut back on “frivolous” spending at Versailles, reasoning (probably quite correctly) that cutting this very obvious waste would cost more money than it would save, as it would likely signal to creditors that France had passed the financial point of no return. For the American empire, facing a recruitment crisis, a hollowed out defense industrial base, and looming fiscal ruin, ideological credibility may be just as important as physical capability.

Today, the most earnest policy wonk in D.C. finds himself tumbling, like Alice down the rabbit hole, into a strange world where the rules make no sense, and where things are all out of place. Fixes are proposed; panels are held; good, sensible reforms are constantly suggested: yet nothing works, everything keeps getting worse, and there seems to be no way out of the crisis. But the strangeness of this world is all an illusion; an effect of the blindfolds put on by those inside it. To the average American war planner of the early twentieth century, the things that are being spoken of as normal today would have appeared as truly insane. Yet the people inside the Beltway today are no more “mad” than their more confident twentieth-century predecessors; they are simply acting rationally in the context of a very different set of institutional pressures.

The missing link inside the American policy establishment today is a basic discussion about the future and sustainability of the empire in light of America’s industrial weakness and cultural confusion. Powerful ideological and political constraints, however, currently make such discussions not just impossible but also career-ending for any individual who would dare to attempt them. The result of this chronic unwillingness to even acknowledge basic first principles inside Washington is to trap the Navy, Army, and all the other branches of the U.S. military on the far side of the Red Queen’s magic mirror: forcing them to constantly make impossible trade-offs and sacrifices just to postpone necessary discussions a little bit into the future, dooming them to running faster and faster just so that America’s leadership class won’t ever have to move an inch. In this clash between ideology and reality, ideology is almost always the victor. And it is winning at the cost of destroying the U.S. military itself.

To a student of human history, the woeful state of America’s national security establishment does not appear as some sort of great mystery. It is far from unique; in fact, it might not even be noteworthy. It is just the normal stuff of human history, going back thousands of years. The USSR is still very much in living memory; what went on in that empire in its final decade wasn’t all that different from what is happening in America today. Despite all the hype, America’s empire is not actually very exceptional; it is far more similar to than different from history’s many other empires that have all risen to wealth and glory only to then fall away. The cancer eating away at the U.S. military is of a similar genus to that which once ate away at the Red Army; the oblivious and out-of-touch responses coming from elites inside Washington aren’t particularly different from the attitudes of Soviet elites of days past. Having foolishly succumbed to the slow-acting poison of an ideology that proclaims that America possesses the first and only nonideological military in the world, America’s civilian and military elites now find themselves trapped in a grim and decaying Wonderland of their own making.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 1 (Spring 2025): 213–27.

Notes

Photo credit: U.S. Naval Institute.1 To get a sense of how massive this problem actually is, the 2022 Government Accountability Office report on weapon system sustainment for airframes is a good starting point. Almost every airframe type used by the services has growing and very serious sustainment bottlenecks. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Weapon System Sustainment: Aircraft Mission Capable Goals Were Generally Not Met and Sustainment Costs Varied by Aircraft,” November 2022.

2 See, for example, Jerry Hendrix, “Sunk at the Pier: Crisis in the American Submarine Industrial Base,” American Affairs 8, no. 2 (Summer 2024): 22–34; U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Navy Readiness: Actions Needed to Address Costly Maintenance Delays Facing the Attack Submarine Fleet,” November 2018.

3 Though it is beyond the scope of this essay, it should nevertheless be noted that the extent of the current recruitment crisis is often severely understated in the media. The debates around this issue tend to focus on the military’s struggles to meet its on-paper authorized strength and its peacetime commitments. What’s less often talked about is that the U.S. military at present has essentially no realistic way to absorb and replace any casualties in real warfare: Katie Crombe and John A. Nagle, “A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force,” US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters 53, no. 3 (Autumn 2023): 21–31.

4 See, for example, David B. Larter, “‘You’re on Your Own’: US Sealift Can’t Count on Navy Escorts in the Next Big War,” DefenseNews, October 10, 2018.

5 Davis Winkie, “Broken Track: Why the Iron Knights Chose to Speak Out about Suicides,” Army Times, March 12, 2024; Janet Reitman, “A Disaster of the U.S. Military’s Own Making,” New York Times, June 19, 2024.

6 Sam Lagrone, “‘Poor Material Condition’ of Navy Amphib Fleet Prevent Marine Deployments, Training, Says GAO,” USNI News, December 3, 2024.

7 Leonard Wong and Stephen J. Gerras, Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession (Carlisle, Penn.: U.S. Army War College Press, 2015).

8 For those unfamiliar with this controversy inside the mid-2010s Navy, the award-winning ProPublica investigation is a good entry point: T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, and Robert Faturechi, “Fight the Ship,” ProPublica, February 6, 2019.

About the Author

Malcom Kyeyune is a writer based in Sweden and contributing editor of American Affairs.

Also by Malcom Kyeyune

• Greening the Void: Climate Change and Political Legitimacy
• Crises of Elite Competition in the East and West
• Planet of the Grifters

25. Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader

​This was posted on March 31st so I do not think this is an April Fool's prank. I was not familiar with this story at all but it again illustrates that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction

Whiskey-Drinking Rocker Transforms Into West Africa’s Most Dangerous al Qaeda Leader

A militant leader from Mali championed a rock band and helped write a hit song before leading an Islamist army that killed tens of thousands

https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/iyad-ag-ghali-al-qaeda-leader-west-africa-85afbca0?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Benoit Faucon

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 and Michael M. Phillips

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March 31, 2025 9:00 pm ET

Back in the day, Iyad ag Ghali wrote lyrics for a flamboyant blues-rock band from the heart of the Sahara. He jammed with the guys in the group, pounding out the beat on metal jerrycans, and frequented West African nightclubs.

The group, Tinariwen, went on to tour the world, win a Grammy and play with the likes of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and U2’s Bono.           

Ag Ghali went on to become the leader of one of the most dangerous al Qaeda franchises in the world, banning music in a swath of West Africa the size of Montana and commanding an army of extremists responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Ag Ghali’s gunmen even ambushed Tinariwen band members and abducted the guitar player.

“I could not believe it,” said the band’s former manager, Manny Ansar, who went clubbing with ag Ghali in Mali’s capital, Bamako, 30 years ago. “It was a huge shock when I saw footage of him walking over corpses.”

Ag Ghali has turned West Africa into the primary battlefield where the West and local governments have clashed with Islamist extremists. His 6,000 fighters have rampaged through villages and battled French soldiers, American Green Berets and Russian mercenaries.

Attacks by AQIM/JNIM and affiliates

ALGERIA

LIBYA

MALI

MAURITANIA

CHAD

NIGER

SUDAN

THE SAHEL

SENEGAL

BURKINA

FASO

GUINEA

BENIN

NIGERIA

IVORY

COAST

GHANA

Source: Armed Conflict Location and Event Data via Africa Center for Strategic Studies

Emma Brown/WSJ

It is a fight the 70 or so year-old ag Ghali is winning. His militants have become so powerful that there is a risk that Mali, his home country, or neighboring Burkina Faso could become the world’s first nation ruled by al Qaeda.

Ag Ghali’s journey from World Music promoter to Islamist warlord followed as unlikely a trajectory as his friends’ rise from fireside jam sessions to the global stage.

This account of his transformation draws on interviews with former friends, Tuareg rebels, Tinariwen band members and managers and government officials, as well as U.N. reports, U.S. diplomatic communications and contemporaneous photos.

Desert boys

As a young man, ag Ghali was a Tuareg first and a Muslim second.

The Tuareg, a Berber ethnic group, have been romanticized in the West for their indigo garb and nomadic lifestyle, wandering the Sahara with their camels, goats and sheep, across what is now Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Algeria and Libya. They resisted almost 70 years of colonial domination by France. After Mali gained independence in 1960, they staged a failed rebellion against the new government.

Ag Ghali was nine years old when his father, prominent among Tuareg families, was killed in the uprising. As he grew up, ag Ghali joined a legion of Tuareg volunteers, under the patronage of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, seeking independence from Mali. 

A 1992 photo of Ibrahim ag Alhabib playing guitar in Mali. Photo: Tinariwen

Gadhafi used the Tuareg to further his own geopolitical ambitions, dispatching ag Ghali and others to fight the Israelis in Lebanon and the French in Chad.

In the 1980s, Gadhafi asked ag Ghali to supervise Tuareg recruits at a camp near Tripoli, Libya. Among the volunteers were musicians, including Ibrahim ag Alhabib, whose father, like ag Ghali’s, had been killed in the 1960s Mali rebellion. 

As a boy, ag Alhabib had been captivated by a guitar-strumming cowboy in a Western screened at a makeshift desert cinema. He fashioned his first guitar out of an oil can, stick and bicycle-brake cable. As he mastered the instrument, ag Alhabib absorbed the music of Elvis, James Brown, Malian star Ali Farka Touré and Arab pop musicians. Around the campfire at night, ag Alhabib and other Tuareg musicians forged their own desert-blues sound.

Ag Ghali saw music as a way to rally support for Tuareg independence. He helped supply ag Alhabib and the musicians with electric guitars and amplifiers, a warehouse for rehearsals and a concrete stage to perform, said Philippe Brix, the band’s second manager.

Ag Ghali crafted lyrics for a song called “Bismillah,” Arabic for “In the Name of God.”

In the name of God, we started the revolution in the company of my brothers.

To drive out the looters and trample the enemies,

We will climb the mountains to escape misery.

Ag Ghali “understood the power of guitar music as a communication tool,” said Brix. “It was his masterstroke.” The musicians named their band Kel Tinariwen, the Desert Boys.

Pierre Boilley, a Tuareg-focused academic, said he hosted ag Ghali at his Paris apartment in 1989, where his guest spent evenings sipping whiskey and plotting a Tuareg uprising.

Ag Ghali eventually soured on Gadhafi, who put his own agenda ahead of Tuareg independence. “Gadhafi had promised for years to help,” Ansar recalled ag Ghali saying. “But he kept on sending us to fight other wars.”

In June 1990, ag Ghali and his fighters left Libya and slipped into Mali. They raided military posts during the day and sang fireside at night.

Bootleg cassettes of “Bismillah” passed hand to hand in Malian settlements, and the song became an anthem of the Tuareg liberation movement. It was ag Ghali’s song, said Abdallah ag Alhousseyni, a guitarist in the group since its early days.

“One can say Tinariwen was behind the uprising,” the band’s bass player, Eyadou ag Leche, later told the French newspaper Le Monde.

After initial battlefield wins, ag Ghali negotiated a 1991 peace that led to increased Tuareg autonomy from Malian authorities.

It was the start of a two-decade alliance between ag Ghali and the Bamako government.

City life

The fighting over, Malian President Moussa Traoré asked Ansar, a Tuareg and popular man-about-town in Bamako, to host ag Ghali for a dinner.

Ansar archived Tuareg music as a hobby, and he hit it off with ag Ghali, who thought Tinariwen needed a manager. The following year, ag Ghali invited Ansar to the Algerian Sahara and introduced him to band members, who were playing guitar on a carpet in the shade of a tree.

“I am entrusting this band to you,” Ansar recalled ag Ghali saying.

Traoré was overthrown by the military in 1991, in response to the killing of pro-democracy protesters. The new president, Alpha Konaré, hoping to keep a lid on the restive Tuaregs, gave ag Ghali a spacious villa in Bamako. 

Soldiers involved in the 1991 putsch led by Malian Lt. Col. Amadou Toumani Touré against President Moussa Traoré. Both leaders cultivated ties with Iyad ag Ghali before he launched an Islamist insurgency against the government two decades later. Photo: FRANCOIS ROJON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Ag Ghali invited Tinariwen’s founder to live in the house. The band stayed up late rehearsing and Ag Ghali sang along, keeping the beat on a water can.

President Konaré asked ag Ghali to join him on official trips to the United Arab Emirates, Algeria and elsewhere. The desert rebel began wearing a Rolex watch, Weston loafers and Smalto suits, gifts from their international hosts, Ansar said.

Ag Ghali and Ansar cranked Bob Marley songs as they drove to nightclubs, where Ag Ghali chain-smoked Marlboros, but drank only orange juice, Ansar said.

In 1999, a group of conservative Pakistani preachers arrived in ag Ghali’s hometown of Kidal, in northern Mali, and his life changed.

Ditch the Rolex

The Pakistanis, bearded and dressed in white, marched through Kidal, exhorting residents to strictly follow the tenets of Islam. Some Tuareg women booed them.

Ag Ghali, though, was intrigued and invited the Pakistanis to his home. Over the following months, he spent more time praying and reading the Quran. He grew a beard and began wearing the same white garb as the preachers.

“I’m ditching my Rolex and my shoes,” Ansar recalled ag Ghali saying. “I can’t wear them anymore.”

Ag Ghali’s growing attraction to an extreme version of Islam and his love of Tuareg music coexisted peacefully for a while. In 1999, the same year the Pakistani preachers came to town, he urged Ansar to organize concerts of Tuareg music, which eventually morphed into the Festival in the Desert.

Tap to unmute

U2's front man, Bono, takes the stage at the 2012 Festival in the Desert near Timbuktu, Mali. Reuters

Among those who attended the first festival in 2001 was U.S. Ambassador to Mali Michael Ranneberger. He was mesmerized by the swaying Tuareg dancers and starry nights in camel-skin tents, according to his written recollections.

Later that year, “Bismillah” appeared on Tinariwen’s first commercially released album. Others are credited for the song, but band managers said ag Ghali wrote most of the lyrics.

In 2003, Vicki Huddleston, then U.S. ambassador to Mali, arranged a meeting with ag Ghali, part of a Bush administration effort to track radicals after the Sept. 11 attacks. “We had intelligence al Qaeda was about to open a new front” in the region, said Huddleston, who suspected ag Ghali was behind the move.

Huddleston was charmed by the charismatic, “good-looking guy” wearing a turban that “made him look the part of a romantic Tuareg.” But when he denied flirting with radicalism, she said, “I knew he was lying.”

Ag Ghali eventually renounced the music festival he had championed. “Stop this,” Ansar remembered him saying. “You are bringing non-Muslims for debauchery.”

The festival’s popularity, and Tinariwen’s, swelled. In 2010, the band performed alongside Shakira and Alicia Keys at the World Cup in South Africa.

Tinariwen performing at the FIFA World Cup Kick-Off concert on June 10, 2010, in Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo: Michelly Rall/Getty Images for Live Earth Events

In 2011, Tinariwen released its Grammy-winning album, “Tassili,” and Libyan leader Gadhafi was overthrown. Tuareg fighters left Libya and flooded into Mali. Many younger Tuareg turned on ag Ghali, seeing him as a sellout who lived in luxury and cozied up to Mali’s government. 

Sidelined by former comrades, ag Ghali founded his own Islamist militant group.

The slow-motion implosion of West Africa soon followed.

Silenced

The last Festival in the Desert held in Mali took place on the outskirts of Timbuktu, where Tinariwen shared the stage with Bono, of the Irish band U2. 

The final curtain fell on Jan. 14, 2012. Two days later, ag Ghali’s former Tuareg rebel group launched a rebellion, later seizing Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal. 

Bono, in black shirt, with Manny Ansar, bottom, before flying out of Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012 after playing the Festival in the Desert with Tinariwen. Photo: ILlili Ansar

Islamist militants destroying an ancient shrine in Timbuktu on July 1, 2012. CREDIT: AFPTV/GETTY IMAGES

Within months, ag Ghali’s new Islamist group and another extremist force, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, drove the Tuareg into retreat.

After seizing Timbuktu, ag Ghali banned what he called the “music of Satan.” Women were barred for going outdoors without their husbands or brothers. Religious police whipped suspected heretics.

“They installed the rule that when a man joined the fighters, he ‘got’ a woman,” International Criminal Court prosecutors wrote later. The men beat and raped their new wives, as well as other women, prosecutors alleged.

In early 2013, ag Ghali’s militants ambushed Tinariwen musicians and held guitarist Abdallah ag Lamida for weeks after catching him trying to retrieve his instruments.

Abdallah ag Lamida performing in August 2022 with his band Tinariwen in London. Photo: Dafydd Owen/Avalon/ZUMA Press

Iyad ag Ghali, right, during a 2012 meeting with Burkina Faso Foreign Minister Djibril Bassole in Kidal, Mali. Photo: REUTERS

The U.S. designated ag Ghali a terrorist that year. France deployed combat troops to Mali and, backed by Malian soldiers and logistical support from the U.S. and others, dislodged the Islamists from Timbuktu. For ag Ghali, it was a setback, not a loss.

In 2017, he drew several al Qaeda-linked militant groups into a coalition called Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin, which translates as Support Group for Islam and Muslims. The coalition launched a new wave of insurgency across West Africa.

Ag Ghali’s men seized gold mines, extorted villagers for their cattle and took protection money from drug- and human-traffickers. The militants were linked to almost 2,300 violent incidents in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and other West African countries last year, leaving more than 8,880 people dead, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank in the Pentagon’s National Defense University. The center analyzes data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a U.S.-based nonprofit monitoring service.

The militant coalition didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Frustrated military officers in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger overthrew civilian rulers in a series of coups starting in 2020, claiming they were better able to defeat the insurgents.

The coups upended the West’s counterinsurgency strategy in West Africa. Over the past three years, the juntas have evicted French counterterrorism forces. Niger’s military rulers ordered 1,100 U.S. troops out of the country and took over a $110 million American drone base. 

Mali booted a 15,000-strong United Nations force and hired Russian Wagner Group mercenaries to provide security. The Russians have been accused of massacring civilians, and ag Ghali has sought popular support by opposing Moscow’s presence. In July, ag Ghali’s forces joined a Tuareg attack in northern Mali that killed at least 50 Wagner fighters, the company’s biggest single loss in Africa. 

Benin, Ivory Coast and Togo, relatively stable countries on the Gulf of Guinea coast, are struggling to fend off insurgents pouring across their northern borders.

Ag Ghali, recalling the backlash to his heavy-handed rule in Timbuktu, has made some effort to soften the image of his militant coalition and assume the trappings of government, suggesting an ambition to establish a West African caliphate.

A crowd watching the aftermath of a September 2024 attack by militants in Bamako, Mali Photo: hadama diakite/EPA/Shutterstock

His fighters have fended off Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, a rival group that has executed village elders and demanded fealty from residents. Ag Ghali’s protection comes at a price: In one village in central Mali, it was 40 cows and 130 pounds of sorghum a year. In exchange, ag Ghali’s men settle disputes among hunters, fishermen, nomadic herders and farmers, who squabble over grazing lands and water resources.

“It’s safe,” said Ibrahim Cisse, a Malian community leader. “But it’s a prison.”

The threat of violence is never far from the surface. Last August, ag Ghali’s militants gunned down some 600 villagers in Barsalogho, Burkina Faso, as the residents dug defensive trenches to try to protect their settlement, according to a French intelligence report.

In June, the International Criminal Court in The Hague unsealed an arrest warrant for ag Ghali, charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity. He remains at large.

Last summer, Tinariwen performed in U.S. cities, including Boston and Los Angeles.

Write to Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com and Michael M. Phillips at Michael.Phillips@wsj.com

​26. The MIT Scientist Behind the ‘Torpedo Bats’ That Are Blowing Up Baseball

​Although it is April 1st this is not a prank. My Yankees (my bias) are doing great.

Science (physics) still has value!

The MIT Scientist Behind the ‘Torpedo Bats’ That Are Blowing Up Baseball

The Yankees just clobbered a MLB record 15 home runs in their first three games thanks in part to a new style of bat developed by a 48-year-old physicist

https://www.wsj.com/sports/baseball/mit-scientist-torpedo-bats-new-york-yankees-bfdeacd9?mod=latest_headlines

By Jared Diamond

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April 1, 2025 5:30 am ET

Jazz Chisholm Jr. hit three home runs in his first three games this season. Photo: Pamela Smith/Associated Press

When Aaron Leanhardt was a graduate student in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was part of a research team that cooled sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded in human history.

What his colleagues didn’t realize was that in the rare moments when Leanhardt wasn’t toiling away at the lab, he was moonlighting as a speedy shortstop in a local amateur baseball league. Leanhardt was good enough to play in a 2001 All-Star Game at a minor-league stadium in Lowell. He hit .464 that season.

“We didn’t even know about that,” said David Pritchard, a professor emeritus at MIT.

More than two decades later, the baseball world suddenly knows all about the 48-year-old Leanhardt. He’s the inventor of the so-called “torpedo bat,” perhaps the most significant development in bat technology in decades.

Leanhardt’s creation exploded into the mainstream this weekend, when the New York Yankees tied a major-league record by bashing 15 home runs in the first three games of their season. Nine of the homers came from players who have adopted the torpedo bat, including three from infielder Jazz Chisholm Jr.

Now, players across the league are desperately scrambling to get their hands on Leanhardt’s creation.

None of this seemed likely when Leanhardt was earning his doctorate and spending seven years teaching at the University of Michigan. But he would leave academia to pursue a higher calling: the solution to a complex, century-old physics problem with significant real-world applications. He wanted to know how to effectively hit a round ball with a wooden bat.

“This,” former Yankees minor-leaguer Kevin Smith said, “is probably the least impressive thing he’s done in his entire life.” 

Leanhardt’s solution, which he devised a couple of years ago as a minor-league hitting coordinator for the Yankees, moves the fat part of the bat closer to the handle rather than the end. The result is a product that better resembles a bowling pin than a traditional bat, redistributing the weight to the area where players most often make contact with the ball.

The idea behind the new design was to help batters make more contact at a time when strikeouts are at an all-time high. Leanhardt eventually came to think about the bat as having what he describes as a “wood budget.” The goal was to use as much of that budget as possible in the ideal spot—six or 7 inches below the tip—without sacrificing swing speed.

With that theory in mind, Leanhardt dreamed up a bat that looked unlike anything the sport has ever seen. To turn his vision into a reality, his concept had to comply with MLB’s bat specifications. Rule 3.02 specifies that bats must be “a smooth, round stick not more than 2.61 inches in diameter at the thickest part and not more than 42 inches in length.” 

Aaron Leanhardt joined the Miami Marlins’ as their field coordinator following six years with the Yankees. Photo: Jeff Roberson/Associated Press

Surprisingly, the torpedo bat qualifies. At this point, Leanhardt says, he is on a “first-name basis with everyone who operates the lathe for every bat manufacturer in baseball.” 

The last step was generating buy-in from players. Initially, the uptake was slow. But after the Yankees’ home-run barrage on the opening weekend of the season, that is no longer an issue.

“It’s just about making the bat as heavy and fat as possible in the area where you’re trying to do damage on the baseball,” Leanhardt said. 

Leanhardt joined the Miami Marlins’ as their field coordinator this winter following six years with the Yankees. Before all that, he was a standout at MIT. Wolfgang Ketterle, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2001, called Leanhardt “one of the handful of absolute outstanding students” he has taught in nearly 30 years at the school. 

In baseball, it took longer for his talent to be recognized. Chris Lewis still remembers the first time he encountered Leanhardt. Lewis was the head coach at a school in Eastern Montana called Dawson Community College in 2017. Leanhardt’s only baseball experience was a summer coaching gig in an independent professional league, but he was interested in the open hitting coach role on Lewis’s staff. 

“His résumé looked like some kind of physics project,” Lewis said. “I was like, ‘Holy cow, I can’t even read this thing.’”  

Austin Wells hits a home run in the first inning against the Milwaukee Brewers on March 29. Photo: Mike Stobe/Getty Images

Lewis was curious to know why someone with Leanhardt’s background wanted to come to Montana. Leanhardt told him that he always loved baseball, wanted to break into coaching and was willing to accept low pay and long hours for the opportunity. 

He was there for one season before successfully applying for a job with the Yankees. Now Leanhardt and his torpedo bats are the talk of the sport.

“Dude,” Lewis said, “that’s the most interesting man in baseball.”

Write to Jared Diamond at jared.diamond@wsj.com

27. New U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier To Be Named USS Musk

​Note it is April 1st.

But I could just see Musk offering to buy a complete aircraft carrier to have his name on it. :-) 

New U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier To Be Named USS Musk

https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/04/new-u-s-navy-aircraft-carrier-to-be-named-uss-musk/

• Published on 01/04/2025
• By Naval News Staff
• In News

Click to Enlarge. U.S. Navy Ford-class carrier performing a sharp turn. U.S. Navy photograph, released

The U.S. Navy is set to launch it next aircraft carrier, CVN 80, later this year. In a change from the planned USS Enterprise name, the vessel will now be named after the Senior Advisor to the President, Elon Musk.

The U.S. Navy will name its next aircraft carrier the USS Musk according to an executive order to be issued later today. The vessel, which was originally to be christened the USS Enterprise (CVN 80), is expected to be launched by Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) in November. It will be the first carrier named after a serving Senior Advisor to the President.

The executive order on ship naming will follow on from a draft order in February entitled ‘Make Shipbuilding Great Again’. That order addressed the imbalance in shipbuilding between the United States and China. President Trump said at the time “We used to make so many ships. We don’t make them anymore very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon.”

Ford-class carrier

The USS Musk will be the 3rd Gerald R Ford-class carrier and will replace the USS Dwight D Eisenhower (CVN 69) in service from 2029. The name change is being seen as part of a wider clamp down on what is seen as ‘wokeness’ in the military.

The Ford-class carriers are among the largest in the world, displacing around 100,000 tonnes, carrying 2,600 crew, and around 75 aircraft. Only the preceding Nimitz-class, and China’s new Type-004 Fujian-class are comparable in size.

The ship features an electromagnetic aircraft launch systems (EMALS). This is in keeping with the new namesake’s electric car interests. This technology has however been criticised by President Trump. In 2017 he called for a return to older steam catapults, complaining that “the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good”. It is unclear whether the naval architects took note of the president’s expertise on ship design.

Other ship naming news

Also part of the ‘Make Ship Names Great Again’ order, reports suggest that another new vessel, a Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) ship, will be named after the United States Secretary of Defense Hegseth. This has been denied by the White House press secretary. The administration has roundly criticised speculation based on unclassified-classified sources.

Meanwhile, it now seems likely that the oldest commissioner ship in the U.S. Navy, the USS Constitution, will be disposed of. The vintage vessel, which is made of wood, is no longer considered fit for purpose. Speaking over the weekend, a spokesperson for DOGE noted that wooden ships have no place in a modern warfare. This will also free up the Navy’s oak forests for commercial purposes

​28. DOGE Is Trying to Gift Itself a $500 Million Building, Court Filings Show

​It is after all the best building in Washington.

I thought this might be one for April 1st but it was actually published on March 31st.

DOGE Is Trying to Gift Itself a $500 Million Building, Court Filings Show

The documents reveal a DOGE affiliate is attempting to transfer the headquarters of an independent think tank, the United States Institute of Peace, to the government at no cost.

Wired · by Brian Barrett · April 1, 2025

The DOGE-affiliated acting president of the United States Institute of Peace, a Congressionally funded, independent think tank, has moved to transfer the agency’s $500 million headquarters building to the General Services Administration free of charge, according to court documents revealed in a recently filed lawsuit.

Tensions at USIP have been escalating for weeks, starting when the Trump administration fired the agency’s 10 voting board members on March 14 and USIP staffers denied DOGE representatives access at the front door. Three days later, DOGE employees made their way into the building, reportedly using a physical key from a former security contractor. The dramatic confrontations culminated in a full takeover, with former State Department official Kenneth Jackson assuming the role of president. As of this past Friday, most USIP staffers have received termination notices.

Former USIP officials have since filed a lawsuit against Jackson, DOGE, Donald Trump, and other members of the Trump administration, seeking an immediate intervention “to stop Defendants from completing the unlawful dismantling of the Institute,” according to the complaint. While US district judge Beryl Howell declined the USIP request for a temporary restraining order that would reinstate the institute’s board on March 19, she sharply criticized DOGE’s conquest in court.

Court documents filed by defendants on Monday reveal the next phase of DOGE’s plans for USIP. As of March 25, DOGE staffer Nate Cavanaugh—formerly installed at GSA—has replaced Jackson as the institute’s acting president, the documents show. They further state that Cavanaugh has been instructed to transfer USIP’s assets—including its real estate—to the GSA. The letter detailing those changes and instructions was signed by secretary of defense Pete Hegseth and secretary of state Marco Rubio.

Cavanaugh did not immediately respond to a request for comment by WIRED. The lead attorney for the Department of Justice in this case also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a separate undated letter, which was also included in the batch of documents filed with the court, Cavanaugh writes to GSA acting administrator Stephen Ehikian: “I have concluded that it is in the best interest of USIP, the federal government, and the United States for USIP to transfer its real property located at 2301 Constitution Ave NW, Washington, D.C. 20037, to GSA and to seek an exception from the 100 percent reimbursement requirement for the building.”

Cavanaugh goes on to estimate that the building has a “fair market value” of $500 million.

In another letter included in the lawsuit’s docket dated March 29, Project 2025 architect and Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought writes to Ehikian to approve his request “to set the amount of reimbursement at no cost for the transfer of the United States Institute of Peace’s (USIP) headquarters building.”

To state this plainly: DOGE forced out the directors and staff of a nonexecutive agency, installed one of its own GSA staffers as president, and that person is now attempting to hand the institute’s $500 million headquarters over to the agency he came from, at zero cost.

“The effort to transfer the building to GSA is part of the DOGE playbook to run agencies through a wood chipper. That’s what they’re trying to do,” claims George Foote, longtime outside general counsel to USIP. “They’re trying to kill the agency, which they have no right to do.”

Judge Howell will decide whether to allow the transfer in court Tuesday; a broader ruling in the USIP case is expected by the end of the month.

Additional reporting by Matt Giles.

Wired · by Brian Barrett · April 1, 2025

​29. Beyond his bright blue suits, Pete Hegseth's unconventional style is 'operator casual'

​This was published on March 29th but I thought this too might have been one for April 1st.

Photos at the link.

Beyond his bright blue suits, Pete Hegseth's unconventional style is 'operator casual'

https://www.aol.com/more-defense-secretary-pete-hegseths-113001259.html

aol.com · by AOL Staff

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth donning "operator casual" style in February.U.S. Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Andrew R. Sveen

• Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seems to favor "operator casual" style on official trips.
• The style, popularized during the Global War on Terrorism, blends professionalism and tactical function.
• Hegseth's look contrasts with predecessors, reflecting a generational shift.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is known for steering clear of the traditional, somber attire expected in Washington, DC, playing the suit game by his own rules. But he's also got a second kind of unconventional look — operator casual.

It's a different, more relaxed vibe from the conspicuously bright blue suit he wore at the recent NATO summit, drawing criticism, but it can share some similarities to some of his other preferred flair, like flag-linings in his suits, patriotic socks, and a star-spangled pocket square.

The style gained momentum during the Global War on Terrorism, or GWOT, though earlier versions date back to the 1990s. US special operators deployed to areas away from support forces have, at times, needed to blend in. Lightweight, nonmilitary clothing that can convey professionalism while offering tactical features that allow the wearer to maneuver in a gunfight has come in handy.

And it's since given rise to this look.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth arrives at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba wearing on "operator casual" look.U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. ShaTyra Cox

Hegseth donned this kind of attire on recent trips to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and the US-Mexico border. He wore the same style while addressing reporters in Hawaii this week as he disputed that he and other Trump administration officials discussed sensitive attack plans on an unsecured messaging app.

Instead of only talking about hoaxes,

I’d like to put the focus back on our warfighters!

Anyone that knows me and @POTUS knows how much we love the warriors. That’s what it’s about. pic.twitter.com/45Flon5BLD

— Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (@SecDef) March 26, 2025

The travel look differs from previous defense secretaries. Hegseth has cultivated an image of "lethality" and having "dust on his boots," characterizing himself as a "change agent" with real, on-the-ground combat experience. That's meant to stand in contrast with his predecessors, many of whom not only had combat experience but significantly more leadership experience.

Had the privilege of meeting the outstanding men and women of the 95th Wing on board “The Nightwatch.” Thanks for your dedication and hard work in ensuring the success of our mission as we continue our travels across the Indo-Pacific. pic.twitter.com/VrIbEtyv0y

— Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (@SecDef) March 27, 2025

He may have taken notice of the comfortable "operator casual" style while serving in the Army National Guard, though it is unclear. The Office of the Secretary of Defense has not responded to Business Insider's request for comment on the secretary's attire.

The general vibe associated with this look is that someone, often soldiers or civilian first responders, could "be traveling at one minute, and then be on the range the next minute, and then be back in the professional office in the third instance," said Tim Jensen, cofounder of the clothing brand Grunt Style, in an interview with BI. The term "grunt" is used to describe infantry personnel.

What is operator casual?

The look usually includes five components, Jensen said. Normally, a baseball-style hat, maybe with a subdued American flag, sunglasses, a collared shirt or tee with a patriotic symbol, technical fabric pants (good in case you need to break into a sprint, Jensen explained), and hiking-style boots.

Early versions of this operator casual look can be seen in photos from the 1990s, like when elite US Delta Force personnel were photographed traveling with Operation Desert Storm leader, US Army General Norman Schwarzkopf, carrying rifles with button-down shirts.

Before the GWOT, special operations-coded words like "operator" weren't really part of the general American lexicon, Jensen observed. But after two decades of war and countless movies, books, and TV shows depicting niche SOF cultures, those preferences have seeped into other parts of American life, including into conventional corners of the US military.

Hegseth did not serve as a special operator, but he is known to enjoy working out with Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs.

Concurrent with the increased cultural popularity of special operations forces, as troops returned from deployments seeking more functional clothes to wear at home or to take on future overseas rotations, many were drawn to the new clothing styles, said Michael Standing, a marketing coordinator for the Zero Foxtrot clothing brand popular with veterans and first responders.

The demand for a more outdoorsy style, with plentiful pockets and a loose fit to help obscure pistols for concealed carry, arose as US special operations units also drafted lucrative contracts with brands like Patagonia, Salomon, and Arc'teryx.

Had the privilege of meeting the outstanding men and women of the 95th Wing on board “The Nightwatch.” Thanks for your dedication and hard work in ensuring the success of our mission as we continue our travels across the Indo-Pacific. pic.twitter.com/VrIbEtyv0y

— Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (@SecDef) March 27, 2025

A different look

Hegseth's travel look is a notable departure from some of the most recent secretaries. Jim Mattis, Trump's first defense secretary, was rarely seen in anything but dark formal suits. Leon Panetta dressed down in khakis and dress shirts while Ash Carter wore dress shirts and multiple holsters for devices. And Chuck Hagel favored a country club vibe and grandfatherly sweaters.

President Barack Obama's Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel touring a military base.DoD photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Sean Hurt

One predecessor, though, Gulf War combat veteran Mark Esper, was photographed in a casual operator style on several occasions while visiting Iraq and Afghanistan during his time as the US Army secretary.

While the off-duty operator look has surged in popularity with veterans and first responders over the past two decades, much of Hegseth's look can probably be chalked up to generational differences between him and his predecessors, said Derek Guy, a menswear expert and author of the blog Die, Workwear.

As men's tailored clothing has declined in popularity while technical fabrics become more ubiquitous, a collared, button-front shirt and khaki-adjacent pants can convey a modern professional image, Guy told BI. A polo shirt could also suffice for such official travel, though it might communicate a less rugged image, he said.

Hegseth is no stranger to tailored clothing, though his tightly fitted and brightly colored suits also distinguish him from other secretaries. But when visiting troops, especially in warm climates, it might make sense that he would gravitate toward a younger look, Guy said.

"If you're a 60 or 70-year-old guy, and you're going out to visit troops, you might still wear a tailored jacket because it is so ingrained in your behavior," he said. "I think generationally, these different types of men across different age groups have different ideas of what it means to look presentable."

Read the original article on Business Insider

aol.com · by AOL Staff

​30. Project 2025: Implementing Changes to the Department of Defense

Project 2025: Implementing Changes to the Department of Defense

Soldiers on patrol.  Getty Images, Virojt Changyencham

https://thefulcrum.us/changes-to-department-of-defense

By Kristina Becvar

Mar 31, 2025

Long before President Trump’s second inauguration in January, it was clear that the Project 2025 blueprint for his administration’s Department of Defense would lead to executive overreach and would make the United States less safe. Aspects of the plan called for overstepping constitutional boundaries, engaging in an overtly partisan approach, and undermining congressional authority.

So, over two months into the second Trump presidency, how closely is his administration following the plan? Close enough that the director of the project, Paul Dans, has said that Trump’s actions are proving to go “way beyond my wildest dreams”. What does that look like?

A National Emergency at the Southern Border

One of the many actions issued on day one of Trump’s current presidency was “Declaring A National Emergency At The Southern Border Of The United States.” This was a clearly defined goal of Project 2025, and though it is laid out in the chapter on the Department of Homeland Security, it calls for the Department of Defense to:

“Assist in aggressively building the border wall system on America’s southern border. Additionally, explicitly acknowledge and adjust personnel and priorities to participate actively in the defense of America’s borders, including using military personnel and hardware to prevent illegal crossings between ports of entry and channel all cross-border traffic to legal ports of entry.”

Consequently, Trump’s January 20th action calls for the Secretary of Defense to deploy the military to support the Secretary of Homeland Security in securing the southern border, including:

· Providing detention space, transportation (such as aircraft), and other logistical support for civilian law enforcement operations.

· Taking immediate action to construct additional physical barriers along the southern border.

· Revising policies and strategies to prioritize preventing unauthorized physical entry of individuals across the southern border.

· Ensuring that use-of-force policies prioritize the safety and security of Department of Homeland Security personnel and members of the Armed Forces.

Addressing Culture Wars

One of the most specific goals laid out by Christopher Miller, former Secretary of Defense and author of the Department of Defense chapter of Project 2025, was to kick transgender individuals out of the military. He called to:

“Restore standards of lethality and excellence. Entrance criteria for military service and specific occupational career fields should be based on the needs of those positions. Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service.”

In “Prioritizing Military Excellence And Readiness”, issued on January 27th, Trump ordered that it be “the policy of the United States Government to establish high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity. This policy is inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria. This policy is also inconsistent with shifting pronoun usage or use of pronouns that inaccurately reflect an individual’s sex.”

A New ‘Star Wars’ For a New Generation

One of the primary goals listed in the Project 2025 DOD section is to champion the benefits of missile defense.

“Invest in new track-and-intercept capabilities ... Accelerate the program to deploy space-based sensors that can detect and track missiles flying on nonballistic trajectories.”

In quick fulfillment of this recommendation, Trump issued “The Iron Dome for America” Executive Order on January 27, just one week into his presidency. It calls upon the Secretary of Defense to provide the President, within 60 days, a reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield.

Reinstating COVID Vaccination Refusers

Another very specific goal of Project 2025 was to “reinstate servicemembers to active duty who were discharged for not receiving the COVID vaccine, restore their appropriate rank, and provide back pay.”

In the Executive Order “Reinstating Service Members Discharged Under The Military’s COVID-19 Vaccination Mandate,” Trump ordered exactly that be done, ordering the Secretary of Defense to “make reinstatement available to all members of the military (active and reserve) who were discharged solely for refusal to receive the COVID-19 vaccine and who request to be reinstated ... enable those service members reinstated under this section to revert to their former rank and receive full back pay, benefits, bonus payments, or compensation.”

Kristina Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and Executive Director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.

​31. 'Lives Are In Danger' After a Trump Admin Spreadsheet Leak, Sources Say

This is troubling (if the reporting is accurate)

I don't think most of us realize that some of the incredibly important work conducted by USAID includes helping to develop democracy programs in denied areas ruled by dictators. There are USAID grantees working in denied areas who should have their names and affiliation with USAID protected.

'Lives Are In Danger' After a Trump Admin Spreadsheet Leak, Sources Say

Trump’s State Department was supposed to keep sensitive information about foreign grants private, despite Musk’s meddling. It all leaked

By Asawin Suebsaeng, Andrew Perez

Rolling Stone · by Asawin Suebsaeng,Andrew Perez · March 29, 2025

Reports that Donald Trump’s top national security officials accidentally shared their Yemen attack plans with The Atlantic in real-time drove the news in official Washington in recent days. But it wasn’t the only damaging leak of information held by the administration this week.

Two Trump administration spreadsheets — which each include what numerous advocates and government officials say is highly sensitive information on programs funded by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — were sent to Congress and also leaked online.

The leak, which sent a variety of international groups and nonprofits scrambling to assess the damage and protect workers operating under repressive regimes, came after the organizations had pressed the Trump administration to keep the sensitive information private and received some assurances it would remain secret.

Reached for comment, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly says: “These documents were transmitted to Congress and not publicly released by the State Department.” She urged Rolling Stone to contact “whoever leaked it and in turn, made it public.”

The episode is just the latest blow to America’s foreign partners and international aid organizations, many of which have seen their funds targeted and frozen by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The Trump administration has also effectively shuttered USAID, America’s foreign aid bureau; its scraps are being folded into the State Department.

The State Department, led by Marco Rubio, informed a variety of international nonprofits and longtime implementing partner organizations last week that upcoming payments of their congressionally approved grant funds came with some conditions that the Trump administration wanted to clarify.

As part of their campaign to eliminate what they’re calling “waste, fraud, and abuse,” Team Trump and DOGE had demanded comprehensive grant recipient information — and State Department officials let the organizations know that Musk’s lieutenants were likely planning on turning this information into a public spreadsheet or database.

The message — according to three sources familiar with the matter, as well as written communications reviewed by Rolling Stone — was abundantly clear: If you’re not OK with providing all this information or with having it all posted online, let us know; however, that decision could, or will, lead to your expected funding being halted.

The pushback was swift from a number of international groups that have spent years, if not decades, working with the State Department, USAID, and the U.S. government. (Rolling Stone has agreed not to name these groups, given their leaders and staff justifiably fear retribution from Trump and his senior officials.)

The nonprofit leaders and others reminded State Department personnel — some of whom are career officials aghast at what Team Trump and Musk are doing, and wished to contain unnecessary damage — that various programs that the department had on file had long been marked “sensitive,” and that their information was not meant for public consumption.

A number of these programs, which rely at least in part on State Department and USAID grants, operate in countries run by repressive regimes or authoritarian governments. Exposing key details of those programs, and effectively linking them to the U.S. government, would likely make it easier for those foreign governments to identify citizens or local activists who are associated with those groups and programs.

Such a move would open up staff and local allies to intimidation, harassment, prosecution, or worse, and provide fodder for officials in these foreign nations who would want to paint dissidents or other political enemies as tools of the United States.

After a flurry of phone calls and messages, State Department officials reported back to their partners with a note of reassurance: Though other information would likely be posted online in the near future, the closely held, highly “sensitive” information on certain grants and nonprofit organizations would be left off the table. The officials promised these groups that that information would stay under lock and key, and the grant recipients would still get their money.

A few short days after these assurances were made, two different documents — one was a spreadsheet about State Department grants, the other concerned USAID — were shared with Congress, and they were leaked to several mainstream media outlets and elsewhere. Today, it’s easy for just about anyone to find much of this information online.

The leaked documents, the sources say, include some of the very same information that multiple nonprofits and international partners had been promised would not be made public. Senior executives and other staff working at these groups were particularly alarmed, for instance, by the inclusion of certain details pertaining to programs and non-governmental organizations operating in China, Russia, Iran, Uganda, Cuba, and elsewhere.

From Wednesday and well into Thursday, this led to a mad dash among these different groups to work up damage assessments on what had just happened; frantically reach out to an array of staffers and local activists to warn them and to confirm that they were safe and OK; and to game out what they were all prepared to do in worst case scenarios, according to the sources familiar with the situation and the written communications and internal memos reviewed by Rolling Stone.

“Please do not share the spreadsheet that was circulating yesterday with terminated awards listed and if possible remove it or ask it to be removed from anywhere you’ve seen it,” reads one message shared in a private USAID chat late this week. “It contains information about partners who are working in unsafe environments with restricted civil society space or terrible LGBTQ laws etc. A few of our friends already had to pull staff on an emergency basis yesterday due to threats and unwanted attention from their governments. Please pass along to anyone you think needs to see this.”

One top executive at an international nonprofit and U.S. government implementing partner that’s been grappling with the fallout bluntly tells Rolling Stone: “In all our years of receiving grants from a range of governments, we have never seen the safety of government partners treated with such reckless abandon. People will lose their liberty, and possibly even more, because of this.”

Another source with knowledge of the situation — a State Department career official — says: “Lives are in danger that did not have to be.”

Rolling Stone · by Asawin Suebsaeng,Andrew Perez · March 29, 2025

32. Competing visions of international order – Responses to US power in a fracturing world

​The 131 page report from Chatham House can be accessed at this link: www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/2025-03/2025-03-27-competing-visions-international-order-vinjamuri-et-al.pdf

​The authors are listed after the table of contents below.

Competing visions of international order

Responses to US power in a fracturing world

Research paper

Published 27 March 2025

Updated 28 March 2025

ISBN: 978 1 78413 638 3

DOI: 10.55317/9781784136383

https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/03/competing-visions-international-order?utm

The ‘liberal international order’ that has been predominant, if often controversial, since 1945 is being challenged as never before. This reflects factors both long-standing and recent: the rise of China; the frustrations and ambitions of countries – including many in the Global South – that associate the US-led liberal international order with deep hypocrisy; inequality within liberal democracies that has given rise to populism; Russian revanchism; and perhaps above all, the US’s more nationalist outlook and disruptive foreign policy since Donald Trump took office for the second time in early 2025. 

This paper takes stock of these developments, examines the US’s changing role and ambitions as a global power, and explores how 11 other key states are adapting. It examines how states are positioning themselves in this more fractured world, and how some are seeking to disrupt or even undermine the existing order. The paper, based originally on research for the US National Intelligence Council but revised and updated in this public version, considers how adversaries of the US seek to exploit what they see as the US’s declining global power, or to promote alternative visions. It also examines the challenges for US allies such as France, Germany and Japan, which have long been pillars of cooperative multilateralism but need to develop new ways to protect their interests and project power. And it explores how rising or middle powers, from Brazil to Saudi Arabia to India, are pursuing visions of international order that include elements of non-alignment, strategic autonomy, and selective or transactional cooperation with the current order. 

Preface

Hide contents 

• Preface
• 01 The fracturing of the US-led liberal international order
• 02 China: Balancing the US, increasing global influence
• 03 Russia stakes global ambitions on regional dominance
• 04 Resistance: the mantra behind Iran’s worldview
• 05 India: A non-Western, not anti-Western, worldview
• 06 Brazil sees opportunity in a multipolar order
• 07 Saudi Arabia’s goals rest on managing multipolarity
• 08 Continuity and non-alignment shape Indonesia’s worldview
• 09 Turkey seeks a vision fit for a multipolar world
• 10 Germany: An internationalist vision in crisis
• 11 French global status rests on averting bloc geopolitics
• 12 Is Japan’s model the future of the liberal order?
• 13 Envisioning the future international order
• About the authors
• Acknowledgments

Preface

An earlier version of this research paper was prepared for the US National Intelligence Council as part of a project entitled ‘Competing Visions for International Order’. The project looked at how national leaders and foreign policy elites in a carefully selected group of states across Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America viewed the United States and its international role. Our research took a special interest in how these elite perceptions of the US have affected the ambitions and strategies of some of the most important allies and partners of the US, but also of several of its adversaries.

Over the course of several months, our authors held a series of individual meetings, and convened for a research workshop at Chatham House to consider the future international order, and how each of these states seeks to establish its own position in this order. In our authors’ workshop, contributors asked whether states were content with the status quo, or whether they sought to adapt, disrupt or even undermine the existing international order. The brief was also to consider the presence (or absence) of a consensus around their state’s vision of international order, the implications of US–China rivalry, and, especially, the changing US international role and the significance of the 2024 US elections.

The prospect of a possible second Donald Trump presidency was surprisingly muted in much of the original analysis. Several authors identified a long-term trend in the US towards a more assertive international position. Trump’s subsequent election victory in November 2024 and the initial two months of his second term in 2025 have been received very differently in different regions of the world. For Europe, foreign policy elites have been transfixed by the US’s abandonment of its commitments to sovereignty, multilateralism and the defence of Ukraine. The chapters in this paper, although conceived and first written in 2024, have been developed and updated to take into account the return of President Trump to the White House.

The paper has deliberately aimed to be selective rather than comprehensive. The states we have studied are actively seeking to manage the challenge presented by a changing US position. Some are more ambitious and seek to adapt or revise the international order, while others are intent on undermining it. The selection of states also reflects the necessary constraints of time and resource and our effort to balance this paper with multiple other initiatives at Chatham House that have addressed, for example, the international ambitions of the UK, or the role of Africa on the global stage. The discussions that have continued since the initial drafts were circulated, together with the comments of several excellent peer reviewers, have helped the authors further develop their chapters. Our aim is to present a carefully considered look at the medium- and longer-term factors that are shaping states’ visions of international order.

Show authors

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Director, US and the Americas Programme

• Email Leslie
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• Google Scholar

Professor Senem Aydın-Düzgit

Professor of International Relations, Sabancı University

Dr Chietigj Bajpaee

Senior Research Fellow for South Asia, Asia-Pacific Programme

• Email Chietigj
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Professor Alexander Cooley

Academy Faculty Member, The Queen Elizabeth II Academy, Chatham House; Claire Tow Professor of Political Science, Barnard College, Columbia University

Dr Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer

Director, Paris Office, German Marshall Fund of the United States

Dr Ralf Emmers

Professor in International Politics of East Asia and Co-Chair of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London

M. Taylor Fravel

Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science; Director, Security Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr Jennifer Lind

Associate Fellow, US and the Americas Programme

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Professor Vali Nasr

Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University

Martin Quencez

Fellow and Deputy Director, Paris Office, GMF

Dr Constanze Stelzenmüller

Director, Center on the United States and Europe, Brookings Institution

Professor Oliver Della Costa Stuenkel

Associate Professor, School of International Relations, Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), São Paulo; Visiting Scholar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), Washington, DC

Dr Sanam Vakil

Director, Middle East and North Africa Programme

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Professor Ayşe Zarakol

Professor of International Relations, University of Cambridge

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com