Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Friends and neighbors complain that taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might the more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly.”

– Benjamin Franklin

“I have never believed that man’s freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do.”

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“The Cold War was a contest of ideas as much as it was a contest of arms, and the United States believed that by promoting freedom of expression and the open exchange of ideas, it could win hearts and minds in the struggle against totalitarianism.”

– The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War by Louis Menand

1. Soldier becomes first woman to compete in Best Ranger Competition

2. Exclusive—how China's military is quietly gaining control of the Pacific

3. China Would Lose a ‘Trade War’ With the US—’Gradually, then Suddenly’

4. U.S. Softens Position on Iranian Uranium Enrichment

5. Aides Push Trump to Adopt Tougher Approach With Moscow

6. China Accuses U.S. Spy Agency of Winter Games Cyberattacks

7. China’s Halt of Critical Minerals Poses Risk for U.S. Military Programs

8. Unintended Consequences of Unmanned Warfare (from 2008)

9. The Swiss Manual on Guerrilla Warfare Advises Hiding in Atomic Ruins

10. Trump signs shipbuilding order as Navy leaders call for 381-ship fleet

11. Repudiating Genesis (Book Review: To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism)

12. The reactionary international: How three ideological families are united in hating progressivism

13. US efforts to hobble China’s AI march can only backfire, top internet official warns

14. China fires back after US official takes swipe at aid to Global South

15. Could this breakthrough in robot manufacturing reshape warfare?

16. ‘Honey badger’ admiral emerges as top contender for Navy chief

17. Open Questions | China may be stunned by Trump’s lack of caution and understanding: ex-diplomat Kerry Brown18.

18. Command Posts, the Iron Triangle, and 1st Armored Division in WFX 23-4

19. Chinese Mockery of U.S. Manufacturing Reveals Economic Truth

20. Rearming Europe: Challenges and Constraints

21. Arms Control Is Not Dead Yet

22. How America Can Stay Ahead of China in the AI Race

23. The USAID Freeze: A View From Sri Lanka and the Global South

24. Trump’s Tariffs Will Ensure America Can Win the Next War

25. Going, Going . . .? The US Base Network in Europe

26. Erik Prince: I'm not so worried about China militarily

27. Trump Administration Memo Proposes Cutting State Department Funding by Nearly Half

1. Soldier becomes first woman to compete in Best Ranger Competition

Not only compete, but also to complete. 14th place. Only 16 teams completed the entire challenge. 38 other teams did not make the cut to the final day.

Only one word: Respect.

Soldier becomes first woman to compete in Best Ranger Competition

https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2025/04/14/soldier-becomes-first-woman-to-compete-in-best-ranger-competition/

By Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press

Apr 14, 2025, 06:45 PM

First Lt. Gabrielle White was the first woman to compete in the Army's annual Best Ranger Competition. (Capt. Stephanie Snyder/U.S. Army)

A female Army Ranger for the first time competed in the annual Best Ranger Competition, and her two-soldier team finished the grueling three-day event over the weekend and came in 14th overall.

First Lt. Gabrielle White, and her teammate, Capt. Seth Deltenre, were among the 16 teams that made it through the final events, where Ranger teams compete for accolades as the best of the elite military force. All together, 52 teams competed and all of the others were made up of only male soldiers.

The two Rangers on the winning team were 1st Lt. Griff Hokanson and 1st Lt. Kevin Moore — both are members of the 75th Ranger Regiment. White and Deltenre are based at the Army Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Triple-tabbed soldier completes Ranger, Sapper and Jungle coursesShe’s the 135th woman to graduate and earn her Ranger tab, making her the eighth woman to be double-tabbed with Ranger and Sapper tabs.By Jonathan Lehrfeld

Female soldiers were not allowed to be Army Rangers until 2015, when the Army opened Ranger school to women. In August 2015, two female soldiers completed the Ranger course for the first time. Later that year, the Defense Department opened all combat jobs to women.

Until this year, no female soldiers had entered the Best Ranger Competition at Fort Benning. Soldiers participating must all be Army Rangers, and they compete in more than 30 events.

White, and her teammate, Capt. Seth Deltenre, finished the grueling three-day event over the weekend and came in 14th overall. (Patrick A. Albright/U.S. Army via AP)

According to the competition, soldiers must move more than 60 miles during the three days, with little rest. It includes helicopter missions, physical fitness tests, land navigation, weapons qualification, obstacle course and other tests.

While in previous years the Army would likely have noted the historic first in a story or press release, that won’t happen this time.

Under President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the department has banned anything that touts diversity, equity and inclusion. And in the recent purge of the military’s online websites and social media postings, mentions of historic firsts by women and minorities were largely eliminated.

White, 25, is a Black infantry officer assigned to the maneuver captains career course. She graduated from the Military Academy at West Point in May 2021 and completed the Ranger School in April 2022, according to Christopher Surridge, an Army spokesman.

According to the Army, 154 females had graduated from the Ranger School as of January 2025.

2. Exclusive—how China's military is quietly gaining control of the Pacific

Just as an aside when I was a battalion S3 in 1st Special Forces Group in 1991 I recall our battalion commander telling us to include Vanuatu in our planning for engagement because of the importance of its geostrategic location and that it would likely be contested with China. Separately he also said that we should have soldiers learning Hindi and Urdu. But higher HQ rejected all these initiatives for lack of foresight.

Excerpts:

"The question is not whether, but when, China will complete a civil-military logistics system in the Pacific," Yang said in China's Dual-Use Infrastructure in the Pacific, a study published on Monday as part of the Coastwatchers 2.0 Project, a collaboration between the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and Project Sinopsis, a research center in Prague in the Czech Republic.

The strategic network began to grow about two decades ago and today is embedded in China's 2013 "Belt and Road Initiative"(BRI), a global infrastructure plan that is purposefully "dual use"—both civilian and military—in nature, said Yang in an interview.

"China's BRI is not merely about infrastructure but a vehicle for strategic influence" with the dual-use infrastructure it constructs "a force multiplier," Yang wrote. The network could eventually make it difficult for the U.S. and its allies to operate across large swathes of the Pacific and make it easier for China to invade Taiwan, which the Communist Party considers to be part of Chinese territory.

"Beijing aims to reshape regional power dynamics and challenge U.S.-led alliances," compelling traditional U.S. allies in the region—Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand—"to reconsider their security partnerships with the U.S., bandwagon with Beijing, and shift the regional power balance in China's favor."

...

Vanuatu, site of a major U.S. naval base in the Pacific War, was also a vital venue for China's "undercover infrastructures," with the state-owned Shanghai Construction Group extending a wharf in Luganville port by nearly 1,200 feet, allowing it to accommodate large cargo vessels—as well as Chinese warships, Yang wrote.

"Given Luganville's strategic past as one of the largest U.S. naval bases in the Pacific during World War II, China appears to be laying the groundwork for a future military foothold—only the host country had to pay for it," Yang wrote. The port project was funded by a $97 million loan from China's state-owned Exim Bank, public records showed.

Underlining China's, interest in October 2024 two People's Liberation Army Navy warships arrived in Vanuatu's capital, Port Vila, in the first known deployment to the South Pacific of the Type 055 and Type 052D large guided-missile destroyers.

Exclusive—how China's military is quietly gaining control of the Pacific

Newsweek · by Didi Kirsten Tatlow · April 14, 2025

China has quietly extended its military reach far across the Pacific by building dozens of ports, airports, and communications projects at key points in a vast region that could shut out the United States and its allies in the event of war, a new report says.

The projects appeared civilian in nature but were in reality "strategic nodes" stretching about 3,000 miles, from Papua New Guinea immediately north of U.S. ally Australia, to Samoa, which lies about 40 miles away from the U.S. territory of American Samoa in Polynesia, according to the new study made available exclusively to Newsweek. The remote, scattered islands of the Pacific were once crucial to American warfighting strategy in World War II, and they could play a role in the next global conflict, too.

The growing logistics network in the South Pacific—built mostly by Chinese state-owned companies with ties to its defense sector—was being overlooked even as Beijing's rivalry with the U.S. deepened and as China's overseas base ambitions elsewhere drew attention, said Domingo I-Kwei Yang, an assistant research fellow at Taiwan's Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR), an institution funded by the government of self-ruled Taiwan, which China has threatened to invade.

"The question is not whether, but when, China will complete a civil-military logistics system in the Pacific," Yang said in China's Dual-Use Infrastructure in the Pacific, a study published on Monday as part of the Coastwatchers 2.0 Project, a collaboration between the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and Project Sinopsis, a research center in Prague in the Czech Republic.

The strategic network began to grow about two decades ago and today is embedded in China's 2013 "Belt and Road Initiative"(BRI), a global infrastructure plan that is purposefully "dual use"—both civilian and military—in nature, said Yang in an interview.

"China's BRI is not merely about infrastructure but a vehicle for strategic influence" with the dual-use infrastructure it constructs "a force multiplier," Yang wrote. The network could eventually make it difficult for the U.S. and its allies to operate across large swathes of the Pacific and make it easier for China to invade Taiwan, which the Communist Party considers to be part of Chinese territory.

"Beijing aims to reshape regional power dynamics and challenge U.S.-led alliances," compelling traditional U.S. allies in the region—Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand—"to reconsider their security partnerships with the U.S., bandwagon with Beijing, and shift the regional power balance in China's favor."

This image captured by Airbus satellites on August 2023 and provided by Google Earth shows Kiribati's Canton Island Airport in the South Pacific. The Chinese government provided a grant to Kiribati in May 2021 to... This image captured by Airbus satellites on August 2023 and provided by Google Earth shows Kiribati's Canton Island Airport in the South Pacific. The Chinese government provided a grant to Kiribati in May 2021 to conduct a feasibility study to upgrade the old airstrip built and used by the United States during World War II. Google Earth/Airbus

The nodes were also part of an even more ambitious geostrategic plan known as Southern Link, with designs all the way to South America, thus further isolating the United States to the north, the report said. Last year, China opened a megaport built and operated by state-owned shipping giant COSCO at Chancay in Peru, a logistics node on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

Asked about its goals in the Pacific, a representative of the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., told Newsweek: "To build a better future with its neighbors, China will hold high the banner of a community with a shared future for mankind and take the building of a peaceful, tranquil, prosperous, beautiful and friendly as its common vision."

"It will uphold the Asian values of peace, cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, use high-quality Belt and Road cooperation as the main platform, and pursue the Asian security model that features sharing weal and woe, seeking common ground while shelving differences, and prioritizing dialogue and consultation," spokesperson Liu Pengyu said in an email.

The U.S. State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

In a series of firsts starting in mid-2024 that startled Pacific nations, China fired a ballistic missile from its southern island province of Hainan that splashed down in the Pacific Ocean in the economic waters of Kiribati, a nation of low-lying atolls; carried out live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea between New Zealand and Australia that forced the diversion of airborne commercial flights; and sent PLA Navy ships to circumnavigate Australia.

China's Defense Ministry said that the naval exercises took place far from Australia, that China's live-fire training were conducted with repeated safety notices and that all China's actions were entirely in accordance with international law.

String of Pacific Pearls

Yang's research identified 39 active strategic nodes, with an additional review by Newsweek finding 11 more, bringing the total to at least 50. The investment was about $3.55 billion, according to Newsweek research—a mixture of direct and indirect grants and loans from the Chinese state and its banks, regional development banks and the states themselves.

The nodes are in 11 Pacific Island countries, about two-thirds of the 18 members of the regional Pacific Islands Forum. Among the projects identified by Newsweek were 26 for construction at airports. At least 12 of the airports could now accommodate China's biggest military transporter, the Y-20, Yang said.

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Some of the companies carrying out the projects are under U.S. sanctions, such as China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) and Huawei Technologies.

CCCC helped build China's controversial island bases in the South China Sea, which Beijing claims, although neighbouring countries dispute that.

Also prominent were China Railway Engineering Corporation, China Overseas Engineering Group and China Civil Engineering Construction Corp—all grew out of China's Ministry of Railways—as well as China Harbor Engineering Company, a CCCC subsidiary, and Sinohydro Corporation, a subsidiary of Power Construction Corporation of China.

Little Pushback

A key venue was Papua New Guinea, population 12 million, with 21 projects such as at Momote Airport, which serves Manus Island and is near a deep-water port used by U.S. ships. That gave China a potential "foothold" to monitor and disrupt U.S. operations, intercepting joint missions between the U.S. and regional partners, Yang said.

The prime minister's office in Port Moresby did not respond to Newsweek's request for comment.

There had been little pushback from regional powers such as Australia and New Zealand, said Cleo Paskal, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., who testified to Congress this year on U.S. national interests in the Pacific. That could have consequences if there were a crisis over Taiwan," she said.

"There is going to be very little or no space for free countries to operate," Paskal told Newsweek, adding that Chinese naval capabilities—now the largest in the world by hull count—were much greater than those of U.S. allies. Australia's Defense Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Undercover Infrastructure

Vanuatu, site of a major U.S. naval base in the Pacific War, was also a vital venue for China's "undercover infrastructures," with the state-owned Shanghai Construction Group extending a wharf in Luganville port by nearly 1,200 feet, allowing it to accommodate large cargo vessels—as well as Chinese warships, Yang wrote.

"Given Luganville's strategic past as one of the largest U.S. naval bases in the Pacific during World War II, China appears to be laying the groundwork for a future military foothold—only the host country had to pay for it," Yang wrote. The port project was funded by a $97 million loan from China's state-owned Exim Bank, public records showed.

Underlining China's, interest in October 2024 two People's Liberation Army Navy warships arrived in Vanuatu's capital, Port Vila, in the first known deployment to the South Pacific of the Type 055 and Type 052D large guided-missile destroyers.

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In 2008, Vanuatu had been the recipient of a project by Huawei to connect Port Vila's Vanuatu government agencies via a fiberoptic network. The project and upgrades spanned 13 years.

"Notably, many Huawei staff maintain deep links with China's military and intelligence sectors, raising concerns about potential security risks," Yang said. Huawei did not respond to Newsweek's request for comment.

Samoa, right by American Samoa, has also received Chinese airport, seaport and information technology projects. China had very little trade with Samoa, Yang said, raising questions about Beijing's interest.

The governments of Samoa and Vanuatu did not respond to requests for comment.

Yang's study did not include other infrastructure such as roads and bridges, but he highlighted the importance of fisheries, equipped with new piers, that Chinese companies such as Fujian Zhonghong Fishery were also developing in the Pacific, for example in Daru in Papua New Guinea, opposite Australia. Daru lies atop the Torres Strait, a key maritime choke point controlling commercial and energy shipping routes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Fisheries opened the door to China's extensive networks of fishing and maritime militias, according to Yang. "China is likely to extend its use of maritime militias, armed and subsidized civilian groups, from the East and South China Seas to the Torres Strait. The Daru Island fishery park could, therefore, act as a cover for China's gray-zone aggression in the region."

Newsweek · by Didi Kirsten Tatlow · April 14, 2025

3. China Would Lose a ‘Trade War’ With the US—’Gradually, then Suddenly’

China Would Lose a ‘Trade War’ With the US—’Gradually, then Suddenly’

China's trade war bluff may backfire as the U.S. pushes allies to choose between a rogue economic actor and a flawed but fairer partner with unmatched global power.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/14/china-would-lose-a-trade-war-with-the-us-gradually-then-suddenly/

By Victor Davis Hanson

April 14, 2025

No one wants a “trade war” with China, or for that matter with any nation. Nonetheless, China has been waging one for years and is now locked in a tariff recalibration with the Trump administration.

In this American effort to find trade parity and equity, China can do some short-term damage to the U.S., especially in terms of ceasing exports of some pharmaceuticals, phones, and computers. But ultimately, it cannot win—and will eventually lose catastrophically. It will likely accept that reality sooner rather than later.

We are only in the first week of the escalating rhetoric and tariffs. But already China is appealing to its Asian rivals, Australia, and the EU to join in fighting the supposed American bully.

But so far, there are understandably few takers.

An exasperated China is now also running vintage Korean War-era propaganda videos of Mao Zedong bragging about how he was standing up to then-President Dwight Eisenhower.

Does Beijing really believe that airing ossified threats from decades ago—issued by the greatest mass killer in human history to the one U.S. president who warned of the military-industrial complex—is going to win over neutral nations?

Or maybe China thinks calls to Western nations to stop American trade “bullying” will resonate—this, from the greatest trade bully, cheat, and rogue commercial nation in history.

China is running a nearly $1-trillion trade surplus with the world. Its mercantilism is the result of market manipulations, product dumping, asymmetrical tariffs, patent, copyright and technology theft, a corrupt Chinese judicial system, and Western laxity—or what might be mildly called “bullying.” The U.S. accounts for about a third of China’s trade surplus, with most of the EU and Asian nations accounting for the other two-thirds.

In the past, third-party nations did not appreciate the ends to which China has gone to warp the international trading system. In one sense, unable to address their deficits with China, our friends and neutrals turned to America, where they sought to make up their trade asymmetries by going China-light and running surpluses with the U.S.

However much they criticize the United States, it is unlikely that European and Asian nations will join China—which imposes high tariffs and steals from them—in order to gang up on the U.S., which has tolerated massive trade deficits for decades.

To the degree that the world accepts China as an international commercial rogue nation, it does so out of fear —or, again, on the assumption it can recycle its deficits with Beijing by running surpluses with the vast open American market.

Countries like Panama, which once thought China’s Belt and Road Initiative was advantageous, soon learned that it was exploitative. Nothing is free with China. Its Silk Road policy is mostly designed to manipulate strategically located—and soon to be indebted and subservient—nations as future choke points in times of global tensions and is directed at the West in general and in particular the U.S.

China has done everything possible to incur global distrust and fear.

Most of the world accepts that the COVID-19 epidemic that killed and maimed millions worldwide was birthed in a Wuhan virology lab under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army. The world also remembers that China and the Chinese-controlled WHO lied repeatedly about the origins and spread of the virus.

The global public may recall that China stopped all domestic flights out of Wuhan on the internal news of the lab leak of the virus, while for days greenlighting nonstop air travel to major European and American cities. The world now accepts that China will never explain exactly when the virus appeared, how it “escaped” from the lab, why it was created in the first place, why Beijing repeatedly lied about all such inquiries, and what happened to an array of whistleblowers who warned of the leak.

China’s so-called allies, such as Russia and India, have historical grievances and ongoing border disputes fueled by Chinese aggression.

NATO, the EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the US also are curious as to why China is using its vast foreign exchange not to lift about a quarter of its population out of third-world-level poverty. Instead, it is frantically building 3-4 nuclear bombs a month, a 700-ship navy, and 2,500 combat aircraft as it ratchets up pressure on Taiwan.

The complexities of trade and tariffs present all sorts of minefields. But the Trump administration is beginning to navigate them, and its trajectory is rather simple. In the next 90 days, it will likely conclude trade deals with our allies and third parties that bring either tariff parity or no tariffs at all that will reduce the U.S. trade deficit.

Of course, our allies and neutrals still use stealth tariffs to ensure advantage by money manipulation, VAT taxes, and pseudo-health and security impediments to free trade. And they deeply resent the Trump administration’s loud denunciations of their surpluses and asymmetrical tariffs. But those machinations can be addressed later in round two after tariff reciprocity or elimination is finalized.

For now, Trump should persuade our allies that if they were not so subject to Chinese mercantilism, they would have more flexibility to ensure fair trade with the U.S. And thus, they should not do something self-destructive and side with China but instead join the U.S. to force China to keep its long-broken promises and play by international rules. A reduced import footprint from China in the U.S. could make room for increased imports from the EU, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—if they strike parity deals with the Trump administration. Barring that, they should simply get out of the way and not opportunistically cut reformist trade deals with China.

If China really does reduce most of its exports to the U.S., America will have to scramble for a year or so to establish new supply chains and some alternate importers of U.S. products. But after a year of gradual dislocation, China will begin to hemorrhage, and then quite suddenly, given the U.S. has almost all the advantages—if it chooses to use them.

One, if it ever comes to a real trade war, remember that nations with the higher tariffs and larger trade surpluses usually lose, given that their economies are far more dependent on mercantile exports and trade imbalances. Psychologically, it is far harder to convince the world of victimhood when tariffs and surpluses illustrate contrived trade aggression.

Two, consensual societies are far more flexible in dealing with external pressures and volatile public opinion. True, Trump must face a midterm election in 18 months. However, Xi Jinping may soon face a third of his export factory workforce unemployed—in a society that has no mechanism for them to vent tensions and objections peacefully.

Three, trillions of trade dollars are at stake as a result of the U.S.-China standoff. And should China escalate, it may well lose elsewhere as well. There are nearly 300,000 Chinese students here in the U.S. and now very few Americans in China—plus an unknown number of young Chinese males who mysteriously and illegally crossed the border en masse during the Biden illegal alien influx. A small percentage—but still a significant number, say 1%, or 3,000 “students”—are likely actively engaged in espionage. More importantly, thousands of PhDs and MAs return to China as now Westernized researchers, professors, and government and corporate scientists in technology, engineering, and mathematics.

The results of such technology absorption are not hard to fathom. Almost every Chinese jet fighter, armored vehicle, missile, or rocket; almost every EV automobile; and almost every solar panel have their origins in either U.S. and European research and development or from Western-trained Chinese engineers.

American universities recruit Chinese students and then often charge premium tuition without discounts or scholarships, but then again, universities are not especially popular now. The Trump administration may feel that if the trade war escalates, then it can always choose to recall visas from Chinese students—in the manner there were few Soviet Russian students in the U.S. during the Cold War. That step would serve a dual purpose by forcing universities to recalibrate their finances and cut their unnecessary or deleterious programs.

Almost every Western institution proves a source of Chinese dependency and vulnerability. Its secretive companies are freely listed on Western stock exchanges, even though their financial and earnings reports are most likely warped. Chinese companies could easily be dropped from these venues. They use Western courts to sue with the expectation of judicial equity, while no Western company in China has any such assurance. Chinese billionaires buy U.S. property, not vice versa.

In terms of self-sufficiency, the U.S. is the world’s largest oil and gas producer. China has four times America’s population but only a third of its oil and gas production. China is desperately trying to catch the U.S. militarily but remains behind in both the quality and quantity of its manpower and munitions. It will take a decade or more to match the U.S. all-nuclear submarine fleet, eleven huge nuclear aircraft carriers, the sophistication and number of 4,000 fighters, bombers, and support aircraft, and the 5,000-6,000 nuclear weapons and the American nuclear triad delivery system.

Morally, China is the only major country that holds an entire ethnic minority—over a million Uyghurs—as virtual indentured servants. If China moves on Taiwan, it will face tough global sanctions. If the Ukraine war ends this year, there will be efforts by the Trump administration to adopt Kissingerian triangulation to see that Russia is no closer to China than to the U.S.

In sum, if the Trump administration can conclude first-round—good enough but not yet perfect— trade deals in the next few weeks with major EU countries, Japan, and other Asian and Pacific powerhouses, and then redirect to China, it will gain both political support and economic advantage. It also must message strategically, given that China, for a half-century, has waged a quiet trade war that has now birthed a loud reaction. So, the administration must remember that the current status quo is the aberration, and its correction is a return to normalcy.

After all, in the end, the EU and Asian nations should know the difference between their protective and rules-based ally, with whom they have run up huge and unfair surpluses, and a rogue bully, whose flagrant violations of trade norms and unfair tariffs have ensured them large trade deficits. And if they don’t calibrate their economic self-interest, but act emotionally, then they should at least consider realpolitik facts, such as which nation has the larger economy, the more open political system, and the largest and most lethal military that, in extremis, would come to their aid—against a bullying China.

4. U.S. Softens Position on Iranian Uranium Enrichment

Excerpts:

Iran has always said it requires 20% enriched uranium to fuel its nuclear research reactor, well above the minimal level Witkoff suggested. It started producing material enriched to that level in 2010.

Iran is currently producing 60% high-enriched uranium, and is the only country without nuclear weapons to do so. That material can be swiftly converted into the 90%-grade material needed for a bomb.

Given the advances Iran has made in making and installing more advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium, a limit of 3.67% could still allow Iran to amass enough fissile material for a bomb in several months unless its stockpile is moved out of the country. Under the 2015 deal, Tehran was kept 12 months away from this so-called breakout point for the first decade, but after that the breakout time shrunk substantially.

Even if Iran had sufficient material for a weapon, it would still need to turn it into a nuclear device. U.S. officials say it would take Iran a few months to produce a nuclear weapon.

Iran has been chipping away at the remaining hurdles. U.S. intelligence noted in its threat assessment that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hadn’t authorized the development of a weapon but was probably under growing pressure to do so.

There are currently United Nations atomic agency inspectors in Iran, but Tehran has placed significant constraints on their activities.

U.S. Softens Position on Iranian Uranium Enrichment

Trump envoy Steve Witkoff backs away from earlier demand for dismantling Tehran’s nuclear program, calls for tough verification

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-softens-position-on-iranian-uranium-enrichment-5bf0953a

By Michael R. Gordon

Follow, Laurence Norman

Follow and Benoit Faucon

April 15, 2025 6:54 am ET

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff is calling for strict verification as part of a nuclear agreement with Iran. Photo: kevin lamarque/Reuters

U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff said that the Trump administration is prepared to allow Iran to enrich uranium at a low level if it is subject to stringent verification, a significant shift from the White House’s initial demand that Tehran’s nuclear program be dismantled.

The position, if adopted during talks that are to resume Saturday following an initial meeting last weekend, would leave Iran with a toehold on a nuclear program and put the U.S. at odds with Israel’s goals on the question.

“They do not need to enrich past 3.67%,” Witkoff said on Fox News Monday night. “This is going to be much about verification on the enrichment program and then ultimately verification on weaponization.”

The U.S. is seeking tight constraints on Iran’s nuclear activities and its missile program, while Tehran is hoping to ease economic sanctions that have battered its economy.

Going into the Trump administration’s first round of talks with Iran, which were held last weekend in Oman, Witkoff told The Wall Street Journal that the U.S.’s initial position was that Iran’s nuclear program needs to be dismantled. But he also suggested the White House would be prepared to compromise to reach an agreement.

President Trump has warned he could launch airstrikes if a nuclear deal isn’t reached.

Iran has always refused to negotiate away the ability to enrich uranium as part of what it says is a civil nuclear program that is used for electricity production and medical research.

The Obama administration’s acceptance of Iranian enrichment was key to paving the way to a nuclear deal with Iran in 2015. That accord also set the enrichment cap at 3.67% but permitted Iran to eventually achieve enrichment levels that went well beyond that. Trump called the deal weak and pulled out of the agreement in his first term.

An enrichment level of 3.67% is typical for fueling nuclear-power reactors, according to the Arms Control Association. Adhering to it would extend the time it would take Iran to purify the material to the 90% needed for nuclear weapons. At present, Iran could produce enough weapons-grade fissile material in a week or two, U.S. officials say.

While the ideas Witkoff outlined in his Fox News interview were similar to the Obama administration’s 2015 accord in allowing Iran to enrich uranium, they differed in other important respects.

Witkoff appeared to suggest the Trump administration wants Iran to permanently keep its enrichment at levels that are no higher than 3.67%. The 2015 deal included a series of “sunset” provisions that allowed the enrichment level to increase over time. By 2031, Iran would have been free to enrich to any purity level and to increase its stockpile of enrichment to any level.

Witkoff also suggested a future accord should cover the missiles that Iran might use to carry a nuclear weapon. He said verification measures should cover “the type of missiles that they have stockpiled there, and it includes the trigger for a bomb.”

Iran has always said it requires 20% enriched uranium to fuel its nuclear research reactor. Photo: Vahid Salemi/Associated Press

Iran has balked at negotiating over its arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles, which it sees as central to its status as a major regional power and a way to compensate for its relatively weak air force, which U.S. intelligence said in its annual threat assessment last month suffers from outdated equipment and limited training.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been calling for an agreement like a 2003 accord struck with Libya, whose nuclear program was taken apart. Under that so-called Libya model, Iran’s nuclear program would be eliminated, and its enrichment sites would be destroyed under American supervision.

The course of the talks indicates a divergence of views between the U.S. and Israel, its main ally in the region, analysts say.

“Israel can’t live with Iran on the threshold, but the U.S. can—that’s the major difference,” said Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank based in Tel Aviv. Many in Israel initially hoped the new Trump administration would help Israel destroy Iran’s nuclear program by force, he added.

The Israeli prime minister’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Trump has indicated that he strongly prefers a diplomatic solution to military action in which Iran might lash out at U.S. allies and American forces in the region and attack oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important commercial-shipping waterways.

But he has continued to threaten harsh consequences for Tehran if it doesn’t agree to a new nuclear deal swiftly. On Monday, Trump said that could include a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities—a direct threat U.S. officials have generally shied away from.

“It’s really simple,” he said. “They can’t have a nuclear weapon, and they’ve got to go fast, because they’re fairly close to having one, and they’re not going to have one.”

Asked if that includes the possibility of a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the president replied, “Of course, it does.”

Iran has always said it requires 20% enriched uranium to fuel its nuclear research reactor, well above the minimal level Witkoff suggested. It started producing material enriched to that level in 2010.

Iran is currently producing 60% high-enriched uranium, and is the only country without nuclear weapons to do so. That material can be swiftly converted into the 90%-grade material needed for a bomb.

Given the advances Iran has made in making and installing more advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium, a limit of 3.67% could still allow Iran to amass enough fissile material for a bomb in several months unless its stockpile is moved out of the country. Under the 2015 deal, Tehran was kept 12 months away from this so-called breakout point for the first decade, but after that the breakout time shrunk substantially.

Even if Iran had sufficient material for a weapon, it would still need to turn it into a nuclear device. U.S. officials say it would take Iran a few months to produce a nuclear weapon.

Iran has been chipping away at the remaining hurdles. U.S. intelligence noted in its threat assessment that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hadn’t authorized the development of a weapon but was probably under growing pressure to do so.

There are currently United Nations atomic agency inspectors in Iran, but Tehran has placed significant constraints on their activities.

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com, Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com and Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com

5. Aides Push Trump to Adopt Tougher Approach With Moscow

Excerpts:

Trump, however, is still siding with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, who thinks Putin wants to make peace after meeting with him twice in Moscow, the officials said.

But Russia has rebuffed Trump’s call for a cease fire and slow-walked his drive for a partial suspension of the fighting, playing for time as it presses its battlefield gains and strives for maximum concessions in negotiations.

Trump is hoping to halt the Ukraine war in part to clear away an obstacle to a rapprochement with the Kremlin. He has at times appeared impatient with Putin, but he hasn’t followed through on his threat to impose new sanctions on Russian oil exports.

Even Trump advisers who favor a tougher approach toward Moscow support his goal of stopping the three-year war. But Russia’s ballistic missile attack Sunday that killed 34 civilians and injured another 100 in the Ukrainian city of Sumy underscored the differences among members of Trump’s senior team.

Aides Push Trump to Adopt Tougher Approach With Moscow

Some senior officials are skeptical of Putin’s interest in halting Ukraine fighting

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/aides-push-trump-to-adopt-tougher-approach-with-moscow-a0d20e65

By Alexander Ward

Follow and Alan Cullison

April 14, 2025 6:57 pm ET

A Russian missile attack Sunday killed 34 civilians in the Ukrainian city of Sumy. Photo: sofiia gatilova/Reuters

WASHINGTON—Several senior aides to President Trump are advising him to be more skeptical of Moscow’s desire for peace with Ukraine, arguing that Russian President Vladimir Putin has yet to show genuine interest in halting the fighting.

The group, which U.S. officials said includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg, has recommended more caution when dealing with Putin and for a harder line against Moscow’s demands for territorial concessions from Kyiv.

Trump, however, is still siding with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, who thinks Putin wants to make peace after meeting with him twice in Moscow, the officials said.

But Russia has rebuffed Trump’s call for a cease fire and slow-walked his drive for a partial suspension of the fighting, playing for time as it presses its battlefield gains and strives for maximum concessions in negotiations.

Trump is hoping to halt the Ukraine war in part to clear away an obstacle to a rapprochement with the Kremlin. He has at times appeared impatient with Putin, but he hasn’t followed through on his threat to impose new sanctions on Russian oil exports.

Even Trump advisers who favor a tougher approach toward Moscow support his goal of stopping the three-year war. But Russia’s ballistic missile attack Sunday that killed 34 civilians and injured another 100 in the Ukrainian city of Sumy underscored the differences among members of Trump’s senior team.

China Accuses U.S. Spy Agency of Winter Games Cyberattacks

Beijing is growing increasingly aggressive in pushing back against perceived efforts by the U.S. to prevent China’s rise

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-accuses-u-s-spy-agency-of-winter-games-cyberattacks-8125642c?mod=hp_lead_pos11

By Brian Spegele

April 15, 2025 5:58 am ET

China accused the NSA of targeting the Asian Winter Games in Harbin in February. Photo: hector retamal/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

BEIJING—Chinese police issued wanted notices for three people they said engaged in cyberattacks against China on behalf of the U.S. National Security Agency, a rare step by Beijing as hostilities between the superpowers escalate.

The accusations that the NSA targeted the Asian Winter Games held in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin in February are part of efforts by Beijing to present China as a victim of U.S. aggression alongside the Trump administration’s hefty tariffs against the country.

China’s official Xinhua News Agency, citing Chinese investigators, said the attackers used front organizations to buy IP addresses in different countries and anonymously rented servers in Europe and in Asia to conceal their origins.

Before the opening ceremony of the games—which was attended by Chinese leader Xi Jinping—Chinese authorities allege that the NSA targeted systems that contained the personal information of individuals associated with the event.

Chinese investigators said the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations office, which collects foreign intelligence through hacking, was behind the attacks. Xinhua didn’t provide details on how the investigators reached that conclusion.

It added that investigators also found evidence of involvement by the University of California and Virginia Tech, without providing details.

China’s leader Xi Jinping attends the opening ceremony of the Asian Winter Games. Photo: jade gaojade gao/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The NSA didn’t immediately provide comment, while the University of California and Virginia Tech didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The U.S. and China are locked in an economic and strategic competition that has grown more fierce since President Trump took office. While the Trump administration has largely focused on raising tariffs against Chinese goods, officials in Beijing are growing increasingly aggressive in pushing back against perceived efforts by the U.S. to prevent China’s rise.

“This move by Beijing should not be viewed as retaliation for tariffs specifically,” but rather as a response to what Chinese leaders see as increasingly aggressive U.S. efforts to undercut Chinese interests, said Bethany Allen, head of China investigations and analysis at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a think tank.

At the same time, Washington has objected to what it says are increasingly brazen cyberattacks by China, including Beijing’s targeting of U.S. infrastructure. Last year, senior officials in the Biden administration alleged China had sought a foothold in U.S. networks responsible for everything from safe drinking water to aviation traffic, which they could use to inflict damaging cyberattacks in a potential future conflict between the countries, such as over Taiwan.

Chinese officials publicly deny involvement in the attacks against the U.S. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Chinese officials privately acknowledged in a December meeting with the U.S. that Beijing was behind the attacks, a report China’s Foreign Ministry said was untrue.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said at a daily press briefing Tuesday that China has raised objections to U.S. cyberattacks in meetings with the U.S. He said the alleged attacks on the Asian Winter Games were of a “particularly egregious nature.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian Photo: tingshu wang/Reuters

“We urge the U.S. side to adopt a responsible attitude on cybersecurity issues, stop its cyberattacks against China, and cease its unwarranted smears and attacks on China,” Lin said.

While China has long accused the U.S. of threatening its cybersecurity, rarely has it so directly taken aim at the NSA.

Earlier this month, a Chinese government report on the alleged attacks against the Asian Winter Games said more than 270,000 cyberattacks from abroad were detected from Jan. 26 to Feb. 14, including roughly 171,000 from the U.S.

The naming of alleged operatives of the U.S. agency follows a similar case in March, in which China’s Ministry of State Security released the names and photos of four men it said were working for Taiwan’s military to carry out cyberattacks and other activities.

Write to Brian Spegele at Brian.Spegele@wsj.com

7. China’s Halt of Critical Minerals Poses Risk for U.S. Military Programs

Excerpts:

In 2017, during his first term, Mr. Trump signed an executive order aimed at boosting U.S. domestic production, and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. followed suit during his administration, allocating even more money for rare earth extraction and refinement facilities.

The Pentagon has been adding to its stockpile since the 2010 episode involving Japan, and “we have more of a stockpile than we did 15 years ago,” said Dan Blumenthal, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. But, he added, “that will not last long enough.” American defense companies, he said, “should be very worried.”

There is historical precedent for the United States’ finding alternatives to crucial elements and minerals during wartime. In World War II, German U-boats sank many Allied cargo ships carrying bauxite from Suriname. “We would potentially have lost the war if we did not get alternative sources for bauxite,” said Seth G. Jones, author of the upcoming book “The American Edge: The Military Tech Nexus and the Sources of Great Power Dominance.”

The United States turned to Arkansas and built a large stockpile of bauxite, used to build airplanes, from mines there.

China’s Halt of Critical Minerals Poses Risk for U.S. Military Programs

The Pentagon and defense contractors are heavily reliant on magnets and rare earth minerals mined or processed in China, which has suspended exports of the materials in an escalating trade war.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/china-critical-minerals-risk-military-programs.html

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Rare earth minerals are present in almost every form of American defense technology. They can form very powerful magnets, for use in fighter jets, warships, missiles, tanks and lasers.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

By Helene Cooper

Reporting from Washington.

April 14, 2025

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On Air Force fighter jets, magnets made of rare earth minerals that are mined or processed in China are needed to start the engines and provide emergency power.

On precision-guided ballistic missiles favored by the Army, magnets containing Chinese rare earth materials rotate the tail fins that allow missiles to home in on small or moving targets. And on new electric and battery-powered drones being adapted by Marines, rare earth magnets are irreplaceable in the compact electric motors.

China’s decision to retaliate against President Trump’s sharp increase in tariffs by ordering restrictions on the exports of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets is a warning shot across the bow of American national security, industry and defense experts said.

In announcing that it will now require special export licenses for six heavy rare earth metals, which are refined entirely in China, as well as rare earth magnets, 90 percent of which are produced in China, Beijing has reminded the Pentagon — if, indeed, it needed reminding — that a wide swath of American weaponry is dependent on China.

“This decision is hugely consequential for our national security,” said Gracelin Baskaran, director of the Critical Minerals Security Program with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Beijing, by beginning with what one Air Force official called a “heads-up” shot meant to signal how much more harm it could inflict should it choose, has left itself plenty of room to escalate. Beijing could also move on from the licensing restrictions to impose tariffs, quotas or even an all-out ban.

Rare earths are a group of 17 elements, including neodymium, yttrium, scandium and dysprosium, that are difficult to separate into usable forms. They are not actually rare at all but can be difficult to extract from the earth, and the process of mining and refining them into usable form carries substantial environmental costs.

They are present in almost every form of American defense technology. They can form very powerful magnets, for use in fighter jets, warships, missiles, tanks and lasers. Yttrium is required for high-temperature jet engine coatings; it allows thermal barrier coatings on turbine blades to stop aircraft engines from melting midflight.

According to the Defense Department, every F-35 fighter contains around 900 pounds of rare earth materials. Some submarines need more than 9,200 pounds of the materials.

Across the American defense industry, aerospace and weapons companies have small stockpiles of the rare earths — the industry term for the 17 elements. That is enough, defense industry analysts say, to meet their needs for months rather than years.

The Pentagon also has stockpiles of some rare earths, but those reserves are not enough to sustain defense companies indefinitely, one official said.

Image

While the Pentagon and defense industry companies have some stockpiles of rare earths, those reserves would meet the American defense industry needs for months rather than years.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

“China mines and refines most of the world’s rare earths, and dominates the downstream supply chain,” said Aaron Jerome, a trader at Lipmann Walton and Co., a metals trading company based in Britain. That supply-chain dominance allows Beijing some say over just how much weaponry that is dependent on the rare earths will cost, giving it enormous power over America’s defense industrial base.

Mr. Jerome pointed to what he called “the F-35 magnet debacle.” Back in 2022, the Pentagon temporarily stopped deliveries of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 after the manufacturer acknowledged that an alloy made in China was in a component of the stealth fighter jet, violating federal defense acquisition rules.

At the time, the Pentagon said a magnet containing the alloy used in part of the integrated power package posed no security problem.

Trump Administration: Live Updates

Updated April 14, 2025, 9:14 p.m. ETApril 14, 2025

But just one month later, the Pentagon allowed the deliveries to continue while it looked for another source for the magnets. Wherever the magnets are coming from now, some component of it is controlled by Beijing’s lock on the supply chain, Mr. Jerome said.

With Beijing now requiring that its exporters of rare earths first receive express permission from the government before sending the material to the United States, American defense companies may see prices shoot up soon, industry experts said.

As recently as the 1980s, the United States was a leader in rare earth production, through the Mountain Pass mine in California. But by 2002, Mountain Pass had shut down, with China dominating the market. Mountain Pass is now owned by MP Materials and is operating again, but it does not come close to Chinese production, industry experts said.

The Aerospace Industries Association, representing defense contractors, two years ago called again for the United States to shore up its minerals supply chain to better secure access for the industry.

“U.S. global leadership in aerospace and defense hinges on a secure and resilient supply chain — particularly for the critical minerals used in the production of cutting-edge aircraft technology,” Eric Fanning, the organization’s president, said at the time.

China has flexed its muscle over the rare earth supply chain in the past. In 2010, Beijing halted rare earths trade with Japan following Japan’s detention of a Chinese fishing trawler captain. The Chinese move caught the attention of the United States, alerting it to the threat posed by China’s control over the minerals’ supply chain.

In 2017, during his first term, Mr. Trump signed an executive order aimed at boosting U.S. domestic production, and President Joseph R. Biden Jr. followed suit during his administration, allocating even more money for rare earth extraction and refinement facilities.

The Pentagon has been adding to its stockpile since the 2010 episode involving Japan, and “we have more of a stockpile than we did 15 years ago,” said Dan Blumenthal, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. But, he added, “that will not last long enough.” American defense companies, he said, “should be very worried.”

There is historical precedent for the United States’ finding alternatives to crucial elements and minerals during wartime. In World War II, German U-boats sank many Allied cargo ships carrying bauxite from Suriname. “We would potentially have lost the war if we did not get alternative sources for bauxite,” said Seth G. Jones, author of the upcoming book “The American Edge: The Military Tech Nexus and the Sources of Great Power Dominance.”

The United States turned to Arkansas and built a large stockpile of bauxite, used to build airplanes, from mines there.

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.

8. Unintended Consequences of Unmanned Warfare (from 2008)

Excerpts:

Recently, I was reminded of several articles and papers I wrote on this topic when a colleague inquired about his PhD research on unmanned systems. After digging through my archives, I shared some of my work with him and thought others might find it interesting as well.

I uploaded one of those papers, writing around April 2008, to Academia.edu (and ResearchGate and SSRN), available here. This paper includes the results of an unscientific survey on de-escalation—which I framed as “compassion” at the time—and vulnerability to adverse information warfare.2 It examined whether the level of autonomy in lethal UGVs influences perceptions of incidents involving insurgents and bystanders. Additionally, it explored respondents’ expectations of a negative impact on the perceived commitment of the US if UGVs replaced, rather than merely augmented, troops providing security in villages or towns.

Below is a version of that paper dated July 2008. Like the one linked above, it is also titled the Unintended Consequences of Unmanned Warfare. I can’t recall where it was published or presented, but it likely appeared somewhere. This has been lightly edited for clarity and most of the footnotes have been removed.

Unintended Consequences of Unmanned Warfare (from 2008)

Two papers from the archives

https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/unintended-consequences-of-unmanned

Matt Armstrong

Apr 14, 2025

At the turn of the century, I devoted significant time to examining the privatization of force by the US government, particularly the role of private military companies in Afghanistan and Iraq. This study also led me to investigate the potential future impact of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) on public perceptions across different audiences, including local combat zones, the broader region, the US, and potential adversaries.1

Recently, I was reminded of several articles and papers I wrote on this topic when a colleague inquired about his PhD research on unmanned systems. After digging through my archives, I shared some of my work with him and thought others might find it interesting as well.

I uploaded one of those papers, writing around April 2008, to Academia.edu (and ResearchGate and SSRN), available here. This paper includes the results of an unscientific survey on de-escalation—which I framed as “compassion” at the time—and vulnerability to adverse information warfare.2 It examined whether the level of autonomy in lethal UGVs influences perceptions of incidents involving insurgents and bystanders. Additionally, it explored respondents’ expectations of a negative impact on the perceived commitment of the US if UGVs replaced, rather than merely augmented, troops providing security in villages or towns.

Below is a version of that paper dated July 2008. Like the one linked above, it is also titled the Unintended Consequences of Unmanned Warfare. I can’t recall where it was published or presented, but it likely appeared somewhere. This has been lightly edited for clarity and most of the footnotes have been removed.

The Unintended Consequences of Unmanned Warfare (July 2008)

Success in modern conflict relies more on the ability to influence rather than the ability to annihilate. Whether through conventional or unconventional means, influence generated by action is, plain and simple, more enduring than bullets or bombs themselves. Precision-guided munitions must be secondary to precision-guided influence that targets the strategic, operational, and tactical information environments.

Today’s unconventional enemy does not need to match America’s warfighting capability if they can effectively shape the perceptions of their target audiences. Insurgents and terrorists increasingly leverage the New Media environment with its 24/7 coverage, blogs, YouTube, and text messaging to shape perceptions around the globe, being attractive to some and intimidating to others. New Media collapses traditional concepts of time and space as information moves around the world in an instant. Unlike traditional media, search engines and the web, in general, enable information- factual or not- to be quickly and easily accessed long after it was created. The increased velocity of information means that careful deliberation by both media and the consumers of media is gone. Today, perception too often trumps fact. By the time the truth comes out, both the media and the audience have moved on.

The unconventional warrior shifts the purpose of physical engagement to incorporate the information effect of words and deeds increasingly. The enemy does this through unconventional means, including improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that have information effects far beyond the point of detonation. The purpose of IEDs is not to kill or maim Americans but to replay images of David standing up to Goliath.

The result is a shift in the fungibility and utility of violent coercion tools, transitioning from bullets and bombs to the warfighters themselves. During the Cold War, the United States relied on technical advantages to counter or surpass the numerical superiority of the Soviets. In the aftermath of the Cold War, lacking a defined enemy, the Defense Department moved from a threat-based posture to one centered on capabilities. This capabilities-based approach can have potentially negative outcomes, as what we can do does not necessarily align with what we should do.

The intoxicating allure of technology poses risks of unintended consequences in the psychological struggle for minds and wills in modern conflict. Unmanned ground vehicles will likely play a prominent role in future conflicts as they offer perimeter security, logistics, surveillance, intelligence, explosive ordnance disposal, and more. While many autonomous and remote-controlled robotic systems are already deployed—including Patriot missile batteries and Phalanx ship defense systems to aerial vehicles like the Predator—the impact of self-propelled unmanned ground combat vehicles operating within the “sea of the people” is underexamined.

To date, reports on unmanned systems overlook the impact that “warbots” will have on shaping the perceptions of key audiences. A decade ago, General Charles Krulak introduced the now widely accepted concept that every soldier and Marine is a “strategic corporal” who can significantly influence larger operational and even strategic elements through tactical and, by definition, local actions.3 The United States military and civilian leadership must discuss, anticipate, and plan for each robot to act as a “strategic corporal” in the global information environment.

This paper investigates the influence robots will have in three interconnected information domains. The first domain pertains to the psychological challenges faced by indigenous populations in conflict and post-conflict zones. The second domain involves the impact on the global information environment and the wider struggle, while the third domain addresses the shift in the calculus of foreign engagement as the American public, Congress, and the Executive Branch perceive a diminished human cost of war (on our side).

This examination has its limits. This paper focuses on armed mobile ground robots, often referred to as Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV), that will interact with host populations—the potential for negative consequences from a water-delivering robot is significantly less than from one that engages in violence. The aspect of mobility is crucial because static robots, typically sentries, will not represent the United States in the “last three feet,” as will robots patrolling among the people, working alongside or as replacements for American warfighters. Lastly, this paper adopts the general notion that a robot is a machine capable of performing tasks with or without explicit human control. In other words, the robot may be a machine endowed with varying degrees of “intelligence” and autonomy, or it may simply serve as a mechanical proxy for a human around the corner, behind a hill, or on another continent.

Domain I: The Local Struggle for Minds and Wills

Military force alone offers only temporary solutions to complex strategic problems. Regardless of doctrine—terrorist, insurgent, or counterinsurgent—success hinges on influencing the population. In today's interconnected world, where information spreads rapidly through diverse media, everyone involved participates in the battle for public opinion. As Clausewitz observed, war is an extension of politics. However, modern conflict transcends traditional political engagement, evolving into a global campaign for strategic influence over all parties. Al-Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri recognized this, emphasizing in his 2005 letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that “more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media.”

Today’s conflict represents a struggle for minds and wills. Merely entering someone’s thoughts is insufficient; it is crucial to influence their will to act. Convincing supporters to act, or refrain from acting, against the adversaries’ interests is vital. The phrase “hearts and minds” has come to represent only part of the struggle, seemingly focusing on enhancing America’s likability or popularity and addressing the question, “Why do they hate us?” This concept has been separated from its counterinsurgency roots, where Teddy Roosevelt’s aphorism better captured the intent: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Influencing support for American national interests is as crucial as dissuading support for our adversaries’ agendas.

To this end, the structure of American military operations should be inverted. Instead of starting with an operational view accompanied by an information effects annex, all actions should commence with a targeted information effect and be supported by an operations annex. The center of gravity today is not a single point but rather an informational ecosystem in which the support systems targeted and relied upon by both insurgents and counterinsurgents exist and propagate. These spheres of influence encompass physical (sanctuary), financial (resources for purchasing), moral (support from religious leaders), social (networks of friends and family), and recruitment. Today, the effectiveness of information campaigns across these spheres will more frequently determine victory than the precision of bullets and bombs aimed at a target.

It is unclear how effectively robots will interface with indigenous populations. The word “robot” originates from Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) and is derived from a term meaning slave labor or drudgery. In the play, years of attempts to create an artificial human succeed only when “nonessential” human features are removed—feelings, appreciation for truth and beauty, and the fear of death. Removing these cognitive and emotional attributes—traits typically associated with humans—resulted in obedient robots that performed manual labor and, when they wore out, turned themselves in for recycling.4

In some situations, removing human traits from robots in human-robot interfaces is helpful. Studies show that both Alzheimer patients and children with social deficiencies fare better with robots than with humans for certain engagements. In both cases, the subjects prefer interacting with and receiving instruction from robots rather than humans. There are likely two reasons for this: robots do not judge, and the interactions are simplified with fewer options.

Robots, whether remote-controlled or autonomous, further depersonalize engagement by increasing the mechanical distance between the shooter and the target. Similarly, a sniper’s scope or a video camera observing someone planting an IED depersonalizes and diminishes the humanity of the target. This distance makes killing easier by removing the “feel for the street” and other atmospheric elements. The outcome is a greater likelihood of more lethal actions, or “heavy-handed” non-lethal measures when personal interaction may be preferable.

But in a cross-cultural engagement, can a robot be a strategic corporal? Will it be able to transmit and receive verbal or non-verbal cues that are essential for effective perception management? In Iraq, Afghanistan, and future post-disaster zones, personal interaction with indigenous people can provide substantial long-term benefits. Can robots bridge cultural divides and transform from fierce warriors with just a few simple gestures, as Lieutenant Colonel Chris Hughes did in Iraq?

In 2003, Lt. Col. Hughes faced a rapidly deteriorating situation in Najaf, Iraq. Choosing an option few would have considered, let alone risked, he instructed his men to smile, point their weapons to the ground, and take a knee. This allowed his soldiers to withdraw from a developing Iraqi-on-Iraqi encounter that they were not prepared to handle. The human-to-human interface was enhanced by cross-cultural non-verbal communication, effectively preventing what could have been a major flashpoint.

Another example from the same period involves a captain who was asked by a town leader to don the robes of sheikh because he was the new chief. It is doubtful that a robot would have received equal treatment. The depersonalization, or dehumanization, of contact- one of the main advantages of robots- can limit the ability to become the strategic corporal on-site and in the moment. Will robots on patrol develop the same “feel for the street” and understanding of the human terrain as a person?

Major General Robert Scales captured the tendency of the United States to emphasize technology and capabilities over addressing the requirements based on actual threats. He noted that “wars are won as much by creating alliances, leveraging nonmilitary advantages, reading intentions, building trust, converting opinions, and managing perceptions—all tasks that demand an exceptional ability to understand people, their cultures, and their motivations.” These are not machine tasks, and they will not be for a very long time; they are human tasks. The inability of robots to perform such tasks stems from the simplicity of their designed robot-to-human interface. Consequently, the advantages of robotic simplicity must be weighed against the ensuing loss of effectiveness in the critical tasks in the final three feet of engagement.

Removing or significantly reducing the human element from our side of the engagement risks negating the lessons learned about the importance of personal contact with local populations, lessons that were paid for with blood and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mapping the human terrain not only becomes, at least implicitly, unnecessary in the sterility of a robot-human interface but also impossible.

In 2007, Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno issued guidance emphasizing the importance of engaging with the local population and the necessary “feel” for the streets. This guidance instructed Coalition forces to “get out and walk” and noted that up-armored Humvees limit “situational awareness and insulate us from the Iraqi people we intend to secure.”

Effective counterinsurgency necessitates building trust and legitimacy within the local population, while simultaneously managing perceptions globally. This involves countering enemy propaganda, convincing neutrals of the enemy's destructive ideology, and persuading enemy supporters to abandon their cause—effectively isolating the insurgents. Neglecting either local or global support systems jeopardizes the mission. Focusing solely on external factors leaves locals vulnerable to insurgent violence, which erodes confidence in the government's ability to protect them. The Taliban’s phrase, “The Americans have the wristwatches, but we have the time,” highlights this, sowing doubt about long-term Western commitment.

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment’s 2007 report on Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs) further develops this argument. It emphasizes that the objective of counterinsurgency is not to outfight the enemy but to “outgovern” them, asserting that MRAPs and armored vehicles hinder this effort by limiting engagement with the local population. The separation created between the indigenous people and the warfighter “actually assists the enemy in accomplishing his objectives.”

In his 1968 book Counterinsurgency Warfare, David Galula emphasized the importance of commitment and the consequences of limited action, citing the example of the Chinese Nationalists during the failed July 1953 attack on Mainland China. Anticipating an uprising, or at least support, the Nationalists launched a raid on the Chinese mainland, but were soundly defeated, partly by those they had hoped would remain neutral due to a shared animosity toward the Communists. However, the locals recognized who was truly committed to watching over them and who would be present the next day: the Communists.

In a web survey conducted by this author, respondents had strong reactions to encountering a robot in a conflict environment. In cases of accidental civilian deaths, they felt that autonomy would significantly negatively impact U.S. media and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Western European press. Respondents indicated that a fully autonomous robot would evoke only slightly greater sympathy than having any control over the robot. Overall, they believed that using robots instead of American troops would suggest a diminished commitment to the mission and reflect a typical American tactic of throwing money at a problem. Overwhelmingly, 82% of respondents felt this handoff would be perceived as a decreased commitment by the U.S. While the survey was not scientific, the results and associated discussions indicated a perception that robots could be as much a liability as a benefit in unconventional warfare. The use of robots must not raise any doubts about the importance of the mission to sacrifice our men and women, lest the local populace wonder why they should risk their own. It would quickly be interpreted as a sign that the United States was not entirely behind its mission and was afraid to send its own into harm’s way. Very quickly, the propaganda of our deeds could be spun to reflect that the United States was unwilling to risk American lives for the mission or the host population. Deploying robots will not only risk the critical connection with the indigenous population, but it could have the blowback effect of increasing the value of targeting Americans, as our warfighters are an increasingly rare commodity, thus expanding the propaganda value and emotional impact of an attack. The result may be more than replaying improvised explosive device attacks on YouTube. Still, an escalation of spectacular attacks designed to influence an American public only partially mobilized and with a correspondingly heightened sensitivity to shocks, as well as to increase extra-regional sympathy for the insurgents in a modern propaganda contest of mano e mano.

Domain II: Global Information Environment

The second domain is the discourse in global media, both formal (e.g., television and newspapers) and informal (e.g., blogs, YouTube), which includes foes, allies, and “swing-voters,” such as the American public. The purpose extends beyond merely justifying actions to contain and manage failures. Regarding the former, there is ongoing work to formulate rules of engagement for robots designed around a Western practice of warfare. The noble pursuit of “Lawfare,” aimed at discovering the truth through careful legal parsing and analysis to justify ends and means, falters in the modern information environment. The collapse of traditional concepts of time and space caused by the global information environment hinders the careful post-facto deliberation that is typically allowed in the traditional application of the Laws of War.

Justifying actions based on what can be accomplished according to Western notions creates, counterintuitively, a model of engagement that is overly permissive and ultimately harmful to a mission where, as Lieutenant General James Mattis put it, “ideas are more important than rounds.”Certain acts that are justifiable under international law could backfire if the information effects are not anticipated, planned for, and managed effectively. However, since the end of the Cold War, the United States has demonstrated a weakened capacity in this area.

The United States cannot afford technological failures or induced failures (e.g., hacking) that kill civilians. We may attempt to shift the blame for an action onto an agent, whether a computer or a contractor, possibly achieving short-term success. However, the principal will still face the consequences in the modern information environment, especially if the adverse event reinforces previous impressions.

Previous incidents of “technical failure” or even “out of control” contractors in Iraq will reflect on the United States, regardless of whether blame is accepted. Deniable accountability is a myth where influence matters, and perceptions can trump facts.

Below are two examples of technological failures that resulted in significant civilian deaths. Both illustrate the ability to frame perceptions favorably despite information suggesting an alternative reality. The first example began on September 5, 1983. A mistake by the Soviet Air Defenses was exploited by the United States, leveraging its global stature into a significant propaganda coup. Global messages were coordinated and disseminated. The shootdown of Korean Air 007 by the Soviet Union was, according to President Ronald Reagan, an “act of barbarism … [of] inhuman brutality.” The President went to great lengths, including declassifying communications intercepts, to attack the very essence and reputation of the Soviet Union. The language of the administration and the American media was clear: the leadership of the Soviet Union intentionally and knowingly ordered the attack on the passenger jet. Premier Yuri Andropov was even described in one report as having shot the plane down himself. In the United States, Congress even reversed its stance on the MX missile and nerve gas, authorizing the production of both.

These events occurred even as information emerged indicating that the U.S. position was deliberately misleading. However, the facts could not challenge the prevailing narrative put forth by the White House, which capitalized on the public’s perception of the Soviet Union.

The second example is when the Aegis guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes, a ship designed for convoy duty in the open Atlantic, shot down Iran Air 655 in 1988 in the Persian Gulf. The American response was to humanize the actions and shift the blame onto the Iranians. Accordingly, the incident’s narrative differed from that of the downing of Korean Air 007. Instead of the “loved ones” and “innocent human beings” aboard Korean Air, Iran Air carried only “travelers” and “civilians.” In the United States, blame was quickly and skillfully shifted from the cruiser to the airliner. The civilian aircraft failed to respond to requests for identification despite the USS Vincennes’ inability to transmit on commercial frequencies. When the warship did use the international distress frequency, it provided the incorrect altitude and used ground speed instead of airspeed, both reducing the chances the Iranian aircraft would understand that it was the target of the query.

American strategic communication was effective, at least within the United States. A Washington Post-ABC poll found that seventy-one percent of Americans believed the shootdown was justified, and seventy-four percent felt that Iran was more to blame than the United States. The audience for the information campaign following the shootdown was primarily the U.S. public and its allies, with little regard for Iran or the Middle East.

In a time-compressed, supersonic conflict environment, trusting a machine to make decisions may not be different from trusting it to execute those decisions. The role of the human in the loop can be reduced to a rubber stamp—a situation that will only be exacerbated by the impending shift to a hypersonic conflict environment, where our decision-making loops will be so constrained that they do not allow for human intervention.

Domain III: Cost of Engagement

One of the most touted benefits of robots is their ability to reduce the exposure and vulnerability of America’s warfighters. In certain applications, such as traditional brute force engagements like clearing a house or conventional warfare, robots provide significant value. The Department of Defense Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032, approved in December 2007, emphasizes reduced exposure as a key point. Unlike President Clinton’s deployment of cruise missiles against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Sudan, a future president may use remote-controlled and autonomous robots to achieve the same mission with greater precision. However, the true cost of lowering the threshold for kinetic action in an age of instant communication remains unaddressed, in a world where the American public, and arguably Congress, is becoming increasingly distant from the realities of war. The parallels between outsourcing to machines and outsourcing to private security contractors, which can evade public and Congressional oversight, warrant further exploration.

One of the benefits of outsourcing has been a reduction in the perceived human cost by shifting casualties from our uniformed personnel to contractors. The prospect of a flag-draped coffin has always factored into the political calculus regarding deploying forces overseas. Increasing available firepower compensates for Americans’ smaller commitment and investment in the mission. Unwilling to provide more resources, we aim to maximize the impact of each resource.

Much like arguments suggesting that contracting security and other military personnel diminishes a soldier's commitment to the state, transferring responsibility to robots could similarly affect the value of killing and the warrior ethos. Ownership and accountability for the mission may shift from humans to technology, and, at least in the eyes of policymakers concerned with U.S. domestic issues, this could decrease risk.

Arguments in favor of robots often mirror past arguments for using private military companies: cost-effectiveness, enhanced capabilities, allowing the military to concentrate on core competencies, and political distance. “Dead” robots do not require flag-covered coffins, nor do they need medical care or veterans' benefits.

Insulating the American public from the costs of war is easier with fewer, or even no, boots on the ground. As Thomas Friedman observed, highlighting how the American public was sheltered from the war shortly after 9/11: “You all just go about your business of being Americans, pursuing happiness, spending your tax cuts, enjoying the Super Bowl halftime show, buying a new Hummer, and leaving this war to our volunteer Army.” A whiteboard in Iraq echoed the same: “America is not at war; the Marines are at war; America is at the mall.”

In a democracy, lowering the threshold for mobilization generally indicates that commitment is less profound, relying on limited information and broader generalizations. It also results in less margin for error and a decreased tolerance for marginal activities, while enhancing the influence of “the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup poll.”

Mobilizing a democracy for war, or justifying a military strike after the fact, is challenging and encourages an inclination to seek emotional support rather than objective reasoning. While limiting sacrifices by the American public has its advantages, when the situation becomes tough, the public often exhibits little emotional depth or personal commitment to the cause. This effect may result in heightened sensitivity to spectacular attacks.

Faced with deploying an increasingly smaller force, the Executive Branch may find the path of least resistance in removing Congress and the media from the debate by utilizing robots to help bypass casualty sensitivity in the media and public discussions. Augmenting or replacing American forces with robots reduces the cost of unilateral action more significantly than observed with private security companies.

The increasingly scarce direct links between warfighting and both political elites and the general public reflect a return to the past. With fewer Americans who know someone currently serving or even directly impacted by the conflicts after 9/11, there is a redevelopment of a distinct and professional warrior class in the United States that is proficient in the conduct of war, reminiscent of the professional mercenary soldiers of the past. The modern All Volunteer Force (AVF) is significantly detached from the contemporary political and social spheres of power in the United States, leading to suggestions that non-veteran civilians may be more “interventionist” while simultaneously imposing greater constraints on the use of military force.5 At the same time, the American citizen-soldier is becoming an endangered species, as service members and their families turn inward to focus on their own support networks. It is likely that robots will accelerate this trend.

The use of private security companies in Iraq can teach us lessons. While the myth of deniable accountability is conjured up to manage perceptions in Congress and the media, the impression that matters—and the impression that is often ignored—is the local population and its regional and global support groups. In these information realms that matter, contractors are America’s public diplomats. It will be the same for robots.

Conclusion

Without promoting American holistic efforts in irregular warfare, including counterinsurgency, robots offer a solution that is more beneficial to the American electorate, which has a short-term memory, than to the national security of the United States. Robots can deliver significant advantages by increasing kinetic effects without raising the political liability associated with deploying personnel. However, this sanitizing comes at a cost.

Reliance on robots to meet kinetic requirements without addressing the informational effects overlooks the hard lessons learned in Iraq. While firepower can be used effectively to dissuade, it must be cautiously employed. The insights captured in the U.S. counterinsurgency manual emphasize the detrimental effects of excessive defense and offense. Their application must be carefully considered and calibrated, with the appropriate training, techniques, and procedures established before deployment.

Today, America’s warfighters represent the “last three feet” of contact with local populations and the world. Creating perceptions of America through direct interaction and indirect awareness via media or word of mouth is critically important. This requires an appropriate interface, especially when the suitability of riding in an up-armored Humvee is being questioned, as mentioned in the section on counterinsurgency.

Robots can provide real value. In 1921, Giulio Douhet wrote, “Victory smiles upon those who anticipate the changes in the character of war, not upon those who wait to adapt themselves after the changes occur.” Success in future conflict will depend on technological superiority and sociological, cultural, and informational adaptability in the struggle for minds and wills. Weapons and tactics must align with this; otherwise, we risk merely fighting the last war, specifically, the initial two years of the Iraq War. The question is, how well are we planning? Are we allowing technology to lead us, or are we directing technological solutions that align with the future of conflict?

While some look to autonomous robots in the future, that future is already here. In many areas, authority has already been ceded to computers, sometimes with severe consequences. From Aegis cruisers to Patriot missiles to navigation systems and Blue Force trackers, computers already dominate the American warfighter, not the other way around.6

Just as strategic communicators, public diplomats, and information operators must engage in the “take-offs” of any policy and not just the “crash landings,” they must also be involved in the evolution of unmanned warfare. The information effects of integrating armed robots into the inventory must be considered from the outset, including the impact on information campaigns and operations in the modern media environment. Augmenting or replacing a warfighter with a robot is not equivalent to swapping out the M-16 carbine for the M-4. The uniformed warfighter, whom the robot will replace in the last three feet, reflects America’s commitment to the mission and helps shape local and global opinions that garner or undermine support for the mission. Regardless of any real or perceived autonomy, robots will also represent, reflect, and shape those opinions. The informational impact of robots is substantial, but little research has been conducted on the subject. Failing to recognize the informational effect of unmanned systems designed to operate within the sea of people and participating, willingly or not, in the struggle for the minds and wills of men and women, will have tragic unintended consequences.

In an era where local and global perceptions matter, the United States must anticipate the information effects of the new systems it fields. The future is not like yesterday. Whether or not war will be completely turned over to robots is beyond the scope of this paper, but what is certain is that robots will be involved in some manner in the “last three feet,” and training, techniques, and procedures must be prepared for this.

*** END ***

I also wrote several papers, including a magazine article and academic papers presented at conferences, on the accountability of PMCs. I argued that PMC were not above the law, as was asserted at the time. There were several potential restraints on PMC behavior and means of punishment, including criminal courts, but these were exercised at the discretion of the contracting agencies, i.e., governments. It was a choice to not hold them accountable, not a defect in the system. To prove my point, I showed how UN military peacekeepers were actually above the law, a point the UN Secretary General affirmed. The peacekeepers were, in effect, contractors: they were hired and paid by the UN by order of the Security Council and on behalf of the Security Council; combined, the permanant Security Council members contributed less than 5% of overall peacekeeping troops; and, a somewhat shifting list of six countries countributed over 50% of peacekeepers in any given year, and got paid to do so and had little national interest in the PKOs they were involved in. UN Peacekeepers were not bound by the Laws of War, the Law of Armed Conflict, or any other standards. Market forces available to governments to control PMC behavior was absent in the UN case as the Security Council was beholden to limited pool of countries willing to provide soldiers, many of whom had to be provisioned and nearly all had to be transported to the operations, often using private military companies to do so. I’ll post that paper later.

In these papers, I frequently referred to the 2003 “taking the knee” event by Lt. Col Chris Hughes and his men in Najaf, Iraq.

Charles Krulak, "The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War," Marines Magazine, January 1999.

George A. Bekey, Autonomous Robots: From Biological Inspiration to Implementation and Control, Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 444-46. There is more to the story, however. The leading lady gets the scientists to add more human-like traits to the robots, and as a result they revolt and kill all humans but one.

Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), Charles A. Stevenson, Warriors and Politicians: U.S. Civil-Military Relations under Stress, Cass Military Studies (New York: Routledge, 2006).

This has created a comfort with computers that has proven limiting. Consider Lieutenant General Paul van Riper’s actions in a 2003 wargame when he outsmarted the network-warfare centric Blue Force by using motorcycle messengers, among other tactics. See http://www.slate.com/id/2080814/

9. The Swiss Manual on Guerrilla Warfare Advises Hiding in Atomic Ruins

Practical advice for today? :-)

Graphics at the link.

Excerpts:

It’s the only Swiss book to ever land on Germany’s banned books list. That didn’t stop people from reading it.

Translations spread globally, according to the Zurich newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. America’s Special Operations Forces read it. The book circulated in Lebanon during the country’s civil war. Vietnamese insurgents allegedly studied it during the 1960s.

But there’s not much evidence the Swiss military took the book very seriously. During the Cold War, the Swiss army maintained its own formal underground resistance network known as Projekt-26, which envisioned a more top-down command and control system than what’s in Total Resistance.

The Swiss Manual on Guerrilla Warfare Advises Hiding in Atomic Ruins

Unofficial guide taught how to resist a Soviet invasion

https://daxe.substack.com/p/the-swiss-manual-on-guerrilla-warfare?utm

David Axe

Apr 13, 2025

Swiss soldiers on Oct. 6, 2012. ActiveSteve/Flickr photo

by ROBERT BECKHUSEN

In the 1957 military manual Total Resistance—which describes how to wage an insurgency—Swiss army Maj. Hans Von Dach sketches out a scenario.

Soviet paratroopers and tanks are overrunning Switzerland during World War III. The army has collapsed and defeat is imminent.

“One thing is certain,” the guide states. “The enemy will show no mercy.”

“The enemy will snuff out one life, dozens, hundreds or thousands without any qualms if this would further his aims. The captured soldier will face deportation, forced labor or death. But so will the worker, the employee, the self-employed and the housewife.”

Von Dach’s proposed solution was to arm and prepare these everyday people for a guerrilla war waged from mountains and the radioactive ruins of Swiss cities.

For a lot of reasons, the Swiss military never officially adopted the manual. The 173-page guide begins with the assumption that the Swiss army no longer exists as a cohesive fighting force in the aftermath of an invasion.

Yet the book was arguably more influential outside the country. German left-wing terrorists studied it during the Red Army Faction’s heydays during the 1970s and 1980s.

The German Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons banned the book—only putting it up for review in 2013.

Total Resistance is still a terrorist’s guide in Germany. Tino Brandt, the neo-Nazi leader of the Thuringia Homeland Defense Group, possessed several copies of the book. In 2015, Brandt was charged with 157 counts of aggravated child sexual abuse.

Brandt’s organization also had ties to the terrorist National Socialist Underground, which was responsible for the murders of nine immigrants between 2000 and 2006.

An illustration from Total Resistance

It’s the only Swiss book to ever land on Germany’s banned books list. That didn’t stop people from reading it.

Translations spread globally, according to the Zurich newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. America’s Special Operations Forces read it. The book circulated in Lebanon during the country’s civil war. Vietnamese insurgents allegedly studied it during the 1960s.

But there’s not much evidence the Swiss military took the book very seriously. During the Cold War, the Swiss army maintained its own formal underground resistance network known as Projekt-26, which envisioned a more top-down command and control system than what’s in Total Resistance.

The book is more like a Swiss version of Red Dawn, with civilians waging guerrilla warfare alongside isolated soldiers, largely in a self-organized fashion.

“The enemy tactics of ‘leaping over’ the front by air mobile units or ‘over-running’ the front by armored units will undoubtedly leave many Swiss army units intact,” Von Dach wrote. “These, in turn, will provide us with a nucleus of trained, experienced fighters for guerrilla units.”

Von Dach expected the Soviets to nuke Switzerland. “Ruins in bombed-out cities will also provide good hide-outs,” he wrote. “Devastation wrought by atomic weapons will provide excellent places to hide.”

Helicopter avoidance tactics. From Total Resistance

There’s techniques on how to avoid patrolling helicopters and hiding incriminating documents. There’s tips for sabotaging railroads, power lines and parked aircraft. The guide has battle tactics for surrounding and overrunning isolated outposts.

There’s even illustrations on “disposing of guards without any notice” with an axe. “Obliquely between the small of the back and loin,” the book states.

Perhaps showing its age, the guide recommends keeping a reserve of horses and wagons near planned ambushes—for carrying captured supplies away.

Although unofficial, Von Dach’s book did influence Swiss military exercises well into the 1990s. Soldiers learned how to attacks tanks with grenades attached to gasoline cans—a technique similar to those found in Total Resistance.

But it never made much of an impact on operational planning.

Today, the Swiss army trains along conventional lines with a purpose toward being interoperable with NATO, though Switzerland is not a member of the alliance.

The confederation still has an overwhelmingly conscript force—albeit beefed up with advanced fighter jets and hundreds of tanks.

Within the Swiss military, officers largely view Von Dach’s tactics as practically useless. Would-be insurgents out there reading it will get some bad advice.

There’s an important distinction between conscripts, who are members of the formal military, and self-organized militias. Von Dach also imagined a Swiss uprising during a Soviet occupation modeling itself after the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944.

The German army crushed that rebellion, leveled the city and killed upward of 200,000 civilians. “The last, and admittedly, most cruel battle will be fought by civilians,” he wrote in its closing remarks. It’s no surprise Swiss commanders weren’t fond of this idea.

They preferred to avoid that “cruel battle” before it happened.

10. Trump signs shipbuilding order as Navy leaders call for 381-ship fleet

We are a maritime nation. Let's act like one.

Trump signs shipbuilding order as Navy leaders call for 381-ship fleet

Defense News · by Riley Ceder · April 14, 2025

President Donald Trump on April 9 signed into law a new policy aimed at revitalizing an American shipbuilding industry that has fallen well behind production levels of its rivals from the People’s Republic of China.

Language in the executive order, which cites the need to strengthen a “commercial shipbuilding capacity and maritime workforce,” mirrors many concerns expressed among the industry’s defense counterparts.

In an April 8 hearing of Navy leadership before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower, service officials voiced concerns regarding stagnant shipbuilding and what that could mean for success in great power conflicts.

Navy officials in March 2024 stated the service’s goal of growing its fleet of battle force ships to 381 over the next 30 years, a plan that would require investing at least $40 billion each year over the duration of the effort, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

There are currently fewer than 300 battle force ships in the fleet — and that number is expected to drop. Current projections indicate the Navy will retire close to a dozen more ships through 2027 than it expects to commission.

In a policy statement in February, officials from the nonprofit Navy League echoed the need to expand the service’s fleet while calling on Congress to increase funding for public shipyards and Coast Guard ice breakers.

An estimated 250,000 skilled or well-compensated workers must be hired over the next decade to accomplish shipbuilding and vessel maintenance goals, according to Matthew Sermon, the direct reporting program manager for the Navy’s maritime industrial base program.

Sermon, who spoke at the April 9 hearing, added the Navy is looking to expand supply chain capacity, partner with government and private organizations and address workforce challenges in what he described as an “all-hands-on-deck effort that will attract, train and retain American manufacturing and engineering workers.”

“Simply put, we need more ships delivered on time and on budget, and we are challenged in both of these arenas,” Dr. Brett Seidle, acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month. “Costs are rising faster than inflation and schedules on multiple programs are delayed one to three years.”

The same day as Seidle’s testimony, the Government Accountability Office released a report calling for sweeping changes to U.S. shipbuilding if the 381-ship goal is ever to be realized.

The Navy failed to increase its fleet over the previous 20 years despite a shipbuilding budget that doubled during that period, the report said. Meanwhile, the Navy’s frigate program is running three years behind on delivery.

“We found that Navy ships cost billions more and take years longer to build than planned while often falling short of quality and performance expectations,” Shelby Oakley, a director at the GAO, said in a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Discussing in his order an industry the GAO described as lingering in a “perpetual state of triage,” President Trump decried “decades of government neglect, leading to the decline of a once strong industrial base while simultaneously empowering our adversaries and eroding United States national security.”

In response to the April 9 mandate, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Mike Waltz has been instructed to submit an action plan to the president within 210 days. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is also expected to review different avenues for investing private capital in commercial and defense shipbuilding capabilities, supply chains, port infrastructure, workforce strength and ship repair.

Global ramifications

Navy leaders assessing the shipbuilding aspirations, meanwhile, are pushing for, among other items, a robust annual output of ballistic and fast attack submarines to counter near-peer threats in potential conflict areas like the Indo-Pacific and Arctic.

At present, the state of U.S. shipbuilding is impacting not only the delivery of U.S. vessels but also the demand for Virginia-class submarines by Australia as part of the trilateral AUKUS — Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. — security agreement.

While the Navy aims to deliver one Columbia-class and two Virginia-class submarines per year, AUKUS commitments increase the annual demand for Virginia-class boats to 2.33, Rear Adm. Jonathan Rucker, program executive officer for attack submarines, said during the April 8 hearing.

Those demands coincide with the Navy’s ongoing production issues with the future USS District of Columbia, the Navy’s first Columbia-class submarine — slated to replace Ohio-class boats — which has been floundering in production and is currently delayed by up to 18 months.

“While this delay is due to a variety of factors, it is unacceptable,” said Rear Adm. Todd Weeks, the Navy’s program executive officer for strategic submarines. “The Columbia class is the Navy’s No. 1 acquisition priority and a critical once-in-a-generation recapitalization effort for this foundational leg of the nation’s nuclear triad.”

The sluggish rate of producing U.S. submarines and surface vessels has ignited concern over whether the U.S. would even be able to replace disabled or sunken ships in a near-peer combat environment.

“When it’s a ... conflict and we’re losing ships — i.e., they’re destroyed and sunk — our ability to replace those at a rate higher than the adversary [is vital],” Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) said during the hearing. “Two things ... have to happen — one or both: We have to be eminently survivable under any combat conditions or we have to be able to replace [vessels]. And right now, we can’t replace.”

The Navy recently commissioned the Virginia-class attack submarine Iowa. Two additional Virginia-class submarines, Massachusetts and Idaho, are expected to be delivered this year, officials said at the hearing.

Additionally, the Coast Guard in December added its first polar ice breaker in a quarter-century, a critical development for use in an Arctic region that has yielded a surge in military activity.

The U.S. has for years been pushed by military officials and lawmakers to devote more resources to the rapidly evolving Arctic environment, but it is recent regional collaboration between China and Russia that is giving rise to an all-new sense of urgency.

Beijing is increasingly eyeing the Arctic as a domain that would further China’s power assertions and economic resources, Pentagon officials warned in December. Those concerns were amplified by a swarm of military activity in the region. Despite Russia being in its third year of war following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it has remained committed to directing military and economic resources to the region — at times with China by its side.

In its 2024 Arctic Strategy, the Pentagon noted the “increasingly accessible region is becoming a venue for strategic competition, and the United States must stand ready to meet the challenge alongside allies and partners.”

Military Times editor Nikki Wentling contributed to this report.

About Riley Ceder, Zita Ballinger Fletcher and J.D. Simkins

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

Zita Ballinger Fletcher previously served as editor of Military History Quarterly and Vietnam magazines and as the historian of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. She holds an M.A. with distinction in military history.

J.D. Simkins is the executive editor of Military Times and Defense News, and a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War.

11. Repudiating Genesis (Book Review: To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism)

Excerpts:

Perhaps instead of “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism,” a more apt, if less catchy, subtitle would have been “The Uses of Communist Rhetoric in Power Politics.” After all, he had conceded up front that today, “Russia may no longer be Communist, but it is ruled by Vladimir Putin, a proud and unrepentant former KGB officer.” The same goes for other dictatorships, whatever “ism” is used as camouflage. “What made the USSR ‘Communist’ is the same thing that defines the current governments of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba,” writes McMeekin: “rule by a single-party dictatorship… that blankets society with all-encompassing rules and regulations, and that hectors, monitors, and surveils the people in whose name it claims to rule in minute detail.”

He could certainly have added Iran, Turkey, and other regimes whose Islamist rhetoric has been deftly grafted onto the classic oppressor vs. oppressed, or if you prefer, decadent/secular/rich class against “the people.” Ivy League ideologues groomed in Western guilt nod sympathetically. “Who are we to argue that we know better than they do?” asks McMeekin sarcastically on their behalf.

We do know better, surely. But too many of us have lost the ability and willingness to defend the individual freedom most covet. Consider how meekly the COVID lockdown was accepted, despite its “reversing decades of progressively more humane – and scientifically sound – policies on mitigating disease outbreaks”. Nor is there any excuse for campus protestors applauding barbarians butchering babies and grandmothers, attacking Jewish colleagues, and burning American flags.

It is hard not to conclude that it is this facet of Communism that most concerns McMeekin. For in the Epilogue, he admits to being alarmed by the presence, “[i]n the social and intellectual sphere,” of too many “echoes of Cultural Revolution-style” tactics that undermine our society’s resilience and self-confidence. He blames this in part on “modern-day thought commissars,” fearing that “new Western methods of social control may be more insidious than the cruder methods of physical intimidation and violence” his book has so capably exposed.

Like most immigrants who love America as a beacon of hope, and having seen how much ordinary people throughout the world love freedom, I am more optimistic. But a liberal democracy is fragile. We are responsible for recognizing Big Lies for what they are, exposing them, and defending against them with all the courage we can muster.

Repudiating Genesis | Juliana Geran Pilon

civitasinstitute.org

Published on

Apr 3, 2025

Contributors

Juliana Geran Pilon

Lenin and Workers Monument outside Gorky Park in Moscow, Russia. (Shutterstock)

Repudiating Genesis

Juliana Geran Pilon

Summary

Considering the incalculable devastation caused by communism, measured in hundreds of millions of lives, what explains even the rise, let alone the “surprising non-death, of Communism”?

When the quarantine against the unwalled capitalists literally crumbled in 1989 and the walled-in workers fled their paradise in droves, Western analysts were confounded. Wasn’t history supposed to move leftward? Some resorted to the “it wasn’t real socialism” escape clause, others applauded. Most, if not all, were reluctant to abandon seductive determinist theories of history that offered such comforts akin to religion. Whether neo-Marxist or postmodern scientistic, the millenarian narrative is hard to resist. And everyone hopes for progress.

It is the job of historians, however, to listen to evidence – as does Russia scholar Sean McMeekin in his fine new book To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. Yet even he concedes that he approaches his subject today “with a greater sense of humility than I might have done in those heady early ears of the post-Communist era.” Man having been created with a humility-deficit, its cultivation must be life-long. The hubristic illusion at Babel (Genesis 1.8), that human beings could plan their way to establish a perfect society and abolish discord, has grown with technological advances. The prophets of Communism deftly capitalize on that primeval impulse, arguing that the enlightened can grasp history’s laws, which lead to inevitable utopia.

At least, that’s the justificatory veneer of a darker reality. Examining the facts, McMeekin came to understand the truth behind the dialectic: “The real secret of Marxism-Leninism, as the reigning doctrine of Communism was called after 1917, was not that Marx and Lenin had discovered the immutable laws of history driven by ever-intensifying ‘class struggle,’ but that Lenin had shown how Communist revolutionaries could exploit the devastation of war to seize power by force.” Violence both establishes and later keeps such a system in power. Behind the rhetoric was a simple, fatal instinct to overthrow the world.

McMeekin had his title but no explanation. Considering the incalculable devastation caused by this doctrine, measured in hundreds of millions of lives, what explains even the rise, let alone the “surprising non-death[,] of Communism”? Idealism, perhaps; fellow-feeling cloaked in high-minded language. “As long as people dream of brotherhood between men, … or, in the current jargon, of ‘social justice,’ some version of Communism will retain popular appeal,” easily stoked by demagogues. To illustrate its sinister record, McMeekin embarked upon writing its history.

He begins with Plato’s Republic, a blueprint for the best-governed city (polis). Each socio-economic class being bred and groomed for a specific function; Plato’s polis is rigidly hierarchical. Private interests are fully subordinated to the res-publica. While the abolition of private property is never suggested, materialism is shunned. The ruling philosopher-kings, for example, have neither wealth nor families. Shared pleasures and pains “bind the city together,” the political organism taking precedence over its individual components.

Skipping over the complex transition from Greek paganism to Christianity through Rome (Judaism remains unmentioned), McMeekin notes that Jesus, albeit from an individualist rather than collectivist perspective, also urged his followers to sell their possessions and give to the poor. Gradually, the increasingly corrupt and wealthy government-aligned Catholic clergy would be repudiated by protestants. Some aligned with poor peasants against the greedy property owners, rejecting materialism though not necessarily, as in the case of Martin Luther, state power.

The Scientific Revolution simultaneously ushered in a new era of seemingly limitless human dominion over the world. A hybrid, “secularized Christian eschatology, establishing a kind of European religion of social progress,” would inspire Jean-Jacques Rousseau to advocate for a radically new political and economic system. Like Plato, he believed an ideal state should implement the commonwealth’s General Will that transcends individual egoism.

Egalitarian dreams webbed and flowed. McMeekin proceeds to describe various socialist schemes throughout the nineteenth century. Eventually, the Invisible Hand was no longer attributed to History, nor to either Nature or God. Accusing religion of being “the opium of the people,” designed to sap their strength against overthrowing capitalism, Karl Marx demanded its abolition. In History’s final stage, the triumph of the poor “proletariat” over greedy/rich “capitalists” would mean the eradication not only of every “particular wrong but of wrong in general.” Ethics itself would be abolished. At last, beyond good and evil, the new man would prevail.

Whether he would still be human was left unanswered.

Preposterously simplistic, Marx’s emotionally charged rhetoric obscured his utter lack of familiarity with, let alone concern for, actual workers. (Nor anyone else for that matter, including most of his own family.) By 1847, he openly endorsed “total revolution which required political violence.” The end would be “combat or death: bloody struggle or extinction,” possibly both. Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin condemned Marx’s vision of the utopian future as incontrovertibly totalitarian. Post-revolutionary polity had to “concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require supervision,” he wrote in 1873. Logically, it could function only “by means of the dictatorial powers of this learned minority, which supposedly expresses the will of the people.” Their goal, he wrote, was “to overthrow existing governments and regimes so as to create their own dictatorship on their ruins.” It would take another few decades for Bakunin’s clear-eyed prophecy to be confirmed. Capitalizing on the Russian aristocracy’s corruption and myopia, V. I. Lenin’s political genius, together with the tactical virtuosity of Leon Trotsky (later exiled and eventually hacked to death), accomplished the overthrow of tsarism. After inciting the army away from fighting foreigners and turning it against its own leadership, the Bolsheviks seized power from the clueless moderates in the Provisional Government, then turned to slaughter. The Red Apocalypse had commenced. Already in August 1918, Central Executive Committee's Yakov Sverdlov would announce the launch of “merciless mass terror against the enemies of the revolution.”

The litany of horrors that immediately followed went virtually unreported. The few voices of exiles and Western journalists who dared to ask questions when paraded on official tours “were drowned out by the pleasing lies of Stalin-friendly journalists such as Walter Duranty of The New York Times.” Censorship and lies allowed gullible Western intellectuals to imagine that the USSR was the Eden of their dreams. Nothing was said about the myriad concentration camps known as the Gulag Archipelago that tortured people with unbearable cold, starvation, and brutally hard labor.

Soviet spies, “fellow travelers,” and sympathizers penetrated the U.S. and British governments at the highest levels. They persuaded the Roosevelt administration to approve a program known as Lend-Lease which, unbeknownst to Congress, assisted the Politburo with food but also with warplanes, tanks, and trucks. There was to be no payment up front. Instead of collapsing from within because of Stalin’s appalling economic and political policies into a wasteland, the USSR emerged triumphant. 1945 saw Communism’s resurgence in Europe and beyond.

Duly breaking promises of respecting their elections, Moscow quickly purged each country’s winning party in favor of all but Soviet-controlled Communists. By 1949, the European satellites had “nearly identical secret police forces, all thoroughly penetrated by and loyal to their Soviet handlers…. [Their] production targets and mandatory trade quotas coordinated by Gosplan in the USSR,” amounting to an Ottoman-style tribute. Only Yugoslavia’s Tito was denied admission, despite his Stalinist views, and was punished for insubordination. Lucky he.

Those of us stuck inside the colonized Republics, variously known as People’s, Democratic, or Socialist, watched the new mandarins move into the old mansions, with access to special hospitals and shops. Equality indeed. As shortages of everything worsened by the day, hardly anyone believed a word of the absurd propaganda anymore. It was the same throughout the Soviet Empire.

McMeekin’s command of facts about this era is impressive. He recounts, for example, the little-known story of how Romanian Jews were literally sold by President Nicolae Ceausescu in the 1960s, charging as much as $250,000 for the highly educated. Maybe my own family had been bartered. We left in 1961 after attempting to leave for nearly 17 years, hoping to join our relatives in the U.S. and escape Communism, presumably because Jews were allowed to reconnect with displaced families. In fact, antisemitism flourished while emigration was practically impossible.

Still, the Jews who could leave were far more fortunate than Ceausescu’s ethnic brethren, whom he starved and froze while expecting North Korean-style adulation from everyone. But dollars being dollars, he also sold Transylvanian Saxons. As he told Securitate (Secret Service) General Ion Mihai Pacepa, who later defected to the U.S.: “Oil, Jews and Germans are our most important export commodities.”

So they were, as American politicians eager to claim promotion of “human rights,” pleased by the release of a few emigrants, which they interpreted as proof of Ceausescu’s “independence” from Moscow, rewarded the brutal dictator with trade concessions in 1975. They had fallen prey to a wily “active measures” operation code-named Red Horizons, revealed by Pacepa in 1987.

However brilliant, the success of such deception operations was undoubtedly enhanced by the widespread assumption among Western elite circles that Communism could be liberalized. American naivety and wishful thinking had been reinforced for decades by the Soviet bloc’s highly trained and ruthless secret police network’s deft infiltration of the academy, media, and political institutions.

Among the most effective instruments of sabotage were Moscow-funded front organizations, notably the World Peace Council, whose Western sympathizers took its “peace on earth” slogan as genuine. “The purpose of the Soviet peace campaign was to lull Western Europeans to sleep as Moscow deployed a new arsenal of mobile, medium-range missiles targeting their capital cities,” writes McMeekin. That millions showed up in October 1983 near NATO headquarters to protest, instead of their ruthless enemy, against the one government trying to defend them, the U.S., speaks volumes.

The same stupidity prevented Westerners from grasping the no less brutal form of Communism imposed by the psychopathic Mao on his long-suffering people. The exact Leninist blueprint led to even more immense destruction: expropriations, total censorship, forced labor, and murder of countless “counter-revolutionaries” or “class enemies.” “Hate America” was standard Chinese agitprop, like everywhere else in the Communist world: besides Asia, in Africa and Latin America, notably Cuba.

But worse was yet to come, in Cambodia’s infamous Killing Fields, a genocide that exterminated an estimated 3.5 million souls, half its population. “Here Communism was reduced to its essentials, as a negation of everything existing… a social leveling of society down to equality in abject poverty and misery,” writes McMeekin. Forget happy talk - Pol Pot murdered unencumbered by euphemisms. “The coercion itself was the point, the reduction of free-willed humans to animals.” It was the inversion of creation itself. .

But Pol Pot was only a more deranged member of the Communist dictator quasi-human subspecies. McMeekin’s history of Communism implicitly refutes his original presumption of an idealist motivation. Though not explicitly, his book offers evidence for an altogether different reality: the effectiveness of ruthlessness and deception. Manipulating hope and ignorance with promises of harmony and justice, elites convince themselves and others of benevolent intentions all the way to hell.

Perhaps instead of “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism,” a more apt, if less catchy, subtitle would have been “The Uses of Communist Rhetoric in Power Politics.” After all, he had conceded up front that today, “Russia may no longer be Communist, but it is ruled by Vladimir Putin, a proud and unrepentant former KGB officer.” The same goes for other dictatorships, whatever “ism” is used as camouflage. “What made the USSR ‘Communist’ is the same thing that defines the current governments of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba,” writes McMeekin: “rule by a single-party dictatorship… that blankets society with all-encompassing rules and regulations, and that hectors, monitors, and surveils the people in whose name it claims to rule in minute detail.”

He could certainly have added Iran, Turkey, and other regimes whose Islamist rhetoric has been deftly grafted onto the classic oppressor vs. oppressed, or if you prefer, decadent/secular/rich class against “the people.” Ivy League ideologues groomed in Western guilt nod sympathetically. “Who are we to argue that we know better than they do?” asks McMeekin sarcastically on their behalf.

We do know better, surely. But too many of us have lost the ability and willingness to defend the individual freedom most covet. Consider how meekly the COVID lockdown was accepted, despite its “reversing decades of progressively more humane – and scientifically sound – policies on mitigating disease outbreaks”. Nor is there any excuse for campus protestors applauding barbarians butchering babies and grandmothers, attacking Jewish colleagues, and burning American flags.

It is hard not to conclude that it is this facet of Communism that most concerns McMeekin. For in the Epilogue, he admits to being alarmed by the presence, “[i]n the social and intellectual sphere,” of too many “echoes of Cultural Revolution-style” tactics that undermine our society’s resilience and self-confidence. He blames this in part on “modern-day thought commissars,” fearing that “new Western methods of social control may be more insidious than the cruder methods of physical intimidation and violence” his book has so capably exposed.

Like most immigrants who love America as a beacon of hope, and having seen how much ordinary people throughout the world love freedom, I am more optimistic. But a liberal democracy is fragile. We are responsible for recognizing Big Lies for what they are, exposing them, and defending against them with all the courage we can muster.

Juliana Geran Pilon is Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Her latest book, An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and the American Left, has just been published.

12. The reactionary international: How three ideological families are united in hating progressivism

From LeMonde in Paris.

An interesting thesis. Does it have merit?

This is an intellectual and cultural war. Not a conflict between nations, nor a clash of civilizations, but a battle fought within them. It's an ideological battle where the most powerful center of gravity now lies across the Atlantic. It is being waged by what Emmanuel Macron has called a "reactionary international." It is reshaping alliances and redrawing borders from Washington to Moscow, Buenos Aires to Ankara.

The reactionary international: How three ideological families are united in hating progressivism

By Nicolas Truong

Published on April 13, 2025, at 7:00 pm (Paris)

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2025/04/13/the-reactionary-international-how-three-ideological-families-are-united-in-hating-progressivism_6740182_23.html

13 min read

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INVESTIGATION

Three ideological currents – ultraconservative Christians, national-populists and techno-libertarians – though often at odds, have all been buoyed by Donald Trump's victory.

This is an intellectual and cultural war. Not a conflict between nations, nor a clash of civilizations, but a battle fought within them. It's an ideological battle where the most powerful center of gravity now lies across the Atlantic. It is being waged by what Emmanuel Macron has called a "reactionary international." It is reshaping alliances and redrawing borders from Washington to Moscow, Buenos Aires to Ankara.

Editorial The 'reactionary international' against the rule of law

This movement is not structured like the socialist and communist internationals of the 20th century. Those were the successors to the 19th-century worker's organizations, united by the hope of making a "clean break" with the past in order to change the world "from the ground up," as proclaimed in the famous song, "The Internationale" (1871). However, efforts to unify have been underway for the past decade. In 2018, Steve Bannon, former strategic advisor to Donald Trump, launched The Movement, a Brussels-based organization aimed at uniting far-right populists and nationalists across Europe.

Despite this clear failure, Trump's victory has emboldened far-right leaders in Europe. They met once again in Washington in February 2025 at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering of American conservatives, to try to replicate the MAGA ecosystem in Europe.

Olivier Roy, a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, said that "several ideological factions are celebrating Donald Trump's victory: a reactionary movement backed by the Christian right, identity-based populism and a futuristic high-tech current." Though often at odds, these three currents are united by a shared disdain for wokeness and progressivism, forming the core alloy of this international movement.

The Christian right, illiberal and climate-skeptic

The Trumpist sphere draws support from a large segment of evangelicals – neo-Protestants adhering to a literal interpretation of the Bible and personal conversion. Trump's election also highlighted a lesser-known but highly active faction of Catholic integralists, with JD Vance, the American vice president, as their political figurehead and Bannon as one of the earliest ideological promoters. This Catholic current opposes many of Pope Francis's theological contributions, particularly on the environment and immigration. In one of the most influential encyclicals of his pontificate, Laudato si' (Praise be to you, 2015), the Argentine Franciscan pope called for an integral ecology that links "the cry of the Earth" with "the cry of the poor," in opposition to the "throwaway culture."

Trump, for his part, praises plastic straws and wants to "drill, drill, drill" to extract oil and shale gas. To the environmentalists' advocacy of "degrowth," reactionaries boldly counter with capitalist productivism. "If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg's scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk," Vance told European leaders at the Munich Security Conference on February 14.

The main fight of Catholic integralists is for a ban on abortion and assisted suicide. Some even call for the return of the Latin Mass, arguing – as French-American essayist Guy Sorman puts it – that "Vatican II was Christianity's #MeToo." Inspired by Thomas Aquinas's natural law, their vision aligns more with the traditionalism of the Council of Trent (1545–1563) than the reformism of Vatican II (1962–1965), and appears closer to the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow than to Pope Francis. In any case, they are contributing to the rise of an identity-based Christianity that is illiberal, anti-vaccine, climate-skeptic and anti-science.

While conceding that Europe and the US are still "on the same side," Vance believes that the most worrying threat is "not Russia, it's not China, it's not any other external actor," but "the threat from within," he said in Munich in February. For, in his view, there is a "retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values." He attributes this drift to European democracies' laws and norms that regulate freedom of expression, shield citizens from foreign political interference on social media, bow to feminist demands and criminalize "pro-life" activism.

"The Christian right is literally reactionary," said Roy. "It rejects Enlightenment philosophy, defends the traditional family, and refuses feminism and homosexuality." Reactionaries are not conservatives – they are as radical as revolutionaries, according to intellectual historian Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University in New York and author of The Shipwrecked Mind (2019). The reaction is driven by a desire to restore the old order. Against the revolutionary impulse to wipe the slate clean, they raise the Tablets of Revelation. However, Lilla added, they "are haunted by two contradictory dreams: that of a lost pastoral, religious age, and that of a new society to be built and ruled by strong men."

Identity-based, nostalgic and vengeful populism

The second component of the neo-reactionary arc is identity-based populism – a form of nationalism rooted in the middle and working classes, with the power to attract a resentful elite hostile to "cultural leftism." It is embodied by political figures such as Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Predominant in Europe, this brand of populism is, in truth, "less reactionary than nostalgic," according to Roy. It does not seek to restore a bygone past or invent the world of tomorrow but to preserve the supposed advantages of yesterday's world.

"Nostalgia settled like a cloud over European thought after the French Revolution and has never fully lifted," said Lilla. As its Greek roots suggest – nostos ("return") and algos ("pain") – nostalgia is marked by a yearning to go back. For Western European populists, that means a return to the idealized "30 glorious years" after World War II. In Germany, it sometimes means a romanticized longing for the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), a phenomenon known since the 1990s as Ostalgie (ost meaning "east" in German).

National populism can even claim the legacy of the sexual liberation movements of the 1970s, turning it against today's progressive causes. "You can't say anything anymore, you can't do anything": The complaint unites both a bourgeois right anxious not to give up its old privileges and an aging libertarian left frustrated by the blame placed on men by what it sees as "neofeminism."

Even as they transform republican, humanist and feminist values into "identity markers" against a Muslim world perceived as medieval, the references to Christianity by identitarian populists are merely "rhetorical," according to Roy, author of L'Europe est-elle chrétienne? ("Is Europe Christian?"). "It's a metaphor for defending a 'white' West and opposing the so-called 'great replacement,'" said the researcher, who studies this clash of values. "Most populists aren't against abortion rights or even gay marriage."

Techno-libertarians: digital autocrats

Libertarian transhumanism forms the third branch of this international far-right movement. A handful of wealthy Silicon Valley engineers believe that a caste of brilliant, high-IQ start-up founders is destined to rule the planet.

As American historian David Bell, a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, pointed out, in the US, these "techno-Caesarists" forged their theoretical weapons against "political correctness" on American campuses in the 1990s. Entrepreneurs David Sacks and Peter Thiel, for example, both Stanford alumni, ran a student publication hostile to the "myth of diversity." Later joined by Elon Musk, these ideologues from Palo Alto, California, have, according to Bell, "radicalized" the "PayPal mafia" – a term coined by Fortune magazine in 2007 in reference to these young geeks who met at the PayPal financial services company in the late 1990s.

They are fans of JRR Tolkien's fantasy sagas and, for the more educated among them, influenced by the political philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899–1973) – some even studied under French philosopher René Girard (1923–2015), who spent his entire career at Stanford. These techno-futurists dream of creating a new aristocracy. As the etymology suggests, aristocracy means the rule (kratos) of the best (aristoi). As Thiel bluntly put it, these digital-era autocrats no longer believe that individual freedom and democracy are "compatible."

These transhumanist tycoons "are not populists, but elitists," according to Roy. They often even embrace their eugenicist leanings. "Libertarians aren't liberals, they're neo-Darwinians who think they embody a race of giants," said liberal essayist Sorman. Their goal? "To organize the separatism of a white, genial elite, locked away in its gated communities and other 'free zones,' waiting to go to Mars. They don't care about the people, who can only pedal to deliver pizzas," wrote Roy in an article in Le Grand Continent.

According to Lilla, the global reactionary galaxy "puffs itself up with the same authors": the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, German declinist Oswald Spengler, esoteric thinker René Guénon, antisemitic royalist Charles Maurras, Italian fascist occultist Julius Evola, Russian imperialist Alexander Dugin and even the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, whose work is "their Quran," Sorman said.

However, the references of neo-reactionary tech geeks are also very contemporary, as shown by the success of "Bronze Age Pervert," the pseudonym of a young Romanian-American blogger, Costin Alamariu, close to the "neo-reaction" movement (Dark Enlightenment, or "NRx") led by the American anti-egalitarian computer scientist Curtis Yarvin and the English anti-democratic philosopher Nick Land. "At the moment, the books of these intellectuals are being translated, retranslated and published in every European language," Lilla said with alarm.

The intellectual roots of the reactionary international are varied and confusing, even contradictory. As Lilla explained, the populist political movements it fosters have "no structured ideology" like the communists had with Marxism-Leninism. This makes the period all the more disturbing. "It reminds me of France in 1940," said Bell, author of Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (2020), "when the nationalist Charles Maurras and former communist turned collaborationist Jacques Doriot saw Marshal Pétain's 'national revolution' as a way to crush their common enemies."

A common enemy: 'woke totalitarianism'

Who are the opponents today? The woke, certainly. The detestation of wokeism is unquestionably their strongest unifying force. This catch-all notion aims to disqualify and caricature forms of "critical knowledge," such as gender studies, decolonial approaches and environmental humanities – fields centered in universities and echoed in schools. That's why, according to Vance, "professors are the enemy, universities are the enemy."

The ideas to be defeated are clearly identified in Trump's rants against "critical race theory" or in Javier Milei's imprecations, comparing "woke hegemony" to a "cancer" or a "mental virus." The Argentine president's tirades unite the anger of reactionaries, populists and techno-Caesarists alike: He called to "remove this abhorrent ideology from our culture, our institutions" at the Davos Forum on 23 January, referring to wokeism. "Western civilization – and even the human species – will not be able to return to the path of progress. (...) It is essential to break these ideological chains if we want to usher in a new golden age."

These words echo the recurrent pamphlets devoted to "fiction," "marketing," "capitalism," "tyranny," "religion," "revolution" and even "totalitarianism" that have filled bookshops and news channels in France for nearly a decade, well beyond conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré's media sphere. The semantic proximity to the far right is now an issue for intellectuals who used to claim they wanted to defend a "left-wing anti-wokeism" or simply humanism.

For many researchers who have warned of the dangers of attacks against critical knowledge, such as sociologist Eric Fassin in Misère de l'anti-intellectualisme. Du procès en wokisme au chantage à l'antisémitisme ("The Misery of Anti-Intellectualism: From the Trial of Wokeism to the Blackmail of Antisemitism"), anti-wokeists seem to have played the role of useful idiots for Trumpism. Reflecting on the "identitarian left" on American campuses, Lilla conceded that "it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for this intellectual counter-revolution dismantling the bureaucracies of academic virtue charged with enforcing the new woke gospel." But, he warned that "those American Chouans – that is, the Republicans – are also out for blood and ready to torch the university village."

They've already begun: The Trump administration abruptly froze $400 million (€370 million) in previously approved funding for Columbia University – where Lilla teaches – including for medical research: "The Trumpians want to bring all universities to their knees and force them to toe the Republican Party line." The iconic New York institution caved to demands, agreeing to deploy a force of special agents tasked with maintaining order on campus, regulating student protests and placing the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies under administrative oversight.

Tearing down dogmas

Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian man of Palestinian origin and one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian student protests on the Columbia campus, was arrested at his home on March 8 by the federal border police. "He is accused without evidence of distributing pro-Hamas leaflets. He has a valid residence permit, the police had no arrest warrant when they came to remove him from his home in front of his pregnant American wife – and he is still in custody. This is war," said Lilla.

"When you're in such a climate of repression in the United States and on the brink of war with Russia, the fight against wokeism is no longer the top priority," said Nathalie Heinich, author of Wokisme serait-il un totalitarisme? ("Could Wokeism Be a Totalitarianism?"). A co-founder of the Observatory of University Ethics in January 2021, she resigned from this organization set up to "fight identity-based ideologies at university" in February 2025. She had just discovered that since 2022, the group's funding from ultraconservative billionaire Pierre-Edouard Stérin was coming through the Périclès project, which she noted was "no longer philanthropic but openly political." She added that its ideological program was "strongly right-wing, illiberal and anti-secular."

LAURENT CORVAISIER

"Anti-wokeism has become the rallying cry of those attacking the independence of scientific institutions," said historian Antoine Lilti, professor at the Collège de France and a specialist in Enlightenment thought.

This criticism also extends to the realm of values. Would a philosopher like Diderot (1713–1784) be considered woke today? The Enlightenment thinker is credited with a passage in Histoire des deux Indes (A History of the Two Indies) in which he deplores the "fanaticism" whereby "people [go] in search of continents to invade, islands to ravage, peoples to rob, to subjugate and to massacre," and wonders whether "someone could succeed in putting a stop to this mania," they might "indeed deserve to be counted among the benefactors of the human race." "Diderot would probably be criticized today for his anti-colonial stance," said Antoine Lilti, author of L'Héritage des Lumières. Ambivalences de la modernité ("The Legacy of the Enlightenment. Ambivalences of modernity").

The Enlightenment is a particularly important point of contention. This movement of thought, which can be summed up as the invitation to think autonomously, the courage to use one's own understanding, and "man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity," in the words of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), is simultaneously rejected by reactionaries, recuperated by populists and inverted by libertarians. Reactionaries defend tradition and religion. Populists summon republican principles to denounce Islam as inherently incapable of reform. Libertarians distort the Enlightenment’s legacy, portraying it as a new version of the Ancien Régime.

It's a political, symbolic and ideological order they believe should be abolished, just as absolutism had to be destroyed in the time of Rousseau and Voltaire. This old regime is described as a "Cathedral," notably by Yarvin, a theorist of techno-monarchism. The "Cathedral" refers to the system formed by the alliance of the US federal government, universities and Democratic media. The "Dark Enlightenment," provocatively theorized by Yarvin, is the intellectual weapon with which to bring it down.

"In their apocalyptic, inegalitarian conception of humanity, progress and democracy are seen as dogmas to be torn down. Conversely," said Lilti, "the Enlightenment has always defended an ideal of individual emancipation based on the widest possible dissemination of knowledge." Didn't Diderot say that we must hurry to "make philosophy popular"?

'Continental imperialism'

Will these far-right currents succeed? Roy doubts it, as they represent "three opposing value systems": Traditionalist Catholics are offended by the "demiurgic science fiction" of techno-libertarians, who themselves come into conflict with populist identitarians attached to a regal state. Not to mention that "just because the French are visiting the Puy-du-Fou [an amusement park retracing the history of France created by a staunch conservative] in large numbers doesn't mean they'll become practicing Catholics again."

Bell believes that these currents are sawing off the branch they're sitting on. "Trump is the politics of resentment, allowing downtrodden blue-collar workers to support a billionaire from Queens who was despised by the New York elite," he said. However, "the American president is driving them to bankruptcy." Sorman, meanwhile, believes that the precarious populations who voted for Trump or Milei will turn against their leaders, even if "the revenge of the white male is a powerful unifier."

Michel Feher, a philosopher and author of Producteurs et parasites. L'imaginaire si désirable du Rassemblement National ("Producers and Parasites: The Desirable Imaginary of the Rassemblement National"), is less optimistic. According to him, the reactionary international will not drive the world into a conflict of nationalisms, but "regional powers are seeking to divide up their spheres of influence. They will annex the coveted territories, preferably through sanctions and, if necessary, by invasion." This is why "their imperialism is continental, in the sense that Hannah Arendt gave it in The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951], and unfolds across the continents and geographical areas of expansionist nations," he said.

Russia could continue to extend its influence over Ukraine and the Baltic states, the US over Canada and Greenland, China over Taiwan. Another example: "It's no longer the Ottoman Empire that Erdogan wants to reconstitute, but an expansionist policy that believes that wherever there are Turks, that's Turkey," said Feher.

How can we resist this surge? Firstly, by recognizing that "the prism of anti-totalitarian thinking, which pits democracy against tyranny, no longer works at a time when the US can vote with North Korea at the United Nations," said Feher. The same goes for "the old anti-imperialism, unable to see the Russian imperial will," he continued.

Column Subscribers only 'Trump, by seeking to destroy Europe, is forcing its recomposition'

Resisting would mean forming an "alternative international," one for citizens oppressed by authoritarian powers, who are inventing forms of self-government in the interstices of societies, according to Feher. Sorman, for his part, prefers to imagine a "liberal international," since liberalism – "this cosmopolitanism patiently built since the early 19th century to guarantee freedom of thought and enterprise," he said – is seriously threatened by techno-Caesarism.

One is aligned with the radical left; the other with the neoliberal right. Despite their differences, both agree that Europe could seize its historic opportunity. It could become "a pole of resistance to the union of global potentates," or it could settle for becoming "a fortified retirement home for native-born savers," as Feher puts it. Sorman, meanwhile, hopes Europe will become "the finest example of applied liberalism." Despite the differences, this period of resistance places Europe at the heart of all convergences.

Nicolas Truong

Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.

13. US efforts to hobble China’s AI march can only backfire, top internet official warns

I think China must be very worried that it will be "hobbled."

US efforts to hobble China’s AI march can only backfire, top internet official warns

Officials from top web watchdog and advisory body call for greater regional cooperation, end to ‘zero-sum’ mindsets amid US tariff risks

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3306616/us-efforts-hobble-chinas-ai-march-can-only-backfire-top-internet-official-warns?utm

Meredith Chen

Published: 7:00pm, 15 Apr 2025Updated: 7:37pm, 15 Apr 2025

America’s efforts to curb China’s artificial intelligence (AI) advancements are likely to boomerang on itself, a top Chinese cyberspace official has warned, while calling for increased regional collaboration.

Sun Weimin, chief engineer at the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s primary web regulatory body, made the comments at the World Internet Conference Asia-Pacific Summit in Hong Kong on Monday.

“Attempts to contain China’s development in AI will ultimately only constrain [the US’] own progress,” she said.

“The US has recently been wielding the tariff stick on a global scale – but what will be the ultimate outcome? … History suggests that high tariffs tend to disrupt global value chains for hi-tech products and hamper the pace of global innovation.”

Sun Weimin has called on the world to “work together to build collaborative networks that transcend national borders and span across sectors”. Photo: Weibo

China and the United States have become caught up in a fierce tit-for-tat tariff war following sweeping nation-specific duties imposed by US President Donald Trump in recent weeks.

Trump first raised the “reciprocal” US import levy on Chinese goods to 34 per cent earlier this month before ratcheting it up to the current accumulated 145 per cent – though he exempted smartphones, computers, and other tech devices and components last week.

China has retaliated in kind, with total levies on US imports hitting 125 per cent, while warning its citizens against travelling to the United States and limiting Hollywood film releases in Chinese theatres.

Senior Chinese officials at Monday’s conference called on the world to “transcend the zero-sum mindset” and “abandon technological bullying” to push for better AI development.

In the face of fresh risks brought by the US-China tariff disputes, countries in the region should work together and leverage technological cooperation to consolidate the security and stability of global supply chains, they said.

Wang Yong, vice-chairman of the national committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Beijing’s top advisory body, said China advocated for respecting the cyber sovereignty and governance model of all countries, while rejecting “zero-sum games and technological bullying”.

Traditional risks persisted and new security variables had emerged in cyberspace, Wang warned in his keynote speech, but did not elaborate.

He also suggested that China and other countries use “technology as a thread to weave closer world economic ties” and work jointly to “safeguard the security and stability of global industrial, supply, and technological chains”.

Mirroring Wang in her address later in the day, Sun suggested that all parties around the world “move beyond zero-sum thinking” and “work together to build collaborative networks that transcend national borders and span across sectors”.

Xi Jinping arrives in Vietnam to boost political and trade ties amid tariff war with US

By upholding the principles of openness and sharing, countries could share foundational AI models through open-source platforms, promote the integrated development of computing power, and lower the barriers to technology adoption, she said.

China had often been seen as “a fast follower”, limited to replicating Western innovation, but the success of DeepSeek offered a strong rebuttal to that perception, Sun added, referring to the Chinese start-up whose AI models have taken the world by storm.

A crucial takeaway for policymakers was the need to embrace an open-source approach to spur innovation, she said.

“A nation’s strength does not lie solely in whether it invents a new technology first, but in its ability to scale and apply that technology efficiently across industries,” Sun said. “Relying solely on subsidies, regulations, or sanctions is never a sustainable path.”

For AI, success depended “not only on how it is developed, but more importantly on how it is used, deployed, refined, and continuously improved through real-world application”, she said.

Speed and flexibility were “critical” and mattered more than perfection, Sun added, noting that continuous feedback and iteration were key to creating a positive cycle across “academia, industry, research and application”.

Meredith Chen

Meredith Chen joined the Post in 2023 and covers China politics and diplomacy. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Hong Kong. Previously, she had stints with

14. China fires back after US official takes swipe at aid to Global South

Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counter accusations.

China doth protest too much. Perhaps it is confirming the Treasury Secretary's points.

China Diplomacy

China fires back after US official takes swipe at aid to Global South

Beijing tells Washington to stop sowing discord after US treasury secretary accuses China of signing ‘rapacious deals’ with developing world

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3306628/china-fires-back-after-us-official-takes-swipe-aid-global-south?utm

Alyssa Chen

Published: 6:15pm, 15 Apr 2025Updated: 7:29pm, 15 Apr 2025

Beijing has accused Washington of undermining the welfare of the Global South to serve its own geopolitical interests following remarks by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who described Chinese aid to developing nations as “rapacious deals”.

The Chinese embassy in Argentina rejected the comments on Tuesday and accused the US of sowing discord between China and developing countries, as well as hindering the development of other nations amid US President Donald Trump’s tariff war.

“The United States’ recent excessive imposition of tariffs deliberately strips the development rights of Global South countries … and will only exacerbate the wealth disparity, with underdeveloped countries facing more severe repercussions,” the embassy said in a statement.

The fierce criticism came after Bessent claimed Beijing had signed several agreements with African countries to take mineral rights.

“What we are trying to keep from happening is what has happened on the African continent,” Bessent told Bloomberg in Buenos Aires on Monday.

“China has signed a number of these rapacious deals marked as aid, where they’ve taken mineral rights and added huge amounts of debt onto these countries’ balance sheets,” Bessent said, adding that Chinese efforts were aimed at making the region poorer.

In its response, the embassy said: “China has, within its capacity, offered assistance to a wide range of developing nations, including those in Latin America and Africa, without imposing any political attachments.

“If the US is unable to do so, it should at the very least refrain from obstructing and deliberately sabotaging other nations’ efforts to aid developing countries. Nor should it pursue its own geopolitical gains at the expense of the well-being of developing countries.”

Trump says China’s talks with Vietnam are probably intended to ‘screw’ US

One of the targets of Bessent’s comments was a currency swap deal between China and Argentina that is now worth around US$18 billion. Bessent said Argentina should have sufficient foreign exchange inflows to pay off the active portion of its swap with China if the Latin American country persisted with its economic reforms.

Beijing defended the currency swap line – a financial arrangement that allows the two countries to exchange currencies at an agreed-upon rate, easing bilateral trade and financial transactions without relying on major global reserve currencies such as the US dollar.

The embassy said the agreement had been well received in Argentina and had played an important role in maintaining the country’s economic and financial stability. It added that the deal had recently helped Argentina secure US$20 billion in financing from the International Monetary Fund.

The South American country has been battling persistent declines in the value of its currency and shrinking foreign currency reserves for years.

Argentina was among a handful of countries to be hit with the minimum tariff rate of 10 per cent when Trump imposed “reciprocal” duties on US trade partners earlier this month, escaping the much higher rates he slapped on other nations.

China, the world’s second-largest economy, has maintained a currency swap agreement with Argentina since 2009. Last week, the pair extended a portion of their US$18 billion currency swap until mid-2026, enabling Argentina to access US$5 billion from the People’s Bank of China.

However, the currency swap has faced scrutiny from the Trump administration. US officials have expressed concerns about the agreement and articulated Washington’s desire for its termination.

This has created an increasingly tough balancing act for Argentine President Javier Milei, who appears to be torn between his ideological ally in the White House and China, one of his country’s top trading partners. China is a major buyer of soy, beef, wheat and lithium from the South American country.

Alyssa Chen

Alyssa joined the Post in 2023 as a reporter on China desk to cover diplomacy. Her interests lie in cross-strait relations and Sino-Japan relations. Previously, she was the Asia Correspondent

15. Could this breakthrough in robot manufacturing reshape warfare?

Push the defense industrial base forward?

Or not.

Excepts:

But the advancement also highlights other serious challenges standing in the way of a more automated manufacturing future, namely that China is the market-share leader in key components that robots need, such as sensors and actuators. Additionally, China has much more access to the materials that would be required to print and build products—including weapons—in robot-run factories.

Robots will enable the United States to build more things. But they won’t build themselves.

Could this breakthrough in robot manufacturing reshape warfare?

New advance in artificial intelligence manufacturing could set the stage for robot factories on front lines.

By Patrick Tucker

Science & Technology Editor

April 14, 2025

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

A new way to train factory robots could revolutionize how militaries make drones and other weapons, enabling high-volume manufacturing close to front lines. And beyond the battlefield, it shows a possible path forward in the next era of manufacturing, a topic central to the competition between the United States and China, which the National Defense Strategy calls the “pacing challenge.”

The paper, published in the January issue of the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, lays out a transformative vision of AI-driven additive manufacturing, or AAM.

Today’s factory robots only are capable of a set number of rigid movements, are difficult to adapt to new tasks, and require highly specialized places on production floors. They can’t see when they are lined up incorrectly, or when they make mistakes.

The new system—developed by an international team of researchers from California State University, Northridge; the National University of Singapore; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and the University of Wisconsin-Madison—uses highly-skilled engineers to train robots in a much fuller range of human-like movements, enabling them to perceive and (on a basic level) understand what they are doing. When combined with 3D printing technology, the framework opens up the possibility of complete end-to-end manufacturing of electronics, like the small drones re-shaping the battlefield in Ukraine.

But it also addresses a key question at the root of the overarching power struggle between the United States and China: how to increase the manufacturing strength of the U.S.

Before President Donald Trump made re-shoring manufacturing a core focus of his presidency, the Biden White House undertook a series of different policy moves with the same goal—including the use of smaller and more gradual tariffs accompanied by grants and other incentives.

The Pentagon has launched several initiatives to reshore production of things like microelectronics, citing China's dominance in those sectors as a strategic liability. The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which allocates over $52 billion for domestic semiconductor manufacturing, reflects bipartisan recognition that industrial capability underpins military and economic strength. Without secure, domestic access to critical technologies, the U.S. risks operational delays, compromised weapons systems, and diminished deterrence capacity in future conflicts.

But the United States suffers from a critical lack of skilled workers to meet those goals. And institutes like NIST, as well as industry heads, forecast that even with government investment, building that workforce would take at least seven years.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik said this month that robotics and automation could play a key role in a U.S.-led manufacturing renaissance. And several American robotics companies are pushing for a national strategy to promote manufacturing automation.

However, the current state of factory robotics lags behind hopes for a quick transition to factory automation. A 2019 report from Boston Consulting Group points out the obvious: manufacturing robots lack the adaptiveness and dexterity of human workers, and robots lack the problem-solving abilities that are still key to actually producing things. That’s changed little since 2019, as revealed by the controversies and embarrassing public demonstrations of the Optimus robot developed by Tesla. Questions about whether Optimus is indeed autonomous or just an elaborate human-controlled puppet point to larger uncertainties about exactly how to make truly humanistic robots.

That’s why this new paper is so significant. Traditional manufacturing methods, even robots, “need a lot of well-trained engineers,” said co-author Bingbing Li of California State University, Northridge. And even the most advanced 3D printers often require manual steps for design input, process selection, or post-processing.

The paper’s AAM vision includes end-to-end autonomy: from computer-assisted design model preparation and nesting to scheduling, process optimization, and post-print machining—all managed by a fleet of collaborating robots or drones.

This integration will be particularly important for manufacturing in outer space, hence the interest and support from NASA. Li said he’s also been in contact with military contractors and the Defense Department’s office of Operational Testing and Evaluation for a defense-related project that could begin in May, if final approvals are granted.

AAM relies heavily on what the authors call sensor-integrated design: the use of many sensors of visible light, heat, and other phenomena to create a sort of perception in a software “brain.”

That brain, which differentiates tomorrow’s factory robots from today’s, will have four layers: a “knowledge layer” at the base of the model collects data from sensors, simulations, and past operations. A “generative solution layer” uses AI tools like large language models and knowledge graphs to model decision-making. An “operational layer” implements decisions on hardware, software, and robotic systems; and a “cognitive layer” empowers machines with agency, allowing them to reason, act, and even reflect.

“Within this [cognitive] layer, AI agents act as high-level controllers, assessing the skill pool in the operational layer to select appropriate skills for task execution based on the current state,” the authors write. “These agents are responsible for planning and executing optimal actions, engaging in a lifelong learning process that enhances their expertise through continuous reflection and learning.”

That process of learning is similar to the way humans interact with large language models. At first, the results are generic and error-prone, but over time, the relationship between the trainer and the machine produces a type of human-like intelligence that can be replicated across multiple robots.

“We hope to minimize the human operation down to or close to zero, because the whole process itself, we want to automate,” Li said.

The degree to which some manufacturing processes can be automated will depend greatly on the complexity of the thing that is being produced and how quickly AI systems can learn to adapt to new, unexpected events. Li said human experts will still play a crucial role in that process, but more akin to supervisors than operators. Instead of doing the manual tasks beyond a robot’s ken, the human will help the robots develop, improve, and validate ways to deal with the unexpected.

Ideally, the AI would become smart enough to actually consider how to improve on human designs, via what the authors call “generative design tools,” including diffusion models, 3D reconstruction, and neural radiance fields. NeRFs extrapolate depth and volume from pictures, the same way the brain does, to automate the design and creation of 3D objects from mere sketches or photos.

“These advancements pave the way for 3D content creation, potentially bringing us closer to the realization of ‘What you think is what you get,’” the authors write. “By exploring vast design spaces, these tools generate innovative solutions that traditional methods might overlook.”

In a military context, this means a soldier in the field could scan a broken part and an AI-enhanced system could redesign and print a replacement with minimal oversight—a power that could vastly reduce manning and logistics needs at the front.

The Defense Department, including DARPA, have increasingly emphasized secure, scalable, and on-demand manufacturing for contested logistics environments. The AAM method of closed-loop manufacturing using multiple sensors, feeding data to a layered intelligence, offering a roadmap for not only smarter production but resilient, adaptive manufacturing capabilities that could redefine the industrial front lines.

But beyond bases, the framework shows a path forward for moving manufacturing back to the United States. That has implications for the broader race with China, which wields its industrial capacity not only for economic dominance but to produce vast weapons stockpiles.

Then-Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante noted this challenge in October 2023: “Today, the U.S. is in a technological and economic race to maintain its manufacturing edge, particularly as it concerns critical defense systems, such as satellites, advanced munitions and communications technologies.”

But the advancement also highlights other serious challenges standing in the way of a more automated manufacturing future, namely that China is the market-share leader in key components that robots need, such as sensors and actuators. Additionally, China has much more access to the materials that would be required to print and build products—including weapons—in robot-run factories.

Robots will enable the United States to build more things. But they won’t build themselves.

defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker

16. ‘Honey badger’ admiral emerges as top contender for Navy chief

When I saw the headline I had a different expectation about the nickname

Excerpts:

Caudle has been unusually blunt in calling out failures in the defense industrial base. “I am not forgiving of the fact they’re not delivering the ordnance we need,” Caudle said in 2023 when defense contractors were slow to restock the Navy’s depleted weapons arsenal. He has also criticized the service’s lack of public shipyards to maintain warships and said the Navy should be “embarrassed” that it can’t develop lasers to provide air defense aboard ships.

He joined the Navy more than three decades ago and commanded nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines before taking over the service’s submarine fleet in the Atlantic and serving as a vice director on the Joint Staff. He earned the call sign “honey badger” due to his tenacity and ability to solve hard problems, the former Navy colleague said. He has led the U.S. Fleet Forces Command since 2021.

Caudle has taken on an even more public profile in recent months, praising the Navy’s efforts to patrol U.S. territorial waters after the Trump administration ordered more military assets to the southern border.

Exclusive

‘Honey badger’ admiral emerges as top contender for Navy chief

Adm. Daryl Caudle has spent the past two weeks meeting with senators.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/14/caudle-navy-chief-top-contender-00008888?utm

Adm. Daryl Caudle arrives to ring the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange on May 26, 2023, in New York. He is emerging as the top contender for the Navy's chief officer post. | John Minchillo/AP

By Jack Detsch, Joe Gould and Daniel Lippman

04/14/2025 05:01 PM EDT

Adm. Daryl Caudle — a longtime admiral who has demanded accountability from America’s ailing shipbuilding industry — has emerged as the front-runner for the Navy’s top officer post, according to five people with knowledge of the process.

The likely selection of Caudle, a four-star admiral who heads the command that trains and equips the Navy’s sailors, comes just two months after President Donald Trump fired Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first female in that role. He terminated her in an abrupt purge of top military leaders, including Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown.

A three-decade Navy officer who has commanded submarine fleets, Caudle could prove a fairly safe choice. Unlike Navy Secretary John Phelan, he has significant Pentagon experience. Democrats, who are angry about Franchetti’s sudden dismissal, may find it harder to oppose a well-regarded career officer.

“He’s a no-nonsense guy, you can’t bullshit him,” said one former Navy colleague, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “He goes and finds problems, he turns over the rock, and whatever’s underneath it, he chews it up, spits it out and comes back.”

Caudle, if selected, would inherit a fleet that has struggled with embarrassing and costly shipbuilding delays and which is now 14 times smaller than China’s. He would join as Phelan is examining what to cut in the service’s contracts and as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency investigates the Navy’s shipbuilding efforts.

The admiral traveled with Phelan in late March off the southeastern coast and to the Connecticut shipyard where the Virginia-class submarine is built. He also has spent the past two weeks visiting senators, two people familiar with the conversations said.

He would replace acting Navy chief of staff Adm. James Kilby, who has been on the job since Franchetti was dismissed.

U.S. Fleet Forces Command declined to comment. The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment.

POLITICO previously reported that a number of top military officials were in the running for the post. This included Indo-Pacific Command chief Adm. Samuel Paparo and his predecessor, retired Adm. John Aquilino; Vice Adm. Brad Skillman, who runs the Navy’s Office of Operations for Integration of Capabilities and Resources; and retired Rear Adm. Keith Davids, who served as the director of the White House military office during the first Trump administration.

Paparo, who was a leading contender for Navy chief during the Biden administration, took himself out of consideration, according to a person close to the White House. He and Caudle interviewed for the Navy’s top military post in July 2023 but lost out to Franchetti.

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command did not respond to a request for comment.

Caudle has been unusually blunt in calling out failures in the defense industrial base. “I am not forgiving of the fact they’re not delivering the ordnance we need,” Caudle said in 2023 when defense contractors were slow to restock the Navy’s depleted weapons arsenal. He has also criticized the service’s lack of public shipyards to maintain warships and said the Navy should be “embarrassed” that it can’t develop lasers to provide air defense aboard ships.

He joined the Navy more than three decades ago and commanded nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines before taking over the service’s submarine fleet in the Atlantic and serving as a vice director on the Joint Staff. He earned the call sign “honey badger” due to his tenacity and ability to solve hard problems, the former Navy colleague said. He has led the U.S. Fleet Forces Command since 2021.

Caudle has taken on an even more public profile in recent months, praising the Navy’s efforts to patrol U.S. territorial waters after the Trump administration ordered more military assets to the southern border.

He appeared in a Navy video in March that touted the deployment of guided missile destroyers to waters off the U.S. coast for the border mission. The longtime admiral referred to the location as the Gulf of America, which Trump renamed from the Gulf of Mexico in an executive order.

“Our Navy is answering the call to safeguard America’s southern border,” Caudle said after the USS Gravely left Norfolk, Virginia, in a campaign-style video that featured soaring music and stock footage of U.S. warships.

“He’s really astute and he’s aware of all of those problems,” the former Navy colleague said. “He’s spread his talent across the entire fleet.”

Caudle has had to deal with everything from the high rate of suicide aboard the aircraft carrier USS George Washington to the condition of barracks, barges and parking at the old shipyard.

“The solutions are out there, we’ve just got to have open and honest conversations about the problems,” Caudle said at the Sea Air Space conference this month. We need to “find ways to unite our collective energies behind solving those problems without a Pearl Harbor or a 9/11 event being required to motivate us.”

Paul McLeary and Connor O’Brien contributed to this report.

17. Open Questions | China may be stunned by Trump’s lack of caution and understanding: ex-diplomat Kerry Brown

I think China (and others) just learned that the President is the Disruptor in Chief. He certainly seems to be practicing unconventional diplomacy that is unconstrained by norms and standard and traditional diplomacy activities and international relations theory. Probably not a bug, but a feature.

Open Questions | China may be stunned by Trump’s lack of caution and understanding: ex-diplomat Kerry Brown

King’s College, London professor says he ‘cannot think of a worse tactic’ than threatening Beijing and presenting ‘zero-sum’ options

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3306329/china-may-be-stunned-trumps-lack-caution-and-understanding-ex-diplomat-kerry-brown?tpcc=GME-O-enlz-uv&utm

Sylvie Zhuangin London

Published: 6:00am, 14 Apr 2025Updated: 10:13am, 14 Apr 2025

Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies at King’s College, London, whose research focuses on Chinese elite politics and its diplomatic strategies. Brown lived in the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia between 1994 and 1996 and worked as a British diplomat in Beijing from 1998 to 2005 and served as the first secretary in Beijing from 2000 to 2003.

After moving back to Britain, he directed the Europe China Research and Advice Network, a three-year project that started in 2011 to provide advice on China to European Union foreign services. This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus. For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here.

We want to start with the latest tariff situation between China and the US. In your view, how might this affect their respective economies as well as the broader global economy? As the United States continues to exert maximum pressure on China, how should China respond strategically?

I think China was expecting this, and in many ways set in place some degree of diversification and policy response to what Trump is doing. It has markets and supplies now in the Global South and has been working on these since the start of the pandemic.

China has also been working hard on addressing its technology deficit with the US, expanding its [research and development] expenditure by 10 per cent at the National People’s Congress earlier this year, and now working on trying to decouple as far as possible from the US.

Following up with your point on decoupling. The call for US-China decoupling began during Donald Trump’s first term. Given the recent developments, would you say the two countries are now entering a phase of full decoupling? Is China at risk of becoming increasingly isolated and having to navigate this complex global environment on its own? Would you consider this period one of the darkest moments for China in terms of global trade?

I think that for the Trump administration, the Chinese must be stunned by the lack of caution and understanding that he has of how China negotiates. I cannot think of a worse tactic than threatening and presenting China with zero-sum options. This is a country, after all, with such a strong narrative in its head of never again being victimised and bullied, that everything Trump is doing is only likely to make China stand its ground even more.

Things are in an escalation of “face” where neither side has easy ramps now to back down. I think China’s appetite for this is stronger than the US’. As for China being isolated, because of the unilateral way that Trump has slapped tariffs on everyone, it seems more that the US is isolated now rather than the other way around.

What are the main risks this situation poses to China – economically, politically, and in terms of its long-term global influence?

A big adverse economic impact is clearly a significant issue. China has never known a time in the last half-century when its economy was going into recession. But I think the main impact will be to stoke up Chinese nationalism, and in the short to medium term at least give the Xi [Jinping] leadership a chance to show it standing up against US bullying and intemperance. America under Trump 2 is a historic opportunity for China to really become a global power. Whether they can and want to take that is another matter. But so far, Trump has been delivering for them, almost every day.

Trump’s exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seems a significant change that injects fresh uncertainties into the transatlantic alliance. Where do you see the position of the UK, a close ally of the US, in light of the new uncertainties brought by Trump?

The UK is like in the middle of all of these fighting big, big beasts. We’re between Europe and Trump, and Russia and Trump. We have a special position because of a very close security relationship with America, which goes back decades. Trump seems to know about Britain and has some links here. He doesn’t particularly like Europe. So I suppose Britain does have a role, and Prime Minister Keir Starmer did a good job in trying to keep this middle ground, supporting Ukraine and Zelensky, but also making sure we don’t anger the Americans.

But it’s not an easy or stable position to be in. We’re dealing with a very unstable America, where every day there’s new changes and developments, and it’s very unpredictable. Trump has obviously got negative feelings about the European economy and this relationship with China about America, and the relationship with China and America is increasingly complex, meaning that Britain will have to factor that into the equation in its relations with both.

Also, whether we can really fill the gap that America might leave with Ukraine, which will be expensive. These are big challenges. So I don’t think Britain is going to have an easy position. So far, we are trying to maintain balance.

And as long as we can continue there, we don’t have much choice. Diplomacy is often about not having a choice. We don’t really. We can’t turn on our chief allies. But at the moment, America is fighting with everyone, and it might not last for very long. Trump’s attacking everyone at the moment. It’s like there is no plan, so who knows what will happen. At the moment, I think Britain is just trying to survive.

What role do you think the UK plays in US-China competition but with Washington dismantling transatlantic trust? What would Trump’s presidency mean for China’s relations with Europe and the UK, which seems to have been damaged as China was often accused of supporting Russia’s war?

We’ve had four to five years of extremely difficult relations with China. I think the way that America is behaving now is helpful to China, because to Europe and Britain, at least China is predictable.

When you’ve got America being so aggressive and unpredictable, you kind of think, what are your other options? For Britain, China’s economy is undeveloped. For us, we don’t have a huge amount of investment from China. You’ve got a lot of people in Britain who make big claims about the influence of Britain on China, but they’re 15 years out of date. China is now a major technology innovator and it is going to get stronger.

‘Full audit’ of Sino-UK ties as new Labour Party government looks for reset in bilateral relations

I think America is very self-interested. Now under Trump, they’ll want to look after their own interests. Europe and Britain have to do the same. My priority is prosperity. So in that sense, we’re all trying to achieve the same thing.

Last summer, Keir Starmer became the first Labour prime minister since 2010 and Trump also started his second term in the White House in January. What would the China policy look like for the new government and do you have any suggestions? With uncertainties under Trump, how do you think the UK’s Indo-Pacific strategy will change, including its role in regional pacts like Aukus?

The new policy of Britain’s Labour government is more pragmatic. I think that they have tried to just explore options economically and financially. We don’t agree with China on many things, but we have to work together on some things. We’re just being realistic.

We get people in Britain who feel that we should just turn our backs on China. But when you’ve got 0.1 per cent economic growth, which Britain had last quarter, when you’ve got problems in productivity, which we have, you have to look at other options and make a strategic choice.

You can either say we don’t deal with the world’s second-biggest economy because we don’t agree with it, which isn’t what Britain did historically. We always work with people, even if we didn’t agree with them. Or you kind of just say, I am going to strategically decide these areas where we work and other areas where we can’t.

As for suggestions, China, I believe, is the world’s leader in AI. If you look at the 2025 “two sessions”, the top word was innovation, even more than Xi Jinping. Innovation is like the old saying of “reform and opening up”.

We have a challenge to deal with China as an innovator, but our mindset is not really ready. We need to accept that when a country produces more STEM graduates than any other country, when a country has US$400 billion a year into research and development, which China does well, when a country has leadership in many research areas, it is a new world order. That’s the change, and it’s happened.

So we have to look at China in that framework now, and that’s where we have to make a fundamental change.

In the Indo-Pacific, India is not a natural ally for Britain and in many ways, it’s very close to Russia. It’s extremely difficult to deal with economically. I’m not entirely sure that Trump believes in that kind of multilateral work. He doesn’t believe in the Quad [Quadrilateral Security Dialogue among the US, India, Japan and Australia]. He doesn’t believe in Aukus [a three-way security partnership between Australia, the US and Britain], so I don’t think those multilateral concepts are going to be very popular with him.

The UK is among the leading players in the global AI race. How was the recent rise of China’s DeepSeek received in the UK and what is the right AI strategy London should adopt regarding interactions with China?

I think we’ve got a good basis, because we had China involved in 2023 in a summit on AI for [discussing] some shared principles. AI is going to be a massive opportunity, but a massive threat, so we need international cooperation.

The second thing in terms of interactions is shared research. But whenever you have research collaboration with China, you get these people who are 15 years out of date, who start leaping up and down and saying, China is spying on Britain and it’s going to take our intellectual property. They don’t have any knowledge of how China has developed so quickly. If they went to China for two days, their mind would completely change.

I went to Shenzhen last year and noticed robotics was used a lot. China now uses more robots in its factories than Germany, who was the world leader up till then. China is now the world’s biggest producer of cars and EVs. In many areas, China is incredibly advanced now, and so we have to work out ways of cooperating with China, because China is in the lead. It has advantages, which is a very different position for us to find ourselves in.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has tried to maintain support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky despite US hostility. Photo: dpa

But our security services and policymakers often still think that we are where we were 15 years ago or 10 years ago. We have to completely rethink how we think of our relationship with China as a researcher and as a provider of technology like AI.

You lived in China and worked as a diplomat in China from the 1990s to 2000s. What was your experience of dealing with the Chinese government? What are the most notable changes in China’s diplomacy over the years?

I worked in China between [former presidents] Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. China was quite open then compared to now and the Chinese government was more easy to deal with.

After the hand back of Hong Kong in 1997, the Britain and China relationship reset and it became more about trying to work with each other. It was quite a cooperative time. I travelled to every single province and autonomous region [in China]. I went to Tibet, Xinjiang and I went to Inner Mongolia. I lived in Inner Mongolia as a teacher for two years.

I had a happy time over that period. I had some friends in the Chinese foreign ministry. We used to meet up together, and sometimes we went bowling. It was more sociable in those days. We can just phone people, text people. In fact, even in 2011 and 2012, it was easy to just meet up with people from the Central Party School.

Now it’s more difficult to form a relationship [with Chinese officials] because of the security issues. The relationship since the pandemic has become more complicated, more guarded and more difficult. When I went back to China last August, I didn’t bother to go to see government officials. I stayed in touch with some of my friends, but a lot of those people have retired, and younger people are more careful about relationships with non-Chinese.

China has changed. We’ve changed. The dynamics of the relationship have changed. We had a bigger economy in 2000 than China. Our economy was bigger than China’s, but today, China is nearly 5½ times bigger than the size of the British economy. So it’s an incredible transformation and the context of our relationship now is very different.

When speaking at the Cambridge Union in January, you said you believe China would like reform but you don’t believe the Western political models actually have something to offer to China. How would you envision ways China may reform politically and economically?

I think that China knows what it doesn’t want, it doesn’t want what America has. It doesn’t want what we’ve got. It doesn’t want divisions. It doesn’t want a society that is contradictory and divided. It certainly doesn’t want the chaos that America has at the moment.

The Communist Party is a strong institution, but China doesn’t have strong courts and it doesn’t have strong civil society groups. In Britain, we’ve had law courts for 1,000 years and we’ve had the judges going back to 850 years ago. Our parliament has existed since 1215. We have strong institutions in this country. So when there’s a crisis, our institutions, on the whole, can continue. They have their own laws.

But I think China doesn’t have very strong institutions. China definitely doesn’t want a political model that causes internal fragmentation and division.

I think China wants to build a kind of unified political system where there’s strong commercial rule of law, property rights, intellectual property rights protection. There’s some sense of predictability in the legal system, civic consciousness. [President Xi Jinping] wants all those things, but within a one-party system.

What do you think are the most common wrong perceptions about China’s diplomacy and its strategy in the developed world and its political logic?

China’s diplomacy is trying to say, “let’s just be pragmatic, go for win-win, and have common interests or common prosperity”. What China really wants is for everyone to agree that our aim is prosperous societies.

But obviously this message is difficult for developed economies because China is a competitor, and we’re very nervous about a power which has a very different political philosophy and that is regarded as a threat.

I think it’s also because China is culturally very different. In modern times, there’s been power transitions between America and Britain, Britain and Germany, but China is obviously not in that tradition. There’s a lot of anxiety about what a world looks like with a power which is culturally from a very different historic background. I don’t think people have an easy way to deal with it.

China’s message and its diplomacy are challenged by the fact that China has appeared recently as a major player geopolitically and economically, but also it’s very different. So no matter how good China’s diplomacy is, it’s always going to be difficult.

For America, having a real competitor was never going to be easy, like when Japan was competing with America in the 80s and 90s, there was lots of tension. Now we have the same situation, but on top of that, I think the cultural challenges are huge and need a lot of understanding and knowledge, which, on the whole, many Westerners don’t have.

They have been quite reluctant to learn about China, and we haven’t got much time to learn, so our knowledge levels have been a big disadvantage. Also China isn’t an easy power to relate to because of its political differences. So this is a difficult process that we’re going through.

Is there low-hanging fruit we can start with to improve understanding?

I think Britain and China know a lot about each other. Britain has been talking to China for 400 years. For Britain, we have a long China story. If you look at what British people drink, it’s tea, principally from China. If you look at British garden design, it was often inspired by China in the 18th century. If you look at porcelain, this technology originally came from China.

Britain has a long history of relating to China and we’ve always talked to each other. What we haven’t ever had historically is a relationship where China was much more powerful than Britain, and that’s the case now. So that’s new, and that’s what we’re finding quite difficult. British politicians sometimes use a language about China, which assumes that we can still tell China if we’re not happy, we can still tell China how we feel our values are superior. I think it’s more complicated than that. It’s not like China is just one thing – the Communist Party of China. It’s a long intellectual tradition that we need to understand.

How do you assess the risks of conflicts in the South China Sea and Taiwan? Which poses a greater risk of conflict?

It’s clear that at the moment Beijing and Taipei don’t have a common point. So status quo is the only position we can have at the moment.

On the one hand, you have Taiwan clearly not wanting reunification under the current political circumstances when they’re a democracy and mainland China isn’t. But Beijing won’t show any toleration of independence.

The problem is if Beijing launches an attack on Taiwan or Taiwan declares independence, the consequences would be global and massively destructive. It would really be like a world war, though maybe America wouldn’t get involved. I think that it would be hard for it not to, but if America gets involved, you have two nuclear powers, America and China, facing each other.

The Taiwanese election shows that they don’t want to change the status quo at the moment. So even if Beijing were to try to force the issue, it would be dealing with 23 million people who didn’t agree.

Beijing might win a war, but it wouldn’t win the peace and this would have a massive, shattering impact on its international position. In 10-20 years time, all of geopolitics might have changed, so I think it’s worth waiting. But at the moment, there’s no solution.

How effective do you think London’s current policy on Hong Kong is? In what way is Hong Kong still important to the UK, and what role can Hong Kong play in China-UK relations?

When the hand back happened in 1997, Hong Kong was 25 per cent of the Chinese economy. Today it’s only 2 per cent of the overall national economic size, so the size of Hong Kong’s economic importance has dwindled. No one had thought back in 1997 that China would change as much as it has. I think we in Britain accepted that Hong Kong might change, but we didn’t think that China would change so much.

We thought Hong Kong’s economy would probably become less important, because China was still growing then. But I don’t think that we thought that it would change so rapidly, you know, and now China’s economy is so huge, the dynamics are different.

So putting Hong Kong in such perspective, it is important, but it’s one of several things. Although Britain has a historic link with Hong Kong, our ability to influence Beijing is now very weak.

I think British policy towards China has to include other things. The challenge is how to balance all of those. And if you completely focus on one thing – like Hong Kong or human rights or the economy – it always comes with an opportunity cost. That’s the problem. If you do want to focus exclusively on or a lot on one area, you then are likely to lose opportunities in other areas.

The British position is very simple. Our position now is: it’s OK if we feel the priority is values, we can definitely say we don’t want to deal with China. But then we can’t complain if we don’t get any trade or any investment, and if the Chinese domestic market isn’t accessible to us, and if we aren’t able to cooperate with China on things like AI and environment.

For China now, it has many other options. It has massive possibilities, it’s the main trading partner of 120 countries. So Britain is a middle-ranking power for China. It’s not insignificant, but nor is it a priority.

The Labour government’s current policy is more balanced, it’s more about trying to find some common areas to work on. The Hong Kong issue is one of several issues, and it has to be balanced with the UK’s other interests alongside other issues.

For Britain, we have a lot of different economic or political reasons why we feel we need to deal with China, and we should deal with China constructively. The issue of Hong Kong has to factor into that, but it can’t be the dominant issue.

We still have the 50-year handover agreement between Britain and China and now we have another 20-plus years to be involved in Hong Kong formally, but maybe Beijing feels now that this agreement is already passed, or something symbolic rather than meaningful.

It has been 30 years since the hand back, it’s a different world. Now, China is a different country. Hong Kong has factored into the Pearl River Delta framework, which is massive. Hong Kong is just a part of that. In the UK, we still do a parliamentary report every six months on Hong Kong. I think China thinks this is just Britain’s business and it’s nothing to do with China.

Sylvie Zhuang

Based in Beijing, Sylvie joined the post in 2023 to report on China. She covers elite politics, diplomacy, international development, and has a interest in exploring how evolving technology is tranforming governance and society. Previously, she graduated from the University of Chicago

18. Command Posts, the Iron Triangle, and 1st Armored Division in WFX 23-4

Graphics at the link.

Conclusion:

The iterative train-up of the staff and employment of a deliberate command post system enabled the division to maintain the depth and flexibility required to continuously maintain options and exploit opportunities despite the complex LSCO environment. Though the train-up was not revolutionary, a disciplined progression informed by doctrine and subject matter experts created a formative experience that produced the flexible and knowledgeable staff required to operate the Iron Triangle command post system. It was that convergence of a well-trained staff and the Iron Triangle command posts that gained strength and resiliency during the most complex environments. The division can withstand the frictions of war and uncertainty by having the separate command posts work as a system and complement each other. The command posts of the future will need to continue to evolve with future demands, but the basics of how they operate and how they are filled are exemplified by the 1AD during WFX 23-4.

Command Posts, the Iron Triangle, and 1st Armored Division in WFX 23-4

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/04/15/command-posts-2/

by Doni Wong

04.15.2025 at 06:00am

Introduction

In small wars and large-scale combat operations (LSCO), command posts require not only trained personnel, but mutually supportive physical infrastructure to properly execute the six functions of a command post per ATP 3-90.5, 2-5. During 1st Armored Division’s (1AD) most recent Warfighter Exercise (WFX), which focused on LSCO against a peer competitor in the European region, the Division further refined its own command post operations. The intention of this field report is to share key findings from that exercise, WFX 23-4, with the reader. The key findings from the exercise include: (1) a mutually supportive command post system, (2) acknowledgement of limitations of even the most ideal system, and (3) the need for iterative training with the appropriate focus and rigor to identify shortcomings.

During WFX 23-4, 1AD created a resilient and robust command post system through a deliberate training progression. The train-up, starting in the deserts of Fort Irwin’s National Training Center (NTC), and culminating with Warfighter (WFX) 23-4, 1AD Staff proved its capability through constant tests, mission-generated friction, and relentless contention with the opposing forces (OPFOR). Throughout these challenges 1AD’s headquarters maintained their full range of capabilities and it experienced no loss of tempo from inefficient systems and processes. 1AD used a framework known as the Iron Triangle to build a mutually supportive network of command posts, covering the inherent weaknesses of any single or desynchronized command post.

Throughout these challenges 1AD’s headquarters maintained their full range of capabilities and it experienced no loss of tempo from inefficient systems and processes.

The Idea of Cheap, Fast, and Good

The concept of good, fast, and cheap has been referred to by many names, but it is most commonly called the Iron Triangle. The Iron Triangle is often used for product development, and in this model, the product can only realistically achieve two of the three components of the Iron Triangle, as the third component is mutually exclusive of the other two. The overlap between the two parts represents the characteristics of the final product. Figure 1 illustrates the concept and serves as the baseline for Army application.

Figure 1. Visualization of the Iron Triangle’s concept of Good, Fast, and Cheap

Application to the Army

In the cult classic film The Pentagon Wars, which documented the development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the movie’s tagline was: “They aimed to build the ultimate fighting machine, they missed.” The Bradley’s development process is an example of the application of cheap, fast, and good—among numerous other things— being forcefully applied to a single product, instead of a system that can handle the burden of accounting for each of the three factors. However, the application to the Army is not limited to vehicles or weapons. The Iron Triangle can also be overlayed on top of a command posts. In the aggregate, and when working as a system, command posts can achieve all three elements of the Iron Triangle. In this approach, the cheap, fast, and good are replaced by capacity, survivability, and continuous operations.

Figure 2. The three components of the command post’s Iron Triangle

For the command post Iron Triangle framework, capacity is characterized by the command post’s ability to control operations in the immediate deep, close, and rear fight while also managing planning horizons at 48, 72, 96 hours, and beyond. ATP 6-0.5, 1-40 defines capacity as:

“CPs should be manned and organized to manage the information needed to operate effectively. The capacity to conduct (plan, prepare, execute, and continuously assess) operations concerns both staffing and information systems. So too, does the ability to manage relevant information. The CP personnel must be trained and have the requisite tactical and technical proficiency.”

The command post needs personnel to execute these functions and expertise in the various warfighting functions. In addition to the personnel necessary to control and plan the fight, the command post will also need technical support to gain and maintain communications with subordinate, adjacent, and higher echelons. For all these functions to work, the physical environment must be conducive to their requirements.

Survivability is the command post’s resiliency to threats during large-scale combat operations (LSCO). Per ATP 6-0.5, 1-41:

“… survivability is vital to mission success. Survivability is often obtained at the price of capacity or continuous operations. Depending on the threat, CPs must remain small and highly mobile — especially at lower echelons. CPs are easily acquired and targeted when concentrated. Considerations for CP survivability include dispersion, size, redundancy, mobility, camouflage, and concealment. Additional measures include cover or shielding by terrain features or urban structures.”

Survivability can also be achieved through signature and spectrum management, geographical location, physical size, and active defenses, to list a few methods.

Continuous operations per ATP 6-0.5, 3-1 and 3-2 is defined as:

“Army operations are continuous and continue at the same level of intensity for extended periods. Man, equip, and organize CPs to execute operations and sustain mission command without interruption. During continuous operations, CP personnel execute several routine and recurring tasks to establish, operate, and move the CP.”

Continuous operations must also incorporate the command post’s ability to maintain operations and planning horizons for long periods. Divisions, like 1AD, must manage operations and synchronize brigade activities, and shape the deep area to create the situation that supports success in the close area. Additionally, the command posts at the division level must maintain planning horizon discipline and have the capacity to plan and refine plans out to 96 hours and beyond. To do so, the command post’s staff must possess sufficient depth to handle requirements throughout a continuous 24-hour cycle.

Figure 3. Example planning horizons from ATP 6-0.5.

Achieving all three components of the command post’s Iron Triangle becomes the quintessential gold standard, but as stated by ATP 6-0.5, the components often come at the cost of the other. If the command post has excellent control and the personnel to achieve continuous operations, for instance, its size is likely not optimized for survivability. However, achieving all three components of the command post’s Iron Triangle is required to counter the friction that complex operations induce and that an enemy force adds.

Figure 4. Visual of the Division’s Command Post Threshold of Excellence versus example complex activities with enemy influence during a Warfighter scenario

A System That Brought It All Together

During WFX 23-4, 1AD’s command post proved survivable, could control the entirety of the division’s operations, while coordinating with adjacent units and higher, and maintained the capacity to operate continuous operations. All of this occurred at the division’s desired operational tempo and duration, especially at the most critical points in the operation.

Separately, each of the 1AD’s command posts had its own deficiencies. The Division Main Command Post (DMAIN) could control and maintain continuous operations but was only survivable with multiple and regular relocations (or jumps). Each of those jumps took upwards of at least four to six hours just to gain initial operating capacity. The Division Tactical Command Post (DTAC) was highly survivable and managed the division’s operations. However, the DTAC lacked the endurance of personnel to continuously manage the division’s operations for extended periods of time.

Like the DMAIN, the Rear Area Command Post (RCP) could maintain continuous operations, but it had limited capacity to cover all aspects of the division’s operations. Unlike the DMAIN, the RCP gained survivability through its geographic positioning away from enemy long-range fires, thus reducing its chance of being targeted.

Through mutual employment, 1AD achieved all three components of the command post’s Iron Triangle— capacity, survivability, and continuous operations. The 1AD CP was, by design, at its strongest when it prepositioned itself for the unknown or uncertain. In such instances, 1AD deployed all its command assets, operating at its highest potential. The DTAC deployed to manage mission-specific fights, such as a wet gap crossing and deliberate defense operations, allowing the DMAIN to continue focusing on the deep area and future planning. 1AD’s division of labor amongst its command posts allowed the headquarters to effectively coordinate operations in the close fight without becoming fixated on it and neglecting to prepare for future operations.

During the WFX, for instance, 1AD’s DMAIN was destroyed by a theater ballistic missile attack. Nonetheless, 1AD’s DTAC, in cooperation with the RCP, maintained operations and executed conducted planning despite the loss of the DMAIN. The two smaller command posts focused on refining the plan for this period, allowing the division to continue setting conditions in anticipation of actions 48 to 96 hours out. Furthermore, the DTAC and RCP simultaneously coordinated logistics from the rear to provide the force options to exploit opportunities following the enemy’s attack.

Despite these strengths and command post resiliency in the aggregate, micro-level flaws remained. Due to the constraints emplaced by the DMAIN’s survivability jumps, shared understanding often came at a cost for the organization. During the initial train-up at NTC, the DMAIN retained the functional nodes to practice survivability. However, the physical structure of the DMAIN’s functional nodes created unforeseen inefficiencies with information sharing. These inefficiencies remained unidentified during the III Armored Corps’ CPX II in February 2023 because extreme weather reduced the exercise by three days, thus limiting 1AD to a single jump. However, information sharing improved drastically once the DMAIN was established in the nonstandard location during WFX 23-4. Once all nodes were consolidated into a single open area, unknown inefficiencies in the staff’s knowledge management and information-sharing processes were illuminated. The staff drastically improved the knowledge management processes and information sharing that occurred in the battle rhythm, which increased the speed of command decisions throughout the operations process.

Figure 5. Example Command Post layout. The distance between nodes/clusters is not to scale

Conclusion

The iterative train-up of the staff and employment of a deliberate command post system enabled the division to maintain the depth and flexibility required to continuously maintain options and exploit opportunities despite the complex LSCO environment. Though the train-up was not revolutionary, a disciplined progression informed by doctrine and subject matter experts created a formative experience that produced the flexible and knowledgeable staff required to operate the Iron Triangle command post system. It was that convergence of a well-trained staff and the Iron Triangle command posts that gained strength and resiliency during the most complex environments. The division can withstand the frictions of war and uncertainty by having the separate command posts work as a system and complement each other. The command posts of the future will need to continue to evolve with future demands, but the basics of how they operate and how they are filled are exemplified by the 1AD during WFX 23-4.

Tags: command post, field report

About The Author

Doni Wong
Doni Wong is an Armor officer in the U.S. Army. He is currently serving as the Battalion Executive Officer for 1-67AR, 1AD. His previous assignments include G5 Planner for 1st Armored Division, Reconnaissance Troop Commander in 1-91 CAV (ABN), 173rd IBCT (A), Troop Commander at 2-16 Cavalry Regiment, and Platoon Leader and Company Executive Officer with 1-22 Infantry Battalion, 4th Infantry Division. Doni’s military training includes Airborne School, Ranger School, Cavalry Leaders Course, and School of Advance Military Studies. He graduated from the University of California – Davis with a degree in Sociology in 2009 where he also earned his commission from their ROTC program. Doni also completed a Master's in Leadership Studies from the University of San Diego in 2020.

19. Chinese Mockery of U.S. Manufacturing Reveals Economic Truth

See the Chinese videos mocking the US at the link: https://time.com/7277920/china-manufacturing-us-trump-factory-workers-ai-videos-social-media/

Chinese Mockery of U.S. Manufacturing Reveals Economic Truth

TIME · by Miranda Jeyaretnam

A “Make American Strong Again” banner hangs on the wall as rows upon rows of overweight workers assemble Nike sneakers; one lifts a burger up to his mouth as he eats while working, another rests his head on the sewing machine in front of him, barely able to keep his eyes open.

It’s a caricature of U.S. manufacturing that Chinese netizens have been laughing at over the past week, as social media platforms have seen a wave of AI-generated videos portraying what some think it would look like for Americans to work in sweatshop-like textile factories and iPhone assembly lines more commonly associated with China.

As U.S. President Donald Trump escalates a trade war with China that he began in his first term—seeing tariffs, which are taxes on imports, as a path to restore a U.S. manufacturing sector that has steadily declined over decades—China’s government has made its opposition clear: After Trump’s “Liberation Day” on April 2, when he hiked tariffs on all global trade partners, Chinese state media produced AI-generated parody videos slamming Trump’s approach as costly, divisive, and dangerous. After Trump announced a 90-day pause for other countries but further hiked tariffs on China, which now stand at 145%, China’s finance ministry raised its retaliatory tariff on U.S. goods to 125% but said that it wouldn’t continue to respond with tit-for-tat increases, arguing that doing so amounts to nothing more than a “numbers game” as the current rate already makes imports from the U.S. prohibitively expensive.

“It would be a joke,” the ministry said, promising other unspecified countermeasures if its interests continue to be infringed.

But while a trade war between the world’s two biggest economies is certainly not funny for Beijing, the AI-generated videos gone viral among Chinese social media users satirizing fictitious American manufacturing workers do get at a more serious truth.

@axiang67

Make america great again～#tariff #america

♬ 原创音乐 - Ben Lau

“The joke is Americans don’t want to do those jobs,” Mark Cogan, associate professor of peace and conflict studies at Japan’s Kansai Gaidai University and a U.S. national, tells TIME. “We’re the punchline.”

The economic reality

Trump has promised that his tariffs will usher in a “new golden age” for American workers, harkening back to an industrial past that has been lost to decades of globalization. The logic goes that by raising the price of foreign goods, businesses and consumers will be discouraged from importing and instead invest in U.S.-based manufacturing and American-made goods. But the irony, economists say, is that the trade deficits that he seeks to reverse are a sign of the U.S. economy’s relative dominance, not weakness.

“The U.S. is at a state of development where it has moved beyond manufacturing,” Jayant Menon, a research fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, previously told TIME. “This is what manufacturing countries are trying to aspire to, and this guy is trying to go the other way.”

What is more likely to happen, economists have said, is that as the relatively cheap goods that Americans are accustomed to being able to buy dramatically rise in price, consumers will simply buy fewer things. And greater U.S.-based manufacturing wouldn’t necessarily result in lower prices because it would still involve higher costs—for many overseas manufacturers, paying the tariff would still be less costly than relocating to the U.S.

The biggest reasons why China and not the U.S. has come to be the world’s “sole manufacturing superpower,” or “the world’s factory,” are its greater labor supply and thus lower wages, more efficient domestic business and supply chain ecosystem, and relatively lax regulatory environment. Tariffs alone won’t change these underlying factors for the U.S.

“If you think about producing a laptop in China versus the U.S.,” says Yuan Mei, assistant professor in the School of Economics at Singapore Management University, “in China a lot of parts and components of the laptop are produced within China, so shipping those components within the country is pretty cheap.” Many other components, like chips, are produced in other Asian nations, like Japan and South Korea, which also means relatively cheaper shipping to China than to the U.S.

But the mismatch between America’s workforce and China’s is perhaps the biggest obstacle to shifting a significant amount of manufacturing from China to the U.S. In the U.S., as of March 2025, just under 13 million workers are employed in the manufacturing sector, while just over 7 million Americans are unemployed. China’s manufacturing sector, meanwhile, employs more than 100 million people, while high unemployment and low regulations suppress wages and labor conditions.

While many Americans—80% of respondents to a CATO Institute survey—agree in principle with the idea that the U.S. would be better off if more Americans worked in manufacturing, far fewer would actually want to take such a job themself: only 25% of the CATO survey’s respondents said they believed they would be better off in a manufacturing job.

Moreover, economists have noted that much of the manufacturing work that could be transplanted to the U.S. may actually be more efficiently automated, or done by machines instead of humans, while many of the jobs that would be needed may require skills that the U.S. is short on.

The manufacturing sector relies heavily on engineers, Mei says, and engineering is among China’s most popular college majors. In the U.S., on the other hand, a large proportion of engineering and tech talent is international students—and with the Trump Administration’s crackdowns on immigrants and international students, there might eventually be, Mei says, a “gap in the supply” of engineers that the U.S. needs to boost its domestic manufacturing.

From mocking to hawking

Mei tells TIME he noticed the memes of American factory workers started to spread in recent weeks amid the escalating U.S.-China trade war, when Chinese social media users began wondering what American products may become more expensive due to Chinese retaliatory tariffs. That morphed into conversations about the difference between a brand being American, of which there are many cases, and its manufacturing being U.S.-based, which is much rarer.

“Many netizens realized that there are few examples of daily products that are produced in the U.S.,” says Mei, noting the exceptions of very expensive high tech instruments, aircraft, and pharmaceutical products.

@iambuddhawangwang

#trump #maga

♬ 原创音乐 - Buddhawangwang

Rather, the U.S.’s comparative advantage is in the services sector, Mei says. “Think Silicon Valley.” (Observers believe Beijing will next turn its sights to U.S. services exports, targeting American professional, legal, technological, telecommunications, education, health, entertainment, and other services, many of which have already been scrutinized and restricted, to exert pressure amid the trade war.)

The AI-generated videos depicting Americans taking factory jobs, says Ashley Dudarenok, who runs a China and Hong Kong-based consumer research consultancy, relied on subverting a “long-standing stereotype about global labor dynamics.” And quickly, she tells TIME, the caricature was “absolutely everywhere, and it’s still trending.”

“There was the trade war, there was the tariff war, and now there is the meme war,” Dudarenok says.

Even among the Chinese workforce, more and more aspire to work in sectors other than manufacturing. Dudarenok says across Chinese social media she’s seen comments saying, “Chinese people don’t want to do these jobs, why would Americans want to do these jobs?” or “Chinese manufacturers are moving into Vietnam, into Africa—now we have another option: America.”

Still, the tariffs are no joke to those in China whose livelihoods depend on manufacturing goods for export. Some have also taken to social media to respond to the tariffs: by explaining how cheaply they actually manufacture goods and how much of the price consumers paid pre-tariffs came from brand markups.

Some have even appealed to Americans to buy directly from them. “They want to get rid of the middleman,” says Mei. But consumers should beware that claiming to manufacture for big brands while actually producing knock-offs is a common scam, and some scammers could be exploiting consumer panic about potential price hikes. While China produces more than half of the world’s clothing and textiles, Dudarenok says manufacturers that are “trusted partners” with big brands don’t typically sell their partners out so easily.

A messaging win for Beijing

If social media sentiment is anything to go off of, Mei says that there’s a lot of support among Chinese citizens for the government’s policy decisions related to Trump’s trade war. “It’s seen as a good thing that they are imposing retaliatory tariffs. A small share of Chinese netizens are still worried, and say that maybe we should just yield to the U.S., but the majority agree with the stance of the Chinese government.”

The government’s message is clear, Dudarenok says: “China is prepared to fight for its right to be in the room and to be at the table.”

Mei has even seen memes depicting China protecting other countries from U.S. bullying or suggesting China is the one country brave enough to stand up for itself.

But the sentiment isn’t just popular on Chinese social media. Reshares of posts popular on Chinese social media to X and TikTok, which are blocked within mainland China though still accessed by many users via VPNs, have garnered millions of views and tens of thousands of likes. Although it’s not clear who is generating and sharing the original videos, Cogan, the peace and conflict studies professor in Japan, says it’s nevertheless a “huge win for China.”

“I think that the Chinese understand quite well the fact that American society is quite divided, and at this particular stage of our political polarization, Americans really don’t care whose propaganda they are spreading or where the meme actually comes from—so they’re willing to spread whatever … as long as it furthers their own political messaging.”

TIME · by Miranda Jeyaretnam

20. Rearming Europe: Challenges and Constraints

Excerpt:

Conclusion

The ambition to rearm Europe and develop its autonomous defense capabilities is necessary and cannot be postponed any longer. However, European countries will face significant challenges and constraints. Reliance on American technology and military infrastructure has been deeply embedded in European defense strategies for decades, making any shift toward independence a complex, costly, and time-consuming endeavor. Along these same lines, recruiting and retaining highly skilled personnel will be increasingly difficult for European militaries, which are up against demographic decline, reduced societal support for military service, and intense competition from the private sector. Addressing this issue may require fundamental cultural shifts, enhanced incentives, or even reconsideration of military conscription policies. Finally, a critical but often overlooked aspect of European defense readiness is the need for strategic expertise. Defense planning and military technology are complex fields that require specialized knowledge, yet European academic and professional training programs in these areas remain inadequate. Without investing in the education and development of future defense strategists, even the best-equipped military forces will struggle to formulate and execute effective security policies. In summary, while geopolitical realities justify Europe’s pursuit of greater military self-sufficiency, achieving this objective will require more than just increased funding. It will necessitate a long-term commitment to technological innovation, industrial expansion, military recruitment, and strategic education. Without a comprehensive and pragmatic approach, the vision of an independent European defense force will remain an aspiration rather than a reality.

Rearming Europe: Challenges and Constraints - War on the Rocks

Andrea Gilli, Mauro Gilli, and Niccolò Petrelli

warontherocks.com · by Andrea Gilli · April 15, 2025

The Trump administration is sending shock waves through the development community, diplomatic circles, and financial markets. In doing so, it might have achieved something that, until a short time ago, even the most fervent Europeans would have downplayed as highly unlikely: European leaders seem to have finally recognized the need to take charge of their own defense.

In response to the Trump administration, the European Commission has launched the ambitious ReArm Europe Plan/Readiness 2030, which was unveiled in March 2025 and aims to mobilize 800 billion euros (approximately $872 billion) to strengthen the continent’s defense capabilities. According to the Financial Times, European officials believe “[i]t would take an estimated five to 10 years” for European countries, through a planned increased in defense spending, “to raise European capabilities to a level where they could replace most U.S. competences,” excluding the nuclear deterrent. However, such an ambition risks being optimistic.

To start, European countries depend on the United States for the architecture for long-range detection, identification, geolocation of static targets and tracking of mobile as well as for real-time transmission of the targeting data, beyond line of sight, over adversary territory as well as the airborne electronic warfare needed to neutralize enemy sensors, support operations, and address enemy countermeasures. Moreover, they rely on critical American military platforms, such as anti-submarine warfare aircraft; refueling aircraft; high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles; long-range, high-altitude air defense systems; and multiple rocket launch systems. Additionally, European countries depend, to different degrees, on the United States for many different types of precision munitions — such as air-to-air, anti-radiation, surface-to-air, and surface-to-surface missiles — and they have limited stocks of them. Replacing such an extensive reliance on American assets, stocks, and technology will require time and will be industrially and financially demanding. Compounding these problems, European countries will need to recruit high-quality military personnel to address readiness issues and the new threat scenario they are facing. They will also have to identify how to train a new generation of professionals and strategists to anticipate, identify, and address these new threats.

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A European Architecture for Modern War

Having an architecture that can detect, positively identify, and accurately track and geolocate mobile and static targets at a long range and that can transmit data on adversary targets from sensors to shooters in real time is critical for modern military systems. Without accurate and up-to-date targeting data, the long-range, high-precision missiles on which Western militaries rely are completely useless. In fact, while Western support to Ukraine in the form of HIMARS and ATACMS has received most of the attention, its provision of accurate, real-time targeting data derived from multisensor data fusion is much more important. When the Trump administration interrupted such targeting data, Ukraine’s capacity to engage targets at long range was significantly curtailed.

It goes without saying that developing such architecture is extremely challenging. To start, detecting and identifying enemy targets requires environmental and operational data so that signal-processing and machine-learning algorithms will be able to effectively and efficiently distinguish signals from noise. Such environmental and operational data, however, must be collected beforehand, which is particularly important for electronic signals. Like the smartphone app Shazam needs a library of songs in order to successfully “identify” which song is being played, modern military sensors need a library of unique signals associated with enemy platforms and unique signals associated with idiosyncratic environmental returns (e.g., specific type of fauna). The creation of such a library is a prerequisite for increasing the probability of accurate identification and for lowering the probability of misses as well as of irrelevant “radar anomalies” and false alarms.

Moreover, the architecture for precision-strike complex requires merging input (data fusion) from multiple sensors (e.g., radar, electro-optical, acoustic sensors) and platforms (e.g., satellites, airborne and ground-based systems). The goal is to accurately detect, identify, track, and geolocate targets while avoiding the same target being marked multiple times by multiple platforms and preventing mismanagement from occurring among different deconflicting zones (e.g., a target being detected and identified but not engaged with because it was thought to be the responsibility of a different area or a target being engaged by multiple assets). In fact, Russia lacks such an architecture — as demonstrated by its inability to strike Western supplies of weapons to Ukraine en route to the front lines — and at least until a decade ago, available information suggested that China lagged behind the United States in its precision-strike complex as well.

Further complicating the situation is the fact that it is even more challenging to carry out all these tasks effectively and efficiently while operating against a capable enemy over contested or adversary territory, as this entails dealing with enemy countertactics (e.g., camouflage, decoys, faints) and countermeasures (e.g., electronic warfare systems that also threaten advanced systems and space assets) that aim to blind and deceive sensors, damage and destroy platforms, and disrupt communications.

Dodging the Tinkering Trap

When it comes to starting the production of new technologies that European countries have not produced for decades or that they have not produced at all, European countries will have to design and develop new technologies, which will inevitably encounter technical problems, which will in turn require fixes and solutions, which will in turn generate new problems and hence require new fixes and solutions until, through constant tinkering, a working equilibrium is found.

Addressing these never-ending problems can easily get out of hand, and the defense industry provides plenty of examples of defense programs, even extremely successful ones, that encountered never-ending technical problems, which led to cost overruns and inevitable delays.

It is quite possible that European countries will be able to procure, design, develop, and manufacture the systems that they need in an effective and efficient way. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that technical hurdles are ubiquitous in complex systems, especially in industries driven by technological performance like defense — these systems are subject to countless incompatibilities and vulnerabilities and, as a result, have extremely small and tight margins for errors.

Such technical problems call for both depth and breadth and, even more importantly, for defense companies to “know more than they make.” This is the business of systems integration, in which many European defense companies excel worldwide. Yet, developing such platform-specific expertise requires hands-on experience and thus time, as it spans a multiplicity of technical and organizational realms — from the technical properties of unique materials to the tacit understanding of trade-offs in design and to the knowledge and understanding of suppliers’ capabilities. Further complicating matters, these systems will need to operate against enemy countermeasures and countersystems in varying environmental conditions (e.g., humidity, salinity, sand, lightning) and need to be designed with several considerations in mind, such as ease of use and ease of maintenance.

Breaking Production Bottlenecks

Ramping up the production of the weapon systems and munitions that European countries currently produce will also not be easy. As the pandemic and then the war in Ukraine have clearly shown, increasing production cannot be done in a short time. There are multiple examples from the commercial sector of bottlenecks and choke points that threaten global supply chains. These problems are even more significant in the defense industry, since it requires specific physical and intangible goods with no easy substitute. Building new production plants or converting existing ones (e.g., from the automotive sector) would require effort, resources, and time, as companies would need to train or retrain workers, administrative personnel, and managers; to adopt industry-specific procedures to comply with government regulations (e.g., regulations for handling explosives and hazardous materials, for restricting access to security clearance holders, for meeting ITAR requirements, etc.); ordering and setting up specialized equipment (which will inevitably have backlogs in delivery because they are complex machineries, and only very few companies can produce them); building specialized laboratories and testing facilities; identifying, contacting, and vetting suppliers that can, within a given time frame, produce and deliver components that meet very specific and stringent technical requirements; and, of course, dealing with inevitable supply-chain problems, such as those regarding raw materials and critical minerals.

Mobilizing Talent

European countries will also have to grapple with the problem of recruiting high-quality military personnel. The modern military requires personnel who possess a certain set of cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal skills. Such requirements stem from the lethality of the modern battlefield, which has reduced the margins for errors and mistakes as well as the window for time-sensitive tasks. The increasing availability of multiple sensors and the trend towards a transparent battlefield further reduce existing margins and increase the qualitative requirements for military personnel. Yet, European countries are facing a series of intertwined challenges that are going to frustrate their attempts to recruit high-quality military personnel.

To start, many European countries are experiencing a demographic decline and, in particular, are seeing a reduction in the number of college-age individuals, which reduces the pool of potential recruits. Further reducing such a pool, a significant portion of young adults do not meet the standards required for military service. Together, these two aspects intensify the competition between the military and private industries for the required types of individuals. Private industries generally offer higher salaries, better benefits, and a more stable lifestyle compared to those offered by the military. In this regard, it is telling that competition in the labor market also poses problems for countries such as the United States, where the military is highly regarded among the general population. The U.S. military regularly fails to meet its recruiting goals — preferring to recruit fewer people than it needs and rejecting many applicants who fail to meet specific criteria.

For Europe, this problem would be further exacerbated by a set of cultural and institutional factors. Compared to the U.S. military, European countries’ militaries do not enjoy as high a social status, and there is no comparable Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) system. Moreover, even the idea of defending the nation has little support among younger generations, and specific welfare provisions that exist in some countries are arguably going to further complicate military recruitment.

European countries might consider reintroducing the draft, which most of them suspended or abrogated it in the 1990s and 2000s. Whereas some countries, most notably Sweden, reintroduced military conscription in the late-2010s, such an option would not come without costs — especially in large countries such as France, Germany, Italy, and Spain — due to social conflicts, multiethnic tensions, and ideological opposition to the military.

Strategists, Not Accountants

In light of the challenges ahead, European countries will have to ask themselves a critical question that they have, until now, avoided: What is the goal of rearming Europe? In the abstract, the answer seems obvious: It is for deterrence and defense, primarily against Russia. But in practice, what European countries want to achieve is less clear. For example, are they pursuing deterrence by denial or by punishment? If the former, does it include an offensive operational component, such as long-range interdiction or offensive counter-air? If the latter, which targets will European countries intend to strike: only military targets, or critical infrastructure as well?

Moreover, deterrence is effective if it is credible. The fact that European countries changed the name “ReArm Europe” because some considered it too aggressive is definitively not a good starting point. If some European countries have a problem with calling rearmament what it is, their commitment to European deterrence and defense can be easily called into question given that such commitment would entail striking inside adversary territory. For deterrence to fail, all that is needed is for the enemy to not perceive it as credible.

More generally, European countries will have to ask themselves whether they intend to only pursue deterrence or whether they intend to actively undermine the Russian threat, for example, by imposing costs and creating strategic dilemmas for Russia similar to how the United States employed cost-imposing and maritime strategies in the 1980s. At some point, European countries will have grapple with these questions, and they will have to explain their answers to their citizens — that is, if they want to take responsibility for their own security. If they do not want to make the hard decisions, someone else will do it for them.

It follows that an increase in defense spending cannot simply be an accounting commitment — going from spending less than 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to more than 3 percent (GDP itself being a shifting number that is changing due to ongoing tariff-related turmoil). There must be a clear strategy behind it. To this end, European countries will have to go through a paradigm shift in which defense policy is not dictated by finance ministers. European countries will have to strengthen and, in some cases, even develop a culture and institutions that will enable them to design, elaborate, and execute their defense policies. This will in turn require European countries to relearn the art of strategy, literally. As some commentators have eloquently pointed out, Western countries, in general, and European countries, in particular, seem to be incapable of recognizing contexts and situations that are outside the realm of the norms and rules with which they feel comfortable and adapting to new realities in which norms and rules play a secondary role, if any role at all.

However, the problem goes much deeper than this. European countries will also need to think about how to train next-generation strategists and how to promote their careers given that they will be defined by different parameters compared to other professional profiles. To address defense and security problems, it is not enough to simply increase defense budgets: countries need qualified civilian personnel who understand, among other things, the type of military technologies needed; the inherent trade-offs in weapons design; the issues that plague research, development, testing, and engineering in the defense industry; the considerations and goals that inform defense acquisition; and the drivers of military innovation. To date, there are, however, very few universities across Europe that offer classes in defense planning and policy, analysis of military operations, military technology and operations, and related topics. Moreover, strategic thinking also includes a speculative element that is inherently creative. This aspect requires professional profiles that might be completely different from traditional career paths in large governmental organizations, and European countries will thus have to devise a way to identify, recruit, and retain the right profiles.

Conclusion

The ambition to rearm Europe and develop its autonomous defense capabilities is necessary and cannot be postponed any longer. However, European countries will face significant challenges and constraints. Reliance on American technology and military infrastructure has been deeply embedded in European defense strategies for decades, making any shift toward independence a complex, costly, and time-consuming endeavor. Along these same lines, recruiting and retaining highly skilled personnel will be increasingly difficult for European militaries, which are up against demographic decline, reduced societal support for military service, and intense competition from the private sector. Addressing this issue may require fundamental cultural shifts, enhanced incentives, or even reconsideration of military conscription policies. Finally, a critical but often overlooked aspect of European defense readiness is the need for strategic expertise. Defense planning and military technology are complex fields that require specialized knowledge, yet European academic and professional training programs in these areas remain inadequate. Without investing in the education and development of future defense strategists, even the best-equipped military forces will struggle to formulate and execute effective security policies. In summary, while geopolitical realities justify Europe’s pursuit of greater military self-sufficiency, achieving this objective will require more than just increased funding. It will necessitate a long-term commitment to technological innovation, industrial expansion, military recruitment, and strategic education. Without a comprehensive and pragmatic approach, the vision of an independent European defense force will remain an aspiration rather than a reality.

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Andrea Gilli, PhD, is lecturer at the University of St Andrews, senior advisor at the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense in Italy, and expert mentor at NATO’s Defense Innovation Accelerator of the North Atlantic. Previously, he was a senior researcher at the NATO Defense College, a post-doctoral fellow at both Harvard and Stanford universities, a visiting scholar at both Columbia and Johns Hopkins universities, as well as an associate fellow at the European Union Institute for Security Studies.

Mauro Gilli, PhD, is a senior researcher in military technology and international security at the Centre for Security Studies of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Previously, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Dartmouth College.

Niccolò Petrelli, PhD, is assistant professor at the Department of Political Sciences, Roma Tre University where he teaches strategic studies. Previously he was Eisenhower Defense Fellow at the NATO Defense College, post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, a visiting scholar at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, and military researcher at the Military Center for Strategic Studies.

Image: U.S. Army photo by Capt. Thomas McCarty, accessed via Wikimedia Commons.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Andrea Gilli · April 15, 2025

21. Arms Control Is Not Dead Yet

Excerpts:

Although negotiations with China should be mainly about controls rather than limits, there is one nuclear system the United States should push China, as well as Russia, to ban: the fractional orbital bombardment system, or FOBS. FOBS missiles, which do not follow a predictable ballistic trajectory, could strike without warning and are capable of maneuvering to evade defenses, represent a grave concern for critical command and control sites. According to U.S. Air and Space Force officials, China tested a FOBS in the open ocean in 2021, sparking particular alarm in Washington and underscoring the need to include prohibition in any future talks.

Trump should not waste the opportunity he has now. Even if the hurdle of Senate ratification proves too high for the United States to enter a legally binding nuclear arms treaty—and it may not, given the strong influence Trump exercises over Congress—well-crafted political agreements with China and Russia could still be effective. Apart from these essential talks with Beijing and Moscow, Trump should also address the effect his lukewarm support for U.S. allies in Europe and Asia is having on proliferation debates in those regions. The president speaks adamantly against increasing numbers of nuclear weapons, but his actions are driving Germany, Poland, South Korea, and other countries to openly consider building their own arsenals. If he is truly interested in keeping nuclear weapons in check, Trump and his administration should be reinforcing the U.S. commitment to extended nuclear deterrence. By reducing the temptation for allies to build their own nuclear weapons and stopping a new arms race with China and Russia in its tracks, Trump can do the world a favor and bring the rising nuclear threat under control.

Arms Control Is Not Dead Yet

Foreign Affairs · by More by Rose Gottemoeller · April 15, 2025

America Should Pursue Parallel Nuclear Negotiations With China and Russia

Rose Gottemoeller

April 15, 2025

A Chinese submarine in the South China Sea, April, 2018 Reuters

ROSE GOTTEMOELLER is William J. Perry Lecturer at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute. She is the former NATO Deputy Secretary-General and U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security.

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Nearly every week since taking office in January, U.S. President Donald Trump has had something to say about controlling nuclear weapons. In comments to Fox News in March, for example, he referred to these weapons as “big monsters” and the world’s “greatest existential threat,” lamenting that the United States spends “all this money on something that, if it’s used, it’s probably the end of the world.” The president’s interest is fortuitous. Amid the turbulence of his administration, on this particular matter, Trump’s inclination toward nuclear restraint could push him to negotiate real restrictions—at a time when the world badly needs such measures to succeed.

Nuclear arms control is dying. The 2010 New START Treaty is the only remaining nuclear arms control agreement between the United States and Russia. New START, for which I led negotiations on the U.S. side, limits the number of nuclear warheads, missiles, and launchers each country can deploy and includes various mechanisms to verify implementation. But it is due to go out of force in less than a year, in February 2026. And its efficacy has already been weakened. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared in February 2023, a year after his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that Moscow would cease to implement the treaty as long as the United States continued to assist in Ukraine’s defense—linking the fate of nuclear arms control to an extraneous issue for the first time in the nearly 60 years of nuclear negotiations between Moscow and Washington. The Kremlin has been unwilling to engage in any kind of nuclear discussion ever since.

Meanwhile, China has been steadily modernizing its nuclear forces. Where once Beijing maintained only a modest force of a couple hundred warheads and delivery systems designed and deployed to retaliate in the event of a nuclear attack, it now has more than 500 warheads and is increasing the production of delivery systems. China is building up all three legs of the nuclear triad—intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and strategic bombers—which enables a country to launch nuclear weapons from land, sea, and air. The U.S. Department of Defense has estimated that by 2035 China will have acquired as many as 1,500 nuclear warheads. All the while, Beijing has declined to discuss its rapid buildup with Washington.

Thus, in the near future, the United States could face two nuclear powers, Russia and China, deploying similar numbers of nuclear warheads. These two close partners could together threaten a first strike against which the United States would not have enough weapons to respond. Their combined superiority would undermine the United States’ ability to deter them, with potential catastrophic consequences for regional and global stability. The threat is grave, but it is not unmanageable. There is a better chance for Washington to reach some accommodation with Moscow and Beijing on nuclear matters than on any of the other various military, political, and economic conflicts between these powers. If the United States under Trump can successfully reengage with Russia to sustain nuclear parity and engage for the first time with China to control nuclear risks, the three countries can avoid a Cold War–style nuclear arms race that would be costly, dangerous, and ultimately pointless for them all.

ATOMIC FIXATION

Trump has been thinking about the problem of nuclear weapons for a long time. As far back as the mid-1980s, when Trump was a young real estate tycoon, he lobbied President Ronald Reagan (unsuccessfully) to appoint him as the United States’ lead negotiator in strategic arms talks with the Soviet Union. Although Trump is known to frequently change his mind, he has been notably consistent in his focus on nuclear threats and the need to control them. In the president’s view, these weapons are a bad investment: why waste money on something that can never be used because using them would likely mean the end of the world?

Trump was frustrated by his inability to make headway on nuclear issues during his first term. His efforts to negotiate with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to undo Pyongyang’s deployment of nuclear weapons and to advance an arms reduction deal with China and Russia both came to naught. Now, Trump appears determined to try again, in February describing talks on the matter with Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping as “one of the first meetings I want to have.”

Full denuclearization, as Trump has gestured at, is too much to expect. But there is significant opportunity for Washington to make progress—in different ways—with Russia and China. In Russia, the United States is dealing with a nuclear peer. For six decades the two countries’ nuclear relationship has been based on parity: an equivalence of numbers and freedom to mix on force structure, meaning that as long as they keep the total number of nuclear warheads below equal limits, they can deploy them on different delivery systems. The United States has preferred more sea-launched missiles, whereas Russia has opted for more intercontinental ballistic missiles, which are launched from the ground. Over this period, Washington and Moscow have been engaging in serious efforts to limit and reduce their arsenals of nuclear weapons, sometimes through treaties and sometimes through unilateral initiatives conducted in parallel. This nuclear arms limitation is now eroding. Trump’s goal should be to restore it.

The United States should have a different objective with regard to China: to convince Beijing that its interests lie in predictability and stability. Unlike Russia’s weapons, China’s nuclear forces are still far inferior to those of the United States. Although its forces are modernizing quickly, China will not become a nuclear peer for a decade or more. In the meantime, Washington should engage with Beijing to understand its objectives, create predictability about future force structure and modernization plans, and lower the risk of misunderstandings that could lead to a nuclear crisis. Rather than focusing on the size of China’s arsenal, the United States should be trying to build mutual understanding with China and exercise mutual restraint in order to avoid a nuclear arms race—in other words, arms control.

BACK TO THE TABLE

In the case of Russia, the path to nuclear negotiations is relatively straightforward. U.S. and Russian negotiators have been at this business for nearly 60 years and know each other well. Since the 1970s, when Washington and Moscow were at each other’s throats, the two parties have managed to control, limit, and reduce nuclear weapons no matter what else was happening in their relationship. Especially after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the nearest the two sides came to nuclear war, both appreciated that nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to humanity and committed to isolating the nuclear dialogue on its own track. The United States and Russia continued implementing New START amid the first Russian invasion of Ukraine, when Putin seized Crimea in 2014.

On the Russian side, this attitude changed with Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, after which Putin halted implementation of New START. But the Kremlin may now be willing to reverse that decision and launch negotiations on a new nuclear treaty in parallel with a process to resolve the war in Ukraine. In February 2025, Putin commented, “We and the United States have the question of prolonging New START. Probably everyone else has forgotten, but I remember it is going out of force in about a year, in February 2026.” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has remarked on the change in Washington’s tone since Trump took office, noting it may signal a new opportunity for nuclear talks. Even if Moscow and Washington cannot settle on a replacement treaty before New START goes out of force next February, rapid nuclear expansion is not inevitable. For a long period in the 1980s and 1990s, no nuclear arms treaty was in force, and the United States and the Soviet Union simply agreed to abide by arms limits negotiated in the 1970s in the SALT II agreement, which was never ratified. Russia and the United States could do something similar today. Both could agree publicly to sustain the limits of New START until new limits can be negotiated. China, France, and the United Kingdom—the other nuclear weapons states under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty—should also pledge not to undermine the provisions of New START by building up warhead numbers or deploying destabilizing weapon systems.

THREE-BODY PROBLEM

China is a more complicated case. The country is modernizing its nuclear arsenal apace, and both Washington and U.S. allies are growing concerned that China seeks to become a peer competitor of the United States in nuclear as well as conventional forces. If China, as the U.S. Department of Defense estimates, can build around 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035 and proceeds to deploy all of them, it would more or less reach the 1,550-warhead limit the United States and Russia each agreed to under New START. In the worst-case scenario—in which China and Russia together threaten the United States with nuclear attack—Washington would face such nuclear superiority that it could be deterred from defending its interests.

The United States can and should plan for such a scenario, to protect both itself and the allies that depend on Washington’s nuclear umbrella. But it is also important to be clear-headed about the extent of the threat. Although the United States and Russia each deploy 1,550 warheads under New START, both keep many in reserve. The United States has a total of approximately 5,277 warheads and Russia approximately 5,449. If forced to confront a combined nuclear threat, the United States could deploy more warheads, drawing on the several thousand that it holds in reserve. It could place more warheads on its missiles at sea or on land and designate others to be delivered by its bomber force.

If the United States were forced to deploy more warheads on missiles, it would exceed the limits laid out in New START, Russia might do the same, and a form of arms race could begin. It is therefore important that China pledge not to undermine those limits and prompt a U.S. response. This is where negotiations come in. Washington does not have the long history of negotiating with the Chinese on nuclear matters that it has with the Russians, but it is not totally bereft of experience. The United States and China engage with each other through major multilateral regimes such as the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and China is currently chairing the five-country forum made up of the nuclear weapons states designated in the NPT (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Beijing knows the issues and stakes in nuclear negotiations and what is required to maintain strategic nuclear stability.

China is modernizing its nuclear arsenal apace.

Yet China has stubbornly resisted further negotiations, arguing that, because of the wide gap between Chinese and U.S. nuclear forces, the transparency required for nuclear diplomacy would make China too vulnerable. Only when Washington and Moscow both shrink their nuclear arsenals, China’s diplomats often say, will it be time to talk. That position has not changed as China modernizes its nuclear forces; builds new ballistic missiles, submarines, and bombers; and acquires additional warheads. The Chinese government has even tried to deny the extent of its buildup, insisting for years that 300 new missile silos constructed north and west of Beijing were wind farms.

Both Trump in his first term and President Joe Biden after him were frustrated by China’s refusal to talk about its nuclear modernization. The first Trump administration attempted to shoe-horn Beijing into the New START Treaty, effectively trying to subject China to the same nuclear reduction agreement as two vastly superior nuclear powers, Russia and the United States. Chinese leaders, unsurprisingly, reacted badly and shut down further discussions. They remained unreceptive during the Biden administration. During a 2023 summit in California, Biden thought he had made a breakthrough with Xi about starting nuclear talks, but Beijing again refused to come to the table.

This time may be different. With New START going out of force, negotiations can begin with a clean slate. There will be no legally binding treaty for China to be forced into—although China can and should be ready to support the limits outlined in New START if Russia and the United States agree to do so. Yet many stumbling blocks could derail progress. Plenty of China hawks in Washington and America hawks in Beijing could try to prevent the two sides from talking to each other. The escalating U.S.-Chinese trade war does not help. And although Trump evidently is keen to talk with Xi, it is unclear whether he places as high a priority on nuclear negotiations with China as he seems to place on nuclear negotiations with Russia.

THE ART OF THE DEAL

The best way for Washington to proceed is with two parallel negotiations. The first would be with Russia, to extend the limits of New START beyond February 2026 and then to seek additional limits on all nuclear warheads, deployed and nondeployed, strategic and nonstrategic. Trump took a significant step in this direction in his first term, when he got Putin to agree in principle to a freeze on all existing nuclear warhead stocks. He could build on that framework now by seeking restrictions on Russia’s newest delivery systems, such as the Poseidon nuclear-propelled and -armed torpedo.

Russia, concerned by Trump’s talk of building a new U.S. missile defense system, dubbed the “Golden Dome,” could insist on putting that system on the negotiating agenda. From Moscow’s perspective, strengthened U.S. missile defenses could undermine the Russian nuclear deterrent: the United States, expecting its defenses to hold against nuclear retaliation, might no longer consider a first nuclear strike on Russia to carry an unacceptably high risk. Putin has been particularly concerned about this possibility and was initially critical of New START because it did not limit U.S. missile defenses. If Moscow demands that missile defenses be on the agenda, then Washington should insist that limits on Russia’s own advanced missile defense systems, such as the S-500, also be discussed.

The second negotiation with China, focusing on nuclear arms control, should start with a Chinese pledge not to build or deploy enough warheads to undermine the limits of New START. Beijing will need to be more open about its nuclear modernization and be ready to take steps that reduce the risk that misunderstandings about U.S. and Chinese nuclear postures lead to instability or escalation. Data exchanges, notification of activities such as missile testing, joint definitions of terms related to nuclear weapons, and better crisis communications could all be part of the package.

Although negotiations with China should be mainly about controls rather than limits, there is one nuclear system the United States should push China, as well as Russia, to ban: the fractional orbital bombardment system, or FOBS. FOBS missiles, which do not follow a predictable ballistic trajectory, could strike without warning and are capable of maneuvering to evade defenses, represent a grave concern for critical command and control sites. According to U.S. Air and Space Force officials, China tested a FOBS in the open ocean in 2021, sparking particular alarm in Washington and underscoring the need to include prohibition in any future talks.

Trump should not waste the opportunity he has now. Even if the hurdle of Senate ratification proves too high for the United States to enter a legally binding nuclear arms treaty—and it may not, given the strong influence Trump exercises over Congress—well-crafted political agreements with China and Russia could still be effective. Apart from these essential talks with Beijing and Moscow, Trump should also address the effect his lukewarm support for U.S. allies in Europe and Asia is having on proliferation debates in those regions. The president speaks adamantly against increasing numbers of nuclear weapons, but his actions are driving Germany, Poland, South Korea, and other countries to openly consider building their own arsenals. If he is truly interested in keeping nuclear weapons in check, Trump and his administration should be reinforcing the U.S. commitment to extended nuclear deterrence. By reducing the temptation for allies to build their own nuclear weapons and stopping a new arms race with China and Russia in its tracks, Trump can do the world a favor and bring the rising nuclear threat under control.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Rose Gottemoeller · April 15, 2025

22. How America Can Stay Ahead of China in the AI Race

Excerpts:

What is clear, however, is that this leverage is unlikely to last forever. In the long run, foreign companies may find ways to reduce or eliminate their reliance on the United States, which means that tools like the foreign direct product rule could eventually lose their bite. The United States may therefore wish to exhaust diplomatic options before resorting to unilateral action. Unfortunately, if Trump goes through with even a fraction of the global tariffs he announced in early April, it will likely decrease the administration’s leverage to extract concessions on technology controls and could undermine ongoing cooperation. In the wake of the announcement, for example, ASML’s shares dropped to their lowest level in more than a year, a development that is unlikely to make the company or the Dutch government sympathetic to calls for further restrictions. The Trump administration’s more confrontational approach to traditional allies, particularly those in Europe, will undoubtedly color attempts at export control diplomacy, and some European states may be reluctant to concede too much, given the risks of domestic political blowback.

Still, it is worth trying to find common ground, and sometimes the United States will need to make the first move to apply sufficient pressure on partners to “level up” their own controls. Allies, meanwhile, can lower the perceived costs of diplomacy by signaling their willingness to work fast to close gaps in current controls. The ideal terms of such an offer may change depending on the circumstances but could include commitments to regularly blacklist Chinese manufacturing facilities, restrict more tools, ban onsite maintenance activities, and share intelligence on equipment locations and production capacity in China.

Even if Washington ultimately decides to expand its use of the foreign direct product rule, there will be long-term value in continuing to engage in some form of export control diplomacy: doing the long, arduous, sometimes frustrating, but strategically rewarding work of persuading countries that it is in the collective interest of the United States and its allies to act together to maintain a technological lead over China.

How America Can Stay Ahead of China in the AI Race

Foreign Affairs · by More by Nikita Lalwani · April 15, 2025

The Case for Export-Control Diplomacy

Nikita Lalwani

April 15, 2025

Assembly engineers in Veldhoven, Netherlands, June 2023 Piroschka van de Wouw / Reuters

NIKITA LALWANI is a Fellow at the RAND Corporation and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She served as Director for Technology and National Security at the National Security Council and as a Senior Adviser at the Department of Commerce in the Biden administration.

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In October 2022, the United States imposed sweeping restrictions on the export of advanced chips and chip-making equipment. The move, which followed steps taken in the first Trump administration to curtail China’s access to cutting-edge semiconductors, jumpstarted a comprehensive effort to cut China off from the world’s most powerful computer processors—the inputs required to develop and run sophisticated artificial intelligence systems that could be used to power autonomous weapons, conduct mass cyberattacks, and augment intelligence collection.

Officials knew that U.S. export controls could not succeed on their own. The semiconductor supply chain is global, and countries such as Japan, the Netherlands, and South Korea produce equipment, materials, and components that are key to chip production. Truly hindering China’s progress would require persuading those countries to act in concert with the United States. Officials in the first Trump administration successfully pressured the Dutch to stop selling its most advanced chip-making equipment to China. Building on this effort, the Biden administration began a systematic diplomatic push to curtail China’s access to advanced technologies.

This approach has obvious upsides. Other countries produce semiconductor technologies that would greatly enhance China’s ability to manufacture advanced chips. The Dutch firm ASML, for example, is the only company in the world currently able to build the extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines needed to print intricate designs on the most advanced chips. Plurilateral controls also prevent Chinese firms from simply replacing U.S. equipment with, say, Dutch or Japanese alternatives. And working with allies and partners fit with the Biden administration’s overall preference for diplomacy over unilateralism.

The strategy achieved notable successes: the Dutch and the Japanese announced their own semiconductor export controls in 2023 and again early this year. But there were downsides, too. Coordinating controls takes time and requires difficult compromises, and in the meantime China was able to stockpile large quantities of advanced chips and equipment.

It can be tempting to jettison diplomacy in favor of a more aggressive, unilateral approach, especially amid concerns about a shrinking U.S. lead in the AI competition with China. That President Donald Trump’s second administration has generally favored unilateral action makes such a move even more likely. But the United States should be realistic about the benefits and the substantial risks of going it alone. Expanding extraterritorial U.S. restrictions on selling materials and equipment to China may help Washington maintain a technological edge over Beijing in the short term. It may also help level the playing field between U.S. technology firms and their foreign competitors. But the efficacy of these actions is contingent on the United States’ technological superiority, which may decline over time, and on its diplomatic leverage, which may well be eroding. Working with foreign partners to restrict technology exports has made a real dent in China’s capabilities. For the United States and its partners to successfully limit Beijing’s access to advanced technologies, Washington must find a way to keep some measure of diplomacy alive.

OFF LIMITS

Export control diplomacy is not easy. Foreign countries, including close U.S. partners, can be reluctant to restrict their companies’ access to Chinese markets, alienate Beijing, or craft novel regulations at the request of U.S. diplomats. At the best of times, coordinating controls is a lengthy process, requiring consensus on both the overall strategic approach and minute technical details. This makes it harder for policymakers to adapt nimbly to technological advances and provides China with lead time to stockpile key chips and equipment.

These concerns are not just academic. Anticipating tighter restrictions, China quadrupled its imports of Dutch lithography machines in 2023, before new controls went fully into effect. In the first seven months of 2024, as the United States and foreign partners considered whether and how to tighten controls, China imported roughly $26 billion worth of chip-making equipment, a record amount. This was a boon for firms such as ASML, Tokyo Electron, and the American company Applied Materials, but a significant blow to the efficacy of U.S. export control policy.

What is more, when it comes to China, other countries tend to be more risk-averse than the United States, especially because of Beijing’s willingness to retaliate in response to semiconductor export controls—for example, by threatening to cut off Japan’s access to minerals used in the production of Japanese automobiles. In addition, other countries often wish to satisfy a higher evidentiary burden before acting. The United States may thus be forced to choose between doing more on its own—which disadvantages U.S. firms by denying them the kind of access to Chinese markets afforded to foreign competitors—or “leveling down” controls to whatever the most conservative country is willing to do. In practice, this might mean blacklisting fewer Chinese chip-manufacturing facilities, restricting a smaller subset of advanced equipment, or sidestepping whole categories of controls.

In recent years, U.S. policymakers, frustrated with the drawbacks to diplomacy but nonetheless cognizant of the need to limit access to foreign-made semiconductor technologies, have landed on a little-known export control authority called the foreign direct product rule, which allows Washington to restrict the sale of any product made with U.S. technology. The rule was first introduced in 1959, and for decades was used sparingly. Starting in 2020, however, the U.S. government began exercising it to more aggressively control foreign-made items, including products destined for Russia, Belarus, and the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei, as well as chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.

In December 2024, the Department of Commerce dramatically expanded the applicability of the rule to encompass foreign-made equipment that contains even one chip manufactured with a U.S. tool—a criterion met by virtually all advanced chip-making equipment in the world. Now the United States can unilaterally impose extraterritorial controls on foreign-made chips and equipment in order to block China from alternative markets and promote a level playing field for U.S. firms, all while bypassing lengthy and potentially unsuccessful attempts at diplomacy with third countries. Notably, however, the 2024 rule exempted tools made in a list of countries that participate in multilateral export control regimes and have the authority to control semiconductor technology, among them Japan and the Netherlands. The theory was that these countries could and would impose their own equivalent controls. Indeed, Japan and the Netherlands published complementary controls in early 2025.

HELPING HANDS

Washington is now at an inflection point on export controls. In cases where American companies are the ones most directly regulated—for example, as part of restrictions on U.S.-designed AI chips, including potential new controls on Nvidia’s H20—unilateral action is a relatively simple proposition. But where foreign sales are more directly impacted, such as in the case of restrictions on semiconductor tools, the situation is more complex. Here the new administration must decide whether to go it alone or to recommit to diplomacy and continue to exempt countries such as Japan and the Netherlands from extraterritorial controls. Neither option is perfect, and both entail significant tradeoffs.

Those who favor expanded extraterritorial controls on close partners argue that they are the only way to truly constrain China’s ability to produce advanced chips and maintain a level playing field for U.S. firms. Even countries that have imposed their own export controls have not matched Washington’s comprehensive restrictions, leaving U.S. firms at a distinct disadvantage. Japan and the Netherlands, for example, have prohibited the export of certain listed tools but have not imposed the kind of end-use, end-user, or person-based controls that Washington has. This means that although there are no longer any U.S. items being sent to advanced Chinese chip-manufacturing facilities, or any American workers there, Dutch and Japanese firms can still send unlisted items to those factories, including some key parts and components, and provide some upgrade and maintenance services on the ground. Imposing extraterritorial controls could close this gap.

In addition, proponents of expanded extraterritorial restrictions argue that export control diplomacy has been a failed experiment costing the United States time and effort as it cedes ground to China. Freed from the obligation to align and coordinate export controls with foreign partners, the United States could publish export control updates more regularly, keeping better pace with technological developments in China. It would also be easier for the United States to pursue more aggressive controls, including blacklisting additional Chinese manufacturing facilities or restricting more tools.

Yet the failure of plurilateral controls can be overstated. If one of their primary goals is to degrade China’s ability to manufacture chips to develop and use advanced AI, then the policy has had some real success. While U.S. companies have planned massive data-center buildouts for millions of U.S.-designed chips to create increasingly powerful AI systems and deploy them at scale, China has struggled to produce even a small fraction of U.S. output—and what it has made has cost more and been of lower quality. China does not appear to have indigenously manufactured any of Huawei’s AI chips, and even the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek, the country’s biggest AI success story, has freely admitted that access to computing power is its greatest constraint.

Expanded unilateral extraterritorial controls, meanwhile, are not a panacea. For one thing, the foreign direct product rule can extend Washington’s jurisdiction only to where there is a U.S. technology hook—for example, the presence of a U.S. chip or a foreign chip made with U.S. technology. It will be less effective where the U.S. input is generic and therefore easily replaceable, as is the case for some semiconductor materials and components. In the longer term, expanded use of the rule could further incentivize foreign companies to reduce their reliance on American parts throughout the semiconductor supply chain. Ultimately, this could leave the United States with less leverage as AI becomes more important and more powerful and make it harder for the United States to cut Beijing off from advanced technologies in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

U.S. leverage is unlikely to last forever.

Extraterritorial controls can also be a diplomatic nightmare. Some countries could be persuaded to accept U.S. jurisdiction to deflect blame from China, and where that is the case Washington can seek buy-in and move forward with restrictions. But many understandably balk at the perceived loss of sovereignty that comes with U.S. control over their firms. Countries such as Japan and the Netherlands are also sensitive to U.S. actions that could harm companies that play an outsize role in their economies and that they are wary of alienating. And with an under-resourced enforcement team, the Department of Commerce cannot truly compel foreign companies to comply, especially if their governments direct them to ignore U.S. diktats.

The full diplomatic costs of extraterritorial action are hard to predict. In addition to choosing not to comply, countries could decide to retaliate, roll back existing controls, or reduce cooperation with the United States on other issues, including those outside the technology domain. Whether countries would risk provoking Trump with an aggressive response is an open question—and likely depends on how much leverage the United States has, both diplomatically and technologically, and for how long.

What is clear, however, is that this leverage is unlikely to last forever. In the long run, foreign companies may find ways to reduce or eliminate their reliance on the United States, which means that tools like the foreign direct product rule could eventually lose their bite. The United States may therefore wish to exhaust diplomatic options before resorting to unilateral action. Unfortunately, if Trump goes through with even a fraction of the global tariffs he announced in early April, it will likely decrease the administration’s leverage to extract concessions on technology controls and could undermine ongoing cooperation. In the wake of the announcement, for example, ASML’s shares dropped to their lowest level in more than a year, a development that is unlikely to make the company or the Dutch government sympathetic to calls for further restrictions. The Trump administration’s more confrontational approach to traditional allies, particularly those in Europe, will undoubtedly color attempts at export control diplomacy, and some European states may be reluctant to concede too much, given the risks of domestic political blowback.

Still, it is worth trying to find common ground, and sometimes the United States will need to make the first move to apply sufficient pressure on partners to “level up” their own controls. Allies, meanwhile, can lower the perceived costs of diplomacy by signaling their willingness to work fast to close gaps in current controls. The ideal terms of such an offer may change depending on the circumstances but could include commitments to regularly blacklist Chinese manufacturing facilities, restrict more tools, ban onsite maintenance activities, and share intelligence on equipment locations and production capacity in China.

Even if Washington ultimately decides to expand its use of the foreign direct product rule, there will be long-term value in continuing to engage in some form of export control diplomacy: doing the long, arduous, sometimes frustrating, but strategically rewarding work of persuading countries that it is in the collective interest of the United States and its allies to act together to maintain a technological lead over China.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Nikita Lalwani · April 15, 2025

23. The USAID Freeze: A View From Sri Lanka and the Global South

The INDOPACOM Commander's job is that much harder without USAID.

Excerpts:

More than anything, these developments call into question the United States’ claim of being a reliable partner in the region, seen as an indispensable plank in Washington’s Indo-Pacific policy. How the Trump administration can balance its aggressive foreign policy posturing with the need to project a positive image of itself across the Global South remains to be seen.

The recent arrival of the commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Sri Lanka, with the aim of strengthening security partnerships between the two countries, shows that the U.S. military-security establishment is still very much focused on the region. The question can be asked as to whether the withdrawal of foreign aid and assistance initiatives will have an impact on U.S] activities across the Indo-Pacific, particularly in small states like Sri Lanka.

At the same time, the funding freeze has made civil society in countries like Sri Lanka aware of the need to break away from the dependency that U.S. funding institutionalized in the first place. One activist, interviewed by a local newspaper, said that foreign funding tends to be “counterproductive” in “thinking creatively” and “responding to ground realities.”

There is no doubt that the withdrawal of aid has made vulnerable communities who relied on such programs insecure, in a context where nationalist and conservative forces frame such groups as handmaidens of Western agenda. Yet there is also no doubt that, for a long time, even local activists have felt foreign funding benefits a host of intermediaries, resource personnel, and consultants, rather than those for whom such funding is intended.

Things were far from perfect before the freeze. The Trump administration’s claim that USAID entrenched contractors, rather than actual people, is not wholly false. At the same time, as Jake Johnston tweeted, the result of the USAID shutdown will be to direct aid toward political objectives: in effect, to “make political interventionism an even more explicit aim of U.S. foreign assistance.” In regions like South Asia, hardly a stranger to electoral shifts, this is likely to have broad ramifications in the future.

The USAID Freeze: A View From Sri Lanka and the Global South

Donald Trump’s gutting of the American aid agency has adversely impacted humanitarian work in countries like Sri Lanka – while calling into question the reliability of Western foreign aid in the Global South.

https://thediplomat.com/2025/04/the-usaid-freeze-a-view-from-sri-lanka-and-the-global-south/

By Uditha Devapriya and Omar Rajarathnam

April 14, 2025

Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Adam Jones

On January 20, 2025, his first day in office, U.S. President Donald Trump signaled a pivotal turnaround in U.S. foreign policy, paving the way for arguably the most consequential shift since the September 11, 2001, attacks.

In a single stroke, Trump imposed a 90-day freeze on all aid programs. The executive order that imposed the freeze stated that these programs would be reviewed to ensure “programmatic efficiencies” and “consistency with United States foreign policy.”

Trump’s initial order was followed four days later (January 24) by a memo from the State Department ordering officials at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to stop all projects and “new obligations of funding.”

Since then, 83 percent of all programs have been eliminated, while the remaining 17 percent have been taken under the direct purview of the U.S. State Department.

Meanwhile, officials from the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have conducted several spot inspections and raids, which have been criticized as unconstitutional but have continued uninterrupted at USAID and other institutions, including the U.S. Institute for Peace. Many of these institutions and programs have also since been shut down.

While the State Department has clarified that it will approve waivers on humanitarian grounds, only a few programs, including assistance to Israel, have been allowed to continue.

Anatomy of a Shutdown

Washington’s suspension of foreign aid and assistance has been met with mixed reactions, abroad and at home. The Democratic Party, in disarray since Kamala Harris lost the presidential election last November, has opposed the gutting of any foreign assistance.

Critics contend that the president has no power to bypass congressional approval in enforcing such measures and that the agency tasked with those measures, headed by Elon Musk, a man who enjoys federal tax subsidies, is violating the Constitution.

Since Trump’s assumption, DOGE, which is not an officially mandated body, has accessed personnel data, ostensibly to ensure compliance with Trump’s “America First” policy and “curb wasteful spending.”

In a press release after it halted USAID operations, the State Department declared that ensuring conformity with the president’s mandate, and auditing how taxpayer money is being spent abroad, is no longer an option but a moral imperative.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that in the future, aid programs should be able to address three questions: “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?”

On February 3, Rubio was appointed as acting administrator at USAID. Around that time, officials confirmed the agency would be merged with the State Department – a move critics say will undermine its independence.

Samantha Power, the head of USAID under Joe Biden, has been openly critical of these developments. In a spate of interviews, she argued that USAID operations have saved countless lives in the developing world. In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, she wrote that its closure would be “a win for autocrats everywhere.”

The USAID Withdrawal in South Asia

Despite the State Department’s clarification, the suspension has impacted aid operations in the most vulnerable regions, including South Asia. In Nepal, projects to do with disease surveillance, malnutrition, and other critical health issues have stopped. According to one report, the suspension in Nepal could affect the operation of U.N. agencies that were financing these projects.

Pakistan and Bangladesh are reeling from multiple crises; USAID held a significant presence in both countries. Though not as badly affected, India’s social sector has also unraveled. Sri Lanka and Maldives, reliant on USAID assistance, are bracing for similar impacts.

It’s not just civil society and the development sector that have been left in the dark. In Sri Lanka, parliamentary committees have relied on technical expertise from USAID.

In a recent interview, opposition parliamentarian Harsha de Silva, who chairs the country’s Committee on Public Finance, admitted that while it was the government’s responsibility to ensure “we have high quality analysts,” they have depended on foreign assistance.

Whether the government can resolve this is left to be seen. While Cabinet Spokesperson Nalinda Jayatissa said the Sri Lankan government would continue USAID projects, if necessary with alternative funding, how such funds will be secured has not been mapped out.

In certain cases, humanitarian waivers have come into play. U.S. funding for certain projects, including a $121 million initiative for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, has been allowed. On the other hand, it is unclear how these programs will run without proper personnel to oversee them.

For the Trump administration, the USAID shutdown is part of a broader effort to align foreign aid with U.S. foreign policy and national interests. Supporters of the move claim that the organization has been funneling taxpayer money to “woke” causes, including Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), gender, and climate resilience.

In one of many such “disclosures,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Must accused USAID of having disbursed funds for, among other things, “the expansion of atheism in Nepal” through the State Department.

The Heritage Foundation-authored Project 2025, which some see as the basis for Trump’s agenda, devoted a chapter to USAID, pointing out that it was overhauled during the first Trump presidency but that under Biden it reverted to the old model of making “scores of poor countries underdeveloped and dependent on aid.”

Many of these allegations have been echoed by nationalist-populist politicians in the Global South, including in Sri Lanka, as well as left-wing critics of U.S. and Western aid.

Opponents of Trump’s move, on the other hand, contend that by gutting USAID, the United States stands to lose more than goodwill and influence in the developing world; they argue that it will empower China and Russia, as well as authoritarian leaders around the world.

In the days after the USAID shutdown, statements from Russia and Belarus, and the likes of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, to say nothing of politicians in countries like Sri Lanka, appeared relieved and exultant at the gutting.

On X, both Elon Musk and Trump tweeted details about projects that USAID supported, including one in Sri Lanka to educate journalists on “gender pronouns.”

Many of these disclosures have since been shown to be false or misleading, including by local media. Still, that has not stopped politicians from recycling claims critical of such organizations. This has been true in Sri Lanka, where politicians have frequently linked foreign assistance with “regime change,” and in Bangladesh, where, according to one State Department official, USAID was involved with political changes last year – though Trump himself has since denied such claims.

The situation has become particularly complex in Myanmar, where in the aftermath of the recent earthquake employees from USAID were dispatched for humanitarian work, only to be informed of their dismissal and termination while going about their work.

Fueling Nationalist Narratives in Sri Lanka

In the days following the initial USAID stop order, Wimal Weerawansa, a Sri Lankan (Sinhala) nationalist ex-MP, tweeted his support for Trump’s decision. In his book “Nine: The Hidden Story,” published in 2023, Weerawansa accused a host of actors, including an ambassador, of having helped with then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s removal from power in 2022. Weerawansa went as far as to accuse USAID of conspiring to reduce the country’s population. He has since regularly been retweeting right-wing figureheads on Twitter, including Elon Musk himself.

Namal Rajapaksa, Gotabaya’s nephew and former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s son, soon joined these harangues, penning a long tweet against USAID and calling for a probe into local NGOs. According to a Sri Lankan journalist, however, these parliamentarians made use of USAID funding for government projects when they were in power.

To be fair, of course, USAID has not entirely been free from controversy. When then-President John F. Kennedy initiated it through an executive order in 1961, Washington was engaged in a battle of propaganda with the Soviet Union.

USAID was one of several outfits, including the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, that aimed on the one hand at projecting to other countries, mainly postcolonial societies in Latin and Central America, Africa, and Asia, a positive, benevolent image of the United States, and on the other ensuring economic and political stability in states that seemed vulnerable to communism.

No doubt USAID, like all foreign government funding, has been hard to extract from the quagmire of geopolitics. During the Cold War, such institutions helped achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives, particularly in regions like Latin America.

However, the Trump administration’s argument is that while billions of dollars have been spent on spreading “American values,” this has not helped project American power. “It was always about promoting an agenda,” Rathindra Kuruwita, a Sri Lankan international relations analyst, said. “Trump has made the geopolitical underside of U.S. aid more transparent.”

While the politics and geopolitics of USAID remain debated, the humanitarian fallout from its shutdown continues. In regions like South Asia, development sector organizations that were working with marginalized communities, including sexual minorities, relied on USAID funding.

Because of the shutdown, they have all been forced to lay off staff, or worse, wrap up operations altogether. In a newspaper interview, a Sri Lankan transgender activist stated that, given Trump’s policies, they did not expect a waiver after the 90-day period.

It goes without saying that alternative funding for such organizations will be hard to come by. As a Sri Lankan analyst observed, “this shows how dangerous it was to become complacent about U.S. government funding and to not look into other sources.”

In fact, such funding is increasingly being seen as a two-edged sword. On the one hand, in countries like Sri Lanka, U.S. government involvement in advocacy for gender rights, climate resilience, and democratic governance has been criticized as an intrusion on sovereignty or an attempt at undermining “national culture.”

On the other, in the United States, such funding has been viewed as inimical to U.S. interests. On both counts, activism on gender, minority, and climate issues will suffer; as one activist noted, “smaller agencies that were not able to diversify their funding will take the bigger hit.”

An Inside Perspective

Since Trump’s executive order and subsequent cancellation, USAID employees have faced a dilemma over whether to obey instructions and halt projects or not.

While some in the agency have opposed the shutdown, they have so far been powerless to stop it. USAID employees in the United States and outside have, despite the pressure on them, voiced concerns about what they view as a capitulation by the U.S. to interest groups and lobbies.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a USAID employee who was based in Sri Lanka questioned the rationale for Trump’s orders. While Musk has supported the gutting as a means of promoting transparency on government spending, the employee said that “in fact, the data on USAID funding was available online, including on the Congressional Research Services website.”

However, the employee said that the Trump administration has “developed and perfected a robust and successful communications ecosystem which has enabled disinformation on USAID to be amplified, especially on Elon Musk’s platforms.” Democrats, who are currently in opposition, lack an effective communications strategy to counter this.

The USAID employee also questioned the motives behind these decisions, speculating whether they were part of a bigger effort by Musk to preempt investigations into his companies, “including SpaceX and Starlink,” which have long benefited from government subsidies.

Moreover, by terminating contracts without thinking of replacements, “the government is making the work of the U.S. State Department even harder,” the employee said, contradicting its own objective of making government leaner and more efficient.

“On the one hand, Trump is claiming credit for revealing information on USAID grants, which was already online before,” the employee argued. “On the other, he and Musk are demonizing employees for wasting funds in a context where federal workers pay taxes and billionaires find so many ways of avoiding it.”

All these arguments are being watched closely in developing countries, including Sri Lanka. “Today, the view is that the United States has damaged its international credibility. Even if USAID resumes tomorrow, how can we assure our partners in the Global South we will not break their trust again?” the USAID employee said. This can impact the governments of poor countries.

“In Sri Lanka, nationalist politicians can use Trump’s policies to discredit the current government.” This is becoming more likely. Already, social media posts and articles linking USAID funding to important officials, including the prime minister herself, are making the rounds.

Finally, the official criticized the view that USAID does not serve American interests, pointing out that USAID agriculture projects have benefited American farmers, and that the suspensions will adversely affect these stakeholders.

Perhaps the most important takeaway from these developments is the extent to which the domestic consensus on U.S. foreign aid has ruptured. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have their international aid organizations. The International Republican Institution (IRI), affiliated with the Republican Party, has expanded its presence across countries like Bangladesh.

Yet while the Democratic Party-affiliated National Democratic Institute is still online, the IRI website has been disabled – supposedly to “mitigate expenses.” In the meantime, the National Endowment for Democracy, created during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, has come under attack by Musk for being a “scam.”

Filling the Gap

The question remains as to who will step forward to fill the gap left behind by these policy turnarounds. Western liberal commentators argue that China and Russia will take up the mantle, weakening the United States’ soft power in the Global South. Some even suggest that this will make the U.S. weaker. However, such a scenario remains unlikely for at least two reasons.

First, as an economic and business analyst in Sri Lanka noted, “China may not want to devote much of their budget to aid when confronted with domestic economic challenges.”

While China’s overseas aid has increased since 2009 – reaching, according to one source, more than $3 billion last year – this has been a fraction of what the U.S. has been able to muster, which according to PEW, came to more than $70 billion in 2023. Meanwhile, the EU allocated $1.9 billion for its humanitarian budget this year, against the backdrop of “decreased cooperation funding.”

Second, despite being a key development partner in the Global South, China holds different positions on issues like human rights, media freedom, and good governance, which have long been seen as the mainstay of Western government funding.

The flurry of responses by Sri Lankan journalists to reports of a media agreement between Sri Lanka and China, along with one media organization’s critique of Beijing’s attitude to journalists, indicates that media advocacy groups in such countries tend to prefer U.S. aid to agreements with other countries. Given the blowback against USAID’s activities in the Sri Lankan media landscape, however, it remains debatable whether this will continue.

Some commentators argue that China has more potential in meeting the shortfall in U.N. organizations like the World Health Organization, which have a significant presence in South Asia and Africa. Doing so would certainly be in China’s interest, though it could reinforce accusations that such organizations have become a part of Beijing’s agenda.

On the other hand, both India’s and China’s quick response to the Myanmar earthquake, coupled with Rubio’s recent declaration that the U.S. can no longer “bear the burden of providing the majority of global humanitarian aid,” means that other countries will have to reassess their funding commitments. It is significant that Rubio specifically mentioned China and India as countries that should pitch in to do humanitarian work.

Europe can be pointed out as another possible alternative, even if, given the political compulsions there, it is doubtful whether they will be able to match the United States’ aid spending capacity. If anything, it is likely that Europe will offset increased defense expenditures by cuts to foreign aid: the United Kingdom, for instance, will slash foreign aid to 0.3 percent of Gross National Income from 2027, a move academics and policymakers have criticized.

Yet even as Europe appears to be bracing for foreign aid cuts, there are signs that some countries are moving in to fill the gaps left behind by the USAID suspensions. Recently, for instance, the Sri Lanka Police launched a new training program on LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion. The program, the first-ever in the history of the Sri Lanka Police, commenced in the presence and under the patronage of the Dutch ambassador in Colombo.

Others point out that countries within the Global South themselves can, as one journalist put it, “build an organic civil society more responsive to the needs of our societies.”

The Future: A Question Mark?

All this underlines a fundamental though uncomfortable truth for civil society organizations, which is that competition for funding will now be more intense than before. This is especially true of South Asia, where funding shortfalls were a problem even before the USAID freeze, and it will impact even those CSOs that had a diverse donor portfolio.

More than anything, these developments call into question the United States’ claim of being a reliable partner in the region, seen as an indispensable plank in Washington’s Indo-Pacific policy. How the Trump administration can balance its aggressive foreign policy posturing with the need to project a positive image of itself across the Global South remains to be seen.

The recent arrival of the commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Sri Lanka, with the aim of strengthening security partnerships between the two countries, shows that the U.S. military-security establishment is still very much focused on the region. The question can be asked as to whether the withdrawal of foreign aid and assistance initiatives will have an impact on U.S] activities across the Indo-Pacific, particularly in small states like Sri Lanka.

At the same time, the funding freeze has made civil society in countries like Sri Lanka aware of the need to break away from the dependency that U.S. funding institutionalized in the first place. One activist, interviewed by a local newspaper, said that foreign funding tends to be “counterproductive” in “thinking creatively” and “responding to ground realities.”

There is no doubt that the withdrawal of aid has made vulnerable communities who relied on such programs insecure, in a context where nationalist and conservative forces frame such groups as handmaidens of Western agenda. Yet there is also no doubt that, for a long time, even local activists have felt foreign funding benefits a host of intermediaries, resource personnel, and consultants, rather than those for whom such funding is intended.

Things were far from perfect before the freeze. The Trump administration’s claim that USAID entrenched contractors, rather than actual people, is not wholly false. At the same time, as Jake Johnston tweeted, the result of the USAID shutdown will be to direct aid toward political objectives: in effect, to “make political interventionism an even more explicit aim of U.S. foreign assistance.” In regions like South Asia, hardly a stranger to electoral shifts, this is likely to have broad ramifications in the future.

Authors

Guest Author

Uditha Devapriya

Uditha Devapriya is a researcher and writer from Sri Lanka who currently works as the chief analyst of International Relations at Factum, an Asia-Pacific focused think-tank based in Colombo.

Guest Author

Omar Rajarathnam

Omar Rajarathnam is a co-founder at Factum, and is a communications professional specializing in defense and public diplomacy outreach. He served as the head of communications at the U.S. Embassy in Colombo.

24. Trump’s Tariffs Will Ensure America Can Win the Next War

I have seen this theory advanced on social media often lately. It is about reshoring manufacturing to improve our defense instructional base so we can fight a sustained war with China (and also a connected theory is that we expect Russia to ally with us in a fight against China).

Trump’s Tariffs Will Ensure America Can Win the Next War

April 14, 2025

By: Alexander B. Gray

Trump’s tariff agenda is not simply a policy preference; it is essential for the security and safety of the United States in the decades to come.

The National Interest

Topic: Security

Region: Americas

April 14, 2025

Trump’s tariff agenda is not simply a policy preference; it is essential for the security and safety of the United States in the decades to come.

In announcing the recent “Liberation Day” tariffs, the Trump administration has offered several explanations for returning the United States to its highest cumulative tariff rates since the first decade of the twentieth century. The president, in imposing a 10 percent universal tariff and additional reciprocal tariffs on numerous countries, spoke to the fundamental American desire for fairness. The universal tariffs, now paused, have already successfully driven dozens of countries to the negotiating table, seeking to make a fair deal with the United States. The restoration of a vibrant manufacturing sector, protected by sound trade policies, will have salutary socioeconomic effects on communities across the United States.

These arguments are valid and important, and Americans of all political persuasions have a vested interest in the success of President Donald Trump’s trade agenda. Yet the most critical argument in favor of the Trump tariffs is one of national security: without a tariff policy that fundamentally reorients manufacturing capacity to the United States, the American military will be unable to sustain a protracted conflict with its greatest likely adversary, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Trump’s tariff agenda is not simply a policy preference; it is essential for the security and safety of the United States in the decades to come.

The numbers tell a stark story. From 1997 to 2024, the United States lost approximately 5 million manufacturing jobs, a decline of roughly 30 percent in employment in this sector. This hollowing out of America’s industrial capacity has directly undermined our defense industrial base. In the steel industry, vital for everything from ships to tanks, domestic capacity utilization dropped to 75.3 percent in 2023, down from a brief high of 80 percent in 2021. Aluminum, another key material, saw its capacity utilization fall from 61 percent in 2019 to 55 percent in 2023. These declines reflect a broader trend; the United States has become increasingly reliant on foreign supply chains, leaving it vulnerable to geopolitical shocks and adversaries who control critical inputs.

The Ukraine war has exposed these weaknesses with brutal clarity. Since 2022, the United States has provided $182 billion in aid to Ukraine, including artillery shells, missiles, and advanced systems like the Patriot air defense. This effort has strained our defense industrial base to the breaking point. Production lines for 155mm artillery shells, for instance, have struggled to keep pace, with the U.S. Army ramping up output from 14,000 shells per month in 2022 to a projected 100,000 by late 2025, a number that is still insufficient to meet Ukraine’s needs while replenishing our own stocks. The Pentagon has admitted that replenishing depleted inventories could take years, a luxury we won’t have in a larger conflict.

Now consider the situation in Taiwan. The island is the linchpin of the U.S. Indo-Pacific first island chain strategy and relies heavily on American weapons to deter a CCP invasion. In 2024 alone, Taiwan purchased $19 billion in U.S. arms, including F-16 jets and HIMARS rocket systems. Yet, the same industrial base supporting Ukraine is tasked with fulfilling these orders. Delays are already piling up. Taiwan’s F-16 deliveries, for example, have been pushed back due to production bottlenecks. If the United States can’t simultaneously arm Ukraine and Taiwan, what happens when the CCP moves on Taipei? A real conflict with China would dwarf current demands, requiring not just munitions but ships, submarines, and advanced electronics, all of which are dependent on a robust manufacturing base that we no longer possess.

The USS Connecticut offers a chilling case study. In October 2021, this attack submarine struck an undersea mountain in the South China Sea, sidelining one of our most advanced naval assets. Repairs, initially estimated at eighteen months, have stretched into 2026 due to shortages of skilled labor and specialized components, many of which rely on foreign suppliers. The submarine was forced to sail, on the surface, across the Pacific to the only remaining ship repair yard capable of such work. In a war with China, where naval supremacy in the Pacific would be decisive, losing submarines, a key U.S. maritime advantage, to long repair lines could tip the balance. Multiply this across a fleet stretched thin, and the stakes become existential.

Trump’s tariff negotiations can reverse this decline by bringing manufacturing back to U.S. soil. The goal is to incentivize domestic production and reduce reliance on foreign inputs that could be cut off in a crisis. Critics argue this will raise costs, and perhaps they are right in the short term. But the long-term payoff of restoring our defense industrial base capacity is worth every penny. These are costs that will be offset by lives saved in a conflict.

Deterring China requires more than rhetoric; it demands the hard power of a revitalized defense industrial base. The CCP’s military buildup relies on a manufacturing juggernaut we’ve helped fuel through decades of offshoring. Trump’s tariffs, by reshoring production, aim to claw back that advantage. The alternative of facing a CCP-led conflict with a depleted industrial base is unthinkable. The Ukraine war and Taiwan’s needs are clear a warning. Tariffs are the necessary response to ensure America is ready to deter our adversaries and defend our interests.

About the Author: Alexander B. Gray

Alexander B. Gray, a Senior Fellow in National Security Affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council, served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff of the White House National Security Council, 2019-21.

Image: DVIDS.

The National Interest

25. Going, Going . . .? The US Base Network in Europe

Don't give up the high ground. Once you give it it is difficult to retake it.

Going, Going . . .? The US Base Network in Europe

The US military has invested in dozens of bases across the continent since the end of World War II, representing an intricate system supporting critical national security needs.

By Mila Tanghe

April 14, 2025

cepa.org · by Mila Tanghe · April 14, 2025

The United States operates a vast network of military installations across Europe, serving as a crucial foundation for NATO operations, regional deterrence, and global power projection. This is now under review by the US administration.

On April 8, General Christopher Cavoli, Commander of US European Command (EUCOM), told a Congressional committee that Europe is “the first line of defense of our homeland.”

Retired US commanding officers, including fellows at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), spelled out the arguments in a series of interviews. They said that European bases are about much more than just Europe and that such military facilities are hard to recover once they’re lost.

It is not yet clear what the Pentagon plans, and the adjustments could range from moderate to extensive. At the furthest end of possible options, the officers said the effects would be very serious. Admiral (Ret.) James Foggo said enemies would see base closures and troop withdrawals as signposting a downgrading of the US from global to regional power status; Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Ben Hodges said Russia would judge the US can’t protect Europe, or no longer cares; Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Stephen Twitty said it would mean a substantial loss of strategic depth and indicate the US is walking away from peace and security on the continent; and Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Skip Davis said any major pull-out would make US power projection slower, costlier, and less effective.

From tracking Russian submarines in the Atlantic to enabling rapid response capability in the Middle East and Africa to providing early warning of ballistic missile strikes to electronic eavesdropping and intelligence operations, US forces in Europe support missions that extend well beyond the continent.

The Pentagon says it’s currently taking “a hard look” at where forces are stationed. On April 9, it was announced that the US would cut costs by moving most of its personnel from Jasionka in southeastern Poland, the main logistics base for arms shipments to Ukraine. Meanwhile, NBC News reported on April 8 that up to 10,000 US troops would be withdrawn from Poland and Romania.

As of early 2025, there were roughly 84,000 US service members across the United States European Command (EUCOM) area of responsibility, including troops deployed after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

This included what are termed 31 persistent bases and 18 other military sites to which the Department of Defense (DoD) has access in Europe, encompassing air bases, naval stations, army garrisons, missile defense systems, and surveillance hubs.

Air Bases

Ramstein Air Base (Germany)

Ramstein is the primary US Air Force base in Europe and the headquarters for US Air Forces in Europe–Air Forces Africa (USAFE-AFAFRICA). It is a major transportation hub, supporting US military operations across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The base is a key control center for drone operations worldwide, providing drone data and communications links, a role that has drawn controversy and legal challenges regarding its use in the War on Terror.

Ramstein hosts over 16,200 US military personnel, civilians, and contractors and is part of the Kaiserslautern Military Community, the largest American military population overseas, totaling 56,000 personnel. Established in 1953, it is a permanent US military installation in Germany.

Royal Air Force (RAF) Lakenheath (United Kingdom)

RAF Lakenheath is a significant US Air Force base in the UK and home to the 48th Fighter Wing, tasked with providing combat airpower worldwide. It has played a key role in combat operations in the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and was a launchpad for the 1986 bombing of Libya.

The base hosts approximately 5,177 active-duty US military personnel and 2,700 British and US civilians, with additional units at RAF Feltwell. Owned by the UK Ministry of Defense, it has been operated by the United States Air Force since 1948.

Royal Air Force (RAF) Mildenhall (United Kingdom)

RAF Mildenhall, together with its sister base at Lakenheath, hosts the largest United States Air Force presence in the United Kingdom. It is home to the 100th Air Refueling Wing, the only permanent US air refueling wing in the European theater. From this hub, US forces conduct missions across Europe, the Arctic, Africa, and the Black Sea. Because of its strategic location and rapid deployment capabilities, the base has contributed to major campaigns, including the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War.

The base hosts approximately 3,000 active-duty military members. Owned by the UK Ministry of Defense, it has been operated by the United States Air Force since 1959.

Aviano Air Base (Italy)

Aviano Air Base supports the only US fighter wing south of the Alps and is a key NATO air power hub in southern Europe. It is home to the 31st Fighter Wing, supporting US air combat missions, including offensive, defensive, surveillance, and combat search and rescue operations. In 2024, a new Army Power Projection Facility was added to enable the rapid deployment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade to contingency missions across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

Aviano has supported major US operations, including Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Odyssey Dawn, the US contribution to the 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya.

The base hosts approximately 10,000 individuals, including US military personnel, Department of Defense civilians, local national employees, and dependents. It is a permanent US installation, operating under a bilateral agreement with Italy since 1954.

Incirlik Air Base (Turkey)

Incirlik Air Base is critical for US military operations, particularly in the Middle East, with aviation facilities and rotational aerial refueling capabilities. It has played a crucial role in US and coalition military campaigns, serving as the launch point for combat missions over Northern Iraq during the First Gulf War and later supporting US-led operations in Afghanistan under Operation Enduring Freedom. It has also been heavily used in counterterrorism missions, including operations against ISIS, and enables a rapid US military response in the region.

The base hosts approximately 1,465 US military personnel and 365 civilian employees, totaling around 1,830 US-affiliated personnel. However, Incirlik is not a permanent US base, it remains Turkish-owned and operated with US non-NATO operations dependent on Turkish government approval. The US has maintained a presence there since the 1950s.

Mihael Kogălniceanu Air Base (Romania)

Mihael Kogălniceanu Air Base is a major and fast-growing hub for US and NATO forces, supporting deployments to the Black Sea, Middle East, and Africa. It has been a staging area for US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The base currently hosts over 1,800 US personnel and is undergoing significant expansion. Work began last year and is slated to cost $2.7bn, with the base reportedly becoming NATO’s biggest European facility by 2030, with the capacity to host 10,000 soldiers and civilians.

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Naval Installations

Naval Support Activity (NSA) Naples (Italy)

NSA Naples hosts US Naval Forces Europe and Africa (NAVEUR-NAVAF) headquarters and the US Sixth Fleet, allowing for coordination of US naval operations across Europe, Africa, and the Atlantic Ocean.

The base hosts more than 50 commands and is staffed by approximately 8,500 personnel. It is a permanent US military installation, operating under a long-standing agreement with Italy, and a key hub for maritime security and power projection in the region.

Naval Air Station (NAS) Sigonella (Italy)

Often hailed as “The Hub of the Med”, NAS Sigonella is a significant logistics and operational facility for US forces in the Mediterranean, particularly for the Sixth Fleet. The facility supports intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The base also provides rapid response capabilities and logistical support for US operations across three continents.

It hosts a US-affiliated population of approximately 4,555 personnel, including 2,173 active-duty service members. Established in 1959, NAS Sigonella is a permanent US military installation, operating under a long-standing agreement with the Italian government.

Naval Station Rota (Spain)

Naval Station Rota is a major logistics hub for US and NATO forces, providing cargo, fuel, and support to naval vessels and military units transiting the region. It hosts four US destroyers equipped with Aegis Baseline 9 Ballistic Missile Defense systems, forming a key component of EUCOM’s regional missile defense strategies.

It houses a US-affiliated community of approximately 6,450 personnel, including active-duty service members, families, US civilian employees, and retired military personnel. Owned by the Spanish Ministry of Defense, the US military has continuously used the base since its construction in 1953.

Naval Support Activity (NSA) Souda Bay (Greece)

Located at the crossroads of US European Command (EUCOM), Africa Command (AFRICOM), and Central Command (CENTCOM), NSA Souda Bay in Crete is home to the only deep-water pier in the Mediterranean capable of accommodating US Navy nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, making it a key logistics and refueling site.

In addition to its naval operations, Souda Bay supports US Air Force and Navy reconnaissance aircraft, contributing to global intelligence-gathering and surveillance missions.

The base hosts approximately 1,000 personnel, including active-duty service members, US civilian employees, contractors, and local national staff. NSA Souda Bay is a permanent US naval support installation in Greece, operating under a long-term bilateral agreement.

Land Installations

United States Army Garrison (USAG) Vicenza (Italy)

USAG Vicenza is home to the headquarters of the US Army Garrison Italy. It hosts the 173rd Airborne Brigade combat team that serves as a crisis-response force for European, African, and Middle Eastern locations.

As of 2012, the facility had over 11,000 active-duty, civilian personnel, and family members. The military complex has been a permanent US Army facility since 1952.

United States Army Garrison (USAG) Stuttgart (Germany)

USAG Stuttgart is a strategic command hub for US military operations across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The garrison hosts several key headquarters, including the US European Command (USEUCOM), US Marine Corps Forces Europe and Africa (MARFOREUR/AF), and the Special Operations Command Europe (SOCEUR). As a vital command and control center, it supports US military coordination across 51 countries.

The Stuttgart military community includes more than 25,000 military personnel, civilians, and family members. It is a permanent military installation.

Missile Defense and Space Surveillance

Naval Support Facility (NSF) Redzikowo (Poland)

The first US installation in Poland, NSF Redzikowo, is home to an Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense System. The base’s mission is part of the European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA), established in 2009 to counter potential ballistic missile threats from the Middle East, particularly Iran.

The facility hosts approximately 355 US service members and civilian personnel. Operational since 2024, the base is a permanent US military installation, operated under a bilateral agreement between the US and Poland.

Naval Support Facility (NSF) Deveselu (Romania)

Operational since 2016, NSF Deveselu is home to an Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense System.

The base comprises approximately 200 personnel, and is a permanent US military installation, operating under the Ballistic Missile Defense Agreement between the US and Romania.

Royal Air Force (RAF) Fylingdales (United Kingdom)

RAF Fylingdales is a critical component of the US-UK Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, tasked with monitoring space activities and targeting missile interceptors if needed.

The base hosts approximately 320 personnel, including military staff, Ministry of Defence Police, civil servants, and contractors. While under the authority of UK Space Command, RAF Fylingdales also operates as part of Space Delta 4, a US Space Force unit responsible for strategic and theater missile warning.

Royal Air Force (RAF) Menwith Hill (United Kingdom)

RAF Menwith Hill is a key intelligence and satellite communications facility, jointly operated by the US and the UK. It is controlled by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and is the largest overseas intelligence-gathering site outside the US. The base undertakes surveillance and intelligence gathering for drones and other military operations. It also supports the US Ballistic Missile Defense program as a downlink station for space-based components. Menwith Hill is a permanent US military and intelligence installation.

Pituffik Space Base (Greenland)

The northernmost overseas US base, the Pituffik Space Base, is a critical component of the US’s missile warning and space surveillance network, providing early detection of ballistic missile launches. It is operated by the 821st Space Base Group and is also home to the world’s northernmost deepwater seaport.

The facility hosts about 150 US Air Force and Space Force personnel. Formerly known as Thule Air Base, it is a permanent US military installation and has been in continuous operation since its construction in 1951, following a defense agreement between Denmark and the United States.

Medical

Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (Germany)

The Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC) is the largest overseas American medical facility, serving more than 205,000 people throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. It is the primary medical evacuation center for wounded US and coalition troops.

The center operates alongside six additional clinics in Germany, Italy, and Belgium, jointly staffed by more than 2,000 staff. It is a permanent US military medical installation.

Mila Tanghe attended Columbia University and is currently an Intern with the Editorial team at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.

US Bases in Europe

Military experts explain why US bases in Europe matter.

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Europe's Edge

CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America.

cepa.org · by Mila Tanghe · April 14, 2025

26. Erik Prince: I'm not so worried about China militarily

Erik Prince: I'm not so worried about China militarily - Asia Times

This is the second in a three-part interview series with Blackwater founder Erik Prince on the future dynamics of warfare

asiatimes.com · by Erik Prince · April 11, 2025

The first installment featured critical lessons of the Ukraine war. The second focuses on possible kinetic conflict between the US and China, over Taiwan as many expect, and how US expeditionary forces in the North- and West Pacific might fare against a rapidly arming China.

“I’m not so worried about China militarily,” says Erik Prince. But he warns against blundering into “a dumb, unnecessary war over Taiwan” with a US Navy that’s not ready to fight. What’s required is a leaner, more lethal US military equipped by a reformed and innovative US industrial base.

Excerpts from a Prince speech at Hillsdale College, his alma mater, and an interview with Hillsdale President Larry Arnn follow:

China has an enormous industrial base – 40 to 50 times, by some estimates 200 times, the shipbuilding rate that we have; obviously in drones [production] and components, in a lot of those things that hollowed out the Midwest. Some misguided trade efforts over the last 30 years have moved all that manufacturing to China, and that has definitely accrued to their [China’s] advantage.

But I’m not so worried about China militarily, I am worried if we blunder into a dumb, unnecessary war in Taiwan. The US Navy is not ready to fight tonight. They are plagued by bad leadership, a lot of misguided training policies, and we spent a lot of money and there’s not nearly the readiness that there should be.

Four and a half years ago, we lost the 40,000-ton amphibious assault ship, the Bonhomme Richard. A fire started while it was on pier side, in repair, at her home base in San Diego. It took the Navy and took the crew an hour and a half to get first water on that fire, on an active warship. The ship burned up at the dock because of incompetence of the crew and the responding fire services.

That’s the kind of nonsense, that’s a billion, billion-and-a-half-dollar write-off. And that’s a big ship, bigger than any aircraft carrier we used in World War II, for example.

Now, if the PLA [China’s People’s Liberation Army] would attack Taiwan, the way they would do it is they’d do a blockade, they’d surround it; they’ve been exercising that consistently, with no pushback from the US at all, not even any unconventional means to deter them.

And if they do that, so what is the Navy going to do? They’re going to respond with aircraft carriers. And they’d run a $12 billion aircraft carrier within range of thousands of precision missiles that the Chinese can fire, and that’s going to result in a very bad image of a US Navy aircraft carrier, with 5,000 of our citizens on board, smoking or worse.

And that ties directly into the geopolitical consequences that we would face then. Because remember the British Empire, after they defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar [in] 1804, ruled the waves for the next century and then they got spanked at the Battle of Jutland during World War I by the Imperial German Navy, just off the coast of Denmark.

And that was the beginning of the end of the British Empire. They lost territory, they lost the pound as a dominant currency, and you would see an unwind in that competition of governance.

Is it our system of Western capitalism, freedom? Look, democracy in a republic is a mess. It’s messy, it’s imperfect. It does not have the crispness of a dictatorship, of course. But I would take messy, and innovation, and bottoms-up approach to problem-solving versus top-down dictatorship any day.

But we cannot let ourselves blunder into the stupid things like that because history shows, that can be the beginning of the end.

So, can Taiwan be defended at all?

I think the best way to deter conflict over Taiwan is for them to build a home guard because – in an era of precision weapons where the Chinese, the PLA, can have pre-registered dozens of weapons at every known valuable location that Taiwan might have, meaning anti-aircraft, submarine bases, command bunkers – all those known locations are going to get erased in the opening moments of a conflict.

But what the PLA can’t compute for is national will. If you think about the American colonists in 1775, only 3% of them actually took up arms against, at that point, the most powerful military in the world, and they won. Because there was a will, they knew the terrain, they could figure out the basic means to defend themselves and they ended up buying or smuggling in arms from abroad to get their job done.

In the case of Taiwan, if you take 3% of the Taiwanese population, I think that’s like 720,000 people. That’s a lot. Their military is largely very weak. Let’s say a lot of soy boys, not all but enough.

But if you have people that can step out of their homes and gather weapons from a fire station, police station, civil defense shelter, the complexity and difficulty of trying to occupy a land where there’s armed people that know what they’re doing – that have maybe four to six weeks of partisan training – makes conquering the island exceedingly difficult because you have urban terrain and you also have massive jungle that they can hide out and operate in.

But what about a larger military conflict in the Northwest and West Pacific region, including multiple Asian mainland-based theaters of operation? We are not ready for that.

What really helped America, what really helped the allies win World War II was American industry. If you haven’t read the book, Freedom’s Forge, I highly encourage you to do it. A lot of you are from the Midwest, I’m from the Midwest, from an automotive manufacturing family background.

And it makes me really proud to realize all those factories really cranked out and delivered that kind of capability. It made it possible for Marshal Zhukov, of the Soviet Union, to go all the way from Moscow to Berlin with 600,000 vehicles, trucks – to remember, the German army back then was only about half mechanized. We made it possible with tens of thousands of aircraft and hundreds of thousands of vehicles for the Soviets to win.

Our industrial base now is nowhere near what it needs to be right now to be competitive. I think, as we’ve seen, our government manages to spend unlimited amounts of money doing stupid things, especially when it tries to go to war. And we have politicians that completely lose any idea of what something should cost.

And I guess maybe that’s why Dr. Arnn wanted me back here, because I’m at least having come here as an Austrian economics major. Really, in fact, I remember Dr. Ebeling, who was my professor, and the day right before I graduated, he said, “Mr. Prince, you’ve just come to a school that accepts no federal funding and you’re going to join the largest socialist organization in the world.” I said, “Yes, sir, but it’s the only thing that’s provided, it’s the only part of the military that’s actually specified in the Constitution, “Congress shall raise a Navy.”

After Hillsdale, I rolled into officer candidate school, joined the Navy, spent a few years in the SEAL teams. In the family business it was policy that you don’t come and work in the family business, you have to go do something else first. I really had no interest in it anyway. And so, I was a SEAL, I enjoyed it, was pretty good at it. And then my father died and my wife got cancer, within a few months of each other. So, I got out and to kind of help sort out the family business and that’s what led me to start Blackwater, which was a private military training facility.

You know, as I built a private military contractor, I never really intended to be notorious. I started Blackwater as a way to stay connected to the SEAL teams that I liked. I loved that job. But as I’m laying it out, and I just looked at what does the military do? It recruits, vets, equips, trains, deploys and supports people to do a difficult job in a difficult place. And we understood it, like the Toyota production system, how to manage our costs in a way that big government never was able to do so.

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And of course, the politicians’ constant answer to us was, “You’re doing something inherently governmental.” And I counter that by saying, “I was born in the summer of 1969, Woodstock and Apollo 11. If you said that 50 years later after Apollo 11, that the only way the US government gets to the International Space Station is on a Russian rocket or on a contractor rocket, they would have laughed you out of Johnson Space Center.”

But that convergence of trying to bring some kind of market solutions into a military industrial complex that’s run wild, the amount of spending and waste that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, as you’re seeing now with a DOGE effort, God bless Elon Musk for cutting it down across the board. I hope we have the same opportunity to do something similar to the Pentagon. I have such respect for that guy. He looked at spacecraft and he said, “Look, we have to lower the cost of launch to get it to altitude by a thousand-fold.” And he’s well on his way to doing that.

And as we reach the era of AI, where that technical acceleration is really occurring on the leading and the bleeding edge of battle in theaters like Ukraine, in Israel, where you just saw it in Syria, the required level of innovation and speed is only going to come from the private sector. It’s not going to come from big government labs. It’s probably not even going to come from DARPA. It’s going to come from smart people in America operating from their garages with a dream.

I really hope that the Trump team is able to change procurement to allow for the purchase and innovation that the private sector can do. I don’t really fear – as much as people get super hyperventilated about China with AI – China with this many missiles, all the rest. it still comes down to individual leadership in the field, at the sergeant level, at the junior officer level. We have still the very, very finest of those kinds of soldiers in the world. And I see units and people from all kinds of places as part of my professional life.

We don’t have a monopoly in innovation, but we have a critical mass of it. And a lot of that still resides in the military. And – if the innovation that the private sector can provide, that I know it can provide, and as long as DOD opens just a little bit, opens the tap of money, redirecting from the nonsense, hyper, overpriced programs that they like to spend money on – we can certainly not just catch up but surpass any capability that we have to worry about with China.

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asiatimes.com · by Erik Prince · April 11, 2025

27. Trump Administration Memo Proposes Cutting State Department Funding by Nearly Half

Seems like a deliberate attempt to take down half of the US national security apparatus.

Is a $1 trillion defense budget of hard power really. going to secure us? Can't we spread the wealth a little bit?

Trump Administration Memo Proposes Cutting State Department Funding by Nearly Half

The draft plan is part of a process involving the agency and the White House. It would eliminate almost all funding for international organizations that include the United Nations and NATO.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/trump-state-department-budget-cuts.html

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The memo proposes cutting funding for humanitarian assistance and global health programs by more than 50 percent, despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s pledges that lifesaving assistance would be preserved.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

By Edward Wong and Karoun Demirjian

April 14, 2025

The Trump administration could cut nearly 50 percent of the State Department’s funding next fiscal year, according to an internal memo laying out a downsizing plan being given serious consideration by department leaders, said two U.S. officials. The plan was drawn up as the White House pressures agencies to make significant budget cuts.

The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, proposes eliminating almost all funding for international organizations like the United Nations and NATO, ending the budget for supporting international peacekeeping operations and curtailing all of the department’s educational and cultural exchanges, like the Fulbright Program.

It also proposes cutting funding for humanitarian assistance and global health programs by more than 50 percent despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s pledges that lifesaving assistance would be preserved.

It was not clear if Mr. Rubio had endorsed the cuts outlined in the memo, which was dated April 10. Pete Marocco, who oversaw the gutting of government foreign aid programs before abruptly leaving the department, and Douglas Pitkin, who is in charge of the department’s budget planning, prepared the document. It was also not clear how seriously the proposed cuts would be entertained in Congress, which appropriates federal dollars.

But, according to a U.S. official familiar with the department’s review, it is likely that the White House will send Congress a budget proposal this spring that is substantially similar to what the memo outlines in an effort to press lawmakers to formalize downsizing efforts that are already underway.

Agencies are facing a deadline this week to submit detailed reorganization plans to the White House explaining what cuts they will make to help further shrink the federal government. While many departments have already announced or begun carrying out their planned cuts, the State Department has yet to publicly detail complete plans for downsizing. The memo is part of a process involving the White House budget office and the State Department trading proposals and suggestions.

Reports of steep cuts already had Democrats on Capitol Hill reeling.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement on Monday that the cuts “would leave our country alone and exposed and allow China and Russia to fill the vacuum made vacant by this administration.”

“Why in the world would we cut funding for NATO at a moment when war is raging in Europe and security threats on the continent grow?” she added.

Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, the top Democrat on the appropriations committee, said: “While ultimately Congress controls the purse strings, recent reports about the administration’s plan to gut State Department personnel, U.S. presence overseas and foreign assistance are deeply troubling. These cuts don’t make America safer, they risk our security.”

“I want to hear from Secretary Rubio directly,” he added.

A copy of the budget memo began circulating in Washington in recent days. The Washington Post reported details of the memo earlier on Monday.

The State Department had no immediate comment.

The memo states that the State Department will request a $28.4 billion budget in fiscal year 2026, which begins Oct. 1. That figure is $26 billion less than what was on the books for fiscal year 2025, according to the document.

The administration intends to claw back some funds for the current fiscal year as well, according to the memo. Mr. Marocco and Mr. Pitkin wrote that the Trump administration would seek to reclaim approximately $20 billion in unspent funds from fiscal year 2025 to return to the Treasury.

Among other cuts, the memo proposes keeping a pay and hiring freeze through fiscal 2026, with the exception of any hires needed to take over foreign aid programs inherited from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is being disbanded. Overall, the memo seeks to cut foreign aid spending by more than half of current budget levels for the State Department and U.S.A.I.D.

Though Mr. Rubio promised last month that the State Department would continue administering a number of lifesaving assistance programs, the Trump administration has quietly canceled some of those initiatives in recent weeks.

The only funding for global health programs that the State Department envisions preserving is $2.9 billion for H.I.V. treatments provided through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief; $687 million for interventions for diseases like tuberculosis and malaria; $200 million for global health security; and $800 million for the Global Fund, distributed at a rate of $1 for every $4 other donors provide. The Global Fund is an international organization that finances disease treatment and prevention.

All other programs — including those to tackle neglected tropical diseases, provide vaccines to children in poor countries and preserve maternal and child health — would be cut.

The memo offers fewer details about the cuts to humanitarian aid. It outlines $2.5 billion for a new Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance at the State Department, and $1.5 billion in emergency migration and refugee assistance that President Trump can use “to address humanitarian emergencies.”

The memo also proposes a one-year freeze for a key narcotics control program, rationalizing the suspension of funds by noting that the program has an unspent $1.4 billion on hand that should cover that period.

Additionally, it envisions creating a roughly $2 billion America First Opportunities Fund at the Treasury, which would give the Trump administration latitude to “provide targeted support for economic and development assistance for enduring and emerging Trump administration priorities.”

Stephanie Nolen contributed reporting.

Edward Wong reports on global affairs, U.S. foreign policy and the State Department.

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

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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