Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“For, as Kissinger wrote in A World Restored, “the most fundamental problem of politics… is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness.”[ 29] It is self-righteousness that lies at the heart of the worst tyrannies: the belief that your opponents can be destroyed because they are in your eyes fundamentally illegitimate. This is what the vast anarchy across the whole of Russia finally wrought. Solzhenitsyn was a conservative because he believed in tradition, and therefore in moderation. His Red Wheel warns of a future with all its terrifying technological and ideological innovations. It can never be out of date.”

– Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D. Kaplan

" The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled. "

~Aldous Huxley

“A man on a 1000 mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, today I'm going to cover 25 miles, and then rest up and sleep.”

– Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.

1. Why Richard Armitage was the essential American

2. Be Not Afraid By Stanley McChrystal

3. Students sue Defense Department over book bans in military schools

4. US-funded media like Voice of America must be saved and strengthened

5. Trump Aides Close State Dept. Office on Foreign Disinformation

6. Five Signs That the US and China Will Go to War By James Stavridis

7. A Comparative Analysis of the Impact and Use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) by Terrorist Groups

8. H.R. McMaster receives accidental call from President Trump

9. Third top Pentagon aide Collin Carroll on administrative leave over leaks probe

10. In Grueling Ranger Competition, Gender Proves No Obstacle

11. Defense Secretary Hegseth: Chinese hypersonics missiles could destroy U.S. carriers in minutes

12. Former INDOPACOM commander urges clarity of US intent to defend Taiwan

13. The Trump Administration's Pursuit of a Sino-Russian Schism

14. U.S. Tries to Crush China’s AI Ambitions With Chips Crackdown

15. What Is an AI Supercomputer and Why Is Trump Talking About It?

16. Thinking Through Deception on the Electromagnetic Spectrum17.

17. The Ukraine Dividend: Return on Investment of US Security Assistance

18. The Russia That Putin Made

19. China’s Double Game in Myanmar

20. Trump’s Second Coming: Mongolia Watches the Chaos With Caution

21. US Army Eyes Surge in 3D-Printed Drones That Imitate Enemy Forces

22. End of dollar dominance? Trump tariffs are decreasing trust in US currency.

23. Putin’s play for an Indonesian airbase was always likely to fail – but Russia has wider ambitions

24. U.S. Cutting Forces In Syria By Half, Possible Ripple Effects In Region

25. Unwanted Truth 1: Black Lives Matter Was a Cuban Intelligence Operation

26. Questions Congress should ask about DOD ‘peace through strength’ plan

27. Analysis: How the battles Trump loves to wage explain his presidency

1. Why Richard Armitage was the essential American

The loss of a great American. May he rest in peace. Sure, like all of us, he had his foibles.

But he is still the archetype for a national security professional.

Who is in his mold today? Who are our "essential Americans?"

Why Richard Armitage was the essential American

The longtime national security official stood for U.S. alliances and allies. We could use him now.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/16/richard-armitage-trump-kissinger-reagan-bush-powell/?utm

April 16, 2025 at 4:30 p.m. EDTYesterday at 4:30 p.m. EDT

5 min

Richard Armitage at a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2003. (Ray Lustig/The Washington Post)

By James Mann

James Mann is author of a series of books on U.S. foreign policy, including “Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet.”

Most Americans never knew his name. He was not a regular on the Sunday talk shows, and though he never even held Cabinet rank, he served in senior national security jobs under three presidents (including as deputy secretary of state).

Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter

But Richard Armitage, who died on Sunday at age 79, was among the most influential American foreign policy officials of the past four decades. He was also the undisputed, longtime leader of a cohort of senior U.S. officials from both parties who believed in the paramount importance of foreign alliances, particularly in Asia. His informal network extended to both parties; for example, Armitage, a Republican, served as a mentor to Kurt Campbell, who became President Joe Biden’s top Asia hand.

He will be missed, and never more than right now, as President Donald Trump and his aides question the value of the alliances in which Armitage believed so strongly.

Following Opinions on the news

Following

Armitage’s persona made him a standout figure. He had a raspy voice and a massive neck and chest; he was a weightlifter who could still bench-press 330 pounds in his 50s. He was garrulous, profane and an incurable gossip. A conversation with him often began with “What’s going on? What do you hear?”

Opinions on foreign policy

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Trump’s folly is piling up. And America is weaker for it.

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Damir Marusic

Will nuclear talks with Iran fall apart?

April 10, 2025

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Keith B. Richburg

Trump’s ‘Gulf of America’ might only accelerate a trend

April 7, 2025

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David Ignatius

Trump bets on a ‘Reverse Kissinger’

April 3, 2025

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Editorial Board

Why is Trump waging a trade war?

March 31, 2025

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Fareed Zakaria

Don’t fall for this Russian propaganda — even when it comes from the U.S.

March 28, 2025

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Tim Kaine

Tim Kaine: Why I’m forcing a vote on Trump’s Canada tariffs

March 27, 2025

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Editorial Board

How to truly improve foreign aid

March 26, 2025

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Dana Milbank

It’s a week for Trump’s national security team

March 25, 2025

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Max Boot

The real scandal: Those chatty Trump officials’ loathing of U.S. allies

March 26, 2025

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David Ignatius

Move fast and trip over things

March 25, 2025

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Eduardo Porter

What happens after Trump blows up the world order

March 26, 2025

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Joseph Nye

Trump is liquidating America’s reserves of soft power

March 25, 2025

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David Ignatius

Trump’s destabilizing ‘Liberation Day’

March 20, 2025

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Max Boot

Trump’s bullying is turning Canada from friend to foe

March 21, 2025

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If Trump wants to end the wars, he must pressure Putin and Netanyahu

March 19, 2025

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Lee Hockstader

If Trump’s serious about Greenland, then here’s a serious offer

March 20, 2025

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David Ignatius

Trump is nearing a sharp fork in the road to Ukraine peace

March 18, 2025

His experience in Asia began in Vietnam, where Armitage, a 1967 graduate of the Naval Academy, started aboard a coastal destroyer and then volunteered for three combat tours, running ambush teams and other operations. At the end of the war, as South Vietnam was collapsing, he was sent to arrange the salvage of military supplies. Armitage wound up leading a flotilla of some 30 ships, with about 30,000 South Vietnamese refugees, from Vietnamese waters to the Philippines.

Armitage’s Vietnam experience led to an appointment a few years later as President Ronald Reagan’s assistant defense secretary. And it was there that Armitage began to develop both the outlook and the network that he would hold for the rest of his life.

Here a little history is in order: After President Richard M. Nixon and Henry Kissinger had opened a new relationship with China in the early 1970s, Kissinger, who served as Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state, nurtured a coterie of like-minded officials who for years placed the highest premium on maintaining close relations with China. The Kissinger network — which included Alexander Haig and Brent Scowcroft, who would go on to serve as secretary of state and national security adviser, respectively, in later administrations — regularly sought to avoid conflict with Beijing. They placed a lower priority on close ties with Japan and South Korea, or on Washington’s unofficial ties with Taiwan.

Armitage’s network arose in opposition to the Kissinger approach. It was his job at the Pentagon to meet regularly with allied officials. He began to gather around him others in Washington who felt, as he did, that U.S. policy was too Sino-centric, and that by overemphasizing China and de-emphasizing alliances, the United States was both losing its leverage with Beijing and according it too much power.

That argument has echoes today as, amid a much more adversarial relationship with China, the United States again appears to be losing ground to Beijing.

Meanwhile, inside the Pentagon under Reagan, Armitage began to work closely with a young Army officer named Colin Powell, who was then the military aide to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. The two Vietnam veterans were consequently cautious about using force when other forms of persuasion might work. They became best friends for life, and when Powell was named secretary of state under President George W. Bush, Armitage served as his deputy.

Armitage developed a peculiar but vital specialty in that era. Perhaps because of his years in combat and imposing appearance, he was the go-to choice when hard messages had to be delivered to nasty foreign leaders — an unofficial Ambassador to Thugs and Dictators. In 1988, Reagan chose Armitage to go to Panama to persuade that country’s strongman, Manuel Noriega, to resign. (Noriega didn’t, and was forced out by a U.S. invasion the following year.) The day after 9/11, when the United States demanded Pakistan’s help in arranging military operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s top spymaster balked, trying to explain his country’s long history with the Taliban. Armitage cut him short: “History starts today,” he said.

His stint in the Bush administration was not always a happy one. As the United States moved toward war with Iraq, Armitage was openly skeptical. “A lot of people … have spent a lot of time and energy trying to tie Iraq and al-Qaeda together, but thus far it hasn’t been able to be done,” he told me in late 2001. Yet he stayed on, loyal to the administration and especially to Powell, through Bush’s first term. His penchant for gossip, however, finally landed him in trouble: In talking with columnist Robert Novak, he disclosed that the wife of one of the administration’s critics was an undercover CIA officer. A special prosecutor was appointed to investigate; Armitage was never charged.

After he left government, Armitage remained a champion of America’s alliances. Last month, he co-wrote an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail criticizing the Trump administration’s “bullying” of Canada: “To insult our neighbors is to devalue our shared interests and sacrifices. Worse, it causes every ally around the world to doubt American reliability and our basic decency. It is not a joke and it is dishonorable.”

2. Be Not Afraid By Stanley McChrystal

Be Not Afraid

By Stanley McChrystal The New York Times3 min

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/13/opinion/mcchrystal-fear-america.html?smid=url-share&unlocked_article_code=1._k4.PByp.UyadFIeRojCA&utm

April 13, 2025

View Original

Fear defines us. Not by its presence, but by how we respond to it.

There are two kinds of fear. The first is primal. It grips us when lightning strikes too close or when the crack of a bullet signals imminent danger. In those moments, our bodies freeze, and our focus narrows. But with time, experience and discipline, we recover. We learn to navigate perilous situations, even to function in the face of fear.

The second kind of fear is more insidious. It seeps into our daily lives, lingers in the background and dictates our choices without us realizing it. America has always known fear — war, economic pain, uncertainty.

But today’s fear is different. It has been cultivated.

We live in a world of instability — jobs vanish, institutions falter, narratives shift by the hour. Every word we say, every action we take, is scrutinized, recorded and judged. The threat of digital mobs and public shaming doesn’t protect us; it paralyzes us. It breeds hesitation, then withdrawal, then division.

Fear isolates. It pushes us into ideological bunkers, surrounding us only with those who think like us. And when fear festers, it mutates. What begins as anxiety turns into resentment. Resentment hardens into hatred. Hatred strips away our ability to see others as people. The result is a society riven by suspicion and hostility.

There is no magic cure for fear. But there is an antidote: rules.

Rules are not shackles. They are the foundation of order. They define the boundaries that allow us to function, ensuring fairness and predictability. For over two centuries, the U.S. Constitution has been our guiding framework, enduring war, crisis and division. It has been tested, yet it holds.

But the rules that matter most — the ones that govern character — are also in peril. The loss of external structure is one thing. The loss of internal discipline is another. Too many have abandoned the basic principles of integrity, decency and respect. Without these, society does not simply fray; it collapses.

In war, there was once an unspoken rule: Officers were not to be deliberately targeted. Armies understood that without disciplined leadership, chaos would follow. Leadership, at its best, provides stability, guiding people through uncertainty with resolve and principle.

Today, our leaders — whether in politics, business or culture — are no longer simply attacked; they are torn down with glee. Worse, some have become the very architects of disorder, stoking division and resentment for personal gain. They do not lead; they inflame. They do not steady the ship; they rock it for effect. And in doing so, they set a precedent that character no longer matters, that outrage is a currency and that the path to power is not through integrity but through spectacle.

When our leaders abandon character, it does more than set a poor example. It accelerates decay. It tells people that principles are optional, that decency is weakness, that rules are for fools. It fosters a culture of fear, where hesitation replaces confidence, cynicism replaces trust and self-preservation replaces the courage to stand for what is right. When those at the top abandon the standards that hold society together, the rest of us, knowingly or not, follow suit. And when enough people do, the foundation doesn’t just erode. It crumbles. We cannot afford to let this stand.

The strength of our character is not defined by the absence of fear but by our ability to face it, to rise above it and to live, and lead, with integrity. It is in these moments that we show the true measure of our resolve.

Fear is not a force to be defeated by force alone, but by the steady adherence to rules that govern both our actions and our hearts. In this, we will find not just a defense against fear, but also the foundation of our strength.

Stanley McChrystal is the former commander of U.S. and International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan and the former commander of Joint Special Operations Command.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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3. Students sue Defense Department over book bans in military schools

i think DODEA has more civic education than most of the typical public schools throughout America. Students learn their civic duties in DODEA schools or at least when my daughter attended years ago.

I wonder (and worry) what the tragic blowback will be for these families.

Students sue Defense Department over book bans in military schools

militarytimes.com · by Leo Shane III · April 16, 2025

The American Civil Liberties Union along with a group of military students and family members sued the Defense Department on Tuesday over book bans and curriculum changes instituted in recent weeks to comply with President Donald Trump’s efforts to root out diversity and equity programs within federal agencies.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia, states that moves by Department of Defense Education Activity leaders have unnecessarily harmed learning opportunities for students. The case involves 12 students from six families who attend military-run schools in Virginia, Kentucky, Italy and Japan.

“Learning is a sacred and foundational right that is now being limited for students in DoDEA schools,” said Natalie Tolley, one of the plaintiff parents in the lawsuit.

“The implementation of these executive orders, without any due process or parental or professional input, is a violation of our children’s right to access information that prevents them from learning about their own histories, bodies, and identities.”

Military school students’ test scores lead the nation

The scores showed positive stability at DOD schools, while the nation’s public schools aren’t regaining ground lost during the pandemic.

Since January, the department’s schools system — which encompasses 161 schools across 11 countries, including multiple sites in the United States — has begun removing books and changing classroom curricula related to “gender ideology” or “divisive equity ideology.”

Officials from the ACLU said that has included banning some texts about slavery, Native American history, LGBTQ+ history and sexual harassment prevention.

“These schools are some of the most diverse and high achieving in the nation, making it particularly insulting to strip their shelves of diverse books and erase women, LGBTQ people and people of color from the curriculum to serve a political goal,” said Emerson Sykes, senior staff attorney with the ACLU, in a statement.

“Our clients deserve better, and the First Amendment demands it.”

Defense Department officials have not yet publicly commented on the lawsuit. Leaders have defended similar moves — such as banning cultural awareness months and eliminating diversity and inclusion offices — as necessary to remove distractions and political ideology from military operations.

The lawsuit asks for a full revocation of the administration’s executive orders and reinstatement of all books, classroom materials and course guidelines to the Defense Department schools.

“The government can’t scrub references to race and gender from public school libraries and classrooms just because the Trump administration doesn’t like certain viewpoints on those topics,” said Matt Callahan, senior supervising attorney at the ACLU of Virginia.

Last week, hundreds of students at DoDEA schools staged walkouts over the controversial changes. Department leaders are still considering disciplinary action against individuals involved in those protests.

About Leo Shane III

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

4. US-funded media like Voice of America must be saved and strengthened

I concur. VOA and RFA, RFE/RL are national treasures. Sure, fix the bureaucratic and management issues but we have a human resource pool of some of the world's best journalists and news producers and we are losing a critical national security asset.

US-funded media like Voice of America must be saved and strengthened

By Nury Turkel The Hill4 min

April 16, 2025

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5250438-u-s-funded-media-like-voice-of-america-must-be-saved-and-strengthened/

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The Voice of America building, Monday, June 15, 2020, in Washington.

America has always been at its best when it stands firmly for truth, freedom and human dignity. Today, that legacy is under threat. Just as the world needs them most, vital American soft power tools — Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty — are at risk of being dismantled by the Trump administration.

I know what that voice sounds like. I first heard it through a shortwave radio in the early 1990s, when I was a university student in China, far from my hometown of Kashgar in the Uyghur region. Isolated and eager to understand the outside world, I tuned in to the BBC and Voice of America. That crackling shortwave signal was my window to freedom. For me, it was more than news — it was a revelation.

I never had formal English training. Everything I learned came from programs like Voice of America’s Special English and Talk to America. I also tuned into its Mandarin service, which helped sharpen my Chinese. Hearing democracy and dissent in the same language used for propaganda was both jarring and electrifying.

Those broadcasts introduced me to American ideals — freedom of speech, democratic movements, political dissent and civil society. They told stories of exiles, reformers and ordinary citizens. They changed my life.

As I wrote in my memoir “No Escape,” those radio signals inspired me to come to America nearly 30 years ago. I became the first U.S.-educated Uyghur corporate lawyer, a congressionally appointed official and a human rights advocate.

Over the last two decades, I have given countless interviews to Voice of America’s English, Uzbek, Turkish, Persian, Tibetan and Mandarin programs — sharing stories from the very nation whose ideals once reached me across oceans and borders.

Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty also played a critical role. As someone with ties to Central Asia, the outlet helped me understand the region’s political developments. As former chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, I spoke to its audiences about why Americans care about protecting freedom for everyone, everywhere.

Two years ago, I visited Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s headquarters in Prague and sat in the same chair once occupied by Václav Havel. I met brave reporters covering the war in Ukraine who were risking their lives to deliver the truth.

But my deepest connection is with Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service. When it first launched, I applied to be a reporter, hoping to deliver uncensored news to my people. Since then, I’ve spoken on its Uyghur, Tibetan and Mandarin programs to explain U.S. policy and offer hope to those still silenced.

After 9/11, when China labeled itself a victim of terrorism, I used Radio Free Asia to explain how Beijing exploited global rhetoric to justify oppression. I clarified that America’s fight was never against the Uyghur people. I explained a justice system they had never known. My late father, like many Uyghur intellectuals, listened to Radio Free Asia at great risk. It gave them hope to know that the American people stood with them.

The journalists at Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur Service are heroes. They have exposed China’s concentration camps, forced labor, abuses against women and children and the destruction of places of worship and sacred sites. Their work helped lead to the U.S. government’s recognition of China’s actions as genocide and laid the groundwork for the bipartisan Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. This seminal law bans products made with Uyghur forced labor and protects American consumers, workers and businesses from unfair and unethical trade.

Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur journalists have had loved ones imprisoned or sent to camps because of their work for the American people. Now these same journalists face the loss of their livelihoods. We ask them to risk everything for truth. The least we can do is make sure their microphones stay on.

These networks are not perfect. At times, editorial decisions have strayed from their core mission. But those rare missteps call for reform, not retreat. These outlets need a reboot, not a burial.

Yes, there is waste across government. But gutting the only free media outlets that reach persecuted populations — like the Uyghurs — is not the answer. The U.S. remains the only country with the legislative and policy tools to confront China’s genocide. Silencing that voice now would be morally indefensible and strategically short-sighted.

Resuming and strengthening these broadcasts is not just a moral imperative — it is a strategic investment in American global leadership. These services don’t just report the news. They offer hope — our sharpest weapon against repression. And they show the world what freedom sounds like.

Now is the time to call on leaders to restore funding and empower these programs to continue their core mission. Doing so will reaffirm America’s leadership and send a message to the world that truth still matters.

This isn’t a partisan issue — it’s a patriotic one. Independent media is one of the most cost-effective and powerful tools in America’s arsenal. It doesn’t require tanks or troops — only truth and access.

Freedom of the press is not just a constitutional principle — it is the beating heart of America’s identity and our greatest export. While dictators invest in propaganda, we should be investing in uncensored news and authentic American stories.

Don’t pull the plug — power it up. Because when America speaks clearly and boldly, the world listens.

Nury Turkel is a lawyer and the award-winning author of “No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs.” He is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and former chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

5. Trump Aides Close State Dept. Office on Foreign Disinformation

Another gift for our fusion of foes?

Trump Aides Close State Dept. Office on Foreign Disinformation

By Edward Wong The New York Times4 min

April 16, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/us/politics/trump-rubio-state-department-foreign-disinformation.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm

View Original

Secretary of State Marco Rubio put about 40 employees on leave who had tracked disinformation by China, Russia, Iran and terrorist groups.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his aides shut down a State Department office on Wednesday that tracks and counters global disinformation from foreign actors, including the governments of China, Russia and Iran, U.S. officials said.

The closing of the office, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, had been in the works for weeks. Mr. Rubio put all 40 or so of its employees on paid leave on Wednesday morning, the first step in firing them this spring. The State Department fired about 80 contractors working for the office in March and cut almost all contracts related to its work.

The office had been tracking disinformation campaigns by rival powers of the United States, as well as terrorist groups, and publishing reports on them. Some Republican lawmakers in recent years have accused federal employees and nongovernment experts working on tracking disinformation of trying to stifle the views of right-wing political groups around the world and trying to coordinate with social media companies to do so. Russian disinformation often circulates in far-right online channels.

Mr. Rubio released a statement before noon on Wednesday announcing the closure, saying that the office and its precursor in the Biden administration had “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.” Mr. Rubio did not present any evidence to support the claim.

James P. Rubin, a former State Department official who ran the precursor to the office in the Biden administration, pushed back on the move to shutter the operation.

“This amounts to a form of unilateral disarmament in the information warfare Russia and China are conducting all over the world,” he said on Wednesday.

He added that on his watch, “no efforts were made inside the United States — only international. All of our efforts were focused on Russian and Chinese operations in Latin America, Europe and Africa.”

The office now falls under the authority of Darren Beattie, a political appointee who is the senior official acting as the under secretary for public diplomacy. Mr. Beattie was organizing the firings, said two U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss actions by senior aides to President Trump.

Mr. Beattie was himself fired from a job as a White House speechwriter during the first Trump administration after CNN published a report saying he had given a speech to a group of white nationalists. He has made controversial social media posts on issues of race, including one that said “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”

After starting his job at the State Department, Mr. Beattie gained access to the email accounts of current and former employees who had worked on countering disinformation, the two U.S. officials said. He has looked through them to find evidence of censorship of conservative ideas, they said.

The State Department declined to comment on Mr. Beattie’s role.

Diplomats are bracing for a series of deep cuts at the State Department. A memo has circulated in Mr. Rubio’s office that proposes, in coordination with the White House, a cut to the agency’s budget of nearly 50 percent next fiscal year. Another memo proposes closing 10 embassies and 17 consulates.

The cuts are occurring as China has expanded its diplomatic footprint across the globe, and as that country and Russia have become much more aggressive in spreading disinformation in recent years. When Mr. Rubio was a senator from Florida, he continually spoke about the need to expend government resources to counter both superpowers in contested areas around the world and online.

The State Department’s office for countering foreign disinformation is a successor to the Global Engagement Center, which was set up in 2011 to counter the propaganda of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The center recently had 125 employees and a budget of $61 million. During the Biden administration, it put out reports on global disinformation campaigns by China and Russia.

But the center came under attack during the Biden administration from several House Republicans who called its work an effort to censor conservative ideas in the public sphere, including on social media sites. Conservative groups filed lawsuits against the group. In 2023, Elon Musk, the conservative billionaire who has become a close adviser to Mr. Trump, said the center was the “worst offender in U.S. government censorship.”

Mr. Rubin, the center’s coordinator, rebutted the accusations at the time, saying it had a “focus on how foreign adversaries, primarily China and Russia, use information operations and malign interference to manipulate world opinion.”

Late last year, some House Republicans successfully blocked congressional reauthorization of the center. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and his aides reorganized the efforts to counter foreign disinformation at the State Department by creating the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub.

The State Department under Mr. Blinken managed to move the most essential functions of the efforts into the new office, a U.S. official said. That included channels to inform allies and partners about disinformation spread by China among citizens of various nations in Asia, the official said.

The Trump administration has dismantled federal government efforts to monitor U.S. elections for foreign interference, reassigning dozens of officials across several agencies who had worked on the issue. Those employees had tried to combat false content online and worked on broader safeguards to protect elections from cyberattacks or other attempts to disrupt voting systems. U.S. intelligence officials say Russia is the most active foreign government involved in election interference, and intelligence agencies assessed that the Kremlin intervened in the 2016 U.S. elections in favor of Mr. Trump.

6. Five Signs That the US and China Will Go to War By James Stavridis

Conclusion:

History turns on small hinges. We need to watch these five yellow lights — cyberattacks, Taiwan incursions, the South China Sea, Beijing’s naval construction, and the escalating trade war — because if they turn red, they could turn out the lamps all over the world.

Five Signs That the US and China Will Go to War

While the two nations fight it out on trade, less-noticed concerns are taking place in cyberspace, near Taiwan and at Chinese shipyards.

April 16, 2025 at 3:21 PM EDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-04-16/are-the-us-and-china-headed-to-war-watch-for-these-5-signs?utm

By James Stavridis

James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a retired US Navy admiral, former supreme allied commander of NATO, and vice chairman of global affairs at the Carlyle Group.

China’s navy is huge, and so is the aircraft carrier Liaoning.Photographer: Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images

With the US and China announcing increasingly punitive tariffs against one another over the last week, we have zoomed past theorizing about a “new cold war” and into the opening rounds of a very real trade war. It could conclude with a “big, beautiful” deal with China, as President Donald Trump has repeatedly promised. Or it could lead to a prolonged and painful decoupling of the world’s two largest economies if both sides dig in, something China seems prepared to do. Time will tell.

Yet the question I am constantly asked is not about a trade war. It is: Are we headed toward a hot war with China? The short answer is that I hope not, of course, but I am increasingly concerned about the trends. I spent the majority of my Navy career in the Pacific, and I never felt we were as close to an actual shooting war with Beijing as we are today.

So, is actual conflict truly drawing closer? What are the best indicators to watch, so we could hopefully avoid a full-blown war? As I survey the scene of the Pacific, I see five warning lights that are blinking yellow, and need to be closely monitored in case they turn red.

Cyberattacks

China is increasingly assaulting US critical infrastructure through its powerful offensive tech capability. The best-known of these programs is called Volt Typhoon. It has been openly discussed by senior US national security officials, and was reportedly subject to discussion in a secret December meeting between US and Chinese authorities. The attacks have been directed against “ports, water utilities, airports” and other infrastructure targets, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

A separate program emanating from Beijing, Salt Typhoon, is reportedly directed against US telecommunications. China is demonstrating not only the capability to undertake highly sophisticated cyberwarfare, but that it has the will to do so. If the scope and consequences of cyberattacks rise, the risk of a wider war will increase commensurately.

Aviation Pressure on Taiwan

Monitoring the level of incursions into the Taiwanese Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) can provide a key indicator of China’s forward-leaning military strategy in terms of capturing the “rogue province.” Last year, there were more than 3,000 such incidents, nearly double the number in 2023. Believe me, Admiral Sam Paparo, the commander of US Indo-Pacific Command in Honolulu, is getting briefed daily on these flights. We should all pay attention as well.

South China Sea Operations

Beijing bases its claims to virtually all these vast waters — about half the size of the continental US — in part on the historical voyages of a 15th-century Chinese admiral, Zheng He. These assertions have been adjudicated in the international courts and rejected. Nonetheless, China is undertaking a range of maritime actions, including the creation of at least seven artificial islands as bases for its increasingly powerful navy. Sometimes called the “Great Wall of Sand,” these islands are being used to conduct small maritime advances and harassment against littoral states, notably the Philippines, a treaty ally of the US. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is working far more closely with the US military than his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte: He has been opening military access for the US to Philippine bases on its islands closest to the Chinese mainland. So the level of Chinese Navy and Coast Guard operations in and around the central South China Sea, especially those threatening its neighbors, is a powerful indicator of potential conflict.

Chinese Naval Construction

China is building warships at a prodigious rate, averaging 20 to 30 annually. The current fleet, in terms of numbers of combatant vessels, is larger than America’s: well over 360 ships compared to roughly 300 for the US. China’s stated objective is more than 400 warships. Beijing knows any war with the US will be fought primarily at sea. For a good indicator of Beijing’s intentions for significant combat, keep an eye on the level of production at its shipyards.

Tariff and Trade Conflict

Perhaps the most dangerous indicator is one already in play: the level and breadth of tariffs imposed by each side. It is worth remembering how World War II began in the Pacific: with trade sanctions that cut off Japan from vital resources — notably oil, steel and rubber. Many historians believe the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was the culmination of a decade of economic disputes and provocative steps. China is now starting to cut off supplies of many rare-earth elements and strategically vital minerals — over which it has a virtual global chokehold in terms of mining and, more importantly perhaps, refining. The US tariffs will do immediate and significant damage to the Chinese economy, but it’s China’s responses that will be the fifth key indicator of impending conflict.

Some years ago, I co-wrote a book, “2034: A Novel of the Next World War,” that depicted how the US and China could stumble into a devastating conflict. It was not predictive fiction, but rather a cautionary tale. The war unfolds after a seemingly small incident between a few ships in the South China Sea quickly escalates. As I wrote it, in my head were the opening days of World War I, when an assassin’s bullet in a dusty corner of the Balkans lit a conflagration that put out the lamps all over Europe.

History turns on small hinges. We need to watch these five yellow lights — cyberattacks, Taiwan incursions, the South China Sea, Beijing’s naval construction, and the escalating trade war — because if they turn red, they could turn out the lamps all over the world.

Stavridis is dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University . He is on the boards of Aon, Fortinet and Ankura Consulting Group, and has advised Shield Capital, a firm that invests in the cybersecurity sector.

A Comparative Analysis of the Impact and Use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) by Terrorist Groups

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/04/17/a-comparative-analysis/

by Mahmut Cengiz

04.17.2025 at 06:00am

Terrorist attacks result in the deaths of more than 20,000 people every year. Terrorist groups, which are rarely random or senseless in their actions, tend to use strategic weapons that cause more casualties and increase their notoriety. Although terrorist organizations use various types of weapons, they often prefer improvised explosive devices (IEDs) due to their accessibility and ease of creation. IEDs can be strategically placed or affixed to targeted equipment with minimal effort.

An IED is a homemade explosive device designed to inflict damage, cause disruption, or instill fear. These devices are employed by a variety of actors, including criminals, terrorists, insurgents, vandals, and suicide bombers. The design and potential impact of IEDs can vary significantly, ranging from simple pipe bombs to more sophisticated devices capable of causing extensive damage and loss of life. IEDs can be deployed in several ways, including being carried by an individual, planted in a vehicle, sent via a package, or concealed along roadways. The term “IED,” commonly referred to as roadside bombs, became widely recognized during the Iraq War, which began in 2003.

Some examples of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) include truck bombs, pipe bombs, and devices triggered by cell phone timers. On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb, made from ammonium nitrate fertilizer and nitromethane, exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 169 people. In the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, a pipe bomb filled with nails exploded in Centennial Olympic Park, killing two and injuring several others. On March 11, 2004, in Madrid, 10 explosions rocked four commuter trains, killing 191 people and injuring over 1,800. The bombs were made from Goma-2 ECO explosives and metal fragments, initiated by cell phones. On July 7, 2005, four suicide bombers carried out attacks on London’s transportation system, killing 52 and injuring hundreds. The explosives were believed to be TATP, based on evidence found in an arrested suspect’s apartment.

The procurement of arms and explosives by terrorist groups for deploying IEDs is influenced by several critical factors. First, state sponsorship of terrorism is a significant factor, as political interests and definitional ambiguities lead to varying approaches to addressing terrorism. Non-state actors perceived as allies often receive support, while those labeled as terrorists are targeted. For instance, Iran-backed militia groups in the Middle East receive logistical assistance from Tehran, including rockets, mortars, missiles, and materials used to construct IEDs. Global Terrorism Trends and Analysis Center (GTTAC) reports the use of IEDs in 134 attacks by such groups between 2018 and 2024. Another critical factor is the occurrence of proxy wars, in which non-state actors are provided with weapons and financial support by various states, despite the violent nature of their actions. In Syria, GTTAC recorded 88 terrorist perpetrators from 2018 to 2024, supported by Russia, the Gulf States, Turkiye, and Iran. Porous borders in regions with active terror groups, such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al Shabaab in Somalia, and ISIS in Syria, facilitate the smuggling and transfer of arms and explosives. Additionally, endemic corruption in countries plagued by terrorism is closely linked to weak governance, with high terrorism levels correlating with poor rankings on the Corruption Perception Index. The convergence of criminal and terrorist organizations further exacerbates this issue, as these groups collaborate to achieve mutual interests and gain access to weaponry and explosives. Lastly, the financial capacity of terrorist groups, often sustained through illicit trafficking and smuggling activities, enables them to procure the necessary resources to manufacture and deploy IEDs.

According to data from the GTTAC, firearms were the most commonly used weapon by terrorist groups, accounting for 25,570 incidents, or 50.2% of all terrorist attacks between 2018 and 2023. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were the second most prevalent, with 8,210 incidents (15.93%), followed by explosives in 7,781 attacks (15.1%), incendiary devices in 1,831 attacks (3.55%), and melee weapons in 1,213 attacks (2.29%) during the same period.

The number of terrorist incidents between 2018 and 2024 fluctuated between 8,000 and 10,000, as seen in Figure 1 below. Despite these variations in the overall number of incidents, the frequency of IED-related attacks exhibited a gradual decline over the same period. The proportion of IED-related incidents ranged from 10% to 22%, with the lowest recorded percentage in 2024, at 10.91%. A significant contributing factor to the low proportion in 2024 is the increase in missile attacks by Hezbollah, as documented by GTTAC, which recorded over 1,400 such attacks in Israel in 2024.

Figure 1: Total Incidents and IED-Related Incidents (2018 to 2024)

The GTTAC data from 2018 to 2024, as seen in Figure 2 below, highlights trends in the use of IEDs in terrorist attacks. Total fatalities decreased steadily from 32,864 in 2018 to 18,987 in 2024. However, fatalities caused by IEDs saw notable fluctuations. In 2019, there was a sharp increase in IED-related fatalities, with 5,203 deaths, making up 19.8% of all fatalities. Following this peak, the number of IED-related fatalities gradually decreased over the next several years. By 2024, fatalities due to IEDs dropped to 1,985, or 10.4% of the total. Despite the overall decline in total fatalities, IEDs continued to be a significant tool in terrorist attacks throughout the period. The proportion of IED-related fatalities fluctuated, with a noticeable dip in 2023, when only 1,777 fatalities (8.2%) were attributed to IEDs. This suggests that while the total number of fatalities and IED-related deaths has generally decreased, IEDs remain an important weapon for terrorist groups.

Figure 2: Total Fatalities and Fatalities Due to IEDs (2018–2024)

The GTTAC data on the number of victims targeted and killed in IED attacks, as seen in Figure 3 below, highlights the varying levels of vulnerability among different groups. The general population suffered the highest number of casualties, with 2,324 victims. Military personnel were also significantly targeted, accounting for 1,720 fatalities, which reflects the high targeting of military forces in such attacks. Government personnel faced substantial casualties as well, with 1,321 fatalities, indicating that state institutions are frequently targeted by terrorist groups. Political figures, however, were the least affected, with only 28 fatalities, possibly due to their relatively lower visibility or priority in these attacks. Additionally, groups and professionals each saw a moderate number of fatalities, with 349 and 182 victims, respectively, suggesting that specific sectors or individuals are targeted for their symbolic or strategic value.

Figure 3: Victims Targeted and Killed in IED Attacks (2018–2024)

The GTTAC data on IED attacks by terrorist typologies, as seen in Figure 4, indicates the varying use of IEDs across different ideological groups. Religious (jihadist) groups accounted for the largest share of IED attacks, with 2,703 incidents, followed by separatist groups with 1,973 attacks. Left-wing groups were responsible for 810 IED-related incidents. Interestingly, far-right groups are notably absent from this data, as they have never been reported to use IEDs, reflecting a distinct operational preference for other methods of violence. Anarchist and vigilante groups contributed only a small number of incidents, with 11 and 7 IED attacks, respectively.

Figure 4: Distribution of IED Attacks by Terrorist Typology

The data presented in Figure 5 offers a group-level analysis of IED usage from 2018 to 2024, focusing on several of the top 10 perpetrators responsible for the most attacks in 2024, namely Al-Shabaab, ISIS-Core, JNIM, and Hezbollah. Al-Shabaab maintained a relatively high level of IED activity throughout the period, with 138 attacks in 2018, fluctuating numbers in subsequent years, and a peak of 170 attacks in 2019. However, a steady decline in their use of IEDs was observed in the following years. The Al-Qaeda-affiliated group utilized IEDs in 60 of its 261 attacks in 2024. ISIS-Core exhibited considerable fluctuations in IED use, reaching a peak of 246 attacks in 2019 before gradually decreasing to 55 out of 560 attacks in 2024. This trend may indicate a reduction in ISIS’s territorial control and a strategic shift towards leveraging sleeper cells for low-profile shooting attacks in Iraq and Syria, in response to significant weakening by international counterterrorism operations in recent years.

Figure 5: Group-Level Analysis of IED Usage by Terrorist Organizations (2018–2024)

Jamaat al-Nusra wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an al-Qaeda-affiliated group operating in the Sahel region, exhibited relatively stable IED activity, with a peak of 71 attacks in 2022, followed by moderate levels in subsequent years, including 37 out of its 377 attacks in 2024. JNIM’s sustained reliance on IEDs underscores the continued strategic importance of these devices in its operational activities across the Sahel. Conversely, Hezbollah, which had minimal recorded IED activity in earlier years, experienced a significant increase in 2024, with 97 incidents out of its 1,450 attacks in 2024. This notable escalation is likely attributable to the group’s expanding involvement in the Middle East, particularly in the aftermath of the October 7 terror attacks, which exacerbated regional tensions.

In conclusion, the data provides valuable insights into the changing landscape of IED-related terrorism. The steady decline in the proportion of IED incidents, particularly in 2024, is partly due to intensified military actions targeting terrorist groups in rural areas. This pressure has forced these groups to adapt, shifting towards direct assault methods, such as storming and shooting attacks. Jihadist organizations remain the primary perpetrators of IED-related terrorism. However, despite the overall decline in IED use, groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda continue to rely on these tactics in their areas of operation. The decrease in IED usage may also be linked to a broader shift in terrorist weaponry, with a notable rise in the use of missiles and drones. Various groups, including Iran-backed militias and Al-Qaeda affiliates in regions like Syria, Yemen, and the Sahel, have increasingly turned to drones. This strategy offers lower risk to the attackers while potentially causing greater harm and attracting more attention.

Tags: GWOT, IEDs, terrorism

About The Author

Mahmut Cengiz
Dr. Mahmut Cengiz is an Associate Professor and faculty member at the Terrorism, Transnational Crime, and Corruption Center (TraCCC) and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University (GMU). He has extensive international field experience, having provided capacity-building and training assistance to both governmental and non-governmental partners across the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Dr. Cengiz is the author of seven books and numerous scholarly articles and book chapters that critically address issues related to terrorism, transnational crime, terrorist financing, and human trafficking. His 2024 book, Murder by Mail, co-authored with Mitchel P. Roth, offers an historical analysis of weaponized mail, tracing its development over two centuries. He contributes regularly to Small Wars Journal and <iHomeland Security Today. Since 2018, Dr. Cengiz has been a key figure in the establishment and continued development of the Global Terrorism Trends and Analysis Center (GTTAC). In addition to his research and policy contributions, Dr. Cengiz teaches graduate-level courses on Terrorism, American Security Policy, and Narco-Terrorism at George Mason University. He is a Fellow at Small Wars Journal–El Centro.

8. H.R. McMaster receives accidental call from President Trump

"Things That Make You Go Hmmmm…"

H.R. McMaster receives accidental call from President Trump

Margaret Brennan,

Robert Costa

Updated on: April 9, 2025 / 9:44 PM EDT / CBS News

CBS News

Just over a month ago, retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster received an unexpected call on his personal cell, four sources told CBS News. It was from the White House and he was instructed by the voice on the other end to stand by for the president.

McMaster, who had served as national security adviser during President Trump's first term and was ousted after 13 months, was surprised to hear from Mr. Trump at all.

Just a day earlier, on March 2, Mr. Trump had lobbed his latest insult at McMaster, blasting him on social media as a "weak and totally ineffective loser." McMaster had also just appeared on CBS' "60 Minutes," where he voiced skepticism about Mr. Trump's overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Putin's willingness to end the war in Ukraine.

"Henry..." is how Trump opened the call before launching into the conversation, according to two sources who were not authorized to discuss private conversations.

It was then that McMaster knew this familiar voice was indeed Mr. Trump. But he also realized something else: the commander-in-chief had not intended to call him at all.

McMaster goes by H.R., short for Herbert Raymond. Not Henry.

"Mr. President, this is H.R. McMaster," he said into the phone.

"Why the f*** would I talk" to H.R. McMaster? Trump asked dismissively, and then Trump launched into a scathing critique of his former aide, two sources said.

The call was brief.

Two sources told CBS News that the president intended to call South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, not his former national security adviser.

It is unclear who bears responsibility for dialing the wrong McMaster. According to one person familiar with the call, the call was placed by an aide who works with the president.

A White House official declined to discuss the president's private calls or whether a phone conversation took place.

In a statement, White House communications director Steven Cheung criticized the former national security adviser.

"H.R. McMaster has completely beclowned himself and his third-rate book, which is now sold in the bargain bin of the fiction section of a discount bookstore, is filled with lies in a futile attempt to rehabilitate his tattered reputation," Cheung said.

H.R. McMaster, a CBS News contributor, declined to comment.

McMaster has been outspoken about Trump's views on Putin and how he believes the Russian leader "played to Trump's ego and insecurities with flattery," as he wrote in his recent memoir, "At War with Ourselves."

The mistaken phone call on March 3 came several days before Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly added to a group chat with top Trump national security advisers that included a discussion of sensitive information about U.S. military strikes in Yemen.

The current national security adviser, Mike Waltz, told Fox News he takes "full responsibility" for the group chat episode.

Arden Farhi contributed to this report.

Margaret Brennan

9. Third top Pentagon aide Collin Carroll on administrative leave over leaks probe

Third top Pentagon aide Collin Carroll on administrative leave over leaks probe

Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Sec. Stephen Feinberg, was escorted out of the building on Wednesday

By Morgan Phillips Fox News

Published April 16, 2025 2:24pm EDT | Updated April 16, 2025 2:46pm EDT

foxnews.com · by Morgan Phillips Fox News

Video

Pentagon welcomes back unvaccinated service members to active duty

THEY'RE BACK: Unvaccinated troops are returning to active military duty, thanks to President Trump, after being kicked out due to vax mandates.

A third high-level Pentagon staffer has been placed on administrative leave in two days as part of a probe into media leaks.

Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Secretary Stephen Feinberg, was escorted out of the building on Wednesday, following Dan Caldwell, senior advisor to Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Darin Selnick, deputy chief of staff to Hegseth.

"We can confirm that Mr. Carroll has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation. We have nothing additional to provide at this time," a defense official told Fox News Digital.

Carroll did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

PENTAGON DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF IS SECOND HEGSETH ADVISOR REMOVED AMID DOD LEAK PROBE

Three of Hegseth's top DOD staffers are on leave over leaking (Reuters/Yves Herman)

Last month, the Defense Department (DOD) announced it would launch a probe into "recent unauthorized disclosures of national security information" and might employ the use of polygraphs to determine the source of the leaks.

"The use of polygraphs in the execution of this investigation will be in accordance with applicable law and policy," DOD Chief of Staff Joe Kasper wrote in a memo. "This investigation will commence immediately and culminate in a report to the Secretary of Defense."

GENERAL WHO HELPED TRUMP DECIMATE ISIS TERRORISTS IN FIRST TERM CONFIRMED AS JOINT CHIEFS CHAIRMAN

He wrote that "information identifying a party responsible for an unauthorized disclosure" would be referred for criminal prosecution.

Caroll, a Marine Corps reservist, most recently worked at defense contractor Anduril, which develops autonomous weapons systems. Both Selnick and Caldwell worked at Concerned Veterans for America, an advocacy group once led by Hegseth.

A probe into leaks at the Pentagon game after reporting about the Pentagon reportedly planning to brief Elon Musk on potential war with China (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

The Pentagon has not provided specifics about what the three officials are accused of leaking. An official told Politico that the leak concerned Panama Canal plans and Elon Musk’s visit to the Pentagon and a second aircraft carrier being deployed to the Red Sea.

The DOD followed the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice in announcing it would use polygraphs to root out alleged leakers. But the DOD memo came after President Donald Trump pushed back on a New York Times report that Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk would be briefed on "war plans" with China during a visit to the Pentagon. Trump said he would not show such plans "to anybody."

foxnews.com · by Morgan Phillips Fox News

10. In Grueling Ranger Competition, Gender Proves No Obstacle

There has been surprisingly little media coverage of this. On the one hand that is good. She is just a member of the 14th best team of 52 that competed in the best Ranger Competition. She is just like any of the other 104 Rangers who competed. But on the other hand it is newsworthy because of all the controversy over standards. I of course don't know Lt White but I imagine she is like so many soldiers I have met who are ardent and fierce defenders of the standard and do not want them lowered in the name of gender integration. And her success should be touted as an example to inspire others. And like it or not, we need exemplars to inspire our young people, men and women, to serve our nation. Although I am sure she does not seek the spotlight and notoriety, her success should be highlighted.

In Grueling Ranger Competition, Gender Proves No Obstacle

A female Army Ranger, in a first, competed in one of the military’s toughest tests of physical fitness. She bested many of her opponents.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/us/gabrielle-white-army-ranger-competition.html?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=user/newyorktimes

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First Lt. Gabrielle White climbs an obstacle course at the Ranger competition. The image was provided by the U.S. Army.Credit...Capt. Stephanie Snyder/U.S. Army

By Eve Sampson

April 16, 2025A female Army Ranger competed for the first time in one of the military’s most grueling tests of physical fitness, besting many of her male counterparts and challenging assertions by the U.S. secretary of defense regarding women’s abilities to perform at the highest levels.

First Lt. Gabrielle White and her teammate, Capt. Seth Deltenre, placed 14th out of 52 teams during the weekend’s Best Ranger Competition, a three-day event in Georgia at which some of the Army’s most elite soldiers compete in land navigation, marksmanship and an array of physically strenuous tasks.

Lieutenant White was the first woman to participate in the four decades that the event has been held. Her team’s achievement — she and Captain Deltenre finished among the top competitors after 36 other pairs were eliminated — came less than a decade after women were first granted access to the Army’s Ranger School, a rigorous monthslong course with a high rate of failure.

Some saw Lieutenant White’s performance at the competition as a rejoinder, however unintended, to comments by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth questioning the abilities of women in the military.

“I saw a three-day public display of what we’ve been saying for 10 years,” said Kris Fuhr, a West Point graduate who was instrumental in integrating women into the Ranger School at Fort Benning in 2015.

Mr. Hegseth, a former National Guard infantryman and Fox News host, has spoken critically of the inclusion of women in combat roles.

“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” he said on a podcast in November. “It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated.”

In a recent book, “The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free,” Mr. Hegseth wrote that “women cannot physically meet the same standards as men.”

“Dads push us to take risks,” he wrote. “Moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.”

The Best Ranger Competition outcome suggests otherwise, said Ms. Fuhr, who left the military with the rank of captain. “This administration sometimes makes decisions based on misinformation and myths,” she said. “Military policy should not be based on either of those.”

Mr. Hegseth, who is not a graduate of the Ranger School — considered a basic course for infantry officers — later disavowed some of his comments. “If we have the right standard and women meet that standard, roger, let’s go,” he said.

The Trump administration has called for an end to diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the federal government and in the armed forces.

Women’s integration into Ranger School and combat roles has been hotly debated and still stirs controversy among some people who claim that standards have been lowered for women.

The first women graduated from the Ranger course in August 2015, shortly before Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter announced that the Pentagon would open all military positions to women. Though women had served on the front lines for decades, they were barred from direct combat roles such as armor or infantry officers until December 2015.

According to the Army, 154 women have graduated from Ranger School as of January 2025. Data released in 2022 showed that women accounted for 15.7 percent of the active-duty soldiers.

Jeffrey Mellinger, a retired command sergeant major who served in the 75th Ranger Regiment, attended this year’s Ranger competition as a spectator.

“There is not another competition anywhere in the world that comes close to the mental and physical exertion of this competition,” he said. He compared it to a combination of an Ironman triathlon, a CrossFit competition and multiple marathons.

Sergeant Major Mellinger was deeply involved in an advisory board for integrating women into Ranger School and insists that no standards have been lowered.

Until she was pointed out by another onlooker, he said, he would not have noticed any difference between Lieutenant White and the male competitors, save for “a bun on the back of a head.”

“She had the skill and the physical ability to get it done,” he said.

Sergeant Major Mellinger said Lieutenant White’s coveted Ranger tab, an embroidered patch signifying the wearer’s qualification, was a commitment. “She still has to earn it every day, like every other ranger, like every other soldier,” he said.

Lieutenant White, an infantry officer, graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2021. She completed Ranger School in April 2022 and is assigned to the Maneuver Captains Career Course, which trains officers in combat arms roles, according to the Army.

John Ismay contributed reporting.

Eve Sampson is a reporter covering international news and a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.

11. Defense Secretary Hegseth: Chinese hypersonics missiles could destroy U.S. carriers in minutes

Defense Secretary Hegseth: Chinese hypersonics missiles could destroy U.S. carriers in minutes

washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz

By - The Washington Times - Wednesday, April 16, 2025

NEWS AND ANALYSIS:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth believes the Chinese military’s hypersonic missiles could sink all U.S. aircraft carriers within the first minutes of a potential conflict.

Mr. Hegseth said in a November interview, months before becoming defense secretary, that the People’s Liberation Army’s deployment of ultra high-speed anti-ship missiles highlights Beijing’s rapid drive to build weapons specifically designed to target the American military.

China, he said, is building a military force “specifically dedicated to defeating the United States of America.”

“Take hypersonic missiles,” Mr. Hegseth said on “The Shawn Ryan Show.”

“So if our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers and the ability to project power that way strategically around the globe. And, yeah, we have a nuclear triad and all that, but [carriers are] a big part of it. And if 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our 10 aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of a conflict, what does that look like?” he said.

Although months old, the comments have received relatively little attention and underscore that the new defense secretary has a clear understanding of China’s advanced missile capabilities and highlight the threat posed by PLA asymmetric warfare capabilities.

U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups currently have limited defenses against hypersonic missiles. Anti-missile interceptors can be deployed on group destroyer escorts.

The defense secretary was briefed last month on the Chinese military threat by intelligence officials at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

The briefing included details on Chinese military plans to take over Taiwan using surprise, lightning-fast attacks with the goal of PLA forces entering the capital of Taipei in 14 days. A similar strategy by Russia in the early days of its 2022 invasion of Ukraine failed, leading to the ongoing, years-long conflict.

It’s unclear whether Chinese hypersonic missile attacks were part of Mr. Hegseth’s recent briefing.

China has deployed two unique hypersonic missile systems that can fly at speeds greater than five times the speed of sound, and maneuver in striking targets in minutes while avoiding missile defenses.

The DF-17 medium-range missile can be armed with a hypersonic glide vehicle and is a significant advancement for PLA missiles, according to the Pentagon’s latest annual report on the PLA.

The 1,500-mile-range DF-17 can “be used to strike foreign military bases and fleets in the Western Pacific,” the report said.

The 5,000-mile-range DF-27 also can be armed with a hypersonic warhead, the report said, noting its payload can include land attack, conventional anti-ship, or nuclear warheads, the report said.

Mr. Hegseth’s November comments were made in the context of one of his announced priorities at the Pentagon: Reforming and streamlining the sclerotic U.S. weapons development system.

“The way our bureaucratic system works, where the speed of weapons procurement works, we’re always a decade behind in fighting the last war,” he said.

China, by contrast, is building weapons much faster and in much larger numbers, including both missiles, aircraft, warships and submarines.

Mr. Hegseth said in the interview that China is a major economic threat already and has infiltrated the U.S. electric grid for future attacks. China also is engaged in “elite capture” of officials and private sector leaders and institutions as part of its influence operations.

Beijing also is seeking to corner the international market on microchips, one reason the Chinese Communist Party is seeking to take over Taiwan, a world leader in advanced semiconductors, he said.

“I mean, they have a full spectrum, long-term view of not just regional but global domination,” Mr. Hegseth said, adding that the U.S. remains largely oblivious to the threat.

On preparing for a conflict with China, the defense secretary noted that over the past decade, the U.S. military has a “perfect record” in the results of all its simulated war games against Chinese forces.

“We lose every time,” he said.

The Pentagon is working to develop several types of hypersonic missiles in response to both Chinese and Russian high-speed maneuvering missiles.

For fiscal year 2025, the Pentagon budget request included $6.9 billion for hypersonic missile research.

Programs currently include the Navy’s hypersonic air-launched Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare Increment 2, known as HALO; the Army Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon, known as Dark Eagle; and the Air Force Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM).

The first Navy hypersonic missile was to be deployed this year but has been delayed until 2027.

NORTHCOM outlines Golden Dome missile defense

The general in charge of U.S. Northern Command, the military command with a lead role in homeland missile defense, recently told Congress that President Trump’s Golden Dome system could be a “three-dome” program.

Air Force Gen. Gregory M. Guillot said in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee that his role will be to recommend ways to defend the homeland from ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, cruise missiles, and drone and aircraft threats.

“I’ve provided our command’s recommendation of a three-dome approach with the first dome being a domain awareness dome, the second to handle [intercontinental ballistic missiles], and the third to handle the air threat to include cruise missiles,” Gen. Guillot said on April 9.

“Knowing that depending on what part of the profile hypersonics would be addressed, either in the ICBM dome or in the air dome,” he added.

The comments were the first by a senior military leader on the still-evolving concept Mr. Trump proposed in an executive order in January.

The order noted President Reagan’s efforts to establish a nationwide missile defense system that was opposed by arms control advocates who favored a mutually assured destruction policy.

Air Force Gen. Anthony Cotton, commander of the Nebraska-based U.S. Strategic Command, said during testimony with Gen. Guillot that his military experts also are engaged in studying options for the Golden Dome defense system, including from the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative.

“We’re looking at some of the things that came from the SDI initiative, some of the talking points, some of the op-eds and analysis and theories that happened then just to kind of capture what that looks like,” he said.

SDI was launched in 1984 but never deployed. It envisioned deploying advanced weapons systems on the ground and in space that could provide layered protection from ballistic missile attacks. It also included lasers and particle beam weapons.

One of its revolutionary concepts was called “Brilliant Pebbles,” a plan to use thousands of small satellites each armed with missiles similar to conventional heat-seeking missiles in low-Earth orbit, located over the Soviet Union.

The pebbles would detect missile launches and use infra-seekers to crash into and destroy enemy missiles as they entered space. The goal was to destroy multiple warhead missiles prior to their release from payloads.

The Golden Dome plan is needed to counter growing missile threats posed by China, Iran, North Korea and Russia.

NORTHCOM, Strategic Command and the Space Force are working on a joint requirements report to be presented to the president and Pentagon in the coming months on the outline of the planned Golden Dome defense system.

Current U.S. missile defenses against ICBMs are limited to 44 missile interceptors deployed in Alaska and California that were designed solely to counter a limited North Korean missile attack.

The new system is expected to include capabilities to counter Chinese, Russian, North Korean and Iranian missiles of various types and capabilities.

Pentagon space policymaker John Hill testified at the recent hearing that the department has completed a 60-day study on Golden Dome that is now in the hands of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Chinese fighters captured in Ukraine

Details are emerging about the Chinese nationals fighting alongside Russian military forces in Ukraine.

News reports from Ukraine revealed that one of two Chinese prisoners of war captured by the Ukrainians, Wang Guangjun, said he was recruited to join the conflict by a Russian military promotional video posted on Douyin, the Chinese version of the U.S. video-sharing app TikTok.

The captured Chinese fighter said he was enticed by Russian videos showing “flashy and cool” videos of the Russian soldiers and weapons.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has stated that more than 150 Chinese nationals currently are engaged in the conflict on behalf of the Russian military.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper published a report on one of the Russian videos that showed a Russian with the statement, “Is this the type of defender you dream of becoming?” and “You’re a man. Be it.”

The recruitment pitch offers Chinese fighters a monthly salary of $2,500.

Chinese affairs analysts note that the fact that the videos circulated widely on social media, which is rigorously censored by the Chinese Communist Party, is an indication of Beijing’s tacit support for the Chinese fighters going to the war.

Mr. Wang told reporters in Kyiv on Monday that he was hit by some type of Russian chemical weapon shortly after he was captured by a Ukrainian soldier.

“I was losing my strength and fainting … Then I felt someone grabbing my collar and pulling me out into the fresh air,” he said through an interpreter.

Mr. Wang and a second Chinese fighter, Zhang Renbo, are the first Chinese nationals captured in the conflict.

Both soldiers said they had no connection to the Chinese government and signed contracts with the Russian military on their own.

China has been supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine through propaganda and weapons technology, according to U.S. officials.

• Contact Bill Gertz on X @BillGertz.

• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.

washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz

12. Former INDOPACOM commander urges clarity of US intent to defend Taiwan

Former INDOPACOM commander urges clarity of US intent to defend Taiwan

Stars and Stripes · by Wyatt Olson · April 17, 2025

Retired Adm. Harry Harris, former commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, speaks during a Pacific Forum event in Waikiki Beach, Hawaii, on April 15, 2025. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)

WAIKIKI BEACH, Hawaii — America should abandon its policy of “strategic ambiguity” toward Taiwan and instead declare outright whether it will or will not defend the island if attacked by China, a former head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said Tuesday.

“There is no country more clear about what it intends to do about Taiwan than China,” retired Adm. Harry Harris said in the keynote speech at an event marking the 50th anniversary of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum, a foreign policy research institute.

“We should be equally clear, and we should never allow China to dictate America’s foreign policy with regard to Taiwan,” he said.

Harris retired from a 40-year Navy career after heading INDOPACOM from 2015 to 2018. He then served as U.S. ambassador to South Korea until 2021.

“China seeks to isolate and then dominate Taiwan, and that runs counter to American interests,” Harris said.

He cited recent statements by Adm. Samuel Paparo, current INDOPACOM commander, that China’s ever-growing naval maneuvers in waters off Taiwan are not exercises but rather rehearsals for actual invasion.

China regards Taiwan, a self-governed democracy lying just off its southeast coast, as a renegade province that must be brought under Beijing’s control.

The U.S. has for decades maintained “strategic ambiguity” about what military actions it would take in the event China moved to take the island by force.

During his first trip to Japan as president in May 2022, Joe Biden seemed to suggest that the policy of ambiguity was ending. But a month later in Singapore, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin declared the policy “unchanged and unwavering.”

Harris said he advocates clarity versus ambiguity because “there are three constituents that deserve to know if the United States is going to defend Taiwan or not and not leave it up to some ambiguous agreement or promise at the time of impact.”

“The first constituent is Taiwan,” he said. “They ought to know so they can make the decision whether to arm up or capitulate.

“China ought to know so they can make a decision whether they’re going to invade Taiwan or not. I mean, if they invade Taiwan, they’re going to lose hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines, whatever they have, in a pitched battle over Taiwan.”

The third and most important constituent is the American citizenry, he said.

“You ought to know that your daughters and sons who are wearing the uniform of our nation are going to fight and potentially die over Taiwan,” he said.

Although the U.S. in 1979 switched formal recognition from Taiwan to China, it continues to supply arms to Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act, passed by Congress the same year.

Under its “One China” policy, the U.S. acknowledges Beijing’s view that it has sovereignty over Taiwan, which split from the mainland in 1949, but considers Taiwan’s status as unsettled.

President Donald Trump has not clarified where his second administration stands on the issue of defending Taiwan.

Trump was uncharacteristically mum in February when a reporter asked if his policy would not allow China to take Taiwan by force.

“I never comment on that,” he said. “I don’t comment on it because I don’t want to ever put myself in that position.”

During last year’s presidential election campaign, Trump said Taiwan needed to “pay us for defense” and increase its own defense expenditures.

In the March/April issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, authors Jennifer Kavanaugh and Stephen Wertheim argue that America must reject “the misguided idea that the United States’ survival and prosperity turn on Taiwan’s political status.”

“Washington must make a plan that enables Taiwan to mount a viable self-defense, allows the United States to assist from a distance, and keeps the U.S. position in Asia intact regardless of how a cross-strait conflict concludes,” the authors wrote.

Stars and Stripes · by Wyatt Olson · April 17, 2025

13. The Trump Administration's Pursuit of a Sino-Russian Schism

Folly or fool's errand?

Maybe so but splitting alliances is an important part of any strategy. Is it impossible? Perhaps. Should we try? (yes but perhaps not at the expense of our own alliances).

Conclusion:

The evolution of the Sino-Russian strategic partnership, or Alliance, or whatever one fancies it, shows that both Putin and Xi recognize that there is simply too much at stake to allow another Sino-Russian schism. Putin will assuredly take advantage of whatever the Trump administration is willing to give up at the expense of US allies and partners, and that enables him to attain his enduring strategic objectives. What is also likely is he will not violate the 2001 Sino-Russian Treaty in a trade for better relations with the US. It is the Sino-Russian strategic alignment that is the one constant that provides them both stability and advantage against the West. Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward Denmark over Greenland, Panama over the Panama Canal, and Ukraine over its sovereignty as a free and independent state prove that the Sino-Russian strategic partnership has enabled Xi and Putin to move closer than ever toward establishing the international order they generically envision—defined by individual sovereign geographical spheres of influence within an international order dominated by a handful of great powers. The Trump administration’s commitment to a fundamentally flawed and misinformed policy to divide the Sino-Russian strategic partnership was and remains a road to failure. Additionally, this pursuit comes at the expense of US alliances and partnerships, arguably at the heart of what made America great, so this road to failure will likely have exponentially larger, irreversible, and negative consequences on the US this time around.

The Trump Administration's Pursuit of a Sino-Russian Schism

By Garrett Campbell

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/04/17/the_trump_administrations_pursuit_of_a_sino-russian_schism_1104608.html?mc_cid=918c9cc384

The pro-Russian tack taken by the Trump administration seems puzzling and even counterproductive to most Americans, to say nothing of our NATO allies and global partners. Recent polling shows a majority of Americans do not trust Putin, that there remains majority support among Americans for Ukraine, and that Americans reject the idea of abandoning NATO or our leadership position among our alliances and partnerships. Why, then, is the Trump administration’s messaging disconnected from domestic and international audiences?

It is not so puzzling when one considers it in the context of the first Trump administration’s major foreign policy goal of driving a wedge between Russia and China. While there may be dismay at Trump’s pro-Putin turn, pursuing a Sino-Russian schism is on par with what he and other Republican presidential candidates said they were going to do. Trump was explicit in his intent to return to this policy. The current Trump administration faces a growing dilemma beyond the failures of the first administration’s policy efforts that sought to create a schism but only solidified the strategic partnership in ways not seen throughout history. None of the conditions to effect such a division existed then, nor do they exist today. The two strategic partners spent nearly two decades ensuring they were aligned to prevent such a schism, so pursuing an ill-informed initiative made failure virtually inevitable. The factors that bind them now exist in spades, making another effort to divide the Sino-Russian strategic partnership even more likely doomed to failure. Worse, in zealously reimplementing a failed policy, it is clear Trump’s team has done so without evaluating and assessing why it failed in the first place. Seemingly obtuse to the realities of the relationship, they have decided to court Putin at the expense of our alliances and partnerships. This has committed the US to a potentially self-destructive geopolitical road to failure.

Flawed Assumptions

When the Trump administration released the 2018 National Security Strategy, a key theme was the country’s need to transition from twenty years of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to Great Power Competition (GPC). The reinvigoration of the Nixon-Kissinger strategic balance of power triangle and the explicit need to fracture the Sino-Russian strategic partnership was a central theme within this shift. As expected, the State and Defense Departments enthusiastically began developing approaches to drive a wedge between the two strategic partners. Policymakers and strategists cited a collection of potential areas for exploitation. These included the historic Sino-Russian discord involving mistrust, territorial disputes, and power imbalances leading to senior-junior relationships. These areas were all deemed ripe for exploitation. However, almost two years later, there was a universal acknowledgment that efforts had fallen flat, and attempts to play on these had worsened the situation by drawing the two significantly closer.

The recognition that the policy had failed preceded the Biden administration. Thus, the Biden national security team abandoned the misguided undertaking upon taking the reins. It had been abandoned because it failed to achieve its objectives and resulted in undesirable and opposite outcomes—not because a formal evaluation or assessment was performed that would have shown that it was set to fail from its inception and that the pursuit of such a policy was fundamentally misinformed. Initial assumptions were flawed. To be clear, it does not appear that either administration, including the current Trump administration, has ever questioned the strategic partnership within the context of the Sino-Russian normalization process that started well before the Cold War ended and evolved throughout the post–Cold War era to form the strategic partnership we are now confronted with. Multiple administrations failed to understand that the mutual understanding of the implications associated with their Cold War division brought the two partners together, and this mutual understanding has created a rock-solid commitment to avert such a schism again.

A Misinformed Attempt to Exploit the Unexploitable

The issues the national security community, think tanks, and academia offered for exploitation to divide the Sino-Russian partnership were and are real. However, they were no longer valid given how the post–Cold War Sino-Russian relationship evolved, how it currently exists, and how far they have come to achieving their collective and individual strategic objectives vis-à-vis the US. For both partners, allowing another schism to occur would be tantamount to suicide.

The historical animosity between the Chinese, Russian, and Soviet regimes is well-known, documented, and factual. The two-decade-long formal normalization process required them to address this and related factors. The two strategic partners have been surprisingly successful in addressing these disputes at all levels of government and suppressing a reflash of divisive issues. As such, the top-down continuous leadership interactions now represent the tip of the iceberg.

There is also no argument that their cultural animosity, accompanied by deeply rooted racism and distrust, has manifested itself in almost continuous territorial disputes. Territorial disputes characterized their long history, led them to the brink of a nuclear conflict in 1969, and served to collapse three of their four alliance-like treaties. Lingering territorial disputes remain, but they have been solved or shelved to prioritize their areas of strategic convergence. They do recurringly show themselves, but much like bait, their reappearance serves more to reinforce the misinformed ideas among US policymakers that they can be exploited than actually resulting in discord between the two.

The Cold War Sino-Soviet ideological competition for global communist leadership is also well documented. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin for his violent and excessive suppression of Soviet society alienated Mao. Mao viewed Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin as traitorous. Nearly fifteen years later, after another Alliance treaty failure, the two engaged in a vicious border conflict over a territorial disputed island. It brought them to the brink of a nuclear conflict. Today, the divisive ideology is absent, the military forces along the Sino-Russian border long gone even before the Ukraine War, and the discord replaced by a convergence of strategic interests focused on a mutual desire to realign the international order and establish sovereign spheres of influence.

In summary, none of the exploitable conditions and divisive issues US policymakers put forth to validate their pursuit of a second Sino-Russian schism exist today. The playing field is completely different, thus the exploitable seams offered by national security professionals have proven to be bunk. At best, where they still exist, they are subjugated to the partner’s commitment to strategic alignment, including a vision of a world order that reverses the outcome of the Cold War. This reveals a mutual understanding of their past failure in allowing the US to divide them and that should they allow such a schism to occur again, it would have similar existential ramifications for both of them.

Discounting the Sino-Russian Treaty

The Trump administration has again failed to undertake a basic analysis of the Sino-Russian relationship. As evidence of this failure, consider that Trump officials—as well as the national security community, think tanks, and academic experts that advise them—never reference, showing indifference to, the nearly quarter-of-a-century-old Sino-Russian treaty that has successfully underpinned the relationship. Neither side has violated the treaty since its signature in 2001. Thus, there is little recognition that this treaty is a historical one-off. The treaty, the 2001 Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, while generic, has been in the background as they weathered the unipolar moment and individual confrontations with the West and evolved their relationship to the point where Xi stated, “Right now there are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Unlike Western treaties, which seal the deal and outline how the signatories will comport themselves going forward, the 2001 treaty embodies the Eastern cultural mindset whereby treaties are not where negotiations stop but where negotiations involving individual strategic interests begin. This reality is widely overlooked.

The 2001 treaty was signed after a nearly two-decade effort to normalize relations. It has served two purposes. First, it negated the reasons two Trump administrations believed they could pursue a Nixon-Kissinger geostrategic balance of power triangle coup part deux by allowing them to move beyond their divisive squabbles and ensuring no exploitable daylight for US policymakers. With this success and the trust developed along the way, the treaty enabled the strategic partnership’s evolution. Second, their diplomatic, economic, and military relationship has exponentially increased. Beyond the forty-four face-to-face meetings between Xi and Putin since 2012, it established dozens of working groups across the depth and breadth of their government’s ministries. These have allowed them to address a spectrum of issues that include space exploration and 5G technologies, the establishment of bilateral and multilateral military exercises and patrols, the transfer and collaboration of military and dual-use technologies that have the potential to erode and degrade Western advantages, and diplomatic coordination within international organizations. The reality of the relationship was best captured by Mikko Hautala, the former Finnish ambassador to Russia, who stated, “The PRC-Russian relationship is much closer than we think. They have had almost monthly senior leadership meetings (since 2020). They are serious about developing relations and are focused on a common strategic goal. The number and nature of the participants impart more in play than we want to acknowledge. They have a common fundamental idea that they must move the world to multipolar world, weaken position of West, and exert their power.”

When think tanks and academics mention the 2001 treaty, they often minimize it by saying it falls short of a mutual defense alliance. By default, they compare it to the North Atlantic Treaty. Taken at face value, this is indeed true. However, the treaty does contain security and defense-related articles. Arguably, Article 9 provides for a generic NATO Article 4 by similarly stating they will hold consultations when one of the partners deems peace is threatened, undermined, or their security interests are threatened by aggression. Unlike NATO Article 4, Article 9 goes further, saying that the consultations are to “eliminate such threats.” It leaves room for interpretation for sure but imparts that they will act. The aggregation of this article with the other security and defense-related articles imparts a broad relationship. Again, generic in a manner, and nothing so narrow as a collective defense clause defined by the term “armed attack” such as NATO’s Article 5. That said, even NATO struggles with understanding the application of Article 5, so while it is true that the 2001 treaty does not explicitly specify that an attack on one is an attack on both, that does not mean this context is implicitly absent.

The 2001 treaty was never meant to mirror the North Atlantic Treaty. It is generic and vague by design. This is what has given it its strength and longevity. Sino-Russian leaders built and have leveraged the treaty to mitigate the very issues the US believes it exploited during the Cold War and again serve as exploitable vulnerabilities. Having been on the receiving end of it once before, they understand the US play. The treaty has endured as a framework allowing them to mutually consult, act to close off any exploitable daylight, and—as their relations with the US have soured—evolve from an emphasis on alleviating their relational discord to empowering collaboration in the pursuit of their enduring strategic objectives involving the establishment of advantages over the West across diplomatic, informational, military, and economic areas. While US policymakers understand the success of their own Cold War strategy, they somehow seem obtuse to the fact that the victims of its success are well aware of the past and present ramifications.

Understanding Existential Outcomes

Neither side expected the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Nor did they foresee the subjugation of the PRC to the Western economic order during the initial two decades of the post–Cold War era. The Cold War Sino-Soviet schism left both open to regime change, but it was only the Soviets who succumbed to this fate. Nearly two years before this, it was the suppression of the Tiananmen Square democratic protests that likely averted a similar fate for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Just as it did then, a Sino-Russian schism would have existential repercussions today. For Xi, it would lead to China’s isolation on the world stage, the CCP’s domestic discreditation, and potential economic collapse as the West attempted to undermine China’s economy.

For Putin, as the weaker economic player, hence the junior in the senior-junior analogy, losing China by willingly violating the treaty, thus collapsing it, or inadvertently through a US-China confrontation, would lead to the economic subjugation of Russia to the West. This represents the complete antithesis of Putin’s vision of the international order and the establishment of a Eurasian-centric order with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union at its geographic and political center. It would also have significant implications for Russia’s vision for the Arctic and its control over the Northern Sea Route. While the results of a modern-day Sino-Russian schism might be reversed from those of the Cold War due to their relative power disparities, they would nonetheless be existential to both parties. Ignoring that both parties are likely aware of this is ignorance, arrogance, or both.

Committed to a Road to Failure

The Trump administration has waded headlong into reinvigorating a failed policy without acknowledging why it failed during the first administration. Further, the administration seems to have a limited understanding of the actual state of play within the Sino-Russian relationship. Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing in 1986 began the long road to normalization of relations and, more importantly, the reversal of the US success in dividing the two during the Cold War. Both Putin and Xi understand this legacy and the rationale behind why their predecessors undertook the journey of normalizing relations. It was to rectify their schism. The fact the US national security community, think tanks, and academia openly tout the success of the Nixon-Kissingerian geostrategic balance of power triangle while simultaneously dismissing the longest enduring Sino-Russian Treaty meant to reverse it, as well as enabling the relationship to evolve into a strategic partnership, is profound. All evidence is that regardless of their squabbles, at least for now, the strategic partners are firmly aligned to their 2001 treaty, thus ensuring there is little meaningful exploitable daylight between the two for US policymakers to pursue.

The evolution of the Sino-Russian strategic partnership, or Alliance, or whatever one fancies it, shows that both Putin and Xi recognize that there is simply too much at stake to allow another Sino-Russian schism. Putin will assuredly take advantage of whatever the Trump administration is willing to give up at the expense of US allies and partners, and that enables him to attain his enduring strategic objectives. What is also likely is he will not violate the 2001 Sino-Russian Treaty in a trade for better relations with the US. It is the Sino-Russian strategic alignment that is the one constant that provides them both stability and advantage against the West. Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward Denmark over Greenland, Panama over the Panama Canal, and Ukraine over its sovereignty as a free and independent state prove that the Sino-Russian strategic partnership has enabled Xi and Putin to move closer than ever toward establishing the international order they generically envision—defined by individual sovereign geographical spheres of influence within an international order dominated by a handful of great powers. The Trump administration’s commitment to a fundamentally flawed and misinformed policy to divide the Sino-Russian strategic partnership was and remains a road to failure. Additionally, this pursuit comes at the expense of US alliances and partnerships, arguably at the heart of what made America great, so this road to failure will likely have exponentially larger, irreversible, and negative consequences on the US this time around.

Garrett I. Campbell, CAPT, USN (Ret) is currently supporting NATO’s Strategy, Plans, and Policy Directorate in the implementation of its Warfare Development Agenda (WDA).

This article appeared originaly at Foreign Policy Research Institute.

14. U.S. Tries to Crush China’s AI Ambitions With Chips Crackdown

Graphics/data at the link.

U.S. Tries to Crush China’s AI Ambitions With Chips Crackdown

New chip restrictions for Nvidia and AMD show administration’s determination to battle China on tech advances as well as trade

https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trump-chip-exports-nvidia-h20-china-amd-d2c4c866?st=b4fvRh&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Liza Lin

Follow and Amrith Ramkumar

Updated April 17, 2025 5:18 am ET

Nvidia under Chief Executive Jensen Huang has been privately pushing back against chip-export restrictions. Photo: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg

New U.S. chip-export limits that rocked global markets on Wednesday are the clearest sign yet from the Trump White House that whatever advances China makes in AI will have to happen without America’s help.

Trump administration officials have signaled for months that they were considering a crackdown on exports of processors from U.S. companies such as Nvidia NVDA -6.87%decrease; red down pointing triangle that have helped enable major Chinese advances in artificial intelligence. The latest reckoning came this week, with U.S. authorities moving to stop the flow of billions of dollars of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices AMD -7.35%decrease; red down pointing triangle artificial-intelligence chips to the country.

The move, spurred in part by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s surprising success in building powerful models with less computing power, put an end to Nvidia’s ability to skirt U.S. constraints on sales by tweaking its chips. While the changes affect a relatively small portion of the companies’ business, they squash any hopes of unimpeded future chip sales to China.

Shares of Nvidia and AMD each dropped around 7% on Wednesday. The broader stock market sagged on news that any hope of a reprieve from the highest “reciprocal tariffs” imposed on China was short-lived.

Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang isn’t giving up on China. On Thursday, Chinese state media said Huang arrived in Beijing, where he met a Chinese official and said the country was an important market for his company. He also visited Beijing in January for a company event.

The new restrictions, which affect Nvidia’s H20 chips and AMD’s MI308 products, capped a roughly two-week blitz that created profound market whiplash and underscored the Trump administration’s determination to engage China on many fronts. The battle for tech supremacy is set to unfold in much the same way as the trade war: with toughness and a bit of chaos.

Trump imposed a 145% tariff last week, and then exempted processors, smartphones and other electronics from it days later. On April 9, the federal government told Nvidia that it would be subject to new export restrictions.

‘Stop using our tools’

Publicly, Nvidia has said selling to China helps bring in revenue that it uses to keep its global lead in AI. Privately, it has pushed back against any new restrictions, arguing that China has already been able to produce some chips comparable to its H20, people familiar with the issue said.

Share of Nvidia’s revenue, by source

100%

U.S.

CHINA

TAIWAN

OTHER

2021

2022

2023

2025

2019

2020

2024

Note: Nvidia's fiscal year ends the last Sunday of January. Revenue by geographic source is based upon the billing location of the customer.

Source: the company

In the fiscal year ended in January, Nvidia sold around $12 billion of H20s, accounting for about 70% of the company’s China sales, according to analysts.

China’s ability to access Nvidia’s H20s had been on the radar of U.S. policymakers since the last administration. Officials who realized the value of H20s in AI development had privately discussed how to handle purchases of the chip, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Such talks continued under the Trump administration, and were given added urgency earlier this year when the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek surprised Silicon Valley and Wall Street with its low-cost but powerful models. The emergence of DeepSeek has boosted the adoption of AI models in China, driving up demand for Nvidia’s H20 and other chips.

During his nomination hearing in January, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that Nvidia chips drove the development of DeepSeek’s model and that such American assistance had to end.

“If they’re going to compete with us, let them compete, but stop using our tools to compete with us,” he said. “I’m going to be very strong on that.”

On Wednesday, a new report on DeepSeek from a congressional committee focused on China recommended tightening export controls and boosting funding for the Commerce Department office that oversees them.

Changing suppliers

Chinese customers rushed to make purchases, anticipating a ban would come soon. In the first three months of this year, Nvidia received around $18 billion of orders for servers and modules equipped with the H20, a higher value of orders than Nvidia’s total revenue from China during the last fiscal year, according to people familiar with the purchases. The biggest buyers were Chinese cloud-computing companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance, the people said.

If the U.S. doesn’t grant any exemptions, the move would cut off an important source of computing power used by Chinese companies and research houses, and could increase demand for local substitutes.

Chinese cloud-service providers originally planned to source 50% of AI accelerator demand in 2025 using H20 processors and would now likely turn to Huawei and Cambricon AI chips, analysts from Citigroup wrote in a report Wednesday.

Beijing has been pushing for the development of its own chip industry independent of U.S. technology and encouraging wider adoption of domestic substitutes.

Nvidia said it would take charges of around $5.5 billion in its first quarter, ended in April, because of the new restrictions. AMD said it expected charges of up to $800 million. Shares of ASML fell after the maker of equipment needed to make semiconductors reported weak quarterly orders and said tariffs were fueling uncertainty.

An Nvidia booth at a 2021 conference in China. Photo: Costfoto/DDP/ZUMA Press

Write to Liza Lin at liza.lin@wsj.com and Amrith Ramkumar at amrith.ramkumar@wsj.com

15. What Is an AI Supercomputer and Why Is Trump Talking About It?

Excerpts:

For one thing, it is closer to Mexico, the current hub of AI server manufacturing. Of the servers imported by the U.S.—including AI and non-AI servers—about 70% come from Mexico, according to a report by Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Spacious Texas offers plentiful energy and a business-friendly environment, said Adriana Cruz, executive director of economic development at the governor’s office. In February, representatives of Taiwan’s major AI server makers met Gov. Greg Abbott to discuss expansion in the state.

The Stargate Project, another plan touted by Trump, has said it would spend $500 billion building out AI. The initial phase of data centers is planned for Abilene, Texas. Apple has said it plans a new factory in the state. Texas “will be the center of AI infrastructure,” said Cruz.

Still, industry observers said the headline-grabbing announcements should be viewed with caution until the companies deliver concrete results.

What Is an AI Supercomputer and Why Is Trump Talking About It?

President touts U.S. production by Nvidia, which sees Texas as artificial-intelligence hub

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/what-is-an-ai-supercomputer-and-why-is-trump-talking-about-it-5bb24561?st=9AMicq&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Yang Jie

April 17, 2025 5:35 am ET

Nvidia’s high-end technology has been critical to the advance of artificial intelligence. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News

President Trump enthused on social media this week that chip maker Nvidia NVDA -6.87%decrease; red down pointing triangle would build “A.I. SUPERCOMPUTERS” in the U.S. The company hopes to boost its operations in the U.S. while its business with China has just taken a hit from Trump administration export curbs.

What machines is Trump talking about, and why will they be American-made? Here is a guide:

What is a supercomputer?

“Supercomputer” has generally referred to computers designed to perform calculations and simulations at a speed and scale far beyond what everyday computers can do. They specialize in tasks that require crunching a lot of numbers at once, such as forecasting the weather or modeling what happens inside an atom.

Traditionally supercomputers use a large number of central processing units. Those are similar to the type of chip that runs the show in a personal computer or smartphone, but inside a supercomputer there could be tens of thousands of processors working together in parallel, connected by a high-speed network.

Haven’t supercomputers been around for a long time?

Yes, they go back to the 1960s. Supercomputers have been used especially at government laboratories and universities in countries such as the U.S., China and Japan.

So is the AI supercomputer Trump mentioned another one of these supercomputers?

Not exactly. What Nvidia has in mind is a big computer packed with hundreds or thousands of graphics processing units, or GPUs. Unlike most existing supercomputers, these computers focus on training artificial-intelligence models—the kind used in chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. GPUs are especially useful for these tasks.

Nvidia’s main customers are companies such as Apple and Microsoft that offer AI-powered services, as opposed to university or government research groups.

What’s the difference between Nvidia’s ‘AI supercomputer’ and other machines that power AI?

It is a difference of degree, not of kind, according to people in the industry. In recent years, Nvidia’s high-end GPUs have played a key role in advancing AI, and the high-performance computers built with them are often called AI servers. These are packed together in big computer farms called data centers.

Nvidia didn’t offer a precise definition of when an AI server turns into an AI supercomputer, but it likely wanted to emphasize the high performance of new machines that use a lot of its latest Blackwell chips.

Where will these machines be made?

Nvidia said it has commissioned more than a million square feet of manufacturing space to build and test its Blackwell chips in Arizona and build AI servers in Texas. The company is working with Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics maker, on a plant in Houston and with another Taiwanese manufacturer, Wistron, on a plant in Dallas.

I’ve read it’s impractical to build high-tech products like the iPhone in the U.S. Why are AI servers different?

Price sensitivity is a big difference. Even a $100 price increase may induce consumers to shun a smartphone. But the big U.S. companies that buy servers are willing to pay more for hardware close to home. They can absorb the higher costs in the U.S.

Also, making an iPhone may require hundreds of thousands of manual workers so the level of hourly wages matters. The assembly of an AI server is highly automated, and the critical elements are engineering, design and software. The U.S. has a comparative advantage in these areas.

Why Texas and not Silicon Valley?

For one thing, it is closer to Mexico, the current hub of AI server manufacturing. Of the servers imported by the U.S.—including AI and non-AI servers—about 70% come from Mexico, according to a report by Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Spacious Texas offers plentiful energy and a business-friendly environment, said Adriana Cruz, executive director of economic development at the governor’s office. In February, representatives of Taiwan’s major AI server makers met Gov. Greg Abbott to discuss expansion in the state.

The Stargate Project, another plan touted by Trump, has said it would spend $500 billion building out AI. The initial phase of data centers is planned for Abilene, Texas. Apple has said it plans a new factory in the state. Texas “will be the center of AI infrastructure,” said Cruz.

Still, industry observers said the headline-grabbing announcements should be viewed with caution until the companies deliver concrete results.

This explanatory article may be periodically updated.

Write to Yang Jie at jie.yang@wsj.com

16. Thinking Through Deception on the Electromagnetic Spectrum

Excerpt:

Trickery will always play a role in warfare. New domains offer novel ways to manipulate and fool an opponent. Ambiguity-increasing deceptions, like Operation Bodyguard or through the use of multispectral decoys, cause the adversary to hesitate and waste resources. Meanwhile, ambiguity-decreasing deceptions, like Cannae or Bolo, enable artful ambushes, which increase surprise and lead to favorable casualty ratios. To continue that tradition, the United States should galvanize its investment, development, and incorporation of electromagnetic pods on drones, satellites, and vehicles to leverage surprise and secure success.

Thinking Through Deception on the Electromagnetic Spectrum - War on the Rocks

Michael Posey and David Zesinger

warontherocks.com · by Michael Posey · April 17, 2025

The art of deception, as old as war itself, can garner astonishment when one side’s competence enables it to pull off an audacious plan. Warfighters can exploit the electromagnetic spectrum to deceive as we increasingly sense and understand the battlefield through this medium with equipment like radar, infrared, and passive detection systems. Historical cases when planners employed military deception offer valuable lessons for how the joint force could design its future forces.

On the land, in the air, on the sea, and in space, multi-spectral electromagnetic emitters enable platforms to mask their identities across several parts of the spectrum. For example, these signature-altering tools could cause the adversary, using an array of sensors, to think it detects an unarmed cargo plane. In reality, a bomb-carrying remotely piloted aircraft flies by, wearing an electromagnetic disguise. These emitters can obfuscate operations and hoodwink America’s adversaries, whether using ambiguity-increasing or -decreasing types of military deception.

Ambiguity-increasing military deceptions dazzle an adversary with too many choices regarding what friendly forces will do next. Ambiguity-decreasing deceptions do the opposite, causing adversaries to think — incorrectly — that they know precisely what moves friendly forces will make next, lulled into a finely crafted false reality. Using either type of deception, commanders can achieve an operational advantage, perhaps gaining enough initiative to turn the tide of a battle. We will first describe the value of military deception, then discuss the two types of military deception, and subsequently outline how deception — primarily through manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum via robotic or uncrewed platforms — can be employed to achieve operational advantages in future combat.

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Military Deception

Using military deception results in more favorable casualty ratios and increases the likelihood of achieving surprise. In his seminal work, Stratagem, Barton Whaley analyzed 124 military battles spanning from 1914 to 1969. He found that when the attacking forces employed no deception and no surprise, the casualty ratios were nearly even (1:1.1). However, offensive forces could achieve more favorable force ratios with surprise alone (1:2.0) or deception alone (1:1.3). With both deception and surprise, forces could obtain the most favorable casualty ratios (1:6.3). Whaley’s case studies serve as an essential reminder of the value of military deception that the joint doctrine on the topic highlights these takeaways from Stratagem in its first chapter.

Deception alone only alters force ratio calculations slightly. However, Whaley’s later scholarship ascertained that deception enables surprise. Whaley argues: “Deception has at least an 80% chance of yielding surprise, and the payoffs for surprise are impressively high.” Mark Cancian at the Center for Strategic and International Studies authored a fantastic report on how surprise can lead to an operational advantage in great power competition. Cancian’s research on deception and surprise highlights two notable takeaways. First, military deception works: Even when not wholly misled, adversaries will hesitate, squandering precious decision time if a deception creates uncertainty. Second, surprise enables a fleeting opportunity, temporal in nature, for one side to achieve the initiative. As an enduring principle of war, surprise and the deceptions that enable it will remain imperative for achieving an information advantage, even as modern-day tools of war evolve.

Deception Today Depends on the Spectrum

Today, the U.S. military employs joint electromagnetic spectrum operations across all domains. Former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. John Hyten declared this battlespace “critical to establishing information advantage.” The Government Accountability Office cites the increasingly congested and contested electromagnetic spectrum as a critical enabler to all other warfighting domains. Likewise, Russia and China continue to modernize their ability to operate and contest U.S. freedom of action in this arena. Because adversaries will sense future battlefields through the electromagnetic spectrum, the joint force can leverage the spectrum as a conduit to confuse or mislead adversaries.

Deceive to Befuddle or Mislead

Donald Herbig and Katherine Daniel classified two types of military deceptions: A-type and M-type. The ambiguity-increasing (A-type) deception presents the adversary with multiple friendly courses of action. Meanwhile, an ambiguity-decreasing (M-type, for misleading) causes an adversary to be “very certain and very wrong.”

Confuse Adversaries with Ambiguity

Successful ambiguity-increasing deceptions cause adversaries to delay or hesitate as the operational picture dazzles or confuses them. To protect Allied actions across Europe during World War II, the Allies executed a theater-wide deception plan known as Operation Bodyguard. Churchill remarked: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Operation Bodyguard aimed to keep Hitler guessing where Allied invasions might occur (e.g., France, Norway, or the Balkans). Today, a theater-wide “bodyguard of lies” could prove helpful for force preservation or contested logistics.

At the tactical level, ambiguity-increasing deceptions cause an adversary to waste expensive munitions and other military resources on cheap decoys or drones. In 2022, Ukraine successfully confused Russian forces with rudimentary decoys. As the war rages on, Ukraine continues to adapt and now employs multi-spectral decoys.

In modern combat environments, a force must disperse to survive. As a result, the U.S. military services have devised warfighting concepts like Agile Combat Employment and Distributed Maritime Operations. Electromagnetic spectrum decoys aid in confusing the adversary in this endeavor.

For a successful ambiguity-decreasing deception, where the adversary is certain and wrong, deceivers should understand a target’s pre-existing biases, implying an intimate relationship between intelligence and the deceiver. Deception planners value intelligence that gives insights into how an adversary thinks because deceivers know that it is far easier to fool an adversary into what they already believe, which forms the basis of Magruder’s principle. Leveraging this principle, some of history’s greatest warfighters have exploited their enemies via a lure or ambush.

Mislead to Lure and Spring Ambushes

Classic ambiguity-deception examples abound, from the Trojan horse to the walls of Jericho falling after trumpeting Israelites encircled the city, ostentatiously making the defenders believe there were more attackers. Another exemplary illustration takes place at the height of the Second Punic War. Hannibal and the cohort of Carthaginians and Celts he recruited crossing the Alps had devastated Italy for two years, yet Rome would not bend. Far from home and outnumbered, Hannibal sought to even the odds by seizing supplies in Cannae. Here, Hannibal used the terrain to funnel naïve Roman troops into a death trap. He deceived them by presenting a weak center as a juicy target. Additionally, he instructed his forces to fall back upon contact, luring the eager Romans into a noose buttressed by reinforced Carthaginian flanks. The Romans took the bait and were annihilated, with a 10:1 kill ratio, conceivably losing 20 percent of the Roman Republic’s fighting-aged males. Although Carthage ultimately lost the war, Hannibal cleverly manipulated an outsized, hellbent Roman army in battle, defeating them in their backyard.

Thousands of years later, American airmen were likewise far from home and contending with a defiant and capable enemy. Newly supplied Soviet MiG-21s had greatly enhanced the North Vietnamese air force. These state-of-the-art jets could adeptly intercept American F-105 Thunderchiefs, whose rocket-style design enabled them to deliver more ordnance than a World War II-era B-17 but also limited their maneuverability. As such, the affectionately dubbed “Thuds” flew predictable sorties. Fortunately, the Americans had their own Hannibal, Col. Robin Olds, a daring fighter pilot with an exquisite mustache, who conceived Operation Bolo to deceive and defeat the North Vietnamese.

Like Hannibal chose his terrain, Col. Olds planned to deceive his enemy into thinking they were confidently attacking a weak point and then spring the trap. He baited the MiG-21s into combat by masquerading his F-4 Phantoms, premier fighters of the day, as the North Vietnamese’s customary prey — the less agile F-105s. To conduct this simulation, the F-4s imitated F-105 radio chatter and protocols, and to solidify the ruse, they carried the Thud’s electronic countermeasure, QRC-160 pods, which rendered a convincing signature to the unsuspecting Vietnamese. Col. Olds’ masterful ambush resulted in a lopsided 7:0 kill ratio, a 4-month grounding of the North Vietnamese Air Force, and the inauguration of the Air Force tradition of mustache March. Deception proved successful yet again, this time in the skies, incorporating the exploitation of the electromagnetic spectrum to seal the deal.

Ubiquitous Opportunities for Spectrum Deception

These case studies demonstrate how deception can be effective when a force is constrained or mismatched, shedding light on achieving tactical overmatch in future combat. With decoys, it can boil down to economics: Guided missiles are expensive, while targets vary in importance and price point. In the air, on land or at sea, and seemingly in space, low-cost commercial off-the-shelf systems proliferate across the operational environment. The pervasiveness of these systems and the increasing pace of combat create opportunities for warfighters to either generate targeting dilemmas or conceive ambushes. Future deception, therefore, should be undergirded by the electromagnetic spectrum, and it would behoove forthcoming systems to be equipped with multi-spectral, modifiable signals to mask their true identity and obfuscate adversaries. Equipment like the joint threat emitter should be further developed and modified for ubiquitous drone use. The joint force should rapidly incorporate lessons learned from Ukraine’s practical investments in electronic warfare as they defend their homes from Russian aggression.

Electromagnetic warfare is just as critical in space as it is on the frontlines of Ukraine. Satellites are costly and not readily replaced — though the proliferation and massing of these assets is catching on. Nonetheless, decoys in space can preserve high-value satellites and complicate adversaries’ decision-making processes. Taking a note from theories of nuclear combat, a decoy — in air, space, or the maritime domain — can also serve as a missile sponge. Doing so misdirects an adversary’s attention elsewhere while absorbing hits and preserving forces. As seen in Operation Bolo, lures and ambushes become viable when enabled by existing technology that the adversary employs to sense and understand the environment. In 1967, Col. Olds used the QRC-160 pod to modify his aircraft’s flight profile, but today, the joint force can leverage low-cost multispectral electromagnetic warfare pods on aircraft, drones, satellites, vehicles, or even… elephants, if Hannibal were still around.

Invest in Spectrum Deception

Trickery will always play a role in warfare. New domains offer novel ways to manipulate and fool an opponent. Ambiguity-increasing deceptions, like Operation Bodyguard or through the use of multispectral decoys, cause the adversary to hesitate and waste resources. Meanwhile, ambiguity-decreasing deceptions, like Cannae or Bolo, enable artful ambushes, which increase surprise and lead to favorable casualty ratios. To continue that tradition, the United States should galvanize its investment, development, and incorporation of electromagnetic pods on drones, satellites, and vehicles to leverage surprise and secure success.

Become a Member

Michael Posey is an active duty E-2 Hawkeye naval flight officer with a sub-specialty in information systems and operations. He previously served as the course director for the Defense Military Deception Training Course at the Joint Forces Staff College. He currently serves on the U.S. Army War College faculty in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations.

David Zesinger is an active duty U.S. Space Force space operations officer. Formerly commander of the 23rd Space Operations Squadron, which provides command and control for over 200 satellites, he currently serves on the U.S. Army War College faculty in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Space Force, or Department of Defense.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Michael Posey · April 17, 2025

17. The Ukraine Dividend: Return on Investment of US Security Assistance

Excerpt:

The Department of Defense can reinforce this understanding of the value proposition for security force assistance by following three recommendations. First, elevate the value insights can have within an organization. While the US military places emphasis on intelligence and operations for its fielded force, security assistance organizations should place emphasis on its lessons learned, doctrine development, and concepts development. Second, understand the value in technology demonstrations and continuous improvement in fielded equipment. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the ultimate battle lab for developing more lethal capabilities; operators and industry need to be engaged in collecting these insights. Third, include learning as a security force assistance activity to support the joint force. Army doctrine on security cooperation does not discuss insights, but does highlight other activities like building access, presence, and influence. Making learning a part of the way return on investment is understood demonstrates comprehensively the value of security assistance. A down payment in Ukrainian security assistance now and into the future will pay dividends for Americans.

When I read articles like this I harken back to 2007-2008 when Security Forces Assistance was being (re)-invented.

Here are some excerpts from a briefing as the concept was emerging and USSOCOM was made the joint SFA proponent. I really think the former USSOCOM CDR and CSO/Deputy Commander had the right idea with this description of SFA: SFA is a process that integrates the Foreign Internal Defense (FID) mission (which is inherently and by definition Joint and Whole of Government) with Security Assistance (SA) programs (Title 10 and Title 22) to be able to train, advise, assist, and equip a friend, partner and ally (e.g., build partner capacity) in order to defend itself against internal and external threats.

There is not a consensus concerning the definition of SFA.
The unified action to generate, employ, and sustain local, host-nation, or regional security forces in support of a legitimate authority (FM 3-07 and USSOCOM SFA Fundamentals Document). The intent to enable foreign security forces to respond effectively to internal, external, and trans-national threats either unilaterally, or as part of an alliance or international coalition, (USSOCOM SFA Fundamentals Document Draft).

SFA is unified military action to generate, employ, or sustain local, host nation, or regional security forces in support of a legitimate authority. (from the USSOCOM GSC Executive Session 31 Oct 08)
Train, Advise, Assist and Equip for internal and external threats
Equip underpinned by Security Assistance and Security Cooperation in Steady State
With combat advisor role when required
SFA operates in context of a Whole of Government (similar to Foreign Internal Defense doctrine)

SFA is a process that integrates the Foreign Internal Defense (FID) mission (which is inherently and by definition Joint and Whole of Government) with Security Assistance (SA) programs (Title 10 and Title 22) to be able to train, advise, assist, and equip a friend, partner and ally (e.g., build partner capacity) in order to defend itself against internal and external threats, (USASOC G3 understanding of CDR USSOCOM and CSO intent)

Close doctrinal relationship between FID and SFA
As SFA doctrine continues to evolve it may be possible to merge them into a single, overarching construct (OR GO BACK TO FID!!)
Sourcing SFA requirements will be a shared SOF-GPF responsibility – GFM Process
“SFA Fundamentals” establishes a process ensuring “the right force is at the right place”
Current global sourcing process
SFA methodology to determine appropriate force
SOCOM is the Joint SFA Proponent

The Ukraine Dividend: Return on Investment of US Security Assistance - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Steven S. Lem · April 17, 2025

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After the 2021 collapse of the Afghan military, the value proposition of security force assistance in the twenty-first century was weak, at best. So, when Russia launched its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the impact that US assistance to Ukraine might have on the conflict’s outcome was debated. Three years and nearly $70 billion of military support later, the debate continues. But one consideration is often ignored. While security assistance provided to Ukraine has made a real difference in Ukraine’s defense, there is also significant value from the expenditure of American taxpayers’ dollars, in the form of the insights the US military can gain to prepare for the next conflict in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, or the homeland. This is a return on investment from security force assistance that involves gathering lessons learned and understanding how technology is changing the battlefield. This will pay dividends as the American military transforms, which means this assistance will save American lives if deterrence fails and the nation finds itself in twenty-first-century large-scale combat operations.

There is a real cost to conducting security force assistance. The Afghanistan Security Forces Fund exceeded $82 billion over fifteen years. As the US military withdrew in the summer of 2021, it appeared the return on investment made in building the Afghan military was null as the Taliban quickly overran security forces. Now the Taliban brandish US-made equipment like M4s and HMMWVs left behind.

Only a few months later, the Department of Defense would again be called upon to provide security assistance. The costs to train, equip, and advise the Armed Forces of Ukraine would mount quickly. Training and equipping Ukraine is even more costly than Afghanistan. The amount of security assistance provided to Ukraine in three years approaches the cost of training and equipping the Afghanistan military over fifteen years, largely because Ukraine is using some of America’s most expensive and advanced capabilities, like HIMARS (which has cost a total of $1.1 billion) and ATACMS (the missiles for which cost $1.5 million each). But supporting Ukraine has a return on investment that cannot be easily counted and was not seen in Afghanistan.

To be clear, context matters. The boots-on-the-ground nature of the US involvement in Afghanistan meant an emphasis on partnering and training, whereas discussions about US support to Ukraine have largely focused on weapons and other materiel provided to Ukrainian forces. And there are important definitional distinctions, as well. While security force assistance generally focuses on training and advising of partner forces, security assistance is a broader term that covers a broader set of aid and support activities. Yet the two go hand in hand. When the United States provides Ukraine with weapon systems, it also offers training, not just on how to operate each new system, but how to maintain it, incorporate it into planning processes, and integrate it into a combined arms framework. As a result, providing materiel means sustained contact between dedicated US personnel and Ukrainian forces using US systems in combat—an invaluable learning opportunity.

As the Department of Defense transforms itself from a force that was incrementally optimized for counterinsurgency operations over nearly two decades into a military oriented toward large-scale combat operations, the insights gained from Ukraine will pay dividends. Deployed advisors are able to discover lessons learned from primary sources, on everything from tactics to technology. Thus, assistance provided to Ukraine can help the Department of Defense transform its fighting force and the defense industrial base.

While the US military is larger, more advanced, and at a higher level of readiness than those of its allies and partners, it has not fought a near-peer adversary in decades. For three years, Ukraine has paid the price to show how unprepared the American military would be for modern war. For example, decades of air superiority masked the fact the Department of Defense does not have enough of—or the right mix of—air defense capabilities to defend itself from large-scale drone, glide bomb, cruise missile, and ballistic missile attacks. What the US military can learn from Ukraine—about modern air defense or in a range of subjects—is not just useful in preparing for a similar conflict scenario in Europe, but can be applied to defending the homeland or allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East, as well.

The US defense industrial base has spent billions developing and fielding equipment like main battle tanks, precision-guided munitions, and exquisite air defense systems. However, the Russian military has shown that the Abrams is vulnerable to cheap drones, that GPS-guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems can be jammed, and that the Patriot interceptor requires software updates against evolving Russian missile threats. Ukraine is paying the price in blood and territory to help improve US legacy systems. Using the same air defense example, what Raytheon, the manufacture of Patriot systems, can learn from Russia’s employment of the newly fielded Oreshnik ballistic missile may save American lives in future wars. The defense industrial base can learn how to increase US warfighters’ lethality globally by studying its applications in Ukraine’s security assistance today.

These lessons are only harnessed when American advisors take an active approach to learning how Ukraine is defending itself from Russia’s full-scale invasion. While the security assistance provided to Ukraine is helping defend “freedom, rules, and sovereignty”, there is immeasurable value in gaining insights from this modern war. While the US military is providing advice to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, it is also the Ukrainians who are advising the America of how to wage modern warfare. There is an adage—the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war—that effectively means what we do before a war pays dividends when one breaks out. This is true of security assistance, as well. By delivering it to Ukraine today, we are better prepared to win—and save American lives—on the battlefield tomorrow.

The issue raised by critics, of course, will be that learning the lessons of the war in Ukraine does not inherently require the delivery of billions of dollars in weapons. This is true—there are other methods of learning. The US military has a long history of sending observers to bring back lessons from ongoing conflicts. This criticism, however, misses two fundamental points. First, without US weapons and materiel, Ukraine likely would have struggled to fight as long as it has. If the early expectations of many experts—that Ukraine would be quickly defeated—had been fulfilled, there would not have been much of an opportunity to learn at all, and certainly not learning about how specific US systems perform in this war. And second, because security assistance is a broad framework, it encourages a more holistic appreciation of the many lessons to be learned than ad hoc studies. Moreover, with security assistance organizationally well established within the institutions of the joint force, lessons learned within this framework are more likely to disseminate across the US military and effect organizational adaptation throughout the force. In any case, this is not an argument that learning from the war is sufficient logic to underwrite all security assistance to Ukraine, but rather that it is a return on that investment that is too often ignored.

To maximize this return, the Department of Defense needs to embrace learning as a core function to feed insights back to the fielded force and defense industrial base. The character of warfare is constantly changing. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military had to adapt to insurgents’ innovations in employing roadside bombs, from command-wire, to radio-controlled, to victim-operated, to infrared detonations of improvised explosive devices. Today, it needs to similarly learn and adapt. In drone warfare, for instance, long-range drones now use Starlink for navigation and smaller drones use fiber-optic wire to evade electronic warfare capabilities. As the US military works to integrate drones into its operations even down to the small-unit level, organizations advising Ukraine have an opportunity to improve the way it does so. Establishing deliberate feedback mechanisms into how the force fights and trains is a way of demonstrating security assistance’s return on investment.

The Department of Defense can reinforce this understanding of the value proposition for security force assistance by following three recommendations. First, elevate the value insights can have within an organization. While the US military places emphasis on intelligence and operations for its fielded force, security assistance organizations should place emphasis on its lessons learned, doctrine development, and concepts development. Second, understand the value in technology demonstrations and continuous improvement in fielded equipment. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the ultimate battle lab for developing more lethal capabilities; operators and industry need to be engaged in collecting these insights. Third, include learning as a security force assistance activity to support the joint force. Army doctrine on security cooperation does not discuss insights, but does highlight other activities like building access, presence, and influence. Making learning a part of the way return on investment is understood demonstrates comprehensively the value of security assistance. A down payment in Ukrainian security assistance now and into the future will pay dividends for Americans.

Steven S. Lem is a US Army strategist currently attached to Security Assistance Group–Ukraine in Wiesbaden, Germany as a joint planner. He served as a campaign and contingency planner at US Army Europe and Africa after graduating from the US Army School of Advanced Military Studies.

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

Image credit: Airman 1st Class Jared Lovett, US Air Force

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Steven S. Lem · April 17, 2025

18. The Russia That Putin Made

What comes next?

Excerpts:

Imagining Russia after Putin may seem too distant and abstract, especially after efforts to oust him failed—including, most prominently, the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s 2023 mutiny. Thinking about ways to reconnect with Russia could even seem divisive. The unity that the West achieved on Ukraine before Trump’s reelection was an achievement. Now, with a pro-Putin president in the White House, European unity may seem even more precious. But many European countries, particularly those on NATO’s eastern flank, simply do not want to think about any kind of détente with the Kremlin even after Putin’s departure.

Yet they must. Western leaders need to face and address the concerns of their own citizens, many of whom do not want a costly open-ended confrontation with Russia. And imagining a pragmatic relationship would not be a mere intellectual exercise. It could be a tool to urge Russia toward a transition. Even if Putin would never react warmly to Western overtures, their existence could fragment his regime after he leaves. Putin has not groomed a successor because he fears the erosion of his power. If he eventually designates one, that person will be much weaker than he has been, creating space for rival political forces to jockey for influence. Even if no all-out succession battle erupts, Russia’s post-Putin transition may resemble the period in the 1950s after Stalin’s death, in which the emergence of de facto collective leadership allows for a turn toward liberalization and pragmatism.

The recent change in U.S. leadership caught Europe unprepared. So will a sudden changing of the guard in the Kremlin unless the West more actively imagines what its relationship with Russia could be after Putin. A forever war that cycles between cold and hot is not inevitable. But if Western leaders postpone discussing a different vision, they risk abetting Putin’s efforts to make confrontation with the West a permanent legacy.

The Russia That Putin Made

Foreign Affairs · by More by Alexander Gabuev · April 17, 2025

Moscow, the West, and Coexistence Without Illusion

Alexander Gabuev

May/June 2025 Published on April 17, 2025

Illustration by Gregori Saavedra

ALEXANDER GABUEV is Director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine changed the course of history. It did so most directly, of course, for the Ukrainians subjected to this brutal act of aggression. But the war also changed Russia itself far more than most outsiders grasp. No cease-fire, not even one brokered by a U.S. president fond of his Russian counterpart, can reverse the degree to which Putin has made confrontation with the West the organizing principle of Russian life. And no cessation of hostilities in Ukraine can roll back the extent to which he has deepened his country’s relationship with China.

As a result of the war, Putin’s Russia has become much more repressive, and anti-Westernism has only become more pervasive throughout Russian society. Since 2022, the Kremlin has conducted a sweeping campaign to quash political dissent, spread pro-war and anti-Western propaganda domestically, and create broad classes of Russians that benefit materially from the war. Tens of millions of Russians, including senior officials and many of the country’s wealthiest people, now view the West as a mortal enemy.

For three years, U.S. and European officials showed remarkable resolve in countering Putin’s aggression. But they also, at times unwittingly, played into Putin’s narratives that the West resents Russia and that its conflict with the country is existential. Western leaders’ strategy was marred by an absence of a coherent, long-term approach to Russia paired with rhetoric that could suggest it had a grander design than it did. In 2024, for example, Kaja Kallas—then the prime minister of Estonia and now the EU’s top diplomat, as the vice president of the European Commission and the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy—stated that Western leaders should not worry that NATO’s commitment to a Ukrainian victory could cause Russia to break apart. The Kremlin’s propaganda machine eagerly circulated this statement to prove that dismembering Russia is the West’s endgame.

U.S. President Donald Trump has disrupted the transatlantic alliance’s unity by seeking a swift end to the war. But even if Trump’s overtures to Putin yield a superficial thaw in the U.S.-Russian relationship, Putin’s fundamental mistrust of the West will make a genuine reconciliation impossible. He cannot be sure that Trump will successfully push Europe to restore ties with Russia, and he knows that in 2028, a new U.S. administration may simply make another policy U-turn. Few American corporations are lining up to get back into Russia. And Putin will not divest from his strategic relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The Kremlin will continue to embrace Chinese technology (including tools of digital repression), maintain its reliance on China’s markets and financial system, and deepen its security ties with Beijing, even if that puts it on a collision course with Washington.

The distastefulness of Trump’s appeasement strategy could nonetheless push other leaders, particularly in Europe, to double down on a containment approach or even display outright hostility toward Russia. But that, taken alone, would be a mistake. Putin’s regime will almost certainly not collapse from within. Deterrence must therefore remain the cornerstone of Western policy, and especially European strategy, at least in the near term.

Someday, however, Putin will be out of the picture. Even if, as is likely, Russia’s next leaders arise from his inner circle, they will have more flexibility in crafting the country’s trajectory—and some practical motives to correct course. Although its people are not restive, Putin’s Russia is internally weak. The most obvious way for Putin’s successors to improve the country’s position would be to rebalance its foreign policy. So even as Europe’s leaders shore up deterrence against Russia, they must start preparing to seize the window of opportunity that will open with Putin’s exit from the stage.

They must come up with a vision of a new kind of relationship with Russia, one shorn of the illusion that to become a solid economic and strategic partner for the West, the country must transform as completely as West Germany did after World War II. They must propose specific terms for a peaceful coexistence, such as arms control strategies and forms of economic interdependence that preclude weaponization by either side. And European leaders (as well as U.S. politicians who do not share Trump’s pro-Putin inclination) should begin communicating that vision by making all their Russia-related communications clearer—even, for instance, their announcements about increasing their countries’ military budgets.

Not everyone in the Kremlin shares Putin’s anti-Western obsession. In private, many Russian elites admit that the war in Ukraine was not only a moral crime but a strategic mistake. The easier it is for such pragmatists to imagine a better relationship with Western countries, the likelier they will be to prevail during the inevitable infighting that will follow the end of the Putin era. Changing the West’s message to Russia is not only good preparation for the future; it is also good policy for the present. If Western leaders stop reinforcing the Kremlin’s narrative that they are determined to foment open-ended confrontation with Russia, that could, in turn, diminish the appeal of populists on both the far right and the far left who claim that the defense-industrial complex is bent on making war forever.

But if, instead, Western leaders continue to suggest that it is useless even to discuss a more mutually beneficial form of coexistence with Russia, they risk setting the Kremlin’s future leaders on a dangerous path, feeling that they have no choice but to perpetuate all of Putin’s postures, including his dependence on China. Some in the West may feel that the past three years have taught them that they have very little ability to shape Russia’s trajectory. But they have tools they have not yet fully used—ones they would be unwise to surrender.

CONFLICT OF INTERESTS

During Putin’s first two stints in the Kremlin—between 2000 and 2008—Russia’s GDP nearly doubled thanks to ballooning commodity prices, an inflow of Western investment, market reforms, and an entrepreneurship boom. Compared with Russia’s dictatorial tsarist and communist eras and its chaotic decade after the Soviet Union fell, the country had never been so prosperous and so free at the same time. Although economic growth tailed off in the 2010s, the social contract remained largely intact.

Over the course of the war in Ukraine, however, the Russian economy and the social contract that economy propped up have undergone substantial changes. In Foreign Affairs in January 2024, the economist Alexandra Prokopenko described the situation the Kremlin faced as an “impossible trilemma.” The Kremlin needed to fund an increasingly costly war, maintain citizens’ living standards, and safeguard Russia’s macroeconomic stability—goals that could not be achieved simultaneously.

But Putin solved the puzzle. He chose to focus on funding war: between 2025 and 2027, the Russian government plans to spend about 40 percent of its state budget on defense and security, shortchanging other priorities such as health care and education. War has been good, economically, for a majority of Russians. After dipping slightly in 2022, Russia’s GDP grew by 3.6 percent in 2023 and by another 4.1 percent in 2024, thanks to defense spending. Major economic downsides from the war, such as double-digit inflation, began to emerge only in late 2024. Even after the guns fall silent in Ukraine, Russia’s economy will remain heavily militarized. The defense industry will have to replenish the military’s colossal loss of equipment, and Putin has embarked on an expensive military modernization plan.

If the war in Ukraine restarts or continues, Russians’ economic situation may become much bleaker. But that scenario is unlikely to generate serious pressure for regime change. The more the Russian economy has come under duress, the more Moscow has moved to strengthen repression. The Kremlin has criminalized criticizing the war and the Russian military, and it has launched high-profile legal cases against prominent and little-known dissidents alike. The regime has also dramatically expanded the number of people it officially deems “foreign agents” and its attacks on organizations considered “undesirable,” presenting war critics with a stark choice: exile abroad or prison at home. Police and security forces have every incentive to pursue such cases because officers are rewarded for the number of enemies they expose.

Even after the guns fall silent in Ukraine, Russia’s economy will remain militarized.

As Putin rendered the cost of criticizing his war prohibitive, he simultaneously made it a vehicle for wealth redistribution. Its prime beneficiaries, of course, have been members of his entourage and their patronage networks. Some of them have taken advantage of the departure of foreign and multinational corporations from Russia by buying depreciated assets or simply confiscating them, generally with the support of powerful insiders, such as the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Beyond the superrich, however, are tens of thousands of other opportunists who have benefited from war, such as the entrepreneurs who make money from sanctions-busting. Further down the totem pole, hundreds of thousands of white-collar professionals—particularly in IT, finance, and business services—are benefiting from higher salaries as their dissident peers emigrate and their skills become scarcer.

Finally, Putin has purchased support by buying off men mobilized to the front, workers in military plants, and their family members. According to the Kremlin, in June 2024 about 700,000 Russians were on the frontline. The average Russian soldier’s salary is now close to $2,000 a month, twice the national average and four times the overall average in the dozens of regions that have contributed the most conscripts. Since the start of the invasion, over 800,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded; the government has sent up to $80,000 to their families for each casualty or death. The Kremlin’s financial outlays have thus created a large group of people who owe their material advancement—and their career prospects—to an unjust war. In 2024, the Kremlin launched a program to train and place veterans in public-sector or government work.

War has also become a means for Russian public-sector workers to achieve upward social mobility. Civilian bureaucrats have a new career springboard: working in the occupied territories hastens their promotions. For the hundreds of thousands of Russians employed in counterintelligence and law enforcement, catching Western and Ukrainian agents and neutralizing antiwar activists and journalists is now a way to climb the career ladder. All this has made the Russian bureaucracy much more political. Even in formerly relatively pragmatic institutions such as the central bank, Western-trained technocrats are becoming warriors who fight Western sanctions.

Long before the full-scale war in Ukraine, and thanks to Putin’s repression, Russian society suffered from inertia and learned helplessness. But in recent years, the Kremlin has pursued extensive social engineering to embed distrust of the West in the Russian psyche. In September 2022, it introduced into all schools weekly propaganda sessions that teach pro-war narratives disguised as patriotism lessons. The state has become more interventionist in entertainment and culture, forcing independent-minded musicians, artists, and writers into exile; labeling dissident writers “extremist”; and organizing show trials of liberal intellectuals who opposed the war. Taking inspiration from the Chinese Communist Party, the Kremlin has sought to build a digital iron curtain, outlawing Instagram and Facebook and throttling YouTube, which nearly half of Russians over the age of 12 had previously used daily.

Of course, a black swan event could blow up this “Fortress Russia.” The recent, sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria demonstrated that even the most brutal regimes may be more fragile than they appear. But the outright fall of Putin’s regime remains unlikely. If the cash it needs to buy off potential critics starts to evaporate, that can be compensated for by more state brutality.

WAR DANCE

The war in Ukraine did not temporarily divert Russian foreign policy. It has changed it for good. Russia’s foreign policy has become subordinated to three goals: building alliances to support its war effort, sustaining an economy targeted by sanctions, and taking revenge on the West for its support of Ukraine. Russian officials have made major new investments in partnerships with regimes and entities willing to impose additional costs on the West, particularly North Korea, Iran, and Iranian proxies such as the Houthi militia in Yemen.

If the war ends and the United States lifts its sanctions, the Kremlin might temporarily halt some of its most audacious anti-American activities, including providing weapons to U.S. foes such as the Houthis. But it will retain the capacity to resume those activities once the Trump team is out of the door. The Kremlin has also worked to maintain and expand its ties to developing countries around the world by heavily discounting Russian commodities and boosting exports to India and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Most notably, Russia has decisively turned toward China. Before the war, the two countries were locked in a state of asymmetric interdependence, in which China had more leverage but Russia hedged its bets by maintaining trade, financial, and technological ties with Europe. Since 2022, however, Putin has accepted a much deeper dependence on China in exchange for Beijing’s war support. The Kremlin has managed to prosecute the war for three years thanks only to the flow of critical weapons components from China. The Russian economy has remained afloat because China now buys 30 percent of Russian exports, up from 14 percent in 2021, and supplies 40 percent of its imports, up from 24 percent before the war. Beijing also affords Moscow a yuan-denominated financial infrastructure with which to conduct foreign trade.

Russia has gambled that this dependence will pay off. Because Beijing is Washington’s primary opponent, strengthening China is, in the Kremlin’s view, a strategic investment in the demise of American global primacy. For that reason, Russia now supplies China with weapons designs it hesitated to share before 2022. It has encouraged its labs and universities to contribute to the Chinese innovation ecosystem, initiating joint Chinese-Russian projects in the natural sciences, applied mathematics, IT, and space. The number of Russians who work for Chinese companies such as Huawei has mushroomed. Moscow supplies China with cheap commodities such as oil and gas via land routes, securing Beijing’s access to resources in the event of a maritime blockade, as well as uranium for China’s nuclear weapons program.

BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES

During his 2024 reelection campaign, Trump promised to “un-unite” China and Russia. In a sense, as president, he appears to be trying to do so with his warm overtures to Putin. But no matter what efforts Trump makes, Russia under Putin will never be a country that does not pose a threat to Europe and the United States. Europe will need to keep working to deter the Russian regime’s capabilities—and prepare to do it with far less U.S. support. European leaders should still frame this endeavor as a transatlantic one, best pursued through NATO or, if Trump’s team will not engage, with a team of senior U.S. allies that includes foreign policy practitioners, military leaders, and American defense industry leaders.

The first priority is to scale up defense production. Analysts sometimes present this as a straightforward challenge, but it is not. If policymakers turn toward shoring up Europe’s security without simultaneously addressing the continent’s own anemic economic growth, they will only embolden populists who argue against increased defense spending and call for appeasing Putin.

Europe and the United States must also counter Russia’s so-called shadow war. Moscow has developed a variety of ways to undermine democracies’ security and politics, including acts of sabotage, targeted killings, online disinformation, and interference in elections. The Kremlin is proud of these inventions, and its use of them will likely persist past any cease-fire in Ukraine. No framework with Russia for managing hybrid-war escalations exists; one must be developed. The United States, as well as Europe, will need to make generational investments in counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and fighting organized crime; the organic emergence of radical Islam and far-right extremism in Europe has created a ripe environment for the Kremlin to exploit.

Alongside strengthening deterrence, however, Western leaders, and particularly European ones, must start conceiving of a different approach to Russia. The country that Putin’s successors will inherit will almost certainly be profoundly imbalanced thanks to years of military overinvestment, waning access to cutting-edge technologies, excessive reliance on China, and the way that the war in Ukraine exacerbated already adverse demographic trends. Given how thoroughly Russia’s military, intelligence, and law enforcement elites have invested in the war in Ukraine and prospered from it, Putin’s successors will have little immediate incentive to make a clean break with the past. Not even the most pragmatic Russians will want an adversarial relationship with China. But a sizable pragmatist faction within the Russian elite understands that the war in Ukraine was a disaster and may well want to gradually unwind the most toxic aspects of Putin’s legacy—but only if they know that the door could open on the Western side.

SOFTEN THE GROUND

Changing the West’s message to Russia—and making that new message coherent—will be a tall order, and not only because Trump has shattered the transatlantic alliance’s unity. Within Europe, different governments hold different views on Russia. But European policymakers and American politicians who do not want to follow Trump’s approach can start by concretely imagining the contours of a more stable security relationship.

If events proceed along their current trajectory, NATO and Russia will soon both be armed to the teeth with conventional weapons, including tanks and drones, as well as strategic ones, such as hypersonic nuclear missiles. The risks that emanate from this scenario are familiar from the Cold War, and so is the remedy: arms control with robust verification mechanisms and communications channels for managing incidents. If Western and Russian negotiators can build sufficient trust, the next step would be to ink agreements that impose cuts on conventional and strategic weapons arsenals (similar to the U.S.-Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which is set to expire in 2026, or the Treaty of Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, which NATO and Russia suspended in 2023). Both sides could discuss ways to limit their interference in each other’s domestic politics if Russia is ready to put its efforts to subvert democracies to rest.

Economic interdependence was once a source of prosperity for both Russia and the West. By the time of Putin’s departure, Europe is likely to have fully unwound its reliance on Russian commodities. If it has, then resuming imports of some Russian raw materials would not threaten Europe’s independence; it would further diversify European supply chains. Restoring trade ties would also benefit Russia by reducing its dependence on the Chinese market.

A forever war between Russia and the West is not inevitable.

No substantial rapprochement between Russia and the West can occur, however, without addressing the criminal war Putin launched against Ukraine. Even if Moscow and NATO begin arms control talks on missiles, for instance, no substantively new equilibrium can be established as long as a threatened Kyiv is still building them. Any future project to restore full economic ties with Russia will need to generate funds for Ukraine’s reconstruction or even for some form of reparations.

Moscow, of course, is unlikely ever to accept that word’s presence in any official document. But a special tax on Russian commodities sold to Europe, for instance, could generate funds for Ukraine for an agreed number of years. Or international actors could establish a fund for Ukraine’s reconstruction into which Russia pays a certain percentage of its GDP for a certain period. The faster the Russian economy grows, the more money Ukraine will get, creating incentives for the EU to buy Russian commodities and invest in the country.

Many European countries will want to involve Ukraine when crafting any strategy toward Russia after Putin. For many in Kyiv, a permanently weakened or even destroyed Russia may seem like the best eventual outcome. But such an outcome would hardly serve Europe’s interests, given the danger posed by the collapse of an enormous neighbor whose territory teems with weapons of mass destruction. NATO membership for Ukraine is anathema to Putin now, and his successors may turn out to be just as hostile to it. But more pragmatic Russian leaders may finally appreciate that having Ukraine in NATO is a lesser threat to Russia than a vengeful Ukraine unbound by the alliance’s rules and discipline.

TURN SIGNAL

To present this new vision to Russians, Western countries must urgently revive the communications channels they let wither during the war. It must be made clear to the Russian people and elites alike that the Kremlin wants to isolate Russia from the West, not the other way around. Artists, scientists, intellectuals, and athletes who did not circulate war propaganda should not be canceled simply for being Russian, and Europe needs to adjust its visa policies, which currently make it almost impossible for Russians to travel to the continent.

In public messaging, Western leaders and officials must tirelessly stress that they do not oppose Russians, only Putin’s disastrous policy choices. They should argue that these choices have made Russians themselves less prosperous and secure. Western officials also need to restore a more sustained contact with the Kremlin bureaucrats and foreign-policy elites who will become the backbone of Russia’s state apparatus after Putin. They can do so first at international forums, where discussions with Russian interlocutors will serve existing common interests, such as preventing unintended provocations at sea and in the air. Obviously, many Russian interlocutors will be attempting to collect their own intelligence. But that is hardly a new risk.

Imagining Russia after Putin may seem too distant and abstract, especially after efforts to oust him failed—including, most prominently, the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s 2023 mutiny. Thinking about ways to reconnect with Russia could even seem divisive. The unity that the West achieved on Ukraine before Trump’s reelection was an achievement. Now, with a pro-Putin president in the White House, European unity may seem even more precious. But many European countries, particularly those on NATO’s eastern flank, simply do not want to think about any kind of détente with the Kremlin even after Putin’s departure.

Yet they must. Western leaders need to face and address the concerns of their own citizens, many of whom do not want a costly open-ended confrontation with Russia. And imagining a pragmatic relationship would not be a mere intellectual exercise. It could be a tool to urge Russia toward a transition. Even if Putin would never react warmly to Western overtures, their existence could fragment his regime after he leaves. Putin has not groomed a successor because he fears the erosion of his power. If he eventually designates one, that person will be much weaker than he has been, creating space for rival political forces to jockey for influence. Even if no all-out succession battle erupts, Russia’s post-Putin transition may resemble the period in the 1950s after Stalin’s death, in which the emergence of de facto collective leadership allows for a turn toward liberalization and pragmatism.

The recent change in U.S. leadership caught Europe unprepared. So will a sudden changing of the guard in the Kremlin unless the West more actively imagines what its relationship with Russia could be after Putin. A forever war that cycles between cold and hot is not inevitable. But if Western leaders postpone discussing a different vision, they risk abetting Putin’s efforts to make confrontation with the West a permanent legacy.

ALEXANDER GABUEV is Director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Alexander Gabuev · April 17, 2025

19. China’s Double Game in Myanmar

Should not be a surprise.

Excerpts:

A political solution to the crisis remains a distant prospect. The junta has pledged to stage elections within a year, even though its capacity to hold a vote—even a sham one—seems hugely circumscribed, both by war and by the March earthquake. With most of the country racked by conflict, the regime has been forced to repeatedly postpone elections that it had originally planned for 2022. The opposition groups and public would not recognize a vote organized by the junta as legitimate, in any case. At this point, attempting to stage elections will only further inflame conflict and exacerbate the country’s humanitarian crisis.

Many outside powers, including ASEAN, China, and India, have called for a negotiated settlement, though they have not prescribed specific terms. But this remains unrealistic for two main reasons. First, given the junta’s weakness, members of the resistance and the public see this as a historic opportunity to finally expel Myanmar’s military, the primary perpetrator of their suffering, from a position of power. Second, Myanmar’s generals have never engaged in meaningful political dialogue. Even minor concessions that might threaten their grip on power are intolerable to them. Instead, they dictate terms, expecting their counterparts to capitulate, and operate within a framework that guarantees military dominance. Even in the aftermath of the earthquake in March, the regime prioritized airstrikes against opposition forces and leveraged increased international engagement—particularly through humanitarian aid—as a tool to bolster its legitimacy while countless victims remained trapped beneath rubble without meaningful assistance. And with the unwavering support of China and Russia, the regime feels emboldened and sees little reason to pursue genuine negotiations.

The only way the junta would accept some negotiated end to the war would be if it had absolutely no other choice. That would require greater cooperation and political cohesion among the rebel forces, and then for those united forces to turn the tide on the battlefield decisively against the regime, threatening its hold on the center of the country. Beijing does not want this to happen. It will continue under any future circumstance to undermine the very cooperation among the rebels that is necessary to one day form a peaceful, stable, and federal democratic Myanmar. China has no genuine interest in peace or stability in Myanmar; it wants strategic dominance. And if Beijing can best grow its influence by playing Myanmar’s factions off one another, keeping them weak, fragmented, and dependent on China, then that is what it will do.

China’s Double Game in Myanmar

Foreign Affairs · by More by Ye Myo Hein · April 17, 2025

How Beijing Is Manipulating Civil Conflict to Secure Regional Dominance

Ye Myo Hein

April 17, 2025

A member of Bamar People’s Liberation Army in Karen State, Myanmar, February 2024 Stringer/Reuters

YE MYO HEIN is a Senior Fellow at the Southeast Asia Peace Institute and a former visiting scholar at the United States Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

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Four years into Myanmar’s civil war, the conflict remains far from a resolution. The military regime, reeling from devastating losses, is in deep trouble. It has lost effective control of roughly three-quarters of the country’s territory; surrendered key strategic bases, including two regional military commands, to advancing resistance forces; and now faces a hollowing out of its ranks as defections and demoralization spread. But even though opposition forces have made significant gains nationwide, they have yet to penetrate the military’s stronghold in the center of the country. Opposition forces share the amorphous goal of making the country a federal democratic union, an arrangement that might accommodate the interests of the diverse factions arrayed against the junta. But these groups’ ties remain loose and fragile. With the opposition dispersed throughout the country and lacking both the capacity for reliable communication and the ability to meet safely in person, there are divisions within the resistance that will endure even should victory on the battlefield be in sight.

Meanwhile, the country’s roughly 54 million people continue to suffer. The junta depends on indiscriminate air assault on population centers to compensate for its increasing weakness in ground forces and territorial control. The increasing use of airstrikes against opposition forces has led to a surge in civilian deaths, which reached close to 10,000 by the end of 2024. Over 3.5 million people have been internally displaced, and about a third of the country needs humanitarian aid. The economy is nearing collapse. Natural disasters have compounded what is already a dire situation. A severe typhoon ravaged Myanmar last September, killing hundreds and flooding many areas, and a devastating 7.7-magnitude earthquake rocked the country in late March, killing more than 3,500. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the warring parties announced a temporary humanitarian pause in the fighting, but that did not hold. The regime launched fresh airstrikes and ground offensives just hours after the quake—and it has continued its assaults ever since. According to local media, the military carried out 108 air and artillery attacks between March 28 and April 6—including 46 attacks after the cease-fire was announced—killing around 70 civilians. Fierce clashes continue to rage on the ground.

Only one actor stands to gain from this tragedy: China. In the West, Myanmar’s civil war is often described as a “forgotten conflict.” But for China, the country is a key battleground where Beijing’s regional ambitions, economic interests, and security concerns intersect. A weakened Myanmar is central to China’s goal of establishing uncontested regional hegemony. If Beijing can dominate the country, it constitutes both a strategic barrier against India’s “Act East Policy,” which aims to link India with the fast-growing Southeast Asia region, and a vital foothold for China in mainland Southeast Asia and on the shores of the Indian Ocean. In public statements, Chinese officials insist that they want to restore stability to Myanmar and promote fraternal relations between the two countries. In practice, China props up the faltering junta while simultaneously trying to draw ethnic armed organizations into its orbit, in the process sidelining pro-democracy forces that it believes are too closely aligned with the West.

The lack of genuine Western interest in Myanmar has created a vacuum that China is only too happy to fill. Whereas Western powers did very little in the aftermath of the March earthquake, for instance, China rushed assistance to areas hit hard as part of a high-profile charm offensive. In truth, China finds opportunity in chaos: it is consolidating control in Myanmar by propping up the faltering regime and enabling its brutal operations, undermining resistance unity, expanding sway over several resistance forces, sidelining Western influence, and disregarding the political aspirations of the Myanmar people. A divided Myanmar under lasting military rule will be easier for Beijing to control.

CHINA’S DOUBLE-DEALING

Myanmar is more than just another of China’s neighbors. It provides Beijing with a vital overland gateway to the Indian Ocean, offering a crucial alternative to the chokepoint of the Malacca Strait. Developing this economic conduit is a key objective for the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing’s vast overseas infrastructure investment program. The China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) is a key component of Beijing’s BRI strategy, linking China’s Yunnan Province with Myanmar’s vast energy reserves, natural resources, and access to the Indian Ocean.

Myanmar also possesses important resources that China wants. These include critical minerals, natural gas, hydropower, and agricultural commodities. Myanmar provides well over half of China’s heavy rare earth imports, which are essential inputs to high-technology and defense industries. China has long partnered with armed groups to extract these resources with little regard to environmental or social consequences. In 2024, Myanmar supplied China with 50,000 metric tons of rare earth oxides, surpassing China’s domestic production of these materials. Myanmar is also the source of 79.9 percent of China’s tin ore imports, an essential input in the production of semiconductors and other critical technologies.

Myanmar is of interest to Chinese officials for security reasons as well. China does not want external powers, particularly in the West, to gain a foothold in Myanmar and thereby challenge Beijing’s regional dominance. Beijing harbors deep anxiety that if a government or political force aligned with the West were to come to power, it could open the door to a sustained Western presence near China’s border—posing a long-term security threat. This security-driven mindset has shaped China’s approach to Myanmar’s civil war, with Beijing fearing that the fighting could encourage Western interference in Myanmar’s internal affairs. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently insisted that barring other outside powers from meddling in the conflict is one of his main goals; he sees Myanmar as part of China’s exclusive sphere of influence. A senior editor at People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, underscored this point in a 2012 Global Times opinion piece, by comparing the significance of sites in Myanmar to that of disputed maritime territories in the South China Sea: “The economic and social stability in Kyaukphyu [China’s deep-sea port currently under construction in Rakhine State in Myanmar] and its surrounding region is no less important than the sovereignty disputes between China and the Philippines over Huangyan Island.”

China has no genuine interest in peace or stability in Myanmar.

China has devoted a great deal of attention to events in Myanmar, at least since the 2021 military coup that toppled an elected government. Given that much of the CMEC runs directly through active conflict zones, the post-coup conflagration has disrupted many of Beijing’s investments in the country. It also presented an opportunity, however, for Beijing to strengthen its control over Myanmar. Chinese officials initially downplayed the coup as a “cabinet reshuffle,” and they have maintained active diplomatic ties with the junta when most other countries have marginalized the regime.

But China has pursued a double game by simultaneously strengthening ties with Myanmar’s ethnic armed organizations, an array of groups that have significantly expanded their de facto territorial control since the coup. Not only is China the primary supplier of weapons to these groups, but it also acts as their principal trading partner. These relationships allow Beijing to maintain leverage over nearly all major actors in a divided Myanmar and serve as a strategic hedge in the event of the military’s collapse.

China has always been suspicious of Myanmar’s pro-democratic forces, including especially the National Unity Government, which is primarily composed of individuals deposed in the 2021 coup. Beijing views this group as too close to the West, even though Western powers have provided minimal support. Chinese paranoia deepened after the NUG opened an office in Washington in 2022 and the United States passed the BURMA Act in late 2023, which promised much assistance—aid that it ultimately failed to deliver. Beijing also sought to dissuade other ethnic armed organizations from working with the NUG and instructed them to negotiate with the junta. To be sure, Beijing allowed backchannel communications with the NUG, primarily to protect Chinese commercial assets, but it kept these dealings discreet and noncommittal. As the junta lost more territory, some Chinese companies paid taxes or partnered with ethnic armed organizations and armed groups affiliated with the NUG to maintain business operations.

SEIZING THE MOMENT

For a few years, this double-dealing allowed China to protect critical investment projects while also deepening its influence even as Myanmar became engulfed in violence. Then, in late 2023, an anti-junta coalition of ethnic armed organizations with ties to China, but also including armed forces associated with the NUG, launched Operation 1027, a large-scale coordinated offensive. In the year since the offensive began, rebels have captured two of the junta’s regional commands, six operational commands, over 160 battalion bases, and 93 towns. Once seen as unbeatable, the military today teeters on the brink of collapse.

The fall of the junta’s Northeastern Regional Command in Lashio in August 2024 set off alarm bells in Beijing, which felt the resistance forces had gone too far. China subsequently abandoned its hedging strategy in favor of aggressive intervention on behalf of the regime. This pivot became evident when Foreign Minister Wang visited junta officials in August 2024, signaling Beijing’s clear support. Soon after, junta chief Min Aung Hlaing traveled to Kunming for his first visit to China since the 2021 coup.

At the same time, Beijing attempted to pressure ethnic armed organizations along the China-Myanmar border to cease their hostilities. It tried to coerce factions that did not comply, including by closing border posts and shutting off access to cross-border flows of electricity, water, internet, and essential supplies. In its most drastic move, in late 2024, local news reports claimed that China detained the leader of the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) in an attempt to force the group into a cease-fire and withdrawal from Lashio.

Touting itself as a peace broker and guarantor of stability, in the wake of Operation 1027, Beijing mediated multiple rounds of talks between the junta and several ethnic armed organizations. These negotiations have failed to foster peace because the military insists on regaining control of lost territory and the ethnic factions refuse to give up their hard-won gains. At the same time, though, China has deepened its influence in the country by pressuring all sides to acknowledge and accommodate its role in shaping Myanmar’s future. It has propped up the junta by providing diplomatic cover in the international community and supplying it with heavy weapons, fighter jets, surveillance technology, and financial lifelines. China has also worked to exacerbate divisions within Myanmar’s resistance forces, by pressuring ethnic armed groups under its sway—particularly those along the northern border—not to cooperate with the NUG or allied pro-democracy forces it sees as Western-backed. These interventions have fueled instability and prolonged the war. In response, some resistance groups have felt compelled to issue public assurances of their commitment to protecting Chinese interests in Myanmar—or even to temporarily halt planned offensives to avoid provoking Beijing’s ire.

A divided Myanmar under lasting military rule will be easier for Beijing to control.

The March earthquake has given Beijing another opportunity to expand its influence in Myanmar and chip away at its biggest challenge: widespread anti-China sentiment. Where Western powers have offered only limited support amid Myanmar’s humanitarian catastrophe, China has stepped in. As it cultivates its soft power, China has expanded its security presence in Myanmar. Citing concern that the junta is not equipped to protect Chinese assets, Beijing has pressured the junta to form joint-venture security firms that are now deployed at the Kyaukphyu deep-sea port in the west and in Muse in the east along the Chinese-Myanmar border. These operations are led by Chinese state security companies and constitute China’s first official armed presence in Myanmar. The long-term implications of expanded military presence in Myanmar are unclear, but it could significantly reshape the country’s internal conflict and the broader regional security landscape.

Simply put, Beijing’s involvement is prolonging Myanmar’s destructive war. Emboldened by China’s support, the regime has escalated airstrikes on resistance-held areas, indiscriminately targeting civilians. But the junta is not strong enough to launch ground offensives to reclaim lost territory, so it now focuses on preventing the resistance from consolidating control in newly seized areas. Even amid the widespread devastation caused by the March earthquake, the regime prioritized airstrikes over rescue and relief operations. China has delivered additional warplanes and drones to the junta to abet this effort.

The opposition continues to advance on the battlefield regardless of whether it has the political cohesion needed to replace the junta. For now, the regime’s opponents are trying to expand urban operations across the country, aiming ultimately at the major cities in the center. As long as the military regime still controls Yangon, Myanmar’s biggest city, and Naypyidaw, its capital, the advances by opposition forces will weaken the junta but likely fall short of delivering a decisive blow.Without a strong united front within the opposition, the regime will probably continue to stagger on.

As Western interest in Myanmar has waned, China has seized the opportunity to expand its strategic footprint by exploiting the country’s chaos and political fragmentation. It now holds considerable sway over key actors on all sides of the conflict and has systematically sidelined Western influence by alienating groups aligned with the West. And Beijing has already secured several tangible gains, including retaining its access to strategic resources such as rare earth elements and establishing a military presence on Myanmar’s soil. These moves give China not only privileged access to economic assets but also political leverage over a pliant neighbor within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), tightening its grip on a region central to its ambitions. China’s growing influence in Myanmar is not an isolated case; it is a critical front in Beijing’s larger campaign for regional hegemony. For Western and regional powers, this should sound an alarm. A reactive approach will not suffice. Containing Beijing’s advance must begin where China is expanding at a rapid pace—at its base perimeter in Myanmar.

WHAT BEIJING DOESN’T WANT

A political solution to the crisis remains a distant prospect. The junta has pledged to stage elections within a year, even though its capacity to hold a vote—even a sham one—seems hugely circumscribed, both by war and by the March earthquake. With most of the country racked by conflict, the regime has been forced to repeatedly postpone elections that it had originally planned for 2022. The opposition groups and public would not recognize a vote organized by the junta as legitimate, in any case. At this point, attempting to stage elections will only further inflame conflict and exacerbate the country’s humanitarian crisis.

Many outside powers, including ASEAN, China, and India, have called for a negotiated settlement, though they have not prescribed specific terms. But this remains unrealistic for two main reasons. First, given the junta’s weakness, members of the resistance and the public see this as a historic opportunity to finally expel Myanmar’s military, the primary perpetrator of their suffering, from a position of power. Second, Myanmar’s generals have never engaged in meaningful political dialogue. Even minor concessions that might threaten their grip on power are intolerable to them. Instead, they dictate terms, expecting their counterparts to capitulate, and operate within a framework that guarantees military dominance. Even in the aftermath of the earthquake in March, the regime prioritized airstrikes against opposition forces and leveraged increased international engagement—particularly through humanitarian aid—as a tool to bolster its legitimacy while countless victims remained trapped beneath rubble without meaningful assistance. And with the unwavering support of China and Russia, the regime feels emboldened and sees little reason to pursue genuine negotiations.

The only way the junta would accept some negotiated end to the war would be if it had absolutely no other choice. That would require greater cooperation and political cohesion among the rebel forces, and then for those united forces to turn the tide on the battlefield decisively against the regime, threatening its hold on the center of the country. Beijing does not want this to happen. It will continue under any future circumstance to undermine the very cooperation among the rebels that is necessary to one day form a peaceful, stable, and federal democratic Myanmar. China has no genuine interest in peace or stability in Myanmar; it wants strategic dominance. And if Beijing can best grow its influence by playing Myanmar’s factions off one another, keeping them weak, fragmented, and dependent on China, then that is what it will do.

YE MYO HEIN is a Senior Fellow at the Southeast Asia Peace Institute and a former visiting scholar at the United States Institute of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Ye Myo Hein · April 17, 2025

20. Trump’s Second Coming: Mongolia Watches the Chaos With Caution

We can learn from our friends in Mongolia.

Excerpts:

In Mongolia, we understand the cost of global disarray. We rely on steady diplomacy, open markets, and consistent rules. Trump’s brand of disruption shakes those very pillars. It is emboldening the forces that want to see small democracies like ours squeezed, silenced, or sidelined.

And yet, Mongolia remains pragmatic. We do not choose sides in partisan battles abroad. We will work with any administration that respects our sovereignty, supports our development, and values our democratic voice. But we can only perceive Trump’s adventurism not with enthusiasm, but with unease.

Trump’s Second Coming: Mongolia Watches the Chaos With Caution

For Mongolia – a small democracy navigating life between two resurgent authoritarian powers – Trump’s worldview poses a silent but serious challenge.

https://thediplomat.com/2025/04/trumps-second-coming-mongolia-watches-the-chaos-with-caution/

By Bayarkhuu Dashdorj

April 16, 2025

Credit: Official White House photo

As the world is grappling with the shocks of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Mongolia finds itself reflecting on the implications of a second Trump presidency – not as an abstract geopolitical puzzle but as a small democracy navigating life between two resurgent authoritarian powers.

Trump’s first presidency was not merely unorthodox; it disrupted decades of assumptions about U.S. global leadership. His transactional view of alliances, affection for strongmen, and erratic policies deeply unsettled many in Washington and abroad. For Mongolia, a country whose foreign policy is anchored in its “third neighbor” strategy to diversify relationships beyond China and Russia, Trump’s worldview posed a silent but serious challenge.

Mongolia has no illusions about its geographic constraints. Our two neighbors – Russia and China – have increasingly aligned in opposition to the Western liberal order. Trump, however, seems determined to exploit perceived rifts between them. His desire to court Russia in a bid to isolate China ignores the reality that Moscow and Beijing are now, for all practical purposes, strategic brothers. Their coordination – from military exercises to diplomatic posturing – has only deepened since Trump first took office. To many Mongolian observers, it is clear that Trump has misread the nature of their partnership. Worse, his misreading carries global consequences.

Trump’s foreign policy seems to be often guided less by doctrine than impulse. His open admiration for leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, his public disdain for multilateralism, and his skepticism toward traditional alliances all suggested a United States increasingly willing to retreat from its global responsibilities. For Mongolia, that raised concerns. Our survival strategy hinges on an engaged international community and a predictable rules-based order. The Trump-era unpredictability shook that foundation.

Beyond geopolitics, Trump’s economic nationalism is rattling small economies worldwide. His tariff wars and contempt for trade agreements are injecting needless volatility into global markets. Mongolia, a resource-exporting nation vulnerable to external shocks, is watching warily as China-U.S. tensions escalate under Trump’s leadership. If such conflicts continue to intensify without an off-ramp for either side, Mongolia’s economic stability could again be collateral damage.

Moreover, Trump’s personal style – marked by grievance, vengeance, and nostalgia – invites comparisons to autocrats. His continued insistence that the 2020 election was stolen, his attacks on institutions, and his disdain for critics reflect not democratic resilience but democratic backsliding. To those of us in Mongolia working to preserve democratic gains, Trump’s behavior is a cautionary tale.

At home, Trump fractured his nation, remade U.S. politics in his image, and encouraged political violence. Internationally, he pulled the U.S. from key agreements, alienated allies, and undermined trust. As one American analyst put it, Trump left the world with a sense that the U.S. could no longer be counted on.

Authors

Guest Author

Bayarkhuu Dashdorj

Professor Bayarkhuu Dashdorj is an adjunct foreign policy analyst to the president and prime minister of Mongolia. He is one of the most well-known columnists in Mongolia and previously served as an ambassador to Egypt. The views expressed here are his own.

21. US Army Eyes Surge in 3D-Printed Drones That Imitate Enemy Forces

US Army Eyes Surge in 3D-Printed Drones That Imitate Enemy Forces

thedefensepost.com · by Joe Saballa · April 15, 2025

The US Army is exploring a significant acceleration in the production of 3D-printed drones capable of replicating the capabilities and behaviors of enemy systems.

The push comes as the army anticipates the rollout of a program aimed at rapidly developing low-cost target drones for training exercises.

According to Gen. James Rainey, head of Army Futures Command, there is a critical need to simulate unmanned aerial system (UAS) threats, particularly for preparing platoons to counter drone swarms.

“We need to do it at a price point that is ridiculously low: We don’t need the Gucci cameras and everything else,” he said, as quoted by Breaking Defense.

At present, the army manufactures around 10 Group 1 drones weekly — platforms weighing under 20 pounds (4.5 kilograms) and reaching speeds of 100 knots (185 kilometers/115 miles per hour).

However, plans are underway to ramp up production to 10,000 drones per month to boost training efforts for modern warfare.

“It’s gonna take a couple of months before we get to a decision,” Army Materiel Command acting commanding general Christopher Mohan explained. “We’ve proven that we can do it with this low-level system and we can print this one and produce this then we can produce much larger.”

An Innovative Approach

The army is increasingly tapping into 3D printing technology to produce critical components — from drones to equipment parts — at a pace and cost traditional methods could not match.

The process is said to drastically reduce production timelines, enabling rapid deployment and improved operational efficiency.

In May 2024, the US Air Force showcased its ability to design, build, and deploy 3D-printed UAS in under 24 hours.

Likewise, the army successfully flight-tested a loitering munition produced through additive manufacturing, proving its operational viability in a real-world environment.

Beyond drones, the US military has expanded the use of 3D printing to construct facilities and rapidly repair vehicles, reducing logistical challenges.

“Additive construction has potential to reduce costs, manpower, logistics, and time, while opening the door for improved and new applications, such as unconventional countermeasures,” stated Dave Morrow, director of military programs for the Army Corps of Engineers.

thedefensepost.com · by Joe Saballa · April 15, 2025

22. End of dollar dominance? Trump tariffs are decreasing trust in US currency.

It is a national security imperative to protect the US dollar as the reserve currency.

Excerpts:

At stake is the “exorbitant privilege” of dollar dominance, a term coined in 1965 by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the French minister of finance at the time. The U.S. can buy cheaper goods abroad, impose sanctions with greater force, and issue bonds at a lower cost, helping it service its massive debt.

While Mr. Trump has said he wants to maintain dollar dominance, members of his government have cast doubt on its desirability for the American economy.

“You could argue that the reserve currency status is a massive subsidy to American consumers, but a massive tax on American producers,” said Vice President JD Vance, then an Ohio senator, in a Senate hearing with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell in 2023, suggesting that a strong dollar and cheap imports have helped hollow out U.S. industry.

Where that leaves the global economy is unclear. One characteristic of the current administration is “a kind of disdain or lack of consideration for the rest of the world,” says David Lubin, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, a think tank in London. It stems from Mr. Trump’s confidence that the U.S. can “go it alone.”

“I haven’t seen any coherent framework for what kind of monetary system exists after you undermine the dollar’s role within it,” he adds.

End of dollar dominance? Trump tariffs are decreasing trust in US currency.

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2025/0416/us-dollar-weak-tariffs-treasury-bonds?icid=rss

| Jacob Turcotte/Staff

By Erika Page Staff writer
@erikacpage

April 16, 2025, 2:36 p.m. ET

For nearly a century, the U.S. dollar has reigned supreme in the global economy, dominating trade and finance, and providing stability to international markets. But the events of recent days have thrown that premise into the lurch.

Normally, when the stock market is in distress, investors seek refuge in U.S. treasuries, pushing the value of the dollar upward. Since President Donald Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs, the opposite has occurred. Instead of flocking to the dollar, global investors appeared to run from it.

The dollar hit a three-year low last Friday and continued its slide over the weekend. One dollar, which was worth €0.97 when Mr. Trump took over, is now worth €0.88.

Why We Wrote This

A story focused on

Trust

The economic turmoil caused by President Donald Trump’s tariffs has caused investors to flee from U.S. Treasury bonds – something that didn’t happen even in recent economic crises. That’s a bad sign for the dollar’s global dominance.

Analysts have called this a moment of rapid de-dollarization as investors reassess the trustworthiness of a currency that had long been considered the most reliable in the world. The aftermath will determine if this is a brief stumble for dollar dominance or evidence of a seismic shift in the global financial order.

“It is too early to call if we are seeing the demise of the dollar, but the dollar has certainly been put on a ‘watch list,’” says Kevin Gallagher, director of the Global Development Policy Center at Boston University. For the rest of the world, “The U.S. is no longer innocent until proven guilty, but the opposite.”

Why has the dollar plunged?

Mr. Trump’s sweeping tariffs rattled global markets over the past two weeks, with worries of a trade war and recession running high.

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During the financial crisis of 2008, investors around the world bought more Treasury bonds, confident that despite the crash, this was the safest place in the world for their money. That is how things usually go: The bond market moves in the opposite direction as stocks.

This time, as the stock market took a nosedive, an alarming trend emerged. Investors were dumping their U.S. government bonds. The yield on the 10-year Treasury jumped from 4% to 4.5% in a week, a huge jump for the bond market that indicates a major sell-off. Investors were putting their money into euros, yen, pounds, and gold instead of into dollars.

“The world is treating America like a developing country,” wrote Noah Smith, a leading economic blogger, in a post equating the current moment to the capital flight seen during times of crisis in emerging economies.

Many of those watching say it was the bond markets that made President Trump reverse course, placing a 90-day pause on tariffs for all countries besides China. Yet the damage to the world’s confidence in the dollar may already have been done.

What has made the dollar so dominant?

The dollar has been a central pillar of the global financial system since 1944, when the Bretton Woods agreements pegged major currencies to the greenback, which was tied to gold.

Its dominance persevered after the end of the gold standard in 1971, thanks to the size and strength of the American economy, the dollar’s ubiquity in global trade and central bank reserves around the world, and widespread trust in American democratic institutions and rule of law.

Most commodities, including oil, are priced in dollars. Over half of all international transactions take place in dollars, and nearly 60% of foreign currency reserves are held in dollars, which is triple the amount in euros. That is not due to any loyalty to the United States – China is one of the largest holders of U.S. bonds – but due to the perceived safety of its debt.

For years there have been rumblings about de-dollarization, especially from countries such as China, Russia, and Brazil that would benefit from reducing American dominance. But these calls never gained much traction without a convincing alternative to the dollar.

What does this mean going forward?

America’s role in the global economy will not be overturned overnight. The U.S. market remains the largest in the world, with the deepest capital pockets.

Still, the world’s reliance on the dollar stands on a prerequisite trust in the stability of the American currency and the nation’s global leadership. Without that trust, dollar hegemony should not be taken for granted, say analysts.

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While Mr. Trump has said he wants to maintain dollar dominance, members of his government have cast doubt on its desirability for the American economy.

“I haven’t seen any coherent framework for what kind of monetary system exists after you undermine the dollar’s role within it,” he adds.

23. Putin’s play for an Indonesian airbase was always likely to fail – but Russia has wider ambitions

Excerpt:

“Putin is often regarded as a master strategist,” said the ANU’s Sussex, “I think his skills are more in tactics, in being opportunistic, and making it look like strategy.”

Putin’s play for an Indonesian airbase was always likely to fail – but Russia has wider ambitions

Kate Lamb and Angela Dewan

Russia remains a key arms supplier in South-east Asia, and Trump’s unstable leadership is providing more opportunities to make inroads

The Guardian · by Kate Lamb · April 17, 2025

A defence industry report claiming that Russia requested a permanent base for its warplanes in Indonesia’s remote Papua region, right on Australia’s northern doorstep, sent Canberra into a tailspin. But in Indonesia, it was the frenzy whipped up in Australia’s tight election campaign that came as the real surprise.

Foreign policy and defence experts are highly sceptical about the prospect that Jakarta would ever acquiesce to such a Russian request, and besides, it is hardly new. Moscow has sought permanent basing rights for its planes at Indonesia’s Biak airfield in Papua for almost half a century – and not once has it won approval.

No foreign power has a military base in Indonesia, or permanent access to any of its domestic bases. Indonesia has enshrined in its constitution a commitment to a “free and independent” foreign policy, which is premised on non-alignment.

“The probability [of accepting a Russian request] is low or nearly zero,” said Rahman Yaacob, a defence expert at Australia’s Lowy Institute. “The main reason is because of Indonesia’s domestic foreign policy, it’s basically non-aligned.”

Gatra Priyandita, from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), agreed, saying: “It goes against the principle of basically providing no military bases to any overseas external powers.”

Indonesia dismisses report Russia seeking to base aircraft in country as ‘simply not true’, Australia says

But the prospect is tantalising. Indonesia is a vast archipelago that stretches across South-east Asia. The Papua region is an entry point into the Pacific, and the Biak airbase is just 1,300km from Darwin in northern Australia, where the US has a military base.

Russia has continued this week with economic overtures. Indonesia’s president Prabowo Subianto welcomed Russia’s first deputy prime minister, Denis Manturov, to Jakarta to discuss free trade and mark 75 years of diplomatic relations between the two nations.

Matthew Sussex, a visiting fellow at the Australia National University, said President Vladimir Putin has aspirations for Russia to become a “Euro-Pacific power”.

“From the Russian perspective, they would have a strategic toehold in South-east Asia, which would allow it to conduct intelligence gathering, mainly against the United States in terms of Guam,” he said. “But also extending down towards increasingly important US bases in the Northern Territory and then potentially out west into the Indian Ocean.”

Biak is also close to the Philippines, a close US ally in the region.

Another possible reason for Russia’s interest in Biak is that it is close to the equator, which lends itself to space operations. Indonesia has plans to build a satellite launch site there, and Russia has been trying to negotiate with Indonesia to be involved, said Lowy’s Yaacob. Its airfield is quite rudimentary, so experts say it could make more sense as a site to launch low-Earth orbit satellites and high-altitude, long endurance drones.

“But the negotiation has been slow. I understand Indonesia is trying to say no, but this is their way of saying no, to drag the negotiation on,” he said, referring to Indonesia’s cultural tendency to avoid direct rejection.

The Trump factor

It’s also a matter of timing. As Donald Trump’s administration throws the post-war world order into question, the time is ripe for Russia to grow closer to its Indonesian partners and South-east Asia as a whole.

Indonesia and Russia held their first joint naval drills last year, while President Prabowo Subianto visited Moscow last October. This February, Sergei Shoigu, secretary of the Russian Federation Security Council, visited Jakarta to discuss deepening defence ties.

Indonesia also recently joined the Brics grouping, of which Russia is a founding member. Russian-Indonesian trade has grown by 80% in the past five years, the Russian government reports, reaching $4.3bn in 2024.

But the world’s fourth-most populous nation and South-east Asia’s largest economy, is a far cry from becoming the next client state, for Russia, or any other nation

At best, some say Russia might weasel out a concession, as it did in 2017, when it was granted access to Biak for about five days. (It had at the time also sought permanent access but that request was denied).

But under pressure domestically, due to an ailing economy and controversial new military law, it would be an inopportune time for Prabowo to pull such an extraordinary move.

On the unlikely chance Prabowo granted Russia its request, it would be an unprecedented divergence.

Still, Russia’s opportunistic move raises questions about why exactly Putin is pitching for Biak now.

“I think it was an attempt to say, ‘Well, ‘let’s see how far Jakarta will go,’” said Sussex, adding that with the US in retreat: “When there’s a vacuum, it gets filled.”

Indonesia, of course, is not the only place into which Russia is seeking inroads.

Between 2004 and 2023 Russia was the largest arms supplier in terms of value in South-east Asia, with 25% of a $42bn market, although that share has since dropped. But as Russia runs a wartime economy, it may be looking for new markets if the war in Ukraine ends.

“Those [weapons] factories will not be easily switched over to making washing machines,” Sussex said, “so they will be looking to sell arms around the world, and obviously these Asian clients are cashed up and in a region where there’s a lot of tension, so willing buyers.”

In war-torn Myanmar, Russia is a key ally and arms supplier. This year, Myanmar’s junta leader travelled to Moscow to deliver a gift of six elephants, which coincided with the delivery of six Russian fighter jets to Myanmar.

The two countries also signed an agreement on developing a small-scale nuclear power plant in Myanmar. Russia has successfully locked in other countries to such long-standing partnerships, but it has struggled to replicate that success in South-east Asia.

“This is a known play from Russia,” said Sam Cranny-Evans, editor of the UK-based Calibre Defence news and consultancy. “Its power station in Turkey will be operated and owned by Russia for at least a decade, and Rosatom has signed multiple agreements with African nations for similar projects, building close relations and dependencies as it does.”

Even if Russia’s bid for Biak comes to nothing, Putin has put the idea in the minds of the US’s traditional regional allies, whose sense of security has already been disrupted.

“Putin is often regarded as a master strategist,” said the ANU’s Sussex, “I think his skills are more in tactics, in being opportunistic, and making it look like strategy.”

The Guardian · by Kate Lamb · April 17, 2025

24. U.S. Cutting Forces In Syria By Half, Possible Ripple Effects In Region

U.S. Cutting Forces In Syria By Half, Possible Ripple Effects In Region

The U.S. withdrawing a significant portion of its troops from Syria could see notable shifts in the ongoing power struggle in the war-torn country.

Howard Altman

Published Apr 16, 2025 7:02 PM EDT

twz.com · by Howard Altman

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The U.S. is planning to halve its troop presence in Syria, a U.S. official told The War Zone on Wednesday. The move comes even as the Pentagon is surging resources to the Middle East and could have wide regional ramifications.

“There is a consolidation occurring over the coming weeks and months involving about 1,000 troops,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss operational details. “That will leave about 1,000 troops.”

“The Department of Defense routinely reallocates forces based on operational needs and contingencies,” a defense official said in a statement. “These movements demonstrate the flexible nature of U.S. global defense posture and U.S. capability to deploy worldwide on short notice to meet evolving security threats. Due to operational security reasons, we have nothing additional to provide at this time.”

U.S. Soldiers assigned to Task Force Wolverine, Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), depart base in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle Convoy in Northeast Syria, Dec. 10, 2024. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Alexander Johnson) Sgt. Alexander Johnson

The U.S. forces in Syria are mostly based in the northeastern part of that country with the stated mission of continuing the fight against ISIS. There is also a base in southern Syria, called Al-Tanf, located along the borders of Jordan and Iraq. U.S. forces across Syria have been subjected to attacks by Iranian-backed militias as well as ISIS, prompting frequent kinetic responses.

The official we spoke with did not know where the withdrawing troops would go or from which bases they would be leaving.

Reuters was the first to report on the drawdown.

Reducing the number of troops in Syria has been a goal of U.S. President Donald Trump. He called for a sudden, complete withdrawal during his first term in 2019, however, that was never fully implemented before he left office. The way forward for a drawdown this time was created in large measure by the overthrow last December of dictator Bashar Al-Assad by the former al-Qaeda rebel group known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

A portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is pictured with its frame broken, in a Syrian regime’s Political Security Branch facility on the outskirts of the central city of Hama, following the capture of the area by anti-government forces, on December 7, 2024. (Photo by OMAR HAJ KADOUR / AFP) (Photo by OMAR HAJ KADOUR/AFP via Getty Images)

The new Syrian government, led by HTS head President Ahmed al-Sharaa, has been working closely with officials from U.S. Central Command on several matters, noted Syria expert Charles Lister, Director of the Middle East Institute’s Syria Program and founder of SyriaWeekly.com.

The U.S. military and intelligence communities have “established a fruitful relationship” with the new Syrian government, including sharing intelligence that helped take out “multiple senior ISIS leaders and foiling 9 major urban plots,” Lister explained on X. He added that a U.S. partner is now within Syria’s Defense Ministry.

In addition, the U.S. has been brokering a deal with the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). That group has been a major ally against ISIS, but has also been embroiled in fighting against Turkish-led forces in the north, adding to regional instability. A recent peace deal pushed by CENTCOM is aimed at stopping that fighting and reducing tensions, Lister posited.

Meanwhile, the US military & intel community has established a fruitful relationship with #Damascus — with shared intel taking out multiple senior #ISIS leaders & foiling 9 major urban plots.

A US partner is now within #Syria's Defense Ministry.

— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) April 15, 2025

Despite the increasing cooperation between the U.S and the new Syrian government, drawing down American forces there could create a ripple effect across the region, several experts told us.

The fall of the Assad regime has already led to Russia pulling most of its troops and resources, especially air defense systems, out of Syria. That opened up freedom of operations in the sky for the U.S., Israel and Turkey. However, the U.S. drawdown marks “a significant inflection point in the regional balance of power,” a senior Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) officer told The War Zone Wednesday. “The U.S. presence in northeastern Syria has functioned not only as a counter terrorism outpost against residual Islamic State activity, but also as a geostrategic buffer constraining Iranian entrenchment west of the Euphrates. A reduction in this presence will likely carry profound strategic consequences for Israel.”

A U.S. drawdown of troops in Syria will have a large impact on Israel, a senior IDF officer told The War Zone. (Google Earth)

Furthermore, the reduction in U.S. troop presence in Syria “would create operational space for Iranian proxies, particularly the IRGC and Hezbollah, to solidify logistical corridors through Syria—part of Tehran’s broader objective to establish a contiguous axis of influence from Iran to the Mediterranean,” added the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss these issues. “This ‘land bridge’ enhances Iran’s capacity to transfer advanced weaponry, including precision-guided munitions, to Hezbollah, thereby altering the qualitative edge Israel seeks to maintain.”

As a result, “the diminution of U.S. deterrence and ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) capabilities in Syria would effectively shift the onus of containing Iranian expansionism to Israel,” the IDF officer explained. That, in turn, could increase the military operations of Israel, which already has a growing footprint in southwestern Syria.

Israeli defence minister says troops will remain in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria indefinitely https://t.co/Z3egjfqdgO

— CTV London (@CTVLondon) April 16, 2025

“This could require an intensification of Israeli kinetic operations across Syrian territory, including strategic interdicts on weapons transfers, Quds Force deployments, and the construction of forward-operating infrastructure near the Golan Heights—raising the risk of escalation with both Iran and its proxies,” the IDF officer posited.

Another factor to consider is whether fewer U.S. troops in Syria will affect the growing presence of Israeli and Turkish forces there and the tensions between the two. As we have previously reported, Israel has carried out a series of airstrikes on Syrian air bases to prevent them from being used by Turkish aircraft. Both nations are seeking to expand their influence in Syria, where the new government was heavily backed by Ankara.

“For Turkey, the equation is more nuanced,” Middle East analyst Mohammed “Basha” Albasha told us. “While the U.S. remains a key ally both within and beyond NATO, President [Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan maintains a strong personal rapport with President Trump, making the presence—or withdrawal—of U.S. forces less politically sensitive. Turkey already holds significant influence in Syria as the primary backer of the Al Shaara government, and in that context, it maintains the upper hand regardless of U.S. troop levels.”

Turkish Army sends reinforcements to Syria, deploying howitzers and armored vehicles. pic.twitter.com/FpOLoq5gpj

— Clash Report (@clashreport) January 10, 2025

Meanwhile, Iran, the potential target of the onging U.S. buildup of resources in and around the region, will see this reduction as a victory, Albasha suggested.

“Any time the U.S. reduces its footprint in the Middle East, Iran sees it as a win—consistent with its long-standing goal of pushing the U.S. out of the region,” he explained. “For Israel, however, the opposite is true: a diminished U.S. presence is viewed as a strategic setback and an added operational burden on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).”

Though the U.S. is planning to drastically reduce its presence in Syria, it is surging resources to the Middle East, sending B-2 bombers, fighters, a second aircraft carrier and additional air defense systems to the region. The extra forces are needed due to a month-long campaign against the Houthi rebels of Yemen and as a show of force against Iran, which is facing a deadline from Trump to make a deal on its nuclear program or face potentially large-scale kinetic consequences.

The U.S. has sent six B-2 Spirit stealth bombers to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia to bomb the Houthis and show force against Iran. (PHOTO © 2025 PLANET LABS INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION)

Unlike during his first term, Trump has given the order to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Syria with plenty of time for full implementation. The ripple effects of that move will come into sharper focus once American boots leave Syrian soil.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

Howard Altman

Senior Staff Writer

twz.com · by Howard Altman

25. Unwanted Truth 1: Black Lives Matter Was a Cuban Intelligence Operation

Analyze this.

Sensationalism?

Or where there is smoke there is fire?

Excerpts:

We don’t know the exact relationship between the DI and BLM, but based on standard Cuban modus operandi, we should assume that senior BLMGN officials are vetted by the DI and may be their witting agents. The BLM outburst of the summer of 2020, which rocked America from coast to coast, was no accident, rather was well planned – with help from Havana. It may not be coincidental that Susan Rosenberg, a radical member of the May 19 Communist Organization who helped Assata Shakur escape from prison then spent 16 years in federal prison herself for domestic terrorism, including the Nov. 7, 1983, bombing of the U.S. Senate – her sentence was commuted by President Bill Clinton on his last day in the Oval Office in 2001 – helped fund BLM. Specifically, around 2020, Rosenberg was serving as the vice-chair of Thousand Currents, a grantmaking organization that financially backed BLMGN. That may be merely one more revolutionary coincidence, but counterintelligence officers don’t like coincidences.

In any normal world, the media would ask such questions. They haven’t and won’t. Which is why this newsletter is running this series. Welcome aboard!

*From its establishment in 1961 to 1989, the service was termed the Dirección General de Inteligencia or DGI. It’s been simply the DI since 1989.

Unwanted Truth 1: Black Lives Matter Was a Cuban Intelligence Operation

Five years after Black Lives Matter upended American politics and radicalized the Left, do we know what it really was?

https://topsecretumbra.substack.com/p/unwanted-truth-1-black-lives-matter?utm

John Schindler

Apr 16, 2025

∙ Paid

Today, Top Secret Umbra launches a new series: Unwanted Truths. This series will expose difficult or challenging realities, often from the secret world of intelligence, about what stands behind official stories. These truths are unwanted because they contradict accepted ideas and norms. TSU will go where the media refuses to, and most people don’t even know where to look.

Fittingly, this series begins during Holy Week as Easter approaches, on Holy Wednesday, which is sometimes termed Spy Wednesday. It gets that handle because it remembers the day that Judas Iscariot, the turncoat apostle, took his 30 pieces of silver to betray Jesus to the authorities. Judas is a bad example of the espionage business, but Spy Wednesday is a fitting day to commence this series.

So, without further delay…

Five years ago, as America suffered lockdowns under the COVID-19 pandemic, the country was about to explode in a sensational racial moment after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020. Immediately, protests spread across the United States attesting Black Lives Matter. These involved marches, rallies, even riots. Public gatherings of any kind had been strictly banned due to the pandemic, but suddenly they were deemed mandatory, indeed morally imperative by liberal experts and authorities. Five years have passed and it’s already easy to forget what a strange moment the summer of BLM was.

Yes, elderly white members of Congress really knelt in public wearing pseudo-African garb to atone for…something. Whites vaguely begging for forgiveness from blacks, our moral superiors, were suddenly all the rage. Statues fell and history seemed to be born anew. The BLM agenda was expansive, nothing less than a racial revolution. That didn’t happen. It only took a few years for BLM to collapse amid corruption and scandal, as its founders cashed in handsomely on their activism. The movement’s stars, hailed as saintly geniuses for a moment, turned out to be inept grifters.

Somehow, this actually happened

The whole enterprise was strikingly inorganic. To anyone possessing open eyes and a degree of skepticism – you had to keep quiet about this in 2020, lest you face ostracism from polite society – the BLM revolution appeared, lavishly funded and organized, as if conjured out of thin air. We know more about that funding now, and much of it came from the Usual Suspects of left-wing dark money. In truth, BLM had been planned for at least five years before George Floyd’s unfortunate death. That planning didn’t start in the United States.

Foreign interference in our politics is a topic that’s been all the rage since mid-2015, when Donald Trump descended his golden escalator and entered the presidential race, upending American politics. Since then, Democrats have obsessed over alleged Russian involvement in the Trump enterprise, while proving few of their allegations. The case for a Kremlin hand behind Trump isn’t a nothingburger, exactly, as this newsletter has exclusively established, but Democrats greatly overplayed their hand.

Moreover, Democrat interest in foreign intelligence shenanigans is confined exclusively to Russians and Republicans. Yet, Moscow is hardly the only hostile country that’s meddling in our politics. China is an even bigger problem there, as this newsletter was discussing years before that subject got any traction in the media (the situation in Canada is even worse). Democrats ignore Chinese espionage broadly and Beijing’s sometimes blatant political meddling especially. The revelation this week that Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, a noted progressive and Trump-hater, has shady Beijing ties ought to have been front-page news. Her 2021 election campaign received over $300,000 from an official of the United Front Work Department, which is the Chinese Communist Party’s worldwide political warfare wing. As usual, that shocking development has been ignored by Democrats.

It's even more challenging to get Democrats to care about the espionage-cum-influence threat emanating from Cuba. That country may be close-by, but it’s small and poor, unlike China. However, the counterintelligence threat from Havana is taken very seriously by U.S. counterspies, who consistently rank Cuba among the top five espionage threats to our country and its secrets.

However, Cuba’s Dirección de Inteligencia or DI* isn’t just adept with espionage. Since the 1960s, the DI has displayed impressive acumen in political warfare too, spreading pro-Cuban messaging abroad while influencing politics in many countries, including the United States. This topic is obscure and controversial not merely because liberals don’t like discussing Communist subversion of our politics, but because Cuba’s political warfare emphasis from the outset has focused particularly on African Americans.

The Communist taint on the Civil Rights Movement was known to Cold War American counterintelligence but it’s never been something to be discussed in polite society. In a standard example, Rosa Parks, the Alabama activist whose 1955 refusal to surrender her “white” seat on a Montgomery bus sparked the movement, had been trained at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk School, a radical Left institution that was riddled with Communists. Opponents of Civil Rights asserted that the school was controlled by the Communist Party of the USA, a notion which progressives mocked. However, the Federal Bureau of Investigation took the allegation seriously, and FBI files demonstrate that the school was at a minimum Communist-adjacent, and its leadership consisted of party fellow travelers.

More serious were CPUSA ties to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (who also attended the Highlander Folk School). King’s operation was largely run by his wealthy friend and factotum Stanley Levinson, who was a CPUSA official until at least 1957 (he denied any dealings with the party after that year but the FBI didn’t believe him). However, the FBI knew that Levinson was also a Communist bagman, who took Soviet money to support his radical activism. Since such Moscow funds were controlled by the KGB, this meant the Kremlin was bankrolling the King operation – at the height of the Cold War. FBI suspicions about Levinson mounted when surveillance caught him in 1961 having meetings with Viktor Lesiovsky, a Soviet diplomat assigned to the United Nations in New York, but who was known by the FBI to be a KGB officer. The FBI’s wiretapping of King, the subject of much liberal outrage, was perfectly legitimate from any counterintelligence viewpoint.

From the moment he took over Cuba in early 1959, Fidel Castro strongly wanted to spread his revolution across the Western Hemisphere. Such Communist adventurism didn’t find much lasting success, but Fidel even hoped to spread the revolution to the United States, and he viewed African Americans as the best vanguard for la revolución. This turned out to be mostly wishful thinking, average African Americans were too religious and conservative to find Castro’s message appealing, but Cuban intelligence quickly attempted to cultivate rising blacks in the U.S. to spread Communism.

Many recruits were misfits. One early attempt by Havana was Robert F. Williams, an African American activist from North Carolina who fled to Cuba in 1961 with high hopes of gaining Castro’s support for black revolution. Williams was more a gun nut than a bona fide revolutionary and he wanted armed revolts in the American South rapidly. Cuban intelligence grew skeptical of Williams, who seemed more interested in shooting white people than organizing a revolution, notwithstanding his support for the Castro regime, for instance encouraging African Americans in the U.S. military to rise in revolt against their white officers. Williams found the Cubans too staid for his liking and in 1966 he decamped for Communist China at the onset of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

For several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, multiple self-styled African American revolutionaries hijacked U.S. passenger jets and directed them to safety in Cuba. Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton fled to Cuba in 1974, on the lam from U.S. justice, spending three years on the island. Hanging out in Cuba in the 1970s was de rigueur for African American leftists. Prominent activist and senior CPUSA official Angela Davis visited Cuba regularly in that decade, praising its alleged lack of racism and all-around progress under Communism. Davis hailed Castro for his giving sanctuary to Assata Shakur, born Joanne Chesimard, a black radical and domestic terrorist who helped murder a New Jersey state trooper in 1973. After a 1979 prison break, with help from the May 19 Communist Organization (hold that thought), Shakur made her way to Cuba, which officially gave her sanctuary in 1984. There she remains, having made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Terrorists List in 2013, the first woman so “honored.”

Celebrity Communists were pleasing to Fidel, but they didn’t do much to build the radical cadres that Havana wanted in the U.S. to accelerate the revolution. Those were provided by a unique front organization created by Cuban intelligence in 1969. This was the Venceremos (We Will Win) Brigade, established as a vehicle to bring young American leftists to Cuba, where the regime would propagandize them. Over the past half-century, nearly 10,000 Americans have joined the VB. How many of them became collaborators with Cuban intelligence during or after their sojourn isn’t known, but the FBI has long understood that the DI employs the Brigade as “their” project to spot and assess sympathetic young Americans for recruitment by Cuban intelligence. A DI defector told the FBI in 1983 that his service pulled the strings inside the VB and used it as a vehicle to recruit agents. The VB’s shadowy role is well understood in counterintelligence circles yet seldom mentioned in the media.

A brief but significant exception came in the summer of 2020, as BLM convulsed American cities, when Karen Bass was being considered as a vice-presidential choice by Democrat nominee Joe Biden. It turned out that Bass, a longtime Democrat Congresswoman from California and the head of the powerful Congressional Black Caucus, had spent years with the VB in her youth and made multiple trips to Cuba. Since she rose to be a senior VB official, it’s safe to assume that she was a DI co-optee, at a minimum, since VB leadership appointees must have DI approval. This revelation seems to have cut short Bass’ vice-presidential aspirations – suddenly her gushing over Fidel Castro at his 2016 death as “the passing of the Comandante en Jefe” and “a great loss to the people of Cuba” made sense – and she went on to become the scandal-ridden mayor of Los Angeles.

The larger point is that many people knew about Bass’ VB affiliation, she wasn’t hiding it, but nobody in the media or the Democrat establishment thought it was troubling, or even worth mentioning, that she was so close with the Cuban Communist regime. A significant percentage of African Americans in radical politics turn out to have connections to Havana and sometimes to the DI. There’s no stigma regarding this in their circles.

Which brings us to Black Lives Matter. It’s fair to observe that BLM is a notionally decentralized effort, yet its operational core is highly ideological. Patrisse Cullors, one of the co-founders of BLM in 2013, admitted that she and her comrades leading the group, including Alicia Garza, were ideologically motivated and “trained Marxists” – leaving open the question: Trained by whom?

The answer seems to be Cuba.

The DI and BLM want us to know. In July 2015, the 46^th Venceremos Brigade traveled to Cuba, via Canada per tradition to dodge the U.S. embargo (ironically President Barack Obama was renormalizing U.S. relations with Cuba at the same moment). Each brigade has a revolutionary theme or slogan and the chosen one for 2015, the VB’s central demand that year, was – you guessed it – Black Lives Matter.

The brigadistas returned to the U.S. on Aug. 2, 2015, via Buffalo’s Peace Bridge, under the BLM banner, wearing BLM t-shirts. Their press release gushed praise for Cuba and its regime:

Although the recent negotiations towards normalizing relations between the two countries were announced by both President Raúl Castro and President Barack Obama on December 17, 2014, the travel ban and U.S. blockade against Cuba are still in place. The Venceremos Brigade, along with its sister organization IFCO/Pastors for Peace, continues to claim the importance of engaging in civil disobedience through public Travel Challenges as one of the most effective means of mounting pressure on the U.S. government to change these policies. The Brigade will continue to do so until both the travel ban and blockade have been eradicated, Guantánamo military base is returned to Cuba, U.S. government funding ceases to programs of USAID and other organizations attempting to create political unrest in the country, and the U.S. respects Cuba’s right to national sovereignty and self-determination.

Ever since, BLM has proved a reliable propaganda arm of Havana. At Castro’s 2016 death, the Black Lives Matter Global Network, which is the umbrella non-profit foundation for the group, deeply mourned the passing of El Comandante: “As a Black network committed to transformation, we are particularly grateful to Fidel for holding Mama Assata Shakur, who continues to inspire us.” The group’s dedication to Havana got noticed in the summer of 2021, during anti-regime protests in Cuba. In response, BLMGN issued a statement supporting the Communist regime, blaming the protests on Washington, DC, because Cuba “has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination,” while hailing the Communists for their “solidarity with oppressed peoples of African descent.” Some seemed surprised by the group’s slavish devotion to Havana, not least because more than a few of the anti-regime protesters were black. None should be surprised: BLM is a creation of Cuban intelligence and will be loyal to Havana, no matter what.

We don’t know the exact relationship between the DI and BLM, but based on standard Cuban modus operandi, we should assume that senior BLMGN officials are vetted by the DI and may be their witting agents. The BLM outburst of the summer of 2020, which rocked America from coast to coast, was no accident, rather was well planned – with help from Havana. It may not be coincidental that Susan Rosenberg, a radical member of the May 19 Communist Organization who helped Assata Shakur escape from prison then spent 16 years in federal prison herself for domestic terrorism, including the Nov. 7, 1983, bombing of the U.S. Senate – her sentence was commuted by President Bill Clinton on his last day in the Oval Office in 2001 – helped fund BLM. Specifically, around 2020, Rosenberg was serving as the vice-chair of Thousand Currents, a grantmaking organization that financially backed BLMGN. That may be merely one more revolutionary coincidence, but counterintelligence officers don’t like coincidences.

In any normal world, the media would ask such questions. They haven’t and won’t. Which is why this newsletter is running this series. Welcome aboard!

*From its establishment in 1961 to 1989, the service was termed the Dirección General de Inteligencia or DGI. It’s been simply the DI since 1989.

26. Questions Congress should ask about DOD ‘peace through strength’ plan

Four excellent questions:

First, what will “peace through strength” mean in practice?

Second, how will this guidance translate into changes in U.S. force structure and posture?

Third, what is the role of the military in securing the U.S. border?

Fourth, and most importantly, how will these changes be funded?

Questions Congress should ask about DOD ‘peace through strength’ plan

militarytimes.com · by Clementine Starling-Daniels · April 16, 2025

Less than two months after becoming the 29th Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth published an “Interim National Defense Strategic Guidance” memo, reflecting President Donald Trump’s desire to reshape U.S. defense strategy. It defines how the US military protects national security interests and shapes U.S. force structure, posture, war-fighting concepts and budget decisions.

The document replaces the Biden administration’s 2022 National Defense Strategy and marks a shift in Pentagon priorities under the new administration, offering an early look into what the second Trump administration’s “peace through strength” approach will mean in practice.

While the memo itself is classified, public reporting on the guidance tells us the reordered priorities for the Pentagon: China and homeland defense, followed by everything else. U.S. military departments and combatant commands must now adjust their strategies and resourcing accordingly. Congress and US allies and partners must also assess the memo’s implications — Congress for oversight and funding, and others to adapt their strategies in accordance with new Pentagon priorities.

Top priorities: homeland defense and China

While China was considered the main threat in the past two National Defense Strategies, it appears to be the singular overseas focus of the interim guidance. And aside from concerns regarding Chinese influence over the Panama Canal (and presumably the Western Hemisphere more broadly), the Indo-Pacific remains the primary overseas focus for the U.S. military.

The national objectives that underpinned the Biden and first Trump administrations — to protect the American people and expand economic prosperity —will likely remain. But the interim guidance signals a shift in how the administration perceives the strategic environment and the ways and means it will use to achieve its objectives. While the Biden administration focused on advancing democratic values to promote international stability, the Trump administration has emphasized peace through strength — the notion that military power helps ensure peace, a stance it now seeks to reaffirm.

The Biden administration’s 2022 NDS identified five major threats: China (the “pacing” threat), Russia (the “acute” threat), Iran, North Korea and violent extremist organizations — aligning with the first Trump administration. Biden’s team prioritized those threats regionally, placing the homeland first, followed by the Indo-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East.

This approach, a continuation of U.S. military strategy since the 1990s, is what a RAND study termed “expeditionary defense in depth.” It emphasized maintaining a sizable global posture and projecting power, i.e., deploying forces, across significant distances to crisis zones.

The 2025 interim guidance reverts to an earlier U.S. strategic approach suited for great power competition, what the same study calls “consolidated defense in depth.” Reports of the guidance indicate a shift from emphasizing the U.S. military’s ability to project power to crisis zones around the globe to a narrower prioritization on China and U.S. homeland defense. Previous strategies framed homeland defense around terrorism and overt military threats, but this guidance emphasizes holistic border security and protecting American interests in the Western Hemisphere, such as ensuring access to the Panama Canal and combatting cartels and transnational criminal organizations in Latin America.

The trade-offs: less focus on Europe and the Middle East

Every strategy involves trade-offs — prioritizing resources in one area means deprioritizing them elsewhere. The trade-off for a stronger U.S. focus on China and the Western Hemisphere in this guidance seems to be a diminished focus on Europe and the Middle East. Since the end of World War II, the United States has viewed a stable and peaceful Europe — composed of its closest like-minded allies and supported by a strong US role in NATO, security backing, training, and interoperability efforts — as strategically vital to its own security.

This imperative may now be shifting. While European allies and partners rely heavily on U.S. support against Russian aggression, the Trump administration expects them to carry the brunt of that burden moving forward, which this guidance reportedly affirms. The estimated median defense expenditure among European NATO members in 2024 was 2.1%. This stark reprioritization will send a clear signal to European allies — the United States will likely do less in Europe, so regional deterrence and defense will require strong European leadership, investment and modernization of their military forces. The Middle East, while less stable than Europe and with allies that are spending more on defense (Israel, 5.3% of GDP; Saudi Arabia, 7.1% of GDP; United Arab Emirates, 5.6% of GDP; etc.), is another region that will likely face reduced U.S. military focus.

Still, allies and partners should not believe that the United States will simply evacuate these regions. In some ways, the current trends might be thought of as a neo-Nixon Doctrine. As Nixon put it, this meant recognizing that “the United States will participate in the defense and development of allies and friends, but that America cannot ... undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.” The United States, according to this doctrine, would “help where it makes a real difference and is considered in our interest.” The same is likely to hold true now — this strategic guidance likely means a reevaluation of how the United States supports and enables allies and partners, not abandonment.

A recent report in The Washington Post supports this assessment and further suggests that a Heritage Foundation report from last summer might be a major influence on the interim strategy. If these assumptions are true, then the United States will need to define where its involvement is uniquely necessary compared to what allies can handle independently, and, potentially, what it expects in return. Aligning Washington’s expectations for allied capabilities with the reality of where those allies currently stand may prove challenging.

4 crucial questions policymakers will need to answer

The DoD’s memo makes clear the reprioritization of its strategic threats and likely changes to how it will pursue its objectives. But it also raises crucial questions about what implementation will look like, what the Defense Department will ultimately ask of allies and partners, and how Congress can appropriate the funds to put these ambitions into practice.

First, what will “peace through strength” mean in practice?

This guidance offers a first glimpse. A key attribute appears to be close U.S. control over its most vital interests, especially in the Western Hemisphere — reminiscent of a modern Monroe Doctrine. The original 1823 doctrine warned competitors against meddling in the Western Hemisphere while asserting U.S. dominance and a policy of non-interference in return. It also signals a heightened focus on homeland defense — deterring threats and protecting U.S. citizens and critical infrastructure from foreign attacks — particularly through nuclear deterrence and missile defense, as seen in the Golden Dome for America initiative.

The Pentagon will also need to clarify where else it will invest to bolster homeland defense. Homeland defense can partially be achieved through strategic capabilities and border control — as reporting suggests the memo emphasizes — but threats to the homeland in the cyber and information spaces also abound. These are areas where the military can play a role, particularly in protecting critical infrastructure. If the administration intends to take a comprehensive approach to homeland defense, these aspects should also be considered. How the Defense Department clarifies its role, prioritization and resourcing of these areas will be important to watch in the coming months.

Second, how will this guidance translate into changes in U.S. force structure and posture?

For nearly a decade, the U.S. military prioritized developing forces to project power into the western Pacific to deter against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. For years, U.S. leaders have argued for increased defense spending to create a military capable of fighting and winning in multiple theaters simultaneously. Several of those leaders — National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Senator Roger Wicker, for example — are now in key positions to influence U.S. defense strategy and resourcing. There may be support for a version of the multiple theater force construct proposed by the congressionally mandated 2024 bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy, with significant responsibilities for allies and partners.

But will an emphasis on China-first result in a strategy geared toward countering Chinese aggression and influence primarily in the Indo-Pacific region, or will forces and resources be geared toward countering China globally — across multiple regions and domains in which it is present? The answer to this will have significant implications for U.S. force structure and posture.

North America and Europe will potentially face the most dramatic shifts in U.S. force structure and posture. Building a Golden Dome and accelerating nuclear modernization will consume vast resources. Increasing U.S. shipbuilding, aircraft and munitions production will further add to the bill. Moreover, using conventional ground and special operations capabilities along the southern border will create more costs and readiness issues. Europe is likely where these trade-offs will be felt most.

European states and NATO should prepare for the U.S. military to act as an enabler rather than core provider of the bulk of any combat force. The United States can and should provide capabilities that European states will struggle to produce. Examples include command and control, space and cyber capabilities and bomber aircraft. However, Europe should expect to carry the burden for less unique military requirements, especially land combat roles. How this logic may translate to changes in American force posture in Europe is unclear, but experience from the last Trump administration suggests that some forces, especially land forces, may either withdraw from Europe or move out of Germany and Italy to posts farther east.

The Middle East may continue to receive military resources similar to its current levels, though there will likely be pressure for partners to assume leading roles where they can. To begin, the force posture there is small relative to what it was just fifteen years ago. secon, the renewed maximum pressure campaign on Iran coupled with Israel’s embroilment in several connected conflicts suggests that the administration will be unlikely to reduce support to Israel or Arab allies anytime soon. The desire to stabilize the region and pressure Iran back to the negotiating table are powerful imperatives to maintain commitments in the region. However, the United States may expect partners to do more. For example, European allies may be pressed to increase their presence in the Red Sea and assume more responsibility for common problems, such as countering the Houthi threat.

Third, what is the role of the military in securing the U.S. border?

While militaries are fundamentally tasked with securing a state against outside actors, the U.S. military has not focused on border security for over a century. Since the 1916 Mexican expedition, the United States has primarily secured itself by promoting stability abroad. As a result, border security shifted from a military role to a law enforcement function with defense undertones. A notable exception is air and missile defense, as seen in the combined US-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command.

A century of this strategy has shaped the U.S. military to project power overseas and defend the air and sea approaches to North America. U.S. leaders will need to decide if they want to transition border security back to the military or if using military forces on the border is a temporary measure. If it is permanent, how will border security affect the overall military force structure, especially of the Army? If it is temporary, what conditions are the troops at the border to create and how will those conditions be sustained by traditional border security elements once the troops depart?

Fourth, and most importantly, how will these changes be funded?

The interim guidance seems to represent a major shift in strategy, which requires a significant change in the associated resourcing strategy. Continuing resolutions will not allow this strategy to be realized. Given that fiscal year 2025 is almost half over and a 2026 budget is nowhere to be seen, congressional leaders will need to act with a sense of urgency not typically associated with the budgeting process if the Trump administration wants to see these major efforts take shape.

The interim guidance memo provides an early glimpse into the second Trump administration’s defense priorities. Clearly, the new administration has a different assessment of strategic threats and a distinct approach to ways and means compared to the previous administration. However, many details of how “peace through strength” will be implemented remain undefined — an unsurprising reality given the early days of the administration.

Nevertheless, with pressing security threats, it is critical to articulate these plans quickly. In the coming months, the administration will need to clarify how it plans to adjust U.S. force structure and posture, shift more security responsibilities to allies in Europe and the Middle East, and define the U.S. military’s role in border security. While much is still taking shape, this initial insight into the administration’s strategic thinking provides a foundation for Congress and U.S. allies and partners to begin adapting to the Defense Department’s shifting priorities.

Clementine Starling-Daniels is Director and Senior Fellow of the Forward Defense Program, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council. Theresa Luetkefend is Assistant Director in the Forward Defense Program, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.

27. Analysis: How the battles Trump loves to wage explain his presidency

Excerpt:

But the administration’s plans aren’t just tactical. There’s also philosophical strategy at work. While the president sometimes seems uninterested in policy, some of his most influential second-term operatives are deeply ideological. Beyond Trump’s craving for disruption, there’s a coherent effort to destroy the pillars of the liberal establishment, to turn back civil rights and progressive liberal social victories, and even to reverse demographic change with immigration policy.

Analysis: How the battles Trump loves to wage explain his presidency | CNN Politics

CNN · by Stephen Collinson · April 17, 2025

President Donald Trump during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, on Thursday, April 10, 2025.

CNN —

To understand Donald Trump’s second term, just look at the fights he picks.

The president and his top officials spent this week escalating confrontations over mass deportations, elite universities and transgender athletes on emerging fronts of his “common sense revolution.”

Each is obviously an attempt to please the loyal MAGA political base and other elements of the coalition on which Trump anchored his two election wins.

Trump’s team may also be trying to change the subject from his trade war chaos and his stalled Ukraine peace effort. But the idea that he’s engaged in an endless cycle of distraction to hide his failures became a cliche in his first term. In his second, it’s a lazy critique that fails to encapsulate his often-fateful acts of far greater substance aimed at transforming American life and the world.

The administration fought on multiple fronts on Wednesday. It sued Maine for refusing to apply its transgender high school athlete ban. Top officials furiously worked to discredit an undocumented migrant mistakenly sent, without due process, to an El Salvadorian mega-prison who embodies their ruthless immigration policy. And they doubled down on an attempt to shape the policies, faculty, and student body at Harvard University as part of a crackdown on a bastion of liberal power.

The controversies share some common traits that offer insight into Trump’s leadership. They demonstrate the president’s attempt to apply vast presidential power, often based on questionable constitutional grounds. All are likely to feature protracted legal battles that could ultimately test whether the country will tip into a constitutional crisis if the White House ignores judges’ rulings.

Almost every showdown reflects the essential dynamics driving Trump’s character and politics: He chooses fights that demonstrate his strength over potentially weaker opponents. And his team adopts the relentless win-lose mindset that has defined Trump’s life as a real estate baron, reality star and president.

There’s always an element of “owning the libs” about Trump’s approach in the choreographing of battles designed to crush progressive sensitivities. Often, they leave his opponents forced to defend unpopular institutions or constituencies that offer few political payoffs – like undocumented migrants – leading to hours of mockery on conservative media.

But the administration’s plans aren’t just tactical. There’s also philosophical strategy at work. While the president sometimes seems uninterested in policy, some of his most influential second-term operatives are deeply ideological. Beyond Trump’s craving for disruption, there’s a coherent effort to destroy the pillars of the liberal establishment, to turn back civil rights and progressive liberal social victories, and even to reverse demographic change with immigration policy.

And these fights also show that three months in, Trump’s sweeping claims of presidential authority risk taking the country down an authoritarian slope. There was a whiff of totalitarianism in the air this week when Trump played along with El Salvador’s self-styled “world’s coolest dictator” in the Oval Office.

And a wrecking-ball president unleashing economic upheaval and carving even deeper national divides is posing a critical political question: Is this what voters thought they were getting or wanted from an election in which the country’s main concern seemed to be lowering prices after a punishing surge of inflation?

Immigration: Trump’s favorite way to build his political power

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia has the misfortune of becoming a human pawn in a titanic political clash that those waging it cannot afford to lose.

The sheet metal worker and undocumented migrant is incarcerated in a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador after being expelled in defiance of a judge’s order that he not be deported to his native country. At first, the administration admitted in court that it made an administrative error. But it is now misrepresenting a Supreme Court ruling that it must “facilitate” Garcia’s return amid a brewing constitutional showdown.

Immigration was foundational for Trump’s political career. He’d barely descended the golden escalator in his New York skyscraper in 2015 to launch his campaign when he began slandering Mexican immigrants. In his 2024 presidential bid, he falsely claimed foreign nations were emptying prisons and asylums to create an alien “invasion” of the US to exploit the Biden administration’s failure to initially recognize and address surges of undocumented migrants.

Trump’s demagoguery on migration has often worked. It animated nativist elements of his party and built a coalition that led to his GOP domination. And in a CNN/SSRS poll last month, 51% approved of his handling of immigration. It was the only one of a suite of issues in which he had majority support.

That strength explains why Trump often returns to this magic formula when he’s facing heavy political weather. And it explains the politics of the White House’s refusal to back down on Abrego Garcia.

Attorney General Pam Bondi warned on Wednesday that he’s “not coming back to our country.” Officials accuse Abrego Garcia of being a terrorist, an MS-13 gang member and a threat to the safety of Americans, although he has no criminal convictions and they haven’t produced public evidence of their claims.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during a news conference in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on Wednesday.

Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighted a protection order obtained by Abrego Garcia’s wife in 2021 after he allegedly assaulted her. She cranked up the political histrionics, accusing Democrats of rushing to defend “an illegal criminal, foreign terrorist, gang member, but also an apparent woman beater.” She added, “Nothing will change the fact that Abrego Garcia will never be a Maryland father; he will never live in the United States of America again.”

Garcia Abrego’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, told CNN in a statement that she hadn’t pursued the matter in court, that they were able to work through their difficulties and that their marriage “only grew stronger.”

This all reflected a potentially defining moment for Trump’s immigration policy. To bend would provoke questions about whether some of the other hundreds of migrants sent to El Salvador were also denied due process because of flimsy evidence that they are gang members. It could potentially undermine public support for Trump on a rare issue where he polls well. Abrego Garcia’s return could also lessen the culture of fear the administration has been creating with detentions and deportations designed to vastly slow arrivals at the border.

And perhaps most importantly, a climbdown could puncture the conceit that the courts lack authority to constrain or compel the president’s behavior.

At the same time, however, the plight of Abrego Garcia also risks become a broader political issue around perceived White House cruelty that could begin to erode Trump’s relatively strong ratings on immigration.

Bondi takes up Trump’s transgender sports campaign

Bondi, a star of the MAGA movement, also led another key administration push Wednesday, suing Maine over its refusal to comply with Trump’s ban on transgender athletes in high school sports. The lawsuit alleges the state is violating Title IX, the law that prohibits sex-based discrimination at schools that receive federal aid. A clash is now set between presidential authority and state power. Maine says Trump’s order conflicts with its own Human Rights Act.

The lawsuit could be a harbinger of similar efforts by Trump to use presidential power to enforce social policy in other states.

This is another fight the White House loves.

The president raised the issue in his meeting with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele on Monday. “We have people that fight to the death because they think men should be able to play in women’s sports. And some of those sports, it wouldn’t matter much, but it still matters, but some of them are very dangerous for women,” he said.

Pam Bondi, US Attorney General, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio sit nearby as President Donald Trump meets with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on Monday.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

On the campaign trail, Trump frequently mocked trans athletes and bemoaned what conservatives say is the destruction of girls’ sports, despite instances of transgender athletes competing in women’s competitions being relatively rare.

Trump is tapping into an issue that is perceived as a moral outrage in his own coalition, including among evangelicals and social conservatives. He’s also making a mainstream play with a crossover issue for some more moderate voters, like the suburban independents who helped him win all seven swing states in November.

When Trump argues that he’s voicing “common sense,” he’s pitching suburban moms and dads worried about potential lost opportunities for their daughters if transgender athletes somehow come to dominate women’s sports. And by initiating classic backlash politics, he’s tapping into perceptions that progressives have gone far too far on social issues – in a way that has alienated some voters.

But as with immigration, Trump’s approach victimizes individuals, creates a culture of fear among a marginalized community and raises the question of whether a president has the personal power to dictate the scope of individual rights.

The ideological aspirations powering Trump’s attack on elite education

The standoff with elite US universities is another classic example of Trumpism in action.

He’s targeting institutions that conservatives believe are dominated by progressive extremists. Top colleges are also a source of the expertise and intellectual pursuits to which Trumpism is a reaction. And the clash raises suspicions of presidential overreach.

The populist commander-in-chief seems delighted that Harvard – perhaps the nation’s greatest citadel of elitism – fought back, unlike some other top schools that fueled his power grab by bending to his wishes.

“Harvard has been hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called ‘future leaders,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Wednesday, encapsulating his political incentives in a dispute in which he’s threatening to cancel the university’s tax exemption.

But there’s also a deeply ideological goal underpinning the attack on higher education. The White House is using anti-Israel protests that saw antisemitic incidents on some campuses to crack down on university administrators. But the president is also pursuing policies that could deliver for ideological conservatives, who have spent years pushing back on affirmative action policies and efforts to diversify faculty and student populations in the wake of the civil rights movement.

CNN · by Stephen Collinson · April 17, 2025

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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