Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Thinking is difficult. That's why most people judge."

– Carl Jung

"True freedom is the right to say something that others do not want to hear."

– George Orwell

“Of course, there is more to history than vast impersonal forces such as Communism, technology, geopolitics, and so on. There are also personalities and human agency, with all of their implied contingencies. Vladimir Putin has been the most dangerous Russian leader since Stalin; Xi Jinping is as relentless and ideological as Mao Zedong; Donald Trump, whose political career may lie in the past tense, is more vain and superficial than von Papen even. The point is, there is the raw material in today’s world that can force a true cataclysm, or at the least keep this permanent crisis of world order going. There will be no let-up from the headlines, in other words. Forget Hitler. Every tyrant is unique, just as every hero is. And just as technology liberates, technological demons will abound. The key element in all of this will be closeness. We will all—Eurasia, Africa, North and South America—be exposed to each other’s crises as never before. In this, the mid-and late 21st century will be to the 20th century as the 20th was to the 19th and even the 18th. That is, the pace and quality of connectivity—of closeness—will unceasingly accelerate. That will deliver many wonders, of course. But it will be the disease variants, the toxic destabilizing elements, that can threaten to overwhelm us.”

— Robert D. Kaplan, Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

1. Death of Army Academics in America?

2. US Army leadership says it wants soldiers out figuring out what's needed for war, not 'focused on PowerPoint slides'

3. Trump's first 100 days: Steamrolling government, strong-arming allies, igniting trade wars

4. Tech industry tried reducing AI's pervasive bias. Now Trump wants to end its 'woke AI' efforts

5. Ukraine’s Crimea Lies at the Heart of Russia’s Invasion—and Trump’s Peace Plan

6. China’s Huawei Develops New AI Chip, Seeking to Match Nvidia

7. The NATO Country With No Military Gets Serious About Defense

8. Why Japan and Mongolia Are Expanding Defense Capability Cooperation

9. China Decides How Far the Resistance Can Go in Myanmar

10. Chinese Manufacturers Are Scouring the World for New Buyers

11. ‘The Secret History of the Five Eyes’ Review: Club of Spies

12. With Trump-Zelensky Meeting, Ukrainians See a Glimmer of Hope

13. Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash

14. How Foreign Students Lost Their Sheen in a Nation of Immigrants

15. The children of the Vietnam War’s ‘Operation Babylift’ have turned 50. A look at the lives they built.

16. A blandly titled law from 1946 may play a key role in Harvard’s lawsuit against the Trump administration

17. Jamal Greene: I’m a legal scholar. We're in a constitutional crisis — and this is the moment it began.

1. Death of Army Academics in America?

This is painful to read about our Army.

Excerpts:

Then the worm was pulled out of the ground and vaporized. Early in 2025 the Department of Defense started exercising very specific controls over what could and could not appear on Army web pages. Many of the institution’s own leading web pages for professional discussion—such as the Army War College’s site and their War Room professional blog—went completely dark. This was initially just a ten-day social media “pause”. It then recurred for a longer period as editors and others decided how to comply with the new guidance. The guidance, I am told, was changing rapidly and was often unclear. Several sites went dark, apparently forever (a friend implored the Sergeant Major of the Army to “blink three times if he was under duress” as we watched his post on X—now deleted—where he announced that his social media content was being consolidated (read “shut down”)).

While perhaps there is an argument that the Department of Defense has some legitimate interest in harmonizing its outward-facing messaging to align with larger Departmental goals or imperatives, this was not that. We all know the difference between the public affairs mission (or, more nefariously when speaking in a domestic context, information operations) and the accurate and unvarnished information needed for staffs to complete their work thinking things through for the commander. This action by the Department affected both outward-facing sites as well as sites, like that of War College, primarily intended for audiences inside the profession of arms and geared towards professional learning and discussion. It appeared designed to regulate what was being said, as opposed to pushing a unified message or maintaining good order and discipline.

As such, this Departmental action seems to conflict with the entire notion of the Army as part of a “profession of arms” where some notion of free intellectual enquiry underpins the notion of a profession that must define itself, school itself, and police the values and principles applied by its members. These actions seemed more like attempts at centralized, Napoleonic control and less like efforts to husband and grow a cadre of self-aware, thinking leaders ready to innovate and overcome novel strategic, operational, and tactical problems on the modern battlefield.

Death of Army Academics in America?

wavellroom.com · by Garri Benjamin Hendell · April 25, 2025

The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools

Thucydides

When I was coming up, the Army was in an intellectually humble place. Because of the unforeseen (or at least not fully anticipated) challenges posed by OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM, the Army was in the midst of learning all about what it didn’t know. At the time, this was counterinsurgency. All the lessons we thought we had learned from past conflicts (or the ones we had previously learned and then deliberately forgotten) were re-assessed and we had a process of re-learning. Everyone was reading How to Eat Soup with a Knife, watching a film about the French experience in North Africa, and digesting the latest nuggets of wisdom from General Petraeus and John Nagl.

We tried to develop “design methodology”. We established a school to teach Red Teaming. We encouraged outside of the box thinking.

Then the worm turned. At some point, the institutional imperatives switched back towards building an Army suited to linear combat operations, and the focus again became size and effectiveness in large-scale combat operations. The foundations of counterinsurgency warfare—learning about the cultural parameters of the locales in which we were to operate—came to an end. Red teaming faded away. Learning from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the heroic defense mounted by the Ukrainians, imperatives in modern combat appeared to revolve around space-based detection and communication systems, the ability to scale up manufacturing of defense materiel, and adapting off of the shelf commercial technologies for wartime use.

Then the worm was pulled out of the ground and vaporized. Early in 2025 the Department of Defense started exercising very specific controls over what could and could not appear on Army web pages. Many of the institution’s own leading web pages for professional discussion—such as the Army War College’s site and their War Room professional blog—went completely dark. This was initially just a ten-day social media “pause”. It then recurred for a longer period as editors and others decided how to comply with the new guidance. The guidance, I am told, was changing rapidly and was often unclear. Several sites went dark, apparently forever (a friend implored the Sergeant Major of the Army to “blink three times if he was under duress” as we watched his post on X—now deleted—where he announced that his social media content was being consolidated (read “shut down”)).

While perhaps there is an argument that the Department of Defense has some legitimate interest in harmonizing its outward-facing messaging to align with larger Departmental goals or imperatives, this was not that. We all know the difference between the public affairs mission (or, more nefariously when speaking in a domestic context, information operations) and the accurate and unvarnished information needed for staffs to complete their work thinking things through for the commander. This action by the Department affected both outward-facing sites as well as sites, like that of War College, primarily intended for audiences inside the profession of arms and geared towards professional learning and discussion. It appeared designed to regulate what was being said, as opposed to pushing a unified message or maintaining good order and discipline.

As such, this Departmental action seems to conflict with the entire notion of the Army as part of a “profession of arms” where some notion of free intellectual enquiry underpins the notion of a profession that must define itself, school itself, and police the values and principles applied by its members. These actions seemed more like attempts at centralized, Napoleonic control and less like efforts to husband and grow a cadre of self-aware, thinking leaders ready to innovate and overcome novel strategic, operational, and tactical problems on the modern battlefield.

As such, these actions appear to be, at best, counter-productive.

What is to be done? As a preliminary matter, professional discussions and intellectual enquiry can always occur outside the Army’s intellectual ecosystem. There are plenty of fora for professional discussion which exist outside of official channels. There is a vibrant non-institutional military press.

Even though we can continue to further professionalism and the free enquiry that necessarily underpins that endeavor outside of the military ecosystem, should we? When General Washington originally took command of the Continental Army (and before he realized the error of his ways), the New England states largely ignored his order not to field racially integrated units. Although we pride ourselves in following orders and on military subordination to the civilian authorities, we also have twin doctrines which pull in the other direction: diverting from the letter of the commander’s order when necessary, for example, in order to better fulfill his or her ultimate intent or if the order is really stupid as well as the notion that requirement to follow an order only applies to orders that are themselves lawful. Some orders require opposition, albeit this course entails some personal and professional risk.

In a profession which requires you to kill enemy soldiers in wartime or risk being killed by them in furtherance of your values, nobody said that doing the right thing would be easy.

Garri Benjamin Hendell

Garri Benjamin Hendell is a lieutenant colonel in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. He has served three overseas deployments to the CENTCOM AOR, various training deployments to Europe, and served in 2022-2023 as the brigade task force S3 responsible for land forces in support of border operations. He is currently assigned as the Red Team Chief, 28th Infantry Division.

This author does not have any more posts.

wavellroom.com · by Garri Benjamin Hendell · April 25, 2025

2. US Army leadership says it wants soldiers out figuring out what's needed for war, not 'focused on PowerPoint slides'

But we must be able to not only outfight our enemies we must outthink our adversaries as well. (though I agree with the SECARMY that PowerPoint is not necessarily the best way to outfight or outthink - but it does have value if used properly - and it is a convenient symbol to flog to make a point).

Excerpts:

The visit sent a message about Driscoll's priorities.

In Alaska, where even now, in spring, temperatures are down in the 30s (in the winter, they can be 30 below), US soldiers are tirelessly readying to meet the challenges of Arctic warfare, a necessity as the US attempts to shift its focus to the Indo-Pacific.

On a call with BI, Driscoll and Maj. Gen. Joseph Hillbert, the commander of US Army Alaska and the 11th Airborne Division, spoke about how the unit's soldiers and their work in Alaska align with the goals of US military leadership under President Donald Trump, which are all about lethality, a popular Pentagon buzzword that basically boils down to warfighter readiness.

US Army leadership says it wants soldiers out figuring out what's needed for war, not 'focused on PowerPoint slides'

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-army-wants-more-troops-like-ones-in-alaska-secretary-2025-4

By Chris Panella

Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll visited the 11th Airborne Division in Alaska this week, observing their work in the field. US Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Mejia

Apr 27, 2025, 6:10 AM ETed

US Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll visited soldiers in Alaska training for Arctic warfare.
He praised their focus on readiness and cold weather tactics, saying he wants more of that.
Military leaders have made warfighter lethality a top priority.

What does the US Army secretary want to see more of? Soldiers out in the field, "out in the world figuring out what we need to do as an Army," not making PowerPoints, he told Business Insider.

US Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll, a former armor officer and Iraq war veteran who became the service's top civilian official two months ago, visited the 11th Airborne Division in Alaska this week.

The visit sent a message about Driscoll's priorities.

In Alaska, where even now, in spring, temperatures are down in the 30s (in the winter, they can be 30 below), US soldiers are tirelessly readying to meet the challenges of Arctic warfare, a necessity as the US attempts to shift its focus to the Indo-Pacific.

On a call with BI, Driscoll and Maj. Gen. Joseph Hillbert, the commander of US Army Alaska and the 11th Airborne Division, spoke about how the unit's soldiers and their work in Alaska align with the goals of US military leadership under President Donald Trump, which are all about lethality, a popular Pentagon buzzword that basically boils down to warfighter readiness.

Driscoll joined soldiers during a spur ride at the Black Rapids Training Site in Alaska. US Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Mejia

"Everything that I saw up here, that the 11th Airborne was doing, was focused on" several key questions, Driscoll said. "If we get into conflict," how will the tools the Army has help "keep us alive and help us kill the enemy?"

Soldiers in Alaska, which BI previously observed in action, are out testing how equipment, weapons, aircraft, gear, and more are impacted by really low temperatures, harsh conditions, and regular exposure to the unforgiving elements.

"They were not focused on things like PowerPoint slides and how they could deliver better work products to the Pentagon," Driscoll said of the 11th Airborne Division, telling BI that "they were out there kind of suffering in the cold on behalf of their nation."

Trial and error out in the field and programs like soldier touch points for immersive testing and feedback have long been considered important to innovation and iterative development.

PowerPoint presentations, on the other hand, while a useful tool, are often seen as the hallmarks of uninspiring, morale-lowering military briefings and trainings that can oversimplify or unnecessarily complicate ideas and concepts.

Such criticisms have been around for over a decade now. James Mattis, years before he became Trump's first defense secretary, back when he was still a general with the Marine Corps, said that "PowerPoint makes us stupid."

At that same 2010 speaking event, H.R. McMaster, an Army general who years later became Trump's national advisor, said PowerPoint is "dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control." He said that "some problems in the world are not bullet-izable."

Driscoll spoke highly of the Army unit he observed, noting that leadership wants to support efforts to figure out what the Army needs for future fights. US Army photo by Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Mejia

Driscoll and other Army leaders want to signal that field activities are important. They not only promote warfighter readiness, but they also allow decision-makers to get feedback for next steps and procurement plans.

Trump's first 100 days: Steamrolling government, strong-arming allies, igniting trade wars

By The Associated Press

Published 9:55 AM EDT, April 27, 2025

AP · April 27, 2025

In his first 100 days, President Donald Trump exerted his power in a sweep and scale that has no easy historical comparison.

His actions target the architecture of the New Deal and the Great Society, but they hardly stop there. He is also rewriting the Reagan Republican orthodoxy of free trade and strong international alliances. All of it is in service of fundamentally altering the role of government in American life and the U.S. place in the world.

To implement parts of his vision, he deployed the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, to dismantle the federal workforce, deciding only after the fact if the cuts had gone too far.

Trump also has unilaterally declared the power to remake the post-World War II alliance with Europe that has largely maintained peace for nearly 80 years. The Republican president has made extraordinary emergency declarations to rewrite the rules of global trade, setting off panic in markets and capitals around the world. And he has ordered the removal of migrants to a prison in El Salvador without judicial review.

What’s more, he has taken direct aim at law, media, public health and culture, attempting to bring all to heel, with some surprising success.

Many of his actions were promised during his campaign but he put them in place with a blunt force aggressiveness.

Here is a look at the most consequential first 100 days of an American presidency since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Economy

Trump has tried to bend the U.S. economy to his will. But one force is unbowed: the financial markets.

Trump says the outcome of his tariffs will eventually be “beautiful.” So far, it’s been an difficult three months with consumer confidence plummeting, stock markets convulsing and investors losing confidence in the credibility of Trump’s policies. It has become a time of anxiety instead of his promised golden age of prosperity.

White House reporter Josh Boak covers the White House and economic policy for The Associated Press.

DOGE

Trump promised to take on what he called waste, fraud and abuse in government. He tapped Musk to lead the effort.

Musk turned his plan for a Department of Government Efficiency into one of the most polarizing and consequential pieces of Trump’s first 100 days.

The billionaire entrepreneur approached the task with a tech mogul ethos: break things, then see what you want to fix. Firings were widespread and indiscriminate. Programs were eliminated with limited analysis. The human consequences were left for others to sort out.

Chris Megerian covers the White House for The Associated Press.

Immigration

Cracking down on illegal immigration was the anthem of Trump’s campaign, and it is the issue where he has the greatest support.

He has followed through by implementing some of the hardest-line immigration policies in the nation’s history, even as the promised mass deportations have yet to materialize.

Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport migrants with limited due process, then used it to send hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador in defiance of a court order.

Read the full story.

National politics reporter Will Weissert covers national politics and the White House for The Associated Press.

Retribution

Trump entered office pledging to bring “retribution” for his supporters.

He made good on that on his first day and virtually every week since, with actions taking aim at the prosecutors who investigated him and the law firms that employed them. He went after former officials who criticized him or asserted, correctly, that he had lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump ordered the suspension of the security clearances of the more than four dozen former intelligence officials who signed onto a letter during the 2020 campaign stating that the saga of Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop bore the hallmarks of a Russian influence campaign.

Trump’s Justice Department fired the prosecutors who investigated him as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s team and demanded the names of FBI agents who participated in investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

The nation’s top universities have not been spared, either.

Eric Tucker covers national security in Washington for The Associated Press, with a focus on the FBI and Justice Department.

Courts, judges and the rule of law

Trump has consistently said he would follow an order from federal judges. But that has not stopped talk of a possible constitutional crisis over defying the courts.

His executive orders reshaping the federal government are facing more than 150 lawsuits on issues from fired federal workers and immigration to transgender rights.

Judges have ruled against the administration dozens of times, blocking parts of his agenda for now. The administration has argued that individual judges should not be able to issue nationwide injunctions.

The administration has also pushed back in court, quickly appealing multiple orders to the conservative-majority Supreme Court.

Read the full story.

Lindsay Whitehurst covers the Supreme Court, legal affairs and criminal justice for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C.

Diplomacy and international relations

Trump has rejected the post-World War II order that has formed the basis for global stability and security.

He has rejected long-standing alliances and hinted at scaling back the U.S. troop presence in Europe. Longtime allies such as Germany and France have suggested they no longer can depend on Washington.

Trump also pledged a swift end to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, so far to little effect.

At the same time, he has repeatedly called for the U.S. to annex Greenland, which is a Danish territory, to retake control of the Panama Canal and to make Canada the 51st U.S. state.

Read the full story.

Matthew Lee writes about diplomacy for The Associated Press.

Congress

Congress is proving to be almost no match for this White House.

Trump is testing, challenging and even bullying the Congress in unparalleled ways -– slashing government agencies, deporting legal migrants, investigating perceived enemies and churning the economy -- and all but daring lawmakers to object.

With unified Republican control of the White House and Congress, the GOP has a rare opportunity to muscle through an ambitious partisan agenda.

But Trump has shown he does not necessarily want or need Congress to accomplish his goals.

Read the full story.

Lisa Mascaro is the Chief Congressional Correspondent for The Associated Press.

Military

For the past three months the Pentagon has been rocked by the removals of top military leadership, including its only female four-star officers, its Joint Chiefs chairman — a Black general — and its top military lawyers.

The defense chief, Pete Hegseth, has been floundering in controversy.

He was a key participant in the Signal chat set up by national security adviser Mike Waltz, sending details of sensitive military operations over the nonsecure channel. Hegseth also sed a second Signal chat to send similar information to a group that included his wife and brother. That was followed by the purge of his top staff: He removed or shifted at least five of them, including three whom he said were under investigation for leaks.

Trump has said the military had gone “woke” and he acted swiftly to reverse long-standing policies.

He issued an executive order to remove transgender service members, which has been stalled by the courts. Hegseth ordered the military to eliminate any programming, books or imagery that celebrates diversity.

More change is coming.

Read the full story.

Tara Copp covers the Pentagon and national security for the Associated Press. Lolita C. Baldor covers the Pentagon and national security issues for The Associated Press

Public health

At the Department of Health and Human Services, 10,000 jobs are gone. Billions of dollars in research sent to scientists and universities was shut off. Public meetings to discuss flu shots and other vaccines have been canceled.

Fluoride in drinking water may be the next to go, according to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy has done a blitz of his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign at day cares, schools and health centers around the country where he has promised to work with Trump’s other agency leaders to prohibit soda from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, limit dyes in the food supply and call for fluoride to be removed from drinking water.

Kennedy’s resistance to launching a vaccination campaign as a growing measles outbreak has worsened, so far infecting hundreds and leaving two young children dead, has elicited concerns from doctors, public health experts and lawmakers.

Read the full story.

Amanda Seitz is an Associated Press reporter covering federal health care policy.

Energy and environment

Trump has reversed Biden’s focus on slowing climate change to pursue what the Republican calls U.S. “energy dominance” in the global market.

He created a National Energy Dominance Council, led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and directed it to move quickly to drive up already record-high U.S. energy production, particularly fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas, and remove regulatory barriers that may slow that down.

Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, but he has moved even more aggressively in his second term to roll back major environmental regulations, including rules on pollution from coal-fired power plants, motor vehicles and manufacturers.

Read the full story.

Matthew Daly is a climate, environment and energy reporter for The Associated Press.

Arts and culture

Since returning to office, Trump has ousted leaders, placed staff on administrative leave and cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in funding that artists, libraries, museums, theaters and others in the cultural community had long counted on. Acting without congressional authorization, he has declared that institutions ranging from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to the National Endowment for the Humanities have become fronts for a “woke” agenda that threatens to undermine what he calls “our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.”

The organizations he has attacked mostly date from the mid-1960s, at the peak of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” domestic programs, when public support for government was high and the elevation of the arts a national priority. The Kennedy Center, the NEA, the NEH and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences all were established with broad backing from the two parties.

The humanities “are the languages, religions, laws, philosophies, and customs that make us distinct,” reads a statement on the NEH website. “They are our history and our cultures, the ideas and movements that have shaped societies throughout time.”

Read the full story.

Hillel Italie is a staff writer for literature at The Associated Press.

Media

Many journalists figured a second Trump term would be a challenge for their industry. Few recognized how much.

The new administration has aggressively, even innovatively, waged combat against the press since taking office. It has fought against CBS News and The Associated Press in court, sought to dismantle the government-run Voice of America and sent the Federal Communications Commission after perceived media rivals.

The White House has established rapid-response social media feeds that maintain a constant flow of rejoinders to “hold the fake news accountable.”

“The Trump administration is on a campaign to do everything it can to diminish and obstruct journalism in the United States,” said Bill Grueskin, a Columbia University journalism professor.

The future of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and similar services that for generations have delivered unbiased news to countries where it is in short supply is being haggled over in court.

The AP sued the administration after it reduced the outlet’s access to presidential events for not following Trump’s lead in renaming the Gulf of Mexico, winning a court ruling that the government could not punish the organization for free speech.

Read the full story.

David Bauder is the national media writer for The Associated Press.

Josh Boak, Chris Megerian, Will Weissert, Eric Tucker, Lindsay Whitehurst, Matthew Lee, Lisa Mascaro, Tara Copp, Lolita C. Baldor, Amanda Seitz, Matthew Daly, Hillel Italie and David Bauder contributed reporting to this project.

Ben Curtis, Jose Luis Magana, Alex Brandon, Charles Krupa, Evan Vucci, Mystyslav Chernov, Melissa Majchrzak, Joshua A. Bickel and Mark Schiefelbein contributed photography to this project.

AP · April 27, 2025

4. Tech industry tried reducing AI's pervasive bias. Now Trump wants to end its 'woke AI' efforts

It is time to stop this focus on the false narrative of "wokeness" and instead shift to combating the "cancel culture" that both partisan extremes are practicing as part of their foundational political philosophies. We need to return to first principles of American values to combat this "cancel culture" epidemic and stop defining every action in terms of "woke" and "anti-woke.".

Tech industry tried reducing AI's pervasive bias. Now Trump wants to end its 'woke AI' efforts

AP · by MATT O’BRIEN · April 27, 2025

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — After retreating from their workplace diversity, equity and inclusion programs, tech companies could now face a second reckoning over their DEI work in AI products.

In the White House and the Republican-led Congress, “woke AI” has replaced harmful algorithmic discrimination as a problem that needs fixing. Past efforts to “advance equity” in AI development and curb the production of “harmful and biased outputs” are a target of investigation, according to subpoenas sent to Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and 10 other tech companies last month by the House Judiciary Committee.

And the standard-setting branch of the U.S. Commerce Department has deleted mentions of AI fairness, safety and “responsible AI” in its appeal for collaboration with outside researchers. It is instead instructing scientists to focus on “reducing ideological bias” in a way that will “enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness,” according to a copy of the document obtained by The Associated Press.

In some ways, tech workers are used to a whiplash of Washington-driven priorities affecting their work.

But the latest shift has raised concerns among experts in the field, including Harvard University sociologist Ellis Monk, who several years ago was approached by Google to help make its AI products more inclusive.

Back then, the tech industry already knew it had a problem with the branch of AI that trains machines to “see” and understand images. Computer vision held great commercial promise but echoed the historical biases found in earlier camera technologies that portrayed Black and brown people in an unflattering light.

“Black people or darker skinned people would come in the picture and we’d look ridiculous sometimes,” said Monk, a scholar of colorism, a form of discrimination based on people’s skin tones and other features.

Google adopted a color scale invented by Monk that improved how its AI image tools portray the diversity of human skin tones, replacing a decades-old standard originally designed for doctors treating white dermatology patients.

“Consumers definitely had a huge positive response to the changes,” he said.

Now Monk wonders whether such efforts will continue in the future. While he doesn’t believe that his Monk Skin Tone Scale is threatened because it’s already baked into dozens of products at Google and elsewhere — including camera phones, video games, AI image generators — he and other researchers worry that the new mood is chilling future initiatives and funding to make technology work better for everyone.

“Google wants their products to work for everybody, in India, China, Africa, et cetera. That part is kind of DEI-immune,” Monk said. “But could future funding for those kinds of projects be lowered? Absolutely, when the political mood shifts and when there’s a lot of pressure to get to market very quickly.”

Trump has cut hundreds of science, technology and health funding grants touching on DEI themes, but its influence on commercial development of chatbots and other AI products is more indirect. In investigating AI companies, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, chair of the judiciary committee, said he wants to find out whether former President Joe Biden’s administration “coerced or colluded with” them to censor lawful speech.

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at a Texas event this month that Biden’s AI policies were “promoting social divisions and redistribution in the name of equity.”

The Trump administration declined to make Kratsios available for an interview but quoted several examples of what he meant. One was a line from a Biden-era AI research strategy that said: “Without proper controls, AI systems can amplify, perpetuate, or exacerbate inequitable or undesirable outcomes for individuals and communities.”

Even before Biden took office, a growing body of research and personal anecdotes was attracting attention to the harms of AI bias.

One study showed self-driving car technology has a hard time detecting darker-skinned pedestrians, putting them in greater danger of getting run over. Another study asking popular AI text-to-image generators to make a picture of a surgeon found they produced a white man about 98% percent of the time, far higher than the real proportions even in a heavily male-dominated field.

Face-matching software for unlocking phones misidentified Asian faces. Police in U.S. cities wrongfully arrested Black men based on false face recognition matches. And a decade ago, Google’s own photos app sorted a picture of two Black people into a category labeled as “gorillas.”

Even government scientists in the first Trump administration concluded in 2019 that facial recognition technology was performing unevenly based on race, gender or age.

Biden’s election propelled some tech companies to accelerate their focus on AI fairness. The 2022 arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT added new priorities, sparking a commercial boom in new AI applications for composing documents and generating images, pressuring companies like Google to ease its caution and catch up.

Then came Google’s Gemini AI chatbot — and a flawed product rollout last year that would make it the symbol of “woke AI” that conservatives hoped to unravel. Left to their own devices, AI tools that generate images from a written prompt are prone to perpetuating the stereotypes accumulated from all the visual data they were trained on.

Google’s was no different, and when asked to depict people in various professions, it was more likely to favor lighter-skinned faces and men, and, when women were chosen, younger women, according to the company’s own public research.

Google tried to place technical guardrails to reduce those disparities before rolling out Gemini’s AI image generator just over a year ago. It ended up overcompensating for the bias, placing people of color and women in inaccurate historical settings, such as answering a request for American founding fathers with images of men in 18th century attire who appeared to be Black, Asian and Native American. Google quickly apologized and temporarily pulled the plug on the feature, but the outrage became a rallying cry taken up by the political right.

With Google CEO Sundar Pichai sitting nearby, Vice President JD Vance used an AI summit in Paris in February to decry the advancement of “downright ahistorical social agendas through AI,” naming the moment when Google’s AI image generator was “trying to tell us that George Washington was Black, or that America’s doughboys in World War I were, in fact, women.”

“We have to remember the lessons from that ridiculous moment,” Vance declared at the gathering. “And what we take from it is that the Trump administration will ensure that AI systems developed in America are free from ideological bias and never restrict our citizens’ right to free speech.”

A former Biden science adviser who attended that speech, Alondra Nelson, said the Trump administration’s new focus on AI’s “ideological bias” is in some ways a recognition of years of work to address algorithmic bias that can affect housing, mortgages, health care and other aspects of people’s lives.

“Fundamentally, to say that AI systems are ideologically biased is to say that you identify, recognize and are concerned about the problem of algorithmic bias, which is the problem that many of us have been worried about for a long time,” said Nelson, the former acting director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy who co-authored a set of principles to protect civil rights and civil liberties in AI applications.

But Nelson doesn’t see much room for collaboration amid the denigration of equitable AI initiatives.

“I think in this political space, unfortunately, that is quite unlikely,” she said. “Problems that have been differently named — algorithmic discrimination or algorithmic bias on the one hand, and ideological bias on the other —- will be regrettably seen us as two different problems.”

AP · by MATT O’BRIEN · April 27, 2025

5. Ukraine’s Crimea Lies at the Heart of Russia’s Invasion—and Trump’s Peace Plan

Excerpts:

To Ukraine, and most of its allies, Russia’s takeover of Crimea was a violation of international law—and the West’s failure to strongly resist it fed Moscow’s appetite.

Initially, Russia insisted its troops weren’t present. Days after protests in Kyiv ousted a pro-Russian president in February 2014, men carrying rifles and wearing unmarked uniforms appeared outside the Russian naval base in Sevastopol.

Ukrainians protested to prevent Russians from entering the Crimean parliament but overnight, on Feb. 27, special-forces troops burst inside, hoisted a Russian flag and later supervised a vote to hold a referendum on joining Russia.

The government in Kyiv, struggling to establish a new administration and dissuaded from fighting by Washington, didn’t give clear orders to soldiers in Crimea to resist—something Trump has criticized.

The Obama administration did little to stop the takeover, expressing its displeasure, calling on Russia to de-escalate and applying sanctions on some Russian officials. Trump has blamed then-President Barack Obama for allowing Russia to take Crimea, saying it wouldn’t have happened if he were in charge.

Crimea was transferred under Ukraine’s control in 1954 when then-leader of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev signed a decree that cited the economic, territorial and cultural closeness of Crimea and Ukraine. When Ukraine held an independence referendum in 1991, over half of Crimean voters cast ballots in favor.

Russia presented its so-called referendum in 2014 as a homecoming steeped in Soviet nostalgia, a choice between Russian peace and Ukrainian “Nazism,” a word it frequently uses to smear opponents. Ukrainian television and radio channels were blocked.

Ukraine’s Crimea Lies at the Heart of Russia’s Invasion—and Trump’s Peace Plan

The military takeover of the peninsula was the first of Russia’s land grabs

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/ukraines-crimea-lies-at-the-heart-of-russias-invasionand-trumps-peace-plan-b0b5abe0?st=HrsDKp&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

The Crimean port of Sevastopol.

By Jane Lytvynenko

April 27, 2025 5:30 am ET

Key Points

What's This?

President Trump suggests Crimea should be part of Russia to facilitate a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine.
President Volodymyr Zelensky says Ukraine won’t legally recognize the occupation of Crimea, despite Trump’s suggestion.
Since Moscow took over Crimea in 2014, it has repressed dissent and promoted a Russian vision of its history.

KYIV, Ukraine—One of the central points of tension in President Trump’s strained efforts to end the war in Ukraine is a Black Sea peninsula that Russian President Vladimir Putin has placed at the heart of his national project.

For over a decade, successive U.S. administrations, including Trump’s first, decried Russia’s armed seizure of Crimea in 2014 and said they would never recognize the land grab—but did little to help Kyiv get it back.

Now, Trump is publicly repudiating that stance, saying that the peninsula should become part of Russia to facilitate a peace deal to end the war. In an interview with Time published on Friday, Trump said: “Crimea will stay with Russia.”

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has balked at the suggestion, telling reporters that, “Ukraine will not legally recognize the occupation of Crimea.”

Trump and Zelensky met Saturday ahead of the funeral of Pope Francis, their first face-to-face talk since an acrimonious Oval Office meeting in February. While details of the 15-minute discussion weren’t public, both sides described it as good and Trump later criticized Putin on social media, questioning whether the Russian leader wanted to stop the war.

UKRAINE

Mariupol

RUSSIAN FORCES

Mykolaiv

Melitopol

Kherson

Odesa

Sea of Azov

Kerch bridge

Kerch

CRIMEA

RUSSIA

Simferopol

Kerch Strait

UKRAINE

Area of detail

Sevastopol

50 miles

Black Sea

50 km

Note: As of April 21.

Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project

Emma Brown/WSJ

Since taking over Crimea, Russia has clamped down on opposition and promoted a Russian vision of its history through museums, schools and the repression of dissent.

To Ukraine, and most of its allies, Russia’s takeover of Crimea was a violation of international law—and the West’s failure to strongly resist it fed Moscow’s appetite.

Initially, Russia insisted its troops weren’t present. Days after protests in Kyiv ousted a pro-Russian president in February 2014, men carrying rifles and wearing unmarked uniforms appeared outside the Russian naval base in Sevastopol.

Ukrainians protested to prevent Russians from entering the Crimean parliament but overnight, on Feb. 27, special-forces troops burst inside, hoisted a Russian flag and later supervised a vote to hold a referendum on joining Russia.

The government in Kyiv, struggling to establish a new administration and dissuaded from fighting by Washington, didn’t give clear orders to soldiers in Crimea to resist—something Trump has criticized.

The Obama administration did little to stop the takeover, expressing its displeasure, calling on Russia to de-escalate and applying sanctions on some Russian officials. Trump has blamed then-President Barack Obama for allowing Russia to take Crimea, saying it wouldn’t have happened if he were in charge.

Crimea was transferred under Ukraine’s control in 1954 when then-leader of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev signed a decree that cited the economic, territorial and cultural closeness of Crimea and Ukraine. When Ukraine held an independence referendum in 1991, over half of Crimean voters cast ballots in favor.

Russia presented its so-called referendum in 2014 as a homecoming steeped in Soviet nostalgia, a choice between Russian peace and Ukrainian “Nazism,” a word it frequently uses to smear opponents. Ukrainian television and radio channels were blocked.

Armed men occupied the Crimean parliament in Simferopol in February 2014. Photo: Bulent Doruk/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Russian soldiers unloaded military trucks in Crimea in 2014. Photo: Yuriy Lashov/AFP/Getty Images

At first, pro-Ukrainian demonstrations continued. A day of organized protest took place on March 9, the birthday of Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko.

Then the disappearances began, recalled Olha Skrypnyk, who taught history and lived in the seaside city of Yalta. Some 20 activists, two of them Skrypnyk’s colleagues, were detained.

“They were tortured, degraded, beaten, they put cigarettes out on them, forced them to sing the Russian anthem,” said Skrypnyk, who now runs the Crimean Human Rights Group, a nongovernmental humanitarian organization.

A day before the referendum, a man’s body was found on the roadside, his head wrapped in Scotch tape and his body bearing signs of torture. He was identified as Reshat Ametov, an activist from the indigenous Crimean Tatar community who had been detained 12 days earlier.

The next day, March 16, Russians held their ballot at polling stations guarded by gunmen. Russia announced that 95.5% of Crimeans voted in favor. Putin signed a law to integrate Crimea the following day in a ceremony at the Kremlin. In a later speech, Putin would say that Crimea was Russia’s Temple Mount.

“Crimea was the base from which everything began,” said Skrypnyk, who left Crimea the day of the referendum. “That’s why the takeover of Crimea was only the first step toward the full-scale invasion. Russia was not going to stop.”

Olha Skrypnyk, head of the Crimean Human Rights Group. Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Russia organized a vote for the fate of Crimea in March 2014. Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Russia swiftly began working to erase any trace of Ukraine in Crimea and stamp its own imprimatur, including by looting museums and destroying historical sites. As Russia increased its navy and army presence, families also flooded in. Newly launched government programs lured civilians into relocating in a bid to reshape the population.

By Ukraine’s estimates, about 800,000 Russians moved to the peninsula after the occupation, while at least 53,000 Ukrainian citizens left. The population before the takeover stood at 2.3 million, according to Ukrainian government figures.

The new authorities forced Russian passports on Ukrainian citizens, even when they were unwanted. Declining a passport meant losing access to healthcare, schools, work and pensions. Ukrainian passport holders were constantly harassed.

“To renounce the citizenship of the Russian Federation, you need to make an appeal to Putin,” said Olha Kuryshko, the Ukrainian president’s representative for Crimea. Most forego this step, fearing persecution.

Russia established its own court system and relocated judges from the mainland to hold what Ukrainian authorities and human-rights experts denounce as illegitimate criminal proceedings targeting anyone Russian authorities deemed a threat, particularly activists and journalists. The repression was so vast that Russia opened additional detention facilities.

Crackdowns hit particularly hard the Crimean Tatars, who had been deported en masse under Stalin and only began returning when the Soviet Union repression softened in the 1980s.

A Crimean Tatar praying ahead of the March 2014 referendum on joining Russia. Photo: Bulent Doruk/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

“Occupation authorities constantly monitor pro-Ukrainian people and try to choke off any resistance movement and any freedom of speech,” said Viktoria Nesterenko, who heads Crimea monitoring for the human-rights watchdog Zmina. “This means they’re very afraid of these people.”

Youth summer camps became places of ideological re-education. Children learned how to handle weapons and throw grenades. The Russian authorities’ stated goal was to raise citizens ready to serve in the Russian army.

The jewel in Putin’s Crimean crown was a bridge across the Kerch Strait linking the peninsula to the Russian mainland, which took two years to build. When the bridge opened in 2018, Putin drove across it in a truck.

As it prepared for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia bolstered its forces in Crimea, using it as a launchpad for occupying the southern Ukrainian regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

Tanks rolled in from the peninsula to the mainland. Russia’s Black Sea fleet pummeled the Ukrainian coastline.

A mural painting of Russian President Vladimir Putin in downtown Simferopol, Crimea, in 2020.

A building under construction in Sevastopol in 2020.

After Ukrainian territories were occupied in 2022, the peninsula acted as a logistics hub supporting the Russian army. Ukrainian missile and drone attacks were frequent, and the Kerch bridge was twice struck and had to be closed.

Russia used the port in Sevastopol to ship stolen grain out and prisons inside Crimea to keep newly detained Ukrainians in. Many of the thousands of children taken from Ukraine by occupation authorities were placed in Crimean camps.

Russia began cracking down more brutally on pro-Ukrainian sentiment. Since 2022, it has seized twice as many properties as in the eight years prior. Human-rights organizations say women and the elderly are increasingly targeted.

Military forces in a central square of Simferopol, with a Lenin monument in the background.

Because most of those detained are civilians, there are no mechanisms for prisoner exchanges. Authorities say 10 people from Crimea have been exchanged since 2014.

One of them is Leniye Umerova, a Crimean Tatar born in the region who moved away as a teenager after witnessing the occupation. At the end of 2022, she learned that her father was hospitalized and decided to visit him in Crimea, fearing not having said goodbye.

She traveled into Russia via the Caucasus republic of Georgia, where a Russian border guard asked her why she had a Ukrainian passport rather than a Russian one, given that her place of birth was listed as Crimea.

“I told him I didn’t want one,” Umerova said.

Leniye Umerova, a Crimean Tatar who was detained by Russia. Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison in 2000. Photo: Associated Press

The Russians detained Umerova for over a year and a half, moving her around various prisons before charging her with espionage. She was exchanged back to Ukraine last fall. For Umerova, the suggestion that Crimea will be recognized as Russian sparks anger and indignation.

“I, as a Crimean, do not agree with this,” she said. “We cannot give up Crimea.”

Zelensky agrees, and has pushed back on the idea of Ukraine giving up the peninsula. He appended to a social media message a 2018 Crimea Declaration by Trump’s then-secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.

Russia, he wrote, “sought to undermine a bedrock international principle shared by democratic states: that no country can change the borders of another by force,” Pompeo said in the declaration.

Days earlier, Trump had been more ambiguous.

“What will happen with Crimea from this point on?” he said at a news conference. “That I can’t tell you.”

A field in Crimea.

6. China’s Huawei Develops New AI Chip, Seeking to Match Nvidia

The real strategic competition?

China’s Huawei Develops New AI Chip, Seeking to Match Nvidia

Superpower rivalry over semiconductors heats up despite Washington’s attempts to block Beijing

https://www.wsj.com/tech/chinas-huawei-develops-new-ai-chip-seeking-to-match-nvidia-8166f606

By Liza Lin

and Raffaele Huang

April 27, 2025 8:58 am ET

Visitors tour Huawei’s Ascend AI exhibition booth during a conference last year. Photo: Andy Wong/AP

Key Points

What's This?

Huawei is preparing to test its Ascend 910D AI processor, aiming to rival Nvidia’s high-end chips.
Despite U.S. sanctions, Huawei’s chip development shows China’s semiconductor industry’s resilience.
Huawei is poised to ship 800,000 Ascend 910B/C chips and is in talks to boost orders after Nvidia’s H20 restrictions.

SINGAPORE—Huawei Technologies is gearing up to test its newest and most powerful artificial-intelligence processor, which the company hopes could replace some higher-end products of U.S. chip giant Nvidia NVDA 4.30%increase; green up pointing triangle.

The steady advance by one of China’s flagship technology companies points to the resilience of the country’s semiconductor industry despite efforts by Washington to stymie it, including by cutting off access to some Western chip-making equipment.

Huawei has approached some Chinese tech companies about testing the technical feasibility of the new chip, called the Ascend 910D, people familiar with the matter said. The company is slated to receive the first batch of samples of the processor as soon as late May, some of the people said.

The development is still at an early stage, and a series of tests will be needed to assess the chip’s performance and get it ready for customers, the people said.

Huawei hopes that the latest iteration of its Ascend AI processors will be more powerful than Nvidia’s H100, a popular chip used for AI training that was released in 2022, said one of the people. Previous versions are called 910B and 910C.

Huawei has emerged as China’s champion in a technology field where the U.S. remains ahead. The Shenzhen-based company has developed some of the country’s most promising substitutes for Nvidia’s AI chips. It is part of Beijing’s effort to groom a self-sufficient semiconductor industry.

Nvidia’s powerful H100 chips are sought after by companies developing artificial intelligence. Photo: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg News

Huawei, which has been on a U.S. trade blacklist for nearly six years, showed its ability to shrug off American restrictions by releasing a high-end smartphone in 2023. The model, the Mate 60, was powered by a locally produced processor and raised eyebrows within the U.S. government when it was introduced during a visit to Beijing by then-Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

Earlier this month, Washington added Nvidia’s H20 chip—the most advanced processor the company could sell in China without a license—to a growing list of semiconductors whose sales are restricted there. Nvidia said it would take a $5.5 billion charge as a result.

The restrictions offer an opportunity to Nvidia’s Chinese rivals such as Huawei and Beijing-based Cambricon Technologies, which have developed similar chips.

This year, Huawei is poised to ship more than 800,000 Ascend 910B and 910C chips to customers including state-owned telecommunications carriers and private AI developers such as TikTok parent ByteDance, people familiar with the matter said. Some buyers have already been in talks with Huawei to increase orders of the 910C after the Trump administration restricted the exports of Nvidia’s H20s, the people said.

Despite manufacturing bottlenecks, Huawei and several Chinese chip firms have already been able to deliver some products comparable to Nvidia chips, albeit with a lag of a few years. Chip makers have been turning to technologies that can pack several chips together to create more powerful processors, as it gets harder and more expensive to make the circuitry inside chips smaller.

Beijing also has encouraged Chinese AI developers to increase purchases of domestic chips. State data centers have said most chips they used were from Chinese suppliers.

Still, previous Huawei chips have struggled to live up to their hype. The 910C was marketed to clients as comparable to Nvidia’s H100, but engineers who have used the two chips said Huawei’s performance fell short of its rival.

Huawei faces challenges in producing such chips at a significant scale. It has been cut off from the world’s largest chip foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. China’s closest alternative, Semiconductor Manufacturing International, is blocked from purchasing the most advanced chip-making equipment.

Washington also has blocked China from directly accessing some key components for AI chips, such as the latest high-bandwidth memory units.

Given such constraints, Huawei executives have talked about focusing on building more efficient and faster systems to leverage their chips, instead of making individual chips more powerful.

In April, Huawei introduced the CloudMatrix 384, a computing system connecting 384 Ascend 910C chips. Some analysts said the system was more powerful than Nvidia’s flagship rack system, which contains 72 of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, under some circumstances, even though the Chinese system consumes more power.

Connecting more chips in a system isn’t a trivial task. It requires stable networks as well as software and engineering to prevent network failures, industry practitioners said.

“Having five times as many Ascends more than offsets each GPU being only one-third the performance of an Nvidia Blackwell,” research firm SemiAnalysis wrote in a report. “The deficiencies in power are relevant but not a limiting factor in China.”

Write to Liza Lin at liza.lin@wsj.com and Raffaele Huang at raffaele.huang@wsj.com

7. The NATO Country With No Military Gets Serious About Defense

I had an Army friend who, after retirement, became a Foreign Service Officer and he loved his posting to Iceland. He came back with a wife.

The NATO Country With No Military Gets Serious About Defense

Iceland watches nearby Greenland nervously, aiming to avoid tensions with President Trump

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/iceland-military-defense-us-alliance-8cac5c19

U.S. Marines take part in a military exercise in western Iceland in 2022. Photo: Jeremie Richard/AFP/Getty Images

By Daniel MichaelsFollow

and Benoit FauconFollow

Updated April 27, 2025 4:01 am ET

Key Points

What's This?

Iceland, a NATO founding member without a military, balances interests between North America and Europe.
Growing military activity and climate change in the Arctic are increasing risks for Iceland.
Iceland is debating its defense strategy and potential EU membership amid rising tensions.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland—North America and Europe meet beneath this island, where continental plates diverge. Icelanders are trying to balance interests on both sides.

The country of fewer than 400,000 people is an anomaly. A founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, it has no standing military. Though rooted in Europe, it isn’t part of the European Union. Traditionally a fishing island, it has become a tech hub thanks to bountiful geothermal and hydroelectric power.

For decades, Icelanders lived austerely in peaceful remoteness. Their location in the icy waters between Greenland and Norway offered NATO a base during the Cold War from which to monitor Soviet naval traffic, but residents worried little about dangers from warships.

Today, the island, which sits just south of the Arctic Circle, faces growing risks from increased military activity in the high north, as climate change opens once-impassable waterways. Iceland is simultaneously being tugged by growing antagonism between the Trump administration and Europe.

The pressures are evident in Greenland, about 750 miles away, which President Trump has said he wants the U.S. to own. Iceland, which is greener and less icy than Greenland, lacks the vast Danish territory’s mineral wealth. Iceland has also long made itself useful to U.S. and NATO defensive efforts—something administration officials say hasn’t happened in Greenland, whose defenses Denmark controls.

A Norwegian F-35 taxis on the runway at Keflavik air base in Iceland. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Pilots in the cockpit of a German transport aircraft en route to Iceland. Photo: Britta Pedersen/Zuma Press

When tensions with Russia rose in 2014, U.S. officials told Icelandic counterparts they wanted to restart operations at the decaying Keflavik air base outside the capital, Reykjavik. Iceland quickly agreed and began investing in military infrastructure around the island.

Welcoming the U.S. and other NATO allies is how the country with a population smaller than Wyoming maintains its unique status. The four other Nordic countries—all of which share land borders with Russia or lie across the Baltic Sea from it—are ramping up defenses, while Iceland is plotting a different course.

American submarine-hunting planes now routinely patrol surrounding seas from Keflavik, in Iceland’s southwest. European NATO jet fighters take turns flying from the base to police skies between Iceland and Russia. And alliance subs and warships call at Iceland’s ports.

Hostile Neighborhood

Iceland is the only NATO country with no military and sits between the Arctic, North America and Europe.

Norwegian Sea

GREENLAND

SWE.

GIUK* GAP

ICELAND

NOR.

NORTH ATLANTIC

OCEAN

U.K.

Airport

Ísafjörður

Akureyri

Egilsstaðir

ICELAND

Vatnajökull

Glacier

Reykjavík

Keflavík

U.S. Airbase

The U.S. considers both Iceland and Greenland critical to homeland security. Greenland sits along a path that Russian nuclear warheads targeting America could trace across the sky, so is vital to missile detection and defenses. Russian submarines, meanwhile, must run a gantlet near Iceland that NATO calls the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. Gap. Iceland is a high point along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, an enormous and largely undersea mountain range created by the continental division. Russian subs, which have recently ventured closer to America, are forced to rise nearer the surface as they cross the ridge, making detection easier.

Now Icelanders are debating whether they need to get more active on defense and whether to restart EU accession talks, which they broke off in 2013. Prime Minister Kristrun Frostadottir plans to hold a referendum on the issue by 2027, once her government has addressed issues she sees as more pressing—though some Icelanders see Trump’s policies as pushing them toward the bloc sooner.

One pressing issue is a national-defense strategy review, now under discussion. Public debate on the topic is important “because military activity has sometimes been under the radar in Iceland,” Frostadottir said in an interview. “It’s been uncomfortable to talk about.”

Iceland, like other Nordic countries, has long tried to keep the Arctic from being militarized. With that no longer possible, Icelanders are assessing what expanded defenses might look like.

“There is never been public support in Iceland for a military, and I don’t think there will be in the foreseeable future,” said Frostadottir, who took office in late December. “That doesn’t mean we can’t have active defenses, and that we can’t have active alliances, and defenses are important.”

Iceland’s coast guard, which long existed to protect its fishing waters, is playing a bigger role in defense, including running the Keflavik air base and air-defense systems.

Kristrun Frostadottir, Iceland’s prime minister, is among the world’s youngest national leaders. Photo: Heida Helgadottir/Bloomberg News

Shaping the debate is Iceland’s growing wealth, which the island’s geology underpins with both geothermal energy and volcanic activity that draws tourists. Inexpensive green electricity and an openness to innovation have made Iceland a base for industries ranging from aluminum smelting to digital services.

U.S. military ties to Iceland date to World War II, when American forces occupied the island to keep Germans away and used it to resupply the Soviet Union. When Washington launched NATO in 1949, it deemed Iceland’s location vital for securing sea lines of communication to Europe and so pulled it into the alliance. U.S. military units defended Iceland from 1951—when the two signed a defense agreement that remains in force—until 2006, when the U.S. pulled forces out to focus on the war on terror.

After the Cold War, Iceland worked to stay relevant inside NATO, sending medical staff to alliance operations in the former Yugoslavia and running Afghanistan’s main civilian airport. At home, it hosted NATO drills, including an annual exercise on combating improvised explosive devices, which had become a scourge of U.S. and allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We could blow up cars up there without anyone complaining,” said Jamie Shea, a retired longtime senior NATO official. “The Icelanders were always very keen to demonstrate they weren’t free-riders.”

A bomb disposal technician during an exercise in Iceland in 2023. Photo: Cpl. Kyle Jia/U.S. Marine Corps

U.S. Marines hike to a cold-weather training site in Iceland in 2018. Photo: Reuters

Iceland’s eagerness to play a role in NATO has contrasted with Greenland, said Liselotte Odgaard, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank. Denmark’s military operations on the semiautonomous island have gotten caught between U.S. calls to do more and Greenlanders’ desire not to, said Odgaard, who is Danish. Now, under pressure from Trump, Denmark is expanding its military footprint in Greenland, with islanders’ consent.

“The neglect of Greenland’s defense has put us in a really bad position,” said Odgaard.

Frostadottir said Icelanders are closely monitoring developments around Greenland, with which they have close ties.

Frostadottir, who at 36 years old is among the world’s youngest national leaders, heads a social-democratic party that supports Iceland joining the EU. Talks on joining broke off during the eurozone crisis a dozen years ago.

Trump’s threats to take Greenland, tariffs and antagonism toward Europe have unnerved Icelanders and made Europe seem more appealing to many. Frostadottir, who holds masters degrees from Yale University and Boston University, wants to avoid Icelanders viewing an eventual referendum on restarting EU talks as a choice between Europe and the U.S.

“I do think it’s important that even though the security element will, of course, come into it, that we don’t scare people into joining the EU,” she said. Others want to move faster. Dagur Eggertsson, a member of Parliament from Frostadottir’s party who is active on NATO issues, said that U.S. policy shifts and Europe’s more-active international role recently mean the referendum might need to happen sooner.

An Icelandic Coast Guard ship patrols off the Reykjavik coast. Photo: John MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images

Write to Daniel Michaels at Dan.Michaels@wsj.com and Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

Continental plates spread apart beneath Iceland. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said they collide. (Corrected on April 27)

8. Why Japan and Mongolia Are Expanding Defense Capability Cooperation

Excerpts:

From Mongolia’s point of view, Japan’s participation in Ulaanbaatar’s defense modernization aligns with the country’s desire to maintain military neutrality while still enhancing its capabilities. Mongolia does not seek to become part of any military alliance but understands the importance of modernizing its defense forces to ensure its sovereignty and contribute to regional peacekeeping efforts.

There is a greater purpose for advancing capabilities for both Japan and Mongolia. The Indo-Pacific region has become a focal point of global strategic competition. The timing of the Japan-Mongolia defense agreement in December 2024 reflected this broader geopolitical trend.

Mongolia’s strategic position – between China and Russia – makes it an important player in this evolving security landscape. While Mongolia has traditionally maintained a neutral stance, it has become more active in seeking international cooperation on defense matters, recognizing that regional security stability is in its best interest.

In the East Asia context, the partnership with Japan, a major regional power, provides Mongolia with access to state-of-the-art defense technologies that will bolster its defense infrastructure without aligning itself with any military alliance. This ensures that Mongolia can maintain its independent foreign policy while benefiting from the security enhancements provided by the agreement.

At the same time, observers must also recognize the defense technologies on offer provide capabilities that are not perceived as a direct threat to Mongolia’s immediate neighbors. This is a calculated decision on both sides that will enable Mongolia to modernize outdated equipment without antagonizing its much more powerful neighbors.

Why Japan and Mongolia Are Expanding Defense Capability Cooperation

Among Mongolia’s regional partners, Japan is playing an increasingly important role in modernizing the country’s defense sector.

https://thediplomat.com/2025/04/why-japan-and-mongolia-are-expanding-defense-capability-cooperation/

By Nicholas Millward

April 26, 2025

Mongolia’s Minister of Defense Byambatsogt Sandag (right) and Japan’s Ambassador to Mongolia Igawahara Masaru sign the Agreement between the Government of Japan and the Government of Mongolia concerning the Transfer of Defense Equipment and Technology, Dec. 11, 2024, Ulaabaatar, Mongolia.

Credit: Ministry of Defense of Mongolia

Alongside Mongolia’s proactive foreign policy and global engagement, modernization of the country’s defense sector is of great importance to protect its independence and sovereignty – and Mongolia is seeking foreign assistance to bolster its capabilities. Among Mongolia’s regional partners, Japan is playing an increasingly important role in modernizing the country’s defense sector.

A unique factor in Mongolia’s defense is that the constitution prohibits the country from joining military alliances or allowing foreign military forces to be stationed in the country. But this still leaves open a wide variety of cooperation mechanisms with foreign partners willing to help modernize Mongolia’s defense sector and its capabilities. Japan – which has a technologically advanced defense sector – has proved a particularly important partner in this regard.

Since becoming strategic partners in 2010, Mongolia and Japan have increased defense cooperation. Two years ago, in 2022, during Mongolian President Khurelsukh Ukhnaa’s state visit to Japan, the two governments upgraded their 2010 strategic partnership agreement to a “Special Strategic Partnership for Peace and Security,” expanding their cooperation not only in regional affairs but beyond.

In 2024, Mongolia’s Minister of Defense Byambatsogt Sandag and Japan’s Ambassador to Mongolia Igawahara Masaru signed the Agreement between the Government of Japan and the Government of Mongolia concerning the Transfer of Defense Equipment and Technology. This marked a significant milestone in the defense and diplomatic relations between the two countries and laid the groundwork for enhanced defense cooperation.

This particular agreement can be better understood when we review strategic interests of both countries, the growing need for defense modernization in Mongolia, and Japan’s consistent pursuit of regional stability.

In the current geopolitical circumstances, as a small state with a limited military capability, Mongolia cannot compare to its neighbors or regional actors. Mongolia only shares borders with both Russia and China, two nuclear countries with significant geopolitical clout. In 2025, Mongolia ranked 98th of 145 countries in Global Firepower’s annual Military Strength Ranking, whereas Russia and China are ranked second and third, respectively.

With growing fears over North Korea’s nuclear capability, the Northeast Asian security dynamics are getting more complex, and Mongolia has found it necessary to modernize its defense capabilities. Nontraditional security threats, such as human and drug trafficking, and cyber crime, are also prevalent in Mongolia.

Thus, Mongolia seeks to modernize its forces and become a capable player – not only for its own defense but also to play a greater role in regional and international peace and security. This effort will require partnerships and cooperation with technologically advanced countries, like Japan.

The 2024 defense transfer agreement with Japan provides Mongolia access to advanced defense technology and equipment, such as surveillance radars, air-traffic control radar systems, reconnaissance drones, and other high-tech military assets. In Mongolia’s landlocked environment, these modern defense tools will improve its border control capabilities, allowing Ulaanbaatar to monitor potential threats and tackle human trafficking and transnational drug-trafficking. The combination of these increased capabilities will strengthen its national defense infrastructure.

Japan has long been a key player in regional security, and under the administration of former Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, Japan was increasingly focused on strengthening its defense capabilities and deepening its partnerships with like-minded nations. For Japan, the 2024 agreement with Mongolia is part of a broader strategy to expand its security footprint in the Indo-Pacific region and enhance its alliances with countries outside its immediate sphere of influence.

Japan’s strategic vision is centered around maintaining a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” a concept that emphasizes security, freedom of navigation, and the rule of law in the Indo-Pacific region. This vision is particularly poignant as China continues to assert its claims in the South China Sea and over Taiwan, even while a renewed and antagonistic North Korean military buildup has raised concerns among regional powers, including Japan. Tokyo has consistently described its current security environment as the “most severe” since the end of World War II. In this context, Japan has sought to broaden its partnerships with countries like India, Australia, and Vietnam, as well as with smaller, neutral nations such as Mongolia.

By opening the door to transfer defense technology to Mongolia, Japan not only strengthens its ties with Ulaanbaatar but also sends a message to other regional actors – including China, North Korea, and Russia – that it is committed to ensuring stability and security in the region. For Japan, supporting Mongolia’s defense capabilities also serves as a counterbalance to the influence of China and Russia in the region, supporting the aim that Mongolia remains an independent and sovereign nation with options beyond its two giant neighbors.

From Mongolia’s point of view, Japan’s participation in Ulaanbaatar’s defense modernization aligns with the country’s desire to maintain military neutrality while still enhancing its capabilities. Mongolia does not seek to become part of any military alliance but understands the importance of modernizing its defense forces to ensure its sovereignty and contribute to regional peacekeeping efforts.

There is a greater purpose for advancing capabilities for both Japan and Mongolia. The Indo-Pacific region has become a focal point of global strategic competition. The timing of the Japan-Mongolia defense agreement in December 2024 reflected this broader geopolitical trend.

Mongolia’s strategic position – between China and Russia – makes it an important player in this evolving security landscape. While Mongolia has traditionally maintained a neutral stance, it has become more active in seeking international cooperation on defense matters, recognizing that regional security stability is in its best interest.

In the East Asia context, the partnership with Japan, a major regional power, provides Mongolia with access to state-of-the-art defense technologies that will bolster its defense infrastructure without aligning itself with any military alliance. This ensures that Mongolia can maintain its independent foreign policy while benefiting from the security enhancements provided by the agreement.

At the same time, observers must also recognize the defense technologies on offer provide capabilities that are not perceived as a direct threat to Mongolia’s immediate neighbors. This is a calculated decision on both sides that will enable Mongolia to modernize outdated equipment without antagonizing its much more powerful neighbors.

Authors

Guest Author

Nicholas Millward

Nicholas Millward is Mongolia Connect Director for the Yokosuka Council on Asia-Pacific Studies, and specialist on Northeast Asian international affairs. These statements are his own and do not represent the opinions of the YCAPS or any other affiliated organizations.

9. China Decides How Far the Resistance Can Go in Myanmar

Do we overlook the geopolitical importance of Myanmar/Burma? Are we suffering from "geopolitical neglect" ( or more correctly is Burma suffering from it)? How do we split the difference between "geopolitical neglect" (which is a reality) and geopolitical competition?" What is the better course of action for US interests and for the Burmese people?

Excerpts:

The final and perhaps most troubling implication concerns the broader geopolitical stakes of China’s active and increasingly direct involvement in Myanmar. At present, two possible trajectories are emerging on the global stage: “geopolitical neglect” and “geopolitical competition” between the United States and China. Both scenarios pose serious risks to Myanmar’s long-term interests.

In the case of geopolitical neglect, a weary international community – distracted by crises elsewhere and gripped by inward-looking priorities – is likely to cede ground to China. Regional actors, including Myanmar’s immediate neighbors, may prioritize short-term stability and the protection of their strategic interests over sustainable peacebuilding and democratic governance. In such a context, China will be well-positioned to lead Myanmar’s post-conflict transition according to its own strategic interests, with little pushback against its preferred outcomes. This passive acquiescence – effectively letting Beijing shape the future of the country – is the essence of geopolitical neglect.

The alternative, however, may be even more dangerous. A resurgence of great power rivalry, marked by strategic denial, destabilization efforts, and a race for influence and resources, could plunge Myanmar deeper into chaos. In such a scenario, the country becomes a theater for geopolitical competition rather than a subject of genuine international support. Power vacuums would widen, state institutions could collapse further, and illicit economies, from arms trafficking to narcotics, would thrive in the resulting instability. Simply put, the second path could be disastrous. Whether through neglect or rivalry, the international community’s failure to act responsibly risks consigning Myanmar to a future defined not by peace or prosperity, but by fragility and foreign manipulation.

Myanmar has moved far beyond the political crisis it faced prior to the 2021 coup. The country is now entrenched in a protracted and complex civil conflict, with both the military junta and resistance forces locked into their own uncompromising agendas. Meanwhile, the international environment is increasingly indifferent, distracted by competing global crises and reluctant to engage meaningfully. In this context, Myanmar may ultimately have to chart its own exit from the cycle of conflict and fragmentation.

The British colonial scholar John Sydenham Furnivall once warned that “after a period of anarchy more or less prolonged, our descendants may find Burma a province of China.” In calmer times, such a statement might have seemed hyperbolic or unduly alarmist. But in the current moment of profound instability, Furnivall’s words ring with unsettling relevance. While Myanmar is unlikely to become a literal province of China, Beijing’s expanding influence over the country’s political and territorial reconfiguration is unmistakable – and increasingly decisive.

China Decides How Far the Resistance Can Go in Myanmar

China has a growing ability to dictate outcomes on the ground in Myanmar. For resistance forces, the implications are profound.

https://thediplomat.com/2025/04/china-decides-how-far-the-resistance-can-go-in-myanmar/

By Kyaw Htet Aung

April 26, 2025

Soldiers from the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) pose with the MNDAA flag after capturing a Myanmar military base at Magra-tapok hill in northern Shan State on October 27, 2023.

Credit: Facebook/ The Kokang

Since the February 2021 military coup, Myanmar has descended into unprecedented chaos. The country has fractured under the weight of violent repression and grassroots resistance across the country. In just over four years, more than 500 new armed groups have emerged nationwide, adding to the already long standing ethnic armed organizations (EAOs). What began as sporadic guerrilla warfare has escalated into a full-scale, multifront conflict. Over 16,000 armed clashes have erupted between the junta’s forces and various resistance groups, marking one of the most intense civil conflicts in Southeast Asia in recent history.

A major turning point came on October 27, 2023, when the Three Brotherhood Alliance – comprising the Arakan Army (AA), the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA) – launched Operation 1027. Working alongside other resistance forces, they delivered a significant blow to the junta, seizing territory and forcing the military out of key strongholds across the country. In perhaps the most symbolic victory, the MNDAA and its allies captured the Northeastern Regional Military Command based in Lashio, Northern Shan State – an unprecedented achievement in the modern era of Myanmar’s civil-war.

On the other hand, China has long been a quiet but powerful player in Myanmar’s political and security dynamics, all while officially adhering to a policy of “non-interference.” Since the 2021 coup, however, Beijing has been recalibrating that approach – aiming to shield its strategic investments from instability while keeping a watchful eye on developments along its southwestern border. In the wake of the second phase of Operation 1027, China’s role as a mediator took on a noticeably more assertive, even coercive, tone. Traditionally viewed as a neutral facilitator between the junta and border-based EAOs, China’s latest round of mediation marked a sharp departure – not only in its style, but in its strategic intent.

This time, Beijing pushed forcefully for a resolution that aligned with its own interests. It sought to preserve the existing power imbalance between the military junta and the resistance, ensuring that no single actor could gain enough strength to undermine China’s influence in the region. Using a mix of diplomatic pressure and economic incentives, China succeeded in securing the outcome it wanted. In April 2025, after nine months of holding Lashio, MNDAA troops handed the city back to the junta – a move that would have been unthinkable without Chinese intervention.

This was no isolated event. It marked the consolidation of a broader pattern and phenomenon: China’s growing ability to dictate outcomes on the ground in Myanmar. Increasingly, Beijing is deciding not only who sits at the negotiating table, but also who gets what as the negotiation result. For Myanmar’s resistance forces, the implications are profound. China’s assertiveness is not limited to military maneuvering – it is reshaping the political terrain itself. When China takes the lead in determining Myanmar’s future, there are three key consequences.

The first major implication is that China is actively capping the strategic ceiling of Myanmar’s resistance forces in their pursuit of a military victory. For the resistance, the endgame strategy remains clear: to dismantle the military junta through armed struggle, a narrative that continues to dominate both public discourse and tactical planning. However, China’s coercive style of mediation, most notably demonstrated in Northern Shan State, subtly undermines this objective. While Beijing may not react to every town or city that falls into the hands of resistance forces, it has shown a readiness to intervene when its core interests are at risk. This signals a clear message: there are limits to how far the resistance can go before Beijing draws a line.

Importantly, this is not simply a matter of China siding with either the junta or the resistance. Rather, it reflects a broader strategic calculation – what might be called a deliberate act of “ground balancing” in Myanmar’s volatile power equation. From Beijing’s perspective, a politically fragmented Myanmar is far more manageable than a territorially fragmented one. A country weak and divided – but still intact – better serves China’s long-term interests, allowing it to exert influence without the risks that come with state collapse or regional instability. Beijing’s ideal situation is a Myanmar weak enough to be pliable, yet intact enough to serve China’s strategic interests.

A second key implication is the emergence of a “conflict termination model with Chinese characteristics” that could become a defining reference point for Myanmar. For years, Western donors and governments have invested heavily in Myanmar’s peace process – supporting ceasefire monitoring, dialogue facilitation, and the development of institutional mechanisms. Yet the results have been modest at best, with few durable outcomes. In contrast, China is now advancing its own model, one marked by assertive mediation and direct participation in ceasefire monitoring, exemplified by its role in the recent handover in Lashio. If the Lashio process proves effective, it could set a precedent for how future conflicts in Myanmar are managed – and shaped by Beijing’s strategic calculus.

At the same time, China’s growing dominance in shaping de-escalation dynamics is becoming more pronounced, particularly as the United States scales back funding to organizations across multiple sectors in Myanmar. Moreover, Beijing wields considerable leverage not only over key domestic actors but also over influential ASEAN member states such as Thailand and Malaysia – an influence that inevitably shapes every negotiation process. Yet while China may be capable of facilitating a reduction in violence, it is unlikely to foster the deeper structural reforms necessary for sustainable peace. For Beijing, positive peace – defined by justice, equity, and long-term political solutions – may not align with its strategic interests, nor does it appear to be a pragmatic objective in the context of today’s Myanmar.

Authors

Guest Author

Kyaw Htet Aung

Kyaw Htet Aung is the program head of the Conflict, Peace, and Security Research Program at ISP-Myanmar and a political analyst. The views and opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of ISP-Myanmar.

10. Chinese Manufacturers Are Scouring the World for New Buyers

Chinese Manufacturers Are Scouring the World for New Buyers

Chinese textile companies flock to countries such as Indonesia in search of new markets to replace the U.S.

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/chinese-manufacturers-are-scouring-the-world-for-new-buyers-aab5aa6c

A booth at a textile and garment trade fair in Jakarta where many Chinese manufacturers were looking for new buyers.

By Hannah Miao

| Photographs by Hafitz Maulana for WSJ

Updated April 27, 2025 12:02 am ET

Key Points

What's This?

Chinese textile firms seek new markets like Indonesia due to U.S. tariffs.
Trade fair in Jakarta sees many Chinese exhibitors seeking to offset losses from U.S. tariffs, which are as high as 145%.
Some Chinese firms face challenges adapting to new markets, while Indonesian producers worry about a flood of cheap Chinese goods.

JAKARTA, Indonesia—Wang Chengpei runs a Chinese textile company selling polyester and nylon fabrics to garment manufacturers that make work and athletic wear. Until recently, about 30% of revenue at his company, Suzhou Feimosi Textile Technology, came from orders destined for the U.S.

Now, around a third of his buyers’ orders are on hold due to the U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports, and he is on the hunt for other markets. That has brought him to Indonesia, where he hopes to sell to local manufacturers.

“We came here to see if we can open up new markets” and make up for the loss of U.S. consumers, said Wang.

At a textile and garment trade fair this month in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, he offered swatches of fabric with colorful designs that block ultraviolet rays, hoping they would appeal to local manufacturers making clothes for Indonesia’s tropical climate.

With the White House imposing 145% tariffs this year on Chinese goods, Chinese manufacturers are fanning out around the world in search of new markets to offload products that would have served U.S. demand.

It won’t be easy to find alternatives to America’s voracious consumers. The U.S. is by far the largest single-country buyer of China’s exported goods, accounting for roughly half a trillion dollars of products, or about 15% of China’s goods exports, last year, according to Chinese customs data.

The event pulled together manufacturers that sought to offer their products in the Indonesian market.

Chinese exhibitors outnumbered domestic manufacturers at the trade fair.

About a fifth of China’s goods exports to the U.S. have a high dependency on the U.S., Oxford Economics found.

At stake are about 10 million to 20 million jobs in China geared toward making products for American consumers, according to Goldman Sachs estimates. Also on the line is the health of the world’s second-largest economy.

Many Chinese manufacturers have little choice but to find new overseas markets for their goods, since they face brutal competition and a stagnating economy at home.

China’s leaders said they plan to boost domestic consumption and support tariff-hit sectors, and some e-commerce companies such as JD.com have announced initiatives to help exporters transition to the local market.

But demand from households and businesses in China is weak. After an epic property-market collapse and slowing economic growth, Chinese people are saving more and spending less. Consumer prices have flatlined, factory-gate prices have fallen for more than two years and imports have declined, a reflection of how tepid domestic spending is in China.

Many Chinese manufacturers have little choice but to find new overseas markets.

Qian Xichao, a representative of Wujiang City Hongyuan Textile, said he came to Indonesia for the fair for the first time because of how tough the domestic market is in China, where factories are churning out so many excess goods that price wars have broken out, killing profits.

“To be frank, personally speaking, all we can do is go out and look for new opportunities,” Qian said.

The European Union, the U.K., Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mexico, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria are the most likely to absorb Chinese exports previously bound for the U.S., according to Allianz. China’s exports to those countries could grow about 6% annually over the next three years, the firm estimates.

At the Jakarta trade fair, one of the largest for Indonesia’s textile and garment industry, Chinese exhibitors outnumbered domestic manufacturers by more than two to one in the directory. About 400 Chinese manufacturers were listed as exhibitors, and many said it was their first time in the country.

The squeeze on many exports to the U.S. is rippling to the Chinese manufacturers that produce fabrics, threads, yarns and other materials used to make clothing and other textile products. Some Chinese factory owners at the Jakarta trade fair said a portion of their production has already been suspended, and are bracing for a further slowdown in orders.

They are now on the hunt for new customers—and Indonesia, with its robust manufacturing sector and consumer market of around 280 million people, looks promising.

Signs for fabrics in Arabic and English.

The Chinese exhibitors could also piggyback off any boom in Indonesian textile producers selling to the U.S., given that the Trump administration’s proposed 32% tariff on Indonesian goods is lower than the duty on Chinese imports. Martin Sutanto, sales and marketing director for Indonesian fabric producer Fabriku, said he noticed an uptick in inquiries from agents for the U.S. market.

Still, some manufacturers say pivoting from the U.S. to other regions might not be so easy.

At the trade fair, many booths of Chinese manufacturers were sparsely attended compared with those of Indonesian exhibitors. Some salespeople were glued to their phones as few passersby stopped to check out their products.

Baoji Changxin Cloth, a Chinese exhibitor, displayed samples of thick cotton and polyester fabrics that could be difficult to sell in Indonesia’s climate.

Xi Ya, a manager at the company, said it was her first time in Indonesia and she noticed local buyers favored silkier fabrics.

“Our product may not match well in the market,” she said.

A squeeze on many exports to the U.S. is rippling to Chinese manufacturers.

A technician adjusts threads on a knitting machine at the trade show.

Many manufacturers said they weren’t making big business decisions given how fast-changing the Trump administration’s tariff policy has been. Some are also exploring other consumer markets such as Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

“There’s nothing we can do about the tariffs. We’ll have to wait until the tariffs stabilize before proceeding, otherwise you wouldn’t dare take the risk,” said Michael Wang, a manager at Shaoxing Double-Color Textile.

Meanwhile, Sutanto, the executive at the Indonesian fabric producer, is worried about competing with a potential deluge of cheap goods from China if manufacturers there divert exports to Indonesia. Countries in Asia, Latin America and Europe have filed trade complaints against Chinese exporters that have sold cut-rate products in those markets.

“If China’s product floods the Indonesia market, that’s going to be hard for us,” he said.

Write to Hannah Miao at hannah.miao@wsj.com

11. ‘The Secret History of the Five Eyes’ Review: Club of Spies

Despite the shortcomings noted in the review, I will probably add this to my "to read" stack of books.

‘The Secret History of the Five Eyes’ Review: Club of Spies

Since World War II, a quintet of allied intelligence services have shared information. Competition and even distrust can be part of the bargain.

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-secret-history-of-the-five-eyes-review-club-of-spies-37b46801

By Arthur Herman

April 26, 2025 2:40 pm ET

Not many people outside policy and government circles know about the Five Eyes, the intelligence-sharing network formed by the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand that has existed since World War II. Perhaps that’s what justifies the title of Richard Kerbaj’s “The Secret History of the Five Eyes,” a book that draws largely from public sources, including news articles and interviews with major political figures.

Mr. Kerbaj gives readers a valuable look at the origins and trajectory of the oldest and most successful intelligence network in the world. It’s the one that sustained the U.S. and its allies during World War II and the Cold War, and even after 9/11 and during the War on Terror. As the author shows, it’s an alliance that’s faced its share of internal strife, over the Suez crisis, the Vietnam War and now Donald Trump.

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The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the International Spy Network

By Richard Kerbaj

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448 pages

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“The Five Eyes” refers to the five intelligence agencies that meet annually to discuss how to share information, including the fruits of signal intelligence, human-intelligence capabilities and law-enforcement activities (among them, those of the FBI), with each member having access to whatever the other four uncover. The arrangement also involves a geographic division of labor, with the U.S. covering Latin America and the Caribbean as well as major portions of Asia, Russia and the Middle East; the U.K. is responsible for Europe and Africa; Australia watches over South and East Asia and southern China; and New Zealand monitors the south and west Pacific. Canada covers the increasingly important polar regions of Russia and the interior of China.

“On the one hand, the Five Eyes is equivalent to a band of brothers and sisters drawn together by common values, language and cause,” Mr. Kerbaj writes, with each member ultimately responsible to its respective government. On the other, “the alliance is a non-binding marriage of convenience riddled with distrust, competing intelligence agendas, and a massive imbalance of power that predominantly favors the United States,” with its resources far greater than the other four put together and the global responsibilities to match. Given the asymmetry, it’s not surprising that the others can be resentful, even engage in outright pushback.

At first the urgency of the war against Hitler compelled trust and cooperation between the U.K., the U.S. and Canada. As the war expanded into the Pacific, these Atlantic-based partners drew Australia and New Zealand into their orbit. Cooperation on codebreaking was the group’s original focus and strength, first against the Germans, then the Japanese. Mr. Kerbaj underlines what we’ve all learned since: that this cooperation proved decisive for victory in both theaters.

During the Cold War, the Five Eyes shared a trove of secret Soviet information decrypted through an operation codenamed the Venona Project. Gene Grabeel, a former American home-economics teacher, took charge of sifting through thousands of old encrypted Soviet communications. Her efforts led to the unmasking of the Soviet spies Klaus Fuchs, Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, among others. How Venona got started is one of the most interesting and engaging passages of Mr. Kerbaj’s book.

America’s original codebreaking partner, the U.K., remains the closest of its Five Eyes partners. With the end of the Cold War and the rise of China, however, Australia’s importance has been growing. Mr. Kerbaj describes how Australia’s rise has graduated to strategic cooperation in the so-called AUKUS agreement among Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. for building the Australian navy’s first nuclear submarines.

New Zealand remains the least represented and, from the American perspective, the least trusted of its Five Eye partners, given its government’s serial proclivity for anti-American rhetoric and agendas. But as China expands its influence into the South Pacific, the New Zealand connection, too, will gain value. The same will happen with Canada, the other junior partner, as China and Russia look to dominate new sea routes in the arctic region.

In many ways, Canada’s junior status in the Five Eyes arrangement remains a puzzle. Mr. Kerbaj points out that one of the Five Eyes’ founders, William Stephenson, was a Canadian; Canada worked closely with both the U.S. and the U.K. on secret atomic research during World War II. But since then Canada and the U.S. have often seemed to be on divergent political trajectories. Canada was a critic of America’s Vietnam policy (Australia, by contrast, stood loyally by and sent 60,000 troops to serve alongside American GIs). It also refused to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, based on suspicions by Canadian intelligence officials that the claims regarding Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction had been fabricated. “It was, in fact, the first time ever that there was a war that the Brits and the Americans were involved [in] and Canada was not there,” Jean Chrétien, Canada’s prime minister at the time, is quoted as saying.

Mr. Kerbaj’s discussion of Mr. Trump’s impact on the Five Eyes is perhaps the least satisfactory part of the book. Written in 2021-22, it reflects the disdain and distrust the author’s sources held for Mr. Trump, and echoes their narrative that if Mr. Trump wasn’t an out-and-out collaborator with Vladimir Putin during the 2016 election, then at the very least he recklessly disregarded the risks of being overly friendly with the Russian dictator.

Today we know considerably more about how the so-called Russian hoax began as a Hillary Clinton campaign ploy, and how the FBI engaged in questionable, if not actually illegal, spying on the Trump team.

This time lag is unfortunate in another way: The book doesn’t give us a full picture of what happened to the Five Eyes during the Joe Biden years, while the author’s chapter on “The Future of the Five Eyes” falls well short of Mr. Trump’s ascent to the White House for a second term. Mr. Trump has proved he is determined to shake up America’s international relations, even with its allies. There’s no reason to think he won’t do the same with the Five Eyes.

Mr. Herman is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War Two.”

12. With Trump-Zelensky Meeting, Ukrainians See a Glimmer of Hope

I hope there is hope. But as General Sullivan used to say, hope is not a course of action.

With Trump-Zelensky Meeting, Ukrainians See a Glimmer of Hope

The United States has been pushing Ukraine to accept a peace plan that seems in part a gift to Moscow. But the short meeting of the leaders, and subsequent comments, appeared to be a change in tone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/27/world/europe/ukraine-trump-zelensky-putin.html

Emergency workers at the site of an apartment building that was destroyed in a Russian strike on Kyiv on Thursday.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

By Kim Barker

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

April 27, 2025

Updated 10:19 a.m. ET

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

President Trump’s standing among Ukrainians is practically on life support. But many cheered one statement he made on Saturday after meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky, questioning why President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would continue to pummel Ukraine as the United States is trying to broker peace talks.

“It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social after meeting with Mr. Zelensky on the sidelines of Pope Francis’ funeral, adding that Mr. Putin may need to be “dealt with differently” — with more sanctions.

The day’s events were a victory of sorts for Mr. Zelensky and Ukraine at a critical juncture in the war, which began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The United States has been pushing Ukraine to accept a peace plan that seems in part a gift to Moscow. The proposal would force Kyiv to abandon its aspirations of joining NATO, offer Ukraine only vague security guarantees, and see the United States officially recognizing Crimea as Russian. Ukraine has rejected that deal, which the Trump administration had described as its final offer.

But now, Ukrainians see a small glimmer of hope that Mr. Trump will not try to force Ukraine into a lopsided peace plan. It first emerged in the fallout from a massive Russian missile attack on Ukraine’s capital early Thursday that killed 12 people and injured almost 90. “Vladimir, STOP!” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social, in a rare rebuke of Mr. Putin.

And then, the hope grew slightly on Saturday when Mr. Zelensky managed to wrangle about 15 minutes with Mr. Trump in Rome. Photos released by the Ukrainian government showed the two men sitting in chairs and leaning toward each other, talking like equals — a vastly different scene than a disastrous meeting in the Oval Office in late February that ended with Mr. Zelensky’s abrupt departure from the White House and the temporary freezing of all U.S. aid.

The photos from Rome “were extraordinary,” said Volodymyr Dubovyk, the director of the Center for International Studies at Odesa I.I. Mechnikov National University. He added that it was good for Mr. Zelensky to have some time alone with Mr. Trump.

Image

A picture made available by Ukraine’s presidential press office shows President Trump meeting privately with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Rome.Credit...Ukrainian Presidential Press Service

“Trump’s team has had too much exposure to the Kremlin and its talking points lately, so for Kyiv to be able to present their perspective directly to Trump was useful, I suppose. Just maybe Trump will now understand a bit better Ukraine’s concerns,” Mr. Dubovyk said.

Some Ukrainians interviewed on Sunday in Kyiv acknowledged that Mr. Trump can change his mind with breakneck speed. But they took solace in the fact that the White House called Saturday’s conversation a “very productive discussion.”

Oleh Karas, 40, who was collecting donations to buy drones outside of a memorial to fallen soldiers, called the photos of the two leaders “amazing” and said it looked like “Trump was listening to him.”

As he stood in front of thousands of flags planted in the ground, each one marking a dead soldier, Mr. Karas said: “You should bring Trump here. Have him see this place. Let him go to where the missile hit. Let him see what happened.”

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Even such a small thing as Mr. Trump’s short meeting with Mr. Zelensky felt like a major change. Since taking office, the Trump administration has at times appeared almost solicitous of Mr. Putin, a sharp reversal in U.S. policy. And Mr. Trump has made no secret of his dislike for the Ukrainian leader.

So Mr. Trump’s statements on Truth Social after the meeting seemed to many in Ukraine like something of a vindication or what they have been saying for years: that Mr. Putin might not be telling the truth. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Ukraine has also been fighting Russia in the eastern Donbas region since then, and Mr. Putin has violated multiple peace accords aimed at ending the violence there. The Russian leader also repeatedly claimed that he had no intention of mounting a broader invasion of Ukraine — right up until the moment his tanks crossed the border in 2022 to begin the full-scale invasion.

That history is why Ukraine’s government has insisted that any peace deal in this war with Russia must include a strong security guarantee — and why it wanted NATO membership, even though that dream has been put on hold.

Image

Soldiers fired artillery toward Russian targets in eastern Ukraine last month.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, told journalists in a briefing broadcast on Russian state television on Sunday that it was too early to talk about terms of any peace deal, adding that the negotiations were not public.

The Ukrainians have countered the Trump administration’s peace plan with their own, which calls for a European peacekeeping force with the United States providing backup. In a social media post after the meeting on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky did not get into specifics about his conversation with Mr. Trump, but said they talked about a “full and unconditional cease-fire,” and a “reliable and lasting peace that will prevent another war from breaking out.”

Mr. Trump has repeatedly said Ukraine is losing the war and doesn’t have the leverage to demand a good deal from Russia — a transactional approach to foreign policy at odds with many Western leaders. Some leverage that Ukraine had at one point appears to be lost: Russia’s top military commander said Saturday that Russian troops had completely retaken the Russian region of Kursk, more than eight months after Ukrainian troops launched a surprise incursion. On Sunday, Ukrainian officials continued to deny that they had been pushed out from all of Kursk.

Serhiy Hrabsky, a military analyst who is a former colonel in the Ukrainian Army, said Sunday that talk of a peace deal now was premature and that Moscow was playing “political Ping-Pong” with the Trump administration.

“Russia will not stop,” he added.

On Sunday, Yulia Svyrydenko, the Ukrainian economy minister and a close ally of Mr. Zelensky, called the meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky “a chance to move forward — to build real peace through strength.” In a social media post, she said that only stronger sanctions and more pressure on Russia could bring the war to an end.

After the meeting between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump, Senator Lindsey Graham — the Republican from South Carolina who had been a staunch ally of Ukraine but has shifted his tone amid Mr. Trump’s push to broker a quick peace — seemed to sense an opening. He lauded the Trump administration’s efforts to broker a cease-fire and also touted a recent bipartisan threat to impose more sanctions on Moscow.

Still, there is no doubt that pressure is building on Ukraine to make a deal, both at home and from the Trump administration. The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, who has had a tense relationship with Mr. Zelensky, told the BBC hours after the huge missile attack Thursday that it may be time to give up land for peace, at least temporarily. Mr. Zelensky has also said that Ukraine might have to cede some territory for a peace deal — land it hopes to regain through diplomatic means — as long as it gets a security guarantee, like NATO membership.

And despite the positive feelings about Saturday’s meeting of the two leaders, questions about the relationship between them remained. After the brief meeting, a Ukrainian spokesman said that the two men would talk again later on Saturday. But Mr. Trump made a speedy departure from the pope’s funeral. He had told aides earlier that he wanted to be back to his golf resort in New Jersey by the end of the day.

After Mr. Trump boarded Air Force One to leave, the Ukrainian spokesman said a second meeting would not occur because of the “very tight schedules of the presidents.”

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Nataliya Vasilyeva contributed reporting.

Kim Barker is a Times reporter writing in-depth stories about the war in Ukraine.

13.

New analysis and reporting on the tragic crash at Reagan National.

Excerpts:

Up to now attention has focused on the Black Hawk’s altitude, which was too high and placed the helicopter directly in the jet’s landing path at National Airport. But The Times found new details that show that the failures were far more complex than previously known.

The helicopter crew appeared to have made more than one mistake. Not only was the Black Hawk flying too high, but in the final seconds before the crash, its pilot failed to heed a directive from her co-pilot, an Army flight instructor, to change course.

Radio communications, the tried-and-true means of interaction between controllers and pilots, also broke down. Some of the controller’s instructions were “stepped on” — meaning that they cut out when the helicopter crew pressed a microphone to speak — and important information likely went unheard.

Technology on the Black Hawk that would have allowed controllers to better track the helicopter was turned off. Doing so was Army protocol, meant to allow the pilots to practice secretly whisking away a senior government official in an emergency. But at least some experts believe that turning off the system deprived everyone involved of another safeguard.

The controller also could have done more.

Though he had delegated the prime responsibility for evading other air traffic to the Black Hawk crew under visual separation, he continued to monitor the helicopter, as his job required. Yet he did not issue clear, urgent instructions to the Black Hawk to avert the crash, aviation experts say.

These lapses happened against the backdrop of systemic deficiencies in U.S. aviation. The F.A.A. has struggled for years with low staffing among controllers, and the National Airport tower has been no exception. At the time of the crash, for reasons that remain murky, a single controller was working both helicopter traffic and commercial runway traffic — jobs that would typically be done by two controllers.

The F.A.A. said in a statement that it could not discuss “any aspect” of a continuing investigation led by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Brig. Gen. Matthew Braman, the Army’s director of aviation, said, “I think what we’ll find in the end is there were multiple things that, had any one of them changed, it could have well changed the outcome of that evening.” He, too, deferred detailed questions about the investigation to the N.T.S.B., adding that the Army was conducting its own reviews of the accident.

Investigators from the N.T.S.B. will issue their final report on the causes of the crash by early 2026.

Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash

New details revealed by The Times show that the failures on Jan. 29 before an Army helicopter crashed into a jet near Reagan National Airport were far more complex than previously known.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/27/business/dc-plane-crash-reagan-airport.html

By Kate Kelly and Mark Walker

The reporters reviewed government documents and audio recordings of the air traffic controllers leading up to the collision. They interviewed scores of experts, including pilots, government officials and current and former controllers. They reported from Washington.

April 27, 2025
Updated 12:04 p.m. ET

As they flew south along the Potomac River on the gusty night of Jan. 29, the crew aboard an Army Black Hawk helicopter attempted to execute a common aviation practice. It would play a role in ending their lives.

Shortly after the Black Hawk passed over Washington’s most famous array of cherry trees, an air traffic controller at nearby Ronald Reagan National Airport alerted the crew to a regional passenger jet in its vicinity. The crew acknowledged seeing traffic nearby.

One of the pilots then asked for permission to employ a practice called “visual separation.” That allows a pilot to take control of navigating around other aircraft, rather than relying on the controller for guidance.

“Visual separation approved,” the controller replied.

The request to fly under those rules is granted routinely in airspace overseen by controllers. Most of the time, visual separation is executed without note. But when mishandled, it can also create a deadly risk — one that aviation experts have warned about for years.

On Jan. 29, the Black Hawk crew did not execute visual separation effectively. The pilots either did not detect the specific passenger jet the controller had flagged, or could not pivot to a safer position. Instead, one second before 8:48 p.m., the helicopter slammed into American Airlines Flight 5342, which was carrying 64 people to Washington from Wichita, Kan., killing everyone aboard both aircraft in a fiery explosion that lit the night sky over the river.

One error did not cause the worst domestic crash in the United States in nearly a quarter-century. Modern aviation is designed to have redundancies and safeguards that prevent a misstep, or even several missteps, from being catastrophic. On Jan. 29, that system collapsed.

“Multiple layers of safety precautions failed that night,” said Katie Thomson, the Federal Aviation Administration’s deputy administrator under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Image

On Jan. 29, a Black Hawk helicopter collided with American Airlines Flight 5342, which was carrying 64 people to Washington from Wichita, Kan., killing everyone aboard both aircraft. Police and firefighters saluted near the crash site.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Image

The fuselage of American Airlines Flight 5342 was pulled from the Potomac River on Feb. 3.Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times

Image

A memorial honoring the 28 figure-skating athletes who were aboard Flight 5342.Credit...Kent Nishimura for The New York Times

The New York Times examined public records and interviewed more than 50 aviation experts and officials, including some with extensive knowledge of the events, to piece together the most complete understanding yet of factors that contributed to the crash.

Up to now attention has focused on the Black Hawk’s altitude, which was too high and placed the helicopter directly in the jet’s landing path at National Airport. But The Times found new details that show that the failures were far more complex than previously known.

The helicopter crew appeared to have made more than one mistake. Not only was the Black Hawk flying too high, but in the final seconds before the crash, its pilot failed to heed a directive from her co-pilot, an Army flight instructor, to change course.

Radio communications, the tried-and-true means of interaction between controllers and pilots, also broke down. Some of the controller’s instructions were “stepped on” — meaning that they cut out when the helicopter crew pressed a microphone to speak — and important information likely went unheard.

Technology on the Black Hawk that would have allowed controllers to better track the helicopter was turned off. Doing so was Army protocol, meant to allow the pilots to practice secretly whisking away a senior government official in an emergency. But at least some experts believe that turning off the system deprived everyone involved of another safeguard.

Image

The cockpit of a UH-60 Black Hawk Medical Evacuation helicopter, similar to the Black Hawk involved in the crash, at Fort Novosel in Alabama.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

The controller also could have done more.

Though he had delegated the prime responsibility for evading other air traffic to the Black Hawk crew under visual separation, he continued to monitor the helicopter, as his job required. Yet he did not issue clear, urgent instructions to the Black Hawk to avert the crash, aviation experts say.

These lapses happened against the backdrop of systemic deficiencies in U.S. aviation. The F.A.A. has struggled for years with low staffing among controllers, and the National Airport tower has been no exception. At the time of the crash, for reasons that remain murky, a single controller was working both helicopter traffic and commercial runway traffic — jobs that would typically be done by two controllers.

The F.A.A. said in a statement that it could not discuss “any aspect” of a continuing investigation led by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Brig. Gen. Matthew Braman, the Army’s director of aviation, said, “I think what we’ll find in the end is there were multiple things that, had any one of them changed, it could have well changed the outcome of that evening.” He, too, deferred detailed questions about the investigation to the N.T.S.B., adding that the Army was conducting its own reviews of the accident.

Investigators from the N.T.S.B. will issue their final report on the causes of the crash by early 2026.

In the meantime, data recently analyzed by the board revealed that National Airport was the site of at least one near collision between an airplane and a helicopter each month from 2011 to 2024. Two-thirds of the incidents occurred at night, and more than half may have involved helicopters flying above their maximum designated altitude.

Given those findings, the F.A.A. recently banned most helicopter flights along a portion of the route the Black Hawk used.

A diagram showing the paths of the helicopter and the plane involved in the crash over a satellite image

Hillcrest

Heights

MARYLAND

Plane path

WASHINGTON

Blue Plains

Last recorded

locations

Helicopter path

313 feet

278 feet

Reagan National Airport

Plane was

headed to

Runway 33

Potomac River

Control

tower

VIRGINIA

Aurora

Highlands

Sources: U.S. National Transportation Safety Board Report; Flight data by Flightradar24 (American Airlines jet) and ADS-B Exchange (Army helicopter); aerial image by Google Earth Studio with data from SIO, NOAA, and U.S. Navy.By The New York Times

And, critically, the F.A.A. has also vastly limited the use of visual separation.

The maneuver is primarily used by pilots flying helicopters and smaller aircraft, and is used less frequently for commercial jets. When using visual separation, pilots take responsibility for noticing and steering clear of neighboring air traffic if certain conditions, like good visibility, are met. It has long been viewed in the industry as essential to keeping traffic moving.

But the occasional difficulty for pilots to see and avoid nearby air traffic has also been implicated in at least 40 fatal collisions since 2010, according to the N.T.S.B. It has led to stern safety warnings to pilots from both the F.A.A. and the N.T.S.B.

Human error, blind spots not evident from a cockpit and environmental conditions “leave even the most diligent pilot vulnerable to the threat of a midair collision with an unseen aircraft” under this maneuver, the N.T.S.B. wrote in a safety bulletin published in 2016.

The practice of allowing pilots to navigate around traffic on their own “has long been seen as a flawed concept but a necessary one,” said Jeff Guzzetti, a former accident investigator for both the F.A.A. and the N.T.S.B. “But it has been linked to a number of deadly midair incidents throughout the years.”

Two Departures, Six Minutes Apart

Video

National Airport is one of 57 airports in the United States that has a special-qualification designation from the Federal Aviation Administration, according to an agency document reviewed by The Times.CreditCredit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

At 6:39 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, a CRJ700 regional jet departed Wichita under cool, dry conditions with 60 passengers, two pilots and two flight attendants on board. It was operated by American Airlines’s subsidiary carrier, PSA Airlines, and the direct route to National Airport had started the previous January.

Capt. Jonathan J. Campos, a 34-year-old raised in Brooklyn who had wanted to fly since an early age, was the pilot. Sam Lilley, a 28-year-old former marketer whose father had been an Army Black Hawk pilot, was the first officer.

National Airport is one of only five airports in the United States that the F.A.A. designates as complex because of high density.

Image

Capt. Jonathan J. Campos, 34, wanted to fly from an early age. He was the pilot of the flight operated by American Airlines’s subsidiary carrier, PSA Airlines.

Image

Sam Lilley, 28, a former marketer whose father had been an Army pilot, was the first officer.Credit...Lilley Family, via Associated Press

It is one of 57 airports in the United States that has a special-qualification designation from the F.A.A., according to an agency document reviewed by The Times. Nearly all of the remaining airports, such as those in Durango, Colo., or Missoula, Mont., are included because of hazardous mountainous terrain that pilots must navigate during takeoffs and landings, or because they are smaller airports without radar or a control tower.

“You have to have an aggressive defensive posture coming into DCA,” said Dennis Tajer, a spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association who is also an American Airlines pilot, using the identifier for National Airport. “You have to take your A-game and add a plus to it.”

Image

Data recently analyzed by the National Transportation Safety Board revealed that Ronald Reagan National Airport was the site of a close call between an airplane and a helicopter every month from 2011 to 2024.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Six minutes after Flight 5342 departed, the Black Hawk took off from Davison Army Airfield, at Fort Belvoir, Va., about 20 miles southwest of Washington.

The crew was ordered to fly about 40 miles north of the base to a suburb near Gaithersburg, Md., where it would turn around and head back to Virginia.

The crew’s mission was to conduct an annual evaluation of Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, who joined the Army in 2019, to ensure that her helicopter piloting skills were up to par.

That night, her assignment was to navigate the conditions of a scenario in which members of Congress or other senior government officials might need to be carried out of the nation’s capital during an attack.

Captain Lobach was the highest-ranking soldier on the helicopter, but Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, who was acting as her instructor, had flown more than twice as many hours over time.

Image

Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach, an aspiring doctor who joined the Army in 2019, was taking an annual evaluation to ensure that her helicopter piloting skills were up to par.Credit...Valerie Plesch for The New York Times

A third crew member, Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, whose job was to help with equipment and other technical issues, sat in the back.

Captain Lobach, who was sitting in the front left seat, was initially handling the radio communications. To her right working the controls was Warrant Officer Eaves, a former Navy petty officer who joined the Army, according to his brother Forrest Eaves, because it would train him and permit him to fly helicopters.

Investigators believe Captain Lobach and Warrant Officer Eaves were wearing night-vision goggles, which were required attire for this type of evaluation. Goggles allow exponentially enhanced visibility of nearby people and objects, which is helpful at night in complex surroundings. But urban lights can also become cripplingly bright, according to military pilots.

Despite differences in rank and the delineation of duties, all three Black Hawk crew members bore responsibility for searching the sky for other aircraft and helping to stay clear of them.

A Blip Every Five to 12 Seconds

Image

The Federal Aviation Administration has struggled for years with low staffing among controllers, and the National Airport tower has been no exception.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Sitting in the control hub of the National Airport tower that night, an air traffic controller watched the lighted dots on the radar scope in front of him.

His colleagues’ air-traffic instructions punctuated the ambient noise as he directed aircraft by radio. A little after 8:30 p.m., an Army helicopter, known in the tower as a “P.A.T.” for priority air transport, made contact with him.

The controller had worked for the F.A.A. for about a decade in two smaller air-traffic control centers, but had been stationed at National Airport for about two years, according to government employee filings. The controller, whom The Times is not identifying because his name has not been publicly revealed as part of the investigation, did not respond to requests for comment.

Like his colleagues in the tower, he typically worked one control duty at a time, such as directing just helicopters, or only handling airplanes on taxiways. He worked about seven hours that day, according to a government document reviewed by The Times. The F.A.A. says all controllers get required breaks.

But after a co-worker left the control hub at 3:40 p.m., some controllers began to assume combined duties. The controller who ended up directing the Black Hawk took over combined duties at roughly 7 p.m., according to the government document. An N.T.S.B. spokesman declined to confirm how long the controller operated in both roles.

Such a combination was not unusual, and was approved that evening by a tower supervisor, according to a person briefed on the staffing. But the roles were not typically combined until traffic slowed many hours later, around 9:30 p.m.

Though the reasons why the supervisor combined the duties so early are still not clear, the F.A.A. would later say in an internal report that staffing was “not normal” that evening.

By the time both the Army Black Hawk and Flight 5342 were in radio contact with the controller — starting about 8:43 p.m. — five controllers were working different duties in the control hub of the tower.

In addition to doing two jobs at once, the controller faced another complicating factor that night: He could not watch the helicopter’s movements in real time.

Doing so would have required the use of an aviation broadcasting system called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Out, or ADS-B Out, which reports an aircraft’s position, altitude and speed roughly every second.

But the Black Hawk did not operate with the technology because of the confidentiality of the mission for which the crew was practicing. That is because ADS-B Out positions can be obtained by anyone with an internet connection, making the system a potential risk to national security.

As a result, the controller relied on pings from the helicopter’s transponder to show its changing location, which can take between five and 12 seconds to refresh, according to F.A.A. documents.

Aviation experts said that during that gap, the aircraft could change course or elevation, making for a concerning level of uncertainty.

In a busy airspace, that lapse, said Michael McCormick, a former vice president of the F.A.A. Air Traffic Organization, is “a very long time.”

General Braman said the fact that ADS-B Out was turned off “played no role in this accident” because the transponder meant that the Black Hawk could be seen on the radar and “was never invisible.”

Some federal lawmakers have strongly disagreed.During a contentious Senate hearing on March 27, Chris Rocheleau, the F.A.A.’s acting administrator, announced that the technology would be required on all flights near National Airport — though with some as-yet-undefined exceptions.

Little Margin for Error

Image

The F.A.A. requires that helicopters take responsibility for noticing and steering clear of neighboring air traffic in the nation’s busiest airspaces if certain conditions, like good visibility, are met.Credit...Caroline Gutman for The New York Times

Near the end of his shift, the controller handling both helicopters and commercial jets tried to pull off a complicated, and potentially risky, maneuver called a squeeze play.

This is an attempt to keep operations moving efficiently, according to veteran National Airport controllers, by tightly sequencing runway traffic with minimal time between takeoffs or landings.

In this case, the plan was to let one airplane depart from Runway 1 at about 8:47 and let another land on the same runway about a minute later.

Shortly thereafter, the controller needed to bring Flight 5342 in for a landing.

But to fit in the Wichita flight without interrupting the flow of other traffic, the controller made a request that was permissible but atypical, according to the N.T.S.B. He asked to divert its landing to one of the airport’s ancillary runways, a spot normally used by smaller aircraft because of its shorter length.

“Can you take Runway three-three?” the controller asked the pilots.

His request would require Mr. Campos and Mr. Lilley to adjust their route during the final stage of their flight, introducing a wrinkle at the end of a two-hour journey. But commercial pilots train for such maneuvers, and having just passed over Mount Vernon in Virginia, about 10 miles from National Airport, they still had time to make the shift.

After a beat, one of the pilots replied. “Yeah, we can do, uh, three-three,” he said.

The pilots began the process of rerouting the flight to the new runway, which intersected Runway 1 at an acute angle in the middle.

Runway 33 had an additional quirk: a particularly narrow vertical space between the landing slope for a jet and the maximum altitude at which helicopters using a certain route, called Route 4, could fly.

At an altitude of 200 feet within the designated route, helicopters fly at 75 feet below airplanes approaching Runway 33. This vertical separation decreases if helicopters are farther from the eastern bank of the river.

800

feet

Flight 5342’s last

recorded position

600

400

MARGIN

Safe approach area

200

Helicopter

route

Runway 33

Potomac River

¼ mile

Source: Flightradar24 and FAABy The New York Times

At its highest, near the Potomac’s east bank, the vertical distance between a helicopter and an aircraft en route to landing on Runway 33 would be 75 feet, N.T.S.B. investigators said. But if a helicopter were flying farther from the river’s east bank toward the airport, that distance would be even less.

That is one reason why, after the crash, the N.T.S.B. recommended banning helicopter flights on Route 4 when Runway 33 at National Airport is in use.

Jennifer Homendy, the N.T.S.B. chairwoman, said in a March 11 press briefing that those distances “are insufficient and pose an intolerable risk to aviation safety by increasing the chances of a midair collision at DCA.”

With so little margin for error — 75 feet or even less — it would be crucial that the Black Hawk fly below the maximum altitude for the route.

Aboard the Black Hawk that night a curious exchange occurred between the two pilots.

Captain Lobach, who by that point had assumed the controls, announced an altitude of 300 feet, according to cockpit voice recordings. Warrant Officer Eaves then read out an altitude of 400 feet.

The exact time that passed between the statements has not been detailed in N.T.S.B. reports, but records suggest that it was no longer than 39 seconds. And experienced helicopter pilots say that given the ease of mobility in a Black Hawk, the altitude could have changed in fractions of seconds.

But the discrepancy, which neither pilot commented on at the time, was potentially significant.

The F.A.A. mandated an altitude of no higher than 300 feet for that part of the route, meaning that an altitude of 400 feet would have been unacceptable and could have positioned the Black Hawk uncomfortably close to departing or landing airplanes.

By about 8:44 p.m., it seemed to be in a more appropriate spot.

As the helicopter approached the Key Bridge, from which it would fly south along the river, Warrant Officer Eaves stated that it was at 300 feet and descending to 200 feet — necessary because the maximum height for its route closer to the airport had dropped to 200 feet.

But even as it reached that juncture, Warrant Officer Eaves evidently felt obligated to repeat his instruction: The Black Hawk was at 300 feet, he said, and needed to descend.

Captain Lobach said she would. But two and a half minutes later, the Black Hawk still was above 200 feet — a dangerously high level.

‘Threading the Needle’

Image

The radar altimeter inside the cockpit of a Black Hawk flight simulator. On the night of Jan. 29, the Army Black Hawk over the Potomac River was above 200 feet, the maximum height for its route.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Seconds after the Black Hawk crossed over the Tidal Basin, a shallow lake near the Washington Monument ringed by cherry trees, the controller informed the Army crew that a regional jet — Flight 5342 — was “circling” to Runway 33.

Aviation experts said that development may have blindsided Captain Lobach.

Though she had flown four or five similar practice rides there over the years, she might have never confronted a landing on Runway 33, because it is used only 4 to 5 percent of the time.

In any case, investigators now believe that the word “circling” was not heard by the Black Hawk crew because one of them was pressing the microphone key to speak when the word came through their radios. If the key is depressed, the pilot can speak but not hear incoming communications.

Around 8:46 p.m., Warrant Officer Eaves responded to whatever he did hear of the circle-landing notification, using the call sign for his own flight: “PAT two-five has traffic in sight. Request visual separation.”

Image

Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Eaves acted as Captain Lobach’s instructor and co-pilot at the time of the crash.Credit...U.S. Department of the Army, via Reuters

The controller gave his approval.

Visual separation is at the crux of an aviation concept known as see and avoid, which works exactly as it sounds. A pilot is meant to see neighboring air traffic, often without assistance from the controller, and avoid it by either hovering in place until the traffic passes or by flying around it in prescribed ways.

See-and-avoid flying is commonplace in aviation. At many tiny airports, with no controllers, there is no alternative. In busy airspaces, such as parts of National Airport’s, the helicopter’s altitude limits are too low for controllers to easily assist it in maneuvering around obstacles such as ships or tall buildings, while also keeping it clear of air traffic.

The F.A.A. said in its statement that “pilots are responsible for keeping themselves safely separated from other aircraft.”

Nonetheless, even when a helicopter is operating under see-and-avoid rules, if the controller notices it is converging into another aircraft’s path, he or she should — under F.A.A. rules — call out the existence of the nearby traffic and ask the helicopter to affirm that it has the aircraft in sight.

At that point, the helicopter crew should acknowledge that it sees the traffic and can request visual separation — asking permission to stay clear of the nearby aircraft — which the controller can grant or refuse. Or, if the crew says that it does not see the traffic, the controller will likely direct the helicopter to a safer position.

One benefit of the see-and-avoid system is that it can lighten the controller’s workload during busy periods. But see and avoid has proved problematic, even fatal, in recent decades.

In 2019, two airplanes collided above Ketchikan, Alaska, killing six people and injuring 10 others. Three years later, two helicopters collided above San Diego, but there were no casualties. The N.T.S.B. cited failed see-and-avoid efforts in both cases.

One risk is that the pilots will miscalculate which way the other aircraft is moving; another is identifying the wrong aircraft.

John Goglia, a former N.T.S.B. board member, put it plainly: See and avoid assumes that every pilot has sharp vision and can pick out the right aircraft in the direction they have been told to look. But instructions are not always clear, he said. And tools like night-vision goggles can sometimes cloud vision more than clarify it.

Put two planes in roughly the same patch of sky, and even the most attentive pilot might track the wrong one, Mr. Goglia said.

During a recent press briefing on the crash, Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, criticized the practice of allowing helicopters to use visual separation in confined airspaces like the one near National Airport.

“Having helicopters fly under landing aircraft, and allowing helicopter pilots to say, ‘I’ll maintain visual separation’ — that is not going to happen anymore,” he said. “That is too risky. You’re threading the needle. And it’s going to stop.”

A Last Communication

Video

A night-vision goggles demonstration at Fort Novosel in Alabama. Captain Lobach was being tested on her ability to fly using night-vision goggles, a staple of Army training and combat that greatly amplifies lights, objects and people to increase visibility.CreditCredit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

In the 90 seconds after the air traffic controller granted visual separation to the Black Hawk, the attempted squeeze play started to unfold. At 8:46:48 p.m. the tower cleared a jet for immediate departure off Runway 1.

Then, the Black Hawk, still southbound, passed Hains Point, a park area along the east side of the Potomac, moving it closer to the airport on the opposite bank.

At the same time, Flight 5342 began a leftward turn toward Runway 33. It was flying at about 500 feet and the equivalent of around 153 miles per hour.At 8:47:39 p.m., the controller contacted the helicopter.

“PAT two-five, do you have the CRJ in sight?” he asked, using the abbreviation for the model of Flight 5342’s aircraft.

As he spoke, a conflict alert — which controllers described as a distinctive beeping sound — was audible in the tower behind him, according to the N.T.S.B. report. A warning light, controllers said, would also have been flashing on the radar scope.

Conflict alerts are not rare. Controllers say they can go off numerous times over a long shift, to the point that they risk losing their urgency.

The controller received no response. The helicopter and Flight 5342 were by then about one mile apart.

The controller then issued an instruction to the helicopter crew: Pass behind the airplane.

Cockpit voice recordings indicate that the essence of the controller’s command — to “pass behind” — might not have been heard by the Black Hawk crew, perhaps because of a second bleep-out.

Some former military pilots said that by issuing a proactive command to pass behind the jet, the controller was going above and beyond his obligations, especially under see-and-avoid conditions, and that an experienced Black Hawk crew should have known what to do without help.

Still, some regulators and controllers said that the controller in this case could have done more.

He could have told the Black Hawk crew where Flight 5342 was positioned and which way it was bound. (The F.A.A. manual instructions direct controllers to use the hours of a clock in describing locations.) He could have provided the jet’s distance from the helicopter in nautical miles or feet.

But one thing is critical. When two aircraft are on a collision course, the controller’s top priority must be to warn both sets of pilots.

“Advise the pilots if the targets appear likely to merge,” F.A.A. regulations state.

That did not happen.

Direct, immediate intervention was needed that night. Instead of seeing and avoiding Flight 5342, Captain Lobach continued flying straight at it.

Investigators might never know why. There is no indication that she was suffering from health issues at the time or that a medical event affected her during those final moments aboard the Black Hawk, according to friends and people familiar with the crash investigation, which included autopsies and performance log reviews.

Two seconds after the controller’s cut out instruction about passing behind the jet, Warrant Officer Eaves replied, affirming for the second time that the Black Hawk saw the traffic. “PAT two-five has the aircraft in sight. Request visual separation,” he said.

“Vis sep approved,” the controller replied.

It was their last communication.

The Black Hawk was 15 seconds away from crossing paths with the jet. Warrant Officer Eaves then turned his attention to Captain Lobach.

He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank.

Turning left would have opened up more space between the helicopter and Flight 5342, which was heading for Runway 33 at an altitude of roughly 300 feet.

She did not turn left.

Image

Red Cross workers rushed to National Airport after the collision.Credit...Kent Nishimura for The New York Times

Image

Emergency workers searched the Potomac River for passengers of both flights.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Image

A memorial was erected near the airport for the victims of the collision.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Kate Kelly covers money, policy and influence for The Times.

Mark Walker is an investigative reporter focused on transportation. He is based in Washington.

See more on: Federal Aviation Administration (F.A.A.), National Transportation Safety Board

14. How Foreign Students Lost Their Sheen in a Nation of Immigrants

A view from Australia (not the US). I did not expect to read that foreign students impact housing prices there.

How Foreign Students Lost Their Sheen in a Nation of Immigrants

Both major political parties are pledging steep cuts on the number of foreigners allowed to study in Australia as a way to rein in runaway housing prices.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/27/world/australia/international-students-caps.html

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Ali Bajwa, a native of Pakistan who pursued his doctorate in Australia, arrived in the country a decade ago and now teaches at La Trobe University in Melbourne.Credit...Abigail Varney for The New York Times

By Victoria Kim

Reporting from Sydney, Australia

April 27, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET

Australia was the clear top choice when Ali Bajwa, a native of Pakistan, wanted to pursue a doctorate in agricultural science. The research in the field was cutting edge, the universities were highly ranked and overseas students were welcome in the country, where international education has been referred to as “the biggest export we don’t dig out of the ground.”

Mr. Bajwa arrived a decade ago, specializing in weed control. He brought his family over, all becoming naturalized citizens. He spent years in Wagga Wagga, a rural town, working for the state government and continuing research in weed science. He now teaches at La Trobe University in Melbourne and is a homeowner.

But those hoping to follow Mr. Bajwa’s path face a new reality.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have turned to capping the number of international students as a way to rein in unaffordable housing, a crisis that is at the top of voters’ minds ahead of next month’s election. The argument is that this will reduce demand for rentals and starter homes and tamp down prices. It is a major shift for Australia, whose economy depends on mining but which once saw education as a “super growth sector” and sought to compete for students with the United States, Britain and Canada.

“We gain a lot more than we lose to international students,” said Mr. Bajwa, 35. “There should be a lot more focus on improving the selection criteria or requirements than a blanket ban or limiting the number.”

Last year, the government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sought to to impose a limit on international students but failed to pass legislation. It has since increased student visa fees and slowed processing, reducing the arrival of students from overseas. The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has pledged to put far stricter restrictions on international students, slashing the number by a further 30,000, for a cap of 240,000 new arrivals a year — and more than tripling the maximum visa fees to up to 5,000 Australian dollars, about $3,200.

Strict border controls during the coronavirus pandemic kept many international students out. But Australia then made a concerted effort to bring them back — temporarily removing work restrictions and offering rebates on visa fees. That led to a record surge of students arriving in the country in 2023 and 2024, with total international student enrollment topping a million for the first time last year.

Image

Students at La Trobe University in Melbourne. Australia long allowed and even encouraged major universities to become dependent on international students.Credit...Abigail Varney for The New York Times

In September, Mr. Dutton spoke of students who apply to remain in the country after their degrees as “the modern version of the boat arrivals,” in an apparent reference to refugees and asylum seekers.

Australia has long benefited from immigration, which has boosted its labor force and younger demography. About 30 percent of its population was born overseas, and nearly half has at least one parent born overseas.

But views have shifted, and not just here. The United States is scrutinizing and revoking student visas in drastic fashion, casting the right to study in the country as a privilege that can be taken away seemingly arbitrarily; Canada has put the brakes on the influx of students from abroad; Britain has installed new restrictions that it said would prevent people from using student visas to come work in the country.

Australia had long allowed and even encouraged major universities to become dependent on international students to expand their campuses and research programs. Foreigners pay much higher fees than domestic students and contribute a substantial portion of the schools’ revenue.

“International students in Australia had been used for quite some time as a form of an export industry,” said Peter Hurley, a professor of education policy at Victoria University. “The same way they’re promoting the sheep industry, it’s been the same with international education.”

The post-pandemic surge in international students coincided with an acute housing affordability crisis in Australia. Home values have soared compared with incomes, rising about 45 percent from 2020. Sydney was the second least-affordable city in the world after Hong Kong in 2023, based on a comparison of median home prices to median incomes.

Image

Sydney was the second least-affordable city in the world after Hong Kong in 2023, according to one study.Credit...Hollie Adams/Reuters

While multiple factors have contributed to the crunch in housing supply — including labor shortages, rising construction costs and regulatory issues — international students have made for an expedient, nonvoting segment to target as a quick fix for politicians.

That sentiment was reflected in a question put to Mr. Albanese, of the center-left Labor Party, and Mr. Dutton, who leads the Liberal Party, in their first debate of this election cycle.

“We have a lot of students who are here visiting who are buying housing within the city area,” said a 74-year-old woman named Janine, who said she was concerned about her children and grandchildren’s ability to ever be able to afford a home. “When is one of our governments going turn up and say, Australia belongs to Australians?”

Andrew Norton, a professor of higher education policy at Monash Business School, said there was no question that the number of students arriving in the country — many of them wanting to remain in the country after graduation — was contributing to the demand side of the housing shortage.

At the same time, he said, the current spike is an aberration because of pent-up demand during the pandemic and fewer students returning home. The proposed caps, he added, would be a short-term solution rather than the more thoughtful, comprehensive migration policy reform that is needed.

Critics have also noted that international students largely occupy apartments and share houses concentrated near the universities that would typically not be the types of homes sought out by first-time home buyers.

Clifford Suryana, a fourth-year student at the University of Sydney studying law and commerce who is from Surabaya, Indonesia, said he had learned English from Australian teachers who lived in his hometown. When it came time to think about university, he said he felt a general affinity for Australia and also felt there were business and diplomatic ties with Indonesia that would lend themselves to career opportunities.

Many of his fellow international students, who make up nearly half of the student body at the University of Sydney and account for four-fifths of the school’s tuition fees, contribute far more to Australian society than they take from it, he said.

“Most of them would want to work in Australia or go back to their original country with knowledge they got from Australia,” he said. “In my perspective, that would only be good for Australia.”

Victoria Kim is the Australia correspondent for The New York Times, based in Sydney, covering Australia, New Zealand and the broader Pacific region.

15. The children of the Vietnam War’s ‘Operation Babylift’ have turned 50. A look at the lives they built.

Tragedy, resilience, humanity, hope.

The children of the Vietnam War’s ‘Operation Babylift’ have turned 50. A look at the lives they built.

The first plane to fly children out of Vietnam crashed, killing dozens. Survivors found homes across the United States.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2025/04/27/operation-babylift-saigon-vietnam-war/

Today at 8:00 a.m. EDT

By Petula Dvorak

They are turning 50 now, the babies laid out on airplane seats, six to a row, held and fed by strangers who took turns caring for them as they took artillery fire and fled the bombs and booms of Saigon.

They were part of Operation Babylift, an effort led by the American military to rescue babies from Vietnamese orphanages ahead of the fall of Saigon 50 years ago this month.

“This is the least we can do, and we will do much, much more,” President Gerald Ford said on April 3, 1975.

The operation came after 10 grueling years of U.S. involvement in the 20-year-long Vietnam War, a conflict that took millions of Vietnamese lives, more than 58,000 American lives and divided the country. As the North Vietnamese closed in on Saigon in April 1975, American civilians were evacuated en masse.

The first Operation Babylift flight was catastrophic: The C-5A carrying more than 300 people crashed into a rice paddy 27 minutes after takeoff, killing 78 babies and about 50 adults, including 35 American military personnel.

Rescue and recovery workers search the wreckage of a C-5A Galaxy transport plane on April 5, 1975. (Dang Van Phuoc/AP)

The babies who survived didn’t remember it.

And as children growing up in American homes, often as the only Asian American kids in their Wonder Bread hometowns, forgetting the crash or the airlift or the reason they were adopted was a matter of survival.

Following History

Following

“My family was just amazing and wonderful,” said Devaki Murch, who was one of the 175 people who survived. “I never felt like I was missing something or there was never a yearning to learn more.”

Randy Murch with his daughter, Devaki, in Hawaii not long after she was adopted in 1975. Devaki Murch survived the crash of the first flight of Operation Babylift, which was ordered by President Gerald R. Ford to evacuate nearly 3,000 children from South Vietnamese orphanages. (Family photo/Family Photo)

But with age comes introspection.

“The majority of us are about 50 years old now,” Murch said. “And a lot of us have lived enough life to go back and maybe learn a little more and make those connections.”

She found these connections in the basement of the Colorado office of the adoption agency that worked in Vietnam, Friends for All Children.

“As I brought box after box up from the basement, it wasn’t just adoptee files; there were about 25 boxes of those. There were lists, C-5 crash survivor and deceased lists,” Murch said. “These remaining files are not just the records; they are a part of my personal history and the history of many others.”

For the first time, she found her infant name and hard-copy evidence of her babyhood:

“MIMOSA: female, Vietnam.”

She found the adoption application in her mother’s handwriting, health updates and grammar school pictures the agency kept.

“It was my life that I had never before witnessed,” she said, explaining why she’s now embarking on a massive project to find her fellow survivors and give them their backstories.

The evacuations continued for hundreds of other babies after the crash. Nuns and nurses who had cared for the children loaded them onto planes while under artillery fire. When he heard there was an 11-day delay between flights, American businessman Robert Macauley mortgaged his home to charter a Boeing 747 from Pan Am to fill the gap.

South Vietnamese infants are carried by nurses after their arrival at a Saigon hospital on April 4, 1975. (Neal Ulevich/Associated Press)

Between 2,500 and 3,000 children were delivered safely to the West, but some had enduring scars.

Carol Mason was terrified by loud noises, especially the thunderstorms that rattled the summer skies of her new home in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

“I would hide under furniture. I mean, it was really crazy,” said Mason, who was 5 months old when she was airlifted out of Vietnam. “And the doctor said that maybe I heard the bombs and all of that as a small baby.”

Mason was not on the plane that crashed. She was on the second Operation Babylift flight.

Bill and Ruth Schuler hold Carol, the baby girl they adopted, in April 1975 after she was flown out of Saigon. (Family Photo)

This month, she’s organizing a reunion of the other adoptees she’s found. She wants to build a community, helping adoptees connect with each other and their biological families, if that’s what they want.

“I found that for many adoptees, this is their first reunion after 50 years,” she said. “They’ve not started their journey, they haven’t taken DNA, they haven’t done anything.”

DNA makes it easier for the adoptees to find their backstories. One group bicycled through the Mekong Delta this month distributing DNA testing kits in villages, hoping to make a connection.

Jane MyHan Joy bicycled across the Mekong Delta with other adoptees looking for their biological families, handing out DNA kits along the way. (Jane MyHan Joy)

“I know nothing of my family history — not my parents’ names, whether they’re still alive or not, whether I have biological siblings or extended family, or how I got to the orphanage,” Jane MyHan Joy explained on her GoFundMe campaign to help raise money for Viet Nam Family Search, an organization helping reunite families. “I don’t even know if my birth certificate truly belongs to me or was fabricated to help get me out of the country during the chaos and brutality of the war.”

Murch has no desire to find her biological family this way. But she is sharing her findings to help others like Joy.

“For some of us at this age, you’ve reached your own successes, you have this confidence in who you are and now you can actually truly acknowledge, instead of denying, those groups, this history you’re part of,” she said.

President Gerald Ford carries a Vietnamese baby from “Clipper 1742" after it landed in San Francisco, one of the Operation Babylift planes that transported about 325 adoptees from Saigon on April 5, 1975. (Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum)

Murch brought some of the files to Washington. They’re now part of a collection in the Library of Congress.

Aryn Lockhart also survived the crash. She found the medical crew director who also survived that flight, Lt. Regina Aune. The two formed a bond and wrote a book together, “Operation Babylift: Mission Accomplished, a Memoir of Hope and Healing.” Lockhart calls her “Mom.”

They visited the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington several times to honor the crash victims. It’s a common journey for survivors of the crash.

On a visit in 2017, Lockhart posted a photo of herself on social media showing her hand resting near the name of one of only eight women on the memorial: Mary T. Klinker, who was a 27-year-old Air Force captain and nurse when she died in the crash.

Klinker and Aune were in the cargo area of the C-5A Galaxy when the flight took off from Tan Son Nhut Airport. Someone started getting sick and Aune ran upstairs to get medication. That saved her life, because when the plane crashed minutes later, nearly everyone in the cargo area, including Klinker, were instantly killed.

One of Lockhart’s former classmates saw that photo of Klinker’s name at the memorial wall. She reached out to her old friend to tell her she’s dating one of Klinker’s nephews, Chuck Klinker. So Lockhart, Aune and the Klinkers all connected and later dedicated a memorial to the nurse in her hometown of Lafayette, Indiana.

These journeys of discovery are fraught for the Operation Babylift generation.

Some were among an estimated 100,000 children fathered by American troops and left in orphanages. Some were given up by parents who couldn’t care for them. Others were orphaned by war. There have long been allegations that many were snatched from impoverished families to feed the adoption market.

The shoes worn by one of the Vietnamese children evacuated out of Saigon in April 1975 as part of Operation Babylift, donated to the presidential museum of Gerald Ford. (Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum)

Though they looked like thousands of Vietnamese children who immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s, their experience growing up in America was different.

The refugees who came with their families after 1975 — many by boat — grew up with Vietnamese language and culture. They usually kept their Vietnamese names, constantly pronouncing “Nguyen” and “Phuc” for their new neighbors. But most of the Operation Babylift kids adopted by White American families started their new lives as Carol or Kevin or Susan.

“I didn’t want to find my biological family or learn much about Vietnam; I just had no interest,” Mason said.

She remembers the first time she ever had Asian food, when one of her friend’s parents proudly served “your favorite food” to her. It was chicken lo mein.

“I’d never had anything like it before,” Mason said. And it was Chinese.”

When she was 25, her mom was flipping through a magazine when a photo stopped her cold. It was a flight attendant on one of the Operation Babylift flights with an infant in her arms.

“And my mom just said ‘Oh, my goodness! My baby’s in a magazine!’” Mason said. And that was the first time Mason became interested in learning more about her story.

Karen Ryan was a flight attendant for Pan Am in 1975 and flew on the second plane to transport babies out of Saigon during Operation Babylift. (Family photo/Carol Mason)

The timing was uncanny because her mother was killed by cancer a year later. “It was almost like she knew that doing this, learning about Vietnam, would open up a whole other world for me. It would give me more people to connect with when she would be gone,” Mason said. “Like she was leaving me a gift.”

Since then, Mason found that flight attendant who held her, and they became friends. She began connecting with other Operation Babylift kids, forming a tight network of people who related to their unique upbringings. They went on vacations together and bonded with each others’ families.

About 10 years ago, Mason bought a DNA testing kit. “And I let it sit in my cabinets for three years before I actually spit in the tube, because I was, like, ‘I was okay. I was happy. I didn’t need to find something else.’ ”

She got a hit and found two relatives in California — an uncle and a cousin. She visited them two months ago.

“That was amazing to actually be able to look at someone and say, oh my goodness, we resemble each other,” she said.

As they were marveling at that moment, her uncle asked, “Have you ever returned to Vietnam?” Mason said. “And I told him ‘No. It’s something I’ve always thought of doing.’ ” She had been putting her energy into helping other adoptees find their families and connect.

As far as she was concerned, she had no one to go visit. She couldn’t imagine where to go or who to see.

“So my biological uncle said, ‘Well, we’re planning on going at the end of next year, why don’t you come with us?,’ ” she said.

She said yes.

“I’m looking forward to going back with them, with my family,” she said. “While they show me the country that I came from.”

16. A blandly titled law from 1946 may play a key role in Harvard’s lawsuit against the Trump administration

A blandly titled law from 1946 may play a key role in Harvard’s lawsuit against the Trump administration | CNN

CNN · by Andy Rose · April 25, 2025

Harvard president says university ‘had no choice’ but to fight back against Trump

01:23 - Source: CNN

Harvard president says university ‘had no choice’ but to fight back against Trump

01:23

CNN —

Soon after the Trump administration announced it was cutting billions of dollars in grants to Harvard University following a breakdown in discussions over antisemitism on campus, the Ivy League institution pulled out the biggest weapon in the federal legal arsenal: the First Amendment.

“The Government’s attempt to coerce and control Harvard disregards … fundamental First Amendment principles,” Harvard’s lawsuit says.

But while citing the Bill of Rights’ best-known guarantee is an attention-grabber – both for judges and the general public – a more arcane issue is the focus of many of the lawsuit’s 51 pages: Harvard’s claim Trump’s executive branch isn’t following federal rules for changing key government policies.

Getty Images, NBC News

video

In particular, the Administrative Procedure Act “requires this Court to hold unlawful and set aside any final agency action that is ‘arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law,’” Harvard says in its lawsuit.

It was only hours after its talks with Harvard fell apart that the White House froze $2.2 billion fueling much of the school’s research, a breakneck response that mirrors the pace of sweeping changes on issues from immigration and tariff policy to federal staffing by an administration that prefers quick, unilateral action to deliberation and compromise.

“No administration has done anything like this before precisely because there are procedures in place to restrain this kind of extreme thing,” David A. Super, a professor of administrative and constitutional law at Georgetown and Yale, told CNN.

Whether the government can impose broad demands on Harvard as a precondition for funding appears to be the latest Trump controversy inevitably headed for the Supreme Court. And while predicting what the high court will do is usually a fool’s errand, Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck believes Harvard’s case is strong.

“It’s not that controversial a proposition that the government’s not allowed to say in exchange for this money – which we’re going to give you to fund medical research, to fund new scientific methods, etc. – you have to only teach the classes we tell you to teach or you have to only hire the administrators we tell you to hire,” the CNN contributor told the network’s Laura Coates on Monday.

Why the Administrative Procedure Act could be key in court

The Administrative Procedure Act, known as APA, was passed in the wake of World War II, as the government struggled to manage the major expansion of federal agencies under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“Congress passed the APA to guard against irrational, emotional, unfounded decision-making,” Super said. “Its purpose is not to push any particular agenda substantively but to make sure that the executive branch is following the law and considering the facts before it acts.”

A tower on one of the Harvard University buildings in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 15, 2025.

Scott Eisen/Getty Images

The APA does not require a hearing for every decision made by a government agency, but it does say agencies should not suddenly change procedures without reason.

Harvard argues suspending federal medical and scientific research funding as a way to combat antisemitism doesn’t make any sense and upends official procedures they had come to expect with no warning.

“For decades, Harvard has relied on the well-established process for federal financial assistance in its budgeting and financial planning, including with respect to staffing, infrastructure, facility and equipment purchases, and long-term investment decisions,” the university said in its suit.

While the Trump administration asserts Harvard has allowed antisemitism to flourish in violation of the Civil Rights Act, the university says it is already addressing concerns from Jewish students and faculty by tightening its ban on encampments and other protests that disrupt student activities, making “doxing” a violation of its anti-harassment and anti-bullying rules and expanding “inclusion and belonging efforts” to include Jewish students.

Students protest the war in Gaza and passersby walk in Harvard Yard on April 25, 2024, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ben Curtis/AP

Further, Harvard says the Civil Rights Act requires the government to first give it a chance to fix any violations before taking federal money away.

“Agencies have to follow their own procedures. If they say they’re going to give you a warning, they have to give you a warning,” Super said. “They can’t say, ‘Well, we’re mad, so we’re going to bypass the warning.’”

In its lawsuit, Harvard argues the Trump administration did just that: “They issued a Freeze Order on research funding first (with no process or opportunity for voluntary compliance) and used that freeze as leverage to negotiate,” Harvard’s attorneys wrote. “Such action is flatly unlawful and contrary to statutory authority.”

Indeed, the university learned the billions in federal funding would be frozen at the same time everyone else did – in the final 26 words of a one-page news release from the government’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, it says. The release was issued on the same day Harvard President Alan Garber announced the school would not agree to the administration’s demand letter.

The Trump administration’s attorneys have not yet provided a response to the allegations in the lawsuit, but White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday, “The president has made it quite clear that it’s Harvard who has put themselves in the position to lose their own funding by not obeying federal law, and we expect all colleges and universities who are receiving taxpayer funds to abide by federal law.”

Harvard’s decision to challenge the funding freeze in court seemed to take the administration by surprise. One White House official considered the back-and-forth with Harvard all part of a negotiation, they told CNN, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a CNBC interview, “We would like to be able to move forward with them and other universities.”

But along with the carrot, the White House official continued to brandish a stick at Harvard.

“They want to remain the envy of the world when it comes to research and science and academia, and they can only do that if they work with this administration,” the official told CNN.

SCOTUS likely will be final word on APA limits

Harvard is far from the only group affected by the Trump administration’s orders to mention the APA when fighting back in court. More than 160 lawsuits have cited alleged violations of it, from complaints over international students facing deportation and fired federal workers to transgender students’ access to sports.

Lawsuits challenging the finer points of federal law often take years to resolve, but Harvard is asking a judge to speed up the process, saying time is of the essence to avoid harm to their programs.

“While Harvard is diligently seeking to mitigate the effects of these funding cuts, critical research efforts will be scaled back or even terminated,” the university’s lawyers wrote Wednesday in a court filing asking for an expedited hearing.

A flag flies March 17 at the US Supreme Court building.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

With so many lawsuits pending, the question of how much the APA can limit the White House is almost certain to be decided by the Supreme Court. An early ruling from the justices indicated that, despite showing sympathy to APA-based challenges in the past, citing that law is not a guarantee of success.

Earlier this month, they blocked a lower court’s order to delay the Trump administration’s planned termination of $600 million in teacher training grants to states, saying the APA does not necessarily give courts the power to force the government to pay grant money.

“The Government is likely to succeed in showing the District Court lacked jurisdiction to order the payment of money under the APA,” said the unsigned order from the conservative majority.

Eliot House at Harvard University, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Charles Krupa/AP

It was a 5-4 ruling, with conservative Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the court’s three liberal justices, a split that makes future decisions in similar cases even more difficult to predict.

The issue at the heart of the teacher grants case – with states arguing withholding grant money over diversity, equity and inclusion policy amounted to a broken promise from the government rather than a First Amendment dispute – is different than Harvard’s.

But it shows the rocky road anyone challenging the White House’s administrative decisions could face, perhaps including Columbia University, which cut its own deal last month over federal funding tied to policy demands over antisemitism.

Still, education advocates say, it’s worth facing the legal uncertainty to draw a line in the sand.

“Harvard did absolutely the right thing. They came up with a very courageous decision, and more importantly, I think, they made great arguments for why this kind of federal overreach is beyond the pale,” said American Council on Education President Ted Mitchell.

And the extreme speed of the actions of taken against Harvard – the unapologetic pace Trump prizes – is likely to be the government’s legal undoing, Super said he believes.

“These actions are so sloppy that I don’t see any serious chance that they’ll survive,” he said.

CNN’s Katelyn Polantz, Tierney Sneed and Betsy Klein contributed to this report.

CNN · by Andy Rose · April 25, 2025

17. Jamal Greene: I’m a legal scholar. We're in a constitutional crisis — and this is the moment it began.

Hyperbole? A warning?

It seems to me that you are either for a separation of powers and checks and balances or you are not. And our oath requires that we support those two fundamental principles of our federal democratic republic.

Jamal Greene: I’m a legal scholar. We're in a constitutional crisis — and this is the moment it began.

Some will argue this country entered into a constitutional crisis only recently, but the moment I realized we were in one was on Jan. 20.

April 26, 2025, 6:00 AM EDT

By Jamal Greene

msnbc.com · April 26, 2025

This is an adapted excerpt from MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin’s YouTube series “Can They Do That? With Lisa Rubin.”

A constitutional crisis is a moment where there is some kind of paralysis, or possibly abuse, of the Constitution that has no obvious solution. There’s no question that, under the leadership of Donald Trump, that’s exactly the moment America is in right now.

So much of what the executive branch does is things that will never get to a court. It’s up to the White House to constrain itself.

Some will argue that this country entered into a constitutional crisis only recently, when the administration was accused of disobeying a Supreme Court order regarding the mistaken deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but it came before that. If the administration can’t constrain itself from violating the Constitution or statutes so flagrantly and frequently, then the country is already in a place where a constitutional crisis has occurred.

The truth is, we’ve been in a constitutional crisis since the executive branch decided it wouldn’t pay attention to any internal legal constraints. As someone who served in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, I spent a lot of time during Joe Biden’s administration advising what the president could and couldn’t do. So much of what the executive branch does is things that will never get to a court. It’s up to the White House to constrain itself.

The moment I realized we were in a constitutional crisis was Jan. 20. Shortly after his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. It’s an order that is flagrantly unconstitutional. It doesn’t have any real legal defense. The Trump administration knows that, but they issued it anyway. That kind of behavior — “I’m going to do it unless and until someone tells me not to, and that someone is a court that’s going to act slowly” — shows me that we’ve got an executive branch that doesn’t see itself constrained by law. That’s incredibly dangerous.

Trump’s actions are breaking a long tradition of the executive branch policing itself. Across administrations, executive branch officials, including career employees, have held up this tradition. One of the very first moves of this administration was to try to get rid of as many of those people as possible. That’s a pretty good sign that they’re not trying to constrain themselves.

This situation has taken this constitutional crisis even further into the red.

Now, I’m not saying they’re completely unconstrained. There are political constraints on the president’s behavior. He can’t just do whatever he wants. But there is so much that the executive branch does that will never see a courtroom. Or if it does see a courtroom, the way in which the court is able to intervene is very narrow.

That’s what we’re seeing right now with the Supreme Court and the deportation of Abrego Garcia. The White House is playing with what the court has told it, knowing that it holds a lot of the cards. The court doesn’t have an army. It can’t march into El Salvador, and the Trump administration is taking advantage of that.

This situation has taken this constitutional crisis even further into the red. At some point, people might stop paying attention because there’s so much lawlessness happening. But right now, we have an administration that is unconstrained by any internal legal constraints and flirting with ignoring the Supreme Court. This is really unprecedented territory.

msnbc.com · April 26, 2025

18.

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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A blandly titled law from 1946 may play a key role in Harvard’s lawsuit against the Trump administration | CNN

Why the Administrative Procedure Act could be key in court

SCOTUS likely will be final word on APA limits

Jamal Greene: I’m a legal scholar. We're in a constitutional crisis — and this is the moment it began.