Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Fools learn from experience, I prefer to learn from the experience of others.”

– Otto von Bismarck

"We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect.

We live in the container culture, which despises the content."

– Eduardo Galeano Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist (1940 — 2015)

“Those who know the true use of money, and regulate the measure of wealth. According to their needs, Liv, contented with a few things.”

– Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher, 1632–1677

1. We tried ‘fighting China’ with lower budgets. It didn’t go well.

2. Trump’s Tariffs Aim to Create a New World Economic Order

3. Trump’s Tariffs Were Supposed to Boost the Dollar. Why the Opposite Happened.

4. How the Company Making Nearly All Its Money From the Government Is Navigating Trump’s Cuts

5. AppLovin and Amazon Emerge as TikTok Bidders Ahead of Trump’s Deadline

6. The Brutal War Complicating Myanmar’s Quake Response

7. The Price of Security: U.S. Strategy, European Dependency, and the Future of NATO

8. Douglas Murray: If War Came, Would You Fight?

9. In first, Hegseth to skip multinational meeting on Ukraine support

10. China, E.U. prepare ‘countermeasures’ as Trump tariffs unite friends and foes

11. After Trump’s broad tariffs, Europe reels from the loss of an old ally

12. Experts, civilian workers in the reserves and embassy staff not eligible for DOD’s deferred resignation program

13. West Africa Divided: Challenges of the Fracturing of ECOWAS for Counterterrorism Efforts

14. US approves sale of F-16s to the Philippines in $5.5bn weapons package

15. America's arsenal is failing. We need an industrial mobilization board now.

16. Peering into the Future of Artificial Intelligence in the Military Classroom

17. 'The Greatest Soldier in American History' Took a Tank Round to the Leg and Kept Fighting

18. US-Taiwan Defense Partnership 2.0: Taiwan’s UAV Doctrine and Industrial Base

19. The Brewing Transatlantic Tech War

20. The Day Trump’s Tariffs Shook Wall Street and Corporate America

21. Dismantling VOA and other U.S. Media is a Strategic Mistake

22. Larry Diamond on the Importance of US Foreign Aid

23. Ukraine and the 'democratization' of precision weapons interview with Erik Prince

24. Extended Deterrence: A Tool That Has Served American Interests Since 1945

1. We tried ‘fighting China’ with lower budgets. It didn’t go well.

Conclusion:

Ultimately, the Trump administration has a window of opportunity for change, but that window may not remain open for long. Concerns about a U.S.-China military confrontation are growing steadily, while any administration’s ability to recast defense spending tends to diminish later in its tenure. The budget-related choices being made this month therefore could end up being among the most consequential defense decisions of President Trump’s second term. Even still, absent defense budget growth, even the smartest choices are likely to be insufficient.

We tried ‘fighting China’ with lower budgets. It didn’t go well.

Tabletop exercises hosted by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments offer one big lesson for the fiscal 2026 spending plan.

By Travis Sharp, Casey Nicastro and Evan Braden Montgomery

April 2, 2025 07:30 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Travis Sharp

By month’s end, Congressional leaders expect the Trump administration to release a “skinny budget” containing topline spending amounts for the Defense Department. Though specifics will come later, the choices that shape this fiscal 2026 skinny budget will set policy direction for the next four years.

This first budget submission will surely reflect the administration’s interim strategic guidance, which reportedly downgrades Europe relative to Asia. It will also showcase the administration’s ongoing push to shrink the Defense Department civilian workforce. Most importantly, it will reflect the results of the 8-percent spending shift directed by Secretary Hegseth. In February, he tasked defense organizations to prepare lists of lower-priority activities totaling 8 percent of their 2026–2030 projected budgets—some $365 billion over five years that may be reallocated elsewhere. He also identified 17 high-priority areas that were to be protected from funding reductions.

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments got some early insight into the hard choices involved with the skinny budget and spending relook. Back in January, we conducted an exercise to assess how to adjust defense spending to meet the China challenge. Participants joined from across the U.S. government, defense industry, and think tank community. They wrestled with what to fund based on different strategies for stopping a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and different trajectories for defense budgets.

Our exercise results, which mirror results from the more than 75 budget exercises that we have conducted since 2011, carry one big lesson about the size of the Defense Department’s budget, which remains the ultimate arbiter of whether the Pentagon can meet all its obligations with acceptable levels of risk.

The lesson is that a real topline increase of just 2 percent could fund a real increase in the Pentagon’s ability to deter or fight China. The extra money would enable larger allocations to key efforts—long-range strike aircraft, submarines, munitions, and military infrastructure, and more—while minimizing, although not avoiding, cuts to less critical areas such as older weapons, ground forces, and civilian personnel.

The coin, of course, has a flip side. With flat or lower budgets, there is no consequence-free way to increase funding for the top-priority investments identified by our exercise (and by Secretary Hegseth). Savings from scuttling diversity activities, shelving climate-change efforts, and raising efficiency amount to pennies on the dollar. Eliminating excess facilities would take time and would face inevitable resistance from Congress.

So the discussion would turn to riskier tradeoffs, like near-term vs. future readiness.

For years, many strategists believed that the United States ought to emphasize investments in cutting-edge capabilities while reducing the size of current forces, if necessary, to finance investments in qualitative military superiority. These strategists reasoned that the United States likely had time before it might face off militarily with China, so it could stand to take risk now to reduce risk later.

These arguments were compelling when made years ago. Today, however, the United States has run out of time. The odds of facing a serious military challenge from China in the next five years are high enough that one cannot be cavalier about cutting any part of the current force that might contribute to U.S. victory in that confrontation. The strategy of mortgaging present preparedness for future preparedness had its heyday, but that heyday is over.

A second risky tradeoff involves balancing the efforts to modernize our nuclear and conventional forces. After years of deferring the recapitalization of America’s strategic deterrent, the bill is coming due. That bill might not be nearly as large as critics suggest when put into the proper context of a three-decade timeline. But with flat or declining budgets, something will need to give to support the military services’ conventional modernization plans. The result could be risks that many American strategists would consider intolerable.

Although changes in the security environment are often overstated, the United States is on the verge of facing a truly unique and extremely worrisome development: the existence of two peer competitors in the nuclear domain. Russia, long Washington’s chief nuclear rival and the benchmark for its nuclear posture and plans, remains an atomic heavyweight. Not only has Moscow been replacing its large inventory of Soviet-era strategic and non-strategic nuclear systems, but it has also been experimenting with novel weapons and delivery platforms.

China, long content with maintaining a minimal deterrent, is rapidly moving into the same weight-class. Not only is Beijing on pace to amass an arsenal of 1,000 nuclear weapons or more by 2030, but it also is modernizing its delivery systems across the board and appears likely to field many non-strategic nuclear options as well. These developments put a premium on U.S. nuclear modernization efforts across all three legs of the strategic nuclear triad.

Ultimately, the Trump administration has a window of opportunity for change, but that window may not remain open for long. Concerns about a U.S.-China military confrontation are growing steadily, while any administration’s ability to recast defense spending tends to diminish later in its tenure. The budget-related choices being made this month therefore could end up being among the most consequential defense decisions of President Trump’s second term. Even still, absent defense budget growth, even the smartest choices are likely to be insufficient.

Evan Braden Montgomery is the director of research and studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Casey Nicastro is an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Travis Sharp is a senior fellow and director of the defense budget studies program at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

defenseone.com · by Travis Sharp

2. Trump’s Tariffs Aim to Create a New World Economic Order

The question is, will it be worth remaking the world economic order? We will have to wait and see.

Excerpts:

At issue is how central banks should navigate a negative supply shock—for example, a surge in oil prices. Negative supply shocks limit the ability of the economy to produce goods or services. Prices suddenly rise for some producers but are offset by lower inflation-adjusted incomes that weigh on overall economic growth.

Standard monetary policy theory says if these shocks are expected to raise prices on affected goods as a one-time hit, policymakers should “look through” the shock—in other words, don’t do anything different from what you were planning to do with interest rates before the shock hit.

But that is easier in theory than in practice. Officials could be hard-pressed to declare price increases from tariffs as temporary if they set in motion a reordering of global production processes that takes years to play out.

The upshot is that Fed officials could wait to see economic activity slowing and unemployment rising before they attempt to cushion the hit to demand with lower interest rates.

UBS economists said they think the Fed would cut rates gradually at first because of the risks of higher inflation. But they foresee more Fed rate cuts after unemployment rises and growth weakens, leaving short-term interest rates more than two percentage points lower at the end of next year.

Trump’s Tariffs Aim to Create a New World Economic Order

The announcement Wednesday stunned markets. It could also push countries—including the U.S.—to the brink of recession

https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trumps-tariffs-aim-to-create-a-new-world-economic-order-f48057ae?mod=WSJ_home_mediumtopper_pos_3

By Nick Timiraos

April 3, 2025 5:00 am ET

President Trump announcing new tariffs on Wednesday. Photo: carlos barria/Reuters

The U.S. is moving to blow up the global trading order it built, ushering in an uncertain new era.

President Trump’s highly anticipated announcement Wednesday represents a high-stakes gamble to transform a global economic relationship that Trump for decades has said ripped off the U.S.—even as the American economy had emerged from the pandemic as the envy of its rich-world peers.

The president’s moves raise the specter of a stagflationary shock that increases prices while putting more economies, including the U.S., at risk of recession.

Trump stunned markets by announcing a suite of tariff hikes on major trading partners, including 20% for the European Union and 34% on China. The tax on imported goods, which also includes at least a 10% across-the-board increase on all countries, will raise overall weighted-average tariffs to 23%—the highest in over 100 years—from 10% before the announcement and 2.5% last year, according to JPMorgan Chase.

Economists said Trump’s policy shift, if it isn’t rolled back, could rival President Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to overturn arrangements created by the U.S. and its wartime allies during World War II, when Washington had agreed to exchange dollars for gold at a rate of $35 an ounce.

It would mark “probably the biggest attempt to fundamentally reshape the tax-trade structure in the U.S. since Nixon took us off the gold standard in the early 1970s,” said Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley.

Trump’s Tariffs Were Supposed to Boost the Dollar. Why the Opposite Happened.

Worries that long-term U.S. growth will fade could matter more for the currency than the mechanical impact of tariffs

By Jon Sindreu

Updated April 3, 2025 4:03 am ET

The U.S. dollar whipsawed against major currencies after President Trump unveiled ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs. Photo: jose luis gonzalez/Reuters

While President Trump has always claimed to want a weaker dollar, the consensus among investors was that his policies would strengthen it. Turns out he was right, but perhaps in the worst way.

On Thursday, stocks tumbled in Asia and Europe, following Trump’s unveiling of a raft of punishing “Liberation Day” tariffs. Futures pointed to a negative U.S. market open.

What was more unexpected is that the U.S. dollar tumbled against most major currencies. The WSJ Dollar Index, an indicator based on a basket of currencies, has now lost more than 5% this year and is below where it was on Nov. 5, before its post-election rally.

This is making Wall Street analysts look pretty bad: Most were telling investors, even up to the very moment in which tariffs were announced Wednesday, that protectionist policies would push up the currency. The idea was that fewer purchases of overseas goods would narrow the trade deficit and mechanically reduce U.S. demand for foreign exchange. Also, U.S. growth is outpacing the eurozone’s, which has historically been dollar-positive.

Instead, speculators have swung to betting heavily against the greenback, Commodity Futures Trading Commission derivatives data shows.

The sudden unwind can’t truly be about tariffs increasing the risk of recession. The dollar usually strengthens during busts as well as booms because investors seek refuge in it—creating the famous “dollar smile.”

Why did the market get it wrong? Perhaps the greenback is at such expensive inflation-adjusted levels that it was primed to fall. Or, as some investors argue, U.S. economic aggression against allies is eroding the dollar’s “global reserve” status.

The latter would be a win for the administration. In 2024, Trump’s chief economic adviser, Stephen Miran, stressed the need to tackle the trade deficit by penalizing foreign central banks and treasurers for parking assets in the U.S. This is in line with the view that haven demand overvalues the dollar and places an “exorbitant burden” upon the American economy.

It lacks empirical support, though, since higher official foreign purchases tend to coincide with a weaker dollar. Global dollar reserves have flatlined since 2018 as the dollar rose 16%, per International Monetary Fund figures.

A better answer, which is less flattering for Trump, is that faith in the U.S.’s long-term economic potential is fading.

Currency traders can be short-term chasers of bond-yield differentials. Over five-year periods, however, the difference in return-on-equity between U.S. and European stocks has shown a 70% correlation to dollar-euro moves since 2001.

This suggests a good chunk of dollar strength is due to investments that track relative growth in economic productivity—largely driven by Silicon Valley raking in huge profits and turning the U.S. into a massive exporter of technology goods and, especially, services.

Markets might now be anticipating another structural shift. A rearmament push is fueling hopes of an economic revival in Europe, just as the U.S. growth story becomes tainted by protectionism and Chinese artificial-intelligence challengers.

Of course, China’s rise itself underscores that the textbook case for free trade is flawed, and that the U.S. government should arguably also try to promote key industries. Offshoring to cut costs has often harmed workers, created fragile supply chains and made firms less eager to innovate. Troubled industrial giants such as Intel and Boeing can attest to that.

The problem is that Trump’s tariffs have been sudden and erratic. Wednesday’s list of reciprocal tariffs on each trading partner are a case in point, since they aren’t based on any calculation that makes economic sense. Such policies are probably denting corporate investment rather than inducing companies to relocate production through a targeted and phased-in approach. More than Asia’s development miracles, these policies resemble Latin America’s flawed experiments with “import substitution.”

Yes, there could be benefits to General Motors and Ford reshoring assembly jobs from Mexico. But doing the same with all auto parts—including low-value components such as textiles and wiring harnesses—would just make the U.S. car industry very inefficient. This comes atop likely retaliation by other countries and the 100% tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles inherited from the Biden era.

U.S. carmakers excel in the truck and SUV segments, where American consumers are particularly discerning. But they struggle to produce cars under $25,000, even before tariffs. Tesla, too, is a luxury brand.

If the U.S. market becomes isolated, foreign firms such as Toyota and Hyundai, which dominate budget models, may innovate less in their U.S. plants than abroad.

This is what happened to Brazil and Argentina, because their attempts to build a homegrown auto industry shielded companies from outside competition between the 1950s and 1980s. And it stands in contrast to how Japan, South Korea and China created world-class automakers by combining protectionism with the discipline of foreign markets.

Focusing too much on trade deficits overlooks the fact that the competitiveness and profitability of American tradable products have played a key role in determining the dollar’s value. Right now, they are coming into question.

Write to Jon Sindreu at jon.sindreu@wsj.com

4. How the Company Making Nearly All Its Money From the Government Is Navigating Trump’s Cuts

Excerpts:

For Booz, which makes 98% of its roughly $11 billion in annual revenue from government-related work, the assignment was existential. Rozanski and his team pulled in more than 100 employees to develop a response, which included more than $1 billion in potential cost savings.

Rozanski, 57 years old, is a more than three-decade Booz veteran who has experienced budget showdowns and new administrations before. But the second Trump term is different.

“Slow means never, and fast means now,” Rozanski said. “It’s been a jolt to the system. It’s been a jolt to the industry.”

The jolts are likely to continue. Booz’s stock is down about 35% since the inauguration, and the Trump administration is expected to demand deeper cuts from the firms.

In an interview in the capital this week, Rozanski discussed Booz’s response, whether staff cuts will follow—and why the company is so concentrated in government work. Here are excerpts, condensed and edited:

How the Company Making Nearly All Its Money From the Government Is Navigating Trump’s Cuts

Booz Allen’s CEO discusses the more than $1 billion in savings his firm has offered up and what its business will look like post-DOGE

https://www.wsj.com/business/how-the-company-making-nearly-all-its-money-from-the-government-is-navigating-trumps-cuts-14209b52

By Chip Cutter

April 3, 2025 5:30 am ET

Horacio Rozanski, chief executive officer of Booz Allen Hamilton Photo: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg News

WASHINGTON—When the Trump administration recently ordered big consulting firms to offer price concessions on the billions of dollars in projects they do for the federal government, Booz Allen BAH 5.10%increase; green up pointing triangle Hamilton CEO Horacio Rozanski sprang into action.

For Booz, which makes 98% of its roughly $11 billion in annual revenue from government-related work, the assignment was existential. Rozanski and his team pulled in more than 100 employees to develop a response, which included more than $1 billion in potential cost savings.

Rozanski, 57 years old, is a more than three-decade Booz veteran who has experienced budget showdowns and new administrations before. But the second Trump term is different.

“Slow means never, and fast means now,” Rozanski said. “It’s been a jolt to the system. It’s been a jolt to the industry.”

The jolts are likely to continue. Booz’s stock is down about 35% since the inauguration, and the Trump administration is expected to demand deeper cuts from the firms.

In an interview in the capital this week, Rozanski discussed Booz’s response, whether staff cuts will follow—and why the company is so concentrated in government work. Here are excerpts, condensed and edited:

The Wall Street Journal: The General Services Administration asked companies to explain their work in a way a 15-year-old could understand. What’s your answer?

Rozanski: We’re an advanced technology company. Our work in the federal government spans some of the most critical missions. We’re talking about space, the intelligence community and some of the health agencies like the Veterans Affairs administration. Our work, for the most part, is about bringing technology into those missions to make them faster, better and more efficient.

WSJ: The GSA asked firms like yours to say which projects could potentially be canceled. What did you propose?

Rozanski: There is some work that, in the spirit of efficiency, the government could choose to in-source or maybe not do because it’s not a priority. And we identified contracts where, because we’ve become more efficient, the same work could be done at a lower cost.

WSJ: Does that mean Booz Allen could lose more than $1 billion in revenue?

Rozanski: GSA would need to talk to the partner agencies that actually own the work. But, presumably, an outcome would be that a lot of these dollars don’t come to Booz Allen.

WSJ: What are examples of contracts you feel are no longer needed or the government could do itself?

Rozanski: We don’t have a lot of work that is studies and things like that, but there is some.

There’s work where we’re supporting, say, a research effort the government may not need us to do, or may not want to continue. There’s work that maybe was commissioned three or four years ago that no longer makes sense.

WSJ: Will the price concessions mean layoffs?

Rozanski: Time will tell. A lot of technology companies need us and want us to help them scale. So we may have the ability to repurpose and reallocate some of our workforce. Over 70% of our workforce is technologists.

WSJ: Have you met with Elon Musk or President Trump as part of your conversations with the administration?

Rozanski: I should not talk about who I have and have not met with, but we’re engaging. I will talk to anybody who will talk to me. There’s a natural skepticism about this industry: Is it on the side of change, or is it going to resist change? A lot of my argument is Booz Allen is on the side of change.

WSJ: Is Booz too concentrated in government work?

Rozanski: About three-quarters of the work we do is national security-oriented. The consequence is that it limits some other things we would want to do, or we could do, serving governments around the world and even serving commercial clients.

WSJ: Are there conversations at the board level to broaden your work?

Rozanski: At any time, all options are on the table. We need to find better ways to offer that to a broader set of customers in a way that does not limit our ability to serve the U.S. government the way the government needs to be served.

WSJ: What’s the toughest request the administration has made of you so far?

Rozanski: The self-examination. It’s not easy to take a look at every contract and say: Could this be done by someone else? Could this be done by the government? That’s been a challenging, but very valid, request.

WSJ: A year from now—after this cost review—how different will Booz Allen look?

Rozanski: I really, sincerely hope DOGE is successful, not just in identifying the inefficiencies, but also in removing barriers to competition and burdens that add unnecessary cost. We really are fast becoming the company that brings dual-use technology to the government. I do believe that there’s a path for us to increase the size of the portfolio outside of direct federal government work.

WSJ: One argument is that cuts to the federal workforce will ultimately benefit contractors like Booz Allen. Do you agree?

Rozanski: If we’re replacing one person for one person, that is not to the benefit of the government. If we are actually bringing technology in to make people more effective and more efficient, to make things happen faster, to deliver better national security, that is the answer. And in that, Booz Allen has a lot of opportunity.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

How should companies like Booz Allen navigate the age of DOGE? Join the conversation below.

5. AppLovin and Amazon Emerge as TikTok Bidders Ahead of Trump’s Deadline

Who will get TikTok and will they get the algorithm? And will TikTok continue without interruption?

This is a national security issue for two reasons: First is China's control of so much data collected from Americans. Second, this is a powerful influence tool that can be employed to influence behavior in everything from buying consumer goods to voting in elections. And it calms the masses as they can get an immediate fix for the dopamine needs.

AppLovin and Amazon Emerge as TikTok Bidders Ahead of Trump’s Deadline

Trump was briefed Wednesday on a framework to keep the video-sharing app operational

https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-ban-bids-amazon-applovin-62a1d573?mod=hp_lead_pos3

By Dana Mattioli

Follow, Jessica Toonkel

Follow and Alex Leary

Updated April 2, 2025 9:54 pm ET

A TikTok advertisement in Washington. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News

Mobile technology company AppLovin APP 2.72%increase; green up pointing triangle has made a bid for TikTok and talked to casino magnate Steve Wynn about backing it, according to people familiar with the matter, joining a flurry of suitors for the video-sharing app.

The Trump administration’s April 5 deadline to sell or shut down TikTok is fast-approaching, and the president was briefed Wednesday on a framework that would keep it operational.

The president reviewed a plan in which cloud computing company Oracle ORCL 2.76%increase; green up pointing triangle, along with about a dozen others, would make an offer to TikTok-owner ByteDance, according to people familiar with the matter. Private-equity firms Silver Lake and Blackstone are among the investors in talks to potentially participate in a deal, the people said. Trump had not yet publicly said whether he endorses the concept.

The administration has talked to a coterie of U.S. investors including asset manager BlackRock BLK 1.88%increase; green up pointing triangle and venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, the people said. The administration is working to preserve a popular app that helped Trump get elected, but has raised national security concerns.

Trump’s Wednesday meeting played out just before he launched new global tariffs, including a new 34% additional hike on China, ratcheting up the tension with Beijing just as he will need the country to approve any TikTok deal. Trump has said publicly he is willing to negotiate tariffs with countries and mentioned that he would consider linking China’s tariffs to a better deal for TikTok.

AppLovin, which some analysts have said could be the next TikTok because of its powerful artificial intelligence that can collect data on app users and use it to tailor ads, has a market cap of $100 billion. AppLovin’s pitch to the Trump administration, which would be funded by Wynn, was that it could solve national security concerns and unleash economic growth as a job creator, according to a person familiar with the matter. Wynn couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Earthquake and Disaster Relief

Thank you, everyone, for praying for the people affected by the earthquake in Burma. Please pray for the ability to help people hurt and devastated by this earthquake. We do not know how many have been killed, as most of the areas affected are in government controlled areas.

We’re in Burma right now and felt the earthquake in southern Shan State. We were in the jungle, where almost all the IDPs are hiding and so even though the ground shook and the trees swayed, no one was injured here. In spite of this disaster, the Burma military keeps attacking on the ground and in the air using air strikes against people in Karenni and Shan states and other areas.

At the same time, we do have partners that can reach the earthquake victims on the ground. Donations can be sent to us at FBR, and we can send them on. To designate your donation to earthquake relief, select “other designation” and write “earthquake and disaster relief” in the other designation box.

May God bless you,

Dave, family and FBR.

https://www.freeburmarangers.org/donations2/

The Brutal War Complicating Myanmar’s Quake Response

Earthquakes struck in an area where rebel fighters had pushed close to the stronghold of the military junta

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/the-brutal-war-complicating-myanmars-quake-response-bc810459?mod=hp_lead_pos10

Images of Myanmar military junta chief Gen. Min Aung Hlaing seen on the street during an anticoup demonstration in 2021. Photo: lynn bo bo/Shutterstock

By Feliz Solomon

Updated April 2, 2025 11:02 pm ET

Last week’s violent earthquakes tore through a part of Myanmar that had already borne the brunt of a brutal campaign by the country’s military junta to root out resistance.

That double hit is now complicating relief efforts and could potentially shift the course of one of the world’s most virulent but often forgotten conflicts.

Myanmar’s current war kicked off in 2021 after the military ousted the country’s elected government in a coup. Young and mostly urban pro-democracy activists then allied with ethnic militias that have been battling government forces for decades and launched an insurgency against the ruling generals.

Over the past year, this collection of fighters has pushed closer into the junta’s stronghold in Myanmar’s central heartlands. The region has been devastated by Friday’s tremors, which have killed more than 3,000 people nationwide. Rebel fighters, using guerrilla tactics and often poorly armed, have asserted control over entire villages. The military responded with airstrikes and targeted attacks, burning down houses and terrorizing local populations.

By some measures, the province of Sagaing—the epicenter of the initial, 7.7 magnitude quake—has been hit harder by the war than any other region in Myanmar.

Bhutan

India

China

Bangladesh

Epicenter

Mandalay

Vietnam

Sagaing

Laos

Naypyitaw

Myanmar

(BURMA)

Political violence in Myanmar,

March 28, 2024 - March 28, 2025

Yangon

Thailand

Battles

Explosions, remote violence

Violence against civilians

Events

500

200

Earthquake intensity

100 miles

Less

100 km

Source: Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (Acled); USGS (earthquake intensity)

Emma Brown and Daniel Kiss/WSJ

Nearly a third of the 3.5 million people that had been displaced by the fighting were in Sagaing, an agricultural region known for growing rice, pulses and watermelon. Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, or Acled, a U.S.-based nonprofit that collects conflict data, has counted more than 9,300 violent incidents in Sagaing since the start of the war. Those include battles and remote explosions such as airstrikes, drone attacks and violence against civilians.

In October, regime soldiers killed six civilians in a village called Sipa, according to Fortify Rights, an advocacy group that collected accounts of the attack. The soldiers then decapitated three of the men and mounted their heads on a bamboo fence as a warning, Fortify Rights wrote in a February report. The junta, which has previously denied some other alleged attacks against civilians, didn’t respond to a request for comment on the report.

Little is known about the damage the earthquakes have added to the previous devastation. The junta has long restricted telecommunications in areas of high rebel activity. Now, crumpled roads and collapsed bridges have made it even harder to get information.

Most of the earthquake deaths confirmed by the junta come from the hard-hit city of Mandalay, with a population of 1.2 million people, and the capital, Naypyitaw.

“These communities are already on the edge,” said Morgan Michaels, a conflict analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a security-focused think tank. “Any disruption on top of that is a matter of survival.”

Buddhist monks clearing rubble at a monastery in Mandalay. Photo: sai aung main/AFP/Getty Images

A woman was rescued from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building in Mandalay. Photo: sai aung main/AFP/Getty Images

Several aid groups have reported heavy destruction in Sagaing’s eponymous main city, which is home to some 300,000 people. Two bridges that connect Sagaing to Mandalay were badly damaged, according to satellite images and photographs.

What is clear is that the conflict is making it harder to reach populations in desperate need of help.

On Tuesday, an aid convoy from the Red Cross Society of China came under fire from junta forces, according to the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, one of the armed groups fighting the junta. The group said the convoy was on its way to Mandalay from eastern Myanmar, through an area that had recently been targeted by junta airstrikes.

A spokesman for the junta said the military fired three warning shots when the convoy didn’t follow instructions to stop when driving through a conflict zone. A spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry said the rescue team and supplies in Myanmar were safe.

Pro-democracy activists have allied with ethnic militias fighting government forces. Photo: AFP/Getty Image

Recruits belonging to one of Myanmar’s ethnic armed groups take part in a training session. Photo: Reuters

Those disruptions add to the junta’s previous record of blocking aid to rebel-held areas—and raise concern about how earthquake relief will be distributed.

“If aid goes through the junta, we know it will never reach the people in dire need,” said Yanghee Lee, co-founder of the Special Advisory Council for Myanmar, an advocacy group, and former U.N. rights envoy to the country.

Harder to predict is the impact the disaster could have on the war itself. The National Unity Government, a shadow administration made up of politicians ousted in the coup, announced a two-week pause in fighting shortly after the earthquakes struck, saying its forces would only act in self-defense. A powerful group of rebel armies known as the Three Brotherhood Alliance also declared a month-long unilateral cease-fire.

The junta followed suit Wednesday evening, saying its forces would cease fighting until April 22. In the days after the quakes, the junta had continued to strike opposition targets from the air.

Security analysts said the disaster isn’t likely to change the dynamics of the war fundamentally. The quakes struck during a relative impasse in the fighting, which gave the junta some time to recoup after a rash of surprising, but not crippling, setbacks.

The Myanmar military’s biggest problems, according to Michaels, the IISS analyst, are a shortage of manpower and what he called the “catastrophic leadership” of junta chief Min Aung Hlaing.

A controversial conscription effort launched last year has begun to replenish its ranks. But the quakes could also stymie junta plans to stage a rebound because they damaged important state infrastructure, according to Min Zaw Oo, executive director of the Myanmar Institute for Peace and Security, a policy think tank.

Richard Horsey, senior Myanmar adviser for the International Crisis Group, said the disaster might weaken the regime, but there is still no clear path to peace. The earthquakes have “struck at its core centers of control, and a chaotic response to a crisis that affects its own inner circle will be impossible to hide,” he said.

The earthquake’s impact on Myanmar’s war is hard to predict. Photo: athit perawongmetha/Reuters

Write to Feliz Solomon at feliz.solomon@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

A map of political violence in Myanmar in an earlier version of this article incorrectly sized the circles representing violent events. The map has been corrected. (Corrected on April 2)

7. The Price of Security: U.S. Strategy, European Dependency, and the Future of NATO

Excerpts:

Some policymakers have sought to infuse NATO with broader ideological commitments, such as promoting democracy and human rights. However, NATO’s strength has traditionally been its pragmatism. During the Cold War, it accommodated authoritarian members like Portugal and Greece. Today, semi-authoritarian states like Hungary and Turkey play key roles. Overly ideological demands risk making NATO less flexible and more exclusionary, potentially weakening its cohesion.

Ultimately, NATO will persist because its members need it. However, its future role and structure remain uncertain. The U.S. faces growing pressure to prioritize Asia, regardless of who occupies the White House. While President Trump’s rhetoric may accelerate this shift, the underlying trend is structural and independent of any single administration. In response, European nations must recognize that the US will not always be able or willing to serve as the ultimate guarantor of their security. They will need to collectively rethink their security arrangements—whether within NATO or through alternative coalitions.

Looking ahead, NATO must evolve. Its survival in some form is really not in question, but its effectiveness depends on adapting to geopolitical realities rather than clinging to outdated assumptions. The alliance has served a vital purpose, but nothing in geopolitics is eternal. The challenge now is ensuring that NATO remains an instrument of strategic necessity rather than an unquestioned article of faith. The coming years will test the alliance’s ability to navigate an increasingly multipolar world, where the balance of power is shifting, and old security assumptions no longer hold.

The Price of Security: U.S. Strategy, European Dependency, and the Future of NATO

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/04/03/the-price-of-security/

by Siamak Naficy

04.03.2025 at 06:00am

Ever since the 1940s, the United States has served as the guarantor of Western European security through NATO. After the Cold War, debates arose about NATO’s continued relevance, and the alliance struggled to redefine its mission. However, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 reinvigorated NATO’s original purpose—protecting Europe and American interests against Russian aggression.

Additionally, Russia’s invasion is a stark reminder that large-scale war remains a reality. For years, there was a belief that conflicts were becoming more covert, sub-threshold, and irregular. The fact that NATO has united to support Ukraine has also led to increased interest in membership, reinforcing its core function of defense and security. With Sweden and Finland having joined, the alliance has once again expanded in direct response to Moscow’s actions, highlighting the continued relevance of collective security.

But NATO’s role has never been solely about deterring Russia. As an anthropologist, I am interested in what is particular and local but also in what is true across time and space. America’s alliances worldwide—supported by military bases and shared resources—augment its hard power and reach. To put it bluntly, however, the US’s alliances also serve to contain its adversaries and control regions. NATO, then, exists not solely as a collective defense security framework to stabilize a war-torn region, or merely as a military alliance to counter Russia (or formerly, the Soviet Union), but also as a system to ensure stabilization in ways that favor the United States.

During periods of NATO expansion after the Cold War, Russia was often an afterthought. Instead, enlargement was driven by the desire to integrate countries into a new geopolitical framework—both at their request and due to a general lack of opposition from the West. Now, however, NATO has returned to its foundational purpose: collective defense. The former Biden administration’s response to the Ukraine war has received mixed reviews. Some commend it for committing significant resources to Ukraine’s self-defense, while others argue the U.S. acted either too cautiously or too aggressively. The Biden administration’s approach—supporting Ukraine without direct military intervention—reflects an understanding that the US then, as today, has a genuine but limited interest in Ukraine’s fate.

Striking the right balance has been difficult. The US helped Ukraine resist Russian aggression but avoided escalation into a direct conflict. Biden, for all his political idiosyncrasies, seems to have understood the dangers of major war. While many compare the situation to Munich in 1938, the more relevant historical lesson is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962—a stark reminder that nuclear war remains a possibility.

One missed opportunity was pressuring Europe to take on a greater share of the burden. While European nations have increased their efforts, the imbalance remains stark. The US stepped in as the primary force supporting Ukraine almost by default. A more strategic approach might have been to condition US support on Europe assuming more responsibility. Instead, America’s extensive involvement has reinforced Europe’s dependence on US leadership. The long-term consequence of this could be detrimental if the U.S. begins prioritizing Asia over European security concerns.

China’s exponential growth follows a hard arithmetic, ensuring that regardless of its future trajectory, in terms of scale, it will not revert to a time before the 1980s. The nation is actively pursuing hegemony (or as you prefer—primacy or “leadership”) in Asia, presenting significant implications for the United States and its global footprint. With its status as the largest near-peer rival and the richest challenger the U.S. has ever faced, China’s growth demands a concentrated effort due to the scarcity of both resources and time. Considering the implications of changing power dynamics, it is essential to balance power with goals and assess whether commitments ultimately benefit or hinder the United States.

Whether Europe is becoming post-American or merely less American, its defense strategy must account for the growing uncertainty of US commitments. As Blagden and Porter argue, NATO Europe faces a dangerous gap in its strategic posture due to its lack of tactical nuclear weapons—an asymmetry that Russia could exploit through nuclear coercion. The war in Ukraine has reinforced the necessity of deterrence, but without lower-yield nuclear capabilities, European allies may find themselves unable to counter Moscow’s calculated brinkmanship. A European coalition that relies solely on conventional forces and high-yield strategic weapons risks being paralyzed by the threat of limited nuclear use. Addressing this imbalance requires Britain to reconsider its nuclear posture, potentially following France’s model of maintaining air-launched, pre-strategic weapons. While costly, such an investment is a small price to pay for ensuring that NATO can deny Russia an advantage at every rung of the escalation ladder. If the alliance is to remain a credible deterrent, it must close this gap before a crisis forces the issue.

Some critics argue that the US has overcommitted, suggesting that allowing Ukraine to fall quickly could have minimized bloodshed. However, this perspective ignores the broader strategic consequences. A swift Russian victory would have emboldened Moscow, potentially leading to further aggression in the Baltics or elsewhere. History shows that regimes that achieve easy victories often become overconfident, leading to reckless expansionism. Ensuring that Russia pays a steep price for its invasion serves both a moral and strategic purpose—it signals that future territorial aggression will come at an unbearable cost.

Prior to the invasion, there was widespread belief that Russia had significantly modernized its military. Many expected Ukraine to collapse quickly, particularly given Russian infiltration efforts. However, these expectations were proven wrong. If Russia ultimately prevails, it will do so through sheer attrition, relying on its ability to absorb and inflict massive losses rather than demonstrating the kind of operational brilliance that defines historically great military campaigns. While Russia’s invasion force was arguably not designed to occupy all of Ukraine, early offensives—such as the push toward Kyiv and airborne operations near Hostomel—suggested ambitions beyond the east. Whether this was an attempt at full occupation or a rapid decapitation strike to install a favorable government remains debated. Ultimately, Russia’s war effort has concentrated on securing the eastern and southern regions, where its strategic interests have historically been strongest. The war has demonstrated that while Russia remains a nuclear threat, its conventional forces are far less formidable than previously feared.

The former Biden administration, in attempting to strengthen transatlantic ties, may have miscalculated the extent to which the US should bear responsibility for European security. There has been a tendency to treat NATO as an intrinsic good rather than a strategic tool. The administration’s response to then President Trump’s 2016-2020-era skepticism about NATO was to double down on its commitment, rather than using leverage to extract greater European contributions. Historically, effective alliance management has involved hard-nosed power politics, not just symbolic unity. Leaders from Kennedy to Reagan understood that alliances must justify themselves through strategic benefits, not mere sentimentality.

Some policymakers have sought to infuse NATO with broader ideological commitments, such as promoting democracy and human rights. However, NATO’s strength has traditionally been its pragmatism. During the Cold War, it accommodated authoritarian members like Portugal and Greece. Today, semi-authoritarian states like Hungary and Turkey play key roles. Overly ideological demands risk making NATO less flexible and more exclusionary, potentially weakening its cohesion.

Ultimately, NATO will persist because its members need it. However, its future role and structure remain uncertain. The U.S. faces growing pressure to prioritize Asia, regardless of who occupies the White House. While President Trump’s rhetoric may accelerate this shift, the underlying trend is structural and independent of any single administration. In response, European nations must recognize that the US will not always be able or willing to serve as the ultimate guarantor of their security. They will need to collectively rethink their security arrangements—whether within NATO or through alternative coalitions.

Looking ahead, NATO must evolve. Its survival in some form is really not in question, but its effectiveness depends on adapting to geopolitical realities rather than clinging to outdated assumptions. The alliance has served a vital purpose, but nothing in geopolitics is eternal. The challenge now is ensuring that NATO remains an instrument of strategic necessity rather than an unquestioned article of faith. The coming years will test the alliance’s ability to navigate an increasingly multipolar world, where the balance of power is shifting, and old security assumptions no longer hold.

Tags: American Grand Strategy, National Defense Strategy, NATO, strategy, US Grand Strategy, US National Security

About The Author

Siamak Naficy
Siamak Tundra Naficy is a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Department of Defense Analysis. An anthropologist with an interdisciplinary approach to social, biological, psychological, and cultural issues, his interests range from the anthropological approach to conflict theory to wicked problems, sacred values, cognitive science, and animal behavior. The views expressed are the author’s and do not reflect those of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army, or the Naval Postgraduate School.

8. Douglas Murray: If War Came, Would You Fight?

I hope everyone can give the correct answer.

A powerful read.

Excerpts:

I sometimes asked these people how they cope with their job. And the answer, of course, is that they are used to it. But one of them confided that there was something he was finding especially hard in the wake of the 7th: Many of the bodies, particularly the burned bodies of family members, had been tied together. These people must have known what was coming. “The knowledge that you are going to die,” one pathologist said to me, shaking his head, “that is very difficult.”

What can Western liberal societies do in the face of such an atrocity? What can people who value life do in the face of those who worship Death?

In the year that followed, as I reported on the war, two lines kept going through my head. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given I was in the Holy Land, they were both lines from Scripture.

First was from Deuteronomy, where God says: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that thou and thy seed may live.”

The second was from the Book of Psalms, and it is this: “I shall not die, but live.”

Douglas Murray: If War Came, Would You Fight?

In the first year of Israel’s battle against a death cult, I traveled the country—and saw what it means to choose life.

By Douglas Murray

04.02.25 — Israel and Antisemitism

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-book-israel-war-gaza

0:00

-18:34

(@douglaskmurray via Instagram

“What can people who value life do in the face of those who worship Death?” This is the urgent question at the heart of a vital new book, On Democracies and Death Cults, by a dear friend of The Free Press: Douglas Murray.

If you’re reading this, you probably care about freedom. The freedom to speak your mind. To vote in elections. To host dinner parties and argue about politics and perhaps even fall in love. But are you willing to defend your right to do these things? What would you be willing to sacrifice for those freedoms?

Another way of asking that question is: If war came, would the West defend itself?

Douglas used to be pessimistic about this question. Then came October 7, 2023. He was at home in New York when he heard the news that Israel—a country he had visited many times, and where he had many beloved friends—had been invaded by terrorists. The next day, in Times Square, Americans gathered to protest not the terrorists but the democracy under attack. Douglas decided he needed to fly, as soon as possible, to Tel Aviv—a place where moral clarity still seemed to exist. And in the months that followed, as the war ground on, he returned to Israel many times to cover the conflict. He met the young soldiers defending the nation from Hamas and Hezbollah. He spent time with the pathologists identifying the bodies of the Israelis murdered on October 7, and he came face-to-face with those who survived—as well as with some of the terrorists, now prisoners, who committed the atrocities.

On Democracies and Death Cults, which is out April 8, is an account of Douglas’s time in Israel during the first year of the war, and we’re so honored to publish an excerpt today. In the following piece, Douglas reflects on witnessing both the very best and very worst of humanity.

In his book’s epigraph, Douglas quotes the Soviet dissident Vasily Grossman, who recorded atrocities in the USSR that the authorities would have preferred to cover up: “Someone might ask: ‘Why write about this, why remember all that?’ It is the writer’s duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it.” As readers ourselves, we take that duty seriously. —The Editors

War heightens every human emotion. It is easier to hate in wartime, obviously. But it is also easier to love. The usual expectation that we will die in our eighth or ninth decade, quietly in our beds, is stripped away—and when you are forced to wonder whether you will live to see tomorrow, everything today is different.

This is one of the things that makes war so fascinating: It reveals the meaning of things.

In the days after the war began, I joined the Israeli pathologists who were working on identifying the bodies in the morgues. Bags were still being brought in, but with less and less in them: Many victims were being identified by bits of the mobile phones or other things on their bodies that had not burned fully. One of the skulls that had been put back together was small. Surely this was a child’s skull, I said. Possibly, replied the expert, but it could also be the head of a young adult that had simply contracted in the fire.

These pathologists went about their task with unbelievable care, but I couldn’t describe the sadness in their eyes. Nor the smell everywhere. If the thing you cannot describe about a war zone is the noise, what cannot be communicated about the aftermath of a massacre is the smell.

I sometimes asked these people how they cope with their job. And the answer, of course, is that they are used to it. But one of them confided that there was something he was finding especially hard in the wake of the 7th: Many of the bodies, particularly the burned bodies of family members, had been tied together. These people must have known what was coming. “The knowledge that you are going to die,” one pathologist said to me, shaking his head, “that is very difficult.”

What can Western liberal societies do in the face of such an atrocity? What can people who value life do in the face of those who worship Death?

In the year that followed, as I reported on the war, two lines kept going through my head. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given I was in the Holy Land, they were both lines from Scripture.

First was from Deuteronomy, where God says: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that thou and thy seed may live.”

The second was from the Book of Psalms, and it is this: “I shall not die, but live.”

One evening, late into the night, I went to see a family who lives in the town of Barkan, in Samaria. The father was a local official, and he, his wife, and his teenage son were all still up as though night and day no longer mattered. The house was filled with photos of his beautiful daughter.

Twenty-three-year-old Adi Baruch was an aspiring photographer. She especially liked to photograph sunflowers, because she appreciated how, whatever the time of day, they turn their faces toward the sun. She was a reservist on October 7 and didn’t need to go back into the army—in fact, her parents pleaded with her not to. But she knew she had a job to do.

On her first day back in uniform, October 12, she was in Sderot, close to Gaza. Hamas was still firing rockets. When the sirens went off, she got out of her car and lay on the ground beside it, but one of the rockets landed right alongside her, killing her instantly. Her mother described it all in terrible detail, but one thing comforted her, she said: The blast that killed Adi had also left her untouched. “She looked like she was just sleeping. Like an angel,” her mother told me.

They buried Adi three days later, and after the ceremony, her fiancé approached the coffin alone and left on top of it a small, white box. Inside was the engagement ring he had bought for her.

Before going back into the army, Adi had written her parents a letter. It was to be read in the eventuality of her death. Her mother read it to me now. Among much else, Adi had written to her parents to tell them how sorry she was, but toward the end she told them: “I wanted to live life, and now I want you to live it for me.”

I thought of all the other people who wanted to live. Of Ben Shimoni, who was at the Nova party. His girlfriend, Jessica Miranda Elter, had called him that morning begging him to come home. “Something is happening, come back.”

“Yes, yes,” he had tried to reassure her. “I’ll come back, don’t worry.”

Ben managed to escape the party, taking four other terrified partygoers with him in his car. He drove them to safety in Beersheba, about 30 minutes away. Then, he headed back to the site of the party. He managed to drive another group of five young people to safety. His passengers begged him not to go back into the firefight. But he had a mission. On the third trip, as Ben carried three more survivors in his car, the terrorists caught up. They riddled the car with bullets until it crashed into another car, killing everyone.

I think also of Omer Ohana and Sagi Golan. When they woke up on the morning of the 7th, just two weeks before they were due to marry, both men were ready to serve. Omer was sent to the north and Sagi to the south. They agreed that they would send each other a heart on WhatsApp every hour to let the other know they were okay. Thirty-year-old Sagi fought with his anti-terrorism unit in Kibbutz Be’eri, among other sites, and saved many lives that day. “On midnight, I got the last heart from Sagi,” said Omer. His fiancé was killed shortly afterward in the ongoing battle in Be’eri.

The Israeli singer Ivri Lider, whose music Omer and Sagi planned to dance to at their wedding, instead performed the song they had chosen at Sagi’s funeral.

From the moment the massacre began, I decided that I wanted to see some of the terrorists face-to-face: to look into the eyes of the people who had been so high on the thrill of death, as they brought it on men, women, and children that morning.

Eventually, in April 2024, I got permission to visit one of the world’s most secure prisons. The facility, at an undisclosed location, held some of the most dedicated and murderous people who had broken into Israel the day of the massacre and been caught alive. It was made clear to me that, however defeated they looked now, these were people who had done the most unimaginable things when they were in a position of power just a few months before.

The director of the prison showed me a video on his phone. I had already seen the footage from Netiv HaAsara, where the Taasa family lived. I saw it shortly after the 7th. It was even harder to watch and hear the second time around.

(via HarperCollins)

The Taasa family’s eldest son, who was 17, was on the beach when the terrorists came. He was shot dead. Shortly afterward, Hamas found their way to the Taasa family’s home. Hearing them coming, the father, Gil, ran into a bomb shelter with his two young sons. Security cameras captured the moment when one of the terrorists threw a grenade into the bomb shelter. Gil threw himself on the grenade to save his young sons. Still, the youngest, who was 8, had an eye blown out of its socket by the blast. The elder, who was 12, seemed to lose his hearing. Footage from inside the family house shows the boys clambering out of the shelter and staggering around the living room in their underwear.

Then one of the terrorists—who had just killed their father—calmly walks into the room with an AK-47 around his shoulders. He takes away the older boy’s phone and insists he speak to him in Arabic. (“What? I don’t know,” the boy replies. “Please, please, let me go home. Call mama, my mum. Please. Where’s my dad, my dad?”) Eventually, another terrorist comes into the room, opens the family’s fridge in front of the boys, removes a bottle of the family’s Coca-Cola, and calmly walks away, drinking it.

Now, one of the terrorists who committed this atrocity was only a few feet away from me in the prison.

I suppose that you look at people like this in the hope that you might see something in them. Remorse? Evil? I spent hours in the prison that day, and although I saw people I recognized from videos of the atrocities that took place on October 7, there was nothing to learn from them.

In one of the cells, I recognized someone who had become notorious in Israel since the 7th: a young Hamas terrorist with distinctive, bright ginger hair. Footage shows him entering the Nova party with guns and grenades; evidence suggests he killed as many as 30 or 40 young people at the party that morning. And here he was in front of me, looking no different from any other person of his age. He didn’t look evil—only pathetic.

The men I saw that day had decided to live their lives with one ambition—to take away life.

A few months later, I got a more intimate view of terror.

In October 2024, I was with my cameraman Moshe, on our way north to the Lebanon border, when he got an alert on his Hatzalah device. Something was happening in the city of Hadera. We happened to be exactly at the interchange and we drove right into the situation.

It seemed that a terrorist had gone on a stabbing spree in the city. We arrived in time to find one of the first victims bleeding out in the doorway of his house. He had several knife wounds to his rib cage and was rolling on the floor. Moshe and another first responder tried to apply pressure to the wounds and stem the bleeding. We didn’t know where the attacker was, but there was blood all over the street and floor around us. Occasionally, people peered out from their front doors and then locked them shut again fast. Everyone knew that the terrorists were hiding somewhere around us—but where?

There was word that two of them had driven off on a scooter. Locals shouted that the attacker or attackers were heading to the local school. By now the police were on the scene, along with an ambulance. The man we had tended to was wheeled away, a look of extreme pain, as well as amazement, on his face. He died shortly afterward. It turned out that he was a 35-year-old rabbi, and the father of six children.

Meanwhile, the police managed to handcuff someone they thought was an accomplice of the terrorist. The young Arab man was arrested a few feet away from me, and for a moment we looked directly at each other. There was an expression of complete resignation on his face, as though all this was exactly as he expected.

For my own part, I was overcome with a single feeling: What a stupid, stupid thing to do with your life. Of all the things you could have done on this earth, why do this? Don’t you know what a waste you have just made of your life?

By this point, there were alerts going off everywhere. We got to an intersection just after another victim had been attacked. Blood covered the middle of the road, and as panicked locals drove their cars to get away, first aid bandages were ground into the tarmac. Eventually the police found the terrorist, standing at the end of an alley. He refused to take off his visor mask or his padded jacket, and in a moment, when it looked like he was about to reach for a weapon, he was shot and fell to the floor. It was a situation both surreal and ordinary, the sort of thing that happens in a country at war.

Throughout this year of war, friends and family occasionally remarked that I had changed. Readers sometimes noticed it too, observing that I seemed to have lost some of my usual pessimism. I noticed it myself, and there was a reason for it. I was getting an answer to a question that had always troubled me.

Like most people of my background, I grew up with family stories of those who went away to war in 1914, and those who went to war again in 1939. On my father’s side alone, my grandmother lost her father at sea in World War I and her brother, also in the navy, in the 1940s. The fight against tyranny had been real. And all the generations who have come after have asked themselves: What would we do if our time came?

At one point in the early months of the conflict, I was in a street in Tel Aviv and a taxi driver recognized me. We started talking, and I learned that he was a veteran of the wars of 1967 and 1973. Then he said something that made my eyes prick: “I owe the younger generation an apology.” I was startled, but he continued. “I thought they had become weak,” he said. “I thought they just wanted to party in Tel Aviv or be on TikTok or Instagram. But I was wrong. They have stepped up. They are magnificent.”

Everything I saw in the wars around us confirmed this. I thought of all the heroes—all the young men and women who were just like the people I knew outside of Israel, but who were having to do things these people couldn’t imagine. Other young people, at institutions across the West, were judging the actions of their contemporaries in Israel. They were throwing slur after slur at them and reigniting every blood libel of the past in a modern guise. They should have looked at their contemporaries in Israel not as scapegoats but as an example. Whatever the years ahead hold for the West, I know that Canada, Britain, Europe, Australia, and America should be so lucky as to produce a generation of young people like the one Israel has.

During that year of war, I also realized that I had found the answer to a question I had mulled over for almost a quarter of a century. All my adult life I had heard the taunt of the jihadists: “We love death more than you love life.” I had heard it from al-Qaeda, from Hamas, from ISIS. From Europe to Afghanistan, several of my friends and colleagues had heard such war cries in their last moments. And it had always seemed to me almost impossible to counter. How could anyone overcome a movement—a people—who welcomed death, who gloried in death, who worshiped death? Was it not inevitable that against such a force, a feeble and sybaritic West could not possibly win?

That is what I feared for many years. Yet in the year after the October 7 attacks, what I saw was hope. Of all the Israeli soldiers I met, none took delight in their task. They could feel victorious on occasion, proud to have completed a mission and gotten their unit out alive. But from the south of Gaza to the south of Lebanon and the West Bank, none took pleasure in the task they had to do. They did it not because they loved death but exactly because they love life. They fought for life. For the survival of their families, their nation, and their people. Even the most secular of them knew that the lifestyle most of us take for granted must be protected. They know that you won’t have the ability to party, fall in love, grow a family, or live a meaningful life unless they are willing to fight for it.

In the year after the October 7 attacks I went to weddings and bar mitzvahs and funerals in Israel. Sometimes on the same day. I heard tales of unbelievable suffering, but I also saw people grab for the light in the darkness. “Choose life” is one of the most important commandments of the Jewish people. It is also one of the fundamental values of the West. Israelis, and all of us, can win, in spite of the enemy loving death—and that is because they love life so much.

A final word, from a 50-year-old man named Avida Bachar, whom I met at one of the recovery units in Ramat Gan. He told me about watching his wife and son die in front of him in their safe room, in Be’eri, on October 7. But even through his tears, he still wanted to draw some light from it. He had had 32 years with his wife, he said, and he had had the good fortune to have 15 years with his son. And this was what mattered.

“All of us,” he said. “All of us, we think that the time is going on until the end. But the time, it’s really short. And I told my friends at work, there’s no meeting after four o’clock in the afternoon. We’re not going to stay at work. We go home to our friends and family to make a good time, and good memories. What we have, it’s only people.”

He promised me he would be okay.

This piece was excerpted from the forthcoming On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization by Douglas Murray, on sale April 8. Copyright 2025 by Douglas Murray. Published with permission from Broadside Books and HarperCollins Publishers.

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

9. In first, Hegseth to skip multinational meeting on Ukraine support

In first, Hegseth to skip multinational meeting on Ukraine support

militarytimes.com · by Noah Robertson · April 2, 2025

Pete Hegseth will not attend a gathering of 50 countries to coordinate military support for Ukraine, multiple European officials and a U.S. official said — the first time the coalition will gather without America’s secretary of defense participating.

The group will meet April 11 in Brussels and will be chaired by Germany and Britain. Hegseth attended the last meeting in February, though he became the first U.S. defense secretary in the coalition’s 26 meetings not to lead it.

Hegseth won’t join in person and isn’t expected to join virtually either, according to a U.S. official, who like others was granted anonymity to discuss the planning. In fact, the Pentagon is unlikely to send any senior representatives, which typically join the secretary on such trips.

The United States is still assessing how its officials will participate in the various forums that support Ukraine, including those that help manage security assistance and training, the U.S. official said.

For Europeans, the secretary’s absence is the latest sign of the Trump administration’s lower-priority approach to arming Ukraine — a point Hegseth made clear at the last meeting in February.

In a speech from Brussels, Hegseth scolded European officials, urging them to take more control of their own defense rather than relying on America’s 75-year role helping defend the continent. He also ruled out the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine before the administration had itself made a decision on the topic — something the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Roger Wicker, R-Miss., called a “rookie mistake.”

“President [Donald] Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker,” Hegseth said, referring to a quote from former president Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Hegseth’s predecessor, Lloyd Austin, founded the Ukraine Defense Contact Group shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Since then, the group has helped raise and coordinate more than $126 billion in security aid to Ukraine, around half of which has come from America.

In the three years since, the group became synonymous both with Ramstein Air Base, where it was founded, and U.S. leadership. The only time Austin did not attend one of the group’s in-person meetings was early 2024, when he was recovering from complications following cancer treatment. Instead, he called into the summit and had Celeste Wallander, a top Pentagon policy official, convene the group.

Sensing the U.S. may step back from its role, European officials were already planning for alternate formats when the group last gathered during the Biden administration, Wallander said in an interview. One of the arrangements discussed was for Germany and the United Kingdom to take the lead, representing Europe’s economic powerhouse and one of its most capable militaries.

While the Ukraine group could continue meeting without U.S. leadership, Wallander said, there would be real costs. American defense officials, along with military counterparts from U.S. European Command, have typically led briefings on the state of the war and how it relates to Ukraine’s battlefield needs.

Without them, the group would lack key U.S. intelligence, something European officials are already preparing for. In late February, after a disastrous visit to the Oval office by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the U.S. stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine and paused weapons deliveries for a week.

The Pentagon has $3.85 billion left in authority to send Ukraine military equipment, but no money left to replace it. Leaders in Congress have said they have no plans to pass more.

About Noah Robertson

Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.

10. China, E.U. prepare ‘countermeasures’ as Trump tariffs unite friends and foes

It is obvious that I did not take enough classes in economics in college because I just do not grasp the logic of these tariffs.

China, E.U. prepare ‘countermeasures’ as Trump tariffs unite friends and foes

Allies and adversaries alike were reeling from Trump’s tariff blitz, with some signaling they were ready to retaliate, while others were still hoping for talks.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/04/02/trump-tariffs-reaction-markets-retaliation/

UpdatedApril 3, 2025 at 2:51 a.m. EDTtoday at 2:51 a.m. EDT

8 min

591

Shock, outrage as the world reacts to Trump tariffs

1:56

On April 3, world leaders called President Donald Trump's new tariff plan “regrettable” and “a major blow to the world economy.” (Video: The Washington Post)

By Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Christian Shepherd and Steve Hendrix

SEOUL — China is promising to retaliate against President Donald Trump’s “typical bullying” with unspecified countermeasures, while the European Union said it is working on its response, as allies and adversaries alike reeled Thursday from what Trump billed as a “Liberation Day” tariffs blitz.

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Stock markets across Asia fell upon opening Thursday after Trump imposed huge tariffs on all the region’s leading economies, although they recovered some of their losses during the trading day, while analysts warned the measures risked strengthening China’s hand in the region.

“This decision, which is so unprincipled, so abrupt, so profound in its impact, calls into question what kind of partner the U.S. will be,” said Susannah Patton, the director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank. “It will play into China’s narrative that the U.S. is a unreliable, distant partner that can come and go.”

Stock indexes are seen on a ticker display Wednesday in the financial district of Shanghai, as people pass by on a pedestrian bridge. (Go Nakamura/Reuters)

European political and business leaders awaking to the specifics of the tariff spikes added their shock, outrage and confusion to the global chorus.

Governments held back on rolling out specific countermeasures, with most promising to respond with “cool and calm heads,” in the words of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. But beneath the diplomatic restraint were anger and fears of spreading economic chaos.

Follow Trump’s first 100 Days

Robert Habeck, Germany’s outgoing economy minister, warned that the U.S “tariff mania could trigger a spiral that could also drag countries into recession and cause massive damage worldwide.”

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described the introduction of tariffs against the E.U. as “wrong” and said she would work on a deal with the U.S. to “prevent a trade war that would inevitably weaken the West in favor of other global actors.”

With Wednesday’s announcements, Trump increased the levy on Chinese exports to the United States from 20 to 54 percent. He also slapped duties of 24 and 25 percent on Japan and South Korea, respectively — both key security allies in the region and major trading partners — and 32 percent on Taiwan.

But he also targeted many of the countries that had benefited from efforts, encouraged by the United States across administrations, to diversify supply chains away from China: Cambodia was stung with a 49 percent tariff, Vietnam 46 percent and Thailand 36 percent.

Justifying his tariffs at an announcement in the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump said the United States had been “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike.”

The size of the tariffs stunned the United States’ allies in particular.

“We are bewildered,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a senior fellow of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, an American treaty ally.

“It’s worse now to be a U.S. ally than to be an adversary. As an adversary, at least you know what you’re getting,” Thitinan said. “To be an ally and then be treated like an adversary … that is not expected; it’s not nice.”

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whose country got off relatively lightly with a 10 percent blanket duty, offered a similar sentiment. “The administration’s tariffs have no basis in logic, and they go against the basis of our two nations’ partnership. This is not the act of a friend,” Albanese said.

The European Union, which was hit with a 20 percent blanket tariff, is ready to respond if talks with Washington fail, said the head of the E.U. executive branch, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

“There seems to be no order in the disorder. No clear path through the complexity and chaos,” she said in a statement describing the tariffs as a “major blow.”

The 27-nation bloc is finalizing its first round of retaliation to U.S. steel tariffs and is “now preparing for further countermeasures to protect our interests and our businesses if negotiations fail,” she said. “It is not too late to address concern through negotiations,” she added. Speaking to “my fellow Europeans,” she said, “I know that many of you feel let down by our oldest ally.”

Von der Leyen also warned of possible spillover from other markets, as industry leaders worry that a U.S.-China trade war could prompt Beijing to divert cheaper goods to the continent, creating unwelcome competition. “We will also be watching closely what indirect effects these tariffs could have. Because we cannot absorb global overcapacity, nor will we accept dumping on our markets,” she said.

Trump signs reciprocal tariff executive order

2:31

President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods at a White House event on April 2. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

The tariffs are particularly onerous on China, the world’s second-biggest economy and the target of much of Trump’s ire as it ran a nearly $1 trillion trade surplus with the United States last year.

The new tariff of 34 percent on Chinese goods comes on top of the 20 percent levy already imposed as Trump accused Beijing of not doing enough to stop the flow of fentanyl and its precursors into the United States. It is also in addition to the existing tariffs on goods including some appliances, machinery and clothing that were already as high as 45 percent.

China’s Commerce Ministry condemned the tariffs, pledged unspecified countermeasures and noted that many American trading partners shared Beijing’s dissatisfaction.

“As Trump’s big tariff stick threatens the world, it pushes the United States’ allies to talk to China,” said Ma Bin, an associate professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. “This driving force is really obvious.”

Trump’s latest announcement means that everything the United States imports from China — iPhones, laptops, toys, video game consoles — will carry a minimum tariff of 54 percent, said Chad Brown, a senior fellow from the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Analysts said Beijing is likely to retaliate with additional tariffs on politically sensitive U.S. exports like farming goods while expanding export controls on key raw materials and regulatory pressure on American companies.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has not yet directly engaged with Trump to negotiate tariffs, relying instead on a well-honed retaliatory playbook to ride out the onslaught.

“Xi is playing the long game: Avoid concessions, absorb the hit, and bet Trump blinks first,” said Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank.

China wants to negotiate, but it held back after earlier tariffs because it expected those were “just the hors d’oeuvre, not the main course,” said Henry Gao, an expert on trade at Singapore Management University.

Trump also signed an executive order Wednesday to close the duty-free trade loophole for small packages, which he said is necessary to prevent synthetic opioids from entering the United States. Goods will now be charged 30 percent of their value, or $25 each, effective May 2, a move that will affect shipments from online retailers such a Temu and Shein.

But China was hardly singled out. Taiwan’s executive branch called the measures “seriously unreasonable.”

Just how disruptive the sweeping duties are for allies will depend on enforcement and potential exemptions, analysts said. The White House listed carve-outs for industries like semiconductors and pharmaceuticals that may provide relief for partners such as Taiwan and South Korea.

An observation platform at the port in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, on Wednesday. (Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters)

Japan and South Korea view the tariffs as an opening salvo for negotiations with the Trump administration.

Cars from the two countries, home to Toyota, Honda, Hyundai and Kia, were already set to be hit with the 25 percent tariff on foreign-made vehicles and auto parts that Trump announced last week and came into effect at 12:01 a.m. on Thursday.

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba gave his most forceful response to date Thursday, saying his government had “repeatedly requested” a review of the tariffs, which he called “extremely regrettable” and one-sided.

“This will not only impact the economic relationship between Japan and the United States, but also have significant repercussions on the global economy and the multilateral trade system as a whole,” Ishiba said. “We have serious concerns.”

But Japan has few options to hit back, and retaliatory tariffs would be difficult for Tokyo to levy, experts say.

In Seoul, acting president Han Duck-soo convened an emergency task force Thursday to discuss countermeasures, saying “the global trade war has become a reality.”

Trump’s tariff policy could push Japan to look to other countries to decrease its supply chain dependence on America, including increasing trade with China, said Keisuke Hanyuda, former Japanese trade negotiator.

“Japan relies heavily on the U.S. for security. But if Japan starts to see Trump’s stance as unreliable on that front, then it would be a totally different story,” Hanyuda said. “That’s why China has been actively reaching out to Japan.”

Beijing appears to recognize this vulnerability in Tokyo and Seoul.

After a previously scheduled meeting of the three countries’ trade ministers on Sunday, Chinese state media said they agreed to coordinate supply chains and hold talks on export controls in response to the U.S. tariffs. Tokyo and Seoul swiftly played down that characterization, saying the three had agreed to continue cooperating broadly on economic and trade matters.

Shepherd reported from Singapore and Hendrix from London. Chie Tanaka in Tokyo, Lyric Li in Seoul, Rebecca Tan in Singapore, Kate Brady in Berlin, and Ellen Francis and Beatriz Ríos in Brussels contributed to this report.

11. After Trump’s broad tariffs, Europe reels from the loss of an old ally

We should reflect on these words: "loss of an old ally" and ask why?

After Trump’s broad tariffs, Europe reels from the loss of an old ally

Some Europeans have acknowledged U.S. grievances over trade but wonder whether the Trump administration is serious about finding a middle ground.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/04/03/trump-tariffs-eu-europe/https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/04/03/trump-tariffs-eu-europe/

April 3, 2025 at 5:54 a.m. EDTToday at 5:54 a.m. EDT

Secretary of State George C. Marshall attends the commencement procession at Harvard University, where he gave his speech outlining what became known as the Marshall Plan, on June 5, 1947. (AP)

By Anthony Faiola, Steve Hendrix and Ellen Francis

ROME — In announcing plans to rebuild post-World War II Europe in 1947, U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall linked security with economics. Without the United States doing whatever it could to promote “normal economic health in the world,” he said, “there can be no political stability and no assured peace.”

Nearly 80 years later, America’s closest allies in Europe see President Donald Trump’s tariffs as another blow to a fast-fracturing Western alliance that had stood as the most successful peace project of modern times — one whose pillars included shared democratic values, a strategic goal to contain Moscow, as well as flourishing flows of trade and investment.

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Trump, casting the United States as besieged by friends and foes, has called the European Union a bloc formed largely to “screw” the United States, has threatened to “get” Greenland — a Danish territory — and stoked European fears by signaling warmer ties with the Kremlin. Trump’s announcement Wednesday of sweeping “America First” tariffs is effectively forcing Washington’s closest European allies to bend a knee with everyone else, portraying countries that fought alongside the United States in myriad wars as freeloaders out to milk the world’s largest economy.

“They rip us off very badly,” Trump said of the European Union on Wednesday when announcing the tariffs. “It’s so pathetic.”

Follow Trump’s first 100 Days

Some Europeans have acknowledged a legitimate U.S. grievance over trade and see an opening to patch the damage through negotiation in the weeks ahead. But others wonder whether the Trump administration is truly serious about finding a middle ground and view the tariffs as an ominous pivot point in the transatlantic relationship.

“I think a number of countries see this certainly as the end of the transatlantic relationship as we’ve known it, which is anchored on long-term stable U.S. security guarantees, a strong security and defense partnership, and significant trade flows across the Atlantic,” said Georgina Wright, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “I think there is a sense that that has come to an end.”

The rupture over the past few weeks, European observers say, has seemed magnitudes worse than the transatlantic tensions during the first Trump administration. casting a long shadow over European life and raising core questions about the region’s strategic and economic future. The U.S. shift has left Europe scrambling to respond:

vowing massive increases in defense spending and seeking to diversify its economic partners by cautiously engaging China on deepening trade and investment while racing to strike a landmark free-trade deal with India.

President Donald Trump announces a plan for tariffs on imported goods on April 2 in the Rose Garden at the White House. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

Brando Benifei noted that Trump was launching his trade war while Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine continued to rage on the European continent. Benifei, a member of the European Parliament and head of the legislative body’s delegation for relations with the United States, said: “The transatlantic relation is strained on many sides, and the tariffs are a further blow to trust.”

The concerns are not just over new U.S. levies on Mercedes-Benzes or French wines. For some Europeans, the U.S. antagonism seems existential, deepening a sense of abandonment by a stalwart partner. Norway has reactivated two military bunkers north of the Arctic Circle that were last used during the Cold War. In Italy, companies are again selling nuclear shelters.

The once-unthinkable standoff with the United States over Greenland has prompted Denmark to accelerate a move to draft women into the military. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has told parliament that in a now-unpredictable world, his country must pursue nuclear weapons.

“I know that many of you feel let down by our oldest ally,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told E.U citizens in an address hours after Trump’s tariff announcement.

Trump’s vision of “America First” has stoked economic patriotism in Europe, threatening to further undermine decades of globalization and cross-border efficiencies that sparked innovation and lowered prices for consumer goods. A growing wave of Europeans is calling for boycotts of U.S. products. In a few short weeks, a Reddit community sharing European alternatives to U.S. products and services has expanded into an online directory. The community, Go European, lists more than 1,200 domestic alternatives to U.S. products, such as Coca-Cola and Nike sneakers.

In some European countries, supermarket chains have begun marking European products with a star on price tags. According to a recent YouGov poll in Germany, more than half of respondents said they now support a boycott of U.S. goods — with 53 percent saying they would “definitely not” or “probably not” continue purchasing U.S. products.

“The tension that we feel on the other side of the pond has kind of awakened some kind of consciousness,” said Toon Vos, a 29-year-old Dutch citizen living in Belgium and one of the coordinators of the Go European directory. “Being able to tap into that sense of European-ness and that we’re doing something together has been the driving factor,” he added.

Britain, which is no longer part of the Europe Union, found that its “special relationship” with the United States did not shield it completely from Trump’s tariffs. The 10 percent levy on British exports was half the 20 percent imposed on those from the E.U. But even that rate risks undermining Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s economic recovery plan.

French President Emmanuel Macron, right, greets British Prime Minister Keir Starmer upon his arrival for a summit on peace and security for Ukraine at the Élysée Palace in Paris on March 27. (Teresa Suarez/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

Officials in the E.U. and Britain are calculating that they can strike trade deals with Washington in the weeks ahead. British officials believe they are in a better position, noting that Trump has said that an agreement with Britain could happen “very quickly.”

But regardless of what deals may emerge, political experts said no one in London, Paris or Frankfurt should doubt that Trump is determined to remake the Western alliance for good. The president has shown no fealty to decades of norms and niceties that defined the postwar era. And the coterie of younger conservatives that surround Trump and stand to inherit his movement feels even less attachment to Western Europe.

That sentiment was evident most recently in a leaked Signal chat about Yemen among top U.S. officials. In the chat, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expressed his loathing for European “freeloading,” and Vice President JD Vance bemoaned “bailing out” Europe again, according to excerpts published by the Atlantic, whose top editor was accidentally added to the chat.

“It’s a dramatic new reality and likely an enduring one,” said Desmond King, the Mellon professor of American government at Oxford University.

Trump’s first months have felt dizzying for Europeans. Francesco Mutti, chief executive of Italian food maker Mutti, a major tomato exporter, described himself as “shocked” by the U.S. president’s provocations. He said some European companies, including those who have pulled out of Russia, may begin to see the United States as a risky place to do business, too.

“You have this concept of the fantastic U.S. market in which you think and believe that freedom is its essence. You then are a little bit shocked when you see something completely different,” Mutti said in an interview. “We do not need to make any confusion between Russia and the U.S. They are very different. But I think we are looking at a change” in the way European companies see the United States.

Many European officials believe Trump’s entourage in his second administration includes officials who have an ideological bone to pick with Europe. The Trump administration has made clear that European powers will have to take charge of the continent’s conventional security and signaled intentions to pull back troops to some degree.

But shifting U.S. resources elsewhere is one thing, and threatening NATO allies is another, officials and analysts say. The continent’s leaders have been rattled and galvanized by Trump’s threats to Canada and Denmark, his bid for warmer relations with Russia as he clashed with Ukraine, and his remarks that he won’t protect U.S. allies who don’t spend enough on defense. The moves have left many in Europe facing a reckoning over the region’s decades-long dependence on U.S. military capabilities, intelligence sharing, purchases of U.S. weaponry, and even on the core NATO tenets of mutual defense.

European diplomats privately describe a worst-case scenario in which their strongest ally may one day not just be indifferent, but may actively work against them.

Add to that fresh European fears over the Trump administration’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law, including its intense pressure to thwart Europe’s efforts to contain disinformation — much of it emanating from Russia and seeking to undermine democratic elections or fan anti-migrant and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment.

“We might have security debates, and we might have trade debates, and we might have debates on policy. But here you have a debate on values, a debate on trade and tariffs, a debate on security,” said Camille Grand, a fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations and former NATO official. “Definitely, we are in a form of crisis mode.”

Kate Brady in Berlin contributed to this report.

By Anthony Faiola

Anthony Faiola is Rome Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. Since joining the paper in 1994, he has served as bureau chief in Miami, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and New York and additionally worked as roving correspondent at large. follow on X @Anthony_Faiola

By Steve Hendrix

Steve Hendrix has been at the Washington Post since 2000, becoming London bureau chief in 2025 after five years as Jerusalem bureau chief. He has been a feature and enterprise writer for Metro, National, Foreign, Travel and the Post Magazine, reporting from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas and most corners of the United States.follow on X @SBHendrix

By Ellen Francis

Ellen Francis is The Washington Post’s Brussels bureau chief, covering the European Union and NATO.

12. Experts, civilian workers in the reserves and embassy staff not eligible for DOD’s deferred resignation program

Experts, civilian workers in the reserves and embassy staff not eligible for DOD’s deferred resignation program

Stars and Stripes · by Caitlyn Burchett · April 2, 2025

Highly qualified experts, civilian employees who are also reservists and foreign embassy staff do not qualify for the Defense Department’s deferred resignation program because they are “mission critical,” the Pentagon said. (Robert H. Reid/Stars and Stripes)

WASHINGTON — Highly qualified experts, civilian employees who are also reservists and foreign embassy staff do not qualify for the Defense Department’s deferred resignation program because they are “mission critical,” the Pentagon said.

The “rare exemptions” were outlined in a memorandum issued Tuesday that detailed the reopening of the Defense Department’s deferred resignation program as the Pentagon works to trim the civilian workforce by about 60,000 people. Also ineligible are non-appropriated fund employees, who are paid by organization-generated revenue rather than taxpayer funds, and reemployed annuitants, who are retirees rehired by the federal government.

The deferred resignation program will be open from April 7 to April 14, allowing employees to enter a paid leave status for several months prior to resigning. Probationary employees who have been in their government position for less than 1-2 years are eligible to participate in the deferred resignation program. The effort aims to maximize the number of voluntary separations from government service before the Pentagon fires staff to achieve its target of a 5%-8% workforce reduction.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a summary memorandum signed Friday that the military is realigning the workforce and looking for ways to automate more positions in an across-the-board restructuring to “supercharge our American warfighters.”

“The net effect will be a reduction in the number of civilian full-time equivalent positions and increased resources in the areas where we need them most,” the summary memo states.

Employees participating in the deferred resignation program will begin administrative leave no earlier than May 1. Eligible employees can elect to take voluntary early retirement without going through the deferred resignation program. Employees approved for either separation path must agree to leave federal service by Sept. 30.

The Pentagon offered deferred resignations in January through a program managed by the government’s Office of Personnel Management, offering participants full pay and benefits through September. OPM made the offer available to most full-time federal employees.

As of March 18, only about 21,000 of DOD’s roughly 900,000 civilian workers had been approved. Applicants for deferred resignations deemed critical to national security and military readiness were denied that opportunity, known as the “Fork-in-the-Road” program. A senior defense official told reporters at the time that the Pentagon worked with the services and appropriate offices to ensure those who were approved to resign could do so “without negatively impacting the department’s lethality and readiness.” The official was not authorized to share how many applicants were denied.

“This wasn’t just a totally open process where any employee could depart,” one senior defense official said. “To ensure the department’s ability to effectively function, it is important to consider things like which roles can be removed without losing effectiveness.”

Jules Hurst, the acting defense undersecretary for personnel readiness, said in Tuesday’s memo that denying a request for deferred resignation or early retirement could be considered but should be rare. Principal staff and department leaders must conduct an analysis to determine which positions should be deemed ineligible.

“They should also consider the loss of that position’s impact on readiness and the performance of mission essential functions,” Hurst said.

Stars and Stripes · by Caitlyn Burchett · April 2, 2025

13. West Africa Divided: Challenges of the Fracturing of ECOWAS for Counterterrorism Efforts

Conclusion:

If ECOWAS is unable to work with states outside of ECOWAS—those in AES or otherwise- terrorist groups can more effectively exploit border regions as safe havens and the lack of funding for combined regional security projects. The presence of Russian forces in West Africa will also present challenges for counterterrorism, as divisions on whether West African nations partner with Western or Russian troops will reduce collaboration. Looking to the future, West African nations should strengthen their commitment to other existing regional security constructs as a means of combating terror—including the African Union or the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF), which has demonstrated successful internal collaboration. Bottom line—the withdrawal of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso from ECOWAS will reduce the cohesion and capacity of legacy counterterrorism efforts with dire consequences, unless Western-aligned states acknowledge the new security paradigm confronting West Africa and act accordingly.

West Africa Divided: Challenges of the Fracturing of ECOWAS for Counterterrorism Efforts

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/04/03/west-africa-divided-challenges/

by Michael Howard, by Ethan Czaja

04.03.2025 at 06:00am

Introduction

A series of military junta-led coups in the Sahel over the past few years have earned the region the moniker of the “coup belt.” Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso all recently experienced regime change and subsequently withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to form the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), effective at the end of January 2025. ECOWAS’ failure to support regional counterterrorism efforts is purportedly a key reason for the withdrawal. While there are certainly issues with how ECOWAS has approached counterterrorism in West Africa up to this point, it is unlikely that leaving ECOWAS will improve the situation. The absence of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso will contribute to less cooperation between countries in West Africa by reducing holistic capacity to deal with terrorism effectively. This article examines the shortcomings of ECOWAS which led to the withdrawal, the challenges inherent to replacing ECOWAS in the Sahel, and the role of West Africa in security competition between the NATO-aligned West and Russia.

Shortcomings of ECOWAS

It is challenging to call the criticism of ECOWAS and its Western supporters’ handling of terror in West Africa unfounded. Terrorism has long plagued West Africa—the main culprit being Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimeen (JNIM), an umbrella coalition of groups aligned with Al-Qaeda active in Burkina Faso and Niger. Since its military coup in September 2022, Burkina Faso alone experienced approximately 15,500 fatalities in terror-related incidents, with over 6,000 deaths occurring since January 2024. The lethality of political violence in the Central Sahel increased from 3.9 fatalities per event in 2023 to 4.4 in 2024. While ECOWAS itself has policies to combat terrorism, implementing these policies has proven difficult due to their exorbitant monetary costs, such as the $2.6 billion annually for its security force. This has often meant that ECOWAS member states are unable to execute their own programs, which has in part led to Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso leaving the organization.

The United States and France have also attempted to curb terrorism in the region, but their commitment has proven unreliable. The perceived lack of Western commitment was made apparent to many African nations when France ended Operation Barkhane, its military counterterrorism campaign in Mali that began in 2013. The new AES security mechanism will likely be less effective, as ECOWAS could not fund the programs necessary to combat terrorism despite having more members and funding than AES.

Challenges of Replacing ECOWAS

Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger intend for the new AES to replace ECOWAS as the dominant regional political and economic union. Due to its recent inception, AES policies have not been fleshed out or given time to run their course. However, the AES has a much smaller member size than ECOWAS, meaning its decreased capacity may negatively affect its counterterrorism effectiveness. Interstate cooperation has proven to be an effective method for increasing the security capacities of a region and can often lead to better outcomes for countries that participate in cooperative counterterrorism efforts.

With ECOWAS and the AES now both having fewer members than ECOWAS had before the withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, fewer states in the region will be cooperating to fight terrorism—specifically regarding funding. Regional security projects, which include border security initiatives, combined task forces, and cross-border forces, all benefit from economies of scale. The more total investment into them, the more capacity they have. After losing three member states, ECOWAS will have lower aggregate funds for counterterrorism projects. The scope and scale of what it can do with these projects will be lower. The resultant decrease in ECOWAS resources is especially significant in West Africa, where a lack of counterterrorism funding was already a serious problem. Because ECOWAS and AES will not fund counterterrorism initiatives together, their individual projects will likely be far less effective or simply not be undertaken due to prohibitive start-up costs. The largest casualty of ECOWAS-AES non-cooperation will be border security.

Border regions are already hotspots of terrorist activity, as almost half of all violent events in West Africa occur within 100 kilometers of a border. Borders often lack government oversight and are usually some of the poorest areas of the country. Many borders between ECOWAS and AES nations have historically been areas with high terrorist activity, including the Nigeria-Niger border, which is a location where both the Islamic State in the Sahel and JNIM thrive. Now that Nigeria and Niger will not be collaborating through ECOWAS, they will likely confront more difficulty trying to control their shared border. In this same vein, as some states in West Africa introduce Russian forces to execute counterterrorism operations, cooperation will be hindered between African nations still receiving support from the West and those opting for Russian assistance.

West Africa’s Role in Strategic Competition

Formerly a branch of the Russian Wagner Group, the New Africa Corps is closely tied to the new regimes in West Africa. The group appeared immediately after the coups took place to help shore up the new regimes while also serving as a replacement for the troops from France, Germany, and the United States. Those Western nations provided critical aid in the fight against terrorism but left after the coups. Because of the New Africa Corps’ close ties to the Kremlin, it is unlikely that cooperation between states with a Russian presence and those that are supported by Western militaries will be possible.

The ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine has harmed Russia and the NATO-aligned nations’ capacity for diplomatic and strategic collaboration. This likely means fewer combined exercises and intelligence sharing between ECOWAS and AES nations due to the conflicting interests of their international patrons. As such, this great power strategic competition dynamic adds another layer of challenges to both ECOWAS and AES efforts that will amplify the entire region’s terrorism challenges.

Russia’s reasons for engagement in West Africa are a significant factor working against effective counterterrorism efforts in the region. The Wagner Group typically bases its operations in weak and unstable states, meaning that the group has little incentive to encourage long-term solutions to the instability West African nations face. This manifests in the Wagner Group’s modus operandi, as the group “endorses corruption” and works to keep corrupt regimes reliant while neglecting underlying problems causing terror, including extremism and alienation among West Africans. Of note, the Wagner Group is notorious due to its targeting of civilians.

Wagner’s human rights abuses are well documented, including one egregious example in Mali, where Russians working with the Malian army executed an estimated 300 civilians suspected of being Islamic fighters. The violent nature of Wagner seems to be a core element of its identity, not a flaw, and is therefore unlikely to change. Such civilian targeting is likely to exacerbate the root causes that foster terrorism in Africa—local grievances against the actions of the government. The use of Russian troops in the states that recently withdrew from ECOWAS will make regional counterterrorism cooperation more difficult and the overall threat of terrorism more ominous.

Conclusion

If ECOWAS is unable to work with states outside of ECOWAS—those in AES or otherwise- terrorist groups can more effectively exploit border regions as safe havens and the lack of funding for combined regional security projects. The presence of Russian forces in West Africa will also present challenges for counterterrorism, as divisions on whether West African nations partner with Western or Russian troops will reduce collaboration. Looking to the future, West African nations should strengthen their commitment to other existing regional security constructs as a means of combating terror—including the African Union or the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF), which has demonstrated successful internal collaboration. Bottom line—the withdrawal of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso from ECOWAS will reduce the cohesion and capacity of legacy counterterrorism efforts with dire consequences, unless Western-aligned states acknowledge the new security paradigm confronting West Africa and act accordingly.

Tags: Africa, COIN, Great Power Competition, NATO

About The Authors

Michael Howard
Michael Howard is a sophomore at the University of Michigan, pursuing a degree in public policy from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. His primary research interest is defense and security. In his free time, he enjoys jogging in Ann Arbor.
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Ethan Czaja
Ethan Czaja is a junior at Michigan State University’s James Madison College, majoring in international relations and minoring in Russian and history. He is interested in researching international law and Russian foreign policy. Outside of his studies, he enjoys photography, basketball, and music.

14. US approves sale of F-16s to the Philippines in $5.5bn weapons package

US approves sale of F-16s to the Philippines in $5.5bn weapons package

Defense News · by Leilani Chavez · April 2, 2025

MANILA, Philippines — The U.S. State Department has approved a prospective sale of 20 F-16 aircraft to the Philippines, part of a larger package that includes hundreds of medium-range, air-to-air missiles, bombs, anti-aircraft guns and ammunition, worth $5.58 billion.

The official notice of the sale follows U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s trip to the Philippines last week, and it comes ahead of the annual Balikatan exercises, a joint military drill between the long-time treaty allies.

Hegseth’s visit came amid the U.S.’s growing tension with China and as part of what experts and geopolitical watchers describe as Washington’s pivot to Asia. During the visit, Hegseth said Washington plans to “re-establish deterrence” and strengthen its allies in the region.

The proposed aircraft sale to the Philippines will be “helping to improve the security of a strategic partner that continues to be an important force for political stability, peace, and economic progress in Southeast Asia,” the Defense Security Cooperation Agency stated.

The package includes 16 F-16C Block 70/72 aircraft and 4 F-16D Block 70/72 aircraft, which will be fully equipped with 88 LAU-129 guided missile launchers, 22 M61A1 anti-craft guns with 20 installed upon delivery, 12 AN/AAQ-33 sniper advanced targeting pods, radio systems, AESA radars, and navigational devices.

The package also includes: 112 advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles (AMRAAMs) or AIM-120C-8 or equivalent missiles; 36 guided bomb units; 40 AIM-9X Block II Sidewinder missiles with 32 AIM-9X Block II Sidewinder Captive Air Training Missiles (CATMs); 60 MK-84 2,000-lb general-purpose bombs; and 30 Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) KMU-572 tail kits for GBU-38 or Laser JDAM GBU-54.

The State Department indicated that offset agreements will be “defined in negotiations between the purchaser and the contractor.”

Lockheed Martin is the principal contractor for the package.

The Philippines has had no frontline fighter jets since it retired its fleet of Northrop F-5 A/Bs in 2005. Negotiations to refresh its fleet hark back to the 1990s, but negotiations did not materialize.

In 2021, the State Department approved the sale of 10 F-16C Block 70/72 and 2 F-16D Block 70/72 aircraft in a $2.43 billion package which did not come through as the Philippines had only earmarked $1.1 billion for the acquisition.

Last year, Philippine Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said the country plans to acquire 40 fighter jets as part of the new Horizon 3, the final phase in a massive push to modernize the military.

President Ferdinand Marcos approved the new Horizon 3 under a 1.89 trillion pesos ($33.6 billion) budget, which will be subject to congressional approval in the next ten years.

Also during last year’s budget deliberations, Teodoro told reporters that the department solicits offers with flexible and spread-out financing terms for the 40 jets, adding the military is allotting as much as 400 billion pesos ($6.9 billion) for the acquisition.

The Philippine government has yet to decide on its chosen fighter jets, which is expected to boost its Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept, an external defense strategy to protect Philippine territories including its exclusive economic zones in what the Philippine government calls the West Philippine Sea.

About Leilani Chavez

Leilani Chavez is an Asia correspondent for Defense News. Her reporting expertise is in East Asian politics, development projects, environmental issues and security.

15. America's arsenal is failing. We need an industrial mobilization board now.

Military Industrial Congressional Complex.

Will it benefit from a new "Industrial Mobilization Board?"

Will such a board improve our defense and national security?

We have to ask should we return to being an arsenal of democracy? if our allies are going to seek defense equipment elsewhere; how can we improve our defense instructional base?

I would like to see a synchronization (and articulation) of vision across the elements of national power: diplomacy, information, military AND economic. They seem to be working at cross purposes at the moment.

Excerpts:

Defense industrial mobilization would create jobs, rebuild US manufacturing, and enable America to outproduce our Chinese adversary. It would also help President Donald Trump deliver on two key administration priorities — revitalizing industry and strengthening national security — both of which have long enjoyed bipartisan support.

Ultimately, the IMB won’t make mobilization happen — American businesses will. But establishing an IMB sets the stage for a rapid and successful industrial mobilization.

With each passing day, China’s industrial machine pulls further into the lead. And the stakes of this industrial race — credible military deterrence and failing that, a swift and decisive victory — couldn’t be higher. If we hope to win it, we need to mobilize industry swiftly, and mobilize now.

America's arsenal is failing. We need an industrial mobilization board now. - Breaking Defense

Sheila Cummings of Cummings Aerospace uses this op-ed to call for the creation of a new Industrial Mobilization Board (IMB) for America's defense industrial base.

breakingdefense.com · by Sheila Cummings · April 2, 2025

Stock photo of a production line manager. (Getty/Vithun Khamsong)

If our country fails to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan — or worse — loses to China in a shooting war, the most likely culprit will be insufficient defense industrial capacity. American industry is operating in peacetime mode, while China’s is on a wartime footing.

This isn’t the first time our country has faced an adversary with superior industrial might. On the eve of World War II, the United States transformed its peacetime economy into the “Arsenal of Democracy.” We did this not through central planning, but by coordinating government policy, priorities and funding with America’s entrepreneurial spirit. The result: An industrial mobilization of unprecedented speed and scale.

And we can do this again, by stealing a play from the past and establishing a modern Industrial Mobilization Board (IMB).

The IMB would report directly to the president, and have a straightforward mission: Cut red tape, catalyze private sector scale-up, and focus — but not direct — market forces toward our defense needs. In other words, it would help America outproduce China by unleashing capitalism and empowering ALL of America’s industry.

This means looking beyond the prime defense contractors to include the innovative businesses that are the backbone of American industry: well-financed new entrants, scrappy startups with good ideas and gumption, and experienced small companies with proven capabilities. The IMB would create pathways for all these companies to contribute to national security, whether they’re already in the defense ecosystem or completely new to it.

Done right, this would be more than just a national security initiative — it’s a strategy for renewing American manufacturing.

Three key IMB Initiatives

The IMB’s first priority would be to remove structural barriers to production. The IMB would identify and eliminate regulatory friction points that slow industrial mobilization — everything from construction permitting delays, to unnecessary export controls, to contracting rules that keep capable firms on the sidelines. There are companies with eye-watering capabilities not entering the defense market because of acquisition regulations never designed for dual-use technologies or commercial entrants; we need to avoid handicapping our own technologists.

Unfortunately, the bureaucratic bottlenecks don’t end at contract award. I can personally attest that the paperwork required to test new hardware on DoD ranges can take longer to fill out than it does to design and deliver the technology itself. These delays aren’t the fault of the DoD personnel complying with outdated policies and regulations — but they are strategic vulnerabilities. Every month lost to paperwork is a month China uses to build its advantage. And these types of policies are precisely the low-hanging fruits the IMB could identify and eliminate to accelerate industrial production.

Second, the IMB would identify critical manufacturing priorities based on an understanding of US production gaps and existing technologies, then take steps to accelerate policies that allow their introduction across the defense industrial base.

For example, 3D printing — hardly new technology at this point — remains the exception rather than the norm in defense manufacturing because there’s no AS 9100 equivalent for this capability. Programs can only use it “by exception,” preventing the defense ecosystem from leveraging a commonplace technology that could turbocharge production. The IMB could fix this with an executive-level push.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar policy shortcomings. By identifying and addressing these issues at the executive level, the IMB would help drive down costs, accelerate production capabilities, and encourage new companies to enter the defense ecosystem.

Third, the IMB would coordinate a National Mobilization Strategy, aligning industrial requirements across agencies to help the president drive industrial mobilization throughout government. That includes coordination with the Department of Government Efficiency to ensure cost savings efforts work hand-in-glove with mobilization needs. The goal of the NMS is not to centralize control, but to synchronize planning, remove redundancies, and give industry and all of government a coherent view of what mobilization will require.

The IMB would, of course, take on many more challenges, but these key first steps would accelerate industrial mobilization.

An Opportunity for President Trump

Defense industrial mobilization would create jobs, rebuild US manufacturing, and enable America to outproduce our Chinese adversary. It would also help President Donald Trump deliver on two key administration priorities — revitalizing industry and strengthening national security — both of which have long enjoyed bipartisan support.

Ultimately, the IMB won’t make mobilization happen — American businesses will. But establishing an IMB sets the stage for a rapid and successful industrial mobilization.

With each passing day, China’s industrial machine pulls further into the lead. And the stakes of this industrial race — credible military deterrence and failing that, a swift and decisive victory — couldn’t be higher. If we hope to win it, we need to mobilize industry swiftly, and mobilize now.

Sheila Cummings is CEO & Founder of Cummings Aerospace.

16. Peering into the Future of Artificial Intelligence in the Military Classroom

Excerpts:

Conclusion

AI represents a transformative force in professional military education, crucial for maintaining relevance, enhancing efficiency, and radically improving the depth of learning. As AI advances exponentially, resistance or ambivalence toward its use within professional military education classrooms is not merely impractical — it is strategically negligent. AI tools already excel in critical educational functions such as data analysis, personalized learning, visualization, and real-time feedback, capabilities far surpassing traditional educational methods.

The implementation of AI empowers instructors to transition from conventional lecture-based teaching to roles as active learning coaches, thereby fostering genuinely student-centered and self-directed learning environments. AI’s integration enhances critical thinking by encouraging students to interrogate, refine, and develop insights through iterative interactions with intelligent tools. Moreover, by delegating routine tasks such as curriculum development, class preparation, and grading to AI, educators gain substantial time to dedicate toward meaningful engagement with students, enhancing the quality and impact of interactions.

In the rapidly evolving professional contexts professional military education students will enter, proficiency with AI tools will not be optional but essential. Professional military education institutions that proactively incorporate AI will produce graduates far better equipped for strategic decision-making, adaptive problem-solving, and innovative leadership. Conversely, institutions or educators resisting this shift risk rapidly becoming obsolete.

Ultimately, the critical integration of AI into professional military education promises not only to revolutionize educational methodologies but also to create adaptive leaders who are thoroughly prepared to confront the complexities of future military and strategic landscapes.

Peering into the Future of Artificial Intelligence in the Military Classroom - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by James Lacey · April 3, 2025

The artificial intelligence revolution has arrived in military education, and resistance is futile. AI now stands poised to fundamentally transform how we educate military professionals — whether educators are ready or not.

Moreover, those leaders of professional military education institutions scrambling to establish AI policies are fighting a losing battle. The technology is evolving faster than any bureaucracy can respond, leaving many schools with contradictory approaches that range from outright bans to ad hoc permissions. Thus, students are reporting receiving mixed messages, with some being warned they could lose academic credit for using AI tools.

This approach is both unrealistic and counterproductive. AI tools have become too powerful and accessible to ignore. Expecting students to avoid them is like asking them to abandon search engines. Moreover, students recognize that AI proficiency will be essential in their post-graduation careers.

The evidence is clear: 88 percent of college students use AI multiple times weekly and even high school students regularly employ these tools despite restrictions. Military education students are no exception. My own belief, after querying many dozens of students, is that well over half of them are using AI at some rudimentary level. The uncomfortable truth for professors is simple — it’s impossible to monitor or control AI usage effectively.

Critics argue that AI dependency will undermine writing skills. One professional military professor told me that he dedicated up to 20 hours weekly to writing instruction. This represents hundreds of academic hours annually diverted from specialized military education to remedial writing — hours wasted when writing centers already exist for this purpose. More importantly, this concern is increasingly irrelevant as AI tools will handle most professional writing throughout these students’ careers.

The fear that AI will replace critical thinking is just as misplaced. When properly integrated, AI tools can dramatically enhance critical thinking by providing sophisticated data analysis, visualizing complex concepts, generating diverse perspectives, challenging assumptions, facilitating deeper engagement, and identifying biases. Moreover, the AIs can accomplish these tasks at incredible speeds and, even more crucially, they are always available for any student wishing to undertake a moment of personalized learning.

Military education, therefore, faces a fundamental choice: embrace AI’s transformative potential or futilely resist change while students adopt these tools anyway. The institutions that thrive will be those that teach students to leverage AI effectively — using it to augment rather than replace human judgment.

Instead of asking whether AI belongs in military education, we should be asking how to harness its capabilities to create more capable, adaptable military leaders. The future of military education doesn’t lie in preserving traditional methods but in pioneering new approaches that combine human wisdom with AI to prepare the next generation for increasingly complex security challenges.

The AI tsunami is already making landfall. The question is whether professional military education will ride the wave or be swept away by it.

Become a Member

Interesting Use Cases This Year

This academic year has been a year of experimentation. It all started when a former Marine Corps War College student sent me a text asking if ChatGPT-4 was something to pay attention to. I played with it for an hour that evening and thought it was interesting, but it was probably not a game-changer for anything I did. Still, I came back to play with it a few days later, and after 10 hours I was convinced that the academic world and my small part in it was about to be turned upside down.

My crucial problem was that I had no idea how to exploit AI capabilities. What was painfully evident from the start, however, was that “today” is the worst the AI systems will ever be and that their capabilities are improving at a breathtaking speed. Throughout the year, as the AIs’ capabilities improved, so did the number of use cases I (and my students) discovered. The downside was that long-term planning became impossible, as the speed at which the AIs were advancing made a hash of all my early AI-employment decisions. Thus, I decided to open the spigots and let students use AI unfettered in the classes I controlled while I continued experimenting with different AI models and their expanding capabilities. Along the way, I sent out regular “Artificial Intelligence Notes” to most of the University. These were warmly received by most recipients, but certainly not everyone. Fortunately, the war college director and the university’s commanding general were early believers and strong advocates for expanding AI use throughout the university.

At this point, it may be edifying to see a few examples of how AI has been used at the Marine Corps War College this academic year. Here is one example that caught me by surprise. For the school’s semester-end oral comprehensives, one student used AI tools to analyze my online writings, predict likely exam questions, and generate concise answers. I was astonished to discover that all four questions I asked appeared on his AI-produced list. Another group streamlined their class presentation by feeding their research to ChatGPT, generating an essay, transforming it into a 20-slide presentation with Gamma, and then returning to ChatGPT for slide-specific talking points — all in under half an hour.

A different student team crafted a 6,000-word essay on the 1777 Philadelphia Campaign almost entirely through AI: Perplexity provided extensive research materials, including online primary sources; CustomGPT generated answers and structured outlines; and OpenAI’s Deep Research wrote detailed sections, which ChatGPT seamlessly integrated into a coherent final paper complete with AI-generated artwork. The team even created a now-obsolete 30-point guide for peers interested in this approach. If I tried to reproduce all of their work today, it would take me about four hours, and almost all of that time would be spent collecting the research material to feed into the AI.

This year, with 10 new courses, I significantly reduced my preparation time by employing multiple AI language models (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) to produce summaries, class notes, and synthesized talking points from assigned readings, cutting prep from days to about an hour per class. Recently, I distributed the Intel community’s 2025 Threat Assessment to my class. Within 30 minutes, students responded with AI-generated analyses comparing it to the 2024 assessment, aligning it with the current National Defense Strategy, and critiquing it based on curated essays shaping modern wargaming.

To enhance strategic wargaming exercises, I developed a CustomGPT modeled after China’s leader Xi Jinping, incorporating his public speeches and biographical data, enabling digital role-play of Xi’s decisions during wargames. Additional CustomGPTs we developed for professional military education simulate expertise in competition between the United States and China in the Pacific and historical great-power competition.

A New Paradigm: Doubling Down on What Works

The success of this academic year’s AI experiments encouraged me to go all-in on AI in the future. That, of course, means that much of what I currently do has to change.

What’s Going Away

The first removal is an easy decision: Writing assessments are banished forever. I will still have students write for various projects, but I expect them to use AI heavily. Then, by having them turn in a list of their prompts, I can actually track their critical thinking as they proceed through the assigned task.

If I can’t assess writing, what’s left?

To a degree, I am still working through this problem, but what I am sure of is that in AI-world, assessments will have to be made almost entirely through hugely increasing contact with students. That brings us to our next significant change; for most of my classes, I am also doing away with large seminars in favor of something approaching an Oxford tutorial. Each seminar will be broken in half so that I am teaching two groups of 7–8 people, instead of 15–16. In such an intimate setting, there will be no place for students to hide, making it easy to assess who has mastered the material and who is faking it.

Also, like an Oxford tutorial, I am no longer in the business of imparting knowledge. Going forward, I expect students to teach themselves – true active learning – before they enter the classroom. Never again will I have to pretend to be conducting a Socratic seminar, where I do almost all of the talking and everyone makes believe that answering a few student questions is an intellectual give-and-take.

I know that professional military education professors give a lot of lip service to employing the Socratic method but, within professional military education, I almost never see it done. And that is for a very good reason: It is nearly impossible to use the Socratic method when the student’s depth of knowledge on any particular topic is almost always limited to what they most likely read the night before.

Lectures have always been the easy button for professors and students. They don’t demand much from the professor, as once the notes are made and the PowerPoint is built, most lectures can be put in the rinse and repeat cycle for years. They are also good for the ego, for what professor does not want to show off how much we know to a trapped audience. Unfortunately, most — close to all — lectures have the mental shelf life of a firefly, presented in an hour and mostly forgotten in the next hour.

For decades, we have known the most effective learning methods are active learning approaches (wargames, staff rides, well-prepared case studies) coupled with self-directed learning, where the students teach themselves at their own pace. I have been employing active learning techniques to the greatest extent possible for well over a decade. Now, thanks to AI tools, I can also employ self-directed learning throughout the course. Thus, I will transition to become a “learning coach” while the students teach themselves and then have an opportunity to impress me with their knowledge.

What’s Coming On

To accomplish this, I am using AI tools to create student learning modules for each segment of my courses. Let’s take an example. I plan on teaching multiple classes on the Napoleonic era in the next academic year. To help the students teach themselves, there will be a “Napoleon Folder” they can access on the school’s shared drive. Inside this folder will be several subfolders.

The first of these folders contains the course card and class notes. The course card sets out the learning objectives, while the class notes spell out how the students will meet expectations. The class notes also lay out what is available to help them. This includes links to any informative videos, maps, and other helpful material. Most crucially, the class notes include a link to a CustomGPT on the Napoleonic Era (give it a try). I am building a separate CustomGPT for every topic I teach. All of them are filled with carefully curated published material and have an embedded prompt to help answer student questions. Not only does the CustomGPT know almost everything there is to know about the Napoleonic era, but it is also available to students 24/7, every day of the week. Note, I am using OpenAI’s GPT-4o for this, but most major large language models have similar tools (e.g., Google Gemini’s Gems or Anthropic’s Projects inside of its Claude models). For some courses, such as World War II, there will be multiple CustomGPTs, each focused on a different part of the whole (e.g., one will have an operational focus, while others will focus on economics/mobilization, wartime politics, or diplomacy and war termination).

A separate folder contains all of the student readings, which includes every reading required along with a separate folder for supplemental (optional) readings. I have been increasingly moving away from giving students essays or individual chapters to read in favor of having them read entire books. To make sure they have the time to do this, I am teaching fewer topics, but for those crucial topics that remain I am adding much more depth, which takes multiple class periods.

Still, there is only so much time in a day, so to help them get through the assigned books and to focus on the key topics, I have divided each book into 5 to 7 sections and created an AI-produced study guide for each section. For those few times when I still use shorter readings (essays, chapters), they will also each have an AI-produced study guide.

In the final folder is a series of AI-produced audio supplements. I am using NotebookLM (a Google product) to take each section of the required readings and create audio podcasts for each. This allows students to listen to two AI-podcasters discuss the big themes within the readings. These podcasts are not yet perfect, but they almost always hit on all the key themes I would have addressed in my old-style seminars. I also plan to use ElevenLabs to create a number of other audio projects during the course of the year. The intent is to allow the students to learn during periods when they have previously been unable to study (commuting, exercising, etc.).

These class folders will be available to students at the start of the academic year, allowing them to set their own pace for learning the material. Thus, when they arrive in class, I expect them all to have achieved a level of expertise that allows for much deeper discussions than have been possible before.

I am still pondering my exact role and the overall format for class sessions. But I think I will start seminars with a 10- to 15-minute talk to set the key themes and ideas that I would like to hear discussed and then elicit ideas on additional themes that caught the interest of students. From that point on, my role will be to facilitate the discussion with a light touch, to move the topics along, correct crucial points of fact, and insert some probing questions when discussion slows. My overriding goal is to ensure that most of these discussions take place between the students with as little reference to myself as possible.

Not all classes will follow the Oxford tutorial format, as I plan to enhance my small group classes with seminars designed for the students to work through specific case studies. These will be team events and follow the Harvard model to the greatest extent possible. There will also be periodic staff rides and wargaming will, of course, continue. Finally, I am not so naïve as to think I can completely do away with lecture-based classes. But they will be few and far between.

AI and Professors

I worry most professors will continue to shun the use of AI to the greatest extent possible. I sincerely believe, however, that those who take this route are doing themselves and their students a disservice. Besides, the battle to restrict AI in professional military education classrooms is already lost. Still, I do not believe that AI can replace Title 10 professors (yet), and may never be able to do so. However, I am certain that AI will soon make the bottom half of all professors superfluous and that any professor who does not integrate AI will be replaced by a professor employing AI. Before another year is out, professor-AI teams will be the elite of every university, professional military education included.

There is little in the world of academia that the AI cannot do. For instance, I gave an AI a few sentences of instructions to teach it to grade papers the same way I would (a personal rubric). I then ran 30 student papers from a few years back through an AI tool. Amazingly, the AI went 30-for-30 and gave every paper the same grade I did. I then asked the AI to give me five strengths and weaknesses of the papers, focusing on the key arguments made by the students. The result was sobering: The AI, in about half the cases, did better than I had and at least as well in all of the rest. More unsettling, it took about a minute to do each task.

In addition to some of the AI uses outlined above, AI tools can also reduce the time professors require for many other crucial tasks by orders of magnitude. For instance, AI tools can put together entire syllabi, along with recommended readings and assignment ideas, in moments. I now use my AI-buddies to prepare detailed lecture notes based on my course material and to help create case studies to support classes. Another Marine Corps University professor is using AI tools to help design one of the more complex wargames our students use.

Regarding my research, writing, and publication, AI tools have upended everything I used to do and increased my productivity by a seriously high multiple. As a sidenote, this essay may be the last essay or book I write without AI help (except to run Grammarly on the finished draft).

Last week, I started researching a new book. As a first step, I broke down the central themes and then listed all of the key characters that will appear in the work. I then had OpenAI’s Deep Research do a separate paper on each theme and person. The result was a slew of essays of 4,000–10,000 words, all well-sourced. I then asked the AIs to recommend the best source material for each theme and person. About half the sources were in one of four languages, none of which I can read. Fortunately, the AIs can read and translate them in minutes.

Still, the AIs are not perfect. For instance, they cannot look behind paywalls, so they are unable to access databases that contain academic research products like JSTOR. And you always have to check their work. It is best, therefore, to think of them as really smart Ph.D.-level interns or research assistants who have to be checked up on. Moreover, AIs do not negate the need for archival research for academic books.

What the AI did do, though, was — in a single weekend — to provide me with foundational research that previously would have taken me months to assemble. The AIs even summarized each work for me and gave me a ton of ideas on how to approach different book themes from unique perspectives. Additionally, if you are doing archival research and run across notes scribbled in illegible handwriting, an AI can decipher it instantly and turn hard-to-read fonts or even medieval script into a Word document in only moments.

I plan to use AI tools for data analysis, data visualization, citation fixing, and summarizing research material. I also plan to let an AI review my draft. Although any large language model can undertake this task, I have created another CustomGPT that will look at written works in the role of a peer reviewer for an academic press. This CustomGPT looks for things such as novelty of ideas, innovative approaches, data credibility, clarity, weaknesses and gaps in the work’s arguments, up-to-date references, and much more. It also gives the paper a grade between one and six, similar to an actual peer reviewer. Finally, it will offer concrete recommendations to improve the work. To my way of thinking, anyone who submits a paper or book to an academic publisher without using this or a similar tool first is being foolish.

Conclusion

AI represents a transformative force in professional military education, crucial for maintaining relevance, enhancing efficiency, and radically improving the depth of learning. As AI advances exponentially, resistance or ambivalence toward its use within professional military education classrooms is not merely impractical — it is strategically negligent. AI tools already excel in critical educational functions such as data analysis, personalized learning, visualization, and real-time feedback, capabilities far surpassing traditional educational methods.

The implementation of AI empowers instructors to transition from conventional lecture-based teaching to roles as active learning coaches, thereby fostering genuinely student-centered and self-directed learning environments. AI’s integration enhances critical thinking by encouraging students to interrogate, refine, and develop insights through iterative interactions with intelligent tools. Moreover, by delegating routine tasks such as curriculum development, class preparation, and grading to AI, educators gain substantial time to dedicate toward meaningful engagement with students, enhancing the quality and impact of interactions.

In the rapidly evolving professional contexts professional military education students will enter, proficiency with AI tools will not be optional but essential. Professional military education institutions that proactively incorporate AI will produce graduates far better equipped for strategic decision-making, adaptive problem-solving, and innovative leadership. Conversely, institutions or educators resisting this shift risk rapidly becoming obsolete.

Ultimately, the critical integration of AI into professional military education promises not only to revolutionize educational methodologies but also to create adaptive leaders who are thoroughly prepared to confront the complexities of future military and strategic landscapes.

Become a Member

James Lacey, Ph.D., is the Horner chair of war studies at Marine Corps University. He is the author of The Washington War and the forthcoming book, The Year God Died.

The author used ChatGPT4 to draft portions of this article, especially the conclusion.

Image: Midjourney.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by James Lacey · April 3, 2025

17. 'The Greatest Soldier in American History' Took a Tank Round to the Leg and Kept Fighting

Another example of truth is stranger than fiction and you cannot make this stuff up.

What an American hero.

'The Greatest Soldier in American History' Took a Tank Round to the Leg and Kept Fighting

military.com · by Blake Stilwell · April 1, 2025

On Sept. 4, 1944, Capt. Matt Urban (born Matty Urbanowitz) was carried off a battlefield near Philippeville, Belgium. He'd been given his last rites and was not expected to survive the machine gun rounds that hit him in the neck. But not only did he survive, he returned to duty, his neck wounds unique only in that they kept him from a combat command. The truth was that they were just the latest in a long line of wounds.

Urban had been fighting World War II for as long as the United States was in the war. A graduate of Cornell University, he attended the school through a ROTC scholarship and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army in May 1941. So when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor that December, Urban was ready to respond in kind. Although he never saw the Pacific Theater, he instead fought in six campaigns throughout Europe and North Africa and was wounded seven times.

The only reason Urban didn't receive the Medal of Honor for single-handedly breaking an entire battalion through France while wounded was because the people who were supposed to recommend him for the award were killed or captured. But the accounts of everyone who watched him mount a tank under heavy fire in Normandy were "remarkably consistent" even 35 years later: Matt Urban was fearless in the face of the enemy.

Army Lt. Col. Matt Urban, after receiving the Medal of Honor in 1980. (U.S. Army)

Urban began his Army career with 60th Infantry Regiment, 9th Infantry Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and would end up spending much of the war with his unit, eventually rising to battalion commander. Although severely wounded, he would stay in the theater leading his men in some form until they all went home after the war's end -- and there was a lot of fighting in between.

Urban first saw combat in November 1942 during Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa. The 60th Infantry landed on the Moroccan coast, fighting the Vichy French. By February of the following year, Urban and the 60th Infantry were fighting the Germans in Tunisia. His unit was hit on all four sides by two enemy battalions. After four hours of fighting, the Americans had held firm. His unit received a Presidential Unit Citation while Urban received shrapnel from a grenade and his first Silver Star.

A few months later, Urban and the 60th Infantry landed at Sicily, where they were instrumental in breaking a stalemate in the center of the islands. On Aug. 5, 1943, under the cover of darkness, the 60th crept through the mountains toward the contested, mountainous village of Troina. German and Allied artillery were dueling for supremacy in the area, because it was perfect for providing support fire in any direction. The 60th surprised the German artillery, forcing not only its withdrawal, but the withdrawal of all Axis forces in the area. Urban received a second Silver Star and was sent to England to prepare for the Allied invasion of Europe.

Matt Urban during World War II. (U.S. Army)

Urban didn't land on Utah Beach on D-Day, but that didn't spare him from any intense fighting. Like many Allied infantry units, he got caught in the hedgerows of the French countryside. He arrived in France on June 11, 1944, and was facing down Germans three days later. As his company was held up by two incoming enemy tanks, their bazooka gunner went down. Urban called on an ammo carrier to follow him as he picked up the bazooka and took out both of them.

That same day, he was staring down German tanks with a bazooka yet again, this time near Orglandes, but the German fired first. The 37-mm tank gun round tore through his leg, but he refused to leave the field. After a medic attended to his wound, he kept directing the action while being carried on a stretcher. It wasn't until he was wounded again the next day (this time in the arm) that he was forced to a field hospital. Surgeons worked on his tank-shredded calf and then sent him to England.

While Urban recuperated, the 60th Infantry pushed ahead across the French countryside. By July 25, they were near the French commune of Saint-Lô. Back in England, Urban had taken to training troops who were bound for Normandy so he wouldn't be evacuated to the United States. When a group of them boarded a troop carrier bound for the front, Urban simply hopped on board. He showed up at the 2nd Battalion's command post with a limp and a cane to take command of his old unit.

A U.S. infantry patrol picks its way through the bombed-out ruins of the town of Saint-Lo, France, in July 1944. (U.S. Army)

When Urban finally caught up with his unit, they were held up by two destroyed Allied tanks, a third with no gunner or commander and a hail of intense enemy fire. He created a plan of attack, but the tank's officer and another soldier were killed trying to get to their tank. Urban, despite watching two fully capable people being gunned down in the same attempt, crawled to and mounted the tank with his bad leg and took the role of both machine gunner and commander.

The tank lurched forward as he blasted away at the Germans. The entire battalion, inspired by what they had witnessed, also moved forward and overran the German lines. Urban would be wounded by shrapnel yet again, this time taking the blow to his chest. Just a few days later, the 2nd Battalion commander who recommended Urban for the Medal of Honor was killed in action. His command post clerk, who was actually writing the recommendation, was captured by the Germans. Urban still refused evacuation as they pressed onward toward Belgium.

Just a month later, in September 1944, Urban and the 60th Infantry were attempting to cross the Meuse River at a heavily defended crossing near Heer. He would be shot in the neck while charging a German machine-gun nest with grenades. He ultimately survived, but his larynx was permanently disabled. He was promoted to major and sent to England once more to recover. By December 1944, he was well enough to take a liberty pass to Scotland, but instead of heading north, he once again rejoined his men across the English Channel at Elsenborn, Germany. But with his permanently raspy voice, he was refused a combat command and sent back to England.

Urban would stay in the Army until after the war was over. He returned home to Michigan, where he spent the rest of his life. Staff Sgt. Earl G. Evans, the command post clerk who was captured by the Germans, finished writing Urban's Medal of Honor recommendation, but it seemed no one read it until June 1978. That's when one of his men submitted a Freedom of Information Act request about it. They wanted to know why he had never received the award. The Army had no objections about it, so it finally went forward.

President Jimmy Carter presented Matt Urban with the Medal of Honor on July 19, 1980. (The White House)

On July 19, 1980, President Jimmy Carter presented the Medal of Honor to Urban in a White House ceremony. With a reading of his lengthy medal citation, the president called Urban "the greatest soldier in American history."

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military.com · by Blake Stilwell · April 1, 2025

18. US-Taiwan Defense Partnership 2.0: Taiwan’s UAV Doctrine and Industrial Base

I have listened to many experts describe how important drones are to current and future warfare.

This article offers a lot of food for thought and is useful for those of us not well versed in drones. Please go to the link below to view the graphics.

US-Taiwan Defense Partnership 2.0: Taiwan’s UAV Doctrine and Industrial Base

Taiwan’s drones are not just about national survival. They offer the U.S. a combat-ready, industrially capable partner in the most contested theater of 21st century geopolitics.

https://thediplomat.com/2025/04/us-taiwan-defense-partnership-2-0-taiwans-uav-doctrine-and-industrial-base/

By Hong-Lun Tiunn

April 02, 2025

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

As the U.S. and Taiwan deepen their security cooperation, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become a critical frontier for integrated deterrence. In today’s Indo-Pacific security environment, where deterrence hinges on distributed capabilities and resilient supply chains, Taiwan is redefining its defense strategy through UAVs, commonly called drones. Far from being peripheral, drones are emerging as a cornerstone of Taiwan’s operational doctrine and industrial policy. The strategic logic is clear: Taiwan’s drones are not just about national survival; they offer the United States a combat-ready, industrially capable partner in the most contested theater of 21st century geopolitics.

Taiwan’s drone strategy is shaped by three core objectives: (1) integrating autonomous systems into a layered, survivable defense posture; (2) building secure, scalable, and democratic drone production capacity; and (3) aligning industrial and operational frameworks with U.S. and allied priorities.

This article is an excerpt from an upcoming report on U.S.-Taiwan drone cooperation by the Research Institute for Democracy, Society, and Emerging Technology (DSET), a national think tank founded by the Taiwanese government and based in Taipei, Taiwan. The report draws on DSET’s interviews with Taiwanese stakeholders in the drone supply chain, including leading drone companies.

The following sections outline Taiwan’s phased UAV doctrine, current capability gaps, industrial mobilization strategy, and concrete opportunities for U.S.-Taiwan collaboration. Together, these elements form the backbone of a strategic partnership that strengthens deterrence before conflict.

Drones in Doctrine: A Three-Phase Battlefield Strategy

Taiwan’s Overall Defense Concept articulates a phased defense model: force protection, littoral dominance, and beachhead neutralization. Within this framework, UAVs play a central role in extending the reach of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, degrading adversary systems, and sustaining combat operations under electronic attack.

In the force protection phase, Group 4-5 UAVs such as the MQ-9B and Teng Yun provide persistent ISR, enabling early warning and resilient command-and-control (C2) in contested environments. During littoral dominance, Taiwan employs Group 2 and 3 systems – such as the Albatross and Chien-Hsiang – to conduct electronic warfare and suppress coastal sensors. Finally, in the beachhead neutralization phase, attritable UAVs like the ALTIUS 600M-V and Capricorn execute precision strikes on landing forces and feed real-time targeting to ground units.

As illustrated in Figure 1, this doctrine leverages the logic of attritability, redundancy, and mission-tailored deployment – mirroring elements of Ukraine’s battlefield success and aligning with U.S. concepts like the Replicator Initiative and “Hellscape” architecture.

Mapping the Fleet: Progress and Pain Points

Taiwan’s UAV fleet is sourced through three primary channels: the state-owned National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, private domestic manufacturers, and U.S. Foreign Military Sales. Platforms range from commercial ISR quadcopters to high-end strike drones.

As detailed in Figure 2, Taiwan’s systems span the U.S. group classification framework, but operational gaps remain in Group 3-5 strike platforms, loitering munitions, swarm ISR systems, and autonomous targeting. These gaps reflect broader challenges identified in Taiwan’s defense community, including insufficient domestic production of key UAV components such as flight control chips, vision sensing chips, and secure video transmission modules. Despite significant research and development (R&D) investments, Taiwan’s domestic industry still faces cost disadvantages compared to Chinese suppliers and remains reliant on foreign parts for critical systems.

To meet these challenges, Taiwan has set a 2028 target of fielding 700 military UAVs and 3,000 dual-use drones. Achieving this requires not just procurement but a full-spectrum industrial mobilization and focused support for building indigenous component capacity.

Building the Arsenal: From Concept to Capacity

Taiwan’s UAV industry is advancing under a unified national strategy centered on three priorities: information security, aviation safety, and defense readiness. Coordinated by the National Development Council and supported by the Vice Premier’s office, the plan aims to achieve $30 billion New Taiwan dollars in annual production value and scale to 15,000 units per month by 2028.

This initiative will unfold in two phases. Phase I focuses on foundational technologies: secure flight control chips, SDR modules, AI-enabled ISR software, and MIL-spec testing. Phase II emphasizes production scale-up, democratic supply chain integration, and export readiness. The government has launched targeted R&D subsidies for key UAV components, prioritizing development in three critical chip categories and two core software layers.

However, implementation challenges remain. Strategic misalignment between government policy and industry capacity has slowed progress. As one senior executive from Taiwan’s UAV sector explained during interviews conducted by DSET researchers, “Decoupling from Chinese components is Taiwan’s opportunity – but we are not the only ones who can do this. Our advantage lies in our flexibility: if there are orders, we can deliver volume.” Larger firms push for deep specialization in advanced chips, while smaller companies advocate broader subsidy distribution. International demand remains uncertain as wartime-driven orders fluctuate, and firms face regulatory hurdles including strict Know Your Customer requirements for dual-use drone exports. To stabilize the industry, stakeholders are urging increased military procurement and more robust international cooperation mechanisms.

Taiwan’s strategy emphasizes “three chips and two software”: resilient hardware and secure digital platforms. These include GPS-independent navigation, encrypted communication, and NATO-aligned airworthiness standards. The Chiayi UAV Industrial Park serves as the anchor for this industrial buildout and is central to Taiwan’s ambition of becoming a regional drone manufacturing hub.

From Readiness to Reciprocity: What Taiwan Offers – and Seeks

Taiwan’s value proposition is straightforward. It offers a defense-ready drone ecosystem mapped to its three-phase operational doctrine, with mission-aligned UAVs – from ISR to loitering munitions to saturation-strike platforms – tailored for frontline Indo-Pacific use. Its production infrastructure is real and scaling, and its supply chain is secure, transparent, and non-red. Taiwan also brings a legacy of indigenous UAV development dating back to the 1970s, with lessons learned from recent procurement initiatives and public-private collaboration models. The September 2022 commitment to procure 3,000 UAVs signaled a turning point, demonstrating Taiwan’s serious investment in building industrial scale.

What Taiwan seeks is focused collaboration: joint UAV platform development tailored to frontline mission roles, streamlined technology transfer mechanisms that prioritize IP protection and encryption safeguards, and operational integration into U.S. Indo-Pacific logistics and deterrence planning. As emphasized by a systems integrator interviewed as part of DSET’s industry engagement, “What we hope for in Taiwan-U.S. collaboration is market access and technology sharing – especially in optical payloads and data transmission.” Taiwan also seeks formal inclusion in Blue UAS and other allied drone architecture frameworks.

As summarized in Table 1, Taiwan’s is not asking for open-ended assistance. It is making a reciprocal offer: to co-produce, co-develop, and co-defend.

Conclusion: The Window for Action Is Now

Taiwan’s drone strategy is not a speculative vision. It is a doctrine-driven, industry-enabled framework grounded in survivability, scalability, and partnership. It complements U.S. priorities in the Indo-Pacific by offering a forward-positioned, technologically credible, and operationally aligned partner.

The success of this strategy depends on deeper institutional frameworks and mutual commitment. Taiwan’s position as a hub of semiconductor and smart systems innovation enables it to shoulder greater responsibilities in defense tech. At the same time, U.S. political will and streamlined policy frameworks – particularly around International Traffic in Arms Regulations compliance and R&D funding – are essential to unlocking the full potential of this partnership.

Through joint UAV development, the U.S. and Taiwan can create a resilient, scalable uncrewed systems architecture that enhances deterrence, reduces allied risk, and complicates adversary planning. This is not about aid; it is about allied burden-sharing before the crisis. Taiwan stands ready to partner on the future of drone warfare. The question is whether the U.S. will seize this opportunity and build on it through sustained, next-phase integration.

Authors

Guest Author

Hong-Lun Tiunn

Hong-Lun Tiunn is a deputy director of the National Security Research Program at the Research Institute for Democracy, Society, and Emerging Technology (DSET), a national think tank founded by the Taiwanese government and based in Taipei, Taiwan. He focuses on Taiwan's defense and technology, with research topics including U.S.-Taiwan arms sales, Taiwan’s drone production, and the country’s communication resilience during wartime, including satellites and submarine cables. The opinions expressed are his own and do not represent DSET or the Taiwanese government.

19. The Brewing Transatlantic Tech War

Excerpts:

Google and Microsoft currently control two-thirds of the European market for cloud computing. However, European politicians, academics, think tanks, and entrepreneurs are already converging on the notion that Europe needs to build its own cloud resources to gain the strategic autonomy that it needs to wean itself from U.S. technology. A European court ruling against EU-U.S. data flows would dramatically accelerate these plans. So, too, could sweeping U.S. trade tariffs, which Europe might respond to by restricting U.S. technology services.

If that happens, Big Tech will have no one to blame but itself. Its response to geopolitical changes has been to build a closer relationship with the U.S. government, anticipating that it could continue to thrive in a world of U.S.-Chinese rivalry. Tech leaders willingly embraced Trump after his reelection, when they could have kept their distance. Big Tech companies may be about to discover that not only are they never going to have access to the Chinese market but they are increasingly persona non grata in European markets, too.

These fraying ties may mark the end of the dream of a global Internet, in which everyone shares the same services. Just as in China, European platforms may continue to use the Internet as the technological foundation for their services. But they will begin to construct their own alternative platforms on top, walled away from U.S. interference through Europe-only business models and strong encryption. This will not just lower U.S. profits; it will further damage the transatlantic security relationship. Schmidt’s prophecy may come true a decade later than he expected, and U.S. tech companies will have been complicit in bringing it to fruition.

The Brewing Transatlantic Tech War

Foreign Affairs · by More by Henry Farrell · April 3, 2025

How Silicon Valley Got Entangled in Geopolitics—and Lost

April 3, 2025

At Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, October 2021 Carlos Barria / Reuters

HENRY FARRELL is Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University.

ABRAHAM NEWMAN is John Powers Chair in International Business Diplomacy at the Walsh School of Foreign Service and a Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University.

They are the authors of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

More by Abraham Newman

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Technology companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and OpenAI need to wake up to an unpleasant reality. By getting close to U.S. President Donald Trump, they risk losing access to one of their biggest markets: Europe.

Just a decade ago, these companies believed that information technology would limit the power of governments and liberalize the world. But then, as globalization withered and the U.S. confrontation with China took hold, they tried to take advantage of growing geopolitical divides, enlisting on Washington’s side in the new technological cold war. Now, the new Trump administration appears less enthusiastic about fighting China than it is about subjugating U.S. allies in the European Union and elsewhere. U.S. tech companies extract billions of dollars in profits from European markets. Although many of these tech companies would love to take the EU regulatory state down a peg, they don’t want to get caught in the crossfire of an all-out EU-U.S. tech war.

Unfortunately for Big Tech, such a war may be about to erupt. The Trump administration’s evident contempt for Europe may not only endanger the business interests of European companies. It could also spell the end of today’s open Internet, as Europeans look to build alternative platforms to those of the giant U.S. tech firms.

Silicon Valley’s efforts to cater to the Trump administration threaten to undermine Big Tech’s business model across much of the world. As tech executives have embraced the new U.S. government, they have increasingly embroiled themselves in the brewing conflict between European regulators in Brussels and an executive in Washington acting with striking unilateralism. As a result, Europeans are starting to take a second look at their reliance on U.S. cloud, platform, and satellite providers. They increasingly see such dependency not just as a competitiveness issue but also as a critical strategic vulnerability that could be exploited against them. Most worrying for U.S. tech companies is that even if European politicians are reluctant to act, European judges, regulators, and activists may act in their stead and push to sever data flows between the United States and Europe.

This is not the first time that a rift has opened between the United States and Europe on technology. A decade ago, the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the United States had been spying on European leaders, revelations that provoked EU threats to limit flows of personal data to the United States. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, explained in a 2019 book that the uproar around Snowden’s disclosures had created a lasting “chasm between governments and the tech sector.” When the European Court of Justice ruled in 2015 against an arrangement that allowed data on EU citizens to be sent to the United States, Eric Schmidt, then the executive chairman of Alphabet, lamented that the EU might break the global Internet, “one of the greatest achievements of humanity.”

The global Internet will likely continue to exist in the form of shared technical infrastructure. But if U.S. companies persist in identifying with a U.S. administration that is hostile to Europe, it is likely that Europe will want its own companies and platforms to build technological fortifications against its former ally and protector. Chinese firms will try to expand in Europe, too, although they may also face greater public skepticism. Either way, the end result will be lower profits, weakened American innovation, and a more isolated and insecure United States.

JELLO ON THE WALL

Not too long ago, things weren’t so complicated. Silicon Valley’s business model seemed to go hand in hand with Washington’s geopolitical consensus. The U.S. government and U.S. tech companies agreed that the future lay in building a world that was safe for liberal politics and economics. The spread of the Internet and social media would inexorably undermine the power of autocratic governments. President Bill Clinton famously told China in 2000 that trying to control the Internet was like trying to nail Jello to the wall, and President George W. Bush funded the creation and spread of “liberation technology” that might nibble away at the foundations of dictatorship.

When social media seemed to amplify demonstrations in Iran in 2009, the Goldman Sachs executive Jared Cohen was working in President Barack Obama’s State Department. He asked Twitter to delay a technical downtime so that the platform would remain accessible to protesters. To be sure, the protests weren’t solely dependent on social media. Cohen would nevertheless go on to co-author a book with Schmidt, celebrating the power of technology to spread freedom and underpin shared prosperity.

U.S. tech firms could lose access to the European market.

Other technology companies supported this missionary zeal to remake the planet. In a notorious 2016 internal presentation, Andrew Bosworth, one of the “most trusted lieutenants” of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, told Facebook staff that someone might perhaps die because of bullying on Facebook’s services or in a terrorist attack coordinated with Facebook’s tools. Nonetheless, as the journalists Ryan Mac, Charlie Warzel, and Alex Kantrowitz reported in BuzzFeed in 2018, Bosworth argued that Facebook would go on. Its mission to connect the world, including, eventually, China, was “de facto good,” even if a few people had to suffer along the way.

Certainly, people suffered. In the early 2010s, as the autocratic regime in Myanmar seemed to start opening up, technology evangelists such as Schmidt argued that the country should embrace Internet freedom on the principle that “the answer to bad speech is more speech.” Government officials and religious extremists in Myanmar discovered other possibilities. They used Facebook to propagandize against the Rohingya minority, helping fuel a widespread program of genocide in 2016. Facebook lacked the technical and local language capacities to see what was happening, let alone to do anything about it.

Connecting the world did not, in fact, convert illiberal societies to liberalism. After Trump became president in 2016, many worried that the Internet instead made previously liberal societies more illiberal, drenching publics with disinformation. Some of Trump’s critics used sketchy arguments and weak empirical evidence to accuse Facebook and other social media services of having allowed Russian propagandists to manipulate Americans into voting for a leader with authoritarian predilections. Social media services responded by introducing new antidisinformation tools in the United States and other core markets, while often skimping on such safeguards in poorer countries.

LINES IN THE SAND

Another important transformation occurred around this time. During the first Trump administration, most U.S. politicians became China hawks. They began to think of technology not as a means of liberating China from autocracy but rather as a way to hobble Beijing’s ambitions. When Google’s “Project Dragonfly”—a planned censorship-friendly search engine for the Chinese market—was leaked in 2018, Democrats and Republicans both condemned it, while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that it was “inexplicable” that Google was still investing in an autocratic country whose values were so at odds with those of the United States. Google abandoned its ambitions to return to China.

Big Tech tacked with the political winds, embracing the new technological confrontation. Business leaders also began to seriously rethink the role of technology in a world of geopolitical rivalry. Schmidt, who had stepped down from his role leading Google’s parent company, chaired a highly influential bipartisan commission whose final report in 2021 argued that the United States needed to beat China at artificial intelligence. It could do so by both building up its technological strengths at home and denying China access to the specialized semiconductors best suited to train the most advanced AI models.

Others combined grand geopolitical theory with narrowly self-interested pleading. Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, told Congress in 2020 that if U.S. authorities acted to regulate Meta too harshly or break it up, the United States would actually be helping Chinese competitors such as TikTok undermine American technological dominance. A plethora of Silicon Valley companies that had previously held the U.S. national security state at a distance began to realize that it offered an enormous new business market and joined the likes of the data analytics firm Palantir in trying to sell their services and platforms to the government.

U.S. tech seemed well positioned for Trump’s return to power this year, even before the billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk became Trump’s universal plenipotentiary. Before last year’s election, influential figures such as Zuckerberg and the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos began cozying up to the new regime; Zuckerberg courted Trump in private phone calls and, over the summer of 2024, removed restrictions that had been placed on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, while Bezos scrapped a planned endorsement by The Washington Post—the paper he owns—for Trump’s rival, Kamala Harris. After Trump won, both Zuckerberg and Bezos made pilgrimages to visit the president-elect at his residence, Mar-a-Lago. Trump clearly relished their obeisance, commenting in December that “everyone wanted to be my friend.” For their part, many tech leaders were hopeful that Trump’s victory would be a boon for them; Trump seemed hawkish on China and willing to deregulate tech. Companies such as Facebook and Google had given up on expanding into the China market anyway and hoped instead for a Trump administration that would gear up against their Chinese competitors and also push back against European regulations that Zuckerberg described in January as tantamount to a “censorship” regime.

TRANSATLANTIC DECOUPLING?

Big Tech’s leaders certainly didn’t want to make an enemy of Trump and had some reason to believe that he might help them. Tech CEOs and owners, including Bezos, Schmidt’s successor Sundar Pichai, and Zuckerberg were willing to be displayed at Trump’s second inauguration like so many hunting trophies mounted on the wall.

Unfortunately, none of them are really getting what they hoped for. To be sure, Trump’s second administration dislikes both domestic regulations and EU rules. However, at least for the moment, the government is continuing an antitrust case against Google that stemmed from investigations in Trump’s first term and is preparing actions against Amazon, Apple, and Meta. Trump seems happy to allow the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok to keep operating in the United States, perhaps paving the way for a broader deal with China. And the Trump administration has evinced naked hostility to the EU, as evidenced by the private contempt for Europe expressed by Vice President JD Vance in leaked Signal messages. Rather than renegotiating the United States’ technology relationship with Europe on better terms, Trump’s demands that Europe back off from regulating U.S. tech companies (and that Denmark hand over Greenland) may lead Europeans to ask a question that U.S. tech firms don’t want them to ask: Is Europe’s reliance on American tech not just a competitiveness problem but a critical national security vulnerability?

At a trade fair in Hanover, Germany, April 2024 Annegret Hilse / Reuters

Even during Trump’s first term, many Europeans found such questions unthinkable. The United States had supported Europe for decades. Although Europeans resented the dominance of American Big Tech, they had never seen an alternative or even necessarily wanted one. Casper Bowden, a British privacy advocate and former Microsoft employee, recounted how Europeans literally laughed at him when he warned about the surveillance risks of U.S. cloud computing in the years before the Snowden revelations.

Now, everyone in Europe can see the risks of relying on U.S. tech. The most obvious example is Starlink, the satellite communications firm owned by Musk. When the United States wanted to put pressure on Ukraine regarding possible negotiations to end the war with Russia, the White House suggested that it would deny access to Starlink, which provided the Ukrainian military with critical battlefield resources. Other European countries, now fearing that the United States might sell them out for temporary advantage, took note. They, too, depend on Starlink and other software, hardware, and technology for their daily operations. Europeans are moving away from Starlink as quickly as they can, with the European Commission investigating how it can support domestic alternatives. European car buyers, meanwhile, are turning away from Musk’s Tesla. Unfortunately for Silicon Valley, in the eyes of many Europeans, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure business cloud services, and Facebook, too, all risk becoming damaged brands.

It’s not just that technology might be turned off but that it might be used against European interests. Musk’s intervention on the side of far-right groups in Germany and the United Kingdom, attacking mainstream parties, has many European capitals on edge. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has taken the argument a step further, warning that “tech billionaires want to overthrow democracy.”

BREAK THE INTERNET

There is an even greater threat to U.S. tech companies that has gotten far less attention. In sharp contrast to today’s United States, the European Union has a strong commitment to the rule of law, obliging politicians to comply with judge’s rulings. The Trump administration’s scofflaw tendencies and tech companies’ increasing hostility toward European values may lead to the collapse of the EU-U.S. arrangements on which tech companies such as Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft depend.

Schmidt worried a decade ago that an EU-U.S. data dispute might collapse the Internet. Snowden showed how U.S. intelligence agencies had illicitly accessed European social media and Internet search data, breaching European privacy rules. That dispute was patched over by an ungainly agreement, negotiated between the European Commission and the U.S. government. The EU agreed to allow data flows, as long as the United States committed to protecting the privacy rights of EU citizens and offered some means of redress if they were violated by U.S. surveillance agencies. The keystone of the arrangement was a 2016 U.S. commitment that Washington’s surveillance agencies would respect European privacy rights through a process overseen by an obscure U.S. body, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

This arrangement made nobody happy but provided legal and political cover for flows of data across the Atlantic. Meta continued to operate Facebook in Europe, and companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were able to host Europeans’ personal data on their cloud-computing platforms. For those companies, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Google alone makes over $100 billion in sales in Europe.

That arrangement is now on the verge of disintegrating, with the operations of U.S. tech companies in Europe in serious jeopardy. The Trump administration has not only fired most of the PCLOB’s members; it has also made clear in multiple ways that it will not comply with those legal rules that it finds inconvenient. The executive order that formed the PCLOB is under review—but even if it formally stays on the books, no one trusts the Trump administration to abide by it.

Everyone in Europe can see the risks of relying on U.S. tech.

This potentially opens up the arrangement to challenge by activists such as Max Schrems, a canny Austrian privacy advocate, whose legal complaints led to the collapse of two previous arrangements. As Schrems’s organization has already warned, it may soon be illegal for any European entity to use U.S. cloud services to store personal data or for companies such as Meta to move data on European citizens back and forth between Europe and the United States. That would likely destroy Meta’s business model while making it difficult for companies such as Google and Microsoft to offer safe cloud services in Europe. Even if they segregate European data from U.S. data, they will be vulnerable to U.S. demands to share information held on their European servers or to stop offering robust encryption to European customers.

This time, there will be no plausible agreement between the two regimes. European judges and national privacy regulators will be extremely skeptical of promises from the Trump administration, and rightly so. European judges are not subject to the same political pressures as European politicians or European Commission officials. They see themselves as the guardians of national laws and a European constitutional order, which Trump and his officials want to undermine. Nor will judges be sympathetic to U.S. tech companies. A decade ago, these companies were able to disassociate themselves from the excesses of the U.S. government, deploring the U.S. surveillance programs that they sometimes had been unaware of. Now, their owners and CEOs have quite literally lined up to display their support for Trump, undermining possible excuses and claims of independence.

Google and Microsoft currently control two-thirds of the European market for cloud computing. However, European politicians, academics, think tanks, and entrepreneurs are already converging on the notion that Europe needs to build its own cloud resources to gain the strategic autonomy that it needs to wean itself from U.S. technology. A European court ruling against EU-U.S. data flows would dramatically accelerate these plans. So, too, could sweeping U.S. trade tariffs, which Europe might respond to by restricting U.S. technology services.

If that happens, Big Tech will have no one to blame but itself. Its response to geopolitical changes has been to build a closer relationship with the U.S. government, anticipating that it could continue to thrive in a world of U.S.-Chinese rivalry. Tech leaders willingly embraced Trump after his reelection, when they could have kept their distance. Big Tech companies may be about to discover that not only are they never going to have access to the Chinese market but they are increasingly persona non grata in European markets, too.

These fraying ties may mark the end of the dream of a global Internet, in which everyone shares the same services. Just as in China, European platforms may continue to use the Internet as the technological foundation for their services. But they will begin to construct their own alternative platforms on top, walled away from U.S. interference through Europe-only business models and strong encryption. This will not just lower U.S. profits; it will further damage the transatlantic security relationship. Schmidt’s prophecy may come true a decade later than he expected, and U.S. tech companies will have been complicit in bringing it to fruition.

HENRY FARRELL is Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University.

ABRAHAM NEWMAN is John Powers Chair in International Business Diplomacy at the Walsh School of Foreign Service and a Professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University.

They are the authors of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Henry Farrell · April 3, 2025

20. The Day Trump’s Tariffs Shook Wall Street and Corporate America

Guess it is still a good idea to keep that cash under the mattress (yes attempt at financial gallows humor).

But why the surprise? It is not like he did not give us months of warning.

Excerpts:

,,,President Trump told the world the new price for doing business in America. And it was steep.

Stock-market futures sank and the U.S. dollar slumped. Shares of some of America’s best-known businesses, from Apple and Nvidia to Nike and General Motors, sold off on fears that new trade barriers would swallow their profits and drive up prices to levels that would sap demand for their products.

As details of the announcement spread by text messages and tweets, executives started to realize that Trump’s tariff threats were becoming a harsh reality. Many executives and investors spent the hours after the Rose Garden ceremony trying to understand how far the contagion would spread. China and Europe were preparing their responses.

The Day Trump’s Tariffs Shook Wall Street and Corporate America

Markets tumble and executives scramble to grasp the scope and size of Trump’s trade barriers; ‘I almost couldn’t breathe.’

https://www.wsj.com/business/the-day-trumps-tariff-threats-turned-into-a-harsh-reality-for-ceos-and-investors-f0e58ad3?mod=business_lead_pos1

By Theo Francis

and Krystal Hur

Updated April 3, 2025 9:00 am ET

Traders working on the NYSE floor Wednesday, the day President Trump called ‘Liberation Day’ in announcing tariffs. Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg News

Key Points

What's This?

President Trump's 10% tariffs on imported goods, with higher levies on certain countries, have sent shock waves through the stock market and business community, with executives fearing the impact on profits and consumer demand.
China has pledged to retaliate against the tariffs, while other countries have adopted a more cautious approach. Some businesses welcome the tariffs as an incentive to move production back to the U.S., while others worry about the impact on their costs and the potential for a trade war.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has sought to calm markets, suggesting that tariffs may not cause price increases and that a trade war can be averted, but businesses remain concerned about the long-term impact of the tariffs.

Poster board in hand, President Trump told the world the new price for doing business in America. And it was steep.

Stock-market futures sank and the U.S. dollar slumped. Shares of some of America’s best-known businesses, from Apple and Nvidia to Nike and General Motors, sold off on fears that new trade barriers would swallow their profits and drive up prices to levels that would sap demand for their products.

As details of the announcement spread by text messages and tweets, executives started to realize that Trump’s tariff threats were becoming a harsh reality. Many executives and investors spent the hours after the Rose Garden ceremony trying to understand how far the contagion would spread. China and Europe were preparing their responses.

“It reminds me of trying to manage during Covid,” said Austin Ramirez, chief executive of Husco, which makes parts for automakers and other manufacturers. “The managerial time-suck that Covid was, this strikes me as the same thing.”

Dan Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities, also was hit with flashbacks to March 2020, when the onset of the Covid pandemic sent shock waves through Wall Street. “That almost looked like an Armageddon chart. My initial reaction was, worse than worst case. This is going to be an all-time panic moment,” said Ives. “I almost couldn’t breathe.”

Calls began pouring in after Trump’s press conference from investors in shock, Ives said, and after hours on the phone from Europe, the Middle East and Asia, he still needed to return some 50 calls. “Our reputation is made on these moments, rather than in the good times,” said Ives, adding that he pulled an all-nighter Tuesday and has been in “war rooms” all week.

Wall Street bankers and business leaders have spent weeks trying to understand—and shape—Trump’s ever-shifting tariff plans. Many also believed—as they were reassured by some in Trump’s inner circle—that the potential levies were negotiating tactics the businessman-turned-politician would use to extract concessions from trading partners and adversaries.

Instead, Trump unveiled 10% across-the-board tariffs, and even higher levies on a swath of countries including Japan, Europe, South Korea and Vietnam. The new levies on China will push up the costs of many goods from that country—from toothbrushes to televisions—by more than 50%. The 10% tariffs kick in on April 5 and the higher rates on April 9.

Markets promptly slumped across the globe. Investors fled risky stocks and retreated from the dollar, sheltering in the relative safety of government bonds and traditional haven currencies like the Japanese yen. The U.S. markets were poised to drop sharply at the open.

China called the tariffs “unilateral bullying” and pledged to retaliate, while other countries struck a more cautious tone. Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his government will try to negotiate to remove the tariffs, but won’t join a “race to the bottom” by retaliating, and India’s Trade Ministry, too, said it had no plans to immediately retaliate.

Brian Riley, CEO of Guardian Bikes, says Trump’s agenda ‘is a welcome departure from a trade and economic policy that prioritized offshoring production and cheap consumption.’ Photo: Michael Swenen for WSJ

Brian Riley, CEO of Guardian Bikes, was among the guests at the Rose Garden, one of the few business leaders sitting alongside auto workers and steelworkers. The mood was jubilant before Trump took to the podium. Jazz music played.

Riley welcomed the tariffs, even though they will squeeze his business this year. Guardian moved production of its children’s bicycles in 2022 from China to Seymour, Ind. While 90% of the components are imported from China, Riley had already put in place a plan to reduce that number to about 20% by the end of next year.

The tariffs provide incentive for Guardian to expand capacity at its Seymour facility and invest in building out the bicycle supply chain in the U.S. Trump’s agenda “is a welcome departure from a trade and economic policy that prioritized offshoring production and cheap consumption,” Riley said.

The mood was less joyous at Pulsar Products, a Cleveland supplier of stationery, novelty items and souvenirs. Employees held a “watch party” in the company’s boardroom to listen to Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement on a big-screen TV.

“As I looked around, I sensed a feeling of nausea,” said Pulsar CEO Eric Ludwig.

Employees are concerned not just with the impact on Pulsar, but also with what tariffs mean for their own wallets and the American people. “We are thinking our clothes are going to cost more,” he said. “Everything is going to jump.”

Pulsar has reduced the share of its supply coming from China to 50% from 80% over the last two years by moving some sourcing to Vietnam. One Pulsar employee is currently in Vietnam checking on production for the busy back-to-school season, set to arrive at U.S. retailers in July. Such shipments from Vietnam now face 46% tariffs.

Ludwig said he was hoping to hear the president offer tax credits or some other relief to help small businesses like his 36-person company through the tough adjustment period. The size of the new tariffs is the same for big companies and small businesses, “but the impact on smaller companies is bigger,” he said.

“We knew something would happen, but we didn’t know how dramatic the impact would be,” he said.

Victor Yarbrough, CEO at Brough Brothers Distillery in Louisville, Ky., was left wondering what retaliatory tariffs would bring. He recently invested in an expansion, with a strategy to send his excess spirits overseas. The tariffs complicate those plans.

“We are certain the EU is going to retaliate,” said Yarbrough. He also wondered how much money U.S. consumers would have to spend on his bourbon or rum if everything else gets more expensive. “It boils down to how much disposable income does one family have?,” he said.

For booze giant Diageo, there was some relief after the White House kept duty-free access to the U.S. for USMCA-compliant products. It had feared some of its bestselling brands in the U.S.—like Don Julio tequila from Mexico and Canadian whisky Crown Royal—could be hit by new levies, potentially hitting its operating profit by tens of millions of dollars a month. Shares in the London-listed company rose by almost 2% on Thursday.

News of the tariffs reverberated across Europe, from German car giants to luxury brands like Swiss watchmakers Vacheron Constantin and Piaget. Analysts at UBS think prices of luxury goods will go up 6% on average in the U.S., but a wider worry is that a trade war could tamp down demand in China. Together American and Chinese shoppers drive more than half of global luxury sales. That helped explain the sharp stock drop at Burberry, which was otherwise spared by the U.K.’s relatively lenient 10% tariff rate.

Some investors say that whiplash from Trump’s changing trade policy plans has left them unfazed on Liberation Day.

Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, said the 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada announced in February that were promptly delayed have primed investors for the dramatic nature of these announcements.

“Today is a day where investors are just beaten into acceptance,” she said.

Charts show reciprocal tariffs the U.S. is charging other countries. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

In an interview on CNN Wednesday night, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sought to calm markets, suggesting that tariffs might not cause price increases because U.S. companies will get their foreign vendors to eat the cost of the levies. He said his message to other countries was that a trade war could be averted.

“Everybody sit back. Take a deep breath. Don’t immediately retaliate,” Bessent said. “Let’s see where this goes. Because if you retaliate that’s how we get escalation.”

For Husco, the problem was the magnitude of Trump’s tariffs. “If there had been a 5% tariff, we could have worked through it—maybe absorbing it, maybe sharing some of it with our suppliers,” said Ramirez, the CEO.

Husco has revenues of about $500 million and three factories in the U.S., as well as plants in India, China and Europe, which mostly produce for those regions.

Instead of boosting U.S. production as the Trump administration hopes, the new tariffs are likely to lead Husco to shift some production out of its U.S. factories. The new tariffs mean it will no longer be cost-effective to import components to make products for export.

“It doesn’t make any sense to do that, I’m going to have make those products in another part of the world,” Ramirez said.

He said it would take years for any domestic alternatives for the components he imports to develop. “To reboot that sort of manufacturing here is going to take huge investment in plants and equipment—but also, we don’t have people who want to do that sort of work,” he said.

Write to Theo Francis at theo.francis@wsj.com and Krystal Hur at krystal.hur@wsj.com

21. Dismantling VOA and other U.S. Media is a Strategic Mistake

Of course I fully concur with Ambassador De Trani.

I am sitting here doing my daily news commentary wearing my VOA hat (that says A Free Press Matters). Coincidentally on my last appearance on VOA Washington Talk last month the staff gave me a VOA hat and T-shirt and I jokingly asked - are these parting gifts? For all the years I have worked with VOA this is the first time they handed out some swag.

This was the a VOA Washington Talk episode Ambassador DeTrani and I did together in January https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UMyKxXyGxc

Dismantling VOA and other U.S. Media is a Strategic Mistake

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/dismantling-voa-and-other-u-s-media-is-a-strategic-mistake?utm

Posted: April 3rd, 2025

By Ambassador Joseph DeTrani

Ambassador Joseph DeTrani served as the U.S. Representative to the Korea Energy Development Organization (KEDO), as well as former CIA director of East Asia Operations. He also served as Associate Director of National Intelligence and Mission Manager for North Korea, was the Special Envoy for the Six-Party Talks with North Korea, and served as the Director of the National Counter Proliferation Center, ODNI. He currently serves on the Board of Managers at Sandia National Laboratories.

OPINION — President Ronald Reagan believed in the power of communication. He aimed to inform a global audience about American values and find ways to provide truthful information and analysis to those who were denied access by their own government to the truth.

President Reagan selected Charles Wick, a successful businessman, to head the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) and William J. Casey, his former campaign manager and successful businessman, to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Mr. Wick had an array of agencies – Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Marti (directed at Cuba) and others – which provided news and analysis in twenty-seven languages to twenty-three countries. Mr. Casey would assist, providing support, for example, to the Solidarity labor movement in Poland and methods for USIA to penetrate the Iron Curtain to reach people who had been denied access to truthful information.

During the Reagan years, information was getting into the former Soviet Union, to include Russian literature (Samizdat) banned by Moscow. When Mikhail Gorbachev was elected supreme leader in March 1985, he inherited a demoralized and financially bankrupt country. In November 1986, Mr. Gorbachev made the decision to withdraw all Soviet combat troops from Afghanistan; that deployment was costing Moscow $4-$5 billion per year, and the Soviets were suffering heavy casualties. Gorbachev also implemented a policy of openness (Glasnost) and economic and political reform (Perestroika) for the beleaguered Soviet Union. In August 1991, Gorbachev resigned and shortly thereafter Ukraine and Belarus declared independence and the Baltic States sought international recognition as sovereign states. hat was the end of the Cold War.

Much of the credit must go to President Ronald Reagan for ending the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Among other things, the Reagan administration worked to give people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe accurate news and analysis about their own countries and the world, along with access to literature their own governments were denying to the public. This contributed to Gorbachev’s decision to implement the Glasnost policy. Indeed, an informed public demanded the truth from their government, and it was the truth that helped to end the Cold War and facilitate the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

The Trump administration’s recent decision to dismantle the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Asia and other government media organizations is unfortunate. VOA, established in 1942, serves an audience of 360 million people each week in 50 languages. The Agency for Global Media that oversees VOA manages organizations that broadcast in 64 languages, reaching 427 million people. Why would we cease communicating with the people in Iran via Radio Free Europe/Radio Farda, which is heard by over six million people each week? Why would we stop communicating with the people in all these countries, especially those in autocracies that censor the news and deny their people access to truthful news and analysis?

We live in a global community and a time that unfortunately mirrors the Cold War, with autocrats in different parts of the world controlling access to news and information. We should proudly communicate the narrative of the United States and its liberal democracy and values, while ensuring that objective and independent news and analysis are accessible to everyone, especially those residing in countries where the news is censored. Information is powerful, and unilaterally deciding to stop communicating with other countries is not in our interest.

The international reaction to the dismantling of VOA was welcomed by many of our adversaries. China’s Global Times called VOA “a lie factory.” Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang and others no doubt share this view. These countries fear the truth.

This column by Cipher Brief Expert Ambassador Joseph DeTrani was first published in The Washington Times

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

22. Larry Diamond on the Importance of US Foreign Aid

Mr. Diamond is providing us with the BFO (blinding flash of the obvious). Unfortunately it will fall on deaf ears.

Excerpt:

“If you really want to ‘make America great’ or keep it great or make it greater, I can’t imagine a more self-destructive tactic for that overall goal then ending foreign aid,” Diamond says.

Interview

Larry Diamond

“Ending aid is not a strategy to make America great again. It’s a strategy to make America resented and isolated in the world.”

https://magazine.thediplomat.com/2025-04/larry-diamond

By Shannon Tiezzi

After U.S. President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, one of his very first actions was issuing a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid. In subsequent weeks, Trump and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – which, despite its name, is not an official government department – moved to more permanently dismantle the underpinnings of decades of U.S. foreign aid policy. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was effectively scuttled, with somewhere between 80 to 90 percent of its programs cut.

The Trump administration framed the cuts as necessary steps to combat waste and fraud. Analysts say otherwise, with experts pointing to the immense importance of foreign aid – both for increasing U.S. “soft power” and, more directly, helping keep the United States secure by defending against transborder threats like pandemics and terrorism fueled by poverty and state failure.

The Diplomat’s Shannon Tiezzi spoke to Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University, about the benefits of U.S. aid and why it’s become so controversial.

“If you really want to ‘make America great’ or keep it great or make it greater, I can't imagine a more self-destructive tactic for that overall goal then ending foreign aid,” Diamond says.

To start, could you go over the strategic value of U.S. aid? In the Indo-Pacific, specifically, do you think U.S. development assistance, whether through USAID or other agencies was actually working for the U.S. national interest?

There are two broad purposes to aid. One is more purely strategic, and the other is enlightened self-interest.

The purely strategic angle is that aid – both economic, including humanitarian and developmental, and military – helps to cement and sustain partnerships, and improves the ability to influence partners.

Unfortunately, we're now virtually in another Cold War situation. There’s a world order element to foreign aid that has to do with alignment, alliances, solidarity, and influence – in the better sense of the word, rather than the maligned sense of the word, as it’s being deployed by China, Russia, and Iran. Aid helps in the cementing of partnerships and common purpose for a stabilizing world order.

In the Indo-Pacific region, the goal is to ensure not U.S. hegemony – as the PRC is, I think, maliciously depicting it – but a situation where there is no hegemony, which is why we use the term “free and open Indo-Pacific region.” Aid serves that broad purpose. It’s one of many instruments.

There’s a military dimension to aid. There’s an economic dimension in certain circumstances – more pertinent, probably, to Africa and the poorest countries of the world. But in the era of climate change, humanitarian assistance may be needed by all kinds of partners, even ones that are middle income or higher. There’s a humanitarian element.

On the enlightened self-interest side, the argument goes like this: if states collapse, it’s not going to be in the self-interest of the United States, Japan, Europe, or anybody else that would be providing assistance. We’re already running thin on the resources and patience to stem and resolve civil wars, and deal with the horrible consequences, including the blowback consequences of terrorism, of state failure and state decay.

And in a world that has shrunk more and more because of travel and interconnectedness of various kinds, we need to be on top of public health challenges. We need to get to the source of and eliminate the persistence of deadly communicable diseases, whether it be polio – which is beginning, incredibly, to resurge after we thought we were on the cusp of eliminating it – or obviously HIV/AIDS and God forbid another respiratory virus pandemic, which we could be on the edge of with avian influenza.

If you're not out there on the public health front in a very vigorous and vigilant way – providing assistance and preempting these outbreaks, strengthening the public health infrastructure of developing countries, improving the quality of life, and improving preventive public health – the potential for blowback to all of us, no matter what kind of country we're sitting in, or how high we think our walls are, is very significant.

So on the enlightened self-interest side, you've got a public health dimension too. You've got a security dimension, which includes the dangers of terrorism spreading from radicalized groups that breed in a context of state weakness and state failure. And then you’ve got the developmental possibilities for increasing the flows of good and services by increasing the consuming power of newly emerging markets to buy our goods. Of course there's more competition on the manufacturing side, but this is not a zero-sum game. When countries thrive in a increasingly integrated world, the tide can lift all boats.

You laid out the case for U.S. development aid, and for all those benefits it represents less than 1 percent of the total U.S. government budget. Given that, why do you think that it has attracted so much ire and acrimony from the Trump administration? Why has U.S. foreign aid became such a prominent target of the government cuts that are underway?

I think there are a few reasons why it has been the first target. And I believe a big one is the same reason why, when bigots and autocrats come to power, if you look around the world and study their methods, it's pretty common for them to pick on the LGBTQ community as one of their first targets. Why do they do that? Typically, it’s just an easy target.

These are sexual minorities – 5 percent, 8 percent, maybe 10 percent maximum of the population. And in traditional societies, many of those people are in the closet; they dare not identify as LGBTQ. That makes them an even more vulnerable minority. So if you want to aggrandize your power, you find an adversary that's an easy target. They go after the LGBTQ community because they deem this group to be like the Roma, the Rohingya, and other ethnic minorities, and throughout history the Jews: an isolated, vulnerable minority.

In the context of American foreign policy, U.S. aid becomes that easy target. I think that the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) crowd are looking for some easy scalps and some quick wins, so they can say, “Oh, we've cut government waste, fraud and abuse.” They see foreign aid as as a very easy target, politically, within the United States.

What's the constituency for foreign aid? They've looked at the polls. They see it’s not that popular – but I think that’s because it's not well understood by the average American.

Historically, when asked to identify what percentage of the federal budget is going to foreign aid, in polls Americans tend to choose between 10 and 25 percent. Once you tell them it's 1 percent, and you start laying out the arguments that I've laid out, their attitudes change dramatically. I've seen it in some of the exercises that are done. So I think the MAGA crowd may be surprised, because, as we wage this battle, Americans are finding that aid is a very tiny percentage of the federal budget and it serves our interests in a variety of ways.

The second reason: There is a strong isolationist character to the MAGA movement, and it's more of an impulse than a well thought out philosophy or strategy. Because if you really want to “make America great” or keep it great or make it greater, I can’t imagine a more self-destructive tactic for that overall goal then ending foreign aid. That means ending some of the best things we’re doing in the world to support small producers, improve agricultural productivity, fight deadly diseases, fight corruption and abuses of power, and help people to be freer and more personally secure.

Ending aid is not a strategy to make America great again. It’s a strategy to make America resented and isolated in the world.

The MAGA movement has strong isolationist impulses. We saw what isolationism got us in the run up to World War I and much more dramatically in the run up to World War II. So there’s a long history to the utterly self-destructive – and, I might add selfish and impulsive – nature of this kind of isolationism.

I’m not saying it's in all cases, or even in many cases, consciously serving our adversaries. But that's certainly what it winds up doing. I’ve done the research. I know what China and Russia are saying right now about the Trump administration’s moves to shut down not only the U.S. Agency for International Development, but the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). They’re doing high fives. They’re ecstatic. They can’t believe their good fortune.

It’s like we are in a battle, globally, for who will shape the future of the world: What will be the values? What will be the alliances? What will be the interests that dominate? And you’ve got one side now embarked on a strategy of unilateral disarmament. How could the other side, the authoritarian side, not be euphoric in response?

On that note, many critics have argued that withdrawing U.S. aid will work to China’s benefit. If U.S. aid is permanently scaled back, do you expect China to gain an advantage in the competition for global influence?

People want development. Everybody wants to be economically secure, and everybody wants to become more prosperous if they can be. People who are poor want to emerge out of poverty.

People who’ve recently emerged out of poverty want better jobs, better health, and a better life for their children. If someone comes along and offers them a helping hand with that – by generating economic opportunity and investment, improving the electricity grid, building bridges, building ports, making investments, and stimulating both economic growth and the more efficient flow of people, traffic, goods, and services – you’re going to feel some gratitude for that.

This is why aid delivery, both of humanitarian assistance and other things, typically gets branded: “This was provided to you by the People's Republic of China.” China takes out ads, and they brand what they're doing in a very visible and multidimensionally promotional way. That’s their right.

This comes with a lot of sharp power intervention in the affairs of these countries. It comes with a huge debt bill at the other end of this flow of “assistance,” which countries are now discovering. It comes with a lot of assumptions and intimidation from China. But at the level of people wanting opportunity, wanting better infrastructure, or even just wanting to go see their soccer team in a modern stadium, the inclination is to feel some sense of gratitude

If the U.S. is not there in the game also providing economic development assistance, then China is going to achieve its objective more easily and thoroughly. And its objective in the Indo-Pacific is a kind of hegemony. It’s not going to look like Japan in the 1930s. I think the only landed territory that the PRC really wants to use aggression to absorb is Taiwan, which, of course, they claim to be a part of the People's Republic of China.

But they’ve made their hegemonic intentions clear. They’ve given the region the nine-dash line.

China thinks the entire South China Sea virtually is theirs, and all the mineral wealth in it, and all the fisheries in it – up to the coastal waters of the Philippines and Vietnam. It’s an outrageous violation of international law. And they're doing this around the world. They’re gobbling up the fisheries of West Africa, of Latin America, and so on.

So if we’re not there, they’ve got freer rein to do all this stuff and and we lose leverage. And it’s worse than that.

It’s one thing if you're not providing assistance when people are asking for assistance. There’s disappointment. But when assistance has been provided, and then it’s abruptly, arbitrarily, and – I might say, with the tone that Donald Trump is using – fairly nastily withdrawn, then it’s not just disappointment, it’s resentment. And when a relationship is ruptured and there’s a feeling of resentment and the PRC moves in with propaganda, money, and sharp power influence, including under the table payments to elites, it becomes a development of not only economic but strategic significance.

I’ve been looking at PRC propaganda. The aid freeze feeds into the PRC narratives that the United States and the West more broadly are just in it for their own self-interest; that they can't be trusted; that this is a neo-colonial hegemonic relationship. We don’t want to give credibility to the narratives the PRC has been trying to spin for many years now about Western and U.S. arrogance, selfishness, hegemony, duplicity, exploitation, etc.

We can counter these narratives because they’ve been wrong, and often have been a kind of Freudian projection of China’s own intent. But we can’t do it with this kind of strategy of a peremptory, abusive, and sudden withdrawal of aid.

I don’t say that there's no inefficiency in the delivery of aid through USAID. Most people who know it or work with it feel there’s room for a redesign with an eye toward efficiency and improvement. But this is not about efficiency. This is a project of ideology and vengeance.

The U.S. is one of the primary funders for civil society, media organizations, and grassroots groups working to uphold democratic principles. One of the surprising things under the Trump administration has been to see this aid come under attack from the United States, with Elon Musk and Trump drawing attention to these projects and somehow suggesting that they're malign – essentially buying into China's narratives that this is equivalent to seeking regime change. What does this mean for the future of democracy worldwide?

The isolationists started a campaign against this stream of U.S. engagement in the world a while ago, but it really started heating up last year, and of course, has intensified since. If you read the narratives against human rights, governance, and democracy assistance that have been coming from this crowd, it’s very hard to distinguish between the tone and talking points of these isolationist critics and the tone and talking points of Beijing and Moscow. Both are saying the same things: “This is an effort to affect regime change. This is an effort by the U.S. to impose its ideology.”

It’s just shocking that Americans could be (wittingly or not) adopting Communist and Putin-esque talking points and not feeling ashamed of doing so. But in any case they are, and these streams of U.S. engagement are now under dedicated assault from Elon Musk and the most extreme elements of the Trump administration. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has been another critic of it going way back. People like this just think the U.S. shouldn’t be doing anything to advance good governance, rule of law, freedom, or democratic values around the world.

This work will continue, whether the Congress officially allocates money for it or not. It’s kind of like Ukraine: They’re not going to give up just because Donald Trump cuts off funding. But the work becomes diminished and more difficult without the very substantial flows of financial support that have come from the Congress, directly, more or less, to the NED and from the Congress to USAID, which has also provided some support to the core institutes of NED, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Center for International Private Enterprise, and the Solidarity Center.

Private foundations are providing some of this support. Many European bilateral aid agencies are providing a lot of support. I’ve long admired the work that Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have done – they’ve been punching way above their weight in democracy, human rights, and governance assistance. There’s the Department for International Development (DFID) in Britain, Germany’s foreign assistance, the Canadian International Development Authority, the Australians, and so on. The Japanese have gotten more involved in this. There’s a Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. There’s a European Foundation for Democracy that is not on the scale of NED, but I hope can be expanded so the work will not be diminished.

I hope that Europe and other actors will be able to expand what they do. But we’re not going to give up. We can’t.

The Authors

Shannon Tiezzi is Editor-in-Chief of The Diplomat.

23. Ukraine and the 'democratization' of precision weapons interview with Erik Prince

Ukraine and the 'democratization' of precision weapons - Asia Times

This is the first in a three-part interview series with Blackwater founder Erik Prince on the future dynamics of warfare

asiatimes.com · by Erik Prince · April 3, 2025

The outstanding military lesson of the Ukraine war, says Erik Prince, is the enormous extent to which the “democratization of precision weapons” transforms warfare and forces profound changes in defense and foreign policy.

For Prince, an advisor to the US Pentagon in the present administration and founder of private military contractor firm Blackwater, drones, cruise missiles and other AI-assisted precision weapons now widely available on any front line or to guerilla forces like the Houthis of Yemen are great equalizers.

They challenge conventional US defense capacity and impose unsustainable costs on modern armies, while Chinese mass production of missiles overwhelms any US expeditionary force in the North Pacific Ocean and points west, Prince says.

Russia, a peer adversary, adapted and overcame US high-tech weaponry with special acumen in electronic warfare. Far from being degraded in the Ukraine war, Russia’s army has improved dramatically.

In an interview with Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and a speech to Hillsdale students, Prince argues for a complete rethinking of US military strategy in light of this revolution in arms. Excerpts follow:

LA: I want to talk about Ukraine a bit. You seem to know a lot about that and what’s going on there and what should go on there. What do you think about it?

EP: I think President Trump is right in his instincts to bring that war to a close. There’s about a 0% chance the Ukrainians are going to take all their land back. They should have made a deal a year and a half ago already.

I think they’re in a war of attrition right now. They’re back to literally World War I-style, trench warfare-style tactics, but also with the addition of precision drones, precision rockets to make it an even more lethal place for infantrymen to try to survive.

The Russians are hellbent on claiming Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, which are traditional Russian language areas, and, of course, they already have Crimea. They’re not giving that up.

I think an imperfect peace is better than a sparkly war, and in a war of attrition, math still matters. Russia has a lot more people and a lot more munitions at a much lower cost than the Ukrainians can generate in terms of people. And the Western European and American defense industry is vastly behind and vastly too expensive to really be relevant.

I think it should be a stark wake-up call for America that our weapons are not doing that well there. They’re not in super-high demand. Some of the stuff might work for a month or two, but then Russian electronic warfare figures out a way to jam it – the navigation, the command link or whatever – to make it useless.

And the idiot politicians say, “oh, we’re degrading the Russian army and we’re destroying all this equipment.” No, the Russian army is significantly better, more lethal now than they were when they started. If you shot at the Russians when they went in in February 2022, then it might take ’em an hour, hour and a half to shoot back with artillery.

Now, it’s more like two or three minutes. So their cycle time of communication of finding where the fire is coming from, communicating that to a battery with accurate positions to shoot back is a lot shorter. Yeah, they’ve gotten a lot smarter.

LA: Can anybody find this stuff out?

EP: A lot of it is open source. The RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute in London, does a pretty good job of analyzing a lot of this stuff. I have a lot of relationships in weird places where I talk to people and get firsthand accounts.

But yeah, the US military has not learned the lessons from [Ukraine], the acceleration, that the nature of warfare has changed tremendously from the application of drone warfare and precision warfare across that battle space.

It is such a democratization of precision strike. I think it’s as stark a happening as Genghis Khan using stirrups on horses.

LA: Is it true that we can’t protect our aircraft carriers?

EP: Well, the Houthis, right, the Iranian proxy in Yemen have been firing lots of missiles, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, kamikaze drones at ships and the Navy says they’ve shot down, they’ve used a billion dollars’ worth of US missiles shooting that stuff down, which is really bad math because you’re using not one but two $1 million missiles to shoot down a $20,000-$50,000 drone.

But they say they’ve used a billion dollars to do that but it’s really $5 billion because if the inventory costs are from the 90s when they bought that missile, then to replace it, it’s going to be five times the cost.

Any aircraft carrier, anything that could be located now, can be targeted by dozens and dozens of precision weapons. So then again, it’s just a matter of math.

If the US Navy has to fight a war to in some way defend Taiwan and you drive an aircraft carrier within range of all those [Chinese] missile batteries, they can keep shooting missiles until we run out of missiles to shoot them down, and it becomes a real problem because it’s cheaper for them to build missiles.

The Chinese have done that very well. Our missiles are eight to 10 times as costly, and we only have so many of them.

LA: We can’t seem to build more at any speed.

EP: There are [ways]. I was just talking to a senior executive about this. He said they need to pivot back to an automotive mentality, away from a government defense contractor mentality. They need to read the book “Freedom’s Forge” about how American industry pivoted and really helped win World War II.

And then you go to an automotive company or automotive supplier, they understand a complex assembly in volume. And they’re expected to lower costs every year, not raise costs. There’s plenty of automotive production know-how and capacity that can make great weapons at a more and more affordable cost.

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LA: What does this mean for the strategy of the United States? The modern United States, which maybe begins at the First World War, is interested in power projection and that’s the Navy and the Air Force and some soldiers sometimes.

But if those big aircraft carriers that carry for all those planes and are not safe and they’re very expensive and they can be killed by something cheaper, what does that imply for the future of our defense and foreign policy?

EP: That submarines become even more important, dispersed air power, dispersed combat power, combat projection power into submersible, semi-submersible or other vessels that are harder to kill. Innovation counts … and imagination.

Oddly enough, remember when [President Ronald] Reagan decided to deploy two battleships, he really literally took ’em out of a storage closet and brought ’em back to full combat duty in the 80s.

One of the oddities was that they were largely impervious to modern missiles because they had been built to withstand 15 and 16-inch gun hits. And so any of these cruise missiles, any of these drones, would literally bounce off a battleship.

Even a water displacement torpedo, which is designed to remove the water from below a ship so the keel breaks, the keel on the Iowa-class battleships was so strong it wouldn’t have mattered. So maybe you go back to a very [old technology].

LA: Some of them are still around.

EP: They’re still in storage, yes. That’s a lot of steel to try to rust away.

asiatimes.com · by Erik Prince · April 3, 2025

24. Extended Deterrence: A Tool That Has Served American Interests Since 1945

We throw around "extended deterrence" too loosely I think. Bob Peters provides some useful historical context and analysis.

But how does this conclusion (with which i agree) square with imposing tariffs on our closest allies? Are they concerned that revoking extended deterrence might be next?

Excerpts:

Conclusion

In the end, extended deterrence is a stabilizing force that allows Americans to focus on things that matter directly to them: security, peace, prosperity, family, and faith. It does this by increasing the freedom of action of the United States and increasing foreign direct investment into the American economy, but most importantly, it makes war (particularly, nuclear war) less likely by deterring aggression.

A world without the American nuclear umbrella is a world with more nuclear powers and more nuclear wars—one with unforeseen downsides for the United States and the American people. It is for that reason that since 1947 the United States, across Republican and Democrat administrations, has extended its nuclear umbrella over its closest allies.

Extended Deterrence: A Tool That Has Served American Interests Since 1945

https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/extended-deterrence-tool-has-served-american-interests-1945?utm

Issue Brief Defense

April 2, 2025 10 min read Download Report

Robert Peters

@realbobpeters

Senior Research Fellow for Strategic Deterrence

Robert Peters is a Senior Research Fellow for Strategic Deterrence in Heritage’s Allison Center for National Security.

Summary

Extended deterrence is a stabilizing force that allows Americans to focus on things that matter directly to them: security, peace, prosperity, family, and faith. It does this by increasing the freedom of action of the United States and increasing foreign direct investment into the American economy, but, most importantly, it makes war—particularly, nuclear war—less likely by deterring aggression. A world without the American nuclear umbrella is a world with more nuclear powers and more nuclear wars, with unforeseen downsides for the United States and the American people. It is for that reason that since 1947 the United States, across Republican and Democrat administrations, has extended its nuclear umbrella over its closest allies.

Key Takeaways

America’s nuclear umbrella is a deeply stabilizing force on global security that enables Americans to enjoy family, faith, and prosperity in peace.

One of the most obvious benefits of America’s nuclear umbrella is that it gives the U.S. significant leverage over those states that are underneath said umbrella.

Additionally, the top five direct investors in the United States are all close treaty allies currently underneath the American nuclear umbrella.

Select a Section 1/0

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, the United States has extended its “nuclear umbrella” over its closest allies. This nuclear umbrella, also referred to as an “extended deterrent,” means that the U.S. guarantees the security of a close ally—including through the use of nuclear weapons. Put simply, extended deterrence means that if an adversary carries out a strategic attack on an American ally or otherwise threatens to topple said ally through conventional means, the United States reserves the right to defend that ally with all the forces at its disposal, to include its nuclear arsenal. Generally speaking, the states that are under the American nuclear umbrella are U.S. allies in NATO, Australia, Japan, and South Korea.REF

Today, the fear of a withdrawal of America’s extended-deterrent guarantee to its closest allies is triggering actors from Poland to Korea to France to consider building their own, independent nuclear arsenals to guarantee their own security or to extend their own sovereign strategic capabilities over other allies as a means of establishing their own nuclear umbrella.REF It might seem odd that the United States extends its nuclear umbrella over other nations—seemingly, this puts the U.S. at greater risk of a nuclear attack as it defends a foreign power—with little-to-no overt benefit for the United States. But the reason for extending America’s nuclear umbrella over its closest allies is not altruism, but because doing so squarely serves U.S. national interests and makes war—including nuclear war—less likely for the U.S.

Indeed, extending the nuclear umbrella provides a variety of benefits to the United States, to include giving America greater influence over the actions of its foreign allies; reducing the incentive for other states to pursue nuclear weapons (and therefore reducing the chance that the United States will become involved in a nuclear war); and incentivizing direct foreign investment into the U.S. economy and U.S. markets. Most importantly, though, America’s nuclear umbrella is a deeply stabilizing force on global security and enables Americans to enjoy family, faith, and prosperity in peace.

Extended Deterrence Gives the U.S. More Influence

One of the most obvious benefits of America’s nuclear umbrella is that it gives the United States significant leverage over those states that are underneath said umbrella. Foreign capitals, seeking to maintain their place under the American nuclear umbrella, often acquiesce to Washington’s policy preferences, be they in security issues, trade policies, or diplomacy. This soft power is shown at various international fora, where allies often side with the United States on a host of issues and co-sponsor resolutions that serve American interests.REF

Further, extended deterrence is in many ways a two-way street. Allies, in exchange for the extended-deterrent umbrella, augment American military power. As an example, South Korea, which has been under the American extended deterrent umbrella since the 1950s, has not only fought with the United States in every war since the Korean War but also has one of the strongest defense industrial bases in the free world, possesses a very large and credible army, and gives the U.S. important basing access from which it can generate combat power.REF Taken together, the alliance with South Korea gives the United States a veritable Gibraltar on the Asian mainland.

Similarly, America’s alliance with Japan—to include the nuclear component—provides the United States with an ally that has the second-largest navy in the Western Pacific and a highly competent air force that is capable of conducting strikes across the Western Pacific and East Asia, along with the military bases needed for any long-haul flights from the continental United States.

Europe, with all its problems—and they are many—similarly gives the United States important access from which the U.S. military can conduct a variety of operations that directly benefit U.S. interests. These include the forward stationing of missile defense batteries that can destroy Iranian missile threats, forward deployment of air assets that are critical to targeting and destroying terror threats, maritime bases that allow the U.S. Navy unfettered access to the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and nuclear weapons bases that allow the United States to deter strategic attack by America’s enemies.

Further, European militaries, particularly those in Poland and the Baltic and Nordic nations, are rearming.REF Even Germany has begun a significant rearmament program, long overdue though it is.REF Indeed, one of the reasons that Europe is taking security issues seriously and rearming is out of a fear of the United States withdrawing its nuclear umbrella from its NATO allies if Europe does not contribute more to the NATO alliance in the form of credible combat power.REF

While there may be some benefits to U.S. allies having an independent nuclear arsenal, the downsides of a more proliferated world probably outweigh the upsides. Indeed, the United States may already be seeing the rumblings of states who are less willing to acquiesce or accommodate American security preferences as they seek their own independent (or at least non-American) nuclear umbrellas.REF This loss of influence would track with the historical record, when Washington lost significant amounts of influence over decision-making in Paris, following France’s joining of the nuclear club in the early 1960s.REF

The Nuclear Umbrella Attracts Foreign Investment

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the more secure a state feels, the more prosperous it becomes. The more prosperous it becomes, the more willing it is to invest. This lesson from throughout history continues today.

The top five direct investors in the United States are all close treaty allies currently underneath the American nuclear umbrella.REF It should not be forgotten that extended deterrence often takes the treaty form of a “mutual security” pact, as is the case with the United States and Korea, the United States and Japan, and the broad array of networks within NATO. As demonstrated, a mutual defense treaty is not just a one-sided “the United States gives and others take” agreement. It is a pledge to come to each other’s aid.

Think of the neighborhood bully, China, shaking down other countries and threatening them. The United States teaming up with Japan and South Korea for security means that China is less likely to hurt U.S. neighbors, thereby allowing the United States to increase trade with those neighbors to everyone’s direct and mutual economic benefit. Indeed, in the late 1950s, South Korea and sub-Saharan Africa had the same per capita gross domestic product.REF

Today, South Korea is the 14th-largest economy in the worldREF and one of the most digitally integrated societies on the planetREF—in no small part because of America’s security guarantee and the extended deterrent commitment. This has not only benefited South Korea’s economy—but also the American economy, both due to trade that is mutually beneficial and because of Korea’s direct foreign investment in the U.S. economy. Similar stories unfold with most allies who enjoy America’s extended-deterrent guarantee.

In the final analysis, more security means more investment and prosperity for all, because businesses and investors like stability and certainty. Other countries feel safe investing in the United States because America is strong and its political system is stable. And Americans feel safe investing abroad (and making a tidy profit in the process) knowing that their allies are safe and their investments will be secure in the long term.

Extended Deterrence Reduces Nuclear War

If the United States withdrew its extended-deterrent guarantee from its allies in NATO and East Asia—or, if those states no longer believed in the efficacy of those guarantees—then it should be expected that some, perhaps many, of those states would acquire indigenous nuclear weapons capabilities. Indeed, Germany, Japan, Poland, South Korea, and others may well have sought or desired indigenous nuclear weapons programs but have deferred such plans over the past half century in large part because of the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

If those countries had nuclear arms, the United States would likely see some additional deterrence benefit. Adversaries may be better deterred by the prospects of additional nuclear powers. But there are two very significant downsides to such a world. The first is that selective nuclear proliferation would almost certainly not be limited to U.S. allies. Other powers would likely respond and seek their own nuclear arsenals in response to these new nuclear powers. For each nuclear-armed Germany, Japan, Poland, or South Korea, the world could see a nuclear-armed Burma, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or Vietnam. And there is no reason why such a proliferation cascade would stop at only a handful of countries.

The second downside is that in a world that no longer had fewer than 10 nuclear weapons states, as is the case today, but one with two or three times as many nuclear powers, the prospect for a state-on-state conflict escalating to the nuclear threshold would likely increase.REF Nuclear-armed states that had the option of escalating might be deterred from using nuclear weapons—but would all of those states make that decision? Or might a subset of them feel compelled to employ nuclear weapons in a conflict in order to achieve operational advantage or merely to stave off conventional defeat?

In such a nuclear proliferated world, the likelihood of nuclear war would increase, which could have adverse consequences for the United States—not least of which is that the United States could become embroiled in such a war. This could occur by being pulled into the conflict (either before or after first nuclear employment), or the conflict could expand to other, seemingly uninvolved powers with great rapidity and for little apparent reason. Who can forget that World War I began because a Serbian terrorist assassinated an Austrian Archduke—and dragged the British Empire, France, Imperial Germany, Italy, Czarist Russia, the Turkish Empire, the United States, and many others into the war—resulting in the collapse of four empires and upwards of 14 million dead.REF Now imagine such a war, but with half the participants having nuclear weapons as part of their arsenals.

It is tempting to say that even if medium-sized nuclear-armed powers in Asia, Europe, or the Middle East got into a conflict, the United States could remain aloof and uninvolved: That may be true for some conflicts. But it is difficult to forecast with any degree of accuracy how a nuclear war between two or even multiple nuclear-armed adversaries—some subset of which are not in the American orbit or under the U.S. nuclear umbrella—would end. The United States may get dragged into such a war, even if the United States did not want to get involved (as was the case in World War I and World War II). Indeed, history is replete with nations getting dragged into wars that they otherwise would like to ignore.

Even if the United States was able to maintain its neutrality, the consequence of a multi-sided nuclear war could well be a radical change in the world’s security environment—to include potentially a security order that is far, far less friendly than the one the United States enjoys today. Indeed, additional nuclear wars among non-U.S. partners could well have long-term consequences for the United States that one cannot yet determine—but are unlikely to be to the benefit of the American people and could well imperil that very peace that they so desperately seek and deserve.

Conclusion

In the end, extended deterrence is a stabilizing force that allows Americans to focus on things that matter directly to them: security, peace, prosperity, family, and faith. It does this by increasing the freedom of action of the United States and increasing foreign direct investment into the American economy, but most importantly, it makes war (particularly, nuclear war) less likely by deterring aggression.

A world without the American nuclear umbrella is a world with more nuclear powers and more nuclear wars—one with unforeseen downsides for the United States and the American people. It is for that reason that since 1947 the United States, across Republican and Democrat administrations, has extended its nuclear umbrella over its closest allies.

Robert Peters is a Senior Research Fellow for Strategic Deterrence for Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for National Security at The Heritage Foundation.

Authors

Robert Peters

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."

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