Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.”

– Denis Diderot

"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams – this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness – and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!"

– Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

"All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his courses, wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride."

– Sophocles

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., 39, was shot and killed while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

I would note that Dr. King was one of America's greatest strategists. There is so much still to learn from him.

1. Trump Could Hand China a ‘Strategic Victory’ by Silencing Voice of America

2. Czechia pledges support to Radio Free Europe after Trump's funding cuts

3. China Will Launch an Invasion of Taiwan In Next Few Months: Intel Sources

4. US far-right activist raises loyalty test that could deepen purge of security agencies

5. How Right Wing Influencer Laura Loomer Targeted Top Security Officials

6. Inside Elon Musk’s Shock-and-Awe Months in the White House

7. U.S. Peace Corps says Musk's DOGE has arrived at its HQ

8. Air Force Academy superintendent proposes cutting civilian staff

9. U.S. Tariffs Make Xi Jinping’s Day

10. RFA radio transmissions to China, Tibet halted

11. Feinberg initiates Pentagon's implementation of DOGE-influenced regulatory review

12. Why the UN Human Rights Council Keeps Failing on Israel

13. Philippines alarmed over China arrest of alleged Filipino spies

14. Golden Dome: who and what should it defend?

15. Reading the tree leaves: Why a no-show by China’s No.2 general has speculation running wild

16. Poland Prepares for Direct War With Russia

17. How Trump’s Tariffs Are Reshaping Global Trade

18. Myanmar and the Gutting of USAID

19. First OA-1K Skyraider II Handed Over To Air Force Special Operations Command

20. Actions create consequences: questions, questions, questions – elected officials serve their voters, not necessarily ours

21. U.S. Special Ops Conduct Combined Training With Panama, Formalize Commitment

22. The Godfather of the Campus Intifada

1. Trump Could Hand China a ‘Strategic Victory’ by Silencing Voice of America

I missed this last week.

The subtitle says it all.

There are many commentators on social media who say modern media could do the same. Why can't Fox broadcast to these areas? The reason is because VOA is a not for profit entity. There is no profit motive for any private business to accomplish the VOA mission, There is no advertising revenue from the oppressed peoples in denied areas. This is really a values issue. What are our American values and do we believe our values are inalienable and universal as we say in our founding documents? And should we be the shining city on a hill which so many of our past leaders have described (going back to John Winthrop of course)? And from a security perspective, do we believe that we should be able to put pressure on despots and dictators to change or be changed by those they oppress and that information is the primary tool to contribute to accomplishing that national security objective?

Trump Could Hand China a ‘Strategic Victory’ by Silencing Voice of America

Generations of Chinese, including our columnist, turned to U.S. government-run outlets for an education in democracy, rights and the English language.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/business/media/china-voice-of-america-radio-free-asia.html?unlocked_article_code=1.9U4.1Y-s.bXSpr4RtMYYJ&smid=url-share

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Credit...Dongyan Xu

By Li Yuan

March 28, 2025

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In December 1967, when he arrived at a snowy farm on China’s northeastern border with the Soviet Union, Xu Chenggang carried with him an electron tube to help him assemble a radio.

Mr. Xu, a 17-year-old Beijing native, would spend the next 10 years there, living in a horse stable and subjected to re-education and persecution for his anti-revolutionary thinking. One thing that got him through the cold, dark decade was the tube radio that brought him Voice of America programs.

He learned about the Prague Spring, the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon’s resignation, as well as criticisms of Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. The radio was also used by his peers as evidence of what was called his thoughtcrime, which led them to torture him physically and mentally. But he never regretted it.

“Voice of America was my school,” said Mr. Xu, 74, who attended Tsinghua University and Harvard after the end of the Cultural Revolution and is now an economist at Stanford. The VOA programs beamed into China shaped his worldview, his understanding of constitutional democracy and his values about freedom and human dignity, he said. He also learned English through a special program that provided news and information using a limited vocabulary and slow and clear pronunciations.

Millions of Chinese, me included, learned English through Voice of America and listened to its news reports, which contradicted the Chinese Communist Party’s narratives. Through its programs, we had a glimpse of the world on the other side of the Bamboo Curtain and, later, the Great Firewall, technology China uses to block most popular foreign websites from its citizens. We got to imagine a world where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were held as ideals.

That’s why it came as a shock to many Chinese when they learned that President Trump had decided to dismantle Voice of America and end grants to Radio Free Asia. It’s unfathomable to them that Washington would surrender the battle of narratives by silencing these news outlets, which produce uncensored and factual reporting on countries like China that lack a free press.

It’s a decision that “pains one’s loved ones and pleases one’s enemies,” as a Chinese saying goes. Nationalist Chinese celebrated the news. “The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag,” Global Times, the Communist Party tabloid, wrote in an editorial.

Image

The Voice of America building in Washington. Millions of Chinese have learned English through its broadcasts and listened to its news reports.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

Beijing has long loathed Voice of America’s China coverage, especially its reporting on the persecutions of Uyghurs and Tibetans, the protests in Hong Kong in 2019, the draconian “zero Covid” measures during the pandemic and the country’s economic slowdown. “Almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it,” the editorial said.

I interviewed and had email exchanges with a dozen Chinese, including some in their 20s and 30s. They expressed their sadness and disappointment about the closing or weakening of these agencies. Other than Mr. Xu, they all asked for anonymity, or that I use only their first names, for fear of retribution from Beijing or Washington.

Over the past decade or so, Beijing has killed independent journalism, first in China and increasingly in Hong Kong. That makes agencies like VOA some of the few reliable institutional sources of news that people in the Chinese speaking world can turn to.

“Without VOA and RFA’s independent reporting, Beijing and other authoritarian actors could more easily flood the information space with state propaganda, presenting a distorted view of reality to both domestic and international audiences,” wrote Kris Cheng, a journalist from Hong Kong.

Mr. Cheng, like hundreds of his peers, was forced to leave home and has been freelancing for VOA out of London since 2021. “This would be a strategic victory for the Chinese and Hong Kong governments.”

The U.S. government needs media organizations that convey American values to the world, said a 35-year-old biotech worker in the San Francisco Bay Area who started listening to Voice of America when he was in high school in China.

“Since the United States views China as its biggest competitor, you should have a tool like this in your toolbox,” he said. He is set to become a naturalized citizen next month and invoked the Declaration of Independence in our video call. He said he supported President Trump but had not expected the administration to dismantle these agencies without a backup plan.

In a statement on the White House website, the Trump administration listed reasons behind Mr. Trump’s executive order to shutter Voice of America, including a report by The Daily Caller, a right-wing website, that said multiple VOA reporters had posted anti-Trump content on their social media accounts. Radio Free Asia and some VOA employees are challenging the administration’s efforts in court.

In February, Elon Musk posted on X that the agencies were “just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”

That’s not true.

Voice of America reaches more than 361 million people a week around the world on an annual budget of $268 million. Its English channel on YouTube has 3.7 million subscribers. Its Chinese channel has 2.3 million subscribers. Many of its programs’ episodes had millions of views, including an hourlong one by Mr. Xu, the Stanford economist, on China’s economic troubles, which was viewed 5.1 million times. A weekly commentary program by Cai Xia, a retired professor of the Communist Party central school turned critic of the party, garnered hundreds of thousands of views for each episode on YouTube. They and some other regular commentators on VOA and Radio Free Asia are far from radical leftists.

Radio Free Asia broadcasts in Burmese, Cantonese, English, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Tibetan, Uyghur and Vietnamese. It has an annual budget of $60.8 million and reaches 58 million people a week. “The cost is inconsequential compared to the value of news that challenges the narratives of autocratic regimes,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote last week.

The Cold War ended partly because the thinking of Europeans living in Eastern bloc countries changed, Mr. Xu said. “There might be nothing cheaper than disseminating ideas,” he added.

Agencies like VOA and RFA were created to use uncensored information to fight communism and promote democratic values. Like any traditional media, they have been forced to adapt to the digital age. In 2020, Radio Free Asia launched an online newsmagazine, called WHYNOT, aimed at young Chinese speakers. It quickly gained traction with its coverage of the White Paper protests in 2022.

The U.S. government is giving up on telling its story to the world while China is getting better at shaping narratives and promoting its geopolitical goals.

In a 2023 report, the State Department said Beijing had invested billions of dollars to construct an information ecosystem to propel China’s propaganda. “Unchecked,” the report said, “the P.R.C.’s efforts will reshape the global information landscape,” using an abbreviation for the People’s Republic of China, the country’s official name.

In interviews, Chinese told me how Voice of America and Radio Free Asia had changed their lives.

Zilu, who is in their 30s, started listening to VOA during family breakfast because their father didn’t like the Chinese government. Zilu hummed the opening music of the morning news program to me. In 2001, at the age of 12, they were appalled that their classmates clapped at the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks. Now they read WHYNOT.

Another Chinese person I spoke to, Xuanyi, 29, started listening to Voice of America in high school to learn English. Its news programs led him to conclude that his government did bad things and refused to admit its mistakes. Now a government worker in northern China, he is worried that without U.S. government news outlets, Chinese who circumvent the Great Firewall will find that the internet outside China is full of misinformation.

“They might lose interest and retreat back inside the Great Firewall quickly,” he said.

Li Yuan writes The New New World column, which focuses on China’s growing influence on the world by examining its businesses, politics and society. More about Li Yuan

A version of this article appears in print on March 30, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Silencing Radio Merely Fortifies Great Firewall. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Communist Party of China, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), U.S. Politics

2. Czechia pledges support to Radio Free Europe after Trump's funding cuts

Okay. We can always find a silver lining. It would be a positive development if other countries pitched in to support Radio Free Asia/Radio Liberty and contribute to targeting despots and dictators with information to their oppressed people to demand change in the regime's behavior or just change. The Trump administration and DOGE wix kids could take credit for expanding the support base for these critical information activities.

Czechia pledges support to Radio Free Europe after Trump's funding cuts

Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala has vowed to do everything possible to ensure the continued operations of Prague-based broadcaster.

https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/czechia-pledges-support-to-radio-free-europe-after-trump-s-funding-cuts

Written by

Expats.cz Staff

Published on 23.03.2025 09:30:00 (updated on 23.03.2025)Reading time: 2 minutes

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty headquarters in Prague. Photo: Shutterstock / geogif

The Czech government has vowed to do everything possible to ensure the continued operations of Prague-based broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). The promise comes a week after the Trump administration announced funding cuts to the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), parent company of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala told the Financial Times that his government would back the station in its mission following cuts to its funding. RFE/RL has been broadcasting from its headquarters in Prague since 1995, but now faces an uncertain future.

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RFE/RL’s significance extends beyond the Cold War era, when it provided vital news in the communist bloc. Today, its role is considered crucial in countering disinformation from countries like Russia and Iran. Fiala expressed personal attachment to the station, recalling how its broadcasts helped him during the oppressive Communist regime.

Czech support for RFE/RL

Prime Minister Fiala has stressed that the Czech Republic stands firm in its commitment to ensuring RFE/RL can continue its mission in Prague.

"We will do everything that we can to give them the chance to continue in this very important role," Fiala told the Financial Times. He pointed out that RFE/RL’s historical importance, both during the Cold War and in present-day international relations.

‘‘I know what it meant for me in Communist times,” Fiala added, noting a personal connection to the station that he listened to in his youth.

Trump cuts funding for Prague-based RFE/RL: A 'gift to America’s enemies'

Since the U.S. funding cuts were announced, the Czech government has actively sought European support for the radio station. European Affairs Minister Martin Dvořák confirmed that nine EU countries have supported a Czech initiative for European assistance to sustain RFE/RL.

Discussions with European Commission representatives, including EU Budget Commissioner Piotr Serafin, are ongoing. Fiala has also called for a "coalition of states for a European solution" to safeguard RFE/RL’s future.

A political battle over funding

The U.S. government’s decision to reduce funding to RFE/RL has sparked significant controversy, especially given the station’s role in promoting democratic values and providing independent news in regions where media freedom is restricted.

The funding cuts were part of a broader reduction in U.S. international broadcasting services, a move supported by figures like billionaire Elon Musk, a vocal critic of the station’s perceived political bias. Musk has openly called for the closure of both RFE/RL and Voice of America, dismissing them as wasteful and ideologically biased.

Musk says he wants to shut down Prague-based broadcaster

In contrast, Czech officials are actively making efforts to secure the station’s future. These include exploring potential European solutions or even the possibility of purchasing the station, as suggested by Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský.

As RFE/RL defends its funding in U.S. courts, the station's fate remains uncertain. But its future in Prague may be more secure thanks to growing European support and the Czech government’s firm support.

3. China Will Launch an Invasion of Taiwan In Next Few Months: Intel Sources

Excerpts:

What Will China Do?

It is not like the PRC is unprepared to execute one of the above options. In February, Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, declared that these regular movements of PLAN ships around Taiwan and harassment flights of PLAAF aircraft are “not exercises; they are rehearsals” for forced reunification of the island with the communist Mainland.

Within six months, we may know if one of these three options succeeds or fails.

DeVore’s conclusion: “America’s edge lies in vigilance, allies, and the will to slug it out if needed. China’s gamble? Picking the right play and hoping friction doesn’t lead to ruination.”

China Will Launch an Invasion of Taiwan In Next Few Months: Intel Sources

19fortyfive.com · by Reuben Johnson · April 4, 2025

Intelligence Sources: China Will Try To Take Taiwan in Six Months – A takeover of the Republic of China (ROC) on the island of Taiwan by the Mainland People’s Republic of China (PRC) is increasingly being considered a question of “not if, but when.”

Beijing’s unrelenting program of harassment activities directed against the ROC has been described by Sir Alex Younger, the former Chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service, as “a textbook on subversion, cyber and political harassment” or a case study for understanding the aspects of “grey zone” type warfare.

China’s Threat to Taiwan

While the situation with the ROC has unique aspects related to its long-running tensions with the Mainland, the grey zone-type harassment it faces is nearly identical to the actions taken by both the PRC and Russia against other nations in Europe and Asia. These include sabotaging undersea infrastructure like the internet and other communications cables, election interference, and digitalized disinformation.

On 4 March, the administration of US President Donald Trump imposed a set of tariffs on the PRC, which Washington billed as incentives for Beijing to return to what Washington defines as equitable and fair trade. This prompted the PRC ambassador to make the semi-ambiguous threat that his country was prepared for any “type of war” with the US.

China Could Invade Soon: Intel Sources

The ambassador’s statement has been interpreted as Beijing now deciding that the time may be ripe for a move against the ROC as the opening round in a direct conflict with the US.

Intelligence sources who have spoken to 19FortyFive about this story now state that they believe an attempt by China to do just that is no less than six months away.

The same intelligence sources elaborate further that the “six months from now” time frame is being prompted by the belief among the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) senior leadership that the US administration in Washington will either be unwilling or unable to prevent an invasion by the CCP and its military arm, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

Beijing’s Taiwan Options

A recent assessment of Beijing’s options to affect this takeover by Chuck DeVore, a retired US Army Lt. Col., and former California legislator, projects three possible scenarios: “a patient choke, a lightning grab, or full chaos.”

As DeVore projects, the first option would be a full-on blockade of the ROC. China’s navy (PLAN) would ring the island “like a steel noose, turning the Taiwan Strait into a kill zone. Of course, 90 percent of Taiwan’s food and all its natural gas come by ship. Snip that lifeline and the island will starve for months. No invasion, no blood-soaked beaches, just a slow strangulation.”

The second possibility would involve massive Chinese missile strikes devastating Taiwan’s defenses and overloading its Patriot and other missile defense systems. Beijing’s army of “patriotic hackers” would crash the ROC power grids and shut down the internet and phone networks. Simultaneously, 100,000 PLA troops would hit the island’s beaches.

Given the 12-hour time difference with Washington, this would all transpire, as DeVore writes, “before the US wakes up.” Beijing’s objective would, therefore, be to “seize [the capitol] Taipei in days and present the world with a done deal.”

The Doomsday Scenario

The third possibility is the nightmare, doomsday scenario.

In this variant, the PRC attempts to take the ROC and destroy the defense potential of the US and all of America’s regional allies.

Missile barrages would not only smash military sites on the ROC but also any US bases in Japan, Guam, and the Philippines. While this chaos is being created in Asia, Beijing’s 20,000 or more men of military age smuggled into the US under the protocols of President Joe Biden’s open border begin attacks in conjunction with Mexican cartels.

The US loses complete control of the southern border with shootouts at border crossing points and sabotage attacks inside of the border on the Texas side. Infrastructure is brought down by attacks on power grids.

As DeVore points out, this would be a modern-day version of what was directed in the infamous 1917 Zimmermann Telegram. Then, Imperial Germany “tried to spy Mexico on the US to distract it from World War I—even sending military advisors to Mexico. Britain cracked the code, and America declared war on Germany.”

For the PRC, this “unleashing unrestricted warfare splits US attention, buys invasion [of the ROC] time, and tests alliance resolve. But it’s a high-risk gamble, especially if caught before launch. Further, the US may gain by rallying worldwide outrage, reinforcing global leadership, and punishing China economically.”

What Will China Do?

It is not like the PRC is unprepared to execute one of the above options. In February, Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, declared that these regular movements of PLAN ships around Taiwan and harassment flights of PLAAF aircraft are “not exercises; they are rehearsals” for forced reunification of the island with the communist Mainland.

Within six months, we may know if one of these three options succeeds or fails.

CH-7 Drone from China. From Chinese State Media.

DeVore’s conclusion: “America’s edge lies in vigilance, allies, and the will to slug it out if needed. China’s gamble? Picking the right play and hoping friction doesn’t lead to ruination.”

About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson

Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is now an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.

19fortyfive.com · by Reuben Johnson · April 4, 2025

4. US far-right activist raises loyalty test that could deepen purge of security agencies

This is the problem that some of the uninformed have. They do not have an understanding of how the military works. To follow their logic to the extreme (which I fear they will do) any general officer who was promoted during the former CJCS' time will be considered not loyal by their standards. It is not the fault of the officer that they were promoted under the watch of a previous CJCS. These officers have long years of proven records so they should not be assumed to be "acolytes" of a previous CJCS. This is just like the recent attempt to fire CIA personnel who were in DEI offices. Sometimes personnel are detailed to these positions as routine assignments over which they had no control. It does mean that they are what people like Laura Loomer would consider "DEI zealots." And in general all these personnel follow the policies of the current leadership whether they agree with them or not. And they will follow the policies of the next leadership just as well. In fact they should be respected for that fact and not rejected. But alas, people like Laura Loomer do not have the same standards as the rest of us.

Military leaders are by default appropriately loyal to the leadership when they take their oath to the constitution. That should be sufficient by any US standard.

US far-right activist raises loyalty test that could deepen purge of security agencies

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-far-activist-raises-loyalty-233509856.html

Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali

Fri, April 4, 2025 at 7:35 PM EDT4 min read

Republican presidential nominee Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Harris debate in Philadelphia

By Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - While National Security Agency chief General Timothy Haugh apparently was not told why he was abruptly fired this week, a far-right activist who urged President Donald Trump to dismiss him offered one explanation: his alleged ties to retired Army general and Trump critic Mark Milley.

In an X post on Friday, conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer denounced Haugh as "HAND PICKED by General Milley" without providing evidence. This set off a storm of speculation among current and former Pentagon officials about who might be next, given the hundreds of people Milley worked with during a four-decade military career.

Many current and former officials said they worry any national security official could be suspected of disloyalty by Trump's inner circle because of their perceived links to officials who have fallen out of favor or just for having served in key roles during Joe Biden's presidency.

A former senior official said that every four-star general should now be concerned about their future and wondered whether Loomer would go after other officials whose promotions or nominations could somehow be linked to Milley, even if the link is tenuous.

"I will be releasing more names of individuals who should not be in the Trump administration due to their questionable loyalty & past attacks on President Trump," Loomer wrote on X.

Uniformed members of the military have long prided themselves on being non-partisan executors of U.S. government policy. But Democratic lawmakers said the firings showed Trump was willing to trade away an apolitical military for one that is loyal to him.

"He is sending a chilling message throughout the ranks: don't give your best military advice, or you may face consequences," said Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The news of Haugh's firing, along with those of NSA Deputy Director Wendy Noble and at least 10 members of the White House national security council, marked an unpredictable and potentially deepening national security purge.

In recent weeks, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General C.Q. Brown, as well as other admirals, generals and security staff have already been dismissed.

If ties to Milley are one litmus test for loyalty for Trump's administration, a possibility first reported by Reuters, many more leaders could be vulnerable.

Those promoted during Milley's career include General Michael Kurilla, who leads U.S. forces in the Middle East, or General Christopher Cavoli, head of U.S. troops in Europe. Both are nearing retirement.

General James Mingus, Army vice chief of staff, and Major General James Work, leader of the 82nd Airborne Division, are two more seen as potential targets, officials added.

However, Milley would only have acted as an adviser on such promotions, which are decided by the president and the defense secretary.

'WANNABE DICTATOR'

Milley was Trump's top military adviser between 2019 and early 2021 then had a dramatic falling out with his boss. At his retirement ceremony in 2023, Milley took a veiled jab at Trump, saying U.S. troops take an oath to the Constitution and not a "wannabe dictator."

Milley called Trump "fascist to the core" in a book by journalist Bob Woodward published last year.

Within hours of Trump's inauguration on January 20, the Pentagon removed Milley's picture from a portrait display of all former top U.S. military officers. It then revoked his personal security detail and his security clearance and announced an inquiry that could lead to a demotion in rank.

Loomer met with Trump at the White House a day before Haugh's dismissal on Thursday, and multiple sources said she provided Trump with a list of national security staff whom she said were disloyal to the president.

In her X post on Friday, Loomer, who has previously promoted Islamophobic conspiracy theories, thanked Trump for "being receptive" to her recommendations about who should be fired. Trump told reporters he would let go of people "that may have loyalties to someone else."

(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali; Additional reporting by Erin Banco in New York; Editing by Don Durfee and Cynthia Osterman)

5. How Right Wing Influencer Laura Loomer Targeted Top Security Officials

This is so disappointing.

How Right Wing Influencer Laura Loomer Targeted Top Security Officials

The conspiracy theorist has been loyal to Trump for a decade. Now, she’s cashing in on her influence.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/how-right-wing-influencer-laura-loomer-targeted-top-security-officials-0b002715?mod=hp_lead_pos3

By Dustin Volz

Follow, Vera Bergengruen

Follow and Alexander Ward

April 4, 2025 8:05 pm ET

Laura Loomer is a self-described ‘proud Islamophobe’ who once called 9/11 an ‘inside job.‘ Photo: Zuma Press

WASHINGTON—When Elon Musk visited the National Security Agency last month, current and former senior officials feared he was planning mass layoffs at its sprawling Maryland headquarters.

Musk, who leads the Department of Government Efficiency, turned out not to be the one to fear—at least not yet. Instead, it was far-right conspiracy theorist and failed Florida congressional candidate Laura Loomer, who met with President Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday and provided a list of national security officials, including NSA Director, Gen. Tim Haugh, that he should fire.

Hours later, Haugh, and his civilian deputy, Wendy Noble, were removed from their posts. That came after at least four National Security Council staffers were also abruptly let go.

At a time when Trump’s own national security adviser, Mike Waltz, has seen his standing in the White House deteriorate after initiating a Signal chat about airstrikes in Yemen, Trump, according to administration officials, is taking personnel advice from Loomer, a self-described “proud Islamophobe” who once called 9/11 an “inside job.”

In doing so, Trump has left his plans for NSA—by some measures the nation’s largest intelligence agency—in question. The eavesdropping organization is responsible for deterring foreign cyberattacks and thwarting terrorist plots.

Gen. Tim Haugh, the National Security Agency director, headed efforts to deter foreign cyberattacks and thwart terrorist plots. Photo: Leah Millis/Reuters

Trump’s relationship with Loomer attracted widespread attention last fall after she was spotted on his campaign plane, headed with him to a presidential debate and to a 9/11 memorial service. Influential figures in Trump’s orbit, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), had warned the president that associating with Loomer could harm his re-election chances.

The lawmakers criticized Loomer after she said the White House would “smell like curry” if Democrat Kamala Harris, who is partly of Indian descent, was elected president.

Asked about the Wednesday meeting, Trump called Loomer a patriot and someone he listens to. “She’s a very strong person,” he said Thursday aboard Air Force One. “She makes recommendations of things and people, and sometimes I listen to those recommendations like I do with everybody.” Trump said Loomer, 31, didn’t have anything to do with the recent firings, but she cheered the removals and appeared to take credit in a post on X.

‘Vetting matters’

Loomer has been going after Trump’s critics and perceived enemies for nearly a decade.

Haugh was one of her highest-ranking targets. As the joint head of NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, Haugh oversaw a massive bureaucracy charged with intercepting communications of adversaries as well as U.S. allies. The mission often involves high-technical hacking and careful precautions to avoid unintentionally targeting ordinary Americans’ voice and online communications. The NSA has been credited with uncovering foreign espionage operations, thwarting terror plots and anticipating the plans of world leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Loomer saw Haugh as a holdover from the Biden administration and as a close ally of retired Gen. Mark Milley, Trump’s former Joint Chiefs chairman turned rival. Trump has publicly lashed out at Milley over his handling of Jan. 6 and called him a traitor.

“We need to protect President Trump,” she posted on X, where she has 1.6 million followers. “Vetting matters.”

Haugh and Milley barely knew each other, according to defense officials. Their military careers briefly intersected when Milley was the top military adviser and Haugh was the deputy head of Cyber Command, the Pentagon entity responsible for the military’s offensive and defensive cyber operations. Haugh, who took over as head of NSA and Cyber Command in 2024, was an active duty military officer and not considered a political appointee.

Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats and sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said firing the head of NSA risked catastrophic consequences.

“This country is under attack, and the president just removed his most able general from the front lines,” he said, citing unprecedented cyberattacks from China that have embedded hackers in critical infrastructure networks across the country and deeply compromised U.S. telecommunications providers.

Loomer videotaping pro-Palestinian protesters outside of the New York Stock Exchange last year. Photo: Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/Zuma Press

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who oversees NSA along with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, wasn’t asked for his opinion on Haugh, officials familiar with the matter said, and was unaware the general would be relieved of duty.

In an early-morning X post Friday, Loomer called for more firings including an official she said was transgender, tagging Waltz.

Last week on X, Loomer singled out Adam Schleifer, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, as a “Trump hater” because she said he supported Trump’s impeachment. A few hours later, Schleifer received a termination email. Schleifer didn’t respond to a request for comment.

‘Worst nightmare’

Loomer has blamed a lack of “proper vetting” by Trump’s inner circle for enabling national security officials she called “traitors” to serve in the administration.

“I am happy to expose all who are disloyal to President Trump,” she posted on X last May. “When he’s back in the White House, I would love to help him with vetting. Nobody should be allowed near President Trump during his second term unless they survive a thorough vetting and interrogation process.”

During the presidential transition, Loomer unsuccessfully sought contracts to vet incoming administration officials, two people familiar with the situation said.

She continued digging into the backgrounds of senior national security officials, combing through employment histories, affiliations and previous statements for any trace of criticism toward Trump or his policies, and then posting her findings through highlighted screenshots.

A week before her meeting in the Oval Office, Loomer announced she was launching Loomered Strategies, her own opposition research firm with the tagline, “Your opponent’s worst nightmare.”

She had sought to establish herself as a far-right provocateur during Trump’s first presidential campaign, aligning herself with conspiracy sites and staging attention-grabbing stunts.

She pretended to vote under the name of Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin while wearing a burqa in 2016. A year later, she disrupted a production of Julius Caesar in Central Park to protest what she saw as an anti-Trump message behind the production.

After losing Republican congressional primaries in Florida in 2020 and 2022, Loomer recast herself as one of Trump’s most vocal defenders on social media.

“You’ve been really very special,” Trump said in a clip posted by Loomer in August 2023. “You work hard, and you are a very opinionated lady. I have to tell you that, and in my opinion, I like that.”

Now, the account advertising the services of Loomer’s new vetting firm features a prominent endorsement attributed to Trump: “You don’t want to get Loomered.”

Write to Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com, Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com and Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com

6. Inside Elon Musk’s Shock-and-Awe Months in the White House

It will be fascinating to read the history of these times in 20 years or so.

Inside Elon Musk’s Shock-and-Awe Months in the White House

Trump directed his chief of staff to better manage Musk after complaints arose from his cabinet and aides

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/elon-musk-trump-white-house-doge-43c4d404?mod=hp_lead_pos1

By Josh Dawsey

Follow, Annie Linskey

Follow, Brian Schwartz

Follow and Dana Mattioli

April 4, 2025 9:00 pm ET

Shift to supporting Trump

While Trump’s political persona has changed little since 2016, Musk’s has changed a lot. That year, Musk said about Trump on CNBC: “He doesn’t seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States.“

As the 2024 campaign got under way, though, Musk became increasingly distrustful of Democrats. He repeatedly called Ronna McDaniel, who chaired the Republican National Committee at the time, to complain about the number of people surging across the border, and worried that the party needed to do more to ensure the election wasn’t stolen.

Last year, he said at a Palm Beach, Fla., breakfast that he wasn’t a Republican and had never voted for Trump—but that billionaires needed to back Trump to “save our country.” He went all in after Trump was shot in July at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, impressed with his heroism. He ultimately spent $300 million on November elections.

Musk has said he was impressed at how Trump handled an assassination attempt last year. Photo: brian snyder/Reuters

As hurricanes destroyed swaths of North Carolina, in October, Musk agreed to install SpaceX’s Starlink satellite service there, impressing Trump, who saw it as a political win for him. Musk pitched the Department of Government Efficiency to Trump, who promised him broad freedom.

Musk was involved in many of the administration’s hiring decisions, aides said.

Meanwhile, Trump has trusted Musk with some of the projects he is most interested in. He made Musk a key go-between with Boeing over its delayed new model of Air Force One, according to people familiar with the matter, with Musk demanding to speak to the planemaker’s engineers about the progress.

DOGE dividend

On a recent evening at Mar-a-Lago, Musk was on the patio near Trump, twirling silverware around on his pinkie as Trump entertained others.

Musk’s influence with Trump is partially powered by his close relationship with Stephen Miller, Trump’s domestic-policy adviser and the architect of the executive orders, and Miller’s wife, Katie, a special government employee who is viewed as one of Musk’s top aides. Katie Miller has been known to invoke Musk’s name and give orders liberally at the White House, to the consternation of other staffers skeptical of her status—like Musk’s—as an unpaid, temporary employee rather than a salaried one.

Musk has an office on the second floor of the White House, but the door is rarely opened, and the lights are never on, with Musk working across the street instead with lieutenants, White House officials said.

Republicans around the country have learned that Musk is sometimes the easiest way to get ideas in front of Trump. James Fishback, the head of investment firm Azoria, proposed on X a “DOGE dividend” where 20% of DOGE’s savings would be returned to taxpayers, and tagged Musk.

Within two hours Musk said he would share it with Trump, who endorsed the idea the next day at a Miami investment conference sponsored by the Saudi government.

Lobbyists say it is impossible to get on Musk’s calendar so they create campaigns hoping to reach him on X, in the hopes he might then share the material with Trump.

Trump speaks daily with Musk, who has walk-in privileges at the Oval Office. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Musk also has a Trump-like tendency to absorb new information and then add his own spin to it, at times over-extrapolating. In late February, a DOGE aide called Musk at the conservative CPAC conference to say they had identified people who were listed in the Social Security database as being more than 120 years old, but didn’t say they had been issued inappropriate checks.

Musk told the aide to dig deeper, according to a person who heard the remarks.

Then he got on stage and riffed about how his team found that the Social Security databases included more than 400 million Americans who were alive and eligible for the benefit—more than the current population of Americans of any age—and one person was shown as 360 years old. “Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s a red flag,” Musk said.

Trump later used the same information in his speech to Congress, even though some of his senior advisers were dubious of it. Trump’s aides have sought more information from Musk about the claims, hoping to substantiate some of them, people familiar with the matter said.

Trump’s senior aides and cabinet have grown frustrated with how Musk carries out his haphazard foreign-aid and other cuts, even if they broadly agree with his goals.

Senators also have started to privately complain. After Musk brandished a chain saw on stage at the CPAC conference to underscore his cuts, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R, S.C.) told other Senate Republicans that he imagined that clip would be in every campaign commercial against vulnerable senators next year. A spokeswoman for Graham said he had worked closely with Musk on budget issues.

Musk’s antics surrounding his government cost-cutting efforts haven’t gone over well with all Republicans. Photo: nathan howard/Reuters

Trump has noted to advisers how popular it is to cut the government, and bragged that while other Republicans have promised to make such cuts, he is the only one who has done it.

Aboard Air Force One on Thursday, Trump told reporters that Musk is “fantastic,” but left room for his exit.

Musk will step back and return to running his businesses, Trump said. “There’s a point at which time Elon’s gotta have to leave,” he said, adding that time will come in “a few months.”

Write to Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com, Annie Linskey at annie.linskey@wsj.com, Brian Schwartz at brian.schwartz@wsj.com and Dana Mattioli at dana.mattioli@wsj.com

Appeared in the April 5, 2025, print edition as 'How Musk’s Blitzkrieg of Cuts Fueled GOP Worries of a Political Liability'.

7. U.S. Peace Corps says Musk's DOGE has arrived at its HQ

Please do not mess with our beloved Peace Corps.

U.S. Peace Corps says Musk's DOGE has arrived at its HQ

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/u-peace-corps-says-musks-193736097.html

Nathan Layne, Alexandra Alper and Tim Reid

Fri, April 4, 2025 at 3:37 p.m. EDT·2 min read

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Trump attends a cabinet meeting at the White House

By Nathan Layne, Alexandra Alper and Tim Reid

(Reuters) -Members of Elon Musk's cost-cutting team arrived at Peace Corps headquarters in Washington, the agency told Reuters, a signal it could become the latest U.S. government agency to face job cuts.

"Staff from the Department of Government Efficiency are currently working at Peace Corps headquarters and the agency is supporting their requests," the organization said in a statement on Friday.

The Peace Corps, which sends volunteers across the globe to help countries with education, health and economic projects, had so far remained under the radar amid the cost-slashing drive of the Musk-led DOGE.

The purpose of the visit was not immediately clear, but the arrival of DOGE staff at a federal agency is often followed by layoffs. Fridays have become some of the most nerve-racking times for mass firings of civil servants since President Donald Trump took office on January 20 and established DOGE.

DOGE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

With an annual budget of more than $400 million, the Peace Corps has long been popular with Democrats and Republicans.

Congress has a bipartisan Peace Corps caucus. In 1983 then-President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, said: "By the example of these Peace Corps volunteers, people throughout the world can understand that America’s heart is strong, and her heart is good."

Peace Corps staff had been told by the agency's leaders to expect DOGE staffers to arrive on Friday afternoon and work through the weekend, according to two people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak with the media.

Since the Peace Corps was established in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy, more than 240,000 Americans have served as Peace Corps volunteers. It is widely seen as one of the most visible instruments used by the U.S. government to project influence abroad.

Trump, a Republican, has already taken a number of steps early in his second term to dismantle key pillars of America's soft power, including moves to gut the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Institute of Peace and government-funded broadcasters like Voice of America.

Some 130 employees at the Wilson Center, a non-partisan foreign policy think tank in Washington, were placed on leave, after DOGE began focusing on the institution this week, the New York Times reported.

(Reporting by Nathan Layne, Alexandra Alper, Tim Reid and Patricia Zengerle; editing by Ross Colvin and Howard Goller)

8. Air Force Academy superintendent proposes cutting civilian staff

Here is the tradeoff - how many uniformed military do we draw from the force. And do we want to forgo the civilian expertise that is critical for educating the force? What is the proper balance between civilian and military to optimize both the education of the force and the employment of the force?

Excerpts:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called for more uniformed personnel to teach at the academies during his confirmation hearing.

"We need more uniformed members going back into West Point, the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy, as a tour-to-teach, with their wisdom of what they have learned in uniform, instead of just more civilian professors that came from the same left-wing, woke universities that they left, and then try to push that into service academies," Hegseth said.

Air Force Academy superintendent proposes cutting civilian staff

gazette.com · by Mary Shinn mary.shinn@gazette.com

This story has been updated to include a comment from the Academy.

The Air Force Academy superintendent is proposing to cut civilian faculty positions without hiring uniformed instructors to replace them — a change that could eliminate some majors.

The proposal floated in internal meetings and communications is intended to increase the percentage of military service members among the faculty up to 80% and bring the percentage of civilians down from about 37% to 20%.

The internal communication listed Superintendent Tony Bauernfeind's goals for reducing the staff overall, lowering the civilian representation and reducing the number of faculty members with doctorates to the minimum viable for accreditation. He would like to see changes in place by the coming fall semester, the note said.

The academy currently employs 491 faculty members with 308 (62.7%) uniformed members and 183 (37.3%) civilian members, the communication said. To meet the proposed goals, 105 civilian positions would have to be cut.

"The Dean has communicated that a reduction of our faculty body below 400 members would force us to cut some majors and cease many opportunities for cadets," the communication said.

Some cadets seemed concerned about the prospect of cutting great civilian professors and losing majors on the anonymous social media app Jodel and called on their peers to write their representatives.

"Everyone take five to 10 minutes to write an email to whoever nominated you telling them about the tomfoolery TB (Tony Bauernfeind) is trying to pull and how it will ruin our education and the value of being at this place. He's really trying to fire some some of the best, smartest teachers here and causing them hella stress," one post said.

In a response to a request for comment, the Academy said that all posts related to degrees, faculty ratios or accreditation are speculative.

"The U.S. Air Force Academy continually conducts planning to ensure we have the appropriate force structure to execute our mission within the budget provided by the Department of Defense and the American taxpayer. As part of complying with the executive orders we are assessing all mission, policy, and manpower requirements," an Academy spokesman said in an email.

The proposal would require the secretary of the Air Force to approve it. The nominee to lead the Air Force, Troy Meink, is still awaiting confirmation. He currently heads the National Reconnaissance Office.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called for more uniformed personnel to teach at the academies during his confirmation hearing.

"We need more uniformed members going back into West Point, the Air Force Academy and the Naval Academy, as a tour-to-teach, with their wisdom of what they have learned in uniform, instead of just more civilian professors that came from the same left-wing, woke universities that they left, and then try to push that into service academies," Hegseth said.

Bauernfeind and the other academy superintendents faced questions last week during a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel about the mix of civilians they employ.

At the Naval Academy, it's close to a 50-50 split between civilians and military faculty, Superintendent Vice Adm. Yvette Davids said. At West Point, civilians make up 26% of the faculty and uniformed members make up 74%, Lt. Gen. Steven Gilland said.

Gilland noted during the hearing that civilians bring technical expertise to the institution, particularly in science, technology, engineering or mathematics fields.

The three academies educate and train about 20% of the military's officers, said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., at the hearing. Others commission through ROTC programs at universities and colleges or through officer candidate school.

Top military leaders, such as Space Force Chief of Operations Chance Saltzman, graduated from ROTC programs.

Longtime Air Force Academy department head and retired Brig. Gen. Marty France said the Air Force Academy's transition to employing more civilians started around 1990 and it took 35 years to reach 37%.

Civilians can bring a depth of knowledge and research experience in their field, while military faculty can show the linkage between the field of study and military service. Many of the current civilians are veterans, he said.

"They have the best of both worlds," France said.

gazette.com · by Mary Shinn mary.shinn@gazette.com

9. U.S. Tariffs Make Xi Jinping’s Day

Conclusion:

Mr. Xi and his Communist comrades have long believed the West is weak, divided and in retreat. He will see this week as confirmation, and he won’t have to do much to exploit those divisions.

U.S. Tariffs Make Xi Jinping’s Day

Trump’s global trade war is a strategic gift to the Chinese President.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/xi-jinping-china-u-s-tariffs-donald-trump-trade-war-europe-canada-9dd99d61?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

By The Editorial Board

April 4, 2025 5:55 pm ET

Chinese President Xi Jinping Photo: Li Xueren/Zuma Press

President Trump’s across-the-board tariffs will change the world order in many ways, and one winner is already emerging: Xi Jinping. The Chinese President has had an excellent week.

This is only partly a story about the retaliatory measures Beijing announced Friday following Wednesday’s “Liberation Day” performance at the White House. China will impose a blanket 34% tariff on imports from the U.S. starting next week, matching Mr. Trump’s latest addition to his tariffs on China.

Beijing also added a couple dozen U.S. companies to various regulatory blacklists subject to trade, investment or export restrictions. Mr. Xi is slapping export controls on several rare-earth minerals critical for high-tech manufacturing. Oh, and a smattering of regulatory investigations for antidumping and the like are brewing, targeting American firms.

This is how trade wars escalate, which might be why global markets reacted badly to this retaliatory step—perhaps the first of many around the world. French President Emmanuel Macron has asked European companies not to invest in the U.S. Don’t assume this trade war will be easy for the U.S. to win.

Mr. Xi’s economy remains in a precarious state after several years of a real-estate slump and amid rising political tensions with many trading partners. Mr. Xi must believe he will have no problem finding other sources for critical imports, especially since the U.S. is punishing the rest of the world with tariffs.

Meanwhile, China’s authoritarian system means Mr. Xi probably can ride out whatever political or social pain might result from higher unemployment or slower economic growth in a trade war. Congressional Republicans have to face voters in 18 months following whatever fallout comes from Mr. Trump’s tariffs. It’ll help that Mr. Xi can rally nationalist sentiment against the U.S.

What a fabulous change in fortunes for the Chinese leader. Mr. Trump has taken an ax to the economic cords that were binding the rest of the world into an economic and strategic bloc to rival Beijing—and at precisely the moment many countries finally were starting to re-evaluate their economic relationships with China.

In Asia, countries such as Vietnam hoped expanding trade with the U.S. would allow them to wriggle out from under Beijing’s thumb. Not now that Mr. Trump has imposed a 46% tariff on Vietnamese imports. Ditto other countries eager for a relationship with the U.S. to counterbalance Beijing’s influence, such as Thailand (36% tariff), Indonesia (32%) and the Philippines (17%).

Japan and South Korea, crucial U.S. partners in North Asia, were slapped with tariffs of 24% and 25%. Anti-Americanism remains a potent political force in many of these places, and expect the sentiment to grow. Beijing with its giant market is an alternative.

Ditto in Europe, where the 27 countries of the European Union face a 20% tariff and not even the special relationship could spare Britain the baseline 10% tax. The U.S. has devoted years of diplomacy to discouraging European countries from economic overreliance on China. This finally was starting to pay off in greater European skepticism of closer ties with Beijing. Now it’s only a matter of time before the trade missions to China from France, Germany and elsewhere pick up again.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney summed up the global mood: “Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over.” Noting the end of an 80-year period of American economic leadership, Mr. Carney added: “While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.”

Mr. Xi and his Communist comrades have long believed the West is weak, divided and in retreat. He will see this week as confirmation, and he won’t have to do much to exploit those divisions.

RFA radio transmissions to China, Tibet halted

Relay stations owned or leased by US government no longer carrying Radio Free Asia broadcasts

By RFA Staff

2025.04.04

https://www.rfa.org/english/asia/2025/04/04/china-tibet-shortwave-radio-free-asia/

Tibetan monks listen to a Radio Free Asia broadcast as they march to protest China's hosting of the Olympic Games in Takipur, outside Dharamsala, India, March 11, 2008. (Ashwini Bhatia/AP)

Radio Free Asia announced this week that its radio broadcasts have been drastically cut as transmissions were halted from relay stations owned or leased by the U.S. government.

RFA informed listeners on Thursday that shortwave radio broadcasts for its Mandarin, Tibetan and Lao language services have stopped entirely. The broadcaster, which is funded by the U.S. Congress, said a heavily reduced schedule remains in place for RFA Burmese, Khmer, Korean and Uyghur language services.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, which oversees RFA, abruptly terminated its federal grant on March 15. RFA has since been forced to furlough most of its staff, and filed a lawsuit last week, seeking to restore the funding on the grounds that the termination violated federal laws.

The Trump administration has moved to slash news organizations funded by the U.S. Congress, including Voice of America and those funded through federal grants like RFA and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as part of its drive to reduce government spending.

With its reducing staffing, RFA is still providing limited news updates on its website and social media in all nine languages it serves. The broadcaster was established in 1996, and sends news to countries and regions across Asia that have little or no press freedom, such as North Korea, China, Myanmar and Vietnam.

Monitoring of radio frequencies previously used by RFA indicates that transmissions from shortwave and mediumwave relay stations owned or leased by USAGM have halted in the past week, meaning the hours of radio broadcasts have been slashed from 63 hours in March to just seven hours now.

That is based on review of an online Remote Monitoring System that is maintained by USAGM that provides short audio samples of radio frequencies in regions served by the broadcasters it oversees.

Feinberg initiates Pentagon's implementation of DOGE-influenced regulatory review

DefenseScoop obtained new guidance that the deputy secretary of defense issued to DOD leadership this week.

Brandi Vincent

defensescoop.com · by Brandi Vincent

Feinberg initiates Pentagon's implementation of DOGE-influenced regulatory review | DefenseScoop Skip to main content

Cast your votes for the 2025 DefenseScoop 50 — voting is open through April 18.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg issued a new memorandum directing the Pentagon’s near-term implementation of President Donald Trump’s DOGE-inspired executive order that seeks to pare back federal agency regulations.

Obtained by DefenseScoop and authenticated by several defense officials this week, the March 31 memo and its attached spreadsheet reveal a wide range of existing rules and guidance associated with the Defense Department’s intelligence, information technology, weapons acquisition and other portfolios that are now up for review.

The Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is run by billionaire and presidential adviser Elon Musk. Since its launch near the start of Trump’s second term, DOGE has led multiple disruptive initiatives to cut what they consider wasteful spending and reduce the size of the federal workforce.

On Feb. 19, Trump signed an executive order — titled “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Deregulatory Initiative” — that directs federal agencies to review and potentially cancel regulations that are deemed to be unconstitutional, innovation-stifling, not in the United States’ interests, or too burdensome on small businesses and private entrepreneurship, among other categories.

In the March 31 implementation memo that he penned to senior Pentagon leadership and defense agency and field activity directors, Feinberg designated the assistant to the secretary of defense for privacy, civil liberties, and transparency as the principal staff assistant in charge for carrying out the deregulation mandate.

He called on senior officials leading more than a dozen DOD components to go through their organizations’ regulations identified in the attachments and specify whether any “classes” from the Trump EO apply to them, and also indicate whether the rules should be changed or terminated. Some of those DOD components tasked in the guidance include the Office of the Chief Information Officer, the Pentagon’s Research and Engineering and Intelligence and Security directorates, Office of the Inspector General, as well as the Departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

Feinberg tasked officials to complete their spreadsheet responses and submit them by close of business April 18.

“As stated in E.O. 14219, the Administrator of [the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs] shall consult with agency heads to develop a Unified Regulatory Agenda that seeks to rescind or modify, as appropriate, regulations that fit within the classes identified” in the memo, he wrote.

Regulations that pertain to the Pentagon CIO’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program appear to be among hundreds of rules up for review, according to the memo attachments viewed by DefenseScoop. Two other notable tech-aligned regulatory inclusions that are set to be evaluated are R&E guidance on protecting human subjects during research experiments and an I&S policy on cloud service offerings.

“Deputy Secretary Feinberg’s directive helps to ensure DOD fully supports President Trump’s Executive Order to cut red tape and unleash prosperity, while maintaining our focus on national defense and mission-critical priorities. This memo demonstrates that under Secretary Hegseth’s leadership, we’re actively moving out to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy, streamline our operations, and refocus resources on warfighter readiness and strategic priorities,” Eric Pahon, spokesman for the deputy secretary of defense, told DefenseScoop Wednesday.

12. Why the UN Human Rights Council Keeps Failing on Israel

Why the UN Human Rights Council Keeps Failing on Israel

The UN Human Rights Council is expected to renew Francesca Albanese’s controversial role as special rapporteur for Palestinian territories, despite her documented anti-Israel bias. Albanese has repeatedly defended Hamas, blamed Israel for terrorist attacks, used anti-Semitic rhetoric, compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and accused it of genocide.

19fortyfive.com · by Lawrence Haas · April 4, 2025

UN’s Human Rights Council set to mock itself – The United Nations Human Rights Council is expected to reappoint its special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, to a second three-year term on Friday, mocking its own mandate to fairly and seriously investigate human rights problems around the world.

In doing so, the Council will likely ignore its own procedures, established in 2008, under which the HRC president must alert the council to “any information” to suggest “persistent non-compliance” by a special rapporteur with the position’s code of conduct.

Among other things, the code calls for the UNHRC’s “special procedures mandate holders” (of which Albanese is one) to “uphold the highest standards of efficiency, competence and integrity, meaning, in particular, though not exclusively, probity, impartiality, equity, honesty and good faith.”

During her three years in the post, Albanese has defended the genocidal terrorists of Hamas; blamed Israel for Hamas’ barbaric slaughter and hostage-taking on October 7, 2023; voiced anti-Semitic tropes; accused Israel of committing genocide; compared Israel’s government to that of Nazi Germany; compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler; called for the UN to kick Israel out; and suggested that America’s government is controlled by the Israel lobby.

In one sense, of course, Albanese is a perfect UNHRC appointee, because her twisted and biased views fully reflect the activities of a UN body that has long bathed in ugly anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

Ironically, the UN established the Council in 2016 to replace its Human Rights Commission, which had lost all credibility due to its anti-Israeli bias. Before long, the UNHRC had become the commission’s mirror image.

The Human Rights Council has made Israel its only permanent agenda item, meaning that it discusses the Jewish state at every one of its three meetings each year. In addition, the UNHRC has overwhelmingly targeted Israel for investigations and condemnation, while giving a free pass to some of the world’s worst human rights violators.

The Council reeks of hypocrisy, both on human rights in general, and on the question of Israel in particular.

For starters, the UN’s General Assembly appoints the Human Rights Council’s 47 member states, supposedly after considering a candidate’s “contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights.” That no doubt explains why current members include such paragons of virtue as China, Cuba, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Sudan, and Thailand.

As for the special rapporteur, its mandate calls for the position-holder to investigate only “Israel’s violations of the principles and bases of international law.” That is, as UN Watch puts it, “Whatever Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority may do, against their own people or Israelis, is excluded.”

Albanese, who, in the years before her appointment, accused Israel of apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes, and compared the Palestinian plight to the Holocaust, took to her UNHRC role with the enthusiasm of a zealot.

Here are a few of many highlights:

In November of 2022, she spoke at an official Hamas conference, along with top officials from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, stating by video, “You have a right to resist this occupation.”

-In response to the Hamas slaughter of October 7, 2023, she said, “Today’s violence must be put in context” and blamed it on “almost six decades of hostile military rule over an entire civilian population.” She believes this even though Israel departed Gaza, where Hamas rules, back in 2005.

-After, in October of 2023, it became clear that a rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad had hit a hospital parking lot in Gaza—and that early reports that Israel had bombed the hospital were wrong—she joined other “UN experts” to express “outrage” over the “atrocity” caused by a supposed Israeli air strike.

-After, in June of 2024, Israel rescued four hostages from Gaza, she suggested they had been “released,” said that “Israel has used hostages to legitimize killing, injuring, maiming, starving and traumatizing Palestinians in Gaza,” and called Israeli operations “genocidal intent turned into action.”

-Two months later, she called Gaza “the largest and most shameful concentration camp of the 21st century” and said, “Israel is genociding the Palestinians one neighborhood at the time, one hospital at the time, one school at the time, one refugee camp at the time, one ‘safe zone’ at the time.”

Despite pressure from UN watchdogs, pro-Israel groups, and lawmakers in Congress and Western parliaments, the UNHRC seems almost certain to reappoint Albanese before the weekend. That will only reinforce its well-deserved reputation as a hotbed of anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish hatred.

About the Author: Lawrence J. Hass

Lawrence J. Haas is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and the author of, among other books, Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World.

19fortyfive.com · by Lawrence Haas · April 4, 2025

13. Philippines alarmed over China arrest of alleged Filipino spies

Philippines alarmed over China arrest of alleged Filipino spies

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/philippines-alarmed-over-china-arrest-075259456.html

Reuters

Sat, April 5, 2025 at 3:52 a.m. EDT·2 min read

FILE PHOTO: Philippines' foreign ministry holds a joint news conference on water cannon incident in the South China Sea

MANILA (Reuters) - The Philippines expressed alarm on Saturday over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila's crackdown against alleged Chinese spies.

Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine intelligence agency to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime.

The Philippines' National Security Council disputed Beijing's accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship programme created under an agreement between the southern Chinese province of Hainan and the western Philippine province of Palawan.

"They are ordinary Filipino citizens with no military training who merely went to China at the invitation of the Chinese government to study," National Security Council spokesperson Jonathan Malaya said in a statement.

"They are law-abiding citizens with no criminal records and were vetted and screened by the Chinese government prior to their arrival there," he added.

The Chinese embassy in Manila did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside office hours.

Hainan and Palawan both face the South China Sea, a strategic waterway where the two countries have staked out overlapping claims and have clashed frequently over the past two years.

"The arrests can be seen as a retaliation for the series of legitimate arrests of Chinese agents and accomplices by Philippine law enforcement," Malaya said.

Philippine authorities have arrested at least a dozen Chinese nationals in the last three months on suspicion of espionage, accusing them of illegally obtaining sensitive information on military camps and critical infrastructure that could undermine Manila's national security and defence.

China has expansive territorial claims in the South China Sea that overlap with the exclusive economic zones of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. In 2016, an international arbitral tribunal ruled China's claims have no basis under international law, although Beijing does not recognise that ruling.

(Reporting by Mikhail Flores; Editing by Edmund Klamann)

14. Golden Dome: who and what should it defend?

Excerpts:

Finally, the Dome’s space and terrestrial-based systems will have dramatic impacts on future alliance and international security diplomacy. Allies will ask for formal assurances. Adversaries will offer arms control initiatives to limit the Dome to their advantage. Washington will have to have alternative diplomatic initiatives of its own.

Ultimately, the Pentagon will have to address not just the technical, budgetary, and organizational questions the Golden Dome project poses, but the strategic, diplomatic, and policy issues deployment of the system will raise. These questions must be addressed before real progress toward implementation can be made.

It will be tempting to come up with quick answers to all of these issues. But we shouldn’t be in any rush to get them wrong. In fact, these questions will persist as long as the U.S. develops the Golden Dome and has to defend against hostile missiles and drones.

At a minimum, the Pentagon needs to spotlight these questions in its Golden Dome reports and explain how it intends to balance protection of America at home with the protection of our interests, allies and bases abroad.

Golden Dome: who and what should it defend?

spacenews.com · by Henry Sokolski · April 4, 2025

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On January 27, President Trump ordered the Pentagon to develop “a reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield,” which, inspired by Israel’s Iron Dome, came to be known as the Golden Dome. On March 28, the Pentagon blew past the White House-imposed deadline.

This shouldn’t be surprising. “At a minimum” the report must include plans to defend “the United States against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.” The White House then ordered that this report serve as the basis of a follow-on report on how best to provide theater defenses for U.S. bases and allies overseas from missile attacks.

Meeting even half of these requirements is a tall order. Consider: In 1983, when Ronald Reagan first proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the U.S. needed only to convince Moscow that the project was feasible and serious. The Soviets believed him, stoking fears that contributed to the Soviet Union’s collapse even before the U.S. deployed a single interceptor.

With the Golden Dome, success will require more. Unlike SDI, the U.S. will have to actually develop, deploy and demonstrate the system’s ability to deter. Bluffing alone won’t work. The system also will have to face increasingly effective Chinese and Russian anti-satellite programs and, in time, a rival Chinese space-based missile defense system, as well as a growing number of missile threats from not just hostile states, but from non-state proxies.

It’s unclear, however, if the Pentagon plans to use the Golden Dome’s space-based interceptors to address all of these threats. It will depend first on how technically capable the U.S. makes its space-based interceptors and second, on precisely who and what our government decides to protect.

The president’s tasking for a separate Pentagon report on how it might develop regional terrestrial-based “theater” missile defenses suggests that the Dome’s space-based interceptor system may not be for everyone. Taking this approach, though, could be problematic. For allies and U.S. bases close to hostile states — Germany, Israel, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, the Philippines, India, Japan and various NATO states — the optimal way to counter short flight-time missiles is to intercept them the instant they’re launched (in the boost phase), rather than waiting until they close in on their targets (in terminal phase). The Golden Dome’s space-based interceptors, not its ground-based theater systems, would be optimized for boost phase intercept.

There are ways, however, around this dilemma. The Pentagon could follow outside advice and shutdown most of America’s overseas bases. Under this scheme, the Pentagon would project force almost entirely from bases located in the continental U.S. rather than from bases overseas. Alternatively, the president could decide to defend only a handful of America’s friends from missile assaults (perhaps only Israel, Saudi Arabia, or Japan). Either approach could reduce demands on the Dome’s global space-based systems.

Reducing the Dome’s protection requirements, however, could be risky. It would likely induce undefended, anxious states to hedge their bets by acquiring nuclear weapons and nuclear-capable missiles that could penetrate the Dome. This could make escalatory missile exchanges — such as those between Israel and Iran — more likely and even more destructive. With any bad luck, such bouts could catalyze into larger conflicts (think World War III).

Conversely, increasing the Dome’s protection of such states could squash such horrors. Instead of going more nuclear or ballistic, states with security ties to the U.S. would seek greater safety by increasing their collaboration with Washington. Of course securing this advantage would require spending more on the Dome.

Finally, the Dome’s space and terrestrial-based systems will have dramatic impacts on future alliance and international security diplomacy. Allies will ask for formal assurances. Adversaries will offer arms control initiatives to limit the Dome to their advantage. Washington will have to have alternative diplomatic initiatives of its own.

Ultimately, the Pentagon will have to address not just the technical, budgetary, and organizational questions the Golden Dome project poses, but the strategic, diplomatic, and policy issues deployment of the system will raise. These questions must be addressed before real progress toward implementation can be made.

It will be tempting to come up with quick answers to all of these issues. But we shouldn’t be in any rush to get them wrong. In fact, these questions will persist as long as the U.S. develops the Golden Dome and has to defend against hostile missiles and drones.

At a minimum, the Pentagon needs to spotlight these questions in its Golden Dome reports and explain how it intends to balance protection of America at home with the protection of our interests, allies and bases abroad.

Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Arlington, Virginia, served as Deputy for Nonproliferation Policy at the Pentagon (1989-93), and is author of China, Russia and the Coming Cool War (2024).

SpaceNews is committed to publishing our community’s diverse perspectives. Whether you’re an academic, executive, engineer or even just a concerned citizen of the cosmos, send your arguments and viewpoints to opinion@spacenews.com to be considered for publication online or in our next magazine. The perspectives shared in these op-eds are solely those of the authors.

spacenews.com · by Henry Sokolski · April 4, 2025

15. Reading the tree leaves: Why a no-show by China’s No.2 general has speculation running wild

Reading the tree leaves: Why a no-show by China’s No.2 general has speculation running wild | CNN

Analysis by Nectar Gan, CNN

8 minute read

Updated 9:16 PM EDT, Fri April 4, 2025

CNN · by Nectar Gan · April 5, 2025

Gen. He Weidong was recently absent from a decades-old military springtime ceremony, fueling speculation he may have become the latest - and most senior - casualty in Xi Jinping's purge of the top ranks

Ichiro Ohara/The Yomiuri Shimbun/AP

Hong Kong CNN —

The Chinese military officials in brown uniforms fan out around rows of young trees, shoveling soil into freshly dug pits. The camera pans to the most senior leaders one by one, in order of rank. But one prominent face is conspicuously absent.

The news segment, aired Wednesday night on China’s state broadcaster, features a tree-planting event in the outskirts of the capital Beijing – an annual springtime tradition for the country’s military leadership spanning more than four decades.

But Gen. He Weidong, the second-highest-ranking uniformed officer in the People’s Liberation Army, was nowhere to be seen. Nor was he named as a participant in a report by the official state news agency.

Gen. He’s absence from the high-profile event has fueled ongoing speculation that the second-ranking vice chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission (CMC) may have become the latest – and most senior – casualty in leader Xi Jinping’s purge of the military’s top ranks.

As Xi’s No.2 general, He shares a long-standing relationship with the Chinese leader, dating back decades to the early days of their careers in the coastal province of Fujian.

Rumors about an investigation against He first surfaced among the Chinese dissident community following China’s annual political meetings last month. The 67-year-old hasn’t appeared in public for three weeks since the closing ceremony of the country’s rubber-stamp legislature on March 11.

The Chinese government has offered little in the way of clearing the air.

When asked about He’s situation at a news briefing on March 27, Defense Ministry spokesperson Wu Qian said: “There is no information on this matter, and we are not aware of the situation.”

It is now unclear what has happened to He, who also sits on the Communist Party’s 24-member Politburo.

Three weeks out of the public eye is not unheard of for a top general without a public-facing role and there is always a chance he resurfaces. But his no-show at a well-choreographed annual propaganda event stands out in a political system deeply attuned to the importance of symbolism.

“Clearly the absence of one CMC vice chair is important symbolically,” said James Char, a longtime PLA expert and assistant professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

Similar to the Communist Party Congresses and annual “two sessions” political gatherings, “it’s important for all the major figures that the rest of the world know of to show up to be in the same picture, because it helps to demonstrate the power and – more importantly – the unity of the party,” Char said.

Reading the “tree leaves”

In the opaque world of Chinese politics, observers have long leaned on arcane signals of Communist Party traditions and protocol to interpret what is going on behind the scenes. The discipline, known as “tea-leaf reading,” has become more relevant than ever in Xi’s era as he centralizes power into his own hands and makes the decision-making process even more obscure.

And now, some experts are scouring this week’s events for clues on the fate of one of Xi’s top generals.

The annual ritual began as part of a nationwide tree-planting campaign launched by late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping in late 1981, following devastating floods he blamed on rampant deforestation. It was billed as a patriotic, selfless undertaking in “greening the motherland, building socialism and benefiting future generations.”

The following spring, Deng, then chairman of the CMC, planted the first tree of the campaign, setting a tradition that has since been carried on by successive Chinese leaders and military top brass.

Wednesday marked “the 43rd consecutive year the CMC leadership has collectively participated in the voluntary tree-planting activity in the capital,” said Xinhua, the state news agency.

Chinese President Xi Jinping waves as he drives after inspecting the troops during a parade to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China at Tiananmen Square in 1949, on October 1, 2019 in Beijing, China.

Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Since Xi came to power in late 2012, his two vice chairmen on the CMC had led military officers to plant trees without fail every spring – until He’s rare absence on Wednesday.

The first-ranking CMC vice chairman, Gen. Zhang Youxia, attended the event, so did two other generals on the commission, Liu Zhenli and Zhang Shengmin.

The only other uniformed CMC member who did not show up was Adm. Miao Hua, who was suspended under investigation in November for “serious violations of discipline” – a common euphemism for corruption and disloyalty.

“I think He’s absence is quite telling, but again, no one can be absolutely sure,” Char said. “There’s another school of thought, which is He Weidong was involved in the last two weeks with the preparations for the military exercises around Taiwan.”

Starting from Tuesday, combined forces of the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command held surprise exercises around Taiwan for two straight days, testing capabilities to blockade the self-ruling island, simulate strikes on its ports and other critical infrastructure, and launch long-range live-fire strikes.

The commander of the Eastern Theater Command from 2019 to 2022 was He. It was during his tenure that the Eastern Theater Command staged massive military drills and fired missiles around Taiwan in August 2022, in retaliation against then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei.

A prolonged absence from public view does not always signal trouble for Chinese officials. Some have resurfaced and resumed their duties. It’s also not uncommon for officials to be taken in for questioning by graft busters to assist investigations into colleagues.

Last November, Defense Minister Dong Jun was reported to be under investigation for corruption by the Financial Times, citing US officials. China’s Defense Ministry dismissed the report as a “sheer fabrication.” Dong reemerged in public a week later. The minister was also seen attending Wednesday’s tree-planting event on the state broadcaster.

When Chinese leader Xi Jinping began his third term in 2022, he stacked the Central Military Commission with six loyalists. Now, one of them has been expelled from the Communist Party for corruption, another was suspended under investigation, and a third missed a high-profile event this week.

Yue Yuewei/Xinhua/Getty Images

Military purges

After coming to power, Xi consolidated control over the world’s largest military by taking down powerful generals from rival factions and replacing them with allies and loyal proteges.

But a decade on, having structurally overhauled the People’s Liberation Army and stacked its top ranks with his own men, Xi is still knee-deep in his seemingly endless struggle against graft and disloyalty – and is increasingly turning against his own handpicked loyalists.

Since the summer of 2023, more than a dozen high-ranking figures in China’s defense establishment have been ousted in a sweeping purge that focused on the country’s nuclear force and equipment procurement, including two defense ministers promoted to the CMC by Xi.

The ongoing turmoil roiling the senior ranks of the PLA has raised questions over Xi’s ability to end systemic corruption in the military and enhance its combat readiness at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.

Military delegates arrive at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to attend the closing session of the National Peoples Congress on March 11, 2024.

Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images

“Recurring purges of the senior-most PLA leaders indicate that Xi Jinping distrusts his officer corps,” said Drew Thompson, a senior fellow at the RSIS.

“The constant removal of so many senior officers, as well as the extent of corruption running to the very top undoubtedly has an effect on the PLA’s morale, and likely also its military capabilities,” Thompson added.

But some analysts noted that by this point, the PLA may have well become accustomed to the shake-ups in its high command.

“Leadership purges in the PLA seem to have become normalized to a point that it’s just part and parcel of being the PLA,” said Collin Koh, another research fellow at RSIS.

The Chinese military may have started to grow accustomed to the purges – to a point where it is able to isolate them from its daily operational activities and go on with business as usual, Koh noted.

“It does not necessarily mean that because of the purges, the PLA has started to relent on readiness. These purges might potentially have the effect of reminding the PLA to do their work better – if anything, if you want to escape the purges, then one way to do that is to obey what the party is telling you, which is to be prepared for conflict,” he said.

A close confidant

Like Miao, He is widely believed to have forged close personal ties with Xi during their overlapping years in Fujian, where the future Chinese leader was rising through the ranks as a local official in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Both He and Miao spent most of their early career serving in the former 31st Group Army in Fujian, which became a major power base for Xi. A string of military officers hailing from the 31st Group Army have been fast-tracked for promotion since Xi took power in late 2012.

Gen. He was no exception. In 2013, he was promoted to commander of Jiangsu Military District; less than a year later, he became commander of the Shanghai Garrison. In 2016, he was promoted yet again to command ground forces of the Western Theater Command, which oversees China’s border with India.

He was promoted to full general in 2017, when he became commander of the Eastern Theater Command, responsible for leading any military invasion or blockade of Taiwan.

But the ultimate sign of Xi’s trust in He came at the 20th Party Congress in 2022, when He landed the CMC vice chairmanship – an unusually rapid rise for an official who hadn’t served on the Central Committee of the ruling Communist Party.

During that leadership reshuffle, Xi stacked the CMC with six loyalists. If confirmed to be under investigation, He would be the powerful military body’s first sitting vice chairman to be purged by Xi and the third member on the current CMC to fall from grace.

The last time a sitting CMC vice chair was purged was more than three decades ago, when then-Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang was ousted for sympathizing with student protesters in the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy movement.

“What happens finally to He Weidong gives us a window into how the political system in China is being restructured further under Xi Jinping,” Char said, noting the PLA’s reform of its rigid political structure.

“I don’t think anyone in the system now is irreplaceable,” he said. “This is what a political strong man does. He’s ruthless… he’s continuously purging his own ranks to keep his generals on their toes.”

CNN · by Nectar Gan · April 5, 2025

16. Poland Prepares for Direct War With Russia

Excerpts:

Poland’s military expansion is taking place amid a presidential election campaign, scheduled for May 18, in which neither of the two major political camps wants to be perceived as weak on national security. Duda will be stepping down in August after having served two five-year terms. If no candidate wins over 50 percent of the vote in May’s election, a run-off between the top two candidates will take place on June 1. According to the most recent opinion polls, the frontrunner, with 36 percent support, is Rafal Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw and the candidate of Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition (Koalicja Obywatelska, KO) (Ewybory.eu, March 22–28). The PiS-backed candidate, historian Karol Nawrocki, is currently second in the polls with about 26 percent support. This will make the second round of balloting less predictable, as Sławomir Mentzen, the candidate of the ultra-nationalist Kenfederacja movement, is poised to come third in the first round and many of his voters may turn to Nawrocki in the second round (Notes from Poland, February 28).

In its election messages, the PiS opposition has accused Trzaskowski and the Tusk government of being weak on defense, soft on illegal migration, and beholden to German interests. To counter these charges, the Prime Minister has positioned himself as a defense hawk in Europe, forged closer ties with the United Kingdom and France, and refused to comply with the European Union’s Pact on Migration and Asylum that would have obliged Poland to accommodate illegal immigrants (Euronews, February 7). Regardless of who is elected president, it seems certain that Poland will continue to strengthen its defenses and expand its military capabilities as war with Russia looms on the horizon.

Poland Prepares for Direct War With Russia

By Janusz Bugajski

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/04/05/poland_prepares_for_direct_war_with_russia_1102192.html

Executive Summary:

Poland is accelerating its military build-up for a projected war with Russia as Ukraine faces a potentially unfavorable outcome in the peace talks brokered by the Donald Trump administration.
Warsaw plans to introduce voluntary military training for all adult males and bolster Poland’s armed forces to half a million military personnel and reservists, in addition to increasing military spending and urging NATO allies to raise their defense budgets.
Poland’s military expansion is taking place amid a presidential election campaign, in which neither of the two major political camps wants to be perceived as weak on national security.

Poland has been reinvigorating its military preparations for a potential war with Russia since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. Warsaw is bolstering its defenses in anticipation of the growing likelihood of direct armed conflict with its perennial historical rival, given the uncertainties surrounding U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempts to broker peace between Moscow and Kyiv, as well as the prospect of Russia consolidating its territorial gains in Ukraine. The Polish government calculates that if Washington forces Ukraine to surrender parts of its territory and elements of its sovereignty, while Russia is enabled to restore its economy and military through the lifting of economic sanctions, then Poland will be on the front lines of the next war.

In recent weeks, the coalition government of Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has taken several domestic and international steps to strengthen Poland’s military capabilities and social preparedness. In a major speech in parliament on March 7, Tusk explained the basis for Poland’s accelerated military buildup (Euromaidan Press, March 7). Tusk warned that intelligence reports shared by allies indicate that Moscow is planning for a significantly larger war within three to four years by massively investing in its military expansion and capacity for mobilization. Tusk also noted that it was unlikely that Ukraine would receive any hard security guarantees from the United States under any prospective peace deal, meaning that Poland’s predicament had become more dangerous.

During the parliamentary speech, Tusk announced plans to introduce voluntary military training for every adult male so they will be ready to become “full-fledged soldiers in conflict situations” (Notes from Poland, March 7). The purpose of the training is to create a substantial reserve force over the coming years by providing incentives for annual training without implementing compulsory military service (Rzeczpospolita, March 24). The training program will include courses in civil defense, first aid provisioning, and firearms training. In addition to men, women will have the option to join the training program.

Tusk claimed that the government was considering the need to build a half-million-strong army in Poland, including reservists. Poland already possesses the third-largest military in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the largest in the European Union with 216,100 personnel (Notes from Poland, July 16, 2024). It is surpassed only by the United States (1.3 million) and Türkiye (481,000), and is followed by France (204,700), Germany (185,600), Italy (171,400), and the United Kingdom (138,100). The previous Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwośċ, PiS) government had set a target in 2022 to increase the size of the armed forces to 300,000 personnel (Gazeta Prawna, September 23, 2023). That figure has now been increased due to the growing threat from Russia and the uncertainty surrounding the United States’s commitment to defending Europe.

Poland’s focus on national defense has been evident in its consistent increases in military spending and weapons acquisition (see Bugajski, Pivotal Poland: Europe’s Rising Power, 2025). In 2022, Poland was one of only nine NATO members to maintain its military spending above the 2 percent of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) guidelines agreed upon by NATO leaders and reaffirmed by their 2014 “Defense Investment Pledge” (NATO, June 18, 2024). Warsaw subsequently increased its share to 3.9 percent in 2023, the highest among all NATO members, even ahead of the United States at 3.49 percent. By 2024, Warsaw’s defense spending had reached 4.12 percent of GDP and is projected to grow to 4.7 percent in 2025. The Alliance also issued guidelines stating that at least 20 percent of annual defense expenditures should be allocated for the purchase of military equipment. Poland has consistently met or exceeded this target, allocating more than 50 percent of its defense spending to military modernization, the highest level in the alliance (Polish Ministry of National Defense, February 22, 2024). In one recent acquisition, Poland’s Defense Ministry signed a deal worth about $1.7 billion to acquire 111 Borsuk (Badger) tracked infantry fighting vehicles from the country’s state-run Polish Armaments Group (Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa, PGR). Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz underscored that Warsaw was delivering on promises to invest in Poland’s defense industry (Defense News, March 27).

Another element in Poland’s military buildup consists of constructing major border fortifications with Belarus and Russia (Kaliningrad oblast) (Notes from Poland, May 27, 2024). At a cost of 2.4 billion euros ($2.56 billion), Warsaw is fortifying approximately 700 kilometers (435 miles) of its eastern and northern borders in preparation for a potential attack. This “East Shield” (Tarcza Wschód) project includes new physical infrastructure, such as bunkers, minefields, and anti-tank obstacles, together with electronic components, including satellite monitoring, thermal imaging cameras, and anti-drone systems. According to Kosiniak-Kamysz, the project will be completed by 2028 and will strengthen capabilities against a surprise attack, impede the movement of enemy troops, facilitate the movement of Polish forces, and protect the civilian population (Breaking Defense, May 28, 2024) Warsaw expects funding for East Shield from various EU defense programs and reached a preliminary agreement in March with the European Investment Bank (EIB) for 1 billion euros ($1.08 billion) in funding (Polskie Radio, March 20). The European Parliament has recognized the project as a flagship initiative for EU-wide defense (European Parliament, March 12).

Polish President Andrzej Duda and Premier Tusk, although they are political rivals, are both committed to boosting the country’s defenses. Duda has proposed changing Poland’s constitution to guarantee that Warsaw will spend at least 4 percent of GDP each year on its security (Kancelaria Prezydenta, March 7). Constitutional change requires the support of a two-thirds majority in parliament, so both the ruling coalition and opposition would need to vote in favor. Tusk expressed his willingness to consider Duda’s proposal while the PiS opposition leader Jarosław Kaczyński declared his support. Duda has expressed his satisfaction that he cooperates with Tusk on security issues, as they are in “constant contact and consultation” (Notes from Poland, March 7).

For his part, Tusk has announced that Warsaw intends to redirect 7.2 billion euros ($7.7 billion) from its share of the European Union’s post-pandemic recovery funds toward defense spending (Kancelaria Premiera, March 25). If approved by the European Commission, Poland would be the first member state to do so, and it would be consistent with the “ReArm Europe” plan to bolster Europe’s security, presented by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The funds would be allocated to the newly established Security and Defense Fund (Fundusz Bezpieczeństwa i Obronności) to strengthen Poland’s security infrastructure, build civilian shelters, modernize defense firms, bolster cybersecurity, and fund research and development (Portal Funduszy Europejskich, March 7). The Defense Ministry has also called for all of the country’s civilian airports to be adapted for dual military use (Notes from Poland, February 28).

Warsaw has been at the forefront of encouraging higher NATO defense spending and commitments to defend the eastern flank. Duda has submitted a request for NATO to increase its minimum guideline for defense spending from 2 percent to 3 percent of GDP. After meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Duda stated that “If the entire alliance does not increase its spending, then unfortunately [Russian President Vladimir] Putin may want to attack again, because there will be no effective deterrence” (Notes from Poland, March 7). Duda’s proposal occurred on the same day that Trump warned that if NATO members did not allocate enough funds for their own defense, then the United States would not defend them if they were attacked (YouTube/@TheTimes, March 6). Simultaneously, Tusk called on Europe to “win the arms race” with Russia, to start believing that “we are a global power,” and attain “defense independence” (Notes from Poland, March 2; Kancelaria Premiera, March 6).

On a visit to Warsaw on March 26, Rutte affirmed that the alliance would defend Poland “with full force” if Russia attacked and that “our reaction will be devastating” (Notes from Poland, March 26). Warsaw has also been firming up its bilateral European alliances. A treaty on mutual security guarantees between Poland and France is being finalized, and on January 17, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Warsaw to discuss a new defense and security treaty with his Polish counterpart (Notes from Poland, January 17; TVP World, March 27). The treaty is planned to be signed by the end of the year. It will enhance cooperation against Russian disinformation and hybrid threats, secure energy supplies, protect infrastructure, and deepen ties between Polish and U.K. defense industries. Warsaw is also keenly interested in the extension of France’s “nuclear umbrella” to cover its European allies or alternatively to develop its own nuclear arsenal as a deterrent against Russia, given the growing doubts about U.S. commitments to defend NATO (Notes from Poland, March 10).

Poland’s military expansion is taking place amid a presidential election campaign, scheduled for May 18, in which neither of the two major political camps wants to be perceived as weak on national security. Duda will be stepping down in August after having served two five-year terms. If no candidate wins over 50 percent of the vote in May’s election, a run-off between the top two candidates will take place on June 1. According to the most recent opinion polls, the frontrunner, with 36 percent support, is Rafal Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw and the candidate of Tusk’s centrist Civic Coalition (Koalicja Obywatelska, KO) (Ewybory.eu, March 22–28). The PiS-backed candidate, historian Karol Nawrocki, is currently second in the polls with about 26 percent support. This will make the second round of balloting less predictable, as Sławomir Mentzen, the candidate of the ultra-nationalist Kenfederacja movement, is poised to come third in the first round and many of his voters may turn to Nawrocki in the second round (Notes from Poland, February 28).

In its election messages, the PiS opposition has accused Trzaskowski and the Tusk government of being weak on defense, soft on illegal migration, and beholden to German interests. To counter these charges, the Prime Minister has positioned himself as a defense hawk in Europe, forged closer ties with the United Kingdom and France, and refused to comply with the European Union’s Pact on Migration and Asylum that would have obliged Poland to accommodate illegal immigrants (Euronews, February 7). Regardless of who is elected president, it seems certain that Poland will continue to strengthen its defenses and expand its military capabilities as war with Russia looms on the horizon.

Janusz Bugajski is a Senior Fellow at The Jamestown Foundation in Washington, DC. He hosted several long-running television shows broadcast in the Balkans; has authored 21 books on Europe, Russia, and transatlantic relations; and is a columnist for several media outlets.

17. How Trump’s Tariffs Are Reshaping Global Trade

Excerpts:

The unveiling of sweeping tariffs has fundamentally shifted the nature of global trade diplomacy. Rather than resolving disputes through established norms and multilateral institutions, the United States is reframing trade as a dynamic game of leverage and individual negotiations. In such an environment, economic diplomacy becomes less about adhering to agreed-upon frameworks and more about individual nations’ capacities to manage risk, signal resolve, and exploit informational asymmetries.

For executives and decision-makers, this new paradigm demands capabilities that transcend conventional risk management, trend analyses, and mainstream economic thinking. Success hinges on decoding geopolitical signals and swiftly adapting to them. Given the complexity of this new economy, lucrative profit opportunities will come for those who understand how to navigate these new geopolitical tensions, trade barriers, and “unpredictable” policy decisions.

While U.S. firms accustomed to institutional predictability may find this environment unsettling, this environment is actually stable compared to countries like mine (Venezuela). When I speak with businesspeople in countries like Lebanon, Argentina, or Nigeria, they all recognize that in fractured systems, agility is existential, and chaos is a currency. In this age of transactional multilateralism, the divide between winners and losers will mirror the divide between those who wait for stability and those who realize today’s disruptions are tomorrow’s profit engines.

How Trump’s Tariffs Are Reshaping Global Trade

The National Interest

Topic: Economic Development

Region: Americas

Tags: China, Donald Trump, Stock Market, Tariffs, and Trade

April 4, 2025

The unveiling of sweeping trade barriers has fundamentally shifted the nature of global trade diplomacy toward transactionalism.

This week, President Donald Trump announced a comprehensive set of tariffs affecting nearly all U.S. trading partners. This policy includes a 20 percent tariff on goods from the European Union and an additional 34 percent tariff on imports from China. Combined with existing measures, this results in a cumulative tariff rate of at least 54 percent on Chinese imports, which could be even more if we count the administration’s 25 percent tariff on imports from countries that continue to import Venezuelan oil.

Branded as America’s “Liberation Day,” Trump’s initiative fundamentally reshapes the global trade landscape. While its economic consequences remain uncertain, one feature of the policy stands out: it is structured around several principles of game theory. It leverages power asymmetries, imposes strict time constraints, and fragments coordination among trading partners. In doing so, it reframes global trade as a multi-actor negotiation game, rather than a rules-based system.

Forced to Choose

The tariff policy leverages power asymmetries by exploiting virtually all countries’ disproportionate dependence on access to the U.S. market. Since countries export heavily to the United States, they have more to lose from a disruption in trade than the United States does. The tariffs capitalize on this imbalance by imposing large potential costs on those who hesitate or resist.

Moreover, by imposing tariffs unilaterally and without prior negotiation, the United States positions itself as the first mover, forcing other countries into a reactive role. This sequencing provides Washington with additional strategic leverage. It sets the parameters of engagement and forces others to respond on its terms.

Hit Everyone at Once

A central design feature of this tariff package is simultaneity. All countries are targeted at the same time, leaving no opportunity for sequential responses. This prevents governments from waiting to observe others’ strategies or coordinating joint action. As a result, countries are pushed to make quick, independent decisions. This mirrors a coordination game, where players would benefit from acting together but often fail to do so due to mistrust, uncertainty, or time constraints.

The simultaneity also creates a classic coordination problem under conditions of imperfect information. With no ability to observe how others will act, other governments are more likely to choose risk-averse strategies, such as early compliance, to avoid the worst-case scenario of isolation. These are known in game theory as risk-dominant choices. While some countries may attempt to infer others’ intentions through diplomatic signals or statements, the short deadline curtails their ability to adjust. The policy thus resembles a signaling game under time pressure, where ambiguity can be used strategically to prevent coalition-building.

A Tight Deadline

Another critical component is the time constraint. The United States has given countries until April 5 and April 9 to prepare for the trade barriers. This introduces a “deadline effect,” a well-established concept in negotiation theory and dynamic games. Deadlines increase the cost of delay and compress the time available for coordination, which favors early movers.

This limited time horizon turns the interaction into a finite repeated game. In such games, long-term cooperation tends to unravel as the end point nears. Players, anticipating the conclusion, may defect or retaliate just before time runs out. Larger economies, in particular, may pursue such late-game defection strategies. Meanwhile, countries facing short-term economic or political pressures—such as upcoming elections or vulnerable export sectors—may choose to negotiate early.

This dynamic creates what game theorists call a first-mover advantage for early negotiators, and a coordination failure risk for countries that try—but fail—to act together. The most likely outcome is fragmentation: some countries concede early, others retaliate, and a few attempt to hold out.

An Era of Transactional Multilateralism

The unveiling of sweeping tariffs has fundamentally shifted the nature of global trade diplomacy. Rather than resolving disputes through established norms and multilateral institutions, the United States is reframing trade as a dynamic game of leverage and individual negotiations. In such an environment, economic diplomacy becomes less about adhering to agreed-upon frameworks and more about individual nations’ capacities to manage risk, signal resolve, and exploit informational asymmetries.

For executives and decision-makers, this new paradigm demands capabilities that transcend conventional risk management, trend analyses, and mainstream economic thinking. Success hinges on decoding geopolitical signals and swiftly adapting to them. Given the complexity of this new economy, lucrative profit opportunities will come for those who understand how to navigate these new geopolitical tensions, trade barriers, and “unpredictable” policy decisions.

While U.S. firms accustomed to institutional predictability may find this environment unsettling, this environment is actually stable compared to countries like mine (Venezuela). When I speak with businesspeople in countries like Lebanon, Argentina, or Nigeria, they all recognize that in fractured systems, agility is existential, and chaos is a currency. In this age of transactional multilateralism, the divide between winners and losers will mirror the divide between those who wait for stability and those who realize today’s disruptions are tomorrow’s profit engines.

Jorge Jraissati is the President of the Economic Inclusion Group, a young policy organization tackling urgent and complex economic challenges. EIG partners with policymakers and industry leaders to ensure freedom and fair access to financial systems, expand economic opportunity and innovative growth, and strengthen economic security and energy resilience. Jorge is also a researcher at IESE Business School and at the FAU College of Business. Follow him on X: @JraissatiJorge.

Image: Babooo0 / Shutterstock.com.

The National Interest

18. Myanmar and the Gutting of USAID

Excerpts:

USAID funding was intertwined with support for civil society and groups opposing the regime. Various observers and people directly affected by the funding cuts say that the developments are akin to the U.S. handing over Myanmar on a silver platter to China and Russia. Other cuts and purges, such as to the National Endowment for Democracy and to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, are amplifying the political fallout. Non-political surveillance, including for agriculture, food insecurity, climate vulnerability and economic needs, is also being affected.

Some fear a decline in U.S. assistance and attention will fundamentally tilt the power dynamics towards authoritarian members of the multi-stranded anti-junta resistance like the Three Brotherhood Alliance (3BA), while groups seen as more “democratic-leaning” such as the NUG and the K3C grouping could become sidelined. The 3BA’s ultimate ambitions currently remain unclear, but their actions and rhetoric do not bode well for a democratic, federal, and intact Myanmar.

For all the issues and complaints about its efficacy, USAID transformed the lives of countless people around the world and in Myanmar. Hopefully, the country’s dire situation and the earthquake will convince the Trump administration to be more lenient to Myanmar in allotting what remains of USAID’s gutted portfolio. But for people like the friends and relatives of Pe Kha Lau and the communities affected by the recent earthquake, the cuts have already left an indelible and traumatic mark.

Myanmar and the Gutting of USAID

thediplomat.com

The Trump administration’s foreign aid cuts have crippled U.S. efforts to support earthquake relief efforts. But that’s not the only damage they will do.

By Naw Theresa

April 04, 2025

Shipments of personal protective equipment that were dispatched to Myanmar by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, March 20, 2020.

Credit: Robin Johnson/USAID

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On March 28, what is being called a once-in-a-century earthquake struck central Myanmar, devastating huge swathes of the war-torn country. The cities of Mandalay and Sagaing, along with the administrative capital Naypyidaw and villages in the famed Inle Lake region in Shan State have seen widespread and catastrophic death and destruction. The State Administration Council (SAC) junta has reported over 3,000 dead and thousands wounded or missing, but the broad consensus is that the death toll will likely be in the tens of thousands. Strong aftershocks, destroyed highways, power outages, and deep political cleavages are hampering rescue efforts.

Even as it continued bombing rebel forces in the quake’s aftermath, the military regime made a rare appeal for aid. Relief supplies and rescue teams have been trickling in from China, Russia, India, ASEAN member states and countries further afield. Amid the desperate search for survivors in a race against time, news platforms and commentators noted that while U.S. President Trump has pledged aid in response, there was a notable absence of American rescue or coordination teams on the ground.

Funding Freezes

The Myanmar earthquake is arguably the first major natural disaster to take place in the wake of the Trump administration’s gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). As with other countries around the world, Myanmar and various vulnerable communities living in or originating from the war-torn country have been adversely affected by Trump’s 90-day freeze on foreign aid, announced on the day he was inaugurated for his second term. Despite being far-removed from Trump’s policy priorities and bugbears, Myanmar has become a repeat victim of Trump’s resurrected “America First” foreign policy and the actions of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) headed by Elon Musk.

In a speech on January 29, Trump specifically mentioned DOGE’s cancellation of a $45 million scholarship for Myanmar. “We also blocked $45 million for diversity scholarships in Burma. Forty-five. That’s a lot of money for diversity scholarships. In Burma. Can you imagine where that money went,” he said, drawing chuckles from the audience.

He brought it up again at his first address to Congress on March 5. Behind him, both Vice President J.D. Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson gestured derision at the scholarships.

In early February, Human Rights Myanmar announced that $39.5 million in USAID funding earmarked for human rights, democracy, and media support programs has been halted. It also said that $22 million in humanitarian funding, alongside $36 million for farmers, $22 million for health programs and $30 million for education, has been suspended. In a March update, the group said Myanmar was on track to lose around $1.1 billion in foreign assistance over the second Trump term.

Funding for some refugee camps resumed in late February but is being reportedly granted on a 90-day basis, leaving the future unclear. In mid-March, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that 83 percent of USAID projects would be cancelled with the remainder to be administered directly by the State Department. As of writing, it is unclear how this will impact programs for Myanmar.

Reuters also reported that USAID’s acting deputy administrator, who was put in charge of overseeing the dismantling of the agency, had proposed phasing out assistance to the Rohingya refugees currently in Bangladesh. An email from the administrator obtained by Reuters appeared to both express gratitude for the U.S. support and draw attention to “the odd dependency” of Rohingya refugees on U.S. aid.

U.S. Aid and USAID in Myanmar

Over the past 10 years, Myanmar has been among the top recipients of U.S. foreign assistance in East Asia. In 2024, the country was the fourth-largest recipient in the region and 37th globally in terms of disbursed U.S. foreign aid. Based on public foreign assistance data, the U.S. disbursed $825.9 million to Myanmar during the four years (2021-2024) of the Biden administration, which overlapped with the post-coup period. This averaged $206.5 million annually.

Of the disbursed funds over the aforementioned four-year period, around $268 million (32.5 percent) was categorized as being earmarked humanitarian and emergency responses; $194 million (23.5 percent) for civil society, including $13.6 million for media support; $151 million (18.3 percent) for health; $86 million (10.4 percent) for agriculture; and $43.7 million (5.3 percent) for education.

According to documents from USAID, the U.S. government has provided nearly $2.4 billion in response to the Rohingya crisis since 2017, including nearly $2 billion to assist Rohingya refugees and host communities in Bangladesh.

Almost all (96 percent) of U.S. assistance to Myanmar flowed through USAID to recipients, both inside and outside the country. Most went to groups or beneficiaries beyond the military government and the agency never provided direct budget support to government departments. Beneficiary programs include everything from critical health programs, emergency food aid for displaced persons, and shelter for natural disaster-affected communities and refugee camps, to support for civil society, exiled media outlets, and environmental groups in ethnic minority areas.

The funding has been critical amid the mass displacement, worsening conflict, and unmitigated natural disasters that have befallen Myanmar over the past few years, to say nothing of the fall in overall aid following the coup. According to the Center for Global Development, USAID accounted for 17 percent of the foreign aid disbursed to Myanmar in 2023. On the flip side, what Myanmar received during those four years is an infinitesimal 0.32 percent of the $258.8 billion publicly-reported foreign assistance dispensed by the U.S. for that period.

Indiscriminate Impact

Almost immediately after Trump announced the freeze on January 20, over 100,000 vulnerable refugees on the Myanmar-Thai border lost access to essential health services. This led to the first-reported global death of the aid shutdown. Seventy-one-year-old Pe Kha Lau, a refugee with chronic lung problems, died soon after she was sent home from a USAID-funded health facility on the Myanmar-Thailand border. The facility was among several serving refugee camps that shuttered after receiving a stop-work order.

In affected camps, critically ill persons and mothers with newborns were reportedly turned back from hospitals. Most patients were involuntarily discharged and those with chronic conditions were said to have been given only a week’s worth of medicine. Such actions border on a death sentence for refugees as they neither have the ways nor means to access life-saving medicines and care, and more deaths have since been reported. Some organizations did not receive stop-work orders but nonetheless face uncertainties as they have not received confirmation of additional funding.

Inside the country, over 50,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Karenni State, nearly 300,000 IDPs in Kachin and Northern Shan, and over 700,000 in Rakhine State have been reported affected. Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, home to around 1 million people, have also reportedly been affected despite the interim Bangladeshi government saying there was no pause in funding for Rohingyas. In early March, the World Food Program announced it was halving food rations to Rohingya refugees and that 1 million vulnerable people in Myanmar would have their food assistance completely cut due to funding shortfalls likely exacerbated by the USAID cuts.

HIV and tuberculosis-related programs in both regime and resistance-controlled territories are now under threat, raising fears that hundreds of thousands of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria patients could lose access to life-saving drugs. With various diseases and drug-resistance rebounding due to the health system’s near-collapse and fragmentation since the coup, the funding freeze could contribute to major health impacts that will reverberate for generations and beyond Myanmar’s borders.

In Malaysia, ethnic Chin refugees being resettled in the U.S. had their flights and visas cancelled. Some of those affected were in the final steps of the immigration process, having quit their jobs and returned their rented flats. Similar situations were reported among ethnic Karen refugees in Thailand. Meanwhile, the scholarship cancellation hailed by Trump left over 400 Burmese students stranded in the middle of their academic pursuits, including some studying in the U.S.

The situation is dire despite Rubio’s reported waivers for emergency life-saving aid. One review described the waivers as “all but worthless in practice because there are neither the staff to administer them nor the financial systems to pay for them.” The country representative of an international organization said they were granted several waivers but these ultimately amounted to “political theater.”

Aside from the humanitarian impact, the USAID funding freeze is threatening Myanmar’s media and civil society landscape. Forced underground or into exile as the regime cracked down on news outlets, Burmese media platforms have depended on grants from donors in order to relocate and re-establish themselves. One media group said that U.S. funding accounts for half of all support for exiled outlets and the freeze could sound the death knell for many. One decades-old platform that survived various tribulations has reportedly suspended key services.

Reactions

Amnesty International described the freeze to Myanmar as “recklessly abrupt” and said that it “poses existential threat to human rights.” At a February hearing of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, committee member Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA) called for a moment of silence for Pe Kha Lau – the refugee with lung problems who died after being sent back home. Former Representative Tom Malinowski, who served as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor in the Obama administration, posted a scathing rebuke on the Myanmar scholarship cancellation.

Sentiments on the ground have been grim. UNICEF has warned that the price of the cuts to Rohingya camps will be “paid in children’s lives.” One aid worker described the situation as pandemonium. Human Rights Myanmar said the consequences of the cuts will be “catastrophic” and a “gift” to the regime and its authoritarian allies, China and Russia. An administrator from the Committee for Internally Displaced Karen People said the cuts were devastating for people fleeing conflict. Organizations are scrambling to secure donor funds as well as cut costs but are learning hard lessons about fleeting international attention amid competing global crises.

A senior local staff member of an organization that supports IDPs told the author that projects are being hurriedly reprogrammed with “worst-worst case” scenarios in mind, while one observer said the funding cuts, combined with the junta’s characteristic incompetence, economic collapse and expected broad sanctions under Article 33 of the International Labour Organization, will lead to “suffering on a biblical scale.”

A member of the National Unity Government (NUG), which is coordinating the national resistance to the military regime, said that the funding suspensions would not directly impact the course of the civil war, as it does not receive direct international assistance. A member of the Independent Press Council Myanmar said that Myanmar journalists have survived decades of oppression and will persevere come what may. Some groups operating along the Myanmar-Thailand border are also transitioning their operational nature in order to stand on their own feet.

Among local NGO workers, there is also a sense of dread that international agencies will prioritize shielding well-compensated expatriates over local staff who earn considerably less yet face greater risks. Stateside arguments that USAID cuts will affect a large number of U.S.-based contractors, alongside grievances of employment inequities, sizeable overhead costs, and opaqueness in the humanitarian sector, are complicating how local aid workers process the fallout.

However, some are sanguine and hope that actively framing the civil war as a great power proxy conflict, combined with Trump’s stance towards Beijing and Rubio’s earlier actions on the Rohingya crisis, will translate into both a resumption of USAID funds as well as possible expansion to direct aid for anti-regime groups.

They also seek solace in the 2022 BURMA Act, the Congressional Burma Caucus that was launched last year, and Trump’s continuation of the “national emergency” on Myanmar that was declared shortly after the coup. That said, observers such as Scot Marciel, who served as U.S. ambassador to Myanmar during the first Trump administration, are more cautious about how things could pan out, while pro-resistance voices have complained of high overhead costs.

The Bigger Picture

As noted by various reports and commentators, the post-earthquake response is already highlighting the immediate geopolitical impacts of the USAID cuts. The optics of huge military planes, ships, dozens of rescue personnel, and vital supplies and equipment arriving from China, India, and Russia stand in stark contrast to the more guarded responses from Western countries. The U.S. is reported to be sending a three-member team but no Disaster Assistance Response Team. While Burmese audiences and Myanmar watchers might be able to contextualize the issue to some degree, these don’t really matter to the rest of the world and especially to the Global South.

And devastating as it is, the USAID saga appears only the beginning of a cascade that will fundamentally alter the global humanitarian aid landscape. Foreign aid is shrinking globally. The United Kingdom recently announced a 40 percent reduction in foreign aid and major European donors are following suit. Earlier reductions in aid, and the clipping of aid agencies’ wings, as seen with the U.K.’s Department for International Development, have had negative consequences.

In Myanmar, the USAID freezes are having a crippling effect on the country’s humanitarian landscape amid what the United Nations Development Program describes as an “enduring polycrisis.” The U.N.’s February 2025 humanitarian update reported that 3.5 million persons are displaced, while over 15 million are facing acute food insecurity, and 2 million are on the brink of famine. The figures are expected to jump in the wake of the earthquake.

It also comes amid escalating conflict where the military regime has little qualms about indiscriminately bombing and butchering its populace while resistance supporters make wild claims that the international community is eagerly waiting in the wings to throw Marshall Plan-level amounts of redevelopment grants at the country once the junta inevitably collapses.

But as the civil war drags into its fifth year and with Myanmar’s conflicts and crises having long faded from international attention, the country has faced substantive shortfalls in humanitarian funding. Donors met only 39 percent of the U.N.’s $994 million humanitarian funding requirement for 2024, making Myanmar the sixth-lowest funded humanitarian response plan globally. The estimated need for 2025 stands at $1.1 billion, and this was before the March earthquake flattened the country’s second commercial city and administrative capital. This means that for all the newly mobilized international relief efforts, and no matter how the conflict finally dies down, if ever, the Myanmar people will have an intergenerational humanitarian millstone around their collective necks.

USAID funding was intertwined with support for civil society and groups opposing the regime. Various observers and people directly affected by the funding cuts say that the developments are akin to the U.S. handing over Myanmar on a silver platter to China and Russia. Other cuts and purges, such as to the National Endowment for Democracy and to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, are amplifying the political fallout. Non-political surveillance, including for agriculture, food insecurity, climate vulnerability and economic needs, is also being affected.

Some fear a decline in U.S. assistance and attention will fundamentally tilt the power dynamics towards authoritarian members of the multi-stranded anti-junta resistance like the Three Brotherhood Alliance (3BA), while groups seen as more “democratic-leaning” such as the NUG and the K3C grouping could become sidelined. The 3BA’s ultimate ambitions currently remain unclear, but their actions and rhetoric do not bode well for a democratic, federal, and intact Myanmar.

For all the issues and complaints about its efficacy, USAID transformed the lives of countless people around the world and in Myanmar. Hopefully, the country’s dire situation and the earthquake will convince the Trump administration to be more lenient to Myanmar in allotting what remains of USAID’s gutted portfolio. But for people like the friends and relatives of Pe Kha Lau and the communities affected by the recent earthquake, the cuts have already left an indelible and traumatic mark.

Authors

Guest Author

Naw Theresa

Naw Theresa is the pseudonym of a Myanmar-based independent analyst.

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thediplomat.com

19. First OA-1K Skyraider II Handed Over To Air Force Special Operations Command

First OA-1K Skyraider II Handed Over To Air Force Special Operations Command

It took the USAF decades to field a light attack aircraft and many are questioning its relevance in a new age of ‘great power competition.’

Thomas Newdick

Published Apr 3, 2025 6:01 PM EDT

twz.com · by Thomas Newdick

The TWZ Newsletter

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The first OA-1K light attack aircraft — recently officially named Skyraider II — has been delivered to Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC). While the command welcomed the militarized derivative of the popular Air Tractor AT-802 crop duster, there remains serious questions about how the Air Force will actually make use of the OA-1K, as the service increasingly prepares for future high-end contingencies.

AFSOC announced today that it had officially received a first missionized OA-1K at Hurlburt Field, Florida. The handover ceremony was attended by Special Operations Command representatives, AFSOC leadership, elected officials, and community leaders. Also in attendance was retired Lt. Col. Bill Buice, an A-1 Skyraider pilot and Vietnam War veteran. In this previous story, you can read how the name of the original Skyraider was passed over to the OA-1K.

U.S. Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Thomas Gunnell, left, 492nd Special Operations Wing command chief, and U.S. Air Force Col. Patrick Wnetrzak, right, 492nd SOW commander, pose for a photo holding an American flag that was presented to the 492nd SOW leadership team to signify the handover of the OA-1K at Hurlburt Field, Florida, on April 3, 2025. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Natalie Fiorilli Staff Sgt. Natalie Fiorilli

As we have discussed in the past, the two-seat, turboprop-powered OA-1K can carry up to 6,000 pounds of munitions and other stores, including precision-guided missiles and bombs and podded sensor systems, on up to eight underwing pylons. According to the manufacturer, the OA-1K can fly out to an area up to 200 miles away and loiter there for up to six hours with a typical combat load. Once there, it can conduct its mission aided by a “robust suite of radios and datalinks providing multiple means for line-of-sight (LOS) and beyond line-of-sight (BLOS) communications.”

In a media release, AFSOC described today’s delivery as marking “the start of a new era in aircraft modularity.” The command noted that the OA-1K “can adapt capabilities for required mission sets, be it close air support, precision strike, or armed intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Its flexibility ensures AFSOC can meet the needs set forth by the Secretary of Defense and the President.”

“Skyraider II represents not just a new platform, but a modular solution to our national security needs,” added Lt. Gen. Michael Conley, AFSOC commander, speaking at the ceremony today. “It will redefine how we approach joint campaigning, crisis response, and the evolving landscape of modern warfare.”

U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Conley, AFSOC commander, steps from the OA-1K as part of a delivery ceremony at Hurlburt Field, Florida, on April 3, 2025. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Natalie Fiorilli Staff Sgt. Natalie Fiorilli

AFSOC’s release pointed to the fact that the OA-1K is based on a proven aircraft platform, the AT-802, and that it requires a much smaller maintenance package and provides lower operating costs than other conventional or special operations aircraft.

The command also made efforts to stress the relevance of the OA-1K in missions other than counterinsurgency and other low-intensity warfare scenarios that it was originally envisaged.

“The Skyraider II is a dynamic aircraft that will allow operators to adjust effects quickly for required missions and create dilemmas for our adversaries across the spectrum of armed conflict,” the command said. “The Skyraider II aims at delivering options in a new era of strategic competition, which requires adaptiveness,” it added.

While it’s not exactly clear how the OA-1K will be used for a broader range of missions “across the spectrum of armed conflict,” there’s no doubt that the utility of the aircraft is already being discussed at the highest levels.

A head-on view of the OA-1K Skyraider II. U.S. Air Force

The OA-1K was discussed specifically today before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which included Army Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, commander of U.S. European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and Marine Corps Gen. Michael E. Langley, commander of U.S. Africa Command.

Addressing Langley, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona identified what he said was a “close air support gap” in the AFRICOM area of responsibility, amid an uptick in activities by violent extremist organizations.

“As our focus continues towards large-scale combat operations in INDOPACOM and in Europe, I’m concerned that our defense modernization and optimization will trend towards those theaters, but away from other issues that we can’t ignore [including] the real threat of terrorism and gray-zone operations, especially in Africa,” Kelly said.

Kelly then asked Langley whether the OA-1K could fill a particular armed intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) requirement for AFRICOM.

Another view of the OA-1K Skyraider II. U.S. Air Force U.S. Air Force

“Every combat commander needs more ISR in support of our operations,” Langley said. “I would take any additional ISR and any enhanced technologies that would add to the credibility and the lethality of our forces.”

Questions about the viability of an armed ISR platform in the class of the OA-1K are by no means new. Indeed, they have accompanied the development of this aircraft as well as various progenitors.

This long, drawn-out process involved roughly two decades of mainly abortive light attack aircraft projects under different names, as well as combat experiments conducted across the U.S. military, in particular during the course of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the process, the Air Force stepped away from the light attack initiative, and it then fell exclusively within SOCOM, as you can read more about here.

Throughout these years of lower-intensity operations, there was interest in the potential of cheaper alternatives to existing tactical platforms in the U.S. inventory to carry out missions such as close air support, armed overwatch, and ISR support, in permissive airspace. As well as being cheaper, aircraft in this class also promised to have smaller operating footprints, allowing them to be flown in and out of more austere sites closer to operating areas. At the same time, by having low-cost, fixed-wing light attack platforms fly these kinds of missions, expensive-to-operate tactical warplanes could be held back for more challenging missions, reducing fatigue on these airframes.

An OA-1K pilot conducts a walkaround on the flightline at Hurlburt Field, Florida, on Jan. 28, 2025. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Natalie Fiorilli Staff Sgt. Natalie Fiorilli

By the time of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, these kinds of concepts were looking far less relevant, although they didn’t disappear altogether: the decision to procure the OA-1K was made after U.S. troops left Afghanistan in 2022.

Since then, the Pentagon has been busy considering how best to prepare for a future high-end fight, especially one fought against China in the Indo-Pacific region. Against this backdrop, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), in a 2023 report, criticized SOCOM since it had “not reevaluated its needs [for the OA-1K] despite changes to operational missions (such as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan) and force structure reductions under consideration.”

Another concern has been SOCOM’s planned withdrawal of special operations U-28A Draco and Beechcraft King Air-based ISR aircraft while introducing the OA-1K. While funds from these divestments will help to procure the new platform, the command admits that the OA-1K will not be a direct replacement for either and that new intelligence-gathering platforms will still be required.

AFSOC hosts the delivery ceremony at Hurlburt Field, Florida, April 3, 2025, to mark the arrival of the command’s first missionized OA-1K. An AC-130W Stinger II and a Beechcraft King Air-based ISR aircraft are seen in the background. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Natalie Fiorilli Staff Sgt. Natalie Fiorilli

Some would say this leaves the OA-1K as an aircraft increasingly in search of a role.

Today’s media release from AFSOC would seem to support that, with its vague descriptions of the OA-1K’s potential to be used “across the spectrum of armed conflict.”

When the OA-1K received its Skyraider II name earlier this year, Air Force Brig. Gen. Craig Prather, AFSOC’s director of Strategic Plans, Programs and Requirements, highlighted the aircraft’s potential to “take on missions” along “the southwest border” with Mexico — in addition to operations across Africa. Again, this speaks to the command looking to find relevant missions for its new charge.

At a media roundtable on the sidelines of the Air & Space Forces Association’s main annual conference last September, Conley told TWZ that some thought was already being given to using the OA-1K for “novel mission sets,” such as signals intelligence or electronic intelligence, although he admitted that this was “not anything we’ve committed to yet.”

Conley makes remarks during the delivery ceremony at Hurlburt Field, Florida, on April 3, 2025. U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Natalie Fiorilli Staff Sgt. Natalie Fiorilli

Exactly how and where the OA-1K might be used in an operational context remains to be seen, especially as the focus of the current Trump administration seems to be much less on Africa and other areas of lower-intensity conflict. However, the delivery of the first missionized OA-1K to Hurlburt Field today is an important milestone. Further examples of the 75 aircraft now on order will go to Will Rogers Air National Guard Base, Oklahoma, “in the coming months,” to equip the formal training unit.

“From when OA-1K was conceptualized and decided on until now, the world’s changed a little bit,” Conley told TWZ last September.

AFSOC will now hope that its new Skyraider II can keep pace with those changes.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

Thomas Newdick

Staff Writer

twz.com · by Thomas Newdick

20. Actions create consequences: questions, questions, questions – elected officials serve their voters, not necessarily ours

Conclsuion:

Life and national security involve trade-offs, both immediate and long-term. I rise on 4 April 2025, confident that we see a long-term change ahead, but not where our voice is as powerful as before. Perhaps that is good, but I suspect we will look back on this as a turning point in so many ways.

Actions create consequences

questions, questions, questions

elected officials serve their voters, not necessarily ours

https://cynthiawatson.substack.com/p/questions-questions-questions

Cynthia Watson

Apr 04, 2025

Cast your mind back to the morning of 12 September 2001 as we were in utter paralysis. We tried to understand what happened the prior morning in New York, at the Pentagon, and in a field in southwest Pennsylvania. We worried about assuring our children’s safety. We were in mourning over lives lost as rescuers dug through the remnants of burning buildings for survivors.

We awoke on that September Wednesday to a world of profound uncertainty. Yet, we could trust our allies to stand behind us. Indeed, those allies sent men and women overseas to “protect our back” over the years in Afghanistan.

3 April 2025 dawned with a similar experience for our allies. We cultivated or inspired these nations to adopt the philosophy of global governance, participatory governance, and free trade. Following our leadership in World War II and the Cold War, the world these nations embraced allowed these countries to rebuild their societies (in Asia or Europe) over the past eighty years. There have been ups and downs for some sectors and countries, but the march towards greater overall prosperity has been astonishing.

All of that imploded with the enunciation of open-ended U.S. tariffs which go into effect tomorrow. We had been the central feature of the global free trade system because we benefitted from the system they wove together. These new tariffs undermine the configuration of relationships built over decades. The mutuality, the trust, and the rules that rebuilt nations destroyed in two global wars within thirty years no longer stand as a measure of a shared aspiration for the future of growth for all.

The shocks yesterday globally were equivalent to September twenty-four years ago.

Our allies no longer have the security of believing our commitments. We committed to free trade as a substitute for pursuing conflict, only to preference trade imbalances (apparently) over negotiated commitments to international agreements as the path for the future. Negotiations rely on trust, but that trust disintegrated overnight. The aspired re-shoring of manufacturing jobs to the United States could take years to materialize.

We have never entirely returned to a pre-9/11 sense of security, but we had allies in Europe and Northeast Asia, participatory democracies, who supported us. Why would they be there, we asked in the future?

Our adversaries will suffer from our tariffs, of course, but how much? The imposition of these tariffs will make their products more expensive for U.S. consumers, but how and why will they affect the behavior of other governments? Doesn’t it make sense that the effects on them will be fewer than those in the countries with whom we are simpático?

Trade is only a portion of national security, of course, which returns us to the nature of our alliances now in tatters. The same week the tariff announcement emerged Secretary of State Rubio urged NATO members to increase their defense expenditures to 5% of gdp. The United States spends roughly 3.5%, by the way. How will these two actions affect the future for national security?

U.S. taxpayers, particularly if they expected costs and taxes to decline, will be paying considerably more, at least in the short term, for many products since our globalized world means so much we consume daily comes from abroad. Free trade encouraged companies to move production to the cheapest labor markets to capitalize on comparative advantage of other countries. Tariffs will mean we pay more as that re-shoring, if it occurs, will take years to accomplish. Many taxpayers will also find that defense spending will increase rather than decline as the America First Agenda includes implications likely under-appreciated in during the electoral campaign.

Life and national security involve trade-offs, both immediate and long-term. I rise on 4 April 2025, confident that we see a long-term change ahead, but not where our voice is as powerful as before. Perhaps that is good, but I suspect we will look back on this as a turning point in so many ways.

I welcome your thoughts about tariffs, alliances, adversaries, and other aspects of this week’s monumental decisions. We are entering a world none has lived through, so conversation is vital to prevent us from becoming self-contained capsules.

Thank you for taking time to read Actions today. I appreciate each of you, especially if you put financial support behind this column. An annual subscription is $55 (just a dollar a week) or $8 monthly.

A tulip fading past its prime but still lovely to view.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Laurence Norman and Michael Gordon, “Rubio Pushes for Higher Defense Spending at NATO but Says It will Take Time“, WSJ.com, 4 April 2025, retrieved at https://www.wsj.com/world/rubio-pushes-for-higher-spending-at-nato-but-says-it-will-take-time-891f0224?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

21. U.S. Special Ops Conduct Combined Training With Panama, Formalize Commitment

Should we send 3-7th SFG back to Panama permanently?

U.S. Special Ops Conduct Combined Training With Panama, Formalize Commitment

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4146907/us-special-ops-conduct-combined-training-with-panama-formalize-commitment/

April 4, 2025 | By David Vergun, DOD News |

Recent security engagements between U.S. and Panamanian forces culminated in the first official U.S.-Panama special operations forces talks, Feb. 18, 2025. The talks, along with concurrent joint combined exchange training exercises, underscore a decades-long bilateral partnership and highlight the global impact of U.S. special operations forces.

Since 2020, the U.S. Special Operations Command South's continuous presence has enabled the United States to collaborate with its Panamanian partners daily.

"This enduring partnership is crucial for regional stability and reflects our shared commitment to a secure future," said Navy Rear Adm. Mark A. Schafer, Socsouth commander.

During the meeting, Schafer thanked Frank Abrego, Panama's public security minister, as well as leaders from Panama's SOF community for their dedication and expertise, and for their role in ensuring the safety and stability of the region.

"The work you do is not just critical to Panama but serves as a cornerstone for regional security. Your contributions embody the highest standards of professionalism, courage and adaptability," Schafer said.

The rear admiral added that the dialogue represented a shared commitment to addressing complex challenges — whether countering transnational threats, combating illicit trafficking, or responding to natural disasters with agility and resilience.

Schafer said these first talks are just the beginning, as they set the stage for deeper collaboration and open the door to innovative solutions. He encouraged open dialogue and curiosity.

With about 6,000 U.S. SOF personnel deployed across 80 countries, the U.S.-Panama relationship exemplifies how strong military-to-military partnerships underpin peace through strength and regional stability worldwide, said Army Maj. Trevor Wild, Socsouth public affairs officer.

"Socsouth has been instrumental in strengthening Panamanian security since the early 1990s. This enduring partnership reflects the broader U.S. SOF commitment to building partner capacity and fostering interoperability with allies and partners globally," he said. Wild said a prime example of the partnership is Socsouth's critical role in training Panama's National Border Service in counter-narcotics operations, which they have done since its inception in 2008.

Additional U.S.-Panama training ranges from small team exchanges to large-scale exercises like Panamax-Alpha, a U.S. Southern Command-supported exercise focused on Panama Canal security and interoperability; Socsouth has participated in Panamax-Alpha for more than a decade. Wild said the sustained engagement epitomizes SOF's global presence and commitment to forging enduring partnerships.

In May 2024, Panama hosted the Fuerzas Comando 2024, a Southcom-sponsored special military exercise consisting of a skills competition and senior leadership seminar. About 450 military, law enforcement and civilian personnel from various nations attended the 18th iteration of Fuerzas Comando.

Wild said Panama's hosting of the exercise "further strengthens this partnership" and fosters relationships, which are crucial to SOF's global mission.

The recent SOF talks culminated in a memorandum of agreement, formalizing the ongoing commitment to shared security objectives. Wild said they also established a framework for long-term collaborative training with U.S. SOF. He added that the agreement reinforces the vital role of such partnerships in building partner capacity and enhancing interoperability.

The concurrent joint combined exchange training included advanced marksmanship, communication, small unit combat tactics, demolition and medical care. Wild said this rigorous, hands-on training, coupled with the strategic dialogue of the SOF talks, builds upon years of joint exercises and exchanges, demonstrating the depth of the U.S.-Panama security relationship.

He added that the continued presence of U.S. SOF personnel working alongside Panamanian security forces embodies the SOF's forward deployment model and dedication to building partner capacity.

These combined efforts, within the context of SOF's broader global engagement, demonstrate the enduring strength and continued evolution of the U.S.-Panama security partnership — a partnership built on shared values, a commitment to regional security and stability, and the recognition that strong military-to-military relationships are essential for achieving shared security goals, Wild said.

22. The Godfather of the Campus Intifada

A fascinating read.

Some might argue that some of the major problems today stem from the rise of postmodern philosophy.

The Godfather of the Campus Intifada

Today’s protesters—at Columbia and beyond—owe their worldview to professor Edward Said, whose obsession with the West blinded him to the reality of the East.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-godfather-of-the-campus-intifada?r=7i07&utm

By Eli Lake

04.04.25 — Breaking History

People protest outside a burning government building at the height of Iran’s Islamic revolution in Tehran, November 4, 1978. (Kaveh Kazemi via Getty Images; illustration by The Free Press)

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Today we’re bringing you the latest episode of Breaking History, the podcast where I go back in time, in order to make sense of the present. The last episode was about the history of bourgeois terrorism, in which I told the story of Ulrike Meinhof, who you could describe as the Luigi Mangione of West Berlin. Today, I tell the story of Edward Said, perhaps the most influential professor ever to teach at Columbia University—and the intellectual godfather of today’s pro-Palestine protesters. You can trace a bright line from his 1978 book Orientalism to the students who sympathize with Hamas today.

Listen to the episode, which features voices from both the past and present, here:

And if you’re a paying subscriber, scroll down to read the companion essay, which tells the story of the bitter academic rivalry that reshaped America’s understanding of the Middle East forever. If you enjoy it, make sure to follow Breaking History on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts—and you’ll never miss an episode.

Subscribed

A year after massive pro-Palestinian demonstrations roiled the campus of Columbia University, one protester’s placard sticks in my head:

“Columbia, why require me to read Professor Edward Said if you don’t want me to use it?”

This protester is onto something, because this question gets to the very heart of the wave of anti-Israel enmity that has consumed elite colleges for the last 18 months—and has continued into the Trump administration. Last month, the president gave an ultimatum to Columbia: Reform or lose your funding. And how did the students respond? They protested, once again.

Professor Edward Said would have approved of these students’ actions. One of the most famous and influential people to ever teach at Columbia, Said was an activist scholar, and the author of the renowned 1978 volume, Orientalism, which challenged the way the West’s thinkers and writers had defined and taught the history of the Middle East for hundreds of years. A hand grenade tossed into the academy, the effects of this totemic book are still felt to this day.

It’s in Orientalism that you’ll find the roots of the anti-Israel protests that have spread throughout the elite universities since 2024.

Said was born into a Christian family in Western Jerusalem in 1935, while it was still part of the British Mandate of Palestine. His father, Wadie Said, had become an American citizen after fighting for the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, and Edward immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager. As a student, he excelled, attending Princeton and then later Harvard, where he earned a PhD in English literature. In 1963, he landed a teaching position at Columbia.

It was a few years later, in 1967, when his outlook on the world changed forever.

Students everywhere were protesting the war in Vietnam, but Said’s attention was elsewhere. From the U.S., he watched the Six-Day War in June 1967, in which Israel won decisive victories against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria—taking control of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and other territories. In the West, the war was seen as a miraculous story of survival. Egypt’s strongman president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had said just a month before that “our basic objective” in any war with the Jewish state would be “to destroy Israel.” Israel had fended off three Arab armies. It was this failure to extinguish the Jewish state that curiously awakened Said’s commitment to Palestine.

Years later, reflecting on his career at the age of 63, Said described the effect that the war had on him, in his 1999 memoir, Out of Place:

I was no longer the same person after 1967; the shock of that war drove me back to where it had all started, the struggle over Palestine. I subsequently entered the newly transformed Middle Eastern landscape as a part of the Palestinian movement.

Said was no longer satisfied with a safe career as a quiet academic, a life of interpreting texts and giving lectures. He wanted to be part of a wider cause, and that cause would be the liberation of Palestine.

And so, in the 1970s, he became a trusted advisor to Yasser Arafat, then-chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. But he also used his talents as an academic to advance his cause.

Said believed that the people of the Middle East should build their own image, write their own histories, tell their own stories, and refuse to accept the roles assigned to them by the West. This was the central philosophy of his groundbreaking book.

Orientalism was written not long after Israel again fended off Arab armies in the Yom Kippur War—a dark period for the professor, when he felt that the world had largely abandoned the Palestinian cause. In the book, he argues that the stories told in the West about the East are intertwined with imperialism and power. The East is painted in an exotic light, he says, and depicted as primitive and scary. Western authors reduce ancient, complex civilizations to dehumanizing caricatures that help justify the colonial theft and exploitation of their lands.

This Orientalist tradition includes imperialists like Napoleon Bonaparte, writers like Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling, and painters like Eugène Delacroix. It doesn’t take much effort to find examples of Said’s concepts in more modern popular culture either: Indiana Jones is a whip-cracking Orientalist of the highest order.

As Said himself said, it is “virtually impossible for an American to. . . read books, to see films about the Middle East that are not colored politically.”

“The Arabs almost always play the role of terrorists and violent people.”

Said’s main target, though, was the academics who preceded him: the white, often British, French, or American historians who had written the canonical histories of the Middle East. These historians had spent hundreds of years categorizing peoples and cultures that their nation-states were in the process of conquering. The histories they wrote, according to Orientalism, were an extension of this conquest, inherently racist and repressive. Said argued that the only real thing you could learn from studying the work of Western historians on the Middle East was how the West chose to see the Middle East.

This may sound all very intellectual to you, very dry and highbrow.

But Orientalism made Said a star. Based in the world capital of media, New York, he regularly appeared on chat shows. Back then, as now, the Middle East was in eternal turmoil, an endless font of breaking news that needed to be explained to an American audience—and Said became one of the key voices who was called on. Plus, this was the era of intellectual celebrities: William F. Buckley, Christopher Hitchens, Noam Chomsky. Said, who dressed in the uniform of a British aristocrat—tailored sports coats, silk ties, and custom French shirts—fit into this constellation naturally.

His work quickly became canonical, and it utterly transformed American scholarship on the Middle East.

“One of the main arguments of Orientalism is that all Westerners approach the East with prejudice,” the historian Martin Kramer told The Free Press. And the book basically made the argument against universities hiring Western experts on the Middle East, full stop. Kramer explains this argument: “If you wanted to appoint someone to the faculty who you were sure was not tainted by this prejudice, the way to do it was to appoint someone who was either an Arab or a Muslim. Then you knew you weren’t getting an Orientalist.”

Edward Said was shattering the old consensus and discrediting the thinkers who preceded him. He was bound to make enemies. And one enemy stands out.

In the penultimate chapter of Orientalism, Said found and labeled a villain: a contemporary of his, Bernard Lewis. For years, Lewis had rightly enjoyed his reputation as the best and most respected of the Middle East scholars. He was at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where Albert Einstein once hung his hat, and he had written groundbreaking histories on the Ottoman Empire and the expansion of the first Caliphates into Europe.

He and Said hated each other.

Said was a postmodernist. He saw it as his duty to reinterpret the past according to the new frameworks of the progressive present. But Lewis, who spoke 15 languages, was a traditional historian with little time for trendy intellectuals. He grappled with interpreting and understanding the past on its own terms. And when Orientalism first came out, he dismissed it, assuming the hype would blow over. But by 1982, Lewis was sufficiently concerned to publish a review of it in The New York Review of Books. In it, he picks apart Said’s book, pointing out inaccuracies, poor translations, and a tendency to cherry-pick sources:

A historian of science is not expected to be a scientist, but he is expected to have some basic knowledge of the scientific alphabet. Similarly, a historian of Orientalism—that is to say, the work of historians and philologists—should have at least some acquaintance with the history and philology with which they were concerned. Mr. Said shows astonishing blind spots.

Said responded to Lewis two months later in his own review of the review. It would be an understatement to describe it as scathing. “Lewis’s verbosity scarcely conceals both the ideological underpinnings of his position and his extraordinary capacity for getting everything wrong,” Said wrote.

Again, Lewis responded publicly, in a letter to The New York Review of Books that began: “It is difficult to argue with a scream of rage.”

These two men represented the past and the future of Middle Eastern history. And they were on a collision course. Tufts University invited the pair to debate, and both accepted. On November 22, 1986, the American academy assembled to watch the two men duke it out. In one corner, looking to bury Orientalist traditions, were Edward Said and, by his side, the great intellectual journalist, Christopher Hitchens. Their opponents that morning were the literary editor of The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier—and Bernard Lewis.

What happened in that room that day was, in a way, a changing of the guard. Said’s perspective was the fashionable one, while Bernard Lewis looked like yesterday’s man. And what Lewis said only reinforced the audience’s progressive idea that a white English Jew had no place explaining Arab history to anyone.

“It wasn’t his best performance,” admits Kramer, who was with him that day. Lewis approached his limited time on the podium as an academic lecturer, rather than a debater. His opening remarks were rambling: He began listing clichés about the Middle East, talking about “arbitrary despotism” and “unbridled sexual power.” To be fair, he was acknowledging some of the stereotypes about Arabia and Islam in an effort to knock them down. But he ran out of time before he could finish his argument.

Even Lewis’s debate partner on the day, Wieseltier, thought the great man had flubbed it. “Bernard, I have to say, let down the side,” Wieseltier told me. “He said something, this is not an exact quote, but he mentioned something about, I don’t know, nefarious Arab men and salacious Arab women or something. And I looked at him and I thought, whose side are you on? I mean, really, you don’t have to come here as one of Edward’s nineteenth-century Orientalists.”

Lewis was there to argue that Middle Eastern identity was safe in the hands of Western historians, but he looked exactly like the kind of condescending Orientalist who, Said argued, had distorted the field.

By comparison, Said was cogent and forceful. He ultimately prevailed, and in doing so, he would bury the right of certain historians to cover certain histories. At least inside the ivory towers of education, any Western view of Arab and Muslim cultures would now be perpetually embattled. And so, Said was building the academic space we live in today. On the stage that day, he articulated the talking points of students who would be protesting 40 years later. For instance, he blamed the Orientalist view of the Middle East on “the active collaboration of a whole cadre of scholars, experts, and abettors, drawn from the ranks of the Orientalist and special interest lobbies, among whom one—the Zionist lobby—has garnered a vastly disproportionate strength.”

But this is only half the story. Because while Said won the debate inside the faculty lounge, the real world had not complied with his elaborate theories.

And if it had been less taboo to do so, readers of Lewis might have pointed out that his ideas had been vindicated in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Less than a year after Said released Orientalism, Shia fanatics had taken over Iran. Their leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, claimed power, and his supporters took over the American embassy. He replaced a Western-backed despot with an Islamic tyranny so vicious that recently even dog-walking was banned.

Now, Lewis’s readers at the time would have known that political Islam was on the rise. (In January 1976, for instance, he had written an essay called “The Return of Islam,” which made this case.) But Said was unprepared to draw a connection between the Iranian Revolution and Islamic fundamentalism. He argued that the regime change was the result of anti-imperialism, rather than the triumph of violent theocracy.

In reality, it was both. But Said was so busy arguing that American media coverage of the revolution was Orientalist, he ironically misconstrued what was actually happening in Iran. Yes, the Western media made the revolutionaries seem like a bunch of violent fanatics—but, as history has since shown, a lot of them were violent fanatics. Said’s obsession with the discourse of the West blinded him to the reality of the East.

And Said’s failure to explain the role of political Islam in the Islamic revolution in Iran is a failure that has been emulated over and over again by his many protégés. After 9/11, for example, the academy was largely caught out, unable to explain the atrocity in the context of Islamic fundamentalism. It was Lewis, and intellectual journalists outside the academy, who provided the public with a framework to understand the history of political Islam.

However, as much as the Middle East has changed since the publication of Orientalism, the ivory towers of America remain frozen in time. Over the last 18 months, American students have insisted on viewing Islamic fundamentalists as an anti-imperialist force for good—and, in doing so, have ignored important realities of the Middle East.

Since October 7, 2023, the building occupiers and slogan shouters on American campuses have claimed to oppose oppression, even as they have walked in lockstep solidarity with Hamas. But just last week, we began to see popular resistance to Hamas’s rule in Gaza—which raises an uncomfortable question for the students and their professors. What about the many Gazans who consider themselves oppressed by Hamas?

It’s a question that will likely be ignored. Because on American campuses, the opinion of the regular Palestinians who oppose the regime that foisted a disastrous war upon them is unimportant. They are mere props in a larger drama about Western imperialism, objects in a narrative rather than subjects in their own right. Edward Said had a word for this kind of thing.

If you missed it, listen to the previous episode of Breaking History, where Eli Lake unpacks the Luigi Mangione moment and the unsettling phenomenon of turning killers into icons.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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