Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are two ways to be fooled: One is to believe what isn't true, the other is to refuse to believe what is true."

– Soren Kierkegaard

"Not to be absolutely certain is one of the essential things in rationality."

– Friedrich Nietzsche

1. Hegseth orders sweeping changes to Army structure

2. Letter to the Force: Army Transformation Initiative

3. A New Office of Strategic Services?

4. U.S. Army Plans Massive Increase in Its Use of Drones

5. Behind the Mike Waltz Ouster

6. ‘There's an information war, and we’ve disarmed ourselves’ — ex-US diplomat on Trump cuts to counter Russian disinformation

7. Senior State Department official sought internal communications with journalists, European officials, and Trump critics

8. Voice of America Needs to Be Fixed, Not Silenced

9. China’s ‘Great Firewall’ Spreads to Other Countries

10. “I should never have posted that.” – OSINT Twitter sleuth apologized after the U.S. bombed an erroneous target they had flagged in Yemen.

11. Who Are the Terrorism Researchers? A Study of Scholars in an Evolving Field, 1970–2019

12. Choosing a New National Security Advisor by H.R. McMaster

13. Chinese supercomputer used by U.S. researchers threatens American security

14. The great betrayal: How the CCP humiliates China and blames the world

15. Trump's aggressive actions against free speech speak far louder than his words defending it

16. Trump Plans Record $1.01 Trillion National Security Budget

17. Space Force Special Operations Command is on its way

18. A lesson from 1958 could help deter China from taking Taiwan

19. The Potent Powder and ‘Narco-Subs’ Driving Cocaine’s Global Surge

20. China Signals Readiness to Respond to U.S. Trade Overtures

21. Trump to Rename Veterans Day in Tribute to World War I Victory

22. Trump Issues Order to Defund U.S. Public Media, Including PBS and NPR

23. Europe Is Racing to Build Its Own Version of the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex

24. Will China Escalate? Despite Short-Term Stability, the Risk of Military Crisis Is Rising

25. Trump, Ukraine, and the Limits of Presidential Peacemaking

26. What If America Abandons Ukraine? The Biggest Risk Might Be to the Rest of Europe

27. Blowing up Bridges in Vilnius: The Tactical Lit Review

28. Winning Without Fighting: Resilience as National Security Imperative

29. To Fund U.S. Military Modernization, Congress Needs To Pass On-Time Annual Defense Budgets

30. The Fall of Saigon: The Day Domino Theory Died

31 Analysis: Rubio’s hardest task in his tough new role may be keeping his job

32. ‘This is going to be a challenge’: Military services steeling for impact from civilian resignations

33. Global press freedom ebbs to a new low

34. People who fled authoritarian regimes say Trump's tactics remind them of home

35. SWJ Interview with Dr. Steve Tatham: Will an AI-centric Social Media Take Us Further and Quicker Towards the 1984 Society?

36. Duffel Blog Presents: The 10 dumbest military phrases

1. Hegseth orders sweeping changes to Army structure

I hope the SECDEF and his staff who produced this memo have fully coordinated it with the Army's transformation in contact process that it has been executing for the past year+.

The SECDEF's 4 page memo can be downloaded here. https://media.defense.gov/2025/May/01/2003702281/-1/-1/1/ARMY-TRANSFORMATION-AND-ACQUISITION-REFORM.PDF

A lot to parse but here are a few points (among many).

Merge headquarters to generate combat power capable of synchronizing kinetic and non-kinetic fires, spaced-based capabilities, and unmanned systems.
Reduce and restructure manned attack helicopter formations and augment with inexpensive drone swarms capable of overwhelming adversaries.
Divest outdated formations, including select armor and aviation units across the Total Army (Active, Reserve, National Guard).
Realign forces strategically to optimize deterrence and rapid deployment, above all to defend the American homeland and deter China in the Indo-Pacific.
Merge Army Futures Command (AFC) and Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) into one command.
Merge Forces Command, U.S. Army North, U.S. Army South into a single Headquarters focused on homeland defense and partnership with our Western

As an aside there is no mention of professional military education (except tangentially for the consolidation of TRADOC and FORSCOM). Also there is no mention of Army SOF. (I will look for the SECDEF's memo for USSOCOM which I assume will be coming shortly).

All that said there are some potentially excellent moves here that can really get after some of the inefficiencies that have long existed. While some may disagree with some or many of these actions, ( I think Armor officers and Aviators might push back) this kind of shakeup is needed and based on my observations of the Army leadership and their actions, they are prepared to execute this. Hopefully this is now the top cover the Army needs to truly transform in contact.

Hegseth orders sweeping changes to Army structure

An April 30 memo directs the secretary of the Army to make changes to how the service is organized and purchases equipment, with a focus on prioritizing homeland defense and deterring China in the Indo-Pacific.

Mark Pomerleau

May 1, 2025

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · May 1, 2025

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is directing sweeping transformational changes at the Army.

In an April 30 memo to the secretary of the Army, Hegseth ordered a vast set of alterations to the service aimed at building a leaner and more lethal force that prioritizes defending the homeland and deterring China in the Indo-Pacific.

The administration has made homeland defense — to include securing the southern border and building the “Golden Dome” missile defense system — as well as deterring China, top priorities. The latter includes shifting resources to the Pacific at the potential expense of other theaters, according to press reports.

Some of the changes pushed by Hegseth in his directive — such as consolidated budget lines in unmanned systems, counter-drone systems and electronic warfare, force structure changes and expanded use of other transaction agreements — are already being pursued.

The memo, however, directs much deeper change to include consolidating certain headquarters elements and changes to how the Army contracts, some of which were reported earlier this week by Breaking Defense.

“[T]he Army must prioritize investments in accordance with the Administration’s strategy, ensuring existing resources are prioritized to improve long-range precision fires, air and missile defense including through the Golden Dome for America, cyber, electronic warfare, and counter-space capabilities,” Hegseth wrote. “I am directing the Secretary of the Army to implement a comprehensive transformation strategy, streamline its force structure, eliminate wasteful spending, reform the acquisition process, modernize inefficient defense contracts, and overcome parochial interests to rebuild our Army, restore the warrior ethos, and reestablish deterrence.”

Among some of the biggest changes, the memo directs the secretary of the Army to downsize or close redundant headquarters. That includes merging Army Futures Command — responsible for developing requirements and experimentation for future capabilities — and Training and Doctrine Command, both four-star organizations, and merging four-star headquarters Forces Command with Army North and Army South into a single headquarters focused on homeland defense.

It also calls for restructuring the Army’s sustainment organizations to realign elements within the four-star Army Materiel Command including the integration of Joint Munitions Command and Army Sustainment Command to optimize operational efficiency.

Other force structure changes Hegseth called for include merging headquarters of organizations to generate combat power capable of synchronizing kinetic and non-kinetic effects, spaced-based capabilities and unmanned systems, reducing and restructuring manned attack helicopter formations, and augmenting the force with drone swarms and divesting of “outdated” formations, such as select armor and aviation units across the total Army, though those select units were not named in the directive.

Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George told reporters later Thursday that the Army is converting some armor brigade combat teams in the National Guard to mobile brigade combat teams, which he said will make them much more nimble for the missions that they need to do, whether it’s stateside or abroad.

Some initiatives require fielding certain capabilities or meeting other objectives by a set time — mostly either by 2026 or 2027 — such as achieving “electromagnetic and air-littoral dominance by 2027.”

The Army must field unmanned systems and ground- and air-launched effects in every division and extend advanced manufacturing such as 3D printing to operational units by 2026. The service must also improve counter-drone systems and integrate capabilities into platoons by 2026 and companies by 2027, and enable AI-driven command and control at theater, corps and division headquarters by 2027, according to Hegseth.

On the procurement side, the memo directs ending procurement of obsolete systems as well as canceling or scaling back ineffective or redundant programs such as manned aircraft, excess ground and outdated drones, eliminating “wasteful” contracts and “excess” travel funding and expanding multi-year procurement agreements when it’s cost-effective.

“What we’ve learned in the last couple of years in the conflict in Ukraine is that the old way of doing war will no longer suffice,” Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll said Thursday morning in an appearance on Fox and Friends alongside George.

“Under the leadership for President Trump and Secretary of Defense Hegseth, they basically have empowered the United States Army to go make the hard decisions and the hard changes to reallocate our dollars to best position our soldiers to be the most lethal that they can be,” Driscoll said. “These are hard decisions. These are legacy systems that have been around for a long time. There’s a lot of momentum. There’s a lot of lobbyists around them. but with the leadership of those gentlemen and our chain of command, we have been empowered to go do what’s right.”

George noted that there isn’t necessarily a problem with innovation as soldiers have been innovating the last few years, particularly under one of his keystone efforts dubbed transforming-in-contact since early 2024. The initiative aims to speed up how the Army buys capabilities and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

Three brigades transformed into either mobile or light brigade combat teams over the last year as part of transformating-in-contact 1.0. Now, the service is pushing the initiative to the next level and focusing on armor formations and divisions as a whole, to include enabling units, National Guard units and multi-domain task forces, as well as technologies such as autonomy.

“We don’t have a challenge with the innovation. The innovation’s happening down with our soldiers. We’re changing formations right now,” George said alongside Driscoll. “We had an exercise [where] we had more than 200 drones in a brigade combat team. We’re watching what’s happening. We know we need to change and … we just can’t go fast enough, we got to speed that change.”

Regarding the change to formations, the Army’s number two officer last week said the service is planning to approve force design updates on what those mobile and light brigades will look like going forward based on the transforming-in-contact effort. Those changes are expected to be made soon and released in October.

Officials have stressed more experimentation is to come as they don’t necessarily know the right mix of certain capabilities such as drones at echelon. More experimentation is needed to better understand what forces might need in the future.

This story has been updated with comments from Chief of Staff Randy George regarding armored units being converted.

Written by Mark Pomerleau

Mark Pomerleau is a senior reporter for DefenseScoop, covering information warfare, cyber, electronic warfare, information operations, intelligence, influence, battlefield networks and data.

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · May 1, 2025

2. Letter to the Force: Army Transformation Initiative

Transformation in contact (TiC) evolves to the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI).

It appears the SECDEF and the Army are in sync (which tells me the SECDEF is respecting the work the Army has been doing and is listening to Army leadership.

Excerpt:

This is a first step. We have already directed a second round of transformation efforts to be delivered in the coming months.

Letter to the Force: Army Transformation Initiative

By Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Randy A. GeorgeMay 1, 2025

https://www.army.mil/article/285100

Army Leaders,

Battlefields across the world are changing at a rapid pace. Autonomous systems are becoming more lethal and less expensive. Sensors and decoys are everywhere. Dual-use technologies are continuously evolving and outpacing our processes to defeat them. To maintain our edge on the battlefield, our Army will transform to a leaner, more lethal force by adapting how we fight, train, organize, and buy equipment.

Consistent with the Secretary of Defense directive dated 30 April 2025, the Army is implementing a comprehensive transformation strategy — the Army Transformation Initiative (ATI). This initiative will reexamine all requirements and eliminate unnecessary ones, ruthlessly prioritize fighting formations to directly contribute to lethality, and empower leaders at echelon to make hard calls to ensure resources align with strategic objectives. To achieve this, ATI comprises three lines of effort: deliver critical warfighting capabilities, optimize our force structure, and eliminate waste and obsolete programs.

Deliver Warfighting Capabilities. ATI builds upon our Transformation in Contact (TiC) effort, which prototypes organizational changes and integrates emerging technology into formations to innovate, learn, refine requirements, and develop solutions faster. We will introduce long-range missiles and modernized UAS into formations, field the M1E3 tank, develop the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, and close the C-sUAS capability gap. Command and control nodes will integrate Artificial Intelligence to accelerate decision-making and preserve the initiative. Agile funding, which shifts from program-centric to capability-based portfolios, will increase timely equipment fielding and accelerate innovation cycles. Adaptation is no longer an advantage — it's a requirement for survival.

Optimize Force Structure. Our focus is on filling combat formations with Soldiers. Every role must sharpen the spear or be cut away. We are eliminating 1,000 staff positions at HQDA. To further optimize force structure, Army Futures Command and Training and Doctrine Command will merge into a single command that aligns force generation, force design, and force development under a single headquarters. Forces Command will transform into Western Hemisphere Command through the consolidation of Army North and Army South. Multi-Domain Task Forces will align with theater headquarters to operate under relevant authorities. We will trim general officer positions to streamline command structures and revise civilian talent management policies to prioritize performance.

We will also restructure Army Aviation by reducing one Aerial Cavalry Squadron per Combat Aviation Brigade (CAB) in the Active Component, and we will consolidate aviation sustainment requirements and increase operational readiness. We will convert all Infantry Brigade Combat Teams to Mobile Brigade Combat Teams to improve mobility and lethality in a leaner formation. We are trading weight for speed, and mass for decisive force.

Eliminate Waste and Obsolete Programs. We will cancel procurement of outdated crewed attack aircraft such as the AH-64D, excess ground vehicles like the HMMWV and JLTV, and obsolete UAVs like the Gray Eagle. We will also continue to cancel programs that deliver dated, late-to-need, overpriced, or difficult-to-maintain capabilities. Yesterday's weapons will not win tomorrow's wars.

This is a first step. We have already directed a second round of transformation efforts to be delivered in the coming months.

Leaders, we need you to drive change to ensure we stay lethal, ready, and continue to build cohesive teams that take care of our Soldiers and families. Our Army must transform now to a leaner, more lethal force by infusing technology, cutting obsolete systems, and reducing overhead to defeat any adversary on an ever-changing battlefield. Our continuous transformation is underpinned by strong, agile leaders who act on their initiative.

This We'll Defend.

Dan Driscoll, Secretary of the Army

Randy A. George, General, United States Army, Chief of Staff

A New Office of Strategic Services? - Foreign Policy Research Institute

fpri.org · by J.R. Seeger

Introduction

In the past six months, two different opinion pieces, here and here, have raised the possibility of reviving the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). These recommendations are by no means new. Over the past 80 years, there have been multiple efforts to revive the OSS or, at the very least, to revive the ethos of this special operations organization that served in World War II from 1942–1945. The most obvious legacy units following the OSS tradition are the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), US Army Special Forces Regiment (SF), and the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). The question that the more recent opinion pieces pose is whether these legacy organizations offer the necessary capability for the current strategic environment or what is more easily understood as Cold War v2.0. Critics of current US military and intelligence capabilities argue that these organizations do not serve well in this new environment. In this paper, I argue that these organizations offer precisely the capabilities necessary. Reviving the OSS would add additional bureaucracy without any additional capability and could easily risk intelligence fratricide at a time when the United States needs more focus rather than more capability.

Origins: Roosevelt’s Requirements and Donovan’s Plan

Any discussion of the OSS must begin with understanding the challenges facing the United States in 1940. A strong isolationist wing of Congress made it virtually impossible for President Franklin Roosevelt to support American allies in their fight against the Axis powers. There was no single structure inside the US government providing the president with non-public insights into war-torn Europe or China. Furthermore, there was no single entity providing strategic intelligence related to decision-makers among our allies, our adversaries, and, most importantly, the neutral countries as the world teetered on the brink of total war. Each of the organizations that collected strategic information — the Departments of State, War, Navy, and Justice — ran independent efforts based on their own internal requirements. While it is unfair to say that the departments kept the president in the dark, Roosevelt felt that he was not receiving answers to questions he wanted to ask.

At the recommendation of his Secretary of the Navy, William Franklin Knox, Roosevelt began using a World War I hero to create a formal intelligence service that would work for the White House. While William J. Donovan might have preferred to return to serve as a combat commander in the field, he focused on the president’s request. In June 1941, the president created through executive authority the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) under Donovan. That executive order empowered Donovan to build an organization that acquired information through clandestine means, analyzed intelligence using academic experts in various fields, and provided that intelligence directly to the president through memos delivered to the White House. In that same executive order, Roosevelt used a turn of phrase that has been used ever since by presidents who wished to conduct deniable (aka covert) action. The executive order states the COI was authorized

“…to carry out, when requested by the President, such supplementary activities as may facilitate the securing of information important for national security not now available to the Government.

Donovan had already made two fact-finding trips to Europe at the president’s direction and he recognized this new conflict was nothing like the war in the trenches in 1917–1918. Instead, it was a war fought both through conventional military forces as well as unconventional lines of effort including propaganda, subversion, and terror. He realized that British intelligence and special operations communities were divided into various camps, spending as much time fighting each other as fighting the Nazis. Using the president’s vague guidance and access to presidential “unvouchered funds,” Donovan created a centralized organization from COI, which on June 13, 1942 would become the Office of Strategic Services. Donovan’s team provided the president with what we now call the intelligence cycle where he provided intelligence and then received requirements for future collection. Donovan also created a small irregular warfare capability focusing on sabotage and subversion. To minimize the hostility within Washington, the executive order creating Donovan’s OSS also placed it directly under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).

The OSS had few allies outside of the White House. Donovan’s creation was, at best, tolerated by the JCS and regularly attacked by the FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Army’s Military Intelligence Department. These bureaucracies simply did not understand how an “unprofessional” organization could provide any legitimate assistance to commanders in the field much less to the president of the United States. The bureaucratic knife fights started with the creation of the COI and only ended when President Harry Truman disbanded the OSS in September 1945. While OSS operations in the field gained significant praise from US commanders, including General Dwight Eisenhower, that praise rarely prevented Washington-based military and Justice Department seniors from attacking Donovan and his team. It was only through careful political actions on the part of Donovan that OSS survived until the defeat of Japan. Donovan expected his creation, which was created during wartime, would be disbanded at the end of the war. What he did not expect was that the White House would wish to return to a pre-war status where the president had no independent intelligence organization responsible to his needs.

Cold War v1.0

By January 1946, Truman realized that by disbanding the OSS, he no longer had an organization dedicated to delivering strategic intelligence. His first effort to solve this problem, the Central Intelligence Group, had very little success in corralling or analyzing the intelligence products from the established collectors — State, Navy, Army, and Justice. The National Security Act of 1947 created both a Department of Defense and a Central Intelligence Agency, which simplified the problem by creating a single focal point — the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) — and began the process to once again offer a single organization that would serve the requirements of the president and his senior cabinet officials.

That said, intelligence collection and analysis was necessary but not sufficient along in battling the new adversaries in what became known as the “Cold War.” The Soviet Union, the communist regimes of the Warsaw Pact, and the People’s Republic of China became implacable adversaries with expansionist views. After George Kennan wrote a policy planning staff memorandum titled The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare in 1948, the White House turned to State, CIA, and the Department of Defense to engage in both overt and covert “political warfare” designed to support a policy of containment and, possibly, a “roll-back” of communism. In response, the DCI instructed CIA’s foreign intelligence arm, the Office of Special Operations (OSO), to create a Special Procedures Group to conduct covert psychological operations.

Eventually, that group would become a separate office in CIA known as the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which worked directly with State Department and the White House on covert action programs that included psychological and information operations (such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Radio Asia), political influence operations (such as Operation Ajax in Iran and Operation Success in Guatemala), and unconventional warfare operations (such as Operation Fiend in Albania). OPC nominally received guidance from the Policy Planning Staff at the State Department and crafted covert programs designed to combat the Soviet Union and communist China both inside and outside the Iron Curtain.

While OPC had some spectacular successes, it also had its failures. More importantly, in the field it ran the risk of intelligence fratricide as agent handlers from the intelligence arm of the CIA, OSO, crashed into OPC agent handlers. Secrecy between the two offices as well as with US embassies made it difficult to run clandestine operations. By 1952, the challenges in the field became too great and the two organizations were merged into the Directorate of Plans. Finally, a single focal point in each country, the Chief of Station, would be held responsible for both intelligence collection and covert action. As a result, the American ambassador, the president’s personal representative in a country, would be able to better manage the challenging relationship necessary for a whole-of-government effort in that Cold War setting.

Inside the US Army, the 1950s was a time of experimentation in reviving OSS capabilities. In May 1952, the US Army authorized the creation of a Special Forces unit formed in part from former members of OSS Special Operations Groups and soldiers who had been attached to OPC unconventional warfare programs. The focus of this new unit was unconventional warfare, primarily in Europe. The Lodge Act had been passed in 1950, which allowed foreign nationals who enlisted in the US military and served for five years to become American citizens. This filled the ranks of Special Forces with men who were fluent in the languages of central and eastern Europe and provided the cornerstone for operational capability for units like the 10th Special Forces Group based in Bad Tolz, West Germany and Special Forces Detachment A based in Berlin.

Post 9/11 and Cold War v2.0

From the 1960s to the present, CIA and US Special Forces units have worked together throughout Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. That partnership grew more profound with the introduction of the US Navy Special Warfare Command, the US Air Force Special Operations Command, and especially after the creation of USSOCOM and the special mission units associated with the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). While there have been challenges related to mission authorities (Title 10 versus Title 50 of the US Code) as well as design and implementation, these challenges have been resolved over time through relationships in headquarters and the field among common-sense civilian and uniformed leaders working together to accomplish those missions. Following the attack on the homeland on September 11, 2001, that relationship between the Special Operations Community and the Intelligence Community has improved and grown even stronger.

This partnership has far exceeded the design or capabilities of the OSS. USSOCOM offers the president and the National Command Authority (NCA) an exquisite, sophisticated warfighting capability that includes today far more than the basic unconventional warfare capability that existed in 1952. The Intelligence Community as a whole, offers the president and the NCA insights based on all-source intelligence backed by a community of analytic experts. In the field, the CIA has deployed Human Intelligence (HUMINT) case officers throughout the world in locations where current policymakers have little interest, but in the future may be the next hot spot that focuses Washington’s attention. Moreover, CIA officers bring years of experience in a locale and deep relationships with liaison partners that far exceed the useful but only periodic visits by USSOCOM forces in their Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) exercises. The CIA offers a level of persistent presence in the field that USSOCOM forces simply do not have. On the other hand, CIA stations in the field are small and have little (and sometimes no) combat capability.

Creating an organization that would attempt to build both a combat capability and an intelligence collection capability under a single Department of Defense umbrella would be difficult (at best) and time consuming. Resources currently in place at USSOCOM and the CIA would have to be reassigned and two very different operational cultures would have to be blended. While not impossible, such an experiment would only come at the cost of current capability. Our adversaries in this new Cold War are working to undermine our influence around the globe using both overt and covert means. Taking US resources currently involved in this conflict in an effort to create a new OSS would only give our adversaries even greater opportunities for mischief. Assuming no USSOCOM or CIA resources would be taken to create a new OSS, it would be important to revisit the lesson of the conflict between OSO and OPC in the 1950s. Intelligence collection fratricide as well as confusion among our allies would further advance our adversaries’ gains.

There are many lessons from OSS that national security professionals should learn. First and foremost, the OSS taught that a unified intelligence organization where collection, analysis, and covert action were combined was the best solution set to provide capability to the president. Second, the OSS Operation SUSSEX where HUMINT and Counterintelligence (CI) teams were imbedded into corps- and Army-level commands were critical to providing combatant commanders with real time, on-the-ground intelligence. These were high-risk operations, but the Army was willing to take that risk to gain operational intelligence. These same types of operations were conducted during the Cold War, usually by a blend of CIA and US Special Operations Forces (SOF), where the CIA element offered regional/cultural experience and the SOF team offered military and technical experience. Finally, the OSS designed and conducted a sophisticated CI and psychological warfare (psywar) capability against Axis adversaries. The CI program included running double agents critical to deception operations. The psywar program (called “morale operations” in the OSS) focused on undermining enemy morale and reinforcing the same deception operations. These three capabilities could be expanded using the resources of both USSOCOM and the CIA as well as specialized units within the Department of Defense. It would not take a “new” organization, but simply a focused effort to use the resources already in place.

Finally, it is important to consider the strategic nature of the current challenge. In World War II and in the early Cold War v1.0, the United States conducted operations as a “whole of government” effort. Overt diplomacy, US military combat power and covert operations were all tuned to specific strategic goals — defeat of the enemy. If the United States is going to win in this new Cold War v2.0, the NCA must offer a unified plan similar to Kennan’s memorandum on political warfare that serves to guide all of the resources in its government. Once established, the various overt, clandestine, and covert resources will be available to win the fight.

Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage (Random House, 2001).

Historical Intelligence Documents: From COI to CIG in Studies in Intelligence, 37, No. 4, 111-113.

For greater detail on the bureaucratic infighting, see these two excellent books:

Thomas Troy, Donovan and the CIA (University Publications of America, 2004); and Nicholas Reynolds, Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence (Mariner Books, 2023).

Michael Warner (ed), The CIA Under Harry Truman (University Press of the Pacific, 2005).

J.R. Seeger

J.R. Seeger has been an archeologist, paratrooper, CIA intelligence officer and instructor for several special operations units. Seeger led multiple, small unit teams during his service including leading one of the CIA teams that infiltrated into Afghanistan after 9/11. Seeger’s CIA awards include the Intelligence Star, the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, and the George H.W. Bush Award for Counterterrorism Excellence.

fpri.org · by J.R. Seeger

4. U.S. Army Plans Massive Increase in Its Use of Drones

Excerpts:

“Land warfare has transitioned to drone warfare. If you can be seen, you can be killed,” said Jack Keane, the retired general who served as vice chief of staff of the Army and observed the exercise here. “A soldier carrying a rocket-propelled grenade, a tank, command and control facilities, artillery position can all be taken out by drones very rapidly.”

Drones are just one capability the Army plans to field as the Army seeks to buttress its ability to deter Russia and China after decades of fighting insurgencies in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The service is also developing ways to better link soldiers on the battlefield, drawing on cellphones, tablets and internet technology, and is acquiring a new infantry squad vehicle. The Army plans to invest about $3 billion to develop better systems for shooting down enemy drones and is moving to build up its electronic warfare capabilities.

Altogether the overhaul would cost $36 billion over the next five years, officials said, which the Army would come up with by cutting some outmoded weapons and retiring other systems—steps that will require congressional support.

...

The “Army Transformation Initiative,” as the service’s blueprint is known, comes as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has been seeking to slash spending and personnel across the government.

Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, and Daniel Driscoll, the secretary of the Army, met with Vice President JD Vance recently to explain that the service had a plan to upgrade its capabilities while making offsetting cuts, a Pentagon official said. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth endorsed the plan in a directive signed this week.

“We aren’t going to ask for more money,” George said in an interview. “What we want to do is spend the money that we have better.”

The Army is halting procurement of Humvees, its main utility vehicle for decades, and will no longer purchase its Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. It is also stopping procurement of the M10 light tank, which has proven heavier and less useful than planned when the program began a decade ago. It is also planning to retire some older Apache attack helicopters. A reduction in civilian personnel will also contribute to the savings.

I have to believe the Army was working on this long before DOGE crossed anyone's minds. The Army has done a lot of work to prepare to take these actions.

U.S. Army Plans Massive Increase in Its Use of Drones

The shift to more small unmanned aircraft is based on lessons from Ukraine battlefield

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/us-army-drones-shift-20cc5753?mod=hp_lead_pos8&ut

By Michael R. GordonFollow | Photographs by Louisa Marie Summer for WSJ

April 30, 2025 11:00 pm ET

Key Points

What's This?

The U.S. Army plans to equip each combat division with around 1,000 drones, drawing from lessons in the Ukraine war.
The Army intends to shed outmoded equipment, and is halting procurement of Humvees.
The overhaul would cost $36 billion over five years, funded by cutting outdated systems, and requires congressional support.

HOHENFELS, Germany—The U.S. Army is embarking on its largest overhaul since the end of the Cold War, with plans to equip each of its combat divisions with around 1,000 drones and to shed outmoded weapons and other equipment.

The plan, the product of more than a year of experimentation at this huge training range in Bavaria and other U.S. bases, draws heavily on lessons from the war in Ukraine, where small unmanned aircraft used in large numbers have transformed the battlefield.

The Army’s 10 active-duty divisions would shift heavily into unmanned aircraft if the plan is carried out, using them for surveillance, to move supplies and to carry out attacks.

To glean the lessons from Ukraine’s war against Russia, U.S. officers have debriefed its military personnel and consulted contractors who have worked with Kyiv’s military about their innovative use of drones.

“We’ve got to learn how to use drones, how to fight with them, how to scale them, produce them, and employ them in our fights so we can see beyond line of sight,” said Col. Donald Neal, the commander of the U.S. 2nd Cavalry Regiment. “We’ve always had drones since I’ve been in the Army, but it has been very few.”

Drones have transformed battlefields because they are cheap and can attack in swarms to overwhelm defenses.

Staff officers with the 2nd Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, work out of the back of a truck at Hohenfels, Germany.

The effort to integrate drones was on full display in February when a brigade from the 10th Mountain Division battled against a mock opponent here. During the Cold War, the huge Hohenfels training range was used to prepare for armored warfare against a potential Soviet attack on Western Europe.

But in an updated scenario reflecting new combat tactics used in Ukraine, small drones buzzed in the gray winter skies controlled by soldiers and defense contractors in the muddy fields below.

The bitter cold caused ice to form on some of the aircraft’s rotor blades and sapped the batteries, a glitch that hadn’t arisen in earlier exercises in Hawaii and Louisiana. Soldiers rushed to recharge them as they sought to keep the unmanned aircraft aloft.

Ukrainian and Russian troops have clashed with artillery, armored vehicles, manned fighters and other conventional systems. But it is drones that have transformed the conflict because they are cheap, can attack in swarms to overwhelm defenses, and can send live video feeds to the rear that can make it difficult to hide on the battlefield, analysts said.

Behind the Mike Waltz Ouster

The knives were out for the national-security adviser from the start.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/mike-waltz-donald-trump-united-nations-national-security-maga-alex-wong-laura-loomer-8d9b1e8b?st=g6Uea9&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By The Editorial Board

May 1, 2025 5:36 pm ET

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz Photo: Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

Mike Waltz is out as President Trump’s national-security adviser, and the race to replace him is on while Secretary of State Marco Rubio does double duty in the interim. A factional purge in early April had already depleted Mr. Waltz’s staff and left him weakened.

Mr. Trump said Thursday he’ll nominate Mr. Waltz to a consolation post as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. There’s plenty of work to be done there speaking for U.S. interests, but that job means a loss of influence in White House debates.

The surface explanation is that Mr. Waltz had to take the fall for accidentally adding a reporter to a Signal group chat on the Houthis. But if so, why keep Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who shared details of U.S. attack plans on the chat? Without that blunder, Mr. Waltz’s use of Signal to ask for his colleagues’ points of contact would have been a minor embarrassment.

Mr. Waltz is also said to have clashed with chief of staff Susie Wiles. But the deeper story may be that Mr. Waltz and his deputies are out because they are “hawks,” a term for anyone who would continue the successful Iran, Russia and China policies of Mr. Trump’s first term rather than default to Obama-style appeasement. Mr. Waltz was targeted from the start by the Tucker Carlson-Donald Trump Jr. wing of the MAGA movement.

Laura Loomer, who has shifted from conspiracies about 9/11 to spreading blacklists in the Trump Administration, previously helped to oust members of Mr. Waltz’s staff with guilt-by-association tactics. She tarred Alex Wong, Mr. Waltz’s deputy and a former staffer for Sen. Tom Cotton, as connected to the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Wong is a noted China hawk—a tough-on-Beijing veteran of the first Trump term. Responding on Thursday to reports that Mr. Wong will follow Mr. Waltz out the door, Ms. Loomer claimed another “SCALP” in a tweet.

The internal resistance to Mr. Trump’s foreign policy comes not from Mr. Waltz or “neocon warmongers” but from the come-home-America faction that includes Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. The Signal chat revealed that Vice President JD Vance opposed and tried to delay the President’s decision to use force in defense of U.S. ships under attack by Iran’s Houthi proxy.

Mr. Waltz has been vilified for demanding that Iran dismantle its nuclear program or risk military means to do so. But does the online MAGA brigade realize that’s the same policy that Messrs. Trump, Hegseth and Rubio have elaborated many times?

Yes, they do. They want Messrs. Hegseth’s and Rubio’s scalps as well, but really they want to overturn Mr. Trump’s policy toward Iran, and they oppose a tougher line against Russia. They see the Waltz firing as an opportunity to influence the President to embrace the Obama-Biden approach. Accurately or not, they see an ally in Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s longtime pal and special envoy to the Middle East and Russia, to replace Mr. Waltz at the NSC.

Mr. Trump needs a replacement for Mr. Waltz with national-security experience who can be an honest broker for his policy choices. And it wouldn’t hurt to understand the axis of adversaries—China, Russia, Iran, North Korea—building against America.

‘There's an information war, and we’ve disarmed ourselves’ — ex-US diplomat on Trump cuts to counter Russian disinformation

https://www.yahoo.com/news/theres-information-war-ve-disarmed-171634634.html?utm

Natalia Yermak

Wed, April 30, 2025 at 1:16 PM EDT9 min read

Russia has used information warfare to promote its interests and undermine opponents across the world as a part of its foreign policy for decades.

The Russian state was spending an estimated $1.5 billion annually on its foreign disinformation campaigns, Christopher Walker, National Endowment for Democracy vice president for studies and analysis, told Congress in 2023.

These campaigns skillfully take advantage of already existing divisions in society, inflaming tensions to divide and destabilize countries around the world, according to experts.

In the U.S., the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) had acted as the main tool to expose Russia and China’s disinformation campaigns abroad since it was reformed in 2016.

But in 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration shut the center down, citing concerns about free speech and the rights of American citizens.

The Kyiv Independent spoke with James Rubin, a former diplomat who led the GEC for two years starting in 2022, about the consequences of Trump’s decision, as well as Russia’s continued information operations worldwide.

During Rubin’s tenure, the center, which focused exclusively on what Russia and China information campaigns outside of the U.S., exposed four major Russian disinformation operations around the world, including in Latin America, Africa, and Moldova.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Kyiv Independent: How do Russia’s disinformation campaigns work?

James Rubin: Russian disinformation operations, or what we used to call covert operations, mean they're putting messages into the information system in Europe, in Ukraine, in Africa, that are lies and that are unattributed. They're hiding their hand.

The most important thing we did was last September, when we showed that the Russian television network RT and its parent company were a clearinghouse for covert intelligence operations in the information domain. Our highest intelligence director told me it was one of the most comprehensive intelligence downgrades.

Find out who's telling you something. Don't just believe it.

(The RT network) used its business model to do computer and cyber sweeps, where it would generate money for the Russian army. They used their cyber intelligence tools to suck up information. And they used Russian television all over the world to discredit any country that disagreed with them.

We exposed that with the help of our intelligence community. The most important thing we did was sanction RT’s parent company so that it could not use dollars anywhere in the world. It had a real impact. In my understanding, these sanctions are still in place under Trump's administration.

Russia's state-controlled Russia Today (RT) television broadcast van is parked in front of St. Basil's Cathedral and the Kremlin next to Red Square in Moscow, Russia, on March 16, 2018. (Mladen Antonov / AFP via Getty Images)

The lesson here for everyone is: find out who's telling you something. Don't just believe it. Wait and see who the source of the information is.

In (the United States), we got into a big debate about censorship. Who could say what, when? But the issue is not censoring information. It's providing more information. It's being sure that someone knows that it's the Kremlin apparatus that's coming up with these crazy ideas.

The Russians spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to skew the election in Moldova.

And they failed partly because European countries, the U.S., and the Moldovan government got together and shared information on what Russia was doing, who they were paying, and how they were using phony politicians to pay off local journalists who then put out phony information. They lost that election, which shows that we can beat them.

There's an information war going on around the world, led by the Russians, including the Chinese. But in the U.S., battling it is especially hard now that we've unilaterally disarmed one of our tools — the ability to expose Russian covert operations in the information domain.

The Kyiv Independent: With Russia spending nearly $1.5 billion annually on its foreign disinformation campaigns, how do you think the U.S. will fare in this disinformation war with Russia and China now that the center that countered it is shut down?

James Rubin: I think that number is low and that it's much more than that. It depends on how you count it and if you include all the facilities they created through RT, and you include all the people who are in the business.

I read a book called “Active Measures (:The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare” by Thomas Rid), which was about what the Soviet Union did with Eastern European countries during the Cold War.

(The authors of the book) were able to get real information because when the Cold War ended, the Eastern European countries opened their files and showed how much effort went into what were called “active measures," meaning forgeries or other covert operations in the information space.

Back in the 1970s, they were spending $4 billion (annually) on that program. It didn't go away. It just changed its location. It's changed its form.

So I think (Russia is spending) tens of billions of dollars all over the world (on disinformation).

The Kyiv Independent: What other goals does Russian disinformation pursue worldwide?

James Rubin: We learned that these people take information warfare very, very seriously. They wake up in the morning and they say: “OK, what can we do today, somewhere in the world, to undermine the U.S., undermine the West, undermine democratic institutions?”

They took this idea from the novel and tried to implant it into the minds of the people.

One of the things I was most proud of, in addition to (exposing the work of state-controlled) RT media, was what we did in Africa. It was particularly pernicious there because the Russians were going to create a phony argument, using an idea that came out of a John Le Carre novel, that biological weapons were being used on innocent Africans by the big pharmaceutical companies.

And so they took this idea from the novel and tried to implant it into the minds of the people in Africa, so that they wouldn't go to the Western medical centers and wouldn't use Western medicine. Then the U.S. and the West wouldn't get the so-called "soft power" benefit of helping the people of Africa. We were able to expose that before it took hold.

And that's the real lesson here — if we ever get serious again about the information war, you have to act early, ideally before the operation starts, but certainly in the first few days and weeks. Because once information takes hold, it's very hard to put it back into so-called Pandora's box.

By preventing Russia from doing that last year, we were able to convince Africans not to avoid Western medicine, but to take advantage of it. And we know that that has helped save lives.

I suspect they'll work in Latin America and try to play off the fact that President Trump is unpopular, and try to change people's minds about the war in Ukraine using President Trump's own arguments.

The real tragedy of it is that the Trump administration has accepted some of the arguments about who caused this war. Unfortunately, some in the Trump administration have used the arguments Putin and his friends use.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance delivers a speech at the 61st Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, on Feb. 14, 2025. (Tobias Schwarz / AFP via Getty Images)

The cause of the war is in the Kremlin. But somehow, some people have persuaded other people that this war is somehow Ukraine's fault, the United States' fault, NATO's fault, although it was Vladimir Putin's choice to wake up one morning and invade his neighbor.

And I suspect Russia is going to try and spread those official American statements to try to change minds. Hopefully, the world has already made up its mind about whose fault the war is, and nothing anyone says is going to change the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine.

The Kyiv Independent: Speaking about official U.S. statements, would you agree that the Trump administration dismantled the Global Engagement Center (GEC) that you were leading, which helped expose Russian propaganda, in part because it currently aligns with some of the Russian statements?

James Rubin: I don't know exactly why they did this. But I can say that in the time I served in government, it was certainly true that some American congressmen would repeat Russian arguments. They would repeat Russian lies about Zelensky's yachts, or corruption in Ukraine, or biological weapons (allegedly developed in Ukraine with NATO to target Russia).

When we rejected those arguments as untrue, some in the Republican Party, I'm sorry to say, felt that we were censoring Americans who agreed with Russia.

Let me say this clearly: Americans have a right to agree with Russia.

Americans were being paid by Russia to promote the idea that instead of giving arms to Ukraine, we should be shutting down our southern border.

We don't control American points of view. But there's nothing wrong with telling people that it's also a Russian argument. And then people can decide for themselves whether the fact that they're repeating the argument of a country that invaded its neighbor is relevant.

I'm sure that one of the reasons they closed down these efforts to stop disinformation is because they began to feel that by opposing Russian information operations, we were somehow opposing the points of view of certain members of the Republican Party.

We found out that a group of Americans were being paid by Russia to promote the idea that instead of giving arms to Ukraine, we should be shutting down our southern border. Those arguments were actually used by members of Congress to delay aid to Ukraine.

Outside of my work in the State Department, I happen to know that Russia believes that these groups were serving effectively as useful idiots for Russian propaganda inside the U.S., persuading American congressmen to focus on immigration rather than aid to Ukraine.

It harmed the speed at which we were able to provide aid to Ukraine, when it took six to nine months under (former) President Joe Biden to get the military aid through Congress.

The Kyiv Independent: Within the U.S., what tools do you think Russia uses to influence the American public other than paying bloggers and influencers?

James Rubin: All sorts of social media, all sorts of communications tools are being deployed all over the world to try to undermine Western support for Ukraine.

Let's face it, it happens every day, because the only way Russia can win this war is if everyone quits. But with all the work they're doing, they failed to stop Western support for Ukraine.

We’ve been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.

7. Senior State Department official sought internal communications with journalists, European officials, and Trump critics

Sigh...

I guess this is blowback for an attempted witch hunt

Excerpts:

The document, dated March 11, 2025, focuses specifically on records and communications from the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub, a small office in the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy that tracked and countered foreign disinformation campaigns; it was created after the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which had the same mission, shut down at the end of 2024. MIT Technology Review broke the news earlier this month that R/FIMI would be shuttered.

Some R/FIMI staff were at the meeting where the document was initially shared, as were State Department lawyers and staff from the department’s Bureau of Administration, who are responsible for conducting searches to fulfill public records requests.

Also included among the nearly 60 individuals and organizations caught up in Beattie’s information dragnet are Bill Gates; the open-source journalism outlet Bellingcat; former FBI special agent Clint Watts; Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister; Daniel Fried, a career State Department official and former US ambassador to Poland; Renée DiResta, an expert in online disinformation who led research at Stanford Internet Observatory; and Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board at the US Department of Homeland Security.

When told of their inclusion in the records request, multiple people expressed alarm that such a list exists at all in an American institution. “When I was in government I’d never done anything like that,” Kristol, a former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, says. “What would be the innocent reason for doing that?”

Fried echoes this sentiment. “I spent 40 years in the State Department, and you didn’t collect names or demand email records,” says Fried. “I’ve never heard of such a thing”—at least not in the American context, he clarifies. It did remind him of Eastern European “Communist Party minder[s] watching over the untrusted bureaucracy.”

He adds: “It also approaches the compilation of an enemies list.”

Darren Beattie should read these comments from James Rubin in the article at this link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/theres-information-war-ve-disarmed-171634634.html?utm . These really describe the problem (and the beauty of Russian disinformation) and why we should be exposing Russian and other malign actors' talking points, even if they are parroted by Americans.

Let me say this clearly: Americans have a right to agree with Russia.

Americans were being paid by Russia to promote the idea that instead of giving arms to Ukraine, we should be shutting down our southern border.

We don't control American points of view. But there's nothing wrong with telling people that it's also a Russian argument. And then people can decide for themselves whether the fact that they're repeating the argument of a country that invaded its neighbor is relevant.

I'm sure that one of the reasons they closed down these efforts to stop disinformation is because they began to feel that by opposing Russian information operations, we were somehow opposing the points of view of certain members of the Republican Party.

We found out that a group of Americans were being paid by Russia to promote the idea that instead of giving arms to Ukraine, we should be shutting down our southern border. Those arguments were actually used by members of Congress to delay aid to Ukraine.

Outside of my work in the State Department, I happen to know that Russia believes that these groups were serving effectively as useful idiots for Russian propaganda inside the U.S., persuading American congressmen to focus on immigration rather than aid to Ukraine.

It harmed the speed at which we were able to provide aid to Ukraine, when it took six to nine months under (former) President Joe Biden to get the military aid through Congress.

Senior State Department official sought internal communications with journalists, European officials, and Trump critics

Trump appointee Darren Beattie requested records regarding a large list of high-profile names, organizations, and right-wing buzzwords for a “Twitter files”-style document dump about alleged conservative censorship.

By Eileen Guoarchive page

May 1, 2025

Technology Review · by Eileen Guoarchive page

A previously unreported document distributed by senior US State Department official Darren Beattie reveals a sweeping effort to uncover all communications between the staff of a small government office focused on online disinformation and a lengthy list of public and private figures—many of whom are longtime targets of the political right.

The document, originally shared in person with roughly a dozen State Department employees in early March, requested staff emails and other records with or about a host of individuals and organizations that track or write about foreign disinformation—including Atlantic journalist Anne Applebaum, former US cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs, and the Stanford Internet Observatory—or have criticized President Donald Trump and his allies, such as the conservative anti-Trump commentator Bill Kristol.

The document also seeks all staff communications that merely reference Trump or people in his orbit, like Alex Jones, Glenn Greenwald, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In addition, it directs a search of communications for a long list of keywords, including “Pepe the Frog,” “incel,” “q-anon,” “Black Lives Matter,” “great replacement theory,” “far-right,” and “infodemic.”

For several people who received or saw the document, the broad requests for unredacted information felt like a “witch hunt,” one official says—one that could put the privacy and security of numerous individuals and organizations at risk.

Beattie, whom Trump appointed in February to be the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy, told State Department officials that his goal in seeking these records was a “Twitter files”-like release of internal State Department documents “to rebuild trust with the American public,” according to a State Department employee who heard the remarks. (Beattie was referring to the internal Twitter documents that were released after Elon Musk bought the platform, in an attempt to prove that the company had previously silenced conservatives. While the effort provided more detail on the challenges and mistakes Twitter had already admitted to, it failed to produce a smoking gun.)

“What would be the innocent reason for doing that?” Bill Kristol

The document, dated March 11, 2025, focuses specifically on records and communications from the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub, a small office in the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy that tracked and countered foreign disinformation campaigns; it was created after the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which had the same mission, shut down at the end of 2024. MIT Technology Review broke the news earlier this month that R/FIMI would be shuttered.

Some R/FIMI staff were at the meeting where the document was initially shared, as were State Department lawyers and staff from the department’s Bureau of Administration, who are responsible for conducting searches to fulfill public records requests.

Also included among the nearly 60 individuals and organizations caught up in Beattie’s information dragnet are Bill Gates; the open-source journalism outlet Bellingcat; former FBI special agent Clint Watts; Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister; Daniel Fried, a career State Department official and former US ambassador to Poland; Renée DiResta, an expert in online disinformation who led research at Stanford Internet Observatory; and Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who briefly led the Disinformation Governance Board at the US Department of Homeland Security.

Have more information on this story or a tip for something else that we should report? Using a non-work device, reach the reporter on Signal at eileenguo.15 or tips@technologyreview.com.

When told of their inclusion in the records request, multiple people expressed alarm that such a list exists at all in an American institution. “When I was in government I’d never done anything like that,” Kristol, a former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, says. “What would be the innocent reason for doing that?”

Fried echoes this sentiment. “I spent 40 years in the State Department, and you didn’t collect names or demand email records,” says Fried. “I’ve never heard of such a thing”—at least not in the American context, he clarifies. It did remind him of Eastern European “Communist Party minder[s] watching over the untrusted bureaucracy.”

He adds: “It also approaches the compilation of an enemies list.”

Targeting the “censorship industrial complex”

Both GEC and R/FIMI, its pared-down successor office, focused on tracking and countering foreign disinformation efforts from Russia, China, and Iran, among others, but GEC was frequently accused—and was even sued—by conservative critics who claimed that it enabled censorship of conservative Americans’ views. A judge threw out one of those claims against GEC in 2022 (while finding that other parts of the Biden administration did exert undue pressure on tech platforms).

Beattie has also personally promoted these views. Before joining the State Department, he started Revolver News, a website that espouses far-right talking points that often gain traction in certain conservative circles. Among the ideas promoted in Revolver News is that GEC was part of a “censorship industrial complex” aimed at suppressing American conservative voices, even though GEC’s mission was foreign disinformation. This idea has taken hold more broadly; the House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing titled the “Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department,” on April 1 focused on GEC.

Most people on the list appear to have focused at some point on tracking or challenging disinformation broadly, or on countering specific false claims, including those related to the 2020 election. A few of the individuals appear primarily to be critics of Trump, Beattie, or others in the right-wing media ecosystem. Many have been the subject of Trump’s public grievances for years. (Trump called Krebs, for instance, a “significant bad-faith actor” in an executive order targeting him earlier this month.)

Beattie specifically asked for “all documents, emails, correspondence, or other records of communications amongst/between employees, contractors, subcontractors or consultants at the GEC or R/FIMI” since 2017 with all the named individuals, as well as communications that merely referenced them. He sought communications that referenced any of the listed organizations.

Finally, he sought a list of additional unredacted agency records—including all GEC grants and contracts, as well as subgrants, which are particularly sensitive due to the risks of retaliation to subgrantees, who often work in local journalism, fact-checking, or pro-democracy organizations under repressive regimes. It also asked for “all documents mentioning” the Election Integrity Partnership, a research collaboration between academics and tech companies that has been a target of right-wing criticism.

Several State Department staffers call the records requests “unusual” and “improper” in their scope. MIT Technology Review spoke to three people who had personally seen the document, as well as two others who were aware of it; we agreed to allow them to speak anonymously due to their fears of retaliation.

While they acknowledge that previous political appointees have, on occasion, made information requests through the records management system, Beattie’s request was something wholly different.

Never had “an incoming political appointee” sought to “search through seven years’ worth of all staff emails to see whether anything negative had been said about his friends,” says one staffer.

Another staffer calls it a “pet project” for Beattie.

Selective transparency

Beattie delivered the request, which he framed as a “transparency” initiative, to the State Department officials in a conference room at its Washington, D.C., headquarters on a Tuesday afternoon in early March, in the form of an 11-page packet titled, “SO [Senior Official] Beattie Inquiry for GEC/R/FIMI Records.” The documents were printed out, rather than emailed.

Labeled “sensitive but unclassified,” the document lays out Beattie’s requests in 12 separate, but sometimes repetitive, bullet points. In total, he sought communications about 16 organizations, including Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), as well as with and about 39 individuals.

US office that counters foreign disinformation is being eliminated

Conservative critics have long accused the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub of helping to censor the American right.

Notably, this includes several journalists: In addition to Bellingcat and Applebaum, the document also asks for communications with NBC News senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny.

Press-freedom advocates expressed alarm about the inclusion of journalists on the list, as well as the possibility of their communications being released to the public, which goes “considerably well beyond the scope of what … leak investigations in the past have typically focused on,” says Grayson Clary, a staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Rather, the effort seems like “a tactic designed to … make it much harder for journalists to strike up those source relationships in the first instance.”

Beattie also requested a search for communications that mentioned Trump and more than a dozen other prominent right-leaning figures. In addition to Jones, Greenwald, and “RFK Jr.,” the list includes “Don Jr.,” Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Charlie Kirk, Marine Le Pen, “Bolsonaro” (which could cover either Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president, or his son Eduardo, who is seeking political asylum in the US), and Beattie himself. It also asked for a search for 32 right-wing buzzwords related to abortion, immigration, election denial, and January 6, suggesting a determined effort to find State Department staff who even just discussed such matters.

(Staffers say they doubt that Beattie will find much, unless, one says, it’s “previous [FOIA] queries from people like Beattie” or discussions about “some Russian or PRC [Chinese] narrative that includes some of this stuff.”)

Multiple sources say State Department employees raised alarms internally about the records requests. They worried about the sensitivity and impropriety of the broad scope of the information requested, particularly because records would be unredacted, as well as about how the search would be conducted: through the eRecords file management system, which makes it easy for administrative staff to search through and retrieve State Department employees’ emails, typically in response to FOIA requests.

This felt, they say, like a powerful misuse of the public records system—or as Jankowicz, the disinformation researcher and former DHS official, put it, “weaponizing the access [Beattie] has to internal communications in order to upend people’s lives.”

“It stank to high heaven,” one staffer says. “This could be used for retaliation. This could be used for any kind of improper purposes, and our oversight committees should be informed of this.”

Another employee expressed concerns about the request for information on the agency’s subgrantees—who were often on the ground in repressive countries and whose information was closely guarded and not shared digitally, unlike the public lists of contractors and grantees typically available on websites like Grants.gov or USAspending.gov. “Making it known that [they] took money from the United States would put a target on them,” this individual explains. “We kept that information very secure. We wouldn’t even email subgrant names back and forth.”

Several people familiar with the matter say that by early April, Beattie had received many of the documents he’d requested, retrieved through eRecords, as well as a list of grantees. One source says the more sensitive list of subgrantees was not shared.

Neither the State Department nor Beattie responded to requests for comment. A CISA spokesperson emailed, “We do not comment on intergovernmental documents and would refer you back to the State Department.” We reached out to all individuals whose communications were requested and are named here; many declined to comment on the record.

A “chilling effect”

Five weeks after Beattie made his requests for information, the State Department shut down R/FIMI.

An hour after staff members were informed, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio published a blog post announcing the news on the Federalist, one of the outlets that sued the GEC over allegations of censorship. He then discussed in an interview with the influential right-wing Internet personality Mike Benz plans for Beattie to lead a “transparency effort.”

“What we have to do now—and Darren will be big involved in that as well—is sort of document what happened … because I think people who were harmed deserve to know that, and be able to prove that they were harmed,” Rubio told Benz.

This is what Beattie—and Benz—have long called for. Many of the names and keywords he included in his request reflect conspiracy theories and grievances promoted by Revolver News—which Beattie founded after being fired from his job as a speechwriter during the first Trump administration when CNN reported that he had spoken at a conference with white nationalists.

Ultimately, the State Department staffers say they fear that a selective disclosure of documents, taken out of context, could be distorted to fit any kind of narrative Beattie, Rubio, or others create.

Weaponizing any speech they consider to be critical by deeming it disinformation is not only ironic, says Jankowicz—it will also have “chilling effects” on anyone who conducts disinformation research, and it will result in “less oversight and transparency over tech platforms, over adversarial activities, over, frankly, people who are legitimately trying to disenfranchise US voters.”

That, she warns, “is something we should all be alarmed about.”

Technology Review · by Eileen Guoarchive page

8. Voice of America Needs to Be Fixed, Not Silenced

Let's use this as an opportunity to remake the bureaucracy but let's protect the professional journalists who are doing important work in support of US policy and national security. Yes there are management issues so let's fix those but we must throw the healthy baby out with the damned bathwater.

And please bring back my beloved Korea Service.

But the amount of ignorance from so many critics is just astounding. It is really nothing more than circular reporting of anecdotes from those who cannot handle the truth of the news that is reported. And they have no idea what is really being reported to the multitude of targets around the world. I will turn off any critic who has not really listened to or read actual reporting that is (was) taking place among the target audiences, particularly those oppressed people living in denied areas under authoritarian regimes.

Ms Lake's statement was actually quite correct - VOA should not be Trump TV. But it is the only media source that will accurately represent Trump policies to those people in denied areas from the leaders of authoritarian regimes to their oppressed people.

Excerpts:

ED: What do you think of the Trump administration’s decision to dismantle VOA?

TL: I don’t think the vast government bureaucracy that runs VOA should be salvaged, because that was the problem. I would eliminate that whole federal bureaucracy, so you can save a lot of money right there.

Where they are wrong is wanting to silence the Voice of America. Trump is punishing people. This is a perfect example of punishment by association. He’s punishing people who are innocent of the misdeeds of just a very few people.

You cannot be off the air for weeks on end. It sends a terrible signal, delights dictators, and punishes the audiences. People in countries that don’t have free media, they will not know whether their neighbors are being arrested or put in prison, or people in their next town are being killed, because they won’t find out about it. The Western media are not going to cover this. So you will not find out about these atrocities, human rights violations. It’s a great, great gift to Putin and the Chinese leadership and the ayatollahs in Iran. And to Hamas as well.

ED: What should be done, then?

TL: The Free Press was created because many people saw that the legacy media cannot be reformed, but we don’t have this luxury with the Voice of America, because there’s only one Voice of America.

Trump would have ignored the Voice of America if the Voice of America just stuck with the VOA charter and did its job. But it didn’t.

I was very pleased when I heard Kari Lake say that she doesn’t want to turn it into Trump TV, and that she only wants to make sure VOA does good, solid journalism that’s balanced. Then something happened, with Grenell and Musk calling for the abolition of VOA and Radio Free Europe. I think the original plan was to reform them. I think Trump had a different plan initially, and then he changed his mind. So now someone has to get him to change his mind back to the original purpose of reforming this organization—and they need drastic reforms—but not kill it.

Voice of America Needs to Be Fixed, Not Silenced

Trump’s shutdown delights dictators and punishes people who deserve access to the truth.

By Ethan Dodd

04.28.25 — U.S. Politics

https://www.thefp.com/p/donald-trump-voice-of-america-shutdown-delights-dictators-ted-lipien?utm

This radio address by President Ronald Reagan was beamed to the Soviet Union by Voice of America in 1985. (AP Photo)

Ted Lipien is Voice of America’s fiercest defender and toughest critic. Born in Poland during the Cold War, he fled the communist country at the age of 16, determined to become a journalist so that others wouldn’t have to live under lies. While a college student, he became a translator for VOA’s Polish Service. Spending nearly 40 years with the U.S.-funded news broadcasting service, he rose to Polish Service chief during the Solidarity trade union’s struggle for workers’ rights, interviewed future President George H.W. Bush and future Pope John Paul II, and brought live satellite TV newscasts to Russia and Ukraine. Lipien retired as acting VOA associate director in 2006.

Since then, he has turned to The Hill, The Washington Times, and the Washington Examiner to expose waste and corruption within VOA’s bureaucracy—and liberal bias in VOA English-language news programs. That included instructions to call Hamas members who invaded Israel and murdered 1,200 civilians on October 7, 2023, militants or fighters—but not terrorists. Still, he thinks President Trump has made a grave mistake by shutting down VOA, firing its more than 1,300 journalists and staff, and leaving 360 million listeners around the world in the dark. Lipien says the decision amounts to collective punishment, and a gift to authoritarian regimes and America’s enemies.

VOA director Michael Abramowitz is fighting in court, as are a group of VOA journalists, to reverse Trump’s executive order that effectively gutted the agency overseeing media outlets including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. A judge last week issued a preliminary injunction halting part of the order, but an appeal is likely.

Lipien is working behind the scenes to do what he can to save VOA, such as co-founding a nonpartisan committee, the Committee for U.S. Media Strategy, to help Congress and the White House reform the 83-year-old news service. Here, he discusses how VOA helped end the Cold War, how it got screwed up, and the true meaning of the free press.

The following Q&A has been edited for clarity and concision.

Ethan Dodd: Over 1,300 people lost their jobs at Voice of America. What is your reaction to that?

Ted Lipien: Many, many good journalists are suffering right now. So it was a very unfortunate decision.

I was a listener to VOA in Poland when it was under communism. So I have a great appreciation for the impact that programming from the United States specifically has for people who are deprived of free media when they live under a repressive government. The audience feels abandoned by the United States.

ED: What was it like in Poland when you were growing up?

TL: I realized that the history I was reading in government-approved textbooks was not the history that my grandmother would tell me about. Well, you know, those 20,000 Polish officers in Katyn were not killed by the Germans, as I was being taught, but they were killed by the Soviet secret police on the orders of Stalin. So at that point I realized that I couldn’t possibly have a life and a career in Poland.

ED: Is that why you became a journalist?

TL: What inspired me were the lies of the regime, both in their media and in textbooks. I felt then the best way to fight that was to be a journalist—but a journalist for an uncensored and free media outlet.

ED: What are your reflections on your 40-year career at VOA?

TL: It was the greatest experience in my life. I feel honored and happy that I was able to help contribute to the end of communism in Poland and eventually the rest of East Central Europe. I don’t think it would have been done without Voice of America and Radio Free Europe broadcasts as well as the BBC. That’s why I care so much about Voice of America. Poland is now a free country. They don’t need the Voice of America, but I knew that the Tibetans, the Chinese, the Russians, the Uyghurs, and the North Koreans, and the Cubans, they need the Voice of America.

ED: What was it like reporting during the Cold War?

TL: I went with then–Vice President George H.W. Bush to Poland when the United States was negotiating with the regime to facilitate a peaceful transition to democracy.

And I went to Gdansk, and I recorded an interview with Lech Wałęsa, the leader of the Solidarity movement, who became Poland’s president. He was still under police surveillance. I was a little bit afraid of taking a train to Gdansk. A few years earlier, the secret police killed the Catholic priest Father Popiełuszko, murdered him brutally. I also interviewed quite a few of the future Polish ministers after the fall of communism. That’s how important we were. We helped facilitate the dialogue, while also doing everything to avoid violence.

We were not in favor of propaganda. We wanted to see a peaceful transition to democracy without triggering a Soviet military intervention. I think that was the Voice of America’s most important achievement, a peaceful transition to democracy, not just in Poland, but also in the rest of East Central Europe.

I suppose I can point to that achievement and be happy and forget about the VOA. But I didn’t want to forget about it, because I knew that it is still very much needed. And so basically, I wanted to save it.

ED: Save it from what? Do you mean VOA became “woke”?

TL: I don’t like to use that term, because it has acquired certain partisan and political connotations, just like right-wing also has negative connotations. And I know that some officials tried to apply that label to me, and I am not at all right-wing. I support gay marriage, for example. I support universal healthcare. I’m anti-totalitarian, but definitely not right-wing in that sense.

In 2016, VOA produced a video. Well, basically they took a video where Robert De Niro calls Trump a pig, a dog, a bozo that you would like to hit in the face. And they stuck a VOA logo on it, did the foreign-language subtitles, and put it on social media. This was VOA. This was done by VOA. No nothing, no context, no balance.

And then in 2020, there was another video in which Joe Biden was promoting his candidacy. They put it on the air. This was without context, without any balance. It would have been unthinkable when I was with VOA that we would have done something like this. It just blew my mind. How could they do that? And then I saw the raw videos that VOA was airing of demonstrators in the Middle East burning American and Israeli flags. Also without context; also without balance.

If the VOA director comes into VOA and and sends an email to all staff, as one director did, quoting someone saying that Trump is a candidate of “hate and prejudice,” it sends a certain signal to VOA reporters as to what perhaps is the preferred way of reporting in order to get promotions and and better assignments under the new administration. So that’s the problem.

ED: So you became a critic?

TL: I was critical of the management to save them from exactly the fate they are now in. I knew that if things got worse, the VOA could be defunded.

ED: Is VOA filled with “far-left activists,” as Trump foreign policy adviser Ric Grenell said and Elon Musk retweeted?

TL: Grenell doesn’t watch Radio Free Europe programs in Russian, or Radio Free Asia programs in Chinese and Vietnamese. There are excellent journalists at VOA. There’s a large, vast operation of VOA programming that is only in foreign languages, and most of it is very good, and they are very pro-American.

Most of the problems, I’m afraid, are with some of the American-born, American-educated reporters who are very much focused on their own country and on U.S. politics, even though that’s not what these organizations are all about.

One thing that really bothered me was an email that came from one of the VOA newsroom individuals that listed all the reasons why Hamas said they conducted the October 7 attack, as if to justify this absolute genocidal outrage. Considering what I know from my own family history, what happened to Jews in my own hometown where more than 800 of them were just murdered. They didn’t even send them to Auschwitz or Birkenau, but they murdered them there and buried them.

ED: Much of the legacy media leans left, as you know. At the VOA, are there any journalists who are Republicans?

TL: I know of two. I don’t think they can feel like they can speak openly because they would be ostracized. That’s what they told me.

ED: What do you think of the Trump administration’s decision to dismantle VOA?

TL: I don’t think the vast government bureaucracy that runs VOA should be salvaged, because that was the problem. I would eliminate that whole federal bureaucracy, so you can save a lot of money right there.

Where they are wrong is wanting to silence the Voice of America. Trump is punishing people. This is a perfect example of punishment by association. He’s punishing people who are innocent of the misdeeds of just a very few people.

You cannot be off the air for weeks on end. It sends a terrible signal, delights dictators, and punishes the audiences. People in countries that don’t have free media, they will not know whether their neighbors are being arrested or put in prison, or people in their next town are being killed, because they won’t find out about it. The Western media are not going to cover this. So you will not find out about these atrocities, human rights violations. It’s a great, great gift to Putin and the Chinese leadership and the ayatollahs in Iran. And to Hamas as well.

ED: What should be done, then?

TL: The Free Press was created because many people saw that the legacy media cannot be reformed, but we don’t have this luxury with the Voice of America, because there’s only one Voice of America.

Trump would have ignored the Voice of America if the Voice of America just stuck with the VOA charter and did its job. But it didn’t.

I was very pleased when I heard Kari Lake say that she doesn’t want to turn it into Trump TV, and that she only wants to make sure VOA does good, solid journalism that’s balanced. Then something happened, with Grenell and Musk calling for the abolition of VOA and Radio Free Europe. I think the original plan was to reform them. I think Trump had a different plan initially, and then he changed his mind. So now someone has to get him to change his mind back to the original purpose of reforming this organization—and they need drastic reforms—but not kill it.

9. China’s ‘Great Firewall’ Spreads to Other Countries

Another confirmation of my China thesis:

My assessment is that China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions through subversion. It takes a long term approach, employing unrestricted warfare and its three warfares to set conditions and achieve objectives, with the main objective being the unification of China (i.e., the recovery of Taiwan)

China’s ‘Great Firewall’ Spreads to Other Countries

Reinforcing authoritarianism in Pakistan and beyond

https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/chinas-great-firewall-spreads-to?utm

May 01, 2025

∙ Paid

By: Salman Rafi Sheikh

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China has spent decades framing—and continues to frame—its partnership with BRI member states as purely economic. That China doesn’t interfere in the domestic politics of its member countries has been one of the key hallmarks of Beijing’s self-styled model of economic development, making it different from the sort of interventionism that characterizes the West in general, and the US in particular.

China, however, no longer appears to be different, with Beijing supporting the installation of “Great Firewalls”—systems of censorship and surveillance to control access to the internet and keep its citizens from hearing or experiencing anything the government doesn’t approve of. It operates by blocking access to websites and services, filtering content, and monitoring online activities.

The firewall, also known as the Golden Shield Project in China, allows member states such as Pakistan to monitor, restrict, and even block access to the internet and foreign websites. Beijing’s political entanglements in target states are already taking an obvious form with one clear purpose: to help extend the typically closed Chinese model of political system to other states. Other countries are thought to be using Chinese technologies for their own control measures, although the extent of this collaboration can’t be pinned down.

With reports indicating China is seeking to install such electronic firewalls across several states at the behest of like-minded repressive governments, this model stands to become global in scale and devastating in its impact sooner rather than later.

In November 2024, Pakistan tested the ‘Great Firewall with media reports quoting senior executives of two internet service providers and an official from the security establishment confirming its installation. State institutions such as the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), have refused to disclose the details, but senior officials, including former caretaker prime minister Anwaar-ul-Haq Kakar revealed, before the current regime assumed power after the February 2024 elections, the deployment of a national firewall.

In Pakistan, the purpose is to suppress dissent and camouflage indirect military rule. Reports indicate China’s preference for working with the Pakistani military to install and operationalize this system. The choice is hardly unexpected, given the predominant political position of Pakistan’s military, which has ruled from behind a pseudo-parliamentary façade for decades.

This scheme draws directly from the Chinese playbook. A 2020 report by the Human Rights Watch (HRW) described how China’s internet surveillance and control of online and digital spaces are changing the political mindset of young Chinese, making them “increasingly part of Beijing’s defense operation.” Their target is not an external enemy. Their most immediate target is those Chinese who were once able to use online, digital spaces for political expression.

Beijing’s increasing control of the internet is a direct tool to control its population. By shaping mindsets, it is using segments of its population to suppress and marginalize the possibility of political dissent.

It is this aspect of the political system that China is exporting to the rest of the world, beginning most clearly with its so-called ‘all-weather’ friend, Pakistan. Exporting this aspect of the political system makes perfect sense in the post-Cold War era, given that there is no clear ideological divide (e.g., Communism vs. Liberal Capitalism) in the world.

As such, there is no need for China to spread the ideological component of its overall political system. However, what still matters is for Beijing to reshape host countries in its image as much as possible. For the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), this strategy is absolutely necessary to ultimately survive – and even win – against Washington’s increasing economic and political aggressiveness.

By tying the political survival of such regimes as in Pakistan to China’s technological cooperation, Beijing is not only providing protecting its own interests, i.e., one of the many aims behind installing the firewall in Pakistan is to help Pakistan enhance its security of Chinese personnel and projects, by also creating new forms of regime dependence.

Countries like Pakistan already owe billions of dollars to China as part of BRI investments. The fact that political regimes in these countries now depend on Chinese support for controlling politics is only deepening the Chinese footprint within the domestic political spheres.

Many BRI member states such as Indonesia, where new forms of authoritarian politics are on the rise and where ‘old’ political players such as the military are staging a political comeback, might be willing to deepen their engagement with China for long-term political survival. Indeed, within BRI’s framework, bilateral ‘technological cooperation’ very much includes the establishment of sovereign digital infrastructures to shield the state from any potential internal challenges.

From the Chinese perspective, internal regime stability is crucial for the survival of its interests. On the contrary, frequent regime shifts have negatively impacted the progress of its projects. Even in Pakistan, when Imran Khan became the prime minister, he initiated a ‘review’ of CPEC projects to the displeasure of Beijing. Today, the Great Firewall is visibly targeting PTI’s social media outreach and its ability to resist the regime.

Is this unique?

The firewall isn’t a unique example of the ways in which China may have been reinforcing authoritarianism in BRI member states. Even within Pakistan, several other examples help to showcase the adverse impact that Chinese investment and investment model have had on the country.

Most CPEC projects, for instance, are designed by joint China-Pakistan bodies, such as the Joint Working Committee. However, many, such as those involving mineral extraction and the port of Gwadar, are constitutionally within the purview of either provincial governments or the joint jurisdiction of the provinces and the center. But China’s projects have been fundamentally insensitive to local political realities of Pakistan. They have directly reinforced central control over the country, which is one key geopolitical context of the increasing intensity of the Baloch separatist insurgency.

From the ‘periphery’ to the ‘core’

Whereas the geopolitical impact of Chinese investments was, at one point, limited to the so-called ‘peripheral’ regions of Pakistan, the ‘Great Firewall’ will only make the ‘core’ equally problematic, albeit in different ways.

The ‘mainstream’ Pakistan already has ‘X’ (Twitter) blocked since the February 2024 elections. Access to ‘X’ was shut down in the wake of backlash against the blatant rigging in general elections to ensure the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf’s (PTI) defeat. Following this blockade, any subsequent protests by the PTI and/or other opposition groups have seen internet service completely shut down across major Pakistani cities.

This strategy is far from conducive to growth. In December 2024, Pakistan’s IT industry lost approximately US$ 1 million due to one hour of internet outage. Reports further indicate that a complete internet outage for one hour in Pakistan could result in a loss of US$2.21. Such losses present a sharp contrast to the ‘win-win’ model of development China offered via BRI/CPEC. Therefore, the rhetoric of development and non-interference has been significantly flipped over time, with politics, economic development, and security increasingly favouring regime status quo rather than political and economic progress.

10. “I should never have posted that.” – OSINT Twitter sleuth apologized after the U.S. bombed an erroneous target they had flagged in Yemen.

Excerpts (two article headlines):

Pentagon May Have Drawn on Anonymous Social Media Accounts in Planning Deadly Yemen Attack

U.S.-Made Bomb Fragments Identified at a Strike on a Migrant Facility in Yemen That Killed Nearly 70 People

Excerpt:

And we covered a shocking new development in the U.S. war on Yemen, in which it appears that CENTCOM may be taking targeting advice from amateur OSINT analysts on Twitter. Today, after digging further into the event, we’re publishing this story, which is co-reported by Murtaza Hussain with assistance from our colleague Shuaib Almowsawa in Yemen.

Ryan Grim

“I should never have posted that.”

OSINT Twitter sleuth apologized after the U.S. bombed an erroneous target they had flagged in Yemen.

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/us-yemen-bombing-x-osint?utm

Ryan Grim

May 01, 2025

A woman assaulted by a pro-Israel mob during a protest last week in Brooklyn has met with a detective, and she is willing to testify, if New York City Mayor Eric Adams follows through on his pledge to find those responsible, she told me in an interview on Wednesday.

In the evening on April 24, a crowd had gathered to protest an appearance by Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir at a local synagogue, and the Crown Heights resident, who wishes to remain anonymous, said she joined the group as a bystander before she was assaulted and chased by the mob. Watch the full interview here on Counter Points. She also shared video from her phone’s perspective, which you can watch in this thread.

We also interviewed journalist Chernoh Bah from Sierra Leone on the role that Western aid plays in fueling corruption and undermining democracy.

And we covered a shocking new development in the U.S. war on Yemen, in which it appears that CENTCOM may be taking targeting advice from amateur OSINT analysts on Twitter. Today, after digging further into the event, we’re publishing this story, which is co-reported by Murtaza Hussain with assistance from our colleague Shuaib Almowsawa in Yemen.

Shuaib also teamed up with reporter Amanda Sperber to investigate a recent strike on an African migrant detention center in Yemen.

We know times are tough: if this wasn’t clear already, the GDP and jobs report from today confirms it. We remain grateful for the generous support from so many readers. Your support ensures our journalism is free for everybody. If you can contribute, please do so—or upgrade to a paid subscription.

—Ryan Grim

Upgrade to paid

Google Earth imagery posted by @Vleckie following U.S. strike. Source: X.

Pentagon May Have Drawn on Anonymous Social Media Accounts in Planning Deadly Yemen Attack

A deadly airstrike in Yemen that killed eight civilians appeared to target coordinates posted by social media analysts online.

By Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain

For the past several months, the U.S. military has been carrying out a bombing campaign in Yemen ostensibly aimed at forcing the militant group Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, to stop their military intervention on behalf of Palestinians under Israeli assault in Gaza. This campaign has conducted strikes against more than 800 targets, as well as verified claims of civilian harm, including, most recently, a strike against a detention facility housing African migrants that killed dozens of people. (Shuaib Almosawa in Sana’a and Amanda Sperber have more on that below.)

It would be comforting to think that the decision makers in the U.S. military are carrying out these strikes with great care—and with the highest quality of intelligence—given the power of life and death that its operations hold for innocent people. Yet, serious allegations have emerged that the U.S. military has been relying, in part, on anonymous X accounts who post coordinates that they dubiously claim contain military assets.

This week, U.S. warplanes bombed a location alleged by two such amateur open-source intelligence accounts to be a Houthi stronghold, killing innocent bystanders in the process.

A Twitter account—operated by an individual whose bio says they are based in the Netherlands, using the handle @VleckieHond—apologized this week after the U.S. struck coordinates she erroneously suggested, in early April, were the location of an underground Houthi military position; it was not a military site. “Allright, time for me to go through the mud,” Vleckie posted. “Based on satellite imagery I'd marked this quarry as an underground base, and tweeted is out as such. I'm fairly certain Centcom doesn't take their targeting data from Twitter, but this still is a very severe mistake.” Vleckie had highlighted the coordinates in a thread that claimed to have uncovered a Houthi base, and they had relied, in part, on a secondary account, @Galal_Alsalahi, whose bio suggests they are based in Houston. That account, which is hostile to the Houthis, claimed to have discovered a Houthi missile launcher at the coordinates.

The strike that took place on April 28 reportedly killed eight civilians in their homes on the outskirts of the capital of Sana’a. Vleckie’s reading of satellite imagery, the account later said, was incomplete—they said they had privately marked the target as only “possible”—and they would strive to do better in the future, while posting a screenshot of a 500 Euro donation to charity that she had made as penance. “I should never have posted it,” they added. (A message seeking comment from the account went unanswered.)

Reports from local Yemeni news outlets highlighted the devastating impact of the attack. Among the dead and wounded were children, some of whom were later evacuated to local hospitals.

The U.S. military and CENTCOM have ultimate responsibility for verifying the information used to conduct airstrikes. The Pentagon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advanced data analytics programs from companies, like Palantir, that include open-source data scraped from social media as part of their information-gathering process to help the military with targeting and intelligence. Data analysts live by the credo “garbage in, garbage out,” which sophisticated intelligence collection is intended to overcome.

To be sure, it may be a mere coincidence that the amateur sleuths identified the location before CENTCOM struck it, but the account used for the Sana’a strike is known to officials in the military, increasing the potential likelihood that it was relied on—at least, in part—for the tragic targeting. @VleckieHond has been publicly cited by reputable military-linked publications, including the influential Combating Terrorism Center at West Point Sentinel, which referred to the “ever-resourceful analyst @Vleckiehond,” in an April 2024 report citing her analysis on U.S. air operations against the Houthis. The report noted she had compiled her analysis based on her purchases of commercially available satellite imagery.

The paper “Assessing the Houthi War Effort Since October 2023,” used the “ever-resourceful analyst” to back up its identification of Houthi military assets. The last sentence, with emphasis added, is sourced to Vleckie and Vleckie only:

“Training and depot locations for the Houthi naval and coastal defenses forces at locations such as Hodeida’s Ras al-Khatib naval base and the Khor al-Jabana naval and coastal defense complex across the inner anchorage, both relatively visible locations. A second major headquarters area is the Ras Issa military zone and the adjacent Kamaran Island military zone, both large areas that are subject to closure to non-military personnel during security operations. These sites have been prepared for precision attacks through the creation of hundreds of identical weapons storage “igloos” (buried shipping containers).”

In April, CENTCOM announced it had struck the Ras Issa fuel depot with devastating force, killing at least 80 civilians and plunging the country into a fuel shortage that will exacerbate a hunger crisis.

The author of the West Point paper, Michael Knights, remained confident in @Vleckihond, despite how this week’s attack had gone wrong. “Impressive voluntary self-critique and professionalism. Rare to see and another positive indicator regarding @VleckieHond,” he posted, after backlash over the civilian killings and her subsequent charitable donation.

Analysis from @Vleckiehond has been cited by other publications that draw upon what is known as the open-source intelligence (OSINT) community to provide additional information used for assessing airstrikes abroad, often through analysis of publicly available satellite imagery.

Drop Site asked the Pentagon if the strike it carried out that reportedly killed numerous civilians had been drawn from social media analysis. A spokesperson did not respond. Prior claims that the U.S. had already been using social media accounts as a resource for developing strike targets had already surfaced in recent months, amid the bombing campaign in Yemen. An account identified as run from Houston, Texas, @galal_alsalahi, had also posted on April 1 about what he described as a launch pad for missile attacks operated by the Houthis, and his account had been cited by @vleckiehond in her own analysis.

The air war in Yemen has ramped up at the same time that the U.S. Department of Defense under Secretary Pete Hegseth has loosened restrictions around military strikes that had been aimed at minimizing civilian casualties. Despite the U.S. carrying out hundreds of strikes, many of which are alleged to have hit civilians unconnected to the Houthis, the militant group has maintained its blockade on the Red Sea and continued to fire back at U.S. drones and naval vessels taking part in the campaign. Houthi political leader Mohammed al-Bukhaiti told Drop Site that it would stop firing on U.S. ships if the Trump administration stopped bombing. The offer mirrors peace proposals offered publicly both by Trump and Hegseth, yet the war continues.

U.S.-Made Bomb Fragments Identified at a Strike on a Migrant Facility in Yemen That Killed Nearly 70 People

By Shuaib Almosawa and Amanda Sperber

Earlier this week, a pre-dawn airstrike on a detention center in Sa’ada, northern Yemen killed nearly seventy African migrants. The Houthis blamed the attack on the U.S., while the U.S. said it was “aware” of the claims, but has not confirmed its involvement. Munitions experts, however, said that the fragments of a bomb found at the site were from the U.S.-made GBU-39.

Verified footage from the aftermath of the strike showed lifeless bodies and thin, dismembered limbs strewn across bloody debris, as injured and stunned men and women huddled in the wreckage.

A still from a Houthi video in the aftermath of the migrant facility strike showing remnants of GBU-39 munitions.

The center itself was hit at least three times in slow succession according to Sanaa, an Ethiopian activist based in Yemen’s capital who spoke with fellow survivors. The subsequent strikes hit survivors and halted the rescue operations. “Of course, this place is neither a legitimate target nor humane; it is a complete failure,” said the activist, who asked to be identified by her first name only. Sanaa also commented that an additional strike was carried out near the center.

There is no capacity to manage the devastation, Ismail Al-Warafi, Head of the Republican Hospital Authority in Saada, told Drop Site. One of the airstrikes hit the prison gate, which delayed the rescue and transportation operations, he noted. The prison’s ambulance was also destroyed. The amount of rubble created the need for cranes to dig people out from the ruins. “The situation there was catastrophic. Everyone was shocked—what was the point of targeting these peaceful Africans? It was a tragedy,” Al-Warafi said.

Al-Warafi pointed out that the support offered by humanitarian organizations at this critical moment is insufficient; the United Nations suspended all humanitarian operations in Saada in February after Houthis detained UN workers. Only the International Committee of the Red Cross showed up, he said, renting a morgue refrigerator and providing some medications barely enough for ten people. "The rest of the organizations did nothing. We hold the international organizations responsible and consider them complicit in the crimes of aggression.”

Given the extent of the damage, it appears that multiple GBU-39 bombs were used, affirmed Trevor Ball, a munitions researcher and a former U.S. army explosive ordnance disposal specialist. Ball told Drop Site he thinks the detention facility was intentionally targeted, since GBU-39 are precision munitions and the site was hit multiple times.

GBU-39 bombs have been used by Israel in Yemen, but it appears this is the first evidence of their use by the U.S. in the last year, noted Ball.

The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment regarding the use of GBU-39 bombs.

Yemen is a pivotal transit point for migrant workers from the Horn of Africa—forced from their home by conflict and climate change that has ruined their livelihood—often journeying to neighboring Saudi Arabia to look for work. Tens of thousands make the crossing every year, risking death, abuse, and detention along the way.

U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) has refused to disclose details on the strikes, but it has acknowledged carrying out more than 1,000 hits on targets in Yemen since it launched Operation Rough Rider in mid-March. The Yemen Data Project, which tracks airstrikes in the country, reported that more than 158 civilians had been killed in Trump’s bombing campaign. The group also recorded at least thirteen strikes on civilian objects between April 1 and April 22.

The migrant center in Saada had been hit before in 2022. “We saw the terror and shock on the faces of the injured Africans. It never occurred to them that they could be a target,” Al-Warafi, the head of the Hospital Authority, told Drop Site. “But the incident reminded us of the similar attack. We saw headless bodies and others reduced to scattered limbs.”

"The Saudis bombed that detention center in 2022, and the ICRC has been visiting it regularly. You would have thought that would have gone on the CENTCOM no strike list. Or maybe they were willing to absorb that amount of civilian casualties. At a minimum this tells a story of some sort. It's pretty damn worrying,” Brian Finucane, a senior advisor at Crisis Group’s US Program, told Drop Site.

Niku Jafarnia, a Yemen researcher at Human Rights Watch, likewise told Drop Site that “Dozens of civilians killed while working at a port, and dozens of migrants killed in a detention center within two weeks, amongst dozens of other strikes that have killed civilians, is not just an anomaly: it’s a pattern demonstrating that the Trump administration appears to have an even greater disregard for civilian life than his predecessors.”

11. Who Are the Terrorism Researchers? A Study of Scholars in an Evolving Field, 1970–2019

Right now this is not behind the paywall. It is a very long article and hopefully will remain in the public view.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2025.2490631#abstract

Excerpt:

Regarding specific individuals, how does this list of 38 scholars compare to the lists of scholars from the 1980s and 1990s? There is not a great deal of overlap. Scholars also on the Reid and Chen list through 2003 are Hoffman, Horgan, Laqueur, Post, and Wilkinson. The overlap with Silke’s 1990s list is Hoffman, Horgan, Sandler, Silke, and Wilkinson. There is even less overlap with the Schmid and Jongman 1985 list: only Laqueur and Wilkinson. Only one person appears on all four prolific/prominent terrorism scholar lists: Paul Wilkinson. The differences across lists are in part due to the abundance of post-9/11 scholars who would not have been included in the earlier lists. Additionally, some differences are likely due to the distinct methodologies employed.Footnote 60 Overall, the lists of prominent terrorism scholars provide valuable points of comparison.

Who Are the Terrorism Researchers? A Study of Scholars in an Evolving Field, 1970–2019

Brian J. Phillips

Views 290 | Citations 0 | Altmetric 10 | Received 10 Jan 2025, Accepted 02 Apr 2025, Published online: 25 Apr 2025

Abstract

Debates rage about diversity and representation. How diverse is terrorism studies? How has it changed over time? This article analyzes data on the nearly 2,000 terrorism scholars in the Web of Science databases. It also identifies the scholars who have published the most articles. The vast majority of terrorism scholars have worked in a small set of countries (mostly the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel). The list of the most prolific scholars is more homogenous than the broader sample. In general, however, the field is evolving, with increasing geographic, gender, and racial diversity, as well as professionalization (PhD status).

Who are the terrorism researchers? Who produces knowledge related to terrorism? Many studies have examined terrorism research, analyzing methodologies employed and topics covered. Far less is known about the individuals producing terrorism research. This is important because it is valuable to know from where information comes, in terms of understanding knowledge generally. Knowing who studies terrorism tells us about how terrorism is studied.Footnote 1 More practically, to improve terrorism studies, we need to know more about it. Decades ago, academic terrorism studies were called often “amateurish”Footnote 2 and the field was described as “not in a healthy state”.Footnote 3 More recently, there are assertions that many terrorism scholars are uncredentialed or without training,Footnote 4 and that the field is Western-centric,Footnote 5 understudies regions like Latin America or Sub-Saharan Africa,Footnote 6 and overfocuses on jihadi actors while downplaying the far right.Footnote 7 If these criticisms are correct, terrorism research could be only partially understanding terrorism, missing key aspects of it. To diagnose potential issues or biases in the literature, and simply to understand the field, it is helpful to know who produces the research.

Understanding who produces terrorism research is also important because of broader debates about diversity and representation. Discussions about diversity have occurred regarding many settings (e.g., journalismFootnote 8), including academia. Scholars in disciplines such as economics, epidemiology, and political science increasingly analyze the makeup of their disciplines and consider potential implications.Footnote 9 For example, scholars have pointed out that economics has disproportionately few women or members of historically excluded racial or ethnic groups.Footnote 10 A field experiment on over 6,500 U.S. professors found that they were more likely to respond to emails about potential PhD studies from students with Caucasian male names than any other type of student.Footnote 11

There has also been concern about a lack of geographic diversity in academia; for example, academic publishing being dominated by scholars in a few wealthy countries.Footnote 12 Many journal editorial boards mostly comprise scholars in the United States and a few Western European countries, and this seems to affect who eventually publishes in these journals.Footnote 13 Geographic diversity seems relevant in terrorism studies because much of the violence we study occurs in a certain set of countries (e.g., Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria), while most terrorism scholars seem to work in other countries or continents.

We have little systematic knowledge about terrorism scholars, especially in the post-11 September 2001 (9/11) era. Some studies primarily on terrorism research have also included information on authors.Footnote 14 However, these studies generally only present data such as the discipline or country of residence for a small set of scholars—usually the most prolific. Other studies only look at research in terrorism journals, excluding terrorism research published elsewhere.Footnote 15 We know less about the broader universe of terrorism researchers.Footnote 16 In which countries are they located? Do most have PhDs? How many are women, or from other historically excluded categories? How has the makeup of the field changed over time?

The current study draws on recently released data on the 1,723 scholars who published at least two articles on terrorism between 1970 and 2019 in the Web of Science archive.Footnote 17 This is the source for most of the analyses. Web of Science is a massive set of databases, including more than 21,000 journals over many years. The article also presents a list of the 38 scholars who published the most articles during the period in Web of Science journals—described below as “the most prolific scholars” as shorthand. Comparative information is also introduced on a random sample of the more than 8,000 scholars who wrote one article on terrorism.

Some of the main findings are that terrorism scholars work in many countries, but far more work at institutions in the United States than any other country. The United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel have more terrorism scholars than what might be expected given each country’s population or general scientific production. Taking country terrorist attack history into consideration provides a more nuanced picture. Regarding other findings, most terrorism scholars work in social science disciplines, but many are in health or medicine, studying terrorism’s consequences. Almost 95% of terrorism scholars in recent years have a PhD or MD, suggesting an increasing professionalization of the field. Geographic, gender, and racial diversity have increased in the field over time, but gaps exist between the broader sample and the most prolific scholars. The conclusion summarizes the findings in more detail, considers implications, and suggests additional research that can build on the findings. Overall, the analysis provides the clearest picture yet of the people creating terrorism research.

Continued at this link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1057610X.2025.2490631#abstract

12. Choosing a New National Security Advisor by H.R. McMaster

Excerpt:

The most important determinant of the new National Security Advisor’s effectiveness will be his or her relationship with the President. A lack of trust is fatal, and, sadly, there will be people in the West Wing of the White House and across the administration who will be eager to erode that trust.

History We Don't Know

38Subscribe

Choosing a New National Security Advisor

How should President Trump think about selecting a new National Security Advisor?

https://historywedontknow.substack.com/p/choosing-a-new-national-security?r=55z2fd&triedRedirect=true

H.R. McMaster

May 01, 2025

Trust is the coin of the realm. When trust was in the room . . .good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen.

—Secretary of State George P. Shultz

As the news breaks today that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is leaving the job as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA) to become U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will serve as interim APNSA, President Trump has an opportunity to reflect on his expectations for his next National Security Advisor.

The candidate’s base motivation will be of paramount importance. My experience in the White House convinced me that those who serve in any administration fall into one of three categories. First, those who want to give the President best analysis and multiple options so the President can advance his agenda. Second, those who serve because they want to manipulate decisions consistent with their, not the President’s, agenda. And third, those who assume the role of protecting the country (and maybe the world) from what they regard as a dangerous agenda. The President should choose someone in the first category—but once he does, those in the second and third categories will try to undermine efforts to provide best advice and multiple options.

I believe that Mike Waltz understood his role as the honest broker, and that may be the fundamental reason for his relatively short tenure.

To serve the President, whomever follows Secretary Rubio should be prepared to accomplish five fundamental tasks.

Staff the President. Ensure that he is prepared for any foreign policy engagements including phone calls, visits of foreign leaders, presidential travel, and speeches.
Run the process. Coordinate and integrate efforts across the departments and agencies to give the President multiple options and foster implementation of his policies and decisions.
Advance the President’s policies with foreign counterparts and other foreign leaders. Engagements should foster unity of effort with allies and partners and help influence the behavior of competitors, adversaries, and rivals.
Communicate the President’s decisions, policies, and guidance to key audiences. Those audiences include first and foremost the departments and agencies that participate in the process as well as, on occasion, U.S. citizens or the public from other countries.
Lead the NSC team. Provide the dedicated and talented members of the NSC staff with “purpose, motivation, and direction” and create a positive climate in which teammates are bound together by trust and mutual respect.

The most important determinant of the new National Security Advisor’s effectiveness will be his or her relationship with the President. A lack of trust is fatal, and, sadly, there will be people in the West Wing of the White House and across the administration who will be eager to erode that trust.

13. Chinese supercomputer used by U.S. researchers threatens American security

Plus:

China’s military comments on Hegseth’s warning about hypersonic missile threat to carriers

China’s political warfare revealed

Chinese supercomputer used by U.S. researchers threatens American security

washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz

By - The Washington Times - Wednesday, April 30, 2025

A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.

NEWS AND ANALYSIS:

U.S. national laboratories and several American universities that are engaged in Pentagon-funded research are using Chinese supercomputers in ways that endanger U.S. national security, according to a former Air Force intelligence analyst.

L.J. Eads, now a specialist on China security matters, uncovered the links in research from over 100 scientific studies between 2016 and 2024. The studies revealed that American researchers were using China’s TianHe-series supercomputers located in Tianjin and Guangzhou.

The systems are part of the Chinese national supercomputer center and were used in papers produced by researchers at Argonne, Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories. The laboratories are involved in sensitive defense work, including nuclear weapons.

The supercomputer centers are linked to the People’s Liberation Army and other official Chinese ministries and institutes that are on the Commerce Department’s blacklist of foreign companies.

The systems “serve as critical infrastructure for the PLA and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in advancing military technology, hypersonic weapons and AI-driven defense capabilities,” Mr. Eads said.

The Guangzhou supercomputer, in particular, is a major military system that has been used to build hypersonic missiles, aerospace systems, satellite surveillance, cryptographic analysis and nuclear weapons.

The supercomputer in Tianjin has worked on PLA hypersonic propulsion systems, strategic war gaming and cyber warfare operations.

Other Chinese research using supercomputers has facilitated biomedical research and genetic analysis that could be used for weapons, and air and space research.

The systems are also engaged in work on quantum cryptography, electronic warfare simulations and counterspace operations that are key parts of Beijing’s civil-military fusion strategy.

According to Mr. Eads, 25 U.S. university research papers referenced the TianHe supercomputers and 77 papers from national laboratories involved Chinese supercomputers.

“The involvement of supercomputers known for their military affiliations in China raises significant security concerns about the inadvertent transfer of sensitive nuclear technologies,” Mr. Eads said.

In addition to the dangers of technology theft, the use of Chinese supercomputers by U.S. researchers also increases the risk of hacking and malicious code insertion by Chinese state-run cyber actors, Mr. Eads said.

The supercomputer use also undermines U.S. sanctions enforcement and export controls aimed at limiting China’s acquisition of advanced supercomputer know-how, he said.

“By collaborating with Chinese supercomputing centers on the Department of Commerce’s Entity List, U.S. researchers effectively circumvent the restrictions designed to limit the PLA’s access to advanced computational power, undermining core U.S. foreign policy objectives,” Mr. Eads said.

Key Pentagon entities involved in the Chinese supercomputer use include the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Air Force Material Command, the Naval Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Laboratory, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Pentagon-funded research at several prestigious universities also used Chinese supercomputers. The report listed seven examples of defense-related collaboration using Chinese supercomputers.

In one 2024 case, researchers from MIT worked with Chinese researchers at Peking University on hydrogen production techniques. The dual-use civilian and military research was funded by the Army.

Mr. Eads’ research into Chinese supercomputer use expanded on earlier reporting on the problem first disclosed by the Daily Caller News Foundation in March.

China’s military comments on Hegseth’s warning about hypersonic missile threat to carriers

China’s Defense Ministry recently praised the People’s Liberation Army’s development of hypersonic missiles that can effectively attack U.S. aircraft carriers.

The ministry commented on a report in this space about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s belief that Beijing’s hypersonic missiles can knock out U.S. aircraft carriers within the first 20 minutes of a conflict.

Senior Col. Zhang Xiaogang, a ministry spokesman, was asked about the April 16 Inside the Ring column. He praised PLA hypersonic missile deployment.

Mr. Hegseth’s comments, he said, reflect efforts by the U.S. to inflate Chinese military threats.

“We have a sober understanding of the state of our development,” Col. Zhang said. “We hope the U.S. side will break away from persecution mania and stop using others as excuses.”

The spokesman said “some individuals” in the U.S. view the Chinese military with bias and are hyping the China military threat.

Col. Zhang then sought to exploit past Pentagon eagerness for military exchanges with the PLA. He said hawkish American views are an obstacle to military-to-military engagement between the U.S. and China.

“Nonconflict, nonconfrontation and peaceful coexistence is in the most fundamental interests of both China and the U.S. and meets the common expectation of people across the world,” he said.

The Pentagon’s most recent annual report on the Chinese military, published in December, stated that in 2023, “the PLA largely denied, cancelled, and ignored recurring bilateral engagements.”

Some exchanges resumed after the November 2023 summit between then-President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Mr. Hegseth stated in a November interview — months before becoming defense secretary — that the Chinese military’s ultra-high-speed maneuvering missiles are a key element of forces being built specifically to target the American military.

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

Aircraft carriers currently have limited defenses against Chinese hypersonic missiles. Anti-missile interceptors are deployed with carrier group destroyer escorts.

China has deployed two hypersonic missile systems: The DF-17 medium-range missile can be armed with a hypersonic glide vehicle, and the 5,000-mile-range DF-27 also can be armed with a hypersonic warhead.

The Pentagon is behind schedule in developing several types of hypersonic missiles in response to Chinese and Russian high-speed maneuvering missiles.

China’s political warfare revealed

China is engaged in aggressive political warfare operations against Taiwan as part of its strategy to take over the democratically ruled island nation, according to China experts Kerry K. Gershaneck and Eric Chan.

“Political warfare plays a central role in Chinese military operations,” the two experts stated in a recent journal article. “China is currently conducting a deliberate, multi-layered campaign designed to weaken Taiwan’s resolve and preempt U.S. intervention.”

The Beijing strategy involves what the Chinese military calls “three warfares” — public opinion, psychological and legal warfare.

The goal is to use influence operations, economic coercion and military intimidation to shape the strategic landscape in China’s favor.

The ruling Chinese Communist Party is trying to isolate Taiwan diplomatically, destabilize its internal politics through disinformation operations and deter foreign support through gray-zone military activities — those below the threshold of armed conflict, the China experts said.

If war breaks out across the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait, Chinese political warfare will intensify and target U.S. forces, alliance cohesion and domestic morale.

The overall objective is to spread the narrative that subjugating Taiwan is inevitable and that U.S. resistance is futile, they said.

To counter Chinese political warfare, the United States and Taiwan must recognize the activities as soon as possible. U.S. and Taiwan should then conduct operations to counter the coercive activities, Mr. Gershaneck and Mr. Chan stated in the current issue of the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, published by the Air Force’s Air University Press.

The CCP recently stopped using references to “peaceful reunification” in its state-run media and propaganda, a significant shift from past strategy.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is now using a strategy of military coercion, a component of political warfare. This is visible in large-scale gray-zone tactics involving constant military pressure, economic coercion and disinformation, the experts said.

The campaign is designed to steadily tighten a political noose around the island.

“The scale and intensity of the CCP’s political warfare in peacetime is already unprecedented, often proving highly effective,” Mr. Gershaneck and Mr. Chan said. “In war, it will escalate even further. Given this clearly foreseeable threat, it is imperative that U.S. national security leaders incorporate political warfare considerations into operational-strategic planning.”

The article reveals how CCP political warfare was used during the COVID-19 pandemic, domestically to suppress dissent and establish CCP control over the narrative.

“In December 2019, as the virus spread in Wuhan, the local Party’s first priority was not containment but information suppression—silencing and arresting whistleblower physicians,” the authors said.

The second element saw the CCP engage in offensive political warfare to silence competing international narratives about the disease and its origin.

This was highlighted by Mr. Xi’s visit to Wuhan in March 2020 that marked the launch of a global propaganda campaign to deflect blame for pandemic mismanagement and assert the supposed superiority of the CCP’s communist system over the West.

Chinese propagandists shaped the narrative by stressing the uncertainty over the origin of COVID. This sought to counter its likely source as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Conspiracy theories were then spread through official state media, including the false claim that COVID-19 was introduced to Wuhan by U.S. military personnel who took part in the October 2019 Military World Games.

“By July 2021, these theories had coalesced into an official state-backed disinformation campaign, with Beijing pushing the narrative that the virus originated at the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick research facility,” Mr. Gershaneck and Mr. Chan said.

“The CCP’s pandemic response was not just a public health crisis — it was a global case study in the CCP’s ability to manipulate perception, control information, and weaponize narratives to its advantage,” they stated.

Mr. Gershaneck is a visiting scholar at National Chengchi University in Taipei and a retired Marine with extensive experience in Asia. Mr. Chan is a senior nonresident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute.

• Contact Bill Gertz on X @BillGertz.

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

washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz

14. The great betrayal: How the CCP humiliates China and blames the world

Excerpts:

The real enemies of the Chinese people are not foreign corporations or imaginary Western conspirators. They are the gray-faced men in Zhongnanhai who fear books more than bombs, who fear questions more than armies, and who have turned one of the world’s oldest civilizations into a police state draped in red.

The CCP has betrayed China and blamed the world for the consequences. It has stolen the blood, sweat and hope of the Chinese people. It has humiliated them more thoroughly than any imperialist ever dreamed. And it has the audacity to wave the flag of patriotism as it does so.

The real rejuvenation of China will begin the day the Chinese people realize the truth. Their enemy is not overseas. It is seated at home, cloaked in red banners, and speaks the language of “liberation” while building its prison.

Until then, the party will continue to wage its greatest campaign: the cover-up of its crimes under the banner of the nation’s glory. And the real century of humiliation will continue.

The great betrayal: How the CCP humiliates China and blames the world

It's much easier to rule if you can keep people angry at outsiders instead of you

washingtontimes.com · by Miles Yu

By - Monday, April 28, 2025

A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.

OPINION:

If you believe the Chinese Communist Party, it is the selfless guardian of the Chinese people, tirelessly toiling for national rejuvenation, waving away the dark clouds of the “Century of Humiliation” with a red flag in one hand and a peace dove in the other.

In this version of reality, the CCP is a savior, a redeemer, the only thing standing between China’s greatness and the predatory foreigners lurking at the gates.

Unfortunately, reality has a nasty habit of refusing to cooperate with CCP propaganda.

When the red curtains are pulled back, a much uglier truth is revealed: The CCP does not represent the Chinese people. It never has.

Its true strategic objective is not Chinese rejuvenation but preserving its monopoly on power. The so-called Century of Humiliation? It is not a distant historical injustice. It is an ongoing tragedy inflicted by the CCP — a betrayal dressed up as patriotism, a crime scene hidden under layers of xenophobic slogans.

The original “Century of Humiliation” (1839–1949) involved modernized foreign powers imposing unequal treaties, exploiting China’s weakness and humiliating its people. It was real. It was brutal. Still, the true and most horrifying “Century of Humiliation” is perpetrated by the CCP itself in its century of existence (1921-2025).

In its false narrative, what the CCP fails to mention is that since 1949, the most systematic, violent and enduring humiliation of the Chinese people has come not from any foreigners but from the Chinese Communist Party itself. During the “Great Leap Forward,” 30 million to 45 million were killed by famine, not by foreign guns. The Cultural Revolution: The burning of temples, the smashing of traditions and the executions of teachers were conducted not by invaders but by zealots in Mao jackets. Tiananmen Square: The massacre of Chinese youths in 1989 was not ordered by Queen Victoria. It came from the Politburo.

Today’s mass surveillance state, censorship, forced labor camps in Xinjiang and the constant purging of dissenters are modern extensions of this internal war against the Chinese people. The “Century of Humiliation” never ended; it was merely nationalized and maximized by the CCP.

The CCP understands a simple principle: It’s much easier to rule if you can keep people angry at outsiders instead of you. Thus, every failure is blamed on “foreign hostile forces.”

Economic slowdown? Western sabotage. Popular discontent? CIA plots. Hong Kong protests? American “black hand.” Uyghur resistance? Foreign infiltration. Meanwhile, the party’s real crimes — corruption, nepotism, jailing journalists, prevalent arbitrary prosecution and summary execution, land seizures, environmental disasters, repression — are swept under the rug with the magic words “foreign threat.”

It’s an old trick, beloved by tyrants across history: Invent external enemies to justify internal oppression.

The irony is breathtaking. The CCP crushes the Chinese people and then accuses the world of oppressing China.

The party claims its “primary strategic goal” is the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” A beautiful phrase — vague enough to mean anything, sentimental enough to discourage questions.

Let’s be honest. A rejuvenated China would be open, confident, creative and respected. The CCP’s China is paranoid, brittle, stagnant and feared.

Real rejuvenation requires intellectual freedom, civic dignity and historical honesty, all of which the CCP ruthlessly suppresses. Instead, the party offers a zombie version of nationalism: giant parades, loud slogans and censorship masquerading as pride.

In truth, the CCP’s version of “rejuvenation” means returning China to its rightful place, not as a beacon of civilization but as a plantation farmed for the benefit of the party elite. China is not rising because of the CCP. It is rising in spite of it, with chains still rattling around its ankles.

The CCP’s one true objective is painfully clear: to perpetuate its rule at any cost. Everything else is negotiable. Growth? Only if it doesn’t threaten control. Technology? Only if it can be weaponized against dissent. Wealth? Only for those loyal to the party line.

The real enemies of the Chinese people are not foreign corporations or imaginary Western conspirators. They are the gray-faced men in Zhongnanhai who fear books more than bombs, who fear questions more than armies, and who have turned one of the world’s oldest civilizations into a police state draped in red.

The CCP has betrayed China and blamed the world for the consequences. It has stolen the blood, sweat and hope of the Chinese people. It has humiliated them more thoroughly than any imperialist ever dreamed. And it has the audacity to wave the flag of patriotism as it does so.

The real rejuvenation of China will begin the day the Chinese people realize the truth. Their enemy is not overseas. It is seated at home, cloaked in red banners, and speaks the language of “liberation” while building its prison.

Until then, the party will continue to wage its greatest campaign: the cover-up of its crimes under the banner of the nation’s glory. And the real century of humiliation will continue.

• Miles Yu is director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. His “Red Horizon” column appears every other Tuesday in The Washington Times.

washingtontimes.com · by Miles Yu

15. Trump's aggressive actions against free speech speak far louder than his words defending it

We will not have free speech unless all members of the government who have taking the oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States will truthfully say that they embrace and stand by this statement by Voltaire:

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

That is what our founding fathers believed in. And they were willing to give everything when they signed the Declaration of Independence for American freedom and liberty as stated here:

"And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.”

Excerpts:

In the past decade, the United States has fallen in press freedom, rule of law and democratic governance, resulting in the classification of a "flawed democracy" by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a democratic watchdog. Unsurprisingly, there has been a simultaneous rise in public support for authoritarianism. These changes make support for free speech increasingly important.

On March 4, Trump declared in a speech before a joint session of Congress that he "stopped all government censorship and brought free speech back to America."

The record doesn't support this claim.

Voices April 25, 2025 / 10:09 AM

Trump's aggressive actions against free speech speak far louder than his words defending it

https://www.upi.com/Voices/2025/04/25/president-donald-trump-free-speech/4011745588864/

By Daniel Hall, Miami University

An opponent of the Trump administration participates in a rally at City Hall in Los Angeles on Saturday, Thousands of people across more than 700 locations in the United States demonstrated against President Donald Trump that day, protesting his administration's policies during the second "day of action" organized by the 50501 movement. Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo

Harvard University took the extraordinary step of suing the Trump administration on Monday, claiming that the pressure campaign mounted on the school by the president and his Cabinet to force viewpoint diversity on campus violated the Constitution's guarantees of free speech.

"Defendants' actions are unlawful," Harvard's lawsuit states. "The First Amendment does not permit the Government to 'interfere with private actors' speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance.'"

Yet in his first term, President Donald J. Trump declared that free speech mattered.

Trump issued the Executive Order Restoring Free Speech and Ending Federal Censorship on March 21, 2019. In it, he expressed the importance of free inquiry and open debate to education and directed federal officials to use the federal government's funding of higher education to ensure that universities promote free inquiry.

Channeling free-speech champions Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, Trump wrote that "free inquiry is an essential feature of our Nation's democracy."

As a professor of constitutional, criminal and comparative law, and as a citizen who enjoys his liberty, I agree.

Free speech is fundamental to human progress. Scientific, medical, technological and social advancements all rely on the free flow of information. Robust discussion and disagreement are equally important to maintaining a healthy constitutional republic.

In the words of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."

The First Amendment's free speech and press clauses protect all forms of expression -- oral, print, digital and artistic -- from governmental interference or punishment.

Of the many types of speech, political speech is the most protected.

On the first day of his second term in office, Trump issued another free speech executive order. It affirms the administration's commitment to free speech, directs that tax money is not used to abridge free speech and instructs federal employees to "identify and take appropriate action to correct past misconduct by the Federal Government related to censorship of protected speech."

In a vacuum, Trump's orders appear to bode well for free speech.

But what is important is free speech reality, not rhetoric. Three months into his second term, where does Trump stand?

The many interconnected orders, letters, statements and actions of Trump's White House make an assessment of any positive effects difficult. On the other hand, the Trump administration has clearly violated and chilled free speech on many occasions.

At his second inauguration, Donald Trump promised to 'stop all government censorship' and 'bring back free speech.'

Repression and retaliation

Attempts to silence the president's adversaries are developing as a pattern.

Law firms and attorneys who have sued or prosecuted Trump, or represented his adversaries, have been targeted for retribution and concessions.

It began with an executive order on March 6, directed at the U.S.-based global law firm Perkins Coie, which had once represented Trump's opponent in the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton.

A second order was issued on March 14, against Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison because it once employed an attorney who investigated Trump. Subsequently, at least six other prominent law firms were also targeted.

Several law firms acceded to the president's demands, agreeing to accept clients without regard to political beliefs, to eliminate DEI practices and to perform pro bono work valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars for causes Trump supports.

The firms that didn't accede to the president's demands had their security clearances removed, access to federal buildings restricted, and working for federal agencies banned. A few of the firms that didn't relent have won temporary injunctions barring the administration's actions against them.

The nonpartisan free speech advocacy organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression decried the orders as threatening the foundations of justice and free speech. In one of several challenges to these orders, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell wrote on March 12 that Trump's order appeared motivated by "retaliatory animus" and concluded that it "runs head on into the wall of First Amendment protections." Two other federal courts reached similar conclusions.

In the first three months of his second term, Trump withdrew Secret Service protection of several prominent critics who are former federal government officials, including John Bolton, a former Trump national security adviser. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, his top aide, Brian Hook, and former high-level health official Anthony Fauci also lost their security protection.

It is hard to imagine that these decisions won't have a profoundly chilling effect on potential critics of the president, especially since the revocations were publicly announced and each individual has been the subject of credible threats resulting from their governmental service.

Targeting the press

A similar pattern exists for journalists, where Trump is using his power to punish organizations whose reporting he doesn't like.

Associated Press journalists were banned from the White House and Air Force One on Feb. 11 for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, the new name Trump had ordered for the body of water. On April 9, this ban was found to violate the First Amendment by a judge nominated by Trump during his first term.

Denouncing CNN and MSNBC as "illegal" and claiming they are paid political operatives, Trump suggested they should be investigated during a speech at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Trump effectively closed Voice of America after 83 years of continuous broadcasting for being "anti-Trump" and radical in its views. By charter, the broadcaster represents "America, not any single segment of American society," with "accurate, objective and comprehensive" news and "a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions" through television, radio, internet, social media and satellite broadcasts to people around the world.

The Federal Communications Commission has initiated regulatory actions against the licenses of several television stations for broadcasts that have been accused by the president of being anti-Trump or biased in favor of Kamala Harris. Early in the process, the outcomes of these actions are to be determined.

Other administration actions, I believe, raise serious free speech issues.

Harvard not the only university feeling pressure

The administration is threatening to withhold federal money from universities as a way to coerce many of them to comply with administration policies in ways that implicate free speech and in some instances violate legal processes for the withholding of federal support.

Some of the Trump administration's recent immigration enforcement efforts have targeted international students who are in the United States lawfully, but who participated in Palestinian rights protests and disagreed with Israel's actions during the war in Gaza.

The administration claims that some students whose visas have been revoked were either Hamas supporters or violated criminal laws. The administration has also said that many students are being deported under broad authority the secretary of state has to deport those deemed a danger to national security.

Democracy and free speech

In the past decade, the United States has fallen in press freedom, rule of law and democratic governance, resulting in the classification of a "flawed democracy" by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a democratic watchdog. Unsurprisingly, there has been a simultaneous rise in public support for authoritarianism. These changes make support for free speech increasingly important.

On March 4, Trump declared in a speech before a joint session of Congress that he "stopped all government censorship and brought free speech back to America."

The record doesn't support this claim.

Daniel Hall is a professor of justice and community studies & political science at Miami University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions in this commentary are solely those of the author.

16. Trump Plans Record $1.01 Trillion National Security Budget

This must be a Peace through Strength budget. But how does it square with DOGE and the effort to reduce the debt?

Trump Plans Record $1.01 Trillion National Security Budget

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-02/china-says-it-s-evaluating-possible-us-talks-on-trade?sref=hhjZtX76

The Trump administration has sought to slash some spending at the Pentagon as part of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting efforts but says it wants a higher defense budget overall.Photographer: Tom Brenner/Bloomberg

By Anthony Capaccio

May 1, 2025 at 9:33 PM EDT

Updated on May 1, 2025 at 10:11 PM EDT

President Donald Trump will request a record $1.01 trillion in national security spending for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, more than 13% over the current year’s figure, according to administration officials familiar with the matter.

The defense budget will fund the Golden Dome missile defense project, shipbuilding and nuclear modernization, border security among its top priorities. It includes a 3.8% military pay raise.

One of the officials, who asked not to be identified discussing figures that haven’t been released, said the 13% increase echoes a defense buildup overseen by President Ronald Reagan. The Trump administration has sought to slash some spending at the Pentagon as part of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting efforts but says it wants a higher defense budget overall.

The overall request, which includes defense-support funding at the Department of Energy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and others smaller agencies, totals about 3.2% of gross domestic product, similar to the fiscal 2024 figure. It’s up from $892.3 billion in overall national-security spending for this year.

The figure will be unveiled as part of the “skinny” budget request for the 2026 fiscal year that Trump is set for release on Friday. It allows lawmakers to begin work on fiscal 2026 appropriation bills and offers a glimpse into the administration’s funding priorities.

It’s a step up from a proposal in November from President Joe Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, who sought a defense-only five-year plan that started with $926.5 billion in fiscal 2026.

The Pentagon-only request is $961 billion as compared to $848.3 billion passed in January, the officials said. The Biden administration last year projected a $876.8 billion defense-only budget.

The fiscal 2026 request includes some of the $150 billion Congress is pursing in additional “reconciliation” defense spending to this year’s already passed defense discretionary package, said one of the officials.

Surpassing the $1 trillion mark in defense spending will likely cause sticker shock among US lawmakers who have criticized the Pentagon’s repeated failure to produce financial statements that result in a clean audit. On Tuesday, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Defense Department disclosed about $10.8 billion in fraud in 2017-2024.

“The full extent of fraud affecting DOD is not known but is potentially significant,” the GAO report said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered a preemptive defense of the amount in a social media post last month, writing that despite asking for the first trillion-dollar budget request, the Pentagon intended “to spend every taxpayer dollar wisely — on lethality and readiness.”

Trump also earlier told reporters that the request would be high “because you’ve got a lot of bad forces out there now.”

“Nobody’s seen anything like it,” the president said. “We have to build our military, and we’re very cost-conscious, but the military is something that we have to build.

(Updates with details of defense spending requested in eighth paragraph. A previous version incorrectly described the timing of Hegseth, Trump comments.)

17. Space Force Special Operations Command is on its way

SFSOC.

It has always pained me that the Sace force has taken "SF" from Special Forces. :-)

Space Force Special Operations Command is on its way

The military's newest branch which was established in 2018 will get its own special operations component.

Matt White

Published

May 1, 2025 5:27 PM EDT

taskandpurpose.com · by Matt White

Space Force already has at least one ‘Space Ranger’ and several “Space Cowboys” who’ve completed an infamous “spur ride” with 1st Infantry Division cavalry scouts. But now the newest military service will have its own special operations component.

First reported by Hope Seck for Sandboxx News, the smallest branch plans to stand up its own component inside U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, which oversees the missions and operations of elite units like Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets.

The Guardians won’t be crawling through mud or eating snakes, but they will be teamed up with and work to support special operators under SOCOM’s operational control as part of Space Force Special Operations Command.

“There is no definite timeline associated with the standup of other service components, including the Space Force service component to SOCOM, [Space Force Special Operations Command], but the Space Force will continue to identify requirements to meet the growing demands of combatant commanders’ space needs,” a Space Force spokesperson told Task & Purpose. “Currently, there is a Space Force Special Operations Element at MacDill Air Force Base that supports SOCOM.”

According to a March 26 statement for the record of testimony before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, in 2025 SOCOM “established the Space Force Special Operations Command to deliver specialized space personnel and capabilities to our units responsible for campaigning, our [theater special operations commands].”

A Space Force spokesperson clarified for Task & Purpose that while the command was technically “established” in 2025, it has not been stood up or fully manned.

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Though the air-conditioned control centers where Space Force guardians watch radar scopes and interpret intelligence signals don’t immediately bring to mind the grubby reality of special ops missions, leaders in the special operations world have long seen space ops as their next frontier.

The Army’s top special operations commander, Lt. Gen. Jonathan P. Braga, has made a habit of appearing at conferences and other public events with his counterparts who command the Army’s space and cyber commands.

Teaming up the brawniest troops with the techiest, Braga said, will be a key in future conflicts.

“The Cyber-Space-SOF Triad provides one of these solutions,” Braga said in an Army release. “It is a ‘Modern-Day Triad’ designed to converge unique accesses, capabilities, authorities, understanding and effects in many of the same ways we have implemented combined arms operations.”

In other words, when special ops guys go charging into a fight, they want as much space-based intel and as many sneaky digital tricks as possible.

The service is also establishing components to support other commands.

“The Space Force is standing up service components to the combatant commands, with six service components activated thus far including [U.S Space Forces – Indo-Pacific], [U.S. Space Forces – Central], [U.S. Space Forces – Europe and Africa], [U.S. Space Forces – Space], [U.S. Space Forces – Korea ], and [U.S. Space Forces – Japan],” a Space Force spokesperson told Task & Purpose. “These standups are a critical step in normalizing the presentation of space forces and providing clarity of command relationships, roles, and responsibilities in the Joint Force and across all theaters.”

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Matt White

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Matt White is a senior editor at Task & Purpose. He was a pararescueman in the Air Force and the Alaska Air National Guard for eight years and has more than a decade of experience in daily and magazine journalism.

taskandpurpose.com · by Matt White

18. A lesson from 1958 could help deter China from taking Taiwan

Excerpts:

The 1958 episode provides lessons today because Taiwan continues to be the primary flashpoint in the U.S.-China relationship and a potential cause of major-power war. Unfortunately, recent actions by both Beijing and Washington suggest that the assurance dimension of deterrence has degraded. For example, China regularly launches aggressive and coercive military exercises against Taiwan, while Washington hints through official documents and actions that it might be willing to acknowledge Taiwan’s de jure sovereign status. These actions and others suggest that deterrence dynamics in and around the Taiwan Strait are weakening, which means the chances of a devastating war are correspondingly rising.

The 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis and its associated Newport statement offer a way to bolster deterrence and stabilize today’s situation. The episode is a reminder that assurance—the implied promise that the person or country being deterred will not suffer existential loss or harm—is as relevant today as it was then. In practical terms, this means the United States would not seek to change Taiwan’s status or recognize it as a de jure sovereign state, with the implied assumption—per the Taiwan Relations Act—that Beijing will not attempt to “determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes…”

In addition, the growing power imbalance between Taipei and Beijing requires that the U.S. continue to restore and to build the core elements of deterrence—credible and overwhelming capabilities in the Taiwan area, backed by unquestioned resolve—that would reduce China’s temptation to take unilateral action. This deterrence dynamic, including the assurance element, has maintained peace for more than seven decades. Its successful track record provides a strong case as to why it should be maintained.

A lesson from 1958 could help deter China from taking Taiwan

After China began shelling a nearby island, a four-pronged U.S. response led to decades of cross-strait peace.

By Paul J. Smith

Professor of national security affairs, Naval War College

May 1, 2025 02:54 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Paul J. Smith

As China applies increasing military pressure against Taiwan, it’s worth considering an earlier era when conditions were much worse. In the fall of 1958, four countries—United States, Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan)—found themselves on the brink of nuclear war. The incident, which would later be known as the second Taiwan Strait Crisis, led to a rupture in Sino-Soviet relations and altered the trajectory of the Cold War. Revisiting it reminds us of an element of deterrence that is getting short shrift today.

The crisis began on Aug. 23, 1958, when China began shelling the offshore islands known as Quemoy (Jinmen, 金門, in Mandarin Chinese). At the time, President Eisenhower and his family were preparing for a vacation in Newport, Rhode Island, and the Navy had set up a special office for the president at the Naval War College—in Building 10, today home to the school’s museum.

In early September, Eisenhower summoned John Foster Dulles to fly up from Washington and to meet him at the U.S. naval base at Newport. According to White House records, Dulles arrived in Newport and on Sept. 4 “conferred with the President on the situation at Quemoy and Formosa [Taiwan] from 10:29am until 12:10pm.”

Also attending the meeting were Joseph Greene, special assistant to the Secretary of State, Brig. Gen. Andrew J. Goodpaster, military adviser to the president; James Hagerty, the White House press secretary; and Captain E.P. Aurand, Eisenhower’s naval aide. Later that day, Dulles issued the Newport statement, in which he asserted eight points regarding America’s response to Chinese aggression in the Taiwan Strait.

The statement emphasized that the U.S. was “bound by treaty” to help to defend Taiwan—the main island and the Pescadores [Penghu] Islands—from “armed attack,” while the Formosa Resolution of 1955 granted the President additional powers to protect “related positions,” such as Quemoy and Matsu.

At its core, therefore, the Newport statement was an articulation of America’s deterrence posture in the Taiwan Strait at a critical point in history. Dulles later told U.K. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that “the firm position we are taking will in fact deter reckless Communist action,” although he acknowledged that it might provoke an overreaction or miscalculation by Mao Zedong or his primary backer, Nikita Khrushchev.

To appreciate the deterrent value of the Newport statement, it is useful to examine it through the lens of the three key elements that underpin the concept: capability, credibility and communication. On the capability front, the U.S. had substantial military assets on Taiwan, including conventional and nuclear munitions—of which Beijing was aware—and contemplated using nuclear weapons to achieve a decisive outcome in and around Quemoy if necessary.

On the credibility front, President Eisenhower had already demonstrated in the first Taiwan Strait Crisis (1954-55) that he was willing to go to the brink to defend Taiwan. In addition, the Newport statement reiterated the key point of the Formosa Resolution, which was that it was in America’s “vital interest” that a government friendly to the United States retain control over Taiwan.

On the communication front, Dulles delivered his statement clearly to the international media, which published it widely. However, some critics argued that Dulles’ occasional conditional and conciliatory phrases—such as the “earnestly hope” plea in point seven—weakened American credibility and resolve. An editorial in the Washington Post and Times Herald, for example, said the Newport statement had correctly avoided “the stridency of some military commanders in this delicate situation,” but it had fallen “short of the unqualified assertion necessary to give it backbone.”

However, another way of viewing the Newport statement notes Dulles’ reliance on a fourth element of deterrence known as assurance. In his book Arms and Influence, Thomas Schelling wrote that “any coercive threat requires corresponding assurances; the object of a threat is to give somebody a choice.” In other words, as Schelling describes, in a scenario where a deterrer announces “one more step and I shoot,” the implicit assumption is that by not taking that extra step, one will not be shot.

Dulles was arguably following this logic, intuitively, due to his legal training or because of other factors, when he decided to add conditional and conciliatory phrases to his statement. He wanted to make it clear to his Chinese audience what the United States was willing to do, in the face of adverse scenarios, but he also wanted to give China several “off ramps” in which its national interests could be preserved, and its face—national and individual honor and pride—could be salvaged.

The 1958 episode provides lessons today because Taiwan continues to be the primary flashpoint in the U.S.-China relationship and a potential cause of major-power war. Unfortunately, recent actions by both Beijing and Washington suggest that the assurance dimension of deterrence has degraded. For example, China regularly launches aggressive and coercive military exercises against Taiwan, while Washington hints through official documents and actions that it might be willing to acknowledge Taiwan’s de jure sovereign status. These actions and others suggest that deterrence dynamics in and around the Taiwan Strait are weakening, which means the chances of a devastating war are correspondingly rising.

The 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis and its associated Newport statement offer a way to bolster deterrence and stabilize today’s situation. The episode is a reminder that assurance—the implied promise that the person or country being deterred will not suffer existential loss or harm—is as relevant today as it was then. In practical terms, this means the United States would not seek to change Taiwan’s status or recognize it as a de jure sovereign state, with the implied assumption—per the Taiwan Relations Act—that Beijing will not attempt to “determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes…”

In addition, the growing power imbalance between Taipei and Beijing requires that the U.S. continue to restore and to build the core elements of deterrence—credible and overwhelming capabilities in the Taiwan area, backed by unquestioned resolve—that would reduce China’s temptation to take unilateral action. This deterrence dynamic, including the assurance element, has maintained peace for more than seven decades. Its successful track record provides a strong case as to why it should be maintained.

Paul Smith is professor of national security affairs, Naval War College, and author of the forthcoming book America’s China Gamble: Six Phases and Our Perilous Future (Edward Elgar Publishing). The views expressed here are his own.

defenseone.com · by Paul J. Smith

19. The Potent Powder and ‘Narco-Subs’ Driving Cocaine’s Global Surge

Where did the designs for these subs develop?

north Korea has been using similar capabilities since the 1990s and likely before. Just saying.

Excerpts:

To boost the supply chain, organized crime groups and their accomplices are developing cocaine navies, employing semisubmersible narco-subs that ferry larger hauls over greater distances.

In October, the U.S. Coast Guard seized five tons of cocaine stowed in a 90-foot-long semisubmersible vessel skimming the ocean surface on a 9,000-mile voyage from Colombia to Australia. Authorities said the load was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

“That’s why the traffickers take more risk, why you start seeing bigger seizures—eight tons, nine tons,” said Matt Donahue, former head of global operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration. “Losing drugs doesn’t even matter to them anymore because they’ve got so much.”

Cocaine’s global rebound is a challenge to Trump administration efforts to keep illegal drugs from crossing into the U.S. from Latin America. Customs and Border Protection reported that 10 tons of cocaine were seized at the U.S. border for the six months through March 31, compared with 12.5 tons for the entire 2022 fiscal year.

The Potent Powder and ‘Narco-Subs’ Driving Cocaine’s Global Surge

Colombia grows more coca, drug labs process more powder and improved smuggling vessels traverse oceans, alarming antidrug officials worldwide

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/cocaine-colombia-industry-production-7f10201b?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Juan ForeroFollow /Photographs by Carlos Villalon for WSJ

May 1, 2025 9:00 pm ET

MICAY CANYON, Colombia—One potent tributary in the surging cocaine pipeline begins in the mountains of Cauca province, where nearly every plot of arable land sprouts coca leaves.

On Cesar Rosero’s 10-acre spread, coca bushes in neat rows grow as tall as 6 feet. “We’re totally thankful for this plant,” the farmer said, as he walked through a field, sweeping his hand gently along bright-green leaves.

Rosero and other local coca farmers brag their plants are pest-resistant and yield more of the psychoactive alkaloid compound that keeps the world’s 20 million or so cocaine users coming back for more. A standard 25-pound bag of dried coca leaves can produce 25 grams of the alkaloid compared with 18 grams in the past, Rosero said.

“We have better yields because the technology and the science are better,” he said.

Cocaine supply is at a historic peak worldwide, according to U.S. and United Nations antidrug officials. The U.N. last fall estimated Colombia’s annual cocaine yield at 3,000 tons, about eight times what it was in 2012, when interdiction efforts were at their peak.

An aerial view of Micay Canyon in the province of Cauca, Colombia.

A loosening of antidrug enforcement in Colombia—combined with expansive coca cultivation, supply chain improvements and strong consumer demand—have since pushed the cocaine trade to new highs.

Micay Canyon and 14 similar coca-growing enclaves produce 40% of Colombia’s cocaine production. Not only do these crops yield some of the world’s highest-quality cocaine, there is more of it. Rosero, 64 years old, harvests five times a year. In the old days, he said, it was three.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime reported last year that Colombia was covered by 625,000 acres of coca, 55% more than in 2000. That year, the country joined forces with the U.S. to launch an antidrug program called Plan Colombia. It used chemicals sprayed from aircraft to kill coca crops, an aggressive agrarian campaign that Colombia ended in 2015.

Supply has since grown so large that the price of coca leaf has been at record lows, according to U.S. and U.N. antidrug officials.

Despite the record supply, retail prices for a kilogram of cocaine have reached highs, particularly in far-flung corners of the world, including Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia. In Australia, kilos of the drug sell for more than $200,000, eight to 10 times more than prices in Miami, according to researchers.

Coca farmer Cesar Rosero walking through his fields in Micay Canyon, Colombia.

A worker collecting coca leaves.

To boost the supply chain, organized crime groups and their accomplices are developing cocaine navies, employing semisubmersible narco-subs that ferry larger hauls over greater distances.

In October, the U.S. Coast Guard seized five tons of cocaine stowed in a 90-foot-long semisubmersible vessel skimming the ocean surface on a 9,000-mile voyage from Colombia to Australia. Authorities said the load was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

“That’s why the traffickers take more risk, why you start seeing bigger seizures—eight tons, nine tons,” said Matt Donahue, former head of global operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration. “Losing drugs doesn’t even matter to them anymore because they’ve got so much.”

Cocaine’s global rebound is a challenge to Trump administration efforts to keep illegal drugs from crossing into the U.S. from Latin America. Customs and Border Protection reported that 10 tons of cocaine were seized at the U.S. border for the six months through March 31, compared with 12.5 tons for the entire 2022 fiscal year.

A semisubmersible vessel captured last year by Ecuador and Colombia carried 3.7 tons of packaged cocaine.

Ecuadorean Armed Forces/AFP/Getty Images

Cocaine use among Americans has remained at steady levels over the past decade or so, but the way it is sold and its composition have changed: Drug dealers take orders via text and provide home delivery. And government lab tests found that a quarter of the cocaine sold in the U.S. by street dealers contained fentanyl, the highly addictive synthetic opioid, according to Derek Maltz, the acting DEA director.

“We look at the cocaine threat to the United States and our global partners and it’s been increasing,” Maltz said.

Stepped-up production

The coca harvested by Rosero and others in Colombia’s Micay Canyon is moved to open-air laboratories, where workers transform the dried coca leaves into a more potent derivative, a concoction called coca base or coca paste.

At one roadside lab, men in tall rubber boots mulch the leaves underfoot into dust. They mix it with gasoline, lime, sulfuric acid and other components in oil barrels to tease out the alkaloid. “The gasoline is what pulls out the alkaloid,” said Daimer Mosquera, a 41-year-old worker.

A Colombian worker sprinkling cement over coca leaves being processed into coca base.

A worker processing coca leaves into coca base at an open-air lab in Micay Canyon, Colombia.

Chemists at more sophisticated lab operations near the Pacific coast purify the coca base into cocaine powder. Colombia’s labs at one time used three kilos of coca base to make one kilo of cocaine. Now, the labs need only a kilo of base to make a kilo of cocaine.

Global antidrug authorities worry about production advances spreading beyond Colombia. Small plots of coca plants have surfaced in remote parts of Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, according to the U.N.

Cocaine processing labs have been discovered in Senegal, Niger, Belgium, Spain and elsewhere. Traffickers have learned to smuggle coca base by chemically dissolving it in everyday items—clothing, animal hides, rubber, beeswax, fertilizer and even paint. Chemists working for drug gangs later extract it.

The U.S. remains the biggest consumer of cocaine, but the production techniques and distribution networks are reaching new customers in Asia, Africa and elsewhere. An estimated 23 million people have used cocaine in 2022, according to a 2023 report from the U.N.’s drug agency. the latest data available. In 2016, the U.N. figure was 18 million.

“There’s diversification in global cocaine consumption, which is extremely significant,” said Leonardo Correa, who oversees research of Colombia’s cocaine trade for the U.N. “There is an expansion potential, and we don’t know how much it will grow.”

Root causes

With the help of billions of dollars in U.S. aid, counterdrug officials in Colombia and their American counterparts hobbled cocaine production a dozen years ago. Aerial fumigation reduced the coca crop by 70% in 2012 from its peak in 2000, at the start of Plan Colombia.

“We were all patting ourselves on the back. Colombia was a success story,” said William Brownfield, the former U.S. ambassador to Colombia.

Rosero, the coca farmer, recalled single-engine crop-dusters dropping the defoliant glyphosate on nearly every local coca farm, forcing most of his neighbors to give up the crop. “Why continue losing time and money?” he said.

Under public pressure, Colombia banned aerial spraying in 2015. U.S. officials who designed the anti-cocaine program say the end of large-scale crop eradication programs fostered the rebound of Colombia’s drug-trafficking groups. Americans shifted enforcement attention to highly addictive fentanyl and methamphetamine drugs from Mexico.

A Colombian worker delivering sacks of coca leaves.

Farmers loading coca leaves that will be processed into cocaine.

Luis Alberto Moreno, the Colombian ambassador to the U.S. during Plan Colombia, said the cocaine trade is one of those crime problems that “the minute you let up, they come back with a vengeance.”

Colombia’s current government says it now targets cocaine processing labs and transportation networks. With U.S. help, Colombia confiscated a record 883 tons of cocaine last year, according to the country’s military.

Colombian officials say they want to steer an estimated 230,000 families away from coca farming to legal crops, using government subsidies and technical advice. The country doesn’t yet have the means to support all the farmers who rely on coca leaf sales, said Gloria Miranda, head of Colombia’s crop-substitution program. “That will take time,” she said.

Anibal Hoyos is among the farmers in Micay Canyon awaiting such government assistance. He grows legal crops largely to feed his family. Other crops such as cacao, used in chocolate, and coffee take a year to harvest, he said. Hoyos harvests a coca crop every three months.

“That’s why the farmer plants coca,” Hoyos said. The various species cultivated in the mountain region have such nicknames as “little bird,” “guava,” “Peruvian” and “Bolivian.”

The economy of towns in Micay Canyon rely almost solely on the cocaine trade, which supports hotels, motorcycle dealerships and agriculture-related businesses.

A worker at a coca base lab showing off a tattoo.

Plastic bags holding 18 kilograms of coca base at a house in the mountains of Cauca province, Colombia.

“We’re inundated with coca,” said Luis Cordoba, a 41-year-old grower who uses a gasoline-powered contraption he made to strip coca leaves from branches instead of doing the work by hand.

Far and wide

The wave of cocaine flowing from Colombia is flooding South American cities, including Rosario, Argentina, and Montevideo, Uruguay, where drug gangs fight over shipments and threaten the safety of local communities.

In Australia, cocaine use has risen 19% from 2022 to 2023, according to the U.N. and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.

“You’re going to find a very clear upward trend in the last five or seven years, in consumption, seizures and price,” said Cesar Álvarez, a professor at Charles Sturt University in Australia who studies Latin-American drug use in Australia.

Australian police and border officers focus interdiction efforts on the high seas, where containerships, fishing boats and semisubmersible vessels ferry illegal drugs.

The use of low-profile vessels to smuggle contraband stretches back to Prohibition, when bootleggers moved liquor.

A semisubmersible vessel used for cocaine smuggling that was captured by Colombian forces in 2018. Photo: luis robayo/AFP/Getty Images

Drug cartels in the 1990s ferried cocaine north to Mexico from Colombia in similarly low-slung watercraft. The first voyages transported cocaine 400 miles, from the Colombian port city of Santa Marta on the Caribbean to islands near Central America, said Vice Adm. Orlando Grisales, chief of naval operations for Colombia’s navy. Those early vessels were death traps, built from fiberglass and wood in makeshift jungle shipyards.

“In time, they evolved in their operations, in their reach, their radius of action and how much they could carry,” Grisales said.

The latest oceangoing smuggling vessels are built in estuaries along Colombia’s Pacific coast, as well as in Venezuela, Guyana, Ecuador and Brazil. They ferry cocaine across 3,500 miles of the Atlantic to West Africa and Europe. One semisubmersible with 6.5 tons of cocaine was stopped by the Portuguese navy in the waters of the Azores archipelago.

Last year, the Colombian navy seized two narco-subs headed to Australia, and authorities found the husk of a third abandoned in the Pacific. When smuggling vessels are close enough to Australian shores, workers transfer the cocaine to pleasure craft or fishing boats for the final leg.

“What used to be a one-boat operation risking a run through the Caribbean is now a far more globalized network—with many more players, including seasoned smugglers and captains from illegal fishing fleets,” said Capt. González of the Colombian navy’s research team.

The new naro-subs are impressive, even to those who hunt them.

“You never stop being astonished,” González said. “As long as there are very good earnings, they can invent anything.”

A truck loaded with sacks of coca leaves passing hillsides of coca plants in Micay Canyon, Colombia.

Write to Juan Forero at juan.forero@wsj.com

20. China Signals Readiness to Respond to U.S. Trade Overtures

Is China blinking? Or does it sense an advantage and an opening?

China Signals Readiness to Respond to U.S. Trade Overtures

Beijing again seeks end to Trump’s tariffs and calls for ‘sincerity’

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-signals-readiness-to-respond-to-u-s-trade-overtures-583f2f0d?mod=hp_lead_pos3

By Chun Han Wong

May 1, 2025 10:57 pm ET

A worker carries goods for export in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, China. Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

China said Friday it was weighing starting talks with the U.S. to halt a trade war, but only if Washington shows sincerity through concrete measures such as by canceling tariffs against Beijing.

A Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesperson said “China is currently evaluating” repeated comments and messages from U.S. officials that “expressed their willingness to negotiate with China on tariffs.”

“China’s position is consistent. If you want to fight, we will fight to the end; if you want to talk, our door is wide open,” the ministry spokesperson said. “If the U.S. wants to talk, it should show sincerity to talk, and be prepared to act in correcting its erroneous actions and canceling unilateral tariffs.”

Beijing has imposed 125% levies on American goods in retaliation to President Trump’s 145% tariffs on Chinese products. Chinese officials have previously signaled a willingness to negotiate but not under duress.

The Communist Party leadership has been stoking patriotic fervor among ordinary Chinese, seeking to blame the U.S. for many of China’s economic problems and steel the nation for a prolonged trade fight.

The ministry didn’t give a timeline for Beijing’s evaluation of possible trade talks with Washington.

Trump has said that he wouldn’t end his China tariffs without significant concessions from Beijing, such as increased access to Chinese markets.

“I’m not going to drop them unless they give us something that’s, you know, substantial,” Trump told reporters last week. “Let us go in and work China,” he said. “To go into China and to sell our product, sell our wares.”

Trump to Rename Veterans Day in Tribute to World War I Victory

President plans to designate May 8 as ‘Victory Day for World War II’

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/trump-to-rename-veterans-day-in-tribute-to-world-war-i-victory-c1f7f6c9

By Gareth Vipers

May 2, 2025 6:56 am ET

A Veteran’s Day celebration at the USS Hornet Museum in Alameda, Calif., in 2024. Photo: Gabrielle Lurie/Associated Press

Key Points

What's This?

Trump wants to rename Veterans Day as “Victory Day for World War I”.
Trump designates May 8 as “Victory Day for World War II” to celebrate U.S. military victories.
The move could raise questions about Trump’s commitment to U.S. military veterans.

President Trump said he would rename Veterans Day as “Victory Day for World War I” and designate May 8 as “Victory Day for World War II” to celebrate U.S. military victories.

“We won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance, but we never celebrate anything — That’s because we don’t have leaders anymore,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social late Thursday. “We are going to start celebrating our victories again!”

May 8, 1945, was the date on which fighting against Germany officially ended in World War II, though the conflict continued to rage for four months in the Pacific, claiming hundreds of thousands more lives.

Many U.S. allies celebrate May 8 as V-E Day, marking Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allies in World War II.

Trump didn’t say whether he planned to make May 8 a federal holiday and there was no executive order accompanying the announcement.

President Trump said the changes would allow Americans to celebrate U.S. military victories. Photo: Mehmet Eser/Zuma Press

The move could raise questions about Trump’s commitment to U.S. military veterans. In March, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins said the administration was aiming to cut tens of thousands of workers from the Department of Veterans Affairs, one of many targeted as part of efforts by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency to reduce costs.

Veterans Day, celebrated annually on Nov. 11, was originally established as Armistice Day following World War I to honor U.S. veterans who served in the conflict. It was later broadened out to honor all U.S. military veterans and became a federal holiday in 1968.

The move to consolidate Veterans Day as a specific celebration of World War I could be seen by some as excluding U.S. servicemembers who fought in other wars, such as in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The notion that the U.S. played the biggest role in the defeat of Nazi Germany is the subject of debate. The Soviet Union paid a huge price for its involvement in bringing down the Nazi regime, with an estimated 26 million killed during the war and several pivotal battles won by Soviet forces, including the eventual capture of Berlin in 1945.

Write to Gareth Vipers at gareth.vipers@wsj.com

22. Trump Issues Order to Defund U.S. Public Media, Including PBS and NPR

Just tear down everything.

What is funny is that the haters of PBS and NPR do not watch/listen to the them.

But this will add a few pennies to the DOGE savings account.

Trump Issues Order to Defund U.S. Public Media, Including PBS and NPR

President says the news outlets don’t present ‘a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events’

https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-issues-order-to-defund-u-s-public-media-including-pbs-and-npr-b1f96e83

By Joe Flint

Updated May 2, 2025 1:45 am ET

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is the umbrella organization that oversees government funding for PBS and NPR. Photo: Charles Dharapak/Associated Press

Key Points

What's This?

President Trump sought to end federal funding for public media, including PBS and NPR, via executive order.
Trump’s order claims PBS and NPR don’t provide fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayals of current events.
The order directs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cancel existing funding to the maximum extent.

President Trump issued an executive order Thursday night ending federal funding of the public media, including PBS and National Public Radio.

In his order, Trump said “neither entity presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”

The order states that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the umbrella organization that oversees government funding for PBS and NPR, “cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.”

Officials at the corporation, PBS and NPR didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Trump’s efforts to shut down funding for public broadcasting are the latest of several battles with the media. Last December, Disney’s ABC News settled a defamation suit filed by Trump against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos by agreeing to contribute $15 million to his presidential foundation or museum.

Paramount Global’s PARA -0.77%decrease; red down pointing triangle CBS is currently in mediation with Trump, who sued the network last year, alleging it had deceitfully edited an interview with Kamala Harris to make her sound better.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is slated to receive $535 million a year to fund each of the next two fiscal years. The CPB has said more than 70% of its annual appropriation goes directly to more than 1,500 public television and radio stations.

NPR, PBS and many affiliated local stations rely extensively on donations and sponsorships. On average, about 10% of the funding PBS and its stations receive comes from the corporation, which also provides about 15% of revenue that funds NPR and its stations, according to NPR.

Trump’s order comes just days after he said he was removing three of the five CPB board members. The corporation subsequently sued Trump, saying he lacks the authority to remove board members.

Public media has long been a target of Trump and Republicans. In March, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) held a House hearing in which she called NPR and PBS “radical left-wing echo chambers.”

Many Republican lawmakers see public broadcasting as ripe for cuts at a time when the national debt stands at more than $36 trillion, and said eliminating support for NPR and PBS would be appropriate given their perceived liberal biases. “The United States of America is broke and can’t afford it,” Greene said.

Trump’s order noted that the media landscape has changed dramatically in the nearly 60 years since the CPB was created.

“Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence,” the order says.

PBS and NPR leadership have argued that in many markets, particularly in small towns and rural America, public broadcasting is still a crucial source of local information.

“PBS stations provide something that cannot be found on commercial networks, Paula Kerger, president and CEO of PBS, testified before Congress at the March hearing.

Katherine Maher, NPR’s president and chief executive, also defended the agency in March testimony, saying that its data shows that it has listeners “across the ideological spectrum.”

“Although there is a perception that NPR only serves a liberal audience, NPR data shows us a different fact pattern,” she said.

At the hearing, Alaska Public Media CEO Ed Ulman told the subcommittee that cutting funding to public media would devastate small-market and rural stations like his, and force some to close.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Becky Magura, president and CEO of Nashville PBS, said federal appropriations account for less than 20% of her station’s budget, but nearly half of the budget for stations in other areas of the state including Cookeville and Martinsville.

Write to Joe Flint at Joe.Flint@wsj.com

23. Europe Is Racing to Build Its Own Version of the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex

The ironic thing is that with our eroding and atrophied (but still very expensive) defense industrial base we will probably be buying European weapons systems some day.

Europe Is Racing to Build Its Own Version of the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex

European defense will be reshaped, creating opportunities for industry and investors

https://www.wsj.com/finance/europe-defense-us-military-industrial-complex-61ea9654

By Jon Sindreu

May 1, 2025 11:00 pm ET

Spotters take pictures of a Dutch Air Force Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II jet fighter. Photo: JOHN THYS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

America’s vast military-industrial complex has many critics. For Europe, it is now something to aspire to.

This week, Germany asked the European Union to invoke an emergency clause exempting defense investment from spending rules, as part of the bloc’s five-year rearmament plan. Global defense expenditure experienced the highest year-over-year rise since at least the end of the Cold War in 2024, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute data showed this week, with Europe as the main contributor. Analysts estimate NATO members could add €700 billion ($798 billion) to €2 trillion in extra military spending by 2030.

Of course, much of the windfall will flow to prime U.S. contractors such as Lockheed Martin LMT -0.01%decrease; red down pointing triangle, Northrop Grumman NOC 0.03%increase; green up pointing triangle and General Dynamics GD -0.22%decrease; red down pointing triangle. But Brussels wants at least 50% of European military procurement to go to domestic firms. Achieving that requires major industrial reform—something investors are eager to capitalize on as the U.S. growth story loses its shine.

Because European countries slashed military budgets a lot more than the U.S. after the Cold War, their domestic defense suppliers became niche, low-volume producers with high unit costs. Airbus’s AIR 5.04%increase; green up pointing triangle military arm was the highest-grossing one in 2024 with €12 billion in revenue—barring BAE Systems BA 1.21%increase; green up pointing triangle, which gets half its sales from the U.S. By contrast, Lockheed grossed $71 billion.

This has created a negative feedback loop, with NATO members increasingly channeling off-the-shelf purchases toward American contractors, which remain capable of large-scale production. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, only 22% of the EU’s procurement boost remained in Europe, according to the European Commission.

The clear, first step to fix this is producing more of what Europe already makes: ammunition. After the EU failed to deliver one million artillery shells to Ukraine by March 2023—it took until November—officials in the bloc allocated €500 million to scale output. A quarter went to Rheinmetall RHM 3.50%increase; green up pointing triangle, which targets output of 1.1 million 155mm shells a year by 2027, and tripling annual revenue to €30 billion by 2030.

Rheinmetall wants to evolve into an American-style, all-purpose contractor. It recently acquired U.S. vehicle maker Loc Performance, ammo recovery firm Stascheit, and software developer blackned, and bid for Thyssenkrupp’s warship arm, which was rejected in favor of a spinoff.

However, investor enthusiasm has pushed its forward price-earnings ratio to 43, from 17 six months ago. Such extreme valuations argue for diversification, but it is hard to spot other clear winners in an industrial base wastefully fragmented across national lines.

Germany is a leading manufacturer of tanks but, where the U.S. fields the Abrams main battle tank, the Bradley infantry vehicle and the Stryker personnel carrier, Europe has several competing models for each tank class. Ditto for frigates, submarines and planes.

In jet fighters, the Eurofighter Typhoon, backed by Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K., competes with France’s Rafale and Sweden’s Gripen. But the most popular choice among European NATO members is the F-35, which boasts stealth capabilities and triple the production rate. This locks countries into U.S. systems for two decades. Next-generation fighter development is split too, between a Dassault-Airbus program and a BAE Systems-Leonardo LDO 3.21%increase; green up pointing triangle-Mitsubishi team.

Ideally, these firms would merge into two giants, each bidding for a unified contract, with only one aircraft ultimately developed, just as Boeing BA -0.19%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Lockheed did with the U.S. Air Force’s F-47 project.

In practice, top-tier mergers remain unlikely. National governments retain stakes in most defense firms and are reluctant to cede control.

A more realistic model is missile maker MBDA. Jointly owned by Airbus, BAE and Leonardo, it functions as one company while retaining national subsidiaries. This allowed simplification: The Aster missile family—Europe’s closest equivalent to the U.S. PAC-3 MSE, used in the Patriot systems that have proven vital in Ukraine—has replaced legacy systems such as the Crotale, Masurca, Spada, Aspide and Sea Dart. MBDA plans to double production this year from 2023.

Eurofighter Typhoon jet fighters are backed by Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. Photo: JOHN THYS/AFP/Getty Images

This model could extend to other sectors. Rheinmetall is developing the Panther KF51 tank, aimed at replacing the Leopard 2, and has now joined forces with Leonardo to build a variant for Italy. Naval capabilities could be consolidated across BAE, France’s Naval Group, Germany’s Thyssenkrupp, Italy’s Fincantieri FCT 1.75%increase; green up pointing triangle and the Netherlands’s Damen.

Investors could spread bets across listed players, hoping to reap the benefits of their networks of specialized subsidiaries.

Still, the MBDA blueprint remains vulnerable to national divergence. MBDA Germany and France, for example, make competing land-attack cruise missiles: The Taurus KEPD 350, now restarting production after a five-year pause, and the SCALP EG. This reflects premerger legacies, but highlights the challenge of scaling with stale, legacy lines. University of Oslo’s Fabian Hoffmann estimates combined annual capacity is just 100 units, which is far below Lockheed’s 700 JASSM-ERs.

Meanwhile, Europe lacks a high-altitude missile defense like the U.S. THAAD or Israel’s Arrow 3, which can take 20 years to build. It also depends on the U.S. for software and satellite intelligence.

Lockheed Martin jet fighters being manufactured in West Fort Worth. Photo: Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Getty Images

“It is best to first fix the procurement system, then have these companies compete with each other and then see which winners are emerging and drive consolidation. It is what happened with Rheinmetall,” said Hoffmann.

Indeed, the EU seeks to replicate the Pentagon’s power as a centralized buyer. It will make €150 billion in loans available for joint defense procurement and has set up a target for 40% of purchases to be collaborative by 2030. That may not be enough.

With many countries still reluctant to spend even under the auspices of Brussels, though, there will still be a lot of capital stepping in to finance smaller defense deals, usually involving assets owned by unlisted companies.

Private-equity firms such as London-based Tikehau Capital TKO -1.65%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Paris-based Weinberg Capital Partners are now focusing on security-related small and medium companies, and larger players such as CVC Capital Partners are perfectly positioned to do even more.

Then there is venture capital, which should help address some of the “capability gaps” that EU officials have identified, including drones, artificial intelligence and cyberwarfare. The models are the many Silicon Valley upstarts currently vying for Pentagon contracts, such as Anduril Industries, Palantir and Shield AI.

According to a recent report by NATO Innovation Fund, a €1 billion vehicle launched by NATO in 2023 to provide early support to strategic military technology, European VC funding in this area was at a record high last year. The success of Ukrainian producers of small drones, sprouted out of necessity, have also pointed the way.

There is another straightforward way to play the trend: The top European investment banks, such as BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank, are set to receive a fee windfall in the form of advisory services for mergers and restructurings, as well as equity and debt issuance to fund expansions.

The European military-industrial complex won’t rival the U.S.’s anytime soon, but there is money to be made as it wakes up from a long slumber.

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

24. Will China Escalate? Despite Short-Term Stability, the Risk of Military Crisis Is Rising

Or perhaps another to express this conclusion is to say to China and US - "heal thyselves."

Conclusion:

Ultimately, these internal dynamics—more than long-standing trade and foreign policy disputes—pose the greatest threat of turning strategic stalemate into acute crisis. To reduce the risks of catastrophic conflict, strategists in Beijing and Washington should look inward and scrutinize their own leadership before the uneasy stalemate can no longer hold.

Will China Escalate?

Foreign Affairs · by More by Tong Zhao · May 2, 2025

Despite Short-Term Stability, the Risk of Military Crisis Is Rising

Tong Zhao

May 2, 2025

Chinese soldiers marching in Beijing, April 2025 Iori Sagisawa / Reuters

TONG ZHAO is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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In 2021, at the contentious first meeting between senior Chinese foreign policy officials and their counterparts in the Biden administration, Beijing’s top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, declared that the United States could no longer “speak with China from a position of strength.” The statement, which seemed to unsettle U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, has proved instructive for understanding China’s strategic outlook. In the four years since, Beijing has operated under the assumption that a profound shift in the balance of power between the two countries is underway. Chinese strategists perceive their country’s decades-long “strategic weakness” in its competition with the United States as coming to an end, driven by steady advances in China’s industrial, technological, and military capabilities and an increase in its international influence. This progress has ushered in what Beijing views as a “strategic stalemate” with the United States, in which both nations now wield comparable power.

[阅读中文版。]

The reelection of U.S. President Donald Trump did little to shake Beijing’s optimism that it can navigate continued threats from the United States, secure a lasting equilibrium, and vie for global supremacy. And Trump’s early second-term actions have strengthened Beijing’s conviction that the United States is accelerating its own decline, bringing a new era of parity ever closer. The perception that China likely does not face an existential threat from the United States has had a stabilizing effect on policy in Beijing, which has responded to Trump’s escalation of trade tensions in April with patience, anticipating that Trump will eventually lower U.S. tariffs in an attempt to reach an agreement.

But despite the low immediate risk of conflict between the United States and China, the current stalemate may not prove durable. Over the next four years, the risk of a military crisis will likely rise as the two countries increasingly test each other’s resolve. By the time Trump’s current term nears its conclusion, China will have had ample opportunity to reevaluate the United States’ domestic political environment, its commitment to Taiwan, the global economy’s dependence on the island’s semiconductor industry, and the trajectory of China’s own economic development and military modernization. The risk of a U.S.-Chinese military crisis could sharply escalate if Beijing further closes the capability gap with Washington and perceives international indifference to Taiwan’s status, grows frustrated with nonmilitary efforts to unite Taiwan with China, and foresees more pro-Taiwan leadership in Washington and Taipei. What appears today as strategic stalemate could rapidly transform into something more volatile—and dangerous—for both countries.

BEAT THE DEALER

Beijing has been willing to bide its time as Trump unilaterally weakens the United States’ standing in the world. Despite the Trump administration’s aggressive tariffs on China, many Chinese strategists have downplayed the frequently voiced international concern that the trade war raises the risk of military conflict. In their eyes, heightened trade tensions are simply the first phase of Trump’s signature negotiating tactic: squeeze hard, then back down and cut a deal. China, it appears, is content to let Trump’s trademark strategy run its course, expecting it to falter as the United States faces severe economic and diplomatic consequences.

Beijing has shown similarly little inclination to initiate near-term military conflict, even over issues of core national interest such as Taiwan. This restraint, however, has been underwritten by a military buildup, spanning conventional and nuclear forces, that Chinese officials see as critical to shifting the balance of power with the United States. Trump’s fixation on “holding the cards” in international disputes only reinforces Beijing’s conviction that hard power rules. And Beijing believes it is in position to gain the upper hand.

Despite Trump’s stated interest in arms control talks with China and Russia, officials in Beijing see the White House’s erratic, disjointed decision-making as an impediment to any potential grand bargain. They feel less inclined to pursue cooperative security measures and are prioritizing the development of China’s own military capabilities. As the United States’ global authority fades rapidly, international pressure on China to join arms control talks will diminish. Moreover, Beijing sees the U.S. defense industrial base as faltering, hampered by an increasingly disordered governance system. Trump’s posturing, including his commitment to maintaining the world’s most powerful military and his proposal to build a “Golden Dome” missile defense system, no longer rattles Beijing as it once did. As the United States diverts resources toward fanciful efforts to defend its homeland against China’s comparatively low-cost attack capabilities, Beijing effectively strains U.S. resources at little cost to itself.

China’s military buildup and its assessment of the United States’ stagnation has also emboldened Beijing to act more assertively to shape the behavior of smaller countries in the region. As Washington’s capacity and credibility erode, China is openly courting U.S. allies such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea while drawing firmer redlines around its core interests. Its seemingly contradictory surges in economic and diplomatic outreach and its military muscle flexing, evident in high-profile drills near Australia and Japan in February, are, in China’s view, actions characteristic of the major power it believes it has become.

PLAYING FOR THE STRAIT

Chief among those interests is Taiwan. Despite rising political and military tensions across the strait since Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te took office in 2024, China’s, Taiwan Work Conference in February and the convening of the Chinese Communist Party’s “Two Sessions” conferences in March revealed more continuity than change in Beijing’s near-term Taiwan strategy, which combines patience with the methodical, systematic expansion of control over cross-strait relations. This indicates no significant elevation in the threat of an attack in the near term.

Although the Chinese Communist Party’s recent meetings have not suggested that a Chinese military move against the island is imminent, the risk of a conflict in the medium term is growing. In recent years, Beijing’s strategy has evolved from primarily preventing Taiwanese independence to actively pursuing unification, culminating in the CCP’s 2021 plan, “Overall Strategy for Resolving the Taiwan Question in the New Era”. Details are limited, but the new approach seems to emphasize the boosting of China’s influence within Taiwanese society, nudging Taiwanese to see unification as their least bad option. According to authorities in Taiwan, Beijing has been collaborating with Taiwanese civil-society organizations, political parties, and influencers to undercut Taipei’s narratives, handing out Chinese ID cards to Taiwanese citizens, and even securing loyalty pledges from Taiwanese military officers. China may see such measures as legitimate, whereas Taiwan’s countermeasures, such as Lai’s 17-point plan to combat such infiltration, appear to Beijing as acts of pro-independence defiance that have required China to intensify its air and sea incursions and carry out bigger, bolder military drills. Beijing, which has largely turned its back on Lai’s administration, has little hope that a pro-Chinese leader will win Taiwan’s 2028 presidential election, increasing the likelihood of escalation with Taipei. Ultimately, Ultimately, even nonmilitary unification measures regarded by Beijing as peaceful carry a risk of military escalation to all-out conflict, one that could draw in the United States.

Trump’s lack of clear foreign policy priorities amplifies this risk. His reluctance to engage in conflicts with a major power, lack of interest in defending other democracies, and shaky commitment to Taiwan loom large to Chinese officials. Many in Beijing suspect that if any U.S. president might quietly tolerate China’s coercive takeover of Taiwan, it would be Trump. China’s early April military exercises in the strait served in part as a probe of his resolve. The Trump administration’s verbal condemnations in response did not impress Beijing, with Chinese analysts highlighting the relatively muted nature of the U.S. response.

Other restraining forces are also rapidly weakening. As the United States engages in naked coercion of allies and adversaries alike, smaller states in the region and beyond face new dilemmas. They have fewer incentives to antagonize China, especially as it positions itself as a comparatively more predictable and less disruptive global power that consistently outpaces the United States in economic and military growth. As the U.S.-led Western bloc fragments, the international will and capacity to pressure China toward restraint in Taiwan may wane in a more multipolar world.

AUDIENCE CAPTURE?

For its part, the Trump administration is beefing up the United States’ military deterrent against China amid growing concerns about Beijing’s aggressive actions in Asia. But internal fissures have impeded the effort. Erratic, disruptive overhauls in the Pentagon and broader bureaucracy, driven by administration loyalists eager to carry out the president’s agenda, have made Beijing doubt the United States’ ability to bolster its military capabilities. Senior Defense Department officials aren’t fully aligned on the importance of Taiwan to U.S. strategy. Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, for example, has said that “Americans could survive without it” and is pushing instead to thwart China’s broader regional dominance. Trump’s own wavering commitment to Taiwan further risks rendering any military preparations hollow. His recent dismissal of National Security Council senior officials insufficiently committed to his “America first” foreign policy sounded a warning shot to like-minded peers across the administration.

Meanwhile, the ratcheting up of tensions sparked by the trade war has strengthened national cohesion within China. Even the country’s most liberal-leaning strategists, previously less critical of U.S. policy, now label Washington the aggressor and advocate for tougher measures to counter U.S. economic and foreign policy pressure. To many, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s forecast of “great changes unseen in a century” appears prescient. This growing internal consensus, however, makes Beijing less likely to engage in the critical self-reflection necessary to dispassionately evaluate its own strategic planning—and more likely to intensify its military buildup and pursuit of unification.

Likewise, Trump’s demand for loyalty and his expansive use of executive power to enforce compliance and conformity across the government have eroded the administration’s ability to self-evaluate. And without dissenting voices within the administration, the United States cannot plan and develop effective military deterrence and responsibly manage future military crises.

Ultimately, these internal dynamics—more than long-standing trade and foreign policy disputes—pose the greatest threat of turning strategic stalemate into acute crisis. To reduce the risks of catastrophic conflict, strategists in Beijing and Washington should look inward and scrutinize their own leadership before the uneasy stalemate can no longer hold.

TONG ZHAO is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Tong Zhao · May 2, 2025

25. Trump, Ukraine, and the Limits of Presidential Peacemaking

Excerpts:

Trump’s campaign to secure a deal between Russia and Ukraine is cut from a different cloth from these three earlier cases—and, indeed, different from that of all other presidential efforts to resolve third-party conflicts. In none of these previous cases did the United States seek something for itself other than the goal of regional peace and security. There were no side deals sought for U.S. economic exploitation of Manchuria, West New Guinea, or the Sinai, as the Trump administration has done in seeking to exploit Ukraine’s mineral wealth. And although each had to use threats to nudge the parties along, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Carter were not signaling a desire for one of the sides to undergo regime change, as Trump has done by demanding elections in Ukraine.

In each of the cases, the mediating president could have done more for the people who were affected by the arrangements in question, including the Chinese (in the case of Russo-Japanese peace), the Papuans, and the Palestinians. Nevertheless, all three U.S. leaders understood that these groups had legitimate interests. By contrast, the Trump negotiating team acts as if it is unaware of the existence, much less the interests, of the several million Ukrainians who remain in the 20 percent of the country now occupied by Russia.

When viewed as a whole, Trump’s initiative appears less a neutral mediation of a third-party dispute than a means to achieve a diminished U.S. commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty and curry favor with Moscow. Instead of looking for sources of compromise on both sides and then narrowing the areas of disagreement, Trump has preemptively endorsed the main Russian interpretation of the war—that modern Ukraine included territories that rightfully belonged to Russia, that Kyiv is a more provocative regional player than Moscow, and that Moscow’s efforts at regional peace have been undermined by NATO overreach. Trump has also sought to delegitimize the effort of his predecessor, Joe Biden, to assemble and lead a Western coalition to support Ukraine’s defense, suggesting that the American people were somehow duped and now deserve repayment. Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Carter knew the United States would benefit from a successful mediation but didn’t seek to use their mediations to extract material benefits or stir domestic politics.

Despite Trump’s apparently cordial conversation with Zelensky at the Vatican on the margins of Pope Francis’ funeral last week, and the minerals deal that soon followed, a photograph of Putin and Zelensky shaking hands on the White House lawn is unlikely. The prospect that Trump’s negotiations will earn him the Nobel he so publicly covets seems highly remote. To the extent that the president cares about Putin’s next steps in Europe, he should bear in mind a lesson from the least known of these three cases: the appetites of imperialists grow with the eating.

Trump, Ukraine, and the Limits of Presidential Peacemaking

Foreign Affairs · by More by Timothy Naftali · May 2, 2025

Ignoring Decades of American Practice, His Approach Faces Long Odds

Timothy Naftali

May 2, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump speaking to the media, Washington, D.C., April 2025 Leah Millis / Reuters

TIMOTHY NAFTALI is Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

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A U.S. president was trying to end an exceptionally violent war between Russia and its neighbor. He also had clear preferences on which side he admired more. “I like the Russians,” the president wrote. But the American people favored the other side, and, as a result, he noted, Washington needed to be “scrupulous in its impartiality between the combatants.” The president was Theodore Roosevelt, and the war was between Russia and Japan. U.S. neutrality, combined with Russia’s and Japan’s respect for Roosevelt and American power, allowed the White House to mediate an end to that bloody war in 1905. For his efforts, Roosevelt would become the first U.S. president to earn a Nobel Peace Prize.

More than a century later, another U.S. president is seeking to end another bloody war involving Russia and a neighboring country. Even more than Roosevelt, President Donald Trump favors the Russians in this war, while again most Americans support the other side. Trump has also made clear that he regards ending the war in Ukraine as a crucial goal for his presidency and that in bringing the two sides together, he, too, hopes to win a Nobel Peace Prize—adding to a hallowed U.S. tradition of presidential peacemaking. But this time, the path forward is far less certain. During his campaign, Trump promised he could end the war in 24 hours. Despite much maneuvering by the White House, however, the first hundred days of Trump’s second administration have come and gone with little prospect of the fighting ending soon. The administration has reached a separate deal with Ukraine, announced on April 30, to give the United States a stake in Ukraine’s mineral resources, but although the agreement is meant to signal U.S. investment in Ukraine’s future, it appears largely unrelated to the more pressing question of its war-torn present. All of which suggests that Trump has taken a very different approach to mediation from that of his predecessors.

Despite Roosevelt’s early example, U.S. mediation of foreign conflicts did not become a staple of American foreign policy until the Cold War, when Washington’s concerns became global instead of merely regional. Ever since, however, presidents have often found that the act of committing the prestige of the world’s strongest superpower to a peace process, although no guarantee of success, can significantly increase the odds. The United States played a central role, for example, in reaching a cease-fire and partial Israeli withdrawal in the Sinai after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, in securing a peace in Bosnia in 1995, and in solving the Northern Ireland dispute in 1998. And when they have involved themselves personally in the negotiations, U.S. presidents have usually succeeded, albeit with some notable exceptions. Richard Nixon couldn’t make peace between Syria and Israel in 1974; Bill Clinton managed to get Israel and Jordan to sign a historic peace treaty in 1994 but fell short of his far more ambitious goal to establish a more comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Even when successful, however, not every president-diplomat has been rewarded for his efforts by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Although historical parallels must be drawn with caution, three presidential mediations provide useful standards by which to judge Trump’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine. Along with Roosevelt’s negotiation with Russia and Japan in 1905, John F. Kennedy’s tough experience with the Netherlands and Indonesia in 1962 and Jimmy Carter’s triumph with Egypt and Israel at Camp David in 1978 suggest conditions needed for success but also potential sources of disappointment.

HALF AN ISLAND

Roosevelt said no when the idea of mediating the Russo-Japanese War was first raised with him in 1904. The suggestion came from Baron Kentaro Kaneko, a Japanese diplomat who had overlapped with Roosevelt at Harvard, a few months after Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian-controlled port of Lushun (Port Arthur) in Manchuria. Although the president recognized that the United States had an interest in the outcome of this faraway imperial competition, he was focused on his reelection campaign and doubted that the war would alter the balance of power in East Asia.

When the Japanese unexpectedly routed the Russian Baltic Fleet in May 1905, however, Roosevelt changed his mind. As he later explained, he wanted to prevent “Japan from driving Russia completely out of East Asia.” At this point, Tsar Nicholas II was in no rush to pursue peace, but Roosevelt found another way to persuade him. Through his friend Kaneko, the president encouraged the Japanese to invade Sakhalin Island, which had once been divided between Japan and Russia before Russia gained full control of it in 1875. Roosevelt correctly assumed that the loss of Russian territory would alter Nicholas’s calculations. Meanwhile, he also advised the Japanese halt further offensives aware that the Japanese were riding waves of debt to British shipbuilders and could not afford a forever war. Soon after the invasion of Sakhalin, Japan and Russia agreed to meet in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, under U.S. mediation.

After the talks began in August 1905, two sticking points quickly emerged: reparations and the future of Sakhalin. The Japanese offered to withdraw from Manchuria if Tokyo could inherit Russia’s special economic position in the Chinese province, where it controlled the main port and had built and operated the Chinese Eastern Railway. But they intended to keep Sakhalin and expected Russia to pay them an indemnity of $7 billion (approximately $251 billion today) for the cost of the war. The Russians were willing to concede to the Japanese what they wanted in China, as long as Japan withdrew from Sakhalin and dropped the demand for an indemnity.

Trump has done little to build the reputation for neutrality needed to be a credible mediator.

This left Roosevelt struggling to whittle the distance between the two sides, reducing the Japanese demands for money and the Russian designs on all of Sakhalin. In the end, with the talks on the verge of collapse, the Imperial Court in Japan accepted the tsar’s final offer: half an island and no money. The tsar had likely been impressed with an argument made by Roosevelt’s envoy in St. Petersburg that since the island had long been divided, Nicholas wasn’t actually giving up Russian land. Tokyo had learned of the tsar’s willingness to accept half of Sakhalin through the British, whom the Americans had kept informed of Roosevelt’s backchannel. Faced with the prospect of continuing to fight at great expense or agreeing to a peace that gave it most of what it wanted, Tokyo chose the latter, accepting even less than what Roosevelt had been advocating all along. The two sides signed the Treaty of Portsmouth in September.

Roosevelt’s success laid down a few markers for later presidents. His key contribution had been to keep the two sides negotiating until they reached a formula they both could accept, a process that involved mutual concessions on the main sticking points. Worn down by the negotiations, the Russians and the Japanese came to agree with the president that prolonging the war would not serve their respective interests. This breakthrough was largely possible because neither St. Petersburg nor Tokyo saw Roosevelt as favoring the other side.

By this measure, Trump has already failed. In advance of direct talks, he and his representatives have offered major concessions to Moscow, including U.S. recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and acknowledgment of Russian sovereignty over other occupied areas. Meanwhile, he has publicly berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and even falsely accused him of starting the war. Given this lopsided approach, Trump has done little to build the reputation for neutrality needed to be a credible mediator for both sides.

MORE ISLANDS

Some presidential mediations can end badly even when they initially achieve the desired result. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy deployed his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, to resolve a vestigial colonial dispute in Southeast Asia. Under its strongman leader, Sukarno, Indonesia was claiming the western half of the island of New Guinea (now Irian Jaya), which had remained a Dutch colony after Indonesia won its independence from the Netherlands in 1949. But the Netherlands wanted the approximately 500,000 Papuans who inhabited the territory—a largely Christian people who did not want unification with Muslim Indonesia—to achieve self-determination, charging Sukarno with being neo-imperialist. Both The Hague and Djakarta were willing to fight to defend their positions.

Kennedy had entered office hoping to alter Washington’s reputation in the developing world by encouraging reform movements and decolonization as a way to outflank Moscow. Despite the demographics of Dutch New Guinea, the president believed the optics of siding with the Netherlands against Sukarno’s land grab would undermine U.S. influence in the region. It would also likely push Sukarno into the arms of the Soviets, who were already courting Indonesia. Moreover, Washington could ill afford another conflict in Southeast Asia given the challenges it was already facing in Laos and the growing trouble in South Vietnam.

In early 1962, after the U.S. standoff with the Soviets over the status of Berlin seemed to have briefly settled down, Kennedy believed it was time to pressure the Netherlands to cede West New Guinea to Indonesia. In February, the president dispatched his attorney general as his personal envoy to calm and flatter Sukarno into engaging in face-saving negotiations for the Dutch and then speak bluntly to the Dutch about how the process had to end. Neither side was happy to see the president’s brother, and Sukarno refused to negotiate unless the Dutch promised him in advance to transfer their colony directly to Indonesian control. When Robert Kennedy pointed out that such a concession in advance was impossible, Sukarno threatened to revoke his earlier promise to free a CIA operative, who had been sentenced to death in Indonesia for involvement in a covert operation during the Eisenhower administration.

Meanwhile, the Dutch insisted they needed guarantees for the Papuan people. “We were not dealing with completely reasonable men on either side of this controversy,” Robert Kennedy later wrote. Nevertheless, direct U.S. engagement altered both sides’ calculations. Following the attorney general’s visits to the two capitals, the two sides agreed to meet, without preconditions, if the Kennedy administration provided the mediation. In March, the delegations arrived in Middleburg, Virginia, to begin negotiations.

Robert Kennedy and his wife meeting with Sukarno, Jakarta, February 1962 Bettmann / Getty

Almost immediately, however, the talks broke down, and by May, U.S. intelligence was reporting that Sukarno was putting his forces into West New Guinea to coerce the Dutch. The president now faced a crucial decision: as National Security Council member Robert Komer put it, “Do our larger interests in Southeast Asia demand a peaceful settlement (even if this forces us to lean toward Indo side to get one), or should we preserve a more even-handed approach, based on the merits of the issue, as Secretary [Dean] Rusk seems to favor?” The president prodded the two capitals for action and convinced them to return to Middleburg in July. Although not yet directly involved in the talks, the president also signed off on a new U.S. formula for peace, which included a transitional administration and the promise of a plebiscite for the Papuans.

But Sukarno continued to stonewall. He accepted that, to allow the Dutch to save face, the former colony could be transferred to the United Nations, but only very briefly, before being transferred to Indonesia; but he agreed to nothing else. The president lost his patience. In a dressing down in the Oval Office, he reminded Indonesian Foreign Minister Subandrio that he, Kennedy, had consistently favored the Indonesians in this dispute, and vowed to side with the Dutch if Sukarno chose a full invasion of New Guinea over a diplomatic solution. Subandrio, taken aback, suggested that Kennedy appeal directly to Sukarno. On July 30, Kennedy signed a letter that Komer, its drafter, called “a flowery appeal to Sukarno’s ego,” and the next day, Indonesia reached an agreement with the Netherlands that roughly followed the final U.S. proposal.

Yet far from increasing stability and enhancing U.S. influence in a strategic region, as Kennedy hoped, the deal only emboldened Sukarno, who a year later employed the same pressure tactics to break apart the new state of Malaysia. Sukarno coveted the former British colonies of North Borneo and Sarawak, which had been incorporated into independent Malaysia. Indonesia’s war on Malaysia would not end until Sukarno’s overthrow in 1965. And when the Indonesian government carried out the plebiscite mandated in the agreement, it permitted only a limited number of Papuans to participate, in a vote that was designed to ensure that Indonesia won.

For the Trump administration today, the outcome of Kennedy’s mediation provides a cautionary tale. Putin and Sukarno aren’t twins, but their worldviews share a burning dislike of the status quo. Any deal that concedes too much to a heavily armed power with designs on its neighbors may only lay the ground for future aggression.

THREATENING CANDOR

Jimmy Carter would have a different takeaway about a U.S. president’s role in mediation. Whereas Roosevelt and Kennedy had largely overseen peace talks from the margins, Carter was front and center in the Camp David negotiations of 1978. During 13 days of secret negotiations, the president became the human link between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, meeting separately with each leader and their aides, and having a hand in each of the 23drafts as the final settlement took shape.

Although Carter had the advantage that both Jerusalem and Cairo wanted a settlement, the two sides strongly disagreed over the extent of any Israeli pullback from the Sinai, which Israel had occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War. Sadat wanted a complete withdrawal, including the dismantling of the settlements Israel had created there. But for Begin, although he understood that an agreement with Egypt over the Sinai would relieve international pressure to end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, he and many members of his cabinet did not envision removing the Sinai settlements.

Along with Israeli opposition to a full withdrawal, the American president also faced the difficulty of maneuvering in a region of multiple conflicts. Cairo needed—and the Carter administration wanted—the Israeli-Egyptian agreement to be tied to some kind of process toward self-rule for the millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Although Carter didn’t seek an independent Palestinian state, he hoped to achieve, as he wrote in shorthand notes on the eve of the Camp David meetings, “Palestine auth[ority] in all areas.”

Like Roosevelt and Kennedy, Carter was more sympathetic to one side in the negotiations—in this case, Egypt. Nonetheless, he, too, took great pains to act as an honest broker. Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, counseled the president to suggest to Sadat that he not accept U.S. proposals too quickly. “It will help our credibility if we are seen to be pressing both sides for concessions,” Brzezinski said.

A week into the negotiations, the prospects for a deal looked dim. Begin informed Carter privately that he couldn’t compromise on the settlements; meanwhile, the Israeli delegation was pushing for separating the Sinai negotiation from any discussion of Palestinian aspirations. For his part, Carter refused to drop the Palestinian issue, but he did see that the question of Israel’s Sinai settlements might be finessed. He proposed to both parties that that issue be left out of a preliminary accord, making it instead the focus of subsequent negotiations toward a final agreement.

A photograph of Putin and Zelensky shaking hands on the White House lawn is unlikely.

By trying to meet the Israelis halfway, Carter caused a crisis with the Egyptians. On September 15, Sadat told the president privately that he would walk away. Carter then laid it on the line. “If you leave,” he told the Egyptian leader, “it will mean first of all an end to the relationship between the United States and Egypt.” He added: “It would probably mean the end of my presidency…. [A]nd last but not least, it will mean the end of something very precious to me: my friendship with you.” Moved by Carter’s candor and the implied threat, Sadat agreed to stay the weekend.

Carter then went to Begin, and after a seemingly endless discussion, Begin agreed to dismantle the settlements and pull out completely from the peninsula, but only if the Israeli Knesset ratified the withdrawal first. Perhaps Begin expected the parliament to veto a full withdrawal, but it didn’t matter to Carter: Begin had lifted his veto, and the Egyptians could be told that the Israeli leader had agreed in principle to a full withdrawal. (The Knesset approved the plan a week later.)

Why did Begin relent? Begin’s biographer, Avi Shilon, credits a call to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli general and future prime minister, who, as Begin’s minister of agriculture, was the driving force behind the Israeli settlements. Like the U.S. envoy who assured the tsar in 1905 that Southern Sakhalin wasn’t really Russia, Sharon assured Begin that a tactical concession on settlements in an area that was not historically viewed as Israel would not effect settlement activity in the West Bank. Ehud Olmert, another future Israeli prime minister, who was then a rising star in the Likud Party, later told the former U.S. ambassador and historian Stuart Eizenstat that the key issue for Begin and his government was that Carter threatened to publicly blame Israel if the talks collapsed.

In the end, Carter even managed to achieve something on the Palestinian question, with the two sides agreeing to work for “full autonomy” for the Palestinian people. It was a vague formulation, but neither side wanted the Palestinian issue to be the ultimate roadblock to a peace agreement. This concession was greater for Egypt, which under Sadat’s predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser had positioned itself as the great defender of the Palestinians; ultimately, Sadat, who was assassinated by Islamists in 1981, gave his life for it. In the waning moments of the weekend, however, it was Begin who suffered an attack of buyer’s remorse and threatened to walk away. With success for all parties now within easy reach, Carter used a softer approach with Begin. As Begin was preparing to leave Camp David, the president had albums of photographs of the Camp David summit prepared for each of Begin’s grandchildren, inscribing each one to each grandchild, which he delivered himself to Begin. Profoundly touched, Begin’s resistance melted away, and he followed through on the deal after all.

Like Roosevelt, Carter succeeded largely because of the reputation for fairness he had developed with both sides. Trump has not invested in building a similar reputation, especially with Kyiv. Carter’s likely use of the additional tactic of threatening to pressure Begin publicly has no analog in a presidential mediation that has already involved threats—mainly aimed at Ukraine—on social media. The pressure points available to Trump are the U.S. sanctions on Russia and the U.S. weapons that Ukraine needs.

SUKARNO’S GHOST

Trump’s campaign to secure a deal between Russia and Ukraine is cut from a different cloth from these three earlier cases—and, indeed, different from that of all other presidential efforts to resolve third-party conflicts. In none of these previous cases did the United States seek something for itself other than the goal of regional peace and security. There were no side deals sought for U.S. economic exploitation of Manchuria, West New Guinea, or the Sinai, as the Trump administration has done in seeking to exploit Ukraine’s mineral wealth. And although each had to use threats to nudge the parties along, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Carter were not signaling a desire for one of the sides to undergo regime change, as Trump has done by demanding elections in Ukraine.

In each of the cases, the mediating president could have done more for the people who were affected by the arrangements in question, including the Chinese (in the case of Russo-Japanese peace), the Papuans, and the Palestinians. Nevertheless, all three U.S. leaders understood that these groups had legitimate interests. By contrast, the Trump negotiating team acts as if it is unaware of the existence, much less the interests, of the several million Ukrainians who remain in the 20 percent of the country now occupied by Russia.

When viewed as a whole, Trump’s initiative appears less a neutral mediation of a third-party dispute than a means to achieve a diminished U.S. commitment to Ukrainian sovereignty and curry favor with Moscow. Instead of looking for sources of compromise on both sides and then narrowing the areas of disagreement, Trump has preemptively endorsed the main Russian interpretation of the war—that modern Ukraine included territories that rightfully belonged to Russia, that Kyiv is a more provocative regional player than Moscow, and that Moscow’s efforts at regional peace have been undermined by NATO overreach. Trump has also sought to delegitimize the effort of his predecessor, Joe Biden, to assemble and lead a Western coalition to support Ukraine’s defense, suggesting that the American people were somehow duped and now deserve repayment. Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Carter knew the United States would benefit from a successful mediation but didn’t seek to use their mediations to extract material benefits or stir domestic politics.

Despite Trump’s apparently cordial conversation with Zelensky at the Vatican on the margins of Pope Francis’ funeral last week, and the minerals deal that soon followed, a photograph of Putin and Zelensky shaking hands on the White House lawn is unlikely. The prospect that Trump’s negotiations will earn him the Nobel he so publicly covets seems highly remote. To the extent that the president cares about Putin’s next steps in Europe, he should bear in mind a lesson from the least known of these three cases: the appetites of imperialists grow with the eating.

TIMOTHY NAFTALI is Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Timothy Naftali · May 2, 2025

26. What If America Abandons Ukraine? The Biggest Risk Might Be to the Rest of Europe

Excerpts:

To avert a drift toward division and conflict in Europe, the Trump administration should not consign Ukraine to Europe’s periphery. Nor should it view Ukraine only in economic terms. Instead, Washington should build on the recently agreed-upon minerals deal and commit to Ukraine’s long-term security; a sovereign Ukraine capable of defending itself would help to stabilize the entire region, a core U.S. interest.

Since its independence from the Soviet Union 1991, Ukraine has too often been denied a significant place in Europe’s security architecture. At the 2008 Bucharest NATO summit, the alliance promised Ukraine membership, a promise that was callously forgotten. In multiple rounds of diplomacy in 2014 and 2015, after Russia’s takeover of Crimea and incursion into Ukraine’s Donbas region, France and Germany expended more effort on a cosmetic cessation of hostilities than on solving the underlying problems of regional security. The consequence, some eight years later, was Russia’s brutal invasion, which has sent ripples of insecurity across Europe. Today, the status of Ukraine lies indisputably at the heart of European security.

Without the United States at its side in Ukraine, Europe would face impossible choices. European countries would have to fill gaps in their own security and defense investments, as well as Ukraine’s. Limited resources, or pressure from Washington to moderate relations with Moscow, might induce the Europeans to cut back support for Kyiv, undermining their own long-term security in the process. Moreover, a U.S. abandonment of Ukraine would complicate NATO’s ability to deter Russia. For now, Moscow is tied down in Ukraine and cannot afford to pursue more expansionist undertakings. But should the Trump administration decide that Ukraine does not merit U.S. partnership and cooperation, Putin’s ambitions will only grow—along with the cost of deterring Russia in the future. If Washington abandons Ukraine now, Europe could become the consuming crisis of Trump’s second term.

What If America Abandons Ukraine?

Foreign Affairs · by More by Liana Fix · May 1, 2025

The Biggest Risk Might Be to the Rest of Europe

May 1, 2025

U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaking at the Vatican, April 2025 Ukrainian Presidential Press Service / Reuters

LIANA FIX is Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Germany’s Role in European Russia Policy: A New German Power?

MICHAEL KIMMAGE is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and the author of The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy.

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President Donald Trump is fond of flexibility. Unperturbed by changing course, he prefers not to be pinned down by past precedent or by his own promises. Although he has pledged to end the war in Ukraine quickly, and although Washington has just signed a deal with Kyiv granting the United States a share of future revenues from Ukraine’s minerals reserves, Trump could decide to walk away from the country entirely if he does not get the peace settlement he craves. A final text of the minerals deal has not yet been made public, but there is no indication that it includes security guarantees for Ukraine. As commander in chief, Trump can minimize U.S. support for Ukraine abruptly and dramatically.

But a Ukraine shunted aside by the United States would not be a Ukraine abandoned. After three years of war, dozens of countries now support Ukraine’s increasingly capable military. No ally can replace the United States, but all of them make a difference: it is not within the power of the United States to end the war by pulling out. Although Ukraine will struggle to hold the line without U.S. support, Russia has no easy path to victory. The real risk of a precipitous American withdrawal of support is not that Ukraine will immediately collapse, but that individual European countries might lose the political will to stand up to Russia.

Should the United States forsake Ukraine, Europe would suffer multiple misfortunes. European leaders would conclude that Washington, having devoted itself to normalizing ties with Moscow, is no longer interested in providing the credible deterrence it had supplied for decades. They would perceive the Trump administration’s abandonment of Ukraine as the first step toward a post-American Europe, if not a post-American world. Against this backdrop, Moscow may be tempted to scare Europe into submission, and some Europeans might choose appeasement rather than risk Russia’s wrath.

ON THE DEFENSIVE

The Trump administration is unlikely to endorse another supplemental support package for Ukraine. In a few months, the amount of weaponry and ammunition going from the United States to Ukraine will diminish. Even as Trump seeks economic gain from Ukraine in the form of a revenue-sharing deal, the United States may also curtail or halt the targeting and intelligence support it provides. Although Russia would still struggle to win the war outright, it would not have to worry about losing the war, either. It could lean into its strategy of damaging Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and terrorizing Ukrainians into leaving the country. Kyiv has the manpower, resources, and support to maintain sovereignty in most of the country, but Russian forces could advance slowly and make territorial gains, fulfilling Putin’s goal of getting four of Ukraine’s regions fully under his control.

Lacking the ability to make offensive gains, Ukraine would find it difficult to resolve the war on its terms. After successfully defending Kyiv in the spring and summer of 2022, Ukraine made daring moves in the south and the east, retaking the city of Kherson and liberating huge swaths of territory in the Kharkiv region. Last July, Ukraine even took a piece of Russian territory in the Kursk region. But over time, Ukraine has exhausted its offensive capabilities, and Russia has gradually pushed Ukrainian forces out of Kursk. Ukraine makes occasional drone strikes within Russia, and its degradation of Russian naval power in the Black Sea has been impressive, but Kyiv lacks the manpower and the materiel to capture large amounts of territory. Ukraine has drifted quietly, almost imperceptibly, from the wide-open war it was fighting in 2022 and 2023 to the defensive war it has been conducting since late 2024.

Without U.S. help, the support of its remaining allies would be crucial to Ukraine. Ukrainian forces have been innovative in their use of drone warfare, and European countries will continue to provide military aid. But Ukraine would suffer from a severe shortage of air defenses, enduring missile strikes across frontlines that would be essentially unprotectable. Kyiv would have to ration ammunition and would lose up-to-the-minute information on the battlefield. Even if the Europeans decide to step up, targeting would be exceptionally difficult without U.S. technology.

Ukraine’s leadership knows what is at stake, and it knows what to expect. Kyiv will have to make difficult choices about which territories are defensible. Between the valor and efficiency of Ukraine’s military and the continuous support from its remaining allies, however, Russia has no real path forward in Ukraine. The loss of life on the Russian side would not cease with American abandonment of Ukraine. The war would remain a strategic blunder for Russia. Even so, that abandonment would greatly burden Europe, call into question Washington’s commitment to its European allies, and likely generate spiraling tensions between Europe and Russia.

A POST-AMERICAN EUROPE

The Trump administration might believe that Ukraine’s destiny has no bearing on the future of the NATO alliance. The reality is that Ukraine is a linchpin of European security. The country is a twenty-first-century laboratory of containment, which has been the tacit transatlantic policy toward Russia since 2022. A U.S. retreat from Ukraine would signal to Moscow that Washington is no longer committed to checking the spread of Russian power in Europe. Seeing a green light, Russia would be tempted to test the foundations of European security, not necessarily through invasion but through intimidation and blackmail.

Russian President Vladimir Putin could target a European Union or NATO member state that he perceives as weak or internally divided; perhaps one of the Baltic countries or Romania. He could invent a crisis, perhaps claiming that a Russian-speaking minority is being persecuted in the country, and communicate a zeal to escalate by, say, demonstrating the reach of Russia’s missiles. If the United States were unwilling to back the targeted country, the larger European powers—France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—would need to get involved. But without the United States, they might not be able to compel Russia to back down. The combined British and French nuclear arsenals are insufficient to deter Moscow from engaging in nuclear first-use blackmail or conventional threats. In the absence of a credible U.S. security umbrella for Europe, Russia would view NATO as a paper tiger.

In a post-American Europe, Moscow would establish a patchwork of individual relationships with European countries, confronting some with territorial threats and gray-zone tactics (such as disinformation campaigns) and rewarding others for their acquiescence with cheap energy. These circumstances could motivate some European countries to embrace neutrality or even partnership with Russia. No longer kept in check by a counterbalancing power such as the United States, Putin could reconstitute a sphere of influence in Europe. And then, the hegemonic transatlantic alliance—the dragon that Russian strategists have been trying to slay since the late 1990s—would be no more.

To be sure, Russia does not have the military capacity to capture much European territory outside Ukraine, and that is most likely not Moscow’s underlying intention. But by terrifying and tempting Europe, Putin could drive a wedge in the transatlantic relationship and undermine the European project.

THE HEART OF EUROPEAN SECURITY

The prospect of a less committed United States instills fear in Europeans. It has already prompted higher defense spending in the EU. But the Europeans, including the United Kingdom, are still unprepared to take full responsibility for their own defense. They do not have the political will to take joint action. They lack the money, the military hardware (especially critical enablers such as intelligence and airlift capabilities), and the command-and-control structures necessary for any joint European defense. These capabilities will not be ready for years, possibly decades, and France’s and the United Kingdom’s nuclear umbrellas, even if extended to other European countries, are no match for Russia. Only the United States can ensure credible nuclear deterrence.

Some European countries, deserted by the United States and lacking a formidable European-only defense alliance, may be cowed into cutting deals with Moscow. They may reestablish trade relations or concede to Russian demands regarding the stationing of European troops and hardware. Europe is already rife with political parties willing to accommodate the Kremlin for short-term gain. And because the desired outcome—Europe’s ability to defend itself without the United States—might take more than a decade to achieve, citizens may be reluctant to vote in politicians promising to invest in defense today.

Even countries willing to stand up to Russia might still be tempted to abandon lengthy joint European defense efforts for the sake of short-term bilateral deals with the United States. Poland has already asked the United States to deploy nuclear warheads on Polish soil instead of in western Europe. Should a race to secure favors from Washington ensue, Trump would relish playing the Europeans against each other. In time, the European security landscape could return to a pre-war hodgepodge of complex and confusing security deals and reassurance treaties, tying some countries to each other while excluding others. Amid the confusion, the emergence of rivalries among European countries is entirely possible. Whether the EU can withstand such developments, or whether it would survive at all without a U.S.-led NATO, is an open question. A brittle and acrimonious Europe would benefit only Russia.

An apartment building hit by a Russian air strike, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, April 2025 Stringer / Reuters

To avert a drift toward division and conflict in Europe, the Trump administration should not consign Ukraine to Europe’s periphery. Nor should it view Ukraine only in economic terms. Instead, Washington should build on the recently agreed-upon minerals deal and commit to Ukraine’s long-term security; a sovereign Ukraine capable of defending itself would help to stabilize the entire region, a core U.S. interest.

Since its independence from the Soviet Union 1991, Ukraine has too often been denied a significant place in Europe’s security architecture. At the 2008 Bucharest NATO summit, the alliance promised Ukraine membership, a promise that was callously forgotten. In multiple rounds of diplomacy in 2014 and 2015, after Russia’s takeover of Crimea and incursion into Ukraine’s Donbas region, France and Germany expended more effort on a cosmetic cessation of hostilities than on solving the underlying problems of regional security. The consequence, some eight years later, was Russia’s brutal invasion, which has sent ripples of insecurity across Europe. Today, the status of Ukraine lies indisputably at the heart of European security.

Without the United States at its side in Ukraine, Europe would face impossible choices. European countries would have to fill gaps in their own security and defense investments, as well as Ukraine’s. Limited resources, or pressure from Washington to moderate relations with Moscow, might induce the Europeans to cut back support for Kyiv, undermining their own long-term security in the process. Moreover, a U.S. abandonment of Ukraine would complicate NATO’s ability to deter Russia. For now, Moscow is tied down in Ukraine and cannot afford to pursue more expansionist undertakings. But should the Trump administration decide that Ukraine does not merit U.S. partnership and cooperation, Putin’s ambitions will only grow—along with the cost of deterring Russia in the future. If Washington abandons Ukraine now, Europe could become the consuming crisis of Trump’s second term.

LIANA FIX is Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Germany’s Role in European Russia Policy: A New German Power?

MICHAEL KIMMAGE is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and the author of The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Liana Fix · May 1, 2025

27. Blowing up Bridges in Vilnius: The Tactical Lit Review

All military leaders need to be lifelong learners and should focus on the fundamentals: military history, military theory, military geography, operational art, and strategy (and all the myriad subjects required to understand our globalized and interconnected world).

Every major military planning effort I have been involved in has required a review of history. And that was not on my own initiative. I had leaders who demanded it. But also I had many subordinates (especially Special Forces NCOs who took it upon themselves to know the history and many of them had (and still have) a better grasp of it than I do in many areas).

Excerpts:

No one needs a tasking order or doctrinal change to start doing tactical literature reviews. When your next tasker drops or you kick off mission analysis, set a timer for twenty minutes and start digging: Google, Google Scholar, Line of Departure, CARL, AHEC. Ask: Has someone solved this before? You’ll be surprised how often the answer is yes and how much better your plan becomes.

Still, as an Army we should not leave this to individual initiative alone. Adding sentences to the chapters in Field Manual 5-0 on the military decision-making process and troop leading procedures would be enough. It could say something like: “Leaders and staffs should also consider historical precedent through a targeted review of professional military literature.” Just that. Current doctrine already supports this mindset. It emphasizes using available knowledge and lessons learned to inform assumptions and planning products—but it does not yet call out scanning professional literature or historical precedent as a deliberate step.

We fight smarter when we remember we are not the first to face these problems. Tactical literature reviews help us borrow brilliance, avoid past mistakes, and bring the weight of history into the fight. Do the research. Then blow the bridges.

Blowing up Bridges in Vilnius: The Tactical Lit Review - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Zachary Griffiths · May 1, 2025

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You defend Vilnius by blowing the bridges.

A few years ago, during a warfighter exercise, my battalion was tasked to delay Donovian forces assaulting through Vilnius into the Suwalki Gap. While poring over the maps, I paused to wonder: Has Vilnius been fought over before? A quick search on Google and Google Scholar turned up examples from 1655, 1812, and 1944—all pointing to the same solution: blow the bridges. We did. It worked.

This is the power of what we might call a tactical literature review. In academic writing, literature reviews discuss and analyze “published information in a particular subject area.” A tactical literature review, then, systematically reviews historical accounts, today’s articles, and archives relevant to a specific mission or problem. Just as you might borrow the order for a rifle range from your sister platoon leader, the tactical literature review uncovers what others have already learned, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

A Few Keystrokes from Everything

Professional writing is not just an institutional indulgence—it makes our Army more lethal. Historically, leaders faced with tactical problems could draw on little more than their training and experience—the total of reachable knowledge on hand. Leaders have always battled this challenge. During World War II, General George S. Patton carried along a small library with him and borrowed experience in European campaigning by reading German and French authors before the war began. In fact, the American Library Association even took libraries to war in World War I and II, bringing both reference texts and recreational reading to the front.

Access is not such an obstacle anymore. Nearly all of military history and thought is now just a search away. A commander of a company charged with base defense can read a Vietnam War after action report about the Battle of Kham Due. A staff officer planning a battalion’s assault on a city can pull up newly published research on the 2020 Battle of Hadrut. And in garrison, those planning a dining in or multicomponent training can draw on past examples to make them more meaningful. The real opportunity now is to turn that access into insight—quickly, consistently, and under pressure.

Doing It

The tactical literature review should not take you long. Academics might agonize over particular subfields or disciplines for a full understanding in their literature reviews, but I propose that a quick scan is enough to surface options not otherwise considered. Depending on time available, I recommend setting aside about twenty minutes to browse through your favorite databases to glean key insights. Of course, any insight you uncover still needs to be tested and validated through the full planning process to ensure it fits your specific mission and context.

I recommend starting with a web search and then considering these four resources depending on your question. No matter where you turn for insight during your tactical literature review, I recommend practicing and playing with any of these sources so that you know how to make the most of the limited time available.

Google Scholar. A quick, broad, and accessible first stop, Google Scholar surfaces sources by number of citations and includes most war and staff college papers, as well as public-facing reports from the Defense Technical Information Center. While some articles may not be immediately available, you can often find a free PDF by digging a bit—or by requesting access through your local library. It’s a familiar and powerful tool for most leaders.

Line of Departure. This newest entry consolidates the Army’s journals onto a web-first, mobile-friendly platform. The search tool is especially strong, allowing users to search across the Army’s journals, all of Army University Press, and all of the Defense Technical Information Center’s public-facing content, or to select and search just one of those.

Combined Arms Research Library (CARL). CARL is best for military-technical subjects. Fort Leavenworth’s library has all back issues of Military Review, student papers dating back to the 1930s, digitized war documents from a variety of campaigns, and thousands of primary-source studies that rarely show up in traditional searches.

Army Heritage and Education Center (AHEC). If CARL is where you go to understand tactics, AHEC is where you go to understand institutions. AHEC has a tremendous repository of memos, letters, and notes dating back to the nineteenth century. Beware though: The wide range of artifacts might lead you to fall down a rabbit hole or two.

These tools are just starting points. The results of a good tactical literature review should inform assumptions, shape risk statements, generate priority information requirements, or refine course-of-action evaluation criteria—not just spark interesting ideas.

Depending on your mission and formation, other resources, like the Center for Army Lessons Learned, the Modern War Institute, or the Defense Technical Information Center, may prove even more useful. The key is to treat these databases like weapon systems: Get familiar with them before you are under pressure. Practice now, so when time is tight, you already know where to look and what to trust.

The tactical literature review is not about writing a term paper—it’s about gaining an edge. A few well-placed clicks might surface the insight that wins your next fight. Large language models are increasingly able to assist in this process, but they still lack the domain-specific nuance required for tactical planning. Human-led reviews remain essential for now.

You Don’t Need Permission to Be Curious

No one needs a tasking order or doctrinal change to start doing tactical literature reviews. When your next tasker drops or you kick off mission analysis, set a timer for twenty minutes and start digging: Google, Google Scholar, Line of Departure, CARL, AHEC. Ask: Has someone solved this before? You’ll be surprised how often the answer is yes and how much better your plan becomes.

Still, as an Army we should not leave this to individual initiative alone. Adding sentences to the chapters in Field Manual 5-0 on the military decision-making process and troop leading procedures would be enough. It could say something like: “Leaders and staffs should also consider historical precedent through a targeted review of professional military literature.” Just that. Current doctrine already supports this mindset. It emphasizes using available knowledge and lessons learned to inform assumptions and planning products—but it does not yet call out scanning professional literature or historical precedent as a deliberate step.

We fight smarter when we remember we are not the first to face these problems. Tactical literature reviews help us borrow brilliance, avoid past mistakes, and bring the weight of history into the fight. Do the research. Then blow the bridges.

Lieutenant Colonel Zachary Griffiths is an Army officer. He directs the Harding Project to renew professional military writing. Learn more about applying for the Harding Fellowship here.

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

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Zachary Griffiths · May 1, 2025

28. Winning Without Fighting: Resilience as National Security Imperative

Excerpts:

In short, the U.S. has been engaged in the space between war and peace for decades. The key difference today is that adversaries are doing so as well.

A second core argument in Winning Without Fighting is that the United States should invest more in political warfare. One of the most difficult U.S. experiences in this domain—the extended Vietnam War era (1962-1975)—paradoxically shows how durable political alignments can be. Domestic divisions around the civil rights movement undercut U.S. credibility as a champion of democracy. Support for the autocratic South Vietnamese government damaged America’s legitimacy in many parts of the world. And the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam in 1975 arguably called America’s alliance commitments into question.

Yet through all that tumult, U.S. influence endured where it mattered most, particularly in Western Europe and with key allies in South Asia. This era shows that political warfare is about more than crafting an effective strategy—it requires managing domestic and international legitimacy—and that alliances and global perception can sustain a great deal of stress, especially if backed by on-the-ground commitments of forces, as the U.S. maintained in key theaters throughout the Cold War.

Third, the gap between rhetoric and reality in U.S. strategy can be prodigious. The authors argue that U.S. policymakers wrongly view war and peace as a dichotomy, rather than recognizing the space in between. This may be true, though the 2022 National Defense Strategy concepts of Integrated Deterrence and Campaigning are a clear move toward the kind of strategic competition the authors advocate.

...

Winning Without Fighting provides a framework for understanding modern strategic competition. While its discussion of U.S. strategic culture focuses more on what U.S. leaders have said than on what they do, the book makes a valuable contribution by highlighting the importance of resilience in an era of persistent shocks. The case for resilience as national security policy should motivate policymakers grappling with what else America can do to compete effectively in a world where the line between war and peace is increasingly blurred. And because it involves significant investments at home, it may be more palatable to the Trump administration than calls for investments overseas.

Winning Without Fighting: Resilience as National Security Imperative

irregularwarfare.org · by Jacob N. Shapiro · May 2, 2025

The Irregular Warfare Initiative (IWI) Editorial Team is proud to launch a new series featuring leading thinkers in the irregular warfare community critically engaging with recent IW-related publications. Curated by IWI editors Barbara Elias and Lewis Fraser, this series goes beyond traditional book reviews. Contributors have been encouraged to challenge ideas, draw connections to their own expertise, and explore how the works shape broader debates in the field.

We are excited to kick off the series with a piece by Jacob Shapiro, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and co-founder of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. A distinguished scholar and veteran, Shapiro brings deep field experience and academic rigor to his analysis of Winning Without Fighting: Irregular Warfare and Strategic Competition in the 21st Century by Rebecca Patterson, Susan Bryant, Ken Gleiman, and Mark Troutman.

What is the New Strategic Environment?

In Winning Without Fighting, Patterson et al. lay out a vision of modern geopolitical competition that departs from traditional U.S. strategic thinking. They argue that we have entered a new era defined by two main elements: the return of strategic competition with China and Russia and a world increasingly plagued by recurring crises—pandemics, climate change disasters, and technological disruptions.

For the authors, this strategic competition is less about preparing for traditional warfare and more about long-term, persistent competition in the space between peace and war. Despite this shift, they argue, the United States’ strategic culture has remained rooted in an outdated binary: war versus peace. Meanwhile, its adversaries—China and Russia—are creating a new reality by utilizing non-military forms of power more effectively, and by tapping military force for actions in this grey zone.

All of this is happening in an environment where shocks are the norm rather than the exception. The COVID-19 pandemic, climate disasters, and cyberattacks illustrate how easily states can be thrown off course. The ability to endure and recover from these shocks with resilience is, the authors argue, just as important to national security as military strength.

This argument has many compelling aspects, but perhaps the book’s most important contribution is how starkly it illustrates that, while some U.S. policy makers and strategic thinkers may talk about war and peace as a binary, the country’s foreign policy has operated intensely in the space between war and peace for 80 years now.

So What is to Be Done?

Patterson and her co-authors contend that the U.S. must adapt its strategic approach, shifting focus toward what happens between war and peace. This means incorporating new tools of power and embracing the types of competition that adversaries already exploit.

The first half of the book delves into why the U.S. strategic approach is the way it is. It attributes much of this to strategic culture—a deeply ingrained mindset that shapes how the country views and conducts international competition. The authors contrast this with the strategic thinking of China and Russia, which operate differently. Chapter 3 focuses on these differences, illustrating how China has embraced economic coercion and technological dominance as core elements of its geopolitical playbook.

The major analytical contribution of Winning Without Fighting is its discussion of the instruments of power. The book builds on the traditional DIME framework—Diplomatic, Information, Military, and Economic power, which has been widely used in national security discourse—by introducing “resilience” as a fifth element to the strategic toolbox.

Resilience is roughly defined as the ability to absorb, manage, and recover from crises that will inevitably strike the U.S. and its allies. The logic is simple: countries that can withstand repeated shocks without losing strategic momentum will have an advantage over the long run.

This new perspective reframes geopolitical competition as a contest of endurance rather than just raw power. The most interesting parts of the book’s second half focus on how this principle should guide military, economic, informational, and resilience strategies. While the book’s recommendations seem like they were tailored to a second Biden administration, they open important conversations for today’s shifting political landscape.

The Difference Between Expressed and Revealed Strategic Culture

Winning Without Fighting reveals three important contradictions in U.S. national security policy:

First, one of the book’s core arguments is that the U.S. has historically failed to think beyond war and peace. This may be true of the professional literature and much of the popular discussion of national security policy, but key aspects of 20th century history suggest the actual policy was quite different.

In many ways, the U.S. consistently competed strategically outside of war, particularly during the Cold War, which the authors discuss in Chapter 4 as a potential model for future U.S. foreign policy. Economic power was explicitly leveraged to contain the Soviet Union. The U.S. invested substantial assets in information warfare, including the United States Information Agency (USIA), funding Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and other media campaigns. Military statecraft was similarly prominent—arms deals, basing agreements, and security partnerships were a key part of Cold War strategy, and after 9/11, the United States doubled down on overseas basing well beyond active combat theaters.

In short, the U.S. has been engaged in the space between war and peace for decades. The key difference today is that adversaries are doing so as well.

A second core argument in Winning Without Fighting is that the United States should invest more in political warfare. One of the most difficult U.S. experiences in this domain—the extended Vietnam War era (1962-1975)—paradoxically shows how durable political alignments can be. Domestic divisions around the civil rights movement undercut U.S. credibility as a champion of democracy. Support for the autocratic South Vietnamese government damaged America’s legitimacy in many parts of the world. And the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam in 1975 arguably called America’s alliance commitments into question.

Yet through all that tumult, U.S. influence endured where it mattered most, particularly in Western Europe and with key allies in South Asia. This era shows that political warfare is about more than crafting an effective strategy—it requires managing domestic and international legitimacy—and that alliances and global perception can sustain a great deal of stress, especially if backed by on-the-ground commitments of forces, as the U.S. maintained in key theaters throughout the Cold War.

Third, the gap between rhetoric and reality in U.S. strategy can be prodigious. The authors argue that U.S. policymakers wrongly view war and peace as a dichotomy, rather than recognizing the space in between. This may be true, though the 2022 National Defense Strategy concepts of Integrated Deterrence and Campaigning are a clear move toward the kind of strategic competition the authors advocate.

Rhetoric aside, the U.S. already operates heavily in the space between war and peace. The U.S. is the unambiguous world leader in peacetime military statecraft, running global exercises, selling arms, and maintaining forward bases. Security cooperation programs are a hallmark of U.S. engagement, and while no one has done a comprehensive accounting, they are likely the largest financial investment in overseas engagement once all the costs of deploying U.S. forces for exercises are considered. And decades of U.S. economic policy have established an international trading system favorable to U.S. interests. Indeed, the existence of Beijing’s efforts to establish an alternative to the dollar-dominated SWIFT system (an interbank payment messaging platform)—which the authors discuss in Chapter 3—actually implies that the U.S. has dominated the very pathways of economic influence which the authors later argue U.S. policymakers fail to treat as important tools of statecraft.

So, while U.S. leaders may talk in binary terms of “war” and “peace,” their actions reflect an understanding of persistent competition. And while the current administration’s emerging strategic posture may prove to be an outlier, the system has long embraced many of the principles the book advocates, as the authors’ discussion of the Cold War so nicely highlights.

What Next?

Where does Winning Without Fighting take us? Overall, the book makes a valuable contribution to strategic thinking. It offers a framework for competition that acknowledges the realities of a crisis-prone world and provides a fresh perspective on resilience as a key instrument of power. And some of the authors’ recommendations open up important discussions.

First, the authors argue for a more coherent U.S. information strategy. This will be challenging under the Trump administration for many reasons. Developing a viewpoint-neutral approach to information warfare is challenging, especially when foreign nations amplify and leverage narratives from domestic actors. And many of the U.S. institutions that the authors identify as pillars of an information strategy—such as the Global Engagement Center (GEC) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—have been disbanded or substantially reoriented. Revitalizing support for journalism and fact-based media is a promising path, but the disbanding of USAID and cessation of funding to the National Endowment for Democracy, a Reagan-era organization that supported investigative journalism and pro-democracy actors around the world, raises the very real question of how the federal government can engage on this front.

Second, the argument for a resilience framework is a key takeaway from the book. The authors propose resilience-building at four levels, each of which suggests some practical actions. At the individual level, the authors want citizens to stockpile essential supplies. A tax credit for emergency preparedness supplies (like the electric vehicle tax credits that drove adoption of electric vehicles) is an obvious step here. At the community level, the authors advocate for promoting awareness and cooperative disaster response norms. Providing federal grants to states to strengthen community-government coordination is an obvious step, especially since state and local officials often lead disaster response efforts. At the national level, the authors advocate for a coherent federal resilience strategy. This idea makes sense but will require significant cross-agency coordination that may be challenging to staff with ongoing reductions to the federal workforce. Finally, at the international level, the authors suggest strengthening allies to improve collective resilience. This approach was a critical part of U.S. success during the Cold War; the challenge will be executing on this priority under the current administration’s shift toward a more transactional foreign policy.

Winning Without Fighting provides a framework for understanding modern strategic competition. While its discussion of U.S. strategic culture focuses more on what U.S. leaders have said than on what they do, the book makes a valuable contribution by highlighting the importance of resilience in an era of persistent shocks. The case for resilience as national security policy should motivate policymakers grappling with what else America can do to compete effectively in a world where the line between war and peace is increasingly blurred. And because it involves significant investments at home, it may be more palatable to the Trump administration than calls for investments overseas.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

Image Credit: Generated on Media.Craiyon.com

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irregularwarfare.org · by Jacob N. Shapiro · May 2, 2025

29. To Fund U.S. Military Modernization, Congress Needs To Pass On-Time Annual Defense Budgets

This should be a BFO (blinding flash of the obvious). But obviously Congress does not seem to get the obvious.

To Fund U.S. Military Modernization, Congress Needs To Pass On-Time Annual Defense Budgets

By Jongsun Kim

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/05/02/to_fund_us_military_modernization_congress_needs_to_pass_on-time_annual_defense_budgets_1107586.html?mc_cid=38055c7c91

On April 7, US President Donald Trump and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made clear their ambitions: a one-trillion-dollar budget by fiscal year (FY) 2026 to fund a modern, agile, and globally competitive military. This is an ambitious goal, but if current funding trends hold, that future is far from guaranteed. Despite ongoing threats and bold declarations from the White House and the Pentagon, defense modernization is being squeezed by flat budgets, rising personnel costs, and a Congress that for more than a quarter century has failed to deliver predictable, on-time annual appropriations, which are essential for sustained military investment.

Look at what happened as recently as last month. In early March, Congress passed the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025, a stopgap measure that locks the Pentagon into last year’s funding levels with only a modest $6.1 billion—or 0.7 percent—increase in defense funding, bringing the total to $892.5 billion. However, after accounting for inflation and rising personnel costs, this amounts to a cut in real terms. The total also falls more than $2.5 billion short of the Biden administration’s earlier $895.2 billion request for FY 2025.

Trump and Hegseth have floated a one-trillion-dollar topline for FY 2026, with congressional Republicans backing projections that hit that mark by 2031. But projections alone won’t modernize the force. The longer Congress relies on continuing resolutions, the further the Pentagon is likely to drift from the trillion-dollar goal.

Talk big, fund small

The biggest casualty of flat budgets is modernization. Of the $6.1 billion increase under the FY 2025 continuing resolution, more than $5.6 billion is consumed by rising personnel costs—including a 4.5 percent military pay raise and a 10 percent bump for junior enlisted. While these expenses are core to sustaining force readiness and quality of life for junior enlisted military personnel, they leave scant room for investment in next-generation weapon systems, shipbuilding, and advanced technology—all of which are needed to counter and deter future global threats.

Moreover, modernization and procurement budgets took hits in the latest continuing resolution—down $7.1 billion and $4.6 billion, respectively, compared to FY 2024. This isn’t a future-proofing strategy. It’s triage. And it reinforces a hard truth: the Pentagon is being forced to choose between readiness now and capabilities tomorrow.

As a result of this approach by Congress, a chasm has emerged between what the Pentagon says it needs and what Congress has been able to fund. Even with increased flexibilities granted under this continuing resolution, including fewer restrictions on program-level spending, the Pentagon cannot modernize on cruise control without deliberate and sustained investment. Without real growth in the defense topline, any flexibility becomes a license to reshuffle limited dollars, not expand capabilities.

Strategic signals, budget headwinds

Additionally, the Trump administration’s early moves—deployments to the southern border and near the Panama Canal, counter-narcotics operations, and a reorientation of posture toward homeland defense and regional security initiatives—highlight a shift in defense priorities. But these actions are being underwritten by a budget that isn’t built for strategic transformation.

This spring, the Trump administration’s FY 2026 request is expected to better reflect the new administration’s priorities, since the current budget was mostly shaped by the previous administration and major changes take time to fully appear. One key area to watch is its proposed $50 billion reallocation plan, redirecting funds from “noncritical” areas toward defense programs such as nuclear modernization, missile defense, drone technology, autonomous weapons, and cybersecurity. The Trump administration likely considers these activities necessary to bolster border security and strengthen US military capabilities in response to perceived threats to the homeland.

Regardless of the merits of using defense dollars and personnel for homeland security efforts, without a significant increase in overall funding, the administration will face tough choices between delivering on these priorities and meeting modernization and readiness goals.

The path forward: Congress holds the key

None of this is sustainable without a timely and predictable appropriations process. Even after making tough trade-offs, the Department of Defense cannot sustain modernization, support military pay raises, and reinvigorate domestic policy initiatives without meaningful real-term growth in its overall budget topline.

While continuing resolutions offer short-term stability, they erode long-term planning and procurement. They lock in outdated funding priorities, stall new projects and procurement efforts before they begin, and limit the Defense Department’s capacity to invest in multi-year efforts that benefit from future financial predictability. When the Department of Defense has to begin the fiscal year without an annual appropriations bill in place, it can lead to training disruptions due to uncertainty over available resources, as well as deferred equipment and facility maintenance, which can cause backlogs and increase long-term costs. It can also cause delays in awarding new contracts, affecting industrial base stability and workforce planning. Continuing resolutions also lead to cost inefficiencies from operating under constrained funding and require higher costs to “catch up” later. These stopgap measures also risk a gradual degradation of military readiness from the inability to execute planned operations, training, and maintenance. Even omnibus bills, often seen as a compromise, fall short of the predictability and purchasing power that full-year appropriations—enacted before the start of a fiscal year—offer. Relying on omnibus bills creates uncertainty for long-term modernization efforts and reduces the Defense Department’s ability to plan, start contracts, and invest early in the fiscal year.

The Pentagon needs more than authority and increased flexibility—it needs actual dollars. Timely appropriations passed by Congress are essential to making that possible. Yet persistent delays have become the norm rather than the exception. Without consistent, meaningful, and sustained funding, modernization will remain an ambition rather than a battlefield reality. The one-trillion-dollar vision for the defense budget may serve short-term political goals, but absent decisive and urgent action by Congress, the numbers won’t add up.

One important step Congress can take each year is to pass the annual defense appropriations bill on time, fulfilling its constitutional duty to fund essential government programs and defense functions that serve the national interest. A timely and focused appropriations bill would restore predictability to the budget process and enhance the capacity of the defense industrial base. It would also give military leaders the certainty they need to plan, build, and make more effective long-term investments across administrations.

Congress holds the keys. The question is whether it has the political will to turn them.

Jongsun A. Kim is a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense initiative of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and a former deputy comptroller for budget and appropriations affairs at the Department of Defense.

This article appeared originally at Atlantic Council.

30. The Fall of Saigon: The Day Domino Theory Died

Cover Story

The Fall of Saigon: The Day Domino Theory Died

Fifty years after the communist victory in Vietnam, the old domino theory seems to have been definitively replaced by a deeper conflict determined by history, power, and geography.

https://magazine.thediplomat.com/2025-05/the-fall-of-saigon-the-day-domino-theory-died

By Nayan Chanda

On a cloudy April morning 50 years ago, I watched a North Vietnamese tank crash through the gates of Saigon’s Independence Palace, symbolically toppling what many feared would be the first domino on the path to a communist takeover of Southeast Asia.

Today, from the distance of half a century, it is clear that North Vietnam’s victory in fact shattered the foundations of the United States’ domino theory, blowing open a long hidden intracommunist antagonism and triggering the Third Indochina War. Fifty years later, a truce exists but behind the forced smiles and flowery words of friendship, China and Vietnam continue their shadowboxing.

The much-publicized mid-April visit to Vietnam and Cambodia by Chinese leader Xi Jinping offered new evidence of what Vietnamese diplomat Tran Quang Co once described as China’s “two-faced” policy and the identical Vietnamese response.

Weeks before Xi arrived, the Communist Party of Vietnam’s General Secretary To Lam traveled to the border provinces to commemorate the martyrdom of tens of thousands of Vietnamese who died during China’s punitive invasion in 1979. Lest the world forget the serious contentions between China and Vietnam over the South China Sea – which the Vietnamese call the East Sea – Hanoi announced on the eve of Xi’s visit the creation of special zones incorporating the Paracel and Spratly Islands that China claims. Significantly, one of the special zones covered once disputed Phu Quoc island near the Chinese-refurbished Ream Naval Base in Cambodia.

Those developments were still in the womb of the future when communist tanks crashed into the palace gates in Saigon.

U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson sent the first tranche of U.S. troops to Vietnam in 1965. He believed, like Dwight D. Eisenhower, that South Vietnam was in danger of becoming the first domino to fall.

“You knock over the first one,” Eisenhower had predicted, “what will happen to the last one is that it will go over very quickly.”

Despite fears that the fall of Saigon would prove Eisenhower right, setting off a wider tumble into communism, ultimately only Indochina – the three countries embroiled in the Second Indochina War – succumbed to communist rule. The Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia on April 17, just before Saigon fell, and the Pathet Lao followed, overthrowing the Kingdom of Laos on December 2, 1975. But there the dominoes stopped falling.

North Vietnamese soldiers photographed not far from the palace after its capture.

Photo by Nayan Chanda.

Knocking Down the Domino Theory

In a twist of irony, the biggest believers in the domino theory turned out to be none other than the Vietnamese communists, their erstwhile Cambodian comrades, and even the crusty communist boss in Pyongyang.

When North Vietnamese tanks were racing toward Saigon in April 1975, North Korean leader Kim Il Sung secretly boarded his armored train to rush to Beijing. His mission: get Chairman Mao Zedong’s support to launch his long-awaited march to take over Seoul. Meeting Mao on April 18, the day after the Khmer Rouge had marched into Phnom Penh, Kim said, “Their [Vietnam’s and Cambodia’s] victories are the same as a victory for us.”

Then he suggested reunifying the Korean Peninsula by force of arms, much like Vietnam was about to be. Mao, of course, would have none of it. China would not entertain any further adventurism or a second crossing of the Yalu River after having sealed U.S. support against the Soviet “revisionist” threat.

Similarly, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, who had beaten the Vietnamese communists by 13 days in storming their country’s capital, Phnom Penh, secretly got in touch with some insurgents in Southeast Asia. Like the Chinese, who envisaged a new game of dominos in Southeast Asia, their Cambodian acolytes prepared for a new war. Speaking to Chinese Communist Party Chairman Hua Guofeng in 1977, Pol Pot, the shadowy leader of the Khmer Rouge, spoke of working with Burmese, Malaysian, Indonesian, and Thai friends and uniting Southeast Asia against Vietnam.

Meanwhile in Saigon, the image of the collapse of the old regime amid frenzied helicopter flights and swelling rumors of an impending communist bloodbath added to the sense of foreboding. Nearly a weeklong communication blackout by the new authorities allowed foreign radio stations to speculate on what terrible fate may have befallen silenced Saigon. The handful of foreign reporters who remained, including myself, spent time tuning to shortwave broadcasts while sampling fresh strawberries with cream brought from newly liberated Dalat at the journalist’s hangout, the Givral Café.

Although dazed by the speed and scale of their victory, the Vietnamese leaders were confident that the Americans would read the signs of time and return. As one official explained, the Americans knew that Vietnam had long been the cork in the bottle of Chinese expansion. Surely Washington could not ignore the diktats of history and geopolitics by refusing to shake Vietnam’s hand at the end of a hard-fought contest. Hoang Tung, the editor of the party daily, told me that Vietnam had no desire to humiliate the United States by releasing sensitive documents left behind in Saigon.

Of course, the Vietnamese media could not resist celebrating. After the stunning victory against U.S. imperialism, a path had been opened for the march of socialism in Southeast Asia, broadcasters on the Voice of Vietnam intoned. Watching the massive quantities of U.S. tanks, guns, and aircraft abandoned in Vietnam, diplomats in the region wondered where those weapons would now be pointed by the victorious Vietnamese. In the end, some of the abandoned American arms and ammunition reached rebels in Latin America via Cuba, but cautious Vietnam did not seek to play the role of revolutionary vanguard.

Even though triumphal posturing on the radio did not result in a wider regional revolution, some Vietnamese leaders seemed ready to do what Marxist revolutionaries were expected to do – impose socialism on the south.

“We must lead the peasantry and agriculture immediately to socialism,” Party Secretary Le Duan declared in 1976. It was contrary to the initial statements by senior cadres in the south and some seasoned northerners that Hanoi would not be in a hurry to impose northern socialism.

In retrospect, switching the clock on the Saigon City Hall to Hanoi time was perhaps the least controversial of the measures undertaken by the new revolutionary administration.

Tens of thousands of former regime soldiers and officers were ordered to attend re-education camps. For ordinary soldiers and low-ranking officers, it was for a day or a few weeks; for some officers the incarceration lasted up to 17 years.

In 1976, I met several Saigon regime military officers – including the famous South Vietnamese general Le Minh Dao – in a re-education camp. In a monitored conversation, Dao, strumming a guitar, told me he was waiting to be educated to “adapt myself to the new society to serve the people.” To prove he was being well treated, he told me he had gained four kilograms, “like many of us here.”

He was not released until 1992, when he was allowed to emigrate to the United States.

Generals at reeducation camp in 1976. Gen. Le Minh Dao is the man with the guitar, the others are unidentified.

Photo by Nayan Chanda

Had Ho Chi Minh lived, he would likely have done more to push for national reconciliation. A southern cadre said, “He would not have allowed such treatments of our southern compatriots.” These wounds were compounded by the perception that northern cadres dominated both the political and bureaucratic apparatus in the unified state.

As the party leaders rushed to improvise mechanisms to control the populous and unruly South, they had to deal with resistance from southern cadres about the pace of socialization and dissension within the ranks of the northerners.

Corruption and Economic Crisis

The Communist Party’s Fourth Party Congress in 1976 promised “a chicken in every pot” as part of its Second Five-Year Plan (1976–1980). The government expected that all industry and agriculture in the South would be state controlled by the end of 1979. What followed was a deep economic crisis, severe food shortages, hyperinflation, and crippling unemployment. Economic mismanagement, severed international aid, and poor weather conditions combined with threat of armed conflict along the border brought the country to a precipice.

Hundreds of thousands of citizens from bloated cities and towns were sent to inhospitable New Economic Zones, from where many sneaked back to civilization. Hong Ha, an editor of the Communist Party newspaper, told me the government had to deal with the “capitalist heart” of Chinatown beating in the socialist body of Vietnam. A demonetization campaign launched in 1976 overnight turned many citizens into paupers.

As relations with China soured, Hanoi stepped up its campaign against ethnic Chinese residents (called “Hoa”). Their small clandestine departures in rickety rafts swelled over time into massive organized sailings in large boats with payments to officials in gold bars. The exodus of a million of these so-called “boat people” in the first 15 years of unification stands as a historical rebuke to Hanoi’s failed leadership.

South Vietnamese were no strangers to corruption, but having been fed on stories of Ho Chi Minh’s incorruptible soldiers, Saigonese chuckled over the graft of their new rulers.

A former officer of the North Vietnamese army told me “You must understand that corruption in some way is inevitable. The bo doi (soldier), the can bo (cadre) who have for years lived in the jungle, mountains or in the North under terrible condition, are dazzled by the apparent luxury of Saigon and tempted by it.” And profiting was all too easy, the officer said, citing an example: “Can bo sells official gasoline. [He only has to] Falsify the receipt to embezzle funds.”

North Vietnamese soldiers, bo doi, squatted or simply sat on the pavements ad chatted with Saigon residents after the fall.

Photo by Nayan Chanda

Another portly southern cadre whom reporters called “uncle VC” was pained by poverty-induced corruption. His wife had opened a curb side café to make ends meet.

“Between corruption and café, I have chosen café,” he said.

Saigonese displayed their black humor about their new penury by erasing all but the first three words of the ubiquitous Ho Chi Minh slogan adorning the city’s walls: “There is nothing more precious than independence and freedom.”

The edited version starkly blared: “There is nothing.”

Corruption grew dramatically when new economic policy eased socialist control and more money flowed into the system. In 1986, the party retreated from its revolutionary path. The reforms marked a pragmatic shift from ideological rigidity to economic flexibility. While maintaining the political monopoly of the Communist Party, the reforms introduced a market-based economy, encouraged private enterprise, allowed foreign investment, and liberalized agriculture and trade.

The results were swift and profound. By the 1990s, Vietnam had transformed into one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia, with GDP growth rates regularly exceeding 7 percent. Poverty rates, which stood at over 70 percent in 1993, had fallen below 5 percent by 2020. The country became a success story for development economists, who lauded the new tiger economy’s inclusive growth, disciplined fiscal policy, and gradual but steady integration into the global economy.

China’s Unease

The early revolutionary zeal of Vietnam’s victorious leadership was further inflamed by the challenge from its giant neighbor to the north – China. From the outset, Beijing was deeply skeptical about the wisdom of Vietnam’s rapid reunification. Since 1954, when China pressured Ho Chi Minh to accept the division of Vietnam, Beijing had advised a slow move toward absorbing the free-wheeling South into the socialist North.

Declassified documents show that China’s Premier Zhou Enlai was willing to accept that another long-term division of Vietnam would emerge from the 1973 Paris Accords. He said there was a need for a five- to ten-year status quo, during which South Vietnam could “build peace, independence, and neutrality.”

It was not lost on Hanoi’s leaders that such counsels of moderation also fit well with China’s strategic objective of keeping Vietnam divided and weak. Given their clear-eyed assessments of Chinese thinking, the Vietnamese were quite right to suspect mischief behind China’s newfound concerns about the welfare of ethnic Chinese in Vietnam and their encouragement to depart the country. During the same period, China notably maintained a studious silence about the Khmer Rouge’s mistreatment of the Chinese Cambodian community.

That a new domino theory involving Vietnam had come into circulation is evidenced by the abovementioned documents, published in 1998 as part of a working paper produced by the Woodrow Wilson international Center for Scholars’ Cold War International History Project under the title “77 Conversations Between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the Wars in Indochina, 1964-1977,” edited by Odd Arne Westad, Chen Jian, Stein Tønnesson, Nguyen Vu Tung, and and James G. Hershberg.

In September 1977, Pol Pot told Hua Guofeng, Mao’s hand-picked but short-serving successor, that Cambodia was concerned “about the constant threat from Vietnam. Not only does Vietnam want to annex Cambodia and Laos, it also wants to occupy the whole of Southeast Asia.”

Hua responded by saying, “Your strategy regarding the neighboring countries is correct.”

The Vietnamese were convinced that China had orchestrated the anti-Vietnam campaign by the Khmer Rouge and managed to scuttle the U.S. plan to normalize diplomatic relations with Hanoi. A senior Vietnamese diplomat, Tran Quang Co, who was slated to be foreign minister, wrote an unauthorized memoir that began to circulate in 2003. By his candid account, “In 1977, there was a realistic chance for us to normalize relations with the United States, but we missed that opportunity. At that time, egged on by Beijing, the Pol Pot government started a border war against us [the war began on April 30, 1977], and it unilaterally cut diplomatic relations with our country on 31 December 1977.”

Whether Beijing was actually responsible for the conflict, I got to witness that border war during a visit to Vietnam a year later in the spring of 1978.

Along with three other journalist colleagues, I was awakened in my hotel bed in Saigon to rush to the airport. There, a rusting American helicopter with a gaping, glassless hole for a window – a legacy of the departed Thieu regime – waited to fly us to a Mekong Delta village on the Cambodian border. Apparently the man in charge of dealing with Cambodia, Le Duc Tho, wanted foreign journalists to witness the scene of a massacre by the Khmer Rouge before the blazing sun made the evidence unobservable.

And see we did. A string of Vietnamese villages lay in ruin after the cross-border raid by Pol Pot’s men, who considered those villages to be theirs. Although the main targets of the genocide were ethnic Vietnamese, Cambodians suspected of anti-regime sentiment were also targeted as “Khmer bodies with [a] Vietnamese soul.” In sprawling refugee camps in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, we saw able-bodied Cambodian men who had fled from murderous assaults who were now undergoing training, and would soon join the Vietnamese army in ousting the Pol Pot regime.

On Christmas Day in 1978, after foreign journalists had left Cambodia, Vietnamese regulars riding tanks led the assault on Phnom Penh. The Chinese ambassador and hundreds of advisers retreated to the Thai border along with the Khmer Rouge leadership. The Vietnamese army installed their Cambodian friends, led by Heng Samrin and Hun Sen, as the new government.

Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea turned out to be the next domino to be toppled after the Nguyen Van Thieu government in Saigon. In preparation for the conflict with the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam signed the Treaty of Friendship with Moscow in November 1978. That linked the Third Indochina War firmly to the ongoing Cold War.

Ruins of a hospital in Cao Bang, in northern Vietnam that was blown up by the invading Chinese in February 1979.

Photo by Nayan Chanda

The Cold War Turns Hot (Again) in Southeast Asia

For the next decade, all of Indochina and its Southeast Asian neighbors were plunged into war. Millions of Cambodian refugees escaped from conflict and hunger to gather along the Thai border to be cared for by the United Nations and international NGOs. The Khmer Rouge along the border and in Thai hotels received Chinese supplies that flowed through Sattahip port. Armed with Chinese weapons, brought through the newly created “Deng Xiaoping trail,” the Khmer Rouge battled with Vietnamese soldiers who had fanned out across the Cambodian provinces.

Except for some strips of Cambodian territory along the borders with Thailand and Laos, the Khmer Rouge did not control much. But their armed presence – along with non-communist elements supported by ASEAN and the U.S. – gave body to the fiction of a rival government still representing Democratic Kampuchea. China deployed all its diplomatic prowess and power of the purse to carry on the charade of a legitimate government in Cambodia that was battling Vietnamese invaders. Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister Ieng Sary ostentatiously occupied the seat marked “Democratic Kampuchea” at the United Nations. It was a rare occasion when a genocidal leader was supported by a majority of U.N. members.

In an interview in 1979, Ieng Sary admitted to me that the Khmer Rouge killed “several thousands” of enemies. China’s Vice Foreign Minister Han Nianlong, who led China’s Cambodia strategy, was annoyed when I told him I had witnessed countless remains in Cambodia’s mass graves.

“Yes, they made mistakes,” he grudgingly conceded of the Khmer Rouge, “serious mistakes.”

But, so committed was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to set right the fallen Khmer Rouge domino that he would not try to hide his support for the genocidal group – despite serving a president so often associated with human rights.

Brzezinski told journalist Elizabeth Becker, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the D.K. [Khmer Rouge government-in-exile of Democratic Kampuchea]. The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.”

More than restoring the sovereignty of the Cambodian people, both Brzezinski and the Chinese wanted to punish a victorious Vietnam, now backed by Moscow. This common purpose united the two superpowers and hindered Vietnamese ambitions to normalize relations with its erstwhile enemy in the United States. Vietnamese pride and China-U.S. collaboration against Hanoi foiled the normalization of relations.

Tran Quang Co’s memoir confirms what I learned while interviewing the major players in the Vietnam-America drama for my 1986 book “Brother Enemy: The War after the War.”

When the U.S.-Vietnamese normalization talks opened in Paris in May 1977, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke offered to establish relations without any preconditions. “Mr. Minister,” Holbrooke told his Vietnamese interlocutor, “let’s leave aside the issues that divide us. Let us go outside and jointly declare to the press that we have decided to normalize relations."

But his Vietnamese counterpart, Vice Minister Phan Hien, would not hear of it. The United States, he insisted, would have to honor President Richard Nixon’s secret pledge of $4.7 billion in reconstruction and commodity aid. Reports of Vietnamese demands based on Nixon’s secret pledge touched a raw nerve in the U.S. Congress, which overwhelmingly voted against any reparations to Vietnam.

Ken Quinn, Holbrooke’s special assistant at the time, who would later serve as U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, had told me the Vietnamese stuck stubbornly to their aid demand out of a sense of moral victory.

“It was as if the justness of the Vietnamese struggle would not be fully recognized if the Americans were allowed to come back to Vietnam without paying some reparations,” Quinn said.

Clearly the wounded pride of the Vietnamese communists – the ones who toppled the U.S. domino – was at play.

Years later, writing in his memoir, Tran Quang Co, the Vietnamese diplomat intimately involved in the U.S. negotiation, was candidly remorseful. “Our rejection of the American suggestion that we ‘normalize relations without any conditions’ and our arrogance when ASEAN indicated that it wanted Vietnam to join this regional organization resulted in extremely harmful consequences for our people and for our country,” he wrote. “Would China have dared to help the genocidal Pol Pot clique in its provocations against us or have dared to attack us in 1979 if after our victory in 1975 Vietnam had truly followed a strategy of ‘more friends and fewer enemies’?”

An arrogant Vietnam, Co essentially said, had overplayed its hand.

Reconciliation With China – and America

In the end, Vietnam has reverted to its tried and tested policy of making up with the Middle Kingdom, as Vietnam’s historical leaders frequently did after defeating China in battle. Tributes would be sent, sometimes a Vietnamese masquerading as a king carrying the tribute to give China face. A truce would be secured for a period, until the Chinese empire had the itch to reoccupy its former tributary.

That’s what seems to have happened in Chengdu in 1990.

Co’s memoir revealed details of the secret summit in Chengdu in September of that year, which marked the conclusion of a truce between China and Vietnam. The Communist Party of Vietnam’s General Secretary Nguyen Van Linh, accompanied by then-current and former prime ministers, flew to the central Chinese city, where they agreed to bury the hatchet on Cambodia. China, which was reeling from world condemnation of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, had new reasons to be conciliatory. For the Vietnamese, the agreement they reached meant swallowing their pride and agreeing to have the murderous Khmer Rouge represented in a coalition government.

By the end of 1989, Vietnamese forces had withdrawn from Cambodia, meeting one of the Chinese demands. Now after the Chengdu conclave the foundation was set to put an end to the Cambodia conflict and form a four-party coalition government under a United Nations umbrella.

Another of Co’s surprising revelations was the ideological split between the conservative, effectively pro-Chinese, leadership of Linh and Defense Minister Le Duc Anh and the liberal Foreign Ministry camp under the leadership of Nguyen Co Thach. Linh and friends tried to flatter China by calling for a “Red Solution” – a deal between comrades – an offer that was ignored by China. But the Chinese wanted their pound of flesh. Thach was not only barred from the Chengdu meeting, he was removed from his government and party positions. Thach’s proverbial head formed part of the tribute carried by the leadership.

A North Vietnamese tank on the grounds of the palace in Saigon.

Photo by Nayan Chanda

For some years conservatives continued to nurse their wounds for their failure to get moral recognition for their victory. In 1995, six years after Vietnam ended its decade-long occupation of Cambodia, it and the United States finally established diplomatic ties.

At first, the relationship was a rocky one. I was in Vietnam in December 2000 to cover the visit by then-U.S. President Bill Clinton – the first visit by a sitting U.S. president to Vietnam. A veteran party member shook his head in disbelief as he read out to me a secret directive urging party members to show Clinton a “cold face” to remind him of all the crimes the U.S. had committed. American diplomatic sources confirmed that the lecture that Clinton was subjected to by his Vietnamese interlocutors was “outrageous.”

However, U.S.-Vietnam relations since have undergone a sea change. Abandoning the dream of being the outpost of socialism in Asia that worried its neighbors, Vietnam seems to have set its mind on becoming a vanguard of capitalist globalization. Socialism, of course, is entrenched, especially when it concerns the party’s monopoly on political power. Dissenters are sent to jail and even though the internet is free and not behind a China-like “great firewall,” Vietnamese citizens have to watch what they write on Facebook. But a market-based economy, encouragement of private enterprise and foreign investment, and liberalization of agriculture and trade have gone a long way to reintegrate formerly marginalized southern entrepreneurs into public life.

The South has emerged as the country’s business and industrial hub. Benefitting from improved infrastructure, and a young, educated, and relatively inexpensive labor force, Vietnam has ridden the wave of “China plus one.” Vietnam’s emergence as the manufacturer of half of the world’s Nike shoes and as the third-largest manufacturer of smartphones has helped remove a lot of southern antipathy toward the North.

The China-U.S.-Vietnam Triangle, 50 Years Later

Of course, all this progress is now shadowed by the Trump tariff cloud. Displaying its habitual pragmatism, Vietnam welcomed Donald Trump 2.0 with enthusiasm. Even before the election results were announced, Vietnamese officials in the U.S. were quick to invite Trump enterprises to invest in the country. Within days of his November 2024 victory, Vietnam’s new Communist Party general secretary was on the phone to personally congratulate the U.S. president-elect.

In March, a representative of the Trump Organization was received by Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh, who promised to expedite the organization’s plans to build a $1.5 billion development in Vietnam. Laid out in an October 2024 agreement with Hung Yen Hospitality, the project will include golf courses, hotels, resorts, and residences in the home province of General Secretary To Lam. Ground-breaking is reportedly set for May.

It was not surprising that while welcoming Chinese leader Xi Jinping last month, Lam steered clear of any talk on tariffs while the Chinese leader took potshots at Trump’s unwinnable trade war. By choosing to visit Vietnam and Cambodia shortly after Trump’s tariff war has shaken the region, the Chinese leader clearly wanted to show which country is here to stay and take up a leadership role that is being thrown away by Washington.

As could be expected, given he visited Hanoi just weeks before the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second Indochina War, Xi recalled China’s assistance to the Vietnamese struggle against the French, Japanese, and the Americans while remaining silent about China's own disapproval of Vietnam’s approach to Laos and Cambodia.

In the 1960s, Chinese leaders encouraged Vietnam’s leadership in fighting the imperialists. Zhou Enlai said in 1967, “The struggle of Vietnam is in the common interest of the Indochinese and Southeast Asian peoples.” But with the Americans abandoning Indochina, Beijing had a different worry. “Swollen-headed Vietnamese” were seen to be acting as Soviet proxies in the era after the Sino-Soviet split. Remembering China’s cold fury at the liberation of South Vietnam in 1975, To Lam chose not to mention the Second Indochina War or the coming anniversary in his public comments with Xi.

In off-the-cuff remarks from Washington on April 15, as Xi embarked on his visit to Vietnam, Trump said, “I don’t blame China; I don’t blame Vietnam… That’s a lovely meeting. Meeting like, trying to figure out: ‘How do we screw the United States of America?’”

A Young guerrilla fighter stands on the balcony of the independence palace in 1975.

Photo by Nayan Chanda

He couldn’t be further from the truth.

Lam ignored Xi’s barb about tariffs and the trade war and spoke vaguely about working toward multilateral world order and economic openness.

While Xi may have planned the visit to fall on the eve of the anniversary of the U.S. military exit to display enduring Chinese presence in the region, Vietnam’s actions prior to Xi’s arrival – from honoring those killed during China’s 1979 invasion and setting up special zones to prepare to defend its sovereignty in the sea – left no doubt that the domino theory of a great communist wave is well dead and buried.

Vietnam continues to maintain its vigilant stance toward a “two-faced” China, as advised by Tran Quang Co. “Normalizing relations with China is a strategic requirement for Vietnam,” he wrote. “Because China is carrying out a two-faced policy toward us, so our policy in dealing with China should also have two faces, one being cooperation and the other being struggle.”

By praising China and signing a slew of agreements with China to expand transportation, investment and technological cooperation Vietnam showed its friendly face.

Fifty years after the communist victory, the old domino theory seems to have been definitively replaced by a conflict a thousand years in the making, one determined by history, power and geography. As Foreign Minister Thach never tired of reminding his interlocutors, “You can choose your friends but not your neighbors.”

The Authors

Nayan Chanda is an associate professor of international relations at Ashoka University, India. He was Saigon bureau chief of the Far Eastern Economic Review and later editor of the magazine. He was founding editor of YaleGlobal and director of publications at Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. He is the author of “Brother Enemy: The War After the War” (1986) and “Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization” (2007). Chanda is the winner of the 2005 Shorenstein Award for Journalism jointly given by Harvard and Stanford Universities.

31.Analysis: Rubio’s hardest task in his tough new role may be keeping his job

Excerpts:

It is that loyalty that appears to have endeared Rubio to Trump, and to have led to his latest promotion — even if he’s still regarded as an imposter by some sections of the MAGA movement.

“Marco Rubio, unbelievable, unbelievable Marco. When I have a problem, I call up Marco. He gets it solved,” the president said Thursday.

But everyone who serves Trump knows his faith can be fickle.

Rubio’s biggest job as the face of US diplomacy is therefore not preserving world peace, defusing a risky clash with China or keeping Americans safe. It’s making sure he doesn’t become a problem for his mercurial boss that even he can’t solve.

Analysis: Rubio’s hardest task in his tough new role may be keeping his job | CNN Politics

CNN · by Stephen Collinson · May 2, 2025

Secretary of State Marco Rubio attends a meeting of the Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias Task Force at the Justice Department in Washington, DC, on April 22, 2025.

Ken Cedeno/Reuters

CNN —

The disarray in Donald Trump’s foreign policy team is mirroring the chaos and uncertainty that he’s foisted upon the world in the last three months.

The president’s ouster of national security adviser Mike Waltz on Thursday and his decision to hand Waltz’s White House portfolio to Secretary of State Marco Rubio comes at a fraught moment in international relations.

The trade war that Trump ignited with China is beginning to damage the economy with no easy way out. The administration’s drive to forge peace in Ukraine is yet to bear fruit. And American soft power has been hamstrung by Trump’s attacks on allies and his throttling of US aid.

But Rubio’s most exacting challenge will be at home.

And even if he does a great job, it’s unlikely he’ll be able to impose much coherence on US foreign policy. That’s because the most — and perhaps only — important influence on the America’s global role is Trump himself.

The president is unpredictable, volatile and determined to pursue policies that subvert the principles of US global leadership that have been ingrained since World War II. He cozies up to authoritarians, threatens to annex territory of NATO allies and treats foreign policy more as a giant real estate deal than statecraft. That’s one reason why his envoy Steve Witkoff, a real estate mogul, is handling talks on Ukraine, the Middle East and Iran — a role that has already raised questions about Rubio’s influence over foreign policy.

The whole point of Trump’s approach is not to send the world a message that the US is a stable, consistent power that can be relied upon. This is what his voters — who bought into his claim that the world has forever been ripping off the US — wanted.

The best case for this erratic approach was made by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on ABC News’ “This Week,” speaking about the president’s trade escalation on China: “In game theory it’s called strategic uncertainty,” Bessent said. “So, you’re not going to tell the person on the other side of the negotiation where you’re going to end up.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appears on ABC News's “This Week" on April 27, 2025.

From ABC News

Trump’s critics have another description for it: total chaos.

Further complicating Rubio’s position is that any policy pursued by Trump’s subordinates can be blown up at any moment — as his first-term national security team discovered. The idea that officials serve at the pleasure of the president has never previously come with such a guarantee of impermanence. His ad hoc leadership was underscored Thursday when Tammy Bruce, the State Department spokeswoman, was informed of her boss’s new responsibilities by CNN’s Kylie Atwood during a briefing.

All of which is to say that Rubio faces huge challenges as the first official to serve as both secretary of state and national security adviser since Henry Kissinger — and doing so under a president whose foreign policy is an extension of his volatile personality.

How Rubio is earning the trust of a former GOP primary foe

Still, there are signs that the former Florida senator and 2016 candidate for the GOP nomination has forged a workable relationship with the president. As Rubio visibly sank in his chair during the extraordinary dressing-down Trump administered to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in their notorious Oval Office meeting, many foreign policy observers thought that he might be the first foreign policy big dog to leave the administration.

But he’s still there — and getting more responsibility.

One key to Rubio’s success so far is his willingness to lavish praise on Trump almost every time he’s in front of a camera. He repeatedly stresses that the president is calling the foreign policy shots and his job is to implement his boss’s wishes.

“This president inherited 30 years of foreign policy that was built around what was good for the world,” Rubio said in front of Trump at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday. “In essence, the decisions we made as a government, in trade, in foreign policy was basically, is it good for the world? Is it good for the global community? And under President Trump, we’re making a foreign policy now that’s — was it good for America? …. Does it make America stronger? Does it make America safer? And does it make America richer?”

President Donald Trump speaks next to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 30.

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Such positioning is fine at home in the US. But when Rubio goes on the road — in a world that is conditioned to expect US leadership, not provocations — he is inevitably confronted with awkward moments. He was, for instance, asked by reporters to explain the president’s demands for Canada to become the 51st state while on Canadian soil.

This is a notion that would have been regarded as absurd and insulting by any previous modern US president. Given the traditional conservative ideals Rubio once espoused, it would have been to him as well when he served on the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees. But Rubio didn’t risk getting crossways with a president who sees everything on cable TV. “There is a disagreement between the president’s position and the position of the Canadian government,” Rubio said, somehow implying that Trump’s stance was legitimate and not one of the most outlandish threats in modern US history.

Rubio’s embrace of Trump’s “Make America great again” dogma has dismayed some of his former Senate friends, especially Democrats, who voted along with Republicans to confirm him as secretary of state 99-0. But no one who watched Rubio’s speech at the Republican National Convention last year — and his embrace of the opponent who called him “Little Marco” on the 2016 campaign trail — could have been at all surprised.

Rubio has real talent. As a young, politically adept Republican with Cuban immigrant parents, he was once seen as someone who could broaden the party’s appeal. But the party that he prepared for half his life to lead as a Florida legislator and senator — solidly in the robust Republican tradition of strong defense, support for allies, antipathy toward authoritarianism and support for human rights — no longer exists. This is why many of Rubio’s disappointed advocates in the political center believe he has compromised his principles for power, perhaps because of his unfulfilled presidential ambitions.

But Rubio’s conversion feels complete. He has been at the forefront of Trump’s attempts to use foreign policy to expand his own presidential powers and a key player in actions that test common interpretations of the rule of law. This is especially the case as he’s tried to boost Trump’s mass deportation program.

The secretary of state used controversial powers to detain pro-Palestinian protesters who took part in protests over Israel’s assault on Gaza following Hamas terrorist attacks in 2023. He has declared that many of those involved took actions that are detrimental to US foreign policy — a categorization that suggests almost endless scope to suppress speech among resident aliens that the government doesn’t like. Rubio maintains such protests violate prohibitions on students with US visas taking part in political activity in favor of groups like Hamas.

“We don’t want terrorists in America,” Rubio said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” in March. “I don’t know where we have gotten it in our head that a visa is some sort of birthright. … If you violate the terms of your visitation, you’re going to leave.”

Rubio has also been deeply involved in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented migrant living in Maryland who was deported to a notorious prison in his native El Salvador despite a judge’s order that he not be sent there. He told reporters this week that he’d never say whether he’s spoken to Salvadoran President Najib Bukele about the case, following a Supreme Court ruling that the government must “facilitate” Garcia’s return.

“I would never tell you that,” Rubio responded to reporter who asked about a possible return of the man. “And you know who else I’ll never tell? A judge,” Rubio added, saying it was “because the conduct of our foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States and the executive branch, not some judge.”

It is that loyalty that appears to have endeared Rubio to Trump, and to have led to his latest promotion — even if he’s still regarded as an imposter by some sections of the MAGA movement.

“Marco Rubio, unbelievable, unbelievable Marco. When I have a problem, I call up Marco. He gets it solved,” the president said Thursday.

But everyone who serves Trump knows his faith can be fickle.

Rubio’s biggest job as the face of US diplomacy is therefore not preserving world peace, defusing a risky clash with China or keeping Americans safe. It’s making sure he doesn’t become a problem for his mercurial boss that even he can’t solve.

CNN · by Stephen Collinson · May 2, 2025

32. ‘This is going to be a challenge’: Military services steeling for impact from civilian resignations

‘This is going to be a challenge’: Military services steeling for impact from civilian resignations

Stars and Stripes · by Svetlana Shkolnikova · April 30, 2025

Army Lt. Gen. Brian Eifler, the service’s deputy chief of staff for personnel, testifies April 30, 2025, at a House Armed Services Committee hearing. (Eric Kayne/Stars and Stripes)

WASHINGTON — Tens of thousands of civilian employees who work for the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Space Force are voluntarily resigning as part of the Defense Department’s effort to trim its workforce, forcing the services to restructure to minimize operational gaps.

Personnel chiefs for each of the services told a House Armed Services Committee subpanel on Wednesday that they will feel an impact from the Pentagon’s deferred resignation program and early retirement initiative and are analyzing where the effects will be felt most.

“The civilians maintain an important role for us, for our readiness, for our continuity,” said Lt. Gen. Brian Eifler, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel. “We are doing some reorganization because of that. That’s something we’re looking closely at to make sure we don’t have a gap in our coverage as far as the mission is concerned.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the offers of voluntary separations last month and said mass reductions were necessary to put resources “in the areas where we need them most” and “supercharge our American warfighters.”

Hegseth is aiming to cut the Pentagon’s nearly 900,000 civilians by about 60,000 people. About 21,000 employees volunteered for deferred resignations offered by the Office of Personnel Management earlier this year.

The direct offer by the Defense Department found even more takers.

About 16,000 civilians who work for the Army have signed up for deferred resignations, Eifler said, calling the number “significant.” The Air Force will be losing about 12,000 civilians, according to Lt. Gen. Caroline Miller, the service’s chief of staff for manpower and personnel.

The Navy and the Space Force are expecting to shed about 10% of their civilian personnel. About 1,600 civilians are resigning from the Marine Corps, including some “more senior, more experienced” staff, said Lt. Gen. Michael Borgschulte, deputy commandant for manpower and reserve affairs.

“We’re looking at the impacts of what losing those individuals are and restructuring as appropriate to handle that challenge,” he said.

Miller said she was worried about the effect the resignations will have on recruiting for the Air Force and other military branches.

“If there is an uncertainty about coming into a service, on whether or not you’ll be able to maintain that position, that I think is going to impact,” she said. “We have done tons of work over the last several years to really express the goodness of our service … and a lot of it is job security.”

Vice Adm. Richard Cheeseman, deputy chief of naval operations for personnel, said he was particularly concerned about how the resignations could affect schools and payment systems for sailors.

“We’ve done a lot of work in the last two years in modernizing our pay systems,” he said. “We are, as far as I’m concerned, the gold standard in getting paid transactions on and taking care of sailors. I don’t want to see any impact at all and we’ll be paying attention to that to make sure we mitigate appropriately.”

The Space Force, the military’s youngest and smallest service, is bracing for an outsize impact to its operations.

About one-third of its 17,000-person force is made up of civilians and it relies heavily on the Air Force for support, said Katharine Kelley, deputy chief of space operations for human capital.

“We have to look very carefully at how to mitigate that 10% [loss] and how to be very, very intentional about making sure that does not have a direct mission impact,” she said. “This is going to be a challenge for us.”

Stars and Stripes · by Svetlana Shkolnikova · April 30, 2025

33. . Global press freedom ebbs to a new low

Every citizen of every country of the free world should be fighting for press freedom and not allow the media to be defeated by authoritarian regimes.

A free press is the foundation for a free country and free world.

Global press freedom ebbs to a new low

Financial challenges, authoritarian governments are sources of unrelenting pressure on independent reporting.

By Tenzin Pema and Stephen Wright for RFA

2025.05.02

https://www.rfa.org/english/asia/2025/05/02/press-freedom/

Press freedom advocates rally in Manila to commemorate the massacre of 58 people, including 32 journalists on the southern island of Mindanao in 2009, Nov. 23, 2019. (Jojo Riñoza/BenarNews/Press freedom protest)

BANGKOK and WASHINGTON – Press freedom is at its lowest ebb globally in more than two decades, Reporters Without Borders said Friday, as economic pressures shake the foundations of journalism.

The advocacy group, also known as Reporters sans frontières or RSF, said it classified the global state of press freedom as “difficult” for the first time since it began compiling its media index in 2002.

“Without economic independence, there can be no free press,” RSF said in a statement announcing the 2025 iteration of the press freedom index.

“When news media are financially strained, they are drawn into a race to attract audiences at the expense of quality reporting, and can fall prey to the oligarchs and public authorities who seek to exploit them,” it said.

News outlets are shutting down in nearly a third of the 180 countries included in the index, RSF said. Media in even relatively highly ranked nations such as New Zealand and South Africa are grappling with challenges of financial viability.

10 Principles to Defend Democracy (Based on Maria Ressa’s Book)

Hold the Line

Uphold truth and integrity even when facing threats, intimidation, or legal attacks. "Hold the line" is Ressa's signature phrase for moral courage and journalistic resilience.

Protect Freedom of the Press

An independent press is essential for democracy. Ressa emphasizes that attacking journalists is often the first step in a dictator’s playbook.

Fight Disinformation Relentlessly

Understand how social media algorithms spread lies faster than facts, and challenge the digital architecture that enables authoritarianism.

Build Communities of Trust

Collective action, solidarity, and networks of principled allies are crucial for resisting authoritarianism and standing for democratic values.

Support Rule of Law and Institutions

Democracies erode when legal systems are weaponized. Defend judicial independence and constitutional norms.

Expose and Counter Authoritarian Playbooks

Dictators use similar tactics globally: attacking truth, spreading fear, co-opting power. Recognizing these patterns helps citizens resist them.

Defend Human Rights and Civil Liberties

The suppression of dissent, free speech, and peaceful protest must always be resisted. Democracy depends on individual rights.

Demand Accountability from Tech Platforms

Social media giants must be held accountable for how their platforms amplify hate and falsehoods, often fueling authoritarianism.

Educate for Critical Thinking

Encourage media literacy and civic education to build resilience against propaganda and manipulation.

Act with Courage and Conviction

Ressa repeatedly insists that individuals have power—to speak out, to resist, to vote, to stand for others. Democracy is sustained by courageous choices.

People who fled authoritarian regimes say Trump's tactics remind them of home

NPR · by Frank Langfitt · May 1, 2025

Hungarian police remove a protester blocking the entrance of the Parliament building in Budapest on April 14, as Hungarian lawmakers were expected to approve constitutional changes further clamping down on rights for certain groups, part of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's "Easter cleanup" against his domestic opponents. Peter Kohalmi/AFP via Getty Images

Last year, David Koranyi attended his mother's 70th birthday party back home in Hungary, but the indirect route he took highlights the autocratic rule that grips his homeland. Instead of flying straight to Hungary, Koranyi flew to neighboring Austria and then turned off his phone and drove across the border where there was no passport control and he knew he could slip in undetected.

Koranyi runs an organization called Action for Democracy that has mobilized Hungarians overseas to vote back home, where political scientists say Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has tilted the electoral landscape toward his ruling party. The government says Koranyi threatens Hungary's sovereignty; pro-government media routinely call him an "enemy of the state."

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"Friends and even embassies in Hungary ... told me that maybe it's better if I don't come back to Hungary anytime soon," says Koranyi, who was concerned Orbán's government might try to detain him.

Threats like this are one reason Koranyi came to America and became a citizen in 2022. So, he's been struck to see U.S. government agents stopping and aggressively questioning people — including citizens, tourists and green-card holders — returning to America.

Amir Makled is a Michigan-based attorney who was detained by federal agents when returning to the U.S. from a family vacation. Image courtesy of Amir Makled

They include Michigan lawyer Amir Makled, who was stopped at Detroit Metro Airport in early April as he returned from a family vacation. Makled, who said agents asked to search his phone, thinks he was targeted because he represents a pro-Palestinian protester at the University of Michigan.

"I'm not going to be a dictator"

"I never in a million years would have imagined that atmosphere of fear and that random searches at border crossings and looking into people's phones ... is something that I would live through in my life in the United States," says Koranyi, who lives in New York.

Countless people have left authoritarian countries for the promise of freedom and safety in the United States. NPR reached out to Koranyi and a dozen others to get their impressions of the Trump administration's first several months in power. Most — but not all — said some of the administration's tactics reminded them of those used by the regimes they fled.

In fact, a survey in February found that hundreds of U.S.-based scholars think the United States is moving swiftly from a liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism.

"This is an elected government, obviously, but it is behaving as an authoritarian one, " says Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die. "It is engaging in a rapid and systematic weaponization of the machinery of government and its deployment to punish rivals, to protect allies and to bully elements of the media."

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Some immigrants say Trump is the victim

Last fall, President Trump insisted he would not be an autocrat beyond Inauguration Day, when he said he would all but lock down the southern border and green-light drilling for energy.

"After that I'm not going to be a dictator," Trump pledged to applause at a Fox News town hall during the campaign.

Some U.S. immigrants from authoritarian countries say Trump has kept his word. Lily Tang Williams, who is running for Congress for a third time in New Hampshire as a Republican, says it wasn't Trump but former President Joe Biden, who most reminded her of the authoritarian leaders back in her homeland, China.

"Who censored us during the COVID times [and] put us in Facebook jail?" Tang Williams said in an interview with NPR. "It was not Trump. Trump himself was censored."

Tang Williams says she blames the Biden administration for putting pressure on Facebook and Twitter to crack down on certain posts, including a meme she said she posted about mask mandates.

The Biden administration has said it was encouraging responsible action to protect public health.

If the Trump administration's tactics have unsettled immigrants such as Koranyi, they've instilled fear in others, such as Fulya Pinar, a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (left) and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán shake hands after a joint statement at the Carmelite Monastery in Budapest, Hungary, in 2023. Denes Erdos/AP

Similar authoritarian tactics by Turkey's Erdogan

Pinar grew up in Turkey and says she watched Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country's autocratic president, attack scholars and consolidate power over the news media. She says she moved to the U.S. in 2016 to study for her Ph.D. and to have intellectual freedom.

"It was about survival as an academic," Pinar recalls, "to be able to continue thinking, teaching, writing without fear."

Since taking office, Trump has withheld or threatened to withhold billions of dollars in federal contracts and research grants from universities, including Harvard, saying they haven't done enough to fight antisemitism. In this atmosphere, Pinar worries some students could report her. She's teaching Anthropologies of the Middle East this semester and doing so differently than in the past.

In her lectures, for instance, Pinar used to cite death tolls for conflicts such as the war in Gaza. Now, she directs students to readings where they can find answers on their own. It's a way to insulate herself from charges of bias.

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Fear in college classrooms

"I'm trying to be more careful," says Pinar, who is untenured. "At the end of the semester, students usually provide feedback about professors, and then your promotion depends on that."

Pinar's worries are representative, according to the Middle East Scholar Barometer, which tracks the opinions of scholars who teach about the region. A survey in February found 57% of professors in the U.S. felt more pressure under the Trump administration to self-censor when discussing Israeli-Palestinian issues.

Having left Turkey's autocracy for America's freedom, Pinar says she never saw a period like this coming.

"I feel quite fragile because I feel like I can't work freely here," Pinar continues. "It just feels like I'm stuck."

In addition to taking on universities, the Trump administration has also targeted news organizations that cover the president critically. The Federal Communications Commission is investigating broadcast news networks — including ABC, CBS and NBC — over allegations that they have favored Democrats. Trump has also attacked public broadcasters. In a social media post, he called NPR and PBS "radical left monsters" that hurt the country.

Maria Ressa gestures after she and her online news outfit Rappler were acquitted of tax evasion cases against her at the Court of Tax Appeals in Quezon City, Metro Manila, in January 2023. Jam Sta Rosa/AFP via Getty Images

Threatening to strip licenses from TV news broadcasters

Journalist Maria Ressa says Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines' autocratic former president, used similar tactics. In 2020, Duterte's government refused to renew the license of the country's largest broadcaster and shut it down.

Duterte left office in 2022 and is now awaiting trial in The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity for allegedly allowing tens of thousands of extrajudicial killings during his war on the country's drug trade. But Ressa says the damage he did to the news media endures.

"That network, even after the end of Duterte's reign, never got its license ... back," says Ressa, who once ran the broadcaster herself. "What is damaged in this time period, what is destroyed, stays destroyed."

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Ressa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for standing up to Duterte's attacks on her and her news site, Rappler. At one point, she faced the possibility of more than a century in prison on tax evasion and cyber-libel charges that human rights groups say were politically motivated. Ressa is spending this semester teaching at Columbia University. A dual citizen, she has a message for people here.

"Americans are slow to respond, but I know what fear does," she says. "Don't let fear paralyze you because you are at your strongest now, and every day you do not act and hold the line on your rights, you get weaker."

NPR · by Frank Langfitt · May 1, 2025

35. SWJ Interview with Dr. Steve Tatham: Will an AI-centric Social Media Take Us Further and Quicker Towards the 1984 Society?

How would 1984 be updated if George rewrote it with AI as part of society (or exploited by the Party)? (2084?)

Provocative statement here:

We need the psychologist, anthropologist and sociologist at the heart of our IO campaigns

Interview| The Latest

SWJ Interview with Dr. Steve Tatham: Will an AI-centric Social Media Take Us Further and Quicker Towards the 1984 Society?

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/05/02/dr-steve-tatham-russian-chinese-information-operations-psyops-societal-resilience/

by Octavian Manea

05.02.2025 at 06:00am

This is a Small Wars Journal question and answer session with Dr. Steve Tatham. Dr. Tatham is one of the most recognized and authoritative experts on Information and Psychological Operations (PSYOPs). His most recent book is Information Operations: Facts Fakes Conspiracists published by Howgate Publishing last year.

Manea: What are the convergences and divergencies between Russian and Chinese modus operandi in IO (Influence Operations/Information Operatuibs)?

Tatham: The West has long studied Russia. The Cold War sustained vibrant linguistic and analysis education and training programs across most NATO nations. Whilst the general public may not have had the understanding or interest in Russian disinformation that they do today, our various Armed Forces and intelligence agencies certainly did. For three years I worked at the Advanced Research Group of the UK Defense Academy, a successor to the Soviet Studies Research Center, that for years had tracked and written about Russian military affairs and information warfare. In the US the Foreign Military Studies Office did much the same. Collectively we have a good understanding of how Russia deploys its IO – particularly post the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact as Eastern European nations, such as Poland and the Baltic States, brought their experience and knowledge to the West.

This is not however the case for China. China only opened up to the West in the late 1970s and the number of Western analysts who can speak Mandarin has remained low for years. In this sense, our collective ability to access Chinese documents, doctrine and academic journals is limited. So, I would argue that we are on the back foot, we don’t have the necessary depth and history of understanding about the nature of Chinese IO that we have with Russia.

Another interesting difference is that much of China’s IO is not happening in traditional defense environments – much of it supports its global development programs. They probably won’t be familiar with the term IO but ask a western mining executive about Chinese influence and information activities in Africa and what they describe will be deep, concerted and well thought through IO campaign. And I know from my own personal experience that they are likely to give you a far more detailed assessment than any UK MoD or Pentagon Analyst because the military analysts are not attuned to be looking in non-military environments. In my research some of the best examples of contemporary Chinese IO are not in the military domain, but in their economic and industrial strategies across Africa. Now something that has put them more on the radar is their National Intelligence Law, which compels all Chinese organizations, under Article 7, to cooperate with intelligence agencies and of course in that regard there has been a great deal of debate about TikTok.

As an aside, I wonder how many readings this have been tracking the many Chinese AI created videos that have appeared post President Trump’s tariffs which show Americans wearing MAGA hats on trainers (sneakers) manufacturing and production lines. They were pretty rapidly produced, they played to some significant US stereotypes – their creators understood their target audiences – and (dare I say this?) they were quite entertaining. But they also showed you how far China has come. Corporately, I would suggest our knowledge of Beijing’s efforts remains sketchy and in comparing and contrasting allows us to ‘paint’ only in broad strokes.

From my perspective, I would say that it is clear that both Russia and China regard IO as vital; it is clear that both devote a great deal of time, money and effort to it. On the back of the Ukraine war there may have been some convergence. But, in my experience, Russian efforts continue to be more ‘clunky’ and more identifiable than Beijing’s. Russia is very focused on interrupting Western social media; China less so (or perhaps less obviously so). Russia is clearly focused on disrupting and undermining Western institutions. In my book I highlight that the Russian intervention in the BREXIT referendum was probably on both sides of the debate – hedging their bets to maximize chaos. Russian IO is often easier to spot (either because it is crude and/or because of the number of experienced analysts), Chinese IO less so. Russian IO targets familiar and obvious audiences; China, again, less so (ego my comment about their efforts in, for example, African commercial programs). Russian IO has many targets – in fact it seems there is nothing that is not a target; China’s IO has an obvious military sweet spot – Taiwan – but many commercial ones that seemingly have evoked little to no interest to the UK Ministry of Defense or the US Pentagon.

In the book, I also point out that other nations are developing their IO capabilities – Iran, North and South Korea, Israel, India, Pakistan, Columbia. This is clearly a growing area and in response we collectively need more than just a defense department approach, but a whole-of-government one.

We need the psychologist, anthropologist and sociologist at the heart of our IO campaigns

Manea: The post-9/11 campaigns had an important component of PSYOPs. Their common thread was about ‘winning hearts and minds’. What lessons can be learned from those experiences in order to be able to fight against external/internal malign actors targeting societal cohesion?

Tatham: Post-9/11 Richard Holbrooke, a senior official under President Clinton, asked “How can a man in a cave out-communicate the world’s leading communications society?” In response, and prompted by organizations such as the RAND corporation, the US turned to Madison Avenue and the ‘ad man’ took an active role in US and latterly the US-led coalitions, IO. As Tom Van de Brook (of the US Today newspaper) reported the US spent hundreds of millions of dollars on attitudinal, marketing inspired, IO in Iraq and Afghanistan. I chart it in detail in the book and frankly – and I say this as the former UK PSYOPs commander in Helmand – it was a disaster.

Dismayed at what we collectively saw, in 2007, me, General Andrew Mackay, and General Stanley McChrystal wrote Behavioral Conflict where we recommended replacing this attitudinal, perception based strategy with one that focused instead on applying psychology to understand the drivers for behaviors and, frankly, ignore attitude and perceptions – at least on the battlefield.

Sadly, that never really happened. In my new book, which General H.R. McMaster so very kindly wrote the foreword to, I recall how we tried to convince a senior (British) International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) officer to undertake a behavioral study of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) because we simply didn’t believe that it was as resilient and cohesive as was popular thought. That request was refused – in Brussels, Washington and London; after years of conflict, billions of dollars, and countless lives lost there was no appetite for anything that diverted from the narrative that GiROA (Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan) and ANSF were capable and resilient.

But it wasn’t. And we all saw that almost live on our TV screens as the whole edifice crumbled in three weeks and Afghanistan was lost. In my view, the Hearts and Minds concept was a failure in its application. But there were two huge impediments to changing it: the lobbying power of the commercial organizations that were delivering the products (and making millions of dollars), and (and here I conjecture), an unwillingness by senior officials to challenge received wisdom and convention and a unremitting clinging to conventionalism.

Today the advertising executive is still there, but now they are supplemented by the information technology executive. The currency of IO today seems to be mass messaging, persona management and social media interactions. The only difference is that today behaviors are supposedly factored in. Supposedly? At its core it still hearts and minds messaging. I still don’t see the psychologist, anthropologist and sociologist at the heart of our IO campaigns. If we wish to see real change, I think we need to divest ourselves of some of the traditional companies we have used for years who have cost so much and, in my view who have delivered such poor results and start looking more intelligently at other approaches and providers.

Effective propaganda has to have something to work up-on

Manea: How can we think about achieving societal resilience in an era in which the ability of malign actors to attack the cohesion of open societies is practically endless?

Tatham: People discuss this a lot, and you will hear answers from better education through developing critical thinking skills through to fact checking by (social) media companies and a hundred and one other solutions. Some of that would help – certainly the fact checking by the technology companies, but there are other things we can do that need a bit more thought. I wrote a paper a few years ago for the National Defense Academy of Latvia. It’s less than snappy title was probably why it’s not widely known: The solution to Russian propaganda is not EU or NATO propaganda but advanced social science to understand and mitigate its effect in targeted populations. I stated there that we were becoming fixated on the volume of IO – particularly Russian. The paper argues that maybe we should be less focused on the inputs and instead follow Winston Churchill’s maxim, “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results”. What is actually happening as a direct result of the IO? To do that we need proper tools and if we have tools to look at the results, we will see how resilient our societies are (or are not). To quote directly from that paper:

“Russian IO may in many instances be blatant lies and fabrications but it is generally well crafted and targets specific known vulnerabilities in societies. But targeting is not enough – we need to know how that translates into possible behaviors. In eastern Ukraine it is clear that there were significant rifts in society already but how much can one attribute the civil war to the Russian propaganda machine and how much to dissatisfaction on the group with central government, with poor life changes, a stagnant economy and rampant corruption? Effective propaganda has to have something to work up- on. It also has to resonate with its audience and here my Russian colleague do seem to know their audiences. The problem is we do not.”

UK & NATO actually had the capability to understand it – tested and trailed. It was called the Behavioral Dynamic methodology and we’d spent nine weeks training students at the NATO Center of Excellence (CoE) in Latvia how to use it and teach it. But in 2018 it got caught up in the Cambridge Analytica storm and was utterly destroyed. I show in the book, in the face of a global media firestorm, how it was quickly publicly disowned, even by institutions such as NATO CoE in Latvia that had been enthusiastic supporters of it, had written reports on its utility and were actively using it to combat Russian IO. Such is the pressure of hostile media.

But we used Behavioral Dynamic methodology in a number of places and it was like a ‘light bulb’ moment – providing us with a level of understanding and knowledge about specific audience groups, their motivations, susceptibilities and influences in a way that we had never seen before – and, to the best of my knowledge has not been replicated since. So, to answer the question directly, whilst there are lots of things we can (and should do), I believe we need a little less IT and admen and a whole lot more science – psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists- to be thrown at the problem. It is in the social sciences that knowing how to build strong societal resilience probably exists.

We are close to the horrors of an Orwellian society: ‘newspeak’, ‘the ministry of truth’ and a life where you are monitored continuously

Manea: Last year Romania has been, in part, TikTok-ed. Computational propaganda as well as the co-optation of influencers in a pre-determined campaign were extensively used. What are the broader dangers and vulnerabilities that people expose themselves to by navigating on TikTok?

Tatham: The willingness of people to place their innermost thoughts and personal details on social media is a never-ending source of amazement to me. But along with the obvious personal detail that can be harvested, there is of course the meta-data – the background information in each video. As data mining becomes more sophisticated through the use of AI so the ability to understand the individual will deepen. The very context of their lives becomes all the more attainable.

In college I took an English literature course and one of the books we had to study was George Orwell’s 1984. Coincidentally, it was in 1984 that I read it as a student and it all seemed pretty far-fetched. I enjoyed the story, but didn’t think much more of it. Having re-read it just last year, I realized what a masterpiece it is, that Orwell was arguably a genius in forecasting the future, and how close we are converging on the horrors of Orwellian ‘newspeak’, ‘the ministry of truth’ and a life where you are monitored continuously.

You asked about TikTok. But it is not just TikTok (although people are understandably nervous of it for its Chinese connections); we should be wary of all social media. I use Facebook to keep in touch with owners of the same type of dog breed as I own. I also use it to keep connected to the French community where we have a second home. Social media is so convenient and easy for the types of tasks. But to get to the posts about dogs, to get to posts about France, I have to navigate a FB feed that is beyond my control and despite being a political centrist, a keen supporter of the European Union (EU) and a hater of extreme politics, I find that I have to navigate, increasingly, stuff that is absolutely not what I want to see. I ignore them, but they have their effect. I saw this first hand. My dad, a passionate European, inexplicably voted for BREXIT because he was angry at EU fishery policy – a subject he had never previously expressed any interest in his entire life. I was puzzled, but looking at his FB feed one day I found it was full of anti-EU messaging, much of it focused on immigrants and fishing. How did that get there?

I don’t use TikTok, but I occasionally see an odd video (like the Chinese MAGA videos post the Tariffs I mentioned in an answer to an earlier question). They can seem disconcertingly innocuous. I am not religious, but I am minded by a biblical reference: Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. I regard TikTok as a ravenous wolf, just as I do X, Facebook and social media platforms yet to come. They have to be – users generate their content! You think you can control it, but ultimately it begins to control you and of course someone (and in the future, something) does control it, its algorithms and content. I still believe that it has to have something to leverage off – some pre-existing belief or anger, but as the wolf sucks from and more from users so the opportunity for that leverage broadens.

Like Heroin, Social Media is intoxicating

Manea: Post 9/11 the danger was the radicalization of individuals. Today the danger seems the radicalization of entire segments of population by encouraging a group think effect and echo chambers. How did we end up here?

Tatham: I don’t quite agree with the premise of your question – there is still a danger in the radicalization of individuals as we have seen very recently in New Orleans. And I am not sure we have yet seen, in terrorism terms, the radicalization of entire segments of society per se. But, we have seen the politicization of groups and in some instances that does appear to have translated into violent behaviors – I think in particular of the rioting in the UK last year, but possibly also the January 6th riots in the US.

I was alluding to political radicalization of key segments – not terrorism terms. How we ended up here?

I think it has been a slow journey and in terms of adversaries such as Russia, it probably began a long time when we chose to draw a peace dividend at the end of the Cold War and went about our lives. We happily watched as clever people such as Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg were developing new and exciting technology and didn’t give much thought to its potential to cause us harm. Probably nor did they! That is not to say that there were not warning notes sounded – slowly more and more studies began to conclude that we could be in trouble – but even then those warnings were largely focused on the (mental) health effects of prolonged exposure. But social media was intoxicating – like Heroin it became impossible to stop and each successive ‘fix’ required more and more attention. To an extent we normalized it, even our respective governments and institutions, celebrities and brands all began communicating via it and quite simply it took over our lives. Its only in the last five to ten years – in the military context – that we have begun to seriously understand how it can be weaponized, and some key international events have accelerated that learning – Ukraine war being an obvious example.

When that weaponization is to turn a known issue or fracture in society – BREXIT in the UK was one example, immigration, globally, is another – then it has the potential to be very destructive and suck in large groups of people – just as we saw in the UK last year. To sound like a stuck record, that was why the BDi methodology was so good because it allowed you to measure those fractures and determine susceptibility to influence, online or otherwise.

Looking forward, for me one of the most frightening issues is that although there is a lot of automated trolling, until now most social media still emanates from human hands – that will not be the case going forward. We really should be more suspicious and questioning about AI; for all its considerable potential in benign areas such as cancer diagnosis or physics or conservation, the human condition tells us someone, somewhere, will absolutely use it for bad things. When it is truly let loose in social media it will be hugely destructive. Will it take us further and quicker towards the 1984 society that George Orwell wrote about with such prescient clarity? I am naturally pessimistic – I will be very happy to be proven wrong.

Manea: Any final point about the book?

Tatham: I don’t get a penny (or a dime) from the book’s sales. The royalties all go to a charity for veterans, providing them with helping dogs. So, please support if you can and if you buy from the publisher’s website (instead of Amazon) even more gores to the charity. Thanks. The link is here.

Tags: SWJ interview

About The Author

Octavian Manea
Octavian Manea is a PhD Researcher at the Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy (CSDS) that he joined in October 2021. He is interested in the changing character of conflict and the implications of such alterations for the US-led alliance system. Octavian is also broadly interested in strategic studies, transatlantic relations and security issues. He worked for many years as a journalist, and is currently a contributor at the Romanian weekly 22 and the Small Wars Journal. In addition, Octavian was the managing editor of the Eastern Focus Quarterly in Bucharest and was affiliated with the Romania Energy Center (ROEC). Octavian was a Fulbright Scholar at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where he received an MA in International Relations and a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Security Studies. He also holds a BA and an MA in political science and international relations from the University of Bucharest.

36. Duffel Blog Presents: The 10 dumbest military phrases

Okay. I have to close out the weekend with some humor. I am just disappointed that I only made number 10. But there is a lot of irreverent truth in this humor.

Duffel Blog Presents: The 10 dumbest military phrases

"There’s no ‘I’ in team" but there are three 'U's in "shut the f--k up"

https://www.duffelblog.com/p/duffel-blogs-top-10-dumbest-military?utm

Adrian DeRyder

May 02, 2025

∙ Paid

The military has its own language. Yet many well-worn phrases often elicit a collective eye roll. With a rich tradition of acronyms, motivational slogans, and words that can befuddle the average civilian, some expressions have become so overused that they have lost all meaning.

So here is Duffel Blog’s guide to the top 10 dumbest military phrases.

10. Whatever is said by a retired military officer during a media appearance

There’s nothing like a retired colonel or general saying what everyone already knows. Retired military officers have a knack for sounding like Captain Obvious while delivering groundbreaking insights such as, “the best way to win is not to lose.” You know it’s ‘top secret’ commentary when it’s obvious enough to have been lifted straight out of Military Strategy for Dummies.

9. "Secured"

The word "secured" takes on different meanings depending on the branch of service. For the Army, securing a location involves a rigorous approach that includes posting three guards, starting a roving patrol, conducting radio checks every 15 minutes, and holding an after-action review once the task is complete. The Navy and Coast Guard take a more straightforward approach by locking the doors, turning off the lights, and slapping a sign on the door that reads “Underway” before calling it a day. Meanwhile, the Marines take a far more aggressive stance, eliminating everyone inside, declaring the area “hostile-free,” and sometimes sharing their crayon treats during a joint operation. On the other hand, the Air Force and Space Force prefer a more luxurious interpretation by leasing the property, installing plush carpeting, adjustable desks, and a state-of-the-art espresso bar to ensure it’s not only secured but also comfortable.

8. "You eat like you have five assholes"

Working 14-hour shifts and eating nothing but MREs will make anyone a little unhinged. If you’ve seen soldiers tearing into a meal, you’d swear they’d developed extra anatomy just for digesting. Why hold back in a job that demands 110% energy?

7. "You’re sticking out like a dick in a pickle jar"

This expression raises eyebrows and is typically aimed at someone drawing excessive attention. If the Army’s parties are bringing up imagery like this, maybe it’s time to rethink the refreshments or just go ahead and stick your dick in the mashed potatoes.

6. "Bottom line up front (BLUF)"

Usually, this phrase is announced just as a senior leader launches into a rambling PowerPoint presentation, with the actual “bottom line” buried somewhere on slide 32. Next time, let’s try skipping the preamble and sticking to the “front” part of the brief.

5. "It would behoove you"

A phrase often used to disguise orders as ‘suggestions.’ It sounds suspiciously like a medical issue that could lead to a VA claim. Nothing says authority like pulling out an old-timey word that sounds like it’s describing a rare foot disease.

4. "Be audacious and cunning in your plans"

In theory, bold plans are great until reality hits in the form of a Continuing Resolution. When all ‘audacity’ grinds to a halt because the budget hasn’t been approved, the only cunning strategy left is to keep the photocopier running for another year.

3. "Where is your reflective belt?”

Nothing says tactical readiness quite like the blinding safety of a reflective belt. Need to cross the street on base at noon? Better wear that belt or risk the wrath of your sergeant major. Deployed to a combat zone? Forget body armor, your reflective belt is the real lifesaver. Somewhere, an officer is convinced the enemy won’t dare attack a formation of soldiers glowing like a pack of neon highlighters. The only real mystery is why the military hasn’t issued reflective ghillie suits yet.

2. "There’s no ‘I’ in team"

This line is drilled into every recruit’s head by week two. There’s no “I” in team, but for the record, there are three U’s in “shut the fuck up.” When it’s 0300, that’s the only team message anyone wants to hear.

1. "I SAY HOOAH!"

And finally, our number one phrase. Because nothing says “discipline and morale” quite like saying HOOAH. When someone doubles down with “I SAY HOOAH!” they usually get a reply that’s equal parts sarcasm and a collective wish for them to “shut the hell up.”

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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Senior Editor

A lesson from 1958 could help deter China from taking Taiwan

The Potent Powder and ‘Narco-Subs’ Driving Cocaine’s Global Surge

Colombia grows more coca, drug labs process more powder and improved smuggling vessels traverse oceans, alarming antidrug officials worldwide

Stepped-up production

Root causes

Far and wide

China Signals Readiness to Respond to U.S. Trade Overtures

Beijing again seeks end to Trump’s tariffs and calls for ‘sincerity’

Trump to Rename Veterans Day in Tribute to World War I Victory

President plans to designate May 8 as ‘Victory Day for World War II’

Trump Issues Order to Defund U.S. Public Media, Including PBS and NPR

President says the news outlets don’t present ‘a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events’

Europe Is Racing to Build Its Own Version of the U.S. Military-Industrial Complex

European defense will be reshaped, creating opportunities for industry and investors

Will China Escalate?

Despite Short-Term Stability, the Risk of Military Crisis Is Rising

Tong Zhao

BEAT THE DEALER

PLAYING FOR THE STRAIT

AUDIENCE CAPTURE?

Trump, Ukraine, and the Limits of Presidential Peacemaking

Ignoring Decades of American Practice, His Approach Faces Long Odds

Timothy Naftali

HALF AN ISLAND

MORE ISLANDS

THREATENING CANDOR

SUKARNO’S GHOST

What If America Abandons Ukraine?

The Biggest Risk Might Be to the Rest of Europe

ON THE DEFENSIVE

A POST-AMERICAN EUROPE

THE HEART OF EUROPEAN SECURITY

Blowing up Bridges in Vilnius: The Tactical Lit Review - Modern War Institute

Winning Without Fighting: Resilience as National Security Imperative

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