Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"I think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything l've written there is a thread of this: a man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself."

~Rod Serling, LA Times, 1967

“When I criticize a system. They think I criticize them – and that is of course because they fully accept the system and identify themselves with it.”

– Thomas Merton

“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it.?”

– Eleanor Roosevelt

1. Will Trump Blow Up the National Security Council?

2. Judge says Trump lacked authority to dismantle U.S. Institute of Peace

3. America’s Fiscal Situation Threatens the Good Mood on Wall Street

4. Trump-Putin Call Yields No Breakthrough on Ukraine Cease-Fire

5. Trump Must Be Globally Involved To 'Make America Great Again,' Says Conservative Pundit Clifford May

6. Why Democracy Is in Retreat

7. The hand that feeds: The unseen cost of dismantling foreign aid

8. The Future of Nuclear Deterrence in the Indo-Pacific

9. Rubio, the Trump Doctrine, and the State Department Reorg

10. Trump Is Destroying a Core American Value. The World Will Notice.

11. China Expanding Haifa Port, Endangering Israeli and American Security

12. Constructing Instability in Conflict: The Failures of U.S. Reconstruction

13. China’s Expanding Influence in Bangladesh: Strategic Debt and Naval Ambitions

14. A Three Step Solution To Rebuild the Marine Corps

15. How China recruits its spies in the U.S.

16. The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement

17. Trump’s Ukraine peace push is built on three illusions

18. Why the Nuclear Gravity Bomb Has Gotten a Reboot

19. What If Our Assumptions About a War with China Are Wrong?

20. The Taiwan Tightrope: Deterrence Is a Balancing Act, and America Is Starting to Slip

21. The New Price of Statehood: Trump Is a Mixed Blessing for the World’s Separatists

1. Will Trump Blow Up the National Security Council?

The organization, operation, and activities of the National Security Council and the National Security Staff are at the President's prerogative and discretion.

Will Trump Blow Up the National Security Council?

Diminishing it would put America at risk and limit the president’s access to information critical to good decisions.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-danger-of-gutting-the-national-security-council-foreign-policy-safety-8d60db04?mod=hp_opin_pos_3

By John Bolton

May 19, 2025 5:37 pm ET

President George H. W. Bush speaks with national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State James Baker in Washington, May 18, 1992. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Image

President Trump is reportedly considering major alterations to the national security adviser’s role and the National Security Council staff. One administration official told CNN that the “NSC as we know it is done.” Apparently, the potential changes center on reducing the council’s staff and its responsibility for developing and coordinating policy formulation—particularly long-range policy—and making it an implementer of Mr. Trump’s directives.

If executed, such changes would damage the NSC process. The proposals, which ignore history’s lessons, would seriously harm the administration’s already haphazard decision-making process and the president’s ability to manage the enormous foreign-policy, defense, intelligence and homeland-security bureaucracies. The critical factor in presidential national-security strategy is judgment, and a properly functioning NSC staff can help provide information and options foundational to the sound exercise of judgment.

The National Security Act of 1947 established the NSC to help presidents get their arms around the new and enlarged agencies required to cope with an increasingly menacing international environment. Because presidents have different work habits, the NSC structure was intended to be flexible, varying in size and shape over time. But through often-painful lessons in recent decades, a consensus formed on the best council structure.

Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to pay real attention to NSC staffing, which he structured along lines comparable to his military experience. John F. Kennedy rebelled against what he saw as excessive rigidity, at least until the Bay of Pigs, the intimidating 1961 Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis convinced him that structure wasn’t so bad after all.

The personalized national security adviser roles of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations have received enormous attention, but the current NSC model was largely shaped by Brent Scowcroft, who improved it under Gerald Ford and perfected it under George H.W. Bush while confronting Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the Soviet Union’s collapse and the start of the post-Cold War era.

Scowcroft devised a system to coordinate and control the flow of decision making: at the top, cabinet-level NSC meetings chaired by the president; then cabinet-level “principals” meetings led by national security advisers; “deputies” meetings attended by deputy- and undersecretary-level officials; down to meetings of assistant and deputy assistant secretaries. Some call this tiered model too bureaucratic, but Bush and others proved it could move as fast and comprehensively as circumstances warranted.

The plan embodied the principle of subsidiarity, with decisions made at the lowest level achievable, with only the most important issues occupying the attention of the president and his top advisers. This provided the ultimate decision makers with all the pertinent data, a range of options with their pros and cons, and forward thinking about implementation, countermoves by adversaries and allies, and possible U.S. responses.

To Scowcroft also goes considerable credit for repairing and restoring trust in the NSC after the Iran-Contra Affair, its worst mistake, during which NSC staff became implementers of the policy to provide aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. Since then, most national-security experts have agreed that the NSC should coordinate, while the appropriate departments and agencies should implement. Not all have adhered perfectly to this maxim.

The size of the NSC staff depends on its assigned responsibilities. Size follows mission. Setting a staff level before deciding its tasks is backward. Comparing current staff levels to those of prior administrations is inapposite. In some administrations, only professionals and not administrative staff were counted. Situation Room staffers were sometimes included in NSC numbers, sometimes not. And before 9/11, there were almost no homeland-security staffers in the White House.

Scowcroft’s model bestowed a key advantage on the president: Creating interagency staff who reached into bureaucratic depths gave him greater insight into potential agency agendas and disagreements before they rose to higher levels, thereby reducing the risks of confrontation and delay. A dramatically constrained NSC staff wouldn’t have such abilities.

Presidents make the ultimate decisions. But will they make the best-informed decisions, or will they merely follow their own neuron flashes? The hostility directed at Scowcroft’s system largely emanates from fear of the bureaucracy (or “deep state,”’ as Trump acolytes would put it). The question is whether top decision makers will run the bureaucracy or whether the bureaucracy runs them. If those at the highest levels fail to drive lower levels, the fault lies more with inadequate top officials who lack knowledge, experience and resolve.

The NSC system has its faults, but slashing its staff and turning the rest into liegemen won’t benefit America, or even Donald Trump.

Mr. Bolton served as White House national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the U.N., 2005-06. He is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

Judge says Trump lacked authority to dismantle U.S. Institute of Peace

The government demonstrated a “gross usurpation of power” by forcing a takeover of the independent nonprofit, Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/05/19/judge-denies-trump-shutdown-institute-peace/?utm

UpdatedMay 19, 2025 at 2:56 p.m. EDTtoday at 2:56 p.m. EDT

The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) headquarters in D.C. (Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

By Derek Hawkins

A federal judge in Washington ruled Monday that the Trump administration exceeded its authority when it dismantled the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit group created by Congress to help resolve violent international conflicts.

U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell said the institute, while part of the federal government, was separate from the executive branch; therefore, President Donald Trump lacked the power to terminate its board at will.

“The President’s efforts here to take over an organization outside of those bounds, contrary to statute established by Congress and by acts of force and threat using local and federal law enforcement officers, represented a gross usurpation of power and a way of conducting government affairs that unnecessarily traumatized the committed leadership and employees of USIP, who deserved better,” Howell wrote in her 102 page opinion.

Administration officials and members of billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service — aided by local and federal law enforcement agencies — seized the institute’s privately owned headquarters in March and summarily removed its leaders.

Follow Trump’s second term

Soon after, they began terminating staff and programs, replaced the institute’s president with a DOGE agent, and transferred its headquarters to the General Services Administration.

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Howell said Trump violated the 1984 law establishing the institute when he terminated the board members, who may only be removed because of felony conviction or malfeasance, recommendation of the board majority, or a majority vote of four separate congressional committees.

As a consequence, Howell said, all the other actions dissembling the institute were “effectuated by illegitimately-installed leaders who lacked legal authority to take these actions, which must therefore be declared null and void.”

The administration did not have lawful authority to enter the institute’s headquarters, she said, nor the authority to transfer the building in downtown Washington to the GSA, which oversees federal real estate. “That transfer is thus null and void, and plaintiffs maintain rightful ownership of property,” Howell wrote.

The institute’s longtime outside legal counsel, George Foote, said the ruling would allow the ousted leaders — the plaintiffs in the case — and staff to resume their work and regain control of the building, which sits at the corner of Constitution Avenue and 23rd Street NW near the national mall and the Lincoln Memorial.

But he acknowledged that the government has 30 days to appeal Howell’s ruling, and said he was awaiting word from the Trump administration about when his clients could return to headquarters.

“We’re prepared to take control at a moment’s notice,” Foote said. “Our security team is ready to go.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly attacked Howell as a “rogue judge” and said her “attempt to impede on the separation of powers will not be the last say on the matter.”

Kelly also faulted the institute, saying it “failed to deliver peace.”

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Trump targeted the institute for elimination in an executive order that included the dismantling of several other nonexecutive branch foreign aid and peacemaking agencies. Employees from DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, took over the building with help from the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, the FBI and D.C. police.

Institute officials had tried to convince DOGE representatives that such a takeover would be illegal, given the group’s status as an independent organization and restrictions on the president’s ability to remove board members. But officials from the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia threatened those leaders with criminal investigations if they resisted.

Several ousted board members then filed a suit. In March, Howell denied an emergency request to stop DOGE’s takeover while the lawsuit proceeded, saying she needed to resolve “confusion” about the institute’s independent status.

Trump administration lawyers argued in court papers that the institute was part of the executive branch and that restraints on Trump’s ability to remove leaders amounted to unconstitutional interference with his executive powers.

Similar constitutional questions involving Trump’s ability to remove the heads of government agencies have come up in other high-profile legal challenges.

Trump has broad power under the Constitution to appoint and remove top executive branch officials for any reason, but Congress has restricted that power over some independent agencies, such as the National Labor Relations Board or the Merit Systems Protection Board, to insulate them from political interference. The institute differs even from those agencies because it has no regulatory or enforcement authority.

In her ruling, Howell sided firmly with the plaintiffs, saying Congress created the institute with the clear intent that it remain independent of the executive branch. She noted that no court had previously addressed that question.

President Ronald Reagan signed the law creating the institute, with a mandate to help resolve violent international conflicts, and provide independent analysis to Congress and government agencies.

The institute “does not exercise governmental, let alone executive, power under the Constitution,” Howell wrote. “Instead, USIP supports both the Executive and Legislative branches as an independent think tank that carries out its own international peace research, education and training, and information services.”

From the outset of the case, Howell expressed concern about how the administration and DOGE treated the institute’s leaders and employees during the takeover of headquarters. She said in court that she was “offended” that the administration had involved law enforcement officers, and she repeatedly questioned a government lawyer about whether the administration could have taken less extreme steps to accomplish its goals.

Her ruling said the president and his subordinates used “brute force and threats of criminal process” against institute leaders.

The institute’s roughly 600 staffers are not government workers. All but a few have been barred from the building for the past two months except for brief supervised visits to gather their belongings.

The Trump administration fired about half of the staff without cause at the end of March. Some employees said they were offered severance and one month of health insurance in exchange for waiving their right to sue. Other employees have filed their own lawsuit, which is still pending before Howell.

On Monday, some fired staffers gathered outside the institute’s headquarters to celebrate the ruling, even as they acknowledged that the path ahead was unclear.

“There’s a lot of unanswered questions. It’s not like a light switch you can turn back on,” said one former employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid potential retaliation. “Regardless of what happens next, it’s essential for the functioning of democracy that injustices be acknowledged.”

By Derek Hawkins

Derek Hawkins covers federal law enforcement for The Washington Post. Send him secure messages on Signal at dhawk.01follow on X@d_hawk

3. America’s Fiscal Situation Threatens the Good Mood on Wall Street

Please go to the link to view the graphics.

America’s Fiscal Situation Threatens the Good Mood on Wall Street

Yields on longer-term Treasurys extend recent gains after the U.S. lost its last triple-A credit rating

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/us-economy-moody-credit-rating-investors-34bba11b?st=Cvd4hA&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Sam Goldfarb

Follow and Hannah Erin Lang

May 19, 2025 8:00 pm ET

Key Points

What's This?

Stocks edged higher despite a U.S. credit downgrade late Friday by Moody’s, which cited large budget deficits and rising interest costs.
The House Budget Committee on Sunday approved a tax-and-spending bill projected to add trillions of dollars to deficits, increasing investors’ concerns.
Yields on longer-term Treasurys rose, with the 30-year bond yield briefly topping 5%.

The U.S.’s deteriorating fiscal situation is threatening to spoil Wall Street’s good mood.

Investors sold U.S. government bonds and the dollar on Monday, after Moody’s Ratings late last week stripped the U.S. of its last triple-A credit rating, citing large budget deficits and rising interest costs. Adding to the nerves about America’s debt trajectory, the House Budget Committee approved a tax-and-spending bill Sunday that is projected to add trillions of dollars to those deficits.

Though stocks ended the session higher, selling pushed up yields on longer-term Treasurys, which rise when bond prices fall. The yield on the 30-year bond briefly topped 5% before settling just below that threshold, still near its highest level of the year.

The yield gains extended a weekslong climb, fueled by a mix of receding recession fears, persistent worries about inflation and growing concerns that wider deficits will necessitate ever-larger bond auctions. A bigger supply of Treasurys can outstrip demand, forcing the government to pay higher interest rates to attract investors.

The size of recent budget deficits have been particularly alarming for investors. That is because they have come while the economy is strong, rather than in a recession, when tax revenues typically plunge and the government ramps up spending to revive growth and help the unemployed.

“If we’re putting up deficits of this type now, what might it be like when the economy does run into any form of trouble?” said Christopher Sullivan, chief investment officer for the United Nations Federal Credit Union.

The yield on the 30-year Treasury bond settled at 4.937%, according to Tradeweb. That was up from 4.786% at the end of last year. The yield on the 10-year note settled at 4.473%, up from 4.437% Friday and less than 4.2% at the end of April.

The rise in yields has hardly slowed stocks, which have rebounded in recent weeks after the Trump administration walked back some aggressive tariff policies and investors’ fears of a recession eased.

Still, investors are keeping a watchful eye on Treasury yields, which play a major role in determining borrowing costs across the economy. The S&P 500 rose 0.1% Monday, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 0.3%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was flat.

Heading into this year, many analysts argued that one of the biggest risks to stocks would be a jump in Treasury yields if Republicans passed tax cuts without offsetting their cost.

Those worries faded to the background when President Trump announced huge new tariffs on April 2, raising immediate concerns that the economy could be driven into a recession. But they have resurfaced lately, even before the Moody’s downgrade, while the long-awaited tax-cut legislation has taken shape in Congress.

After clearing its latest hurdle on Sunday, the House is expected to vote as soon as this week on a proposal that would extend expiring tax cuts, add some new ones and reduce spending on Medicaid and nutrition assistance. It is expected to increase budget deficits by about $3 trillion over the next decade, compared with a scenario where the tax cuts expire as scheduled Dec. 31.

The U.S. has a longstanding imbalance between the money it spends and what it collects from taxes. Publicly held federal debt stands at about $29 trillion, nearly double the level when Trump signed his original tax cut in 2017. Nearly $1 in every $7 the U.S. spends goes toward paying interest, more than the country spends on defense.

Moody’s Ratings stripped the U.S. of its last triple-A credit rating late Friday. Photo: angela weiss/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Fiscal concerns threaten to revive the “Sell America” trade that emerged last month, when investors worried that isolationist trade policies could lead to a global capital war that would result in foreign investors dumping U.S. assets, including Treasurys.

“It adds further fuel to the ‘Sell U.S.’ trade, and you’re seeing that reflected,” said Michael Arone, chief investment strategist at State Street Global Advisors.

“Investors are waiting and seeing what happens with policy; they’re waiting and seeing what happens with interest rates,” Arone said. “That’s uncomfortable, and I think that’s ultimately what is being reflected in markets.”

Several investors noted that concerns about the U.S.’s fiscal standing have plagued investors for years without causing extended disruptions to stocks. They said factors including changes in trade policy are more likely to move markets in the short term.

“The market has no idea what to focus on, and it keeps having to shift,” said Kevin Gordon, senior investment strategist at Charles Schwab. “Tariffs will probably still be number one on that list.”

Write to Sam Goldfarb at sam.goldfarb@wsj.com and Hannah Erin Lang at hannaherin.lang@wsj.com

4. Trump-Putin Call Yields No Breakthrough on Ukraine Cease-Fire

Excerpts:

“Russia will propose and is ready to work with the Ukrainian side on a memorandum” outlining their positions for a possible peace treaty, Putin told reporters after the phone call. The memo could include “a possible cease-fire for a certain period if the relevant agreements are reached,” he added.

Trump said his flurry of calls had produced an agreement to begin talks on a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine.

“Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire and, more importantly, an END to the War,” Trump said. “The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of.”

But midlevel officials from Ukraine and Russia met face-to-face in Istanbul last week for the first time since Putin launched the invasion in February 2022. The officials agreed to exchange papers on how to reach a cease-fire. Trump, during a trip to the Middle East last week, had offered to fly to Turkey to see Putin, but the Russian leader didn’t make the trip.

Trump also spoke Monday to the leaders of the European Union, France, Italy, Germany and Finland after the Putin call. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on X thanked Trump for his “tireless efforts to bring a ceasefire to Ukraine.” She added: “It’s important that the U.S. stays engaged.”

European leaders said a week ago that if Russia didn’t agree to an immediate cease-fire, they would take action to pressure Moscow.

Trump-Putin Call Yields No Breakthrough on Ukraine Cease-Fire

The leaders spoke by phone for two hours in their latest exchange over efforts to halt the fighting

https://www.wsj.com/world/trump-holds-call-with-russias-putin-on-ending-the-war-in-ukraine-d0d934af

By Alexander Ward

Follow and Alan Cullison

Updated May 19, 2025 6:12 pm ET

Trump Must Be Globally Involved To 'Make America Great Again,' Says Conservative Pundit Clifford May

https://www.rferl.org/a/interview-clifford-may-trump-series/33415266.html?utm

rferl.org · by Todd Prince · May 16, 2025

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Donald Trump entered the presidency with an unambiguous message to the world: "America First." Now, just over 100 days into his second term, that foreign policy doctrine -- marked by skepticism toward allies, disdain for global institutions, and a preference for transactional diplomacy -- is once again under scrutiny.

"There's a tension, at least it seems to me, between the slogans 'America First' and 'Make America Great Again,'" said Clifford May, founder of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). "To be 'great again,' America has to lead. And it can't lead if it cedes ground to adversaries like Communist China, which [President] Xi Jinping is clearly aiming for."

RFE/RL spoke with May as part of a series of interviews called America's Foreign Policy Shifts.

In his return to the White House, Trump has rebuked NATO members for historically low defense spending in the face of Russia's growing belligerence, condemned the global trading system as biased against American interests, and sanctioned the International Criminal Court.

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At home, Trump is clamping down on both legal and illegal immigration while slashing foreign aid -- moves critics see as symptomatic of a broader US disengagement from global leadership. While some of the president's supporters argue that America must turn inward to confront deindustrialization, rising inequality, and mass migration, May argues that turning away from the world could run counter to the president's own goal of preserving US global primacy.

America's Foreign Policy Shift: A 3-Part Interview Series

This is a three-part series of interviews RFE/RL is conducting with global thinkers offering different perspectives on what we have learned from the first 100 days of Trump's second term. The aim is to provide insight into how the administration of US President Donald Trump is approaching some of the most challenging issues for Europe and the wider region since the end of World War II: Russia's invasion of Ukraine, a heightened confrontation between Russia and the West, and rising tides of disinformation.

May, who founded FDD following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, has long advocated for robust American engagement abroad.

The think tank, which describes itself as nonpartisan, is known for its staunch support of Israel and Ukraine.

May began his career as a journalist, often reporting from overseas. He later served as communications director for the Republican National Committee during the 2000 election and was appointed in 2008 by President George W. Bush to serve on the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the US government agency responsible at the time for RFE/RL and other state-financed broadcasters.

In a wide-ranging conversation with RFE/RL, May argued the world today is even more perilous than during the Cold War, a time when the United States and Soviet Union vied for global influence in a nuclear standoff.

He says the United States confronts not only Moscow but also an "axis of aggressors" that includes Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran. Their shared ambition, he said, is to dismantle the US-led liberal order and replace it with an illiberal one.

"It's a more challenging Cold War than the last one," May said. Despite ideological differences -- China's and North Korea's brands of communism, Iran's Islamic theocracy, and Russia's neo-Imperialism -- he rejects the notion their cooperation is purely opportunistic.

China, North Korea, and Iran are materially supporting Russia's war in Ukraine with missiles, drones, and other weapons systems. Pyongyang has even sent more than 11,000 troops to assist, while Russia may offer sensitive submarine technology to China and North Korea in return, according to US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Samuel Paparo.

Meanwhile, all four nations are accelerating their military build-ups, particularly in missile production, prompting warnings that the United States is no longer a safe haven from attack. May argues that unless Washington and its European allies ramp up defense spending, they risk strategic decline.

'Europeans Are Getting The Message'

Trump last week unveiled a flat top-line defense budget of $892 billion for the next fiscal year along with a onetime infusion of about $120 billion that the Pentagon can use through 2028. The budget includes funding for a space-based missile shield dubbed the Golden Dome.

Some Republicans in the Senate and House say a onetime infusion isn't enough and that the top line must increase to rearm for today's threats.

European NATO members, under pressure from the White House and with war raging nearby, have also begun stepping up their defense budgets. Yet Trump's persistent clashes with Europe over shared defense responsibilities come amid disputes over trade, raising fears of a transatlantic rift even as adversaries draw closer.

"Trump is right to want every NATO member to contribute meaningfully to the collective security of the alliance. It can't be an entitlement that America protects you and you do what you want to do. I think [the Europeans] are getting that message," May said.

Trump's confrontational tone may be strategic.

"To scare them to make sure that they know he's serious about this. Otherwise, they won't do it," May added, caveating that he does not believe the administration will withdraw US protection from Europe.

US Military Aid To Ukraine

Another point of transatlantic contention is Ukraine. Trump has made ending the war a top priority, pushing for a 30-day cease-fire and sidelining European leaders in the process, despite their high stakes in the outcome.

His insistence that both Kyiv and Moscow must make concessions has alarmed officials in Ukraine and Brussels, who fear he may press Ukraine to surrender territory.

In a recent interview with Time magazine, Trump said Crimea -- annexed by Russia in 2014 -- "will stay with Russia" under any peace deal but stopped short of saying whether the United States would formally recognize Crimea or other occupied territories as Russian.

May contends the United States should continue to arm Ukraine. While Trump has criticized the $177 billion in US aid sent to Kyiv, May says future support could be financed by Europe, Ukraine itself, or with frozen Russian assets.

"If we are selling munitions to Ukraine, that's good for us," he said. "It supports our factories, strengthens our defense industrial base, and ensures that Putin can't just regroup and attack again in a few years."

He added: "We shouldn't want to see any free democratic nation conquered and dragged into a dictatorship by military force. I don't think that's in the American interest. And I certainly don't think it's consistent with American values."

Putin's ambitions extend beyond Ukraine, May said, suggesting the Russian president could seek a land bridge to Kaliningrad -- a Russian exclave separated by NATO members Poland and Lithuania -- just as he did to Crimea.

That scenario, May said, poses an existential test for NATO.

"Do we fight for a road through southern Lithuania? If not, NATO collapses," he said.

May said he believes the war may end in a Korean-style armistice rather than a comprehensive peace, with a final settlement perhaps only possible once Putin is no longer in power. The fighting between North Korea and South Korea ended in 1953 after three years without a peace agreement, and the two countries are technically still at war.

The Russian president has ignored Trump's cease-fire overture for two months. While Trump has generally avoided direct criticism of Putin, he has hinted at frustration with the lack of progress.

"I do think that President Trump has become more realistic" about Putin's intentions, May said. "I'm hoping he's realizing that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy is not the problem."

Putin's no-show at peace talks in Turkey on May 15 -- he effectively rejected a challenge from Zelenskyy to hold a face-to-face meeting, instead sending a lower-level delegation whose makeup speaks volumes about his maximalist goals in the war -- may provide the last piece of evidence needed to convince Trump of who to pressure.

This is the second in a three-part series on America’s foreign policy shifts. The next instalment on May 23: A conversation with Leon Aron, a senior fellow and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, who concentrates on Russian domestic politics, Russian foreign policy, and US-Russian relations.

rferl.org · by Todd Prince · May 16, 2025

6. Why Democracy Is in Retreat

A thoughtful and thought provoking essay on democracy (though there are those who do not want to accept that America is a democracy and a republic.

And this is the key point that applies equally to the extreme left and extreme right: " It isn’t about enshrining the cultural and political preferences of the educated professional classes on the rest of society."

Excerpts:

This approach is madness—an unmitigated and total disaster for the democratic cause. Democracy is a tiger, not a pussycat. It isn’t about enshrining the cultural and political preferences of the educated professional classes on the rest of society. Democracy is about self-government, not good government. It is if anything a tool by which the majority can check the pretensions and the delusions of a self-regarding elite.

Alexis de Tocqueville understood this much better than most contemporary self-described democracy advocates and defenders do. He saw democracy as a torrential force overturning traditional hierarchies and ways of life. It was powerful for both good and evil. It was irresistible in the long run, which is why he advised prudent and thoughtful people to make their peace with it.

What democracy needs most today is the one thing that its earnest and respectable advocates have so signally failed to provide: leadership. Democratic societies require leaders who understand the realities of their time and can inspire their fellow citizens to support the policies their countries need. When the vital center fails to produce strong leaders, demagogues rush in to fill the void.

Why Democracy Is in Retreat

Advocates invert its meaning to claim any loss for their side is ‘undemocratic.’

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/why-democracy-is-in-retreat-advocates-invert-its-meaning-to-claim-partisan-losses-as-undemocratic-22ceee2d

By Walter Russell Mead

May 19, 2025 5:09 pm ET

Anders Fogh Rasmussen speaks at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit in Copenhagen, May 13. Photo: Mads Claus Rasmussen/Zuma Press

Copenhagen

Why do the good guys keep losing? That was the question that haunted your Global View columnist last week at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit. The annual gathering was initiated in 2018 by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Danish prime minister and secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The Democracy Summit, whose American associates in past years have ranged from the Carter Center to the George W. Bush Institute, represents what people once called the vital center in Western politics.

For many summit participants, including Danes furious at Donald Trump’s demands for Greenland, the great global dangers to democracy are Mr. Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Many were mourning Kamala Harris’s defeat in the 2024 elections; others worried about strong showings by Trump-friendly parties across much of Europe.

The truth is that the vital center has been on the back foot in Europe and the U.S. for roughly a decade, and during that time democracy has been in retreat around the world. Joe Biden described global politics as a contest between democracies and autocracies. He left office with his enemies on the march. An oft-cited statistic at the summit: 72% of the world’s population lives under autocratic regimes.

At times, this year’s Democracy Summit sounded inspired and hopeful. Mr. Rasmussen’s address, in which he called for European defense spending to reach 4% or more of gross domestic product, was focused and clear. Boris Johnson’s defense of chlorinated chicken (“Delicious . . . made me the man I am”) accompanied a brilliant analysis of the war in Ukraine. A screening of the first episode of “Zero Day,” a Taiwan-made 10-part series about a Chinese invasion, got a standing ovation.

But these high points couldn’t conceal the internal weaknesses that undermine the world’s democracy advocates. Too many of them, especially in Europe, conflate democracy as process—free elections with a free press to determine who gets to run a particular country—with electoral outcomes. They define a democratic election as one in which the right people win.

Under the former definition, any reasonably free election is a victory for democracy, even if the winner is a bad person with bad ideas. But under the latter definition, elections that bring the wrong candidates to power are considered undemocratic. An electoral victory by a party that wants to crack down on illegal immigrants? A failure of democracy. Victory by a party that refuses to rework society around the preferences of people who feel they were born into bodies of the wrong sex? A gain for authoritarianism. Victory by a party that rejects green-energy mandates as too expensive and impractical? An attack on everything democracy is about.

Under the second definition, it becomes the duty of democracy advocates to suppress their domestic opponents. The police should investigate citizens who post “antidemocratic” tweets about trans people or migration. Governments can and should ban antidemocratic candidates or outlaw antidemocratic political parties for the crime of advocating “undemocratic” ideas. It doesn’t matter if these ideas are popular. The more popular an “antidemocratic” idea becomes, the more necessary it is to suppress its supporters.

This approach is madness—an unmitigated and total disaster for the democratic cause. Democracy is a tiger, not a pussycat. It isn’t about enshrining the cultural and political preferences of the educated professional classes on the rest of society. Democracy is about self-government, not good government. It is if anything a tool by which the majority can check the pretensions and the delusions of a self-regarding elite.

Alexis de Tocqueville understood this much better than most contemporary self-described democracy advocates and defenders do. He saw democracy as a torrential force overturning traditional hierarchies and ways of life. It was powerful for both good and evil. It was irresistible in the long run, which is why he advised prudent and thoughtful people to make their peace with it.

What democracy needs most today is the one thing that its earnest and respectable advocates have so signally failed to provide: leadership. Democratic societies require leaders who understand the realities of their time and can inspire their fellow citizens to support the policies their countries need. When the vital center fails to produce strong leaders, demagogues rush in to fill the void.

Too many democracy advocates today argue that the ignorant and willful popular masses have failed the cause of democracy. This is a cop-out. It is the elites and the establishments of the democratic world who are failing. In times like these, with war clouds darkening abroad and economic and social changes roiling the waters at home, conformity, senility and mediocrity won’t do.

Foreign aid and the nation’s founding

So, why has the new administration pursued a path that will result in the deaths of thousands of people who cannot survive without aid? The stated motivations — addressing waste and fraud, being responsible with money — do not fit any fact on the ground. USAID may have its share of waste, but it is minuscule compared to other government agencies that have been untouched: In 2016, for example, The Washington Post found that the Pentagon had “buried” around $125 billion in bureaucratic waste, which is money that could be saved without sudden program cuts, mass layoffs or other forms of disruption. The Defense budget last year was nearly $900 billion. In contrast, last year USAID’s total budget was $44 billion, or around one-third of just the identifiable waste in the DOD’s budget.

The comparisons raise an obvious question: Why target aid, and why now? While conservative media places the blame for foreign aid waste on USAID, vastly larger amounts of waste and inefficiency in the military go largely untouched, facing none of the disruptions, layoffs or mass death that is accompanying USAID’s sudden cutoff. It is hard to find an innocent explanation for it.

The interesting thing about USAID is that its lifesaving work overseas directly helps Americans, too. The food aid that I watched save lives in Afghanistan comes from American farms, which stand to lose billions of dollars of business as the agency is dismantled. The medicines it distributes are made by American companies whose workers’ livelihoods could be threatened because of the sudden stoppage. Foreign aid gets a bad rap in the media, but it is also domestic aid, as well: We benefit from these programs as much as the overseas beneficiaries. They support American industry, businesses and lives. That’s largely all gone now.

During a meeting of the Continental Congress, after the British had occupied Philadelphia and chased the founding fathers to York, Pennsylvania, Samuel Adams said, “We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection.” It is a value that liberals and conservatives have agreed on for over a century: American virtue is one of our great strengths and abandoning that virtue one of our great weaknesses. The rapid shuttering of USAID threatens that virtue: It has harmed American businesses and interests, already killed people and placed millions more at risk, and has directly burdened religious relief organizations with mass layoffs, broken promises and preventable death. Yet, we have the opportunity to speak up for the helpless, to demand we fulfill our promises to save and to stop assaulting Christian charity in the false name of efficiency.

In his farewell address, President George Washington begged the fledgling United States to “observe good faith and justice towards all nations” so that we may “cultivate peace and harmony with all.” The public credit of America, as he described it, was our “important source of strength and security.” Whatever fiscal decisions the government decides to make, it must live up to that credit: We cannot simply abandon the poorest and most vulnerable we have promised to help.

Globally, USAID has become the target of tyrants who loathe civic participation, and the agency’s support for democratic governance made it a looming enemy in Russian state propaganda.

The hand that feeds

The unseen cost of dismantling foreign aid

https://www.deseret.com/magazine/2025/05/15/unseen-cost-of-dismantling-usaid/?utm

Published: May 15, 2025, 10:21 a.m. MDT

Miriam Martincic for the Deseret News

By Joshua Foust

Around 15 years ago, I was in the Tagab Valley of Afghanistan, about two hours’ drive north of Kabul. I was there as an adviser for the U.S. Army, helping them build better relationships with local communities in the hopes of reducing insurgent violence directed at troops and the national government. It was a tense period in a tense region, as the valley had recently been the staging ground for a series of violent assaults by terrorist group Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin, known by the acronym HIG. I was attached to a Provincial Reconstruction Team, an innovative hybrid of military, civil affairs, police advisers, State Department diplomats and representatives from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

At our first meeting with community elders from the area, they expressed a familiar set of needs: less disruptive behavior by the troops, more security, more money, less corruption, more opportunity. The first need was relatively straightforward to address: Our adviser team learned that male troops were invading female spaces, so we asked the unit to use female troops to search those spaces instead. It eased tensions and reduced the rate of car bombs targeted at international troops. It was the other complaints, about corruption, food, infrastructure and money, where we had less success. One of the elders, an old man with a big fluffy white beard, was upset that his family could not leave their village in the winter due to impassable mud roads. “We can build a working road,” he insisted, according to my notes of the meeting, “if we are given the money and equipment.”

When I brought this concern to the USAID representative, he shrugged and said they already had a road construction partner, a local businessman with ties to an Indian subcontractor who was paid to build a highway nearby. I relayed this news to the elder. “But we hate this man,” he told me. “This man steals from us. He is a HIG.”

Catholic Relief Services is losing at least half of its funding this year due to the USAID cuts, which means millions of people are at risk of an agonizing, preventable death.

I never found any evidence that the subcontractor was actually tied to the terrorist group, but I believed the villagers that he did steal from them. USAID contractors doing reconstruction work in Afghanistan hired networks of subcontractors to do work, each layer of the industry extracting fees along the way. The corruption that resulted was a depressingly common story in that part of Afghanistan. USAID had a reputation for building computer labs without electricity, power plants that cost more to run than to refuel, and roads meant to improve commerce that instead became superhighways for terrorists.

On top of the corruption and poorly conceived construction projects, USAID was also painfully slow to act. When the nearby Forward Operating Base, Morales-Frazier, developed a flooded entrance gate, the agency told us it would take six months of paperwork and thousands of dollars for a subcontractor to clear. It just wasn’t a priority for them, despite the malaria risk and impediment to responding to security threats. In frustration, a colleague and I spent $40 of our own money to buy a shovel and a small pipe. We dug a hole under the fence line and drained the gate area in less than an hour.

Despite all the frustrating examples of inefficiency, however, USAID also helped untold numbers of people in Afghanistan. Many of the villagers I met were only able to eat because of USAID-provided food aid. The roads, though repurposed for terrorism by the Taliban and other militias, really did help reconnect cities, improve commerce and lessen suffering across the country. The expensive power plants really did provide electricity and many of the schools where young people studied only existed because of USAID funding.

A target of tyrants

I am recounting this story to make a point: USAID is hardly a perfect agency, but it is also life-saving for millions of people in ways that protect American lives and national security interests. Before we dismantle it entirely, we should remember that without USAID programs and money, far more soldiers and contractors would have died in Afghanistan, as poverty and isolation led many bereft young people to join the Taliban. Without USAID resources, an entire generation of children would likely have grown up with only sporadic, mediated access to the West, leaving them more vulnerable for recruitment by extremists. These programs may have waste, but they also matter. They help us.

Take for example Catholic Relief Services — founded 82 years ago to help World War II survivors in Europe — which assists more than 200 million people in 134 countries access education, microfinance, food and medicine and other relief. The organization is losing at least half of its funding this year due to the USAID cuts, which means millions of people, relying on a U.S. government-funded Christian relief organization, are at greater risk of an agonizing, preventable death.

I saw USAID’s utility and importance after I left Afghanistan, too. I wound up in Washington, D.C., where I worked for the Eurasia Foundation, which operated in the 1990s and early 2000s as a grants manager for USAID and the State Department. These grants materially contributed to establishing the fledgling democracies we have seen emerge from the wreckage of the former Soviet Union: Countries like the Republic of Georgia hold elections today, however troubled, because of the work USAID did to support civil society, democracy and the rule of law 25 years ago. Small programs of barely $1 million paid back decades of direct benefit for American interests.

In his farewell address, President George Washington begged the fledgling United States to “observe good faith and justice towards all nations” so that we may “cultivate peace and harmony with all.”

As the Eurasia Foundation shifted in the 2010s to direct services, it secured USAID money to work with women in the Middle East to build small businesses; civil society groups in the Caucasus to support democracy; and governments in Central Asia to reduce corruption and improve services for citizens. The foundation even operated a small program doing civic exchanges with scientists and activists in Russia as an effort to build bridges and lower tensions. The program remained open even after Russia evicted other civil society groups following its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Readers' Forum: A firsthand look at the value of USAID

Globally, USAID has become the target of tyrants who loathe civic participation, and the agency’s support for democratic governance made it a looming enemy in Russian state propaganda. The Russian government hates voices it cannot control, and USAID supported independent media there that documented corruption and abuse (that support has ended, and their staff are at risk of imprisonment, torture and murder).

USAID was also instrumental in supporting the democratic development of Ukraine, which helped it break free of Russian domination. Russian leaders have never forgiven the agency for it. Misinformation researchers can trace how Russian state media produces messages spuriously attacking the agency, which then end up in American media, creating a false impression of wasteful or illegal conduct. These falsehoods have fueled the current crusade to disband the agency and distract the public from understanding how central USAID is for saving lives.

The DOGE response to disasters

Earlier this year, when the Department of Government Efficiency came to USAID, disconnecting phones and computers, forcing people out of work and misappropriating funds in the name of saving money, it felt like a stab in the heart — not just because of the disruption and contested legality (a lawsuit claiming President Donald Trump overstepped his constitutional authority in shuttering the agency is wending its way through the federal courts), but because it is an effort to end USAID’s lifesaving work abroad.

In less than a month, horror stories emerged as death, misery, financial ruin and starvation accompanied the sudden cut of funding. Government employees were abandoned, defenseless and without resources in dangerous conflict zones. The Telegraph, a British newspaper, reported in early February that within a week of USAID’s funding being cut off, a woman died because she could no longer access oxygen from a USAID-funded hospital. In late March, staff at the agency’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance received letters of termination the day an earthquake struck in Myanmar, killing 2,700 people. Instead of hundreds of U.S. disaster rescue and relief workers being among the first on the scene of the disaster, the State Department dispatched a team of advisers and donated $2 million to affected communities.

USAID to resume food aid in Ethiopia after massive theft

It is hard to recount these stories of preventable death without feeling rage. There are reports of food crops being abandoned, which will place hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people at risk of starvation. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program to treat HIV that President George W. Bush started, widely credited with saving tens of millions of lives, was shut off without warning — placing hundreds of thousands of people at immediate risk. Children are dying of preventable disease because they suddenly, overnight, cannot access USAID-funded medicines. In the same way that USAID has saved untold lives through its work, the sudden stop to such activities is putting untold numbers of people at risk, too. The cruelty is nearly unimaginable.

Even religious agencies aren’t immune from this disruption. World Vision, the Christian aid agency, receives hundreds of millions of dollars from USAID to distribute food grown by American farmers to starving children. It is now cut off, and while these groups scramble to secure bridge funding and exemptions from government officials, people are dying daily from starvation and preventable disease. The Associated Press reported that World Relief, another Christian USAID contractor, was unable to distribute seeds in Haiti, leaving them to languish in a warehouse during the growing season instead of yielding much-needed food. World Relief also operates in war-torn South Sudan to feed malnourished children under 5. It is unknown how long those children can survive without USAID support. In March, eight people, including five children, died while walking through the desert to a clinic in South Sudan. They were seeking treatment for cholera after USAID cuts forced their local hospital to close. A State Department spokesperson said without evidence that while many U.S. government programs remain in South Sudan, those providing medical services had enriched the country’s leaders instead of helping those in need.

Globally, USAID has become the target of tyrants who loathe civic participation, and the agency’s support for democratic governance made it a looming enemy in Russian state propaganda.

That same month, Pete Marocco, Trump’s deputy director-designate for USAID at that time, held a closed-door meeting with the representatives of World Relief, Samaritan’s Purse, Christian Aid, Food for the Hungry, Compassion International and the National Association of Evangelicals — all Christian relief organizations that rely on USAID money to save lives. As The Washington Post recounted, these leaders explained, in excruciating detail, how the cuts will cost lives every day that they aren’t reversed. Marocco insisted that the cuts were a “success,” which was met with disbelief by leaders of the faith-based charities. At meetings with congressional leaders, he reportedly repeated the false claim that USAID was a “money laundering scheme.” As of this writing, the funding remains inaccessible.

It is important to note that even temporary “pauses” on funding are not costless. In the near term, suddenly stopping medicine and food aid has already killed people and the death will continue until it is restored. But the longer these cuts remain in place, the harder such aid efforts will be to restart. Both Catholic Relief and World Vision have said that they will need to terminate employees and permanently lose capacity as a result of the money disruptions, even if they do eventually negotiate exemptions to continue their lifesaving work. The damage being done, not just to human lives but to our capacity to ever safeguard them again, is willful and permanent.

Foreign aid and the nation’s founding

So, why has the new administration pursued a path that will result in the deaths of thousands of people who cannot survive without aid? The stated motivations — addressing waste and fraud, being responsible with money — do not fit any fact on the ground. USAID may have its share of waste, but it is minuscule compared to other government agencies that have been untouched: In 2016, for example, The Washington Post found that the Pentagon had “buried” around $125 billion in bureaucratic waste, which is money that could be saved without sudden program cuts, mass layoffs or other forms of disruption. The Defense budget last year was nearly $900 billion. In contrast, last year USAID’s total budget was $44 billion, or around one-third of just the identifiable waste in the DOD’s budget.

The comparisons raise an obvious question: Why target aid, and why now? While conservative media places the blame for foreign aid waste on USAID, vastly larger amounts of waste and inefficiency in the military go largely untouched, facing none of the disruptions, layoffs or mass death that is accompanying USAID’s sudden cutoff. It is hard to find an innocent explanation for it.

Opinion: Are the consequences of cutting USAID worth it?

The interesting thing about USAID is that its lifesaving work overseas directly helps Americans, too. The food aid that I watched save lives in Afghanistan comes from American farms, which stand to lose billions of dollars of business as the agency is dismantled. The medicines it distributes are made by American companies whose workers’ livelihoods could be threatened because of the sudden stoppage. Foreign aid gets a bad rap in the media, but it is also domestic aid, as well: We benefit from these programs as much as the overseas beneficiaries. They support American industry, businesses and lives. That’s largely all gone now.

During a meeting of the Continental Congress, after the British had occupied Philadelphia and chased the founding fathers to York, Pennsylvania, Samuel Adams said, “We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection.” It is a value that liberals and conservatives have agreed on for over a century: American virtue is one of our great strengths and abandoning that virtue one of our great weaknesses. The rapid shuttering of USAID threatens that virtue: It has harmed American businesses and interests, already killed people and placed millions more at risk, and has directly burdened religious relief organizations with mass layoffs, broken promises and preventable death. Yet, we have the opportunity to speak up for the helpless, to demand we fulfill our promises to save and to stop assaulting Christian charity in the false name of efficiency.

In his farewell address, President George Washington begged the fledgling United States to “observe good faith and justice towards all nations” so that we may “cultivate peace and harmony with all.” The public credit of America, as he described it, was our “important source of strength and security.” Whatever fiscal decisions the government decides to make, it must live up to that credit: We cannot simply abandon the poorest and most vulnerable we have promised to help.

Globally, USAID has become the target of tyrants who loathe civic participation, and the agency’s support for democratic governance made it a looming enemy in Russian state propaganda.

Joshua Foust is an assistant professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University and a former adviser for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan.

This story appears in the May 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.

8. The Future of Nuclear Deterrence in the Indo-Pacific

The $64,000 question is how long will the nuclear taboo hold?

Conclusion:

Despite growing tensions and troublesome trends, the number of nuclear-armed states remains limited, and the nuclear taboo still holds. No nuclear use has occurred on the Korean Peninsula, and India-Pakistan clashes remain contained. The United States is at least talking with all potential adversaries about nuclear weapons and tension reduction; perhaps little will change as a result, but as Harold Macmillan famously said, “jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” While challenges multiply, deterrence in the Indo-Pacific has not failed. At least not yet.

The Future of Nuclear Deterrence in the Indo-Pacific

May 19, 2025

By Patrick M. Cronin

Indo-Pacific, Security

https://perryworldhouse.upenn.edu/news-and-insight/the-future-of-nuclear-deterrence-in-the-indo-pacific/?utm

We are entering a new nuclear age. Although no nuclear weapons have been used in conflict since World War II, the world is riven by great-power rivalries, regional instability, and revolutionary technological disruption. These trends place us “At the Precipice of Armageddon,” as the subtitle of Ankit Panda’s recent book warns.[1] He is not alone. With arms control agreements eroding and the global security becoming more volatile, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set the Doomsday Clock to a record-shattering 89 seconds to midnight.

Indo-Pacific actors are at the center of this emerging era of global peril. The actions taken by the United States, People’s Republic of China, Russian Federation, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)—as well as America’s allies and partners such as the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Taiwan, Japan, and India—will determine whether the four-score-long postwar nuclear taboo is broken.

Four Major Actors

Russia Normalizes Nuclear Coercion

Russia has gone a long way in the past three years to normalize nuclear coercion. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 undermined the core commitments of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and revived fears of nuclear blackmail and brinkmanship. Moscow wields the world’s largest stockpile of non-strategic (tactical) nuclear weapons, and it has clasped nuclear saber-rattling as a tool of statecraft. Vladimir Putin’s 2024 military doctrine lowers the threshold for nuclear use by authorizing the use of nuclear weapons in scenarios that are thought to pose an existential threat. Perhaps, this broad doctrine is simply designed to manipulate foes. But other nations cannot ignore Russia’s “escalate to de-escalate.” Kremlin rhetoric and military drills simulating limited nuclear strikes make the unthinkable thinkable.

Simultaneously, Moscow has dismantled the legal foundations of nuclear arms control. Russia’s violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty led to U.S. withdrawal from the agreement in 2019. Four years later, Putin revoked ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; he also suspended participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which limits the United States and Russia to 1,550 strategic weapons.

China Moves Beyond Minimal Deterrence

Russia’s contributions to heightened nuclear dangers would be less remarkable were it not for China’s rise as a second nuclear peer (or at least peer-ICBM) threat.[2] Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping’s ideological shift toward “Marxist Nationalism” is backed by as an unprecedented nuclear expansion, and China has departed from its historical “minimum nuclear deterrence” posture. Xi believes nuclear weapons bolster China’s strategic power. At a minimum, China’s more robust nuclear arsenal may make the region “safer” for conventional war, perhaps even protracted conventional war.

According to the most recent annual U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) report on People’s Liberation Army (PLA) capabilities, Beijing’s nuclear arsenal grew from an estimated 200 warheads in 2018 to more than 600 by mid-2024, and is on track to reach 1,500 by 2035. The PLA’s modernization includes the addition of 320 new silos for solid-fuel ICBMs and expansion, perhaps doubling, DF-5 silos for liquid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles. China is also making advancements in other parts of the nuclear triad, including the H-20 stealth bomber and future Type 096 SSBNs, which will augment existing H-6N bombers carrying air-launched ballistic missiles and augment the Type 094 Jin-class SSBN.

Worryingly, China has also deployed regional nuclear forces to ensure “usable nuclear options on every run of the escalation ladder.” The nuclear-capable DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missile is thought to be capable of regional precision strikes using low-yield nuclear warheads, and the hypersonic-capable DF-27 ballistic missile reportedly carries hypersonic and nuclear land-attack payloads that can target Guam, Alaska, and Hawaii.

Nuclear modernization will bolster China as it seeks to become a “world-class” military power by mid-century. As a 2023 DoD report explained, China’s armed forces are increasingly preparing for high-intensity conflict with the United States—intelligentized, multi-domain counter-intervention warfare backed by the expanded nuclear arsenal. Together, the entire “system of systems” approach is meant to preempt all American military threats, most especially U.S. power projection capabilities within the first and second island chains.

North Korea Seeks Nuclear Utility

Indo-Pacific deterrence and dangers are not restricted to near-peer nuclear powers. North Korea is completing an ambitious five-year military buildup that has moved Pyongyang from survival strategies toward coercion and even warfighting concepts. At a minimum, Kim Jong Un wants to be a de facto nuclear power. Kim has repeated this objective, declaring that he will “never abandon” his nuclear weapons and that his nuclear weapons will “exist forever,” buttressing such declarations by amending the North Korean constitution. Kim also reminds the world of North Korea’s extensive and very real nuclear weapons program by publicizing moves such as visiting a previously secret uranium enrichment facilityand a new airborne early warning and control aircraft.

North Korea’s nuclear weapons help ensure regime survival by deterring the superior conventional forces of the United States and South Korea. The nominee to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired USAF Lt. Gen. John Caine said during his confirmation hearing testimony that “North Korea’s long-range missile and nuclear programs represent an immediate security challenge.” He underscored Pyongyang’s cooperation with Moscow and its testing of a solid-fuel ICBM and hypersonic systems and unveiling a new “tactical” nuclear warhead and exercising a simulated tactical nuclear attack. As Caine commented, “Pyongyang has tested multiple missile systems capable of striking U.S. forces in the ROK and Japan, as well as Guam, Alaska, Hawaii, and CONUS.” And despite a possibility of potential new Trump-Kim summitry, Pyongyang is not about to negotiate away its nuclear lift insurance. Even Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has testified that “Kim has no intention of negotiating away his strategic weapons programs.”

The United States Responds

Six years ago, after North Korea demonstrated a successful ICBM test and China began building new ICBM silos, the first Trump administration took moves to break out of the post-Cold War mindset that nuclear weapons were exclusively intended to deter an adversary’s use of nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies. The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) sought to accelerate flexible nuclear options that could address lower runs on the escalation ladder and included an explicit reference to the possibility that nuclear weapons could be used to respond to “non-nuclear strategic attacks.” Among other initiatives, a low-yield warhead for the Trident missile and a new nuclear-tipped sea-launched cruise missile were set out as responses to emerging nuclear threats.

The Biden administration upgraded but did not enlarge the existing inventory by transitioning to the fifth-generation, nuclear-capable F-35 aircraft, seeking a new B-61-13 gravity bomb designed to attack harder and deeper targets, and developing a new nuclear sub-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N). It also sought measures to extend the service life of Ohio-class submarines; it also mulled a range of options including advanced non-nuclear systems and allied cooperation.

The second Trump administration inherited a range of options from the Biden administration, as well as from the bipartisan Strategic Posture Commission that examined threats out to 2035. Strengthening all legs of the triad is seen as essential. Adding warheads to land-based Minuteman III missiles, converting B-52 bombers to carry nuclear weapons, adding more missiles to Ohio-class SSBNs, developing a SLCM-N were among the steps recommended from officials in both parties. Secretary of the Air Force nominee Troy Meink’s Senate Committee on Armed Services testimony in March placed priority on nuclear modernization, particularly the land and air legs of the triad: containing cost overruns of the LGM-35A Sentinel (designed to replace about 450 50-year-old Minuteman III nuclear missiles) and moving forward with the B-21 Raider stealth bomber.

A signal challenge for the United States is retaining credible combat power against capable foes, including a near-nuclear weapon state. For instance, the Islamic Republic of Iran is deemed to have a sufficient stockpile of fissile material to make several weapons in a matter of weeks (and perhaps a year or 18 months to produce a weapon). But threatening to bomb Iran unless it negotiates a deal has simply prompted the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to vow “a strong counterattack,” and declare that Iran would have “no choice” but to build a nuclear arsenal. In the meantime, Iran has moved to quadruple near-bomb-grade fuel to 60 percent purity—not far from 90 percent needed, according to International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi.

The challenges do not stop with the aforementioned countries, as the next section of this paper tries to clarify.

Five Major Issues

The new nuclear age raises at least five consequential issues related to deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region. The first is the growing credibility gap regarding America’s nuclear umbrella or extended deterrence. A second issue is the increased blurring of conventional and nuclear thresholds. The third issue involves growing linkages among some of the “axis of upheaval” countries and the apparent danger of a polycrisis or multi-front war involving several nuclear weapon states. A fourth concern is how emerging technology, including artificial intelligence (AI) and other leading-edge technologies, may precipitate the breakdown of deterrence. Finally, the stress on an already beleaguered nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime begs for leadership and multilateralism at a time when both seem to be in short supply.

Rising Doubts about Extended Deterrence

Extended deterrence is inherently anxiety-ridden, particularly when reduced to the canonical question of whether one would risk one’s capital for the capital of any ally. The question of U.S. reliability preceded the reelection of President Trump, and the problem also transcends the Indo-Pacific. As threats multiply, the United States is supercharging distrust and fears of alliance abandonment. Europeans are talking openly of some form of nuclear sharing or multilateral strategic arsenal, however difficult that challenge may be to implement practically. French President Emmanuel Macron has long advocated European nuclear autonomy.

Still, talk about significant steps to bolster deterrence are sure to be on the agenda of the next South Korean government, and they will be discussed with equal vigor in official circles in Tokyo and perhaps Canberra.

Take the case of South Korea, a close U.S. treaty ally under enormous pressure to prevent the gap between regional threats and alliance security guarantees from widening further. After the election of Yoon Suk-yeol in 2022, the allies resumed large-scale military exercises and signed the Washington Declaration to reinforce extended deterrence. President Biden embraced President Yoon’s desire for South Korea to play the role of a “global pivotal state,” and the two leaders aligned their approaches not just toward North Korea but through overlapping Indo-Pacific strategies and with respect to democratic values. The Korean debate flared up as the Yoon administration announced a possible nuclear option policy in 2023. A trilateral summit at Camp David in 2023 bolstered US–South Korea–Japan cooperation. But South Korea’s fear of North Korea’s and China’s nuclear buildups, combined with lingering doubts about America’s, rekindled discussion about the need for a nuclear threshold capability. The allies can achieve better strategic alignment that will build on the Nuclear Consultative Group process and other alliance mechanisms to prevent decoupling and catalyzing an alliance crisis over extended deterrence.

The Blurring of Nuclear and Conventional Thresholds

As governments think harder about conventional-nuclear integration, it seems as if the line between potential conventional and nuclear use becomes even more muddied. A trenchant example of the blurring between nuclear and conventional thresholds is India’s development of the Agni-V ballistic missile equipped with MIRVs in March 2024. These dramatic new capabilities shift India away from a “credible minimum deterrent” and no-first-use doctrine toward a potential first-strike or warfighting capability. This shift is particularly destabilizing vis-à-vis Pakistan, which maintains a broad-spectrum deterrence strategy with low-yield tactical nuclear weapons. One danger derives from the possibility that Indian officials might think they can neutralize Pakistan’s second-strike capability in one blow—a concept strengthened by the addition of an indigenous Phase II Air Defense and Russian S-400 air defense systems. Fearing a preemptive strike, the threshold for nuclear use in a conventional conflict could lower. And this is just one of many examples.

Polycrisis and Multi-Front Wars

A multipolar world filled with multiple nuclear powers also complicates intra-crisis stability. In the Indo-Pacific, there is increased discussion about the possibility of near-simultaneously contingencies involving China and North Korea. Russia could also be involved in an idea made more credible by Article 3 of the Russia-DPRK Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty that says they will consult if either is subject to armed attack. Recognizing these trends, President Biden’s 2024 Nuclear Weapons Employment Planning Guidance directed the Pentagon to adapt to and develop options for simultaneously deterring aggression by China, Russia, and North Korea. This problem is likely to grow rather than dissipate over time. Thus, the United States and its allies must be ready to deter a two-front war and nuclear attacks in East Asia, as Markus Garlauskas has argued. Allies must be ready to take on China and North Korea including in a contingency involving limited nuclear attacks or multiple adversaries.

Emerging Technology and Strategic Stability

Technological innovation compounds the deterrence quandary. The appetite for focusing on ethical AI, for instance, appears to have lost the battle for now about whether it is possible to erect or negotiate guardrails for their use. Yet, reducing the risk of nuclear escalation stemming from AI-enabled weapons remains an obvious concern. As Oxford University’s John Tasioulas puts it, “The annihilation of the human race in a nuclear war is much more likely than annihilation of the human race by robots.” Decision-making timelines are shrinking, and the diffusion of technology is creating new threats. Even actors like Kim Jong Un is showcasing “suicide attack drones” powered by AI.

Paradoxically, the more we live in an advanced information age, the less reliable information seems to become. The lessons from malign uses of disruptive technology—from Stuxnet to exploding pagers to Pegasus eavesdropping to Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon campaigns—are creating case studies for the future of warfare and gray-zone and hybrid operations. All of them represents efforts that could neutralize systems vital for the maintenance of deterrence of nuclear war, as well. Consider the recent testimony of General Chance Saltzman, the chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force, who shone a spotlight on China’s rapidly developing ground-based laser threat that will soon be able to destroy U.S. satellites. The power to neutralize an opponent’s eyes and ears could wind up being the reason for deterrence failing in the future.

Strains on the Nonproliferation Regime

Finally, we appear to be in a proliferation moment. At a time when pillars of the postwar security and economic order have been called into question, global nonproliferation institutions and norms appear to be fraying. It is difficult to be optimistic about the NPT regime and nuclear arms control in general.

Vipin Narang, then acting assistant secretary of defense for space policy, declared last year, “We must prepare for a world where constraints on nuclear weapons arsenals disappear entirely,” adding that China’s strategic buildup alone may require “a modernization program sized for a completely different security environment . . . [a] multiple, nuclear challenger world.”

It is not yet clear where the Trump administration may push the boundaries of nonproliferation. But it is worth noting that former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien wrote in Foreign Affairs that President Trump should resume nuclear testing—even if it meant breaching the 1971 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty—to ensure new nuclear weapons could be grounded in physical rather than just virtual tests. Some of the pressure may simply accompany efforts to modernize the nuclear force, including the question of testing the W93 warhead for Trident II D5LE SLBMs and the dial-a-yield B61-13 gravity bomb for strategic bombers.

President Biden wanted to make sure nuclear weapons are used exclusively to deter nuclear attack, but his 2022 reviewultimately gave way to the reality that such a principled stance might undermine rather than strengthen deterrence. Encapsulating Biden’s review in the context of other NPRs since their inception more than three decades ago, Tom Nichols concluded that nuclear weapons remain a possible option against nuclear weapon use but also potential non-nuclear strategic attacks. The dilemma for the United States is whether it can decide on the purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons: are they strictly for deterrence or might they be a warfighting tool? Just as Russia, China, North Korea, and others grapple with this question, so, too, must the Washington.

Concluding Thought

Despite growing tensions and troublesome trends, the number of nuclear-armed states remains limited, and the nuclear taboo still holds. No nuclear use has occurred on the Korean Peninsula, and India-Pakistan clashes remain contained. The United States is at least talking with all potential adversaries about nuclear weapons and tension reduction; perhaps little will change as a result, but as Harold Macmillan famously said, “jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” While challenges multiply, deterrence in the Indo-Pacific has not failed. At least not yet.

About the author

Patrick M. Cronin is Asia-Pacific security chair at the Hudson Institute and scholar in residence at Carnegie Mellon University.

9. Rubio, the Trump Doctrine, and the State Department Reorg

This is probably the clearest and comprehensive deception of the vision for US foreign policy in this administration.

Read about the Ben Franklin Fellowship here: https://www.benfranklinfellowship.org/principles

Rubio, the Trump Doctrine, and the State Department Reorg

The secretary of state is taking serious steps to make the department work for the American people, not the world.

The American Conservative · by Peter Van Buren · May 19, 2025

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The deranged left claims that President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is chaotic and has no broad goal. So it is good to see Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a little-noticed 100-days statement, lay out the broad outlines of Trump’s foreign policy and thus his own department’s marching orders. Rubio managed to work in some “inside baseball” points as well, leaving clues as to how the State reorganization is proceeding.

Rubio, speaking next to Trump in the Oval Office, began with the bottom line up front: American foreign policy is going to be about American goals, not some sort of global largesse.

This President inherited 30 years of foreign policy built around what was good for the world. The decisions we made as a government in trade and foreign policy were basically, is it good for the world and the global community? And under President Trump, we are making foreign policy based on is it good for America. What that means is foreign policy is about three things: Does it make America stronger? Does it make America safer? Does it make America richer? If something doesn’t do those three things—and hopefully all three things—we are not doing it.

This explains Rubio’s gutting of a whole vertical stack of State Department offices on his revised organizational chart whose names begin with the word “global,” such as the Office for Global Women’s Issues. The current foreign policy system was built primarily around two ideas: that it was America’s responsibility to right all wrongs in the world to its own liking, and competition with the Russians during the Cold War to gain leverage in the developing nations of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

The latter faded with the shifts of history (though the Cold Warriors lurking in government would love to revive the Cold War using China as the punching bag). The former morphed under a succession of presidencies into things like the U.S. scolding the world about human rights (while ignoring the dark stains on our society at home) and pressing social justice programs empowering women, LGBT people, and minorities around the world in tune with woke America. That was Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

One of the main tools for enacting that kind of foreign policy is now gone, USAID. Rubio reminded everyone:

Foreign aid. We were funding some crazy stuff—crazy stuff! You tell me, how does a puppet show in some country around the world make us stronger, safer, more prosperous? So we got rid of the puppet shows and many other things. I’m sure they were very good puppet shows, and I'm sure some charity can go pay for it, but the American taxpayer should not.

The crazy projects way of doing business reached its high point in the nation-building fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan. The social justice side of things may have found its pinnacle under the Biden administration, when Pride flags and Black Lives Matter banners were displayed outside many American embassies. It is certainly true that many countries treat their minorities poorly. It is less clear, Rubio seems to say, that fixing this is America’s business.

Rubio also laid claim to his department’s role in Trump’s mass deportation plans.

I say this unapologetically—we are actively searching for other countries to take people from third countries, not just El Salvador, but other countries, to say, “We want to send you the most despicable human beings to your countries. Will you do that as a favor to us?” The further away from America, the better, so they can’t come back across the border. I am not apologetic for that. The President was elected to keep America safe and get rid of a bunch of perverts and pedophiles and child rapists out of our country.

He then turned to his department’s own reorganization to meet the demands of the new administration.

We have stopped student visas for people who burn down our universities and take over libraries and harass people. Why are we giving student visas to people to create disruption? We have taken away student visas from people who came here to do that.

ICE does the heavy lifting of actually arresting and physically deporting illegal aliens from the United States, but it is the State Department, through its Visa Office in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, that actually issues the visas abroad. Rubio is calling for a new vision in those visa decisions, one that looks to the anticipated behavior of the applicant once in the U.S., not just his paper qualification for the visa itself. It is a change, if fully implemented, as drastic as those following 9/11 when visa officers were repurposed from basically tourism advocates to pseudo-law enforcement.

It is simple—if you are coming to America to start riots, we will not give you, and we will take away, a student visa. By the way, every country I have traveled to, 14 countries in 14 weeks, and you know what they say to me? “Yes, that is what we would do too.” The only people that seem to disagree are a handful of federal judges and a bunch of crazy people who get paid to write a report.

The State Department legally revokes visas. In line with this, Rubio announced “his officials are evaluating whether any of the anti-Israel protesters who invaded a Columbia University building [recently] should see their temporary visas revoked.” Rubio said on X that the State Department is “reviewing the visa status of the trespassers and vandals” after New York police made 80 arrests at the campus. A State Department spokesperson said, “We are upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process.” That is a new emphasis under Rubio. Trump critics claim this “America First” policy will collide with the upcoming World Cup matches scheduled this year in the United States. Not so, said Rubio, explaining, “We have very talented consular affairs people, but technology, working with consultants, and millions of people coming into the country for this.”

Finally, Rubio praised State’s most public-facing office, the one that issues U.S. passports to the public.

Some of us who served in Congress recognized a year and a half ago we had a meltdown under Biden. You couldn’t get a passport. We had people calling in on Friday, “My passport expires,” and in the month of March, 2.78 million Americans got their passports. That’s the largest single-month processing of passports ever.

It is more than a coincidence that Rubio in his statement called out by name only two not-so-well-known offices at State, the Visa Office and the Passport Office. Both have new heads, and both men are members of the Ben Franklin Fellowship (BFF). The BFF believes “U.S. international engagement should recognize the primacy of American sovereignty and the obligation to defend national borders... The central purpose of U.S. diplomacy is to serve the national interest. We endorse the careful husbanding of limited resources, both budget and staff, rather than engaging in perpetual, unfunded expansion.” In its own words, BFF is “a community of current and past State Department employees and foreign affairs practitioners who support traditional, Constitutional American values in international affairs.”

Layoffs are not expected to hit passport and visa processing within the Bureau of Consular Affairs. That bureau has around 2,400 domestic employees, about half of whom process passports, removing a large swath of the workforce from the RIF pool.

Rubio has seeded other BFF members at key nodes within State, most visibly as deputy secretary (Rubio’s Number 2) and as the acting head of the director general’s office, the part of the State Department that sits atop a pyramid of offices controlling internal budgets, personnel assignments, discipline, and promotions. It grants Rubio a lot of control over the department, and represents an understanding of the mechanics of the bureaucracy that his predecessors, Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo, never achieved.

Rubio gave no hints whatsoever that he is done making changes at Foggy Bottom. Keep a close eye on his public statements for clues for which direction he intends to take his department next.

The American Conservative · by Peter Van Buren · May 19, 2025

10. Trump Is Destroying a Core American Value. The World Will Notice.

This is a counterpoint to the article in The American Conservative by Peter Van Buren, "Rubio, the Trump Doctrine, and the State Department Reorg."

Opinion

Guest Essay

Trump Is Destroying a Core American Value. The World Will Notice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/opinion/trump-soft-power-state.html

May 18, 2025

Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

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By Michael Posner

Mr. Posner is a lawyer and human rights advocate who was the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor from 2009 to 2013.

In the late 1980s, Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist who died this month, developed the concept of soft power. His central premise, that the United States enhances its global influence by promoting values like human rights and democracy, has guided U.S. foreign policy for decades across both Republican and Democratic administrations.

President Trump has made clear that he fundamentally rejects this vision. As president, he has ordered a sweeping overhaul of the State Department that will cripple its capacity to promote American values abroad. At the center of this effort are drastic cuts to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — the State Department’s core institution for advancing soft power, which I led under President Barack Obama. Unless Congress intervenes, the debasement of the bureau’s role will impair America’s ability to challenge authoritarianism, support democratic movements and provide independent analysis to inform U.S. foreign policy. The long-term result will be a United States that is weaker, less principled and increasingly sidelined as authoritarian powers like Russia and China offer their own transactional models of global engagement.

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor was created with bipartisan congressional support in 1977, a time when lawmakers sought greater influence over foreign policy in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and America’s support for authoritarian regimes in countries like Chile and South Korea. President Jimmy Carter’s religious convictions and deep commitment to human rights gave the fledgling bureau early momentum. Still, its purpose was always practical: to ensure U.S. foreign aid and trade decisions were informed by credible assessments of human rights conditions around the world. That’s why every year, the bureau prepares congressionally mandated human rights reports.

In its early years, it struggled to defend its existence. Foreign governments resented being called out in its annual reports and attacked its legitimacy. Many State Department traditionalists viewed its focus on human rights as an unhelpful distraction from the realpolitik topics they were much more comfortable addressing. It also drew criticisms of hypocrisy, mostly from the left, for condemning the records of other countries in the face of unresolved human rights problems here in the United States. Others accurately pointed out that even as the State Department’s human rights reports documented serious abuses, the United States continued to provide substantial aid to governments like Ferdinand E. Marcos’s Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and numerous military regimes across Latin America.

These tensions have not disappeared. But over nearly five decades, the bureau has evolved to confront them. Governments, companies, judges and nongovernmental organizations have all come to rely on its annual country reports. It plays the lead role in preventing the United States from funding foreign security forces that violate human rights. And its policy engagement has guided the U.S. approach to international conflicts, repressive regimes and civil wars.

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That progress is now at risk. The Trump administration’s proposed “reforms” would hamstring my former agency’s ability to uphold its mission in three major ways.

First, under the guise of what Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls streamlining, the administration plans to eliminate two offices, one that oversees grants, the other focused on promoting internet freedom in closed societies and on championing human rights in corporate conduct and international bodies like the United Nations. As part of a departmentwide downsizing, the bureau’s overall staff will also be cut by at least 15 percent.

While modest streamlining might make sense, these sweeping cuts will severely compromise Democracy, Human Rights and Labor’s ability to act as a counterweight to regional State Department bureaus and U.S. embassies, which by design give precedence to diplomatic relationships over human rights. Mr. Rubio has said that he wants to give regional bureaus more power to decide when human rights issues should be considered or ignored.

Inevitably, the effect of this shift will be to relegate human rights to the sidelines of U.S. foreign policy. During the first Obama administration, I was able to focus U.S. attention on issues that regional bureaus or U.S. embassies had chosen not to prioritize, including extrajudicial killings in Pakistan, restrictions on civil society in Cambodia, increasing authoritarianism in Hungary, security force abuses in Nigeria and the broad denial of rights of the Sahrawi people in Western Sahara by Morocco. Senior U.S. officials still need to hear about such issues to make informed policy decisions. A diminished Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor will prevent this from happening.

It will also undermine the government’s ability to act when opportunities for human rights progress arise. Take Myanmar, for example. In 2011, Myanmar’s military leaders signaled an interest in opening to the West. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on the bureau to lead an effort that freed more than 1,100 political prisoners and negotiated access to prisons by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The bureau’s expertise makes these kinds of interventions possible.

Image

Clinton tours the Shwedegon Pagoda, a Buddhist temple in Rangoon, Myanmar, in 2011.Credit...Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Second, the Trump administration’s plan will significantly narrow the scope of the annual human rights reports. This year’s reports will no longer include sections on freedom of assembly, free and fair elections, gender-based violence, arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy, or violent crimes targeting vulnerable populations. The administration has not offered any justification for deleting these sections, which will deprive the entire world of important information about human rights abuses.

Finally, the Trump administration’s proposed restructuring will eliminate the Human Rights and Democracy Fund, the primary funding source for the bureau’s democracy promotion programs, which provide a lifeline to embattled human rights defenders worldwide. Oddly, the bureau is planned to be housed within the State Department’s budget office, even though it will almost certainly no longer have any funds to disburse. While administration officials suggest that future funding could flow through regional bureaus, given the Trump administration’s approach to date, that possibility is highly unlikely to materialize.

In 2020, Mr. Nye poignantly wrote, “human rights should not be framed as pitting values against U.S. national interests, because values are part of America’s national interest.”

We may learn more this week about when the administration plans to carry out its overhaul, as Mr. Rubio is slated to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Lawmakers from both parties need to stand up to him and demand that the State Department continue to support the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, which is an essential engine of soft power in U.S. foreign policy. It is in our long-term national interest that they stop it from burning out.

More on America’s soft power under President Trump

Opinion | Krista Mahr, Nicholas Kristof, Lydia Polgreen and Derek Arthur

Two Opinion Columnists on Trump’s Era of International Bullying

May 15, 2025

The Demise of U.S.A.I.D. and American Soft Power

Feb. 11, 2025

Opinion | Joseph E. Stiglitz

My Brush With Trump’s Thought Police

May 13, 2025

Michael Posner is the director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at N.Y.U. Stern School of Business and the author of “Conscience Incorporated.”

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11. China Expanding Haifa Port, Endangering Israeli and American Security

One of the many forms of "strategic competition."

China Expanding Haifa Port, Endangering Israeli and American Security

Newsweek · by Gordon G. Chang · May 19, 2025

"Israel must halt this expansion, reassess the Haifa arrangement, and align itself once again with the values and interests it claims to share with the United States," Gadeer Kamal-Mreeh, a former member of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, wrote in a recent op-ed. "Anything less is a betrayal of our shared security—and of the American trust we rely on."

In March, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued permission to China's state-owned Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) to double the capacity of its Bay Port in Haifa. The controversial decision entrenches China in one of Israel's most strategic locations and reflects the continuing ambivalence of countries toward the Chinese Communist Party.

Israeli security professionals in 2015 were alarmed when Israel Ports Co., without adequate interagency review, selected SIPG to run the Haifa port for 25 years.

An Israeli Navy fast patrol boat cruises in the port of Haifa in northern Israel on October 30, 2024. An Israeli Navy fast patrol boat cruises in the port of Haifa in northern Israel on October 30, 2024. AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP via Getty Images

The threat was obvious. Haifa Bay Port is close to Haifa's airport and is a mere 1.8 kilometers away from the Israeli navy's main base. Haifa, in the northern part of the country, has the Jewish state's largest port.

"Israel's seaports are critical strategic infrastructure," Shaul Chorev, a retired Israeli Navy rear admiral and now a director at the Haifa-based Institute for Maritime Policy and Strategy, told Newsweek. The Haifa Bay Port, he pointed out, "is considered to be amongst the country's most important strategic assets."

"To operate the facility, Shanghai International Port Group will have to connect to all the internet systems of both the harbor and the Ministry of Transportation, exposing them to manipulation, data mining and cyber warfare in the service of Chinese government interests," states the September 2019 report by the University of Haifa-Hudson Institute Consortium on the Eastern Mediterranean, co-chaired by Rear Admiral Chorev. "Given the military and intelligence ties among China, Russia and Iran, the Haifa port arrangements create the risk that China might, under some circumstances, obtain sensitive Israeli naval, merchant shipping and maritime infrastructure information and provide it to Iran."

Iran, therefore, will now have an expanded listening post in Haifa. SIPG can monitor what comes in and out of that port, especially general cargo. At a time of war, the Chinese company could disable cranes at the port or even engage in acts of sabotage, damaging or disabling ships.

Why would the Netanyahu government allow the Haifa port expansion? For too long there has been a failure, around the world but especially in the U.S., to acknowledge the danger posed by China's regime. Even today, in the face of clear evidence that the regime leverages investment and commercial relations to accomplish malicious ends, countries continue to accept Chinese money.

The one obvious solution for Israel is to cancel SIPG's concession. A cancellation, Kamal-Mreeh told Newsweek, "would likely be a highly complex and sensitive move" and "would require a strong political consensus in Israel."

Once such a consensus is reached, there are few legal impediments to a cancellation. Section 9(b) of the May 2015 contract awarding the port concession to SIPG provides that Israel's transport minister, with the consent of the finance minister and after consultation with SIPG, may "cancel or restrict the authorization if he deems it necessary to address the needs of the economy or for reasons of public interest."

China's backing for attacks on Israel would seem to qualify as a "reason of public interest." The Chinese state, for instance, has provided and continues to provide economic, diplomatic, propaganda, and weapons support for Iran's October 7 attack on Israel, and since then Beijing has gone all-in on the Palestinian cause. All three main Iranian proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi militia—have large quantities of Chinese weapons. China supplies critical components, such as computer chips, for Iran's own weaponry.

Of even greater concern, China has provided most of what Iran needs for its nuclear weapons program. For a long time, the international community looked the other way as China, both directly and through the nuclear black market ring of Dr. A.Q. Khan of Pakistan, helped Iran's "atomic ayatollahs" enrich uranium for the world's most destructive devices and take other steps needed for a bomb.

Is cancellation of the port concession possible?

"The feasibility depends largely on the evolving regional security context and the level of support from key allies, particularly the United States," said Kamal-Mreeh, now CEO of Washington, D.C.-based GKM Global Consulting. "Growing concerns over national security and critical infrastructure resilience—especially in light of shifting global alliances—could push the issue higher on Israel's strategic agenda."

China will certainly be upset if SIPG is ejected. Beijing is now throwing a tantrum because CK Hutchison, a public Hong Kong company, had tentatively agreed to sell to BlackRock 199 berths in 43 ports in 23 countries. Two of the ports are in the Panama Canal Zone.

Beijing's intervention in the BlackRock deal shows that it considers ports to be strategic assets, which should encourage the rest of the world to consider these facilities in the same light.

Panama's comptroller general and attorney general are now seeking to cancel CK Hutchison's concessions to its two Canal Zone ports. Israel should be doing the same with SIPG's port in Haifa.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America and The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on X @GordonGChang.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

Newsweek · by Gordon G. Chang · May 19, 2025

12. Constructing Instability in Conflict: The Failures of U.S. Reconstruction

A thoughtful essay by a young researcher.

Excerpts:

The American model of reconstruction as a tool for government legitimacy in conflict zones has consistently fallen short. The “hearts and minds” strategy often overlooks the complexity of internal conflicts. Historical incidents, such as Greece and Vietnam, as well as case studies from Afghanistan and Iraq, reveal a pattern of overemphasis on material improvements at the expense of long-term stability. Reconstruction programs failed to align with local governance structures, leading to corruption and inefficiency. Beyond operational failures, the assumption that aid fosters legitimacy is fundamentally flawed. Large financial injections into conflict zones often exacerbate violence rather than stabilizing governments.

Future U.S. engagement in reconstruction should reconsider its approach. A more nuanced understanding of legitimacy, local governance, and security dynamics is necessary to avoid repeating past mistakes. Reconstruction debates have introduced alternatives like coercion theory, which prioritizes security over services, as seen in El Salvador and Dhofar. Polycentric state-building favors local authority and participation, exemplified by the Anbar Awakening’s bottom-up approach. A rewards-based development model, like the Millenium Challenge Corporation’s (MCC) Results-Based Financing, challenges the idea that aid reduces conflict by incentivizing security instead.

Essay| The Latest

Constructing Instability in Conflict: The Failures of U.S. Reconstruction

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/05/20/constructing-instability-in-conflict-the-failures-of-u-s-reconstruction/

by Tyler Lissy

05.20.2025 at 06:00am

Overview

American foreign policy engages with unstable foreign nations to address shared global challenges. Fragile governments require support to prevent threats to international peace, economic development, and political stability. One key tool the U.S. employs in conflict zones is foreign assistance, which includes financial aid, resources, and technical expertise.

Despite its intent, American reconstruction efforts in foreign conflicts face significant criticism. The U.S. model emphasizes legitimacy among local populations, yet some scholars argue that its foundations are flawed. Others suggest shifting beyond population- and enemy-centric approaches to improve outcomes. With both internationalized (foreign involvement) and non-internationalized internal conflicts dominating modern warfare, understanding the relationship between reconstruction, legitimacy, and stability is essential. This write-up explores key debates surrounding American reconstruction efforts, highlighting a range of perspectives.

Definitions and Terminology

Clarifying key terms helps frame the discussion on reconstruction policy. Definitions are based on U.S. operational doctrines to distinguish them from other global perspectives.

Merriam-Webster defines insurgency as a “condition of revolt against a government that is less than an organized revolution and that is not recognized as belligerency.” This term, often contrasted with civil war, is used to delegitimize opposition groups and justify government force. Insurgencies succeed based on factors like external sanctuaries, security forces, and the population’s identity and political alignment. Government legitimacy, as defined in the Study of Internal Conflict, hinges on citizens’ acceptance of the rule of law and governance quality.

The U.S. Department of State describes foreign assistance as a means to “address fragility, respond to and mitigate conflicts and crises, and promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms.” In counterinsurgency (COIN) operations, aid is part of a broader strategy that blends military and civilian efforts to contain insurgencies and address root causes. U.S. COIN doctrine prioritizes a population-centric approach, often referred to as “winning hearts and minds.” This assumes economic and infrastructure development can reduce insurgent influence and bolster government legitimacy.

History and Background

U.S. counterinsurgency strategies predate modern conflicts. Some trace their origins to the Indian Wars (17th-19th centuries), though these were more punitive than structured COIN efforts. A more widely accepted precedent is the American Civil War, where the Union countered Confederate guerrilla tactics with strategies ranging from pacification to General Sherman’s “hard war.”

At the turn of the 20th century, COIN evolved during the Philippine-American War, combining military force with civilian outreach to weaken insurgent support. These methods influenced interventions in Haiti and Central America and shaped the Marine Corps’ Small Wars Manual.

During the Cold War, COIN gained strategic importance. U.S. aid and military support helped suppress a communist insurgency in Greece (1947-49). The British-led Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) introduced “hearts and minds” tactics, blending coercion with civic reforms. However, the Vietnam War exposed COIN’s limitations. Despite large-scale efforts, U.S. forces failed to prevent a North Vietnamese victory. Late 20th-century interventions in Grenada, Panama, and Libya yielded mixed results, but post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq reinforced COIN’s challenges. Initial military victories gave way to prolonged insurgencies, where weak governments, sectarian tensions, and shifting U.S. strategies hindered stabilization.

Analysis: Shortcomings of U.S. Reconstruction

Despite its historical significance, U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine prioritizes influence and legitimacy while relying on debatable assumptions about internal conflicts. The U.S. model treats government-insurgent competition as a zero-sum game, emphasizing active support through material improvements. However, legitimacy in conflict zones is complex. It extends beyond material needs to include governance perceptions and societal expectations. The lack of critical reflection on legitimacy within COIN doctrine has resulted in misguided strategies.

Afghanistan

Following 9/11, U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan repeated past mistakes. Policymakers ignored lessons from the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) program in Vietnam. A significant reduction in USAID and civil affairs staff left U.S. operations underprepared. Unrealistic reconstruction timelines led to short-term projects with little long-term sustainability. The U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations found no clear link between poverty, low education, and radicalization. Poor coordination between U.S. and Afghan officials further weakened efforts, with under-budgeted hospitals and unsuitable road projects highlighting mismanagement.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) identified additional failures. Ignoring Afghanistan’s geography and climate led to flawed infrastructure planning. Insurgents often exploited U.S. projects to discredit the government. Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) lacked reliable evaluation methods, leading to ineffective aid distribution. Studies in conflict-prone areas found that increased aid did not improve security and, in some cases, escalated violence.

Iraq

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. quickly transferred power but failed to establish a stable governance framework. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and its successors struggled with mismanagement, corruption, and security failures. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) reported widespread inefficiencies. Iraqi leaders criticized U.S. oversight, citing incomplete projects like the Basrah Children’s Hospital and the Fallujah Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Organizational failures further hindered reconstruction. The CPA delayed coordination with field offices and military divisions. Pre-war planning underestimated the need for civilian-military cooperation. Economic miscalculations, particularly in the energy sector, led to wasteful spending. Contracting mismanagement worsened the situation, with funding gaps, cost overruns, and poor financial oversight. By 2006, electricity generation remained below prewar levels, and U.S. audits revealed missing financial data for large aid allocations.

Studies on aid effectiveness in Iraq mirrored findings from Afghanistan. U.S. reconstruction efforts disrupted local governance and reinforced patronage politics. The dissolution of Iraqi security forces created a power vacuum, exacerbated by off-budget aid distributions. Despite significant oil revenues, Iraq’s extractive state capacity remained weak, and U.S. aid further destabilized governance structures.

Conclusions

The American model of reconstruction as a tool for government legitimacy in conflict zones has consistently fallen short. The “hearts and minds” strategy often overlooks the complexity of internal conflicts. Historical incidents, such as Greece and Vietnam, as well as case studies from Afghanistan and Iraq, reveal a pattern of overemphasis on material improvements at the expense of long-term stability. Reconstruction programs failed to align with local governance structures, leading to corruption and inefficiency. Beyond operational failures, the assumption that aid fosters legitimacy is fundamentally flawed. Large financial injections into conflict zones often exacerbate violence rather than stabilizing governments.

Future U.S. engagement in reconstruction should reconsider its approach. A more nuanced understanding of legitimacy, local governance, and security dynamics is necessary to avoid repeating past mistakes. Reconstruction debates have introduced alternatives like coercion theory, which prioritizes security over services, as seen in El Salvador and Dhofar. Polycentric state-building favors local authority and participation, exemplified by the Anbar Awakening’s bottom-up approach. A rewards-based development model, like the Millenium Challenge Corporation’s (MCC) Results-Based Financing, challenges the idea that aid reduces conflict by incentivizing security instead.

Tags: COIN, Conflict zone legitimacy, Peace Process, Reconstruction

About The Author

Tyler Lissy
Tyler Lissy is a senior studying Political Science and Security Studies at Dickinson College. He is currently a member of Pi Sigma Alpha (national political science honor society) and formerly a member of Dickinson College Student Senate. Relevant courses taken include National Security Policy, Counterterrorism, and Civil Wars and Political Violence. Applicable experience includes a Policy internship with the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce and multiple stints as a research analyst with the US Army War College. Interests for future research include international affairs, internal conflicts, and innovative technology/tactics in warfare.

13. China’s Expanding Influence in Bangladesh: Strategic Debt and Naval Ambitions

Excerpts:

Xi likely sees India’s work on Andaman and Nicobar as a challenge to China’s “String of Pearls” strategy, which is part of its port network. As a result, more BRI money continues to flow into ports like Hambantota and Gwadar, to counter India.

In its current state, Bangladesh will continue to pander to China. In doing so, Bangladesh may shore up its failing economy, in hopes that these projects will lead to increased trade, and a way out of its mounting debt problems. China will continue to court Bangladesh to secure its interests in the Bay of Bengal, counter India’s economic plans and, expand CCP influence throughout the Indo-Pacific region.

Opinion / Perspective| The Latest

China’s Expanding Influence in Bangladesh: Strategic Debt and Naval Ambitions

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/05/20/china-bangladesh-bay-of-bengal-strategy/

by Charles Davis

05.20.2025 at 06:00am

Bangladesh appears to be yet another example of China’s economic coups. Leveraging debt may allow China to expand its naval presence into the Bay of Bengal and add another strategic port to China’s Blue Water Naval goals. It is also likely to elevate tensions with India.

Bangladesh’s Growing Reliance on China

In August 2022, Mustafa Kamal, then the finance minister for Bangladesh, warned developing countries about the risk of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) loans. He expressed deep concern over poor lending practices and overwhelming indebtedness. At the time of his interview, Bangladesh owed China USD 4 billion, which equated to roughly 6 percent of its foreign dept. Bangladesh’s dept to China has surged to USD 7 billion, nearly doubling in three years.

In January 2024, Bangladesh replaced Kamal with Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali. Abul Hassan has a long, and developed, relationship with China. Abul Hassan served as the Chief of Mission at the Embassy of Bangladesh in Beijing from 1983 to 1986 and led the way to China’s investment in the Barapukuria coal mine project. Bangladesh’s interim government, led by Muhammad Yunus, has signaled a deepening alignment with Beijing.

Yunus met with President Xi Jinping on March 28, 2025 in an effort to reinforce its relationship with Communist China and likely to solidify an additional USD 5 billion soft loan from China, which would raise the dept to USD 12 billion.

Yunus is hopeful China will increase investments in Bangladesh to revive its economy, which is in disrepair due to both political and economic crises. He encouraged collaboration in infrastructure, renewable energy, and trade, highlighting Bangladesh’s potential as a manufacturing hub. Most importantly, he reminded Xi that his country’s strategic position provided opportunities for China to expand its influence and solidify presence in an area that is strategically important to the United States.

China’s Interests In the Bay of Bengal

China has strategically invested in Bangladesh, focusing on two key ports—Chattogram and Mongla—to expand its maritime footprint. The Chattogram Port is part of China’s broader BRI and strategically important because of northern location within the Bay of Bengal. In fact, in October 2024, a Chinese naval fleet, including the ships Qi Jiguang and Jing Gangshan, made a goodwill visit to the port, where bilateral meetings focused on naval cooperation between the two countries.

China’s financial entanglement with Bangladesh is not merely economic—it serves a broader strategic purpose, particularly in maritime security. Recently, China pledged $400 million to modernize Bangladesh’s second largest port in Mongla. Projects include boosting the port’s capacity and efficiency, which are also in line with China’s strategic interests in the Bay of Bengal. China’s navy has not visited this port and that is likely the reason for the significant investment in capacity and efficiency, as these changes will make the port available for naval access.

Further Friction Between China and India

So why keep throwing money at Bangladesh? What does China want? Xi is making a strategic move to enhance influence in South Asia and secure alternative routes in trade. The Bay of Bengal offers an option to the Malacca Strait, which can easily be blockaded due to narrow navigation through the region. Control and influence in Bengal will also allow China to connect Myanmar-Yunnan oil and gas pipelines to an easy distribution center.

Leverage through extreme debt allows Xi to project naval power, counter India’s influence in the region, and set Communist China up as a leader in the Global South.

As a result of China’s continued encroachment, India has increased its naval presence in the Bay of Bengal, conducting regular patrols and participating in joint naval exercises like the Malabar Exercise with the U.S., Japan, and Australia; all aimed to maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific region.

The Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project will provide an alternate route to the Siliguri Corridor (Chicken’s Neck) and enhance connectivity to India’s northeastern states. India hopes to connect Kolkata with Myanmar’s Sittwe Port via the Bay of Bengal. Additionally, India is enhancing its naval and air presence in the Bay of Bengal through infrastructure upgrades on Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Both serve key roles in India’s naval operations which focus on maritime security and surveillance in the region.

For the CCPs part, they continue to disrupt the Kaladan project by supporting the Arakan Army, an insurgent group in Myanmar. The group reportedly has access to Chinese weapons and additional funding from Chinese linked organizations; much of which is used to disrupt crucial road work and project timelines.

Final Thoughts

Xi likely sees India’s work on Andaman and Nicobar as a challenge to China’s “String of Pearls” strategy, which is part of its port network. As a result, more BRI money continues to flow into ports like Hambantota and Gwadar, to counter India.

In its current state, Bangladesh will continue to pander to China. In doing so, Bangladesh may shore up its failing economy, in hopes that these projects will lead to increased trade, and a way out of its mounting debt problems. China will continue to court Bangladesh to secure its interests in the Bay of Bengal, counter India’s economic plans and, expand CCP influence throughout the Indo-Pacific region.

Tags: Bangladesh, Belt and Road Initiative, China, INDO-PACIFIC

About The Author

Charles Davis
CW4 Charles Davis serves on the Warrant Officer Career College faculty. He currently instructs International Strategic Studies at all levels of Warrant Officer Education. CW4 Davis is a U.S. Army War College Strategic Broadening Program graduate with a Master’s Degree with Honors in Intelligence Studies from American Military University. CW4 Davis is also a recipient of the Military Intelligence Corps Knowlton Award.

14. A Three Step Solution To Rebuild the Marine Corps

From Gary "Lynyrd Skynyrd" Anderson.

Excerpts:

A final step would be to insist that the Navy commit to a thirty-eight big deck amphibious ship fleet. When General Berger released the Navy from that requirement the then CNO promised him that the Navy could maintain the capability to maintain three Marine Expeditionary Units afloat world-wide 24/7.

The combination of incompetence and negligence the Navy has fallen far short of that promise. Incredibly, the other living commandants recently allowed Berger to sign on to a letter urging the Navy to expand its amphibious fleet. That is akin to letting the fox complain about hen house security.

I warned my former colleague that my recommendations would probably not be well received at Headquarters Marine Corps or at Quantico and that the current Marine Corps leadership has an unfortunate reputation for shooting the messenger. However, if General Smith wants to quiet the insurgents in the family, those recommendations would be a good place to start. To paraphrase Lynyrd Skynyrd – give me three steps General – and you won't hear from me no more.

A Three Step Solution To Rebuild the Marine Corps

By Gary Anderson

May 19, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/05/19/a_three_step_solution_to_rebuild_the_marine_corps_1110987.html

I recently received a call from an old Marine Corps acquaintance who now works for the Corps as a contractor. He has been heavily involved in the controversial Force Design (FD) project begun by former commandant, General David Berger, and continued by his successor General Eric Smith. FD has caused an intellectual civil war within the Corps that has pitted the current senior leadership against many retired marines as well as a growing underground resistance in the active ranks.

I have been a particularly virulent critic of FD for six years and have gone so far as to recommend replacing General Smith with a commandant more open to an approach which would head the Corps back to becoming a balanced world-wide force in readiness rather than being a China-centric force as directed under FD.

I was asked what actions on the part of the current leadership would cause people like me to be less antagonistic toward General Smith and FD.

I started off by telling him that I don't presume to speak for the other people who think that FD is a terrible idea, including every living former commandant, with the exception of Gen Berger. Every living USMC Medal of Honor winner, most of the former Marine Corps combatant commanders, and the editor of the alternative Marine Corps publication "Compass Points".

However, I did outline three steps that would shut me up. All of them are designed to give future commandants some latitude to determine the future of the Corps. Right now, whoever the next commandant is, he will have one option, and that is FD.

First, conduct a real operational and tactical field test of FD. Most critics argue that it is a flawed concept at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war. Its operational assumption is that small groups of Marines known as Stand-in-Forces (SIF) can operate from the hundreds of isolated islets and shoals in China’s first island chain, firing sub-sonic NEMSIS anti-ship missiles at Chinese naval combatants. The theory is that they will "shoot and scoot" from islet to islet before the Chinese can develop a firing solution. They would theoretically be transported by light, yet to be built, Navy Medium Landing Ships (LSM).

Most of the critics of FD, myself among them, believe that the SIF will not be able to scoot fast enough to avoid Chinese detection and destruction. Although the personnel numbers are relatively small, the missiles, launchers, and radars are bulky and not easily transported. However, I for one, am willing to be proved wrong.

After six long years, the Marine Corps has exactly one SIF deployed to the Philippines. It could be declared an experimental unit and tested in deployment/employment exercises with the U.S. Navy playing the Chinese Red Team.

However, since the transport LSMs do not yet exist, the marines would have to borrow Army ships with similar capabilities for the experimental exercises. These exercises should be conducted and umpired by the Commander of the Indo-Pacific Command. Being the supported Combatant Commander, If he determines that the concept is as useless as many retired and current marines think it is, the concept can be scrapped before it does any more damage to the Corps in particular and national defense in general.

The second step is a logical follow-on to the first. The commandant should form two more experimental units, one of tanks and one of heavy engineers to include an assault bridging capability. If FD shows itself to be the fraud that I think it is, the next commandant will at least have something to build from.

The Army is looking at some lighter and more transportable tank and engineer capabilities that the Marine Corps discarded to afford the missiles and radars to support the SIFs for FD implementation. At least the new commandant would have something in the way of expertise with which to rebuild a semi-castrated Marine Corps.

A final step would be to insist that the Navy commit to a thirty-eight big deck amphibious ship fleet. When General Berger released the Navy from that requirement the then CNO promised him that the Navy could maintain the capability to maintain three Marine Expeditionary Units afloat world-wide 24/7.

The combination of incompetence and negligence the Navy has fallen far short of that promise. Incredibly, the other living commandants recently allowed Berger to sign on to a letter urging the Navy to expand its amphibious fleet. That is akin to letting the fox complain about hen house security.

I warned my former colleague that my recommendations would probably not be well received at Headquarters Marine Corps or at Quantico and that the current Marine Corps leadership has an unfortunate reputation for shooting the messenger. However, if General Smith wants to quiet the insurgents in the family, those recommendations would be a good place to start. To paraphrase Lynyrd Skynyrd – give me three steps General – and you won't hear from me no more.

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who also acted as a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. He is the author of Beyond Mahan; a Naval Strategy for the 21st Century.

15. How China recruits its spies in the U.S.

Video at the link.

60 Minutes Overtime

How China recruits its spies in the U.S.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-china-recruits-its-spies-in-the-us-60-minutes/

By Brit McCandless Farmer

May 18, 2025 / 7:14 PM EDT / CBS News

How China recruits its spies in the U.S.

CBS News · by Brit McCandless Farmer

China's main spy agency, the Ministry of State Security – or MSS – is now the largest and most active spy agency in the world. Its top target is not a foreign power, although the United States ranks number two. Instead, the priority for the MSS is China's own people, including those living abroad in the U.S.

According to Jim Lewis, a former U.S. diplomat whose direct experience with China's intelligence agencies spans more than 30 years, Chinese nationals on foreign soil pose a unique risk to Chinese President Xi Jinping's regime.

"They could be plotting. It's happened before," Lewis said. "They could be agents of the evil foreign power. They could be learning something that Xi doesn't want them to learn. And so, they are seen as a risk, not as a threat, but as a risk."

Spying on Chinese nationals in the U.S.

According to Lewis, the MSS spies on Chinese nationals living abroad in a few ways. First, it surveils WeChat, a Chinese instant messaging and social media app used by more than 1 billion people worldwide.

"It's hard to do things in China without access to it," Lewis said. "And it's completely monitored with the cooperation of the owner by the Chinese state."

In addition to monitoring online activity, Lewis told 60 Minutes that Chinese intelligence agents have also infiltrated college campuses in the U.S. This corroborates a report this month from the Stanford Review, which alleges that spies from the Chinese Communist Party are recruiting students at the California campus.

"I've had Chinese students tell me, 'I couldn't talk in class because the fellow sitting over there in the corner would report back.'"

How China's MSS recruits its spies in the U.S.

According to Lewis, China's MSS uses many of the same techniques as other spy agencies: sex, money, and revenge.

"You're a disgruntled employee. You haven't been recognized, and someone comes along and flatters you and says you can pay them back," Lewis explained.

He also said the "honeypot" or "honey trap" strategy is common. A mainstay in spy activity for centuries, a honey trap is when an undercover operative, typically a woman, establishes a romantic or sexual relationship with someone to extract confidential information from them.

If those do not work, there is always a monetary incentive. "Money works like a charm," Lewis said.

The MSS last year released a propaganda video on China's largest social network, boasting that the agency "fights against evil." The video served as both propaganda and as a recruiting commercial.

"It's both an advertisement to recruit people and it's an advertisement to warn people that if you fall afoul of us, we will come after you," Lewis explained. "The Chinese want to give this perception they are largely present everywhere anymore."

China's MSS is not the only agency sending a message through flashy videos. The CIA this month released its own videos to encourage Chinese nationals to spy for the U.S. Last year, the CIA also published a text-based video in Chinese that provided detailed, step-by-step guidance on how to safely get in touch with the agency online.

A U.S. official told the New York Times that the agency released this month's videos because the instructional video was successful. The recent, highly produced videos tap into the fear of the Chinese Communist Party, especially for those who still have family living in China.

Lewis told 60 Minutes that Chinese intelligence agents coerce Chinese nationals abroad by threatening to harm their family members back home in China.

"The ability to blackmail people into being agents because of threats to their family is very powerful, and it's a tool denied to the West," he said. "But it's a tool that the Chinese are not at all bashful about using."

Lewis told 60 Minutes that people with ties to China are not the only ones who should care about Beijing's coercion abroad.

"One of the precedents that I thought we had learned in the 1940s is that countries that don't respect their own citizens, don't respect their neighbors," he said. "Fundamental rights are the basis of international security... Because when they mistreat their own citizens, you're next."

The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann.

In:
China

Brit McCandless Farmer is a digital producer for 60 Minutes, where her work has been recognized by the Webby, Gracie and Telly Awards. Previously, Brit worked at the CBS Weekend News, CBS Mornings, CNN and ABC News.

CBS News · by Brit McCandless Farmer

16. The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement

Quite an expose. Hit job or fact based?

The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement

Even before President Trump was re-elected, the Heritage Foundation, best known for Project 2025, set out to destroy pro-Palestinian activism in the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/us/project-esther-heritage-foundation-palestine.html?searchResultPosition=1

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The Heritage Foundation headquarters in Washington, D.C.Credit...Jared Soares for The New York Times

By Katie J.M. Baker

Published May 18, 2025

Updated May 19, 2025

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In late April, the Heritage Foundation dispatched a team to Israel to meet with power players in Israeli politics, including the country’s foreign and defense secretaries and the U.S. ambassador, Mike Huckabee.

Listen to this article with reporter commentary

Listen · 22:03 min

The conservative Washington-based think tank is best known for spearheading Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for President Trump’s second term that called for reshaping the federal government and an extreme expansion of presidential power.

Now the Heritage contingent was in Israel, in part, to discuss another contentious policy paper: Project Esther, the foundation’s proposal to rapidly dismantle the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States, along with its support at schools and universities, at progressive organizations and in Congress.

Drafted in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel in 2023 and the mounting protests against the war in Gaza, Project Esther outlined an ambitious plan to fight antisemitism by branding a broad range of critics of Israel as “effectively a terrorist support network,” so that they could be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered “open society.”

Project Esther’s architects envisioned outcomes that at the time might have seemed far-fetched. Curriculum it believed to be sympathetic to a “Hamas support” narrative would be taken out of schools and universities, and “supporting faculty” would be removed. Social media would be purged of content deemed to be antisemitic. Institutions would lose public funding. Foreign students who pushed for Palestinian rights would have their visas revoked, or be deported.

Image

Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security adviser and the vice president at the Heritage Foundation who oversees Project Esther.Credit...Jared Soares for The New York Times

Once a sympathetic presidential administration was in place, the plan said, “We will organize rapidly, take immediate action to ‘stop the bleeding,’ and achieve all objectives within two years.”

Now, four months after Mr. Trump took office, Heritage Foundation leaders are taking an early victory lap.

Since the inauguration, the White House and other Republicans have called for actions that appear to mirror more than half of Project Esther’s proposals, a New York Times analysis shows, including threats to withhold billions in federal funding at universities and attempts to deport legal residents.

In interviews with The Times — the Heritage Foundation’s first public comments since Mr. Trump took office about its blueprint for shaping U.S. public opinion on Israel — Project Esther’s architects said there were clear parallels between their plan and recent actions against universities and pro-Palestinian demonstrators on both a state and a federal level.

“The phase we’re in now is starting to execute some of the lines of effort in terms of legislative, legal and financial penalties for what we consider to be material support for terrorism,” said Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Trump and the vice president at Heritage who oversees Project Esther.

Heritage officials said they did not know whether the White House, which has its own antisemitism task force, had used Project Esther as a guide. Administration officials declined to discuss it. But Robert Greenway, a Heritage national security director who coauthored Project Esther, said it was “no coincidence that we called for a series of actions to take place privately and publicly, and they are now happening.”

Until now, key details about Project Esther, including the identities of its authors, had not been widely disclosed. The Times reviewed confidential records preceding Project Esther’s release and interviewed Heritage employees, members of the task force that inspired the blueprint and others associated with the initiative to present a clearer understanding of Project Esther’s genesis, aims and impact.

Image

Republican and Democratic administrations alike have long supported and funded Israel as a crucial ally. And there have been bipartisan efforts to counter criticism of Israel by labeling a range of speech and organizing in support of Palestinian rights as support for terrorism. But Project Esther aims to go further, equating actions such as participating in pro-Palestinian campus protests with providing “material support” for terrorism, a broad legal construct that can lead to prison time, deportations, civil penalties and other serious consequences.

“Project Esther changed the paradigm by associating anyone who opposes Israeli policies with the ‘Hamas Support Network,’” said Jonathan Jacoby, the national director of the Nexus Project, a watchdog group that works to combat antisemitism and protect open debate. “It’s no longer about ideology or politics; it’s about terrorism and threats to American national security.”

Heritage describes Project Esther as a “groundbreaking” national strategy to fight antisemitism that aims not to censor opinions but to hold people it deems to be supporters of Hamas, a designated terrorist group, responsible for their actions. But critics such as Mr. Jacoby say the think tank is exploiting real concerns about antisemitism to advance its broader agenda of radically reshaping higher education and crushing progressive movements more generally.

Project Esther exclusively focuses on antisemitism on the left, ignoring antisemitic harassment and violence from the right. It has drawn criticism from many Jewish organizations amid increasing calls for them to push back against the Trump administration.

“Trump is pulling straight from the authoritarian playbook, using tools of repression first against those organizing for Palestinian rights,” said Stefanie Fox, the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace. “And in so doing, sharpening those tools for use against anyone and everyone who challenges his fascist agenda.”

Her group is one of those described by Project Esther as a “Hamas Support Organization,” or an H.S.O. — a label Ms. Fox strongly rejected.

An open letter from three dozen former leaders of major Jewish establishment groups, including a former national chair of the Anti-Defamation League, recently warned that “a range of actors are using a purported concern about Jewish safety as a cudgel to weaken higher education, due process, checks and balances, freedom of speech and the press.” It called on Jewish leaders and institutions “to resist the exploitation of Jewish fears and publicly join with other organizations that are battling to preserve the guardrails of democracy.”

‘The Gloves Will Come Off Very Quickly’

The months following the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza, saw college campuses descend into a state of chaotic division and turmoil, with endless protests and counterprotests. Pro-Palestinian advocates called for an end to the Israeli occupation and its retaliatory war campaign, while supporters of Israel defended the country’s right to self-defense and said they were harassed by their classmates and didn’t feel safe on campuses.

Soon after, four well-connected, conservative supporters of Israel met virtually to address these events.

Only one was Jewish: Ellie Cohanim, Mr. Trump’s former antisemitism envoy. She said she was grateful when the three men reached out to her and affectionately called them her “Christian friends.” Two were leaders of Christian Zionist groups: Luke Moon, executive director of the Philos Project, and Mario Bramnick, the president of the Latino Coalition for Israel and an evangelical adviser to Mr. Trump. The fourth was James Carafano, senior counselor to the president at the Heritage Foundation.

Some evangelical Christians have increasingly aligned themselves with conservative political forces in Israel, supporting their claims of biblical dominion over contested Palestinian territories. Many feel a kinship with Israel because of shared religious heritage. But some also believe that supporting Israel will hasten biblical end times, or advance Christianity’s global influence.

Image

A pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University in November 2023.

Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times

The think tank, which has influenced Republican presidential administrations since the Reagan era, has long supported Israel.

In recent years, this support took on a new dimension, as the foundation blamed the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that gained prominence after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, along with other progressive movements, for rising reports of antisemitism on campuses.

The Biden administration had already released what it called the first national strategy to combat antisemitism, vowing to address the issue. (The A.D.L. counted over 9,000 antisemitic incidents across the United States in 2024, the highest number on record since it began tracking them 46 years ago.)

But the group decided to begin their own national task force and released a statement of purpose that affirmed a definition of antisemitism that is hotly debated because it considers some broad criticisms of Israel to be antisemitic.

Statement of Purpose

Antisemitism: We recognize any attempt to delegitimize, boycott, divest, or sanction the modern [state] of Israel or bar Jews from participating in academic or communal associations must be condemned. 

We recognize that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are the different manifestations of the same hatred against Jewish people.

Dozens of groups joined the task force, but an “overwhelming number” had something in common, Mr. Carafano said during a January 2024 meeting: They weren’t Jewish. A short list of initial members that Heritage posted online consisted mainly of conservative and Christian organizations.

Heritage built on the task force’s recommendations to write Project Esther, which is named in honor of the biblical queen who is celebrated for saving the Jewish people.

By summer 2024, Heritage had finalized a national strategy that aimed to convince the public to perceive the pro-Palestinian movement in the United States as part of a global “Hamas Support Network” that “poses a threat not simply to American Jewry, but to America itself.”

It singled out anti-Zionist groups that had organized pro-Palestinian protests, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, but the intended targets stretched much further. In pitch materials for potential donors, Heritage presented an illustration of a pyramid topped by “progressive ‘elites’ leading the way,” which included Jewish billionaires such as the philanthropist George Soros and Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois.

It asserted that philanthropic organizations such as the Tides Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund were backing the antisemitism “ecosystem.” Later, the Heritage Foundation added the names of what it called “aligned” politicians such as Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

The pitch materials, which were first reported on by The Forward, included goals such as reforming academia (defunding institutions, denying certain pro-Palestinian groups access to campuses and removing faculty) and lawfare (filing civil lawsuits, identifying foreigners vulnerable to deportation). Other initiatives included plans to enlist support from state and local law enforcement and to “generate uncomfortable conditions” so that groups could not conduct protests.

Esther’s Architects

Ms. Coates said that her colleagues Mr. Greenway and Daniel Flesch were the co-authors of Project Esther.

Mr. Greenway, a former senior National Security Council official, previously ran the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, a nonprofit founded by Jared Kushner that sought to normalize relations between Israel and other Middle Eastern countries.

Mr. Flesch is a policy analyst at the foundation who has written about his experience as an American Jew who served in the Israeli Defense Forces.

Project Esther also benefited from a private advisory committee that included unnamed former National Security Council members from the first Trump administration, Ms. Coates said. Their expertise “created a more compelling product” and gave the plan “a lot more grip and substance than we would have had otherwise,” she said.

Ms. Coates holds three degrees in Italian Renaissance art history, and planned on being a professional academic until she grew uncomfortable with what she has described as a “very noxious anti-Western worldview” at her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.

Image

The Heritage Foundation’s office in Washington, D.C.Credit...Jared Soares for The New York Times

Blogging about missile defense led to a job for former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and then roles with other Republican politicians before she joined Mr. Trump’s transition team and held various national security roles in his first administration.

Two months before Oct. 7, Ms. Coates became the vice president of a division of Heritage that focuses on foreign policy and national security. But her interest in Israel, and in fighting antisemitism, long predated that role, she said. She traces it back to her grandfather, who fought in the D-Day invasion during World War II. “I come from a line of Nazi hunters,” she said.

In her recently published book, “The Battle for the Jewish State,” Ms. Coates, who described herself as “a Christian and a religious person,” wrote that “the biblical values on which our civilization rests have always promoted an alliance between Christians and Jews.” But she said her views on Israel were based on an “America-first” approach that recognizes Israel’s role in bolstering America’s security interests in the Middle East. She has visited Israel so often that she has “no idea” how many times she’s been there, she has said. Her office features a collection of Israeli prime minister figurines.

In December, a little-known nonprofit that promotes foreign policy discourse on college campuses hosted Ms. Coates to speak about her new book. She revealed her own perspective on how the tactic of slashing federal funding to universities could be used to help bring them to heel.

“As a former academic, I can tell you the one thing they care more about than parking spaces is federal funding,” she said. “The viciousness with which the other elements of the faculty will turn on the law schools and the Middle East Studies folk,” she added. “The gloves will come off very quickly.”

The next month, Mr. Trump was inaugurated. His administration unfurled a series of directives, some of which closely resembled some of the actionable steps outlined in Project Esther.

Administration officials moved to revoke student visas and deport activists who had criticized Israel.

Necessary Conditions

HSO members in violation of student visa requirements.

They began monitoring immigrants’ and visa applicants’ social media.

Desired Effects

Social media no longer allow the spread of antisemitic content.

They sought to withhold billions of dollars in grants to some of the country’s most prestigious research universities.

Necessary Conditions

HSOs not eligible for public funds.

They ordered an investigation of student protesters at Columbia University and reportedly planned to share that information with immigration agents.

Necessary Conditions

Evidence of HSOs’ criminal activity gathered.

Despite acknowledging Heritage’s regular meetings with the administration and members of Congress, employees at the foundation said they didn’t know if White House officials had acted on their recommendations or had just come to the same conclusions about what needed to be done.

“I don’t think it’s a great leap to look at the changing landscape since Esther came out, and to look at the actions that Esther calls for and to look at them taking place,” Mr. Greenway said. “But it’s not our place, and not really our purpose, to take credit for the actions that others are taking.”

In line with Project Esther’s calls for state-level actions and “public-private” partnerships, a wider campaign is also underway. Heritage Action, the think tank’s grass roots advocacy arm, is helping states pass legislation that penalizes those who support boycotts against Israel. It has encouraged civil litigation as law firms have filed suits accusing various people and organizations of collaborating with Hamas.

And Ms. Coates pointed to Heritage’s increased presence in Israel, a country which, Ms. Coates said when she was there recently, “deserves a peace prize for what they’ve done over the course of the last year.”

Foundation employees were in Israel primarily to discuss Heritage’s new U.S.-Israel strategy, a copy of which, she said, they personally handed to Ron Dermer, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs.

But they also discussed Project Esther and concern over a decline in Israel’s public image among younger Americans, a trend that has accelerated since Oct. 7. It is reassuring for Israelis to hear that the largest conservative think tank in the United States is on the case, Ms. Coates said.

Leading by Example

Project Esther accuses “America’s Jewish community” of “complacency.” “There are multiple Jewish nonprofits that are dedicated to fighting antisemitism, and yet here we are today,” said Ms. Cohanim, the task force’s sole Jewish co-chair.

Not everyone who Heritage hoped would join the cause felt comfortable doing so, including prominent Jewish and Christian Zionist organizations that members at the foundation assumed would be allies. Three people from such groups told The Times they did not want to associate with the plan because they found its failure to consider right-wing acts of antisemitism too partisan.

Image

Stefanie Fox, the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, spoke during one of the group’s member meetings in May.Credit...Jared Soares for The New York Times

Ms. Coates acknowledged that antisemitism was also a problem on the right and said that was why it was important for the Heritage Foundation to “lead by example” with Project Esther.

“Our goal is to eradicate — or not eradicate, but to confront — what we consider a very noxious bigotry,” she said.

But she and others at the Heritage Foundation also contend that the progressive groups that Project Esther charges with supporting Hamas pose a threat not just to Jewish people or Israel but, as the plan warns, to “the foundations of the United States and the fabric of our society.”

“This isn’t just a battle for the Jewish state,” Ms. Coates told her audience in December. “It is also a battle for the United States.”

Halina Bennet contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Read by Katie J.M. Baker

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.

Katie J.M. Baker is a national investigative correspondent for The New York Times.

A version of this article appears in print on May 20, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Inside the Effort to Crush the Palestinian Cause. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Heritage Foundation, The Israel Hamas War, Donald Trump

17. Trump’s Ukraine peace push is built on three illusions

Excerpts:

The first and biggest problem is that Putin has shown no evidence that he wants peace. He still wants victory, which he described once again after Monday’s call with the phrase “eliminate the root causes of the crisis.” That’s code for his conviction that Ukraine cannot be a European country, as it wants, but must remain under Russian hegemony.

...

A second impediment is Trump’s notion that Russia represents a potential economic gold mine for the United States. Trump said it again Monday with characteristic hyperbole: “There is a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth [when the war ends]. Its potential is UNLIMITED.”

...

A third misconception is that a crippled Ukraine can be compelled to surrender. Trump’s version of this doom scenario is the phrase “you have no cards,” which he repeats often to President Volodymyr Zelensky. But it turns out that Ukraine has one very powerful card, which is strong support from Europe.

...

Trump has a chance to help mediate an agreement that would end the most violent conflict of our era. But if he doesn’t find the patience for hard and well-organized bargaining with Putin, Ukraine will have no choice but to fend for itself — leaving a black mark for Trump rather than a badge of honor.

Opinion

David Ignatius

Trump’s Ukraine peace push is built on three illusions

The president clearly wants to end the bloodshed. He needs a better-organized strategy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/05/19/trump-ukraine-putin-phone-call-peace-talks/?utm

May 19, 2025 at 7:13 p.m. EDTYesterday at 7:13 p.m. EDT

Russian President Vladimir Putin at an event outside Sochi on Monday. (Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Sputnik/AP)

“Let the process begin!” proclaimed President Donald Trump after his Monday phone call with President Vladimir Putin about beginning talks to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. And, after so much bloodshed, it’s a devout hope indeed. Pope Leo XIV wants to host the negotiations at the Vatican.

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But to resolve this conflict, Trump needs to address the obstacles standing in the way of a breakthrough agreement. Putin right now won’t even accept a ceasefire. Trump indulged him by agreeing Monday that “the conditions for that [ceasefire] will be negotiated between the two parties, as it only can be, because they know details.” That’s a form of magical thinking.

Trump needs to organize this process more coherently or it will fail. The administration has used a confusing string of tactics: First, it proposed limited ceasefires for energy infrastructure and maritime domains. That went nowhere, so the Trump team told the two sides to draft term sheets. They were wildly disparate, so Trump turned to face-to-face talks. That ran aground in Istanbul, so on Monday it became a Trump-Putin process.

And now? Well, it seems Trump wants the parties to work it out themselves. This scattershot, ever-changing approach is a recipe for failure — and it reflects underlying mistaken assumptions.

Follow Trump’s second term

The first and biggest problem is that Putin has shown no evidence that he wants peace. He still wants victory, which he described once again after Monday’s call with the phrase “eliminate the root causes of the crisis.” That’s code for his conviction that Ukraine cannot be a European country, as it wants, but must remain under Russian hegemony.

Putin launched the war on this illusion that Ukraine wasn’t a real nation and wouldn’t fight hard for its sovereignty. How wrong he was. Russia has suffered approximately 800,000 dead and wounded, and in three years its huge army hasn’t even managed to conquer Donetsk. When the guns go silent, Russia will begin to reckon with Putin’s stupendous folly. No wonder he prefers to keep fighting.

A second impediment is Trump’s notion that Russia represents a potential economic gold mine for the United States. Trump said it again Monday with characteristic hyperbole: “There is a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth [when the war ends]. Its potential is UNLIMITED.”

Trump has been fixated since the 1980s on the idea that Russia can be a business bonanza. This enthusiasm has been animated by Putin adviser Kirill Dmitriev, a Harvard Business School graduate who has met with Trump’s Russia envoy Steve Witkoff. But economists who study Russia say this vision is misplaced. Russia remains a corrupt, mismanaged economy, still largely dependent on exporting energy and minerals. In recent decades it has been a declining nation rather than a rising one.

If Trump had a more realistic economic appraisal, he would see a better economic bet in Ukraine. It’s far too corrupt, but the war has created an innovation ecosystem in Kyiv that may be the most productive in Europe. Rather than buying drones from Iran, Ukraine builds its own, in ever-more-sophisticated packages. Rather than looking for handouts, Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov told me this month in Kyiv that he is looking for defense investment partners.

A third misconception is that a crippled Ukraine can be compelled to surrender. Trump’s version of this doom scenario is the phrase “you have no cards,” which he repeats often to President Volodymyr Zelensky. But it turns out that Ukraine has one very powerful card, which is strong support from Europe.

The Europeans recognize that if Putin overwhelms Ukraine, he will rebalance security relations across the continent. They see evidence of his ambitions in new military bases bordering Finland and the Baltic states, and in Putin’s campaign of paramilitary sabotage against Ukraine’s supporters. Some Europeans have told me they think Russia is already at war with NATO.

Trump won’t be able to stuff a bad deal down Zelensky’s throat because European allies are ready to resist. And they are at last developing the military muscle to make their views stick. Germany’s new Chancellor Friedrich Merz has plans to boost his country’s defense spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product. He pledged last week that the government “will provide all the financial resources that the Bundeswehr needs to become the strongest conventional army in Europe.”

Ukraine can get an acceptable deal in the negotiations ahead if Putin sees that Kyiv is ready to keep fighting with European help — and a bit of needed satellite intelligence from the United States. I heard that confidence expressed by the senior cabinet ministers in Zelensky’s government during meetings in Kyiv this month. They want Trump’s peace initiative to succeed. But they’re preparing for the likelihood that it will fail.

Trump has been a persistent and passionate advocate of peace in Ukraine. He often refers to it as a “bloodbath,” as he did Monday. But, if he wants to succeed, he needs to realize that solving this conflict isn’t a quick “flip.” It’s closer to building a new factory than a real estate deal.

Henry Kissinger, arguably the best dealmaker in modern diplomatic history, offered a useful warning: “Any negotiator who seduces himself into believing that his personality leads to automatic breakthroughs will soon find himself in the special purgatory that history reserves for those who measure themselves by acclaim rather than achievement.”

Trump has a chance to help mediate an agreement that would end the most violent conflict of our era. But if he doesn’t find the patience for hard and well-organized bargaining with Putin, Ukraine will have no choice but to fend for itself — leaving a black mark for Trump rather than a badge of honor.

What readers are saying

The comments overwhelmingly criticize President Trump's approach to the Ukraine peace talks, suggesting that his motivations are self-serving, primarily aiming for a Nobel Peace Prize rather than genuine peace. Many commenters argue that Trump lacks the necessary negotiation... Show more

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By David Ignatius

David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column for The Washington Post. His latest novel is “Phantom Orbit.” follow on X@ignatiuspost

18. Why the Nuclear Gravity Bomb Has Gotten a Reboot

Perhaps sometimes simple is better?

Excerpts:

America’s nuclear modernization program is already set to deliver a force with greatly enhanced diversity of weapon characteristics and delivery vehicles. The planned nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile, for instance, will provide the Navy with considerable new optionality to deter China in the Indo-Pacific. Work is well underway on the Air Force’s Long-Range Standoff cruise missile. Should additional nuclear capabilities be needed to overcome integrated air and missile defenses or provide more proportional theater response options, warhead design and production can now be performed on a timeline unimaginable a decade ago.

Even then, there was reason for optimism that nuclear weapons would continue to recede in relevance, as they had in the decade prior. Yet the behavior of America’s adversaries in the intervening years has made clear that nuclear deterrence will remain a dominant feature of the global landscape for the foreseeable future. Deterrence is not magically achieved by reaching an arbitrary threshold of missiles and bombs — it is a condition painstakingly attained and preserved by fielding the right number of the right weapons in the right places. The B61-13 is merely the latest output of the formula used to shape America’s nuclear arsenal, whose wisdom will ultimately be affirmed if these weapons never have to be used.

Why the Nuclear Gravity Bomb Has Gotten a Reboot - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by David A. Hoagland · May 20, 2025

Within months of the Cuban Missile Crisis, weapons designers at Los Alamos National Laboratory began engineering what would become the longest-serving and most adaptable weapon in America’s nuclear arsenal. Although it was ballistic missiles that had sparked the crisis in Cuba and came to symbolize the nuclear age, the new B61 would be an air-delivered gravity bomb. So named because it is dropped from an aircraft, gravity bombs had been a feature of aerial warfare since wooden biplanes released them over the trenches in World War I. But the B61 was a revolutionary weapon, featuring a versatility not seen in a nuclear munition before or since.

Sixty years later, it remains the primary family of gravity bombs in the U.S. nuclear stockpile. The B61’s longevity attests to both the timelessness of its role and the modularity of its original design. Indeed, there is no longer a single B61 today but an ensemble of weapon systems that all derive from the same progenitor. Thirteen variants, or modifications, have been developed, each with distinct characteristics and missions. A variety of modifications can be delivered by a broad range of U.S. and allied aircraft, from strategic platforms like the B-2 stealth bomber to dual-capable fighters such as the F-15, F-16, F-35, and the European Tornado, as well as next-generation systems like the B-21 Raider. In various configurations, the bombs can be released in free-fall mode or with a speed-retarding parachute that when packed is denser than hardwood.

The latest descendant in this bloodline is the B61-13, whose first production unit the National Nuclear Security Administration heralded this week as part of the comprehensive modernization of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. As stewards of the stockpile, my colleagues and I are responsible for ensuring the unerring reliability of these systems, as well as reconfiguring them when necessary to meet evolving threats. Although nuclear deterrence has shown remarkable consistency through the decades — the triad of land-, sea-, and air-based weapons is more or less the same today as it was in 1960 — nuclear weapons are periodically tailored in response to fluctuations in the security environment. Just as adversaries adjust how they protect the assets they value most, the United States calibrates its tools to hold them perpetually at risk. The B61-13 is the most recent manifestation of this principle. Designed to provide enhanced capabilities against certain harder and large-area military targets, or in Pentagon parlance to “deny an adversary sanctuary from attack,” the B61-13 is a steppingstone toward a more definitive solution to a longstanding military challenge.

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Defeating hardened targets is a perennial aspiration in modern warfare. During World War II, the German Kriegsmarine constructed a naval base at Lorient, on the Atlantic coast of France, that was all but impervious to Allied bombing. Built with 3.4 million cubic feet of concrete — compared to the Hoover Dam’s 4.4 million — and featuring a seven-layer, 25-foot reinforced roof, the base’s submarine pens enabled the predations of German U-boats across the Atlantic. In hundreds of sorties, Allied bombers pummeled the fortress mercilessly from the air, including with 12,000-pound “Tallboy” ballistic bombs, to no avail. In exasperation, the Allies finally shifted to pulverizing the surrounding city to kill essential personnel and cut supply lines to the base, which remained insuperable until the very end of the war.

In the following decades, militaries the world over built command centers and other facilities that were not only heavily reinforced but buried deep beneath the Earth, presenting a vexing problem to targeteers. Naturally, strategists looked to nuclear weapons as a potential solution. If a system could be designed to penetrate soil, rock, and concrete before detonating, the effects would greatly increase the efficacy of the weapon against the most forbidding structures. As early as 1952, the Mark 8 nuclear bomb was introduced to the U.S. stockpile with the means to reach and destroy such targets.

Yet, as weapons capabilities advanced, so did feats of structural engineering to protect against them. The Moscow Metro, famously deep by the standards of the world’s subways, was designed in part to double as a massive bomb shelter for the Kremlin leadership, motivating ever more powerful weapons in the U.S. stockpile to compromise it. Today, the challenge is even more daunting. Weapons designers are responding to dictates from the highest levels of the U.S. government to remove the possibility that enemy assets can be placed beyond the reach of America’s nuclear force.

The last two Nuclear Posture Reviews — periodic presidential directives on the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security — have emphasized the defeat of especially stubborn targets. President Donald Trump’s first Nuclear Posture Review, issued in 2018, cited North Korea’s reliance on hardened and deeply buried facilities to secure the Kim regime, pledging to “field a range of conventional and nuclear capabilities able to hold such targets at risk.” President Joe Biden’s, released in 2022, echoed the theme, vowing to “leverage existing capabilities to hold at risk hard and deeply buried targets” and “develop an enduring capability for improved defeat of such targets.” Congress, too, has joined the chorus. The Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act directed a study on options to destroy hard and deeply buried targets, including a “proposed strategy for fielding such capabilities in sufficient quantities and making other adjustments to the strategy and plans of the United States to account for the growing hard and deeply buried target set…”

The B61-13 represents an intermediate answer to these edicts as even more effective instruments are being evaluated. While the bomb will provide new military capabilities, it will not be a novel weapon in the sense of being assembled from wholly new components and materials. Rather, the system is a modification, a subset of weapon modernizations that upgrade existing warheads with new operational characteristics. Most of the weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal were built in the 1970s and 1980s, and the B61 is one of seven systems undergoing modernization to extend their operability or add further capabilities. The planned W93 warhead, by contrast, will be an altogether new, modern weapon.

As with any complex electro-mechanical system, components and materials in nuclear warheads degrade over time. To ensure their continued safety and reliability, engineers scrupulously analyze every component — more than 6,000 individual parts in the case of the B61 — and determine whether to reuse, repair, or replace them. The modernization process resolves aging and performance issues, enhances safety features, improves the security of the weapons, and can, as in the case of the B61-13, impart new military attributes.

Among the most remarkable aspects of the B61-13 program is the speed with which it is being accomplished without disruption to the broader modernization campaign. The first usable bomb was completed almost a year before the original target date and less than two years after the program was announced. For a nuclear enterprise often seen as operating at a languid pace over the last two decades, this was the latest achievement that signaled a newfound aggressiveness by the National Nuclear Security Administration. In 2023, the agency delivered more than 200 modernized weapons to the Navy and Air Force, the most in a single year since the end of the Cold War. Mindful of the deteriorating security environment, program managers made a number of bold decisions, often consciously accepting calculated risks, to accelerate the manufacture of the B61-13.

To be fair, compression of the timeline was enabled in part by the earlier B61-12 life extension program, which completed its final unit in late 2024. By taking advantage of production equipment and processes from the earlier program and using common components, the B61-13 progressed much more quickly than planned. The program largely sidestepped the steep learning curve that attends a new modification. Normally, technical teams must be built and trained to perform development, engineering, testing, and production, but by harnessing the same engineering cadre and methods from the previous program, the design timeline was greatly reduced. Yet, these factors do not paint the full picture. The outcome hinged to a large degree on adjustments to the risk tolerance of the scientists and engineers managing the program, who are, by nature and training, a technically conservative bunch.

Although they maintained their customary vigilance against safety and security risks, the engineers were more forgiving of programmatic risk in the interest of moving swiftly. By streamlining, and in some cases combining, “design gates” — the exacting reviews performed at each stage of a weapon design process — the engineers significantly shortened the timeline to begin production. These economies resulted in B61-13 hardware “test builds” beginning merely three months after the program received authorization and appropriation from Congress. Further efficiencies were then devised for the production process itself.

In a typical modernization program, before the first unit of a new weapon is ever produced, it must pass an exhaustive series of qualification tests to ensure the system will function reliably in every environment. These assessments involve a combination of computer modeling and simulation as well as physical tests of weapon components. The marquee step in the process is to conduct “flight tests” in which high-fidelity replicas of the bomb — with all the internal gadgetry but none of the fissile material — are dropped from the aircraft that delivers the real thing. For the B61-13, these qualification tests are occurring in parallel with the production of live units. To the uninitiated, it is impossible to appreciate the unorthodoxy of this approach, or the willpower required for the engineers to relax their usual meticulousness. Reassured by decades of B61 design and qualification data, program managers developed a phased plan for simultaneous qualification and manufacture that allowed the standard schedule to be cut in half. While there was some risk involved, the earlier program inspired confidence that it was minimal, and well worth the accelerated delivery.

Vindication of these practices may allow them to be transposed to future modernization efforts, with implications for their production timelines. So, too, might other aspects of the B61-13 program. In particular, the process featured an extraordinary level of cohesiveness between the laboratories that designed the weapon and the plants responsible for its production. In earlier eras, relations between elements of the nuclear complex were often marked by institutional rivalries and cultural idiosyncrasies that subtracted from efficiency. The B61-13 is very much a team effort. The Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico manage the physics and systems engineering, while production is performed at the Pantex Plant in Texas, Kansas City National Security Campus in Missouri, Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, and Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Experts from each site collaborated closely from the beginning, consciously avoiding the stove-piping that has characterized weapons programs in prior decades.

When complete, in addition to having its service life extended, the B61-13 will boast a greater accuracy than its forebearers by virtue of a modern “tail kit assembly” — the fins that guide and stabilize the weapon during its descent. The bomb’s yield will be higher than its older sibling, the B61-12, contributing to its utility against certain harder and large-area targets. Owing partly to these advantages, the number of B61-12s built was lowered by the same number of B61-13s that will be produced. Consequently, the new modification will not increase the overall number of weapons in the U.S. stockpile.

Of course, at some point, America’s leaders may deem it necessary to build additional nuclear weapons to meet military requirements. Russia, China, and North Korea are aggressively expanding and modernizing their nuclear capabilities with lavishly funded construction projects and weapons programs. As the United States confronts the challenge of deterring multiple nuclear-armed states simultaneously, its leaders will continuously appraise the suitability of the U.S. nuclear posture to this task. But what is abundantly clear, even without an uptick in the size of the stockpile, is that qualitatively new capabilities will be necessary to hold adversary targets at risk.

America’s nuclear modernization program is already set to deliver a force with greatly enhanced diversity of weapon characteristics and delivery vehicles. The planned nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile, for instance, will provide the Navy with considerable new optionality to deter China in the Indo-Pacific. Work is well underway on the Air Force’s Long-Range Standoff cruise missile. Should additional nuclear capabilities be needed to overcome integrated air and missile defenses or provide more proportional theater response options, warhead design and production can now be performed on a timeline unimaginable a decade ago.

Even then, there was reason for optimism that nuclear weapons would continue to recede in relevance, as they had in the decade prior. Yet the behavior of America’s adversaries in the intervening years has made clear that nuclear deterrence will remain a dominant feature of the global landscape for the foreseeable future. Deterrence is not magically achieved by reaching an arbitrary threshold of missiles and bombs — it is a condition painstakingly attained and preserved by fielding the right number of the right weapons in the right places. The B61-13 is merely the latest output of the formula used to shape America’s nuclear arsenal, whose wisdom will ultimately be affirmed if these weapons never have to be used.

Become a Member

David A. Hoagland serves as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s acting deputy administrator for defense programs, with responsibility for maintaining the safety, security, and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. Prior to his current role, he served in other elements of the National Nuclear Security Administration and on the National Security Council staff, where he focused on countering nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

Image: Sandia National Laboratories

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by David A. Hoagland · May 20, 2025

19. What If Our Assumptions About a War with China Are Wrong?

Failing to recognize erroneous assumptions and not changing the plan is the path to strategic failure.

What If Our Assumptions About a War with China Are Wrong? - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Tyler Hacker · May 20, 2025

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From the rout of Union forces at Bull Run to two decades of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, history tells us that our assumptions about future war are often incorrect. Looking to today, consider this view of a potential US-China conflict:

Any confrontation between the United States and China would be short and intense, decisively determining the war’s outcome in a matter of days or weeks.

How often has this assumption informed past discussions in the Pentagon and Washington’s think tanks? Three years of attritional war in Ukraine and stubbornly persistent security challenges in the Red Sea call this sentiment into question, causing defense commentators to reexamine the possibility that despite both nations being nuclear armed, a US-China war may not end in days or weeks, but could protract for months or even years. This raises the question: How many other assumptions about great power war are due for reexamination?

At the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, we have conducted dozens of exercises on the strategic choices facing political and military leaders regarding the revitalization of the US military for great power war. These exercises often highlight how fighting a prolonged war calls for a different approach than shorter campaigns, such as choosing to expand defense production over relying on existing stockpiles. Regardless of the participant, some form of industrial mobilization is frequently considered the key for unlocking greater production in long wars.

Admittedly, no one can know the exact character of a future war between the United States and China, but recent CSBA research on US mobilization planning during the interwar period gives reason to question some oft repeated assumptions. Comparing current planning assumptions to those of the interwar period reveals several instances where our expectations may fall short of the realities of war, protraction, and mobilization. Today’s security environment, economic circumstances, and military forces may be a world apart from those of the 1930s, but planning to wage war in the American system is fundamentally the same in many ways. For this reason, the US experience in World War II should inform our thinking regarding a future US-China conflict. Five frequently recurring and often implicit assumptions about protracted war stand out, and the American historical experience suggests they may be due for reconsideration.

Assumption 1: The opening battle would determine the outcome of the war.

Maybe—or maybe not. The United States Pacific Fleet was attacked at Pearl Harbor and the US Army ceded the Philippines to Japan by the summer of 1942. Huge swathes of Western Europe fell prey to Nazi invasion and occupation before being liberated years later.

Similarly, the loss of Taiwan or other Chinese military moves in the Indo-Pacific might not determine the outcome of the broader war they could trigger. Unless the United States or China suffer irreparable attrition or domestic pressures force leaders to cut losses, war may continue long after an opening engagement. For this reason, US decision-makers must weigh risk to force against risk to mission in any Indo-Pacific action. Committing the US military to an opening battle that sacrifices its longer-term global position is not a winning protracted war strategy.

Assumption 2: Once a conflict begins, the US industrial base will rapidly expand into the arsenal of democracy and provide the goods required for prevailing in a protracted war.

Our understanding of America’s World War II mobilization is due for an update. Interwar planners spent twenty years after World War I thinking about industrial mobilization. President Franklin D. Roosevelt started mobilizing in a limited fashion two years prior to Pearl Harbor, and the US military was still ill-equipped to wage war at the necessary scale until 1943, nearly five years after mobilization began.

Moreover, the enabling conditions of US industrial mobilization for World War II no longer exist. Globalization has fueled US deindustrialization. The degree to which this will limit the expansion of war production is unclear. If recent efforts to supply Ukraine are any indicator, then increasing US war production today will require more time than it did in the late 1930s. The United States no longer possesses the raw industrial might of the 1940s; today’s defense industry is more brittle than during the Cold War; and contemporary weapons are exceedingly more complex and harder to manufacture than those of World War II. These changes point to the need for novel mobilization planning that accurately links manufacturing timelines and operational plans.

Assumption 3: After the proverbial balloon goes up, resources will be infinite and any politics that impede defense procurement and production will be pushed aside.

Again, a reductionist and rosy impression of the nation unifying to fight World War II obscures the gritty reality of bureaucratic infighting, investigations into defense spending, and numerous labor strikes that delayed war production. Even when the fiscal spigots were opened after Pearl Harbor, the US strategic approach remained constrained by basic national limits on raw materials and manpower, which had to be shared between the military and industry. American leaders were forced to accept a US Army of three hundred thousand fewer men (and significantly less armor) than desired, delay major campaigns, and choose between building factories or weapons.

A contemporary great power war would not eliminate the need for convincing Congress to authorize and appropriate resources. It would not eradicate all bureaucracy and regulatory regimes. It would not immediately resolve disputes between the military, industry, the workforce, and other interest groups. And even unprecedented boosts in defense spending would not remove fundamental shortfalls in raw materials, critical infrastructure, transportation capacity, and the workforce. Ukraine and Russia have both demonstrated a continued reluctance to fully mobilize, which shows how even during existential war, politics reign supreme and resources remain limited. It is up to the Department of Defense to work within these limits, mitigate risks where possible, and find creative solutions to enduring political and bureaucratic challenges.

Assumption 4: Without massive increases in defense spending, the Department of Defense cannot prepare the defense industrial base for expanded production or mobilization.

Activating the arsenal of democracy was massively expensive and required the mobilization of national resources on a level not seen before or (thankfully) since. But mobilization planning during the interwar period shows how effective peacetime preparations can be made even during periods of constrained resources. More money would have helped, but planners invested limited funds in preparing to expand production of the most essential military goods.

Mobilizing to fight a great power war against China would be similarly costly. That said, there are a variety of ways the department can prepare today. From mobilization and protracted war planning within the Pentagon to commissioning production studies or even educational orders with US commercial manufacturers, the department has numerous options. Similar efforts accelerated mobilization for World War II and could do so again.

Assumption 5: For a protracted war, we will just need more of (and the ability to produce more of) our current munitions, platforms, and systems.

The US military of 1945 was vastly different from that of 1940. From different platforms (the Sherman tank, the Essex-class aircraft carrier, and the B-29 bomber) to new organizations (mobilization agencies, the Office of Strategic Services) and novel missions (strategic bombing, large-scale amphibious invasion), the interaction between US objectives and the course of the war dictated new challenges, requirements, technologies, and institutions.

Contemporary planners must consider how the US military’s production needs will change over the course of a protracted war. Producing war materiel at scale may dictate design and production modifications or the development of entirely new classes of minimum-viable systems, such as the Liberty ship or M3 submachine gun. It is worth developing, testing, and experimenting with these systems before they are urgently needed. More immediately, planners must ensure the standing military is capable of fighting and sustaining losses until follow-on forces can be trained, equipped, and deployed.

The Pentagon may forever be planning to fight the last war, but when it comes to thinking about the next war, questioning long-held assumptions, taking an unbiased look at the historical record, and seeking perspectives from outside the beltway can only improve our chances of getting predictions right—and winning. There are always risks associated with over-applying the US experience in World War II. However, by looking into the past the Department of Defense may develop a more fulsome appreciation for great power war, its potential duration, and the need to address mobilization’s challenges rather than assuming them away.

Tyler Hacker is a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a 2024–2025 research fellow with the Modern War Institute. He is the author of the forthcoming report “Arsenal of Democracy: Myth or Model?,” which draws lessons for contemporary industrial mobilization from World War II. At CSBA, his work focuses on long-range strike and future operational concepts for great power conflict. He previously served as a field artillery officer in the United States Army.

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

Image credit: Eben Boothby, US Army Materiel Command

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Tyler Hacker · May 20, 2025

20. The Taiwan Tightrope: Deterrence Is a Balancing Act, and America Is Starting to Slip

Excerpts:

Concrete economic and diplomatic concessions that increase China’s benefits from maintaining the status quo and credibly convey benign U.S. intent would be effective reassurances. Pausing or reversing the economic decoupling is an obvious place to start; Washington should rescind tariffs on Chinese imports (or at least make them conditional on reasonable Chinese reciprocation) and relax its restrictions on exports and on incoming investment in all but the most sensitive technologies and sectors. This would not only quell Beijing’s perception that the United States seeks to weaken and “split” China but also allay any brewing domestic instability that could threaten the CCP’s legitimacy and encourage Chinese leaders to forcibly take Taiwan to boost nationalist legitimacy. Perhaps most important, sustaining economic interdependence, especially the asymmetric sort that currently exists, gives the United States enormous leverage over China by allowing it to threaten heavier sanctions in the event of war. Unilateral U.S. sanctions could set the Chinese economy on a path of permanent decline. Pausing or circumscribing an economic decoupling would give U.S. sanctions maximum bite and bolster deterrence.

Of course, bolstering economic interdependence also requires limiting U.S. reliance on key Chinese imports, such as rare-earth minerals, transformers for the electric grid, scarce medicines, high-tech electronics, and other industrial, infrastructural, and military inputs. The United States should diversify its sources for these imports and reduce the proportion that China provides to acceptable levels. But Washington does not need to immediately reduce imports of Chinese consumer goods, even though substitutes can be found relatively easily. Allowing such imports to continue would enable the United States to avoid destabilizing China while retaining the threat of painful sanctions. Finally, to maximize its deterrent leverage against China, Washington should coordinate a sanctions coalition with allies, which may require offering them subsidies or other concessions.

For many in Washington, deterrence has come to mean projecting an uncompromising and even hostile posture toward China. But such gestures do not meaningfully augment Taiwan’s security. Instead, the United States should invest quietly in its military readiness and capabilities, speak carefully, and maintain economic resilience and even some interdependence. The dilemma of deterrence—the fact that it can so easily slide into provocation or procrastination—necessitates such a tightrope approach. And if there’s one place where striking the right balance could pay enormous dividends, it’s Taiwan.

The Taiwan Tightrope

Foreign Affairs · by More by Oriana Skylar Mastro · May 20, 2025

Deterrence Is a Balancing Act, and America Is Starting to Slip

May 20, 2025

The Taiwanese military conducting a military exercise in Pingtung, Taiwan, May 2025 Ann Wang / Reuters

ORIANA SYLAR MASTRO is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

BRANDON YODER is a Senior Lecturer at Australian National University and a Visiting Fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.

More by Brandon Yoder

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As tensions rise across the Taiwan Strait, the policy debate in Washington remains fractured. U.S. strategy broadly revolves around deterring China from attacking Taiwan, and for the past three presidential administrations, it has consisted of three central components: increasing the ability of the United States and Taiwan to defend the island militarily; using diplomacy to signal U.S. resolve to protect Taiwan while also reassuring China that Washington does not support Taiwanese independence; and using economic pressure to slow China’s military modernization efforts.

But there is little consensus on the right balance among these three components—and that balance determines to some degree how deterrence looks in practice. Some contend that diplomatic pressure—along with military restraint, to avoid antagonizing China—will keep Beijing at bay. Others warn that unless Washington significantly strengthens its military posture in Asia, deterrence will collapse. And a third approach, outlined recently in Foreign Affairs by Jennifer Kavanagh and Stephen Wertheim, emphasizes that bolstering Taiwan’s self-defense and enabling offshore U.S. support is the best route to sustaining deterrence while also mitigating the risk of escalation.

These prescriptions have merit but fall short of grappling with the paradox at the heart of U.S. strategy: deterrence can fail in two ways. Do too little, and Beijing may gamble it can seize Taiwan before Washington is able to respond. Do too much, and Chinese leaders may conclude that force is the only remaining path to unification. Navigating this dilemma requires more than a stronger military or bolder diplomacy. It requires a calibrated strategy of rearmament, reassurance, and restraint that threads the needle between weakness and recklessness. Combined properly, forward-deployed capabilities, diplomatic restraint, and selective economic interdependence can reinforce one another to maintain credible deterrence while avoiding provocation.

So far, however, the Trump administration’s approach to Taiwan has veered between harsh transactionalism, such as the imposition of a 32 percent tariff on most Taiwanese goods last month, and quiet reaffirmations of support for Taipei through bipartisan visits and a pause on the highest tariffs. The administration still has time to settle on a coherent strategy, but the window of opportunity is closing.

LOOSE LIPS START WARS

Currently, the U.S. military is improving its force posture in the vicinity of Taiwan, most notably through expanded access to bases in the Philippines and by reinforcing capabilities in southwestern Japan and the broader western Pacific. In the Philippines, thanks to the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, the United States gained access to four new strategic sites, bringing the total there to nine. Several, such as those in Cagayan and Isabela Provinces, are just a few hundred miles from Taiwan.

The story is similar in Japan’s case. Washington and Tokyo agreed in 2023 to restructure the U.S. Marine Corps presence in Okinawa from the artillery-focused 12th Marine Regiment, part of a force of roughly 18,000 marines stationed in Japan, into a 2,000-strong Marine Littoral Regiment, a quick-reaction force designed to operate along the so-called first island chain encompassing Indonesia, Japan, portions of the Philippines, and Taiwan. To complement this effort, the U.S. military has increased joint military exercises and expanded integrated air and missile defense systems across allied territories.

But U.S. military capabilities in the Pacific need more than just quantitative upgrades; they require qualitative shifts to be able to block China from forcibly unifying with Taiwan. The United States needs a greater forward presence in the region, as well as specific capabilities that would prevent an invading force from making its way across the Taiwan Strait, such as strategic bombers, submarines, and antiship missiles. Once those were deployed, they would also require significant operational flexibility. For example, Washington should prioritize securing forward-deployed submarine tenders in Japan and the Philippines to enable submarines to reload, resupply, and rearm without returning to Guam or Hawaii. And it should work to establish permanent bomber bases in Australia and the Philippines and deploy antiship missile systems in Japan’s southwestern islands and the northern Philippines.

The trade war could make a shooting war seem more appealing to Beijing.

So far, the U.S. military has stopped short of seeking such changes because they are politically sensitive both at home and abroad: host countries worry they might become greater targets of Chinese aggression, and some U.S. policymakers worry that such moves could cross a redline for Beijing. But if Washington follows a few principles, such improvements will not necessarily provoke Chinese aggression. First, the United States should not make a public announcement or a spectacle of enhancements to its military force posture. As U.S. forces increase their activities around and in Taiwan, be they joint exercises, freedom of navigation exercises, or training, U.S. officials should refrain from making statements to which China might feel forced to respond. Military upgrades should be concealed or downplayed until they are fielded to minimize the likelihood that China will effectively launch a coercive campaign against their deployment.

Bolstering Taiwan’s independent military capabilities—a long-standing U.S. policy—presents an arguably even bigger risk of provocation. Beijing worries that Taiwan will become so certain of its ability to protect itself that it will consider declaring independence. In recent years, Taiwan has acquired defense capabilities with the aim of deterring potential Chinese aggression. It has bought asymmetric warfare systems, such as coastal defense cruise missiles and HIMARS rocket systems, moving away from traditional high-cost platforms such as submarines. It has also pledged that its defense budget will exceed three percent of GDP in 2025 and that it will prioritize precision-guided munitions, air defense upgrades, command-and-control systems, equipment for reserve forces, and anti-drone technologies. These are sensible steps, but they also pose a risk: the less Taiwan depends on U.S. assistance, the more China’s leaders worry that Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, could be emboldened to declare independence unilaterally—further incentivizing Beijing to invade sooner rather than later.

To prevent deterrence from morphing into provocation, the United States should provide Taiwan mainly with capabilities that rely on continued U.S. support. In 2024, for example, the Biden administration approved the sale of three National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems to Taiwan in a deal that was brokered to increase U.S.-Taiwanese interoperability. In other words, this system was designed to function best in tandem with U.S. support. The United States should continue to encourage Taiwan’s asymmetric defense, particularly by prioritizing the speedy and reliable delivery of systems such as the highly mobile precision HIMARS rockets; advanced air defense missile systems such as the NASAMS; and antiship missiles such as the RGM-84L-4 Block II Harpoon. But Washington should also highlight the aspects of Taiwan’s military capacity that are linked to the United States, reassuring Beijing that the island cannot act alone.

WORDS AND DEEDS

Reassuring Beijing is a critical component of a successful deterrence strategy. But during both the Trump and the Biden administrations, the United States has relaxed its longstanding policy of “strategic ambiguity,” wherein U.S. policy has avoided defining whether and under what circumstances Washington would intervene to defend Taiwan. Instead, the United States has been signaling to China its determination to defend Taiwan—especially by making incremental moves toward establishing formal diplomatic relations with the island, such as direct interactions between American and Taiwanese officials.

Joe Biden was the first U.S. president to invite Taiwan’s diplomatic representatives to attend his inauguration, for example, and he repeatedly referred to a U.S. “commitment” to Taiwan’s defense, even saying once that U.S. forces would defend the island in the event of an “unprecedented attack.” (White House officials stated at the time that there was no change to the official policy of “strategic ambiguity.”) Officials in the second Trump administration, including Mike Waltz before he was ousted as national security adviser, have advocated ending strategic ambiguity and moving toward “strategic clarity.” And in February, the State Department removed a statement about not supporting Taiwan’s independence from its website—a deletion that China interpreted as provocative.

Although they may seem merely symbolic, such diplomatic slights have real consequences, making it harder for Beijing to maintain a veneer of progress toward unification of the mainland with Taiwan. Chinese leaders see any drift toward Taiwanese independence as a threat to their legitimacy. So, far from deterring Beijing, U.S. provocations—official diplomatic interactions, references to Taiwan as a country, calls for a U.S.-Taiwanese alliance—could incentivize Beijing to undertake a cross-strait invasion.

Reassurance that Washington does not support Taiwanese independence should include public criticism when Taiwan’s leaders make statements or take actions that suggest otherwise. For example, in December 2003, President George W. Bush publicly rebuked Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian during a joint press conference with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, stating that the United States opposed any “unilateral decision by either China or Taiwan to change the status quo,” noting that Chen’s “comments and actions” had indicated “that he may be willing to make decisions unilaterally to change” it. In 2006, after Chen angered Beijing by scrapping a government council that had been established to guide unification with China, the Bush administration once again signaled its disapproval, denying the Taiwanese leader’s request for a high-profile U.S. stopover during a presidential trip to Latin America. These sorts of reassurances helped convince Chinese leaders that future “peaceful reunification” remained possible, reducing the likelihood of an invasion.

The United States should also keep trying to build a multilateral consensus for peace in the Taiwan Strait. For instance, joint statements issued at the G-7 summit last month and at the Munich Security Conference in February reaffirmed cross-strait stability and expressed opposition to any unilateral actions that threaten peace in the Taiwan Strait, including through force or coercion. Washington should pair these diplomatic signals with a clear reaffirmation that its “one China” policy remains in place, that any resolution must be nonviolent, and that the United States is not against peaceful unification with Taiwan’s assent.

FROM TRADE WAR TO SHOOTING WAR

These changes to military capabilities and to U.S. diplomacy are easy compared with what is required in the third area of U.S. deterrence strategy: economic pressure. Economic pressure can undermine deterrence and reassurance alike. Since the first Trump administration, the United States has pursued an economic containment strategy to slow China’s long-term growth and deny it advanced technologies, with the aim of hampering its capacity to match U.S. military investments. This began with the first Trump administration’s tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese goods. The Biden administration not only kept these tariffs in place but also added export controls on strategically important technologies, such as semiconductors and telecommunications. The United States also pressured American companies to shift their supply chains and manufacturing operations away from China.

The second Trump administration has threatened to accelerate an economic decoupling from China with even wider-ranging, unconditional tariffs, although the prospect of financial pain for the United States seems to have given it pause for now. Nonetheless, these policies portend lasting damage to the Chinese economy, especially in view of China’s looming demographic and environmental challenges. For Washington, the hope remains that Beijing may be unable to keep pace militarily as its relative growth rate slows.

But the ongoing U.S.-Chinese trade war and escalating American export and investment restrictions have deepened Beijing’s mistrust and reinforced its claim that Washington seeks containment rather than peaceful coexistence. This economic pressure not only risks hardening China’s resolve but also enables Beijing to recast itself as a defender of global trade norms and to shift blame for any global economic slowdown to the United States. At the same time, the United States risks forfeiting its long-term leverage, as the tariffs may goad Beijing to deepen its commitment to what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls “domestic demand expansion,” or selling more products at home instead of exporting them. Such a shift in China’s economy would encourage domestic production and innovation and accelerate efforts to reduce reliance on foreign markets.

This U.S. strategy will also have limited effects on China’s long-term military prowess. China has pursued military modernization at historically low costs, avoiding the classic “guns or butter” dilemma. China has not matched U.S. defense spending dollar for dollar, as challengers did in earlier great-power rivalries. Nazi Germany, for instance, spent twice as much on its military as the United Kingdom did between 1933 and 1939. And during the Cold War, the U.S. and Soviet defense budgets signaled direct competition: the United States spent an average of 32 percent more than the Soviet Union until 1970, when the Soviet Union took the lead, outspending the U.S. by an average of 26 percent until 1988. In contrast, China has made targeted investments intended to give it an advantage in a quick, limited war, while keeping its overall defense spending relatively modest: Beijing’s defense spending has risen from five percent of U.S. levels in 1995 to 32 percent in 2017. In this way, China has sustained both economic development and military modernization, but avoided a Cold War–style arms race. China will therefore be able to continue its military modernization program even with a stagnant economy, especially if it increases its military spending as a share of GDP.

Fighter jets on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in the East China Sea, November 2024 Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

Indeed, instead of hampering China’s military, the trade war could make a shooting war seem more appealing to Beijing. Currently Chinese leaders would consider an invasion of Taiwan only in a specific, narrow scenario: if China could take the island before U.S. forces could intervene. For Beijing, a larger-scale, protracted war would be too costly. This is partly because of the economic value of the U.S.-Chinese relationship. But if U.S. economic pressure increases, Chinese leaders could conclude that the benefits of continued economic engagement are low and that conflict with the United States is the only way to get out from under the American thumb. This would make them more willing to risk war over Taiwan.

Concrete economic and diplomatic concessions that increase China’s benefits from maintaining the status quo and credibly convey benign U.S. intent would be effective reassurances. Pausing or reversing the economic decoupling is an obvious place to start; Washington should rescind tariffs on Chinese imports (or at least make them conditional on reasonable Chinese reciprocation) and relax its restrictions on exports and on incoming investment in all but the most sensitive technologies and sectors. This would not only quell Beijing’s perception that the United States seeks to weaken and “split” China but also allay any brewing domestic instability that could threaten the CCP’s legitimacy and encourage Chinese leaders to forcibly take Taiwan to boost nationalist legitimacy. Perhaps most important, sustaining economic interdependence, especially the asymmetric sort that currently exists, gives the United States enormous leverage over China by allowing it to threaten heavier sanctions in the event of war. Unilateral U.S. sanctions could set the Chinese economy on a path of permanent decline. Pausing or circumscribing an economic decoupling would give U.S. sanctions maximum bite and bolster deterrence.

Of course, bolstering economic interdependence also requires limiting U.S. reliance on key Chinese imports, such as rare-earth minerals, transformers for the electric grid, scarce medicines, high-tech electronics, and other industrial, infrastructural, and military inputs. The United States should diversify its sources for these imports and reduce the proportion that China provides to acceptable levels. But Washington does not need to immediately reduce imports of Chinese consumer goods, even though substitutes can be found relatively easily. Allowing such imports to continue would enable the United States to avoid destabilizing China while retaining the threat of painful sanctions. Finally, to maximize its deterrent leverage against China, Washington should coordinate a sanctions coalition with allies, which may require offering them subsidies or other concessions.

For many in Washington, deterrence has come to mean projecting an uncompromising and even hostile posture toward China. But such gestures do not meaningfully augment Taiwan’s security. Instead, the United States should invest quietly in its military readiness and capabilities, speak carefully, and maintain economic resilience and even some interdependence. The dilemma of deterrence—the fact that it can so easily slide into provocation or procrastination—necessitates such a tightrope approach. And if there’s one place where striking the right balance could pay enormous dividends, it’s Taiwan.

ORIANA SKYLAR MASTRO is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

BRANDON YODER is a Senior Lecturer at Australian National University and a Visiting Fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Oriana Skylar Mastro · May 20, 2025

21. The New Price of Statehood: Trump Is a Mixed Blessing for the World’s Separatists

Excerpt:

For independence movements, the new rules of secession mean a more volatile and uncertain future. If success depends on timing, charisma, and strategic utility, some breakaway regions may have a shortcut to recognition. Others might suffer. All of them, however, will have to navigate a landscape where sovereignty is not earned but cynically auctioned off.

The New Price of Statehood

Foreign Affairs · by More by Ryan D. Griffiths · May 20, 2025

Trump Is a Mixed Blessing for the World’s Separatists

Ryan D. Griffiths and Seva Gunitsky

May 20, 2025

Supporters of Greenland’s pro-independence Naleraq party celebrating in Nuuk, March 2025 Marko Djurica / Reuters

RYAN D. GRIFFITHS is Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University and the author of The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won’t Work.

SEVA GUNITSKY is the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto.

More by Seva Gunitsky

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Statehood is a precious commodity. After a burst of creation following the Soviet Union’s collapse, only three new countries have been recognized in the last 30 years—East Timor, in 2002, Montenegro, in 2006, and South Sudan, in 2011. There have been plenty of other attempts in that interval. But most have been stymied by the principle of territorial integrity, which prioritizes fixed borders even in cases of state failure and makes the path to legal independence long and uncertain.

But in the last few years, this norm has grown weaker. In February 2022, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine designed to wipe the country off the map. Initially met with shock and horror, the idea of the Russian conquest of Ukraine has since been normalized by U.S. President Donald Trump, who has called for letting Moscow keep some of this land. Trump has also threatened to annex Canada, as well as Greenland, which is an autonomous region of Denmark. Just how serious he is remains to be seen. But the upshot is clear: the United States, the most powerful country in the world, no longer views territorial integrity as an important element of the global order.

For some secessionist groups, this is certainly good news. Independence movements no longer must prove that their cause is just or essential. Instead, they may simply need to align with powerful countries, especially in strategically important areas. Trump’s preference for personal diplomacy could also help separatists, provided that they have charismatic leaders who can sidestep cumbersome institutional diplomacy and court the American president himself.

Yet Trump’s rejection of international norms is a double-edged sword. These norms constrain separatists and deter governmental repression. They also give secessionists a way to make their claims. Independence movements typically justify their existence using the language of human rights and self-determination, which Trump disregards. Rather, this U.S. president favors strong, brutal rulers over fledgling upstarts. He has aligned himself with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who have used killings and other kinds of violence to suppress Kurdish and Chechen secessionists, respectively. Trump does not care about impoverished separatists if they cannot provide him with immediate rewards.

For independence movements, the era of Trump is thus one of both opportunity and danger. There are both fewer restraints and fewer protections. For groups he sees as strategically useful (or favors for some other reason), the path to statehood will become more straightforward. But for those that Trump sees as strategically useless, he will either change nothing or make life more difficult. In a system where recognition depends on leverage rather than law, more movements could try their luck at gaining independence. But without consistent norms or protections, success will remain rare and failure will become more dangerous. More breakaway regions may receive some form of recognition, but it would be weak and partial—contingent on whether their leaders can keep aiding more powerful states. And the world as a whole will experience more bloodshed, as both governments and separatists, unencumbered by global sanctions or normative restrictions, become more assertive.

SOVEREIGNTY FOR SALE

Trump is hardly the first modern American president to ignore norms around territorial integrity when they become inconvenient. But Trump is the first in decades to disregard the idea altogether. Ukrainians “may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday,” Trump said in February. He has repeatedly called the U.S.-Canadian border an “artificially drawn line.”

These remarks are bad news for the people of Ukraine and Canada, who have made it clear that they do not want to join Russia or the United States, respectively. But if Trump’s realpolitik approach takes hold, secessionist entities might find it easier to gain legitimacy by aligning with the United States or other great powers. Movements in valuable locations, such as Kurdish separatists in oil-rich Iraq or the leadership of Somaliland (which is already functionally independent, and located in the geographically important Horn of Africa), might secure U.S. recognition and support if they advance Washington’s aims. Separatists in Greenland who seek independence from Denmark, or in New Caledonia who seek independence from France, could garner support from the United States or another great power if they can promise trade routes, military bases, or access to their resources.

In Trump’s world, secessionists may also be able to succeed—or at least gain traction—through diplomacy. Typically, separatists are disadvantaged in talks because they are cut off from the kinds of formal institutional channels through which diplomacy normally flows. But Trump routinely disregards this standard operating procedure. Instead, he prefers personal diplomacy, such as his 2018 discussions with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. That means that charismatic separatist leaders could curry favor with the U.S. president by appealing to him directly.

Secession will become a geopolitical transaction.

Trump’s world, however, will hardly guarantee more success for secessionists. The president has loosened constraints on independence movements, but his preference for strongmen and centralized control creates new obstacles. Trump tends to favor aggressive national leaders who project power, not upstart rebels or subnational challengers. This makes him more likely to support existing regimes over separatist fragments—so long as the regime supports him. During Trump’s first term, for example, Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Biafra separatist movement in Nigeria, issued a personal plea to the U.S. president, citing Trump’s support for Brexit as proof of his belief in self-determination. Yet there is no evidence that Trump responded, either publicly or privately, to Kanu’s appeals. The U.S. government treated Biafra, which is of little strategic value to the United States, as an internal Nigerian matter, as it had for decades.

Biafra is hardly alone. Despite rhetorical nods to sovereignty, the Trump administration has showed little interest in backing most independence movements, like those of the Kurds, throughout the Middle East, or the Catalans, in Spain. In October 2019, Trump even ordered the withdrawal of U.S. troops from northern Syria, effectively abandoning the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and allowing Turkey to launch a military operation against them. The move drew bipartisan criticism as a destabilizing betrayal of a reliable partner, and Trump ultimately agreed to keep U.S. troops in Syria (where they remain). But it still showed Trump’s willingness to prioritize regional power politics over friendly secessionists.

More generally, Trump’s geopolitical vision favors stable spheres of influence, where great powers set the rules. A world of breakaway regions undermines the principle of control that undergirds this Mafia-style view of order. So do the standard pro-secession arguments, which are couched in the language of human rights, minority rights, historic injustice, and self-determination. Trump, in other words, may tolerate secession if it serves a purpose. But he is unlikely to encourage it as a principle.

IDENTITY CRISIS

Because Trump’s order has mixed consequences for separatists, it will not yield a single outcome for their movements. Instead, it will reconfigure the terrain on which they operate. Secession will become a geopolitical transaction, not a legal or moral claim.

This change, however, will have some predictable results. The few successful secessionist movements of the last three decades were largely the result of ethical claims, as well as intensive organization. But now separatist success will largely depend on whether the movement serves the interests of a dominant power, not on its legitimacy or efficacy. Secessionism, in turn, could cease to function as a tool of imperial resistance and instead become a tool of empire itself—a means for great powers to project influence or engage in proxy conflict (as Russia has already done by propping up breakaway regions in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine).

As independence movements sense new openings in a weakened international order, there may still be an uptick in separatist attempts. But that hardly means that there will be more successes. Recognition will remain rare, both because great-power interests often conflict and because home states—less constrained by norms or economic restrictions—will be empowered to crush separatist uprisings before they gain ground. Instead of new full-blown states, partial recognition cases might become more common, such as Kosovo, Northern Cyprus, Palestine, and Western Sahara. Such recognition, for example, could soon extend to Catalonia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Somaliland, and breakaway parts of Libya and Syria. For places that are already functionally independent, a transactional global order might open new diplomatic venues or economic channels that bring them closer to official recognition—provided, of course, that they can offer strategic value like basing rights or resource access. For regions which lack de facto independence, success will now hinge even less on legal or moral claims.

In this newly contingent and chaotic world, separatist-related violence will also become more frequent. In part, that will simply be the product of renewed separatist attempts. But breakaway regions could also launch more violent attacks, encouraged by their newfound patrons and the diminished consequences of breaking international law. Incumbents, likewise, will feel more empowered to use violence to quash independence movements. The global institutions that traditionally restrain both secessionist overreach and heavy-handed repression are losing their power to constrain either. The EU once played a central role in restraining violence between Serbia and Kosovo, for example, using accession talks as leverage to encourage cooperation. The UN helped limit violence in East Timor and South Sudan by providing peacekeeping forces. But ultimately, these institutions derive their power from the support of member countries, which is weakening. Trump, for his part, has repeatedly attacked both bodies and cut U.S. funding for the U.N.’s peacekeeping missions.

For independence movements, the new rules of secession mean a more volatile and uncertain future. If success depends on timing, charisma, and strategic utility, some breakaway regions may have a shortcut to recognition. Others might suffer. All of them, however, will have to navigate a landscape where sovereignty is not earned but cynically auctioned off.

RYAN D. GRIFFITHS is Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University and the author of The Disunited States: Threats of Secession in Red and Blue America and Why They Won’t Work.

SEVA GUNITSKY is the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Ryan D. Griffiths · May 20, 2025

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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