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Quotes of the Day:
“But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously – after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year he knows he is important…”
– Robert A. Heinlein – To Sail Beyond the Sunset
"History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power have destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must never let that happen again."
– Carl Sagan
"The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people."
– Martin Luther King, Jr
1. Trump Lauds Cadets for Choosing Service, Honor Over Civilian Life
2. Russia Launches Massive Aerial Assaults on Ukraine, Defying Trump’s Peace Calls
3. Ukraine Is Offering Money and Perks for Gen Z to Fight
4. Behind Xi’s Strongman Image, a Demanding Father Always Loyal to the Party
5. Trump the central planner
6. Merz backs Nord Stream ban to prevent US and Russia restarting gas link
7. ‘No anti-Americanism in Hiroshima’: Eighty years later, city puts remembrance before retribution
8. The Not-So-Secret Society Whose Members Run State
9. Voice of America's prospects appear grim after appeals court order
10. Golden Dome creates a new missile defense bargain with US partners
11. America is having its Ming Dynasty moment
12. US brain drain handing the global talent war to China
13. The Spy Factory (Russia and Brazil)
14. Donald Trump betrays one more ally of US in Asia, India’s friend is in danger, China to become…?
15. These Are the U.S. Universities Most Dependent on International Students
16. The Age of Answers Is Over: Training Adaptive Thinkers for Modern Military Realities
17. The CIA Built a Special Helicopter to Sneak Into North Vietnam
18. Things Worth Remembering: ‘Do Not Mourn Me Dead’
1. Trump Lauds Cadets for Choosing Service, Honor Over Civilian Life
You can view his speech and the ceremony here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyULwVCcgJw
The full transcript is here: https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-speech-commencement-address-west-point-usma-may-24-2025/
Trump Lauds Cadets for Choosing Service, Honor Over Civilian Life
May 24, 2025 | By David Vergun
"No task has ever been too tough for America's Army, and now that 250-year legacy of glory and pride belongs to you," President Donald J. Trump told more than 1,000 cadets while delivering the commencement address to the 2025 graduating class of the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., today. "You are the greatest fighting force in the history of the world."
The president noted that each cadet on the field could have taken an easier path.
"You could have done anything you wanted. You could have gone anywhere. You could have gone to any school. … , you chose a life of service," Trump said.
The president urged graduates to savor the moment, but warned against complacency.
"You can never rest on your laurels. You can never give up. You can have great moments," he said.
"Through every challenge and every battle, you'll stand strong, you'll work hard, you'll stay tough and you will fight, fight, fight and win, win, win," he added.
Highlighting the importance of innovation in modern warfare, Trump cited historical figures like Billy Mitchell, an early advocate for airpower, and former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was once nearly threatened with court martial as a young officer for promoting a new doctrine of tank warfare.
"You have to have the courage to take risks and do things differently," he said.
The president emphasized the need for forward-thinking leaders and innovators because the battlefield is changing rapidly in light of emerging threats, including hypersonic weapons and advanced drone warefare as demostrated in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
"We've never seen anything like it, and we're learning from it," Trump said of the latest warefare technology.
He also praised the class for its accomplishments, noting that nearly a third of the graduating cadets are children of veterans and that four cadets are Rhodes Scholars.
Last year, for the first time, Army lacrosse became the No. 1 ranked men's team in the entire country, he said.
In football, Army beat Navy in 2022 and 2023, with the help of quarterback Cadet Bryson Daily, also known as "Captain America," Trump said, inviting him to speak on the stage.
"At a time when other top college quarterbacks were thinking about going pro, Bryson's mind was on something else," Trump said. "As he told an interviewer earlier this year, 'I focused on my career as an infantry officer.' That's what he wants to do. So, Bryson, he did the right thing."
Trump also mentioned getting rid of distractions to focus on warfighting and lethality, recruiting successes, sealing the Southern Border and advancing the Golden Dome initiative to protect the homeland from aerial threats.
Yesterday, Vice President JD Vance delivered the commencement address to the 2025 graduating class of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.
2. Russia Launches Massive Aerial Assaults on Ukraine, Defying Trump’s Peace Calls
Excerpts:
The increased ferocity of Russia’s assaults comes days after Trump demurred on threats to sanction Russia further if it didn’t sign an immediate, 30-day cease-fire. In a two-hour call with Trump last week, Putin refused a truce that Kyiv consented to in March. Trump has publicly insisted that Putin wants peace, but in a call with European leaders this week, conceded that Putin isn’t ready for peace, The Wall Street Journal reported, because he believes he is winning.
Zelensky said only pressure on the Kremlin would yield results.
“Resolve is important right now—the resolve of the United States, the resolve of European countries, of all those in the world that want peace,” Zelensky said Sunday. “The world knows all the weak points of the Russian economy. It is possible to stop the war, but only thanks to the necessary pressure on Russia.”
Ukraine countered the aerial assault with a combination of missile defense, Western-provided F-16 jet fighters and small drones used to intercept Russian strike drones, an Air Force spokesman said.
Russia Launches Massive Aerial Assaults on Ukraine, Defying Trump’s Peace Calls
At least 12 killed and dozens injured as strikes across the country hit residential buildings, Ukrainian officials say
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia-launches-massive-aerial-assaults-on-ukraine-defying-trumps-peace-calls-f0a28234
By James Marson
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and Ievgeniia Sivorka
May 25, 2025 6:30 am ET
An explosion lights up the sky over Kyiv in this weekend’s attack. Photo: gleb Garanich/Reuters
Key Points
What's This?
- Russia intensified attacks on Kyiv and other Ukrainian regions, resulting in at least 12 deaths.
- The attacks involved 367 missiles and drones, marking one of the war’s largest single-night raids.
- Zelensky urged more sanctions against Russia, criticizing the silence of America and others.
Russia stepped up missile-and-drone assaults on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and other regions, killing at least 12 people overnight into Sunday after President Trump last week declined to impose further sanctions on Moscow over its refusal to halt its invasion.
Russia attacked with a total of 367 drones and missiles—one of the largest single-night raids of the war, according to the Ukrainian Air Force—in a second consecutive day of pounding strikes that sent civilians running for shelters in the middle of the night. Officials said that children were among those killed by the strikes and that a further 60 were injured and more than 80 residential buildings damaged across the country, even as more than 300 of the missiles and drones were shot down.
President Volodymyr Zelensky called for more economic sanctions against Russia to force it to stop its invasion, which Russian President Vladimir Putin has refused to do despite Trump’s entreaties.
“Russia is dragging out this war and is continuing to kill on a daily basis,” he said on social media. “It can’t be ignored. The silence of America, the silence of others in the world, only encourages Putin.”
The Russian Defense Ministry said its strikes had targeted Ukrainian military-production facilities. The ministry said it had downed 110 Ukrainian attack drones in regions across the west of Russia, including Moscow. Ukrainian officials said that their large-scale drone attacks on Russian targets in recent days have damaged several Russian military-industrial facilities, including a factory that makes parts for ballistic missiles.
The increased ferocity of Russia’s assaults comes days after Trump demurred on threats to sanction Russia further if it didn’t sign an immediate, 30-day cease-fire. In a two-hour call with Trump last week, Putin refused a truce that Kyiv consented to in March. Trump has publicly insisted that Putin wants peace, but in a call with European leaders this week, conceded that Putin isn’t ready for peace, The Wall Street Journal reported, because he believes he is winning.
The Russian attack damaged more than 80 residential buildings, according to Ukrainian officials. Photo: SERGEY Dolzhenko/epa-efe/Shutterstock
Zelensky said only pressure on the Kremlin would yield results.
“Resolve is important right now—the resolve of the United States, the resolve of European countries, of all those in the world that want peace,” Zelensky said Sunday. “The world knows all the weak points of the Russian economy. It is possible to stop the war, but only thanks to the necessary pressure on Russia.”
Ukraine countered the aerial assault with a combination of missile defense, Western-provided F-16 jet fighters and small drones used to intercept Russian strike drones, an Air Force spokesman said.
Trump last week said that Ukraine and Russia should continue negotiations over a peace deal among themselves—talks that so far have yielded only one tangible result: a three-day exchange of around 1,000 prisoners from each side that concluded Sunday.
Russia has confounded Trump’s efforts to end the war, which it launched in February 2022, insisting that its original war goals of a neutered Ukraine under firm Russian influence be met even as its army struggles to advance in its neighbor’s east.
Write to James Marson at james.marson@wsj.com
3. Ukraine Is Offering Money and Perks for Gen Z to Fight
What motivates Gen Z and will this help or backfire?
Excerpts:
The fresh recruit is among hundreds who have signed up since February through a generous new government program aimed at enticing Ukraine’s youngest adults into the country’s badly depleted armed forces. The numbers signing up so far are modest. But Ukraine’s leaders hope that in time the program, known as Contract 18-24, will help chase down a demographic they have largely sought to spare from the front lines.
That they are doing so reflects the severity of the manpower deficit that has hobbled Ukraine’s defense effort in the face of a relentless Russian onslaught in the country’s east. Most men willing to fight signed up long ago, and enlisting more is getting harder each year. Many eligible men—those between 18 and 60 who are banned from leaving the country—are either in hiding or have paid bribes to flee the country illegally and escape the draft.
Kyiv has sought various ways to replenish its ranks after almost 3½ years of full-scale war. It has raided nightclubs, allowed convicts early release from prison and unveiled billboards throughout the country proclaiming: “Everyone is going to fight.” Last year it lowered the age of compulsory military service from 27 to 25, which only temporarily boosted numbers.
Ukraine Is Offering Money and Perks for Gen Z to Fight
A government program promises a $24,000 sign-on bonus to teenagers willing to fight Russia on the front lines
https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-is-offering-money-and-perks-for-gen-z-to-fight-2aa0e5bf
By Matthew Luxmoore
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Updated May 25, 2025 12:01 am ET
Key Points
What's This?
- Ukraine launched ‘Contract 18-24’ to entice young adults into its depleted armed forces with sign-on bonuses and perks.
- The program offers 1 million hryvnia, a monthly salary six times the Ukrainian national average, free college tuition and discounted dental care.
- Few have joined the scheme, facing bureaucracy and parental pressure, while some older soldiers dislike the preferential treatment.
ZARICHNE, Ukraine—Kyrylo Horbenko was 16 years old in the summer of 2023 when he and two dozen of his male friends walked into an army recruitment office in east Ukraine and announced they wanted to fight Russian troops on the front lines.
The officials on duty laughed them out, telling them to come back when they were adults. The others later lost interest or went abroad, Horbenko said. But he enlisted immediately after turning 18 in March.
“Who is going to fight, if not us?” the gangly teen asked as he prepared for his army induction course at a training ground in east Ukraine last month.
What separates Horbenko from the thousands of battle-hardened soldiers he will soon serve alongside is that when he signed up, he secured for himself an interest-free mortgage, a rare chance to vacation abroad and the first installment of a sign-on bonus totaling a 1 million Ukrainian hryvnia, equivalent to about $24,000—a sum that exceeds many experienced soldiers’ yearly pay.
Recruits to Ukraine's Contract 18-24 program receive a $24,000 sign-on bonus and access to an interest-free mortgage.
Svet Jacqueline for WSJ
The fresh recruit is among hundreds who have signed up since February through a generous new government program aimed at enticing Ukraine’s youngest adults into the country’s badly depleted armed forces. The numbers signing up so far are modest. But Ukraine’s leaders hope that in time the program, known as Contract 18-24, will help chase down a demographic they have largely sought to spare from the front lines.
That they are doing so reflects the severity of the manpower deficit that has hobbled Ukraine’s defense effort in the face of a relentless Russian onslaught in the country’s east. Most men willing to fight signed up long ago, and enlisting more is getting harder each year. Many eligible men—those between 18 and 60 who are banned from leaving the country—are either in hiding or have paid bribes to flee the country illegally and escape the draft.
Kyiv has sought various ways to replenish its ranks after almost 3½ years of full-scale war. It has raided nightclubs, allowed convicts early release from prison and unveiled billboards throughout the country proclaiming: “Everyone is going to fight.” Last year it lowered the age of compulsory military service from 27 to 25, which only temporarily boosted numbers.
Teenage recruit Horbenko spent years preparing for military service. Photo: Svet Jacqueline for WSJ
Western allies have long called on Kyiv to lower the age further, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has rebuffed such calls, arguing Ukraine needs its youth to rebuild the country once fighting ends. “It’s very important for me to safeguard the lives of our people, our youth,” he told a French newspaper in December.
Meanwhile, 18- to 24-year-olds have been largely free to get on with their lives—even as commanders argue that their verve and energy would bolster Ukraine’s aging and exhausted force.
That is where Contract 18-24 comes in. It dangles various perks in return for a one-year commitment to the military, and alongside the 1 million Ukrainian hryvnia it offers a monthly salary equivalent to almost $3,000, six times the national average in Ukraine. There is also free college tuition and discounted dental care.
A recruitment push for the program has featured TikTok videos, viral social-media posts and shiny billboards that stand on the central streets of Ukraine’s major cities—all of them with a Gen Z twist.
Young recruits from Ukraine's 28th Brigade take part in military training in the country's Donetsk region.
Serhii Korovayny for WSJ
One video posted in March to the TikTok account of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry asked: How many McDonald’s cheeseburgers does 1 million hryvnia buy in Ukraine? (The answer, apparently, is 15,625).
Ukraine’s move to attract new recruits with high salaries and mortgage help echoes similar moves in Russia, which has managed to bring tens of thousands of men into its armed forces by offering generous sign-on bonuses that dwarf average salaries in most parts of the country.
Russia last year announced an expansion of its armed forces by 180,000 people, to 1.5 million active service members. Zelensky said in January that Ukraine has almost a million people in arms, and officials say the army is adding 30,000 people a month.
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But few young people are swayed by Contract 18-24 so far. The government says only around 500 have joined the scheme since it launched in February. A wall of bureaucracy often delays the process of onboarding recruits, and many get cold feet or drop out under pressure from their parents, according to Ukrainian officials, who caution that it is still too early to judge its success.
Behind the program’s slick promotional campaign is a tough decision it places before Ukraine’s youth.
With no peace on the horizon despite a monthslong diplomatic push by President Trump, male Ukrainian teens often say the choice before them is to either join the military or to try a professional career that may be cut short by mobilization once they turn 25. Many choose emigration instead.
Timur Ushak plans to move to Slovakia. Photo: Svet Jacqueline for WSJ
Timur Ushak has watched as one classmate after another has moved abroad from his town in east Ukraine, mostly to Poland or Germany. The 16-year-old is now studying the Slovak language ahead of a planned move to Bratislava for university studies next year.
“If I leave, I know it’s probably for good,” said the tall, athletic teenager, who says he has lost faith in Ukraine after 10 years of conflict that is drawing ever closer to his town, Kamianske. “I don’t believe the war will end.”
There is also some resentment among older Ukrainian servicemen, who dislike the preferential treatment of the Contract 18-24 cohort. The generous sign-on bonus of 1 million hryvnia has inspired a mocking nickname for its participants: “the millionaires.”
Maj. Yevheniy Hromadsky, a 24-year-old soldier who in 2022 received the Hero of Ukraine medal, the country’s highest military award, said he earned only 12,000 hryvnia a month when he fought in the defense of Kharkiv in the first months of the war—a battle in which he lost his father.
With no peace on the horizon, signing up to fight is a tough decision for Ukraine’s youth.
Serhii Korovayny for WSJ
Hromadsky, who joined the military at the age of 18, said there is a subtle generational divide between his peers, who experienced their formative years after Russia annexed Crimea and invaded east Ukraine in 2014, and those who are teenagers today.
Most young Ukrainians became desensitized to the risk of war when the conflict with Russia abated between 2018 and 2021, Hromadsky said. Those years of relative peace, he argues, bred complacency and decreased their willingness to fight.
He argues that the best way to keep Ukraine’s army staffed is to introduce two years of mandatory military service between the ages of 18 and 20, after which conscripts can receive a university education at the state’s expense.
“The army needs logisticians, we need engineers,” Hromadsky said. “We need people with a higher education.”
Maj. Yevheniy Hromadsky said there is a subtle generational divide between his peers. Photo: Svet Jacqueline for WSJ
Horbenko, the fresh Contract 18-24 recruit, is aware that his enthusiasm for military service is unusual. He has spent years preparing, researching weapons and Ukrainian army units, and tracking Russian and Ukrainian battlefield advances.
After high school, while still underage, he took a job at the post office. While he helped dispatch humanitarian aid packages to troops on the front, he spent his days wondering: Why should I sit here, hiding away?
The day he signed his military contract in March, he drove past his mother’s workplace to share the news before continuing on to the training base where he is now staying. She told him: I knew this day would eventually come.
“It’s because others are hiding from recruitment officers that 18-year-olds like me are signing contracts,” Horbenko said.
Hromadsky shows medals and documents from his service in the Ukrainian army, as well as tattoos of his brigade and family crests.
Svet Jacqueline for WSJ
Oleksandr Bahach, another recruit, waited months for the military to get in touch after he turned 18 and registered his interest last year. Several weeks ago, he saw an online ad for the 18-24 program and submitted an application that was quickly approved.
“I would collect all the men in the country and send them to the front,” said the 19-year-old. “The bitter truth is that we’re losing this war.” Bahach cites Bakhmut, Avdiivka and other key battles of the war as inspiration for his decision to fight.
The two young men are now preparing to take their oath of service and begin basic military training for Ukraine’s 25th Airborne Brigade. After a month and a half, they will be allowed to choose a specialization in the brigade. After another 4½ months of specialized training, they will serve half a year on the front lines.
They spend their evenings at the training ground watching videos of Ukrainian military operations to ready themselves mentally to be in trenches for real, or familiarizing themselves with their new equipment, including radios and tactical bodywear. Horbenko worries he is too emotional and short-tempered and is steeling himself for what is to come.
“I’m preparing for the worst, so that when it happens I can stay calm and handle it,” he said.
Oleksandr Bahach said he was inspired by key battles in Ukraine to sign up to fight. Photo: Svet Jacqueline for WSJ
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com
4. Behind Xi’s Strongman Image, a Demanding Father Always Loyal to the Party
Know your enemy. (so said Sun Tzu)
Excerpts:
These qualities, some historians say, have roots in Xi’s formative years as a son of the revolutionary hero Xi Zhongxun, whose harsh parenting and unwavering loyalty to the Communist Party—throughout a tumultuous career rocked by years of persecution—seem to have inspired Xi Jinping to show the toughness his father demanded.
Party lore celebrates the elder Xi as a stoic figure who fought bravely for the Communist revolution and stayed true to the cause despite being wrongfully purged under Mao.
“While some may wonder why Jinping would remain so devoted to an organization that severely persecuted his own father, perhaps the better question is, How could Jinping betray the party for which his father sacrificed so much?” historian Joseph Torigian writes in the first English-language biography of Xi Zhongxun, which offers fresh vignettes and insights into the father’s influence on the Chinese leader.
Many within the party elite misread Xi Jinping when he took power in 2012, expressing expectations that he would emulate his father’s reputation as a reformer who helped open up China’s economy and managed religious and ethnic minorities with a softer touch. Instead Xi used iron-fisted tactics to centralize power, squelch dissent and tighten party control over the economy and society.
Xi’s hard-line approach belies a deeper degree of continuity with his father, whose “absolute devotion” to the Communist Party may have inspired his son’s own commitment to it and its long-term rule, Torigian argues in “The Party’s Interests Come First.”
Behind Xi’s Strongman Image, a Demanding Father Always Loyal to the Party
From harsh discipline to memorizing Mao, Xi Zhongxun shaped China’s powerful leader, a new biography recounts
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/behind-xis-strongman-image-a-demanding-father-always-loyal-to-the-party-7a5b66ea
By Chun Han Wong
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Updated May 24, 2025 12:01 am ET
Xi Zhongxun had a tumultuous career rocked by years of persecution. Photo: Stanford University Press
Key Points
What's This?
- Xi Jinping’s leadership style is rooted in his father’s unwavering loyalty to the Communist Party.
- Xi Zhongxun’s experiences of both favor and persecution shaped his son’s commitment to the party.
- Xi Jinping’s hard-line tactics reflect his father’s devotion to the Communist Party’s long-term rule.
When President Trump paused his tariff fight against Beijing this month, prominent voices in China praised their leader Xi Jinping as having fended off American pressure with resilience and resolution.
Beijing had taken a tough stance toward Trump’s tariffs, retaliating with economic countermeasures and vowing to “never kneel down” before foreign bullies. This defiance burnished Xi’s self-styled image as a leader with absolute authority, one imbued with the fortitude and spirit of sacrifice needed to guide China’s resurgence as a great power.
These qualities, some historians say, have roots in Xi’s formative years as a son of the revolutionary hero Xi Zhongxun, whose harsh parenting and unwavering loyalty to the Communist Party—throughout a tumultuous career rocked by years of persecution—seem to have inspired Xi Jinping to show the toughness his father demanded.
Party lore celebrates the elder Xi as a stoic figure who fought bravely for the Communist revolution and stayed true to the cause despite being wrongfully purged under Mao.
“While some may wonder why Jinping would remain so devoted to an organization that severely persecuted his own father, perhaps the better question is, How could Jinping betray the party for which his father sacrificed so much?” historian Joseph Torigian writes in the first English-language biography of Xi Zhongxun, which offers fresh vignettes and insights into the father’s influence on the Chinese leader.
Xi Jinping, wearing a cap, with his father Xi Zhongxun. Photo: Stanford University Press
Many within the party elite misread Xi Jinping when he took power in 2012, expressing expectations that he would emulate his father’s reputation as a reformer who helped open up China’s economy and managed religious and ethnic minorities with a softer touch. Instead Xi used iron-fisted tactics to centralize power, squelch dissent and tighten party control over the economy and society.
Xi’s hard-line approach belies a deeper degree of continuity with his father, whose “absolute devotion” to the Communist Party may have inspired his son’s own commitment to it and its long-term rule, Torigian argues in “The Party’s Interests Come First.”
Xi Zhongxun joined the Communist Party as a teenager in 1928 and won Mao’s trust as a revolutionary fighter. After the Communist victory in 1949, he took on roles as a regional leader, propaganda minister and vice premier, but was purged in 1962 for alleged “anti-party” activities.
Stunned by his downfall, the elder Xi told a friend that he felt like “a person who fell off an eighteen-floor building,” according to the biography.
He was sent away from Beijing to work in a factory and separated from his family. During Mao’s 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, which began as Xi Jinping entered his teens, militant Red Guards abused Xi Zhongxun at public-shaming rallies and, according to party accounts which don’t offer details, “persecuted” one of his daughters to death.
But Xi Zhongxun “never abandoned his emotional attachment to Mao,” writes Torigian, who describes how the patriarch—while still in political disgrace—made Xi Jinping memorize some of Mao’s speeches. During a brief reunion in 1976, the father watched his son recite the speeches by heart while they both sat in their underwear, according to the book.
Xi Jinping, then a local party official, participated in farm work in China in 1988. Photo: Xinhua/AP
“Although the party betrayed Xi Zhongxun, Xi Zhongxun never betrayed the party,” Torigian writes.
The elder Xi was rehabilitated after Mao’s death in 1976, serving as a provincial chief, a member of the party’s elite Politburo and a senior lawmaker before being sidelined after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. A father of four daughters and three sons across two marriages, the patriarch died in 2002 at the age of 88. Xi Jinping is the elder of the two sons he had with his second wife, Qi Xin.
Historians and people who knew Xi Zhongxun say he molded his son’s character by imposing brutal discipline at home—including strict rules on frugality enforced with physical beatings—and by recounting tales of his revolutionary exploits. During the Mao era, Xi Jinping often faced persecution as a child of a disgraced official—experiences he later credited for hardening his character and schooling him on the vagaries of power.
Xi Jinping “does seem to have learned quite a bit from his father about the nature and dynamics of Chinese politics, which even insiders struggle to navigate successfully—including Xi’s own father,” said Jonathan Czin, a fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution and a former director for China on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council.
Xi Jinping showed reverence for his father, publicly and privately. Torigian recounts how the son would kowtow to his father at Lunar New Year gatherings, wait for the patriarch’s go-ahead before taking his seat, and on one occasion even finished a piece of food that his father had started eating but found too difficult to chew.
“The ways in which Xi has gone out of his way to almost perform respect and obedience to his father…is striking,” said Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London, who has written books on Xi.
“Xi [Zhongxun] respected toughness—Jinping was his favorite son precisely because of a belief that Jinping had the most ‘mettle,’ ” writes Torigian.
Xi Jinping during a visit to a farm in China’s Hubei province last year. Photo: Xie Huanchi/Xinhua/Zuma Press
Xi Jinping has sought to demonstrate that mettle as China’s leader. He has pursued a more assertive style of diplomacy to advance Beijing’s interests and called on the Chinese people to show grit in adversity such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the current trade war with the U.S.
The younger Xi’s forcefulness in cleansing corruption and disloyalty within the party echoes his father’s approach. Notwithstanding his reputation as being relatively liberal, Xi Zhongxun was zealous in implementing Mao’s brutal purges, according to Torigian.
During the 1942-45 Yan’an rectification drive, a purge that Mao launched to consolidate power, Xi Zhongxun directed an “aggressive hunt for spies” that led to many wrongful persecutions, according to the book. Suspects often made false confessions to avoid torture, sometimes while Xi watched. Entire classes of school children were denounced as enemy agents, Torigian writes.
In the early 1950s, as a senior official overseeing northwestern China, Xi fervently enforced a Mao campaign to hunt counterrevolutionaries, saying that “it is necessary to remember that the more bad people whom we kill, the more they will be afraid.”
“Studying his father enables us to understand how Xi [Jinping] would have gained a view on how vicious elite-level politics in China was, and what would need to be done to stay in power,” said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London and co-author of a book on Xi’s political ideas.
Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com
Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the May 24, 2025, print edition as 'A Demanding Father Set Tone for Xi’s Tough Posture'.
5. The Fed Economist Accused of Espionage for Beijing
How does one come to admire Beijing and betray your country?
MICE: money, ideology, compromise/coercion, ego.
Or a honeypot?
Excerpts:
Prosecutors say Rogers was a logical target for Chinese espionage, with an important-sounding title at the Fed and a growing affection for China. In 2018, he married a Shanghainese woman whom he met through a Chinese matchmaking service. FBI agents would later find a note on his iPad, dated December 2018 and addressed to “Dear Chinese People,” in which he expressed admiration for China.
...
With a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia, Rogers joined the Federal Reserve Board as an economist in 1994. He later worked as a senior adviser researching exchange rates and interest-rate policy.
On social media, Rogers aired his fondness for bands such as R.E.M. and the Cure. A lanky figure standing more than 6-feet tall, he sometimes led yoga classes for Fed colleagues.
People familiar with Rogers’s work said his position as senior adviser could oversell to outsiders his involvement in the Fed’s sensitive policymaking discussions. While some officials with the “senior adviser” title help Fed leaders prepare for their highly secret monetary-policy meetings, others have simply been at the Fed a long time or have specialized research backgrounds.
Rogers fell into this latter category. He didn’t attend Federal Open Market Committee meetings or have access to sensitive FOMC materials.
Even so, alleged Chinese intelligence homed in on Rogers when he traveled to China in 2013. He went there to speak at an annual conference hosted by Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University, Rogers recalled in a podcast interview in 2024.
In 2017, Rogers accepted an invitation from the Chinese man who described himself as a graduate student to visit his university, Shandong University of Economics and Finance, in the eastern city of Ji’nan, according to the indictment. Rogers asked the student to pay for flights and hotels, and the man agreed.
Around that time, Rogers became acquainted with a 31-year-old Shanghainese makeup artist through a Chinese matchmaking service called Sky Love, which caters to Chinese women seeking romantic partners from abroad.
The Fed Economist Accused of Espionage for Beijing
John Rogers voiced admiration for China before U.S. prosecutors alleged that he sent secrets to Beijing
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/the-fed-economist-accused-of-espionage-for-beijing-7cbbed3e
Illustration: Alexandra Citrin-Safadi/WSJ
By Chun Han Wong
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and Nick Timiraos
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May 24, 2025 10:00 pm ET
John Rogers was visiting Shanghai in May 2013, attending a business forum as a Federal Reserve economist, when he first received an email from an alleged Chinese intelligence agent.
The man described himself as a Chinese graduate student who was interested in learning about the Fed. Rogers says he refused the man’s offer to pay him. But they stayed in touch, and later, the man invited Rogers to visit China again, all expenses paid.
This time, Rogers made the trip, setting off a chain of events that led to espionage charges against him in the U.S.—and exposed new details about China’s alleged efforts to recruit informants inside U.S. government institutions.
Prosecutors allege Rogers handed over sensitive information to Chinese operatives, who posed as students and who offered to cover travel expenses to China. Rogers met his Chinese handlers in hotel rooms and in some cases shared internal Fed reports, including information prepared for discussions by the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee, according to an indictment unsealed in January that accused Rogers of conspiring to commit economic espionage.
Federal Bureau of Investigation officers arrested Rogers in January and found $50,000 in cash at his Washington-area apartment—money that his wife said belonged to her.
Rogers, who left the Fed in 2021, has denied all charges against him, including that he knowingly assisted Beijing. People who know him, and his role at the Fed, say his value to China would have been limited because he wasn’t privy to high-level decision-making.
An attorney for Rogers said the government’s indictment lacks context and relevant facts that would undercut its implication of impropriety. For example, Rogers doesn’t speak Chinese, the attorney said.
The indictment “presents an overly-simplistic, one-sided, and skewed version of events,” said the lawyer, who added that Rogers’s legal team would provide a detailed rebuttal in court “where we will prove Dr. Rogers’s innocence.”
Fed Chair Jerome Powell has pointed to the central bank’s security protocols in response to past concerns about alleged Chinese spying. Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg News
Prosecutors say Rogers was a logical target for Chinese espionage, with an important-sounding title at the Fed and a growing affection for China. In 2018, he married a Shanghainese woman whom he met through a Chinese matchmaking service. FBI agents would later find a note on his iPad, dated December 2018 and addressed to “Dear Chinese People,” in which he expressed admiration for China.
“I love your kindness, your generosity, and your humbly hard working, high-achieving society,” the note said. “I love you unconditionally, Shanghai.”
Asked about Rogers’s case, China’s Foreign Ministry said it wasn’t aware of the matter. China’s main civilian intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, didn’t respond to queries.
Western officials say China has ramped up espionage activities to unprecedented levels under leader Xi Jinping, including targeting institutions such as the Fed, a linchpin of U.S. financial stability. While Chinese cyberattacks have gained more prominence recently, Beijing continues to groom traditional human sources such as informants to get information, even when they appear to offer limited insight.
A 2022 report by Republican staff on a Senate committee accused China of trying to “gain access to sensitive internal information and influence the Federal Reserve” since at least 2013, offering money and other benefits.
In one case in 2019, Chinese authorities allegedly held a Fed economist in a hotel room during a trip to Shanghai and threatened to imprison him unless he agreed to provide nonpublic economic data, according to the Senate committee report. Chinese officials allegedly told him they had been monitoring his phones, including conversations about his divorce, and would publicly humiliate him if he didn’t cooperate. The economist reported the incident to Fed officials after being released, the report said.
China’s Foreign Ministry denounced the report, calling it “political disinformation.”
In response to the report at the time, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank maintained robust information-security protocols. Those policies included reviews of foreign travel and personal contacts for staff with access to sensitive economic information, he said then.
The Fed updated its policies in 2021 to prohibit gifts and compensation from entities in countries, including China, that are subject to defense export controls by the State Department.
This account is based on interviews with Rogers’s associates and a review of documents related to the case.
Hot pot and currency policy
With a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia, Rogers joined the Federal Reserve Board as an economist in 1994. He later worked as a senior adviser researching exchange rates and interest-rate policy.
On social media, Rogers aired his fondness for bands such as R.E.M. and the Cure. A lanky figure standing more than 6-feet tall, he sometimes led yoga classes for Fed colleagues.
People familiar with Rogers’s work said his position as senior adviser could oversell to outsiders his involvement in the Fed’s sensitive policymaking discussions. While some officials with the “senior adviser” title help Fed leaders prepare for their highly secret monetary-policy meetings, others have simply been at the Fed a long time or have specialized research backgrounds.
John Rogers
Rogers fell into this latter category. He didn’t attend Federal Open Market Committee meetings or have access to sensitive FOMC materials.
Even so, alleged Chinese intelligence homed in on Rogers when he traveled to China in 2013. He went there to speak at an annual conference hosted by Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University, Rogers recalled in a podcast interview in 2024.
In 2017, Rogers accepted an invitation from the Chinese man who described himself as a graduate student to visit his university, Shandong University of Economics and Finance, in the eastern city of Ji’nan, according to the indictment. Rogers asked the student to pay for flights and hotels, and the man agreed.
Around that time, Rogers became acquainted with a 31-year-old Shanghainese makeup artist through a Chinese matchmaking service called Sky Love, which caters to Chinese women seeking romantic partners from abroad.
After months of online conversations, Rogers wanted to meet the woman, Liu Yu, in person. He added a stop in Shanghai, where they spent about two days together, sightseeing, enjoying a hot-pot meal and exchanging gifts, according to Sky Love, which detailed the romance in online posts publicizing its successes in matchmaking.
Rogers then traveled to Ji’nan, where he delivered a lecture, “Uncertainty, Currency Excess Returns and Risk Reversals,” at Shandong University.
The couple wedded in Hong Kong in March 2018, and Liu gave birth to their daughter in Shanghai later that year, the company said.
“A lot of trouble”
About two months after his wedding, Rogers reached out to the Chinese man who said he was a student and asked about an essay the man was writing, according to the indictment. The man sent Rogers questions about Fed policy, purportedly to get help for the essay.
Photos from John Rogers’s wedding to Liu Yu appear on the website of the matchmaking service they used.
Rogers emailed two Fed colleagues asking for information he could share during a trip to China, including on the Fed’s views on China’s currency. One colleague emailed him two PDF documents, one of which Rogers emailed to his Chinese contact.
After arriving in China, under the guise of teaching classes, Rogers met in hotel rooms with the man and another person—who U.S. prosecutors say was also an intelligence agent—and shared internal Fed information, according to the indictment.
In text exchanges made public by U.S. prosecutors, Rogers said the Fed wouldn’t allow him to discuss policy matters with Chinese contacts unless there was a sound academic reason for doing so.
“There has to be a lot more done to make this legitimate in the eyes of the Fed. Remember, it has to be teaching and not consulting. I am only allowed to teach,” he said in one text message in 2018.
If anyone questioned the relationship, “that would cause me a lot of trouble!” he wrote. Under U.S. law, economic espionage can be punished with up to 15 years in prison.
The Federal Reserve employed Rogers for decades. Photo: Samuel Corum/Bloomberg News
In a February court filing, Rogers’s lawyers said the text message “demonstrates the defendant’s commitment to do the teaching which he was hired to do—not to conspire with anyone.”
In the second half of 2018, Rogers took a sabbatical from the Fed, spending time in Shanghai as a visiting professor at Fudan, according to his podcast interview. He continued supplying information to the Chinese persons who described themselves as students, including notes on a briefing to someone awaiting Senate confirmation as a Fed governor around two weeks before a Fed policy meeting.
Attorneys for Rogers would later tell a Washington, D.C., court that the economist’s communications with his Chinese contacts reflected the teacher-student relationship between them. Rogers could answer his students’ questions without revealing trade secrets, the attorneys said.
Hundred-dollar bills
By 2019, Rogers had brought his new wife and daughter to live with him in Washington, according to a Sky Love post. His wife has another daughter in China and continued to spend “significant time” there, prosecutors said.
In 2020, Fed officials raised questions about Rogers’s Chinese ties in an interview with the Fed’s watchdog agency, the Office of Inspector General.
“The Chinese, they’re watching everything that the U.S. does. I don’t mean that in an espionage way, I’m sure they are doing espionage but I don’t confront that,” Rogers said, according to a court submission from prosecutors. “They just want to know what’s…the Fed thinking.”
Rogers added, “I was offered money, they’d come out with packets of hundred-dollar bills.” But he denied sharing restricted Fed information. Prosecutors would later charge Rogers with making a false statement during this interview.
Attorneys for Rogers said he lost access to most Fed documents in May 2020, around three months after the interview. He was forced out of the Fed in May 2021, according to a government filing. A Fed spokesperson, citing privacy rules, declined to comment on the case.
About two months before leaving the Fed, Rogers signed a contract to teach at Fudan, according to government prosecutors. His contract offers a salary of around $150,000 for one semester of teaching a year, according to his lawyers. They said he also received a $300,000 research grant, to be disbursed over three years, from a state-run research institution. Fudan didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The Chinese persons describing themselves as students continued to contact Rogers. In February 2022, one messaged Rogers asking if he and his wife would be interested in traveling to the eastern city of Qingdao, and arranging a class there.
“All related expenses will be covered by us, and we can pay for the class,” the agent said. It couldn’t be learned if Rogers made the trip.
Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com and Nick Timiraos at Nick.Timiraos@wsj.com
6. Merz backs Nord Stream ban to prevent US and Russia restarting gas link
Excerpts:
Even before Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the link was a bone of contention between Berlin and Washington, with the first Trump administration urging then chancellor Angela Merkel to reduce her country’s energy dependence on Russia.
Matthias Warnig, a former Stasi spy and close friend of Putin, has discussed a restart of the pipeline with the backing of US investors, people with knowledge of the talks said previously. Warnig was seeking to leverage US President Donald Trump’s desire for economic rapprochement with Moscow, they said.
“It is correct that the chancellor actively supports sanctions against Nord Stream 2,” a government spokesman said, adding: “One of the aims of our sanctions is to cut off Russia from revenues that could be used to finance its war of aggression against Ukraine in violation of international law. This includes revenues from the export of fossil fuels.”
Trump’s efforts to negotiate a settlement with Russia over Ukraine have rekindled a debate in Germany over Nord Stream and Russia gas, which accounted for more than half of German gas imports before 2022.
Merz backs Nord Stream ban to prevent US and Russia restarting gas link
German chancellor worried about reigniting domestic row over Russian gas imports
Financial Times · by Anne-Sylvaine Chassany · May 23, 2025
German chancellor Friedrich Merz is “actively” backing a proposed EU ban on the Nord Stream pipelines connecting Russia to Germany in a bid to stop any US and Russian efforts to reactivate the gas links.
Merz’s government earlier this week said it endorsed the ban as part of the bloc’s upcoming round of sanctions against Russia for its war in Ukraine. According to three officials familiar with the matter, the chancellor sought to quell any domestic debates about the merits of a potential reactivation.
Reports in the Financial Times in March about Kremlin-linked Russian and US business people seeking to restart the privately owned pipelines prompted Merz to start discussions with officials in Berlin and Brussels about how to prevent that, one of the people said.
Adding Nord Stream to the EU sanctions list “potentially removes a political problem for him”, they said.
The punitive measures are also a way for Merz to “Europeanise” the fate of the pipeline, instead of Berlin facing up potential US and Russian pressure on its own, another official said.
While it has no state control over any of the four pipelines currently disabled after explosions damaged three of them in 2022, Berlin would have to grant a certification for any activation of the gas link.
The EU restrictions would target Nord Stream 2 AG, the Switzerland-based entity that owns the pipelines, and any other companies — Russian or otherwise — that are necessary for its restart and operation, people familiar with the plans told the FT.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen last week mentioned Nord Stream as part of the “new package of sanctions” her team was working on. She made those remarks having first consulted with Merz, who gave his support for the move, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
The commission was set to begin formal discussions with EU governments this weekend, the people added. They can only be adopted with the unanimous support of all capitals.
A brainchild of former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who had close relations with Putin and was later hired by Kremlin-backed Gazprom, Nord Stream was once a symbol of the deep economic ties between Russia and Germany.
Even before Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the link was a bone of contention between Berlin and Washington, with the first Trump administration urging then chancellor Angela Merkel to reduce her country’s energy dependence on Russia.
Matthias Warnig, a former Stasi spy and close friend of Putin, has discussed a restart of the pipeline with the backing of US investors, people with knowledge of the talks said previously. Warnig was seeking to leverage US President Donald Trump’s desire for economic rapprochement with Moscow, they said.
“It is correct that the chancellor actively supports sanctions against Nord Stream 2,” a government spokesman said, adding: “One of the aims of our sanctions is to cut off Russia from revenues that could be used to finance its war of aggression against Ukraine in violation of international law. This includes revenues from the export of fossil fuels.”
Trump’s efforts to negotiate a settlement with Russia over Ukraine have rekindled a debate in Germany over Nord Stream and Russia gas, which accounted for more than half of German gas imports before 2022.
A survey by Forsa found that 49 per cent of residents of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the German state where Lubmin, the pipeline’s terminus, is located, were in favour of resuming Russian gas supplies.
The far-right Alternative for Germany, which has secured more than 20 per cent of the votes nationwide in February elections, has called for bringing the pipelines back online as the Eurozone’s largest economy grapples with high energy prices and stagnation.
This view is shared by some business leaders and politicians from Merz’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and his centre-left coalition partners, the Social Democrats. The Green opposition has blamed remnants of the “Moscow connection” within Germany’s mainstream parties.
In March, Michael Kretschmer, the CDU prime minister of the east German state of Saxony, said that maintaining punitive measures against Moscow was “completely out of date and does not fit at all with what the Americans are doing right now”.
Responding to reports by the FT and others about Nord Stream, CDU MP Thomas Bareiß in a LinkedIn post saluted “how business-minded our American friends are”.
Dietmar Woidke, the SPD prime minister of the east German state of Brandenburg, called for a normalisation of Germany’s trade relations with Russia after a peace agreement.
Financial Times · by Anne-Sylvaine Chassany · May 23, 2025
7. ‘No anti-Americanism in Hiroshima’: Eighty years later, city puts remembrance before retribution
‘No anti-Americanism in Hiroshima’: Eighty years later, city puts remembrance before retribution
washingtontimes.com · by Andrew Salmon
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By - The Washington Times - Tuesday, May 20, 2025
A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.
HIROSHIMA, Japan — In this bustling metropolis, not far from shopping malls and a sports stadium, the modest park surrounding Genbaku Dome is quiet.
Trees muffle the rumble of traffic crossing the nearby Aioi Bridge over the Ota River. Tourists from across the world speak in hushed tones.
The dome, like the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal, is a UNESCO World Heritage site — but a memorial to mass carnage does not lend itself to selfies.
The skeletal dome and its bare walls are the preserved ruins of the Prefectural Industrial Promotional Hall. It was one of the few structures left standing in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.
That day, at approximately 2,000 feet (“the hypocenter”), the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” over its aiming point, the Aioi Bridge (“ground zero”). Little Boy — a uranium-based atomic bomb — detonated. At 7,700°F, its fireball blazed as hot as the sun’s surface.
Humanity was jolted into the atomic age. Hiroshima was pitched into a nightmare.
After this month’s 80th anniversary commemorations marking the end of World War II in Europe, global attention is shifting to the Pacific and to Japan’s surrender on Aug. 15, 1945.
Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine puts forth Imperial Japan’s reasoning for igniting World War II in the Pacific. Similar messaging is not visible in Hiroshima.
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“Generally, Hiroshima people have no anti-Americanism,” said Katsugoro Tanaka, a 74-year-old local retiree. “Why don’t we hate America? War is bad! This park is constructed as a desire for no more war and for the abolition of nuclear weapons.”
Still, Japan’s decades of pacifism have come under stress recently. Facing nuclear North Korea, expansive China and invasive Russia, Japan’s Self Defense Force has been quietly expanding its capabilities.
Tokyo has acquired marines and F-35 carriers. It is buying U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles and fortifying its southern islands, north of Taiwan.
Amid Asia’s threatening security environment, there has been minimal public pushback.
The most terrible weapon
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Peace Memorial Museum presenters recall that children who spotted the silvery Enola Gay in the summer sky thought it “beautiful as a popsicle.”
Then a great flash flared over Hiroshima. A mushroom cloud curled 60,000 feet upward. The sky turned electric orange.
Below, a firestorm ignited that melted bronze Buddha statues and fused glass and pottery. The impact on humans — recorded in scraps of scorched clothing, disturbing images and survivors’ letters — was diabolical.
Flying debris caused kinetic damage. Flash burns turned humans into what looked like “broiled and smoked pigs.”
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Many had no choice but to view the horrors: Their eyelids had been seared off. Those who had shaded their faces walked like “processions of ghosts.”
Unable to lower their agonized arms, from which long strips of burned skin hung, they held them out in front.
An estimated 70,000 died on Aug. 6. But dying continued.
Victims exposed to fallout — the gray, uranium-poisoned dust and black rain that fell upon the ruins — would succumb to radiation sickness. Purple blotches (“death spots”) appeared on skin; black nails dropped from fingers, teeth from bleeding gums, hair from scabby scalps.
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Cancer cases — skin, thyroid, leukemia — spiraled. Many affected were shunned in the false belief that symptoms were contagious.
Today, Hiroshima’s death toll is estimated at 140,000.
The question of guilt
Along with exhibits on the bombing and warnings on the perils of nuclear proliferation, the Peace Memorial Museum includes context.
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Japan’s imperial aggressions, invasions of Southeast Asia and its Pearl Harbor attack are covered. Hiroshima was “an important military base,” signage notes.
Visitors appreciate this even-handedness.
“It’s not, ’The U.S. is bad, Japan is good,’” said Argentine Javier Leveroni, 30. “It’s about the atrocities nuclear weapons can cause.”
Visitors from Allied nations say the exhibits elicit complicated emotions.
“I feel guilty,” said Briton Michael Scott, 61, who found the museum “heartbreaking.” “My [veteran] Dad told me it probably saved lives, but it’s a horrible way to kill a population.”
“I don’t feel guilt as an American,” said Chris Taylor, 44, from Los Angeles. “I do feel guilt for humankind.”
A Japanese museum presenter held a different view.
“The U.S. believed atomic bombs could end the war,” said octogenarian Seiji Tsuji. Asked if that was justified, he said, “I think so. Japan was a militarized country.”
Consensus has it that the upscale in carnage that ended the war saved more lives — Allies and Japanese soldiers, and Japanese civilians — than it devoured.
’Tell them what you learned here’
Mr. Taylor had a special connection: His Japanese grandmother had been a schoolgirl in Hiroshima on the day of the attack. She survived because she was digging a bomb shelter. She emigrated to the U.S. in 1948.
He had a video call with her after leaving the museum.
“She is not emotional, but when I showed her her high school memorial, she was crying,” Mr. Taylor said. “I asked her, ’Do you want to go back?’ and she said, ’No.’”
Hiroshima’s doom is seared into global consciousness.
The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize went to Nihon Hidankyo, the association of Japanese A-bomb survivors.
Popular culture is fixated. France’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1959) ushered in new wave cinema. Radiation fears inspired Japan’s “Godzilla” (1954-2024) franchise. Hollywood explored the scientist who oversaw the Allies’ nuclear program in the film “Oppenheimer” (2023), which won seven Oscars.
Trauma tunneled deep into survivors’ psychologies.
Mr. Tsuji recalled that when news broke in 2011 of a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear reactor after tsunami damage, some survivors momentarily feared Japan had suffered another nuclear strike.
Multiple Hiroshima locations — shops, banks, temples — feature outdoor signage showing atomic damage. In a side street, a poignant paper sign taped to a wall pleaded for the U.N. to memorialize the bombing.
Mr. Tsuji made a similar request.
“When you go to your country, please tell your family and friends what you learned here,” he said.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
Copyright © 2025 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
washingtontimes.com · by Andrew Salmon
8. The Not-So-Secret Society Whose Members Run State
Here is a link to the Fellows at the Ben Franklin Fellowship. https://www.benfranklinfellowship.org/fellows
Excerpts:
I have had a number of conversations with founders of the Fellowship, and they clearly cast it as a refuge for a group they believe is marginalized in U.S. diplomacy.
“It is a network of people who are not progressive and who have felt as though they’ve not had a forum like so many others in the State Department over the decades,” said Matthew Boyse, a Fellowship founder and a former foreign service officer.
But many career U.S. diplomats are suspicious of the organization.
They warned me that it could politicize a foreign service that is supposed to be nonpartisan and undermine policymaking by promoting MAGA-infused ideology over facts. Some worry that joining the Fellowship is an unofficial requirement to get ahead in their careers under President Donald Trump, and that its anti-DEI message will hurt women and minorities in a State Department historically dominated by white men. Some also question the qualifications of Fellowship members who have gotten plum assignments.
The Not-So-Secret Society Whose Members Run State
Politico
A group named after Benjamin Franklin is attracting scrutiny, and suspicion, as its members gain top diplomatic slots.
A statue of Benjamin Franklin, whose many vocations included serving as America's first diplomat, is seen in Washington. A group named after Franklin is drawing interest — and suspicion — as many of its members earn top positions at the State Department. | Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images
05/24/2025 04:00 PM EDT
Nahal Toosi is POLITICO’s senior foreign affairs correspondent. She has reported on war, genocide and political chaos in a career that has taken her around the world. Her reported column, Compass, delves into the decision-making of the global national security and foreign policy establishment — and the fallout that comes from it.
If you want to know who’s running the State Department these days, it helps to peruse the website of a relatively new, conservative-leaning organization called the Ben Franklin Fellowship.
The group’s roster includes Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau, top officials in bureaus such as consular affairs, and even an acting undersecretary or two. The fellows include current and former members of the foreign service, as well as other international affairs specialists. And while the Fellowship describes itself as nonpartisan, its right-of-center views are obvious: It emphasizes goals such as border security; opposes typical diversity, equity and inclusion practices; and advocates for the careful use of U.S. resources abroad.
I have had a number of conversations with founders of the Fellowship, and they clearly cast it as a refuge for a group they believe is marginalized in U.S. diplomacy.
“It is a network of people who are not progressive and who have felt as though they’ve not had a forum like so many others in the State Department over the decades,” said Matthew Boyse, a Fellowship founder and a former foreign service officer.
But many career U.S. diplomats are suspicious of the organization.
They warned me that it could politicize a foreign service that is supposed to be nonpartisan and undermine policymaking by promoting MAGA-infused ideology over facts. Some worry that joining the Fellowship is an unofficial requirement to get ahead in their careers under President Donald Trump, and that its anti-DEI message will hurt women and minorities in a State Department historically dominated by white men. Some also question the qualifications of Fellowship members who have gotten plum assignments.
The Fellowship “seems like a thinly veiled MAGA loyalist roster — like, sign up and you’ll be ‘one of the good ones,’” said one State Department staffer, who, like others, I granted anonymity because they didn’t want to get fired for talking to a reporter.
I’ll be frank: I wasn’t that interested in writing about the Fellowship when I first heard about it months ago. My initial view was: So what if a bunch of right-leaning diplomats link up?
It’s hardly the only group to cater to national security types across the political spectrum — from the left-leaning Truman National Security Project to the right-leaning Hudson Institute. Freedom of association is still a thing, even for diplomats who, regardless of their personal views, are expected to implement the policies of whoever is president.
But I soon concluded that the Fellowship is distinct in its heavy focus on reforming the State Department itself. It is intent on getting people with very specific views into the department, an approach that could affect U.S. foreign policy decades into the future.
And I simply couldn’t ignore the Fellowship after May 2.
That was the day the State Department held its annual Foreign Affairs Day celebration. The event came amid anxiety at State over a reorganization plan that threatens many jobs and Trump’s destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Several key speakers were Ben Franklin Fellows. And things got … awkward.
The speakers included Lew Olowski, State’s acting human resources chief, who touted the Fellowship in his remarks. Olowski’s appointment has been derided by diplomats who argue he is too junior and not qualified for the job.
Then there was Phillip Linderman. He’s a retired diplomat and another Fellowship founder, and he was given a major prize, the Foreign Service Directors General’s Cup. At one point, Linderman told the audience he was accepting the award on behalf of “overlooked” foreign service officers who had “been intentionally passed over for promotion and assignments abroad” due to “extreme” DEI policies.
Some audience members walked out at this point. Many watching online reached out to me, aghast at Linderman’s comments, which they said implied women and minorities who received promotions hadn’t deserved them.
Also speaking was Landau, the deputy secretary of State. He repeatedly raised the concept of respect and said he was disappointed by the earlier walkouts. But his remarks drew heckles from some audience members who asked why the Trump administration was disrespecting U.S.-allied nations and employees of USAID. Such interruptions were a shocking breach of decorum for an audience of diplomats.
In subsequent interviews with the Fellowship’s founders — Boyse, Linderman and Simon Hankinson — I’ve tried to figure out what drives the Fellowship and how much power it truly wields.
The answer is, like so much of the world right now, murky.
The Fellowship’s founders insist they are not trying to inject partisan politics into U.S. diplomacy and that the last thing they want is to create a right-wing “deep state” inside the government.
“We very much believe in the constitutional order, which is that the federal bureaucracy works for the president, and it doesn’t have a policy interest, a legitimate policy interest, outside of what the president wants to do,” Linderman told me.
But the Fellowship’s leaders argue conservative views are barely represented within the foreign service, which undermines policy debates. So while suspicious diplomats worry the Fellowship will skew policy debates toward one ideology, the Fellowship’s leaders say the debates are already unhealthily skewed toward another.
Both Hankinson and Linderman said they’d separately thought of setting up a network of conservative diplomats years ago, but Linderman did much of the early legwork that eventually led to the Fellowship. Boyse connected the two men.
At State, there have long been different kinds of employee associations. They include “affinity groups” that link people of different faith, ethnic and other backgrounds, including military veterans. Many on the right saw such groups as vehicles for progressive ideas. The current Trump administration has effectively disbanded many such groups on grounds that they promote gender and racial ideology.
For a variety of often logistical reasons, Boyse, Hankinson and Linderman chose to create the Fellowship as an independent nonprofit outside the State Department. That choice also gives the group a bit more freedom than being under State’s auspices.
Linderman told me he was especially motivated to create the Fellowship, which was up and running by last year, during the Joe Biden presidency.
That administration, he said, radicalized the State Department leftward, especially in its promotion of DEI policies and, in his view, a lax treatment of migration. (Linderman is affiliated with the Center for Immigration Studies, which wants to restrict immigration.)
When I pressed Linderman about his comments at the award ceremony, he pointed to the Fellowship’s roster, which includes women and minorities. These fellows believe in the group’s principles and resent being thought of as “DEI hires,” he said. He and the other founders stress that they don’t oppose diversity in general but that it’s unfair for a person’s immutable characteristics to be given more weight than another’s accomplishments in, say, promotions.
Linderman also told me he was surprised to receive the award but was told — he wouldn’t say by whom — that his work on the Fellowship affected his selection.
Despite diplomats’ suspicions, I couldn’t find proof that the Fellowship is outright directing State Department policy or personnel decisions — at least not as an organization.
U.S. diplomats in multiple time zones told me they’d not seen formal, written State communications that mentioned the group. A senior State official familiar with the situation also said he’s not heard the group mentioned by top officials as a must-consult entity.
But these are early days, and the Fellowship is taking actions designed to seed long-term conservative influence in the diplomatic ranks. Even if creating a conservative “deep state” is not a formal goal of the Fellowship’s founders, a future Democratic president may find a foreign service that’s far less amenable to their goals.
The State Department would not directly answer my questions about the Fellowship’s role, including whether a person’s affiliation with the group affects personnel decisions. But it sent me a statement that said Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his team “value the insights, ideas, and leadership provided by members of the Ben Franklin Fellowship. We’re grateful for their service to our country.”
The Fellowship’s founders said there have been one-on-one talks between top State officials and individuals in their group at various settings, but they described that as typical Washington networking. And fellows such as Landau and Olowski, for instance, are likely to have significant influence over hiring given their official positions at State.
Hankinson, who also spent years in the foreign service, said the overlap between the group’s Fellows and the State staffing chart comes down to math. The pool of current and former U.S. diplomats known to have views that match Trump’s is small.
“One of our primary goals is to serve as a network to connect career diplomats and other foreign policy professionals who share the same values — including openly advocating for the U.S. national interest in foreign affairs,” Hankinson said. He added that if a Democratic administration sought Fellowship members’ suggestions for hires, they’d offer them ideas, too. “I suspect that won’t happen,” he chuckled.
I pointed out that Olowski is much less experienced than past diplomats who’ve overseen human resources at State. How is that a merit-based promotion?
But Hankinson noted that Olowski had the role on an acting basis and argued that he had a solid résumé. Hankinson also said many political appointees under other administrations were underqualified for their roles. The Fellowship’s concerns about putting merit over DEI are centered more on the career foreign service, not political appointees. (Olowski did not respond to my request for comment; neither did Landau.)
The Fellowship has largely been funded out of its founders’ pockets, but it is seeking grants and accepting donations, Hankinson said. One superficial but potentially tricky challenge it will face is differentiating itself from multiple other programs named after Franklin, who is considered America’s first diplomat. (That’s one reason the group uses “Ben” instead of “Benjamin” in its name.)
The organization has multiple levels of affiliation, including fellows, members and people who are on the mailing list. Becoming a fellow or a member involves vetting to ensure the applicant agrees with the basic principles of the group, Hankinson said.
At the moment, he added, “we’re seeing a lot of interest.”
Politico
9. Voice of America's prospects appear grim after appeals court order
One of the biggest strategic mistakes we have made is the elimination of VOA.
If I had the power, money, and influence I would try to create a consortium of allied investors from among like minded democracies to remake VOA into the "Voice of Allies" and carry on the mission outside of governments.
I cannot tell you how many times I have been told by people that VOA is old school and Cold War acronyms and no one listens to the radio any more (as an example) (I know the critics are among those who do not and likely have never listened to VOA or RFA, etc. And they certainly have never worked with them). Those people are uninformed and do not know how important radio broadcasts are to the people in denied areas that are occupied by totalitarian governments.
But such uninformed people are ignorant of the basic mission description of VOA which is highlighted in the photo below: "Voice of America provides news and information for people around the world in more than 45 languages on radio, television, and digital media. - A Free Press Matters."
What these uninformed people do not realize is that VOA uses the best medium to reach the right target audience and in some cases that is digital modern communications while in others it is radio and television.
Voice of America's prospects appear grim after appeals court order
NPR · by David Folkenflik · May 22, 2025
A sign outside of the Voice of America headquarters in Washington, DC, US, in March, shortly after President Trump signed an executive order aimed at reducing the scope of eight federal agencies as part of his campaign to downsize the US government, including the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America. Bloomberg/Getty Images
A federal appeals court on Thursday dashed the hopes of journalists and free-press advocacy groups seeking to stave off the near-total dismantlement of Voice of America by the Trump White House.
The administration, led by senior adviser Kari Lake, has iced almost the entire workforce. It has laid off hundreds of contract employees and put permanent workers on indefinite leave, citing a March 14 executive order from Trump.
Last month, U.S. District Court Senior Judge Royce C. Lamberth ordered Lake and the Voice of America's federal parent, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, to bring back workers and get the network up and running, as Congress intended through law. He also ruled that the administration had to restore Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks, calling their dismemberment "arbitrary and capricious."
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"Not only is there an absence of 'reasoned analysis' from the defendants; there is an absence of any analysis whatsoever," Lamberth wrote.
Earlier this month, by a 2-to-1 margin, an appeals court panel temporarily froze Lamberth's ruling, as it takes time to consider the full merits of the case. It has not yet issued a decision on the full case.
In the meantime, however, Lake has plunged back into slashing the ranks of the workforce, with hundreds of contract employees let go for a second time over the past weekend. The Voice of America website hasn't posted new stories in more than two months.
On Thursday, the full appellate court made clear it would not intervene, at least for now.
"We are devastated and concerned that this ruling might lead to further adverse reactions from the administration," Patsy Widakuswara, the lead plaintiff and White House bureau chief for Voice of America tells NPR. "But our day in court is not over yet, and we are committed to fighting until we can return to our congressionally mandated right to broadcast factual, balanced, and comprehensive news."
Lake did not reply to a request for comment.
An effort to cut "frivolous expenditures"
What future lies in store for the network and its sister broadcasters remains unclear.
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Under Lake's guidance, the agency has killed a lease for a new headquarters, canceled contracts to carry reporting from the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse wire services, and struck a deal to carry coverage from the far-right and pro-Trump One America News network.
Lamberth's requirement that Lake and the agency comply with the law stays in effect. Administration officials maintain they are doing just that — even as they withhold money from VOA and its sister networks that Congress has allocated.
Trump's March executive order called for the U.S. Agency for Global Media and several other institutions to be "eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law." The order also stated that those organizations "shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law:"
The White House cited the move as part of a broader effort to cut government waste on "frivolous expenditures that fail to align with American values or address the needs of the American people."
In addition to Widakuswara, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit include VOA Director Michael Abramowitz and at least one unnamed U.S. Agency for Global Media employee. The workforce, which has been reduced to a token presence, has been whipsawed between the various court rulings. The plaintiffs say the administration has violated clear-cut Congressional statutes as well as Constitutional protections of free speech.
"With the decision today, I am concerned that USAGM will move quickly to make further reductions," Abramowitz wrote in a letter to staff Thursday. "Please be assured that we are reviewing our legal options."
According to three employees of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Lake appears intent on running the agency on a shoestring, and reducing Voice of America to a handful of foreign language services, including Mandarin for China, Farsi for Iran, and Dari and Pashto for Afghanistan. (The people who spoke were granted anonymity to characterize unfolding events at the agency, given fears of retaliation.)
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A lifeline for one broadcaster
Voice of America was established in World War II to provide reliable news in places controlled by the Nazis and to hold out the prospect of what life could be like under democratic Allied rule.
Taken together, VOA and its four sister networks reach 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week, according to the U.S. Agency for Global Media. They are fully funded by the U.S. government.
The networks' mission is to deliver news coverage and cultural programming to places where a free press is threatened or doesn't exist. They are also designed as a form of soft diplomacy, modeling independent journalism that incorporates dissent from government policy.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, founded early in the Cold War, this week secured millions of dollars from the European Union as a temporary lifeline as it awaits its Congressionally authorized payments for the month of May. The government owes it $75 million for the rest of the year, under legislation passed by Congress. The network, which a court ordered the government to pay, has already engaged in furloughs and cut back on programming as it awaits the funds.
What's next for VOA?
In her public rhetoric, mostly on social media and right-wing media appearances, Lake has veered between promising to restore the networks to their historic mission and pledging to demolish them.
In December, then President-elect Trump said he would appoint Lake to lead Voice of America, though he does not have legal authority to do so. She called the network "a vital international media outlet dedicated to advancing the interests of the United States by engaging directly with people across the globe and promoting democracy and truth."
A few days after Trump's inauguration, Lake said she wanted to make sure Voice of America was "telling the American story accurately and fairly."
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"We don't want VOA to be Trump Derangement Syndrome News, nor do we want it to be Trump TV," Lake tweeted.
In March, a few days after Trump's executive order, she called the network "unsalvageable."
In April, Lake called Voice of America "anti-American propaganda" and said she was "scaling it back."
In early May, Lake hailed the appellate panel's ruling. "BIG WIN," she posted on social media. "Turns out the District Court judge will not be able to manage the agency as he seemed to want to."
The full appellate court Thursday allowed Lake to proceed, at least for the moment.
That said, in a case with some parallels, a federal judge on Monday struck down the takeover of the U.S. Institute for Peace by the White House budget-cutting DOGE initiative. In March, the same judge declined to issue a temporary ruling blocking the move by DOGE staffers, reserving her right to rule on the merits subsequently.
NPR · by David Folkenflik · May 22, 2025
10. Golden Dome creates a new missile defense bargain with US partners
It might be good to have allies join in the project and invest in the development.
Golden Dome creates a new missile defense bargain with US partners
By Léonie Allard and Jean-Loup Samaan
atlanticcouncil.org · by dhojnacki · May 21, 2025
New details are emerging about the White House’s “Golden Dome” initiative, a missile-defense system intended to intercept long-range and hypersonic missiles fired at the United States. Even in its early stages, the initiative looks set to become the focal point of US missile defense policy. On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump announced an initial $25 billion investment out of a total $175 billion to start building Golden Dome with the aim of completing it within his term. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth further laid out that Golden Dome will be a layered system, will draw from existing and future technologies as it is phased in over time, and will have an open architecture, allowing multiple companies to contribute to it.
The announcement defied some of the policy discussions around Golden Dome so far, which have focused on its technical feasibility and relevance vis-à-vis Chinese, Russian, and North Korean missile arsenals. Golden Dome proponents seek to address challenges to homeland and extended deterrence as the United States faces what it describes as a two-peer or near-peer threat environment. However, less attention has been dedicated to how Golden Dome could impact US partnerships worldwide, potentially offsetting some of the political costs of a diminished US troop presence abroad.
US missile defense has always involved cooperation with regional partners. The United States exercises broad influence in the production and planning of missile defense programs in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The executive order that first outlined Golden Dome, which Trump signed in January, reiterated this international dimension of missile defense. The executive order called for increasing bilateral and multilateral cooperation on missile defense technology development, capacities, and operations. And in his address Tuesday, Trump explicitly cited Canada as a potential first partner for the implementation of Golden Dome.
Although the details of Golden Dome remain unclear, the Trump administration should seek to hold a revived missile defense dialogue with US partners and allies across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Such a dialogue would serve the Trump administration’s agenda in its strategic, political, and industrial dimensions. However, the success of this dialogue and effective missile defense collaboration will require overcoming technical military challenges, as well as carefully addressing the sensitivities of regional partners. In particular, this means being careful not to overstate Golden Dome’s role in the United States’ pledges of extended deterrence to its allies.
Can US missile defense help the Pentagon prioritize the Indo-Pacific?
Renewing US investment in missile defense could be seen by the current administration as a way to help reassure allies from the threat of potential adversaries such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran while mitigating the need for a massive deployment of US troops on the ground. This logic is not new. During the Obama administration, US officials conveyed to NATO allies that deploying missile defense systems in Europe would compensate for the reduction in the number of army brigades deployed on the continent. The origins of Poland’s Aegis Ashore system in Redzikowo, officially transferred to NATO in November 2024, date back to the decisions taken by the Obama administration.
Given the Trump administration’s desire to reduce the US military footprint worldwide and focus on strategic competition with China, missile defense could be a convenient way to maintain global influence while lowering overseas troop commitments. From the outset, missile defense has always involved advanced technologies, demanding years of research and development that only a few countries can afford. If Golden Dome achieves its goals, it will shift resources to develop space-based missile defense systems. This could disrupt the current market for missile defense, which is made up mainly of ground and naval-based sensors and interceptors. Today, none of the US allies and partners in Europe, the Middle East, or Asia has a space industry that could credibly invest in this new domain. Consequently, it is likely that strategic cooperation on Golden Dome means allies procuring future US missile defense systems and added incentives for co-production. Right now, only Japan is engaged in the co-production of US missile defense systems, specifically through the surface-to-air SM-3 and PAC-3 missiles. Last April, Japan proposed the co-production of SM-6 new-generation long-range ship-to-air missiles. Israel may be interested in similar collaborations, as its main missile defense systems (Iron Dome, Arrow, David’s Sling) already rely on co-development and co-production with the United States.
For a broader allied collaboration on missile defense production to take shape, however, the United States will need to navigate several military and diplomatic difficulties in dialogues with its partners.
Different allies, different reassurance needs
First, US partners in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific face different threats from their respective adversaries’ missile capabilities. Golden Dome is conceived to address global competitors launching an intercontinental ballistic missile at US territory. It is planned to include space-based interceptors, which could prove effective in defending allies against adversaries using long-range ballistic missiles—for instance, if Russia were to launch a strike against Europe.
However, Europeans are also worried about shorter-range cruise missiles and drone campaigns such as the one launched by Russia in Ukraine, which requires different systems to address. In light of Ukraine’s experience, Europeans started addressing their capability gaps to protect against a full spectrum of air threats (cruise missiles, ballistic and hypersonic missiles, aircraft, and unmanned aircraft sysems). Meanwhile, the Gulf states and Israel face the threat from rockets and missiles fired by Iran or its proxies.
The ability of missile defense to reassure local partners varies according to the severity of the threat. For instance, in the extreme scenario of a total US withdrawal of troops from South Korea, it is unlikely that Seoul would view US missile defense as a credible substitute for US boots on the ground as a defense against North Korea. Lastly, allies and partners are unlikely to receive the same amount of attention. The United States is prioritizing the Indo-Pacific theater, and Golden Dome is intended as a technological breakthrough in the space domain—an area where China is rapidly advancing. This will lead European and Gulf states to fear being left out of any new missile defense arrangement.
Golden Dome and Alliance politics
The second challenge facing Washington lies in the disparities in the regional security architectures in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In the past two decades, the United States has only succeeded in creating a truly regional framework for missile defense in Europe.
In the Middle East and Asia, most US missile defense cooperation is bilateral. The lack of regional integration often results from distrust among local partners. It is also caused by the reluctance of countries in these regions to tie their national security prerogatives to an intergovernmental mechanism heavily dependent on Washington. This constrains the United States’ ability to apply missile defense cooperation lessons from NATO elsewhere.
In the Middle East and Asia, Washington must build on its existing cooperation frameworks and should consider exploring new formats. The August 2023 Camp David Summit opened up the development of a trilateral security cooperation framework with Japan and South Korea, with more consultation, information-sharing, and cooperation designed to accompany the integration of Indo-Pacific missile defense architecture. The three countries have since implemented real-time information sharing about North Korean missile launches. Additionally, missile defense could become an item on the agenda of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or between NATO and its four Asian partners—Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand.
Washington will also have to accommodate the different industrial interests of its partners. Today, US allies have domestic defense industries with their own missile defense programs to protect. In Asia, countries such as South Korea and Japan have produced their own missile defense systems. Even though they will keep procuring US products, their governments will carefully protect their industrial bases. In Europe, the Sky Shield initiative, launched in 2022 by twenty-four participating countries, will rely on US Patriot and Israeli Arrow batteries. France fiercely opposed the initiative in the name of strategic autonomy, to no avail.
However, Sky Shield may not reflect the current state of US-European relations. Golden Dome emerges amid a transatlantic crisis in which Europeans are trying to become more self-sufficient in their defense. Their desire for strategic autonomy and the need to protect the European defense industrial base mean they will likely pursue their own version of missile defense. In this case, European governments must make clear the areas where they intend to design and produce their own systems, including investments in the space domain.
Differences in political priorities and strategic culture are inevitable, but consultations should identify the space for common interests between the United States and its allies. The case of Israel offers positive lessons on cooperation in missile defense. The US and Israeli militaries have very few things in common when it comes to threat assessment, force structure, and doctrine, not to mention Israel’s desire to protect its national defense industry. But both countries—and their defense industries—have found ways to develop missile defense technologies to mutual benefit.
Ultimately, the success of a renewed missile defense dialogue will boil down to how much cooperation on the Golden Dome project can serve the security interests of US partners. While the deterrent value of missile defense remains limited, Golden Dome could play a complementary role. With nuclear and missile threats becoming ever more serious, the question of how to defend against such attacks has never been more salient in allied capitals, be they in Europe, the Middle East, or the Indo-Pacific.
Léonie Allard is a visiting fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center, previously serving at the French Ministry of Armed Forces.
Jean-Loup Samaan is a senior research fellow at the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore, as well as a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative.
11. America is having its Ming Dynasty moment
This article is heavily focused on technology, AI, rare earths, etc. Do not be misled by the title.
Excerpts:
I agree that sweeping historical analogies are overwrought and rarely useful, especially when they draw parallels between modern times and the agricultural age. To be honest, at the time, I wanted the post to be more of a warning than a prediction.
I didn’t think the US was well on its way to becoming the Ming dynasty, but I saw a few troubling signs of complacency and insularity, and I wanted Americans to be more proactive about fixing our country’s problems and pushing progress forward. We have a long and hallowed tradition of using declinist histrionics as a form of self-motivation.
These days, however, I often find myself thinking about that post, and it feels like the Ming analogy fits a bit better than it did in 2015. I thought about it again when I saw the results of a recent Ipsos poll, which asked countries around the world about their attitudes toward AI. Of all the countries surveyed, Americans were among the most negative toward the technology, and Chinese people were among the most positive:
Graphics at the link: https://asiatimes.com/2025/05/america-is-having-its-ming-dynasty-moment/?utm
America is having its Ming Dynasty moment - Asia Times
When powerful nations start fearing and denying the future – as America does today – history shows they stagnate and die
asiatimes.com · by Noah Smith · May 20, 2025
“I set no value on objects strange or ingenious” — The Qianlong Emperor
Ten years ago, when I was still writing freelance articles in my spare time, I wrote a post for The Week in which I mused about America becoming like China’s Ming Dynasty — powerful but insular, rich but stagnant, arrogantly disdainful of science and technology, and ignorant of progress being made in the world outside:
Ming China was by far the greatest nation on the planet for most of the 15th and 16th centuries…But with the hindsight of history, the Ming doesn’t look so awesome. While China was basking in seemingly timeless stability, Europe was seething with new ideas and technological progress.
Even as the Chinese government banned oceanic shipping and heavily restricted foreign trade, European countries were discovering the New World and building trading empires…Another likely reason for the Ming’s decline was disrespect of science…[T]he Ming education system de-emphasized science and technical studies, and instead forced aspiring bureaucrats to learn “Confucianist” philosophy…
Why did the Ming allow itself to become isolationist, stagnant, and backward-looking? Historians are divided, but the leading explanation is what…Mark Elvin calls the “high-level equilibrium trap.” Simply put, when a country thinks it’s in a golden age, it stops focusing on progress…
America shows signs of falling into this trap…We gape and gawk when we first travel to Japan or Switzerland and find that all the trains run perfectly on time — not to mention the fact that there are trains in the first place. We ignore our sky-high infrastructure costs…never pausing to wonder why West Europe and East Asia don’t have these problems…America had an extraordinary run of success in the 20th century…But other countries have been racing to catch up with us, and in some ways they have already succeeded.
At the time, this post was not particularly well-received. Experts on Chinese history scoffed at the analogy and told me to stay in my lane. The broader public simply yawned, seemingly secure in the belief that America would continue to be the world’s leading nation, as it had been for their entire lives.
I agree that sweeping historical analogies are overwrought and rarely useful, especially when they draw parallels between modern times and the agricultural age. To be honest, at the time, I wanted the post to be more of a warning than a prediction.
I didn’t think the US was well on its way to becoming the Ming dynasty, but I saw a few troubling signs of complacency and insularity, and I wanted Americans to be more proactive about fixing our country’s problems and pushing progress forward. We have a long and hallowed tradition of using declinist histrionics as a form of self-motivation.
These days, however, I often find myself thinking about that post, and it feels like the Ming analogy fits a bit better than it did in 2015. I thought about it again when I saw the results of a recent Ipsos poll, which asked countries around the world about their attitudes toward AI. Of all the countries surveyed, Americans were among the most negative toward the technology, and Chinese people were among the most positive:
Source: Ipsos
This survey closely parallels my own experience. When I hear other Americans talk about AI, it’s usually disapprovingly — many seem to think of AI as primarily something that threatens their jobs while producing little that they need or want. Over on X, I decided to see what would happen if I expressed bland, anodyne, positive sentiments about AI:
Here were some of the representative responses that I got:
It’s not just AI, though. Look at the two countries’ different approaches to nuclear power. Over the past decade, China has nearly tripled its nuclear capacity, while America’s has declined:
Source: EIA
Source: EIA
And this divergence is accelerating. China just approved 10 new nuclear plants, which will catapult it past the US and France to be the world’s top country in nuclear energy. Meanwhile, in the US, the Republicans in the House of Representatives are poised to wreck the domestic nuclear industry. Thomas Hochman and Pavan Venkatakrishnan write:
Earlier this week, two House committees released their sections of the [budget] bill, which includes cuts to key energy loan and tax credit programs. If enacted, the provisions would constitute the biggest setback to US energy security in a generation — and nuclear energy would be hardest hit…
Nuclear projects face massive up-front capital costs…As a result, private lenders either charge prohibitive interest rates…This is why every commercial nuclear reactor to enter service since the turn of the century has relied on…the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office — save one, which was built with similar federal support via the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The Trump White House has previously recognized the importance of these loans…But the draft reconciliation language would wipe that progress away. By limiting both funding for administrative costs and virtually all unobligated credit subsidies…the bill could leave the office unable to pay staff or originate most new deals…
Tax credits are on the chopping block, too…[the GOP bill] would also terminate transferability, the mechanism that lets a project developer sell its energy tax credits…Its elimination would kneecap next-generation projects just as they’re getting started.
I don’t think nuclear will be our most important energy technology over the next half century, but this is still a very bad sign.
Why do Americans fear the future while Chinese people embrace it?
Why are Americans so much more negative about AI and nuclear power than Chinese people? We’re always tempted to blame partisan ideology, and I admit that sometimes that is the root of the problem (see, for instance, mRNA vaccines). In general, there’s a recent pattern where Democrats fear the software industry while Republicans are apprehensive about new physical technologies.
But in these cases, I just don’t think that explanation fits. Nuclear power is traditionally thought of as being Republican-coded, and yet this time it’s Republicans who are now voting to gut it. And fear of AI is very bipartisan:
Source: AI Policy Institute
The most likely reason, I think, comes from the two countries’ recent histories. We know that people’s life experiences deeply shape their macroeconomic expectations; why should attitudes toward technology and progress be any different?
The US has been a slow-growing country at the technological frontier for as long as almost all of us have been alive. If your country generally grows at 2%, you can expect to see your living standards quadruple over your lifetime. That’s much better than nothing, but it means that in the shorter term — over a five-year or ten-year period — your economic fortunes will be primarily determined by random shocks, not by the slow and steady march of technological improvement.
A spell of unemployment, a medical bankruptcy, a decline in the price of your house, the loss of a government contract or a big customer — any of these could wipe out many years of slow improvement in living standards.
In other words, to most Americans, risks loom larger than opportunities. If everything stays the same, then they’ll continue to be wealthy and comfortable; if something changes, they might not. In an environment like that, it makes sense to be afraid of change, because change means risk.
For most of Americans’ lives, technological progress has been a major source of risk. The advent of the internet put encyclopedia salesmen and term life insurance salesmen out of a job. Hybrid cars from Japan put competitive pressure on traditional carmakers.
Flip-phone makers were wiped out by smartphones. Electronic trading made many human “specialists” obsolete. And so on and so forth, throughout the economy. At the aggregate level, these innovations drove growth in living standards, but at an individual level, having the technology in your industry change was generally a source of peril.
Someone who grew up in modern China has experienced something utterly different. Over the course of their lifetime, rapid technological progress has radically transformed their lives and the lives of the people around them, allowing them to experience a level of comfort and security utterly undreamt of by their grandparents.
Meanwhile, the risks from new technology were pretty low. In a fast-growing economy, if your job gets automated, you can often just go get a better one. If your industry gets destroyed by competition from a new technology, you can often just go work for the winners, since everyone is just expanding business so quickly.
You can see this pattern in all sorts of polls. A decade ago, Pew did a survey and found that fast-growing countries tend to be much more optimistic about the future than slow-growing ones:
Source: Pew
China’s once-torrid growth has now slowed, of course; it has caught up to the advanced economies technologically, and has less room to grow. In 30 years, as the young generation grows up in a world of slower growth,1 Chinese attitudes toward things like AI — or whatever the next cutting-edge thing is — may converge toward those of their rich-world peers.2 But 30 years is a long time, by modern standards — long enough to determine whether the US or China will be the world’s premier civilization.
The example technologies I cited above — AI and nuclear — aren’t actually the best illustration of the divergence between a pessimistic, backward-looking America and an optimistic, forward-looking China. America invented AI, and has most of the world’s premier AI companies and researchers.
Despite popular anxieties, both the government and large companies recognize the crucial importance of the technology, and are investing heavily to stay at the cutting edge. Meanwhile, the US still has more nuclear power per capita than China, and that will continue to be true for a while. If we were just talking about AI and nuclear, then this post would be more of a warning than an alarm — much like my post about the Ming dynasty back in 2015.
But we’re not just talking about AI and nuclear. In fact, there’s a crucial set of technologies that has recently experienced revolutionary breakthroughs, and is poised to reorder global power and wealth over the next few decades. And when it comes to this set of technologies, the US is moving backward, while China has seized global leadership.
I’m talking, of course, about electrical technology.
America is losing the Electrical Age
Over the past few years, I’ve come to understand that the world is undergoing a profound technological shift — the kind of thing that only happens once a century, and perhaps only a few times in all of human history. I tried to explain it in this post entitled “The triumph of electromagnetism over thermodynamics.”
During the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was powered by combustion technology — you burned coal to boil water into steam, and steam turned a series of gears that powered trains, ships, and factories. In the 20th century, internal combustion gave us cars, planes, and rockets.
But in the 20th century, we also harnessed an alternative method of generating power — electricity. When we needed fine control instead of raw oomph — for example, to power the parallel workstations of a modern factory, or to power a delicate device like a TV or a computer — we pushed electrons through wires instead of creating a controlled explosion.
Then, at the close of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, there were three key technological breakthroughs that changed the balance between combustion and electricity. These were:
- Rare-earth permanent magnets
- Gallium nitride and silicon carbide transistors
- Lithium-ion batteries
In my experience, very few Americans know that the first and second of these breakthroughs even happened — or even what these technologies are. That in itself is shameful and represents a failure of our education system. In brief:
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Rare-earth permanent magnets are able to hold a much stronger magnetic field than traditional magnets like the toys you played with when you were a kid or the little magnets you stick on your refrigerator. You can use these super-powerful magnets to create electric motors with very high torque, to power cars, drones, or other stuff that could previously only be powered by combustion engines. These were developed in the 1980s and 1990s. Source: Sam D’Amico
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GaN and SiC transistors are able to operate at much higher levels of current and voltage than the transistors that run your computer or your phone. This allows them to work in things like cars and drones that operate at very high power. Source: Power Electronics News via Sam D’Amico. They were developed in the 2000s and 2010s.
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Lithium-ion batteries were developed in the late 20th century, and a series of incremental innovations led to a huge increase in the amount of energy they can hold, and a huge decrease in their manufacturing cost. Source: RMI via Sam D’Amico
Together, these three inventions have made electricity better than combustion for a wide range of physical technologies. They’ve made electric cars better than combustion cars along almost every possible dimension — and even the few drawbacks that EVs still have, like slow charging, are being solved pretty easily by a series of more modest inventions. And they’ve made battery-powered drones the dominant weapon on the modern battlefield.
Increasingly, it’s electricity, not combustion, that rules the land and the sky.
Whichever country dominates electrical technology will therefore rule the land and the sky in the 21st century. AI is amazing, and yet without drones for it to command, it will not be able to win modern wars.
And no matter how entertaining our online lives are, humans will still need to move themselves and their possessions around in physical space, so the auto industry will continue to be incredibly lucrative and important.
Currently, America is losing this race in dramatic and catastrophic fashion. I wrote about this back in December under the headline “America is losing the physical technologies of the future.”
While the US lags behind Europe and the world overall in terms of the percent of its energy it gets from electricity, China has surged ahead of the field:
Meanwhile, China is now dominating the global auto industry because it’s embracing electric cars more than other countries are:
Source: RMI
China also dominates the manufacturing of batteries, drones and electric motors.
So while America is remaining competitive (for now) in software, and still has a lead in the old combustion technologies of the 20th century, China is absolutely trouncing the US in the race for the new electrical technologies that will define physical power this century.
Given this dire situation, you’d think America would be racing to catch up. Instead, the US is intentionally forfeiting the race, destroying our nascent electrical capabilities as fast as we can:
President Donald Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ spans 1,116 pages. Some of those pages include serious cuts to clean energy incentives in a number of sectors such as transportation…Section 112002 on page 30 of the One Big, Beautiful Bill document is titled “Termination of clean vehicle credit.” The credit was originally set to expire December 21, 2032.
A provision in the bill “accelerates the expiration to December 31, 2025.” Americans would lose the ability to claim the EV tax credit in 2026…The bill also targets EV and hybrid vehicle owners…Electric vehicle owners could be charged $250 annually and hybrid owners could be charged $100 annually if the bill is passed…The President has been taking aim at EVs for years…The passage of the bill as is would mean electric vehicles are about to get much more expensive.
And:
House Republicans also propose to kill a loan program that supports the manufacture of certain advanced technology vehicles. It would rescind any unobligated funding and rescind corporate average fuel economy standards and greenhouse gas emission rules for 2027 and beyond. That portion will be taken up by the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Among outstanding loans finalized in President Joe Biden’s last weeks in office are $9.63 billion to a joint venture of Ford Motor and South Korean battery maker SK On for construction of three battery manufacturing plants in Tennessee and Kentucky; $7.54 billion to a joint venture of Chrysler-parent Stellantis and Samsung SDI for two EV lithium-ion battery plants in Indiana; and $6.57 billion to Rivian for a plant in Georgia to begin building smaller, less expensive EVs in 2028.
This is intentionally forfeiting the technological future to China. The auto industry is lucrative and important, but even that pales in comparison to the importance of drones. If you can’t build batteries and electric motors in the US, you can’t build drones here, either. And if you can’t build drones, you can’t win a modern war.
Defenders of Trump’s move to kill battery subsidies will ask: If batteries are the best technology, why do they need subsidies? The answer is so simple and so obvious that anyone who even asks the question should feel a deep sense of intellectual shame: Markets do not provide national defense.
The battery and motor manufacturing capacity America needs in order to defend itself against China will simply not be sufficient without subsidies, since China is heavily subsidizing its own manufacturing capabilities in this area. Of course, as military ground vehicles go electric, the same will hold true for those as for drones.
Would you want China to make all of the world’s plutonium? No? Would you want China to make all of the world’s jet engines and rockets? No? Then you’re a fool to want to let China make all of the world’s batteries and electric motors.
I don’t want to get too partisan here. After all, it was NIMBY progressives who blocked many of the Biden administration’s attempts to build solar power and transmission lines, and it was progressive contracting requirements that stymied Biden’s attempt to build a network of EV chargers. Some progressives even hate electric cars, because they hate cars in general. This is all very foolish.
Among Republicans, however, and especially among followers of Trump, hatred of electrical technology has been raised almost to the level of a cultish religion. This is partly downstream of a tactical error by progressives, who sold their own base on the electric future by painting it as a climate policy instead of as a policy for promoting economic growth and national security. But that shouldn’t let conservatives off the hook here. At the end of the day, Democrats tried (inefficiently) to give electric technology a boost, and Republicans are the ones killing that effort.
Try talking to a conservative about the importance of EVs, and you’ll typically be confronted with a confused eruption of the most outdated arguments why the technology will never work. “EVs don’t have good range!” (False.) “EVs are slow to charge!” (False.) “Batteries can’t be recycled!” (False.) And so on, ad infinitum. It’s like hearing someone in 1910 tell you that cars will never replace horses, even as that replacement was well underway.
You simply cannot will a technological shift out of existence, or make the world go back to the way it used to be, no matter how big and powerful your country is. In 1793, a British mission to China (which was then ruled by the even more stagnant and isolationist Qing dynasty that succeeded the Ming) offered the emperor various technological marvels from the West.
The emperor was unimpressed and expressed utter disinterest in the wonders he was being shown, uttering the famous line: “As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.”
Fast forward a couple of centuries, and the shoe is on the other foot. It’s America — the leading civilization of the West — that is turning up its nose at new inventions that are remaking the map of global power. We really are becoming a technophobic civilization, looking inward to our petty domestic conflicts and looking backward to our great historical achievements, even as a rival civilization embraces the future.
My Ming dynasty analogy was more appropriate than I realized at the time.
Notes:
1. In fact, the rule I’ve postulated — that people who grow up with faster growth are more optimistic — is far too simple. When growth slows down during a person’s lifetime, having grown up under rapid growth tends to make them structurally pessimistic, since it raises their expectations to unsustainable levels. Matsumoto et al. (2024) document this effect. This may happen with the current generation of young Chinese people.
2. This is actually why the Ming dynasty analogy is more rhetorical than real. In the industrial age, things like technology, economic growth rates, and demographics change much more quickly than they did back in the agricultural age. It took only two or three decades for Japanese people to go from optimism to pessimism about their country’s future, and China might end up being the same.
Maybe as every country ages into senescence and catch-up growth runs its course all over the world, we’ll become a global Ming dynasty. Or perhaps AI will supercharge growth rates and we’ll figure out a solution to the low fertility problem, and optimism will be restored. Either way, the long slow decline of an agricultural society like the Ming seems less likely in the modern unstable age.
This article was first published on Noah Smith’s Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.
asiatimes.com · by Noah Smith · May 20, 2025
12. US brain drain handing the global talent war to China
Troubling.
Excerpts:
The world is witnessing a quiet revolution as global brain drain morphs into brain circulation. The old assumption that the West is the final stop for talent no longer holds.
China is rewriting the rules and the US is at risk of writing itself out of the game. The winners will be those who recognize that global talent seeks trust, opportunity and, just as importantly, respect.
In the new world of global competition, it’s not just about who builds the fastest chip or finds the next vaccine. It’s about who people trust to build a future they’re willing to work toward.
US brain drain handing the global talent war to China - Asia Times
asiatimes.com · by Tang Meng Kit · May 20, 2025
The US-China rivalry is no longer just a clash of tariffs, navies and diplomatic showdowns. A quieter, subtler front has emerged – one that is nonetheless reshaping the global order and deciding future winners and losers. It’s a contest for people, specifically the scientists, engineers and academic pioneers who will shape the future.
In this emerging struggle, talent is the new oil and the pipelines are shifting as the once-unidirectional flow of talent toward the United States is reversing, redirecting careers, rebalancing innovation and redrawing the map of global power and influence.
Thousands of highly skilled professionals, especially those of Chinese descent, are leaving American institutions for new opportunities in China and elsewhere. This is more than a reversal; it is a redistribution of global brainpower, one that is reshaping research ecosystems and tilting discernibly the balance of global innovation.
Between 2010 and 2021, nearly 20,000 Chinese-born scientists left the United States, a trend that accelerated after 2018. These are not second-string researchers: they include figures like neuroscientist Yan Ning, who left Princeton to lead the Shenzhen Medical Academy, and Gang Chen, a top MIT engineer who returned to Tsinghua University after being cleared of espionage-related charges.
Increasingly under Trump, restrictive visa policies, geopolitics and racialized suspicion are repelling rather than attracting top talent. The previous Trump administration’s China Initiative may be over, but its chilling effect remains.
Chinese and other Asian scientists worry about surveillance, unjust scrutiny or even prosecution. Simultaneously, shrinking research budgets and unstable funding make the US less attractive.
Added to that is a cultural atmosphere strained by rising anti-Asian sentiment. For many scientists, it is not just about funding, it is about a sense of belonging, and increasingly, they feel like they don’t.
Personal reasons matter too: proximity to family, cultural affinity and a desire to build something at home are strong motivators for many. The choice is not always ideological; sometimes, it is just practical.
Meanwhile, countries like China are actively luring top talent. Programs like the Thousand Talents Plan offer not only top-tier salaries and research budgets, but also housing, leadership roles and prestige.
Institutions like Westlake University and the Shenzhen Medical Academy promise autonomy and world-class facilities. For many, returning to China is no longer a step down but rather a step up.
Control, prestige and a new national narrative
China’s talent recruitment is strategic and political. Scientists are welcomed back with fanfare, but also with expectations. Loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party matters. Returnees are integrated into networks that blend scientific leadership with ideological alignment.
Yet even within these constraints, China offers room to lead. The government knows innovation cannot be fully micromanaged, so it invests heavily in reducing red tape and offering clear career trajectories. The result is a paradox: a system that demands control but depends on creativity.
Returnees also serve as powerful symbols. Chinese media portray their return as validation of China’s rise and the West’s decline. These narratives bolster nationalism and legitimize the regime. But the government knows this soft power cuts both ways: Disillusioned returnees could become critics, so integration and respect are key.
This moment raises an important question: Is China reaching a true inflection point in its ascent as a scientific superpower? For some, the symbolism is striking. Mao Zedong once declared the rise of the Chinese people on the world stage. Today, the return of world-class scientists to China could be seen as a realization of that prophecy – not through revolution but rather through research.
China’s growing ecosystem of labs, research parks and universities is producing world-class science. Its top research institutions are climbing global rankings. Its researchers are making breakthroughs in quantum computing, artificial intelligence and biomedicine. If this trajectory holds, China may soon rival or surpass the United States in the highest tiers of innovation and technology.
But the path is not guaranteed. Real leadership in science requires openness, trust and intellectual freedom – qualities that sit uneasily with China’s political leadership. Whether China’s scientific rise is sustainable will depend on how the Communist Party manages these tensions.
Is this the beginning of a new Chinese scientific century, or a premature peak? The answer lies in how China balances its national ambitions with the global ethos and norms of science.
For the United States, the loss of top researchers is a clear threat to its innovation edge, jeopardizing future breakthroughs in AI, biotech and clean tech. It also weakens American soft power. The American university used to be the global gold standard, but that aura is now fading.
China, on the other hand, is reaping real benefits, with returnees driving progress in key innovation sectors. Chinese universities, meanwhile, are climbing in global rankings. It’s all giving Beijing cause to tout these successes as proof of its system’s superiority.
Globally, talent flows are becoming more fluid. Brain circulation, not just brain drain, is creating new innovation hubs in places like Singapore, Germany and the UAE. These countries are benefiting from researchers disillusioned with both Washington and Beijing. The science world is thus becoming decentralized and more competitive.
But also more fragmented. As US-China collaboration collapses, Europe and others are increasingly being forced to pick geopolitical sides. The science world is slowly but surely breaking into competitive blocs.
US on the defensive
In response, the US has gone on the defensive. National security policies like Project 2025 and export controls aim to wall off critical technologies. But this fortress mentality could backfire if it alienates more and more international talent. If it goes too far, the US could easily find itself isolated in the global innovation race.
Some US universities and tech leaders are pushing back, calling for visa reform and more support for international students and scholars. But without federal leadership and a clear vision, the drift and alienation of talent is set to continue under Trump.
China, meanwhile, is doubling down on luring talent home. It sees returnees as key players in its “moonshot” initiatives, ranging from quantum computing to green tech. The challenge for Beijing is maintaining enough openness to keep innovation alive while ensuring loyalty.
Other nations are also seizing the moment. Canada, Australia and parts of Europe are streamlining immigration for scientists. The future may not be bipolar but multipolar, with a mosaic of innovation centers replacing the old US-centric model.
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The United States must act decisively. Immigration reform is essential, including green cards for STEM graduates, simplified visa processes and a clear welcome message. Combatting anti-Asian racism in academic and professional spaces is also critical.
Beyond that, the US must recommit to public investment in science, not just for military goals but for shared human progress. Building global collaborations, not tearing them down, will help retain trust and talent.
China must also tread carefully. Over-politicizing science risks smothering the innovation it seeks and craves. It needs to protect intellectual freedom, promote interdisciplinary research and allow greater institutional autonomy.
Other countries will likely continue cultivating environments where scientists can thrive regardless of their national origin. Science is inherently global, and countries that embrace this will punch above their weight in the coming decades.
The world is witnessing a quiet revolution as global brain drain morphs into brain circulation. The old assumption that the West is the final stop for talent no longer holds.
China is rewriting the rules and the US is at risk of writing itself out of the game. The winners will be those who recognize that global talent seeks trust, opportunity and, just as importantly, respect.
In the new world of global competition, it’s not just about who builds the fastest chip or finds the next vaccine. It’s about who people trust to build a future they’re willing to work toward.
Tang Meng Kit is a graduate of the MSc in International Relations program at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. His research interests encompass cross-Strait relations, Taiwanese politics and policy issues, as well as aerospace technology. He currently works as an aerospace engineer.
asiatimes.com · by Tang Meng Kit · May 20, 2025
13. The Spy Factory (Russia and Brazil)
Long but fascinating read. I would be interested in hearing comments from intelligence professionals and their assessment of this.
If accurate, you have to admire the Russian's long term planning and the commitment of its "human capital" in ways that free countries (democratic republics) could not do.
I guess all we have to do is watch "The Americans" on FX to see the Russians in action.
The Spy Factory
Russia’s intelligence services turned Brazil into an assembly line for deep-cover operatives. A team of federal agents from the South American country has been quietly dismantling it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/21/world/americas/russia-brazil-spies-deep-cover.html?unlocked_article_code=1.J08.WPuw.GLI8mlQGcN5m&smid=url-share
By Michael Schwirtz and Jane BradleyIllustrations by Lucy JonesPhotographs and Video by Dado Galdieri
Michael Schwirtz and Jane Bradley have covered Russian operations in the West for a decade. They reported this story from across Brazil, the United States and several countries in Europe.
Published May 21, 2025
Updated May 23, 2025
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Artem Shmyrev had everyone fooled. The Russian intelligence officer seemed to have built the perfect cover identity. He ran a successful 3-D printing business and shared an upscale apartment in Rio de Janeiro with his Brazilian girlfriend and a fluffy orange-and-white Maine coon cat.
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But most important, he had an authentic birth certificate and passport that cemented his alias as Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich, a 34-year-old Brazilian citizen.
After six years lying low, he was impatient to begin real spy work.
“No one wants to feel loser,” he wrote in a 2021 text message to his Russian wife, who was also an intelligence officer, using imperfect English. “That is why I continue working and hoping.”
He was not alone. For years, a New York Times investigation found, Russia used Brazil as a launchpad for its most elite intelligence officers, known as illegals. In an audacious and far-reaching operation, the spies shed their Russian pasts. They started businesses, made friends and had love affairs — events that, over many years, became the building blocks of entirely new identities.
Major Russian spy operations have been uncovered in the past, including in the United States in 2010. This was different. The goal was not to spy on Brazil, but to become Brazilian. Once cloaked in credible back stories, they would set off for the United States, Europe or the Middle East and begin working in earnest.
The Russians essentially turned Brazil into an assembly line for deep-cover operatives like Mr. Shmyrev.
One started a jewelry business. Another was a blond, blue-eyed model. A third was admitted into an American university. There was a Brazilian researcher who landed work in Norway, and a married couple who eventually went to Portugal.
Then it all came crashing down.
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Six of the Russian spies, clockwise from top left; Yekaterina Leonidovna Danilova, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Danilov, Olga Igorevna Tyutereva, Aleksandr Andreyevich Utekhin, Irina Alekseyevna Antonova and Roman Olegovich Koval.
For the past three years, Brazilian counterintelligence agents have quietly and methodically hunted these spies. Through painstaking police work, these agents discovered a pattern that allowed them to identify the spies, one by one.
Agents have uncovered at least nine Russian officers operating under Brazilian cover identities, according to documents and interviews. Six have never been publicly identified until now. The investigation has already spanned at least eight countries, officials said, with intelligence coming from the United States, Israel, the Netherlands, Uruguay and other Western security services.
Using hundreds of investigative documents and interviews with dozens of police and intelligence officials across three continents, The Times pieced together details of the Russian spy operation in Brazil and the secretive effort to take it out.
Dismantling the Kremlin’s spy factory was more than just a routine bit of counterespionage. It was part of the damaging fallout from a decade of Russian aggression. Russian spies helped shoot down a passenger plane en route from Amsterdam in 2014. They interfered in elections in the United States, France and elsewhere. They poisoned perceived enemies and plotted coups.
But it was President Vladimir V. Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 that galvanized a global response to Russian spies even in parts of the world where those officers had long enjoyed a degree of impunity. Among those countries was Brazil, which historically has had friendly relations with Russia.
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A timelapse of Brazil’s Federal Police headquarters in Brasília. Agents working there helped expose the espionage network.CreditCredit...
Brazil’s investigation dealt a devastating blow to Moscow’s illegals program. It eliminated a cadre of highly trained officers who will be difficult to replace. At least two were arrested. Others beat a hasty retreat to Russia. With their covers blown, they will most likely never work abroad again.
At the heart of this extraordinary defeat was a team of counterintelligence agents from the Brazilian Federal Police, the same unit that investigated Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for plotting a coup.
From their modern glass headquarters in the capital, Brasília, they spent years combing through millions of Brazilian identity records, looking for patterns.
It became known as Operation East.
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Ghosts in the System
In early April 2022, just a few months after Russian troops rolled into Ukraine, the C.I.A. passed an urgent and extraordinary message to Brazil’s Federal Police.
The Americans reported that an undercover officer in Russia’s military intelligence service had recently turned up in the Netherlands to take an internship with the International Criminal Court — just as it began to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
The would-be intern was traveling on a Brazilian passport under the name Victor Muller Ferreira. He’d received a graduate degree from Johns Hopkins University under that name. But his real name, the C.I.A. said, was Sergey Cherkasov. Dutch border officials had denied him entry, and he was now on a plane to São Paulo.
With limited evidence and only hours to act, the Brazilians had no authority to arrest Mr. Cherkasov at the airport. So, for several anxious days, the police kept him under heavy surveillance while he remained free at a São Paulo hotel.
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Finally, the officers got a warrant and arrested him — not for espionage, but on the more modest charge of using fraudulent documents.
Even that turned out to be a much harder case to make than anyone expected. Under questioning, Mr. Cherkasov was cocky, insisting that he was Brazilian. And he had the documents to prove it.
His blue Brazilian passport was authentic. He had a Brazilian voter registration card as required by law and a certificate showing that he had completed compulsory military service.
All were genuine.
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Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro. For years, Russia used Brazil as a launchpad for its elite intelligence officers, known as illegals.
“There was no link between him and great Mother Russia,” said an investigator at the Federal Police, who spoke, as did others, on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still open.
It was only when the police found his birth certificate that Mr. Cherkasov’s story — and the entire Russian operation in Brazil — began to crumble.
In the past, Russian spies have often obtained identification documents by assuming the identities of dead people, frequently babies.
Not in this case. Victor Muller Ferreira, the agents determined, had never existed at all. Yet he had a real birth certificate.
The document indicated that Victor Muller Ferreira had been born in Rio de Janeiro in 1989 to a Brazilian mother, a real person who had died four years later.
But when the police located her family, agents learned that the woman had never had a child. The authorities never found anyone matching the father’s name.
The discovery raised startling questions. How had a Russian spy obtained genuine documents under a fake name? Most important, the police wondered, if one spy could do it, why couldn’t others?
Federal agents began searching for what they called “ghosts”: people with legitimate birth certificates, who spent their lives without any record of actually being in Brazil and who appeared suddenly as adults rapidly collecting identity documents.
To find these ghosts, agents began looking for patterns in millions of birth records, passports, driver’s licenses and social security numbers.
Some of that could be automated, but not all Brazilian databases can be easily linked and searched digitally. Much of it had to be done by hand.
That analysis allowed Operation East to unravel the whole Russian operation.
“Everything started with Sergey,” a senior Brazilian official said.
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Putin’s Special People
All spies, no matter what country they work for, face the same challenge: creating a fake identity that will stand up to scrutiny.
For generations, undercover operatives used fake passports, stolen names and well-rehearsed cover stories. The digital age, in which nearly everyone has an online history, has made things much more complicated.
This is a particularly acute problem for Russia. That’s because, while all spy services employ undercover operatives, most rely on networks of local informants to do the grunt work of intelligence collection. Russia is unique. Dating back to the earliest years of the Soviet Union, deep-cover officers have committed to a lifetime of service, living and working as completely different people.
Mr. Putin himself has acknowledged overseeing Soviet deep-cover spies while posted in East Germany as a young K.G.B. officer at the end of the Cold War.
“These are special people of a special quality, special convictions and a special character,” he said in a 2017 television interview. “Leaving behind your former life, leaving behind your loved ones and your family, leaving behind your country for many many years to dedicate your life to serving the fatherland, is not something everyone can do. Only the chosen can do it, and I say this without any exaggeration.”
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A photograph from the late 1980s provided by the Stasi Records Agency shows Vladimir V. Putin, second from left, when he was posted in Dresden, East Germany, as a K.G.B. officer from 1985 to 1990.Credit...BStU
Brazil seemed an ideal place for Mr. Putin’s chosen spies to build their lore. The Brazilian passport is one of the world’s most useful, allowing visa-free travel to nearly as many countries as the American one. Someone with European features and a slight accent is unlikely to stand out in multiethnic Brazil.
And while many countries require verification from a hospital or doctor before issuing birth certificates, Brazil allows a niche exception for those born in rural areas. The authorities will issue a birth certificate to anyone who declares, in the presence of two witnesses, that a baby was born to at least one Brazilian parent.
The system is also decentralized and vulnerable to local corruption.
With a birth certificate in hand, it’s just a matter of applying for voter registration, military papers and, finally, a passport.
Once this is obtained, a spy can go nearly anywhere in the world.
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A Break in the Case
One of the first names to surface when investigators started their search was that of Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich. He seemed to fit the pattern. His birth certificate indicated that he was born in Rio in 1986, but he seemed to have appeared out of nowhere in 2015.
By the time agents began investigating, Mr. Shmyrev had built a cover identity so convincing that even his own girlfriend and colleagues had no clue. He spoke perfect Portuguese, tinged with an accent that he explained was the result of a childhood spent in Austria.
He seemed to pour everything he had into his printing company, 3D Rio, which he built from scratch and appeared genuinely to care about, according to former colleagues. He spent long hours at work on the 16th floor of a high-rise in central Rio, a block away from the American Consulate. Sometimes he sent employees home so he could work alone.
“He was a work addict,” said Felipe Martinez, a former client who befriended the Russian he knew as Daniel. “He thought big, you know?”
The company became a success, a former employee said, winning clients like TV Globo, a television network, and the Brazilian military. (The employee, who asked not to be identified, said that Mr. Shmyrev was never invited onto any bases.)
But there were oddities, friends and colleagues said. He never kept his computer connected to the internet when he was not using it. And he seemed to have more money than his business could provide.
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Felipe Martinez, left, and Bernardo Souza, who were friends with a man they knew as Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich. Mr. Wittich was the alias of a Russian spy, Artem Shmyrev.
He took sudden trips to Europe and Asia, and joked about conducting “industrial espionage” against competitors. He sometimes posed as a customer with other printing companies and once sent one of his employees to intern at a rival business and report back.
He also seemed terrified of cameras and so disliked having his photograph taken that one former employee recalled joking that he might have been “wanted by the Federal Police.”
Mr. Shmyrev panicked when a local newspaper published a photograph of him standing across from Rio’s mayor at the opening of a technology hub, Mr. Martinez recalled.
But only in hindsight did all this seem significant, friends said.
Privately, Mr. Shmyrev was bored and frustrated with undercover life.
“No real achievements in work,” Mr. Shmyrev wrote in one text message to his wife. “I am not where I have to be for 2 years already.”
His wife, Irina Shmyreva, another Russian spy texting from half a world away in Greece, was unsympathetic. “If you wanted a normal family life, well you have made a fundamentally wrong choice,” she responded.
But she acknowledged that the lives they were leading were not what they had expected.
“Yes, it is not as it was promised and it is bad,” she texted him. “They basically trick ppl into it and I see it as a bad thing. It is dishonest and not constructive.”
The texts are part of a cache of documents that were shared with foreign intelligence services and seen by The New York Times. They were sent in August 2021 and were recovered later from Mr. Shmyrev’s phone. [Read some of the text messages here.]
Six months later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Suddenly, intelligence services around the world were working together and making it a priority to disrupt Kremlin espionage. The lives of Russian spies deployed worldwide were thrown into upheaval.
First came Mr. Cherkasov, the intern who was arrested weeks after the invasion. Then Mikhail Mikushin, who had been under Brazilian investigation, turned up in Norway and was arrested. Two Russian deep-cover operatives were arrested in Slovenia, where they lived under Argentine cover identities.
By late 2022, Brazilian investigators were closing in on Mr. Shmyrev.
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The Botafogo neighborhood in Rio, where Mr. Shmyrev lived. By the time agents began investigating, Mr. Shmyrev had built a cover identity so convincing that even his girlfriend and colleagues had no clue.
Federal agents had peeled back the Gerhard Daniel Campos Wittich persona and discovered that his mother was dead and had never had a child by that name. His father could not be found.
By late December, the agents were almost certain that they had unearthed a deep-cover Russian spy.
If Mr. Shmyrev was spooked, he gave no indication of it. One afternoon that December, he dined with a colleague in Rio’s trendy Botafogo neighborhood. He seemed relaxed and said he was leaving for a monthlong trip to Malaysia, according to the employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
He slipped the country just days before the Federal Police unraveled his identity. The agents were stunned. All that work, and they had missed him.
Mr. Shmyrev had a return ticket dated Feb. 2, 2023. So the agents obtained arrest warrants and search orders for his addresses. When Mr. Shmyrev landed on Brazilian soil, they would be ready.
But he never came back.
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‘What’s Worse Than Being Arrested?’
Mr. Shmyrev wasn’t the only Russian spy to slip through the Brazilians’ fingers.
Every time the agents uncovered a name, they seemed to have been too late.
A married couple in their 30s, living as Manuel Francisco Steinbruck Pereira and Adriana Carolina Costa Silva Pereira, had decamped to Portugal in 2018 and vanished.
A bunch seemed to be in Uruguay. A woman ostensibly named Maria Luisa Dominguez Cardozo had a Brazilian birth certificate and later obtained a Uruguayan passport. And there was another married couple: Federico Luiz Gonzalez Rodriguez and his wife, Maria Isabel Moresco Garcia, a blonde spy who posed as a model.
The Brazilian agents’ best hope for an arrest seemed, for a time, to be a jeweler named Eric Lopes. The police discovered that he was actually a Russian spy named Aleksandr Utekhin.
His business had been featured in a 2021 Brazilian television program called “Successful Entrepreneurs,” which referred to him as an “expert in precious stones.”
But the presenter said in an interview with The Times that Mr. Lopes had paid for that television spot. Mr. Lopes, she said, was odd. He spoke “gringo Portuguese,” she noted, and refused to go on camera. An employee who went on air on his behalf knew so little about the business that he kept feeding her lines.
“I thought: ‘Wow, is there something going on?’” the presenter added.
When the federal agents arrived at the shops, they found no trace of Mr. Lopes or the gold or gemstones that he had advertised on Instagram.
His shop in Brasília is occupied now by an insurance company. The address in São Paulo, opposite a branch of Brazil’s military police, is home to a real estate company.
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The atrium of an office building in Brasília where the Russian spy Aleksandr Utekhin ran a jewelry shop under the name Eric Lopes.
Investigators believe that his business existed only as a front to bolster his Brazilian credentials. A Western security official with knowledge of the case said that, after leaving Brazil, Mr. Utekhin had spent some time in the Middle East. His precise location is unknown, though intelligence officials say they think that he and others are back in Russia.
It is unclear if any one event spooked the officers into heading home. But with so much focus on Russia after the Ukraine invasion, intelligence experts said that perhaps the bosses in Moscow concluded that the world had become too dangerous for them.
The Brazilian agents running Operation East had spent countless hours uncovering the names and still had no case except for the false document charge against Mr. Cherkasov.
But they shared what they had learned with the world’s intelligence agencies, whose officers cross-checked that information against records of known Russian intelligence operatives. And they found matches, which in some cases allowed the Brazilians to attach a real name to the fake Brazilian identities.
The couple living in Portugal under the name Pereira, for instance, turned out to be actually Vladimir Aleksandrovich Danilov and Yekaterina Leonidovna Danilova, according to two Western intelligence officials.
Brazil has long maintained neutrality when it comes to geopolitical divisions. Even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Brazil maintained a friendly relationship with Moscow. So the Kremlin’s use of Brazilian territory for a large-scale espionage operation was seen as a betrayal. The authorities wanted to send a message.
“We just put our heads together and thought, ‘What’s worse than being arrested as a spy?’” the senior Brazilian investigator said. “It’s being exposed as a spy.”
To do that, investigators came up with an audacious idea. They could use Interpol, the world’s largest policing organization, to burn Mr. Putin’s spies.
It was an ironic revenge. Mr. Putin has, for years, manipulated Interpol’s databases to harass dissidents and political opponents.
Last fall, the Brazilians issued a series of Interpol blue notices — alerts seeking information on a person. The notices circulated the names, photographs and fingerprints of the Russian spies, including Mr. Shmyrev and Mr. Cherkasov, to all 196 member countries.
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Mr. Shmyrev’s birthplace, according to his fake Wittich identity papers, was the Catete neighborhood in Rio.
Interpol, as an independent body, does not deal with politicized issues like espionage. To get around that, the Brazilian authorities said that the Russians were being investigated for using fraudulent documents.
Uruguay issued similar alerts, seen by The Times, for those suspected of being Russian spies who had turned up there under Brazilian identities. Their real names, intelligence officials said, were Roman Olegovich Koval, Irina Alekseyevna Antonova and Olga Igorevna Tyutereva.
Mr. Koval and Ms. Antonova, the married couple, had suddenly left Brazil on a flight to Uruguay in 2023, investigators said. Ms. Tyutereva’s last known location was Namibia, according to the senior official.
The Interpol notices do not include the real names, but include the photographs and other identifying information. With their identities logged in police databases, and their true names flagged by spy services, the operatives most likely will never be able to work as foreign spies again.
Of all the spies, only Mr. Cherkasov remains in prison. He was convicted of falsifying documents and sentenced to 15 years, but his sentence was reduced to five years.
In an apparent gambit to get him home early, the Russian government claimed that he was a wanted drug dealer and filed court documents asking to have him extradited.
But the Brazilians swiftly countered. If Mr. Cherkasov was a drug dealer, the prosecutors argued, then it was essential that he be held in prison even longer so the police could investigate.
He might otherwise have been released by now. But he remains in a Brasília lockup.
Image
‘You’re Going to Hear Things About Me’
For a time after leaving Brazil, Mr. Shmyrev checked in regularly with friends and his Brazilian girlfriend. But in early January 2023, his text messages stopped.
“Weeks went by, and we didn’t know what to do,” said Mr. Martinez, his friend.
Mr. Shmyrev’s girlfriend posted to a Facebook group called Brazilians in Kuala Lumpur seeking help in finding him.
“We started like some detective work,” Mr. Martinez said. “We would go online. We called the police stations, the embassies, hotels in Kuala Lumpur, trying to go after him. And we couldn’t find him.”
When Mr. Shmyrev did not take his return flight to Brazil, the police moved in. Agents found that he had left behind several electronic devices that contained crucial personal details, including the texts with his Russian spy wife. He also left $12,000 in cash in his safe.
Those are indications that he had planned to return. As with the others, the questions of what spurred him to leave and what kept him away remain mysteries. Around that time, his Russian wife suddenly left her espionage posting in Greece. She was later outed by Greek authorities.
Image
A view over Botafogo. Brazil seemed an ideal place for Russian spies to build their lore. Someone with European features and a slight accent is unlikely to stand out in the multiethnic South American country.
Despite everything, friends said they miss him.
“Sometimes I think like one day I’m going to go there, to Saint Petersburg,” Mr. Martinez said. “I’m going to be at the counter. I’m going to ask for a vodka. And then, like, he’s going to be on the other side.”
In his fantasy, Mr. Martinez nods at Mr. Shmyrev, and Mr. Shmyrev nods back.
The last known contact Mr. Shmyrev had with Brazil was a phone call to his girlfriend after he had left. As relayed to Mr. Martinez, his friend was sad, perhaps crying.
“You’re going to hear things about me, but you need to know that I never did anything that bad. Like I never killed anyone or something like that,” he said, in Mr. Martinez’s recollection.
“My past caught up with me,” he said.
Rodrigo Pedroso contributed reporting from Sao Paulo. Produced by Gabriel Gianordoli and Rumsey Taylor.
Read by Michael Schwirtz
Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.
Michael Schwirtz is an investigative reporter with the International desk. With The Times since 2006, he previously covered the countries of the former Soviet Union from Moscow and was a lead reporter on a team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for articles about Russian intelligence operations.
Jane Bradley is an investigative reporter on the International desk. She is based in London, where she focuses on abuses of power, national security and crime, and social injustices.
A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Russia’s Spy Factory Assembled Moles in Brazil. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
14. Donald Trump betrays one more ally of US in Asia, India’s friend is in danger, China to become…?
A view from India.
This is not an unexpected interpretation of the Washington Post (originally Wall Street Journal) report on Friday. This is being interpreted as a possible prelude to the withdrawal of troops from the Indo-Pacific.
We have to help our friends, partners, and allies to NOT interpret every change to force posture as a reduction of commitment. And simply counting numbers of troops is the wrong metric to evaluate commitment though it is the simplest (or simplistic) measure.
Donald Trump betrays one more ally of US in Asia, India’s friend is in danger, China to become…?
This move could have serious implications in the entire region.
https://www.india.com/news/india/donald-trump-betrays-one-more-ally-of-us-in-asia-indias-friend-is-in-danger-china-to-become-north-korea-japan-south-korea-pentagon-russia-taiwan-7839884/?utm
Published: May 24, 2025 7:00 PM IST
By Tahir Qureshi |Edited by Tahir Qureshi
New Delhi: It seems that Donald Trump’s administration has changed America’s foreign policy. Japan, Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Ukraine, and India, every country that previous American administrations have worked hard to make an ally, Donald Trump has strained the relations. In his nearly four months of administration, Donald Trump has not touched America’s enemies, but he has not missed an opportunity to trouble friends. Now, The Washington Post has claimed that the Trump administration has decided to withdraw thousands of its soldiers from South Korea. Trump’s decision could open the door to North Korean aggression against South Korea.
According to the report by The Washington Post, U.S. officials have indicated that the Trump administration is considering bringing back thousands of its troops stationed in South Korea, raising deep concerns among America’s allies in Asia. The Washington Post stated that the Pentagon is considering recalling around 4,500 troops.
Officials stated that the Pentagon’s proposal has not yet reached the President’s desk, but discussions are ongoing intensely. Meanwhile, a Pentagon spokesperson did not dismiss this report and stated that ‘there is currently no announcement to be made on this policy.’ While the spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council, Pete Nguyen, did not address the issue of troop withdrawal, he mentioned that Donald Trump is committed to the ‘complete denuclearization’ of North Korea. The South Korean Ministry of Defense has refused to comment. Donald Trump has been considering changing the presence of American troops in South Korea since his first term, where about 28,500 American soldiers are deployed.
Last month, top commanders overseeing the U.S. military in Asia warned about the reduction of troops from America to South Korea. The soldiers stated that this reduction would jeopardize their capacity against North Korea and also affect their capability in potential conflicts against China and Russia in Northeast Asia. According to the post, U.S. Army Commander in Korea, General Javier Brunson, said in the American Parliament that “reducing the number of soldiers will make the situation quite difficult.”
According to a report by Reuters, South Korea’s Defense Ministry has stated that there have been no discussions about the withdrawal of troops with the United States at this time. They have expressed a commitment to maintaining a strong joint defense posture with the U.S., which serves as a deterrent against North Korea.
However, the withdrawal of troops could have serious implications for South Korea’s security, raising concerns among investors and potentially leading to economic instability. Furthermore, this move could increase China’s influence and prompt South Korea to consider alternative security options. There is a strong sentiment among the American public to strengthen security ties with South Korea. Recent surveys indicate that most Americans support the long-term maintenance of U.S. military bases in South Korea and view the withdrawal of troops as a threat to regional security.
In addition, the withdrawal of the South Korean army could create a state of concern among America’s allies in the Indo-Pacific. South Korea, along with Japan and the Philippines, relies on close coordination with the U.S. military to defend itself and to demonstrate its power in this increasingly contested region. Furthermore, Taiwan may also find itself in danger. Trump’s decision could be interpreted by the allies in a negative light and raise serious trust issues between Washington and its allies.
It is very much possible that if Pentagon reduces its military presence in the region, then China could invade Taiwan.
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15. These Are the U.S. Universities Most Dependent on International Students
Graphics/statistics are at the link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/upshot/harvard-trump-international-students.html?unlocked_article_code=1.J08.tFg-.2AgTyBaaeMnr&smid=url-share
From my time at Georgetown I recall how financially lucrative international students were.
These Are the U.S. Universities Most Dependent on International Students
By Emily BadgerAatish BhatiaAsmaa ElkeurtiSteven Rich and Ethan Singer
May 23, 2025
The Trump administration’s threat to block Harvard from enrolling international students would remove more than a quarter of the university’s student body, a share large enough to rock its campus and, potentially, its tuition revenue.
The move, frozen within 24 hours on Friday by a federal judge, also highlights the risk other universities face from an administration that has shown deep hostility toward higher education. N.Y.U., Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Carnegie Mellon have even larger international student shares than Harvard does.
This metric that once reflected their international renown — and financial strength — now looks like a vulnerability.
Schools with the most international students
As a share of full-time undergrad. and grad.
undergraduate
graduate
students in fall 2023
SchoolStudentsPct. InternationalIllinois Tech6,57151%
Carnegie Mellon14,51744%
Stevens Tech7,46142%
Northeastern29,73840%
New School8,72540%
Columbia28,75640%
Johns Hopkins16,83039%
N.Y.U.49,84737%
Clark3,83034%
Rochester10,10933%
Caltech2,46332%
Chicago16,49931%
Boston U.29,10430%
M.I.T.11,70630%
Harvard20,80728%
U.S.C.41,64828%
WashU14,28228%
Penn23,94827%
Brandeis4,87327%
Rice7,97226%
Cornell25,33426%
Duke16,55725%
Stanford17,21224%
Saint Louis12,90424%
Princeton8,84924%
Yale14,85424%
Northwestern19,45124%
Illinois47,11823%
Ga. Tech25,17823%
U.T. Dallas25,10823%
N.J.I.T.10,38823%
Mt. Holyoke2,20622%
Dartmouth6,67821%
Georgetown15,45320%
U.M.B.C.11,52320%
Brown10,83219%
Case Western11,14319%
Grinnell1,70719%
Emory13,56518%
U.C.S.D.40,71618%
Washington43,11818%
Bentley4,69017%
Fran. & Marshall1,90217%
Berkeley41,57217%
Denison2,39117%
G.W.18,04917%
Michigan48,16717%
U.C. Irvine35,51116%
Tufts11,95316%
U.C. Davis38,18415%
Shows fall enrollment of full-time students at selective four-year colleges and universities that offer bachelor’s degrees and above, with at least 1,000 students. Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Carnegie Classification
These Are the U.S. Universities Most Dependent on International Students - The New York Times
The share of international students studying at these colleges and across the United States has been growing for the past two decades as rising incomes in countries like China and India have produced more families looking to educate their children in America.
Domestic forces have played a role, too: Public research universities in particular have turned to international students, who commonly pay full price for tuition, to help compensate for declines in state funding for education.
“We have all this debate about trade deficits with China right now,” said Gaurav Khanna, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied these shifts in higher education. “That’s a deficit in goods. But when you think of services — like higher ed services — we have a big surplus.”
Share of students who are international
Among full-time undergrad. and grad.
undergraduate
graduate
students at 193 colleges
Based on fall enrollment figures among 193 selective four-year colleges and universities that offer bachelor’s degrees and above, with at least 1,000 students. Source: National Center for Education Statistics, Carnegie Classification
Higher education is, effectively, a major American export — and one where the foreign students consuming it do so in American communities, also spending money on housing, groceries and books there. More than 1.1 million international students contributed about $43 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2023-24 academic year, most of it on tuition and housing, according to an analysis by NAFSA, a nonprofit association of international educators.
U.S. students, by contrast, often receive financial aid directly from universities or other federal programs. And at public universities, many pay lower in-state tuition. As a result, foreign students can end up contributing more than one and a half times as much as their American counterparts in tuition dollars, said Mirka Martel, head of research, evaluation and learning at the Institute of International Education.
Another way to look at this is that the higher tuition paid by international students helps subsidize lower costs for U.S. students. At some public universities, international students pay a tuition rate that’s even higher than regular out-of-state tuition.
For universities, all of this means that a decline in international students could have serious financial consequences, beyond disrupting classrooms, research and the next generation of workers in the United States. And even without threats as grave as the one Harvard now faces, colleges and universities were already bracing for a decline in international students amid the Trump administration’s cuts to federally funded research and aggressive immigration enforcement.
Universities See Trump’s Harvard Move as a Threat to Them, Too
May 24, 2025
Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades
How Trump’s Medical Research Cuts Would Hit Colleges and Hospitals in Every State
Emily Badger writes about cities and urban policy for The Times from Washington. She’s particularly interested in housing, transportation and inequality — and how they’re all connected.
Aatish Bhatia, a graphics editor at The Upshot, creates interactive articles that explain complex ideas in simple ways.
Steven Rich is a data reporter at The Times, using data analysis to investigate major issues and contextualize current events.
Ethan Singer reports using data for The Upshot section as a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
See more on: Harvard University, Donald Trump, U.S. Politics
16. The Age of Answers Is Over: Training Adaptive Thinkers for Modern Military Realities
Some wise words here and in the entire essay. Some excellent food for thought. The four methods for developing adaptive thinkers that he describes are very useful.
Excerpts:
This is not just about improving instruction. It’s about preserving operational relevance. A warfighter who can’t tolerate ambiguity will hesitate. A leader who needs a checklist will miss the moment. A system that resists paradox will fail to adapt in real time.
What we need now are not just answers, but adaptive minds—trained not only to execute plans, but to diagnose situations, create novel responses, and act before certainty arrives. That starts with how we train and how we teach. Because when the situation changes faster than the syllabus, thinking is the only weapon that scales.
This last quote is very powerful to me and reminds me of two great leaders who were past commanders of USSOCOM:
" Who thinks, wins." – the late General Wayne Downing
"Train for certainty, educate for uncertainty." – General Peter Schoomaker
The Age of Answers Is Over: Training Adaptive Thinkers for Modern Military Realities - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jeff DeGraff · May 23, 2025
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I’m not a military strategist. I’m an innovation professor.
For decades, I’ve helped leaders at top global companies develop the mindsets, methods, and muscles required to lead through change. In the last ten years, I’ve been honored to do the same for the US military and its allies. And I’ve learned something crucial from that experience: We’re preparing our people for a world that no longer exists.
Emerging technologies and dislocating events now unfold faster—and hit harder—than any strategic planning process can keep up with. We used to believe that with enough data and a well-laid plan, the future could be predicted, controlled, or at least managed.
That era is over.
Just look at the exponential evolution of artificial intelligence. In the time it takes to draft a doctrinal update, we’ve seen AI integrated into a variety of uncrewed aerial platforms with autonomous targeting capabilities. These systems will soon operate across domains and make decisions that no human planning cycle could anticipate, let alone fully understand in advance.
That’s not a technological challenge—it’s a mindset challenge. The new normal in military education is not linear progress—it’s ambiguity, incongruity, and paradox.
Strategic Planning Is No Longer Strategic
Most strategic planning systems were built for a world of relatively slow change. They work best when we can define the battlefield, the enemy, the timeline. But we’ve entered a nonlinear reality where we will be challenged not just by our adversaries, but also by the misalignment of our own mental models with what’s actually happening.
COVID-19 taught businesses this lesson the hard way. Strategic roadmaps were scrapped within days. But some organizations—like Zoom or Shopify—pivoted and adapted in real time. They weren’t more clairvoyant. They were more adaptive. And in my work with military units, I’ve seen the same principle at play.
We don’t need better forecasts. We need better framing. And that means cultivating what I call adaptive intelligence: the ability to interpret changing conditions, generate responses quickly, and iterate under uncertainty.
What Makes a Mindset Adaptive?
Adaptive thinkers ask questions that don’t have tidy answers. They hold contradictions without rushing to resolution. They see ambiguity not as a failure of planning, but as a natural feature of a complex world.
They experiment. They reflect. They improvise.
And most importantly, they learn faster than they plan.
This is what we need to teach—not just in war colleges or professional development seminars, but in the earliest moments of enlisted and officer training. Every service member, regardless of rank, will be asked to make decisions in environments where the script doesn’t apply. This isn’t about soft skills. It’s about combat-ready cognition.
So how do we do it?
Most importantly, we need to shift our orientation from content delivery to mindset development. Doctrine has its place. So do tactics and models. But these must be framed as tools—not truths.
In a recent innovation leadership program I led for a NATO-affiliated group, I didn’t start with frameworks. I started with a question: Why do we say we value innovation, but reward compliance? We didn’t resolve the question. We wrestled with it. And that experience—starting from paradox instead of instruction—changed the way participants engaged, reflected, and acted. It activated not just their minds, but their ownership.
I’ve seen this same transformation across dozens of military cohorts when we replace structured content with live tension—when we stop asking, Did they memorize the steps? and start asking, Can they think their way through the unknown?
Four Methods for Developing Adaptive Military Thinkers
In the fast-evolving tech and biotech sectors, where I’ve trained innovation leaders for over thirty years, one principle is constant: You don’t start with static plans—you start with dynamic uncertainty. These leaders are taught to frame problems on the fly, test assumptions, and iterate quickly. Military education must now do the same.
Drawing from decades of experience training innovation leaders in the tech and biotech sectors, here are four methods that translate directly into preparing today’s warfighters to lead in complexity and act without certainty:
1. Begin with unresolved tensions—not learning objectives.
In biotech, leaders are trained to navigate live challenges with no clear solutions—such as how to accelerate vaccine deployment while preserving long-term efficacy. These scenarios force decision-making through complexity, not compliance. Military training should begin the same way: with unresolved, real-world tensions. Use operational paradoxes to frame the learning experience, not as sidebars but as the core challenge:
- How do we empower decentralized action while preserving the chain of command?
- How do we maintain interoperability while protecting national sovereignty?
Pose these tensions up front and allow participants to wrestle with the dilemma before offering theory or precedent. This approach primes adaptive thinking from the start.
2, Embed microadaptation into every exercise.
High-growth tech firms regularly stress-test leaders with midstream changes—sudden shifts in market signals, technology outages, or product pivots. The goal is not perfection, but agility. Military exercises should do the same. At all levels—whether combat training center rotations, warfighter exercises, or operational- or strategic-level wargames—introduce scenario injects that force real-time reassessment.
A drone feed goes dark. A coalition partner drops out. An objective suddenly becomes secondary to a humanitarian threat. These are not disruptions—they are the exercise. The point isn’t to follow the plan; it’s to reframe the plan. Measure how quickly leaders can diagnose and redirect—not just how well they execute.
3. Use doctrine as a lens—not a law.
In innovative industries, playbooks and protocols are reviewed after experimentation to make sense of what happened—not to dictate every move in advance. Military doctrine should be applied in the same spirit. After simulations or field exercises, use it to reflect and sharpen strategic judgment. Ask:
- Where did doctrine, standard operating procedures, and other formal guides help clarify the decision space?
- Where did they constrain initiative?
This develops a more mature understanding of when to comply and when to adapt.
4. Build ambiguity tolerance into promotion pathways.
In tech and biotech, organizations now promote leaders not just for results, but for cognitive agility—their ability to operate with flexibility and creativity in uncertain environments. The military can do the same by embedding behavioral indicators into performance evaluations:
- Comfort making decisions with incomplete information
- Willingness to challenge assumptions constructively
- Ability to hold competing priorities without freezing
These are not abstract traits. They are operational advantages in environments where change is constant and planning is always behind.
Why This Matters Now
This is not just about improving instruction. It’s about preserving operational relevance. A warfighter who can’t tolerate ambiguity will hesitate. A leader who needs a checklist will miss the moment. A system that resists paradox will fail to adapt in real time.
What we need now are not just answers, but adaptive minds—trained not only to execute plans, but to diagnose situations, create novel responses, and act before certainty arrives. That starts with how we train and how we teach. Because when the situation changes faster than the syllabus, thinking is the only weapon that scales.
Jeff DeGraff is clinical professor of management and organizations at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. He has trained innovation leaders in the tech, biotech, and defense sectors, and developed programs used by the US military and NATO in over forty-five countries.
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: Staff Sgt. Nicolas A. Cloward, US Army
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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Jeff DeGraff · May 23, 2025
17. The CIA Built a Special Helicopter to Sneak Into North Vietnam
For all my friends who were little bird pilots.
The CIA Built a Special Helicopter to Sneak Into North Vietnam
The agency worked with the Pentagon and the U.S. Army to come up with a quiet chopper
https://daxe.substack.com/p/the-cia-built-a-special-helicopter?r=7i07&utm
David Axe
May 23, 2025
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A standard OH-6A. U.S. Army photo
by JOSEPH TREVITHICK
On a dark night in 1972, a special helicopter operated by the Central Intelligence Agency slipped into North Vietnam. The crew’s mission was to tap phones lines to key government buildings.
But they had to slip past the country’s vast array of anti-aircraft weapons and elaborate security measures. They had planned the operation for years—and developed a unique and super-quiet helicopter to do it.
Choppers are amazingly versatile, capable of getting troops and supplies into some of the hardest to reach places. But they’re also loud and enemy forces can hear them coming from miles away.
What the CIA built instead was “a ‘quiet’ helicopter which would be able to undertake dead-dark operations at low altitudes,” according to a heavily-redacted article from Studies in Intelligence, the CIA’s in-house journal, declassified in 2014.
The aircraft would have to fly in the dead of night with no lights and close to the ground to have any chance of getting to their objectives. Ultimately, the Agency rigged up two Hughes 500P helicopters for the mission with help from private companies, the Pentagon and the U.S. Army.
While designed only for the one mission, the heavily modified Model 500Ps provided an opportunity for pilots to explore new tactics for flying in the dark. It also spurred the development of advanced night vision gear.
From what little we know, commandos and spies are flying around in even more advanced stealth choppers today.
As the United States’ war in Vietnam began to ramp up, intelligence agencies and the Pentagon scooped up as much information on their new opponents as they could.
In 1968, Washington and Hanoi started working on a peace deal in Paris. American diplomats desperately wanted to know what the Vietnamese side were planning. Unfortunately for the CIA, Hanoi was adept at hunting down American-funded agents.
Spy planes weren’t able to glean enough about anyone’s intentions, either.
To get around these problems, the CIA proposed a more direct way of getting the information they wanted—tap a phone line used by senior leaders in the city of Vinh more than 150 miles south of the communist nation’s capital.
But getting into the heavily fortified country was far from easy. Natural barriers and one of the most elaborate air defense networks on Earth—which Hanoi had expanded to try and blunt the U.S.’s fearsome bombing campaigns—made it hard for agents to creep in unnoticed.
You didn’t just waltz into North Vietnam.
A regular U.S. Army OH-6A in Vietnam. U.S. Army photo via Ray Wilhite
“After examining many other options, it became apparent that it would take something like a helicopter to accomplish this mission,” the undated CIA article explained.
But the agency wasn’t aware of a chopper stealthy enough to survive the dangerous trip. Instead, the CIA’s Technical Services Division started searching for an aircraft that would fit the requirements. The technicians then turned to the Pentagon.
At the same time the peace talks were starting Paris, the U.S. military’s Advanced Research Projects Agency was trying to build their own quieter chopper. The Pentagon—especially the U.S. Army—wanted these aircraft so aviators and troops could get the jump on enemy forces.
ARPA chose the Army to oversee the work on what became the Quiet Helicopter Program. The Army hired Bell Helicopter to draw up plans for a modified variant of their OH-58A helicopter.
The ground combat branch understood that helicopters rarely had the element of surprise. This fact severely limited their usefulness in combat, according to one Army report from the project.
The resulting Bell aircraft had wider main rotor blades, a new four-bladed tail rotor and large mufflers on the engine exhausts. Scientists standing 200 feet away found the choppers could be as quiet as 77 decibels, Army evaluators reported.
That’s about as noisy as a vacuum cleaner. At an altitude of 4,000 feet, the aircraft might be as quiet as someone whispering.
Bouyed by this initial success, ARPA expanded the project and added the Hughes Aircraft Company, Sikorsky, and Kaman—all major helicopter manufacturers—to the roster a year later.
Hughes developed a new version of its OH-6A scout helicopter. Sikorsky modified its larger SH-3 submarine hunter, while Kaman used its HH-43 rescue chopper as the project’s baseline.
ARPA and the Army both felt that the Hughes’ Model 500P, dubbed “The Quiet One,” was the most promising design. After taking a look at the work Hughes had already completed, the CIA agreed.
The Quiet One had a five-bladed main rotor compared to the OH-6’s four-bladed arrangement. The Model 500P also had an all new four-bladed tail rotor just like Bell’s original test aircraft. A large muffler capped off these noise-cutting improvements.
Above—photos of “The Quiet One,” showing the new tail rotor and muffler. Hughes photos via San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives
Still, the Quiet One had its problems. The CIA had to contend with issues the Army did not.
For one, the CIA needed helicopters that could fly long distances without refueling. And the pilots would have to navigate—in an era before GPS—in total darkness.
So the agency’s first order of business was to find a new, more efficient motor for its new helicopter. The Allison Division of General Motors had intentionally limited the output of its engines in existing OH-6s to 250 horsepower for safety reasons.
“Talk about bureaucracy!” the unnamed author of the CIA journal article, a member of the development team, wrote. “The G.M. people were afraid that we would change one ‘hair’ on this [engine] without years of testing, and they cited ‘liability’ after ‘liability.’”
In the end, Allison lent one of its engineers to the CIA so it could do the work in house and away from G.M.’s lawyers. The spooks hand-selected a small number of rebuilt engines from an unnamed company in Burbank, California.
The technicians picked the six best performing engines out of a batch of 100, the CIA article noted. These motors could reportedly produce almost twice the horsepower as the factory models.
With the new motor, the 1,100 pound aircraft could lift more than 2,000 pounds of people, gas and specialized equipment. To safely land in an emergency, Hughes suggested the CIA limit the total weight to 2,400 pounds.
The helicopter’s added power also meant the aircraft could carry the fuel needed to get deep into North Vietnam. The technicians installed a special fuel tank—like a pair of saddle bags attached together through the main cabin—to hold the extra gas.
To try and keep noise to an absolute minimum, the agency tweaked the new engines so that parts wouldn’t rattle or scrape against each other. The technicians also designed a further improved muffler.
“We … found an engineer who was working at Lockheed who was working on quieting problems of the Rolls Royce RB-211 engine,” the Studies in Intelligence piece noted.
Rolls Royce built the engines for the Lockheed TriStar airliner. RB-211 engines are still used today on commercial planes.
“We tried to obtain his services, but Lockheed said he could not be spared from their programs,” the author added. “He wound up doing this [work] in his garage at night, and, within a week had produced a design that was almost perfect.”
The heavily redacted article did not state how quiet the final configuration was in the end.
But with a new, muffled engine, the agency’s engineers just had to figure out how the crews would pilot their small choppers into North Vietnam. The technicians decided on a combination of infrared cameras and night vision gear.
Flying 100 feet or less above the ground, the pilots would have to fly their route by looking through a small television screen. The co-pilot would wear night vision goggles to keep an eye out for other obstacles.
It would be dangerous, hard flying. But the helicopter had an inertial navigation system. This is a computer that takes data from a combination of sensors — such as gyroscopes — and figures out where the aircraft is, what direction it’s pointed and how fast it’s going.
“At the time, the best unit available had an error rate of about one nautical [mile per hour],” the CIA article stated. So manufacturer Singer-Kearfott “put some packages together that used ‘selected’ gyros that yielded us an error rate of less than one-fourth nautical [mile per hour].”
Today, the Kearfott Corporation still makes navigation and guidance computers for aircraft, ships and ground vehicles.
Army aviators “loaned” to the CIA found the modified aircraft handled well. The pilots had no trouble flying the choppers at night using the infrared camera.
Two years after ARPA started its Quiet Helicopter Program, the CIA quietly registered four Hughes helicopters through its Air America front company. The small fleet included two modified Model 500Ps.
“Most official Air America papers … speak of only two Air America Hughes 500s,” historian Joe Leeker wrote in his deeply researched Aircraft of Air America database. “But those two aircraft only served as cover for two others—the ‘Quiet Ones.’”
With approval from the White House, the CIA ferried the top-secret helicopters to a base known by the code “PS-44” in neighboring Laos. “With[in] a month, however, pilot error claimed one of the two modified choppers as it landed hard in front of the hangar,” Leeker noted.
At the time, Taiwanese crews—who Washington also employed in other secret programs—were training to fly the choppers to Vinh. After the accident, the CIA sent Taipei’s airmen home and replaced them with Air America pilots.
On the night of Dec. 6-7, 1972, the agency’s aviators flew the remaining Quiet One to Vinh and back without incident. With the Model 500Ps in standard Army colors, the pilots planned to claim they were lost if North Vietnamese forces discovered or shot down the helicopters.
After the operation, both Air America discreetly loaded the Model 500Ps onto C-130 transport planes and flew them out of the country. The CIA then sent the two regular Model 500s to Laos as a way to cover up the entire project.
The mission was reportedly a success, but we don’t know exactly what information the CIA’s analysts actually got for their comrades’ troubles. In 1973, the bulk of America’s troops left South Vietnam after Pres. Richard Nixon finalized the peace deal with Hanoi.
In late April 1975—40 years ago now—North Vietnamese troops captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, effectively ending the country’s long-running civil war.
The agency turned over at least one of the Quiet Ones to the Army. We don’t know how long the ground combat branch ended up working with the special chopper. But we do know that the Pentagon and the CIA continued developing quiet and stealthy helicopters after the mission to Vinh.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency still leads various—and sometimes outlandish—military projects. In 2011, the public managed to get a brief glimpse of the next generation of these stealthy choppers.
During the mission that led to the death of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, a super-secret chopper crashed at the Al Qaeda leader’s compound.
This aircraft—nicknamed a “Stealth Hawk” as it appeared to be a modified UH-60 Black Hawk—probably isn’t the only one of its kind in Washington’s arsenal.
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18. Things Worth Remembering: ‘Do Not Mourn Me Dead’
Things Worth Remembering: ‘Do Not Mourn Me Dead’
When I went to war, I wrote letters to my loved ones in case I never came home. Sullivan Ballou did too, and his words are a reminder of what Memorial Day is about.
By Elliot Ackerman
05.25.25 — Things Worth Remembering
https://www.thefp.com/p/things-worth-remembering-memorial-day
(Photo by Library of Congress via Getty Images)
Welcome to “Things Worth Remembering,” in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, to mark Memorial Day, former Marine Elliot Ackerman reflects on a letter written by a soldier who never came home. His words remind us of the best way to honor the dead.
Of all American holidays, Memorial Day is beset by the most contradictions. Officially, it is a somber holiday, one where we honor our country’s war dead, but it is also the holiday that marks the unofficial beginning of summer. Over this long weekend, many of us will pull out our barbecues, or travel to our local beach, or check out the latest blockbuster. I grew up in a religious household and, for me, Memorial Day weekend meant it was the one Sunday I didn’t have to go to church; the Indy 500 was on, and I was allowed to watch the race with my dad.
Then I joined the Marines, and fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. After that, Memorial Day took on a different, more specific meaning for me. In the early years, I’d spend the day visiting the graves of friends buried at Arlington.
Many Americans don’t have any personal ties to our war dead, and so the remembrance part of Memorial Day is, for them, an abstraction. The first-ever Memorial Day was anything but abstract. It was celebrated in 1868, three years after the Civil War, a national bloodletting that killed one out of every 50 Americans. Back then, everyone knew someone lost in the war. The original idea was simple: The day would be used to decorate the graves of the fallen. It was proposed by John Logan, a retired Union officer, who understood how important it was to the dead that they not be forgotten. The truth is, anyone who has fought in a war, and had the good fortune to survive, understands this—because all of us have imagined our own deaths.
Like countless others before me, I knew that, in the event I was killed, I wanted to have one last word with the people I loved. So I wrote a few letters, hid them, and told my best friend from high school where they were in case anything happened. Fortunately, they were never opened. Today, they sit in a drawer with some mementos from the war. My father, who one of the letters was addressed to, has since passed away. My children, who were then unborn, have no letters addressed to them. The letters are from a different time, as if written by a different person. I doubt I’ll ever open them.
The practice of writing a “death letter” is as old as war itself. In the summer of 1861, Sullivan Ballou, a 32-year-old Union major in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry Regiment, wrote one such letter to his wife on July 14, one week before the First Battle of Bull Run. If you’re wondering how to remember the dead this Memorial Day, I recommend you spend a moment with this letter. It begins:
My very dear Sarah,
The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days—perhaps to-morrow. Lest I should not be able to write again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more . . .
Military life is filled with movement. You are never in one place long, and the days before a battle are often frenetic, as pieces are put in place for one great effort against the enemy. If you love a soldier, part of waiting for them is living with uncertainty. You never know exactly where they are or what they’re doing.
When I read the opening of this letter, I imagine how much Sullivan and Sarah’s life had changed in the past six months. Before the war, Ballou was an attorney. Losing his father at an early age, he had attended Brown University for two years, before establishing himself as a lawyer. He had married Sarah Hart Shumway six years before, on October 15, 1855, and they had started a family. When war came, she was in her mid-twenties, and they shared two sons, Edgar and William.
Then, in April 1861, after the bombing of Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for volunteers. Ballou answered that call, left his family, and took up life as a soldier with the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry. Listening to his stridency in the next paragraph of the letter, I can almost imagine their conversations as he made his decision to join:
If it is necessary that I should fall on the battlefield for any country, I am ready. I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing, perfectly willing to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, our cause was rarely so clearly articulated. It was the same for the American wars that preceded mine, in Vietnam and Korea. To hear a voice from the past speak with such clarity about his cause gives us a view into a very different America. In my wars, we fought for myriad reasons: for each other; because we were professionals; or because we loved soldiering and couldn’t imagine or didn’t want a life outside the military. I can’t remember ever hearing someone say the reason they were willing to lay down their life was for any “Government” whether it be Iraqi, Afghan, or even American.
Country, yes. Each other, yes. But not the government.
Willingness to make such a sacrifice is never simple. I deployed five times to Iraq and Afghanistan. My last nights in the U.S. before leaving were some of the longest of my life and they never got easier. I both did and didn’t want to go. That tension—between obligations at home and a desire to go—is as old as war. Ballou must have felt that acutely when he left home and began his long march south. In his letter, he writes to Sarah of his ambivalence, as well as its source: his love of her.
Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables, that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet, my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield . . .
By my final deployment, I had become a father. The firebase where I stayed was pretty comfortable. I had internet in my room. Many nights, I would Skype with my infant daughter. Often, I would listen to her laugh, and try to get her to say “Daddy,” while my helmet, body armor, and assault rifle sat in the corner, just out of the video’s frame, ready for later that night, when I would go on a raid with the Afghan special operations unit I advised. As I logged off Skype, I couldn’t help but wonder if that call would be the last time I spoke to her. In Ballou’s letter, he is clearly wrestling with similar emotions. What will Sarah’s life be like without him? What will be left for her and the children to hold onto?
Forgive my many faults, and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and how foolish I have often times been! . . . But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights . . . always, always; and, if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.
Sarah, do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.
Sullivan Ballou was killed a week later at the First Battle of Bull Run. Sarah Ballou never remarried. She lived another 55 years after her husband’s death. She died in 1917, and is buried next to him.
Sullivan Ballou and I are separated by centuries. He lived in a country I scarcely recognize. But what I understand is the letter he wrote, one that seeks to reach across time, across the barrier between life and death, one that would allow him to continue living in the memories of those he left behind. It is a reminder that Memorial Day is not only for those who died, but also those who go on living without them. Ballou’s letter isn’t about death; it’s about life: the “soft breeze” on Sarah’s cheek; “the cool air” on her temple.
Years ago, an old friend of mine was killed in Afghanistan. He left behind a wife and three children. We had fought alongside one another on an earlier deployment, and I learned that, in a letter he’d left behind, he’d asked that I deliver a eulogy at his funeral. As I struggled to write it, my wife said, “You know who the eulogy is for, don’t you?”
I didn’t say anything. I realized that I didn’t know.
She told me: “It’s for the children.”
These days, my family spends Memorial Day weekend with an old Marine buddy, who also fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his family. This weekend, we’ll be doing the same as so many other American families: barbecuing with the kids, and going down to the beach. But, in between, we’ll tell stories about old friends. The gunnery sergeant whose nickname was Moshpit. The captain who lived out of his truck and dated a Swedish track star. These stories are never really about combat, or death, but mostly about what a group of characters these guys were, and when our kids laugh at these stories those friends seem to live again.
So please go to the beach, watch the blockbuster, have that barbecue. Remember the dead. And then live, for them; that is what they fought for.
“Things Worth Remembering” will be back in your inbox next Sunday. In case you missed it, last week, Tiya Miles wrote about Percival Everett’s new novel, “James,” and the power of the humanities.
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
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