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Quotes of the Day:
“Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.”
– Niccolo Machiavelli
“A fool contributes nothing worth hearing and takes offense at everything.”
– Aristotle
“Given this prospect, Donovan urged President Roosevelt to create a centralized intelligence organization to oversee the collection of intelligence abroad. Ideally, this organization would rise above the bureaucratic rivalries that stymied other intelligence organizations—the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Army’s Military Intelligence Division, the Office of Naval Intelligence—and provide the president with the most accurate and up-to-date information possible. Donovan also wanted this centralized intelligence organization to engage in espionage, sabotage, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns against America’s enemies. “Modern war operates on more fronts than battle fronts,” he explained to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. “Each combatant seeks to dominate the whole field of communications. No defense system is effective unless it recognizes and deals with this fact.” For thousands of years, humans had fought by land and sea. In the early twentieth century, they had added aerial combat to the mix. Now, Donovan reasoned, the United States needed to officially expand its arsenal to include a fourth domain: “Underground.””
– The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare by John Lisle
1. No Forbidden Areas: Would Russia Join China in a Pacific War?
2. Trade talks with China going well, says US commerce secretary
3. Huawei chips are one generation behind US but firm finding workarounds, CEO says
4. Chinese hackers and user lapses turn smartphones into a 'mobile security crisis'
5. Overnight attack leaves Kyiv choked in smoke, hits Odessa maternity hospital
6. Vietnam’s F-16 Gamble
7. US-China: what's really at stake in London
8. 'Spider's Web' warning: The US must prioritize drone defense to avoid Russia’s fate
9. New Unit Explores How to Deploy Drone Wingmen
10. U.S. Project at Philippine Navy Base to Support Unmanned Surface Vessels
11. US-China trade showdown: where do the talks stand after Day 1?
12. U.S. Army Forces Command Leader Discusses Readiness, Transformation at CSIS Strategic Landpower Dialogue
13. Why AFRICOM Should Remain Independent: Preserving Strategic Agility through Dedicated Theater Command
14. Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb Was Smart, Not Reckless
15. Third Chinese national accused of smuggling biological materials into Michigan
16. South Korea In 'Final Stages' To Sign Major Tank Deal With Poland
17. Get Ready for the New Rules of War in the Indo-Pacific
18. Will China Force a Rethink of Biological Warfare?
19. The Balkans Model and Conditions for Peace in Ukraine
20. Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: June
21. The U.S. Foreign Investment Miracle, RIP
22. The tiny Philippine island denying and defying China at sea
23. America’s Brexit Phase: Trump’s Tariffs and the Price of Economic Uncertainty
24. The New Balance of Power in the Middle East: America, Iran, and the Emerging Arabian Axis
1. No Forbidden Areas: Would Russia Join China in a Pacific War?
Excerpts:
By 2026, Russia could present what the head of the U.S. Northern Command characterized as “a persistent threat, 24-hours a day.”18 As the commander of the combatant command responsible for defending the continental United States, his prime concern was that Kalibr land-attack cruise missiles could carry a nuclear warhead. However, these boats, roaming undetected in the vast Pacific, would present a serious challenge to allied antisubmarine warfare forces if Russia decided to join a Chinese effort. Of further concern are reports that Russia’s hypersonic Zircon missile, the follow-on to the Kalibr, was reportedly sent to Pacific Fleet forces starting in 2022.19
The changes to Russia’s Pacific Fleet are not limited to order-of-battle modernization. According to the Federation of American Scientists, “infrastructure at the Pacific Fleet naval base in Kamchatka is undergoing significant renovations. In the past several years, Russia has added additional storage at the missile and warhead depots and begun construction of a new pier.”20 These improvements are designed in part to support a new class of submarine capable of firing the Poseidon nuclear-powered, nuclear-warhead-carrying torpedo.21 The addition of these strategic submarines, along with the incorporation of next-generation Borei-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines, into the Pacific, would add a considerable workload in a future Pacific war to an already stressed U.S. antisubmarine effort.
According to the assessments by the American Sea Power Project authors in the War of 2026 scenario, the outlook for the United States and its allies is not optimistic. But even this sober conclusion might grossly underestimate a true worst-case scenario by not accounting for an emerging Sino-Russian alliance. The growing “friendship without limits”—unthinkable even 20 years ago—the increased revanchist sentiment of Russia, and the growing capabilities of Russia’s Pacific Fleet require U.S. planners to reckon with the possibility of Russian participation in a future Pacific war between China and the United States. U.S. forces must include a combined Russian-Chinese force in future Pacific wargames and exercises to encompass a full threat scenario.
No Forbidden Areas: Would Russia Join China in a Pacific War?
Beijing and Moscow declared in 2022 that their friendship has no limits, and the two sides’ actions have backed that promise. The U.S. Navy cannot rule out direct Russian participation in a conflict in the Pacific.
By Lieutenant Commander William Bunn, U.S. Navy (Retired)
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2025/june/no-forbidden-areas-would-russia-join-china-pacific-war-0
June 2025 Proceedings Vol. 151/6/1,468
History gave British Prime Minister Winston Churchill the job of defining Russia’s foreign policy ambiguity for the ages. “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” Churchill told his nation on 1 October 1939, one month after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland—an invasion the Soviet Union had already joined. He spoke to a nation still taken aback by Moscow’s treaty of nonaggression with Berlin, and he suggested a way to understand the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: “Perhaps there is a key,” Churchill said. “That key is Russian national interest.”
Since 2005, the growth of another military relationship has surprised the West: that between China and Russia.1 Speculation about the extent of this relationship between traditional antagonists peaked in 2022, after Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a joint communiqué declaring “friendship between the two states has no limits, there are no forbidden areas of cooperation.”
Weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. One year later, Xi visited Moscow for three days of meetings with Putin, marking the 40th time the two had met as heads of state, and putting to rest any reasonable doubt that the growing bond was real.
The growing relationship between Russia and China was unthinkable even 20 years ago. There is reason to believe that Russia would support a Chinese war in the Pacific, even if Moscow’s war in Ukraine were stil ongoing. (Maxim Shemetov/POOL/AFP)
Would Russia Get Involved?
A national security threat is a product of a potential adversary’s intent and capability to take actions that oppose U.S. objectives. The formula is a multiplication problem: If either intent or capability is zero, there is no threat, and the actor in question is not an adversary. In the hypothetical “War of 2026” presented in the December 2023 Proceedings, Russia’s involvement is limited to possibly “stirring up tensions” in Europe, with the result that “a significant part of the U.S. military force structure cannot be deployed to the Pacific.”2 Though Russia has a capable and growing naval presence in the Pacific, direct Russian involvement in the theater is not taken into consideration. The “intent” portion of the threat formula is measured as zero. This is a faulty and dangerous calculation.
There is no doubt Russia is a threat. In fact, the 2022 National Defense Strategy labels Russia as the acute threat to the United States.3 China is instead labeled the “pacing challenge.”4
But would Russia perceive supporting China in a Pacific war as benefiting its interests? If the war in Ukraine continues, conventional wisdom holds that Russia would avoid war on a second front. There are at least four reasons that assumption might be wrong.
1) A blow to the United States is a win for Russia. The United States losing a war in the Pacific, after substantial sacrifice of combat power, would serve Russian goals. NATO would be weakened significantly, flipping the balance of power in Europe. In addition, a primary Russian goal is to be recognized as a great power in a multipolar international system not dominated by the United States.5
2) A U.S. win is a loss for Russia. A U.S. victory in the Pacific would not only damage one of Russia’s sole remaining allies, but also could strengthen U.S. hard and soft power to levels unseen since the end of World War II. Depending on China’s losses, the United States could turn its attention back to Europe. That would be a worst-case scenario for Putin, who might judge that the potential costs of inaction in the Pacific would greatly outweigh the possible risks of action.
3) It is better to fight the Americans away from home.If Russia determines war with the United States is inevitable, it might conclude that fighting many thousands of miles away from Moscow is the best option. A short, sharp naval war in the Pacific—especially if Russia achieves surprise—could be a lower-cost way of damaging U.S. combat capabilities, compared to facing the Americans on the steppes of Ukraine.
4) Revanchism drives Russian choices. “Revanchist” is a common term to describe Russia.6 Revanchism refers to a state’s desire to reclaim territory it believes it lost in the past; but the word is French for “revenge.” Rodric Braithwaite, the British ambassador to Moscow as the Soviet Union collapsed, wrote that Russia’s perceived treatment by the West following the Cold War “aroused an overwhelming sense of humiliation and resentment which colored the making of Russian policy for decades.”7 That resentment has grown with NATO’s support for Ukraine.8 For Putin, the United States and its allies are waging a proxy war against Russia, resulting in thousands of Russian deaths. Vengeance is a motive for Russian military action.
A CSIS report noted that “Chinese and Russian forces seem capable of geographic ‘deconfliction’ in joint operations.” Russia’s Yasen-class guided-missile nuclear-powered submarines are especially capable. (Sevmash)
Could Russia Alter The Balance?
Still, the prevailing view that Russia would most likely use a Pacific war mainly to cause mischief in Europe may be correct. After all, compelling the United States to keep some forces stationed 8,000 miles away would greatly challenge U.S. war planners. The last time the U.S. Navy fought a war against great powers, the Axis of Japan and Germany/Italy forced the United States to manage forces on opposite sides of the globe. The “China-Russia Axis” today presents a unique problem: Russia’s Pacific Fleet.9 Japan and Germany in World War II could at best coordinate their efforts within their own areas of operation.10 Russia and China have been operating as allies in the western Pacific for 20 years.
In August 2005, Russian and Chinese troops participated in an eight-day wargame that began in Vladivostok, the location of Russia’s Pacific Fleet headquarters, and culminated with an “amphibious and paratrooper landing on China’s Shandong peninsula,” near the entrance to the Bohai Gulf and the current headquarters of China’s Northern Theater Command Navy.11 This marked the beginning of a shared military exercise regimen that continues to grow. In a 2021 assessment, the Center for Strategic and International Studies found:
[T]hese exercises have remained a prominent and recurring feature of the Sino-Russian defense partnership for more than a decade. They have aimed to improve both forces’ capabilities, enhance interoperability, encourage defense industrial collaboration, send signals to third parties, and promote mutual reassurance and confidence building.12
The report further noted that “Chinese and Russian forces seem capable of geographic ‘deconfliction’ in joint operations.”13 This does not come close to the kind of mutually supporting naval operations the United States and its allies can perform, but geographic deconfliction in an area as vast as the Pacific theater may be all Russia and China would need. While the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and Air Force (PLAAF) concentrated on Taiwan, Russian naval forces (particularly submarines) could threaten access to the region by U.S. forces attempting to join the fight from the eastern Pacific.
Admiral John Aquilino, commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command from 2021–24, revealed during a 2023 speech that:
Just a month ago . . . Russian bombers landed in China, and then [Russian and Chinese bombers] flew a joint mission into the Philippine Sea towards Guam. Today, a Russian and Chinese maritime Task Force is doing a combined patrol. . . . So, their exercises have increased, their operations have increased. I only see the cooperation getting stronger, and boy that’s concerning. That’s a dangerous world.14
During a May 2024 Senate hearing, then-Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines was asked about the likelihood that if either Russia or China goes to war with the United States, the other would join. The question was general, but Haines’ answer was specific: “We see, for the first time ever, China and Russia exercising together in relation to Taiwan, recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t.”15
China and Russia have a shared military exercise regimen that goes back two decades. Here, Russian cruiser Varyag arrives in China’s Shandong Province in 2019. (Xinhua/Li Ziheng/AFP)
Growing Lethality Of Russia’s Pacific Fleet
The costly war in the Black Sea would seem to leave events in the Pacific low on Moscow’s priority list; the opposite is true. According to a report commissioned by the Australian Navy:
Between 2022 and October 2023, for instance, [Russia’s Pacific Fleet] commissioned eight new warships and auxiliaries, including four nuclear-powered and conventional submarines. On December 11, two new nuclear-powered submarines formally joined the [Pacific] Fleet, in addition to the conventional RFS Mozhaisk submarine, which entered service last month.16
One of those submarines, the Krasnoyarsk, is a Yasen-class guided-missile nuclear-powered submarine. This class presents a significant threat, with antiship and land-attack variants of Kalibr cruise missiles. According to a USNI News report, the 13,800-ton Yasen-class attack boats are among the most capable submarines in the world.17
By 2026, Russia could present what the head of the U.S. Northern Command characterized as “a persistent threat, 24-hours a day.”18 As the commander of the combatant command responsible for defending the continental United States, his prime concern was that Kalibr land-attack cruise missiles could carry a nuclear warhead. However, these boats, roaming undetected in the vast Pacific, would present a serious challenge to allied antisubmarine warfare forces if Russia decided to join a Chinese effort. Of further concern are reports that Russia’s hypersonic Zircon missile, the follow-on to the Kalibr, was reportedly sent to Pacific Fleet forces starting in 2022.19
The changes to Russia’s Pacific Fleet are not limited to order-of-battle modernization. According to the Federation of American Scientists, “infrastructure at the Pacific Fleet naval base in Kamchatka is undergoing significant renovations. In the past several years, Russia has added additional storage at the missile and warhead depots and begun construction of a new pier.”20 These improvements are designed in part to support a new class of submarine capable of firing the Poseidon nuclear-powered, nuclear-warhead-carrying torpedo.21 The addition of these strategic submarines, along with the incorporation of next-generation Borei-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines, into the Pacific, would add a considerable workload in a future Pacific war to an already stressed U.S. antisubmarine effort.
According to the assessments by the American Sea Power Project authors in the War of 2026 scenario, the outlook for the United States and its allies is not optimistic. But even this sober conclusion might grossly underestimate a true worst-case scenario by not accounting for an emerging Sino-Russian alliance. The growing “friendship without limits”—unthinkable even 20 years ago—the increased revanchist sentiment of Russia, and the growing capabilities of Russia’s Pacific Fleet require U.S. planners to reckon with the possibility of Russian participation in a future Pacific war between China and the United States. U.S. forces must include a combined Russian-Chinese force in future Pacific wargames and exercises to encompass a full threat scenario.
Recent Russian-Chinese Military Cooperation
Chinese and Russian air and naval assets have exercised together at an increasing pace over the past 20 years. (Sun Liren/Xinhua)
22 December 2020: China and Russia conduct a joint bomber patrol in the Sea of Japan. Russian fighter jets and airborne early warning aircraft participate in the drill, which enters the South Korean air defense identification zone.1
22 October 2021: Five Russian and five Chinese warships circumnavigate Japan following exercises in the Sea of Japan.2
1–7 September 2022: Chinese warships join Russia for its quadrennial exercise Vostok-22 near the Sea of Okhotsk and the disputed Kuril Islands.3
25–27 February 2023: Three warships from China’s 42nd Escort Task Force and two Russian Navy ships join a South African frigate off that country’s coast.4 The Russian guided-missile frigate Admiral Gorshkov reportedly carries Zircon hypersonic missiles.5
17–19 March 2023: The Admiral Gorshkov joins China’s 43rd Escort Task Force and an Iranian frigate off Iran’s coast for the exercise Security Belt 2023.6
20–25 July 2023: Northern Interaction 2023 takes place in the Sea of Japan, involving Chinese and Russian warships.7 Drills reportedly include “naval guided-missile strikes against coastal targets with targeting guidance provided by naval aviation aircraft.”8
11–24 March 2024: The Russian, Chinese, and Iranian trilateral exercise Sea Security Belt 2024 takes place in the Gulf of Oman. China’s 45th Escort Task Force, including a Luyang III-class destroyer, takes part. Russia sends its Pacific Fleet flagship, the Slava-class cruiser Varyag, along with a modernized Udaloy-class destroyer.9
24 July 2024: Russian Tu-95 Bear and Chinese H-6 bomber aircraft fly to approximately 200 miles off the Alaskan coast.10
10–16 September 2024: Ocean 2024 kicks off in the Pacific, Arctic, Caspian, Baltic, and Mediterranean, with vessels from Russia’s Pacific, Northern, and Baltic fleets and its Caspian Sea flotilla
taking part.
29 November 2024: Nuclear-capable PLAAF bombers and the Russian Air Force conduct their ninth joint patrol over the Sea of Japan. China flies H-6N nuclear-capable bombers, joined by Russian Tu-95M strategic bombers.11
1. Ryan Pickrell, “Russian and Chinese Bombers Did a Joint Patrol Between South Korea and Japan in a Show of Strength Against the U.S.,” Business Insider, 22 December 2020.
2. Mike Yeo, “Chinese, Russian Task Force Sails Around Japan,” Defense News, 22 October 2021.
3. Edward Arnold, “Russia’s Vostok 2022 Military Drills: Not the Size or the Tanks, but the Context,” Royal United Services Institute, 9 September 2022.
4. CAPT James E. Fanell, USN (Ret.), “Another Historic Year for the PLA Navy,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 150, no. 5 (May 2024).
5. “Russia Rules Out Hypersonic Missile Launch off South Africa,” Deutsche Welle, 22 February 2023.
6. “China, Iran, Russia Conclude Four-Day Joint Maritime Exercise,” Naval Technology, 23 March 2023.
7. Dzirhan Mahadzir, “Chinese, Russian Warships Continue Exercises in Sea of Japan; North Korea Resumes Missile Launches,” USNI News, 25 July 2023.
8. Mahadzir, “Warships Continue Exercises.”
9. Dzirhan Mahadzir, “Russia, China and Iran Finish Drills in Gulf of Oman,” USNI News, 14 March 2024.
10. Paul Sonne, “Russia and China Carry Out First Joint Bomber Patrol Near Alaska,” The New York Times, 25 July 2024.
11. Craig Nigrelli, William Jackson, and Jack Henry, “China Debuts H-6N Nuclear Bomber in Joint Patrol with Russia,” video transcript, Straight Arrow News, 29 November 2024.
1. Paul Haenle and Ali Wyne, “The Paradox of the Russia-China,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 18 August 2022.
2. Commander Paul Giarra and Captains Bill Hamblet and Gerard Roncolato, USN (Ret.), “The War of 2026: American Sea Power Project Phase III,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 149 no. 12 (December 2023).
3. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, National Defense Strategy of the United States of America Including the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review and the 2022 Missile Defense Review, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2022.
4. Austin, National Defense Strategy.
5. Samuel Charap et al., Russian Grand Strategy: Rhetoric and Reality (Santa Monica, California: RAND), 2021.
6. Ashish Kuman Sen, “Standing Up to a ‘Revanchist Russia,’” Atlantic Council, 5 May 2015.
7. Paul Dibb, “Putin’s Revanchist Excuses for Going to War,” The Strategist, 29 March 2022.
8. Ann M. Simmons, “Putin Condemns Western Support for Ukraine as Russia’s Battlefield Losses Mount,” The Wall Street Journal, 9 May 2023.
9. Bonny Lin, “The China-Russia Axis Takes Shape,” Foreign Policy, September 2023.
10. John W. Masland, “Japanese-German Naval Collaboration in World War II,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 75, no. 2 (February 1949).
11. “First China-Russia War Games Begin,” The Guardian, 18 August 2005.
12. Richard Weitz, “Assessing Chinese-Russian Military Exercises: Past Progress and Future Trends,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, 9 July 2021.
13. Richard Weitz, “Chinese-Russian Military Exercises.”
14. ADM John C. Aquilino, discussion at the Aspen Security Forum, 20 July 2023.
15. Senate Hearing on Worldwide Threats, U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, 2 May 2024.
16. Mikhail Klimentyev, “Australia Can No Longer Afford to Ignore Russia’s Expanding Naval Power in the Pacific,” The Conversation, 20 December 2023.
17. Sam LaGrone, “NORTHCOM: Russia Close to Persistent Nuclear Cruise Missile Attack Sub Presence off U.S. Coasts,” USNI News, 23 March 23 2023.
18. Sam LaGrone, “Persistent Nuclear Sub Presence.”
19. Vladimir Karnozov, “Hypersonic Zircon Missile from Russia now deployed to the Pacific,” Asia-Pacific Defence Reporter 46, no. 3 (April 2020.)
20. Eliana Johns, “Upgrades to Russia’s Nuclear-Capable Submarine Fleet” Federation of American Scientists, 20 February 2024.
21. “Submarine Force Armed with Poseidon Torpedoes to Come into Operation in Kamchatka in 2025,” TASS, 3 April 2023.
Dr. William Bunn is an assistant professor at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. He is a retired naval intelligence officer.
2. Trade talks with China going well, says US commerce secretary
Excerpts:
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Monday that the US was ready to agree to lift export controls on some semiconductors in return for China speeding up the delivery of rare earths and magnets.
"(Talks went on) all day yesterday, and I expect (them) all day today," Lutnick told reporters. "They're going well, and we're spending lots of time together."
Trump's shifting tariff policies have roiled global markets, sparked congestion and confusion in major ports, and cost companies tens of billions of dollars in lost sales and higher costs.
But markets have made up much of the losses they endured after Trump unveiled his sweeping "Liberation Day" tariffs in April, aided by the reset in Geneva between the world's two biggest economies.
The second round of US-China talks, which followed a rare phone call between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping last week, comes at a crucial time for both economies.
Trade talks with China going well, says US commerce secretary
10 Jun 2025 06:27PM
channelnewsasia.com
LONDON: US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Tuesday (Jun 10) trade talks with China were going well as the two sides met for a second day in London, seeking a breakthrough on export controls that have threatened a fresh rupture between the superpowers.
US and Chinese officials are trying to get back on track after Washington accused Beijing of blocking exports of rare earth minerals that are critical to its economy, straining ties after they struck a preliminary deal in Geneva last month to step back from a full-blown trade embargo.
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Monday that the US was ready to agree to lift export controls on some semiconductors in return for China speeding up the delivery of rare earths and magnets.
"(Talks went on) all day yesterday, and I expect (them) all day today," Lutnick told reporters. "They're going well, and we're spending lots of time together."
Trump's shifting tariff policies have roiled global markets, sparked congestion and confusion in major ports, and cost companies tens of billions of dollars in lost sales and higher costs.
But markets have made up much of the losses they endured after Trump unveiled his sweeping "Liberation Day" tariffs in April, aided by the reset in Geneva between the world's two biggest economies.
The second round of US-China talks, which followed a rare phone call between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping last week, comes at a crucial time for both economies.
Customs data published on Monday showed that China's exports to the US plunged 34.5 per cent in May, the sharpest drop since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the impact on US inflation and its jobs market has so far been muted, tariffs have hammered U.S. business and household confidence and the dollar remains under pressure.
DISCUSSING DISAGREEMENTS
The talks have been led by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Lutnick and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, with the Chinese contingent helmed by Vice Premier He Lifeng.
The talks ran for almost seven hours on Monday and resumed just before 10am local time on Tuesday, with both sides expected to issue updates later in the day.
The inclusion of Lutnick, whose agency oversees export controls for the US, is one indication of how central rare earths have become. He did not attend the Geneva talks, when the countries struck a 90-day deal to roll back some of the triple-digit tariffs they had placed on each other.
China holds a near-monopoly on rare earth magnets, a crucial component in electric vehicle motors, and its decision in April to suspend exports of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets upended global supply chains and sparked alarm in boardrooms and factory floors around the world.
Kelly Ann Shaw, a former White House trade adviser during Trump's first term and now a trade partner at the Akin Gump law firm in Washington, said she expected China to reaffirm its commitment to lift retaliatory measures, including export restrictions, "plus some concessions on the US side, with respect to export control measures over the past week or two".
But Shaw said she expected the US to only agree to lift some new export curbs, not longstanding ones such as for advanced artificial intelligence chips.
In May, the US ordered a halt to shipments of semiconductor design software and chemicals and aviation equipment, revoking export licences that had been previously issued.
Source: Reuters/fh
Newsletter
3. Huawei chips are one generation behind US but firm finding workarounds, CEO says
Excerpts:
The chipmaker invests 180 billion yuan (US$25.07 billion) in research annually and sees promise in compound chips - chips made from multiple elements - Ren said in an interview with the People's Daily newspaper of the governing Communist Party.
There is "no need to worry about the chip problem", Ren said, addressing concerns stemming from US export controls.
The article, published on the front page of the newspaper, come as top US and Chinese officials are set to resume trade talks for a second day in London where topics such as US tech restrictions on China are expected to be discussed.
Since 2019, a slew of US export curbs, aimed at curbing China's technological and military advancements, have restricted Huawei and other Chinese firms from accessing high-end chips and the equipment needed to produce them from abroad.
Huawei chips are one generation behind US but firm finding workarounds, CEO says
channelnewsasia.com
10 Jun 2025 12:37PM
(Updated: 10 Jun 2025 04:53PM)
BEIJING: Huawei Technologies' chips are one generation behind those of its US peers but the firm is finding ways to improve performance through methods such as cluster computing, Chinese state media quoted CEO Ren Zhengfei as saying on Tuesday (Jun 10).
The chipmaker invests 180 billion yuan (US$25.07 billion) in research annually and sees promise in compound chips - chips made from multiple elements - Ren said in an interview with the People's Daily newspaper of the governing Communist Party.
There is "no need to worry about the chip problem", Ren said, addressing concerns stemming from US export controls.
The article, published on the front page of the newspaper, come as top US and Chinese officials are set to resume trade talks for a second day in London where topics such as US tech restrictions on China are expected to be discussed.
Since 2019, a slew of US export curbs, aimed at curbing China's technological and military advancements, have restricted Huawei and other Chinese firms from accessing high-end chips and the equipment needed to produce them from abroad.
China has accused the United States of "bullying" and "abusing export controls to suppress and contain" the country's firms.
Ren's comments are the first ever from him or Huawei about the company's advanced chipmaking efforts, which have become a flashpoint in US-China tensions.
Huawei is just one of many Chinese chipmakers, Ren said in the interview, adding: "The United States has exaggerated Huawei's achievements. Huawei is not that great. We have to work hard to reach their evaluation."
"Our single chip is still behind the US by a generation. We use mathematics to supplement physics, non-Moore's law to supplement Moore's law and cluster computing to supplement single chips and the results can also achieve practical conditions. Software is not a bottleneck for us," he said.
Cluster computing is when multiple computers work together. Moore's law refers to the speed of chip advancement.
The Shenzhen-based company has been at the centre of an intense standoff between the economic supergiants after Washington warned its equipment could be used for espionage by Beijing, an allegation Huawei denies.
When asked about "external blockades and suppression" - a veiled reference to US export restrictions on Beijing - Ren said he had "never thought about it".
"Don't dwell on the difficulties, just get the job done and move forward step by step," he added.
HUAWEI'S LAUNCHES
Huawei's Ascend series of AI chips compete in China with offerings from Nvidia, the global leader in AI chips.
The US commerce department last month said the use of Ascend chips would be a violation of export controls.
Nvidia's AI chips are more powerful than Huawei's but the company has been barred by Washington from selling its most sophisticated chips to China, causing it to lose significant market share to Huawei.
In April, Huawei launched "AI CloudMatrix 384", a system that links 384 Ascend 910C chips in a cluster that companies can use to train AI models, which has been described by analysts as able to outperform Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 system on some metrics.
Dylan Patel, founder of semiconductor research group SemiAnalysis, said in an article that month that it meant Huawei and China now had AI system capabilities that could beat Nvidia.
Nvidia and the US commerce department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Ren's remarks.
Ren also said about a third of Huawei's annual research spending went to theoretical research while the rest was spent on product research and development.
"Without theory, there will be no breakthroughs, and we will not catch up with the United States."
Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang told reporters last month that Chinese companies "are very, very talented and very determined, and the export control gave them the spirit, the energy and the government support to accelerate their development".
Source: Reuters/dy
Newsletter
4. Chinese hackers and user lapses turn smartphones into a 'mobile security crisis'
Excerpts:
Foreign hackers have increasingly identified smartphones, other mobile devices and the apps they use as a weak link in U.S. cyberdefenses. Groups linked to China’s military and intelligence service have targeted the smartphones of prominent Americans and burrowed deep into telecommunication networks, according to national security and tech experts.
It shows how vulnerable mobile devices and apps are and the risk that security failures could expose sensitive information or leave American interests open to cyberattack, those experts say.
“The world is in a mobile security crisis right now,” said Rocky Cole, a former cybersecurity expert at the National Security Agency and Google and now chief operations officer at iVerify. “No one is watching the phones.”
Chinese hackers and user lapses turn smartphones into a 'mobile security crisis'
By DAVID KLEPPER
Updated 7:40 AM EDT, June 8, 2025
AP · by DAVID KLEPPER · June 8, 2025
WASHINGTON (AP) —
Cybersecurity investigators noticed a highly unusual software crash — it was affecting a small number of smartphones belonging to people who worked in government, politics, tech and journalism.
The crashes, which began late last year and carried into 2025, were the tipoff to a sophisticated cyberattack that may have allowed hackers to infiltrate a phone without a single click from the user.
The attackers left no clues about their identities, but investigators at the cybersecurity firm iVerify noticed that the victims all had something in common: They worked in fields of interest to China’s government and had been targeted by Chinese hackers in the past.
Foreign hackers have increasingly identified smartphones, other mobile devices and the apps they use as a weak link in U.S. cyberdefenses. Groups linked to China’s military and intelligence service have targeted the smartphones of prominent Americans and burrowed deep into telecommunication networks, according to national security and tech experts.
It shows how vulnerable mobile devices and apps are and the risk that security failures could expose sensitive information or leave American interests open to cyberattack, those experts say.
“The world is in a mobile security crisis right now,” said Rocky Cole, a former cybersecurity expert at the National Security Agency and Google and now chief operations officer at iVerify. “No one is watching the phones.”
US zeroes in on China as a threat, and Beijing levels its own accusations
U.S. authorities warned in December of a sprawling Chinese hacking campaign designed to gain access to the texts and phone conversations of an unknown number of Americans.
“They were able to listen in on phone calls in real time and able to read text messages,” said Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois. He is a member of the House Intelligence Committee and the senior Democrat on the Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, created to study the geopolitical threat from China.
Chinese hackers also sought access to phones used by Donald Trump and running mate JD Vance during the 2024 campaign.
The Chinese government has denied allegations of cyberespionage, and accused the U.S. of mounting its own cyberoperations. It says America cites national security as an excuse to issue sanctions against Chinese organizations and keep Chinese technology companies from the global market.
“The U.S. has long been using all kinds of despicable methods to steal other countries’ secrets,” Lin Jian, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said at a recent press conference in response to questions about a CIA push to recruit Chinese informants.
U.S. intelligence officials have said China poses a significant, persistent threat to U.S. economic and political interests, and it has harnessed the tools of digital conflict: online propaganda and disinformation, artificial intelligence and cyber surveillance and espionage designed to deliver a significant advantage in any military conflict.
Mobile networks are a top concern. The U.S. and many of its closest allies have banned Chinese telecom companies from their networks. Other countries, including Germany, are phasing out Chinese involvement because of security concerns. But Chinese tech firms remain a big part of the systems in many nations, giving state-controlled companies a global footprint they could exploit for cyberattacks, experts say.
Chinese telecom firms still maintain some routing and cloud storage systems in the U.S. — a growing concern to lawmakers.
“The American people deserve to know if Beijing is quietly using state-owned firms to infiltrate our critical infrastructure,” U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich. and chairman of the China committee, which in April issued subpoenas to Chinese telecom companies seeking information about their U.S. operations.
Mobile devices have become an intel treasure trove
Mobile devices can buy stocks, launch drones and run power plants. Their proliferation has often outpaced their security.
The phones of top government officials are especially valuable, containing sensitive government information, passwords and an insider’s glimpse into policy discussions and decision-making.
The White House said last week that someone impersonating Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, reached out to governors, senators and business leaders with texts and phone calls.
It’s unclear how the person obtained Wiles’ connections, but they apparently gained access to the contacts in her personal cellphone, The Wall Street Journal reported. The messages and calls were not coming from Wiles’ number, the newspaper reported.
While most smartphones and tablets come with robust security, apps and connected devices often lack these protections or the regular software updates needed to stay ahead of new threats. That makes every fitness tracker, baby monitor or smart appliance another potential foothold for hackers looking to penetrate networks, retrieve information or infect systems with malware.
Federal officials launched a program this year creating a “cyber trust mark” for connected devices that meet federal security standards. But consumers and officials shouldn’t lower their guard, said Snehal Antani, former chief technology officer for the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command.
“They’re finding backdoors in Barbie dolls,” said Antani, now CEO of Horizon3.ai, a cybersecurity firm, referring to concerns from researchers who successfully hacked the microphone of a digitally connected version of the toy.
Risks emerge when smartphone users don’t take precautions
It doesn’t matter how secure a mobile device is if the user doesn’t follow basic security precautions, especially if their device contains classified or sensitive information, experts say.
Mike Waltz, who departed as Trump’s national security adviser, inadvertently added The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief to a Signal chat used to discuss military plans with other top officials.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had an internet connection that bypassed the Pentagon’s security protocols set up in his office so he could use the Signal messaging app on a personal computer, the AP has reported.
Hegseth has rejected assertions that he shared classified information on Signal, a popular encrypted messaging app not approved for the use of communicating classified information.
China and other nations will try to take advantage of such lapses, and national security officials must take steps to prevent them from recurring, said Michael Williams, a national security expert at Syracuse University.
“They all have access to a variety of secure communications platforms,” Williams said. “We just can’t share things willy-nilly.”
AP · by DAVID KLEPPER · June 8, 2025
5. Overnight attack leaves Kyiv choked in smoke, hits Odessa maternity hospital
Putin's evil and brutality knows no limits.
Overnight attack leaves Kyiv choked in smoke, hits Odessa maternity hospital
The escalation in aerial attacks comes as Russia begins a summer push on the 620-mile front line in the country’s east.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/06/10/ukraine-russia-war-drones-kyiv/
June 10, 2025 at 4:52 a.m. EDTToday at 4:52 a.m. EDT
A man looks out of a heavily damaged apartment building in Kurenivka neighborhood of Kyiv on Tuesday, following a Russian drone and missile strike on the city. (Sasha Maslov/For The Washington Post)
By Lizzie Johnson, Serhii Korolchuk and David L. Stern
KYIV — A massive overnight drone and missile attack on Ukraine damaged a maternity hospital in the southern port city of Odessa and left buildings in the nation’s capital smoking and smoldering Tuesday morning.
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It is the second large-scale drone attack in two days and follows another major aerial attack on Friday, which the Russians at the time said was retaliation for an ambitious Ukrainian drone strike on distant airfields on June 1. The renewed pounding of Ukrainian cities comes as the U.S.-sponsored peace process is faltering.
Ukrainian officials said Russia attacked with 315 drones — including 250 self-detonating Iranian-made Shaheds — two North Korean KN-23 ballistic missiles and five Iskander cruise missiles, killing two people and injuring 15.
Fires have erupted all over Kyiv on the early morning of Tuesday, after a massive Russian drone and missile attack on the Ukrainian capital. (Sasha Maslov/For The Washington Post)
In Kyiv, downed wreckage fell in 16 locations, igniting blazes, Ukraine’s Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko wrote on Telegram. As dawn crested, helicopters could be seen scooping water from the Dnieper River to douse the flames, which spilled plumes of inky smoke across the summer sky.
“Russian strikes with missiles and Shaheds are louder than the efforts of the United States and others in the world to force Russia to peace,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a post on Telegram, adding that the attack also struck Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk and Chernihiv regions. Zelensky said that the assault was “one of the largest attacks” on the capital.
Following World news
Following
Just the day before came the largest strike of the war, after Russia overnight launched nearly 500 drones across Ukraine. The escalation in aerial attacks come as Russia begins a summer push on the 620-mile front line in the country’s east.
Russian authorities, meanwhile, reported shooting down 102 Ukrainian drones in several regions and restrictions were placed on airports in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Head of the Kyiv city military administration Timur Tkachenko wrote on Telegram that the attack was “a difficult night for all of us … there is partial destruction and fire in high-rise buildings and private houses. Cars and warehouses were set on fire.”
“A difficult day lies ahead. Perhaps not one,” Tkachenko wrote. “It will take time to eliminate the consequences, but the city is working, all services are on the ground, responding promptly.”
Fires have erupted all over Kyiv on the early morning of Tuesday after a massive Russian drone and missile attack on the Ukrainian capital. (Sasha Maslov/For The Washington Post)
In Odessa, attacks left two dead and nine wounded and slammed into the administrative department of a maternity hospital, head of the regional military administration Oleh Kiper wrote on Telegram.
There were no casualties at the hospital itself, Kiper said. He added that “residential buildings in the center of Odessa were destroyed and damaged,” and “the administrative building of an emergency medical station” was “completely destroyed.”
“The very fact that an institution where life is born was targeted is striking in its cruelty,” Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov said.
Fires have erupted all over Kyiv on the early morning of Tuesday, after a massive Russian drone and missile attack on the Ukrainian capital. (Sasha Maslov/For The Washington Post)
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By Lizzie Johnson
Lizzie Johnson is an investigative reporter on The Post's narrative accountability team and the author of "Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire."follow on X@LizzieJohnsonnn
By David L. Stern
David L. Stern has worked for news outlets in Russia, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East and Central Asia. He has lived in Ukraine since 2009, covering the 2014 Maidan revolution, war in the country’s east and now Russia’s 2022 invasion.follow on X@loydstern
6. Vietnam’s F-16 Gamble
Conclusion:
In a fractured world where binary alliances often bring more risk than reward, Vietnam’s ability to straddle multiple poles may offer a model for others. This is not neutrality; it is strategy in motion, rooted in history but focused on the future.
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Vietnam’s F-16 Gamble
Strategic shift or symbolic hedge?
https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/vietnam-f16-gamble
Jun 10, 2025
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By: Duy Anh Thai
In April, the US-based publication 19FortyFive and regional defense analysts suggested that Vietnam and the United States are nearing a deal to sell Vietnam F-16 fighter aircraft. Although the transaction has not been confirmed officially by either side, multiple sources have indicated the deal is in its advanced stages and appears likely to go forward. If concluded, it would be the most consequential military procurement Vietnam has made in the past two decades, one with regional and geopolitical reverberations.
The potential acquisition is not occurring in isolation. Rather, it is emerging in the context of a deteriorating global security environment, intensified US-China rivalry and a significant shift in Vietnam’s own strategic calculus. The F-16 deal is more than a bilateral defense agreement; it is a prism through which we can understand Hanoi’s growing ambition, its constraints, and its finely-tuned balancing act.
From Soviet Dependency to Strategic Flexibility
For more than four decades, Vietnam's defense doctrine was deeply enmeshed in and influenced by its historical alliance with the Soviet Union. The MiG-21 became a Vietnam War icon, while later generations of Su-22 and Su-30MK2 fighters cemented the Soviet legacy in Vietnam’s air defense command. This dependency was not merely about weapons – it symbolized ideological brotherhood, economic reliance, and a shared Cold War worldview.
But the past decade has tested the model’s viability. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and subsequent global isolation have crippled its defense exports. For Hanoi, already wary of single-source dependence, this disruption underscored a deeper vulnerability. The F-16 isn’t just a plane; it’s an exit hatch from a decaying military-industrial past relationship with the Soviet Union.
In early 2025, soon after returning to office, the Trump administration imposed punitive tariffs on Vietnam, citing alleged currency manipulation and unfair trade practices. These tariffs, targeting furniture, garments, and electronics, strike at the heart of Vietnam’s export engine. For Hanoi, the timing of these measures is troubling, but not coincidental.
Some in Washington likely view Vietnam’s F-16 interest as a tool of leverage and a test of new alignment, while others in Hanoi see defense procurement as a way to recalibrate political goodwill. Still, this exchange is not transactional in the crude sense. Vietnam doesn’t trade sovereignty for policy relief. Instead, the move reflects Hanoi’s broader doctrine of adaptive engagement: never pivoting fully, but always repositioning smartly.
What the F-16 Brings, —And What It Doesn’t
The F-16 is a 50-year-old legacy platform, signed as a small, light, and ultra-nimble dogfighter. Since 2015, it has been the most numerous military fixed-wing aircraft in the world, with more than 2,000 thought to still be in active use globally today. They are flown by Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand and are upgraded with remarkable effectiveness. For Vietnam, with a rapidly-aging fleet of Soviet-origin jets, the F-16 provides a cost-effective, combat-proven, and politically symbolic choice.
Yet the prospective deal is riddled with critical variables. Would Vietnam receive the latest versions – Block 70/72 variants with cutting-edge radar and avionics – or would the U.S. allow technology transfer or merely lease old platforms? The structure of this deal will determine whether the F-16 becomes a cornerstone or a cosmetic addition to Vietnam’s military posture.
Beyond hardware, interoperability with US systems could open new doors, from participation in multilateral exercises to deeper defense dialogue. But it also risks political backlash from factions in Hanoi that are wary and suspicious of closer Western alignment.
Wider Implications for Southeast Asia
Vietnam’s prospective purchase reflects a sweeping regional shift away from Russian military hardware. The Philippines, once hesitant, has rapidly expanded its US military ties, acquiring Black Hawks and BrahMos missiles. Indonesia is eyeing French Rafales and US F-15EX fighters. Thailand is reviewing its China-heavy defense profile, quietly opening talks with Israeli and US suppliers.
These moves share common drivers: China’s growing assertiveness and Russia’s growing unreliability. In this changing landscape, Vietnam must modernize or fall behind. The F-16, in that sense, is a message to neighbors and rivals alike: Hanoi is not retreating into nostalgia, but stepping into a new era of strategic realism.
No foreign policy in Vietnam is executed without a keen awareness of domestic sensitivities. Older generations still hold strong attachments to Russia, recalling a historic ally that provided arms and solidarity during the darkest years of war. Pro-Russia sentiments, especially within sections of the military and party apparatus, still shape elite attitudes. However, Vietnam is not ruled by sentiment. The country’s emerging middle class, urban elites, and rising generation of policymakers are looking beyond ideology. Their focus is on capacity, modernization, and regional deterrence.
The challenge for Hanoi will be control of the narrative control. The F-16 deal must be framed as a sovereign decision, not a capitulation to Washington. It must be sold domestically as part of Vietnam’s long-standing doctrine of strategic autonomy, not as a Western turn, but as an imperative of modernization.
A Small Power’s Strategic Playbook
Vietnam’s greatest strength lies in its disciplined strategic ambiguity. It cooperates deeply with the US on maritime security, peacekeeping, and trade while maintaining cordial, if sometimes tense, relations with China and Russia. This hedging posture is not indecision, it is doctrine.
The F-16 deal, if concluded, would become a case study demonstrating that a small power can use defense procurement not just for deterrence but as diplomacy. By deepening military ties with the US without abandoning its ‘Four No’s’ policy, Vietnam sends a powerful message: sovereignty is not isolation. It is the freedom to choose, and the wisdom to choose carefully. (The "four no’s" defense policy means: no partaking in military alliances, no siding with one country to act against another, no foreign military bases in the Vietnamese territory or using Viet Nam as leverage to counteract other countries, and no using force or threatening to use force in international relations.)
In a fractured world where binary alliances often bring more risk than reward, Vietnam’s ability to straddle multiple poles may offer a model for others. This is not neutrality; it is strategy in motion, rooted in history but focused on the future.
Duy Anh Thai is a Ho Chi Minh City-based geopolitical analyst
7. US-China: what's really at stake in London
Excerpts:
That’s why framing these talks purely as tariff negotiations misses the point. This is about system design and every conversation about chips, data or critical minerals is, in reality, a conversation about who gets to define economic power in the coming decades.
Some investors have already begun adjusting to this reality. Sovereign wealth funds are shifting long-term allocations away from passive indices and toward strategic sectors. Venture capital is increasingly split along ideological lines.
Private equity is retreating from cross-border deals in politically sensitive industries. The smart capital knows this is the macro megatrend.
What London offers this week is a readout not just of policy positions but of political will. Are the world’s two largest economies capable of coexisting with guardrails, or are we headed toward a fully bipolar economic order?
Markets have always priced in risk. But this is something more fundamental. This is about pricing in rival worldviews. And the London talks are where the next chapter begins.
US-China: what's really at stake in London
Forget tech bans and rare earth shipments – trade talks in London to decide who writes the rules for 21st century global economy
asiatimes.com · by Nigel Green
A high-stakes showdown is unfolding this week in London—far from the manufacturing plants of Shenzhen or the trading floors of Wall Street, yet central to the global economic order.
Senior US and Chinese officials will hold a second day of talks today (Tuesday) aimed at de-escalating the most consequential economic rivalry of our time.
After Monday’s first day of talks, US President Donald Trump said, “We are doing well with China. China’s not easy…I’m only getting good reports.” China is negotiating for looser US tech controls while the US wants China to ease limits on rare earth mineral exports.
But for investors watching from Singapore to Silicon Valley, these meetings aren’t just about tariffs. They’re about who writes the rules of the 21st-century global economy.
Both sides are seeking to revive the Geneva framework established last month—an agreement that temporarily eased a volatile tariff standoff by rolling back US import duties on Chinese goods from 145% to 30%, and slashing Chinese tariffs from 125% to 10%.
The compromise was a ceasefire, not a peace treaty. Since then, fiery accusations of non-compliance have resumed.
Washington says Beijing is dragging its feet on critical mineral exports. Beijing accuses the US of doubling down on tech restrictions, particularly on semiconductors and AI.
The talks in London are significant because the stakes have never been higher. China and the US are no longer just competing powers—they are operating two fundamentally divergent systems, each trying to shape the global economic architecture in its own image.
This is a full-spectrum competition that spans data flows, digital currencies, energy policy, national security, and ideology. Investors ignore this at their peril.
To understand the gravity of this week’s negotiations, you have to look beyond the tariff tables and see the wider trajectory.
Under Trump, the US is doubling down on strategic protectionism. The re-imposition of sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs in April was not an isolated action—it was the next phase in a broader effort to reshape American economic exposure.
China, under President Xi Jinping, is responding in kind by accelerating self-reliance campaigns, boosting its military-industrial complex and tightening control over capital flows and foreign technology.
The two economic giants are hurtling toward a split system of parallel supply chains, competing standards, rival digital currencies and mutually exclusive rules for artificial intelligence. The old model—interdependence through globalization—is unraveling in real time.
From a market perspective, this fracturing introduces volatility but also extraordinary opportunity. Strategic sectors are being rapidly repriced.
Defense tech, AI, cybersecurity, semiconductor manufacturing and rare earths have all emerged as proxies in this economic power contest.
Recent capital flows tell the story: US and European investors are ramping up exposure to domestic chip production, while China is injecting vast state funding into its own tech champions and weaponizing industrial policy.
Just last week, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced a new 500 billion yuan (US$69 billion) investment initiative focused on dual-use technologies—those with both civilian and military applications.
Simultaneously, the US Commerce Department expanded its export restrictions to cover quantum computing components and AI training data sets. The message from both sides is unmistakable: dominance in tomorrow’s tech is national security today.
The London talks, then, a theater where the future is being negotiated—or not. With US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer facing off against China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng, these are the most senior discussions since the Geneva reset.
Both capitals know what’s at stake, and neither wants to look like it’s blinking.
Investors are caught in a strange double bind: exposed to the risks of fragmentation, but positioned to benefit from the rush to secure the commanding heights of the future economy. That’s why the London talks are being watched as closely in corporate boardrooms as in diplomatic circles.
If the talks succeed in holding the Geneva line, it could stabilize sentiment and breathe life into cross-border dealmaking that’s been paralyzed by policy uncertainty.
If they fail—and signs point to fundamental misalignments in trust and expectation—then the decoupling will accelerate. Supply chains shift faster, capital reallocates at scale and inflation risks in key inputs like semiconductors and rare earths will spike again.
Investors will need to think in terms of dual portfolios: one optimized for the Western bloc, the other for the Chinese sphere of influence.
However, there is another, deeper implication that should not be overlooked. The current rivalry is not just about GDP or tech leadership; it’s about two economic visions vying for legitimacy.
One is anchored in democratic capitalism, now reasserting control over trade and industrial policy after decades of liberalization. The other is a centralized, state-driven model that promises order, speed and resilience. This isn’t the Cold War redux, it’s something newer, more fluid—and potentially longer-lasting.
That’s why framing these talks purely as tariff negotiations misses the point. This is about system design and every conversation about chips, data or critical minerals is, in reality, a conversation about who gets to define economic power in the coming decades.
Some investors have already begun adjusting to this reality. Sovereign wealth funds are shifting long-term allocations away from passive indices and toward strategic sectors. Venture capital is increasingly split along ideological lines.
Private equity is retreating from cross-border deals in politically sensitive industries. The smart capital knows this is the macro megatrend.
What London offers this week is a readout not just of policy positions but of political will. Are the world’s two largest economies capable of coexisting with guardrails, or are we headed toward a fully bipolar economic order?
Markets have always priced in risk. But this is something more fundamental. This is about pricing in rival worldviews. And the London talks are where the next chapter begins.
asiatimes.com · by Nigel Green
8. 'Spider's Web' warning: The US must prioritize drone defense to avoid Russia’s fate
So now we will chase Operation Spiderweb. But I want to know if we are planning for what comes next? Who is thinking about and planning for the threat beyond Operation Spiderweb? And the one after that?
And as I have previously mentioned, we do not need to be attacked like Russia was to create strategic effects. There only needs to be a credible threat. Our adversaries are going to use shipping containers to infiltrate drones into the US and conduct such attacks. Imagine if a single shipping container was found at a border crossing with Mexico or Canada or at the Port of Los Angeles? What actions would we take? Would we bring our economy to its knees by inspecting every shipping container arriving in the US? Would we establish inspection stations in each state to inspect what comes into their states? We do not need an Operation Spiderweb in the US to do significant damage. we only need the threat of one to make us overreact. The same goes for any country. What would this do to the global economy? Did Ukraine open a pa[andora's box or give us a warning?
This would be unrestricted warfare.
'Spider's Web' warning: The US must prioritize drone defense to avoid Russia’s fate - Breaking Defense
CNAS's Stacie Pettyjohn and Molly Campbell argue in this op-ed that Ukraine's clandestine operation should be a wake-up call for the US military and its own base defense.
By Stacie Pettyjohn and Molly Campbell
on June 09, 2025 at 12:21 PM
breakingdefense.com · by Stacie Pettyjohn
A TV screen shows a clip from the Ukraine’s Operation “Spider’s Web” inside Russian territory during a news conference at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, DC on June 4, 2025. (Photo by OLIVER CONTRERAS/AFP via Getty Images)
With a single, coordinated attack, Ukraine has crippled at least a dozen Russian aircraft – including around 10 percent of Russia’s bomber fleet – using only small drones.
This drone ambush should trigger alarm bells for the US military. Like Russia, the United States is unprepared to meet the growing threat of small commercial drones.
The audacious Ukrainian “Spider’s Web” operation was 18 months in the making. Operatives with the Security Service of Ukraine smuggled 117 first-person view (FPV) quadcopters into Russia, transporting them in crates and driving them thousands of miles in semi-trucks. On the day of the attack, the trucks stationed in a handful of locations in different parts of Russia released swarms of the small, fast drones, guided by goggle-clad pilots to crash into parked AT-50 airborne warning aircraft, and Tu-95 and Tu-22M bombers.
Ukraine has launched regular long-range drone strikes into Russia since 2023, but none of them have caused as much damage as the June 1 attacks.
More Coverage of Ukraine’s Drone Attack:
Small drones flown by skilled pilots can cripple soft targets like unsheltered aircraft with less than five pounds of explosives. Because drones can independently navigate to multiple targets over a large area, a coordinated swarm attack can inflict more damage than a single missile or large strike drone.
Swarming attacks like those launched by Ukraine are an inexpensive way to precisely deliver area effects that previously could only be achieved with cluster missiles. Furthermore, the large, slow-flying drones typically used in standoff strikes are often shot down, but the maneuverable, fast-flying FPVs are difficult to detect and intercept.
Despite the ubiquity of small FPV drones on the frontlines, the Russian military has been seemingly unconcerned about this threat against its interior bases. They were surprised that covert Ukrainian operatives had infiltrated deep inside of Russia near some of its most sensitive military installations.
The United States cannot afford to similarly be caught by surprise and can no longer be complacent to the threat posed by small drones abroad and at home. This attack is wake-up call for US military: its counter-drone efforts are inadequate and are not keeping pace with the threat.
Bases, equipment, troops — every element of a deployed American force will be at risk of drone attack in any future conflict. US defense systems are barely sufficient against current low-end drones that are typically fired in ones or twos and would be quickly overwhelmed by autonomous drone swarms or large, sophisticated attacks.
Bases in the US homeland likewise must also be defended against a surprise drone barrage. Though not in coordinated swarms, hundreds of small drone incursions occur each year around US bases. In 2023, small drones flew over Langley Air Force base 17 times, observing F-22 stealth fighters parked, uncovered, on the tarmac. Though there has not been a drone attack on a base inside the United States, once could occur at any time and American aircraft are sitting ducks.
Defeating drones requires a robust layered defensive system with protective measures, such as hardened shelters, and offensive counter drone systems. Early warning sensors that help to identify drones are the foundation of any defensive system, but priority installations also need weapons that can disable or destroy a drone, such as jammers, guns, and missiles.
Only high-powered microwaves can neutralize a large swarm at once and are not dependent on ammunition stockpiles. Thus, multiple types of counter-drone systems are needed to work together, so that they cannot easily be circumvented by a skillful adversary.
Perhaps most importantly, however, is a command-and-control system with AI to integrate the layered defenses, process sensor data for positive threat identification, and to automate the engagement process. This would enable operations at the speed required to successfully intercept fast-moving drones and large attacks. Countering drones is particularly difficult in the homeland, as American troops abroad can often shoot down drones, but inside the United States low-collateral defeat approaches are necessary to ensure civilian and airspace safety.
On paper, the Defense Department has made defeating small drones an imperative since 2016, but, in reality, the response has been slow and inadequate. The small drone threat is already here, and it will only intensify.
While Golden Dome for America has brought renewed focus on homeland defense at the highest levels of government, there is a risk that it will exclusively focus on defeating high-end missiles and neglect small drones.
On Friday President Trump released an executive order on countering drones and restoring airspace sovereignty, but more investment is urgently needed to reduce current vulnerabilities. The details of the 2026 presidential defense budget request have yet to be released, and Congress has an opportunity to act in defense of American forces at home and abroad.
Congress must authorize and appropriate adequate funding for comprehensive counter-drone defense training and improved air and drone defense technologies. The United States needs to learn from Russia’s monumental failure and make countering drones a priority, or risk suffering the same fate.
Stacie Pettyjohn is a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, where Molly Campbell is a research assistant.
breakingdefense.com · by Stacie Pettyjohn
9. New Unit Explores How to Deploy Drone Wingmen
It seems to me a "drone wingmen" concept has a lot of potential application in the land and sea domains as well as air. Imagine every tank, warship, or even every soldier or Marine having their own "drone wingmen" (emphasis on the plural). I still like a squad of 3 soldiers: 1 squad leader and 2 fire team leaders with each fire team leader leading 5 robotic or drone soldiers.
New Unit Explores How to Deploy Drone Wingmen
airandspaceforces.com · by David Roza · June 9, 2025
June 9, 2025 | By David Roza
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The Air Force has launched a new unit dedicated to figuring out how to use wingman drones in tandem with manned aircraft over future battlefields.
It’s an upgrade for the Experimental Operations Unit, which has operated as a detachment of the 53rd Wing since 2023. On June 5, the wing formally elevated the unit to sit on par with other operational squadrons at a ceremony at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.
“This is a pivotal moment for our force,” 53rd Wing Commander Col. Daniel Lehoski said in a press release. “The EOU embodies our commitment to rapid innovation and ensuring our warfighters have the most advanced tools to dominate the future battlespace.”
The Collaborative Combat Aircraft program aims to provide the Air Force with “affordable mass,” dramatically expanding the number of aircraft and missiles the combat fleet can put in the air without risking additional lives.
Pilots aboard F-35, F-22, and the upcoming F-47 fighters could manage a handful of CCAs equipped with electronic-warfare tools to disrupt air defenses, for example, allowing the manned jets behind them to slip into enemy territory. In that spirit, the motto scrawled across the bottom of the EOU’s unit emblem is “Kill More, Die Less.”
Col. Joshua M. Biedermann, left, 53rd Test and Evaluation Group commander, passes the unit guidon to Lt. Col. Matthew W. Jensen, inaugural commander of the Experimental Operations Unit (EOU), during the EOU activation ceremony at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, June 5, 2025. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Michael Sanders)The drones are among the Air Force’s top acquisition priorities and underscore the growing role of autonomy in combat. Still, Maj. Gen. Joseph D. Kunkel, the Air Force’s force design director, said in January that the service will keep the jets’ level of autonomy relatively simple to build them faster.
“What we thought was going to be this requirement for a great amount of autonomy and a significant amount of artificial intelligence, and really, really complex algorithms,” he said, has turned out to be instead “frankly, simple autonomy, simple algorithms, a little bit of AI sprinkled in.”
“We’ve been able to decrease pilot workload to a degree where they can really, really effectively utilize these capabilities,” he said.
Last month, the Air Force announced that two CCA prototypes had begun ground testing ahead of a first flight planned this summer. The two CCAs are the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems YFQ-42A and Anduril Industries’ YFQ-44A—the first unmanned aircraft in the Air Force inventory to receive a fighter designation. Production of as many as 200 of the autonomous aircraft is supposed to be underway by 2028; CCAs are slated to join the fighter fleet by the end of the decade.
The Air Force is still developing its concept of operations for CCAs, which is where the Nellis unit comes in. According to the release, the unit will test and refine human-machine teaming for CCAs in realistic scenarios.
“We are here to accelerate the delivery of combat-ready capabilities to the warfighter,” EOU commander Lt. Col. Matthew Jensen said in the release. “Our experimental operations will ensure that CCA are immediately viable as a credible combat capability that increases joint force survivability and lethality.”
Nellis is well-equipped to handle that mission: The base is home to a major training range as well as hosts a branch of the Joint Integrated Test and Training Center, where joint and coalition partners can simulate future air battles. The unit expects to fly real-world experiments to verify simulated results and further refine its tactics.
Air
airandspaceforces.com · by David Roza · June 9, 2025
10. U.S. Project at Philippine Navy Base to Support Unmanned Surface Vessels
Excerpt:
Washington and Manila’s joint defense industrial base vision, which seeks to support Philippine industries developing the country’s self-reliant defense posture, identified unmanned systems as a priority area “with the greatest potential for near-term cooperation.”
U.S. Project at Philippine Navy Base to Support Unmanned Surface Vessels - USNI News
news.usni.org · by Aaron-Matthew Lariosa · June 9, 2025
Marine Corps 1st Lt. Michael Prendergast, a platoon commander assigned to Bravo Company, Battalion Landing Team 1/5, 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and a native of Florida, instructs a Philippine Marine assigned to Marine Battalion Landing Team 11, 3rd Marine Brigade, to fire an M3A1 84 mm multi-role, anti-armor, anti-personnel weapon system during a live-fire range during exercise KAMANDAG 8 at Naval Detachment Oyster Bay, Palawan Province, Philippines, Oct. 17, 2024. US Marine Corps Photo
The U.S. is planning to upgrade a Philippine naval base crucial for Manila’s South China Sea operations with a maintenance facility capable of supporting unmanned surface vessels, according to documents.
Naval Detachment Oyster Bay is home to Cyclone-class patrol ships, fast attack boats, Philippine Marine maritime units and resupply vessels dedicated to ferrying supplies and personnel to Manila’s outposts in the disputed waters. Its strategic location on the coast of Western Palawan offers forces deployed at Oyster Bay the ability to reach Philippine outposts faster than previous staging points on the province’s eastern ports.
A U.S. government notice released last month detailed an American-funded boat repair facility at the remote base for the maintenance of Philippine government vessels. The document was recently modified to include drone boats of the same specifications that Washington previously provided to Manila, specifically the Maritime Tactical Systems Devil Ray T-38.
“The building’s structure, air conditioning, and electrical systems shall support various Host Nation (HN) vessels, including 11.6m (38ft) unmanned surface vessels (USVs),” reads the project notice.
Aside from the maintenance facility, the upgrade also tackles existing infrastructure issues at Oyster Bay. The Pentagon expects to issue a contract for the project within the next two months.
A series of spats between the Philippines and China over maritime features within the Philippine exclusive economic zone between 2023 and 2024 prompted the U.S. to increase defense cooperation, bolstering bilateral military drills and equipment support to America’s only Southeast Asian defense treaty ally. The supply of the Devil Ray T-38 and four MANTAS T-12 unmanned surface vessels to improve Philippine maritime domain awareness in the South China Sea has been one of the most significant developments between the two allies. he Philippine Navy has highlighted the transfer, supported by a forward-deployed American military task force to train Philippine drone operators, in the country’s fleet modernization efforts.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth highlighted unmanned surface vessel operations during his visit to Manila earlier this year, emphasizing joint training with the systems at Balikatan 2025. The Maritime Security Consortium, a public-private initiative that aims to provide up to $95 million annually in readily available unmanned systems to states across Southeast Asia, identified this year’s iteration of Balikatan as a venue to demonstrate the how unmanned systems can meet “pressing maritime security challenges.”
During a visit to Palawan in November, former U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he expected to see more drone boat transfers to the Philippines.
Washington and Manila’s joint defense industrial base vision, which seeks to support Philippine industries developing the country’s self-reliant defense posture, identified unmanned systems as a priority area “with the greatest potential for near-term cooperation.”
Related
news.usni.org · by Aaron-Matthew Lariosa · June 9, 2025
11. US-China trade showdown: where do the talks stand after Day 1?
Excerpts:
Beijing has changed its negotiating team since the previous round of US-China trade talks in Geneva, Switzerland, last month, with Commerce Minister Wang Wentao replacing Vice-Finance Minister Liao Min for the meetings in London.
The shift appears to mirror a personnel reshuffle by the US, which has added US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to its delegation for London.
Both changes have added to the impression that export controls – rather than tariffs – have become the focus of negotiations this time round. Wang and Lutnick are the ministers overseeing both countries’ export restrictions.
On Tuesday, Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily published two op-eds about the ongoing trade talks.
One hailed the complementary natures of the US and Chinese economies, while adding that US export controls on hi-tech products had harmed America’s own companies.
Washington “has overstretched the concept of national security and politicised trade issues,” the article said. “The relentless restrictive measures have caused American businesses to miss out on opportunities in the Chinese market.
“We believe that through equal-footed consultation and pragmatic cooperation, China and the United States can find mutually beneficial and win-win solutions,” it added.
The other commentary justified China’s rare earth export controls, saying it is China’s legitimate right to safeguard its own natural resources.
US-China trade showdown: where do the talks stand after Day 1?
Chinese and American officials are set to begin a second day of negotiations in London, with both sides sending signals about their expectations
Ji Siqiin Beijing
Published: 11:16am, 10 Jun 2025Updated: 11:23am, 10 Jun 2025
Top officials from China and the United States are expected to start a second day of negotiations in London on Tuesday morning local time, as the two sides strive to de-escalate a stand-off over trade and technology that has sent shock waves across the global economy.
No official statements were released after the first round of talks on Monday, which finished without a deal being agreed. But both sides have sent signals regarding their expectations.
US
A White House official indicated soon after the talks began that the US would be willing to ease some export controls targeting China in exchange for Beijing allowing more rare earth minerals to be shipped to the American market.
Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC that “immediately after the handshake, any export controls from the US will be eased, and the rare earths will be released in volume, and then we can go back to negotiating smaller matters”.
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, US President Donald Trump authorised the American delegation to negotiate away recent restrictions on the sale of advanced technologies and other products to China ahead of the London talks.
The recent US export controls cover jet engines and related parts, though these were never publicly announced by Washington; design software Chinese companies need to make advanced microchips; and ethane, a component of natural gas that is used to manufacture plastics, the report said.
China
Beijing has changed its negotiating team since the previous round of US-China trade talks in Geneva, Switzerland, last month, with Commerce Minister Wang Wentao replacing Vice-Finance Minister Liao Min for the meetings in London.
The shift appears to mirror a personnel reshuffle by the US, which has added US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to its delegation for London.
Both changes have added to the impression that export controls – rather than tariffs – have become the focus of negotiations this time round. Wang and Lutnick are the ministers overseeing both countries’ export restrictions.
On Tuesday, Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily published two op-eds about the ongoing trade talks.
One hailed the complementary natures of the US and Chinese economies, while adding that US export controls on hi-tech products had harmed America’s own companies.
Washington “has overstretched the concept of national security and politicised trade issues,” the article said. “The relentless restrictive measures have caused American businesses to miss out on opportunities in the Chinese market.
“We believe that through equal-footed consultation and pragmatic cooperation, China and the United States can find mutually beneficial and win-win solutions,” it added.
The other commentary justified China’s rare earth export controls, saying it is China’s legitimate right to safeguard its own natural resources.
It further added that China had approved a number of applications for rare earth-related exports in accordance with the law, and was ready to deepen dialogue with other nations over export controls on the strategic resources.
The paper also published an interview with Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei Technologies, on the same day. He stressed that when facing external barriers, it was necessary to accept the situation and confront it head on.
“You don’t focus on the difficulties; you just get it done and keep moving forward, step by step,” Ren said.
One day after the US and China agreed a trade truce in Geneva, Washington escalated its crackdown on Huawei, banning the global sale of advanced Chinese-made microchips and name-checking Huawei’s Ascend series of AI chips in the announcement.
“The US has overstated Huawei’s achievements: we’re not that advanced yet. We still have to work hard to live up to that praise. In terms of single-chip performance, we remain one generation behind the US,” Ren said.
“But we compensate for physics with mathematics, for Moore’s Law with non-Moore approaches, and for single-chip limitations with clustered computing – and in practice, we can still achieve usable results.”
Time and location
The talks are taking place at Lancaster House, a British government property in central London.
Negotiations wrapped up on Monday evening and are set to resume at 10am local time on Tuesday, a source familiar with the negotiations told Reuters.
Ji Siqi
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Ji Siqi joined the Post in 2020 and covers China economy. She graduated from Columbia Journalism School and the University of Hong Kong.
12. U.S. Army Forces Command Leader Discusses Readiness, Transformation at CSIS Strategic Landpower Dialogue
Excerpts:
"You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud,” Poppas reminded the audience from a famous Korean War history book. “I think that’s as true then as it is today and as we move forward.”
Poppas, who is in charge of military readiness for much of the U.S. Army, also spoke about the Army’s “Transformation In Contact”, an initiative Poppas described as a rapid, 12-to-18-month process to integrate new technologies and tactics into Army operations.
“I’m a big fan of Transformation In Contact because of the speed in which we’re executing,” Poppas said, explaining how TIC allows FORSCOM to adapt tactical lessons learned from ongoing conflicts -- such as the war in Ukraine -- to enhance capabilities like armor and light-vehicle operations. Transformation In Contact allows the Army to test and refine equipment and organizational structures, based on real-time feedback from commanders.
Moderated by Dr. Tom Karako, a senior fellow at CSIS’s International Security Program and director of the Missile Defense Project, the discussion stressed the critical role of landpower in modern warfare.
Poppas also highlighted the Army’s ongoing role in the Indo-Pacific, emphasizing forward presence, long-range fires to support naval operations, and sustainment of pre-positioned military logistics to maintain operational endurance.
U.S. Army Forces Command Leader Discusses Readiness, Transformation at CSIS Strategic Landpower Dialogue
https://www.army.mil/article/286171/u_s_army_forces_command_leader_discusses_readiness_transformation_at_csis_strategic_landpower_dialogue
By FORSCOM Public AffairsJune 9, 2025
“Everything you love about the U.S. Army resides in U.S. Army Forces Command,” the Army command’s general said June 5 as part of a presentation about the need for “boots on the ground” in today’s uncertain world, underscoring FORSCOM’s pivotal readiness role in preparing Soldiers and units for multidomain operations
Gen. Andrew Poppas, commanding general of U.S. Army Forces Command, spoke during the seventh installment of the Strategic Landpower Dialogue series, sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in partnership with the Association of the U.S. Army. The event focused on Army force readiness, emerging threats and the transformation of warfighting strategies in an evolving global security landscape.
Poppas, discussed the Army’s enduring commitment to landpower readiness and adaptability in the face of dynamic global challenges.
"You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud,” Poppas reminded the audience from a famous Korean War history book. “I think that’s as true then as it is today and as we move forward.”
Poppas, who is in charge of military readiness for much of the U.S. Army, also spoke about the Army’s “Transformation In Contact”, an initiative Poppas described as a rapid, 12-to-18-month process to integrate new technologies and tactics into Army operations.
“I’m a big fan of Transformation In Contact because of the speed in which we’re executing,” Poppas said, explaining how TIC allows FORSCOM to adapt tactical lessons learned from ongoing conflicts -- such as the war in Ukraine -- to enhance capabilities like armor and light-vehicle operations. Transformation In Contact allows the Army to test and refine equipment and organizational structures, based on real-time feedback from commanders.
Moderated by Dr. Tom Karako, a senior fellow at CSIS’s International Security Program and director of the Missile Defense Project, the discussion stressed the critical role of landpower in modern warfare.
Poppas also highlighted the Army’s ongoing role in the Indo-Pacific, emphasizing forward presence, long-range fires to support naval operations, and sustainment of pre-positioned military logistics to maintain operational endurance.
Drawing from ongoing global events, Poppas referenced a recent attack in Russia as an example of evolving warfare, stressing the importance of leadership and the “will to fight” in strengthening resilient formations.
“It’s about winning trust and empowering our leaders,” he said, noting that tactical lessons from ongoing conflicts worldwide are shaping the Army’s approach to readiness and leadership development.
Poppas said FORSCOM’s core purpose is warfighting and winning. He outlined the command’s “Four Wins” principles: “1. Win trust and empower leaders; 2. Win the first fight; 3. Win the future fight; 4. and Win as a balanced, Total Army.” These four driving principles for FORSCOM are synchronized with the Chief of Staff of the Army’s top focus area: warfighting.
Poppas spoke a little over a week prior to the Army’s 250th birthday on June 14.
“If you look at those 250 years, we have fought and dominated on land throughout multiple different campaigns and wars,” he said. “That was true in our history, and it'll be true in the future moving forward.”
As the Army navigates a rapidly changing security environment, Poppas’ insights underscored the importance of agility, leadership and innovation in maintaining the U.S. Army’s status as the world’s most lethal and capable land force.
The Strategic Landpower Dialogue series engages military and defense leaders. During the event, retired Gen. Robert Brown, AUSA President and CEO, credited the partnership with CSIS for amplifying discussions on Army landpower’s enduring relevance. “Land is one of the domains, and it’s where humans spend most of their time,” Brown said, reinforcing the series’ focus on addressing critical security issues.
A recording of the event is available on the CSIS YouTube channel, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WdGXpWaKeo.
13. Why AFRICOM Should Remain Independent: Preserving Strategic Agility through Dedicated Theater Command
Excerpts:
AFRICOM is not a Cold War legacy command, but a modern platform tailored for irregular, political-military competition. Maintaining its independent combatant command status signals enduring United States commitment to regional security, governance, and development—inclusive of not just Africa, but also Europe and the Middle East. Any perceived downgrading will reverberate far beyond Stuttgart.
General Langley, in his 2025 Senate Armed Services Committee posture statement, emphasized that Africa is a “nexus theater” where global interests converge—rapidly emerging as a focal point of strategic competition with its youth-dominant population, economic potential, and strategic geography. Langley warned that Chinese and Russian influence operations are accelerating, leveraging infrastructure investments, digital platforms, and security partnerships to outpace U.S. efforts. The proximity of China’s only overseas military base to U.S. forces in Djibouti, as well as its geographic position as a chokepoint to the Red Sea, underscore the urgency of maintaining a dedicated command focused on African dynamics.
This is not only a moment of urgency, but also of opportunity. As highlighted by Vice Adm. Thomas Ishee, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa, Africa presents an opening for increased U.S. military training, assistance, and engagement that aligns with mutual security interests. By empowering regional partners and expanding persistent presence, the United States can shape African outcomes that reinforce global stability and uphold democratic norms. AFRICOM, as the platform for that engagement, should be optimized, not merged, if we are to lead where it matters most.
Looking beyond security, the United States has a long-term interest in the continent’s economic potential. Africa’s population is projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050—more than six times that of the United States—making it the fastest-growing labor and consumer base on the planet. While the continent’s combined GDP currently trails that of the United States by a wide margin, it has the potential to double or even quadruple its purchasing power and middle-class growth over the coming decades. This emerging demographic and economic powerhouse will help shape the global economy in the second half of the 21st century. Do we want to cede that future relationship—and the influence it brings—solely to China AFRICOM is the connective tissue that can help the United States maintain that stake in Africa’s trajectory.
If the United States is serious about competing globally while remaining agile and effective, it must back words with action. In the 21st-century contest for influence, presence is power—and AFRICOM must stand independent to be present where it matters most.
Why AFRICOM Should Remain Independent: Preserving Strategic Agility through Dedicated Theater Command
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/06/10/why-africom-should-remain-independent/
by Joel Richardson
|
06.10.2025 at 06:00am
Introduction: A Command for a Continent
Maintaining U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) as an independent geographic combatant command (CCMD) is more than a bureaucratic decision—it is a strategic imperative as global competition intensifies. Proposals to merge AFRICOM with U.S. European Command (EUCOM) in the name of efficiency risk undercutting U.S. influence in one of the most dynamic, contested, and complex regions of the world.
As a former global force management (GFM) planner and incoming security cooperation officer assigned to Africa, I argue from firsthand experience. AFRICOM’s unique design, its weight of 4-star leadership, and its critical role in strategic competition and trans-regional challenges offer the clarity, prioritization, and responsiveness essential to meeting today’s—and tomorrow’s—strategic challenges.
Instead of subordinating AFRICOM to EUCOM, the Defense Department should pursue three targeted reforms to optimize AFRICOM’s utility: (1) Enhance Cross-Theater Synchronization to share resources without sacrificing strategic autonomy; (2) Expand Interagency Integration—in support of upcoming State Department restructuring—to better align military, diplomatic, and development efforts; and (3) Accelerate Data Architecture Modernization to create true efficiencies through automation, optimizing workflows, and exploiting data as a strategic asset.
AFRICOM’s Unique Design Meets a Unique Mission
Established in 2007, AFRICOM is unlike other CCMDs. Its small-footprint, light-touch approach—relying on partner capacity-building, interagency coordination, and regional engagement—enables persistent presence without permanent basing. With 53 countries in its area of responsibility, AFRICOM supports not only counterterrorism and crisis response but also long-term stability efforts against a backdrop of fragile states, violent extremist organizations (VEOs), humanitarian crises, and strategic competition with China and Russia. AFRICOM’s integrated civilian-military structure and low-cost operating model already make it one of the most efficient commands within the Unified Command Plan (UCP). Downgrading it to a sub-unified command under EUCOM would diminish that effectiveness and send the wrong message to partners and adversaries alike.
AFRICOM’s success stories underscore its tailored and effective approach. From facilitating the G5 Sahel Joint Force’s coordination efforts, to conducting logistics and medical partnerships with African Union (AU) and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) members, AFRICOM has built a reputation as a trusted and reliable partner. Its support to Exercise FLINTLOCK and multinational operations in the Gulf of Guinea have increased maritime domain awareness and regional cooperation. In East Africa, its ongoing collaboration with Djiboutian and Somali partners has enabled a continued counterterrorism presence without large-scale deployments. These examples reveal that AFRICOM’s unique model allows it to respond nimbly across diverse political and operational environments—without triggering the backlash that often follows heavier U.S. military footprints.
Geographic and Strategic Complexity Demand 4-Star Level Focus
Africa is not monolithic. Regions like the Sahel, the Horn, the Gulf of Guinea, and Southern Africa each present unique operational environments and political dynamics. EUCOM, already stretched with NATO, Ukraine, and expanding security demands in the Arctic, cannot absorb Africa’s complexity without losing focus and further diluting its resources. Subordinating AFRICOM would risk treating the continent’s crises as peripheral concerns. The result would be slower decision-making, reduced prioritization, and minimal advocacy during the GFM process, where having a four-star general or flag officer at the table directly impacts force allocation.
Ongoing operations in Europe reinforce this concern. EUCOM’s focus on supporting Ukraine has consumed considerable intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets and strategic mobility, often leaving competing theaters like Africa with limited residual capacity. The situation mirrors challenges seen in past sub-unified arrangements—such as U.S. Forces Korea under INDOPACOM—where regional requirements have, at times, been deprioritized due to broader theater commitments. If AFRICOM were similarly subordinated, African contingencies could face delayed or diminished support in times of crisis, undermining long-term regional engagement and the ability to maintain influence.
Strategic Competition Requires a Clear Signal of Commitment
“Africa is a nexus theater where strategic competition is playing out in real time. We must remain present, credible, and engaged—or risk ceding influence to authoritarian rivals.”— General Michael Langley, AFRICOM Commander, 2025 Posture Statement
China and Russia are not hesitating in Africa. Beijing is building strategic infrastructure and digital ecosystems across the continent, ranging from the Peoples’ Liberation Army’s only overseas naval base in Djibouti to widespread Belt and Road investments like Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway. Likewise, Africa is becoming a central platform for Moscow’s global strategy via arms sales and security provision through the Wagner Group. In such a contested information environment, perception matters. Merging AFRICOM signals strategic retreat. This perceived disengagement could unravel years of trust-building, reduce access and influence, and open a vacuum for authoritarian competitors to exploit. U.S. Central Command is a cogent foreshadow—it already feels the effects of this abandonment narrative as China and Russia capitalize on reduced American engagement and force posture.
AFRICOM’s value must be understood within the broader framework of global campaigning as articulated in the 2022 National Defense Strategy and the Joint Concept for Competing. Both documents emphasize the importance of integrated deterrence and persistent engagement in the gray zone, where influence, access, and partnerships matter as much, if not more, than physical basing or troop levels. AFRICOM’s model directly supports these objectives by enabling presence without provocation, trust-building without coercion, and partnership without overextension. In an era defined by information dominance and strategic competition, the command’s agility and theater-specific focus make it indispensable.
Proponents of merging AFRICOM into EUCOM argue that such a move would streamline command relationships, reduce redundancy, and create efficiencies in logistics, infrastructure, and theater-level planning. They point to the dual-hatted nature of United States Air Forces in Europe – Air Forces Africa (USAFE-AFAFRICA) and U.S. Army Europe and Africa (USAREUR-AF) and the potential for integrated support functions as justification. However, these theoretical efficiencies risk becoming operational liabilities.
Africa’s security challenges—marked by irregular threats, state fragility, and dynamic political landscapes—require tailored attention that cannot be absorbed into a command primarily focused on conventional deterrence in Europe. Combining commands may create the perception of efficiency based on saving staff billets, but the loss in dedicated senior advocacy, situational awareness, and responsiveness will create outsized operational risk to U.S. military forces operating on the content and outsized strategic risk to U.S. national security.
Both EUCOM Commander General Christopher Cavoli and AFRICOM Commander Gen. Michael Langley expressed strong reservations despite the short-term allure of cost savings, warning that merging the commands would create an unmanageable span of control and risk diluting focus on the distinct political and operational environments inherent to each theater.
What Happens in Africa Doesn’t Stay in Africa
Africa is also home to many additional threats that serve as strategic distractors to competition with China as our pacing threat. These include terrorism, pandemics, and human migration that all produce trans-regional spillover effects that have, and could again, directly impact the U.S. homeland. An independent and adequately resourced AFRICOM is critical to ensure that these threats do not metastasize.
As the “global epicenter of terrorism,” Africa now accounts for over half of all terrorism-related deaths. Groups like al-Shabaab, ISIS-West Africa, and Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) are expanding both their territorial control and transnational ambitions. Their ability to destabilize local governments and draw international fighters reflects a threat environment that extends beyond regional borders. AFRICOM’s ability to engage early and often with partner forces helps prevent localized threats from escalating into global ones.
Beginning in 2014, West Africa’s Ebola epidemic spread to seven additional countries across Europe (Italy, Spain, United Kingdom), Africa (Mali, Nigeria, Senegal) and most notably—the United States. AFRICOM’s response to the outbreak demonstrated its unique ability to rapidly organize logistics, medical response, and host-nation coordination at scale. In an era where pandemics travel faster than military deployments, early detection and forward engagement are critical. No other combatant command is designed with the interagency integration and light footprint needed to execute such missions across austere environments.
Mass irregular human migration from Africa also creates significant trans-regional spillover challenges. When Niger repealed its anti-trafficking law in early 2024, migrant flows to the European Union surged. The resulting political friction and humanitarian strain were direct consequences of fragile governance in the Sahel. Russia is also postured in the Sahel and Libya to leverage migrants as “hybrid weapons” to pressure Europe as part of its long-term gray zone political warfare campaign. As Europe grapples with migration challenges, it is AFRICOM—not EUCOM—that is best positioned to support African partners in maintaining border security and building rule-of-law institutions. Subordinating AFRICOM risks overlooking these complex relationships in favor of narrower Euro-Atlantic priorities.
A Better Approach: Optimize AFRICOM, Do Not Subordinate It
From my experience in GFM planning and Joint Staff sourcing forums, the presence of a combatant commander matters. Those with command-level representation have greater advocacy in competition for limited ISR platforms, special operations enablers, and expeditionary logistics. Reducing AFRICOM to a sub-unified command would diminish its ability to compete for the necessary capabilities to fulfill mission requirements—especially as competition below armed conflict intensifies.
Rather than consolidating AFRICOM with EUCOM, the Defense Department should pursue three targeted reforms to enhance its utility:
- Enhance Cross-Theater Synchronization. Establish formal GFM coordination mechanisms with EUCOM and CENTCOM to share resources without sacrificing strategic autonomy. This would especially include ISR, mobility, and cyber assets to achieve outsized effects with minimal presence.
-
Expand Interagency Integration. Bolster civilian presence within AFRICOM HQ and joint planning structures to align diplomatic and development efforts more tightly with military objectives. This would align with and support the upcoming State Department restructuring intended to streamline regional bureaus and embassies to increase functionality.
-
Accelerate Data Architecture Modernization. Leverage commercial software and artificial intelligence to digitize existing processes and improve decision-making. True efficiencies—and increased effectiveness, can be found in automation, optimizing workflows, and exploiting data as a strategic asset. This would align with Defense Secretary Hegseth’s recent directive for all Defense Department components to embrace rapid software acquisition pathways and commercial solutions, similar to EUCOM’s current modernization efforts.
Conclusion: Posture and Partnerships Reflect Priorities
AFRICOM is not a Cold War legacy command, but a modern platform tailored for irregular, political-military competition. Maintaining its independent combatant command status signals enduring United States commitment to regional security, governance, and development—inclusive of not just Africa, but also Europe and the Middle East. Any perceived downgrading will reverberate far beyond Stuttgart.
General Langley, in his 2025 Senate Armed Services Committee posture statement, emphasized that Africa is a “nexus theater” where global interests converge—rapidly emerging as a focal point of strategic competition with its youth-dominant population, economic potential, and strategic geography. Langley warned that Chinese and Russian influence operations are accelerating, leveraging infrastructure investments, digital platforms, and security partnerships to outpace U.S. efforts. The proximity of China’s only overseas military base to U.S. forces in Djibouti, as well as its geographic position as a chokepoint to the Red Sea, underscore the urgency of maintaining a dedicated command focused on African dynamics.
This is not only a moment of urgency, but also of opportunity. As highlighted by Vice Adm. Thomas Ishee, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa, Africa presents an opening for increased U.S. military training, assistance, and engagement that aligns with mutual security interests. By empowering regional partners and expanding persistent presence, the United States can shape African outcomes that reinforce global stability and uphold democratic norms. AFRICOM, as the platform for that engagement, should be optimized, not merged, if we are to lead where it matters most.
Looking beyond security, the United States has a long-term interest in the continent’s economic potential. Africa’s population is projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050—more than six times that of the United States—making it the fastest-growing labor and consumer base on the planet. While the continent’s combined GDP currently trails that of the United States by a wide margin, it has the potential to double or even quadruple its purchasing power and middle-class growth over the coming decades. This emerging demographic and economic powerhouse will help shape the global economy in the second half of the 21st century. Do we want to cede that future relationship—and the influence it brings—solely to China AFRICOM is the connective tissue that can help the United States maintain that stake in Africa’s trajectory.
If the United States is serious about competing globally while remaining agile and effective, it must back words with action. In the 21st-century contest for influence, presence is power—and AFRICOM must stand independent to be present where it matters most.
(Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.)
Tags: AFRICOM, Al-Shabaab, Belt and Road Initiative, CENTCOM, China, combatant command, counterterrorism, Deterrence, EUCOM, Integrated deterrence, interagency, irregular warfare, ISIS, Russia, Security Cooperation, Strategic Competition, terrorism
About The Author
- Joel Richardson
-
Major Joel J. Richardson is a U.S. Army Field Artillery officer with previous service as a Global Force Management Planner at Special Operations Command Central (SOCCENT). He is an incoming Security Cooperation Officer bound for the AFRICOM area of responsibility and writes on operational planning, security cooperation, and regional competition.
14. Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb Was Smart, Not Reckless
Conclusion (with which I concur):
The US should enable Ukraine to earn more battlefield victories, sell it the weapons it needs, support Ukrainian domestic weapons production, and encourage a joint-US and European security architecture in Ukraine to prevent further aggression. And it should impose biting sanctions on Russia, more and more effective than the Biden sanctions, so to dry up Russia’s war funding. Until then, Ukraine will do what any sovereign nation will do that wants to live and live on its own terms and with its national identity intact — and in doing so, deserves even more admiration from Americans.
Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb Was Smart, Not Reckless
https://providencemag.com/2025/06/ukraines-operation-spiderweb-was-smart-not-reckless/
By Rebeccah Heinrichs on June 4, 2025
read
5 min
In a stunning operation, on June 1, 2025, the Ukrainian SBU Security Service carried out Operation Spiderweb. The operation included a large-scale coordinated drone strike on five Russian air bases: Belaya, Dyagilevo, Ivanovo Severny, Olenya, and Ukrainka stretching more than 2,000 miles into Russian territory and miles from one another. The Russians had sought to keep their strategic bombers dispersed to lower the risk of damage to a significant portion of the fleet if Ukraine could pull off a larger-scale attack. According to Ukraine, the Ukrainians damaged or destroyed 41 Russian aircraft including bombers. (It’s important to note that there has been no third-party verification of these numbers.)
Much of the public response from those who have been fearful of escalation was predictably alarmist due to Ukraine’s choice of target—those Russian bombers are highly valuable to Russia and can carry either conventional or nuclear weapons. The concern for Ukraine escalating the war is in keeping with the Biden administration’s constant fear of escalation, which motivated the Biden policies to limit US support to Ukraine and to restrain the range and type of Ukrainian attacks. The effect was that Ukraine could defend itself but only in limited ways that would not hurt the Russians “too much.” Thus, the war never had a strategy to enable Ukraine to win a battlefield advantage over the Russians or to impose such a military defeat, even tactically, to convince the Russians that even though they had help from China, North Korea, and Iran, the defending nation — Ukraine — had committed backing from the entire NATO alliance, including the United States. Thus, the Russians grew in confidence and the war basically stayed even and is grinding on in a terrible and tragic war of attrition.
But the critics of Ukraine’s attack are taking the wrong lessons. Operation Spider Web was not unique in Ukraine’s choice of target. Ukraine had already successfully carried out a stunning attack against a Russian Millerovo Air Base taking out a Su-30SM fighter jet. The attack occurred on February 25, 2022, the same month of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Later that year the Ukrainians attacked Russian Engels-2 Air Base on December 5, 2022, with drones, hitting and damaging a Tu-95 strategic bomber. Then on August 19, 2023, Ukrainians used drones to destroy a Tu-22M3 bomber at Soltsy Air Base. The bombers are the same platforms that have been launching conventional cruise missiles at Ukraine. Those planes, and the runways they require, are legitimate and smart targets for Ukraine. Russia should not be left with the impression that because they are so valuable to it, and tucked away from Ukraine’s border, they have sanctuary.
And this is why Operation Spiderweb was unique. It was remarkable in scale and distance from Ukraine’s borders but also in its use of modern technology and its guile. Ukraine reportedly snuck the drones into trucks and then when the trucks transported the drones, artificial intelligence selected the targets and carried out the attack at a short distance.
Will Russia respond with an even more overwhelming counter strike, which will ratchet up the escalation? We will soon learn. But if it does, Ukraine is not to blame for Russia’s response. The Russians have agency and have been escalating at various inflection points over the course of the war knowing the United States has placed restraints on Ukraine. Most recently, Russia launched yet another large scale attacks against civilian targets, violating the laws of armed conflict, and the just war doctrine’s principle of discrimination. Notably, Russia has continued these atrocities all while rejecting the US-negotiated ceasefire, which Ukraine has long agreed to without condition. The US restrictions on Ukraine to restrain it, has not resulted in an absence of escalation; the Russians have not stopped fighting, have not moderated their war aims, and have not been restrained to only hitting Ukrainian military targets.
As we have witnessed throughout the war, both sides have sought to achieve military advantages, and on the side of the Russians, it has included intentionally causing societal destruction and carrying out other war crimes to hurt Ukrainian morale and decrease Ukrainian society’s will to fight. Ukraine, with the support of the NATO alliance, has sought to abide by the laws of war and the additional restrictions some of its most powerful allies have placed on it.
It is a myth that any one country can “control” escalation, let alone the stronger patron supplying weapons to one of the combatant countries. Each country can only control itself. But if the United States wishes to affect the way Ukraine carries on the fight and is seeking to mediate between the two nations to encourage a diplomatic outcome, it would be wise to clearly and publicly back Ukraine as the defender. The less Ukraine feels support and solidarity from the United States, the more daring and riskier it may decide to behave, if it thinks it’s the only way to survive as a sovereign nation and not to lose additional territory.
The US should enable Ukraine to earn more battlefield victories, sell it the weapons it needs, support Ukrainian domestic weapons production, and encourage a joint-US and European security architecture in Ukraine to prevent further aggression. And it should impose biting sanctions on Russia, more and more effective than the Biden sanctions, so to dry up Russia’s war funding. Until then, Ukraine will do what any sovereign nation will do that wants to live and live on its own terms and with its national identity intact — and in doing so, deserves even more admiration from Americans.
Russia-Ukraine War (2022) | The Latest
Drones | Nato | Nuclear Weapons | Operation Spiderweb | Russia | SBU Security Service | Ukraine | Vladimir Putin
Rebeccah L. Heinrichs, a contributing editor at Providence, is a fellow at Hudson Institute where she provides research and commentary on a variety of international security issues and specializes in deterrence and counter-proliferation. She is also the vice-chairman of the John Hay Initiative’s Counter-proliferation Working Group and the original manager of the House of Representatives Bi-partisan Missile Defense Caucus.
15. Third Chinese national accused of smuggling biological materials into Michigan
Now when I think of fungus for biological warfare I think of the HBO show, "The Last of Us." And then I think of unrestricted warfare. And then I wonder.
Third Chinese national accused of smuggling biological materials into Michigan
CBS News · by Joseph Buczek Manager of Digital Content and Promotion, CBS Detroit
A third Chinese national is accused of smuggling biological materials into the U.S. for work at a University of Michigan laboratory.
Chengxuan Han, of the People's Republic of China, is charged with smuggling goods into the U.S. and making false statements.
Authorities say Han is a doctoral student at the College of Life Science and Technology in the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China. According to a criminal complaint, in 2024 and 2025, Han sent four packages to the U.S. from China containing concealed biological material. The packages were addressed to persons associated with a University of Michigan laboratory.
On June 8, Han was stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after arriving on a J1 visa. Officers inspected Han, who, during that time, reportedly lied to officials about the packages and the biological materials she is accused of previously sending to the U.S. Officers say Han related content from an electronic device three days before arriving in the U.S.
While being interviewed by the FBI, agents say Han admitted to sending the packages, saying the packages contained biological material related to roundworms. She also admitted to lying to officers during her inspection.
The FBI, ICE, Homeland Security Investigations and U.S. Customs and Border Protection are investigating the case.
"The alleged smuggling of biological materials by this alien from a science and technology university in Wuhan, China — to be used at a University of Michigan laboratory — is part of an alarming pattern that threatens our security," said U.S. Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon, Jr. "The American taxpayer should not be underwriting a PRC-based smuggling operation at one of our crucial public institutions."
Han is the third Chinese national accused of smuggling biological material into Michigan in the last week. On June 3, Yunqing Jian, 33, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, and her boyfriend, Zunyong Liu, 34, were charged with conspiracy, smuggling goods into the U.S., false statements and visa fraud.
Officials allege that Liu, who works at a Chinese university where he conducts research on the same pathogen, first lied but later admitted to smuggling Fusarium graminearum — a fungus classified by scientific literature as a potential agroterrorism weapon — into Detroit Metro Airport so that he could conduct research on it at a University of Michigan lab that Jian worked.
The FBI arrested Jain on June 3. Liu has since returned to China.
The Chinese Consulate General in Chicago issued the following statement on the charges:
We saw the news from U.S. media reports and are working on learning about the case through relevant channels. The Chinese Consulate General in Chicago has lodged a solemn démarche with the U.S. side on its law enforcement's failure to fulfill the relevant obligations stipulated in the China-U.S. Consular Convention.
The Chinese government has always required Chinese nationals overseas to strictly observe local laws and regulations, including the Entry and Exit regulations, while resolutely protecting their legitimate and lawful rights and interests in accordance with the law. China firmly opposes the U.S. side making political manipulation on related cases under the pretext of ideology and overstretched national security.
Han will appear Monday afternoon in federal court in Detroit.
Joseph Buczek
Joe Buczek is manager of digital content and promotion at CBS Detroit. He previously worked at WWTV, the Grand Traverse Insider, the Leader and the Kalkaskian, the Oakland Press and the Morning Sun.
CBS News · by Joseph Buczek Manager of Digital Content and Promotion, CBS Detroit
16. South Korea In 'Final Stages' To Sign Major Tank Deal With Poland
South Korea is a partner in the arsenal of democracies.
South Korea In 'Final Stages' To Sign Major Tank Deal With Poland
By AFP - Agence France Presse
https://www.barrons.com/news/south-korea-in-final-stages-to-sign-major-tank-deal-with-poland-6b2254ee
June 10, 2025, 4:17 am EDT
REFILES to tag file picture
South Korea is in the "final stages" of negotiations to potentially sign a major deal to supply K2 tanks to Poland, according to South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration on Tuesday.
In 2022, the two countries signed a $13.7 billion arms deal -- Seoul's largest to date -- which included South Korean K2 tanks and fighter jets for Poland, Ukraine's ally and neighbour.
The negotiations for the potential upcoming deal -- part of the broader 2022 agreement -- are "in the final stages, with both governments and companies working to expedite its conclusion", an official from South Korea's Defense Acquisition Program Administration told AFP.
While the agency did not disclose the amount, it said if signed, the deal would be the "largest ever based on a single weapon system".
South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported that the potential deal is worth around $6 billion, with the country's Hyundai Rotem set to manufacture 117 tanks and Poland's state-owned Polish Armaments Group producing 63 locally.
Yonhap reported that the signing ceremony is scheduled to take place in late June in Poland, but the Defense Acquisition Program Administration said the "signing schedule for the second contract has not yet been finalised".
"This contract includes provisions such as local production and technology transfer, which have required a significant negotiation period," it said in a statement.
The contract was originally expected to be signed late last year, according to Yonhap, but was delayed due to issues including political turmoil in South Korea following the brief declaration of martial law in December.
South Korea has emerged as a major player in global defence exports, as Moscow's invasion of Ukraine created opportunities for its industry to secure large-scale contracts across Europe and the Middle East.
It has signed major arms deals with countries such as Poland and Romania, including the export of K9 Howitzers and Chunmoo missile systems.
South Korea's President Lee Jae-myung, who took office last week, has vowed a more dovish approach towards Pyongyang -- an ally of Russia -- compared with his predecessor Yoon Suk Yeol.
The nuclear-armed North, which technically remains at war with the South, has recently bolstered military ties with Russia.
Pyongyang sent at least 14,000 troops to support Moscow's war in Ukraine, and officially declared the South an enemy state.
cdl/dhc
The Barron's news department was not involved in the creation of the content above. This article was produced by AFP. For more information go to AFP.com.
© Agence France-Presse
17. Get Ready for the New Rules of War in the Indo-Pacific
Excerpts:
These tactical responses require training across joint and combined forces to address the new threat and its associated legal implications.
The Department of Defense requires law of war training, but it has not kept pace with the times. Neither the extent of current training nor the topics covered adequately prepare forces deployed in Indo-Pacific Command for the new rules of war. Commanders and their staffs should be retrained not only in the law of war but the overlapping and distinct laws of naval warfare. Old principles in the law of war, like distinction and proportionality, play out differently at sea and virtually no one in the U.S. armed forces is savvy. Every officer deployed to an operational billet in Indo-Pacific Command should understand the Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations (2022) and the Newport Manual of the Law of Naval Warfare (Second Edition 2025). Every judge advocate in the region should have the major contours of the rules committed to memory. These resources will help inform decision-makers who will be required to exercise high-risk judgment under conditions of great uncertainty. Line officers and public affairs officers should be able to explain these rules to allied governments and media.
Making decisions about container missile threats requires better maritime domain awareness. Investment in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets is critical, but so is an understanding of civilian ship registrations, shipboard and port facility security protocols, and cargo chain of custody certificates. AI can more quickly analyze civil shipping data, such as distributed ledgers for shipping certificates, satellite monitoring of cargo flows, anomaly detection in identification signals, and automated data fusion systems that track changes in vessel behavior or ownership.
Finally, there needs to be frank conversations with China, regional allies, and strategic partners about the risks to civilian shipping so that they will play constructive roles in preventing or identifying perfidy, and accepting the legitimacy of Indo-Pacific Command strikes against these ships if they are misused. In 2020, Chief of Naval Operations John Richards, for example, stated that China’s maritime militia fishing vessels may be attacked if they support the People’s Liberation Army Navy during an armed conflict. Similarly, senior leaders must first understand the rules and then engage regionally and globally, so that flag states, ship owners, and operators understand that their vessels can become military objects and could be destroyed in the event they are engaged in perfidy during a naval war. Seafarers should also understand the risks so that both labor and management have a vested interest in exercising due diligence to prevent their ships from being misused. Bilateral and multilateral engagements in Indo-Pacific Command can serve as forums to calibrate expectations regarding the lawful use of civilian merchant ships and the consequences of perfidy. In addition to regional engagement, the United States and its allies should raise these issues at the International Maritime Organization, the UN agency for shipping regulation, and the International Labor Organization, the UN agency with oversight over seafarer safety and welfare.
Just as NATO states are drawn to negotiating new agreements to address security threats, Association of Southeast Asian Nations states are also seeking consensus. However, it is unlikely that a regional instrument will emerge that provides greater clarity and guidance, such as requiring certain classes of cargo ships to be declared in conflict zones, promoting international inspections at sea, or even negotiating new norms around the deployment of containerized weapons. An agreement cannot be completed and if one is adopted, China will not comply. For example, even the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations now acknowledge that the 20-year effort to negotiate a code of conduct with China has stalled. Despite a looming 2026 deadline, no state is confident of reaching an agreement. The purpose of the code of conduct? To provide greater fidelity on compliance with the rules of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. In 2016, an international tribunal composed under the Law of the Sea unanimously determined China was a serial violator of the treaty.
Get Ready for the New Rules of War in the Indo-Pacific – War on the Rocks
James Kraska and Gavin Logan
warontherocks.com · June 10, 2025
Ukraine shocked the world (and the Kremlin especially) when it launched a surprise attack with over a hundred kamikaze drones smuggled into Russia and delivered by unwitting Russian truck drivers to locations near sensitive military bases. If Kyiv’s claims are correct, 34 percent of Russia’s strategic cruise missile carriers were taken out of action.
Imagine if something like this happened to the United States. It’s not so far-fetched. We know, for example, that China possesses adapted civilian shipping containers that can house various missiles. They could enter any port on civilian commercial ships. What if a war with China breaks out by hundreds of these missiles taking out the bulk of the U.S. fleet in American ports on the east and west coasts as well as in Hawaii, all launched from ships operated by COSCO, a Chinese civilian shipping company with known ties to the People’s Liberation Army? What if we were to tell you that their ships already routinely dock within just a few miles from U.S. naval installations? The homeland security threat is real, and the same risks extend to any American military campaign in the Indo-Pacific, where the majority of container ships operate. If the United States is to defend Taiwan or treaty allies like Japan or Korea, the threat of container missiles on board ships poses a new and vexing maritime threat.
If you play the game, you must know the rules. How will the laws of targeting and rules of engagement apply in such a contingency? Unfortunately, U.S. military commanders are poorly trained on these matters, if they are even trained at all.
As the Defense Department shifts toward deterring war or winning a conflict in the Western Pacific, a grasp of the legal concepts required for mission accomplishment has lagged.
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The Multi-Domain War
The challenge for the United States and most of its allies and partners lies in the fact that the legal principles applied during land warfare and counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan differ dramatically from those that govern battles in the maritime littorals to defend Taiwan, Japan, or the Philippines.
The differences in how the law of targeting applies on land and at sea are relatively unknown, as the principles of distinction and proportionality are domain-specific. U.S. forces are not well trained in this area. Professional military education provides at most a few hours on the law of armed conflict — hardly enough to understand the basic rules, let alone grasp the subtle but significant distinctions between protections afforded to civilians and civilian objects on the ground versus mariners at sea. Commanders and line officers are responsible for decisions, and American judge advocates have limited exposure to operational law. Most with deployment experience have learned lessons in counterinsurgency and irregular warfare that do not translate well to the multi-domain environment.
The U.S. military’s shift toward multi-domain operations in East Asia requires rapid adaptation to naval warfare’s new realities, especially China’s prospective employment of missile-armed civilian container ships. If war breaks out, commanders and legal advisors will be forced to grapple with complex issues of distinction and proportionality under the law of naval warfare, reshaping operational practices and strategic decision-making in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. military should extensively train commanders in the specific rules of naval warfare, clearly communicate targeting policies to regional allies and commercial shipping entities, and actively engage in international forums to address this emerging threat.
The U.S. armed forces are shifting focus from war planning in South Asia to East Asia, with profound implications for force structure and theater strategy. These changes also implicate the law of armed conflict and require learning the law of naval warfare. Rather than fighting insurgencies and nation-building, new Indo-Pacific Command Army and Marine Corps campaign strategies call for fighting and winning in the maritime littorals of the first and second island chains. China threatens to dominate this vast area with an enormous force of mobile land-based missiles, as well as a modernizing and growing navy that eclipses the U.S. fleet in size if not capability. Beijing’s mobile land-based systems on the mainland, like the DF-21 and DF-26, are designed to wipe out American air bases and aircraft carriers.
To meet this threat, the U.S. armed forces are reconfiguring to deliver long-range strikes. The U.S. Army, U.S. Marine Corps, and U.S. Air Force are each testing new operations and basing concepts to bring fire against shipping in the Western Pacific. These forward strategies seek to close the distance to the adversary, but they also place more forces at risk in the weapons engagement zone. Both the United States and China are seeking ways to enhance survivability and complicate enemy targeting in the weapons engagement zone. One of the best strategies is to disaggregate or widely distribute forces across this vast maritime theater to avoid putting all their “eggs in one basket.” China is ahead in this approach, with the world’s largest theater or intermediate-range missile force and now the world’s largest navy. Beijing has an additional asymmetric advance to multiply fires in the weapons engagement zone: civilian merchant ships. China’s armed forces are supplemented by a vast fleet of civilian and commercial ships distributed throughout the region, including fishing vessels, ferries, and container ships, that serve as illicit naval auxiliaries.
The People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia serve as Beijing’s “fishermen spies.” It has been a decade since the U.S. Naval War College first cast a light on this force and its role in supporting the People’s Liberation Army Navy. More recently, the Naval War College has exposed China’s civilian vehicle ferries, special barges, and cargo ships to support landing force logistics and heavy lift of Chinese troops and armored rolling stock invading Taiwan.
As we mentioned above, China’s greatest advantage with civilian ships, however, may be in hiding theater-range missiles in shipping containers on board container ships. China’s Container-type Sea Defense Combat System presents this new and complex distributed threat. These systems use standard intermodal shipping containers to house powerful weapons, allowing them to blend into civilian maritime traffic and remain concealed until launch. The system was unveiled at the 2022 Zuhai Airshow and requires only a crew of four. It is internally powered, does not need any external support, and reportedly has no electronic emissions. Targeting data is passively downlinked. The system carries up to four missiles, including the YJ-12E supersonic anti-ship cruise missile, YJ-83 medium range subsonic anti-ship cruise missile, YJ-62 long-range subsonic anti-ship cruise missile, PL-16 anti-radiation cruise missile, and the YJ-18E supersonic anti-ship cruise missile.
These “Trojan Horses” could ply international trade routes and enter ports from Long Beach in California to Kaohsiung in Taiwan. Retired U.S. Navy intelligence officer Jim Fanell said, “If this capability is confirmed, it will require a completely new screening regimen for all Chinese-flagged commercial ships bound for U.S. ports.” Employing civilian ships in these ways distributes lethality throughout the region, making them harder to locate and target, and creates legal and political dilemmas for the United States. It is not certain container missile systems will be deployed, but Rick Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center said doing so “fits with China’s penchant for seeking asymmetric advantages against its enemies.” China has a tendency to prefer “deniable weapons systems that are difficult to identify or track,” Fisher said.
Civilians and Civilian Objects in Armed Conflict
Using civilian ships to attack the enemy and targeting the enemy’s container missile carriers raises confounding legal problems. There are only two ways to deploy missiles on civilian ships, which are protected civilian objects during armed conflict and immune from attack. First, the flag state could convert container ships to warships. A flag state may convert any merchant ship into a warship, satisfying legal requirements that allow it to be treated as a combatant platform, acquiring sovereign immunity and belligerent rights, but also exposing it to attack. Second, states may surreptitiously place missiles on container ships. This action constitutes perfidy because it unlawfully invites the confidence of the enemy by exploiting the protected status of merchant ships under international law. Article 37 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions defines perfidy as “[a]cts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence.”
Whether China’s new missile-armed container ships are done lawfully through conversion to warships or unlawfully through perfidy, Indo-Pacific Command planners are stuck with the legal dilemma of whether or when container ships carrying missiles may be attacked.
The Principle of Distinction
If some portion of China’s container ships are converted to warships, they qualify as military objects and may be targeted at any time during hostilities. If China deploys missiles on container ships, the act would constitute perfidy. Perfidy violates the legal principle of distinction: the obligation of parties to a conflict to distinguish between combatants and military objects, such as warships, from civilians and civilian objects, like container ships. The “cardinal” and “intransgressible” principle of distinction in targeting law is set forth in paragraphs 78 and 79 of an International Court of Justice advisory opinion on nuclear weapons. It requires combatants to distinguish at all times between civilians and civilian objects and combatants. The International Court of Justice determined “[s]tates must never make civilians the object of attack and must consequently never use weapons that are incapable of distinguishing between civilian and military [objects].”
However, if a container ship is operated as a weapons platform, even if it contains just one cruise missile that endangers the enemy, the entire ship becomes a legitimate military target. Section 8.6.2.2 of the 2022 U.S. Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations, for example, states enemy civilian ships may be attacked and destroyed, either with or without warning, if they are armed with weapons systems capable of harming the enemy and there is reason to believe that such armament has been used, or is intended for use, in offensive operations. This excludes light armament for anti-terrorism or force protection. The Commander’s Handbook lists other criteria that expose civil or merchant shipping to attack, including a persistent refusal to stop upon being duly summoned, actively resisting visit and search or prize capture, and sailing under convoy of enemy warships or enemy military aircraft. Section 8.8 of the Commander’s Handbook concludes civilian ships may be attacked if they are being incorporated into, or assisting in any way, the intelligence system of an enemy’s armed forces or acting in any capacity as a naval military auxiliary to an enemy’s armed forces. In short, enemy merchant ships are normally civilian objects and may not be attacked, but they lose their special protection if they are integrated into the enemy’s warfighting or war-sustaining effort. When this occurs, the merchant ship is “taking a direct part” in hostilities. When a commander makes this finding, it not only satisfies the principle of distinction, but it also raises another issue with the principle of proportionality.
The Principle of Proportionality
Section 15.4 of the Department of Defense Law of War Manual restates the customary rule that civilians on land generally cannot be targeted except for such time they are “directly participating in hostilities.” By comparison, section 7.5.1 of the Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations states civilian ships may not be targeted unless they are taking a “direct part in hostilities.” The terms used on land and at sea are almost identical, but they are not the same and the subtle difference reveals profound implications for targeting in the principle of proportionality.
If a container ship loses its protected status and becomes a lawful target, commanders are obligated ensure their attacks against it are proportional. Proportionality is a core principle of the law of war, as set forth in section 5.5 of the second edition of the Newport Manual on the Law of Naval Warfare. It prohibits attacks that are expected to cause harm to civilians or civilian objects that would be excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage.
In land warfare, the law of armed conflict emphasizes the protection of individual civilians, and commanders weigh expected proportionality in terms of civilian lives lost and civilian objects injured or destroyed. Ground combat often occurs in or near population centers, where non-combatants can easily intermix with legitimate military targets. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and the conflict in Gaza today, distinguishing combatants from civilians is a persistent challenge. As a result, contemporary scholarship and doctrine under the law of armed conflict often focuses on minimizing harm to individual civilians. The goal of civilian harm mitigation became controversial in Iraq and Afghanistan but this issue is dramatically less salient during the law of naval warfare, even against civilian container ships carrying missiles.
In naval warfare, ships, submarines, and aircraft of the enemy — not individuals on board — are lawful targets. Importantly, if a warship (or a container ship with missiles) is a lawful target, the composition of its crew, even if partially or completely civilian mariners, does not factor into the proportionality analysis. Only civilians present nearby but off the ship, such as those on a civilian vessel alongside the target ship, are included in the proportionality analysis. On this point, Lassa Oppenheim, perhaps the greatest international lawyer of the past 150 years, wrote in section 202 of his landmark Treatise that non-combatants on warships suffer the same fate as the vessel itself:
Just as military forces consist of combatants against non-combatants, so do the naval forces of belligerents. Non-combatants, as for instance, stokers, or naval surgeons, chaplains, members of the hospital staff, and the like, who do not take part in the fighting, may not be attacked directly and killed or wounded. But they are exposed to all injuries indirectly resulting from attacks on, or by, their vessels; and they may certainly be made prisoners of war, unless they are members of the religious, medical, and hospital staff, who are inviolable…
This platform-centric focus significantly shapes targeting decisions at sea. The painstaking collateral damage estimation and proportionality analysis many warfighters and judge advocates applied in Southwest Asia are not required when targeting warships or civilian ships integrated into the enemy force. Individuals on board warships, regardless of their civilian status are still exposed to injury or death if the ship itself is being used in the service of the enemy.
The Newport Manual on the Law of Naval Warfare (Second Edition 2025) reflects this approach in section 8.8.1. Likewise, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is steadfast in minimizing the effects of war on civilian populations, incorporates this interpretation in its Commentary of Additional Protocol I. Paragraph 1903 of the Commentary states that “[a]t sea, civilians on board warships run the risks to which such ships are exposed. If they are on board enemy merchant ships, their fate will depend on the nature of these vessels.”
Operational Considerations
Maritime deception is not new, but the advent of advanced, mobile weapon systems housed in civilian-looking containers raises the stakes considerably. Given the complexity of shifting flag states, opaque ownership structures, and multinational crews, assessing whether a container ship can be targeted is based on its behavior and capability — not presumed intent or identity. For instance, a vessel could be flagged in Panama, owned by a Chinese company, and crewed by mariners from India, the Philippines, and Ukraine with a Korean master. Further complicating matters is the possibility or even likelihood that the ship’s crew is unaware they are a mobile platform for a containerized missile system. Commanders will be confronted with vessels that appear to be civilian ships as their registration, nationality, and electronic emissions, such as the automatic identification system, suggest they are protected civilian objects; however, in fact, they pose an immediate threat.
Conclusion
Engaging enemy or neutral civilian ships — especially with neutral multinational crews — carries political and potentially strategic risks. If a mistaken strike occurs or if the adversary succeeds in portraying an otherwise lawful attack as illegitimate, the consequences will include diplomatic backlash, erosion of international support, or damage to the perceived legitimacy of U.S. operations. Worse, adversaries may provoke such a response deliberately to generate strategic propaganda or deter future engagements. But the legal doctrine is clear: merchant ships in the service of the enemy are lawful targets, and the proportionality analysis factors in only the expected civilians or civilian objects in the vicinity of the ship that could be injured or destroyed, and not those crew members or passengers on the ship itself. The entire ship becomes a lawful target, and the people on board, whether willing or unwitting, stand in peril because of the misuse of the vessel.
How can commanders, their staffs, and judge advocates adapt to the new rules of war in the Indo-Pacific? First, just because a strike against a civilian merchant ship is lawful does not necessarily mean a commander has to do it. There may be other tactical means of neutralizing the threat, such as persuading neutral state port authorities to prevent suspicious Chinese-owned or -affiliated container ships from getting underway, thereby keeping them out of the theater of conflict. Second, commanders may exercise the belligerent right to visit and search enemy and neutral merchant ships. All enemy ships may be seized and converted as prize. Neutral ships may also be seized if they are carrying contraband or are integrated into the enemy force.
These tactical responses require training across joint and combined forces to address the new threat and its associated legal implications.
The Department of Defense requires law of war training, but it has not kept pace with the times. Neither the extent of current training nor the topics covered adequately prepare forces deployed in Indo-Pacific Command for the new rules of war. Commanders and their staffs should be retrained not only in the law of war but the overlapping and distinct laws of naval warfare. Old principles in the law of war, like distinction and proportionality, play out differently at sea and virtually no one in the U.S. armed forces is savvy. Every officer deployed to an operational billet in Indo-Pacific Command should understand the Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations (2022) and the Newport Manual of the Law of Naval Warfare (Second Edition 2025). Every judge advocate in the region should have the major contours of the rules committed to memory. These resources will help inform decision-makers who will be required to exercise high-risk judgment under conditions of great uncertainty. Line officers and public affairs officers should be able to explain these rules to allied governments and media.
Making decisions about container missile threats requires better maritime domain awareness. Investment in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets is critical, but so is an understanding of civilian ship registrations, shipboard and port facility security protocols, and cargo chain of custody certificates. AI can more quickly analyze civil shipping data, such as distributed ledgers for shipping certificates, satellite monitoring of cargo flows, anomaly detection in identification signals, and automated data fusion systems that track changes in vessel behavior or ownership.
Finally, there needs to be frank conversations with China, regional allies, and strategic partners about the risks to civilian shipping so that they will play constructive roles in preventing or identifying perfidy, and accepting the legitimacy of Indo-Pacific Command strikes against these ships if they are misused. In 2020, Chief of Naval Operations John Richards, for example, stated that China’s maritime militia fishing vessels may be attacked if they support the People’s Liberation Army Navy during an armed conflict. Similarly, senior leaders must first understand the rules and then engage regionally and globally, so that flag states, ship owners, and operators understand that their vessels can become military objects and could be destroyed in the event they are engaged in perfidy during a naval war. Seafarers should also understand the risks so that both labor and management have a vested interest in exercising due diligence to prevent their ships from being misused. Bilateral and multilateral engagements in Indo-Pacific Command can serve as forums to calibrate expectations regarding the lawful use of civilian merchant ships and the consequences of perfidy. In addition to regional engagement, the United States and its allies should raise these issues at the International Maritime Organization, the UN agency for shipping regulation, and the International Labor Organization, the UN agency with oversight over seafarer safety and welfare.
Just as NATO states are drawn to negotiating new agreements to address security threats, Association of Southeast Asian Nations states are also seeking consensus. However, it is unlikely that a regional instrument will emerge that provides greater clarity and guidance, such as requiring certain classes of cargo ships to be declared in conflict zones, promoting international inspections at sea, or even negotiating new norms around the deployment of containerized weapons. An agreement cannot be completed and if one is adopted, China will not comply. For example, even the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations now acknowledge that the 20-year effort to negotiate a code of conduct with China has stalled. Despite a looming 2026 deadline, no state is confident of reaching an agreement. The purpose of the code of conduct? To provide greater fidelity on compliance with the rules of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. In 2016, an international tribunal composed under the Law of the Sea unanimously determined China was a serial violator of the treaty.
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James Kraska is Charles H. Stockton professor of international law and chair of the Stockton Center for International Law at the U.S. Naval War College and John Harvey Gregory lecturer on world organization at Harvard Law School. He is a graduate of Mississippi State University, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, and the University of Virginia School of Law. He is a former Navy judge advocate who served as the legal adviser for Expeditionary Strike Group SEVEN/Task Force 76 and as the director of international negotiations on the Joint Staff.
Gavin Logan is deputy chair of the Stockton Center for International Law and an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. He is a graduate of Auburn University, Cumberland School of Law, and The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School of the Army. He has served as command legal advisor for Task Force 51/5, 3d Marine Aircraft Wing, and Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, as well as a U.N. peacekeeper and company commander.
Image: Midjourney
warontherocks.com · June 10, 2025
18. Will China Force a Rethink of Biological Warfare?
And as I commented about the Chinese national smuggling fungus into Michigan:
Now when I think of fungus for biological warfare I think of the HBO show, "The Last of Us." And then I think of unrestricted warfare. And then I wonder.
On a more serious note, when Al Mauroni talks (or writes) about WMD, I listen (or read). This is a very sobering conclusion:
Excerpt:
China’s conventional and nuclear strength undercut arguments for deterrence by retaliation, and U.S. unwillingness to invest in military biodefense and public health undercuts arguments for deterrence by denial. Today’s policymakers and military analysts must abandon concepts of large-scale military use of biological weapons that evolved from the Cold War arms races. These historical scenarios have no application to modern biological warfare. Policymakers and military planners today must collectively re-examine the biological weapons threat and take steps to move away from 20th-century threat models for biological defense.
Will China Force a Rethink of Biological Warfare? – War on the Rocks
Al Mauroni and Glenn Cross
warontherocks.com · June 10, 2025
Is the Defense Department still preparing to fight biological warfare as if it’s 1970?
When preparing for biological warfare, most nations picture scenarios in which an enemy openly sprays traditional agents over wide areas to kill their adversaries. However, revolutionary capabilities in the life sciences and biotechnology have transformed the threat. China’s approach to warfare, combined with these emerging technologies, reveals new vulnerabilities among Western forces that, to date, have not been fully acknowledged. In no small measure, this is due to the U.S. government’s continued reliance on a 20th-century strategy for countering weapons of mass destruction. In particular, as China is a major nuclear power, it cannot be threatened after it uses biological weapons as easily as a non-nuclear state. Given these points, can China be deterred from using such advanced biological weapons during a regional crisis in the Indo-Pacific, especially an invasion of Taiwan? And if not, is it possible to mitigate the damage from such a scenario?
Although Western attention has focused on the rapid expansion of China’s nuclear and conventional warfighting capabilities, one ought to expect equal analysis of China’s biological warfare potential. By examining China’s most recent efforts at biological research, we put forward that it has bypassed 20th-century Western concepts of biological warfare and has new capabilities that could be effective across the entire conflict spectrum. Given China’s new capabilities and nuclear arsenal, we assess that standard strategies of deterrence and protection likely will not work in the future. New approaches and new concepts will be necessary if the United States is to prepare itself for potentially new forms of biological warfare in the 21st century.
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What We Suspect about Chinese Biological Research
Little reliable open-source information exists about an offensive Chinese biological warfare program. Beijing has never admitted to possessing a biological warfare program, although the U.S. government assesses that China had an active offensive biological warfare program from the 1960s to at least the late 1980s. Beijing’s historical biological warfare program reportedly developed and weaponized ricin; botulinum toxins; and the causative agents of anthrax, cholera, plague, and tularemia. The U.S. government consistently has highlighted concerns — in both the annual State Department arms control compliance reports as well as the annual Department of Defense reports to Congress on Chinese military power — about studies at Chinese military medical institutions that include researchers identifying, testing, and characterizing diverse families of potent toxins with dual-use applications.
As China’s biotechnology and biopharmaceutical sectors mature and become more innovative, China is also developing a dual-use production capability and scientific know-how relevant to sophisticated offensive biological warfare research. Yet the U.S. government has stopped short of claims that China possesses an offensive biological warfare program. Clearly, China has the capability to research, develop, produce, and weaponize sophisticated biological weapons should the national leadership decide to do so. On very short notice, China can also produce a wide range of biological threat agents and sophisticated delivery systems (i.e., a mobilization capability converting civilian infrastructure to military use).
China’s civilian life sciences research sector and biopharmaceutical industries are highly integrated with the People’s Liberation Army and its Academy of Military Medical Sciences. Many life science researchers in academia and industry serve as People’s Liberation Army officers. Chinese life science researchers also benefit from funding from the central government through its 14th Five-Year Plan, released in 2021, which emphasizes growth in China’s indigenous biotechnology capabilities, specifically in the convergence of biotechnology and information technologies. Through its “Made in China” campaign, Beijing strives to produce medical equipment, prophylaxes, and therapeutics domestically. With government and venture capital investment, the Chinese biotechnology and biopharmaceutical sectors are second only to those of the United States in terms of market capitalization. A recent U.S. congressionally sponsored study has predicted that China will soon surpass the United States in biotechnology development if the latter does not quickly take action. Chinese AI capabilities already equal if not exceed those of its competitors.
Published accounts out of China from 2005 to 2020 point to increased interest in advanced biological weapons and their role in future conflict. In 2005, then-Col. Guo Ji-wei wrote a seminal article, “Ultramicro, Nonlethal, and Reversible: Looking Ahead to Military Biotechnology,” that looked at military uses of proteomics, which are transgenic technologies used to “vastly enrich the military’s ability to defend and attack.” Col. Guo elaborated that biotechnology affords or soon will afford militaries with the ability to design agents that “attack only key enemies without harming ordinary people … Injuries might be limited to a specific gene sequence or a specific protein structure.” Col. Guo expanded on his thesis in a book, War for Biological Dominance, emphasizing the role of biology in future conflict. In 2015, Lu Beibei and He Fuchu — the latter was president of the Academy of Military Medical Science at the time — wrote an article in the People’s Liberation Army Daily extolling the development of “new brain-control weapons and equipment that [will] interfere with and control people’s consciousness, thus subverting the combat style … ”
In 2017, a retired Chinese National Defense University president, Zhang Shibo, argued: “Modern biotechnology is gradually showing strong signs characteristic of an offensive capability, including the possibility that specific ethnic genetic attacks could be employed.” Undoubtedly, until COVID-19 emerged, the Chinese military was actively and openly discussing the potential military advantages of next-generation biological weapons. The 2020 edition of China’s Science of Military Strategy emphasized the growing importance of biotechnology on the battlefield. It stated the following:
The biological field has become a brand-new territory for the expansion of national security. For example, the use of new biological weapons, bioterrorism attacks, large-scale epidemic infections, specific ethnic genetic attacks, and purposeful genetic modification of the ecological environment, food, and industrial products, and the use of environmental factors such as population migration, climate change, and natural disasters.
According to the discussion in this book, China anticipates that biotechnology, including biological weapons, will dominate the modern battlefield. China not only will defend itself against adversaries’ use of biotechnology (including biological weapons), but it also likely will be prepared to use biotechnology offensively. The need for China to seize the initiative is emphasized in Science of Military Strategy:
The situation of military conflict in the biological field is becoming increasingly severe. We must deeply understand its importance and urgency, and raise the initiative to seize the military conflict in the biological field to the height of safeguarding the overall situation of national security, strengthen strategic guidance, and comprehensively enhance the strategic response ability of military conflict in the biological field.
The absence of any more recent discussion of this topic in the open Chinese literature raises concerns that current work is now classified. In addition to Chinese statements, one also needs to consider an understanding of the social and technical factors that can incentivize or disincentivize a Chinese biological weapons capability, which, to date, has given a mixed picture of Chinese biological weapons research. In short, there are numerous forms in which this capability could be manifested in a regional conflict.
Options for Countering China’s Biological Weapons Threat
Calls to address biological threats as a domain of warfare will largely fail for several reasons in particular, the tendency to conflate deliberate biological incidents and natural disease outbreaks. Given the impact of COVID-19 and the threat of natural disease outbreaks, calls for increased funding and attention on mitigating the effects of such events are expected. However, this prioritization diverts any meaningful focus on deliberate biological threats in the hope that public health programs will mitigate any deliberate disease outbreak. This approach fails to respond to the integration of new methods and biotechnologies into the conduct of war in an era of intense great power competition.
In addition, this argument often fails to appreciate the second- and third-order effects of such a decision. The overwhelming majority of defense analysts and policymakers already treat chemical and biological defense issues as tangential but not primary aspects of warfighting. By creating a “biological domain,” U.S. defense agencies would relegate biological warfare concerns to a small, isolated technical community and continue to ignore the potential impact of biological weapons on operational plans.
The U.S. government’s strategy to address biological warfare threats falls along two distinct concepts: (1) threatening massive retaliation and developing robust defensive measures for U.S. forces, while (2) relying on public health measures that improve the resiliency of its civilian population. Trying to deter China’s use of biological weapons through the threat of retaliation will fail. Even as U.S. administrations call for the option to use nuclear weapons in response to a chemical or biological attack, it is not credible to believe this would happen if the biological attack did not cause significant U.S. casualties. China’s leadership will not fear additional U.S. military retaliatory strikes if it is in the process of taking Taiwan, one of the key goals in China’s national revival. In addition, China’s strategic nuclear arsenal and overwhelming conventional superiority in the Indo-Pacific will cause U.S. decision-makers to deter themselves from undertaking any disproportionate retaliation in response to biological weapons use.
Likewise, deterrence by denial will not work if U.S. allies and partners in Southeast Asia are not fully prepared to stave off biological threats regardless of origin. Few countries have the funding and public support to develop robust defensive measures against all potential biological threats. Contagious and non-contagious diseases cause tens of thousands of deaths every year and consume an overwhelming amount of federal funding. As the United States makes dramatic cuts to its health security measures and continues to starve military and civilian chemical and biological defense programs of adequate funding, deterrence by denial becomes impossible. Deterrence by denial will not work as long as China understands that the United States does not, in fact, have a robust biodefense and health surveillance capability.
What, then, can the U.S. government do to adapt to this new future? First, we should consider that deterring China from the limited use of biological warfare agents in a regional conflict is not feasible, much as Russia has used banned non-lethal chemical agents in Ukraine to advance battlefield successes. Recognizing that this threat does not mirror Cold War threats is a first step to moving forward on realistic concepts and capabilities.
U.S. executive agencies must focus on their core competencies. The Department of Defense’s strategies and funding should focus on deliberate biological threats, while Health and Human Services’ strategies and funding address natural biological threats. This will require direction from top defense leaders, which has been lacking in this area for some time. The United States must move quickly to leverage Congress’ interest in maximizing the benefits of biotechnology for national defense, as outlined by its National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. The Department of Defense should immediately stand up an office under the assistant secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment to research threats and leverage potential new biotechnologies.
Finally, the U.S. government must address the vulnerabilities of critical defense infrastructure, particularly in the Indo-Pacific theater, to novel biological threats that affect materiel as well as individuals, and apply risk management measures to mitigate them. The Department of Defense should also advance the nuclear hardening of its critical infrastructure to reduce their vulnerability to a Chinese attack. The technology to harden defense infrastructure is there, but not the priority to execute these plans.
Conclusion
Traditional views of large-scale battlefield use of biological warfare, particularly in large-area coverage attacks, are obsolete and rooted in outdated Cold War doctrines of a bipolar world. This does not mean that biological weapons are not a current threat — ongoing advances in biotechnology, genetic engineering, and AI have both military applications as well as public health implications. The challenge is, and will remain, to convince policymakers not to talk about biological weapons in isolation from how adversarial nations could use them to support national priorities and military objectives.
Biological weapons are not a primary threat — they are supplementary to a country’s use of conventional and nuclear weapons. At the same time, they have limited utility in a small set of situations in which countries with advanced industrial capabilities are not confident that their conventional weapons can win the day for them. China has an overwhelming conventional superiority in the Indo-Pacific region but faces considerable challenges if it tries to take Taiwan by force. As a result, one can envision China’s use of biotechnology to give its military forces an edge when those amphibious fleets launch from the mainland.
China’s conventional and nuclear strength undercut arguments for deterrence by retaliation, and U.S. unwillingness to invest in military biodefense and public health undercuts arguments for deterrence by denial. Today’s policymakers and military analysts must abandon concepts of large-scale military use of biological weapons that evolved from the Cold War arms races. These historical scenarios have no application to modern biological warfare. Policymakers and military planners today must collectively re-examine the biological weapons threat and take steps to move away from 20th-century threat models for biological defense.
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Al Mauroni is a senior policy analyst with 40 years of experience with U.S. military chemical and biological defense and is the author of BIOCRISIS: Defining Biological Threats in U.S. Policy.
Glenn Cross, Ph.D. is a former deputy national intelligence officer for weapons of mass destruction responsible for biological weapons analysis.
The views expressed here are solely those of the authors in their private capacity and do not in any way represent the views, positions, or policies of the U.S. government including any of its constituent departments, agencies, or entities.
Image: Sgt. Gianna Sulger via DVIDs
warontherocks.com · June 10, 2025
19. The Balkans Model and Conditions for Peace in Ukraine
Conclusion:
Given the war’s hybrid nature and complexity, Ukraine’s path to peace will be long and arduous. A near-term legal solution is not only unlikely to end in agreement, but also unlikely to last. A durable settlement will require a suite of strategic and political tools including international oversight of temporarily occupied territories, robust security guarantees, a calibrated sanctions regime, and prosecuting war crimes. Some of these measures may be out of reach in the current strategic environment, yet they remain essential benchmarks for a just outcome.
A ceasefire may be a necessary first step. But taken in isolation, a ceasefire risks merely freezing today’s battlespace, which aligns with Moscow’s preferred outcome. Rather than unconditional ceasefires, Ukraine must insist on ceasefires that are conditional, temporary, and embedded within a broader irregular warfare strategy. This can degrade Russia’s capacity to wage hybrid war while reinforcing Ukraine’s sovereignty, legitimacy, and resilience. In the twenty-first century, peace is more than the absence of gunfire. Peace must be actively built, defended, and sustained through military and non-military means. For Ukraine, that means mobilizing every available instrument of national power to safeguard freedom, uphold international law, and secure the future of a democratic Europe.
The Balkans Model and Conditions for Peace in Ukraine
irregularwarfare.org · by Mariya Heletiy · June 10, 2025
Editor’s note: This article is part of Project Europe which focuses on European and European-adjacent security issues to deter and defend against irregular threats, develop IW knowledge, and advance the American understanding of allied, partner and competitor practices of IW. We invite you to contribute to the discussion, explore the complex IW environment and help.
Following the 2024 US presidential elections, President Donald Trump prioritized peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia as a key foreign policy objective. The peace talks that followed led Putin to declare a brief “Easter truce” that he summarily broke, echoing Russia’s repeated violations of the 2019 ceasefire agreement and highlighting its broader challenge to Europe and the post–World War II international order.
These recent ceasefire violations underscore a critical lesson: in today’s conflicts, where the lines between conventional and irregular warfare are blurred, durable peace cannot be achieved through formal negotiations and traditional diplomacy alone. The Russia-Ukraine war is not just a conventional military conflict, but a struggle playing out across diplomatic, informational, economic, humanitarian and military dimensions.
As with all irregular wars, legitimacy and perception are at the center of the struggle. Russia seeks not only territorial gains but also to delegitimize Ukraine’s sovereignty and erode Western unity. Accordingly, securing peace in Ukraine demands more than conventional negotiations. Instead, it requires a comprehensive irregular warfare strategy attuned to the conflict’s complex dynamics, much like the successful approaches used in the Balkans in the 1990s which integrated military deterrence, legal accountability, information dominance, civil resilience, and international governance mechanisms.
Lessons from the Balkans
An analysis of the Balkan conflicts offers important insights for Ukraine. The Balkan wars exhibited a hybrid nature characterized non-state actors and so-called volunteers, as well as the blurring of lines between civilian and military roles that included the mobilization of civilians and widespread information operations employed by all sides.
None of the Balkan conflicts were resolved solely through peaceful means or decisive military victory. Rather, they demonstrate how irregular warfare dynamics—including the use of irregular tactics, economic pressure, and information campaigns to subdue aggressors—can be integrated into a broader, multi-front strategy. Although negotiations are a common feature of peace processes, they often result in the unintended consequence of halting hostilities only to allow parties to regroup or codify the results of military victories for future generations to challenge. In conflicts characterized by irregular warfare, traditional approaches (such as ceasefires) may be insufficient, as they fail to address the underlying asymmetries, ideological drivers, and non-state actors that continue to fuel instability beyond formal cessations of conflict.
These dynamics played out most clearly during the Yugoslav wars. For example, in Croatia (1991–1995), temporary ceasefires functioned less as steps toward peace and more as tactical pauses, allowing Croatian forces to regroup and consolidate territorial gains. The introduction of international peacekeeping missions merely served to temporarily freeze frontlines, enabling future offensives rather than securing lasting peace. The 1991 Vance Plan and subsequent Sarajevo Agreement were never fully implemented but still succeeded in pausing hostilities. These pauses, however, enabled the Croatian military to restructure, integrate civilian and military capabilities, and prepare for future operations with NATO support. Although framed as steps toward peace (establishing ceasefires, demilitarized zones, and conditions for refugee return), they ultimately codified battlefield positions without addressing deeper drivers of conflict.
Against this backdrop, Croatia successfully integrated civilian and military capabilities into a coordinated and highly functional organizational structure. This comprehensive approach managed to focus on developing defense capabilities to liberate occupied territories while also countering persistent disinformation campaigns propagated by Serbia and Republika of Serbian Krajina (Croatia), both domestically and abroad. Through clear strategic vision and effective communication with both its population and the international community, Croatia secured broad public support—an essential factor in sustaining national resilience and legitimacy. Backed by NATO airstrikes on Croatian Serb-controlled airfields authorized under UN Security Council Resolution 958, this coordinated buildup set the stage for a decisive blitzkrieg-style offensive that allowed Croatian forces to regain control of nearly all formerly occupied territory. The Balkan experience ultimately shows that military, diplomatic, irregular warfare, and legal tools must all be used in combination to shift the balance of power, impose legitimacy, and build durable peace.
Confronting the Limits of Legal Solutions in Ukraine
The current conflict in Ukraine has none of the conditions that could allow for a legal solution to bring an end to the war. A legal solution would demand the full withdrawal of Russian forces, an unlikely prospect while Russia maintains claims of sovereignty over four Ukrainian oblasts and Crimea and continues to leverage illegal referenda to fabricate political authority. Moscow has shown no willingness to deescalate, compensate for its aggression, or demilitarize. Sanctions—while they have been partially effective in past conflicts such as Yugoslavia and have inflicted some economic pain—have been insufficient to compel Putin to reconsider his decision to invade Ukraine thus far. Finally, while justice for war crimes and restoration of human rights are vital for reconciliation, international tribunals require not only substantial evidence admissible in court but also the political leverage to secure extradition and enforcement.
In light of the above, drawing lessons from the Balkan experience demonstrates that conflicts of a similar nature require a combination of force and diplomacy to attain peace. The Dayton Peace Accords and the Kumanovo Agreement that ended the 1995 Bosnia War and 1999 Kosovo War, respectively, were only possible after NATO airstrikes targeted Serbian positions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and its territory during the Kosovo war. A similar dynamic is visible today in the war between Ukraine and Russia, where negotiations show no genuine willingness from Russia to implement a ceasefire or end hostilities. Only by further strengthening Ukraine’s military capabilities and applying sustained pressure on Russia and its allies can meaningful negotiations be pursued.
As long as Russia refuses to acknowledge the core tenets of international law and sovereignty, these long-term mechanisms for peace remain aspirational rather than actionable. Until that paradigm shifts, irregular warfare strategies remain Ukraine’s most viable path forward to challenge Russia’s willingness to fight and impose prolonged costs over time.
Beyond the Battlefield: Fighting Russia’s Hybrid War on Multiple Fronts
The Russia-Ukraine has had a distinctly irregular character since fighting began over three years ago. Russia used a range of hybrid tactics, from disinformation campaigns and coercion to the use of proxy forces and private military companies to provide a veneer of legitimacy for its actions while also giving deniability and obfuscating its objectives. These tactics blur the lines between state and non-state action, making the conflict inherently political, psychological, and transnational.
To counter Russia’s hybrid approach (and until there are changes to the underlying conditions that limit the effectiveness of legal mechanisms, such as international war crimes tribunals), Ukraine and its allies should consider the following integrated lines of effort that address the full spectrum of irregular threats.
The first line of effort is countering Russian information operations. Russia’s information strategy targets various audiences to reinforce pro-Russian sentiment among targeted populations, justify its war in Ukraine, or complicate decision making for acting against Moscow. Russia does this by spreading historical and cultural myths, creating pretexts of needing to protect Russian-speaking populations in Ukraine. Russia’s information operations also transcend national borders, extending their reach to interfere in elections in neighboring Romania and Moldova. In the Balkans, Russia amplifies its disinformation through cultural centers, such as a Wagner Group-affiliated facility in Belgrade, aimed at destabilizing the region and diverting attention from the war in Ukraine.
To counter Russia’s advances in the information domain, Ukraine and its partners must adapt a comprehensive approach involving government leadership and citizen participation. Complex threats such as deepfakes and hybrid information warfare demand coordinated efforts across civil society and the state. Governments must enhance strategic communication, invest in media literacy and information integrity, and consider establishing dedicated counter-disinformation agencies. Regulatory frameworks should govern digital intermediaries, promote transparency, and uphold the quality of government communications to maintain public trust. Finally, fostering media pluralism, supporting professional journalism, and promoting media literacy will strengthen citizens’ ability to discern reliable information from falsehoods.
The second line of effort is using ceasefires strategically. Ceasefires play a paradoxical role in this type of conflict. While often framed as a step toward de-escalation, in irregular conflicts they are often exploited for tactical advantage—used to reposition forces, manipulate public perception, and weaken an adversary’s will to fight. Russia has repeatedly used ceasefires this way, including the recent “Easter truce,” which was reportedly violated with over 3,000 unique incidents. These violations reveal how ceasefires can be weaponized to sow doubt in the viability of resistance, create false expectations of peace, and pressure Ukraine into premature concessions.
Ukraine should not reject ceasefires outright, but must approach them with realism and incorporate them within a broader irregular warfare strategy. Ceasefires must be conditional, temporary, and allow for concrete gains in legitimacy, accountability, and lasting deterrence. They should only be accepted when they: (a) are accompanied by enforceable security guarantees, (b) allow time to rebuild and rearm, (c) include mechanisms to expose Russia’s duplicity when violated, and (d) support governance reforms to bolster public trust. Without these safeguards, ceasefires risk consolidating Russian gains rather than enabling lasting peace.
The third line of effort is building civil and national resilience. During the last few years, Russia has increased hybrid attacks to undermine Ukrainian society. Building resilience to Russian attacks would entail bolstering cyber, information, economic, and military resilience—not only at the state level but also by empowering non-state actors such as civil society organizations and the private sector.
Civil society is central to building national resilience and reinforcing legitimacy during irregular conflict. In Ukraine, grassroots organizations, local actors, and the private sector have filled critical gaps left by the state, demonstrating how a whole-of-society approach can counter hybrid threats. These groups play a crucial role in developing new capacities in areas like cyber defense, humanitarian security, and counter-disinformation efforts. Their activities range from monitoring military expenditures and assisting internally displaced populations to rebuilding homes, caring for children, combating disinformation, and directly supporting defense initiatives. In some cases, they even supply the armed forces with critical equipment and weapons under licenses issued by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. Together, these efforts not only meet urgent needs but also strengthen public trust, foster national cohesion, and make society more resistant to manipulation and coercion.
Conclusion
Given the war’s hybrid nature and complexity, Ukraine’s path to peace will be long and arduous. A near-term legal solution is not only unlikely to end in agreement, but also unlikely to last. A durable settlement will require a suite of strategic and political tools including international oversight of temporarily occupied territories, robust security guarantees, a calibrated sanctions regime, and prosecuting war crimes. Some of these measures may be out of reach in the current strategic environment, yet they remain essential benchmarks for a just outcome.
A ceasefire may be a necessary first step. But taken in isolation, a ceasefire risks merely freezing today’s battlespace, which aligns with Moscow’s preferred outcome. Rather than unconditional ceasefires, Ukraine must insist on ceasefires that are conditional, temporary, and embedded within a broader irregular warfare strategy. This can degrade Russia’s capacity to wage hybrid war while reinforcing Ukraine’s sovereignty, legitimacy, and resilience. In the twenty-first century, peace is more than the absence of gunfire. Peace must be actively built, defended, and sustained through military and non-military means. For Ukraine, that means mobilizing every available instrument of national power to safeguard freedom, uphold international law, and secure the future of a democratic Europe.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
Mariya Heletiy (Ph.D.), is a member of the Advisory Board for the International Diplomacy Initiative.
Photo: Serhii Nuzhnenko, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty / the Collection of war.ukraine.ua
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irregularwarfare.org · by Mariya Heletiy · June 10, 2025
20. Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: June
Read all the assessments by country, region, and functional area at the link below.
June 9, 2025 | FDD Tracker: April 29, 2025-June 4, 2025
Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: June
John Hardie
Russia Program Deputy Director
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/06/09/trump-administration-foreign-policy-tracker-june/
Trend Overview
Welcome back to the Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. Once a month, we ask FDD’s experts and scholars to assess the administration’s foreign policy. They provide trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch.
Even as Moscow has doubled down on its maximalist demands for peace in Ukraine, President Donald Trump has yet to follow through on his threats to punish Russia economically. Europe is doing what it can to increase pressure on the Kremlin, and a bipartisan coalition in Congress is eager for the United States to join that effort. But buy-in from the Oval Office is critical.
In mid-May, Washington and Beijing agreed to a fragile truce in their tariff war. But trade talks have since faltered, with both sides accusing the other of violating the agreement. Meanwhile, the United States tightened restrictions on exports of inputs for China’s semiconductor and aerospace industries. At the same time, the administration’s budget request would slash funding for cyber defense and technological innovation and leave the base defense budget stagnant.
Trump toured Gulf Arab countries for his first foreign visit since taking office in January. While in Riyadh, he met with Syria’s interim president, a former al-Qaeda commander, and announced that Washington would lift sanctions on the war-torn country. Elsewhere in the region, nuclear negotiations with Iran have yielded scant progress, and the Israelis worry Trump will cave on the issue of whether Tehran can maintain a domestic uranium enrichment capability.
Check back next month to see how the administration deals with these and other challenges.
Trending Positive
Trending Neutral
Trending Negative
International Organizations
Lebanon
China
Gulf
Indo-Pacific
Iran
Israel
Nonproliferation and Biodefense
Cyber
Defense
Europe and Russia
Korea
Sunni Jihadism
Syria
Turkey
21. The U.S. Foreign Investment Miracle, RIP
The long honeymoon is over. "Danger, Will Robinson." Are the light flashing red?
Excerpts:
The problem is, foreign investment is borrowed investment. Its stock constitutes foreign debt. The net foreign debt of $26.2 trillion is the other side of the net foreign investment. Both derive from foreigners applying their trade surpluses to purchase U.S. assets. It is a two-faced Janus. If security alliances and trade relations are good, it is foreign investment. The flows continue and the stock grows. If security alliances break up and trade wars break out, it is foreign debt. The flows dwindle, discontinue, and unwind, and the stock is unloaded.
The path has been entered. Trade wars will diminish imports and squeeze and eventually end the new flows of foreign investment. The European and other Western rearmament and the buildup of their own nuclear umbrella will rebalance their economies and divert their savings from U.S. investment to defense spending. Eventually they may need to divest their stock of U.S. assets. Unloading foreign holdings of Treasuries, equities, corporate bonds, and bank loans will crash stocks and 401ks, raise borrowing costs, and constrain domestic capital formation. Depleting foreign deposits in U.S. banks will require their bailouts by the Fed and may precipitate a financial crisis.
Unless the course is reversed, it is impossible to repay or refinance $26.2 trillion of the net foreign debt, 90 percent of GDP. Foreign creditors will race to unload ahead of each other. This is a downward spiral. In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Mike Campbell explains how, having lots of creditors, he went bankrupt: “Gradually, and then suddenly.”
The U.S. Foreign Investment Miracle, RIP
By Michael S. Bernstam
https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2025/06/09/the_us_foreign_investment_miracle_rip_1115308.html
For the past half-century, the U.S. witnessed a foreign investment miracle. The breakup with Western allies and trade wars can end it.
By 2025, foreign countries invested $62.1 trillion in the U.S. This is 213 percent of U.S. GDP, 56 percent of world GDP, and 31 percent of U.S. family wealth. The U.S. also owns assets abroad, worth $35.9 trillion, and so the net foreign investment is $26.2 trillion, 90 percent of GDP and equivalent to four years of U.S. gross domestic investment.
Ironically, the source of the foreign investment miracle is the currently vilified trade deficit (technically, the current account deficit). When the dollar value of imports exceeds that of exports, the worldwide difference cannot but be invested in U.S. assets.
Foreign investment is everywhere: Treasuries, stock market equities, over-the-counter stocks, investment funds shares, interest in partnerships, mortgage-backed securities, corporate bonds, commercial paper, loans to U.S. businesses from foreign banks, foreign loanable funds in U.S. banks, and foreign direct investment in manufacturing capital stock and technology startups.
Depending on the category, 60 percent to over 90 percent of foreign investment is by the U.S. Western allies--European, Asian-Pacific, and Canadian. This is their contribution to U.S. fiscal, financial, and productive capacity, economic growth, and prosperity. So much for the neo-Marxist postcolonial grievances and victimhood of the Trump administration that Western allies exploit, rip-off, freeload on, and take advantage of the United States,
- The largest category is stock equities and investment funds shares, $18.4 trillion, 23 percent of the U.S. total. Western allies own 84 percent of these holdings.
- Foreign direct investment is $17.8 trillion at market value. On a historical-cost basis, 92 percent was invested by Western allies who trust the U.S. with their illiquid assets.
- Foreigners held $4.3 trillion of corporate bonds, 27 percent of the total corporate debt, and 78 percent of foreign holdings were by Western allies.
- Foreign banks and their U.S. branches extended $4.0 trillion in loans and leases to U.S. borrowers, compared with $12.6 trillion by U.S. banks, and so 24 percent of the total loans. Foreign loanable funds deposited in U.S. banks added over $3.5 trillion, 20 percent of the total loanable funds in the U.S.
- By 2025, of the $36.2 trillion of U.S. government debt and of the $28.8 trillion held by the public, foreign governments and private investors financed $8.5 trillion, 23 percent of the total, 30 percent of public debt. Western allies financed 64 percent of the foreign share. By extension, of the $1.9 trillion of U.S. federal budget deficit, foreigners financed $440 billion, more than half of defense expenditures or Medicare.
In short, foreign countries provide close to one-quarter of cash flow from financing to U.S. business and federal budget deficit, and Western allies, a fifth. For Western allies, the U.S. offers more than the safe harbor investment premium. Studies show that for the last hundred years, Western political, military, and financial alliances strongly overlapped. This is a mutual insurance policy utilizing comparative advantages, U.S.’ in providing nuclear security and global deterrence and Western allies’ in saving and investing in the U.S.
Considering the contribution of foreign, primarily Western, investment to the U.S. economy, the U.S. nuclear umbrella for Western allies and global security has been one of the greatest investments the U.S. has ever made. But this foreign investment miracle may be over.
The problem is, foreign investment is borrowed investment. Its stock constitutes foreign debt. The net foreign debt of $26.2 trillion is the other side of the net foreign investment. Both derive from foreigners applying their trade surpluses to purchase U.S. assets. It is a two-faced Janus. If security alliances and trade relations are good, it is foreign investment. The flows continue and the stock grows. If security alliances break up and trade wars break out, it is foreign debt. The flows dwindle, discontinue, and unwind, and the stock is unloaded.
The path has been entered. Trade wars will diminish imports and squeeze and eventually end the new flows of foreign investment. The European and other Western rearmament and the buildup of their own nuclear umbrella will rebalance their economies and divert their savings from U.S. investment to defense spending. Eventually they may need to divest their stock of U.S. assets. Unloading foreign holdings of Treasuries, equities, corporate bonds, and bank loans will crash stocks and 401ks, raise borrowing costs, and constrain domestic capital formation. Depleting foreign deposits in U.S. banks will require their bailouts by the Fed and may precipitate a financial crisis.
Unless the course is reversed, it is impossible to repay or refinance $26.2 trillion of the net foreign debt, 90 percent of GDP. Foreign creditors will race to unload ahead of each other. This is a downward spiral. In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Mike Campbell explains how, having lots of creditors, he went bankrupt: “Gradually, and then suddenly.”
Mr. Bernstam is Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University
22. The tiny Philippine island denying and defying China at sea
David and Goliath.
I am always reminded of this statement from the Ambasador:
“The West Philippine Sea, not Taiwan, is the real flashpoint for an armed conflict,”
– Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez February 28, 2024
Excerpts:
Filipino maritime expert Chester Cabalza said frequent military patrols were necessary to further the country’s win in the legal battle in the face of the arbitral ruling that China continues to ignore.
“Frequent maritime patrols exercise our right to use, possess and control all resources in the shoal,” he told Asia Times. “It also increases familiarity to the maritime domain as a means of readiness to the potential disputes amid flashpoints in the contested islands.”
More importantly, Cabalza notes, it ensures that military forces are prepared against all “unauthorized access that would lead to annexation.”
“The government must fulfill its aspiration of a self-reliant defense posture to sustain its massive military and coast guard operations,” he said, pointing out that Japan has also recently ratified a Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) that allows its troops to participate in joint drills with the Philippines, similar to the Americans.
“Beijing will feel a pinch of insecurity in view of this because they view the RAA as an impediment to their bigger goals in securing the entirety of the South China Sea,” he asserted.
The tiny Philippine island denying and defying China at sea - Asia Times
Asia Times reports from little Likas, a remote island outpost that marks the front line against China in the South China Sea
asiatimes.com · by Jason Gutierrez · June 9, 2025
LIKAS ISLAND – Philippine Marine Private John Lloyd Lobendino scanned the deep blue waters surrounding Likas, a tiny speck of an island in the West Philippines Sea, while rubber boats carrying visitors from the BRP Andres Bonifacio landed on the pristine beach.
While other 21-year-olds are busy with other young adult pursuits, Lobendino went about his task with a seriousness normally associated with veterans who have seen terrible wars waged and blood spilled in the name of national patrimony.
Like many of his fellow soldiers assigned to this remote and lonely outpost, Lobendino says he is willing to fight to the end.
“Because this is ours,” he said quietly when asked by Asia Times, which joined a recent maritime patrol operation in the South China Sea to check on the area ahead of the Philippines’ Independence Day this week (June 12)
He was accompanied by a fellow marine who was also in his 20s. He wore a pair of shades to protect his eyes from the sun’s glare that intensely reflected the stretch of fine white sand of Likas (West York Island), the second-largest of the nine Philippine-controlled features in the disputed Spratly island chain.
The military took journalists for the first time in patrolling the West Philippine Sea, the name the Southeast Asian country uses to refer to areas in the South China Sea that are within its jurisdiction.
A crew member aboard the Philippine Navy’s BRP Andres Bonifacio scans the horizon as the ship embarks on a maritime patrol of Manila-controlled areas in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea) on June 5, 2025. Picture: Jason Gutierrez
Regularly, troops among the claimants are often in the background, preferring their respective coast guards – which are technically civilian in nature – to patrol the disputed sea lest a sudden miscalculation triggers outright hostility.
But the mission is meant to assert the Philippines’ sovereignty and sovereign rights over the waters amid an increasingly assertive China that rejected a 2016 arbitral ruling by an international court in The Hague, which invalidated Beijing’s expansive nine-dash line claims in the region.
That case was brought by the Philippines, a long-time military ally of the United States and the most vocal Southeast Asian region that has stood up to China in the contested maritime area. The patrol is part of the government’s “transparency initiative” to show the public that the distant shores are vital to the country’s interests.
Presidential decree
Visitors to the island are greeted by weather-beaten green signage that welcomes them to the naval detachment.
In the postcard-perfect background, a Philippine flag flutters in the gentle wind. Written on a fading-green board is a reminder of PD 1596, a presidential decree signed in 1978 that formally recognized Likas as part of the Kalayaan island group in the country’s map.
The 18-hectare island is home to a rotating number of Marines tasked with guarding the paradise island in the middle of the ocean and watched by the People’s Liberation Army Navy forces backed by their coast guard and a fleet of militia vessels posing as fishermen.
Last year, a Filipino soldier was wounded when China Coast Guard men armed with pikes and machetes violently seized firearms from Filipino supply boats near the Second Thomas (Ayungin) Shoal, called Ren’ai Jiao by Beijing, in another part of the disputed sea.
An armed soldier guards the coast of Pag-Asa Island in the West Philippine Sea. Picture: Jason Gutierrez
The United States has repeatedly said it is prepared to step in if Manila invoked a 1951 treaty that calls on both sides to defend each other in times of outside aggression, a scenario that could trigger a larger conflict. For now, cooler heads are prevailing despite China’s provocations.
For corpsman Ibasco, who was recently transferred to the Likas detachment, there was no time to think before he shipped out from home. “To us, it is a privilege to serve,” said Ibasco, who did not want to give out his first name citing the sensitivity of his post.
He said he took his mission to heart, though time can be an adversary. To break the monotony, he swims in the morning and catches fish “because our provisions are all preserved food.” While a satellite connection allows him to connect with his wife and young daughter at times, much of his free time is spent on self-reflection.
Lonely island, crowded sea
Veteran combatant Technical Sergeant Nino Calbog, who has seen action in the strife-torn southern Philippine region against homegrown insurgents, said it was an honor to be on the ground protecting the country from foreign aggressors. A father of two, he said his service is for the country and family.
“I always tell them that my job as a soldier is for them. It is difficult for a soldier to be away from family, but my wife is there explaining to them why I need to be away for three months,” he said.
There is an improvised basketball court, where the men shoot hoops beside a garden patch, while two goats roam in the back. They can be slaughtered for food but are considered more like pets.
Philippine soldiers hooping in their spare time on the island, June 5, 2025. Photo: Jason Gutierrez
Power is provided by a generator and solar generators, although it can be pitch black at night here. Drinking water, however, is shipped on regular resupply missions or is collected through rainfall.
“Our flag is always waving because this island is ours,” said Naval Task Force 42 chief Colonel Joel Bonavente. “It symbolizes that our troops are here to always guard and defend our territory in the West Philippine Sea.”
Isolation, he said, could be the biggest enemy for some, but assured that “the attitude of our soldiers is well adjusted.” “They are well-motivated and stand ready to defend our territory,” Bonavente said, adding that protocol requires them to challenge anyone who is passing by nearby.
Plans to upgrade the “hospitability of our patrol base” are in the pipeline, he said.
Allies and adversaries
Filipino maritime expert Chester Cabalza said frequent military patrols were necessary to further the country’s win in the legal battle in the face of the arbitral ruling that China continues to ignore.
“Frequent maritime patrols exercise our right to use, possess and control all resources in the shoal,” he told Asia Times. “It also increases familiarity to the maritime domain as a means of readiness to the potential disputes amid flashpoints in the contested islands.”
More importantly, Cabalza notes, it ensures that military forces are prepared against all “unauthorized access that would lead to annexation.”
“The government must fulfill its aspiration of a self-reliant defense posture to sustain its massive military and coast guard operations,” he said, pointing out that Japan has also recently ratified a Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) that allows its troops to participate in joint drills with the Philippines, similar to the Americans.
“Beijing will feel a pinch of insecurity in view of this because they view the RAA as an impediment to their bigger goals in securing the entirety of the South China Sea,” he asserted.
Jason Gutierrez was head of Philippine news at BenarNews, an online news service affiliated with Radio Free Asia (RFA), a Washington-based news organization that covered many under-reported countries in the region. A veteran foreign correspondent, he has also worked with The New York Times and Agence France-Presse (AFP).
asiatimes.com · by Jason Gutierrez · June 9, 2025
23. America’s Brexit Phase: Trump’s Tariffs and the Price of Economic Uncertainty
Conclusion:
The biggest lesson of Brexit is that policy uncertainty can chill business investment, growth in productivity, and incomes—quickly, lastingly, and painfully. The supporters of Trump’s “strategic uncertainty” approach have been forewarned.
America’s Brexit Phase
Foreign Affairs · by More by Jonathan Haskel · June 10, 2025
Trump’s Tariffs and the Price of Economic Uncertainty
June 10, 2025
A U.S. flag fluttering at a port in San Pedro, California, May 2025 Mike Blake / Reuters
JONATHAN HASKEL is Professor of Economics at Imperial College Business School. From 2018 to 2024, he served as a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee.
MATTHEW J. SLAUGHTER is Paul Danos Dean and Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. From 2005 to 2007, he served on the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
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The chaotic trade policies of U.S. President Donald Trump have created a climate of uncertainty that does not bode well for the U.S. economy. In his second inaugural address, in January, Trump declared his intention to fundamentally restructure the United States’ place in the global economy. In April, following his announcement of the so-called Liberation Day tariffs, his administration embarked on a wholesale reshaping of generations’ worth of international trade policies. But in the weeks since, Washington has reversed course on some tariffs and begun negotiations on others with major trading partners such as China. Meanwhile, U.S. policymakers are making sweeping changes to immigration policy and contemplating restrictions on foreign direct investment. Little wonder that U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently described the administration’s approach as “strategic uncertainty.”
The outcome of this supposedly strategic uncertainty, however, is predictable. Unless Washington changes course fast, the United States will suffer many of the same consequences that the United Kingdom did in the aftermath of Brexit. By voting to leave the European Union in June of 2016, after nearly half a century of membership, the United Kingdom opted to upend its trade, immigration, and investment arrangements with the rest of the bloc. Brexit ended up being a protracted process, not a single event, as changes to British economic policies took years to negotiate and implement. Policy uncertainty facing the country’s businesses surged and remained high for years. That sustained uncertainty did not fundamentally alter the United Kingdom’s trade outlook; trade policies that had been in place before the Brexit vote remained mostly unchanged for some time. Indeed, for five years, British exports and imports remained almost constant; only after higher trade barriers with the EU were permanently in place in 2021 did trade volumes begin to fall.
But despite little change in trade policy and volume for the first five years after the Brexit vote, the British economy suffered. The period of prolonged uncertainty ushered in by the Brexit vote hampered business investment. Beginning in 2016, years of stagnant investment slowed the country’s growth in labor productivity and real incomes. If Washington continues to embrace “strategic uncertainty,” the United States, too, will likely face years of stagnating investment, sluggish growth in its economic output, and flat or even falling standards of living.
“A PROCESS, NOT AN EVENT”
Many initial economic forecasts projecting Brexit’s impact predicted that the United Kingdom’s trade would fall, leading to lower output. In April 2016, two months before the Brexit vote, the British treasury projected that the United Kingdom’s gross domestic product would fall by nearly four percent over 15 years. Other forecasts predicted an immediate post-vote decline in trade and output. But for five years after the Brexit vote, the country’s trade changed little. Trade openness, even allowing for the pandemic, moved more or less in line with other peer countries.
Sir Ivan Rogers, the former British ambassador to the EU, presaged the more important, more damaging impact of Brexit in a 2018 speech, when he said, “Brexit is a process, not an event.” Soon after the Brexit referendum, it became clear that British policymakers had little idea what the post-Brexit trade regime with the EU would look like. Around half of the United Kingdom’s exports and imports were with the EU and were thus covered by an agreement that the United Kingdom and the EU would need to renegotiate. Non-EU trade was also governed by EU agreements that likewise needed to be replaced.
The major British political parties were split on what to do. “Soft” Brexiteers proposed making minimal changes, hoping to maintain common product safety standards, liberal movement of labor, highly integrated supply chains, and the existing, nearly frictionless trade in goods and services. “Hard” Brexiteers argued that minimal changes would betray the people’s wishes and decried the government’s slow-going approach as “Brexit in name only.” They preferred independent product standards, limited labor mobility, and the renegotiation of non-EU trade relations. Indeed, in June 2018, the then Brexit secretary David Davis, predicted that new trade deals with Canada and the United States would be secured within two years.
In terms of actual policy changes, virtually nothing happened for nearly five years, as parliamentary and judicial challenges to Brexit came and went. It was not until January 2020 that the United Kingdom exited the EU, and it was not until May of 2021 that the new EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement came into force. And since 2020, no comprehensive new trade agreement has been reached with any substantial non-EU countries, either, despite years of negotiations. Instead, existing EU trade deals with all other nations were effectively rolled over. To this day, Britain’s Brexit path remains meandering and slow. In May, the United Kingdom and the EU convened their first summit since the United Kingdom officially departed in late 2020, and contentious negotiations continue in key economic areas such as fisheries and agriculture.
BRAKE ON INVESTMENT
Brexit’s years-long process of economic and judicial proposals, disagreements, and negotiations meant sustained policy uncertainty for British companies. And that policy uncertainty turned out to be ruinous for business capital investment. In 1983, Ben Bernanke, later the chairman of the Federal Reserve during the Bush and Obama administrations who was then a young economist at Stanford, published a paper on uncertainty and investment. Bernanke’s key insight was that when confronted with high or rising uncertainty, companies with greater sunk investments—those that are unrecoverable—are more likely to delay making additional investments. Such companies will rationally wait for greater clarity on market demand and input costs, which are influenced greatly by government policies, to make innovation efforts.
In reality, a great deal of business investment involves sunk costs, particularly for globally integrated companies. So if a country announces a fundamental change in its global economic relations but then leaves it unclear what new policies will prevail and when, the result is likely to be a sharp and sustained slowdown in capital investment by that country’s companies.
This kind of uncertainty-induced investment slowdown is precisely what befell the British economy in the wake of the Brexit vote. British business investment was about $85 billion in the second quarter of 2016; it was barely changed, at about $86.7 billion, in the last quarter of 2024. By contrast, U.S. business investment grew by 35 percent over this period. According to monthly surveys by the Bank of England since 2016, British firms have consistently cited Brexit-related uncertainty as one of their top three concerns. The United Kingdom’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research has noted that despite the signing of the trade and cooperation agreement with the EU, “firms remain cautious due to shifting regulatory requirements, potential market access restrictions, and trade frictions.”
Since the referendum, near-zero growth in British capital investment has also slowed growth in British citizens’ real incomes to near zero, because slow investment slows growth in labor productivity. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted average incomes in the United Kingdom have risen by only about four percent; at that pace, it would take more than a century for average incomes to double. The typical British household would be earning almost $2,000 more a year today had Brexit not slowed growth in investment, innovation, and the economy overall.
DÉJÀ VU
Thus far, the initial impacts of Liberation Day on the United States’ economy look ominously like those of Brexit on the United Kingdom’s. Nearly every possible indicator measuring the uncertainty that faces American businesses has surged. The Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, which tracks indicators including news articles discussing policy uncertainty and disagreement among prominent economic forecasts, nearly doubled when Trump was reelected, and then more than doubled again after Liberation Day. Today, it is higher than it was during the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2007–8 financial crisis, or, indeed, any other time since 1985, the earliest year for which data is available.
Leading publicly traded U.S.-based companies, including Ford, Mattel, Southwest, and UPS, have ceased publishing forecasts of future earnings because they say their business outlook is so unclear. And according to both government and private-sector surveys, business investment expectations have plunged. In April, the Federal Reserve’s Beige Book, a report on the U.S. economy published eight times a year, used the word “uncertainty” an unprecedented 80 times.
The effects of all this uncertainty did not show up in this year’s first-quarter statistics for U.S. gross domestic product. Indeed, private capital investment surged at an annual rate of 24.4 percent, as American companies rushed to import capital goods in advance of tariff increases; first-quarter U.S. imports of goods exploded at an unparalleled annual rate of 53.3 percent. But looking ahead, there is every reason to expect capital investment to stagnate.
According to the CEO Economic Outlook Survey for the first quarter of 2025, published by the Business Roundtable, an association of more than 200 CEOs of leading U.S. companies, 58 percent of member companies have forecast flat or falling U.S. capital investment in the next six months. And during this year’s first quarter, the number of merger-and-acquisition transactions announced in the United States fell by 19 percent relative to the last quarter of 2024. Among small businesses, only 18 percent planned new capital outlays over that same period, the lowest percentage since April 2020, when the pandemic had just been declared. The hiring of workers has also slowed. The monthly hiring rate—the number of new hires as a proportion of overall employment—was 3.4 percent in the first three months of 2025, the lowest for that period for any year in more than a decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The companies most affected by this uncertainty are the same ones that drive innovation and undertake most of the investment in the United States. In 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, the parent companies of U.S.-based multinationals undertook 43.5 percent of all capital investment by U.S. companies and 66.6 percent of all research and development by U.S. companies.
A STORM BREWING
Despite the climate of uncertainty that Trump’s policy chaos has fostered, there are some trends that favor the United States. For at least a year before Trump’s reelection, the United States was enjoying a surge in capital investment linked to generative artificial intelligence. Microsoft, for example, has announced plans to invest $80 billion in 2025 in AI-enabled data centers. If the underlying business case for generative AI proves immune to the United States’ trade wars, then this important driver of overall U.S. business investment will not wither. Moreover, Trump has repeatedly called for foreign-based multinationals to expand their investments in the United States rather than export their products here.
But the critical issue facing U.S. companies—profound policy uncertainty—remains. Trump has unleashed a dizzying barrage of tariff increases, decreases, pauses, and negotiations with the United States’ major trading partners. And there is no indication that his administration is ready to move past its disastrous “strategic uncertainty” approach. Under these circumstances, few globally connected U.S. companies are likely to announce large new capital investments. And foreign-based multinationals are facing the same U.S. policy uncertainty that U.S.-based companies are, which may inhibit their investments in the United States, too.
As the United Kingdom learned after Brexit, uncertainty produces grinding stagnation in capital investment and R & D by private companies. That, in turn, leads to plummeting productivity growth and stagnant real incomes. Instead of learning from this bleak recent history, Americans are now painfully absorbing this lesson by repeating it. According to last month’s Surveys of Consumers produced by the University of Michigan, expectations for year-ahead U.S. price inflation have skyrocketed, from 2.8 percent last December to 6.6 percent last month.
The biggest lesson of Brexit is that policy uncertainty can chill business investment, growth in productivity, and incomes—quickly, lastingly, and painfully. The supporters of Trump’s “strategic uncertainty” approach have been forewarned.
JONATHAN HASKEL is Professor of Economics at Imperial College Business School. From 2018 to 2024, he served as a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee.
MATTHEW J. SLAUGHTER is Paul Danos Dean and Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. From 2005 to 2007, he served on the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
Foreign Affairs · by More by Jonathan Haskel · June 10, 2025
24. The New Balance of Power in the Middle East: America, Iran, and the Emerging Arabian Axis
Excerpts:
Iran and the Gulf states now need each other, and both sides need a nuclear deal. That is a welcome development. It could build trust between the Gulf neighbors, enabling them to deepen their engagement to include security cooperation, investments, and trade. Moreover, reengaging with Iran does not require the abandonment of normalization efforts with Israel. Gulf leaders do not want to have to make a Faustian choice between Iran and Israel. They want relations with both in order to strike a regional balance that works to their countries’ advantage and ensures the peace and stability that are vital to the region’s geoeconomic goals. For the Gulf states, a nuclear deal would align their strategy with Washington’s Middle East policy, which could then be consecrated in a formal strategic partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia.
Trump’s recent visit to the Gulf seemed to confirm this expectation. Even before arriving in the region, his administration set aside Israel’s concerns and concluded a bilateral cease-fire agreement with the Houthis. At the same time, the ambitious economic deals that Arab leaders offered Trump served as the backdrop to U.S. statements on Gaza, Iran, and Syria that reflected Gulf priorities at the expense of Israel’s preferences. At every stop on his trip, Trump reiterated his preference for resolving the Iran nuclear issue through diplomacy. And on occasion, he seemed to acknowledge Arab concerns over the war in Gaza: in Abu Dhabi, for example, he said, “A lot of people are starving in Gaza”—apparently criticizing Israel’s ten-week blockade on aid to the territory.
But for this realignment to truly bring regional peace and stability, the United States must give a new nuclear deal with Iran a broader strategic framing. A deal would need to be reached in tandem with a push to expand the Abraham Accords, normalizing Israel’s relations not only with Saudi Arabia but also with other Arab states, such as Syria. To resume normalization efforts with Israel, Riyadh will demand an end to the war in Gaza and a viable political future for the Palestinians. Yet at another level, the United States and its Gulf allies must think of normalization as a necessary complement to both a U.S.-Iranian nuclear deal and the growing Iran–Gulf state axis, with these three pieces together forming a new regional balance.
Of course, U.S. negotiations with Iran may stall, and Washington could return to a more confrontational course with Tehran. Such an outcome would likely prolong regional conflict and foreclose any possibility of further Arab-Israeli normalization in the near term. But if a deal can be reached, the Gulf states have an opportunity to become the pivot of a new regional order, with axes running through them to Iran, Israel, and the United States. After years of war and turmoil, that might finally offer a real chance to bring stability to the region.
The New Balance of Power in the Middle East
Foreign Affairs · by More by Vali Nasr · June 10, 2025
America, Iran, and the Emerging Arabian Axis
June 10, 2025
Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman and Chief of Iranian Armed Forces Mohammad Bagheri in Tehran, April 2025 Iranian Armed Forces Office / Reuters
VALI NASR is Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the author of Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History.
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During his visit to the Middle East in May, U.S. President Donald Trump did several things that few would have predicted months or even weeks earlier. One was his surprise meeting with Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, and the subsequent lifting of U.S. sanctions on Syria, notwithstanding Shara’s history as a leader of a militant Islamist group. Another was his decision not to include Israel on the itinerary, despite his administration’s ongoing efforts to end the war in Gaza. The trip followed the administration’s decision in early May to sign a bilateral cease-fire with the Houthis in Yemen, without consulting or including Israel. Along with Trump’s initiation of direct talks with Iran—a step that Israel adamantly opposes but Arab leaders in the Persian Gulf welcomed and even helped facilitate—these developments suggest how much the regional balance of power has changed since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
The war in Gaza has altered the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East. In the years before the October 7 attack, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and other Gulf states shared with Israel the perception that Iran and its alliance of proxy forces were the region’s overriding threat. They supported the first Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign on Tehran, and they began to normalize relations with Israel. Today, the situation has dramatically shifted. Twenty months into the war, Tehran appears far less of a threat to the Arab world. Meanwhile, Israel looks increasingly like a regional hegemon.
Amid these developments, Washington’s Arab allies and Israel are now in opposite camps on the merits of a new nuclear deal. Israel still sees a deal as a lifeline for the Islamic Republic and has been urging the Trump administration instead to take military action to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. The Gulf states, by contrast, dread a new and potentially uncontainable war on their doorsteps and view a diplomatic resolution with Tehran as vital to regional security and stability. They are also wary of creating a Middle East in which Israel has free rein—even in a future in which normalization with Israel can move forward. In their effort to achieve a new balance between Israel and Iran, the Gulf states have become primary players in Trump’s push for a new nuclear deal. Together, they aim to become the fulcrum of a reconfigured regional order.
PRESSURE FAILURE
To grasp the extent of the Gulf states’ shift on Iran, it is crucial to recall Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s reaction to the first U.S.-Iranian nuclear deal a decade ago. When Iran and the United States signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, in July 2015, the Gulf states shared Israel’s concern that it would bolster Iran’s regional influence. At the time, the Arab world was still recovering from popular uprisings during the 2010–11 Arab Spring, which had toppled once powerful rulers and sparked civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen. Iran had profited from the tumult, carving a sphere of influence stretching from the Arabian Peninsula to the Levant. In a speech before the U.S. Congress in March 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned, “Iran now dominates four Arab capitals—Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and Sanaa.” The Gulf Arab states, like Israel, worried that the United States, in its push for the nuclear accord, was ignoring the growing regional threat posed by the Islamic Republic and its proxies. The same month as Netanyahu’s speech, Saudi Arabia announced it was leading a military intervention in Yemen against the Houthis, the insurgent group that was expanding Iran’s sphere of influence into the Arabian Peninsula.
Israel and Washington’s Gulf allies may have overstated the prospect of Iranian hegemony in the Middle East, but there was no denying that the turmoil in the Arab world had tilted the regional balance of power in Iran’s favor. To its Middle East detractors, the JCPOA was not just about Iran’s nuclear capabilities but also about Iran’s relative influence. According to the terms of the deal, Iran got sanctions relief just for agreeing to limit its nuclear program; it was not required to rein in its proxy forces in the region. As a result, the deal threatened to increase Iran’s sway even as it curbed the country’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. Arab states thus joined hands with Israel to underscore this flaw and used it in a high-profile effort to undermine the JCPOA. In addition to aggressively lobbying members of Congress—an offensive symbolized by Netanyahu’s 2015 speech—this effort included a public and media campaign against the deal.
During his first administration, Trump concurred with the deal’s critics. The United States unilaterally abandoned the JCPOA in 2018 and placed Iran under “maximum pressure” economic sanctions. At the time, the Trump administration expected that this pressure would weaken Iran and shrink its regional influence in favor of a new regional order centered on Israel and Washington’s Arab allies. The administration promoted expanded Arab-Israeli security and intelligence cooperation, culminating in the 2020 Abraham Accords—the agreement that normalized relations between Israel and a series of Arab and North African states, including Bahrain and the UAE, and subsequently Morocco and Sudan. It also took a harder line toward Iran’s support for proxy forces across the region, to the point of making the highly unusual decision to assassinate Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, the powerful head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in Baghdad in 2020.
The tougher U.S. strategy toward Iran continued under President Joe Biden. Contrary to expectations, the Biden administration did not restore the JCPOA and eschewed engaging with Iran—agreeing to talks only after Iran raised the stakes by accelerating its accumulation of highly enriched uranium. Biden’s focus, much like Trump’s, was instead on forging an Arab-Israeli axis. Normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia thus became the lodestar of Biden’s Middle East policy. Indeed, at the time of Hamas’s October 7 attack, the administration thought it was on the cusp of an Israeli-Saudi deal that would bring lasting peace to the region.
ISRAEL UNLEASHED
As events would soon make clear, that assumption was terribly misguided. The Trump-Biden strategy only aggravated regional tensions. Iran responded to U.S. pressure by expanding its nuclear program and its support for the Houthis in Yemen in their war with the Gulf states. It also began directly attacking U.S. and Gulf interests, most notably Saudi oil facilities, in 2019. Even before the October 7 attack, the Gulf states had lost confidence in Washington’s strategy. In March 2023, Saudi Arabia broke ranks to normalize ties with Iran—in a deal brokered by China. One immediate benefit was an end to Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Gulf states remained committed to expanding ties with Israel, but maintaining a balance between Iran and Israel would prove difficult.
Then came Hamas’s attacks and Israel’s blistering war in Gaza, which derailed normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia. A resurgent “axis of resistance,” backed by Iran—including Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, who, along with Hamas saw the prospect of Israeli-Saudi normalization as an existential threat—was now at open war with Israel. The Biden administration assumed that this new regional conflict would strengthen the case for an Israel–Gulf state security alliance, but the Gulf states were loath to be dragged into that conflict. In January 2024, when Biden resolved to respond militarily to the Houthis’ attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia and the UAE assiduously avoided getting involved, despite their years-long struggle against the group. Arab states also had to account for the growing anger among the Arab public about the treatment of the people of Gaza, which precluded any further tightening of Arab-Israeli security cooperation.
Then, in the fall of 2024, a series of Israeli successes turned the tide of the war. In late September, Israel eliminated Hezbollah’s top leadership, including the organization’s longtime leader, Hasan Nasrallah, in a targeted bomb attack—a strike that followed on the heels of a successful undercover operation that decimated the group’s command-and-control structure using exploding pagers. The following month, Israeli forces killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who had masterminded the October 7 attack. And in early December, the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, a longtime close Iranian ally, collapsed. Meanwhile, dangerous exchanges of missiles and drones between Iran and Israel raised the stakes but also further dented Iran’s aura of power, with Israel claiming to have neutralized many of Iran’s air defenses.
By the end of the year, the axis of resistance had been diminished, and Tehran found itself largely cut off from the Levant. Even Iran’s defense of its homeland looked vulnerable. With Trump, a strong backer of Israel, poised to return to the White House, a confident Netanyahu government in Israel saw a rare opportunity to deal a decisive blow to Iran, destroying its nuclear facilities and devastating its economic infrastructure in an attack that would push the Islamic Republic to the brink.
IRAN IN THE BALANCE
Yet Trump has not followed the expected Israeli script. Worried that military strikes on Iran will pull the United States into a costly war, the president has thus far resisted Israeli pressure to dispense with diplomacy and wage open war on Iran. Instead, he has pushed for a new version of precisely the thing he repudiated during his first term: a nuclear deal. In doing so, he is backed by the Gulf states, which, despite their opposition to the earlier deal, also now favor diplomacy with Iran. Since Trump took office, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have all counseled against war and acted as intermediaries and mediators between Tehran and Washington. The most obvious reason for this shift is fear of what war in the Gulf would do to their economies. At a more fundamental level, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states see a nuclear deal as central to achieving a new balance of power in the Middle East.
In part, Gulf support for an Iran deal has to do with Israel’s own changed position in the region. Even as it continues its offensive in Gaza, Israel has already begun to emerge triumphant, confident in its absolute military superiority, and ready to use it to assert domination over the Middle East. In addition to expanding its occupation of Gaza, which Israeli leaders have suggested could be put under indefinite military rule, Israel has been imposing its will on south Lebanon and is occupying and carrying out military incursions into large swaths of Syria. And now it wants to extend its victorious campaign in the Levant to the Gulf, with a military attack on Iran. In addition to provoking Iranian retaliation that could soon include targets on the Arabian Peninsula, such an attack could disrupt world energy supplies and cast doubt on the long-term viability of the economic boom in the Gulf.
The Middle East’s main power brokers, including the Arab states, Iran, Israel, and Turkey, have historically resisted domination by one regional actor. When the Arab world was reaching for primacy under the banner of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, Iran, Israel, and Turkey banded together to contain it. Even after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Israel was not reflexively hostile to Iran if regional power balancing dictated otherwise: in the early years of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was gaining an upper hand and posing as a claimant to leadership of the Arab world, Israel supplied revolutionary Islamist Iran with intelligence and war materiel. Later, as Iran emerged as a rising power, Israelis joined hands with Arab states to counter it.
Now that Israel is laying claim to being the region’s unrivaled power, Arab states and Iran—and also Turkey—need each other to establish a balance. Among the former are Bahrain, Egypt, and Jordan, which do not have diplomatic relations with Iran but, like other Arab powers, have drastically increased their engagement. Above all, Gulf states have become Iran’s crutch in pursuing nuclear negotiations with the United States. The Gulf states understand that, in the rivalry between Iran and Israel, they are the prize. Israel wants an axis with the Arab world that would contain Iran, and Iran wants to deny Israel a footprint in the Arabian Peninsula. For their part, Gulf leaders want a regional order that restrains both Iran and Israel while empowering their own governments. It is this balancing imperative that has turned Washington’s Gulf allies from erstwhile opponents of a nuclear deal into strong advocates. As they see it, a new deal between Iran and the United States would deny Israel a path to war with Iran that could spill onto their shores, and then only confirm Israel’s unchecked regional supremacy.
In turn, Iran, which is eager to conclude a nuclear deal to avoid war and boost its ailing economy, has become increasingly dependent on the Gulf states to manage the Trump administration and keep the negotiations going. Oman’s foreign minister, for example, has played a key role in the talks by developing proposals that bridge differences between Tehran and Washington; Saudi Arabia has embraced the idea of creating a regional nuclear consortium with Iran to jointly manage uranium enrichment. The Saudi foreign minister has also suggested that the kingdom is willing to use its economic muscle to help a final deal take hold.
AXIS OF STABILITY
Iran and the Gulf states now need each other, and both sides need a nuclear deal. That is a welcome development. It could build trust between the Gulf neighbors, enabling them to deepen their engagement to include security cooperation, investments, and trade. Moreover, reengaging with Iran does not require the abandonment of normalization efforts with Israel. Gulf leaders do not want to have to make a Faustian choice between Iran and Israel. They want relations with both in order to strike a regional balance that works to their countries’ advantage and ensures the peace and stability that are vital to the region’s geoeconomic goals. For the Gulf states, a nuclear deal would align their strategy with Washington’s Middle East policy, which could then be consecrated in a formal strategic partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia.
Trump’s recent visit to the Gulf seemed to confirm this expectation. Even before arriving in the region, his administration set aside Israel’s concerns and concluded a bilateral cease-fire agreement with the Houthis. At the same time, the ambitious economic deals that Arab leaders offered Trump served as the backdrop to U.S. statements on Gaza, Iran, and Syria that reflected Gulf priorities at the expense of Israel’s preferences. At every stop on his trip, Trump reiterated his preference for resolving the Iran nuclear issue through diplomacy. And on occasion, he seemed to acknowledge Arab concerns over the war in Gaza: in Abu Dhabi, for example, he said, “A lot of people are starving in Gaza”—apparently criticizing Israel’s ten-week blockade on aid to the territory.
But for this realignment to truly bring regional peace and stability, the United States must give a new nuclear deal with Iran a broader strategic framing. A deal would need to be reached in tandem with a push to expand the Abraham Accords, normalizing Israel’s relations not only with Saudi Arabia but also with other Arab states, such as Syria. To resume normalization efforts with Israel, Riyadh will demand an end to the war in Gaza and a viable political future for the Palestinians. Yet at another level, the United States and its Gulf allies must think of normalization as a necessary complement to both a U.S.-Iranian nuclear deal and the growing Iran–Gulf state axis, with these three pieces together forming a new regional balance.
Of course, U.S. negotiations with Iran may stall, and Washington could return to a more confrontational course with Tehran. Such an outcome would likely prolong regional conflict and foreclose any possibility of further Arab-Israeli normalization in the near term. But if a deal can be reached, the Gulf states have an opportunity to become the pivot of a new regional order, with axes running through them to Iran, Israel, and the United States. After years of war and turmoil, that might finally offer a real chance to bring stability to the region.
VALI NASR is Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the author of Iran’s Grand Strategy: A Political History.
Foreign Affairs · by More by Vali Nasr · June 10, 2025
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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