​Quotes of the Day:

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

– Elie Wiesel, Nobel Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1986

“In everything, power lies with those who control finance, not with those who know the matter upon which the money is to be spent. Thus the holders of power are, in general, ignorant and malevolent, and the less they exercise their power the better.”

~Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays, 1928

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr. (Letter from a Birmingham Jail, 1963)

1. U.S. and China Agree to Get Geneva Pact Back on Track

2. Rare earths: China's trump card in trade war with US

3. Can the US-China agreement to restore trade truce ease long-standing tensions?

4. Russia’s Top Peace Negotiator Is a Historian Who Justified the War

5. The Audacious Reboot of America’s Nuclear Energy Program

6. Trump reverses Army base names in latest DEI purge

7. Trump reverts 7 Army bases to former names with new honorees, including Delta Force soldier

8. ‘Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized’ Review: A People Persecuted

9. Gabbard warns of ‘nuclear holocaust’ in ominous social media video

10. Why Bamboozled Putin Is Struggling to Avenge Ukraine’s Sneak Attack

11. Russia no longer sees US as top enemy, new survey finds

12. What Washington Doesn’t Understand About CCP Membership

13. AI Without Borders: Why US Diplomacy Can't Afford to Ignore Tech Sovereignty

14. The Perils of a Cold War Analogy for Today’s U.S.-China Rivalry

15. Hegseth’s return to Congress turns heated as Democrats go on offense

16. US spy chief wants intel community to move away from building its own tech

17. The U.S. granted these journalists asylum. Then it fired them.

18. Coding Defense Solutions on the Fly with AI

19. Ukraine and Taiwan: Why Learning the Right Lessons Matters

20. How Global Governance Can Survive

21. Why the Right Hates the National Security State

1. U.S. and China Agree to Get Geneva Pact Back on Track

​Good news?

Excerpts:

Representatives from the countries said the framework would essentially restore a pact they agreed to in Switzerland last month, a deal that saw both sides lower tariffs and was premised in part on Beijing’s promise to speed up critical mineral-export licenses while the negotiators kept talking.

“The two largest economies in the world have reached a handshake for a framework,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said. “We’re going to start to implement that framework upon the approval of President Trump, and the Chinese will get their President Xi’s approval, and that’s the process.”

A senior Chinese negotiator, Li Chenggang, nodded to Lutnick’s remarks, saying the two sides “agreed in principle.”

U.S. and China Agree to Get Geneva Pact Back on Track

Move marks the latest twist in countries’ winding trade war

https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/u-s-and-china-agree-to-get-geneva-pact-back-on-track-695eb5f5?st=GC7CkZ&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Max Colchester

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, Caitlin McCabe

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 and Lingling Wei

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Updated June 11, 2025 1:07 am ET

(onlookers faintly speaking)

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Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the two countries will take the deal back to President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping for final approval. Photos: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg; Toby Melville/Reuters

Key Points

What's This?

• U.S. and Chinese negotiators created a framework to restore their trade truce.
• The framework would restore a pact agreed to in Switzerland last month.

LONDON—U.S. and Chinese negotiators wrapped up two days of intense talks here with what they said was a framework to get their trade truce back on track and ratchet down tensions between the two biggest economies.

Representatives from the countries said the framework would essentially restore a pact they agreed to in Switzerland last month, a deal that saw both sides lower tariffs and was premised in part on Beijing’s promise to speed up critical mineral-export licenses while the negotiators kept talking.

“The two largest economies in the world have reached a handshake for a framework,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said. “We’re going to start to implement that framework upon the approval of President Trump, and the Chinese will get their President Xi’s approval, and that’s the process.”

A senior Chinese negotiator, Li Chenggang, nodded to Lutnick’s remarks, saying the two sides “agreed in principle.”

The framework marked the latest twist in a winding trade war—one that had been ratcheting up in recent weeks following the earlier detente.

Lutnick later told The Wall Street Journal that he expects Trump to approve the agreement as soon as Wednesday or Thursday. “I feel really good about where we got to,” he said.

A key goal for the U.S. negotiators, led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Lutnick, was to get China to speed up exports of rare-earth minerals and magnets containing them as their Chinese counterparts had agreed to in Geneva last month. 

Tresaury Secretary Scott Bessent following trade talks in London on Tuesday. Photo: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

The Chinese team, led by Vice Premier He Lifeng, a trusted aide to leader Xi Jinping, drove a hard bargain by asking the U.S. side to loosen restrictions significantly on the sale of technology and other products to China, according to people familiar with the matter.

The negotiators didn’t disclose exactly what they had agreed to as part of the framework, which could lead to continued uncertainty over the trade truce. And the lack of announced details might suggest the U.S. side will need Trump’s approval to undo some of the controls Beijing’s representatives asked for.

Following a phone call with Xi last week that paved the way for the London talks, Trump had said, “There should no longer be any questions respecting the complexity of rare-earth products.” Lutnick echoed that sentiment when talking to reporters in London.

“You should expect those to come off, sort of, as President Trump said, in a balanced way, when they approve” the rare-earth licenses, Lutnick said. “Then you should expect that our export implementation will come down,” he said.

Last month, Washington and Beijing agreed to reduce sky-high tariffs on imports in a de-escalation of trade hostilities. Both sides had since accused each other of violating the spirit of that agreement by using nontariff means to throttle exports.

The U.S. accused China of slow-walking export licenses for rare earths and magnets, critical components needed by U.S. companies for advanced machinery such as cars, semiconductors and military aircraft.

China bristled at new U.S. restrictions on exports to China of American technology including jet engines and chip-design software, as well as the Trump administration’s plan to revoke the visas of Chinese students studying at American colleges.

A recent commentary by the official Xinhua News Agency criticized the U.S. for allegedly viewing economic issues through the lens of security, saying, “This thinking will become the biggest obstacle” to cooperation between the two countries. Yet it also left the door open for relations to improve, saying strengthening economic ties will benefit both nations.

Shan Guo, a Shanghai-based partner at the advisory firm Hutong Research, said the framework agreement is likely the first step of many toward reaching a broader deal and doesn’t expect export controls to be fully resolved.

“Both sides would want deterrence to prevent the other side from violating the truce,” she said, adding that there is “little political trust in each other.”

Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy research at Jefferies in Hong Kong, said the London meeting “looks like damage control, but it looks like they’ve got things back on track.”

Still, he said, “What’s become clear in the last few weeks is that this rare-earths issue has got real leverage for Beijing.” After raising tariffs on China to above 100%, Trump agreed to lower them as exporters and consumers felt the pain.

Now, with a shortage of rare earths threatening automakers’ ability to keep production lines running, the U.S. has had to come back to the table—as China stresses that it was Washington that asked for the talks.

“If you had a test case for how not to approach China, this is it,” Wood said.

Write to Max Colchester at Max.Colchester@wsj.com, Caitlin McCabe at caitlin.mccabe@wsj.com and Lingling Wei at Lingling.Wei@wsj.com

2. Rare earths: China's trump card in trade war with US

​Excerpts:

Since then, Beijing's heavy investment in state-owned mining firms and lax environmental regulations compared to other industry players have turned China into the world's top supplier.

The country now accounts for 92 per cent of global refined output, according to the International Energy Agency.

But the flow of rare earths from China to manufacturers around the world has slowed after Beijing in early April began requiring domestic exporters to apply for a licence, widely seen as a response to US tariffs.

Under the new requirements, which industry groups have said are complex and slow-moving, seven key elements and related magnets require Beijing's approval to be shipped to foreign buyers.

Rare earths: China's trump card in trade war with US

11 Jun 2025 04:10PM

(Updated: 11 Jun 2025 04:27PM)

channelnewsasia.com

BEIJING: China is counting on one crucial advantage as it seeks to grind out a deal to ease its high-stakes trade war with the United States – dominance in rare earths.

Used in electric vehicles, hard drives, wind turbines and missiles, rare earth elements are essential to the modern economy and national defence.

AFP takes a look at how rare earths have become a key sticking point in talks between the US and China.

MINING BOOM

"The Middle East has oil. China has rare earths," Deng Xiaoping, the late Chinese leader whose pro-market reforms set the country on its path to becoming an economic powerhouse, said in 1992.

Since then, Beijing's heavy investment in state-owned mining firms and lax environmental regulations compared to other industry players have turned China into the world's top supplier.

The country now accounts for 92 per cent of global refined output, according to the International Energy Agency.

But the flow of rare earths from China to manufacturers around the world has slowed after Beijing in early April began requiring domestic exporters to apply for a licence, widely seen as a response to US tariffs.

Under the new requirements, which industry groups have said are complex and slow-moving, seven key elements and related magnets require Beijing's approval to be shipped to foreign buyers.

DEEP IMPACT

Ensuring access to the vital elements has become a top priority for US officials in talks with Chinese counterparts, with the two sides meeting this week in London.

"The rare earth issue has clearly ... overpowered the other parts of the trade negotiations because of stoppages at plants in the US," said Paul Triolo, a technology expert at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, in an online seminar on Monday (Jun 9).

That disruption, which forced US car giant Ford to temporarily halt production of its Explorer SUV, "really got the attention of the White House", said Triolo.

Officials from the two countries said on Tuesday that they had agreed on a "framework" for moving forward on trade, with US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick expressing optimism that concerns over access to rare earths "will be resolved" eventually.

RARE EARTH ADVANTAGE

The slowing of licence issuance has raised fears that more automakers will be forced to halt production while they await shipments.

China's commerce ministry said over the weekend that as a "responsible major country", it had approved a certain number of export applications, adding that it was willing to strengthen related dialogue with "relevant countries".

But that bottleneck has highlighted Washington's reliance on Chinese rare earths for producing its defence equipment, even as trade and geopolitical tensions deepen.

An F-35 fighter jet contains more than 400kg of rare earth elements, noted a recent analysis by Gracelin Baskaran and Meredith Schwartz of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Developing mining and processing capabilities requires a long-term effort, meaning the US will be on the back foot for the foreseeable future," they wrote.

PLAYING CATCH UP

The recent export control measures are not the first time China has leveraged its dominance of rare earths supply chains.

After a 2010 maritime collision between a Chinese trawler and Japanese coast guard boats in disputed waters, Beijing briefly halted shipments of its rare earths to Tokyo.

The episode spurred Japan to invest in alternative sources and improve stockpiling of the vital elements - with limited success.

That is "a good illustration of the difficulty of actually reducing dependence on China", said Triolo, noting that in the 15 years since the incident, Japan has achieved only "marginal gains".

The Pentagon is trying to catch up, with its "mine-to-magnet" strategy aiming to ensure an all-domestic supply chain for the key components by 2027.

The challenge facing Washington to compete with Beijing in rare earths is compounded by sheer luck: China sits on the world's largest reserves.

"Mineable concentrations are less common than for most other mineral commodities, making extraction more costly," wrote Rico Luman and Ewa Manthey of ING in an analysis published on Tuesday.

"It is this complex and costly extraction and processing that make rare earths strategically significant," they wrote.

"This gives China a strong negotiating position."

channelnewsasia.com

3. Can the US-China agreement to restore trade truce ease long-standing tensions?

​Analysis from Singapore (Channel News Asia).

Excerpts:

But observers said they are cautiously optimistic about the positive shift in tone between the two global superpowers.

“It's unclear what has been agreed to besides a sort of pathway to a framework to implement a concept of a plan. So it's early days,” said trade and economic policy expert Deborah Elms.

“But I suppose that the good news is, both sides do seem to see that escalation is not in their interest, and they agree that negotiations or discussions are important pathways to get to some kind of resolution.”

...

In a separate briefing, China's Vice Commerce Minister Li Chenggang noted that the framework would be taken back to US and Chinese leaders for review.

“The fact that both sides have to fly back to present whatever was discussed in person to their leaders tells you something about the negotiating leverage that the teams had on the ground,” said Elms.

“In other words, they weren't authorised ahead of time to accept an agreement. I think that it shows you how complicated these talks will ultimately be.”

Can the US-China agreement to restore trade truce ease long-standing tensions?

Top officials from Washington and Beijing on Tuesday (Jun 10) agreed on the preliminary plan after two days of intense talks in London.

Calvin Yang

11 Jun 2025 05:46PM

(Updated: 11 Jun 2025 06:13PM)

channelnewsasia.com

Trade relations between the United States and China remain fluid, even as the world's two biggest economies have agreed on a framework aimed at reducing friction and reviving the flow of sensitive goods, said observers.

Top officials from Washington and Beijing on Tuesday (Jun 10) agreed on the preliminary plan after two days of intense discussions in London.

The framework builds upon the groundwork that the superpowers laid in Geneva last month to ease tariffs they had taken against each other’s economies. But further details, including plans for a next round of talks, remain sparse.

“It's important to realise that this remains a very fluid, a very contentious relationship,” said Alex Capri, a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore Business School.

“In the past, historically, negotiating a proper free trade agreement literally took years because there are so many moving parts. There are so many elements … and that takes a lot of time.”

Capri expressed skepticism about the efficacy of short-term negotiations, saying these might not lead to long-lasting agreements.

“I think we'll continue to see more transactionalism, and we'll probably see more and more of these types of shorter, one-on-one type of meetings that remain a work in progress,” he told CNA’s Asia First.

But observers said they are cautiously optimistic about the positive shift in tone between the two global superpowers.

“It's unclear what has been agreed to besides a sort of pathway to a framework to implement a concept of a plan. So it's early days,” said trade and economic policy expert Deborah Elms.

“But I suppose that the good news is, both sides do seem to see that escalation is not in their interest, and they agree that negotiations or discussions are important pathways to get to some kind of resolution.”

In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (right) shakes hands with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent before their meeting to discuss China-US trade, in London, Monday, June 9, 2025. (Photo: Li Ying/Xinhua via AP)

GROWING WEAPONISATION OF RESOURCES

However, analysts highlighted how countries have been weaponising their strategic commodities to gain an edge.

China’s dominance in rare earth minerals and America’s lead in semiconductor innovations have become geopolitical bargaining chips.

“That is something that's here to stay,” said Capri.

“I think it's going to be more and more the new normal to see a linkage between tariff discussions and discussions about strategic supply chains such as rare earth and semiconductors.”

Workers transport soil containing rare earth elements for export at a port in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province, China on Oct 31, 2010. (Photo: Reuters)

He added: “We're looking at a very transactional world, certainly under the Trump 2.0 administration where tariffs, export controls, sanctions, all of these things are going to be lumped together now in trade-related and commercial discussions.”

Although the initial focus was tariff reduction, experts cautioned that these strategic issues could derail momentum.

“Both sides have identified that they have some cards to play in this dispute, and both have shown a willingness to use those if the negotiations start to unravel,” said Elms, who is head of trade policy at philanthropic organisation Hinrich Foundation.

“The tariff discussion is only a small piece of what is now on the agenda,” she told CNA’s Asia Now.

“There's a whole lot of things that you could put on the negotiating cards for both sides. All of them are difficult.”

COMPLEX NEGOTIATION CHALLENGES

The high-stakes issues require compromise from both countries, Elms stressed.

“There are lots of things that could go horribly wrong in these discussions, unless they keep to the sort of bedrock principle that we do not want to have an escalation of tension going forward.”

Despite the complexity of factors now on the negotiation table, she said she believes the concerted effort on both sides in reaching a deal is encouraging.

“I think talking is always better than not talking, but the fact that it's proving difficult to get clear outcomes is a worry.”

US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick waves as he arrives at Lancaster House, on the second day scheduled for trade talks between the US and China, in London, Britain on Jun 10, 2025. (Photo: REUTERS/Toby Melville)

On Tuesday, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the agreement reached in London would remove some of the recent US export restrictions.

In a separate briefing, China's Vice Commerce Minister Li Chenggang noted that the framework would be taken back to US and Chinese leaders for review.

“The fact that both sides have to fly back to present whatever was discussed in person to their leaders tells you something about the negotiating leverage that the teams had on the ground,” said Elms.

“In other words, they weren't authorised ahead of time to accept an agreement. I think that it shows you how complicated these talks will ultimately be.”

IMPORTANCE OF STRATEGIC ALLIANCES

Observers warned that countries lacking strategic resources may find themselves increasingly sidelined in global trade discussions.

“Unfortunately, for the middle-tier countries that don't have that same kind of bargaining power … those countries are going to have less choice,” said Capri.

“They're going to be pushed into positions where they're not going to be able to leverage a lot of things like the bigger countries when it comes to negotiating a trade deal, whether it's over tariffs or whether it's over access to supply chains.”

He highlighted the importance of strategic alliances, encouraging smaller countries to join minilateral agreements to gain negotiating leverage.

“What's in the best interest of middle-tier countries is to build as many relationships as possible, to forge as many minilateral agreements,” said Capri.

“Smaller countries are going to be looking to position themselves and connect themselves with as many opportunities as possible.”

US President Donald Trump holds a chart next to US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick as Trump delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, DC, US on Apr 2, 2025. (Photo: Reuters/Carlos Barria)

Meanwhile, some countries are racing to strike a deal with the US before President Donald Trump’s 90-day pause on his sweeping tariffs expires on Jul 9.

Without agreements in place, countries may once again face the duties temporarily imposed on Apr 9.

“In any case, these are short deadlines for very complicated negotiations with an awful lot of trading partners,” said Elms.

“Ultimately, the decision maker is Donald Trump himself, and his capacity to manage all of these decisions is also time-limited. He only has so many hours in a day in which he could actually get into the details or even sign off on an agreed upon commitment.”

channelnewsasia.com

4. Russia’s Top Peace Negotiator Is a Historian Who Justified the War

​Can Russia make good on this threat? Will we let it?

Russia’s Top Peace Negotiator Is a Historian Who Justified the War

Vladimir Medinsky warns, in an interview, that Ukraine would lose more territory if it doesn’t agree to Moscow’s list of demands

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-negotiator-vladimir-medinsky-85612fec

By Matthew Luxmoore

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June 10, 2025 11:00 pm ET

Vladimir Medinsky first gained prominence in Russian political circles through his interpretations of the past. Photo: gavriil grigorov/Reuters

Key Points

What's This?

• Vladimir Medinsky, Moscow’s chief negotiator, is drawing on his view of history in peace talks with Ukraine.
• Medinsky downplays Ukraine’s drone attacks, warns of territorial losses if Kyiv doesn’t compromise.
• Ukraine views Medinsky as a messenger for Putin whose rhetoric prevents breakthroughs in negotiations.

ISTANBUL—Moscow’s chief negotiator in peace talks with Kyiv was a lead architect of the historical revisionism that drove Russia to invade Ukraine.

Now, Vladimir Medinsky is drawing on his view of history again as he tries to convince Ukraine that it would be better off unwinding its integration with the West and embracing Moscow’s terms for peace.

“With Russia, it’s impossible to fight a long war,” Medinsky said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, citing Russia’s 21-year war with Sweden in the 18th century as evidence that the country prevails in protracted fights.

Medinsky, who spoke to the Journal after the latest round of negotiations in Istanbul, played down the impact of Ukraine’s recent drone assault that destroyed at least 12 Russian bombers, saying that it hadn’t cast a cloud over talks.

The talks yielded no breakthrough, though the sides have agreed on a series of prisoner exchanges. President Trump, who has been pushing for a peace deal, said last week that he might let the two sides “fight for a while.” Medinsky warned that a lack of compromise from Kyiv would only lead to more territorial losses.

“We want peace,” he said. “But if Ukraine keeps being driven by the national interests of others, then we will be simply forced to respond.”

and can cause significant damage to Russia

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03:1406:01

WSJ’s Ukraine Bureau Chief James Marson explains Ukraine’s clandestine drone attack, known as “Operation Spider’s Web,” on Russia’s air force. Photo: Maxar Technologies

Ukraine has long argued that it is precisely this kind of rhetoric—echoed in regular statements by Russian President Vladimir Putin—that has prevented any breakthrough in peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow.

It contends that the only Russian with a mandate to decide the terms of a truce with Ukraine is Putin, and the negotiators sent by him to Istanbul were simply messengers for the Kremlin—though Ukrainian officials acknowledge Medinsky has played a role in arranging crucial prisoner swaps.

“Russians don’t want peace,” said Ukraine’s former defense minister, Andriy Zagorodnyuk, who currently advises the Ukrainian government. “And we don’t need Medinsky to prove this to us.”

Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine took place last week in Istanbul. Photo: murad sezer/Reuters

Ukrainian officials say Medinsky, during talks in Istanbul, has routinely turned to questionable interpretations of conflicts from past centuries to try to press his points on the Ukrainian team.

It is through interpretations of the past that Medinsky, a bespectacled, stern 54-year-old, first achieved prominence in political circles. 

In the 2000s, he penned a series of popular history books titled “Myths about Russia,” in which he assailed primitive clichés about Russian drunkenness and cruelty, examined the concept of a “Russian soul,” and railed against claims that Russians are authoritarian at heart.

As Putin’s culture minister between 2012 and 2020, he pushed a more positive vision of Russia’s past. The ministry sponsored a number of historical action movies—at least three of them about World War II-era tanks—with thin plotlines and video game-style shootouts that were popular with cinema audiences. Medinsky also oversaw the construction of statues to Russian historical figures across the country.

The senior Putin aide has co-written Russian textbooks that have been introduced as part of a sweeping reorientation of the curriculum toward what the Kremlin calls “patriotic education” that plays down the dark pages of Russia’s past and justifies the war in Ukraine, which Moscow calls a “special military operation.”

At the June 2022 presentation of another history book series, he noted past Russian statesmen who contributed to the country’s rapid territorial expansion over the centuries. “Now it’s a bit smaller,” he said of Russia’s territory. “But that’s not forever.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Medinsky at the dedication last year of a World War II monument. Photo: EPA/Shutterstock

Mikhail Zygar, a Russian author and expert on Putin’s inner circle, has alleged that Medinsky is the ghostwriter for many of Putin’s historical texts, including a June 2021 essay that denied Ukraine’s right to statehood and introduced many themes Putin would later invoke to justify the invasion. Medinsky said he has been involved in writing notes and preparing documents for Putin, but doesn’t write the texts.

He has headed up Russia’s delegation in talks with Ukraine since 2022, which Kyiv abandoned after Russia withdrew from Ukraine’s capital and surrounding areas, and left behind evidence of atrocities that hardened Kyiv’s stance.

Medinsky, in his interview with the Journal, said the West’s mistake is that it views the war in Ukraine as something similar to a conflict between England and France—two countries with their own distinct histories and cultures. He argued that the war with Ukraine is instead a fratricidal fight between two states with a common language and culture that are essentially one people and are destined to be close allies.

“This is like a conflict between two brothers—one older and one younger—about who is smarter and more important,” he said. “This conflict sadly deepens our differences, and that’s why we want it to end as soon as possible.”

Ukrainian soldiers on a training exercise earlier this year in eastern Ukraine. Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ

Ukraine has said Russia’s view of Ukrainians as younger brothers in the same family is the kind of language that masks expansionist ambitions at the core of Moscow’s campaign.

“If Russia claims to be a ‘brother’ to any Central or Eastern European nation, it is the Cain in the story, already holding the stone,” said Heorhii Tykhyi, spokesman for Ukraine’s foreign ministry.

Medinsky has warned Ukrainians that long wars with Russia end in inevitable defeat for its enemies. He cited the Great Northern War at the start of the 18th century, which pitted Peter the Great against the Swedish Empire.

Peter had proposed a truce that would leave in Russia’s hands only the territory of modern-day St. Petersburg, with its access to the Baltic Sea. Sweden refused and launched an ill-fated march on Moscow that ended with its crushing defeat at the Battle of Poltava in Ukraine and its later loss of the Baltic provinces.

Putin has invoked that war as inspiration for the war in Ukraine, arguing that Russia today is taking back territory that rightfully belongs to it.

“That war would go on for 21 years,” Medinsky said of the fight with Sweden. “We don’t want [that]. We want peace.”

But some long wars fought by Russians have ended in defeat, including a nearly decadelong invasion of Afghanistan that drained Moscow’s resources and ended in 1989 with a military withdrawal that accelerated the Soviet collapse two years later.

Western officials say Russia has suffered more than 10 times as many casualties in Ukraine as the Soviet Union did during the entire Afghan campaign.

Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com

Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the June 11, 2025, print edition as 'Top Russian Negotiator Takes Hard Line'.

5. The Audacious Reboot of America’s Nuclear Energy Program

​I think we need nuclear energy in America.

The Audacious Reboot of America’s Nuclear Energy Program

AI and competition with China are pushing startups to reinvent atomic energy, backed by unprecedented private capital and enthusiasm from the Trump administration

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/nuclear-energy-industry-startups-942ae4a1?st=SSPXmV&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

A coating is applied to uranium kernels in a furnace at Standard Nuclear in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to develop triso fuel, which is in high demand for small, modular reactors.

By Heather Somerville

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 | Photographs and Video by Jessica Tezak for WSJ

June 11, 2025 5:30 am ET

Key Points

What's This?

• Standard Nuclear in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is developing meltdown-resistant fuel for safer, smaller nuclear reactors.
• Venture capitalists have invested $2.5 billion since 2021 in U.S. next-gen nuclear tech amid AI growth and China competition.
• The U.S. aims to revive its nuclear power industry to achieve energy independence and compete with China’s growing nuclear capabilities.

Oak Ridge, Tenn., earned the moniker “Atomic City” as a base for the Manhattan Project and later as a center of the U.S. nuclear power program.

Now, it is home to a group of scientists at Standard Nuclear who are trying—against all odds—to power up America’s next nuclear era.

They are developing meltdown-resistant fuel for a smaller, safer type of nuclear reactor that has become an imperative for meeting modern energy needs, including both strategic and industrial independence from China and the rise of power-hungry artificial intelligence.

So strong was their conviction in the breakthrough that more than 40 employees of the startup’s precursor worked for about eight months with little or no pay. Some sold their homes or downsized, juggling mortgages and daycare expenses, convinced the departure of a single scientist would risk sacrificing their progress.

Building advanced AI systems will take city-sized amounts of power and a low-carbon energy source such as nuclear is the preferred choice. Microsoft, Meta and other tech giants are putting big money into revitalizing reactors that are decades old, and sometimes even being decommissioned. But Big Tech and venture-capital money is also being steered into new modular reactors designed with safety considerations informed by over a half-century of nuclear mishaps.

Uranium kernels with triso coating in a lab dish at Standard Nuclear. Right, sections of uranium kernels with triso coating layers are measured to ensure size and shape meet the required specification.

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel, OpenAI leader Sam Altman and Bill Gates are among the tech titans who have placed their bets. Since 2021, venture capitalists have invested $2.5 billion in U.S. next-generation nuclear technology, according to data firm PitchBook. Most years before that, investment hovered near zero.

“It’s time for nuclear,” President Trump said last month at the White House, signing four new executive orders aimed at accelerating nuclear-power deployment.

The Defense Department wants the small reactors to power its ships and bases, and to deploy in the Arctic region and on remote islands in the Pacific. The Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit this spring announced eight companies were in line for awards to work with the Army and Air Force to install microreactors on military bases.

This nuclear reboot is risky—previous attempts ended in bitter disappointment with cost overruns or environmental disasters, and billions of dollars lost. Standard Nuclear’s success is hardly guaranteed, nor is that of the dozens of other startups aiming to fill out America’s nuclear-power supply chain. 

But to many, the drive to build a new nuclear age in the U.S. seems irreversible.

“I really see it as a very low probability that this is going to go away because I can’t think of an alternative,” Kurt Terrani, Standard Nuclear’s chief executive, said. “At some point, we’re going to run out of gas.”

The U.S. produces less nuclear power than it did a decade ago. Reactor projects have been plagued by delays, manufacturing mishaps and cost overruns, causing utility companies to backpedal.

U.S. efforts to mine and enrich uranium, the staple fuel ingredient, were long ago abandoned. The country has no significant commercial source of enriched uranium, although new startups are trying to fill the void. Russia controls roughly half of the world’s market for enriched uranium, and about a quarter of America’s.

As the U.S. lagged behind, China emerged as its largest competitor, expected to outproduce the U.S. in the next five years. China right now has 31 reactors under construction—half the global total—and plans to build 40 more in around the next decade, according to the World Nuclear Association.

“We can’t allow ourselves to lose the AI arms race with China. But we need power,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told tech executives in April. “First we have to win the power race.”

The designers of small, modular reactors—known as SMRs—have mostly repackaged old technology into smaller, more efficient designs that most everyone agrees are safe.

Standard Nuclear said it is the largest source of tristructural isotropic—aka “triso”—fuel outside of China, based on its capacity to produce fuel. Triso fuel, in high demand for use in SMRs, is known for its durability and safety: Poppyseed-size pellets of uranium are coated in carbon and silicon carbide to trap nuclear material and prevent leaks.

Left, Brian Jolly, vice president of triso manufacturing at Standard Nuclear, observes the coating process through a prism. Right, Griffin Gayne and Evan Kirsch inspect uranium oxycarbide kernels after the solution gelation process.

Ultra Safe Nuclear—the precursor to Standard Nuclear—had been a sprawling enterprise funded largely by a single man, Richard Hollis Helms, a former Central Intelligence Agency operative. After Helms died last year, funding immediately dried up.

The former CEO left and Terrani was put in charge, tasked with laying off almost 300 people. He took care to retain the fuel scientists. Terrani gave weekly updates to his staff, which were mostly: “We have no funds, no cash.”

“Every day, you get in your car and go to work knowing you’re not going to get paid,” said Terrani, 39. 

One manager, Dan Billings, sold the three wooded acres surrounding his home to developers so he could keep working. The buyer began clear-cutting and demolished his kids’ treehouse. The $50,000 from the sale helped pad Billings’s bank account.

“I’m not gonna lie, I refreshed my LinkedIn profile because I didn’t know which way it was going to go,” said Billings, 39.

Dan Billings weathered months without pay before Standard Nuclear was rescued by investors. At the Oak Ridge facility, a worker handles uranium oxycarbide particles.

Christmastime brought relief. A group of venture capitalists, led by a former Special Forces officer, invested $42 million to reboot and rebrand the company Standard Nuclear.

The deal marked an extraordinary bet by venture capitalists, who have historically steered clear of heavily regulated enterprises that require huge amounts of capital up front. The lure of AI and heightened competition with China have changed that calculation.

“The investment environment for nuclear is very attractive right now,” said Tommy Hendrix, who led the bailout. Hendrix, a venture capitalist at Decisive Point, acknowledged the risk of his bet, but said, “You follow the money, follow where the government is investing.”

Standard Nuclear’s fortunes are tied to other companies trying to fill out a fractured supply chain largely dominated by adversaries. Russia’s enriched uranium will become off limits in 2028 when a U.S. ban takes effect. Los Angeles-based General Matter, backed by a fresh $50 million from Thiel’s venture fund, is aiming to replace Russian imports.

The prospective buyers of Standard Nuclear’s fuel have designs for SMRs but none has completed building one—although China has. Critics say they don’t produce enough energy to justify their expense, and that entrepreneurs and investors underestimate the regulatory complexity.

Chain Reaction

Scientists and investors are re-envisioning the U.S. nuclear-power supply chain for the 21st century, with new forms of fuel and smaller, safer reactors.

Yellowcake

UF6

Centrifuge

Triso fuel particle

1

2

3

Conversion

Enrichment

Fuel fabrication

Milled uranium is converted into uranium hexafluoride.

Uranium is enriched at different concentrations for weapons or energy production. Russia is the world leader.

Tiny triso fuel particles are coated in ceramics to prevent leaking, enhancing safety. Standard Nuclear develops this type.

SMR

4

5

Power plant

Recycling

New designs for small modular reactors improve safety. The U.S. hasn’t finished building one, but China has.

Recycling creates a new source of uranium and reduces waste storage. Though the U.S. discouraged it for years, startups say it’s a way around foreign dependence.

Source: Energy Department

“I don’t think this is an area for the faint of heart, or for the quick buck to get turned,” said Ross Fubini, managing partner of XYZ Venture Capital. Fubini looked at around 15 nuclear-sector startups over the past two years, and passed. None showed promise of deploying their technology before running out of money.

Trump’s executive orders seek to slash some red tape and hasten deployment, including by allowing reactors on federal lands, which could result in largely bypassing the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The industry was elated. “It’s a pathway for everything I and others in the industry hope for,” said Staff Sheehan, a uranium chemist who co-founded a nuclear-sector startup. The orders triggered a fuel-buying spree—Standard Nuclear is sold out through much of 2027.

Critics argued the administration’s push suggests less independence for the NRC and a more permissive environment for startups without a safety record.

Back in Tennessee, Billings says he has no regrets about working without pay—and even losing the kids’ treehouse.

“I believe that if we can get this technology out to the market, we can solve a lot of energy crises,” he said.

Write to Heather Somerville at heather.somerville@wsj.com

6. Trump reverses Army base names in latest DEI purge

​Well, it is good news for sign makers.  

But note that they will not restore the names of the confederate soldiers but rather find soldiers to honor who share the same surname. I expect that the Army's Center for Military History is hard at work looking for the right new soldiers.

Excerpts:

President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he plans to restore the names of seven Army bases that once honored Confederate leaders, relabeling them after soldiers who share the same last names.

“We are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill and Fort Robert E. Lee,” Trump said. “We won a lot of battles out of those forts, it’s no time to change.”

The Army released a statement after Trump’s speech noting that they will use a similar arrangement when renaming the seven bases.

Trump reverses Army base names in latest DEI purge

The announcement comes just four days before the Army’s multimillion dollar parade in Washington.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/10/trump-army-names-confederate-00398568

Soldiers listen as President Donald Trump speaks at Fort Bragg on June 10, 2025, in North Carolina. | Alex Brandon/AP

By Jack Detsch and Paul McLeary

06/10/2025 06:18 PM EDT

Updated: 06/10/2025 08:22 PM EDT

President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he plans to restore the names of seven Army bases that once honored Confederate leaders, relabeling them after soldiers who share the same last names.

“We are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill and Fort Robert E. Lee,” Trump said. “We won a lot of battles out of those forts, it’s no time to change.”

Trump’s announcement, during a speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg, follows a move during the Biden era to change the names of 10 installations to honor new, non-Confederate individuals. Those included changing Fort Hood to Fort Cavazos, for the Army’s first four-star Hispanic general.

The Army redesignated Fort Liberty, previously known as Fort Bragg, to its original name in February, but honoring Private First Class Roland L. Bragg, a World War II hero instead of the Confederate general Braxton Bragg. The service also redesignated Fort Moore, after Gen. Hal Moore and his wife Julia Compton Moore, for Fred G. Benning, who earned the Distinguished Service Cross during World War I.

The Army released a statement after Trump’s speech noting that they will use a similar arrangement when renaming the seven bases.

The Tuesday announcement came as a surprise to some in the Pentagon. One Army official, granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak, said they were caught off guard by the rapid-fire developments, which could take months to implement. The Army did not immediately respond to follow up questions.

A congressional aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about closed-door policy talks, said Trump was using a “thinly veiled attempt” to get around the law that directed the Pentagon to remove the Confederate names by finding veterans who “just so happen” to have the same names as the Civil War leaders. The Senate overrode the president’s attempted 2020 veto of the law at the end of Trump’s first term.

The Trump administration insisted this year’s redesignations were in line with laws that prevent the Pentagon from naming bases after Confederate leaders or battles. But Ty Seidule, a retired Army brigadier general who was the vice chair of the Congressional Naming Commission — tasked with relabeling bases and U.S. military assets — said that Trump’s decision went against the spirit of the new rule enacted after the George Floyd protests in 2020.

“The bottom line is he’s choosing surname over service,” said Seidule, who’s now a visiting professor at Hamilton College. “It is breaking the spirit of a law that was created by the will of the American people through their elected representatives.”

Seidule said that the commission, which was made up of three Republicans, one Democrat and four retired flag officers, spent 20 months seeking input from the public and got 33,000 responses to change the names of Army bases and other installations and assets named after Confederates, including Navy ships.

But he said the decision still reflected that the Trump administration “realizes that Confederates chose treason to preserve slavery, and they are unworthy of having bases named for them in America in 2025.”

Trump criticized Biden on Tuesday at several points during his speech, which was full of asides about immigration, transgender Americans and the spending bill currently being debated in Congress.

His political comments in front of hundreds of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division led to a smattering of boos from the mostly uniformed audience when he criticized former President Joe Biden. Audience members also jeered when Trump mentioned California Gov. Gavin Newsom, with whom the president clashed over protests in Los Angeles that were sparked by the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Presidents normally avoid giving political speeches to military personnel.

“Do you think this crowd would have showed up for Biden,” Trump said at one point in his remarks. “I don’t think so.”

“We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again,” Trump said, claiming parts of the city are under the control of international criminal gangs. The president has ordered 4,000 California National Guard soldiers and 700 Marines to Los Angeles, though so far only about 300 Guardsmen have entered the city.

The Marines are positioned outside Los Angeles, where they’re undergoing training on crowd control, said one DOD official who was granted anonymity to speak to the media.

The move to rename Army bases comes just days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved to relabel a Navy vessel named after gay rights activist Harvey Milk as well as other ships named after civil rights leaders and women.

Seidule, the retired Army brigadier general who served on the Biden-era naming commission, said Trump’s decision creates the risk that future administrations could take turns renaming the Army’s bases.

“What happens if some other administration would name something after someone that one party thinks is just absolutely beyond the pale,” Seidule said. “I think that this could absolutely be a tennis match.”

Sam Skove contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misstated the nature of President Donald Trump’s plans to rename seven Army bases. The bases will be named after soldiers who share the same surnames as the original Confederate leaders.

7. Trump reverts 7 Army bases to former names with new honorees, including Delta Force soldier

​The Army was ahead of the curve here and ready to execute.

Task and Purpose gets the scoop. I have not seen these names reported anywhere else.

I suppose this reinforces the old adage, "the only thing harder than getting a new idea into a military mind is getting an old one out." I had never made the transition to the new names in my mind. 

But the names below are quite honorable, the naming conventions quite create (A.P. Hill) and in terms of Fort Lee an interesting choice to replace Robert E. Does that send a message?

And what if we had used this naming convention the first time around?

Trump reverts 7 Army bases to former names with new honorees, including Delta Force soldier

taskandpurpose.com · by Jeff Schogol, Matt White

President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that seven Army bases will revert to names that once honored Confederate leaders but will now take the names of nine highly decorated U.S. Army soldiers of the same name.

“For a little breaking news, we are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee,” Trump said while speaking at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. “We won a lot of battles out of those forts. It’s no time to change. And I’m superstitious. I like to keep it going.”

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Minutes after Trump’s speech, the Army announced those names would now honor nine soldiers from five conflicts whose names match the original Confederate leaders for each base. The name changes mirror the previous name reversions ordered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Fort Liberty is Fort Bragg again, and Fort Moore in Georgia has gone back to being named Fort Benning, but both installations now honor two previously obscure soldiers of the same names from World War I and World War II.

The new soldiers include five who received the Medal of Honor, three who were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and one who received the Silver Star.

The bases and their new namesakes are:

• Fort Gordon, Georgia, formerly Fort Eisenhower, will honor Master Sgt. Gary I. Gordon, perhaps the best-known soldier among the new namesakes. Gordon, a Delta Force soldier, was awarded the Medal of Honor after he volunteered to defend wounded crew members at a helicopter crash site during the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, Somalia. He held off an advancing enemy force to protect a wounded pilot until he was killed.
• Fort Pickett, Virginia, renamed from Fort Barfoot, will be named for 1st Lt. Vernon W. Pickett, a Distinguished Service Cross recipient in World War II. The Army did not provide details on Pickett’s unit nor where he fought, noting in a release that he was captured and escaped after a battle, rejoined his unit and was eventually killed in action.
• Fort Hood, Texas, formerly Fort Cavazos, will be named for Col. Robert B. Hood, a Distinguished Service Cross recipient in World War I. While under heavy shelling near Thiaucourt, France, the Army said, then-Capt. Hood “directed artillery fire under enfilading machine-gun fire. After his gun crew was lost to enemy fire, he rapidly reorganized and returned fire within minutes.”
• Fort Lee, Virginia, formerly Fort Gregg-Adams, will be named in honor of Medal of Honor recipient Pvt. Fitz Lee, a Black Buffalo Soldier, for his heroism during the Spanish-American War. During a coastal assault in Cuba, Lee voluntarily disembarked under direct enemy fire to rescue wounded comrades from the battlefield.
• Fort Polk, Louisiana, formerly Fort Johnson, will be named in honor of Silver Star recipient Gen. James H. Polk for his gallantry in action as commanding officer of the 3rd Cavalry Group (Mechanized) during operations across Europe in World War II. Then-Col. Polk led reconnaissance and combat missions under fire, spearheading Third Army advances as part of Task Force Polk. He later served as the commander of U.S. Army Europe.
• Fort Rucker, Alabama, formerly Fort Novosel, the home of Army aviation, will continue to be named after an Army aviator. Capt Edward W. Rucker was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in World War I as a pilot for missions over France.
• Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia, formerly Fort Walker, will be named for three Civil War Medal of Honor recipients: Lt. Col. Edward Hill, 1st Sgt. Robert A. Pinn and Pvt. Bruce Anderson. The three earned the Medal of Honor at different engagements at Cold Harbor, Virginia; Chapin’s Farm, Virginia; and Fort Fisher, North Carolina.

A total of nine Army bases that bore the names of Confederates were renamed in 2022 and 2023 following recommendations by an official naming commission.

Trump said he was asked why he didn’t wait to announce the name changes to the other seven bases at the Army’s 250th birthday parade on Saturday in Washington, D.C.

“I said ‘I can’t wait,’” Trump added.

UPDATE: 06/10/2025; this story was updated after the Army clarified that Fort Walker, Virginia, will be renamed Fort A.P. Hill.

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Jeff Schogol is a senior staff writer for Task & Purpose. He has covered the military for nearly 20 years. Email him at schogol@taskandpurpose.com; direct message @JSchogol73030 on Twitter; or reach him on WhatsApp and Signal at 703-909-6488.

8. ‘Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized’ Review: A People Persecuted

​I suppose "open those vocational education and training centers" does not have the same ring as Reagan telling Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."

I fear there is no help coming for the Uyghurs.

‘Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized’ Review: A People Persecuted

Beijing at first denied the existence of camps for Xinjiang’s Muslims. Now the party calls them ‘vocational education and training centers.’

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/those-who-should-be-seized-should-be-seized-review-a-people-persecuted-3b057cd9

By Ellen Bork

June 10, 2025 2:52 pm ET

In 2017, satellite images, leaked government documents, online tenders for prison construction and guards, as well as social-media posts of ribbon-cutting ceremonies revealed a network of prison camps used to detain, torture and politically indoctrinate Turkic Muslims in China’s far-western region of Xinjiang. The following year the U.S. State Department cited estimates that between 800,000 and 2 million people were interned in these camps.

Grab a Copy

Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized: China's Relentless Persecution of Uyghurs and Other Ethnic Minorities

By John Beck

Melville House

320 pages

We may earn a commission when you buy products through the links on our site.

Buy Book

Initially the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) denied the camps’ existence. One official insisted that China was the target of vicious lies and claimed that Xinjiang’s Muslims were the “happiest in the world.” As shock and revulsion spread around the world, however, officials put forward another line: The camps were “vocational education and training centers” providing instruction in Mandarin language, civic education and even hairdressing. Meanwhile, across Xinjiang, mosques were being razed and intensive surveillance imposed; officials were deployed to monitor the population, some by living in their subjects’ homes and sharing their beds as part of the “Join Up and Become Family” program.

In “Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized,” John Beck illustrates the brutality of China’s repression through the experiences of four individuals. Saira is a Kazakh writer and entrepreneur; Tursunay is a Uyghur nurse. Both women survived the re-education camps. Adiljan, a Uyghur, fled Xinjiang after a brief detention and settled in Istanbul, where he sought out and confronted Chinese agents spying on the Uyghur exile community. Serikzhan, a Kazakh national based in Almaty, sounded the alarm about his fellow Kazakhs being persecuted in China; for this he earned the wrath of his own government.

Driven to recover territories lost at the fall of the Qing empire in 1911, China’s People’s Liberation Army took control of Xinjiang in 1949 and then Tibet, to Xinjiang’s south, during the 1950s. Together these two regions constitute an enormous swath of territory along China’s frontiers, sparsely populated by inhabitants with close cultural and religious ties with neighboring India and parts of the Soviet Union that would later become the independent Central Asian republics.

Deeply insecure, the CCP brought in troops and Chinese settlers, making the inhabitants of Xinjiang and Tibet minorities in their own lands. Manifestations of ethnic or religious identity were cast as the Three Evils: “separatism, religious extremism and terrorism.” Repression, in turn, stoked unrest; responses to actual terror attacks fell arbitrarily and disproportionately on the broader population.

Xinjiang’s Muslims were always persecuted, but China’s Xi Jinping has taken repression there to new heights. Mr. Beck’s title comes from a speech Mr. Xi gave to a 2014 party meeting. Coming only two years after he became the CCP’s general secretary, it marked a departure from party policy that, at least officially, embraced China as a multiethnic state. Instead, Mr. Xi stressed “ethnic mingling” in pursuit of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese race.” In other words, not tolerance of diverse populations leading to a shared civic identity, but erasure.

Mr. Beck excerpts this speech and other party documents, as well as human-rights reports, as epigraphs to his chapters but otherwise lets the survivors tell their stories.

Mr. Xi’s agenda became horrifyingly concrete in the camps: physical abuse, rape, forced sterilization and indoctrination aimed at eradicating the ethnic and religious identity of Xinjiang’s Muslims. Saira tells of receiving mysterious injections. Tursunay describes being attacked by guards: “They took turns at first and then it was all of them at once. They used something metal and they used shock batons. . . . If Tursunay had known what awaited her in the camp . . . she would have killed herself.” Inmates had to study and regurgitate the tenets of “Xi Jinping Thought,” Mr. Beck tells us, and write essays against “harmful ideologies or influences,” including religions that were likened to “disease.” One guard told Saira, “your God is Xi Jinping now.”

Those fortunate to be released found their hometowns depleted, their former neighbors living under a pall of fear. When Tursunay asks about absent friends and relatives, she receives only hushed replies: “taken, taken.”

Even those who escape Xinjiang find they cannot escape the Chinese state. China is the world’s leader in transnational repression, reaching into other countries to harass, intimidate and assault critics and refugees—even in the U.S.—and training other autocracies to do the same.

In Virginia’s substantial Uyghur community, Mr. Beck tells us, talking publicly about what happened to them in Xinjiang carries with it “the near certainty of being contacted by Chinese authorities,” not only from police inside China but from embassy officials posted in the U.S. and Chinese overseas students engaged in the party’s united-front influence activities. Serikzhan feels threatened by both the Kazakh and Chinese governments; he receives intimidating phone calls and online attacks and suspects he is being surveilled.

America’s response has so far been creditable. Washington sanctioned some top Chinese officials, including, in 2020, Chen Quanguo, the former party chief of Tibet. (Mr. Chen’s transfer to party chief of Xinjiang inspired Serikzhan to send recorded warnings, via WhatsApp, to fellow ethnic Kazakhs, advising them to flee.) In 2021 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo determined that China’s campaign against the Muslims of Xinjiang constituted a genocide and crimes against humanity. And when he was a senator, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sponsored legislation to block the importation of products made with forced labor in Xinjiang; the law took effect in 2022. But China’s atrocities continue. According to a February 2025 report by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the number of Turkic Muslims currently detained in some form exceed 500,000.

Mr. Beck’s book reads at times like a tale of suspense as he recounts poignant stories of suffering, resilience and survival. He has added to the body of literature documenting the effects of Mr. Xi’s dystopian vision and its consequences, not only for the Muslims of Xinjiang but also for the rest of the world.

Ms. Bork writes about democracy and human rights in American foreign policy.

Copyright ©2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the June 11, 2025, print edition as '‘Your God Is Xi Jinping Now’'.

9. Gabbard warns of ‘nuclear holocaust’ in ominous social media video

​A question for all the nuclear theory experts: Do these kinds of statements help or hurt US nuclear deterrence? Could these statements be interpreted as an indication of an unwillingness to make the decision to employ nuclear weapons?

Excerpts:

Gabbard then warns that, because today’s nuclear weapons are stronger than the one used by the U.S. in 1945, “a single nuclear weapon today could kill millions in just minutes.”

“This is the reality of what’s at stake, what we are facing now,” Gabbard says in the video. “Because as we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” Gabbard went on to suggest that powerful people are confident they’d have access to “nuclear shelters” and would therefore be unaffected by any consequences.

...

When asked to clarify Gabbard’s comments in the video, Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff Alexa Henning said her concern about nuclear war is shared by President Donald Trump.

“President Trump has repeatedly stated in the past that he recognizes the immeasurable suffering, and annihilation can be caused by nuclear war, which is why he has been unequivocal that we all need to do everything possible to work towards peace,” Henning said in a statement. “DNI Gabbard supports President Trump’s clearly stated objectives of bringing about lasting peace and stability and preventing war.”

Gabbard warns of ‘nuclear holocaust’ in ominous social media video

The director of national intelligence said the world is “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/10/tulsi-gabbard-nuclear-weapons-00396586

U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard departs following a closed door meeting with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. at Malacanang Palace in Manila, Philippines June 2, 2025. | Pool photo by Ezra Acayan

By Aaron Pellish

06/10/2025 12:23 PM EDT

Updated: 06/10/2025 07:46 PM EDT

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard warned of a “nuclear holocaust” and chastised “warmongers” for bringing the world “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before” in a foreboding video posted to social media on Tuesday.

In the three-minute video, Gabbard details a recent visit to Hiroshima, Japan to learn more about the aftermath of the U.S. nuclear attack on the city in 1945 during World War II. The video features footage of Gabbard’s trip and archival footage showing victims, interspersed with Gabbard speaking directly to camera about the consequences of a nuclear attack.

Gabbard then warns that, because today’s nuclear weapons are stronger than the one used by the U.S. in 1945, “a single nuclear weapon today could kill millions in just minutes.”

“This is the reality of what’s at stake, what we are facing now,” Gabbard says in the video. “Because as we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” Gabbard went on to suggest that powerful people are confident they’d have access to “nuclear shelters” and would therefore be unaffected by any consequences.

“It’s up to us, the people, to speak up and demand an end to this madness. We must reject this path to nuclear war and work toward a world where no one has to live in fear of a nuclear holocaust,” she continues.

It’s unclear when the video was made, but Gabbard traveled to Japan last week, where she visited a U.S. military base alongside U.S. Ambassador to Japan George Glass. Gabbard did not visit Hiroshima during her first trip to Japan as DNI in March, according to a readout from her office.

When asked to clarify Gabbard’s comments in the video, Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff Alexa Henning said her concern about nuclear war is shared by President Donald Trump.

“President Trump has repeatedly stated in the past that he recognizes the immeasurable suffering, and annihilation can be caused by nuclear war, which is why he has been unequivocal that we all need to do everything possible to work towards peace,” Henning said in a statement. “DNI Gabbard supports President Trump’s clearly stated objectives of bringing about lasting peace and stability and preventing war.”

Gabbard’s comments come as the Trump administration continues negotiations with Iran over a nuclear deal. Trump told reporters on Monday Iran rejected a U.S. proposal that would have stopped the nation from enriching uranium — fuel that could be used to build nuclear weapons.

The former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate has a long history of criticizing war hawks and warning of nuclear war prior to her endorsing then-candidate Donald Trump for president and switching parties last year. During her presidential campaign launch in 2019, she warned the world is “on the precipice of nuclear war,” and she was a strong advocate for strengthening nuclear treaties while in Congress.

“The warmongers are trying to drag us into WW3, which can only end in one way: nuclear annihilation and the suffering and death of all our loved ones,” Gabbard wrote in a post on X in 2023. “Zelensky, Biden, NATO, congressional and media neocons are insane. And we are insane if we passively allow them to lead us into this holocaust like sheep to the slaughter.”

10. Why Bamboozled Putin Is Struggling to Avenge Ukraine’s Sneak Attack

​Excerpts:

While commentators discuss just how much Ukraine’s sneak attack may have changed war in general--a few thousand dollars worth of drones destroying an estimated $7 billion of hardware--the question remains as to how it will change this war.

If Ukraine can pull off more audacious strikes against the Russian air force, then it will pose a serious challenge to Putin’s war effort and Russia’s ability to threaten NATO. If Ukraine opts for their more traditional long-range strikes against oil facilities and airfields, then the damage to Russia’s military and finances will be more gradual.

The implications for Russia’s ongoing summer offensive along the front lines are also unclear. Russia’s use of its bombers to strike Ukraine’s cities means that knocking them out might only indirectly benefit Russia’s frontline troops. Even so, Ukraine’s successes, such as shooting down one of Russia’s most advanced fighter jets at the weekend, point to their resilience in the face of Putin’s renewed onslaught.

As Russia grapples with the fallout from Spider’s Web, it will have to face some hard realities. Ukraine’s ability to strike Russia has expanded dramatically since 2022 and shows no sign of slowing down. Even as Putin and others claim that they cannot negotiate a peace with Ukraine, the continuing degradation of Russia’s economy and military capability may yet force the Kremlin boss to the table.

Why Bamboozled Putin Is Struggling to Avenge Ukraine’s Sneak Attack

Spoiler alert: He doesn’t have a clue how to respond

https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-bamboozled-vladimir-putin-is-struggling-to-avenge-ukraines-sneak-attack/

By Marcel Plichta

Jun. 9 2025

Contributor/Getty Images

Ever since Ukraine’s devastating drone attack on Russian strategic bombers, the Kremlin has been trying to figure out a fitting response.

Ukraine initially claimed 41 Russian aircraft were hit in the sneak June 1 attack on deep-lying airbases, though subsequent satellite imagery suggests fewer airframes may have been damaged or destroyed than initially thought.

Nevertheless, the blow is significant enough to Russia’s bomber fleet that President Vladimir Putin has to respond to save face. But while Russia has stepped up nightly drone and missile attacks at Ukrainian cities—framed as “revenge”—Putin has not been able to ease the sting of Russia’s lost aircraft.

 Russia has stepped up its nightly strikes on

towns and cities across Eastern Ukraine

since the sneak attack.

Global Images Ukraine/Global Images Ukraine

via Getty

“Operation Spider’s Web,” as the secret Ukrainian operation was dubbed, was a big enough deal to feature in a lengthy call between Putin and President Donald Trump, who blithely claimed that Putin “will have to respond” to the attacks.

Trump himself reportedly thought the Ukrainian operation—using drones assembled in Russia itself and hidden in trucks—was “bad-ss,” then later suggested Ukraine’s precision strike on military aircraft justified subsequent Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians. Trump’s view is firmly rooted in the idea that both sides are at fault, like a messy schoolyard brawl, even though Russia clearly started the conflict with its invasion of Ukraine.

Trump’s comments aside, Russia’s major problem is one of optics: Ukraine’s attack was focused solely on Russian military targets; Russia’s attacks, both before and after Spider’s Web, are more often than not aimed at civilian targets like apartment buildings. The difference in approach reflects a major feature of the war: that Ukraine is fighting off the Russian military, while Russia is fighting against the Ukrainian people.

Map Illustration by Eric Faison/The Daily Beast

Responding to a military disaster by causing a humanitarian disaster will do little to convince observers other than Trump that Russia’s strikes are in any way justifiable.

At previous points in the war when Russia has suffered a military setback—the loss of its Black Sea Fleet flagship, for example, or a bombing attack on the Kerch Bridge—Putin’s response has been predictable: a large-scale retaliatory strike on Ukrainian cities to draw the headlines away from their embarrassment.

Part of the problem this time is that Russia was already in the middle of an escalation, launching ever more brutal drone and missile attacks on apartment blocks and other civilian targets in Ukraine in an apparent bid to soften the Ukrainians up for Trump’s “peace talks.”

Putin’s post-Spider’s Web drone attacks against Ukraine’s cities were indeed huge, with more than 800 kamikaze drones sent over the border in the following days.

The attack on Sunday June 8 was the largest to date, using 479 Shahed-style drones. That broke a record that had been broken four times already in the past few weeks, most recently on the same day as the Spider’s Web attack on Russian airbases.

An additional complication for Russia is that many of the planes that would launch missiles at Ukrainian civilians were themselves damaged in the Ukrainian attack. They have other bombers that could do the role, but these are in various states of modernization or are more expensive to operate.

Russia’s recent use of Iskander missiles, which are launched from the ground instead of by air, strengthen the impression that Russia’s bomber fleet is at least temporarily unable to launch the dozens of missiles it could in the past.

Putin is taking his military insecurity out on Ukrainian civilians and is threatening the nascent peace process. Russia and Ukraine have had tense negotiations in Istanbul, which are widely considered a step forward even if they have not yet achieved results beyond prisoner swaps.

Ukraine had repeatedly suggested a 30-day ceasefire, which Russian officials have so far rejected. Putin told reporters last week that Kyiv “does not need peace” and that Ukraine is relying on terrorism, even though the attacks struck military targets at a time of war.

 The charred remains of TU-95 strategic bombers

at the Belaya airbase in Siberia

Maxar/DigitalGlobe/Getty Images

For now, the initiative in the drone war is with Ukraine. In addition to Spider’s Web, Ukraine’s long-range drones have continued to hammer Russian military infrastructure. Last Friday Ukrainian drones struck an oil depot that supplies one of Russia’s major airbases. Ukrainian officials have also promised more covert operations like Spider’s Web, forcing Russian authorities to slow down commercial shipping across the country to conduct mass searches for stowaway drones.

Russia may not be moving fast enough to stop more attacks. On Saturday, drones hidden aboard a Russian military reportedly destroyed dozens of armored vehicles and tanks.

Ukraine destroys 13 Russian tanks, 100 armored vehicles as locomotive lit

The Southern Defense Forces of Ukraine has struck a Russian train carrying military equipment.

While commentators discuss just how much Ukraine’s sneak attack may have changed war in general--a few thousand dollars worth of drones destroying an estimated $7 billion of hardware--the question remains as to how it will change this war.

If Ukraine can pull off more audacious strikes against the Russian air force, then it will pose a serious challenge to Putin’s war effort and Russia’s ability to threaten NATO. If Ukraine opts for their more traditional long-range strikes against oil facilities and airfields, then the damage to Russia’s military and finances will be more gradual.

The implications for Russia’s ongoing summer offensive along the front lines are also unclear. Russia’s use of its bombers to strike Ukraine’s cities means that knocking them out might only indirectly benefit Russia’s frontline troops. Even so, Ukraine’s successes, such as shooting down one of Russia’s most advanced fighter jets at the weekend, point to their resilience in the face of Putin’s renewed onslaught.

As Russia grapples with the fallout from Spider’s Web, it will have to face some hard realities. Ukraine’s ability to strike Russia has expanded dramatically since 2022 and shows no sign of slowing down. Even as Putin and others claim that they cannot negotiate a peace with Ukraine, the continuing degradation of Russia’s economy and military capability may yet force the Kremlin boss to the table.

11. Russia no longer sees US as top enemy, new survey finds

​How will this be interpreted in the US national security community? What impact will this have on US-NATO relations and on Europe? What impact will it have on Russia-Ukraine negotiations that the US is trying to broker?

How can/will Putin exploit these survey results?

Or will it have no impact at all and will just be brushed off?

Russia no longer sees US as top enemy, new survey finds

helsinkitimes.fi · June 10, 2025

For the first time in two decades, Russians no longer rank the United States as the most hostile country toward their nation. According to a new survey by the independent Levada Center, respondents now see three European nations, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine, as more antagonistic than the U.S.

The poll, conducted in May 2025, marks a significant shift in public perception. Since 2013, the U.S. had consistently topped the list of countries seen as most unfriendly to Russia. In the latest results, the U.S. dropped to fourth place, followed by Poland and France.

The change appears to be driven by younger respondents and residents in major cities, particularly Moscow, where views of the U.S. have grown noticeably less hostile since autumn 2024. That timing coincides with the return of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, a development that has been viewed favourably by many in Russia.

Trump has repeatedly advocated for closer ties with Russia, and the shift in rhetoric may have influenced public sentiment. Still, two-thirds of respondents told Levada they expect distrust between Russia and the West to continue dominating international relations.

Despite a softening view of the U.S., animosity toward Ukraine remains strong. The country, which has been at war with Russia since 2022, ranked third on the list of hostile nations. Analysts note that this is consistent with the Kremlin’s messaging and the prolonged conflict.

Meanwhile, countries traditionally viewed as friendly by Russians remain unchanged. Belarus and China are still considered the most supportive of Russia, followed by India and North Korea.

Levada has tracked Russian public opinion on international relations regularly since 2011, with earlier surveys dating back to 2005. Over time, perceived hostility has shifted from regional neighbours, such as Georgia, the Baltic states, and Ukraine, to a broader focus on Western Europe and the U.S., particularly following sanctions imposed after 2014.

The current results indicate a possible recalibration in that view, especially among younger Russians, though overall scepticism of the West remains high.

HT

helsinkitimes.fi · June 10, 2025

12. What Washington Doesn’t Understand About CCP Membership

​What if it took this much effort (mastery of communist (political) ideas) to join the republican and democratic parties in the US? To join the CCP you must have a communist civics education.

Excerpts:

Joining the CCP requires a mastery of communist ideas and attendance at party meetings, but many people treat these tasks as a tiresome chore rather than a call to revolutionary action. Actually supporting workers on Marxist grounds can get you arrested, as what happened to students at Beijing’s elite Renmin University in 2018.

So, why does the United States see CCP membership as a security threat?

One worry is that members will establish party cells in the United States, which has taken place at some universities. But Beijing uses propaganda, coercion, and monitoring against the whole Chinese diaspora, and instances of targeting Chinese abroad specifically tied to their party membership are rare. A student who belongs to the CCP is no more or less vulnerable to pressure than one who doesn’t.

And, critically, because CCP members—thanks to recruitment biases—tend to be better educated, their decision to stay in the United States would be a win for Washington in the growing race for global talent. Ultimately, the CCP is a party of connected strivers, not revolutionary conspirators.

What Washington Doesn’t Understand About CCP Membership

Targeting students based on party affiliation is fundamentally misguided.

Palmer-James-foreign-policy-columnist20

James Palmer

By James Palmer, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.

Foreign Policy · by James Palmer

June 10, 2025, 6:34 PM

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: The Trump administration flip-flops on Chinese student visas, U.S.-China trade talks continue in London, and a Beijing judge makes a heist.

Washington Fixates on Party Politics

U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have gone back and forth on restricting Chinese student visas in recent weeks. On May 28, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to “aggressively revoke” the visas, especially those belonging to students with connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

But following Trump’s call with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week, the U.S. president said that “Chinese students are coming—no problem. It’s our honor to have them, frankly.”

These inconsistencies aside, there’s a fundamental problem with going after CCP connections: Party membership isn’t particularly ideological, and the immigrants that U.S. authorities prefer—educated, wealthy, and on a legal path to citizenship—are more likely to be CCP members than other groups.

The distinction may not matter for members of the U.S. far-right movement, who are increasingly transparent about their desire to bar nonwhite people from entering the country or to stir up panic about socialist infiltrators. But it should matter if the United States aims to have a policy that treats the CCP as a serious foe without catching innocent people in the crossfire.

Washington’s misunderstanding of CCP membership is long-standing. Take Yang Jianli, a Chinese immigrant to the United States, long-term dissident, and Foreign Policy contributor. Yang was studying for his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, when he returned to Beijing to participate in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Afterward, he was given refugee status in the United States.

When Yang returned to China in 2002 to observe labor unrest, he was arrested and imprisoned for five years, and lawmakers in Washington repeatedly pressured China for his release. Despite Yang’s impeccable credentials as an opponent of the CCP, he was blocked from becoming a U.S. citizen in 2020 because he was a CCP member at one point in his life.

As Yang told me over email, “I voluntarily disclosed my past membership during my naturalization interview. I … submitted evidence of my expulsion from the Party after the Tiananmen Massacre and included affidavits explaining why many young intellectuals like myself joined the Party and later had to mark ‘no’ on visa forms.”

“Despite this, my application was rejected. I sued [the Department of Homeland Security] and eventually reached a settlement,” he wrote.

U.S. paranoia about communist or anarchist immigration dates back to the first Red Scare of the 1920s, but it was fully introduced into U.S. law during the McCarthy era, with the Internal Security Act of 1950. Its ban of so-called totalitarian parties has lingered in U.S. immigration policy.

There are exceptions for inactive membership (after five years), those who joined before the age of 16, and those who joined in order to survive. But as Yang’s case shows, even applicants that clearly fall into these categories can have problems.

This approach came about at a time when most U.S. policymakers were convinced that communism was an apocalyptic threat that sought to undermine free societies from within. Although this fear was overblown, it at least had some basis in the Soviet Union’s support for communism in Angola, Cuba, Vietnam, and beyond.

China pursued a similar strategy under leader Mao Zedong—often competing with the Soviet Union for influence, as was the case in Albania and Tanzania. But the CCP largely abandoned that policy in the 1980s.

Today, CCP members in the United States aren’t forming revolutionary cells or plotting with U.S. communists. They are more likely to be starting businesses or pursuing an education. This is partly because CCP membership is determined not by ideological zeal but by family connections and personal or career ambitions.

Roughly 40 percent of new CCP members are students, particularly from elite universities, and within China, party membership is a prerequisite to most positions of power. The Communist Youth League (CYL), which accepts members starting at age 14, is another CCP feeder and is overwhelmingly concentrated in elite schools.

Joining the CCP requires a mastery of communist ideas and attendance at party meetings, but many people treat these tasks as a tiresome chore rather than a call to revolutionary action. Actually supporting workers on Marxist grounds can get you arrested, as what happened to students at Beijing’s elite Renmin University in 2018.

So, why does the United States see CCP membership as a security threat?

One worry is that members will establish party cells in the United States, which has taken place at some universities. But Beijing uses propaganda, coercion, and monitoring against the whole Chinese diaspora, and instances of targeting Chinese abroad specifically tied to their party membership are rare. A student who belongs to the CCP is no more or less vulnerable to pressure than one who doesn’t.

And, critically, because CCP members—thanks to recruitment biases—tend to be better educated, their decision to stay in the United States would be a win for Washington in the growing race for global talent. Ultimately, the CCP is a party of connected strivers, not revolutionary conspirators.

What We’re Following

Trade talks. U.S. and Chinese negotiators are meeting in London this week in pursuit of a trade deal. This follows renewed tensions, as each side’s government has accused the other of failing to keep promises related to the temporary tariff cease-fire.

Following Trump and Xi’s convivial phone call on June 5, negotiations appear to be going well. The U.S. side, however, seems a bit panicked: Trump has reportedly authorized negotiators to lift some U.S. sanctions on chips and other exports. Trump might be eager to make a deal after China’s recent limits on rare earth exports exposed vulnerabilities in U.S. military supply chains.

But any agreement is likely to be fragile, held hostage by presidential whim and Trump’s tendency to talk big but pull back at the last minute. Typically, trade negotiations take months to years, which doesn’t work for a White House that’s obsessed with the immediate news cycle. I’d take anything that comes out of these talks with a grain of salt.

Judicial heist. A Beijing judge named Bai Bin has reportedly absconded with somewhere between $18 and $41 million, apparently stolen from court fines and processing fees. Authorities were tipped off after Bai’s girlfriend bragged to friends that he had obtained citizenship in Greece, which has had a limited extradition treaty with China since 2019.

Corruption is common in Chinese courts, but it usually comes in the form of bribes rather than embezzlement. Efficiency reforms that occurred in the late 2010s, which allowed for the transfer of court funds to be approved by a single person, may have given the young judge the opportunity to pull off his theft. Bai is still on the run, but the heist will likely result in a wider crackdown on the courts and the control of fines.

FP’s Most Read This Week

• Putin Is a Gambler, not a Grand Master by Anastasia Edel
• What Is the Impact of Ukraine’s Raid on Russia’s Air Force? by Franz-Stefan Gady
• How Russia Responds to Ukraine’s Drone Attack Depends on Trump by John Haltiwanger

Tech and Business

TikTok ban. Trump continues to disregard the 2024 law requiring ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to divest or see the app face a nationwide ban in the United States. Last week, reports emerged that Trump is planning to extend what may be an illegal suspension of enforcement for a third time as he seeks to find a U.S. buyer friendly to his administration.

Any buyer, however, will be hard-pressed to overcome Beijing’s reluctance to put a key asset in foreign hands—especially as the U.S.-China relationship remains so tumultuous.

Exports shrink. Despite the pause in the spiraling trade war with the United States, Chinese export growth in May still dropped more than expected to just 4.8 percent in dollar terms, down from 8.1 percent in April.

Most of that was caused by a stunning 34.6 percent drop in shipments to the United States compared to May 2024, though redirecting goods to other markets still meant overall growth.

Foreign Policy · by James Palmer

13. AI Without Borders: Why US Diplomacy Can't Afford to Ignore Tech Sovereignty

​In today's domestic political climate I think it will be hard for us to create any kind of international institution since it will be associated with globalist philosophies.

Excerpt:

In the past, the US led the creation of institutions, including the World Trade Organization and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today, it must lead again—this time on the digital frontier. That begins not in Silicon Valley, but in Foggy Bottom. Diplomats must learn to speak the language of AI governance because the future of democracy may well depend on it.

AI Without Borders: Why US Diplomacy Can't Afford to Ignore Tech Sovereignty

The National Interest · by Steven Hendrix · June 10, 2025

Topic: Technology

Blog Brand: Techland

Region: Americas

Tags: AI, China, Competition, Diplomacy, and Sovereignty

AI Without Borders: Why US Diplomacy Can’t Afford to Ignore Tech Sovereignty

June 10, 2025

US diplomacy must urgently adapt to shape global AI norms or risk ceding digital governance to authoritarian powers.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the global order—not just economically or militarily, but diplomatically. As algorithms govern more decisions, from trade routes to refugee vetting, the question of who sets the rules is no longer theoretical. It’s geopolitical. The US is now locked in a high-stakes competition with China to shape global AI norms, governance models, and infrastructure. But while American technologists surge ahead, American diplomacy is lagging behind.

AI Is Now a Geopolitical Issue, Not Just a Technological One

For decades, foreign policy has centered on weapons, treaties, and territorial disputes. But in this century, diplomacy must also contend with predictive policing software in Africa, Chinese surveillance systems in Latin America, and generative AI tools used by authoritarian regimes to spread disinformation.

The State Department’s Emerging Technology primers, co-developed with the Foreign Service Institute and the Cyberspace and Digital Policy Bureau, reflect a growing awareness of this challenge.

China Is Actively Exporting Its Model of Digital Governance

China has understood this for years. Through initiatives like the Global Initiative on Data Security and the Digital Silk Road, Beijing is exporting its tech governance model across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Huawei and ZTE offer affordable surveillance and communications infrastructure with few questions asked. These tools are bundled with training, cloud services, and soft power. In many places, the Chinese model is now the default.

US Policy Remains Fragmented and Lacks Diplomatic Muscle

Meanwhile, the US remains fragmented. Though the White House has issued Executive Orders on AI and formed domestic advisory councils, its international tech agenda lacks depth and continuity. The 2022 Declaration for the Future of the Internet was a step in the right direction, endorsing an open, interoperable, secure, and reliable internet; however, it remains nonbinding and under-resourced.

A Diplomatic Surge Is Essential to Protect Democratic Values

What’s needed is a diplomatic surge. That means embedding tech attachés in embassies, scaling up AI literacy in the Foreign Service, and integrating digital governance into trade agreements and multilateral forums. It also means listening to emerging economies, many of whom don’t want to pick sides but do want secure, rights-respecting infrastructure.

The stakes are high. Without US leadership, digital norms will calcify around authoritarian defaults. Privacy, transparency, and algorithmic accountability could become luxuries rather than expectations. And the world’s data—from biometric profiles to supply chain logistics—may increasingly flow through closed, opaque systems.

In the past, the US led the creation of institutions, including the World Trade Organization and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today, it must lead again—this time on the digital frontier. That begins not in Silicon Valley, but in Foggy Bottom. Diplomats must learn to speak the language of AI governance because the future of democracy may well depend on it.

About the Author: Steven Hendrix

Steven Hendrix is chief executive of Hendrix LLC and senior research fellow at DePaul University College of Law. He is a former career diplomat and Coordinator for Foreign Assistance of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) at the US State Department.

Image: Shutterstock

The National Interest · by Steven Hendrix · June 10, 2025

14. The Perils of a Cold War Analogy for Today’s U.S.-China Rivalry

​It is great to see Andrew Scobell back at work at USIP. I hope that USIP is able to continue to do its good work for the nation.

Excerpts:

By definition a cold war is not a hot one. Yet the Cold War was filled with hot wars. While Washington and Moscow were successful at avoiding hot wars with each other, proxy-on-proxy wars and superpower-on-proxy-power wars were common. But the fact that there were no direct U.S.-Soviet wars can lead to the facile takeaway that crisis management and escalation control efforts in the Cold War were foolproof. In short, a cursory and rosy reading of the Cold War can promote an overconfidence in the ability of the United States and China to manage crises and control escalation.

...

In other words, Taiwan is much more than a 21st century Cuba. Most notably, Taiwan stands out as China’s primary irredentist objective where Beijing’s top priority is national unification. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has explicitly linked realizing unification with Taiwan with achieving China’s grand strategy of national rejuvenation. Indeed, Taiwan has been identified as a core national security interest of China. Speculation has been rife that the People’s Liberation Army was given a deadline to seize Taiwan by 2027. For a time, multiple leading U.S. officials and analysts were asserting this as fact. More recently, this alarmist rhetoric has been scaled back. According to Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command: “This [the 2027 date] is not a go-by date. It’s a be-ready-by date.” While the distinction is important, it brings scant reassurance.

...

A second dangerous presumption based upon the historical analogy of the Cold War concerns the way the extended 20th century rivalry ended: an abject defeat for Moscow and resounding victory for Washington. A United States that effectively prosecuted the Cold War and emerged triumphant against a foe as mighty as the Soviet Union can surely emerge victorious at the conclusion of an extended rivalry against China. This seductive reasoning is attractive in 2020s Washington. Unsurprisingly, this historical analogy is unappealing in 2020s Beijing since it suggests the outcome of the contemporary U.S.-China strategic competition could be the overthrow or collapse of the CCP.

...

Conclusion

Analogies are cognitive tools for making new situations and challenges more comprehensible to decision-makers. Yet, decision-makers can fixate upon an analogy and draw spurious inferences that lead to bad decisions. One fundamental mistake, as David Hackett Fischer notes, is the “ … erroneous inference [that because] … A and B are similar in some respects [then] … they are the same in all respects.”

While the Cold War can be a useful and insightful parallel when looking to understand the multifaceted challenges of contemporary U.S.-China competition, this historical analogy also presents potent perils. First, the analogy can foster overconfidence in the ability of the United States and China to avoid direct, hot war because the United States and the Soviet Union were remarkably successful in managing escalation and averting conventional and nuclear conflicts with each other. A second peril in drawing an analogy with the 20th century Cold War is that it can perpetuate zero-sum thinking in Washington and Beijing. That Washington-Moscow strategic competition ended in the disintegration of the Soviet Union encourages a U.S. mindset viewing the optimal — or even inevitable — outcome of Washington-Beijing rivalry as the end of CCP rule and resounding victory for the United States. The analogy also reinforces alarmist thinking in Beijing and bolsters the presumption that Washington’s desired end state is the CCP’s overthrow.

For the Soviet Union, Cuba proved to be a “one off” early 1960s crisis involving a distant ally over which Soviet leaders were reluctant to risk sparking a devasting all-out war with the United States. In contrast, for 2020s Beijing, Taiwan is a proximate serial crisis flashpoint, which is considered a vital national security priority of immense geostrategic and geoeconomic significance. In short, latter-day China is not the Soviet Union and contemporary Taiwan is not Cold War-era Cuba.

The Perils of a Cold War Analogy for Today’s U.S.-China Rivalry

KEY TAKEAWAYS

The temptation to view U.S.-China rivalry through a Cold War prism encourages erroneous assumptions.

First, it can lead decision-makers to believe that the two great powers will avoid escalation spirals and hot war.

Second, it can prompt zero-sum thinking about the outcome of U.S.-China rivalry.

usip.org

Tuesday, June 10, 2025

/ READ TIME: 10 minutes

By: Andrew Scobell, Ph.D.

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In the new era of great power rivalry between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (hereafter “China”), the paradigm of strategic competition has become popular. In looking to make sense of the present global geopolitical moment and paradigm, pundits search for a relevant historical analogy. Perhaps the most oft referenced analogy for contemporary U.S.-China strategic competition — with the possible exception of the “Thucydides trap” popularized by political scientist Graham Allison — is the 20th century Cold War. Indeed, the Cold War is foremost in the minds of those in both Washington and Beijing. That Chinese decision-makers and researchers routinely insist that their U.S. counterparts are trapped in a “Cold War mentality” says as much about the current mindset in Beijing as it does about thinking in Washington. But this Cold War analogy, while useful up to a point, contains significant perils, leading decision-makers to draw dangerous conjectures about U.S.-China rivalry.

A boy views a video depicting Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the Military Museum in Beijing on Sept. 2, 2022. (Gilles Sabrié/The New York Times)

Academics and analysts vigorously debate the aptness of this historical analogy, focusing on discerning noteworthy similarities or dramatic differences between ongoing U.S.-China rivalry and the Cold War. Often overlooked in these debates is the fact that analogies are not intended to be exact in every respect. If one episode was an exact replica of another, then they would not be analogous but identical! Indeed, a “‘perfect analogy’ is a contradiction in terms,” historian David Hackett Fischer notes.

As international relations scholar Yuen Foong Khong observes: “decision-makers routinely resort to analogies or schemas to interpret the complex and uncertain environment in which they operate and respond.” However, unlike researchers, decision-makers do not have the time or inclination to explore the finer points of an analogy or apply strict selection criteria. Khong’s research demonstrates that a decision-maker’s preoccupation with a specific historical analogy can often prove to be more of a hindrance than a help.

Perhaps the greatest hazard to embracing the historical analogy of the 20th century Cold War when analyzing the current U.S.-China rivalry is that it can encourage glib suppositions and facile assumptions. In this analysis, I will highlight two perils. First, since the United States and Soviet Union were able to quash escalation spirals and successfully avoid direct superpower-on-superpower military conflicts — both conventional and nuclear — many believe it should be straightforward for the United States and China to manage their rivalry and avert hot wars. This can generate overconfidence in Washington and Beijing regarding their ability to manage crises and control escalation and produce risky behavior. Second, the outcome of the Cold War can prompt zero-sum thinking about the anticipated outcome of ongoing U.S.-China rivalry. In Washington, this can produce a maximalist mindset focusing on achieving a triumph akin to the American victory over the Soviet bloc in the late 20th century; in Beijing, this can reinforce paranoia about a U.S. masterplan designed to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Together the escalation-avoidance supposition and zero-sum outcome assumption could very easily increase the volatility of the current rivalry between the United States and China.

Peril 1: The Illusion of Hot-War Avoidance

By definition a cold war is not a hot one. Yet the Cold War was filled with hot wars. While Washington and Moscow were successful at avoiding hot wars with each other, proxy-on-proxy wars and superpower-on-proxy-power wars were common. But the fact that there were no direct U.S.-Soviet wars can lead to the facile takeaway that crisis management and escalation control efforts in the Cold War were foolproof. In short, a cursory and rosy reading of the Cold War can promote an overconfidence in the ability of the United States and China to manage crises and control escalation.

The superficial takeaway from the outcome of multiple superpower confrontations is that despite large arsenals of nuclear weapons and multiple crises, the United States and the Soviet Union were able to avert nuclear Armageddon. If Washington and Moscow could successfully manage their fraught relationship, then shouldn’t Washington and Beijing be able to do the same? The most celebrated crisis of the Cold War is the Cuban missile faceoff. On its face, the outcome would seem to support the inference that if Washington and Moscow were able to arrest escalation and avert war in 1962, Washington and Beijing ought to be able to manage in similar fashion some 60 years later. However, a careful reading of the extensive scholarship based upon a wealth of primary sources on both sides reveals a far more alarming interpretation.

A cursory and rosy reading of the Cold War can promote an overconfidence in the ability of the United States and China to manage crises and control escalation.

Cold War-era Cuba presents itself as an obvious candidate analogy to 21st century Taiwan. The analogy holds considerable appeal: both islands are located some 90 miles off the coast of a rival and each counts as their prime patron the rival’s rival. Moreover, while Cuba was a key Cold War flashpoint, it never escalated into a hot war — setting aside the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion that was swiftly suppressed.

While the United States has yet to install missiles on Taiwan, Washington has enhanced its military assistance to Taipei in terms of armaments and advisors. Although China has yet to launch any Bay of Pigs-style invasion, Beijing has significantly ramped up its hostility and coercive actions against Taiwan.

Although 21st century Americans tend to be somewhat confident about managing crises and concerned about miscalculation, contemporary Chinese are prone to be supremely confident about Beijing’s abilities to manage crises and control escalation. While Chinese leaders and analysts were not happy about how they handled the 2001 Hainan Island Incident, they believe that Beijing has dramatically improved its effectiveness in handling crises during the past 20 years. Moreover, Chinese political and military leaders are convinced they can contain escalation — or manage what they call “war control.”

Is Taiwan a 21st century Cuba? While the analogy has limitations, it does serve to underscore the centrality of the island in U.S.-China strategic competition. Yet, Taiwan serves as the location of an enduring, creeping cross-decades crisis or chronic flashpoint in a way Cuba never did. While Cuba brought the United States and Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, the flashpoint greatly diminished in intensity in subsequent years thanks to serious mutual superpower efforts at de-escalation. In contrast, Taiwan seems to be a far knottier challenge for the United States and China if only because the island has been and continues to be the most contentious issue in relations between Washington and Beijing. Moreover, each side vociferously blames the other for exacerbating the issue and demands that the other side stop “changing the status quo” even as they disagree on what the status quo was in the first place.

In other words, Taiwan is much more than a 21st century Cuba. Most notably, Taiwan stands out as China’s primary irredentist objective where Beijing’s top priority is national unification. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has explicitly linked realizing unification with Taiwan with achieving China’s grand strategy of national rejuvenation. Indeed, Taiwan has been identified as a core national security interest of China. Speculation has been rife that the People’s Liberation Army was given a deadline to seize Taiwan by 2027. For a time, multiple leading U.S. officials and analysts were asserting this as fact. More recently, this alarmist rhetoric has been scaled back. According to Admiral Samuel Paparo, the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command: “This [the 2027 date] is not a go-by date. It’s a be-ready-by date.” While the distinction is important, it brings scant reassurance.

Taiwan is much more than a 21st century Cuba … Taiwan stands out as China’s primary irredentist objective where Beijing’s top priority is national unification.

Beijing’s high-profile attention to Taiwan tightly binds the island’s fate to the CCP’s political legitimacy. Moreover, both Beijing and Washington consider the island a key geostrategic strongpoint in the western Pacific — a critical link in the so-called First Island Chain — as well as a major global technology and commercial hub. In short, Cuba is not only not an apt analogy but also a dangerous one. Taiwan constitutes ground zero in U.S.-China competition — the most likely location to spark a war between Washington and Beijing. To paraphrase General Omar Bradley, applying the wrong analogy to the wrong crisis could lead decision-makers into the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong enemy.

Peril 2: Zero-Sum Thinking with Winner-Loser End state

A second dangerous presumption based upon the historical analogy of the Cold War concerns the way the extended 20th century rivalry ended: an abject defeat for Moscow and resounding victory for Washington. A United States that effectively prosecuted the Cold War and emerged triumphant against a foe as mighty as the Soviet Union can surely emerge victorious at the conclusion of an extended rivalry against China. This seductive reasoning is attractive in 2020s Washington. Unsurprisingly, this historical analogy is unappealing in 2020s Beijing since it suggests the outcome of the contemporary U.S.-China strategic competition could be the overthrow or collapse of the CCP.

China’s rulers are haunted by the shocking bloodless collapse of the Soviet Union. That an erstwhile superpower and the world’s original Leninist party-state collapsed with a whimper is traumatic for China’s communists. From the earliest days of his administration, Xi’s consuming focus appears to have been to ensure that the Chinese Communist Party avoids the fate of the Soviet Communist Party. In a January 2013 speech at the Central Party School in Beijing, Xi asked: “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?” The Chinese strongman admonished his fellow party leaders on the importance of the task to ensure they did not repeat the mistakes of their Soviet comrades.

But beyond this, the widespread embrace of the Cold War analogy in the United States reinforces Beijing’s fear that Washington is not interested in coexistence or accommodation. As scholar Hal Brands notes, this “could ratchet up tensions and dangers in the relationship.” The analogy serves as confirmation of Chinese leaders’ suspicions that U.S. leaders have long been intent on containing China and toppling the CCP. That prominent U.S. voices insist that “there is no substitute for victory,” further fuels this fear.

Moreover, the CCP is proving a far more daunting and adaptive adversary than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ever was. Whereas Yuen Foong Khong characterized the Soviet Union as a “one-dimensional (military) superpower,” contemporary China is proving to be a more formidable “multi-dimensional power.” The upshot of this reality is that the United States is now engaged in competition across multiple military and non-military domains with China. All this means that U.S.-China rivalry is likely to be far more complicated, much more costly to wage and a lengthier contest than was Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Conclusion

Analogies are cognitive tools for making new situations and challenges more comprehensible to decision-makers. Yet, decision-makers can fixate upon an analogy and draw spurious inferences that lead to bad decisions. One fundamental mistake, as David Hackett Fischer notes, is the “ … erroneous inference [that because] … A and B are similar in some respects [then] … they are the same in all respects.”

While the Cold War can be a useful and insightful parallel when looking to understand the multifaceted challenges of contemporary U.S.-China competition, this historical analogy also presents potent perils. First, the analogy can foster overconfidence in the ability of the United States and China to avoid direct, hot war because the United States and the Soviet Union were remarkably successful in managing escalation and averting conventional and nuclear conflicts with each other. A second peril in drawing an analogy with the 20th century Cold War is that it can perpetuate zero-sum thinking in Washington and Beijing. That Washington-Moscow strategic competition ended in the disintegration of the Soviet Union encourages a U.S. mindset viewing the optimal — or even inevitable — outcome of Washington-Beijing rivalry as the end of CCP rule and resounding victory for the United States. The analogy also reinforces alarmist thinking in Beijing and bolsters the presumption that Washington’s desired end state is the CCP’s overthrow.

For the Soviet Union, Cuba proved to be a “one off” early 1960s crisis involving a distant ally over which Soviet leaders were reluctant to risk sparking a devasting all-out war with the United States. In contrast, for 2020s Beijing, Taiwan is a proximate serial crisis flashpoint, which is considered a vital national security priority of immense geostrategic and geoeconomic significance. In short, latter-day China is not the Soviet Union and contemporary Taiwan is not Cold War-era Cuba.

PHOTO: A boy views a video depicting Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the Military Museum in Beijing on Sept. 2, 2022. (Gilles Sabrié/The New York Times)

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s).

PUBLICATION TYPE: Analysis

usip.org

15. Hegseth’s return to Congress turns heated as Democrats go on offense

​One of the most heard exchanges I have seen at a Congressional hearing - multiple heated exchanges. It seemed reminiscent of TV talk shows like Crossfire and the FIring Line.

One of the things that jumped out to me is that it does not appear that DOD is providing sufficient information to Congress whether it is budget details or responses to letters from Congress requesting information.

In my limited experience when a request for information from Congress was received it took priority and we felt a lot of pressure from the higher headquarters to respond expeditiously. 

Hegseth’s return to Congress turns heated as Democrats go on offense

Trump’s Pentagon chief struck a defiant tone, leveling his own accusations at lawmakers who took aim at his polarizing stewardship of the military.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2025/06/11/voa-firing-journalists-asylum-russia-putin/

Updated

June 10, 2025 at 4:38 p.m. EDTyesterday at 4:38 p.m. EDT

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced thorny questions regarding the deployment of National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles during a House hearing on Jun. 10. (Video: The Washington Post)

By Abigail Hauslohner and Dan Lamothe

Congressional Democrats on Tuesday clashed repeatedly with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, demanding details on the Trump administration’s sparsely outlined defense budget request and admonishing him for a string of controversies — including his deployment of thousands of military personnel to Los Angeles over the objections of California’s governor.

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Hegseth’s appearance before the House Appropriations subcommittee on defense was the first of four hearings scheduled over the next week. From the outset, it offered a forecast of what is likely to be a series of explosive exchanges, as lawmakers aired frustration with the former Fox News host’s unabashed partisanship since taking the helm of what traditionally has been a staunchly apolitical institution.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Connecticut), the Appropriations Committee’s top Democrat, and Rep. Betty McCollum (Minnesota), the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, grew visibly irritated by Hegseth’s refusal to answer their questions seeking the specifics of President Donald Trump’s $1 trillion defense budget request; how the administration intends to pay for its troop deployment to Los Angeles, where people are protesting Trump’s immigration policies; and its vague plans to reform the nation’s defense industrial base.

“Where are you pulling the money from?” McCollum asked of Hegseth’s surge of nearly 5,000 National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles. (It was disclosed later that the Pentagon projects the deployment, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has denounced as unnecessary and an abuse of presidential power, will cost $134 million over 60 days.)

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“Do you have a plan. … And what is that plan?” DeLauro asked next, alluding to the funds Congress previously allocated to ramp up the United States’ lagging submarine production.

Hegseth responded to both queries with defiant criticisms of Democratic policy decisions, prompting interruptions from his interrogators.

“I want your plan!” DeLauro shouted, cutting him off. “What is your plan for the future? Can we get that in writing and on paper so that we know where you’re going? Because we don’t have anything today. We have zip! Nada!”

“We have the details,” Hegseth said, though he offered none at the hearing.

Moments later, an official Pentagon social media account posted video of the exchange, mocking the congresswoman. “WHY ARE YOU SCREAMING!” it said.

Hegseth, testifying alongside Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other Pentagon officials, repeatedly went on offense himself, criticizing the Biden administration and other Democrats for their own judgment.

In one pointed exchange about the deployment of troops to Los Angeles, Hegseth accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat and vice-presidential candidate last year, of abandoning a police precinct in Minneapolis after the police murder of George Floyd and allowing it to “burn to the ground.”

The same Defense Department social media account, which is staffed by Hegseth’s team, quickly amplified the claim, and McCollum, the Minnesota congresswoman, tried to cut him off. Hegseth said the National Guard in that case was mobilized “far too late” and that the Trump administration wanted to avoid a repeat of that situation in California.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, has said previously that it was his decision to abandon the police precinct, and Walz has criticized the city’s response as an “abject failure.” But city officials also have voiced frustration that Walz did not deploy the state’s National Guard sooner.

Hegseth also clashed with Rep. Pete Aguilar, a California Democrat, who echoed criticism from Newsom and suggested that military personnel were deployed to Los Angeles without necessary support and accommodations. Hegseth responded that the troops were “very well prepared” and the Defense Department was reviewing their needs.

He said he rejected Aguilar’s assertion that “we don’t care about the troops.”

“Nobody cares more about the troops at the top than this secretary, the chairman and the department,” Hegseth said, pointing his finger at the congressman.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gestures at Tuesday's hearing. (Tom Brenner/For The Washington Post)

Republicans, meanwhile, used Tuesday’s hearing to praise Hegseth’s and Trump’s leadership, though some in the GOP also have expressed frustration with the budget delay.

The president is required by law to submit to Congress a complete budget for the coming year by early February. Budgets often arrive later in the first year of a presidential term — a fact acknowledged by the Appropriations Committee’s chairman Rep. Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma).

While Hegseth is not personally responsible for the delay, Cole said, “I must say I do agree with my friend Ms. McCollum. We do need more information than we’ve gotten” to adequately fund the president’s national security priorities.

The Appropriations Committee on Monday unveiled a 146-page draft defense budget. More detail on what the administration wants to prioritize is “critical for us to be able to make the decisions we’re going to have to make,” Cole said.

Beyond the budget, Democrats assailed Hegseth’s conduct in his first months on the job, behavior that has alarmed lawmakers and national security experts.

DeLauro criticized his “careless sharing of military secrets” — referring to his controversial use of the unclassified, nongovernment messaging application Signal — and blamed the scandal for Trump’s dismissal of Michael Waltz as national security adviser. Waltz is now Trump’s pick for U.N. ambassador.

“Your tenure as secretary has been marked by endless chaos,” she said.

Hegseth focused his opening statement on oft-stated talking points about the Trump administration’s plan to provide “peace through strength,” and he credited the administration for an uptick in military recruitment that began before Trump took office. The top brass has declined to affirm such an assertion.

He also defended his efforts to quash diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the Defense Department and claimed that the military is responding “positively and incredibly” to these changes.

This week’s hearings marathon — Hegseth testifies before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday and the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday before meeting with the Senate Armed Services Committee next week, on June 18 — comes ahead of Saturday’s military parade in Washington to mark the Army’s 250th birthday.

The Army estimates that the parade, which coincides with Trump’s 79th birthday, will cost $25 million to $45 million, making it a lighting rod for criticism at a moment when the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate “waste” by slashing funding for federal safety net programs such as Medicaid.

Dozens of heavy tanks and other military vehicles will roll down Constitution Avenue, subjecting the city’s streets to nearly double the weight they were constructed to tolerate, and officials estimate that the parade could cost an additional $16 million in repairs.

“I honor and celebrate the United States Army, but I’d like to know how much this praise is going to cost,” McCollum said during the hearing. “I have sent the department letters on several occasions on this, and I’m still waiting for a response.”

Trump on Tuesday described those who might protest the parade as “people that hate our country” and vowed that any protesters would “be met with very heavy force.”

After the hearing, Hegseth traveled with the president to Fort Bragg, an Army base in North Carolina, to preview the weekend’s events. A sea of soldiers in camouflage and red berets — and other people donning Trump shirts and “Make America Great Again” hats — awaited them.

Trump and Hegseth then watched a thudding, 38-minute display, as U.S. troops crawled along the ground clutching rifles and parachuted onto a base tarmac; helicopters, drones and war planes roared overhead; and U.S. forces launched rockets and other munitions worth millions of dollars.

Patrick Svitek, Amy B Wang and Matt Viser contributed to this report.

What readers are saying

The comments overwhelmingly criticize Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's handling of the defense budget and his deployment of troops to Los Angeles. Many commenters express disdain for his perceived incompetence, lack of leadership, and inability to provide clear plans or answers... Show more

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By Abigail Hauslohner

Abigail Hauslohner is a Washington Post national security reporter focused on Congress. She was previously a roving national correspondent, writing on topics ranging from immigration to political extremism. She covered war and politics in the Middle East for seven years, and joined the Post in 2012 as Cairo bureau chief.follow on X@ahauslohner

By Dan Lamothe

Dan Lamothe joined The Washington Post in 2014 to cover the U.S. military. He has written about the Armed Forces since 2008, traveling extensively, embedding with five branches of service and covering combat in Afghanistan.follow on X@danlamothe

16. US spy chief wants intel community to move away from building its own tech

​Hmmm... but the IC has been a technology incubator.

Would we have the SR-71 if it had not been for the CIA's A-12?

But sure AI is changing the dynamics. But I also think the IC has long had a positive public -private-corporate partnership. E.g., Palintir among others.

US spy chief wants intel community to move away from building its own tech

defenseone.com · by David DiMolfetta

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard speaks with Vice President of Amazon Web Services' Worldwide Public Sector Dave Levy on June 10 at the AWS public sector conference. David DiMolfetta/Staff

Gabbard says industry can provide more tools, citing AI systems that are already helping analysts with major tasks.

|

June 10, 2025 03:00 PM ET

• Artificial Intelligence
• Industry

By David DiMolfetta

Cybersecurity Reporter, Nextgov/FCW

June 10, 2025 03:00 PM ET

• Artificial Intelligence
• Industry

The U.S. intelligence community should lean harder on industry and make fewer of its tech tools in-house, the director of national intelligence said Tuesday.

"I want to get us away from having the government trying to build tech solutions for itself because it’s really not what the government is best at doing, but really focusing on buying and purchasing solutions wherever we can, so that our workforce can really focus on the things that we are very good at and have exclusive responsibilities to fulfill,” Tulsi Gabbard said at Amazon Web Services' annual public-sector conference in Washington, D.C.

Known examples of in-house systems include NSA's XKeyscore, which helps intercept, store, and query communications along the internet backbone, and tools like HammerDrill and other USB-based intrusion methods largely designed by CIA's Embedded Development Branch.

But for at least two decades, the nation’s 18 intelligence offices have also used industry-made tools to eavesdrop, hunt for cyber threats, analyze troves of data, and more. Amazon, for example, supplies systems that help the NSA and CIA store and exchange classified information. Other tech giants have done the same.

Last year, Gabbard's predecessor, Avril Haines, said that the private sector “increasingly possesses certain unique and specialized talent, knowledge and capabilities in key fields of critical importance to national security that we don’t have access to in the government.”

In some of her first public thoughts on the private sector, Gabbard seemed to imply that there is far more outsourcing to be done—particularly with AI-powered tools.

She said that AI tools had helped scan thousands of documents released in a recent declassification push pertaining to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. She also said they’ve helped staff pore through documents and files available in the open internet.

“10,000 hours of media content, for example — that normally would take eight people 48 hours to comb through — now takes one person one hour, through the use of some of the AI tools that we have here.”

Gabbard has also pushed to create more unclassified spaces at Liberty Crossing—the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s main campus in McLean, Virginia—arguing they will facilitate discussions with industry representatives.

“It’s crazy that, you know, when we have people who need to go out and have a Zoom call with someone, they have to go sit in the car outside and take that call,” she said. “There are rules in place that make it very difficult for people who are working in the private sector to come in and meet with our professionals and have robust conversations about exactly this: What solutions are you bringing to our work to make it so that we can better accomplish our mission?”

Gabbard, who had lacked formal intelligence experience before her nomination, has drawn criticism for her performance on the job. She installed a top adviser in the IC Inspector General’s office, a move that some former officials warned could compromise its integrity. One of her top aides pushed analysts to rewrite an intelligence document so it could not be used against the Trump administration, the New York Times reported last month. And in an ominous video posted Tuesday morning, Gabbard warned that the world was coming closer to a “nuclear annihilation” and said that “political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” The video comes amid nuclear discussions between the U.S. and Iran.

17. The U.S. granted these journalists asylum. Then it fired them.

​A terrible self-inflicted wound. A major strategic error by the US, by us losing VOA, RFA,etc. 

The U.S. granted these journalists asylum. Then it fired them.

Three employees at Voice of America’s fact-checking unit fled Putin’s wrath and are now among the many journalists losing their jobs under Trump’s orders.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2025/06/11/voa-firing-journalists-asylum-russia-putin/

41 minutes ago

9 min

1

Leonid Martynyuk is a Russian journalist who was working for Voice of America but was recently fired in the Trump administration’s cuts at the government-funded news operation. Martynyuk came to the United States in 2014 and was later granted asylum. (Aristide Economopoulos/For The Washington Post)

By Scott Nover

W

hen Leonid Martynyuk got off the train from Sochi to Krasnodar in southern Russia in the summer of 2014, a strange man bumped into him.

The man started yelling, refusing to leave, egging on a fight. He claimed Martynyuk pushed him — not the other way around. Martynyuk’s soon-to-be-wife, Ekaterina, motioned to police officers, pleading to intervene and defuse the hostile situation.

But when the police arrived, they were only interested in interrogating Martynyuk — not the other man, who was released without questioning. “This was when I was sure that the entire thing was an orchestrated set up to have me arrested,” Martynyuk later wrote in his application for political asylum in the United States.

Martynyuk spent 10 days in prison on charges of hooliganism. His real offense, he maintains, was criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin. His crime was journalism. Martynyuk, then in his mid-30s, spent years writing critical reports about Putin alongside his mentor, the well-known political opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who previously served as deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin in the late 1990s.

In one report, Nemtsov and Martynyuk detailed Putin’s extensive wealth and opulence; in another, they detailed extensive corruption around the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. Martynyuk also ran a popular YouTube channel.

When he was released from prison, Martynyuk’s lawyer suggested that he and Ekaterina relocate to the United States for a short time, so the pair left for the New York area in October 2014. Four months later, two gunmen assassinated Nemtsov while he was walking home from dinner along a Moscow bridge.

“After that, I decided it would be dangerous to return,” Martynyuk recently told The Washington Post. He applied for political asylum, which the U.S. government granted two years later.

But now Martynyuk, who became a full citizen in 2024, is once again feeling the ire of a powerful government — this time, it’s the United States.

The entrance at Voice of America’s Washington headquarters. (Tom Brenner/For The Washington Post)

On May 30, Martynyuk was one of more than 500 Voice of America staffers terminated by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the agency that oversees the government-funded news service. Kari Lake, senior adviser to the USAGM, which oversees Voice of America and funds nonprofit news outlets with similar goals, says the agency represents government waste. The contractors fired could soon be joined by hundreds of full-time staffers, who are expected to be fired.

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After Putin came to power in 1999, he gradually clamped down on independent media in the country. Martynyuk read, listened to and watched Voice of America’s work as a young man in the early 2000s, and he learned English through a program at the time titled Special English. His history with the network goes back much further: His grandfather was a colonel in the Soviet Army, stationed in Lviv in the 1970s. At night, he would listen to VOA on the radio — in secret.

Martynyuk applied to work for VOA’s fact-checking team, Polygraph. At the time of his firing, Polygraph employed one editor and three reporters, all of whom either received or had applied for political asylum.

Stacy Caplow, a Brooklyn Law School professor, who — along with students in her clinic — helped Martynyuk apply for asylum, told The Post that he was the quintessential asylum seeker. “This was the kind of case where if they didn’t grant asylum, there would be something wrong with the system,” she said. “It’s clear-cut. Asylum is designed for people like him.”

For foreign-born journalists who have found refuge not just in the U.S. but at Voice of America, losing their jobs feels like an existential threat — one that could stop them from working every day to speak truth to power, for the first time in their careers.

N

ik Yarst, a video producer on the fact-checking team, also lost his job on May 30.

Yarst was a Sochi-based correspondent for the Public Television of Russia, also known as OTR, and reported extensively on corruption in Russia during the Olympics. He and a cameraman were driving to an interview with a Russian official when he was stopped by Russian police, who found narcotics in his car. Yarst, who later tested negative for a drug test, said the police slid the drugs into his car to arrest him. He served a year on house arrest, while his legal battle continued, and faced a 10-year prison sentence if convicted.

“After the Olympic Games were done, I decided to escape from the Russia,” Yarst told The Post. “I asked for the political asylum here in the United States because I truly believed here the independent media exists. Here is freedom of speech. And I have to escape from Russia because I was facing prison or death.”

Nik Yarst’s federal badge, with an expiration date of February 2026. (Nik Yarst)

Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch, said Russia was a different country back then — “still quite authoritarian,” but there were still independent journalists, news organizations and human rights organizations. “This was a time you could still operate in Russia, but Krasnodar region was one of the toughest to operate and had a very, very harsh governor who really went after journalists,” said Denber, who has known Yarst for many years and documented his story. “Nik, sadly, was no exception.”

Yarst worked on an investigative story involving the kidnapping of a 6-year-old girl who had received a large inheritance, including land in the zone designated for construction of the Sochi Olympics. “Her mother was murdered — before that, she had been threatened — and the girl was taken to Abkhazia,” Yarst told The Post. “Her grandmother fought in court, trying to restore justice. We were helping her. That case was a boiling point.”

The story, which involved allegations of corruption and improper land seizure by the government, made him a target.

In the U.S., Yarst — now based in Miami — first flew to New York and stayed at a hostel for a month, choosing to start his life over in a new country. Human rights organizations heard about his case and contacted him, connecting him with a lawyer and to resources from the Committee to Protect Journalists and other organizations. He received asylum in 2017, and he found employment at Voice of America.

“VOA was the one service who could hire people like me,” he said.

He feels not betrayed but disappointed by the government. President Donald Trump, “during his campaign, he talked a lot about the swamp, about corrupt people,” Yarst said. “But these are not corrupt people who are out on the street.”

W

hen Fatima Tlis arrived in America, she resettled in Erie, Pennsylvania, through the work of the International Institute of Erie, now the Erie field office of the nonprofit U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. It helped her learn English, get a Social Security card and establish credit. She couldn’t get a car, so she and her two children would ride bicycles through the rural roads of northeast Pennsylvania to Walmart for groceries, which they loaded into backpacks. “Of course, in Pennsylvania, nobody cares that you’re some kind of a famous journalist,” she told The Post.

When she found out her fellowship application to Harvard University’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights had been accepted, she broke down sobbing.

Fatima Tlis joined Voice of America in 2010 and is the supervisory editor in charge of Polygraph, VOA’s fact-checking team. (Fatima Tlis)

Before that, in Russia, Tlis reported for both independent Russian media and the U.S.-based Associated Press, particularly about issues in the Caucuses. She said Russian security forces harassed her, detained her, tortured her and once put her in a hidden room in a police station that she called a “cage.” It was 12 feet long, but only four feet wide, and had a door with thick iron bars, through which she could see a portrait of Putin on the wall.

After that, a former classmate who worked for the Russian security forces, stopped her on the street one day and warned her that her name was on a list and urged her to flee the country. “What list?” Tlis replied.

“You remember your friend Anna Politkovskaya?” she recalls him asking. “She was on the same list — and those lists never expire.”

Politkovskaya, a journalist and human rights activist critical of Putin, was assassinated in 2006.

Tlis joined Voice of America in 2010 after two years of fellowships at Harvard, including the prestigious Nieman Fellowship. At the time of Trump’s executive order in March dismantling the USAGM, she was the supervisory editor in charge of Polygraph and the team’s only full-time employee. The others worked full time but were designated as personal services contractors, who are easier to hire and fire. As of now, she still has a job.

Lake sent her plans for a reduction in force at the USAGM to Congress on June 3, a move that would eliminate all but 80 staffers at the agency and fewer than 20 at Voice of America. About 1,300 people worked at VOA before the March executive order. Tlis said that — beyond Polygraph — she personally knows of more than a dozen asylum holders or seekers at Voice of America. Lake did not respond to a request for comment about the asylum holders that have or could be fired.

“The people who were working on my team, journalists who, because of their job, endured the impossible just to be able to support the truth in their countries,” Tlis said. “Still, after all of that they remained true to their profession, to their mission, and wanted to continue fighting lies and falsehoods and unmasking disinformation. Those people are getting fired right now.”

The Voice of America building. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)

18. Coding Defense Solutions on the Fly with AI

​Excerpts:

It is hard to use frontier AI models every day to develop software and not believe we stand at the beginning of the largest revolution in how militaries develop capabilities in human history. The U.S. military was 15 years late to adopt commercial Agile software development methodologies. Because that delay happened in the wake of America winning the Cold War, the consequences were mostly experienced in terms of wasted resources, not lost wars. But if America is late to this AI-centered paradigm shift while facing off against China, the consequences could be far more severe for the free world.

Success requires three key changes: program offices should start using AI to build dramatically more prototype software, should build secure enclaves on their platforms in which they can prototype quickly, and should build cyber testing infrastructure that enables speed while increasing security.

Prototyping non-safety-critical software is the right place to start learning how to build organizations that can effectively and responsibly use imperfect AI tools.

Without experience, using AI can slow development due to increased time fixing bugs. I write significantly more automated tests to validate performance when building with AI. Without AI, the flight planning application described earlier would have required five end-to-end test cases to validate calculations. With AI-generated code, I needed thirty tests to feel confident it was correct. Bouncing code off multiple models and using standard code quality assessment tools also helps minimize problems and maximize speed.

The development of these best practices is a major component of the value that will accrue to program offices using AI to build products. Future AI models will likely achieve in days what now takes years and millions of dollars: integrating weapons onto legacy platforms, developing autonomous drone software, and refactoring safety-critical systems. Program offices that don’t use AI in low-risk settings today won’t have the experience needed to safely use future capabilities.

The window for adaptation is open, but it won’t remain so indefinitely. The military that masters AI-powered development first will gain a decisive advantage in tomorrow’s conflicts.

Coding Defense Solutions on the Fly with AI – War on the Rocks

Sean Lavelle

warontherocks.com · June 11, 2025

Two weeks ago, a P-8 aviator asked if I could make a tool to help plan flight schedules when conducting operations against maneuvering submarines. The daily planning cycle for these kinds of operations usually ties down a couple of officers in a squadron every day. It’s the kind of problem that is easy to throw manpower at but would cost millions and take several years to solve by procuring software through the acquisition system. Given those options, commanders default to throwing people at the problem.

Over the last decade, it’s usually taken me a couple of weeks to develop the basic version of an application like this to be shared with users for feedback and iteration. These initial products usually lacked key features, but served as a canvas onto which sailors could sketch what they really needed to solve their problem. Over the course of a couple months, we could deliver a product that really moved the needle.

Today, AI tools reduce this to mere hours. The aviator made that request at 9:04 a.m., and by 12:40 p.m., I had built and sent the initial application back to him, using a combination of OpenAI’s GPT-4.1 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro. Instead of a simple mock-up, it was fully functional. The code was well-documented, with complex math working flawlessly. The AI had even drafted a series of additional features for customers to consider and questions to help tease out their real needs.

The application comprised more than 5,000 lines of well-crafted code, and a human didn’t write a single one of them.

Even without dramatic advances in AI capabilities, these tools will fundamentally change how program offices acquire capabilities and how combat units solve problems. But this will happen only if the Department of Defense thinks systematically about changing how it understands problems, builds solutions, and fields secure final products.

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Traditional acquisition processes force program offices into high-stakes, one-shot decisions. Consider an aircraft program manager having trouble clearing maintenance backlogs, keeping aircraft on the ground. Given two million dollars to build something that solves the problem, that program manager would typically hold lengthy stakeholder meetings, debate endlessly about the right solution, and spend months in contract negotiations to get started. By the time engineers begin coding, operational needs may have changed entirely.

With AI-powered software development, though, that same program manager can immediately attack the problem with a portfolio of possible solutions. He could direct a small team to prototype three different applications in 72 hours: a maintenance work scheduler, a defect root-cause analysis tool, and a simulation-based training tool for maintainers. After two weeks of testing and iteration, real data would replace conjecture.

Perhaps the root-cause analysis tool creates more work than it solves. The training tool shows promise but needs industry refinement to ensure accuracy. And the scheduler demonstrates measurable improvements in aircraft availability while receiving positive feedback from maintainers. Armed with actual performance data, the program manager can make confident decisions about which solutions to pursue. They can scale the successful scheduler prototype in-house, flip the training tool to industry for refinement, and redirect resources away from the less promising root cause analysis tool.

Prototyping isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the only practical way to uncover the subtle, context-driven frameworks that good software must work within. AI can slash the marginal cost of these experiments. Early user data dictates what to scale, refine, or eliminate. Program managers become portfolio managers, quickly reallocating resources based on measured value rather than on optimistic PowerPoint pitches.

This portfolio approach to development works best when program offices control their own products, but the government often does not own the rights to modify its own systems.

Overcoming Platform Constraints

Program offices fielding flexible, government-owned software should begin using AI to prototype today. The barriers are low, and the tools are available. But not every program office enjoys the luxury of open, modifiable software systems. Many manage platforms dominated by vendor-locked code that runs safety-critical systems with long certification processes.

These constraints might seem to preclude rapid AI-powered prototyping, but they shouldn’t.

Every major weapon system has problems that don’t touch safety-critical code: problematic supply chains, inadequate training resources, and poor post-mission analytics tools. These adjacent problems offer fertile ground for rapid prototyping. A fighter aircraft program office might not be able to modify flight control software quickly, but they can build tools to predict component failures or streamline pilot training schedules. These kinds of applications deliver immediate value while building institutional competency in AI-assisted development.

In the longer term, program offices need to invest in secure, containerized software enclaves within their platforms. These isolated environments should have read-only access to real-time mission system data that lets engineers prototype applications without compromising security or safety. They can quickly deploy prototype algorithms, visualization tools, and decision aids against real operational data, iterating at AI speed. Once proven in the enclave, promising capabilities can enter the formal integration pipeline with confidence in their value.

Failure to build enclaves like this will stop manned platforms from directly benefiting from AI-accelerated software development. Over time, small and unmanned platforms with less onerous assurance processes will compound gains from more rapid development and make those legacy platforms obsolete.

Security as the Critical Constraint

As the military starts developing hundreds of rapid prototypes, cybersecurity will become the primary bottleneck to deploying software quickly. Today’s generative AI models likely introduce more cyber vulnerabilities than the average human. Moving fast while maintaining security requires new approaches to threat assessment and certification.

The Department of Defense’s Software Fast Track Initiative offers a promising foundation for re-architecting security approvals. AI tools excel at generating compliance documentation, but the Department of Defense needs intelligent code review systems that can identify vulnerabilities better than traditional tools without slowing development cycles.

At least one cyber researcher has used a frontier AI model to find an undiscovered zero-day vulnerability in a major operating system. This is the future of cyber defense and because it is also the future of cyber offense, the Department of Defense cannot wait to adopt these technologies.

The military should also develop standardized “system prompts” that guide AI models toward cybersecurity best practices. Academic research indicates that security-focused prompts significantly reduce vulnerabilities in generated code.

Emerging threats require attention as well. Adversaries will likely attempt to poison public AI training data, inducing models to output malicious code or repeat false information. As public data continues training commercial AI models, defense research dollars should support efforts to counter these attacks.

The Strategic Imperative

It is hard to use frontier AI models every day to develop software and not believe we stand at the beginning of the largest revolution in how militaries develop capabilities in human history. The U.S. military was 15 years late to adopt commercial Agile software development methodologies. Because that delay happened in the wake of America winning the Cold War, the consequences were mostly experienced in terms of wasted resources, not lost wars. But if America is late to this AI-centered paradigm shift while facing off against China, the consequences could be far more severe for the free world.

Success requires three key changes: program offices should start using AI to build dramatically more prototype software, should build secure enclaves on their platforms in which they can prototype quickly, and should build cyber testing infrastructure that enables speed while increasing security.

Prototyping non-safety-critical software is the right place to start learning how to build organizations that can effectively and responsibly use imperfect AI tools.

Without experience, using AI can slow development due to increased time fixing bugs. I write significantly more automated tests to validate performance when building with AI. Without AI, the flight planning application described earlier would have required five end-to-end test cases to validate calculations. With AI-generated code, I needed thirty tests to feel confident it was correct. Bouncing code off multiple models and using standard code quality assessment tools also helps minimize problems and maximize speed.

The development of these best practices is a major component of the value that will accrue to program offices using AI to build products. Future AI models will likely achieve in days what now takes years and millions of dollars: integrating weapons onto legacy platforms, developing autonomous drone software, and refactoring safety-critical systems. Program offices that don’t use AI in low-risk settings today won’t have the experience needed to safely use future capabilities.

The window for adaptation is open, but it won’t remain so indefinitely. The military that masters AI-powered development first will gain a decisive advantage in tomorrow’s conflicts.

BECOME A MEMBER

Sean Lavelle is a Navy aerospace engineering duty officer with master’s degrees in finance and machine learning from Johns Hopkins University and Georgia Tech. He is the founder of the first all active-duty software development team in the Navy and has built and deployed more than 60 software applications to units across the Navy. The views in this article are the author’s and not those of the U.S. Navy, the Defense Department, or any part of the U.S. government. The appearance of, or reference to, any commercial products or services does not constitute Navy or Defense Department endorsement of those products or services.

Image: Midjourney

warontherocks.com · June 11, 2025

19. Ukraine and Taiwan: Why Learning the Right Lessons Matters

​Of course China has. I wonder if China and the US are interpreting the lessons in similar ways?

Excerpt:

China has been paying close attention to the ongoing war in Ukraine, including reportedly sending some of its own soldiers to observe the battlefield. What Chinese leaders have learned cannot be encouraging to a country that has not engaged in combat since 1979, and that in a war it arguably lost to a much smaller neighbor. Rolling the iron dice of war is always a risky endeavor; doing so to invade a country that the under secretary of defense for policy has repeatedly declared is its top national security priority is a reckless act beyond any China has conducted since its intervention in the Korean War seventy-five years ago. That invasion happened because China believed that its homeland was under imminent threat; it is hard to imagine an equally rash act short of a similar belief today. So long as Taiwan does not announce its independence, China is far more likely to play a patient game of increasing diplomatic and informational pressure, accompanied by military actions short of war, to win this battle without firing a shot.

Ukraine and Taiwan: Why Learning the Right Lessons Matters - Modern War Institute

Zenel Garcia and John Nagl | 06.11.25

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Zenel Garcia · June 11, 2025

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As the world watches the war in Ukraine reshape the global order, the United States and its allies are seizing the moment to extract hard-earned lessons on the art of managing great power rivalry, crisis, and conflict. Arguably, the United States has adeptly employed its diplomatic, informational, military, and economic instruments of national power to keep its population safe and out of the conflict, while helping Ukraine impose severe costs on Russia. Diplomatically, it has built a coalition of partners to simultaneously seek a peaceful solution and cast opprobrium on Russian actions through international institutions like the United Nations. Informationally, it took the unprecedented step of releasing intelligence on Russian activities to deprive Moscow the element of surprise or the means to conduct false flag operations. It has also promoted an effective discourse portraying Russia’s action as threatening to the international order. Militarily, it has delivered one of the few recent successes in training and equipping a foreign military. Finally, economically, it has led the organization and implementation of severely damaging sanctions on Russia.

The apparent success of these efforts has generated much discussion about lessons to be learned. However, overly optimistic analyses risk obscuring the applicability of these policies to future conflicts. This is particularly important as the foreign policy community draws parallels between Ukraine and a potential conflict over Taiwan. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for the United States to apply its instruments of power in a similar fashion in a Taiwan contingency, specifically because China is not Russia, and Taiwan is not Ukraine. Nevertheless, the war in Ukraine offers lessons across the elements of national power for the prospects and likely consequences of a Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan. For both military and economic reasons, China is unlikely to follow Russia’s example of an overt invasion; instead, it will likely rely on diplomatic and informational power to accomplish its objectives.

Amphibious Invasion Complexities: Military Challenges for China

The principal lesson that President Xi Jinping is likely to have learned from watching Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the past three years is disarmingly simple: Invasions are hard.

Russia and Ukraine share a long contiguous land border that is largely flat and rolling hills—the easiest of all geographical conditions for a land invasion. Additionally, the Black Sea ostensibly allows Russia to use its advantage in seapower to apply additional pressure on Ukraine from the south, and there is a long fighting season from approximately May to October during which military operations are essentially unhindered by weather or terrain conditions. Literally none of these conditions apply to a potential invasion of Taiwan.

Most obviously, Taiwan is an island separated from the Chinese mainland by roughly one hundred miles of open water. There are only two months—May and October—when sea conditions would allow China to launch an amphibious invasion of Taiwan, which has limited (and well-defended) invasion beaches, a significant mountainous spine, subtropical jungle, and several large cities, all of which present major obstacles to military conquest even if the Taiwan Strait could be conquered. Amphibious operations are among the most difficult of all military operations, in no small part because they require the achievement of air superiority prior to beginning the invasion to protect vulnerable troop transports. This is why the “so few” in Winston’s Churchill’s famous quote—“never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”—were the pilots of the Royal Air Force. Russia’s inability to achieve air superiority over Ukraine is hence an important cautionary tale for Xi; if Ukraine’s skies have been protected by American intelligence and American missiles, it is not too much to expect that Taiwan’s would be as well—and that the island, about six percent the size of Ukraine and surrounded by a sea likely to be populated with American air defense assets aboard ships, would be even better defended against air attack than Ukraine has been.

Moreover, Russia’s challenge in establishing dominance over the Black Sea highlights another vital requirement for any successful campaign: naval superiority. Without command of the sea, China would be unable to secure and sustain the logistical lifeline required for a full-scale amphibious assault or to shield its invasion fleet from interdiction. Despite the significant advances of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, the narrowness of the Taiwan Strait could become a deadly bottleneck under the threat of Taiwanese and American submarines and missile-equipped ships. The United States Navy and its regional allies and partners possess considerable blue-water capabilities and regional presence, making the contest for maritime dominance not only unavoidable but arguably decisive. Xi’s planners must therefore consider not only how to reach Taiwan—but how to keep the corridor open once the first boots are ashore.

Sanctions and Interdependence: Economic Deterrents and Limits

China has become the manufacturing center of the world and, therefore, a pivotal component to global supply chains. It has also become the largest trading partner to most countries, and through the Belt and Road Initiative, it has emerged as a major investor. Consequently, the degree of sanctions currently being imposed on Russia are unlikely to be replicated for two reasons. The first is that implementing these kinds of sanctions on China would require a significant level of decoupling between the United States, its partners, and China. This is likely to be particularly painful to the consumer economies in the West. Even with the requisite political will, a policy of decoupling would be difficult to implement. The second is that China is increasing its footprint in emerging markets, which may mitigate some of the effects of US and European sanctions. This means that even if sanctions were imposed, the interconnected nature of the global economy provides Beijing with access to additional markets outside of the sanctions regime, as Moscow has quickly learned. Put simply, the United States would face domestic and structural challenges if it sought to impose the same level of punitive economic sanctions on China.

Despite these relatively positive lessons, there are legitimate economic constraints to China’s resort to the use of force. The most important of these is that any conflict across the Taiwan Strait would have a negative economic impact even in the absence of sanctions. This is important because of Beijing’s preoccupation with ensuring a stable environment conducive to economic development—something Chinese officials have long believed to be correlated with social stability, and therefore, security. There is also the concern that any cross-strait conflict would result in the reorientation of regional shipping and a spike in insurance costs. Few Chinese ports would be capable of conducting regular trade operations and overland trade routes would not be capable of handling the current volume. This would result in compounding economic challenges that may prove too costly for Chinese officials that have historically prioritized domestic stability.

De Jure Containment and Coalition Building: Diplomatic Obstacles for Taiwan

One key distinction between the conflict in Ukraine and a potential one over Taiwan is their legal status and the effect this can have on the framing of the discourse over such an event. Ukraine is a recognized sovereign state. As a result, it is straightforward to designate Russia’s actions as a war of aggression. Moscow is essentially undermining two foundational norms of the international order: the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a recognized state. This messaging has currency across the globe. Taiwan, however, is a different entity altogether given its lack of de jure recognition. While the US interpretation of the “One China” policy does not necessarily recognize Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan, this is not the case around the world. In fact, Beijing makes this the basis for the establishment of diplomatic relations with other countries. This makes framing a mainland invasion of Taiwan as a war of aggression more difficult given that few countries recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country.

Furthermore, Beijing actively blocks Taiwan’s participation in international organizations such as the United Nations and even forums like the World Health Organization by leveraging its position within these bodies. This systematic marginalization reduces Taipei’s ability to build international coalitions or gain official support in the event of conflict, further complicating global efforts to frame Chinese military action as unlawful aggression. As a result, many countries may see a cross-strait operation as a domestic issue for China.

Shaping the Discourse: Informational Power and Taiwan’s Marginalization

Chinese officials have worked to shape international narratives to portray Taiwan as an inseparable part of China. In this effort, China has used both overt and covert means to influence media outlets, foreign governments, and international institutions. Over the past two decades, China has invested heavily promoting its media platforms around the world. Chinese media companies have established a foothold by increasing their overseas capacity and presence, training local journalists, acquiring existing local outlets or establishing new ones, and finally, creating local content. This allows them to achieve Xi Jinping’s mission of “telling China’s story well,” a phrase rooted in his broader strategy to shape global public opinion around Chinese interests and legitimize China’s governance model.

For its part, the Chinese Communist Party’s International Liaison Department (ILD) has played a significant role in advancing these objectives. Traditionally tasked with managing party-to-party diplomacy, the ILD has increasingly positioned itself as a tool of influence operations abroad, including shaping discourse around Taiwan. Through building relationships with foreign political parties and think tanks, particularly in developing nations, the ILD subtly promotes Beijing’s narrative that Taiwan is an internal matter and not a subject of international concern. This strategy enables Beijing to cultivate sympathetic elites and suppress pro-Taiwan positions in multilateral forums. Additionally, the ILD often collaborates with United Front organizations and media partners to amplify favorable coverage while discrediting Taiwan’s democratic legitimacy. Such efforts are part of a broader, long-term campaign to normalize the Beijing’s claims and marginalize Taiwan on the world stage. As a result of these developments, China is likely to have a greater capacity to shape the discourse surrounding the status of Taiwan than Russia has had vis-à-vis Ukraine—as well as the legality of any use of force—among a broader audience.

China has been paying close attention to the ongoing war in Ukraine, including reportedly sending some of its own soldiers to observe the battlefield. What Chinese leaders have learned cannot be encouraging to a country that has not engaged in combat since 1979, and that in a war it arguably lost to a much smaller neighbor. Rolling the iron dice of war is always a risky endeavor; doing so to invade a country that the under secretary of defense for policy has repeatedly declared is its top national security priority is a reckless act beyond any China has conducted since its intervention in the Korean War seventy-five years ago. That invasion happened because China believed that its homeland was under imminent threat; it is hard to imagine an equally rash act short of a similar belief today. So long as Taiwan does not announce its independence, China is far more likely to play a patient game of increasing diplomatic and informational pressure, accompanied by military actions short of war, to win this battle without firing a shot.

Zenel Garcia is an associate professor of national security studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy and codirector of the Resident Course China Integrated Course at the US Army War College. He is the author of China’s Western Frontier in Eurasia: The Politics of State and Region-Building and China’s Military Modernization, Japan’s Normalization and the South China Sea Territorial Disputes.

John Nagl is a professor of warfighting studies and codirector of the Resident Course China Integrated Course at the US Army War College. He is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and directs the Army War College Ukraine War Integrated Research Project.

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

Image credit: 玄 史生

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Zenel Garcia · June 11, 2025

20. How Global Governance Can Survive

​My questions (not asked or fully answered in this piece but it made me think of them): Is global governance possible? Is global governance a myth? Is the G7 actually global governance? Is the G7 the type of global governance we want?

Excerpts:

But it doesn’t have to be. The G-7 has the potential to play a meaningful role in global governance: taking on a position the Trump administration does not want for the United States and addressing the problems of burden-sharing that appear to lie at the root of many of Trump’s concerns about U.S. global leadership. In previous meetings, G-7 members have made clear their interest in addressing technological advancements, public health, major wars, and other issues beyond the group’s traditional mandate. With many international institutions today paralyzed by geopolitical rivalries, the world needs concerted action now more than ever.

Yet to truly turn the G-7 into a body that can sustain the rules-based order, its members need to bolster their ranks, streamline their procedures, and strengthen the group’s legitimacy in the eyes of the world. Pulling off this reinvention would position the G-7 for leadership—and could even be the kind of sweeping project that appeals to Trump.

...

For years, G-7 members have resisted the impetus for reform. That resistance was tolerated because global governance institutions were functioning, the United States helped to underwrite world order, and there was general stability in the international system. When the leaders meet in Canada, they need to recognize that none of these conditions hold today, and that a new, reimagined G-7 needs to step up to fill the void. There is even a chance that Trump could get on board with G-7 reform, despite his general disdain for international institutions. Trump is drawn to any big policy for which he can take credit, and transforming the G-7 from a sluggish group into one that is action-oriented could qualify. According to Trump’s former representatives at the G-7, expanding and reforming the body could appeal to the president’s interest in getting U.S. allies to contribute more to the costs of global leadership and relieving the United States of the burden.. Adding new members such as Australia, South Korea, and Spain could also deflect Trump’s call, which he repeated as recently as February, for the group to readmit Russia, an idea that the rest of the G-7 countries reject. Trump might also like to see the organization’s European dominance diluted by new players from the Indo-Pacific, particularly Australia and South Korea, who would owe their membership to him.

Trump’s “America first” inclinations are a part of the reason for the disarray in the world today, as the United States’ disenchantment with leadership creates a void in global governance. If that void is left unfilled, other actors or institutions may seek to impose less desirable and even dangerous forms of rule. It would be far better for the G-7 to serve as the champion of a rules-based system that the world so urgently needs.

How Global Governance Can Survive

Foreign Affairs · by More by Victor Cha · June 11, 2025

With the Right Reforms, the G-7 Can Sustain the Rules-Based Order

June 11, 2025

Flags at the G-7 summit in Muenster, Germany, November 2022 Wolfgang Rattay / Reuters

VICTOR CHA is President of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and University Professor at Georgetown University.

JOHN HAMRE is President and CEO and Langone Chair in American Leadership at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

G. JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea.

Cha and Hamre contributed to “ ‘Bending’ the Architecture: Reimagining the G7,” a report published in 2024 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

• More by John Hamre
• More by G. John Ikenberry

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The last time U.S. President Donald Trump attended a Group of Seven (G-7) leaders’ summit in Canada, in 2018, he treated it like a reality TV show. “Trump Blows Up G7 Agenda,” read the headline in Politico. Trump arrived late; called for Russia’s readmission to the group (a nonstarter with the other members); described the host, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as “very dishonest and weak”; and refused at the last minute to endorse the joint statement at the end of the meeting.

This month, as leaders of the advanced industrialized democracies that make up the G-7—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—prepare for their annual summit, Canada is hosting once again. With Trump’s tariff war in full swing and targeting the other countries in attendance, this meeting could be even more contentious than his last visit.

But it doesn’t have to be. The G-7 has the potential to play a meaningful role in global governance: taking on a position the Trump administration does not want for the United States and addressing the problems of burden-sharing that appear to lie at the root of many of Trump’s concerns about U.S. global leadership. In previous meetings, G-7 members have made clear their interest in addressing technological advancements, public health, major wars, and other issues beyond the group’s traditional mandate. With many international institutions today paralyzed by geopolitical rivalries, the world needs concerted action now more than ever.

Yet to truly turn the G-7 into a body that can sustain the rules-based order, its members need to bolster their ranks, streamline their procedures, and strengthen the group’s legitimacy in the eyes of the world. Pulling off this reinvention would position the G-7 for leadership—and could even be the kind of sweeping project that appeals to Trump.

FILLING THE VOID

Global governance is in crisis. Wars in Europe and the Middle East, collusion among autocratic powers, and possible nuclear proliferation in Asia and the Middle East have divided members of the UN Security Council, making the once active body effectively nonfunctional. In the last five years alone, Russia has vetoed 14 draft Security Council resolutions on Gaza, Mali, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, nuclear proliferation, and human rights. China has aided this obstruction in 11 of these cases, voting down five resolutions and abstaining from the votes for six. Yet advances in artificial intelligence and synthetic biology require new standards and norms, and the need for resilient supply chains, pandemic preparedness, and clean development demands that countries work together to solve problems—none of which is possible under the current global system.

Without a functioning UN, it falls on individual countries or institutions to uphold the international order. But under Trump, the United States has abdicated its role as the underwriter of the post–World War II rules-based system. The Trump administration is not interested in promoting due process, accountability, representative governance, open capital flows, or liberal trade policies. Authoritarian governments in China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are working together to undermine, not to support, the institutions and norms of the order. Many middle powers—such as Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—want to use the liberal order when it helps them, but they also want to engage with the authoritarian axis. Countries in the global South, meanwhile, are not powerful enough to lead.

Many institutions are not strong candidates for leadership, either. The G-20 was a stabilizing force during the 2008 global financial crisis, but the size of the grouping and the rivalries among China, Russia, the United States, and others have since hamstrung its ability to take collective action. The World Trade Organization, with over 160 members, cannot find consensus on anything, and it has failed to stop China or the United States from weaponizing trade against each other and the world. The ten-country BRICS bloc—which includes founding members Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, as well as five newer members—seeks to diminish international institutions historically dominated by the West.

Smaller groupings have proliferated as countries search for alternative rule-making bodies. In the last decade, these have included the Quad (a diplomatic partnership among Australia, India, Japan, and the United States), AUKUS (a security partnership among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (a U.S.-led economic initiative with 14 members), the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (a 12-country free trade agreement), and trilateral cooperation among Japan, South Korea, and the United States. But none of these groups are currently in a position to set rules that the rest of the world might sign onto.

The body that develops solutions to today’s global problems must be composed of governments that trust each other, share similar values, possess significant economic and political power, and have a track record of working together. This is where the G-7 comes in. As a group of like-minded advanced industrialized democracies, it is the only institution that can meet this mandate. The United States has always been an important player in the G-7, but the group’s other members will have to become more fully capable of sharing the burden of leadership in a new era of “America first” policies by Washington. Before they can play this role, however, the G-7 must be overhauled.

NOT YOUR FATHER’S G-7

The origins of the G-7 lie in the global oil crisis of the early 1970s. In 1973, finance ministers from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States convened an informal meeting to coordinate monetary policy in response to the economic shock. Italy and Japan joined the group later that year, Canada joined in 1977, and Russia joined in 1998 (but was expelled in 2014, after its invasion of Crimea). Today, the European Union is also represented in the G-7, with a seat each for the European Council and the European Commission.

For most of its history, the G-7 was a club of rich countries that met to coordinate monetary and macroeconomic policies to combat inflation and recession, and to promote free trade. The club would reach agreements like the 1985 Plaza Accord, in which European economies agreed to allow their currencies to appreciate against the U.S. dollar for macroeconomic balance. But in the past few years, as the COVID-19 pandemic, economic disruption, climate change, and major wars have demanded global attention, the G-7 has expanded its portfolio. The statement released after the 2023 G-7 leaders’ summit in Hiroshima, Japan, for instance, emphasized global governance issues that were not even on the G-7’s radar five years earlier. Members prioritized topics such as the future of the Indo-Pacific, the war in Ukraine, economic resilience, food security, digital competitiveness, climate change, sustainable development, labor, and nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. For example, the Hiroshima summit produced task forces on improving global health infrastructure, combatting economic coercion, building robust cyberdefenses, and coordinating the confiscation of frozen Russian assets related to the war in Ukraine. At the 2024 G-7 summit in Italy, the leaders agreed to provide $50 billion in funds for Ukraine using interest from the frozen Russian assets.

But the G-7 faces a dilemma: it wants to play a larger role in global governance but is not currently well equipped for the part. From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, the G-7 represented as much as 67 percent of world GDP. Today, that number is now barely over 40 percent, and less than ten percent of the global population resides in G-7 countries. The group does not, and should not, harbor expectations that it could replace the UN Security Council and create mandates for all the world to comply with, as the Security Council is set up to do. But the G-7 can aim for meaningful action that sustains global order. By coordinating their economic, development, security, energy, and technology policies, its members can impose sanctions to deter conflict, set rules and norms to keep pace with technological innovation, punish predatory economic behavior, support democratic governance, combat disinformation, and help the developing world with food security and labor standards.

WELCOME TO THE CLUB

The G-7 must embrace reform to meet the moment. The world needs effective governance institutions, and to serve that purpose the G-7 needs to broaden its scope, enhance its capabilities, and add new voices to its deliberations. The first place to start is membership. Expanding the G-7 is not without controversy. Many of the group’s representatives value its exclusiveness and worry that adding new members could make it as unwieldy as the G-20. But if the G-7 is to take on additional responsibilities, it will need additional partners with commensurate capabilities to share the work. The body today is also geographically imbalanced. European countries or institutions hold six of its nine seats. Just one country, Japan, represents the whole of Asia, and no member represents the developing world.

Australia and South Korea should be at the front of the line to join the G-7. G-7 representatives opine that any new members must be responsible stewards of the international economy, be capable of and committed to assuming this role, and, importantly, have the trust of the other G-7 members. Canberra and Seoul clearly meet this standard. Australia has a per capita GDP larger than all G-7 states except the United States; among democracies it has the 12th largest economy in the world. South Korea is a technological and cultural powerhouse and has the largest economy among non-G-7 industrialized democracies except for India and Brazil. Australia has fought on the side of democracy and a rules-based order in every major war since World War I; South Korea has done so since the Korean War.

Both countries have also taken leading roles already in addressing issues that preoccupy the G-7. Australia has shined as an example of a country standing up to economic coercion by China. In 2020, Canberra demanded an international investigation into the origins of the COVID virus and, over more than two years, withstood massive Chinese retaliatory tariffs against Australian beef, barley, and wine by diversifying its export markets away from China. Australia is also a key supplier of critical minerals to other industrialized democracies. South Korea is a major provider of economic and indirect military assistance to Ukraine, and it is a critical player, along with the United States and Japan, in protecting the lead in critical emerging semiconductor chip technology in the West’s competition with China. Over the past few years, moreover, both countries have convened international summits on global health, anticorruption efforts, artificial intelligence, and a host of other pressing issues, demonstrating their commitment to providing public goods for the international system.

Australia and South Korea even outperform some current G-7 members in critical areas identified by G-7 leaders. In a 2024 study for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Cha and Hamre analyzed more than 300 publicly available measures of country performance for all G-7 members as well as Korea and Australia, using data from 2023. We focused on performance across seven issues that the G-7 has identified as priorities: climate change; digital competitiveness; economic resilience and supply chain security; food security; global economy finance, and sustainable development; labor standards; and support for Ukraine. In each issue area, we used the relevant performance metrics to give each country a numerical rank score. Taking the average of all these issue-specific scores, Australia and South Korea ranked higher than several current G-7 members including France, Italy, and Japan. On digital competitiveness, measured across 160 rankings, South Korea performs better than every G-7 country except the United Kingdom and the United States. On economic resilience and supply chain security, measured across 20 available rankings, Australia ranks above every country except Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In aggregate, South Korea ranks eighth among G-7 members in terms of overall performance, ahead of Italy, and Australia ranks fifth, ahead of France, Japan, and Italy. By contrast, another major democracy, India, ranked below Italy in terms of aggregate performance across all the priority issue areas. Australia’s and South Korea’s capabilities as high performers on the very issues deemed critical to G-7 leadership would bring added value to the group.

The Indo-Pacific region now is the center of gravity in global commerce and, arguably, in global politics. Adding Australia and South Korea to the G-7 could boost the representation of the wider Indo-Pacific, giving the region’s interests a stronger voice than Japan can offer alone. To further balance the G-7’s configuration, the EU’s two seats in the body should also be consolidated into one. If the European G-7 members demand that the open seat go to another European country—several of which perform respectably in the G-7’s priority areas—Spain could be a good candidate. According to the 2024 CSIS study, Spain ranked higher than the lowest-ranked G-7 member, Italy, on four out of the seven priority issue areas—and performed better on climate change issues (33 metrics) than all G-7 countries except Germany and the United Kingdom. As a member, Spain could expand the G-7’s reach by providing Spanish-speaking representation, which has been absent from the group. By extension, Spain’s membership could provide a bridge between the G-7 and Latin America.

IT AIN’T BROKE, BUT FIX IT

Institutional reform could also make the G-7 more effective. At present, the agenda for each summit is set by the host country in an informal process. This makes the group flexible, open to frank discussions, and able to act quickly, but the downside is that G-7 efforts lack consistency. At the close of the 2023 Hiroshima summit, for example, G-7 leaders laid out an ambitious agenda to establish a G-7 Coordination Platform on Economic Coercion by authoritarian regimes, as well as guiding principles on the development of advanced AI systems. Then, at the next meeting, in 2024, the host, Italy, chose to focus on migration from North Africa. Next week’s G-7 summit in Canada focuses on energy security and accelerating the digital transition. All of these issues are important. But the discontinuity in the G-7’s agenda sends confusing signals to the rest of the world and results in the body not following through on its announced commitments.

To solve this problem, the structure of the G-7 must be reformed. In particular, a consultative body, or troika, composed of representatives from the past, current, and next year’s G-7 hosts should set G-7 meeting agendas, replacing today’s informal system. The current host would invite the previous host and the successor host together to plan out the year’s conferences. Planning annual conferences in this way would give the meetings more continuity from year to year.

In addition, establishing a permanent secretariat would provide the G-7 with an administrative home, regular staff support for the troika and the related task forces, and an archive for G-7 deliverables. The politics of who should host this office are probably least complicated by locating it in Canada. Formal task forces could track member countries’ commitments to G-7 goals and ensure that progress continues between summits. In the G-7 structure, host countries provide most of the technical support for the group’s initiatives, but the temporary nature of the support contributes to continuity problems. The G-7 instead needs to be supported by ongoing and permanent technical expertise on priority issues such as climate change, AI, and global health. This expertise could be provided through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which could lend data and networks of experts from its AI Policy Observatory, its climate adaptation and resilience policy shop, and its health statistics group.

Emerging and middle powers and countries in the global South must also be more involved in a reimagined G-7. The list should include multilateral organizations, such as the African Union, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the G-20, as well as prominent countries outside the G-7, particularly China. Before the leaders’ summits, the troika countries would host formalized consultation channels with these organizations and countries through the foreign and finance ministers’ tracks to discuss the agenda and expected deliverables. After the summit, the consultation channels would link up with the same organizations and countries to discuss implementation and task forces. Institutionalizing outreach to developing economies in this way could demonstrate the G-7’s commitment to inclusivity and confer more legitimacy on its decisions. In the near term, the G-7 could engage outside countries on issues of proximate concern by supporting their economic development and climate goals, fostering new norms and standards for AI and other emerging technologies, and shaping their opposition to disruption to the global order by China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?

For years, G-7 members have resisted the impetus for reform. That resistance was tolerated because global governance institutions were functioning, the United States helped to underwrite world order, and there was general stability in the international system. When the leaders meet in Canada, they need to recognize that none of these conditions hold today, and that a new, reimagined G-7 needs to step up to fill the void. There is even a chance that Trump could get on board with G-7 reform, despite his general disdain for international institutions. Trump is drawn to any big policy for which he can take credit, and transforming the G-7 from a sluggish group into one that is action-oriented could qualify. According to Trump’s former representatives at the G-7, expanding and reforming the body could appeal to the president’s interest in getting U.S. allies to contribute more to the costs of global leadership and relieving the United States of the burden.. Adding new members such as Australia, South Korea, and Spain could also deflect Trump’s call, which he repeated as recently as February, for the group to readmit Russia, an idea that the rest of the G-7 countries reject. Trump might also like to see the organization’s European dominance diluted by new players from the Indo-Pacific, particularly Australia and South Korea, who would owe their membership to him.

Trump’s “America first” inclinations are a part of the reason for the disarray in the world today, as the United States’ disenchantment with leadership creates a void in global governance. If that void is left unfilled, other actors or institutions may seek to impose less desirable and even dangerous forms of rule. It would be far better for the G-7 to serve as the champion of a rules-based system that the world so urgently needs.

VICTOR CHA is President of the Geopolitics and Foreign Policy Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and University Professor at Georgetown University.

JOHN HAMRE is President and CEO and Langone Chair in American Leadership at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

G. JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea.

Cha and Hamre contributed to ‘Bending’ the Architecture: Reimagining the G7, a report published in 2024 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Victor Cha · June 11, 2025

21. Why the Right Hates the National Security State

I offer this for the national security views and not for any partisan perspective.

Excerpt:

Just like in the aftermath of World War II, it is not in the single-minded pursuit of either side’s vision that the United States will find success, but in achieving compromise between them. The Silicon Valley ethos embraced by DOGE is often described as “move fast and break things.” Washington’s ethos, however, has often been described as “in crisis, opportunity.” The breaking of the national security state is indeed a crisis, but it also creates an opportunity for the Trump administration or its successors to finally build a new national security state tailored to the world’s present-day threats as well as the United States’ deep-rooted and disparate political traditions.

Why the Right Hates the National Security State

Foreign Affairs · by More by Michael Singh · June 11, 2025

The Historical Roots of Trump’s Assault on the NSC

Michael Singh

June 11, 2025

The Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., January 2024

MICHAEL SINGH is Managing Director and Lane-Swig Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He served as Senior Director for the Middle East at the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration.

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Since assuming office, U.S. President Donald Trump has overseen an unprecedented assault on the federal government. Initially, his agent in this campaign was the tech mogul Elon Musk, who was running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Musk described DOGE’s mission as reducing the United States’ $36 trillion in federal debt and ending the “tyranny of bureaucracy.” After a very public rift between the billionaires last week, Musk is on the outs with Trump, but the goal of downsizing the federal bureaucracy remains deeply ingrained in the administration. At the end of May, for instance, in a move not apparently initiated by Musk or his staff, the Trump administration cut dozens of staff from the National Security Council, which advises the president on international affairs and coordinates the interagency policymaking process. This move, according to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also replaced Mike Waltz to lead the NSC, is intended to make the NSC hew more closely to “its original purpose and the President’s vision.” But, according to Axios, an anonymous official put it more bluntly: “The NSC is the ultimate Deep State. . . . We’re gutting the Deep State.”

Critics argue that such drastic cuts to the federal government will ultimately diminish U.S. influence in the world. Yet it is worth remembering that debate over the size and scope of the NSC and other parts of the national security bureaucracy fit squarely in a long-standing American political tradition. Indeed, the recent attacks on bureaucracy—and especially the national security bureaucracy—are reminiscent of the immediate aftermath of World War II.

With the U.S. victory in 1945, the shattering of the international order that preceded it, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a military and ideological rival, midcentury American political and intellectual circles broadly accepted that there could be no return to Washington’s pre-war military readiness or its foreign policy of relative aloofness from global affairs. But precisely what a “new normal” should look like was hotly debated. Internationalists believed the United States should maintain a robust overseas role, while conservatives were skeptical of international intervention. From those debates emerged the U.S. national security state—the collection of government agencies and organizations that focus on protecting citizens from external threats.

Thanks to its success winning the Cold War, the national security state has been treated almost as sacrosanct by the U.S. foreign policy establishment, with its logic and institutions going unchallenged and unchecked for decades. Now that the Trump administration has revived a 75-year-old debate, however, the United States has an opportunity to remember and learn from those midcentury conversations—with the most important lesson of all being that the national security state was a product both of political compromise and of the particular threat it was designed to counter. Ensuring U.S. national security in the future requires not simply reversing DOGE’s cuts or restaffing various organizations but fighting for new compromises and considering new threats.

BORN OF COMPROMISE

In the aftermath of World War II, as communism and Soviet power spread abroad, the priority for American policymakers of all stripes was to defend the United States’ democracy and its way of life. Yet there were two distinct views on how to accomplish this, and each side felt the other’s proposed policies would bring about the very calamity they aimed to prevent. Internationalists believed that the United States had to cast off its historic caution overseas and take up the mantle of international leadership that had fallen in Washington’s lap. This meant, among other things, building lasting alliances, sustaining a permanent military presence abroad, and preparing for what was anticipated to be “total war” of one great power against another. Conservatives were appalled at these ideas, which in their view ran counter to traditional American political culture, represented the very sort of European imperialism America’s founders had rebelled against, and militarized U.S. society in a way that would erode democracy.

Conservatives argued instead for focusing on domestic affairs, which had been relatively neglected during the war, and returning to an older approach to U.S. foreign policy—one that emphasized the Western Hemisphere and insisted on the reduction of defense budgets. In 1947, as President Harry Truman and his Secretary of State George Marshall peddled their proposal to provide billions of dollars in postwar reconstruction aid to Europe, Congressman Harold Knutson of Minnesota described the Marshall Plan as “tax-and-borrow-and-spend in other countries” and suggested the men were captive to the “intelligentsia, one-worlders, and do-gooders.” He derided supporters of the spending in his own party as “internationally-minded, ‘me-too’ Republicans”—echoes of today’s “RINO,” or Republican in name only, epithet. Internationalists returned the conservatives’ scorn in full measure, arguing that their “Fortress America” would allow adversaries to prosper and accumulate power and that the United States could not survive as a democratic island in a communist and authoritarian world.

The end of this story is by now well known: the internationalists prevailed, their case helped immeasurably by global events, including crises in Czechoslovakia, Greece, and Turkey; the Soviet Union’s successful atomic test; and the triumph of communists in China. As Truman asserted in sketching his eponymous doctrine in 1947, it would be the “policy of the United States to support free peoples,” and the United States had every intention of remaining a global and interventionist power. Yet, as detailed by the American historian Michael Hogan in A Cross of Iron, the national security state Truman and other internationalists went on to build was nevertheless the product of compromise. Despite his foreign policy leanings, Truman sought to reduce defense spending and restore balanced budgets—which were still considered an American tradition—and he stood firm against the most ambitious proposals coming from his administration, such as the unification of the military under an all-powerful commander or the institution of universal military training for Americans.

To be sure, the resulting national security system had a strong internationalist bias. The newly formed National Security Council, for example, rejected proposals to include once dominant domestic cabinet agencies such as Agriculture and Commerce—but checks on its power were included in its design. Rather than a single consolidated structure, the national security state worked via committee and coordination. Limits were imposed on both the military and the brand-new Central Intelligence Agency to prevent them from becoming more powerful. The CIA, for example, could not readily access domestic law enforcement information, nor could it participate in policy debates; and the secretary of defense received only a slim staff to allay concerns the role would be too powerful.

But if the national security state built after World War II was designed in part to accommodate conservative concerns about imperial overreach, that compromise quickly fell by the wayside.

GROWTH SPURT

After the 1950s, the national security apparatus grew inexorably: the U.S. Information Agency, which aimed to influence foreign public opinion, was created in 1953; eight years later, the government created the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which administers foreign aid and development assistance, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which provides intelligence support to the Department of Defense and the U.S. military; and other organizations devoted to preventing and resolving conflicts abroad such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Institute of Peace were created in the 1980s. Each new body had a logic of its own, but each also pushed the United States further from its roots as a noninterventionist state.

By the 1990s, the national security state had succeeded in the mission it was designed for: to secure victory in the Cold War. Yet that success carried significant costs, many of which were predicted by conservative commentators. Conservatives of the late 1940s, for instance, worried that the creation of the national security state portended high taxes, permanent budget deficits, the growth of presidential power, and the atrophying of traditional domestic institutions such as local governments and religious organizations that had until then dominated American life. Conservatives and self-professed realists had also warned that the internationalists’ logic was a recipe for fruitless conflict. The political commentator Walter Lippmann, for example, thought that the policy of containment articulated by the U.S. diplomat George Kennan played to Soviet rather than American advantages: Lippmann wrote that Kennan’s strategy meant that “Moscow, not Washington, would select the ground where the conflict was to be waged, and would choose the weapons.” Washington, he believed, would be drawn into conflicts by partners about whom it knew little and would ultimately be forced either to abandon them or to indefinitely defend them at enormous cost. Although Lippmann was wrong about the failure of the United States’ Cold War strategy, warnings such as these proved prescient in Vietnam and elsewhere.

Congressional conservatives made a brief comeback in the 1990s, under former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s leadership, but a full-throated debate over the national security state’s merits still did not resume. If anything, the quick and overwhelming victory in the Gulf War coupled with victory in the Cold War led many to believe the United States was “uniquely capable of influencing world events,” as Clinton administration official Martin Indyk put it. By the time of the 9/11 attacks, the national security state was primed and ready to resume its expansion. Indeed, facing an urgent crisis, the administration of George W. Bush largely repurposed, strengthened, and expanded the existing national security state, with violent Islamist extremism standing in for communism. The government created the Department of Homeland Security, the Homeland Security Council, and the office of the Director of National Intelligence and partially eased the restrictions on intelligence sharing originally meant to dampen the CIA’s power. The NSC staff, which numbered 34 in the early 1970s and roughly 50 in the early 1990s, grew to over 200.

DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK

The widespread perception that Washington’s post-9/11 wars—and by implication, the policy apparatus behind them—had failed to deliver gains took hold as early as the end of Bush’s second term. A decade later, it had become conventional wisdom. This perception helped to finally reignite the debate that conservatives initiated in the late 1940s, along with calls to end “forever wars” and to redirect U.S. resources to domestic needs. These sentiments became the mainstream Republican view with Trump’s rise to power, which occurred in parallel with the emergence of think tanks devoted to isolationism or restraint, such as the Quincy Institute and Defense Priorities.

The second Trump administration is arguably the first in which this faction of conservatives, a throwback to the days of Herbert Hoover and Robert Taft, have a major role in national security issues. After many years in exile, it should be little surprise that they have largely picked up where their political and intellectual predecessors left off and are now bringing the rest of the party with them. One-time internationalist hawks like Rubio, for instance, are helping to lead the reorientation in U.S. foreign policy. In his first official remarks as secretary of state, he called for a greater emphasis on hemispheric issues and on internal security, and he has been eager to slash budgets and shrink the agencies he oversees, including the NSC, USAID, and the State Department. These priorities reflect a political tradition largely relegated to the fringes during the Cold War and the so-called war on terror, but one that remained alive, relevant to political debates, and deeply rooted in American society even when it was not dominant. Although its adherents are not monolithic in their views by any means, it is a tradition that differs from internationalism in that it views broad U.S. entanglement in international affairs as delivering more risk than reward, more cost than benefit.

Yet there is an incoherence to many of Trump’s initiatives that would cause midcentury conservatives to blanch. Budget deficits, for example, have grown not as a result of the national security state but because of the expansion of entitlements and the growing number of Americans who qualify for them as the population ages. According to the Petersen Foundation, from 2001 to 2023, discretionary outlays, which include all spending on national security, grew from 6.2 to 6.4 percent of GDP. Mandatory outlays, which include social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, grew from 9.6 to 13.9 percent of GDP over that same period, as net interest on the U.S. debt grew from 2.0 to 2.4 percent of GDP. DOGE efforts, such as gutting USAID and the U.S. Institute of Peace, will not only fail to put a dent in this problem but ironically target spending that may be among the national security state’s most efficient. For the cost of a couple of fighter jets, these agencies aim to prevent or slow the growth of conflicts and crises that, if left unaddressed, might become far more costly for the United States. These cuts also exacerbate a risk that used to alarm the sort of conservatives now in power in Washington: foreign partners may increasingly see the U.S. military as their most stable and effective counterpart in Washington. This trend is already noticeable with the rise of powerful combatant commanders in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific.

More fundamentally, the Trump administration’s efforts to kneecap the national security state have been paired with the expansion of Trump’s presidential power. The unilateral imposition of tariffs is one example, but so is a more hierarchical method of crafting national security policy: presidential comments or social media posts, for example, have replaced the postwar bottom-up system. Although small-government conservatism and limits on the power of the presidency are as old as the Republic, this trend is newer and arguably began with conservative frustrations in the 1980s that President Ronald Reagan was hampered in his ability to carry out his agenda by a too-powerful Congress. Whatever the merits of Trump’s campaign, the combined effect of an increase in presidential power and a dismantling of national security institutions means there will be ever-greater power concentrated in ever-fewer hands—the very outcome that postwar conservatives were determined to avert.

“IN CRISIS, OPPORTUNITY”

In the debates preceding the construction of the national security state in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a surprising degree of consensus regarding the threats faced by the United States. For all the acrimony that has attended DOGE’s scorched-earth campaign against the national security state and Trump’s efforts to consolidate power in his own hands, the same degree of consensus exists today: there is near unanimity among national security experts regarding the futility of recent wars and the need to focus on nuclear-armed great-power rivals—namely, China and Russia. Differences among ideological factions regarding how to address those threats are sharp, but no more so than those in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Indeed, the debates and the rhetoric are eerily similar. It is worth remembering how those earlier debates led to compromises that produced a thoroughgoing reform of the bureaucracy that, while imperfect, served American needs at a critical time.

For their part, modern-day internationalists should recognize that the national security system that won the Cold War is not sacrosanct but in need of reconsideration: it was designed for different threats in a different century, and its failings provide useful lessons for the current generation of policymakers. Merely reversing Trump’s cuts and repurposing the old system for new threats—such as arguing that competition with China is a “new cold war”—is insufficient. Yet they are right that U.S. engagement in the world is more necessary than ever; any notion of retreating to our own hemisphere or carving the world into spheres of influence is nonsensical when facing adversaries with innumerable ways to cause the United States direct harm. And they are right that the non-military tools of power are critical if war is to be avoided and peace won. The federal government must provide a home both to those with critical skills of the obscure sort—such as nuclear weapons scientists or pathogen researchers—and those with highly marketable expertise in emerging technologies.

Newly triumphant traditional conservatives, meanwhile, are right that a slimmer national security state could serve U.S. interests better than the bloated structure that emerged from the Cold War and the war on terror. Communication between capitals is far more direct than in the past, and the policy process must unfold more quickly to keep up with the pace of information and events. Most importantly, the United States must more ruthlessly prioritize given the sharp decrease in its advantages in relative power. But they should also instinctively recognize the danger in sweeping away a system that served U.S. national security well for decades, with no plan or strategy for replacing it beyond trusting in the intelligence, goodwill, and restraint of the handful of officials who accumulate power in the wake of the cuts.

Just like in the aftermath of World War II, it is not in the single-minded pursuit of either side’s vision that the United States will find success, but in achieving compromise between them. The Silicon Valley ethos embraced by DOGE is often described as “move fast and break things.” Washington’s ethos, however, has often been described as “in crisis, opportunity.” The breaking of the national security state is indeed a crisis, but it also creates an opportunity for the Trump administration or its successors to finally build a new national security state tailored to the world’s present-day threats as well as the United States’ deep-rooted and disparate political traditions.

MICHAEL SINGH is Managing Director and Lane-Swig Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He served as Senior Director for the Middle East at the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Michael Singh · June 11, 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