Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war"

– President Harry S. Truman

"From the onset of the crisis, Truman's concerns were of a global nature. At meeting after meeting he prodded his subordinates to assess where the next Soviet moves might be. A key deterrent, in fact, to intervention in Korea was the thought that Stalin might divert U.S. attention to an area of tertiary significance while the Russians swiftly seized areas of greater importance. Truman instinctively believed that the Soviets wanted to overrun Iran, gain access to Middle Eastern oil, and find warm-water ports in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean. The idea that North Korea might be acting on its own volition to bring about a unification of the Korean people was beyond the grasp of U.S. officials."

Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, "Wrestling The Initiative", (1992), p. 366.

"We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too."

– Curtis LeMay, in Strategic Air Warfare: An Interview with Generals (1988)

1. How Trump Cajoled Iran and Israel Into a Cease-Fire and Forced Them to Comply

2. U.S. Strikes Set Back Iran Nuclear Program by a Few Months, Initial Report Says

3. The Pillars of Iran’s Regime Are Damaged, Not Destroyed

4. New Life for Nonproliferation

5. How the U.S. Locked Itself Into a Regime Change War

6. U.S. Credibility Returns to the Middle East

7. A Strait of Hormuz blockade would barely hurt the US

8. China Tightens Controls on Fentanyl but Calls It a U.S. Problem

9. Female Troops Played Key Roles in B-2, Submarine Strikes on Iran's Nuclear Facilities

10. The Lion Rises and the Eagle Soars | Juliana Geran Pilon

11. For 250 years, it’s been ‘change or lose’ for our military. Here’s what needs changing now

12. Why Recent Surprise Attacks Against Russia and Iran Should Worry Taiwan

13. War, Bound: Fiscal Constraints, Tactical Realities, and Contemporary Land Warfare

14. The Strategic Consequences of Deferred Maintenance: Challenges to the Resilience of U.S. Sea Power

15. FBI Probing Leak of Iran Strike Intelligence Report, Hegseth Says

16. China’s top security agency mocks CIA Chinese spy recruitment drive as ‘farcical’

17. Explainer | US bunker-busting GBU-57 in Iran: experts in China assess combat debut

18. Are Trump’s Iran strikes a ‘wake-up call’ for China on US unpredictability?

19. Why Saturday's strike on Iran was perfectly timed

20. China to Block Its Rare-Earth Experts From Spilling Their Secrets

21. Beware the Europe You Wish For

22. How to Survive the New Nuclear Age

23. The Real Obstacle to Peace With Iran

24. The Key to the Young Male Vote: Beer

1. How Trump Cajoled Iran and Israel Into a Cease-Fire and Forced Them to Comply

Will it hold?

How Trump Cajoled Iran and Israel Into a Cease-Fire and Forced Them to Comply

It remains to be seen how long the truce will hold and whether it will pave the way for a nuclear deal between the U.S. and Iran

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-israel-iran-ceasefire-b0e654ac

President Trump at the White House on Tuesday. He rebuked Israel and Iran for threatening the truce. Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated Press

By Yaroslav Trofimov

Follow, Alexander Ward

Follow, Jared Malsin

Follow and Summer Said

June 24, 2025 9:00 pm ET

It began with a ferocious weekend assault on Iranian nuclear sites by U.S. stealth bombers. What came next was a stunning display of behind-the-scenes diplomacy, a telegraphed missile attack on an American military base and an expletive-laced tirade by President Trump aimed at the leaders of Israel and Iran.

The result by Tuesday morning: a cease-fire between Iran and Israel.

It remains to be seen how long the truce will hold, and whether the U.S. and its allies will be able to use the leverage gained by the American and Israeli strikes to reach a diplomatic deal that prevents Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon in coming years.

Yet, the rapid move from a surprise airstrike to a cease-fire, with major policy pivots announced via social-media posts that gave whiplash to friends and foes alike, has showcased Trump’s unorthodox approach to wielding power.

It isn’t just allies who were bypassed. U.S. officials who would normally play a role during such a crisis were also left out of the loop, administration officials said, a sign of how narrow is the circle of advisers Trump trusts.

Almost immediately after the American B-2 strikes, Trump called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and told him it was time to end the war, a senior administration official said. Trump’s message: The U.S. had completed its military mission and would cease offensive operations and Israel needed to do the same, the official said.

A B-2 bomber returns to an Air Force base in Missouri on Sunday. VIDEO: Matt Evans/KMBC-TV/Storyful

Vice President JD Vance has described the events of recent days as a new American foreign-policy doctrine focused on clearly defining national interests, aggressively negotiating to achieve them and the use of overwhelming force if necessary.

The force in this case was the fleet of B-2 stealth bombers that struck underground Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow and Natanz with a total of 14 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs. It achieved what the Israeli military—despite gaining air superiority over Iran more than a week earlier—was unable to do. The underground facilities at Fordow were likely significantly damaged and at Natanz the enrichment plant was hit, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“The sites that we hit in Iran were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it,” Trump said in a social-media post.

During the conflict, Israeli cities sustained several hits from Iranian ballistic missiles, and Iranian military targets were subjected to widespread bombing. Neither side wanted the war to go on much longer, at least at that intensity, and both were eager for a way out that they could portray as a victory.

By then, Israel had hit what it considered the most important Iranian military targets and saw limited upside in a continued air campaign, according to people familiar with Israeli government thinking.

Iran, meanwhile, had been exchanging separate messages with Washington via Arab intermediaries for days.

On Saturday evening, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff informed several Arab countries that a U.S. strike on Iran was imminent, Arab officials said. After the attack, at Trump’s direction, Witkoff exchanged direct messages with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, a senior administration official said.

Witkoff told Araghchi that Iran needed to come back to the negotiating table, saying the U.S. could inflict more damage on the country, according to the official.

Arab leaders also told Iran it was time to offer concessions to Washington, but Iran’s foreign minister responded that Iran wouldn’t negotiate under fire and wouldn’t abandon its nuclear program, according to Arab officials briefed on the diplomacy.

A satellite view of Iran’s Fordow complex, an underground nuclear facility that the U.S. struck over the weekend. Photo: maxar technologies/Reuters

Once Fordow, Natanz and a separate site in Isfahan were struck by the U.S., Iran’s top military commander vowed to retaliate, saying the U.S. had violated its sovereignty.

Tehran’s move, a limited missile salvo fired at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, seemed designed to avoid further escalation.

Around noon Monday, moments before the missiles were launched, Iranian officials called Qatar to deliver a warning that the base would be hit, according to Middle Eastern officials familiar with the situation. Qatar relayed the Iranian message to the U.S.

U.S. officials told Qatar later on Monday that Washington also anticipated the attack, and that the U.S. didn’t plan to retaliate, U.S. and Middle East officials said. Iran passed messages to Qatar that the attack would target solely the base, not the civilian areas of Qatar, according to those officials.

That gave the U.S. military, which already removed aircraft and many troops from Al Udeid, sufficient time to move remaining personnel from the base, and for the U.S. Embassy in Doha to warn American citizens to “shelter in place.”

Qatar then closed the country’s airspace to commercial flights as it awaited the Iranian barrage: a total of 19 missiles, according to Qatar. All were intercepted by air defenses, except one that fell harmlessly near the base. The interceptors collided with the missiles, leaving streaks in Doha’s summer night sky.

Explosions were seen over Doha, Qatar, after Iran said it fired a missile salvo at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. VIDEO: Heba Younis/Storyful

Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, Qatar’s prime minister, said at a news conference Tuesday in Doha that his country had received prior intelligence that allowed the country and the Americans to prepare, but didn’t say what the intelligence was.

Shortly after the barrage, Vance spoke with the Qatari prime minister around 5 p.m., and Trump spoke with Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani minutes later, according to a person familiar with the calls. Trump asked the emir whether he would call Iran and ask whether the Iranian government was open to a cease-fire. He obliged, and Iran agreed.

Trump—who just hours earlier publicly contemplated regime change in Iran—announced the cease-fire after the calls, posting on social media: “CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE!”

A Truth Social post by President Trump announced a cease-fire between Israel and Iran.

“Donald Trump is not a pacifist, but there is an aversion to being drawn into long, drawn-out military engagements,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, director of the U.S. program at nonprofit International Crisis Group. “There is a motivation in doing the things his predecessors failed to do.”

Diplomats who would normally provide talking points for calls with regional leaders weren’t asked for help, U.S. officials said. Instead of a flurry of orders and coordination requests, the National Security Council was effectively dormant.

Despite Trump’s social-media victory lap, Israel and Iran were still exchanging further blows.

Four hours before the cease-fire was set to take effect at 7 a.m. local time on Tuesday, Israel launched a wave of strikes in Tehran, killing hundreds of security-force personnel, Netanyahu said on X.

Among the targets was the headquarters of Iran’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, a defense-ministry research institution, according to the Israeli military.

Minutes before the cease-fire deadline, an Iranian missile struck a seven-story residential building in the city of Be’er Sheva, killing four people in one of the deadliest episodes of the war for Israeli civilians. Rescue workers the next day combed through piles of rubble at the site.

An Iranian missile struck a building in Be’er Sheva, Israel, shortly before the cease-fire, killing four people. Photo: atef safadi/epa-efe/shutterstock

Three more missiles were fired from Iran after 7 a.m., without causing casualties or damage, according to Netanyahu. Israel threatened further retaliation for the strikes. “In light of the severe violation of the cease-fire carried out by the Iranian regime, we will respond with force,” warned the Israeli military’s chief of the general staff, Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir.

Trump was surprised to learn Tuesday morning that the war hadn’t ended. He stepped out on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding a helicopter on his way to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in Europe and rebuked both countries for threatening the cease-fire, especially the U.S.’s closest Middle East ally.

U.S. Strikes Set Back Iran Nuclear Program by a Few Months, Initial Report Says

Preliminary classified intelligence report produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency counters White House’s claims of more-extensive damage

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-strikes-set-back-iran-nuclear-program-by-a-few-months-initial-report-says-db9373ad

By Dustin Volz

Follow, Jared Malsin

Follow and Lara Seligman

Updated June 24, 2025 8:49 pm ET

A satellite image shows Iran’s Fordow nuclear site after recent airstrikes. Photo: Maxar Technologies

Key Points

What's This?

A U.S. intelligence report found military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities only delayed Tehran’s ambitions by a few months.
The White House press secretary called the assessment “flat out wrong” and blamed a leaker for sharing the classified report.
The Defense Intelligence Agency wrote the initial findings, which relied on military damage assessments after the bombings.

A preliminary intelligence report found that the U.S. military’s strikes last weekend on three Iranian nuclear facilities only set back Tehran’s nuclear ambitions by a few months, countering claims made by President Trump and the White House, according to people familiar with the intelligence.

The initial findings, written by the Defense Intelligence Agency, relied on military damage assessments following the U.S. bombings, the people said, adding that the assessment could change as more intelligence is collected.

A senior administration official confirmed the report’s existence but said it hadn’t risen to the level of being shared with the Defense Department’s top leaders. Several members of Congress, including full committees, have seen or have access to the report, lawmakers said.

U.S. intelligence agencies frequently produce classified reports that are later revised, sometimes substantially, as more information is collected. Such reports don’t necessarily reflect the views of other spy agencies, and disagreement among the agencies isn’t uncommon.

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As the U.S. deployed decoy B-2 bombers west over the Pacific, military officials quietly sent a “strike package” east over the Atlantic to hit nuclear facilities in Iran. WSJ breaks down Operation Midnight Hammer. Photo: Annie Zhao/The Wall Street Journal

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a post on X that the “alleged ‘assessment’ is flat out wrong,” and described the report as classified at the top-secret level. She blamed an “anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community” for leaking the report to the media. CNN earlier reported on the assessment.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all intelligence agencies in the U.S. government, declined to comment. The Defense Intelligence Agency didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The report contradicts statements from Trump, who has repeatedly said the targets of the raids were destroyed. “Those targets were obliterated,” he said Tuesday morning. Some independent nuclear security experts have said they believe that Iran sustained significant to severe damage to its nuclear program.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also challenged the intelligence report. “Based on everything we have seen, and I’ve seen it all, our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons,” he said Tuesday, adding: “Anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the president and the successful mission.” Trump posted Hegseth’s comments on social media.

June 20

June 22

Satellite imagery shows tunnel entrances of Iran's Isfahan facility on June 20 and, after airstrike damage, on June 22. Maxar Technologies

The administration delayed a classified Iran briefing scheduled for lawmakers on Tuesday, leading some in Congress—mainly Democrats—to question whether U.S. intelligence matches up with Trump’s public statements.

The strikes over the weekend shut the entrances to underground facilities at two of the sites, but didn’t collapse their underground structures, the report said, according to an official familiar with the assessment.

One of the people familiar with the intelligence said the facilities were degraded, but not severely, and that Iran still retained the ability to enrich uranium. Iran may have also moved enriched material from the sites before they were destroyed, and may have other covert sites to enrich uranium, the person said.

Early last week, days before the U.S. strikes on Iran, a senior U.S. intelligence official said the consensus intelligence community view at the time was that Israel’s bombing campaign had already set back Iran’s nuclear program by five to six months.

The U.S. strikes targeted three key Iranian nuclear sites: Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow. American B-2 stealth bombers dropped a total of 14 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator “bunker buster” bombs at targets including Fordow, which has an underground nuclear facility. U.S. submarines also fired Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Isfahan site.

The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said Monday that the strikes likely caused “significant damage” at Fordow, but that no one, including the agency, was in a position to assess the damage at the underground site fully.

A fuel-enrichment plant was hit at Natanz, Grossi told the IAEA board of governors Monday. At Isfahan, other buildings were hit, as were entrances to tunnels used for storing enriched nuclear material, he said.

The strikes followed days of Israeli bombing at Iranian military and government sites. Israel and the Trump administration said the strikes were intended to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful.

Write to Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com, Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com and Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com

Appeared in the June 25, 2025, print edition as 'U.S. Strikes Found to Cost Tehran A Few Months on Nuclear Program'.

3. The Pillars of Iran’s Regime Are Damaged, Not Destroyed

Excerpts:

“The regime is wounded, but still lethal,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which promotes relations with Israel in Washington. “Any victory lap now, despite the real successes, the real military successes, would still be premature.”

...

“The country’s nuclear program remains large and distributed with significant redundancy in expertise and leadership,” said Nicole Grajewski, a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Iran doesn’t need to rebuild its entire previous infrastructure but could develop a smaller, focused capability sufficient for weapons production.”

Israel also targeted Iran’s conventional weapons, leaving the nuclear targets vulnerable to attack. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel destroyed around half of Iran’s missile launchers. Israel has said it disabled dozens of Iranian air-defense missile batteries and destroyed their production sites. Israel estimates Iran began the war with 2,500 ballistic missiles on track to possess 8,000 within two years.

“Israel was shooting at the archer rather than the arrow,” said Fabian Hinz, a research fellow for missile technologies and drones at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Building more launchers and restoring air defenses that Israel first struck last year would take time, analysts said.

“What Israel bought itself is time,” said Michael Horowitz, an Israel-based geopolitical analyst. “The question is for what?”

The Pillars of Iran’s Regime Are Damaged, Not Destroyed

Country expected to rebuild conventional arsenal and, potentially, nuclear program

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/the-pillars-of-irans-regime-are-damaged-not-destroyed-fc052656

By Sudarsan Raghavan

Follow, Omar Abdel-Baqui

Follow and Laurence Norman

Updated June 24, 2025 6:11 pm ET

A street scene from Tehran shows a mural with Iran’s supreme leader. Photo: majid asgaripour/Reuters

DUBAI—Israel and the U.S. have delivered powerful blows to the pillars of Iran’s theocracy, degrading nuclear and missile capabilities, the highest military echelons and institutions of governance.

Yet the regime, while weakened, is still intact, capable of recuperating and emerging more dangerous and unpredictable. A fragile cease-fire hasn’t alleviated tensions that soared during more than a week of war.

Israeli and U.S. warplanes pummeled Iran’s nuclear supply chain and Israel killed 11 veteran nuclear scientists. They destroyed Iranian missile launchers, air defenses, state media and prison buildings. But Iran still has a pathway—albeit a risky one—to a nuclear weapon.

“The regime is wounded, but still lethal,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which promotes relations with Israel in Washington. “Any victory lap now, despite the real successes, the real military successes, would still be premature.”

Israeli and U.S. strikes in Iran since June 13

Israeli strikes

U.S. strikes

Turkmenistan

Caspian Sea

Tabriz

Mashhad

Tehran

Khondab

Qasr-e Shirin

Fordow

Arak

Kermanshah

Natanz

Iraq

Afghanistan

Isfahan

IRAN

Shiraz

Persian Gulf

Saudi Arabia

Qatar

Gulf of Oman

U.A.E.

200 miles

Oman

200 km

Note: As of 5 p.m. ET on June 23

Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI's Critical Threats Project; staff reports

Daniel Kiss/WSJ

A preliminary U.S. intelligence report found that the U.S. military’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities only set back Tehran’s nuclear ambitions by a few months, according to people familiar with the intelligence. The initial findings, written by the Defense Intelligence Agency, relied on military damage assessments following the bombings, the people said. The assessment could change as more intelligence is collected, the people said.

A senior administration official confirmed the report’s existence but said it hadn’t risen to the level of being shared with top Defense Department leaders. Such reports don’t necessarily reflect the views of other spy agencies, and disagreement among agencies is not uncommon. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a post on X that the “alleged ‘assessment’ is flat out wrong,” and described the report as classified at the top-secret level.

Damage assessments are still being done at the Fordow facility the U.S. struck with “bunker buster” bombs to reach deep under a mountainside. U.N. atomic energy agency chief Rafael Grossi said Monday he suspects it was seriously damaged.

Iran’s oldest enrichment site at Natanz was hit harder. Grossi said all its centrifuges—machines that enrich uranium—might have been wiped out. Israel and the U.S. also knocked out facilities capable of converting uranium into a form in which it can be enriched and turning fissile material into uranium metal. Factories for centrifuge parts were destroyed.

Yet the attacks likely left Iran in control of the main ingredients for a bomb. U.S. officials have signaled Iran still has control of around 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium it has produced since 2021. The whereabouts of the stockpile aren’t known—Grossi said it could have been moved from a facility in Isfahan before it was bombed. Vice President JD Vance said the U.S. wanted to discuss the state of the stockpile with Iran.

Satellite image of damage to Iran’s Isfahan nuclear technology center. Photo: MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

“The country’s nuclear program remains large and distributed with significant redundancy in expertise and leadership,” said Nicole Grajewski, a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Iran doesn’t need to rebuild its entire previous infrastructure but could develop a smaller, focused capability sufficient for weapons production.”

Israel also targeted Iran’s conventional weapons, leaving the nuclear targets vulnerable to attack. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel destroyed around half of Iran’s missile launchers. Israel has said it disabled dozens of Iranian air-defense missile batteries and destroyed their production sites. Israel estimates Iran began the war with 2,500 ballistic missiles on track to possess 8,000 within two years.

“Israel was shooting at the archer rather than the arrow,” said Fabian Hinz, a research fellow for missile technologies and drones at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Building more launchers and restoring air defenses that Israel first struck last year would take time, analysts said.

“What Israel bought itself is time,” said Michael Horowitz, an Israel-based geopolitical analyst. “The question is for what?”

The surprise attack on Iran

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As the U.S. deployed decoy B-2 bombers west over the Pacific, military officials quietly sent a ‘strike package’ east over the Atlantic to hit nuclear facilities in Iran. WSJ breaks down Operation Midnight Hammer. Photo: Annie Zhao/The Wall Street Journal

Israel could face renewed menace from Iran’s proxy militias, known as the Axis of Resistance. Lebanon’s Hezbollah, once Iran’s most powerful allied militia, is still reeling from a punishing Israeli military campaign last year that decimated its leadership and military. The Houthis in Yemen largely sat out this month’s conflict.

Iran could seek to rouse them now.

“As Iran figures out what is going to be the anchor of its deterrence strategy going forward—and the role of its proxy network—then it is in their interest to preserve whatever is left of Hezbollah,” said Randa Slim, a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University-based Foreign Policy Institute.

At the same time, Slim said, “There is a sentiment among Hezbollah supporters that Iran wasn’t there for them when they needed them most.”

On Tuesday, Iran’s theocratic leaders declared victory over Israel. “While the terrorist enemy initiated this imposed war, its conclusion was determined by the will and strength of the great Iranian nation,” said Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian.

But the regime could be headed for a period of internal turmoil as ambitious officials vie to fill power vacuums and seek recrimination for intelligence and security failures that left Iran vulnerable to attack.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said that the country’s ‘terrorist enemy initiated this imposed war.’ Photo: Vahid Salemi/Associated Press

“The regime will definitely go after infiltrators and purge from within,” said Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House in London. “There is a risk of increased repression against potential opponents.”

Some hard-line members of Iran’s parliament are already calling for the regime to build a nuclear weapon to deter future attacks. Iran’s leaders might determine that is too great a risk for now, with their nuclear infrastructure damaged and President Trump having shown his willingness to use the military to prevent Iran from completing a bomb.

“The conflict is still not over,” Vakil said. “This is potentially just a pause, and escalation can kick up at any time unless a proper deal is done.”

Write to Sudarsan Raghavan at sudarsan.raghavan@wsj.com, Omar Abdel-Baqui at omar.abdel-baqui@wsj.com and Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com

Appeared in the June 25, 2025, print edition as 'A Weakened Iran Remains Lethal'.

4. New Life for Nonproliferation

Pyongyang poses a slightly different problem than Tehran. Would we be able to target all systems and ensure sufficient destruction so there would be no retaliatory strike? But that is not what this OpEd is about at all.

Excerpts:

A week ago I would have bet on a can-kicking Iran settlement from Mr. Trump. A can-kicking certainly would have come from his 2024 opponents. Joe Biden’s puppeteers would have had no choice because Mr. Biden couldn’t serve as the face of an overtly risk-taking strategy. Kamala Harris’s leadership attributes? Not evident in the presidential campaign.

With his Iran actions, Mr. Trump makes clear he dominates his coalition rather than being dominated by it. He enjoys an idiosyncratic legitimacy, having repeatedly been raised up by the voting public in defiance of universal establishment resistance.

That resistance continues. If puppies and unicorns spring forth now from a democratizing Iran, the permanent state would be no less bent on discrediting a Trump presidency.

Which brings us to an irony. “If you follow regularly what is said by those who are in charge of the federal government right now, there is a weak commitment to . . . our understanding of how a liberal democracy is supposed to work,” intoned President Obama to an audience of Long Island swells last week.

New Life for Nonproliferation

In a better world, the B-2’s next stop would be Pyongyang.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/new-life-for-nonproliferation-foreign-policy-0ec7afd4

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

June 24, 2025 5:18 pm ET

A U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bomber lands after returning from Operation Midnight Hammer at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Photo: u.s. air force/Reuters

No good deed usually goes unpunished. President Trump’s Iran strike may prove the exception to the rule, and North Korea points to why.

A Trump walk-off home run already seemed a faint possibility last week given the distress the Israelis inflicted on the Iranian regime. Now it seems barely far-fetched after Iran’s conspicuously token attack Monday on a U.S. base in Qatar, followed hours later by a Trump cease-fire that actually seems to be holding.

If so, Donald Trump the Peacemaker may have ended not only the war but Iran’s nuclear threat. Garlands would descend upon his shoulders from the fair-minded. That’ll be nice for him. The bigger payoff would come when he’s long retired, and only if future U.S. leaders and allies are as determined as Mr. Trump seems to be in cutting off the rise of nuclear rogue states.

A tweet ought to have you questioning the intelligence of the American elite. It was provided by Obama veteran Ben Rhodes: “Trump’s message to the world: if you have nukes like North Korea I’ll trade love letters with you, if you don’t I’ll pull out of agreements you’re keeping and bomb you during diplomacy.”

Good heavens. North Korea had the bomb and the means to deliver it thanks to the ineffective diplomacy of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. That’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid with Iran. And Mr. Trump is following the same path now he followed then, offering friendship but zero compromise on giving up their nukes.

In a more perfect world, Pyongyang would be the next stop for our B-2s. In a less perfect world, Mr. Trump at least makes a start on correcting the poor incentives in the West’s Russia dealings. Vladimir Putin has been allowed to understand he can end the Ukraine war whenever he wants. The West will let him keep what he has. He won’t be punished, he will be rewarded with sanctions relief.

The West will do nothing to destabilize his regime because of his nukes.

This is an inducement to keep fighting to see what else he might gain.

A week ago I would have bet on a can-kicking Iran settlement from Mr. Trump. A can-kicking certainly would have come from his 2024 opponents. Joe Biden’s puppeteers would have had no choice because Mr. Biden couldn’t serve as the face of an overtly risk-taking strategy. Kamala Harris’s leadership attributes? Not evident in the presidential campaign.

With his Iran actions, Mr. Trump makes clear he dominates his coalition rather than being dominated by it. He enjoys an idiosyncratic legitimacy, having repeatedly been raised up by the voting public in defiance of universal establishment resistance.

That resistance continues. If puppies and unicorns spring forth now from a democratizing Iran, the permanent state would be no less bent on discrediting a Trump presidency.

Which brings us to an irony. “If you follow regularly what is said by those who are in charge of the federal government right now, there is a weak commitment to . . . our understanding of how a liberal democracy is supposed to work,” intoned President Obama to an audience of Long Island swells last week.

The problem is real. Mr. Obama’s concern is fake, a partisan weapon. In fact, no politician has been more victimized by the lying of the U.S. government than Mr. Trump even as he remains wildly careless himself in many of his claims.

His re-elevation to the presidency, moreover, was the direct, head-smacking consequence of the means by which the establishment, starting with the Obama administration, tried to suppress him, culminating in the Biden fiasco of 2024.

Mr. Obama has shrunk in his postpresidency. He will shrink further when history reckons with this part of his record.

Mr. Trump was already rated our worst president by historians almost before he took his first oath of office. On present trend, though, he won’t leave 535,000 Americans marooned in a futile war as LBJ did. He won’t lose 36,500 because he failed to make U.S. enemies aware of our red lines as Truman did.

His term will be a mixed bag like any president’s but he’s already done more than the last three to adapt the U.S. to the changing strategic reality of the world.

The Constitution will survive despite Democrats constantly insisting otherwise to justify their own behavior. A weird streak of recklessness has characterized Mr. Trump’s critics, who had so much to criticize legitimately and preferred self-exploding lies and exaggerations. If you want to feel sorry for an astronaut and military veteran, listen to Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly’s interview with NPR on Monday desperately trying to benefit from any reverse the U.S. might yet experience in its Iran showdown.

Mr. Trump seemingly hinted at a bomb targeted at Iran’s supreme leader to give encouragement to talks. U.S. vulnerabilities aren’t just troops at bases in the region. Ten former FBI officials issued a warning letter about unusual numbers of young single men entering the country during the Biden open border.

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WSJ Opinion: China’s Drone Production Pacing Threat Over the U.S.

Play video: WSJ Opinion: China’s Drone Production Pacing Threat Over the U.S.

Will an increase in defense spending enable the U.S. to close the gap in the drone market? According to North Carolina Rep. Pat Harrigan, 'China's drone output in 2024 was $29.4 billion, at least four times the amount of money that the United States is spending, with far lower, by an order of magnitude, unit costs.'

Appeared in the June 25, 2025, print edition as 'New Life for Nonproliferation'.

5. How the U.S. Locked Itself Into a Regime Change War

It is amazing how one article can blame the US at every turn and blame every administration for everything.

Excerpts:

Iran has no option now but to consider a dash for a nuclear deterrent as synonymous with regime survival. This is also a perilous path, as it may invite regime destruction. But it seems that Israel and the United States have already begun working to that end.

If U.S. policy toward Iran remains a demand for zero enrichment, the quickest and surest way to get there would be to replace Iran’s regime with one that does not require a nuclear deterrent for survival because it is subservient to Israel and the United States. Otherwise, the alternative for the United States—which has effectively ruined any chances for diplomacy—is to continue striking Iran when and if it gathers intelligence, or is given intelligence, about clandestine nuclear efforts in the country. That road likely escalates into regime change as well.

The United States finds itself in this position today not only because of Trump’s 2018 choice to unilaterally withdraw the United States from the JCPOA but also because renewed U.S. efforts at diplomacy kept shifting the goalposts for Iran. Zero enrichment was a nonstarter—a poison pill that ensured the negotiations collapsed into war.

The chance of returning to a viable diplomatic option that does not demand zero enrichment has very slim prospects, especially after Trump decided to try to bully Iran into submission with strikes on its nuclear facilities. But in the interest of avoiding further war, the United States and its allies should spare no effort in negotiations.

It is imperative that proponents of Trump’s foreign policy and the administration itself be honest and straightforward with the American public about where their demands of Iran are heading—and that is toward a regime change war.

How the U.S. Locked Itself Into a Regime Change War

Trump’s insistence on zero enrichment was a poison pill in talks with Iran.

By Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and the head of the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center Washington DC.

Foreign Policy · by Yousef Munayyer

June 24, 2025, 2:35 PM

Iran Conflict

Analysis and updates

President Donald Trump on Saturday announced that the U.S. military had struck three nuclear facilities in Iran. The escalation followed months of fruitless negotiations between Tehran and Washington over Iran’s nuclear program. Trump described the strikes as a one-off, saying, shortly after dropping massive bombs on the country, that “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace.”

The reality, however, is that Trump has likely locked the United States into long-term military action and regime change in Iran. Although Trump announced on Monday that he had brokered a cease-fire between Iran and Israel, he has already accused both sides of violating it. In a string of expletive-filled remarks to reporters on Tuesday, Trump said he was “not happy” with either country and that Iran would “never rebuild” its nuclear program.

Trump is clear in his demands that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, a stance that successive U.S. administrations have shared. But Trump’s decision to strike Iran over the weekend was not driven by this policy. U.S. intelligence assessments showed that Iran was not building a nuclear bomb and had not reversed its 2003 decision to halt its weaponization program, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said during March testimony to Congress.

Pressed on this point in an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not contradict or update the U.S. intelligence assessments. Rather, he said they were “irrelevant” because Iran has “everything they need to build the weapon.” After Trump publicly expressed discontent with Gabbard’s testimony, saying, “She’s wrong,” she wrote on Friday on social media that Iran could “produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months.” Trump appears to be pursuing a policy of preventing Iran from even the possibility of achieving nuclear threshold status.

The U.S. demand for zero Iranian enrichment—civilian or nuclear—is new. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated under President Barack Obama, permitted limited Iranian enrichment for civilian and research purposes alongside an intensive inspections regime to prevent Iran from developing a weapon. Enrichment to generate power or conduct research is permitted under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a party. Diplomats were able to reach this deal because it bridged significant gaps in trust and allowed both sides to get enough of what they wanted to be palatable.

Iran was able to keep its civilian nuclear program under tight supervision while retaining the option of escalating enrichment to approach a threshold status in case the United States walked away from the deal—as Trump did in 2018, during his first term—or Israel attacked. The United States secured a tight inspections regime over Iran’s nuclear program and retained all response options, from diplomacy to sanctions to military strikes, if Iran backed out.

Perhaps most importantly, because the JCPOA would delay Iran’s breakout time, it would afford the United States and its partners space to respond to potential Iranian weaponization via other options, such as diplomacy and sanctions, keeping military force as a last resort.

Trump escalated his zero-enrichment demands at a time of even greater distrust between Iran and the West and as Iran faces unprecedented vulnerability following Hezbollah’s weakening in Lebanon. Iran had long been able to count on the proxy militia to act as a check on Israel and the United States. But after nearly two years of Israeli strikes on Hezbollah—which culminated in the killings of much of its leadership last year—Iran is more exposed than before.

In its negotiations with Tehran in recent months, the Trump administration was pushing for greater Iranian concessions in an environment where Tehran was less likely than ever to agree to them. While this divergence set diplomacy up for failure, Trump’s decision to use U.S. military force to back up his zero-enrichment policy sends everyone involved down an even more dangerous road.

For decades, Iran’s support of regional allied militias such as Hezbollah has helped keep Israel at a distance—even as Israel has sought to target Iran through cyberattacks and other clandestine methods. But this balance has fallen apart as Israel degraded Hezbollah. As of this month, Israel is not only carrying out repeated airstrikes in Iran, but the United States has also joined in. Two massive taboos were broken in just over a week.

From Iran’s perspective, its severely weakened deterrence capacity via proxies has led to a rapidly devolving security situation at home. Though Iran retains a ballistic missile deterrent that is doing real damage in Israel, its impact is limited—as are Iran’s stockpiles. Iran has also taken significant losses in the last two weeks, as Israeli strikes have decimated infrastructure and killed high-ranking officials and likely also civilians. Iran’s health ministry reports that Israel’s attacks have killed around 500 people, while Israeli authorities have recorded at least 24 deaths from Iranian retaliation, as of June 23.

Iran faces a choice between reestablishing a deterrent or complete submission to Israeli and U.S. regional hegemony. Given that Israel has demonstrated the ability to strike at will in Iran, it may continue to do. Israel has for years struck Syria and Lebanon when it saw opportunities to hinder the development of conventional weapons capacities in the hands of militias or unfriendly governments.

It’s also not clear what happened to Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile following the U.S. strikes. If it still exists and has been withdrawn from nuclear facilities to a safe house—as many reports indicate—it could serve as an advance restarting point for a dash to a bomb. Even if the stockpile doesn’t exist anymore, a hampered Iranian nuclear program can be reconstituted through either homegrown knowledge or the support of partners such as Russia or China. What has changed now is that Iran—in the face of Israeli and U.S. bombardment—is likely as convinced and desperate as ever to achieve a nuclear deterrent.

In 2003, after U.S. President George W. Bush famously put Iraq, Iran, and North Korea on his “axis of evil” list (and later proceeded to invade and destroy Iraq), North Korea responded by dashing to a bomb. A year after Bush’s speech, Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; three years later, it conducted its first nuclear test. Iran took a different route. Tehran halted its nuclear weaponization program and never restarted it while keeping open the possibility of approximating threshold status and relying on regional deterrents such as allied militias. This choice has now shown its limits.

Iran has no option now but to consider a dash for a nuclear deterrent as synonymous with regime survival. This is also a perilous path, as it may invite regime destruction. But it seems that Israel and the United States have already begun working to that end.

If U.S. policy toward Iran remains a demand for zero enrichment, the quickest and surest way to get there would be to replace Iran’s regime with one that does not require a nuclear deterrent for survival because it is subservient to Israel and the United States. Otherwise, the alternative for the United States—which has effectively ruined any chances for diplomacy—is to continue striking Iran when and if it gathers intelligence, or is given intelligence, about clandestine nuclear efforts in the country. That road likely escalates into regime change as well.

The United States finds itself in this position today not only because of Trump’s 2018 choice to unilaterally withdraw the United States from the JCPOA but also because renewed U.S. efforts at diplomacy kept shifting the goalposts for Iran. Zero enrichment was a nonstarter—a poison pill that ensured the negotiations collapsed into war.

The chance of returning to a viable diplomatic option that does not demand zero enrichment has very slim prospects, especially after Trump decided to try to bully Iran into submission with strikes on its nuclear facilities. But in the interest of avoiding further war, the United States and its allies should spare no effort in negotiations.

It is imperative that proponents of Trump’s foreign policy and the administration itself be honest and straightforward with the American public about where their demands of Iran are heading—and that is toward a regime change war.

This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage. Read more here.

Foreign Policy · by Yousef Munayyer

6. U.S. Credibility Returns to the Middle East

Excerpts:

Doubtlessly there will be more bumps in the road. Nothing in the Middle East comes easily. A 1977 visit to Jerusalem by Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat triggered great optimism about a new Mideast built on Arab-Israeli peace. Islamists assassinated Sadat in 1981, and nearly a half-century later, regional peace remains elusive. But with Iran no longer able to play the Palestinian card, and with growing alignment between Saudi and Israeli development strategies, the crown prince, who got where he is by cunning and courage, not cautious calculation, seems certain to follow his core creed. “If you don’t stand out, you might as well disappear,” he told me once. “If you see something to do, do it.” Do it regardless of what others think.

U.S. Credibility Returns to the Middle East

Apart from Israel, Saudi Arabia is the region’s big winner. Its crown prince is eager to modernize.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/u-s-credibility-returns-to-the-middle-east-iran-strikes-f6e7fe74

By Karen Elliott House

June 24, 2025 2:29 pm ET

Illustration: David Gothard

President Trump’s dramatic weekend strike may or may not have obliterated Iran’s nuclear potential, but it has restored U.S. deterrence and credibility. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, leader of a theocracy that held the Mideast in a grip of terror for nearly half a century, is cowering in an underground bunker. He fears even to use a cellphone lest Israel’s superior intelligence and air power combine to eliminate him along with his nation’s nuclear ambitions.

While Israel obviously is the big winner from the war it launched against Iran just over a week ago, Saudi Arabia stands to emerge as the other major regional beneficiary. Gone is Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” which encircled the region and tormented Saudi Arabia. Of all the regimes in the Middle East, only Israel, the “little Satan,” and Saudi Arabia, the “small and puny Satan,” were earmarked for elimination. Iran coveted not only Saudi Arabia’s oil but, more important, its guardianship of Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina.

On Monday the wounded and frightened Iranian regime lashed out with a missile attack on a U.S. air base in Qatar. Tehran could also seek to retaliate by closing the Strait of Hormuz or unleashing its terrorists to attack Americans. But Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Mideast partners now have ample demonstration of U.S. reliability, which has been in short supply for a decade. Mistrust of the Biden administration led Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, to hedge his bets by establishing diplomatic relations with Tehran in 2023. And hoping to ward off any Iranian retaliation against the kingdom now, the Saudi foreign minister quickly tweeted the country’s “great concern” for the “sisterly Islamic Republic of Iran.” But make no mistake: Riyadh is thrilled.

With a single blow, Mr. Trump restored America’s reputation in the region. At the same time, Russia and China, Iran’s supposed loyal allies, look impotent watching their partner being mauled. Equally important for the Saudis, the humiliation of Mr. Khamenei, the great leader of Shiism, explodes the myth that God is on the side of Islamists. If, as seems likely, the 86-year-old ayatollah is either killed or sidelined, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which underpins the theocracy, will likely keep Iran’s 90 million economically deprived citizens under control with force, not appeals to Allah.

A wounded Iran also bolsters Saudi Arabia’s goal of stabilizing Syria. MBS persuaded Mr. Trump to recognize Syria during his recent visit to the kingdom. This allowed Damascus to secure international economic help to stabilize its nascent government. Israel, too, seeks a stable Syria and is asserting its right to control a larger slice of southern Syria to protect the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1981.

To the extent that Iran’s government now needs to focus internally rather than externally, Saudi Arabia’s agenda for development at home and political influence in the region will be freed from fear of its rival. If the U.S. and Israel persist in destroying not only the regime’s nuclear ambitions but also its ballistic-missile program, the largest in the region, the crown prince will emerge as the key Arab leader. With a population of 30 million, the kingdom is far larger than any of the wealthy Gulf Arab states. Egypt’s population is nearly four times Saudi Arabia’s, but Cairo long ago lost most of its regional influence.

MBS’s ambition more than matches the kingdom’s economic resources. In less than a decade, he has transformed Saudi Arabia’s culture and economy, among other things by freeing the kingdom’s educated women to work in any job, not merely teach in girls’ schools. He is bent on transforming the country, breaking its dependence on oil revenue and developing income from tourism, sports and minerals. He wants Saudi Arabia to be a top five global economy by 2050. It’s now ranked 16th.

To achieve his lofty goals, the crown prince is investing heavily in artificial intelligence. He is determined to transform Saudi Arabia into a global AI hub capable of competing with the U.S. Low-cost energy gives the kingdom an advantage given the industry’s gargantuan power needs. With Iran’s ability to make mischief in the Middle East seriously diminished, MBS is free to pursue his vision of using Saudi capital and Israeli technology to create a commercial zone connecting Asia to Europe. All this portends the eventual recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia, one of Mr. Trump’s major goals.

Doubtlessly there will be more bumps in the road. Nothing in the Middle East comes easily. A 1977 visit to Jerusalem by Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat triggered great optimism about a new Mideast built on Arab-Israeli peace. Islamists assassinated Sadat in 1981, and nearly a half-century later, regional peace remains elusive. But with Iran no longer able to play the Palestinian card, and with growing alignment between Saudi and Israeli development strategies, the crown prince, who got where he is by cunning and courage, not cautious calculation, seems certain to follow his core creed. “If you don’t stand out, you might as well disappear,” he told me once. “If you see something to do, do it.” Do it regardless of what others think.

Ms. House is a former publisher of the Journal and author of “The Man Who Would Be King,” forthcoming in July.

And one of the urgent lessons

0 of 7 minutes, 19 secondsVolume 0%

The U.S. is exposed to many threats besides ballistic missiles—ranging from drones and spy blimps to cruise missiles launched by submarines—and President Trump deserves credit for prioritizing a layered missile shield that exploits new technology and existing systems.

Appeared in the June 25, 2025, print edition as 'U.S. Credibility Returns to the Middle East'.

7. A Strait of Hormuz blockade would barely hurt the US

Good to know.

Conclusion:

In sum, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is not the economic Achilles’ heel of the United States that it once was. Thanks to energy independence, strategic reserves, diversified economic sectors and global alliances, Washington can absorb the shock. For others—especially in Asia—the costs are higher and the tools for mitigation fewer.

A Strait of Hormuz blockade would barely hurt the US - Asia Times

US gas exporters would likely gain from any Iran blockade while China’s energy import vulnerability would be exposed

by Phar Kim Beng and Luthfy Hamzah

June 24, 2025

asiatimes.com · by Phar Kim Beng, Luthfy Hamzah · June 24, 2025

The Strait of Hormuz has long stood as a symbol of global energy vulnerability. Stretching barely 39 kilometers at its narrowest point between Iran and Oman, it funnels nearly 20% of the world’s oil supply and over one-third of liquefied natural gas. Any threat of its closure—whether rhetorical or real—inevitably triggers alarms across energy markets.

Yet beneath the headlines and hyperbole lies a strategic paradox: closing the Strait of Hormuz would not deal a decisive economic blow to the United States. In fact, the economic and geopolitical recalibration underway since the US shale revolution suggests that Washington is less exposed than its adversaries and even some of its allies.

Since the early 2010s, the United States has pursued a pathway toward energy self-reliance. The shale boom transformed the US from a net importer into one of the world’s top oil producers. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), less than 10% of its crude imports now come from the Persian Gulf.

Moreover, the US has fortified itself with a Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) capable of dampening supply shocks during times of geopolitical crisis. Though partially drawn down during the Ukraine and Gaza crises, the SPR remains a vital economic shield.

This structural shift has dramatically reduced America’s vulnerability to turmoil in the Gulf. In contrast to the 1970s oil shocks, when OPEC’s embargo inflicted widespread inflation and recession, today’s US economy is not tethered to the Strait of Hormuz.

Energy independence has become a cornerstone of US strategic confidence, especially under the Trump administration’s renewed emphasis on resource nationalism and transactional diplomacy.

But the implications go deeper. For President Donald Trump and his circle of foreign policy strategists, any regional escalation in the Gulf—whether through Iranian retaliation or Israeli provocation—can be leveraged as a controlled escalation.

When the US and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran’s Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites in June 2025, the anticipation of Iranian closure of the strait was likely already priced in—not only by markets but by decision-makers.

Ironically, such a disruption strengthens Washington’s geopolitical hand. US naval dominance, particularly through the Fifth Fleet stationed in Bahrain, allows it to present itself once more as the guardian of maritime freedom.

This plays well with allies such as Japan, South Korea and India, who depend heavily on Gulf energy. These countries, in turn, may deepen security alignments with Washington, reinforcing the hub-and-spokes model that underpins US regional primacy.

In the meantime, American LNG producers could benefit. With Gulf LNG supplies constrained and threatened, US exports from terminals in Louisiana and Texas become more competitive, especially in European and East Asian markets. This is not just a security story—it is an economic windfall for key US constituencies in energy-rich states.

Critically, one must distinguish between temporary inflationary pressures and systemic economic collapse. Yes, a Hormuz closure could push up global oil prices, and yes, US consumers may feel the pinch at the pump.

But the broader US economy—now driven more by services, digital innovation and financial capital than by fossil fuel dependencies—can absorb these shocks. The US Federal Reserve, equipped with monetary tools and real-time data analytics, has repeatedly shown agility in stabilizing inflationary expectations.

If economic pain is not evenly distributed, who then suffers most? The answer lies eastward. China, the world’s largest energy importer, relies on Gulf oil to sustain its industrial output and urban development.

Despite efforts to diversify sources—from Russia to Central Asia—Beijing remains structurally dependent on maritime routes that it does not militarily control. Iran’s threats to blockade the Strait of Hormuz put China in a strategic bind: its top oil supplier (Iran) is also its potential liability and its maritime vulnerability remains unresolved.

India, too, finds itself exposed. With over 80% of its oil imported, a significant portion of which passes through the Gulf, any prolonged disruption could spike inflation and slow economic growth.

Japan and South Korea face similar risks. Lacking domestic energy resources and deeply reliant on maritime supply chains, both East Asian powers watch Gulf tensions with unease. Yet unlike the US, they lack either the military reach or economic fallback mechanisms to influence outcomes.

Within Southeast Asia, the impact is nuanced but concerning. Association of Southeast Asian (ASEAN) economies, such as Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, rely on Middle Eastern oil to varying degrees. Energy price volatility would exacerbate fiscal pressures, especially in economies already facing post-pandemic debt burdens.

However, ASEAN has begun to recalibrate its strategic posture. Under the current ASEAN chairmanship of Malaysia and Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s leadership, the bloc has prioritized energy diversification and regional cooperation.

Malaysia and Indonesia are expanding refining capacity and investing in LNG infrastructure. Thailand and Vietnam are integrating solar power into regional grids. Rather than being reactive, ASEAN’s long-term recalibration reflects its quiet adaptability to global disruptions and refusal to be trapped in binary choices between great powers.

This recalibration is not only economic—it is also diplomatic. ASEAN’s recent engagement with both the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and China in trilateral forums reflects a conscious effort to de-escalate tensions through dialogue. The ASEAN-GCC-China Summit and Track 1.5 diplomacy provide a platform for coordinated responses that preserve economic stability without defaulting to militarization.

Still, the US finds itself in an interesting contradiction. While it may not be economically crippled by the closure of Hormuz, its longer-term challenge lies in managing the unpredictability of its own military responses.

The use of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP)—designed originally for North Korean bunkers—in Iranian terrain poses strategic risks. The efficacy of such strikes remains uncertain, as the geological structures and subterranean complexity of Iranian nuclear sites are not easily neutralized.

Moreover, Iran’s calibrated retaliation, including its pre-notified missile strike on the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, shows that Tehran seeks to balance deterrence with diplomatic signaling. This ambiguity is a calculated move not just toward Washington, but also toward Beijing and wider Asia. Iran does not want to be isolated, even while responding to aggression.

In sum, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is not the economic Achilles’ heel of the United States that it once was. Thanks to energy independence, strategic reserves, diversified economic sectors and global alliances, Washington can absorb the shock. For others—especially in Asia—the costs are higher and the tools for mitigation fewer.

Phar Kim Beng, PhD, is professor of ASEAN studies, International Islamic University Malaysia. Luthfy Hamzah is senior research fellow, Strategic Pan Indo Pacific Arena, Kuala Lumpur

asiatimes.com · by Phar Kim Beng, Luthfy Hamzah · June 24, 2025

8. China Tightens Controls on Fentanyl but Calls It a U.S. Problem

Admit nothing, deny everything, and make counter accusations.

China Tightens Controls on Fentanyl but Calls It a U.S. Problem

Two chemicals used to make the powerful opioid will be more strictly regulated, but an official said it was “the United States’ responsibility to solve the issue.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/world/asia/china-fentanyl-us-trade.html

Listen to this article · 3:21 min Learn more

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Using fentanyl at a California encampment last year. The Trump administration says China hasn’t done enough to keep the drug out of the United States.Credit...Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

By David Pierson and Keith Bradsher

David Pierson reported from Hong Kong and Keith Bradsher from Shanghai.

June 25, 2025,

2:17 a.m. ET

China has strengthened controls on two chemicals that can be used to make fentanyl, its latest step in addressing an issue that has become tangled in its broader trade dispute with the United States.

The Trump administration has accused Beijing of not doing enough to stem the flow of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid, into the United States, where it kills tens of thousands of Americans each year. Earlier this year, the administration cited the issue as it imposed tariffs totaling 20 percent on Chinese goods.

This week, six Chinese government agencies said they had added two chemicals, 4-piperidone and 1-Boc-4-piperidone, to a list of so-called precursor chemicals, or base ingredients, for fentanyl that would be more strictly controlled, according to a joint statement.

The move “demonstrates China’s sincerity in wanting to work with the United States on this issue,” said Yun Sun, the director of the China program at the Stimson Center, a Washington research institute.

The new restrictions, which take effect on July 20, were announced days after China’s minister of public security, Wang Xiaohong, met with David Perdue, the recently appointed U.S. ambassador to China, in Beijing last week to discuss efforts to fight drug trafficking.

The United States has accused Chinese producers of supplying drug cartels with the ingredients to make fentanyl, which the cartels smuggle into the United States.

China has maintained, however, that it is not responsible for America’s fentanyl crisis, which it says is rooted in the abuse of prescription painkillers and ineffective regulation in that country.

“We’ve repeatedly made it clear that fentanyl is the United States' problem, not China’s,” Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, said on Tuesday. “It’s the United States’ responsibility to solve the issue.”

The tariffs imposed by the Trump administration over fentanyl are still in place, even though overall levies on Chinese goods came down to 55 percent from 145 percent or more in May, after the two countries agreed to a truce in their trade war.

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Chinese restrictions on its exports of crucial minerals recently threatened to derail that détente, but President Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, agreed to revive trade talks during a call this month. The two leaders also discussed the possibility of meeting in China.

Wu Xinbo, the dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said that China would like to host Mr. Trump, but that it depended on progress made on disputes over trade and issues like fentanyl.

Another option, Mr. Wu said, could be for the two leaders to meet on the sidelines of the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Seoul, which starts in late October. Mr. Xi usually attends the summit, and American presidents have typically done so, but neither leader has said whether he will participate in this one.

Berry Wang contributed research.

David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.

Keith Bradsher is the Beijing bureau chief for The Times. He previously served as bureau chief in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Detroit and as a Washington correspondent. He has lived and reported in mainland China through the pandemic.

9. Female Troops Played Key Roles in B-2, Submarine Strikes on Iran's Nuclear Facilities

But the bottom line is that we should not know the names: they are just military professionals doing their jobs.

Excerpts:

There is also a growing cadre of female sailors who have begun to take leadership roles in the community. Two years ago, the Navy announced that a female sailor, one of the first to serve on submarines, was named as the USS Louisiana's top enlisted official. The same year, the Navy also tapped a female officer to serve as the first executive officer of a submarine.

The women involved in Operation Midnight Hammer have not been publicly named by the Pentagon or services and, given the small number of female aviators in the stealth bomber and submarine community, for example, it is likely seen as an operational security concern.

"I don't know her name, I don't know the guys' names," Goodwin told Military.com, speaking of the B-2 pilots. "She was put on there because she was qualified and she was ready to execute that mission, just like the guys were. No other reason."

Female Troops Played Key Roles in B-2, Submarine Strikes on Iran's Nuclear Facilities

military.com · by Thomas Novelly,Konstantin Toropin · June 24, 2025

Operation Midnight Hammer, the name of the U.S. military's coordinated strikes against three of Iran's nuclear facilities last weekend, marked the longest B-2 Spirit stealth bomber mission since 2001 and the inaugural use of the 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator bomb in combat.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth praised the work of "our boys in those bombers" during a press conference at the Pentagon on Sunday.

But female troops also played key roles in the Iran strikes. "Women were incorporated in all aspects of the mission," a U.S. official told Military.com on Monday on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the operation.

At least one woman served as a B-2 bomber pilot during the mission, that official said. Another official confirmed women were on a guided missile submarine crew that launched more than two dozen cruise missiles at the Iranian nuclear sites.

It's a historic achievement because the B-2s and submarines at the tip of the U.S. military spear have, historically, not been manned by women.

Some retired female pilots brushed off the secretary's choice of words, but those who spoke with Military.com said it seemed to track with his other recent comments, as well as Hegseth's past public opposition to female service members taking on combat roles.

Retired Lt. Col. Jessica Ruttenber, an Air Force pilot who flew numerous planes including the KC-135 Stratotanker -- a refueling aircraft -- told Military.com in an interview Monday that she could understand if he was speaking generally when referring to "our boys" but said his views and rhetoric in the past call for more scrutiny.

"When you say 'boys,' given his history, his track record, you would think he'd be more conscious of the language he's using, especially with high visibility," Ruttenber said. "It matters."

Prior to his confirmation as defense secretary, Hegseth spoke out about women in combat roles during media interviews.

"I'm straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn't made us more effective. Hasn't made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated," Hegseth said in November on a podcast hosted by Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL.

He later softened those comments during his confirmation hearing in January, stating he wanted to make physical standards between men and women the same.

Just this past month, when questioned during a House Armed Services Committee hearing by Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., Hegseth wouldn't answer yes or no when asked "whether women should be in all roles in the military," responding only that "it's all about standards."

After several news outlets reported that there was at least one female pilot among the B-2 pilots -- contradicting Hegseth's remarks at the press conference -- the Pentagon's Rapid Response account repeated the phrase in a post to social media on Sunday evening.

"Welcome home boys!" the account proclaimed over footage of the bombers landing in Missouri.

The B-2 pilot community is small. As of 2022, Air Force Global Strike Command said there had been just over 500 B-2 pilots assigned a "spirit number"-- a tradition in which those who fly in the aircraft, including passengers, are tracked.

A Whiteman Air Force Base news release announcing the 2019 graduation of a female B-2 pilot stated there had been only 10 women to fly the stealth bomber at that time.

Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Kristin Goodwin is among those pilots.

In addition to flying the B-2 and other aircraft, Goodwin previously served as the vice commander of the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman and later as the commander of the 2nd Bomb Wing at Barksdale Air Force Base, among numerous other positions at the Pentagon, according to her service biography.

She told Military.com in an interview Monday that she's faced harsh comments as a female pilot in a largely male-dominated community but that never stopped her from focusing on the mission.

"I've heard that women should be in the kitchen, women shouldn't be in combat, women can't fly. I've heard all the things that we can't do," Goodwin said. "To me, what's really important, personally, is that I know that I know how to do my job, that I show up every day ready to execute, to do the mission that I was called to do."

Goodwin said the Iran operation was a testament to the B-2 pilot community as well as the refuelers, maintainers and other support roles. It's also a mission she was personally familiar with.

"This mission is not something that they scrambled to put together," she said. "It was a mission that I knew when I was in. I knew the targets and the training."

Just like the Air Force B-2 pilots, the women involved with the submarine strikes for Operation Midnight Hammer are also a small community.

As a result of its history and structure, the Navy's submarine service -- which is all-volunteer and was all male up to 2010 -- was, until recently, seen as something akin to a combat role.

When the service began undertaking integration efforts, there was a spate of scandals that plagued early female submariners. One case involved nearly a dozen sailors secretly recording their female shipmates while they showered. Then, in 2019, sailors aboard the USS Florida were investigated and punished over allegations of a "rape list" of female sailors stationed aboard the submarine.

However, since then, women have slowly made progress in the community and, now, an official told Military.com on Monday, there are more than 800 female officers and enlisted sailors serving on submarines.

military.com · by Thomas Novelly,Konstantin Toropin · June 24, 2025

10. The Lion Rises and the Eagle Soars | Juliana Geran Pilon

Excerpts:

Compare this with “the Lion and the Sun” symbolism in Iranian tradition, rooted in both Persian mythology and Islamic sources. For the Safavid emperors (who ruled from 1501 to 1736), it represented a strategic move designed to distinguish Iran’s identity from neighboring powers, especially the Ottomans’ crescent moon. Originally representing both the spiritual and temporal authority of the Shah, however, by the early nineteenth century, a sword and crown were added to the lion to underscore the state’s military might while simultaneously reinforcing the three-millennia-old Zoroastrian tradition.

It should surprise no one that today, the symbol has been adopted by various opposition groups against the tyrants who, six decades ago, hijacked a revolution meant to institute reform, not impose a medieval straitjacket. Having squandered the rich resources of their enslaved population on building weapons to arm terrorists, Russian and other oligarchs, a large percentage of Iranians feel closer to Israel than to their own leaders. The Guardian reported on June 18th: “A large portion of Iran’s population is bitterly opposed to the government, which has only grown more repressive as the country slips deeper into economic crisis. Just two weeks ago, much of Iran was paralyzed by a nationwide strike in protest at the dismal economic situation.”

And yet, continues the Guardian, Iranians are weary of a war that seems to be waged almost single-handedly by the Israelis. Notes Joseph Puder that over the past half-century, despite Iranian threats against both Israel, dubbed Little Satan, and Big Satan – the main enemy - America (or as they prefer to spell it, following Sixties radicals, Amerikkka):

Significantly, no nation, including the United States, was willing to take on the Islamic Republic of Iran despite its provocations and attempted assassinations in Europe and an attempt on the life of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Israel alone has done what the rest of the civilized world was reluctant to do by taking on the head of the octopus. Israel deserves credit for saving the world from a nuclear-armed fanatical regime whose messianic beliefs call for an Armageddon that, according to its fanatics, would end with the appearance of the vanished 12th Shi’ite imam.

The Lion Rises and the Eagle Soars | Juliana Geran Pilon

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Jun 24, 2025

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Juliana Geran Pilon

An Israeli flag flutters on the Mount of Olives as the sun rises over Jerusalem and its landmark Dome of the Rock on June 13, 2025, following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's announcement that a military operation was launched against Iran and would "continue for as many days as it takes".

The Lion Rises and the Eagle Soars

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Juliana Geran Pilon

Summary

The nation had risen “like a lioness,” and roared, while the world shook in disbelief.

‍

Summary

The nation had risen “like a lioness,” and roared, while the world shook in disbelief.

‍

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In the early hours of June 13, the night sky above the Holy Land witnessed a miracle. In an unprecedented heart-stopping maneuver, a formidable flock of 200 fighter jets took off in unison, on their way to a dangerous, unprecedented 2000 km journey whose goal was as noble as it was necessary: to preempt the latest attempt at annihilation of their ancient people. Within a few hours, dozens of military targets, nuclear targets and facilities, and senior members of the Iranian General Staff and leaders of the nuclear program were struck and destroyed. The Israeli phoenix had emerged from 3500 years of persecution, determined to survive.

Urban warfare expert John Spencer has called that operation “not just historic. It was transformational. It redefined what shock and awe can look like in the 21st century. This was not merely a strike. It was a campaign—a layered, synchronized demonstration of modern operational art, built on deep intelligence, strategic deception, and the innovative fusion of old and new tools of war.” The nation had risen “like a lioness,” and roared, while the world shook in disbelief. This phase of Israel’s war against Iran and its proxies would become known in English as Operation Rising Lion (ORL).

It is not quite equivalent to the Hebrew original, Am K’lavi, meaning “a people like a lion,” first used by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on May 1 at an awards ceremony for the International Bible competition. As poet and linguist Aviya Kushner points out, in retrospect, it was a Jewish joke with a twist: the punchline lay in the future. Likening his nation’s determination to win its ongoing “war of existence” by invoking Am K’lavi, he alluded to Numbers 23:24: “The people rise like a lioness; they rouse themselves like a lion.”

The association of royalty with lions was not uncommon in the ancient world, particularly in early Greek art and literature, where it was often linked to power, masculinity, and fierceness. Later, Christians embraced the lion as a symbol of the messiah. It was also adopted by the nine-hundred-year-long Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia, which lasted until 1974.

But it has a special meaning for Jews. The Bible contains more than 150 references to the lion, many of which are descriptive, metaphorical, and allegorical. And for Israel at this particular time, it is underscored by the fact that at the start of the operation, Netanyahu wrote the lion verse from Numbers, which he used on May 1, and placed it between the stones at the Western Wall.

Although destined for the Highest Authority, the paper has also made headlines in the cybersphere and Israeli media for its insights into its political implications. That Torah commentators have mulled over those verses for centuries only adds to their complexity and significance. Israel’s operation, whatever its ultimate outcome in geopolitical terms, has already delivered a statement for the ages.

William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, declared on June 18, 2025, that ORL unequivocally establishes Jewish sovereignty over its homeland. It reinforces Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s Doctrine, articulated half a century earlier with these words, “[o]n no account shall we permit an enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction against the people of Israel.” That principle, writes Daroff, “remains clear, moral, and essential. In 2025, the promise of 1948 lives on. The Jewish people stand as a nation among nations – unapologetic, unafraid, and unwavering. A Zionist moment unfolds. The world watches as Israel exercises the most basic right of any sovereign state: the right of self-defense. No apologies. No equivocation. Only clarity of purpose and the courage to act.”

The extraordinary unity of the Israelis behind the operation, documented by Hebrew University’s research team on June 16, shows that not only do 83 percent of Jewish Israelis support it, but also 70 percent of the entire nation, with a mere 16 percent opposed. This is not despite but “because its home front endures impossible travails,” writes Joseph Puder, founder and director of the Interfaith Taskforce for America and Israel (ITAI). He notes that for the first time in centuries, “[a]s an independent people, Jews proved that once free in their homeland, they prepared and trained themselves to defend and, when necessary, to fight like ferocious lions.”

When necessary to defend themselves. But the king of the jungle does not rise to defend itself, it rises to eat. It is for this reason that Robert Alter, the celebrated translator of the Tanakh [Old Testament] for the Jewish Publication Society (JPS), notes that “the rising, bloodthirsty lion is a stock metaphor for martial prowess in biblical and other Near Eastern poetry.” The biblical context, however, highlights a peculiarity of the Hebrew lion: it is “a people that dwells apart,” to which Kushner adds: “This apartness, and perhaps loneliness, is something many in the Diaspora have also invoked, and it seems especially relevant now.”

She then proceeds to cite the rest of Numbers 23:24 (from the JPS translation), including the last two verses which Netanyahu had omitted (italicized):

Lo, a people that rises like a lion,

Leaps up like a king of beasts,

Rests not till it has feasted on prey

And drunk the blood of the slain.

Appalled that “Israel is envisaged now not merely as vast but as a fiercely indomitable warrior people,” Alter observes that “Balak now has not just been led off the road into the field but feels his leg crushed against the wall.” Aviya Kusher speculates that “perhaps this image of a ‘fiercely indomitable warrior people’ is what captivated Netanyahu.” This line of thought has been echoed by the PM’s opponents, who view his ambition as the primary motivation for what they perceive as his hardline approach to the war.

But it might have helped to cite a little more from Numbers 23:23 (italicized):

It will now be said of Jacob

and of Israel, ‘See what God has done!’

24 The people rise like a lioness;

they rouse themselves like a lion

that does not rest till it devours its prey

and drinks the blood of its victims.”

“What will be said of Jacob and of Israel” – ah yes, public opinion. Drink the blood of its victims! A portent of the greatest libel that would plague Jews throughout their entire tragic odyssey in exile. Its latest incarnation is the execrable lying about Israel’s alleged “genocide” in Gaza, which has triggered the greatest increase in worldwide antisemitism in a century. According to a new report by the World Zionist Organization, 2024 was a “peak year” for antisemitism, with a 340 percent increase in total antisemitic incidents worldwide compared to 2022.

For this reason alone, it is crucial to revisit the original biblical allusion to Jews as lions by recalling its first appearance in Genesis 49:9. There, the dying Jacob blesses each of his twelve sons, but reserves the highest praise for his fourth, Judah (whence Juda-ism):

Judah is like a young lion.

From prey, my son, have you risen up.

He crouches, lies low as a lion,

And like a lion, who can roue him?

The famous Talmudic rabbi Ohr Chayim HaKadosh (1696-1743) applied the same metaphor to the entire nation, comparing it to a young lion cub that rises to pounce even before it has fully matured. Its current relevance was spelled out in the Jerusalem Post on July 16:

This vividly reflects the story of the Jewish nation, which rose from the ashes of the Holocaust to confront multiple powerful Arab armies surrounding it. Like the lion cub, Israel rose to the challenge despite being outnumbered and seemingly weaker-armed with extraordinary courage and deep trust in Hashem [Hebrew for “The Name,” meaning God]. And just like the lion, repeated wars did not weaken or exhaust this small nation, but only sharpened its strength and resolve to persevere and triumph in every battle for survival.

But the nation reflects the persona of its eponym, who “is not merely fierce, he is royal. Like a lion, he doesn't chase glory; he rests with confidence, and when he rises, the world trembles” and his strength was to have been passed down to his descendants. “This isn’t about brute force. ‘From the prey, my son, have you risen’ refers to admission of failure’” does not refer to plundering anyone. “That’s Jewish strength: rising not by stepping on others, but by standing up with truth.” Not by stepping on others. These words are key. Although political leaders, notably kings and emperors, throughout history were often titled “the Lion,” the Jewish lion does not seek empire.

Compare this with “the Lion and the Sun” symbolism in Iranian tradition, rooted in both Persian mythology and Islamic sources. For the Safavid emperors (who ruled from 1501 to 1736), it represented a strategic move designed to distinguish Iran’s identity from neighboring powers, especially the Ottomans’ crescent moon. Originally representing both the spiritual and temporal authority of the Shah, however, by the early nineteenth century, a sword and crown were added to the lion to underscore the state’s military might while simultaneously reinforcing the three-millennia-old Zoroastrian tradition.

It should surprise no one that today, the symbol has been adopted by various opposition groups against the tyrants who, six decades ago, hijacked a revolution meant to institute reform, not impose a medieval straitjacket. Having squandered the rich resources of their enslaved population on building weapons to arm terrorists, Russian and other oligarchs, a large percentage of Iranians feel closer to Israel than to their own leaders. The Guardian reported on June 18th: “A large portion of Iran’s population is bitterly opposed to the government, which has only grown more repressive as the country slips deeper into economic crisis. Just two weeks ago, much of Iran was paralyzed by a nationwide strike in protest at the dismal economic situation.”

And yet, continues the Guardian, Iranians are weary of a war that seems to be waged almost single-handedly by the Israelis. Notes Joseph Puder that over the past half-century, despite Iranian threats against both Israel, dubbed Little Satan, and Big Satan – the main enemy - America (or as they prefer to spell it, following Sixties radicals, Amerikkka):

Significantly, no nation, including the United States, was willing to take on the Islamic Republic of Iran despite its provocations and attempted assassinations in Europe and an attempt on the life of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Israel alone has done what the rest of the civilized world was reluctant to do by taking on the head of the octopus. Israel deserves credit for saving the world from a nuclear-armed fanatical regime whose messianic beliefs call for an Armageddon that, according to its fanatics, would end with the appearance of the vanished 12th Shi’ite imam.

The following observation of Ohr HaChayim HaKadosh is especially relevant to our day, as it applies most poignantly to Israel’s closest ally, the United States: “[I]f a lion forgets he’s a lion and begins to see himself as a rabbit, others will treat him like one. He’ll be harassed, hunted, and mocked because he forfeited his own majesty.” Far from needing to demonstrate its prowess by constant strutting and displaying aggression, “a lion who remembers who he is doesn't need to roar all the time. His very presence commands awe. When we carry ourselves with inner clarity, rooted in Torah and emunah, the world reacts differently. Respect returns. Fear returns. Order returns.”

That moment may have arrived on the night of the Summer Solstice of 2025, June 21. The eagle had joined the lion, as more than 125 U.S. aircraft, including seven B-2 bombers, in full coordination with Israeli military intelligence, conducted a devastating raid on Iran’s nuclear program. The eagle, after all, has always been a symbol of strength, freedom, and courage. The two are ancient Armenian symbols, found together on royal insignia from times immemorial. And of course, in the Tanakh, as evidenced by this episode from II Samuel 1:23:

Saul and Jonathan,

Beloved and cherished,

Never parted

In life or in death!

They were swifter than eagles,

They were stronger than lions!

The American and Jewish people do not go looking for monsters to slay. But when repeatedly attacked and terrorized, while their repeated attempts to settle differences are contemptuously rejected, they have no choice but to protect not just themselves but other weaker, threatened creatures. Fortunately, with God’s help, once they do finally rise, every rodent gnawing at the entrails of civilization should consider scurrying under the rubble.

‍Juliana Geran Pilon is Senior Fellow at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization. Her latest book, An Idea Betrayed: Jews, Liberalism, and the American Left, has just been published.

11. For 250 years, it’s been ‘change or lose’ for our military. Here’s what needs changing now

Excerpts:

What is coming is not just an evolution; it's a revolution in how we man, train, and equip our forces for the next century of conflict. If we hope to maintain our decisive edge against any adversary, we must act decisively and without delay.

For 250 years, it’s been ‘change or lose’ for our military. Here’s what needs changing now

A former commandant and a futurist take stock of Spider’s Web, Rising Lion, and more.

By Robert Neller and Peter W. Singer

June 22, 2025

defenseone.com · by Robert Neller

A thread runs through the 250 years of service that the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps will celebrate this year: adaptability and relentless innovation are not just desirable traits, but essential for victory. No less urgently than at Yorktown, in the halls of Montezuma, and on D-Day, the U.S. military must once again harness everything our people bring to the fight, or lose the next war because we are afraid to change.

The latest reminders came in the form of Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web, the bold sneak attack that used small drones to devastate a strategic bomber force scattered all over Russia and Israel’s Operation Rising Lion, which took Iran’s leadership by utter surprise, decimating much of its military and nuclear capability. Again and again, we are warned that new trends and technologies demand nothing less than a radical rethinking of not just the weapons we plan to buy, but how we hope to prepare our service members for what comes next.

The operational environment awaiting our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Guardians will be defined by machine speed and overwhelming amounts of data. Our people in the field will demand, and receive, high-speed access to more information at their fingertips than what was literally in existence a generation ago. To win will not just require faster downloads; it's about the fusion of this data into real-time intelligence, instantaneous decision-making, and a common operating picture that extends from the squad leader to the theater commander.

On the hardware side, while too many leaders' visions of war remain wedded to the expensive platforms of old, the future battlefield will be teeming with robotics. They will be working not just as tools, but as critical partners operating autonomously or in tight human-machine teams, extending our reach and reducing risk to our personnel. This means we'll need to develop forward repair capabilities at an unprecedented scale, push technical expertise closer to the fight and ensure these complex systems remain operational under the most demanding conditions.

It also requires reimagining even the newest of technologies. For instance, uncrewed systems, aka "drones," are no longer just airframes to be flown, they are also now munitions with lethal precision to be both delivered and defended against. And we will need them in numbers far more than our current procurement plans are prepared to deliver. This year, Ukraine will build, buy, and use over 4 million drones. The U.S. military is behind that number by literal orders of magnitude.

As such, drones' value must be weighed by whether they are not just attritable, but affordable. Their proliferation also means every general and grunt needs to understand their offensive potential and how to counter them, making AI and robotics literacy a fundamental skill for all.

This notion of new skills points yet again to the essential value of the human side. Preparing the force for the future fight is not about how many pushups a service-member can perform, it's about how they can be profoundly smarter and better trained. The old notion of the "dumb grunt," if it ever truly existed—and, it did not in any meaningful sense—is utterly dead. The complexities of tomorrow's fight demand that our combat arms be filled by the best and brightest, which now means the most adaptable. The future fight will turn upon the critical thinkers, the problem-solvers who can make instantaneous, high-stakes decisions under duress, leveraging technology rather than being overwhelmed by it. They'll need to be masters of distributed operations, capable of independent action and rapid collaboration across vast distances and domains.

This demands a new kind of mental toughness, an ability to process immense amounts of information and adapt to rapidly changing circumstances, all while under fire. The cognitive load will be immense, requiring advanced critical thinking, rapid learning, and unparalleled resilience. We must thus cultivate these traits from day one, through rigorous, realistic training scenarios that push the boundaries of current capabilities.

The Marine Corps has always understood the decisive power of the small unit, the initiative of the individual, and the impact of the "strategic corporal"—not as a liability, but as a force multiplier. This lesson, learned in battles from Belleau Wood to Fallujah, will be even more critical as weapons like drones, long-range missiles, and cyber give our lowest echelons unprecedented reach and lethality. A small unit led by someone in their twenties will not just be asked to take the next hill, but perhaps to cause a lethal effect on a hill thousands of miles away.

This vision demands we stand our manpower policies on their head. The traditional hierarchy and assignments approach must be re-evaluated. With artificial intelligence capable of executing complex tasks and making informed decisions, this strategic reallocation should be designed to funnel our most capable minds and bodies where they are most critically needed, where human ingenuity will pay off the most and the stakes are highest. Our enlistment standards and career paths must reflect this reality, prioritizing intellectual acuity and adaptability for combat roles, and re-evaluating the requirements for support functions where automation can augment human effort. In turn, akin to how every unit is supported by specialist occupational fields like JAGs, chaplains, and medical corps, we may require new specialized support roles be provided for all our units, like data scientists.

What is coming is not just an evolution; it's a revolution in how we man, train, and equip our forces for the next century of conflict. If we hope to maintain our decisive edge against any adversary, we must act decisively and without delay.

Gen. (ret.) Robert Neller served as the 37th Commandant of the Marine Corps.

Peter W. Singer. PhD. is a best-selling author and Managing Partner of Useful Fiction.

defenseone.com · by Robert Neller

12. Why Recent Surprise Attacks Against Russia and Iran Should Worry Taiwan

Conclusion:

To be sure, the dust has yet to settle on either Spider’s Web or Rising Lion. Defense planners in Washington and Taipei should therefore guard against over-learning from events that are still playing out. It is nevertheless imperative that the United States and Taiwan start to think seriously about the latter’s unique vulnerability to a surprise “shock and awe” insider attack. China is undoubtedly studying the recent strikes in Russia and Iran — not just the drone tactics, but the intelligence groundwork, clandestine logistics, and operational secrecy that made them possible. It also knows it has many of the necessary pieces already in place to launch similar attacks against Taiwan. While Taiwan is only just now starting to get serious about exploring asymmetric warfare to counter China’s conventional military advantage, the unfortunate reality is that it must now also prepare for a Chinese asymmetric campaign against it.

Why Recent Surprise Attacks Against Russia and Iran Should Worry Taiwan – War on the Rocks

Michael A. Hunzeker and Yuster Yu

warontherocks.com · June 25, 2025

On June 1, Ukraine caught Russia off-guard with a bold series of drone strikes against five air bases inside of Russia. Weeks later, Israel initiated its ongoing air campaign against Iran’s nuclear program with an equally cunning attack on Iranian soil. These dramatic Trojan horse operations, replete with hidden weapons placed deep within their target’s territory, caught the world’s attention. Hopefully, Taipei took notice too. Taiwan must prepare for a range of potential contingencies. From gray zone incursions to naval blockades, and from long range strikes and offshore island grabs to a full-scale invasion: Chinese defense planners have options. Taiwan has to be prepared for all of them. Now, in the wake of two audacious deep strikes by Ukrainian and Israeli forces — Operation Spider’s Web and Operation Rising Lion, respectively — Taiwanese leaders will need to contemplate another potential scenario: a decisive first strike from within. And they must do so with a citizenry that remains ambivalent about the urgency of both the challenge and the need to prepare for war, as well as a patron that is far away, spread thin, and just initiated combat operations halfway around the world.

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Breathing New Life into an Old Threat

Surprise attacks from within are nothing new. From the Trojan War to 9/11, adversaries have long sought to win by unexpectedly hitting their target where they least expect it: at home with covertly pre-positioned assets.

And Taiwan has always been vulnerable to insider attacks. Yet up until now, the expectation was that covert Chinese agents operating in Taiwan would serve as part of a larger campaign and not as a knock-out blow in their own right. After all, other recent attempts to overthrow a regime with the first punch, including the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Russia’s re-invasion of Ukraine in 2022, failed to deliver a quick victory.

That was before Spider’s Web and Rising Lion. These operations suggest that China might have a way to combine old tools — such as spies, fifth columns, and saboteurs — with newer capabilities pre-staged before the fighting starts — like drones and malware — to overwhelm and paralyze the country. Deterrence could falter to the degree Beijing (thinks it) can achieve these goals before Taipei is able to mobilize its defenses or Washington could deploy U.S. forces in decisive numbers.

Will these two operations reshape China’s calculus or its war plans? We have no idea. It is entirely possible that both operations will ultimately prove overhyped rather than a revolutionary inflection point in warfare. At the same time, it is our well-considered view that Taiwan is uniquely vulnerable to a preemptive strike from within. Therefore, Taipei and Washington should take the risk seriously.

Thankfully, there are ways to mitigate this challenge. There are commonsense measures, including rigorously testing continuity of government operations, especially in a communications-degraded environment. Other options include steps that Taipei ought to be taking anyway. In particular, accelerating asymmetric defense transformation and creating a territorial defense force will both offer a meaningful hedge against a surprise attack by making it harder for Beijing to rapidly exploit a successful first strike. Finally, Taiwan should invest in “red teaming” to stress test its leadership and defensive plans against a range of plausible surprise attacks from within. The harsh fact is that Taiwan is at far more risk of being caught off guard than either Russia or Iran, not least because there is no question China has already infiltrated Taiwan.

Learning from Audacity

Ukraine’s daring, multi-axis strike showed that drones can serve as a cheap and effective way to conduct highly precise “long range” strikes (by virtue of having been covertly pre-positioned near Russian bases far from the front) with little to no warning. Perhaps the most notable aspect of the operation was the fact that Ukrainian operatives spent months quietly smuggling drone components into Russia. Ukraine ultimately built 117 first-person view drones, which remained concealed inside wooden boxes on civilian trucks. Ukrainian operatives, and in some cases unwitting Russian drivers for hire, parked these ordinary-looking vehicles near their targets. A remote signal caused the containers to spring open and unleash the drones in waves. The operation disabled or destroyed some of Russia’s most valuable strategic aircraft, including Tu‑95 bombers, A‑50 AWACS, and Il‑78 refuelers. Western estimates place the damage at up to $7 billion, including a third of Russia’s cruise missile-capable fleet.

Less than two weeks later, the Israeli military launched its own, still ongoing, attack. The Mossad quietly smuggled micro-drones into Iran months before the first fighter jet took off. They hid these drones in suitcases, trucks, and shipping containers near Iranian missile batteries and radar sites, and activated them just hours before the main Israeli strikes were set to begin. These drones helped compromise Iran’s air defenses, opening the door for over 200 Israeli jets, including waves of F‑35s, to launch precision strikes on Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, air defense missile and radar crews, and of course nuclear facilities in Natanz and Isfahan.

In the wake of both operations, it seems reasonable to think that Beijing will contemplate whether it too can use cheap, mobile, lethal, and potentially autonomous weapons to mount a surprise attack on strategic targets. Operation Rising Lion in particular demonstrates ways China might creatively weave drones, artificial intelligence, and its longstanding covert preparations into a larger surprise campaign. Indeed, any country now pondering a surprise attack or surviving one cannot afford to ignore these cases.

Why Taiwan is so Vulnerable

The fact is that Chinese proximity, Taiwanese openness, and the deep cultural, linguistic, and economic ties between the two have always made Taiwan susceptible to an attack from within. Four vulnerabilities are especially noteworthy in the context of a surprise attack from within.

Espionage

Taiwan has a well-documented espionage problem. The number of recent high profile cases is striking. Three of President LaiChing-Te’s military guards were caught selling classified information to China, including sensitive data from Lai’s Wanli security detail. Ho Jen-chieh, an assistant to the current Secretary General of Taiwan’s National Security Council and former Foreign Minister, Joseph Wu, was detained on charges of spying for China. Taiwanese prosecutors indicted Kao An-kuo, a retired Army lieutenant general and the convener of the so-called “Republic of China Taiwan Military government,” along with five others for taking money from the Chinese Communist Party to establish an armed organization in Taiwan, plot operations to overthrow the government, and pledge to act as an inside agent in support of an invasion from the mainland. The list goes on. An active-duty intelligence officer from Taiwan’s ultra-secret signals intelligence Unit — the Communication Development Office — was caught selling high-level classified information to the Chinese military. A retired Taiwanese air force officer who served in the Communication Development Office and the Ministry of National Defense’s J-2 (Intelligence) division, helped develop covert networks inside Taiwan. Chinese agents recruited a retired Military Intelligence Bureau colonel who referred to himself as “Taiwan’s Number 1 Spy.” He went on to turn other retired military officers. Another Taiwanese air force officer stationed at the Songshan Base Command — which services and operates aircraft used by the president and senior military leadership — leaked classified information. And a former bodyguard to Presidents Chiang Ching-kuo and Lee Teng-hui was accused of persuading his nephew, army officer Wang Wen-yen — then serving at the Presidential Security Center — to gather classified details about President Tsai Ing-wen’s secret meetings with visiting U.S. and Japanese lawmakers and officials.

There is no question that China has already penetrated Taiwan’s most sensitive institutions — including the presidential office, the Foreign Ministry, the Legislative Yuan, top secret intelligence units, and, of course, the military. Active duty and retired personnel are a particularly alluring target. In 2024 alone, 15 retired military personnel — accounting for 23 percent of all espionage prosecutions — and 28 active duty personnel — accounting for 43 percent of all espionage prosecutions — were indicted on charges of spying for Beijing.

More frightening is the fact that these cases might just be the tip of the iceberg. The number of prosecuted Chinese espionage cases has doubled over the past two years alone. Former Military Intelligence Bureau Director Liu De-liang estimates that more than 5,000 undercover Chinese agents are currently living in Taiwan. He describes the threat as “beyond imagination.” Particularly worrying is the fact that National Security Bureau Deputy Director Huang Ming-chao believes that this figure includes approximately 1,300 Chinese nationals who have gone missing after illegally entering Taiwan.

Gangs

Beijing is also actively exploiting Taiwan’s criminal gangs. Chinese intelligence operatives have long worked to establish and leverage ties with both national crime networks — including the Bamboo Union, the Heavenly Way Alliance, and the Four Seas Gang — and smaller local groups such as the Niupu Gang in Taipei, the Blood Eagle Gang in Taoyuan, the Sanhuan Gang in Hsinchu, the Taixi Gang in Yunlin, and the Dongmen Gang in Tainan. Chinese intelligence officers have built an extensive, 30,000-word “Map of Taiwan’s Armed Gang Factions.” This report describes gang influence zones and provides Beijing with a comprehensive breakdown of the major gang factions across Taiwan’s cities and counties, including detailed information on their branches and sub-organizations. It includes extensive intelligence on temple networks, firepower, financial flows, political connections, and even assessments such as “high mobility and aggression,” “uncommitted, needs monitoring,” and “politically unstable.” It outlines proposed bribery budgets and assesses vulnerability to infiltration. The report also shows that Chinese authorities are especially interested in religious sites across Taiwan, including major religious centers such as Dajia Jenn Lann Temple, Beigang Chaotian Temple, and Baishatun Gongtian Temple.

Smuggling

Taiwan’s trade-reliant economy opens the door to smuggling. Nearly 40,000 cargo ships visit Taiwanese ports each year. And some of Taiwan’s offshore islands are literally within swimming distance of the Chinese coast. It is not hard to see how Beijing might exploit such vulnerabilities while also using its aforementioned ties to the Taiwan’s criminal underworld and Taiwanese military personnel to sneak and pre-stage drones, explosives, supplies, and operatives into Taiwan.

Nor does Beijing even need to rely on illicit channels to preposition assets. Chinese logistics companies already operate openly in Taiwan. S.F. Express has been active since 2007, and Hong Kong-based Lalamove since 2015. Their trucks are a routine sight across the island, offering Beijing a low profile, ready-made distribution network for moving weaponized drones or related equipment undetected. And as was the case with Ukraine’s audacious attack, these drivers do not even need to be witting or willing participants in the ruse.

China is even smuggling parts into Taiwanese military technology. In January, a whistleblower alleged that two domestically developed drones — the Chien Feng I and Rui Yuan II — contained Chinese made chips and memory cards. A former employee further revealed that despite a 2018 ban on Chinese components, parts for these drones were still being sourced from the “red supply chain” and funneled through Singapore’s ACE6 Technologies. ACE6 lacks manufacturing capacity and is funded by a Hong Kong firm tied to an address in Shenzhen. Moreover, Taiwan’s flagship drone, the Teng Yun, also uses a Chinese-made RS-2W-1015 wireless module. And when then President-elect Lai visited Taiwan’s UAV AI Innovation and R&D Center in Chiayi last year, reporters spotted a drone on display equipped with a motor labeled “Made in China.”

Centralization

Perhaps Taiwan’s greatest source of vulnerability to a surprise attack from within that tries to decapitate — or at least overwhelm — its leadership is the fact that its military remains far too centralized. As we previously documented in these pages, Taiwan’s military leadership is top-heavy, rigid, sclerotic, and hierarchical. Exercises are scripted. Subordinates worry excessively about making mistakes. Junior leaders are neither empowered nor trained to seize the initiative. All things equal, a military leadership system structured in this way is already more susceptible to decapitation and paralysis than one which is decentralized and empowered from the bottom up. Anyone who has spent much time around Taiwan’s military knows that if China manages to take out a sizeable portion of Taiwan’s command and control system, there is a very real risk that even its senior most operational commanders will either do nothing until directions are forthcoming, or will insist on executing a pre-scripted plan (that China might already have). It does not help that the Ministry of National Defense’s headquarters is a mere few thousand feet off of the flight path for aircraft landing at Taipei’s Songshan airport.

Connecting the Dots

Each of these vulnerabilities is a problem in its own right. Viewed collectively — especially after recent surprise attacks against Russia and Iran — they suggest that Taiwan and the United States should take the risk of a decisive surprise attack from within much more seriously.

What might such an operation look like?

Imagine a not too distant future in which yet another crisis is brewing in the Taiwan Strait. Beijing once again uses a supposed violation of its “One China Principle” as an excuse to launch a large-scale joint exercise. Because Washington and Taipei have weathered many such storms in recent years, they return to their well-worn playbook. The United States moves a carrier strike group closer to Taiwan. A U.S. Marine littoral regiment conducts last minute rotational training in Northern Luzon meant to deter and, if necessary, enter the fight. Taiwanese coastal defense batteries set up astride the most likely invasion beaches as units conduct “snap” response exercises to demonstrate their readiness. Yet because the People’s Liberation Army does not seem to be staging a landing force or the logistics needed for a massive amphibious invasion, American and Taiwanese military commanders agree that they have what they need to handle any foreseeable contingency.

Unfortunately, the assault forces are already in Taiwan. Beijing spent years buying off Taiwanese gangs, port officials, and key military leaders. It exploits both these meticulously crafted networks as well as “civilian” owned shipping to smuggle weapons, supplies, special operations cells — and yes, drones — into Taiwan via its many ports. Thus, even as Taiwanese air force jets and naval ships patrol around the island looking for a strike from across the strait, the storm breaks inside the country.

Chinese intelligence agents masquerading as police officers and security guards assassinate key Taiwanese leaders. Saboteurs destroy critical infrastructure and highly visible symbols of political power. Taiwanese gangs on the United Front payroll spill into the streets. Cyber operations, enabled by well-positioned spies, bring down the power and communications grid. Some compromised Taiwanese officers opt not to show up for duty. Others disable critical command and control links. Worse yet, Chinese officers hijack compromised communications systems to issue nonsensical orders to Taiwanese units. That is when thousands of drones infiltrated into Taiwan in the preceding months emerge from nondescript containers to destroy air defense radars, damage fighter jets on the runway, and hammer coastal defense missile batteries the moment they emerge from their bunkers.

In a matter of hours, Taiwan’s key political and military leaders are dead, incapacitated, or holed up in safe rooms — cut off from their people and their military. Police and civil defense units struggle to regain control from Taiwanese gangs. Civilians are in the dark, figuratively and literally. Neighbors begin to wonder who they can trust. Reservists remain at home, because the order to mobilize never comes. Many active duty units sit in their barracks awaiting instructions. With Taiwan’s air and coastal defenses effectively neutralized, the door for missile and air strikes is now wide open. U.S. forces look on helplessly as Chinese aircraft, missiles, and drones surge across the Strait. Sweeping aside surviving Taiwanese ships and aircraft, they hunt ground targets with impunity even as the first airborne and air assault troops put boots on the ground. The Taiwanese people are in shock. Long promised that even if a (very unlikely) invasion does happen, it will be defeated on the beaches, they must now come to grips with the reality that thousands of Chinese troops are already massing in and around their major cities.

Blunting the Risk

Again, no one knows if Beijing is actually thinking along these lines. At the very least it appears that Chinese planners are paying close attention to the war in Ukraine and are aware of the costs and risks associated with a prolonged conflict. In any case, hope is not a course of action, especially because Taiwan is unusually susceptible to a surprise first strike from within. At the very least, the risk of such a scenario is not zero.

Thankfully, there are ways to reduce the risk, many of which involve doing things that Taipei ought to be doing anyway.

First, the Lai administration ought to get serious about planning for continuity of government operations. Insofar as we are aware, although Taiwan has a list of successors, there are no protocols in place to determine who is in charge if multiple leaders are incapacitated or otherwise unable to communicate; or how such determinations will be made if governmental command and control infrastructure is seriously damaged. Lai and his national security staff should develop, rigorously test, and religiously rehearse scenarios in which different — and multiple — key civilian and military leaders are neutralized.

Second, Taiwan should accelerate asymmetric defense transformation. If Operations Spider’s Web and Rising Lion do nothing else, they demonstrate the risks associated with over-investing in $2 billion submarines, F-16V aircraft, and M1AT main battle tanks. Small numbers of expensive weapons make for especially alluring targets. In contrast, a military force equipped, postured, and trained to wage a flexible defense in depth across the Taiwan Strait and Taiwan itself is the best (and most affordable) insurance policy against a preemptive attack, even from within. It bears repeating that making such a transition requires Taiwan to do more than just buy the “right” weapons. The Ministry of National Defense also needs to articulate a coherent doctrine, publish operational concepts, and begin reforming its rigid culture to make asymmetry a viable and credible reality. Time is running out to take these steps. Not because war is inevitable, but because change — especially culture change — tends to unfold slowly. Nor would it hurt to thin the ranks of the military’s 300-plus-strong general and flag officer corps, if only because it reduces the number of key leaders Beijing might attempt to turn.

Third, Taiwan needs to establish a territorial defense force comprised of volunteers trained and equipped to wage an insurgency. The Lai administration’s existing efforts to enhance resilience and civil defense are admirable, but they are not enough. General Secretary Xi Jinping will not be deterred from launching a devastating insider attack because the Taiwanese people have stockpiled supplies (which most have yet to do) or know how to perform first aid. The best way to convince him not to try is to ensure that his attempt to cut the head off the snake will not eliminate the need for a costly, prolonged, and uncertain occupation.

Finally, Taiwan should stress test its vulnerabilities to a multi-dimensional surprise attack, not least because Taiwan is arguably far more at risk of being caught off guard and overwhelmed than either Russia or Iran. A common mistake in defense planning is preparing for a generic threat rather than anticipating how the enemy sees the situation, and the way it is most likely to solve the operational challenges it believes that it faces. One of us, a cybersecurity professional, has witnessed this mindset play out repeatedly in Taiwan’s digital domain — where organizations rely on broad, checklist-style defenses instead of analyzing adversary behavior and crafting tailored countermeasures. The best way to address this shortfall is to engage independent red teams empowered to creatively explore and uncover vulnerabilities that internal personnel may overlook. These red teams can also help identify and reality check potential counter-deception and counterintelligence operations designed to identify and expose inside threats.

To be sure, the dust has yet to settle on either Spider’s Web or Rising Lion. Defense planners in Washington and Taipei should therefore guard against over-learning from events that are still playing out. It is nevertheless imperative that the United States and Taiwan start to think seriously about the latter’s unique vulnerability to a surprise “shock and awe” insider attack. China is undoubtedly studying the recent strikes in Russia and Iran — not just the drone tactics, but the intelligence groundwork, clandestine logistics, and operational secrecy that made them possible. It also knows it has many of the necessary pieces already in place to launch similar attacks against Taiwan. While Taiwan is only just now starting to get serious about exploring asymmetric warfare to counter China’s conventional military advantage, the unfortunate reality is that it must now also prepare for a Chinese asymmetric campaign against it.

BECOME A MEMBER

Michael A. Hunzeker (@MichaelHunzeker) is an associate professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, where he also directs the Taiwan Security Monitor. He served in the Marine Corps from 2000 to 2006.

Yuster Yu is the senior executive advisor of Octon International and a senior advisor of the iScann Group. A retired Taiwanese naval officer, he served on Taiwan’s National Security Council and as a naval attaché to the United States. He is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, the U.S. Pacific Fleet Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer Course, and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Image: 臺灣港務股份有限公司高雄港務分公司 via Wikimedia Commons

warontherocks.com · June 25, 2025

13. War, Bound: Fiscal Constraints, Tactical Realities, and Contemporary Land Warfare

Excerpts:

These quibbles aside, Wilf Owen has written a sharp and enjoyably punchy book that is well worth the time of any serving soldier or militarily conversant civilian. Euclid’s Army is “not a cookbook,” nor is it a book about the future of war; Owen invokes a phrase in his adopted Hebrew that finds the shortest path to ridicule is prophecy. What he is attempting, in eighty thousand or so words, is to lay out what can be done to prepare for warfare today, using existing equipment and concepts, applied with intellectual rigor and unremitting attention to economy.

Military professionals might be put off by the breezy way Owen covers rules of engagement, military manpower, or information operations (“Warfare is about killing and breaking will. Information Warfare is about political opinions mostly consumed on a small screen in a café. They are not the same”). But for American soldiers reared on reading lists littered with shallow strategy and the worst banalities of the airport bookshop nonfiction rack, Euclid’s Army offers a welcome fixation on the problems and practicalities of fighting in 2025.

Like Georges Clemenceau, Wilf Owen judges much to be above the soldier’s pay grade; his focus is warfare, not war. The where and the when of war are unknowable, while the why and the who are not his concerns. For the 99 percent of soldiers serving below the strategic level, the what and the how of modern warfare ought to be more than enough to chew on.

War, Bound: Fiscal Constraints, Tactical Realities, and Contemporary Land Warfare - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Gil Barndollar · June 25, 2025

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Wilf Owen, Euclid’s Army: Preparing Land Forces for Warfare Today (Howgate Publishing, 2025)

It’s been a rough new millennium for armies. After the end of history ended abruptly on 9/11, US and NATO land forces spent twenty years pursuing counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, spending trillions of dollars to achieve strategic defeat despite the massive tactical overmatch they held against insurgent enemies. The US Army now grapples with an identity crisis, while European NATO forces are in far worse shape: belatedly rearming, but increasingly unable to man their shrunken formations. The West’s potential adversaries are hardly better off: The failures of Russia’s military reforms have been dramatically exposed since 2022, while China seems to doubt its army’s readiness for war amid relentless purges of the top ranks.

A major land war in Europe, now three years old, has certainly given a shot in the arm to discussions of ground combat—and to European defense budgets. But the grinding, attritional nature of the war in Ukraine, after the failure of Russia’s initial coup de main and Ukraine’s 2023 counterattack, has fueled a legion of technological determinists who argue that drones have revolutionized warfare. (The metastasizing US defense venture capital sector, now armed with political influence commensurate with its growth, may also be a factor in this latest RMA devil’s tattoo).

William F. (Wilf) Owen is having none of it. A British Army veteran, defense consultant, and editor of Military Strategy Magazine, Owen is a longtime analyst and commentator on military affairs, often in the pages of the British Army Review and the RUSI Journal. A naturalized Israeli citizen, he blends deep knowledge of two nearly opposite military cultures. Britain wields the original long-service, professionalized Anglosphere army, while Israel is the world’s foremost model for a conscript, reservist, nation in arms. In his new book, Euclid’s Army: Preparing Land Forces for Warfare Today, Owen has done something oddly rare in contemporary military writing: assembling an intensely practical primer on modern tactics and training, based around the idea of what an army division should look like and what it needs to fight today.

Euclid’s Army attempts to mirror the approach of the father of geometry by proceeding from axioms to more advanced propositions and conclusions. Owen mostly does this through the concept of the “Monash Division,” a deployable armored division named after the Jewish Australian general judged by one major historian to have been “the only general of creative originality produced by the First World War.” Owen argues that almost every nation on earth could afford to train and equip something like a Monash Division.

The Monash Division is governed by a simple imperative: Keep total vehicle numbers under two thousand in order to force simplicity, speed of movement, and affordability. The last criterion is the critical one. As a Briton, Owen comes from an army that broke both Napoleon’s Grande Armée and Hindenburg’s Heer in one hundred days but is now functionally unable to deploy a full warfighting division. As an Israeli, he observes an army that can summon over five hundred thousand soldiers from a population of fewer than eight million—force generation capacity only possible through conscription, ready reservists, and a relentlessly pragmatic national security orientation.

America might seem insulated from Wilf Owen’s prerogatives. From the perspective of any uniformed foreign observer, the United States Army and Marine Corps are uniquely, indeed ridiculously, well equipped. US land forces boast a surfeit of gold-plated solutions to tactical and operation problems: $50 million attack helicopters to kill tanks, $80 million tiltrotors to conduct raids, $5 billion for an (at best) incrementally better battle rifle. But the United States quietly passed a major red line last year. In fiscal year 2024, spending on net interest on the US national debt surpassed defense spending for the first time. Aging platforms, recruiting struggles, and the skyrocketing cost of new weapons systems are threatening America’s tactical edge and strategic preeminence, while political leaders stare at an annual federal budget deficit of nearly $2 trillion. Restoring sensible but ruthless economy to American defense is not only overdue, but essential.

After a succinct but valuable summary of the Monash Division, concepts and doctrine, and training for war, Owen takes his readers through short chapters on infantry, cavalry, fires, air defense, and other supporting arms. He then moves on to broader examinations of offense, defense, terrain, and more niche subjects. A through line is a focus on the capabilities of “Rifleman Snotgoblin”—Owen’s far more evocative version of Britain’s “Tommy” or the US Army’s even blander “Joe.”

Wilf’s examination of “Deploy March Sustain” is particularly laudable. Contending that “readiness is the test of any army,” Owen draws on Cold War and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) history to lay out realistic standards for units and armies. These lessons are already being recalled and applied: Another conscript-reservist force, the Finnish Army, created higher-readiness and very-high-readiness units in the wake of the 2014 Crimean annexation, as a hedge against Russian “little green men” and faits accompli. Owen argues for a division two-thousand-kilometer road march as a key readiness performance test. For those of us raised on facile stoplight readiness reporting, such a challenge should be both welcomed and dreaded.

Euclid’s Army sometimes reads like a belated broadside against the woolly-headed Western military thinking of the post-9/11 era. Tasked with nation building and man hunting in some of the most remote and austere regions of the world for the better part of two decades, the armies of wealthy Western democracies degraded intellectually and often physically. Buoyed by carefully curated history, most NATO militaries willfully went down the doctrinal cul de sac of third-party counterinsurgency. Even as their conventional capacity ebbed, their thinkers scribbled hills of hubris; armed with new “population-centric” doctrine, Western militaries could “change entire societies.”

Owen offers a simple corrective: “Using lethal force to break the collective will to endure in combat defeats any type of armed opponent in any environment.” Though he doesn’t use the perhaps fraught term, Wilf is on the counter-guerrilla side of the counterinsurgency debate of the early aughts. Transforming societies is far beyond an army’s remit.

Owen has argued in a host of other venues over the years that that much-invoked old T. E. Lawrence line—“Irregular warfare is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge”—is hokum. High-intensity, formation-level (brigade-level) warfare brings with it enormous violence, disruption, and requirements for speed and skill that outstrip anything demanded by lesser contingencies. This was near heresy little more than a decade ago, but today the old wine again drinks smoothly: “You can make a good soldier into an adequate policeman more easily than a good policeman into an adequate soldier.”

Owen is equally ardent in his antipathy to the myths of urban warfare. Drawing on operational research by the UK’s Defence Evaluation and Research Agency in the 1980s, he notes that urban operations are invariably a death trap for the defender, not the attacker. There are simple reasons for this. Truncated sight lines and complex terrain enable attackers to get close to defensive positions relatively easily and destroy or bypass them. Often equipped with healthy amounts of high explosives down to the squad level, modern armies are rarely subject to the tyranny of Battle Drill 6. Contrary to popular current narratives, Wilf notes that attackers’ daily casualties have almost always been far lower than those of defenders in recent urban combat operations all over the world. Wilf contends that five to ten days of annual urban training for any combat unit is sufficient. (The problem of urban scale, however, is unaddressed).

Owen’s thoughts on unmanned systems are a welcome corrective to the current waves of drone mania pulsing out ceaselessly from the war in Ukraine. Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have been around since World War I. The ability of a UAS operator to find a target and then pass targeting data to a firing platform has existed for more than forty years. Loitering munitions are thirty years old. The IDF issued all infantry units with UAS sections nearly twenty years ago. Little about the drone use in Ukraine, Owen notes repeatedly in Euclid’s Army, is meaningfully new or surprising.

What has changed is the cost. UAS now provide a poor man’s air force, with major tactical impacts from the Libyan desert to the Donbas. But this is evolutionary, not revolutionary, change. The transparent battlefield is a myth, though a useful measure of the credulity of those who espouse it.

As Owen notes early on in his book, Archibald Wavell and Winston Churchill (or George Marshall and Harry S. Truman on this side of the Atlantic) “went from horse-mounted armies with no tanks or aircraft to nuclear warfare within their professional lifetimes. . . . No modern commander has ever seen anything like that rate of change.”

Dominance of the air domain and the electromagnetic spectrum remain critical to victory on land. A failure to establish that dominance, coupled with training and materiel deficiencies that hamstring maneuver and exploitation, has yielded the drone-scoured, nearly static battlefields of Ukraine. Drones, and countermeasures to them, will continue to evolve as part of the combined arms team.

Euclid’s Army is rife with practical digressions and reminders. Reverse slope defenses, communications architecture, the merits of mines, and the utility of wargames all come in for comment. In an infantry truism that bears repeating, Wilf notes that focusing collective training on reconnaissance and movements to contact will lift an organization’s overall level of proficiency more quickly and surely than repetitions of any other task.

Owen also questions some old verities. In the aftermath of Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon, some IDF officers were widely attacked as “plasma screen commanders.” This was to be expected in an army with an unparalleled (and often bloody) tradition of officer leadership from the front. But Owen argues that the critique was also professionally illiterate. Unlike in the 1980s or 1990s, battalion and brigade commanders today should have a far better picture of the overall tactical situation than their subordinates. Above the company level, the idea that rapidly gaining and using accurate and relevant information comes from “being shoulder to shoulder with junior NCOs, binoculars in hand, as bullets splash the ground around you, is at best moronic.” Moral example and shared risk remain intrinsic elements of effective combat leadership on the emptying battlefields of the twenty-first century—but this should not be confused with effective command and control.

In other instances, the tried and true is still true. To a US Army that is yet again tweaking its physical fitness test, Wilf offers two very simple and cheap physical tests for the infantryman: an eighteen-kilometer (eleven-mile) march with fifty pounds plus weapon and water in three hours in reasonable temperatures, on two consecutive days; and climbing an eight-meter rope—with arms only—twice in two minutes.

For all of its breadth, Euclid’s Army is hampered by a lack of basic diagrams. Occasionally a point or comparison is fleshed out graphically, but the Monash Division is laid down only in words. Though Owen rightly notes that tables of organization and equipment (TOEs) don’t survive contact with reality, his reader is left begging for at least a one-page wire diagram.

There is also the question of what a division of two combat brigades, as Owen proposes, gets you in a major war. Between them, Russia and Ukraine boast around three hundred combat brigades, the majority of which are currently holding frontage. Again: Britain, with an active duty army that fits in Wembley Stadium with room to spare, cannot field a single armored division today. And the British Army is still among NATO’s better funded and most capable ground forces! One is far more than none, and Owen rightly warns against building formations that cannot be properly trained and equipped. But a critic of the concept of maneuver warfare, watching a war of attrition rage, might find a few more words to discuss reserves, mobilization, and the very clear constraints on a new, far smaller, British Expeditionary Force (BEF). The first BEF, of 1914, boasted the finest marksmen in Europe, while the second, in 1940, was the first fully mechanized field army in the world. The BEF of World War I essentially ceased to exist in a matter of months; the World War II version was lucky to escape the continent by the skin of its teeth. Quality only gets you so far.

These quibbles aside, Wilf Owen has written a sharp and enjoyably punchy book that is well worth the time of any serving soldier or militarily conversant civilian. Euclid’s Army is “not a cookbook,” nor is it a book about the future of war; Owen invokes a phrase in his adopted Hebrew that finds the shortest path to ridicule is prophecy. What he is attempting, in eighty thousand or so words, is to lay out what can be done to prepare for warfare today, using existing equipment and concepts, applied with intellectual rigor and unremitting attention to economy.

Military professionals might be put off by the breezy way Owen covers rules of engagement, military manpower, or information operations (“Warfare is about killing and breaking will. Information Warfare is about political opinions mostly consumed on a small screen in a café. They are not the same”). But for American soldiers reared on reading lists littered with shallow strategy and the worst banalities of the airport bookshop nonfiction rack, Euclid’s Army offers a welcome fixation on the problems and practicalities of fighting in 2025.

Like Georges Clemenceau, Wilf Owen judges much to be above the soldier’s pay grade; his focus is warfare, not war. The where and the when of war are unknowable, while the why and the who are not his concerns. For the 99 percent of soldiers serving below the strategic level, the what and the how of modern warfare ought to be more than enough to chew on.

Gil Barndollar is an MWI research fellow. A US Marine Corps veteran and serving National Guardsman, he is also a Lieutenant General Bernard E. Trainor veterans fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

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

Image: Members of 3rd United Kingdom Division conduct a rehearsal of concept drill during Warfighter Exercise 25-4 at Fort Hood (then Cavazos), Texas, May 28, 2025. (Credit: Sgt. Jose Escamilla, US Army)

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Gil Barndollar · June 25, 2025

14. The Strategic Consequences of Deferred Maintenance: Challenges to the Resilience of U.S. Sea Power

Conclusion:

The Sea Services are at a crossroads. Deferred maintenance is not just a problem to be solved in the abstract—it is an existential threat to America’s ability to project power, maintain global stability, and deter aggression from China and Russia. The warnings are clear, the stakes are high, and the time for action is now.

If we ignore these critical challenges, we will wake up one day to find that our once-dominant fleet can no longer defend U.S. interests. That day is fast approaching; only decisive, bold action can prevent it. Sea Services must overhaul its maintenance approach before it’s too late.

The world isn’t waiting for the U.S. to catch up, and our adversaries are already moving to exploit our weaknesses. The question is simple: will we rise to the challenge or fall behind?

The choice is ours—and if action is not taken, the consequences will echo for generations.

The Strategic Consequences of Deferred Maintenance: Challenges to the Resilience of U.S. Sea Power

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/06/25/the-strategic-consequences-of-deferred-maintenance-challenges-to-the-resilience-of-u-s-sea-power/

by Dr. Emily Pesicka

06.25.2025 at 06:00am

Abstract

The U.S. Sea Services – comprising the Navy, Coast Guard, and Military Sealift Command – face a mounting crisis born of decades of deferred maintenance, shrinking fleet size, and aging infrastructure. As great power competition with China and Russia intensifies these systemic issues have eroded America’s maritime dominance and compromised its ability to project power, sustain readiness, and respond rapidly to global contingencies.

This article argues that maintenance shortfalls are not merely logistical hurdles but represent a strategic vulnerability with far-reaching consequences. Drawing on data from the Government Accountability Office and defense assessments, it details how prolonged neglect has diminished naval capacity and capability, resulting in a force increasingly ill-suited to 21st-century threats. While past reform efforts have fallen short, the article contends that bold, immediate action to overhaul maintenance planning and investment in shipyard infrastructure is essential. Without decisive intervention, the U.S. risks ceding maritime advantage to adversaries prepared to exploit its inertia.

Introduction

The U.S. Sea Services are on the brink of a precipice. Years of ship maintenance neglect, complacency due to ship degradation, and an inability to keep up with a quickly changing global landscape have left the Navy, Coast Guard, and Military Sealift Command ill-prepared for the reality of 21st-century great power competition. It is common knowledge that military spending fluctuates with geopolitical and economic factors, often leading to deferred maintenance when funds are tight, or priorities shift. For the U.S. Sea Services, these maintenance delays directly impact readiness, increase long-term maintenance costs, and limit operational capabilities and capacities. Deferred maintenance erodes the foundation of America’s maritime dominance.

The era of global hegemony, when the U.S. could afford to drag its feet on maintaining ships, is over. China and Russia are actively advancing their strategic objectives, showing no inclination to wait for the United States to resolve its internal challenges and enhance its readiness. As great power competition intensifies, consistent and strategic planning is crucial to ensure the U.S. military remains prepared, regardless of budgetary changes. This article will show how the deferred maintenance crisis hinders our ability to project power and advocate for the steps the U.S. must take to avert a potential catastrophe.

Operational Consequences: Ships in Port

Ships are the backbone of America’s global military presence—emphasizing the strategic importance of naval forces to U.S. defense and international presence. The Navy’s fleet is central to maintaining maritime security, ensuring freedom of navigation, and projecting power globally. The U.S. Sea Services operate in critical regions like the South China Sea, the Red Sea, and the Arctic to counter potential adversaries such as China and Russia, safeguarding international trade routes and responding to global threats.

Deferred maintenance is evident across the Navy, Coast Guard, and Military Sealift Command (MSC), resulting in critical assets being tied up in drydocks or awaiting long-overdue repairs. For example, the Navy faces significant challenges due to a shortage of certified dry docks, particularly on the West Coast, where only four dry docks serve 45 surface ships, creating a bottleneck that delays routine maintenance and modernization efforts. This shortfall is further compounded by backlogs and unexpected growth in maintenance work beyond the planned scope, which results in a domino effect for subsequent vessels waiting for their turn.

The Coast Guard faces similar challenges, with older vessels, such as its Polar-class icebreakers, suffering from deferred maintenance and aging equipment that limits their operational capabilities in the Arctic. The MSC, responsible for prepositioning ships, also deals with maintenance deficiencies. These issues include inadequate preventative maintenance plans and poor contractor oversight, which have led to unplanned repair costs and extended dry dock periods, impeding the readiness of vital logistics and support vessels.

U.S. aircraft carriers, the linchpins of U.S. maritime superiority, are a prime example. Due to maintenance delays, multiple carriers have been unavailable at crucial moments, severely limiting our ability to respond to crises. For example, USS George Washington (CVN 73) was in port undergoing repairs due to extensive maintenance needs. It could not support operations during heightened tensions in the Indo-Pacific region. Another example is the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77), which faced a maintenance availability period extending over 20 months—longer than planned—due to delays and challenges at Norfolk Shipyard. These maintenance issues have severely impacted the Navy’s ability to deploy carriers when needed, leaving the East Coast with fewer operational carriers available for crisis response.

In an era when China is churning out ships at an unprecedented rate—boasting a fleet of approximately 400 battle force ships compared to the U.S. Navy’s around 300 operational ships—can we afford to have multi-billion-dollar platforms sitting idle in dry dock? The answer is obvious, yet our repair and maintenance continue at a pace that fails to respond to the urgency or consequence of letting the U.S. fleet rust away. At the same time, military budgets and funding see constraints year after year.

Decades of Decline Readiness

Over the past 30 years, the Department of Defense (DoD) has seen a consistent decline in the operational readiness of its naval fleet. The U.S. Navy’s fleet size decreased from over 500 ships in the early 1990s to around 290. The reduction, combined with extended deployments and deferred maintenance, has significantly strained fleet readiness, making it increasingly difficult to maintain operational capabilities.

Reports by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and other defense analyses highlight that maintenance backlogs, personnel shortages, and inadequate shipyard capacity have contributed to this issue. For example, the GAO noted that the Navy faces challenges completing necessary maintenance due to limited drydock availability and outdated infrastructure. Furthermore, a 2010 report identified a “tipping point” in fleet readiness, indicating that current strategies were unsustainable given the shrinking fleet size and the high operational tempo.

To address these problems, various initiatives, such as the Optimized Fleet Response Plan (OFRP), have been introduced. However, these measures have not fully resolved longstanding issues, leading to a continued decline in readiness over the past several decades.

Impacts on the Navy’s readiness are closely tied to its operational capacity and capabilities, both of which have declined for decades. The reduction in fleet size from over 500 ships to around 290 has led to significant strain, limiting the Navy’s ability to meet global demands while maintaining adequate training and repair schedules. Capacity shortfalls are compounded by aging vessels and insufficient shipyard infrastructure, resulting in a backlog of maintenance projects and delays in returning ships to operational status. These challenges diminish the Navy’s capabilities, reducing the availability of combat-ready vessels needed to respond quickly to conflicts or crises. The widening gap between available capacity reducing and operational requirements increasing stresses the urgent need for strategic investment in shipbuilding and repair facilities to restore and sustain naval readiness. As capacity declines, so too does capability—fewer ships and constrained infrastructure directly limit the Navy’s ability to project power, sustain forward presence, and respond effectively to emergent threats.

Deferred Maintenance and U.S. Maritime Superiority

The Reality of Deferred Maintenance

Deferred maintenance refers to postponing essential upkeep, repairs, and upgrades due to budget constraints or competing priorities. For this article, it is defined as the accumulated backlog of necessary maintenance activities that have been delayed, resulting in deteriorating conditions that can impair performance and safety over time. In the context of the DoD, deferred maintenance affects operational readiness as critical infrastructure, ships, and aircraft suffer from prolonged delays in maintenance, making them less effective or even inoperable during critical times.

Deferred maintenance isn’t just a budgetary oversight; it’s a risky business, especially for an organization like the DoD, which manages risk. For years, the U.S. Sea Services have been operating their ships, submarines, and aircraft to the point of degradation while continuously deferring critical maintenance and modernization efforts. What we’re left with is a fleet of aging, worn-out platforms that are more likely to break down than project power. Deferred maintenance is evident throughout numerous reports of breaking ships, and non-repairable ships due to prolonged deferred maintenance. The GAO has highlighted that many ships face extended maintenance delays due to these limitations, which results in a significant portion of the fleet being unavailable for operations at any given time. Additionally, shortages in skilled personnel further exacerbate repair timelines, reducing fleet readiness and increasing the operational strain on the remaining functional ships. Maintenance is no longer something we can defer—it is a crisis, and the situation worsens every day we delay addressing it.

While other military assets—such as airpower and long-range strike capabilities—can offset some shortfalls, they cannot replicate the full range of missions that maritime forces are uniquely positioned to perform. Naval forces provide a persistent presence, sea-based deterrence, and the ability to project power without dependence on foreign bases. They enable operations such as amphibious landings, control of critical sea lanes, and crisis response in areas where access may be limited or contested. These functions cannot be outsourced to other domains without compromising operational flexibility and strategic reach. Relying on alternatives may temporarily mask the effects of deferred maintenance, but it does not resolve the underlying degradation of maritime readiness. A capable fleet remains essential to sustaining U.S. influence, meeting alliance commitments, and responding effectively to emerging threats.

Strategic Implications and The Indo-Pacific

Deferred maintenance is not merely an inconvenience but a significant threat to national security. The ability of the Sea Services to be operationally ready within days is intrinsically tied to the nation’s security. U.S. maritime dominance is precariously maintained in the Indo-Pacific, where China has aggressively expanded its influence, building a formidable navy. China’s shipbuilding efforts have outpaced those of the U.S., making it the largest Navy in the world, with a projected fleet of 395 battleforce ships by 2025, increasing to 435 by 2030. In contrast, the U.S. Navy is expected to see a decrease in its fleet size, with projections indicating just 294 battleforce ships by the end of the fiscal year 2030.

Over the past decade, Chinese naval presence in the Indo-Pacific has surged, with a significant increase in maritime vessels and a greater assertiveness in regional disputes, thereby complicating U.S. operations and alliances. For example, China has undertaken humanitarian aid missions while expanding its naval bases in the South China Sea, effectively increasing its foothold in these strategic waters. Meanwhile, the U.S. has relied heavily on humanitarian efforts such as the Pacific Partnership, which provide vital support to regional nations but are a stark reminder of our constrained capabilities. With a growing maintenance backlog, the U.S. faces the untenable decision of sending under-maintained ships into contested waters, risking mission failure or allowing China to fill the strategic void left by a weakened U.S. presence.

Every delay in maintenance gives China a strategic advantage because it allows it to project power more effectively while the U.S. struggles to keep its existing fleet operational. The data unequivocally demonstrates that China’s accelerated naval expansion has placed the United States at a strategic disadvantage. The implications of these developments are profound. If the U.S. Sea Services continue to neglect maintenance, they risk becoming outmatched and outmaneuvered in strategic theaters. The necessity of addressing these gaps cannot be overstated; failure to adapt and modernize will seriously affect U.S. national security in the face of rising competition from China and Russia.

A Path Forward

Modernizing Maintenance Processes: A Matter of National Survival

The answer to deferred maintenance is simple: we must fix what’s broken and do it now. There’s no time for the usual Pentagon bureaucracy or drawn-out budgetary debates. Modernizing maintenance and procurement processes should be treated with the same urgency as war planning. A report titled “Actions Needed to Address Cost and Schedule Estimates for Shipyard Improvement” by the GAO has highlighted significant challenges in fleet maintenance and readiness, indicating that a substantial portion of the fleet is not operational due to being in dry dock for repairs or upgrades. Specifically, recent assessments show that nearly half of the U.S. Navy’s ships are unavailable for deployment at any given time, primarily due to maintenance issues. This situation compromises the Navy’s ability to project power and respond to global threats effectively, mainly because naval presence is crucial for maintaining stability and countering potential adversaries.

Public-private partnerships with shipyards can significantly enhance maintenance capacity for the U.S. Navy, accelerating repairs and reducing costs. Such collaborations leverage private sector efficiencies and innovations, which are crucial given the current maintenance backlogs. For instance, initiatives like the Naval Sustainment System have successfully improved maintenance productivity by incorporating external business practices, notably reducing workload carryover and improving on-time completion rates for maintenance work.

Furthermore, adopting advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics can revolutionize the Navy’s approach to maintenance. By utilizing AI to analyze inspection data and identify potential issues before they escalate, the Navy can shift from reactive to preventive maintenance strategies. Recent projects, including collaborations with tech companies like Google Cloud, aim to automate inspections, thereby increasing accuracy and efficiency while reducing risks related to manual inspections.

Investing in these innovative solutions is not merely about financial expenditure; it’s a matter of national security. The U.S. must ensure its naval assets are fully operational and ready for deployment as the global military landscape becomes increasingly competitive, particularly with rising challenges from China and Russia. The time has come to prioritize these partnerships and technologies to maintain maritime superiority and safeguard national interests.

Leveraging Technology: The Future of Warfare

As much as deferred maintenance threatens current readiness, the future demands that we invest in new technologies to fill the gaps. Unmanned systems, drones, and autonomous ships can alleviate some of the strain on our overworked fleet and personnel. For example, the U.S. Navy has invested in the Sea Hunter, an uncrewed surface vessel (USV) designed for long-duration missions. This vessel can operate independently, providing valuable reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities without risking human lives. Moreover, drones such as the MQ-8 Fire Scout and the MQ-25 Stingray are being integrated into naval operations to enhance situational awareness and logistics support. These technologies require less maintenance, reduce risk to human operators, and offer strategic flexibility that traditional platforms cannot provide.

Adopting these innovations is not just a bonus—it’s a necessity. The increasing complexity of modern warfare, especially in contested areas like the Indo-Pacific, underscores the importance of these advancements. The U.S. Navy faces significant threats from adversaries such as China, which is rapidly expanding its naval fleet and capabilities. For instance, China’s Type 055 destroyer and large numbers of unmanned systems present a challenge that the U.S. must address to maintain its maritime superiority.

The future battlefield will not wait for the U.S. Navy to play catch-up. To supplement its aging fleet, the Navy must prioritize developing and fielding USVs, autonomous submarines, and drone swarms—all uncrewed vessels used to collect data. These systems can enhance maritime surveillance, extend operational reach, and conduct missions in highly contested environments where traditional human-crewed ships are too vulnerable or stretched too thin. For instance, drone swarms have proven effective in recent military exercises, demonstrating the capability to overwhelm enemy defenses through coordinated attacks. Additionally, integrating autonomous submarines can allow for covert operations and intelligence-gathering missions in areas too risky for human-crewed vessels.

Considering these developments, the U.S. Navy’s strategic priorities must shift towards embracing these technologies as essential components of future operations—failure to do so risks leaving the U.S. at a significant disadvantage in a rapidly evolving security environment. Investing in uncrewed systems is not merely about enhancing capabilities but ensuring the Navy is prepared for the challenges in a dynamic and increasingly hostile maritime landscape.

Conclusion

The Sea Services are at a crossroads. Deferred maintenance is not just a problem to be solved in the abstract—it is an existential threat to America’s ability to project power, maintain global stability, and deter aggression from China and Russia. The warnings are clear, the stakes are high, and the time for action is now.

If we ignore these critical challenges, we will wake up one day to find that our once-dominant fleet can no longer defend U.S. interests. That day is fast approaching; only decisive, bold action can prevent it. Sea Services must overhaul its maintenance approach before it’s too late.

The world isn’t waiting for the U.S. to catch up, and our adversaries are already moving to exploit our weaknesses. The question is simple: will we rise to the challenge or fall behind?

The choice is ours—and if action is not taken, the consequences will echo for generations.

(Disclaimer: The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement)

Tags: Deferred Maintenance, Navy, U.S. Sea Services

About The Author

Dr. Emily Pesicka
Dr. Emily Pesicka currently serves as an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) postdoctoral research fellow at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) with an appointment in the Energy Academic Group. Dr. Pesicka is the co-lead of the NPS Climate Security Network. Before her current role, Dr. Pesicka held a teaching position in the Political Science Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa from 2015 to 2021. Dr. Pesicka's research advances resilience and surprise theories relating to the U.S. military, critical infrastructure systems, and military and civilian communities. Dr. Pesicka's research within the EAG focuses on climate security, energy security, national security, and climate security education.

15. FBI Probing Leak of Iran Strike Intelligence Report, Hegseth Says

As it should. Who is speaking out of school?

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-israel-ceasefire-conflict-news/card/fbi-probing-leak-of-iran-strike-intelligence-report-hegseth-says-AjoWvf8RvvLvpKlhjP8J?msockid=229cb3235036605f1027a75951af61b0

FBI Probing Leak of Iran Strike Intelligence Report, Hegseth Says

Annie Linskey

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the NATO summit in The Hague, the Netherlands. (Markus Schreiber/Associated Press)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has started a probe into how a preliminary intelligence assessment about U.S. military strikes in Iran became public, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday morning.

“We’re doing a leak investigation with the FBI right now, because this information is for internal purposes,” said Hegseth, speaking to reporters Wednesday at the NATO summit in The Hague. The preliminary report said that the strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities only set back Tehran’s nuclear ambitions by a few months.

16. China’s top security agency mocks CIA Chinese spy recruitment drive as ‘farcical’

Perhaps they are worried.

China’s top security agency mocks CIA Chinese spy recruitment drive as ‘farcical’

US spy agency’s ‘clumsy’ effort to recruit Chinese informants is budget-driven stunt in face of Trump cuts, Ministry of State Security says

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3315782/peddling-fear-chinas-top-security-agency-mocks-cia-spy-recruitment-drive-farcical?tpcc=enlz-china&UUID=b6aa9fa1-137f-48da-8e5d-b6a303526224&tc=1

Yuanyue Dangin Beijing

Published: 5:10pm, 25 Jun 2025Updated: 7:03pm, 25 Jun 2025

China’s top intelligence agency says a recent CIA campaign aimed at recruiting informants from China while hyping up the “China threat” is a sign the US spy agency is desperately looking for ways to survive Washington’s budget cuts.

“As resources shrink, the CIA has doubled down on hyping the ‘China threat’ as its lifeline, peddling fear to Congress and taxpayers to carve out a larger slice of the budget pie,” the Ministry of State Security (MSS) said in an article published on Wednesday on its official WeChat account.

The post, published in both Chinese and English, referred to a US Central Intelligence Agency effort to recruitChinese spies as “yet another farcical performance”.

New CIA videos seek to lure Chinese officials to leak secrets to US

This is the first time that the MSS, which has become increasingly active on social media, has responded to the CIA advertisements, made via two Chinese-language videos posted on social media last month.

The videos were intended to exploit possible dissatisfaction among Chinese officials with the ruling Communist Party leadership and encourage them to leak secrets to the United States.

A public recruitment drive, launched by the CIA last October, posted instructions online on how to safely contact the spy agency in the hope of attracting informants from China, Iran and North Korea.

Beijing has condemned the drive, with Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian labelling it last month as “a serious violation of China’s national interests and a blatant political provocation”.

Last October, the Chinese embassy in Washington warned that “any attempts to drive a wedge between the Chinese people and the [Communist Party], or to weaken their close bond, will inevitably fail”.

The MSS article on Wednesday also claimed the CIA recruitment videos were “riddled with clumsy rhetoric and slanderous claims”.

The ministry added that the restructuring of federal agencies since US President Donald Trump returned to office in January had “hit the CIA hard”.

“Plagued by internal and external pressures, the CIA still encounters mounting challenges,” it said, adding that the agency was recruiting Chinese spies to “avoid becoming a sacrificial pawn in the next political reshuffle”.

The MSS article stated that if the CIA’s tactics had been effective, “America’s intelligence failures against China wouldn’t be so glaring”, adding that China’s anti-espionage authorities had in recent years “dealt a fatal blow to the CIA’s intelligence network in the country”.

In 2023, former CIA director William Burns told the Aspen Security Forum that the agency had made progress in rebuilding its spy networks in China after suffering significant counter-intelligence losses 10 years earlier.

The New York Times reported in 2017 that US intelligence operations had suffered a heavy blow in China between 2010 and 2012, with dozens of sources either being killed or disappearing.

Yuanyue Dang

Yuanyue joined the Post in 2022 after working as a feature writer for various Chinese media outlets. He graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with a bachelor's degree in journalism and holds a master’s degree in anthropology from University College London.

17. Explainer | US bunker-busting GBU-57 in Iran: experts in China assess combat debut

Conclusion:

“As for the US strike this time, while it was expected, it was far from perfect. In fact, it shows that airdropped munitions from manned bombers may not be the most effective solution in future warfare.”

Explainer | US bunker-busting GBU-57 in Iran: experts in China assess combat debut

How does the powerful missile compare to the Chinese military’s arsenal of similar penetrating bombs?

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3315754/us-bunker-busting-gbu-57-iran-experts-china-assess-combat-debut?tpcc=enlz-china&UUID=b6aa9fa1-137f-48da-8e5d-b6a303526224&tc=3

Amber Wangin Beijing

Published: 4:00pm, 25 Jun 2025Updated: 4:59pm, 25 Jun 2025

Chinese military analysts have closely followed Saturday’s US strikes on Iranian facilities, especially the bombs used – the GBU-57, a powerful “bunker buster” designed to penetrate deeply buried targets.

While praising the success of the B-2 stealth bombers’ long-range delivery and the bunker busters’ performance, they also pointed out the limitations the bomb’s effectiveness, especially against sites like Fordow that are deep underground.

Mainland China is believed to have the world’s most extensive underground bunker systems and has developed its own bunker-busting weapons, with ambitions to target facilities including those deep within the mountains of Taiwan.

So how do Chinese military analysts view the US bomber strike action and what it entailed? And what is China’s approach to the development of its own bunker-busting arsenal?

Combat debut

A total of 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs) were dropped by seven B-2 stealth bombers in the early hours of Sunday local time, striking Iran’s heavily fortified Fordow nuclear site as well as facilities at Natanz.

The operation marked the combat debut for the world’s most powerful non-nuclear bunker buster – a type of munition specifically designed to penetrate hardened or deeply buried targets beyond the reach of conventional bombs.

Bunker busters such as the GBU-57 differ from typical bombs because they burrow into the ground before detonation, exponentially increasing their destructive potential.

Weighing around 30,000 pounds (13,600kg), the GBU-57 is the largest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal. It is believed to be capable of penetrating up to 60 metres (197 feet) of reinforced concrete or rock, depending on the material encountered.

What’s known about the 3 Iranian nuclear sites hit by US bunker-buster bombs

Due to its size, it can only be carried by B-2 bombers, with each aircraft able to carry up to two MOPs at a time. The US military is estimated to have around 20 of these bombs, according to American media reports.

While Israel does not have the GBU-57, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) says it is equipped with the less powerful GBU-28 and the BLU-109. Neither has the penetration capability to reach the Fordow facility, around 80 metres underground.

Trump declared that the targets were “totally obliterated” in the strike. However, Pentagon officials adopted a more cautious tone, describing the damage to the sites as “severe” while adding that a final assessment would take time.

Chinese analysts react

Military expert Du Wenlong described the B-2’s 37-hour mission – the second-longest in the aircraft’s history – as a success, based on its range, accompanying aircraft and the use of decoys. However, he emphasised that the strike’s true impact remained uncertain.

“Although the strike successfully hit its targets, the extent of internal damage is unclear,” Du said, noting that there was a gap of about 30 metres between the GBU-57’s penetration depth and Fordow’s core.

“The strike may have damaged the mountain structure, but whether it hit the actual facility is undetermined,” he said.

United States of Israel’s war on Iran endangers the whole world

Du’s assessment was echoed by analyst Song Zhongping, who drew attention to satellite imagery showing six craters near the facilities. It appeared that two bombs were aimed at each specific target – possibly in an attempt to reinforce penetration, he said.

“If the goal was complete destruction of facilities like Fordow or Natanz, the mission likely fell short. Iran had likely relocated critical nuclear materials, and while some infrastructure may have been damaged, total elimination is improbable,” Song added.

China’s bunker busters

China has developed its own suite of bunker-penetrating weapons, with an emphasis on land-based ballistic missile delivery systems.

The DF-15C, unveiled in 2013, is a variant of China’s short-range ballistic missile designed specifically for precision strikes on hardened underground targets.

According to the nationalist tabloid Global Times, the DF-15C features a long cylindrical penetrator warhead around 2 to 2.5 metres long, designed to breach reinforced concrete and underground bunkers.

With a range of around 700km (435 miles), the missile gives the People’s Liberation Army a significant regional strike capability, with targets in Okinawa, northern Vietnam, New Delhi and Taiwan reportedly in reach.

The DF-15C is understood to be capable of targeting underground command centres and hardened shelters, including the Taiwanese military facility in Yushan, the island’s highest peak, the article said.

In 2014, Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily reported that China’s state-owned defence giant Norinco had showcased its GB1000 series of 1,000kg (2,200lbs) guided bombs at the country’s annual Zhuhai air show.

According to the article, these bombs are compatible with various penetrating and fragmentation warheads, and are designed to destroy hardened ground targets such as reinforced aircraft hangars, underground bunkers, and transport hubs.

It is unknown how far underground the Chinese bunker busters can travel.

Song noted that China had taken a “distinct approach” to the technology compared to the United States, by opting to emphasise ballistic missile-based delivery for bunker-busting missions.

“I believe different countries pursue different strategies. China’s advantage lies in ballistic missiles, and we should continue to refine and master that capability,” he said.

“As for the US strike this time, while it was expected, it was far from perfect. In fact, it shows that airdropped munitions from manned bombers may not be the most effective solution in future warfare.”

Amber Wang

Amber Wang is a reporter for the China desk, and focuses on Chinese politics and diplomacy. She joined the Post in 2021, and previously worked for The New York Times and Southern Metropolis Daily.

18. Are Trump’s Iran strikes a ‘wake-up call’ for China on US unpredictability?

Are Trump’s Iran strikes a ‘wake-up call’ for China on US unpredictability?

Bombings send ‘strong and clear’ signal about possible US intervention in potential Taiwan or South China Sea conflicts, experts say

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3315690/are-trumps-iran-strikes-wake-call-china-us-unpredictability?tpcc=enlz-china&UUID=b6aa9fa1-137f-48da-8e5d-b6a303526224&tc=17

Reading Time:

4 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities call into question the anti-war stance of US President Donald Trump, they may also reinforce Beijing’s assumptions about the unpredictability of the US administration, according to diplomatic observers.

Meredith Chen

Published: 11:03pm, 24 Jun 2025

As US air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities call into question the anti-war stance of US President Donald Trump, they may also reinforce Beijing’s assumptions about the unpredictability of the US administration, according to diplomatic observers.

The attacks could bolster belief in Beijing that Washington might intervene in regional conflicts, prompting stronger strategic preparations in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, they added.

Their assessment came after an unprecedented US air strike on Iran with its most powerful non-nuclear weapons, followed by an Iranian retaliatory strike on the largest US airbase in the region.

During his election campaign, Trump repeatedly pitched himself as an anti-war president and a peace broker, promising to put “America first” by ending US involvement in risky and expensive overseas conflicts.

The conflict makes Iranian newspaper headlines in Tehran on Tuesday. Photo: Reuters

Trump has yet to meet his campaign promises to swiftly end wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and with the bombing of Iran, he appears to have shifted from his anti-war position, despite a subsequent ceasefire announcement on social media on Tuesday.

“Israel & Iran came to me, almost simultaneously, and said, “PEACE!” I knew the time was NOW. The World, and the Middle East, are the real WINNERS! Both Nations will see tremendous LOVE, PEACE, AND PROSPERITY in their futures,” he wrote online.

Israel and Iran announced on Tuesday that a ceasefire had begun, but not long after Israel’s defence minister ordered “intense strikes” on Tehran, citing Iran’s violation of the ceasefire. Tehran denied the accusation. Trump later accused both nations of breaking the ceasefire.

Isaac Kardon, a senior fellow for China studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the US escalation in Iran sent a “strong and clear” signal to Chinese analysts who might have been wondering about the potential for US intervention in regional conflicts.

“Massive use of force actually is ‘on the table’ and may be employed very quickly and even impulsively by a leader who is showing himself to be less gun-shy and more risk-acceptant than his first term,” he said.

What’s known about the 3 Iranian nuclear sites hit by US bunker-buster bombs

“Beijing will assess that the US can be drawn further into another Mideast quagmire and do everything within its power to keep US naval and air forces tied up in Western Asia instead of in the Western Pacific where China’s strategic attention is concentrated,” he said.

Josef Gregory Mahoney, a professor of politics and international relations at East China Normal University in Shanghai, said that while US involvement was not surprising, it was a forewarning for Beijing.

“I don’t think the Chinese leadership was caught off guard by Trump’s attacks on Iran, but they did serve as a wake-up call of sorts for those in Beijing and elsewhere who’ve pandered for years to this absurd position that Trump is the president of peace and other such nonsense.”

James F. Downes, an assistant professor in international relations at Hong Kong Metropolitan University, said US air strikes against Iran validated China’s fears and could fuel China’s long-term efforts to boost military readiness, economic resilience and diplomatic efforts, with “a sharper focus” on deterring possible future US interventions in Taiwan and the South China Sea.

“China’s earlier preparations for worst-case scenarios remain important, but the need for concrete deterrence – particularly regarding Taiwan and the South China Sea – will now become even more pressing issues,” he said.

He said the US strikes would likely confirm Beijing’s view of Trump’s “unilateral and destabilising approach” and unpredictability – which Beijing has long prepared for, and it could further damage US credibility in the core Chinese leadership.

Kardon, however, argued that the strikes would not change Beijing’s estimate of how likely the US was to intervene in the Western Pacific, where the strategic balance was very different.

“In a far more challenging operational environment around China, Trump hasn’t shown any propensity to test the escalatory roulette wheel with China,” he said.

Compared to Iran – which sought a peace deal immediately after “a nominal retaliation” – China, with the advantage on its home field in East Asia, had a much stronger military and industrial base that “poses far more credible and formidable threat to impose immense costs and protract any conflict with the US”, he said.

Zhao Minghao, of Fudan University’s Centre for American Studies, said the bombing showed Trump was willing to apply intense military pressure when needed, as seen in his 2017 Syria strikes.

However, a full-scale Middle East conflict would contradict Trump’s “America first” approach, which had sought to force Iranian concessions through pressure rather than prolonged war, Zhao said. “The US wants to shift its strategic resources to the Asia-Pacific region, but in reality it still cannot get out of the mess in the Middle East.”

He also suggested that the strikes could influence China’s assessment of Trump’s decision-making and willingness to use force – a key factor in managing tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Chong Ja Ian, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, agreed that the US strikes could reinforce ideas about the unpredictability of the US president on major issues and call into question the credibility of the Trump administration’s statements.

Beijing could be more cautious about how it handled the Trump administration after the strikes. “Trump and his senior officials seem to have reacted to the strike differently after all. Beijing will have to factor in this possibility at least in the short run, although I do not think Beijing believes the Trump administration seeks confrontation with [China],” he said.

“However, should there be escalation in the Middle East, Washington may have to divert more attention and resources to that region that could, in turn, relieve some pressure on [China].”

Meredith Chen

Meredith Chen joined the Post in 2023 and covers China politics and diplomacy. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Hong Kong. Previously, she had stints with both international and Chinese-language media outlets, focusing on affairs in Asia.

19. Why Saturday's strike on Iran was perfectly timed

Conclusion:

The ultimate success of Saturday's strikes will be measured by Iran's response in the coming weeks and months. If Tehran chooses to rebuild its nuclear program, the favorable conditions that enabled Saturday's operation are unlikely to be replicated. If Iran instead chooses negotiation and denuclearization, Saturday will be remembered as the moment when twenty years of patient preparation finally paid off.

Why Saturday's strike on Iran was perfectly timed

The president waited until Israel set the conditions for success.

By Charles Hamilton

Former Commander, U.S. Army Materiel Command

June 24, 2025 04:00 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Charles Hamilton

For more than two decades, the United States has employed every tool short of direct military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Sanctions, sabotage, cyberattacks, and diplomatic negotiations all aimed to slow Tehran’s march toward becoming a nuclear power. Four administrations—including Trump's own in 2019—have contemplated striking Iran's nuclear facilities but ultimately pulled back due to the enormous risks.

The regime in Tehran survives on three legs of a gruesome stool: its terrorist proxy network, its missiles, and its ability, should it decide to, build nuclear bombs. With the first two legs of the stool already wobbly, Saturday’s strike might have knocked out Iran’s ability to bully the region.

The bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites represents the culmination of what may be the most rehearsed, examined, and studied war plan of the last twenty years. President Trump's swift shift from diplomacy to direct action—just a month ago, he was holding Israel at arm’s length, pursuing talks with Tehran, and warming relations with Gulf countries with little appetite for war—appears to reflect a unique convergence of favorable conditions.

The first is Israel’s systematic and sequential degradation of Iran’s network of proxy groups since Hamas’ October 2023 attack.

A more recent development is Israel’s assault on Iran itself. Since June 9, missile attacks and special operations have degraded Iran's air defense network, penetrated and consequently disrupt Iran's military communications, and helped deplete and destroy perhaps half of its missile arsenal. The first two effects enabled the U.S. strikes with unprecedentedly low risk to American forces, while the last two reduced the threat of effective retaliation.

And a third condition, of longer standing, is the state of the U.S. military’s arsenal and operational art. The GBU-57/B "bunker-buster" bombs that pulverized Iran's Fordo facility were designed by the U.S. Air Force beginning in 2004 for exactly this mission. The 30,000-pound munitions are the only U.S. weapon that can penetrate the hundreds of feet of concrete and rock protecting Iran's most critical nuclear infrastructure. Saturday marked their first combat use, dropped from B-2 stealth bombers, while a submarine fired Tomahawk missiles from waters south of Iran.

Operation Midnight Hammer was one of the most complex, coordinated, and sequenced military operations ever conducted. The strike required coordination across geographic combatant commands in secrecy that limited the number of leaders aware of the timing. It required deception, deconfliction of a tight airspace corridor, and communication across every operational domain. If the attack is eventually found to have destroyed Fordo—a facility that many analysts considered virtually impregnable—it would validate two decades of military planning and technological development.

The convergence of factors that made Saturday's operation possible was both rare and temporary. Iran's air defenses will eventually be rebuilt, its proxy networks reconstituted, and its communication systems restored. The IRGC's command structure will adapt to operating under compromised conditions, and new leaders will emerge to replace those eliminated by Israeli operations.

More fundamentally, Iran's nuclear program itself will evolve. Tehran will disperse its uranium stockpiles, harden additional facilities, and could build a nuclear arsenal. Nonetheless, while we don’t know the damage done at the point of enrichment, Saturday’s strike set back that timeline.

President Trump's decision to authorize Saturday's strikes represents the vindication of a strategy that prioritized creating optimal conditions for military action rather than rushing into a suboptimal scenario. The president was presented with this same strike plan in 2019 and deferred. It appears he waited until Israel set the theater this time around. By supporting Israel's systematic degradation of Iranian capabilities while maintaining the credible threat of American intervention, the administration created the precise circumstances necessary for a successful operation.

The president's public statements in the days leading up to the strikes—which Pentagon officials privately criticized as compromising operational security—may have served a strategic purpose by forcing Iran to spread its defensive resources across potential targets while obscuring the true timing and direction of the eventual attack.

It’s unclear how much Saturday's operation set back Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. The 14 bunker-buster bombs damaged the three nuclear sites, but questions remain about Tehran's stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium and the regime's long-term intentions.

Questions also exist about President Trump's war aims. Defense Secretary Hegseth, for one, said the president had said that the June 21 strike was no prelude to “open-ended war.” But Trump’s subsequent social media posts suggested that the new aim is "regime change," a completely different problem set.If so, Saturday’s strikes may have been the opening move in a broader campaign rather than a one-off operation. It’s likely that the IRGC, Basij militia, and intelligence services remain effective at suppressing uprisings and monitoring opposition.

The ultimate success of Saturday's strikes will be measured by Iran's response in the coming weeks and months. If Tehran chooses to rebuild its nuclear program, the favorable conditions that enabled Saturday's operation are unlikely to be replicated. If Iran instead chooses negotiation and denuclearization, Saturday will be remembered as the moment when twenty years of patient preparation finally paid off.

Charles Hamilton, a former U.S. Army four-star general, last served as commander of U.S. Army Materiel Command.

defenseone.com · by Charles Hamilton

20. China to Block Its Rare-Earth Experts From Spilling Their Secrets

China to Block Its Rare-Earth Experts From Spilling Their Secrets

Beijing asks companies for lists of specialists to keep tabs on them

https://www.wsj.com/world/china-to-block-its-rare-earth-experts-from-spilling-their-secrets-8d69b75f

By Jon Emont

June 25, 2025 7:41 am ET

A worker at a rare-earth mine in Jiangxi province, China. Photo: stringer china/Reuters

China has told companies in its rare-earth industry to give the government lists of employees with technical expertise, aiming to ensure they don’t divulge trade secrets to foreigners.

The queries point to the growing geopolitical significance of China’s control over the materials, which are widely used in cars, electronics and weapons and stand at the center of the U.S.-China trade war.

According to people familiar with the queries, China’s Ministry of Commerce in recent weeks asked rare-earth companies based in China for personnel lists that include specialist employees’ specific expertise, education, research background and personal information.

The goal, the people said, is to develop a formal catalog of Chinese nationals with rare earth expertise and keep tabs on these employees to make sure they don’t travel abroad and reveal secrets.

The lists include those in upstream roles, such as processing rare earths, and those in downstream roles, such as those using the processed minerals to make rare-earth magnets. The magnets are used in automobiles, wind turbines, drones and jet fighters.

One of the people said some experts at Chinese companies have been asked to turn in their passports to their companies or local authorities, to ensure they don’t make any unauthorized trips. China already requires government officials and employees of state-owned companies to turn in travel documents and apply for approval to travel abroad.

China is the world’s largest miner and processor of rare earths, and it makes around 90% of the world’s rare-earth magnets. With trade tensions heating up, China in April established a new system for licensing the export of rare earths and rare-earth magnets. That has constricted the global trade in magnets, worrying Western car and electronics companies and leading to some temporary closures at factories dependent on Chinese supplies.

For years, China has produced these magnets so cheaply that it has been all but impossible for companies elsewhere to compete. But the recent export restrictions are breathing new life into efforts to develop rare-earth industries in countries such as the U.S. and France.

One of the main hurdles is the paucity of rare-earth production expertise outside of China. Processing rare earths involves painstaking separation of individual rare-earth elements from raw materials, in which many elements with similar chemical properties are jumbled together. Chinese scientists have developed equipment and processes that are widely considered best in class.

That is a turnaround from decades ago, when China was first developing its rare-earth industry and benefited from foreign experts who trained workers in the latest technologies.

To fortify its advantage, China’s government in December 2023 released new regulations forbidding the export of certain Chinese technology used in rare-earth processing, making it harder for foreign competitors to emulate China’s strengths.

Last September, China’s Ministry of State Security said a Chinese national was sentenced to 11 years in prison for selling secrets about China’s rare-earth stockpiles to unspecified foreign interests.

The ministry said foreign entities “use every means to obtain our internal data” and if they get leaked data, it could “put China at a disadvantage in international strategic competition.”

Write to Jon Emont at jonathan.emont@wsj.com

21. Beware the Europe You Wish For

Excerpts:

If the United States can maintain its partnership with Europe, it will have an advantage not available to China or Russia in a multipolar world. Neither Beijing nor Moscow has an alliance of such economic heft, diplomatic might, and global reach. They cannot muster the kind of power wielded by NATO. Europe may give Americans headaches, but it always has; there is a reason why Washington has long wanted the continent to give the United States freedom to focus on other issues.

But having achieved what they wanted, U.S. officials now have to make a choice. They can spurn Europe and face a more dangerous world alone and depleted. Or they can forge a new, more accommodating transatlantic relationship. They will face obstacles in attempting the latter, given all that has changed. But the two parties have nearly a century of shared experience. Their friendship can prevail.

Beware the Europe You Wish For

Foreign Affairs · by More by Celeste A. Wallander · June 24, 2025

The Downsides and Dangers of Allied Independence

Celeste A. Wallander

July/August 2025 Published on June 24, 2025

Emmanuel Polanco

CELESTE A. WALLANDER is Executive Director of Penn Washington and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. She was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs and oversaw U.S. military assistance to Ukraine during the Biden administration.

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For decades, the United States had asked its NATO allies in Europe to do more for their own defense. And by the alliance’s 2024 summit in Washington, they had gotten the message. Twenty-three of NATO’s 32 members were spending two percent of their GDP on defense, the alliance target—up from six members in 2021.

In explaining this increase, many commentators cited a single factor: Donald Trump. It is true that the U.S. president’s rhetoric, broadly critical of European defense spending during his first presidential term and now his second, has played a role in the uptick. But the increase was underway before Trump entered politics. For over a decade, NATO allies have been focused on the elevated threat that Russia poses to European security, with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression against Ukraine as a harbinger. They have also warily watched as Washington paid less attention to their region and more to Asia. Together, these factors prompted the steady increase in defense spending, procurement, and production that helped Europe build more capable militaries before Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025—and that will continue after he leaves office. Trump’s reelection has only helped underscore the continent’s burgeoning independence: Europeans now see a fundamentally changed United States, and they are no longer confident that investing in U.S. leadership will secure their interests.

The fact that Europe is spending more on its own defense is in many ways good news for Americans. Thanks to the continent’s increased strength, Washington can now focus on China first and Russia second. There is a reason why generations of U.S. presidents from both parties have pushed for Europe to spend more on defense.

But before American officials pat themselves on the back or take a victory lap, they must understand the downsides of their success. Growing European power means the era of comfortable U.S. leadership is over. Now that it provides more for itself, Europe will feel less pressure to defer to Washington’s interests. It is less likely to buy American-made weapons. It might deny the United States the right to use American military bases in Europe for operations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. And the continent is already holding up Washington’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine, restraining American officials in ways it previously wouldn’t.

None of this means the transatlantic alliance is doomed, let alone already finished. Washington and Europe still have many shared interests, which will encourage them to keep working together. But the changing balance of power means that the United States now has to earn Europe’s partnership—just when that partnership is becoming more significant. The United States is facing challenges on multiple fronts across the globe in ways it hasn’t since the end of the Cold War. It will need its European friends, with their newfound strength, to help it handle aggressors in multiple regions. Washington, then, has to make a decision. It can forge a new transatlantic relationship that respects Europe’s interests. Or it can lose the world order to a triumvirate of autocracies: Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.

NOT-SO-FREE RIDERS

Ever since its 1949 founding, NATO has relied heavily on the United States. During the Cold War, in the 1970s, Europe’s NATO members spent an average of two to three percent of their GDP on defense. The United States, meanwhile, averaged seven percent. As a result, the most capable military force defending Europe was made up of American troops. With some exceptions, European NATO militaries were underfunded. Credible defense and deterrence against any Soviet attack depended on Washington.

This might seem odd, given that Europe—not North America—would suffer most immediately from Soviet conquest. But preventing Moscow from controlling western Europe when it already occupied eastern Europe was the necessary condition for American global security and prosperity. The Soviet Union’s ultimate goal was to defeat the United States, and control of western European economic and industrial power would fuel Moscow’s ability to strike against its real enemy: an America built on democracy, a market economy, and global trade. Washington, locked in competition with the only other power that came close to matching it, could thus not risk a third world war on the continent. European and American security were, in other words, indivisible. They constituted a collective good.

Because a collective good benefits all members of a group regardless of who steps up to provide it, there is little incentive for most members to pay. But for the most powerful player, one with a huge stake in ensuring that the collective good is secure, contributing the lion’s share is perfectly rational. After the disasters of two world wars and a global depression, the United States was the only country with the resources to really ensure that Europe was defended from Soviet occupation, and so it did. The imbalance of defense spending was still a source of friction in the alliance, but U.S. leadership was ultimately in Washington’s own interest.

The United States got more than just a stable world order in exchange for being Europe’s protector. It received a stockpile of military, political, economic, and diplomatic advantages. Some of these were explicit and negotiated. Others developed naturally from the structures and processes of the alliance, and still others arose from the determination of individual allies to support Washington one on one. (Each state gained unique benefits from its bilateral relationship with the superpower.) All of these advantages helped Americans.

U.S. officials must realize the downside of their success.

Consider the most concrete benefit: the more than 30 military bases the United States has set up across Europe. The legal status of these bases is established in bilateral agreements that dictate how, when, and whether the U.S. military can operate from both the bases themselves and the airspace and waterways that allow access to them. These are called “access, basing, and overflight,” or ABO, agreements. Typically, the terms are quite generous, allowing the United States to use the bases not only to defend Europe but also to support American interests across the globe.

Washington has repeatedly availed itself of this ability. In 1973, for example, Portugal let the United States use an air base in the Azores to supply Israel during the Yom Kippur War despite the risk of economic retribution by Arab states. In 2001, multiple European allies granted Washington permission to use its bases for operations in Afghanistan, as well as the right to fly military planes through European airspace. Several NATO allies that opposed the 2003 U.S. war against Iraq nonetheless allowed Washington to use bases in Europe for the invasion—or at least permitted U.S. military aircraft to transit their territory. When France did not, it was criticized by some members for causing NATO disunity. This is the essence of the United States’ hegemonic advantage, built over the course of 75 years of leadership: NATO allies often support American priorities, even when they disagree with them, to preserve U.S. leadership.

The benefits of the United States’ NATO hegemony continue to this day. Washington’s 2024 defense of Israel against Iranian air attacks depended on American military aircraft and ships based in Greece, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. European basing and overflight enabled the United States to destroy strike and command facilities operated by the Houthi rebels in Yemen. And European bases support U.S. counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa.

These bases even help the United States protect itself. To reach the northern Atlantic Ocean, for example, Russian submarines must first travel from a naval and air base on the Arctic Ocean through a chokepoint known as the GIUK Gap (for Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom). If they succeed in evading detection there, they can move along the U.S. coastline unnoticed, ready to launch nuclear weapons against hundreds of American targets without warning. Such an attack would be extremely difficult to defend against. The Pentagon is typically able to track these submarines through the gap, but only because of the many U.S. naval and air assets it has stationed in Europe. Washington is helped in this task by patrols from Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and the United Kingdom.

ONE-STOP SHOP

The United States benefits from NATO leadership in ways that go beyond basing. For the alliance to function properly, its members need to be able to jointly plan, patrol, and carry out operations. That means they must use similar sets of weapons. And although NATO states are free to purchase any systems that meet alliance interoperability and capability requirements, in practice, they very often buy U.S.-made ones.

The advantage of buying American is simple: European forces are more effective at operating alongside U.S. forces when they use American systems. Norwegian and U.S. NATO patrols in the GIUK Gap, for instance, train on the same systems, especially the Boeing P-8 Poseidon aircraft, so that they can seamlessly coordinate complex joint military operations. Poland and the Baltic states have prioritized the purchase of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known as HIMARS, because when their units and U.S. units need to hand off patrol duties to each other to ensure round-the-clock coverage of NATO’s eastern frontline, operating with the same equipment makes the process relatively frictionless. The Polish government is more likely to get American soldiers patrolling and training with Polish soldiers every day if they are all working from the same weapons systems. American leaders, after all, will then have greater confidence that their soldiers will be effective and safe if the troops fighting alongside them are using the same technology. By equipping European forces with American weapons, eastern allies can encourage Washington to keep its military in the region.

The reliability of the U.S. defense industrial base and the scale of the Pentagon’s long-term contracts offer additional incentives to use American weapons. The American Foreign Military Sales system is notoriously inefficient, with years-long processes to finalize contracts and last-minute price increases. But European countries still choose U.S. military equipment over their own partly because American defense contractors, accustomed to servicing the enormous U.S. armed forces, are typically capable of providing decades’ worth of maintenance, parts, and upgrades. This reliability is one reason why European countries have inked contracts for fifth-generation F-35 aircraft despite the high prices and torturous timelines.

Europe’s purchases help the United States maintain a strong defense industrial base. From 2022 to 2024, European countries purchased $61 billion worth of U.S. defense systems, accounting for 34 percent of all their defense contract procurement, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The F-35 alone is worth billions of dollars to U.S. defense companies. And these deals are growing in size and scale: since 2020, European NATO allies have more than doubled the number of weapons they import and increased the proportion they buy from the United States from 54 percent to 64 percent. U.S. military contractors are not just exporting more to European allies but also getting a larger share of the continent’s defense spending pie. Yes, Washington pays more for defense than Europe does. But the United States has long enjoyed its own benefits from this predominance.

MIND THE GAP

As European defense spending grows, however, the two sides are becoming more equal. In 2014, European NATO members spent an average of 1.5 percent of their GDP on defense, procurement included, compared with 3.7 for the United States. In 2024, however, European members spent an average of 2.2 percent of GDP on defense, whereas the United States spent just under 3.4 percent. Two EU countries, Estonia and Poland, spent a greater percentage than Washington: 3.43 percent and 4.12 percent, respectively. If the United States’ share of global GDP were significantly larger than Europe’s, Washington might still be spending far more on NATO than its transatlantic counterparts do, even as Europe begins to spend a similar share of GDP on defense. But by 2025, the United States made up 14.8 percent of global GDP, whereas European countries (the EU, along with Norway and the United Kingdom) made up 17.5 percent. European NATO allies allocated the vast majority of their defense spending to the continent. The United States, by contrast, has military forces spanning the globe.

The move toward parity in relative expenditures has been years in the making. Europe’s increase in defense spending began after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Rattled by Moscow’s assault and under mounting American pressure, nearly all NATO countries began to allocate larger shares of their spending to defense, even as U.S. outlays slipped. Europe also began spending more on buying and maintaining military equipment. In 2024 alone, for instance, NATO’s non-U.S. members increased their expenditures on equipment by 37 percent, while U.S. spending for equipment grew 15 percent.

Europe seems poised to go even further in the years ahead. The EU, for example, is making changes in procurement and in overall military spending to expand defense industrial production. The union recently changed its stringent deficit spending restrictions so that members can budget up to 1.5 percent more of individual GDP on defense. If EU countries take advantage of this provision, they could spend more than $700 billion more on defense through 2030 than is currently earmarked. The EU has also proposed setting aside a $163.5 billion pool of money for long-term low-interest loans for procuring military goods.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Berlin, May 2025 Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

EU member governments seem similarly committed to increasing spending. Belgium, Italy, and Spain have all announced that they will reach NATO’s two percent goal in 2025. Other European countries have announced defense budget increases, as well. Most strikingly, Germany—long highly averse to both defense and deficit spending—changed its constitution so it could borrow money for military purposes. The country’s new government, led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has signaled plans to expand defense procurement through at least 2030. Should all these trends continue, Europe will not only match U.S. regional defense spending but also exceed it.

The continent has also taken steps to make sure this new money is not wasted. Right now, Europe is plagued by redundancy and poor interoperability, largely because each state is responsible for its own procurement. But the EU is adopting new rules to standardize planning and purchasing, including a 2023 provision that incentivizes and facilitates joint defense procurement and production. This change resulted in the signing last year of a $5.6 billion contract by Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, and Sweden to procure Patriot missiles.

European states are not just stepping up monetarily. They are also stepping up in terms of leadership. Since 2017, for example, NATO has established nine battle groups, one for each of its nine frontline countries. Rather than expecting Washington to carry the burden, the alliance has adopted a distributed leadership approach for these groups; only in Poland does the United States lead. In Finland, Sweden is the leader. In Estonia, it is the United Kingdom. Germany leads in Lithuania, Spain in Slovakia, France in Romania, and Italy in Bulgaria. Hungary has taken leadership of its own battle group. Canada is leading in Latvia.

Washington, of course, still has a vital role to play in the defense of all these countries. No one expects that European forces can match the scale and global reach of the U.S. military. But they are now much closer in strength to the United States within the NATO alliance, even in comparison with five years ago. With Finland and Sweden as NATO members, the continent has forces that can better manage challenges from China and Russia in the Arctic. To counter Russia’s use of the Black Sea as a platform for striking Ukraine, NATO’s European members are developing new coastal defense forces and autonomous vehicles that can enhance U.S. operations in the Mediterranean. European defense companies are at the forefront of developing uncrewed vehicles, and the continent is no longer dependent on the United States’ surveillance aircraft. The heavy burden that Washington bore for collective defense is being lightened by Europe’s response to Russia.

BUYER’S REMORSE

For the United States, the upside of Europe’s rise is easy to grasp. Beijing is the primary challenge to American security, so U.S. officials want to prioritize it over Moscow. Now, they can.

But Americans may find that they overcorrected in their quest to get Europe to do more. Consider, for example, the manufacturing implications. With Washington retrenching from the continent, Europe has seemingly decided to buy fewer goods from American defense manufacturers. Countries drawing from the EU’s new $163.5 billion defense procurement loan pool must spend the funds only for purchases from European defense companies. A senior EU official told me that purchases from U.S. defense companies might qualify if their products are manufactured in Europe. Yet the contracts will require employing European workers and paying European taxes. Such agreements could help American production by creating more resilient supply chains, but not if tariffs and trade barriers create obstacles for U.S. companies in Europe. For example, American companies have been scouring the globe for sources of ammunition fuses and explosives, many of which European companies have been able to source. But ironically, that potential benefit could be undermined if new tariff rules label these products as European imports, even if they are ultimately produced by American companies on the continent.

Europe’s newfound autonomy is also causing strategic difficulties. For instance, the United States wants to put a quick stop to the war in Ukraine, and it has therefore argued for lifting sanctions on Russia in step-by-step peace negotiations. Europe, however, does not want to pressure Kyiv into an unwanted settlement. In the past, Europe might have gone along with Washington’s plans anyway, lest the bloc lose American support. But this time around, the continent has declared that it will not lift sanctions until Ukraine is ready to settle.

This has severely restricted the amount of relief American officials can provide to Russia. Europe holds two-thirds of the $330 billion of the Russian assets that U.S. allies agreed to freeze in 2022 to deny Moscow access to financing for its war in Ukraine. This means that the White House cannot dangle this carrot before Putin without European permission. Europe is also home to SWIFT, the payments mechanism that is keeping Russian banks from gaining access to the global financial system. The United States could loosen sanctions on the Russian energy sector, but since it is Europe that buys Russian natural gas through the now shuttered Nord Stream pipelines, a change in U.S. energy policy alone has little impact on the Kremlin’s purse strings. And Europe has significant sanctions on Russian shipping and Russian access to dual-use technology goods, which the United States can do nothing about.

Washington will have to earn Europe’s partnership.

Other parts of the United States’ Russia policy also depend on European acquiescence. Washington, for example, wants European countries to pledge to put troops on the ground in Ukraine to enforce an eventual peace settlement. But Europeans have demonstrated little interest in doing so as long as Washington entertains Russia’s demands. Unlike the United States, for example, the vast majority of European countries will not concede that Russia should be able to dictate whether Ukraine can be a member of NATO—not least because Putin has stated that a peace settlement with Kyiv should also revisit previous rounds of NATO’s enlargement.

If a sense of a common transatlantic purpose continues to fray, Europe might wind up undermining Washington’s objectives elsewhere in the world. Should the United States decide to conduct a major military campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, for example, it will want to use its military bases in Europe. This would require seeking permission from European countries. Those governments will know that their granting Washington’s request will guarantee massive protests all over the continent. But in contrast to their actions in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, many European countries might refuse. Washington would then either have to start its offensive from far-off bases in the United States—or from partner bases in the Middle East, which are easier for Iran to hit than bases in Europe.

As long as NATO remains strong, the United States will probably be able to keep using its bases in Europe for self-defense. Protecting North America is written into the alliance’s charter. But European countries may no longer trust that Washington will defend them should the need arise. As a result, European leaders are seriously discussing whether the continent should acquire its own credible nuclear deterrent. France and the United Kingdom both have nuclear weapons, but neither currently has the number of warheads and the variety in delivery vehicles that the U.S. arsenal does, or the strategic depth. (Washington, for example, is separated from its competitors by vast oceans.) The United States claims it has no intention of pulling its nuclear umbrella from Europe or ignoring Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which states that an attack on one member of the alliance is an attack on all. But Washington’s NATO policy seems to change every day, and Europe does not have the time to wait and see if the Americans will actually uphold their commitments.

RUSSIAN RESET

There is, of course, another force splitting Washington and Europe: Trump. In 2017, Europe could comfort itself with the thought that American voters didn’t really know what they were getting when they elected him. But in 2024, Americans had already watched Trump bully U.S. allies, toy with leaving NATO, and cozy up to Russia. They voted for him anyway. As one European diplomat told me in January, the continent must consider the idea that Joe Biden’s presidency, not Trump’s, was the blip.

Unfortunately, in the months since that diplomat and I spoke, relations have deteriorated further. During his first term, Trump had advisers and cabinet members who supported the transatlantic relationship and restrained some of his worst impulses. This time around, those in his administration are far more in sync with Trump’s deep-seated antagonism toward Europe. In February, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told European officials in Brussels that “the United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency.” In a speech in Munich the same month, Vice President JD Vance said that when he looked “at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, told reporters that Washington had “incredible opportunities” to partner with Russia.

Europeans have listened. In a poll of 18,000 Europeans conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations just after Trump’s victory in November, more than half of respondents considered the United States merely a “necessary partner” rather than an “ally,” a term that just 22 percent were willing to apply. Just 18 months earlier, more than half of Europeans polled by ECFR considered the United States an ally.

At a NATO military exercise in Babaj i Bokes, Kosovo, June 2025 Valdrin Xhemaj / Reuters

European officials, for their part, now speak of relations with the United States using a term that they once reserved for China: “de-risking.” Over the past decade, European countries have erected barriers to Chinese investment in critical national infrastructure on the assumption, pushed by Washington, that doing so was necessary to reduce the risk that Beijing could acquire leverage over their political systems and economies. Now, the script has flipped: European countries are considering enhanced trade with China to mitigate their vulnerability to the United States. They became particularly interested in doing so after Trump slapped sudden, massive tariffs on almost all the continent’s exports.

In 2028, Americans might be able to slow Europe’s flight from Washington by replacing Trump with a more traditional leader. But it will take more than one election to persuade Europeans that the United States can be trusted again. Even if Trump is followed by a string of committed transatlanticist presidents, U.S.-European relations will probably never return to what they were. Europe is moving away from Washington not just because of Trump but also because its priorities are different from the United States’, its capabilities have improved, and Europeans are no longer certain that America is an unshakable ally.

But that doesn’t mean the United States and Europe are headed for divorce. The two parties may give different weight to their respective concerns, but those concerns are still mutual. China remains a threat to Europe. Russia is still a threat to the United States. The world is changing, and not for the better, and the two sides need each other to cope with a challenging Beijing, a destructive Moscow, a dangerous Tehran, and a wildcard Pyongyang.

The United States’ Russia policy depends on European acquiescence.

To repair relations, however, Washington will have to recalibrate its approach to Europe. This means accepting, first and foremost, that the world now has multiple poles and that the continent is one of them. The key will be returning to the fundamentals of defense diplomacy: accommodating power, recognizing interests, and allowing for a give and take that unlocks mutually beneficial agreements. Over eight decades of leadership born of gratitude from a destroyed Europe, generations of American officials have gotten used to European concessions to U.S. priorities. Now, they will have to get better at dealmaking and compromise. As Washington considers reducing its military posture in Europe, it will need to spend more to compete for the continent’s defense contracts. The United States will likely have to listen to European arguments about balancing the continent’s wariness of Chinese influence with the need for Chinese trade, investment, and technology—just as the United States heeds the needs of its partners in the Middle East, who are developing strong ties with China out of economic necessity. The United States will also have to accept that NATO allies hosting U.S. military bases might have strong views on how Washington can prevent Iranian nuclear proliferation. It certainly will have to acknowledge that the European Union is a powerful economic force essential to NATO’s success.

If the United States can maintain its partnership with Europe, it will have an advantage not available to China or Russia in a multipolar world. Neither Beijing nor Moscow has an alliance of such economic heft, diplomatic might, and global reach. They cannot muster the kind of power wielded by NATO. Europe may give Americans headaches, but it always has; there is a reason why Washington has long wanted the continent to give the United States freedom to focus on other issues.

But having achieved what they wanted, U.S. officials now have to make a choice. They can spurn Europe and face a more dangerous world alone and depleted. Or they can forge a new, more accommodating transatlantic relationship. They will face obstacles in attempting the latter, given all that has changed. But the two parties have nearly a century of shared experience. Their friendship can prevail.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Celeste A. Wallander · June 24, 2025

22. How to Survive the New Nuclear Age

MIssion impossible?

Excerpts:

Getting the three major nuclear powers to agree to some form of nuclear guardrails across all domains—nonstrategic and strategic nuclear weapons, missile defenses, and space—will be highly complex. To have even a chance of success, any such agreement will need to be innovative and flexible. For example, it might impose warhead limitations on all nuclear weapons states but allow for specific exclusions, including for capabilities that address imbalances in the relative number of warheads, strategic delivery platforms, or other big-ticket items. A model for such an approach might be the 1922 Washington Naval Conference, which limited the overall tonnage of great-power navies with the goal of preventing a naval arms race, but tailored the specific limits to each party’s needs, relationships, and naval status. Regardless of the path taken, American policymakers must urgently craft creative, practical solutions, both formal and informal, to manage a world of multiple nuclear actors that are currently unwilling to negotiate in good faith.

In the decades after the Cold War, many senior U.S. officials hoped that nuclear weapons might recede from global politics entirely. But that prospect turned out to be an illusion. Instead, nuclear weapons are back with a vengeance. To maintain a credible strategy for this new nuclear age, the United States must begin by recognizing and understanding the world as it is—not as many hoped or wished it would be. It will need farsighted analysis by some of the country’s finest strategic minds. It will need to reaffirm American leadership to allies across the world. In no future is the United States safer without its network of allies, regardless of the costs the country must pay to ensure that its security guarantees and extended nuclear deterrent remain credible. And it will require a concerted effort by senior U.S. officials and members of Congress to realign the U.S. arsenal to meet today’s and tomorrow’s threats: the United States cannot simply hope that China’s large nuclear expansion might someday be reversed.

One thing is clear. If the United States does not urgently prepare for the impending nuclear hurricane, it could find itself in a place it has never been: a situation in which China, North Korea, or Russia—acting separately or in concert—uses a nuclear weapon against a U.S. ally or even the U.S. homeland because Washington appears to be unwilling or unable to deter such an attack. The world has never lived through such a storm. For eighty years, U.S. strategists have successfully fought to prevent it from arriving. But it is now coming faster than anyone forecast, and complacency may be deadly.

How to Survive the New Nuclear Age

Foreign Affairs · by More by Vipin Narang · June 24, 2025

National Security in a World of Proliferating Risks and Eroding Constraints

July/August 2025 Published on June 24, 2025

Matt Needle

VIPIN NARANG is Frank Stanton Professor of Nuclear Security and Political Science and Director of the Center for Nuclear Security Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2022 to 2024, he served as U.S. Principal Deputy and then Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy.

PRANAY VADDI is a Senior Nuclear Fellow at the Center for Nuclear Security Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2022 to 2025, he served as Senior Director for Arms Control, Disarmament, and Nonproliferation at the National Security Council.

More by Pranay Vaddi

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In 2009, when U.S. President Barack Obama came into office, nuclear weapons looked increasingly superfluous. As the Cold War faded into history, Moscow and Washington, the world’s two nuclear superpowers, had long been working together to reduce their arsenals. At the same time, after years of protracted conventional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the broader “war on terror,” the U.S. defense establishment was far more preoccupied with counterterrorism and counterinsurgency than with nuclear strategy and great-power rivalry. The notion that any other country would attempt to reach nuclear parity with Russia and the United States seemed far-fetched, and American leaders were all too happy to delay an expensive refurbishment of the aging U.S. arsenal. So strong was the consensus that nuclear arms were a relic of a previous era that four top former national security officials—Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and William Perry, not one of them a dove—publicly called for “ending” nuclear weapons “as a threat to the world.”

A decade and a half later, things could not be more different. The United States now faces a Category 5 hurricane of nuclear threats. After decades of maintaining only a minimal nuclear capability, China is on pace to nearly quintuple its 2019 stockpile of some 300 nuclear warheads by 2035, in a quest to attain an arsenal equivalent in strength to Russia’s and the United States’. Far from being a partner in arms reductions, Russia is using the threat of nuclear weapons as a shield for its aggression in Ukraine. Meanwhile, North Korea continues to expand its arsenal, which now includes missiles capable of hitting the continental United States. Iran is closer than ever to producing a nuclear weapon. And in May, the world witnessed India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed powers, strike each other’s heartlands with conventional weapons in the aftermath of a terror attack, a confrontation that—already unprecedented—could have escalated to a nuclear standoff.

These multiplying threats have not just brought nuclear strategy back to the center of U.S. defense concerns; they have also introduced new problems. Never before has the United States had to deter and protect its allies from multiple nuclear-armed great-power rivals at the same time. Like Russia, both China and North Korea may integrate nuclear weapons into offensive planning, seeking a nuclear shield to enable conventional aggression against nonnuclear neighbors. Moreover, there is a growing possibility that two or more nuclear powers—for example, China and Russia, or North Korea and Russia—might try to synchronize military aggression against their neighbors, stretching the U.S. nuclear deterrent beyond its means. Finally, the rapid erosion of nuclear guardrails, the diplomatic architecture that has for decades limited proliferation and brought security to dozens of countries under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, has pushed some Asian and European allies to consider acquiring their own nuclear weapons. All this has happened in an era in which the United States’ antiquated nuclear arsenal has fallen into disrepair, with ongoing modernization efforts mired in delays and rampant cost overruns.

This coming nuclear hurricane poses far-reaching challenges. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, Washington will need to develop more, different, and better nuclear capabilities and begin to deploy them in new ways. Given the scale of the problem, nuclear concerns can no longer be treated as a niche issue managed by a small community of experts. Officials at the highest levels of government will need to incorporate them into core defense policy in each of the major theaters of vital interest to the United States: Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East. At the same time, Congress will need to back an accelerated effort to overhaul the U.S. arsenal with significant funding and give the project urgent priority, to be able to address not just today’s changing threat environment but tomorrow’s as well. Above all, for the United States to effectively handle a highly volatile and quickly changing nuclear order, nuclear affairs must once again become a central part of American grand strategy.

CHINA’S BIG PLAY

The most momentous shift in the global nuclear weapons landscape is China’s determination to become a nuclear powerhouse. As recently as 2019, the small Chinese arsenal scarcely factored into U.S. nuclear strategy. After first testing nuclear weapons in 1964, Beijing sought nuclear capabilities almost exclusively for defensive purposes and to be able to deter the United States (or the Soviet Union) from nuclear attack and “blackmail.” To achieve these limited goals, Beijing maintained a handful of unfueled intercontinental ballistic missiles and stored the warheads separately—an arrangement that required hours, perhaps days, to prepare the ICBMs for launch. This posture enabled a retaliation-only strategy, accompanied by a “no first use” pledge to the world. As a result, U.S. strategists, both during the Cold War and after, were able to set China’s nuclear forces aside as a “lesser included case” and concentrate on deterring the Soviet Union and its successor, Russia.

Sometime during the last decade, however, Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered a breathtaking expansion of his country’s nuclear arsenal. Along with hundreds of new ICBM silos, the new force will include regional low-yield ballistic missiles (and possibly cruise missiles), hypersonic delivery systems, an orbital warhead-delivery system designed to evade U.S. missile defenses, and an expanding submarine-based deterrent designed to survive a nuclear first strike. Moreover, Beijing is building this arsenal even faster than Washington had initially anticipated: in just five years, it has doubled its number of operational warheads to 600, a figure that is estimated to reach 1,000 by 2030 and possibly 1,500 by 2035. As a result, the United States may soon face not one but two rival great powers with large, diverse strategic nuclear forces comparable to its own.

China’s nuclear rise poses a complicated dilemma for U.S. planners. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, American nuclear strategy has centered on convincing any adversary that there is no viable pathway to using nuclear weapons to achieve its political-military goals against the United States or any U.S. allies. This strategy has three parts. First and most important, the U.S. arsenal must be able to survive a first strike and impose assured destruction on its attacker in retaliation for such a strike. Second, to the extent possible, it needs to be able to meaningfully limit the amount of damage the attacker can inflict on the United States and its allies. To do this, the United States must maintain the capability to destroy as many of the attacker’s nuclear weapons as practicable before or after they are launched, a principle known as counterforce targeting. Thus, in addition to flexible regional nuclear options that can manage escalation, Washington needs highly accurate U.S.-based strategic nuclear forces that can threaten to destroy the adversary’s long-range arsenal, to prevent a limited war—wherein one or two nuclear weapons might be exchanged in theater as an escalatory step in an intense conventional conflict—from turning into a far more destructive one. The ability to limit damage is a core requirement of U.S. deterrence strategy and its nuclear guarantee to allies—that the United States could likely save Berlin without losing Boston. Third, the U.S. arsenal needs to be large and survivable enough to retain sufficient nuclear capabilities after an initial exchange to deter further attack by a weakened adversary or opportunistic aggression by one of the smaller nuclear-armed states. A nuclear force that is designed to meet these three goals with respect to only Russia, however, as the U.S. arsenal currently is, will be insufficient to do so against both China and Russia at the same time.

Adding to this problem is the specific composition of Beijing’s new arsenal. Had Xi’s nuclear expansion focused on building up survivable nuclear forces—for example, by placing more warheads on ballistic missile submarines—then U.S. strategists would mainly need to focus on enhancing antisubmarine tools. But Xi has chosen also to build hundreds of new silos for land-based ICBMs, which can be launched within minutes to devastate the U.S. homeland—a posture that seems designed to break U.S. strategy. For the United States to be able to credibly limit damage from China, it will need to account for each new silo. Moreover, the United States cannot assume, as some have argued, that Beijing merely wants a more credible assured retaliation capability. By acquiring new ICBMs and lower-yield short-range weapons, it could be fundamentally shifting the orientation of its nuclear strategy. For example, China could use lower-yield weapons “locally” in a battle against conventional forces, whether on the battlefield or to deter the United States from using similar capabilities if a Chinese offensive imperils U.S. conventional forces. The new ICBMs could also help China counter the United States’ ability to threaten strategic escalation. Given the number of new Chinese ICBM silos and their geographic spread, and China’s potential shift to a strategy that enables regional coercion, the United States will likely need a larger—and different—deployed nuclear arsenal to be able to deter both China and Russia in twin crises.

DANGER AT EVERY CORNER

To make matters worse, China’s emergence as a major nuclear weapons state comes at a moment when Russia and other smaller nuclear powers have begun wielding their arsenals in far more dangerous and destabilizing ways. In recent years, Moscow has not only steamrolled over almost every arms control agreement with Washington but also made explicit nuclear threats against the West. In the fall of 2022, for example, when Russia’s front in southern Ukraine appeared at risk of collapse, Russia’s nuclear threats took on a new edge as its senior leaders credibly discussed using low-yield nuclear weapons to avoid conventional defeat. The U.S. intelligence community judged that the odds of such use were higher than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis—a “coin flip,” as one aide to U.S. President Joe Biden put it. The Biden administration urgently set out to convince Putin that using a nuclear weapon would have “catastrophic consequences,” and Putin decided not to test Western resolve—this time.

Nevertheless, the threat crystallized Moscow’s stakes in the conflict and forced the United States and its allies to carefully weigh the escalation risks of providing military aid to Ukraine. Moreover, there was no “the other guy blinked” moment, as U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk famously stated when describing the Soviets backing down to end the Cuban missile crisis: the threat of Russian nuclear use may have receded after the 2022 crisis, but the conditions that generated it have persisted and intensified. Since then, the Kremlin has suspended the 2010 New START treaty—which had brought the U.S. and Russian arsenals down to their lowest levels in 60 years. It has also revised its nuclear doctrine, clarifying that it would consider targeting nuclear-armed states, such as France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that provide aid to a nonnuclear belligerent at war with Russia, such as Ukraine. Putin has begun to deploy Russian nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus, and U.S. officials assessed that Russia may have a reckless plan to put nuclear weapons in space.

Notwithstanding Russia’s saber rattling, Washington and its European allies announced more expansive military support to Kyiv, including F-16s, new munitions, and missiles that would allow long-range strikes against Crimea and into Russian territory. The United States and NATO allies also suspended compliance with the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe following Russia’s withdrawal in 2023, a step that allows a greater number of U.S., NATO, and other forces to be stationed closer to the Russian border if necessary. Amid heightened Russian nuclear rhetoric and growing risk-taking by both sides, the nuclear threat has become a permanent feature of the conflict. What’s more, Russia’s strategy in Ukraine has provided a possible playbook not only for China but also for North Korea for using the threat of a nuclear attack as a shield to enable increasingly ambitious regional aggression.

Indeed, the complexities of the emerging nuclear landscape go well beyond rising China and revisionist Russia. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is steadily expanding his country’s nuclear arsenal, seemingly disinterested in Trump administration efforts to reduce nuclear tensions in exchange for sanctions relief. In recent years, along with a newer generation of ICBMs capable of reaching U.S. territory, North Korea has added enough regional nuclear weapons to its arsenal to deter a combined U.S.–South Korean attack. North Korean strategists aim to convince Washington that it should not risk San Francisco to protect Seoul—that it should abandon South Korea to fend for itself. Meanwhile, Iran continues to advance its nuclear program, reducing the time required to sprint to a weapon to potentially days. Weakened by the dismantling of its network of proxy forces over the past 18 months, it may also feel more urgency than ever to weaponize its nuclear capability. If Israel and the United States conclude that the Iranian regime is about to cross that threshold, they might feel compelled to launch a preventive attack, possibly setting off a destabilizing regional war. Although the Trump administration has said it is open to a new nuclear deal with Iran, making progress will not be easy. Too much pressure could backfire, causing Iranian hard-liners to push for rapid weaponization. But readiness to compromise could embolden Tehran to continue its secretive, creeping progress toward a weapon, setting the stage for future war.

Yet another threat comes from Pakistan. Although Pakistan claims its nuclear program is strictly focused on deterring India, which enjoys conventional military superiority, U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the Pakistani military is developing an ICBM that could reach the continental United States. In acquiring such a capability, Pakistan might be seeking to deter the United States from either trying to eliminate its arsenal in a preventive attack or intervening on India’s behalf in a future Indian-Pakistani conflict. Regardless, as U.S. officials have noted, if Pakistan acquires an ICBM, Washington will have no choice but to treat the country as a nuclear adversary—no other country with ICBMs that can target the United States is considered a friend. In short, mounting nuclear dangers now lurk in every region of vital interest to the United States.

NUCLEAR BULLIES, ANXIOUS ALLIES

Although each of these rising nuclear antagonists poses a challenge in its own right, the possibility of coordination or collusion among them is even more worrying. To aid Russia’s war in Ukraine, for example, Iran has furnished the Russian military with drones; North Korea has provided at least 14,000 soldiers and huge amounts of munitions and has cemented a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Russia. In addition to giving North Korea a dependable Russian veto in the UN Security Council against any additional global sanctions, the growing Moscow-Pyongyang axis means that a conflict on the Korean Peninsula could draw in China, Russia, and the United States, with each supporting its respective ally—creating a true nuclear nightmare.

By far the greatest concern, however, is the growing alignment of China and Russia. In 2023, China provided Russia with approximately 90 percent of its imports of goods that are subject to the G-7’s high-priority export control list, according to a study by the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. Filling a massive import gap, this Chinese supply chain has helped Russia sustain its war economy and quickly reconstitute its depleted conventional capabilities. In return, Russia has helped China in strategic military domains such as space, missile defense, and early warning technologies—including a system that can detect an adversary missile attack from anywhere on the globe, a capability that only Russia and the United States possess.

Indeed, U.S. defense planners must now consider the possibility that Beijing and Moscow may try to synchronize aggression against their neighbors to further limit the U.S. ability to respond. If China attacks Taiwan while Russia is attacking eastern Europe, for example, U.S. forces would be split and stretched thin. Hypothetically, if it failed to deter Russia from using a nuclear weapon to further Moscow’s regional aims, the United States might need to respond with nuclear use, and potentially with a larger nuclear exchange if it is unable to reestablish nuclear deterrence in Europe. In such a situation, with overall U.S. deterrence weakened, China could exploit the moment to launch a conventional attack against its neighbors, or even be emboldened to use nuclear weapons to stave off the United States. Confronted with this two-war dynamic, given the current U.S. arsenal, a U.S. president might be compelled to back down in one or both fights, with catastrophic consequences for American and global security.

Russia’s offensive nuclear strategy in Ukraine is a playbook for China and North Korea.

Amid these volatile developments, a number of nonnuclear states—including, for the first time this century, Washington’s own allies—are contemplating developing their own nuclear arsenals. For decades, a key pillar of American nuclear strategy has been extending the U.S. nuclear deterrent to at least 34 formal allies across two vast oceans, a responsibility no other power assumes. This policy was born not out of altruism but out of self-interest: the United States and its collective deterrent are stronger with the geography, capabilities, and political unity that allies provide. Fewer nuclear powers means fewer opportunities for nuclear use, a goal that has also allowed Washington to centralize alliance decision-making under its command.

With the rapid changes in both the global nuclear environment and U.S. foreign policy, however, some American allies have begun to question Washington’s ability and willingness to extend deterrence. South Korea—anxious about American abandonment—is now most likely to engage in nuclear proliferation, although some NATO powers could also be candidates. In Europe, the United Kingdom’s and France’s nuclear arsenals can compensate to some degree for reduced U.S. engagement. But these forces, even combined with additional nonnuclear capabilities, are not positioned to limit the damage that Russia can cause to allies and thus cannot credibly replace the nuclear umbrella offered by the United States. As a result, countries such as Poland or even Germany could decide to seek their own nuclear weapons if they become convinced that the United States is no longer willing or able to protect them.

The advent of more nuclear powers, regardless of whether they are U.S. allies, would open a Pandora’s box that Washington has fought for decades to keep closed. For one thing, the same nuclear powers these countries are seeking to deter—China, Russia, and North Korea—could decide to wipe out any emerging nuclear programs in a preventive attack. And even if a U.S. ally succeeds in acquiring nuclear weapons, its small arsenal would become vulnerable to more powerful adversaries as U.S. security guarantees fade, leading to growing instability. Consider South Asia, where India and Pakistan continue to engage in increasingly intense conventional strikes despite the ever-present threat of nuclear use, testing the limits of the so-called stability-instability paradox, wherein the existence of nuclear stability between two countries may actually increase the likelihood of conventional conflict. Moreover, if one U.S. ally—say, South Korea—developed nuclear weapons, it would likely encourage others, such as Japan, to quickly follow suit. This would deliver a damaging blow to an already fragile Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which has for decades served as a crucial brake on the spread of nuclear weapons. Keeping allies nonnuclear and preserving the treaty are core American interests—if nothing else, to prevent other states from starting, and dragging Washington into, nuclear wars that the United States has to finish.

A GAME WITHOUT RULES

Among the remarkable facts about the nuclear order in previous decades has been the general observance of formal and informal guardrails to limit the growth, spread, and use of nuclear weapons. Even at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States saw mutual benefit in verifiable strategic arms control. And after successful negotiations on shaping and limiting their arsenals in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the 1970s, the two countries began a series of agreements to massively reduce their military armaments, from the U.S.-Soviet Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987 to the U.S.-Russian New START Treaty in 2010. In this way, the countries managed a steady and precipitous reduction in their forces from the heights of Cold War military competition.

Today, these constraints are crumbling. Under Putin, Moscow has partially or fully abandoned many of the earlier agreements, and Beijing continues to refuse even discussing arms limits as it rapidly expands its arsenal. The looming 2026 expiration of New START, which limits Russia and the United States to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads each on intercontinental delivery systems, may be a crucial inflection point. Without a successor agreement, the United States could find itself in a full-blown nuclear arms race for the first time in half a century—this time with both China and Russia expanding their arsenals simultaneously. At some point, Beijing, Moscow, and Washington may come to recognize that limits on strategic arms are in their mutual self-interest. But for the foreseeable future, the United States may have to face unconstrained nuclear competition in which it is potentially outnumbered and outgunned and does not have the means to quickly even the odds.

The lack of guardrails makes the new nuclear age all the more dangerous. The United States has had to deter a great power with a similar nuclear arsenal before, but it has never had to deter two. It has assured allies against a single major nuclear adversary in Europe, but it has never had to assure distinct groups of allies, thousands of miles apart on land and sea, against two. The United States has worked to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to so-called rogue states since the end of the Cold War, but it has not previously had to stop nervous allies from pursuing them this century. Although there are no easy solutions to these multiplying threats, U.S. leaders can significantly mitigate them by making astute, yet still modest, changes to the arsenal itself and to the overall role of nuclear strategy in U.S. foreign and defense policy.

Watching a military parade in Moscow, May 2025 Yulia Morozova / Reuters

In theory, the United States is already upgrading its nuclear posture to address these challenges: for 15 years, the government has been committed to a trillion-dollar-plus nuclear modernization program to update the land-, sea-, and air-based weapons that constitute the U.S. nuclear “triad.” This includes replacing decades-old systems with more advanced alternatives: the 1970s Minuteman III ICBMs and Ohio-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines, for example, will be replaced by modern Sentinel ICBMs and Columbia-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines. The new B-21 stealth bomber will be equipped with a long-range nuclear stand-off cruise missile that can be launched at a target from outside an enemy’s air defenses. In 2024, fifth-generation F-35 fighters began carrying the modern B61-12 gravity bomb for regional deterrence in Europe.

Yet this overhaul was conceived in 2009, when the United States had not even anticipated, let alone accounted for, the nuclear expansions of China and North Korea. Thanks to its strategic arms control agreements with Moscow, Washington also assumed that global nuclear stockpiles would continue to shrink, and it did not even seek to replace the full number of legacy capabilities. Take the submarine-based nuclear forces, which are both the backstop of nuclear survivability—deterring an adversary from targeting the U.S. homeland—and also essential for targeting as many of an adversary’s ICBMs as possible. According to the modernization plan, the existing 14 Ohio-class submarines, which can (without New START limits) carry a maximum of 336 Trident ballistic missiles, are to be replaced by just 12 Columbia-class submarines with maximum capacity for only 192 Tridents—representing a launcher reduction of more than 40 percent, just as China completes its construction of hundreds of new ICBM silos.

Moreover, because of the low priority accorded to nuclear-armed conflict at the time, many parts of the plan started late, and further delays now mean that new capabilities are still years away and billions of dollars over budget. With the Sentinel ICBMs now likely ten years behind schedule, the legacy Minuteman III will need to be maintained until at least 2050, well beyond its designed life expectancy. Even if the United States completes the modernization as planned, the country’s arsenal will still be insufficient to confront today’s and tomorrow’s nuclear challenges.

MORE, DIFFERENT, BETTER

The United States will need innovative approaches and a far more comprehensive strategy to manage the multiplying threats from China, North Korea, and Russia. Although the second Trump administration is pursuing an ambitious “Golden Dome” homeland missile defense architecture, the plan comes with risks of its own. Not only will it take decades to be fully realized and cost hundreds of billions of dollars that could be spent on other capabilities, but it may also spur adversaries to cheaply build and deploy more warheads and decoys, as well as more destabilizing exotic technologies, to potentially evade and saturate the system. More advanced missile defenses will be necessary to intercept small or residual adversary nuclear forces, but they—including Golden Dome—cannot replace the nonnuclear and nuclear forces that may be required to first eliminate as many adversary forces as practicable if an adversary miscalculates or threatens escalation in a war. As a result, the United States will need a nuclear arsenal that breaks sharply from that of past decades, and that deploys, for the first time this century, more, different, and better nuclear systems.

In Europe, the United States and NATO must assess what is required to create a strong regional deterrent against a revisionist Russia. Currently, Moscow possesses up to 2,000 lower-yield “battlefield” nuclear weapons that are unhindered by any existing arms limits. NATO has an opportunity to build resilience and redundancy into its nuclear mission, taking advantage of the common F-35 program and the expanded geography of the alliance with new members Finland and Sweden. But in the face of improving Russian air defenses, the alliance may need to develop a longer range air-launched nuclear weapon for deployment on F-35 fighter jets, or more cost-effective ground-based options, as successors to the B61-12 gravity bomb.

In the Indo-Pacific, the regional nuclear cupboard is even more bare. Although B-2 and B-52 bombers stationed in the United States can deliver gravity bombs and long-range, air-launched nuclear cruise missiles to the region, the tyranny of distance reduces the bombers’ effectiveness. To enhance its sea-based regional deterrent, the United States has developed a lower-yield warhead (the W76-2) deployed on Ohio-class Trident ballistic missiles. But these weapons must take the place of higher-yield warheads, reducing the United States’ overall counterforce capabilities, as well as the strength of the survivable second-strike force on which it relies to deter attacks on the homeland.

A promising alternative is to build dedicated regional deterrence capabilities for Asia. In 2023, Congress mandated that the Pentagon develop a lower-yield, sea-launched nuclear cruise missile for U.S. attack submarines. Such a weapon could deter China’s first use or provide a limited escalation option should China attack a U.S. ally. It could also free up the Trident missiles for higher-yield strategic warheads, thus allowing the United States to more effectively target the growing number of Chinese ICBM silos within existing capabilities. The problem is that the new sea-launched cruise missiles may not be ready soon enough. In addition to exploring quicker ways to acquire this capability—such as by pairing lower-yield nuclear warheads with existing Tomahawk missiles on older, Los Angeles–class attack submarines—policymakers should assess the viability of apportioning to the Indo-Pacific some of the future air-launched or ground-based missile systems developed for Europe. Given the long timelines for developing new weapons, the United States needs to anticipate future needs in Asia and Europe now so that it can be ready when the storm hits.

Some allies have begun to question the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

If China or Russia were to escalate a regional conflict beyond Asia or Europe, Washington would have to turn to “central” strategic deterrence to credibly deter a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland. In a nuclear world in which either China or Russia can test the United States on its own, and in which the two U.S. adversaries could align to do so simultaneously or in rapid succession, a key challenge is figuring out how to deter one without compromising the ability to deter the other. The Biden administration first recognized this problem in its Nuclear Weapons Employment Planning Guidance, a report issued in 2024. This updated guidance directed the Department of Defense to prepare for deterring China, North Korea, and Russia “simultaneously in peacetime, crisis, and conflict.” The broad implication is that Washington needs to deploy not only more warheads but also more systems than originally planned under the modernization program.

To do so amid continued delays, the Biden administration considered near-term options such as uploading additional warheads to Minuteman III ICBMs, which now carry a single warhead apiece; extending the operating lifetime for Ohio-class submarines for several additional years to ensure there is no immediate launcher shortage; and adding more Trident missiles to Ohio-class submarines, which have had four of their 24 missile launchers deactivated, or “capped,” to comply with the expiring New START limits. To avoid the looming launcher cliff in the crucial sea component of its nuclear triad, however, the United States must build a larger number of Columbia-class submarines in the 2040s and beyond—at least 14, and perhaps more, to hedge against the further growth of adversaries’ arsenals.

To be clear, there is no need for the United States to deploy more nuclear forces than those of China and Russia combined. Deterrence is not—and never has been—a function of raw warhead comparisons. The U.S. nuclear stockpile today, for example, is not identical in size or composition to that of Russia, which has a larger number of weapons overall, including its large number of regionally focused, nonstrategic nuclear warheads and delivery systems. Still, to counter the ICBM silos that China is now developing while maintaining deterrence against Russia, the United States will need to consider deploying additional warheads. Precisely how many more is uncertain and will depend largely on the choices adversaries make and on how much risk a president is willing to accept in both the most plausible and worst-case nuclear scenarios.

In response to China’s nuclear expansion, some experts have called for a fundamental shift in U.S. nuclear strategy to avoid having to deploy additional nuclear weapons. According to the current counterforce approach, which in concert with missile defenses seeks to limit damage against allies and the homeland, the United States needs to deploy a sufficient number of nuclear and nonnuclear forces to be able to target adversary nuclear forces. Given the challenge of maintaining this capability against two growing nuclear peers, some strategists advocate shifting to a so-called countervalue approach, in which the United States would not try to target adversaries’ nuclear forces, but would instead target a smaller number of key population centers, infrastructure, and sources of political control and economic wealth. Proponents argue that this strategy shift would require no adjustments to U.S. posture because U.S. submarines, hidden deep beneath the seas, could assuredly retaliate against centers of political power, infrastructure, and population in response to an adversary’s first strike, deterring the attack in the first place.

Military vehicles carrying ballistic missiles during a parade in Beijing, September 2015 Andy Wong / Reuters

Leaving aside the legal and moral issues of intentionally targeting civilian populations, abandoning the objective—or even the option—of damage limitation would force a U.S. president to expose the American homeland and population to a devastating reprisal. That prospect raises questions about whether a countervalue strategy would effectively deter adversaries and the extent to which it would unnecessarily risk additional American lives—what any U.S. president would value the most. The countervalue approach would also cause allies to question whether the United States would be willing to use nuclear weapons to defend them in a regional war. With American cities under increased nuclear threat, and the United States holding its arsenal in reserve to deter against such attacks rather than to maintain extended deterrence, allies may conclude that they need to seek their own nuclear arsenals. A strategy built for general deterrence of attacks against the U.S. homeland is not credible in an era of extended deterrence, a lesson the United States learned in the 1960s and never revisited, as national leaders then and today correctly prioritized nonproliferation as a key component of nuclear strategy.

In view of these drawbacks, a better approach would be to adapt the current counterforce strategy for the new era. Since counterforce targeting is driven by the composition and not the size of adversaries’ nuclear arsenals, this would require only a modest adjustment to account for China’s growing ICBM silos. Indeed, unless China and Russia choose to increase the size of their own arsenals above what they already plan, the United States should not have to expand its overall existing stockpile of 3,800 or so warheads. But changing the composition of the arsenal will be crucial. This includes assessing the importance of regional nuclear capabilities to deterring local aggression by China and Russia, and analyzing how to prioritize, say, sea-based versus land-based capabilities to fortify strategic deterrence in a world of multiple major nuclear powers, given available forces. For example, although additional Columbia-class submarines may take decades to build, U.S. planners have various ways to use existing forces to rebuild credible deterrence, as the near-term options outlined by the Biden administration make clear. Designed in the right way, even modest short-term and long-term adjustments can maintain credible deterrence against both China and Russia at reasonable cost. But unless the United States is prepared to radically depart from its enduring nuclear strategy—and risk exposing the homeland to nuclear attack and undermining the credibility of its extended deterrence commitments—it will need to deploy more, different, and better nuclear forces. America needs a more flexible and robust arsenal not to fight a nuclear war but to prevent its outbreak.

HURRICANE WATCH

To make its nuclear strategy effective in a world of multiplying threats, Washington can no longer relegate nuclear issues to a small, insulated community of experts. The transformation of the nuclear landscape requires deep engagement from the most senior leaders in government, as occurred during the Cold War. Nothing will enhance the credibility of the extended deterrence the United States offers to allies in Asia and Europe more than a clear demonstration that the country’s most senior leaders are actively preparing for the coming challenges.

To inhibit allies from seeking their own nuclear deterrents and to ensure that U.S. “hardware”—its military capabilities—is fit for purpose, the United States must explicitly reaffirm that its “software”—its political willingness to defend allies with the full range of capabilities—is equally strong. Washington must show that it remains committed to the concept of extended deterrence and that it is determined to make this guarantee credible against new and emerging threats. Previous U.S. efforts in this direction, including during the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, spurred allies to make greater contributions to NATO’s nuclear deterrence mission, including by procuring and deploying more of their own nonnuclear capabilities. Similarly, in the Indo-Pacific, Washington’s efforts to upgrade its extended deterrence relationships with Australia, Japan, and South Korea have helped reaffirm the U.S. nuclear umbrella. These efforts must now be redoubled to avoid a wave of proliferation of Washington’s own making.

In addition to reaffirming extended deterrence, the United States should seek to revive arms control and nuclear risk-reduction efforts, even if today’s environment has made such measures far more difficult. By adjusting its own nuclear posture, the United States could motivate China and Russia to come to the table. If that happens, Washington should tailor agreements to allow for evolving and emerging threats. For example, by permitting a higher warhead ceiling for deployed weapons, an updated New START agreement with Russia could, in theory, maintain mutually stable deterrence between Moscow and Washington while permitting the United States to counter and prioritize the increasing threat from China’s ICBM silos. Because Russia retains a relatively fixed number of strategic nuclear delivery systems, a Russian effort to increase the number of warheads on a given delivery system would be largely immaterial to U.S. strategists: to maintain an effective counterforce deterrent, U.S. Strategic Command would still need to target an unchanged number of Russian delivery systems but would have the required additional warheads available to target Chinese ICBMs.

The United States cannot simply hope that China’s large nuclear expansion might someday be reversed.

Getting the three major nuclear powers to agree to some form of nuclear guardrails across all domains—nonstrategic and strategic nuclear weapons, missile defenses, and space—will be highly complex. To have even a chance of success, any such agreement will need to be innovative and flexible. For example, it might impose warhead limitations on all nuclear weapons states but allow for specific exclusions, including for capabilities that address imbalances in the relative number of warheads, strategic delivery platforms, or other big-ticket items. A model for such an approach might be the 1922 Washington Naval Conference, which limited the overall tonnage of great-power navies with the goal of preventing a naval arms race, but tailored the specific limits to each party’s needs, relationships, and naval status. Regardless of the path taken, American policymakers must urgently craft creative, practical solutions, both formal and informal, to manage a world of multiple nuclear actors that are currently unwilling to negotiate in good faith.

In the decades after the Cold War, many senior U.S. officials hoped that nuclear weapons might recede from global politics entirely. But that prospect turned out to be an illusion. Instead, nuclear weapons are back with a vengeance. To maintain a credible strategy for this new nuclear age, the United States must begin by recognizing and understanding the world as it is—not as many hoped or wished it would be. It will need farsighted analysis by some of the country’s finest strategic minds. It will need to reaffirm American leadership to allies across the world. In no future is the United States safer without its network of allies, regardless of the costs the country must pay to ensure that its security guarantees and extended nuclear deterrent remain credible. And it will require a concerted effort by senior U.S. officials and members of Congress to realign the U.S. arsenal to meet today’s and tomorrow’s threats: the United States cannot simply hope that China’s large nuclear expansion might someday be reversed.

One thing is clear. If the United States does not urgently prepare for the impending nuclear hurricane, it could find itself in a place it has never been: a situation in which China, North Korea, or Russia—acting separately or in concert—uses a nuclear weapon against a U.S. ally or even the U.S. homeland because Washington appears to be unwilling or unable to deter such an attack. The world has never lived through such a storm. For eighty years, U.S. strategists have successfully fought to prevent it from arriving. But it is now coming faster than anyone forecast, and complacency may be deadly.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Vipin Narang · June 24, 2025

23. The Real Obstacle to Peace With Iran

Excerpts:

Finally, the Trump administration should offer immediate sanctions relief once Iran and the United States agree to even a broad framework for a deal. This would be consistent with Trump’s assertions that he hopes to see a successful and prosperous Iran and would offer Iran’s leaders some evidence that Washington is not out to topple the regime. Getting European partners to sign on to this promise will help strengthen any U.S. commitment and the benefits sanctions relief can offer to Iran. Notably, the effects of sanctions relief could be rapid: Syria recently completed its first banking transaction using SWIFT, barely one month after Trump announced plans to lift U.S. sanctions.

Even as he offers these three types of assurances, Trump should also retire the “deal or bombs” ultimatums that he continues to make to Iran’s leaders. With Iran’s nuclear program set back and its ballistic missile infrastructure severely damaged, there is not an urgent need for either a deal or further military action. Trump now has the luxury of time and so should take advantage of it. He has adopted “peace through strength” as a mantra. In the coming days and weeks, he will need to remember that strength is measured not only through the use of military force but also through the ability to credibly withhold it.

The Real Obstacle to Peace With Iran

Foreign Affairs · by More by Jennifer Kavanagh · June 25, 2025

Credible Assurances Are the Key to Countering Tehran’s Nuclear Ambitions

June 25, 2025

The aftermath of an Iranian missile attack in northern Israel, June 2025 Avi Ohayon / Reuters

JENNIFER KAVANAGH is a Senior Fellow and Director of Military Analysis at Defense Priorities and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies.

ROSEMARY KELANIC is Director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities.

Just two days after authorizing military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordo, Isfahan, and Natanz, U.S. President Donald Trump announced an end to the air war between Iran and Israel and declared that it was time for peace. “Perhaps Iran can now proceed to Peace and Harmony in the Region,” he wrote on his site Truth Social. Whether the cease-fire will hold remains to be seen, but if Trump is hoping for a quick return to diplomacy he is likely to be disappointed.

Trump and his national security team find themselves in a bind. As administration officials have admitted, Iran’s stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and centrifuge components have probably survived military operations by Israel and the United States. In order to locate and secure them, Washington will require Tehran’s cooperation. So far, however, Trump and his negotiators have been unable to cajole Iran’s leaders into making significant concessions. Most notably, the Iranians continue to reject calls to give up uranium enrichment entirely. Trump may hope that his recent display of U.S. military power, combined with Israel’s aggressive military campaign over the past two weeks, will force Iran to compromise, but this is unlikely. If anything, Iran’s leaders will be more reluctant to pursue diplomacy after Trump twice allowed ongoing talks with Iran to be scuttled by military action—first by greenlighting Israeli airstrikes and then by joining the war directly. His ultimatums promising more military punishment and his references to the possibility of regime change are equally unhelpful.

The challenge that the Trump administration faces now is not with the severity of the threats it has issued but with the credibility of the assurances it can provide to Iran’s regime. For Trump’s coercive approach to diplomacy to work in pushing Iran into a strong nuclear deal, two things are necessary. First, the United States must issue believable threats to impose significant and painful consequences if Iran ignores or violates U.S. demands. Trump has done that, with his social media posts, the surge of U.S. military forces to the region, and, most emphatically, his strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. These warnings and actions, however, may still have limited impact on Iranian behavior without the second requirement: meaningful U.S. assurances that Iran won’t suffer the threatened consequences—or other repercussions—if it acquiesces to U.S. demands. Iran’s leaders need to believe that if their country bends the United States won’t try to break it.

Trump’s decision to use U.S. military force has made his threats more believable but made it harder to offer credible assurances. Washington still has options, however, if it hopes to bring Iran’s leaders back into productive negotiations toward a new nuclear deal. Trump will need to ensure that Israel permanently ends its military campaign, including by restricting the resupply of offensive munitions if Israel restarts its air war. The president and his national security team should state definitively that regime change is not an American goal and show that they mean it by withdrawing recently surged air and naval forces from the Middle East. And Washington should offer immediate sanctions relief that kicks in as soon as Iran and the United States reach a broad framework for an agreement. Restarting the diplomatic track that Washington abruptly interrupted in mid-June will be difficult and require patience, but solving the problem of credible assurances offers the only pathway to Trump’s ultimate goal: an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

WHY THREATS NEED ASSURANCES

Trump remains focused on blocking Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon. That is a goal best achieved through diplomacy, not military means, given the inherent limitations of airpower for destroying deeply buried nuclear sites and uranium stockpiles with certainty and finality.

The U.S. attacks on Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan aptly demonstrate the problem. Although battlefield damage assessments are ongoing, Fordo appears to have been damaged but not entirely destroyed. Gary Samore, a Harvard nuclear expert, suggested in an analysis for the Financial Times that the Iranian regime removed centrifuges and perhaps other materials from Fordo before it was targeted, meaning that components of Iran’s nuclear program likely survived the attack. David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, told CNN on Monday that some centrifuges are “unaccounted for” and that some stockpiles of 60 percent highly enriched uranium “were taken away by Iran, and we don’t know where they are.” According to analysis that nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis shared on social media, the last known location of the Iranian stockpile was in tunnels at Isfahan that the United States does not appear to have struck.

More broadly, the Iranian nuclear program far exceeds these three sites. Mindful of the 1981 Israeli attack on Osirak, an Iraqi nuclear reactor, Iran constructed its nuclear program to be compartmentalized, redundant, and highly resilient. Critical functions such as R & D, uranium metallurgy, and centrifuge engineering are embedded in government agencies, engineering firms, and Iranian universities. Diplomacy must therefore follow U.S. airstrikes to persuade Iran to cooperate in dismantling its nuclear program.

Iran clearly fears a long war with the United States. It is for this reason that Tehran limited its retaliation to the U.S. airstrikes to a highly telegraphed missile attack on the U.S. Al Udeid airbase in Qatar that was easily intercepted with no casualties to U.S. military personnel. But even if Iran’s leaders are willing to give up many of their demands to extricate themselves from war with the United States, Trump’s heavy use of threats will fail to bring them back to the negotiating table. As Thomas Schelling, the revered international relations scholar and Nobel Prize recipient, famously recognized, credible threats must be paired with credible assurances to successfully persuade an adversary to capitulate. For coercion to be successful, in other words, it must come with promises that if the target complies, it will avoid the threatened consequences.

The Trump administration can convince Iran that compromise will be worthwhile.

The issue, then, is not just convincing Iran that if it doesn’t give up its nuclear program, the United States will attack. Washington must also convince Tehran of the implicit assurance: if it does give up its nuclear program, then no attack will occur. If Iran believes that Israel or the United States will use military force no matter what, it has no incentive to compromise.

There are several reasons why Iran cannot simply take the credibility of U.S. assurances for granted. First, states live in an anarchic international system where no overarching authority exists to guarantee agreements and punish those who renege. Iran has no external recourse if the United States double-crosses it by pursuing regime change after Iran has given up its nuclear ambitions. Second, there is a time-inconsistency problem: only after Iran has already sacrificed its chief source of leverage—its nuclear program—will the United States have to keep its end of the bargain. Finally, Iran must worry that nuclear concessions will embolden Israel and the United States to make more expansive demands in the future. Altogether, compliance with U.S. conditions is risky for Iran because the United States has less incentive to remain restrained after Trump gets what he wants.

States can break their promises immediately or over the long term. Consider the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, when Ukraine returned Soviet nuclear weapons to Russia in return for a commitment from Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States that Ukraine’s territorial integrity was sacrosanct. That promise lasted a mere 20 years; Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and invaded deep into Ukrainian territory again in February 2022.

In the case of Iran, the regime clearly believes that the United States might be committed to regime change regardless of whether Tehran agrees to dismantle its nuclear program. And right now, it holds an important card: knowledge of the location of the missing components of that nuclear program. If the United States is unable to trace and capture all program components, it risks the possibility that embattled remnants of the current government could covertly sprint for a bomb or that these missing components fall into the hands of unpredictable militant groups. Washington, therefore, is disincentivized from jumping to regime change right away. But once Iran gives up those components or their location, Iran’s leaders will have reason to fear for their political survival—unless, that is, the United States gives them real assurances.

THE CREDIBILITY PROBLEM

Even if the Trump administration is ready and willing to provide Iran with credible assurances, it will find this task difficult for several reasons. For one, there is an inherent tension between threats and assurances. The steps a country takes to make its threats more convincing—such as moving military forces into position or exploiting “madman tactics” to convince the adversary that the country is “crazy enough” to follow through with extreme threats—simultaneously throw into doubt its commitments that cooperation will be rewarded rather than taken advantage of.

In dealing with Iran, Trump has leaned primarily on threats, both promised and delivered. He has flooded U.S. military assets into the Middle East, including more air defenses, additional U.S. fighter jets, and a second U.S. navy carrier strike group. Trump has also used social media and public statements to make clear that he is ready and willing to unleash the full weight of the U.S. military on Iran. And he has ensured that Iran’s leaders see his threats to use military force as credible by following through on them with strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites. Trump has also demonstrated himself to be an unpredictable actor, using deception to catch Iran off guard, even while publicly calling for negotiations.

Iran now can have no doubt that Trump is ready to make good on military threats. But these same actions have made any pledge of cooperation that Trump and his national security team might offer unreliable. With a still large and ready U.S. military footprint in the region, Iran’s leaders are likely to be skeptical of Washington’s commitment to peace and fear that yielding to Washington’s demands will leave their country vulnerable and exposed for the next round of strikes.

U.S. President Donald Trump en route to a NATO summit in The Hague, June 2025 Brian Snyder / Reuters

The second challenge Trump faces is not entirely of his own making. It arises from the many times that past U.S. presidents have gone back on their word or offered assurances that ended up being hollow. Haunting the current interaction between Iran and the United States, for example, is the case of the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq. In the lead-up to war, President George W. Bush demanded that Saddam Hussein let international weapons inspectors in to substantiate Saddam’s claims that he was not pursuing weapons of mass destruction. After months of dispute, Iraq finally readmitted international inspectors in November 2002, acquiescing to Bush’s pressure campaign in hope of averting a military strike. Yet Bush subsequently attacked Iraq anyway, despite the inspectors finding no evidence of such weapons. Later evidence, such as the Downing Street Memo, suggested that Bush was determined to attack Iraq regardless of what the inspectors discovered.

Iran has every reason to worry about the same dynamic here. After all, Trump allowed Israel to take military action in mid-June even while American and Iranian negotiating teams were planning for another round of talks just days later. He was also the one who pulled out of the original nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and imposed punishing “maximum pressure” sanctions despite Iran’s compliance with the terms of the 2015 deal. With these experiences in mind, Tehran would be justified in suspecting that Washington has already decided to use military force again in the future no matter the extent of Iran’s concessions.

Finally, and perhaps trickiest of all, Trump’s assurances to Iran need to carry over to Israel. For diplomacy to work, Trump has to convince Iran not only that concessions will forestall a future U.S. attack but also that they will also keep Israel in compliance with the new cease-fire and prevent renewed Israeli military action down the road. This will be challenging because Israel has already demonstrated its ability and willingness to act unilaterally, while Trump has exhibited limited appetite (or perhaps ability) to restrain Israel when pressured. Convincing Iran that the United States can and will keep Israel from taking future military action against Iran as long as Iran’s leaders agree to U.S. conditions will require, at the very least, a president determined to use U.S. leverage over Israel, not only with regard to its activities in Iran but across the Middle East.

Providing credible assurances to Tehran is thus a tall order for Washington, made more complicated by the long tail of past U.S. foreign policy choices. It is not, however, impossible, and the Trump administration can convince Iran that compromise will be worthwhile.

RESTARTING DIPLOMACY

Reengaging Iran diplomatically will require a combination of military and economic assurances that are visible and irreversible, some made unilaterally by the United States and some made alongside other countries. Trump must first promise to rein in Israel. This will be challenging politically and made much harder by the fact that Trump has already yielded to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at least twice. Moreover, it is unlikely that Trump would pull back defensive aid while Iran still threatens Israel. But the United States could signal to Israel (and Iran) that it will not resupply certain offensive Israeli capabilities, including precision bombs and missiles, should Israel try to resume its air war against Iran during negotiations or while Iran is adhering to the terms of a new deal. This would at the very least limit the scope and duration of future Israeli airstrikes.

Second, Trump and other U.S. officials should assert clearly and consistently that they do not seek regime change in Iran and are focused only on Iran’s nuclear program. Rhetoric alone is unlikely to be sufficient, so the United States should reinforce its words with changes to U.S. regional posture that clearly signal that Washington is not getting ready for another regime change war in the Middle East. For example, the United States could, in the near-term, withdraw air and naval forces that have been surged to the region over recent weeks and, as things in the region stabilize, lower readiness and threat levels at regional military bases to normal. Washington could also recommit to plans to withdraw forces from Syria and Iraq as an indication that the United States intends to continue its global realignment away from the Middle East once the current crisis abates. U.S. regional partners could be enlisted to bolster the message that the United States is not interested in facilitating regime change in Iran by refusing to allow U.S. forces to use their territory or airspace for operations aimed at regime targets.

Finally, the Trump administration should offer immediate sanctions relief once Iran and the United States agree to even a broad framework for a deal. This would be consistent with Trump’s assertions that he hopes to see a successful and prosperous Iran and would offer Iran’s leaders some evidence that Washington is not out to topple the regime. Getting European partners to sign on to this promise will help strengthen any U.S. commitment and the benefits sanctions relief can offer to Iran. Notably, the effects of sanctions relief could be rapid: Syria recently completed its first banking transaction using SWIFT, barely one month after Trump announced plans to lift U.S. sanctions.

Even as he offers these three types of assurances, Trump should also retire the “deal or bombs” ultimatums that he continues to make to Iran’s leaders. With Iran’s nuclear program set back and its ballistic missile infrastructure severely damaged, there is not an urgent need for either a deal or further military action. Trump now has the luxury of time and so should take advantage of it. He has adopted “peace through strength” as a mantra. In the coming days and weeks, he will need to remember that strength is measured not only through the use of military force but also through the ability to credibly withhold it.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Jennifer Kavanagh · June 25, 2025

24. The Key to the Young Male Vote: Beer

As an aside when I was growing up and could first vote at 18 years old. The drinking age in Connecticut where I lived was also 18. Perhaps that is why I have voted in every election since.

The Key to the Young Male Vote: Beer

Democrats should embrace a reduction in the drinking age. (Republicans too.)

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-key-to-the-young-male-vote-beer-556d06ae

By Scott Johnston

June 24, 2025 5:15 pm ET

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A bartender pours a craft beer at Liquid Love Brewing in Buffalo Grove, Ill., 2022. Photo: Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press

Democrats are spending $20 million to understand the great mystery of young men—probably the simplest creatures on earth. Here’s an idea for you, Democrats: lower the drinking age, at least for beer.

Congress established a federal drinking age of 21 in 1984 to combat drunk-driving fatalities, of which there were 21,000 in 1983. States were coerced with the threat of withheld highway funds. They caved in quickly. Louisiana was the last holdout.

Since then, the rate of drunk-driving deaths has dropped almost 50%. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, a powerful lobby, will tell you it’s because of the age increase, but does anyone really think college-age kids have stopped drinking because it’s illegal?

In reality, drivers of all ages have responded to much tougher enforcement and severely increased penalties. Back in the day, it was, “Get home safe, son.” Now it’s the slammer for a night and huge fines. Technology has also changed, creating safe alternatives. Uber wasn’t an option in the 1980s.

It’s time to lower the drinking age. Current law is not a deterrent, and it has had negative cultural effects, particularly on our nation’s campuses. Start with the binge drinking of hard alcohol. Beer, the college beverage of choice since the first student was forced to read Sartre, has faded away. It’s too bulky to sneak into your dorm room. Vodka is today’s poison. It’s clear and mixes with about anything.

Not surprisingly, this has made campus drinking a bigger problem than ever. When I was in college, I didn’t hear of anyone going to the hospital because he drank too much beer—and people tried.

The higher age has also affected college culture, and not in a good way. In the halcyon early 1980s, we had big, campuswide events. It was very social and egalitarian.

In fact, my very first day, Yale’s president, Bart Giamatti, welcomed all freshmen to his house with an open bar. Imagine! Now, students squirrel away, pregaming, consuming what they want in places they won’t be caught by resident assistants and other mandated busybodies. This has made college social life cliquey and balkanized, self-selecting mostly along demographic lines. DEI administrators, take note.

In 2008, 130 college presidents signed a petition that declared “twenty-one is not working” and urged “an informed and dispassionate public debate.” They saw the damage firsthand and have been forced to set up expensive compliance regimes. Complicating matters, most seniors and some juniors can legally partake, creating a schism between haves and have-nots.

A change is needed. Democrats, this is your opening. Republicans, it could be yours too. Lowering the age for beer would steer college kids toward safer forms of consumption.

The best part is that it’s the right thing to do. Eighteen-year-olds can legally drive, sign contracts, get married, take a bullet in foreign wars—everything except have a beer. It’s inconsistent and patronizing, and it’s time to change it. As long as we treat alcohol like forbidden fruit, the thrill remains.

Mr. Johnston’s novels include “Campusland” and “The Sandersons Fail Manhattan.”

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Journal Editorial Report: The week’s best and worst from Kyle Peterson, Jason Riley, and Kim Strassel.

Appeared in the June 25, 2025, print edition as 'The Key to the Young Male Vote: Beer'.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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