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Quotes of the Day:
"Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?"
– Bertrand Russell
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."
–Plato
"Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't."
– Pete Seeger
1. It’s not too late to spare this crucial intelligence agency (INR)
2. China’s strategy? Let Trump cook.
3. Chinese Hackers Are Exploiting Flaws in Widely Used Software, Microsoft Says
4. Russia and Ukraine Are No Closer to Peace After Trump’s Threats
5. China Flexes Muscles at U.N. Cultural Agency, Just as Trump Walks Away
6. Two U.S. generals speak, but is anyone listening?
7. How U.S. Forces Should Leave Europe
8. ‘Founders Films’ aims to remake Hollywood with patriotism, Palantir and Ayn Rand
9. Building Strategic Lethality: Special Operations Models for Joint Force Learning and Leader Development
10. Trump administration unveils new AI Action Plan
11. Asia-U.S. Trade Deals Pick Up as Tariff Deadline Nears
12. China’s growing influence on Taiwan lawmakers prompts massive recall effort
13. China’s World War II victory parade: A supreme fiction
14. State Department approves $322 million in proposed weapons sales to Ukraine
15. Is Taiwan doing enough to repel a Chinese invasion?
16. Russia Is Losing Its Near Abroad
17. Illicit Liquidity as Battlespace: Rethinking Finance in Asymmetric Conflict
18. It’s Time to Think About (and Fear) Drones and Psychological Operations
19. The Pentagon's Trillion-Dollar Nightmare: Bad Contracts Are Crippling the Military
20. The Army's New AbramsX Might Be the Best Tank Ever
1. It’s not too late to spare this crucial intelligence agency (INR)
Another major mistake.
The OSS Society
@osssociety
·
Jul 22Here’s a comment to the Post op-ed: “One interesting fact about the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) is its beginning. INR is the direct descendant of World War II's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Research and Analysis Branch. When the OSS was shut down in 1945, its covert action activities were eventually taken over by the CIA when it was established, but its Research and Analysis Branch was incorporated into the State Department as INR where it has been ever since. It enjoyed a superb reputation as part of the OSS, and it has enjoyed a superb reputation as INR. It is truly a gem within the intelligence community.”
Opinion
It’s not too late to spare this crucial intelligence agency
The small but mighty INR faces significant staff cuts despite its vital role supporting diplomacy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/07/22/bureau-intelligence-research-state-department-staff-cuts/
July 22, 2025 at 7:00 a.m. EDTYesterday at 7:00 a.m. EDT
4 min
167
(Flavio Pessoa Santanna/For The Washington Post; iStock)
By Ellen McCarthy
Ellen McCarthy is a former assistant secretary of state and led the Bureau of Intelligence and Research from 2019 to 2021.
In a world increasingly defined by uncertainty and great-power rivalry, the last thing the United States should be doing is cutting one of its most quietly indispensable assets: the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) at the State Department. And yet approximately 20 percent of the staff might soon be gone, having either been laid off or accepted deferred retirement. These cuts undermine not just the bureau, but the intelligence and diplomatic posture of the United States itself.
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INR, a small but mighty team of subject matter experts, linguists, geologists and analysts, has played a unique role in intelligence since its founding after World War II: It provides independent analysis directly to our nation’s diplomats.
It is this independence that made it the only intelligence agency to assess correctly that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction in 2002. Unfortunately, its well-documented assessment was dismissed in favor of a broader consensus that supported the case for war. In the decades since, INR has consistently provided threat assessments that shape and inform some of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of our time, including detailed analysis of Russia’s intents in Ukraine.
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The bureau has long operated on a shoestring budget. When I took the helm in 2019, it had about 300 full-time employees, down from more than 1,000 when it was first established. Yet while global challenges have grown increasingly complex, the INS budget has actually decreased in real terms. No other intelligence element has followed this trajectory.
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Unlike other bureaus at the State Department, there is no replacement for INR’s mission or its method. It’s not just a matter of losing staff; also lost will be institutional memory, regional fluency, analytic rigor, and the highly experienced people who understand intelligence and diplomacy as two sides of the same coin.
Naturally, tough decisions must be made when budgets tighten. But in an era when authoritarian regimes are rewriting reality with propaganda generated by artificial intelligence, we need more INR, not less.
Some argue that INR’s analysis is duplicative of what other intelligence agencies, such as the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, produce. But this overlooks what makes INR fundamentally different. Its mission is purpose-built to support diplomacy. Its analysis is tailored for the specific needs of the State Department, grounded in deep regional expertise, historical context, and close daily contact with U.S. embassies and diplomats. INR doesn’t just echo what others are saying. It refines, questions and translates intelligence into the specific insights that diplomacy demands. That’s not duplication. That’s precision.
INR also frequently challenges the consensus view — something that’s essential for an intelligence system. Its independence within the department and its mandate to speak with its own voice allow it to raise dissenting views that others might overlook.
Why didn’t the State Department shield INR from staff reductions? Part of the answer lies in the quiet nature of the bureau’s work. Unlike larger agencies with visible programs or domestic constituencies, INR’s impact is often behind the scenes. In times of bureaucratic triage, the loudest voices and most visible wins tend to get protected. INR, by design and by culture, has rarely had either.
Another reason is the enduring, if unspoken, friction between diplomacy and intelligence. Diplomats focus on engagement, negotiation and relationship-building. Intelligence, by contrast, is about uncovering hard truths. That tension can lead to discomfort with INR’s role — especially when its analysis challenges prevailing policy assumptions. As a result, INR may not enjoy the institutional protection afforded more traditional diplomatic agencies, despite the fact that its work strengthens foreign policy outcomes.
INR’s model is not outdated; it’s essential. While the CIA provides global assessments for the national security apparatus, INR offers something uniquely valuable: intelligence that is embedded in the policy process. Its proximity to diplomats only enhances its relevance. INR analysts understand the tempo, constraints and pressures of diplomacy. They know the questions policymakers are grappling with (sometimes before they’re asked) and deliver insight that is rigorous, contextual and immediately usable.
Far from being a vulnerability, INR’s colocation with policy is one of its greatest strengths. The challenge isn’t that diplomacy and intelligence are too close; it’s that we fail to recognize how powerful they can be when they work together.
The mission of diplomacy requires timely, nuanced and accurate insight. INR provides exactly that. The risks of diminishing its role won’t show up overnight, but when they do, the cost will be far greater than what was saved.
It’s not too late to course correct. In fact, it’s never been more urgent.
2. China’s strategy? Let Trump cook.
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." (Bonaparte).
Why are we disbanding US soft power capabilities? Is the conclusion below correct or just hyperventilation? Are we dropping the ball and are we dethroning ourselves?
Excerpts:
“The Chinese people are happy to see the U.S. anti-China ideological fortress breached from within,” cheered Hu Xijin, former chief editor of the Global Times, a Chinese state-run, English-language newspaper, this year on social media.
In a video circulating this month, Victor Gao, a former Chinese diplomat and vice president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, mused whether Trump may come to be remembered as an American Mikhail Gorbachev. The comparison to the late Soviet leader and famous author of glasnost and perestroika was not meant to be flattering: Gorbachev’s attempt at reforms, Gao said, precipitated the collapse of the Soviet empire and unleashed a “trauma” still being felt today.
...
Tooze argued that the Americans have “dropped the ball” here and the consequences will be vast. “This is the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history,” he said. “This is really what the provincialization of the West really looks like.”
China’s strategy? Let Trump cook.
As President Donald Trump dismantles U.S. soft power and launches trade wars with allies, China is content to sit back and watch.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/23/china-us-trump-sabotage-trade/
July 23, 2025 at 12:00 a.m. EDTToday at 12:00 a.m. EDT
President Donald Trump attends a bilateral meeting with China's President Xi Jinping during the 2019 G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Column by Ishaan Tharoor
It’s cringe for an elder millennial to use Gen Z parlance, but there are times when a colloquialism just hits. That’s the case when gauging China’s evolving view of President Donald Trump’s second term. Beijing sees Trump’s disruptive actions — his gutting of institutions of U.S. soft power, his launching of trade wars against adversaries and allies alike, his steady eroding of trust in the U.S. alliance system — as acts of self-sabotage that need no Chinese prompting. Better for now, as Gen Z would say, to let him cook.
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After Trump moved to dismember the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which backed internationally oriented outlets such as Voice of America, Chinese state-made broadcasts took the place of U.S. programming on TV networks in countries as disparate as Indonesia and Nigeria. Trump, like a growing number of Republicans, viewed the media properties as suspicious fonts of “anti-American” liberalism. But Chinese propagandists exulted at the demise of these U.S.-funded news operations, which had, to varying extents, chronicled the state of pro-democracy movements around the world and provided space for dissident voices in countries where political freedoms are curtailed.
“The Chinese people are happy to see the U.S. anti-China ideological fortress breached from within,” cheered Hu Xijin, former chief editor of the Global Times, a Chinese state-run, English-language newspaper, this year on social media.
In a video circulating this month, Victor Gao, a former Chinese diplomat and vice president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, mused whether Trump may come to be remembered as an American Mikhail Gorbachev. The comparison to the late Soviet leader and famous author of glasnost and perestroika was not meant to be flattering: Gorbachev’s attempt at reforms, Gao said, precipitated the collapse of the Soviet empire and unleashed a “trauma” still being felt today.
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Gao suggested that by the end of the decade, Trump’s own attempt at reforms will have “fundamentally changed” both the United States and NATO, likely for the worse. Trump would not have made America “bigger, stronger, greater,” Gao said, but rather may have “led it astray, like Gorbachev.”
A laid-off employee fights back tears while carrying a box of office belongings July 11 as she leaves the U.S. State Department. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
The fall of the Soviet Union isn’t the only historical parallel alive in Chinese discourse about the U.S. A host of Chinese commentators see in MAGA a whiff of China’s own Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, which saw myriad purges and the defenestration of ranks of the intellectual classes and political elites. “Mao unleashed the Red Guards to ‘smash’ the police, prosecutors, and courts, so that loyal revolutionaries could seize control of state machinery,” Zhang Qianfan, a constitutional law professor in Beijing, recently told CNN. “Trump brought Elon Musk and six young Silicon Valley executives into the White House under the banner of eliminating corruption, waste, and inefficiency — akin to the ‘Cultural Revolution Leadership Group’ entering the party’s central leadership.”
Proponents of “America First” say they see their reforms as rescuing the country from liberal torpor. They don’t necessarily wish for an end to U.S. primacy on the world stage. But they find in Beijing a confident Chinese leadership that won’t blink amid the weekly havoc unleashed by the White House. Trump has engaged in rounds of tariff threats with China, but has settled for periodic diplomatic truces, including the one that followed high-level talks last month in London. On Tuesday, he confirmed that he’s considering journeying “soon” to Beijing for talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Trump’s erratic approach has also played into China’s hands. “The disruption to bilateral trade triggered by Trump’s tariffs has left U.S. manufacturers scrambling and overpaying for materials,” wrote Zongyuan Zoe Liu, a senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “In implementing rare-earth export controls in early April, the Chinese government has discovered a powerful tool for inflicting pain on American businesses.” China, she added, may not want a trade war with the United States, but “it would rather decouple than kowtow to Trump.”
Ali Wyne, an expert on U.S.-China relations at the International Crisis Group, said China is broadly pursuing three main lines of strategy in the face of Trump’s threats: It’s working to boost trade with other countries and parts of the world, in a bid to insulate itself from the effects of U.S. protectionist measures. It’s arguing in diplomatic channels and public propaganda that “America First” is not an aberration, but a feature of U.S. politics that will have negative consequences for American allies. And it’s finding “more momentum, more traction,” as Wyne put it to me, for the emergence of a 21st century international order that’s organized more around principles that suit Beijing and its political worldview.
A guide shows guests around the Chinese tech conglomerate Xiaomi's EV factory in Beijing this month. (Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images)
Various “initiatives” promulgated by Xi on development, security and cultural harmony have put forward a rosy Chinese vision of global cooperation and prosperity stripped of liberal ideals around universal rights and democracy. China’s position is gaining ground thanks to the shifts in Washington. “Beijing’s assessment right now is that the United States is dismantling, fairly systematically, the sources of its strength,” Julian Gewirtz, a China scholar and former Biden administration official, said in a recent interview.
“The United States, in their view, is dismantling its alliance relationships and alienating much of the world,” Gewirtz told the Wire China. “It is dismantling aspects of the U.S. science and technology ecosystem, cutting funding to some of our great universities, and making it very unappealing, if not outright impossible, for foreign talent to come do research in those universities. And it is eliminating arms of U.S. influence around the world, from USAID to Voice of America. China’s view is that the United States is, in a sense, unilaterally disarming.”
The blow to U.S. soft power and the damage to U.S. credibility among allies and other partners might be irreversible. “I am not sure if any other incumbent power in history has so rapidly and systematically attacked its own principal sources of competitive advantage,” Wyne told me.
“If Trump’s current hostility to alliances continues and the administration keeps insulting, belittling, and even economically harming its long-standing partners, the United States is going to find the world an increasingly unfriendly place,” wrote Margaret MacMillan, a historian and professor emeritus at Oxford University, in Foreign Affairs.
To be sure, China is not about to supplant the United States as a new global hegemon. Many Asian countries are not keen on embracing a Pax Sinica after decades of a Pax Americana. Europe, for all its new friction with the Trump administration, isn’t about to pivot toward Beijing; analysts expect Chinese-EU talks at a summit this week to be cagey and cautious.
But on at least one key front — green technology — Trump has handed China a huge advantage in scrapping Biden administration funding for renewables and doubling down on fossil fuels. China is speeding down an open lane to become the leader in steering the world’s energy transition. It is, as economic historian Adam Tooze said in a recent podcast, “the biggest laboratory of organized modernization that has ever been or ever will be.”
Tooze argued that the Americans have “dropped the ball” here and the consequences will be vast. “This is the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history,” he said. “This is really what the provincialization of the West really looks like.”
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By Ishaan Tharoor
Ishaan Tharoor is a foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, where he authors the Today's WorldView newsletter and column. In 2021, he won the Arthur Ross Media Award in Commentary from the American Academy of Diplomacy. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.follow on X@ishaantharoor
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3. Chinese Hackers Are Exploiting Flaws in Widely Used Software, Microsoft Says
Excerpts:
The U.S. government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a notice that said it was aware of the hacking attack on SharePoint. It added that it had notified “critical infrastructure organizations” that were affected.
“While the scope and impact continue to be assessed,” the agency said, the vulnerabilities would enable “malicious actors to fully access SharePoint content, including file systems and internal configurations and execute code over the network.”
A Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an emailed response that the company had been “coordinating closely” with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Defense’s Cyber Defense Command and “key cybersecurity partners globally throughout our response.”
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. China has routinely denied being behind cyberattacks and asserts that it is a victim of them.
Chinese Hackers Are Exploiting Flaws in Widely Used Software, Microsoft Says
The company said state-backed hacking groups were breaching systems through flaws in SharePoint, which is used by the U.S. government and companies around the world.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/world/asia/chinese-hackers-microsoft-sharepoint.html
A Microsoft office in Beijing. The company said groups linked to the Chinese government had been taking advantage of security flaws in its SharePoint software. Credit...Tingshu Wang/Reuters
By Vivian Wang
Reporting from Beijing
July 23, 2025
Updated 2:13 p.m. ET
Microsoft said that Chinese state-sponsored actors were exploiting vulnerabilities in one of its popular collaboration software products, SharePoint, which is used by U.S. government agencies and many companies worldwide.
Microsoft said in a notice on its security blog on Tuesday that it had identified at least two China-based groups linked to the Chinese government that it said had been taking advantage of security flaws in its SharePoint software. Such attacks aim to sneak into the computer systems of users.
Those groups, called Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon, were ones that Microsoft said it had been tracking for years, and which it said had been targeting organizations and personnel related to government, defense, human rights, higher education, media, and financial and health services in the United States, Europe and East Asia.
Microsoft said another actor, which it called Storm-2603, was also involved in the hacking campaign. It said it had “medium confidence” that Storm-2603 was a “China-based threat actor.”
The U.S. government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a notice that said it was aware of the hacking attack on SharePoint. It added that it had notified “critical infrastructure organizations” that were affected.
“While the scope and impact continue to be assessed,” the agency said, the vulnerabilities would enable “malicious actors to fully access SharePoint content, including file systems and internal configurations and execute code over the network.”
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A Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an emailed response that the company had been “coordinating closely” with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Department of Defense’s Cyber Defense Command and “key cybersecurity partners globally throughout our response.”
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment. China has routinely denied being behind cyberattacks and asserts that it is a victim of them.
Microsoft said in its blog post that investigations into other actors also using these exploits were still ongoing.
Eye Security, a cybersecurity firm, said that it had scanned more than 23,000 SharePoint servers worldwide and discovered that more than 400 systems had been actively compromised.
The cybersecurity firm also noted that the breaches could allow hackers to steal cryptographic keys that would allow them to impersonate users or services even after the server was patched. It said users would need to take further steps to protect their information.
James Corera, the director of the cyber, technology and security program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a research group, said that being able to deploy back doors to enable long-term access was “a level of sophistication typically associated with the most advanced actors.”
While there was no public confirmation that the Chinese hackers had stolen those cryptographic keys, it was clear that China’s state-sponsored operations had become increasingly precise in recent years, he said.
“Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors have steadily evolved from opportunistic to highly disciplined operators,” Mr. Corera wrote in written responses to questions. “What we’re seeing now is a level of sophistication in initial access, lateral movement, and credential harvesting that exceeds what many governments and vendors had anticipated.”
Indeed, American officials have grown increasingly alarmed by Chinese hacking capabilities. During a breach of the U.S. telecommunications system last year, a group linked to a Chinese intelligence agency was able to listen in on telephone conversations and read text messages, members of Congress said. The hack was considered so severe that former President Joseph R. Biden took it up directly with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, when they met in Peru in November.
With this latest breach, a researcher with Viettel Cyber Security, a Vietnamese security firm, uncovered the SharePoint vulnerability at a May security conference called Pwn2Own in Berlin. On May 16, the researcher won a $100,000 award at the conference for uncovering the weakness.
The vulnerability was shared with Microsoft on May 29, according to the Zero Day Initiative, which tracks security exposures and hosted the security confernce.
Microsoft said it noticed hackers had been trying to use the software weaknesses to gain access to “target organizations” since July 7. The company issued security updates the next day, as part of its monthly batch of security patches, and urged users to install them immediately.
But those patches only partially solved the problem. Microsoft said on July 19 that it was aware of attempts to exploit those vulnerabilities, and has since issued updates to its patches and guidance to customers that it says, if followed, “fully protect customers.”
Cybersecurity firms had said that they believed Chinese actors were among those attackers, even before Microsoft said so on Tuesday.
SharePoint helps organizations create websites and manage documents. It integrates with other Microsoft services such as Office, Teams and Outlook.
Microsoft said the vulnerabilities affected only on-premises SharePoint servers, meaning those managed by organizations on their own computer networks, and not those operated on Microsoft’s cloud.
Palo Alto Networks, a cybersecurity company, said in a post about the breach that on-premises servers “particularly within government, schools, health care (including hospitals) and large enterprise companies” were “at immediate risk.”
“A compromise in this situation doesn’t stay contained, it opens the door to the entire network,” the cybersecurity company said.
Karen Weise contributed reporting from Seattle.
Vivian Wang is a China correspondent based in Beijing, where she writes about how the country’s global rise and ambitions are shaping the daily lives of its people.
4. Russia and Ukraine Are No Closer to Peace After Trump’s Threats
Excerpts:
Russia has stuck to its maximalist demands that any negotiated end to the conflict must address its “root causes,” which is Moscow’s shorthand for reasserting Russian dominance over Ukraine and forcing the West to withdraw its support. Russia has, meanwhile, been steadily advancing on the battlefield and stepping up its attacks on Ukrainian population centers in recent weeks.
“It’s the continuation of the same diplomatic Kabuki for the time being,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “At least on the Russian side, Mr. Putin is for obvious reasons not interested yet in a deal that’s not on his terms.”
While Trump has expressed rising frustration with Putin’s continued attacks on Ukraine, he hasn’t taken steps to bring the kind of pressure on Moscow that would be necessary to end the war, analysts said.
“He’s very likely to continue to kick the can down the road and try to wait and see what happens, instead of proactively investing in the only probably viable strategy to deliver peace on terms that Ukraine can live with, which is to help the Ukrainians attrit the Russians to the point where they will not make any territorial gains at all,” Gabuev said
Russia and Ukraine Are No Closer to Peace After Trump’s Threats
Third round of talks ends without progress toward ending the war
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia-and-ukraine-are-no-closer-to-peace-after-trumps-threats-700e4c17
By Jared Malsin
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Updated July 23, 2025 6:15 pm ET
Delegations from Russia and Ukraine met in Istanbul on Wednesday. Photo: Muammer Tan/Turkish Foreign Ministry/AP
ISTANBUL—President Trump’s ultimatum for Russian President Vladimir Putin is showing no signs of bringing Russia and Ukraine any closer to peace.
The third round of direct talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials, held Wednesday in Istanbul, yielded few results. The two sides met for less than an hour.
“We have no progress on cessation of hostilities or cease-fire,” Rustem Umerov, a senior official who led the Ukrainian delegation, said at the conclusion of the talks. He noted that many meetings and six months of work haven’t gotten the two parties closer to ending the conflict.
Umerov said Ukraine had again extended an offer for President Volodymyr Zelensky to meet with Putin—a challenge that Russia has been unwilling to accept.
The impasse underscored how Trump’s recent warnings have done little to push Moscow toward making concessions. Trump threatened last week to impose 100% tariffs on Russia’s top trading partners if a peace deal wasn’t reached in 50 days and said he would work with European allies to send Patriot air-defense systems to Ukraine.
The threat was the latest attempt by Trump to ratchet up pressure on Putin, who has only intensified his assault on Ukraine as the U.S. president pushed for peace. On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump said he would quickly end the war upon his re-election. Little has resulted, however, from a series of meetings between Russian and Ukrainian officials in Istanbul and a number of calls between Trump and Putin.
Administration officials point out that Russia and Ukraine are only talking because of Trump. “Russia and Ukraine are having direct talks for the first time in years because of President Trump’s leadership,” said White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly, adding that Trump made the threat because he wants the killing to stop.
As President Trump promises more weapons and threatens economic pressure on Moscow, WSJ’s Ukraine Bureau Chief James Marson recently explained what is at stake for Kyiv amid increasing Russian attacks. Illustration: Louisa Naks
Russia has stuck to its maximalist demands that any negotiated end to the conflict must address its “root causes,” which is Moscow’s shorthand for reasserting Russian dominance over Ukraine and forcing the West to withdraw its support. Russia has, meanwhile, been steadily advancing on the battlefield and stepping up its attacks on Ukrainian population centers in recent weeks.
“It’s the continuation of the same diplomatic Kabuki for the time being,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “At least on the Russian side, Mr. Putin is for obvious reasons not interested yet in a deal that’s not on his terms.”
While Trump has expressed rising frustration with Putin’s continued attacks on Ukraine, he hasn’t taken steps to bring the kind of pressure on Moscow that would be necessary to end the war, analysts said.
“He’s very likely to continue to kick the can down the road and try to wait and see what happens, instead of proactively investing in the only probably viable strategy to deliver peace on terms that Ukraine can live with, which is to help the Ukrainians attrit the Russians to the point where they will not make any territorial gains at all,” Gabuev said.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) has proposed legislation that would impose sweeping 500% tariffs on Russia and its trading partners, but Senate Republicans have backed off advancing the proposal because of objections from Trump, who has issued assurances to lawmakers that he would take his own actions to penalize Moscow.
Trump “has been deeply involved in this conflict since the beginning, and so any decisions that are made with respect to sanctions, the president wants to reserve that authority and that right to himself,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
A combined Russian drone and missile attack in mid-June inflicted heavy damage in Kyiv. Photo: Serhii Korovayny for WSJ
The tariffs on Russia’s partners would escalate an already complex trade war in which Trump has backtracked on his threats multiple times. Some of Russia’s largest trading partners include China and India.
The Patriot missiles that Trump has promised to provide will help bolster Ukraine’s air defenses, but won’t fundamentally alter the balance of power in the war. Senior U.S. and European officials warn that Russia’s arsenal of drones and missiles hammering Ukrainian cities vastly outnumber the Patriot missile supplies the West can deliver to Kyiv.
Halting Russian attacks would require providing Ukraine with long-range missiles to attack launch sites and airfields deep inside Russia, something the U.S. has been unwilling to do.
Expectations were low that Wednesday’s talks would yield a breakthrough. Russia sought to play down the negotiations even before they began. “We have no reason to expect any magical breakthroughs,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday before the two delegations met.
Ukraine dispatched Umerov, who was defense minister when he represented Kyiv in the previous round of negotiations in Istanbul in June. Zelensky shifted Umerov this month to an advisory role as the secretary of the country’s National Security and Defense Council. The Russian delegation was led by Vladimir Medinsky, a hawkish aide to Putin and former minister of culture.
The June talks took place a day after Ukraine carried out a daring drone attack deep inside Russia that disabled a portion of the Kremlin’s nuclear-capable bomber fleet. The attacks boosted Ukrainian morale, but Russia handed over a punishing set of conditions during the talks.
Rustem Umerov, who led the Ukrainian delegation, acknowledged the lack of progress over month of peace talks. Photo: Tolga Bozoglu/EPA/Shutterstock
Moscow demanded that Ukraine recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and four other regions, including areas that it doesn’t occupy, and declare military neutrality. The two sides ultimately agreed only to exchange some prisoners and bodies of the dead.
In the weeks since, Ukraine has suffered wave after wave of Russian drone attacks that have strained the country’s air defenses.
“Russia has made it clear through continued large-scale aerial attacks on Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure that it is not negotiating in good faith,” said Yevgeniya Gaber, a former Ukrainian government foreign-policy adviser and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Turkey program.
Write to Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com and Robbie Gramer at robbie.gramer@wsj.com
5. China Flexes Muscles at U.N. Cultural Agency, Just as Trump Walks Away
Ceding the cultural battlespace?
I thought China was the pacing threat? Why are we competing with China on every level?
Excerpts:
World Heritage sites attract so many tourists that a UNESCO designation can transform economies. Sites in Western countries have historically dominated this list, and Asian countries have lobbied heavily in recent years to have their history acknowledged, too. But persecuted ethnic minorities say that in the hands of Beijing, the sites become tools of appropriation and are not protected.
At a palace in Lhasa that was for centuries the home of Tibetan Dalai Lamas, the Chinese government erected two pavilions in 2020. The pavilions, built in a distinctly Chinese style, surround sacred stone columns that commemorate Tibetan history. UNESCO regulations require that countries alert the organization before making major changes to sites. The Chinese government did not do that.
Advocacy groups called on UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee to designate the palace as a site in danger at its meeting this month. It did not.
Chinese officials have described the country’s efforts to get its historical and cultural sites designated by UNESCO as a key part of Mr. Xi’s Global Civilization Initiative. That initiative holds that each region has its own values and should not face pressure from countries with different values. Critics have described this as an attempt to undermine human rights and democracy.
U.S. defunding of UNESCO will mean less oversight of the heritage process, said Stephan Dömpke, chair of the Berlin-based nonprofit group World Heritage Watch. “Even now,” he said, “UNESCO cannot monitor about one-third of the sites on the World Heritage List. The withdrawal of the United States will only accelerate this process.”
The American ambassador to UNESCO stepped down in January as Mr. Trump took office. Shortly afterward, a Uyghur linguist, Abduweli Ayup, discovered the risk of offending China at UNESCO.
China Flexes Muscles at U.N. Cultural Agency, Just as Trump Walks Away
Washington had been a buffer against China’s efforts to use UNESCO to influence education, historical designations and even artificial intelligence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/world/asia/unesco-china-us.html
The Temple of Heaven in Beijing is a UNESCO World Heritage site. China has spent years trying to influence the U.N. cultural agency. Credit...Jessica Lee/EPA, via Shutterstock
By Mara Hvistendahl
Mara Hvistendahl reported from Paris, home to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
July 23, 2025
Updated 3:30 p.m. ET
Leer en español
Any traveler who has picked up an international guidebook knows the UNESCO World Heritage site designation as shorthand for a must-see cultural destination that’s worthy of a detour.
But the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has also become the target of an intense Chinese influence campaign in recent years as Beijing has sought to increase its reach over educational curriculums, historical designations and even artificial intelligence.
President Trump’s decision Tuesday to withdraw the United States from the group removes a powerful check on China’s effort, in the latest example of how the White House retreat from international institutions offers an opening for China to advance its soft power.
The United States was once the largest UNESCO backer, accounting for nearly 25 cents of every dollar. But Washington has had an on-again-off-again relationship with it for years, especially since Mr. Trump first took office in 2017, and China has stepped up to take its place. A Chinese official is now UNESCO’s deputy director general, a post that diplomats said is often awarded in exchange for political or monetary favors.
UNESCO has lent support to major priorities for China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, including the global infrastructure program known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Beijing has also lobbied heavily for World Heritage designations and is jockeying to surpass Italy as the country with the most culturally significant sites. Some of those sites are in oppressed regions like Tibet and Xinjiang, where many local residents view them as an attempt to appropriate and control their culture and history.
And while UNESCO wields tremendous clout over what counts as history, it is also the U.N. agency in charge of setting artificial intelligence guidelines. UNESCO has an agreement with iFlytek, a major Chinese A.I. company, to cooperate on higher education in Asia and Africa, according to Chinese state media. (UNESCO said it has partnerships with many artificial intelligence companies worldwide.)
Image
UNESCO, which sets artificial intelligence guidelines, reached a cooperation agreement with the Chinese technology company iFlytek.Credit...Albert Gea/Reuters
“UNESCO is a battleground for cultural and intellectual power and influence,” said David Killion, who was an ambassador to UNESCO under President Barack Obama. “We are conceding the soft power realm to an expansionist, authoritarian great power.”
The Chinese Embassy in Washington, in a response to a request for comment on its influence in UNESCO, said that international organizations are “not arenas for geopolitical games.”
“China never intends to challenge or replace the U.S.,” the embassy said. “We hope that all parties could see China’s positive role in UNESCO objectively.”
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UNESCO said that, while China will soon be the biggest funder, it is underrepresented on the agency’s staff. “We are not in a position to comment on the diplomatic strategy of one member state or another,” an agency spokeswoman said in a statement.
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment but issued a statement saying that UNESCO advanced “a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy.”
The pullback reflects a broader American retreat from international bodies and Mr. Trump’s dim view of soft power, the longstanding idea that America’s cultural and economic influence abroad strengthens its hand in foreign affairs.
Mr. Trump has announced America’s departure from the World Health Organization and gutted the United States Agency for International Development. A White House review of U.N. agencies is due in early August, and experts expect the White House to defund others.
“The United States is no longer reliable,” said Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. “China’s status and influence in the United Nations will definitely increase accordingly. This is certain.”
UNESCO was the first U.N. agency that Mr. Xi visited after becoming China’s leader in 2012. The United States had withdrawn funding under 1990s legislation requiring a cutoff of American financing to U.N. agencies that accepted Palestine as a full member.
That provided an opening for China.
Beijing got Mr. Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, appointed as a special envoy and sent money to Paris that it earmarked for its foreign policy goals.
Tang Qian, a former UNESCO assistant director general from China, recalled in his 2020 memoir that his government viewed financing the agency as a way to expand Chinese influence, particularly in Africa.
Washington was not on the sidelines during this period, despite the funding cuts. The Obama administration kept its diplomats, like Mr. Killion, in Paris to work on issues like Holocaust education and countering Brazil and China on internet regulation.
Image
“UNESCO is a battleground for cultural and intellectual power and influence,” said David Killion, top center, a former U.S. ambassador to the organization.Credit...Thibault Camus/Associated Press
But in 2017, the Trump administration announced it would withdraw from the organization completely, citing anti-Israel bias. After President Joseph R. Biden took office in 2021, Mr. Killion and others campaigned to get the United States to return.
“The void left by the U.S. is being filled by other major powers, like China, who understand the immense soft power opportunity that exists at UNESCO,” read a document that they circulated within the Biden administration.
Congress authorized a funding waiver and the United States rejoined UNESCO. The waiver explicitly mentioned concerns about Chinese influence.
The new ambassador set about trying to restore American influence, securing partnerships for tech companies like Microsoft and Netflix and leading a group, with the Ghanaian ambassador, that worked on artificial intelligence and digital learning in Africa, where Chinese companies had been making inroads.
Mr. Trump is hardly eager to empower China. He has launched a trade war and imposed export restrictions on American technology. But Mr. Trump favors economic and military might over foreign aid and cultural programs.
China views soft power as essential to expanding its global influence and UNESCO as key to establishing its culture and history as prominent on the world stage. China leads the world in the number of “intangible cultural heritages” — humanity’s most worthy creations, like the Spanish flamenco dancing, the Thai prawn soup known as tom yum kung and Jamaican reggae.
Image
UNESCO headquarters in Paris.Credit...Jacques Demarthon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
World Heritage sites attract so many tourists that a UNESCO designation can transform economies. Sites in Western countries have historically dominated this list, and Asian countries have lobbied heavily in recent years to have their history acknowledged, too. But persecuted ethnic minorities say that in the hands of Beijing, the sites become tools of appropriation and are not protected.
At a palace in Lhasa that was for centuries the home of Tibetan Dalai Lamas, the Chinese government erected two pavilions in 2020. The pavilions, built in a distinctly Chinese style, surround sacred stone columns that commemorate Tibetan history. UNESCO regulations require that countries alert the organization before making major changes to sites. The Chinese government did not do that.
Advocacy groups called on UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee to designate the palace as a site in danger at its meeting this month. It did not.
Chinese officials have described the country’s efforts to get its historical and cultural sites designated by UNESCO as a key part of Mr. Xi’s Global Civilization Initiative. That initiative holds that each region has its own values and should not face pressure from countries with different values. Critics have described this as an attempt to undermine human rights and democracy.
U.S. defunding of UNESCO will mean less oversight of the heritage process, said Stephan Dömpke, chair of the Berlin-based nonprofit group World Heritage Watch. “Even now,” he said, “UNESCO cannot monitor about one-third of the sites on the World Heritage List. The withdrawal of the United States will only accelerate this process.”
The American ambassador to UNESCO stepped down in January as Mr. Trump took office. Shortly afterward, a Uyghur linguist, Abduweli Ayup, discovered the risk of offending China at UNESCO.
Image
Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur linguist, was pulled from a speaking spot at a UNESCO conference.Credit...Andrea Gjestvang for The New York Times
The Uyghurs are a persecuted ethnic group in northwestern China who have been interned in camps, forced into labor and barred from using their native language in schools. The Chinese government works aggressively to censor and beat back discussion of this repression.
In February, Mr. Ayup traveled to Paris with his family, expecting to make a presentation at a UNESCO conference on Indigenous languages. He had been invited to speak about how smartphones have contributed to a decline in Uyghurs’ using their native language.
On the first day of the conference, Mr. Ayup asked a Chinese state media anchor a question that was critical of Beijing. The next day, a few hours before he was scheduled to present, organizers abruptly rescinded the invitation.
Mr. Ayup’s question was the reason, according to three members of the conference’s academic committee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The Chinese language learning company Talkmate was a major sponsor, and staff members feared offending the executives, one of the committee members said.
UNESCO, in its statement, said that its management was not involved in canceling Mr. Ayup’s presentation and that the agency had not received a request from China about it.
Before he left the conference, Mr. Ayup angrily scrawled on a sheet of paper and taped it to the wall of the conference venue. “UNESCO,” the sign read. “My presentation cancelled. Why? Why?”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Mara Hvistendahl is an investigative reporter on the International desk. You can reach her at mara.hvistendahl@nytimes.com
A version of this article appears in print on July 24, 2025, Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: China Expands Influence in UNESCO as Trump Abandons the Agency. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: Unesco, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping
6. Two U.S. generals speak, but is anyone listening?
Excerpts:
Two of the most senior U.S. generals in Europe were key speakers. Surprisingly, perhaps, comments made by both should have provoked major reactions. Neither did.
The first, Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Forces Europe and Africa, bluntly assessed how NATO's military capability could neutralize the tiny Russian-controlled enclave of Kaliningrad.
...
Donahue's boss, Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, became the U.S. European and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander on July 4. He delivered the conference's keynote address the next day. It was very well-received and well-delivered. Whether he knew of, authorized or approved Donahue's statements on Kaliningrad is unknown. But in the question-and-answer period, Grynkewich inadvertently exposed two potentially grave weaknesses of the alliance.
His answer to the audience question of what has surprised him most in his new assignment was most relevant. Grynch, his pilot's call sign, humorously responded that what surprised him most was that he got this job in the first place.
Second, and what was most revealing, was that his greatest surprise was how Ukraine gave its brigades the authority to buy their weapons and the money to do so. Grynkewich then argued that the United States must replicate this authority at the brigade level, implicitly reinforcing the conference's challenge to defense industries.
What is very worrying about the general's comments is that his last job was director for operations, or J-3, of the Pentagon's Joint Staff. That he should have known about that weapons purchase policy leads to the question of how many of the Pentagon's senior leadership lacked understanding of this and other novel ways Ukraine was waging the war despite intensive study and analysis of the conflict.
Voices July 23, 2025 / 5:00 AM
Two U.S. generals speak, but is anyone listening?
https://www.upi.com/Voices/2025/07/23/nato-conference-military-hardware/3061753216446/
By Harlan Ullman
Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, speaking at a NATO arms conference last week, said he was surprised how Ukraine gave its brigades the authority to buy their weapons and the money to do so. File photo by Sergey Kozlov/EPA
July 23 (UPI) -- The inaugural NATO EuroLandWarfare was held in Wiesbaden, Germany, last week. The symposium and exhibition, which a large number of defense companies attended, was designed to reinforce NATO's new dependency on a defense industrial base capable of providing hardware and particularly software not in years, but in days or weeks.
Two of the most senior U.S. generals in Europe were key speakers. Surprisingly, perhaps, comments made by both should have provoked major reactions. Neither did.
The first, Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Forces Europe and Africa, bluntly assessed how NATO's military capability could neutralize the tiny Russian-controlled enclave of Kaliningrad.
Situated on the Baltic Sea and nestled between NATO member states Poland in the south and Lithuania in the north, Kaliningrad was retained by Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Russia has reportedly stationed nuclear weapons in this small city state.
Donahue, in what some might call bragging, forcefully predicted that NATO allies, in the event of war, could "take that down [Kaliningrad's defenses] from the ground in a timeframe that is unheard of and faster than we've ever been able to do."
This smacked of Gen. George Patton. However, the Russian response so far has been muted and only has come from lawmakers, not the Putin government, who predictively have regarded this as a belligerent threat that could lead to World War III. The White House and the Pentagon have remained silent on the general's statement.
One wonders who, if anyone, authorized the general to make this unduly provocative comment, no matter how correct. Was it in his script or ad-libbed, and were any of his seniors in Washington aware of or even concerned about the possible political consequences of the comment from Russia?
Is it possible that in today's world, few take seriously credible statements from any source? And thus the general's seemingly offensive remark passed relatively unnoticed and unmentioned.
Donahue's boss, Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, became the U.S. European and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander on July 4. He delivered the conference's keynote address the next day. It was very well-received and well-delivered. Whether he knew of, authorized or approved Donahue's statements on Kaliningrad is unknown. But in the question-and-answer period, Grynkewich inadvertently exposed two potentially grave weaknesses of the alliance.
His answer to the audience question of what has surprised him most in his new assignment was most relevant. Grynch, his pilot's call sign, humorously responded that what surprised him most was that he got this job in the first place.
Second, and what was most revealing, was that his greatest surprise was how Ukraine gave its brigades the authority to buy their weapons and the money to do so. Grynkewich then argued that the United States must replicate this authority at the brigade level, implicitly reinforcing the conference's challenge to defense industries.
What is very worrying about the general's comments is that his last job was director for operations, or J-3, of the Pentagon's Joint Staff. That he should have known about that weapons purchase policy leads to the question of how many of the Pentagon's senior leadership lacked understanding of this and other novel ways Ukraine was waging the war despite intensive study and analysis of the conflict.
And while this may seem a trivial gap in knowledge, what else might the United States not know or understand about the war in Ukraine or Russia's aims that could prove a debilitating weakness?
It was not news to this writer about Ukrainian brigades ordering weaponry tailored to their needs. In some cases, software upgrades were delivered in hours to the front line. This gave Ukrainian ground forces huge advantages in fighting a much larger Russian army.
Even supposing that this admission, and recommendation to emulate Ukraine, were accepted by the audience, that leads to a second grave weakness. Transforming or absorbing the Ukrainian example of delegating authority to ensure quick responses into NATO's defense industrial base may be impossible today.
Can major defense industries, and more importantly their governments' procurement processes, shift quickly from revising contracts aimed at producing highly technologically advanced, multibillion-dollar weapons systems in relatively small numbers to the Ukrainian model that stresses mass numbers of cheap systems and a highly diversified base of many small firms?
At present there are no answers to why Gen. Donahue's response got little attention, and more importantly, what we do not know about the war or how to induce defense industries to make this tectonic transformation.
Harlan Ullman is UPI's Arnaud de Borchgrave Distinguished Columnist; senior adviser at Washington's Atlantic Council, chairman of a private company and principal author of the doctrine of shock and awe. His next book, co-written with Field Marshal The Lord David Richards, former U.K. chief of defense and due out next year, is Who Thinks Best Wins: Preventing Strategic Catastrophe. The writer can be reached on X @harlankullman.
7. How U.S. Forces Should Leave Europe
This conclusion is a huge assumption.
Excerpt:
In the end, a serious, well-equipped European self-defense will be a more credible deterrent to a Russian attack than a relatively weak Europe perpetually reliant on the United States. The continent, after all, will always have a greater interest in fighting a war over its own territory than Washington has in fighting an ocean away. The era in which the United States enjoyed wide latitude to project military power all over the world is long over, and Washington cannot delay making adjustments to avoid a cycle of overspending and relative decline. Downsizing U.S. forces in Europe is a crucial piece of this rebalancing. With a clearly planned and focused drawdown, the United States can allay European fears of U.S. abandonment and retain influence with its allies. The United States needs bold action now to sustain the momentum already underway to realize a credible European self-defense, for its own sake and for Europe’s.
How U.S. Forces Should Leave Europe
Foreign Affairs · by More by Christopher S. Chivvis · July 23, 2025
And Why Trump Should Start the Process Now
July 23, 2025
U.S. Army equipment in Esbjerg Harbor, Denmark, April 2025 Bo Amstrup / Reuters
CHRISTOPHER S. CHIVVIS is Director of the American Statecraft Program and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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For decades, collective European self-defense was merely an aspiration. Today, the time to realize this goal is finally at hand. Momentum in Europe is building: years of marginal steps to bolster European defenses gave way to meaningful action after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and these efforts have accelerated in the six months since U.S. President Donald Trump came into office. European leaders promised a sharp increase in defense and defense-related spending at the NATO summit in June, raising members’ overall budget commitments from two percent to five percent of GDP. To make good on those crucial new pledges, Europe is introducing new financial mechanisms and breaking down barriers to cooperation in its defense industry.
The danger now is that Europe will lose its momentum—and that the United States, by delaying an expected drawdown of forces from the continent, will let it. Both sides have good reason to see Europe’s defense buildup succeed. The United States would be able to free up forces now stationed in Europe for other missions, or simply make cuts and pocket the savings. A more capable Europe would become the kind of partner that Washington wants and needs, and it would gain the freedom to set its own strategy as a global power.
To ensure that this necessary rebalancing proceeds, the Trump administration must withdraw substantial numbers of U.S. forces from Europe, starting now, and truly shift the burden of the region’s conventional defense onto the continent. Hesitating would undermine Europe’s progress and risk locking in a suboptimal security structure for years to come. To encourage Europe to follow through on its own promises, Washington must lay out a realistic, targeted, and phased plan that cuts U.S. troop levels in Europe roughly in half over the next four years while keeping in place forces vital to U.S. security interests or forces that Europe cannot reasonably replace in that time. If a drawdown is executed well, there is little reason to fear that it would end the transatlantic partnership or leave either side less safe.
THE OPPORTUNITY
The best window for Europe to take on a greater share of the burden for its defense is now—not in five or ten years when political will may have faded or an emergency elsewhere forces a sudden U.S. withdrawal. The reasons for making the change are not going away. Competition with China and the emergence of other global powers have altered the United States’ strategic reality. Washington can no longer maintain the global military primacy it enjoyed after the end of the Cold War. To avoid overstretching, the United States must allocate its assets prudently—which means withdrawing from or downsizing in some parts of the world. Not to do so would drain the country’s resources, worsening a domestic fiscal crisis and killing any hope of retaining the global military lead that the United States still enjoys. Every U.S. administration since President Barack Obama’s has recognized this imperative—in theory, if rarely in practice—and future administrations are very unlikely to think differently. The reality is that U.S. troop deployments in Europe are larger than necessary to defend core U.S. interests on the continent, so they will remain near the top of the list of cuts. This is not because Europe is unimportant to the United States but because many U.S. forces in Europe are unneeded given the current threat level and becoming redundant as Europe’s military might grows.
Russia, of course, is a serious threat to Europe and the United States. President Vladimir Putin despises both. He has sophisticated nuclear weapons, well-developed hybrid warfare and intelligence capabilities, and a large conventional force hardened by years of war against Ukraine. But not all of these capabilities directly threaten the United States. Russia’s long-range nuclear weapons and advanced cyber capabilities put the United States at risk, as do Russian covert agents who spy, disrupt civil society, and have assassinated private citizens. Russian tanks and artillery, however, do not. Concentrating U.S. resources on nuclear, cyber, and gray-zone defense while leaving land defense largely to European allies will be a more sustainable division of responsibilities as Washington pares down its commitments.
The war in Ukraine is often cited as a reason to keep U.S. forces at current levels—if Putin is willing to invade Ukraine, the logic goes, he may be willing to invade other European countries, and U.S. troops provide a valuable deterrent against this. But with the Russian army dug in in Ukraine, the Kremlin cannot seriously contemplate a conventional attack on a NATO country for at least the next few years. This creates an opening for both the United States and Europe. If the United States can transfer more responsibilities for European security to Europe now, any gaps can be closed by the time Russia extricates itself from Ukraine and rebuilds its strength.
Europe has never had a more auspicious moment to take the lead in continental defense. Russia’s attack on Ukraine showed European publics the harsh reality of the threat from Moscow and softened their resistance to increases in military spending. Their leaders, meanwhile, have watched U.S. attention diverted to East Asia and the Middle East. Joe Biden will be the last U.S. president who can be counted among the true transatlanticists of the Cold War generation; future presidents will not be drawn to Europe in the same way. European leaders are recognizing the real risk that the United States might not come to the defense of their continent. It is their moral and political responsibility to ensure they can protect their populations by strengthening their own defenses. And this is their opportunity to build a more self-reliant, more confident, and more capable Europe—as well as ensure a stronger and more sustainable NATO.
THE COMPLICATIONS
The strategic rationale for a substantial U.S. withdrawal is strong, but, as always, the devil is in the details. Some U.S. forces in Europe are essential to protect the East Coast of the United States from a Russian sea-based attack from the North Atlantic, particularly through the ocean gaps between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom. Other U.S. conventional weapons stationed on the continent, such as the Rivet Joint, Global Hawk, and P-8 reconnaissance aircraft, collect crucial intelligence. To remove such capabilities would be unwise.
In some cases, the fact that large U.S. weapons in Europe serve multiple purposes precludes a dramatic drawdown. U.S. warships, for example, are badly needed in the Indo-Pacific, and Europe has strong naval capabilities already. But many American ships will need to stay where they are. U.S. naval forces in Europe offer a suite of weapons used for different tasks, some of which they must continue to perform in Europe for the foreseeable future. Take the Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, the U.S. Navy’s workhorse. One cannot remove a destroyer’s Tomahawk missiles, whose land-attack function Europe can be expected to replace, without removing its Aegis radars, which are a cornerstone of Europe’s missile defense network. U.S. Ohio–class nuclear-powered submarines, a key component of the U.S. nuclear triad, require access to certain naval bases in Europe. Maintaining a presence in Europe—particularly the use of the base in Rota, Spain—is also important for the U.S. Navy’s logistics network and power projection to other regions of the world.
If a U.S. drawdown is executed well, there is little reason to fear it.
The United States clearly should not withdraw all its forces from Europe. Nor should it remove assets too quickly and in too many areas at once, taking away capabilities that Europe’s own militaries cannot satisfactorily replace in the next few years. As Washington plans its withdrawal, it must factor in ambitious but realistic expectations of what Europe’s financial resources, bureaucracies, and defense industrial base can accomplish. Washington must also accept that creating gaps as it draws down will bring some risk—otherwise, the drawdown might never proceed—but it should not recklessly expose Europe to Russian attack.
That said, it would be easy to overstate the risks created by U.S. withdrawals and understate Europe’s capability to satisfactorily fill them in. Responsibly managing a drawdown while keeping many essential capabilities in position is not abandoning Europe. But actors with vested interests on both sides of the Atlantic may depict a U.S. withdrawal as such. European leaders who face obstacles in ramping up defense spending and production could cry foul, for example. Supporters of the U.S. Army will also likely argue that because the army is not needed in Asia, it might as well remain in Europe, but this makes no strategic sense when European armies can do the work themselves. To rebut exaggerated claims and resist the pressure to allow unnecessary redundancies, U.S. policymakers must carefully tailor their rhetoric. The way they talk about and carry out U.S. withdrawals must preserve the trust, norms, and processes that give strength to the United States’ relations with Europe. U.S. policymakers, and above all the president, must continue to make clear statements of U.S. support for NATO, clarifying that Washington aims to reform and update the alliance, not to end it.
MAKING IT WORK
The drawdown itself should be predictable and focused, proceeding in phases and targeting primarily land power and, to a lesser extent, air power. In the first phase, Washington should withdraw the U.S. forces it surged to Europe in response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Early in the war, U.S. force levels peaked above 100,000—a huge increase from the approximately 60,000 troops stationed on the continent before 2022. These have since been reduced to around 80,000. (The exact numbers change constantly as forces rotate in and out of Europe.) The initial deployment after Russia’s invasion was prudent, given the uncertainty about Russia’s intentions beyond Ukraine, but three years later, it’s clear the threat of an imminent Russian attack is minimal. The Trump administration should therefore announce plans to begin an immediate withdrawal of these forces, to be completed by the end of 2026. In addition to these ground forces, the squadron of U.S. F-35s that is expected to begin operations this fall should join the first round of removals—Europe already has plenty of fighter aircraft of its own and is expecting substantial deliveries of more over the next few years.
Quickly beginning this phase of modest withdrawals will keep the momentum going for Europe to build up its conventional defenses without leaving gaps that are too big for Europe to realistically fill. If Washington were to stop here, however, it would not be doing enough to truly shift the defense burden to Europe’s shoulders. Together, with this first round of cuts, the Trump administration should therefore lay out a broader drawdown of U.S. conventional forces with a deadline of January 2029. This will provide the maximum amount of time for Europe to adjust without the deadline becoming so abstract that momentum dissipates.
U.S. troop deployments in Europe are larger than necessary.
This second phase should complete (for now) the restructuring of U.S. forces in Europe, cutting them to roughly half of today’s levels and rebalancing them to include primarily naval forces, a smaller proportion of air power, and a limited number of ground forces. To achieve this force mix, the United States should remove the armored brigade combat team that has been rotating through eastern Europe since 2017, the European combat aviation brigade and artillery capabilities that have been deployed since 2018, and most short-range air defense units. The main purpose of these forces has been to reassure European allies and deter Russia. They have done an excellent job of reassurance—perhaps too good a job. European armies can take over the deterrent function if properly trained and equipped. As U.S. forces are reduced, staff at U.S. headquarters across Europe can also be downsized. Two of the six Arleigh Burke destroyers that the U.S. Navy has sent to Europe since the start of the war in Ukraine should be redeployed to the Indo-Pacific, where the need is greater. Most U.S. fighter aircraft, such as F-35s and F-16s, currently in Europe for deterrent purposes can be removed as well, given Europe’s large and growing stock of high-end aircraft.
The Trump administration should also discuss with France, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom, Europe’s strongest military powers, the possibility of naming a European official as Supreme Allied Commander Europe—NATO’s top command post. This high-visibility position has traditionally been held by the commander of U.S. forces in Europe, but giving a European general this responsibility would accelerate the transition to European leadership of European defense. A senior U.S. officer could serve as deputy. For a short period, rotating American officers into the top position at regular intervals could also ease the handoff.
A drawdown would leave a meaningful backstop of U.S. forces in Europe, including two army brigades, support aircraft, and most naval forces. U.S. command and control, special forces, space forces, theater ballistic missile defense, and other elements that only the U.S. military can provide would stay in place. To avoid unnecessarily irking allies, the United States should also continue to contribute a small, low-cost deployment to NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence, a force that helps deter a Russian attack on NATO’s eastern flank. Remaining forces would preserve vital U.S. interests: protecting the U.S. East Coast, maintaining nuclear deterrence, and supporting the country’s world-class collection of intelligence.
Still, the withdrawal would free up a large number of U.S. Air Force and Army units, which could be either redeployed to other theaters or deactivated upon their return to the United States, saving the country money. This two-phase plan, moreover, need not be the end of U.S. force restructuring in Europe. Washington could pursue additional drawdowns in the 2030s—or, if changing security conditions make it necessary, send some forces back.
MINIMUM COST, MAXIMUM BENEFIT
As with any change, this strategy involves an element of risk. The principal danger is that European militaries might not fill all the gaps created by U.S. withdrawals, thus leaving Europe more vulnerable to a Russian attack than it is today. Europe has made real progress on funding and coordinating a defense buildup, but the work is not finished, and it could still stall—which is why maintaining momentum now is so important.
This risk, however, is ultimately very low. Europe’s current military weaknesses are easily exaggerated, as is Russia’s current conventional threat to NATO. Some European armies do have low readiness levels, but the continent has lots of troops—the members of the European Union alone already have 1.3 million soldiers under arms, roughly the same number as the United States has and slightly more than Russia’s 1.1 million. European combat airpower is highly advanced and could badly weaken Russian forces attempting to invade a Baltic country or Finland. European NATO allies already deploy large units to the Baltics, including German soldiers permanently stationed in Lithuania—something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. And because European forces would be fighting defense should Russia attack, they would not need as many forces as the aggressor to maintain an advantage. Russia, meanwhile, has proven less capable than once feared. For years, frontline countries worried that a lightning-fast Russian operation might topple their governments before allies could come to their aid. In 2022, they all saw that gambit fall apart in Ukraine.
Europe’s defense buildup could still stall—so maintaining momentum is important.
To be sure, even if Europe is generally equipped to handle a possible Russian incursion, some specific U.S. ground systems will be difficult to replace. Long-range artillery and air defenses, for example, are expensive, in high demand, and hard to produce. But Europe’s procurement funds are growing by tens of billions of euros annually, which should make buying and deploying many of these systems possible within the next few years. Europe can also strengthen its arsenal through means other than one-to-one replacements, such as by increasing its drone warfare capabilities.
The United States should do what it can to make this transition as seamless as possible. Just outlining its withdrawal plans will simplify Europe’s defense calculus, as it will make the future more predictable and thus help Europe think practically about its procurement goals. Eventually, many new European weapons will come from European industry, but for the next few years, Europe will still need to buy a great deal from the United States. The State Department should prioritize Europe as it approves sales of the systems the United States is withdrawing, and the Defense Department and the White House should work with U.S. defense firms to overcome their resistance to making the technology transfers necessary to help European industry fill gaps quickly.
In the end, a serious, well-equipped European self-defense will be a more credible deterrent to a Russian attack than a relatively weak Europe perpetually reliant on the United States. The continent, after all, will always have a greater interest in fighting a war over its own territory than Washington has in fighting an ocean away. The era in which the United States enjoyed wide latitude to project military power all over the world is long over, and Washington cannot delay making adjustments to avoid a cycle of overspending and relative decline. Downsizing U.S. forces in Europe is a crucial piece of this rebalancing. With a clearly planned and focused drawdown, the United States can allay European fears of U.S. abandonment and retain influence with its allies. The United States needs bold action now to sustain the momentum already underway to realize a credible European self-defense, for its own sake and for Europe’s.
Foreign Affairs · by More by Christopher S. Chivvis · July 23, 2025
8. ‘Founders Films’ aims to remake Hollywood with patriotism, Palantir and Ayn Rand
Videos at the link:
https://www.semafor.com/article/07/20/2025/founders-films-aims-to-remake-hollywood-with-patriotism-palantir-and-ayn-rand
Excerpts:
The Founders Film group’s analysis of the long leftward shift from Hollywood’s early days is hard to dispute, though they also risk joining a long line of ideologically-motivated cultural projects whose didactic output flops in the theaters. ( If it isn’t f*cking entertaining, I’m out,” one former studio chief told me.)
But changes in viewership habits and advances in technology have given this generation of right-leaning entertainers an opportunity to break through.
Streaming has allowed niche filmmakers to find much easier distribution online and connect with audiences on YouTube or connected TVs. The sharp drop in attendance at movie theaters has made theatrical releases a shakier business, and opened up possibilities for niche filmmakers to distribute their films, particularly if they can offer audiences the type of action and adventure that traditionally has filled theaters.
And at least members of the old generation of Hollywood leadership seem more like the upstarts. David Ellison has telegraphed to Trump and the world that he is willing to take Paramount and its television network CBS in a different direction when and if his company Skydance completes its acquisition of the Hollywood studio. (His father, Larry Ellison, is one of Trump’s biggest backers.) As the merger awaits approval from the FCC, Paramount has settled a weak lawsuit filed against CBS News by Trump, and the company recently announced that it is ending The Late Show, hosted by Stephen Colbert, an outspoken Trump critic.
Artificial intelligence seems poised to transform Hollywood, allowing studios to make movies and TV with fewer people, and for much cheaper. Independent filmmakers, including those with political agendas, can put together films without the kind of traditional financing that proved challenging for filmmakers wanting to make films with a message sure to turn off half the country. In its pitch to investors, Founders noted that “AI production and filmmaking will reduce costs for those who can wield it.”
‘Founders Films’ aims to remake Hollywood with patriotism, Palantir and Ayn Rand
semafor.com · by Max Tani
The Scoop
As a conservative political backlash sweeps across US media, some are reaching for the ultimate prize: Hollywood.
Shifting the liberal tilt of the studios and creative culture that shapes America’s image of itself has long been a goal for the right: The late media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart popularized the notion that politics is “downstream” from culture, and acolytes from Steve Bannon to Ben Shapiro have sought to inject their politics into the movie business, with limited success.
But conservatives have celebrated a few mainstream hits, like the patriotic Top Gun: Maverick and Taylor Sheridan’s nostalgic, libertarian-inflected Yellowstone. And a longstanding Christian culture industry has backed projects like the 2023 film Sound of Freedom, a dramatization of child trafficking that grossed more than $242 million for Provo’s Angel Studios. The Christian drama The Forge earned $30 million on a $6 million budget last year.
Now a set of prominent figures close to the software firm Palantir are pitching a new project to shake up streaming TV and film with a portfolio ranging from feature films about daring Israeli and American military operations to a three-part treatment of an Ayn Rand tome.
In a pitch deck circulated to investors in recent months, Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar, early Palantir employee Ryan Podolsky, and investor Christian Garrett are raising money for Founders Films, a new production company based in Dallas that aims to push for films with a nationalistic bent and unsubtle political overtones. The company said its projects would adhere to a set of rules: “Say yes to projects about American exceptionalism, name America’s enemies, back artists unconditionally, take risk on novel IP.”
“The American Brand is broken. Hollywood is AWOL. Movies have become more ideological, more cautious, and less entertaining. Large segments of American and international viewers are underserved. Production costs have soared and sales are flagging,” the deck, which is labeled confidential, says. Founders aims to be a production studio that would also co-finance projects, distribute films, and engage in brand partnerships.
Podolsky did not respond to requests for comment. A representative for Palantir also did not respond to requests for comment.
The project’s name echoes that of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and both Palantir and Garrett have close ties to the investor, a key figure on the new right. A spokesman for Thiel didn’t respond to a request for comment on the project.
But in a post late last year on his Substack, Sankar outlined his view for a return to blockbusters of the 80s and 90s, like Red Dawn, Top Gun, Rocky IV, and The Hunt for Red October. He said the entertainment needed to be unafraid of offending Chinese audiences, and use American cultural power to spread skeptical views of the Chinese government: “Breaking out of our cultural malaise will require the studios to wake up and choose America,” he wrote, invoking the renaissance in American film in the 1970s, when directors including Steven Spielberg “brought back heroes, villains, and romance” and “rekindled the flame of the American Cinematic Universe.”
While Founders’ deck largely avoids political language, the company’s proposed projects celebrate American military action, push for confrontation with China, and elevate heroes of the right from Rand to Elon Musk.
Screenshot from Founders Films deck
The slate includes 102 Minutes, a feature film about the evacuation of the World Trade Center on 9/11 (“courage is contagious,” the tagline reads). The company also hopes to create a three-part adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, and a film about killing Qasem Soleimani.
Screenshot from Founders Films deck
Not to be confused with the 2000’s stoner comedy Pineapple Express, the deck pitches Operation: Pineapple Express, a movie about the “botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Then there’s The Greatest Game, a “multi-season, global spy thriller that lays bare China’s plans to replace the United States as the dominant global power by showing their operations and sometimes devastating impact from Kenya to the Atacama desert in northern Chile.”
Screenshot from Founders Films deck
The company brands itself as explicitly pro-American, but many of the projects also celebrate Israel. Founders’ proposed film slate also includes Roaring Lion, a movie about the recent attack against Iran, which depicts Israel as “striving for nuclear non-proliferation and exercising its right of self-defense against a crazed regime intent on destroying it.” The proposed projects also include When the Towers Fall, a film about Israel’s 2024 booby-trapped pager operation against Hezbollah.
While much of the content has a military bent, the company also said it hoped to produce unscripted documentaries about influential figures like Musk, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, and Admiral Hyman Rickover, who led the development of nuclear-powered submarines.
Founders Films, if it succeeds in its fundraising efforts, would immediately be a major player among conservative media companies like the Daily Wire, which have also gotten into the scripted and theatrical movie and TV business, and have sought to tap into right-leaning audiences while also challenging the cultural dominance of Hollywood.
“It’s great that new players are coming into the space, and I’m almost positive that we will work with them,” said Dallas Sonnier, a former manager for Hollywood talent including Greta Gerwig and whose production company produces for the Daily Wire. His output includes TV shows and films like Am I Racist?, a mockumentary that played in 1,500 theaters and grossed $12 million.
Max’s view
The Founders Film group’s analysis of the long leftward shift from Hollywood’s early days is hard to dispute, though they also risk joining a long line of ideologically-motivated cultural projects whose didactic output flops in the theaters. ( If it isn’t f*cking entertaining, I’m out,” one former studio chief told me.)
But changes in viewership habits and advances in technology have given this generation of right-leaning entertainers an opportunity to break through.
Streaming has allowed niche filmmakers to find much easier distribution online and connect with audiences on YouTube or connected TVs. The sharp drop in attendance at movie theaters has made theatrical releases a shakier business, and opened up possibilities for niche filmmakers to distribute their films, particularly if they can offer audiences the type of action and adventure that traditionally has filled theaters.
And at least members of the old generation of Hollywood leadership seem more like the upstarts. David Ellison has telegraphed to Trump and the world that he is willing to take Paramount and its television network CBS in a different direction when and if his company Skydance completes its acquisition of the Hollywood studio. (His father, Larry Ellison, is one of Trump’s biggest backers.) As the merger awaits approval from the FCC, Paramount has settled a weak lawsuit filed against CBS News by Trump, and the company recently announced that it is ending The Late Show, hosted by Stephen Colbert, an outspoken Trump critic.
Artificial intelligence seems poised to transform Hollywood, allowing studios to make movies and TV with fewer people, and for much cheaper. Independent filmmakers, including those with political agendas, can put together films without the kind of traditional financing that proved challenging for filmmakers wanting to make films with a message sure to turn off half the country. In its pitch to investors, Founders noted that “AI production and filmmaking will reduce costs for those who can wield it.”
Room for Disagreement
Several studio executives and Hollywood figures dismissed the idea that a studio founded on a political premise will break through.
“I doubt that either right or left oriented production ideology is a good business model,” Barry Diller told Semafor in an email.
Notable
-
Sankar, the 13th employee at Palantir, has become an increasingly visible figure on the tech and defense right. Trump reportedly considered him last year for a top research job in the administration. In an op-ed last month in the Free Press, Sankar announced he was joining the Army Reserve’s Executive Innovation Corps, a newly created unit that aims to solicit advice from tech executives on modernizing the military.
9. Building Strategic Lethality: Special Operations Models for Joint Force Learning and Leader Development
Download the entire article here: https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1306&context=joint-force-quarterly
Authors
Spencer B. Meredith III, College of International Security Affairs (Joint Special Operations Master of Arts, Fort Bragg), National Defense University
https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/joint-force-quarterly/vol118/iss3/6/
Abstract
This article examines how U.S. Joint Special Operations Forces (SOF), particularly through SAG-U and CJSOTF-10, have rapidly adapted to support Ukraine amid Russia’s full-scale invasion, offering a model for future joint force innovation. SAG-U emerged as a key logistics and coordination hub, integrating NATO and interagency partners to manage complex, high-stakes supply chains. Meanwhile, CJSOTF-10 and its subordinate SOTF-10.1 shifted from traditional training and advising roles to rapid tactical adaptation, virtual assistance, and technological integration to meet evolving battlefield demands. The creation of the Remote Advise and Assist Cell (RAAC) illustrates how remote support and real-time data can bridge operational gaps, while experimentation and concept development efforts, through exercises and war games, demonstrate how joint SOF can drive broader force modernization. Ultimately, the article argues that adaptability, partner-centric networks, and continual experimentation are essential to sustaining strategic advantage in complex security environments.
Recommended Citation
Spencer B. Meredith III, "Building Strategic Lethality: Special Operations Models for Joint Force Learning and Leader Development," Joint Force Quarterly 118 (3rd Quarter 2025), 30-41, https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/joint-force-quarterly/vol118/iss3/6.
10. Trump administration unveils new AI Action Plan
U.S. News July 23, 2025 / 1:11 PM
Trump administration unveils new AI Action Plan
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2025/07/23/trump-administration-AI-action-plan/4341753289233/
By Lisa Hornung
President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media at the White House before boarding Marine One in Washington, D.C, on July 15. The administration just announced its AI Action Plan to make the United States a global leader in AI technology. Photo by Al Drago/UPI | License Photo
July 23 (UPI) -- The White House unveiled its new AI action plan Wednesday to make the United States a global leader in the technology.
President Donald Trump's administration is cutting back AI regulation, making U.S. laws more friendly to Silicon Valley.
According to a statement on the White House's website, the key policies in the 28-page AI Action Plan include:
Exporting American AI: The Commerce and State departments will partner with industry to deliver secure, full-stack AI export packages -- including hardware, models, software, applications, and standards -- to America's friends and allies around the world.
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Promoting rapid buildout of data centers: Expediting and modernizing permits for data centers and semiconductor fabs, as well as creating new national initiatives to increase high-demand occupations like electricians and HVAC technicians.
Enabling innovation and adoption: Removing "onerous Federal regulations that hinder AI development and deployment," and seek private sector input on rules to remove.
Upholding free speech in frontier models: Updating Federal procurement guidelines to ensure that the government-only contracts with frontier large language model developers who ensure their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.
"This plan galvanizes Federal efforts to turbocharge our innovation capacity, build cutting-edge infrastructure, and lead globally, ensuring that American workers and families thrive in the AI era, said White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios in the statement. "We are moving with urgency to make this vision a reality."
The AI Action Plan also directs the Commerce Department to revise an AI risk framework to remove references to misinformation, climate change and diversity, equity and inclusion. It calls for an update to federal procurement guidelines that only allow contracts to AI systems deemed "objective and free from top-down ideological bias."
It further calls for making federal land available to build data centers and their power generation infrastructure.
"To win the AI race, the U.S. must lead in innovation, infrastructure, and global partnerships. At the same time, we must center American workers and avoid Orwellian uses of AI. This Action Plan provides a roadmap for doing that," AI and crypto czar David Sacks said.
"These clear-cut policy goals set expectations for the Federal Government to ensure America sets the technological gold standard worldwide, and that the world continues to run on American technology," said Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The plan also calls for pushing American AI systems worldwide to counter China's influence in AI governance.
11. Asia-U.S. Trade Deals Pick Up as Tariff Deadline Nears
Excerpt:
Excluding a truce with China, four Asian nations have now reached deals, with just over a week before the grace period expires.
Asia-U.S. Trade Deals Pick Up as Tariff Deadline Nears
Excluding a truce with China, four Asian nations have now reached deals ahead of a looming Aug 1. deadline
https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/asia-u-s-trade-deals-pick-up-as-tariff-deadline-nears-cccbc644
By Kimberley Kao
Follow and Amanda Lee
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July 24, 2025 12:51 am ET
Countries that fail to reach an agreement by then face steep so-called reciprocal tariffs on exports to the U.S. Photo: greg baker/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Trade deals are gathering pace in Asia, as several countries secure lower U.S. tariffs ahead of a looming Aug 1. deadline.
Countries that fail to reach an agreement by then face steep so-called reciprocal tariffs on exports to the U.S. The Trump administration outlined the rates each country will get in letters sent early July, widely seen as a tactic to push trading partners to the table.
Excluding a truce with China, four Asian nations have now reached deals, with just over a week before the grace period expires.
Japan: Trump on Tuesday touted what he called the “largest TRADE DEAL in history” with Japan in a social-media post.
He said Japan would get a reciprocal tariff of 15%, down from the 25% previously threatened. In return, Japan will invest $550 billion in the U.S. and open access to American cars, trucks, rice and certain agricultural products, Trump posted.
Notably, Japan secured lower duties on autos—a major export. “We were the first in the world to achieve tariff reductions on autos and auto parts with no quantity limits,” Tokyo’s top trade negotiator, Ryosei Akazawa, said Wednesday.
That could raise hopes, and pressure, on others to secure favorable trade terms.
Indonesia: The Trump administration said Tuesday that Indonesia will remove numerous trade barriers as part of its deal, though specifics on how the U.S. will apply tariffs remain unclear.
The tariff on Indonesian products is now set at 19%, lower than the 32% Trump threatened in his April 2 “Liberation Day” announcement. However, goods from Indonesia that contain significant content from other nations, particularly China, will face a 40% levy.
The vast majority of U.S. exports to Indonesia will receive duty-free access, senior administration officials told reporters.
Philippines: After a meeting with the Philippine president, Trump said on Truth Social that the two countries reached a trade deal.
The U.S. will charge the Philippines a 19% tariff under the deal, slightly below the 20% rate floated in the letters but above the 17% proposed in April.
“It was a beautiful visit, and we concluded our Trade Deal, whereby The Philippines is going OPEN MARKET with the United States, and ZERO Tariffs,” Trump said.
That doesn’t seem like much of a win for the Philippines, analysts say.
Without the relative advantage of a lower tariff rate, Philippines economic growth faces headwinds, and it will be harder to attract investment, HSBC economists said.
Vietnam: Vietnam’s trade deal, the first reached in Southeast Asia, seems to be serving as a rubric for the rest of the region.
Vietnam’s reciprocal tariff was lowered to 20% from 46% as part of the agreement announced by Trump, which he said includes duty-free access for American goods.
Goods from other countries that pass through Vietnam on their way to the U.S. will be charged a higher 40% tariff, a measure seen as targeting rerouted products originating from China.
Despite the reduced rate, growth in Vietnam is still expected to slow through 2025 and 2026, the Asian Development Bank said. It has cut growth projections for both years.
Malaysia: Malaysia faces a 25% tariff if it fails to reach a trade deal by Aug. 1. The government has said it will continue seeking a mutually beneficial agreement.
As a partner country of the Brics bloc, Malaysia is also at risk for an additional 10% tariff that Trump threatened on Brics-aligned nations.
A favorable deal that brings Malaysia tariffs in line with Indonesia and Vietnam would ease the economic hit.
“On the flipside, limited clarity on exemptions and no change to the current tariff rate could exacerbate downside risks to growth,” said OCBC economist Lavanya Venkateswaran.
South Korea: Finance Minister Koo Yun-cheol and Trade Minister Yeo Han-koo were scheduled to meet U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Friday, but talks were delayed, with Koo’s office citing an “urgent schedule” clash on Bessent’s side.
Instead, Seoul officials will hold talks with Trade Representative Jamieson Greer as planned.
South Korea currently faces a 25% reciprocal tariff, and is heavily exposed to sector-specific duties, both in effect and proposed.
India: Hopes remain that a trade deal with India is near the finish line, as Trump has repeatedly said that a deal is close.
The South Asian nation was noticeably absent from Trump’s list of letter recipients earlier this month. It faces a 26% reciprocal tariff.
Indian officials reached a framework agreement with the U.S. in April during a visit by Vice President JD Vance. Trump later claimed India’s government had offered to remove import duties on U.S. goods.
Given that India faces a much lower tariff than China for now, it has a golden opportunity to capture business from companies seeking alternative manufacturing and export hubs.
Singapore: The city-state faces a 10% tariff from the U.S.
Officials are more worried about another duty targeting exports of pharmaceuticals, which make up more than 10% of Singapore’s shipments to the U.S.
Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong is in the U.S. until July 26, where he is expected to hold talks with U.S. officials on pharma exports.
Gan has also floated the possibility of discussions on semiconductors—another sector that could be targeted by Trump’s tariffs.
Write to Kimberley Kao at kimberley.kao@wsj.com and Amanda Lee at amanda.lee@wsj.com
12. China’s growing influence on Taiwan lawmakers prompts massive recall effort
Excerpts:
“At stake is whether Taiwan remains a functioning front-line democracy or a hollowed shell of one,” said Orina Chang, founder of Chang Development Co., an investment firm that promotes democracy. “The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t need to fire a missile if it can quietly reshape Taiwan’s institutions from within.”
The Great Recall is “a public immune response to that threat,” she said. “It is a reminder to democracies everywhere that defense begins not at the border but in the legislature, in the constitution and in the resolve of ordinary citizens.”
Beijing is crying foul.
In June, Chinese officials overseeing Taiwan policy denounced the recall as a “political scheme” by Mr. Lai, according to Reuters.
Taiwan’s president is “engaging in dictatorship under the guise of democracy,” China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson Zhu Fenglian said, accusing him of “using every means possible to suppress the opposition.”
These vocal, blunt commentaries embarrass the KMT as they fortify beliefs of Chinese support.
China’s growing influence on Taiwan lawmakers prompts massive recall effort
washingtontimes.com · by Andrew Salmon
By - The Washington Times - Wednesday, July 23, 2025
An unprecedented political movement in Taiwan aims to overturn a legislative majority that, at the behest of Beijing, according to some analysts, has stymied the governance of President Lai Ching-te.
The grassroot movement’s most important test comes in Saturday’s recall elections. They could potentially shift Taiwan’s legislative landscape and empower the strongly anti-Beijing Mr. Lai before year-end.
The cracks in the Taiwanese political system came to the fore in the 2024 general election.
Although Mr. Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party won the presidency, the main opposition Kuomintang and a third party, the Taiwan People’s Party, captured a narrow majority in the Legislative Yuan.
Since the election, the opposition bloc has quashed or watered down many of Mr. Lai’s initiatives. It has slashed the budget for a domestic submarine program and blocked moves to increase defense spending and combat Chinese influence operations.
Beijing, which claims the democratically ruled island under the “One China” policy, strongly opposes Mr. Lai. It dubs him “a creator of crises.”
China has ramped up the intimidation of Taiwan, notably with aerial probes and naval drills, under Mr. Lai’s rule.
DPP supporters reckon some KMT lawmakers are pro-Beijing, or beholden to China’s communist leaders.
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They are especially riled by KMT Caucus Whip Fu Kun-chi, who led an “icebreaker” party delegation last year in a chummy meeting with Chinese leaders.
Amid a belief that the KMT has overplayed its hand in the legislature, blowback looms.
“Within Taiwanese society lies a deeply valuable civic force that emerges in times of crisis or need,” Mr. Lai said in a speech last month, citing past civic movements.
Taiwan’s domestic tug-of-war mirrors a similar confrontation that unfolded in South Korea between the Yoon Suk Yeol presidency and an opposition-controlled legislature.
Mr. Yoon failed to reverse that situation with a martial law decree in December. He was impeached in April and is currently detained and on trial.
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The DPP’s voters are leading the process in Taiwan, so Mr. Lai is not at risk if it falters.
‘The Great Recall’
The movement, dubbed “The Great Recall,” leverages a Taiwanese constitutional mechanism.
A recall is a constituent’s right to petition for a by-election, one year after an election, if 10% of voters in the constituency sign on. If the Central Election Commission certifies the legitimacy of the signatures and processes, voting takes place.
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In recent weeks, the commission has verified processes in multiple constituencies. Voting is imminent.
The first and largest tranche of recall votes — 24, all for KMT-held seats — is set for Saturday. Seven more seats will be up for vote in August.
To pass, the number of votes to remove a lawmaker must exceed those in support. At least a quarter of eligible voters in a constituency must cast a ballot.
If the vote goes against the incumbent, a by-election is held within three months.
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That points to by-elections in October and November.
Pundits anticipate by-elections for as many as a quarter of the Legislative Yuan’s 113 seats, including almost half the opposition-held seats.
Tantalizingly for DPP supporters, a swing of just six seats is enough to grant the party a legislative majority.
The “Great Recall” is a DPP initiative, but KMT activists have retaliated in mass and in-kind protests. Their recall processes failed to pass Central Election Commission scrutiny, meaning no DPP seats are in play Saturday.
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“The recall wave amounts to a virtual mid-term election,” Bo Tedards, a longtime American observer of Taiwanese politics, said in a report for the Global Taiwan Institute.
It is extraordinary and probably unique: In most democracies, recall applies to the local, not national level. In the U.S., Arnold Schwarzenneger famously won California’s governorship via recall.
“The idea of a mass recall is kind of an innovation,” Mr. Tedards said in an interview. “This may be the first time in the world that anyone has tried a mass recall of national members of parliament, I believe.”
High stakes
Tech billionaire Robert Tsao, a former KMT supporter, now calls the party “China’s Trojan horse in Taiwan.”
Other DPP supporters are equally suspicious.
“These KMT legislators have, over the past year, acted in ways that significantly diverge from their original promises to voters,” said Chen Yun-chu, an academic and vice president of an association of Taiwanese expatriates in Washington. “They have … blindly pushed through policies aligned with the Chinese government.”
Taiwanese have identified a serious threat, they say.
“At stake is whether Taiwan remains a functioning front-line democracy or a hollowed shell of one,” said Orina Chang, founder of Chang Development Co., an investment firm that promotes democracy. “The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t need to fire a missile if it can quietly reshape Taiwan’s institutions from within.”
The Great Recall is “a public immune response to that threat,” she said. “It is a reminder to democracies everywhere that defense begins not at the border but in the legislature, in the constitution and in the resolve of ordinary citizens.”
Beijing is crying foul.
In June, Chinese officials overseeing Taiwan policy denounced the recall as a “political scheme” by Mr. Lai, according to Reuters.
Taiwan’s president is “engaging in dictatorship under the guise of democracy,” China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson Zhu Fenglian said, accusing him of “using every means possible to suppress the opposition.”
These vocal, blunt commentaries embarrass the KMT as they fortify beliefs of Chinese support.
“This is our business. It is the two parties, the DPP and the KMT, fighting for public support, for public recognition,” a KMT spokesperson told Reuters. “It has nothing to do with the Mainland.”
Recall supporters rebut Beijing’s accusations.
“The recall is not an attempt to overturn democracy; it is part of a democratic system,” said Kenichi Ishi, a recall volunteer in Japan, a nation with close ties to Taiwan. “It has clear legal thresholds … calling this ‘overturning democracy’ misrepresents the principle of democratic accountability.”
One expert reckons that the passion and creativity of the recall movement speak volumes about Taiwanese attitudes.
“This demonstrates again that Taiwanese civil society is resilient in the face of Chinese Communist Party pressure,” Mr. Tedards said.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
Copyright © 2025 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
washingtontimes.com · by Andrew Salmon
13. China’s World War II victory parade: A supreme fiction
China’s World War II victory parade: A supreme fiction
Fabricated photos, false narratives and upcoming celebrations based on lies
washingtontimes.com · by Miles Yu
By - Monday, July 21, 2025
A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.
OPINION:
On Sept. 3, the Chinese Communist Party will orchestrate a grand military parade in Tiananmen Square to commemorate victory over Japan in World War II.
Ostensibly a tribute to wartime heroism, this display is, in truth, a monumental distortion of history, a calculated fiction meant to glorify the party, vilify its contemporary adversaries and mislead its people.
At the heart of this charade lies the falsehood that the CCP was the principal fighting force against Japanese aggression during the war. This claim is a brazen lie.
From 1937 to 1945, it was the Nationalist government, under Chiang Kai-shek, that bore the brunt of Japan’s military assault. Nationalist forces, not the Chinese communists, fought nearly every major battle and sustained more than 3.5 million military casualties. In stark contrast, the CCP, holed up in its Yan’an stronghold, sustained minuscule losses. Only one high-ranking communist officer, Zuo Quan, is confirmed to have died in a skirmish with the Japanese.
Japanese casualty data confirms the truth: Of the estimated over 1 million Japanese casualties in China, virtually all fell to Nationalist or Allied hands, not the communists.
The main cause of the CCP’s inaction against the Japanese invading forces is its ideological symbiosis with the Soviet Union, which prohibited the CCP from actively fighting Japan during World War II. In late August 1939, Josef Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler, whose ally in Asia was Japan, and despite the Nazis’ subsequent betrayal of the pact, the Soviets remained vigilant against any Allied efforts using their territory, resources or affiliated forces to fight Japan in Asia. This was because of the notorious April 1941 Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, which Moscow strictly enforced until the very last days of the war.
As such, the Soviets and their CCP clients were effectively bound to a policy of nonconfrontation against the Japanese in China during most of the war. Any military action by the CCP would have jeopardized the USSR’s neutrality pact with Tokyo, and thus Mao Zedong and the CCP carefully avoided real conflict with the Japanese. As a result, the Japanese military and the CCP forces virtually coexisted in the same large swaths of Japanese-occupied North China, where there was little to no communist resistance.
Mao focused not on liberation or resistance but on quietly building his army from a few thousand to more than 1 million troops by war’s end, all without serious engagement but with the goal of defeating the legitimate, U.S.-supported Chinese Nationalist government in the postwar era.
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Even when American efforts, via the Office of Strategic Services, sought to arm and train guerrilla resistance in communist-held zones, the CCP obstructed operations. The brutal killing of Office of Strategic Services agent Capt. John Birch stands as a grim testament to the CCP’s duplicity and hostility toward genuine anti-Japanese resistance that threatened its ambitions.
The party’s rare foray into combat, i.e., the much-touted “Hundred Regiments Offensive” of 1940, was neither decisive nor heroic. To fake its anti-Japanese feat, the CCP claimed massive Japanese casualties because of this campaign, as many as 46,000, but Japan’s casualty records suggest the real number was less than 500. Mao later even denounced the operation as a strategic blunder, and its commander, Peng Dehuai, was purged for, among other things, violating Mao’s preference for strategic concealment in 1940.
Today’s CCP regime continues to weaponize historical memory. Museums in China’s wartime capital Chongqing and elsewhere have been redesigned to promote the illusion of a CCP-American wartime alliance.
They exhibit fabricated photos and false narratives, airbrushing out the true partnership between the U.S. and Chiang’s Nationalists. American figures such as Gen. Joseph Stilwell and the Flying Tigers are co-opted into CCP mythology, while the party viewed U.S. personnel as threats and even targeted them for assassination.
The entire upcoming parade is a political theater, a state-forged spectacle masquerading as remembrance. The irony of holding it in Tiananmen Square, where countless lives were crushed in 1989, is not lost on those who know China’s real history.
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Although the CCP claims to honor 15 million Chinese victims of the war, it remains silent about the more than 70 million who perished at its own hands through purges, famines, forced labor, terror campaigns and continuing repressions.
A regime responsible for more Chinese deaths than any foreign power has no moral standing to speak of peace or sacrifice. There will be no banners for the dead of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
No tribute will be paid to the countless intellectuals, farmers or workers crushed by Maoist campaigns or imprisoned for dissent. This parade will honor ghosts, but only the ones the party deems politically useful.
If China wishes to truly honor those who resisted Japan, it should salute the Nationalist soldiers who fought and died, the American airmen of the Flying Tigers, the brave men and women of the U.S. armed forces and OSS and the millions of unarmed civilians who endured occupation. A truthful commemoration would also acknowledge the victims of communist tyranny, the real cost of the CCP’s rise to power.
To attend this spectacle is to legitimize a fraud. No foreign leader, especially from a democratic nation, should grace this falsified history with their presence. To do so is to betray the memory of those who fought fascism and to reward a regime built on the bones of its own people.
What will unfold on Sept. 3 is not remembrance but propaganda — an insult draped in flags and uniforms, parading not history but deception. It is a lie in motion. Like all lies, it demands to be exposed.
• Miles Yu is the director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute. His “Red Horizon” column appears every other Tuesday in The Washington Times. He can be reached at mmilesyu@gmail.com.
Copyright © 2025 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
washingtontimes.com · by Miles Yu
14. State Department approves $322 million in proposed weapons sales to Ukraine
State Department approves $322 million in proposed weapons sales to Ukraine
AP · by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS · July 23, 2025
The State Department said Wednesday that it has approved $322 million in proposed weapons sales to Ukraine to enhance its air defense capabilities and provide armored combat vehicles, coming as the country works to fend off escalating Russian attacks.
The potential sales, which the department said were notified to Congress, include $150 million for the supply, maintenance, repair and overhaul of U.S. armored vehicles, and $172 million for surface-to-air missile systems.
The approvals come weeks after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed a pause on other weapons shipments to Ukraine to allow the Pentagon to assess its weapons stockpiles, in a move that caught the White House by surprise. President Donald Trump then made an abrupt change in posture, pledging publicly earlier this month to continue to send weapons to Ukraine.
“We have to,” Trump said. “They have to be able to defend themselves. They’re getting hit very hard now. We’re going to send some more weapons — defensive weapons primarily.”
Trump recently endorsed a plan to have European allies buy U.S. military equipment that can then be transferred to Ukraine. It was not immediately clear how the latest proposed sales related to that arrangement.
Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S. has provided more than $67 billion in weapons and security assistance to Kyiv.
Since Trump came back into office, his administration has gone back and forth about providing more military aid to Ukraine, with political pressure to stop U.S. funding of foreign wars coming from the isolationists inside the Trump administration and on Capitol Hill.
Over the course of the war, the U.S. has routinely pressed for allies to provide air defense systems to Ukraine. But many are reluctant to give up the high-tech systems, particularly countries in Eastern Europe that also feel threatened by Russia.
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AP · by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS · July 23, 2025
15. Is Taiwan doing enough to repel a Chinese invasion?
Excerpts:
2027 is no longer a distant warning. It’s a schedule. China is not posturing. It is practicing, testing and moving with purpose. Every military action, cyber intrusion, and blockade rehearsal is aimed at one place: Taiwan. And everyone is watching—Japan, Australia, Southeast Asia, Europe, the United States. But no one watches more closely than China itself.
Taiwan is running out of time. Defense planning must move faster than political debate. Real preparation has to replace signals. Taiwan must act before asking others to act with it. That means stronger training, better planning and deeper cooperation.
The world is watching, and so is the enemy.
Is Taiwan doing enough to repel a Chinese invasion? - Asia Times
Han Kuang 2025 military exercises showed island is seriously preparing for a fight but its partners aren’t moving fast enough
asiatimes.com · by Yenting Lin · July 23, 2025
The Han Kuang 2025 military exercises marked a major shift in how Taiwan prepares for war.
For the first time, the annual national exercise combined ten days of live-fire combat training with a full-society readiness push. Civilians across all 22 counties and cities practiced air raid response, medical supply distribution, food rationing and emergency communications.
On the military side, Taiwan deployed new US-supplied weapons including M1A2T Abrams tanks, HIMARS rocket artillery and upgraded coastal defense missiles. Drones, cyberattacks and joint command systems were tested more seriously than in previous years.
This time, the preparation also moved into real-world spaces—Taipei Metro stations, morning markets and major intersections—bringing the public closer to the actual scenarios Taiwan could face. The simulation was no longer abstract; it was physical, visible and local. The political message was clear: Taiwan is preparing as if conflict could be real, and soon.
Still, Han Kuang only covers the end game—what happens if China launches a full attack? It leaves a major gap at the beginning of the conflict. What happens when the threat is not missiles, but cyberattacks, disinformation, cable sabotage, or energy disruption? Taiwan is practicing for total war, but the grey zone is already here.
This article examines what that preparation means. Is Taiwan able to hold the line alone before allies arrive? Is the public truly ready? What is the United States signaling through its support—and is it enough? Are Taiwan’s regional partners building a defense that matches the threat? And finally, what must be done now, while there is still time to act?
Domestic reaction, political messaging
Taiwanese society has not always viewed Han Kuang with urgency. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was widely seen as symbolic—just a routine show of weapons, disconnected from any real threat. During calmer periods such as the Ma Ying-jeou presidency, the event was often criticized as out of sync with public sentiment, more about appearances than substance.
The 2025 iteration felt different. Facing near-daily Chinese military pressure, the exercise received stronger support from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). President Lai Ching-te declared July as “National Unity Month,” framing public participation as a democratic responsibility. DPP officials used the moment to send a message to both Beijing and Washington: Taiwan is not just waiting—it is actively preparing.
The opposition Kuomintang (KMT), however, raised concerns. While not opposing the exercise outright, KMT lawmakers argued it lacked real coordination with allies and risked giving the public false confidence. Their position reflected a broader divide—between those promoting political resolve and those questioning its depth.
Public opinion reflects this tension. About 67.8% of respondents say they are willing to fight for Taiwan, and 51% support increasing the defense budget—the first time that figure has passed 50%. Yet only 14% express strong confidence in the military’s ability to fight effectively. The desire to be ready is growing, but belief in actual readiness remains limited.
That gap deepened after several safety incidents during the exercise. A US-made M1A2 tank collided with a civilian vehicle. A missile transport vehicle blocked traffic while turning. An armored car flipped over in Taitung, injuring soldiers.
No lives were lost, but the string of mishaps raised an uncomfortable question: if basic coordination breaks down in practice runs, how would it hold under attack? Critics pointed to weaknesses in logistics, communication, and execution—saying that appearances had improved, but fundamentals remained shaky.
Han Kuang 2025 expanded civilian participation, introduced updated systems and signaled stronger political will. But confidence lags behind ambition. Planning still focuses on conventional military engagements, even as the more likely threats—cyberattacks, disinformation, sabotage—remain underdeveloped.
The island has shown it is willing to prepare. Whether that preparation is enough remains in question.
US support gap
Taiwan’s military depends on the United States. Over 90% of its key weapons come from America, and its strategy is built on the idea that the US will show up if war breaks out.
In 2025, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named Taiwan the Pentagon’s “animating scenario,” putting it at the center of US global planning. A classified directive now tells the US military to focus more forces like submarines, bombers, drones and special ops to deter a Chinese cross-strait attack.
But there’s a big gap between what’s said and what’s done. Hegseth told allies at Shangri-La that the US would “fight and win” if deterrence failed. But there’s still no joint command, no large training together, and no clear plan to fight as one team.
Admiral Mark Montgomery said 500 US troops are now in Taiwan—10 times more than in 2021—but they’re just rotating trainers and are not believed to be a combat force. He even said it should double to 1,000. That’s a signal, but not enough to change outcomes.
Yes, the US Congress has backed Taiwan with real money. In FY2025, it approved $300 million in support, then $500 million for FY2026. It also passed an $8.1 billion Indo-Pacific bill, with $2 billion set aside just for Taiwan.
Lawmakers keep voting in favor—most bills pass with over 300 House votes. But most of these efforts are stuck in slow delivery. Training programs and joint planning still haven’t happened. Equipment orders are delayed. Taiwan buys, but it doesn’t receive.
This relationship is stuck. It runs on delays, speeches, and symbolic help. That might build headlines—but it doesn’t build a war plan. The US says it stands with Taiwan, but the real structure to fight together still doesn’t exist.
Meanwhile, the enemy is not waiting. China runs exercises all the time. It prepares for war more often—and more seriously—than Taiwan or its partners. Right now, we are not keeping pace.
Talisman Sabre rattling
Talisman Sabre 2025 was the largest military exercise in the Indo-Pacific this year. It involved 35,000 troops from 19 countries and 3 observers, training across land, sea, air, cyber, and space domains.
The scenario was clear: a high-end conflict in East Asia, modeled on a potential Taiwan contingency. The US deployed its Typhon missile system to the region for the first time, while Australia launched HIMARS rockets in simulated counterstrikes.
But Taiwan was not invited. The country most likely to be attacked and the one the whole exercise quietly centers on was excluded. While Japan and the Philippines trained as frontline participants and countries like the UK, France, Germany, India, and Singapore joined in supporting roles, Taiwan was left outside the coordination table.
This disconnect carries real risk. A coalition may look strong on paper, but without practical planning that includes Taiwan, coordination in a crisis could fail. Military forces from across the Indo-Pacific are building habits and protocols together—while Taiwan is still preparing alone.
Talisman Sabre was meant to signal readiness to Beijing. But it should also raise concern in Taipei. Taiwan’s security is central to regional planning, yet it remains politically isolated from the exercises that matter most. That silence is not strategy. It is a vulnerability.
Parallel plans, shared deterrence
Despite all the improvements, Taiwan is still getting ready on its own. There is no joint plan with allies for handling a breakdown in civil order. No shared response for economic attacks. No coordination for protecting digital systems. That silence feels familiar. It is what Ukraine faced when the war began and partners waited to see what Washington would do.
This cannot happen again. The US will play a key role, but it cannot be the only one. Regional defense must take the lead, with US support as a partner, not a trigger. Allies keep preparing for a final large-scale war but are still ignoring the early warning signs that are already here.
China is testing Taiwan daily through pressure, interference and slow-moving threats. Yet Indo-Pacific countries have not made clear commitments. Taiwan still does not know who will help, how or when.
Taiwan’s numbers show how urgent this is. The 2025 defense budget was about $20.25. That is just eight% of China’s official defense spending and only 5% if we count estimates of China’s full military budget at $390 billion.
Even if Taiwan reaches its goal of spending 3% of its GDP in 2026, the number will still be under $25 billion—less than what China adds in a single year. Bigger budgets alone will not fix the problem. What matters more is faster coordination and stronger partnerships.
Taiwan’s partners are not moving fast enough. Han Kuang 2025 brought in 22,000 reservists and expanded civil defense. But it is still a national-level exercise trying to prepare for a regional war.
There is no shared command, no joint cyber protection and no regional backup plan if Taiwan’s economy or power systems are hit. China’s Strait Thunder 2025A training had none of these gaps. It included blockades, power grid attacks, and missile strikes—clear signals of how it would fight. While China prepares for real conflict, Taiwan’s partners are still stuck in speeches and rehearsals.
Taiwan should raise its defense spending target to 3.4% of GDP. That extra 4.7 billion dollars should go directly to programs that help work with allies and respond to gray-zone threats. Han Kuang should not stay a solo effort. It should open the door to Japan, Australia, and South Korea so that they can plan and train together.
The Pacific Deterrence Initiative should shift more funding to build real shared capabilities, not just US-led efforts. And the region needs a new group—modeled after the Ukraine Defense Contact Group—that includes Taiwan and meets regularly to share plans, intelligence, and logistics.
Symbolic support is not enough. If a real strike comes, what matters is what is already in place.
War clock ticking down
2027 is no longer a distant warning. It’s a schedule. China is not posturing. It is practicing, testing and moving with purpose. Every military action, cyber intrusion, and blockade rehearsal is aimed at one place: Taiwan. And everyone is watching—Japan, Australia, Southeast Asia, Europe, the United States. But no one watches more closely than China itself.
Taiwan is running out of time. Defense planning must move faster than political debate. Real preparation has to replace signals. Taiwan must act before asking others to act with it. That means stronger training, better planning and deeper cooperation.
The world is watching, and so is the enemy.
Yenting Lin is a Master’s student in Public Policy at George Mason University. He holds a B.A. and B.S. from National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan. His research focuses on algorithmic hate speech, AI-driven misinformation, and their impact on national security and U.S.–Taiwan–China relations. His work has been featured in Small Wars Journal, American Intelligence Journal, and The Defence Horizon Journal. The views in this article are his own.
asiatimes.com · by Yenting Lin · July 23, 2025
16. Russia Is Losing Its Near Abroad
Excerpts:
In a 1997 speech at Johns Hopkins University, then Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott argued that the United States wanted “to see all responsible players in the Caucasus and Central Asia be winners,” rather than for the region to become an object of great-power contestation as it was during the nineteenth-century Great Game. Developments over the past three-plus years have moved post-Soviet Eurasia closer to realizing that vision, even as the world (and the United States) has changed dramatically.
Today, the Caucasus and Central Asia remain peripheral to U.S. strategy, especially given Washington’s pivot to the Indo-Pacific and President Donald Trump’s apparent openness to great-power spheres of influence. Yet the Trump administration has devoted some attention to the region; amid Armenian-Azerbaijani talks this month, for example, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack suggested that a private U.S. company operate the route connecting mainland Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave through Armenia. The idea of a neutral third party overseeing the route had been discussed in earlier rounds of talks, but Barrack’s statement was the first time a U.S. official suggested Washington could play a role. A more comprehensive regional strategy could help the administration access energy resources and check its great-power rivals without overburdening the United States with new commitments.
To be sure, the United States is not likely to be central to developments in the Eurasian interior. But it can and should encourage the EU, Turkey, and other allies and partners to maintain an active presence in this part of the world. Washington, moreover, can give a boost to efforts already underway. It should discreetly encourage governments in the South Caucasus and Central Asia to pursue greater regional coordination. It can contribute to regional dealmaking if asked but should otherwise allow local actors to take the lead. It can also work with countries in the region to lower barriers to trade and facilitate the involvement of Western firms, including American firms, in new energy, infrastructure, and critical minerals projects. Such trade and investment deals should be the focus of the next C5+1 ministerial conference, an annual meeting of U.S. and Central Asian foreign ministers held since 2015. A C5+1 summit of presidents has only been held once, in 2023; the Trump administration should take up the mantle of convening another one.
Above all, the United States must recognize that it shares a key objective with countries in the Eurasian interior. Their domestic political systems may not all be to Washington’s liking, and many of them will want productive relations with Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran. Given their geography, they have little choice. But these countries and their populations will also resist the Kremlin’s attempts to incorporate them into a reconstituted Russian sphere of influence. For the United States, preventing the region’s domination by Russia or other revisionist powers means supporting post-Soviet Eurasian countries’ pursuit of diversified economic and political ties. Even though those efforts do not always happen on Washington’s terms, their contributions to a freer, more open region align with Washington’s strategic interest.
Russia Is Losing Its Near Abroad
Foreign Affairs · by More by Jeffrey Mankoff · July 24, 2025
How America and Its European Allies Can Help Erode Moscow’s Declining Influence
July 24, 2025
Russian service members attending a base-closing ceremony in Khojaly, Azerbaijan, May 2024 Aziz Karimov / Reuters
JEFFREY MANKOFF is a Distinguished Research Fellow at National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and a Nonresident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is the author of Empires of Eurasia: How Imperial Legacies Shape International Security. The views expressed here are his own.
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Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine is one piece of a broader campaign to restore a sphere of influence in post-Soviet Eurasia. The 2022 invasion came as a shock to many of Russia’s neighbors in eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia, confirming their fears that Russia remained a threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of their countries. Yet because the war in Ukraine has been a massive drain on Russian attention and resources, it has also presented many of these countries with an opportunity. Taking advantage of Moscow’s distraction, they have enhanced their cooperation with one another, cultivated and deepened partnerships outside the region, and loosened some of the bonds tying them to their former imperial hegemon.
Although many governments in the Eurasian interior have been cautious about criticizing the Russian invasion, they are creating facts on the ground that reinforce their sovereignty and independence—a key objective of U.S. policy in the region since the 1990s. As the Russian military’s demand for weapons has left Moscow unable to fulfill promised exports, countries such as Armenia are turning to other suppliers in Europe and India; other regional states are purchasing weapons from Turkey and even China. And as Russia has withdrawn forces and equipment from its military bases in the Caucasus and Central Asia to redeploy them to Ukraine, countries in both places are resolving conflicts that Russia has long exploited for its own benefit. Improved cooperation within the wider region is also creating new opportunities to enhance trade connectivity and build alternatives to transit through Russia. By reducing the dependency that once defined their relationship with their former hegemon, countries in the region have become increasingly capable of engaging Russia (and other powers) on favorable terms.
And yet if history is any guide, Moscow could go to extreme lengths to preserve its regional dominion. In 2014, before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia annexed Crimea and intervened in the Donbas region; earlier, in 2008, it invaded Georgia. Today, the Kremlin maintains a proprietary view of not only Ukraine but also many other countries. Ukraine and Belarus remain Moscow’s top priorities, but the Kremlin also aspires to a kind of suzerainty over Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Moldova and maintains a more distant postimperial regard toward the remainder of Central Asia. The 2023 Russian Foreign Policy Concept, the strategy document outlining parameters and priorities for Russia’s foreign policy, resurrected the term “near abroad” to describe these countries, pointing to their “centuries-old traditions of joint statehood, deep interdependence … a common language, and close cultures” as a justification for efforts to keep them within Moscow’s sphere of influence. Once the fighting in Ukraine winds down, the Kremlin will almost certainly ramp up its attempts to coerce other neighbors to join Russian-backed multilateral bodies, strengthen economic ties, adopt Russian-style laws targeting civil society, and accept a larger Russian military and intelligence presence on their territory.
The Eurasian interior may be increasingly interconnected, cooperative, and even taking steps toward peace, but it needs to keep moving in this direction if it is to resist future Russian efforts to reassert authority. That is why the United States, together with the European Union and countries such as India, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, must make new investments in cross-border infrastructure, supply chains, defense, and sustained diplomatic engagement to reinforce regional stability. Countries in the region will continue to search for their own ways to reduce their historic reliance on Moscow—but Washington and its partners should help tip them the scales.
POWER VACUUM
Russia’s pivot of attention and resources to Ukraine initially created a vacuum in the Caucasus and Central Asia that encouraged greater instability and conflict. During the fall of 2022, cross-border tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan and between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan flared up violently. Although Russia had previously been the primary broker keeping these conflicts from expanding, it was in no position to do so at that moment, as it was busy pulling forces out of both the Caucasus and Central Asia to shore up its frontlines in Ukraine.
Moscow’s inability to intervene in a significant way initially enabled long-running Kyrgyz-Tajik border clashes in the Fergana Valley to escalate. The clashes left more than 100 dead, including at least 37 civilians, and more than 10,000 displaced before petering out. But afterward, Moscow’s absence proved beneficial. The two countries’ leaders deliberately negotiated without Russia at the table. Earlier this year, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan finalized an agreement to settle their border disputes in the Fergana Valley. The agreement led to the first summit of leaders from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, held in March 2025 in Khujand, Tajikistan, to discuss enhancing cooperation in the territory that all three share.
The situation in the South Caucasus proved more explosive than the one on the Kyrgyz-Tajik border. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia withdrew some of the peacekeepers it had deployed to Armenia under the terms of a 2020 Armenian-Azerbaijani cease-fire and refused repeated requests for military assistance from Armenia, a fellow member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a regional security bloc nominally committed to defending its members from attack. Azerbaijan, expecting that Russia would remain on the sidelines, invaded what remained of Armenian-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh in the spring of 2023. During the offensive, Azerbaijani forces even fired on Russian peacekeepers. Baku ended up fully reconquering Nagorno-Karabakh and dissolving the Armenian-run breakaway state there. Almost all the region’s ethnic Armenian inhabitants fled.
The fall of Nagorno-Karabakh profoundly reshaped the region’s geopolitics. The remaining Russian peacekeepers departed, and Baku and Yerevan began the difficult process of making peace. Armenian and Azerbaijani negotiators have now met multiple times, and in March they announced an agreement on the text of a peace treaty that would normalize relations and resolve conflicting territorial claims. It would also ratify the departure of foreign peacekeepers, guarding against future efforts to redeploy Russian forces. Although the deal is not yet signed and could still fall through, the progress made so far is encouraging.
Both the Armenian-Azerbaijani and the Kyrgyz-Tajik talks have proceeded without mediation from Moscow. The Kremlin’s strategy for regional influence has long entailed managing conflicts among its smaller neighbors to maintain their dependence; an old joke has it that in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the side Russia always supported was the conflict’s. But in Moscow’s absence, diplomatic breakthroughs have become possible. Post-Soviet Eurasian states have exercised greater agency, chosen cooperation, and found themselves capable of resolving their own disputes.
FILLING THE VOID
The war in Ukraine has also created space for other countries to get involved in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. Although most of them have decent relations with Russia and do not claim to be trying to balance Moscow, the fact of interior Eurasia’s increasing connection to the wider world reinforces the independence of the smaller states from Russian authority. Armenia, for example, has sought to end its reliance on Russian weapons by buying new systems from France and India (choosing the latter, in part, to counterbalance Pakistani support for Azerbaijan); Yerevan purchased $1.5 billion in Indian weapons in 2022–23 alone. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are investing in green energy and agriculture in Azerbaijan, and an Emirati firm made the largest real estate investment in Georgia’s history in January. The EU adopted its first Central Asia strategy in 2022 and is now the region’s largest source of foreign investment.
The most prominent non-Russian player, especially in Central Asia, is China. Chinese trade with the five Central Asian countries rose from $89.4 billion in 2023 to $94.8 billion in 2024, more than twice the value of those countries’ trade with Russia. China is also driving investment in key infrastructure projects, including gas pipelines from Turkmenistan through the rest of Central Asia and a railway from the city of Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang province to Andijon, Uzbekistan. Last year, a Chinese-Singaporean consortium won a tender to construct a new deep-sea container port at Anaklia, Georgia, after Tbilisi cancelled an earlier agreement with a U.S.-Georgian consortium. Central Asia has rapidly become an important market for Chinese automakers, especially producers of electric vehicles.
Alongside its growing economic presence, Beijing is also quietly expanding its security footprint. Security ties have progressed furthest in Tajikistan, where Beijing has deployed forces from the People’s Armed Police, China’s main paramilitary force, along the frontier with Afghanistan; China also sells weapons and equipment to the country and participates in joint trainings and exercises with Tajik counterparts. Other Central Asian states have signed agreements to purchase Chinese air defense systems, and, according to defense officials in Tashkent, Uzbekistan is close to finalizing a deal for Chinese-Pakistani-produced fighter jets.
Post-Soviet Eurasian countries are seeking to reduce their historic reliance on Moscow.
An expanded Chinese presence in interior Eurasia may raise concern in Washington about trading Russian influence for Chinese. But it does help protect the countries in the region against the more immediate threat of a revanchist Russia. The Anaklia port, for example, could significantly enhance Georgia’s trade not just with China but also with other partners, reducing the country’s economic dependence on Russia. And despite its close relationship with Moscow, Beijing has made clear that it opposes Russian activities that could disrupt its economic interests, including threats to a trading partner’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Another power player in the region is Turkey, a NATO member. At Ankara’s behest, the Organization of Turkic States—an organization originally set up to foster cultural ties among Turkey, Azerbaijan, and the Turkic-speaking states of Central Asia—is increasingly pushing for trans-Caspian energy cooperation, including a potential project to export Turkmen natural gas to Europe and another to jointly invest in new production capacity on both sides of the Caspian Sea. Turkish support in modernizing Azerbaijan’s army was instrumental in its defeat of the (nominally) Russian-backed Armenia in both 2020 and 2023. Azerbaijan’s crushing victories garnered substantial attention across the region. They offered proof that a Soviet-legacy military could both be remade along Western lines and afterward win a war. With Turkey’s support, other countries in the region may also be able to promote institutional and cultural change within their militaries and develop along NATO lines.
For many countries, Azerbaijan’s triumph has also generated new interest in Turkish defense technology. All the Central Asian states except Tajikistan have now purchased Turkish drones, and last fall the Turkish drone producer Baykar agreed to set up a production site in Kazakhstan. Ankara is also pursuing other forms of security cooperation with these countries, including training, advising, joint exercises, and providing professional military education. Even in Armenia, which has a fraught historical relationship with Turkey, some senior officials are contemplating defense cooperation with Ankara after a peace agreement with Azerbaijan is signed. By normalizing relations, opening the long-closed Turkish-Armenian border, and unlocking greater Turkish investment, an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace deal could substantially enhance Turkey’s influence in the South Caucasus—which is one reason Moscow may now be picking fights with both Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev (following the accidental downing of an Azerbaijani jet by the Russian air force) and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan (over allegations of Russian support for a possible coup plot) to prevent a final accord.
NEW NETWORKS
New trade and transit patterns have also emerged to connect the Eurasian interior to global markets. As the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline did in the early 2000s, the expansion of east-west pipelines, railways, and roads over the past decade gives the smaller states of the Caucasus and Central Asia additional revenue from transit fees and opens up new markets for the region’s energy exporters. This income and market access reduce their economies’ dependence on Russia.
Much of the initiative for building new infrastructure comes from countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia themselves. After Moscow repeatedly interfered with shipments of Kazakh oil through the Tengiz-Novorossiysk pipeline to signal displeasure with Astana’s criticism of the invasion of Ukraine, Kazakhstan started sending more of the oil it delivers to Europe through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, bypassing Russia. Washington and Brussels had lent strong political and economic support to the construction of this route, which opened in 2006. In March 2024, Kazakhstan signed a new agreement with Azerbaijan to further expand deliveries via the pipeline.
Europe’s shift away from Russian natural gas after 2022 could be a further boon for producers and transit states in the region. In July 2022, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Aliyev signed a memorandum of understanding to double Azerbaijan’s gas exports to the EU. Turkmenistan has since agreed in principle to send gas to Europe through Azerbaijan and Turkey—aided by a 2021 agreement between Baku and Ashgabat to resolve their differences over sharing Caspian resources. European companies and governments are also looking to the region as a potential source of green energy, with Azerbaijan in particular pushing to develop solar and wind capacity to reduce its dependence on oil and gas exports.
The most important new transit initiative may be the Middle Corridor, a route inaugurated in 2013 by transportation companies from Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Kazakhstan that connects China to Europe through Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, and the Caucasus. Challenging economics, a lack of infrastructure, and intraregional disputes have long slowed development along this route; much of the transcontinental trade that did occur passed through Russia’s Northern Corridor, where infrastructure is in place and border crossings are fewer. But with the imposition of Western sanctions on Russia and the departure of many foreign companies from the country after 2022, shipments across the Northern Corridor have plummeted, and trade volumes along the Middle Corridor have grown substantially. According to the Asian Development Bank, the number of Chinese container trains passing through the Middle Corridor has expanded by a factor of 33 from 2023 to 2024, while freight volumes handled by Azerbaijan’s and Kazakhstan’s Caspian seaports grew by 21 percent.
To reach its full potential, the Middle Corridor needs more investment to loosen bottlenecks and simplify regulations. During the EU-Central Asia Summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, in April, Brussels pledged an additional ten billion euros as part of its Global Gateway Initiative to enhance regional connectivity. Meanwhile, the Houthis’ attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, the Taliban government’s stated interest in opening Afghanistan to foreign investment, and long-term uncertainty about Russia are all strengthening interest in this route. But if Western states begin removing sanctions on Russia following a cease-fire agreement in Ukraine, and if transit across Russia becomes less risky, governments and development banks may have less inclination to act.
PLAYING BOTH SIDES
None of these developments suggest that Russia will cease to be a key player in what it regards as its traditional sphere of influence. Thanks to geographic proximity, familiarity between elites, and the long legacy of imperial and Soviet domination, Russia retains significant hard and soft power across the Caucasus and Central Asia. Leaders of most countries in the region value good ties with Moscow, even if they oppose the invasion of Ukraine. Many of these states have profited from Russian efforts to evade Western sanctions since February 2022. The U.S. and European governments have sanctioned dozens of companies in the region for facilitating the export of dual-use items to Russia. In many post-Soviet Eurasian countries, remittances from migrant laborers working in Russia provide vital revenue, as well as a source of Russian leverage, even after Russia began cracking down on irregular migration following the March 2024 terrorist attack at a Moscow concert venue.
Russian political influence remains, too. Putin meets regularly with Aliyev, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and other leaders (and sometimes leaders’ children who are being groomed as possible successors). The Kremlin has consolidated its de facto protectorate in Belarus and fostered close ties with politicians in Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, and the Moldovan opposition. Last year, in a stark shift in Tbilisi’s political orientation, Georgian Dream adopted a Russian-inspired law cracking down on civil society and suspended EU accession negotiations. Moldova’s fate, too, remains in the balance, with a Moscow-backed candidate narrowly losing last year’s presidential election and Russian-backed groups seeking to unite ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for this September.
Far from being locked out of the region’s emerging transit infrastructure, Russia is also participating in and benefitting from these new structures. Even as Kazakhstan seeks to export more hydrocarbons to Europe, for instance, the government awarded a contract for Kazakhstan’s first nuclear power plant to the Russian state-owned firm Rosatom in June. Russia is working with Azerbaijan and Iran to build out the International North-South Transport Corridor—a road, rail, and sea route that would connect Russia to the Indian Ocean through Azerbaijan, India, and Iran, none of which have sanctioned Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine. Azerbaijan’s centrality to both this route and the Middle Corridor is indicative of many countries’ approaches. Rather than taking sides in the confrontation between Russia and the West, they aim to seize the opportunities that this competition affords.
WIN-WIN
In a 1997 speech at Johns Hopkins University, then Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott argued that the United States wanted “to see all responsible players in the Caucasus and Central Asia be winners,” rather than for the region to become an object of great-power contestation as it was during the nineteenth-century Great Game. Developments over the past three-plus years have moved post-Soviet Eurasia closer to realizing that vision, even as the world (and the United States) has changed dramatically.
Today, the Caucasus and Central Asia remain peripheral to U.S. strategy, especially given Washington’s pivot to the Indo-Pacific and President Donald Trump’s apparent openness to great-power spheres of influence. Yet the Trump administration has devoted some attention to the region; amid Armenian-Azerbaijani talks this month, for example, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack suggested that a private U.S. company operate the route connecting mainland Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave through Armenia. The idea of a neutral third party overseeing the route had been discussed in earlier rounds of talks, but Barrack’s statement was the first time a U.S. official suggested Washington could play a role. A more comprehensive regional strategy could help the administration access energy resources and check its great-power rivals without overburdening the United States with new commitments.
To be sure, the United States is not likely to be central to developments in the Eurasian interior. But it can and should encourage the EU, Turkey, and other allies and partners to maintain an active presence in this part of the world. Washington, moreover, can give a boost to efforts already underway. It should discreetly encourage governments in the South Caucasus and Central Asia to pursue greater regional coordination. It can contribute to regional dealmaking if asked but should otherwise allow local actors to take the lead. It can also work with countries in the region to lower barriers to trade and facilitate the involvement of Western firms, including American firms, in new energy, infrastructure, and critical minerals projects. Such trade and investment deals should be the focus of the next C5+1 ministerial conference, an annual meeting of U.S. and Central Asian foreign ministers held since 2015. A C5+1 summit of presidents has only been held once, in 2023; the Trump administration should take up the mantle of convening another one.
Above all, the United States must recognize that it shares a key objective with countries in the Eurasian interior. Their domestic political systems may not all be to Washington’s liking, and many of them will want productive relations with Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran. Given their geography, they have little choice. But these countries and their populations will also resist the Kremlin’s attempts to incorporate them into a reconstituted Russian sphere of influence. For the United States, preventing the region’s domination by Russia or other revisionist powers means supporting post-Soviet Eurasian countries’ pursuit of diversified economic and political ties. Even though those efforts do not always happen on Washington’s terms, their contributions to a freer, more open region align with Washington’s strategic interest.
Foreign Affairs · by More by Jeffrey Mankoff · July 24, 2025
17. Illicit Liquidity as Battlespace: Rethinking Finance in Asymmetric Conflict
Follow the money.
Excerpts:
Illicit liquidity now constitutes core terrain in modern conflict. Armed groups, proxy actors, and sanctioned states no longer rely on traditional banking or formal remittance channels. They exploit decentralized laundering infrastructure—composed of stablecoin brokers, escrow bots, and regionally protected financial corridors—to finance operations, sustain logistics, and wage narrative warfare.
Platforms like Huione are not peripheral or purely criminal. They function as tactical assets–digital equivalents of tunnels, weapons caches, or encrypted communications. These systems enable recruitment through economic incentives, fund weapons acquisition, and sustain political influence across borders. Their continued operation erodes deterrence and complicates battlefield intelligence.
Failure to identify, map, and degrade these systems will cede initiative in conflicts that remain below the threshold of war. The architecture behind illicit liquidity functions as enemy infrastructure and must be treated as such, with its operators prioritized as strategic targets. Without this shift, irregular actors will continue to weaponize liquidity–transforming stablecoins and informal brokers into engines of asymmetric power.
Illicit Liquidity as Battlespace: Rethinking Finance in Asymmetric Conflict
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/07/24/illicit-liquidity-as-battlespace-rethinking-finance-in-asymmetric-conflict/
by Adam Rousselle
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07.24.2025 at 06:00am
Inside the Digital Architecture Powering Proxy Warfare and State-Linked Crime
Executive Summary
Illicit liquidity has emerged as the hidden scaffolding of modern conflict – a decentralized architecture enabling covert influence, conflict financing, and strategic evasion on a global scale. This report examines the continued operation of Huione, a Chinese-language criminal marketplace that facilitates large-scale financial laundering across Southeast Asia, despite public claims of shutdown. It further explores digital laundering tools more broadly, building toward a working typology. Leveraging encrypted messaging apps and informal financial networks, Huione enables the movement of billions of dollars in illicit funds through fiat-to-stablecoin conversions, card transfers, and in-person cash exchanges–critical infrastructure for state-aligned criminal actors, proxy networks, and scam-industrial complexes.
While often treated as a cybercrime or compliance issue, Huione and networks like it reflect a new reality: decentralized financial platforms now function as logistics and influence infrastructure in irregular conflict.
This article argues that the U.S. and its allies should view this laundering ecosystem not just as a criminal threat, but as a strategic enabler of adversarial statecraft. Without a shift in how threat finance is integrated into operational planning, on-chain laundering infrastructure like Huione will continue to outpace enforcement, undermine deterrence, and fuel irregular conflict below the threshold of war.
Introduction
Starting in early 2024, blockchain analysts began tracing a set of suspicious transactions flowing out of Shwe Kokko–a lawless border town in Myanmar known for its Chinese-backed casinos and scam compounds. The money trail wound through obscure stablecoin swaps, informal brokers, and encrypted Telegram channels before disappearing into the digital void. According to open-source intelligence, the proceeds, originating from online fraud and forced labor, are ultimately linked to the financial wing of the Karen National Army (KNA), a militia currently engaged in armed resistance against Myanmar’s military regime.
This case is not an isolated one. Across the globe, armed groups exploit digital finance to fund their operations, evade sanctions, and project influence across borders. From Yemen’s Houthi rebels trading sanctioned Iranian oil with Chinese refineries, to Southeast Asian insurgents laundering vast sums in proceeds from brutally exploitative scam centers, evidence suggests militant groups increasingly launder their illicit gains through informal online networks. One such network is Huione, which has laundered billions of dollars through its highly resilient, decentralized digital infrastructure.
Huione Guarantee, a subsidiary of Huione Group, is a loosely organized network of Chinese‑language Telegram channels and informal money brokers, operating out of Cambodia. It facilitates high-volume laundering through stablecoins, escrow-like “guarantee” services, gift-card conversions, and direct fiat exchanges. Among its top executives is Hun To, a cousin of Cambodian President Hun Manet–one of Beijing’s most reliable allies in the region. Despite public claims of a shutdown in May, Huione continues to function as a critical backend for scam compounds, sanctioned actors, and gray market networks.
Illicit finance is no longer a secondary enabler of conflict–it has become strategic terrain. Until military and intelligence planning fully integrates the financial dimension, adversaries will continue to weaponize liquidity with little resistance.
Legacy vs. Reality: Why Conventional CTF Tools Are Failing
For decades, counter-threat finance (CTF) operations have relied on a core set of tools: Suspicious Activity Reports(SARs), wire transfer tracing, and international cooperation through systems like SWIFT. These models assume that most illicit finance flows through formal institutions—banks, remittance services, and regulated money transmitters. But this assumption is increasingly outdated.
Today, insurgent groups, proxy forces, and transnational criminal networks operate in a parallel financial ecosystem—one designed to avoid the very systems traditional CTF tools are built to monitor.
Instead of wire transfers, these actors use stablecoins–digital tokens pegged to fiat currencies and moved easily across borders without banks. Instead of formal remittance services, they rely on informal brokers, often functioning as over-the-counter intermediaries, embedded in ethnic, linguistic, or diaspora networks. And instead of SWIFT messages, they communicate through encrypted apps like Telegram and WeChat, where entire money-laundering marketplaces function out of public view.
Virtual economies–such as those embedded in scam centers, in-game asset markets, and social media monetization—have become viable sources of revenue and platforms for money movement. These systems allow for peer-to-peer value transfer, rapid obfuscation, and low enforcement visibility, especially when shielded by weak regulatory regimes or state complicity.
Most CTF frameworks are not designed to detect or disrupt financial flows that evade the banking system. And even when red flags are triggered, enforcement often stops at jurisdictional boundaries. By contrast, platforms like Huione Guarantee operate within a legal gray zone–unlicensed in most of the jurisdictions they touch but are tolerated or even protected within their host countries.
https://www.fatf-gafi.org/content/dam/fatf-gafi/guidance/Opportunities-Challenges-of-New-Technologies-for-AML-CFT.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.comThe result is a growing enforcement gap. State and non-state actors alike are learning to operate in spaces where sanctions carry less relevance, banking oversight is minimal, and enforcement agencies lack both visibility and jurisdiction. Without a shift in how CTF is conceptualized and deployed, these alternative systems will continue to grow–fueling insurgency, proxy warfare– in addition to advanced criminality–far beyond their points of origin.
Case Study Cluster: Illicit Liquidity in Action
Illicit finance is now a primary enabler of armed groups operating in strategic gray zones. Whether through Huione or possibly through equivalent broker-mediated platforms, these actors rely on decentralized laundering infrastructure that overlaps with Chinese regulatory and economic ecosystems–providing both operational funding and resilience. Here are a few examples where the Huione case provides direct evidence of use, and where further research is needed to determine the nature of laundering pathways.
Ansar Allah (AKA: The Houthis), Yemen
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A May 2025 Elliptic investigation linked $39 million in illicit flows to Houthi-controlled wallets via Huione-affiliated OTC brokers operating in Yemen and Southeast Asia.
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In parallel, the Houthis have sold Iranian oil to Chinese “teapot” refineries in Shandong—allowing for off-the-books revenue outside U.S. Treasury control.
- The Houthis’ may have laundered these illicit oil proceeds through Huione-style stablecoin conversions, anonymized brokers, and encrypted cash channels.
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The Houthis channel their illicit proceeds into ballistic missile development, drone programs, and influence operations, making illicit liquidity a critical pillar of Houthi capability.
Karen National Army (KNA), Myanmar
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2025 U.S. Treasury sanctions confirm that the KNA facilitated and profited from scam compounds in Shwe Kokko tied to forced labor, trafficking, and cybercrime.
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Sanctioned shortly after Huione, the KNA is a likely–but not publicly confirmed—user of these or similar laundering channels.
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The KNA operates in territory influenced by China-tied real estate and criminal enterprises, making it structurally embedded in a transnational gray zone economy.
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As with other conflict-linked criminal profit streams, illicit funds flowing through KNA-controlled scam operations are likely channeled into weapons, militia pay, and territorial control–similar to broader patterns documented in United National Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)/Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) analysis.
Myanmar National Democratic Alliance (MNDAA, AKA: Kokang Army), Myanmar
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The Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, composed of Mandarin-speaking ethnic Han Chinese, operates along the China-Myanmar border and maintains long-standing ties to Yunnan’s informal trade and finance ecosystems.
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The MNDAA has operated and protected scam compounds in Kokang, including in Laukkai, where cyber fraud targeting overseas victims has been widespread. These operations positioned the group within a broader ecosystem of illicit finance, logistics, and trafficking networks along the China-Myanmar border—though the mechanisms used to launder proceeds remain opaque.
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The MNDAA has participated in Chinese-brokered ceasefires, benefited from border gate openings and infrastructure access, and aligned rhetorically with Beijing’s regional narrative.
- While no confirmed link to Huione has been documented, MNDAA’s involvement in the scam compound ecosystem and operational alignment with Yunnan’s gray finance routes make it a plausible participant in this emerging gray finance ecosystem.
Shared Strategic Profile
- Each group operates near or within China’s shadow financial sphere
- Each has benefited–directly or indirectly–from China’s regulatory fragmentation or tolerance of illicit flows
- All use illicit finance not just for survival, but for the projection of asymmetric power
The Illicit Liquidity Complex: A Working Typology
Over the past five years, digital laundering tools have coalesced into a loosely connected ecosystem. Armed groups, sanctioned regimes, and criminal syndicates now operate within a shared financial domain. This domain is best described as an Illicit Liquidity Complex.
The Illicit Liquidity Complex does not operate as a single platform or network. It functions as an ecosystem of loosely affiliated brokers, laundering channels, and pseudo-legitimate financial services. These components collectively enable high-speed, low-visibility liquidity transfer across borders. The system’s effectiveness stems not from technical sophistication. It derives from structural fragmentation, operational adaptability, and regulatory absence.
Core Components
- Informal Stablecoin Brokers: Middlemen who convert crypto to fiat and back—usually by communicating on Telegram or WeChat—without know-your-customer (KYC) protocols, often tied to language or diaspora trust networks.
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Shadow Financial Rails: Infrastructure that moves value without touching the banking system: OTC desks, Telegram-based escrow services–often automated or managed anonymously, in-person swaps, gift card laundering, and multiple wallet hops.
- Pseudo-Legitimate Platforms: Exchanges, fintech front ends, or “payment services” that provide a compliant façade while facilitating high-volume laundering behind the scenes (Ex, Huione).
- Social Monetization Layers: Streaming apps, fake shops, and in-game tipping tools that convert scam earnings into surface-level income—popular among scam syndicates and hybrid operators.
The convergence of state-backed threats and informal financial systems makes this multifaceted ecosystem especially dangerous. State-aligned militias, cybercriminals, and sanctioned entities now use the same rails – or closely related ones. The same Huione-linked broker might move funds for a scam ring one day and a sanctioned militant group the next. This ecosystem is no longer merely a criminal concern; it is a form of financial infrastructure – built for plausible deniability, speed, and resilience. Its growth is outpacing what traditional enforcement can track.
Toward a Strategic Response
Confronting the Illicit Liquidity Complex will require more than conventional financial enforcement. Traditional counter-threat finance methods—built around SARs and bank-led compliance–fail to engage the architecture of decentralized, broker-mediated laundering networks. A coherent response must address both tactical intervention and strategic adaptation across military, regulatory, and intelligence domains.
Tactical Responses
- Map financial enablers in active and emerging conflict zones. Conventional tools do not capture the movement of funds that never enter formal institutions. Field-level analysts and signal intelligence (SIGINT) operators must track informal stablecoin brokers, peer-to-peer transactions, and escrow services that exist entirely outside the banking system. Mapping should prioritize network structures and chokepoints–not just endpoints.
- Target and disrupt laundering infrastructure. Focused action against digital escrow providers, laundering-as-a-service platforms like Huione, and OTC brokers can have a disproportionate impact. These entities perform functional roles similar to tunnels, supply caches, or encrypted communications. Their removal degrades adversarial force projection and financial resilience.
Strategic Shifts
- Embed financial mapping in counterinsurgency (COIN) and hybrid warfare doctrine. Financial networks must be treated as terrain. This includes embedding forensic financial analysis into campaign planning, target development, and stability operations. Doctrinal integration should treat laundering infrastructure as both a logistics system and a narrative engine.
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Partner with blockchain analytics firms and adjacent platforms. Blockchain firms possess tools to trace stablecoin movement, cross-chain swaps, and laundering loops. Partnerships with these firms–along with digital platforms vulnerable to abuse (e.g., gaming economies, social streaming networks)–will expand visibility into high-velocity, low-signature financial flows.
- Build multi-jurisdictional regulatory frameworks
Financial fragmentation remains one of the greatest enablers of illicit liquidity. Ireland and the EU have moved toward tighter regulation of stablecoin flows and informal brokers through Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation (MiCAR). Such frameworks should be expanded and adapted to other high-risk environments, including Southeast Asia, the Gulf, and Central Asia.
Conclusion: Mapping the Unseen Battlespace
Illicit liquidity now constitutes core terrain in modern conflict. Armed groups, proxy actors, and sanctioned states no longer rely on traditional banking or formal remittance channels. They exploit decentralized laundering infrastructure—composed of stablecoin brokers, escrow bots, and regionally protected financial corridors—to finance operations, sustain logistics, and wage narrative warfare.
Platforms like Huione are not peripheral or purely criminal. They function as tactical assets–digital equivalents of tunnels, weapons caches, or encrypted communications. These systems enable recruitment through economic incentives, fund weapons acquisition, and sustain political influence across borders. Their continued operation erodes deterrence and complicates battlefield intelligence.
Failure to identify, map, and degrade these systems will cede initiative in conflicts that remain below the threshold of war. The architecture behind illicit liquidity functions as enemy infrastructure and must be treated as such, with its operators prioritized as strategic targets. Without this shift, irregular actors will continue to weaponize liquidity–transforming stablecoins and informal brokers into engines of asymmetric power.
Tags: cybercrime, proxy warfare, Statecraft, weaponize liquidity
About The Author
- Adam Rousselle
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Adam Rousselle is a researcher focused on threat finance, weapons technology, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and more. He has been featured in The Jamestown Foundation, The Hudson Institute, Nikkei Asia, The Wall Street Journal, and others. He is the founder of www.btl-research.com.
18. It’s Time to Think About (and Fear) Drones and Psychological Operations
Excerpts:
Militaries are notorious for resisting new warfighting concepts. It took an act of Congress to initiate the 1921 airpower tests that would result in the U.S. military’s integration of newfangled airplanes. When Navy admirals viewing the bombing test runs saw the damage that an aircraft could do to a ship, many of them visibly wept, with years of organizational resistance to airpower having finally been thwarted.
The U.S. military needs an equivalent test — one that demonstrates the strategic potential of drones for influence operations. The prevailing notion that drones should be used only for battlefield destruction or intelligence and reconnaissance ignores deeper implications of their use, and may have the unintended consequence of prolonging wars by forcing entrenchment. A test of influence applications would seek to better understand psychological vulnerabilities to drone operations, devise psychological defenses, and assess how drones can be effectively used in persuasive information campaigns.
Lessons taken from testing drone influence applications should be taught in military schoolhouses at all levels and should be integrated into U.S. and allied military exercises. Military leaders need a better understanding of their own drone options, beyond tippers like the Army’s counter-unmanned aircraft system techniques publication. Just as important, defensive lessons should be included in U.S. civilian key leader exercises to prepare states and municipalities for the possibility of drone strikes on non-combatants, especially in large metropolitan areas and along U.S borders. The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security have important lessons for each other, and will need to strengthen information-sharing capabilities as the ever-lower cost of drones enables new attackers, such as drug cartels. Civilian populations should be given realistic training and information about potential drone attacks, with the goal of developing psychological resilience if ever they occur. U.S. allies and partners — especially those in potential areas of conflict — should receive similar training and information.
Training and testing should serve as pretext to new doctrine development. Useful drone doctrine would define ethical limitations and offer conceptual applications. On the other hand, counterproductive drone doctrine would limit the potential tactical applications of drones, which require extreme flexibility. Tactical applications are better catalogued in a group chat with live drone operators offering on-the-fly input. New drone influence doctrine would complement codifications like the Defense Department’s 2023 Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment.
It’s Time to Think About (and Fear) Drones and Psychological Operations - War on the Rocks
J.D. Maddox
July 24, 2025
warontherocks.com · July 24, 2025
Everyone knows that sound: the high-pitched whir of an unmanned aircraft system, racing through the air overhead. To a soldier below, it’s the sound of lost control. As warfighters struggle to deal with this new sense of vulnerability, the mere sound of drones has become a source of post-traumatic stress disorder — a strong indicator of drones’ psychological potency. It’s time to openly discuss what such cognitive dynamics mean for military influence operations.
Most assessments of drone capabilities focus on their kinetic effects. The dark corners of the internet are rife with videos of ingenious drone sorties targeting entrenched Russian conscripts. Analysts interpret these killings as the drone value proposition: low-risk tactical access to denied areas. Yet, no one would claim that drones are strategically decisive.
If a military analyst takes an alternative view of these new weapons systems, it’s usually to consider threats from enemy use, such as the way drones are blurring geographic lines of control. An enemy drone’s high speed and broad flight range requires a new elastic concept of the front line and demands a reassessment of rearguard preparedness.
Perhaps the most cunning use of drones on the battlefield is their psychological impact. While reporting confirms their effectiveness in hitting targets, it also reveals the growing mental toll drones are taking on both soldiers and civilians. Drones are seemingly unstoppable — appearing from everywhere and nowhere in overwhelming numbers and known for blowing heads off shoulders. Tactically, drones are an advantage to special operators focused on precise targeting. But it’s the resulting paralysis that offers strategic opportunity to both sides of a fight — mostly the underdog. This apprehensiveness helps sustain a deterrent stalemate that works to the disadvantaged force’s benefit, characterized by largely static lines of control and entrenchment — a dynamic seen in the Russo-Ukrainian War. But this is hardly a good thing — it means pinning down forces, prolonging a war, and introducing new forms of trauma. Military commanders hoping to use drones to inflict mass casualties or take and hold terrain may be overlooking how humans cognitively respond to these systems.
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Drones Beyond Strikes and Reconnaissance
Front line soldiers are now known to go to extraordinary lengths to camouflage themselves and maneuver away from drone detection. Persistent surveillance has been known to breed paranoia among terrorist organizations and can trigger in-group and out-group suspicions. Among civilians, the constant presence of drones can evoke fear, helplessness, and despair.
It’s safe to say that everyone in a warzone is, in some sense, held captive by drones. Their cognitive applications — perhaps the most under-analyzed advantage of these systems — are just beginning to come into focus. Early observations reveal psychological tools to control terrain, directly affect warfighters’ cognition, and collect and reuse battlefield information for broader influence purposes.
Distraction
In a warzone, the sound or sight of a nearby drone often triggers an immediate fight-or-flight reaction. This creates a brief but dependable window to distract enemy personnel — even in hardened or well-defended positions. It also provides a reliable opportunity to draw attention and small arms fire to drones and away from more critical targets. For example, an attacking force could deploy drones to temporarily divert fire away from a tactical assault. Where such a diversion once required a high-risk decoy maneuver, drones can now achieve the same effect with negligible losses.
Displacement
The presence of a drone often prompts efforts to destroy, evade, or hide from it. The sense of inescapable surveillance can lead to the abandonment or weakened control of a location due to fear of detection or targeting. This means that surveillance drones may be particularly useful for control of terrain. For example, pre-positioning surveillance drones along the boundary of a desired corridor could help create undefended channels of attack. In this sense, drones may be able to take temporary area denial actions that replace or reduce the need for more complicated terrain control options like landmine emplacement.
Immobilization
Recent drone operations have driven combatants to entrench themselves, seeking safety inside reinforced hideouts and staying hidden unless venturing outside is safer. This entrenchment signals a paralysis of ground forces under persistent drone presence. With this in mind, commanders might use continuous drone coverage to operationally immobilize an enemy for a limited period of time. This lesson from the Russo-Ukrainian War will likely radically change the way poorly equipped forces engage against superior enemies, with drones being seen as a tactical equalizer, enabling a weaker force to at least stall a numerically superior force.
Equivocation
Unmarked, unattributed, or misattributed drones create confusion and fear among combatants and non-combatants alike. Attribution often relies on the drone’s direction of travel, but this is unreliable since drones can bypass lines of control and return from unexpected directions. Minimizing attribution markings and using drones to mimic more powerful aircraft, within the limits of the laws of war, offers potentially useful ambiguity, but presents ethical dilemmas. Their untraceable nature makes it easier than ever to conduct traditional “false flag” operations by technical means, with little risk of detection.
Conditioning
Combatants exposed to repeated drone attacks change their daily patterns of activity to avoid detection. A pattern of primary drone attacks, followed by secondary attacks, creates anticipation of follow-up assaults among targets. These behaviors reveal a psychological vulnerability that drones can exploit through routine exposure. Consequently, drones may reliably shape the cognitive battlespace by establishing predictable patterns of use. These phenomena indicate psychological vulnerability to behavioral conditioning through routine exposure to drones. Drones may be reliable for shaping the cognitive battlespace through the establishment of anticipated patterns of drone use. Enemy attack patterns have always created fearful expectations among defenders, but the feeling of inescapability of drones means those fears are intensified.
Documentation, Dissemination, and Condemnation
Drones are not only tactical assets on the battlefield but also potent tools of military propaganda and psychological warfare. Their imagery shapes narratives, influences public perception, and impacts morale on both sides of a conflict. These are all functions that overlap each other. Military media producers use drones to capture footage of enemy defeats, surrenders, and desertions — showcasing the enemy’s failures to both sympathetic and unsympathetic audiences. But the footage also conveys a sense of inescapability from drones. This dual-use application may be used to support narratives of defiance and imminent victory while undermining enemy morale. When used illegally or unethically — and documented — enemy drone use is especially vulnerable to condemnation in media channels. Drones may be the most despised piece of military hardware, short of weapons of mass destruction. The self-proclaimed Islamic State set an example for drone capture of powerful propaganda footage during its short ascendance in Iraq and the Levant. The U.S. military took note but is behind the curve in creating similarly compelling videos.
Drones have been fitted with loudspeakers for communicating with combatants, can distribute leaflets, and even be equipped with high-decibel sound projectors for non-lethal effects. They can also be used to deliver humanitarian and medical aid to denied areas. They provide unlimited opportunities for projecting advantageous information to physical audiences. This carrying capacity offers to minimize the stand-off distance that has been required for battlefield loudspeaker unit broadcasts, for example, and may enable easier access to target audiences.
Recent cases of drone use for documentation and dissemination underscore their potential applications in information operations with strategic impact beyond the battlefield. In particular, drones are powerful imagery collection systems that may be used to produce emotionally charged appeals to global audiences. For example, drone video imagery of an atrocity against civilians — real or staged — could be shown publicly, in courtrooms, and in diplomatic channels as a campaign against an aggressor, with the goal of reducing support for the aggressor and persuading viewers of their culpability. Drones might also be used to discretely document and expose military build-up before an expected offensive — with the goal of casting doubt on the legitimacy of an aggressor’s violent intentions and creating international unity against them.
Strategic outcomes of campaigns like these are concrete and measurable, akin to the de-classification and release of intelligence community reporting about Russia’s military preparations for their 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which created international resolve against Russia. Documenting and releasing clear evidence of China’s acute preparations for an invasion of Taiwan would be an ideal deterrent use for drone-based information operations and may be more impactful than destructive targeting. Strategic informational uses of drones, however, require a shift of mindset from destructive applications to creative cognitive applications.
Ethics
Each of these cognitive applications comes with a host of ethical concerns. The risks of dehumanization through drone warfare, low accountability of remote drone operations, high potential for collateral damage, and the under-evaluated question of psychological trauma resulting from military drone use — measured against the inevitability of enemy use of drone systems — present a modern security dilemma.
It seems that these moral and ethical problems may only be enabled by uncertain and unenforced international legal limits. As the U.S. Department of Justice’s author of the notorious 2002 “torture memos” recently warned, “calls for legal regulation will not only fail, but also could be counterproductive. Early regulation of military technology has rarely, if ever, succeeded when nations are still learning the costs and benefits of new weapons.”
If recent warzone drone use has taught analysts anything, it’s that the United States should be prepared for its enemies’ very worst uses of this technology. It will not be enough to try to match enemies’ kinetic offenses. The Department of Defense has practically no option but to adapt to this harsh new reality by overmatching adversaries’ drone capabilities — especially their sometimes diabolical uses for psychological effects, comprising the true “hellscape” of department leaders’ visions. The secretary of defense has very openly declared the department’s intent to create a numerical drone advantage for “the fight,” but the Pentagon should also think innovatively about second- and third-order effects of drone use, and initiate policy and exercises to put them to use in ways that exceed adversary advantages. The successful application of drones for psychological effects will require new policy, planning, and training that so far does not appear to be happening yet at the service or departmental level.
The pragmatic reality of drone use and the expectation of malfeasance by our adversaries, though, do not excuse the United States from developing and applying ethical safeguards against their misuse. Basic international legal principles such as distinction between military and civilian targets, and proportionality of strikes, apply to drones as much as they do to the use of any other weapon. However, in a situation where U.S. drones are believed to be outnumbered, we should assume that our own forces will suffer the most from a lack of specific international limitations on their use. It is in our own best interests to push for new norms against the misuse of drones.
A New Approach
Militaries are notorious for resisting new warfighting concepts. It took an act of Congress to initiate the 1921 airpower tests that would result in the U.S. military’s integration of newfangled airplanes. When Navy admirals viewing the bombing test runs saw the damage that an aircraft could do to a ship, many of them visibly wept, with years of organizational resistance to airpower having finally been thwarted.
The U.S. military needs an equivalent test — one that demonstrates the strategic potential of drones for influence operations. The prevailing notion that drones should be used only for battlefield destruction or intelligence and reconnaissance ignores deeper implications of their use, and may have the unintended consequence of prolonging wars by forcing entrenchment. A test of influence applications would seek to better understand psychological vulnerabilities to drone operations, devise psychological defenses, and assess how drones can be effectively used in persuasive information campaigns.
Lessons taken from testing drone influence applications should be taught in military schoolhouses at all levels and should be integrated into U.S. and allied military exercises. Military leaders need a better understanding of their own drone options, beyond tippers like the Army’s counter-unmanned aircraft system techniques publication. Just as important, defensive lessons should be included in U.S. civilian key leader exercises to prepare states and municipalities for the possibility of drone strikes on non-combatants, especially in large metropolitan areas and along U.S borders. The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security have important lessons for each other, and will need to strengthen information-sharing capabilities as the ever-lower cost of drones enables new attackers, such as drug cartels. Civilian populations should be given realistic training and information about potential drone attacks, with the goal of developing psychological resilience if ever they occur. U.S. allies and partners — especially those in potential areas of conflict — should receive similar training and information.
Training and testing should serve as pretext to new doctrine development. Useful drone doctrine would define ethical limitations and offer conceptual applications. On the other hand, counterproductive drone doctrine would limit the potential tactical applications of drones, which require extreme flexibility. Tactical applications are better catalogued in a group chat with live drone operators offering on-the-fly input. New drone influence doctrine would complement codifications like the Defense Department’s 2023 Strategy for Operations in the Information Environment.
BECOME A MEMBER
J.D. Maddox has led influence activities as a Central Intelligence Agency branch chief, deputy coordinator of the U.S. Global Engagement Center, and as a U.S. Army Psychological Operations team leader. He’s an expert in political warfare, and an executive, professor, writer and former political candidate.
Image: Sgt. Rognie Ortiz Vega via DVIDS
warontherocks.com · July 24, 2025
19. The Pentagon's Trillion-Dollar Nightmare: Bad Contracts Are Crippling the Military
The Pentagon's Trillion-Dollar Nightmare: Bad Contracts Are Crippling the Military
nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Jonathan Baba · July 23, 2025
Key Points and Summary – The Department of Defense has a record budget but faces a crisis: its outdated acquisition process is failing.
-A former industry executive argues that inefficient contracts and poor collaboration are wasting billions and hindering military readiness at a critical time.
-This systemic failure to incentivize innovation and value puts the U.S. at a disadvantage in the face of peer competition from China.
-The solution lies in smarter, outcome-based contracts and true partnership, a goal the administration is now pushing through a series of reforms to ensure spending translates directly to increased lethality and deterrence.
How DoD Can Unlock Greater Value Through Increased Industry Engagement
The Department of Defense (DoD) faces a challenge that also marks its greatest opportunity since the end of the Cold War: how to spend record-high budgets to address urgent readiness, modernization, and sustainment challenges during a period of (very fair) heightened cost scrutiny. The path forward is daunting, but it is the challenge itself that provides the solution. DoD and the defense industry are not adversarial parties. On the contrary, they actually share untapped synergies embedded in these intersecting dynamics: historic budgets, transformative requirements, and a cost-aware environment.
The formula should be simple: historic budgets and urgent defense priorities + industry innovation and efficiency = increased readiness, modernization, and cost savings. Execution, however, demands substantive collaboration. These outcomes can be achieved through effective incentives, thoughtful acquisition strategies, clearly defined deliverables, and disciplined lifecycle management.
DOD must get more out of its partnerships with industry. In the area of IT there are clearly opportunities to acquire, implement, and manage these significant investments more effectively by working closely with industry to meet cost, schedule and performance milestones.
I would know. For over 16 years I sat across the table from the government negotiating and delivering billions of dollars in contract value as a Deloitte Consulting Principal. In this role I led engagements that identified hundreds of millions of dollars in potential cost savings for Defense business systems.
I have experienced firsthand that both parties come to the table with the intent to provide optimal value to our warfighters. But good intentions aren’t enough. They also bring to the table organizational and personal metrics that they are incentivized to achieve and the capability and capacity realities of their own organizations. If DOD and industry could discuss, understand, and address these throughout the acquisition and delivery cycle, they could be a force multiplier.
Without acknowledging them, though, these realities are anything but.
Rethinking the Industry Relationship
Two sayings come to mind in this context: “You get what you pay for,” and “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” The government understandably wants cost-effective, on-schedule innovation. Industry, for its part, wants to deliver value with manageable risk, fair margins, and predictable revenue streams. These goals are not mutually exclusive.
The government (and taxpayers) expect increased mission impact, value, and efficiency—especially when spending a trillion dollars. Yet industry can tend to gravitate toward costly bespoke solutions, seeing value in uniqueness. When a requirement looks tailored to a specific vendor or small pool of vendors, the assumption is that value will outweigh price in evaluation. This can sometimes be justified—exceptional solutions deserve a premium. But when the premium is associated with brand or incumbency, rather than performance, the government is often not the beneficiary.
Industry, meanwhile, often feels constrained by contract types and acquisition methods that fail to reward what it sees as innovation and value. They know that delivering their capabilities and value is not a handoff; it’s a partnership. Their success depends heavily on how well government teams acquire, receive, test, field, and maintain industry solutions. Poor lifecycle execution can undo the value of even the best industry proposal.
This is not about assigning blame. It’s about acknowledging that both sides benefit from transparency, clear and executable requirements, realistic acquisition strategies, and predictable markets.
Better Contracts for Mission Outcomes
We are squarely in the Davidson Window in the Indo-Pacific theater. Our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Guardians, and Marines will depend on the capabilities DoD and industry acquire and field in the next few years. Now is the time to improve incentives, delivery partnerships, and acquisition approaches that result in the needed pace of lethality and operational readiness. It is equally time to hold industry more accountable for cost, schedule, and performance outcomes.
Everything starts with the contract. Better contracts begin with better pre-award collaboration. Structured early and transparent dialogue focused on mission needs can lead to acquisition strategies that reflect operational realities. When properly structured, outcome-based contracts shift focus from level-of-effort to measurable mission impact. Incentives should be tied to functionality, availability, operational readiness, or interoperability – not just billable hours.
Industry is not afraid of accountability. It seeks to mitigate risk, especially in areas prone to ambiguity, change, and unpredictability. The government has the tools to manage those risks. They can use contractual incentives to unlock unprecedented innovation, cost control, and impact to speed capacity to the warfighter.
Smarter Acquisition Strategy
The Trump Administration and DoD leaders recognize the urgent need for acquisition reform. A suite of recent Executive Orders, initiatives, and directives are aimed at increasing lethality, deterrence, and readiness for every dollar spent.
–EO 14265 modernizes defense acquisition by accelerating the use of commercial solutions, OTAs, and rapid capabilities models
-A comprehensive review of MDAP is aimed at modernizing defense acquisition and spurring innovation while targeting high-cost or behind-schedule programs for reform or cancellation
-The “Restoring Common Sense to Federal Procurement” EO mandates streamlining of acquisition regulations and prioritizing commercial-market solutions.
-Secretary Hegseth’s memo designates the Software Acquisition Pathway as the default for digital procurements—making way for agile, efficient tech delivery.
-The Department of the Navy’s Innovation Adoption Toolkit is speeding the adoption time of private-sector technologies by limiting the contracting process timeline and allowing smaller companies to bridge the startup “Valley of Death.”
Modular, interoperable, authorized, and secure solutions are critical for improving acquisition outcomes. Bespoke, proprietary, and non-traditional approaches may have value in specific contexts. However, they must be managed thoughtfully to align with broader DoD objectives. The Military Services must empower program managers with the tools, training, contract flexibility, and leadership support to co-create smart, accountable delivery frameworks with industry.
A Call to Action: Build the Right Environment, and Industry Will Deliver
The realities of peer competition, the Davidson Window, and ongoing operational demands in the Middle East implies the U.S. military must possess the means to dictate mission outcomes—not simply react. The mission now is to scale the use of contractual mechanisms and delivery models that allow the government to articulate mission requirements clearly, reward innovation, reduce delivery cycles, and expand interoperability and accountability.
The expertise exists in government and industry. The budget exists. The directives and intent exist. The only remaining variable is how well government and industry work together to deliver the lethality and readiness the DoD desires in today’s dynamic threat environment.
About the Author:
Jonathan Baba served as a Principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP for nearly two decades, where he helped launch the firm’s Navy and DoD practice. He led LMI’s defense market with a “Pentagon to the Pacific” strategy and was awarded the Washington Executive’s 2024 Pinnacle Award for DoD Executive of the year.
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20. The Army's New AbramsX Might Be the Best Tank Ever
The Army's New AbramsX Might Be the Best Tank Ever
nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Caleb Larson · July 23, 2025
Key Points and Summary on AbramsX – The M1 Abrams, America’s legendary main battle tank, is facing a modern battlefield crisis, with devastating losses in Ukraine highlighting its vulnerability to drones and its ever-increasing weight becoming a logistical nightmare.
-In response, the Army has canceled the incremental SEPv4 upgrade in favor of a revolutionary new concept: the AbramsX. This lighter, faster, hybrid-electric “super tank” features a silent electric drive, an unmanned turret, and an active protection system.
-While still a prototype, the AbramsX represents a radical redesign driven by the brutal lessons of modern warfare and the urgent need to create a more survivable apex predator.
Meet the AbramsX: The ‘Silent Killer’ Super Tank Replacing the M1 Abrams
Initially introduced into U.S. Army service during the Cold War, the M1 Abrams was a significant upgrade over the tanks that preceded it. Combining a comprehensive armor protection package with vastly improved situational awareness and firepower, the Abrams has become the literal backbone of U.S. Army armored warfare since its introduction in the 1980s.
The Abrams has been steadily upgraded since then, and the latest in-service variant is the Abrams M1A2 System Enhancement Package Version 3, or, as it is commonly known, the Abrams SEPv3. Compared to the original M1 Abrams, this more updated Abrams main battle tank offers increases in armor, electronics, and other design aspects. Plans are already underway for a replacement.
General Dynamics Land Systems, the American defense firm behind the Abrams main battle tank, has proposed an advanced concept vehicle as a successor to the venerable M1 Abrams: the AbramsX. This demonstrator vehicle concept emerged from the need to address issues with the SEPv4 Abrams variant that became apparent through combat information gathered from the Abrams’ performance in the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Rather than invest in an incremental upgrade like the SEPv4, General Dynamics instead pitched a next-generation main battle tank.
The AbramsX
Though still very much a prototype, the AbramsX offers a host of improvements over the M1. Some experts are already calling it the best tank ever, at least, if it is built.
Improved fuel efficiency boosts range by as high as 50 percent, made possible by a hybrid-electric engine, a three-man crew, and an unmanned turret. This, along with other features, reduces overall weight by 10 tons compared to the current M1 Abrams.
One of the most significant departures from the past is AbramsX’s hybrid-electric drive, which combines smectic motors with a more conventional engine, drastically reducing the tank’s fuel consumption —a key negative aspect of the M1 Abrams, particularly as the platform’s weight increased and compromised power-to-weight ratios.
However, the hybrid drive also offers non-logistical benefits.
Electric drives are virtually silent and do not emit hot exhaust, giving the AbramsX a distinct advantage at night.
As a ground-up tank design, the AbramsX can also accommodate technologies that boost cooperative networking with other friendly elements on the battlefield as well as situational awareness and collaboration with and through artificial intelligence in the future.
While the AbramsX “might not meet all of the Army’s eventual requirements for the M-1E3,” the Congressional Research Service wrote, “it is seen as demonstrating current tank design capabilities.”
The War in Ukraine: Lessons Learned and Implemented?
As losses on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides have laid out in no uncertain terms, the vulnerability of today’s armored vehicles, even main battle tanks, to the threat posed by aerial drones is very high.
These and other kinds of precision-guided munitions, but also the traditional anti-armor infantry weapons, have proven deadly.
One potential solution to the FPS threat is active protection systems, also known as APS. Using cameras, acoustic sensors, and radar, APS intercepts projectiles before they can find their mark, drastically reducing the chances of absorbing a deadly strike.
However, an effective APS could also have the benefit of reducing armor weight if it proves reliable.
“We appreciate that future battlefields pose new challenges to the tank as we study recent and ongoing conflicts,” said Brigadier General Geoffrey Norman in a U.S. Army statement. “We must optimize the Abrams’ mobility and survivability to allow the tank to continue to close with and destroy the enemy as the apex predator on future battlefields.” General Norman is the director of the Next-Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team, an Army initiative.
“The Abrams Tank can no longer grow its capabilities without adding weight, and we need to reduce its logistical footprint,” added Major General Glenn Dean, Program Executive Officer for Ground Combat Systems. “The war in Ukraine has highlighted a critical need for integrated protections for Soldiers, built from within instead of adding on.”
Abrams SEPv4 End and the M1E3 Abrams
The U.S. Army decided to cancel the SEPv4 Abrams upgrade program because, although the Abrams has been a reliable central battle tank platform throughout the end of the Cold War and today, the limitations of upgrading a roughly 40-year-old design for today’s challenges would not be sufficient.
That upgrade would have featured a high-output engine, a more advanced sensor suite, and increased firepower. But ballooning weight, already a logistical burden for the Abrams, put the kibosh on that variant.
As an interim measure until something like the AbramsX or another much more advanced tank design piques the Army’s interest, the M1E3 will be the standard U.S. Army Abrams variant that steals a few elements from the AbramsX.
In addition to a hybrid-electric drive, as well as a new autoloader and main gun, the Army would like the M1E3 to pair with unmanned vehicles and incorporate an AI component.
About the Author: Caleb Larson
Caleb Larson is an American multiformat journalist based in Berlin, Germany. His work covers the intersection of conflict and society, focusing on American foreign policy and European security. He has reported from Germany, Russia, and the United States. Most recently, he covered the war in Ukraine, reporting extensively on the war’s shifting battle lines from Donbas and writing on the war’s civilian and humanitarian toll. Previously, he worked as a Defense Reporter for POLITICO Europe. You can follow his latest work on X.
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De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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