Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Our freedom to say or write whatever we please in this country is holy to me. It is a rare privilege not only on this planet, but throughout the universe, I suspect. And it is not something somebody gave us. It is a thing we give to ourselves. Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads--or in other people's heads. And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.”

– Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

"He opens a school door, closes a prison,."

– Victor Hugo

"Perhaps no one since Spinoza has believed so passionately or coherently or fully in the principle that knowledge alone liberates, not merely knowledge of physics or history or physiology, or psychology, but an altogether wider panorama of possible knowledge which embraces forces, open and occult, which this infinitely retentive and omnivorous reader was constantly discovering with alternate horrors and hope."

– Isaiah Berlin on Aldous Huxley (1965)

1. Resilience and Resistance: Interdisciplinary Lessons in Competition, Deterrence, and Irregular Warfare (to include north Korea)

2. Taiwan’s Recall Vote and Its Implications

3. All 24 KMT lawmakers, Hsinchu mayor survive recall votes

4. Inside TSMC, the $1 Trillion Ghost Foundry Behind Nvidia's Crown

5. The New Chips Designed to Solve AI’s Energy Problem

6. Washington Is Jumping Into Rare Earths. Investors Have Run the Other Way.

7. Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel

8. Gaza’s Aid Crisis Helps Only Hamas

9. No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say

10. The Pentagon Gets Serious About Drones

11. China’s No-Exit Plan for Foreigners

12. A Clash Over a Promotion Puts Hegseth at Odds With His Generals

13. China proposes new global AI cooperation organisation

14. China after Communism: Preparing for a Post-CCP China

15. Xi Jinping’s War on Dinner Is Hurting China’s Economy

16. Microwaves Against the Swarm: A New Phase in US Counter-Drone Strategy.

17. What China really wants for Russia and Ukraine

18. Some Priorities for the Next NDAA

19. Putin may be miscalculating Trump’s resolve on Ukraine

20. Does China really pose an existential threat to America?

21. Pentagon Risks Falling Behind in AI Influence and Info Ops

22. US-led forces kill senior IS leader in Syria

23. Media and information literacy in the disinformation age

24. Why the Revolution Never Ends (Marxist that is)

25. A timeless Chinese game is hooking people across D.C. and the nation

26. The Most-Taught Books in American Classrooms Have Barely Changed in 30 Years

27. ‘Monopoly X’ Review: The Board Game Gambit (WWII POWs)

1. Resilience and Resistance: Interdisciplinary Lessons in Competition, Deterrence, and Irregular Warfare

Rob Burrell's 576 page book can be downloaded at this link: https://jsouapplicationstorage.blob.core.windows.net/press/551/2025_RR Book_FINAL.pdf

LTG Cleveland provides the introduction.

One of the common themes connecting most of the research is the focus on the four powers of "adversarial cooperation" (China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea or the "CRINK"). All the essays were written more than a year before the DNI's Annual Threat Assessment that highlighted the threat of adversarial cooperation.

The table of contents is below.

Please do not overlook Appendix B as it may be a useful startpoint.

Appendix B. Utilizing Resilience and Resistance as a Textbook

Robert S. Burrell…………………………………………………………………………................................................541

Lastly I would like to highlight the dedication. I was the USASOC G3 when Paul was the Chief of G3X and came to me and said we need to reprise the ARIS project from SORO. LTG Wagner (USASOC CG) and COL Andy Miliani (USASOC COS) approved the funds for Paul to contract with Johns Hopkins to take over the work of American University and SORO from the 1950s and 1960s and update it for the 21st Century. His work now forms the intellectual foundation for the study of revolution, resistance, and insurgency (to include irregular warfare and unconventional warfare). And now Rob Burrell's JSOU publication builds on and adds to that work.

Paul J. Tompkins Jr.

This book is dedicated to Paul J. Tompkins Jr. For two decades after his retirement from activity duty in Special Forces, Tompkins served as the Chief of U.S. Army Special Operations Command G3X, Special Programs Division. During his more than 20 years in that office, he was the unconventional warfare authority for both the U.S. Army and U.S. Special Operations Command. He led most of the Department of Defense’s unconventional warfare and support to resistance capability development efforts. He also led the effort to update the historical Special Operations Research Office (SORO) studies on insurgencies, resistance movements, and unconventional warfare. Tompkins promoted and obtained command support and funding for a joint partnership with Johns Hopkins University, resulting in more than 30 published products during a 10-year effort. This collaboration with Johns Hopkins University/Applied Physics Laboratory enabled the update of the SORO studies into the Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) project, which is available online at https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/ARIS.html. ARIS remains a foundational source for this book.

See the 1 minute 20 second video introducing this report at this link: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7354604480878788608/

Resilience and Resistance: Interdisciplinary Lessons in Competition, Deterrence, and Irregular Warfare

Authored by:

Robert S. Burrell, John Collison, A. Jackson, David Oakley, Brian Petit, Chris Mason, John H. Mongan, David DiOrio, Thomas A. Marks, Aaron Baty, Gabriele Pierini, Christopher Marsh, David Maxwell, Namrata Goswami

Edited by:

Robert S. Burrell

Edited Volumes

Published on 7/18/2025

Digital Only

https://jsou.edu/Press/PublicationDashboard/284

This comprehensive edited volume provides the first canon for SOF, interagency, and conventional forces to understand irregular warfare, competition, and deterrence. The theories and concepts provide insights for students and practitioners to appreciate the dynamics of intrastate conflict as well as internationalized intrastate conflict. It adds new research highlighting the asymmetric strategies of adversaries to subvert the world order, including the malign activities of the CCP, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and violent extremist organizations.

Practitioners can use this information to inform campaign planning as well as contingency plans.

Part I provides foundations in resilience and resistance and includes chapters on military science, political science, sociology, and history (including case studies of Cuba, Laos, Tibet, and Colombia).

Part II builds on those foundations and examines ways to operationalize methods of resilience and resistance frameworks. It advocates a data-centric approach to understanding and quantifying intrastate conflict to inform foreign policies and military strategies. It also explores the strengths and weaknesses of a coalition approach to achieving collective security.

Looking to the future, the book also includes a chapter that explores how cyber, AI, and space will intersect with the deployment of SOF teams. Finally, the book offers an example of how to apply the book's concepts through an examination of Iran in terms of resilience, resistance-measuring and quantifying available opportunities to influence change.

CONTENTS

Dedication....................................................................................................................................................... x

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………............................................. xii

Foreword…………………………………………………………………………............................................................... xiv

Charles T. Cleveland

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………........................................................ xviii

Robert S. Burrell

PART I: FOUNDATIONS IN RESILIENCE AND RESISTANCE 1

CHAPTER 1: MILITARY SCIENCE 1

I. The Resilience and Resistance Model: An Overview

Robert S. Burrell and John Collison………………………………………………………………………...............3

II. Measuring Resiliency and Resistance

Robert S. Burrell and John Collison…………………………………………………………………………............35

III. Redefining the Bang: A Full Spectrum of Conflict Design

Robert S. Burrell…………………………………………………………………………..............................................53

CHAPTER 2: POLITICAL SCIENCE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 65

I. Research Methods for Area Studies

A. Jackson………………………………………………………………………….........................................................67

II. Appreciating the World: A Framework for Doing Socio-Political Analysis

David P. Oakley…………………………………………………………………………...............................................83

III. Building Resistance in Georgia

Brian Petit………………………………………………………………………….........................................................107

IV. Measuring and Quantifying State Fragility: Why Governments Lose Internal Conflicts

and What that .Means for Counterinsurgency

Chris Mason..…………………………………………………………………............................................................119

V. Understanding Institutional Resilience

John H. Mongan……………………………………………………………………....................................................137

CHAPTER 3: SOCIOLOGY 155

I. Social Movements: What Causes Resistance to Succeed or Fail?

A. Jackson………………………………………………………………………….........................................................157

II. The Arab Spring as a Case Study

David DiOrio, PhD………………………………………………………………......................................................181

CHAPTER 4: HISTORY 203

I. Support to Resistance: Case Study of Cuba, 1959–1961

Robert S. Burrell…………………………………………………………………………..............................................205

II. Support to Resilience: Case Study of Laos, 1954–1975

Robert S. Burrell…………………………………………………………………………..............................................223

III. Support to Resistance: Case Study of Tibet, 1951–1975

Robert S. Burrell…………………………………………………………………………..............................................239

IV. Support to Resilience: Case Study of Uribe’s Colombia (2002–2006)

Thomas A. Marks………………………………………………………………………................................................261

PART II: APPLICATION OF RESILIENCE AND RESISTANCE 289

CHAPTER 5: MILITARY SCIENCE 289

I. Assessing Resistance for the Purpose of Informing International Policy

Robert S. Burrell and John Collison………………………………………………………………………................291

II. Classical and Modern Deterrence Theories

Aaron Baty…………………………………………………………………………........................................................309

III. Integrated Deterrence as a National Strategy

Aaron Baty…………………………………………………………………………........................................................337

IV. Allied Security Strategies: NATO Special Operations as a Case Study

Gabriele Pierini…………………………………………………………………………................................................355

CHAPTER 6: INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 369

I. China’s Evolving Way of War: From Deception to Deterrence

Christopher Marsh…………………………………………………………………………...........................................371

II. Russia’s “Special” Way of War: Special Operations Forces, Spetsnaz, and Irregular Warfare

Christopher Marsh…………………………………………………………………………............................................387

III. More than a Terror State: The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a Misunderstood

and Neglected Global Malign Actor that Requires an Innovative New Strategy

David Maxwell…………………………………………………………………………...................................................411

IV. Hegemon in the Middle East: Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards and the Quds Force

David R. DiOrio………………………………………………………………………......................................................431

V. Defeated? Violent Extremist Organizations and Non-State Actors

Namrata Goswami…………………………………………………………………………............................................453

CHAPTER 7: ENGINEERING 479

I. Cyber, Artificial Intelligence, and Space: Impact on the Future of Special Operations

Namrata Goswami…………………………………………………………………………............................................481

PART III: APPENDICES 511

Appendix A. A 2024 Guide to Assessing Resiliency and Resistance in Iran

Robert S. Burrell and David R. DiOrio…………………………………………................................................513

Appendix B. Utilizing Resilience and Resistance as a Textbook

Robert S. Burrell…………………………………………………………………………................................................541

Appendix C. Acronyms………………………………………………………….......................................................547

2. Taiwan’s Recall Vote and Its Implications

Will the results of this indicate that the Taiwan government and population will be able to resist PRC coercion?

Is this a major inflection point that will give us indications of the resistance potential against the PRC and possible future invasion and occupations?

Taiwan’s Recall Vote and Its Implications

Joshua Freeman explains how a mass recall could shake up a political system that has become increasingly dysfunctional in the past year.

https://fpriinsights.substack.com/p/taiwans-recall-vote-and-its-implications?isFreemail=true

Jul 25, 2025

On July 26, only a year and a half after the most recent general election, Taiwanese voters will once again head to the polls. This time, however, the vote is not part of a standard election cycle. Instead, after months of gathering signatures, twenty-four legislators from the opposition Nationalist (KMT) party will face potential recall. Another seven will face recall votes in late August. In all, the fate of more than a quarter of Taiwan’s legislators—and more than half of the KMT contingent in the legislature—will be up for a vote, the first mass recall in Taiwan’s history.

The mass recall could shake up a political system that has become increasingly dysfunctional in the past year. Since last year’s election, partisan fighting has become so intense that it has brought the government to a standstill. Longtime political analysts say that the level of animosity and gridlock in Taiwan’s legislature is unprecedented, even in a political system that is often deeply polarized. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate Lai Ching-te won the presidency in 2024, but the DPP lost control of Congress. The KMT took control of fifty-two legislative seats to the DPP’s fifty-one, while the upstart Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) won eight at-large seats—enough to give them the power to tip the majority balance.

The KMT, working with the TPP, has used its newfound advantage to try to wrest power away from Lai and the DPP. Traditionally, Taiwan’s political system has empowered a strong executive, but the KMT pushed through a controversial set of bills to codify and expand the legislature’s power to investigate and oversee the president and force him or her to annually address the legislature and answer their questions. Large-scale street protests against the KMT followed. Then, in advance of the constitutional court ruling on the validity of these laws, the KMT passed new rules that raised the number of justices needed to judge cases and rejected the DPP’s nominees, effectively paralyzing the court. In the words of one keen observer of Taiwanese politics, since the end of 2024, Taiwan has been “on the brink of a constitutional crisis.”

The recall might offer a path out of this crisis—or it could exacerbate the problems. Each of the three possible outcomes of this recall process will affect both Taiwan’s domestic politics and its geopolitical relations. If the recall vote succeeds, subsequent elections to replace the recalled legislators could shift control of the legislature to the DPP, which also holds the presidency. Even a failed recall campaign in which the KMT retains its legislative advantage could shift the balance of power within the parties if voters unseat legislators with closer ties to Beijing. The outcome of the process unfolding over the next few months could revive a paralyzed government or further entrench its dysfunction—and it could introduce new challenges to already tense relations across the Taiwan Strait.

The Looming Presence of China

Although cross-strait relations are not explicitly on the ballot, relations between Taiwan and mainland China are central to the recall efforts. For many supporters of the recall, the fundamental issue is the cozy relationship between some KMT officials and leaders in mainland China. In April 2024, a handful of KMT legislators traveled to China and met with Wang Huning, Beijing’s chief theoretician and a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s most powerful political body. For many Taiwanese citizens skeptical of Beijing’s intentions about Taiwan, this visit raised fears that KMT leaders were taking orders from Beijing.

As part of the concerns around relations with China, support for the recall does not neatly overlap with existing party divides. DPP legislators were early proponents of the recall, and the party has provided support for the recall campaign. Still, much of the recall campaign has emerged from bottom-up grassroots activism among individuals concerned about Beijing’s role in Taiwan’s domestic politics. Individuals putting in the work to make the recall happen—canvassing for signatures, filling out paperwork, and mobilizing voters—have often been self-motivated, rather than working on behalf of the DPP, and represent demographics that are not typically engaged in party politics.

Moderate KMT supporters who dislike the DPP but are fearful of closer ties with mainland China have rallied in support of recalls to unseat legislators they view as too pro-Beijing. Observers have noted how members of pro-KMT factions, such as military veterans in the so-called True Blue Army, support the recalls and have criticized members of the KMT for cozying up to China. Moderate critics of Beijing and more radical pro-independence forces have found common cause in supporting recalls of KMT legislators who maintain close ties with mainland China.

President Lai did not play an active role in supporting the recalls at the outset. As the momentum for recalls targeting KMT legislators picked up, however—and the possibility of recalls successfully tilting the balance of power in the legislature toward the DPP—he began to use his voice to support the recall efforts. Since June, Lai has declared that civil society has pushed this recall, and therefore, the DPP should support the effort. He also launched a series of lectures on national unity, implying the need for DPP majority control of the legislature as well as the executive branch to break out of the gridlock. Lai’s fiery speeches, however, have further infuriated Beijing, which has openly expressed its disdain for him.

Three Potential Outcomes, All with Risks for Taiwan

The first round of recall votes on July 26 and August 23 is only the first stage in a longer process. In this first round, local voters will choose whether to keep or unseat KMT legislators in specific districts around Taiwan (At-large legislators, who include all TPP members, cannot be recalled). There are three possible ways the recall could unfold, each having major implications for Taiwan’s political system and its geopolitical relations.

Outcome I: No Recall and Entrenched Gridlock

For a recall to pass, at least 25 percent of eligible voters in a district must vote, and more voters must support the recall than oppose it. If recall votes in a given district fail to meet the minimum threshold or if more voters reject the recall, the legislator will keep the seat and cannot be recalled again before the next election.

The most recent polling suggests that the majority of Taiwanese citizens oppose the recall. A poll from the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation (TPOF), conducted in mid-July, found that nearly 48 percent of respondents opposed the recalls compared to 41.7 percent who supported them. In terms of voting behavior, more respondents to the poll said they would vote to keep legislators in their seats than would vote in favor of a recall.

Despite the cross-cutting coalitions driving recall efforts, many citizens express reluctance to support recalls. They are wary of undercutting the results of the prior democratic election by attempting to unseat legislators so soon after the last vote. Proponents of the recall also cast the vote in terms of protecting Taiwan from the existential threat of Beijing’s meddling, arguing that recalls are necessary to preserve Taiwan’s democracy and autonomy. But the TPOF poll found that more than half of respondents did not think the recall was of major concern to the future survival of Taiwan.

If few to no recalls succeed, the KMT will keep its legislative majority, and the status quo of the legislative balance of power will not change. Legislators who survive the recalls, however, are likely to be even more hardened in their opposition to DPP governance than before. Any possibility of compromise is likely dead on arrival. Perpetual dysfunction in domestic politics raises concerns about the government’s ability to handle geopolitical challenges: domestic political leaders caught up in partisan bickering will struggle to mount an effective strategy for dealing with pressure from Beijing, and they will not be able to navigate increasingly fraught relations with Washington.

Outcome 2: Partial Success and Intra-Party Realignment

Even if this first round of recalls successfully unseats current legislators, the ultimate political balance of power depends on the subsequent by-elections to elect new legislators. Many of the KMT legislators facing recall represent districts with a strong partisan lean toward the KMT. It is possible—even likely—that even if the first round of recalls succeeds, many of the winners of the by-elections will also be from the KMT.

Even if this first round of recalls successfully unseats current legislators, the ultimate political balance of power depends on the subsequent by-elections to elect new legislators.

Political scientist Nathan Batto, who has rigorously parsed Taiwan’s elections, categorized the differing vulnerabilities of legislators facing recall. While about one-third of legislators are in districts that could be considered “toss-ups,” other legislators in strongly KMT areas may be at risk of recall for their controversial public statements or support of questionable legislative actions, rather than because of strong DPP opposition. If the recalls succeed in ousting these legislators, voters are likely to elect another KMT candidate to succeed them.

If recalls succeed and the winner of a by-election is also from the KMT, the overall partisan balance in the legislature will not shift. Yet there may still be a profound effect on Taiwan’s domestic gridlock. The partisan challenge is not only between the KMT and DPP (and TPP), but also within the parties. Replacing more controversial or pro-Beijing legislators with new KMT figures may shift the balance of power within the KMT toward moderation, which could open up new areas of cooperation and tone down some of the distrust underlying Taiwan’s current crisis. More likely, of course, is that nothing will change and the parties will continue to fight—but the internal dynamics of the KMT may be more malleable than party labels suggest.

Outcome 3: Full Recall and Consolidated Power

To regain an outright majority in the legislature, the DPP will need to successfully recall at least six legislators and flip the seats to the DPP in the by-elections. While many analysts were skeptical of such an outcome when the recall campaigns first launched, the failure of the KMT to recall any DPP legislators and growing momentum for the movement have raised the prospects for a fundamental shift in the balance of power. Polls show that at least a few candidates in highly competitive districts are polling underwater in the recall campaigns.

If the DPP does manage to flip enough seats, it will change the dynamics of Taiwan’s politics. DPP control of both the executive and the legislature will kickstart the gears of government and break through the paralysis and gridlock plaguing Taiwanese politics. The DPP will also be able to boost spending on its priorities, including national defense. But DPP control also comes with geopolitical risks. Dominance of all branches of government will inevitably increase tensions with Beijing at a time when relations are worse than ever. Chinese leaders are deeply mistrustful of Lai and believe he is personally trying to push Taiwan toward independence, and Lai’s speeches during the recall campaign—which included rhetoric describing the defense of Taiwanese democracy as similar to ridding metal of “impurities” while forging a sword—have hardened Beijing’s position toward Lai and the DPP. Regardless of their policy agenda, an emboldened and empowered Lai-led DPP will have to act much more carefully than they have done so far to dial down tensions across the strait.

No matter how the recalls unfold, they will reshape the next stage of Taiwan’s politics and its international relations.

No matter how the recalls unfold, they will reshape the next stage of Taiwan’s politics and its international relations. It is, as one Taiwanese political analyst described to me, a huge gamble for civil society. If the recalls pass and the DPP wins enough by-elections, the government will be able to pass major legislation, and grassroots supporters of the recall will feel more empowered in their Taiwanese identity and opposition to the KMT’s relationship with mainland China. Yet it risks quickly and irrevocably increasing tensions with Beijing, with few checks on DPP power. On the other hand, if the recall fails to flip even a small number of seats, it will further entrench the mutual distrust that plagues intra-party politics in Taiwan—preventing Taiwan from crafting a coherent and unified strategy to deal with its mounting geopolitical challenges.

Perhaps the most muddled outcome—a partial recall without changing the overall balance of power—is the most likely and the one with the most unclear implications. Replacing more Beijing-friendly KMT legislators with moderates would not change the overall balance of power in the legislature, but it would validate the recall and potentially change the internal politics of the KMT. True inter-party cooperation is unlikely, but it could shift dynamics around the edges. Each of the options carries major risks; how the parties respond to the eventual outcomes will determine how well Taiwan is prepared to handle its growing geopolitical challenges.

Image: Facebook | 護國大遶境

Joshua B. Freedman is a Non-Resident Fellow in the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

3. All 24 KMT lawmakers, Hsinchu mayor survive recall votes

Well belay my last comments on the Taiwan election.

Here is a comment that a long-time China hand and mentor provided when he flagged this for me: "This should reassure Beijing (if they choose to interpret it that way), since it is a defeat for the DPP and Pres. Lai. That means increasing the stability of the cross-strait situation."

All 24 KMT lawmakers, Hsinchu mayor survive recall votes - Focus Taiwan

https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202507260014

focustaiwan.tw · by Link · July 26, 2025

Taipei, July 26 (CNA) All 24 lawmakers of the main opposition Kuomintang (KMT) up for recall Saturday survived their recall votes, ensuring that the KMT along with Taiwan People's Party (TPP) lawmakers will maintain opposition control of the Legislature.

Recall votes against all of the 24 KMT lawmakers as well as Hsinchu Mayor Ann Kao (高虹安) failed to pass, according to Central Election Commission (CEC) figures.

In only six of the 25 recall votes did the ballots cast in favor of the recall even meet the threshold of 25 percent of eligible voters needed for the recall to pass, according to CEC numbers as of 7 p.m.

But in all six cases, the number of votes opposing the recall exceeded those cast in favor, leading those recall campaigns to fail.

In the other 19 recall races, the number of votes against the recall exceeded those in favor, and the threshold of pro-recall votes was not met as of 7 p.m.

It was a major defeat for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and civic groups pushing the recall votes, which had hoped to remove lawmakers whom they argued were pro-China and were obstructing the government's policies.

(By Elizabeth Hsu)

Enditem/ls

focustaiwan.tw · by Link · July 26, 2025

4. Inside TSMC, the $1 Trillion Ghost Foundry Behind Nvidia's Crown

I learned quite a bit about chips this week and the importance of TSMC. This is a very comprehensive article that I found useful.

Graphics and video at the link https://howardyu.substack.com/p/inside-tsmc-the-1-trillion-ghost

Inside TSMC, the $1 Trillion Ghost Foundry Behind Nvidia's Crown

How a chip factory powers every AI boom, and the future‑ready playbook no business can ignore.

Howard Yu

Jul 22, 2025

Credit: BING‑JHEN HONG / iStock

Late one evening in 2010, in his Taipei home, Morris Chang topped off the wine in his guest’s glass. Across from him sat Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, who had flown in with a proposal that was as audacious as it was simple.

Williams got straight to the point: We want to move the iPhone’s chipmaking to TSMC, but on a production line so advanced it existed only on paper.

TSMC had just poured billions into perfecting its current 28‑nanometer process, circuits roughly one‑ten‑thousandth the width of a human hair. Apple was asking for 20 nm, an even tighter scale that wasn’t on TSMC’s roadmap.

Saying yes meant undertaking a frantic, high-stakes race to build new capacity from scratch. But CEO Morris Chang did not flinch. He listened calmly as Williams spoke. (By Chang’s own count, the Apple exec did 80% of the talking that night.)

Chang later told his team that “Missing Apple would cost us far more,” as he authorized a crash program to build the new production line. It’s a gamble of nearly half of TSMC’s cash reserves: A $9 billion investment, with 6,000 people working around the clock. In a record 11 months.

“I bet the company, but I didn’t think I would lose,” the CEO said.

Credit: jamesonwu1972 / Shutterstock.com

That single decision, to go all-in for Apple, would rewire the entire semiconductor industry. It changed everything.

Fifteen years later, at 9:32 AM on July 9, 2025, the unthinkable flashed across trading desks worldwide: NVIDIA — a company once known only for its video-game graphics chips — had just dethroned Apple as the world’s most valuable company, with a staggering $4 trillion market cap.

On Wall Street, traders whooped and headlines blared. Half a planet away in Taiwan, inside a humming TSMC fab, engineers in cleanroom suits stayed focused on their monitors. No applause, no champagne, just the steady whir of machines laying down atoms on silicon wafers. They didn’t need to cheer. The milestone had been engineered long ago.

By July 2025, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) had quietly grown into a trillion-dollar colossus itself, firmly in the world’s top ten by market value, well ahead of stalwarts like JPMorgan and Walmart and Visa.

Worth barely a tenth of that was Intel, once the chip industry’s lodestar. All these were the direct result of a paradigm that TSMC had been forging for more than a decade.

In an age where politicians clamor to bring manufacturing “back home,” the truth is more complicated, and more inspiring. TSMC isn’t just a factory. It’s Nvidia’s factory. And Apple’s. And Qualcomm’s. And AMD’s. It’s the silent partner behind every AI boom headline. The ghost in the machine. The engine inside the engine.

This is the story of how making microchips became a team sport. How the old model of one company doing it all, like Intel’s proud in-house empire, was outpaced by a new era of openness, partnership, and focus.

It’s the story of how the tech world was unbundled. How one kingdom fell, and another rose in its place. Because the biggest breakthroughs didn’t come from working in isolation. They came from borderless collaboration.

TSMC quietly added more market cap than Intel ever lost.

It challenges the very notion of what a company should be. It reveals a future-ready strategy that no business, in any industry, can afford to ignore.

I. The Fortress of Solitude: Intel's Gilded Cage (1968–2005)

When Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce founded Intel in 1968, they fused physics brilliance with manufacturing might under one roof. The model was singular and uncompromising: one team, one mission. Design engineers sat just meters away from fabrication experts. Problems were solved over cafeteria coffee. Secrets never leaked. Everything — from transistor layout to atomic-level etching — stayed in-house.

By the 1990s, Intel was in the PC era. Its microprocessors powered over 90% of the world’s personal computers. “Intel Inside” became a consumer-facing brand, not just a sticker on a laptop, but a seal of dominance.

The strategy was simple yet profound: own the whole stack. Intel controlled every stage of production.

It poured billions into R&D.
It hired the sharpest minds in the Valley.
It relentlessly pushed Moore’s Law (doubling transistor density every two years).

And it worked.

Competitors like AMD survived on scraps. Intel’s vertical integration made it a juggernaut. It was the Roman Empire of tech: self-sufficient, all-knowing, seemingly invincible. By the year 2000, Intel’s market cap peaked around $500 billion, more than the GDP of Sweden. CEO Andy Grove’s mantra, “Only the paranoid survive,” became gospel in boardrooms and business schools alike.

Intel’s Santa Clara campus wasn’t just a workplace; it was a fortress. But then it became a cage.

II. The Great Unbundling (2005–2016)

In 2007, Steve Jobs made an offer to Intel to power the first iPhone. We're building a new kind of phone. Want in?

Intel’s CEO at the time, Paul Otellini, did the math. The chips would be low-margin. The volumes looked small. Intel was printing money with PC processors.

Otellini said no. “We didn’t think it would be high volume.” That single misjudgment would haunt Intel for years. Apple turned instead to ARM-based chips. That’s why Jeff Williams flew across the Pacific to see Morris Chang.

When Intel hesitated, TSMC listened. And with that, the old empire began to crack.

Credit: 19 STUDIO / Shutterstock

The architect of this new world wasn’t your typical hotshot founder in a hoodie. Morris Chang was 55 when he returned to Taiwan, an elder statesman in an industry infatuated with youth.

Armed with an MIT PhD and 25 battle-hardened years at Texas Instruments (TI), Chang had seen it all. At TI, he had championed a radical strategy known as “ahead of the cost curve”: sell chips below their current cost to lock in future demand. Audacious. Borderline reckless. But it worked.

Chang drove down costs faster than competitors could react.

His goal was to “sow despair in the minds of my opponents.”

TI’s fabs ran at full tilt. The semiconductor division boomed.

But by the early ’80s, TI’s focus had shifted to consumer electronics. Chang was passed over for CEO. So at 55, he left the U.S. and returned to Taiwan. He was recruited by the government to do something few thought possible: build a national tech industry from scratch.

The Veteran with a Radical Idea

Chang had watched too many brilliant engineers fail to launch semiconductor startups because they couldn’t afford their own fabs. Capital outlays often ran over a billion dollars, even back then.

So he flipped the model.

Chang launched Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in 1987 with a pledge: We will never compete with our customers.

TSMC would make chips and chips only. It wouldn’t design them. It wouldn’t release rival products. It would be a pure-play foundry, like a printing press for silicon. He also received zero equity as a founder. Every penny of his eventual $3 billion net worth came from buying shares with his own salary.

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The genius of the model lay in its ability to pool risk. By serving hundreds of customers — Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and more — TSMC could keep its multi-billion-dollar fabs running near full capacity all the time. One customer’s flop would be offset by another’s blockbuster. TSMC didn’t need to predict the winners; it just had to be the best at serving all of them. Rather than bet on which chip would succeed, TSMC would bet on all of them.

Unlike Intel’s walled garden, TSMC’s model was built on radical openness:

Manufacture only others’ designs.
Share process secrets and tools with partners.
Pool demand across competitors, filling fabs around the clock.

That was the Great Unbundling, trading fortress-like empires like Intel for a sprawling, open ecosystem led by TSMC.

III. A Day in the Life of the Borderless Chip

To understand how this borderless chip empire actually works — how a company in California can build the most advanced hardware on Earth without ever touching silicon — you have to meet a chip designer. Let’s call her Anna.

Anna is a senior engineer at a fabless company like Apple or Nvidia. Her task: design a next-generation AI accelerator. Her challenge: cram more computing power into a smaller chip that draws less energy, and ship it before competitors even start thinking about it.In 2025, Anna’s most important collaborators aren’t down the hall. They’re 13 time zones away, inside a fabrication facility she’ll likely never visit. That’s why Anna’s workspace isn’t a lab bench or a cleanroom. It’s a virtual cockpit.

Credit: Galeanu Mihai / iStock

There, she operates a suite of high-powered digital tools — streamed securely from TSMC’s servers in Hsinchu — forming a kind of chip design metaverse. Among them:

The Rulebook (Design Rules)
Every chip designer at TSMC must follow a massive list of do’s and don’ts. These rules cover tiny details, like how close wires can be, or how much electricity each part can handle. If you break just one rule, the chip might not work at all.
This rulebook is like a secret recipe, capturing everything TSMC has learned about making world-class chips.
The LEGO Bricks (Standard Cells)
Instead of building every tiny part from scratch, designers use ready-made building blocks. These blocks—like memory bits or logic gates—are tested, reliable, and designed to fit together perfectly.
It’s like building something complex out of LEGO: faster, safer, and way less likely to break.
The Crystal Ball (Simulation Models)
Before a chip is ever built, designers use powerful software to predict exactly how it will perform. They can see how fast it will run, how much energy it will use, and how hot it might get.
It’s like taking the chip for a test drive, without having to build it first. Because if something goes wrong after it’s built, fixing it can cost millions.

It’s past midnight. Anna rubs her eyes as lines of code blur on the screen. A simulation error blinks red. Her stomach knots. One more problem to solve before dawn.

She tweaks a tiny circuit parameter, heart pounding. Then the red alert flickers to green.

Anna exhales. A small smile cuts through the fatigue.

The Unsung Heroes of Automation

TSMC didn’t create the chip design metaverse on its own. Since 2008, its Open Innovation Platform (OIP) has been the glue binding together a powerful alliance of key players:

IP core providers like ARM, who license ready-made building blocks used in chips. Things like CPU cores, graphics engines, and communication controllers.
EDA (Electronic Design Automation) vendors like Synopsys and Cadence, who provide the software tools that help engineers design and test chips with billions of tiny components.

EDAs? Let’s pause. No story of unbundling is complete without these unsung heroes.

Back in the mid-1980s, a team led by Aart de Geus spun out of General Electric to found Synopsys. Their breakthrough? Logic synthesis. A software tool that could take a high-level description of a chip’s intended behavior and automatically generate an optimized circuit layout.

At first, customers were skeptical. Could a machine really do better than human engineers? But the results were undeniable: Designs that once took months could now be synthesized in weeks, often with fewer errors.

Meanwhile, a startup called ECAD (which later merged into Cadence) developed tools that could automatically verify chip layouts with blazing speed. Together, these tools democratized chip design.

Welcome to the Great Library of Taiwan

Today, through TSMC’s OIP, players like Synopsys, Cadence, and IP vendors start working together years before a new chip process is even ready. So by the time engineers like Anna show up at TSMC:

The design tools are already fine-tuned and certified for the latest tech.
The simulation flows have been road-tested to catch expensive mistakes.
More than 60,000 plug-and-play chip components, all proven to work in real silicon.

It’s like stepping into the Great Library of Taiwan, where every book, every IP block, is guaranteed to function flawlessly at the 3-nanometer scale.

(Fun fact: TSMC’s 3nm transistors are so small that if you blew one up to the size of a marble and blew a regular marble proportionally, the regular marble would be about the size of Earth.)

Even the heaviest simulations now run seamlessly in the cloud — on AWS or Azure — thanks to TSMC’s Virtual Design Environment (VDE). Once, this kind of computing firepower was reserved for the likes of Intel. But now, it’s available to anyone with ambition, and a login.

The AI Chip Ecosystem: Who Does What

What’s work like for Anna? It’s as if she’s working inside TSMC, without ever leaving California. This isn’t outsourcing. It’s deep entanglement.

IV. The Reckoning

Intel’s decline wasn’t a dramatic collapse. It was a slow, grinding erosion.

First, it missed the smartphone wave entirely. Then came a misfire: betting big on its own low-power Atom chips that never caught on. Meanwhile, its greatest strength — manufacturing — began to falter. The once-reliable cadence of process improvements slipped. Intel’s long-promised 10nm node arrived years late.

In the semiconductor world, a “node” refers to a manufacturing standard. The smaller the number (like 5nm or 3nm), the more powerful and efficient the chip is, because you can squeeze more transistors into it.

By contrast, TSMC advanced in lockstep with its partners, moving like a steady metronome.

7nm in 2018, powering Apple’s A12 and Huawei’s Kirin chips.
5nm by 2020, for Apple’s A14 and the first M1 Macs.
3nm by 2023, arriving on time, on target.

By the time Washington realized America’s chip supply rested on an island just 100 miles from China, it was too late. The geopolitical alarm bell rang. The response was massive: $6.6 billion in CHIPS Act grants and another $5 billion in loans to lure TSMC into building fabs in Arizona.

Building factories is easy. But replicating excellence? That’s hard.

Taiwan’s 24/7 Discipline Meets America’s 9‑to‑5

By 2024, TSMC’s U.S. operations were deep in the red, posting a staggering NT$14.3 billion loss (roughly USD $440 million). The Arizona fab, once hailed as a symbol of industrial revival, had become TSMC’s most costly site.

The problem wasn’t technology. The chips scheduled to come out in 2025 were still world-class. The problem was culture.

The precision required in semiconductor fabrication defies comprehension. Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines fire lasers that must hit droplets of molten tin 50,000 times per second. That’s an accuracy exceeding the math used in Apollo moon landings.

But the cultural misalignment was harder to control than any beam.

Credit: Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock

Inside the Arizona project, a clash of norms played out. American engineers chafed under at what they saw as “rigid, counterproductive hierarchies. Some found the environment “prison-like.” Decisions flowed strictly top-down. Overnight shifts and 12-hour days weren’t just common, they were expected. What Taiwanese leadership saw as discipline, U.S. staff saw as dysfunction.

Taiwanese managers, meanwhile, were dismayed by what they perceived as a lack of “dedication and obedience.” American engineers seemed overly fixated on work-life balance, unwilling to push through the kind of relentless all-hands grind that TSMC’s culture had long normalized.

In Taiwan, manufacturing is treated with the urgency of a national mission. In Arizona, it felt like just another job.

Morris Chang didn’t sugarcoat it. He called America’s semiconductor manufacturing push “a very expensive exercise in futility.” Taiwan’s edge, he argued, wasn’t just cheaper costs. It was something far more difficult to replicate: a 30-year compounding advantage of talent, culture, and ecosystem alignment. Every layer — from suppliers and universities to shift workers — was finely tuned for one thing: building the best chips on Earth.

That kind of excellence doesn’t come from a simple blueprint. And it doesn’t copy-paste.

V. The Ecosystem is the New Empire

In 1987, Morris Chang was nobody's first choice. Passed over, pushed aside, sent to an island most executives couldn't find on a map.

But Chang understood something his rivals didn't. TSMC’s borderless empire — a sprawling, unbundled, collaborative kingdom — operates not by domination, but by enablement.

Nvidia’s trillion-dollar rise. Apple’s insourced chip. AMD’s comeback. None of it would have been possible on the old, closed playing field.

In the 21st century, the most defensible advantage isn’t owning factories or hoarding expertise. It’s building a gravitational field, so strong that the best companies in the world choose to orbit around you.

The moat? Trust. TSMC’s radical openness lets partners innovate fearlessly. Risks are pooled. Knowledge flows freely. The question isn’t “What can we do alone?” but “What can we unleash together?”

Gravitational Strategy: How TSMC Built the Orbitals That Made Nvidia King

The Quiet Power of Being Everyone’s Future

“Sitting in Hsinchu, being in the foundry business,” Morris Chang once said, “I actually see a lot of things before they actually happen.”

When Qualcomm abruptly shifted orders to TSMC from IBM in the late ’90s, Chang didn’t need a formal memo. “IBM Semiconductor is in trouble,” he thought. And he was right.

This is the quiet power of being the enabler, not the enforcer. TSMC sees the future first, not by fortune-telling, but because everyone’s future runs through it.

The next time someone tells you to build walls, hoard your advantages, and trust no one… remember the 55-year-old engineer who gave away his secrets, and ended up shaping the future of high tech.

Because the future never belongs to the paranoid or the possessive. It belongs to the cross-border collaborators.

Those who reject border walls and build gravitational wells instead.

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P.S. I tried out Google Gemini’s Audio Overview feature, which turns the article above into a podcast-style discussion. I have to say… it was both fascinating and a little unsettling. I’m not sure I could ever speak as eloquently as those AI hosts! Anyway, here it is.

5. The New Chips Designed to Solve AI’s Energy Problem

Electricity, power, energy are the keys to everything. (A BFO, I know)

Excerpts:

The “it” that has him so befuddled—irate, even—is the projected power demands of future AI supercomputers, the ones that are supposed to power humanity’s great leap forward. Wee held senior roles at Apple and Meta, and is now head of hardware for cloud provider Cloudflare. He believes the current growth in energy required for AI—which the World Economic Forum estimates will be 50% a year through 2030—is unsustainable.

“We need to find technical solutions, policy solutions and other solutions that solve this collectively,” he says.

To that end, Wee’s team at Cloudflare is testing a radical new kind of microchip, from a startup founded in 2023, called Positron, which has just announced a fresh round of $51.6 million in investment. These chips have the potential to be much more energy efficient than ones from industry leader Nvidia at the all-important task of inference, which is the process by which AI responses are generated from user prompts. While Nvidia chips will continue to be used to train AI for the foreseeable future, more efficient inference could collectively save companies tens of billions of dollars, and a commensurate amount of energy.

The New Chips Designed to Solve AI’s Energy Problem

Tech giants and startups alike are trying new approaches to what has been a vexing problem

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-new-chips-designed-to-solve-ais-energy-problem-1ba9cac1

By Christopher Mims

July 25, 2025 7:00 pm ET

Positron’s microchips aim to be much more energy efficient than Nvidia’s at inference. Photo: Positron

“I can’t wrap my head around it,” says Andrew Wee, who has been a Silicon Valley data-center and hardware guy for 30 years.

The “it” that has him so befuddled—irate, even—is the projected power demands of future AI supercomputers, the ones that are supposed to power humanity’s great leap forward. Wee held senior roles at Apple and Meta, and is now head of hardware for cloud provider Cloudflare. He believes the current growth in energy required for AI—which the World Economic Forum estimates will be 50% a year through 2030—is unsustainable.

“We need to find technical solutions, policy solutions and other solutions that solve this collectively,” he says.

To that end, Wee’s team at Cloudflare is testing a radical new kind of microchip, from a startup founded in 2023, called Positron, which has just announced a fresh round of $51.6 million in investment. These chips have the potential to be much more energy efficient than ones from industry leader Nvidia at the all-important task of inference, which is the process by which AI responses are generated from user prompts. While Nvidia chips will continue to be used to train AI for the foreseeable future, more efficient inference could collectively save companies tens of billions of dollars, and a commensurate amount of energy.

What really happens after you hit enter on that AI prompt? WSJ’s Joanna Stern heads inside a data center to trace the journey and then grills up some steaks to show just how much energy it takes to make an AI image and video. Photo: David Hall

There are at least a dozen chip startups all battling to sell cloud-computing providers the custom-built inference chips of the future. Then there are the well-funded, multiyear efforts by Google, Amazon and Microsoft to build inference-focused chips to power their own internal AI tools, and to sell to others through their cloud services.

The intensity of these efforts, and the scale of the cumulative investment in them, show just how desperate every tech giant—along with many startups—is to provide AI to consumers and businesses without paying the “Nvidia tax.” That’s Nvidia’s approximately 60% gross margin, the price of buying the company’s hardware.

Nvidia is very aware of the growing importance of inference and concerns about AI’s appetite for energy, says Dion Harris, a senior director at Nvidia who sells the company’s biggest customers on the promise of its latest AI hardware. Nvidia’s latest Blackwell systems are between 25 and 30 times as efficient at inference, per watt of energy pumped into them, as the previous generation, he adds.

Getting specialized

To accomplish their goals, makers of novel AI chips are using a strategy that has worked time and again: They are redesigning their chips, from the ground up, expressly for the new class of tasks that is suddenly so important in computing. In the past, that was graphics, and that’s how Nvidia built its fortune. Only later did it become apparent graphics chips could be repurposed for AI, but arguably it’s never been a perfect fit.

Amazon’s in-house chip-making lab, Annapurna, is building its own inference-focused chips. Photo: Jordan Vonderhaar for WSJ

Jonathan Ross is chief executive of chip startup Groq, and previously headed Google’s AI chip development program. He says he founded Groq (no relation to Elon Musk’s xAI chatbot) because he believed there was a fundamentally different way of designing chips—solely to run today’s AI models.

Groq claims its chips can deliver AI much faster than Nvidia’s best chips, and for between one-third and one-sixth as much power as Nvidia’s. This is due to their unique design, which has memory embedded in them, rather than being separate. While the specifics of how Groq’s chips perform depends on any number of factors, the company’s claim that it can deliver inference at a lower cost than is possible with Nvidia’s systems is credible, says Jordan Nanos, an analyst at SemiAnalysis who spent a decade working for Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Positron is taking a different approach to delivering inference more quickly. The company, which has already delivered chips to customers including Cloudflare, has created a simplified chip with a narrower range of abilities, in order to perform those tasks more quickly. The company’s latest funding round came from Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management and DFJ Growth, and brings the total amount of investment in the company to $75 million.

Positron’s next-generation system will compete with Nvidia’s next-generation system, known as Vera Rubin. Based on Nvidia’s road map, Positron’s chips will have two to three times better performance per dollar, and three to six times better performance per unit of electricity pumped into them, says Positron CEO Mitesh Agrawal.

Competitors’ claims about beating Nvidia at inference often don’t reflect all of the things customers take into account when choosing hardware, says Harris. Flexibility matters, and what companies do with their AI chips can change as new models and use cases become popular. Nvidia’s customers “are not necessarily persuaded by the more niche applications of inference,” he adds.

Cloudflare’s initial tests of Positron’s chips were encouraging enough to convince Wee to put them into the company’s data centers for more long-term tests, which are continuing. It’s something that only one other chip startup’s hardware has warranted, he says. “If they do deliver the advertised metrics, we will open the spigot and allow them to deploy in much larger numbers globally,” he adds.

By commoditizing AI hardware, and allowing Nvidia’s customers to switch to more-efficient systems, the forces of competition might bend the curve of future AI power demand, says Wee. “There is so much FOMO right now, but eventually, I think reason will catch up with reality,” he says.

One truism of the history of computing is that whenever hardware engineers figure out how to do something faster or more efficiently, coders—and consumers—figure out how to use all of the new performance gains, and then some.

Google develops its own AI chips and released its Ironwood chip in 2025. Photo: Google

Mark Lohmeyer is vice president of AI and computing infrastructure for Google Cloud, where he provides both Google’s own custom AI chips, and Nvidia’s, to Google and its cloud customers. He says that consumer and business adoption of new, more demanding AI models means that no matter how much more efficiently his team can deliver AI, there is no end in sight to growth in demand for it. Like nearly all other big AI providers, Google is making efforts to find radical new ways to produce energy to feed that AI—including both nuclear power and fusion.

The bottom line: While new chips might help individual companies deliver AI more efficiently, the industry as a whole remains on track to consume ever more energy. As a recent report from Anthropic notes, that means energy production, not data centers and chips, could be the real bottleneck for future development of AI.

Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com

Appeared in the July 26, 2025, print edition as 'AI Is Hungry for Energy. These Chips Are the Answer.'.

6. Washington Is Jumping Into Rare Earths. Investors Have Run the Other Way.

Uh oh.

Former President Ronald Reagan famously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

Washington Is Jumping Into Rare Earths. Investors Have Run the Other Way.

Rare-earth elements are key to trade disputes with China, but American projects are rife with risks

https://www.wsj.com/business/washington-is-jumping-into-rare-earths-investors-have-run-the-other-way-20079a1d

By David Uberti

Follow and Jennifer Hiller

July 26, 2025 5:30 am ET

American Rare Earths’ proposed Cowboy State Mine sits on land where the state of Wyoming owns both the surface and the minerals. Photo: Dane Rhys

Key Points

What's This?

A Wyoming mining project aims to quickly produce rare-earth elements, crucial in the U.S.-China standoff.
American Rare Earths, a penny stock, faces financing challenges despite potential federal investment.
U.S. seeks to reduce reliance on China for rare earths, but inconsistent policies pose risks to new ventures.

A promising mining find in Wyoming aims for lightning-fast production of a resource that is a key chokepoint in America’s standoff with China. Federal officials have signaled a potential investment in the project of close to $500 million.

Yet the company behind it is a penny stock.

The paradox of American Rare Earths, whose biggest prospect is the Wyoming site about three hours north of Denver, is endemic to the mostly small firms trying to extract rare-earth elements crucial to everything from electric vehicles to jet fighters. Shares often trade on smaller stock exchanges in Canada or Australia. Banks proceed with caution toward projects that can take a decade to materialize, if they ever do.

That has left the U.S. with a quandary as China wields its dominance over global rare-earths production as a cudgel in the countries’ simmering trade dispute. The U.S. has rare earths. What it lacks are investors willing to gamble on an industry dominated by Beijing.

Washington in recent years has tried to pump the market, throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at new mines and processing plants. A Pentagon deal this month with the country’s largest producer may be the biggest such investment ever.

A site map of the Cowboy State Mine rare-earth exploration area. Photo: Dane Rhys

Even so, the difficulty of standing up a domestic industry backed by limited private capital has exposed a weak point in the White House’s push to wean America off cheap Chinese supplies.

“The financing piece is a big question mark,” said Joe Evers, president of American Rare Earths’ Wyoming project.

Ubiquitous commodities like oil boast corresponding financial markets where companies can shield themselves from volatility and traders can bet on it. The resulting prices help investors value companies and banks structure loans.

That isn’t the case for the 17 rare-earth elements needed in relatively tiny quantities across many high-tech industries. For rare earths, Evers added, the market “really hasn’t evolved at all, in my opinion, because there’s such a dominant player in the form of China.”

Beijing has spent decades expanding its rare-earths footprint at home and abroad, commanding a huge portion of the world’s ability to refine the elements and process them into magnets used by robotics firms, phone makers and other businesses. More than two-thirds of U.S. imports last year came from China, according to S&P Global. China also dominates many of the industries that rely on rare earths, including EVs.

An area of high rare-earth concentration in a rock sample from the Cowboy State Mine is shown. Photo: Dane Rhys

After China imposed export controls earlier this year, automakers like Ford Motor scrambled for supplies, giving Beijing leverage over Washington in trade talks. June shipments abroad were down 38% from a year earlier, even after the countries struck a deal that included China lifting some of the restrictions.

Now, American miners hope tension with China’s state-backed model will push the feds to fight fire with fire—and gin up interest among unenthusiastic investors.

“The government has realized that that game ain’t gonna work,” said Randall Atkins, chief executive of Ramaco Resources, a Kentucky-based coal producer that recently opened a coal and rare-earths mine in Wyoming.

Earlier this month, Nevada-based MP Materials announced a massive Defense Department investment to expand rare-earths production and processing capacity. Analysts say the deal, which includes a loan, a decadelong offtake agreement and equity investment that makes the Pentagon MP’s largest shareholder, could total billions and require additional money from Congress. Apple soon after announced its own supply deal with MP.

The moves set off wild price swings in stocks of similar companies that are draping themselves in the American flag—both figuratively and literally—as they vie for government cash.

Shares in Sydney-based American Rare Earths, which last year earned a letter of interest from the Export-Import Bank for debt financing up to $456 million, nearly doubled in value within a week to 46 Australian cents apiece.

Spanning less than half a square mile, the company’s proposed Cowboy State Mine sits on land where the state of Wyoming owns both the surface and the minerals, giving it the potential for expedited permitting. The find holds metals including the “core four” rare earths necessary for powerful permanent magnets: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium.

But the chief executive of American Rare Earths, which aims to start mining and processing as soon as 2029, resigned Monday in the second such shake-up since last year. On Thursday, the company announced a capital raise equivalent to nearly $10 million.

Ramaco stock similarly rocketed higher after the MP deal. At a ribbon-cutting ceremony this month attended by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Atkins described Ramaco’s Wyoming project as “America’s mine” and part of a broader push “to win a war being waged below our soil.”

The executive said in an interview that his firm will seek private and public backing as it pilots a processing facility and builds out the mine’s full capacity in the coming years.

Federal, state and Ramaco officials attend the opening of the Brook Mine, a coal and rare-earth mine in Wyoming. Photo: Louise Johns/Ramaco

“We have to have realistic throughput agreements that aren’t subject to Chinese manipulation,” he added.

There are dangers to relying on government aid. U.S. policy toward critical minerals—a broader basket of materials that includes rare earths—has long been inconsistent. Tax credits for domestic production were included in President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, but now will sunset starting in 2030 under Trump’s new tax-and-spending law.

With a drawdown in other credits for EV purchases and renewable-energy development, “you risk killing a demand signal to ensure that these new industries, many of which are coming from startups, are going to have a market,” said Milo McBride, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

It is unclear if the MP deal can or will be replicated for other rare-earth miners. The Pentagon didn’t respond to requests for comment.

But analysts warn that jumping headfirst into the mining business comes with risks inherent to sometimes speculative projects. An Idaho cobalt mine three decades in the making has been mothballed for years despite tens of millions in government support.

“For any of these projects, [commercial production] is probably a long shot,” said Rod Eggert, an economics professor at the Colorado School of Mines. “But that’s the nature of the business.”

Write to David Uberti at david.uberti@wsj.com and Jennifer Hiller at jennifer.hiller@wsj.com

7. Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel

Can Israel be "reined in?" I think we have to ask whether or not Israel beleives it is successfully accomplishing its strategic and national security objectives? If Israel believes it is then it will be hard for Washington to rein it in.

Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel

Trump administration has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in recent days

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/washington-struggles-to-rein-in-an-emboldened-israel-14fa3a74

By Shayndi Raice

Follow and Alexander Ward

Updated July 26, 2025 12:00 am ET

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu enjoys firm U.S. support but has lately rankled the Trump administration. Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Key Points

What's This?

Israel’s military strength in the Middle East is causing friction with the Trump administration.
Some in Trump’s base are fearful Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu will pull the U.S. further into Middle East conflicts.
Differing views on handling regional security threats at times strain the U.S.-Israeli relationship.

TEL AVIV—Israel has emerged from a string of stunning military successes with nearly unchecked power in the Middle East. Now Washington is struggling to adjust.

The Trump administration in recent days has expressed frustration with Israeli actions in Syria and Gaza. President Trump’s MAGA supporters, in particular, are growing more critical of his support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who they fear will drag the U.S. deeper into a morass of regional wars.

Israel this month bombed Syria’s military headquarters and presidential palace in Damascus, saying it was defending the Druze religious minority group from sectarian violence. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. helped broker an agreement to de-escalate the situation after characterizing the clashes between Israel and Syria as a misunderstanding. The U.S. has backed interim Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s efforts to unite the country.

Separately, Israel drew widespread condemnation, including from the Trump administration, after it struck a Catholic church in Gaza, killing three people. Israel said it was an accident.

The White House said this past week that Trump was “caught off guard” by the bombing in Syria and the strike that hit the Catholic church.

The dissonance in part reflects Israel’s new position of power after a series of wars that have left it with no significant regional rivals, according to former officials and analysts.

Israel has said a strike on a Catholic church in Gaza that killed three people was an accident. Photo: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP/Getty Images

“The fundamental change that has to be recognized in addressing the future of the Middle East is that Israel is now the strongest power in the Middle East,” said Amos Hochstein, who was a senior adviser under President Joe Biden. “They are the absolute, overwhelming, dominant military hegemon of the Middle East. Like it or hate it, it’s fact; there is no real counterweight.”

“Ironically, that is not necessarily good news for Israel or the U.S.,” Hochstein said, adding that Israel’s strength is leading it to overreach, prolonging its wars in Gaza and beyond.

Israel’s recent assertiveness has in part been encouraged by the Trump administration. Trump’s decision to join Israel’s attack on Iran in June—the first time the two countries fought side by side in a war—has reinforced Israel’s view that the U.S. supports and is aligned with its goals in the Middle East.

Trump administration officials have said they want the killing in Gaza to stop and for Israel and Hamas to sign a cease-fire deal. But an agreement to halt the fighting has proven elusive. On Thursday, the U.S. special envoy, Steve Witkoff, recalled the U.S. negotiating team from Doha, Qatar, saying Hamas showed a “lack of desire” to reach a deal.

Israel, meanwhile, has renewed its assault on Hamas in recent months, leading to growing international condemnation over the rising toll on Palestinians.

The tensions over the recent bombings in Syria and Gaza in part stem from mixed U.S. messaging and Israeli misunderstandings, said Dan Shapiro, who served as U.S. ambassador to Israel under President Barack Obama.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine in June discussed the mission details of a strike on Iran. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

The Trump administration has greenlighted Israeli actions in Gaza and Lebanon and didn’t stand in Israel’s way when Netanyahu attacked Iran last month. But it flashed a red light on Syria, after initially echoing Israeli concern over Sharaa’s Islamist ties.

“When you have this kind of differentiated approach, it requires very clear communication to avoid mixed signals,” said Shapiro. “It seems there have been some gaps there, which can lead to misunderstandings, and then friction between the two governments after the fact.”

A senior administration official said the White House coordinates closely with Israel and has considerable influence over Netanyahu because the prime minister knows that “the United States literally is the sole reason the state of Israel exists.”

Trump speaks directly to Netanyahu when issues arise, the official said. After Israeli forces hit the church in Gaza, the president spoke to Netanyahu and urged him to put out a statement explaining what happened, the official said.

The Catholic church in Gaza damaged in an Israeli strike this month. Photo: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP/Getty Images

The Israeli military on Tuesday said that a mortar accidentally hit the church “due to an unintentional deviation of munitions” and apologized.

Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel and supporter of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, denounced Israeli-settler attacks on Taybeh, a Palestinian Christian village. In a rare criticism of Israel, he called the event “an absolute travesty” and said “we will certainly insist that those who carry out acts of terror and violence in Taybeh—or anywhere—be found and prosecuted. Not just reprimanded, that’s not enough.”

The Israeli moves are angering Trump’s MAGA supporters. Trump ran on extricating the U.S. from the region and broadly ending American involvement in foreign wars so it had the resources to deter China. So far, they see Netanyahu leading Trump to act against his instincts.

“He is putting his own country on the path to further war and dragging the U.S. into further war,” Curt Mills, executive director of the America First-aligned magazine The American Conservative, said on the Trump ally Matt Gaetz’s television show this past week. “When Netanyahu makes a decision, he has the temerity to demand—the chutzpah, frankly—that the U.S. back him, and it’s an extremely unstable situation.”

Some former U.S. officials and analysts say Trump has more leverage over Netanyahu than did Biden, whose position weakened as his fellow Democrats fought over Israel’s military approach in Gaza. Despite MAGA opposition, Trump isn’t contending with a revolt from congressional Republicans that threatens to derail his Israel policy. The situation allows him more room to handle the ever-shifting relationship.

Israeli troops patrolling the border fence with Syria this past week in the annexed Golan Heights. Photo: Jalaa Marey/AFP/Getty Images

Others say the reality of the relationship is far more complex. While the U.S. sells Israel advanced weapons and actively defends it against attacks, no American president would fully cut off the support to send Israel a message. Netanyahu knows this and operates knowing he can’t really lose U.S. backing for whatever it does.

“Every president thinks they have some ability to constrain him and shape him, and they do,” said Philip Gordon, who in the previous administration was national-security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris. “But in the end, Netanyahu is an experienced, wily actor, and knows he can get away with a lot.”

The gaps between the two sides are also the result of a tougher security posture by Israel, especially in defending its borders, since the surprise Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Israeli interventions in Lebanon, Syria and Iran all reflect the calculation that Israel can’t afford to wait for threats to materialize but must take offensive action to thwart them as they grow.

Netanyahu attributed the cease-fire ultimately reached in southern Syria to Israeli military action. “This is a cease-fire that was reached through strength,” he said. “Not by making requests, not by begging—through strength. We are reaching peace through strength, quiet through strength, security through strength—on seven fronts.”

Israel’s post-Oct. 7 mindset isn’t focused on diplomacy, said Ofer Guterman, a senior researcher at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies. “Nobody in the aftermath of Oct. 7 is thinking about diplomacy and how peace agreements can be a very good tool of prevention,” he said.

The result is that Trump is finding it just as difficult as all of his predecessors to bring Israel completely in line with the U.S., said Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

“The problem for American presidents is that the Israelis are determined to fix their security problem, not just manage it,” Cook said.

Write to Shayndi Raice at Shayndi.Raice@wsj.com and Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com

Appeared in the July 26, 2025, print edition as 'Washington Struggles to Rein In an Emboldened Israel'.

8. Gaza’s Aid Crisis Helps Only Hamas

Gaza’s Aid Crisis Helps Only Hamas

The U.N. and Israel can drop the recriminations and get food on tables.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/gaza-aid-crisis-food-israel-hamas-gaza-humanitarian-foundation-united-nations-d79096c9

By The Editorial Board

July 25, 2025 6:00 pm ET

Piles of humanitarian aid packages wait to be picked up on the Palestinian side of the Kerem Shalom crossing in the Gaza Strip on July 24. Photo: Ilia Yefimovich/Zuma Press

The food shortage in northern Gaza really is dire this time, which spells opportunity for Hamas. Not to accept a cease-fire that would ease the distribution of aid, but to reject one and blame Israel.

U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff wrote Thursday that Hamas’s latest response to mediators “clearly shows a lack of desire to reach a ceasefire in Gaza.” He withdrew the U.S. negotiating team from Qatar. Hamas saw the rising international pressure on Israel, U.S. officials believe, and went back on previous concessions.

The work of Hebrew University Prof. Yannay Spitzer is instructive about Gaza’s lack of supplies. He has tracked a steep rise in the price of flour in Gaza these past few months, reportedly reaching 80 times the prewar level in recent days. In an unremarked scandal, Gazans largely have had to pay merchants for United Nations aid, with Hamas taking a cut.

Israel says the aggravating problem this month hasn’t been the entry of aid, but what has happened after it lets the aid in—a sharp drop in its collection for distribution by the U.N. and others. A senior U.S. official agrees: “Huge amounts of aid, purchased by U.S. taxpayers, are sitting in Gaza or less than 2.5 miles away. Rotting. The aid-industrial complex has been refusing to distribute it,” he told us.

Until, that is, the past few days, after Israel shared videos of truckloads of aid waiting in Gaza for the U.N. and World Food Program. There were “entire days with zero (!) trucks of aid collected by international organizations,” an Israeli military spokesman wrote Friday. Only under pressure have the U.N. et al. dropped their excuses and collected 480 trucks’ worth since Monday, Israel said Friday.

That’s good news, as Gazans have suffered for what the U.S. official calls the “my-way-or-the-highway approach” of the traditional aid groups. Israeli military stubbornness has also been to blame, including an unwillingness to divert assets that would help expand aid efforts.

It’s notable that shutting down the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the new U.S.- and Israel-backed aid group, was the no. 2 item on Hamas’s list of demands in cease-fire negotiations on Thursday, according to a U.S. official who viewed them. Another U.S. official adds that the GHF has “caused Hamas more fear than anything else has in the past two years.” Whatever its flaws, the new aid group usually provides some two million meals a day directly to Gazans free of charge. That’s a threat to Hamas, which fired a rocket at a GHF aid site on Thursday.

Instead of working with the GHF to make its sites safer for Gazans to access, the U.N. and other aid groups want it gone. Were the pressure to shut down the GHF to succeed, a U.S. official adds, “say goodbye to the hostages.” Hamas will have all the aid and control it needs and won’t make a deal.

“The answer is more aid, not less,” a GHF spokesman said Friday. Aid also needs to get to the weak, not only the strong, which is difficult when aid sites are rushed and trucks are looted. Opening an aid site to women only, as the GHF did Thursday, is one promising idea.

Israel is running out of time to ensure more aid gets through to Gazans. Blaming the U.N., though fair, doesn’t suffice. In a good sign on Friday, Israel allowed Arab states to resume aid airdrops. Jerusalem will also have to prove to its allies that the GHF can work and scale up operations, or risk losing their support.

While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Minister Ron Dermer appreciate the urgency, a U.S. official says, “the dips— around them are oblivious and don’t care.” They need to, but as Israeli writer Haviv Rettig Gur notes, “It’s hard to convince Israelis of that because literally everything said to them for 22 months on this topic has been a fiction.”

Appeared in the July 26, 2025, print edition as 'Gaza’s Aid Crisis Helps Only Hamas'.

9. No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say

Excerpts:

In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.

Now, with hunger at crisis levels in the territory, Israel is coming under increased international pressure over its conduct of the war in Gaza and the humanitarian suffering it has brought. Doctors in the territory say that an increasing number of their patients are suffering from — and dying of — starvation.

More than 100 aid agencies and rights groups warned this past week of “mass starvation” and implored Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian assistance. The European Union and at least 28 governments, including Israeli allies like Britain, France and Canada, issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s “drip-feeding of aid” to Gaza’s two million Palestinian residents.

Israel has largely brushed off the criticism.

David Mencer, a government spokesman, said this week that there was “no famine caused by Israel.” Instead, he blamed Hamas and poor coordination by the United Nations for any food shortages.

Israel moved in May toward replacing the U.N.-led aid system that had been in place for most of the 21-month Gaza war, opting instead to back a private, American-run operation guarded by armed U.S. contractors in areas controlled by Israeli military forces. Some aid still comes into Gaza through the United Nations and other organizations.

No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say

Israel has long restricted or completely blocked aid to Gaza on the argument that Hamas steals it to use as a weapon of control over the population.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/middleeast/hamas-un-aid-theft.html

Palestinians with food handouts northwest of Gaza City last month.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

By Natan Odenheimer

Reporting from Jerusalem

July 26, 2025,

5:31 a.m. ET

For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid provided by the United Nations and other international organizations. The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza.

But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.

In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.

Now, with hunger at crisis levels in the territory, Israel is coming under increased international pressure over its conduct of the war in Gaza and the humanitarian suffering it has brought. Doctors in the territory say that an increasing number of their patients are suffering from — and dying of — starvation.

More than 100 aid agencies and rights groups warned this past week of “mass starvation” and implored Israel to lift restrictions on humanitarian assistance. The European Union and at least 28 governments, including Israeli allies like Britain, France and Canada, issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s “drip-feeding of aid” to Gaza’s two million Palestinian residents.

Israel has largely brushed off the criticism.

David Mencer, a government spokesman, said this week that there was “no famine caused by Israel.” Instead, he blamed Hamas and poor coordination by the United Nations for any food shortages.

Israel moved in May toward replacing the U.N.-led aid system that had been in place for most of the 21-month Gaza war, opting instead to back a private, American-run operation guarded by armed U.S. contractors in areas controlled by Israeli military forces. Some aid still comes into Gaza through the United Nations and other organizations.

Image

Palestinians in Gaza securing aid trucks headed toward Gaza City last month.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

The new system has proved to be much deadlier for Palestinians trying to obtain food handouts. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, almost 1,100 people have been killed by gunfire on their way to get food handouts under the new system, in many cases by Israeli soldiers who opened fired on hungry crowds. Israeli officials have said they fired shots in the air in some instances because the crowds came too close or endangered their forces.

The military officials who spoke to The New York Times said that the original U.N. aid operation was relatively reliable and less vulnerable to Hamas interference than the operations of many of the other groups bringing aid into Gaza. That’s largely because the United Nations managed its own supply chain and handled distribution directly inside Gaza.

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Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid.

A Hamas representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

An internal U.S. government analysis came to similar conclusion, Reuters reported on Friday. It found no evidence of systematic Hamas theft of U.S.-funded humanitarian supplies, the report said.

“For months, we and other organizations were dragged through the mud by accusations that Hamas steals from us,” said Georgios Petropoulos, a former U.N. official in Gaza who oversaw aid coordination with Israel for nearly 13 months of war.

The senior military officials and others interviewed by The Times spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on behalf of the military or government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In a statement, the military said that it has been “well documented” that Hamas has routinely “exploited humanitarian aid to fund terrorist activities.” But the military did not dispute the assessment that there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole aid from the United Nations.

Image

The World Food Program distributing flour to Palestinian families in Gaza City in June.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times

The Israeli government and military have often clashed over how to conduct the war in Gaza. Early last year, top commanders urged a cease-fire with Hamas to secure the release of hostages. Mr. Netanyahu’s government instead expanded the ground operation in southern Gaza.

Israel used the rationale that Hamas steals aid when it cut off all food and other supplies to Gaza between March and May. In March, after a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel collapsed, Mr. Netanyahu said: “Hamas is currently taking control of all supplies and goods entering Gaza,” and he declared that Israel would prevent anything from entering the territory.

That blockade, and problems with a new aid system that launched in May, brought hunger and starvation in Gaza to the current crisis levels.

For most of the war, the U.N. was the largest single source of aid entering Gaza, according to data from the Israeli military unit that oversees policy in the territory.

Now, the new aid system is managed instead by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or G.H.F., a private American company led by a former C.I.A. agent. It was intended to eventually replace international aid organizations and the U.N. role.

But it has only a few distribution hubs, compared with hundreds under the former U.N.-run operation.

The new system’s rollout at the end of May was quickly followed by near-daily episodes of deadly violence near distribution sites. Desperate and hungry Palestinians must go to the few aid distribution sites located in areas controlled by Israeli forces. The hours of operation are limited and supplies run out, so crowds arrive early, with some walking for miles to get there.

After concluding that Hamas had not stolen from the United Nations on a regular basis, members of the Israeli military met in mid-March with Mr. Netanyahu’s military adviser to discuss the government’s emerging plans for a new aid system, according to the officials interviewed by The Times.

At the meeting, they said, military officials expressed concerns about the intention for G.H.F. to be the sole provider of aid for all of Gaza and presented a plan to expand the U.N. role in parts of Gaza where the private group was not expected to operate.

The military officials in the meeting also suggested that the United Nations could distribute other types of aid that the G.H.F. does not hand out, such as medical supplies.

Image

Piles of humanitarian aid packages from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation at the Kerem Shalom crossing on Thursday.Credit...Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated Press

But the government initially dismissed the military’s plan, according to three of the people familiar with the matter and records reviewed by The Times.

Eventually, when the military warned of looming hunger in Gaza in May, the government changed its position and allowed the United Nations and other organizations to distribute aid along with the G.H.F.

Since May 19, when Israel allowed emergency supplies to resume entering Gaza after its two-month blockade, half of the aid has been distributed by the United Nations and international organizations, with the other half coming through the G.H.F., the Israeli military says.

Image

Israeli soldiers patrolling the central Gaza Strip, photographed during an escorted tour by the Israeli military in February last year.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

Over the course of the war, the Israeli military released records and videos purporting to show how Hamas has been exploiting humanitarian aid. The army also shared what it described as internal Hamas documents found in a headquarters in Gaza, which discuss the percentage of aid taken by various Hamas wings and dated to early 2024. But those documents do not specifically refer to the theft of U.N. aid.

Israel has long had tense relations with the United Nations, which spilled over into open hostility during the Gaza war. Israel accuses the organization of bias and says that it was infiltrated by Hamas, including claims that U.N. staff took part in the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack that started the war.

Israel has accused the United Nations of failing to collect truckloads of aid sitting idle near a border crossing into northern Gaza.

The United Nations, in turn, says the Israeli military has not provided enough secure routes to send those trucks in. It accuses Israel of destroying Gaza and blocking critical aid.

This past week, Israel refused to renew the visa of Jonathan Whittall a senior U.N. humanitarian official who oversees humanitarian affairs in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said the official had “spread lies about Israel.”

Mr. Petropoulos, the former U.N. official in Gaza, welcomed the notion that some Israeli officials had recognized the U.N.-led aid system as effective during the war. But he said he wished that endorsement had come much sooner.

“If the U.N. had been taken at face value months ago, we wouldn’t have wasted all this time and Gazans wouldn’t be starving and being shot at trying to feed their families,” he said.

Natan Odenheimer is a Times reporter in Jerusalem, covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.

10. The Pentagon Gets Serious About Drones

I think this could be one of the SECDEF's legacies.

The Pentagon Gets Serious About Drones

Pete Hegseth moves to speed up defense tech amid lessons from Ukraine.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/pentagon-drones-deregulation-pete-hegseth-u-s-military-57ad092a

By The Editorial Board

July 25, 2025 5:54 pm ET

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Photo: jim lo scalzo/epa/shutterstock/Shutterstock

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently put out a video unveiling drone deregulation for the U.S. military, and the Trump crowd loves a good show. But the Pentagon’s play is welcome and crucial for preparing American forces for a future fight.

“Drones are the biggest battlefield innovation in a generation, accounting for most of this year’s casualties in Ukraine,” Mr. Hegseth’s memo this month says. “Our adversaries produce millions of cheap drones each year.” Anyone awake to the Ukraine war knows drones dominate the front lines, and Russia is churning out copies with a heavy assist from Chinese parts.

The Pentagon memo aims to help U.S. forces digest the lessons and transform faster. The Administration rescinds internal red tape “that hindered production and limited access to these vital technologies,” and devolves more ability to experiment to the rank equivalent of U.S. Army colonels in the field.

Also notable is styling certain small drones as closer to “munitions than high-end airplanes. They should be cheap, rapidly replaceable, and categorized as consumable.” The larger ambition is that every U.S. Army squad “will have low-cost, expendable drones” by the end of 2026. Pacific combat units will be the priority.

This a welcome rhetorical elevation of innovative tech in U.S. military forces, and the Pentagon is correct that “drone dominance is a process race as much as a technological race.” Ukraine is constantly having to adjust to new tactics, jamming methods and the like. An institutional military ability to adapt and buy new equipment is as crucial as the number of weapons in the stockpile.

Caveats are in order. The Biden Administration rolled out a drone program, known as Replicator, and presented it as a whizzbang solution for dealing with the military threat from China on the cheap. Larger unmanned vehicles can help in that region, but as Indo-Pacific Commander Adm. Sam Paparo put it last year, “a pocket drone that can stay airborne for an hour ain’t gonna do it.” Drone evolution is no substitute for larger forces and deeper weapons magazines.

The drone memo is also a timely reminder that U.S. weapons support for Ukraine isn’t charity. Ukraine’s military is now the most experienced drone force in the free world and “the Silicon Valley” of war, as Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told Congress recently. The lessons of that awful conflict may someday save American lives in battle.

Credit the Administration for putting down a marker that the U.S. military will embrace rapid technological change. It’s also important as a signal to investors in defense tech that the Pentagon is getting more serious about buying nascent equipment to dominate the next war. Now Congress has to put the money behind the ambition.

Appeared in the July 26, 2025, print edition as 'The Pentagon Gets Serious on Drones'.

11. China’s No-Exit Plan for Foreigners

Is this another form of Unrestricted Warfare? What are the effects that China is seeking with these actions?

China’s No-Exit Plan for Foreigners

Beijing is blocking two more Americans from leaving the country which is part of a pattern.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/china-blocks-foreigners-exit-chenyue-mao-xi-jinping-74602d2b

By The Editorial Board

July 25, 2025 5:48 pm ET

Chinese President Xi Jinping Photo: Xie Huanchi/Zuma Press

Chinese President Xi Jinping has been eager to lure American companies to invest in China, but you wouldn’t know it from Beijing’s latest actions. China is preventing American citizens, including a Commerce Department employee and a Wells Fargo banker, from leaving the country.

The detentions, known as “exit bans,” highlight the continuing risk to American companies of doing business in China. The State Department says it is working to get them released and that it has “no higher priority than the safety and security of American citizens.” But the Chinese bans have ensnared dozens of foreigners over the years, often with little recourse.

The Commerce employee, whose name hasn’t been released, was barred from leaving because he didn’t disclose his U.S. government employment and past military service, according to media reports. The South China Morning Post says he was detained for reasons possibly related to “national security.” He was in the country to visit family members.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Monday that Wells Fargo employee Chenyue Mao wasn’t allowed to leave because she is “involved in a criminal case” and has to stay to participate. Under the Chinese system, no evidence of wrongdoing is required to trigger an exit ban. Some targets are detained as witnesses in legal cases. Many never know why their travel is blocked.

Behold the perils of China’s capricious legal system, where the absence of due process means exit bans can be imposed without the targets having a chance to challenge it. In many cases the bans are a tool of business extortion, in which local companies leverage the courts to squeeze a foreign competitor.

Of the U.S. citizens prevented from leaving China, many are Chinese-Americans who traveled to China for business or to visit family. John Kamm, of the nonprofit Dui Hua Foundation, which advocates for detainees in China, estimates there are between 30 and 50 Americans who are currently under exit bans in China and more than 200 under other coercive measures, including arrest or imprisonment.

Some of those under the bans don’t know the restrictions exist until they head to the airport. Others have languished for years. California businessman Henry Cai has been held in China since 2017 after a business dispute. Chinese artist Gao Zhen, who is a U.S. permanent resident, is being held for creating artworks including “Mao’s Guilt,” a commentary on the former Chinese Communist Party leader who presided over mass starvation and murder.

President Trump is eager for a summit with Mr. Xi to discuss trade and security issues. Exit bans on Americans should be top of the list. As for U.S. companies, any employee in China is at risk of being detained at any time on the whim of the Communist Party.

12. A Clash Over a Promotion Puts Hegseth at Odds With His Generals

A Clash Over a Promotion Puts Hegseth at Odds With His Generals

Suspicions about leaks and a mistrust of senior military officers have defined much of the defense secretary’s first six months on the job.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/us/politics/hegseth-pentagon-leadership.html

By Greg Jaffe Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper

Reporting from Washington

July 26, 2025

In the spring, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decided not to promote a senior Army officer who had led troops over five tours in Afghanistan and Iraq because Mr. Hegseth suspected, without evidence, that the officer had leaked sensitive information to the news media, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

When Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Sims II was cleared of the allegations, Mr. Hegseth briefly agreed to promote him, only to change course again early this month, the officials said. This time, Mr. Hegseth maintained that the senior officer was too close to Gen. Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff whom President Trump has accused of disloyalty.

Mr. Hegseth’s sudden reversal prompted a rare intervention from Gen. Dan Caine, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He urged Mr. Hegseth to reconsider, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Mr. Hegseth met with General Sims one final time but refused to budge. General Sims is expected to retire in the coming months after 34 years in the military, officials said. Through a spokesman, General Sims and General Caine declined to comment. A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Hegseth’s role.

Image

Mr. Hegseth decided not to promote Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Sims.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

The standoff over his promotion reflects an ongoing clash between Mr. Hegseth’s highly partisan worldview, in which he has written that the Democratic Party “really does hate America,” and the longstanding tradition of an apolitical military that pledges an oath to the Constitution.

Mr. Hegseth’s actions could shape the military’s top ranks for years to come. His insistence on absolute loyalty, backed with repeated threats of polygraphs, also creates uncertainty and mistrust that threaten to undermine the readiness and effectiveness of the force, officials said.

The tension between top military officers and their civilian leaders has been persistent since the earliest days of Mr. Trump’s second term, when senior administration officials ordered the removal of General Milley’s portrait from a Pentagon hallway.

General Caine, who pressed Mr. Hegseth on General Sims’s behalf, got the job of Joint Chiefs chairman after Mr. Hegseth and President Trump fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., his predecessor. Mr. Hegseth accused General Brown, who is Black, of prioritizing diversity over the combat effectiveness of the force.

Also removed during the first months of the new administration were the first woman to command the Navy, Adm. Lisa Franchetti; the first woman to command the Coast Guard, Adm. Linda Fagan; Mr. Hegseth’s senior military assistant, Lt. Gen. Jennifer Short; and the U.S. military representative to the NATO military committee, Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield. All were dismissed as part of a campaign to root out diversity, equity and inclusion from the military and restore what Mr. Hegseth has described as a “warrior ethos.”

Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., Adm. Linda Fagan, Adm. Lisa Franchetti and Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield were all dismissed during the first months of the new Trump administration.Credit...Photographs by Doug Mills/The New York Times; Lenin Nolly/NurPhoto, via Associated Press; and Benoit Doppagne/Sipa, via AP Images

Mr. Hegseth also recently withdrew the nomination of Rear Adm. Michael “Buzz” Donnelly to lead the Navy’s Seventh Fleet in Japan — its largest overseas force — amid reports in conservative media that seven years earlier the admiral had allowed a drag performance to take place on the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan.

The decision not to promote General Sims, who is white, seems unrelated to any issues of race or gender. Rather, the general’s career seems to have become tangled up in broader suspicions about leaks and a mistrust of senior military officers that have defined much of Mr. Hegseth’s first six months on the job.

Mr. Hegseth, a former Fox News host and an Iraq war veteran, came to the Pentagon with little managerial experience. Since his arrival, a series of firings and resignations in his inner circle have left him with only a skeleton staff of civilian aides to run his office. He has been without a permanent chief of staff since late April. Ricky Buria, a recently retired Marine colonel who has forged a close relationship with Mr. Hegseth, has been serving in the critical role.

But White House officials, who have concerns about Mr. Buria’s competence and qualifications, have blocked Mr. Hegseth from formally appointing him to the job, officials said. Mr. Buria, meanwhile, has clashed repeatedly with many of Mr. Hegseth’s closest aides and some officers in the Pentagon.

Image

White House officials have expressed concerns about Ricky Buria, a recently retired Marine colonel who has forged a close relationship with Mr. Hegseth and has been serving in the critical role of chief of staff.Credit...Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

This spring, Eric Geressy, a retired sergeant major who served with Mr. Hegseth in Iraq and now advises him in the Pentagon, threatened to quit after an argument with Mr. Buria, according to people with knowledge of the situation. The rift was reported earlier by The Washington Post. Mr. Geressy briefly went to his home in Florida before Mr. Hegseth persuaded him to return, officials said.

Mr. Hegseth is also still contending with a review by the Pentagon’s inspector general related to his disclosure on the Signal messaging app of the precise timing of U.S. fighter jets’ airstrikes against the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen in March.

The office has received evidence that the information that Mr. Hegseth put in the commercial chat app came from a classified Central Command document, according to two U.S. officials with knowledge of the review. The classified origins of the information were reported earlier by The Washington Post.

Image

During an intelligence hearing in March, members of Congress discussed the Signal group chat in which Mr. Hegseth shared the precise timing of U.S. fighter jets’ airstrikes in Yemen.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

The infighting, investigations and personnel churn have strained Mr. Hegseth’s ability to manage critical operations in the Pentagon. Mr. Hegseth found himself in the cross hairs earlier this month after Democrats and Republicans in Congress blamed him for pausing critical shipments of interceptors and other arms to Ukraine without sufficiently consulting with the White House or the State Department.

The suspension was particularly jarring because just days earlier Mr. Trump had said he was open to selling more weapons to Ukraine after meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of a NATO meeting in The Hague.

It also left the impression that Mr. Hegseth and his top aides had failed to keep the president and senior White House officials in the loop.

As aides to Mr. Hegseth traded blame, and then tried to play down the impact of the pause, Mr. Trump dramatically overruled the Pentagon, saying he was unhappy with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

In a further twist, Mr. Trump endorsed a plan for NATO countries to send Patriot antimissile systems to Ukraine and replace them by purchasing new arms from the United States. It was an approach conceived by NATO countries. Mr. Hegseth has delegated responsibility for working out details of the arms transfers to senior U.S. military officers in Europe.

The frustration with Mr. Hegseth is seeping out. Senator Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who cast the deciding vote to confirm Mr. Hegseth, this month called him ill-suited to lead the Pentagon.

“With the passing of time, I think it’s clear he’s out of his depth as a manager of a large, complex organization,” Mr. Tillis told CNN.

For now, Mr. Hegseth’s missteps do not seem to have hurt his standing with the person who matters most: Mr. Trump.

Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Hegseth had a career in television before joining the administration and relishes the performative aspects of his job. As defense secretary, he regularly posts videos that show him exercising with troops. The photo ops — known inside the Pentagon as “troop touches” — are a central part of almost all his public appearances, current and former aides said.

Several officials have complained that the photos and videos — including one that he posted from Omaha Beach in Normandy in which he joins Army Rangers carrying a soldier on a stretcher as part of D-Day remembrances — are distractions that serve primarily to bolster his image.

Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said that Mr. Hegseth retained Mr. Trump’s “full confidence” and cited the “critical role” he played “in ensuring the flawless execution” of the strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June.

Current and former military officials said that Mr. Trump largely bypassed Mr. Hegseth in the days leading up to the strikes and instead relied on General Caine and Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, the head of Central Command, for counsel.

But officials with knowledge of the president’s thinking said that Mr. Trump especially admired his defense secretary’s combative response at a news conference to reports questioning the effectiveness of the attack.

Image

Mr. Hegseth addressed reporters alongside Gen. Dan Caine, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs, during a news conference after the strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities last month.Credit...Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Today Mr. Hegseth is managing the Pentagon with a smaller immediate staff than when he started in January. Several top aides were forced out or quit. In late April, three top aides were fired and escorted from the building. Mr. Hegseth has repeatedly accused them, without offering evidence, of leaking classified information to the media.

The fired aides, who have not been charged with any wrongdoing, were recently told that an investigation into the allegations against them was in its final stages and would soon be shared with the Pentagon’s senior leaders, officials said.

In the wake of their dismissal and a series of negative stories about Mr. Hegseth’s performance in the job, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, offered a window into how Mr. Hegseth views the department he now runs.

“This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and working against the monumental change you are trying to implement,” she said.

That same spirit seems to animate the Pentagon today. Only a few months ago, General Sims’s promotion to four stars seemed to be a given. Of the last 21 officers to hold his current position, 19 were promoted to four-star rank.

“He’s the type of person you would want your kids serving under — extremely dedicated, selfless and loyal,” said Brynt Parmeter, who stepped down in June as the Pentagon’s chief talent management officer and has known General Sims for more than three decades.

The Pentagon gave a more muted assessment. In a statement, Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, thanked General Sims for his “decades of service.”

“We wish him well in his future endeavors,” Mr. Parnell wrote.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military.

Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.

Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.

13. China proposes new global AI cooperation organisation

Beware. I do not think we want China leading such an effort.

China proposes new global AI cooperation organisation

Speaking at the opening of the annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Chinese Premier Li Qiang called AI a new engine for growth while adding that governance is fragmented.

26 Jul 2025 01:30PM

(Updated: 26 Jul 2025 04:13PM)

channelnewsasia.com

SHANGHAI: China said on Saturday (Jul 26) that it wanted to create an organisation to foster global cooperation on artificial intelligence (AI), positioning itself as an alternative to the US as the two vie for influence over the transformative technology.

China wants to help coordinate global efforts to regulate fast-evolving AI technology and share the country's advances, Premier Li Qiang told the annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.

US President Donald Trump's administration on Wednesday released an AI blueprint aiming to vastly expand US AI exports to allies in a bid to maintain the American edge over China in the critical technology.

Li did not name the United States but appeared to refer to Washington's efforts to stymie China's advances in AI, warning that the technology risked becoming the "exclusive game" of a few countries and companies.

China wants AI to be openly shared and for all countries and companies to have equal rights to use it, Li said, adding that Beijing was willing to share its development experience and products with other countries, particularly the Global South. The Global South refers to developing, emerging or lower-income countries, mostly in the southern hemisphere.

How to regulate AI's growing risks was another concern, Li said, adding that bottlenecks included an insufficient supply of AI chips and restrictions on talent exchange.

"Overall global AI governance is still fragmented. Countries have great differences, particularly in terms of areas such as regulatory concepts, institutional rules," he said. "We should strengthen coordination to form a global AI governance framework that has broad consensus as soon as possible."

SHANGHAI HEADQUARTERS

The three-day Shanghai conference brings together industry leaders and policymakers at a time of escalating technological competition between China and the United States - the world's two largest economies - with AI emerging as a key battleground.

The annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai brings together industry leaders and policymakers at a time of escalating technological competition between China and the United States, with AI emerging as a key battleground. (File photo: Reuters/Aly Song)

Washington has imposed export restrictions on advanced technology to China, including the most high-end AI chips made by companies such as Nvidia and chipmaking equipment, citing concerns that the technology could enhance China's military capabilities.

Despite these restrictions, China has continued making AI breakthroughs that have drawn close scrutiny from US officials.

China's Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu told a roundtable of representatives from over 30 countries, including Russia, South Africa, Qatar, South Korea and Germany, that China wanted the organisation to promote pragmatic cooperation in AI and was considering putting its headquarters in Shanghai.

The foreign ministry released online an action plan for global AI governance, inviting governments, international organisations, enterprises and research institutions to work together and promote international exchanges, including through a cross-border open-source community.

The government-sponsored AI conference typically attracts major industry players, government officials, researchers and investors.

Saturday's speakers included Anne Bouverot, the French president's special envoy for AI, computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as "the Godfather of AI", and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has in past years regularly appeared at the opening ceremony in person or by video, did not speak this year.

Besides forums, the conference features exhibitions where companies demonstrate their latest innovations.

This year, more than 800 companies are participating, showcasing more than 3,000 high-tech products, 40 large language models, 50 AI-powered devices and 60 intelligent robots, according to organisers.

The exhibition features predominantly Chinese companies, including tech giants Huawei and Alibaba and startups such as humanoid robot maker Unitree. Western participants include Tesla, Alphabet and Amazon.

Source: Reuters/ws

Newsletter

14. China after Communism: Preparing for a Post-CCP China

This is something I do not think anyone gives any serious thought about (other than Dr. Yu here).

What comes next?

But also, how do we get to the point where we will see what comes next?

Download the 128 report here: https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/media.hudson.org/China+after+Communism+-+Preparing+for+a+Post-CCP+China.pdf

Jul 16, 2025

Hudson Institute

China after Communism: Preparing for a Post-CCP China

Miles Yu

https://www.hudson.org/politics-government/china-after-communism-preparing-post-ccp-china-miles-yu

Executive Summary

As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) strengthens its regime and pursues global dominance, it faces significant and complex structural challenges. Domestically, Chinese economic growth is declining drastically under misguided policies while an aging population and declining birth rates affect the country’s labor supply, consumption, and social security system. The housing market is in crisis as millions of apartments remain unsold and real estate developers go bankrupt, and high youth unemployment creates further instability. Political corruption in the CCP, bureaucratic inefficiency, and other waste also hinder economic progress and public trust.

Internationally, trade tensions with the United States and other Western nations threaten exports and foreign direct investment. And Beijing’s coercive policies complicate relations with the Global South, where countries often owe debt to China. Diplomats and other officials at international organizations are increasingly skeptical of the China’s global influence, making foreign policy more difficult.

While the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has weathered crises before, a sudden regime collapse in China is not entirely unthinkable. Policymakers need to consider what might happen and what steps they would have to take if the world’s longest-ruling Communist dictatorship and second-largest economy collapses due to its domestic and international troubles.

With chapters written by experts in military affairs, intelligence, economics, human rights, transitional justice, and constitutional governance, this report examines the initial steps that should be taken in the immediate aftermath of the CCP regime’s collapse and the long-term trajectory China might take after a stabilization period. Drawing on historical analysis, strategic foresight, and domain-specific expertise, this anthology describes these challenges as an exercise in possibilities. The different chapters explore how a single-party system collapses in key sectors of the country and how political institutions transform, as well as China’s unique political, economic, and social situation. Taken together, they assess the daunting tasks of stabilizing a long-repressed country after it has collapsed, in addition to the forces shaping China’s future. In so doing, the authors hope to offer policy recommendations for managing the risks and opportunities of a transition.

The chapter “OSS in China Again: The Role of US Special Operations Forces after CCP Collapse,” written by an author outside Hudson Institute, describes US operations in China during World War II and suggests that US special operations forces (SOF) can help stabilize a post-CCP China. It envisions SOF aiding provisional authorities, protecting critical infrastructure, and facilitating the peaceful emergence of a new government while working “by, with, and through” local actors. The chapter also underscores the cultural importance of narratives, historical memory, and symbolic legitimacy in a post-Communist transition.

In the second chapter, “Targeting Bioweapons Facilities with Precision after a CCP Regime Collapse,” Ryan Clarke assesses the CCP’s bioweapons infrastructure and warns that the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) dual-use biological research poses a strategic threat. He outlines three options for neutralizing bioweapons labs, with an emphasis on simultaneous operations, control of facility perimeters, and safe extraction or destruction of hazardous materials. The chapter argues for completely disabling the programs to prevent proliferation and catastrophe.

Clarke then advocates for overhauling the Chinese economy by recapitalizing the country while a new government repudiates illegitimate debts, privatizes state assets, and implements decentralization in “Restructuring the Chinese Financial System after CCP Collapse.” He emphasizes that CCP policies have constrained China’s economic potential and argues that a liberalized financial architecture is essential for both domestic prosperity and integration with global markets.

In the chapter “Securing China’s Assets in America,” Gordon G. Chang advises Washington to “get American businesses and citizens out of China” and to remove PRC entities from important sectors of the US economy. It highlights vulnerabilities of engaging with Beijing and describes what America should do with PRC assets in the US.

Rick Fisher in “Securing and Restructuring the PLA, PAP, and People’s Militia” outlines a post-CCP demobilization and professionalization plan for China’s vast security apparatus. It recommends retaining a leaner, more accountable military force focused on national defense and disaster relief while disbanding units associated with political repression. A Chinese military force without hegemonic ambitions can then help a new government integrate into peacekeeping operations and space exploration partnerships.

The chapter “Spy Versus Spy Versus Spies: The CCP’s Security and Espionage Apparatus in the Absence of Central Authority” explores the potential fragmentation of the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and local Public Security Bureaus (PSBs). It draws lessons from European political transitions, particularly in dismantling secret police networks and opening archives for public scrutiny.

In “China’s Autonomous Regions and Human Rights,” Nina Shea discusses the importance of protecting human rights during a transitional period. According to her, the US should intervene to prevent ethnic violence, civil wars, and political retribution, with a special focus on China’s five autonomous regions— Guangxi, Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia. She also highlights the need for measures to alleviate the grievances of other groups, including religious minorities like Christians and the Falun Gong.

The author of “How to Initiate a Truth and Reconciliation Process in China” describes how China can only move beyond past evils through the investigation and public disclosure of those crimes. The chapter recommends establishing a national truth and reconciliation commission modeled after South Africa’s, and argues that peacefully transitioning to democracy will be difficult without forgiveness and reconciliation.

The final chapter, “A Constitutional Convention Plan,” focuses on how a post-Communist China can establish a constitutional democracy and draft a new constitution. It addresses how a constitutional convention would work, whether the boundaries of certain regions should be redrawn, how China’s relationship with Taiwan should change, and what the new country’s name should be.

15. Xi Jinping’s War on Dinner Is Hurting China’s Economy

Excerpts:

Powerful as Xi is, he still faces an institutional challenge: How to build a system where local incentives are better aligned with Beijing’s—where policies are carried out with both discipline and discretion, and where the private sector trusts that tomorrow’s rules will be the same as today’s. Until then, empty restaurants will continue to symbolize something larger: a bureaucracy caught between the imperative to spend and the command to behave; a private sector ossified by fear of political fallout; and an uneven path to economic reform, suspended between the need to toe political lines and the urgency of unleashing economic vitality.

As long as Beijing remains trapped in this contradiction, not even the most fragrant meal will revive the appetite for real economic transformation.

Xi Jinping’s War on Dinner Is Hurting China’s Economy

An anti-corruption campaign is chilling consumption.

July 25, 2025, 3:00 PM

By Lizzi C. Lee, a fellow on Chinese economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.

Foreign Policy · by Lizzi C. Lee

Politics
Economics
China

A logo shows a red caterpillar munching on a globe with the words The Hungry Hegemon.

Where cuisine conquers all. Read more from the series.

There’s a popular Chinese idiom that goes back to the Han Dynasty: “民以食为天,” or, “Before everything else, the people want food.” But in today’s China, a dinner plate can carry political peril. From banquets laced with bottles of Moutai to humble noodle shops near local party offices, where and what officials eat has become a political minefield.

As part of a sweeping crackdown on what’s been deemed improper dining by Communist Party leaders—lavish, inappropriate dining and drinking, especially on the public dime—civil servants across China are under scrutiny for even modest gatherings. In some provinces, officials are warned not to dine in groups larger than three.

Elsewhere, they face daily breathalyzer tests, are instructed to go straight home after work, or are required to study lists of 20 “dangerous” dining configurations—such as meals with colleagues from other departments, dinners held at upscale private clubs, banquets hosted by businesses or subordinate agencies, or even reunions framed as classmate or hometown association gatherings that carry the whiff of factional politics. In Wuhan, one state-owned enterprise reportedly told employees that even a low-cost meal in the workplace canteen with a colleague from another department is off-limits.

This seemingly absurd level of control is rooted in President Xi Jinping’s long-running campaign to “self-cleanse” the Communist Party. As Xi began his rule in 2012, he launched a sweeping anti-corruption initiative targeting “tigers and flies” alike—both elite officials and grassroots cadres. State media framed this as “an inward-facing revolution with the blade pointed at oneself.” Reform, in this vision, meant slicing into the party’s own flesh. Specifically, his eight-point regulation, introduced that same year, directly targeted bureaucratic excess, making lavish official banquets one of the first visible casualties. These meals had long been central to how business was done in the Chinese bureaucracy: They served as ritualized spaces for forging relationships, exchanging favors, and building informal networks of influence.

Men raises small glasses in a toast as they gather around a table.

Chinese men toast while drinking baijiu at a dinner in Maotai, China, on Sept. 23, 2016.Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Yet despite the sweeping nature of the reforms, and even more than a decade into their implementation, it remained common in many places for local officials to rack up huge unpaid restaurant bills—often covered by public funds or disguised as supposed entertainment expenses. In practice, banquets frequently functioned as gateways to deeper corrupt practices, reinforcing public perceptions of privilege, opacity, and impunity within officialdom.

The latest iteration of these crackdowns, introduced in May, marked a clear intensification of the campaign. Among the most notable changes was a formal ban on alcohol at all official functions—a move that immediately rattled markets. But this policy tightening didn’t occur in a vacuum. Momentum began to build after a high-profile incident in March, when a cadre died following a banquet organized by local officials in Henan province—an event held just one day after a political education session. The gathering involved 10 party and government officials who drank heavily at a private restaurant; four bottles of baijiu, a colorless liquor that clocks in between 35 and 60 percent ABV, were consumed between five attendees.

One official died that afternoon, and other people present attempted to conceal the role of alcohol in the death and quietly compensated the family, including with money borrowed from individuals under their jurisdiction. The incident reinforced Beijing’s belief that the culture of banquet diplomacy remains dangerously entrenched—and provided political license for a more aggressive and highly visible enforcement push.

But what began as a popular effort to eliminate elite corruption at the start of his rule is now metastasizing into something broader and more economically consequential. Technically, the challenge is to distinguish politically toxic banquets from the healthy rhythm of daily consumption. But in practice, the result has been confusion, overcorrection, and unintended harm—especially to China’s already fragile service sector.

In one county, all government-affiliated canteens were shut down, forcing night-shift medical staff to rely on instant noodles; in another city, a blanket ban on all gatherings involving party members disrupted local investment talks and business negotiations. A policy tool meant to root out graft is now at risk of becoming a blunt instrument of top-down governance that chokes the very growth Beijing is eager to revive.

Even party mouthpieces are pushing back. A widely circulated article from People’s Daily Online criticized this overreach, warning that equating all dining with corruption smacks of lazy governance and “formalism”—a favorite term of Xi’s that means, in Communist Party jargon, adhering to the form of regulations without understanding their spirit.

A large formal hall filled with people around hundreds of circular tables.

People gather for a banquet to celebrate the founding of the People’s Republic of China at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Sept. 30, 2009. Feng Li/AFP via Getty Images

This moral rigor—or its ostensible form—comes at an economic cost. On May 19, the day after the new regulations were released, major baijiu stocks fell, as investors feared a replay of the post-2012 slump triggered by the original eight-point regulation. China’s food and beverage sector is vast: In 2024, it generated over $775 billion and employed more than 20 million people. Restaurants—especially the humble, street-corner kind—represent one of the key engines of domestic demand.

The problem is not just that officials are eating out less. Business banquets, receptions, and social meals lubricate not only business relations but also local economies. When low-level cadres stop dining out, the chilling effects are real. It’s not just about their extended social networks—it’s also about the political signal sent to the business community. The anti-graft scalpel seems to have become a sledgehammer, flattening demand far beyond its intended target.

By late May, after the sweeping alcohol ban was rolled out in several pilot regions, restaurants reliant on official or business entertaining began to feel the freeze. In Gansu’s Qingcheng County and Menyuan in Qinghai, some high-end venues reported revenue plunges by as much as 70 percent that month. In first-tier cities like Beijing, the atmosphere around large-scale dining has clearly cooled, with some restaurants reporting single-store sales falling roughly 20 percent year-over-year. A fine-dining brand operating in East China also saw overall revenues decline by 60 to 70 percent between May and June.

At its core, the “dinner table dilemma” reveals a deeper structural contradiction within China’s political economy. Beijing wants a clean, disciplined bureaucracy—but also vibrant consumption and a confident middle class. It wants cadres who obey orders, but also who nurture business, cut red tape, and drive local growth. These imperatives are not only in tension—they often directly contradict one another.

The contradiction is worsened by the political logic of overcompliance: China’s bureaucratic system is hyper-hierarchical, with limited space for local discretion or institutional feedback loops. This tendency has intensified under Xi’s push for stricter party discipline and centralized oversight. While the pre-Xi era allowed more localized flexibility—sometimes at the cost of enabling corruption—it also gave officials more room to adapt policy to on-the-ground realities. Today, when vague rules are paired with harsh enforcement, the rational response from local officials is overcorrection; better to be safe than politically sorry.

So while Beijing seeks to stimulate consumption, it must contend with the reality that local bureaucrats’ incentives are frequently misaligned with its own. In this case, when the political cost of being perceived as corrupt outweighs the economic cost of over-enforcement, local officials know exactly which path to choose.

This phenomenon is not new in China. It emerged during the zero-COVID years, when cities imposed extreme lockdowns even in the absence of clear central mandates. It has surfaced in property sector tightening, education crackdowns, and data security enforcement. In each instance, fear of political missteps led to excessive—and economically damaging—responses. Where previous crackdowns focused on speculative capital or private industry, this one strikes at the social rituals that bind Chinese society. Once again, China’s economy cannot escape the gravitational pull of its political constraints.

In an effort to manage this tension, party media has tried to draw a line between “improper dining” and “normal dining.” But the implementation gap remains vast. What exactly counts as “normal” in a system where informal boundaries are defined not by law, but by shifting political winds?

The deeper issue is that resolving this tension requires a fundamental retooling of how authority is delegated and how accountability is enforced. Unless local officials are granted real room to interpret and implement policy with discretion—without fear of political reprisal—the cycle of overcorrection will continue.

Ironically, the eating-and-drinking saga could have been an opportunity. If implemented with nuance, the crackdown might have spurred genuine public sector reform—channeling official hospitality into more transparent, regulated avenues, while also clarifying policies for the business sector, whose appetite for investment remains in limbo. Instead, it has become yet another example of how China’s political nervous system—reflexively tight, risk-averse, and vertically rigid—undermines its own economic ambitions.

Xi Jinping in a suit drinking from a wine glass behind a flower-covered lectern.

Chinese President Xi Jinping drinks wine after making a toast during a banquet in Hong Kong on June 30, 2017. Dale de la Rey/AFP via Getty Images

Powerful as Xi is, he still faces an institutional challenge: How to build a system where local incentives are better aligned with Beijing’s—where policies are carried out with both discipline and discretion, and where the private sector trusts that tomorrow’s rules will be the same as today’s. Until then, empty restaurants will continue to symbolize something larger: a bureaucracy caught between the imperative to spend and the command to behave; a private sector ossified by fear of political fallout; and an uneven path to economic reform, suspended between the need to toe political lines and the urgency of unleashing economic vitality.

As long as Beijing remains trapped in this contradiction, not even the most fragrant meal will revive the appetite for real economic transformation.

This post appeared in the FP Weekend newsletter, a weekly showcase of book reviews, deep dives, and features. Sign up here.

Foreign Policy · by Lizzi C. Lee

16. Microwaves Against the Swarm: A New Phase in US Counter-Drone Strategy.

Microwaves Against the Swarm: A New Phase in US Counter-Drone Strategy.

https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2025/microwaves-against-the-swarm-a-new-phase-in-us-counter-drone-strategy

25 Jul, 2025 - 12:36 Defense News Army 2025

The U.S. Army is expanding its efforts to counter emerging threats by investing in breakthrough technologies. Among them, microwave weapons now stand at the center of a new initiative designed to address the growing use of drones on contemporary battlefields. On July 17, 2025, the Los Angeles-based technology firm Epirus announced a $43.5 million contract with the Army for the development of a new generation of microwave systems, designed to disable entire drone swarms with a single pulse.

Follow Army Recognition on Google News at this link

This high-power electromagnetic pulse technology had already been tested in previous operational trials. During an exercise conducted on April 30, 2025, at Naval Station Leovigildo Gantioqui in the Philippines, the Epirus system demonstrated its ability to neutralize multiple drones simultaneously in a tropical environment. According to Captain Bray McCollum, cited in a U.S. Army release, the exercise confirmed the system’s effectiveness under demanding climate conditions, which constitutes a necessary step toward operational readiness.

Leonidas is a next-generation High-Power Microwave (HPM) system developed by Epirus, specifically designed to neutralize a wide range of electronic threats, starting with drones and drone swarms. Built on gallium nitride (GaN)-based solid-state technology and utilizing long-pulse high-energy emissions, Leonidas relies on a fully software-defined architecture. This allows for continuous performance optimization without the need for hardware changes, by adapting range and efficiency through each software update. The system is modular and available in several configurations, including a fixed installation, a mobile version that can be mounted on vehicles, and a pod format suitable for airborne or ground-based platforms. This flexibility gives it high operational adaptability across various deployment environments.

Among its key technical features, Leonidas offers a reduced Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) profile, full compatibility with existing command-and-control networks (notably FAAD C2), safety for personnel and friendly systems, and an extremely low cost per engagement. The use of line-replaceable amplifier modules enables rapid maintenance and easy upgrades to new configurations. Validated by the U.S. Department of Defense, Leonidas is part of the Army’s Indirect Fire Protection Capability–High-Power Microwave (IFPC-HPM) initiative and stands as a directed-energy electronic warfare solution that is production-ready and designed to address the growing threat of mass-produced, low-cost aerial systems.

The contract marks a transition toward an upgraded system featuring double the range and increased output. This shift reflects the need to address the rapid spread of low-cost drones, frequently deployed in swarms capable of saturating traditional defense mechanisms. Epirus CEO Andy Lowery emphasized that drone incursions are no longer limited to conflict zones, pointing to incidents near military sites on U.S. territory, including areas along the southern border.

Current U.S. counter-drone measures rely on a mix of electronic warfare and precision-guided munitions. While effective in some scenarios, these methods can be expensive and limited in scope when facing large-scale drone deployments. Microwave-based systems offer a lower-cost alternative, with the potential to disable multiple targets simultaneously by affecting their onboard electronics, regardless of how they are controlled. Unlike kinetic weapons that require individual targeting, this approach enables broad-area neutralization in a single activation.

However, the technology faces limitations. Analysts note that no single capability can fully address a threat that continues to evolve. In a report published in May, Neil Hart of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute argued that resilient air defenses must be based on a layered architecture combining kinetic interceptors, electronic warfare, and directed-energy solutions. He also cautioned against relying too heavily on any one system, noting that adversaries are likely to develop countermeasures, including hardened electronics and tethered drones less susceptible to jamming.

The Army’s investment in microwave weapons forms part of a broader effort to adapt to shifting patterns of aerial threat. The agreement with Epirus signals progress toward fielding systems that are cost-effective and operationally responsive. Still, as experts underline, their success will depend on integration into a comprehensive defense framework and continued adaptation to the evolving tactics and technologies of potential adversaries.

17. What China really wants for Russia and Ukraine

Our understanding of the answer to this question is important. But I wonder if we should view what China tells us through the lens of Unrestricted Warfare or if we can accept what they tell us at face value?

Excerpts:

Significantly, a weakened Russia would also suit America’s, Europe’s and Ukraine’s interests, even if such a Russia might not be their first choice.

All of which suggests that Wang may have been telling the West that what China wants is what the West should want.

The implications for American policy are evident. The U.S. should actively pursue what China wants: a weak Russia. That’s easy to achieve by helping Ukraine stop Putin, as the Trump administration may finally be doing.

Chances are that Wang will shed crocodile tears and pat poor Putin on the head — but he won’t object.

What China really wants for Russia and Ukraine

by Alexander J. Motyl, opinion contributor - 07/25/25 11:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5418921-what-china-really-wants-for-russia-and-ukraine/

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was probably dissembling when he recently confided in Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s High Representative for foreign affairs and security policy, that China “can’t accept Russia losing its war against Ukraine as this could allow the United States to turn its full attention to China.”

Why might Wang have been less than fully truthful? For starters, he’s a diplomat, and all diplomats have a tendency to express less than fully truthful views. To confuse adversaries and keep them guessing is a lesson that diplomats in all countries have mastered.

In addition, Wang represents a totalitarian state with a huge propaganda apparatus which, like all such entities, is prone to prefer manipulation to truth telling.

But the misleading nature of Wang’s private comments is most evident in the fact that, contrary to his suggestion that the U.S. is China’s greatest worry at the moment, it is actually Russia.

Yes, China certainly wants the U.S. off its back, and any distraction is therefore a good distraction. But America isn’t next door, and it isn’t involved in a debilitating war. Despite the Trump administration’s loud barks, it has yet to resort to biting. Nor is it clear, as the ongoing tussle over tariffs shows, just what biting China would entail.

In contrast, Russia is a far more immediate security concern, and maybe even threat, for China.

Consider these three possible outcomes in terms of China’s security interests.

If Russia wins in Ukraine — however victory is defined — Putin will be flush with self-confidence and arrogance, his imperialist adventure having proven to be successful in making Russia great again. Such a Russia might be foolhardy enough to attack a NATO country or attempt to annex northern Kazakhstan, neither of which would benefit China.

Next would be a change in tone. A triumphant Russia could begin to flex its muscles and challenge its sworn “no limits” friendship with China. Perhaps the terms of the partnership could be amended to reflect Russia’s new status? Perhaps Beijing might consider paying more for energy from Russia? Perhaps China could stop publishing irredentist maps with Chinese names for Russian cities?

The eternal friendship might not evaporate overnight, but this would surely create a more complicated relationship that could test China’s patience.

If Russia loses in Ukraine — however loss is defined — a whole raft of highly destabilizing scenarios could emerge.

An utterly defeated Russia could descend into internal violence, thereby destabilizing Eurasia. Vladimir Putin could be ousted in a coup and his regime could collapse. Elite infighting would be inevitable, and civil war could raise its head. Non-ethnic Russians might take advantage of the chaos to declare independence, and Russia’s federation could meet its inglorious end. True, China could annex large chunks of the Russian Far East, but those gains would be overshadowed by the security threats that would emanate from its decaying northern neighbor.

A war that bloodies but does not beat Russia is China’s obvious favorite choice. A weak Russia implicated in an unwinnable war would be chastised but still exist as Beijing’s vassal and have no alternative to kowtowing to its Chinese overlord. That kind of Russia suits China perfectly.

And the war need not be protracted for this goal to be achieved. It could end tomorrow, because Russia is already a pale shadow of its former self. Its army has been mauled, its economy is on the verge of a major crisis and its people, though largely supportive of the war, are experiencing increasing economic pain.

Significantly, a weakened Russia would also suit America’s, Europe’s and Ukraine’s interests, even if such a Russia might not be their first choice.

All of which suggests that Wang may have been telling the West that what China wants is what the West should want.

The implications for American policy are evident. The U.S. should actively pursue what China wants: a weak Russia. That’s easy to achieve by helping Ukraine stop Putin, as the Trump administration may finally be doing.

Chances are that Wang will shed crocodile tears and pat poor Putin on the head — but he won’t object.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”

18. Some Priorities for the Next NDAA

Conclusion:

Conservatives should support this year’s NDAA, with the Senate’s topline increase necessary to meet the moment, address the priorities of the Trump administration, and account for the historically high inflation seen under the Biden administration. Once passed, the FY 2026 NDAA will contribute substantially to President Trump’s vision of an American golden age achieved by peace through strength.

Some Priorities for the Next NDAA

The National Interest · by Wilson Beaver

Topic: Security

Region: Americas

July 25, 2025

The Senate NDAA proposal will not only raise defense spending but also devote resources to urgent priorities, especially in the Indo-Pacific.

Both the Senate and House versions of the FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) contain critical and substantive provisions that support President Trump’s vision of a revitalized American military refocused on war-fighting and with sufficient capacity to defend the national security interests of the American people.

The Senate version of the bill increases the national defense topline to $924.7 billion, accounting for the historically high inflation of the Biden era and the need for the revitalization and modernization of the military in an era of renewed great power competition.

The bills being voted on in both chambers place particular emphasis on reforming Department of Defense (DOD) acquisition processes and cutting red tape to increase efficiency and deliver capabilities more quickly, an important effort clearly in line with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s goals for the military. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker stressed the bill’s “historic reforms to modernize the Pentagon’s budgeting and acquisition operations” in support of the reindustrialization of the United States.

The bills direct the DOD to streamline acquisition processes, cut onerous reporting requirements and limitations, and adopt commercial products and services when possible. These efforts echo Secretary Hegseth’s April memorandum, which called for transformation and acquisition reform within the Army, with the intended effect of delivering war-fighting capabilities to American service-members as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The Senate version in particular contains exceptionally impressive investments in the American nuclear deterrent, vital to a strategy of peace through strength that limits the need to engage in military action. It authorizes the procurement of five Columbia-class submarines and continued development of a sea-launched nuclear cruise missile, a critical part of America’s Indo-Pacific deterrence strategy.

China is engaging in a massive nuclear build-up, and Russia is rapidly modernizing its nuclear arsenal. The United States must modernize its arsenal to regain the edge and ensure that no nuclear-armed adversary can threaten the homeland.

Both bills provide considerable funding to support American airpower, prohibit the Air Force from retiring aircraft prematurely, and facilitate the procurement of additional B-21 bombers. Importantly, the Senate version restores procurement of most of the F-35 fighters that had been left unfunded.

The bill does an impressive job of aligning the budget with strategy, prioritizing the deterrence of China in the Indo-Pacific. That includes the authorization of the full budget request for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, support for the US-Philippine alliance, $1 billion for the Taiwan Security Cooperation Initiative, and direction for the DOD to work with Taiwan to develop a joint program for building military drones.

The Senate version of the bill contains some especially important provisions supporting the administration’s goals in the Western Hemisphere as well, with a pilot program to deepen cybersecurity cooperation with Panama to protect the Panama Canal, a report on Russian and Chinese intelligence activities in Cuba, and an assessment of security cooperation between Guyana and the United States, which is needed given the recurring threats against Guyana made by socialist Venezuela.

If more funding is made available, conservatives should support additional funding in this year’s NDAA for precision-guided munitions and the procurement of warships.

An examination of the unfunded priorities lists for the Army, Navy, and Air Force will show that precision-guided munitions procurement is one of the most common requests for additional funding across the services. US munitions stocks are running low as the country attempts to balance its commitments across the globe.

Massive investments in the most critical munitions will be needed if the United States is to replenish and expand munition inventories to sufficient levels to deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific. In particular, the US military needs additional procurement of Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM), Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missiles (PAC-3), Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles (LRASM), Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSM), and Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM).

There is substantial funding in both versions (but especially the Senate version) for the procurement of submarines. This is especially important, given the centrality of both Virginia-class attack submarines and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines to US deterrence of China in the Indo-Pacific.

Hitting annual shipbuilding goals for the Virginia-class is also necessary if the AUKUS agreement with Australia is to be maintained. AUKUS is a generational investment in the broader security of the Indo-Pacific and should be preserved, providing yet another reason for lawmakers to fund and fix the delays, cost overruns, and insufficient procurement of Virginia-class subs.

Lawmakers interested in reviving the US Navy should also consider additional procurement of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and Constellation-class frigates (of which, so far, none are being purchased this year), as well as increased funding for the next two aircraft carriers.

Conservatives should support this year’s NDAA, with the Senate’s topline increase necessary to meet the moment, address the priorities of the Trump administration, and account for the historically high inflation seen under the Biden administration. Once passed, the FY 2026 NDAA will contribute substantially to President Trump’s vision of an American golden age achieved by peace through strength.

About the Author: Wilson Beaver

Wilson Beaver is a Senior Policy Advisor for defense budgeting at The Heritage Foundation.

Image: Greg Meland / Shutterstock.com.

The National Interest · by Wilson Beaver

19. Putin may be miscalculating Trump’s resolve on Ukraine

Excerpts:

The Kremlin can’t be happy with the current direction of US and NATO policy. But Moscow’s reaction is unlikely to involve reconsidering its current aggression in Ukraine. In fact, Moscow tried to use this week’s demonstrations in Kyiv and other cities against Zelenskyy’s misguided decision to place independent anti-corruption agencies under the control of the prosecutor general. The Kremlin clumsily called them protests against Zelenskyy’s defense of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion; the Ukrainian president also nimbly defused the crisis by reversing his decision.

Russia’s aim is to delay. Moscow has suggested that Trump and Putin could meet in Beijing in September, when Chinese President Xi Jinping will host a celebration to mark the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II in the Pacific. This is an obvious attempt to tempt Trump to extend his fifty-day deadline for placing tariff sanctions on Russia and its principal trading partners if there is no agreed cease-fire in Ukraine.

The Kremlin is playing for time. Putin is still counting on Trump to back off his efforts to end the war. Putin’s timeline is long—unless the Russian economy crashes. Trump and US allies and partners need to demonstrate that they are in this for the long haul. Only that can bring Putin to accept a durable peace with an independent Ukraine.

New AtlanticistJuly 25, 2025 • 6:53 pm ET

Putin may be miscalculating Trump’s resolve on Ukraine

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/putin-may-be-miscalculating-trumps-resolve-on-ukraine/

By John E. Herbst

Forty minutes. That’s how long talks between Ukraine and Russia lasted on July 23 in Istanbul. This was enough time to announce a prisoner exchange, but nothing more. There was no progress on achieving a stable cease-fire, and both negotiating teams realized quickly that there was no reason to prolong the talks.

This outcome was no surprise. Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, said before the talks that the two sides remained far apart. Putin still thinks that he can outlast the United States and Europe, whose support for Ukraine remains crucial, and win the war on the battlefield. He has no interest in the cease-fire that US President Donald Trump continues to seek.

But the real story in recent days has been the growing evidence that Putin is making a serious miscalculation regarding Trump’s policy and the staying power of the West.

Building support ahead of the fifty-day deadline

Moscow was not pleased with what the White House announced on July 14: The United States would now sell advanced weapons to NATO countries for transfer to Ukraine, and it would impose tariff sanctions of 100 percent on Russia and its trading partners if a stable cease-fire in Ukraine were not in place within fifty days. Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and current deputy chairman of Russia’s security council, was quick to dismiss the US announcement, noting that it would not move the Russian position. Indeed, Moscow seems to consider Trump’s statement bluster—designed to bluff Putin into agreeing to a cease-fire but unlikely to be implemented once it becomes clear that Moscow will not agree.

What has happened since Trump’s July 14 announcement, however, is a steady increase in US and Western support for Ukraine and a concomitant toughening of NATO policy toward Russia.

Regarding weapons, the principal focus has been on air defense and specifically US-produced Patriot batteries and interceptor missiles. During the visit to Washington last week of German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, the two countries reached a general agreement on providing five Patriot batteries with missiles to Ukraine. As part of this deal, Germany would buy two Patriot batteries with missiles and send two of its current batteries to Ukraine.

Trump took two additional steps this week toward implementation of his July 14 weapons decision. First, the United States and the European Union signed an agreement for Brussels to fully fund the purchase of US weapons, some of which will be sent to Ukraine. Second, the US State Department announced a $322 million sale to Ukraine for HAWK Phase III air defense systems and repair parts for Bradley infantry fighting vehicles. On the horizon is a possible deal that would send Ukrainian drones to the United States in exchange for other US weapons to Kyiv.

The Ramstein group, which has coordinated the provision of substantial military aid for Ukraine since shortly after Moscow’s full-scall invasion, also met July 21, with the United Kingdom and Germany in the chair. (The United States had led the group until Trump’s return to the White House.) The July 21 meeting was bad news for Moscow, as well. Norway, the Netherlands, and Canada announced $1.3 billion in military aid to Ukraine. More than $500 million of this aid is slated to go to the coproduction with Ukraine of drones and missiles, an initiative agreed at an earlier Ramstein session.

Not letting Putin control the clock

Moscow also witnessed two steps in the past two weeks to strengthen NATO. First, General Chris Donahue, the commander of US Army forces in Europe, said publicly that NATO forces could easily take Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave lodged between Poland and the Baltic states. While Moscow immediately denounced this as a provocation, it is actually a very late and welcome response to years of Russian provocations in the region, including regular violations of NATO air space and territorial waters, and the jamming of airplanes of NATO members. It is further confirmation that the June NATO communiqué meant it when it identified Russia as a threat to European security.

The second step was the reported deployment of US nuclear weapons to the United Kingdom. Their return comes after a hiatus of nearly two decades.

The Kremlin can’t be happy with the current direction of US and NATO policy. But Moscow’s reaction is unlikely to involve reconsidering its current aggression in Ukraine. In fact, Moscow tried to use this week’s demonstrations in Kyiv and other cities against Zelenskyy’s misguided decision to place independent anti-corruption agencies under the control of the prosecutor general. The Kremlin clumsily called them protests against Zelenskyy’s defense of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion; the Ukrainian president also nimbly defused the crisis by reversing his decision.

Russia’s aim is to delay. Moscow has suggested that Trump and Putin could meet in Beijing in September, when Chinese President Xi Jinping will host a celebration to mark the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II in the Pacific. This is an obvious attempt to tempt Trump to extend his fifty-day deadline for placing tariff sanctions on Russia and its principal trading partners if there is no agreed cease-fire in Ukraine.

The Kremlin is playing for time. Putin is still counting on Trump to back off his efforts to end the war. Putin’s timeline is long—unless the Russian economy crashes. Trump and US allies and partners need to demonstrate that they are in this for the long haul. Only that can bring Putin to accept a durable peace with an independent Ukraine.

John E. Herbst is the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a former US ambassador to Ukraine.

20. Does China really pose an existential threat to America?

What is the real threat to America from China?

Excerpts:

Whatever modern China’s many achievements, there is no prospect of it achieving dominance over Eurasia, or even over Asia. The other great powers, many of them nuclear-armed, will simply not allow it. And even if they did, the United States would still have a strong domestic economy, a large military, and nuclear weapons. What kind of threat could China pose in those circumstances?

Confusion over the nature of the threat is revealed in two articles Tabarrok cites with links. “Many influential voices do view China as a very serious, even existential, threat …”, he says. But there is nothing in either article that comes remotely close to describing an existential threat – if we mean a power that could conquer America territorially or destroy its political system, such that the United States, as we know it today, ceases to exist. Again, there is no realistic prospect of China achieving that kind of power.

It suggests a different conclusion about what is at stake in the competition between the United States and China: status.

Does China really pose an existential threat to America? | Lowy Institute

Americans seem more concerned about losing status as top

dog than acknowledging the limits of Beijing’s actual power.

lowyinstitute.org · by Sam Roggeveen

On his blog, Marginal Revolution, American economist Alex Tabarrok has made some unflattering comparisons between the way the US educational and scientific establishments responded to the Soviet threat in the 1950s to the way it is responding to China today. Tabarrok calls it the “Sputnik vs DeepSeek Moment”:

“In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik triggering a national reckoning in the United States … The country’s self-image as a global leader was shaken, creating the Sputnik moment.

The response was swift and ambitious. NSF funding tripled in a year and increased by a factor of more than ten by the end of the decade. The National Defense Education Act overhauled universities and created new student loan programs for foreign language students and engineers. High schools redesigned curricula around the “new math.” Homework doubled. NASA and ARPA (later DARPA) were created in 1958 …

America’s response to rising scientific competition from China – symbolised by DeepSeek’s R1 matching OpenAI’s o1 – has been very different. The DeepSeek Moment has been met not with resolve and competition but with anxiety and retreat.”

The observation sparked New York Times columnist David Brooks to join with Tabarrok and speculate on the causes for this change.

Tabarrok’s preferred explanation is the rise of zero-sum thinking in the United States – the belief that China’s gain must be America’s loss. Brooks unwittingly reinforces this explanation in a column last week. He lists a series of awe-inspiring Chinese scientific and technological advances to illustrate the extent to which the United States is falling behind. Yet Brooks never acknowledges that China’s advances don’t necessarily come at the expense of the United States and are in many cases beneficial to it. He assumes that technological progress in China can only have negative consequences for America.

Ultimately, Brooks opts for a moral judgment:

“This country sometimes feels exhausted, gridlocked, as if it has lost its faith in itself and contact with its future.”

A more persuasive interpretation of the Sputnik vs DeepSeek Moment starts with examining the stakes in the US-China competition, and whether it really is zero-sum. The big difference between the Cold War and the US competition with China today is that the United States did face an existential threat from the Soviet Union, at least in the early years following the Second World War. That was a time in which Soviet-led communist domination of the entire Eurasian landmass, from Western Europe to China, was a realistic prospect. It was feared that, if properly unified, economic and military power on that scale could overwhelm the United States.

Status anxiety has not been enough to motivate American action.

Whatever modern China’s many achievements, there is no prospect of it achieving dominance over Eurasia, or even over Asia. The other great powers, many of them nuclear-armed, will simply not allow it. And even if they did, the United States would still have a strong domestic economy, a large military, and nuclear weapons. What kind of threat could China pose in those circumstances?

Confusion over the nature of the threat is revealed in two articles Tabarrok cites with links. “Many influential voices do view China as a very serious, even existential, threat …”, he says. But there is nothing in either article that comes remotely close to describing an existential threat – if we mean a power that could conquer America territorially or destroy its political system, such that the United States, as we know it today, ceases to exist. Again, there is no realistic prospect of China achieving that kind of power.

It suggests a different conclusion about what is at stake in the competition between the United States and China: status.

The grasping for high stakes (“existential threat”) might really be an attempt to create cover for Americans who are worried about being demoted by one rung in technology, GDP, and as an Asian great power. But clearly, as the Sputnik-DeepSeek comparison shows, status anxiety has not been enough to motivate American action. China’s rapidly growing military stature hasn’t done the trick either – the US military presence in Asia has barely grown since the end of the Cold War. Nor have America’s intellectual elites raised their game to Cold War levels. Brooks is one of America’s leading public intellectuals, yet his column marks a relatively rare intervention in the China debate. An economist like Tabarrok might call this a revealed preference.

So, Brooks’ moral judgment is misplaced. If Americans really are “exhausted”, it might just be that they are tired of the foreign entanglements in which Brooks wants to ensnare them. There is no question about China’s scale – historian Adam Tooze recently referred to China’s rise as “the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history.” Being dethroned is unpleasant, but Americans seem to have concluded that it isn’t worth fighting over, particularly since their own country is likely to remain wealthy and secure anyway.

lowyinstitute.org · by Sam Roggeveen

21. Pentagon Risks Falling Behind in AI Influence and Info Ops

The referenced 48 page RAND report can be downloaded here: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA3100/RRA3157-1/RAND_RRA3157-1.pdf

Excerpts:

What Comes Next

The authors urged leaders in influence ops to press forward. That includes defining what they need, increasing funding, streamlining workflows, and teaming up with Pentagon-wide AI offices to tap into shared systems and resources.

They also recommended selecting the right teams to put these ideas into action.

Finally, the Office of Information Operations Policy and the Principal Information Operations Advisor are encouraged to take the lead in setting standards, offering training and setting rules for using AI-generated content responsibly in influence operations.

Pentagon Risks Falling Behind in AI Influence and Info Ops

The authors urged leaders in influence ops to press forward. That includes defining what they need, increasing funding, streamlining workflows, and teaming up with Pentagon-wide AI offices to tap into shared systems and resources.

2 minute read

militaryai.ai · by Rojoef Manuel · July 25, 2025

The US military needs more advanced generative AI tools to keep pace with Russia and China in the realm of online influence and information warfare, a Pentagon-backed study has revealed.

Generative AI could give US forces a critical edge in influence campaigns – an area where rivals are already operating at a scale the Pentagon struggles to match, according to research published by California-based nonprofit policy think tank RAND Corporation.

It emphasized that America could fall even further behind if it fails to adopt the tech at scale.

To assess current efforts, RAND consulted a small group of subject-matter experts, industry leaders, and other government researchers. It also hosted a workshop with influence-focused units to identify their operational and tactical needs for AI.

Funding, Coordination Needed

The study found that the Pentagon must overcome a serious lack of investment and coordination to stay competitive. Stronger collaboration among stakeholders could bolster tech procurement and long-term sustainment, it said.

Moreover, the paper said buying and fielding generative AI will require a smarter, more flexible approach, along with a plan to keep those tools running across joint and mission-specific teams.

“Already, multiple organizations are acquiring duplicative tools, leading to redundancies in investments,” RAND said.

“The cost of sustainment activities over the life cycle (routine maintenance, upgrades for improved capability, changes for interoperability) makes this need for coordination even more imperative to meet.”

Medium, Not Answer

The study highlighted that generative AI is a tool, not a standalone solution, for addressing challenges in influence operations, from planning and analysis to measuring impact.

While influence ops are often associated with multimedia messaging, RAND said AI’s true potential lies in supporting campaign planning, decision-making, and real-time assessments.

But there’s still no clear, department-wide strategy for how generative AI should be used, or what risks and opportunities it brings, for influence ops and information warfare, according to the study.

“Limited guidance on differentiating between the need for highly customized generative AI solutions and more broadly applicable commercial off-the-shelf alternatives confounds both vendors and [Department of Defense] acquisition officials,” RAND said.

“There are no standardized reassessment criteria for generative AI tools being used in influence. Users note that vendors are not incentivized to continue developing generative AI products after initial acquisition.”

What Comes Next

They also recommended selecting the right teams to put these ideas into action.

Finally, the Office of Information Operations Policy and the Principal Information Operations Advisor are encouraged to take the lead in setting standards, offering training and setting rules for using AI-generated content responsibly in influence operations.

militaryai.ai · by Rojoef Manuel · July 25, 2025

22. US-led forces kill senior IS leader in Syria

As General Fenton has said, we may have thought we were done with terorism, but terrorism is not done with us.

US-led forces kill senior IS leader in Syria

U.S.-led forces have killed a senior Islamic State leader in a raid in northwestern Syria

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/25/syria-coalition-islamic-state-albab-aleppo-centcom/65508d0c-6969-11f0-ac4f-195fdb8ee9a8_story.html

July 25, 2025 at 11:09 a.m. EDTYesterday at 11:09 a.m. EDT

By Associated Press

DAMASCUS, Syria — A raid by U.S.-led forces in northwestern Syria on Friday killed a senior leader in the Islamic State militant group, the U.S. military said Friday.

The U.S. Central Command said in a statement that it had killed IS leader Dhiya Zawba Muslih al-Hardan and his two adult sons, who were also affiliated with the group, early Friday in a raid in the town of al-Bab, in Syria’s Aleppo province.

Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.

It said the men “posed a threat to U.S. and Coalition Forces, as well as the new Syrian Government,” adding that three women and three children at the site were not harmed.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based war monitor, said the raid was carried out through an airdrop of forces, the first of its kind to be carried out by the U.S.-led coalition against IS this year, and that ground forces from both the Syrian government’s General Security forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces participated.

The observatory said the operation was “preceded by a tight security cordon around the targeted site, a heavy deployment of forces on the ground, and the presence of coalition helicopters in the airspace of the area.”

Following World news

Following

There was no statement from either the government in Damascus or the SDF about the operation.

Washington has developed increasingly close ties with the new Syrian government in Damascus since the fall of former President Bashar Assad in a lightning rebel offensive last year, and has been pushing for a merger of forces between the new Syrian army and the Kurdish-led SDF, which controls much of the country’s northeast.

However, progress between the two sides in agreeing on the details of the merger has been slow and could be further complicated by the recent outbreak of sectarian violence in the southern province of Sweida, in which government forces joined Sunni Muslim Bedouin clans in fighting against armed factions from the Druze religious minority.

Some government forces allegedly executed Druze civilians and burned and looted their houses. The violence has increased the wariness of other minority groups — including the Kurds — toward Damascus.

23. Media and information literacy in the disinformation age

The 45 page referenced report can be downloaded here: https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Rethinking_Media_Literacy_2025.pdf

Useful models below.

Excerpt:

While media and information literacy are increasingly recognized as essential, current efforts are not fully adapted to the realities of the digital age.

The information resilience mapping model offers a holistic framework for understanding and addressing disinformation, highlighting the need for coordinated, multi-level interventions that extend beyond individual education to include community, institutional and policy actions.

Media and information literacy in the disinformation age

Sasha Havlicek

Chief Executive Officer, Institute for Strategic Dialogue

Daniel Dobrygowski

Head, Governance and Trust, World Economic Forum

weforum.org

Disinformation is a more complex challenge than ever, amplified by technologies such as generative AI.
Effective media and information literacy must be integrated across all ages and sectors to build widespread information resilience.
A proposed new ecosystem model aims to identify gaps and target interventions at each stage of disinformation, while supporting systemic responses.

The ability to critically engage with information is more important than ever. From viral falsehoods and deepfakes to emotionally manipulative content designed to mislead or divide, the information environment has become increasingly complex and opaque.

In this context, media and information literacy have emerged as a global priority, recognized not only as a key individual skill set but also a foundational pillar for safeguarding democratic discourse, social cohesion and public trust.

Media and information literacy equips individuals with the tools to access, analyze, evaluate and create information responsibly, empowering them to navigate a digital ecosystem shaped by algorithmic curation, commercial incentives and evolving threats. Yet, its significance extends beyond personal empowerment.

As disinformation campaigns grow more sophisticated and pervasive, the need for a whole-of-society approach becomes clear, one that integrates media and information literacy into education systems, workplace training, public service messaging and digital platform design.

The latest report from the World Economic Forum’s Global Coalition for Digital Safety, Rethinking Media Literacy: A New Ecosystem Model for Information Integrity, introduces a holistic model for strengthening information integrity. It identifies multiple entry points for intervention and helps identify gaps in current efforts.

“

As generative AI and other technologies blur the lines between fact and fiction, the need for robust media and information literacy has never been greater.

”

Media and information literacy – growing scope and urgency

Media and information literacy is no longer limited to traditional media literacy. It now encompasses digital, human rights, news, advertising, computer, privacy and artificial intelligence (AI) literacy. This broad approach is designed to equip individuals with the skills to access, analyze, evaluate and create information across platforms and formats.

As generative AI and other technologies blur the lines between fact and fiction, the need for robust media and information literacy has never been greater.

Despite its recognized importance, media and information literacy efforts remain fragmented. Most initiatives focus on youth and formal education, leaving significant gaps in adult and lifelong learning. There is also a lack of coordination, long-term evaluation and resources, particularly outside the education sector.

Information resilience mapping model

At the heart of this new model is the integration of two complementary conceptual frameworks: the disinformation lifecycle and the socio-ecological model.

By aligning these perspectives, the framework helps better map the current media and information literacy landscape, highlighting gaps, surfacing opportunities for engagement and enabling coordinated, scalable impact over time.

The information resilience mapping model. Image: World Economic Forum

The socio-ecological model

The report draws on the socio-ecological model, which highlights how individual behaviours are embedded within and influenced by broader social systems. This model emphasizes a web of interrelated factors operating at multiple levels of society.

Individual level: At the core of the model are individuals and their personal capacities. Skills such as critical thinking, emotional literacy, media discernment and digital navigation are central to how people interpret and engage with information.
Interpersonal level: Families, friends, peers and mentors play a critical role in shaping information habits. Whether through forwarding messages or casual conversation, these interpersonal networks often serve as the first line of amplification or correction for false content.
Community level: Schools, religious groups, local media outlets and civil society organizations help reinforce or resist disinformation narratives. Community norms, trust in local institutions and access to locally relevant media all influence whether individuals are exposed to diverse perspectives.
Institutional level: Larger institutions, including educational systems, media companies and digital platforms, set the tone for the kinds of information produced, promoted or suppressed. Platform design, algorithmic incentives, journalistic standards and the resources allocated for media literacy all shape the information environment in which disinformation thrives.
Policy level: National, subnational and international regulations define the legal and structural boundaries for action. These policies create the enabling conditions for systemic responses to disinformation.

“

While media and information literacy are increasingly recognized as essential, current efforts are not fully adapted to the realities of the digital age.

”

The disinformation lifecycle

The other part of the model is the disinformation lifecycle on the x-axis. Each stage, from pre-creation to distribution and post-consumption, requires distinct and coordinated interventions to reduce both supply and demand.

Pre-creation: This phase is shaped by cultural norms, public awareness and perceptions of accountability. These underlying conditions determine whether disinformation finds fertile ground or fails to take hold, regardless of the specific narrative.
Creation: Focuses on the tools and conditions that enable the production of disinformation, particularly the ease with which high-impact content can be made. This challenge is amplified by the mass-market availability of generative AI, which accelerates the scale, precision and persuasiveness of false narratives.
Distribution: Examines how platforms contribute to the spread and normalization of disinformation. It highlights the algorithmic and structural factors that shape what content is surfaced, amplified or ignored. Increasing transparency is critical for accountability.
Consumption: Examines how individuals interact with information in their daily lives and how better habits can be cultivated. Interventions aim to promote critical engagement, reduce vulnerability to manipulation and empower users to challenge disinformation.
Post-consumption: Addresses the longer-term impacts of disinformation on individuals and society. Because disinformers adapt quickly, responses must include resilience strategies: planning for persistent harms, supporting those affected and reinforcing systems to respond to evolving threats even after false content circulates.

Towards a coordinated response

While media and information literacy are increasingly recognized as essential, current efforts are not fully adapted to the realities of the digital age.

The information resilience mapping model offers a holistic framework for understanding and addressing disinformation, highlighting the need for coordinated, multi-level interventions that extend beyond individual education to include community, institutional and policy actions.

weforum.org

24. Why the Revolution Never Ends (Marxist that is)

A long read to ponder over the weekend. Are we still at war with Marxism/Communism?

Useful history and analysis but a dire warning from the conclusion:

Americans and Europeans, in short, are converging on a version of the Chinese model, which is why McMeekin refers to “the surprising non-death of Communism,” whose story “is far from over.” It probably never will be. There will always be naive young idealists, “along with ambitious older politicians who may or may not share in the idealism—but are tempted by the promise of an all-encompassing state granting them vast power over their subjects.” Because the commissars of today “often work in the private sector (or for companies aligned with state intelligence),” their forms of control are, though less obvious than those of the NKVD, more “insidious.”

McMeekin wrote his book as a “helpful tonic for keeping despair at bay.” But for the reader it serves as a warning. “Far from dead,” reads the book’s last sentence, “communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.” Evidence that he is right keeps accumulating.

I just ordered Sean McMeekin's book to add to my "to read pile." To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism

Why the Revolution Never Ends

Marxism didn’t die. It just changed costumes. A historian of communism breaks down how today’s radicals rebranded the ideology for a new generation.

By Gary Saul Morson

07.24.25 — U.S. Politics

https://www.thefp.com/p/why-the-revolution-never-ends

A sculpture of Vladimir Lenin’s head rests amidst the debris. (Photo by Shepard Sherbell/CORBIS SABA/Corbis via Getty Images)

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Just when everyone at the monastery has heaved a sigh of relief that the repulsive villain of The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Pavlovich, has at last gone home after behaving scandalously, he reappears. “They thought I had gone, and here I am again,” he chortles maliciously, devising fresh disgraceful actions. In much the same way, Marxism, which we had all thought over and done with, has returned in new forms among the woke intelligentsia. Antifa, “occupiers” of this and that, antisemitic college mobs, and other American versions of Red Guards keep emerging, each outdoing the last. The slogan “Death to America!” is now heard not only in Tehran, Iran, and Pyongyang, North Korea, but also on campuses across the West. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously began The Communist Manifesto (1848) proclaiming that “a specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism,” but today it is more like a zombie, unexpectedly risen from the dead. History did not end, it just had taken a brief nap.

Refurbishing the old ideology was easy. It was only necessary to substitute other, more up-to-date oppositions for “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie” so the world could still be divided into virtuous oppressed and evil oppressors. Far from betraying Marxism, this flexibility was just what Marx and Vladimir Lenin had recommended. Lenin, who adapted an ideology focused on workers to a country still composed largely of peasants, deemed the rigid refusal to grasp present opportunities an “infantile disorder.” Marx himself had described a constant change of hostile classes: “freedman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.”

And why limit oneself to one opposition at a time? White and black, cis and trans, colonizer and colonized, and many more potentially unlimited contrasts now “intersect.” Just as endless purges shaped Joseph Stalin’s Russia and Mao Zedong’s China, ever new forms of oppression, macro and micro, are discovered, each flaunting its own difficult discourse and forbidden words, so that no one who fails to pay constant attention can speak safely. Despite occasional references to “class,” Marxism endures not primarily as a critique of capitalism but as a template for Manichaean struggle. History repeats itself, as Marx himself said, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Two new books (from the same publisher) reassessing the communist experience demonstrate Marxism’s surprising vitality. In Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism, Maurice Isserman, a historian at Hamilton College with a long record of radical action and writing, regrets that this wonderfully idealistic movement failed to capture America, largely because of obtuse Soviet meddling and a failure to adapt to American circumstances. “This book,” explains Isserman, “is an attempt to tell the story of American communism, not as an encyclopedic, esoteric, or antiquarian dive into ‘Party history,’ but as an integral part” of American history in which “social critics and agents of much-needed social change” struggled for a better world, only to become “targets of official repression and mass hysteria. Understanding the causes for their triumphs and their failures might provide a measure of insight into the political challenges of our own era.” The struggle continues.

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As if it had been written to answer Reds, Sean McMeekin’s To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism—the best short history of communism I know—tells a very different story. As the book’s subtitle suggests, communism fell only to rise again. Today it threatens liberal values even more dangerously, in part because we underestimate it but also because we have become less able to resist it.

In their classic study In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage, published by Encounter Books in 2003, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, the foremost historians of American communism, recognized earlier than most that, despite the collapse of the USSR, “a significant number of American academics still have soft spots in their hearts for the CPUSA [Communist Party USA], either because they applaud the causes it championed, deplore what they see as the persecution of those who fought for ‘social justice,’ romanticize the party’s accomplishments, disdain American capitalism, culture, and constitutional democracy, or honor . . . relatives who were party members.”

These “revisionist” historians challenged the “traditionalist” predecessors, who judged communism harshly. When Soviet archives were briefly open after the fall of the USSR, Jonathan Brent of Yale University Press initiated the Annals of Communism series of books, which published important, previously unknown documents. They showed beyond any reasonable doubt that the traditionalist view of communism was, if anything, too forgiving.

Although many revisionists persisted in sacrificing truth to ideology, Isserman, according to Haynes and Klehr, proved himself “one of the most able of the revisionist scholars.” Instead of denying Soviet crimes and communist espionage, Isserman instead tries in Reds to preserve as much of the old idealism as facts allow. He depicts the history of American communism as a “tragedy,” a noble endeavor defeated by a tragic flaw.

Most Americans grossly underestimate the influence once exercised by American communists. I myself was brought up to regard warnings about the “red menace” as paranoid or childish fears of “communists under the bed.” In fact, by the late 1940s, American communists controlled several labor unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), including the third largest, the United Electrical Workers, as well as the CIO Greater New York Industrial Union Council, which represented half a million workers in 250 city locales. According to Isserman, the communists also “maintained an informal working alliance with CIO president Philip Murray and the politically influential president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Sidney Hillman.”

Most Americans grossly underestimate the influence once exercised by American communists.

What’s more, Soviet agents—at least 221, according to Soviet NKVD (secret police) records—had successfully penetrated the highest levels of American government. They included Alger Hiss, who headed the Office of Special Political Affairs in the State Department, where he had access to classified military material. If one looks closely at the famous portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta, one can see Hiss, who accompanied FDR, standing behind the president’s chair. Another spy, Harry Dexter White, a close friend of Roosevelt, served as second-in-command at the Treasury Department.

The American Communist Party strongly supported FDR, who appointed a full-throated Soviet sympathizer, Joseph Davies, as his ambassador to Moscow. In Britain, the famous “Cambridge Spies” infiltrated the top ranks of the Foreign Office, MI6, the BBC, Army Intelligence, and the War Office. If FDR had died a few months earlier, his third-term vice president, Henry Wallace—who took a rosy view of the USSR—would have become president. Instead, it was his fourth-term vice president, Harry Truman (who understood the Soviet threat), who became president in April 1945.

Alger Hiss, an American government official accused of spying for the Soviet Union, is photographed before his trial in December 1948 in New York. (Irving Haberman/IH Images/Getty Images)

When Truman sought reelection in 1948, Wallace challenged him as the candidate of the Progressive Party, which was dominated by communists. Communist progressives even defeated a motion that the Progressive Party disavow “a blanket endorsement of the foreign policy of any nation”; they sought to endorse the foreign policy of the USSR, of course.

Radical historians, including Isserman, have argued ever since that the Cold War could have been avoided, or at least postponed, if Wallace had won. If only they had been willing to disobey counterproductive orders from Moscow, Isserman dreams, American communists might have succeeded.

The result was that, for all their commitment, discipline, self-sacrifice, and organizational prowess, communists in the United States were incapable of offering a meaningful vision of a good society, a “Soviet America,” that could possibly be made to appeal to any but a tiny portion of their fellow Americans.

Given that all Comintern member parties had explicitly agreed to fulfill Comintern orders without question, however, it is hard to see how they could have behaved differently.

To be sure, American communists might have avoided ideologically strained language, which reads like a poor translation of Soviet discourse. Isserman cites the “famously turgid” prose of the communist Daily Worker:

The 15th Plenum of our Party clearly establishes that the resolution of the 14th Plenum of the Party remains the basic guide for examining the work of the Party in carrying out the line of the 12th Plenum of the ECCI [Executive Committee of the Communist International].

Of course, today’s “critical theorists” often sound just as unnatural to ordinary people, perhaps because the ability to write in such an obscure way, comprehensible only to initiates, demonstrates membership in a perspicacious elite.

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Isserman bends over backward to confine criticism to CPUSA leaders. Yes, there really were communist spies, he concedes, but most CP members were patriotic idealists. “While a few hundred communists, to one extent or another, had been involved in espionage activities, the overwhelming majority, tens of thousands, had not,” he writes. As we would say today, communists were “mostly peaceful.” How could they know what their leaders were doing in secret? “Party leaders had all betrayed them and their cause, implicating communists by association in crimes in which they had no knowledge or involvement,” writes Isserman. But how could they not have known that something of the sort was going on? After all, the Comintern (and its successor, the Cominform) made no secret of its plans to undermine and overthrow “bourgeois” states by any means possible. After the shocking Hitler–Stalin pact of 1939 and the takeover of Eastern European governments in the late 1940s, how could something as routine as espionage have been surprising?

Yes, Isserman concedes, American communists and fellow travelers blinded themselves to what they could have known. He cites the explanation of the longtime communist Herbert Aptheker, who eventually left the party: “Many of us were easily deceived; we were credulous because we felt we had to be.” For Isserman, such willing self-deception, resulting as it did from idealistic motives, excuses—or at least seriously diminishes—responsibility. I don’t see why it should.

How could American communists have simultaneously been noble idealists and apologists for Stalin’s mass murders? Citing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous maxim that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” Isserman begins by insisting that “two seemingly incompatible things can be true simultaneously.” Readers too benighted to accept this paradox, he intones, “would be well advised to put this book down right now.” But there is nothing surprising about high-minded support of totalitarianism. On the contrary, it is idealists who are most likely to shut out counterevidence.

Isserman discerns a similar contradiction in the fact that the Communist Party “helped win democratic reforms . . . at the same time that the movement championed a brutal totalitarian state.” As a general rule, when people endorse contradictory positions, it is worth asking, from what point of view are those positions not contradictory? In this case, the answer is easy to find: If one’s goal is to take over a country, one gains supporters by advocating the very policies one would reject once in power. In 1921, the communist Robert Minor, debating a socialist, explained that a true revolutionary will take a position of free speech when it is the bourgeois dictatorship that is on top, and he will take a position against free speech when it is the workers on top.

In his celebrated contribution to The God That Failed (1949)—a collection of essays by famous writers describing how they lost faith in communism—the African American novelist Richard Wright explained that he left the party when he realized that communists, even though they took stands against racism, cared no more for African American rights than they did for free speech.

There is nothing surprising about high-minded support of totalitarianism. On the contrary, it is idealists who are most likely to shut out counterevidence.

Isserman also tries to diminish responsibility by arguing that while a few communists were guilty of “sins of commission,” such as espionage, most can be charged only with sins of “omission.” “The principal form taken by those sins of omission,” Isserman explains, “was the collective failure by communists to speak truthfully to others and, fatefully, to themselves” because of their keen desire for social justice.

He continues:

Communists, taken as individuals, could be altogether admirable people: intelligent, compassionate, self-sacrificing to a fault. And yet, whatever their personal qualities, the movement to which they devoted their lives was based on lies, not about everything, but certainly in regard to . . . the nature of the Soviet Union.

If so, then Isserman has a ready excuse for his own omissions. Discussing the Spanish Civil War, he omits mentioning that the Soviets not only infiltrated organizations of international volunteers but, as George Orwell described in Homage to Catalonia, also tried to eliminate all other leftist forces. Although Isserman mentions Whittaker Chambers, he never discusses Chambers’s Witness (1952), surely the most significant book to come out of the American communist movement. Again, Isserman refers to I. F. Stone, a hero of the anti–Vietnam War movement in which Isserman participated, as “close to the Communist Party,” when Stone had in fact once been a Soviet agent.

Despite knowing about Soviet crimes, Isserman subscribes to absurd moral equivalence. “The Soviet Union was not a workers’ paradise; nor, of course, was the United States a land of liberty and justice for all,” he lamely argues. Of course, one can always apologize for any regime, no matter how horrendous, by pointing out that no existing alternative is perfect either. Isserman also maintains that American liberals must share blame for the Cold War. Although “it was not irrational for Americans to be concerned about Stalin’s intentions in the later 1940s . . . reason was adulterated with hysteria,” writes Isserman—especially by Truman and other fanatical anti-communists. “Perhaps Franklin Roosevelt would have found a way to lessen if not eliminate postwar tensions with the Soviet Union had he not died shortly before victory was achieved over Nazi Germany,” Isserman surmises, but “his successor was not so inclined.”

Such reasoning alarms McMeekin. How can it be that, however many times Marx’s predictions fail and Bolshevik horrors come to light, Marxism continues to enthrall intellectuals? Why was Che Guevara widely regarded as a hero, McMeekin wonders, long after Stalin’s purges and gulags were well-known? What explains how Alberto Korda’s iconic image of him, entitled Heroic Guerrilla Fighter, inspired a cult of this murderer lasting for generations? “It is curious that his death was mourned by more people in Washington, D.C. (50,000), than in Moscow (200),” McMeekin observes. “Che was the single most admired celebrity among American college students in a 1968 poll, and he has never since lost his mojo,” as we see from the widely circulated image of Barack Obama based on Korda’s Che.

Robert Conquest wisely observed that Marxism captivates not in spite of its mass killings but because of them. That is why it attracted far more enthusiastic American followers during Stalin’s great terror than in the less brutal reigns of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, when admiration shifted to the even more murderous Mao. I wonder whether a similar fascination with brutality explains why, on October 7, 2023, and in the days that followed, some progressives cheered Hamas.

Students hold flags with the face of Che Guevara during an anti-Vietnam War sit-in at North Carolina State University in 1970. (Stuart Lutz/Gado/Getty Images)

For McMeekin, the essence of communism, and the source of its endless appeal, lies not in its outdated economics but in its totalitarian imperative to destroy utterly the old world, reject all traditional values, and completely remake both individuals and society. The apocalypse is never out of date. Despite its market reforms and economic modernization, China is still, in McMeekin’s view, an essentially communist country using the latest technology not to liberate but to surveil people further. The richer it grows, the more tools for repression China deploys.

So understood, communism displayed its true nature in the Cultural Revolution’s violent destruction of “the four olds”—old thought, old culture, old customs, and old habits. Libraries were torched, as were Christian churches, ancient Chinese pagodas, Buddhist temples, and other monuments. As Frank Dikötter’s celebrated study of this movement shows, Mao’s destruction went further than Stalin’s. Countless artworks and precious ancient manuscripts were destroyed. If not for repositories in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and discoveries unearthed later (like the terra-cotta soldiers), whole periods of Chinese culture would have been lost. “Struggle sessions” replaced traditional education because, in Mao’s notorious explanation to the Red Guards, “the more you study, the stupider you become.”

The Chinese-supported Cambodian Khmer Rouge went still further. Pol Pot emptied whole towns by deporting not just “class enemies,” as Mao had done, but everyone. Patients in hospital beds had to march or die. The ancient royal capital of Oudong was looted, its priceless Buddhist manuscripts destroyed. One survivor cited by McMeekin explained that the goal was “stripping away, through terror and other means, the traditional bases, structures, and forces which have guided an individual’s life,” until each person “is left an atomized, isolated individual unit; and then rebuilding him according to party doctrine.”

A group of Chinese children circa 1968 read Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book during China’s Cultural Revolution. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

McMeekin quotes another man lucky enough to have escaped: “There were no schools, no money, no communications, no books, no courts. . . . Surveillance was constant and mutual.” At compulsory meetings, people were told that “the perfect revolutionary . . . should not experience any feeling, was forbidden to think about spouse and children, could not love.” The goal was for a person to resemble an ox: “When we tell him to pull the plough, he pulls it. He never thinks of his wife or his children.”

Coercion was not just a means, writes McMeekin, “coercion itself was the point, the reduction of free-willed humans to animals, enslaved by robotic, heavily armed children who had themselves been deprived of genuine education, human warmth, or feeling.”

Far from a deviation, Khmer Rouge practice is, for McMeekin, communism’s most perfect realization. In Cambodia, communism “was reduced to its essentials, as a negation of everything existing . . . a social leveling of society down to equality in abject poverty and misery.” According to McMeekin, communism always gained power by force and never by persuasion, not only because it was inherently unpersuasive but also because persuasion and dialogue implicitly acknowledge the autonomy of the individual.

McMeekin is surely correct that force was an end in itself. And he has a point that the essence of Marxism is not a collectivist economy, as usually assumed, but the dehumanization of individuals by terror. George Orwell concurred. At the end of 1984, O’Brien tells Winston that he should imagine the future as a boot stomping on a human face forever.

Communism displayed its true nature in the Cultural Revolution’s violent destruction of “the four olds”—old thought, old culture, old customs, and old habits.

Far from pretending otherwise, Lenin scorned anything but force, which was to be used not as necessary but whenever possible. The fundamental fact about Soviet coercive power, he insisted, is that it was and always would be unlimited. Soviet schoolchildren learned Lenin’s definition of “dictatorship of the proletariat” as “nothing more nor less than authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force. The term ‘dictatorship’ has no other meaning but this.”

Contrary to what Western admirers have assumed, terror for Lenin was not just a necessary expedient for seizing power, but essential to communism itself. As Lenin instructed the People’s Commissar of Justice D. I. Kursky, charged with formulating the new law code: “The law should not abolish terror . . . it should be substantiated and legalized in principle, clearly, without evasion or embellishment.”

By the same token, the Bolsheviks created the secret police (Cheka) not in response to organized resistance, but a month after the seizure of power, before there was any resistance. Civil war was not the regrettable consequence of that seizure but the purpose of seizing it, as Lenin had long insisted. The point was to eliminate not just opponents but all “class enemies,” even if they supported Bolshevik rule.

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As the Cheka leader M. I. Latsis instructed revolutionary tribunals dispensing summary justice in 1918:

Do not seek in your accusations proof of whether the prisoner rebelled against the Soviets with guns or by word. First you must ask him to what class he belongs, what his social origin is. . . . These answers must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror.

Mao agreed. At a birthday party he celebrated as the Cultural Revolution was beginning, he gave a toast: “To the unfolding of a nationwide civil war!” “Killing counter-revolutionaries,” he explained, “is even more joyful than a good downpour.”

Compulsory labor—Leon Trotsky forthrightly called it slavery—was also intended at first to be a permanent feature of Soviet communism. Given natural human laziness, Trotsky explained, there is no alternative to the market but naked force. The policies retrospectively called “war communism” were not, as that term suggests, a temporary expedient. They included the abolition of money as well as all exchange outside of government control, which was henceforth called “speculation.” Grain was requisitioned from peasants by force, leading first to rebellions that were put down with maximum brutality and then, once peasants realized they were supposed to work for nothing, to a famine costing some five million lives, roughly twice as many as all the Frenchmen and Englishmen killed during World War I. The death toll would have been much higher if not for the American Relief Administration and Red Cross, which Lenin at last allowed to help. Far from a deviation from Leninist practice, as apologists for communism have maintained, Stalinist terror was a direct continuation of it.

As the novelist Vasily Grossman explained in Life and Fate (1959), “The violence of the totalitarian State is so great as to be no longer a means to an end; it becomes an object of mystical worship”—mystical because the Bolsheviks endowed it with what had previously been considered supernatural power. Terror was supposedly capable of accomplishing what Engels called “the leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom,” that is, to a world in which humanity no longer submits to laws of nature but alters them as needed. When one of Lenin’s favorites, Yuri Piatakov, was reproached by an émigré friend for abandoning his former Trotskyite opinions, Piatakov explained that the essential element of the “boundless coercion” Lenin demanded is not coercion itself but the absence of any limit whatsoever—moral, political, and even physical, as far as that goes. Such a party is capable of achieving miracles and doing things that no other collective of men could achieve.

Contrary to what Western admirers have assumed, terror for Vladimir Lenin was not just a necessary expedient for seizing power, but essential to communism itself.

Mao shared this Promethean view. Bypassing the dull, step-by-step acquisition of material wealth, the Great Leap Forward plunged China into what McMeekin calls “an abyss of forced labor madness.” “Three Years of Hard Labor Is Ten Thousand Years of Happiness,” promised Mao’s slogan. Fields were to be plowed to an unprecedented depth and fertilized with disassembled chicken coops, pig pens, dwellings, and animal as well as human excrement. As one party boss explained, “even shit has to be collectivized.” People were left homeless in accord with the Maoist slogan, “Destroy Straw Huts in an Evening, Erect Residential Areas in Three Days, Build Communism in a Hundred Days.” The result was the deadliest famine in history.

Today China relies on less dramatic but more effective means to achieve total control. The social-credit system, for instance, uses information from surveillance to deny access to schooling, travel, and banking services to people failing to toe the line. Those who seek total control over American life, McMeekin warns, are borrowing similar methods: “Private (or semi-private) social media and other tech companies are harnessed by the state to track, monitor, censor, and control private communication, speech, and political activity.”

A device monitors passenger flow in Shanghai, China. (VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Americans need to know the history of communism, McMeekin explains, because they are facing a new version of it. As the Covid epidemic illustrates, government officials use every excuse to restrict or eliminate previously inviolable freedoms. Social distancing, McMeekin argues, was in fact “a CCP [Chinese Communist Party] import” originally “imposed in 2002–2003 in response to outbreaks of avian flu” and SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), and then, “owing to CCP influence, incorporated into pandemic guidelines by the World Health Organization” and subsequently adopted by American authorities. “ ‘Lockdown’ had absolutely no basis in the Western tradition,” McMeekin explains. Even during the Black Death of the 14th century, “sick people might have been quarantined against their will, but never the entire healthy population.” The West adopted the sort of “statist population control” typical of communist regimes.

Americans and Europeans, in short, are converging on a version of the Chinese model, which is why McMeekin refers to “the surprising non-death of Communism,” whose story “is far from over.” It probably never will be. There will always be naive young idealists, “along with ambitious older politicians who may or may not share in the idealism—but are tempted by the promise of an all-encompassing state granting them vast power over their subjects.” Because the commissars of today “often work in the private sector (or for companies aligned with state intelligence),” their forms of control are, though less obvious than those of the NKVD, more “insidious.”

McMeekin wrote his book as a “helpful tonic for keeping despair at bay.” But for the reader it serves as a warning. “Far from dead,” reads the book’s last sentence, “communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.” Evidence that he is right keeps accumulating.

This article was originally published in The New Criterion.

The Free Press earns a commission from all qualifying purchases made through book links in this article, including as an Amazon Associate.

25. A timeless Chinese game is hooking people across D.C. and the nation

Chinese soft power?

We should be playing Go (which I do on my phone and computer and I always lose).

Photosat the link.

A timeless Chinese game is hooking people across D.C. and the nation

Interest in mah-jongg is surging, thanks in part to a coterie of coaches and instructors, social media influencers, and luxe spaces to play.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/07/24/mah-jongg-dc/?utm

On Saturday, millennials play mah-jongg

Grandma’s favorite game is popping up at nightspots in D.C. and around the country.

July 24, 2025

By Maura Judkis

Last February, my friend Fiona texted a question to me and two other friends: Who wants to learn how to play mah-jongg?

None of us — a group of millennial moms in our late 30s and early 40s — had ever played the game, often thought of as a retirement community pastime for Asian and Jewish grandparents. But we love a good pretext for cocktails and gossip. And we’d heard rumblings of a resurgence among women our age, won over by mah-jongg’s combination of luck, skill, and socialization. So Liz ordered a cheap set of tiles. We DoorDashed dinner from Chang Chang, then sat down to memorize a chart of Chinese numerals and watch a YouTube tutorial. A few rounds later, we were hooked, and before long, our group text had a new name: Momjong.

We were, it turned out, extremely on-trend. Interest in mah-jongg is surging in D.C. and nationwide, thanks in part to a coterie of coaches and instructors, social media influencers, and luxe spaces to play. New York hotels including the Ace and the Standard have hosted mah-jongg nights; mah-jongg influencers post videos of candy-colored tiles, over-the-top tablescapes, and games set up on floating tables in swimming pools, or girls’ nights in floral dresses, with plenty of wine.

The mah-jongg parlor at Lucky Danger. (Alex Kent/The Washington Post)

Celebrities have gotten into it, too: Meghan Sussex, neé Markle, raved about her mah-jongg nights with friends — she calls them her “Maj Squad” — during her series, “With Love, Meghan.” Actresses Julia Roberts, Sarah Jessica Parker and Amy Poehler have also discussed learning the game. Designer labels including Ralph Lauren and Hermes have designed luxury sets that cost thousands of dollars.

In our region, Joy by Seven Reasons in Chevy Chase hosts chic mah-jongg nights with instructors to help game newbies and a menu of mah-jongg-themed cocktails. And the new Chinatown-adjacent location of Lucky Danger has a back room mah-jongg parlor with fancy auto-shuffling tables, decor inspired by the Jackie Chan movie “Rush Hour,” and a special menu of overproof whiskeys. There are gameplay nights at the Capital Jewish Museum and the Martin Luther King Jr. library.

Lucky Danger chef Tim Ma grew up playing mah-jongg, and wanted to offer the game as a “culture passion project,” he says. But the restaurant’s mah-jongg classes, which are taught by his father, also named Tim Ma, have consistently sold out.

“It feels like the culture is being seen,” Ma says.

Tim Ma, the owner of Lucky Danger, sets up a mahjong table before teaching a class on how to play the game. (Alex Kent/The Washington Post)

Iwon’t turn this story into a mah-jongg lesson, but to outline the basics: The objective of this game is to form sets of consecutive or matched pairs, much like gin rummy. A good mah-jongg hand is both strategy and good luck, because deciding which pairs to pursue is informed by the random draw of tiles you are dealt and calculating your odds based on which tiles other players have discarded. The first player to form a winning combination gets to declare “Mah-jongg!” and reveal their hand with a victorious flourish.

Mah-jongg was invented around the turn of the 20th century, an evolution of an older Chinese card game. In her book “Mahjong: House Rules from Across the Asian Diaspora,” Nicole Wong, founder of the Mahjong Project, writes that the first documented appearance of a mah-jongg set in the United States was at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The game trended in the U.S. in the 1920s after an executive who had lived in China introduced it to well-to-do friends in California. A group of Jewish American women who were fans of the game created the National Mah Jongg League in 1937, developing an American style of the game and creating a lasting affinity for it within a culture that, like the Chinese, was othered in America.

Mah-jongg had another resurgence with the 1993 film “The Joy Luck Club.” And the current one has been building ever since a pivotal scene in 2018’s “Crazy Rich Asians,” in which the protagonist uses a game of mah-jongg to best her snobbish, wealthy mother-in-law-to-be.

Mah-jongg! (Alex Kent/The Washington Post)

Wong’s book, a glossy-pink instruction manual and love letter to her family’s favorite pastime, outlines tips for Chinese-style gameplay and the more than a dozen regional variations from countries throughout southeast Asia. (The transliterated word, too, has a number of accepted spellings; We’ve gone with mah-jongg, as per the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.) The styles that seem to be most popular here in D.C. are Chinese and American, which differ in their rules, scoring and number of tiles used. American mah-jongg is scored according to an annual card produced by the National Mah Jongg League. The card changes every year and is met with great anticipation and the occasional scandal: This year’s contained a misprint.

After a few sessions of self-taught Chinese-style mah-jongg at home and an upgrade to a vintage Bakelite set gifted to Fiona by her mother-in-law, my friends and I wanted to level up. So Momjong headed to Lucky Danger’s parlor, cocktails in hand — food isn’t allowed in the mah-jongg room to keep the tables nice — for a lesson with DC Mahj Collective, led by duo Sallie Routh and Mary Kate Craven, who were drawn to the game as a way to build community after becoming mothers.

“Chinese, American, Singaporean, whatever style of mah-jongg you’re playing, It’s a really sweet way to bring people together,” Craven says. “I think connection is more important now than ever in a post-pandemic landscape.”

Cocktails are encouraged. (Alex Kent/The Washington Post)

When I looked at the mah-jongg card that Routh and Craven handed to me, I felt like I was trying to decipher the enigma code. It was filled with lines of letters and numbers in different colors, all representing different combinations of tiles that can win mah-jongg, and divided into categories like “Quints,” “Consecutive Runs,” and “Winds-Dragons.” Some of the 55 lines on the card look like this:

FF 123 4444 5555 (Any 3 suits, Any 5 Consec. Nos.)

FF 333 D 666 D 999 D (Any 3 Suits w Matching Dragons)

NNNN EEE WWW SSSS

That last one caught my eye, of course. N, E, W, and S represented the tiles called winds, and their cardinal directions — north, east, west, and south — but also spelled out “news,” which charmed this journalist. Wouldn’t it be fun if I could win mah-jongg with NEWS? I thought.

Routh and Craven broke down American-style mah-jongg’s peculiarities in easily understandable ways, teaching us the language and etiquette of calling tiles when discarded, and claiming other players’ tiles, (“Two bam.” “Five crack.” “Soap.” “Birdbam.” “Pung.”) and deciphering the card so that we would understand how to build winning hands. Fiona won twice. We felt like we were finally beginning to understand both styles.

(Alex Kent/The Washington Post)

The game can be strangely addicting, and everyone seems to have a different reason why they got hooked. For Wong, the author, it’s nostalgia, as well as the tactile experience of playing.

“There’s a real sensory part of this game, and so I do feel like memories kind of like, take hold in that,” she said during a May book talk at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art. “You hear that sound” of the tiles clacking, “and you’re just like, ‘Oh my God, I’m 10 years old again, learning from my auntie how to play.’”

For Ma, it’s the thrill of victory: “You’re talking s--- to each other,” he says. When someone calls mah-jongg, “everybody turns over [their tiles] and looks at each other’s hands like, ‘How close were you?’”

For the ladies of DC Mahj Collective, it’s the intergenerational aspect of the game. They frequently teach twentysomethings, and also septuagenarians. Study after study has shown that mahjong has a positive impact on cognition and socialization for people as they age, thanks to the problem-solving and socialization the game promotes.

“We have people come who are like, ‘I want to learn to play with my grandmother, or my aunt, or my mom,’” Routh says.

(Alex Kent/The Washington Post)

The mah-jongg resurgence has not come without a few cringeworthy moments. In 2021, a Dallas company called the Mahjong Line founded by White women was accused of cultural appropriation for selling redesigned American-style mah-jongg tile sets that replaced all the Asian references with other pictures that the founders said more closely reflected their personalities.

“Everyone can play it, but I think once it’s being taken and kind of like, claimed to be something of your own without that broader acknowledgement,” it crosses a line, Wong said during her book talk.

Respect for the game’s origins is an issue that dates back to the very beginning of mah-jongg’s history in America: White Americans who played the game in the ’20s often perpetuated Orientalist tropes, sometimes even dressing up in Chinese attire. I couldn’t help but notice that many of the American-style mah-jongg brands with big followings on social media appeared to be White, Southern and preppy, like a sorority.

“When we were building our business, we were trying to very much respect the fact that we did not invent this game,” says Routh, who is careful to emphasize mah-jongg’s history and tradition in her teaching. “It didn’t start with us.”

Three generations of the Ma family, Tim Ma, Charlotte Ma, and Tim Ma, supervise students as they learn to play. (Alex Kent/The Washington Post)

The true test came two weeks later, when Fiona and I joined a mah-jongg night at Joy by Seven Reasons in Chevy Chase, where we were seated with two more advanced players. Allison and Blair, we learned, were regulars at this event, and had been taking lessons from longtime instructor Caryn Fagan, who began the evening with a quiz: “How many suits” of tiles are there?

Three.

“And the names of the suits are?” Crack, bam, and dots.

“And the red dragon goes with?” Crack, and the green is bam, and the white dragon goes with dots, unless it’s also a zero, and ... Fiona and I looked at each other with uncertainty.

But mah-jongg clacks, and then it clicks: Supervised by Fagan and her team of instructors, we were able to start pulling patterns out of our hands, making order out of chaos. Fiona won one round, Allison won another. Each new hand was a little puzzle to solve, a test of quick thinking and strategy, boosted by a little luck.

Mah-jongg is old-school, analog. When Fagan plays, she says, “I leave all my troubles at the door and focus on my hand. . . I love the camaraderie of it, getting together with my friends. We share good things and bad things. We support each other.”

I looked at my hand, which was shaping up to be a good one. Two joker tiles, and several winds. I drew another E. Discarded a seven dot. Drew another W. A third joker finally made it happen: NNNN EEE WWW SSSS.

“Mah-jongg!”

(Alex Kent/The Washington Post)

What readers are saying

The comments reflect a diverse range of perspectives on the resurgence of mah-jongg among millennials, highlighting its appeal as a social activity. Some commenters appreciate the game's strategic elements and its ability to bring people together, while others note its historical... Show more

This summary is AI-generated. AI can make mistakes and this summary is not a replacement for reading the comments.

Comments 63

By Maura Judkis

Maura Judkis is a features reporter for The Washington Post. She is a two-time James Beard Award winner. She joined The Post in 2011. follow on X@MauraJudkis

26. The Most-Taught Books in American Classrooms Have Barely Changed in 30 Years

Some have been more than 50 years since I was in high school.

The Most-Taught Books in American Classrooms Have Barely Changed in 30 Years

‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘The Great Gatsby’ and other classics still dominate school reading lists

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/books-most-popular-american-schools-class-982c57fd?st=tk7GAy&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Sara Randazzo

July 24, 2025 7:00 am ET

Key Points

What's This?

A new report reveals that English teachers still rely on the same classic books they did over thirty years ago.
Classics remain popular due to available resources, curriculum inertia, and challenges in getting newer books approved.
While diversity in schools increases, teachers face censorship and also struggle to engage teens with older texts.

Teenagers in English classrooms today in many ways seem a world apart from students decades ago. The books sitting on their desks, however, are remarkably similar.

Classics including Shakespeare plays, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” and Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” all appear in the top 10 books assigned by English teachers at public middle and high schools today, according to a new report. Six of the top 10—John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” and “Hamlet” among them—overlap with the most-taught books reported in an influential 1989 study.

“We’re all shocked that what’s being taught has shifted so little from 30 years prior,” said Emily Kirkpatrick, the executive director of the National Council of Teachers of English, which produced the new report.

The staying power of the classics, Kirkpatrick and English teachers say, has as much to do with inertia as literary merit. Building the curriculum around a book and buying physical copies for each student takes time and resources. The internet is awash with ways to teach “Romeo and Juliet,” the most popular book on the new list, but teachers say fewer resources exist related to newer releases.

Introducing a new text also often involves several layers of approvals and scrutiny.

When high-school English teacher Gina Kortuem noticed her sophomores were no longer responding to “Animal Farm,” by George Orwell, she wanted to sub in Trevor Noah’s 2016 autobiography “Born a Crime.”

She learned the timing wasn’t right at her parochial school in suburban St. Paul, Minn., to buy a new batch of books. Kortuem herself also started to question the age-appropriateness of some of the language in the comedian’s memoir, which tracks his upbringing as a mixed-race child in apartheid South Africa. Instead, Kortuem decided to teach “Julius Caesar.”

“If it’s newer, fewer people have heard of it, and you have to push so much harder to get it approved,” she said.

As the student population in America’s public schools becomes more diverse—white students are no longer the majority, at 44%—the English teachers association and others have encouraged teaching texts from a wider range of voices. All of the authors of the top 10 books are white, with eight by men and two by women.

Long Island, N.Y., high-school teacher Brian Sztabnik has taught a lot of the classics in his Advanced Placement classes, including Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” A few years ago, he added a newer historical fiction book, “Mudbound” by Hillary Jordan, after hearing about it in online teacher forums.

One year, Jordan came to visit Sztabnik’s classroom, giving the students a chance to ask her questions about the novel, set in 1946 Mississippi. “Just that possibility of real-life authors being able to interact with students,” Sztabnik said, “could be that one small thing that bridges that gap from absolute boredom and apathy to engagement.”

Some teachers accomplish greater diversity through short stories, poems and excerpts, which are easier to add and subtract from lessons than full-length books.

The power of the classics is their ability to create shared cultural touchpoints, said Michael Hicks, a recently retired English teacher in Los Angeles. “We need these through lines,” he said. “We need common ways to think about our culture and talk about things.”

The new study is drawn from in-depth surveys of more than 4,000 middle- and high-school English teachers. Almost 44% of the respondents said they had experienced some form of censorship regarding which books they could teach, from parents, school boards or elsewhere.

Some of the most censored titles teachers reported were Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel “The Bluest Eye,” “The Hate U Give,” a 2017 young-adult novel by Angie Thomas, and 2007’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie.

Some classics were as popular to teach as to ban, like Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”—a top book in the 1980s—and Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird,” which was also among the current most-taught books.

The report found that teachers in more affluent and whiter areas had more autonomy in choosing their own curriculum and books. About one in five teachers said they had the freedom to choose all of their texts, with one in five also saying none of the texts were their choice.

The National Council of Teachers of English says the report is the most comprehensive look at what is being taught by English teachers since a 1989 federally funded survey done by State University of New York researchers.

In the smartphone and TikTok era, English teachers have battled growing disengagement from teenagers, who sometimes have trouble focusing on full books. In a federal survey of students who were 13 as of 2023, 14% reported reading for fun almost every day, down from 27% in 2012 and 35% in 1984.

Sticking with only the classics, said Rex Ovalle, a teacher at Oak Park and River Forest High School in Illinois, isn’t the way to win over modern teens.

“I more than anything want to create a lifelong reader,” he said.

Write to Sara Randazzo at sara.randazzo@wsj.com

These are the most-assigned books in American schools today. Which is your favorite?

1. Romeo And Juliet

2. The Great Gatsby

3. The Crucible

4. Macbeth

5. Of Mice And Men

6. To Kill A Mockingbird

7. Night

8. Hamlet

9. Fahrenheit 451

10. Frankenstein

These are the most-assigned books from 1989. Which is your favorite?

1. Romeo and Juliet

2. Macbeth

3. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

4. Julius Caesar

5. To Kill a Mockingbird

6. The Scarlet Letter

7. Of Mice and Men

8. Hamlet

9. The Great Gatsby

10. Lord of the Flies

These are the most-censored books in American schools today. Which book are you most surprised to see?

1. The Bluest Eye

2. To Kill a Mockingbird

3. The Hate U Give

4. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

5. Gender Queer

6. The Handmaid’s Tale

7. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower

9. The Kite Runner

10. Looking for Alaska

Appeared in the July 26, 2025, print edition as 'Books in English Class Shift Little in Decades'.

27. ‘Monopoly X’ Review: The Board Game Gambit (WWII POWs)

‘Monopoly X’ Review: The Board Game Gambit

During World War II, innocent-seeming Monopoly game sets were a useful tool in the hands of crafty Allied intelligence services.

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/monopoly-x-review-the-board-game-gambit-e19c1dd0?st=2ZzxbU&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

By Clive Priddle

July 25, 2025 11:10 am ET

Photo: Dan Page

During World War II, a few imaginative, skilled and very discreet printers, designers and executives turned a beloved board game into a get-out-of-jail device for prisoners of war. The idea was so good, and so well executed, that at the conclusion of the war almost all records of the plan were either shredded or buried by the various official-secrets acts in Britain and America. Only at the end of the 1980s, when the prospect of armed conflict with the Soviet Union disappeared (followed by the U.S.S.R. itself) did some aspects of the wartime scheme begin to be acknowledged publicly. In “Monopoly X,” Philip E. Orbanes, a former executive at Parker Bros. and an author of several books about Monopoly, has produced the fullest version of the role that a familiar board game played in the war.

Grab a Copy

Monopoly X: How Top-Secret World War II Operations Used the Game of Monopoly to Help Allied POWs Escape, Conceal Spies, and Send Secret Codes

Parker Bros. introduced Monopoly in the U.S. in 1935. But it was Waddingtons, the British licensee of the game, that turned the game into a wartime secret weapon. Waddingtons was a printing firm led by a man named Victor Watson, whose son, Norman, had convinced him to take on the Monopoly license the same year. A version of the game was produced that used London streets and proved very lucrative.

Norman Watson was wealthy, patriotic and had connections to London’s shadowy intelligence world. He also believed there was a national need to rescue as many as possible of the airmen who had been shot down over occupied Europe and were being held as POWs.

Waddingtons was already very involved in the war effort: It contributed cartridges needed for explosives production and quietly took to printing British and European banknotes when the better known printer, De La Rue, was bombed during the Blitz. And in a subbasement, “the room we never speak of,” a group of designers and printers doctored sets of Monopoly at the request of MI9, a wartime division dedicated to getting the POWs back home.

Waddingtons, clearly, wasn’t just a game maker but a game changer. The company produced specially adapted sets, indistinguishable from the standard ones, in which falsified documents and vital pieces of escape equipment were embedded. In Mr. Orbanes’s telling, Norman Watson’s meeting with his MI9 contact, “Clutty,” reads like a comic moment in a John le Carré novel: “I want you to alter a Monopoly game by hiding certain items inside its board. Include a map . . . and these.”

Clutty reached into his pocket and produced a tiny compass, not more than a half inch in diameter, along with a flat saw blade six inches in length. “Make sure they do not rattle, nor give away their presence with bumps or depressions. When you are satisfied with your work, call me at this number.”

Clutty handed Watson a business card bearing the name George Bunson. “That’s me. I have a secretary. She’ll answer and say I am a solicitor. Do not be put off.”

The doctored boards were sent to Allied prison camps in Germany, shipped alongside unaltered sets via charities like the Red Cross or by other, innocent-sounding organizations such as the Sussex Ladies Benevolent Society (which didn’t exist). A deliberately placed dot on the Free Parking square was the only clue that a board held secret items and needed to be handed over to the ranking intelligence officer among the POWs.

The first beneficiary of the Monopoly gambit was Airey Neave, who broke out of Oflag IV-C, better known as Colditz, thanks to a lock pick, local currency, a compass and a map. After his return to London he was recruited into MI9 so he could assist other escapees. In later life he became a Conservative member of Parliament and one of Margaret Thatcher’s most devoted supporters.

15 Books We Read This week

The case for nuclear power, film-editing magic, how Monopoly played a part in World War II and more.

“Monopoly X” is more than a collection of escape stories, however. Mr. Orbanes also weaves in the story of Harold Cole, a moral chameleon and double or triple agent who adopted the nickname “the Top Hat” from his fondness for the Monopoly playing piece. Cole’s story folds around the escapees because he was intimately connected with sabotaging one of the escape lines in France.

After his betrayal was discovered, Cole worked exclusively for the Nazis: “Cole was offered a choice,” the author tells us, “execution following torture if he did not cooperate, or a paid position as a double agent if he agreed to help the Abwehr arrest everyone Cole knew to be working for escape lines. . . . With a tip of his hat, this Monopoly player, army deserter, false captain, gigolo, and erstwhile hero chose to betray his country and become a consummate traitor.”

The role of Monopoly expanded once the U.S. joined the war and started to lose pilots. Gen. Carl Spaatz, commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, appreciated the potential of the game to smuggle messages and equipment to downed Americans. He began to run a parallel operation with the help of a new unit named Military Intelligence Service—Department X. Except that MIS-X never told Parker Bros. Its operatives simply bought up games from local retailers and adapted the boards discreetly. Parker Bros. executives, Mr. Orbanes reports, could never explain the extraordinary sales spike they saw in the Washington, D.C., area during the war years.

The most inventive adaptation of Monopoly by the U.S., however, came through its use as part of a shared code cipher based on the cards from the game. This code became critical to the exchange of messages from a highly placed Soviet spy who sent a terrifying alert: “The message was unlike any anticipated,” Mr. Orbanes writes breathlessly: “THREE TRAITORS IN WHITE HOUSE MAYBE FOUR.” Tracking down the spies in turn required encrypted communication, for which Monopoly cards were again the key.

“Monopoly X” zigzags among various storylines in Britain and the U.S., and among POWs, escape routes and intelligence operations, pursuing the characters touched by Monopoly through to the war’s conclusion. Mr. Orbanes isn’t a subtle enough writer to balance all the competing information: Some narratives feel underdeveloped, some characters disappear right as they become interesting and some of his judgments are questionable, especially at the end. The author isn’t a professional historian; much of the book’s material is derived from his own conversations with people who knew the participants, and there are no footnotes to help the reader identify his source for any given piece of information.

But in a way that is also the point. Monopoly’s secret history was kept secret for a reason. Intelligence is a world where discretion trumps record-keeping. A professional historian would never have been able to find this story; it had to be written by an insider, someone who has spent many hours around the table in the company of fellow specialists who love every nuance of the game. Mr. Orbanes is certainly that, and we have him to thank for recording some truly memorable acts that might otherwise never have come to light.

The tantalizing and mysterious Benoîte Jean, for instance, was an escape-line courier in Strasbourg, France, and probably much more besides. Her almost unbelievably romantic story includes the killing of a rapacious German officer, two affairs, the smuggling of secret codes to the American spymaster Allen Dulles and other acts of extraordinary heroism. She and her equally shadowy husband may even have continued their espionage work into the Cold War era.

In 1992 Mr. Orbanes was in Berlin, attending the World Monopoly Championship as a judge when, during a break, he was introduced to a woman who called herself Mrs. Nearac and who claimed they had a mutual friend. Distracted by his judging duties, Mr. Orbanes turned aside and, when he turned back, she had disappeared into the crowd. He eventually concluded this must have been Benoîte Jean, but he never saw her again. Someone else must do full justice to her story, but Mr. Orbanes has placed an intriguing piece on the board.

Mr. Priddle is a writer and editor in New York.

Appeared in the July 26, 2025, print edition as 'The Board-Game Gambit'.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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