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Quotes of the Day:
"Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies."
– Robert F. Kennedy
"The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
– Thomas Jefferson
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."
– George Orwell
1. Trump warns of 'severe consequences' if Putin does not agree to stop war after summit
2. Putin Might Pitch a 'Geopolitical Armistice' in Alaska
3. US briefly deploys warships after Chinese military ships’ collision
4. Is This the Hardest Physical Contest in the World?
5. Another baked Alaska -- Trump and Putin
6. Chinese jet accused of ‘dangerous’ moves near South China Sea’s Scarborough Shoal
7. How NATO nations need to sell the 5 percent spending hike to their own people
8. Army to reclassify 22,000 airborne jobs, ending jump pay for many paratroopers
9. Exclusive-Trump ally Erik Prince plans to keep forces in Haiti for 10 years to fight gangs and collect taxes
10. The Fundamental Truth About U.S. Strategy That Putin Knows and Trump Ignores
11. U.S. MQ-9 Drone Just Flew A Mission Deep Into Mexico
12. The Secret Channel Russia and Ukraine Use to Trade Prisoners of War
13. Exploring War Termination in the Russo-Ukraine War
14. The Collapse of Iran’s Proxy Strategy Exposes the Limits of Asymmetric Warfare
15. Israel, the Syrian Druze, and the Ghosts of the “Responsibility to Protect”
16. Best of: Is the World Ready for the Population Bust?
17. The Shocking Rift Between India and the United States
18. How to Stop a Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza
19. Trump’s national defense strategy is focused on the homeland. So far, that has included troops in the streets.
20. 4 out of 5 US troops surveyed understand the duty to disobey illegal orders
21. The Drift from the Human Domain: How JSOC Thinking is Reshaping USASOC
1. Trump warns of 'severe consequences' if Putin does not agree to stop war after summit
Excerpts:
Trump has said he wants to see whether Putin is serious about ending the war, now in its fourth year, describing Friday’s summit as “a feel-out meeting” where he can assess the Russian leader’s intentions.
Yet Trump has disappointed allies in Europe by saying Ukraine will have to give up some Russian-held territory. He has also said Russia must accept land swaps, although it was unclear what Putin might be expected to surrender.
Trump on Monday ducked repeated chances to say that he would push for Zelenskyy to take part in his discussions with Putin, and the president was dismissive of Zelenskyy and his need to be part of an effort to seek peace. Trump said that following Friday’s summit, a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders could be arranged, or that it could also be a meeting with “Putin and Zelenskyy and me.”
The Europeans and Ukraine are wary that Putin, who has waged the biggest land war in Europe since 1945 and used Russia’s energy might to try to intimidate the European Union, might secure favorable concessions and set the outlines of a peace deal without them.
The overarching fear of many European countries is that Putin will set his sights on one of them next if he wins in Ukraine.
Trump warns of 'severe consequences' if Putin does not agree to stop war after summit
AP · by GEIR MOULSON · August 13, 2025
Follow live updates on President Donald Trump and his administration
BERLIN (AP) — President Donald Trump warned Wednesday that there will be “very severe consequences” if Russian President Vladimir Putin does not agree to stop the war against Ukraine after the two leaders meet for a summit later this week in Alaska.
Trump made the comment in response to a question from a reporter after announcing this year’s Kennedy Center Honors recipients in Washington. He did not say what the consequences might be.
The remark came soon after Trump consulted with European leaders, who said the president assured them he would make a priority of trying to achieve a ceasefire in Ukraine when he speaks with Putin on Friday in Anchorage.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy joined several of Kyiv’s main allies in the virtual meeting with the U.S. leader, and Zelenskyy told the group that Putin “is bluffing” ahead of the planned summit about Russia’s ability to occupy all of Ukraine and shake off sanctions.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said afterward that “important decisions” could be made in Alaska, but he stressed that “fundamental European and Ukrainian security interests must be protected.”
Merz convened Wednesday’s meeting in an attempt to make sure European and Ukrainian leaders are heard ahead of the summit.
He stressed that a ceasefire must come at the beginning of negotiations. He told reporters that Trump “also wants to make this one of his priorities” in the meeting with Putin.
At a separate appearance in France, French President Emmanuel Macron said Trump “was very clear” that the U.S. wants to achieve a ceasefire at the summit.
Following Friday’s summit, Macron added, Trump will “seek a future trilateral meeting” — one involving Trump, Putin and Zelenskyy. He said he hoped that it could be held in Europe “in a neutral country that is acceptable to all parties.”
Merz, who described Wednesday’s conversation as “constructive and good,” said the Europeans made clear that “Ukraine must sit at the table as soon as there are follow-up meetings.”
European allies have pushed for Ukraine’s involvement in any peace talks, fearful that discussions that exclude Kyiv could otherwise favor Moscow.
The Ukrainian president, who traveled to Berlin to join the meeting alongside Merz, has repeatedly cast doubt on whether Putin would negotiate in good faith. He said Wednesday that he hoped an immediate ceasefire will be “the central topic” in Alaska, but also argued that Putin “definitely does not want peace.”
Zelenskyy said Putin “is trying to apply pressure ... on all sectors of the Ukrainian front” in an attempt to show that Russia is “capable of occupying all of Ukraine.” Putin is also bluffing that sanctions “do not matter to him and are ineffective,” he added. “In reality, sanctions are very helpful and are hitting Russia’s war economy hard.”
The stakes for Europe
Trump has said he wants to see whether Putin is serious about ending the war, now in its fourth year, describing Friday’s summit as “a feel-out meeting” where he can assess the Russian leader’s intentions.
Yet Trump has disappointed allies in Europe by saying Ukraine will have to give up some Russian-held territory. He has also said Russia must accept land swaps, although it was unclear what Putin might be expected to surrender.
Trump on Monday ducked repeated chances to say that he would push for Zelenskyy to take part in his discussions with Putin, and the president was dismissive of Zelenskyy and his need to be part of an effort to seek peace. Trump said that following Friday’s summit, a meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian leaders could be arranged, or that it could also be a meeting with “Putin and Zelenskyy and me.”
The Europeans and Ukraine are wary that Putin, who has waged the biggest land war in Europe since 1945 and used Russia’s energy might to try to intimidate the European Union, might secure favorable concessions and set the outlines of a peace deal without them.
The overarching fear of many European countries is that Putin will set his sights on one of them next if he wins in Ukraine.
Merz said that “if there is no movement on the Russian side in Alaska, then the United States and the Europeans should and must increase the pressure” on Moscow.
Land concessions a non-starter for Kyiv
Zelenskyy said Tuesday that Putin wants Ukraine to withdraw from the remaining 30% of the Donetsk region that it still controls as part of a ceasefire deal, a proposal the Ukrainian leader categorically rejected.
Zelenskyy reiterated that Ukraine would not give up any territory it controls, saying that would be unconstitutional and would serve only as a springboard for a future Russian invasion.
He said diplomatic discussions led by the U.S. focused on ending the war have not addressed key Ukrainian demands, including security guarantees to prevent future Russian aggression and ensuring that Europe is included in negotiations.
Three weeks after Trump returned to office, his administration took the leverage of Ukraine’s NATO membership off the table — something Putin has demanded — and signaled that the EU and Ukraine must handle security in Europe now while America focuses its attention elsewhere.
Senior EU officials believe Trump may be satisfied with simply securing a ceasefire in Ukraine and that he is probably more interested in broader U.S. interests and great power politics, aiming to ramp up business with Russia and rehabilitate Putin.
Russian advances in Donbas
Russian forces on the ground in Ukraine have been closing in on a key territorial grab around the city of Pokrovsk, in the eastern Donbas region that comprises Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland, which Putin has long coveted.
Military analysts using open-source information to monitor the battles have said Ukraine’s ability to fend off those advances could be critical. Losing Pokrovsk would hand Russia an important victory ahead of the summit and could complicate Ukrainian supply lines to the Donetsk region, where the Kremlin has focused the bulk of military efforts.
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Corbet reported from Paris. Associated Press writers Annie Ma in Washington, Lorne Cook in Brussels, Samya Kullab in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Stefanie Dazio in Berlin contributed to this report.
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Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
AP · by GEIR MOULSON · August 13, 2025
2. Putin Might Pitch a 'Geopolitical Armistice' in Alaska
Putin Might Pitch a 'Geopolitical Armistice' in Alaska
nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Nikolas Gvosdev · August 13, 2025
Published
13 hours ago
Putin November 2022. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
PUBLISHED on August 13, 2025, 7:29 PM EDT – U.S. President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for a high-stakes summit this Friday in Anchorage. The aim is to find a path toward ending the war in Ukraine.
Assuming the meeting takes place – that no last-minute incident compels one or both chief executives to cancel – what might emerge from their encounter in Alaska?
This Is No Summit
Calling the meeting a summit is actually something of a misnomer. There has been no extensive set of pre-meetings between sherpas; no creation of bilateral working groups to set out an agenda. Anchorage is instead designed to be a face-to-face fireside chat between the two heads of state – a listening session where ideas can freely flow. This fits Trump’s style. He would like to see if it is possible for the leaders in a one-on-one format to agree on a broad framework for ending hostilities.
Only then would subordinates begin the task of filling in the small print that transforms a vision into a set of policies. The White House has made this explicit, stressing that, as happened in the 2017 Helsinki Summit between the two leaders, Trump’s preference is for a direct, personal chat with Putin.
What Will Putin Pitch to Trump?
Based on scuttlebutt from Russian sources, it appears Putin will propose the outlines of what might be called a geopolitical armistice.
Several days ago, Dmitry Suslov, the deputy director of the Center for European and International Studies at the Higher School of Economics, in Saint Petersburg, released a trial balloon in conversations with the European press.
What he suggested appears to be more than a ceasefire that freezes the war in Ukraine, but it would not be a final settlement, either.
The proposal would recognize that while Russia cannot continue to push westward, the project for Euro-Atlantic expansion has also run out of steam. It would see the establishment of deconfliction channels, neutral zones, and lines of control that, taken together, would formalize something that resembles spheres of influence, even without naming them as such.
What a Geopolitical Armistice Looks Like
Within such an arrangement, channels for investment and trade through third-party hubs – starting perhaps in the broader Silk Road region – might lead to the development of mutually profitable projects. Regarding this point, Putin might emphasize that the recent framework agreement reached between Armenia and Azerbaijan to unblock the Zangezur corridor – a step Russia has ostensibly supported in the past – should not lead to efforts to block Russia’s use of the corridor and its surrounding states to blunt the impact of Western sanctions. Putin may also seek guarantees that any future U.S. role in the region would be purely commercial, with no military or intelligence deployments to the area.
A geopolitical armistice in Ukraine would rest on a set of ad hoc arrangements that would not require formal changes to treaties. Still, it would create new operational realities on the ground.
This might resemble arrangements along the India-Pakistan frontier, or across the Green Line in Cyprus. It would also rest on promises that current bureaucratic roadblocks that prevent Ukraine from joining NATO would remain in place, and that there would be no effort to change the de facto settlement reached, even if NATO never formally disavows its Bucharest pledge to Kyiv.
Putin might also hint that a geopolitical armistice would increase Trump’s leverage vis-à-vis China, especially since Washington has been hinting at its willingness to find a modus vivendi with Beijing. Suslov, in his remarks, further suggested that relaxing tensions in U.S.-Russia relations could clear the way for considering cooperation in the Arctic.
Indeed, the Arctic matters a great deal to Putin. His 2020 Arctic strategy explicitly reflects his belief that the Russian North is the “strategic backbone of Russia’s economic future” – that the development of the region’s resources and infrastructure is crucial to securing Russia’s position as a great power. Even with a closer Russia-China partnership, Moscow has been leery of conceding any control of the Arctic to Beijing. Meanwhile, U.S. interests would not be served by having China secure the pre-eminent position in such an economically vital region.
Here Comes the Fireside Chat…
For now, however, a simple discussion between two heads of state that does nothing to suspend hostilities serves Moscow’s preferences best. Russia is in the midst of a summer campaign to reshape the battlefield in the Donbas.
In many ways, the Russian campaign seems tied to a timetable based on Trump’s July announcement that he wanted to see a cessation of large-scale operations by the early fall.
So far, Putin has adopted a “yes, but” approach to Trump’s proposals, and Trump has tended to view this approach as a form of acquiescence, rather than refusal. Putin seems to be gambling that he can continue with this pattern if and after he meets Trump in Alaska.
President Trump has noted he plans to come to Anchorage to listen to his counterpart.
Will he find anything to like in what Putin has to say?
About the Author: Nikolas K. Gvosdev
Nikolas K. Gvosdev is a Senior Fellow at the National Security Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Gvosdev received his doctorate from St Antony’s College, Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes Scholarship. A frequent commentator on Russian and Eurasian affairs, his work has appeared in such outlets as Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Orbis, and he has appeared as a commentator on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, National Public Radio, and BBC. He is the co-author of US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy: The Rise of an Incidental Superpower, and the co-author of Russian Foreign Policy: Vectors, Sectors and Interests.
nationalsecurityjournal.org · by Nikolas Gvosdev · August 13, 2025
3. US briefly deploys warships after Chinese military ships’ collision
US briefly deploys warships after Chinese military ships’ collision
Defense News · by Jim Gomez, The Associated Press · August 13, 2025
MANILA, Philippines — The U.S. deployed two warships Wednesday in a disputed South China Sea shoal where two Chinese ships collided earlier in the week while trying to drive away a smaller Philippine ship in a high-seas accident that raised alarms about maritime safety.
Both China and the Philippines claim Scarborough Shoal and other outcroppings in the South China Sea. Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also lay overlapping claims in the contested waters.
The Higgins, a guided missile destroyer, and Cincinnati, a littoral combat ship, were shadowed by a Chinese navy ship while sailing about 30 nautical miles from the Scarborough Shoal. There were no reports of any untoward incident, Philippine coast guard Commodore Jay Tarriela said, citing information from U.S. officials and a Philippine surveillance flight.
The U.S. Navy has staged what it calls freedom-of-navigation voyages and overflights in the South China Sea for years to challenge China’s restrictions and its demand for entry notifications in virtually the entire stretch of the disputed waters that it claims. That has angered China and its forces have had close runs-in with U.S. warships and aircraft on such patrols in international waters and airspace.
RELATED
Two Chinese military vessels collide in South China Sea
A China Coast Guard vessel accidentally crushed the front of a People’s Liberation Army Navy ship while chasing a Philippine Coast Guard vessel.
The deployment happened after Washington’s ambassador to Manila, MaryKay Carlson, on Tuesday condemned “the latest reckless action by China directed against a Philippine vessel” in Scarborough. The rich fishing atoll off the northwestern Philippines has been the scene of increasingly tense confrontations between the Chinese and Philippine coast guard, fishing and other ships in recent years.
The Philippines is the oldest treaty ally of the U.S. in Asia. Washington has repeatedly warned that it’s obligated to defend the Philippines if Filipino forces come under an armed attack, including in the South China Sea.
On Monday, a Chinese navy destroyer and a Chinese coast guard ship accidentally collided while trying to block and drive away a smaller Philippine coast guard ship, the BRP Suluan, about 10.5 nautical miles from Scarborough. Video footages made public by the Philippine coast guard show the Chinese coast guard ship blasting its powerful water cannon and a number of Chinese personnel standing at the bow shortly before that section was hit by the fast-turning Chinese navy ship.
Shortly after the collision, the video shows the heavily shattered bow of the Chinese coast guard ship without the Chinese personnel, who were standing on deck before the crash. The Chinese navy ship sustained deep dents and what appeared to be linear gushes on its hull.
Japan, Australia and New Zealand expressed alarm on Wednesday over the dangerous maneuvers that led to the collision in the busy waters, a key global trade route.
“Japan upholds the rule of law and opposes any actions which increase tensions. Our concern goes to the repeated actions in the South China Sea,” Japanese Ambassador to Manila Endo Kazuya said in a post on X.
The Australian Embassy in Manila expressed concern “by the dangerous and unprofessional conduct of Chinese vessels near Scarborough Shoal involving the Philippine Coast Guard,” saying in a statement the incident “highlights the need for de-escalation, restraint and respect for international law.”
“This is a learning experience for the People’s Republic of China,” Tarriela, the Philippine coast guard commodore, told a news conference in Manila. “For so many years, we have been reminding them to stop dangerous maneuvers, to stop risky blockings, to adhere to the [anti-]collision regulations because if there is a very high chance of miscalculation, this kind of collision incident would happen.”
Tarriela spoke a few hours after a Chinese fighter jet flew as close as 500 feet to try to drive away a Philippine coast guard plane on a surveillance flight on Wednesday over the Scarborough with invited journalists on board. The Chinese jet carried out dangerous maneuvers for about 20 minutes, including flying about 200 feet above the small Philippine aircraft, Tarriela said.
Associated Press writers Joeal Calupitan and Aaron Favila in Manila, Philippines, contributed to this report.
4. Is This the Hardest Physical Contest in the World?
Is This the Hardest Physical Contest in the World?
The Best Ranger Competition belies the idea that the Army is weak or “woke.”
By Kevin Maurer
Photographs by Kendrick Brinson
The Atlantic · by Kevin Maurer · August 13, 2025
The United States Army, in business now for more than 250 years, comprises more than 450,000 soldiers. Of those, about a third are in combat arms, serving in armor, artillery, engineering, cyber, and aviation units. Some 56,000 are in the infantry, the “Queen of Battle,” serving in units such as the 82nd Airborne Division and the 4th Infantry Division. These are the soldiers who go to battle on foot (or, in the case of Airborne units, by parachute—at least on occasion). Among them are some of the most physically fit humans on the planet—the soldiering equivalent of Olympic decathletes.
These are the sort who choose to attend Ranger School, the grueling 61-day Army course at Fort Benning, in Georgia, that is meant to push the body, and the spirit, substantially past the breaking point. Only about half of those who start Ranger School eventually finish, some after trying repeatedly. The most elite of those who graduate, the 1 percent of the 1 percent, show up each April to compete in what’s known colloquially as the Ranger Olympics.
This event is not well known. It is not televised. Not one participant is sponsored by Nike. But the Best Ranger Competition may be the hardest physical competition in the world. Fifty-two teams of two soldiers each start the Ranger Olympics. Over the course of three days, the field is narrowed as soldiers march and run dozens of miles, crawl through obstacle courses, and navigate swamps at night. They carry 50 pounds in their rucksacks, climb 60-foot ropes, and sleep, at most, for four hours at a time. All told, the average competitor burns more than 30,000 calories.
These soldiers are, pound for pound, the fittest, most trained, and most disciplined the world has ever known. They are also, nevertheless, part of what President Donald Trump has called our “woke military that can’t fight or win.” Trump has vowed to remake the armed forces, eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and excoriating generals (many of whom served in combat) as losers. His secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has moved to push trans service members out of the military (“No more dudes in dresses,” he said in a speech this spring) and has suggested that women should not serve in combat.
For three days in Georgia this spring, those culture wars felt very far away, in part because what I saw at Best Ranger belies the idea that the Army is weak or “woke”; in part because among the 104 soldiers on the starting line at Fort Benning was a 25-year-old first lieutenant named Gabrielle White, a West Point graduate who was the first woman to compete for the Best Ranger title; and in part because, to her opponents on the course, the fact that she was a woman did not seem to matter. The only thing that mattered to the Rangers I met was that she had qualified for the competition.
First Lieutenants Kevin Moore and Griffin Hokanson, both members of the 75th Ranger Regiment, were favored to win this year’s competition. (Kendrick Brinson for The Atlantic)
I’ve covered the military for more than 20 years and have seen soldiers in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Through my travels, I’ve come to realize that the political class and civilians in general have little idea who soldiers are or why they serve. In the past, military service was almost an unwritten requirement of the Oval Office, but the only president to have served in the past three decades was George W. Bush (who did not see combat). And although the U.S. has one of the largest active militaries in the world, less than 1 percent of its population serves in the armed forces, which means that most civilians have little contact with the military.
During the 20 years of war that began in 2001, the military faced numerous crises of public perception. In fairness, the mission the armed forces were given during the War on Terror was near impossible, with an ever-evolving definition of victory in both Afghanistan and Iraq and competing agendas from administrations of both parties, not to mention a public more comfortable with thanking soldiers for their service than sharing the burden.
These days, debates over trans and women soldiers and other “wokeness” wars dominate the discourse around the military, all of which hides the fact that, in my experience, most people volunteer to serve because they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Once among the ranks, most consider a soldier’s politics or gender identity less important than their ability to do the job.
Read: The backdoor way that Pete Hegseth could keep women out of combat
The military must now reinvent itself for a modern battlefield where it could face combat against Russia, China, or North Korea—or perhaps more than one at once. In this context, understanding the current force is crucially important. The Best Ranger Competition offers a glimpse of some of the most elite soldiers at work.
A month before the competition, I met the three qualifying teams from the 75th Ranger Regiment, a special-operations unit whose members had won the competition four years in a row. They were training on an indoor turf field with squat racks along one side and cardio machines along the other.
When I arrived, the soldiers were finishing a workout—doing planks with a 45-pound plate on their back and carrying 120 pounds 10 yards after a circuit of squats and bench presses. Speakers blared AC/DC and Johnny Cash. Nick O’Brien, who trains the regiment’s 3,000 Rangers, looked on with his team of nine coaches, trainers, and dietitians.
For months, these six men had paused their day jobs with the regiment to prepare under O’Brien, practicing tasks such as assembling just about every handheld weapon in the American arsenal, marching and running for miles, and navigating the woods at night with just a compass and a map, eating only MREs (“meals ready to eat”), rations supplied by the Army that, over time, do demoralizing things to the standard human digestive tract.
First Lieutenants Kevin Moore and Griffin Hokanson, who composed Team 44, were favored to win this year. It was the first time that either man had represented the 75th and the first time they had been paired, but they had competed for other units in the past. Both look, a bit disconcertingly, like action figures. Hokanson, who’s originally from Oregon, is a faster runner and more agile on the obstacles; Moore, from New York, is stronger. Both graduated from West Point in 2021. First Lieutenant Gabrielle White was also in their class, and the three started Ranger School together the following year. Moore had noticed that the leaders he respected all had Ranger scrolls on their sleeves. Hokanson had a battalion commander who was a Ranger, and saw that Ranger School was where lieutenants who wanted more of a challenge than what they found in the conventional army went.
Neither Moore nor Hokanson has faced combat, but they understand, as all Rangers do, that the battlefield in the age of drone warfare can easily become what a former senior Ukrainian commander called a “zone of continuous death.” Networks of tunnels mean threats can come from any direction—above or below. The infantry must prepare for action at night, or underground, to avoid detection.
Still, no other part of warfare is as unchanging as the soldier on the ground, holding the line, defending it, or taking it. The Ranger motto—said to have originated on D-Day, as German mortars and artillery fell down on Omaha Beach—is “Rangers lead the way.” Ranger battalions were deactivated at the end of World War II but called back into action again in Korea, where they executed raids, set ambushes, and led the counterattack during the winter of 1950 to regain land lost to the Communist offensive. The first Ranger School class was conducted around this time at Fort Benning, focused on individual combat skills and decision making under pressure, reflecting lessons learned in both World War II and the Korean War.
Later, as the armed services were becoming an all-volunteer force in the final years of the Vietnam War, generals saw the need for a specialized infantry unit capable of rapid deployment to troublespots around the world. The 1st Ranger Battalion was activated as a permanent unit in 1974. The idea was to build a unit that would act as a benchmark of excellence for the volunteer force. “The battalion is to be an elite, light, and the most proficient infantry battalion in the world. A battalion that can do things with its hands and weapons better than anyone,” General Creighton W. Abrams Jr. wrote in what would become the unit’s charter. “Wherever the battalion goes, it must be apparent that it is the best.”
In recent decades, Rangers deployed during conflicts including 1991’s Gulf War and the War on Terror. Rangers were among the special-operations forces who took part in the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia in 1993, in which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and 18 American soldiers, including members of the 75th, were killed. In 2019, Rangers and Delta Force operators killed the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. “I often think how many soldiers are alive today because they were led by a Ranger,” retired Command Sergeant Major Rick Merritt, who served 25 years in the 75th Ranger Regiment, including combat deployments to Panama, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, told me. Ranger School, Merritt said, is “the ultimate life-insurance policy for going to combat.”
Soldiers wait to begin the Best Ranger Competition at Fort Benning on April 11. (Kendrick Brinson for The Atlantic)
This year’s competition started before dawn at Camp Rogers, a training area at Fort Benning, in the pine forest of western Georgia. A crowd of spectators had gathered, a mix of family members, unit mates, and former Rangers. Midway through the first seven-mile run, the competitors picked up a 60-pound sandbag that they would carry for the rest of the race.
The 75th Ranger Regiment teams were among the first to return to Camp Rogers, barely pausing after dropping the sandbags before heading to Victory Pond. There, they dove into the frigid water and made their way toward the boat ramp on the opposite shore, about 400 meters away. Some dog-paddled, held up by their life jacket. Others paddled on their back, hoping to conserve energy. One by one, the Rangers shuffled out of the water, soaked and shivering in the cool morning air.
“This sucks,” one of the paratroopers of Team 34 said as they scrambled up the concrete boat ramp and a subsequent hill.
Without stopping, his partner answered with the universal infantry rejoinder, “Embrace the suck.”
That meant a day of marching with 50-pound rucksacks as the teams navigated from task to task, earning points for each. In the past, the competition had been linear: Each team followed the same sequence of events. This year’s wrinkle—called “Ranger Reckoning”—left it to the soldiers to complete the remaining objectives in any order.
Each task presented a different problem. One was an urban-assault course where teams attacked a two-story building; after throwing a grenade into a makeshift bunker, they would rush forward to a yellow line and perform 20 burpees (an exercise in which a single rep includes a push-up followed by a squat jump). The exercise raised their heart rate, mimicking the stress of combat. Once the burpees were done, the team shot red balloons attached to two targets before moving inside a cinder-block house, where they then faced other targets meant to represent both enemy fighters (to shoot) and civilians (to avoid shooting).
In past years, completing events faster meant more time to rest between events. But this new format turned the first day into an endurance competition, O’Brien told me. In all, the teams marched about 35 miles to complete the course. Every task was graded by instructors from the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade, which runs Ranger School.
Retired Lieutenant Colonel Blain Reeves, a two-time competitor who won the Best Ranger competition in 1993 and served with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, told me that the first day was a “smoker.” (Ranger School is meant to “smoke”—exhaust—its students each day.)
Team 38—White and her partner, Captain Seth Deltenre—had a 20-person cheering section that followed them from station to station. White did not agree to an interview; it seemed that she wanted her achievement to speak for itself. Among her supporters was Kris Fuhr, a 1985 West Point graduate who recalled coming of age in a very different military. West Point “made it very clear that they did not want us there,” she told me. “We didn’t have the protections of equal opportunity” or resources around sexual harassment and assault. “We had no advocates.”
Fuhr has tried to take on that role for younger women in the military, and has run a mentorship program for women attending Ranger School since they were first allowed to do so, in 2015. Later that same year, then–Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced that all military positions would be open to women. (Although women had served near the front lines for years, this decision removed the remaining formal barriers to direct-combat roles.) The Army reports that 367 women have attempted Ranger School since 2015; 160 have earned the Ranger tab. In recent years, upwards of 1,000 men have earned a Ranger tab each year.
Read: What does it take to become a U.S. Army Ranger?
In my months of contact with the Army’s event organizers leading up to the Best Ranger Competition, no one mentioned Team 38 or Gabrielle White. In different times, the Army might have celebrated White’s history-making presence. But under Trump and Hegseth, mentions of historic achievements by women and minorities have been removed from military websites. As of this writing, trans service members have been banned from the military, and the Pentagon has taken the name of the slain gay leader Harvey Milk, a Navy veteran, off of a supply ship.
In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth wrote that “women cannot physically meet the same standards as men,” arguing that they will mother soldiers in their units. “Dads push us to take risks,” he wrote, but “moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.” On a video podcast last year, Hegseth said: “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective; hasn’t made us more lethal; has made fighting more complicated.” (He has since walked back some of his earlier remarks. On the Megyn Kelly Show in early December, he said, “If we have the right standard and women meet that standard, roger. Let’s go.”)
During his confirmation process, Hegseth echoed President Trump’s desire for a Pentagon focused on “lethality, meritocracy, warfighting, accountability, and readiness.” It is worth noting that Gabrielle White was given no accommodations or special treatment, and at no point did the Ranger instructors adjust her score because she was a woman.
First Lieutenant Gabrielle White (right) was the first woman to compete for the Best Ranger title. She and her teammate, Captain Seth Deltenre, stayed upbeat throughout a difficult second day. (Kendrick Brinson for The Atlantic)
Waiting to start the Malvesti Obstacle Course, Moore and Hokanson bounced from foot to foot and shook out their arms and legs. Both knew they had no more than four minutes of suffering before a break. When they got the order to go, Moore and Hokanson easily knocked out the six chin-ups and shimmied up the 30-foot rope. Jumping down a log ladder with nearly six feet between each rung barely slowed them down. Finishing the monkey bars over water put them on the edge of the notorious “worm pit,” a shallow, muddy trench covered with barbed wire that would-be Rangers must crawl through—sometimes submerged—on their belly.
Hokanson went first. Moore was next, slipping past the last rusty strand of wire and meeting Hokanson on the chin-up bar. Six more chin-ups and a run to the finish line later, they’d completed the obstacle course in three minutes and 35 seconds—a respectable time for rested soldiers, and an astonishing one for people who’d been going for almost 13 hours. They hadn’t caught their breath before it was time for a pop quiz, which instructors give after some events to test competitors’ cognitive powers. In which three conflicts did Army Colonel Richard Malvesti—the Ranger for whom the course is named—serve? (The answer, which Hokanson and Moore got right, was Vietnam, Grenada, and Operation Just Cause in Panama.)
A soldier shooting at moving targets (Kendrick Brinson for The Atlantic)
Before a night ruck march, the field would be narrowed to 32 pairs. In the holding area, Moore pulled off his boots and propped his swollen feet, chewed up with blisters from his wet socks, on his rucksack. He was exhausted, but he and Hokanson were in first place and Moore knew all eyes were on them.
“I’m going to act like this is the first thing I’m doing and I’m fresh,” Moore said. “Everyone’s going to look at me and realize that we are here to do business.” Competitors had deliberately not been told how long the ruck march would be, but at least they were hydrated and had gotten something to eat.
When it was time, Moore laced up his boots once more. “You look strong,” Hokanson told his partner. “I don’t know if you’re faking it or if you’re being serious, but you look strong.”
Moore admitted afterward that he’d been faking it a little. Nevertheless, Team 44 took the lead and tore through the first four miles. Hokanson and Moore soon dumped their rucksacks to face the next test: They were each to carry two 45-pound water jugs for an unknown distance using only grip strength—no carrying the jugs on their shoulders, no wrist wraps, no resting the jugs on their feet, no setting them on the ground. As soon as one jug was set down, both men would have to stop and return to the starting line. The test, as the Ranger livestream commentator said, had a steep price for failure.
Team 44 came in second, but had the most total points for the competition. Team 38—White and Deltenre—sat near the bottom of the table.
Moore and Hokanson at a station in Doughboy Stadium on the second day of the competition (Kendrick Brinson for The Atlantic)
Before the second day’s events kicked off, the Rangers lay on the grass outside Doughboy Stadium, their boots and socks off. When they walked, they tended to do so with a grimace or a limp.
Inside the stadium were six stations, including one where the soldiers had to breach doors with a torch, a saw, and fire-rescue tools. At the first station, teams would toss a 100-pound medicine ball over one shoulder between burpees—30 in all—before hauling a 290-pound yoke 50 meters. Then they’d each climb a 15-foot rope 10 times. Later they’d sprint to a dummy, bandage its fake wounds, and haul it roughly 50 yards on a stretcher sled back to the starting line. At the last station, they would throw axes before they retreated to a neighboring baseball field to throw practice grenades.
For Team 44, this was light work. Moore, in particular, seemed to have a well of energy, and the men left the stadium area before lunch, giving them time to rest.
More was at stake for White and Deltenre as they entered the stadium to cheers from their supporters; only 16 teams would advance to the third and final day, and Team 38 would need good scores to make it. After each burpee and medicine-ball throw, White and Deltenre encouraged each other to press on. They skipped the rope climb, incurring a penalty but saving energy for other events, and went on to win the axe throwing, which moved them up to 17th place.
By the end of the afternoon, they were the only team that still seemed upbeat. They waited for the order to head toward the field where a Black Hawk helicopter would take them to Camp Darby for a mystery event before the night land-navigation test—historically the most difficult part of the competition. Once they got the order, White and Deltenre trotted to the helicopter.
For the night event, each team would have five hours to find five points in the tangled swamps near Hollis Branch Creek without using any roads or trails.
Hokanson took the lead on navigating for Team 44. Moore followed his partner’s chem light as they bushwhacked through the swamp, in mud up to their knees, to the first point. But when they got across the swamp, Hokanson didn’t see what he’d expected. Checking the map again, he realized they were going the wrong way.
“Kevin, I love you, but we’re going to have to go through this again,” Hokanson said.
“Griff, I’m going to kill you,” Moore said. “I’m going to wring your neck.”
They had planned to hit one point each hour, but it took them almost two hours in the thorn brushes and mud to find the first one. With their bearings finally set, the men found two more points in under two hours and a fourth before the five-hour cutoff, leaving them with a lead of more than 100 points going into day three. (No team found all five points in the allotted time.)
Team 38, meanwhile, ranked second in the night navigation event, securing themselves a spot for the final day.
White completing the Combat Water Survival Assessment on the third day of the competition (Kendrick Brinson for The Atlantic)
At 7:30 the next morning, as the first streaks of light came through the pine trees, the 16 remaining teams prepared to take on the Darby Queen, one of the toughest obstacle courses in the U.S. Army. The course comprises 24 stations made mostly of wood and rope set over a mile of rolling terrain. Some are as tall as three stories; others require crawling through trenches. Hokanson, who scored the fastest official solo time during the regiment’s training period this year, moved effortlessly through them all, encouraging Moore as he went. They finished first, extending their lead.
Next, the teams retreated to a field where they packed their gear and wrapped it with their ponchos to create a raft before boarding a helicopter for a short flight to Victory Pond. Sitting in the door of the helicopter with his legs dangling, Hokanson was shivering uncontrollably. After two full days of competition, he couldn’t wait to complete the final tasks.
The helicopter swooped past a rappelling tower and hovered over the middle of the lake. As the crew chief signaled for Team 44 to jump, they pushed their raft into the water before following it out. They swam their rucksacks to shore, then ran to a launch point where inflatable boats waited and paddled against the current, across the lake to the rappelling tower.
One more water event and Team 44 could rest before the final run, whose distance the competitors did not know. The Combat Water Survival Assessment, which also must be completed during the beginning of Ranger School, starts at the bottom of a 35-foot-tall metal ladder. From the top, with no safety harness, Moore calmly walked across a log suspended above the pond. He shimmied across a rope, plunged into the water and swam to a dock, then ran back and tagged Hokanson, who started up the 35-foot ladder to the suspended log. Moore, meanwhile, headed for a 70-foot tower. At the top of the tower’s staircase, he slid down on a pulley attached to a suspended cable, and crashed into the pond. All of these tasks were timed. Even though their lead was insurmountable this late in the competition, Hokanson and Moore ran through the course at full speed; they didn’t want to leave any doubt. They came in fourth for the event, all but assuring their victory.
Now the only thing left to do was run the final road race. Team 43—another 75th Regiment team, made up of Sergeants Emerson Schroeder and Tyler Steadman—was in third place but wanted to use this last event to push for second. When it was time to run, they kept a near-superhuman pace after having been almost constantly active for three days, and won the 4.1-mile race in about 30 minutes, becoming the first team to raise its rifles at the finish line.
Team 44 came in third in the race, and first in the overall competition. As they approached the finish line, Hokanson was so tired that he couldn’t lift his rifle above his head. Tears welled up in his eyes as blood ran from his face onto his bib.
The loudest cheers were for Team 38, which finished the run second to last. Overall, though, White and Deltenre ended the competition 14th out of the 52 teams. After raising their rifles, they hugged and went to get checked by the medics, a standard safety precaution.
Kris Fuhr was at the finish line with the other Team 38 supporters. Watching White raise her rifle at the end of the race felt like validation, she told me, for the work she and her peers had done to make the military a more hospitable place for the women who came after them.
Jackie Munn: I felt more welcome in combat than I did on base
For their part, White’s opponents seemed to respect her. “Anyone who makes it to day three and finishes the competition has achieved a standard far beyond anything in the Army,” Hokanson said.
Sergeant Emerson Schroeder zip-lining as part of the Combat Water Survival Assessment (Kendrick Brinson for The Atlantic)
In his speech at the awards ceremony, General Randy A. George, the Army chief of staff, asked a question that had hung over the whole three days: Why does the Army put so much time and so many resources into the Best Ranger Competition?
“Our Army is the best in the world,” George told the audience. “When tested in battle, we prevail time and again. Rangers are the best of our Army.”
Later, I asked George whether he thought that this generation of soldiers was less lethal than those that came before.
“I don’t buy that,” George said, shaking his head.
In fact, he said, if you compare Rangers over the past three decades, today’s are at least as capable as their predecessors—maybe even more so. “Everybody’s going to have to shoot, move, and communicate on the modern battlefield,” George said. “They’re going to have to be absolute experts at that. And that’s what you get with any Ranger formation.”
Toward the end of the awards ceremony, George challenged every Ranger onstage to take what they’d learned and use it to inspire excellence among their peers. “Go back to your units and build Rangers,” he said. “Challenge your troops. Test them and push them. Send them to school and set expectations that they come home Ranger-qualified. Hold them accountable to being tough and lethal.”
In my conversations with the competitors, I saw this ethic firsthand. The Rangers had trained for months not in the hopes of attaining fame or fortune but for the chance to exceed even their own expectations. Perhaps this is why, after the competition ended, none of the soldiers I spoke with brought up the fact that this year’s Best Ranger Competition had made history by being the first to include a woman—not because they did not want to draw attention to White or her performance but because the days-long physical and mental challenge demanded everything they had, leaving them no time to think about anything but putting one foot in front of the other.
Moore and Hokanson placed first in this year’s Ranger Olympics. (Kendrick Brinson for The Atlantic)
The Atlantic · by Kevin Maurer · August 13, 2025
5. Another baked Alaska -- Trump and Putin
Voices Aug. 13, 2025 / 9:10 AM
Another baked Alaska -- Trump and Putin
By Harlan Ullman
https://www.upi.com/Voices/2025/08/13/trump-putin-alaska-summit/1001755015371/
upi.com
Aug. 13 (UPI) -- Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will hold an Alaskan summit over Ukraine on Friday.
The last U.S. summit held in Anchorage was between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in March 2021. It turned into a public spectacle, with both sides firing off angry charges and counter-charges. Will this summit be more productive?
One way to anticipate the possible outcomes is through considering a series of binary choices. Either one or both sides will leave the conference having achieved nothing, much like Trump being unable to persuade North Korea's Kim Jung Un to denuclearize in June 2018 in Singapore. Or there will be an agreement of sorts or an agreement to agree in the future.
Regarding any agreement, Munich 1938 and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's "peace in our time" will not easily be forgotten should Trump yield to Putin's demands.
Far more relevant was Trump's 2020 Doha Agreement with the Taliban that excluded the presence of the Afghan government and indeed led to the fall of the Ashraf Ghani administration in August 2021. In fact, it can be argued that Trump has carefully laid the framework for abandoning Ukraine and its feisty president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Trump's first meeting with Zelensky in the White House was an ambush. Zelensky was accused by Vice President JD Vance of not expressing sufficient gratitude for U.S. aid and support. Trump's views softened. But currently, he has given every indication that Zelensky must cede territory to Russia in any cease-fire or peace agreement.
More importantly, Trump has shifted the entire burden to NATO and the European Union of keeping Ukraine supplied with weaponry and money to sustain the war. The United States will happily sell its defense equipment to Europeans, who in turn will provide it to Ukraine.
To America Firsters, this is brilliant. To many in Congress and in the public, it is an abandonment of an ally and a deeply flawed concession to Putin that the West will come to regret.
But the crucial questions are what do both presidents see as outcomes from this meeting? What is each prepared to concede? And what does this mean for the ending of the war and the killings Trump says he hates so much? Surprisingly, Putin's aims are clearer and are keeping with Lenin's strategy of "other means."
In simple terms, "other means" means that Putin is prepared to accept less than a full measure of his demands. That suggests he will retain Crimea while accepting certain "land swaps" of Ukrainian for Russian territory. Keeping Ukraine from joining NATO will be part of his terms although, Putin could accept the prospect of EU membership, as that will not be relevant given his likely next steps.
Obviously, the United States and West must provide security guarantees to maintain Ukraine as a sovereign independent state. Here the record is bleak. Neither the 1996 Budapest or the 2014/15 Minsk Agreements that provided for Ukraine's security worked -- all having failed miserably.
Putin understands this. In the event of an agreement, Russia will pursue "other means" to gain greater control of Ukraine politically and even territorially. And Putin also could wait while his military is restored before launching a future reattack.
From Trump's perspective, walking away from Ukraine could make perfect sense. Trump has gone, in his mind, above and beyond trying to end the war. He has patiently negotiated with both sides. And despite his election promise to end the war in 24 hours, he will claim that was a purposeful exaggeration. Finally, having convinced Europe to become the ultimate supporter of Ukraine, Trump can argue he has done all he can. Now it is up to the warring factions to end the war.
Game, set and match -- or not. Still, Trump could take a harder line believing that if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, Western Europe is next. However, it would be in Trump's interest if he recognizes that Putin lacks the reasons and the forces for an attack to the west and will not risk war with a far superior NATO military. If Trump reaches this conclusion, it reinforces why the United States need not be engaged any more in the Ukraine fight.
Left unsaid are sanctions. Would Trump accept pressure from Congress and 85 senators to impose sanctions on Russia and secondary sanctions on China? Probably not. But we shall find out later this week when or if the Ukraine war ends.
Harlan Ullman is UPI's Arnaud de Borchgrave Distinguished Columnist, senior adviser at Washington's Atlantic Council, chairman of a private company and principal author of the doctrine of shock and awe. His next book, co-written with Field Marshal The Lord David Richards, former U.K. chief of defense and due out next year, is Who Thinks Best Wins: Preventing Strategic Catastrophe. The writer can be reached on X @harlankullman.
upi.com
6. Chinese jet accused of ‘dangerous’ moves near South China Sea’s Scarborough Shoal
ChinaMilitary
Chinese jet accused of ‘dangerous’ moves near South China Sea’s Scarborough Shoal
The Philippines coastguard claims that a fighter tailed one of its aircraft and performed manoeuvres at close proximity
Liu Zhen
Published: 7:00pm, 14 Aug 2025Updated: 7:28pm, 14 Aug 2025
A Chinese fighter jet allegedly flew close to a Philippine coastguard aircraft near the disputed Scarborough Shoal on Wednesday morning, while US and PLA naval vessels operated close by amid heightened tensions in the South China Sea.
According to the Philippine state-run broadcaster People’s Television Network (PTV), a Cessna Caravan operated by the coastguard was performing a “maritime domain awareness flight” when the alleged incident occurred, involving what appeared to be an Su-30.
On-board footage posted by PTV on social media appeared to show the Chinese jet making a turn at a higher altitude than the Cessna with multiple missiles visible, signalling it was on a combat-capable mission.
The Russian-made Su-30 is a multirole fighter, mainly used for long-range interception, strike and air superiority missions.
A PTV reporter on board the Cessna Caravan said the jet tailed the single-propeller coastguard plane for about 20 minutes and allegedly conducted “dangerous manoeuvres” at close proximity, an estimated “200 to 500 feet (30 to 150 metres)” away.
Chinese fighter jet flies close to Philippine plane over disputed shoal in South China Sea, Manila says
Meanwhile, People’s Liberation Army Navy ships in the area repeatedly issued radio challenges during the incident, according to the report, and a communication from a US Navy ship was also heard.
In the footage, a radio transmission in Chinese could be heard saying “US military aircraft, this is Chinese navy ship No 553. You are approaching Chinese air space. To avoid misjudgment, turn around and leave immediately.” The reply was in English but inaudible.
While the audio mentioned a US military aircraft, none was visible in the accompanying footage.
The PLA Navy ship bearing hull number 553 is the Dali, a Type 054A frigate in the South Sea Fleet.
The footage showed a Type 054A frigate operating at sea with a US Navy Independence-class littoral combat ship not far away. The hull numbers could not be clearly identified.
History, money and military: why the South China Sea is so important to Beijing
The alleged incident was the latest in a series of escalating developments near Scarborough Shoal, which is known by China as Huangyan Island and called Bajo de Masinloc in the Philippines.
The traditional fishing ground has been a flashpoint between the two nations for years. China claims the shoal and effectively seized control of it in 2012, while the Philippines says that it is within its 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone.
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The tension has grown significantly since 2022, and confrontations are frequently reported.
On Monday, Manila released footage of an incident in which it said a Chinese coastguard vessel collided with a PLA Navy Type 052D guided-missile destroyer while chasing a Philippine coastguard ship.
Chinese ships collide during clash with Philippine coastguard in contested South China Sea
The Chinese coastguard cutter, numbered 3104, appeared to have sustained severe damage to its bow. China has yet to confirm the collision.
The US – a treaty ally of the Philippines – has been conducting “freedom of navigation operations” to challenge Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea for several years.
These have led to several confrontations with Chinese naval and air forces, the most recent one involving the destroyer USS Higgins near Scarborough Shoal on Wednesday.
Liu Zhen
Liu Zhen joined the Post in 2015 as a reporter on the China desk. She previously worked with Reuters in Beijing.
7. How NATO nations need to sell the 5 percent spending hike to their own people
How NATO nations need to sell the 5 percent spending hike to their own people - Breaking Defense
The Atlantic Council's Kristen Taylor argues in this op ed that committing to defense spending is only half the battle.
breakingdefense.com · by Kristen Taylor · August 13, 2025
At the NATO Summit earlier this summer, NATO allies agreed to raise their defense spending target to 5 percent of GDP by 2035 — with 3.5 percent focused on hard security and 1.5 allocated to defense-enablers like critical infrastructure and cybersecurity. The move, pushed by the White House, represents a much-needed increase in spending to match mounting challenges to international security. Allies are already signaling considerable progress toward this goal. Following the Summit announcement, Berlin unveiled an ambitious plan to double its military spending by the end of a decade—a welcome, albeit delayed, commitment from Europe’s largest economy.
But the 5 percent figure belies the true cost. The gross domestic product of allied countries dwarfs annual national expenditures. So, while a rise from 2 to 5 percent of GDP may not seem like much on face value, but as a share of national expenditure, it is a massive ask, and one the people could begin to feel, sooner rather than later.
If NATO nations truly want to boost their defense investments, they must bring their own people along, and that’s going to require a coordinated public support campaign, heeding lessons from so-far successful initiatives by Norway and the UK.
To understand the scale of the new spending request, look to Berlin. In 2024, Germany spent 2.12 percent of its GDP on defense, allocating a little over $97 billion in defense spending. In the same year, Germany spent approximately $485 billion on total national expenditures. In total, as a share of national outlays, this accounts for approximately 20 percent of Germany’s national expenditures. All else equal, if Germany were to increase defense spending to the newly agreed target, more than 47 percent of Germany’s total budgetary expenditures would go toward defense. Some allies, particularly laggard spenders who do not meet the 2 percent goal currently, face even sharper projections.
Now, this is an imperfect metric. These pledges have a time horizon over a decade; GDP certainly will not remain stagnant for allies over this time; economic conditions and tax demands will fluctuate; countries may be able to count already-planned infrastructure development toward the 1.5 percent for defense enablers; and governments and their constituencies will adjust spending based on the state of the international security environment balanced with domestic priorities.
Also, some nations may be poised to wait out a Euro-skeptic Donald Trump administration. It is no coincidence that Allies agreed to review progress toward the 5 percent goal in 2029, a year after Trump’s term ends.
Cybersecurity skills must evolve in near-real time as Zero Day threats continue and AI provides new challenges.
But for the foreseeable future, the point stands. This is not just a reallocation of budgets, but rather a substantial overhaul of government priorities and an unprecedented shift in the mindset of allied societies who have long enjoyed the benefits of the transatlantic peace dividend. Representing the increase in spending as a share of GDP is political misdirection — one that may not play well once publics begin to feel the effects.
To realize this shift, governments are going to have to make hard choices. Capitals will have to consider tax hikes or cuts to social programs to account for the delta in defense spending. Most countries will look to run budgetary deficits to account for the disparity in resourcing. Resource-pooling and novel financing options, from Euro defense bonds to internationally-governed financial institutions, could offer a way forward. But questions around implementation and long-term viability remain wide open.
And it will be tough for publics to swallow such budgetary shifts. Allies, like Spain and Slovenia, are already sounding the alarm over such increases. Many countries may simply decide not to adhere to the new defense pledge. After all, not all allies currently meet the previous 2 percent of GDP threshold agreed to at the Wales Summit in 2014—even after Trump’s first term and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Public support for these spending hikes does not only raise political questions, but practical ones as well. Allies on both sides of the Atlantic struggle to match increased spending with industrial capacity. And defense industries are unlikely to accept the risk necessary to expand capacity if they believe politicians or publics may balk in the face of a steep price tag in coming years.
Both to shore up political support and quell industry concerns, the Alliance will need an effective messaging strategy that coheres strong and enduring political support across a coalition of societal stakeholders for politicians to bring to bear the money needed to finance such a defense transformation.
This will require a consistent and sustainable message across a spectrum of political voices. Allies, like Norway, which unanimously passed a historic defense pledge in 2024 that featured sharp hikes in defense spending through 2036, can serve as a pathfinder. By working closely with the opposition party, Stortinget’s leadership was able to craft a bipartisan plan that messaged urgency and unity to the broader public. Such political cohesion is persuasive to most citizens, and it also requires consistent outreach to a vast array of constituencies with a myriad of domestic priorities to reinforce the importance of such measures.
Additionally, these messages must touch on the needs and priorities of individual publics. For example, public support in the United Kingdom for defense spending is on the rise as British politicians highlight the importance of these initiatives for creating domestic jobs, bolstering industrial input, and growing challenges posed by hybrid cyber-attacks. By underscoring the broad societal benefits of increased defense spending has allowed the UK to bridge the gap between public opinion and increased deterrence measures—and such a strategy would likely land well across the Alliance.
As such, allies should root their messages in the 1.5 percent of the total spending pledge slated to go toward dual-use items that can elevate security resilience and provide material civilian benefits. While these infrastructure improvement projects will have tangible military applications, they will also improve societal conditions from technology investment to resilience initiatives. Citizens across the Alliance may not support such drastic increases in the defense domain (particularly for allies where the Russian threat is not as palpable), but most citizens will understand the importance of infrastructure development with dual-use capabilities.
To be sure, allies need to spend more on defense. But the Alliance is not in a place politically to reach this target. Governments must do better at public outreach and messaging campaigns now to cohere the support necessary to fulfill sustained efforts to ramp up defense spending in the next decade.
Kristen Taylor is an assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative, where she oversees portfolios on transatlantic defense industrial and innovation work.
breakingdefense.com · by Kristen Taylor · August 13, 2025
8. Army to reclassify 22,000 airborne jobs, ending jump pay for many paratroopers
Just before National Airborne Day
I wonder how many would remain on jump status without pay if they could.
Army to reclassify 22,000 airborne jobs, ending jump pay for many paratroopers
Stars and Stripes · by Bradley Latham · August 13, 2025
The Army plans to end jump pay for about 22,000 parachutist positions, the service said in a message delivered to troops on July 30, 2025. (Stars and Stripes)
Some Army paratroopers will lose $150 in monthly pay next year as the service reorganizes its airborne force and reclassifies more than 22,000 paid parachutist positions.
The jobs in fiscal year 2026 will be recoded so that airborne experience is required but jump pay is not authorized, according to an administrative message delivered to the force July 30.
The change still will allow soldiers to attend airborne school but won’t require them to keep their qualifications current or participate in jump operations.
Lt. Gen. Gregory Anderson, XVIII Airborne Corps commander, said a lack of available aircraft and personnel challenges with parachute riggers and jumpmasters were driving factors for this reorganization on an April episode of the “From the Green Notebook” podcast.
“We’re trying to prop up a very big structure of 56,000 with dwindling resources, we’re spreading those resources out, and we’re undermining our own readiness goals,” Anderson said.
The Army has grown its airborne force by over 13,000 positions since 2002, including activating the Arctic-focused 11th Airborne Division in June 2022.
A majority of the cuts will come from support and headquarters units, while prioritizing pay for soldiers in front-line combat positions.
“It’s not about the money per se,” Anderson said on the April podcast. “It’s literally about the forces that will jump in the alpha echelon and fight off a potentially contested drop zone. We want them at the highest level of readiness.”
Paratroopers who currently receive what is formally known as hazardous duty incentive pay should direct questions about their airborne status to the local chain of command, the service said.
Estimates from the Army, originally reported by Army Times in April, put the number of affected jobs at slightly under 20,000.
The Army did not immediately answer questions on the updated figures when asked Tuesday.
Soldiers who continue to receive jump pay will see a boost in line with a revision for airborne-qualified personnel announced in May by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Paratroopers’ monthly jump pay will increase from $150 to $200, while jumpmasters will receive an additional $150 per month, bringing their total to $350.
Bradley Latham
Bradley Latham
Bradley is a reporter and photographer-videographer for Stars and Stripes in Wiesbaden, Germany. He has worked in military communities stateside and overseas for nearly two decades. He is a graduate of the Defense Information School and Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina.
Stars and Stripes · by Bradley Latham · August 13, 2025
9. Exclusive-Trump ally Erik Prince plans to keep forces in Haiti for 10 years to fight gangs and collect taxes
Exclusive-Trump ally Erik Prince plans to keep forces in Haiti for 10 years to fight gangs and collect taxes
Story by Anna Hirtenstein, Sarah Morland and Harold Isaac • 2h • 4 min read
https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/exclusive-trump-ally-erik-prince-plans-to-keep-forces-in-haiti-for-10-years-to-fight-gangs-and-collect-taxes/ar-AA1KvE9l
FILE PHOTO: Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, attends a police and military presentation, in Guayaquil, Ecuador April 5, 2025. REUTERS/Santiago Arcos/File Photo
© Thomson Reuters
By Anna Hirtenstein and Sarah Morland
August 14 (Reuters) - The prominent Donald Trump supporter and private security executive Erik Prince says he plans to keep his forces in Haiti for 10 years under an arrangement that will eventually give his firm a role in the country's tax-collection system.
In an interview with Reuters, Prince said his company, Vectus Global, had reached a 10-year agreement with the Haitian government to fight the country's criminal gangs and set up a tax collection system. After the security situation is stabilized, the firm would be involved in designing and implementing a program to tax goods imported across Haiti's border with the Dominican Republic, he said.
He said he expected to wrestle control of major roads and territories from the gangs in about a year. “One key measure of success for me will be when you can drive from Port-au-Prince to Cap Haitian in a thin-skinned vehicle and not be stopped by gangs,” Prince said in the interview.
FILE PHOTO: Security personnel patrols near the Villa d'Accueil where Haiti's transition council will be installed, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti April 25, 2024. REUTERS/Ralph Tedy Erol/File Photo/
© Thomson Reuters
Prince would not comment about how much the Haitian government would pay Vectus Global, nor how much tax he expects to collect in Haiti.
The new president of the transitional council, Laurent Saint-Cyr, who was inaugurated on August 7 as part of a planned rotation of council leaders, did not respond to requests for comment. Haiti's former council president and prime minister also did not respond to requests for comment.
Vectus began operating in Haiti in March, deploying mainly drones in coordination with a task force led by the prime minister, but the long-term engagement and the involvement in tax collection have not been previously reported.
A person familiar with the company's operations in Haiti told Reuters that Vectus would intensify its fight against the criminal gangs that control large swathes of Haiti in the coming weeks, deploying several hundred fighters from the United States, Europe and El Salvador who are trained as snipers and specialists in intelligence and communications, as well as helicopters and boats.
Prince, a former U.S. Navy Seal, founded the Blackwater military security firm in 1997. He sold the company in 2010 after Blackwater employees were convicted of unlawfully killing 14 unarmed civilians while escorting a U.S. embassy convoy in Baghdad's Nisour Square. The men were pardoned by Trump during his first term in the White House.
FILE PHOTO: Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, climbs into an armoured personnel carrier during a police and military presentation, in Guayaquil, Ecuador April 5, 2025. REUTERS/Santiago Arcos/File Photo
© Thomson Reuters
EXPANDING ROLE
Since Trump's return to the White House, Prince has advised Ecuador on how to fight criminal gangs and struck a deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo to help secure and tax its mineral wealth.
“It’s hard to imagine them operating without the consent of the Trump administration,” said Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, head of the Haiti program at Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
When asked for comment about Le Cour Grandmaison's assertion, a State Department spokesperson said it has not hired Prince or his company for any work in Haiti.
A senior White House official said: "The U.S. government has no involvement with the private military contractor hired by the Haitian government. We are not funding this contract or exercising any oversight.”
It's unclear whether Prince's contract would be affected by the change of leadership in Haiti earlier this month.
In an August 7 televised address, Saint-Cyr said he welcomed more international support to fight the gangs. “I am inviting all the international partners to increase their support, send more soldiers, provide more training," he said. "Help us with a more robust international force.”
The crisis in Haiti has worsened in recent years, as armed gangs gained territory and attacked hospitals, police stations and prisons, taking control of strategic transport routes and extorting funds from the population. Rights groups accuse the gangs of massacres, rapes, kidnappings and arson. About half the population is food-insecure and over 8,000 people in displacement camps face famine-level hunger.
FILE PHOTO: Former police officer "Commander Samuel" walks on the street surrounded by armed men from his group called Du Sang 9 during a protest against insecurity, Port-au-Prince, Haiti June 28, 2025. REUTERS/Jean Feguens Regala/File Photo
© Thomson Reuters
Haiti used to collect half of its tax revenue at the border with the Dominican Republic, but gang control of key transport routes has crippled trade and cut off state income, a report commissioned last year by Haiti's government and several multilateral organizations found. This has undermined the government's ability to respond to the crisis or deliver basic services, the report said.
The Dominican Republic is a key source of grains, flour, milk, water and other food staples for Haiti, according to customs data. Haiti also relies on imports from the Dominican Republic for textiles, consumer goods, and medical supplies.
FILE PHOTO: A man holds up placards as he yells toward a patrol car during a protest against gang-related violence and to demand the resignation of Haiti's transitional presidential council, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, May 15, 2025. REUTERS/Jean Feguens Regala/File Photo
© Thomson Reuters
Security contractors working in Haiti have faced challenges operating in a country with entrenched links between the gangs, local police and some factions of the government.
Earlier this year, a team from American security firm Studebaker Defense abandoned their mission in Haiti after two of their members were abducted, likely due to corrupt police officials, the New York Times reported.
Mounir Mahmalat, who serves as a country coordinator of the World Bank's Fragility, Conflict and Violence Group, said that it was virtually impossible to ensure the safe transport of goods or the security of people working in Port-au-Prince.
Other security firms working in Haiti have raised questions about how Vectus would hold onto cleared gang territory as well as the wisdom of channelling resources to private security firms instead of the country's own security forces.
"Resorting to private military companies cannot be seen as a solution to insecurity in Haiti,” said Gedeon Jean, head of Haiti’s Center for Human Rights Analysis and Research. “The use of private companies has often resulted in human rights violations.”
While a private force could help police restore security, Jean warned against large spending on a foreign company while Haiti's own security forces lack funds and equipment.
(Reporting by Anna Hirtenstein in London, Sarah Morland in Mexico City and Harold Isaac in Port au Prince. Editing by Suzanne Goldenberg)
10. The Fundamental Truth About U.S. Strategy That Putin Knows and Trump Ignores
Excerpts:
As the soldiers onscreen drag themselves through mud and ruins, the voices of Western commentators and newscasters occasionally intrude, off screen.
“Western confidence is likely to dip.”
“If we’re not getting results here, then perhaps Ukraine wants to think about another plan, even some land concessions for peace.”
“Western officials have expressed disappointment in a much-vaunted counteroffensive.”
“Russia has millions more men from whom to draw. There’s no path to a military victory here, only more death.”
“How sustainable is this level of support when there’s really no end in sight to the war?”
Those are not, in the end, complicated questions. No, Ukraine cannot win this war as it is fought now. Yes, this war may drag on indefinitely, and yes, this means more and more death. But this was never and still is not the only possible outcome. The United States and NATO have always had the capacity to put an end to this war the only way it can be ended: by defeating Putin. They have consistently chosen not to do that, relying instead on old, failed policies. In this one way, Trump is more of the same. He just puts on a much bigger show.
Opinion
M. Gessen
The Fundamental Truth About U.S. Strategy That Putin Knows and Trump Ignores
Aug. 13, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/13/opinion/trump-putin-ukraine-alaska.html
Credit...Juan Mabromata/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By M. Gessen
Opinion Columnist
Leer en español
Donald Trump wants the war in Ukraine to end. Volodymyr Zelensky wants the war in Ukraine to end. Many other presidents and prime ministers want the war to end. Vladimir Putin is not one of those presidents. The war in Ukraine has become the political, psychological and economic center of Putin’s regime.
That basic asymmetry would seem to doom any attempt at a negotiated peace — it is, in fact, the main reason no meaningful peace negotiations have occurred in the three and a half years since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Trump thinks he has a solution, though. He says he intends to use his negotiating prowess and keep ratcheting up economic pressure until Putin has no choice but to stop the fighting.
Between the bombastic social media posts, the shifting deadlines, the erratic announcements — one day a White House official says Trump will meet with Putin only after Putin meets with Zelensky, another day Trump drops the requirement — it’s easy to overlook the fact that Trump’s policy toward Russia largely follows the same failed strategy employed by the Biden administration, the first Trump administration and the Obama administration before that. For more than a decade, the United States has responded to Russian aggression by threatening and gradually imposing economic sanctions. That some of Trump’s sanctions take the form of tariffs doesn’t alter the nature of the policy.
The conventional theory behind sanctions is that economic pressure destabilizes regimes, possibly forcing the leader to change course. In one scenario, widespread hardship — unemployment, inflation, shortages — leads to popular discontent, even unrest. In another, a shrinking economy and loss of access to foreign markets anger the elites, who stage a palace coup or at least compel the leader to change direction.
The problem with this theory is that it’s wrong. When sanctions have an effect, it is usually to immiserate ordinary people. The elites remain wealthy, and the gap between the rich and the poor only grows. Rather than foment resentment against the regime and the elites, this tends to rally society against the country that imposed the sanctions. That enemy, after all, is far away and easily turned into an abstraction, while the elites at home control the media, which frames the conflict. They also control the jobs and the goods, making it much costlier to hate the elites at home than the enemy far away. And beyond a certain level, hardship leads people to withdraw from even thinking about politics, because they have to focus on survival.
As for the palace coup scenario, Russia has shown clearly how sanctions come to have the opposite of their intended effect. Superrich Russians living abroad who found their access to Western markets cut off and some of their assets frozen moved to places like Dubai or returned to Moscow. What else were they going to do? That the economic pie is shrinking doesn’t mean that the elites suddenly start conspiring to overthrow the leader — a risky proposition unlikely to succeed in the best of cases; it means only that they compete harder for what remains of the pie.
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The conventional model dictates that sanctions be imposed gradually, following stern warnings. This gives the Russian regime time to prepare for the impact: to subsidize domestic production of goods that will no longer be imported (Obama-era sanctions did wonders for Russian farmers and cheese makers), to prioritize new export markets as well as to find third-party countries through which to, say, export oil or import dual-use technology. It also bolsters ties between Russia and countries that are already under U.S. sanctions — such as Iran, which has become an essential partner in Russia’s drone warfare.
And still, one presidential administration after another has touted sanctions as its main instrument in getting Putin to change his ways. Joe Biden imposed multiple rounds of sanctions, though none were “devastating,” as he had promised. Trump imposed an additional 25 percent tariff on India, ostensibly as a penalty for importing Russian oil, and has promised more secondary tariffs for Russia’s other trade partners. Year after year, American presidents do the same thing, expecting different results. In this one way Trump is no crazier than his predecessors.
However difficult it is for foreign-policy theorists to grapple with the limitations of the economic pressure approach, for Trump it is all but impossible. Again and again, Trump has shown that he assumes that everyone is motivated by money.
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He is not alone in this: Many Western analysts have repeatedly suggested that Putin would seek an off-ramp in Ukraine once the war proved costly for Russia and, perhaps more to the point, for him personally. As much as Putin loves wealth, however, he has shown that he loves power even more — eternal power in his own country, which he wins by expanding Russia’s borders, and power in the world at large, which he wins by making other leaders fear him. Trump seems to be unaware that, by meeting with Putin, he is giving Putin exactly what the Russian leader wants — a demonstration of his power.
Trump is giving Putin additional gifts by agreeing to meet with him without Zelensky and by sidelining the European Union. Trump is affirming for all of Russia to see what Putin has claimed all along: that the conflict is really between Russia and the United States.
The moment Putin walks into the negotiating room, he has gotten everything he wants — plus an opportunity to make a quip about Alaska as historically Russian land (consider this a prediction). If the meeting does not produce an agreement, Putin loses nothing. Trump, on the other hand, would lose face if he walked out empty-handed. He may be motivated to accept something, anything.
The conditions for peace that Russia offered in June were merely a more elaborate display of the four things Putin has consistently demanded: land, including parts of Ukraine that Russia has not occupied; an end to Western military aid to Ukraine; guarantees that Ukraine will never be invited to join NATO; and a change of leadership in Ukraine. Trump can agree to those conditions, but Zelensky will never accept them. Putin has very little reason to change his demands.
Still, if the Russian leader is inclined to help Trump look good — a big if — they may emerge with some kind of a cease-fire agreement. This may be a time-limited cease-fire, contingent on Ukrainian withdrawal from parts of eastern Ukraine. Such a deal would force Ukraine to retreat from positions it considers strategically important while giving Russia a couple of months to regroup before attacking again, on the pretext that Ukraine didn’t abide by Russian demands. Another possibility that has been floated is a ban on waging war deep inside enemy territory, or an air truce. Such an agreement would save lives — in Kyiv and Odesa, which have come under Russian barrages day after day, but also in Russian cities, which Ukraine has grown increasingly capable of attacking with drones.
For Ukraine, an air truce would come at tremendous strategic cost. It would continue to be a country at war. It would still be governed under a set of state-of-emergency provisions. Families would continue to be separated, with so many women and children having fled to Western Europe while the men remained. Worst of all, people would continue dying at the front, in the villages and towns near the frontline, and in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, which is about 20 miles in.
The ability to attack deep in Russian territory is Ukraine’s sole negotiating advantage. These days, Russian airports are frequently forced to suspend operations because of drone attacks. The mayor of Moscow reports on the number of drones intercepted by air defense in much the same way as the mayor of Kyiv does. This is not enough to destabilize Putin’s regime, but it is enough to make him nervous. If drone attacks deep inside Russian territory stopped, war — what Russian propaganda still calls the “special military operation” — may once again come to feel far away.
The only thing that could force Putin to negotiate in earnest is the possibility of military defeat. Without that prospect, he is content to let the war continue forever. He doesn’t care about losing wealth as much as Trump imagines he does, and he doesn’t care about losing soldiers at all. In 2022 and again this May, the Kremlin noted that Peter the Great’s war with Sweden, which began in 1700, lasted 21 years. This war, too, could go on for decades.
One doesn’t have to go back centuries to imagine what that would be like. The forever war is already here. A devastating new documentary, “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” by the Ukrainian director Mstyslav Chernov shows what it looks like.
The film follows a Ukrainian brigade trying to liberate a small village. It takes them months to cover the distance in the movie’s title, roughly the equivalent of one mile. The movie shows the gigantic horrors of war — entire cities destroyed, swaths of farmland turned into minefields and what looks like miles of identical fresh graves — and the smallness of it: handfuls of soldiers, armed with semiautomatic rifles, killing and being killed one person at a time, taking one prisoner at a time, fighting for one trench at a time, in terrifying minutes that stretch into hours. It is relentless like a nightmare. A platoon commander says that he dreams of the fighting, then wakes up to the fighting. “And I thought, this war is a nightmare none of us can wake up from,” the narrator says.
As the soldiers onscreen drag themselves through mud and ruins, the voices of Western commentators and newscasters occasionally intrude, off screen.
“Western confidence is likely to dip.”
“If we’re not getting results here, then perhaps Ukraine wants to think about another plan, even some land concessions for peace.”
“Western officials have expressed disappointment in a much-vaunted counteroffensive.”
“Russia has millions more men from whom to draw. There’s no path to a military victory here, only more death.”
“How sustainable is this level of support when there’s really no end in sight to the war?”
Those are not, in the end, complicated questions. No, Ukraine cannot win this war as it is fought now. Yes, this war may drag on indefinitely, and yes, this means more and more death. But this was never and still is not the only possible outcome. The United States and NATO have always had the capacity to put an end to this war the only way it can be ended: by defeating Putin. They have consistently chosen not to do that, relying instead on old, failed policies. In this one way, Trump is more of the same. He just puts on a much bigger show.
11. U.S. MQ-9 Drone Just Flew A Mission Deep Into Mexico
U.S. MQ-9 Drone Just Flew A Mission Deep Into Mexico
The flight of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Guardian drone comes as the Trump administration is ramping up its campaign against Mexican drug cartels.
Howard Altman
Aug 13, 2025 5:59 PM EDT
120
twz.com · by Howard Altman
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Weekly insights and analysis on the latest developments in military technology, strategy, and foreign policy.
An MQ-9 Guardian medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) drone operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) flew deep into Mexico this morning, according to flight tracking data. What at least appears publicly to be a very rare event comes as the Trump administration has reportedly authorized the military to take action against cartels in Mexico.
The drone, using the call sign TROY701, took off from San Angelo, Texas, at about 4 a.m. Eastern Time and flew more than 800 miles south, including about 600 miles deep into Mexican airspace, according to data provided by FlightRadar24 and shared on X by our friend @thenewarea51.
US Reaper drone orbiting deep inside Mexico
Is this like US an anti-cartel operation? pic.twitter.com/6LdQiQcKcp
— Thenewarea51 (@thenewarea51) August 13, 2025
TROY is a known Department of Homeland Security (DHS) callsign and San Angelo is one of three locations where CBP has MQ-9s. The military variant of the Guardian is the MQ-9 Reaper, which can employ a variety of weapons in addition to collecting data from a vast array of reconfigurable sensors. CBP’s MQ-9 variants are not armed.
As far as the flight track that is visible to the public, the drone conducted several orbits in an area in the southern state of Mexico, to the west of Mexico City. Sometime after flying over this area, about six hours into the flight, the MQ-9 disappeared off online tracking software.
Interesting. A US CBP MQ-9B Guardian (shows as USAF on FR24) CBP-113 #AE2FD0 as TROY701 out of San Angelo, appears to be operating W of Toluca.
H/T to @sipjack1776 for the spot@All_Source_News @natsecboogie @ioangrillo @KatarinaSzulc pic.twitter.com/IQi18gAxeC
— Johnny Gemini (@Borrowed7Time) August 13, 2025
The drone was operating at the behest of the Mexican government, according to the head of that nation’s Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection, Omar García Harfuch.
La aeronave que ha sobrevolado las últimas horas el Estado de México no es un avión militar, sino un avión no tripulado que vuela a petición específica de una institución del Gobierno de México, aclaró el titular de la Secretaría de Seguridad y Protección Ciudadana, Omar García… pic.twitter.com/Ok53AWJsEL
— NMás (@nmas) August 13, 2025
However, it is unclear at the moment why the MQ-9 had taken this unusual flight path or where it went after going dark. CBP drone operators are fully aware that they can be tracked online with ease when broadcasting with their transponders. The area they circled over may have been part of an active collection area or it may not have been, with the aircraft moving to more sensitive locales after it stopped transmitting. We have reached out to CBP and the White House for more details and will update this story with any pertinent information provided.
CBP operates a pocket fleet of Q-9 aircraft, including these Predator-B drones, the cousin of the Guardian drone flown on this mission. (CBP)
While we don’t know the flight’s objective, those tracking cartels note that the area where the drone did its orbits is the territory of the notorious La Nueva Familia Michoacana (LNFM) cartel.
The organization was sanctioned by the U.S. under a 2021 Biden executive order for illegally delivering large amounts of Fentanyl and synthetic opioids north of the border, “causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans annually.” In April, two of its leaders were indicted on trafficking charges. Siblings Johnny Hurtado Olascoaga — also known as El Pez, Pescado, and Mojarra — and Jose Alfredo Hurtado Olascoaga — also known as El Fresa, El Feyo, and La Fruta — are both fugitives. There is a $5 million bounty for the arrest of El Pez and a $3 million bounty for the arrest of his brother.
DEA
DEA
The cartel trackers suggested that the MQ-9 flight could be related to LNFM.
“Based on geolocation work we have done utilizing open source materials, this territory has a heavy LNFM presence and the drone would most likely be looking at high value targets or areas of interest associated with that particular narcoterrorist organization,” a spokesman for a team of open source analysts with a focus on cartels & other non-state actors under the X handle @natsecboogie told us on Wednesday.
The exact target is “really hard to tell, but likely someone high up there in either cartel leadership – LNFM more likely – or someone on the most wanted list,” explained Stefano Ritondale, chief intelligence officer for Artorias, an AI-driven intelligence company specializing in cartel violence in Mexico, Latin American affairs, and drug trade/organized crime.
Once again, we have no real idea what it was collecting or even if it was collecting when it was flying circles with its transponder on near Mexico City. Given that the Guardians can stay aloft for nearly a day and half, it’s just as likely it was holding in that area before shutting off its transponder and heading to its sensitive collection area or areas. It’s also possible it was staging to support a larger multi-national, multi-agency operation and flew that area at a certain time.
The MQ-9 flew more than 800 miles from its launch point into Mexican airspace. (Google Earth)
While this flight is uncommon, it would not be the first time MQ-9s have flown in Mexican airspace in cooperation with that nation’s government.
“CBP also uses Predator B aircraft to perform bi-national law enforcement operations with the government of Mexico through coordination at the Information Analysis Center located at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Mexico,” according to a 2017 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional watchdog. “We found that 7 percent of Predator B flight hours from fiscal years 2013 through 2016 were in foreign airspace located in Mexico or 1,615 flight hours.”
Today’s flight was made by tail number CBP113, according to FlightRadar24. The aircraft has been referred to in the past as a Guardian Maritime Mission version of the Q-9 family. It features a Raytheon SeaVue multi-mode radar under the central fuselage, and includes surface search and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery modes. SAR images are highly detailed maps of the surface below, which can be produced day or night, despite any cloud cover, smoke, or dust. Advanced radars of this type can also track moving vehicles on the ground. Guardian Maritime Mission drones also have an MTS electro-optical and infrared sensor ball under the nose, as well as data links capable of sending imagery and radar tracks back to control stations on the ground in near real-time.
There are three separate MQ-9 variants flying for CBP today, including the Guardian Maritime Mission variant. Beyond internal radar and electro-optical systems, they can also carry a wide array of missionized podded systems. None of them are armed or employ kinetic effects. You can read more these drones in this previous feature.
CBP
As we previously wrote, the CIA is also reportedly flying unarmed MQ-9 Reapers over or very near Mexico to snoop on drug cartels. The overflights are said to have built off a covert CIA drone surveillance program that began under Biden, focused on finding labs producing the narcotic Fentanyl inside Mexico. We reached out to the CIA for comment.
USAF MQ-9s were not on a list of aerial assets being used by NORTHCOM to collect against cartels for the border mission. NORTHCOM oversees the U.S. military response on the southern border.
“We do not release specific information regarding ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) missions,” NORTHCOM told us. “However, the Department of Defense employs AISR (aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) capabilities in support of the southern border mission. To date, there have been a total of 347 ISR missions conducted in support of southern border operations utilizing various platforms. Various aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft from the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Air Force are supporting USNORTHCOM’s southern border mission. Air Force AISR platforms include the U-2 Dragon Lady, RC-135 Rivet Joint, and the RQ-4 Global Hawk. The U.S. Army ISR asset is the MQ-1 Gray Eagle.”
NORTHCOM declined to say if any of these missions flew over Mexico.
You can read more about the Dragon Lady and Rivet Joint flights along the border in our story on the subject here and here.
While MQ-9s are not on its list, NORTHCOM collects data from a wide array of sources.
“We recently established the Joint Intelligence Task Force Southern Border, which is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, along with — at a CBP facility,” NORTHCOM commander Gen. Gregory M. Guillot testified earlier this year before Congress. “And what we do is we bring in interagency, DOD and Intel community feeds and fuse it and redistribute that information from there. That has led to unparalleled sharing of intelligence data on this mission set that used to be available but not all processed from one location.”
Today’s MQ-9 flight was launched a week after The New York Times reported that Trump “secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed terrorist organizations, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Considered the administration’s most aggressive step so far in its campaign against cartels, the “order provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against cartels,” the publication reported. “U.S. military officials have started drawing up options for how the military could go after the groups, the people familiar with the conversations said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations.”
Breaking News: President Trump has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels. https://t.co/lpL8fm4b1d
— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) August 8, 2025
The Times does not offer specifics about what actions the military may take against the cartels, however we previously discussed at length what some of those options might be. ISR flights would be launched as part of any operations.
Seeing this flight show up on FlightRadar24 validated what cartel trackers have thought about these drones.
“We have seen CBP drones magically appear in the Gulf of Mexico, so I wouldn’t consider this new, but it’s the first definitive proof we have them operating in Mexico,” Ritondale told us.
Though the MQ-9 let its location be known for hours, given the secret nature of these operations, we may never learn its true mission.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com
Senior Staff Writer
Howard is a Senior Staff Writer for The War Zone, and a former Senior Managing Editor for Military Times. Prior to this, he covered military affairs for the Tampa Bay Times as a Senior Writer. Howard's work has appeared in various publications including Yahoo News, RealClearDefense, and Air Force Times.
twz.com · by Howard Altman
12. The Secret Channel Russia and Ukraine Use to Trade Prisoners of War
The Secret Channel Russia and Ukraine Use to Trade Prisoners of War
Peace talks are fraught on the eve of the Putin-Trump summit, yet the two countries have managed to trade more than 10,000 troops, something virtually unheard of in modern warfare
https://www.wsj.com/world/pow-trade-russia-ukraine-secret-channel-55bc49df
By Matthew Luxmoore
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, Drew Hinshaw
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/ Photographs by Sasha Maslov for WSJ
Aug. 13, 2025 9:00 pm ET
KYIV, Ukraine—Europe’s largest wave of prisoner exchanges since the wake of World War II was set in motion when a Ukrainian soldier reached into the pocket of a dead Russian officer and found a phone.
The device landed in the hands of Brig. Gen. Dmytro Usov, a deputy to the head of Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence service, which had just lost two of its men in battles northwest of Kyiv. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was only three weeks old, and the phone presented a way to retrieve their remains.
Usov, a career intelligence officer with a trim gray-streaked beard, scrolled through the deceased’s phonebook and pressed “call” on a contact whose rank suggested this might be a Russian frontline commander.
“Your officer is dead,” he told the stunned Russian after introducing himself. He texted a photograph of the corpse, then offered a deal: the bodies of your men for ours.
What followed has evolved into one of the strangest subplots of Europe’s biggest war since the 1940s: a series of swaps that started with a few corpses and then slowly escalated into the regular trade of hundreds of captured prisoners, many skeletal and barely clinging to consciousness.
President Vladimir Putin has refused to meet Volodymyr Zelensky unless the Ukrainian president all but concedes defeat, complicating President Trump’s peace summit in Alaska on Friday. The two countries, once part of the same Soviet empire, no longer have embassies with each other, and successive peace talks have broken down.
Brig. Gen. Dmytro Usov poses with relatives of missing Ukrainian service members in June after arriving with a group of around 100 POWs released in a prisoner exchange with Russia.
And yet without fanfare, Ukraine and Russia over the course of their war have managed to exchange more than 10,000 combatants across front lines and secure corridors in neighboring Belarus. They include some 1,200 soldiers traded in recent weeks; another 100 young, wounded and ill combatants are due to cross the border on Thursday, Ukrainian officials say.
Despite being snared in conflict and deadlocked at the negotiating table, both sides speak of their shadowy prisoner exchange channel—run directly by military intelligence officers—as efficient and professional. Their transactions mark a striking paradox: two bitter enemies aligned on almost nothing, yet collaborating time and again on one deeply human issue—prisoners of war.
Military historians have puzzled over the relatively smooth logistics and regular pace of these trades, conducted mid-conflict, a pattern virtually unheard of in modern warfare. By contrast, the Soviet Union held onto German POWs for years after World War II. Some weren’t freed until 1956. The United States and North Vietnam didn’t begin consistent POW releases until 1973, after two decades of American deepening involvement and a long, grinding peace process. Iran and Iraq, whose war ended in 1988, released their last POWs three days before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq began.
The backstory of how Moscow and Kyiv began trading in a resource they both have—an oversupply of captured men—dates back more than a decade, to the earliest days of Ukraine’s violent break from Russia. It hints at a hidden infrastructure that reveals the war is more nuanced than many Americans understand. Mostly, it centers around a tiny handful of military and intelligence officers who now constitute nearly the last thin wire still linking two neighbors that Putin insists are “one people, a single whole.”
Usov, speaking hours before his agency commenced another historic exchange via Belarus in June, put it a different way: “Despite the fact that we’re enemies, that Russia is the aggressor, we have established a certain level of communication,” he said. “It’s hard to fight them, and it’s hard to negotiate with them. But at the same time, we do it honestly.”
Usov used a cellphone found in the pocket of a dead Russian officer to initiate contact with officials on the other side of the war.
To understand how two wartime enemies managed to set aside their differences to retrieve their POWs, The Wall Street Journal spoke to more than a dozen Ukrainian, Russian and European officials, and visited exchange points along the frontline and detention facilities throughout Ukraine. Reporters also spent time in the basement of a military-intelligence office in Kyiv that functions as the nerve center for Ukraine’s hunt for soldiers captured by Russia. These sources described trades as a way to ease domestic pressure, demonstrate progress to foreign powers—most recently, the U.S.—and relieve themselves of the burden of feeding and housing thousands of the enemy.
At the center of the web is perhaps the world’s top prisoner trader, Vladimir Putin, who last year greenlighted a wide-ranging exchange, freeing a group of dissidents and journalists, including three wrongly held Americans—among them, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich—in return for eight Russian spies, cybercriminals, smugglers and a professional hitman. That trade, on a cordoned off airfield in Turkey, attracted global attention. But it is dwarfed by the lesser-known human commerce underway along the frontlines between Russian and Ukrainian forces.
“If there’s a chance to save a human life, returning someone home to their family before hostilities end, and in the process free our own soldiers whom we deeply care about it, then we do it,” said Russia’s chief negotiator on Ukraine, Vladimir Medinsky, who used a Russian idiom to emphasise that the neighbors remain mortal enemies: “As we say in Russia, we don’t christen our children together.”
‘Five letters in his name’
The seeds of the POW channel were planted more than a decade ago, in the President Hotel in the Belarussian capital of Minsk.
It was 2014 and Ukraine was struggling to reclaim eastern territory seized by Russian-backed militants. Western leaders had pressured its government into talks—to resolve political, economic and cultural disputes.
The negotiators argued over every point, from the spelling of Ukrainian and Russian names to whose troops were shelling where, according to the Swiss diplomat, Tony Frisch, who oversaw the sessions. When he tried to coax the parties to socialize during lunch breaks or have evening drinks at the hotel bar to build a rapport, he was sternly rebuffed.
Several times, Viktor Medvedchuk, the head of a minor pro-Kremlin Ukrainian party who was supposed to be negotiating for Kyiv, made a surprising announcement: He needed to fly to Moscow, to seek guidance from “a man with five letters in his name.”
When he returned, it was clear Putin wanted to make a trade, and the stage was set for a series of small prisoner exchanges from the end of 2014 into the next year. Prisoners crossed through checkpoints on landmine-littered roads, between Ukraine and the Kremlin-backed paramilitaries.
Portraits of missing Ukrainian service members blanket a hospital in Chernihiv, where relatives came searching for released POWs.
The two sides fell into dysfunctional haggling over whose captives were worth more, as one Russian delegate refused to speak—at all. In the meantime, the Swiss visited paramilitary prisons with the International Committee of the Red Cross, and met Ukrainian captives who recalled being tortured, choked with plastic bags, their children’s lives threatened. Ultimately, over the course of about 125 meetings, the two sides managed to trade 600 prisoners: “I can tell you, it was sometimes like a discussion in a market in Morocco for sheep or cows,” said Frisch.
Then, as Russian troops amassed around Ukraine’s borders in early 2022, meetings were abruptly canceled. On February 22, 2022, Putin yanked all Russian diplomats from Ukraine, blaming “provocations” and threats to their lives. That same day, he effectively ended the Minsk process, lamenting a lack of results. Two days later, some 150,000 Russian troops streamed across the border.
The long game
Less than a month later, Brig. Gen. Usov was summoned to his boss Kyrylo Budanov’s office at HUR’s sprawling headquarters: Ukraine’s military intelligence agency had no way to contact its counterpart inside Russia.
Old communications lines were shuttered and new attempts were floundering. “There was no trust. We had battles just outside Kyiv, and we had to convince them to swap people,” Budanov said in an interview. “But we didn’t believe each other.”
The breakdown rendered the Chinese-made Xiaomi cellphone in Usov’s hands an unusually precious channel to re-establish communication between two nations rallying troops into a fight that both claimed was now a war of survival.
Ukrainian Military Intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said that, early on, ‘there was no trust.’
In conversations with the Russians, Usov used his call-sign—Stayer, or marathon-runner—and his real name only sparingly. Trust had to be built painstakingly slowly. He never shared his own number.
Two months into the war, Russia revealed his counterpart: a lieutenant general at Moscow’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU.
In Libya, Gen. Aleksandr Zorin had been Russia’s pointman on relations with the pro-Kremlin faction controlling the country’s east. He represented Russia in Syrian ceasefire talks with the U.S. in Geneva—and as those talks dragged into the evening, he stepped into the press hall, and delivered pizza to foreign journalists.
Usov found Zorin, who at 56 is his senior by 12 years, frank and straight-talking. Zorin had been born in Soviet Ukraine.
“The way he spoke, and discussed things, corresponded with his general’s rank,” Usov said. “He was head and shoulders above the others I had talked with up to that point.”
That call with Zorin was the start of a long working relationship that would inspire Usov to embrace a new role as negotiator. Two of his great-grandfathers had died in Nazi captivity and he said he felt duty-bound to ensure Ukrainian servicemen did not repeat their fates.
The two senior spies began to assess one another in more regular calls. Usov was learning on the job, studying the complex mechanics needed to safely engineer an exchange, and seeking advice from Jonathan Powell—now the U.K.’s national security adviser, who had once helped end The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
He read a copy of Zorin’s doctoral thesis, which he said recounted negotiating conflicts in the Middle East. “When I read this, I understood how I might establish a working relationship with him,” Usov said. Zorin couldn’t be reached for comment and the GRU didn’t respond to a request for an interview.
Within a month, Usov was barrelling deep into Russian-held territory to meet Zorin in person in the devastated coastal city of Mariupol, escorted by two Russian Tigr armored vehicles, a white flag fluttering above his car.
The cars wound through streets littered with the corpses of dead civilians. Next to the charred metal and rubble of the port city’s steel mill, the Ukrainians stopped to collect one of the commanders of a 2,500-strong garrison of elite Ukrainian fighters who were surrounded inside the plant under constant bombardment to surrender.
That afternoon Usov shook hands with Zorin, who was flanked by four Russian officers, and sat opposite him at a conference room table at a location outside the city, according to a person who was there. The talks dragged on for hours, with both sides fielding calls to their superiors in Kyiv and Moscow. Eventually, Ukraine consented to a surrender: The 2,500 fighters would be taken to Russian prisons.
The question remained of how Ukraine might bring the fighters home.
A member of the 111th brigade greets a fellow soldier who was in captivity 27 months before his release. Relatives show photos to a former POW looking out a hospital window.
Kyiv looked for a country that could mediate an exchange, but Switzerland was now on Moscow’s “Unfriendly Countries List,” punishment for joining European sanctions. Instead, it turned to the new Switzerlands of the Middle East: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
On September 21, Turkey brokered the largest swap since Russia’s invasion, a choreography that flew five captured Ukrainian commanders to the capital of Ankara while Moscow received Medvedchuk, the pro-Russian politician who had once negotiated in Minsk but had since been arrested for high treason. A separate group of European POWs captured while fighting for Ukraine simultaneously boarded a Saudi jet leaving Russia to find a celebrity businessman there to escort them: Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.
By now, the two sides had an understanding. The top intelligence officers had met and sized each other up. Foreign governments were standing by to help resolve disputes if necessary. Intelligence chiefs in both countries reported back to superiors in their capitals: This is someone we can work with.
Smuggled lists
In time, those early exchanges birthed a whole new infrastructure. In a leafy district of Kyiv, near hipster cafes and beauty salons, a nondescript three-story building became HUR’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners-of-War.
On the top floor, Usov and his HUR subordinates meet regularly in a conference room with the families of POWs who come dressed in T-shirts bearing logos of their son or husband’s brigade and often harangue the officials over a lack of results.
In the basement, analysts scour Russian websites and social media feeds for clues about POWs’ location and condition. They have compiled a vast database that includes 200 data points about each individual including height, eye color and Russian responses to questions from the Red Cross.
Ukrainians released in swaps have smuggled out lists with the names of comrades in a specific cell. Photos of those lists are compiled in evidence to convince the Russians a particular person is in their captivity.
“To get people back, we have to know who we’re fighting for,” said Viktoriia Petruk, a 34-year-old who leads the analytics department and spoke for the first time to the media about her work.
Viktoriia Petruk leads a group of HUR analysts who scour websites and social media to feed a database of POWs held by the Russians.
The basement analysts have identified almost 200 detention facilities across Russia and occupied parts of Ukraine where Ukrainian combatants are held often in dire conditions.
Ukraine has five dedicated POW camps, most of them former prisons where the captive Russians earn money sewing, chopping wood, or producing furniture for sale at Ukrainian stores. Kyiv is eager to show Western partners it has moral high ground by treating its prisoners better than Russia.
Logistics have often been fraught. In January 2024, a Russian military plane carrying 65 Ukrainian POWs to a prisoner swap was shot down near the border, a move Moscow blamed on Kyiv, which hasn’t taken responsibility for it. During a lull in swaps, and facing political protests from prisoners’ relatives, HUR concocted several long-shot schemes to speed things up: offering convicted pro-Russian collaborators and even the bones of long-buried Russian spies for exchange.
Russia didn’t take the bait. But when peace talks stalled in Istanbul this Spring, both countries consented to another round, this time bigger than ever before.
On a sunny recent morning, Usov again headed north from Kyiv to greet a fresh cohort of hundreds of exchanged Ukrainian soldiers. Injured men limped and staggered up to the general to thank him, then asked a question: when would be the next round of prisoner trades that might bring their brothers-in-arms home?
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com, Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com and Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com
13. Exploring War Termination in the Russo-Ukraine War
Excerpts:
The persistence of the Russo-Ukraine War illustrates the enduring relevance of Goemans’ theory for explaining the dynamics of war termination. His theory offers critical insights into why costly wars continue despite their devastating consequences. The informational asymmetries that underpinned Russia’s initial decision to invade, the shifting war aims of both belligerents, the credibility deficit in postwar commitments, and the complex interplay of domestic political incentives all contribute to the current stalemate. Far from being a discrete event, war termination is a fluid process in which battlefield outcomes, political calculations, and strategic signalling continuously redefine the parameters of a possible peace.
In the case of the Russo-Ukraine War, no stable bargaining range has emerged because each side remains unwilling or unable to accept the minimum terms the other requires. Russia’s irredentist ambitions and refusal to accept a sovereign, Western-aligned Ukraine are met by Kyiv’s existential need for genuine independence and security guarantees. In addition, the restrained, inconsistent, and conditional military support to Ukraine from the international community create the conditions for what William Zartman and Matthew Krain call a “mutually hurting stalemate,” in which neither side is able to impose enough unacceptable battlefield outcomes to create bargaining space. For example, former US Army Europe commander Lieutenant General Ben Hodges has consistently argued that more robust support for Ukraine earlier in the war would have helped end the conflict with a Ukrainian victory. These positions are hardened by internal political structures that incentivize continued conflict: for Russia, a personalist regime that punishes defeat; for Ukraine, a democratic selectorate demanding freedom from foreign domination. In this environment, third-party security guarantees appear essential to resolving commitment problems, but they remain politically fraught and strategically uncertain.
Ultimately, Goemans’ theory reminds us that wars do not end simply because one side desires peace. They end when both parties perceive that peace is more valuable than continued fighting and when political and security guarantees make negotiated outcomes viable. Until those conditions emerge in the Russo-Ukraine conflict, peace in Eastern Europe will remain elusive.
Opinion / Perspective| The Latest
Exploring War Termination in the Russo-Ukraine War
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/08/14/exploring-war-termination-in-the-russo-ukraine-war/
by Jerry Landrum
|
08.14.2025 at 06:00am
During his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised that, if elected, he would end the Russo-Ukraine War within 24 hours by meeting personally with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. Six months into his term, however, the war persists. This gap between political rhetoric and reality reflects not a deficiency in negotiation skills but the deeper dynamics that H.E. Goemans’ theory of war termination reveals about how battlefield outcomes reshape war aims, exacerbate commitment problems, and interact with domestic political constraints to prevent peace. Applying Goemans’ framework to the Russo-Ukraine War reveals why even sustained US pressure has failed to produce a settlement and why similar dynamics recur in protracted conflicts. Any future peace negotiations over the Russo-Ukraine War must successfully navigate the challenges highlighted within this theoretical framework.
Variance in War Aims
Goemans argues that bargaining space for war termination opens only when neither side demands more than the other can accept. Yet war aims vary based on battlefield outcomes. For Russia, the Kremlin’s illegal annexation of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia marked a pivot from an early focus on capturing Kyiv to securing territorial control in the east and south. Putin’s rhetoric, however, continues to invoke a vision of a culturally unified Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, suggesting that if conditions allowed, the Kremlin would once again pursue control over all of Ukraine. At the 2025 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin reiterated that he considers “Ukraine and Russia peoples to be one people. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours. We have a rule. Wherever a Russian soldier sets foot is ours.”
For Ukraine, the central objective remains the preservation of genuine independence. Zelensky has declared that surrendering territory is “legally” impossible, yet he has hinted that a settlement involving concessions might be conceivable if backed by Western guarantees. This ambiguity reflects the weaker side’s adaptive strategy of balancing maximalist goals with pragmatic assessments of Western commitment, battlefield innovation (such as cost-effective drone strikes on Russian strategic assets), and the resilience of its population.
Both sides continually reassess their war aims based on questions of capability, endurance, and external support. These shifting assessments prevent convergence on mutually acceptable terms.
Commitment Problems
Goemans identifies the “commitment problem” as a major obstacle to peace as the weaker party fears that concessions today will invite further demands tomorrow. For Ukraine, any deal ceding territory risks emboldening future Russian aggression. This fear is echoed in European policy circles, where leaders such as Estonian foreign minister Kaja Kallas and Romanian President argue that only strength at the negotiating table can deter Moscow’s long-term ambitions. Indeed, Kallas has stated that “Russia is already a threat to the European Union” because it has a “long-term plan for long-term aggression.”
From the Kremlin’s perspective, the commitment problem works in reverse. Russia demands more than Ukrainian neutrality; it expects complete subordination akin to Belarus’s vassal status. The Kremlin’s insistence during the 2025 Istanbul Ukraine renounce NATO aspirations was rejected as an assault on Ukrainian sovereignty, which Ukrainian negotiators “who insist that the country has the right to “choose to be part of the Euro-Atlantic community and move towards EU membership.” In short, Russia fears that Ukraine will continue its pro-Western track after a negotiated settlement, which is unacceptable.
The respective actions needed to address these commitment problems are contrary and difficult to resolve. For the Ukrainians, Goemans’ framework suggests that only credible third-party security guarantees could resolve the impasse. Yet such guarantees, whether NATO membership or direct Western troop commitments, are unacceptable for Russia and prompts them to continue the war. For the Russians, only a complete pro-Russian regime would demonstrate a commitment to reject its pro-Western trajectory. However, regime change in Kyiv—as a demonstration of credible commitment to address Russia’s security concerns—is a for both the Zelensky government and opposition leaders in the country. These commitment problems clearly challenge the attainment of a negotiated settlement.
Domestic Political Constraints
Goemans’ most original contribution is his analysis of how regime type shapes war termination. According to his theory, leaders of “mixed autocracies” that simultaneously cater to elite and mass constituencies often double down when facing defeat, as losing power may mean imprisonment or death. Timothy Frye, a scholar specializing in Russia, describes the Russian government as a “personalist autocracy,” where Putin holds extensive powers. Russia’s personalist autocracy, while dominated by Putin, relies on three key selectorates: the siloviki (security sector elites), powerful business magnates, and the mass public. In the prosperous 2000s, oil revenues made it easy for the Putin regime to placate all these groups. Now, the strain from Western economic sanctions forces the Kremlin to make trade-offs between the groups, which raises the risk of elite coup or mass unrest. As Lawrence Freedman notes, ending the war without achieving core objectives would enrage ultra-nationalist constituencies and undermine Putin’s survival.
Indeed, evidence suggests that after battlefield setbacks in 2022, Putin chose to escalate because the perception of defeat was unacceptable. He doubled down with mobilization of 300,000 reservists, , invited troops to fight on Russian soil, and issued . Such measures reflect a regime fighting not only for strategic objectives but for survival from banishment, imprisonment, or possibly even death. The desperate stake of the conflict makes it difficult for Kremlin negotiators to make concessions unless they are certain that such concessions are not perceived as a humiliating defeat for Russia. In a 2023 interview on Russian state media, Putin admitted that he was “primarily focused on the special military operation” and that he stays up “quite late” directing the effort. His sleepless nights are doubtless related to concerns over his selectorates: the siloviki, powerful business magnates, and the mass public. In 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a powerful business elite and long-time ally of Putin, marched his Wagner Group towards Moscow over dissatisfaction with the war effort, and there have been mass protests over the decision to mobilize reserve forces. To date, Putin has been able to sidestep these challenges, but Goemans’ theory helps to increase understanding on why Putin is hesitant to engage in peace negotiations unless there is a perception that Russia was victorious. Again, this diminishes the bargaining space and increases the difficulty of reaching a negotiated settlement.
Conclusion
The persistence of the Russo-Ukraine War illustrates the enduring relevance of Goemans’ theory for explaining the dynamics of war termination. His theory offers critical insights into why costly wars continue despite their devastating consequences. The informational asymmetries that underpinned Russia’s initial decision to invade, the shifting war aims of both belligerents, the credibility deficit in postwar commitments, and the complex interplay of domestic political incentives all contribute to the current stalemate. Far from being a discrete event, war termination is a fluid process in which battlefield outcomes, political calculations, and strategic signalling continuously redefine the parameters of a possible peace.
In the case of the Russo-Ukraine War, no stable bargaining range has emerged because each side remains unwilling or unable to accept the minimum terms the other requires. Russia’s irredentist ambitions and refusal to accept a sovereign, Western-aligned Ukraine are met by Kyiv’s existential need for genuine independence and security guarantees. In addition, the restrained, inconsistent, and conditional military support to Ukraine from the international community create the conditions for what William Zartman and Matthew Krain call a “mutually hurting stalemate,” in which neither side is able to impose enough unacceptable battlefield outcomes to create bargaining space. For example, former US Army Europe commander Lieutenant General Ben Hodges has consistently argued that more robust support for Ukraine earlier in the war would have helped end the conflict with a Ukrainian victory. These positions are hardened by internal political structures that incentivize continued conflict: for Russia, a personalist regime that punishes defeat; for Ukraine, a democratic selectorate demanding freedom from foreign domination. In this environment, third-party security guarantees appear essential to resolving commitment problems, but they remain politically fraught and strategically uncertain.
Ultimately, Goemans’ theory reminds us that wars do not end simply because one side desires peace. They end when both parties perceive that peace is more valuable than continued fighting and when political and security guarantees make negotiated outcomes viable. Until those conditions emerge in the Russo-Ukraine conflict, peace in Eastern Europe will remain elusive.
Tags: Russia, Russia-Ukraine War, Ukraine, war termination
About The Author
- Jerry Landrum
- COL J. E. Landrum, U.S. Army, is assistant professor and department chair at the United States Army War College, Carlisle Barracks. He holds a B.A. from the University of North Georgia, a M.M.A.S. from the School of Advanced Military Studies, and a PhD from Kansas State University. His assignments include tours with the 10th Mountain Division, 1st Infantry Division, NATO Headquarters LANDCOM, and XVIII Airborne Corps.
14. The Collapse of Iran’s Proxy Strategy Exposes the Limits of Asymmetric Warfare
Excerpt:
In summary, as Iran’s case shows that relying on proxies and asymmetric warfare possesses many limitations. When a proxy calls on its benefactor to intervene directly, the risks to the benefactor’s risk increase significantly. This flies in the face of proxy war logic. In addition, in these situations, if the benefactor does not rush to help its client the benefactor can lose the trust of its proxy and loss of reputation with the proxy. As the recent developments show, proxy groups cannot ensure viable deterrence or shield an intervening state indefinitely.
The Collapse of Iran’s Proxy Strategy Exposes the Limits of Asymmetric Warfare
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/08/14/the-collapse-of-irans-proxy-strategy-exposes-the-limits-of-asymmetric-warfare/
by Rufat Ahmadzada
|
08.14.2025 at 06:00am
Rising Lion and Iran
With the conclusion of Operation Rising Lion, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu iterated that Israel has accomplished its strategic operational goals, in particular, rolling back the Iranian threat in terms of both its nuclear weapons program and ballistic missiles. The accuracy of the conduct of the military operation by the Israeli air force, military intelligence, and Mossad, and the intense focus in the opening stage of the operation, particularly the decapitation of the Iranian military chain of command, inflicted a strategic and humiliating defeat on Iran. The Israeli air force flew more than 1,000 sorties from a distance of more than 1,500km and struck Iranian nuclear sites Natanz and Isfahan, as well as ballistic missiles sites and launchers in western Iran. In doing so, the Israelis disabled the Iranian air defense systems, thereby establishing complete air superiority including over the capital Tehran, and attacked regime power structures such as the Basij paramilitary, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Ministry of Defense, and police. Likewise, the targeted assassinations of Iran’s nuclear scientists, a vital group of people with know-how for the nuclear weapons program, were also a strategic action, eliminating or setting back Iran’s nuclear program. The US’s operation, codenamed Midnight Hammer, dealt the final blow against the nuclear program with strikes on nuclear enrichment sites Natanz, Isfahan, and the Fordow uranium enrichment site buried deep underground. This operation essentially paved the way for a ceasefire after 12 days of confrontation.
Israel and the US’s direct confrontation with Iran marks the total collapse of Tehran’s asymmetric warfare strategy. It is timely, therefore, to analyze the concept of proxy war and the limits of proxy war strategy. More importantly, Operation Rising Lion and Midnight Hammer raise questions about Iran’s proxy war strategy and whether that strategy has been successful or has finally failed. In looking at Iranian strategy, it is thus important to examine the following questions: What is proxy warfare? Why do states use it, and why are proxy groups unreliable? What is Iran’s proxy war strategy, and why has it failed?
Defining Proxy Warfare
In the Middle East’s complex geopolitical landscape, proxy conflicts have emerged alongside the rise of Tehran’s regional importance. As a result, proxy wars have become major security concerns. One of the primary reasons they are concerning is because they tend to blur the line between the mainstream concepts of war and peace, and they exploit those windows of opportunity.
During the Cold War, proxy wars became a central focal point of the rivalry between the two superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union. The emergence of nuclear weapons pushed the US and the Soviet Union to avoid direct confrontation and the potential of nuclear annihilation. As a result, each superpower turned to third-party countries as their playgrounds for great power competition.
Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov defines a proxy war as an international conflict with the participation of a minimum of two states, where one or several parties to the conflict are forced or asked to go to war on behalf of another state. In other words, state A, the sponsor or benefactor, utilizes a local political movement to target state B in pursuit of its own (i.e., state A) strategic and national interest.
According to Tyrone Groh, a proxy war occurs when a intervening actor (actor A) directs a local political actor (actor B) toward accomplish its own (i.e., A) strategic goals, under the guise of indirectly influencing domestic affairs the target state. Put another way, using a proxy to achieve strategic and geopolitical goals, an intervening state incorporates a pre-existing local political actor as a client to accomplish its strategic interests. In doing, so the intervening state provides the necessary material support in the form of intelligence, weapons, military instructors, financial, ideological and diplomatic aid to a local actor in the target state to increase its capabilities. The indirect intervention does not necessarily mean that the intervening state’s actions are actual combat operations.
Amos Fox describes the complex, intermingled ties between the principal state and its client as a hierarchical relationship, while defining proxy war as a complex process of working against a common adversary with a shared goal. The relationship between the benefactor state and its surrogate proxy is hierarchical, and the primary objective of the proxy is to implement the goal shared with its patron. The intervening state consolidates its influence over its proxy if the latter stays primarily dependent on it, especially on its supply of financial and material aid.
Mumford argues that shaping and influencing a conflict’s strategic outcome is the primary goal of the intervening state or actors in a proxy war, as he defines a proxy war as an indirect engagement by a third party. States pursue a proxy war strategy for several reasons, among them mitigating the high risks of a direct military engagement in a conflict. Proxy wars are considered cheaper than demonstrating a state’s relative power in a direct confrontation. They also avoid the unpredictable outcome of a direct clash, which requires states to win, whereas in a proxy war, conflict management is the primary goal rather than full-scale victory.
Furthermore, Groh argues that states pursue several goals in an indirect engagement, such as winning a conflict, mounting a holding action, meddling, and feeding chaos. Groh, among many other proxy war scholars, says that different objectives or interests between an intervening state and a proxy complicate this relationship over time, thus proxies are not always reliable. Interests can diverge in the long run for various reasons: the proxy finds an alternative source of supply or its needs change; a shift in the dynamics of the conflict as the proxy loses its combat and political effectiveness; the intervening state has to change its strategy as a matter of urgency due to growing risks posed by the proxy war or common ground being found with the adversary; or the proxy becomes more powerful and self-reliant.
In Iran’s case, their principal-proxy relationships are seemingly strong. The bond between Tehran and its proxies, most of which area Shia, fuels a solid and divine dyad driven by the recognition of the religious authority of the Islamic Republic’s leadership. However, Iran’s case also demonstrates that a proxy strategy primarily intended to shield the intervening state and provide it with plausible deniability backfires when a proxy seeks direct intervention from the intervening state, as is demonstrated by Hezbollah’s request that Iran intervene directly against Israel in 2024.
Iran’s Shattered Proxy Strategy
Iran’s decades-long strategy of deterrence, based on the proxy warfare strategy and capacity building of surrogate groups such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia militias and the Houthis in Yemen, was intended to create a Ring of Fire around Israel. With the conclusion of Operation Rising Lion the strategy has collapsed. Branded a so-called Axis of Resistance, the regional network of Iranian proxies in the Middle East enabled Tehran to emerge as a significant regional powerhouse. The Islamic Republic’s expansionist vision, chiefly the export of their political-religious-ideological revolution, has been branded as a messianic goal by many Iran-watchers. In 2006, Henry Kissinger famously said: Iran’s leaders have to “decide whether they are representing a cause or a nation”. This statement remains apposite today.
Close examination of Iran’s expansionist activities reveals offensive realist power projection tendencies, with the aim of establishing viable deterrence instruments and protecting the regime in Iran while it develops nuclear capabilities. Despite that strategy, Tehran’s strategic aim of outsourcing war away from Iranian soil and shielding Iran from direct attacks by enabling proxy groups in the region has ended in a strategic defeat for the Islamic Republic.
The October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel, and Hezbollah’s rocket attacks the following day, were examples of Iran’s Ring of Fire strategy in action. In the wake of initiating that strategy, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei declared that “our region was very much in need of this attack”. The October 7 attacks were part of Iran’s multidimensional strategy of preventing the expansion of the Abraham Accords, which are the process of normalization between Israel and the Arab states.
Moreover, on October 8, 2023, Tehran-backed Hezbollah opened a second front against Israel by launching rocket attacks from Lebanon on Israel. The Hezbollah’s actions followed a strategy of controlled escalation against Israel. Hezbollah was the most vital and strongest Iran-backed proxy group, considered the crown jewel in the Iranian network of proxies. It was such a precious asset for Tehran’s leaders that they did not want to sacrifice it in full-scale ground warfare with Israel, so they chose controlled escalation in order to force Israel to divide its resources tackling Hamas and Hezbollah.
Israel gradually changed the balance in the multi-front Iranian war, however, as they weakened Hamas capabilities throughout Gaza. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) intensified its air campaign in Lebanon, targeting and eliminating Hezbollah’s senior commanders. This was followed by the notoriously exploding thousands of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies, and assassinating Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah.
In October 2024, the IDF expanded the scope of Israel’s operations by launching a ground offensive in southern Lebanon. This seriously weakened Iran’s network of proxies, and appears to have had a domino effect in the region with the fall of Iran’s ally, the Al Assad regime in Syria, in December. With Assad’s fall, Tehran indefinitely lost its strategic land bridge to the eastern Mediterranean and its proxy capabilities to threaten Israel from Syrian soil.
Former Israeli minister Naftali Bennett described Iran’s strategy as the “octopus doctrine”. It sent out its tentacles – such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza – to fight while the head of the octopus relaxed in safety at home. As defense minister, Bennett advocated the strategy of directly attacking the IRGC’s Quds force in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq – not just Tehran’s proxies – in order to prevent Iran entrenching itself in close proximity to Israel. Frequent airstrikes on Iranian personnel in Syria over the years prevented Iran from solidifying its strategic gains in the Syrian Civil War. Hamas’ October 7 attack was a strategic miscalculation that led to Operation Rising Lion, targeting Iran’s nuclear, military, and ballistic missile facilities and government institutions, as well as the assassinations of its nuclear scientists and top brass.
In summary, as Iran’s case shows that relying on proxies and asymmetric warfare possesses many limitations. When a proxy calls on its benefactor to intervene directly, the risks to the benefactor’s risk increase significantly. This flies in the face of proxy war logic. In addition, in these situations, if the benefactor does not rush to help its client the benefactor can lose the trust of its proxy and loss of reputation with the proxy. As the recent developments show, proxy groups cannot ensure viable deterrence or shield an intervening state indefinitely.
Tags: Iran, irregular warfare, Israel-Iran War, proxy forces, proxy strategy, proxy war, proxy warfare, Unconventional Warfare
About The Author
- Rufat Ahmadzada
- Rufat Ahmadzada is a Ph.D researcher at the University of Exeter and a graduate of City St George’s, University of London. His research area covers Azerbaijan, Iran, and the South Caucasus region.
15. Israel, the Syrian Druze, and the Ghosts of the “Responsibility to Protect”
Excerpts:
At the time of its unveiling and in the years since, proponents and opponents alike heralded the doctrine as a radical departure from the traditional conception of absolute sovereignty, ostensibly dating back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. That interpretation was inaccurate. The Westphalian ideal was always more myth than reality, and early modern political theorists had long argued that sovereignty entailed responsibilities to the governed, not merely freedom from external intervention. But the Responsibility to Protect augured other, more troubling historical continuities. By conditioning sovereignty on certain standards of internationally monitored state behavior, the mechanisms of atrocity prevention enshrined in the Responsibility to Protect bore a striking resemblance to the minority protections of the 19th and early 20th centuries. And just as the League was powerless to hold the European powers accountable for their mistreatment of the populations they were mandated to safeguard, there is no single arbiter to determine which atrocities are beyond the pale, which populations merit protection, and which states can claim the mantle of guardian — not to mention any framework to hold self-anointed protectors accountable. For that very reason, Russian President Vladimir Putin was able to portray his annexation of Crimea in 2014 and full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as acts of humanitarian intervention on behalf of ethnic Russians or Russian speakers, mutilating the Responsibility to Protect beyond recognition in the process.
Something similar is playing out in Syria today. Emerging from 14 years of civil war that fractured the country, killed hundreds of thousands, and displaced millions, Syrians have a historic opportunity to forge a new vision for national unity. At the same time, the centrifugal forces of sectarianism — then as now, exacerbated by self-proclaimed protectors — keep it mired in a painful past. This is not to say that Sharaa is unimpeachable, or that the road to national reconciliation will be smooth. Nor is this to suggest that outside actors have no role to play in a new Syria. Quite the opposite. Rather than resort to militarized humanitarianism, as Netanyahu has done, Syria’s neighbors should seek its integration into the regional economy, support upcoming parliamentary elections, and back transitional justice initiatives as long-term investments in the rule of law and accountability. Even the Trump administration, whose foreign policy has been characterized by chaos and cruelty on so many fronts, has recognized the promise of this moment. The White House lifted sanctions on Damascus in June, and Trump’s envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, has emerged as a vocal advocate for the country’s unity and sovereignty.
In the best-case scenario, military interventions like the one Israel launched last month will protect the Druze in the narrowest sense: providing short-term deterrence against renewed violence in Suweida. But that definition of protection is grossly inadequate. Indeed, it is likely to beget a far worse scenario: allegations of Druze disloyalty to the Syrian state, zero-sum identitarian politics, and perhaps even the return of a full-scale civil war marked by external intervention. In the long term, real protection — for the Druze as for all Syrians — should come from national reconciliation, not ethnic and religious cantons policed at the point of a foreign military’s guns. That is a vision worth protecting.
Israel, the Syrian Druze, and the Ghosts of the “Responsibility to Protect” - War on the Rocks
Daniel Chardell
August 14, 2025
warontherocks.com · August 14, 2025
Though relatively limited in their duration and destruction, Israel’s airstrikes on Syria last month were conspicuous for their rationale. This was no act of self-defense. It was, in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s telling, an act of protection: Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government, in power since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December, failed to protect the Druze from Sunni violence, compelling Israel to intervene on the minority’s behalf.
Just like that, Netanyahu unearthed what seems like a relic from a bygone era: the Responsibility to Protect, a principle rarely mentioned these days outside specialized humanitarian circles. Israel’s self-declared responsibility to protect the Syrian Druze suggests that talk of the doctrine’s demise was premature.
The Responsibility to Protect remains as relevant as ever — and as problematic. It is not just that Netanyahu’s pretensions to humanitarianism in Syria ring hollow amid the cacophony of suffering in Gaza, where famine claims more Palestinian lives each day. As important, the framework lends itself to noble rhetoric of disinterested humanitarianism, enabling the likes of Netanyahu to drape strategic ambitions — namely, asserting primacy over a fractured Syria — in the garb of minority protection. This echoes the minority protection regimes of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when European powers pursued hegemony in the Middle East under the guise of defending favored ethnic and religious groups. The Assad dictatorship may be a thing of the past, but last month’s events signal that the divisive legacy of extraterritorial protection is very much alive. Failing to reckon with that history risks condemning the region to a future of further fragmentation and sectarian violence.
Ironically, the Responsibility to Protect points a way forward. The doctrine holds that states have a responsibility to help others build the capacity to protect their own populations before resorting to force. To be sure, this oft-neglected facet of the Responsibility to Protect is susceptible to political weaponization, too. But humanitarianism is never devoid of politics. Rather than pretend otherwise, the United States, Syria’s neighbors, and international organizations should support Sharaa’s government as it embarks on the path of constitutional reform, national reconciliation, and reconstruction. Ultimately, a united, sovereign Syria that governs inclusively and accountably — not selective, militarized humanitarianism and balkanization — offers the most credible, sustainable form of protection for all Syrians.
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The Politics of Protection in a Fractured Syria
Throughout the Syrian civil war, Assad’s apologists routinely claimed that the only thing preventing the decimation of Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities at the hands of Islamist terrorists was the regime’s iron-fisted rule. Disingenuous though it was, that narrative got a new lease on life after Assad’s ouster last year. Sharaa, after all, was the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni rebel faction that splintered from al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch in 2017. Despite his pledge to form an “inclusive transitional government that reflects Syria’s diversity,” observers in the region and beyond were quick to warn that this reformed Islamist was unable — or worse, unwilling — to govern on behalf of all Syrians.
Those anxieties only deepened with time. In March, Assad loyalists in the predominantly Alawite coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus launched an insurgency against the new government. Segments of the armed forces and various rebel factions massacred 1,500 Alawites in retaliation. While Sharaa vowed to hold the perpetrators accountable, last month’s violence against the Druze reignited debate about his fitness to govern the country inclusively. The episode began on July 11, when Sunni Bedouins kidnapped a Druze vegetable merchant on the highway connecting Damascus and Suweida, the predominantly Druze city in the southern province of the same name. Druze reprisals triggered wider clashes in Suweida and its environs. Attempting to contain the violence, Sharaa deployed the military to Suweida and began negotiating a ceasefire. Then came the Israeli airstrikes — first on Syrian forces advancing south, and then on the Ministry of Defense and presidential palace in the heart of Damascus. By the time a ceasefire came into effect on July 19, an estimated 1,400 civilians — mostly Druze, but also Bedouins — had been killed and thousands more displaced.
Netanyahu rationalized the intervention by invoking a responsibility to protect the Syrian Druze. Israel is home to 150,000 Druze citizens, not including 25,000 Druze residing in the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1981. Despite the legal discrimination they endure, Israeli Druze are deeply integrated in the Jewish state and serve loyally in the military. For months, Netanyahu had maintained that Israel would not allow “any threat” to the Druze in southern Syria. Amid the violence in Suweida, Sheikh Muwaffaq Tarif, the spiritual leader of the Israeli Druze, implored Netanyahu to intervene on the community’s behalf. “During the Holocaust, when you were being slaughtered, you, the Jews, cried for help and no one came,” he reportedly told the prime minister. “Today we, the Druze, are being slaughtered and we are calling for the help of the State of Israel.” Netanyahu assented, citing his responsibility to protect “the brothers of our brothers.”
Almost immediately, voices from across the Israeli political spectrum touted their newfound role as their brother’s keeper. “For the first time, Israel is deciding not just to defend itself but to defend others,” read one characteristic column in the Jerusalem Post. Sawsan Natour-Hason, an Israeli Druze official at the Israeli embassy in Washington, cast the intervention as an expression of Israeli exceptionalism. “As the only democracy in the Middle East that actively protects minority rights, Israel has not stood idly by,” she wrote. “This is not about power projection,” added Amos Yadlin, a prominent commentator and former head of Israeli military intelligence. “It is about regional responsibility.” Itamar Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu’s far-right minister of national security, has gone so far as to argue that Sunni violence against the Druze gives Israel license to “eliminate” Sharaa.
There is no question that the Israeli Druze fear for the safety of their family members and coreligionists across the border. Still, it is difficult to ignore this Israeli government’s cynicism. How can Netanyahu profess humanitarian concern for the Druze at the same moment that he limits aid to starving Palestinians in Gaza and his far-right ministers champion ethnic cleansing and resettlement in the strip?
To dismiss the Israeli intervention in Syria as mere hypocrisy, however, would be to miss a larger point: Netanyahu’s claim to protect the Druze does not signal some perversion of the Responsibility to Protect, as if the doctrine were untainted by politics to begin with. Humanitarianism is always political, and the Israeli intervention in Syria is no exception. Within hours of Assad’s fall last December, Israel seized the buffer zone east of the Golan Heights, patrolled by the United Nations since 1974. In the months since, Netanyahu has repeatedly demanded the demilitarization of southern Syria — meaning, in practice, truncated sovereignty for the new central government in Damascus, if not the outright cantonization of Syria. And contrary to the trope of Netanyahu the “madman,” as one Trump administration official recently described him, the airstrikes on Suweida and Damascus had a clear — if cynical — geopolitical logic: they offer Netanyahu leverage over Sharaa at precisely the moment that Israeli-Syrian normalization talks are ramping up. Seen in this light, the intervention was less humanitarian than coercive.
Taking Netanyahu’s humanitarian pretense at face value also silences the voices of those he purports to protect. Two of the Syrian Druze community’s three leading spiritual figures, Sheikhs Hammoud al-Hinnawi and Yusuf Jarbou, have expressed support for Sharaa and advocate for the integration of the Druze in a united Syria. The third, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, staunchly opposes Sharaa’s government. Amid the violence in Suweida, Hijri called on Israel to intervene on his community’s behalf. The vast majority of Syrian Druze reject Israeli intervention and Hijri’s separatism, rightly fearing that identification with Israel risks fueling the impression that the Druze are fifth columnists.
Echoes from the Past
What we see in Suweida, then, is the resurgence of the same dilemmas that have dogged proponents of humanitarian intervention on behalf of minorities throughout modern history: Who gets protection? Who gets sovereignty? And who gets to decide?
These questions loom especially large in the Middle East, where the protection of minorities has long been a pretext for foreign intervention and, consequently, a proxy for wider debates about sovereignty and national belonging. In the grand scheme of the region’s history, the notion of minority protection and of minorities themselves — is of fairly recent provenance. As historians have amply demonstrated, the term “minority” — in the sense of numerically inferior, politically disadvantaged religious, ethnic, or linguistic groups – had no purchase in the pluralistic Ottoman Empire until the 19th century, when territorial losses, liberal political reforms, and European meddling began to imbue religious, ethnic, and linguistic difference with new political salience.
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the arrival of the nation-state in the Middle East after World War I, minorities fully acquired their present-day significance. Striking a compromise between Wilsonian self-determination and imperial conquest, the new League of Nations placed the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire under British and French mandatory rule. Only under the tutelage of enlightened Europeans could the peoples of the Levant learn to “stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,” as the League infamously put it. Not unlike its minorities treaties — a series of postwar agreements that conditioned the sovereignty of new Eastern European nation-states on internationally monitored minority rights – the League took up the protection of minorities as a foundational rationale for the mandates system.
The Syrian case is illustrative of the pitfalls and false pretenses of the minority protections regime. The French carved out autonomous “statelets” for the Druze, Alawites, and Kurds, reinforcing the notion that these communities — now fashioned as minorities — required territorial separation and external protection from an ostensibly hostile Sunni majority. Cantonization and heavy-handed French colonial rule sparked a national uprising. Exactly 100 years ago, the Great Syrian Revolt was spearheaded by the Druze leader Sultan al-Atrash in Jabal al-Druze — ironically enough, the very site of last month’s violence. “Remember,” Atrash wrote in a missive to his compatriots, “that civilized nations that are united cannot be destroyed. The imperialists have stolen what is yours. They have laid hands on the very sources of your wealth and raised barriers and divided your indivisible homeland.” Over the next two years, the French quelled the uprising with brute force, making a mockery of the claim that mandatory tutelage was a progressive alternative to colonial rule. More than that, the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission, formally tasked with overseeing the territories, utterly failed to hold the French to account for their brutality and misrule.
To be sure, the causes and consequences of the Great Syrian Revolt were multifaceted. Yet it is a cruel irony that the Druze, who once stood at the vanguard of an uprising that rejected cantonization in favor of a pluralistic Syrian nationalism, now find themselves at the center of a foreign intervention premised on a similarly divisive logic.
Back to the Future?
Like all ideas, the Responsibility to Protect was a product of its times. The end of the Cold War, the ascent of the transnational human rights movement, mass displacement, the advent of so-called failed states, and the proliferation of humanitarian emergencies all coalesced in the 1990s to create an environment ripe for fresh thinking about sovereignty, intervention, and atrocity prevention.
While the doctrine’s architects were not concerned with the protection of minorities alone, many of the atrocities that would animate their thinking sprang from the plights of specific ethnic and religious groups — often minorities — throughout the decade: Saddam Hussein’s persecution of the Iraqi Kurds in 1991; the 1994 Hutu genocide against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda; the 1995 genocide of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica; and the unsanctioned NATO intervention in Kosovo on behalf of Kosovar Albanians. It was in this context that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked the question on everyone’s mind: “If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica — to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?” In 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty — a cosmopolitan group of politicians, lawyers, and activists assembled by the Canadian government — proposed an answer: the Responsibility to Protect.
In a remarkable show of unity, world leaders unanimously endorsed the new doctrine in 2005. The “international community” had a duty to act, it was said, where governments were unable or unwilling to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. No sooner had the Responsibility to Protect reached its zenith, however, than it suddenly fell out of favor. The 2011 NATO intervention against Muammar al-Gadhafi in Libya —authorized by the UN Security Council in the language of protection — quickly morphed into a war for regime change, triggering a brutal civil war that endures today. The Libya debacle appeared to confirm suspicions that the Responsibility to Protect was a fig leaf for Western, and especially U.S.-led, interventionism. By the time Assad deployed chemical weapons against his own population in 2013, the world had no appetite for another intervention under the banner of protection.
At the time of its unveiling and in the years since, proponents and opponents alike heralded the doctrine as a radical departure from the traditional conception of absolute sovereignty, ostensibly dating back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. That interpretation was inaccurate. The Westphalian ideal was always more myth than reality, and early modern political theorists had long argued that sovereignty entailed responsibilities to the governed, not merely freedom from external intervention. But the Responsibility to Protect augured other, more troubling historical continuities. By conditioning sovereignty on certain standards of internationally monitored state behavior, the mechanisms of atrocity prevention enshrined in the Responsibility to Protect bore a striking resemblance to the minority protections of the 19th and early 20th centuries. And just as the League was powerless to hold the European powers accountable for their mistreatment of the populations they were mandated to safeguard, there is no single arbiter to determine which atrocities are beyond the pale, which populations merit protection, and which states can claim the mantle of guardian — not to mention any framework to hold self-anointed protectors accountable. For that very reason, Russian President Vladimir Putin was able to portray his annexation of Crimea in 2014 and full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as acts of humanitarian intervention on behalf of ethnic Russians or Russian speakers, mutilating the Responsibility to Protect beyond recognition in the process.
Something similar is playing out in Syria today. Emerging from 14 years of civil war that fractured the country, killed hundreds of thousands, and displaced millions, Syrians have a historic opportunity to forge a new vision for national unity. At the same time, the centrifugal forces of sectarianism — then as now, exacerbated by self-proclaimed protectors — keep it mired in a painful past. This is not to say that Sharaa is unimpeachable, or that the road to national reconciliation will be smooth. Nor is this to suggest that outside actors have no role to play in a new Syria. Quite the opposite. Rather than resort to militarized humanitarianism, as Netanyahu has done, Syria’s neighbors should seek its integration into the regional economy, support upcoming parliamentary elections, and back transitional justice initiatives as long-term investments in the rule of law and accountability. Even the Trump administration, whose foreign policy has been characterized by chaos and cruelty on so many fronts, has recognized the promise of this moment. The White House lifted sanctions on Damascus in June, and Trump’s envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, has emerged as a vocal advocate for the country’s unity and sovereignty.
In the best-case scenario, military interventions like the one Israel launched last month will protect the Druze in the narrowest sense: providing short-term deterrence against renewed violence in Suweida. But that definition of protection is grossly inadequate. Indeed, it is likely to beget a far worse scenario: allegations of Druze disloyalty to the Syrian state, zero-sum identitarian politics, and perhaps even the return of a full-scale civil war marked by external intervention. In the long term, real protection — for the Druze as for all Syrians — should come from national reconciliation, not ethnic and religious cantons policed at the point of a foreign military’s guns. That is a vision worth protecting.
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Daniel Chardell is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and a nonresident fellow at Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs.
Image: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit via Wikimedia Commons
warontherocks.com · August 14, 2025
16. Best of: Is the World Ready for the Population Bust?
A podcast with our good friend and expert economist and demographer, Dr. Nick Eberstat.
Listen to the podcast at this link or read the transcript below.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/best-world-ready-population-bust
Excerpts:
KANISHK THAROOR
And I suppose in terms of those advantages, it seems that at least when we’re looking at demographic trends, countries like Russia, China, even Iran and North Korea, are in a much worse state than the United States.
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
If we simply look at the human resources, China and Russia are both depopulating societies. China is aging very, very, very rapidly. Russia has a long-standing cough that it can't shake. It’s got this health crisis that began under the Soviets that is still dogging the country. Iran is a below-replacement society, which is going to begin shrinking before people appreciate this. The mullahs, by the way, are very aware of the demographic constraints on the national power there. What goes on in North Korea stays in North Korea, except the troops on the Kursk Oblast, I guess, so we don’t really know what the demographic situation is in North Korea, except that we have seen the supreme leader and living god, Kim Jong Un, declaim in alarmed terms about the low birthrate in this country.
So you’ve got aging and shrinking societies in the largest of these countries. So I argue in this piece that the demographic tides are running against the revisionist dictators of Eurasia. That doesn’t mean that any of these countries is harmless. North Korea has a GDP of approximately zero, and it causes all sorts of trouble in the world. So if you have the second-largest economy in the world, China, run by revisionists, you can expect you’re going to be in perhaps for a rather bumpy ride. But that doesn’t mean that the future is going to be open for the dictatorships from the Eurasian heartland.
Best of: Is the World Ready for the Population Bust?
Foreign Affairs · August 14, 2025
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A Conversation With Nicholas Eberstadt
Published on August 14, 2025
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Episode Details
In an episode released in January 2025, Senior Editor Kanishk Tharoor spoke with the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt about the global crash in fertility rates and the looming prospect of depopulation.
Over the past century, the world’s population has exploded—surging from around one and a half billion people in 1900 to roughly eight billion today. But according to Eberstadt, that chapter of human history is over, and a new era, which he calls the age of depopulation, has begun. That subject has become even more prevalent in the past year. The United States, for example, recorded its lowest ever birthrate in 2024.
Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute and has written extensively on demographics, economic development, and international security. In a 2024 essay for Foreign Affairs, Eberstadt argued that plummeting fertility rates everywhere from the United States and Europe to India and China point to a new demographic order—one that will transform societies, economies, and geopolitics.
Sources:
“The Age of Depopulation” by Nicholas Eberstadt
The Foreign Affairs Interview is produced by Kanishk Tharoor, Molly McAnany, Ben Metzner, Caroline Wilcox, and Ashley Wood, with audio support from Todd Yeager and Marcus Zakaria and original music by Robin Hilton. Special thanks to Irina Hogan.
DAN KURTZ-PHELAN
This week, we’re pleased to bring you some of the best conversations from our archives. Last year, we spoke with the demographer Nicholas Eberstadt about the global crash in fertility rates and the looming prospect of depopulation. That subject has become even more prevalent in the past year. The United States, for example, recorded its lowest ever birthrate in 2024. I hope you enjoy our conversation with Nicholas Eberstadt. We’ll be back next week with a new episode.
KANISHK THAROOR
Nick, it’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Well, thank you for inviting me.
KANISHK THAROOR
You wrote in our recent issue what is nothing short of a monumental piece titled, “The Age of Depopulation: Surviving a World Gone Gray.” In this piece, you make the case that, due to the collapse of fertility rates around the world, the world’s population is going to begin shrinking. Now, some estimates place that happening as soon as 2053, some in the 2070s or the 2080s, but whenever it might be, it seems to be inevitable. And when this does happen, it’ll be the first time that the world’s population has shrunk since the Black Death of the fourteenth century ravaged Eurasia.
There’s a ton of ground to cover here, but let’s begin by sketching some of the trend lines. In your piece, you take us on a tour of the globe to show how fertility rates are plunging pretty much everywhere. What are some of the surprising things we learn when we spin the globe in this way?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Well, Kanishk, demographers don’t really have a toolkit for forecasting fertility accurately. But over the past decade, there’s been an acceleration that was entirely unanticipated of the already existing, long-term decline in global fertility, more or less everywhere. Some of the things which I think are kind of jaw dropping are to learn, for example, that in Mexico City, the current birth trends imply less than one baby per woman per lifetime, and that Mexico last year had a lower birth rate than the United States of America for the first time since those numbers were ever collected. That Thailand is down to about one birth per woman per lifetime. I first went to, then called Calcutta, now Kolkata, almost 50 years ago, and it was teeming with children. Now, officials say the fertility level is down again to one birth per woman per lifetime. And even off the coast of Africa, which is the last really high fertility bastion in the world today, a place like Mauritius is down to 1.4 births per woman per lifetime. You need a little bit over two for long-term population stability, not just two, but a little over two, since not everybody survives to childbearing years.
It’s not impossible that the world has already fallen, on a planetary scale, below the level of childbearing necessary for long-term population stability. We can’t tell if that's actually happened yet, but if this has not happened already, it may happen much sooner than people expected.
We know that at least two-thirds of the world’s population was living in sub-replacement venues before the pandemic. We may be up to three-quarters of the world’s population in such places now. It’s happened with staggering speed.
KANISHK THAROOR
It is really striking. And just to underline one of the points you raised, in India, which is the world’s most populous country by most estimates, India has now become a sub-replacement country. And in Calcutta, a city that you described and a city I’ve spent a lot of time in—I grew up there a little bit—the numbers are staggering in that now, according to West Bengal officials, women have, on average, one birth in their lifetime. The only place where fertility seems to be fairly high is sub-Saharan Africa, but even there we're seeing dips. What’s going on, as far as we can tell, in sub-Saharan Africa?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Absolutely right. In the sub-Sahara, as best we can tell from the more limited statistical evidence that we have, the overall birth level is probably 100 percent above the replacement level. So on current patterns, on current trends, that would mean the doubling of each generation. That’s pretty fast population growth. What we’ve seen, however, is that even in the sub-Sahara, there’s been a pronounced and perhaps now accelerating decline. Overall fertility levels in the sub-Sahara have dropped by more than a third since the late 1970s, early 1980s. In Southern Africa, fertility surveys are all pointing towards lower fertility. So the only question really, I think, at the moment, is: Will these continue? Will these accelerate? How long is it going to take until sub-Saharan Africa is no longer the global exception?
KANISHK THAROOR
We’re only a few decades, well, let’s say six, seven decades removed from a time when people around the world were worried about the explosion of population. In the middle of the twentieth century, there was this concern that human populations were growing far beyond our capacity to sustain them, and it is striking when you take a step back and look at the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, we began at around 1.6 billion people on the planet. We ended at six billion people, which is an enormous jump. And I wonder, just to think particularly about the twentieth century, that if, sometime from now, future historians or, indeed, alien historians picking over the bones of our vanished species might find that the twentieth century was incredibly anomalous in human history.
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Well, it clearly was anomalous because there had never been such a jump in human numbers in so brief a timespan. There’d never been any sort of proportional increase, a tempo like that before. What was missed by many during the population explosion panic was that this surge in human numbers was generated entirely by improvements in health: by pervasive plummets in mortality, by explosive increases in life expectancy, and really by about a doubling of planetary life expectancy at birth between 1900 and the year 2000. Look at what happened, when you had this health explosion: human capabilities increased so much. Per capita income over the course of the twentieth century soared. We didn’t eliminate all extreme poverty, but we made huge inroads in it. Literacy improved virtually everywhere. Skills improved virtually everywhere, and availability of food outpaced this jump in human mouths rather handily. So when we look back at the population explosion, I think one of the most fascinating aspects of it will be how badly so-called experts mis-assessed its significance and its likely consequence.
KANISHK THAROOR
That gets us into one of the braver contentions of your piece. You do come down a little bit definitively in this piece to identify why we are seeing such widespread collapses in fertility, and you attribute that to the simple fact of what people want, of how many children they want to have. And around the world it seems that men and women just want to have fewer kids. You write, “Volition is why even in an increasingly healthy and prosperous world of over eight billion people, the extinction of every family line could be only one generation away.”
I think this topic of low fertility rates and shrinking numbers of children is much discussed these days, and when you hear familiar answers for why this is happening, a lot of material explanations are offered. It could be that it’s now very expensive to have children, so some couples are reluctant to have more than one child or any children at all. It could be that we’re seeing a decline in teenage pregnancies that might be also influencing the lower number of children around. Why are explanations of that sort insufficient and why should we think purely in terms of desire?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Well, I think maybe I should start by differential diagnosis, at least addressing the question of whether there may be an increase in infertility, in infecundity, which might be the constraint that we’re seeing here, a sort of a precursor to P.D. James’ The Children of Men or whatever. There’s no reason to think that this couldn't eventually happen through estrogen in the water or microplastics or all sorts of other potential contaminants. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the big declines in fertility we're seeing yet are due to environmental factors. They do seem for the most part to be driven by changes in human behavior and most importantly by changes in desired family size.
Why do I say that? There were a lot of things that correlate with declining fertility, including income, education, contraception, you can go through the entire modernization litany. Problem is, there are always exceptions there, and one of the exceptions that I mentioned in the Foreign Affairs piece, for example, is what we’re seeing today in Myanmar, in Burma, one of the most impoverished countries in the world. Myanmar has below-replacement fertility as well, in a non-catastrophic setting. So you don't have to be an affluent society to have parents choosing very small families. Now the question of what considerations go into this choice is an inescapably human one and thus a tremendously nuanced, personal one.
And the reasons for choosing two children or less than two children, I would guess, would be rather different in rural Burma from affluent Seoul in South Korea. What I think we can be pretty confident about is that these new patterns reflect choices that parents have made.
KANISHK THAROOR
If I may just sort of press the point a little bit on particular explanations, what about, say, declining levels of religiosity? Does that inform fertility rates? And then, I suppose, one of the bigger explanations that you hear more often is levels of female education. Isn’t it broadly true that the higher the level of education a woman attains, the fewer children she’s likely to have?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
I tend to think that religiosity and fertility track rather closely. I don’t find that a surprise since, at least in the Judeo-Christian tradition and perhaps in all of the Abrahamic faiths, there is this injunction to be fruitful and multiply, and there’s this view of the hereafter where you have a connection to the hereafter through your children and your descendants. And as for education, there has generally been a correspondence between greater educational attainment and smaller family size, but that doesn't hold everywhere anymore.
We've got fascinating exceptions also to the overall patterns of modernity, such as the increase in fertility for Israeli Jewry well above replacement in an affluent, highly educated society in the Middle East. And I think that that further reinforces the importance of volition.
KANISHK THAROOR
It does seem broadly true that having fewer kids is the price we have to pay for a world in which we have fewer teenage pregnancies, women have greater access to public life, to employment, potentially to individual fulfillment and accomplishment. And if that’s the case, is that such a bad thing? Is it not good for women and for men to have greater control over their lives and pursue the forms of accomplishment that are meaningful to them, if indeed that includes not having children?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
I was one of the contrarians way back when who was arguing that governments and NGOs and others didn’t know better than the parents in question how many children they should be having in low-income countries. That was during the population explosion era. I feel the same way now with sub-replacement fertility. I don’t think that there are outsiders or experts who know better than the parents in question how many children parents should be having. The alternative seems rather terrifying.
KANISHK THAROOR
To talk about those outsiders, so to speak: sub-replacement fertility has been a problem in certain societies for a long time now. Think of Japan, for instance, where the phenomenon of the emptying village in the countryside is almost a cultural trope there. But what we’ve seen is that governments have not been able to institute policies that in any reliable fashion can encourage the birthrate to go up in a meaningful way. You would think that by offering incentives, subsidies, other kinds of welfare provisions and benefits, government policy could have an effect in encouraging people to have children, but by and large it doesn’t seem to be the case. Why is that?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
I think this gets back to the whole question of volition. It gets back to the whole question of human agency. I kind of find it reassuring to find out that we’re not rabbits and we’re not robots, and that we can’t be cheerled into having different number of children from what, in general, we’d want, and we can’t be bribed into having a different level of childbearing than we’d want. The record of pronatal policies around the world, as I read it, is that it’s very expensive to get really marginal or tiny fractional changes in long-term childbearing.
So from my standpoint, at least from my perspective in looking at this, it seems to me there is a lot that human beings and their governments and civil institutions of all various sorts can do to adjust to shrinking and aging populations, just the way we adjusted to a growing world, when we had a population explosion. And that the emphasis should be on making the most for human flourishing, for the human beings that exist, rather than trying to count chickens that are never going to hatch.
KANISHK THAROOR
Some people have a rather apocalyptic view of depopulation. They imagine that societies will crumble, anarchy will reign. That doesn’t seem to be your view. You write, “The problems that [depopulation] raises are not necessarily tantamount to a catastrophe. Depopulation is not a grave sentence; rather, it is a difficult new context, one in which countries can still find ways to thrive.”
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Just look at it in the mirror of the population explosion. Look how wrong so many of the experts were about what its consequences would be. It’s quite clear that a shrinking, aging world is something that we're intuitively, almost completely unprepared to encounter, because all of our experience, in ways that we don't even think about, has been framed by a growing world population. We don’t know how to cope with this yet, but human beings are very good at coping. We’re very good at coping. We’re very good at adapting. And given the foundations that we put into place in the twentieth century for routinizing improvements in health, routinizing improvements in education, routinizing improvements in scientific advance and technological progress and innovation, It’s not as if we are in a tightly, relentlessly worsening straitjacket. We’ve got an awful lot of opportunity to help us deal with these inevitable social changes that we’ll be confronting.
KANISHK THAROOR
Well, let’s talk a little bit about those social changes, the major one being that a depopulating world where there are fewer children is invariably going to be an aging world. You’ll have more and more older people and fewer and fewer young people. What would it be like to live in such a society, and specifically in the US context, what new problems would we face that we have not yet encountered?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Well, certainly aging and shrinking societies will require very different approaches to government policy, but they’re also going to require different approaches for corporations, for communities, for families, for individual behavior. One of the most obvious government policy challenges: financing of social programs. We came up in the twentieth century with this contrivance of pay-as-you-go social programs. You have current earners financing the retirement or the medical care of current retirees. When you live in a world where there are five or six current earners for every retiree, that’s great. You’re getting social benefits on the cheap. As soon as that population pyramid tilts, you’re in a doom loop. You just can’t do it.
And we know enough about how population trends are going to unfold over the next couple of decades because all of the workers for 2040 have already been born, for example. We know enough that we should already be preparing for a set of social guarantees that transcend this old-fashioned pay-as-you-go model. It’s not going to be all sugar and light because some particular group, some particular birth cohort is going to be the one that kind of loses out on the musical chairs. They’ll have to both start financing their own retirement and they’ll have ended up paying for somebody else's.
The way that I think humane and intelligent government policy ought to be working with something like that is to help compensate that particular group, so you come as close as possible to an overall situation where there are winners without losers.
KANISHK THAROOR
At the risk of inviting your optimism, what will be the mark of a country that’s dealing with depopulation well, and then conversely, what will a country that’s struggling to deal with depopulation look like?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Well, this inescapable challenge of dealing with depopulation is going to be a problem for the entire world economy. Who’s going to deal with it well? The governments and the societies that have the foresight and the social trust to start thinking about how to recalibrate to be nimble and timely in this. There may well be a learning curve and the early pioneers in this may be the ones who have to take the licks on this, but certainly having a foresighted government and having enough social trust so that there can be complex cooperation in the face of a pressure that’s going to require immense complex cooperation.
KANISHK THAROOR
What sorts of policies, at the national or indeed intergovernmental level, could be put in place now to better prepare the world for a future of dwindling national populations?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Everybody will be better off with more money. When you’ve got more money, you’ve got more options. So I would say policies that encourage countries to get rich as fast as they can sustainably can’t hurt. I would think of those as being efforts to improve health, efforts to improve skills, efforts to increase research horizons and knowledge production. People are going to have to pay much more attention, I think, to personal savings and to personal conduct, especially when we get towards the upside-down population pyramid, and that includes looking after one’s own health.
I expect that we’re going to see a world in which longer-living peoples also are longer-working peoples. And I can tell you as a very happily employed senior citizen that there are a lot of great benefits to working past the technical retirement level.
KANISHK THAROOR
So you’re a vision of the future?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Well, it’s nothing to be afraid of. Let’s put it that way.
KANISHK THAROOR
We haven’t talked yet about migration, which I think is often raised as a potential solution for those countries where low fertility rates mean they’re going to see a great shortfall in the workers they need. Migration from countries that are growing at a faster clip is often suggested as a possible solution. What do you see as the role of migration in the coming decades?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Well, migration is going to be a great benefit for those states and countries that can, let’s say, have a competitive migration policy, where they attract talent from abroad and where they can absorb and assimilate that talent into loyal and productive newcomers. I’d say that the history of the United States, of Canada, of Australia, of New Zealand have been pretty good at being able to assimilate newcomers, obviously not perfect, but been pretty good on the whole. But not every country seems to be able or willing to do that in the rich world.
KANISHK THAROOR
In addition to migration, another potential solution that’s often raised is the burgeoning areas of automation and artificial intelligence. Do you see any reason to think that those sorts of technologies might help buffer against the worst impacts of depopulation?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Well, of course robotics, of course artificial intelligence, of course all sorts of technological innovations offer a sort of productivity multiplier for aging, shrinking societies. Without getting too fancy about it, it’s another form of mechanization. And for a couple of centuries, human beings have been relying more and more on mechanization to increase human productivity. The great concern, as you know, that is voiced today is whether we might see extraordinary displacement of manpower, even in shrinking societies, with radical innovations in AI and machine learning and so forth. I’m certainly not going to say that that’s impossible.
I would observe that it’s much less likely if we skill up in societies all around the world, because in the race between education and technology, it’s the more educated that seem less likely to be displaced in these great transformations.
KANISHK THAROOR
You are actually fairly sanguine about the prospects of the United States in the coming decades. It is true that the United States actually has, by the standards of other wealthy countries and indeed of its principal geopolitical rivals, a fairly high fertility rate—below replacement level, but still fairly high. And you’ve described the United States in the past as an outlier, but why does the United States remain that kind of outlier and how do you see the United States faring in the era of depopulation?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
Long ago, I described the United States as an exemplar of demographic exceptionalism. That was back in the early 2000s. I think this is still the case, but less absolutely spectacularly so than we would’ve seen a decade and a half ago. The United States has a relatively high level of fertility for an affluent society, although now, unlike a decade and a half ago, it’s below replacement. The United States also has been a magnet for immigration from all around the world, including absolutely, extraordinary, uncanny capacity to attract entrepreneurial and inventor talent from around the world, even though they’re a small portion of the overall flow of migrants.
This being the case, the United States is, as an arithmetic proposition, on a trajectory to continue to increase in total headcount, although rather modestly, over the next couple of decades; its working age population to increase rather modestly over the next couple of decades; its population composition to go gray, but more modestly than in some of the other places we might be looking at. And to the extent that those sorts of trends matter, it’s arguably favorable for the United States of America. If this sounds too “Yankee Doodle Dandy” for people, I should also point to the elephant in the room, which is the litany of problems we have in the United States today, ranging from health to slowdown in educational improvement, to the divisiveness in our society, to a uncanny appetite for financing current social programs on public debt.
There are plenty of headwinds to what I’m describing, but in the unforgiving world of power politics, you don’t compare yourself to the ideal; you compare yourself to whatever else is in the field. And although I would like to see those problems in my own country addressed and alleviated, if we’re doing the clinical comparison, we’d have to say that there are some advantages for the United States in this situation looking forward.
KANISHK THAROOR
And I suppose in terms of those advantages, it seems that at least when we’re looking at demographic trends, countries like Russia, China, even Iran and North Korea, are in a much worse state than the United States.
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
If we simply look at the human resources, China and Russia are both depopulating societies. China is aging very, very, very rapidly. Russia has a long-standing cough that it can't shake. It’s got this health crisis that began under the Soviets that is still dogging the country. Iran is a below-replacement society, which is going to begin shrinking before people appreciate this. The mullahs, by the way, are very aware of the demographic constraints on the national power there. What goes on in North Korea stays in North Korea, except the troops on the Kursk Oblast, I guess, so we don’t really know what the demographic situation is in North Korea, except that we have seen the supreme leader and living god, Kim Jong Un, declaim in alarmed terms about the low birthrate in this country.
So you’ve got aging and shrinking societies in the largest of these countries. So I argue in this piece that the demographic tides are running against the revisionist dictators of Eurasia. That doesn’t mean that any of these countries is harmless. North Korea has a GDP of approximately zero, and it causes all sorts of trouble in the world. So if you have the second-largest economy in the world, China, run by revisionists, you can expect you’re going to be in perhaps for a rather bumpy ride. But that doesn’t mean that the future is going to be open for the dictatorships from the Eurasian heartland.
KANISHK THAROOR
I’ve seen it said that the way that many on the left perceive climate change as a sort of framing existential crisis, that for people on the right depopulation is beginning to serve a similar kind of function. And we see this in political rhetoric, in the rhetoric of individuals like Elon Musk. What’s it been like for you to see your work and the stuff of your work become such a political flashpoint?
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
P.J. O’Rourke, the late, great humorist, had a chapter in a book of his, a book called All the Trouble in the World. It was a chapter about overpopulation, and I think the subtitle was, “Just enough of us, way too much of you.” And there’s often a temptation when people talk about population to frame it in sort of tribalistic terms like that. During the population explosion, I think there was more than a touch of eugenic talk tinge to some of this, even in seemingly enlightened climes. The prospect of extinction has a way of maybe sometimes clarifying one’s thinking. Sometimes it has a way of inflaming people’s thinking.
I would say that what concerns me the most in the United States about low fertility is not the birth numbers per se, but the array of attitudes that are often associated with these: demoralized, worried about the future, the anxiety, the lack of confidence, the lack of patriotism. And it’s those attitudes, rather than the birth numbers, that may have a formative effect on society. And I argue in another essay that I wrote that the United States may be less prepared for low fertility today than it was in the past, given these changing attitudes that we see in the United States. But I don’t think that has to do as much with the numbers as with other things that we associate with the numbers and maybe shouldn’t.
KANISHK THAROOR
Well, on that note, Nick, thanks so much for speaking with us, and thank you again for writing your wonderful essay.
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
It was a pleasure. Thank you.
17. The Shocking Rift Between India and the United States
Excerpts:
This is not just India’s plight. The story in Europe and among American treaty allies in Asia is similar. In that shared doubt about the United States, however, lies a potential salve for India’s injured foreign policy. India could strengthen partnerships with European countries and major Asian powers, such as Japan and South Korea, who face their own balancing dilemmas because of the unreliability of the Trump administration. It could also seek to cultivate, or at least signal, closer ties to China and Russia; indeed, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi confirmed this month that Putin will visit India later this year.
To be sure, New Delhi views Washington’s conciliatory approach to Beijing with deep alarm. It has already begun considering how to better strengthen its defenses, source its weapons platforms, and establish reliable partnerships and supply chains. India will survive this geopolitical whirlwind with some deft diplomacy and patience, but this turbulent period is likely to have several long-term consequences for New Delhi’s foreign policy and strategic outlook. Bilateral relations between India and the United States will suffer acutely. Indeed, the domestic factors in the United States that appeared to guarantee good relations with India have not slowed their precipitous decline: the influential Indian diaspora in the United States seems powerless, the supposed bipartisan consensus in favor of India has not reined in Trump, and India-friendly politicians and industry leaders have remained conspicuously silent. After decades of abating, anti-Americanism is once again on the rise within the Indian foreign policy community. For an Indian foreign policy establishment that is doggedly consistent in its commitment to the status quo, Trump is a constant puzzle.
And yet, paradoxically, India’s response to its current predicament is likely to be, well, more of the same. The very inadequacies of multialignment may in fact push India to become only more multialigned. If Washington is not a viable or reliable partner, New Delhi will seek and cultivate other partnerships. Trump’s outreach to Beijing and Moscow will now prompt New Delhi to follow suit, reversing India’s earlier policy of gradually distancing itself from China and Russia. India’s policy of multialignment has just undergone a geopolitical stress test and emerged rather winded. But Indian policymakers are not concluding that they should abandon it; to the contrary, they will fortify it.
The Shocking Rift Between India and the United States
Foreign Affairs · by More by Happymon Jacob · August 14, 2025
Can Progress in the Partnership Survive Trump?
August 14, 2025
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., February 2025 Nathan Howard / Reuters
HAPPYMON JACOB is Founder of the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, a New Delhi–based think tank, and Editor of India’s World magazine.
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In the past 25 years, India and the United States have become closer than ever before, building strong economic and strategic ties. Their partnership has rested on shared values and shared interests: they are the two largest democracies in the world, home to vast multicultural populations, and both have been concerned about the rise of India’s northern neighbor, China. But in the past four months, that carefully cultivated relationship has abruptly gone off the rails. The return of U.S. President Donald Trump to the White House threatens to undo the achievements of a quarter century.
Trump’s actions have disregarded several of India’s core foreign policy concerns, crossing sensitive redlines that previous U.S. administrations tended to respect. The United States once treated India as an important American partner in Asia. Today, India faces the highest current U.S. tariff rate, of 50 percent—an ostensible punishment for India’s purchase of Russian oil after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. India finds itself dealing with a higher tariff rate than even China, the country that, at least until recently, Washington wanted New Delhi to help contain. Indeed, Trump seems far more keen to strike a deal with China than to relent on his tough stance toward India. And to make matters worse, Trump announced a deal in late July with India’s frequent adversary Pakistan, under which the United States will work to develop Pakistan’s oil reserves.
These tariff woes follow on the heels of another shock to the Indian system: Trump’s intervention in May in a clash between India and Pakistan. After a few days of escalating strikes precipitated by a terrorist massacre in India, Trump unilaterally announced that he had brokered a cease-fire between the two countries. India vehemently denied that claim—New Delhi has long resisted any external mediation of its disputes with Islamabad, and American officials have been careful not to offend Indian sensitivities in this area—but Trump doubled down. No doubt he was offended by Indian pushback, just as he was pleased by Pakistan’s immediate embrace of his claims and its eventual nomination of him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Indian officials are seething, but they understand that anger is unlikely to work where reason has failed. For the moment, New Delhi has decided to wait out the storm, carefully wording its responses to try not to inflame the situation further while signaling to a domestic audience that it is not simply submitting to the White House. The implications of Trump’s bullying for India’s grand strategy are profound: Trump’s foreign policy has upended New Delhi’s key geopolitical assumptions and shaken the foundations of the U.S.-Indian partnership. India’s favored policy of “multialignment”—seeking friends everywhere while refusing to forge clear alliances—has proved to be ineffective. And yet Trump’s actions won’t encourage a great revision in Indian foreign policy. Instead, New Delhi will survey the shifting geopolitical landscape and likely decide that what it needs is more productive relationships, not fewer. To protect itself from the capriciousness of the Trump administration, India will not abandon multialignment but pursue it all the more forcefully.
TAKING IT FOR GRANTED
Since its independence, in 1947, India has mostly followed a policy of nonalignment, eschewing formal alliances and resisting being drawn into competing blocs. That posture largely defined its diplomacy during the Cold War but began to change after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when India opened its economy and pursued better relations with the United States. Now its foreign policy community stresses a commitment to multialignment, which consists of the diversification of partnerships, the refusal to join military alliances, the promotion of a multipolar world order in which no single superpower or pair of great powers is predominant, and a willingness to engage in issue-based cooperation with a wide variety of actors across geopolitical fault lines.
This policy is driven both by pragmatism and by the hope that India can serve as a pole in the order to come. Indian policymakers believed that the country’s economic, strategic, and military needs could not be fulfilled by a single partner or coalition. They assumed that India could maintain its ties, for instance, with the likes of Iran and Russia while still working closely with Israel and the United States, and while building coalitions in the so-called global South with countries such as Brazil and South Africa. New Delhi imagined that Washington, in particular, would tolerate this behavior because when it came to the competition with China and the geopolitical contest in the Indo-Pacific, India was indispensable.
India sees itself as a central player in Asia. Trump does not.
Trump’s return to the White House has rocked the foundations of India’s strategy and challenged New Delhi’s closely held assumptions. As American tariffs take effect, the Indian economy will face increasing headwinds, most likely slowing economic growth. American ties with Pakistan in the wake of the May military standoff seem to only be growing stronger. And India now feels increasingly dispensable and marginalized in a geopolitical landscape it can hardly recognize.
India’s strategy presumed a number of structural conditions that Trump has thrown into flux. India assumed, for good reason, that it played a crucial role in the great-power competition between the United States and its allies in one camp and China and Russia in the other. Pakistan seemed peripheral to this larger contest; Islamabad’s global standing had diminished after its security establishment facilitated the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in 2021. Despite its refusal to condemn Russia for attacking Ukraine, India remained a favored partner for both the United States and Europe. After all, Washington’s perception of New Delhi as a potential regional counterweight to Beijing cemented India’s strategic value.
Russia’s war on Ukraine then provided India with a unique opportunity to demonstrate its policy of multialignment and raise its profile in global geopolitics. Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and Europe—key parties to the conflict—all courted India. In the process, India was able to maintain ties with both the United States and Europe, even as it bought Russian oil at favorable rates. And if the United States sometimes behaved in South Asia in ways that rankled India (for instance, when it did nothing to stop the ouster of a pro-India leader in Bangladesh in 2024), Indian officials still perceived American involvement in the region as largely beneficial, and confirmation that the United States saw the subcontinent as a key front in its larger competition with China. India much preferred the occasionally irritating involvement in South Asia of a faraway superpower to the aggression and ambition of the aspiring hegemon next door.
SHAKEN TO THE CORE
Trump’s return to the White House has complicated each of the assumptions New Delhi held. Instead of girding itself for great-power competition, the White House is scouring the world for short-term gains. Through that lens, Washington has much more to gain from China than it does from India; the war in Ukraine must end because supporting Ukraine is not worth American taxpayers’ money; and Europe’s problems with Russia are Europe’s problems, not those of the United States. In such a worldview, India’s geopolitical profile invariably shrinks.
Take the issue of the hour: the soaring tariff rate that Trump has imposed on India. Indian governments have traditionally maintained a high tariff structure to protect domestic manufacturing and agriculture, generate revenue, and manage trade balances. India has long justified these tariffs as essential for its developing economy, but the United States is unhappy about the persistent trade deficit in goods with India, agricultural subsidies that limit U.S. access to the Indian market, and India’s omnivorous geopolitical maneuvering, including its membership in the coalition of nonwestern countries known as BRICS and its continued reliance on Russian oil and defense equipment. Previous U.S. governments tended to overlook these infelicities, allowing India to liberalize its economy and decouple from Russia at its own pace. But this Trump administration is not so patient.
Washington’s revised approach to great-power competition has not only transformed its own policy toward New Delhi but has also influenced the choices and decisions of other major players—with significant implications for India. Russia, for instance, has sensed that Trump is far less committed to supporting Ukraine than was Biden, is less interested in the systemic challenge posed by China to the U.S.-led world order, and is reluctant to provide security commitments to allies in Europe and Asia. As Trump prepares for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, he seeks to punish India for buying Russian oil—a policy that the United States previously encouraged. With Trump in the White House, Russia has more options and needs India less.
America has much more to gain from China than it does from India.
Indeed, Moscow feels a diminishing obligation to New Delhi and is unwilling to offer more support than it receives, which explains its lukewarm backing during India’s clash with Pakistan in May. Russia’s public statements at the time were vague: they neither mentioned Pakistan by name nor endorsed India’s military reprisals, but simply called for settling disagreements diplomatically. In a sense, Russia echoed India’s own messaging after the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, the statements alarmed New Delhi’s Russia watchers, who expected the Kremlin to stand by India, condemn Pakistan, and affirm India’s right to retaliate—much as Israel did in its full-throated support for India. Indian analysts suspect that Russia refrained from doing so because it didn’t want to irritate China, which has become a close strategic partner of Pakistan and provided it with a great deal of new weaponry.
Going forward, Russia is likely to prioritize closer ties with China over its declining relationship with India. Sensing victory in Ukraine, Moscow has new priorities: it now seeks partners capable and willing to challenge the United States and Europe, not merely offering commercial relationships. China can do that, but India is only interested in trade. Russia may therefore be reluctant to support India in any future Indian-Pakistani conflict, owing to China’s ties with Pakistan. If Russian support for India is doubtful during a conflict with Pakistan, it’s safe to assume that Russia will do little to help India in any future conflict with China.
Trump’s relative indifference to South Asia will invariably mean a free pass for China, which will attempt to tilt the regional balance of power in its favor through a combination of debt-trap diplomacy, military agreements, and growing political and diplomatic ties with South Asian states. Chinese equipment and know-how strengthened Pakistan’s conventional capabilities in May and helped Pakistani forces probe Indian defenses. China is more directly involved in South Asian matters today than ever before and its defense industry will have a growing role in future military conflicts in the region. And if China can burrow even deeper into South Asia, it will have Trump to thank. The U.S. president is seeking a trade deal with China while trying to bully India into submission; he evinces little interest in the geopolitical fate of the Indo-Pacific, in general, and South Asia, in particular. This peculiar orientation in Trump’s foreign policy will help Beijing consolidate its influence in the region, invariably at India’s expense.
MORE OF THE SAME
The recent months of foreign policy setbacks reveal the inherent limitations of India’s commitment to multialignment. During the May clashes with Pakistan, most of India’s partners were more concerned about a potential nuclear exchange in South Asia—even if that remains extraordinarily unlikely—than interested in helping India diplomatically, politically, or militarily. But beyond the nuclear concerns, the response of India’s friends and partners was one of qualified neutrality. They echoed India’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. India’s position of not siding with either Russia or Ukraine, a stand born out of the policy of multialignment, didn’t satisfy either Russia or Western governments, and so nobody stood with India when it faced a crisis.
India imagined that it would benefit from great-power competition, maneuvering between China, Russia, and the United States to its own advantage. It worked until the dynamics of that competition changed dramatically. New Delhi saw itself as a central player in Asia. Trump has disabused Indian officials of that notion. His imposition of very high tariffs this month blindsided Indian policymakers who thought that the White House, in its own interest, would always treat India with due consideration. Trump seeks deals with China and Russia, browbeats traditional allies and friends, and seems content to speed the emergence of some kind of G-2 condominium in which the United States and China carve up the world between them. In such a world, India’s geopolitical importance declines dramatically.
This is not just India’s plight. The story in Europe and among American treaty allies in Asia is similar. In that shared doubt about the United States, however, lies a potential salve for India’s injured foreign policy. India could strengthen partnerships with European countries and major Asian powers, such as Japan and South Korea, who face their own balancing dilemmas because of the unreliability of the Trump administration. It could also seek to cultivate, or at least signal, closer ties to China and Russia; indeed, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi confirmed this month that Putin will visit India later this year.
To be sure, New Delhi views Washington’s conciliatory approach to Beijing with deep alarm. It has already begun considering how to better strengthen its defenses, source its weapons platforms, and establish reliable partnerships and supply chains. India will survive this geopolitical whirlwind with some deft diplomacy and patience, but this turbulent period is likely to have several long-term consequences for New Delhi’s foreign policy and strategic outlook. Bilateral relations between India and the United States will suffer acutely. Indeed, the domestic factors in the United States that appeared to guarantee good relations with India have not slowed their precipitous decline: the influential Indian diaspora in the United States seems powerless, the supposed bipartisan consensus in favor of India has not reined in Trump, and India-friendly politicians and industry leaders have remained conspicuously silent. After decades of abating, anti-Americanism is once again on the rise within the Indian foreign policy community. For an Indian foreign policy establishment that is doggedly consistent in its commitment to the status quo, Trump is a constant puzzle.
And yet, paradoxically, India’s response to its current predicament is likely to be, well, more of the same. The very inadequacies of multialignment may in fact push India to become only more multialigned. If Washington is not a viable or reliable partner, New Delhi will seek and cultivate other partnerships. Trump’s outreach to Beijing and Moscow will now prompt New Delhi to follow suit, reversing India’s earlier policy of gradually distancing itself from China and Russia. India’s policy of multialignment has just undergone a geopolitical stress test and emerged rather winded. But Indian policymakers are not concluding that they should abandon it; to the contrary, they will fortify it.
Foreign Affairs · by More by Happymon Jacob · August 14, 2025
18. How to Stop a Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza
Excerpt:
Finally, and most important, Hamas must free the hostages so this war can end. As recognized by Israel’s military leaders more than a year ago, to have a future free from Hamas after the war ends, there needs to be a plan for non-Hamas governance. Hamas started a war in full knowledge that it was putting its own civilians at risk, and it is now threatening aid providers and recipients. Egypt, Qatar, and other governments with influence must press Hamas and the gangs to free the hostages, lay down their arms, and end their predatory behavior, which is playing a major role in creating mass hunger.
Humanitarian assistance—not just food but also water, shelter and medical care that meets the needs of all Gazans—can and must get back on track.
How to Stop a Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza
Foreign Affairs · by More by Jacob J. Lew · August 14, 2025
What It Took Under Biden—and Why It Fell Apart
August 14, 2025
Palestinians waiting to receive food in Gaza City, August 2025 Mahmoud Issa / Reuters
JACOB J. LEW is Professor of International and Public Affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Israel from 2023 to 2025 and as U.S. Treasury Secretary from 2013 to 2017.
DAVID SATTERFIELD is Director of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. He served as U.S. Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues from 2023 to 2024.
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A humanitarian crisis is unfolding in the Gaza Strip. Since the March 2025 breakdown of a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, conditions have worsened dramatically, and the potential for widespread starvation is real. Thousands of containers with food, medical supplies, and shelter materials remain stranded at border crossings on both sides, awaiting Israeli clearance to enter Gaza and conditions for safe passage free from seizure by desperate Gazan civilians, Hamas or gang attacks within the enclave. At least several hundred truckloads of food aid must enter daily to avert a wider catastrophe.
Many parties bear responsibility for this crisis. First and foremost, Hamas launched a war with the brutal October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel; because Hamas fighters live and fight in civilian areas and in tunnels running underneath them, Hamas invited an Israeli response that would put millions of people at risk. Gazan civilians have suffered hardships and deaths at an unfathomable scale since the start of the war, and outside organizations attempting to meet humanitarian needs are struggling to deliver aid in the midst of intense combat and disorder in a dense urban environment.
From the very beginning, U.S. President Joe Biden was steadfast in his support of Israel’s right to defend itself in Gaza and defeat Hamas as a military threat. But his administration, in which we both served, also made clear that Israel was responsible for exercising care to limit civilian harm and to ensure access to food, medical care, and shelter. As the U.S. ambassador to Israel (Lew) and as the U.S. special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues (Satterfield), we communicated these dual positions in our daily engagements with Israeli leaders at all levels. And we pressed all parties to coordinate so that enough lifesaving supplies reached Gaza, even if inconsistently.
There was still too much scarcity and precarity, and for months following the October 2023 attacks on Israel, some commentators labeled the situation in Gaza a famine. But although the results of our work never satisfied us, much less our critics, in reality the efforts we led in the Biden administration to keep Gaza open for humanitarian relief prevented famine. The fact remains that through the first year and a half of relentless war, Gazans did not face mass starvation because humanitarian assistance was reaching them.
During our tenure, the United States deployed officials from multiple agencies that had the tools, leverage, and determination to improve the situation, and we were committed to doing so despite the often adverse circumstances. In March, when the cease-fire broke down, everything changed.
Under the terms of the cease-fire, which was struck in the last days of the Biden administration in January 2025, Israel had allowed a surge of supplies into Gaza. But when the cease-fire collapsed, Israel closed all humanitarian access in an effort to pressure Hamas to agree to the terms of a hostage deal. It was the first time it had blocked all aid to Gaza since late October 2023. The total blockade continued for 11 weeks, and during this critical time, the Trump administration stood back as remaining food supplies diminished and suffering increased, until it became clear to the president that the crisis had grown to politically unacceptable levels and was triggering outrage even in the MAGA base.
Then, when Israel finally did allow a limited amount of aid to enter, it changed the primary food distribution model, mostly bypassing the United Nations and other established humanitarian organizations in favor of a brand-new operation called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Although the UN continued to operate, it experienced significant operational difficulties and restrictions. The nearly 20,000 tons of monthly food aid that got through from March to July was about a third of what the World Food Program deemed necessary. The scenes of acute hunger and potential starvation that have emerged from Gaza in recent weeks reveal a frightening deterioration.
When aid was flowing before the cease-fire, it did not arrive by chance. It came one border crossing and one truck convoy at a time, and it required overcoming political and battlefield challenges every step of the way. As the world watches the crisis unfolding today and demands a solution, it is important to learn from what worked and what did not, and to remember that it falls to all parties to find a solution. The stakes are too high to allow the delivery of critical assistance to be derailed by Israeli political dynamics, obstruction by Hamas or armed Gazan gangs, or infighting among aid providers. And Washington must remember that it uniquely has the tools and leverage to avert an escalating catastrophe.
UNDER PRESSURE
After the October 7 attacks, the people of Israel were in shock, traumatized both by Hamas’s brutality and by the failure of their government to protect their fellow citizens. Immediately following the attacks, Israel responded forcefully, imposing a complete blockade on Gaza that prevented any humanitarian aid from entering via land routes. The Israeli cabinet decided that, as a matter of policy, there would be no commercial or civilian contact between Israel and Gaza. In those early days, it was common to hear Israelis use the phrase “not a drop of water, not a drop of milk, and not a drop of fuel will go from Israel to Gaza.” In the raw trauma after October 7, this sentiment was understandable but unsustainable with growing needs.
From the beginning, U.S. officials made clear that Israeli leaders needed to find a way for lifesaving supplies to get in. We underscored that doing so was unquestionably a moral obligation. We also argued that it was a strategic necessity, in that it would give Israel the time to plan and accomplish its military mission of eliminating Hamas as a threat while maintaining the support it needed from its allies, in particular the United States.
On October 18, 2023, Biden visited Israel to demonstrate U.S. solidarity in the aftermath of the attacks but also to persuade the government to allow trucks to cross into the Gazan city of Rafah from Egypt. He told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his security cabinet privately—and then the Israeli people publicly—that the United States “had Israel’s back” and that Israel had not just a right but also an obligation to ensure that Hamas could never again act as it did on October 7. But Biden also emphasized that the military campaign against Hamas would be complex and warned explicitly that the ability of the United States to support the operation would depend on Israel’s initiating and sustaining an effective “humanitarian campaign.” Without such a campaign, the president stressed, Israel would have neither the time nor the space it needed to accomplish its military goals.
The efforts we led in the Biden administration prevented famine in Gaza.
At the time, Israel’s wounds were raw, and its focus was on defending against further attacks. Its government needed to work to meet humanitarian needs in Gaza while Hamas kept hostages in captivity and was still showering Israel with rockets. Under any circumstances, it would have taken determined leadership to explain to the public why it was the responsibility of their government to make sure that humanitarian needs were met on the ground in Gaza. But it was even harder given the political dynamics of Israel’s governing coalition. Netanyahu’s coalition includes far-right parties that held what were then fringe views. The goals of the right-wing parties did not stop at defeating Hamas. They believed that Israel should never have disengaged unilaterally from Gaza and removed Israeli civilian settlements in September 2005 and that Israelis should resettle the territory after the war. This was not the position of the government, but far right-wing parties threatened to bring down the coalition if the cabinet made decisions they opposed, including opening routes for humanitarian assistance.
While some on the right opposed humanitarian assistance, others in the Israeli government chafed when we in the administration reminded them that Israel had both a right to defend itself and an obligation and a strategic imperative to ensure that aid could reach Gazans. They took umbrage at the notion that U.S. pressure was needed to persuade them to provide humanitarian assistance. Given the tensions within the government, it took active and consistent U.S. engagement to manage the internal Israeli political dynamics and maintain the adequate flow of assistance. The message to our interlocutors in the Israeli government was in essence, “If the politics are hard, blame the United States.” Allowing Netanyahu to cite a need to satisfy U.S. demands was crucial then—and remains crucial today. Because Biden never wavered in his commitment to Israel’s defense, we had the space to urge its government to meet growing humanitarian needs.
Immediately after Biden’s visit, Israel agreed to open the Rafah crossing for aid deliveries from Egypt. At first, just 20 trucks a day entered Gaza through Rafah—far from enough to meet humanitarian needs. Part of the challenge was that the Rafah crossing was designed for pedestrians and cars, not large truck convoys, making it inadequate in view of the extent of the demand and the logistical difficulties. But Israel also placed limits on the types of goods and the number of trucks (around 75 per day) permitted to go through Rafah. And to comply with the Israeli government’s decision not to allow any direct movement of assistance into Gaza from Israel, trucks had to be inspected at an Israeli-Egyptian border crossing before proceeding to Rafah—which caused significant delays.
AN OPENING
Watching this, we knew we needed to find ways to increase the volume of aid. U.S. cabinet members and other senior officials were making frequent visits to Israel to consult on the unfolding military operations and to repeat the message that more humanitarian aid was necessary. In November 2023, a one-on-one conversation between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Netanyahu scheduled for only a few minutes stretched to over an hour. As Israel’s war cabinet and the rest of the U.S. delegation waited for Blinken and Netanyahu to conclude the meeting, we began informal discussions, including with Yoav Gallant, who was then defense minister and had declared immediately after the October 7 attacks that no aid would move from Israel to Gaza. By this point, however, he understood that Israel had to allow more humanitarian assistance into the enclave—and he had an idea about how to do it.
Gallant walked the two of us through the complex geography of the southern border crossing between Israel and Gaza at Kerem Shalom. He explained that a truck could back up in Israel and be unloaded in Gaza without technically crossing the border, and that observation towers in Israel could provide full visibility to monitor threats against such an operation. Although this plan was a bit nebulous, it offered a road map to increase entry points beyond Rafah—and to chip away at the broad Israeli prohibition against moving aid directly from Israel to Gaza.
In early December, with the international support that had swelled for Israel immediately after October 7 beginning to wane, we saw an opening to put the plan into motion. UN Secretary-General António Guterres was prepared to use a very rarely invoked authority, Article 99 of the UN Charter, to force the Security Council to vote on a resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire. Washington needed to show the international community that Israel was taking steps to meet humanitarian needs. The White House and State Department debated whether to have Biden call Netanyahu to demand the opening of Kerem Shalom, but our sense was that the pressure would more likely succeed if it came from within Israel’s own cabinet. We asked Washington to give us a few days to work through the Defense Ministry.
We knew we needed to find ways to increase the volume of aid.
More than anyone else in government, Defense Ministry officials understood the vital importance of American supply lines and strategic and defensive capabilities to Israel’s war effort. And as he had told us a few weeks earlier, Gallant was prepared to defend the position that opening Kerem Shalom could be reconciled with the official policy of no direct civilian contact between Israel and Gaza. In private, he acknowledged that civilians needed more access to essential items, and he understood the strategic importance of maintaining broad support for Israel, at least in the United States.
In a phone call in the middle of the night, one of us (Lew) put it very directly to the defense minister: “You know this is the right thing to do, and in a few days the United States will be the only country in the world prepared to block a UN Security Council resolution that hurts Israel. You need to help us and act now to open Kerem Shalom.” He said he would make that case.
The United States vetoed the UN resolution on December 8 on the grounds that it did not condemn the October 7 attack and that an immediate cease-fire would allow Hamas to retain its military power and “only plant the seeds for the next war.” On December 12, the U.S. national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, visited Israel with the same message that we had delivered. On December 15, Israel announced it would open the crossing at Kerem Shalom.
Over the next several months, similar U.S. engagement, typically with Gallant playing a key role, persuaded Israel to open a series of additional crossings into Gaza. Each opening—Gate 96 in March, Erez and Zikim (Erez West) in April and May, and Kissufim in November 2024—required arduous diplomacy, including very blunt messaging to Netanyahu from Biden in April 2024 after an Israeli attack on World Central Kitchen humanitarian workers. Israeli hard-liners resisted every time, among them protesters who blocked aid trucks, which prompted the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to intervene. After each decision to open a crossing, it was a struggle to counter potential violence by far-right groups and overcome logistical snafus and bureaucratic obstacles. And on the other side of each opening were desperate civilians, criminal gangs, and an ever-present Hamas.
SIDELINING THE SPOILERS
Throughout this period, it was evident that Hamas wanted to control aid distribution to benefit its own fighters and tighten its grip on Gaza. At first, Israel tolerated this, and for a while it even refrained from attacking Hamas police officers who, in their blue cars, accompanied convoys to prevent violent tribal gangs and criminal elements from interfering with the distribution of aid. Eventually, however, Israel came to see this as allowing Hamas to strengthen its hold on governance, and in January 2024 the IDF began targeting the blue cars. With Hamas sidelined during the delivery process, the criminal gangs and looters came out in full force.
To be clear, Hamas did find ways to tax, extort, and to some extent divert aid, including assistance from Egypt handled by the Palestine Red Crescent Society. But until January 20, 2025, neither the IDF nor the UN ever shared evidence with us—or asserted to us privately—that Hamas was physically diverting U.S.-funded goods provided by the World Food Program or international nongovernmental organizations. Furthermore, there was no evidence of substantial Hamas diversion of any major assistance funded by the UN or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
Theft and diversion of UN assistance was primarily the work of criminal gangs, and we engaged with Israel and the UN to take steps to mitigate the risks. Israel’s solution was to turn to private contractors to secure the convoys, until it later concluded that the contractors were assisting the gangs and Hamas. At this point, maintaining orderly movement and distribution inside Gaza became even harder.
Aid packages being airdropped over Gaza, August 2025 Mahmoud Issa / Reuters
By February 2024, the situation in northern Gaza prompted Netanyahu to ask Biden to arrange for the U.S. military to build a floating pier to deliver aid directly to Gaza from the sea. The pier would offer quicker access to deliver aid to civilians in and around Gaza City and allow access to both the north and south along more protected routes, in theory avoiding looting and easing the passage of convoys through the IDF-controlled Netzarim Corridor checkpoint. By that point, Biden had been exploring the idea of the pier for weeks, wrestling with both the temporary nature and high cost of a maritime delivery option. He authorized the pier in the conviction that despite these drawbacks, the United States needed to employ all means possible to address the increasingly desperate humanitarian situation. He had another goal as well: Washington agreed to this plan on the condition that the Israelis would also allow the port of Ashdod to receive U.S. wheat deliveries destined for Gaza and that two more land crossings from Israel would open into northern Gaza. (Israel also provided significant construction assistance and perimeter security for the pier and paused some of its military operations to allow the pier to function.)
Rough waters ultimately made it impossible to sustain the pier, which broke apart a number of times and was shut down after less than a month of operation. While it was functioning, however, the pier managed to feed approximately 450,000 people. And even after the pier was removed from service, Israel kept Ashdod and the two northern crossings open. By April 2024, at our urging, it had also opened Ashdod to all humanitarian cargo, not just wheat.
Such U.S. efforts saved lives in Gaza. Many of us in the Biden administration asked one essential question every single day: How many trucks got in? This was an imperfect measure, as it did not reveal how the aid got distributed or who received it. But it was a simple, measurable, and important bellwether. Even Biden tracked the number of trucks daily. We knew by December 2023 that if fewer than about 250 trucks entered daily, the distribution system might be overwhelmed once more by desperate Gazans. We believed that Gaza needed closer to 350 or 400. Although not all the trucks were the same—some carried far less food and other aid than others—every truck counted. Every open gate mattered.
WHAT CHANGED?
Between the U.S. presidential election in November 2024 and the transition to a new administration in January 2025, the Biden and Trump teams worked hand in hand to reach a cease-fire and hostage-release agreement. When the deal was done, 33 hostages were freed, and over 600 trucks per day began to enter Gaza. With food reserves building up, the humanitarian situation appeared to improve significantly. And contrary to concerns that Israel might never allow Gazan civilians to return to their homes, hundreds of thousands returned to the northern part of Gaza—a Hamas demand that was key to getting the hostages returned.
From there, the cease-fire agreement was designed to unfold in stages. Further negotiations to release all the hostages in exchange for a permanent cease-fire were meant to begin as the first stage was being implemented. But those end-stage negotiations never came to fruition. And in the meantime, there was a new administration in Washington that was far less involved in the details of aid delivery—and had begun dismantling the architecture of U.S. assistance worldwide.
In February, President Donald Trump dropped a rhetorical bomb: he suggested that all of Gaza’s residents be relocated while the United States reconstructed the territory. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip,” he declared in a joint press conference with Netanyahu, outlining his vision of a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Of course, no one had asked the people of Gaza whether they wanted to leave, or other countries whether they were prepared to absorb two million refugees. At the news conference, Netanyahu seemed startled by Trump’s comments. He avoided embracing or rejecting the goal, instead hailing the president’s “bold vision” on Gaza. Yet it quickly became clear that Trump’s remark had delighted Israelis on the far right and handed them more of a claim of political legitimacy and leverage within the cabinet than they could ever have imagined. In minutes, the fringe idea of forced mass resettlement—pragmatically unattainable, morally unconscionable, and legally unacceptable—had been legitimized by no less an authority than the American president.
Hamas wanted to control aid distribution.
Israel halted all entry of humanitarian assistance into Gaza in the first week of March, after the breakdown of cease-fire negotiations. The prime minister declared to the Israeli cabinet and the nation that “no assistance would be allowed to go to Hamas.” This was a pivotal decision. It reflected a genuine concern that aid was being diverted by Hamas—even though the alleged scale of that diversion was not substantiated—but also the premise that depriving Gaza of food would pressure Hamas to release the remaining hostages and surrender its arms. As food reserves diminished, the consequence was a new and unparalleled humanitarian crisis: for the first time, genuine malnutrition showed signs of becoming widespread.
Under pressure as photographs started coming out—notably from Trump and the IDF—the Israeli government had to act. In an effort to square the circle within the cabinet between the declaration that “no assistance” would go to Hamas and the demands that humanitarian relief resume, Israel abandoned the system of aid provision that had existed before the cease-fire broke down. Instead, it turned in May to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a new U.S.- and Swiss-based NGO backed by Israel and the United States.
In its original conception, which came as part of a negotiation between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, the GHF was meant to operate in a postwar Gaza in which international forces would maintain security, and governance would come from a transitional administration with Palestinian and international participation; aid was to be distributed to civilians directly in secure zones. Instead, the GHF operation started under very different wartime conditions. It established distribution points in a handful of IDF-controlled areas in the south and center of Gaza, giving it, by its own acknowledgment, the ability to distribute just some 20 percent of the total food aid needed by the territory’s population. With growing desperation from civilians and reports of fatalities in crowd control efforts by the surrounding IDF units (as well as private military contractors hired to assist with distribution), the GHF launch has been plagued by problems. Scores of civilians in search of aid have been killed or injured both by stampedes and by live fire from some combination of the IDF, Hamas, and criminal gangs.
NO SILVER BULLET
Speaking last week, Trump acknowledged the inhumanity of the situation and the reality of starvation. But it takes sustained engagement at the highest level, not just a casual remark from the Oval Office or a social media post, to ensure that Israel keeps multiple crossings open so that hundreds of trucks can enter Gaza every day. And as we learned, the massive humanitarian need for assistance can be met only if all parties find a way to work together.
The steps needed to right the situation are clear.
First, Israel must not treat humanitarian aid as a coercive means to pressure Hamas. This tactic risks civilian lives in Gaza and subjects Israel to international condemnation and isolation. Israel must keep land crossings open and ensure that its use of force adheres to rules of engagement that protect civilians. This means more training, more accountability for civilian casualties, and better coordination with aid providers.
Second, all aid providers and facilitators need to work together. In this fractured, heavily militarized landscape, aid must flow through multiple, imperfect channels. Israel has good reason to want to prevent Hamas from deriving any benefit from international aid. Conversely, UN agencies and most international aid organizations refuse to work with any organization they deem militarized and connected to a party to the conflict, and that includes the GHF. The reality, however, is that the GHF is now the main channel for bringing in food.
By its own admission, the GHF cannot be a substitute for the UN and other international agencies or meet the full needs of Gazans. Nor is it designed or staffed to distribute specialized nutrition to the most vulnerable—children, women, and the elderly. At the same time, the established UN model for aid distribution is struggling to reach people, as its convoys are being swarmed and attacked by a combination of desperate civilians, gangs, and Hamas. The UN and the IDF—through sustained operational coordination and deconfliction—must make every possible effort to “flood the zone” in a way that discourages attempts by civilians to “self-distribute” and reduces the incentive for criminal looting. Yet because of the disorder and outright chaos engulfing the convoys, the UN is struggling to reach the most vulnerable in Gaza.
Israel must not treat humanitarian aid as a coercive means to pressure Hamas.
Given this situation, the UN, the GHF, and other aid providers need to coordinate with one another and with the IDF—even if this requires flexibility on deeply held positions. This means bringing in and distributing assistance to all populations in need throughout Gaza, through all available means. With this as the essential guiding principle, the UN needs to accept security from the IDF, the GHF, or its own contractors. Rather than trying to sideline the GHF, the UN should work with it or at a minimum parallel to it. And the GHF needs to be open to learning from the UN, with its deep knowledge of operating in Gaza and of how professionals structure humanitarian assistance. Fragmentation and institutional bickering will not help the situation. Alleviating the acute suffering of Gazans must come first, even if that means working with or beside actors one does not agree with and in conditions one does not fully control and would not choose.
Third, Washington needs to lead. In May, Trump played a key role in getting the GHF launched and provided it with some U.S. funding. Israel has in recent days expanded the flow of assistance into Gaza by the GHF and the UN. But without assistance at scale, too little aid is getting to people in need. This cannot be a one-time engagement by the White House. The pressure must be consistent and accompanied by sustained attention from senior U.S. officials. Far too many Gazans have died in this war. Getting aid through, however messily and imperfectly, can help save thousands more who might otherwise perish. But it will take American leadership and coordination to make that happen.
Finally, and most important, Hamas must free the hostages so this war can end. As recognized by Israel’s military leaders more than a year ago, to have a future free from Hamas after the war ends, there needs to be a plan for non-Hamas governance. Hamas started a war in full knowledge that it was putting its own civilians at risk, and it is now threatening aid providers and recipients. Egypt, Qatar, and other governments with influence must press Hamas and the gangs to free the hostages, lay down their arms, and end their predatory behavior, which is playing a major role in creating mass hunger.
Humanitarian assistance—not just food but also water, shelter and medical care that meets the needs of all Gazans—can and must get back on track.
Foreign Affairs · by More by Jacob J. Lew · August 14, 2025
19. Trump’s national defense strategy is focused on the homeland. So far, that has included troops in the streets.
Excerpts:
“Military forces have the wrong attitude about civilians. Law enforcement is trained to see civilians as citizens who deserve protection, except in the most extreme circumstances,” Cancian and Chris Park, a CSIS research associate, wrote in an analysis published Tuesday. “Military personnel are taught to treat civilians as potential threats and to always be ready to respond. Crowd control—in other words, dealing with unruly citizens—is the primary law enforcement training the National Guard receives.”
Service members also don’t receive the same training that police do when it comes to citizens’ rights and use of force, they wrote. This could present issues not only with Guardsmen assisting D.C. police, but with other possible domestic missions that are in line with the current national defense policy: immigration enforcement and counter-drug operations.
Six states have deployed Guardsmen to assist with Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
“Putting aside whether you think that crime is out of control or whether you think that action is needed, it's just not a very good tool for it,” Cancian said.
D.C.’s Home Rule Act allows the president to federalize its police force for 30 days, meaning the Guard’s mission is expected to last at least as long. The president said Wednesday that he would seek authorization from Congress to extend his takeover.
A White House press release about the mission does not give an end date, saying only that the “Guard will remain mobilized until law and order is restored.”
Trump’s national defense strategy is focused on the homeland. So far, that has included troops in the streets.
While calling out the National Guard makes a political statement, they’re not the best means of fighting crime, CSIS’s Mark Cancian says.
By Meghann Myers
Staff Reporter
August 13, 2025 03:05 PM ET
defenseone.com · by Meghann Myers
As National Guardsmen are sent for a second time in recent months to a U.S. city whose local leaders made no requests for their support, we may be seeing the Trump administration’s new national defense strategy play out in unprecedented ways ill-matched to military capabilities.
Civilian and uniformed Pentagon officials have said publicly that this administration is prioritizing the geographical United States in its national security policy, a departure from recent administrations—including Trump’s first—that have described conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific or terrorism in the Middle East as the biggest threats to America.
“I think we're learning in real-time what that means,” Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International studies, told Defense One.
Currently, the administration is operating under an interim NDS that is “focused on defending the homeland,” with China and the Indo-Pacific a lower priority, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the Senate Appropriations Committee in June.
“We did an interim national defense strategy almost immediately upon arriving, because with a new administration, our planning guidance was from the previous administration—that we think had the wrong priorities, or some of the wrong priorities—and by issuing that interim national defense strategy, it allowed our building to plan around the priorities of President Trump,” Hegseth said.
The interim NDS, which is classified, was finalized in March. An unclassified version exists but has not been released to the public—another change from the Biden administration, which published unclassified versions of both the interim and final NDS.
In May, the Pentagon announced that work on the final NDS would begin. The effort is being led by Defense Undersecretary for Policy Elbridge Colby, who has long proclaimed China to be the leading threat to America and who helped establish the Indo-Pacific as the priority theater in the 2018 NDS. This time around, it seems, Colby has been instructed to move the homeland to the top of the agenda, and bump China and Russia down.
Despite its second-place ranking, there’s no indication that the Indo-Pacific is getting a demotion in terms of attention or funding.
“And that's certainly true this year,” Mark Cancian said.
But that’s largely thanks to the one-time boost of the reconciliation bill. The defense budget request itself is flat in terms of dollars, and effectively a dip because of inflation. If the next years’ budgets include maybe a 2-percent hike, that might cover losses in spending power, Cancian said.
“But you know, if the budget is flat in nominal terms…then, you know, you're losing 5 percent a year,” he said. “And I mean, that doesn't take very long before you've made some deep cuts.”
Hegseth didn’t mention Russia at all in his characterization of the strategy, except insomuch as the administration is pressuring Europe to spend more on its own defense as Moscow continues its war on European soil.
That will enable the Pentagon to shift forces and resources elsewhere, he said: “...burden-sharing for our allies and partners, making sure that they're stepping up so that we can focus where we need to.”
Defending the homeland
Weeks after the interim NDS came out, Gen. Joe Ryan, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations, told a conference audience that while the service has been balancing requirements in the Indo-Pacific and Europe, “I can't leave out maybe the No. 1 priority theater today, and that's the homeland."
“But I would argue it hasn't made a big splash quite yet, and it needs to, because it's an important document,” Ryan said.
What’s now playing out is the administration’s interpretation of domestic defense.
It started in February with an increase in troops deployed to the southern border, followed by the creation of a militarized border zone in April. That required bumping up the number of troops assisting Customs and Border Patrol from about 2,000 to 10,000.
“For a while, I was a little worried that the requirement for [U.S. Northern Command] to seal the border, it would end up taking tens of thousands, but that doesn't seem to have happened,” Cancian said.
The administration’s first ambitious stateside project is “Golden Dome,” envisioned as an Israeli Iron Dome-like web of sensors and missile-defense weapons—including some in orbit—intended to prevent aerial attacks anywhere in the United States.
The effort got a big boost in the recently passed reconciliation bill, with a $25 billion downpayment on what the administration has projected will be a $175-billion endeavor and be at least somewhat operational by 2028. Many experts have called the plan unworkable, even with far more time and money.
The administration has been tight-lipped on progress. Earlier this month, the Defense Department barred officials from mentioning Golden Dome at the annual Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Alabama, a forum traditionally used to showcase Pentagon efforts and discuss needs with defense contractors. Two days later, DOD hosted an unclassified Golden Dome industry day, but banned reporters from attending.
On Monday, Trump—with Hegseth by his side—announced that he would be taking control of Washington, D.C.’s police department and deploying 800 members of the district’s Army National Guard to support them in efforts to fight crime.
“I think this is part of that focus on national security, because I think that there's a big push politically, domestic politics—aside from views about national security—that they like using troops to make a political point,” Cancian said.
But the Guard really isn’t well-suited to law enforcement missions, he said. Even when units were sent to guard the Capitol building after the Jan. 6 riot, troops were limited to crowd control and manning entrances to a fenced-in complex.
“Military forces have the wrong attitude about civilians. Law enforcement is trained to see civilians as citizens who deserve protection, except in the most extreme circumstances,” Cancian and Chris Park, a CSIS research associate, wrote in an analysis published Tuesday. “Military personnel are taught to treat civilians as potential threats and to always be ready to respond. Crowd control—in other words, dealing with unruly citizens—is the primary law enforcement training the National Guard receives.”
Service members also don’t receive the same training that police do when it comes to citizens’ rights and use of force, they wrote. This could present issues not only with Guardsmen assisting D.C. police, but with other possible domestic missions that are in line with the current national defense policy: immigration enforcement and counter-drug operations.
Six states have deployed Guardsmen to assist with Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids.
“Putting aside whether you think that crime is out of control or whether you think that action is needed, it's just not a very good tool for it,” Cancian said.
D.C.’s Home Rule Act allows the president to federalize its police force for 30 days, meaning the Guard’s mission is expected to last at least as long. The president said Wednesday that he would seek authorization from Congress to extend his takeover.
A White House press release about the mission does not give an end date, saying only that the “Guard will remain mobilized until law and order is restored.”
defenseone.com · by Meghann Myers
20. 4 out of 5 US troops surveyed understand the duty to disobey illegal orders
What makes America great is that we have a military that supports and defends the Constitution of the United States.
4 out of 5 US troops surveyed understand the duty to disobey illegal orders
theconversation.com · by Charli Carpenter
With his Aug. 11, 2025, announcement that he was sending the National Guard – along with federal law enforcement – into Washington, D.C. to fight crime, President Donald Trump edged U.S. troops closer to the kind of military-civilian confrontations that can cross ethical and legal lines.
Indeed, since Trump returned to office, many of his actions have alarmed international human rights observers. His administration has deported immigrants without due process, held detainees in inhumane conditions, threatened the forcible removal of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and deployed both the National Guard and federal military troops to Los Angeles to quell largely peaceful protests.
When a sitting commander in chief authorizes acts like these, which many assert are clear violations of the law, men and women in uniform face an ethical dilemma: How should they respond to an order they believe is illegal?
The question may already be affecting troop morale. “The moral injuries of this operation, I think, will be enduring,” a National Guard member who had been deployed to quell public unrest over immigration arrests in Los Angeles told The New York Times. “This is not what the military of our country was designed to do, at all.”
Troops who are ordered to do something illegal are put in a bind – so much so that some argue that troops themselves are harmed when given such orders. They are not trained in legal nuances, and they are conditioned to obey. Yet if they obey “manifestly unlawful” orders, they can be prosecuted. Some analysts fear that U.S. troops are ill-equipped to recognize this threshold.
We are scholars of international relations and international law. We conducted survey research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Human Security Lab and discovered that many service members do understand the distinction between legal and illegal orders, the duty to disobey certain orders, and when they should do so.
President Donald Trump, flanked by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Biondi, announced at a White House news conference on Aug. 11, 2025, that he was deploying the National Guard to assist in restoring law and order in Washington. Hu Yousong/Xinhua via Getty Images
Compelled to disobey
U.S. service members take an oath to uphold the Constitution. In addition, under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the U.S. Manual for Courts-Martial, service members must obey lawful orders and disobey unlawful orders. Unlawful orders are those that clearly violate the U.S. Constitution, international human rights standards or the Geneva Conventions.
Service members who follow an illegal order can be held liable and court-martialed or subject to prosecution by international tribunals. Following orders from a superior is no defense.
Our poll, fielded between June 13 and June 30, 2025, shows that service members understand these rules. Of the 818 active-duty troops we surveyed, just 9% stated that they would “obey any order.” Only 9% “didn’t know,” and only 2% had “no comment.”
When asked to describe unlawful orders in their own words, about 25% of respondents wrote about their duty to disobey orders that were “obviously wrong,” “obviously criminal” or “obviously unconstitutional.”
Another 8% spoke of immoral orders. One respondent wrote that “orders that clearly break international law, such as targeting non-combatants, are not just illegal — they’re immoral. As military personnel, we have a duty to uphold the law and refuse commands that betray that duty.”
Just over 40% of respondents listed specific examples of orders they would feel compelled to disobey.
The most common unprompted response, cited by 26% of those surveyed, was “harming civilians,” while another 15% of respondents gave a variety of other examples of violations of duty and law, such as “torturing prisoners” and “harming U.S. troops.”
One wrote that “an order would be obviously unlawful if it involved harming civilians, using torture, targeting people based on identity, or punishing others without legal process.”
A tag cloud of responses to UMass-Amherst’s Human Security Lab survey of active-duty service members about when they would disobey an order from a superior. UMass-Amherst’s Human Security Lab, CC BY
Soldiers, not lawyers
But the open-ended answers pointed to another struggle troops face: Some no longer trust U.S. law as useful guidance.
Writing in their own words about how they would know an illegal order when they saw it, more troops emphasized international law as a standard of illegality than emphasized U.S. law.
Others implied that acts that are illegal under international law might become legal in the U.S.
“Trump will issue illegal orders,” wrote one respondent. “The new laws will allow it,” wrote another. A third wrote, “We are not required to obey such laws.”
Several emphasized the U.S. political situation directly in their remarks, stating they’d disobey “oppression or harming U.S. civilians that clearly goes against the Constitution” or an order for “use of the military to carry out deportations.”
Still, the percentage of respondents who said they would disobey specific orders – such as torture – is lower than the percentage of respondents who recognized the responsibility to disobey in general.
This is not surprising: Troops are trained to obey and face numerous social, psychological and institutional pressures to do so. By contrast, most troops receive relatively little training in the laws of war or human rights law.
Political scientists have found, however, that having information on international law affects attitudes about the use of force among the general public. It can also affect decision-making by military personnel.
This finding was also borne out in our survey.
When we explicitly reminded troops that shooting civilians was a violation of international law, their willingness to disobey increased 8 percentage points.
Drawing the line
As my research with another scholar showed in 2020, even thinking about law and morality can make a difference in opposition to certain war crimes.
The preliminary results from our survey led to a similar conclusion. Troops who answered questions on “manifestly unlawful orders” before they were asked questions on specific scenarios were much more likely to say they would refuse those specific illegal orders.
When asked if they would follow an order to drop a nuclear bomb on a civilian city, for example, 69% of troops who received that question first said they would obey the order.
But when the respondents were asked to think about and comment on the duty to disobey unlawful orders before being asked if they would follow the order to bomb, the percentage who would obey the order dropped 13 points to 56%.
While many troops said they might obey questionable orders, the large number who would not is remarkable.
Military culture makes disobedience difficult: Soldiers can be court-martialed for obeying an unlawful order, or for disobeying a lawful one.
Yet between one-third to half of the U.S. troops we surveyed would be willing to disobey if ordered to shoot or starve civilians, torture prisoners or drop a nuclear bomb on a city.
The service members described the methods they would use. Some would confront their superiors directly. Others imagined indirect methods: asking questions, creating diversions, going AWOL, “becoming violently ill.”
Criminologist Eva Whitehead researched actual cases of troop disobedience of illegal orders and found that when some troops disobey – even indirectly – others can more easily find the courage to do the same.
Whitehead’s research showed that those who refuse to follow illegal or immoral orders are most effective when they stand up for their actions openly.
The initial results of our survey – coupled with a recent spike in calls to the GI Rights Hotline – suggest American men and women in uniform don’t want to obey unlawful orders.
Some are standing up loudly. Many are thinking ahead to what they might do if confronted with unlawful orders. And those we surveyed are looking for guidance from the Constitution and international law to determine where they may have to draw that line.
Zahra Marashi, an undergraduate research assistant at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, contributed to the research for this article.
theconversation.com · by Charli Carpenter
21. The Drift from the Human Domain: How JSOC Thinking is Reshaping USASOC
Conclusion:
JSOC and USASOC are different instruments in the same orchestra, each playing a vital part in America’s security symphony. But when JSOC leaders bring their operational mindset into USASOC without adapting it to the human domain, cognitive biases like the illusion of validity and the illusion of understanding create a dangerous drift. 1st Special Forces Command cannot afford to become a smaller, less capable version of JSOC. The United States already has a JSOC; what it risks losing is the slow-burning, culturally embedded capability of Special Operations Forces to shape environments and achieve strategic effects without firing a shot. In an era of great power competition fought largely in the gray zone, the decisive terrain will remain human, not technological. And while technology will keep advancing, the side that best understands and shapes human behavior will continue to have the greatest strategic advantage.
The Drift from the Human Domain: How JSOC Thinking is Reshaping USASOC
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/drift-from-human-domain-how-jsoc-thinking-reshaping-usasoc-artiaga-mbmyc/?trackingId=%2FqZJ0IPeaH51VoyAZPS55A%3D%3D
Irregular Warfare & National Security Strategist | Intelligence & Latin America Professional | Opinions = my own. Sharing ≠ endorsement.
August 9, 2025
Introduction
The U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) have long stood as pillars of American special operations, each with distinct missions, cultures, and strengths. JSOC was designed for speed, precision, and secrecy, executing the nation's most sensitive counterterrorism missions and hostage rescues on short notice with global reach. USASOC, on the other hand, has been the institutional home for the Army's Special Forces (Green Berets), Civil Affairs, and Psychological Operations units, forces whose specialty lies in operating within the human domain, building relationships, influencing populations, and conducting Unconventional Warfare (UW) and Foreign Internal Defense (FID) over extended periods. Yet in recent years, the increasing presence of JSOC leaders in USASOC, and particularly within 1st Special Forces Command (1st SFC), has begun to shift the command’s center of gravity. The traditional role of man, train, and equip is slowly giving way to a desire to mirror JSOC's operational model, prioritizing high-tech solutions such as AI, robotics, cyber capabilities, and rapid direct action over the slow, deliberate art of human engagement.
Two Different Worlds
JSOC and USASOC maintain distinct operational philosophies regarding special operations. JSOC operates within a time-sensitive environment that demands quick intelligence gathering and target development before executing missions. The organization achieves success through direct measurements of high-value target captures and kills as well as successful raids that finish within short timeframes. USASOC focuses on a longer-term approach by integrating with partner forces while studying local cultures to create lasting regional stability through processes that require months or years to produce results. The two approaches function as complementary elements rather than competing methods. The complete transfer of JSOC mindsets to USASOC operations without modifications creates cultural changes that endanger the distinctive qualities of USASOC.
The Cultural Drift
The Global War on Terror elevated JSOC to near-mythical status within the military. The high-profile raids, the rapid targeting cycles, and the technological precision all contributed to an aura of operational perfection. Many of the officers who built their careers in JSOC during this period are now leading elements of USASOC. Their experiences and successes give them confidence, understandably so, but also foster a tendency to shape USASOC in JSOC's image. This manifests in a growing emphasis on operations over preparation, in the prioritization of advanced technology over language and cultural immersion, and the pursuit of short-term metrics rather than long-term strategic effects. The problem is not that technology, cyber tools, and AI have no place in USASOC; they do, but that these tools risk overshadowing the deep human skills that have always been the Army’s Special Operations Forces' true comparative advantage.
Kahneman's Lens: The Illusion of Validity and Understanding
Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow offers a useful framework for understanding why JSOC leaders often believe their operational mindset will improve USASOC's performance. The first relevant bias is the illusion of validity, the tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one’s judgments, particularly when those judgments are shaped by past successes in a familiar domain. JSOC's leaders have decades of operational success to point to. In their world, speed, precision, and technology repeatedly delivered results. This reinforces their belief that the same methods will succeed anywhere, including in USASOC’s slower, human-focused mission sets. Yet success in JSOC’s operational environment does not automatically translate to success in the human domain, where influence and trust cannot be rushed or forced.
The second bias, the illusion of understanding, compounds the problem. JSOC’s victories are often remembered as the product of superior leadership, technology, and operational execution. In these narratives, the broader enabling context, political will, intelligence dominance, and permissive operational authorities are often downplayed. Leaders influenced by this bias may believe they fully understand the mechanics of success and can replicate them in USASOC without adapting to its fundamentally different requirements. The result is a growing emphasis on high-tech capabilities, rapid action, and operational tempo that does not match the patient, persistent engagement required in the human domain.
The Cost of Becoming a Mini-JSOC
If 1st SFC continues to evolve into a miniature version of JSOC, the costs will be significant. The first casualty will be the erosion of human domain mastery. Language proficiency, cultural fluency, and relationship-building are perishable skills; if they are not prioritized in training and deployments, they will wither. Without them, USASOC loses the ability to build the trust and networks that make it effective in UW and FID missions. Another consequence is misalignment with the national strategy. The National Defense Strategy and the Irregular Warfare Annex both stress the need for persistent engagement and influence in the gray zone, missions that require patient human engagement, not just high-speed raids.
There is also the matter of resource allocation. If funding and training cycles increasingly favor expensive technological solutions, less will be available for cultural immersion, regional expertise, and unconventional problem-solving that Special Forces need. Finally, there is the loss of strategic depth. JSOC can strike a target anywhere in the world, but it cannot sustain long-term influence or shape the political environment in the way USASOC can. Without USASOC’s human-centric capabilities, the U.S. will be left with only the ability to hit threats after they emerge, rather than shaping environments to prevent them.
Why the Human Domain Still Matters Most
Advanced technology attracts people with its undeniable appeal. The combination of AI data processing speed, drone capabilities, and cyber network disruption tools enables operations to succeed without traditional military action. Irregular warfare remains a fundamental human activity. The goals of changing minds, building alliances, and influencing decision-making processes are still beyond what algorithms and machines can achieve. History shows that having superior technology does not always lead to victory. The French in Indochina, the Americans in Vietnam, and the Soviets in Afghanistan all demonstrated technological superiority, yet their opponents gained the upper hand through effective control of human terrain. The Green Berets' original mission to work "by, with, and through" indigenous forces remains crucial because it builds lasting capabilities and influence, often avoiding direct combat.
A Way Forward
The answer is not to reject technology, but to integrate it in a way that enhances rather than replaces human-domain capabilities. USASOC must preserve its core focus on language, culture, and persistent engagement. Leader development should explicitly teach the differences between JSOC’s and USASOC’s missions, drawing on historical case studies that highlight the unique requirements of the human domain. Technology should be treated as a tool to support, not drive, operations. And perhaps most importantly, the roles of JSOC and USASOC should remain clearly defined: JSOC as the nation’s precision strike capability, and USASOC as its long-term influence capability. Diluting either role weakens the entire special operations enterprise.
Conclusion
JSOC and USASOC are different instruments in the same orchestra, each playing a vital part in America’s security symphony. But when JSOC leaders bring their operational mindset into USASOC without adapting it to the human domain, cognitive biases like the illusion of validity and the illusion of understanding create a dangerous drift. 1st Special Forces Command cannot afford to become a smaller, less capable version of JSOC. The United States already has a JSOC; what it risks losing is the slow-burning, culturally embedded capability of Special Operations Forces to shape environments and achieve strategic effects without firing a shot. In an era of great power competition fought largely in the gray zone, the decisive terrain will remain human, not technological. And while technology will keep advancing, the side that best understands and shapes human behavior will continue to have the greatest strategic advantage.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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