https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor-s-Picks/China-up-close/Analysis-A-1950-map-foreshadows-what-Xi-Jinping-has-in-mind-today

Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the day:

"It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral su[eriorty in their ignorance."

– Thomas Sowell

"Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage."

– Ambrose Bierce

"How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?"

– John Stuart Mill

1. The Department of War: Why Strength and Strategy Must Go Hand in Hand

2. Niall Ferguson: Osama bin Laden’s Posthumous Victory

3. The United States Is Undoing Post-9/11 Security Architecture

4. Wasn’t Hell Supposed to Break Loose if the U.S. Struck Iran?

5. U.S. Announces New Health Sector Assistance for the Philippines'

6. Book Release – Perpetual War and International Law: Enduring Legacies of the War on Terror

7. Charlie Kirk’s Murder and the Crisis of Political Violence

8. Russia Pays the Price as Ukraine Targets Its Oil Refineries

9. Xi’s Grand Show Of Force Failed To Challenge The US – Analysis

10. Inside Ukraine’s drone wall holding off Russia’s meatgrinder assaults

11. America's defense begins in the Western Pacific, not in San Diego

12. Countering the People’s Republic of China’s Maritime Insurgency in the South Pacific

13. China’s unwarranted exclusion of the U.S. and Taiwan from Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting

14. After Xi’s parade, Trump must re-engage with Asia to overturn perception of U.S. ‘chaos’

15. Marine Corps reaches deal with Palantir for Maven Smart System

16. Russia Is Losing the War—Just Not to Ukraine

17. A New Frontier: Japan’s Deep-Sea Mining at Minamitorishima for US Rare Earth Resilience

18. The Greatest Danger in the Taiwan Strait

19. How to Build a Post-American Liberal Order – The World’s Democracies Must Work Together—and Constrain Washington

20. The Importance of the Battle of the Yalu

21. Pentagon stages first ‘Top Drone’ school for operators to hone skills

22. Actions create consequences : projecting – what do others see? by Dr. Cynthia Watson

23. The social hierarchy of US special operations units

1. The Department of War: Why Strength and Strategy Must Go Hand in Hand

Excerpts:

The challenge then is to strike the right balance: strengthening homeland defense while doubling down on our ability to project power abroad, deter aggression, and shape the international environment in ways that favor peace. This means investing in next-generation technologies, replenishing our munitions stockpiles, modernizing our logistics and industrial base, and ensuring that our warfighters remain the best-trained, best-equipped force on earth. It also means aligning our diplomacy, economic policy, and information strategy with this effort—so that when we say we will defend the rules-based order, it is not a slogan but a credible commitment.

The United States has a narrow window to get this right. Congressional resources, executive follow-through, and sustained global engagement are necessary to restore readiness and ensure the U.S. does not cede influence to China and its partners. Otherwise, we could foster false confidence at home while calling into question about U.S. credibility at a critical moment in the strategic competition.

Ultimately, reclaiming the spirit of the Department of War and taking the initiative across the economic and information domains, matched by investments, alliances, and a narrative the world wants to follow, can avoid conflict, and importantly preserve a world where peace endures.

The Department of War: Why Strength and Strategy Must Go Hand in Hand

By Kimberly Lehn

September 11, 2025

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/09/11/the_department_of_war_why_strength_and_strategy_must_go_hand_in_hand_1134150.html

America once had a Department of War. From 1789 to 1949, under this name, America won its independence, preserved the Union, and emerged victorious from two world wars that defined the modern international order. Its existence made clear that the nation did not shy away from the hard truth that peace often depends on the credible ability and readiness to wage—and win—war. Reconsidering that legacy, along with the posture and policies it represents, could reinvigorate the U.S. approach to deterrence at a time when great power competition is intensifying.

Recent events underscore the enduring relevance of this mindset. The United States’ strikes on Iran earlier this year demonstrated both capability and will. Far from escalating conflict, such decisive action reinforced deterrence and showed adversaries that aggression carries consequences. History repeatedly shows that credible, immediate responses to provocations are the best ways to keep the peace. Deterrence is not simply about having forces—it is about demonstrating that we will use them if required.

The change of the Department of Defense back to the Department of War if paired with real investments in capability, modernization, and readiness, would signal that America is serious about defending its interests and those of its allies. It would remind allies and adversaries alike that the United States does not confuse restraint with weakness, nor dialogue with deference.

For all our desire to avoid conflict with China, we must remember that peace is not a unilateral choice. Beijing must want it too. Its actions suggest otherwise. The recent meetings among Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, coupled with Beijing’s highly publicized military parade, bellicose training activities, and aim to coordinate economically and technologically against the United States, underscore a shared vision by China and its partners of countering U.S. influence and rewriting international rules. Pretending that Beijing’s ambitions can be dissuaded solely by our rhetoric is a recipe for strategic surprise. Instead, we should implement a whole-of-government approach focused on executing a coherent, winning strategy.

During WWII, America understood that information warfare was also vital in competition and conflict, creating agencies like the U.S. Office of War Information. These capabilities were dismantled upon victory. America had also created powerful agencies like the War Industries Board and War Production Board that successfully coordinated national industrial capacity but then dissolved these capabilities. Meanwhile, China has built the world’s most sophisticated propaganda and information warfare apparatus—deploying armies of social media influencers, controlling global narratives through state media, and conducting massive disinformation campaigns aimed at the U.S. and its allies and partners. China also maintains permanent state-directed economic coordination across its entire industrial base that operates continuously, giving them the advantage of never having to rebuild institutional knowledge and relationships.

What the United States needs is a proactive plan that couples strength with excellence—militarily, economically, and morally. We need to lead by example, setting a narrative and industrial activities that others want to follow. America’s most enduring power has always been its ability to inspire allies, partners, and even former adversaries. Attraction works best when it is underwritten by confidence and credibility.

This discussion takes on even greater urgency in light of the upcoming National Defense Strategy, which is expected to emphasize homeland defense. Protecting the homeland, which is no longer limited to physical borders or interests, is the first responsibility of government, as it should be. At the same time, we must prioritize deterring China in the Indo-Pacific theater and the threat that China is. As China’s military strategist and author of the “Art of War,” Sun Tzu famously stated that “supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” Achieving that kind of excellence requires global engagement, forward presence, and a posture that reassures allies and partners even as it deters adversaries.

At this critical moment, the United States cannot afford to pull back from the Indo-Pacific or cede initiative to China while Xi consolidates regional dominance. Nor can we risk appearing distracted or hesitant. Our competitors are watching closely for signs of vacillation, and they will seize every opportunity to fill any vacuum we leave behind.

Kimberly Lehn is the Senior Director for the Honolulu Defense Forum at the Pacific Forum. The Honolulu Defense Forum is a solutions-based conference that partners with U.S. and ally government stakeholders and the defense and technology industry to discuss ways of overcoming defense and economic security challenges in the Indo-Pacific region. It will take place on January 11-13, 2026, in Waikiki. She is also a senior fellow (non-resident) at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and was a professional staff member on the House Armed Services Committee.

2. Niall Ferguson: Osama bin Laden’s Posthumous Victory

Excerpts:

You can see why, at the time, many commentators saw 9/11 as vindicating the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose seminal essay on “The Clash of Civilizations” had been published in 1993, as well as the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, who had long argued that Islam was chronically unable to modernize.

My wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was born in Somalia and shared this view, not because she was a scholar of Islam but because she was a Muslim—and, indeed, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood. In September 2001, she was working at a political think tank in the Netherlands, having sought asylum there in 1992 to escape war-torn Mogadishu and an arranged marriage.

In her memoir, Infidel, she recalls how, after hearing bin Laden’s video, she “picked up the Quran and the hadith and started looking through them, to check. I hated to do it, because I knew that I would find bin Laden’s quotations in there.” She shot to notoriety by telling the Dutch that the 9/11 attackers were simply following the Prophet Muhammad’s injunction to wage holy war.

Over the past 24 years, I have valiantly tried to see 9/11 differently—not as a civilizational clash between Islam and “the West” but as something that fit better into my own secular frame of reference. Raised an atheist, trained as an economic historian, I felt obliged to look behind what I took to be the facade of religious zealotry.

A decade after the attacks, in a piece I wrote for The New York Times Magazine, I portrayed them as the product of four underlying historical trends. First, the spread of terrorism from the Middle East and Europe to the United States. Second, the post-2000 economic downturn, combined with widening inequality between nations and a coming oil shock, possibly compounded by a Saudi revolution akin to the one that overthrew the Shah in 1979. (I completely failed to foresee the shale oil revolution and bought into the “peak oil” myth). Third, the transition of American global power from informal to formal imperialism. And last, the fragmentation of the multicultural polity. (“Rather than anticipating a clash between monolithic civilizations, we should expect a continued process of political disintegration as religious and ethnic conflicts challenge the integrity of existing multicultural nation-states.”)

Missing in this—and in much of my work that followed—was Islam.

Niall Ferguson: Osama bin Laden’s Posthumous Victory

My wife is a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood. It took me two decades to see what she saw on 9/11.

By Niall Ferguson

09.11.25 —

U.S. Politics

Sir Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of 16 books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award. He is a columnist with The Free Press. In addition, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, a co-founder of the Latin American fintech company Ualá, and a co-founding trustee of the new University of Austin.

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-osama-bin-laden-9-11-october-7-israel-hamas?utm

Smoke pours from the World Trade Center after it was hit by two planes on September 11, 2001, in New York City. (Craig Allen via Getty Images)

0:00

When the Twin Towers fell in 2001, Niall Ferguson wrote that the attack was a result of complex historical trends—post-2000 economic downturn, the rise of American imperialism, and the fragmentation of ethnic pluralism in Western nations. But Niall now thinks he was wrong. And he explains why in his essay for The Free Press today. Read it below, and then read Matt Labash’s dispatch from the streets of New York City after the attack, which we’re honored to republish today: “South Toward Hell After September 11.” —The Editors

This week’s azure September skies over New York brought back memories. Twenty-four years ago, I was due to give a lecture at New York University. The date of the lecture was 9/12. I never flew.

On the day of the attacks, I sat in my study at Jesus College, Oxford, staring incredulously at the pixelated live video of the Twin Towers first blazing, then collapsing. Not long after, in April 2002, I accepted a chair at the Stern School of Business at NYU and resigned my Oxford professorship.

My motivation was partly the hereditary Scottish tendency to march toward the sound of gunfire. As a teenager in 1914, my grandfather John Ferguson had volunteered to fight the Germans. This seemed easier.

Regardless of the 9/11 attackers’ motives, I had a strong objection to terrorism as a political method—a result of growing up in Glasgow in the 1970s, when “the Troubles” in nearby Northern Ireland did more than merely resonate. My first impulse after the attacks, in a piece for The New York Times, was to liken the sympathetic British reaction to 9/11 to the American reaction to the Blitz of 1940-41. But I also warned Americans to “steel themselves for a long, inglorious kind of war that governments in Europe already know only too well.” In wars against terrorists, I wrote, “there are no quick victories. The foe does not line up his tanks for you to flatten, his ships for you to sink. His troops live among you.”

Yet this was not the Provisional IRA. Rereading a transcript of Osama bin Laden’s first post-9/11 video, from November 3, 2001, I am reminded how explicitly he declared a war of religion. “People were divided into two parts” after 9/11, he declared. “The first part supported these strikes against U.S. tyranny, while the second denounced them.”

“The vast majority of the sons of the Islamic world were happy about these strikes,” bin Laden went on, “because they believe that the strikes were in reaction to the huge criminality practiced by Israel and the United States in Palestine and other Muslim countries.” There were demonstrations of support for his action “from the farthest point in the eastern part of the Islamic world to the farthest point in the western part of the Islamic world.” This revealed the key reality: “This war is fundamentally religious. The people of the East are Muslims. They sympathized with Muslims against the people of the West, who are the crusaders.”

With the passage of two and a half decades, it is startling just how unambiguous bin Laden was about his religious motive. “Under no circumstances,” he declared, “should we forget this enmity between us and the infidels. For, the enmity is based on creed. . . . It is a question of faith, not a war against terrorism.” The goal of all Muslims should now be to “resist the most ferocious, serious, and violent Crusade campaign against Islam ever since the message was revealed to Muhammad.”

Bin Laden saw the war he was waging as a counterattack—“to take revenge for those innocent children in Palestine, Iraq, southern Sudan, Somalia, Kashmir and the Philippines.” The U.S. president, George W. Bush, might be the latest “crusader,” who “carried the cross and raised its banner high,” but bin Laden traced his war back to the aftermath of World War I, when “the whole Islamic world fell under the crusader banner … and Palestine was occupied by the British.” Now the tables had been turned. And he had turned them with just 19 men whose faith exalted martyrdom.

Comparing the world today with that of 24 years ago, I am tempted to say that bin Laden lost the war on terror but is winning the clash of civilizations.

You can see why, at the time, many commentators saw 9/11 as vindicating the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose seminal essay on “The Clash of Civilizations” had been published in 1993, as well as the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, who had long argued that Islam was chronically unable to modernize.

My wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, was born in Somalia and shared this view, not because she was a scholar of Islam but because she was a Muslim—and, indeed, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood. In September 2001, she was working at a political think tank in the Netherlands, having sought asylum there in 1992 to escape war-torn Mogadishu and an arranged marriage.

In her memoir, Infidel, she recalls how, after hearing bin Laden’s video, she “picked up the Quran and the hadith and started looking through them, to check. I hated to do it, because I knew that I would find bin Laden’s quotations in there.” She shot to notoriety by telling the Dutch that the 9/11 attackers were simply following the Prophet Muhammad’s injunction to wage holy war.

Over the past 24 years, I have valiantly tried to see 9/11 differently—not as a civilizational clash between Islam and “the West” but as something that fit better into my own secular frame of reference. Raised an atheist, trained as an economic historian, I felt obliged to look behind what I took to be the facade of religious zealotry.

A decade after the attacks, in a piece I wrote for The New York Times Magazine, I portrayed them as the product of four underlying historical trends. First, the spread of terrorism from the Middle East and Europe to the United States. Second, the post-2000 economic downturn, combined with widening inequality between nations and a coming oil shock, possibly compounded by a Saudi revolution akin to the one that overthrew the Shah in 1979. (I completely failed to foresee the shale oil revolution and bought into the “peak oil” myth). Third, the transition of American global power from informal to formal imperialism. And last, the fragmentation of the multicultural polity. (“Rather than anticipating a clash between monolithic civilizations, we should expect a continued process of political disintegration as religious and ethnic conflicts challenge the integrity of existing multicultural nation-states.”)

Missing in this—and in much of my work that followed—was Islam.

Read

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: We Have Been Subverted

In The War of the World (2006), I got a little closer to Huntington, portraying 1979 as a much bigger turning point than 2001 in terms of the demographic as well as political rise of Islam, a point I returned to in Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011). However, laboriously quantifying every war since Huntington’s essay had appeared, I argued that most conflicts since 1993 had, in reality, been within rather than between civilizations. In The Square and the Tower (2017), I applied network theory to the problem, showing how al-Qaeda itself was a network within a much larger network of Islamist organizations; and that its expansion in response to the invasion of Iraq ultimately necessitated a networked response (in the form of General Stan McChrystal’s Joint Special Operations Command). Most recently, in Doom (2021), I downgraded 9/11 to just another disaster, and not a very big one. “In terms of excess mortality, April 2020 in New York City was … three and a half times worse than September 2001, the month of the 9/11 terrorist attack.”

On reflection, I see that I was overthinking the event. Or perhaps under-thinking it.

Huntington, Lewis, and my wife were right.

In Huntington’s original formulation, “the fundamental source of conflict” in the world after the Cold War would be “cultural”; “the principal conflicts of global politics” would be “between nations and groups of different civilizations”—“Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African.” In particular, Huntington predicted, the “centuries-old military interaction between the West and Islam” could become “more virulent.” He also foresaw a “Confucian-Islamic military connection” that would culminate in a conflict between “The West and the Rest.”

Amongst the younger generation of proto-woke Ivy League professors, Huntington was widely mocked for his “essentialism.” But consider, with Huntington’s argument in mind, all that has happened since September 2001. Terrorism has largely been contained in the U.S. and EU, though not globally. In that sense, we won the “war on terror,” which was successfully displaced from the U.S. to the periphery. It was ultimately defeated in Iraq, though not in Afghanistan. Today, as a result, terrorism in the world looks very different from what I foresaw in 2001. According to the Global Terrorism Index 2025, published by the Institute for Economics & Peace, the top five countries most impacted by terrorism last year were: Burkina Faso, Pakistan, Syria, Mali, and Niger. Globally, terrorism peaked in 2014-2015. In countries such as Iraq, it has declined dramatically. (In 2007, terrorists claimed 6,249 lives in Iraq. Last year, the total was just 59.)

Burkina Faso servicemen carry a coffin during the burial of the soldiers killed in a clash with al-Qaeda, in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on October 8, 2022. (Olympia De Maismont/AFP via Getty Images)

In the United States, it is widely asserted, white supremacists now pose a bigger terrorist threat than Islamists—although the attack in New Orleans on January 1, 2025, when Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 14 people by driving a pickup truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street, is a reminder that Islamic State has not entirely gone away. We don't yet know who murdered Charlie Kirk yesterday. My wild guess: not a white supremacist. Still, the latest Global Terrorism Threat Assessment by the Center for Strategic and International Studies makes clear just how wrong I was in 2001 to anticipate a sustained campaign of jihadist terrorism in the United States. Say what you like about our national security agencies, they won that war.

Yet nonviolent radicalization (what Islam calls dawa as opposed to violent jihad) has advanced significantly everywhere in the Western world, wherever there are Muslim communities. The critical point—as my wife explained in a book on the subject—is that Islamism as a deeply illiberal political ideology does not need to engage in acts of terrorism to spread.

I never cease to marvel at the ingenuity with which the Muslim Brotherhood and other proselytizing organizations spread their network, through mosques, Islamic centers, schools, colleges, and local politics. Consider only the effectiveness of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), founded in 1994, which today boasts on its website of having “100+ active lawsuits” and “600,000+ Legislative Action Alerts,” whatever that means. It has almost 30 offices throughout the country.

Most people who encounter CAIR take it to be something like the Anti-Defamation League for Muslims—a civil rights organization that just happens to be concerned about the rights of Muslims. But it is not that at all. Rather, it is more like a front organization for the Muslim Brotherhood of America. In a recent article, Ayaan has brilliantly described the many ingenious ways that CAIR exploits the institutions of our open society, most recently settling a lawsuit to avoid revealing its sources of funding.

Good luck following the money. In her words:

The North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) controls mosque properties and financial assets. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) lends the Brotherhood a degree of religious legitimacy. The American Muslim Council (AMC) works the political front, cutting deals and building alliances. The Muslim American Society (MAS) runs operations on the ground, embedding itself firmly in local communities. In universities, the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) shapes the narrative. On campuses, the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) targets the next wave of recruits. The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) and Young Muslims (YM) focus on families and youth.

Even the UAE has proscribed CAIR as a terrorist organization. Yet dozens of Democratic legislators are on the record on the CAIR website, praising its work as they doubtless also praise the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

A complementary effort is the way Qatar—the largest source of foreign donations to U.S. universities since reporting began in 1986—funnels money into academia. According to the Network Contagion Research Institute, as reported in The Free Press, nearly a third of Qatari donations to American colleges—over $2 billion—were given between 2021 and 2024. As Mitchell G. Bard shows in “Arab Funding of American Universities” (2025), this money is one of the reasons college campuses have become such hotbeds of antisemitism in recent years.

It is not just that the West has been successfully penetrated by an antagonistic civilization that fundamentally rejects the fundamental division between religion and politics—church and state—that lies at the heart of both Christianity and Judaism. The West is also being geopolitically outmaneuvered by “the rest” in just the way Huntington foresaw.

Contrast the global order after 9/11 with the global order today. We have come a long way since NATO secretary-general George Robertson’s statement on September 11, 2001—“Our message to the people of the United States is . . . ‘We are with you.’ ”

In the past three years, Zbig Brzezinski’s worst-case scenario has come about. “Potentially, the most dangerous scenario,” he wrote in The Grand Chessboard (1997), “would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.” Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that grand coalition has come into being, with North Korea as a fourth member. The “Axis of Upheaval” (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) are now cooperating in military, economic and diplomatic ways. Moreover, the Trump administration’s combative treatment of American allies (the European Union, Japan, South Korea) and neutrals (Brazil, India, and Switzerland), not least with respect to trade policy, is alienating not only the traditionally nonaligned but also key partners.

The upshot is that Israel is now virtually alone in fighting against the Islamists, so that even the United States wants plausible deniability when, as this week, the Israeli Air Force strikes the leadership of Hamas in the Qatari capital, Doha.

The point is that the clash of civilization continues. Now ask yourself: Who’s winning?

The Hamas attack on Israel two years ago was essentially an Israeli 9/11 (worse in relative terms). But compare the global reactions. UN Security Council Resolution 1373, adopted unanimously on September 28, 2001, called on all member states to freeze terrorist financing, pass anti-terrorism laws, prevent suspected terrorists from traveling across international borders, and screen asylum seekers for possible terrorist ties. This was an unprecedented show of international unity.

Mourners grieve victims of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks during a funeral on October 18, 2023, in Hod HaSharon, Israel. (Alexi J. Rosenfeld via Getty Images)

By contrast, no Security Council resolution could be passed in the wake of 10/7. UN General Assembly Resolution ES-10/21—which called for an “immediate” and “sustained” humanitarian truce and “cessation of hostilities” in Gaza and condemned “all acts of violence aimed at Palestinian and Israeli civilians”—was introduced by Jordan on behalf of a group of Arab states. When it was adopted on October 27, 2023, 121 voted in favor, 44 abstained, 14 absented themselves, and only 14 (including Israel and the U.S.) voted against. Ten countries have recognized the non-existent Palestinian state since October 7, including three European Union member states, Ireland, Slovenia, and Spain. Canada, France, and the United Kingdom are itching to join them.

In short, comparing the world today with that of 24 years ago, I am tempted to say that bin Laden lost the war on terror but is winning the clash of civilizations. That’s not to say his particular brand of Salafist jihadism is winning; it can even be argued that it’s in decline. Bin Laden’s creed was always too uncompromising to form alliances of convenience. By contrast, the pro-Palestinian “global intifada” is much more omnivorous, and can easily absorb the old left (Marxism and pan-Arabism) and the new (anti-globalism and wokeism).

Demographically, Islam is certainly winning. According to Pew Research (June 2025), “the number of Muslims around the world grew 21 percent between 2010 and 2020, from 1.7 billion to 2.0 billion.” That was twice as fast as the rest of the world’s population, increasing the Muslim share from 24 percent to 26 percent. Earlier research by Pew (from 2015) forecast that “if current trends continue, by 2050 the number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world.” In Europe, Pew estimated, Muslims would make up 10 percent of the overall population, up from 5.9 percent in 2010. In the United States, Muslims would outnumber Jews. This does not seem implausible. Already in the United Kingdom, Muhammad has overtaken Noah as the top name for baby boys in England and Wales, having been in the top 10 since 2016.

At the same time, Western civilization today is so much more divided than it was 24 years ago. The public response to 10/7 illuminated the divisions. Whereas older voters generally remain more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian, younger cohorts have swung the other way. Perhaps that’s because to Gen Z, 9/11 is a faint memory—as distant as the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy’s assassination were to my generation. But it’s also because the Islamists have done such a good job of co-opting the campus radicals, somehow overriding the cognitive dissonance in slogans such as “Queers for Palestine,” while at the same time tapping the antisemitism that still lurks on the far right.

Walking the streets of New York this week, I felt old. To my children, my students, and my employees, 9/11 is not a memory. It is not even an historical fact.

According to Brookings, “young Republicans aged 18-49 have shifted from 35 percent having an unfavorable view of Israel to 50 percent unfavorable. . . . Among Democrats, there has been an increase of 62 percent to 71 percent [with an unfavorable view of Israel] in the 18- to 49-year-old demographic. . . . Only 9 percent of those aged 18 to 34 approve of Israel’s military actions in Gaza.”

A recent poll in the UK by the Campaign Against Antisemitism revealed a striking shift in attitudes towards Jews. Once again, the swing towards antisemitism is more pronounced amongst the young:

“45 percent of the British public … believes that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews … 60 percent of young people believe this.”
“49 percent of 18-24-year-olds are uncomfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel.”
“Only 31 percent of young voters agree that Israel has a right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people.”
“26 percent of the British public believes that Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media.”
“19 percent of young people believe that the Hamas attack on Israel was justified.”

Such attitudes can be found in Britain on both the political left and the political right. A third of Labour voters say that they are uncomfortable spending time with people who openly support Israel, as do 54 percent of Green Party voters, 15 percent of whom believe that Hamas’s attack on Israel was justified. But almost one in four supporters of the rapidly growing Reform UK Party, led by Nigel Farage, believe that Jewish people “chase money more than other people do.” During the Cold War, the West was often referred to as a “Judeo-Christian” civilization. That term is starting to seem like an anachronism.

Two years ago, another bin Laden pronouncement—his “Letter to America,” originally published on the first anniversary of 9/11—enjoyed a sudden resurgence of interest, not least because its attacks on the power of American Jews seemed to strike a chord with young users of TikTok. One popular video showed a young woman brushing her hair with the caption, “When you read Osama bin Laden’s letter to America and you realize you’ve been lied to your whole entire life.” At one point in November 2023, a TikTok search for #lettertoamerica found videos with 14.2 million views. In total, approximately 300 videos were posted under that hashtag.

Walking the streets of New York this week, I felt old. To my children, my students, and my employees, 9/11 is not a memory. It is not even an historical fact. It is something people argue about on social media. As I write, Tucker Carlson has just told Piers Morgan that an “FBI document” indicated “an Israeli spy ring in the United States … knew 9/11 was coming.” The reality is, of course, that only the conspirators themselves knew that. They also knew, very clearly, why they were going to do it.

It has taken me all these years to understand that 9/11 really was a clash of civilizations. And it has taken me until this week finally to face the reality that ours is losing.

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Niall Ferguson

3. The United States Is Undoing Post-9/11 Security Architecture

Excerpts:

On September 11, 2001, I was in New York City, one block away from the North Tower as it came crashing down. The sound was deafening, unlike anything I have heard in my life. Today, it is quiet, but that does not mean it is safe to become less vigilant. It isn’t just transnational zealots bent on apocalyptic violence that Americans must defend against, it is also fellow citizens seeking to redress a spectrum of perceived grievances with violence.

In less than a year, the Trump administration has transformed DHS from a complex and multifaceted juggernaut to an anemic agency with a singular focus: illegal immigration. We owe it to the thousands of people that lost their lives on that terrible day 24 years ago, and the first responders and service members who have paid the ultimate price in the years after, to make good on their sacrifice.

Every year we utter the grim slogan “Never Forget,” but this year, it seems that so many in this administration have forgotten. In my assessment, we are no better at addressing terrorism threats 24 years after 9/11. In fact, I fear the worst is yet to come.

The United States Is Undoing Post-9/11 Security Architecture

By Donell Harvin

Published on September 11, 2025

justsecurity.org · Donell Harvin · September 11, 2025

Since 9/11, the United States has invested more than $1 trillion directly into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and trillions more dollars into wars fought in the name of counterterrorism, intelligence centers, surveillance, and counter-extremism programs. That money bought a sprawling security architecture that provided safer airports, fusion centers connecting federal and local intelligence, reforms to disaster relief, and new counterterrorism units at every level of government. But since President Donald Trump took office in January, many of those investments have been completely erased. Americans may be no safer today from foreign and domestic terrorism than they were on September 11, 2001. In some ways, given the rise of domestic violent extremism and the political encouragement of it, Americans may be even more vulnerable.

This a sobering reality for me. I served as a 9/11 first responder with the New York City Fire Department. Marking the day means remembering the tremendous loss of life caused by the attacks, including deaths from toxic exposure at Ground Zero that continue even today, and the sacrifices of many in the days, weeks, and years since.

Post-9/11 investments created what many of us in homeland security thought was a permanent paradigm shift: stronger defenses against both transnational and domestic terrorism; improved information sharing between the federal, state, and local government; and a public safety architecture built to detect, deter, respond to, and rapidly recover from “over the horizon” threats. But today, at the direction of the president, we are witnessing the degradation of those homeland security capabilities.

The Destruction Reaped by DOGE

The creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was sold by the Trump administration as merely a streamlining measure, but for DHS and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), it has been anything but. Since January, DOGE has forced wholesale reorganizations, inserted partisan appointees with little to no subject matter expertise, and siphoned resources from terrorism prevention into politically charged enforcement priorities. FEMA, in particular, has been pressured to align disaster relief with immigration enforcement, which has nothing to do with helping Americans recover from catastrophe. This kind of political interference erodes mission clarity and makes the U.S. homeland less prepared for potential crises.

DOGE activities have raised serious alarms for privacy and civil liberty organizations. Partnering with Palantir Technologies, DHS and the Department of Justice are now aggregating vast datasets, including the financial, social media, and travel records of Americans into powerful analytic tools that can be used for domestic spying. These tools were originally designed for tracking terrorists overseas, but are increasingly applied to U.S. citizens. The risk is clear: Palantir’s platforms could be used to monitor political activity, dissent, or even voting behavior. When the line between counterterrorism and domestic surveillance blurs, democracy itself is threatened. To be clear, post-9/11 measures such as the Patriot Act, the expansion of government surveillance powers, and bulk metadata collection already blurred the lines between counterterrorism and domestic monitoring. The difference now is who the tools are aimed at, if they are being politicized, who controls them, how transparent their use is, and how weak the guardrails are in protecting the rights of U.S. persons.

DHS also shuttered its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), stripping away a critical oversight function. The poorly named CRCL may have been a victim of anti-wokeism, with uninformed DOGE and White House staffers thinking the office had something to do with the Civil Rights movement. Instead, it was one of the few internal offices empowered to review DHS operations for compliance with constitutional protections and to protect Americans from surveillance abuses that the right constantly decries. Its reports often highlighted mission creep and potential abuses in counterterrorism and immigration enforcement. Without CRCL, there is no independent watchdog inside DHS to push back against government overreach. The absence of this office leaves all Americans exposed to unchecked surveillance, targeting, and discrimination.

The Hollowing Out of America’s Primary Counterterrorism Force

Since January, Trump has carried out a purge of some of the FBI’s most experienced and knowledgeable senior agents. FBI officials who worked on cases concerning the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol have become targets of harassment and threats. These are men and women who carried out lawful investigations into a violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and now they are being treated like political enemies of the president. This undermining of the FBI may embolden domestic extremists who already believe the system is rigged against them. It certainly reduces the federal capacity to protect the homeland.

Meanwhile, valuable FBI resources have also been diverted to support ICE deportation operations at the cost of protecting Americans against future terrorist attacks. This change in priorities represents the most dangerous policy shift I’ve seen in the post-9/11 era. It distracts the very people trained to identify and disrupt terrorist plots before they happen. Immigration enforcement has never been the FBI’s mission and forcing it into that role creates both inefficiency and vulnerability. When you take counterterrorism specialists and reassign them to track migrants, you inevitably reduce the ability to monitor potential terrorist threats. And, despite the political narrative, the foreign terrorist threat has not disappeared. ISIS-K has carried out mass-casualty attacks abroad and continues to plot against Western targets, al-Qaeda branches are active from Yemen to the Sahel, and Iran’s proxy networks remain a persistent danger to U.S. interests.

The administration is telling the public that is still pursuing terrorists at home and abroad, with a focus on what it calls “narco-terrorists,” or drug cartels that use violence to protect their criminal drug trade. And while I personally applaud the administration’s pursuit of stanching the flow of deadly fentanyl into the United States, I do not believe it should come at the cost of keeping the country safe from other threats. Drug cartels are criminal enterprises driven by profit, not ideologically driven terror groups committed to killing Americans. Conflating transnational criminal organizations with transnational terrorist organizations overwhelms already strained homeland security resources. The administration cannot simply slap a “terrorist” label on a criminal organization and then applaud itself for protecting Americans from “terrorists.” It is as absurd as the administration criminalizing homelessness and then bragging about how it brought down crime by removing encampments.

Domestic Terrorism Deprioritized; Violent Assaulters Lionized

We are also witnessing a seismic shift in the domestic terrorism (DT) detection and enforcement landscape. Under this administration, the FBI has slashed staffing and tracking tools in its DT unit, and agencies such as DHS and the State Department are dismantling programs and actively scrubbing language that describes DT threats as emanating from far-right extremists. This coincides with a Republican makeover of January 6 offenders, turning the violent rioters into “political prisoners,” a cosmetic overhaul that would make the “Human Ken Doll” jealous. This recasting of events follows Trump’s pardoning of them. These domestic extremists are now praised by the right as patriots. They are invited to political rallies, with several prominent insurrectionists suing the federal government for their prosecution, and hundreds more considering taking class action.

This whitewashing sends a dangerous message to extremists: violence in the name of the ruling party will be pardoned, if not encouraged. And those who attack the U.S. government in service of the president may eventually be rewarded, both reputationally and financially. I cannot overstate how corrosive this is to deterrence. In the homeland security world, we count on consequences to shape future behavior and to serve as a deterrent for violence. But when those punishments are erased, the signal to future attackers is unmistakable. Absolving or rewarding political violence is the optimal way a society normalizes violent extremism and terrorism at home.

A dangerous countertrend is also emerging: the demonization of those on the left of the political spectrum. Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of designating ANTIFA, an anti-fascist political movement, as a domestic terrorist group, which would represent the first such group designation in U.S. history. There are currently no domestic organizations that have been formally designated by the US government as a “Domestic Terrorist Organization.” The government has not even designated the original American domestic terror organization, the Ku Klux Klan, as a DT group and they are still overtly active in 10 states. ANTIFA is not a formal organization. Instead, it is a loose collection of activists and tactics with no hierarchy, membership rolls, or centralized command. Treating it like al Qaeda or ISIS would be a categorical error with enormous consequences. It would mean that anyone accused of engaging in anti-fascist protest activity could be labeled a terrorist, opening the door to law enforcement abuse and political persecution. Such a move would criminalize dissent and set a precedent for branding political opponents as enemies of the state. Imagine attending a march to peacefully protest and getting arrested because one of the organizers is loosely linked to the ANTIFA movement. Or worse, being charged with “terrorism” because one holds anti-government sentiment, or shares a political meme online. The United States would quickly resemble the dystopian future described by George Orwell in his book 1984.

Speaking on Fox News in August, Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller called the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization.” This assertion is spreading like wildfire in far-right extremist forums. But it is no longer fringe rhetoric, it is being promoted by Trump’s inner circle. In a country where political polarization already fuels extremist violence, this kind of language accelerates the risk of stochastic terrorism against elected officials, their staffers and volunteers, or anyone with a Democratic Party bumper sticker on their car.

I’ve studied extremist movements for decades, and I can tell you with certainty that once you start branding political opponents in such a dark and menacing manner, violence is never far behind. There is clear intent behind the demonization of Democrats as domestic extremists. Miller has not retracted his statement, and therefore we must take this as a credible and specific threat directly from the administration.

Violent Left-Wing and Nihilist Ideologies Spreading Online as Political Violence Rises

The demonization of migrants and transgender people is now a central feature of rightwing political rhetoric. These groups are being scapegoated as serious threats to the country, despite evidence showing no such danger. Homeland security experts know this is how stochastic terrorism works: leaders vilify a community, and eventually someone with means and malice takes violent action against them. Migrants and LGBTQ+ people are already facing elevated levels of harassment and attacks, with over 950 anti-LGBTQ+ bills considered in states across the country between 2023 and 2024. In 2023, hate crimes against LGBTQ+ victims constituted nearly 25 percent of all hate crimes recorded by the FBI. By further inflaming hate against this community, political leaders and influencers on the right are effectively putting a target on its back. In response, LGBTQ+ citizens have started arming themselves and taking firearms classes, even as the Department of Justice considers stripping trans people of their Second Amendment rights.

As hateful rhetoric on the right intensifies, violent left-wing groups, including so-called “trans anarchists” who advocate anarchist principles and violence in support of trans rights. Although no violent acts have been attributed to these groups, they are a growing concern. Nihilist communities who essentially believe that “no lives matter,” are growing online. A recent FBI arrest in Los Angeles involved a man suspected of being part of a “nihilist extremist group” known as “764.” These networks reject traditional politics and civic order altogether, embracing a worldview that celebrates chaos, destruction, and sometimes mass violence. We’ve seen similar ideological fringe groups before, but what’s different now is their ability to recruit, radicalize, and coordinate on encrypted platforms. As someone who tracks extremist trends for a living, I worry about disaffected and marginalized young people coming into contact with nihilist ideologies.

Today, politically motivated violence is a credible threat to the homeland and threatens to erode American democracy from within. A day before the anniversary of September 11, Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and cofounder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University. His assassination follows other shocking acts of political violence over a brief timespan, including the attempted assassination of Trump, and the killing of Democratic Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband earlier this summer. The United States Capitol Police has reported that threats against lawmakers continue to rise, with nearly 9,500 cases documented in 2023. That is the highest total since the January 6 attack, and it is a stark reminder that extremists are increasingly turning their anger into violence aimed directly at political figures.

Dismantling to the Tools to Defend the Homeland

Under the Biden administration, DHS confirmed that hundreds of individuals on the terrorist watch list have been encountered at the U.S. border in recent years. DHS also openly acknowledged that there are thousands of “got-aways,” people who entered the country undetected. We have no way of knowing how many of those people are aligned with foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs). Although Biden officials downplayed the risk at the time, in homeland security circles we know that the unknowns are often more dangerous than the knowns. While I applaud the Trump administration for locking down the border, the threat is likely already inside the country.

And now, DHS’ leading counterterrorism prevention office is led by a 22-year-old former intern with no experience in homeland security. The Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) was built to oversee complex partnerships with state and local agencies, coordinate prevention programs, and engage in sensitive community outreach. Leadership of such an organization requires deep knowledge of the terrorism landscape, plus law enforcement and public trust-building efforts. CP3 is not some community project that one of my undergrad students uses in their capstone paper. By elevating someone so blatantly unqualified, the Trump administration effectively neutered the office’s credibility and capabilities. As someone who ran the fusion intelligence center in the nation’s capital during critical national security moments, including on January 6, 2021, I can tell you this kind of appointment is dangerous and will backfire.

It is also important to note that the administration has feverishly sought to cut DHS programs such as the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) grant program and the Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP). The TVTP grant is administered by CP3, and in a July 17 press release, DHS confirmed that it eliminated $18.5 million in CP3 grants because they were cutting “wasteful and ideologically driven programs,” while also drastically reducing the center’s staff.

The NSGP is pivotal in assisting private sector non-profits, such as schools and churches, in meeting their security goals. This grant program is expected to see its 2024 budget of $454 million slashed to $274 million. These rollbacks could not come at a worse time. These funds help communities train staff, harden soft targets, and build local prevention networks against extremist violence. This is not an effort to eliminate waste and fraud, it is a signal to extremists that the federal government is hastily retreating from protecting vulnerable communities.

Lastly, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was created by Congress during Trump’s first term to protect critical election infrastructure, defend against cyberattacks, and oversee programs such the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards. At the time, homeland security professionals, including myself, applauded the Trump administration for addressing a growing vulnerability. But CISA drew the ire of Trump when Christopher Krebs, its Trump-appointed director, refused to back Trump’s claims of a stolen 2020 election. Now, in a clear case of retaliation, Krebs is under federal investigation and the agency he once led is being gutted. The administration wants to transfer $300 million of its 2025 budget to ICE operations. Weakening CISA at this moment is like removing the locks from your front door in a high-crime neighborhood (and perhaps opening the door wide and leaving cookies and milk on the doorstep). Letting American election infrastructure go unprotected is pure recklessness, as foreign actors such as Russia, Iran, and China are openly plotting election interference, in some cases using sophisticated AI tools.

***

On September 11, 2001, I was in New York City, one block away from the North Tower as it came crashing down. The sound was deafening, unlike anything I have heard in my life. Today, it is quiet, but that does not mean it is safe to become less vigilant. It isn’t just transnational zealots bent on apocalyptic violence that Americans must defend against, it is also fellow citizens seeking to redress a spectrum of perceived grievances with violence.

In less than a year, the Trump administration has transformed DHS from a complex and multifaceted juggernaut to an anemic agency with a singular focus: illegal immigration. We owe it to the thousands of people that lost their lives on that terrible day 24 years ago, and the first responders and service members who have paid the ultimate price in the years after, to make good on their sacrifice.

Every year we utter the grim slogan “Never Forget,” but this year, it seems that so many in this administration have forgotten. In my assessment, we are no better at addressing terrorism threats 24 years after 9/11. In fact, I fear the worst is yet to come.

FEATURED IMAGE: Firefighters walk towards one of the tower at the World Trade Center before it collapsed after a plane hit the building September 11, 2001 in New York City. (Photo by Jose Jimenez/Primera Hora/Getty Images)

justsecurity.org · Donell Harvin · September 11, 2025

4. Wasn’t Hell Supposed to Break Loose if the U.S. Struck Iran?

Excerpts:

However much Americans incorrectly forecast the war’s results, the shock in Iran—the failure of strategic imagination—was far worse. Today, fear permeates Tehran. The regime is unconvinced that the war has ended. Last month, Rahim Safavi, a senior military adviser to Mr. Khamenei, told Iranian media, “We are in a stage of war, and this [current] situation may collapse at any moment.” Accordingly, the Islamic Republic is trying to do with diplomacy what it failed to do with missiles and proxies. Ali Larijani, a longtime functionary adept at deluding Western officials, has taken over leadership of the Supreme National Security Council. “The path to negotiations with America is not closed yet,” he says. The regime is again talking to Rafael Grossi of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors the theocracy accuses of spying for Israel.

By dangling an offer of talks, Iran’s clerical oligarchs are hoping to create divisions between Jerusalem and Washington and to entice the Europeans to be more patient about snapping back United Nations sanctions. Diplomacy could provide time for a battered regime to regain its bearings and, if the Russians or Chinese help, to enhance its defenses.

The combination of Mr. Trump’s unpredictability and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bellicosity has unsettled the mullahs as never before. But awe is a perishable commodity in international politics. The Middle East is all about hard power. Despite being discombobulated, fearful of the Iranian citizenry and uncertain about their leadership, Iran’s ruling elites still remain tough, die-hard men who believe they’re doing God’s work. They are down, but far from out.

Wasn’t Hell Supposed to Break Loose if the U.S. Struck Iran?

‘We can’t do this,’ Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said. Years later, Trump did it.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/wasnt-hell-supposed-to-break-loose-if-the-u-s-struck-iran-dc5bd219

By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh

Sept. 11, 2025 4:05 pm ET

An Iran flag hangs over a building damaged by Israel's attacks during the 12-day war against Iran. Photo: Sobhan Farajvan/Zuma Press

Wars always upend assumptions. In 1983 the Islamic Republic of Iran instructed Hezbollah terrorists to “take spectacular action against the United States Marines,” according to American military officials. Hezbollah did so a few weeks later by bombing the U.S. Embassy and Marines in Beirut. Since then, American officials and political commentators of both parties have averred that a U.S. attack on Iran would provoke a forever war in the Middle East.

Even as the theocracy’s popularity among the Iranian populace tanked in the 1990s and 2000s, American officials saw any foreign intrusion as a gift to the regime, sure to revive its domestic fortunes. They assumed that the Iranian people, under threat, would set aside their grievances and tolerate, if not embrace, their Islamist overlords.

The aftermath of this summer’s 12-day war should bury these assumptions. The Islamic Republic’s leaders have always celebrated their martyrs, hypercharging the traditional Shiite embrace of salvation through suffering. They fill the streets with murals of the dead. Fiery speeches and large demonstrations greet the wrapped corpses of fallen heroes. When a U.S. drone strike killed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020, the mullahs made the most of his death, summoning tens of thousands of the wailing faithful for funeral processions. Such staged rituals mobilize the regime’s core supporters, energize the leadership, and intimidate the sullen citizenry.

During the 12-day war, Israel killed around 30 Iranian generals and several nuclear scientists. In total, more than 400 Iranian VIPs might have died. These weren’t battlefield losses but men killed at home, in their offices or in similar locations. Israel’s intelligence services and military successfully penetrated the Islamic Republic’s defenses. Such operational dexterity impressed President Trump, likely spurring him to join the attack.

In the aftermath, the regime has issued mournful press releases, painted a few more murals, and set up life-size cutout images of the hallowed dead at the Tehran airport to welcome foreigners. But there have been no massive state-orchestrated rallies. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei spent the war in various bunkers, reportedly plotting his succession. His occasional appearances and speeches have hardly been the inspirational, righteous oratory the faithful might expect from God’s personal representative. He has become terse, disconnected and aggrieved. Meanwhile, President Masoud Pezeshkian awkwardly brags about surviving the Israeli strike.

There’s no glory in national disgrace. Staging demonstrations to celebrate men who died in their apartments doesn’t uplift the revolutionary cadre’s morale. Instead, the mullahs and the IRGC have launched a vicious campaign of repression. In the name of cleansing the country of informers, Iranian authorities have arrested about 20,000 people and executed 262. This isn’t about counterespionage; it’s about intimidating a society that hasn’t rallied around the flag.

This isn’t how many American officials expected the Islamic Republic to behave after being bombed. When selling his Iran nuclear deal, President Barack Obama dismissed those who thought that “surgical strikes against Iran’s facilities will be quick and painless.” His deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes was more damning. “The default view in Washington is that if there’s a challenge in the Middle East, the U.S. has to solve it,” he said. “Our basic point has been, no, sorry, we learned the opposite lesson from Iraq. It’s not that more U.S. military engagement will stabilize the Middle East. It’s that we can’t do this.”

On June 4, only a few weeks before the U.S. let loose the B-2 bombers, right-wing talk-show host Tucker Carlson tweeted: “The first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans. . . . An attack on Iran could very easily become a world war. We’d lose.” Clearly, he was mistaken.

However much Americans incorrectly forecast the war’s results, the shock in Iran—the failure of strategic imagination—was far worse. Today, fear permeates Tehran. The regime is unconvinced that the war has ended. Last month, Rahim Safavi, a senior military adviser to Mr. Khamenei, told Iranian media, “We are in a stage of war, and this [current] situation may collapse at any moment.” Accordingly, the Islamic Republic is trying to do with diplomacy what it failed to do with missiles and proxies. Ali Larijani, a longtime functionary adept at deluding Western officials, has taken over leadership of the Supreme National Security Council. “The path to negotiations with America is not closed yet,” he says. The regime is again talking to Rafael Grossi of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors the theocracy accuses of spying for Israel.

By dangling an offer of talks, Iran’s clerical oligarchs are hoping to create divisions between Jerusalem and Washington and to entice the Europeans to be more patient about snapping back United Nations sanctions. Diplomacy could provide time for a battered regime to regain its bearings and, if the Russians or Chinese help, to enhance its defenses.

The combination of Mr. Trump’s unpredictability and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bellicosity has unsettled the mullahs as never before. But awe is a perishable commodity in international politics. The Middle East is all about hard power. Despite being discombobulated, fearful of the Iranian citizenry and uncertain about their leadership, Iran’s ruling elites still remain tough, die-hard men who believe they’re doing God’s work. They are down, but far from out.

Mr. Gerecht is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Appeared in the September 12, 2025, print edition as 'Wasn’t Hell Supposed to Break Loose if the U.S. Struck Iran?'.

5. U.S. Announces New Health Sector Assistance for the Philippines'

$250 million

U.S. Announces New Health Sector Assistance for the Philippines'

https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/09/u-s-announces-new-health-sector-assistance-for-the-philippines/

Press Statement

Marco Rubio, Secretary of State

September 11, 2025

The Trump Administration, working with Congress, plans to allocate $250 million in new assistance to the Philippines to address acute public health challenges. Through this assistance, our governments will work together on tuberculosis and maternal health while investing in preparedness, detection, and response capabilities to reduce the threat of emerging diseases and protect our homelands. This programming builds on the $63 million in assistance announced during President Marcos’s July official visit to Washington, which was the first announcement of new assistance for any country following President Trump’s review and realignment of foreign assistance. Today’s announcement is yet another demonstration of the comprehensive bond between the United States and the Philippines. It also demonstrates the efficient, time-limited, and narrowly targeted approach of this new era of America First foreign assistance.

6. Book Release – Perpetual War and International Law: Enduring Legacies of the War on Terror

Book Release – Perpetual War and International Law: Enduring Legacies of the War on Terror

By Ryan Goodman and Tess Bridgeman

Published on September 11, 2025

justsecurity.org · Ryan Goodman, Tess Bridgeman · September 11, 2025

Published on September 11, 2025

Listen to Article

Just Security is proud to announce the publication of the latest book in our partnership with Oxford University Press, Perpetual War and International Law: Enduring Legacies of the War on Terror, edited by Brianna Rosen, Senior Fellow at Just Security and Director of the AI and Emerging Technologies Initiative. We are enormously grateful to Brianna for conceiving of and spearheading this brilliant contribution to the field of study and practice. The book is available for pre-order here.

Released to mark the 24th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the volume offers a timely reflection on the enduring legacies of the post-9/11 era and prospects for moving beyond the war paradigm. It interrogates the blurring of the boundaries between war and peace, demonstrates how precedents set during the global “war on terror” continue to shape contemporary conflicts, and examines how this era of perpetual war might come to a close.

Bringing together leading legal scholars, ethicists, and national security experts, the 20-chapter book features contributions from Federica D’Alessandra, Linda J. Bilmes, Tess Bridgeman, Andrew Clapham, Tom Dannenbaum, Laura A. Dickinson, Anthony Dworkin, Mary L. Dudziak, Pablo de Greiff, Adil Ahmad Haque, Oona A. Hathaway, Harold Hongju Koh, Alberto J. Mora, Priyanka Motaparthy, Radya al-Mutawakel, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin KC (Hons), Faiza Patel, Brianna Rosen, Cheyney Ryan, Timor Sharan, Elad Uzan, and Sir Michael Wood KCMG, KC.

The volume builds on Just Security’s Ending Perpetual War Symposium, as well as a series of workshops held jointly with the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. It also continues the Just Security–OUP series’ engagement with pressing issues at the intersection of law and security, following the first book in the collaboration, Race and National Security, edited by Matiangai V. S. Sirleaf.

Perpetual War and International Law is a vital intervention for scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and students seeking to understand the enduring legacies of the post-9/11 era and to imagine a global order grounded in restraint and the rule of law.

FEATURED IMAGE: OUP book cover

About the Authors

Ryan Goodman

Ryan Goodman (YouTube - Bluesky - LinkedIn) is co-editor-in-chief of Just Security and Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Professor of Law at New York University School of Law.

Tess Bridgeman

Tess Bridgeman (Bluesky - LinkedIn - X) is co-editor-in-chief of Just Security and Senior Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law. She previously served as Special Assistant to the President, Associate Counsel to the President, and Deputy Legal Adviser to the National Security Council (NSC), and at the U.S. State Department in the Office of the Legal Adviser.

justsecurity.org · Ryan Goodman, Tess Bridgeman · September 11, 2025

7. Charlie Kirk’s Murder and the Crisis of Political Violence

Political violence is targeting both sides of the political spectrum. It is not one sided.

Excerpts:

The effect of these violent acts on politics has been easier to track. Shortly after the news of Kirk’s shooting, the former Obama Administration official and liberal pundit Tommy Vietor echoed a common sentiment when he wrote on social media, “Political violence is evil and indefensible. It’s a cancer that will feed off itself and spread.” If that is right—if violence is contagious—then that is because each act generates its own responsive pattern of fear. The news itself in recent years has been a catalogue of the ubiquity of political aggression and anticipatory dread. In 2022, a man arrived at Brett Kavanaugh’s home with a Glock and padded boots; later that year, a man broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and tried to murder her husband with a hammer. Threats against members of Congress have also escalated significantly in the past decade. The Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, said at a conference this summer, “I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.” After the shootings of lawmakers in Minnesota, the Democratic congressman Greg Landsman told the Times that every time he went out on the campaign trail he was haunted by a vision of himself lying murdered. “It’s still in my head. I don’t think it will go away,” he said.

What politicians can control is how they respond. Speaking from the Oval Office on Wednesday evening, Trump denounced his perceived enemies. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, and vowed to find those he deemed responsible for “political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.” Unlike Barack Obama, who sang “Amazing Grace” at a funeral after the mass shooting at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel church, Trump made no gesture toward common national feeling; he limited his litany of victims to those with whom he is aligned. The man sitting at the Resolute desk and blaming his enemies for political demonization—for acting “in the most hateful and despicable way”—had earlier in the week promoted a new campaign of ICE raids in Chicago with a social-media post featuring himself as Robert Duvall’s character in “Apocalypse Now” and the tag line “ ‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning . . .’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” That aggression, combined with Kirk’s shooting, seemed to be literalizing the culture war, in real time.

The footage of Kirk’s murder is horrifying. His head flops; blood gushes from his neck. At a press conference afterward, the university’s police chief, who had just six officers to protect the crowd of three thousand, said, “You try to get your bases covered, and unfortunately, today, we didn’t.” It is hard to blame him. The ubiquity of weapons and the ease with which just about anyone can get them has made the protection of human lives increasingly difficult. That the threat of political violence is so endemic is one reason that what was once true of Trump’s movement is increasingly true of the country: it is distrustful, and feeling imperilled. In Utah, the people closest to the stage threw themselves to the ground quickly, and then so did hundreds of others, as they realized what was happening, in a wave that moved outward from Kirk. It was a visual manifestation of fear, spreading.

Charlie Kirk’s Murder and the Crisis of Political Violence

The New Yorker · Benjamin Wallace-Wells · September 11, 2025

Comment

After a shooting with obvious political resonance, news about the perpetrator’s motives rarely brings clarity.

September 11, 2025

Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photograph from Getty

Three thousand people attended the Turning Point USA event at which Charlie Kirk spoke on Wednesday, on an outdoor green at Utah Valley University. The sheer size of that crowd—in the morning, at a school in a suburb of Provo, and even if some were there to protest—is just another piece of evidence that Kirk, in his years-long campaign to inspire a hard-right turn among people in their teens and twenties, had built a formidable movement. There was a Q. & A. portion, and someone asked how many transgender Americans had been mass shooters in the past decade, to which Kirk replied, “Too many.” The person next asked, “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last ten years?” Kirk said, “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Then, in videos, there is a single, audible crack, and Kirk’s body jerks and then goes limp. In the audience, heads turn: someone had shot him, apparently from an elevated position about a hundred and fifty yards away. Soon, Kirk’s spokesman announced that he had been killed. He was thirty-one, and left behind a wife and two young children. President Trump, a close ally, ordered all flags flown at half-staff until Sunday evening.

Kirk’s death was brutal, and tragic. It also had the effect that terrorists aim for, of spreading political panic. In the immediate aftermath of a killing with obvious political resonance, there is a period of nervous foreboding, as the public waits for news of the perpetrator’s identity and for any hints of what might have motivated the terrible act, and braces for the recriminations to come. But, as often as not, information brings no clarity. We have a fairly good sense of the politics that motivated Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O., and James Fields, who sped his car into a crowd of counter-protesters at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, killing a young woman.

But attempts to define the political motives of Thomas Crooks (who tried to kill Trump last summer, in Butler, Pennsylvania), or of Cody Balmer (who has been charged with firebombing Governor Josh Shapiro’s official residence, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in April), or even of Vance Boelter (the longtime anti-abortion activist who, in June, allegedly killed one Minnesota state lawmaker, along with her husband, and tried to kill another) quickly become ensnared in the problems of their apparent mental illness or a more basic incoherence. Robin Westman, who stands accused of shooting and killing two children at a Catholic church in Minneapolis last month (and whose transgender identity was the focus of many right-wing media reports), had written “Kill Donald Trump” on some weapons, and neo-Nazi slogans (“Jew gas” and “6 million wasn’t enough”) on others, and expressed alignment with the Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza. The motives were strange and idiosyncratic enough that they couldn’t easily be blamed on any one partisan side.

The effect of these violent acts on politics has been easier to track. Shortly after the news of Kirk’s shooting, the former Obama Administration official and liberal pundit Tommy Vietor echoed a common sentiment when he wrote on social media, “Political violence is evil and indefensible. It’s a cancer that will feed off itself and spread.” If that is right—if violence is contagious—then that is because each act generates its own responsive pattern of fear. The news itself in recent years has been a catalogue of the ubiquity of political aggression and anticipatory dread. In 2022, a man arrived at Brett Kavanaugh’s home with a Glock and padded boots; later that year, a man broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and tried to murder her husband with a hammer. Threats against members of Congress have also escalated significantly in the past decade. The Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, said at a conference this summer, “I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real.” After the shootings of lawmakers in Minnesota, the Democratic congressman Greg Landsman told the Times that every time he went out on the campaign trail he was haunted by a vision of himself lying murdered. “It’s still in my head. I don’t think it will go away,” he said.

What politicians can control is how they respond. Speaking from the Oval Office on Wednesday evening, Trump denounced his perceived enemies. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, and vowed to find those he deemed responsible for “political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.” Unlike Barack Obama, who sang “Amazing Grace” at a funeral after the mass shooting at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel church, Trump made no gesture toward common national feeling; he limited his litany of victims to those with whom he is aligned. The man sitting at the Resolute desk and blaming his enemies for political demonization—for acting “in the most hateful and despicable way”—had earlier in the week promoted a new campaign of ICE raids in Chicago with a social-media post featuring himself as Robert Duvall’s character in “Apocalypse Now” and the tag line “ ‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning . . .’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” That aggression, combined with Kirk’s shooting, seemed to be literalizing the culture war, in real time.

The footage of Kirk’s murder is horrifying. His head flops; blood gushes from his neck. At a press conference afterward, the university’s police chief, who had just six officers to protect the crowd of three thousand, said, “You try to get your bases covered, and unfortunately, today, we didn’t.” It is hard to blame him. The ubiquity of weapons and the ease with which just about anyone can get them has made the protection of human lives increasingly difficult. That the threat of political violence is so endemic is one reason that what was once true of Trump’s movement is increasingly true of the country: it is distrustful, and feeling imperilled. In Utah, the people closest to the stage threw themselves to the ground quickly, and then so did hundreds of others, as they realized what was happening, in a wave that moved outward from Kirk. It was a visual manifestation of fear, spreading.

Published in the print edition of the September 22, 2025, issue, with the headline “Politics and Fear.”

Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006 and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2015. He writes about American politics and society.

The New Yorker · Benjamin Wallace-Wells · September 11, 2025

8. Russia Pays the Price as Ukraine Targets Its Oil Refineries

Excerpts:

The Kremlin’s official narrative has been that damage to refineries came from falling debris after drones were shot down. Yet at the same time, Russian authorities broadcast loudspeaker warnings urging citizens not to record footage of Ukrainian drones – an implicit admission that direct hits were occurring and to not broadcast the success of Kyiv’s efforts.

Things will continue to get worse for Russia. Ukrainian defense company Fire Point has recently unveiled two new ballistic missiles, the FP-7 and FP-9, with ranges of 200 km and 855 km respectively, as part of Kyiv’s push to strike deeper into Russian territory. Kyiv has also been deploying AI drone swarms. With time, this technology will be extended to long-range drones.

While these strikes alone may not determine the outcome of the war, they are shaping its trajectory. Ukraine has shown it can bring the fight deep into Russia’s economic heartland, weakening the very revenues that sustain Moscow’s military machine.

Putin would be wise to remember the lessons of Tsar Nicholas II during World War I: when the frontlines dragged on and domestic shortages mounted, social pressure at home proved as dangerous as the enemy abroad.

Russia Pays the Price as Ukraine Targets Its Oil Refineries

11 September, 2025

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/ukraine-russia-refineries

By David Kirichenko

David Kirichenko is an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. His work on warfare has been featured in the Atlantic Council, Center for European Policy Analysis, and the Modern Warfare Institute, among many others.

OPINION — Following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Vladimir Putin expected a swift victory from his “special military operation.” Instead, it is Kyiv now conducting special air campaigns against Russia’s oil and gas industry. Ordinary Russians are beginning to feel the war’s costs more directly and the pressure on the Kremlin is growing.

Since late 2023, Ukraine has unleashed a drone offensive, targeting Russian oil refineries. By 2024, the Biden administration was upset at the impact Ukraine was beginning to have, as the US was sensitive to changes in oil prices.

The Math of Moscow’s War: Five Thousand Kilometers, One Million Dead and Wounded

Ex-NATO Commander Warns Western Inaction Built “Sanctuary” for Russia

But for Russia, oil and gas revenues help fund its ongoing war against Ukraine. Russia’s reliance on massive recruitment bonuses to sustain its war effort in Ukraine is straining its economy, driving up wages and inflation as the military competes with civilian industries for labor. According to a June survey by the independent Russian pollster Levada Center, 58% of Russians named rising prices as their top concern.

Drones have formed the backbone of Ukraine's defense, but now, they are increasingly used on the offensive against Russia. Over time, drone strikes became more effective. By 2025, Ukraine had built an extensive fleet of long-range drones and put them to use, targeting Russian oil, hitting Moscow where it hurts most. Kyiv believes these to be “kinetic sanctions,” since the West has been hesitant to target Russian oil for years. And for Putin, fuel prices are politically dangerous.

Since early August, Ukraine has carried out more than a dozen strikes on Russian oil refineries, knocking out as much as 20% of refining capacity – over 1 million barrels a day. According to The Economist, the attacks have forced rationing, sent wholesale petrol prices up by more than 50%, and pushed Russia to suspend gasoline exports. The attacks have continued into September.

The result is that Russians are stuck in long lines waiting for fuel. Some cities reportedly don’t have any fuel supplies left. Local government budgets are in freefall. All of Russia’s major oil companies have reported profit declines in 2025, with industry-wide earnings cut in half.

The shortages now dominate the headlines of Russian newspapers. By early September, Putin himself was forced to admit that Russia is facing a gas shortage. The result is growing social pressure within the country. One Russian war blogger wrote, “We've been half-dead here for months, digging mud in the trenches, under drones every day, counting bullets, while back home, oil refineries are burning down in batches.”

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The Kremlin’s official narrative has been that damage to refineries came from falling debris after drones were shot down. Yet at the same time, Russian authorities broadcast loudspeaker warnings urging citizens not to record footage of Ukrainian drones – an implicit admission that direct hits were occurring and to not broadcast the success of Kyiv’s efforts.

Things will continue to get worse for Russia. Ukrainian defense company Fire Point has recently unveiled two new ballistic missiles, the FP-7 and FP-9, with ranges of 200 km and 855 km respectively, as part of Kyiv’s push to strike deeper into Russian territory. Kyiv has also been deploying AI drone swarms. With time, this technology will be extended to long-range drones.

While these strikes alone may not determine the outcome of the war, they are shaping its trajectory. Ukraine has shown it can bring the fight deep into Russia’s economic heartland, weakening the very revenues that sustain Moscow’s military machine.

Putin would be wise to remember the lessons of Tsar Nicholas II during World War I: when the frontlines dragged on and domestic shortages mounted, social pressure at home proved as dangerous as the enemy abroad.

The Cipher Brief is committed to publishing a range of perspectives on national security issues submitted by deeply experienced national security professionals.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views or opinions of The Cipher Brief.

Have a perspective to share based on your experience in the national security field? Send it to Editor@thecipherbrief.com for publication consideration.

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief

9. Xi’s Grand Show Of Force Failed To Challenge The US – Analysis

Excerpts:

The SCO lacks the binding commitments and frameworks like other official alliances, and it is not a full fledged security or economic alliance.

The SCO charter avoids military alliance obligations, focusing more on vague cooperation against terrorism, and focusing on economic links, and political dialogue.

Despite the close friendships tied by ideology and a common threat of Washington, if conflicts break out over Taiwan or in the South China Sea, there is no guarantee that Russia or Iran would provide support.

SCO remains a platform for photo-ops and for a common venting ground against the West, and it stops at that.

Most of the players that are apparently friendly with Beijing are hedging carefully and aware of the consequences, rather than fully committing themselves.

The Global South countries would not want to send a wrong message to Beijing by not attending, but most of them are still courting both sides in their hedging game, still wary of Beijing’s expansive and bellicose claims on the disputed regions in an increasing show of might but still in need for its economic and market dependency.

Xi’s coalition and the SCO lack the deep underlying trust and institutional cohesion beyond economic measures alone, unlike the Western frameworks that have both security, values and economic fronts that bind and endure.

Xi’s Grand Show Of Force Failed To Challenge The US – Analysis

https://www.eurasiareview.com/11092025-xis-grand-show-of-force-failed-to-challenge-the-us-analysis/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic/world

September 11, 2025 0 Comments

By Collins Chong Yew Keat

Chinese President Xi Jinping orchestrated a strategically and purposely intended display of power and diplomacy, from hosting the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin, to the biggest military parade in Beijing to showcase China’s coming of age to the world. Both events are well crafted to send a direct show of force to Trump, as a warning to Taiwan, and a subtle warning to other potential adversaries and regional powers that China’s power is unrivalled in the region, and is increasingly toppling the American power.

However, despite efforts to frame this new narrative and to consolidate synergy and strength with new allies in elevating this new world order with China firmly in the lead, deep historical wariness and suspicions and this fragile alliance of convenience will not hold, and the entrenched and proven global order led by the US for more than eight decades will continue to endure.

The SCO summit, the largest ever, with Xi being true to expectations in rallying powers to “oppose hegemonism” and reject Cold War bloc politics, in a clear rebuke of Trump and the US.

The biggest military parade marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s WWII surrender, is being crafted to showcase the latest state of the art military hardware and assets from hypersonic missiles to laser weapons and unmanned submarines, all being intended as a stark warning to all including Washington and Taipei.

Deterrence Signals to Taiwan and Trump

The carefully crafted optic is meant to show Xi has powerful friends in his camp, reinforcing China’s claim to great-power leadership. The inclusion of Indonesia and Malaysia as summit guests was also a deliberate move, signaling Beijing’s intent to broaden its influence beyond its core Eurasian partners.

In Xi’s strategic vision, events like the SCO summit and Victory Day parade were more than just commemorations, they were meant to be platforms to consolidate a China-led coalition on the world stage.

This is also seen as a hidden signal even to close allies with Jong-un and Putin attending, that China still has the edge of military capacity over them, and in the long run, it still has the neighbouring power edge.

While others have pointed out the inaugural show of solidarity with the leaders of China, Russia, and North Korea appeared together in public, this does not necessarily show a long term united front that is ready to sacrifice their own survival risks to fully align with Beijing’s overall position.

A key motive behind Xi’s spectacle has always been to deter Taiwan from challenging Beijing’s claims, with a show of force meant to deter and discourage Taiwan from using force or declaring independence by showcasing.

By invoking World War II victory, Xi is also reinforcing the historical narrative that China will fight separatism just as it once resisted foreign aggression, which remains a pointed message to Taipei’s leaders that the People’s Liberation Army is prepared to fight if provoked.

Xi’s maneuvers were a direct message to Trump – back off or risk the new move of a new axis of power to jointly resist, and Beijing will not be cowed by Trump’s tariffs and tech sanctions and wanted to demonstrate that China and its friends are prepared to confront U.S. power head-on.

The deterrent signal was twofold: to Taiwan, don’t even think about independence, and to Trump’s America, your containment strategy will fail.

With Us or Against Us

This narrative had an ideological hue that strikes resemblance to the force of choice to the world and a classic “with us or against us” gambit: to align with China’s new bloc or to remain with the US led order. As Xi has stated in his speech during the parade for the world to choose between peace or war, the stark reality on hand is one that peace is relatively different to one’s own interpretation and ideological bias.

The underlying proposition is: join our new club of power and benefit from Chinese markets, investments, and security partnerships – or side with Washington and risk our displeasure with all the anti China policies espoused by the West.

Modi’s presence and renewed enthusiasm shown towards both Beijing and Moscow has been broadcast as proof and propagandistic win that even traditional US partners are gravitating toward China’s camp. But Modi-Trump ties have never wavered.

Through these moves, Xi is sending a clear signal that China now has the readiness and power capacity to not only rival the US and its order, but to replace it.

The primacy of the SCO is uplifted: representing 43% of the world’s population and 23% of GDP and this is touted by Chinese media as evidence that the “East” or the “Global South” under Beijing’s leadership can outmatch the West, and contrasting this new model with the so called unfair Western system.

Both SCO and BRICS are touted to offer financing support without the strings attached, a new trade system that can ditch the dollar, and collaborations without the lectures on democracy which are geared to appeal to the players that have been resentful of Western sanctions and human rights obligations.

The underlying threat through this move by Xi in giving the ultimatum is implicit: those who still remain on the fence may eventually be left isolated if China’s bloc gains momentum both in power and efficacy.

Washington sees this new axis of power as a rising real threat to the decades old global peace and stability built and maintained by it, and sees no need for any power to disturb this peaceful dividend that has been enjoyed by the world although Washington did not get the long overdue recognition.

Xi’s Time Trap: The “Peak China” Danger

Xi’s assertive moves are driven by a sense of urgency. China is nearing the apex of its national power and that a window is closing before economic and demographic forces slow its rise.

This Peak China theory, espoused by Michael Beckley and Hal Brands, argued that as a peaking power, China’s meteoric rise is faltering but remains strong enough to be dangerous.

In historical terms, such peaking powers often become more aggressive precisely because they fear future decline. As Beckley argued,when fast-growing great powers suffer a prolonged economic downturn, most crack down at home while expanding abroad to secure their economic lifelines, beat back rivals, and grab territory.

Xi’s current belligerence may reflect a “now or never” mindset, where, facing downturns internally and the closing time frame for it to achieve the 100-Year Marathon, and coupled with Trump’s revival of America, Beijing might fathom that this is the favorable window of strategic opportunity to rekindle China’s rise before facing plateau and decline.

Xi’s consolidation of power and foreign policy amplification reflects this peak-power behavior. Domestically, grip has been tightened, and externally, Xi’s China is extending its reach and fast pacing its blue-water navy and military supremacy to secure its expansive claims and to deter American interference, even challenging American interests at its own zones.

All these moves fit the spectrum of what Beckley calls “mercantilist expansion”, in using state power to gain resources and military footholds and presence globally as a fallback for its slowing growth at home.

The act of confidence and boldness might not be what they seem. Xi’s China is also acting out of strategic anxiety, realising that its best chance to reshape the world order is now, before its relative power declines and before the US retains its large portion of the power gap under Trump.

Fault Lines in Xi’s Bloc: Mutual Distrust and Marriage of Convenience

The coalition that Xi is trying to hold together is tied by convenience rather than true consensus where they have divergent interests and deep historical mistrust of each other, and of China. For all the smiles in Tianjin and Beijing, significant fault lines run beneath the surface.

Despite Xi’s efforts to court Modi, both know of the underlying wariness. Beijing and Delhi fought a border war in 1962 and exchanged deadly clashes as recently as 2020 in the Himalayas. India harbours deep suspicions about China’s strategic intentions, resenting Beijing’s support for Pakistan and its encroachments via the Belt and Road projects near India’s sphere with its String of Pearls containment of India.

Modi and Xi’s brief rapprochement was driven by immediate pressure, Trump’s tariffs and US snubs, rather than a lasting realignment. New Delhi will remain steadfast to its long held strategic autonomy and will have no intent to become a secondary junior partner to China.

The same goes for Moscow-Beijing ties. Historically, Russia has been uneasy about China’s rise especially along their long Siberian border and in Central Asia, coupled with historical Cold War wariness and tensions.

Today, Russia is effectively the junior partner where its economy and technology are increasingly dependent on China.

Putin needs Xi’s support to resist Western sanctions, yet the Kremlin is well aware of the limitations and is cautious not to be overly beholden to Beijing. Russia maintains a strong defense partnership with India and sells advanced weapons to New Delhi, reflecting Moscow’s desire to hedge against total reliance on China.

Moscow is in fact more trustful of Delhi than Beijing, and this goes way back during the Cold War too. Competition between Moscow and Beijing has also been growing,with fighting of influence in Central Asia,competition for Arctic ambitions, and the jostle for arms sales globally.

Trust only goes so far, where although Moscow and Beijing share a common adversary in Washington, they do not share an alliance treaty despite the No Limits Ties and each would most likely abandon the other if their core interests clash or when national survival calls for so.

Moscow still sees Beijing as a potential future threat and vice versa.

The same goes for North Korea. It owes its survival in part to Chinese patronage and support, but Pyongyang has been fiercely guarding its independence and has often defied Beijing’s wishes.

Jong un’s rare visit to stand with Xi and Putin in Beijing and to show solidarity was a propaganda win for Beijing, yet Pyongyang’s loyalty is not guaranteed and not confirmed.

Historically, we have seen how different contextual fears and changing needs played out. Pyongyang has also played China and the Soviet side against each other for its own benefits.

Pakistan might be growing in importance to China,with Beijing’s vast investments there, but even Islamabad has often sought US aid and cannot afford to alienate Washington in total.

Central Asian states in the SCO also do have their own wariness in their policy calculations, balancing between Moscow’s security umbrella and China’s economic heft, all while being cautious to secure their own national interest calculations.

Many of them also are wary of the debt-heavy infrastructure deals of China and its growing presence.

SCO’s Trust Gap

The SCO lacks the binding commitments and frameworks like other official alliances, and it is not a full fledged security or economic alliance.

The SCO charter avoids military alliance obligations, focusing more on vague cooperation against terrorism, and focusing on economic links, and political dialogue.

Despite the close friendships tied by ideology and a common threat of Washington, if conflicts break out over Taiwan or in the South China Sea, there is no guarantee that Russia or Iran would provide support.

SCO remains a platform for photo-ops and for a common venting ground against the West, and it stops at that.

Most of the players that are apparently friendly with Beijing are hedging carefully and aware of the consequences, rather than fully committing themselves.

The Global South countries would not want to send a wrong message to Beijing by not attending, but most of them are still courting both sides in their hedging game, still wary of Beijing’s expansive and bellicose claims on the disputed regions in an increasing show of might but still in need for its economic and market dependency.

Xi’s coalition and the SCO lack the deep underlying trust and institutional cohesion beyond economic measures alone, unlike the Western frameworks that have both security, values and economic fronts that bind and endure.

Collins Chong Yew Keat

Collins Chong Yew Keat has been serving in University of Malaya, the top university in Malaysia for more than 9 years. His areas of interests include strategic and security studies, American foreign policy and power analysis and has published various publications on numerous platforms including books and chapter articles. He is also a regular contributor in providing op-eds for both the local and international media on various contemporary global issues and regional affairs since 2007.

10. Inside Ukraine’s drone wall holding off Russia’s meatgrinder assaults

Excerpts:

Andrii notes that the Russians hold a clear advantage in manpower. They send in daily waves of soldiers on suicidal missions. Most are killed but over time the relentless assaults can overwhelm Ukrainian positions. Life is cheap on the Russian side – but for Ukrainians preserving every life must be a priority.

For now, Ukraine’s “drone wall” continues to hold the line against Russia. It’s a layered defense of unmanned systems that the Kremlin has been trying to breach for years. Units behind this wall, such as the Unmanned Systems Battalion of Ukraine’s 110th Separate Mechanized Brigade, make up just 2% of Kyiv’s personnel yet account for one-third of enemy casualties.

But with the so-called Axis of Evil arming the Kremlin, and what feels like an endless conveyor belt of Russians willing to die for a paycheck, the war grinds on. I’m not the only one who fears that, if Russia is not stopped here, the meatgrinder tactics and Mad Max-style armored hulks now crawling across Ukraine’s front could one day choke the roads and fields of Europe’s eastern flank.

Inside Ukraine’s drone wall holding off Russia’s meatgrinder assaults - Asia Times

A layered defense composed of unmanned systems picks off Russians who, astride motorcycles, cross the line in suicidal wave attacks

asiatimes.com · David Kirichenko · September 11, 2025

Past midnight, in near-total darkness, Andrii, callsign “Drunya,” a driver from the Unmanned Systems Battalion of Ukraine’s 110th Separate Mechanized Brigade, prepares for a resupply run to a drone unit on the front just after midnight. He loads a pickup truck with first-person-view (FPV) drones and explosives. The vehicle is fitted with a jammer to guard against incoming enemy FPV strikes.

Once the truck is ready, the dash to the front begins. Along the roads leading to the frontline, trucks, civilian vehicles and heavy armor crawl forward under makeshift cages and welded plating – protection against the ever-present drone threat. It’s a scene that looks torn from “Mad Max,” but it’s also a stark reflection of how today’s small, cheap drones have reshaped modern warfare.

With me is Ryan Van Ert, a filmmaker from Los Angeles. We met on a previous trip to Ukraine, and he decided to join this mission. Last year, I spent nearly a week embedded with a drone unit in Chasiv Yar, getting as close as 1.5 kilometers to Russian lines. But in the past year, the kill zone has expanded greatly; now, anything within 10-15 kilometers of the front is fair game for enemy drones.

Before setting out, Andrii warns us: If the truck stops for any reason, don’t bother grabbing anything – just run for cover under the nearest treeline. Wearing body armor and helmets, we speed down pitted country roads. In the passenger seat, a soldier keeps his rifle ready, prepared to shoot down an enemy FPV if one dives toward us. Fiber-optic drones lying in wait along the roadside have become a deadly hazard for both sides.

Andrii cues up music on the Bluetooth speaker, each song somehow amplifying the tension in the air. I stare out the window, imagining Russian drones circling above, watching us from the darkness. As we near the front, Andrii switches off the headlights, slips on his night-vision goggles, and drives the rest of the way in pitch black.

Bohdan, a drone pilot from the Unmanned Systems Battalion of Ukraine’s 110th Separate Mechanized Brigade, pilots an FPV drone in Donetsk Oblast during active battle operations. Photo: David Kirichenko

I can’t shake the worry that his speed on these cratered roads might damage the truck, forcing us to abandon it in a place where standing still is dangerous. Then another thought cuts in: Here I am, alongside Ryan, two freelancers on the front, far from any newsroom safety net. If something happens, we’re on our own. We aren’t soldiers, but we came here by choice, and that means accepting the brutal truth: Here, death is not an abstract, but a very real possibility for us. Real skin in the game, as they say, in my attempt to tell Ukraine’s story from the front.

Shortly before the mission, I’ve overheard Ryan on the phone, telling someone where he was going, just in case something happened to him. Following suit, I’ve texted a friend that if they should fail to hear from me in a few days, this was where I had gone and with which unit, so they would know where to start looking.

When we reach the frontline dugout, we’re met by Bohdan, callsign “Bandera,” a drone pilot. The soldiers quickly unload the supplies before starting the return trip. Not long after, Bohdan hears over the radio that Andrii has ambushed by a Russian drone, which has narrowly missed his truck. A close call, but he has escaped unharmed.

Bohdan takes a smoke break after several hours of piloting FPV drones. Photo: David Kirichenko

By early morning, Bohdan warns us to brace for the daily assaults, which usually open with a barrage of glide bomb strikes. In this part of Donetsk Oblast, near the border with Dnipropetrovsk, the fighting has been relentless in recent days.

For hours with almost no pause, Bohdan flies FPV bomber drones, trying to blunt the constant Russian advances. First, enemy infantry creep across open fields and through treelines toward a nearby village. Then Bohdan’s drones hunt them, working in tandem with artillery to flush them out.

“Artillery can hit sectors, but it can’t chase someone into a basement,” said Andrii, callsign “Price,” who oversees the flight mission and assists Bohdan with targeting.

Serhii “Gray” handles the explosives on the FPV drones. Photo: David Kirichenko

As their assault intensifies, the Russians begin sending in motorcycle units. Serhii, callsign “Gray,” handles the explosives, sprinting back and forth to arm the drone’s trigger before Bohdan launches. On the video screens, motorbikes tear across the fields, kicking up plumes of dust. I translate the rapid Ukrainian chatter for Ryan; he later tells me it’s the first time he’s felt “true fear.”

Part of me wonders whether I should translate all the dangerous updates the soldiers are sharing. Only days earlier, a Russian assault has broken through, forcing Ukrainian drone pilots to drop their controllers, grab rifles and fight off enemy soldiers. I tell Ryan this, warning him that there’s a chance we might have to do the same if another breakthrough happens – that we could be fighting for our lives with rifles instead of cameras.

Ryan Van Ert prepares for a Russian assault on the position. Photo: David Kirichenko

On one feed, a Russian motorcyclist darts through a village, weaving between farm fields and treelines. Andrii fires off sharp commands – “Left, left … climb … higher!” – trying to keep the target locked in. The terrain, the bike’s speed, and a glitchy video stream make the pursuit difficult, but eventually they find their shot. A sudden blast flares across the screen. “Yes. Big explosion,” another operator confirms from the command center, watching the Mavic drone streams while still scanning for any sign of movement.

Andrii “Price” helps provide support for an FPV bombing mission. Photo: David Kirichenko

Commenting on the Mad Max–style armor now common on the front, Bohdan says, “If a tank is spotted with cages and a jammer, it takes at least double or triple the usual number – six to eight drones – to disable it. We used to laugh at their cages, but now we use them too.”

The soldiers explain that after the battle for Avdiivka in 2024 – when US aid was halted and Ukraine was forced to rely on its own resources – the military rapidly scaled up its use of drones across the battlefield. “If Ukraine had more artillery back then, it wouldn’t have needed to rely as much on drones,” says Bohdan.

For now, the Ukrainian infantry huddled on the front are few in number and rarely engage the Russian troops they track. Instead, they primarily act as spotters for other Ukrainian units, only fighting house to house when Russian forces push into their positions.

Andrii, a soldier from the Unmanned Systems Battalion of Ukraine’s 110th Separate Mechanized Brigade. Photo: David Kirichenko

asiatimes.com · David Kirichenko · September 11, 2025

11. America's defense begins in the Western Pacific, not in San Diego

I absolutely agree that we must defend the homeland from forward positions. To do anything less puts America at risk.

However, I am sorry but I have to disagree with my friend Grant Newsham regarding Korea. His criticism is off base. I fear that he has no experience with actual combined operation nor an understanding of how the ROK/US alliance developed over the past seven decades. I fear this is because he is of late part of the faction as "China only" in terms of defense (war) strategy.

First and foremost it has been the US interest to prevent war in Northeast Asia. That is true and necessary more so now than before.

From 1953 through the beginning of the OPCON transition process the alliance evolved under the strategic assumption that the alliance together would defend the ROK against attack from the north. There was no plan for the ROK to defend itself on its own. This has long guided war planning, doctrinal development, and weapons development and procurement. Both the ROK and US developed doctrine and military capabilities to conduct combined operations not unilateral operations on the Korean peninsula. For a short time during the OPCON transition process there were discussions and planning for separate warfighting commands and for a short time and the only time in seven decades the process for developing independent warfighting capabilities took place.. This was abandoned by 2012 when the decision was made to retain the ROK/US Combined Forces Command.

So the bottom line is that the ROK has not developed independent war fighting because the strategic assumption has long been that we will fight as an alliance. We have long optimized the combined capabilities of both militaries. It has never been the intent for the ROK "to go into the deep end of the pool" by itself. That said, the ROK has developed numerous advanced warfighting capabilities as well as a defense industrial base that is now a major contributing partner in the arsenal of democracies.

Excerpts:

If earlier War Department statements are to be believed, China will get its due in the final defense strategy. And it is prudent both to defend the US homeland (which has in fact been under attack for decades) and to stop taking Western Hemisphere security for granted and pay some real attention.

But here’s the problem:

Although the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will continue to be recognized as a major threat, and deterring China in the Indo-Pacific as a major task, the final NDS – as a sort of tough love – will also stress that regional nations need to pull their weight, allowing the US to focus on hemispheric and homeland defense.

This resembles what the Trump Administration is doing in Europe – demanding that US allies do more to handle the Ukraine problem and Russian threats.

In theory it makes sense. The US is stretched and has plenty of problems domestically and globally. Nobody should expect regional nations that are closer to the threats to free-ride on the United States, which has carried too much of the security load for too long.

But the problem is that none of our allies or partners in the Indo-Pacific is ready to go into the deep end of the pool by itself. Not even Japan, South Korea or Australia.

And that’s in large part America’s fault. The US never did what was necessary to ensure they could. Yes, there was plenty of feel-good “engagement,” there were scripted exercises – but not the thorough nuts-and-bolts development of real military capabilities to fight a war by themselves (or even alongside the US) against an actual enemy.

There is now no individual Indo-Pacific nation or collective grouping that can take on China.

America's defense begins in the Western Pacific, not in San Diego - Asia Times

Those who ultimately implement the National Defense Strategy need to understand that a policy of tough love for allies has its limits

asiatimes.com · Grant Newsham · September 11, 2025

A recent article in Politico claims that the new US National Defense Strategy (NDS) currently being drafted at the War Department will downplay China as a major threat and place primary focus on homeland defense and hemispheric defense – think, Western hemisphere.

A truism, “Things are never as good as they seem, and never as bad as they seem,” is worth keeping in mind.

If earlier War Department statements are to be believed, China will get its due in the final defense strategy. And it is prudent both to defend the US homeland (which has in fact been under attack for decades) and to stop taking Western Hemisphere security for granted and pay some real attention.

But here’s the problem:

Although the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will continue to be recognized as a major threat, and deterring China in the Indo-Pacific as a major task, the final NDS – as a sort of tough love – will also stress that regional nations need to pull their weight, allowing the US to focus on hemispheric and homeland defense.

This resembles what the Trump Administration is doing in Europe – demanding that US allies do more to handle the Ukraine problem and Russian threats.

In theory it makes sense. The US is stretched and has plenty of problems domestically and globally. Nobody should expect regional nations that are closer to the threats to free-ride on the United States, which has carried too much of the security load for too long.

But the problem is that none of our allies or partners in the Indo-Pacific is ready to go into the deep end of the pool by itself. Not even Japan, South Korea or Australia.

And that’s in large part America’s fault. The US never did what was necessary to ensure they could. Yes, there was plenty of feel-good “engagement,” there were scripted exercises – but not the thorough nuts-and-bolts development of real military capabilities to fight a war by themselves (or even alongside the US) against an actual enemy.

There is now no individual Indo-Pacific nation or collective grouping that can take on China.

One on one, China will eat them.

There’s also a delicate psychological aspect to US commitments – an aspect that our friends and enemies carefully watch. The prospect of US backing is the glue that lets most nations in the Indo-Pacific at least think they don’t have to roll over for the PRC.

Any sign of lagging commitment – even if Washington protests otherwise, claiming “rock solid” and “iron-clad” alliances, and has the physical capacity to step in – has a corrosive effect, demoralizing friends and encouraging enemies to make a move.

The tough-love approach requires solid, long-term commitment that is also believable and able to survive domestic political expediency and short-attention spans in Washington.

The track record is poor.

Recall the Nixon Doctrine, introduced in 1969, that “the United States would assist in the defense and developments of allies and friends” but would not “undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.” This aimed to replace on-the-ground US military activities with self-defense by capable allies backed up by US support.

By 1975, however, US support for South Vietnam had wavered owing to Congressional interference. The South Vietnamese military and government collapsed and North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon.

And more recently, there was Afghanistan in 2021. So much for US promises of commitment and tough love of our friends.

The NDS will probably look good on paper – and can be interpreted to suit the reader’s preferences.

But other rumors are floating around of US force withdrawals from Asia, and people of influence in the War Department’s policy world favor pulling back to what they consider more defensible positions closer to, or on, the US mainland.

The US military in the Indo-Pacific is already bare bones when weighed against the powerful and growing Chinese threat.

Just remove a few destroyers and a couple of fighter squadrons from Japan and see what happens. Before long, the NDS will indeed be “as bad as it seemed.”

America’s defense starts in the Western Pacific – not in San Diego. Let’s hope that the people who ultimately implement the NDS understand that.

Colonel Grant Newsham (US Marines – Ret.) is the author of When China Attacks: A Warning to America.

asiatimes.com · Grant Newsham · September 11, 2025

12. Countering the People’s Republic of China’s Maritime Insurgency in the South Pacific

Excerpts:

The PRC’s deepening engagement with PICs, particularly through dual-use infrastructure, strategic partnerships, and coercive economic practices has shifted the balance of influence away from traditional allies like the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. The potential for Chinese military assets in Kiribati or the Solomon Islands should be viewed as a severe threat to U.S. territories and Indo-Pacific allies. Coupled with increased PLAN presence and aggressive operations, this trend signals a challenge to U.S. freedom of movement and regional dominance.

To effectively counter this encroachment, the U.S. must commit to a comprehensive, multi-pronged strategy that integrates regional security support, humanitarian assistance, and institutional cooperation. Expanding the Pacific Fusion Center will strengthen intelligence sharing and regional coordination and MDA. Increased USCG presence would deter illegal activities like unregulated fishing and support local law enforcement capabilities. These efforts should be pursued in partnership with Australia, New Zealand, and other like-minded nations to promote regional ownership and reduce perceptions of neocolonial influence.

Combating transnational crime, particularly illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing requires not only physical presence but also legal and political resolve. Holding senior PRC officials accountable through international legal mechanisms can deter further violations and reinforce the rule of law. In parallel, bolstering regional healthcare through expanded Pacific Partnership missions and sustained medical presence such as stationing a T-EMS in Micronesia will address urgent humanitarian needs and enhance U.S. soft power. Ultimately, securing the South Pacific is not solely about countering PRC influence. It involves empowering Pacific Island Countries, reaffirming the United States’ commitment to its allies, and ensuring that the region remains free, open, and resilient.

Countering the People’s Republic of China’s Maritime Insurgency in the South Pacific | Center for International Maritime Security

cimsec.org · Guest Author

By Jason Lancaster

Guadalcanal, the Coral Sea, Tarawa, New Guinea, and Iron Bottom Sound highlight the strategic location of the South Pacific during the Second World War. Today, U.S. and allied preeminence in this vital region is under threat. The People’s Republic of China (PRC,) through a sophisticated blend of economic inducements, political influence, and maritime coercion, is executing a campaign to erode U.S. and allied presence and reshape the Indo-Pacific order. Such activities mirror the tactics of insurgency, where control is gained not just through force, but by blurring legal boundaries, exploiting economic vulnerability, and using civilian fronts to advance strategic ends.1

The PRC’s maritime insurgency is not limited to the South China Sea. It is a global phenomenon. This maritime insurgency is not fought with gunfire but with corruption, development loans and aid, and the PRC’s deep-water fishing fleet. More than 17,000 vessels fishing throughout the world routinely engage in Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing (IUUF), often acting as a civilian vanguard for PRC state objectives. The situation is particularly acute in the South Pacific, where Chinese fishing fleets exploit the limited enforcement capacity of Pacific Island Countries (PICs), deplete sovereign marine resources, and undermine local economies, eroding governance, and sovereignty in the process.

The South Pacific is by no means a strategic backwater. It lies astride the sea lines of communication connecting U.S. treaty allies in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia. It is home to key U.S. territories such as Guam and American Samoa. It includes the Compact of Free Association (COFA) states Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands. At its heart are the fourteen Pacific Island Countries. possess rich marine resources, and command strategic real estate that could either anchor regional stability or serve as launchpads for malign influence.2

Historically, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand have been the region’s primary security and development partners. However, since 2018, the PRC has dramatically expanded its presence building dual-use infrastructure, embedding security arrangements, and offering opaque development assistance. Despite sustained Western aid to these nations, Beijing’s influence has surged. The construction of Chinese-funded ports and runways in the Solomon Islands and Kiribati. Long range missiles stationed in the Kiribati or the Solomons could threaten Hawaii, Australia, and the continental U.S., compromising freedom of navigation, eroding regional deterrence, and challenging the U.S. ability to defend treaty partners Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.

IUUF is a major threat to PIC economies. Fishing is a major contributor to many PIC economies and IUUF challenges the ability of states to create revenue, further condemning them to a future of dependency on international development aid. The United States can enhance its hard power in the Indo-Pacific by utilizing soft power to counter IUUF and provide humanitarian assistance, thereby denying PRC regional influence.

Countering IUUF

The United States does not need to develop a new engagement strategy with South Pacific nations from whole cloth. The Pacific Island Forum produces its own strategic documents. Composed of 18 members and associate member states, the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) serves as a unifying voice for the small states of the South Pacific. Australia and New Zealand are full members while U.S. territories Guam and American Samoa are associate members. The 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent and the 2018 Boe Declaration on Regional Security articulate shared South Pacific security concerns and development goals. The United States and its allies are already adopting PIF strategic documents for engagement with Pacific Island Countries to achieve mutual successes.

Countering IUUF and other forms of transnational crime is a top PIF priority, second only to climate change and rising sea levels. While the United States pays signatory nations US$60 million a year over ten years for the privilege of fishing within PIC Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) under the South Pacific Tuna Treaty,3 the PRC flagrantly disregards the sovereignty of Pacific Island states while plundering their maritime bounty. Pacific Island nations do not have the capacity to police their expansive EEZs against massive fishing fleets without assistance.

China’s fishing fleet activity, 2019-2021. (Graphic via Oceana/Global Fishing Watch)

Pacific Fusion Center

The PIF’s 2018 Boe Declaration recommended various security proposals to defend PIF interests. One was the development of a Pacific Fusion Center to support the collation, sharing, and analysis of intelligence. The Pacific Island Forum stood up a Pacific Fusion Center in Vanuatu in 2021. The fusion center “enhances information sharing, cooperation, analysis and assessment, and expands situational awareness and capacity across the Pacific.”4 The fusion center provides an opportunity to expand multinational cooperation in the region and expand defense and security force capacity. To successfully counter transnational crime, the U.S. should support and increase the capacity of the Pacific Fusion Center with the mid-term goal of turning it into a maritime headquarters, increase the capacity to enforce PIC EEZs and laws, and increase regional maritime domain awareness fed into the Pacific Fusion Center.

Through US associate PIF members Guam and American Samoa, the U.S should offer USCG support for the center to immediately increase its effectiveness. With a mid-term goal of creating a PIC-led multilateral maritime headquarters like the Combined Maritime Forces headquarters in Bahrain, this multinational maritime headquarters would be rotationally led by PICs with Australian, New Zealand, and U.S. support, and would have tactical control of forces regionally assigned to countering transnational crime.

The Pacific Fusion Center will not be effective without forces at sea enabling maritime domain awareness (MDA). MDA supports two vital interests: enabling US, Australian, New Zealand, and local PIC forces to intercept and eliminate IUUF, and monitoring the PLAN in the region. IUUF fleets are vast. This was illustrated off South America, in February 2025, when the Argentine Navy tracked over 380 PRC flagged fishing vessels near the Argentine economic exclusion zone, requiring Argentina to send two warships and two aircraft—a sizable portion of its deployable blue water forces—to monitor these fishing vessels.5 The United States can support MDA through multiple asset types to identify potential threats within the maritime domain, supporting both the Pacific Fusion Center and a PIF response at sea.6

Improving Capacity

Most PICs have little capability to enforce their own EEZs. Australia’s mitigation for the PIC’s lack of resources is the Pacific Maritime Security Program. This security assistance program provides Guardian-Class patrol boats, an equivalent of the USCG’s fast response cutter (FRC), along with crew training and maintenance for every PIC.7 The program has provided a total of 22 patrol boats over 30-year program. This effort has been a mixed success, as the region is full of marked and unmarked reefs and multiple ships have met with accidents. In December 2024 the new Fijian patrol boat RFNS Timo was damaged while docking. Timo is a replacement vessel for RFNS Puamau, which hit a reef and sank in June 2024.8 Timo completed her first patrol in April 2025.9 Despite this program many of these countries still do not have the capacity to patrol the entirety of their EEZs. The geography is a demanding one—the EEZ of Kiribati is roughly the size of the continental United States. The RAN and RNZN also have capacity issues. The RAN and RNZN serve dual functions, conducting both war at sea and law enforcement missions. The RNZN’s new force design will reduce the availability of RNZN vessels to conduct regional constabulary duties.

The US Coast Guard (USCG) faces budgetary and ship number restrictions, but they are the regions preferred US service for cooperation. With local agreements, the USCG can help increase regional capacity. USCG District Oceania, formerly District 14’s area of responsibility is the Pacific with ships based in Honolulu and Guam. The USCG has two national security cutters, one medium endurance cutter, three Fast Response Cutters (FRCs), and three buoy tenders stationed in Honolulu, as well as three FRCs and a buoy tender based in Guam. The U.S. Navy supports USCG missions as able. These efforts are primarily focused on the U.S. and COFA state EEZs. USCG ships are responsible for patrolling thousands of miles of both U.S. and COFA EEZs. The distances involved are vast: it is 850 miles from Guam to Palau and over 5,000 miles from Honolulu to American Samoa. In addition to fisheries protection, these cutters are also responsible for counter-narcotics, smuggling, other law enforcement requirements, and search and rescue.10

The United States must increase its regional naval presence to reassure citizens, partners, and potential partners. Utilizing USCG assets reassures regional allies and partners while minimizing the threat of escalation with the PRC, reducing fears and potential misgivings of U.S. intent. The United States should increase USCG District Oceania’s assets by relocating four Fast Response Cutters currently homeported in Bahrain to the South Pacific. The increased presence of Littoral Combat Ships in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility would mitigate the reallocation of the four FRCs.

Eradicating IUUF

Increased and improved provision of command and control and MDA and increased capacity to intercept IUUF fishermen is required for the eradication of IUUF. Officials at the New Zealand embassy stated that there were not sufficient naval forces in the region to enforce EEZs across the multitude of countries. Legal action offers an essential tool to deter further incursions despite limited forces at sea.

PICs should be provided legal, domestic, and security assistance to prosecute transnational crime. Most PRC fishing captains work for state owned enterprises tied to important CCP bosses. Linking senior CCP party members to illegal behavior that costs PIC citizens jobs, money, and resources for the future could be a method to end IUUF as well as deter future PRC illegal activities. Convictions in absentia after fair public trials are a method to deter PRC activity and highlight PRC malign influence.

Healthcare and Pacific Partnership

Medical support is one of the most frequently requested forms of aid from PICs. The U.S. Navy’s Pacific Partnership is hugely popular in the region and provides life-changing care. The popularity of the mission should drive the U.S. and allies to increase the frequency of visits with increased allied support. USNS Mercy does not participate every year, but there has been an attempt at her participation every two years.

The Department of Defense should discuss RAN, RNZN, and Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force support for increasing the number of Pacific Partnership missions. Although none of these navies have a dedicated hospital ship like USNS Mercy, each nation has a ship suitable for these missions and the capacity to send a single vessel for a 3–4-month humanitarian deployment to the South Pacific. A planned rotation of USN, RAN, USN, RNZN, USN, JMSDF provides a six-year cycle that enables maintenance, training, and other operational requirements to be scheduled. The U.S. off-years would still see U.S. mission support with a ship as well as medical personnel. U.S. years would have USNS Mercy support.

The Navy should hub a medical expeditionary ship (T-EMS) in Yap, Federated States of Micronesia to support smaller scale but persistent humanitarian medical support in the region. These vessels contain one or two operating rooms and are extremely suitable for this mission because of their shallow draft and hospital level facilities and ability to embark helicopters. The T-EMS’s sister ships, the fast expeditionary transports (T-EPFs) have been frequently used for Pacific Partnership stations, demonstrating the utility of this class for use in the South Pacific.

Conclusion

The South Pacific region holds immense strategic value for the United States and its allies. Located at the heart of key U.S. alliances and territories, the region has drawn increasing attention from the PRC, whose maritime gray zone insurgent activities threaten to undermine regional security, economic stability, and political alignment.

The PRC’s deepening engagement with PICs, particularly through dual-use infrastructure, strategic partnerships, and coercive economic practices has shifted the balance of influence away from traditional allies like the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. The potential for Chinese military assets in Kiribati or the Solomon Islands should be viewed as a severe threat to U.S. territories and Indo-Pacific allies. Coupled with increased PLAN presence and aggressive operations, this trend signals a challenge to U.S. freedom of movement and regional dominance.

To effectively counter this encroachment, the U.S. must commit to a comprehensive, multi-pronged strategy that integrates regional security support, humanitarian assistance, and institutional cooperation. Expanding the Pacific Fusion Center will strengthen intelligence sharing and regional coordination and MDA. Increased USCG presence would deter illegal activities like unregulated fishing and support local law enforcement capabilities. These efforts should be pursued in partnership with Australia, New Zealand, and other like-minded nations to promote regional ownership and reduce perceptions of neocolonial influence.

Combating transnational crime, particularly illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing requires not only physical presence but also legal and political resolve. Holding senior PRC officials accountable through international legal mechanisms can deter further violations and reinforce the rule of law. In parallel, bolstering regional healthcare through expanded Pacific Partnership missions and sustained medical presence such as stationing a T-EMS in Micronesia will address urgent humanitarian needs and enhance U.S. soft power. Ultimately, securing the South Pacific is not solely about countering PRC influence. It involves empowering Pacific Island Countries, reaffirming the United States’ commitment to its allies, and ensuring that the region remains free, open, and resilient.

Commander Jason Lancaster is a Surface Warfare Officer. He has served at sea in amphibious ships , destroyers, and a destroyer squadron. Ashore he has served as an instructor at the Surface Warfare Officers School, on the N5 at Commander, Naval Forces Korea, and in OPNAV N5, and is the Operations Officer for the Joint Staff J-7 Joint Deployment Training Center. He holds Masters’ degrees from the National War College and the University of Tulsa and completed his undergraduate work at Mary Washington College.

Endnotes

1. Commander Jennifer Runion, “Fishing for Trouble: Chinese IUU Fishing and the Risk of Escalation,” Proceedings 149, no. 2 (February 2023), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2023/february/fishing-trouble-chinese-iuu-fishing-and-risk-escalation. Geoffrey Till, “At War with the Lights Off,” Proceedings 148, no. 7 (July 2022), https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/july/war-lights.

2. Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat. *2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent: Implementation Plan 2023–2030*. Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, Mar. 2024, https://forumsec.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/2050-Strategy-Implementation-Plan_2023-2030.pdf#:~:text=This first Implementation Plan for the 2050 Strategy,and levels of ambition of the 2050 Strategy. Accessed 5 Sept. 2025.

3. New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Fishing in the Blue Pacific, 2018, https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/aid-and-development/our-development-cooperation-partnerships-in-the-pacific/case-studies/fishing-in-the-blue-pacific.

4. Pacific Fusion Centre, Home, Pacific Fusion Centre, n.d., accessed June 11, 2025, https://www.pacificfusioncentre.org/.

5. Micah McCartney, “Argentina Deploys Military as PRC Leads Fishing Swarm Near Waters,” Newsweek, 2025, https://www.newsweek.com/argentina-deploys-military-atlantic-fishing-swarm-PRC-spain-korea-taiwan-2035671.

6. CDR Mike Holland, “Overview: Maritime Domain Awareness, Securing the Seas: 12 Global Tides and Currents of Maritime Domain Awareness,” The Coast Guard Journal of Safety & Security at Sea 63, no. 3 (2006).

7. Australian Defence Forces, Australian Defence Forces Pacific Maritime Security Program, n.d., https://www.defence.gov.au/defence-activities/programs-initiatives/pacific-engagement/maritime-capability.

8. Max Walden, “RFNS Timo Sustains Damage during Docking,” ABC News, December 22, 2025, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-23/fiji-navy-vessel-gifted-australia-sustains-damage-docking/104757584.

9. Ana Madigibuli, “RFNS Timo Completes First Patrol,” Fiji Times, April 16, 2025, https://www.fijitimes.com.fj/rfns-timo-completes-first-patrol/.

10. U.S. Coast Guard, United States Coast Guard Sector Pacific Area, n.d., accessed March 16, 2025, https://www.pacificarea.uscg.mil/Our-Organization/District-14/D14-Cutters/.

Featured Image: Twelve Chinese fishing boats are banded together with ropes on December 21, 2010 to try to thwart an attempt by a South Korean coast guard ship to stop their alleged illegal fishing in the Yellow Sea off the coast of South Korea. (Photo by Park Young-Chul, Agence France-Press)

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13. China’s unwarranted exclusion of the U.S. and Taiwan from Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting

China’s unwarranted exclusion of the U.S. and Taiwan from Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting

washingtontimes.com · The Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com

By Allen Zhang - Thursday, September 11, 2025

OPINION:

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele, under mounting pressure from Beijing, recently reaffirmed Taiwan’s exclusion from the upcoming Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting. The decision marks a significant setback for Taipei and the broader coalition of democratic partners striving for a free and open Indo-Pacific.

The Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting is no ordinary summit. It convenes high-level delegates from 18 Pacific countries and territories to set regional priorities and shape frameworks for engagements with other countries.

For decades, Taiwan has quietly maintained its diplomatic relevance by participating in sideline meetings at the summit. This year, that door has slammed shut. Taiwan now joins 20 other dialogue partners — including the U.S., Japan and France — that are also barred from attending.

Although China is now also excluded, the blanket exclusion of all dialogue partners, in practice, benefits Beijing. China retains more avenues for Pacific engagement than most other nations: Ten of the 14 members of the Pacific Island Countries Network are recipients of Belt and Road Initiative financing, and China remains the region’s second-largest donor.

Lately, China has shifted toward a more calibrated influence campaign that focuses less on formal engagements. Over the past decade, Chinese embassies in Pacific Island countries more than tripled their local, community-level engagements by donating vehicles to local governments, cash grants to schools and gifts of agricultural equipment to farmers.

This is not the first time China has influenced decision-making for the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting. At the forum last year, when dialogue partners were still invited, China’s regional envoy, Qian Bo, demanded that a planned communique be altered to remove language about Taiwan.

In a wolf-warrior-style confrontation, Mr. Qian, whom The Independent characterized as “visibly angry,” challenged the forum’s secretary-general. The communique was republished with the paragraph regarding Taiwan removed.

Moving forward, Washington can expect sustained Chinese involvement in the region. China views engagement with Pacific Island countries as strategically important for economic and military goals.

Pacific Island countries control exclusive economic zones that span more than 10% of the world’s ocean surface. The region is rich in fisheries and natural resources and is vital to U.S. military strategy, anchoring forward deployments along the second island chain. Adding to its strategic weight, three of the 12 nations that maintain diplomatic ties with Taiwan are Pacific Island countries.

Since the Solomon Islands switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing in 2019, China has showered the country with millions of dollars in foreign aid and investments. Last year, it handed over more than $30 million in “budgetary support.”

In 2022, China signed its first security agreement with a Pacific Island country, the Solomon Islands, granting Chinese warships access to dock and receiving logistical support. Soon afterward, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi spent two weeks unsuccessfully rallying support for a similar but regionwide proposal: the “China-Pacific Island Countries Common Development Vision,” which aimed to embed Chinese military forces across the Pacific.

While China continues to expand its influence across the Pacific, Washington has critical tools to counterbalance this trend.

One such tool is the enhancement of existing ship rider arrangements. Although Pacific Island countries may welcome Chinese investments for developmental infrastructure, they remain deeply concerned about Chinese illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing within their exclusive economic zones.

The U.S. has signed ship rider agreements with 12 Pacific Island countries, allowing the U.S. Coast Guard to conduct patrols with host-state oversight. These arrangements represent a hard-power commitment to maritime security and sovereignty. Washington should consider increasing the frequency of joint patrols and integrating them with U.S. naval deployments.

Another avenue lies in safeguarding critical infrastructure. Ports, subsea cables and airfields are strategic linchpins. If funded or controlled by Chinese entities, they risk becoming conduits for espionage or dual-use military capabilities. Washington should work with members of the Pacific Island Countries Network to ensure infrastructure funding remains free from coercive leverage.

Finally, the U.S. should deepen its engagement with the network through high-level visits and sustained diplomatic outreach. In recent years, the White House has hosted regional summits and expanded its presence by opening new embassies. Building on this momentum, the administration should continue working with Congress to ensure regular representation in the region, demonstrating that Pacific partnerships are a priority.

As China deepens its political footprint across the Pacific, the U.S. must treat engagement with Pacific Island countries as a strategic necessity. China’s assertive posture at the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting reveals a calculated effort to edge out U.S. influence and redefine the regional order on its terms.

This latest decision delivers exactly what China wants: sidelining the U.S., Taiwan and other democratic partners from a key regional platform. Washington must respond by sustaining partnerships with island nations to protect its strategic interests.

• Allen Zhang is a research assistant in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.

washingtontimes.com · The Washington Times https://www.washingtontimes.com

14. After Xi’s parade, Trump must re-engage with Asia to overturn perception of U.S. ‘chaos’

Perhaps we must change "America First "to "America First, Allies Always." Or Allies First, America Always."

Excerpts:

Regardless, surprises emanating from Washington have granted China the opportunity to portray itself as a champion of stability and norms.

“It is ironic that China wants to appear as defender of the world order … it ignores international laws,” said retired U.S. Adm. Harry Harris, citing coercive actions and territory grabs in the South and East China Seas.

Those actions might be expected to drive some capitals into U.S. arms. However, “America First” rhetoric has shaken some allies, who question U.S. commitment to their respective regions and alliances.

“There is a false narrative that says ‘America First’ means ‘America Alone,’” said Mr. Harris, who formerly led Indo-Pacific Command, and was subsequently U.S. ambassador to Seoul. “This false narrative has the possibility of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy if we don’t put ambassadors in place and engage with other nations at the leader level.”

After Xi’s parade, Trump must re-engage with Asia to overturn perception of U.S. ‘chaos’

washingtontimes.com · Andrew Salmon

By - The Washington Times - Thursday, September 11, 2025

In the wake of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s reception of world leaders at a military parade last week, the U.S. needs to reengage with the Indo-Pacific via top-level visits and diplomatic engagement, while addressing concerns generated by tariffs and “America First” rhetoric, top analysts said Thursday.

On Sept. 3, Mr. Xi hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and a host of leaders from the Global South in Beijing to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in the Pacific.

“China was trying to buttress its legitimacy both domestically and internationally,” said Daniel J. Kritenbrink, who served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Biden administration.

Mr. Kritenbrink told a panel discussion hosted by Washington think tank CSIS on Thursday that “more than anything, China was trying to present itself as a responsible actor in global affairs … the language was designed to portray China as a defender of the multilateral system and the Global South.”

That message has resonance.

Much of the world has been shaken by the Trump administration’s unilateral imposition of tariffs on imports, and the tariffs hit especially hard in the Indo-Pacific — a hotbed of export-focused, manufacturing economies.

The early shock has now passed.

“Friends in the region said it was relative tariff rates that were most important,” Mr. Kritenbrink said. “Most of Asia is in the 15-20% range, so it is seen as mostly manageable.”

He warned, however, that related details, particularly on investment packages, still need to be reconciled.

Regardless, surprises emanating from Washington have granted China the opportunity to portray itself as a champion of stability and norms.

“It is ironic that China wants to appear as defender of the world order … it ignores international laws,” said retired U.S. Adm. Harry Harris, citing coercive actions and territory grabs in the South and East China Seas.

Those actions might be expected to drive some capitals into U.S. arms. However, “America First” rhetoric has shaken some allies, who question U.S. commitment to their respective regions and alliances.

“There is a false narrative that says ‘America First’ means ‘America Alone,’” said Mr. Harris, who formerly led Indo-Pacific Command, and was subsequently U.S. ambassador to Seoul. “This false narrative has the possibility of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy if we don’t put ambassadors in place and engage with other nations at the leader level.”

Mr. Trump has not yet appointed ambassadors to Seoul or Sydney, nor has he met Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

“We have to have the right messenger and when we don’t have ambassadors in place, it sends the wrong message,” Mr. Harris said. “That creates an opportunity for China to say, ‘We are here and you can’t trust America.’”

“President Xi was trying to send the signal that there is a vacuum in international affairs, there is instability and chaos coming out of Washington,” Mr. Kritenbrink said. “Let’s make sure … we have a steady pace of senior U.S. officials traveling to the region … to prove and demonstrate our commitment.”

It remains unclear whether Mr. Trump will attend two major multilaterals, both set for October: The East Asia Summit in Malaysia and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in South Korea.

Last week’s parade in China — optically, at least — showcased a convergence between Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang. But matters did not go all Mr. Xi’s way.

The event showed “a cementing of this ‘Axis of Upheaval’ — a cool term that is better than most of the terms bandied about,” Mr. Harris said. “But let’s not hyperventilate. The greatest strategist in Beijing was [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi.”

Mr. Modi attended the Tianjin SCO meet, but not the Beijing parade.

“He conveyed the message he wanted to convey and did not attend the parade, which would have created an entirely different visual dynamic,” Mr. Harris continued.

Analysts have fretted that the Modi-Trump relationship has become so toxic that the world’s largest democracy may drift away from Washington toward Beijing.

However, others say that India’s ideological DNA, and strategic and territorial differences with China, are restraining factors.

“I think there will be real limits to what will happen between India and China,” said Mr. Kritenbrink. “Modi probably sent signals to Washington about strategic autonomy.”

• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.

washingtontimes.com · Andrew Salmon

15. Marine Corps reaches deal with Palantir for Maven Smart System

Marine Corps reaches deal with Palantir for Maven Smart System

The technology will enhance intelligence, targeting and decision-making for joint fires integration, according to Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith.

Jon Harper

defensescoop.com · Jon Harper · September 10, 2025

The Marine Corps is acquiring a new enterprise license from Palantir Technologies as it looks to proliferate the company’s AI-powered Maven Smart System capability throughout the force, the service announced Wednesday.

The contract was finalized Aug. 15 in partnership with the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office, the Silicon Valley-headquartered Defense Innovation Unit, and the Army Research Lab, according to a press release.

The announcement did not disclose the dollar value of the contract, and the Marine Corps has not yet provided that information.

Last year, the Defense Department inked a $480 million, five-year IDIQ contract with Palantir for the MSS technology. A few months ago, DOD revealed its decision to increase that contract ceiling to nearly $1.3 billion through 2029, to meet the “growing demand” for the tool.

The Marine Corps’ latest pursuit of these types of capabilities comes as the U.S. military is pursuing a warfighting construct known as Combined Joint-All Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, with the aim of better connecting its sensors, shooters and data flows through a unified network.

“MSS is a mission command application (MCA) and data integration platform that aggregates data across Service and Joint C2 technology stacks to share a live, synchronized view of the battlespace,” officials wrote in Wednesday’s press release. “This enables rapid sensor-to-shooter engagements through a fully digital workflow, leveraging automation and AI-driven tools for advanced target management.”

Under the new deal, Fleet Marine Force units will have expanded access to Maven Smart System licensing down to the tactical level within each major subordinate command, and the supporting establishment will also use it to “support training, integration testing, and reach-back support,” per the release.

In a statement, Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said the MSS capability will enhance intelligence, targeting and decision-making for joint fires integration and maritime domain awareness.

Lt. Gen. Jerry Carter, deputy commandant for information, added that Marines will “continue to look for opportunities to leverage AI and other emerging capabilities at speed and scale.”

Written by Jon Harper

Jon Harper is Managing Editor of DefenseScoop, the Scoop News Group’s online publication focused on the Pentagon and its pursuit of new capabilities. He leads an award-winning team of journalists in providing breaking news and in-depth analysis on military technology and the ways in which it is shaping how the Defense Department operates and modernizes. You can also follow him on X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter) @Jon_Harper_

defensescoop.com · Jon Harper · September 10, 2025

16 Russia Is Losing the War—Just Not to Ukraine

So what happens next if Russia loses the war in Ukraine? Are we planning for that? What happens if Putain fails? What comes next and are we prepared for that? Who is planning for that eventuality?

Also, are we just going to sit by while Russia tries to pound Ukraine into oblivion?

Excerpts:

Both Russia’s defenders and its enemies suggest that a successful campaign in Ukraine will somehow produce a stronger, reinvigorated Russia capable of posing an immediate threat to Europe and beyond. But what exactly would Moscow have “won”? An angry, revanchist neighbor; a more unified, hostile Europe; a ruined economy; a gutted army; reduced international influence; and a boss in Beijing. That is not victory but self-inflicted decline.

This is perhaps why the Kremlin seems so uninterested in ending the war. A compromise peace would not expose a defeat on the battlefield but rather something far worse: the absence of any larger strategy. As one economist put it, “The Russian regime has no incentive to end the war and deal with that kind of economic reality. So it cannot afford to win the war, nor can it afford to lose.”

In sacrificing its global influence for the chance to spend the past year pulverizing the previously unheard-of city of Pokrovsk in the Donbas, Russia has proved not its resilience but its near irrelevance. Russia has not rediscovered its imperial destiny. It has discovered only that it can still destroy—and that destruction is just about all that its foreign policy has to offer.

Russia Is Losing the War—Just Not to Ukraine

A war meant to catalyze national revival has instead become a case study in national self-harm.

By Jeremy Shapiro

The Atlantic · Jeremy Shapiro · September 10, 2025

Vladimir Putin, we’ve been told since the start of the war in Ukraine, has goals that extend well beyond territory: He seeks to upend the post–Cold War international order, to reconstruct the Soviet sphere of influence, and to allow Russia to reassume its rightful position as a world power equal to the United States. Bilateral summits, such as the recent one between Donald Trump and Putin in Anchorage, offer a symbolic recognition of that aspiration—as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov highlighted not so subtly by showing up in Alaska wearing a CCCP (U.S.S.R.) sweatshirt.

But summits and sweatshirts won’t make Russia a superpower. Only a credible show of strength can do that. The war in Ukraine was meant to supply this, but it has instead become a slow-motion demonstration of Russia’s decline—less a catalyst of national revival than a case study in national self-harm.

Moscow has devoted considerable resources, manpower, and political will to its invasion of the country next door. In purely military terms, it has managed not to lose and may even be eking its way toward some sort of attritional victory in the Donbas. But even if it consolidates its territorial gains and keeps Ukraine out of NATO, Russia will have won only a pyrrhic victory, mortgaging its future for the sake of a few bombed-out square kilometers. In other words, Russia is effectively losing the war in Ukraine—not to Ukraine, but to everyone else.

Read: Did the White House not understand what Putin was really offering?

In virtually any likely end-of-war scenario, Ukraine will remain a hostile, Western-armed neighbor—a permanent sucking wound on Russia’s western flank. Europe will continue to embargo Russian goods and build its energy future without Russia’s Gazprom. The Russian army, having shown itself moderately adaptable to modern warfare, will nonetheless be gutted of equipment, bereft of its best cadres, and reliant on foreign suppliers. To reconstitute it will take years and many billions of dollars. By then, Russia’s supposed mastery of modern drone warfare will probably be obsolete.

While Russia obsesses over Ukraine, its erstwhile friends and clients are quietly slipping away. In Africa, Wagner’s heirs struggle to hold their franchises together, and China and the Gulf states are buying up influence, drawing from far deeper pockets. In the Middle East, Moscow’s old claim to be an indispensable broker appears totally vacuous.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Syria. Moscow once celebrated its involvement in that country’s civil war as part of a “Russian resurgence” that would restore the country to the ranks of great powers, showing that it could project influence and outmaneuver Washington in the Middle East. Now Syria has become a symbol of overstretch. The Bashar al-Assad regime, whose survival Putin once touted as existential for Russia, disappeared with barely a murmur from Moscow, leaving Turkey, Israel, the Gulf States, and the United States to carve up influence in the land it once ruled.

The South Caucasus were once Moscow’s backyard playground: Azerbaijan and Armenia long depended on Russia for security guarantees, arms supplies, and mediation of their conflicts. Russia’s implicit promise to Armenia was that its membership in the Collective Security Treaty Organization and its deep ties with the Russian military (as well as the Russian peacekeepers deployed on the disputed territory) would ensure protection against Azerbaijani aggression. But in 2020 and again 2023, Azerbaijan routed Armenia in the territory contested between the two states, showing how little weight Russian promises carried. Now the United States is negotiating peace between the two countries—something unimaginable even four years ago.

The one place Russia has effectively influenced is Europe, where NATO has expanded to include Finland and Sweden, and states have increased their military spending, courtesy of Russian belligerence. Putin appears to have engineered a strange geopolitical bargain: Moscow sacrifices its demographically scarce young men in the Donbas so that Europeans will finally buy air defenses.

At home, Russia’s wartime economy looks like a parody of Soviet stagnation, exactly what Putin warned against in the early years of his presidency. Factories churn out shells and missiles even as the rest of the world invests in artificial intelligence, green technology, and microchips. The Kremlin has succeeded in building a fortress economy, but one that is fortified against the future more than against the enemy. This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic for Russia’s prospects: a petrostate doubling down on oil and artillery in the middle of a technological revolution. The Kremlin says it’s waging a war of destiny; in reality, it’s missing the 21st century.

The clearest proof that Russia is not winning lies in Beijing. Russia is running down its stocks of precision missiles, and without access to Western components, it has grown ever more dependent on imports from China to sustain its military machine. Each missile in turns costs millions of dollars (for example, approximately $1 million to $2 million for a Kalibr cruise missile) and increases Russia’s need for fossil-fuel exports and capital. China is now Russia’s largest oil customer, accounting for nearly 40 percent of Russian fossil-fuel-export revenue in 2025 so far (at discounted rates), and has also become its main source of foreign credit; Western finance has dried up because of the sanctions.

Listen: Why the West failed the ‘Putin test’

Far from making Russia a superpower, Russia’s war against Ukraine has relegated it from would-be empire to China’s disgruntled junior partner. For Xi Jinping, this war is a gift. It is diverting Western resources and bleeding Russia, all at bargain prices. For Putin, it’s a trap.

Both Russia’s defenders and its enemies suggest that a successful campaign in Ukraine will somehow produce a stronger, reinvigorated Russia capable of posing an immediate threat to Europe and beyond. But what exactly would Moscow have “won”? An angry, revanchist neighbor; a more unified, hostile Europe; a ruined economy; a gutted army; reduced international influence; and a boss in Beijing. That is not victory but self-inflicted decline.

This is perhaps why the Kremlin seems so uninterested in ending the war. A compromise peace would not expose a defeat on the battlefield but rather something far worse: the absence of any larger strategy. As one economist put it, “The Russian regime has no incentive to end the war and deal with that kind of economic reality. So it cannot afford to win the war, nor can it afford to lose.”

In sacrificing its global influence for the chance to spend the past year pulverizing the previously unheard-of city of Pokrovsk in the Donbas, Russia has proved not its resilience but its near irrelevance. Russia has not rediscovered its imperial destiny. It has discovered only that it can still destroy—and that destruction is just about all that its foreign policy has to offer.

The Atlantic · Jeremy Shapiro · September 10, 2025

17. A New Frontier: Japan’s Deep-Sea Mining at Minamitorishima for US Rare Earth Resilience

Excerpt:

Conclusion

While technological development for mining at 6,000 meters remains a challenge, and China currently holds a cost competitiveness edge, the Minamitorishima project offers a sustainable and environmentally-conscious approach to rare earth extraction. For the United States, this project demonstrates another viable path toward domestic rare earth production, reducing reliance on unreliable Chinese imports and bolstering national economic and resource resilience. By investing in similar deep-sea exploration and extraction technologies and leveraging domestic underwater deposits, the United States can become a leader for a more resilient and diversified global supply chain for these critical materials.

A New Frontier: Japan’s Deep-Sea Mining at Minamitorishima for US Rare Earth Resilience

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/09/12/a-new-frontier-japans-deep-sea-mining-at-minamitorishima-for-us-rare-earth-resilience/

by Ian Murphy, by Aira Yoshida

09.12.2025 at 06:00am

Introduction

The United States faces a critical vulnerability in its supply chain for rare earth elements (REEs) with a dependence on China, which controls an estimated 97% of global REE production and 85-90% of rare earth magnet manufacturing. Without these REEs, modern technologies, including renewable energy technology, consumer electronics, medical devices, and advanced military hardware simply cannot be built. China’s near-monopoly presents a significant geopolitical concern that is accelerated by its demonstrated willingness to impose arbitrary export restrictions on REEs used in US military technology.

The escalating global demand for REEs is projected to increase dramatically in the coming decade, with the International Energy Agency anticipating a 40% rise in rare earth demand by 2030, driven by the accelerating transition to green technologies. This urgent need to de-risk critical supply chains and maintain technological leadership has driven the United States to explore domestic sources, even opening old mines, but it has not given adequate attention to a promising source of rare earths – deep-sea mineral deposits.

Attempts to revive traditional REE mining in the United States have faced significant hurdles, thus limiting this as an option to diversify away from Chinese sources. The reopening of the Mountain Pass rare earth mine in California has been a contentious issue. The reopening of this mine has generated several controversies, mainly centered around environmental impact and, to a lesser extent, social and economic considerations. The mine has a history of past environmental issues. In the 1980s and 1990s, its previous owner (Unocal, and later Molycorp) was responsible for numerous spills of radioactive and hazardous wastewater onto the desert floor. This resulted in significant fines and cleanup, but this legacy naturally raises concerns about the current operation’s environmental practices. Past bankruptcies and reliance on Chinese processing of mined material also pull the mine’s continuity of operations into question.

While deep-sea extraction presents a potential alternative to traditional land-based mining, the current approach and prevailing assumptions warrant re-evaluation. The current technological readiness for integrated commercial-scale deep-sea mining systems and specialized REE processing is still in experimental or early prototype stages and faces significant development hurdles. Additionally, the lack of legal clarity for deep-sea mining is a major impediment for companies pursuing large-scale extraction.

Given these challenges, it is important that the United States consider alternative models to REE extraction and processing. While public-private partnerships are actively targeting the REE processing bottleneck, a comprehensive strategy is essential. This strategy must include legal clarity for companies making decades-long financial decisions, empowerment for US government agencies to conduct much-needed site surveys and research, and strategic investments in deep-sea extraction technologies.

The Minamitorishima Project

The Minamitorishima Project in Japan presents a compelling alternative model for the United States to extract rare earth elements and diversify its industry away from reliance on China. Japan is heavily dependent on rare earth imports from China. In 2023, China supplied approximately 58.05% of the import price and about 73.23% of the import volume of rare earth metals, including scandium and yttrium. Though these figures are down from its previous high of 85% import dependence from China in 2010, the 2023 figures show that Japan is still highly reliant on China for its critical rare earth element imports. Japan began to deliberately reduce its reliance on China for its REE imports in response to Chinese economic coercion following the 2010 Senkaku Islands incident.

The Senkaku Islands incident refers to an event on September 7, 2010, when a Chinese fishing vessel was illegally fishing near the Senkaku Islands and ignored a request by the Japanese Coast Guard to stop. The fishing vessel then collided with a Japanese Coast Guard ship and the captain was arrested for obstructing public duties. In response, the Chinese government requested Japan to immediately release the captain, with the Japanese government ultimately deciding to release him on September 24, 2010. It is believed that the Chinese government implicitly suggested that it would restrict rare earth exports to Japan if it did not comply.

This incident is the first recorded time that the Chinese government has shown its willingness to use REE export restrictions as a tool of economic coercion. In response to such vulnerabilities, Japan has actively pursued a strategy to reduce its dependence on China for rare earths. This included initiatives to develop technologies for reduced rare earth usage, alternative materials, recycling, stockpiling, and expanding rights to overseas rare earth mines. The Minamitorishima project is the natural continuation of this vulnerability-reduction strategy.

Minamitorishima, located 1,950km east of Tokyo, is an island with significant rare earth deposits within Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone. In 2012, a University of Tokyo research team discovered 6.8 million tons of rare earth mud, equivalent to 230 years of Japan’s domestic demand for rare earths. By 2018, expanded surveys identified 15 types of rare earth elements totaling 16 million tons. These deposits are remarkably rich, containing an estimated 730 years’ worth of dysprosium and 420 years’ worth of terbium. The rare earth mud around Minamitorishima has a 50:50 ratio of heavy to light rare earths, unlike Chinese rare earths that have a 25:75 ratio.

This project is part of Japan’s Strategic Innovation Promotion Program, which is a collaborative effort between government agencies, the public, and the private sectors. This is a long-term plan that aims to extract and process this rare earth mud by 2028. Short-term goals include small-scale mining and mud extraction tests, primary processing tests, and large-scale mining and dredging verification tests.

The other benefit of the Minamitorishima project is a lower environmental cost. Unlike traditional rare earth mining, this rare earth mud contains minimal thorium and uranium, meaning that extraction will have a smaller environmental impact. Moreover, many of these rare earth elements can be extracted by soaking the mud in acid, which is a less intensive and wasteful process than traditional mining and processing. With a combination of shallow extraction, minimal thorium and uranium, and simple processing, the project has a significantly smaller environmental footprint compared to traditional mining.

Recommendations

To reduce their dependence on China for rare earths and safeguard national security, democratic nations must work together. The United States and Japan will be instrumental in leading this effort.

To take full advantage of their natural resource endowments, the United States and Japan will need to better collaborate on joint deep-sea mining. As it stands today, it is difficult to fully explore and extract resources on the seafloor. By improving technologies like autonomous underwater vehicles and improving rare earth processing, the two countries can create a standardized system for stable mining operations at Minamitorishima and future projects within the US EEZ.

Quad members – Japan, Australia, and India – already provide a cooperative framework. The United States can build on this existing framework to decentralize mining and processing, share rare earth stocks, and establish emergency reserves of REEs in the event of an emergency, such as economic coercion from China.

Supporting these efforts would also mean establishing international environmental standards and clarifying regulations for rare earth mining. It will be difficult to get every country on board with a new set of regulations, but setting environmental standards among allies and partners will increase stability and predictability in resource development, ultimately stabilizing rare earth prices and supply.

Conclusion

While technological development for mining at 6,000 meters remains a challenge, and China currently holds a cost competitiveness edge, the Minamitorishima project offers a sustainable and environmentally-conscious approach to rare earth extraction. For the United States, this project demonstrates another viable path toward domestic rare earth production, reducing reliance on unreliable Chinese imports and bolstering national economic and resource resilience. By investing in similar deep-sea exploration and extraction technologies and leveraging domestic underwater deposits, the United States can become a leader for a more resilient and diversified global supply chain for these critical materials.

Tags: China, China strategic influence, coercion, critical minerals, Energy Security, Influence, rare earth elements, Renewable Energy, supply chain

About The Authors

Ian Murphy
Ian Murphy, MBA, works as a China Subject Matter Expert at SecuriFense Inc., where he helps organizations understand developments in China’s economy and foreign policy. He is currently a PhD student in International Studies at Old Dominion University.
View all posts
Aira Yoshida
Aira Yoshida is a Master's student in International Studies at Old Dominion University, specializing in security with a particular focus on the intersection of domestic and Japanese international relations.

18. The Greatest Danger in the Taiwan Strait

Excerpts:

In even the best-case scenario, however, incidents are likely to occur. Establishing a feedback mechanism whereby information on dangerous encounters or stunts by individual Chinese operators get high-level attention would ensure that Beijing is more aware of individuals’ extreme actions that might cause conflict. In the 2023 B-52 incident, the U.S. Department of Defense suggested that the Chinese pilot himself was “unaware how close he came to causing a collision.” There may be no direct contact between defense officials from China and Taiwan for the time being, but U.S. officials can pass along information about the antics of individual aviators or units to Beijing. Chinese leaders have a stake in controlling escalation, which would allow the PLA to rein in its worst offenders and reduce the prospects of a war of chance.

China and Taiwan do ultimately need some level of communication to discuss crisis prevention and find off-ramps that both sides can accept without losing face. Chinese officials will not condone direct discussions with Lai because of what they perceive as his ardent pro-independence beliefs, but there is still room for backchannel conversations between Taipei and Beijing. Research institutes, for example, could be designated to pass information and offers across the strait. These channels need to be established and safeguarded in peacetime so that they can be quickly activated in a crisis, just as informal U.S.-Soviet contacts helped avert catastrophe during the Cuban missile crisis.

Washington, for its part, needs to address concerns that an alliance-like commitment to Taiwan could galvanize a much larger conflict. The United States should uphold its long-standing policy of strategic ambiguity with respect to Taiwan’s defense. The alternative, a policy of “strategic clarity” in which the United States would commit to providing immediate military assistance in a cross-strait crisis, would increase the likelihood of a war of chance by limiting Washington’s ability to determine if an incident is intentional or accidental and force the United States into an immediate and potentially escalatory response. It is thus encouraging that U.S. President Donald Trump has declined to offer specific guarantees to Taiwan.

Prevention, of course, can only go so far. The United States and Taiwan will still need to be prepared with a credible plan to prevent escalation if and when an incident occurs. What is alarming is that almost all public wargames are premised on an intentional use of force by Beijing, with little focus on how the United States and Taiwan should respond to a crisis triggered by accident. Improvisation, necessitated by a lack of preparation, would be more than dangerous. It could lead to another world-historic calamity of chance.

The Greatest Danger in the Taiwan Strait

Foreign Affairs · More by Joel Wuthnow · September 12, 2025

Even If China Avoids a War of Choice, a Miscalculation Could Spark a War of Chance

Joel Wuthnow

September 12, 2025

Soldiers loading sea mines during a military exercise in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, July 2025 Ann Wang / Reuters

JOEL WUTHNOW is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University and a co-author of China’s Quest for Military Supremacy. The views expressed here are his own.

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Tension across the Taiwan Strait has raised fears that Beijing and Taipei could soon find themselves at war. Most observers imagine two possible avenues that could lead to conflict. In a so-called war of choice, Beijing could try to capture Taiwan by force after careful consideration of the economic, military, and political risks. Such an aggressive action without explicit provocation would reflect Chinese leaders’ judgment that the island could be taken at minimal cost. Alternately, Beijing might launch a so-called war of necessity if it felt that Taiwan had crossed a political redline that permanently threatened China’s control of the island. A formal declaration of independence in Taipei, for example, would likely trigger a military response from Beijing regardless of the costs.

A third possibility, however, has received much less attention—yet may be even more likely. A war between China and Taiwan could result from an accident or miscalculation that spirals out of control. The risks of such a war of chance are high compared with other parts of the world, in part because both military forces operate in close proximity. Domestic political dynamics on both sides of the Taiwan Strait make backing down difficult. And the possibility of U.S. intervention on Taiwan’s behalf raises the stakes, which means that a chance encounter could escalate a small skirmish into a larger war.

Unlike a war of choice or a war of perceived political necessity, which can be avoided by strengthening deterrence against China and preventing Taiwan’s pursuit of de jure independence, respectively, China, Taiwan, and the United States cannot eliminate the risk of a war of chance. But shrewd statesmanship by leaders can manage it. China and Taiwan need to maintain ongoing backchannel communications to discuss crisis prevention and establish off-ramps. The United States and Taiwan, too, must increase dialogue on how to make decisions in the event of a crisis and preserve U.S. strategic ambiguity that provides space for flexible responses to potential Chinese aggression. China must also exercise military restraint and rein in fighters whose aggressive tactics could provoke further conflict. Wars of chance are by nature sudden and unpredictable, often with devastating consequences. Careful coordination could prevent one in the Taiwan Strait.

ACCIDENTS OF HISTORY

It is not difficult to envision how a war of chance could start in the Taiwan Strait. Imagine that a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fighter jet ventures too close to Taiwan. After the aircraft fails to heed repeated warnings, Taiwan’s forces shoot down the plane with surface-to-air missiles, killing the pilot. Enraged, Beijing orders the destruction of air defense batteries in retaliation, which results in the deaths of dozens of servicemembers in Taiwan’s armed forces. The United States, unsure of Beijing’s intentions, begins to mobilize for a larger conflict in the region, prompting China to ramp up mobilization of its own forces. With no party willing to back down and each interpreting the other’s moves as signs of aggression, the crisis quickly escalates.

Such a sequence has numerous historical precedents. World War I, which was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in 1914, is a classic example of how a war of chance can develop. The Austro-Hungarian Empire’s retributive demands against Serbia led Serbian ally Russia to mobilize its forces, which in turn provoked Germany to build up troops against Russia and England, another Russian ally. Within a month, a single act of violence had engulfed the entire world in war.

Wars of chance do not require acts of political violence as triggers; minor military and diplomatic incidents, too, can set them in motion. The Revolutionary War in the United States began when a British soldier in Concord, Massachusetts, opened fire on local militia forces, against orders. This accidental “shot heard ‘round the world” launched the war that led to U.S. independence. The Peloponnesian War of the fifth century BC began with a quarrel between opposing factions in the city-state of Epidamnos, in modern-day Albania, which snowballed into a clash involving the major rivals Athens and Sparta. And the Second Opium War began in 1856 when Chinese officials boarded a British vessel and arrested the crew. Unwilling to suffer the indignity of the arrest, England responded with attacks against Chinese coastal forts near Canton, culminating in a blow to the Qing dynasty remembered as a key episode in China’s “century of humiliation.”

History suggests that three main factors combine to increase the risks of a war of chance. Frequent contact between opposing military forces, such as that between British soldiers and colonial militiamen on the eve of the American Revolution, increases the chance of an incident. Internal political dynamics can make de-escalation difficult, particularly when leaders value intangibles such as prestige, honor, or preserving their or their nation’s reputation. In the 1856 incident that led to the Second Opium War, sensationalist press coverage in Britain sparked public outrage that contributed to London’s heavy-handed reprisal against the Qing empire. And mobilization by allied nations concerned about the credibility of their commitments can turn a dispute into something much more serious, as occurred between rival alliances in the Peloponnesian War and at the outbreak of World War I.

THE PERFECT STORM

All three of these factors are present in cross-strait relations today. Chinese air and naval forces are operating increasingly close to the main island of Taiwan to gradually erode the informal boundaries between China and Taiwan. In January, Chinese jets crossed the center line of the Taiwan Strait 248 times, compared with 72 times in January 2024. In April 2024, a Chinese fighter came within about 40 miles of the island—a five-minute flight to downtown Taipei. As part of the Strait Thunder military exercise in April, Chinese navy ships entered Taiwan’s 24-nautical-mile contiguous zone for the first time. Chinese Coast Guard ships have been venturing closer to territory held by Taiwan, as well, and in 2024 they arrested the crew of a Taiwan-flagged vessel near Kinmen, which is part of Taiwan but sits just off the coast of China’s Fujian Province—the exact type of incident that could spark a war of chance.

Chinese forces are likely to exert greater pressure on Taiwan in the years ahead. As Taiwan becomes accustomed to aggressive maneuvers, and such actions lose their desired effect of pressuring the island, the PLA will need to add to its coercive repertoire by taking progressively greater risks. Chinese air force sorties may encroach farther on Taiwan’s territorial airspace, and ships may close in on the island’s territorial seas, raising the risk of collisions or misperceptions of Chinese intent among Taiwan’s defenders.

If an accident does occur, finding an off-ramp will be difficult because of political considerations for leaders on both sides of the strait. No Chinese leader will want to suffer the embarrassment of backing down against what the Chinese Communist Party has long framed as a rogue secessionist movement. Nor will Beijing want to lose face by withdrawing if the United States or other foreign powers line up to defend Taiwan, because doing so would roil nationalist sentiment among a population taught that the party will defend the nation’s core interests. Taiwan’s leaders might want to be cautious in escalating tensions with China, given the relative weakness of their military force, but they would also face a political price at home if they backed down too easily, given support in Taiwan for autonomy from the mainland. (About a quarter of the island’s residents want independence now or in the future.) Anti-China protests could break out in Taiwan’s cities and embolden independence activists to press their agenda more forcefully, which would alarm Beijing.

Finally, although Taiwan has no official military allies, U.S. involvement could expand the crisis. Washington might not be able to distinguish between an accident and a provocation, or it could interpret the events as a pretext for an invasion and begin sending its own forces into the area. Strong bipartisan pressure on the White House to intervene could force the president’s hand. Worried that failure to act would make the administration look weak, embolden China, and undercut the credibility of U.S. commitment among East Asian allies such as Japan and the Philippines, the U.S. president could order rapid mobilization, which could lead to escalation and even preemptive strikes if Beijing believes it is about to face a U.S. attack.

RISKY BUSINESS

China’s reckless military actions have created another hazard that is increasing the probability of a war of chance. Beijing may intend for encroaching flights and ship transits to exert psychological pressure on Taiwan’s government, led by independence-leaning President William Lai, without causing a war, but the actions of individual aviators and sailors could unintentionally cross a line. They might veer too close to areas that Taiwan has pledged to defend or accidentally collide with Taiwan-flagged planes or boats. Beijing would then be stuck in an unintentional escalatory spiral from which it cannot escape.

The 2001 collision between a J-8 fighter from the Chinese navy and a U.S. EP-3 reconnaissance plane in the South China Sea is instructive. The Chinese pilot died and the U.S. plane made an emergency landing on Hainan, an island province of China in the South China Sea. Although the Chinese pilot’s poor airmanship was responsible for the crash, Beijing could not easily back down because of nationalist outrage among the Chinese population. China detained the U.S. crew for ten days and released them only when the United States issued a formal statement of “regret.”

The incident might have served as a cautionary tale for Beijing. Yet similar encounters have continued across the region, many of them driven by the brashness or arrogance of individual PLA pilots or crews. In October 2023, a J-11 fighter flew within ten feet of a U.S. B-52 bomber at night and in poor visibility over the South China Sea. In June 2024, Chinese sailors boarded a Philippine naval vessel that was attempting to resupply troops at the disputed Second Thomas Shoal, destroying the ship’s communications and navigation equipment and seriously injuring a Philippine marine in the process. In August, a Chinese Coast Guard ship collided with a ship from China’s own navy as both pursued a Philippine Coast Guard vessel in the South China Sea.

Perhaps the most serious clash in recent memory was the brutal melee that broke out along the disputed Sino-Indian border in the Galwan Valley, high in the Himalayan Mountains, in 2020. Chinese and Indian forces accused each other of precipitating the clash by engaging in what each side saw as aggressive infrastructure-building and troop movements. Twenty Indian soldiers and more than 40 Chinese soldiers were killed.

Fortunately, none of these near misses triggered a war. Yet with the uniquely fraught geography, history, and politics of the strait, a similar incident involving Taiwan and China could.

TALK ISN’T CHEAP

Preventing a war of chance between China and Taiwan requires reducing the opportunities for interactions that could be misinterpreted as aggressive acts. The PLA needs to exercise caution in how close airplanes and naval and Coast Guard ships come to Taiwan and its offshore islands such as Kinmen and Matsu. The PLA should assume that probing Taiwan’s defenses is a dangerous game with potentially fatal consequences. Meanwhile, Taiwan’s military should exercise prudence in its rules of engagement and not assume that every close call is intentional. Leaders on both sides of the strait, especially Chinese President Xi Jinping, can help by giving clear internal messages to their forces they will not tolerate rogue displays of showmanship from service members.

In even the best-case scenario, however, incidents are likely to occur. Establishing a feedback mechanism whereby information on dangerous encounters or stunts by individual Chinese operators get high-level attention would ensure that Beijing is more aware of individuals’ extreme actions that might cause conflict. In the 2023 B-52 incident, the U.S. Department of Defense suggested that the Chinese pilot himself was “unaware how close he came to causing a collision.” There may be no direct contact between defense officials from China and Taiwan for the time being, but U.S. officials can pass along information about the antics of individual aviators or units to Beijing. Chinese leaders have a stake in controlling escalation, which would allow the PLA to rein in its worst offenders and reduce the prospects of a war of chance.

China and Taiwan do ultimately need some level of communication to discuss crisis prevention and find off-ramps that both sides can accept without losing face. Chinese officials will not condone direct discussions with Lai because of what they perceive as his ardent pro-independence beliefs, but there is still room for backchannel conversations between Taipei and Beijing. Research institutes, for example, could be designated to pass information and offers across the strait. These channels need to be established and safeguarded in peacetime so that they can be quickly activated in a crisis, just as informal U.S.-Soviet contacts helped avert catastrophe during the Cuban missile crisis.

Washington, for its part, needs to address concerns that an alliance-like commitment to Taiwan could galvanize a much larger conflict. The United States should uphold its long-standing policy of strategic ambiguity with respect to Taiwan’s defense. The alternative, a policy of “strategic clarity” in which the United States would commit to providing immediate military assistance in a cross-strait crisis, would increase the likelihood of a war of chance by limiting Washington’s ability to determine if an incident is intentional or accidental and force the United States into an immediate and potentially escalatory response. It is thus encouraging that U.S. President Donald Trump has declined to offer specific guarantees to Taiwan.

Prevention, of course, can only go so far. The United States and Taiwan will still need to be prepared with a credible plan to prevent escalation if and when an incident occurs. What is alarming is that almost all public wargames are premised on an intentional use of force by Beijing, with little focus on how the United States and Taiwan should respond to a crisis triggered by accident. Improvisation, necessitated by a lack of preparation, would be more than dangerous. It could lead to another world-historic calamity of chance.

Foreign Affairs · More by Joel Wuthnow · September 12, 2025

19. How to Build a Post-American Liberal Order – The World’s Democracies Must Work Together—and Constrain Washington

Excerpts:

Clearly, democratic states have many ways they can cooperate to protect themselves. But in the long term, they should aim beyond simple self-preservation. They should also look for ways to put autocratic states on the back foot. Doing so will not be easy, especially if Washington becomes a real foe. Yet with luck, the United States will eventually emerge from its flirtation with authoritarianism, and they can position themselves well for when that moment occurs.

To succeed, however, the democratic world will have to pick its battles. In practice, that means the most coherent bloc of democracies—Europe—should focus on the weakest of the three main autocratic powers—Russia. Even without the assistance of Asian democracies, Europe has a major economic and technological advantage over Moscow, which is a sclerotic and overrated power. If Europe sensibly and effectively rearms and invests in strategic industries, it can create military forces far superior to those of the Kremlin.

It would therefore behoove this new Europe to do to Russia exactly what Russia has been trying to do to other states (with significant success) over the last few years: destabilize its society and weaken the political legitimacy of its rulers. European states should fund Russian opposition groups and individuals willing to stand up to Putin’s dictatorship. They should also consider seizing Russia’s shadow fleet of uninsured tankers, which often sail in European waters, and shooting down Russian drones when they encroach on democratic Europe’s airspace, as regularly occurs. Most of all, European states need to redouble their efforts to help Ukraine emerge from its war in the best shape possible.

In this way, European states could transform what seems like a weak position into a stronger one. And a vibrant, free, and technologically advanced Europe that can stand on its own two feet will be infinitely more attractive, especially to young Russians, than Putin’s corrupt regime. Europe must present itself as being in opposition to everything Putin stands for. If it can do that, the continent might persuade younger Russians to opt for a European future, which could, in time, lead to the fall of the country’s current system. And if Europe can break Russia’s dictatorship and consolidate democratic rule across the whole continent, it would gain the power to support democracies in other places where it is now in retreat. A strategy of democratic survival, in other words, will eventually be transformed into one of democratic expansion.

If the United States does eventually return to its senses, it can help these states build on the progress they’ve made by institutionalizing their cooperation. Washington will still be best positioned to bring Asian and European democracies together and turn their loose association into a more formal alliance, given its historical connections to each. But the United States will never again, and should never again, be trusted to lead the free world. It could convene this grouping, but it could not helm it. After all, the world’s other democratic countries will not only have saved freedom without the United States. They will have saved democracy from it.

How to Build a Post-American Liberal Order

Foreign Affairs · More by Phillips P. O’Brien · September 12, 2025

The World’s Democracies Must Work Together—and Constrain Washington

Phillips P. O'Brien

September 12, 2025

Sunset at the National Mall, Washington, D.C., October 2024 Jose Luis Gonzalez / Reuters

PHILLIPS P. O’BRIEN is Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews.

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The United States used to be known as the “leader of the free world”— a mostly self-proclaimed but still widely resonant title that revealed how Americans viewed themselves and how allies judged their country. Although major democracies in Europe and East Asia at times chafed under U.S. dominance, they accepted Washington’s strategic supremacy. Starting in 1945, the United States’ allies adjusted to living in a U.S.-dominated world and believed that the country would protect them in the event of war.

Those days might be over. In the first seven months of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second administration, Washington has weakened its defense commitments around the world. It has, for example, questioned NATO’s Article 5 (which requires NATO members to assist others under attack), launched a tariff war with practically every country, and repeatedly threatened to cut off support for Ukraine. Before, U.S. allies tailored their defense plans and many of their international policy positions to curry favor with American officials. Today, Washington’s allies are contemplating a world where the United States can no longer be trusted to provide for their security or to uphold the rules-based order it spent almost a century constructing.

The risks emanating from Washington go beyond abandonment. Trump is not only pulling away from the United States’ traditional partners; he is flirting with working directly against them. Trump has made it known for years that he often prefers engaging with dictators—including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping—to engaging with democracies. Since returning to office, for instance, he has routinely spoken with Putin and discussed carving up Ukraine. The summit in August in Anchorage, at which Trump welcomed Putin on a red carpet and with warm remarks, is only the most recent example. Other major voices in the Republican Party are making it clear that, at a minimum, they no longer feel bound to defend democracy around the world. U.S. Vice President JD Vance has said the United States is “done with the funding of the Ukraine war business” and openly called for Europeans to support far-right forces across their continent. Republicans are also weakening the foundations of democratic rule in the United States. Trump and his allies are redrawing the boundaries of House seats to protect their congressional majorities, firing government employees because they do not like the results of nonpartisan research, constantly issuing unlawful executive orders, and bullying the media and universities. This, too, can hardly be comforting for the democratic allies that believed Washington led the “free world.”

Many of these states have tried to pretend that this problem will go away. They have worked to ingratiate themselves with the Trump administration, lavishly praising the president. But Trump has continued to threaten them and weaken their bonds with Washington. The strategy of appeasing Trump, in other words, could well fail. Instead, it might make sense for states committed to democracy and what is left of the old rules-based order to reimagine their international relations, insulate themselves from the United States’ whims, and try to generally protect their own freedoms in this deeply unstable time. Such an effort would require that they build far stronger economic and defense ties with each other than they have now and make a much greater (and more expensive) commitment to their own security. It will be a tough endeavor. But it could be the only way for these countries to save democracy at home—and perhaps help it spread again.

AUTHORITARIAN TURN

In both his terms in office, Trump has been enthusiastic about authoritarian leaders. He has repeatedly praised North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. He has cheered on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. All the while, he has blasted democratic heads of state. He repeatedly denigrated former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for example, whom he labeled “governor” of the United States’ “fifty-first state.” And he appears to see authoritarian governance as the model he wants to emulate. In August, Trump went so far as to say that he believes many Americans would prefer to have a dictator in charge of their country.

The biggest beneficiaries of Trump’s decision to reorient the United States away from its historic allies are China and Russia. Although one of the justifications for his desire to improve relations with Putin is that he might drive China and Russia apart, Trump seems more keen to work with the two autocracies than to try to split them. Recently, Trump has signaled this to Beijing in several ways. He has said, for example, that he expects China and the United States will develop a “great relationship.” He frequently praises Xi. And although Trump was happy to heap tariffs on India for buying too much discounted Russian oil, he has not used this reasoning to impose similarly sizable tariffs on China, which buys even more.

There is a seeming logic behind Trump’s decision to turn away from democratic states and toward dictatorial ones: a desire to establish three spheres of influence that encompass most of the world. The first is the Americas, where Trump has been avowedly expansionist. (Democratic Denmark accused him of trying to destabilize Danish rule in Greenland earlier this year.) The second is China and the Eastern Pacific. And the third is Russia and Europe.

The risks emanating from Washington go beyond abandonment.

The result would be a new Dreikaiserbund, or Three Emperors League—the pact between Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany in the 1870s and 1880s. It presents perhaps the greatest change to the global balance of power since World War II. Washington’s democratic allies in Asia, Europe, and North America would no longer be protected by the United States. As a result, they would have to remake everything about their foreign policies (and probably their economic and political systems) to survive, especially as Washington becomes an active agent in attempts to destroy their democratic independence. Between China and the United States, liberal states would have to protect themselves against the two largest economies in the world and the two most powerful militaries. Add Russia to the mix, and democracies would be confronting three powers with many more nuclear weapons than the rest of the world combined.

Moreover, the surviving democratic states would in no way be a coherent bloc. The Pacific democracies—Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan—often collaborate but also experience bouts of tension. Canada stands alone. The democracies of the developing world, such as Brazil, frequently disagree with all the wealthy ones. The only truly organized bloc is what might best be termed European NATO.

The rich and technologically advanced democracies of Europe, North America, and the Pacific have a history of cooperation. But that is to a large degree because of their common links to the United States. It is hard to imagine them acting as an alliance. European states, for example, would find it all but impossible to deploy adequate military forces to the Pacific to help defend Taiwan. It is also hard to see the Pacific democracies fighting to defend Canada, even though that country is geographically much closer to many of them than is Europe. In fact, the different groupings all have more economic ties with illiberal states than they do with each other. Japan, South Korea, and even Taiwan trade much more with China than with any other country.

SAME BOAT

But even if the wealthy democratic states do not act as members of one alliance, they can better coordinate their actions to provide each other with both immediate and longer-term support. They can, for instance, help each other construct the kinds of armed forces required to deter antidemocratic forces. They can begin by addressing one enormous weakness—their deficit of nuclear weapons. Without Washington’s arsenal, the only nuclear weapons liberal democracies possess are in the hands of the British and the French. And both these arsenals are very small and very much based on U.S. technology.

Other liberal states will need to construct nuclear deterrents of their own. To do so, they will have to cooperate. Consider the Europeans. The continent will be able to build nuclear warheads quite easily. But it will struggle to build delivery systems without outside help. The Pacific democracies, however, have been working on different conventional missile systems that could easily be repurposed for nuclear weapons. Japan, for instance, is constructing a long-range conventional strike capacity. By quietly working together, the Pacific democracies could help the European ones construct an effective nuclear deterrent. In exchange, the European democracies could help the Asia-Pacific states develop nuclear warheads and nuclear weapons maintenance programs, as well as share best practices on how to keep such weapons secure.

Nuclear cooperation could then expand into cooperation on conventional military systems, which would exponentially increase the value of the massive investments in defense that all the democratic states will have to make. (Right now, these countries are dangerously reliant on the United States for advanced weaponry.) In certain areas, such as shipbuilding, both the European and the Pacific democracies are superior to the United States, and they could help each other keep pace with the shifting nature of war. Right now, the shape of militaries seems to be changing from a reliance on expensive legacy systems, such as tanks and big warships, toward smaller, cheaper ones. Warships, accordingly, may need to be reduced in size and become platforms for launching large numbers of smaller, autonomous weapons. In that case, European and Pacific democracies can use their expertise to develop new ships in tandem.

Other liberal states will need to construct nuclear deterrents.

Democracies could also help each other secure more of the raw materials essential for building strong armed forces. Illiberal leaders are fond of cutting off raw materials to bend states to their will; China, for example, dominates the supply chains for rare-earth minerals and has repeatedly threatened to stop sending them to states that undermine its interests. The only way democratic states can contest such power is to make their resources available to each other. Fortunately, three geographically big democracies—Australia, Canada, and Ukraine—are well endowed with raw materials, including rare-earth minerals. These countries could strike trade deals with other liberal states that help everyone involved build up their militaries and grow richer.

When it comes to economic cooperation, democracies should not limit themselves to raw materials. Trade helps economies grow, and trade between liberal democracies can prove especially valuable because these states have something illiberal ones don’t: the rule of law. Democratic states have contracts enforced by their judiciaries, relatively reliable patent systems, and other checks to provide for a more trustworthy business environment. As a result, they will have an easier time attracting investment. If liberal states invest more in each other and less in autocracies, the rule of law could give them an even greater material advantage, as corruption in other authoritarian countries slows growth. That is most apparent in China and Russia, where graft is already routine and thus already suppresses economic activity. But even the United States has recently been weakening its anti-corruption laws, and top American officials are becoming easier to pay. Trump, for instance, has created a cryptocurrency that people hoping for presidential favors can purchase. As such dealings become regularized in Washington, democratic states that support legal standards will become better options for commerce.

Not all democracies will benefit equally from this new economic geography—or be equally resilient to authoritarian attacks. The Canadian economy, for instance, is enmeshed with that of the United States: Canada does about two-thirds of all its international trade with its southern neighbor. Ottawa is also extremely vulnerable to U.S. pressure, given that Canada’s long land border is impossible to defend with conventional forces. Canada should thus try to avoid provoking the United States, such as by developing nuclear weapons. (If Washington continues down its current dark path, however, Ottawa will have to consider the nuclear option.) But although Canadians should probably not go out of their way to antagonize Trump, they must keep strongly rebuffing his attempts to annex their country and must strengthen relations with democratic Asian and European states. Most notably, Canadians have discussed boosting direct defense ties with Europe—bypassing the United States.

DEFENSE TO OFFENSE

Clearly, democratic states have many ways they can cooperate to protect themselves. But in the long term, they should aim beyond simple self-preservation. They should also look for ways to put autocratic states on the back foot. Doing so will not be easy, especially if Washington becomes a real foe. Yet with luck, the United States will eventually emerge from its flirtation with authoritarianism, and they can position themselves well for when that moment occurs.

To succeed, however, the democratic world will have to pick its battles. In practice, that means the most coherent bloc of democracies—Europe—should focus on the weakest of the three main autocratic powers—Russia. Even without the assistance of Asian democracies, Europe has a major economic and technological advantage over Moscow, which is a sclerotic and overrated power. If Europe sensibly and effectively rearms and invests in strategic industries, it can create military forces far superior to those of the Kremlin.

It would therefore behoove this new Europe to do to Russia exactly what Russia has been trying to do to other states (with significant success) over the last few years: destabilize its society and weaken the political legitimacy of its rulers. European states should fund Russian opposition groups and individuals willing to stand up to Putin’s dictatorship. They should also consider seizing Russia’s shadow fleet of uninsured tankers, which often sail in European waters, and shooting down Russian drones when they encroach on democratic Europe’s airspace, as regularly occurs. Most of all, European states need to redouble their efforts to help Ukraine emerge from its war in the best shape possible.

In this way, European states could transform what seems like a weak position into a stronger one. And a vibrant, free, and technologically advanced Europe that can stand on its own two feet will be infinitely more attractive, especially to young Russians, than Putin’s corrupt regime. Europe must present itself as being in opposition to everything Putin stands for. If it can do that, the continent might persuade younger Russians to opt for a European future, which could, in time, lead to the fall of the country’s current system. And if Europe can break Russia’s dictatorship and consolidate democratic rule across the whole continent, it would gain the power to support democracies in other places where it is now in retreat. A strategy of democratic survival, in other words, will eventually be transformed into one of democratic expansion.

If the United States does eventually return to its senses, it can help these states build on the progress they’ve made by institutionalizing their cooperation. Washington will still be best positioned to bring Asian and European democracies together and turn their loose association into a more formal alliance, given its historical connections to each. But the United States will never again, and should never again, be trusted to lead the free world. It could convene this grouping, but it could not helm it. After all, the world’s other democratic countries will not only have saved freedom without the United States. They will have saved democracy from it.

Foreign Affairs · More by Phillips P. O’Brien · September 12, 2025

20. The Importance of the Battle of the Yalu

Of course the Yalu River is known in Korea as the Amnokgang (Amnok RIver). I mention that because this excellent article or "battle study" illustrates both the geographic and political importance of the Korean peninsula both in the 19th Century and still today. It was connected to so much then as it is today. What happened on the Korean peninsula had regional effects in the 19th century and I like to say today that what happens on the Korean peninsula (and in the region) will have global effects. Yes I am showing my bias.

And of course history matters and it is surely rhyming today.

The Importance of the Battle of the Yalu

Tommy Jamison

September 12, 2025

warontherocks.com · September 12, 2025

Editor’s Note: This is part of a new series of essays entitled “Battle Studies,” which seeks, through the study of military history, to demonstrate how past lessons about strategy, operations, and tactics apply to current defense challenges.

The Battle of the Yalu on September 17, 1894, set the conditions for Japanese victory in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895). The region — if not the world — has been dealing with the ramifications ever since. Strategically, Japanese success guaranteed sea control for an expeditionary assault on Korea and China. Geopolitically, the battle upset assumptions about hierarchies of prestige in East Asia and, more tangibly, led to the Japanese annexation of Taiwan. Technologically speaking, the battle offered a real-world test for novel and largely untried weapons: armored battleships, protected cruisers, and “quick-firing guns.” A globally contested war of words followed, as officials across Europe and the United States attempted to derive useful “lessons” from this natural experiment in modern war.

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Strategic Context: One Mountain, Two Tigers

While ostensibly sparked by a rebellion in Korea, the First Sino-Japanese War ultimately grew out of friction between the Meiji Japanese and Qing Chinese empires dating back a generation — if not centuries. In 1874, a Japanese naval expedition to Taiwan shocked Chinese officials and catalyzed a bilateral arms race between China and Japan, one every bit as dynamic as the 19th-century Anglo-French race, albeit on a smaller scale. “Self-strengthening” movements in both empires relied on the acquisition of foreign technology and expertise to build up national power. What the Qing called “strong ships and powerful cannons” were key components of that larger effort. After years of buying ships and organizing armies, both Japan and China seemed well-prepared for war in the 1890s. When a political crisis in Korea triggered Japanese and Chinese intervention on the peninsula, long-running tensions bubbled over into overt hostilities.

The core challenge for the Imperial Japanese Navy was to land forces on mainland Asia. Doing so required control of the sea, and control of the sea necessitated the defeat of the Qing Empire’s North Sea Fleet. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s Influence on Sea Power upon History was not translated into Japanese until 1896, but the principles of concentrated fleet engagement and decisive action to achieve sea control already resonated with officers in the Imperial Japanese Navy. In the late summer of 1894, the belligerents deployed their navies to the Yellow Sea. After months of shadowboxing (mostly owing to political restrictions on how far east Chinese ships could steam), the two fleets joined off the Korean coast near the mouth of the Yalu River. As they closed to engage, regional preponderance in Northeast Asia was on the line. The Chinese expression “one mountain cannot hold two tigers” sums up the general situation well.

Most international observers agreed that the Chinese appeared, superficially at least, to be the dominant force. As late as 1891, the Chinese North Sea Fleet had “awed” the Japanese on a port visit to Nagasaki. But appearances — or simple comparisons of orders of battle — can be deceiving. Since the late 1880s, Qing officials had siphoned off naval funds for pet projects. Contemporaneously, and by sharp contrast, the Japanese parliament authorized a disciplined naval build-up, seizing rapid technological changes to catch up with China’s order of battle. The naval race created a security dilemma that, like many naval races, soon contributed to the outbreak of war.

The Battle: Testing Two Modernizations

Contemporary sources disagree on the exact composition of the belligerent fleets, but in effect, a dozen Chinese and Japanese warships met during the engagement. The Chinese counted on an older (built primarily in 1882–1887) and heterogeneous fleet, organized around two ironclad battleships. These ships, the Dingyuan and Zhenyuan, were larger and better armed than anything in the Japanese arsenal. The Japanese fleet was composed of armored or protected cruisers, but most had a more recent vintage (post-1890) and were equipped with “quick-firing guns” capable of shooting five projectiles per minute under combat conditions. How the two fleets — one old and armed with battleships, the other new and composed of quick-firing cruisers — would perform defied prediction. Battle was the only real way to find out who had won a generation-long naval race.

The Chinese commander Ding Ruchang, onboard the battleship Dingyuan, organized his forces into a line abreast with the two ironclads at the center flanked by weaker cruisers and gunboats. In response, the Japanese squadron under Vice Admiral Itō Sukeyuki formed a column, driving toward the Chinese as though crossing a “T.” As he neared Ding’s forces, Itō split his force in two. The faster “flying squadron” veered off at an angle to attack the weaker ships on the exposed right wing of Ding’s line. Itō’s main force then circled the Chinese fleet, attacking the left end of the Chinese formation. From their position at the center of the Chinese line, Ding and his battleships struggled to engage the more mobile Japanese. A breakdown in Chinese command and control exacerbated Ding’s predicament. The Japanese destroyed four Chinese ships and riddled the rest with shell fire. Two smaller Chinese vessels simply fled. As night fell, Itō broke contact, allowing what remained of the North Sea Fleet to escape. The big ironclads Dingyuan and Zhenyuan limped back to the shelter of Chinese port defenses but were badly damaged by artillery and fire.

Chinese officials feebly called this a “victory,” but at best, the Chinese North Sea Fleet survived (barely) as a “fleet in being” bottled up in the Bohai Sea. For several weeks, this rump force nursed its wounds at the northern Chinese port of Weihaiwei. In February 1895, Japanese torpedo boats and amphibious assaults against Weihaiwei finished the job, capturing or destroying the North Sea Fleet in its entirety. Ding committed suicide. When combined with the collapse of Chinese armies at Pyongyang on September 15, 1894, the Japanese victory at the Yalu was decisive — operationally and eventually strategically.

Sketch Map of the Battle of the Yalu River, Century Illustrated (1895)

Turning Point of the War

Over the next months, Japanese forces pressed their advantages home. Like a reverse Trafalgar (1805), the Japanese victory enabled a maritime state to attack a continental power. Amphibious armies carried out operations against Qing continental forces, which performed only marginally better than the Imperial Chinese Navy. Japanese troops crossed the Yalu in October 1894, bringing the war to mainland China. Facing collapse, the Chinese dispatched negotiators to Shimonoseki, Japan to handle the peacemaking. Li Hongzhang, the head of this delegation, had spent the previous decades building the North Sea Fleet as a tool to resist foreign aggression and recover Chinese sovereignty. In the wake of its defeat, he made his way to Japan to oversee yet another humiliation in a century full of setbacks.

The resulting Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) ended the war and came at a steep cost to the Chinese — and Li Hongzhang personally. After arriving with the unenviable task of negotiating a settlement, a Japanese radical shot him in the face. He survived (refusing surgery in order to get on with the deliberations), but centuries of Chinese hegemony in Eastern Eurasia did not. To get peace, Li signed away a massive indemnity, recognized Korean independence from any tributary relationship with China, and ceded Taiwan to Japanese colonization, though insurgency and disease meant Japan’s occupation of the island would cost many lives. He would have given up more had France, Germany, and Russia not intervened — no doubt fearing Japan’s rise as a regional power — to compel Meiji negotiators to give up maximalist claims.

Even when moderated, Japan’s acquisition of Taiwan and the Penghu islands alongside its growing influence in Korea represented a major acceleration in a program of imperial aggrandizement. The annexation of Okinawa (1879) brought Meiji imperialism to the doorstep of continental Asia. In 1895, the Japanese “joined the imperialist club” by taking Taiwan at the expense of the wobbling Qing Empire. Japanese success in the Russo-Japanese War a decade later (1904-1905) followed much the same playbook: victory at sea (the Battle of Tsushima) followed by an expeditionary campaign against another continental power. On a slightly longer timeline, the annexation of Korea in 1910 and the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 trace their roots to the armies Japan dispatched to Northeast Asia after victory at the Yalu in 1894.

Most broadly, the Chinese defeat at the Yalu was a challenge to the legitimacy of the Qing Dynasty. The Battle of the Yalu was a test of self-strengthening or the Foreign Affairs Movement: an effort to build military and economic power to recover lost sovereignty. In an age that so commonly reified navies into markers of civilizational standing, the failure of the North Sea Fleet not only discredited the movement’s leaders, it wrecked Chinese pretensions of regional hegemony and cultural superiority. In the months and years that followed, many ordinary Chinese and some future revolutionaries looked at the Qing defeat and wondered aloud, “What have you done for me lately?” The Xinhai Revolution that brought down the Qing in 1911 is impossible to disentangle from this moment of disillusionment.

Culture Eats Order of Battle for Breakfast

News of the battle came as an ironic shock that journalists, military officers, and pundits struggled to explain. Yes, Meiji Japan was widely admired as a dynamo of industrial progress, but its advances seemed unlikely to overcome Chinese demographic and geographic advantages. Somehow, contrary to expectation, plucky Japan had defeated the massive Qing Empire. How had it happened? In the end, most attributed Chinese defeat not simply to contingency or tactics, but to an underlying weakness in Chinese culture that manifested in the North Sea Fleet as institutional corruption and favoritism.

Institutionally, the North Sea Fleet struggled with what today might be called “talent management.” Corruption and favoritism limited the efficacy of material acquisitions. What good were ships without the skill to maintain and employ them? Western mercenaries commonly complained about the pathologies of late-Qing bureaucracy: favoritism, careerism, or simply “mandarinism.” The Chinese had bought ships, but a decade of underfunding left the North Sea Fleet in need of maintenance and low on supplies. In the months before the war, officials in China requested to upgrade batteries with quick-firing guns, but to no avail. In battle, foreign experts onboard the big ironclads reported artillery shells filled with sand, which, in fairness, looked a lot like gunpowder and was much cheaper. The inability or unwillingness of other regional fleets to cooperate with the North Sea Fleet further diminished China’s numerical advantage over the Japanese. Itō’s fleet attacked as a unified national force while regional officials in Qing China refused to coordinate. For Chinese historians in the Mao era, all this was evidence of the superiority of “people’s war” over investments in a technologically sophisticated military.

Beyond institutional limitations, 19th-century observers (some of them Chinese) were quick to assign a still deeper level of culpability: civilizational culture. The contrast between Japanese progress and Chinese backwardness seemed to lie at the root of victory and defeat. Reciprocally, defeat was “refracted” by foreign observers into a belief in the incompatibility of Chinese culture with modern science and technology. In 1896, the naval historian Herbert Wilson left no doubt about his feeling, writing that the war proved China “is perhaps the most effete and barbarous state in the world.” This cultural thesis fell in line with many of the popular assumptions of late-19th-century Social Darwinism. Strong Japan succeeded, weak China lost.

It is easy to overextend this argument. By any measure, the very making of the North Sea Fleet was a tangible achievement worth celebrating. Yet, that same fleet’s disastrous performance at the Battle of the Yalu, with the right caveats, was (and is) a warning about culture and material power more generally. The Chinese had the stuff — and some proficiency with it at the tactical level. But without a culture of technocracy and meritocracy, the Qing North Sea Fleet became an unusable liability. Culture — be it institutional or national — had a differential effect, and many believed a decisive one at that.

Tellingly, the cultural explanation of defeat was adopted by many Chinese observers themselves. Defeat was an indictment against the status quo leadership in China. Since the Opium War, Chinese reformers held fast to a conviction that Western study was useful for “application,” but Chinese knowledge should be conserved as the “root” of any modernization. After the Yalu, one skeptic of that approach, Yan Fu, went from instructing North Sea Fleet officers at the Tianjin Naval Academy to translating texts on liberalism and Darwinism in an effort to “awaken” the Chinese nation in a cultural or even spiritual sense. In other words, Yan spent his early life supporting “strong ships and powerful cannons” only to conclude after 1894 that such weapons were baubles. What China really needed was a deeper change; for better or worse, it got it in the revolutions of the 20th century.

Learning (or Not) from Other People’s Wars

The Battle of the Yalu generated a modest library of newspaper stories, journal articles, and intelligence reports. It is easy to understand the excitement. Here was a natural experiment in the efficacy of modern weapons. Professional intelligence agencies were still works in progress (the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence dated only to 1882), but intelligence officers and attachés did their best to understand the war from a tactical and technical perspective. After all, even “scanty indications,” from such real-world engagements, as Alfred Thayer Mahan contended in 1896, were “worth much more than the most carefully arranged programme,” at war colleges and academies in the North Atlantic.

Foreign observers came as journalists, intelligence officers, and mercenaries. William Sims was one of many rushing to the theater to gather information. As the intelligence officer onboard the USS Charleston, he was detailed to shore to explore fortifications and captured warships. His reports provided a granular assessment of the combat power of offensive and defensive weapons. He wrote so many reports that he injured his wrist and had to be medically relieved. When the mercenary Philo T. McGiffin, who served onboard the Zhenyuan, returned home to the United States in 1895, he was enlisted to lecture at the Naval War College and write in national magazines. Alfred Thayer Mahan used McGiffin’s first-person account as the basis for his 1895 “Lessons from the Yalu Fight.” All the while, journalists lit up the telegraph networks, providing detailed (if dubious) commentaries on the course of the war and the sources of victory and defeat.

But just what, exactly, were the lessons to take from this conflict? Mostly, military observers tended to see in defeat confirmation of their existing preferences toward battleship-dominated fleets. Given that Japanese cruisers won out at the Yalu over Chinese battleships, that “lesson” required some heroic rationalization. It went something like this: Yes, the Chinese fleet had been defeated, but Ding’s battleships survived the Japanese cruisers’ rain of shells. With better tactics and artillerists, the Chinese would likely have succeeded. Alfred Thayer Mahan offered an excellent example of this motivated reasoning in action. Even in defeat, he saw the survival of the Chinese ships Dingyuan and Zhenyuan as proof of the “argument of those who favor the battleship as the chief constituent of naval force.” Mahan noted, moreover, that the battle confirmed his assertion that “concentrating force under one command is more efficient than that disseminated among several.” His preferred theory of naval warfare, originally derived from historical research, now appeared validated by empirical observation of modern war.

But were these the right lessons? The process of collecting information and refining it into intelligence on which to make judgments was imperfect and confusing. People are flawed, so too are the data they collect. Analytical biases further distorted matters. Experts downplayed some developments in the war — like the role of torpedoes, logistics, as well as the links between navies and expeditionary warfare — in favor of a selective emphasis on armor, tonnage, and firepower. Reading ex post facto analyses of the battle today gives the sense of selective validation rather than rigorously controlled, objective “lessons.” In a word: “cherry-picking.” Similar temptations are at work today. The aftermath of the Yalu should come as a cautionary example about learning from “other people’s wars.”

Why it Matters: Political Controversy, Heritage, and Experiments

The gap between what most Americans know about the First Sino-Japanese War and the trouble its legacy may one day land them in is genuinely startling. Beijing’s revisionism aims at a region shaped by the Battle of the Yalu and its consequences. Sino-Japanese tensions in the East China Sea, the challenge of managing the U.S.-Japanese and U.S.-South Korean alliances, respectively, and above all, the nebulous status of Taiwan all grew out of Qing defeat in 1894-1895. These dynamics are not so much “past” as they are present politics.

For the People’s Republic of China, the legacy of the Yalu has shaped institutions as well. The defeated North Sea Fleet is at once a rationale for military modernization and a source of heritage. Xi Jinping’s “strong military dream” is justified as a response to defeats in the 19th and 20th centuries, often explicitly to the Battle of the Yalu. “Those who lag behind will be bullied” is a common refrain in propaganda at historical sites. And by implication: Modern Chinese must do better than their late-Qing predecessors. As a vast experiment in industrialization and modernization, the creation of the North Sea Fleet is also a form of heritage for the 21st-century People’s Liberation Army Navy. It offers a kind of origin story in history and popular media for sea power in China.

The Battle of the Yalu also matters globally as a case study in the inherent difficulty of learning from “other people’s wars.” How to account for biases and fragmentary evidence is a major challenge. Notice how observers of the Russo-Japanese War and Spanish Civil War took contradictory insights from the same empirical records of conflict. At present, as intelligence services, industry players, and casual observers debate the implications of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the experience of the Sino-Japanese War begs the questions: Are 21st-century observers smarter than Alfred Thayer Mahan? Can they check biases in ways he could not?

BECOME A MEMBER

Tommy Jamison, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Strategic Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is the author of The Pacific’s New Navies (2025). The views here do not represent those of the Naval Postgraduate School or Department of Defense.

Image: Walters Art Museum via Wikimedia Commons

warontherocks.com · September 12, 2025

21. Pentagon stages first ‘Top Drone’ school for operators to hone skills

Tom Cruise: your next movie - it will open with you on your motorcycle cruising next to the airfield with a drone just off your shoulder. Maverick ain't done yet.

Pentagon stages first ‘Top Drone’ school for operators to hone skills

militarytimes.com · Courtney Albon · September 11, 2025

The Pentagon last month held its first “Top Drone” school for drone pilots to demonstrate their skills in a threat-representative environment.

The event took place as part of the Defense Department’s Technology Readiness Experimentation, or T-REX, a semiannual showcase and evaluation staged at Camp Atterbury in Indiana. The event aims to validate prototypes built to fill urgent capability gaps across the military services and combatant commands.

Lt. Col. Matt Limeberry, commander of the Pentagon’s Rapid Assessment or Prototype Technology Task Force, told Defense News in an interview Monday that DOD plans to host at least two Top Drone schools each year.

The goal, he said, is to provide a chance for service members, industry and academia to prove out tactics, operational procedures and drone capabilities on a test course that mimics the kinds of terrain and adversary effects an operator might see in the field. It also allows the department to validate and refine its own counter-uncrewed aircraft system sensors.

“It’s a dual effect of data collect but also benefits the warfighter and industry flying through this threat-represented and emulated environment,” Limeberry said.

For the inaugural, four-day event, the task force set up a training course at the Muscatatuck Training Center just south of Camp Atterbury, designing it to imitate an urban setting and focusing on maneuverability, endurance and reconnaissance. Two companies, Vector and Code 19, flew drones alongside two service partners — the Army’s Combat Lethality Task Force and its Aviation Center of Excellence.

The drones were a mix of untethered first-person view systems and fiber-optic-connected drones.

The department also staged a trial at a separate test range at Camp Atterbury that was supporting T-REX where the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team conducted live fire demonstrations.

Limeberry said he was impressed with how well service members participating in Top Drone performed, navigating and identifying targets. For future events, he hopes to expand the trials over multiple weeks to allow operators to “refine” their tactics against more complex obstacles.

The department is also building a secondary Top Drone course at Camp Atterbury to emulate a more dense, wooded environment.

“As we continue to scale the complexity, it will be an a la carte menu of [electronic warfare] jamming and providing a real-world, adversarial threat-informed environment that we need to fly with and through to make sure that we’re staying competitive,” Limeberry said.

Senior leaders in the Pentagon in recent months have ramped up their drive for what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called “drone dominance.” The intent is for the military services to not only field more drones to operators, but also develop the organizational and training infrastructure to support broader adoption by 2027.

Top Drone supports that push as did much of last month’s T-REX event, which focused on low-cost, attritable attack drones as well as counter-uncrewed aircraft system technologies like interceptors and sensors.

Over the course of the two-week showcase, the department assessed 58 technologies, some of which were sponsored by a military service or combatant command and others brought by firms that had never engaged with the Defense Department but had technology with the potential to address a critical capability gap.

Of those technologies, some number will progress into joint, rapid experimentation and others will require further development and iteration or experimentation. Limeberry noted that DOD has a number of innovation pathways aimed at further maturing technology and T-REX is a good way to identify which route makes the most sense for a particular capability.

“The goal of T-REX is to come out and you find your best transition partner, an innovation pathway that fits the need of your company or fits the need of the government, depending on where the gap and critical need is,” he said.

Decisions about which technologies will transition into the rapid experimentation phase are pending, Limeberry said. He expects the team will brief Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael in the coming weeks and have a determination before the end of September.

Along with the technology demonstrations, T-REX also featured static displays from another 50 companies whose capabilities are in an early stage of development. Those capabilities may be considered for participation in future T-REX assessments.

“They were showcasing emergent and urgent capabilities but didn’t have the capacity yet to fully assess and put their prototypes into the environment, so we put them on a prototype technology display,” Limeberry said.

About Courtney Albon

Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.

22. Actions create consequences : projecting – what do others see? by Dr. Cynthia Watson

Dr. Watson's short thoughtful essay provides a lot of food for thought. It illustrates two things that I really benefited from from my experience as a student and faculty member at the National War College. Her vignette about an international student is why it is so important to have such students attend PME - they can open our eyes about ourselves. Second, is that from Dr. Watson and the other great faculty members at NWC (e.g., Bud Cole and Joe Collins and so many others) I learned (or perhaps had it drilled into me) the importance of assumptions and of challenging our assumptions continuously.

Actions create consequences

projecting

what do others see?

https://cynthiawatson.substack.com/p/projecting?utm

Cynthia Watson

Sep 12, 2025

The United States brings about three dozen international officers (International Fellows) from allied and partner nations to learn alongside U.S. students at various joint professional military education institutions for their ten-month programs. At the National War College, students share the seminar experience following a two-month crash course on our civics, history, and geography. The overwhelming majority bring their spouses and children for the year. They share their insights on their countries, with the hope that they will come to appreciate our society and values, thereby strengthening ties between our militaries for the future. This “capacity building”-via shared knowledge and experience —has been a relatively inexpensive but invaluable investment over the past forty years.

You can imagine my discomfort when one of those officers opined to his fellow visiting officers at our first meeting nine years ago that they were taking their lives into their hands by living in the United States for a year. My head snapped around to face him after he cited the “likelihood they would be shot” while traveling to or from the College during that time period. This Southeast Asian officer had never been to the United States previously but knew a lot about the frequent shootings in this country. The conversation at our table of eight stopped for several seconds until, fortuitously, the official program for the hour began. However, this event left me troubled, stuck in my mind almost a decade later.

I have to wonder today how this year’s IF group is pondering their year here. Are these men (and occasional women) reconsidering or asking to return home (that happened with a couple of people after the 9/11 attacks)? Are they fearful of visiting the National Mall or the Grand Canyon with their kids? Do they worry about taking the second-graders to the grocery store? Are they telling their relatives back home to cancel visits during this year because they see so many of us selectively dehumanize anyone with a different skin color, different political views, or religious creed? How are they seeing this country asking that they join us in battling a danger posed by China’s expanding suggestion of an alternative governing style to ours?

We continue to see ourselves as the epicenter of the civilized world, yet our actions and words—across the political spectrum—evidence intolerance, distrust, and self-entitlement. Too often, we don’t care what others prioritize, but the consequences of this self-absorption are enduring, if not immediately apparent.

All of this, a quarter of a century after the 9/11 attacks, when so much of the world rallied around us, illustrates that the trajectory of history varies in response to behavior. It’s seductive to ignore that truth, but nothing is set in stone, domestically or internationally. Put in strategy terms, we would do well to reexamine all of our assumptions about the future.

Where is this leading us?

I welcome your reactions, rebuttals, queries, or comments. The purpose of this column is to expand measured, civil discussion so please chime in.

Thank you for taking time to read Actions. I appreciate those of you who subscribe as your support allows me to access many resources I could not otherwise afford.

Wishing you a healthy and satisfying weekend. Be well and be safe. FIN

23. The social hierarchy of US special operations units

Satire. University/college analogy.

For the record I never smoked, not in high school nor college though I did live off campus and held two jobs while in college. (But I do not look down on SEALs - they are my brothers too - Some of the best "Green Berets" I know were SEALS - e.g., James Marvin, who could "out-green beret" a Green Beret)

Excerpt:

Constantly looking down on those SEALs are what I’d call the salty senior class: the Army’s Special Forces. Those guys could not give a shit about campus drama, or getting the attention, as they’ve been there on campus so long they’re on autopilot. They live in off-campus apartments, smoke cigarettes, hold jobs between classes, know what they’re good at and do it, and don’t care what anyone else is doing. Just leave them alone is all they ask.

The social hierarchy of US special operations units

Special Operations

By Frumentarius
September 10, 2025

sandboxx.us · September 10, 2025

Human beings never really outgrow their petty adolescent jealousies. It starts once we hit that Age of the Hormone, in which we are always measuring ourselves against everyone else. Within our peer groups, we judge ourselves and others, some days never feeling adequate, other days feeling superior to all.

The phenomenon is evident in elite athletics, the corporate world, among the parents at a local school, and within the government, at every level. You will no doubt be shocked to hear that it is also present within the military’s Special Operations (SOF) community. My friend George Hand ably and humorously touched on this phenomenon in a piece for Sandboxx News (although I’d refute that piece – gently – by stating that our particular SEAL platoon took live-fire training extremely seriously, and never once did I ever push a poop through the water toward another human).

Those minor quibbles aside, Geo’s article reminded me of a GWOT-era meme that made its way around the SOF community a few years after the various US Government SpecOps components had been working together for a while in Afghanistan and Iraq. Given the time spent together, the SOF units had had time to grow much more familiar with each other. Of course, with that familiarity was bred plenty of contempt.

The essence of that meme was that each of the various SOF elements – including the CIA’s Paramilitary Ground Branch – could be described using college as a frame of reference. I don’t remember exactly how it went, but that doesn’t matter, because I have my own ideas, and here they are. No one take offense, these are the musings of a former SEAL and they’re firmly tongue-in-cheek. Also, I’m only including ground units, so no SWCCs, or Night Stalkers.

The SOF university

Oregon Air National Guard Brig. Gen. Steven Gregg, commander of the Oregon Air National Guard, and U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Eric E. Feil, commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, applaud airmen of the 125th Special Tactics Squadron during an award ceremony held at the Portland Air National Guard Base, Portland, Ore., Jan. 23, 2013. The event honored airmen from the unit with five Bronze Star Medals and one Purple Heart medal. The airmen earned the medals during recent deployments to the Middle East. (US Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. John Hughel, 142nd Fighter Wing Public Affairs/Released)

Let’s start at the bottom of the social hierarchy. I’m sorry, Marine Raiders, but you’re still the new kids on the block, and thus have to put up with some hazing. I mean, how much can a Marine really be a swarthy spec ops snake eater? The rigorous uniform and grooming standards are holding you back, fellas. You’ll never hit peak cool guy living that way. You’re the new freshmen on the college campus, still looking like high school kids.

I’ve gotta hit my Air Force spec ops brothers next in the Pararescuemen (PJ) and Combat Controller community. I’d compare those guys to the slightly nerdy kids on campus, who are super good at something cool despite their not-quite-cool-guy status. They’re like that one super smart math or robotics club kid who has no athletic skill, but who shreds on guitar. You gotta give him props despite your desire not to, and you’re occasionally mystified by him.

U.S. Army 1st Sgt. Quint Pospisil and other Soldiers from 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, stand in formation during an award ceremony hosted by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno at Hunter Army Airfield, Ga., Oct. 26, 2012. Pospisil received an Army Commendation Medal with V Device for his actions during combat operations in Afghanistan. (Photo by Master Sgt. Teddy Wade/Office of the Chief of Public Affairs)

Next up you’ve got the Army Rangers. Those guys are basically the ROTC kids on campus, with their haircuts and constant hooah-ing. They’re just too much and pretty much keep to themselves, wearing their rucks and uniforms all over campus. We get it guys, you’re in the military.

Now, don’t get me started on the non-SEAL Team 6 Navy SEALs. Those guys are like the popular jock underclassmen. They’re full of ego, barely tamed on campus, always cracking jokes, occasionally getting into trouble, doing keg stands at parties, and generally getting all the attention because they’re college freshman and sophomores that made the varsity team, have lots of money, and all the girls like them. They’re insufferable, to be honest.

Constantly looking down on those SEALs are what I’d call the salty senior class: the Army’s Special Forces. Those guys could not give a shit about campus drama, or getting the attention, as they’ve been there on campus so long they’re on autopilot. They live in off-campus apartments, smoke cigarettes, hold jobs between classes, know what they’re good at and do it, and don’t care what anyone else is doing. Just leave them alone is all they ask.

SEAL Team 6 (also known as DEVGRU) members. (Vanity Fair via US Navy)

Next up on campus are the grad school teams: SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force. Those guys have left regular campus life behind and operate outside the norms and rules of college life. They’re given more responsibility, left to do things on their own initiative, and see the bigger picture a lot of the time – one that is invisible to the undergrads. They look down their noses at the silly undergrads with their myopic focus on the unimportant (in their eyes) mission at hand. Instead, they’re doing the important work, they’d say.

Now, between the two of them, there is a further division. The Delta cool guys want to be in the shadows, don’t wanna be associated with campus life, prefer to stick to themselves, and make their own way without any fuss. The SEAL Team 6 guys, on the other hand, are the wild ones. They’re stampeding all over the place, breaking things, relishing their freedom and autonomy, breaking stuff everywhere (including the rules and the law), and couldn’t give two sh**s about who knows it, because they see themselves as untouchable. They’re like the regular SEALs only with less accountability and more money.

Finally, we come to the top of this social hierarchy, which really isn’t the top at all – it’s more like the non-academic world beyond the university. This would be the CIA’s Ground Branch. They’re out there in the real world, eyes wide open, seeing the whole picture and what really happens. They’re handpicking university kids from all the above groups to join their club if they can get the job done. What that job is, exactly, they’ll only find out when they arrive and get briefed in. It’s a secret, man.

That, my friends, is Fru’s social hierarchy at the University of SOF.

This article is dedicated to former Delta guy George “Geo” Hand, former SF guy Jack Murphy, and former Air Force PJ BK Actual. Geo is the best single writer to ever come from the world described above, Jack is the smartest and hardest working, and BK is probably the single funniest. Well done, boys.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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