​Quotes of the Day:

“The devil’s aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despot’s dread of a newspaper that laughs.”

– Mark Twain

“Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them. I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were taught only to look one way when many ways exist.”

–Charles Bukowski

"All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions."

-- W.B. Yeats

1. USASOC Identifies Soldiers Who Perished in Aviation Mishap

2. Riding the Tiger: Why Xi and Putin’s ‘Axis of Autocracies’ Could End the Way Churchill Predicted

3. In Rare Visit to China, U.S. Lawmakers Push for More Military Dialogue

4. Drone Incursions Force Airport Closures in Copenhagen, Oslo

5. Tech’s H-1B Debate: Is Trump’s New Fee a Solution or a Setback?

6. America's $100,000 talent tax vs China's free welcome mat

7. Trump's immigration war pivots to Asian talent

8. Tariffs Will Hit Slowing U.S. Economy Hard in 2026, OECD Says

9. Donald Trump's Tariffs Are Nothing But a Giant Mistake

10. The United States’ Dirty War on “Narco Terrorism”

11. As the U.S. Pulls Back From the U.N., Rivals Stand to Gain

12. Donald Trump’s UN Address Opportunity

13. China, Russia’s gray zone tactics raising risk of wider war

14. Philippines looking like next powder keg to blow in Asia

15. Speech by Sir Richard Moore, Chief of SIS, 19 September 2025

16. Fix the CIA by getting rid of the Directorate of Analysis

17. How Apple Turned China Into a Tech Behemoth

18. Act of defiance against China’s ruling party lasted less than an hour

19. Unnamed Pentagon Officials Ridicule Hegseth’s Plan to Stop War Department Leaks

20. How to Silence Dissent, Bit by Bit Until Fear Takes Over

21. The NATO-Russia War of 2025: Who Wins?

22. Beijing’s “Robot Army” Isn’t Science Fiction. It’s Already Here.

​23. Weekly Drone Report – September 23, 2025

24. ISIS’s Transition and the Interplay of Online and Face-to-Face Recruitment

25. Austronesian Identity as “Networked Deterrence” in the Indo-Pacific

26. Guns, Oil, and Dependence: Can the Russo-Indian Partnership Be Torpedoed?

27. The Only Security Guarantee Ukraine Can Trust

1. USASOC Identifies Soldiers Who Perished in Aviation Mishap

May our soldiers rest in peace. Every flight is dangerous.

USASOC Identifies Soldiers Who Perished in Aviation Mishap

https://www.army.mil/article/288634/usasoc_identifies_soldiers_who_perished_in_aviation_mishap

By Jacqueline HillSeptember 22, 2025

FORT BRAGG, N.C. – Four Soldiers who perished in a Sept. 17, aircraft mishap while conducting routine flight training are identified. The cause of the mishap remains under investigation.

The deceased are:

U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Three Andrew Cully, 35, from Sparta, MO

U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Three Andrew Kraus, 39, from Sanibel, FL

U.S. Army Sgt. Donavon Scott, 25, from Tacoma, WA

U.S. Army Sgt. Jadalyn Good, 23, from Mount Vernon, WA

“It is with the heaviest of hearts that we confirm the loss of four courageous Night Stalkers from the 4th Battalion, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), who tragically lost their lives on Sept. 17th during a training mission.,” said Col. Stephen Smith, commander. “These exceptional warriors— Chief Warrant Officer Three Andrew Cully, Chief Warrant Officer Three Andrew Kraus, Sgt. Donavon Scott, and Sgt. Jadalyn Good—embodied the unwavering dedication, selflessness, and excellence that define the very spirit of the Army and Army Special Operations. Their sacrifice in service to our nation will forever be etched in our hearts and in the legacy of the Night Stalkers. These heroes were not only elite professionals but also cherished teammates, friends, and family members whose absence leaves an immeasurable void.”

Cully, 35, commissioned in May 2013 as a U.S. Army aviation officer from Missouri State University as a second lieutenant. He completed Flight School at Ft. Rucker, AL. After his initial service as a commissioned officer, he was then reappointed as an aviation warrant officer and served as a UH-60M (Blackhawk) Pilot. In 2022, he completed the UH-60M Instructor Pilot Course at Fort Rucker, AL. He has two operational deployments to the EUCOM theater in support of OPERATIONS ATLANTIC RESOLVE and SWIFT RESPONSE. In 2024, after being selected to serve in the 160th SOAR (Abn), he was assigned to C Company at Joint Base Lewis McChord, WA. While assigned to C Company he supported multiple Continental United States (CONUS) and Outside Continental United States (OCONUS) training missions and deployed to the INDOPACOM theater.

His awards include the Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal with three oak leaf clusters, Army Achievement Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Global War on

Terrorism Service Medal, Korea Defense Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon, Basic Army Aviator Badge, Parachutist Badge and Air Assault Badge.

Kraus, 39, served in the U. S. Marine Corps as a CH-46 (Chinook) maintainer from July 2008 until 2013. In 2017, he joined the U.S. Army and attended Warrant Officer Candidate School and flight school at Ft. Rucker, AL. He then served as an Aeromedical Evacuation Pilot in Command in Germany, performing real-world medical evacuation missions. In 2023, after being selected to serve in the 160th SOAR (Abn), he was assigned to C Company, where he supported multiple CONUS training missions and deployed in support of contingency response operations. He is a 2025 graduate of the Aviation Maintenance Test Pilot Course at Ft. Rucker, AL.

His awards include the Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, Navy Achievement Medal second award, Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon, Armed Forces Service Medal, Overseas Service Ribbon, Navy Sea Service Deployment Ribbon, Navy Unity Commendation, and Navy Meritorious Unit Commendation and Basic Aviation Badge.

Scott, 25, enlisted in the U.S. Army as a UH-60 Helicopter Repairer, 15T. After being selected to serve in the 160th SOAR, his first assignment was to D Company, 4th Battalion as a UH-60 Helicopter Maintainer. After completing the MH-60 (Blackhawk, Modified) Non-Rated Crewmember Course, he served as a MH-60 Crew Chief in C Company. While serving in C Company he earned Fully-Mission-Qualified status as a Crew Chief, accumulating over 776 flying hours. He has served on two support missions to OPERATION INHERENT RESOLVE and a crisis response contingency operation.

His awards include the Meritorious Service Medal, Army Achievement Medal, Army Good Conduct Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Inherent Resolve Campaign Medal - Campaign Star, Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon and Combat Action Badge.

Good, 23, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2021 as a UH-60 Helicopter Repairer, 15T. After being selected to serve in the 160th SOAR, she was then assigned to C Company where she served as a Helicopter Maintainer and in 2023 after graduating from the MH-60 Non-Rated Crewmember Course she served as a Crew Chief. While serving in C Company she achieved Basic-Mission-Qualified status, accumulating over 730 flight hours. She was instrumental in the success of numerus CONUS and OCONUS training missions and a crisis response contingency operation.

Her awards include the Meritorious Service Medal, Army Good Conduct Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Army Service Ribbon, Basic Parachutist Badge, Combat and Special Skill Badge Expert Marksmanship Qualification Badge and Basic Aviation Badge.

“As we mourn their loss, we stand united in honoring their memory and their extraordinary commitment to the mission. Our thoughts and prayers are with their families, loved ones, and the entire Night Stalker community during this profoundly difficult time,” said Smith.

The U.S. Army Special Operations Command extends its profound thanks to the professionalism and heroism of the many who assisted in the recovery of our fallen; the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office, the Griffin Fire Department, the McLane Black Lake Fire Department, the King County Sheriff’s Office, the Lacey Fire Department, the Olympia Fire Department, the Department of Natural Resources, the 2/75th Ranger Regiment, the 17th Special Tactics Squadron, the 22nd Special Tactics Squadron, the 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), the I Corps and the Joint Base Lewis McChord, WA.

The U.S. Army Special Operations Command Public Affairs office may be reached at 910-432-6005, or by email at PAO-USASOC@socom.mil.

-SINE PARI-

2. Riding the Tiger: Why Xi and Putin’s ‘Axis of Autocracies’ Could End the Way Churchill Predicted

​Excerpts:

At this stage, the key question is whether, when and how Putin intends to end his assault on Ukraine. At present, the Kremlin is publicly evincing no willingness to end this war absent the achievement of at least his minimalist demands: no NATO membership for Ukraine and occupation of the four Russian-annexed regions of that country (in addition to Crimea).

If Ukraine does not cede control over those territories, it appears Putin intends to pursue a fight and negotiate strategy until his goals are achieved. However the war ends, the U.S. will then have to decide if it is prepared to try to engage Russia with an eye towards creating a rift between it and China.

With the latter on a course that appears to be inexorably leading to a confrontation with the U.S. over Taiwan, and Washington clearly preferring not to have to simultaneously deal with two adversaries on different fronts, the questions of whether, how and how soon the war in Ukraine can be ended, and what tack the Russian leader will take thereafter are of great significance to U.S. national security.

In the years since Churchill wrote about the dangers for and from dictators in riding a tiger, others have used the same analogy. Jefferson Starship even wrote a song about it. Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein cautioned all who would try it that “the first principle in riding a tiger is to hold on tight to its ears.” But it was John F. Kennedy who most succinctly addressed the perils past leaders courted by engaging in the practice. “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger,” he cautioned, “ended up inside.” One wonders how tight a grip the dictators in Beijing and Moscow have on the big cats they sit astride.

Riding the Tiger: Why Xi and Putin’s ‘Axis of Autocracies’ Could End the Way Churchill Predicted

 20 September, 2025

https://www.thecipherbrief.com/riding-the-tiger-why-xi-and-putins-axis-of-autocracies-could-end-the-way-churchill-predicted

By Mark Kelton

Former Senior Executive Service Officer, CIA

Kelton retired from CIA as a senior executive with 34 years of experience in intelligence operations. He is a partner at the FiveEyes Group; a member of the Board of Trustees of Valley Forge Military Academy and College; member of the National Security Advisory Board of the MITRE Corp.; member of the Day & Zimmermann Government Services Advisory Board; member of the Siemens Government Technologies Federal Advisory Board; and a member of the Board of BigMediaTV.

“Dictators,” Churchill observed, “ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount.” “And,” he added, “the tigers are getting hungry.”

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE / OPINION -- Churchill penned those words when mankind was on the precipice of what would be the most devastating conflict in human history. The men who took it over the edge - Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and a leadership in Japan that would increasingly take on the characteristics of a military dictatorship under men such as General Hideki Tojo - were driven by ambition; animus for their enemies, real, imagined and contrived; and a will to use any means at their disposal to ensure their countries assumed what they saw as their rightful places in the world.

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Why Russia Remains a Key Threat Behind the China Axis

Ensuring Stability in the Indo-Pacific Region and Beyond

The leaders of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan took their countries into war because of conditions they had fomented. Cynically exploiting political radicalization, economic pressures, and societal fervor stoked by authoritarian leadership and militarist-nationalist ideology, they dismantled democratic institutions – thus removing the brakes on both repression and aggression - and promulgated pervasive propaganda that created a climate where war appeared both inevitable and justified.

Once at war, they desperately clung to their illusions of national greatness and delusions of personal grandeur as their countrymen were killed, their nations devastated and their militaries defeated. In the end; with Hitler’s suicide in a dank bunker; the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress hanging in a Milan square; and Tojo’s drop through a trapdoor with a hangman’s noose around his neck; the tigers feasted.

The nature of the relationship among the Axis powers of the Second World War is worth considering within the context of the recent meeting of the leaders of the ‘Axis of Autocracies’ in Beijing. The extension by Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping of invitations to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit and a massive military parade celebrating the end of the Second World War to Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was in keeping with Xi’s intent to send a signal of unity in opposition to the so-called ‘rules-based’ international order dominated by the U.S. Further, the Chinese leader will have seen the presence of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Turkish President Recep Erdogan among some twenty invitees to the Beijing festivities – coming, as they did, amid trade tensions with Washington and with the 2027 deadline he has set for his military to be ready to act against Taiwan nearing - as evidence his message is finding broader resonance.

"Global governance,” Xi said, “has reached a new crossroads." The new order he envisions would, the Chinese leader said in comments clearly directed at the U.S., “take a clear stand against hegemonism and power politics, and practice true multilateralism."

What he did not say, and did not need to say, was that his country and party would be at the center of a realignment of global power that would bear little similarity to the current world order for which the Chinese leader has nothing but contempt.

As China has long demonstrated, it has no regard for adherence to norms of behavior that the failed U.S. policy of engagement was intended to promote. Indeed, its aggressive and expansionist policies vis-à-vis its neighbors; its disregarding of treaty obligations in the case of Hong Kong; its resort to influence operations to suborn foreign governments and international institutions; its exploitation of Belt and Road initiative projects that turn recipients into debtor nations; its use of espionage means to steal the intellectual property and national wealth from rival nations, their businesses and industries; and its brutal repression of political opponents and ethnic minorities demonstrate that Beijing neither recognizes nor accepts any international rules of conduct.

While North Korea and Iran play lesser, supporting roles in this Axis, the relationship with between Russia and China is central to Xi’s desire to put together a global system of strategic and economic ties that supersedes the post-war, U.S.-dominated world order.

Xi’s message clearly resonated with Putin. Addressing his Chinese counterpart as “dear friend,” the Russian President said that Moscow’s ties with Beijing are “at an unprecedentedly high level.” Citing Soviet assistance to China during the war, going on that: “We were always together then, we remain together now.” Putin’s avowals of what he would have termed ‘fraternal friendship’ in his earlier life notwithstanding, Russia likely sees its reliance on Beijing for support as being driven by the necessities of the Ukraine war and surely does not envision long-term dependence on China.

However, what Putin also surely understands - if Xi did not make the point explicitly clear to him in conversations between the two - is that the state of the Ukraine war is a significant factor in the timing and nature of Chinese planning for ‘reunification’ of Taiwan with the mainland insofar as it serves to distract and diffuse any Western – read U.S. – response to such an undertaking.

Consequently, there is every incentive for Beijing to ensure there is no resolution of that war prior to any move it makes against Taiwan. In such an instance, the U.S. would find itself having to contend with China backed by Russia should it choose to counter a move by Xi to seize the island. It is, of course, unclear what form Beijing-Moscow war-time cooperation would take. But ties between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan might be instructive in this regard.

As is the case with relations between Moscow and Beijing today, the connection between the two most powerful Axis powers was rooted in a desire to undo the existing – then Anglo-American and now U.S. led - world order. Germany and Japan fought their war as ostensible allies. But it was a strangely distant union. They were bound together more by de facto strategic interdependence than by formal alliance. The two countries did sign a series of compacts. Chief among these were 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact (according to which both parties agreed to work against the Soviet-directed ‘Comintern’, or Communist International), and the Tripartite Pact of 1940, establishing an “Axis” alliance which also included Italy.

There were also several supporting economic and military cooperation agreements, the most significant of which was the "No Separate Peace” agreement of 11 December 1941. Signed following U.S. entry into the war, it formalized joint prosecution of the war against the U.S. and Britain by the Axis, pledging that the signatories would not seek a separate peace without mutual consent.

These arrangements were integral to the wartime calculations of Germany and Japan. But none of them formally bound either country to come to the aid of the other in event of war. Moreover, their ability and willingness to develop and implement a joint strategy for waging the war was hampered by geographical distance, divergent interests, and occasionally conflicting operational priorities.

There is, for instance, no evidence that the timing of Tokyo’s December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor was coordinated with Berlin. The attack’s timing was primarily dictated by Japan’s urgent need to break U.S.-led embargoes and secure critical resources, rather than a calculated move to exploit any German "distraction" of the Allies.

But Germany’s war in Europe did create opportunity for Japan in the Asia-Pacific by significantly weakening the Western colonial presence in the region, indirectly making a Japanese attack more viable and thus influencing Tokyo’s risk calculus.

With major Western powers preoccupied—Britain fully engaged in Europe and North Africa, and the U.S. focused on supporting Britain and preparing for possible conflict—Japanese leaders judged that the Western colonial powers in Asia (Britain, the Netherlands, and France) were vulnerable to rapid Japanese offensives. That assessment enhanced Japan’s confidence in the success of those operations but was not the determining factor in their timing.

Moreover, Hitler’s declaration of war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor puzzled Allied leaders and historians since given America’s massive industrial potential; his own experience in the First World War when entry of America into the war tipped the balance against Germany; and the fact that Tokyo did not join the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, a non-decision that allowed Stalin to shift reserves from Siberia to confront the German army threatening Moscow.

It appears the German dictator declared war on the U.S. - even though the declaration removed any remaining obstacles to full American involvement against him in Europe - primarily because he thought war with America inevitable, wanted to unleash his U-Boats on ships carrying Lend-Lease material to Britain, and sought to present the Axis as a united front. He also saw the U.S. as a decadent, racially mixed nation and underestimated its capacity to quickly gear up for war, believing Germany could defeat the Allies before significant American power could be brought to bear. His decision proved a crucial strategic blunder as it unified America’s population and industries behind a total war effort that was ultimately decisive.

The February 2022 promulgation of a “Partnership Without Limits” by Xi and Putin on the margins of the Winter Olympics not only signaled a warming of relations between their countries. It also implied at least tacit Chinese backing for the Russian invasion of Ukraine that occurred just a few days later.

As was the case with the Axis powers, that announcement was presaged by other agreements between Beijing and Moscow. The establishment of formal diplomatic ties after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the 2001 signing of a ‘Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation’ set the stage for strategic, economic, and security collaboration between the two countries. Over the following years, they resolved border disputes, held joint military exercises, expanded energy trade, and cooperated within such international organizations as the SCO.

While ties between Russia and China on economic, diplomatic and military matters have deepened, the relationship – as was the case with the Axis - is marked more by a joint desire to challenge the U.S. than by deep mutual affinity. Despite declarations in the 2022 joint statement that the friendship between the two countries “has no limits” and that there are “no forbidden areas of cooperation,” Putin is no doubt well aware that Xi has other motives in supporting Russia.

Not least among them are using the Ukraine war to draw down Western military stockpiles and taking advantage of Moscow’s relative loss of influence in Central Asia. And Russia remains deeply wary of Chinese strategic intentions and intelligence activities. Notably, recently leaked Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) documents indicate Moscow’s growing concern over Chinese espionage targeting Russian military, scientific, and geopolitical assets. The FSB has labeled China as an "enemy" and initiated counterintelligence programs designed to counter aggressive Chinese recruitment of Russian scientists, officials, and businessmen—especially those with access to sensitive state institutions.

Like the (successful) intelligence operations mounted by Stalin’s Soviet Union against its erstwhile Western allies during World War Two, Chinese intelligence has intensified its attempts to gain insight into Russia’s military operations in Ukraine and its knowledge of Western combat systems.

The FSB has documented Chinese front organizations—including corporate and academic groups—seeking access to information on Russian technological advancements, as well as covert Chinese activities in the Arctic and Russia’s Far East. Moscow has responded by restricting the access of foreign researchers, monitoring users of Chinese platforms like WeChat, and increasing face-to-face warnings to vulnerable officials. These security concerns underscore the reality of the relationship: while Russia and China publicly coordinate on economic and military fronts, deep mutual suspicion and competing strategic ambitions complicate their alliance.

In spurring his country towards war, Hitler exploited economic instability, the national humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, fears of internal enemies in the form of Jews and communists, and a desire to restore German national power by re-building the military and expanding the country to develop a totalitarian, militarized, racially pure state under a supreme leader able to act decisively in his quest to dominate Europe.

The German dictator seized on an opportunity to play on what he rightly perceived as weakness on the part of his potential adversaries to fulfill his dark version of his country’s national destiny. Likewise, the leaders of Imperial Japan exerted enormous influence over the country’s domestic and foreign policy, seizing an opportunity to press for an expansionist war to address economic pressures and resource scarcity. Often acting independently of - and sometimes overruling - civilian authorities, the militarists used propaganda, suppression of political dissent and racialist exhortations to national destiny to justify expansionary war as the only viable path to Japanese strength and salvation, as well as their own power.

Similarly, both Xi and Putin are driven by imperatives; in their cases – assuming their revealing conversation about organ harvesting and eternal life was just aspirational – in the form of actuarial calendars. The former has committed to resolving the Taiwan issue during his time as Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary. And the latter undertook the Ukraine invasion as part of an effort to restore Russian power and influence world-wide, but particularly in the former Soviet “the near abroad,” while at the helm in the Kremlin. Both are building up their militaries – Putin out of immediate necessity and Xi to actualize expansionist aspirations - while stoking nationalism to at once garner support for those endeavors and to defray potential domestic threats to their rule.

Although Xi maintains a strong grip on power as China’s paramount leader, internal tensions are rising due to the absence of a succession mechanism, demographic decline and, most importantly, increased public discontent engendered by weak economic growth, prolonged real estate market weakness, record youth unemployment, deflationary pressures, and ballooning government debt.

He faces also elite dissatisfaction fueled by his reluctance to initiate necessary market reforms. Party insiders are said to be concerned over the sustainability of the state-led model and its impact on global competitiveness, as well as the political risk of widespread public dissatisfaction in an environment where social mobility appears impossible and wealth gaps are evident.

In response, the Chinese leader has used surveillance, purges, ideological education, and anti-Western messaging to silence dissent. This approach has made him over-reliant on what the Soviets called ‘the instruments of state repression.”

Even though overt dissent is suppressed, the risk of future instability is rising beneath the surface. Unrest could rapidly appear if economic or political crises dramatically worsen. To avoid the fate of those who ruled the Soviet Union, Xi’s approach over the coming years may be shaped by the need to adapt by opening the economy to some degree to vent off steam while trying. Confronted with such circumstances, he could well be tempted to further ramp up repression while whipping up nationalist fervor around the Taiwan issue. Although adopting such a course might obscure economic difficulties and bolster his authority, it could also increase the risk of reckless foreign policy steps.

The potential for, and the possible consequences of, a rash move by Xi are increasing. China is engaged in intensifying competition that is generating friction with the U.S., especially around Taiwan, the South China Sea and the race to dominate the emerging realm of AI. Regional tensions are likewise intensifying as China’s increasingly aggressive stance has prompted growing concern and coalition-building by Japan, India, Australia and the U.S.

Pushback to China’s exploitive Belt and Road Initiative in the form of growing recipient-country debt and local resentment are complicating Beijing's ambitions and increasing its frustration.

Finally, Beijing has been impacted by American economic decoupling and sanctions. Export restrictions, technological bans, and tariffs imposed by the U.S. are beginning to bite, challenging China’s drive to seize global leadership in AI, semiconductors, and green technology.

Putin, playing on nationalist sentiment over claimed repression of ethnic Russians in Ukraine and a desire to reassert Moscow’s dominion over that nation, plunged his country into a regional war that could – like the Japanese assault on China in the 1930’s – be a prelude to a larger conflict.

The Russian leader faces mounting internal pressures as the war he unleashed grinds into its fourth year. His invasion has devolved into a slogging match that has cost his country immense amounts of blood and treasure for relatively little recompense.

Although the Kremlin has retained control through coercion, propaganda, and material incentives, challenges are surfacing from multiple directions. The costs in blood and treasure of waging a seemingly endless war are straining the economy, rising inflation, and reducing living standards. Importantly, frustration within elite circles is rising due to the costs and duration of a war waged for insufficient territorial gains.

Moreover, Russia is struggling with the spiraling costs and military overstretch of its commitment in Ukraine, which has limited its ability to project power elsewhere. The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria and Armenia’s distancing from Russia after the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict have weakened Russia’s network of regional allies. Its position in Belarus and in other former Soviet states is increasingly precarious, with popular uprisings and anti-Russian sentiment rising. This, coupled with sustained Western sanctions and relative international isolation, has resulted in reduced Russian influence on the world stage.

The Kremlin continues to call its Ukraine invasion a "special military operation" rather than issuing a formal declaration of war due to fears of backlash. It has, to date, successfully isolated most of society from the war’s worst impact, suppressed dissent, and delayed difficult political choices. The Kremlin portrays all of this as the consequences of a U.S.-led proxy war targeting the Russian nation and its people. But internal pressures from war fatigue, economic strain, and elite tensions are quietly growing. And the longer the war persists without a decisive victory or settlement, the risk of cracks—in the form of elite disaffection and public unrest —will continue to rise.

Finally, like his Chinese counterpart, Putin could be tempted to engage in more external adventurism to divert attention away from the internal pressure building within his country.

Their mutual antipathy for the U.S. aside, another thing the two modern-day dictators have in common is that both are taking steps to prepare their militaries and people for possible large-scale conflict by intensifying military reforms, working to enhance readiness and developing more advanced weapons systems. Having already put his economy on a war footing, Putin is doing this both to enable operations in Ukraine and to prepare for a possible wider war.

Xi, for his part, has embarked on military modernization and shows of force such as the massive parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II to undergird his strategic messaging regarding his intent to “reunify” Taiwan with the mainland and to ready their militaries for active operations to that end if needed. Finally, China and Russia have engaged in a series of joint military exercises, including recent and upcoming naval drills in the Sea of Japan and Pacific emphasizing anti-submarine warfare, missile defense, and combined arms tactics to counter the U.S. and its allies.

Those exercises may signal something more than theater in terms of cooperation between the two militaries. But they have not shown that ties between the two countries have progressed to the point that they are prepared to implement a joint plan for waging war against the U.S.

Like their Axis forbearers, their strategic interests are likely too disparate to allow for anything more than strategic coordination in broad terms between them. This does not mean the U.S. and its allies would find it easy to confront both adversaries at once. Nazi Germany and Japan did not fight jointly, but Allied victory came at huge cost, nonetheless.

At this stage, the key question is whether, when and how Putin intends to end his assault on Ukraine. At present, the Kremlin is publicly evincing no willingness to end this war absent the achievement of at least his minimalist demands: no NATO membership for Ukraine and occupation of the four Russian-annexed regions of that country (in addition to Crimea).

If Ukraine does not cede control over those territories, it appears Putin intends to pursue a fight and negotiate strategy until his goals are achieved. However the war ends, the U.S. will then have to decide if it is prepared to try to engage Russia with an eye towards creating a rift between it and China.

With the latter on a course that appears to be inexorably leading to a confrontation with the U.S. over Taiwan, and Washington clearly preferring not to have to simultaneously deal with two adversaries on different fronts, the questions of whether, how and how soon the war in Ukraine can be ended, and what tack the Russian leader will take thereafter are of great significance to U.S. national security.

In the years since Churchill wrote about the dangers for and from dictators in riding a tiger, others have used the same analogy. Jefferson Starship even wrote a song about it. Science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein cautioned all who would try it that “the first principle in riding a tiger is to hold on tight to its ears.” But it was John F. Kennedy who most succinctly addressed the perils past leaders courted by engaging in the practice. “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger,” he cautioned, “ended up inside.” One wonders how tight a grip the dictators in Beijing and Moscow have on the big cats they sit astride.

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the U.S. Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying U.S. Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.

3. In Rare Visit to China, U.S. Lawmakers Push for More Military Dialogue

​Do we sufficiently understand the role of the PLA and its relationship to the CCP? Do the Chinese view military to military engagement and dialogue the same way we do? We view it positively of course but does China? Does the CCP? What if the military is not trusted by the CCP? What if the military fears saying or doing the wrong thing and then suffering punishment from the CCP?

Military dialogue seems so obviously positive to us. Does it seem so to the PLA and CCP?

Is our mirror imaging here helpful or harmful?

In Rare Visit to China, U.S. Lawmakers Push for More Military Dialogue

Bipartisan House delegation met with China’s No. 2 leader and its defense minister

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/in-rare-visit-to-china-u-s-lawmakers-push-for-more-military-dialogue-ec0f0414

By Yoko Kubota

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Sept. 23, 2025 4:42 am ET

Rep. Adam Smith (D., Wash.) says the U.S. wants to open up communication with China’s military. Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Quick Summary

• A bipartisan U.S. House delegation visited China for the first time in six years, to maintain diplomatic momentum ahead of a Trump-Xi summit.View more

BEIJING—The first U.S. House delegation to China in six years met with senior Chinese officials this week as the two countries, entrenched in economic and military rivalry, seek to keep diplomatic momentum going ahead of an expected meeting between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

The bipartisan delegation, which included three members of the House Armed Services Committee, called on the U.S. and China’s militaries to talk more regularly to avoid veering into conflict—a growing concern as Beijing builds up its nuclear capabilities and exhibits its military power more assertively around the region.

“We want to open up the lines of communication,” Rep. Adam Smith (D., Wash.), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said in a news conference Tuesday. “When you are getting up into the hundreds, close to thousand, of nuclear weapons, it’s time to start having a conversation about it, to make sure we understand each other and that we don’t stumble into any sort of conflict.”

Earlier this month, China for the first time displayed its full nuclear triad—the means to deliver nuclear weapons by land, sea and air—at a lavish military parade, where Xi was flanked by Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The Pentagon estimates that China’s stockpile of nuclear warheads has more than doubled since 2020, and that it has a growing array of options to launch those weapons. China says its nuclear arsenal is solely for deterrence.

The U.S. and China have stepped up the tempo of meetings between senior officials this month ahead of an anticipated summit between Trump and Xi, which could come as soon as next month. The engagements this month have included high-level trade talks in Madrid and a phone call between Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his Chinese counterpart, Dong Jun.

This week’s congressional delegation to Beijing met with Premier Li Qiang, China’s No. 2 leader, and Dong, among others. While a few senators have visited China in recent years, including Trump ally Sen. Steve Daines (R., Mont.) in March, this week’s visit was the first by members of the House of Representatives since before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The drying up of visits to China—even as U.S. lawmakers frequent Taiwan, the self-governed island that Beijing claims as its territory—underscores the sour state of bilateral relations. Many U.S. lawmakers have grown more hawkish with regard to Beijing and risk being seen by constituents as being too close to China.

U.S. lawmakers meet with Chinese officials in Beijing. Photo: Shen Hong/Xinhua/Zuma Press

David Perdue, the U.S. ambassador in Beijing, said the lawmakers weren’t soft or hard on China and commended them for making the journey despite the political risks.

Engagement between the world’s two powerful militaries has also slowed. Though Hegseth spoke with the Chinese defense minister by phone this month, the two haven’t met in person.

Last year, then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met Dong at an annual security conference in Singapore. The two sides reaffirmed plans to reopen direct lines of communication between their militaries, though those efforts stalled.

This year, Dong skipped the Singapore conference. At a Chinese-hosted security forum in Beijing this month, the U.S. sent a defense attaché from its embassy, a lower-ranking official than last year. 

Dong told his American visitors this week that Beijing is willing to establish a stable military-to-military relationship with the U.S., so long as national sovereignty is respected, according to a statement by China’s Defense Ministry. It also quoted him saying that the two militaries should explore ways to open up channels of communication and exchange.

Smith said the two sides didn’t discuss Taiwan, a thorny topic.

The House delegation did talk about Boeing, the American aerospace giant, during its visit, Smith said. During recent trade negotiations, U.S. and Chinese officials have been discussing a deal that could include fresh orders by China of hundreds of Boeing jets. Perdue, the ambassador, said the U.S. and China are in their “last days of that, or weeks of that negotiation,” referring to Boeing.

Smith was joined by fellow Democratic members of the House Armed Services Committee—Reps. Ro Khanna of California and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania—as well as Republican Rep. Michael Baumgartner of Washington, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Write to Yoko Kubota at yoko.kubota@wsj.com

4. Drone Incursions Force Airport Closures in Copenhagen, Oslo

​If these were Russian how much more of this will Europe and NATO take? Will we continue to allow Russia to test NATO defenses by penetrating NATO airspace?

Drone Incursions Force Airport Closures in Copenhagen, Oslo

Danish prime minister describes incident as serious act against critical infrastructure

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/drone-incursions-force-airport-closures-in-copenhagen-oslo-ee49ba4d

By Sune Engel Rasmussen

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Updated Sept. 23, 2025 4:24 am ET

Danish police at Copenhagen Airport on Monday. Photo: Steven Knap/Zuma Press

Quick Summary

• Copenhagen and Oslo airports closed for hours due to drone sightings, following a string of European airspace disruptions.View more

Denmark’s police and military are investigating drone sightings that forced airports in Copenhagen and Oslo to close for several hours, the latest in a string of disruptions to European airspace.

Copenhagen Airport, the busiest in Scandinavia, halted all departures and arrivals for nearly four hours late Monday after two or three large drones were spotted in its airspace. Oslo airport did the same for three hours after the sighting of at least one drone. 

Danish police said the unmanned aircraft came from several directions, and that their size and flight patterns had led authorities to believe a “capable operator” sent them. 

“It’s an actor who has the capabilities, the will and the tools to show off in this way,” Danish police Chief Superintendent Jens Jespersen said.

He said authorities weren’t able to confirm allegations by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on X that Russia had violated Danish airspace.

“What we saw last night is the most serious act so far against Danish critical infrastructure,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said. “It tells us something about the times we are living in, and what we as a society must be prepared to deal with.”

Danish police said they had launched a joint investigation with the military into the incidents, and that it was too early to say if the incidents in Denmark and Norway were linked.

“We take it extremely seriously,” Flemming Drejer, chief of operations at the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, said. “We’re under a high threat of sabotage in Denmark. Someone might not be out to attack us, but to stress us and see how we react.”

Norwegian police said they had seized a drone that was spotted over Oslo airport, but that they had yet to locate its operator.

The drone sightings were the latest in a series of disruptions to the airspace of European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, some of which have been blamed on Russia.

NATO jet fighters intercepted Russian war planes that violated Estonia’s airspace for 12 minutes on Friday, leading the Baltic state to call for formal consultations with members of the Western alliance. The consultations were the second in two weeks, after NATO radar and war planes engaged 19 Russian drones that flew deep into Polish airspace.

Cyberattacks on Friday hit check-in and boarding systems at four of Europe’s main airports, including London’s Heathrow, causing days of flight cancellations and delays.

Danish armed forces didn’t engage the drones over Copenhagen Airport because of their size and the population density around the airport. The drones left Danish airspace of their own accord, police said.

More than 30 incoming aircraft were redirected to other airports and some 100 flights were canceled as a result of the drone sightings, affecting around 20,000 passengers, according to Copenhagen Airport. Delays would continue into Tuesday, it said.

Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com

5. Tech’s H-1B Debate: Is Trump’s New Fee a Solution or a Setback?

Tech’s H-1B Debate: Is Trump’s New Fee a Solution or a Setback?

Some in tech say charging $100,000 for visa applications will weed out bad candidates, others expect it to drive hiring overseas

https://www.wsj.com/tech/h1b-visa-fee-tech-industry-reaction-6bd5444d

By Rolfe Winkler

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 and Angel Au-Yeung

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Sept. 23, 2025 5:30 am ET

President Trump announced changes to the H-1B program on Friday. Photo: Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg News

Quick Summary

• President Trump’s new $100,000 fee for H-1B visa applications sparks mixed reactions across Silicon Valley.View more

The all-out panic in the tech industry has subsided. Now comes the debate: Will President Trump’s move to charge $100,000 to apply for a coveted H-1B visa help or hurt Silicon Valley? 

After a weekend of chaos in which Amazon, Microsoft and other tech giants advised employees holding the skilled-worker visas to race home from overseas, administration officials restored calm, clarifying that the proposed fee would only apply to new H-1B applications starting next year.

By Monday, some prominent industry leaders were offering measured enthusiasm for the policy. In a joint CNBC interview, Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, and Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, expressed cautious optimism about the change. 

In a post on X, Netflix Chairman Reed Hastings called it “a great solution,” predicting it would eliminate the need for a lottery to award H-1Bs by discouraging applications for anything other than high-value jobs.

“I would gladly pay $100,000 if it meant I was guaranteed to win,” said Parker Conrad, chief executive of Rippling. This year his company, which makes software to run corporate operations and has over 4,000 staffers, applied for 64 H-1B visas, of which only 12 were granted, he said.

Many in the industry have said abuse of H-1Bs is a problem, with staffing firms using them to bring in IT workers without special skills, but who will work for below-market wages and be unlikely to change jobs.

Still, a number of startup founders and investors argued that the size of the fee creates a barrier that only large, well-capitalized companies will be able to navigate.

While many startups hire few if any H-1B workers, others see them as a vital talent pool. “When it comes to this fee, it is a fact that as an early stage startup, our resources are limited compared to Big Tech,” said Savin Goyal, founder of AI infrastructure startup Outerbounds, adding that 12% of his employees are on H-1Bs.

“For Amazon and Microsoft, there is a cost, but they can choose to pay. They have the resources to decide,” said Ethan Evans, a former Amazon vice president who now advises startup founders. “For little companies, there is now a question of survival.”

Others argued that the policy wouldn’t necessarily succeed at its goal of creating more opportunities for Americans in the tech sector. Some predicted tech companies would respond to the fee by expanding overseas operations. A number of tech companies now have campuses in India, which supplies the overwhelming majority of H-1B applicants.

“One counterargument is this will just lead to more offshoring, as companies hire the same people but keep them in India at a lower wage without a $100,000 fee,” said Cobi Blumenfeld-Gantz, founder of Chapter, a startup that helps seniors sign up for Medicare and other retirement plans.

Many major U.S. companies were still working out the implications of the proposed fee. Several are contemplating joining lawsuits against the policy, though building a case will prove tough given the Supreme Court’s recent ruling limiting judges’ authority to block policies nationwide.

The technology sector is by far the largest user of the program, with computer-related work accounting for around two-thirds of approved H-1B visa applications in recent years. The sector has turned to foreigners with advanced training in engineering and other technical fields that fewer Americans specialize in. 

In 2025, Amazon had the most approved applications for H-1B workers, employing more than 12,000 of them, according to government data. Large IT staffing and other services firms had about 20,000 as a group, while Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Google each had between 4,000 and 5,000.

“Net-net there should be more H-1Bs, I think it’s good for the country. You can’t start businesses without more good engineers,” said Rippling’s Conrad. Short of that, he said, a one-time fee would reduce applications from companies that farm out lower-wage workers and who win visas that companies like Rippling could use to recruit higher-value employees.

Among many unresolved questions is how companies will win exemptions to the $100,000 fee for hires made “in the national interest,” which Trump’s proclamation referred to but didn’t detail.

People at two companies involved in the artificial-intelligence race said it was their hope the administration would grant waivers to bring in AI researchers, given the strategic importance of the technology.

The $100,000 fee could also deter applications for lower-value candidates if the fee is forfeited when applicants are denied, said Audrea Golding, partner at immigration law firm Fragomen, as is true of smaller fees paid today.

But even technologies not deemed crucial to the national interest can generate billions of dollars in wealth and hundreds of thousands of jobs for the country.

Among those at the top of the tech world who previously lived in the U.S. on H-1B visas are Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and xAI. 

“It would be a shame if you didn’t get the next generation of entrepreneurial talent to come here because they don’t have H-1Bs as a pathway,” said Rich Wong, partner at venture firm Accel.

Write to Rolfe Winkler at Rolfe.Winkler@wsj.com and Angel Au-Yeung at angel.au-yeung@wsj.com

6. America's $100,000 talent tax vs China's free welcome mat

Excerpts:

Strategic blindness

Trump’s H-1B fee represents a classic case of winning the battle while losing the war.

By focusing narrowly on immediate domestic employment concerns, the policy ignores the broader competitive landscape where talent mobility determines technological leadership. While America debates the costs of admitting foreign talent, China systematically attracts it with comprehensive support systems.

The policy’s one-year timeline suggests even the administration recognizes its experimental nature. But in global talent competition, perception often matters more than policy details—and America has just signaled that foreign professionals, especially from Asia, are no longer as welcome as before.

Trump’s $100,000 H-1B fee may ultimately be remembered as one of the most effective policies China never had to implement. By pricing Asian talent out of American markets while Beijing opens new pathways for the same professionals, America risks accelerating its own relative decline in the global innovation race.

The administration’s attempt to protect American workers may instead protect Chinese competitiveness—an unintended consequence that Asian professionals, forced to seek opportunities elsewhere, will help deliver.

America's $100,000 talent tax vs China's free welcome mat - Asia Times

Trump’s new $100,000 H-1B visa fee will kill US jobs, stunt start-ups and shift global innovation from West to East

asiatimes.com · Y Tony Yang · September 22, 2025

President Trump’s decision to impose a US$100,000 annual fee on new H-1B visa applicants represents more than immigration policy—it’s a strategic miscalculation that risks accelerating America’s decline in the global competition for talent while inadvertently strengthening China’s hand in the very contest the US seeks to win.

Asian professionals, particularly from India, constitute the overwhelming majority of H-1B beneficiaries, making them the primary targets of this policy shift.

The $100,000 fee—unprecedented globally and roughly 25-30 times higher than comparable visa costs in Canada or the UK—effectively creates a two-tiered system where only the largest corporations can afford international talent while startups and mid-sized companies are priced out.

This concentrates global hiring power among tech giants while paradoxically harming the very innovation ecosystem that made America attractive to Asian entrepreneurs and engineers in the first place.

The immediate chaos following the announcement, with major employers issuing urgent “return to America” advisories to overseas employees, reveals the policy’s disruptive impact on established Asian professional networks spanning Silicon Valley, Wall Street and beyond.

For the estimated 500,000 H-1B holders currently in the US – disproportionately Asian – the message is clear: leaving means potentially never returning at an affordable cost.

China’s perfect timing

While Trump restricts Asian talent flows to America, Beijing is rolling out the red carpet through its new K-visa program, which launches on October 1, 2025. This isn’t coincidence—it’s strategic opportunism.

China’s K-visa specifically targets young foreign science and technology professionals, offering streamlined entry, flexible work arrangements and extensive government support packages worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

China’s broader talent recruitment apparatus already includes signing bonuses ranging from $420,000 to $700,000, housing subsidies, spousal employment guarantees and pathways to permanent residency. While America erects financial barriers, China eliminates them—creating a talent arbitrage that Beijing didn’t engineer but is expertly exploiting.

The timing reveals China’s sophisticated understanding of global talent flows. As America’s $100,000 fee takes effect, China’s K-visa launches, creating a perfect alternative pathway for the very Asian STEM professionals America is pricing out.

The Trump administration’s justification—protecting American workers from wage suppression—fundamentally misunderstands how high-skilled immigration functions.

Research consistently shows H-1B workers complement rather than replace American talent, creating net job gains through increased productivity and innovation. A 2015 study found that skilled immigrant employment correlates with rising overall employment, particularly benefiting younger American workers.

The policy’s greatest irony lies in its likely outcomes. Rather than hiring more Americans, companies facing the $100,000 fee will likely offshore operations to talent-rich locations—exactly what China hopes to facilitate through its competing programs.

This creates a lose-lose scenario: America loses both jobs and talent, while competitor nations gain both.

Perhaps most damaging is the policy’s disproportionate impact on startups and emerging companies—the engines of American innovation that have historically attracted Asian entrepreneurs.

While Google or Microsoft can absorb $100,000 fees, a five-person AI startup cannot, effectively locking them out of global talent markets. This consolidates hiring power among established giants while strangling the entrepreneurial ecosystem that Asian immigrants have helped build.

Asian entrepreneurs who might have started companies in America will increasingly look elsewhere—and China’s streamlined K-visa process, combined with its massive domestic market, presents an increasingly attractive alternative.

The most profound consequence may be generational. Asian STEM graduates, who have traditionally viewed America as the premier destination for career advancement, are now forced to recalculate. China’s systematic investment in talent attraction, combined with America’s new barriers, creates a fundamental shift in global talent flows.

China’s research and development spending has grown from $40 billion in 2000 to $620 billion in 2021—nearly matching America’s $710 billion. Combined with its new visa policies and existing talent programs, China is positioned to benefit from any Asian professionals deterred by America’s $100,000 fee.

Strategic blindness

Trump’s H-1B fee represents a classic case of winning the battle while losing the war.

By focusing narrowly on immediate domestic employment concerns, the policy ignores the broader competitive landscape where talent mobility determines technological leadership. While America debates the costs of admitting foreign talent, China systematically attracts it with comprehensive support systems.

The policy’s one-year timeline suggests even the administration recognizes its experimental nature. But in global talent competition, perception often matters more than policy details—and America has just signaled that foreign professionals, especially from Asia, are no longer as welcome as before.

Trump’s $100,000 H-1B fee may ultimately be remembered as one of the most effective policies China never had to implement. By pricing Asian talent out of American markets while Beijing opens new pathways for the same professionals, America risks accelerating its own relative decline in the global innovation race.

The administration’s attempt to protect American workers may instead protect Chinese competitiveness—an unintended consequence that Asian professionals, forced to seek opportunities elsewhere, will help deliver.

Y. Tony Yang is an Endowed Professor at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

asiatimes.com · Y Tony Yang · September 22, 2025

7. Trump's immigration war pivots to Asian talent

​

Excerpts:

It’s natural to be afraid of getting pushed out of that elite by hard-charging immigrants who were selected for their genius — and also by ethnic cartelization to monopolize the elite.

The price of that fear, however, is simply very high. This is not the 19th century; America has low birthrates among its elite (and in general), so it can’t replenish its elite through reproduction. Instead, if we want to keep having the world’s best engineers and researchers and such, we need to import some of them.

Cut off that flow, and Americans will discover why a country with only 4% of the world’s population can’t remain the center of global research and development without a lot of skilled immigration.

On top of that, Trump’s poor treatment of Indian H-1B workers and Korean construction workers will end up weakening America’s alliances — and economic relationships — with those two Asian countries. Weakened alliances in Asia will make it nearly impossible for the US to effectively resist the encroachment of Chinese power.

So right-wing fears of an Asian-led America are going to end up making the actual America poorer and less globally relevant. Personally, I don’t think that tradeoff is worth it. Demographic change among the elite can be unsettling, but not as unsettling as the collapse of America’s global power and domestic economic dynamism.

We’ve dealt with a changing elite before, and it worked out fine; we can do it again.

Trump's immigration war pivots to Asian talent - Asia Times

Excessive new H-1B visa fees and ICE raid on Hyundai factory show Indians and Koreans aren’t welcome in Trump’s America

asiatimes.com · Noah Smith · September 22, 2025

In the past, if you asserted that the Republican Party is anti-immigration, someone would always pop up to angrily retort that the GOP is only against illegal immigration. Occasionally, someone would say that what conservatives really want is to shift our immigration mix from low-skilled to high-skilled.

If this were 1995 or 2005, perhaps conservatives really would be satisfied with policies that curbed illegal immigration while preserving the legal kind. But the Trump administration has made it crystal clear that it’s opposed to all immigration, including of the legal high-skilled variety that the right used to claim to want.

On September 19, Trump issued an executive order slapping incredibly harsh restrictions on the H-1B visa program. According to the order, and to clarifying remarks made by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, anyone who employed an H-1B worker would have to pay US$100,000 to the government every year that worker was employed:

An uproar immediately ensued. It wasn’t clear whether the order would hold up in court, but if it did, it would effectively kill the entire H-1B program. $100,000 a year is simply too onerous.

Killing the H-1B program would cause huge disruption to much of the US tech industry and to the university system as well. The tech industry is very international; often the people who bring key ideas to a startup are at first only able to come work in America via H-1B.

A lot of universities initially depend on H-1B visas to bring over faculty and researchers. In general, critical knowledge workers will eventually get employment-based green cards,[1] but this takes a lot of time and effort; usually, they have to come on H-1B first, and apply for green cards while working in America.

As a result, a lot of very successful and famous Americans needed the H-1b to get their start in the country:

Cut off H-1B, and you cut off much of the pipeline of skilled legal immigrants to the US.

Whether or not the Trump administration was aware of the ramifications of the order will probably never be known. But the size of the uproar — which was probably assisted by some frantic behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the “Tech Right” — caused the administration to do one of the hasty backtracks for which it has become famous.

Within a day, US government agencies were tweeting that the new rule is only a one-time fee rather than a repeating one, and that it doesn’t apply to existing visa holders. There was an instant wave of relief.

If the $100,000 fee holds up in court, it’ll still place a significant burden on H-1B employers and workers [2] but not an insurmountable one.

And it looks like foreign students may be exempted from the fee, which would bias the visa program toward people who study at US universities and away from people who are hired directly from overseas. That would actually be good, since the former are especially desirable.

But in any case, the order, in whatever form, is still a significant attack on skilled immigration. And it wasn’t the most egregious one we’ve seen in recent weeks. A couple of weeks ago, ICE raided a Hyundai battery factory in Ellabell, Georgia, arresting hundreds of South Korean workers:

A sprawling Hyundai manufacturing plant in a quiet southeast Georgia community became ground zero on Thursday for one of the most extensive immigration raids in recent US history. The operation, months in the making, ended with 475 arrests, most of them Korean nationals…[N]early 500 federal, state and local officers poured into the sprawling battery production facility, still under construction…The high-stakes raid…was the result of…a meticulously coordinated investigation involving multiple federal and state agencies and weeks of intelligence gathering…marking the largest sweep yet in the current Trump administration’s immigration crackdown at US worksites…

Federal agents descended on the Hyundai site Thursday morning like it was a “war zone,” a construction worker at the electric car plant told CNN…All 475 people taken into custody were illegally in the US, said Steven Schrank, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge. Some crossed into the US illegally, some had visa waivers and were prohibited from working, and some had overstayed their visas, he said.

The raid on the South Koreans, by all accounts, was very harsh and brutal, with various medical incidents among the detainees and frequent threats of violence by the federal agents.

The raid wasn’t illegal, of course, or even against the letter of the law. These workers were not working legally (except for one who had a valid visa and was detained anyway, for some reason).

Most of them were in a legal gray area — their temporary permits allowed them to do certain kinds of work but not others. But they certainly possessed skills that were important to the build-out of a critically important US manufacturing industry.

Both of these actions were very bad, and will be detrimental to America’s wealth and power. The negative impact of the raid on the Hyundai factory is obvious — the mass arrest has caused an international incident, inciting rage among the Korean populace, and prompting some Korean politicians to demand an official apology from the US.

Meanwhile, an absolutely massive amount of planned Korean investment into the US is now being reconsidered or put on hold, threatening Trump’s dreams of reindustrialization.

As for the H-1B case, the program has a variety of problems. Some companies that abuse the system — hogging H-1B slots for low-value outsourcing workers, or treating H-1B employees like indentured servants. I wrote about these problems and how to fix them in a 2022 post.

Let me just quote myself a bit:

[C]oncerns over the H-1B program…deserve serious consideration…If some employees can’t change jobs, they won’t have much leverage to negotiate for raises. H-1b visas are not hard to transfer, but if a worker is in the process of applying for a green card, that transfer (which is really a cancellation and reapplication) can be a lot more difficult.

And if visa workers desperately fear losing their jobs — an H-1B worker who gets laid off has to leave the country if they can’t find work in 60 days — they’ll accept lower wages. These two effects will tend to put downward wage pressure on other workers, who have to compete with the H-1B holders…

As it happens, there’s…some direct evidence against [this] common fear. Mithas and Lucas (2010) studied compensation of H-1B workers compared to their native-born colleagues, and found that after controlling for observable determinants of skill, the visa holders actually earned more…This is exactly the opposite of what you’d expect if H-1B workers were forced to accept low wages because they’re yoked to their employers…

In fact, H-1B workers do lots more than just compete with [native-born workers]. They boost the economy in at least two important ways.

First, having more skilled workers in an area enhances clustering effects…H-1b workers increase the size of [the] pool [of skilled workers in American cities], and so they make a whole city a more attractive destination for investment. That will tend to raise both employment and wages — including for native-born workers in the same industry!

In fact, there are multiple studies showing that either this effect, or some other benefit of H-1B workers, dominates any competitive pressure when it comes to the effects on the native-born.. For example, Peri, Shih and Sparber (2015) find that “increases in STEM [H-1B] workers are associated with significant wage gains for college-educated natives.” Kerr, Kerr, and Lincoln (2015) find “consistent evidence linking the hiring of young skilled immigrants to greater employment of skilled workers by the firm”…

The second way H-1B workers help the US economy…is through innovation…Lincoln and Kerr (2008) find that increases in H-1B levels increase patenting (without decreasing patenting by the native-born). Khanna and Lee (2018) find that when a company is lucky enough to get more H-1bs, it introduces more new products and its revenue goes up. Dimmock, Huang and Weisbenner (2019) find that startups that win the H-1B lottery get more VC funding and have more successful IPOs.

Though it’s hard to measure, these innovative activities probably generate economic activity far from the city or company where the H-1Bs work, and so they boost wages and employment for native workers in addition to the ones found in the earlier studies.

The idea that the main effect of immigrants is to compete with native-born American workers is incredibly seductive, simple, and persistent. It is also, generally speaking, wrong.

And here are a couple more papers:

Mayda et al. (2017) found that when national H-1B numbers were restricted, employment for similar native-born workers didn’t rise…

Mahajan et al. (2024) found that companies who won the H-1B lottery didn’t hire fewer “H-1B-like” native-born workers. They conclude that “lottery wins enable firms to scale up without generating large amounts of substitution away from native workers.”

Glennon (2023) also finds evidence that when we do restrict H-1Bs, it leads to more offshoring; if companies can’t hire tech workers here in America, they will hire them elsewhere. This is because A) tech workers earn even less when they’re working overseas, so the wage competition is stiffer, and B) when they’re overseas, tech workers don’t spend their money in America and stimulate local economies.

On top of all that, there’s evidence that the H-1B program is great for startups. Dimmock et al. (2019) found that startups that win the H-1B lottery end up getting more VC money, patenting more, and having more successful exits.

So there’s a ton of research showing that the H-1B program is very important and good for Americans. In my experience, opponents of H-1Bs tend to just dismiss this research without even looking at it, or impugn the motives of the studies’ authors. They almost never seriously engage with the literature.

Occasionally one will search around and dig up a rare paper saying that H-1Bs do compete down the wages of US workers — usually Bound et al. (2017). But Bound et al. (2017) is a structural estimation paper — it concludes that H-1B workers reduce native-born wages because it assumes away the induced investment demand mechanism by which those workers increase native-born wages.

Of course, the people pulling up the paper rarely, if ever, realize that.

The almost religious zeal with which people attack the H-1B program tells me that there’s something else going on here. Oftentimes, that “something” is anti-Indian racism.

Around Christmas of last year, there was a huge battle on X between the Tech Right and the alt-right over Indian immigration. The alt-right unleashed a fiery attack on Indians, much of it directed at H-1B workers (who are about 70% Indian these days):

The Tech Right won the battle thanks to Elon Musk — himself a former H-1B worker — who threatened to “go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

But the alt-right won the war, because anti-Indian hate became widespread on X. Some of the hate-posts were opportunistic trolling from Pakistan, but most were homegrown[3] the alt-right simply found Indians an easy target.

Despite Musk’s attempt to protect them, Indian-Americans went onto the hard right’s list of targeted groups. Once you’re on that list, it’s very hard to get off of it.

In fact, that shift was probably in the works for a while. During Trump’s 2016 campaign, alt-right influencer Steve Bannon said the following:

In response to Trump actually arguing that we need to keep some immigrants in the country, Bannon says, “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think… A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

Bannon’s argument here is that even the highest-skilled immigrants from Asia are suspect, because they’re unlikely to have America’s best interests in mind.

And in 2022, right-wing law professor Amy Wax attacked Asians for leaning toward the Democratic Party:

Maybe it’s just that Democrats love open borders, and Asians want more Asians here…But as long as most Asians support Democrats and help to advance their positions, I think the United States is better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration.

Wax has also made many negative comments about Indians specifically.

So there was probably a roiling undercurrent of negative sentiment towards Asians, and Indians in particular, on the political right for many years. Now, with the right’s political ascendance and the weakening of progressives’ cultural power, the submerged anti-Indian sentiment is boiling to the surface.

To some degree, this is to be expected. Indian Americans are stunningly successful — they’re the country’s most elite minority, with the highest income, the most education and plenty of representation in science, politics, entrepreneurship and upper management. It was inevitable that some people in the US would envy that success, and that some would fear it.

A similar thing happened with Jews a hundred years ago. Some incumbent elites tried to shut Jews out of the Ivy League and the upper echelons of business. Others believed that Jews would not understand American values or have America’s interests at heart. And still others feared that Jewish people would support each other in the business world to the exclusion of others.

You can see all of those reactions happening with regards to Asians today — and especially to Indians. Famously discriminatory practices at the Ivies have worked to keep Asian numbers down (something that right-wingers have actually fought against). The alt-right thinks of Indians as resident aliens, conspiring for their own profit at the expense of the nation.

And as for self-dealing and ethnic exclusivity, I’m starting to hear this charge thrown around a lot as well, on social media and even in some San Francisco parties.[4] The X user “Power Bottom Dad”, a harsh critic of H-1Bs, has identified at least two lawsuits in which a big American company was accused of preferentially hiring Indians or discriminating against US citizens.

Whether that is a general pattern, as Power Bottom Dad asserts, or a couple of isolated incidents that could be found from time to time among any ethnic group in America, is probably irrelevant to the politics of the issue; what matters is that there is a portion of Americans out there who see Asian immigrants, and particularly Indian immigrants, as a clannish self-dealing cartel.

The other notorious backlash against an immigrant elite in America, of course, was the Japanese internment during World War 2. Although officially about preventing Japanese Americans from turning traitor, the internment also allowed opportunistic white California farmers to push their Japanese competitors out of the market.

We haven’t seen anything like that yet with Indians, Koreans, or other Asian groups, but if there’s a conflict with China while Trump is President, we could see persecution of Chinese people.

But anyway, while figures like Amy Wax and Steve Bannon are odious, I’m actually slightly sympathetic to the fear of a demographic turnover among the elite. The number of slots for elite politicians, businesspeople, and academics in America is fairly constant, so it does become a zero-sum competition.

It’s natural to be afraid of getting pushed out of that elite by hard-charging immigrants who were selected for their genius — and also by ethnic cartelization to monopolize the elite.

The price of that fear, however, is simply very high. This is not the 19th century; America has low birthrates among its elite (and in general), so it can’t replenish its elite through reproduction. Instead, if we want to keep having the world’s best engineers and researchers and such, we need to import some of them.

Cut off that flow, and Americans will discover why a country with only 4% of the world’s population can’t remain the center of global research and development without a lot of skilled immigration.

On top of that, Trump’s poor treatment of Indian H-1B workers and Korean construction workers will end up weakening America’s alliances — and economic relationships — with those two Asian countries. Weakened alliances in Asia will make it nearly impossible for the US to effectively resist the encroachment of Chinese power.

So right-wing fears of an Asian-led America are going to end up making the actual America poorer and less globally relevant. Personally, I don’t think that tradeoff is worth it. Demographic change among the elite can be unsettling, but not as unsettling as the collapse of America’s global power and domestic economic dynamism.

We’ve dealt with a changing elite before, and it worked out fine; we can do it again.

Notes

1 Or O-1 visas, which can be renewed infinitely and thus act a little bit like a green card.

2 It will also be a vehicle for corruption, since — like many of Trump’s policies — the $100,000 fee can be suspended at the President’s discretion.

3 I even heard a second-hand anecdote about a rich right-wing guy who maintains a huge army of anti-Indian hate bots to post on X and other social media sites.

4 Of course, these parties included plenty of Indians.

This article first appeared on Noahpinion Substack and is republished with permission. Read the original here.

asiatimes.com · Noah Smith · September 22, 2025

8. Tariffs Will Hit Slowing U.S. Economy Hard in 2026, OECD Says

Tariffs Will Hit Slowing U.S. Economy Hard in 2026, OECD Says

Growth has been more resilient than expected, the research body says, but some indicators are weakening

https://www.wsj.com/economy/global/u-s-economy-set-to-slow-less-sharply-this-year-but-tariffs-will-hit-hard-in-2026-oecd-says-50f9dfab

By Paul Hannon

Follow

Updated Sept. 23, 2025 5:55 am ET

Shipping containers in Baltimore, Maryland. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Quick Summary

• The OECD forecasts a less sharp slowdown for U.S. and global economies this year, but momentum will decrease into 2026.View more

The U.S. and global economies are set to slow less sharply this year than previously expected, but will continue to lose momentum in 2026 as higher tariffs take an increasingly large toll on activity, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Tuesday.

In a quarterly report, the Paris-based research body forecast the U.S. economy will grow 1.8% this year and 1.5% next year, having expanded by 2.8% in 2024. In June, the OECD projected growth of 1.6% this year and 1.5% in 2026.

“Growth has been a bit more resilient than we expected,” said Alvaro Pereira, the OECD’s chief economist. “But in spite of that resilience, some indicators are weakening.”

The global economy is now forecast to grow by 3.2% this year, a slight slowdown from the 3.3% expansion recorded in 2024 and stronger than the 2.9% projected in June. In 2026, the global economy is expected to grow by 2.9%, an unchanged forecast. The OECD expects the slowdown to be more apparent in the second half of this year than it was in the first as the boost from businesses building stocks ahead of the rise in duties fades.

Surveys of purchasing managers released Tuesday pointed to a slowdown in business activity in India, the U.K. and Australia during the early weeks of September, but a slight acceleration in the eurozone.

The OECD said economies around the world could grow more slowly than forecast if further rises in tariffs are implemented or inflation revives. A sharp and sudden fall in equity markets if investors become less comfortable with the risks they face could also harm growth.

The OECD estimated that the overall effective U.S. tariff rate on imports rose to 19.5% at the end of August from 15.4% in mid-May, reaching its highest level since 1933. It forecast a pickup in inflation to an average of 3% in 2026 from 2.7% this year.

“The impacts of higher tariff rates are yet to be fully felt in the U.S. economy,” the OECD said. “This reflects a combination of factors, with firms making use of inventories and ample profit margins to avoid or absorb the initial impact of higher tariffs, lags between the announcement and imposition of higher tariff rates, and the exemption of goods already in transit from higher tariff rates.”

But while U.S. inflation is set to accelerate as tariffs push prices of imports higher, the research body expects the Federal Reserve to respond to signs of weakness in the labor market by following up last week’s reduction in its key interest rate with one more cut before the end of this year, and two in early 2026.

“There are downside risks,” Pereira said. “This makes it a difficult balancing act.”

President Trump has been pressuring the Fed to lower borrowing costs more quickly, and has taken steps to gain control of its policymaking committee. The OECD said that independent central banks are more likely to deliver low and stable inflation than those whose autonomy has been compromised.

The OECD said high levels of investment in new technologies had helped boost activity in the U.S., although not enough to offset the impact from higher tariffs.

“A drop in net immigration and reductions in the federal workforce are also anticipated to soften economic growth,” the OECD said.

The research body, which advises member governments that include the U.S. on policy, repeated its call for measures to halt and if possible reverse the rise in debt that has pushed bond yields higher this year.

“There is growing concern about future fiscal risks,” the OECD said, noting that those worries were focused on rich economies such as the U.S. and France.

As evidence, the research body said the premium paid by government borrowers from developing economies compared with their advanced-economy counterparts is at its lowest since 2007.

Without action the OECD warned governments might be unable to respond as they would like when the next shock hits their economies.

“It’s possible some countries will face some unpleasant surprises down the line,” Pereira said.

Write to Paul Hannon at paul.hannon@wsj.com

9. Donald Trump's Tariffs Are Nothing But a Giant Mistake

​Excerpts:

By adopting a mercantilist approach to international relations and abandoning America’s past commitment to shared values, principles, and objectives, President Trump has eroded allies’ trust in Washington as an economic and security partner.

President Trump’s overreliance on tariffs as an economic, diplomatic, and security tool appears akin to a toddler with a hammer—everything looks like a nail—resulting in significant destruction. Washington may have done irreparable damage to its reputation and ability to convince its allies and partners toward reducing their trade dependence on Beijing and susceptibility to Chinese economic coercion.

The US may also have degraded military deterrence by undermining the perception—in the minds of both allies and opponents—that the US is a dependable security partner that sallies forth to fulfill its treaty obligations and defend the common good.

Donald Trump's Tariffs Are Nothing But a Giant Mistake

nationalsecurityjournal.org · Bruce Klingner · September 22, 2025

Dollars and Sense

Published

3 hours ago

President Donald Trump participates in the swearing-in ceremony for U.S. Ambassador to China David Purdue, Wednesday, May 7, 2025, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)

United States President Donald Trump touts his trade deals as victories against foreign countries, but it will ultimately be American businesses and consumers who pay the price. Trump’s tariffs are capricious protectionist measures ostensibly imposed to retaliate against other nations’ trade barriers, but were instead based on US trade deficits. Moreover, the US has now weaponized economic penalties to remedy non-economic issues such as immigration, drug trafficking, and election results.

The Truth About Tariffs

Despite President Trump’s repeated claims, foreign businesses and governments do not pay for tariffs on goods imported into the United States. Instead, it is the American importing firm that pays the tariff, which in turn decides to either absorb the additional cost as reduced profit or pass it along to American consumers as increased prices. So, every increased tariff imposed by the Trump administration is a tax on the American people, perhaps the most significant tax increase in history.

In addition, American firms manufacturing goods in the United States will now be paying significantly higher prices—up to 50 percent more—for some metals and components necessary for making their products. This, in turn, will raise the prices that US consumers will have to pay for American-made products. US car manufacturers are complaining that, because of Trump’s tariffs, they are now more disadvantaged against foreign competitors than before the tariffs.

President Donald Trump is joined by Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Vice President JD Vance, British Ambassador Peter Mandelson, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, while announcing a trade agreement with the U.K., Thursday, May 8, 2025, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Emily J. Higgins)

Tariffs Go Against Existing “Deals” and Agreements

The US tariffs on South Korea violate the 2012 South Korea-US (KORUS) free trade agreement that the first Trump administration renegotiated in 2018, and which Trump hailed at the time as “a great deal for American and Korean workers.” Trump’s tariffs also violate the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which the first Trump administration renegotiated and he hailed as a “wonderful new trade deal” that “greatly opens markets to our farmers and manufacturers [and] reduces trade barriers to the US”

Suppose Trump is unwilling to abide by formal treaties approved by Congress or his own personal agreements. Why would countries trust that these new minimalist, less formal trade deals will be upheld or that there won’t be additional arbitrary tariff changes in the future?

There are serious doubts about the legality of Trump’s tariffs. The US Court of International Trade and the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit have both ruled against most of the Trump administration’s tariffs by determining that the President exceeded his authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The Supreme Court has indicated it will review the issue.

Trump’s tariff tantrums left nations with a decision to either reject American economic extortion and risk further retaliation or become supplicants by providing outsized pledges of future investments in the United States. Foreign nations now see themselves stuck between two abusive trading partners, with the US being the more immediate danger to their economies.

The US trade diktats dispensed with any consideration of treaty commitments, loyalty, or previous economic and security contributions to the United States. Reliance on US markets has now become a vulnerability. Even when the tariffs were eventually reduced, the damage had been done to America’s reputation and any goodwill that allies and partners used to have for the United States.

Tariffs Have an Unseen Cost

Treating friend and foe alike and showing disregard for America’s partners undermines trust in the United States, which is the foundation of economic, diplomatic, and security relationships. It will also exacerbate growing doubts among US allies about the US commitment to uphold its pledges to defend them. That will not go unnoticed by America’s opponents.

Trump’s tariffs have severely undermined Washington’s strategic objective of forming an international coalition against China’s predatory business practices and coercive diplomacy. The US goal to reduce Beijing’s ability to bully its neighbors should have first prioritized augmenting regional economic cooperation and integration amongst potential coalition partners rather than initiating trade wars against them. Just as security alliances are military force multipliers, trading partners are economic force multipliers.

The new US tariffs will negatively impact partners’ economies, which could cause anti-American resentment as well as degrade their ability to devote a greater percentage of their GDP towards augmenting defense requirements. Indo-Pacific nations may now be more tempted to seek alternative trade opportunities, forge non-US trade coalitions, and reduce their exposure to the whims of US tariff policy.

President Donald Trump meets with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Tuesday, May 6, 2025, in the Oval Office. Vice President JD Vance attends. (Official White House Photo by Emily J. Higgins)

By adopting a mercantilist approach to international relations and abandoning America’s past commitment to shared values, principles, and objectives, President Trump has eroded allies’ trust in Washington as an economic and security partner.

President Trump’s overreliance on tariffs as an economic, diplomatic, and security tool appears akin to a toddler with a hammer—everything looks like a nail—resulting in significant destruction. Washington may have done irreparable damage to its reputation and ability to convince its allies and partners toward reducing their trade dependence on Beijing and susceptibility to Chinese economic coercion.

The US may also have degraded military deterrence by undermining the perception—in the minds of both allies and opponents—that the US is a dependable security partner that sallies forth to fulfill its treaty obligations and defend the common good.

About the Author: Bruce Klingner

Bruce Klingner is a senior fellow at the Mansfield Foundation. He previously served 20 years with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, including as CIA’s Deputy Division Chief for Korea. You can follow him on X: @bruceklingner.

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In this article:

Written By Bruce Klingner

Bruce Klingner specializes in Korean and Japanese affairs as the Senior Research Fellow for Northeast Asia at The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center. Klingner’s analysis and writing about North Korea, South Korea and Japan, as well as related issues, are informed by his 20 years of service at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Klingner, who joined Heritage in 2007, has testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He is a frequent commentator in U.S. and foreign media. His articles and commentary have appeared in major American and foreign publications and he is a regular guest on broadcast and cable news outlets. He is a regular contributor to the international and security sections of The Daily Signal. From 1996 to 2001, Klingner was CIA’s Deputy Division Chief for Korea, responsible for the analysis of political, military, economic and leadership issues for the president of the United States and other senior U.S. policymakers. In 1993-1994, he was the chief of CIA’s Korea branch, which analyzed military developments during a nuclear crisis with North Korea.

nationalsecurityjournal.org · Bruce Klingner · September 22, 2025

10. The United States’ Dirty War on “Narco Terrorism”

Will this go down in history as a "dirty war?"

The United States’ Dirty War on “Narco Terrorism”

By Ben Saul

Published on September 22, 2025

https://www.justsecurity.org/121115/united-states-dirty-war-narcoterrorism/

The United States recently fused the “war on drugs” with the “war on terror” by killing “narco terrorists” aboard vessels in the Caribbean Sea. The killings violate the human right to life and reflect an alarming new phase of U.S. lawlessness abroad.

On Sept. 2, 2025, President Donald Trump announced a “kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists” aboard a vessel in international waters, allegedly transporting illegal narcotics to the United States, killing 11 people. The President posted a video of the strike and noted that Tren de Aragua had previously been designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The U.S. Secretary of State indicated the U.S. could have intercepted the vessel but chose to destroy it in order to send a deterrent message to traffickers saying, “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up.” He threatened to conduct similar operations in the future, also stating: “What will stop them is when we blow up and get rid of them.”

The U.S. armed forces struck a second vessel on Sept. 15, 2025, killing another three people, and a third vessel on Sept. 19, 2025, killing another three people.

The strikes follow an unpublished order reportedly signed by the U.S. President in August 2025 authorizing the Pentagon to use military force, in foreign territory or international waters, against Latin American drug cartels that the U.S. government had earlier designated a foreign terrorist organization.

The United States has reportedly deployed considerable naval, air and land forces in the region for the stated purpose of deterring illicit narcotics trafficking and “narco-terrorism.”

The Terrorist Designations

The U.S. Department of State designated eight organized criminal groups (gangs and drug cartels) as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs) on 28 February 2025. The U.S. listings asserted that six of the groups are based primarily in Mexico, one originated in Venezuela, and one began in the United States but has expanded to Central America. The United States alleges some of these groups are present in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, which indicates the potentially broad application of any U.S. authorization to use force.

On July 25, 2025, the U.S. sanctioned Cartel de los Soles (a.k.a. Cartel of the Suns) as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, alleging that it is a “Venezuela-based criminal group headed by Nicolas Maduro Moros and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals in the Maduro regime that provides material support to foreign terrorist organizations threatening the peace and security of the United States, namely Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel.” The U.S. President’s orders accordingly raise the possibility that the United States may use force against foreign State officials. In August 2025, the United States doubled the reward to US$50 million for information leading to the arrest of Mr. Maduro, who the U.S. Department of Justice indicted on drug trafficking charges.

The United States also announced the listing of two Haitian gangs as foreign terrorist organizations on May 2, 2025 and two Ecuadorian criminal groups on Sept. 4, 2025.

UN experts have previously expressed concerns about the United States’ designation of organized crime groups as terrorist organizations in communication USA 14/2025, on the basis that terrorism and organized crime are distinct phenomena to which different legal frameworks should apply. In that communication, concern focused on the use of the terrorist listings in applying the Enemy Aliens Act to carry out unjustified deportations in contravention of international law. UN experts are further concerned that in the present case, terrorist listings are again being used as a first step toward justifying other illegal measures, namely the unlawful use of force.

U.S. Violations of International Law

The facts of the three strikes as presented by the U.S. point to serious violations of international law, and the reported U.S. Presidential order appears to authorize such violations.

The human right to life

Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), ratified by the United States in 1992, prohibits the arbitrary deprivation of life, and extrajudicial killings are universally understood as a violation of customary international law. States must respect the human right to life whenever the State’s military activities have a direct and reasonably foreseeable impact on the right to life of individuals outside the State’s territory (UN Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 36, paras. 22 and 63). This includes on foreign territory not otherwise under the States’s control as well as on the high seas.

The use of potentially lethal force is permitted only where it is strictly necessary and proportionate in personal self-defence or defence of others against an imminent threat to life (General Comment No. 36, para. 12). There is no evidence that anyone on board the three vessels attacked by the U.S. posed such a threat to the life of others in the circumstances. The attacks on the three vessels accordingly violated the right to life of the 17 victims.

Under international law the United States must investigate these apparent extrajudicial killings in line with international standards, prosecute the perpetrators (including those who ordered the attacks) for crimes (such as murder) reflecting the seriousness of the attacks, provide effective remedies and reparation to the victims, and guarantee non-repetition of such attacks.

Use of force on the high seas

Any use of force on the high seas must additionally comply with the international law of the sea, including as regards the rules on the interception and boarding of foreign-flagged and flagless ships (see the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, articles 110–111, reflecting customary international law) and on flagged ships suspected of engaging in drug trafficking (article 17 of the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances 1988). There is a right to unilaterally intercept stateless vessels, and to intercept flagged vessels suspected of engaging in drug trafficking with flag State consent. It is unknown whether the three vessels attacked by the U.S. were flying a national flag and thus whether there were lawful grounds for interception.

Regardless, under the law of the sea, a law enforcement not military paradigm governs the use of force, consistent with the right to life discussed earlier. In other words, force must be used as a last resort and in a graduated manner, and the use of potentially lethal force must be used only in self-defence or defence of others. The attack did not appear to comply with these requirements, with the United States admitting that it chose to attack rather than intercept the vessel, and no information provided about any lawful ground for the use of force.

Prohibition on the use of armed force

The activities of criminal groups listed by the United States as terrorist organizations do not constitute armed attacks giving rise to self-defence under international law. Early in 2025, the U.S. President invoked the Alien Enemies Act to claim that Tren de Aragua was engaged in an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” against the United States on behalf of the Venezuelan Government, in order to summarily deport alleged members of that organization to El Salvador. However, United Nations experts have repeatedly condemned the President’s order as having no factual or legal basis.

When there is no “armed attack” at all, debates about the scope of self-defence can be set aside, such as whether it extends to attacks by autonomous non-State actors. According to long-established international law, the United States may exercise the right of self-defence only under article 51 of the United Nations Charter and customary law where it is necessary and proportionate in response to an armed attack committed by a foreign State, whether directly by State forces or where a State sends non-State forces to carry out the attack.

However, a question arises whether international law prohibits the use of armed force against a stateless vessel on the high seas, since article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter and customary international law prohibit force only against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State (and by extension, its flagged public and private vessels). International law clearly does not give carte blanche to assassinate pirates and the like. As mentioned, the international law of the sea carefully regulates the interception of flagless vessels and applies a law enforcement not military paradigm.

In addition, none of the potentially affected States appears to have consented to the United States using military force against criminal groups in their territories in the manner envisaged under the U.S. President’s order. It is particularly alarming that the order may be aimed not only at criminal groups but in the case of Venezuela against foreign officials, even including the head of government. The United States previously used illegal force in 1989 to arrest the Panama’s head of government, who had been indicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges, an action condemned as a violation of international law by the United Nations General Assembly.

States parties engaged in acts of aggression as defined in international law, resulting in deprivation of life, violate ipso facto the right to life under article 6 of the Covenant (Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 36, para. 70). The illegal use of force on foreign territory would also violate the foreign State’s sovereignty and the duty of non-intervention.

International humanitarian law

The United States is plainly not involved in an armed conflict with Tren de Aragua or any of the other criminal groups so as to engage the targeting rules of international humanitarian law.

No other relevant frameworks

There are no separate international law rights to unilaterally use military force in foreign territory to counter terrorism or organized crime, including illicit narcotics trafficking. Nor is there any rule permitting such extraterritorial law enforcement without the foreign State’s consent; any resulting detentions – better described as abductions or kidnapping – would be arbitrary and unlawful, contrary to article 9 of the ICCPR.

Conclusion

The human rights-compliant response to the challenge of transnational organized crime is to make effective use of multilateral law enforcement cooperation tools, including the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, and bilateral cooperation, by building relationships of mutual trust and benefit with other States. The United States has a long history of cooperation with States in the region, including building the capacity of foreign law enforcement partners.

The United States could also do much more to preventively mitigate the root causes of organised crime, including by better addressing the demand-side of drug use in the United States and regulating the licit and illicit trade in powerful U.S. weapons that fuel cartel violence and corrode political systems in Latin America. Murdering “narco-terrorists” amounts to vigilante justice becoming of a gangster-State, and the political and military leaders responsible must be investigated, prosecuted, and punished.

11. As the U.S. Pulls Back From the U.N., Rivals Stand to Gain

​Never give up the high ground.

The irony is that if we turned Ambasador Waltz loose he could really drive change at the UN and ensure that US interests are protected.

As the U.S. Pulls Back From the U.N., Rivals Stand to Gain

We explain how Russia, China, Iran and other countries are trying to strengthen their influence as America retreats.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/briefing/un-china-russia-palestine-typhoon.html

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Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

The U.S. is pulling back from the U.N. Russia, China, and Qatar are filling the void.

By Mara Hvistendahl

This year, while reporting in Geneva, I heard about a revealing meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council that took place in the city this spring.

The meeting, an annual closed-door retreat of ambassadors, was held against the backdrop of President Trump’s threats to slash American funding for the United Nations. According to two diplomats who attended, as the group discussed how to save money, the ambassadors of China and Cuba had a suggestion: What if the council limited inquiries into, say, government-sanctioned abuses like torture, war crimes, and jailing of dissidents?

Diplomats told me this wasn’t the only time in recent months that representatives of those countries cited American funding cuts to justify what seem like convenient changes to how the U.N. conducts business. China and Cuba, along with other countries like Iran, Russia and Venezuela, have repeatedly suggested scaling back human rights investigations.

The United States has always been the U.N.’s largest financial contributor. But since taking office, Trump has upended its operations by withdrawing from the Human Rights Council and other agencies, and freezing funding for others. Officials are bracing for more cuts.

I’ve spent the past three months talking to diplomats and U.N. officials and reviewing documents, trying to understand the consequences of this pullback. What I’ve found: The Trump administration’s retreat is emboldening authoritarian nations to reshape the U.N. to their advantage.

Money problems

The U.N. has long had money issues, and the Trump administration’s retreat has made its cash crunch worse. As a result, U.N. leaders are looking to save money everywhere: by relocating positions to cities less expensive than New York or Geneva, ending some leases early, and even potentially cutting rations to peacekeeping troops.

For some countries, that crisis looks like an opportunity:

• Qatar, which has a history of labor abuses, is offering to host some of the offices of the U.N. workers’ rights agency.
• Rwanda is interested in hosting a “long-term U.N. campus.”
• Russia has proposed cutting speaking time for advocacy groups, to save money on hearings.

And countries like China and Iran are “using every opportunity, including the opportunity presented by the liquidity crisis,” to try to advance their agenda, said Phil Lynch, the executive director of International Service for Human Rights, a nongovernmental group in Geneva focused on U.N. advocacy.

U.S. influence at the U.N.

Trump is scheduled to speak today at the General Assembly. He’ll talk about “how global institutions have significantly decayed the world order,” a White House spokeswoman said.

But the United States played a pivotal role in the creation of the United Nations 80 years ago, and has long wielded immense power there, helping sway elections and votes on human rights and in other arenas.

One former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva told me about a time he helped defeat a Chinese candidate in the 2020 election for the head of the U.N. organization charged with protecting intellectual property, an area where the U.S. and China have long clashed.

In another instance, the U.S. helped secure the election in 2022 of an American to the head of an obscure but influential U.N. agency that sets standards for satellite communication and internet cables. China had led the agency for eight years, and used its position to push 5G equipment developed by the Chinese company Huawei.

Over the course of my reporting, I learned about another incident that helps illustrate how U.S. power at the U.N. is slipping.

In June, American diplomats tried to block Shanghai from hosting a 2027 conference to discuss satellite regulations. A win for China would have presented security concerns for American companies, and the U.S. offered Washington as a last-minute alternative venue.

Influencing votes of this sort was the kind of soft power move that the U.S. once excelled in.

This time, the Americans lost.

Image

At a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, yesterday. Credit...Eyad Baba/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

France recognized Palestinian statehood

President Emmanuel Macron announced France’s recognition of the state of Palestine, drawing a standing ovation from some of the attendees at the U.N. yesterday.

Macron began his speech by denouncing the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, demanding that the remaining hostages be freed and that antisemitism be smothered. He has worked repeatedly to try to convince Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel that recognition of a Palestinian state is not a reward to Hamas.

The highly symbolic move is intended to help salvage a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That solution is looking as distant as ever as the Gaza war nears the end of its second year and Israel rapidly expands its settlements in the West Bank. France joins nearly 150 nations that already consider Palestine a sovereign nation. See which countries recognize a Palestinian state.

ASK A CORRESPONDENT

Your questions about tariffs, answered

All this week, Ana Swanson, who writes about trade and international economics from Washington, answers your questions about tariffs. Thank you to all the readers who wrote in.

Once tariffs are in place, can they be easily removed? If subsequent governments decide to do away with tariffs, would there be any barriers, economic or otherwise, to doing so? — Douglas Macrae Smith, Pujols, France

Ana: The tariffs that Trump has put in place have been done through executive action, rather than legislation in Congress. Legally, that makes it easier for a subsequent president to remove them. Many of Trump’s tariffs are also the current subject of a Supreme Court case, and it’s possible the court will find them illegal and order the president to remove them later this year. But in general, trade experts often observe that tariffs can be sticky; easier for governments to put in place than to remove. For example, the Biden administration chose to keep most of the tariffs that Trump put into effect in his first term. A future president could certainly remove some tariffs that prove politically unpopular, but it seems likely that the average U.S. tariff could end up being higher than it was before.

Interested in providing feedback on this newsletter? Take our short survey here.

MORE TOP NEWS

Image

Basco in the northern Philippines, yesterday. Credit...Justine Mark Pillie Fajardo/Associated Press

Weather: Super Typhoon Ragasa made landfall in the Philippines, causing landslides, and is expected to reach Hong Kong tomorrow. Forecasters say it is the most powerful storm in the world so far this year. You can track it here.

U.S.: Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night TV show, which was suspended last week over comments about Charlie Kirk, will return to the airwaves today, the network said.

Egypt: The country’s best-known political prisoner, Alaa Abd El Fattah, was pardoned by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Tech: Nvidia said it would invest $100 billion in OpenAI, an indication of the wild financial figures being tossed around in the artificial intelligence world.

Russia: President Vladimir Putin proposed maintaining the caps imposed by the last remaining arms control treaty between Moscow and Washington for another year.

TikTok: A U.S. official said China will license a copy of TikTok’s algorithm, the engine that powers the app’s video feed, to a U.S. investor group that will oversee the app in the U.S.

SPORTS NEWS

Football: Ousmane Dembélé and Aitana Bonmati won the Ballon d’Or for best players. Here are the highlights from the ceremony.

Tennis: Find out what it’s like watching a match with Roger Federer at the Laver Cup.

Formula 1: Red Bull said it had finalized a settlement with Christian Horner over the termination of his contract.

MORNING READ

Image

Credit...Renaud Philippe for The New York Times

Gjoa Haven, an Inuit hamlet high in Canada’s Arctic, lives through weeks of total darkness during its long winters. Fresh produce and other perishables are flown in from northern Manitoba once a week.

Now, strawberries, carrots, broccoli, bell peppers, tomatoes and myriad other fruits and vegetables are being grown there all year long, in a high-tech greenhouse with artificial lights and constant heating. The project required residents with little experience growing plants to learn fast. And they did. Read more.

CONVERSATION STARTERS

Image

Credit...Kristjan Lok

Weddings: Foreigners are flocking to Denmark to marry. That has left local couples battling for space at city halls and prompted the authorities to step in.

Activism: Onstage campaigning for an end to the war in Gaza is now common in the British music scene, and pro-Palestinian benefit shows can sell out huge venues.

No joke? Under Trump, comedians and late-night hosts are navigating a thorny landscape, our comedy columnist writes.

ARTS AND IDEAS

Image

Duc Phuc at the Intervision Song Contest in Moscow.Credit...Olesya Kurpyayeva/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Not quite Eurovision

How do you challenge Western cultural dominance? Russia is trying a song contest.

The country was suspended from most international cultural and sporting events, including the Eurovision Song Contest, after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. So, over the weekend, Moscow staged the Intervision Song Contest, a revival of a Cold War-era spectacle. The broadcast opened with a message from President Vladimir Putin and competitors came from countries including China, Cuba and India.

The winner was Duc Phuc, a popular pop star from Vietnam, who sang about a Vietnamese hero over an intense dance beat.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Image

Credit...Johnny Miller for The New York Times

Cook: This richly sauced, tangy shrimp recipe from Bahrain works well with some flatbread.

Read: Our critic says Ian McEwan’s new novel, “What We Can Know,” is the best the author has written in ages.

Exercise: Stronger glutes can help your whole body move more easily. Try this workout.

TIME TO PLAY

That’s it for today. See you tomorrow. — Katrin

We welcome your feedback. Send us your suggestions at briefing@nytimes.com.

12. Donald Trump’s UN Address Opportunity

Excerpts:

President Trump has taken unprecedented steps in reevaluating America’s relationship with the United Nations. Earlier this year, he withdrew from several UN organizations, including UNESCO and the World Health Organization. He ended US support and engagement with the Human Rights Council and the Palestinian humanitarian organization UNRWA. In February, Trump launched a comprehensive review of US membership in all international organizations and multilateral treaties.

The review was supposed to be concluded in early August, but if it is indeed on schedule, the results have not been publicly announced. UN organizations and other governments are on pins and needles.

If the president wants to make news in his speech, nothing will shake the UN world more than announcing before the UN General Assembly which UN organizations the United States will remain engaged with, which it will withdraw from, and what reforms and changes the US requires to resume funding for others.

US financial leverage is at a maximum. The United States has caused financial stress throughout the UN system by withholding and delaying funding, causing UN organizations and governments to worry about the impact on international programs and initiatives that they deem valuable. As a result, UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced the UN80 reform initiative, aimed at reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and reducing waste.

Other governments are eager for the United States to reengage. President Trump is positioned to demand fundamental reforms in return for restoring US funding. But the administration has not publicly conveyed the specifics of its desired changes.

If Washington wants to see the UN return to its core purposes and implement fundamental reform, the time is ripe. There is no better time, place, or venue for the president to lay out his vision than during his speech next week.

Donald Trump’s UN Address Opportunity

The National Interest · Brett D. Schaefer

September 21, 2025

Share

With US financial leverage at a zenith, President Trump has the chance to remake international institutions.

This Tuesday, President Donald Trump will address the United Nations General Assembly for the fifth time. In previous addresses, President Trump has signaled policies and priorities that have had great implications for the United Nations—this year, one should expect no different.

In 2017, Trump presaged his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. In 2018, he repudiated the International Criminal Court. In 2019, he called open border policies “cruel and evil” and doubled down on his demands for “fair” trade deals. In a prerecorded address during the COVID pandemic in 2020, he sharply criticized the World Health Organization and demanded accountability for China.

These speeches clarified the policies of his first term and set the stage for early decisions in his second. His fifth speech may offer clarity on the US relationship with the UN, which is ambiguous pending the result of a review of US involvement with international organizations. As in previous speeches, Trump will probably highlight what he sees as successes, including various trade deals, interventions to end foreign conflicts, and securing the US border.

He will also discuss his foreign policy priorities. In the Middle East, the president undoubtedly will call for the release of Israeli hostages and criticize the effort by France and other European countries to recognize a Palestinian state as a reward for Hamas terrorism. The president is also eager to finalize a deal with China that he can tout in New York. Hopefully, he will warn Russia about testing NATO and announce new sanctions in coordination with European allies.

But the biggest question for many in the audience will be the future of US engagement with many parts of the UN system.

The US Mission to the United Nations gave a preview. While noting the value of the United Nations in convening nations to address international challenges, the US Mission asserted, “The UN has at times strayed from its original mandate. Now is the time for bold reform. The United Nations must return to its core purposes.”

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Specifically, the United States called on the UN to focus on preserving international peace and preventing conflict through “transparent, accountable, and results-driven” peacekeeping; respect the sovereignty and independence of the member states and avoid “imposing burdensome regulations or policies that stifle innovation, impede economic growth, or infringe on national decision-making;” and defend “natural and unalienable rights” especially the “freedoms of expression, association, peaceful assembly, and religion.”

Assuming the president’s speech will expound on these themes, President Trump will find a rapt audience.

President Trump has taken unprecedented steps in reevaluating America’s relationship with the United Nations. Earlier this year, he withdrew from several UN organizations, including UNESCO and the World Health Organization. He ended US support and engagement with the Human Rights Council and the Palestinian humanitarian organization UNRWA. In February, Trump launched a comprehensive review of US membership in all international organizations and multilateral treaties.

The review was supposed to be concluded in early August, but if it is indeed on schedule, the results have not been publicly announced. UN organizations and other governments are on pins and needles.

If the president wants to make news in his speech, nothing will shake the UN world more than announcing before the UN General Assembly which UN organizations the United States will remain engaged with, which it will withdraw from, and what reforms and changes the US requires to resume funding for others.US financial leverage is at a maximum. The United States has caused financial stress throughout the UN system by withholding and delaying funding, causing UN organizations and governments to worry about the impact on international programs and initiatives that they deem valuable. As a result, UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced the UN80 reform initiative, aimed at reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and reducing waste.

Other governments are eager for the United States to reengage. President Trump is positioned to demand fundamental reforms in return for restoring US funding. But the administration has not publicly conveyed the specifics of its desired changes.

If Washington wants to see the UN return to its core purposes and implement fundamental reform, the time is ripe. There is no better time, place, or venue for the president to lay out his vision than during his speech next week.

About the Author: Brett D. Schaefer

Brett D. Schaefer is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on multilateral treaties, peacekeeping, the United Nations, and international organizations.

13. China, Russia’s gray zone tactics raising risk of wider war

​I have not seen MOOTW used in a long time (nor the Gulf of Tonkin and the USS Maine in Havana Harbor).

Excerpts:

The Rand Corporation, a US-based think tank, reported in 2022 that, “Chinese analysts characterize coercive or confrontational external-facing MOOTW as stability maintenance, rights protection, or security and guarding operations.”

The report said, “Chinese analysts characterize coercive or confrontational external-facing MOOTW as stability maintenance, rights protection, or security and guarding operations.”

China had informed the United Nations 13 years earlier of its claims to the South China Sea because it holds “undisputable sovereignty and jurisdiction over its islands and adjacent waters” and has the right “to install military and non-military facilities for the purpose of self-defense.”

The danger of both Russia’s and China’s gray zone activities lies in the possibility of incidents that could lead to combat.

US history, for instance, is sprinkled with seaborne disasters that led to war. The mysterious sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor triggered a US intervention in what became the Spanish-American War.

The equally ambiguous attack on a US naval ship in the Gulf of Tonkin provoked Washington to vastly intensify its military intervention in Vietnam.

The self-inflicted crash of the Chinese Coast Guard ship off Scarbrouh Shoal was not enough to incite Chinese action against the Philippines. The question now is, what kind of incident would? Or is it just a question of when?

China, Russia’s gray zone tactics raising risk of wider war - Asia Times

Beijing and Moscow using gray zone tactics around Taiwan and Ukraine in what increasingly looks like a coordinated effort

asiatimes.com · Daniel Williams · September 22, 2025

Almost in tandem, Russia and China have expanded their hostilities with Taiwan and Ukraine, respectively, to allies of each.

Russia sent fighter aircraft into the territory of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which is supplying weapons and intelligence to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s full-scale invasion.

At sea and in the sky, China is moving to tighten its grip in areas around Taiwan, the self-governing island China claims as its own, with low-intensity intimidation.

The incidents that have become frequent in recent weeks fall under the category of “gray zone” activity, in which countries take action against enemies because the low-intensity attacks are unlikely to attract military retaliation from the targeted countries.

Both Beijing and Moscow have used gray zone tactics for years. Russia has employed methods even before its first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and its second full-scale one that began in 2022:

Those include military aircraft overflights around Western Europe, cyberattacks on NATO allied countries, sabotage of infrastructure, damage to undersea communication cables, interference with electronic navigation tools, misinformation campaigns and financing activities of pro-Kremlin politicians abroad.

China’s menu is similar, though much of it doubles as rehearsals for a possible invasion or blockade of Taiwan.

On Saturday, Poland scrambled fighter jets in response to a massive Russian bombardment of Ukraine, some of which occurred close to the Polish border.

The day before, three Russian fighter jets flew over Estonia, a former Soviet republic that joined NATO after it gained independence. NATO jets scrambled and the Russian MIG-31 jets retired.

In early September, drones launched from Russia were shot down by NATO forces over Poland and Romania. The drones were apparently unarmed and did no damage. Russia said the air vehicles had gone inadvertently astray.

Observers’ theories suggest that Russia’s air intrusions are distractions from the slow pace of its efforts to conquer Ukraine on the ground.

Russia is trying to compensate for its “faltering position in Ukraine, as the invasion has come at a high cost and few territorial gains,” wrote the American Security Project, an American research institute.

The Kremlin “may be employing sub-threshold tactics to project strength, aiming to deter outside powers from fully understanding its vulnerabilities,” the ASP journal added.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, a government agency, said, “Russian grey zone tactics are principally intended to support Russia’s view of its place as a great power.

“Russia has many options for aggressively challenging countries attempting to counter its agenda, and its long experience in deception and denial has led to material gains in geopolitical influence.”

Moscow denied that its jets flew into Estonian airspace. The flights were in “strict compliance with international airspace regulations,” the Kremlin asserted.

Meanwhile, in the Taiwan Strait, Chinese jets buzzed warships from Australia and Canada that were navigating the waterway. Western naval vessels have made periodic transits through the strait to demonstrate it is an open route under international law.

Chinese officials called the ships’ passage “troublemaking and [a] provocation.” Canadian and Australian officials indicated they would continue to traverse the strait to “uphold international law.”

On September 12, China said it deployed naval and air forces to monitor a pair of US and British warships sailing through the strait. The pair of ships “provoked trouble” in its coastal waters, a Chinese military spokesperson said.

Major Jason Welch, a spokesman for the US Indo-Pacific Command, responded that a US missile destroyer and a British frigate conducted a “routine Taiwan Strait transit” that was “in accordance with international law.”

In early August, a Chinese Coast Guard vessel crashed into a People’s Liberation Army Navy vessel as both were trying to scare off a Philippine supply ship trying to reach a group of Filipino fishermen near reefs known as the Scarborough Shoal.

China claims the feature as within its sovereign domain and accused the Philippine vessel of having “illegally invaded China’s waters.”

Manila responded, saying the shoal “is a longstanding and integral part of the Philippines.” Under an international court ruling, the shoal belongs to the Philippines.

Military relations between Manila and the United States have tightened in recent years as China’s insistence on full control of the Taiwan Strait has grown louder and more frequent.

Beijing claims Scarborough Shoal as part of a “nine-dash line” mapping of the South and East China seas that Beijing says gives it ownership of the entire route between Taiwan and mainland China. The United States, Japan and the Philippines in August staged naval drills off the Scarborough Shoal.

A Chinese frigate tried to move close to the allied warships undertaking maneuvers, but a Philippine frigate warned it off by radio. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver closer but, again, we challenged them,” Philippine naval Commander Irvin Ian Robles told reporters on board the BRP Jose Rizal frigate.

Isaac Kardon, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that “gray zone [activities] are recognizable and controversial elements of the People’s Republic of China’s strategy,” which began in the 2000s in the South China Sea and extended northward to the East China Sea in the 2010s.

Kardon describes the tactics as a kind of strategic ambiguity, Washington’s long-held policy of keeping China uncertain about what the US would do if Beijing decided to invade Taiwan.

“Most definitions of the gray zone key on the uncertain political and operational space between war and peace, Kardon wrote. He added that China’s gray zone actions “typically include some combination” of:

• People’s Republic maritime law enforcement vessels enforcing Chinese maritime law and implementing maritime and boundary policies.
• The People’s Liberation Army coordination with seaborne militia forces, civilian fishing fleets, marine scientific vessels and offshore oil and gas industrial assets, with PLA naval forces over the horizon.

The Rand Corporation, a US-based think tank, reported in 2022 that, “Chinese analysts characterize coercive or confrontational external-facing MOOTW as stability maintenance, rights protection, or security and guarding operations.”

The report said, “Chinese analysts characterize coercive or confrontational external-facing MOOTW as stability maintenance, rights protection, or security and guarding operations.”

China had informed the United Nations 13 years earlier of its claims to the South China Sea because it holds “undisputable sovereignty and jurisdiction over its islands and adjacent waters” and has the right “to install military and non-military facilities for the purpose of self-defense.”

The danger of both Russia’s and China’s gray zone activities lies in the possibility of incidents that could lead to combat.

US history, for instance, is sprinkled with seaborne disasters that led to war. The mysterious sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor triggered a US intervention in what became the Spanish-American War.

The equally ambiguous attack on a US naval ship in the Gulf of Tonkin provoked Washington to vastly intensify its military intervention in Vietnam.

The self-inflicted crash of the Chinese Coast Guard ship off Scarbrouh Shoal was not enough to incite Chinese action against the Philippines. The question now is, what kind of incident would? Or is it just a question of when?

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Daniel Williams

Daniel Williams is a former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Miami Herald and an ex-researcher for Human Rights Watch. His book Forsaken: The Persecution of Christians in Today’s Middle East was published by O/R Books. He is currently based in Rome.

asiatimes.com · Daniel Williams · September 22, 2025

14. Philippines looking like next powder keg to blow in Asia

​Excerpts:

Last month, Marcos disclosed the results of an internal audit into flood control projects that revealed patterns of irregularity that prompted calls for action from business and civil society groups outraged by what they describe as massive corruption.

Key findings showed that out of 545 billion pesos ($9.54 billion) of spending on flood control since 2022, thousands of projects were either substandard, poorly documented or even non-existent.

A Filipino protester not masking how they feel about state corruption, September 21, 2025. Photo: Jason Guiterrez / Asia Times

Some recorded identical costs even though they were in different locations, and 15 out of more than 2,000 accredited contractors were able to corner 20% of the total budget.

Many of the flood control initiatives were tagged as “ghost projects” where funds spent were divided among corrupt officials, who allegedly gave kickbacks to some politicians.

The controversy has already led to the resignation of the public works secretary, and his successor has suspended all bidding for locally-funded flood control projects, ordered courtesy resignations of all public works officials and vowed to permanently blacklist contractors involved in fraudulent projects.

Philippines looking like next powder keg to blow in Asia - Asia Times

Protesters flood Manila’s streets to denounce corruption and elite privilege, echoing unrest that recently shook Indonesia and Nepal

asiatimes.com · Jason Gutierrez · September 21, 2025

MANILA – Tens of thousands of fed-up Filipinos took to various points in Manila on Sunday (September 21) for a day-long protest against alleged massive corruption tied to anomalous infrastructure projects that have led to a shakeup in Congress amid widespread calls for reforms.

Angry protesters, many garbed symbolically in black, torched a steel container van that police used to block a bridge leading to the presidential Malacañang Palace compound, while hurling bottles and rocks towards the police.

Protesters, mostly youths, engaged police in a violent cat-and-mouse game near the presidential palace that lasted until 8 pm. By day’s end, police said 49 people – 36 adults and 13 minors – were arrested for “violent behavior, including stone-throwing and acts of arson.” At least 70 police officials were injured.

Acting national police chief Lieutenant General Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr said: “Our police units worked hard to keep everyone safe today. While there were some isolated incidents, including a trailer truck set on fire at Ayala corner Romualdez by a few unruly protesters, most rallies went on peacefully because many participants cooperated with the authorities.”

There were more than 60,000 protesters scattered in different locations in and around Manila. More than 50,000 police personnel were deployed across the country, with 29,300 stationed in Metro Manila alone as part of Civil Disturbance Management (CDM) units.

The protests came weeks after Filipinos were treated to nationally-televised sessions in the Senate and the House of Representatives, where officials from the public works department testified about the implementations of billions of dollars worth of “ghost” infrastructure projects.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, whose father was ousted by a “people power” revolt in 1986 that ended his two-decade dictatorship, ironically placed the corruption issue front and center after an address before Congress in July that came in the wake of deadly floods that hit parts of the capital city.

His cousin, Martin Romualdez, has since been replaced as speaker of the House after his name was implicated in the anomaly, while at least two senators were also named as among those involved.

While on the surface Marcos has appeared to be on the right track, questions about his motives remain. After all, his family was considered among the most corrupt in the world, and various estimates have placed his father’s ill-gotten wealth at over US$10 billion.

Demands for them to return the funds have so far fallen on deaf ears, and after a brief period of exile, members of the Marcos clan are back in power. Opposition congresswoman Leila de Lima said that while Marcos had allowed the protests to proceed, he may have underestimated public anger boiling under the surface.

“It’s our moral duty. It’s our duty as a people. We need to do something. We need to express our anger, our rage. Everything was happening now all this widescale corruption, which I consider the biggest corruption scandal in our history,” De Lima told Asia Times speaking before a peaceful crowd, away from the mob that engaged the police.

Leila DeLima has something to say about Marcos’ administration corruption at a September 21, 2025, protest in Manila. Image: Jason Gutierrez / Asia Times

She noted that the Philippines was also commemorating the 53rd anniversary when Marcos’ father and namesake, Ferdinand E Marcos, declared martial law. Thousands of people were killed or went missing under his brutal regime, while the country was plunged into poverty and the Marcos family enriched itself.

Marcos Sr was ousted in 1986 and fled into exile in Hawaii, where he perished three years later. But his flamboyant wife, Imelda, and three children were allowed to return home. In 2022, they reclaimed lost political clout, with Marcos Jr winning the presidency, his sister a Senate seat, his son a congress seat, while his cousin took the House speakership.

“It is but imperative. It is but right that we gather today and express our voice, express our thoughts, express our feelings, sentiments and rage over this corruption issue,” said De Lima, a former justice secretary and political prisoner under the previous Duterte administration on trumped-up drug charges.

“We cannot let this go,” she said, adding that investigations “must result in concrete action” and lead to the jailing and conviction of allegedly corrupt officials. “If that is not done, it would be unacceptable to the people.”

She warned that if the issue is not properly handled, public anger could grow and further lead to massive destabilizing protests – similar to what recently occurred in Indonesia and Nepal.

Marcos Jr has surprised many with his style of governance and by ending his coalition with the Duterte family. His allies in Congress impeached his popular Vice President Sara Duterte on graft accusations, and handed his father, ex-leader Rodrigo Duterte, to the International Criminal Court for thousands of deaths under his regime’s war on drugs campaign.

He has also repaired ties with the United States that were strained under Duterte, who leaned more toward China, and has embraced the international community’s help against Beijing in the South China Sea.

Veteran activist Teddy Casino stressed that the Marcos family should come clean and return the stolen wealth to the Philippines; otherwise, Marcos Jr’s professed anger over corruption rings hollow.

“He should show us that he really is serious in this rebranding of himself as an anti-corruption advocate,” he told Asia Times. “And so the jury is still out.”

His allies, meanwhile, are using the corruption scandal to fling mud at each other, and “at the end of it all, it will be the small fish who will be held accountable,” Casino predicted.

Last week, Marcos Jr said he would not stop street protests from happening, as long as they remained peaceful.

“You have to remember, I brought this up and it is my interest that we find the solution to what has become a very egregious problem. And since this has all been exposed, well, it’s actually known to many people, but it has now been exposed to the general public,” Marcos has said.

“Do you blame them for going out into the streets? If I wasn’t president, I might be out in the streets with them,” the president said.

He has also created a three-member commission to carry out an investigation that will run parallel to those being carried out in the legislature. The panel would be empowered to summon officials as well as recommend charges.

Last month, Marcos disclosed the results of an internal audit into flood control projects that revealed patterns of irregularity that prompted calls for action from business and civil society groups outraged by what they describe as massive corruption.

Key findings showed that out of 545 billion pesos ($9.54 billion) of spending on flood control since 2022, thousands of projects were either substandard, poorly documented or even non-existent.

A Filipino protester not masking how they feel about state corruption, September 21, 2025. Photo: Jason Guiterrez / Asia Times

Some recorded identical costs even though they were in different locations, and 15 out of more than 2,000 accredited contractors were able to corner 20% of the total budget.

Many of the flood control initiatives were tagged as “ghost projects” where funds spent were divided among corrupt officials, who allegedly gave kickbacks to some politicians.

The controversy has already led to the resignation of the public works secretary, and his successor has suspended all bidding for locally-funded flood control projects, ordered courtesy resignations of all public works officials and vowed to permanently blacklist contractors involved in fraudulent projects.

Jason Gutierrez was head of Philippine news at BenarNews, an online news service affiliated with Radio Free Asia (RFA), a Washington-based news organization that covered many under-reported countries in the region. A veteran foreign correspondent, he has also worked with The New York Times and Agence France-Presse (AFP).

asiatimes.com · Jason Gutierrez · September 21, 2025

15. Speech by Sir Richard Moore, Chief of SIS, 19 September 2025

To a Turkish audience.

Speech

Speech by Sir Richard Moore, Chief of SIS, 19 September 2025

Sir Richard Moore, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, spoke about the launch of a new dark web portal to recruit spies for the UK.

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/speech-by-sir-richard-moore-chief-of-sis-19-september-2025

From:

Secret Intelligence Service and Sir Richard Moore KCMG

Published

19 September 2025

REMARKS IN TURKISH 

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is so good to be back in my second home, Turkey, a country in which my wife and I are privileged to have lived for eight years, most recently when I served as British Ambassador for four fascinating years from 2014 through 2017. 

But my connection with Turkey started much earlier in 1989 when, as a young language student, I arrived in Istanbul to board with a Turkish family for several weeks to improve my newly learnt Turkish language. I fell in love with this marvellous country, its extraordinarily hospitable people, its fabulous cuisine and stunning combination of history and breathtaking scenery… and I fell in love with Besiktas football club! The bond with Turkey was cemented by the arrival of my daughter, born here in Istanbul, a true Istanbullu. 

But I didn’t just choose Istanbul for this speech for reasons of sentiment, I did so because, as it has been for centuries, Turkey is a nation of pivotal importance to the international system. On almost all of the issues that I have grappled with as Chief of MI6, Turkey has been a key player. 

A NATO ally, Turkey has been a staunch supporter of Ukrainian sovereignty and independence, moved especially by the plight of their ethnic cousins, the Tatars of the Crimea, but committed above all to international law and the UN charter. To their east they share the UK’s interest in a stable Caucasus and Central Asia free from malign external influence. And to the south we have worked together against so-called Islamic State terrorists and to shore up the stability of post Assad Syria. 

We both share the same abhorrence at the bestial depravity of October 7th and dismay at the appalling suffering of innocent Palestinians in Gaza that has followed, and we believe that only a two-state solution will deliver lasting security and prosperity for Israeli and Palestinians alike. In all these endeavours, I have been able to work closely with MIT directors Hakan Fidan and now Ibrahim Kalin, who are consummate professionals and firm friends. 

REMARKS IN ENGLISH: 

When I was appointed, I decided I would speak more often and more openly, where doing so could advance Britain’s national interest. In my first public intervention at the Royal United Services Institute in London, I posited the paradox that MI6 needed to “be more open to stay secret”.  

I was communicating a fundamental truth about the world we now operate in. If we’re to remain an effective intelligence service in the 21st century, and keep the identities of our agents and the tradecraft we use to run them secret, we must continue to modernise and adapt; extending our partnerships, especially in technology, and strengthening our relationship with the society we serve, whether via social media where we launched on Instagram last week, or through speeches like this one. And to do that we need to be more open.  

It’s a strategic approach that I believe in even more strongly today, and I know my successor, Blaise Metreweli does too.  

Any organisation that wants to maintain its licence to operate, particularly one as unique as ours, must also earn and maintain trust. For us that comes from a continuing dialogue with the British people, who we serve, and engagement with our international partners, in countries like Turkey. 

And that is why I have been committed to explaining more clearly who we are, what we do, and why we do it. So, in this, my final speech as C, I want to reflect a little on what MI6 as an intelligence agency has worked to achieve over these past five years as well as touch on some of the ongoing risks that Blaise and her team will be focusing on from October. I want to pay special attention to events in Europe, and Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine - which has been a defining issue for me as Chief, and for our country. 

First the evolution of MI6 itself – five years on, how are we different? I have always believed that MI6 should reflect the country we’re here to serve. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because diversity helps us to do a better job of keeping the UK safe. I am pleased we can point to progress. It’s by no means job done, but we have made measurable improvements.  

Many more women have taken on leadership roles across the agency — in intelligence operations, at home and overseas, and in our technology teams. Alongside this, colleagues from ethnic minority backgrounds have been promoted into senior positions for the first time. 

One of the most moving moments of my tenure was issuing a public apology to the LGBT+ community for the injustices they endured, especially the ban on their serving in MI6 up until 1991. A moment of pride. 

But we have more road yet to travel; we’re still only 40% female staff, ethnic minorities are just under 10% of our officers, and we need to do more to attract people from economically deprived backgrounds - of all races. 

Nowhere have we needed to change faster than in the technology space. Our adversaries are looking to leverage cutting-edge technologies to attack UK interests with ever greater precision and scale. At MI6, we need to do two things simultaneously: counter these tech-infused threats; whilst also harnessing technological advances for our own purposes - the sort of technology which emerges from universities, from start-ups, from big tech, from international collaboration like this week’s UK/US tech partnership, as well as - of course - from our brilliant in-house technologists.  

Which is why one of my priorities as Chief was to forge new partnerships. Much of this mission is undertaken with HMGCC, the UK’s National Security Engineering Centre. Their own bold move towards greater openness is manifest in their co-creation centre in Milton Keynes, which brings together technical expertise from outside government with in-house experts to identify brilliantly innovative solutions for the trickiest national security challenges.  

We’re also helping the UK and allies build cutting-edge technology through our partnership with the National Security Strategic Investment Fund. NSSIF backs British companies whose dual use technology has both commercial and national security value. The right early support from our intelligence community can help them thrive and hopefully become the unicorns of the future.  

We support bold, brave firms with big ideas in fields like quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and synthetic biology. For the UK, this delivers both advances in our own national security capabilities and creates valuable high-tech jobs at home.  

This is how we stay ahead. Not by retreating deeper into secrecy, but by being open enough to form the right partnerships, recruiting staff from every part of society, and adapting at the speed of the threats we face. And we do that as part of a UK intelligence community, MI6, MI5 and GCHQ – UKIC for short. I believe no one, worldwide, is better at intelligence collaboration than UKIC – this is our “secret sauce” and the envy of partners and adversaries alike. UKIC is so much more than the sum of its parts.  

So, when I said we needed to be more open to stay secret, I meant it. It’s about pace. It’s about innovation. It is about building trust within UKIC and then extending trust to partners, beyond. MI6 can only remain effective and relevant in the years to come as part of that wider team.  

Trust, truth, deception and spying are key components of the biggest challenge our Service and our country has faced in my five years as Chief: Russia’s unprovoked and illegal invasion of Ukraine. We have been at the forefront of efforts to support the Ukrainians in their self-defence, and their defence of the principles on which we all depend for our peace and security. 

The leadership of President Zelenskyy has been critical. I remember the man I hosted for lunch in my first week as Chief; he was still pretty new into politics, an untried and untested leader. But even then, you could sense the grit and determination. To have watched him become the leader he is has been a remarkable privilege. My admiration for him is unbounded. I’m proud to say that support for Ukraine amongst the British public remains steadfast, underpinning successive Prime Ministers’ determination to be Kyiv’s staunchest advocate and ally. 

The suffering of the Ukrainian people is immense. The war has seen levels of death and destruction not seen in Europe since World War Il, and civilians have been targeted with a cold and calculated brutality. In recent weeks, Russia has stepped up its attacks on civilian targets still further. 

There can be no equivalence between the suffering of the aggressor and the victim, but it is absolutely clear that Putin’s lack of concern for human life extends also to his own people. Russia has incurred more than a million casualties, a quarter of them killed, as poorly trained troops from Russia’s poorest regions are fed into the meat grinder. 

Every sane person wants the killing to stop. I applaud the efforts of President Trump to resolve the conflict, President Zelenskyy for his willingness to make very difficult compromises, and European leaders working to achieve a just and lasting peace. 

However, I have seen absolutely no evidence that President Putin has any interest in a negotiated peace short of Ukrainian capitulation. He is stringing us along. Because the issue has and has always been sovereignty: Putin denies Ukraine’s sovereignty and its very existence as a country and a nation. 

He seeks to impose his imperial will by all means at his disposal. But he cannot succeed: Russia simply does not have the wherewithal to fully subjugate Ukraine by force. Yes, they are grinding forward on the battlefield, but at a snail’s pace and horrendous cost, and Putin’s army is still far short of its original invasion objectives.  

Bluntly - Putin has bitten off more than he can chew. He thought he was going to win an easy victory. But he - and many others - underestimated the Ukrainians, Indeed, Putin’s actions have strengthened Ukrainian national identity and accelerated the country’s Westward trajectory, as well as persuaded Sweden and Finland into joining NATO. 

Putin has sought to convince the world that Russian victory is inevitable. But he lies. He lies to the world. He lies to his people. Perhaps, he even lies to himself. The ringing of an incoming phone call from the President is the equivalent of Pavlov’s tinkling bell inside the Kremlin, eliciting learned behaviour to tell Putin whatever it is the system thinks he wants to hear. But we should not believe him, or credit him with strength he does not have.  

In the run up to his invasion in 2022, acting on outstanding intelligence, the US and UK governments took an extraordinary step: declassifying intelligence that exposed Putin’s lies and revealed Russia’s military build-up and attack plans. It was a finely balanced call: it had to be done in a way that would not endanger sources, but it proved hugely impactful. It undercut Russian disinformation, halted Russia’s initial advance and rallied the alliance that came to Ukraine’s aid. 

The big picture remains that Putin is mortgaging his country’s future for his own personal legacy and a distorted version of history. As such, Russia’s economy and demography, and its means to project imperial power, are in long term decline - and Putin’s war is accelerating this decline. He invests not in infrastructure, schools and hospitals but in missiles, munitions and morgues. 

History warns us never to underestimate a country fighting for its independence, and for its very survival. Greater powers than Russia have failed to subjugate weaker powers than Ukraine. In the end, if we hold our nerve, Putin will need to come to terms with the fact that he has a choice: to risk an economic and political crisis that threatens his own rule, or make a sensible deal. 

This is a choice he would have had to confront earlier, if not for the outside help he has been receiving: yes, the drones from Iran, plus the men and materiel from North Korea, but it is the support that China has consistently given to Russia, both diplomatically and also in terms of “dual use goods” - the “Made in China” chemicals that end up in their shells; the electronic components that end up in their missiles - that have prevented Putin from reaching the conclusion that peace is his best option. And evidently, peace is in the interest of the Russian people. 

I must be clear that my Government, my Service and myself are not hostile to Russia, only to the actions of the Kremlin. While Putin deceives and dissembles, our task is to illuminate the truth.  

Putin is not Russia. And not all Russians subscribe to Putinism. Some keep their heads down and try to get on with their lives as best they can. Some, like Alexei Navalny, resist openly, and die for their beliefs. But others do so secretly, by working with MI6. 

Intelligence officers immerse themselves in the cultures of their interlocutors. Russia is, in many ways, a big part of the history of MI6. The country holds a special place within the service. MI6 is full of men and women who know and love many of the achievements of Russian culture, and who understand and respect the sacrifices of its people in our shared struggle against Nazi Germany. 

To those men and women in Russia who have truths to share and the courage to share them, I invite you to contact MI6. You will be working to bring peace to our continent; to protect the long-term interests - and redeem the honour - of your country. You will be working with a world class organisation. We will do everything in our power to keep you safe. Your needs and aspirations will be paramount. We can help you make a difference. 

Spying is an ancient craft, but the world has never been changing so fast - and we are changing with it. Many of our best and most highly motivated agents have been volunteers who have offered their services to MI6. Our door is always open. 

And, from today, you can now reach us securely online via our new dark web portal, Silent Courier. Our virtual front door harnesses the anonymity of the dark web so that anyone, anywhere in the world can make secure contact with MI6. So, contact us today via Silent Courier and choose a different future for yourself, for your family and for your country. 

But our appeal today is not to Russians alone. Anyone, anywhere in the world with access to sensitive information relating to terrorism or hostile intelligence activity, can use the new portal to contact MI6. 

Whilst Russia remains one of the key missions of MI6, the other three priorities, China, Iran and counter terrorism, are proving to be enduring challenges too. Which is why the UK in 2025 needs an MI6 that can operate with agility and at scale. To achieve that goal, I am grateful successive Prime Ministers have recognised the need to fund our intelligence community appropriately, despite tough economic times. 

China in many respects straddles that dichotomy of opportunity and threat. As Russia declines, so China rises. The 21st century will undoubtedly be defined by the rise of the “Middle Kingdom”. A major player in the global system, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and a country that is seeking to deepen its regional alliances, China has unique responsibilities that come with its size and ambition. In many areas of the global commons: climate change, secure Al and world trade, China has a huge and welcome role to play. We, in the UK, want a respectful and constructive relationship with China. 

But China needs to stick to the established rules of engagement and non-interference that it publicly promotes. I hear the concerns of my colleague, Director MI5 Sir Ken McCallum, about Chinese interference in the UK; and we, in the UK, will be robust in defending our freedoms, our way of life and our economic security. 

Iran has featured heavily throughout my period in office. A nuclear free Iran must remain a priority, and I hope the Iranian government can see that a prosperous and secure future lies in engagement and compromise, not blindly pursuing a strategy that destabilises their neighbourhood and puts them at odds with much of the rest of the world.  

Their proxies, while bringing misery, violence and death to the region, have gained Iran nothing, and we must hope their humbling by Israel may bring an opportunity for a reset. That requires a change of mentality in Tehran, not yet detected in intelligence.  

And Gaza needs peace too for such a reset to take hold in the region, and to prevent the further appalling suffering of innocent Palestinians - that we see so persistently on our TV screens - fuelling radicalisation globally. We need to see the hostages returned and aid flowing freely. 

On the broader topic of counter terrorism, we continue to work closely with our sister agencies in the UK - GCHQ, MI5 and as well as with CT policing, and overseas partners including Turkey, maintaining a constant focus on the terrorist threat. 

In recent years, terrorist organisations such as the so-called Islamic State and Al Qaida have been damaged by a collective effort to degrade their capabilities. The threat has come more via the keyboard from homegrown, self-radicalised lone operators - a dispersed and networked danger. But IS and AQ are looking to re-group to exploit conflict and ungoverned spaces to re-establish themselves, while using technology to spread their violent ideologies online. We need agility and good partnerships to defeat these efforts to terrorise. And we need statesmen to address the root causes of the radicalisation that lead on to terrorism. 

In my stint as Chief, we have faced many unexpected crises: the implosion of Sudan into civil war, the collapse of the Ghani government in Afghanistan, the end of 53 years of the Assads in Syria to name but a few. We pride ourselves in our ability to maintain the long-term relationships which come into their own in a crisis. 

We sourced intelligence on Sudan in hours; we continue to counter terror emanating from Afghanistan, and, having forged a relationship with HTS a year or two before they toppled Bashar, we forged a path for the UK Government to return to the country within weeks.  

Syria is a good example of where, if you can get ahead of events, it really helps when they suddenly, unexpectedly move at a faster pace. This nimbleness is a fundamental requirement for MI6 - and I think we remain pretty good at it. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, while discussing a piece of joint business, said to me recently: “You guys can really hustle.” 

We pride ourselves on that hustle, that tenacity, and it is a characteristic that is deeply present in my successor Blaise Metreweli. An intelligence officer to her core, with a quarter of a century of experience in this business, she understands the guts of spying. But more than that, she gets how technology can enable human espionage. She’s spent four years as ‘Q’, not just shaping our approach to fast-evolving technologies like Al, but also delivering innovative tech to the agent-runners, based on her deep understanding of human intelligence. 

It’s on that topic - Human Intelligence or HUMINT - that I want to draw my remarks to a close. I come back to this subject again and again in my various speeches for a reason. We recruit and run clandestine agents. It’s what we do. 

In Prague, I called on Russians disillusioned and dismayed by Putin’s agenda to come spy with us, just like their grandparents and parents did. Because of their bravery, and the bravery of other agents around the world, our ministers very often play their cards knowing at least some of what is in the other side’s hand, which improves their ability to deliver a world based on rules, stability and democracy.  

Many people think that they know our most famous agents. But neither l, nor any other Chief will ever confirm their names. Indeed, because of our binding promise, most of our most consequential agents will travel through history faceless and nameless to the public, but quietly celebrated within MI6 by those few, even within the Service, who know. 

As I step away, I reflect on how much has changed during my career as an intelligence officer. From the Cold War with the Soviet Union to Putin’s hot war on European soil; from Abu Nidal to 9-11. To our rise in countering the threat; from an analogue world of multiple passports to now ubiquitous surveillance; the world of espionage has changed.  

But change is everywhere. It’s in geopolitics, it’s in our climate and it’s in the technology revolution. It’s in the risks and adversaries that we face off against. Change is a constant.  

And, of course, Chiefs need to change too. I feel immensely confident that my successor, ‘Q’ - shortly to become ‘C’- while being true to the past, to our values and to our mission, has the fresh eyes needed to meet the challenge of change. After almost four decades in public service, I am now hanging up my cloak, returning my imaginary dagger to its scabbard, and handing over my famous green pen. Running MI6 has been the privilege of my life. There is no organisation like it in the world. Our people, our partners, our mission, the integrity with which we do our work, is second to none. I leave knowing that the mission goes on, that our capabilities are strong, and that we are in very safe hands.  

As I step into the next chapter, I have the chance to pause, to take stock and to reflect on what an extraordinary personal journey it has been. It was George Smiley – John le Carré’s legendary spymaster – who said: “There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.” I look forward to reflecting back on all that stuff.

Published 19 September 2025

16. Fix the CIA by getting rid of the Directorate of Analysis

​Excerpts:

The bigger problem is the disappearance of traditional cover thanks to the internet and biometrics. This challenge confronts spy agencies worldwide, and nobody yet has a firm solution. The old ways of masquerading as a diplomat or businessperson, thanks to fake documents, get much trickier when quick database and social media checks can reveal the spy’s true identity with astonishing ease. These days, casual habits regarding cover can get CIA personnel arrested or even killed.

The agency is addressing this through its Directorate of Digital Innovation, established a decade ago, which counts among its missions finding new ways to employ cover in the digital age. This effort requires maximum effort because the CIA’s traditional espionage practices are disappearing rapidly in the always-online world.

Fix the CIA by getting rid of the Directorate of Analysis

By John Schindler

September 22, 2025 7:00 am

Washington Examiner · September 22, 2025

The agency is an experienced bureaucratic player inside the Beltway. It protects its turf with more effectiveness than the agency sometimes displays with its spy mission. However, the hour for serious reform has arrived. During former President Barack Obama’s second term, his relationship with the CIA turned toxic, thanks to his excessively cozy relationship with Director John Brennan, a naked Democratic partisan. Matters hardly improved under former President Joe Biden, when CIA leadership and too much of the intelligence community corrupted themselves by endorsing White House lies about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the attacks on U.S. intelligence personnel known as the Havana Syndrome.

We need a fresh start in the second Trump administration, yet so far results are mixed. CIA Director John Ratcliffe enjoys a good relationship with the White House. The administration’s emphasis on payback against the deep state for its past sins against Trump is a top priority for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, but Ratcliffe has played along too. Gabbard’s reaching into CIA ranks to purge suspected anti-Trumpers, especially when the anti-Trump evidence against some of those officers is very thin, doesn’t sit well with many Langley veterans.

The larger problem, which Team Trump must address, is that the CIA shouldn’t have the political power it possesses, much of which is derived from its status as the U.S. government’s chief intelligence analyst. It’s the CIA that owns most of the analysts who provide the White House with intelligence, including the President’s Daily Brief, going back to President Harry Truman. That’s too much power vested in one spy agency, plus a recipe for politicization — exactly as occurred under Obama and Biden. The agency’s Directorate of Analysis, formerly Intelligence, boasts battalions of analysts, of frankly mixed quality. One very accomplished CIA analyst once described his colleagues as “rather bright graduate students” in their mentality, which explains their politics, too.

The fix here is a simple one. Copy the United Kingdom’s Joint Intelligence Committee, which takes intelligence officers from all Britain’s spy agencies and rotates them to perform national-level intelligence analysis and assessments. The U.S. must do the same. Disband the Directorate of Analysis and create a top-level analysis shop, with the best spy minds. Make sure none of them serve there too long, because that’s what leads to partisan politics infecting the intelligence business. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, just mimic the U.K.’s JIC, which has existed since before World War II.

The CIA’s most famous mission resides in its Directorate of Operations, which is where the real spies are. The DO’s core mission is to steal foreign secrets. Per Hollywood depictions, DO officers serving all over the world, under various forms of cover, represent the pointy end of Langley’s secret spear. Sometimes, it can be very dangerous work, as the agency’s storied Memorial Wall attests.

The DO’s operational model, which is largely based on employing U.S. diplomatic facilities to collect foreign intelligence, has changed remarkably little since the agency’s establishment in 1947. It still works rather well on the whole. In most of the world, CIA spies work the diplomatic cocktail circuit, per the spy-film cliché, while waiting for walk-ins to show up at the U.S. Embassy door, selling secrets.

However, this venerable modus operandi faces serious challenges in “hard target” countries such as China and Russia, where AI-enabled facial recognition systems and the ubiquitous local security service watch suspected CIA personnel so closely that getting any work done outside the embassy can be extraordinarily difficult and dangerous. To say nothing of “denied areas” such as Iran and North Korea, where the U.S. has no embassies, nor do American businesses operate. The CIA is all but shut out.

The bigger problem is the disappearance of traditional cover thanks to the internet and biometrics. This challenge confronts spy agencies worldwide, and nobody yet has a firm solution. The old ways of masquerading as a diplomat or businessperson, thanks to fake documents, get much trickier when quick database and social media checks can reveal the spy’s true identity with astonishing ease. These days, casual habits regarding cover can get CIA personnel arrested or even killed.

The agency is addressing this through its Directorate of Digital Innovation, established a decade ago, which counts among its missions finding new ways to employ cover in the digital age. This effort requires maximum effort because the CIA’s traditional espionage practices are disappearing rapidly in the always-online world.

John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.

Washington Examiner · September 22, 2025

17. How Apple Turned China Into a Tech Behemoth

​Excerpt:

But, while the Marshall Plan rebuilt democratic allies, Apple's version helped turbocharge an authoritarian competitor. Apple helped build railways, power infrastructure, specialized tooling, and entire cities around assembly lines. All of this enabled a level and precision in Chinese manufacturing that no other Western firm could match. As McGee states: "What Apple was doing was akin to making 10 million Ferraris a year." Apple's plan was not simply about cheap labor, but China's unmatched capacity to coordinate state-backed infrastructure, training, logistics, and scale.

REVIEW: 'Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company' by Patrick McGee

https://freebeacon.com/culture/how-apple-turned-china-into-a-tech-behemoth/

Dan Blumenthal and Ian Jones

September 21, 2025

In Apple in China, Patrick McGee, a veteran Financial Times journalist, provides a sobering and meticulous account of how Apple's pursuit of scale and profit helped fuel the meteoric rise of China's techno-industrial power. Ultimately, Apple outsourced not just production, but national leverage.

McGee compares Apple's total investment in China—through capital, supplier development, logistics, and ecosystem support—to over twice the inflation-adjusted cost of the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Western Europe after World War II. According to internal documents, Apple was investing up to $55 billion annually in China by 2015. In 2016, Apple CEO Tim Cook pledged $275 billion over five years—more than all American and Canadian investment into Mexico from NAFTA between 1993 and 2020. By comparison, the United States' supposedly "generational" federal investment in the semiconductor industry—the CHIPS and Science Act—will cost taxpayers $52 billion over four years.

But, while the Marshall Plan rebuilt democratic allies, Apple's version helped turbocharge an authoritarian competitor. Apple helped build railways, power infrastructure, specialized tooling, and entire cities around assembly lines. All of this enabled a level and precision in Chinese manufacturing that no other Western firm could match. As McGee states: "What Apple was doing was akin to making 10 million Ferraris a year." Apple's plan was not simply about cheap labor, but China's unmatched capacity to coordinate state-backed infrastructure, training, logistics, and scale.

Apple implemented a form of contract manufacturing that McGee dubs the "Apple squeeze." Apple products demanded novel components, cutting-edge techniques, rapid scale, and stringent quality control. To achieve this, Apple embedded designers and engineers into its manufacturers, training and co-inventing with them. Apple "squeezed" suppliers for low-margin high-volume output. In turn, suppliers gained valuable know-how that it could use to win contracts from other clients. Taiwan features prominently in McGee's tale. Foxconn, a Taiwanese firm led by Terry Gou, was the key intermediary that allowed Apple to scale in China. Gou emerged as a figure who combined industrial savvy with a disregard for the risks of building China up.

As Apple continued to expand, China—with a large labor force and government desperate for foreign investment—became an obvious destination. Apple's move toward China was not some part of a grand strategy, but rather the result of Apple being "lured into the country" with "one opportunity after another." Inevitably, China's labor force became the envy of the world.

McGee describes how, with no other countries developing similar skills, Apple became overly dependent on China and facilitated the country's move toward self-sufficiency. He points to the grim reality that for now China's manufacturing dominance is irreplaceable. China's competitive position isn't just about cost—it's about massive government support, scale, and talent. Apple trained hundreds of thousands of Chinese engineers in advanced precision tooling, quality control, and process integration. Now, the same industrial systems that Apple helped establish, are being used to displace worldwide production across other industries—led by firms like Huawei, Xiaomi, and BYD, often staffed by former Apple-trained engineers.

As Xi Jinping consolidated power, Chinese tech policy became "in China, for China," turning Apple into a target. Beijing made clear the leverage it held over the company by enforcing previously unenforced rules, enacting spurious roadblocks, and threatening antitrust investigations to get Apple to comply with its dictates. Beijing also manufactured public sentiment against Apple through targeted attacks in influential CCP mouthpieces such as Global Times and Consumer Day, and government reports that ranked the tech giant last in "corporate social responsibility," meaning its support of CCP policies.

Although Apple realized it was facilitating technology transfer at an "extraordinary scale," the company concluded that the transfer itself was not its main problem. Rather, the real problem was that Apple was not advertising its investments to Beijing. Apple, as a sign of its capitulation to China, played ball with the regime. It removed the New York Times app, WhatsApp, AirDrop, and VPNs from the Chinese app store; made large, public investments in Chinese companies and data centers; and increasingly aligned with Beijing's "Made in China 2025" initiative meant to make China an industrial powerhouse. In return, Apple avoided crackdowns and lockdowns. The company thrived through Beijing's crackdown on domestic tech companies and independent media, and zero-COVID measures that disrupted global supply chains—because of Apple's successful lobbying efforts to prove its value to the country.

Despite geopolitical friction and growing calls for "decoupling," Apple remains deeply entangled with China. Over 90 percent of its products are still made there, and efforts to diversify—like expanding into India or Vietnam—are marginal in impact. Apple is not alone: The entire Western consumer electronics sector is caught in the same trap.

Attempts to move production to friendly shores, such as India, have largely failed. The reasons are structural: India lacks the logistics, skilled industrial workforce, and integrated supplier base that make Chinese manufacturing cheaper and fundamentally better. Indian attempts to replicate Foxconn-style mega-campuses have faced persistent obstacles: land acquisition delays, inconsistent state support, and insufficient mid-skill technical training.

One of McGee's unstated themes is the absence of a coherent U.S. strategy in the face of a fierce techno-industrial competitor. Where China fused state support with market signals, the United States offloaded responsibility to private corporations. The result: a two-decade head start for Beijing in techno-industrial competition.

McGee's findings echo the warnings of Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and others who argue that the United States is losing the techno-industrial war. As McGee demonstrates, U.S. policy over the past two decades has incentivized leading American companies to outsource ever greater value-added production and entire supply chains to China. The U.S. industrial and innovation system optimizes for great inventive disruptions, high profits, and short-term shareholder value. China instead emphasizes comprehensive national power—manufacturing and industrial might that also leads to innovation of a different kind.

Apple's model is the embodiment of mistaken U.S. doctrine: a hyper-efficient company that, in seeking global margin optimization, hollowed out its own country's capabilities while transferring core competencies to a strategic competitor.

American economic dependency has become a strategic liability. Without new policies for techno-industrial competition, America risks dependencies on China for production in critical sectors. U.S. policymakers face a complicated and unprecedented challenge: How will the United States maintain its enviable free-market system, the best wealth creator on the planet, while facing down a state-capitalist behemoth?

Apple in China is essential reading to understand how America's most iconic company helped transform a strategic competitor into a technological peer. But it's more than a company history—it's a case study in how corporate strategy, national policy failure, and geopolitical myopia combined to reshape global power. Clear-eyed, deeply reported, and politically urgent, Apple in China should be read as a call to action: for a new era of techno-industrial strategy that doesn't outsource power in pursuit of profit.

Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

by Patrick McGee

Scribner, 448 pp., $32

Dan Blumenthal is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Ian Jones is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.

Published under: Apple , Big Tech , Book reviews , China , Tim Cook

18. Act of defiance against China’s ruling party lasted less than an hour

Act of defiance against China’s ruling party lasted less than an hour

https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/protest-china-communist-party-0dpj0gn8t

thetimes.com · , China Correspondent

The slogan ‘freedom is not a gift, it must be seized back’ was beamed on to the side of a building in what is a rare sign of protest during Xi’s crackdowns

Richard Spencer

Tuesday September 02 2025, 6.00am BST, The Times

Preparations for the forthcoming Victory Day parade in Beijing

XINHUA/SHUTTERSTOCK

Richard Spencer

, China Correspondent

Tuesday September 02 2025, 6.00am BST, The Times

When police saw a slogan beamed on to the side of a building in a university district of the major Chinese city of Chongqing, they sprang into action.

The slogan called for the overthrow of the Communist Party. “Freedom is not a gift, it must be seized back,” it said.

“Rise up, people who refuse to be slaves, rise up and resist to reclaim your rights. Down with red fascism, overthrow the Communist tyranny.”

President Xi has overseen a crackdown on public debate

NOEL CELIS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

It took 50 minutes, according to observers, for the police to find the projector. It was beaming its message from an empty bedroom in the nearby Mama Hotel. When they entered, the police found a letter explaining the perpetrator’s grievances with the CCP, and appealing for those who found it to be merciful on the CCP’s critics.

Of the perpetrator himself, there was no sign — because, according to the man who has claimed responsibility for the action, he was already in London.

“I set it up so I could trigger it remotely,” he told The Times, giving his name as Qi Hong, which he said was not a pseudonym. “I had booked the room for several days, and I told the staff it didn’t need room service.

“Then I left and went with my wife and children to the airport, and flew to Britain. Once I was there, I pressed play.”

Anti-CCP slogans were projected on a building in Chongqing for about 50 minutes

Outright opposition to the Communist Party in China these days is rare — in part, because a rising economy has lifted all boats, including those of former dissidents — and in part because of the severity of the consequences if caught.

However, a crackdown on public debate during the rule of President Xi even on issues that could once be discussed in public has had a side-effect of making public protest more nakedly political.

One trigger was the severity and length of Covid lockdowns. Where once, protests on social issues mainly targeted those directly responsible, the “white paper” demonstrations against lockdown in 2022 attacked Xi personally.

Qi, 43, who said he had grown gradually more hostile to the CCP over the course of his adult life, having originally been a supporter, said he was inspired by the “white paper” protests and also other acts of sporadic resistance.

Riot police detain a protester during a rally against a new national security law in Hong Kong in 2020

MIGUEL CANDELA/EPA

In particular he was inspired by an activist thought to be called Peng Lifa, a physicist who three years ago draped banners calling for political reform over a bridge in Beijing. Peng — if that is his real name — is said to be still in custody.

Qi said he wanted to make his point before Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing to mark the anniversary of the end of the Second World War, which will be attended by world leaders.

“I wanted to take this opportunity to make people aware that we should stand against tyranny,” he said. “In particular, that students should stand up.”

Qi Hong was inspired by Peng Lifa, the “Bridge Man” protester, a democracy activist who initiated the Beijing Sitong Bridge protest in October 2022

TWITTER

Such slogans get little publicity in China, except among those whose laptops are armed with VPNs that allow them to circumnavigate the CCP’s firewall.

Qi also acknowledged his family back in China might pay a price — his brother was immediately traced and, he believed, was still under arrest.

He said his wife had had no idea what he was planning and had simply thought they were going on holiday to the UK. His own future plans are unclear. But he said that any act of protest was worthwhile, adding: “Anything might be the spark that lights the prairie fire.”

Additional reporting by Lyndon Li

19. Unnamed Pentagon Officials Ridicule Hegseth’s Plan to Stop War Department Leaks

​It would seem that there are some pretty bold Pentagon officials.  

On the other hand what if no officials actually spoke? What if this is deliberate disinformation from Nick Turse to create the conditions for a witch hunt in the Pentagon to go after a mythical leaker and undermine trust within the Pentagon among Pentagon officials. Yes I know I am being a conspiracy theorist.

Unnamed Pentagon Officials Ridicule Hegseth’s Plan to Stop War Department Leaks

The Intercept · Nick Turse · September 21, 2025

Three current Pentagon officials decried a new War Department policy designed to restrict press freedom. Under new rules, the Department of War said it would forbid reporters from gathering any information that had not been approved for release and would revoke press credentials from any journalists who did not obey.

A 17-page document laying out the new guidelines says that journalists who wish to report from the Pentagon must sign agreements restricting their movement in the building and stipulating that they will not obtain or possess unauthorized material.

“DoW remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust,” the department’s Orwellian memorandum states.

Experts and current Pentagon officials call the rules an egregious assault on the freedom of the press.

One defense official who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity called the new policy a “mockery of American ideals.” Another likened it to policies seen in some of the most repressive and unstable nations on the planet. “The idea they want editorial control over the press is something I expect from a banana republic not the United States,” that official told The Intercept. A third said it was Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s latest assault on accountability, referencing his earlier efforts to kneecap the military’s lawyers.

“This is a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the U.S. military,” National Press Club President Mike Balsamo said in a statement. “If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting. It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American.”

In a Friday post on X.com, Hegseth said that “the press is no longer allowed to roam the halls of a secure facility,” and that reporters would have to “wear a badge and follow the rules — or go home.”

The Department of War responded to questions about the new policy from The Intercept with a boilerplate statement. “These are basic, common-sense guidelines to protect sensitive information as well as the protection of national security and the safety of all who work at the Pentagon,” said chief War Department spokesman Sean Parnell.

“Agreeing not to look where the government doesn’t want you to look and, by extension, not to print what it doesn’t want you to print, is propaganda, not journalism,” Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, told The Intercept.

“The government isn’t only seeking to restrain specific documents it contends pose a unique threat, it’s seeking to restrain everything it doesn’t want the public to know.”

Stern noted that the government is legally barred from requiring journalists to trade their right to investigate the government in exchange for reporting access.

“This policy operates as a prior restraint on publication which is considered the most serious of First Amendment violations. As we learned in the Pentagon Papers case, the government cannot prohibit journalists from public information merely by claiming it’s a secret or even a national security threat,” Stern said, referencing a landmark 1971 case in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of the New York Times and others to publish a classified Defense Department study of the Vietnam War. “This is worse in a way, because the government isn’t only seeking to restrain specific documents it contends pose a unique threat, it’s seeking to restrain everything it doesn’t want the public to know. That is fundamentally unAmerican.”

Hegseth’s Pentagon pledged earlier this year to “always deliver on our promise of transparency.” In February, Hegseth booted several mainstream news organizations from their offices at the Pentagon, including CNN, NPR, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, in favor of conservative mouthpieces, like Breitbart, Newsmax, and One America News.

Related

Hegseth Leads Push to Punish Military Service Members Over Charlie Kirk Comments

While not specifying any outlets by name, the defense official who said the new policy mocked American ideals expressed worry that some reporters would self-censor to curry favor with the War Department. “Some of these so-called journalists are a joke,” the official said.

Balsamo noted that the latest media crackdown “comes at a time when the nation is witnessing a devastating hollowing out of defense trade publications, just as rigorous, independent coverage of military and national security issues has never been more essential.”

Regular press briefings by the Pentagon press secretary or his deputy – a staple of previous years – have been abandoned in favor of propaganda pumped out by Hegseth, Parnell, and press secretary Kingsley Wilson. Wilson repeatedly replies to questions from The Intercept with variations on the phrase: “Nothing for you on that.”

Early in his tenure, Hegseth shared classified information about forthcoming air strikes in Yemen in a private Signal group chat that included his wife. He also disclosed attack plans in a separate Signal chat that included the editor of The Atlantic.

The Pentagon was also embarrassed by a leak to the New York Times that billionaire Elon Musk would receive a briefing on the military’s war plans concerning China. That briefing was called off and led to an investigation.

The new press policy coincides with the Department of War’s political correctness crusade in the wake of the killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. The military is taking disciplinary action against both enlisted troops and officers over social media posts they view as taking the wrong stance on Kirk’s legacy.

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The Pentagon’s actions are part of an all-out war on freedom of speech by the Trump administration. President Donald Trump recently filed a $15 billion defamation suit against the New York Times — which a federal judge threw out Friday, calling the complaint “improper and impermissible” in its current form. Trump also sued the Wall Street Journal in July for an article chronicling his relationship with the disgraced financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump previously sued CBS News and ABC News over their coverage of him, extracting $16 million settlements from each. This week, ABC apparently bowed to threats from chairman of the Federal Communications Commission Brendan Carr over remarks that Jimmy Kimmel, the host of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” had made in the wake of Kirk’s killing. The network pulled Kimmel’s late-night show from the air “indefinitely.”

Stern said that the Trump administration, like its predecessors, often leans on vague national security claims to avoid having lies exposed.

“Perhaps there are so many embarrassing documents at this point that it’s too difficult to keep finding bogus reasons to keep each of them secret,” Stern said. “Maybe that’s why the administration is taking more of a wholesale approach to concealing records that may show wrongdoing, corruption and incompetence.”

IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.

What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.

This is not hyperbole.

Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.

Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.”

The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.

We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?

Contact the author:

Join The Conversation

The Intercept · Nick Turse · September 21, 2025

20. How to Silence Dissent, Bit by Bit Until Fear Takes Over

Fundamental questions: Why do you want to silence dissent? What are you afraid of? These are two questions I would have VOA and RFA focus on in messaging to China and authoritarian leaders.

​Excerpts:

On the Chinese internet, many people sensed something familiar in Mr. Kimmel’s suspension. “Has Trump been trained in China?” asked a Weibo commenter. “The U.S. starts to feel more and more like a dictatorship,” said a comment under a WeChat video posted by the official Xinhua News Agency.

Chinese government censors usually leave more room for the public to express their opinions on unflattering news posts about the United States. Their aim is to help promote the narrative that China is ascendant and the United States is declining.

The United States is far from a one-party state. But China’s example shows how total control can be achieved step by step, through top-down pressure and the self censorship that follows.

Michael Berry, a professor of Chinese literature and cinema at the University of California, Los Angeles, likens the process to how an electric fence holds sheep back: They need to be shocked only once or twice before they never approach the boundary again. That’s how self-censorship works in China, he said, and “now it seems like that’s what’s happening here.”

Mr. Berry said he was worried that the survival strategy of many Chinese intellectuals — to stop speaking out to stay out of trouble — will take root in the United States as people realize they must be cautious to avoid repercussions.

Ms. Zhang, the former journalist, said she had been unsettled to see American institution like ABC and its parent company, Disney, yield to political pressure. She said she and her Chinese friends used to blame themselves for not resisting Beijing more boldly. “I never imagined Americans would be so meek,” she said. “By comparison, we were actually pretty brave.”

How to Silence Dissent, Bit by Bit Until Fear Takes Over

In China, journalism and public debate were opening up, and then a leader took over and used a series of steps to dictate speech.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/business/china-censorship-jimmy-kimmel.html

By Li Yuan

• Sept. 22, 2025
• Updated 4:35 p.m. ET

In early March, I asked a lawyer, a naturalized citizen living in Texas, whether he shared the unease among Chinese immigrants that American politics under President Trump was beginning to echo the China we left behind: fawning officials, intimidation of the press and business leaders currying favor with leadership.

He shrugged. As long as late-night talk show hosts can still make fun of the president, he said, American democracy is safe.

For those of us who grew up under strict censorship, late-night comedy always felt like an emblem of American freedom. The idea that millions of Americans could go to bed each night having watched their presidents mocked felt almost magical, something unimaginable where we came from.

That’s why ABC’s suspension of the Jimmy Kimmel show after pressure from the Trump administration, amid the president’s public threats toward critical journalists, felt so jarring. To many Chinese who have endured the relentless erosion of speech by the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, it felt ominous. Free speech rarely vanishes in a single blow. It erodes until silence feels normal.

“Coming from a dictatorship, people like me are sharply attuned to these things,” said Zhang Wenmin, a former investigative journalist in China better known for her pen name Jiang Xue. “We can sense how freedoms are chipped away little by little.”

Ms. Zhang was repeatedly harassed and threatened for what state security agents called her “negative reporting” on China. She now lives in the United States.

The United States is not China. Constitutional protections, an independent judiciary and a robust civil society still provide guardrails. Yet the Trump administration’s menacing comments and actions show how those guardrails can be weakened.

Image

Jimmy Kimmel hosting the 96th Academy Awards, last year. His show was suspended last week after ABC decided his comments on the fatal shooting of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk had crossed a line.Credit...Amir Hamja/The New York Times

The path China has traveled can offer lessons for Americans about how freedom is lost and the resulting cost.

China has not always been as tightly controlled as it has become under Mr. Xi. In the 1990s and 2000s, censorship could be harsh and people went to jail for their political views. But there was still space for free expression.

Investigative journalists like Ms. Zhang helped expose corrupt officials. The internet and social media then also allowed public debate, and people were able to pressure the government to respond to their concerns.

That started to change, step by step, after Mr. Xi took power in late 2012. He muzzled a newspaper’s editorial, elevated the role of a government official to control the internet and declared that all media must “love, protect and serve the Communist Party.” There was resistance: strikes by journalists, protests by members of the public, and displays of solidarity from entertainers, intellectuals and entrepreneurs. The government responded with arrests, penalties and prohibitions.

Within a few years, it became impossible to do critical journalism in China. Investigative reporters became “extinct.” The social media site Weibo, once a cacophony of debate, became an amplifier for state media. Websites were censored, and forced to self censor, to survive.

The cost of stifling speech had consequences. When an unknown pneumonia surfaced in Wuhan near the end of 2019, Dr. Li Wenliang tried to warn colleagues and friends. He was reprimanded for “spreading rumors.” Warnings were delayed; the window for a public-health response narrowed. After Dr. Li’s death, his message — “a healthy society should not have only one voice” — circulated as both a plea and an indictment.

As the coronavirus spread worldwide, Mr. Xi jailed and silenced more of his critics and mobilized the public to attack a novelist who kept an online diary of her experiences in Wuhan.

Image

A memorial for Dr. Li Wenliang, in 2020, who was reprimanded for “spreading rumors” about an unknown pneumonia that surfaced in Wuhan near the end of 2019.Credit...Mark Ralston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The chilling effect took hold. The Chinese internet devolved into a platform for nationalists to praise the government and Mr. Xi. Dissent or criticism is not tolerated. Online grievances are attacked, called ammunition for hostile foreign media. Even public grief and videos about poverty are censored.

The control hasn’t stopped at news media and social media. Films were edited to erase same-sex relationships. Hip-hop artists were ordered to radiate “positive energy.” Economists were told not to speak negatively about China.

Any criticism or mocking of Mr. Xi was forbidden. In 2017, the government censored images and mentions of Winnie-the-Pooh because some saw a resemblance to Mr. Xi.

Ren Zhiqiang, a retired real estate developer, is serving an 18-year sentence for calling Mr. Xi “a power-hungry clown.” Cai Xia, a retired professor at the Communist Party Central School, lost her party membership and pension for calling Mr. Xi a “mafia ringleader.”

Under Mr. Xi, China made it a crime to criticize martyrs and heroes, prosecuting even perceived slander of Communist Party figures.

The Chinese government fined a comedy studio about $2 million in 2023 for a joke comparing China’s military to stray dogs, saying the comedian “severely insulted” the People’s Liberation Army.

Mr. Xi’s effectively canceled voices that are not aligned with his vision for China.

This is why the silencing of Mr. Kimmel and the subsequent remarks by Mr. Trump and his allies ring an alarm for those who have watched freedoms in China erode.

Mr. Kimmel’s show was suspended after he made a remark speculating about the political beliefs of the man who is accused of assassinating the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Think of China’s criminal code for slandering martyrs. Mr. Kimmel is expected to return to the air on Tuesday, but the Trump administration’s attack on speech is getting only more intense.

Mr. Trump said last Friday that news reporters who cover his administration negatively were breaking the law. “They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad,” he said. “See, I think that’s really illegal.” Think of Mr. Xi’s instruction that news reporting should steadfastly focus on positive coverage.

Image

Ren Zhiqiang, former chairman of Huayuan Property Co., Ltd., in China in 2018. He is serving an 18-year sentence for calling Mr. Xi “a power-hungry clown.”

Credit...Oriental Image, via Reuters Connect

On the Chinese internet, many people sensed something familiar in Mr. Kimmel’s suspension. “Has Trump been trained in China?” asked a Weibo commenter. “The U.S. starts to feel more and more like a dictatorship,” said a comment under a WeChat video posted by the official Xinhua News Agency.

Chinese government censors usually leave more room for the public to express their opinions on unflattering news posts about the United States. Their aim is to help promote the narrative that China is ascendant and the United States is declining.

The United States is far from a one-party state. But China’s example shows how total control can be achieved step by step, through top-down pressure and the self censorship that follows.

Michael Berry, a professor of Chinese literature and cinema at the University of California, Los Angeles, likens the process to how an electric fence holds sheep back: They need to be shocked only once or twice before they never approach the boundary again. That’s how self-censorship works in China, he said, and “now it seems like that’s what’s happening here.”

Mr. Berry said he was worried that the survival strategy of many Chinese intellectuals — to stop speaking out to stay out of trouble — will take root in the United States as people realize they must be cautious to avoid repercussions.

Ms. Zhang, the former journalist, said she had been unsettled to see American institution like ABC and its parent company, Disney, yield to political pressure. She said she and her Chinese friends used to blame themselves for not resisting Beijing more boldly. “I never imagined Americans would be so meek,” she said. “By comparison, we were actually pretty brave.”

More by Li Yuan

A Hidden Camera Protest Turned the Tables on China’s Surveillance State

Sept. 2, 2025

Trump Could Hand China a ‘Strategic Victory’ by Silencing Voice of America

March 28, 2025

China Is a Nation of Savers. Many Are Drowning in Debt.

Aug. 6, 2025

Li Yuan writes The New New World column, which focuses on China’s growing influence on the world by examining its businesses, politics and society.

​21. The NATO-Russia War of 2025: Who Wins?

​Excerpts:

The blunt response to the guiding questions is, therefore, as follows: if there is an all-out NATO–Russia war, NATO likely wins the battles; no one wins the war; and it ends—in the least bad scenario—with a hotter cold war than ever experienced during the real Cold War.

No one desires this, but then —as Thucydides has reminded us many centuries ago— war is a violent teacher. It bends judgment, inflames passions, and drags states to ends that they never intended.

The NATO-Russia War of 2025: Who Wins?

nationalsecurityjournal.org · Andrew Latham · September 22, 2025

Key Points and Summary – Baltic incidents—drones, airspace brushes, GNSS spoofing—could cascade into a NATO–Russia war driven by fear, honor, and interest.

-Opening phases likely favor NATO in air and sea with superior ISR, EW, and standoff fires; Russia counters with missiles, dense air defenses, cyber, and navigation attacks.

-Two plausible endgames emerge: a non-nuclear grind to an armistice shaped by attrition and political risk, or limited nuclear use to coerce termination, shattering the taboo and accelerating crisis instability.

-By Clausewitz’s test, NATO’s best “win” is defending territory without crossing the nuclear threshold; overall, no side truly wins—the result is a harsher, more brittle cold peace.

World War III? How NATO and Russia Could End Up At War

The Baltic has felt jittery again in recent days. Reports of alleged incursions into Polish airspace by Russian drones, a lumbering Il-20 buzzed by German and Swedish fighters, new allegations of navigation interference in crowded flight corridors.

None of it is a Hollywood provocation; all of it is friction—small, deniable, cumulative. If one of them snaps into gunfire the questions that follow are blunt: who wins, and how does it end? For Clausewitz, victory is the attainment of a political object at a cost your polity will endure; for Thucydides, honor, fear, and interest can drive leaders to gamble with calamitous stakes. By those measures a NATO–Russia war produces no true victor. NATO likely wins battles; politics, economics, and nuclear risk devour the gains.

NATO-Russia War: How the War Starts

The war’s opening would probably include several depressingly familiar incidents. Fighter crosses a line; interceptor fires; missiles answer; suppression missions fan out from Kaliningrad. Each move is justified in defensive terms; each one tightens the coil. Thucydides’ triad does the pushing—fear of being seen as weak, honor bruised by losses, interests tied to geography and alliance credibility. Clausewitz’s trinity does the pulling—passion in the street and the headquarters, chance in the fog, and policy in an escalatory bind.

The opening phase probably favors NATO at sea and in the air. Allied Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance (ISR) will rapidly identify the Russian order of battle; electronic attack will degrade targeting; standoff fires will peel away fixed air defenses, logistics hubs, and Baltic and High North naval assets.

Moscow will counter with land-attack salvos, layered air defense around key nodes, and aggressive electronic warfare—Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) denial and spoofing to complicate both military and civilian flows—augmented by cyber attacks on power and health infrastructure. Expect spillover in the Barents and Black seas, and political warfare designed to slow NATO decision cycles and fracture public consent.

Who Wins? A Loaded Question…

Who “wins” depends on the political object. For NATO, winning means holding Alliance territory, preserving credibility, and ending the war without crossing the nuclear threshold—at a cost publics will absorb. On the battlefield, that is plausible: the Alliance can blunt Russia’s offensive capacity near the Baltic rim and force a stop. But the price—shattered infrastructure, a convulsed European economy, global supply chains buckling—would be steep. If the nuclear threshold is crossed, the word ‘win’ becomes meaningless.

For Russia, the plausible “win” is different. It is not the conquest of NATO states. It is survival of the regime and coercive leverage over the postwar order: forcing an armistice on terms that dent NATO credibility (limits on basing or strike systems near Russian borders; political guarantees that constrain Alliance behavior), while demonstrating that Moscow can impose costs and manage escalation. Russian declaratory policy reserves nuclear use for a conventional attack that threatens the state’s survival or territorial integrity; Western planning therefore assumes a spectrum of coercive nuclear signaling—visible dispersals, exercises, force movements—and, if that fails, limited options designed to compel termination. Whether treated as doctrine or contingency, the practical effect is the same: any successful NATO offensive tightens the nuclear vise.

That is escalation by design, not accident.

How Does a NATO-Russia War End?

And how would it end?

Two broad paths, one barely survivable; the other unbearable.

In the first, the nuclear threshold is not crossed and the war grinds into interdiction and exhaustion. NATO exploits its maritime and air edge to constrict Russian logistics around Kaliningrad and the Gulf of Finland, attriting fixed air defenses and command nodes from standoff. Russia answers with short-range ballistic missiles and cruise-missile strikes, dense air defenses, electronic attack, and long-range artillery to keep pressure on Baltic airfields, ports, and rail hubs.

Tu-22M3 Bomber Russian Air Force. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

Cyber operations and GNSS spoofing become routine, producing rolling disruptions to aviation, shipping, energy, and health systems. Refugee flows from contested areas strain politics in Poland, the Baltics, and Germany; Russian domestic control tightens as mobilization drags on.

Neither side achieves a clean breakthrough: Russia cannot sustain a deep push against layered Alliance defenses; NATO will not drive a low-risk offensive into zones where air defenses are thick and nuclear tripwires ambiguous. Both pivot to coercive bargaining by firepower—curated target lists, pauses to test diplomatic channels, resumed strikes when talks stall.

The armistice that follows is transactional, not reconciliatory. Lines settle where attrition, magazine depth, and political risk intersect. Verification and deconfliction measures are bolted on—hotlines, air and maritime separation rules, exercise-notification regimes.

Sanctions harden into a long-war economy; defense spending skyrockets; forward posture near the Suwałki corridor becomes permanent and heavily shielded against electronic and cyber attack.

The postwar order is colder, more crisis-ready, and less forgiving of miscalculation. Deterrence is “restored” in a narrow sense, but at the cost of a militarized peace and a Europe living with chronic disruption.

Limited Nuclear War?

Following the second path, limited nuclear use breaks the taboo. If Moscow concludes conventional trends threaten regime survival or the integrity of critical territory, it signals first—conspicuous dispersals, alerting, perhaps a “demonstration” detonation over remote waters.

Should that fail to arrest allied operations, a single low-yield strike against a military target with limited collateral effects becomes plausible: an air base, a logistics hub, a naval concentration.

The military impact is modest; the political shock is seismic. Civil defense alerts ripple across Europe; markets convulse; allied cabinets split between punishment and pause. NATO’s most likely sequence is maximum conventional pressure inside strict geographic bounds—rapid suppression of the specific Russian unit(s) enabling the strike; expanded air and missile defense; visible but carefully calibrated nuclear readiness measures that stop short of matching use. Washington, London, and Paris move forces to survivable postures; Moscow showcases second-strike assets.

Diplomacy During War Won’t Be Easy

Crisis diplomacy becomes a race: Russia seeks a ceasefire that codifies limits on allied posture and standoff systems near its borders; NATO seeks a ceasefire that bars further nuclear use, restores violated territory, and preserves freedom to reinforce.

A B-52H Stratofortress taxis down the runway at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., Sept. 16, 2021. The bomber is capable of flying at high subsonic speeds at altitudes up to 50,000 feet. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Zachary Wright)

Termination arrives faster than along the first path, but at a civilizational price: precedent broken, taboo degraded, and every future crisis conducted under a darker sky. Arms control revives in name, not in trust; every extensive NATO exercise and every Russian snap drill is shadowed by nuclear-use gaming. The “peace” that follows is decidedly more brittle than anything we have known since the dawn of the nuclear age.

Pray None of this Happens

By Clausewitz’s test, the first path is clearly preferable all around. NATO’s best “win” is a narrow political one: defending allied territory, avoiding nuclear use, and exiting the war with cohesion intact—even if the battlefield story ends in a bruising armistice rather than a parade. By Thucydides’ warning, Russia’s best “win” is a coercive stalemate that survives domestic pressures and dents NATO credibility without provoking annihilation. Neither outcome is triumph. Both are worse than the status quo.

No One Wins the ‘War’

The blunt response to the guiding questions is, therefore, as follows: if there is an all-out NATO–Russia war, NATO likely wins the battles; no one wins the war; and it ends—in the least bad scenario—with a hotter cold war than ever experienced during the real Cold War.

No one desires this, but then —as Thucydides has reminded us many centuries ago— war is a violent teacher. It bends judgment, inflames passions, and drags states to ends that they never intended.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a Senior Washington Fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities, and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham. He writes a daily column for National Security Journal.

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nationalsecurityjournal.org · Andrew Latham · September 22, 2025

22. Beijing’s “Robot Army” Isn’t Science Fiction. It’s Already Here.

​Excerpts:

The race for robotics supremacy is not some distant science-fiction contest. It is happening now, in real time, with consequences that will echo for generations.

The United States still has the tools to compete in this contest. It has world-class universities, deep capital markets, and an entrepreneurial culture that remains the envy of the world. But that edge is eroding as Beijing mobilizes its industrial base at wartime speed. Failing to take the robotics race seriously means watching Beijing set the rules of the automated economy—and risks leaving American power to rust.

Beijing's “Robot Army” Isn’t Science Fiction. It’s Already Here.

The National Interest · Ryan Fedasiuk

Topic: Robotics

Region: Asia

Tags: China, Manufacturing, Robotics, and United States

Beijing’s “Robot Army” Isn’t Science Fiction. It’s Already Here.

September 18, 2025

Share

Failing to take the robotics race seriously means watching Beijing set the rules of the automated economy, and risks leaving American power to rust.

China commands two-thirds of global robotics patents. Its flagship robotics company is shipping humanoid robots at one-tenth the cost, and ten times the volume, of American alternatives. These are not the distant indicators that some commentators cite arguing that America “might fall behind” in a future robotics competition with China. They are urgent signs that Beijing is already succeeding in its quest to control the physical infrastructure of the automated economy. Time is running out to adjust course.

Why Robotics Matters to US National Security

Robotics is not merely about improving manufacturing efficiency or making another billion off of consumer gadgets. It stands to reshape the future architecture of economic and military power. Banks and market research groups project the market for the machines and related services will surge to $7 trillion by 2050, and envision a world populated by hundreds of millions of human-like robots. Demographic decline and major strides in AI are further accelerating demand for “embodied intelligence.” As it faces a dearth of physical laborers and the dawn of intelligence too cheap to meter, the key question now facing the United States is how to build a capable and modern manufacturing base. The answer lies in mobile platforms capable of rendering services in physical space.

China has figured this out. President Xi Jinping has made robotics a central pillar of the country’s economic growth model in the 2020s. China’s 14th Five-Year Plan lists “robotics and smart manufacturing” as a cornerstone of its industrial innovation, with China aiming to be a global innovation hub by 2025 and a world leader by 2035. Beijing is well on the way to achieving this objective; between 2013 and 2022, Chinese universities added over 7,500 new engineering majors, with nearly 100 focused specifically on robotics. China’s academic output is already surpassing American contributions at major robotics and computer vision conferences. Moreover, Chinese institutions hold more than 190,000 robot-related patents, two-thirds of the global total. The country is already home to more than half of the top humanoid robotics companies.

The economics of this competition are even more striking. Founded in 2016, China’s robotics champion, Unitree, now sells its G1 humanoid robot for $16,000—about one-tenth the cost of comparable Western systems. Their quadrupeds, or “robot dogs,” are even more dominant in price-to-performance. To be clear, these are not low-quality Chinese knockoffs of Western products. They are robots that function well, at prices that make Western alternatives look like luxury goods no customer can afford to buy at scale. This is why China shipped 10 times as many robots as Boston Dynamics to customers in 100 countries last year.

The United States Must Not Cede Robotics Dominance to China

We have seen this movie before. During the 21st century, China has used a handful of tools—massive state support, relentless cost reduction, and flooding global markets before competitors can react—to crush its Western competitors in a range of industries: 5G telecommunications, solar cells, batteries, drones, and electric vehicles, among others. Each time, we told ourselves the next technology would be different. Each time, we were wrong.

Crucially, robotics is not just another consumer market to lose. Unitree’s mass-produced platforms could flood global markets, capturing critical data streams that serve as a flywheel for progress in machine learning and autonomy. For the People’s Liberation Army, such access translates directly into military potential in areas like urban warfare, intelligence gathering, and autonomous combat systems. It is notable that dozens of Unitree robot dogs have already been deployed in Ukraine.

Robotics is also the point where China’s commercial and military ambitions converge. The factories that make delivery robots can just as easily make bomb-carrying ones. The engineers building computer vision systems to navigate warehouses are also building the future of weapons targeting software. PLA analysts describe humanoid robots as “the key link in robots replacing humans in ‘intelligentized’ warfare.” They understand that commercial leadership in robotics is, in effect, a form of military strength.

The Trump administration has a narrow window to act before Chinese robotics companies gain an unassailable foothold in global markets. The American response must match the scale of the threat.

First, the United States should immediately restrict Unitree’s operations on American soil. The company poses a clear risk to US national security. There is ample evidence to suggest a close relationship between Unitree and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, to say nothing of the potential for intrusive data collection and legal requirements set forth by China’s National Intelligence Law. While some US lawmakers have proposed adding Unitree to the Department of Commerce’s Entity List, or pursuing restrictions through the FCC’s Covered List, the most straightforward approach available to the Trump administration would be to invoke the ICTS Executive Order—the same tool used to target TikTok and Internet-connected electric vehicles—which allows Commerce to prohibit transactions involving Unitree’s products and services.

Second, make it easier to build robots in America. That will necessarily include importing large numbers of certain critical robotics and manufacturing equipment components on a short timeframe—including high-precision actuators from Japan and South Korea. Only a handful of companies in the world currently produce essential robotics components like precision actuators and reducers, charging high price points and with exceptionally long backorders. Ongoing trade negotiations with Tokyo and Seoul may offer a window to lock-in favorable purchase commitments or provide tariff exemptions for specific pieces of equipment that will aid in America’s own manufacturing revival.

Third, accelerate private investment in the US robotics industry. President Trump has already secured more than $2 trillion in private manufacturing commitments through direct engagement with CEOs. A natural next step could be to increase the leverage cap for Small Business Investment Companies, freeing more capital for robotics startups and advanced manufacturing ventures looking to build downstream supply chains. The Small Business Administration allows some investors to borrow government dollars at discounted rates, but the amount of leverage typically offered in these deals—capped at three times starting capital—is rarely enough to build a standalone factory in America.

Fourth, expand pathways for global robotics talent to build in America. At the same time the administration takes steps to secure the US research enterprise from foreign influence, President Trump could expand the use of the International Entrepreneur Rule to incentivize entrepreneurship directly within US borders. Current immigration law makes it difficult for foreign entrepreneurs to launch robotics companies in America, pushing talent toward more welcoming jurisdictions. A dedicated visa category for founders with proven track records or significant funding would channel global innovation toward American soil rather than allowing it to flow to competitors.

Finally, establish “advanced manufacturing zones” with real incentives. American robotics companies are pushing for a national robotics strategy, including a central government robotics office, to promote the industry. As part of the effort, Commerce Secretary Lutnick could designate advanced manufacturing zones with expedited federal permitting, liability shields for testing autonomous systems, and a 10-year tax holiday for robotics production. States are already competing for these facilities, and federal coordination could determine whether they succeed or fail.

The race for robotics supremacy is not some distant science-fiction contest. It is happening now, in real time, with consequences that will echo for generations.

The United States still has the tools to compete in this contest. It has world-class universities, deep capital markets, and an entrepreneurial culture that remains the envy of the world. But that edge is eroding as Beijing mobilizes its industrial base at wartime speed. Failing to take the robotics race seriously means watching Beijing set the rules of the automated economy—and risks leaving American power to rust.

About the Author: Ryan Fedasiuk

Ryan Fedasiuk is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University. He was formerly the US-China Bilateral Affairs Adviser at the State Department Office of China Coordination. His writing on China has appeared in Foreign Policy and War on the Rocks.

Image: Shutterstock / Maxim Ladouski.

The National Interest · Ryan Fedasiuk

23. Weekly Drone Report – September 23, 2025

Weekly Drone Report – September 23, 2025

https://sof.news/drones/20250923/

September 23, 2025 SOF News Drones 0

Below the reader will find recent news about unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are used in conflicts (Ukraine, Africa, etc.), new developments in drone use, and training by military units for using drones during combat operations. Curated articles on the topics below are provided:

• Countering Drone Swarms
• Oregon NG’s Drone Training Program
• ‘Falcon Peak’ and Counterdrone Measures
• CobraJet Interceptor
• Helicopters Replaced by Drones?
• Switchblade 600 Now Has a ‘Mothership’
• Ukraine Has a New Kamikaze Drone
• Ukraine and Drone Swarming
• New Playbook on Warfare
• Russia’s Rubicon Drone Unit
• Lethal Drone Operators of Ukraine
• Is it Possible to Annihilate Drone Swarms?
• Defending Against Drones with Lasers

U.S. and Drones

Defending Against Drone Swarms. Stacie Pettyjohn and Molly Campbell write about how to protect the Joint Force in the Drone Age. “Countering the Swarm”, CNAS.org, September 10, 2025.

Oregon NG’s Drone Training Program. The Oregon Army National Guard is continuing to develop its UAS capabilities at the Rees Training Center where soldiers learn to operate, maintain, and build unmanned systems. The training courses provide a comprehensive program that combines commercial systems, custom-built platforms, and innovative training methodologies to prepare soldiers for the future of unmanned warfare. “Oregon Guard Advances Drone Capabilities With New Training Systems”, U.S. Army, September 16, 2025.

‘Falcon Peak’ and Counter Drone Measures. The U.S. military is developing teams that will respond in 24 hors to drone incursions at homeland installations. A counter-drone evaluation taking place at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida is where this coming capability was demonstrated. “New Quick Reaction Force Will Counter Military Base Drone Incursions”, by Howard Altman, The War Zone, September 18, 2025.

Cobra Jet Interceptor. SkyDefense LLC’s new drone is an autonomous eVTOL (electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing) interceptor that is designed for counter-drone operations. This low-cost fighter drone uses artificial intelligence (AI) and exceed speeds of 200 miles per hour – faster than most military drones currently fielded. The Cobra Jet can operate independently or as part of an AI-powered “flight team”. The company says the Cobra Jet is an advanced air defense for smaller militaries and private security firms. Brandon J. Weichet provides more details in “Here’s How the New “CobraJet” Autonomous Vehicle Will Change Warfare Forever”, National Interest, August 22, 2025.

Helicopters Replaced by Drones? “Helicopter air assaults once symbolized the decisive strike behind enemy lines. Today, their role is fading as small, inexpensive drones paralyze logistics at a fraction of the cost and risk.” Elena Davlikanova and Yevhen Malik argue that the economics of using drones vs helicopter assaults to disrupt the rear areas of the enemy tilt the choice to drones. “Do Drones Make Helicopters Obsolete?”, National Interest, September 12, 2025.

Switchblade 600 Now Has a ‘Mothership”. The U.S. Switchblade 600 is a loitering munition that can now be launched from a MQ-9A Reaper. Although it is an expensive system there will be times that it is the right weapon in certain situations. (Defense Express, 14 Sep 2025)

Drones and the Ukraine – Russia Conflict

Ukraine Has a New Kamikaze Drone. A new UAS that has a range of more than 40 kilometers and that can overcome electronic warfare (EW) systems will soon be deployed by Ukraine. Kamikaze drones have become an efficient and cheap way to oppose the Russians. They are capable of precise targeting and can be mass produced. Ukraine has been faced with an enemy that has more people and a bigger industrial base. Russia has the advantage in artillery and in missiles. It is not far behind Ukraine the the advancement of drone technology and fielding drones. “Ukraine Set to Deploy New Kamikaze Drones”, The Defense Post, September 17, 2025.

Ukraine and Drone Swarming. Collaborative drone swarms that bring together kamikaze drones and wheeled robot grenade launchers could be coming to a battlefield near you. “This Ukrainian startup has re-invented drone swarming”, Defense One, September 15, 2025.

New Playbook on Warfare. Ukraine has developed a “creative destruction approach” with its battlefield innovation of utilizing drones on a massive scale. Ukraine’s success with the development of drone technology, ability to mass produce drones, and to train and kit up drone operators has caused a seismic shift in the wars are fought. “Drone Wars: How Ukraine’s Creative Destruction Rewrote the Playbook on Warfare”, National Interest, September 17, 2025.

Russia’s Rubicon Drone Unit. Much of Russia’s success in regaining ground in the Kursk Oblast this past winter was due to a Russian drone unit. The unit was established in the summer of 2024 and is known as the Rubicon Center of Advanced Unmanned Systems. It is thought to consist of seven units each with approximately 130-150 personnel. The unit employs electronic warfare and radio signal reconnaissance to assist in locating Ukrainian drones and their operators. “Inside Rubicon, The Elite Russian Drone Unit Wreaking Havoc on Ukraine’s Troops”, Radio Free Europe, September 17, 2025.

Lethal Drone Operators of Ukraine. Ken Harbaugh visits a drone unit on the front lines in Kherson and learns how drone teams compete for points . . . based on kills. “Ukraine’s Most Lethal Soldiers”, The Atlantic, September 15, 2025.

Drones Around the World

Is it Possible to Kill Drone Swarms? Saab’s Nimbrix missile appears calibrated to take on the threat of an AI drone swarm that will provide a valuable countermeasure against a weapon that so far has operated without one. “Did Saab Just Invent a Way to Annihilate Drone Swarms?”, by Brandon J. Weichert , National Interest, September 17, 2025.

Defending Against Drones with Lasers. Cheaper than advanced air defenses and more versatile than low-tech options, lasers have become a popular choice for nations worried about drone attacks. “The Hottest New Defense Against Drones? Lasers”, The New York Times, September 18, 2025. (subscription)

**********

Image. “Drone Swarm Over Desert” – Grok, 20 Sep 2025

24. ISIS’s Transition and the Interplay of Online and Face-to-Face Recruitment

Excerpts:

Conclusion  

The ISIS’ trajectory from a regional insurgency to a global extremist franchise illustrates the evolving nature of contemporary Salafi-jihadist terrorism. Its ability to leverage both face-to-face and online networks, mobilize foreign fighters, recruit within prisons and utilize digital platforms, has enabled the group to persist even after its territorial defeat, expanding its reach far beyond Iraq and Syria.  

The emergence and expansion of regional affiliates across Africa, each adapted to local grievances and governance vacuums, reflect a troubling transformation and decentralization of the jihadist threat. This trend poses an alarming risk for further expansion, particularly in regions afflicted by weak state institutions, social polarization, and collective grievances. 

To counter the evolving ISIS threat, a multi-faceted approach is essential. This strategy must integrate efforts to disrupt the group’s digital presence, such as by collaborating with tech companies on advanced content moderation, and on-the-ground initiatives that address the root causes of recruitment described above. These initiatives include strengthening local governance and security forces, providing essential services to communities, and implementing effective de-radicalization programs in prisons, thereby directly tackling the vulnerabilities that ISIS exploits for its expansion, particularly across Africa.

ISIS’s Transition and the Interplay of Online and Face-to-Face Recruitment 

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/09/23/isis-transition-online-and-face-to-face-recruitment/

by Suleyman Ozeren, by Suat Cubukcu, by Gokhan Aksu

|

09.23.2025 at 06:00am

The ISIS-controlled Amq News Agency shows Islamic State fighters celebrating in May 2019 after an ambush on an army patrol, in the western Tillabéri region of Niger, that killed at least 28 troops. Photograph: HO/AFP/Getty Images

Abstract

The article explores how ISIS sustained its operational presence through a strategic blend of face-to-face and online recruitment, including prison radicalization, social media outreach, and the exploitation of local grievances. It highlights how ISIS adapted to territorial losses, with a focus on its expansion into new regions, particularly in Africa, through affiliates such as Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), Islamic State-Central Africa Province (ISCAP), ISIS-Mozambique, and ISIS in the Greater Sahara.  

Introduction

Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (ISIL), represents a unique case study of how a terrorist organization can emerge, rapidly expand, suffers a territorial defeat, yet successfully reconstitute itself as a global extremist franchise. While ISIS built on the know-how and ideological foundation of al-Qaeda, it has proved far more successful in building a diverse recruitment and propaganda machine.  

To understand the group’s trajectory, three main periods should be analyzed: its emergence, expansion, and enduring insurgency. In short, ISIS “emerged from the convulsions of the war in Iraq (2003-2011), the Arab revolutions (2010-present) and the civil war in Syria (2011-present)”.  

ISIS’ global network of affiliates across various regions has contributed to the group’s resilience and solidified its status as the preeminent force in global jihadist terrorism. This article explores how ISIS strategically leveraged both offline and online recruitment methods to broaden its reach. It also investigates the emergence and recruitment activities of ISIS’ regional affiliates in Africa, with a focus on the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), the Islamic State Central Africa Province (ISCAP), ISIS-Mozambique, and ISIS in the Greater Sahara.

Overview of the Rise and Fall of ISIS

ISIS initially emerged after the second US invasion of Iraq and rebranded itself multiple times. The institutional collapse in Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, along with widespread discrimination against Sunni Arabs, and sectarian politics that further marginalized them, created the social-psychosocial and political conditions conducive to the emergence and empowerment of ISIS in Iraq.   

The civil war in Syria offered a strategic opportunity for ISIS. After securing major territorial gains in both Syria and Iraq, the group declared itself as the Islamic State – and so-called Caliphate – in 2014, which triggered US military intervention   

A defining feature of the group is its adaptability even after losing territorial control in Syria and Iraq in 2019. Despite substantial setbacks resulting from the US-led military campaign, including Operation Inherent Resolve, ISIS has proven to be remarkably resilient.  

This resilience is evident in the group’s ability to adapt its tactics and strategically expand its influence and territorial control during its peak. Its rapid and unprecedented expansion in Syria and Iraq is partly attributable to an exceptionally efficient propaganda machine, which produced three major outcomes.  

First, the group managed to recruit thousands of foreign fighters from more than 90 countries, becoming a critical source of resilience for the group. Second, its propaganda methods, content, and platforms inspired individuals to carry out attacks in their home countries. While many of these actors had no formal ties to ISIS, their actions—motivated by the group’s ideology—fueled the perception of a global presence. Third, as seen in other groups like al Qaeda, ISIS’s success led other like-minded groups from Afghanistan to Madagascar to establish alliances with ISIS.

ISIS Recruitment in the Physical Space

While cyberspace is a critical platform for ISIS recruitment, face-to-face interaction is still the prominent model of recruitment. ISIS has relied on a wide array of recruitment channels, namely established networks of friends and family and tribal affiliations. In locations that become hotbeds for ISIS recruitment, “social media becomes less important than via direct human contact, as clusters of friends and neighbors persuade each other to travel separately or together to join the Islamic State”. 

ISIS has conducted recruitment activities in a wide range of physical spaces, including mosques, cafes, bookstores, front organizations disguised as humanitarian aid agencies, makeshift madrasas, religious festivals and gatherings, prisons, and other locations where marginalized or vulnerable individuals commonly congregate. This complex and well-organized recruitment infrastructure has enabled ISIS to survive and sustain its presence across multiple countries.  

Although precise figures on ISIS membership remain unavailable, estimates range from 30,000 to over 100,000 members. Two critical enablers of ISIS’ recruitment efforts have been foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs) and networks of family and friends, both of which played a key role in facilitating the group’s global outreach. 

In addition, prisons in particular have offered fertile ground for recruitment. Recruiters have been known to “take advantage of the psychological characteristics of inmates and their deprivation of liberty to inculcate them with jihadist values.” Notably, the network of detention centers—often referred to as prisons—in Syria and Iraq has held large numbers of ISIS members and their families. According to the US Central Command (CENTCOM), as of July 2024, there were “more than 9,000 ISIS detainees in detention facilities in Syria, and … more than 43,000 individuals and families from the Al Hol and Al Roj camps”. Poor conditions in these camps enable male or female ISIS detainees to enforce their own rules and exert pressure on families, including children, to replicate the group’s pre-defeat governance structure. In short, ISIS continues to exploit prisons and detention camps as spaces to maintain influence and recruit new members.

ISIS’s Influence & Propaganda in Cyberspace

ISIS has demonstrated a highly sophisticated media and communications strategy, particularly in its use of social media and other digital platforms to advance propaganda and recruitment efforts. Despite its territorial defeat in 2019, ISIS core and global affiliates have continued to increase their online presence by sustaining its networks, driving radicalization, and facilitating the planning and execution of attacks.     

Virtual spaces continue to serve as platforms for ISIS-linked activities. For example, a study examined over 90 unofficial media outlets affiliated with ISIS across different platforms—some fully active, others partially inactive. They found many of them recycled existing content and relied on low-quality visuals or narratives. Despite this, outlets attracted large followings with individual channels. Another study examines how TikTok enables the persistence of terrorist content, particularly audio recordings of ISIS and al-Qaeda leaders. Research based on a dataset of over 55 videos found that, despite the removal of original content, extremist speeches often resurface in new user-generated videos, sometimes stripped of context or mislabeled, and attract millions of views. While these videos clearly violate TikTok’s community guidelines, most videos remained accessible, with the platform’s algorithm even recommending additional extremist content.  

The informal online ecosystem that supports ISIS is composed of a complex and decentralized international network of individuals—including writers, editors, and graphic designers—who operate across mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter) as well as encrypted messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram. These actors frequently adopt similar messaging strategies and self-organize into small, autonomous groups centered around key influencers or individual social media accounts. Their primary objective is to generate and disseminate content that promotes ISIS ideology, supports its leadership, and circulates ISIS-related news through rebranded channels. These groups translate content into multiple languages, employ tactics to avoid detection, and share secure communication tools.     

These accounts used deeply embedded evasion tactics to avoid detection and moderation systems. The tactics they used include disguising content with altered branding, sharing links through comment sections, organizing coordinated raids on adversarial social media pages, and using “broken text” formats to bypass automated content moderation. For example, the unofficial ISIS-linked outlet Global Events operates across multiple platforms, such as Facebook (22,000+ followers), Telegram (30,000+ subscribers), using coded language and backup accounts to sustain viability. It has played a key role in promoting migration (hijrah) to sub-Saharan Africa and spread propaganda via more than 80 video reels—some viewed over 230,000 times—while relying on emoji code systems to circumvent content moderation.  

ISIS’s media operations also include news agencies such as Amaq News Agency and Al Hayat Media Center, which allow the group to broadcast a range of propaganda including claims of attacks. An emerging subculture driven by young supporters further amplified the influence of ISIS. Termed the “Alt-Jihad,” this movement merges visual aesthetics of far-right online communities with jihadist content, using platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Telegram to disseminate its messages.   

These networks – often driven by tech-savvy youth – form decentralized and multi-platform communities that use modern aesthetics and language to spread propaganda, recruit followers, and sustain online influence.

Key Hotspots of ISIS-Linked Groups Across Africa

While ISIS continues to exploit the digital realm to maintain global influence, its offline footprint remains equally concerning—particularly across Africa, where several affiliated groups have become key actors in regional conflicts. This analysis draws on incident-level data from the Global Terrorism Trends and Analysis Center’s (GTTAC)’s GRID database, an open-source database sponsored by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Counterterrorism for the Country Reports on Terrorism and its Statistical Annex.  

Figure 1 illustrates the geographic distribution of violent activities linked to ISIS-affiliated groups across Africa between 2018 and 2024. The data reveal that IS-DRC (formerly Allied Democratic Forces) was the most active affiliate, responsible for over 1,500 incidents primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo. IS-DRC’s operations overwhelmingly dominate the conflict landscape in central Africa. Following this, ISIS-Mozambique (ISIS-M) and ISIS-West Africa (ISIS-WA) emerge as the second and third most active affiliates, centered in Mozambique and Nigeria, respectively. The data also illustrate significant operational presence by ISIS-Greater Sahara (ISIS-GS) in the Sahel region and ISIS-Sinai Province (ISIS-SP) in Egypt.

Figure 1. Geographic Distribution of Attacks by ISIS-Affiliated Groups, 2018-2024  

The Democratic Republic of the Congo experienced the highest number of ISIS-linked incidents, followed by Mozambique and Nigeria. These three countries represent the primary zones of ISIS expansion and sustained operations in Africa during this period. Meanwhile, Libya, Egypt, Somalia, and a handful of Sahelian and North African states reported relatively fewer incidents, suggesting more localized or less active insurgencies. 

Figure 2 presents trends, tactics, and victims of ISIS-affiliated attacks between 2018 and 2024, based on the GTTAC GRID database. The trend graph illustrates a sharp rise in both incidents and fatalities beginning in 2020, with ISIS-DRC (formerly ADF) emerging as the most lethal and active affiliate. The group escalated attacks consistently culminating in over 300 incidents and nearly 1,800 fatalities in 2024 alone. ISIS-M and ISIS-WA follow in scale, with episodic surges, notably in 2021 and 2022. These trends underscore a geographical pivot toward Central and Southeastern Africa, now the primary theaters of ISIS-linked violence.

Figure 2. Trends, Tactics and Victims of ISIS-affiliated Attacks, 2018-2024  

The bar chart on tactics in Figure 2 shows that attacks involving firearms account for the majority of incidents. This is followed by extortion, kidnappings, executions, and ambushes—reflecting a hybrid insurgency strategy blending guerrilla warfare, coercion, and terrorism aimed at controlling territory and intimidating local populations. The high frequency of incidents labeled with “unclear tactics” also points to gaps in intelligence and challenges in data collection, particularly in remote or unstable regions.  

The bar chart on victim types emphasizes the heavy toll on civilians: the general population is the primary target, far surpassing attacks on security forces or state actors. Civilian targeting is a hallmark of ISIS’s African affiliates, which rely on mass intimidation and population control. Notably, Christian communities are frequently targets, especially in the DRC, Nigeria, and Mozambique. In 2024 alone, 106 such incidents were recorded— 88 of them in the DRC.  

In sum, Figure 2 reveals a disturbing trajectory in ISIS’s African operations: rapid escalation, operational sophistication, lethal efficiency, and a civilian-centric strategy of violence and intimidation. The prominence of ISIS-DRC and sustained attacks in Mozambique and Nigeria illustrate a geographic pivot toward regions with weak governance, porous borders, and exploitable local grievances.  

Our analysis ultimately highlights the geographic diversification and regional entrenchment of ISIS-affiliated violence in Africa. Central, Southeastern, and West Africa (Sub-Saharan) have emerged as epicenters, with soft-target-strategies reinforcing ISIS’s influence. ISIS’s presence in Africa is manifested through regionally distinct affiliates, each shaped by local grievances, historical dynamics, and leadership structures. The following sections explore key regional ISIS affiliates and their recruitment strategies—both offline and online—beginning with Central Africa, followed by Southeastern Africa, and concluding with West Africa (Lake Chad region and Greater Sahara). 

Central Africa Epicenter: ADF   

One major ISIS-affiliated hotspot in Africa is the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) operate. The group emerged in Uganda in the mid-1990s under the leadership of Jamil Mukulu, following the state’s crackdown on violent factions within the Salafi Muslim Youth Movement. Although the ADF initially struggled to recruit from Salafi mosques due to government alliances with quietist Salafi clerics and the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council (UMSC), it later received support from Sudan and the DRC and evolved into a transnational jihadist group, drawing recruits mainly from outside Uganda, including Burundi, Tanzania, Mozambique, and the Ugandan diaspora in the United Kingdom.   

Since 2015, the ADF transitioned from a reclusive insurgent group to a multinational network focused on propaganda and recruitment. The group’s media efforts evolved significantly under Musa Baluku’s leadership, shifting from low-quality audio sermons shared on memory cards to highly produced videos and coordinated social media campaigns aligned with the Islamic State’s global messaging. After rebranding and being recognized as the Islamic State’s Central Africa Province (ISCAP), the group has maintained its localized propaganda apparatus and began releasing videos glorifying violence, urging jihadist migration to Central Africa, and coordinating with the Islamic State’s central media units. This resulted in a dual-track propaganda strategy targeting both local and global audiences. Through videos distributed via Telegram and branded platforms like Mujahideen TV, the ADF glorifies martyrdom, reinforces loyalty to the Caliphate, and emphasizes that it is no longer the ADF, but rather the Islamic State’s Central Africa Province, fully integrated into the global jihadist movement. 

Southeastern Africa: ISIS-Mozambique 

ISIS-Mozambique (ISIS-M), also known as Ansar al-Sunna Wa Jamma (ASWJ), gained global attention following its March 2021 assault on Palma and has since been elevated to the status of a formal ISIS province, Wilayat Mozambique. Locally, ISIS-M conducts guerrilla warfare, relies on brutal violence against civilians, and uses these acts to both coerce communities and fuel recruitment. 

ISIS-Mozambique’s recruitment and propaganda are deeply rooted in local conditions rather than directed primarily by the Islamic State’s central leadership. The group capitalizes on local grievances—especially inequality, state neglect, and resource exploitation in Cabo Delgado—to attract recruits.     

Regionally and globally, the group employs its ISIS affiliation through a layered propaganda strategy. While it produces localized media content aimed at inspiring recruits and glorifying martyrdom (e.g., through Mujahideen TV), its attacks are also featured in the ISIS’ central propaganda, including its Al-Naba newsletter and social media channels, with over 50 attack claims made by ISIS-Central between 2019 and 2022. This dual-media approach allows ISIS-M to maintain local relevance and international visibility, portraying itself as part of the broader ISIS movement while remaining strategically autonomous in its operations and recruitment strategies.  

West Africa – Lake Chad Region: ISIS in West Africa Province (ISWAP) 

The Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) has been a prominently active ISIS-affiliated group in West Africa and emerged in 2016 after breaking away from Boko Haram. Unlike its predecessor, ISWAP has prioritized cultivating legitimacy by presenting itself as a more disciplined and community-oriented force.   

ISWAP’s recruitment is primarily driven by local dynamics. It takes advantage of widespread poverty, insecurity, and weak government presence in northeastern Nigeria and surrounding areas to draw in new members. The group appeals to local populations by providing essential services such as basic healthcare, water access, religious education, and local dispute resolution mechanisms. It also attracts recruits by offering protection from rival group Boko Haram , shielding communities from harsh counter-terrorism operations, and promising economic opportunities.   

The group actively avoids harming Muslim civilians and focuses its attacks on government forces and collaborators—a tactic designed to gain trust and cooperation from local communities. By imposing structured taxation and enforcing its version of Islamic law with relative restraint, ISWAP has built a governance framework that attracts new recruits and strengthens its territorial control.   

West Africa – Tri-Border Region ISIS in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) 

The Tri-border region of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso is another hot-spot for ISIS affiliated groups in West Africa. The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) has operated primarily in this region. Originally a splinter from al-Qaeda, ISGS was formally acknowledged as an ISIS affiliate in 2019. Its online and media presence has grown since then. ISIS’s core media, including the Amaq News Agency, has claimed ISGS attacks and promoted its role in regional jihadist conflicts—particularly highlighting its clashes with rival groups like JNIM and encouraging defections to ISGS.  On the ground, ISGS actively co-opts fighters from groups like Ansaroul Islam and appeals to marginalized communities, especially through grievances stemming from abuses by local militias and state forces. ISGS propaganda frames itself as a defender of aggrieved populations. Additionally, ISGS has implemented limited governance and welfare services in rural areas, offering food, medicine, and protection to gain local support and incentivize participation in its campaigns. 

Conclusion  

The ISIS’ trajectory from a regional insurgency to a global extremist franchise illustrates the evolving nature of contemporary Salafi-jihadist terrorism. Its ability to leverage both face-to-face and online networks, mobilize foreign fighters, recruit within prisons and utilize digital platforms, has enabled the group to persist even after its territorial defeat, expanding its reach far beyond Iraq and Syria.  

The emergence and expansion of regional affiliates across Africa, each adapted to local grievances and governance vacuums, reflect a troubling transformation and decentralization of the jihadist threat. This trend poses an alarming risk for further expansion, particularly in regions afflicted by weak state institutions, social polarization, and collective grievances. 

To counter the evolving ISIS threat, a multi-faceted approach is essential. This strategy must integrate efforts to disrupt the group’s digital presence, such as by collaborating with tech companies on advanced content moderation, and on-the-ground initiatives that address the root causes of recruitment described above. These initiatives include strengthening local governance and security forces, providing essential services to communities, and implementing effective de-radicalization programs in prisons, thereby directly tackling the vulnerabilities that ISIS exploits for its expansion, particularly across Africa.

Tags: ISIL, ISIS, Islamic State, terrorism, terrorist recruitment

About The Authors

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• Suleyman Ozeren
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• Suat Cubukcu
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• Gokhan Aksu
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25. Austronesian Identity as “Networked Deterrence” in the Indo-Pacific

Austronesian Identity as “Networked Deterrence” in the Indo-Pacific

irregularwarfare.org · Bailey Galicia · September 23, 2025

Editor’s Note: This article earned third place in the Irregular Warfare Initiative’s 2025 Writing Contest, “Irregular Allies: Strengthening Regional Partnerships through Unconventional Means.” Authors were asked to respond, in 800 words or less: How can the United States and its partners use irregular warfare to strengthen security cooperation, build trust, and enhance resilience among Indo-Pacific nations; particularly those with limited conventional military capacity?

The following piece stood out to our selection panel for its originality, clarity, and relevance. It offers concrete recommendations on how cultural identity, trust-building, and unconventional partnerships can serve as the foundation for “networked deterrence” in the Indo-Pacific. We have lightly edited the piece after its selection.

For the other winning articles in our contest, look back to our winners’ announcement here.

Small Indo-Pacific states are on the front lines of Beijing’s gray zone playbook, finding themselves subject to malign influence, economic coercion, and maritime encroachment. If these nations falter under pressure, it could harm U.S. strategic interests by fracturing regional cooperation, limiting access to critical sea lanes and the Western Pacific, and weakening collective responses to crises, including a potential conflict over Taiwan.

Against this backdrop, the U.S. and its Indo-Pacific allies should embrace “networked deterrence,” a human-centered deterrence where intentional layers of trust, shared culture, and empowerment work in unison to counter China’s preferred strategic approach. At the heart of this human-centered irregular warfare concept lies a potent tool: Austronesian identity.

Connecting the Island Chains: Taiwan to Tuvalu

The Austronesian identity stretches across the first, second, and third island chains uniting disparate yet strategically vital partners like Taiwan, New Zealand, and the Pacific Island Countries alongside U.S. states and territories such as Hawaii and Guam. Common linguistic, navigational, and cultural heritage create inherent but underappreciated linkages.

Taiwan has already taken the lead in strategically elevating Austronesian identity by spearheading the Austronesian Forum, which brings together 15 members, some of whom recognize Taiwan and others who do not, with Taiwan as a ‘non-state cultural partner.’ Given Taiwan’s leadership in the forum, the United States can lend support indirectly and from a less prominent position by encouraging broader participation from allies and partners. Although Beijing will object to any engagement with Taiwan, subnational governments like Hawaii can expand participation, strengthening cultural ties while cleverly sidestepping diplomatic friction points.

Framing Taiwan as an Austronesian cultural partner instead of a contested political actor offers strategic benefits. It chips away at Beijing’s narrative that Taiwan is globally isolated and inextricably linked to the Chinese mainland, and strengthens public affinity for Taiwan across the region. Citizens who see the Taiwanese people as cultural cousins will be more inclined to resist disinformation or support Taiwan in a future crisis. In this way, heritage becomes a tool for information warfare by proactively telling a story of solidarity before malign actors can spin one of division.

Military Cultures Underpin Deterrence

Building on these cultural linkages, deterrence also depends on the shared military traditions and practices that reinforce solidarity in the face of coercion. Beijing will continue working to fracture solidarity, obscure aggression, and flood the region with narratives that cast Taiwan as isolated, illegitimate, or already lost. To counter Beijing, the United States should promote joint trainings and cultural exchanges that empower local actors to defend against foreign interference and strengthen regional cohesion.

A military exchange initiative grounded in shared cultural identity could connect U.S.-based Austronesian service members, especially in Hawaii and Guam, with their counterparts in Taiwan and other strategic Pacific Island Countries. These exchanges would strengthen trust among defense communities and demonstrate solidarity rooted in shared heritage.

Exchanges could include joint training in disaster response, civil-military relations, and maritime domain awareness, while also creating space for dialogue about traditional navigation, oral history, and language preservation. This approach to security cooperation not only enhances readiness, but also deepens enduring relationships and adds to Taiwan’s legitimacy.

Deterrence in Action

The Marshall Islands, after enduring waves of cyberattacks and coordinated fake-news campaigns, signed a security pact with Taiwan in June 2025 focused on “maritime domain awareness, cybersecurity, and counter-disinformation” training. This agreement recognizes that information threats require a whole-of-society response. A similar model should be scaled across the region, particularly in the other two Pacific Island Countries that recognize Taiwan: Palau and Tuvalu.

According to a Pacific Forum analysis, even a $5 million initiative could provide basic cyber training, harden communications infrastructure, and help localities safeguard defenses against hostile influence. These are low-cost, high-impact steps that build resilience both at the state level and even the community and household level.

Policy Recommendations

To implement human-centered networked deterrence, U.S. policymakers should:

1. Elevate the Austronesian Forum as a key venue for Indo-Pacific cooperation. Support language revitalization programs, cultural exchanges, and regional gatherings that include Taiwan and other subnational governments like Hawaii, with allies sharing the costs.
2. Launch culturally grounded military exchanges drawing on the U.S. Austronesian population. Military service is deeply rooted in Hawaii and Guam. The United States should build on this tradition by developing exchange programs that connect Austronesian service members with counterparts in Taiwan and other strategic Pacific Island Countries.
3. Scale localized training programs, like those piloted in the Marshall Islands, to help small nations build community-led defenses against disinformation and gray-zone coercion.
4. Frame Taiwan as a cultural partner in public messaging. Avoid language that pressures states into formal recognition. Instead, support Taiwan’s soft power as a steward of Austronesian heritage.
5. Integrate these efforts into existing tools, like the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and National Guard State Partnerships, to signal clear commitment to local cultural engagement as a pillar of networked deterrence.

Bailey Galicia is a program assistant with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Before joining the Atlantic Council, Bailey completed a Fulbright in Bulgaria and worked for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He holds a joint master’s degree in Security, Intelligence, and Strategic Studies from the University of Glasgow, Dublin City University, and Charles University.

Main Image: Children look through items received during Operation Christmas Drop Dec. 9, 2014, at Ulithi Atoll, Micronesia. U.S. Air Force photo. Courtesy of DVIDS.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

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irregularwarfare.org · Bailey Galicia · September 23, 2025

26. Guns, Oil, and Dependence: Can the Russo-Indian Partnership Be Torpedoed?

​Excerpts:

While tensions persist, with Washington now pressing Brussels to impose new tariffs on Beijing and New Delhi over their purchases of Russian oil — a step the European Union currently seems unwilling to take — opportunities also remain. This month’s developments — including President Donald Trump’s declaration and Modi’s reciprocation of the positive nature of their own and the Indian-U.S. relationship, the tariff exemption on 31.3 percent or $28.4 billion of India’s exports to the United States (particularly minerals and pharmaceuticals), and the continuation of defense equipment-related negotiations — may signal an easing of tensions between Washington and New Delhi. It behooves us to mention here that Indian media outlets’ portrayals of the Trump administration’s tariff-related decisions have also varied, likely shaped by their affiliations with Indian oil refineries. For instance, while the Reliance-owned Network-18 has called the current U.S.-Indian relations “frosty” and the tariffs “punishment,” other outlets with no direct ties to Indian oil companies have adopted a more fact-driven and less editorialized tone.

Should Washington revise its stance on the Indian tariffs due to changed circumstances — as allowed under Trump’s Executive Order — it could take other measures to target Russia’s oil revenues and accelerate India’s pivot away from Russian crude (the latter being a “top priority” for the Trump administration, according to Trump’s pick as the next U.S. Ambassador to India, Sergio Gor). One such option could be to require importers of Russian crude, like India, to remit a portion of the discount they get on Russian barrels as a surcharge to the U.S. government. Should a similar measure be considered, we propose that the collected funds be invested in joint U.S.-Indian projects aimed at facilitating a faster military and energy shift for India away from Russia and toward the United States.

Guns, Oil, and Dependence: Can the Russo-Indian Partnership Be Torpedoed?

Vasabjit Banerjee and Tina Dolbaia

September 23, 2025

warontherocks.com · September 23, 2025

Between Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi attended the 2025 Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s summit meeting in China. Established by China in 2001 to manage border disputes, the organization now includes members like Iran, Pakistan, India, and faraway partners like the Maldives and Cambodia. Save India, all the member states are authoritarian or authoritarian-leaning regimes. At the summit, Modi and his Chinese counterpart, General Secretary Xi Jinping, committed to peacefully resolving Indian-Chinese border disputes. Symbolic gestures included Modi riding in President Vladimir Putin’s limousine. Substantively, participants discussed a Shanghai Cooperation Organization bank that would not use the U.S. dollar.

This was not Modi’s first attendance at the summit. He forwarded India’s vision for a multipolar world order in the 2022 summit, but also rebuked Russia’s President Putin by stating “today’s era is not an era of war,” and urged for stability and economic cooperation. Back then, Modi did not hold a bilateral meeting with Xi, because of the ongoing militarized border clashes caused by China’s occupation of disputed territory. In 2023, India hosted the summit, but switched to a virtual format, and Modi did not attend the summit in 2024.

Why did India’s stance change this year?

Indian sources have claimed that Modi’s actions were, in part, influenced by the U.S. decision to impose 50 percent tariffs on Indian goods and services, purportedly in response to India’s surging imports of Russian crude oil. Peter Navarro, the president’s trade advisor, has been one of the most vocal advocates of this move, accusing India’s “big oil lobby” of financing Russia’s war machine by purchasing its crude. Indeed, as the United States presses for an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine, the Russo-Indian trade relationship has come under increasing scrutiny in Washington. According to official Indian sources, in 2024, exports to India provided Russia with $63.84 billion, while exports to Russia generated only $4.88 billion for India — indicative of a large trade deficit that New Delhi has with Moscow. In our latest research, we discuss the two main anchors of these trade ties: India’s long-held dependence on Soviet-Russian arms and its renewed reliance on Russian oil, with the latter being instrumental in ballooning trade imbalance between the two countries.

Russia has been India’s primary supplier of weapons since the mid-1960s. Even now, New Delhi remains Moscow’s largest arms customer. Similarly, since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has become India’s top crude oil supplier — while India imported $2.31 billion worth of Russian crude in 2021, this figure surged to $25.5 billion in 2022, only to climb further to $48.6 billion in 2023 and $52.7 billion in 2024. Russian crude is bought and refined by large Indian refineries for domestic consumption, as well as for the burgeoning re-export business.

This nexus of guns and oil linking Russia and India is now threatening New Delhi’s relationship with its major strategic partner, Washington, while ostensibly softening its ties with Beijing — a historic rival and a long-term security concern.

BECOME A MEMBER

Why Does India Need Russian Arms?

Approximately 60 percent of India’s weapons, from tanks and fighter jets to surface ships and its nuclear submarine program, are of Russian origin or license-produced versions. India’s dependence on Russia for arms stems from its economic constraints as a developing country and the need to maintain a sizable standing army because of its historically hostile relations with Pakistan and China — thus necessitating the rapid delivery of weapons in large numbers .

By the 1960s, India’s increasing security concerns, due to its defeat in the war with China and a stalemated conflict with Pakistan, combined with the refusal of its then traditional arms supplier — the United Kingdom — to allow India licensed production, led to a deepening of defense ties between Moscow and New Delhi. For instance, while talks with the United Kingdom ultimately failed over India’s attempt to acquire an export variant of the English Electric Lightning supersonic fighter jet, the Soviet Union offered its second-generation supersonic MiG-21, which India could both purchase on a loan and produce domestically under license. In the years that followed, the Soviets generally retained an edge over Western suppliers by offering highly attractive financial terms — lower interest loans, longer repayment periods, and the option of payment in Indian rupees.

This past dependence, in addition to its present inability to finance large-scale purchases of completely new systems, forces India to primarily operate older Soviet-Russian weapons or look to indigenous alternatives and upgrades. Of the 2,400 artillery pieces in India’s possession, most are Soviet-origin towed 122 mm D-30 howitzers or Israeli-upgraded versions of the Soviet-origin towed 130 mm M-46 howitzers. Similarly, India’s Russian-origin T-72 and T-90 tanks, which make up most of its fleet of 3,700–4,200 tanks, are from the late Cold War era and are being upgraded for future service. In terms of infantry fighting vehicles, approximately 2,500 are license-produced Soviet-origin and locally produced BMP-2s, which are being indigenously upgraded. India’s air force, too, primarily operates a special variant of the 1990s Russian Su-30 aircraft and continues to rely on the 1980s Soviet MiG-29. The May 2025 Indian-Pakistani conflict has underscored the scale and depth of India’s dependence on these systems, with most of the weapons used by New Delhi, including fighter jets, missiles, and air defense systems, being of Soviet-Russian origin. Finally, India’s defense exports also rely on Russian technology and components, such as the co-developed BrahMos cruise missile now being operated by the Philippines and potentially by Indonesia and Vietnam. India has also agreed to collaborate with Russia to upgrade and re-export its T-72 tanks to countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

However, beginning in the 2000s — and becoming more pronounced since 2014 — India has made a notable pro-Western shift in its higher-end defense procurements, in part due to New Delhi’s concerns over the performance of Soviet-Russian systems that have only deepened with these weapons’ failures on the Ukrainian battlefield since 2022.

Why Does India Need Russian Crude Oil?

As with weapons purchases, Russia’s energy relations with India began during the Soviet era. Between the early to mid-1980s, around 70 percent of India’s commercial imports from the Soviet Union were comprised of crude oil and petroleum products. The Soviet collapse triggered a parallel decline in Russo-Indian oil trade, with Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, becoming India’s major oil suppliers. Prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, New Delhi imported only around 2 percent of its oil from Moscow. Such low import volumes were in part explained by higher freight costs than those of Middle Eastern producers.

The situation changed drastically once Russia, stricken by sanctions and the $60 oil price cap, began offering discounted crude to willing buyers. In the first nine months of 2023, India paid an average of $525.60 per ton for delivered Russian oil, including shipping and insurance costs, compared to $564.46 per ton for Iraqi oil of similar quality. By the end of that year, India had overtaken Europe as the largest purchaser of seaborne Russian crude, while Russia had displaced Iraq as India’s top oil supplier. This opportunistic pivot to Russian crude has saved New Delhi at least $17 billion since 2022 and, until recently, did not draw U.S. condemnation. As the previous U.S. administration viewed the price cap as a way to curb Russia’s energy revenues without triggering major spikes in global energy prices, it likely acquiesced to India’s increased purchases of Russian crude.

This dramatic shift to Russian crude, however, has hardly reflected on Indian consumer prices. Instead, the main beneficiaries have been Indian refineries, including the privately owned Reliance Industries Limited and Nayara Energy. Russian energy giant Rosneft became the latter’s majority stakeholder in 2017. Our research has shown that, between March 2022 and June 2025, over half of discounted Russian crude exports to India went to these two companies. Other sources have reported similar trends. For instance, it has been estimated that Reliance’s gigantic Jamnagar refinery increased its crude imports from Russia from 3 percent in 2021 to an average of 50 percent in the first half of 2025. From February 2023 to July 2025, it refined and exported $85.9 billion worth of resulting oil products, including those derived from Russian crude, globally. Roughly 42 percent of those exports went to countries sanctioning Russia. Similar trends have been observed with Nayara’s Vadinar refinery: 66 percent of Vadinar’s crude imports so far this year have come from Russia.

Before the adoption of the European Union’s 18th sanctions package, which will ban third-country imports of refined petroleum products made from Russian crude starting January 2026, the continent was considered a highly lucrative export market for Indian refineries, particularly Reliance. S&P Global valued those exports at $20.5 billion in 2024 — an almost 250 percent increase from $5.9 billion in 2019. Some analysts warn that, given the resilience and adaptability of sanctions-evading supply chains, the grace period until January 2026 could allow the creation of new networks through countries capable of masking cargo origins.

How Can the United States Separate India from Russia?

India’s current dependence on Russian arms is a legacy of decades of purchases requiring further maintenance and upgrades rather than new orders. In reality, New Delhi does not want to be dependent on outside powers for arms, yet its own defense industrial base cannot support this ambition in terms of both technology and production at scale. Thus, a critical step to facilitating India’s divorce from Russian arms supplies is to resolve its long-standing problem of requiring weapons in quantity, affordably, and fast. Given the current high demands from the U.S. forces, allies, and partners due to the Russo-Ukrainian war and China’s growing threat to Taiwan, we propose two solutions. First, the United States should facilitate co-production of arms and related products via agreements like the U.S.-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology. Washington should also streamline the International Traffic in Arms Regulations process and institutionalize exceptions like India’s election to Tier 1 of Strategic Trade Authorization in 2018. Second, the United States should cooperate with NATO members due to established procedures about secrecy, intellectual property rights, and technology transfers to help India reduce its overdependence on any single supplier. Such cooperation could cover providing platforms that can be rapidly shipped in quantity, like standardized designs of the Rafale or the Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets; components for India’s indigenous platforms, as stipulated by the Defense Acquisition Council in June 2025 — for instance, naval propulsion systems for India’s surface ships akin to Everllence’s recent contract; and technology transfers, including co-developing indigenous alternatives to Russia’s T-14 Armata tank currently being offered for co-production.

In the energy domain, even before the 50 percent U.S. tariffs, India was likely to gradually reduce its energy ties with Russia, in part due to a massive trade imbalance that has made bilateral trade one-sided, as well as due to shrinking discounts on Russian crude, which over time would have pushed New Delhi to diversify procurement in search of better pricing. But as the Trump administration appears eager to deliver tangible results sooner rather than later, the imposed 50 percent tariffs could trigger visible shifts in India’s crude acquisition patterns starting this October. Yet, for now, India’s crude import volumes from Russia show little change. Though, as some argue, if India were to halt imports of Russian crude, it could trigger a temporary spike in global oil prices and further strain U.S.-Indian relations.

While tensions persist, with Washington now pressing Brussels to impose new tariffs on Beijing and New Delhi over their purchases of Russian oil — a step the European Union currently seems unwilling to take — opportunities also remain. This month’s developments — including President Donald Trump’s declaration and Modi’s reciprocation of the positive nature of their own and the Indian-U.S. relationship, the tariff exemption on 31.3 percent or $28.4 billion of India’s exports to the United States (particularly minerals and pharmaceuticals), and the continuation of defense equipment-related negotiations — may signal an easing of tensions between Washington and New Delhi. It behooves us to mention here that Indian media outlets’ portrayals of the Trump administration’s tariff-related decisions have also varied, likely shaped by their affiliations with Indian oil refineries. For instance, while the Reliance-owned Network-18 has called the current U.S.-Indian relations “frosty” and the tariffs “punishment,” other outlets with no direct ties to Indian oil companies have adopted a more fact-driven and less editorialized tone.

Should Washington revise its stance on the Indian tariffs due to changed circumstances — as allowed under Trump’s Executive Order — it could take other measures to target Russia’s oil revenues and accelerate India’s pivot away from Russian crude (the latter being a “top priority” for the Trump administration, according to Trump’s pick as the next U.S. Ambassador to India, Sergio Gor). One such option could be to require importers of Russian crude, like India, to remit a portion of the discount they get on Russian barrels as a surcharge to the U.S. government. Should a similar measure be considered, we propose that the collected funds be invested in joint U.S.-Indian projects aimed at facilitating a faster military and energy shift for India away from Russia and toward the United States.

BECOME A MEMBER

Vasabjit Banerjee is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Tina Dolbaia is an associate fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Image: Midjourney

warontherocks.com · September 23, 2025

27. The Only Security Guarantee Ukraine Can Trust

​Excerpts:

After more than 11 years of war, the lesson from Ukraine is clear: the security guarantees that matter are the ones that practically shape the battlefield. If the goal is to make Russian aggression futile, then the United States and Europe must channel resources into capabilities that deny, disrupt, and paralyze the Russian military. Nothing less will succeed.

Giving Ukraine what it needs does not only help Kyiv. If Putin’s military is not stopped somewhere in Ukraine, it may march on a NATO member. Putin has made no secret of his desire to reverse the collapse of the Soviet Union and establish Russian dominance over Europe’s east. Over the last several weeks, he has floated drones and fighter jets over NATO’s boundary in a clear test of the alliance’s integrity. At a minimum, more of these provocations are likely to happen unless NATO helps Ukraine neutralize Russia’s military.

The EU seems aware of this. In European Defence – Readiness 2030, a report published in early 2025, the European Commission explicitly framed Ukraine’s survival as central to Europe’s own security. It called for a “steel porcupine” strategy—or fortifying Ukraine so that future Russian offensives fail by design—and investing in Ukraine’s defense industry as part of creating a shared European capacity. But the EU and NATO must do more to help Ukraine firmly prevail over Russia’s technologies and deny Moscow any further battlefield victories. Its members need to plow more resources and in-kind technology contributions into Ukraine’s defense industry. They must help Kyiv quickly develop and massively scale up new systems. Then, and only then, will Europe be able to breathe.

The Only Security Guarantee Ukraine Can Trust

Foreign Affairs · More by Andriy Zagorodnyuk · September 23, 2025

More Drones and Missiles Are All that Can Stop Russia

Andriy Zagorodnyuk

September 23, 2025

Ukrainian soldiers near Kharkiv, Ukraine, September 2025 Reuters

ANDRIY ZAGORODNYUK is Chair of the Centre for Defence Strategies and a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council and Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. From 2019 to 2020, he served as Ukraine’s Defense Minister.

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Ever since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House, officials across Europe have scrambled to craft a peace deal that could work for Ukraine. They know by now that, at the moment, Russian President Vladimir Putin is not interested in stopping his offensives, and they fear that shifting American priorities may leave Ukraine without a critical source of support. As a result, they are racing to find a way to provide Kyiv with security guarantees that could deter Russia and allow for an armistice.

In conversations about security guarantees, officials have tended to focus on a handful of measures: placing a small number of European troops in Ukraine to shore up the country’s defense (so-called reassurance forces), levying additional sanctions against Russia, and providing Ukraine with more weapons, including conventional ones. They have also mused about committing themselves, on paper, to Ukraine’s defense. Two of these actions- more weapons and sanctions- could take place before any ceasefire. The rest would go into effect only after the fighting ends.

These proposals have certain virtues. But by themselves, they are not enough to guarantee Ukraine’s security. Since the start of Russia’s invasion in 2022, Putin has been transparent about his objective—the destruction of Ukraine as an independent nation—and has subjected many people to almost unimaginable suffering in order to achieve it. He will not be deterred by words, a smattering of NATO troops, or by more agony (including if it affects Russians). In fact, he will not stop the war unless Russian troops literally cannot advance any further.

Right now, some U.S. and European analysts are pessimistic that Ukraine can completely halt Russia’s aggression, and understandably so. NATO countries, after all, have been arming Kyiv for years, and Moscow keeps making incremental gains. But Ukraine need not destroy every element of the Russian military to achieve strategic neutralization—stripping away the enemy of its ability to achieve its objectives. And the conflict has recently changed in ways that have made it easier to freeze. Today, the war is being fought less with traditional military equipment and more with newer, cheaper technologies that Ukraine helped pioneer. In fact, Ukraine has already done a great deal of what’s needed to deter Russia for good. But Europe must stop focusing on which traditional capabilities it should provide to Ukraine or on establishing written-out security guarantees. Instead, the continent should get serious about investing more in the Ukraine’s war effort by flooding the country with more advanced technologies. It needs to invest heavily in the country’s sophisticated defense industry. It must cooperate more directly with Kyiv on matters of military manufacturing and on air defenses. Such measures will indeed be daunting, but not any more than NATO’s original effort to help Ukraine. And ultimately, Europe has little choice. They are the only way to bring peace.

WORDS FAIL

Throughout the past century, powerful states have sought to provide security guarantees to weaker partners. Those guarantees, however, have only conferred a real benefit when they created tangible shields. During the Cold War, NATO effectively deterred the Soviet Union because the United States situated substantial forces and firepower on the continent, including some nuclear weapons. In Asia, the mutual defense treaty between South Korea and the United States works to deter a North Korean invasion because tens of thousands of American troops remain on the peninsula, where they jointly plan and train with their South Korean partners. In the 1930s, by contrast, the British and the French backed their pledge to defend Poland with nothing but rhetoric; as a result, Nazi Germany felt free to invade the country. Likewise, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which a consortium of states (including Russia) promised to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty if it gave up its nuclear weapons, did nothing to stop Russia from invading its neighbor multiple times because it offered no military resources to Kyiv.

After Russia launched its first invasion of Ukraine, sending troops into Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk in 2014, the United States and Europe did begin supplying Kyiv with defensive and, eventually, offensive assistance. But it was only in late 2021, after it became clear that Russia aimed to invade the entire country, that NATO states got somewhat serious about arming Ukraine. That support, however, proved effective: rather than quickly conquering Ukraine, as much of the world expected, Russia quickly became bogged down.

In fact, in some domains, Ukraine has managed to functionally defeat its enemy. Consider the battle over the Black Sea. From the outset of its full-scale invasion, Russia sought to strangle Ukraine’s economy by cutting off its maritime access. Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet blockaded Ukrainian ports, occupied Snake Island, and threatened Odessa, the country’s main coastal city. Allied attempts to negotiate a partial end to this blockade failed. But by the fall of 2023, the Ukrainian military succeeded in breaking it with naval drones, precision missiles, and air-launched bombs—a substantial portion of which came from the United States. (Ukrainian-made weapons, of course, were also essential to this victory.) Although these strikes only destroyed part of Russia’s fleet, Kyiv made it impossible for Putin’s ships to sail near Ukraine’s main ports, and Moscow was left with no choice but to move most of its fleet to the east.

Ukraine has had success in the air, as well. Russia began its 2022 war confident it could establish air dominance within days, allowing it to quickly march on Kyiv. Instead, Ukraine’s innovative defenses have made it impossible for Russia to achieve superiority. In an air denial operation undertaken in the first days of the invasion, now known as Ghost of Kyiv, Ukraine used its limited air capabilities to intercept many Russian fighter jets and effectively push these planes out of its airspace. During its more complex 2025 “Spiderweb” operations, Ukraine has used innovative uncrewed systems to destroy a substantial portion of Russia’s strategic aviation fleet, or the aircraft Russia uses to launch numerous cruise missiles at all areas of Ukraine. Kyiv has not been able to make its skies safe enough for commercial air-traffic transit, and it experiences constant missile and long-range drone attacks. But it has been able to force Russian manned aircraft to operate tens of kilometers from the frontlines, launching glide bombs rather than conducting close air support operations to help ground forces.

Fully liberating Ukraine would take more than just such measures, at least for now, and it would require considerable additional capabilities. But strategic neutralization is attainable without waging a multidecade war of attrition. To obviate Russia’s threat, Ukraine does not need to kill off every Russian soldier. Instead, it can paralyze the military by targeting essential functions such as logistics, coordination, mobility, and firepower. In this way, it can follow a template pioneered by Israel, which neutralized Egypt’s far larger air force in 1967 not by destroying every aircraft but by taking out many of them and eliminating its runways and command systems. As a result, Israel preserved its existence without annihilating vast opposition forces.

BIGGER AND BETTER

Ukraine is closer to paralyzing Russia than most people think. Russia’s jets do still strike Ukrainian targets, albeit from a great distance, and Russian ground forces continue to seize small chunks of territory. But with drones, remote mines, precision artillery, and constant surveillance, Ukraine has transformed large stretches of the front into persistent kill zones: areas where forces find it nearly impossible to maneuver without being detected and then immediately hit. Only by throwing thousands upon thousands of troops at Ukrainian targets can Russia advance through a few of these regions. If Ukraine can widen these kill zones—by surveilling more territory and striking behind Russia’s current forward lines—and deny Russia the ability to mass men and materiel in its rear, Russian formations will be unable to generate any momentum. Future offensives by Russia would then become strategically futile, and thus not worth attempting.

To succeed, however, Ukraine will need more drones and high-tech weapons. And helping Kyiv get these systems will necessitate that NATO change its presumptions and priorities. When the war broke out, it made sense for the United States and Europe to pump Ukraine full of traditional weapons systems. But as the operational environment has evolved, many legacy systems have become largely obsolete. For instance, some sophisticated assault weapons, such as tanks, are now disabled almost as soon as they enter the kill zone by simpler, cheaper uncrewed aerial vehicles. They therefore do little to help either party.

Ukraine’s allies must refocus their attention on helping Ukraine innovate and integrate new technologies at the scale needed to stop Russia. These allies have what they need. Europe alone has financial resources, scientific capabilities, and an industrial base that Russia cannot match. If the continent uses these capacities alongside Ukraine, it could help the Ukrainian military develop and produce many advanced and affordable precise, long-range systems- including missiles and uncrewed aerial vehicles- as well as communications gear, positioning and targeting equipment, air defenses, and electronic warfare systems.

The security guarantees that matter are the ones that practically shape the battlefield.

The continent has already taken meaningful steps in this direction. The European Union has launched several programs designed to channel money into Ukrainian defense-industrial factories. Kyiv has also forged bilateral deals with a variety of countries to scale up its drone and ammunition production. But these partnerships must be expanded dramatically. Europe must, of course, spend more on Ukraine and increase its own production of material. But it must also focus on speeding up design, testing, and scaling.

There are other ways Europe can assist Kyiv. Perhaps the most important is a European Sky Shield for Ukraine: an initiative proposed by a group of international and Ukrainian military experts. In it, a collection of European states would establish a no-fly zone, first over western Ukrainian territory and later over central Ukraine. Participating states would mobilize roughly 120 combat aircraft, which would fly from European bases and shoot down missiles and drones over the covered territory. In addition to safeguarding Ukraine’s infrastructure and economy—by, for example, shielding Ukrainian nuclear plants and export corridors—it would free Ukraine’s own air force to concentrate on the eastern front. The model, which is based on the air policing missions Europe has conducted over the Baltics for 20 years, carries some escalation risks. But Russia is unlikely to interfere, since direct, air-to-air combat would not work to its advantage.

NATO states will also have to continue supplying Kyiv with some traditional weapons. Ukraine will need more F-16 fighter jets to defend its skies. It still requires long-range missiles, like the U.S. Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) and British and French Storm Shadow and SCALP missiles, to hit the many Russian logistics hubs, command centers, stockpiles, and troop formations located beyond the battlefield. Ukraine’s allies should also earmark certain stockpiles of ammunition, drones, and spare parts housed in eastern Europe for Ukraine, so that they are never again vulnerable to political delays in Washington or European capitals. And the United States must continue providing Kyiv with military intelligence, which has been indispensable to tracking Russian troop movements and missile strikes. Such high-end enablers will remain cornerstones of any meaningful security guarantees.

But tanks or other legacy equipment would be of little use on its own. Giving Ukraine another paper commitment to its security, even one modeled off of NATO’s Article 5, as some European states have discussed, would do nothing. And without tangible support that’s tailored to today’s Ukrainian battlefield, even European reassurance forces would be of dubious value. Unless NATO countries decide to station large numbers of combat-ready troops or send over instructors, these deployments would have the main effect of being expensive and politically risky within their home countries. The troops are unlikely to stop, or be spared from, Russia’s military.

HOLD THE LINE

After more than 11 years of war, the lesson from Ukraine is clear: the security guarantees that matter are the ones that practically shape the battlefield. If the goal is to make Russian aggression futile, then the United States and Europe must channel resources into capabilities that deny, disrupt, and paralyze the Russian military. Nothing less will succeed.

Giving Ukraine what it needs does not only help Kyiv. If Putin’s military is not stopped somewhere in Ukraine, it may march on a NATO member. Putin has made no secret of his desire to reverse the collapse of the Soviet Union and establish Russian dominance over Europe’s east. Over the last several weeks, he has floated drones and fighter jets over NATO’s boundary in a clear test of the alliance’s integrity. At a minimum, more of these provocations are likely to happen unless NATO helps Ukraine neutralize Russia’s military.

The EU seems aware of this. In European Defence – Readiness 2030, a report published in early 2025, the European Commission explicitly framed Ukraine’s survival as central to Europe’s own security. It called for a “steel porcupine” strategy—or fortifying Ukraine so that future Russian offensives fail by design—and investing in Ukraine’s defense industry as part of creating a shared European capacity. But the EU and NATO must do more to help Ukraine firmly prevail over Russia’s technologies and deny Moscow any further battlefield victories. Its members need to plow more resources and in-kind technology contributions into Ukraine’s defense industry. They must help Kyiv quickly develop and massively scale up new systems. Then, and only then, will Europe be able to breathe.

Foreign Affairs · More by Andriy Zagorodnyuk · September 23, 2025

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