​Quotes of the Day:

“It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.”

– Aldous Huxley

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

– Albert Camus

"History is full of people who, out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power have destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value, which truly belongs to us all. We must not let that happen again."

– Carl Sagan

1. De Oppresso Liber – Applying Green Beret Identify and Ethos to Build U.S. Military Resiliency

2. Pete Hegseth wants to rename the Defense Department. Why it matters.

3. ‘Tale of 2 Petes’: Fired adviser describes Pentagon chief consumed by image

4. ‘I Run the Country and the World’ (President Trump interview in the Atlantic)

5. Five key quotes from Trump's interview with The Atlantic

6. Political Warfare against Intervention Forces

7. FBI, national security agencies using polygraphs for ‘leak’ hunts

8. How data wrecked American warfare – Robert McNamara remade the military

9. The Kellogg Framework Is A Disaster For Trump – OpEd

10. Niall Ferguson: Donald Trump Is Crushing His To-Do List

11. Censorship is far more dangerous than free speech

12. Get Ready for the Aleutian Island Crisis

13. Actions create consequences – representation and consequences by Cynthia Watson

14. Heading for Divorce? The Ideological War Threatening NATO

15. NATO Needs to Be Terminated

16. Playing the Long Game: 6 Habits That Set Strategic Leaders Apart

17. The Truth About The Chinese AI Video Mocking Efforts To Revitalize American Manufacturing

18. China Pushed a Hard Sell on Autonomous Driving. After a Deadly Crash, It’s Pulling Back.

19. Annexing Greenland: Six Questions

20. Beyond Collection: Building Publicly Available Information Systems for Strategic Effect

21. How China Armed Itself for the Trade War

22. An Attack on America’s Universities Is an Attack on American Power

23. Modernization as Readiness in the U.S. Marine Corps

24. Haiti Is a Political and Criminal Crisis that Should Not be Ignored

25. Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: First 100 Days

26. Amid Syria troop reduction, will Trump repeat Middle East withdrawal mistakes?

1. De Oppresso Liber – Applying Green Beret Identify and Ethos to Build U.S. Military Resiliency

​ Please download the PDF at this link for proper formatting and to view the graphics. The text only is below.

https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=gnsi_decision_briefs

4-25-2025

GNSI Decision Brief: De Oppresso Liber – Applying Green Beret Identify and Ethos to Build U.S. Military Resiliency

Robert S. Burrell 

Joseph E. Long

Charles Cleveland

Recommended Citation

Burrell, Robert S.; Long, Joseph E.; and Cleveland, Charles, "GNSI Decision Brief: De Oppresso Liber – Applying Green Beret Identify and Ethos to Build U.S. Military Resiliency" (2025). GNSI Decision Briefs. 25.

https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/gnsi_decision_briefs/25

“It will take a while, but an elite mindset remains critical, starts at the top, and must permeate the entire organization.” – Charles Cleveland (LTG ret)

​Military ethos is the “spirit of the unit, which is the sense of unity that leads warriors on the battlefield to believe that the lives of those around them are more important than their own.”¹ In 2025 Secretary of

Defense Pete Hegseth promised a return to a “warrior ethos,” which he said the Department of Defense (DOD) has lost because of the recent politicized climate, including diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. This brief will utilize the Army’s Special Forces as a viable model for achieving collective military spirit in one of the world’s most diverse nations.

Organizational identity and ethos are important factors in any group,​ but particularly in military elements. For most of U.S. history, the​ Army resorted to recruiting entire units from a singular demographic or geographic location which formed the basis for shared cultural characteristics and value systems.

The American Civil War (1861-1865) provides excellent examples of this practice. The Army recruited most battalions specifically from within their states. In other instances, ethnicity was emphasized instead of geographic homogeneity. Ironically, some of the most​ diverse units included some made up of African Americans, which the Army assembled solely based on the color of skin while disregarding aspects of geographic origin and culture.

Figure 1: 69^th New York Infantry (Irish Brigade), circa 1864 (source/Library of Congress)

An example of addressing identity and ethos is seen in the Union’s Irish Brigade, a unit composed of Irish Americans exclusively from battalions assembled geographically in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. Even the brigade’s motto, “Faugh a Ballagh” (clear the way) was derived from Gaelic. This brigade achieved remarkable cohesion in language, culture, ethnicity, and religion, which undoubtedly contributed to its reputation as one of the best- performing units of the war.

In World War I (1914-1918), the United States started experimenting with merging enlistees from multiple states into a singular unit – exemplified by the 82^nd Infantry Division, which henceforth garnered the nickname – the All-American (AA). Following this pattern, the​ U.S. military gradually embraced compiling its units without regard to origin or ethnicity. This practice has become so entrenched in modern American military culture, that the U.S. failed to recognize its evident drawbacks in different cultural environments. For instance, during its occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S. assembled Afghan units at a national level without regard to crucially important regional loyalties, languages, and cultures. Instead of generating tight-knit formations, the Afghan Army units thereby constituted lacked cohesion and combat effectiveness.

Fractionalization

The U.S. population is extremely diverse in terms of language, religion, and ethnicity. Consequently, American soldiers face significant challenges in terms of unit cohesion, more so than in most nations.

Compared to all other countries, the U.S. has one of the highest levels of religious fractionalization – 211th out of 212 nations, or 99.5% in comparison with the world. In linguistic fractionalization, it is 137th of 200 (above average at 68.5%). In ethnic fractionalization, it is 100th of 189, or 52.9%. Overall, the U.S. population is 73.6% fractionalized in comparison with others. The following illustration comprises a graphic comparison of U.S. diversity with those of Russia​ and China in hard data. The U.S. remains twice as fractionalized as these two competitors.² This fact makes the DoD requirements for identity and ethos critical.

Figure 2: Population Fractionalization Comparison of Russia, China, and the United States (source/authors)

The Importance of Identity

As a consequence of its diversity, and its subsequent choice to raise nationalized units versus provincial or ethnic ones, the U.S. military must adopt innovative approaches in creating organizational unity.

Each U.S. service (as well as subordinate units) has approached this challenge in unique ways. In the Marine Corps, identity is embodied by the Marine rifleman (adopted by everyone). In the larger Army organization, each service corps has developed unique identities, a bit varied for infantry, armor, medical, and transportation.

Of all these, the special operations forces (SOF) corps of the U.S. Army, also known as The Green Berets, boasts a warrior ethos. The Green Beret’s identity is not anchored by its chosen headgear but on a cohesive culture of leading cross-cultural paramilitary partner forces (insurgents, counterinsurgents, partisans, guerrillas) in unconventional warfare. Not only does the Green Beret epitomize a warrior ethos akin to most special operations forces, but it also imparts in its members a unique introspective human-centric understanding of conflict. Although the nature of warfare is constantly evolving, the culture and identity embodied by Green Berets as they were founded in 1952, particularly their expertise in leading partner forces, create a unifying identity for all its members. The organizational identity and ethos of the Green Berets constitutes a great model that other​ U.S. military units could adopt to varying degrees and declinations to attain cohesion and effectiveness.

Creating a Unique and Powerful Ethos

While there are many special operations forces, the unique warrior identity of Green Berets was born out of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II (1939-1945), where small groups of well-trained Allied forces parachuted into enemy-controlled territory to provide support and leadership for local resistance efforts. They​ embodied a popular OSS aphorism of fielding “a Ph.D. who can win a bar fight.”

As a unique facet of SOF, Green Berets hone their partner force leadership skills in their lengthy and grueling selection and training programs. Not only are Green Berets selected according to the same physical toughness standards as other SOF units, but they are also selected for their abilities to demonstrate critical thinking in complex situations and to lead their partners in conditions where their survivability is completely reliant on their ability to lead without formal authority. Thus, Green Beret training is rife with learning objectives related to understanding culture and overcoming language barriers while also demonstrating proficiency in using and teaching others to use advanced weapons and tactics necessary for guerrilla operations.

Another unique facet of Green Beret identity is that while all its seven operational groups are organized similarly, they each have a regional focus. This allows members with similar backgrounds, cultures, and languages to complement one another. Overall, training for unconventional warfare and subsequently deploying to serve with partners over multiple iterations builds a pervasive identity, which is shared by each Green Beret – no matter their origin or ethnicity. This ethos is embodied by their motto De Oppresso Liber – to free the oppressed.

Figure 3. 3rd Special Forces Group Trains with Beninese Soldiers, 2022 (source/DVIDS)

Lessons

Green Berets unveil a universal truth. While one might think that taking lessons from SOF and applying them to conventional forces is a stretch, the proposition is worthy of consideration. The days of the World War II “Willie and Joe” Army and the “Kilroy” Navy with everyday Americans in foxholes are gone.³ Given the very small percentage of the population eligible and willing for active service to fulfill the complex 21st Century national security requirements, these warriors must be treated and organized as elite units – just like Green Berets. In simple terms, unlike decades prior, every military organization today has a special mission.

Elite organizations require clear incentives. The seven SOF truths engraved on the walls of any Special Forces compound represent a given and accepted set of principles that all its members accept. Around that same compound, the names placed under each tree represent a fallen member from that unit. Members of the Green

Berets know they are distinctive, and it is evident clearly on their daily drive to work. A similar ethos should exude from all DoD units.

Embrace a distinct ésprit de corps. Like Green Berets, each branch in the DoD should ensure standards and policies which support their identity, and their distinctive ethos required to ensure mission accomplishment. Implementing such an ethos may take time, but an elite mindset starts at the top and must permeate the entire organization.

Trust the training. Following their qualification as Green Berets, the Command empowers and gives more responsibility to junior officers and senior noncommissioned officers. In doing so, the Green Berets double down on mission command and operating by intent.⁴ The trust and confidence placed by the Command in Green Berets is why they perform so well and what each team relishes. That same type of trust makes aircraft take-off and landing operations work on U.S. Navy carriers or makes U.S. Marines such effective fighters on the battlefield.

Task-organize with identity in mind. Special Forces consist entirely of one 18 series occupation designator. This includes experts in weapons, engineering, medical, communications, and intelligence. They should all train together throughout their career progression, to create a cohesive identity. Each military service should consider how their units deploy, including critical support capabilities, then reengineer their training pipelines and unit organization to account for identity and ethos.

Decision Points

D In addition to regular DoD readiness reports, should units be required to articulate their unique identity and common ethos?

D In command climate surveys, should service members be asked to verify if a common identity and ethos are evident?

D Should service members be rated in annual fitness reports on specific actions taken to reinforce unit identity and exemplify unit ethos?

Disclaimer:

This document was prepared by the Global and National Security Institute (GNSI) at the University of South Florida (USF). GNSI Decision Briefs aim to inform the reader on a particular policy issue to enhance decision- making while proposing the questions policymakers need to address.

Dr. Burrell and Dr. Long serve as 2025 Irregular Warfare Initiative Fellows. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors. The authors’ opinions do not reflect any other official or unofficial organization, or the USF administration or its components.

Endnotes

1             The Noncommissioned Officer and Petty Officer: Backbone of the Armed Services. NDU Press, (2024), 30.

2              Alesina, et al. “Fractionalization.” Journal of Economic Growth, (2003).

3             “The Fighting Cartoonist – How Bill Mauldin’s ‘Willie & Joe’ Comics Captured the plight of GIs in WWII.” Military History, (2023). Also see, Richard W. O’Donnel. “Kilroy Was Here.” Naval Institute Press, (1989).

4              James D. Sharpe Jr. and Thomas E. Creviston. “Understanding Mission Command.” U.S. Army, (2015).

5              The Noncommissioned Officer and Petty Officer: Backbone of the Armed Services. NDU Press, (2024), 30.

2. Pete Hegseth wants to rename the Defense Department. Why it matters.

​A rather detailed treatment of this idea (for a newspaper article). I had not heard this formally proposed yet.

One correction from one of the photo captions. I believe General Powell was the first African American CJCS not General Brown.

Excerpts:

Retired Army Lt. Col. Dru Brenner-Beck, a former intelligence officer who taught at the South Texas College of Law in Houston, said the U.N. Charter and the creation of the Defense Department “reflect the idea of a new world order where war was not used as an instrument of policy.

"The experience since that time belies that,” she said, “but the concept and its legal enunciation in the U.N. Charter remain relevant."

Retired Air Force Gen. Gregory "Speedy" Martin, a former commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe and the Air Force Materiel Command, said Defense Department is the more appropriate label for the organization because it does many things beyond waging war — and exists specifically to prevent it.

Martin said the current name “is the cleanest way to describe” the mission of the U.S. military, which he defined as “being prepared to defend the neighborhood against all threats.

"Conflict doesn't always mean war,” he added. “You don't always have to have guns firing to have two nations in conflict.

A retired senior defense official, speaking on condition he not be named, said Hegseth’s preoccupation with the agency's name suggests misplaced priorities.

"There are 3 W’s that define every secretary of defense," the retired official said. "The best secretaries in our history have always understood that their job was the world, then Washington and then warfighting. And the worst secretaries have been the ones that got that in reverse."

Pete Hegseth wants to rename the Defense Department. Why it matters.

After World Wars I and II, war got a bad name. U.S. leaders recast military might as a deterrent, a way to prevent war. Hegseth thinks that went too far. He wants to re-emphasize 'lethality.'

expressnews.com · by Sig Christenson · April 28, 2025

The last time there was a War Department, Hollywood still made most of its movies in black and white, and Americans were falling in love with a new entertainment device called the TV set. They cost an average of $400 each.

The year was 1949.

In at least one respect, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants to turn the calendar back to that time. The nation’s military forces were organized under the War Department, and Hegseth believes that term, with its bold martial overtones, better suits his desire to remake the armed services to emphasize fighting and killing.

The Trump administration has yet to formally propose renaming the Defense Department. But students of the military say Hegseth’s talk about doing so should not be taken lightly. They say it could signal a desire to free combat forces from legal restraints meant to protect civilians — rules of war Hegseth has derided as fussy, burdensome and dangerous to American soldiers.

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Rechristening the Defense Department the War Department would put an exclamation point on the Trump administration’s combative approach to foreign affairs, evident in its willingness to explicitly threaten the use of force, even against allies.

Trump has spoken repeatedly of making Canada the 51st state, taking back the Panama Canal and annexing Greenland, by force if necessary. The autonomous territory is administered by Denmark, a fellow member state of NATO. "One way or the other, we're going to get it," Trump said of Greenland in his State of the Union address last month.

The president has been even more truculent in regard to Iran. He threatened to subject the Middle Eastern nation to bombing “the likes of which they have never seen before” if Iran refused to engage in direct negotiations with the U.S. over limits on its nuclear development.

The idea of substituting “War Department” for “Defense Department” ties in with Hegseth’s own agenda as well. The defense secretary maintains the armed forces lost their edge under President Joe Biden, privileged diversity above competence and strayed from what he argues should by their overriding focus: “lethality.”

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'Warriors, not defenders'

Hegseth esteems “warrior culture” and refers to sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marine as “warfighters.” The rhetoric goes hand-in-hand with his oft-expressed disdain for the rules of war and a simmering resentment of military lawyers, who he says have handcuffed troops in the field.

“Sure, our military defends us. And in a perfect world it exists to deter threats and preserve peace,” Hegseth wrote in his best-selling 2024 memoir, “The War on Warriors — Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free.”

"But ultimately its job is to conduct war. We either win or lose wars. And we have warriors, not ‘defenders,'" he wrote. "Bringing back the War Department may remind a few people in Washington, D.C., what the military is supposed to do, and do well."

Regarding the laws of war, he wrote: “Our boys should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms 80 years ago. America should fight by its own rules. And we should fight to win or not go at all.”

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In a March 21 post on X, Hegseth invited users to propose a “better name” for the Defense Department. More than 203,000 users cast votes. “Department of War” won, 54.3% to 45.7%.

Among those endorsing the idea was tech billionaire Elon Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, leader of the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency and owner of X.

“War is more accurate,” Musk wrote in a reply to Hegseth’s post.

Left, Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, center, inspects 100th Infantry Battalion troops. He later became the first U.S. defense secretary. Right, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reviews an honor guard during a visit to Tokyo on March 30, 2025.

Top, Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, center, inspects 100th Infantry Battalion troops. He later became the first U.S. defense secretary. Bottom, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reviews an honor guard during a visit to Tokyo on March 30, 2025.

'Conflict doesn't always mean war'

Congress created the War Department on Aug. 7, 1789, as a Cabinet agency headed by a secretary of war who oversaw the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. It remained the War Department until after World War II. Then an amendment to the National Security Act of 1947 put the service branches under what is now the Department of Defense.

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The name change formally took effect on Aug. 10, 1949. James V. Forrestal, a former naval officer and Wall Street financier, was the first defense secretary.

The renaming reflected a new, rule-based international order and a more nuanced view of the military’s role. After two devastating global conflicts in the first half of the 20th century, wars of aggression were widely viewed as uncivilized, even illegal.

The legitimate uses of military force were to keep the peace and repel invasion. As a nuclear standoff developed between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the role of armies, air forces and navies was to deter the other side.

The two superpowers fought "proxy wars," supporting opposing sides in low-level regional conflicts while avoiding direct confrontation. The rivalry was called the Cold War to distinguish it from overt “hot” conflict. In that contest of wills, the U.S. objective was not to defeat the Soviet Union on the battlefield but rather to “contain” its expansionism through interlocking economic might, diplomatic influence and military strength.

The name “Defense Department” mirrored this new reality.

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"I think the primary purpose was to indicate a broader mission for the armed forces," said Geoffrey Corn, a former Army lawyer who is now the George R. Killam Jr. chair of criminal law and director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at the Texas Tech University School of Law.

Corn noted that the United Nations Charter, signed in San Francisco in June 1945, sanctioned the use of military force in just two circumstances: when authorized by the U.N. Security Council in response to aggression, and when a country or group of countries was compelled to act in self-defense.

"The pragmatic meaning of war may be the same today as it was 100 years ago,” Corn said, “but from an international law perspective, the use of military force is no longer characterized as ‘war’ because war is technically prohibited. Thus, it would have been inconsistent with the (U.N.) Charter to retain a War Department."

Retired Army Lt. Col. Dru Brenner-Beck, a former intelligence officer who taught at the South Texas College of Law in Houston, said the U.N. Charter and the creation of the Defense Department “reflect the idea of a new world order where war was not used as an instrument of policy.

"The experience since that time belies that,” she said, “but the concept and its legal enunciation in the U.N. Charter remain relevant."

Retired Air Force Gen. Gregory "Speedy" Martin, a former commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe and the Air Force Materiel Command, said Defense Department is the more appropriate label for the organization because it does many things beyond waging war — and exists specifically to prevent it.

Martin said the current name “is the cleanest way to describe” the mission of the U.S. military, which he defined as “being prepared to defend the neighborhood against all threats.

"Conflict doesn't always mean war,” he added. “You don't always have to have guns firing to have two nations in conflict.

A retired senior defense official, speaking on condition he not be named, said Hegseth’s preoccupation with the agency's name suggests misplaced priorities.

"There are 3 W’s that define every secretary of defense," the retired official said. "The best secretaries in our history have always understood that their job was the world, then Washington and then warfighting. And the worst secretaries have been the ones that got that in reverse."

Pvt. Brandon Ellis of the Army's 422d Civil Affairs Battalion heads for cover during a sandstorm in the southern Iraqi town of Kifil on March 26, 2003. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's views on war-fighting and the laws of war were powerfully influenced by serving as an infantry officer in Iraq.

BAHRAM MARK SOBHANI/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS NEWS

Iraqi soldiers surrender to U.S. troops in the desert after a battle at Najaf on March 23, 2003.

BAHRAM MARK SOBHANI/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS NEWS

U.S. soldiers load Staff Sgt. Micah Lewis onto a medical evacuation flight in Iraq’s Diyala province on Oct. 2, 2008. Lewis was injured by an improvised explosive device.

NICOLE FRUGE/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

From left, Sgt. Jason Grizzle, Pvt. Richard Krum, Pvt. John Lewis and Pfc. Michael Nash clean their weapons in northern Kuwait on March 19, 2003. They were preparing for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which began the next day.

BAHRAM MARK SOBHANI/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS NEWS

Iraqi prisoners of war are unloaded from a truck at Saddam International Airport in Baghdad on April 4, 2003.

BAHRAM MARK SOBHANI/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS NEWS

Two Iraqis in a pickup raise their hands to signal they are unarmed as a U.S. Abrams tank rolls through Al Yusufiyah south of Baghdad on April 3, 2003.

BAHRAM MARK SOBHANI/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS NEWS

U.S. soldiers march in formation at Saddam International Airport in Baghdad on April 6, 2003. They were headed to a memorial for Sgt. 1st Class Wilbert Davis, who was killed when his humvee overturned in a ditch.

BAHRAM MARK SOBHANI/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

Iraqi POWs sit in the back of a U.S. Army vehicle after they were captured near Saddam International Airport in Baghdad on April 4, 2003.

BAHRAM MARK SOBHANI/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS NEWS

In the town of Navit Al Ajil south of Baghdad, a captured Iraqi soldier waits to be taken to a POW camp on April 3, 2003.

BAHRAM MARK SOBHANI/SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS NEWS

A rocky beginning

Hegseth, 44, became defense secretary with much less experience running large organizations or commanding troops than his predecessors had.

After graduating from Princeton University in 2003, he served as a junior infantry officer in the Minnesota Army National Guard, including stints in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, before embarking on a career as a conservative commentator and Fox News contributor and weekend host.

His Pentagon tenure, which reached the 100-day mark last week, has been turbulent. Early on, he fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., a San Antonio native, along with the head of the Navy and other senior officers.

Brown was the first African American to lead the Joint Chiefs. Adm. Lisa Marie Franchetti, head of naval operations, was the first woman to hold that position. Hegseth offered no explanation for the firings, but he previously had cited Brown as an example of someone promoted for reasons of race, not merit.

Hegseth also canceled DEI initiatives and cultural awareness events across the armed forces, including the annual celebration of Black History Month, and he ordered commanders to purge from military websites material that celebrated diversity and the accomplishments of women and minorities.

He has come under fire for his handling of sensitive information. The Pentagon inspector general is investigating whether he improperly disclosed classified information by using the commercial messaging app Signal to discuss an imminent air strike against Houthi militants in Yemen.

Amid the tumult, Hegseth has kept a steady emphasis on war-fighting, “lethality,” and removing obstacles to battlefield domination.

Prime among those obstacles, in his view, is the Judge Advocate General Corps, the lawyers who advise military commanders on the laws of war and the legal boundaries surrounding deadly force.

During his first term, President Donald Trump watches as Vice President Mike Pence swears in Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., right, as Air Force chief of staff in the Oval Office on Aug. 4, 2020. Brown, a San Antonio native, was the first African American to hold the position.

Pool/Getty Images

Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., center, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, listens as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth answers reporters' questions about U.S. policy toward Israel on Feb. 5, 2025. Less than three weeks later, Hegseth fired Brown, the first African American to lead the Joint Chiefs.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., then commander of Pacific Air Forces, arrives at Kunsan Air Base in Korea for a tour on Oct. 18, 2019.

Staff Sgt. Mackenzie Mendez/Courtesy U.S. Air Force

Cindy Cole Chal, right, receives a U.S. flag from Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., then Air Force chief of staff, during a burial ceremony for Chal’s father at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery on Sept. 7, 2021. Col. Dick Cole, the last of the famed Doolittle Raiders, died on April 9, 2019, at age 103.

Jerry Lara/San Antonio Express-News

Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., then head of Air Forces Central Command, talks with airmen assigned to a security forces squadron at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan on July 25, 2015.

Swafford/U.S. Air Force

Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., a San Antonio native, was chief of staff of the Air Force and later chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was the first African American to serve in either role.

Air Force/The Washington Post

JAG officers deploy to battle zones and work closely with commanders to review target lists and operational plans, sometimes in the heat of combat. They’re widely regarded as a vital safeguard against excesses on the battlefield.

In “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth contends American troops were hamstrung in Iraq and Afghanistan by JAG Corps lawyers, who he refers to repeatedly as “jagoffs.”

“We have watered down the last twenty years of armed conflict into morality plays over what ‘should have happened’ and how a ‘morally superior’ person should react when their friends become pink mist from an Iranian-built, Chinese-financed roadside bomb,” he wrote in a chapter titled “The Laws of War, for Winners.”

Hegseth heaped scorn on a Biden-era policy that said people in a war zone must be presumed to be civilians, which he said causes troops “to hesitate every time they fire."

A 'bull— rule'

In the book, he describes a briefing by a JAG corps officer on the Army’s rules of engagement in Iraq. It was 2005, and then-Lt. Hegseth was the leader of a platoon posted to Forward Operating Base Falcon in Baghdad's Rashid neighborhood, an area torn by bitter sectarian fighting.

The JAG officer posed a hypothetical, asking the soldiers if they could fire on an insurgent armed with a rocket-propelled grenade.

The GIs said yes.

"Wrong answer, men," Hegseth quotes the lawyer as saying. "You are not authorized to fire at that man until that RPG becomes a threat. It must be pointed at you with the intent to fire. That makes it a legal and proper engagement."

"We sat in silence, stunned,” the future defense secretary wrote.

Hegseth said he gathered the soldiers together afterward and told them, "Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat."

He called the JAG’s guidance a "bull— rule that's going to get people killed."

Martin, the retired Air Force general, said Hegseth's mistake was believing the JAG officer had the authority to dictate how soldiers should respond to a threat. His actual role was to make a recommendation, Martin said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, center, at a meeting of NATO Defense Ministers, harbors a simmering resentment for military lawyers, who he contends hamstrung U.S. troops in Iraq.

Omar Havana/Getty Images

Once in office, Hegseth moved against the JAG Corps on Feb. 21, the same night he fired Brown and Franchetti. He sacked the judge advocates general of each of the service branches: Lt. Gen. Joseph B. Berger III of the Army, Lt. Gen. Charles Plummer of the Air Force and Rear Adm. Lia M. Reynolds of the Navy.

Rosa Brooks, a specialist in national security law who teaches at the Georgetown University Law Center, said at the time that the removal of the top JAGs was “even more chilling” than the firing of Brown.

“It's what you do when you're planning to break the law: you get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down,” she wrote on social media.

Trump also firing the Army, Navy and Air Force JAGs. In some ways that's even more chilling than firing the four stars. It's what you do when you're planning to break the law: you get rid of any lawyers who might try to slow you down.

— Rosa Brooks (@brooks_rosa) February 22, 2025

Hegseth denied that.

“We want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice and don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks,” he told Fox News.

'Acme of skill'

Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap Jr. helped oversee more than 2,200 JAG officers worldwide as the Air Force's deputy judge advocate general from 2006-10. He is now a law professor at Duke University.

Dunlap expressed a dim view of the idea that a "War Department" would make America stronger.

"As to renaming the Department of Defense to the more belligerent-sounding Department of War, I would have two observations,” he said. "One, sometimes the military is involved in operations that do not amount to 'war' such as guarding the border, suppressing civil disorders, or providing disaster relief. Is this meant to suggest that the military would no longer be doing those missions?

"Two, I would invite the secretary to consider that resorting to war is not the 'acme of skill,'" he said.

Dunlap quoted Sun Tzu, the Chinese general, military strategist and philosopher: “To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth contends the U.S. military lost its way under President Joe Biden, emphasizing diversity over competence and "lethality."

The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty Im

expressnews.com · by Sig Christenson · April 28, 2025

3. ‘Tale of 2 Petes’: Fired adviser describes Pentagon chief consumed by image

Sour grapes or an accurate assessment?

‘Tale of 2 Petes’: Fired adviser describes Pentagon chief consumed by image

Colin Carroll said the Defense secretary was focused on identifying leakers and proving his competence.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/28/caroll-hegseth-pentagon-00312849?utm

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth prepares to give a television interview at the White House on March 21. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP

By Paul McLeary and Jack Detsch

04/28/2025 12:43 PM EDT

Updated: 04/28/2025 01:28 PM EDT

A former top adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described a head office gripped by paranoia and more focused on photo ops than leadership, the latest in a series of brutal accusations about the inner workings of the Pentagon.

Colin Carroll, who was fired this month from his post as chief of staff to the deputy Defense secretary, told the Megyn Kelly podcast that Hegseth was obsessed with the spread of leaks and spent half his time investigating them at the detriment of defense priorities.

“He was very focused on the leaks, and I think it kind of consumed the team a little bit,” said Carroll, who was terminated amid a leak probe. “If you look at a pie chart of the secretary’s day, at this point, 50 percent of it is probably a leak investigation.”

His ouster came after a vicious brawl among Hegseth’s top advisers, including Joe Kasper, his former chief of staff. Hegseth’s senior adviser, Dan Caldwell, and deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick were also fired during the leak investigation. Kasper left the department last week.

White House backs Pentagon firings amid leaks against Hegseth

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Carroll portrayed a secretary intent on maintaining a public image of competence and control. Hegseth’s staff often films his early morning workouts with troops, which Carroll said was partly an attempt to push back against the idea of Hegseth as undisciplined and a heavy drinker — allegations that trailed him during his confirmation hearing and which he denied.

“In order to combat that image, it’s ‘hey, I’m gonna go work out with the troops,’” Carroll said. ”While that is important — and it’s a thing to do to get out there and helps recruiting and helps morale — if you’re taking a half day trip to the Naval Academy at the same time the budget is due, and we really need some support here … come on, you gotta weigh priorities.”

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell pointed to the increased number of troops on the southern border, the bombing campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, and contracts canceled by DOGE as signs of progress. “Secretary Hegseth has delivered more change to the DOD in 100 days than most secretaries have in four years,” he said. While the media “focuses on gossip, we’re focused on results.”

The ousted adviser described a “tale of two Pete’s” in Hegseth’s behavior, a straight-talking leader able to convince skeptical Republicans to boost higher defense spending, and a Pentagon chief fixed on “weird details” who could get “very agitated” in internal meetings.

Carroll said that Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg assured Carroll he would not be ousted, even after the others were suspended. Carroll said he “very much” wants to return to DOD to work with Feinberg.

Hegseth, after losing his office’s most senior advisers, has relied on a smaller group that includes his wife, his personal lawyer and a former junior military aide.

The Defense Department on Thursday announced three new Hegseth advisers: the former military aide, Col. Ricky Buria; Justin Fulcher, a tech entrepreneur and DOGE adviser; and Patrick Weaver, who worked on Capitol Hill and the Department of Homeland Security in President Donald Trump’s first term but has no Pentagon experience.

Trump, in an interview with The Atlantic published Monday, indicated that he’s closely following the issues with Hegseth’s team.

“He’s gonna get it together,” Trump said. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.”

4. ‘I Run the Country and the World’ (President Trump interview in the Atlantic)

​A long read. The next article will be an Axios summary.

Credit President Trump with sitting down with his "enemies" or "nemeses."

I would guess that there has never been a politician as resilient or perhaps as "teflon coated" as President Trump.

‘I Run the Country and the World’

Donald Trump believes he’s invincible. But the cracks are beginning to show.

By Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/trump-second-term-comeback/682573/?utm

The Atlantic · by Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer · April 28, 2025

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Before we begin, a primer on the science of arranging an interview with a sitting American president:

In ordinary times, reporters seeking an on-the-record encounter with the commander in chief first write an elaborate proposal. The proposal details the goals of the interview, the broad areas of concern, and the many reasons the president must, for his own good, talk to these particular reporters and not other, perfectly adequate but still lesser reporters. This pitch is then sent to White House officials. If the universe bends favorably, negotiations ensue. If the staff feel reasonably confident that the interview will somehow help their cause, they will ask the president—with trepidation, at times—to sit for the interview. Sometimes, the president will agree.

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Such is what happened recently to us. We went through this process in the course of reporting the story you are reading. We made our pitch, which went like this: President Donald Trump, by virtue of winning a second term and so dramatically reshaping the country and the world, can now be considered the most consequential American leader of the 21st century, and we want to describe, in detail, how this came to be. Just four years ago, after the violent insurrection he fomented, Trump appeared to be finished. Social-media companies had banned or suspended him, and he had been repudiated by corporate donors. Republicans had denounced him, and the country was moving on to the fresh start of Joe Biden’s presidency. Then came further blows—the indictments, the civil judgments, and the endless disavowals by people who once worked for him.

And yet, here we are, months into a second Trump term. We wanted to hear, in his own words, how he’d pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks in political history, and what lessons, if any, he’d internalized along the way.

Trump agreed to see us. We were tentatively promised a meeting and a photo shoot—likely in the Oval Office, though possibly the Lincoln Bedroom. But then, as is so often the case with this White House, everything went sideways.

The week our interview was supposed to occur, Trump posted a vituperative message on Truth Social, attacking us by name. “Ashley Parker is not capable of doing a fair and unbiased interview. She is a Radical Left Lunatic, and has been as terrible as is possible for as long as I have known her,” he wrote. “To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times.” (That last sentence is true—Ashley Parker does not know that Trump won the presidency three times.) “Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.”

Apparently, as word of our meeting spread through Trump’s inner circle, someone had reminded him of some of the things we (specifically Ashley) had said and written that he didn’t like. We still don’t know who it was—but we immediately understood the consequences: no photo shoot, no tour of the newly redecorated Oval Office or the Lincoln Bedroom, and definitely no interview.

But we’ve both covered Trump long enough to know that his first word is rarely his final one. So at 10:45 on a Saturday morning in late March, we called him on his cellphone. (Don’t ask how we got his number. All we can say is that the White House staff have imperfect control over Trump’s personal communication devices.) The president was at the country club he owns in Bedminster, New Jersey. The number that flashed on his screen was an unfamiliar one, but he answered anyway. “Who’s calling?” he asked.

Despite his attacks on us a few days earlier, the president, evidently feeling buoyed by a week of successes, was eager to talk about his accomplishments. As we spoke, the sounds of another conversation, perhaps from a television, hummed in the background.

The president seemed exhilarated by everything he had managed to do in the first two months of his second term: He had begun a purge of diversity efforts from the federal government; granted clemency to nearly 1,600 supporters who had participated in the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those caught beating police officers on camera; and signed 98 executive orders and counting (26 of them on his first day in office). He had fired independent regulators; gutted entire agencies; laid off great swaths of the federal workforce; and invoked 18th-century wartime powers to use against a criminal gang from Venezuela. He had adjusted tariffs like a DJ spinning knobs in the booth, upsetting the rhythms of global trade and inducing vertigo in the financial markets. He had raged at the leader of Ukraine, a democratic ally repelling an imperialist invasion, for not being “thankful”—and praised the leader of the invading country, Russia, as “very smart,” reversing in an instant 80 years of U.S. foreign-policy doctrine, and prompting the countries of NATO to prepare for their own defense, without the protective umbrella of American power, for the first time since 1945.

Donald Trump after being sworn in as president for his second term in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol (Shawn Thew / Reuters)

He had empowered one of his top political donors, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, to slice away at the federal government and take control of its operating systems. He had disemboweled ethics and anti-corruption architecture installed after Watergate, and had declared that he, not the attorney general, was the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. He had revoked Secret Service protection and security clearances from political opponents, including some facing Iranian death threats for carrying out actions Trump himself had ordered in his first term. He had announced plans to pave over part of the Rose Garden, and he had redecorated the Oval Office—gold trim and gold trophies and gold frames to go with an array of past presidential portraits, making the room look like a Palm Beach approximation of an 18th-century royal court.

Old foes were pleading for his grace. Meta—whose founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had become an enthusiastic supplicant—had paid $25 million to settle a civil lawsuit with Trump that many experts believed was meritless. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, announced that he was banning his opinion writers from holding certain opinions—and then joined Trump for dinner the same night at the White House.

“He’s 100 percent. He’s been great,” the president told us, referring to Bezos. “Zuckerberg’s been great.”

“You saw yesterday with Columbia University. What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” Trump asked us. Yes—all of it was shocking, much of it without precedent.

We asked Trump why he thought the billionaire class was prostrating itself before him.

“It’s just a higher level of respect. I don’t know,” Trump said. “Maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now.”

“I mean, you saw yesterday with the law firm,” he said. He was referring to Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, whose leader had come to the Oval Office days earlier to beg for relief from an executive order that could have crippled its business. Trump had issued the order at least partially because a former partner at the firm had in 2021 gone to work for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where he was part of an investigation of the Trump Organization’s business practices. Also that week, an Ivy League institution, threatened with the cancellation of $400 million in federal funding, had agreed to overhaul its Middle Eastern–studies programs at the Trump administration’s request, while also acceding to other significant demands. “You saw yesterday with Columbia University. What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” Trump asked us.

Yes—all of it was shocking, much of it without precedent. Legal scholars were drawing comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the early stages of the New Deal, when Congress had allowed FDR to demolish norms and greatly expand the powers of the presidency.

As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal. If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again.

“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.

Media owners weren’t the only ones on his mind. He also seemed to be referring to law firms, universities, broadcast networks, tech titans, artists, research scientists, military commanders, civil servants, moderate Republicans—all the people and institutions he expected to eventually, inevitably, submit to his will.

We asked the president if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”

For weeks, we’d been hearing from both inside and outside the White House that the president was having more fun than he’d had in his first term. “The first time, the first weeks, it was just ‘Let’s blow this place up,’ ” Brian Ballard, a lobbyist and an ally of the president’s, had told us. “This time, he’s blowing it up with a twinkle in his eye.”

When we put this observation to Trump over the phone, he agreed. “I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do,” he said. “You know, what I do is such serious stuff.”

EXILE

That Trump now finds himself once again in a position to blow things up is astonishing, considering the depth of his fall. So much has happened so fast that the improbability of his comeback gets obscured. Perhaps no one in American history has had a political resurrection as remarkable as Donald Trump’s.

In the waning days of his first term, his approval rating stood at a pallid 34 percent. A few weeks earlier, he had watched on television while an insurrection he incited overran the Capitol; polls showed that a clear majority of Americans believed he bore responsibility for the attack. The House of Representatives had just impeached him for the second time—making him the only president to ever achieve that ignominy. And although the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds majority required for conviction, seven Republican senators voted to convict—the most members of a president’s own party to vote for an impeachment conviction in history.

Twitter and Facebook, his favorite social-media platforms, had banned or effectively silenced him, along with Instagram and YouTube. To try to reestablish direct connection with his followers, he would launch a blog, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump.” But it gained little traction and was abandoned within weeks.

Major corporations announced that they were cutting off political contributions to officials who had supported Trump’s election lies. Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank decided to stop doing business with Trump and his companies. Perhaps most painful to the president, the PGA of America yanked its scheduled 2022 championship tournament from Trump’s Bedminster golf course. Former members of his own Cabinet and staff—people he had hired—would declare him, or had already declared him, “a moron” (Rex Tillerson, secretary of state), “more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine” (James Mattis, secretary of defense), “the most flawed person I have ever met” (John Kelly, chief of staff), and “a laughing fool” (John Bolton, national security adviser). And now longtime allies were abandoning him. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority leader, had discussed pushing Trump to resign from office. On the evening of the insurrection, Senator Lindsey Graham, a compass reliably magnetized toward wherever power in the Republican Party lies, pointed away from Trump for the first time in four years. “Count me out,” Graham had declared on the Senate floor. “Enough is enough.” Rupert Murdoch, then the chairman of Fox Corporation, sent an email to a former Fox Broadcasting executive in which he declared, “We want to make Trump a non person.” Coming from Murdoch himself, the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told us recently, “that’s a papal bull.”

On the morning of Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump was a dozen miles southeast of the festivities, at Joint Base Andrews, preparing to depart for Florida. (Trump was the first president since Andrew Johnson, in 1869, to boycott the swearing-in of his successor.) Standing before a modest crowd, his dark overcoat a meager bulwark against the cold, the soon-to-be-former president cut a diminished figure.

Just before boarding Air Force One for the final time, to head to Mar-a-Lago, Trump spoke to those gathered to bid him farewell. “We will be back in some form,” he said, a notably modest framing from such a formerly oversize figure.

Few believed him. It didn’t even sound like he believed it himself. The Trump era was over.

Almost as soon as Trump arrived at his gilded Elba, he began plotting his return. He missed the press pool—the gaggle of reporters that tails every president—and once tried to summon it, only to be told that no such pool still existed. But it would turn out that the lack of attention in those first months—and the lack of access to social-media platforms—was a blessing. Enforced obscurity gave him the time and clarity he needed to plan his comeback.

To understand how Trump rose from the political dead, and how he set himself up to wield power in his second term, we spoke with dozens of top advisers, senior aides, allies, adversaries, and confidants. Many who talked with us did so only on the condition of anonymity, in order to be more candid or to avoid angering the president. The story they told us revealed that Trump’s time in the political wilderness is crucial to understanding the way he’s exercising power now.

He had been in Palm Beach a week when an opportunity presented itself. Trump heard that Kevin McCarthy would be in South Florida for fundraisers. Though the two men had clashed after the Capitol riot, Trump invited McCarthy to Mar-a-Lago. Even before the meeting happened, news of it leaked to The New York Times, shaking the political universe: Were Republican leaders, who had seemed so intent on purging Trump, embracing him again? When Trump and McCarthy met in person, the former president asked the minority leader who had tipped off the Times.

Donald Trump departed Washington in 2021 a pariah, twice impeached, abandoned by former allies, and banned or suspended from his favorite social-media platforms. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Noam Galai / Getty; Alex Edelman / AFP / Getty; Sepia Times / Universal Images Group / Getty.)

“I know who leaked it—you did,” McCarthy replied, multiple people briefed on the exchange told us.

“It’s good for both of us,” Trump shot back.

Both men were right. McCarthy had already concluded that the path back to Republican control of the House in the 2022 midterms—and his own path to the speakership—required a unified party, one that included Trump and his MAGA base. After the meeting, each man separately released the same photo: the two of them grinning amid the ostentatious splendor of Mar-a-Lago. Trump had taken his first step toward political redemption.

It is a truism that Trump has never felt governed by the traditional rules of politics. And he has always been convinced of his own genius, his pure gut instincts. But never more so than today. The past four years have turned him into a Nietzschean cliché. Banishment, multiple indictments, a 34-count felony conviction, repeated brushes with assassins—all have combined to convince him that he is impervious to challenges that would destroy others. Those years also strengthened in him the salesman’s instinct that he can bend reality to his will—turn facts into “fake news,” make the inconceivable not just conceivable but actual, transform the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, make people believe what he’s selling in defiance of what they see with their own eyes. This is the core lesson that Trump and his acolytes internalized from the 2020 election and January 6. The real-estate mogul who branded buildings with his name everywhere from Turkey to Uruguay, who sold the “world’s greatest steaks” and the “finest” wine and “fantastic” mattresses, had mastered the alchemy of perception. Reality, to Trump, is fungible. While reporting on Trump over the past four years, we were repeatedly struck that, in failing to drive a stake directly through his heart, all of the would-be vampire slayers—Democrats, Never Trumpers, Republican-primary opponents, prosecutors, judges, media critics—only strengthened him. Which brings us to a second lesson: Trump and his team realized that they could behave with near impunity by embracing controversies and scandals that would have taken down just about any other president—as long as they showed no weakness.

Even now, Trump—who described himself to us as “a very positive thinker”—struggles to admit that his return to power was a comeback. To concede that he’d had to come back would be to admit that he had fallen in the first place.

Early in our reporting for this article, we asked the Trump loyalist and former Breitbart News editor Raheem Kassam to explain how the president had been able to bend the country, and the world, to his will. Over a meal of oysters brûlées, duck confit, and fries cooked in beef tallow at Butterworth’s, the new MAGA haunt on Capitol Hill, he responded crudely, if vividly. “He didn’t bend them to his will,” Kassam said. “He bent them over.”

When we spoke with Trump in late March, his approval ratings seemed steady, his political base apparently unshakable. Institution after institution was submitting to him—“obeying in advance,” as the historian of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder has put it. Trump was carrying out his agenda with surprisingly little resistance, even from Democrats. But in the days and weeks that followed, the patina of infallibility began to crack. At the instigation of Elon Musk’s DOGE team, critical workers had been getting fired—and then hired back. An embarrassing (and possibly illegal) operations-security snafu, in which the editor of this magazine was included on a Signal group chat that discussed imminent attack plans on Houthi targets in Yemen, made the administration look incompetent, in a fashion reminiscent of the clown-car chaos of Trump 1.0. The president’s tariff rollout was shambolic, tanking the stock market and causing even some loyalists to question him publicly. His approval rating on the economy, long a buttress of his polling support, went negative. Was this what happens when a feeling of indomitability curdles into hubris? Or was this just the next setback for Trump—some combination of Houdini and Lazarus—to recover from?

Read: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans

Trump advisers like to tell a story from November 5, 2024, Election Night, just before the networks called Wisconsin, and thus the election, in his favor. He and his aides were preparing to head to the West Palm Beach convention center, where he would deliver his victory speech. His whole senior team was crowded into his private office at Mar-a-Lago. Addressing no one in particular, as though just musing aloud, Trump spoke.

“You know, they made a big mistake,” he said. “They could have been getting rid of us by now. But actually, we’re just beginning.”

THE ART OF THE COMEBACK

He had almost been destroyed before. After a real-estate downturn in the early 1990s, Trump found himself on the brink of financial ruin. His near bankruptcy and recovery led to his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback. For his political advisers in exile, this book became essential reading.

The first pages list Trump’s “Top Ten Comeback Tips.” When we met one of his advisers recently, this person recounted from memory some of the rules on the list. “Rule 1 is: Play golf,” this adviser told us. “Rule 9 is: Get even.” (Rule 10, “Always have a prenuptial agreement,” seemed less applicable to politics.)

To stage a comeback, Trump would need the right staff. He had realized, in his exile, that at nearly every turn in his first term, someone on his own team—Reince Priebus, John Kelly, James Mattis, Bill Barr, Gary Cohn—had blocked him. He needed smart people who would figure out how to let him do everything that he wanted to do, in whatever way he wanted to do it. His first key hire was a political operative who had impressed the former president with her retrospective analysis of the 2020 election. Biden had won the election that year by flipping back into the Democratic column five key states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (along with a lone congressional district in Nebraska). One of the few bright spots for Trump in 2020 had been Florida, where he had increased his winning margin from 2016. What, Trump began asking his allies after the election, had he done right in Florida that he hadn’t done in the rest of the country?

The answer, in large part, boiled down to Susie Wiles, who had run Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns in the state. Wiles, the daughter of the legendary NFL announcer Pat Summerall, is an experienced campaign operative (she was a scheduler for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign), who over the past three decades had developed deep Florida ties. After every campaign she runs, Wiles writes an “after action” report, documenting what worked and what didn’t. Over dinner with Trump on the patio at Mar-a-Lago in early 2021, she delivered “the Florida memo.” Soon after, he hired her to run his political operation, which eventually became his 2024 campaign.

Wiles saw that one thing that had held Trump back in 2020 was that he had not finished taking over the Republican Party during his first term. Part of Trump’s leverage had been his ability to endorse in Republican primaries—influence he was eager to reprise. “When I endorse somebody, they win,” Trump told us on the phone. “But even when I endorse them in the general election, mostly they win. It’s important.” (Now when Trump calls to pressure a fellow Republican about an issue or a vote, they are almost always grateful for his past support, or feel that they owe their seat to him.)

The Wiles process for evaluating potential endorsees—which she undertook with James Blair, now a deputy chief of staff in the White House, and Brian Jack, now a congressman representing Georgia—involved researching how they had spoken about Trump in the past. “The basic thing was their loyalty and their political viability,” one adviser told us. “So we were looking for things like: So, what did they say on J6? What did they say during the Access Hollywood tapes? What is their voting record with us?” Trump was building a coalition of loyalists, something he hadn’t sufficiently done during the first term.

Wiles had plenty of experience managing men with big personalities. But colleagues say a key reason she’s been successful working with Trump (she is now his White House chief of staff) is that she never tries to manage him. She does not imagine that she can control him, as some former top advisers attempted, and she tends not to offer advice unless specifically asked. Her primary role, as she sees it, is to set up processes to help ensure Trump’s success, and then to execute his directives, whatever they may be.

At first, Trump’s banishment from the big social-media platforms, along with mainstream media outlets’ reluctance—including Fox News’s—to give him much coverage, seemed potentially devastating. But Trump turned to the far-right platforms and activists still welcoming him. Taylor Budowich—now a White House deputy chief of staff—worked with MAGA influencers to evade the Twitter and Facebook bans: They would print out pro-Trump social-media posts; Budowich would have Trump sign the paper with his Sharpie, and then mail the signed post back to the influencer; almost invariably, the influencer would then post the signed missive, flexing their access and building their audience—while simultaneously amplifying Trump’s voice. At the same time, a video ecosystem grew up around Trump, with streaming platforms such as Right Side Broadcasting Network stepping in to cover his events when cable networks would not.

“Him being banned gave rise to people like me, because the president’s supporters followed me to find out what he was saying,” one MAGA influencer told us. “It backfired on the tech people who deplatformed him, because it platformed all of us.”

Trump, meanwhile, continued to promote the lie that he’d won the 2020 election, and that January 6 was just an ordinary Wednesday. Normal political logic suggested that this was a bad strategy. But his shamelessness, as ever, remained a strength. By repeating something frequently enough, he could slowly make it feel true, at least for his supporters.

Not long ago, we sat in Steve Bannon’s Capitol Hill rowhouse, where he records his War Room podcast, pressing him on Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, and his denial of what transpired on January 6. “Our reality is that we won” and that January 6 was a “fedsurrection,” Bannon said, referring to the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had incited the crowd on the Ellipse that day.

But this reality, we pointed out to Bannon, is simply not true.

“Now, here’s the interesting thing,” Bannon said. “Who’s won that argument? I think we have.”

“BE READY!”

The first televised hearing of the House select committee on January 6 was scheduled for the beginning of June 2022, and it was sure to be a spectacle that reminded viewers of the horror of the insurrection and emphasized the former president’s culpability. Trump’s team at Mar-a-Lago was desperate to distract attention from the hearing. At one point, someone proposed a brazen gambit: Trump could announce his 2024 bid for the presidency just minutes before the hearing gaveled in.

Trump’s response was telling. “I’m not ready for this,” he said. “We’re not ready for this right now.”

“That was the first moment of, like, ‘Okay, he’s not just thinking about it; he’s seriously thinking about how he wants to do it,’ ” one of his advisers told us. “He’s not going to just use it as a stunt to make a moment. He wants to win.”

Before long, Trump began emphasizing behind the scenes that he was serious. “Be ready,” he would repeat to people who had served with him the first time around. “Be ready! Be ready! We’re coming back! Be ready!”

Still, when Trump did launch his campaign, in November 2022, it did not get off to an auspicious start. Even his most fiercely supportive advisers concede that the announcement, in the form of an hour-long speech at Mar-a-Lago, was a dud.

Surprisingly few political reporters from major outlets were in attendance; it was as though the mainstream media still didn’t believe that Trump could be a viable candidate again. Worse, some members of Trump’s own family hadn’t bothered to show up. As the speech dragged on, even Fox News cut away, switching to what Bannon called “a C-level panel,” before returning for the final few minutes.

The campaign struggled to gain traction. Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio told us that even months later, into early 2023, getting donors to attend the first big super-PAC event “was like pulling teeth.” And although Trump was now a declared presidential candidate, his team said it was still having trouble getting him booked even on shows such as Fox & Friends.

The first turning point, several advisers told us, came in February 2023. A Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, spewing toxic material. Sitting in the West Palm Beach campaign headquarters one day, Trump’s team watched Joe Biden’s press secretary struggle to answer a question about the president’s plans for outreach to East Palestine. Soon after, Susie Wiles received a call from Trump’s oldest son, Don Jr., saying that his father ought to just show up there himself. When Wiles brought the suggestion to Trump, in the living room of Mar-a-Lago, his response was unequivocal: “That’s a great idea,” he enthused. “When can we go?”

Trump’s visit to East Palestine—and the footage of him buying McDonald’s for the first responders—had a potent effect. “It just reminded everyone that people still like this guy,” one adviser told us. “He’s still a draw.” Nearly two years later, Trump’s visit continued to resonate. “People are living their lives and they don’t delve that easily into policy,” a woman across the border in the swing state of Pennsylvania told our colleague George Packer before the election last fall. “All they know is that Trump was here buying everyone McDonald’s” and that Biden hadn’t visited for more than a year.

Read: George Packer reports on the 2024 election from Charleroi, Pennsylvania

The halting start to the campaign kept Trump off the radar, giving his team time to plan. Former Trump advisers had used their years out of power to set up their own groups—America First Legal, America First Policy Institute, Center for Renewing America—to prepare for a second Trump administration.

“The people who were the true believers knew Trump was going to run again and win,” Caroline Wren, a former top Trump fundraiser, told us, adding that Trump’s policy loyalists “sat there and prepared executive orders for four years.”

The time out of the spotlight also allowed the team to build a new election strategy. By now, Trump had alienated a significant share of the voting public, and he was polling lower among some demographic groups than in previous elections. The conventional wisdom was that the criminal investigations and legal proceedings then under way would only increase that alienation. His campaign directors decided that the best tactic was to turn this problem into a strength. Chris LaCivita, who was a co–campaign manager alongside Susie Wiles and a military veteran wounded in the Gulf War in 1991, took to exhorting younger staffers with a Marine slogan: “Embrace the suck.”

The impulse to let Trump be Trump, so contrary to the instincts of much of the first-term staff, was laid out in a memo that James Blair and Tim Saler, the campaign’s lead data expert, sent to Wiles in early 2024. This became known around the campaign as the “gender memo.” “Instead of saying, ‘Look, we did two points worse with white suburban women between 2016 and 2020’ and ‘How do we get those points back?,’ what if we did it the other way?” an adviser familiar with the memo told us. “What if we said, ‘We gained eight points with non-college-educated men. What if we won them by 12?’ ”

During his brief political exile, Trump hired the campaign operative Susie Wiles. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: ablokhin / Getty; Tom Brenner / The Washington Post / Getty; ZUMA Press / Alamy.)

The strategy had the benefit of letting Trump be the version of himself that appealed to those men. In a moment when the Democratic Party often felt like an amalgamation of East Coast elitists, niggling scolds, and far-left activists, Trump appeared to offer judgment-free populism to a populace sick of being judged.

Trump’s own view, we were told, was more self-referential: “Why would I distance myself from my people? They love me.”

“IT MADE ME STRONGER”

On Friday, May 31, 2024, the day after Trump was convicted of 34 felony charges in a New York City courtroom, the treasurer at Make America Great Again Inc., the main super PAC supporting the former president, called his boss, Taylor Budowich, with good news. A large wire transfer was incoming—a record $15 million. The call set off an internal scramble, because the bank needed the donor’s name to approve the transfer, and nobody knew who it was.

Shortly thereafter, the treasurer called back. “I’m so sorry,” he told Budowich. “I misheard him. It’s not $15 million—it’s $50 million.”

“Don’t be sorry!” Budowich said. (The donation was eventually traced to Timothy Mellon, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune.)

The Democrats assumed that Trump’s legal issues would politically neuter him. “A convicted felon is now seeking the office of the presidency,” Biden would say. But all the scandals and controversies that would have sunk a different candidate became background static. “The thing about the court cases is there were too many of them, and this is one of Trump’s superpowers—he never just breaks the law a little bit; he does it all over the place,” Sarah Longwell, a formerly Republican, anti-MAGA political strategist who regularly conducts focus groups, told us. “And as a result, there were so many court cases that it was just white noise to voters. They couldn’t tell them apart.”

“If I’m not president, you’re fucked,” Trump told a roomful of oil executives at Mar-a-Lago.

The Democratic base remained outraged. Trump’s base continued to believe his claims that all the criminal investigations and January 6 hearings constituted a “witch hunt.” But for the sliver of voters who would actually decide the election, the Democratic argument that Trump was a threat to democracy was too far removed from their more urgent concerns about grocery prices. As time passed and Trump continued to rewrite history to turn insurrectionists into “patriots,” the events of January 6 receded into abstraction for many of these voters.

“If you said, ‘What’s J6?,’ it’s like, ‘What is that? Bingo? Are you playing Battleship?’ ” the adviser familiar with the gender memo told us, describing what the campaign’s voter research had found.

Trump’s felony conviction actually proved to be a boon. This did not surprise his advisers. A year earlier, in the spring of 2023, when Trump had been indicted over hush-money payments to a porn star, his support in Republican-primary polls jumped 10 points within a month, to more than 50 percent—a level it would never drop below again. In the first three months of 2023, MAGA Inc. had reported raising only about $600,000; in the three months following the indictment, the group took in nearly $13 million. “Democrats just played right into our hands,” Fabrizio, the Trump pollster, told us.

For Trump’s base, the cases were energizing, and they put his Republican-primary opponents in the difficult position of having to defend Trump against “lawfare” or risk being seen as supporting the Democrats’ position. So even while campaigning against him for the nomination, they were in effect campaigning for him.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump had ignored the traditional fundraising circuit, which increased donor skepticism of him. But during his time in the wilderness, he began to enjoy raising money. He asked advisers to schedule more call time for him with top donors. He wrote personal notes, and he regularly invited wealthy supporters and potential donors to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago. He judged generosity not by the size of the check, his allies told us, but by the size of the check relative to the donor’s net worth. He liked pressuring donors to bet on him—and watching them squirm if they hedged. Sometimes he was blunt, invoking the specter of a President Kamala Harris taking their wealth.

(“If I’m not president, you’re fucked,” he would tell a roomful of oil executives at Mar-a-Lago after the election. “Look at your profit-and-loss statements. You realize what would have happened to you if she was president? What’s wrong with you?”)

The Supreme Court decision in July 2024 regarding a legal challenge to the federal prosecution of Trump for interfering in the 2020 election gave Trump and his allies further momentum. Trump v. United States addressed the question of legal liability for a president, but Trump’s allies focused on how the Court described the presidency itself, suggesting that all the powers of the executive branch were imbued in the personage. “Unlike anyone else,” the Court wrote, “the President is a branch of government.” That the prosecution of Trump both revivified his candidacy and then gave him more executive power in his second term remains a stinging irony for Democrats.

When we talked with Trump, we asked him if he thought the criminal prosecutions had made him stronger. “Shockingly, yes,” he said. “Normally, it would knock you out. You wouldn’t even live for the next day. You know, you’d announce your resignation, and you’d go back and ‘fight for your name,’ like everybody says—you know, ‘fight for your name, go back to your family.’ ”

He paused. “Yeah, it made me stronger, made me a lot stronger.”

In the final months of the campaign, Democratic strategists working for Vice President Harris focused on seven swing states. Trump, by contrast, told aides that he wanted to put resources into picking up voters even in states he was already certain to win.

“We don’t want anyone to know—it’s a surprise—but I think we might win the popular vote,” Trump would say to his advisers. “We have got to run up the score.”

During breaks between events, his team would place calls to groups of voters in red states and put him on the line. “This is your favorite president, Donald Trump,” he’d say, before launching into brief remarks. They would make calls from the motorcade, from the campaign plane, as many as 10 a day. In this way, working around the old mass media, Trump reached thousands of voters directly.

“If there was someone in America in some state, still awake, Donald Trump would find a way to get to them,” Chris LaCivita told us.

In 2016, Trump had been so frustrated about losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton that he’d falsely asserted, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Eight years later, he didn’t have to pretend. As Election Night gave way to dawn in Palm Beach, Trump basked in the comprehensiveness of his victory—all seven swing states, and a strong showing in the popular-vote tally, which he ultimately won. Several aides got calls from him around 4 a.m. “You won’t believe it,” Trump crowed, according to one. “I’ve already had 20 world leaders call me. They all want to kiss my ass.”

Some time later, Trump addressed a gathering of supporters in the living room at Mar-a-Lago. During his first term people would say, “Yeah, he won, but he doesn’t have a mandate, ” Trump told the crowd. “Now they can’t say it anymore.”

THE TRANSITION

People who worked with Trump in his first term used to play a parlor game of sorts. What would happen, they wondered, if they, the human guardrails, weren’t there to correct the president’s errors, to explain to him all the things he did not know or understand, to talk him out of or slow-walk his most destructive impulses?

During his first term, he faced resistance and obstruction from all over the government: from the courts and from the Democrats, but also from Republicans in the House and Senate, who at times treated him like a floundering student. The contempt was mutual. “Paul Ryan was a stupid person,” Trump told us in March, referring to the former Republican speaker of the House. “And Mitch, Mitch wasn’t much better,” Trump said of Mitch McConnell, the former Senate Republican leader and, lately, the epicenter of GOP resistance to Trump, such as it is. But some of the most crucial pushback came from within the executive branch. At times, his chief of staff and his White House counsel declined to carry out his orders. Trump had been apoplectic when “his” Justice Department, under Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, opened an independent-counsel investigation into whether the Russians had influenced the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign had colluded with them.

Read: Mitch McConnell and the president he calls ‘despicable’

This time would be different, because he’d learned from experience. “When I did it before, I never did it, you know?” he told us. “I didn’t know people in Washington.”

On January 15, at 8 p.m., five days before the inauguration, Trump sent out an incendiary post on Truth Social. In it, he described the sorts of people his incoming administration would not be hiring—a list that included anyone who had ever worked for, in his words, “Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), ‘Dumb as a Rock’ John Bolton, ‘Birdbrain’ Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongerers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho daughter, Liz,” and anyone “suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.” For those staffing Trump’s second term, the missive was doctrine: This time, loyalty would be absolute.

In 2016, few experienced Republicans had been involved in Trump’s campaign, so the pool of presumptive loyalists to draw from was small. His incoming team also used key transition picks—Cabinet secretaries, West Wing advisers—to reassure a still-skeptical Republican Party that Trump was one of them. This produced a dysfunctional dichotomy in which Reince Priebus, a mild-mannered traditional Republican from Wisconsin, and Steve Bannon, a revolutionary hell-bent on dismantling the administrative state, shared top billing in the West Wing. The competing camps—the MAGA fire-breathers, the establishment swamp creatures, “Javanka” and the globalists—leaked relentlessly to the media and tried to knife one another. A miasma of chaos surrounded Trump, and impaired the administration’s ability to carry out its policy agenda.

But by 2024, Trump had effectively consumed the party, and he had no need to recruit traditional Republicans, if any even remained. Cliff Sims, who during Trump’s first term had served as a communications aide in the White House before going to work for the director of national intelligence, helped the transition team manage hiring for the second term. The formula for staffing the administration wasn’t hard this time, Sims told us: “Don’t hire anyone who wasn’t committed to the agenda last time.”

“I knew that Stephen Miller would ultimately run the policy operation, with immigration as a top priority,” Sims told us, referring to Trump’s senior domestic-policy adviser, who is, famously, an immigration hard-liner. “So I just asked him, ‘Who do you want? Who should prepare DHS? Who should prepare ICE? Who are the rock stars from your team? Let’s get them all rolling.’ ” Same, too, with trade. Sims called Jamieson Greer, who had served as the chief of staff to the U.S. trade representative in Trump’s first term before taking over the role himself this time around. He asked Greer who Trump’s pro-tariff “killers on trade” were. “And he’s like, ‘I’ve been sitting here hoping someone would call about this; I’ve already got a list ready,’ ” Sims told us.

Because the transition hiring for the second term harvested a uniformly loyalist crop of staffers, getting things done the way Trump wants became easier. In the first term, executive orders designed by the MAGA faction were sometimes rushed through without proper legal vetting, in an attempt to prevent a warring faction from killing the directive, someone familiar with this process told us—which made them vulnerable to court challenges. This time around, the process for generating the orders is more disciplined.

Trump’s aides and advisers also now understood the hydraulics of the government better. They’d learned, for instance, that immigration policy was not contained solely within the Department of Homeland Security, and that to curb the flow of immigrants across the southern border, they also needed to install loyalists in crucial roles at the Department of Health and Human Services. When it came to the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, they now knew they needed MAGA diehards in key roles. This kind of knowledge would now be applied to thousands of hires across dozens of agencies.

When his Cabinet nominees hit trouble in the Senate, Trump and his team were determined to test their new power. “It was ‘You’ll eat your breakfast and you’ll like it,’ ” a veteran Republican operative told us. The first major test came during the former Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s quest for confirmation as defense secretary.

Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, a Republican, was skeptical about Hegseth’s qualifications. Ernst is the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate; Hegseth had previously said that women should not serve in combat roles. Ernst is also a sexual-assault survivor; Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault and other misconduct, including alcohol abuse. (Hegseth has denied the accusations.) But when Ernst publicly signaled that she might not be able to support the nomination, Trump’s allies leaped into action. On private text chains, they talked about how failing to win confirmation for Hegseth was untenable. The consensus was clear: Because Matt Gaetz had already had to withdraw as Trump’s pick for attorney general, if they lost another major nominee, there would be blood in the water. Even the most controversial—Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel—needed to be muscled through.

Trump and his team saw the confirmation of their most controversial Cabinet nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard—as a chance to flex their power over the Republican Party. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Rebecca Noble / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Philip Yabut / Getty; Print Collector / Getty.)

They decided to make an example of Ernst, as a warning to other senators about what to expect if they stepped out of line. An op‑ed implicitly excoriating her appeared on Breitbart News ; Bannon and the gang on his War Room podcast hammered her relentlessly; and the powerful young conservative activist Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA team threatened to send resources to Iowa to oppose her reelection in 2026. Ernst’s effort to “end Pete Hegseth,” Kirk posted on X in early December, “is a direct attempt to undermine the President and his voters. Pete Hegseth is the redline. If you vote against him, primaries will ensue.”

Trump’s team knew that once the most prominent MAGA figures began their onslaught, second-tier influencers would follow. Ernst called around to Trump allies, begging them to stop the attacks. But they wouldn’t relent; she voted to confirm Hegseth.

Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator and physician from Louisiana, also briefly found himself in the hot seat as he struggled with his confirmation vote on Kennedy, a vaccine critic who has misstated scientific findings, to lead the nation’s top health agency. (Cassidy was also viewed as a problem by Trump supporters because he’d voted to convict the president for his role in the January 6 insurrection.)

Cassidy ultimately supported Kennedy’s nomination, though he maintained that the vote had nothing to do with his own reelection prospects in 2026. Afterward, in the course of general conversations about the midterms, Cassidy’s team sought Trump’s support in his upcoming GOP primary. Trump told an aide to relay to Cassidy: “I’ll think about it.” (A Trump adviser told us that, for the moment, the president and Cassidy have reached “an uneasy détente.”)

Business leaders fell more quickly in line. After the election, they descended on Mar-a-Lago.

At dinner with Silicon Valley moguls, Trump would sometimes play “Justice for All”—a song by the J6 Prison Choir that features men imprisoned for their actions on January 6 singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” interspersed with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. One Trump adviser gleefully recounted how confused the tech billionaires appeared when “Justice for All” started, looking around for cues before inevitably rising and putting their hands over their hearts.

“The troll is strong,” the adviser told us.

The Thursday before the inauguration, a friend of Trump’s was sitting with him at Mar-a-Lago when the once and future president held up his phone to show off his recent-call log.

“Look who called in the past hour,” Trump boasted, then scrolled through a list that included Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tiger Woods. Apart from Woods, all were former Trump critics who, eight years earlier, had tried to keep their distance.

SHOCK AND AWE

The start of a new presidency is a famously harried and jury-rigged affair. But Trump and his team had spent his time out of office preparing for his return. Longwell, the anti-MAGA strategist, told us—echoing something our colleague David Frum had warned about four years ago—that watching Trump’s second-term team attack the federal bureaucracy was like watching “the velociraptors who have figured out how to work the doorknobs.” Day one of the second term, the product of weeks of meticulous planning, was all about—in the Trump team’s words—“shock and awe.” “We did all the immigration and border executive orders,” an adviser told us. “If we just left it at that, all the stories would have been about what bad people we are—we’re kicking people out of this country. But then right after he signed those border executive orders, bam: the J6 pardons.” The adviser explained that, along with Trump’s multiple speeches that day and inaugural balls that evening, this meant “the media had to choose what to cover. It’s either the J6 pardons or the immigration executive orders.” This convulsion of activity, the adviser told us, was all “planned”—designed to overwhelm.

“We have everyone kind of in the barrel, like everyone’s on the spin cycle, just getting whipped around, and that’s advantageous for us,” another adviser told us.

In his first term, Trump had floated the idea of buying Greenland—speaking of it almost offhandedly as a potentially intriguing if unusual real-estate acquisition. But now, even before taking office again, he had suggested that Canada should be America’s 51st state, threatened to reclaim the Panama Canal, and vowed to gain control of Greenland—“one way or the other,” as he would later put it. He followed this during his inaugural address by invoking “manifest destiny,” the 19th-century idea that the United States has a divinely ordained right to control North America.

“This time it’s ‘Hey, fuck you, Greenland’s ours,’ ” Bannon told us.

He added that many of the things that, in his first term, Trump had floated as provocations or trollings or idle musings are now things the president realizes he can actually do. “These are all doable,” Bannon told us. “When you’ve come back from such long odds, you clearly feel, ‘I can do anything.’ ”

In his first term, Trump and his team had not done certain things—fired key bureaucrats, upended certain alliances, overhauled various initiatives—because, as one former adviser told us, “we thought they were red-hot.

“And then you touch it,” the former adviser continued, “and you realize it’s actually not that hot.” This may be the key insight of Trump’s second term. The first time around, aides were constantly warning him that the stove was too hot. This time, no one is even telling him not to touch the stove.

Tradition holds that artists honored with lifetime-achievement awards at the Kennedy Center meet with the sitting president. During Trump’s first term, some of the most prominent artists refused to do so. He, in turn, didn’t attend a single performance there.

“I didn’t really get to go the first time, because I was always getting impeached or some bullshit, and I could never enjoy a show,” Trump said, according to an adviser familiar with the comments. But as planning for the second inauguration got under way, someone mentioned the possibility of holding an event there, impelling Trump to muse aloud about naming himself chairman of the Kennedy Center, a position that had long been held by the philanthropist and Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein. Trump ordered, “Call David Rubenstein and tell him he’s fired.”

Overnight, Trump’s cultural remit went from queuing oldies on his iPad on the patio of Mar-a-Lago to being chairman of the Kennedy Center, one of the nation’s premier arts institutions. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty)

Some of Trump’s advisers have learned to operate by an unofficial rule: They make sure to do things after he says them twice. This is a necessary and important rule because, as one adviser explained, “he says a lot of shit.” So the second time Trump mentioned wanting to take over the Kennedy Center, his aides got to work, and in early February, Trump fired most of the board and named himself chairman. His cultural remit had gone overnight from entertaining his aides by playing oldies on his iPad on the patio of Mar-a-Lago to being chairman of the board of one of the nation’s premier arts institutions.

One of the most chaotic departures from convention has been Elon Musk’s prominent role in the administration. The disruption Musk has unleashed through DOGE, putting swaths of government “into the wood chipper,” as he described it, has tended to obscure the fact that the richest man in the world, who is one of Trump’s biggest financial donors, is attending Cabinet meetings while continuing to run his private businesses, which benefit from billions of dollars in federal contracts. The conflicts of interest here run fathoms deep. But Trump has confidently normalized all of it, even going so far as to conduct an infomercial for Tesla on the White House grounds.

In previous presidencies, Musk’s role in the administration would have been a scandal that dominated the media and congressional hearings for months. In Trump’s second term, this—by design—gets drowned out by everything else.

So, too, does Trump’s complete departure from convention regarding the Justice Department, which has historically had some independence from the president. In April, Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate Chris Krebs, who in Trump’s first term ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which declared the 2020 election secure and Biden the legitimate winner. Trump, in short, wanted to prosecute Krebs for accepting reality. He has also made clear that he wants the attorney general to protect his supporters, including Musk, whose Tesla dealerships and charging stations have been targeted by vandals. “When I see things going on like what they’re doing to Elon, that’s terrible,” Trump told us. “That’s a terrible thing. That’s terrorism.”

Trump boasted to us of Musk’s private business successes as if they were his own. One of Musk’s companies, SpaceX, had just helped to retrieve astronauts who had been marooned for months on the International Space Station. “They don’t come out of there at some point, you know, the bones start to break down,” Trump said.

Trump marveled at the media’s coverage of the splashdown. “They said, ‘And the rocket’s coming down in the Gulf of America.’ They didn’t make a big deal. They didn’t say Trump named it,” he told us. “It was like it was old hat. And it’s been the Gulf of Mexico for hundreds of years, literally hundreds of years. The Gulf of Mexico, before our country was formed. It’s been a long time. And that’s good.”

“THAT IS NOT WHAT THEY SIGNED UP FOR”

For all of Trump’s success in dominating the political sphere, Democrats have grown more optimistic that his political fortunes may be changing. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who gave the Democratic rebuttal to Trump’s address to Congress in early March, told us that some of her constituents say their votes for Trump were born of despair. “They’ll say to me, ‘Look, it’s like I’m a Stage 4 cancer patient. My life has been getting worse, from my grandfather to my father, from my father to me, and my kids are going to do worse than me, so I need experimental chemo. Trump is my experimental chemo. It may hurt like hell. It may not work at all. But I’m at the end of my rope, and I’ll try anything.’ ”

We asked her whether now, several months into the second Trump administration, her constituents think the chemo is working. “I can’t tell you how many Trump voters have said to me, like, ‘Look, I voted for him to make the economy work. I did not vote for all of this craziness, and I certainly didn’t vote, for instance, for cuts to the VA,’ ” Slotkin said. “That is not what they signed up for.”

But in nearly every conversation we had with various Trump advisers, they told us that delivering on what people had voted for was in fact essential to holding the House and the Senate in the 2026 midterms. Trump himself has his eyes on a larger, long-term political realignment. “It’s a much different party,” he told us. “I got 38 percent of the male Black vote. Nobody knew that was possible. That’s a lot. I got 56 percent of Hispanics. How about that one? Every county along the Texas border is Hispanic. I won every one of them.” Though every single number he cited was wrong, the general thrust of his observation was correct.

Delivering on Trump’s campaign promises, his advisers told us, was the key not only to securing his legacy but to transforming the MAGA base into Republican voters for decades to come. (This project—persuading MAGA supporters to vote for Republicans even when Trump is not on the ballot—is a “central theme” of this presidency, one adviser repeatedly told us.) During the campaign and then the transition, Trump’s aides kept a shared document that meticulously cataloged and updated his promises for what he would do on day one, as well as what he’d promised to do more generally. The advisers we spoke with said that voters had absolutely known what they were asking for when they pulled the lever for Trump—and Trump’s team was determined to deliver.

But this is where the now nationally ingrained tendency to take Trump seriously but not literally may have created a disconnect between what Trump’s supporters thought they were voting for and what they are now getting, even among his most committed base. Over the years, Trump said many things that never came to fruition. Or he spoke with such hyperbole that everyone substantially discounted the reality of what he was ostensibly committing to. Or the policy implications of what he said would get obscured in the cloud of his ruminations about shark attacks and electrocutions and Hannibal Lecter—allowing voters to focus on what they liked and to ignore the riskier, more worrisome aspects of his promises. So although it’s true that Trump is delivering on commitments to impose tariffs, cut government waste, and aggressively deport immigrants, many of his voters are only now beginning to realize the effect these policies will have on their daily lives.

Several months into his second chance, the blitzkrieg of the early days continues—but it seems to be meeting more substantial resistance. Federal courts are once again blocking—or at least trying to block—Trump plans that flout the Constitution or stretch legal reasoning. The repeated rollouts and rollbacks and re-rollouts of his tariff measures have pushed the world toward an economic breaking point. (Even in the best-case scenario, any renaissance of the U.S. industrial base remains a long way off.) The Federal Reserve recently adjusted short-term-inflation projections higher, and GDP projections are getting lower. Financial analysts say the odds of a recession have risen significantly. The stock market just had its worst quarter in three years. When we talked with him in March, Trump had told us that Vladimir Putin “is going to be fine” in the Ukraine peace negotiations—but Putin has thwarted Trump’s promise of a quick deal. (“I’m trying to save a lot of lives in the world,” Trump told us. “You know, Ukraine and Russia—it’s not our lives, but it could end up in a Third World War.”)

The Signalgate fiasco appalled even a majority of Republicans. (Here Trump has so far stuck to his second-term policy of conceding essentially nothing, of never admitting weakness or a lie. To date, no one has been fired over Signalgate—though advisers we spoke with privately predicted that National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who inadvertently added The Atlantic’s editor in chief to the attack-planning chain, would exit the administration by the end of the year, if not much sooner.) Mass anti-Trump protests, notably absent during the first two months of this term, have become more frequent, including in red states.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Signalgate, Trump, and The Atlantic

Even as Trump continually seeks to expand his presidential powers, he at times seems to acknowledge that they have limits. In our March conversation, he seemed frustrated at the notion that a court might try to curb his ability to deport anyone he wanted, however he wanted. Yet when we asked if he would go so far as to actively disregard a judicial order, his answer suggested that he understood the Constitution would not allow that. “I think the judge is horrible,” he said, referring to James Boasberg, the federal-district-court judge who had tried to stop deportations of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. But Trump then referenced the Supreme Court’s more congenial opinion in Trump v. United States, which had given him immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he does as part of his core “official” duties as president. “But I’ve had a lot of horrible judges, and I won on appeal, right? I got immunity on appeal,” he said. He told us that the Court is “going to do what’s right” when reviewing his expansive use of executive power, and he spoke with uncharacteristic charity about the Court’s Democratic appointees. “I see them at the State of the Union, things that I do, and I think they’re very good people,” he said.

When questioned, Trump has sought to evade direct responsibility for individual deportations by his administration, legal challenges to which are wending their way through the courts.

“You know, I’m not involved in that. I have many people, many layers of people that do that,” Trump told us when we asked if he was worried that he may have mistakenly deported innocent people. “I would say they are all extremely tough, dangerous people. I would say that. And, don’t forget, they came in the country illegally.”

Trump’s advisers argue that, overall, the shock-and-awe approach is working. “Think about everything that’s happened immediately on immigration,” Cliff Sims told us. “Oh, we’re just going to ship gang members to a prison in El Salvador? ‘Sure.’ We’re going to send Tom Homan”—Trump’s border czar—“to kick down the door of every criminal illegally in the country? ‘Have at it.’ It is the ultimate example of the ruthless efficiency of Trump 2.0.”

“I got indicted five different times by five different scumbags, and they’re all looking for jobs now, so it’s one of those things. Who would have thought, right? It’s been pretty amazing.”

We asked Trump about the portraits on the walls of the Oval Office. Who, we wondered, had a legacy that he himself might like to have? “Ronald Reagan, I like in terms of style. But he was not good on trade—terrible on trade,” Trump replied. We pointed out that Reagan was also far more welcoming of immigrants. “Well, the toughest one in immigration was Eisenhower, believe it or not,” Trump said. “He was tough, and he just didn’t want people to come in illegally, like, you know, me. Well, I’m great on trade.”

Trump has also started talking publicly about running for a third term, which the Twenty-Second Amendment clearly prohibits. This started as joking comments with advisers—before making them, he would sometimes teasingly instruct the sober-minded Wiles, “Susie, close your ears”—but now seems to have become more serious. MAGA acolytes outside the administration have said they’ve been investigating ways of getting around the Twenty-Second Amendment, and an adviser acknowledged that if Trump thought a third term could somehow be made feasible, he would likely consider it.

We asked Trump about a rumor we’d heard that he had tasked his Justice Department with looking into the legality of his running again in 2028. He said he hadn’t, but then seemed to leave open the possibility. Was this the rare democratic norm he was unwilling to shatter? “That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it?” he mused, laughing. “Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter.” He noted, twice, that his supporters regularly shout for him to seek a third term, but concluded, “It’s not something that I’m looking to do. And I think it would be a very hard thing to do.” But not, it appears, a hard thing to profit from: The Trump Organization is now selling “Trump 2028” hats.

As a final question during our conversation in March, we asked the president whether he had concerns that his successor will follow his precedent and directly steer the powers of the presidency against his opponents, something he had accused Biden of doing against him. Wasn’t he laying the groundwork for an endless cycle of tit-for-tat retribution?

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve already gone through it,” the president told us. “I got indicted five different times by five different scumbags, and they’re all looking for jobs now, so it’s one of those things. Who would have thought, right? It’s been pretty amazing.”

Three weeks after our initial phone call, the political complexion of the moment seemed to have shifted rather dramatically, and we wondered if that had changed Trump’s thinking. So we called the president’s cellphone, hoping to ask some follow-up questions. He didn’t answer. We left a voicemail.

That night, Saturday, April 12, Trump traveled from Mar-a-Lago to Miami to watch the mixed-martial-arts spectacle of UFC 314. He entered the arena like a conquering general, surrounded by a coterie of Cabinet secretaries and other high-level advisers and officials. The cheers from the adoring fans were uproarious. After some of the fights, the winner would rush to the side of the ring where Trump was sitting, to demonstrate fealty.

When the fights were over, well after midnight, Trump’s motorcade headed back to Air Force One, at the Miami airport. The next morning, one of us awoke to find that, at 1:28 a.m., the president had called, just as the pool report showed he was getting back in his motorcade. He hadn’t left a message. Had he been calling to ask if we’d seen what had transpired—the display of obeisance from these gladiators, and from his base? Or was this merely a late-night pocket dial? His team declined to clarify.

We made another appeal for an in-person interview. Later that day, an aide told us Trump was denying our request. But the rejection came with a message from the president—a message, Trump specified, only for Michael, not Ashley, with whom he was still annoyed. If the article we were working on really told the remarkable story of how he had come back from the political dead, “maybe The Atlantic will survive after all.” As is often the case with Trump, his business advice could also be interpreted as a kind of a threat.

The president had one last message for us. “What can be said?” Trump had instructed his aide to tell us. “I won the election in a landslide, and there isn’t anyone who can say anything about that. What can they write about?”

We thought we’d finished our story. But for Trump, negotiation is a perpetual state, and nine days later, he reversed himself again. We were asked to report to the Oval Office on the afternoon of April 24 for the interview we had first requested two months earlier. Trump also invited the editor in chief of this magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, whom he had recently attacked as a “total sleazebag,” to join the meeting. Then, hours before we arrived, the president announced the interview to the world.

“I am doing this interview out of curiosity,” he wrote on Truth Social, “and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be ‘truthful.’ ” Goldberg, he added falsely, was a writer of “many fictional stories about me.” (Several White House aides, upon reading the message, joked about playing a prank on National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, the official who had accidentally added Goldberg to the Signal chat. “Tell Waltz to go into the Oval,” they dared one another, “but don’t tell him who’s in there.”)

“This will be very, very interesting,” Trump said, by way of greeting us as we approached the Resolute Desk. “You think Biden would do this? I don’t think so.”

In private, Trump often plays against the bombastic persona he projects in larger settings—at rallies, on television, on social media. He was launching a charm offensive, directed mainly at Goldberg. There was none of the name-calling or hostility he regularly levels at our magazine. He boasted about the 24-karat gold leaf he’d had imported from Palm Beach to decorate the Oval Office. “The question is: Do I do a chandelier?” he asked. “Beautiful crystal chandelier, top of the line.”

Radio Atlantic: In the Oval Office With Donald Trump

Over the next hour, we asked questions about America’s place in the world, the latest challenges to his administration, and his use of his powers to punish his enemies. He often avoided direct answers in order to recite lists of accomplishments. When pressed, he again committed to following the rulings of the Supreme Court. “You have to do that,” he said.

He also sought to distance himself from the most controversial parts of his own presidency. There are “two types of people,” he told us: those who want him to just focus on making the country great and those who want him to make the country great while simultaneously seeking retribution against his supposed persecutors.

“I am in the first group, believe it or not,” he said. (This was indeed difficult to believe, we interjected.) “But a lot of people that are in the administration aren’t. They feel that I was really badly treated.” In our presence, he seemed inclined to outsource his retributive id to others. But soon after we left the Oval Office, Trump sought to exact further political revenge on his foes by directing the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the main Democratic fundraising platform.

When we mentioned the turmoil at the Pentagon, including recent reporting that Pete Hegseth had installed a makeup room in the building, the president smiled. “I think he’s gonna get it together,” Trump said of Hegseth. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.” Trump also said that Waltz was “fine” despite being “beat up” by accidentally adding Goldberg to the Signal chat. What had Trump told his staff after the controversy? “Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?”

He spoke of his opposition with earnest befuddlement, if not actual pity. “I think that the Democrats have lost their confidence in the truest sense,” he said. “I don’t think they know what they’re doing. I think they have no leader. You know, if you ask me now, I know a lot about the Democrat Party, right? I can’t tell you who their leader is. I can’t tell you that I see anybody on the horizon.”

Trump pushed back on the notion, popular among some Wall Street analysts, that financial turmoil—plummeting markets, the threat of a recession, a weakened dollar—would cause him to roll back his tariff policies. “It always affects you a little bit,” he said, but there’s no red line, no “certain number” at which he would feel compelled to change course.

We asked about the concern that his administration was pushing the country toward authoritarianism, where politicians use the power of their office to punish their enemies for speaking their minds, as Trump was attempting to do to Chris Krebs, Harvard, law firms, universities, and news outlets. He did not answer the question directly, but instead talked about how he’d been wronged.

We pressed further, again bringing up his efforts to deport undocumented immigrants without due process. What would happen, we asked, if his administration accidentally got the wrong person—a legal resident, or even an American citizen? “Let me tell you that nothing will ever be perfect in this world,” he said.

Near the end of the interview, we asked Trump why, given that he’s now definitively won a second term, he can’t just let go of the claim that he won the 2020 election.

The president told us it would “be easier” for him to just accept our assertion. But he couldn’t. “I’m a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,” he said. “And I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart. I believe it with fact.”

“I’d like to say that that is reality,” Trump said. “Probably I do create some things, but I didn’t create that.”

Never mind that the votes had been counted, the court cases concluded. He was still trying to shift perceptions, make a sale, bend the world to his will.

This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “Donald Trump Is Enjoying This.”

The Atlantic · by Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer · April 28, 2025

5. Five key quotes from Trump's interview with The Atlantic

​A short summary of some of the highlights.

10 hours ago -Politics & Policy

Five key quotes from Trump's interview with The Atlantic

• Avery Lotz
• https://www.axios.com/2025/04/28/trump-interview-atlantic-first-100-days?utm

Cover: The Atlantic

President Trump mused on his political comeback and the first 100 days of his second term in a newly published interview with The Atlantic out Monday.

The big picture: The Atlantic's June cover story, "Donald Trump Is Enjoying This," lays out Trump's thinking in the lead up to his return to the White House. The magazine asked him about his embattled Pentagon chief, unpopular immigration crackdown and if he'll really seek a third term.

• The president met with representatives of the publication that dropped the biggest bombshell of his second term so far: Signalgate.
• "I am doing this interview out of curiosity, and as a competition with myself, just to see if it's possible for The Atlantic to be 'truthful,'" Trump said in a Truth Social post last week ahead of the sitdown.

Here are five key quotes from the president's interviews with The Atlantic.

1. "I run the country and the world"

Asked how his second term so far differed from his first, Trump said: "The first time, I had two things to do — run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys."

• "And the second time, I run the country and the world," he added.
• "I'm having a lot of fun, considering what I do ... You know, what I do is such serious stuff."

2. A third term "would be a big shattering"

Of a potential 2028 run, Trump told the magazine it "would be a big shattering."

• He continued, "Well, maybe I'm just trying to shatter." But Trump added, "It's not something that I'm looking to do. And I think it would be a very hard thing to do."
• That follows his comments from last month, when said he is "not joking" about a third term,

Reality check: Trump launching a bid for a third term wouldn't just shatter norms — it would violate the 22nd amendment.

• Meanwhile, the Trump Organization has started selling "Trump 2028" hats.

3. The billionaire class' "higher level of respect"

The billionaire class has largely bowed to Trump in his second term. He described the mega-rich taking a friendlier posture as "just a higher level of respect."

• "I don't know ... Maybe they didn't know me at the beginning, and they know me now," he continued.

Zoom in: Of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Trump said he's "100 percent. He's been great."

• He also praised Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a one-time-foe turned friend.

4. Hegseth will "get it together"

Despite fallout from the Signal scandal and turmoil at the Pentagon, Trump has stood by embattled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

• "I think he's gonna get it together," he said of Hegseth.
• He added, "I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him."

Zoom out: Trump also said that Mike Waltz, his national security adviser who accidentally added Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to the now-infamous group chat, was "fine" despite being "beat up" by the incident.

5. "Nothing will ever be perfect"

Trump was pressed on his administration's efforts to deport undocumented immigrants without due process and the possibility that a legal resident or American citizen could be accidentally removed — a hypothetical that advocates have said already happened.

• He replied, "Let me tell you that nothing will ever be perfect in this world."

Go deeper: Trump's boundary-breaking 100 days

6. Political Warfare against Intervention Forces

​The complete 22 page essay can be downloaded in PDF at this link:

https://media.defense.gov/2025/Apr/28/2003698966/-1/-1/1/FEATURE - CHAN & GERSHANECK DISCLAIMER.PDF/FEATURE - CHAN & GERSHANECK DISCLAIMER.PDF

​We ignore political warfare at our peril. We need to be able to conduct a superior form of political warfare. We must take a holistic approach to the full spectrum of warfare - nuclear warfare, conventional warfare, irregular warfare AND political warfare. And we must understand political warfare (in some form) will be conducted across the spectrum of conflict.

Political Warfare against Intervention Forces

• Published April 21, 2025
• By Prof. Kerry K. Gershaneck and Eric Chan
• https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/JIPA/Display/Article/4167178/political-warfare-against-intervention-forces/

Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs -- 

Click here for PDF version.

Abstract

Political warfare plays a central role in Chinese military operations. China is currently conducting a deliberate, multi-layered campaign designed to weaken Taiwan’s resolve and preempt US intervention. Through the “Three Warfares”—public opinion, psychological, and legal—Beijing employs influence operations, economic coercion, and military intimidation to shape the strategic environment in its favor. Rather than seeking a conventional military confrontation, the Chinese Communist Party aims to isolate Taiwan diplomatically, destabilize its internal politics, and deter foreign support through disinformation and gray-zone tactics. Should conflict arise, China’s political warfare will intensify, targeting US force mobilization, alliance cohesion, and domestic morale. The objective is clear: to make Taiwan’s subjugation appear inevitable and US resistance seem futile. Countering this strategy requires early recognition of China’s asymmetric approach and a proactive effort to harden Taiwan and US regional positions against coercion before Beijing sets the terms of engagement.

***

“All battles are won or lost in the mind.”

—Joan of Arc

Political warfare is the art of achieving strategic objectives through influence, subversion, and coercion. George Kennan, in a 1948 policy memorandum for the US Department of State, defined it as “the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.”1 His warning was aimed at Soviet operations, which he called “the most refined and effective of any in history.” But even as Kennan wrote this memo, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was proving that his definition was incomplete. The Party secured victory in the Chinese Civil War through battlefield successes empowered by political warfare, including the use of ideological subversion, propaganda, and coercion.2

With the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the subsequent dismantling of America’s own political warfare capabilities, Beijing has refined and expanded its political warfare strategies and tactics, securing strategic gains with little resistance. The militarization of the South China Sea is a textbook case. Declaring sovereignty over vast swaths of international waters, constructing artificial islands, and turning them into forward military bases—all accomplished without provoking a meaningful global response.3 Former US Assistant Secretary of Defense Wallace C. Gregson described it as “a feckless global response,” a verdict reinforced when the Obama administration failed to act after Xi Jinping publicly reneged on his 2015 pledge not to militarize the region.4 Beijing’s island-building campaign sent an unmistakable message: the United States was unwilling to confront the PRC in the South China Sea. The artificial islands, now fortified military outposts, serve a dual purpose: complicating US and allied access to the region while advancing the CCP’s broader objective of pushing the United States out of the Western Pacific.

This, in turn, sets the stage for Taiwan’s isolation and coercion into so-called “re-unification”—an outcome Xi has declared essential for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (中華民族偉大復興). The fall of Taiwan, whether through capitulation or after a failed US intervention, would reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait. It would fracture America’s global alliance network, hand the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) a dominant position in the First Island Chain, and cement PRC hegemony over the Indo-Pacific.5 Integrating Taiwan’s advanced semiconductor and technology sectors would supercharge China’s industrial base, narrowing the technological gap with the United States and accelerating Beijing’s challenge to American primacy on a global scale.

Yet Xi understands that political warfare alone may not be enough to bring Taiwan to heel—particularly after the CCP’s heavy-handed crackdown on Hong Kong’s 2019 protests reinforced Taiwanese skepticism of Beijing’s promises. The CCP has steadily dropped references to “peaceful reunification” from its official lexicon, signaling a shift in strategy. Instead of a high-risk full-scale invasion, Xi has pursued military coercion as a subset of political warfare, leveraging gray-zone tactics—constant pressure through military maneuvers, economic coercion, and disinformation—to wear down Taipei’s resistance while avoiding outright war. Since 2012, Beijing has refined this strategy, calibrating its actions to probe US and allied resolve while steadily tightening the noose around Taiwan.

Beijing’s early forays into gray-zone warfare were crude but effective—relying on fishing boats as proxies to maintain plausible deniability. Taiwan was not the initial target. Instead, China tested its coercive tactics on weaker regional actors. In 2012, at Scarborough Reef, the People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia (PAFMM) swarmed the area, blocking Philippine naval access while the Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) loitered nearby, ready to escalate if necessary. In 2014, a similar script played out when China deployed the Hai Yang Shi You 981 oil rig in contested waters near Vietnam. PAFMM vessels, again under CCG protection, rammed Vietnamese ships attempting to intervene.6

Beijing escalated its pressure campaign further in November 2013 by declaring an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea, covering the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands and overlapping existing ADIZs from South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.7 The move was more than symbolic. It laid the foundation for an aggressive airspace harassment campaign: People’s Liberation Army (PLA) incursions into Japan’s ADIZ surged from 96 in 2010 to 851 by 2016.8

Taiwan now bears the full weight of China’s gray-zone warfare. Over-fishing and sand-dredging degrade maritime resources, CCG “law enforcement patrols” assert Beijing’s claims, and PLA warplanes probe Taiwan’s defenses with near-daily ADIZ incursions. Joint coercion exercises, increasingly sophisticated and large-scale, send an unmistakable signal: China has calibrated its military posture to provide Xi with a menu of escalatory options, with the ability to credibly threaten full-scale war at short notice. 9

This strategy elevates political warfare to a central pillar of PLA operations, a fact often overlooked in conventional military assessments. This article examines the key facets of the PRC’s political warfare doctrine—particularly how Beijing might weaponize these tactics to disrupt and degrade US and coalition forces in the event of a Taiwan contingency.

7. FBI, national security agencies using polygraphs for ‘leak’ hunts

​Negative or unfavorable information versus classified information? It is a logical argument that if you expose ("leak?") embarrassing or negative information about the administration then you are working against it.

But for all those who are not exposing such information they are living in a toxic leadership environment with these measures in place. These tactics kind of influence the creation of resistance and insurgents. (COIN 101 - draconian population and resources control measures create more opposition than they can suppress, repress, and oppress).

But are we allowing our government to be run by someone like Laura Loomer?

Excerpts:

The combination of summary dismissals, polygraph threats and leak prosecutions has rattled the workforce.

“People are terrified,” said one former senior intelligence community lawyer who was involved in leak investigations under the Obama administration.

“The difference today is they are not looking only for people leaking classified information,” said the former official. “They are looking for people leaking negative information, which is not necessarily against the law,” he said, referring to information that the administration sees as embarrassing or that challenges its version of events.

At the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said one former official, dozens of veteran staffers — many disenchanted with the change in climate — recently left the agency, taking either a buyout or early retirement.

“There’s definitely a culture of fear that there will be personal retribution if they’re seen as in any way shining a light on, or sharing details about, what’s happening in the organization — not even sharing classified information,” the former official said.

...

One defense official said that amid the push to ferret out leaks and disloyalty, the four-star generals he works with have begun parroting Hegseth’s language — constantly talking about the need to be patriotic warfighters, for example. “They are using the right words so they don’t get fired,” said the official.

“In the past, candor was valued as a positive trait among military leaders,” a second defense official said. “Today, people no longer feel safe having an opinion that might be misconstrued as going against the [defense secretary] or the [president].”

This month, Loomer openly urged the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to “polygraph every single intelligence employee” in order to “clean house” of leakers, especially those who served under the Biden administration.

“Why are we waiting for something bad to happen?” Loomer posted on X.

FBI, national security agencies using polygraphs for ‘leak’ hunts

Current and former officials say the crackdown is creating a climate of fear and harming national security.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/28/leak-polygraph-fbi-justice-odni-dhs/?utm

April 28, 202

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Director Kash Patel attend a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on March 26. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

By Ellen Nakashima and Hannah Natanson

National security agencies across the Trump administration are ramping up investigations into alleged leaks to the news media, in some cases using polygraph tests that current and former officials say are creating a climate of fear and intimidation.

Sign up for Fact Checker, our weekly review of what's true, false or in-between in politics.

At FBI Director Kash Patel’s direction, the bureau in recent weeks has begun administering polygraphs to identify the source of information leaks, an FBI spokesperson said. The new use of polygraphs at the bureau, which are commonly known as “lie detector” tests, has not been previously reported.

“The seriousness of the specific leaks in question precipitated the polygraphs, as they involved potential damage to security protocols at the bureau,” said the spokesperson, who declined to elaborate.

The ramp-up has been bolstered by Attorney General Pam Bondi’s new legal guidelines that allow the Department of Justice to subpoena reporters’ personal communications and broaden the scope of potential criminal prosecution to leaks of not just classified material, but also “privileged and other sensitive” information that the administration says were “designed to sow chaos and distrust” in the government.

But current and former officials note that the broader scope could include information that is simply embarrassing or seen as undermining the administration’s views.

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“People are trying to keep their heads down,” said one former FBI field office head, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “Morale’s in the toilet. … When you see people who are being investigated, or names [of agents who worked on Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack cases] being passed over to the DOJ, it’s what the f---?”

At the Pentagon, embattled Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened the use of polygraphs, according to current and former officials, and has demanded that some senior department officials be administered lie detector exams, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

The sense of dread is palpable. Some officials who have left the government under a buyout and might normally feel less constrained about talking to the news media are refusing to speak while they are officially still on the payroll. Even contractors with security clearances say they can’t take any chances in case they get asked in their next polygraph test whether they’ve had contact with journalists.

“It’s a toxic environment,” said one official with a top-secret clearance. “First you’ve got the insecurity of not knowing whether you’re going to get fired or not. Then there’s the witch hunt to find the whistleblowers who are exposing the ineptitude and bad management of agencies. They’re trying to silence those who do not follow the party line.”

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This official and others pointed to the firing of Gen. Timothy Haugh, who until earlier this month led the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, as well as the dismissals and early retirements of dozens of experienced personnel at the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency, which the employees warn will leave critical infrastructure vulnerable to Russian, Chinese, North Korean and Iranian hackers.

Haugh, whose firing was not accompanied by any explanation, was dismissed by President Donald Trump for being “disloyal,” according to Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who urged Trump — in a highly unusual White House meeting — to remove him. The move drew outrage from Democratic lawmakers.

“This is pretty astounding, that the president has chosen to dismiss somebody as capable in such an important position as Gen. Haugh with the threats being as they are,” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pennsylvania) said in an interview this month.

In recent weeks, the Pentagon has been in turmoil over the forced departures of several of Hegseth’s top aides, allegedly over leaks to the news media that displeased the secretary and that involved “sensitive communications” with senior defense officials.

The combination of summary dismissals, polygraph threats and leak prosecutions has rattled the workforce.

“People are terrified,” said one former senior intelligence community lawyer who was involved in leak investigations under the Obama administration.

“The difference today is they are not looking only for people leaking classified information,” said the former official. “They are looking for people leaking negative information, which is not necessarily against the law,” he said, referring to information that the administration sees as embarrassing or that challenges its version of events.

At the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said one former official, dozens of veteran staffers — many disenchanted with the change in climate — recently left the agency, taking either a buyout or early retirement.

“There’s definitely a culture of fear that there will be personal retribution if they’re seen as in any way shining a light on, or sharing details about, what’s happening in the organization — not even sharing classified information,” the former official said.

One defense official said that amid the push to ferret out leaks and disloyalty, the four-star generals he works with have begun parroting Hegseth’s language — constantly talking about the need to be patriotic warfighters, for example. “They are using the right words so they don’t get fired,” said the official.

“In the past, candor was valued as a positive trait among military leaders,” a second defense official said. “Today, people no longer feel safe having an opinion that might be misconstrued as going against the [defense secretary] or the [president].”

This month, Loomer openly urged the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to “polygraph every single intelligence employee” in order to “clean house” of leakers, especially those who served under the Biden administration.

“Why are we waiting for something bad to happen?” Loomer posted on X.

Polygraph testing is required at large intelligence agencies for establishing eligibility for employment and continued access to classified materials. Such testing takes place generally every five years.

But polygraphs are not lie detectors, said Steven Aftergood, an expert on intelligence policy formerly with the Federation of American Scientists. “They are stress detectors. If for any reason the questions being posed are upsetting to an individual, your pulse might accelerate even if you’ve done nothing wrong. So polygraphs do not measure truth or falsity. They measure stress.”

Aftergood said they are prone to false positives and negatives, noting that former CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames famously passed two polygraph tests while spying for the Soviet Union. Ames is serving a life sentence in prison.

Nonetheless last month, the Department of Homeland Security began performing polygraph tests on employees to suss out who might be leaking to the news media information about immigration operations, NBC reported. Dozens of FEMA employees have been given lie detector tests, CNN reported this month.

Veteran intelligence and national security officials have lived through periodic clampdowns on leaks: The Obama administration brought more leak prosecutions than all previous administrations combined. And during the first Trump administration, which was one of the leakiest in modern history, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions warned that the “culture of leaking must stop.”

But none of those instances compares to the generalized sense of dread and frustration that the Trump administration is creating in agencies from the ODNI to the FBI to the Department of Defense, a number of officials and employees said.

“The agency heads are thin-skinned and fearful of adverse news coverage,” Aftergood said. “So, far from demonstrating strength, they are displaying political weakness.”

He pointed to Bondi’s memo that used as criteria for potential prosecution disclosures of information that “undermine President Trump’s policies.”

That presumes that the White House’s every utterance is “sacrosanct,” Aftergood said. “It’s like saying dissent will not be tolerated. It is both absurd and offensive.”

A second former intelligence official said colleagues who have taken early retirement offers have confided they’re leery of attending social gatherings such as farewell parties for fear of being monitored by private investigators. “They’re very anxious,” the former official said, and more guarded in what they say.

The chilling effect on the intelligence community is particularly disturbing, say current and former officials. “The culture of independence is so important,” said a third former intelligence official. “If you don’t have an intelligence community that is able to challenge the prevailing thought, then you are undermining the ability of the government to think critically on some of the most important issues.”

The irony is that CIA Director John Ratcliffe has vowed to make the agency less risk averse, yet “by creating this atmosphere of fear they’re actually making people more risk averse,” the former official said.

The former official noted the emails from leadership that directed employees to report on colleagues who were engaged in diversity, equity and inclusion activities. “They did this in the Soviet Union,” the former official said.

Dan Lamothe and Missy Ryan contributed to this report.

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By Ellen Nakashima

Ellen Nakashima is an intelligence and national security reporter at The Washington Post. She's been a member of three Pulitzer prizewinning teams, for probing the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the hidden scope of government surveillance. Send her secure tips on Signal at Ellen.626 follow on X@nakashimae

By Hannah Natanson

Hannah Natanson is a Washington Post reporter covering Trump's reshaping of the government and its effects. Reach her securely on Signal at 202-580-5477.follow on Xhannah_natanson

8. How data wrecked American warfare – Robert McNamara remade the military

​Does leadership trump data? Leadership remains essential. We must never forget that.

Excerpts:

Amid these challenges, leadership remains central. To wield quantitative tools effectively, a leader must master them, not be mastered by them. Leadership is not defined by the sophistication of systems but by the use of them toward chosen ends, requiring competence beyond the technical. Great leaders adapt, innovate, and operate beyond established scripts. Franklin D. Roosevelt, confronting the abyss of the Great Depression, improvised the New Deal not from orthodoxy but from experimentation, forging new institutions to match the crisis at hand. Dwight D. Eisenhower, wary of rigid doctrines during the Cold War, balanced deterrence with diplomacy, crafting a strategy of containment without cataclysm. In a different era, Václav Havel, playwright turned president, navigated Czechoslovakia’s peaceful transition from communism with strategic clarity and imagination, showing that leadership could be both principled and inventive. In a more ambiguous light, President Trump has pursued a policy of personal negotiation in the Ukraine war, advocating a peace plan that recognises Russian control over occupied territories, with the effectiveness of his approach yet to be determined.

Such figures continuously improvise, foster tight coordination, and explore uncharted territory. Unconstrained by prevailing models, they wield tools creatively within a larger vision, guided by wisdom and foresight. Leadership demands flexibility, vision, and the courage to pursue paths not yet mapped.

The allure of legibility — of reducing the world to what can be measured, managed, and optimised — remains potent. While McNamara left government in 1968 and assumed the presidency of the World Bank, the US military continues to operate within the framework he helped to establish. As illustrated by Afghanistan and the F-35, the armed forces still rely on the methods McNamara championed even as these tools repeatedly fail. The history of these efforts challenges us to reconsider the relationship between data and decision-making, efficiency and effectiveness, tools and leadership.

In the end, the persistence of rationalism confronts us with a question as urgent as any McNamara once charted on a graph: how do we harness analysis without becoming captive to its illusions? The answer is not more data, but deeper discernment, a leadership that sees beyond the spreadsheet, hears what the numbers cannot say, and resists mistaking clarity for truth. In every era, the temptation endures to confuse the map with the territory, the metric with the meaning. If McNamara’s story warns us of anything, it is that legibility is not understanding, and that wisdom begins where the numbers end.

How data wrecked American warfare 

Robert McNamara remade the military

'Robert S. McNamara articulated a vision of victory in Vietnam, speaking not of jungles, villages, or human lives, but of body counts, kill ratios, and sortie statistics.' 

https://unherd.com/2025/04/how-data-wrecked-american-warfare/?tl_groups%5B0%5D=18743&tl_inbound=1&tl_period_type=3&utm

Stephen Pimentel

April 25, 2025   7 mins

Standing before the White House press corps 60 years ago this weekend, Robert S. McNamara articulated a vision of victory in Vietnam, speaking not of jungles, villages, or human lives, but of body counts, kill ratios, and sortie statistics. For McNamara, success was quantifiable, shaped by metrics suitable for spreadsheets. Moulded by the techniques of Harvard Business School and the logistics of the Second World War, he believed that, with the right data, any problem could be solved.

As Secretary of Defense between 1961 and 1968, McNamara introduced systems analysis into decision-making, asserting that war could be rationalised and won through quantitative management that would later shape much of the activity of the American government. Vietnam became his proving ground, with progress measured by tons of bombs dropped, roads cleared, or Viet Cong killed. If the numbers looked good, so too would the future.

Yet the press conference betrayed the fragility of his vision, which mistook legibility for understanding. Beneath the seductive statistics lay deeper truths that were resistant to data’s neat columns. The jungle might be penetrated by special forces or removed by Agent Orange, but the culture and politics that flowed through it remained elusive. America’s failure to quell these currents would ultimately cost it the war.

McNamara’s tenure in Vietnam stands as a cautionary tale for rationalist governance, which seeks mechanistic mastery while ignoring human ambiguity. In confusing the map with the territory, McNamara charted not victory but a deepening mire. His story encapsulates the perennial tension in governance between legibility and judgement, data and reality. It is a tension we see today in Donald Trump’s tariff programme, which relies on a blunt economic formula being applied wholesale to scores of countries, irrespective of their particular relation to the US economy. It is also one we see in the work of DOGE, in which the multidimensional work of government agencies has been reduced as far as possible to a single dimension: cost.

Suggested readingVietnam still haunts America

By Dominic Sandbrook

Some institutions put legibility above all other considerations. On his way to the White House, McNamara ascended through a technocratic elite that, in this spirit, valued formal procedures and quantitative analysis. It was an elite he thrived in. Born in San Francisco in 1916, son of a shoe merchant, McNamara was an able student. By 1939, he had earned an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he absorbed the method of scientific management, an endeavour that seeks to transform human enterprises into optimisable systems. Specialising in case studies, McNamara dissected businesses into quantifiable parts, defeating ambiguity with numbers. In 1940, he returned as Harvard’s youngest and highest-paid assistant professor.

The Second World War tested these principles on a grand stage. In 1943, McNamara joined the Office of Statistical Control, applying analytical rigour to military logistics. There, he optimised bomber deployments and reduced aircraft losses for General Curtis LeMay in Southeast Asia. The mechanics of war became a statistical laboratory for McNamara, one that reaffirmed his faith in optimisation and data.

After the war, McNamara joined the Ford Motor Company with other wartime analysts — dubbed the “Whiz Kids” — and introduced statistical methods that streamlined production, improved inventory control, and analysed markets. Ford rebounded from financial struggles, becoming a model of corporate efficiency. President Kennedy, having read about McNamara’s brilliance in TIME magazine, hired him as Secretary of Defense in 1961.

McNamara was hailed as one of the “best and brightest” in government, a moniker that would later resound with irony. McNamara’s belief in the supremacy of quantitative analysis left little room for the qualitative dimensions of leadership — the interactions of culture, behaviour, politics — that eluded metrics. In the early Sixties, American involvement in the Vietnam War began to escalate. McNamara, a hawkish voice in Kennedy’s cabinet, would find his faith in data was tested against reality. His strategy of gradual escalation, designed to incrementally compel the North Vietnamese to capitulate, presumed that war was a machine that could be tuned for optimal results.

Quantitative metrics became the measure of success: body counts, sortie rates, bombing tonnage. Yet, reliance on these numbers obscured the true nature of the conflict. The data showed roads cleared and villages controlled, but could not capture the loyalties of Vietnamese elites or the political will that sustained the insurgency.

“Quantitative metrics became the measure of success: body counts, sortie rates, bombing tonnage.”

This focus on metrics induced distortions that exemplified Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Commanders inflated body counts; villages were bombed to produce favourable statistics, alienating populations. The numbers became a channel of deception, prioritising legibility over reality.

Even accurate metrics proved irrelevant. Body counts could not measure enemy resilience; bombing tonnage could not gauge political impact. By 1968, the mirage of legibility had begun to vanish. For all the metrics pushed in the right direction, the US was no closer to achieving its objectives. The gap between data and reality widened. As McNamara’s vision faltered, critics offered alternative frameworks. Among them, Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger advanced a realist approach that rejected McNamara’s technocratic abstraction in favour of judgement, restraint, and recognition of empirical reality.

Morgenthau’s view was that successful foreign policy required a deep understanding of power and human nature, not formulas and data. In his 1948 work Politics Among Nations, he argued that national interest — not ideology or numerical targets — should guide policy. Morgenthau entered government service during the Kennedy administration and stayed to serve Johnson, but was dismissed on account of his criticism of McNamara’s reliance on metrics. Morgenthau became one of the most public critics of the war.

Henry Kissinger, who came to prominence during the Nixon administration, similarly embodied the realist tradition, though his methods were more controversial. His policy of Vietnamisation, which sought to transfer combat responsibilities to South Vietnamese forces, reversed McNamara’s strategy of incremental escalation. As National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State under Nixon, Kissinger sought to extricate the US from Vietnam, not through a decisive military victory, but through a combination of negotiation, battlefield manoeuvring, and pragmatic compromise. His strategy acknowledged the political realities on the ground and the limits of US power, focusing on achieving a “decent interval” that would allow an orderly withdrawal while maintaining American credibility. He prioritised détente with China and the Soviet Union, seeking to isolate North Vietnam diplomatically. Kissinger’s handling of Vietnam, including the Paris Peace Accords, reflected an awareness that wars are ended through political settlements, however imperfect. Realism, embodied by Morgenthau and Kissinger, valued prudence over certainty, judgement over the illusion of control. Kissinger had it that, in the end, McNamara “repeatedly implored” him to negotiate an end to the war.

Suggested readingThe tragedy behind Kissinger's realpolitik

By Robert D. Kaplan

Though the US withdrew its combat troops in 1973, the war’s epilogue was written not on the battlefield but in the halls of Congress. Under the Case-Church Amendment, Congress cut off funding for further military involvement, and in 1975, South Vietnam — lacking US support — succumbed to a full-scale North Vietnamese invasion. Yet even as Saigon fell, McNamara’s rationalist methods endured, resurfacing in later military strategies and institutional management, continually exposing the limits of quantitative rationalism.

The strategy, and its failings, endured into the 21st century. Following 9/11, US responses in Afghanistan and Iraq repeated past technocratic errors. Databases became a cornerstone of counterinsurgency efforts, cataloguing everything from drone strike targets to population movements. Advanced surveillance tools allowed the collection of vast amounts of information, and algorithms promised to detect patterns and identify threats with precision. While these systems provided tactical advantages, they exposed rationalism’s limits in asymmetric warfare. Metrics like insurgents killed or districts cleared echoed the body count metric used in Vietnam, but took no account of the ethnic grievances fuelling the insurgencies. As a result, these tools yielded tactical victories but strategic stagnation. The deeper causes of hostility remained untreated.

Beyond battlefield strategy, the technocratic emphasis on theoretical efficiency, often measured through projected cost savings and unified platforms, has persisted in American defence procurement — to America’s detriment. We can see this in the development of the F-35 joint strike fighter. Conceived as a universal platform intended to streamline production and serve multiple military branches, the F-35 instead faced significant delays, cost overruns, and design compromises, all of which stemmed from its attempt to satisfy varied, often conflicting, operational requirements. The programme became a case study in how theoretical efficiency, pursued through complex system integration, could result in a product that was over-engineered and operationally challenged.

The contemporary reach of technocratic rationalism extends beyond military hardware, shaping education, climate policy, and public health. Educational policy increasingly rests on standardised testing and performance metrics, numerical indicators designed to capture student achievement and institutional quality. Such metrics promise clarity and accountability but frequently incentivise reductive practices — teaching to the test, narrowing curricula, and prioritising quantifiable short-term outcomes over actual educational attainment. Similarly, the global response to climate change hinges on carbon accounting and emissions targets, quantifiable benchmarks intended to guide environmental stewardship. Yet these numeric frameworks, focused solely on domestic figures, can foster practices that are both superficial and deceptive. “Carbon outsourcing”, for instance, allows a nation to lower its reported emissions by shifting heavy industry abroad, while continuing to import and consume the goods produced there.

“The contemporary reach of technocratic rationalism extends beyond military hardware, shaping education, climate policy, and public health.”

Such manoeuvres meet the quantitative target but merely displace the environmental cost, creating an illusion of progress rather than reducing net emissions. Perhaps most vividly, the Covid pandemic highlighted the limitations inherent in the technocratic approach, as policymakers leaned heavily on epidemiological models to dictate broad social measures. Although models provided important guidance, their reductive assumptions about human behaviour and societal response fostered rigid policies that induced political polarisation, economic harm, and social fatigue. The Trump administration’s tariffs programme is itself a response to an over-reliance on simple metrics. The architects of Nafta had economic growth in mind when they designed the project, but did not fully understand the resentment that would arise as a result of the consequent relocation of manufacturing.

Amid these challenges, leadership remains central. To wield quantitative tools effectively, a leader must master them, not be mastered by them. Leadership is not defined by the sophistication of systems but by the use of them toward chosen ends, requiring competence beyond the technical. Great leaders adapt, innovate, and operate beyond established scripts. Franklin D. Roosevelt, confronting the abyss of the Great Depression, improvised the New Deal not from orthodoxy but from experimentation, forging new institutions to match the crisis at hand. Dwight D. Eisenhower, wary of rigid doctrines during the Cold War, balanced deterrence with diplomacy, crafting a strategy of containment without cataclysm. In a different era, Václav Havel, playwright turned president, navigated Czechoslovakia’s peaceful transition from communism with strategic clarity and imagination, showing that leadership could be both principled and inventive. In a more ambiguous light, President Trump has pursued a policy of personal negotiation in the Ukraine war, advocating a peace plan that recognises Russian control over occupied territories, with the effectiveness of his approach yet to be determined.

Such figures continuously improvise, foster tight coordination, and explore uncharted territory. Unconstrained by prevailing models, they wield tools creatively within a larger vision, guided by wisdom and foresight. Leadership demands flexibility, vision, and the courage to pursue paths not yet mapped.

The allure of legibility — of reducing the world to what can be measured, managed, and optimised — remains potent. While McNamara left government in 1968 and assumed the presidency of the World Bank, the US military continues to operate within the framework he helped to establish. As illustrated by Afghanistan and the F-35, the armed forces still rely on the methods McNamara championed even as these tools repeatedly fail. The history of these efforts challenges us to reconsider the relationship between data and decision-making, efficiency and effectiveness, tools and leadership.

In the end, the persistence of rationalism confronts us with a question as urgent as any McNamara once charted on a graph: how do we harness analysis without becoming captive to its illusions? The answer is not more data, but deeper discernment, a leadership that sees beyond the spreadsheet, hears what the numbers cannot say, and resists mistaking clarity for truth. In every era, the temptation endures to confuse the map with the territory, the metric with the meaning. If McNamara’s story warns us of anything, it is that legibility is not understanding, and that wisdom begins where the numbers end.

Stephen Pimentel is an engineer and essayist in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s interested in the classics, political philosophy, governance futurism, and AI.

9. The Kellogg Framework Is A Disaster For Trump – OpEd

​As an aside, the political warfare described in Washington must not be confused with real political warfare that must be conducted internationally. Partisan infighting is not political warfare in the Kennan sense. Unfortunately partisan fighting is what comes to mind for most Americans when they hear "political warfare."

Excerpts:

Rubio subsequently passed details of the plan to Russian FM Lavrov, who calmly stated that any ceasefire plan should resolve the underlying causes to the conflict in Ukraine as its first task.

Witkoff flies to Moscow this week to present this ‘pig’s ear’ of a plan to Putin – seeking his consent. The Europeans and Ukrainians are set to meet next Wednesday in London to give their riposte to Trump.

What’s next? Most obviously, the Kellogg Plan will not ‘fly’. Russia will not accept it, and likely Zelensky will not either, (though the Europeans will work to persuade him – hoping to ‘wrong-foot Moscow’ by presenting Russia as the essential ‘spoiler’). Reportedly, Zelensky already has rejected the Crimea provision.

For the Europeans, the lack of security guarantees or backstop by the U.S. may prove to be a killer for their aspiration to deploy a tripwire troop deployment to Ukraine, in the context of a ceasefire.

Is Trump really going to wash his hands of Ukraine? Doubtful, given that the U.S. neo-conservative institutional leadership will tell Trump that to do so, would weaken America’s ‘peace through strength’ narrative. Trump may adopt supporting Ukraine ‘on a low flame’ posture, whilst declaring the ‘war was never his’ – as he seeks a ‘win’ on the business front with Russia.

The bottom line is that Kellogg has not well-served his patron. The U.S. needs effective working relations with Russia. The Kellogg contingent has contributed to Trump’s egregious misreading of Russia. Putin is a serious actor, who says what he means, and means what he says.

The Kellogg Framework Is A Disaster For Trump – OpEd

https://www.eurasiareview.com/28042025-the-kellogg-framework-is-a-disaster-for-trump-oped/?utm

 April 28, 2025  0 Comments

By Alastair Crooke

Political warfare in Washington is endemic. But the body count at the Pentagon has started to rise precipitously. Three of Secretary of Defence Hegseth’s top advisors were placed on leave, and then fired. The war continues, with the Secretary now in the firing line.

Why this matters is that the Hegseth attrition comes amid fierce internal debates in the Trump administration about Iran policy. Hawks want an definitive elimination of all Iran’s nuclear and weapons capabilities, whilst many ‘restrainers’ warn against military escalation; Hegseth reportedly was amongst those warning against an intervention in Iran.

The recent Pentagon dismissals have all been identified as restrainers. One of the latter, Dan Caldwell, formerly Hegseth’s Top Adviser and an army veteran, wrote a post slamming the ‘Iran Hawks’ – and subsequently was fired. He was later interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Notably, Caldwell describes in scathing terms America’s wars in Iraq and Syria (“criminal”). This adverse sentiment concerning America’s earlier wars is a rising theme, it seems, amongst U.S. Vets today.

The three Pentagon staffers essentially were fired, not as ‘leakers’, but for talking Hegseth out of supporting war on Iran, it would appear; the Israeli-Firsters, have not given up on that war.

The inflamed fault lines between hawks and traditionalist ‘Republicans’ bleed across into the Ukraine issue, even if the faction membership may alter a tad. Israeli-Firsters and U.S. hawks more generally, are behind both the war on Russia and the maximalist demands on Iran.

Conservative commentator Fred Bauer observes that when it comes to Trump’s own war impulses, they are conflicted:

“Influenced by the Vietnam War of his youth … Trump seems deeply averse to long-term military conflicts, yet, at the same time, Trump admires a politics of strength and swagger. That means taking out Iranian generals, launching airstrikes on the Houthis, and boosting the defence budget to $1 trillion”.

Hegseth’s potential exit – should the campaign for his removal succeed – could cause the struggle to grow fiercer. Its first casualty is already apparent – Trump’s hope to bring a quick end to the Ukraine conflict is over.

This week, the Trump team (including both warring factions, Rubio, Witkoff and General Kellogg) met in Paris with various European and Ukrainian representatives. At the meeting, a Russian-Ukrainian unilateral ceasefire proposal was mooted by the U.S. delegation.

After the meeting, at the airport, Rubio plainly said that the ceasefire plan was ‘a take-it-or-leave-it’ U.S. initiative. The various sides – Russia, Kiev and the European members of the ‘coalition of the willing’ – had only days to accept it, or else the U.S. was ‘out’, and would wash its hands of the conflict.

The framework presented, as reported, is almost (maybe 95%) unadulteratedly that previously proposed by General Kellogg: i.e. it is his plan, first aired in April 2024. It appears that the ‘Kellogg formula’ was adopted then as the Trump platform (Trump was at the time in mid-campaign, and unlikely to have been following the complicated minutiae of the Ukraine war too closely).

General Kellogg is also the likely source for Trump’s optimism that the ending to the Ukraine war could come with a click of Trump’s fingers – through the limited application of asymmetric pressures and threats on both belligerents by Trump – and with the timing decided in Washington.

In short, the plan represented a Beltway consensus that the U.S. could implement a negotiated end-state with terms aligned to U.S. and Ukrainian interests.

Kellogg’s implicit assumptions were that Russia is highly vulnerable to a sanctions threat (its economy perceived as being fragile); that it had suffered unsustainably high casualties; and that the war was at a stalemate.

Thus, Kellogg persuaded Trump that Russia would readily agree to the ceasefire terms proposed – albeit terms that were constructed around patently flawed underlying assumptions about Russia and its presumed weaknesses.

Kellogg’s influence and false premises were all too evident when Trump, in January, having stated that Russia had lost one million men (in the war) then went on to say that “Putin is destroying Russia by not making a deal, adding (seemingly as an aside), that Putin may have already made up his mind ‘not to make a deal’”. He further claimed that Russia’s economy is in ‘ruins’, and most notably said that he would consider sanctioning or tariffing Russia. In a subsequent Truth Social post, Trump writes, “I’m going to do Russia – whose Economy is failing – and President Putin, a very big FAVOR”.

All of Kellogg’s underlying assumptions lacked any basis in reality. Yet Trump seemingly took them on trust. And despite Steve Witkoff’s subsequent three lengthy personal meetings with President Putin, in which Putin repeatedly stated that he would not acceptany ceasefire until a political framework had been first agreed, the Kellogg contingent continued to blandly assume that Russia would be forced to accept Kellogg’s détente because of the claimed serious ‘setbacks’ Russia had suffered in Ukraine.

Given this history, unsurprisingly, the ceasefire framework terms outlined by Rubio this week in Paris reflected those more suited to a party at the point of capitulation, rather than that of a state anticipating achieving its objectives – by military means.

In essence, the Kellogg Plan looked to bring a U.S. ‘win’ on terms aligned to a desire to keep open the option for continuing attritional war on Russia.

So, what is the Kellogg Plan? At base, it seeks to establish a ‘frozen conflict’ – frozen along the ‘Line of Conflict’; with no definitive ban on NATO membership for Ukraine, (but rather, envisaging a NATO membership that is deferred well into the future); it places no limits on the size of a future Ukrainian army and no restrictions on the type or quantity of armaments held by the Ukrainian forces. (It foresees, contrarily, that after the ceasefire, the U.S. might re-arm, train and militarily support a future force) – i.e. back to the post-Maidan era of 2014.

In addition, no territory would be ceded by Ukraine to Russia, save for Crimea which alone would be recognised by the U.S. as Russian (the unique sop to Witkoff?), and Russia would only ‘exercise control’ over the four Oblasts that it currently claims, yet only up to the Line of Conflict; territory beyond this line would remain under Ukrainian control (see here for the ‘Kellogg map’). The Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant would be neutral territory to be held, and managed, by the U.S. There is no mention made of the cities of Zaporozhye and Kherson that have been constitutionally incorporated into Russia, but lie beyond the contact line.

Nothing about a political solution apparently was outlined in the plan, and the plan leaves Ukraine free to pursue its claim to all Ukraine’s former territories – save for only Crimea.

Ukrainian territory west of the Dnieper River however, would be divided into three zones of responsibility: British, French and German zones (i.e. which NATO forces would manage). Finally, no American security guarantees were offered.

Rubio subsequently passed details of the plan to Russian FM Lavrov, who calmly stated that any ceasefire plan should resolve the underlying causes to the conflict in Ukraine as its first task.

Witkoff flies to Moscow this week to present this ‘pig’s ear’ of a plan to Putin – seeking his consent. The Europeans and Ukrainians are set to meet next Wednesday in London to give their riposte to Trump.

What’s next? Most obviously, the Kellogg Plan will not ‘fly’. Russia will not accept it, and likely Zelensky will not either, (though the Europeans will work to persuade him – hoping to ‘wrong-foot Moscow’ by presenting Russia as the essential ‘spoiler’). Reportedly, Zelensky already has rejected the Crimea provision.

For the Europeans, the lack of security guarantees or backstop by the U.S. may prove to be a killer for their aspiration to deploy a tripwire troop deployment to Ukraine, in the context of a ceasefire.

Is Trump really going to wash his hands of Ukraine? Doubtful, given that the U.S. neo-conservative institutional leadership will tell Trump that to do so, would weaken America’s ‘peace through strength’ narrative. Trump may adopt supporting Ukraine ‘on a low flame’ posture, whilst declaring the ‘war was never his’ – as he seeks a ‘win’ on the business front with Russia.

The bottom line is that Kellogg has not well-served his patron. The U.S. needs effective working relations with Russia. The Kellogg contingent has contributed to Trump’s egregious misreading of Russia. Putin is a serious actor, who says what he means, and means what he says.

Colonel Macgregor sums it up thus:

“Trump tends to view the world through the lens of dealmaking. [Ending the Ukraine war] is not about dealmaking. This is about the life and death of nations and peoples. There’s no interest in some sort of short-fused deal that is going to elevate Trump or his administration to greatness. There will be no win for Donald Trump personally in any of this. That was never going to be the case”.

• This article was published at Strategic Culture

Alastair Crooke

Alastair Crooke is a former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.

10. Niall Ferguson: Donald Trump Is Crushing His To-Do List

​Another roll-up of the first 100 days.

Excerpts:

But I did, because I thought Trump would win—and because I wanted to know what he would do. Here’s a representative sample:

• “Protecting Students from the Radical Left and Marxist Maniacs Infecting Educational Institutions”
• “Cementing Fair and Reciprocal Trade with the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act”
• “Using Impoundment to Cut Waste, Stop Inflation, and Crush the Deep State”
• “Ending Citizenship for Children of Illegals and Outlawing Birth Tourism”
• “Reverse Biden’s [Executive Order] Embedding Marxism in the Federal Government”
• “Slashing Biden’s Disastrous Trade Deficits”
• “New Trade Plan to Protect American Workers”
• “Protecting Americans from Radical Leftist [Environmental, Social, and Governance] Investments”
• “Protect Children from Left-Wing Gender Insanity”
• “Stop China from Owning America”

One day, historians will refer to this as the most consequential to-do list in American history. And, in his first 100 days back in the White House, Donald Trump has crushed that list.

Niall Ferguson: Donald Trump Is Crushing His To-Do List

But is he crushing the economy in the process?

By Niall Ferguson

04.28.25 — U.S. Politics

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-donald-trump-first-hundred-days

(Illustration by The Free Press; President Trump image by Joe Raedle via Getty Images)

0:00

-22:37

It always shocks me when people say they are shocked by Donald Trump. The president told us exactly what he was going to do. All you had to do was look.

By my count, there were 37 short but tightly scripted videos, recorded between December 2022 and December 2023, in which the then-candidate previewed just about every move he has made since his inauguration 100 days ago.

Because Kamala Harris had no policy ideas of her own, her campaign made almost no reference to these videos, which may be why so few people watched them.

But I did, because I thought Trump would win—and because I wanted to know what he would do. Here’s a representative sample:

• “Protecting Students from the Radical Left and Marxist Maniacs Infecting Educational Institutions”
• “Cementing Fair and Reciprocal Trade with the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act”
• “Using Impoundment to Cut Waste, Stop Inflation, and Crush the Deep State”
• “Ending Citizenship for Children of Illegals and Outlawing Birth Tourism”
• “Reverse Biden’s [Executive Order] Embedding Marxism in the Federal Government”
• “Slashing Biden’s Disastrous Trade Deficits”
• “New Trade Plan to Protect American Workers”
• “Protecting Americans from Radical Leftist [Environmental, Social, and Governance] Investments”
• “Protect Children from Left-Wing Gender Insanity”
• “Stop China from Owning America”

One day, historians will refer to this as the most consequential to-do list in American history. And, in his first 100 days back in the White House, Donald Trump has crushed that list.

You are entitled to criticize President Trump—and I do, regularly. But you cannot accuse him of overpromising and underdelivering.

Since his second inauguration, the president has issued no fewer than 211 executive actions (including executive orders, proclamations, and memoranda). Around a quarter of these addressed aspects of the federal government, including seven aimed at curtailing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The rest have been concerned with the economy, energy, immigration, national security, education, foreign policy, and health. Almost all of these actions were prefigured on Trump’s campaign website.

Not since the first year of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term in 1933 has an administration engaged in such frenetic activity. If he keeps it up for the rest of the year, Trump may even beat FDR’s record-breaking average of 307 executive orders a year.

There, however, the resemblance ends. For, if FDR’s goal was to enlarge the federal government, Trump’s New Deal is designed to shrink it.

The question, as we look beyond the first 100 days, is how far can a chronically understaffed administration with wafer-thin majorities in Congress achieve such a counterrevolution in government while at the same time pursuing a parallel counterrevolution in U.S. trade policy? The economic consequences of Trump’s attempt to turn back the tariff clock by roughly a century are already manifesting themselves.

Trump is crushing his to-do list. The question for the rest of us is whether or not he will crush the economy, too.

The way to assess the performance of something as complex as a new administration is to look not only at its stated intentions but also at its execution. Personnel, policy, and process are the essential ingredients.

Personnel

One distinctive feature of the Trump administration is that a combination of inertia and design have made this the most understaffed government in modern American history.

So far, the administration has nominated 279 individuals to fill the roughly 1,300 posts that require Senate confirmation. Of these, just 53 have been confirmed by the Senate. At the same time, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has spent a hundred days firing thousands of federal employees, in a purge unlike anything the Beltway has seen in a generation. Anyone who visits the corridors of power these days finds them eerily empty. The Eisenhower Executive Office Building is a ghost town. The National Security Council is a shell.

This unstaffed administration is able both to move fast and to break things—though not quite in the way the president’s red-pilled Silicon Valley allies envisaged. They were shooting for creative destruction; but there is such a thing as destructive destruction.

The hope that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles would impose some kind of discipline on who has access to the president has been disappointed. The worst damage has been caused by Peter Navarro’s encouragement of the president to live out his “Tariff Man” fantasies. This has necessitated a good deal of firefighting by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett. The battle over trade policy has also caused a rift between Bessent and Musk, whose unintended role as a lightning rod for anti-administration sentiment is shortening his time at the head of DOGE, not least by driving down the Tesla stock price. Trump is not the first president to sideline his secretary of state. If anything, Marco Rubio is faring somewhat better than, say, William Rogers did under Richard Nixon. The real problem is that the National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz, is not playing the Henry Kissinger role, but has been sidelined in favor of Steve Witkoff, whose hapless attempts to broker a Ukraine ceasefire with President Vladimir Putin recall the negotiations between First Little Piggy and the Big Bad Wolf.

Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are mired in twin crises—one over their ability to communicate securely, the other over their ability to manage their own agencies. Waltz’s National Security Council is reeling from a series of presidential firings, several of them recommended by Laura Loomer, the far-right conspiracy theorist whom Wiles was apparently unable to keep out of the Oval Office. Hegseth, meanwhile, stands accused of having plunged the Pentagon into “disarray.”

Policy and Process

Disarray, at least, shows signs of life. Trump’s legislative agenda risks being DOA.

Almost none of the president’s agenda is going through Congress, including stuff such as tariffs that the Constitution assigns to the legislature (Article I, Section 8, look it up). With slim majorities in both chambers, Republicans are betting on “one big beautiful [tax] bill” that will extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts; add some new tax cuts; increase the debt limit; boost spending on border security and defense—while also cutting some discretionary spending. Good luck to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson. If they can pass such a catchall bill this year, it will be the first miracle in history to occur on Capitol Hill.

While the House and Senate are roughly aligned on tax cuts, they are far apart on spending cuts, with the fiscal hawks in the lower chamber shooting for $1.5 trillion in reduced outlays, compared with the paltry $4 billion envisioned by GOP senators. Fights are looming over Medicaid cuts, the tax breaks in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the state and local tax deduction, and the top marginal tax rate.

The bottom line: It is very unlikely that the Trump administration will achieve much in the way of deficit reduction this year. During the campaign, Trump vowed that DOGE would find savings of up to $2 trillion. That target had been halved by January 30. Now we are looking at just $150 billion of savings, of which just $63 billion are itemized. Turns out, the main driver of the federal deficit is not a wasteful bureaucracy but the ever-rising cost of Social Security and Medicare, two entitlement programs Trump has pledged to leave untouched. (Who knew?) Monthly federal outlays for February and March are higher than they were in the same period last year and in 2023.

On fiscal policy, to put it bluntly, the first hundred days have been a fail.

The same cannot be said on the key issue of illegal immigration. According to data from Customs and Border Protection, “encounters” on the border in the first two months of Trump’s second term were down nearly 90 percent compared with the same period last year. That looks like an A+ for Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, even if there are clearly going to be legal battles over such cases as that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who almost certainly should not have been deported to El Salvador. Still, you get the feeling Miller relishes such cases. The whole point is to signal to anyone contemplating a border crossing: Don’t risk it. Wherever you are now is better than the brutal Salvadoran prison where Abrego Garcia is being held.

A similar intent to intimidate lies behind the administration’s onslaught against the universities. It ought to be an unmitigated cause for celebration that the Trump administration is acting to curb the excesses of the “progressive” elements in our higher education system. On a wide range of issues—from the prevalence of antisemitism on campuses, to the various forms of discrimination dressed up as affirmative action and DEI, to the questionable role played by some accreditors—Trump is in the right.

The problem is that, in practice, research scientists appear to be paying the price of ideological excesses that mainly emanated from humanities departments and centers for “grievance studies.” I have somewhat limited sympathy for the STEM professors, who were conspicuously absent or silent when their colleagues from anthropology and gender studies were trashing academic freedom, harassing conservative scholars, and lowering academic standards. The scientists acquiesced in the overt politicization of their universities, never considering that there might one day be a price to pay. Yet the U.S. still benefits enormously from federal funding of scientific research. This is not the part of higher education where the cancer is located.

The other obvious danger is that, by seeking to dictate how Harvard University runs its affairs, the administration is not only overstepping the limits on its constitutional authority, but also ensuring that the worst elements within Harvard can portray themselves as heroic opponents of the detested Trump and thereby evade long-overdue internal reforms.

I have a similar ambivalence about the Trump administration’s foreign policy. Its predecessor was guilty of an infuriating succession of failures of deterrence. But how much of an improvement are we seeing?

The president now claims that he was only jesting with his campaign pledge to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours. That’s good, because no one took it seriously. The key question remains how far he and his administration are willing to lean on the Russian government the way they have leaned on the Ukrainians. We saw the first signs of presidential impatience with Putin last week. But I remain to be convinced that a lasting ceasefire, much less a lasting peace, can be achieved without sustained economic and military pressure on Moscow. Trump should want Ukraine to be South Korea; he risks leaving it as South Vietnam.

In the Middle East, I am equally skeptical about the president’s apparent inclination to resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal that he killed in his first term. I still think the likely outcome in the coming months is an Israeli attack, with tacit U.S. support, on Iran’s nuclear sites. But the longer this is postponed, the less successful it will surely be. Every week that passes gives Tehran time to repair its air defenses, devastated by the Israeli Air Force six months ago.

Yet the biggest foreign-policy puzzle is whether Trump can succeed in reducing America’s reliance on China for critical imports, while simultaneously waging trade wars with America’s principal allies—and everyone else, too.

And that brings us to the most worrisome part of the first hundred days: The economic consequences of Trump’s tariffs.

The Worst Thing So Far—By Far

Trump told us that the most beautiful word in the English language was tariff. And he made no secret of his intention to use tariffs as a negotiating lever, as a kind of economic sanction, and as a source of revenue. What was impossible to foresee was how soon in his second term he would deploy tariffs, how aggressively, and how chaotically.

He opened by hitting Mexico, Canada, and then China with a succession of punitive levies. But Liberation Day—April 2—was when Trump unveiled his reciprocal tariffs on all the countries with which the United States trades, plus a few non-sovereign territories (including one island inhabited solely by penguins).

It took some time for analysts to work out what had happened. The president wanted reciprocal tariffs. Overstretched staffers ended up asking artificial intelligence to come up with something that fulfilled Trump’s criteria. The formula the large language models spat out originated in a paper by Peter Navarro, the only economist in the world who shares Trump’s view that all our bilateral goods trade deficits are a problem (as opposed to our aggregate current account deficit).

The result was one of the great fiascos in the history of modern economic policy. Combined with the tariffs Trump imposed on China—which were so punitive as to amount to a trade embargo—Liberation Day triggered panic in financial markets.

For several days, the world teetered on the brink of a financial crisis as bonds and the dollar both sold off—a combination rarely seen, save in times of extreme market distress. At lunchtime on April 9, a 2008-level crisis was averted when Trump postponed the reciprocal tariffs for 90 days. Two days later, he exempted electronics from his tariffs, including those on China.

Even after these concessions, however, the United States remains a radically more protectionist country than it was prior to Trump’s second inauguration. The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the overall average effective U.S. tariff rate is now 28 percent, the highest since 1901, and more than 10 times the 2024 rate. Consumer prices could rise by around 3 percent in the short run. Shoe prices could rise by 87 percent; clothes by 65 percent. These are just two of the many sectors where the United States still relies heavily on imports from China, even if these often come via third countries to avoid the tariffs imposed in Trump’s first term.

This remains an extraordinary shock for an administration to inflict on its own citizens, to say nothing of the rest of the world. And, while we may have pulled back from a financial crisis, the probability of a recession has risen substantially. The bond market has settled down somewhat, but it remains out of whack relative to the dollar’s decline. This is the key problem, much more than the stock market correction (at the close on Friday, the S&P 500 was down 10 percent from its February 19 peak, compared with a nadir of 19 percent on April 8, the day before Trump delayed the reciprocal tariffs).

That said, a fall in stock prices matters. U.S. households hold close to a third of their total assets in equities. The wealthiest 10 percent of households own 87 percent of all stocks, and the top 10 percent of households by earnings now account for about half of total consumer spending. So even a stock market correction will impact consumption. Trade policy uncertainty has also made loans more expensive for businesses.

Think of what is unfolding as a chain reaction. The first place it shows up, after financial markets, is in business confidence. In April, the Philadelphia Fed manufacturing business outlook survey sank to its lowest point in two years. In the latest New York Fed manufacturing survey, firm sentiment dropped by 20 points, while the outlook for new orders dropped to the lowest point in the history of the survey (which goes back to 2001).

The next domino to fall is consumer sentiment, which has plummeted over the past month.

Next comes the behavioral change. Foreign travel to the United States has declined sharply. The Los Angeles port’s website currently shows large declines for future bookings compared to a year ago. True, U.S. consumers and households have not yet changed their behavior. But that is simply because the chain reaction has not got there yet. Give it a month or two—then you’ll see it clearly in the data.

The Federal Reserve knows this. But Fed Chair Jerome Powell—having been threatened with summary dismissal by Trump just a week ago—is in no hurry to cut interest rates. With consumer prices almost certain to rise because of the tariffs, he can argue that his obligation to achieve price stability precludes immediate rate cuts.

The end point of such an economic chain reaction tends to be political revulsion. But this may already have begun. According to polling from YouGov/The Economist, Trump’s approval rating has fallen by 14 points since he entered office in January. A New York Times/Siena College poll found that 55 percent of voters, including 63 percent of independents, oppose his tariffs. His approval rating among independents is down to 29 percent. Now imagine how these numbers will look if the economy does enter a recession later in the year. And then picture what that will mean for next year’s midterm elections.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” That is the best of H.L. Mencken’s aphorisms in his A Little Book in C Major (1916). It seems highly apposite. Less well-known is another political aperçu in the same book: “The majority always has its way in the end. So does the undertaker. But neither gains in pleasantness by the fact.”

What does Trump do now? He may have only another hundred days to salvage his second term and avoid premature political interment. In his business career, when things went wrong, there was an easy way out: bankruptcy, something Trump ventures entered six times between 1991 and 2009. But there is no equivalent of Chapter 11 in the realm of politics.

The nearest thing would be for Trump to execute a radical U-turn on tariffs, accompanied by a Night of the Long Knives designed to clear out the various figures in the administration best qualified to be fall guys. Yet my hunch is that tariffs are too central to Trump’s worldview for him to swallow such a declaration of policy bankruptcy. A more likely outcome is that the Wall Street Wise Guys, led by Secretary Bessent, hastily stitch together a bunch of back-of-envelope trade deals, continue to soothe the bond market, and rely on a weakening dollar to keep the U.S. economy out of recession. If they are lucky, by this time next year they will look like geniuses. If not—if inflation picks up, the deficit widens, the bond market takes fright, and Cold War II with China escalates, with a Taiwan Semiconductor Crisis playing the part of the 1973-74 Oil Price Shock—then Trump runs the risk of sharing Nixon’s ignominious fate. For, if Republicans lose the House, a third impeachment becomes a near inevitability.

That would be a tragic outcome for a man who made no secret of his radical intentions last year, and who—if only he had under- rather than over-delivered on tariffs—would be in a far stronger position than he finds himself on Day 101 of his second White House term.

The next hundred days will reveal if Trump’s epic to-do list was too much, too soon.

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

Niall Ferguson

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

11. Censorship is far more dangerous than free speech

​I concur with the headline. But....

This is not a book I will add to my "to read pile" based on this review. I do not believe that the government should regulate free speech. And I agree with the reviewer that the academy and its peer review process does not provide an acceptable or practical method for ensuring free speech. respectful discourse yes but "cancel culture" exists in the academy as well as among the political extremes. To me it is "cancel culture" that infringes on free speech and it is worse when it is weaponized by institutions, to include the government, political parties, and the academy.

Excerpts:

The reader might take these claims more seriously if Dabhoiwala lent as much attention to the nefarious influence of government censorship as he lavishes on the ills of inequality. Yet as his book unfolds, it becomes clear that he sees in the state a largely positive role in regulating speech for the purposes of eliminating disinformation, protecting public morals, preventing disorder and curbing the power of social-media companies.

Dabhoiwala has not written a reliable, let alone readable, book. The prose is repetitious, hectoring and anaemic, full of meaningless formulations (‘It signifies that the views expressed have more value than the harm that they perpetrate’), jargon (‘markets need guardrails’) and truisms posing as aphorisms (‘the force of words is not intrinsic’). There are glaring inconsistencies, as he calls the maximalist approach to the First Amendment at various times both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. He also makes no attempt to grasp the central question raised by his book: if free speech must be subordinated to the public good, who defines what the public good actually is?

Dabhoiwala concludes by suggesting that if we want to know how best to regulate speech, then we should look to the academy. Society, he writes, has much to learn from the respectful discourse, peer-review processes and fact-checking found in scholarly settings like Harvard and Princeton. Never mind that the modern university is plagued by censorship, cancel culture and stifling groupthink. If he ever tries his hand at satire, it really could prove dangerous.

Censorship is far more dangerous than free speech

Fara Dabhoiwala’s What Is Free Speech? reflects an alarming contempt for our most precious liberty.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/28/censorship-is-far-more-dangerous-than-free-speech/

David Gelber

28th April 2025

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So widespread is the word ‘dangerous’ in film titles, lyrics and adverts that it is easy to lose sight of its principal meaning. When in his new book, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea, Princeton history professor Fara Dabhoiwala calls free speech a ‘dangerous’ idea, one might be forgiven for thinking that he is calling it exciting, provocative or liberating. He isn’t. He means that it is something that might put you, quite literally, in danger.

‘Throughout history’, Dabhoiwala writes, free speech has been manipulated ‘by the powerful, the malicious and the self-interested – for personal gain, to silence others, to sow dissension or to subvert the truth’. Words ‘can be at least as damaging as physical blows’, he says. They can ‘perpetuate sexual and racial discrimination, fuel religious persecution, sow social and political division, undermine legitimate political and scientific authority, or pave the way for violence’. Free speech floods the public sphere with ‘hatred and slander, the poison of untruth and the politics of demagoguery’, he warns. Dabhoiwala blames free speech for everything from genocides in Asia to the election of Donald Trump. The rise of X, formerly Twitter, and other unregulated social-media platforms has been ‘disastrous’, he says.

Dabhoiwala’s book belongs to that category of history written not so much to illuminate the past as to make a point about the present. The author was born in Britain, but it is the free-speech culture of the United States that he is most contemptuous of. Like a kind of obverse JD Vance, he comes from a supposedly more enlightened Europe bearing hard truths about how Americans have got free speech badly wrong. Throughout the book, he makes no effort to disguise his biases. He casts those who oppose restraints on expression as ‘free-speech warriors’ who take an ‘absolutist’ or ‘populist’ approach. When he finds an example of censorship that matches his own worldview, he can’t help but emit a cheer of approval. Citing a Danish law that prohibits the publication of material that might be deemed degrading of race, sexuality or religion, Dabhoiwala trills, ‘That is not what the right of free speech is for’.

This history – such as it is – presents two opposing visions of free speech. On the one hand, there is the European version articulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man in revolutionary France, and later found in the European Convention on Human Rights and many national constitutions. This states that freedom of speech is permissible so far as the law allows, and that governments might restrain it for the ‘public good’, however defined. On the other hand, there is the American version, manifest in contemporary interpretations of the First Amendment, in which no official check on speech is acceptable other than to prevent imminent violence. Dabhoiwala traces this view back through the decisions of the US Supreme Court, the writings of John Stuart Mill and the authors of the US Constitution to an obscure set of essays known as Cato’s Letters. These were written in early 18th-century London by two journalists, who proclaimed, ‘Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man’.

Any disinterested observer might conclude that only the second of these comes close to resembling freedom of speech as commonly understood. Dabhoiwala, however, is at pains to show the opposite. His approach is not so much to play the ball as the man. He flays each and every proponent of the maximalist interpretation of free speech in the hope that their arguments will die alongside their reputations. The authors of Cato’s Letters, he tells us, were corrupt, mercenary, hypocritical hacks. Mill and the Founding Fathers were complicit in imperialism, slavery and racism. The justices of the Supreme Court, he claims, have been wantonly inconsistent in their reading of the First Amendment. It was, apparently, only ‘a historical accident’ that the First Amendment, with its crisp statement of principle (‘Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech’), passed at all, he says. Had they drafted the constitution a few years later, Dabhoiwala suggests, the Founding Fathers would have had the French example to draw on and taken a wiser approach.

What Mill, First Amendment fanboys and other advocates of unrestrained speech fail to grasp, he diagnoses, is ‘the unequal distribution of power’ in societies that uphold free speech. ‘Authority and dominance take many different forms’, he declares. ‘Governments are never the only or even the most powerful arbiters of speech.’ Differences in race, gender and wealth mean that, even when freedom of speech exists at its greatest legal extent, only a rich and powerful minority can ‘shape public discourse’. For Dabhoiwala, it is ultimately socio-economic factors that determine ‘who can speak, and who is silenced; whose voices are amplified, and why’. As a result, he warns, the whole idea of free speech as found in America today is ‘deeply prejudiced’ and ‘deeply rigged’.

The reader might take these claims more seriously if Dabhoiwala lent as much attention to the nefarious influence of government censorship as he lavishes on the ills of inequality. Yet as his book unfolds, it becomes clear that he sees in the state a largely positive role in regulating speech for the purposes of eliminating disinformation, protecting public morals, preventing disorder and curbing the power of social-media companies.

Dabhoiwala has not written a reliable, let alone readable, book. The prose is repetitious, hectoring and anaemic, full of meaningless formulations (‘It signifies that the views expressed have more value than the harm that they perpetrate’), jargon (‘markets need guardrails’) and truisms posing as aphorisms (‘the force of words is not intrinsic’). There are glaring inconsistencies, as he calls the maximalist approach to the First Amendment at various times both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. He also makes no attempt to grasp the central question raised by his book: if free speech must be subordinated to the public good, who defines what the public good actually is?

Dabhoiwala concludes by suggesting that if we want to know how best to regulate speech, then we should look to the academy. Society, he writes, has much to learn from the respectful discourse, peer-review processes and fact-checking found in scholarly settings like Harvard and Princeton. Never mind that the modern university is plagued by censorship, cancel culture and stifling groupthink. If he ever tries his hand at satire, it really could prove dangerous.

David Gelber is an editor at Literary Review.

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12. Get Ready for the Aleutian Island Crisis

​Excerpts:

The threshold for U.S. military action in the Arctic remains unclear. A Chinese crossing of a trip wire could also lead to escalating tensions and trigger a nuclear crisis. The United States should establish a clear threshold in the Arctic in order to signal to its adversaries which activities are tolerable and which would prompt a military response. Trump stated in January that “you don’t even need binoculars—you look outside. You have China ships all over the place. You have Russia ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen.”

The United States should respond to the growing Chinese threat by communicating red lines in the Arctic. Should the United States fail to issue clear red lines to Beijing over military activities in the Bering Strait and the northern Pacific, then Washington stands to unwittingly encourage Beijing to take greater geopolitical risks close to U.S. territorial boundaries.

Beijing may perceive a lack of resolve as a source of encouragement to escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Or worse, U.S. inaction might be seen as a sign that Taiwan is there for the taking. If deterrence isn’t restored in the Alaskan Arctic, then the Aleutians could be next in line to join Cuba and Taiwan in the annals of crisis history.

Instead of obsessing over Greenland, the Trump administration should focus on securing a part of the Arctic that already belongs to the United States—lest the Alaskan frost turn into Arctic fire.

Get Ready for the Aleutian Island Crisis

As conflict heats up in the Arctic, foreign adversaries eye Alaskan territory.

By Alex Alfirraz Scheers, a London-based defense analyst.

Foreign Policy · by Alex Alfirraz Scheers

April 28, 2025, 1:58 PM

Move over, Cuba—there are new islands in town. While the prospect of a nuclear crisis over Taiwan remains a genuine and dangerous possibility, China’s activities around the Aleutian Islands should not be overlooked. Brazen Chinese military activities in and around the islands and the Bering Strait could escalate.

The Aleutian Islands are part of the U.S. state of Alaska, so they are part of U.S. vital interests. Failure to enhance deterrence and demonstrate resolve over the chain not only threatens the territorial integrity of the United States in the Arctic, but could also embolden Beijing to intensify military operations in the Taiwan Strait.

The situation in the Arctic is heating up. In recent years, China and Russia have made joint military forays into the region. Now, U.S. President Donald Trump seemingly wants to annex Greenland. “We need Greenland for international safety and security,” Trump said recently. On March 28, he even deployed his didactic sidekick, Vice President J.D. Vance, to the Danish territory.

Meanwhile, the threats to the Alaskan Arctic, northwest of the continental United States, have intensified. Indeed, the most recent annual threat assessment report published by the Office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) briefly mentions Alaska in the context of emerging threats.

The DNI report, published on March 25, is chilling. While it highlights growing concerns over Chinese designs on Taiwan and Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, it fails to address the specific threats posed to the Aleutian Islands, an obscure island chain off the coast of Alaska.

This warrants a course correction. While the Trump administration obsesses over Greenland, China’s assertiveness in the Alaskan Arctic should be of major concern to the U.S. military and foreign-policy establishment. Consequently, the United States should make defense of the Aleutian Islands a national security priority to offset the possibility of a nuclear crisis in the Arctic.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has gradually downscaled its military outposts around the island chain. In 1997, a major naval base located on Adak Island was closed. Today, Washington’s adversaries have renewed their interest in the Aleutian Islands. While remote, the chain is not impervious to Chinese and Russian military predations.

Alaskan Sen. Dan Sullivan has recently expressed his concerns about Chinese and Russian incursions around the islands. Last September, Sullivan wrote that “as the world becomes more dangerous, Alaska continues to be on the frontlines of authoritarian aggression. Coordinated activity off Alaska’s shores by the Russians and Chinese is increasing.”

Washington should heed the strategic salience of the Aleutian Islands, if its foreign-policy and military establishment wants to secure its vital interests in the Arctic.

China is not an Arctic nation, yet it has declares itself to be an Arctic power, designating the region to China’s high north as part of its sphere of influence. In Chapter 33 of its 14th five-year plan, a document that outlines Chinese geostrategic policy, Beijing explicitly stated its vision for the region: China “will strengthen the investigation and evaluation of strategic resources in the deep sea” and “participate in practical cooperation in the Arctic and build the ‘Polar Silk Road.’”

Conducting research expeditions in the Arctic deepens China’s economic links to the region. Economic and military resilience is the bedrock of Chinese national security strategy, and both shape Chinese President Xi Jinping’s global ambitions.

Speaking about the Chinese in December, Iris A. Ferguson—the former U.S. deputy assistant secretary for defense for Arctic and global resilience—said that the United States needs “to be clear-eyed about some of their intentions” as well as “thinking about their long-term interests” and “how we can best protect ours.”

To this point, in July 2024, two Chinese H-6 nuclear-capable bombers operating within the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone were intercepted by American and Canadian fighter jets, indicating that Chinese excursions into the Arctic are not merely done for scientific and economic purposes.

The Chinese aircraft were accompanied by Russian TU-95 nuclear-capable bombers, meaning that the air patrol was the first time that China and Russia have been documented conducting a joint patrol near Alaska. That same month, four Chinese military warships were spotted in the Bering Sea, roughly 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of Amchitka Pass and northeast of the Atka Island, both part of the Aleutian Islands.

According to comments made at the time by Michael Salerno, a U.S. Coast Guard public affairs officer, these encounters have become commonplace since 2021 but were rare before 2017.

In recent years, China has also increased its naval presence in the Arctic—completing extensive round trips across critical strategic areas such as the Bohai Sea and the Bering Sea. Beijing’s increased naval presence in these geostrategic locations puts the United States at a disadvantage, threatening to disrupt its maritime military capabilities and frustrate navigational operations.

As U.S. Maj. Ryan Tice indicated in 2020, “because the Bering Strait lies at the boundary of three geographic combatant commands (GCCs), increased adversary activity around the strait creates challenges for unity of effort among those combatant commands.’

Sullivan, the senator, has raised these concerns with the Senate Armed Services Committee. Following additional Chinese and Russian joint military exercises in September 2024, Sullivan stated, “on five separate occasions in the past seven days, Russian military incursions into our ADIZ [air defense identification zone] or EEZ [US exclusive economic zone] have occurred—both naval and air.”

In response, the U.S. Army deployed its 11th Airborne Division to the Aleutian Islands. Yet as the United States’s strategic environment grows increasingly dangerous, more needs to be done to counter the threat emanating from Chinese forces in the Arctic. By conducting military exercises in places such as the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands, a region dominated by the United States, China is also demonstrating resolve at the United States’s expense.

As Brandon J. Babin, a senior analyst at the China Strategic Focus Group, has asserted, “[t]his counterbalance seems to require a buildup of China’s means of strategic deterrence.”

Freedom of navigation is a critical factor in ensuring the United States can maintain its mission to deter adversaries in the Arctic. While Beijing’s interests appear to be ostensibly economic, Chinese access to important geostrategic locations carries significant national security implications for the United States and its allies across the Pacific.

Specifically, Chinese efforts to bolster military operations in U.S. strategic buffer zones undermine regional deterrence capabilities. Indeed, such activities are a direct challenge to the United States’ vital interests and could potentially obstruct Washington’s extended deterrence operations from the Arctic and northern Pacific regions, with potential implications rippling down to the western and southern Pacific as well.

Furthermore, the U.S. has multiple interests in the Arctic, which overlap with the interests of NATO member states such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. As tensions intensify between the United States, China, and Russia, the importance of strategic choke points such as the Bering Sea will only increase.

While Washington’s extended nuclear deterrence mission against China focuses on dissuading aggression against Taiwan, coercion of Japan and South Korea, and the potential targeting of strategic positions such as the U.S. territory Guam—all concerns located farther south in the vast Pacific Ocean—the threats that the United States and its regional allies face from China in the Arctic are just as severe.

Attempts to undermine long-standing territorial boundaries in the form of provocative activities can also lead to increased tensions and could escalate even further, turning critical island chains into theaters of crises—or worse, war.

For example, there are indications that China perceives the Aleutian Islands as part of what is known as its first island chain. As Adm. Liu Huaqing, the former commander of the Chinese Navy, stated in 1987, “the first island chain refers to the Aleutian Islands, the Kurile Islands, the Japanese archipelago, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan Island, the Philippine archipelago, and the Greater Sunda Island in the Western Pacific that form an arc-shaped arrangement of islands akin to a metal chain.”

To put Liu’s claims into context, the Aleutian Islands comprise 14 main islands and 55 smaller ones. These islands continue to host U.S. Naval and Coast Guard forces. The distance between the westernmost island in the archipelago, Attu Island, and the eastern coast of mainland China is 4,000 kilometers (nearly 2,500 miles).

Yet in the aforementioned incident in July 2024, four Chinese military warships were spotted in the Bering Sea. Such activities could lead to a tense standoff in the United States’ backyard. By expending unnecessary foreign-policy attention in Greenland, Washington risks being caught off guard. Being prepared in the Alaskan Arctic would enhance Washington’s ability to deter conflict across the first island chain—including the East Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea.

Taiwan has long been a focal point for analysts and policymakers alike, and rightly so. However, as Sullivan warned in September, “authoritarian regimes are testing the United States. … Congress and the President should do more to deter further aggression. … We must continue to send a strong message to Xi Jinping and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin that the United States will not hesitate to protect and defend our vital interests in Alaska and beyond.”

Joint Chinese and Russian military naval and air patrols around the Aleutian Islands should deeply concern the United States’ military and foreign-policy establishment. Permanently reopening the naval base on Adak Island would certainly be a vital first step in enhancing deterrence around the region.

When nuclear weapons states are involved, miscalculations can prove to be gravely consequential. As RUSI analyst Jamie Kwong wrote in 2018, “the Arctic remains an important region in the global nuclear security complex.” The United States operates the North Warning System, an early warning system intended to detect threats in the Arctic. Deliberate or accidental Chinese actions that are perceived to be threatening could trigger these U.S. early warning systems, and detection could lead to defensive military action.

In the fog of uncertainty, U.S. nuclear command and control would have to make a decision that could precipitate a standoff—and a standoff between nuclear powers always carries with it the inextricable risk of nuclear escalation.

With tensions already running high, a deep distrust between China and United States underpins the strategic environment. An incursion into U.S. territory could compel the United States to militarily engage with Chinese assets. For example, should a Chinese jet fly into U.S. Arctic airspace, or should a vessel stray into regional territorial waters, the United States could opt to strike.

Accidental or inadvertent escalation also poses a risk. In September 2022, a Type 055 Nanchang guided missile destroyer came within 160 kilometers (about 100 miles) of the Aleutian Island of Kiska. It was armed with up to 112 cruise missiles. The accidental launch of a Chinese missile could push the protagonists to the nuclear brink. After all, the strategic environment in the Arctic is already febrile, and costly accidents can happen.

The threshold for U.S. military action in the Arctic remains unclear. A Chinese crossing of a trip wire could also lead to escalating tensions and trigger a nuclear crisis. The United States should establish a clear threshold in the Arctic in order to signal to its adversaries which activities are tolerable and which would prompt a military response. Trump stated in January that “you don’t even need binoculars—you look outside. You have China ships all over the place. You have Russia ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen.”

The United States should respond to the growing Chinese threat by communicating red lines in the Arctic. Should the United States fail to issue clear red lines to Beijing over military activities in the Bering Strait and the northern Pacific, then Washington stands to unwittingly encourage Beijing to take greater geopolitical risks close to U.S. territorial boundaries.

Beijing may perceive a lack of resolve as a source of encouragement to escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Or worse, U.S. inaction might be seen as a sign that Taiwan is there for the taking. If deterrence isn’t restored in the Alaskan Arctic, then the Aleutians could be next in line to join Cuba and Taiwan in the annals of crisis history.

Instead of obsessing over Greenland, the Trump administration should focus on securing a part of the Arctic that already belongs to the United States—lest the Alaskan frost turn into Arctic fire.

Foreign Policy · by Alex Alfirraz Scheers

13. Actions create consequences – representation and consequences by Cynthia Watson

​Diplomacy (and diplomatic activities) is one thing we cannot afford to get wrong (and of course defense is the other).

Both State and the UN are convenient scapegoats for partisan bickering.

But for both diplomacy and defense (AND development) we need to take a long term view and that requires active and continuous engagement throughout the international security community.

E​xcertps:

Over the last few decades, our political divisions slowed, if not halted, putting nominees in place, whether it's been political tension between the president and Senate (it’s hard to recall how much North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms loved to slow Bill Clinton’s nominees) or the vetting process itself which appears ever more convoluted. The current administration is hardly unique in having vacancies.

Some of you will ask, "So what? Why does it matter?" whether we are part of the United Nations Management & Reform branch. Everyone knows we tell ourselves that the United Nations is incapable of reform because it's a corrupt organization full of our adversaries asking us to pay their salaries.

However, more than half—98—of the 195 nominated seats are empty. Put otherwise, we lack a voice at fully half of the global positions where other countries send representation. Rest assured Zhongnanhai fills its positions with capable Party members (and mouthpieces) rapidly when vacancies arise. Thus China’s views on human rights (Beijing rejects the basic assumptions about universality as declared in the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights). It’s much easier to ignore workers than a formal ambassador who points out where our views differ radically from those of others.

The real problem is that these organizations will persist, often turning to the next most significant contributor to fill in the leadership and financial commitments we are abandoning. Dues for U.N. membership result from gross domestic product, where we still outshine everyone else. Without us, China becomes the country to whom the rest of the world defers decision-making when the United States is not participating on an equal footing. The days when the United Nations could not operate without us, if they ever truly existed, ended a long whie back.

That is part of being a superpower: we pay our dues, whether we like the responses we get. That is terribly distasteful for Americans but to withdraw only invites Beijing’s, if not Putin’s or Teheran’s, greater stature as a guiding voice for the organization.

Actions create consequences

representation and consequences

https://cynthiawatson.substack.com/p/representation-and-consequences?r=7i07&utm

substack.com · by Cynthia Watson

Most of you keep tabs open on your electronic devices as I do. Truthfully, some are open for so long that I have to revisit the tab periodically to wonder why on earth I ever opened it. This morning I remembered leaving open the American Foreign Policy Association's "Tracker: Current U.S. Ambassadors” for an Actions Create Consequences column.

The Association represents diplomats, that rarified group of individuals representing us overseas. I use rarified with profound respect as it's bloody hard to get a position in the U.S. Foreign Service—deservedly so. These folks represent us in some of the least attractive places and tedious venues. They are almost invariably the hardest realists and yet patient people I know; I can only remember a single exception. Think about a two-year tour in Dushanbe, Tajikistan versus Brussels, Belgium. The two environments sum up the political appointees as ambassadors versus professional FSOs: the career people tend to lust for places like Dushanbe or Vanuatu with the many challenges they offer on all levels. At the same time, political donors savor Beaujolais and paté in Europe (I have no idea what the national dish is in Tajikistan, but I am confident it's neither of those items).

The Tracker lists individuals serving as the U.S. emissary, the president’s connection, to 195 countries and organizations globally as of 9 April 2025. As a Constitutional reminder, the president names the individual he wants as ambassador, and the Senate approves or disapproves of the nominee.

Three-quarters of a century ago, confirmation was a straightforward process under which most nominees won Senate approval after the administration identified and vetted individuals as worthy of such a lofty position.

Over the last few decades, our political divisions slowed, if not halted, putting nominees in place, whether it's been political tension between the president and Senate (it’s hard to recall how much North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms loved to slow Bill Clinton’s nominees) or the vetting process itself which appears ever more convoluted. The current administration is hardly unique in having vacancies.

Some of you will ask, "So what? Why does it matter?" whether we are part of the United Nations Management & Reform branch. Everyone knows we tell ourselves that the United Nations is incapable of reform because it's a corrupt organization full of our adversaries asking us to pay their salaries.

However, more than half—98—of the 195 nominated seats are empty. Put otherwise, we lack a voice at fully half of the global positions where other countries send representation. Rest assured Zhongnanhai fills its positions with capable Party members (and mouthpieces) rapidly when vacancies arise. Thus China’s views on human rights (Beijing rejects the basic assumptions about universality as declared in the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights). It’s much easier to ignore workers than a formal ambassador who points out where our views differ radically from those of others.

The real problem is that these organizations will persist, often turning to the next most significant contributor to fill in the leadership and financial commitments we are abandoning. Dues for U.N. membership result from gross domestic product, where we still outshine everyone else. Without us, China becomes the country to whom the rest of the world defers decision-making when the United States is not participating on an equal footing. The days when the United Nations could not operate without us, if they ever truly existed, ended a long whie back.

That is part of being a superpower: we pay our dues, whether we like the responses we get. That is terribly distasteful for Americans but to withdraw only invites Beijing’s, if not Putin’s or Teheran’s, greater stature as a guiding voice for the organization.

We have lower-level officials staffing our foreign relations work, whether in an embassy or New York. These worker bees know the issues, prepare position papers, and do much of the day-to-day work on the relevant topics. Yet showing we care enough to send an ambassador is a not-too-subtle reminder we are in the game. Our current seeming preference for unilateral decision-making leaves our counterparts everywhere completely uncertain of whether we hear them, much less intend to work with their diplomats.

The rest of the world sees formal representation by the head of state as a vital indicator of respect. I often write about China's demand for respect to prevent what the CCP considers a replication of the Century of Humiliation; Putin demands a similar measure of esteem. The DPRK, with its hermetic Kim dynasty, equates respect with a step towards survival. Having no diplomatic representation with Washington (hardly unique to the current administration) is one of many aspirations Pyongyang retains in its frustrated interactions with the world. With its millennia-long centrality to South Asia, India is prone to demanding recognition as intensely as anyone else. Everyone values an ambassador from Washington, regardless what their rhetoric implies, as we remain the global power, even if a chaotic, wobbly one.

The current administration deploys special envoys, thus circumventing the annoyance (and oversight) of the Senate confirmation, to several places it considers most relevant. Real estate magnate Steve Witkoff serves as special representative to the Russian Federation as does former general Keith Kellogg to Ukraine. Do those individuals suffice to satisfy other countries’ nationalist pride? Perhaps, yet but the position does not entirely placate those who measure our actions by counting an appointed envoy versus fully confirmed ambassadors.

During a growing and substantial tension, we have no formal ambassador or alternate envoy in Beijing. In the China case, toss in trade warriors as yet another high level connection but how ought Beijing prioritize these buckets of policies should conflicts between our objectives develop? Put otherwise, does any single voice speak for the U.S. objectives with China? If so, who and what is she saying? How does the Senate determine what we have promised in consultation with the PRC? That is not a flippant comment but a serious interrogative as we see questions continue about whether trade negotiations are occurring.

The Ambassador is the chief of our mission in a foreign country. She ought to know all that is transpiring, if we seek accountability and consistency in policy. With the recent mixed messaging and staff upheaval at State, it’s hard to know who speaks when or where or why.

The good news is that the administration has submitted 42 individuals for confirmation, but the Senate, that exquisitely deliberative body, has yet to confirm them. The clock, however, still ticks as the states where these individuals would serve react to those formal vacancies to varying degrees.

Recent plans to reform the Department, explicitly citing the intention to scale back representation, particularly in Africa, attracted some attention domestically last week but will be interpreted far differently overseas. The world knows we have had budget issues for decades, but we rarely consider serious options to address them.

One personal anecdote informs my thinking on why these actions will play a role in foreign appraisals of the United States. The National Defense University, as an administrative body within Joint Professional Military Education (PME), is the interlocutor with defense establishments worldwide. PME institutions offering military diplomacy in times of tension. The late Army Lieutenant General Paul Cerjan led the first military delegation to China in January 1994, almost five years after the Tian'anmen Square massacre, as a step to reopening military-to-military discussions halted by our reaction to Zhongnanhai’s barbarism towards its students. NDU presidents have been three-star officers since the organization's establishment in 1976.

During the Obama administration, the Joint Staff decided lowering the rank of the NDU president to a two-star. I was in Beijing with an NDU delegation at a major Asian PME meeting in November 2012 when the Chinese host had a single question, rather than the usual exchange of mutual concerns, for our two-star NDU President. Why, the PLA NDU counterpart asked as he picked his teeth, are you merely a two-star when all of your predecessors have been three-star generals or flag officers?

Our delegation head fumbled with an answer, mumbling that we needed to cut costs. Our Chinese interlocutors were amused and disdainful, if not incredulous. In the eyes of our PLA hosts, the United States was "dissing" China rather than seriously discussing cutting costs. The conversation ended within a few minutes without our side delivering any prepared talking points on concerns. It makes many happy to “diss China” these days but the symbolism did not convey strength.

Major powers balance domestic and foreign policy issues. Still, their nations must recognize that everyone else around the world pays meticulous attention to what we say, who says it, and what power that individual has to represent our views abroad. We tend to be relatively informal, unimpressed by diplomatic niceties (even if we adore the pomp and circumstance of our British cousins having a king and queen with jewels and castles). We can't assume others see our statements about saving money as relevant for a great power as we still have far greater wealth than so many of these countries combined. I suspect many countries would like to see us address our spending challenges as an adult government rather than nibble around the edges as we are; some governments would prefer watching us fall further down the deficit hole amid domestic upheaval.

But I guarantee that diminishing our presence abroad, particularly through neglecting our formal ambassador ranks, only reinforces their doubts about superpower status. We have the power to address that, but we don't recognize the portrait we are painting of ourselves as a nation.

No, those with whom we have international concerns elect neither the president nor Members of Congress which is why foreign relations ranks so low on the priorities of many Americans. To paraphrase an old idea, we may hardly be interested in foreign affairs and who formally represents us in other countries, but the rest of the world desperately watches these nominations with keen attention.

Thank you for your time this morning. I welcome any and all feedback on this topic. Dialogue requires multiple voices so let’s hear your views.

Thank you for reading Actions. I especially appreciate the paid subscribers who make this column possible. Your support, whether it’s $8 a month or $55 a year, make such a difference in the sources I can read.

It was a beautiful Sunday in the Chesapeake, replete with my first clematis sighting of the year.

Be well and be safe. FIN

“Tracker: List of Current Ambassadors”, afsa.com, 9 April 2025, retrieved at https://afsa.org/list-ambassadorial-appointments

Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, OHCRC.org, retrieved at https://www.ohchr.org/en/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

substack.com · by Cynthia Watson

14. Heading for Divorce? The Ideological War Threatening NATO

​Excerpts:

Still, in politics, nothing is preordained, and regardless of what happens in Europe in a few years, today, Donald Trump’s America and Ursula von der Leyen’s Europe continue to drift apart.

Most importantly, what has not received sufficient attention in US media is how European states see their own policy choices in light of the US realignment of its Russia policy and what is driving Europe to make them. But it is also true that notwithstanding the declarations of newfound European solidarity as the continent inches towards its declared independence from the United States, what comes across is a degree of pique that doesn’t augur well for the future of the project.

And suppose accelerated overtures to China augment this process as we have witnessed of late. In that case, the Ameri-skeptics in Europe and the Euro-skeptics in the United States may get their wish, and regrettably, we will be worse off for it on both sides of the Atlantic.

Heading for Divorce? The Ideological War Threatening NATO

The strain in US-European relations under the second Trump administration stems primarily from a deepening ideological divide, not just policy disputes over trade or Ukraine/Russia.

19fortyfive.com · by Andrew A. Michta · April 26, 2025

It is an understatement to say that since the arrival of the second Trump administration, America’s relations with its European allies have become unsettled. Analysts in Europe and the United States have blamed this change on Washington’s combative tone, the administration’s Ukraine policy and reset with Russia, and, of late, Trump’s tariffs and the prospect of a trade war with the European Union.

The Great Divide that Threatens NATO and Transatlantic Ties

These high-visibility US policy moves do not tell the full story. Much of the current strain in transatlantic relations is driven by ideological differences between Donald Trump’s political base and the prevailing mindset among mainstream European elites. As the United States navigates the turbulent waters of Trump’s populist revolution, Europe’s policy establishment has been holding fast to key left-liberal precepts that no longer resonate in Washington. In a nutshell, the two sides of the Atlantic are increasingly ideologically misaligned.

Until recently, ideology had little to no impact on transatlantic relations. As long as Washington pursued its long-established neo-liberal course on economic policy, it remained wedded to globalization as a path to reach “complex interdependence.” The broad ideological alignment across the Atlantic notwithstanding, the electoral cycling between Democrats and Republicans when it came to who occupied the White House did not seriously upset the overall transatlantic equilibrium.

In the national security arena, business as usual was buttressed by the fact the United States was providing the bulk of NATO’s capabilities that proved to be the deal of the century for Europe’s largest economies, especially Germany, leading over time to de facto disarmament across the continent after the Cold War.

The first Trump administration initially shocked this ideological consensus across the Atlantic, but most of Europe’s political establishment saw it as a temporary aberration. Even as some countries in NATO yielded somewhat to Trump’s demands that they spend more on defense, they soon welcomed the election of Joe Biden as President as a return to the status quo ante, with only the countries along the Eastern flank of NATO truly ramping up their efforts to rebuild their militaries.

This inaction on defense spending by Europe’s largest economies continued despite the war raging in Ukraine being a persistent reminder of how fast their immediate neighborhood was changing. The left-liberal Brussels consensus remained dominant, and any insurgency by the citizenry was apt to be branded “populist” and dismissed out of hand. Predictably, this has only further fueled popular ire across Europe, mobilizing the right and, more importantly, rapidly foreclosing the space for a political compromise that was once widely believed to be the mother’s milk of democratic politics.

Even before the new US administration entered office and launched its blunt approach to the transatlantic alliance, the second election of Trump was greeted in Europe with a gasp of disbelief and a doubling down on the Brussels consensus. In private conversations with European politicos, there were unmistakable signs that Americans who did not affirm the left-liberal consensus were now considered something akin to wayward peasants—to be condescending rather than understood, not to mention accepted as one’s equals and interlocutors. It was only a matter of time before the Trump administration’s manifest disdain for Europe not spending on defense would clash with the conviction—to quote one European official—that “Europe has agency” and hence can go its own way.

Today, the ideological difference between the Trump administration and Europe’s key leaders has dangerously obscured the basic realities of European geopolitics, further stressing the already frayed transatlantic relationship. In turn, the Trump administration’s moves to redefine the assumptions about the foundational nature of the transatlantic relationship have fueled the fire that threatens to consume NATO.

Focused on ideological jousting, many on both sides of the Atlantic seem to have forgotten that “Europe” as a unitary actor in international affairs exists largely in the minds of the Brussels elite or politicos in DC, for the European Union is a treaty-based organization built around shared markets and regulatory regimes and at present lacks the ability to play a meaningful role in defense. Moreover, this view of Europe as an autonomous player is, in effect, a manifestation of resentment towards the United States that, while brought to the fore and amplified by comments emanating from the Trump administration, has increasingly gathered over the three post-Cold War decades.

As Western European states, in particular, no longer felt an existential threat from Russia—for two decades, Berlin pursued a policy that explicitly tied Germany’s economy to Russia’s energy through Nord Stream I and II pipelines—the ennui of having to rely on Americans for defense served as a reminder of Europe’s continued weakness and its lack of great power status.

Beyond Tariffs and Economics

Today’s growing drift in Euro-Atlantic relations is not just about tariffs or economic policy priorities. It is fundamentally about ideological differences between the Trump administration and the elites governing in key European capitals.

Unless cooler heads prevail and both sides begin to listen to each other, set aside their ideological preconceptions, revisit the fundamentals of geopolitics, and bring back a modicum of mutual respect to the conversation, the United States and Europe may be soon heading for a messy divorce. How quickly it comes to that is anyone’s guess, as there are signs that populist parties in Europe, including in Germany and France, may take the field in the next electoral cycle.

Still, in politics, nothing is preordained, and regardless of what happens in Europe in a few years, today, Donald Trump’s America and Ursula von der Leyen’s Europe continue to drift apart.

Blasting a 155mm Howitzer round during a gun calibration exercise at Destiny Range, Soldiers from 1-9 Field Artillery make the earth tremble as they fire over 30 rounds from an M109A6 Paladin, 2nd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Mosul, Iraq, April 23.

Most importantly, what has not received sufficient attention in US media is how European states see their own policy choices in light of the US realignment of its Russia policy and what is driving Europe to make them. But it is also true that notwithstanding the declarations of newfound European solidarity as the continent inches towards its declared independence from the United States, what comes across is a degree of pique that doesn’t augur well for the future of the project.

And suppose accelerated overtures to China augment this process as we have witnessed of late. In that case, the Ameri-skeptics in Europe and the Euro-skeptics in the United States may get their wish, and regrettably, we will be worse off for it on both sides of the Atlantic.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Michta

Andrew A. Michta is a Senior Fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council of the United States. Views expressed here are his own. Michta is also a 19FortyFive columnist.

19fortyfive.com · by Andrew A. Michta · April 26, 2025

​15. NATO Needs to Be Terminated

​Conclusion:

A transatlantic divorce is not only feasible, but given the growing divisions on policy issues and the overall concept of democracy, it is entirely appropriate. The alliance is akin to a long marriage that has grown stale and ever colder.

Let’s part as friends with an amicable separation rather than as angry, disillusioned partners who now are beginning to hate each other.

NATO Needs to Be Terminated

19fortyfive.com · by Ted Galen Carpenter · April 28, 2025

RIP, NATO? Tensions between the United States and its European allies have become so nasty and vitriolic that they can no longer be ignored or even minimized.

Europe Missed A Changing America

Both the depth and breadth of the disputes are unprecedented. Even the sometime bitter policy quarrels that marked Donald Trump’s first administration pale by comparison to what has taken place during the initial weeks of his second term.

The attitude on the part of European leaders is noticeably different this time around as well. The dominant view throughout NATO when Trump entered the White House in 2017, seemed to be that he constituted a temporary ideological aberration in America’s political system.

Consequently, mature, sensible European governments believed that while it might be necessary to make a few concessions to placate the volatile occupant of the oval office, especially on such issues as greater financial burden-sharing within NATO, the transatlantic relationship remained basically sound.

Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump in the 2020 presidential election appeared to validate that prediction and vindicate a strategy of patience. There were pervasive demonstrations of relief among Europe’s political elites that the United States had returned to “normal.” Those elites were confident that the transatlantic status quo was secure, and that they could resume pursuing the same policies of armed globalism that had dominated the scene since the end of World War II.

Yet there was an undercurrent of uneasiness, especially as Trump did not fade into political oblivion, but instead showed strong signs of staging a comeback. His decisive victory in America’s 2024 presidential election confirmed that transatlantic tensions would not be a brief, passing phenomenon.

By focusing so intently on Trump as the cause of policy divisions between the United States and Europe, establishment elites on both sides of the Atlantic ignored other important factors—and they continue to do so.

Time to Break Up NATO?

The bottom line is that while the United States and Europe share important interests and goals, those interests and goals are far from being congruent. NATO’s European members have been far more united and intense in their support for Ukraine as Kyiv continues to wage its war against Russia. Attitudes toward the war are noticeably more divided and conditional in the United States. That is especially true among Trump and his supporters.

Whereas European leaders insist that they cannot support a peace accord that includes forcing Kyiv to relinquish Crimea and other territories, Americans give higher priority to bringing an end to the fighting even if that requires Kyiv to lose land and abandon the goal of joining NATO. That policy gap between the United States and its NATO allies is becoming a chasm.

There are major disagreements about policy toward regions other than Europe. The Unites States has been totally supportive of Israel’s recent actions, especially its conduct in Gaza, whereas the European countries are noticeably divided. Intra-alliance feuding over that ugly episode is not likely to end anytime soon.

The United States has adopted a noticeably tougher line toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC) regarding both economic and security issues. The European powers are not receptive to Washington’s new enthusiasm for tariffs.

Moreover, their negative attitude is not just because the Europeans themselves are negatively impacted. They also seem uneasy because China is such a high-priority target for Washington, creating the prospect of a major spike in global tensions involving the world’s two largest economies.

The transatlantic policy gap is even larger with respect to security issues toward China. European leaders obviously do not want to antagonize their longtime American protector, but they also don’t want to alienate the PRC. Washington, on the other hand, is re-emphasizing its security commitment to friendly East Asian clients, especially Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and most controversial of all, Taiwan. Washington’s hardline stance toward Beijing began even before Trump took office in 2017, and it continued largely unabated throughout Biden’s presidency. Getting in the middle of a dust up between the PRC and the United States has all the earmarks of a no win situation for Europe. Conversely, East Asia is fast becoming a more important economic and security theater than Europe for the United States.

A final source of transatlantic disunity is the growing discord about what constitutes genuine democracy in the 21st century. Vice President J. D. Vance put the spotlight on that issue during his speech to the Munich Security Conference, when he contended that some European allies were rigging their political systems to disqualify right-wing parties and candidates. Indeed, governing elites in both Britain and the European Union (EU) now embrace what might be termed conditional or “politically correct” democracy.

A large and widening gap has opened between the U.S. version of democracy, especially given the emergence of Donald Trump’s conservative, populist administration, and the version that most of Washington’s European allies embrace. Each side seems to regard the other as a cynical, faux democracy, and that does not bode well for continued transatlantic unity.

Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic need to consider whether the time has come to terminate NATO and give it a long overdue retirement party. The alliance was created when a powerful totalitarian state posed a major threat to a weakened, demoralized, democratic Europe.

A Norwegian Leopard 2A4 main battle tank during Iron Wolf II in Lithuania. It involves 2,300 troops from 12 NATO Allies. The Lithuanian-led exercise is helping to train the NATO Battlegroup which consists of soldiers from Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Norway. Shot in Rukla, Lithuania.

That era bears no resemblance to today’s world. The European Union and Great Britain combined have a larger population and a larger economy than the United States. That combination of countries has a collective economy more than 10 times larger than Russia’s, and it can massively outspend Russia to build whatever defense force they deem necessary.

Time For a New Way of Thinking on Transatlantic Relations

A transatlantic divorce is not only feasible, but given the growing divisions on policy issues and the overall concept of democracy, it is entirely appropriate. The alliance is akin to a long marriage that has grown stale and ever colder.

Let’s part as friends with an amicable separation rather than as angry, disillusioned partners who now are beginning to hate each other.

About the Author: Ted Galen Carpenter

Ted Galen Carpenter, is a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute and a contributing editor at 19FortyFive. He is the author of 13 books and more than 1,300 articles on national security, international affairs, and civil liberties. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).

19fortyfive.com · by Ted Galen Carpenter · April 28, 2025

16. Playing the Long Game: 6 Habits That Set Strategic Leaders Apart

​Sound advice for leaders, planners, and strategic thinkers.

Playing the Long Game: 6 Habits That Set Strategic Leaders Apart

Steve Leonard / Apr 22, 2025

Career Advice

“You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.” – Leon Trotsky

A couple of years into my military career, I was dealing with someone who just seemed to have an inhuman abundance of hate for me. I’d never said or done anything to him personally, but he bled schadenfreude like no one I’d met before. One day, I asked a friend of his if he could explain the animosity.

“He hates you because you’re lucky. He thinks you could step in pile of shit and come out smelling like a rose.”

What looked like luck on the outside was actually much more. It was a potent combination of hard work, high standards, and strategic thinking, all of which blended to create an environment of luck. That’s not to say that chance didn’t go the other way from time to time, but the occasional bad flip of the coin ultimately had little impact on my overall drive to succeed.

As I wrote in an article for The Military Leader several years ago, “As long as I stuck to formula… life and career would find a balance and things would work themselves out. Luck would eventually fall my way.

And it all started with strategic thinking.

The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking

In a recent Big Think article, Josh Browning explored how strategic thinking can put you on the fast track to success. Those cognitive abilities are essential in “volatile, uncertain, and highly competitive” environments where outcomes can be unpredictable. “Too many leaders favor reactive, short-term decision-making,” Browning writes, “to calculated, long-term frameworks.” When the stakes are highest, it’s imperative to see the long game.

“A strategic thinker looks at and elevates their entire ecosystem,” he continues. They see the future and inherently understand what it takes to reach that future state. In his book, The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking, Michael Watkins describes the mental disciplines that underpin a leader’s ability to play the long game.

1. Pattern recognition.

“A foundation of strategic thinking is the ability to evaluate a system, understand how all its pieces move, and derive the patterns they typically form.” A strategic thinker sees patterns where others see randomness. They see the forest and the trees.

2. Systems analysis.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when trying to make sense of a system of systems. “A strategic thinker avoids this by creating simplified models of complex patterns and realities.” This allows them to predict behaviors within the system and make informed decisions.

3. Mental agility.

“Because the systems and patterns of any work environment are so dynamic, leaders must be able to change their perspective quickly to match the role they are examining.” They can shift effortlessly between a high-level perspective and the minute details without losing focus on the long game.

4. Structured problem-solving.

Identifying and solving the right problem is fundamental to strategic thinking. To get there, leaders need a process that is both flexible and intentional: “Developing and defining a structure will ensure that the correct problem is addressed in the most robust way possible.”

5. Visioning.

“Great leaders don’t rely on vague goals.” Effective strategic leaders are exceptional at defining a concrete, desired future state and leading their organizations decisively toward that vision. They don’t just dream, they achieve.

6. Political Savvy.

“Politics plays an inescapable and massive role in any collaborative environment.” Probably the most challenging of the six disciplines, political savvy is what separates the doers from the dreamers.

According to Watkins, the common thread weaved through the six disciplines is intentionality. “A good leader can recognize the patterns and systems around them, shift their perspective to keep an eye on the entirety of the goal, develop a structure that moves toward a defined vision, and navigate the complex politics inherent to a system of people.” They get out and play the long game.

Playing the Game

A good friend of mine often describes the effort he puts into planning his professional decisions as “Machiavellian schemes.” He is as deliberate a strategic thinker as I know and considers every option possible before making a choice, leaving little to chance. As a result, he’s maneuvered through a highly successful military – and now civilian – career with deft touch of a classic political realist.

None of that is by chance. It is the purposeful application of strategic thinking. In a 2024 Harvard Business Review article, David Lancefield describes six proven ways to bring strategic thinking into your everyday life.

1. Identify the actions that matter.

Every day presents opportunities. Not all of those opportunities offer strategic advantage. When making those choices, keep your eye on the long game and lean into a tool like the Eisenhower Box to help frame your priorities.

2. Focus on the most important problem.

Multitasking is a fallacy. When choosing where to expend effort, “focus on the biggest problem that needs to be addressed” with an eye toward how that will have the most strategic impact.

3. Explore the choices you face.

In any moment, simple choices can have a significant impact strategically – a task, a conversation, a meeting. Consider your choices carefully, weighing how they can impact you positively or negatively over time. Think strategically about your choices.

4. Master the capabilities required.

Life is a journey of learning and growing. Or not. You choose whether to accept the status quo or push yourself to the next level. That means identifying and aggressively pursuing the knowledge, skills, and abilities you need to achieve your strategic goals.

5. Create alignment between elements of the strategy.

Achieving your desired outcomes requires the deliberate alignment – and balancing – of ways (the paths to those outcomes), means (the resources required to achieve those outcomes), and risk (the obstacles you encounter along the way). And time gets a vote, as well. Strategic calculus is not for the faint hearted.

6. Assemble the resources you need.

Goals without resources are pipe dreams. Identify and assemble the resources required and recognize one immutable fact: you will never have all of the resources you require, so alignment and balance are key. Choose wisely.

“Being strategic — that is, making a coherent set of choices to help you pursue an ambition or goal — is a nonnegotiable skill” for leaders in today’s world. “But,” Lancefield writes, “it can be hard to practice, and strategies are notoriously hard to design and deliver.” Get it right, and there’s little you can’t accomplish.

Steve Leonard is a former senior military strategist and the creative force behind the defense microblog, Doctrine Man!!. A career writer and speaker with a passion for developing and mentoring the next generation of thought leaders, he is a co-founder and emeritus board member of the Military Writers Guild; the co-founder of the national security blog, Divergent Options; a member of the editorial review board of the Arthur D. Simons Center’s Interagency Journal; a member of the editorial advisory panel of Military Strategy Magazine; and an emeritus senior fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He is the author, co-author, or editor of several books and is a prolific military cartoonist.

17. The Truth About The Chinese AI Video Mocking Efforts To Revitalize American Manufacturing

​I would love to read a professional PSYOP assessment of these videos and include post-testing with American audiences to determine how they view these videos.

The Truth About The Chinese AI Video Mocking Efforts To Revitalize American Manufacturing

ByEthan Karp, Contributor.  I write about transforming businesses through technology & innovation.

Apr 28, 2025, 10:48am EDT

https://www.eurasiareview.com/27042025-chinese-security-companies-expand-without-oversight/?utm

An AI generated video aimed at the current trade war takes aim at American manufacturing.

Photo: screen grab Gabor Gurbacs

Recently, an AI-generated video aimed at the current trade war started circulating on Chinese social media, and eventually here in the U.S. It’s simple enough: Inside what appear to be the U.S. version of manufacturing sweatshops, a bunch of “schlubby Americans” (as Yahoo puts it) toil away at sewing machines or on assembly lines for smartphones. They do not look particularly happy. At the end, the screen flashes, “Make America Great Again.”

Although it’s difficult to trace the origins back to the original publisher, the video clearly struck a nerve. The reading between the lines seems to be: Hey, before you bring these jobs back to America, are you sure you want them? Is this the future you envision for yourself?

These questions get at a point many folks are missing when it comes to the country’s current spotlight on the industry. We can win at manufacturing on a global scale—but it shouldn’t involve filling the country with low-wage, low-skill jobs.

Diving Deeper

The AI video plays on the conception that Chinese manufacturing is dark, dingy, sweaty, and low-tech. The truth is more complex.

There’s no question that in China, wages are significantly lower. As of 2022, the average manufacturing worker there makes 97,528 yuan yearly, or a little more than $13,000, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. Contrast that to the U.S., where the average sits around $52,000 a year, with room to grow into six-figure territory. It’s the delta between these two numbers that sent 2.8 million manufacturing jobs out of the U.S. in less than two decades.

Indeed, many of the jobs that left were lower skill and repetitive. Today, The U.S. ranks first among major economies in value added per manufacturing employee, at $141,000, according to the Cato Institute. That’s nearly seven times that of workers in China. Still, with the Chinese government’s aggressive investments, a flourishing industry there has taken root. China’s financial support for manufacturing equaled at least 1.7% of GDP as of 2019 (compared to .4% in the U.S.), but it’s likely close to 5% when you take into account investment incentives and generous policy, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

That money has helped Chinese manufacturers build truly advanced, state-of-the-art facilities. The industry’s adoption of robotics, for instance, far outpaces that of the U.S.: China saw some 290,000 ​ installations in 2022, compared to 40,000 here.

There’s not a world where the U.S. can compete with Chinese labor costs. Even if tariffs balance the cost scales, it’ll take years to build up the factory capacity required to reshore all those jobs. And then we’d need to find people to fill them—a tall order when already the U.S. is forecasted to be short some 2 million manufacturing workers by 2030. We can’t fill the high-skill positions, so how are we going to fill a sudden influx of low-skill roles? That’s the dichotomy the Chinese video exposes, in many less words than I’ve used here.

It’s the higher skill jobs that we should be focusing on. Government-backed or not, manufacturers here should be aggressively investing in technology. We can’t afford to let China win on labor cost and on tech. We can instead build a high-tech manufacturing sector while showing our young workforce that their manufacturing career can look much different than the one in that AI video—that it will be high-skill and high-paying.

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So, How Do We Get There?

Generally, our efforts should be falling into two main categories:

Investments in technology: Tariffs or not, manufacturers here should be investing in their tech. The barrier to entry is not as high as one might expect from the outside, and those that don’t have cash on hand can easily find willing investors. Start by equipping the shop floor with real-time data sensors, and manufacturers will soon realize just how much ROI is buried in these technologies, spurring deeper investments.

If the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that the global environment is subject to a wide range of disruption. So, whether tariffs stick around long-term or not, companies should be investing in American capacity to build resiliency into their operations. It’s true that some products will, for the foreseeable future, continue to require tedious and repetitive human work. But others in that category can be brought into the modern age and automated through the power of American innovation—and there’s money to be made in doing so.

Investments in people: The perception problem continues to rear its head in our industry. Young people don’t have a view of the industry that aligns with the current reality, so we need to do the work of educating our youth on the benefits of a career in manufacturing. As many in the industry know, manufacturing careers can be as fulfilling as they are financially rewarding. And as we make the requisite investments in technology, that will only become truer.

To be clear, even higher skill manufacturing jobs aren’t rocket science—by and large, we’ll be able to pull from the same broad pool of talent. But we must shift our approach to training and prep, and manufacturers must take an active role in the process—investing in training programs for their existing employees, leveraging partnerships with local workforce centers and colleges, and doing the work of selling young people on manufacturing before it becomes time to make a career choice.

The economics prove out over time—manufacturing’s contribution to the GDP has doubled since 1990, yet there are nearly 5 million less jobs in the industry now than there were then, according to Haver Analytics and Federal Reserve Board data. The path to sustainable growth is through technology investments that make our factories more efficient and through programs that train our workforces to work side-by-side with that technology. Over time, as our industry grows, we will gain back the jobs while growing production exponentially.

As it stands today, American manufacturing is far behind China in scale alone. That’s the reality. As we wade through the shape and impact of extended tariffs, we must also keep an eye on what we’re truly after. It’s not the future imagined by that AI video. It’s one that is much more prosperous and promising.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

​18. China Pushed a Hard Sell on Autonomous Driving. After a Deadly Crash, It’s Pulling Back.

​In San Francisco last week I took a couple of rides in a self driving car from Waymo. It was a modified Jaguar. I was very impressed. I really like it and I think it drove better than me. It was quite a nice ride and I was amazed at how it navigated the hills in downtown San Francisco and avoided pedestrians, bicycles, and cars stopped in the street. It showed exceptional judgement making left turns with oncoming traffic. The ride was very smooth and after a few minutes I was not at all apprehensive. The only drawback is that it had a limited operating service range so we could not take it on all our trips. And when we compared it to prices of Uber and Lyft, sometimes it was slightly more expensive and sometimes slightly less. The pricing was competitive.

China Pushed a Hard Sell on Autonomous Driving. After a Deadly Crash, It’s Pulling Back.

Xiaomi collision intensifies regulatory scrutiny as U.S., China compete over driver-assistance technology

https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/china-pushed-a-hard-sell-on-autonomous-driving-after-a-deadly-crash-its-pulling-back-b12072e3

By Yoko Kubota

Follow

April 29, 2025 5:30 am ET

The crash involving Xiaomi’s driver-assistance technology led to the deaths of three people. Photo: go nakamura/Reuters

SHANGHAI—Beijing is slamming the brakes on China’s self-driving marketing frenzy.

As Tesla and other automakers have touted their assisted-driving systems with terms such as “autonomous” and “self-driving,” one deadly crash last month involving the technology has sparked a broad debate over its capabilities—and how the features are being portrayed to the public.

Coming in for particular scrutiny by Beijing’s regulators is the question of whether automakers are portraying the artificial intelligence-powered technologies accurately, as well as the related issue of whether the public fully understands how it should be employed. 

It is a high-stakes moment for China’s electric-vehicle industry, which has upended the global automotive world with a wave of affordable, sleekly designed cars. Chinese EVs have forced Western automakers to fight for survival in China, the world’s largest automotive market, and increasingly to play defense in their own home markets. Washington has slapped sky-high tariffs on Chinese EVs to keep them out of the U.S., while China leads in car-battery technology.

On advanced driver-assistance technology, another key area of competition, China’s rapid advances have raised alarm in the U.S. Beijing sees AI-powered driver-assistance systems as an area where China can lead the world, alongside other AI products such as chatbots and humanoid robots.

Chinese regulators aren’t banning advanced driver-assistance technology. To the contrary, the technology is rapidly advancing and is likely to continue. In a crowded EV market with more than a hundred brands, Chinese carmakers have looked to driver-assistance technology as a way to distinguish their offerings from their rivals.

But last month’s deadly crash, involving a car manufactured by Xiaomi, has served as a warning to officials that language used to describe the technology should be more carefully monitored.

A staff member at Auto Shanghai displays a driver-assistance system. Photo: Fang Zhe/Xinhua/Zuma Press

After last month’s accident, Chinese regulators called a meeting on smart connected vehicles, instructing roughly 60 carmakers and other industry players to “not engage in exaggerated and false publicity.” 

The current moment serves as a “wake-up call” for the industry, said Giovanni Lanfranchi, vice president of Chinese EV startup Zeekr. “We need to be super, super paranoid” when it comes to safety, he said at an event. Zeekr, which is a part of Chinese carmaker Geely Holding, offers a driver-assistance system that it calls G-Pilot.

Yale Zhang, managing director at Shanghai-based research firm Automotive Foresight, said that some carmakers have been telling “their stories a little bit too aggressively,” leading to misunderstanding by some drivers of how the technology should be used.

“This policy probably will save the industry,” he said. “If every car owner can be persuaded that this is just assisted driving—it’s not autonomous driving—this will cause a lot fewer accidents.”

Last week at Auto Shanghai, China’s biggest auto show, the nervousness across the industry was palpable. Executives were careful to stick to terms like “driving assistance” or “support.” Suppliers’ product presentations emphasized safety. Carmakers’ marketing staff scrambled to revise executive speeches ahead of the show, cutting out words like “autonomous” and other terms that they worried could be seen as too aggressive, said people familiar with the matter.

“Cars becoming more intelligent is definitely the trend of the future, but safety is the main thing when it comes to what we are developing,” said He Xiaopeng, co-founder and chief executive of Chinese EV startup XPeng, last week. XPeng will get better at explaining new functions and delineating the capabilities of assisted-driving functions, he added.

At the moment, even the most advanced driving-assistance technologies in China still require drivers to pay attention while sitting behind the wheel and to be prepared to take over at any time—what is known in the industry as “Level 2” of vehicle autonomy. China hasn’t completed the regulatory framework for “Level 3,” in which the car temporarily would take over driving. Industry experts say the shift from Level 2 to 3 would be a big leap. 

Executive at Auto Shanghai were careful in the language they used to discuss driver-assistance technologies. Photo: Johannes Neudecker/dpa/Zuma Press

In recent years, Tesla has been at the global frontier of promoting driver-assistance technologies in consumer vehicles, through its “Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving (Supervised),” or FSD, systems.

Over the past year, Tesla has been awaiting regulatory approval to offer FSD. Earlier, Tesla rendered its “Autopilot” system into Chinese using a translation roughly equivalent to “Enhanced Autonomous Assistant Driving.” FSD, meanwhile, it translated as something akin to “Full Self-Driving Ability.”

Chinese EV makers and suppliers have followed in Tesla’s footsteps and developed similar driving-assistance systems. The trend accelerated with the emergence of so-called “end-to-end technology” powered by AI, which replaced an approach that relied on preprogrammed rules that laid out a variety of situations that a car might encounter on the road.

Many Chinese carmakers, including XPeng, NIO and Xiaomi—the latter of which was best known for making smartphones and rice cookers before leaping into the auto industry—as well as leading Chinese auto suppliers such as Huawei Technologies and Momenta, have introduced technologies that aim to help drivers navigate complicated urban streets.

In China, where car buyers are relatively new to driving and generally tech-savvy, an openness to ceding vehicle controls to a computer have allowed for rapid adoption of self-driving technologies, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report from 2023.

Tesla’s misstep, Xiaomi’s crash

In February, Tesla started to offer some driving-assistance features in China such as city navigation through over-the-air updates. While these features are a part of Tesla’s FSD system in the U.S., it was bundled under the Autopilot system in China.

Critically, Tesla didn’t seek Chinese regulators’ blessing before doing so—an oversight that angered government officials, said people familiar with the matter. The move prompted China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the auto industry’s primary regulator, to release emergency guidance on driving assistance and over-the-air updates, the people said.

The guidance, which was published in February, made clear that carmakers are responsible for safety and securing regulatory approval before issuing over-the-air updates related to driving assistance technology.

In late March, Tesla changed the translated version of its product names. Autopilot was now “Enhanced Assistant Driving” and FSD was “Intelligent Assistant Driving,” with earlier references to “self-driving” gone.

Tesla and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A Tesla showroom at a shopping mall in Beijing. Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Then, on March 29, came the accident involving Xiaomi’s driver-assistance technology.

According to Xiaomi, right before the accident, the car had been driving along the highway in the eastern province of Anhui at about 72 miles an hour, with the driving-assistance system activated. The car neared a construction zone, with a section of the road cordoned off with roadblocks and vehicles diverted to the opposite lane.

At 10:44:24 p.m., the Xiaomi driving-assistance system detected an obstacle, issued a warning and started to slow down. One second later, a human driver took the wheel. Between the next one to three seconds, the car then crashed into a concrete guardrail, killing three people, Xiaomi said.

Lei Jun, Xiaomi’s founder, expressed condolences and said Xiaomi has submitted the vehicle data to the police. Xiaomi said it would cooperate with investigations and declined to comment further.

Crashes involving driving-assistance technology have happened around the world. In an investigation last year, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tied at least 14 fatalities to Tesla’s driving-assistance technology.

The Chinese-driving assistance technologies aren’t available in the U.S., in line with a Biden administration-era ban on Chinese connected car-related technology.

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

19. Annexing Greenland: Six Questions

E​xcertps:

Question 6: Has This Sort of Thing Happened Before? Can It Happen Today?

Yes. This type of thing was quite common in the 19th century and in the centuries before, as great powers expanded their colonial empires and carved up much of the world prior to the World Wars. Indeed, the birth of America in the 18th century is the direct result of foreign territorial expansion into indigenously self-governing homelands in the 16th and 17th centuries, often with brief and decisive skirmishes against indigenous resistance forces required before the formation of new settler states. In the 20th century, such behavior was not uncommon and is one of the direct causes of World War II, after Poland was jointly carved up by Germany and the Soviet Union, and in the aftermath of the Soviet victory of Germany in Europe’s east, Moscow quickly came to dominate the whole of Eastern Europe, setting up Soviet-styled puppet states that held power until 1989. America’s own history of proxy-warfare and client state formation in Central America likewise continued through to the same time period (and critics of American hegemony suggest continue to this day), as it does in the Middle East (where President Trump’s controversial proposal to takeover Gaza and depopulate it is but one contemporary manifestation of such behavior).

Vladimir’s Putin’s bloodless annexation of Crimea in 2014 after a month-long information operation (IO) campaign is another example, one quite recent, that shows how annexation can be achieved in our contemporary world. As a mode, it was remarkably efficient, well planned, and swiftly implemented, and so effective that it perhaps encouraged Putin to over-reach after his quick success, resulting in the subsequent hybrid war in Eastern Ukraine that was fiercely and successfully contested, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that with NATO support was largely thwarted. Perhaps one lesson is when annexing, keep focused! If Greenland is the goal, don’t extend the campaign to Canada where a larger and less colonized population awaits to defend their homeland. One could say the same of America’s invasion plans during the Global War on Terror, where it shifted its strategic attention from Afghanistan to Iraq for no logical reason and suffered greatly because of the distraction.

If Greenland’s annexation does happen by force, the White House will need to engage in a more concerted IO campaign to win over hearts and minds in Greenland among those who are opposed to Danish rule, and who do not have faith in their political leaders to bring them the fruits of independence. Recent statements by President Trump and VP Vance that Denmark has not done a good job of protecting Greenland are, to a large degree, true. And while Denmark is responding to these criticisms with increased efforts, the White House can make a strong case that it has always been, and will always be, American power that keeps Greenland free.

This will find some level of support in Greenland, particularly given anti-Danish sentiments in the months preceding President Trump’s re-election, and the “Spiral Case” scandal (relating to past policies of suppression of native Greenlanders’ birth rate), and related offenses that brought shame to Copenhagen and did much to discredit their rule.

Opinion / Perspective| The Latest

Annexing Greenland: Six Questions

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/04/29/annexing-greenland-six-questions/

by Barry Scott Zellen

|

04.29.2025 at 06:00am

Abstract:

Greenland has taken center stage since the start of the second Trump Administration, becoming the object of intensifying strategic competition between the United States and its NATO partner the Kingdom of Denmark, which colonized and remains sovereign over Greenland today. With the polar thaw now widely accepted as a geographical and climatological fact of life, the United States is positioning itself for strategic predominance in an effort to secure the vulnerable northeastern flank of North America, shifting from a long-held trans-Atlantic to a newly articulated hemispheric security concept where the center of mass has shifted from protecting Atlantic sea lanes to defending the more remote, lightly populated, and newly accessible North American Arctic archipelago. As tensions rise and diplomatic competition within the Western alliance intensifies, the specter of a U.S. invasion and annexation of Greenland grows less implausible. This analysis considers what an American takeover of Greenland could look like.

Question 1: Could America Rule Greenland?

Yes. What was floated in 2019 as an out-of-the-box Presidential policy idea but not pursued (due in part to competing demands of presidential attention, such as ending the war in Afghanistan and battling the Covid-19 pandemic), has reemerged in Trump 2.0 as part of a grand strategy to reframe American defense and security through a hemispheric, “America First” lens that departs from over 75 years of a trans-Atlantic, alliance-centric security concept. This now places the “Greenland purchase” concept at the top, and not periphery, of American defense, security, and foreign policy from the start of the new administration. But it does not necessarily mean that the U.S. would become the formal sovereign, or official leader, over Greenland, even if the policy is presently perceived and described that way. Much depends on the response by Greenland and Denmark, as well as the NATO alliance, and in addition of Canada, if a Greenland expansion/annexation is accompanied by an American expansion to/annexation of part or all of Canada.

Could America become the leader of, and sovereign power ruling over, Greenland at the end of the day? Yes. And could Greenland become a 51st state, or a new island territory comparable to our island territories in the Caribbean and Pacific? Yes. Statehood usually follows a period of political and economic maturation and modernization as a territory, as we saw with Alaska and Hawaii. But sometimes it leads to a permanent territorial status, federally governed but without full state powers (as we see in Guam, Samoa, etc.). In other cases, it leads to quasi-independence under a Compact of Free Association (COFA), as we see in Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau. (The COFA structure is not entirely unlike what Greenland has incrementally achieved through Home-Rule (1979) and later Self Rule (2009) with Denmark, though presumably Greenland would gain even more power, and more investment and financial support, to switch from Copenhagen to Washington.)

The journey is only just getting started, and so far, the Danes and Greenlanders have been reluctant to engage in the conversation America seeks. So it is not yet clear what the final sovereign form would be, which could range from a COFA with a (quasi-) independent Greenland under American defense protection, to various territorial structures, to a 51st state.

Question 2: Could an American Become Greenland’s Leader?

Because the takeover of Greenland will be a complex, a multi-step process involving the cessation of Danish sovereignty, potentially aligned with a move toward sovereign independence in Greenland under elected Greenlandic leaders with popular support and electoral legitimacy, the leadership will likely remain Greenlandic with, at least initially, its present party structure. (New parties and merged parties may result from the empowerment of pro-independence voices in Greenlandic politics, and new opposition with loyalty to Denmark may also emerge.) If Greenland’s leadership negotiates a COFA with the United States, they will likely enjoy the initial fruits of the COFA but in time, if local conditions worsen or do not improve measurably, they may lose political power with critics of the COFA coming to power to revise its terms. There may also emerge a more radicalized independence movement to break free from the American hegemony, with loyalty to Denmark or perhaps Canada and/or Iceland (neighbors to its west and east) that seeks to weaken or sever the ties to Washington.

One can also imagine the US cultivating a pro-Washington leader in Greenland who has the charisma to hold onto power, like many of the leaders of the newly independent, former Warsaw Pact member states. Eastern European leaders after the Cold War, such as Lech Walesa or Vaclav Havel, had moral authority to change their nations’ trajectories after the old system collapsed. This may happen, with Danish-aligned political elites discredited after the collapse of Danish sovereignty over Greenland.

If the first step toward American control of Greenland is not through the cessation of Danish sovereignty amidst the empowerment of independence-seeking leaders in Greenland, but comes by an American forced takeover in the absence of a more friendly and negotiated scenario as described above, one can envision the creation of some sort of “provisional authority” as we saw in post-Saddam Iraq in 2003. Its American-imposed Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), helmed by an American administrator, cultivated the formation of a new, friendly government (quite incompetently, fueling the insurgency that spread and soon engulfed American forces and ultimately gave rise to ISIS, making many Iraqis and even some Americans nostalgic for Saddam).

Easing the challenges of such a task in Greenland is its small population (under 60,000) spread out across 16 towns, and some 60 small, remote villages – with only one capital city, Nuuk, with 20,000 residents, and two smaller cities, Sisimiut and Ilulissat, with populations just over 5,000. Thirty of Greenland’s communities are villages with populations below 100, with fourteen having populations between 100-200, fifteen with populations between 200 and 1000, and nine with populations ranging from 1000-3000. Greenland’s abundance of small villages eases the burden of occupation considerably and makes interim proxy rule conceivable.

One can be hopeful that Greenlanders will make the most of the opportunity and work to leverage the new system in their favor, and build alliances with the Americans, as we observed most Afghanis doing in Afghanistan over two decades (with notable early successes that were ultimately undermined by repeated military mistakes that radicalized Afghanis once supportive of the Americans). If America doesn’t blow it through incompetent administration or corrupt contractors siphoning off resources (a problem to be watchful of, given the Arctic’s tendency for rampant cronyism and nepotism and contractors long experienced at overcharging governments and militaries for their services), it may never need to impose direct rule by an American administrator. That the Inuit in Alaska have successfully augmented their autonomy, leveraging the Alaska state constitution, American Indian law, and the United States Constitution, as well as innovative legislation such as that which brought forth the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971 and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) of 1980, provides further hope that Greenlanders will find much opportunity in a union with the United States.

Question 3: Could Greenland Oppose US Rule and Protest America’s Expansion Efforts?

Yes. A backlash is already happening. The mass protest in Nuuk and its march of 1,000 protestors to the US consulate on March 15, led by outgoing Prime Minister Mute Egede (chair of Inuit Ataqatigiit) and incoming PM Jens-Frederik Nielsen (chair of Demokraatit), brought out 1,000 Greenlanders (5% of Nuuk’s population) carrying “Make America Go Away” signs and wearing MAGA-styled “Make America Go Away” hats, along with “Yankee Go Home” signs reminiscent of anti-American protests around the world such as during the Cold War and the Global War on Terror. The day before the mass rally, chairmen of all five political parties elected to Parliament in the March 11 national election signed a statement of unity condemning President Trump’s muscular talk of “annexation” in talks with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on March 13.

But this “unity” may be largely among elites tied to the Greenlandic and Danish governments, and supporters of the welfare state Copenhagen has created. Outside of Nuuk and among those marginalized in Nuuk, there is potentially (and I believe, quite likely) a “silent majority” seeking change and more open to America’s interest and ideas on strengthening our partnership, whether through statehood, annexation, or COFA.

Behind the March 11 electoral turnabout, there was a groundswell of support for change, with two smaller pro-independence parties with two very different approaches to independence winning over half the vote. The pro-business Demokraatit party earned 29.9% of the vote, while the more populist pro-independence Naleraq party earned 24.5%. The two parties that had previously dominated Greenlandic politics, Inuit Ataqatigiit (with 21.4% of the vote) and Siumut (14.7%) were effectively voted out of power, but through the machinations of forming a parliamentary coalition government, Naleraq – with pro-America sympathies – was shut out of the government in what Americans can rightly perceive as an effort to undermine Greenland’s democracy through parliamentary procedures unfamiliar to Americans with their two-party system. Rather than the first and second place winners uniting to form a coalition of their own, Demokraatit turned its back on the change Greenlanders voted for decisively, partnering with those who would have been otherwise ousted from the governing coalition. The protests against Trump’s vexing “annexation” talk, and the unity that has been fostered by Danish and Greenlandic elites in opposition to America, have somehow overshadowed the revolution Greenland’s ballot box.

Question 4: Could America’s Pursuit of Greenland Cause a Rift with Denmark and/or NATO?

Yes. Diplomatically, the clash with Denmark has already been underway since Trump’s cancellation of a state visit to Denmark in 2019 after he first proposed the idea of acquiring Greenland. Denmark has been stridently vocal in its opposition to Trump 2.0’s reiterated interest in Greenland, and in recent weeks has been aligned with the outgoing Greenlandic PM in its messaging against the annexation talk, an alignment that continues under the new PM

With the White House also changing its tone on NATO, shifting away from President Biden’s intensively cultivated alliance unity after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, and instead warming its ties with Moscow, it risks more than a minor intra-alliance spat and could spark the collapse of NATO.

For historic comparison, however, the intra-alliance spats between Greece and Turkey (which went to war in Cyprus in 1974, even as fellow NATO members) and between Iceland and Britain (which had their “Wars” while both in NATO, in 1958-61, 1972-73, and 1975-76) may be better illustrations – crises within the alliance that in time were worked out diplomatically. But as the US is the military guarantor for NATO, the stakes are even higher and risk greater chance of alliance collapse.

Question 5: Could the US Military Deploy Troops to Greenland? What Would an Invasion Look Like?

Yes. An American invasion of Greenland, should it be necessary to gain sovereign possession over Greenland, would likely be a quick and largely bloodless affair. It would be more like the invasion of Grenada (Operation “Urgent Fury”) in October 1983, which lasted about four days. Similar cases of the US quickly gaining sovereign control – Iraq in 2003, prior to the insurgency; Afghanistan in 2001 when the Taliban were quickly routed – prior to the insurgency that followed there; Kuwait in 1990 (a lightning-fast 100-hour expulsion of Iraqi armed forces), and Panama in 1989 where a corrupt American ally was deposed in favor of his democratic opposition – all come to mind. But these all faced more experienced and potent military opponents than faced in Grenada and resulted, in the case of Panama, a protracted stand-off, and in the cases of Iraq (2003) and Afghanistan (2001), protracted insurgencies, though Kuwait in 1990 was quickly liberated by overwhelming American force and a speedy occupation of southern Iraq. Grenada was, in comparison, as quick and easy as invasions get against an opponent with a small population and nearly non-existent military capability.

Because Greenland has long been an ally that has welcomed America’s role as its defender, an invasion could feel somewhat friendlier and face less armed opposition than an American takeover of a more hostile land with a longer tradition of anti-Americanism. It could (one may hope) feel more akin to the arrival of uninvited and initially unwanted American forces in Iceland in 1941 and the deployment of American forces all across the Canadian Arctic during World War II, unopposed and for the most part welcome but with locals and government officials concerned the Americans might never leave.

America’s takeover of Hawaii could also be helpful as a model for what to expect in Greenland, where U.S. commercial interests (mostly American plantation owners) aligned with American forces (Marines) to depose an indigenous monarchy by coup, one of our nation’s first regime changes. This was very much unlike, and therefore more pertinent to a Greenland takeover than, our negotiated 1867 purchase of Alaska, which was between America and Russia with Alaskans having no say in the change of sovereigns, and the negotiation was done in secret without any force required at all. Because there are likely domestic factions in Greenland who will welcome the change of sovereigns, one can even envision a coup-like dynamic unfolding quickly and bloodlessly.

But is an invasion likely? No, at least not at this time. The Trump Administration has been consistent in its messaging in wanting to acquire Greenland, which implies some give and take and a mutuality of consent, even if one party gets a better deal, and in dispatching high-level (albeit uninvited) delegations there to start a conversation with the people of Greenland – first, led by his son, and the second led by the Second Family – having been unable to get much buy-in from either the government of Denmark or Greenland thus far. While it is clear there is a desire in Washington for consent and a negotiated solution, this has thus far been met by much resistance among the ruling elites of Greenland and Denmark. If such a conversation can get started, we may see – instead of invasion – something more like the Taliban peace treaty where we drive a wedge between two domestic stakeholders (one a close ally and military partner, and the other once the target of America’s regime change policy) and switch our support from the former to the latter in the interest of long-term peace. President Trump made peace with the Taliban and abandoned America’s own client government it had installed in Kabul, which quickly fell as sovereign control quickly transferred to a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. If we can make peace with the Taliban after the horrors of 9/11, a negotiated solution in Greenland with our own allies, as unhappy as they may now be, seems to remain inherently plausible.

In Greenland, we may thus see something similar to what unfolded in Afghanistan under the historic peace that President Trump achieved: where Denmark loses sovereignty over Greenland, in its place emerges an independent, indigenously self-governing Greenland under America’s direct protection. This may, in fact, be the optimal outcome, one where Greenlanders and Americans are both the winners and there is no need for invasion or annexation. A COFA would likely follow. It is even possible that Greenlanders may, once the conversation starts, find that being part of our constitutional fabric brings many advantages, as Alaskan Inuit have found since they began their long march toward empowerment in the 1970s with the formation of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (now Council), the enactment and revision of ANCSA, and the formation of the North Slope Borough. Greenlanders may therefore choose this for their sovereign form, whether as a territory on a path toward statehood or as a state from the very start.

But given the anti-American backlash and strengthening unity displayed in Greenland after its March 11 election, such talks between Washington and Nuuk could collapse, and a Balkanization of Greenland into occupied zones could be one result, or an America-sponsored coup or direct ground invasion becoming another and more likely outcome. Intriguingly, mapping Greenland’s 2025 election results by regional municipality reveals a new regional fault line, with northwest Greenland (the region that Robert Peary once anticipated would be colonized by America, and which was thus widely called Pearyland) becoming Naleraq country (including, from north to south, Avannaata, Qeqertalik, and Qeqqata), while Greenland’s southwest and southeast has become Demokraatit territory (including Sermersooq and Kujalleq). And yet, Demokraatit’s party chairman joined with all of Greenland’s political parties that won seats in Greenland’s parliament except for Naleraq in his governing coalition (not for a lack of trying, but Naleraq withdrew from the coalition negotiations and is presently the only parliamentary opposition that remains) effectively turning his back on Greenland’s northwest and planting a seed, potentially, for a future Balkanization of Greenland in the event international tensions rise again.

Question 6: Has This Sort of Thing Happened Before? Can It Happen Today?

Yes. This type of thing was quite common in the 19th century and in the centuries before, as great powers expanded their colonial empires and carved up much of the world prior to the World Wars. Indeed, the birth of America in the 18th century is the direct result of foreign territorial expansion into indigenously self-governing homelands in the 16th and 17th centuries, often with brief and decisive skirmishes against indigenous resistance forces required before the formation of new settler states. In the 20th century, such behavior was not uncommon and is one of the direct causes of World War II, after Poland was jointly carved up by Germany and the Soviet Union, and in the aftermath of the Soviet victory of Germany in Europe’s east, Moscow quickly came to dominate the whole of Eastern Europe, setting up Soviet-styled puppet states that held power until 1989. America’s own history of proxy-warfare and client state formation in Central America likewise continued through to the same time period (and critics of American hegemony suggest continue to this day), as it does in the Middle East (where President Trump’s controversial proposal to takeover Gaza and depopulate it is but one contemporary manifestation of such behavior).

Vladimir’s Putin’s bloodless annexation of Crimea in 2014 after a month-long information operation (IO) campaign is another example, one quite recent, that shows how annexation can be achieved in our contemporary world. As a mode, it was remarkably efficient, well planned, and swiftly implemented, and so effective that it perhaps encouraged Putin to over-reach after his quick success, resulting in the subsequent hybrid war in Eastern Ukraine that was fiercely and successfully contested, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that with NATO support was largely thwarted. Perhaps one lesson is when annexing, keep focused! If Greenland is the goal, don’t extend the campaign to Canada where a larger and less colonized population awaits to defend their homeland. One could say the same of America’s invasion plans during the Global War on Terror, where it shifted its strategic attention from Afghanistan to Iraq for no logical reason and suffered greatly because of the distraction.

If Greenland’s annexation does happen by force, the White House will need to engage in a more concerted IO campaign to win over hearts and minds in Greenland among those who are opposed to Danish rule, and who do not have faith in their political leaders to bring them the fruits of independence. Recent statements by President Trump and VP Vance that Denmark has not done a good job of protecting Greenland are, to a large degree, true. And while Denmark is responding to these criticisms with increased efforts, the White House can make a strong case that it has always been, and will always be, American power that keeps Greenland free.

This will find some level of support in Greenland, particularly given anti-Danish sentiments in the months preceding President Trump’s re-election, and the “Spiral Case” scandal (relating to past policies of suppression of native Greenlanders’ birth rate), and related offenses that brought shame to Copenhagen and did much to discredit their rule.

Tags: Great Power Competition, Influence, NATO

About The Author

• 
  
• Barry Scott Zellen
• Barry Scott Zellen, PhD is a Research Scholar in the Department of Geography at the University of Connecticut (UConn) and a Senior Fellow (Arctic Security) at the Institute of the North (IoN). He is the author, most recently, of Arctic Exceptionalism: Cooperation in a Contested World (Lynne Rienner Books, 2024) He has lived in Inuvik, NWT, Canada (1990-93), Yellowknife, NWT, Canada (1994-98), Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada (1988-89 and 1998-99), and Akureyri, Iceland (2020), and during his 11 years living in the Arctic worked for the Inuvialuit and Gwich’in of the Mackenzie Delta/Western Beaufort Sea region, the Dene and Metis of the Mackenzie Valley, and the Yukon First Nations.

20. Beyond Collection: Building Publicly Available Information Systems for Strategic Effect

​Excerpt:

An important implication of this paradigm shift is that PAI analyst training will also need to adapt to using foundational models and basic data science skills. While not everyone in the military information dimension community (i.e., OSINT, PAO, PSYOPs, etc.) needs to be able to deep dive into PAI analytic tools and data, more of the force does need to overcome the fear of handling data. Also, many of the skills required to use digital data and operate things like foundational models are very trainable, making it not unrealistic for more of the force to utilize PAI data. At the same time, leaders need to better understand what PAI analysis can tell them about a military problem and, potentially, how to solve it. The data, PAI tools and the understanding they can bring aren’t as confusing or complicated as many people have made it out to be. The military should continue to push for operators, analysts and leaders to be trained to manipulate and understand digital data. In an era where information is as vital as ammunition, equipping ourselves with adaptable, customizable PAI tools is not just a necessity but a strategic imperative to excel in modern warfare.

Essay| The Latest

Beyond Collection: Building Publicly Available Information Systems for Strategic Effect

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/04/29/beyond-collection-building-publicly-available-information-s/

by Iain Cruickshank, by Michael Schwille

|

04.29.2025 at 06:00am

Unaffiliated Researcher: Jessica Dawson

The U.S. Army recently published a new Information doctrine. For an organization that is often resistant to change, publishing a doctrine on information is a monumental change. However, it is also a necessary change; recent conflicts show that information has become a critical aspect of all modern warfare. This dimension encompasses content and data, and analytical and technical processes used to exchange information across operational environments. Just as each operational environment is multifaceted and complex, so too is the information dimension. A particularly complex, yet important component of the information dimension of the operational environment is Publicly Available Information (PAI), or open-source information.[1]

PAI is an increasingly critical source of information for military operations. While exact numbers are not known, significant amounts of classified intelligence used to drive operations come from PAI. Furthermore, PAI is the most important medium for information warfare and controlling narratives. PAI is an essential source of battlefield intelligence and operational assessment. And, as battlefields become increasingly digitized, the importance of PAI to military operations is likely to grow.

Despite the new doctrine and the importance of PAI, the U.S. Army is still unequipped to understand – let alone dominate – the information dimension of warfare. Current PAI analytic tools are insufficient for military understanding of the informational dimensions of the operational environment. With the growing complexity and value of the informational dimensions, the problems with current PAI analytic tools will only worsen. In this article, we outline limitations of current PAI tools, brought on by the nature of the information dimension itself as well as the technical considerations for analyzing digital information. We will then present a new paradigm for how PAI analysis tools should be made to support military operations. Overall, PAI analysis tools need to shift from the current offerings that are primarily based in dashboards with no access to data, to designs which are interoperable and focus on data acquisition and availability. These analytic tools need to prioritize greater variety in data collection, the ability to access that data programmatically, and user-level configurability of tools over niche machine learning models and visualizations on dashboards.

Changes to The Information Dimension

To understand the necessary evolution of PAI analysis tools, it is crucial to dissect why current offerings fall short. Current PAI tools currently fail in three, main ways: they do not allow access to data, they are not designed for military use, and they are not customizable. To understand why these are critical shortcomings, we first must understand the nature of the information dimension.

The information dimension is complex, voluminous, and dynamic – and largely indecipherable to nonspecialists. This results in two things. First, it means that military analysts struggle to distill digital information into actionable intelligence for a commander to make more informed decisions. Second, it is never clear what information is important for any given operational context. Furthermore, most commercial PAI tools are Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products designed for advertising, brand management, and consumer analytics. Thus, the information from these tools, which is typically only presented as a dashboard (i.e., a visual computer interface that presents key data and metrics in an organized format), is of limited military value.

Additionally, the social media environment, one of the most important parts of the information dimension, has become more fragmented and complex. There are now dozens, if not hundreds, of different social media sites with varying structures and rules. For example, many sites now have some form of private or semi-private page or channel for certain types of conversations. Some sites only work with images and videos for posting, while others allow only text. This means that certain analyses will be important for one particular social media site but useless for others. Additionally, it means that the analysis of social media data must extend beyond text to other modalities. The changing nature of the social media environment will necessitate that military analysts be able to analyze multiple modalities within different contexts due to the different governing rules of different social media sites.

Furthermore, useful PAI in the military context will come from more than just Western social media sites. As social media fragments, there is an increasing number of foreign, non-English language social media sites and subdomains within social media sites. These foreign, relatively-small social media sites can provide very useful information for military operations. However, most commercial PAI analysis offerings only focus on Western social media outlets for data collection and only have tools for handling English. So, most commercial PAI analysis offerings have a significant data gap.

Additionally, to get more complete PAI analyses, analysts need access to more than social media data. Legacy sources of PAI, such as traditional print media, online websites, commercial data, and others also provide operationally important information. This presents a future where data streams of various types of PAI will need to be configured at low levels of military operations. This requirement is unique and unless the military drives the demand for these small market efforts, the commercial demand signal will be insufficient to create a market opportunity. At present, current PAI tools frequently do not have foreign social media data, non-social media data – and most importantly – completely lack the ability to integrate new streams of data at an analyst level.

Why Are Current PAI Tools So Ineffective?

Current PAI tools generally seek to condense a lot of technical information down to manageable information displays in a particular context. The vast majority of current PAI tools are a combination of some unknown collection of social media data combined with usually unspecified machine learning (ML) models and a dashboard. All a user can interact with is that dashboard. Unless it so happens that a particular PAI tool happens to have the correct data and analysis for a given operational context, the tool will likely be unable to address PAI analysis needs.

It is this latter point which makes even those PAI analytic tools actually designed for military use come up short. The nature of what constitutes militarily relevant analysis in the information dimension for any given operation is continually evolving and poorly understood. Truly leveraging PAI requires multiple tools, and every operational context will need different tools. Emerging disciplines like social cybersecurity, which didn’t exist a decade ago, have come into existence because whole new aspects of the information dimension are now becoming militarily relevant in new and unforeseen ways. The information dimension, and what aspects are militarily relevant to it, are continually changing. Thus, even at a conceptual level it is not possible to create one dashboard that will be sufficient for military PAI analysis. It is this point that has continued to plague the authors when analyzing PAI for military commanders and the main reason for writing this piece; every PAI tool we have tried to use in a military context is never able to answer all of the questions that a commander has. This indicates we need a new paradigm for PAI tools.

Since these tools do not allow access to the underlying data, it’s also impossible to customize analyses to support a particular operational context. For example, a military organization may care about things like detecting bots or coordinated inauthentic behavior, but any given PAI analysis tool only has dashboard displays for things like trending topics and aggregate sentiment scores. And, without access to underlying data, it becomes impossible to do any analysis outside of that dashboard. Furthermore, without access to the underlying data it’s not clear how representative any results presented by the dashboard actually are; if all one can see are aggregate statistics, one cannot know if these aggregate statistics describe the whole environment or just some specially selected subset of it. The fact that these tools do not allow access to data forces users to make assumptions about what can be seen in the dashboards (e.g., using sentiment as a proxy for opinion or stance) and leaves many military analysts of PAI unable to fully understand the information dimension and advise commanders.

The nature of how machine learning models operate contributes to the inadequacy of current dashboard-only tools. As PAI consists of a plethora of sites and voluminous data streams, detailed analysis must leverage machine scalability in order to draw useful insights from it. This means that innovations like machine learning are critical to the analysis of PAI , particularly to deal with the sheer magnitude of data that is available. However, these models are also often fragile, and require maintenance to remain current and deliver correct results. Furthermore, current machine learning models are often specially designed for a particular task, like sentiment classification or bot detection. Thus, when a user is only presented with a dashboard, they cannot maintain or create specialty ML models which reduces the usefulness of the PAI tool. Finally, researchers and ML developers are constantly creating newer, better models as well as models for new tasks in the information dimension. All of this means that a PAI tool must allow for changing and updating any ML models, or other analysis methods, at the user level, or the tool will fail to keep pace with operational demands and remain relevant.

Changes to Technology

Recent technologies provide the possibility for new types of PAI analysis tools and methods. Groundbreaking models like Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) are ushering in a new era where analysts can dynamically create ML algorithms tailored to their specific analysis needs. Unlike the current generation of PAI offerings where analysts must adapt their tasks to fit available ML tools, Foundational Models empower them to instead adapt ML tools to their tasks. For example, using LLMs eliminates the need to settle for current PAI offerings, like generic sentiment algorithms, when trying to analyze complex socio-linguistic concepts like opinions on specific events or individuals.

An analyst can instruct an LLM to directly perform these operationally-specific analyses using everyday language. Analysts can also craft custom, high-performing algorithms in real-time, leveraging model distillation and data programming, which overcomes the limitations of pre-packaged, narrow tools prevalent as currently offered. These narrowly-focused, opaquely-trained ML models packaged with current PAI analysis tools are nowhere near as performant or flexible as using Foundational Models outside of those tools.

A New Paradigm

While new technologies can address some issues with current PAI tool sets at the analyst level, certain aspects in the information dimension are better handled at the tool-maker level. Data acquisition, especially for social media data, remains a persistent challenge. Social media sites frequently change rules on data collection, adjusting technical methods like APIs and data formats with the introduction or removal of features. This dynamic landscape makes acquiring internet data, assessing that data, and integrating that data with other sources or databases an ongoing challenge. Due to the increasing intricacy of the information dimension in online environments, evaluating data quality and linking together relevant data pose ongoing challenges. Solving these data-related technical issues often requires a high degree of expertise in niche skill sets like web scraping, which are not easily trainable. Addressing challenges related to data acquisition and integration demands specialized knowledge, and the evolving nature of the online landscape ensures that expertise in areas like web scraping remains crucial for effective tool development and maintenance.

With all the current shortcomings and changes in the information dimension, it’s clear that the military doesn’t just need new PAI tools but rather a new paradigm where the analyst is central and tools and data are customizable to them. PAI tools should fundamentally focus on interoperability and data acquisition, as opposed to dashboarding and ML models. Organizations should be able to access all collected data from a vendor. Analysts should be able to query any number of PAI tools from a programming environment to combine data sources and ML models to create customized analysis pipelines. The age of full suites with just access to a dashboard for an analyst is over, and having a special algorithm for a niche concept is no longer a selling point for a PAI tool.

PAI tools need to be configurable at all levels, from data inputs to the construction of analyses. This paradigm of configurable and modular PAI tools fits into a growing need to have such digital tools across all warfighting functions. Current PAI offerings for military personnel resemble buying a gas station sandwich: average bread, meat, cheese, and vegetables all in one package — or nothing. PAI offerings should be more like getting a sandwich in a market, with choices between exquisite offerings of bread, meat, cheese, and more, allowing users to assemble data and analyses on demand. PAI tool makers should stop focusing efforts on creating mediocre, full suites and instead concentrate on creating exquisite capabilities in critical aspects like data acquisition or foundation models.

Figure 1: Comparison between current and future paradigms for analysis tools for Publicly Available Information (PAI). Graphic created by the Authors.

An important implication of this paradigm shift is that PAI analyst training will also need to adapt to using foundational models and basic data science skills. While not everyone in the military information dimension community (i.e., OSINT, PAO, PSYOPs, etc.) needs to be able to deep dive into PAI analytic tools and data, more of the force does need to overcome the fear of handling data. Also, many of the skills required to use digital data and operate things like foundational models are very trainable, making it not unrealistic for more of the force to utilize PAI data. At the same time, leaders need to better understand what PAI analysis can tell them about a military problem and, potentially, how to solve it. The data, PAI tools and the understanding they can bring aren’t as confusing or complicated as many people have made it out to be. The military should continue to push for operators, analysts and leaders to be trained to manipulate and understand digital data. In an era where information is as vital as ammunition, equipping ourselves with adaptable, customizable PAI tools is not just a necessity but a strategic imperative to excel in modern warfare.

[1] For the purpose of this article, we utilize Army doctrinal terms. The informational dimensions of the operational environment are human, information and physical. We will collectively refer to these three dimensions as the ‘informational dimensions’.

The views expressed are those of the authors and contributor, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.

Tags: Information Analysis, Information Technology, Publicly Available Information

About The Authors

• 
  
• Iain Cruickshank
• Major Iain Cruickshank is a Functional Area 49 (Operations Research/Systems Analysis Officer) in the U.S. Army and specializes in data science, machine learning, and computational social science. He is currently assigned as a senior research scientist at the Army Cyber Institute and has had previous assignments at the Army's Artificial Intelligence Integration Center, the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade, and the 101st Airborne Division. He holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, obtained as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
• View all posts 
• 
  
• Michael Schwille
• Lieutenant Colonel Michael Schwille is a U.S. Army reserve officer qualified in Civil Affairs, Psychological Operations, and Information Operations Army Reservist with multiple deployments to the Middle East and Africa. He is also a political scientist at RAND with research focuses on the integration of information into combined arms warfare. In this capacity he has experience with Joint, Army and Marine Corps concept development, Operations in the Information Environment, countering A2AD strategies, strategic workforce analysis and force development. He holds an M.A. in international development studies from George Washington University.

21. How China Armed Itself for the Trade War

​Excerpts:

To ensure that Beijing recycles its trade surplus into U.S. assets and maintains exposure to the dollar system—another quiet but potent point of American leverage—one practical opportunity lies in reversing the People’s Bank of China’s ongoing diversification away from U.S. Treasuries. Since 2016, the PBOC has cut its Treasury holdings by roughly 40 percent, shifting a portion of its reserves into gold. Redirecting even part of those recent gold purchases back into U.S. Treasuries could generate an estimated $43 billion in new investment in the United States, which would support the Trump administration’s desires to keep interest rates low and stabilize the bond market, critical components of its plan to refinance the $36 trillion U.S. national debt. Such a move would also signal Beijing’s continued commitment to the dollar system and dampen speculation about an emerging BRICS currency or a broader push toward de-dollarization.

Without a coordinated tariff regime among U.S. allies and partners, however, no strategy will be airtight. Chinese exporters will not sit still while Washington negotiates, especially given the glacial pace of past talks. It took two years, for example, to finalize the Phase One trade deal that the United States and China signed in January 2020, while the average lifespan of a Chinese small and medium-sized enterprise—the workhorse of the country’s exports—is just 3.7 years.

Even sustained tariffs won’t stop China’s global commercial expansion. Domestic overcapacity and brutal internal competition have already pushed Chinese firms to expand abroad in search of profit margins. That push has been reinforced by state support through financial incentives, regulatory streamlining, tax breaks, and easier access to overseas markets and supply chains.

The scope of a deal between Washington and Beijing—and the concessions Trump can extract from Xi—has likely narrowed over the past month. If Trump wants to secure an agreement, he may have to join the Chinese people in “eating bitterness” and accept some tough compromises. But with a recalibrated diplomatic strategy, he could still claim some small victories—and avoid the massive potential losses now facing the United States.

How China Armed Itself for the Trade War

Foreign Affairs · by More by Zongyuan Zoe Liu · April 29, 2025

Beijing’s High-Risk Approach to Its Economic Confrontation With Washington

Zongyuan Zoe Liu

April 29, 2025

Shipping containers at port in Oakland, California, April 2025 Carlos Barria / Reuters

ZONGYUAN ZOE LIU is Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances Its Global Ambitions.

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How did the world’s two largest economies stumble toward a trade war that neither truly seeks and which the rest of the world can’t afford? Following U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” ceremony on April 2, during which he unveiled tariffs of varying levels on all of Washington’s trade partners, the United States and China have engaged in several rounds of tit-for-tat escalation, driving tariffs between the two countries to prohibitively high levels. By April 11, tariffs on Chinese goods entering the United States had reached 145 percent, while U.S. goods entering China reached 125 percent. Unless the two countries carve out broad exemptions, the $700 billion in annual bilateral trade between them could shrink by as much as 80 percent over the next two years. Markets have responded negatively to the looming trade war, and many economists and analysts have struggled to explain what the Trump administration is trying to achieve.

The best way to understand the current standoff with China is as the product of faulty assumptions and missteps on both sides. Within Trump’s orbit, powerful players and factions misjudged the resilience of China’s economy and wrongly assumed that Chinese leader Xi Jinping would rush to make a deal in order to avoid a domestic backlash. As a result, China hawks in Washington failed to anticipate how resolutely Beijing would react to Trump’s tariffs.

In China, meanwhile, a deficit of skilled diplomacy has left the country more adept at signaling defiance than at shaping outcomes. Beijing has failed to address the legitimate concerns among many in the United States and beyond that a renewed surge of low-cost Chinese exports would produce a second “China shock” by further eroding the industrial bases of other economies. And bellicose rhetoric—such as the declaration made in March by China’s embassy in Washington that China is “ready to fight till the end” in “a trade war or any other type of war”—does little to sway international opinion, and fails entirely to convey the Chinese leadership’s long-standing desire to avoid external conflict.

The Trump administration is now trying to salvage a situation of global economic chaos—which, by many indications, it did not plan for—by pivoting from a full rewiring of the global economic system to a more targeted frontal assault on the Chinese economy. Xi and the rest of the Chinese leadership harbor no illusion that China can win a trade war with the United States. But they are willing to risk one that Trump might lose.

FAULTY FORMULAS

The view that the Chinese leadership was desperate to negotiate a trade deal, to avoid economic pain that could destabilize Chinese society and threaten the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on power, is common among China hawks in the United States. This analysis is partly accurate, but it has led many to draw false conclusions.

China’s economic growth is weaker today than at any point in the last three decades. But it is not, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly stated, in a “severe recession, if not depression.” Growth decelerated from double-digit annual rates two decades ago to rates in the high single digits in the 2010s to rates of around five percent today (discounted by many China watchers to closer to two percent, to account for the CCP’s tendency to exaggerate).

But China’s slowing growth does not automatically give the United States an advantage. Advanced economies grew an average of 1.7 percent last year, with the U.S. economy leading the pack at 2.8 percent. That momentum, however, is fading. The financial services firm JPMorgan now forecasts negative U.S. growth in the second half of 2025, while projecting that China’s official growth will slip to 4.6 percent.

China is, if necessary, ready to decouple from the United States.

In early March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told NBC News, “Donald Trump is bringing growth to America. I would never bet on recession. No chance.” Such hyperbole, taken at face value, has contributed to the Trump administration’s overestimation of the chances that tariffs would force China to the negotiating table. Its strategy has backfired, greatly diminishing the possibility of direct negotiations in which China might be willing to offer meaningful concessions. Beijing has shown a strong capacity for retaliation and a tactical openness to negotiation, but not a willingness to kowtow.

The Trump administration seems to believe that a comprehensive trade deal can be thrashed out through direct personal dialogue between Trump and Xi. But Xi does not negotiate deals; he maintains an imperial aloofness, offering his blessing to agreements crafted by others and standing above the fray of daily governance. Trump, by contrast, draws political capital from commanding media attention; every achievement must be visibly and vocally his. He has cast himself as the “negotiator in chief,” personally driving the tariff agenda.

This asymmetry in leadership styles presents a serious logistical challenge to diplomacy. It is difficult to imagine Trump exercising the restraint necessary to avoid framing the dispute as a personal contest between two great leaders. Yet that very framing is anathema to the Chinese side—and likely to cause Beijing to disengage altogether. Beijing thinks that a meeting between Xi and Trump would be unlikely to guarantee substantive results, and sees it as a concession to Washington with little upside and considerable risk. Even a carefully choreographed summit could damage Xi’s image and, by extension, the party’s standing. Chinese officials still vividly recall how Trump launched a trade war almost immediately after what they had considered a warm and fruitful state visit to Beijing in 2017. Moreover, Beijing does not want to risk a blowup such as the one that occurred when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House in February.

XI’S LONG GAME

Xi’s political career has been distinguished by two throughlines: resisting foreign coercion and mastering domestic power struggles. His instincts were forged during the Cultural Revolution, during the 1960s and 1970s, when his family fell from grace and he was sent to toil in rural Shaanxi. Xi’s core political message—captured in the concept of chi-ku, or “eating bitterness”—calls on Chinese citizens, especially youth, to endure hardship in service of national rejuvenation. His invocation of the CCP’s historic mission to overcome China’s “hundred years of humiliation” is not mere rhetorical flourish. It is the scaffolding of his legitimacy.

Trump’s confrontational trade policies, though designed to weaken Beijing’s hand, have paradoxically reinforced Xi’s narrative. The external threat provides cover for the CCP’s ongoing economic reorientation and justifies the state’s push for greater self-reliance. It also allows Xi to deflect blame for past policy missteps—particularly his administration’s often punitive stance toward private enterprise. That shift is evident in the symbolic restoration of favor toward billionaire entrepreneurs who had previously fallen out with the state, such as prominent businessman Jack Ma, who largely disappeared from public view after criticizing China’s financial regulatory system in 2020 but who has been politically rehabilitated in recent months.

The CCP holds a monopoly on power in China’s political system, and Xi maintains a near-monopoly within the party itself. This concentration of authority allows the Chinese leader to make sweeping policy decisions unchallenged—and to reverse course just as swiftly. And as a result of the party’s control over information, particularly regarding foreign affairs, any encounter with the Trump administration can be framed domestically as Xi standing firm against foreign bullying.

China’s reaction to U.S. tariffs is less about saving face than about executing a long-calibrated strategy. Unlike U.S. allies, many of which have been caught off guard by Trump’s tactics, Beijing has spent years preparing for confrontation. Since 2018, China has weathered a low-level trade war, gaining experience in managing the deepening U.S.-Chinese rivalry and learning how to circumvent Washington’s economic restrictions.

Unlike U.S. allies, Beijing has spent years preparing for confrontation.

In response, Beijing has pushed local officials and state-owned enterprises to strengthen supply chain resilience and cultivate overseas markets. To cushion the blow to small businesses and stave off unemployment, it has unveiled targeted fiscal and monetary measures to support them amid uncertainty. At the latest National People’s Congress, in March, Chinese leaders emphasized boosting domestic demand as the key to future growth, with new policies to strengthen consumer spending and improve the domestic business environment. They have also promoted the international use of renminbi-based payment systems to reduce China’s exposure to coercive U.S. financial sanctions.

Simultaneously, China has rolled out a suite of new laws—ranging from the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law to the Export Control Law and anti-espionage regulations—that create legal bases for retaliatory measures and put international businesses in an impossible bind. Firms can either comply with U.S. sanctions and risk violating Chinese law, or vice versa.

On the diplomatic front, China has sought to blunt Western protectionism by deepening regional ties. It has accelerated negotiations on a free trade agreement with the Arab states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Regarding the European Union, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi described a March meeting with French counterpart Jean-Noël Barrot as “constructive,” and China and France are planning three high-level dialogues this year. In the days before the Trump administration’s tariff announcement, ministers from China, Japan, and South Korea resumed their economic and trade dialogue after a five-year hiatus, agreeing to explore a more comprehensive free trade agreement among the three countries, to collaborate on reforms to the World Trade Organization, and to welcome new members to their regional free trade agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Earlier this month, Xi visited Southeast Asia for the second time in less than two years, to strengthen ties with Vietnam and other key neighbors that have become transshipment hubs for Chinese goods.

There is no question that high tariffs will erode Chinese exporters’ access to the U.S. market. But from Xi’s vantage point, the Chinese economy is better positioned than ever to endure the pain. Compared to the shocks of the COVID-19 lockdowns, a trade rupture with the United States would be a tolerable disruption. The lockdowns demonstrated how far the CCP can push hardship on its people without destabilizing social control—its paramount concern. More important, Xi’s measure of national rejuvenation is not GDP; it is scientific and technological development. Trump’s “America first” policy agenda only reinforces Xi’s argument for indigenous innovation and greater self-reliance. Unlike during the first Trump administration, China is now, if necessary, ready to decouple from the United States.

NO SURE BETS

Setting aside near-term inflation concerns, the greatest variable reshaping global supply chains today is whether the United States can still be counted on as a stable, long-term economic partner. This doubt among traditional U.S. partners has not gone unnoticed in Beijing, where officials have swiftly taken advantage of the shift in international attention away from Xi’s centralization of power and departure from Deng Xiaoping’s vision of “reform and opening up.” In early April, the CCP’s official newspaper, People’s Daily, invited foreign investors to “use certainty in China to hedge against uncertainty in America.”

Uncertainty about U.S. stability, however, does not automatically make China a more credible alternative. Beijing has yet to resolve its own structural economic problems. There is no guarantee that its strategy of self-reliance and state-driven innovation will deliver results fast enough to prevent China from stagnating in the middle-income trap. As internal and external growth headwinds mount, Beijing faces the hard budget constraint of capital scarcity: more money for technology means less money for households.

But those born in the 1970s and afterward envisioned a future not of more struggle but of lasting prosperity. And younger generations have good reason to worry. They came of age in a China of rising affluence and opportunity, and COVID-19 was the first major national crisis many of them ever experienced. Now, as U.S.-Chinese tensions jeopardize access to global education and professional advancement, their sense of economic security is eroding.

In both China and the United States, policymaking is dominated by aging political elites. And in both countries, younger generations are increasingly aware that those in power are willing to mortgage their futures. For China, in the long term, the rallying cry of “eating bitterness” may no longer inspire a society that has grown up expecting sweetness.

TRUMP’S BITTER PILL

Trump’s “America first” approach to China need not translate into one of maximum pressure. Strong-arm tactics will only reinforce Beijing’s long-held suspicion that Washington seeks to contain China and ultimately topple the Communist Party. The better strategic play is to present Beijing with a dilemma instead of an ultimatum.

That dilemma begins by accepting a structural reality: the United States will always run a trade deficit with China because Americans have no desire to reclaim low-end manufacturing jobs from Chinese factories. The challenge Trump faces is how to structure that deficit in a politically durable way—to level the playing field in industries that will shape the future, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and clean energy, and to ensure that China continues to recycle its surplus into U.S. dollar assets.

To do this, the United States should continue exporting large numbers of raw materials and industrial inputs, running a surplus that reinforces its position as an upstream supplier in global production chains and a critical partner in China’s industrial ecosystem. At the same time, Washington should accept a sizable deficit in low-end, small-scale manufacturing. Although domestic demand for these goods remains strong, bringing this sector back to the United States is both politically empty and economically unattractive. On the other hand, the Trump administration should aim to keep high-end, strategic manufacturing—in sectors such as semiconductors and industrial robotics—close to balanced, through formulaic reciprocal tariffs. With those tariffs, Washington could also create incentives for Beijing to narrow the net trade gap, by applying slightly higher tariffs in those high-end sectors at first and offering reductions as China purchased U.S. raw materials and industrial inputs. Such a framework would give both countries a victory to claim: Trump could say that he defended critical American industries, while Xi could argue that he preserved China’s manufacturing base and even secured modest tariff reductions. Crucially, it would shift the burden of adjustment onto Beijing, giving China the flexibility to rebalance its economy on its own terms while still aligning with U.S. interests.

Even sustained tariffs won’t stop China’s global commercial expansion.

To ensure that Beijing recycles its trade surplus into U.S. assets and maintains exposure to the dollar system—another quiet but potent point of American leverage—one practical opportunity lies in reversing the People’s Bank of China’s ongoing diversification away from U.S. Treasuries. Since 2016, the PBOC has cut its Treasury holdings by roughly 40 percent, shifting a portion of its reserves into gold. Redirecting even part of those recent gold purchases back into U.S. Treasuries could generate an estimated $43 billion in new investment in the United States, which would support the Trump administration’s desires to keep interest rates low and stabilize the bond market, critical components of its plan to refinance the $36 trillion U.S. national debt. Such a move would also signal Beijing’s continued commitment to the dollar system and dampen speculation about an emerging BRICS currency or a broader push toward de-dollarization.

Without a coordinated tariff regime among U.S. allies and partners, however, no strategy will be airtight. Chinese exporters will not sit still while Washington negotiates, especially given the glacial pace of past talks. It took two years, for example, to finalize the Phase One trade deal that the United States and China signed in January 2020, while the average lifespan of a Chinese small and medium-sized enterprise—the workhorse of the country’s exports—is just 3.7 years.

Even sustained tariffs won’t stop China’s global commercial expansion. Domestic overcapacity and brutal internal competition have already pushed Chinese firms to expand abroad in search of profit margins. That push has been reinforced by state support through financial incentives, regulatory streamlining, tax breaks, and easier access to overseas markets and supply chains.

The scope of a deal between Washington and Beijing—and the concessions Trump can extract from Xi—has likely narrowed over the past month. If Trump wants to secure an agreement, he may have to join the Chinese people in “eating bitterness” and accept some tough compromises. But with a recalibrated diplomatic strategy, he could still claim some small victories—and avoid the massive potential losses now facing the United States.

ZONGYUAN ZOE LIU is Maurice R. Greenberg Senior Fellow for China Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances Its Global Ambitions.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Zongyuan Zoe Liu · April 29, 2025

22. An Attack on America’s Universities Is an Attack on American Power

​We are cutting off our nose to spite our face. The long term implications of this effort will have profound national security effects.

"Ideologically non-compliant?" Are we really conducting government affairs using that criteria? Somehow I do not think our Constitution calls for being "ideologically compliant."

Excerpts:

The Trump administration’s recent moves are stripping university labs of their funding by freezing Defense Department research grants to institutions it deems ideologically noncompliant—effectively targeting the very research pipelines that sustain national security innovation. Weakening the university-defense research partnership is a strategic miscalculation with far-reaching consequences. Universities are the channels through which scientific discoveries yield real-world applications and talented youth become world-changing entrepreneurs and innovative defenders of national security. The Trump administration might argue that it is willing to continue funding if universities align with its ideological demands. But ceding independence in exchange for scientific funding would undermine the very rigor and openness that has given the U.S. university system its edge for decades.

If the government allows ideological discomfort to disrupt its alliance with research universities, it will sacrifice its advantage in innovation and competitiveness. Cutting off Defense Department funding to universities will not halt defense innovation. But it will help ensure that it moves elsewhere. Some talent will drift toward private firms, where pressure to generate short-term profit often precludes a focus on projects that align with long-term national security priorities. Other talent and resources may move to foreign institutions eager to capitalize on U.S. retrenchment. To enable these shifts out of political pique is not principled—it is self-defeating.

An Attack on America’s Universities Is an Attack on American Power

Foreign Affairs · by More by Sarah Kreps · April 29, 2025

How Academia Bolsters National Security

Sarah Kreps

April 29, 2025

Columbia University in New York City, April 2025 Ryan Murphy / Reuters

SARAH KREPS is John L. Wetherill Professor and Director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. From 1999 to 2007, she served in the U.S. Air Force, where she helped to develop advanced airborne surveillance and reconnaissance systems.

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In the spring of 1943, Hans Bethe, a theoretical physicist and professor at Cornell University, left Ithaca, New York, for a classified government site in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Once there, he led the theoretical division of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Bethe was just one of dozens of academics pulled from elite American research universities into wartime service, applying their intellectual training to solve critical national security challenges. When the war ended, Bethe returned to Cornell, where he helped transform the university into a hub of Cold War–era research, working to invent—among other innovations—the synchrotron, one of the world’s first particle accelerators. That development, in turn, paved the way for the creation of advanced radar systems and semiconductors.

Bethe’s career path epitomized the long-lasting and mutually beneficial partnership between U.S. universities and the government. Before 1940, U.S. federal support for scientific research was minimal and mainly limited to agriculture and public health. But during World War II, the government turbocharged its funding for research and development and boosted it again during the Cold War. The government extended grants to a kaleidoscopic variety of academic efforts that included conducting basic physics experiments, developing materials to enable hypersonic flight, and inventing artificial intelligence algorithms. This funding often constituted the only reliable support for long-term high-risk projects that private industry, focused on near-term profits, typically neglects.

Now, President Donald Trump’s administration is moving to sever the link between academia and government by freezing billions of dollars in federal grants to top research institutions. This act may score political points among those accustomed to understanding academia as a left-leaning “ivory tower” insulated from ordinary Americans and private enterprise. But it reflects a dangerous misunderstanding of how the United States became militarily and commercially dominant in the first place. Research universities have long undergirded, in particular, the country’s national security through defense research, and they continue to train the pipeline of talent that powers both government and industry. Practically speaking, cutting their support does not represent a principled political stance—it is a friendly-fire assault on U.S. national security.

BETTER TOGETHER

The defense partnership that developed between universities and the federal government during World War II marked a turning point in the relationship between science and state in America. Before the war, most American scientific research was funded by foundations, university endowments, and private donations. In 1945, Vannevar Bush—the Raytheon founder who became vice president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then directed the government’s Office of Scientific Research and Development, which sponsored wartime military R & D—prepared a report called Science, the Endless Frontier. Federal funding for research had already ballooned from $69 million in 1940 to $720 million in 1944. Bush, who had overseen much of the United States’ wartime scientific mobilization, argued that the United States must not stop boosting universities’ funding. In his report, he emphasized the importance of basic science research to the United States’ prosperity and security. Because modern war required “the use of the most advanced scientific techniques,” he wrote, “colleges, universities, and research institutes” would have to “meet the rapidly increasing demands of industry and government for new scientific knowledge,” and so “their basic research should be strengthened by use of public funds.”

This report became a blueprint for maintaining and expanding federal support for university research in peacetime. Institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology, and Stanford University quickly secured new federal grants and transformed themselves into hubs of scientific innovation, many with a direct connection to defense. MIT, for example, created the Research Laboratory of Electronics, which—supported by $1.5 million in annual funding from the Defense Department—expanded the university’s wartime research into microwave, atomic, and solid-state physics into engineering applications. By the late 1940s, grants from the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission grants accounted for 85 percent of MIT’s research budget. This model—in which universities received federal funding for defense-oriented research—quickly spread, and by 1949, such grants made up 96 percent of all the public funding for university research in the physical sciences.

Federally funded university research became the backbone of U.S. global leadership.

The experiment in federally funding university research proved so successful that it became a permanent feature of U.S. government strategy. After the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the United States responded by creating the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to fund high-risk, high-reward scientific research—much of it conducted at universities. One early ARPA project, a collaboration with Stanford and UCLA, led to the development of ARPANET, the direct precursor to today’s internet. What began as a government investment in secure communication technology revolutionized the way the whole world exchanged information.

Universities, for their part, converted U.S. taxpayers’ dollars into innovations that made the country prosper. Nowhere was this more evident than at Stanford, where federal defense contracts and research funding supported a culture of innovation that helped create Silicon Valley. Faculty members such as Frederick Terman, who aggressively expanded the university’s statistics and engineering departments to win more Defense Department grants, encouraged students to commercialize their research, enabling the founding of companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor that would become cornerstones of the computing revolution.

While many other countries, such as France and the United Kingdom, continued to direct government funding for scientific research mainly toward government labs, the United States built a decentralized research system anchored in its universities. This decentralized system not only accelerated technological progress but also helped defense-related innovations flow into private commerce, giving U.S. industry a clear edge that the Soviet Union struggled to match, despite its extensive investments in technical education. By the end of the twentieth century, this system of federally funded university research had become the backbone of the United States’ global leadership.

LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP

The same alliance that propelled Cold War–era breakthroughs continued to propel innovation after the Cold War—and to underwrite U.S. national security. But since the early 1990s, the stakes have become even more complex. Rapidly advancing technologies such as artificial intelligence, hypersonics, space systems, and quantum computing are creating new national security challenges as well as potential solutions. Although private companies such as OpenAI and Google are popularizing new AI models, the core technologies that power these systems were developed by researchers trained in university labs sustained by decades of publicly funded research. Without substantial U.S. government investment into universities, there would be no AI revolution to commercialize.

Indeed, academic research rarely stays confined to university labs. The flow of knowledge and expertise from academia into industry is what transforms abstract scientific insights into deployable technologies with strategic and economic value. Many universities have so-called technology transfer offices that work to patent inventions, license new technologies, and support startups. Through these initiatives, discoveries made on campuses migrate into the commercial sector and startup ecosystem, preserving the United States’ dominance in advanced technology. Today’s driverless vehicles, for instance, rely on a Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) system that originated from federally funded missile-tracking research at MIT.

This migration of ideas is accompanied by a migration of people. American graduate programs in engineering, applied physics, and computer science are among the most respected in the world, attracting top-tier talent and serving as engines of innovation. These programs function as incubators for the workforce that goes on to power the defense sector, the tech industry, and government research agencies. For example, Jensen Huang came to the United States to study electrical engineering at Oregon State University and earned his master’s in engineering at Stanford. The year after he graduated from Stanford, he founded the semiconductor company Nvidia, which has enabled the AI revolution.

Students trained in federally supported labs often move fluidly between academia, national laboratories, and private industry. Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk depicts the university-to-SpaceX pipeline: “Musk would personally reach out to the aerospace departments of top colleges and inquire about the students who had finished with the best marks on their exams.” Poaching from top aerospace departments allowed SpaceX to go from a risky startup to the world’s premier launch provider at a time when the United States’ dependence on Russian launch systems posed serious national security risks.

Yet the advantage conferred by the United States’ decentralized research funding system is no longer assured. Rivals have studied the U.S. model closely and are moving aggressively to replicate it. China, in particular, is racing to close the gap by pouring state investment into its universities. The People’s Liberation Army now collaborates with leading Chinese technical institutes to accelerate the development of dual-use technologies, particularly in AI, space systems, and cyber warfare. But there is one advantage China cannot easily replicate: the openness of U.S. universities. Authoritarian states can flood labs with money, but they cannot manufacture the academic freedom and economic dynamism that make the U.S. university system a magnet for global talent.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY

The Trump administration’s recent moves are stripping university labs of their funding by freezing Defense Department research grants to institutions it deems ideologically noncompliant—effectively targeting the very research pipelines that sustain national security innovation. Weakening the university-defense research partnership is a strategic miscalculation with far-reaching consequences. Universities are the channels through which scientific discoveries yield real-world applications and talented youth become world-changing entrepreneurs and innovative defenders of national security. The Trump administration might argue that it is willing to continue funding if universities align with its ideological demands. But ceding independence in exchange for scientific funding would undermine the very rigor and openness that has given the U.S. university system its edge for decades.

If the government allows ideological discomfort to disrupt its alliance with research universities, it will sacrifice its advantage in innovation and competitiveness. Cutting off Defense Department funding to universities will not halt defense innovation. But it will help ensure that it moves elsewhere. Some talent will drift toward private firms, where pressure to generate short-term profit often precludes a focus on projects that align with long-term national security priorities. Other talent and resources may move to foreign institutions eager to capitalize on U.S. retrenchment. To enable these shifts out of political pique is not principled—it is self-defeating.

SARAH KREPS is John L. Wetherill Professor and Director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. From 1999 to 2007, she served in the U.S. Air Force, where she helped to develop advanced airborne surveillance and reconnaissance systems.Foreign Affairs · by More by Sarah Kreps · April 29, 2025

23. Modernization as Readiness in the U.S. Marine Corps

​Excerpt:

Conclusion

To embark on a thousand-mile journey requires the Marines to take the first step. Force Design was that first step and is an ongoing process that has no end point. Winning the nation’s battles is not a birthright, but a legacy that marines can only preserve by out-adapting and out-innovating the adversary. Modernization as readiness is a journey that requires the Marine Corps to move out now. The service can no longer afford to move at the pace of the future years’ defense plan. The horizon for pursuing advanced technologies is moving ever closer and the Marine Corps can longer afford to innovate at the pace of money. The commandant has been clear-eyed on how the Marine Corps will be postured for near-peer conflict, crisis response, and future warfare. Service efforts to pursue high-end intelligent systems and supporting capabilities will not only make the Marine Corps more lethal but help avoid the false dilemma of modernization versus readiness.

Modernization as Readiness in the U.S. Marine Corps - War on the Rocks

Keenan Chirhart and Scott Humr

warontherocks.com · by Keenan Chirhart · April 29, 2025

Many observers had grown numb to yet another Chinese military exercise encircling Taiwan. But after two weeks, the maneuvers did not end. Instead, China quietly transformed its “exercise” into a suffocating naval blockade, sealing off all maritime routes around the island. Beijing’s timing was impeccable. Anticipated shortfalls in carrier strike group and marine expeditionary unit coverage — driven by personnel shortages, deferred ship maintenance, and overcrowded shipyards — left U.S. Indo-Pacific Command with few options to counter China’s tightening grip. Yet, just when the situation seemed irretrievable, the U.S. Marine Corps’ agile stand-in forces stationed inside the first island chain — armed with cutting-edge intelligent robotics and autonomous systems — gave the joint force commander an opening to reclaim momentum. Had some folks in Washington had their way just a couple years earlier, these marines might not have been there at all.

To address the challenges of the modern battlefield and fulfill its expeditionary force in readiness mandate, the Marine Corps should avoid the false choice of balancing readiness with modernization. Resourcing changes that attempt to balance near-term readiness with future capability modernization introduces an unhelpful dichotomy by limiting how the Marine Corps views such tradeoffs. Technology is accelerating at a blistering pace where yesterday’s modernization equates to today’s readiness. The Marine Corps should therefore seize the opportunity to posture itself to lead the secretary of defense’s initiative for prioritizing robotics and autonomous systems such as combat collaborative aircraft and one-way attack drones.

The Marine Corps stands at a critical crossroads, where its ability to adapt quickly to advanced threats will define its future relevance as America’s premier crisis-response force. Facing an increasingly aggressive China and Russia, the Marine Corps should see modernization as readiness by prioritizing autonomous and unmanned systems that can reduce risk and enhance marines’ ability to fight to meet these threats head-on. However, bureaucratic inertia and outdated acquisition processes threaten to undermine rapid progress, putting the service at a strategic disadvantage in a fast-evolving battlefield. Marine Corps readiness and modernization efforts are a high-stakes race to outpace adversaries, necessitating bold congressional support and a willingness to take on calculated risks. If the Marine Corps fails to overcome these barriers by placing itself on the horns of its own self-made dilemma, it risks being relegated to obsolescence and unable to fulfill its mission to protect and deter on a global scale.

Become a Member

Autonomy in Software and Hardware Makes Readiness Possible

It is clear that intelligent systems are changing how militaries fight across the spectrum of conflict. Advances in artificial intelligence, sensors, and autonomy are making platforms smarter and more capable. Today, autonomous systems patrol areas of key maritime terrain in peace, watch and record adversarial activities in competition, and are deployed throughout the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Red Sea, and the Gaza conflict. Robots are already killing robots as unmanned systems counter other unmanned systems over the numerous engagements around the Red Sea and an all-robot assault force in Ukraine, signaling the “no blood for first contact” concept is here. Moreover, the Red Sea and Ukraine are now veritable weapons test ranges, allowing militaries to quickly improve and adjust their tactics and systems on a near daily basis.

Currently, many of the uses of intelligent systems are employed in traditional roles or as substitutes for existing capabilities in many cases. However, as these platforms advance in capability, they create new possibilities for reimagining some aspects of warfare. For instance, a fixed-wing fighter could employ a loyal wingman or collaborative combat aircraft as an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance asset, a retransmission node, a missile delivery system, or an electronic warfare asset. It is increasingly possible that operators will pass mission-type orders to collaborative combat aircraft as natural language processing becomes more even more capable.

The use of intelligent autonomous systems moving soldiers into combat is readily becoming reality. These intelligent systems provide novel ways to fight that have yet to be explored and developed. In December 2024 alone, the Ukrainians were reported to have struck over 54,000 Russian targets with drones. These changes in how modern warfare is conducted offer compelling reasons for the Marine Corps to move out more quickly on experimentation at scale for employing such systems. Intelligent robotics and autonomous systems can greatly multiply a military’s capabilities across the competition continuum by reducing risk to human operators and accelerating task execution, while providing decisive effects. Therefore, the central idea is to have formations across the total force that can capitalize on technological advancements to grow from a platform-centric to a capability-centric approach.

Contrary to some opponents of Marine Corps force design, unmanned systems are already increasing the kinds of maneuver marines can perform. These systems reconceptualize maneuver and combined-arms warfare and truly define what readiness demands, not tomorrow, but today. For example, the Marine Corps is pursuing capabilities that will allow it to operate in multiple domains, while unmanned systems will enable maneuver by fire across these different domains. Equally important is the cost of these systems. The Neros Archer, a low-cost first-person view drone, for instance, was recently added to the Defense Innovation Unit’s Blue unmanned aerial systems list. Its cost is estimated at around $2,000 per drone with a range of approximately 20 kilometers. On the other hand, the cost of a single Hellfire is approximately $58,000 per missile with a maximum range of only half of the Neros Archer. Systems such as this increase the average Marine Corps rifle squad’s maximum effective range by more than an order of magnitude at an affordable cost. It is easy to see from the math and range alone why Ukraine is now receiving 6,000 Nero Archer systems. A Marine Corps equipped with these capabilities is a requirement for today, not for a modernized infantry squad of 2030.

The proliferation of commercial off-the-shelf technologies has not only lowered the barriers to entry in this environment, but has also democratized the equipping of modern militaries. For instance, civilians are crowd-sourcing the building of drones while average citizens become sensors within the kill chain through the use of apps on their smart phones. These changes not only complicate legal and ethical considerations of jus in bello, but they also add additional dimensions to an already confusing and chaotic battlefield. Systems such as small unmanned aircraft systems and counter-unmanned aircraft systems are no longer optional capabilities on the modern battlefield — they are critical enablers and define readiness today, not modernization tomorrow. It is more likely today that militaries will first make contact with machines on the battlefield. On the flipside, it is an open question as to whether or not autonomous systems can help incidents remain below the threshold of further conflict or add lower rungs to an escalation ladder. For instance, Iran’s attacks on Israel using hundreds of drones, missiles, and rockets were mostly intercepted. This attack, while communicating resolve and solidarity to Hamas’ efforts, may provide new ways to potential deescalate conflict without committing a significant number of boots on the ground or provide additional rungs to the ladder of conflict escalation. U.S. investments in autonomous systems technologies are now the table stakes for today’s definition of readiness.

Balancing Readiness with Modernization?

It is no mystery that flat budgets are part of the current operating environment. However, as mentioned in numerous congressional testimonies, passing a budget on time allows the Marine Corps to begin new programs that are critical to ensuring marines will have the right equipment when they need it. As those in the acquisitions community know, executing a year’s worth of new contract work in less than six months is a Herculean task without taking significant risk in the acquisitions process. Moreover, the current acquisition system already prioritizes acquisition risk over operational risk. Current incentives prioritize cost, schedule, and performance. This results in making progress extremely slow by reducing risk within the acquisitions process but delays getting the right equipment to the warfighter in the time it is needed. Rather, with the stand up of the new Marine Corps Fusion Cell, the service will look to flip this risk calculus to facilitate experimentation with platforms more quickly to allow a continuous cycle of feedback from marines on the forward edge to engineers developing the systems to help buy down risk. Envisioned warfighting approaches such as an unmanned “hellscape” will demand large numbers of attritable autonomous systems in quantities requiring changes to the defense industrial base that may take time. Therefore, the Marine Corps needs to get comfortable fighting with prototypes and the continuous process of refinement for fielding ever more capable equipment. Technology is changing too fast to purchase enormous amounts of equipment in bulk. The technology fielded today could rapidly become obsolete in a few short months. As a result, readiness is rather a continuous cycle of modernization with tight feedback loops.

The epicenters of technological development have also shifted away from the military sector, and today competitive advantage on the battlefield is generated in the commercial sector. This means that new technologies are emerging at an increasing rate and are fundamentally changing the way the Marine Corps fights, but only if the service can deliver the capability to the fleet within a relevant timeframe. How then does the service proceed when to be ready the Marine Corps should also be modernized?

It is common to speak about moving faster and accepting risk. However, accepting risk in the short term to fund modernization translates into deploying marines without the equipment they need today. Short of changing Federal Acquisition Regulations, or modifying congressional responsibility for oversight of the national budget, what are the mechanisms that would actually allow the Marine Corps to test and field advanced weapon systems to keep pace with adversaries?

The valley of death is a pejorative term for transition process that lies between research and development on one end, and acquisitions and sustainment on the other. The rapid pace of technological advancement collides with the slow, risk-averse acquisition process, creating a tectonic shift that forms a valley of death where innovative technologies struggle to transition into operational use. But this valley only exists because it is surrounded by mountains of uncertainty and peaks of risk aversion. The Marine Corps should work to flatten the entire landscape and move from concept to capability to acquisition faster than an adversary can make that capability obsolete. To do this, concepts and capabilities requirements should be informed not only by the threat and fleet needs but also by the defense innovation ecosystem, so planners can prepare for transition before capabilities are matured and ready. The Marine Corps should be agile enough to rapidly adjust from insights gained from lessons learned and fleet experimentation. Congressional assistance can mitigate the risk of losing programs to lack of budgetary consistency and programmatic defensibility by allowing the Marine Corps to remain adaptable through re-prioritizing budgets and requests for new funding. These efforts, along with the Marine Corps’ campaign of learning, should be followed by a crusade of action, otherwise the service will have lost its momentum to the bureaucratic force development process.

The Changes That Should Happen

Marine Corps modernization efforts are a centerpiece around Force Design and are arguably redefining readiness. The Marine Corps should, however, continue to modernize its thinking as well. Arguing several years ago in these same pages for redefining readiness, the chairman and the commandant observed the services are reinstating shuttered units based on a demand from the operating forces to maintain what is familiar. This is antithetical to Force Design’s purpose and avoids the difficult, but necessary, endeavor towards a more ready force. Modernization as readiness should be an unemotional endeavor of bold initiatives that accelerate the service above the point of parity with any adversary.

Recommendations from the recent reform of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process offers opportunities to make the needed adjustments for prioritizing and sequencing investments accordingly. Recent congressional legislation introduced by Sen. Roger Wicker, Restoring Freedom’s Forge, provides the flexible and innovative approaches to acquisition the services need to modernize readiness. Such proposals advocate for increasing below threshold reprogramming and increase availability of operating funds that allows carryovers between fiscal years alone would go a long way for providing the kind of flexibility needed to respond to new threats and to pursue better capabilities. Additionally, the recently released Defense Innovation Board report “A Pathway to Scaling Unmanned Weapons Systems” provides recommendations that complement Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution reforms that speak mostly to the service side of the equation: get systems into the hands of warfighters quickly; pick winners and award them; streamline the doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel and facilities; and develop flexible funding mechanisms. Their most important recommendation is to act now. These efforts, along with prodigious technological opportunities, are cultivating the right conditions for the Marine Corps to move out, time now.

Events in the Red Sea, Ukraine, and Israel demonstrate that the Department of Defense cannot continue to use multimillion-dollar missiles to shoot down drones that are a fraction of that cost. The Marine Corps needs to change the cost ratio — and it needs to do so urgently. By reconceptualizing modernization as readiness, the Marine Corps can appropriately address modern crisis response capabilities through rapid iteration of technology cycles Therefore, investments in affordable robotics and autonomous systems will find equal use in addressing multiple enemy courses of action while helping address the current disparities in cost ratios.

Lastly, the Marine Corps should be ruthless in cutting programs that no longer provide the needed capability once thought or require significant technological maturity. The Marine Corps can learn from the U.S. Army in its own efforts to eliminate outdated requirements. The commandant of the Marine Corps stated: “There are no “untouchable” programs — each program will be assessed based on its effectiveness and applicability to the future fight.” However, this should apply to training and readiness standards that have become outmoded or reconceived differently with the application of robotic and autonomous systems. For instance, it is clear that first-person view drones are playing an outsized role on the modern battlefield. If infantry formations adopt these systems en masse, commanders will face clear tradeoffs in gaining proficiency with these advanced systems and traditional infantry tasks. Rather than making wholesale decisions for the entire infantry, commanders should be given these options as the best arbiters of these technological decisions. The recently announced Marine Corps Attack Drone Team will further provide the needed experimentation and lessons learned to advance this capability within the ranks. Therefore, the Marine Corps should position itself to quickly capitalize on these experiences before this opportunity is squandered.

Conclusion

To embark on a thousand-mile journey requires the Marines to take the first step. Force Design was that first step and is an ongoing process that has no end point. Winning the nation’s battles is not a birthright, but a legacy that marines can only preserve by out-adapting and out-innovating the adversary. Modernization as readiness is a journey that requires the Marine Corps to move out now. The service can no longer afford to move at the pace of the future years’ defense plan. The horizon for pursuing advanced technologies is moving ever closer and the Marine Corps can longer afford to innovate at the pace of money. The commandant has been clear-eyed on how the Marine Corps will be postured for near-peer conflict, crisis response, and future warfare. Service efforts to pursue high-end intelligent systems and supporting capabilities will not only make the Marine Corps more lethal but help avoid the false dilemma of modernization versus readiness.

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Keenan “Smallbaux” Chirhart is the senior unmanned aerial systems capabilities integration officer and founding member of the Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Systems Office within the Capabilities Development Directorate. He is an MQ-9A pilot and former UH-1Y weapons and tactics instructor, and holds a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical Engineering and a Masters of Business Administration in Strategic Leadership.

Scott Humr, Ph.D. is a Marine officer. He currently serves as the deputy for the Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Systems Office within the Capabilities Development Directorate. He is a member of the Marine Corps’ technical analyst cohort that forms the Force Design Research Group at Headquarters Marine Corps Combat Development and Integration.

The views in this article are those of the authors and not those of the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.

The authors would like to thank Col. Scott Cuomo and Noel Williams for their helpful feedback on this article.

Image: Cpl. Amelia Kang

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Keenan Chirhart · April 29, 2025

24. Haiti Is a Political and Criminal Crisis that Should Not be Ignored

​Excerpts:

The lessons from Haiti are clear: When criminal groups embed themselves within the political and economic systems of a state, the situation becomes far more complex than traditional international responses can handle. Haitian authorities, the United Nations, and key actors involved in crisis resolution — including the United States — should adjust their thinking and actions if they hope to break the cycle of violence, corruption, and impunity.

Haiti’s future depends on a strategic, multi-pronged response that addresses both the symptoms and the root causes of the crisis. Failure to act decisively and comprehensively will not only worsen the situation in Haiti but also create far-reaching instability in America’s neighborhood.

Haiti Is a Political and Criminal Crisis that Should Not be Ignored - War on the Rocks

Mark Shaw and Romain Le Cour Grandmaison

warontherocks.com · by Mark Shaw · April 29, 2025

A coalition of criminal gangs is close to capturing Haiti’s beleaguered capital of Port-au-Prince.

Today, Haiti is grappling with extraordinary violence as gangs have tightened their stranglehold over large portions of the country. Over one million people have been internally displaced — nearly one in ten Haitians. By the end of 2024, at least 5,601 murders had been recorded, an alarming 1,000 more than in 2023, marking a national homicide rate of nearly 48 per 100,000 inhabitants — a grim record for what is the poorest country in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The ongoing crisis in Haiti defies traditional definitions of intrastate conflict. The crisis goes beyond a scourge of gang violence, as the gangs challenge the authority of the state. Yet, the gangs have not taken over the country, though they likely could do so at any time. Instead, the gangs appear to operate in parallel to the state, enabled by political instability, corruption, and weak institutions.

Without a clear diagnosis of what is happening and why, any attempts to resolve the crisis risk being misdirected, reinforcing the status quo. Indeed, the failure to define the crisis in precise terms has led to fragmented and ineffective responses from Haiti’s state leaders as well as a number of powerful state actors and international organizations. The situation has reached a tragic stalemate.

To adequately address the political-criminal crisis in Haiti, international actors — namely the U.N. Security Council, the United States, Canada, France, and the Caribbean Community should assume a new approach. This approach should focus on improving coordination between Haitian authorities and existing multinational forces to tamper violence, improving intelligence sharing to reduce the flow of weapons into the country, and empowering Haiti’s judicial institutions — if necessary, located outside of the country — to prosecute gang leaders, and their supporters, including for human rights violations.

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Defining the Problem

What do the gangs want? Why do they stop short of a coup d’état, even though they hold the capital in the palm of their hand? Some of the gangs have carried out serious violations of human rights, such as the massacre of 207 people in the commune of Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince on Dec. 6 and 7, 2024. Should they be considered armed groups, criminal organizations, or terrorists? And how should they be held accountable? These questions remain largely unanswered at the legal, operational, and political levels. This lack of clarity is not only a matter of intellectual debate — it has profound consequences for how the crisis is understood and addressed by external actors.

The gangs of Haiti do not operate as fully autonomous groups. While the gangs enjoy a measure of economic independence through drug trafficking, extortion, and kidnapping, they remain tightly tied through old allegiances and ongoing negotiations with the political elites of the country. Rather than seeking to overthrow the government, Haitian gangs aim to integrate, or at least try to navigate within the existing political system to occupy the most strategic place possible. The desire to remain within the system enables an illicit taxation regime and a stranglehold on trafficking networks but also positions the gangs themselves as actors and brokers indispensable to any stabilization of the country. At present, gangs function as the de facto authority in vast parts of the country, regulating the daily lives of the local population.

Inadequate International Response

In October 2023, the U.N. Security Council authorized a Multinational Security Support Mission to address escalating violence and reestablish security in Haiti. Led by Kenya, the mission was finally deployed in June 2024 with the aim of bolstering the Haitian National Police’s fight against the gangs. While the mission was expected to deploy over 2,500 personnel, the current force hovers around 1,000. This is far too few personnel to effectively combat a growing tide of gang-led criminal violence. Both Haitian authorities and multinational forces are outmatched by gangs who are increasingly well-equipped and can control swathes of territory.

The U.N. Security Council’s attempts at intervention in Haiti to improve political stability through the Multinational Security Support Mission is well-intentioned. Yet, it has been underfunded, under-resourced, and poorly coordinated. Without addressing the underlying political corruption that enables the gangs to thrive, any foreign intervention will likely fail.

Extortion is Central to the Gangs’ Grip on Power

The linkages between gangs and political officials have enabled gang leaders to impose protection racket schemes across the country. This system operates on multiple levels, from territorial control to economic influence, notably through rent extraction. Gangs impose extortion taxes across the country’s infrastructure, including ports, roads, and key border crossings. A single day’s travel between two Haitian cities often involves paying a dozen or more illegal taxes to gang-run checkpoints.

In the Artibonite region, the agricultural heart of the country, the Gran Grif gang levies a tax on the farm laborers. When conflicts break out over the payment of taxes, or when groups of farmers try to resist — as they did in October 2024 — the reprisals are terrible: A massacre committed by Gran Grif just a few days after its leader and a local politician were sanctioned by the United Nations and the United States for actively supporting the gangs, left at least 115 people dead. The logistical functioning of the country depends on a gang-run tax scheme. If they are not paid, gangs block access to goods and infrastructure, as they did in the spring of 2024.

More Guns, More Recruits, and More Violence

Gang recruitment efforts soared in 2024. This included a troubling 70 percent increase in child soldiers, many forcibly conscripted. The gangs also expanded their arsenals, amassing small arms weapons and larger caliber machine guns. Aided by national and international criminal networks, Haitian gangs now wield considerable firepower and have gained access to a steady flow of arms and ammunition. The U.S. state of Florida has become a key waypoint for illicit flows into Haiti.

The gang violence in Haiti, while deadly, is also highly calculated. Gangs no longer simply engage in random acts of terror. Instead, they systematically attack public and private state institutions — destroying private homes, hospitals in Port-au-Prince and in Artibonite, police stations and bases, and media organizations. This intimidation tactic erodes public trust and accelerates the collapse of essential services, leaving the population increasingly vulnerable and seeking protection from the gangs.

From Insecurity to Governance: The Political Impact of the Gangs

Gangs depend on the support of corrupt public officials and former elected representatives. The United Nations Panel of Experts on Haiti has pointed out these connections several times, but Haitian judicial institutions have been slow to act. Political-criminal networks are therefore still operational, financing gangs or supplying them with firearms, for example.

The gangs’ increasing power is no longer just a matter of public security — it has become a profound political crisis. Gang leaders exert increasing influence over the trajectory of Haiti’s fragile political transition, putting pressure on the sitting government and international actors. This pressure involves constant propaganda on social media networks and threats against public figures and the institutions of the political transition. Some gangs have even become involved in the transition itself. In early 2025, the leader of the gang coalition known as Viv Ansanm announced it would transform into a political party.

What Can Be Done?

The current situation in Haiti should be seen as a political-criminal crisis in which the use of large-scale violence serves to obtain or maintain an advantageous position within the political game — not in opposition to it. Haiti’s gangs are a parasite on the state, but they do not appear to want to kill the host.

The crisis is not merely a gang problem or a security issue — it’s a political-criminal crisis that demands a new approach. The deployment of another U.N. peacekeeping mission might help to stabilize the country in the short term, but it likely won’t solve the criminal governance problem. From Afghanistan to Sudan and from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Myanmar, peacekeeping operations, in particular, have historically failed to deal with conflicts beset by criminalized political economies. In any event, the era of classic U.N. peacekeeping operations is likely over.

Rather, the United Nations and other international actors need a new strategy that tackles not only the gangs but the political and economic structures that allow them to endure and thrive. What is required is a new set of initiatives built around the current Multinational Security Support Mission. As a crucial first step to addressing the crisis, Haitian and international actors, including the United States, Canada, France, and the Caribbean Community, should focus on improving public safety. Cooperation between the Haitian police and the existing Kenyan-led mission should be strengthened to enable more effective deployment of forces on the ground to deter gang violence and safeguard the local population. Security forces on all sides also need better training, intelligence, and logistics support.

Second, international actors should work to reduce the flow of weapons into Haiti. This requires better intelligence sharing and tighter coordination between Haitian authorities, the United States, the Dominican Republic, and other Caribbean countries.

Third, the United Nations and other multilateral organizations such as the European Union, the World Bank, or the Inter-American Development Bank should increase their support for Haiti’s law enforcement and judicial institutions. Without a functioning justice system to target the entire ecosystem of corruption and crime, criminal gangs will continue to operate with impunity. This involves creating or strengthening mechanisms to prosecute gang leaders and supporters, and human rights violations, in courts located both within and outside of Haiti.

Ultimately, making Haiti a functioning state will require more than just military interventions and political debate. A long-term strategy should include building a robust, independent justice system, ensuring accountability for political and economic actors, and addressing the broader social and economic issues that fuel gang recruitment, such as poverty and low living standards.

The lessons from Haiti are clear: When criminal groups embed themselves within the political and economic systems of a state, the situation becomes far more complex than traditional international responses can handle. Haitian authorities, the United Nations, and key actors involved in crisis resolution — including the United States — should adjust their thinking and actions if they hope to break the cycle of violence, corruption, and impunity.

Haiti’s future depends on a strategic, multi-pronged response that addresses both the symptoms and the root causes of the crisis. Failure to act decisively and comprehensively will not only worsen the situation in Haiti but also create far-reaching instability in America’s neighborhood.

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Mark Shaw is the director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

Romain Le Cour Grandmaison is the head of the Haiti Observatory at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

Image: U.S. Embassy Haiti

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Mark Shaw · April 29, 2025

25. Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: First 100 Days

​Read the entire analysis at this link: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/04/28/trump-administration-foreign-policy-tracker-first-100-days/

April 28, 2025 | FDD Tracker: January 20, 2025-April 28, 2025

Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: First 100 Days

John Hardie

Russia Program Deputy Director

29 min

Trend Overview

Welcome back to the Trump Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. This is a special edition covering President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. As always, FDD’s experts assess the administration’s foreign policy with trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch.

Although Russia has so far rebuffed his calls for a ceasefire, Trump has focused his ire not on Moscow but on Kyiv. The administration’s Ukraine policy, along with its broader desire to divest from European security and reset ties with Russia, has fractured transatlantic trust.

Meanwhile, Washington announced an ambitious missile defense project, began working to fix broken arms sales processes, and has sought to bolster key Indo-Pacific partnerships. At the same time, the administration purged military leaders for political reasons, gutted important cybersecurity and counter-disinformation programs, and moved to dismantle soft-power tools such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and Voice of America.

In early April, Trump’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs roiled markets and strained relations with allies. He soon scaled them back while doubling down on his trade war with China, though Washington has recently indicated a willingness to de-escalate.

The Trump team helped broker an Israel-Hamas ceasefire before entering office, though it later broke down. The administration launched nuclear talks with Iran after reinstituting “maximum pressure” sanctions. But there are signs Trump’s deal may resemble the 2015 agreement from which he withdrew. Washington also ramped up airstrikes against Yemen’s Houthis, which so far seem undeterred.

Check back next month to see how the administration deals with these and other challenges.

Trending Positive

Trending Neutral

Trending Negative

China

Indo-Pacific

International Organizations

Israel

Gulf

Iran

Korea

Lebanon

Nonproliferation and Biodefense

Syria

Cyber

Defense

Europe and Russia

Sunni Jihadism

Turkey

26. Amid Syria troop reduction, will Trump repeat Middle East withdrawal mistakes?

​Excerpts:

While periodic assessments and adjustments in force posture are prudent and necessary, especially after dramatic developments, such adjustments should be informed by the advice of military leaders and actual conditions on the ground. Withdrawals based on domestic political considerations and arbitrary timelines invite disaster and risk repeating the mistakes of past withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In its announcement, the Trump administration asserted that its “consolidation” of US forces in Syria is a “conditions-based process.” Time will tell if that is true. If Trump repeats past mistakes by conducting timeline-based withdrawals that ignore conditions on the ground, this will not end well.

Amid Syria troop reduction, will Trump repeat Middle East withdrawal mistakes? - Breaking Defense

Cameron McMillan and Bradley Bowman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy argue in this op ed that getting out of Syria too quickly could leave the US vulnerable.

By  Cameron McMillan and Bradley Bowman

on April 28, 2025 at 11:40 AM

breakingdefense.com · by Cameron McMillan, Bradley Bowman · April 28, 2025

U.S. Air Force Airman, a combat control technician assigned to the Combined Special Operations Joint Task Force – Levant, watches a UH-60 Blackhawk land after clearing the landing zone in support of Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve in Northeast Syria. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Emma Scearce)

The Trump administration announced on April 18 a “consolidation of US forces in Syria,” where American troops are deployed to ensure the lasting defeat of ISIS.

While details from the Pentagon are limited, DoD’s announcement makes clear that the “consolidation” of forces to “select locations in Syria” is also a reduction of US troops to below one thousand “in the coming months.” The Pentagon disclosed in December that roughly 2,000 US troops were stationed in Syria at that time, an increase from the last publicly known troop count of roughly 900 before the wave of attacks on US forces by Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attack on Israel.

And though the Defense Department promised to continue strikes against ISIS and keep pressure on the terror group, the reduction in forces runs counter to warnings from US military and intelligence professionals. It also risks a repeat of failings by previous American presidential administrations.

Indeed, an objective assessment of the situation in Syria makes clear an excessive or premature reduction of US forces could catalyze a costly ISIS resurgence. That, in turn, could force the US military to return to Syria later at a greater cost against a worse ISIS threat that could have been prevented, endangering US interests in the Middle East and undercutting efforts to prioritize the threat from China.

According to The New York Times, the process to reduce forces has already begun with three of the US military’s eight bases in Syria set to be closed, including Mission Support Sites Green Village and Euphrates, located in the country’s northeast. These strategically located bases near the Syrian-Iraqi border enable US forces to support local partners combatting ISIS in the Euphrates River zone.

To justify the decision, DoD pointed to the “success” that the United States has had battling the terrorist organization over the past decade, including the territorial defeat of the ISIS caliphate in 2019 and the fact that “ISIS’ appeal and operational capability regionally and globally” have been seriously degraded.

But that clashes with the recent assessments of US Central Command (CENTCOM) and the US Intelligence Community, which have warned that ISIS remains a threat. While the ISIS caliphate is indeed territorially defeated, the terrorist organization itself is not, and a premature withdrawal of US forces risks an ISIS resurgence.

In its March 2025 Worldwide Threat Assessment, the US Intelligence Community made clear that ISIS remains “the world’s largest Islamic terrorist organization” despite facing “major setbacks.” The assessment also stated that ISIS “sought to gain momentum from high-profile attacks” and pointed to several ISIS-connected terrorist attacks over the past year in the region and beyond, including the New Year’s Day attack in New Orleans, which killed 14 people and was “influenced by ISIS propaganda.”

The US military has also sounded the alarm about a potential ISIS resurgence. In July 2024, CENTCOM announced that ISIS was on pace to double its number of attacks in Iraq and Syria compared to the previous year, which CENTCOM took at the time as an indication that “ISIS is attempting to reconstitute.”

CENTCOM Commander General Erik Kurilla warned lawmakers last year that an “ISIS resurgence remains a threat” and that “ISIS would reconstitute the ability to seize territory within two years” should Iran and Russia succeed in their goal of evicting the US-led coalition from Syria and Iraq.

Kurilla has also warned about the risk of the thousands of ISIS fighters held in prison camps in Syria guarded by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which rely on support from US forces in the country. In January, CENTCOM stated that these 9,000 ISIS prisoners and the additional tens of thousands of displaced persons, many of whom have ties to ISIS, in refugee camps in Syria “risk creating the next generation of ISIS.” The Pentagon’s announcement made clear these detainees are still a concern.

To be sure, the situation in Syria has dramatically changed after the fall of the Assad regime, and the US military posture in Syria may need to be adjusted to reflect that reality. But we should not ignore these warnings and the fact that ISIS is attempting to take advantage of the current instability and uncertainty in Syria to increase its ability to conduct attacks.

This dissonance between the Trump administration’s plan in Syria and the recent warnings of US military leaders and intelligence professionals begs for congressional oversight.

Here are some questions that members of Congress and their staffs may want to ask: Do US military leaders and intelligence professionals no longer have the concerns they expressed just a few months ago, or have the concerns simply been suppressed in support of a politically motivated withdrawal?

What is the current strength of ISIS in Syria and what are the terror group’s ambitions, plans, and activities? How is the new regime in Damascus impacting these ISIS variables?

How secure are ISIS detention facilities? In what ways does the SDF still rely on the US military for support? What will be the consequences if that support is reduced or ended?

What impact could US military withdrawals have on Turkey’s military presence in Syria, and how might that hurt US interests and the SDF’s efforts to counter ISIS terrorists and keep thousands of them detained?

While periodic assessments and adjustments in force posture are prudent and necessary, especially after dramatic developments, such adjustments should be informed by the advice of military leaders and actual conditions on the ground. Withdrawals based on domestic political considerations and arbitrary timelines invite disaster and risk repeating the mistakes of past withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In its announcement, the Trump administration asserted that its “consolidation” of US forces in Syria is a “conditions-based process.” Time will tell if that is true. If Trump repeats past mistakes by conducting timeline-based withdrawals that ignore conditions on the ground, this will not end well.

Cameron McMillan, an Iraq veteran of Operation Inherent Resolve, is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy’s Center on Military and Political Power, where Bradley Bowman is the senior director.

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