Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear. “

– Mark Twain

“All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.”

– Sophocles

 “When someone tries to trigger you by insulting you or by doing something that irritates you, take a deep breath and switch off your ego. Remember that if you are easily offended, you are easily manipulated.”

– Bruce Lee

1. Why Americans Voted for Trump Konstantin Kisin, X

2. Railroading Russia Through Unconventional Warfare | Opinion

3. Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?

4. China says it respects America's choice, congratulates Trump

5. Trump is Eyeing Iran Hawk Brian Hook as First Foreign Policy Pick

6. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, November 6, 2024

7. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 6, 2024

8. Trump admin will bring 'uncertainty,' opportunities for defense industry: Analysts

9. The Low Fertility Fallacy

10. Russian Drone Jockeys Hunt Front-Line Shop Clerks and Repairmen in Ukraine

11. Trump’s Win Signals More Confrontation With Beijing

12. Allies Fret Over Trump Presidency as Authoritarian Axis Challenges U.S.-Led Order

13. Next-Generation Decoys for the Marine Corps

14. Ukrainian drones strike Russian fleet's Caspian hideout

15. What the Army learned from its first all-digital ground vehicle design

16. What does Trump's win mean for the world? by Sir Lawrence Freedman

17. No, the Problem Isn’t the Voters

18. Pace of war shortens EU-based training for Ukrainian troops

19. What Trump’s win means for the federal workforce

20. China backing off when Philippine forces patrol with allies, says Navy official

21. What Trump’s Win Means for U.S. Foreign Policy

22. The Chinese Military Is Weaponizing Facebook's Open Source AI

23. Trump and the Future of American Power

24. How Ukraine Became a World War

1. Why Americans Voted for Trump Konstantin Kisin, X

Is Mr. Kisin a modern de Tocqueville. Has he captured the essence of America (more specifically Americans) in the 21st Century (which is still a lot like the America in the 18th, 19th, and 20th Centuries.). If de Tocqueville were alive today his two columns of Democracy in America would be written in tweets.

Why Americans Voted for Trump

Konstantin Kisin, X

https://x.com/KonstantinKisin/status/1854151133385613690

Konstantin Kisin

@KonstantinKisin

For my British and European friends who are "shocked" and "surprised", here are 10 reasons you didn't see this coming.

Read this short post and then read the replies from our American friends who will confirm what I'm saying.

1. Americans love their country and want it to be the best in the world. America is a nation of people who conquered a continent. They love strength. They love winning. Any leader who appeals to that has an automatic advantage.

2. Unlike Europeans, Americans have not accepted managed decline. They don't have Net Zero here, they believe in producing their own energy and making it as cheap as possible because they know that their prosperity depends on it.

3. Prices for most basic goods in the US have increased rapidly and are sky high. What the official statistics say about inflation and the reality of people's lives are not the same.

4. Unlike you, Americans do not believe in socialism. They believe in meritocracy. They don't care about the super rich being super rich because they know that they live in a country where being super rich is available to anyone with the talent and drive to make it. They don't resent success, they celebrate it.

5. Americans are the most pro-immigration people in the world. Read that again. Seriously, read it again. Americans love an immigrant success story. They want more talented immigrants to come to America. But they refuse to accept people coming illegally. They believe in having a border.

6. Americans are sensitive about racial issues and their country's imperfect history. They believe that those who are disadvantaged by the circumstances of their birth should be given the opportunity to succeed. What they reject, however, is the idea that in order to address the errors of the past new errors must be made. DEI is racist. They know it and they reject it precisely because they are not racist.

7. Americans are the most philosemitic nation on earth. October 7 and the pro-Hamas left's reaction shocked them to their very core because, among other things, they remember what 9/11 was like and they know jihad when they see it.

8. Americans are extremely practical people. They care about what works, not what sounds good. In Europe, we produce great writers and intellectuals. In America they produce (and attract) great engineers, businessmen and investors. Because of this, they care less about Trump's rhetoric than you do and more about his policies than you do.

9. Americans are deeply optimistic people. They hate negativity. The woke view of American history as a series of evils for which they must eternally apologise is utterly abhorrent to them. They believe in moving forward together, not endlessly obsessing about the past.

10. America is a country whose founding story is one of resistance to government overreach. They loathe unnecessary restrictions, regulations and control. They understand that freedom comes with the price of self-reliance and they pay it gladly.

8:17 AM · Nov 6, 2024

8.1M

Views

Per suggestions, I really should have signed off with: - Alexis de Kisin

9:01 AM · Nov 6, 2024

575.6K

Views

2. Railroading Russia Through Unconventional Warfare | Opinion

Excerpts:

Ukraine's approach to undermining Russian logistics mirrors the resistance campaigns employed by the American Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Allied-supported groups across Europe successfully delayed enemy movements by targeting rail lines, bridges, and other transportation infrastructure. Ukraine has modernized this approach by leveraging advanced technology and old-school intelligence work to pinpoint and strike the most vital parts of Russia's railway network.

A largely unknown U.S. effort over the 2014-2022 period led by U.S. special operations forces helped build these Ukrainian resistance capabilities. Richard Clarke, former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, said that such efforts "directly contributed to the success on the battlefield" in Ukraine.

While the sabotage campaign is impressive, for it to have a real strategic impact the United States and other allies of resistance will have to do more. Being careful to avoid escalation risks, the ramping up of international support and coordination to improve Ukraine's national resistance capabilities could help further degrade Russia's war machine.

...

Ukraine's ongoing efforts offer a powerful lesson for military strategists worldwide—national resistance campaigns and the sabotage of critical infrastructure is a highly effective way to weaken a larger, more powerful adversary. With increased support from Western allies, Ukraine's efforts could prove to be a real difference maker to the broader war effort.

Better supporting Ukrainian irregular warfare capabilities could indirectly help Kyiv claw back territory in occupied areas and set the stage for more favorable negotiations when the war eventually comes to an end. But the window of opportunity is closing, and time is not on Ukraine's side.

Railroading Russia Through Unconventional Warfare | Opinion

By Doug Livermore and Alexander Noyes

National Vice President of the Special Operations Association of America; Fellow at the Brookings Institution

Newsweek · by Paul du Quenoy · November 6, 2024

Ukrainian special operations forces are stepping up efforts to sabotage railroads and other Russian targets, which are key to Moscow's logistics strategy supporting their war of attrition in Ukraine. The United States and other like-minded allies should likewise ramp up support to organize, train, equip, and share intelligence with Ukrainian national resistance warfare efforts. Doing so could help tip the balance in Ukraine's favor.

These unconventional operations harken back to tactics used by the United States and other allies in World War II in German-occupied areas. The U.S Defense Department currently defines resistance as, "a nation's organized, whole-of-society effort," both violent and non-violent, to "reestablish independence and autonomy within its sovereign territory that has been wholly or partially occupied by a foreign power."

Ukraine has effectively used this form of irregular warfare to help repel Russia's unprovoked invasion in weeks and months following February 2022, and in currently occupied areas–approximately 18 percent of Ukraine.

They are now focused on disrupting Russian logistics, which is a critical factor shaping the battlefield. Recognizing Russia's heavy dependence on railways for transporting military supplies, Ukraine's special operations forces and intelligence services have launched a comprehensive sabotage campaign.

At the heart of Russia's logistical system lies its vast railway network, which serves as the primary means of transporting troops, equipment, and supplies during large-scale military operations. Historically, this reliance on railways has allowed Russia to mobilize quickly, but it has also become a glaring vulnerability in the current conflict. Ukraine's forces have keenly focused on targeting railway junctions, bridges, tunnels, and other chokepoints in Russia's supply chain.

The sabotage campaign has been remarkably effective, with notable operations like the attack on the Severomuysky railway tunnel and the recent sabotage of the Kinel railway bridge. These operations have damaged key supply routes, forcing the Russian military to divert resources away from the frontlines to repair and protect critical infrastructure. This, in turn, slows down Russia's ability to transport essential supplies, weakening its overall military capability.

Ukrainian soldiers fire salvoes during the funeral of Roman in Bila Tserkva, near Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2023. Ukrainian soldiers fire salvoes during the funeral of Roman in Bila Tserkva, near Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2023. Emilio Morenatti/AP Images

Ukrainian forces have not acted alone in this effort. Russian partisans—groups of domestic dissidents opposed to the Kremlin's policies—have joined forces with Ukrainian operatives. These partisans are amplifying Ukraine's campaign, helping to carry out targeted strikes within Russia's borders and further undermining the Kremlin's logistical framework.

Disruptions to the delivery of ammunition, fuel, and other critical military supplies have not only delayed Russian operations, but in many cases, forced the cancellation of offensive plans altogether. The shortages have also taken a toll on troop morale, as soldiers on the frontlines increasingly find themselves without the supplies they need to continue fighting effectively. Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, have gained a strategic advantage, using the disruption of Russian logistics to bolster their own defensive and offensive efforts.

Ukraine's approach to undermining Russian logistics mirrors the resistance campaigns employed by the American Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Allied-supported groups across Europe successfully delayed enemy movements by targeting rail lines, bridges, and other transportation infrastructure. Ukraine has modernized this approach by leveraging advanced technology and old-school intelligence work to pinpoint and strike the most vital parts of Russia's railway network.

A largely unknown U.S. effort over the 2014-2022 period led by U.S. special operations forces helped build these Ukrainian resistance capabilities. Richard Clarke, former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, said that such efforts "directly contributed to the success on the battlefield" in Ukraine.

While the sabotage campaign is impressive, for it to have a real strategic impact the United States and other allies of resistance will have to do more. Being careful to avoid escalation risks, the ramping up of international support and coordination to improve Ukraine's national resistance capabilities could help further degrade Russia's war machine.

First, Washington and allies should double down on previous support and dramatically ramp up efforts to organize, train, and equip Ukraine's national resistance capabilities. Fostering greater collaboration between Ukrainian forces and local partisans would also help. The Ukrainian government can strengthen these underground groups with more training and resources to enable complex operations.

Second, outside supporters can help Ukraine expand its capabilities for information campaigns and influence operations. This would help Kyiv to capitalize on growing Russian dissent.

Finally, allies can increase intelligence sharing to support Ukraine's precision in targeting. Satellite imagery, drone reconnaissance, and signals intelligence can pinpoint vulnerabilities, enabling impactful, low-risk strikes. This would also help broaden the campaign's targets to include additional Russian logistical hubs and rail network.

Ukrainian innovation in unconventional warfare is invaluable as Washington thinks through how America and its allies will fight and prepare for future wars.

Ukraine's ongoing efforts offer a powerful lesson for military strategists worldwide—national resistance campaigns and the sabotage of critical infrastructure is a highly effective way to weaken a larger, more powerful adversary. With increased support from Western allies, Ukraine's efforts could prove to be a real difference maker to the broader war effort.

Better supporting Ukrainian irregular warfare capabilities could indirectly help Kyiv claw back territory in occupied areas and set the stage for more favorable negotiations when the war eventually comes to an end. But the window of opportunity is closing, and time is not on Ukraine's side.

Doug Livermore is the national vice president of the Special Operations Association of America and a former senior operational advisor in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict.

Alexander Noyes is a fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution and former senior advisor in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy.

The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.

Newsweek · by Paul du Quenoy · November 6, 2024

3. Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?

Perhaps ALL politicians will get the message. Pay attention to voters.

Excerpts:

The rest of us need to look at this result with humility. The American voters are not always wise but they are generally sensible, and they have something to teach us. My initial thought is that I have to re-examine my own priors. I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.

Can the Democratic Party do this? Can the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs and the hipster urban cores do this? Well, Donald Trump hijacked a corporate party, which hardly seemed like a vehicle for proletarian revolt, and did exactly that. Those of us who condescend to Trump should feel humbled — he did something none of us could do.

But we are entering a period of white water. Trump is a sower of chaos, not fascism. Over the next few years, a plague of disorder will descend upon America, and maybe the world, shaking everything loose. If you hate polarization, just wait until we experience global disorder. But in chaos there’s opportunity for a new society and a new response to the Trumpian political, economic and psychological assault. These are the times that try people’s souls, and we’ll see what we are made of.

Opinion

David Brooks

Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/opinion/trump-elites-working-class.html

Nov. 6, 2024, 7:00 p.m. ET

Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

Share full article

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

We have entered a new political era. For the past 40 years or so, we lived in the information age. Those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the postindustrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies to meet our needs.

Our education policy pushed people toward the course we followed — four-year colleges so that they would be qualified for the “jobs of the future.” Meanwhile, vocational training withered. We embraced a free trade policy that moved industrial jobs to low-cost countries overseas so that we could focus our energies on knowledge economy enterprises run by people with advanced degrees. The financial and consulting sector mushroomed while manufacturing employment shriveled.

Geography was deemed unimportant — if capital and high-skill labor wanted to cluster in Austin, San Francisco and Washington, it didn’t really matter what happened to all those other communities left behind. Immigration policies gave highly educated people access to low-wage labor while less-skilled workers faced new competition. We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels.

That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible. The situation was particularly hard on boys. By high school two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class are girls, while about two-thirds of the students in the bottom decile are boys. Schools are not set up for male success; that has lifelong personal, and now national, consequences.

Society worked as a vast segregation system, elevating the academically gifted above everybody else. Before long, the diploma divide became the most important chasm in American life. High school graduates die nine years sooner than college-educated people. They die of opioid overdoses at six times the rate. They marry less and divorce more and are more likely to have a child out of wedlock. They are more likely to be obese. A recent American Enterprise Institute study found that 24 percent of people who graduated from high school at most have no close friends. They are less likely than college grads to visit public spaces or join community groups and sports leagues. They don’t speak in the right social justice jargon or hold the sort of luxury beliefs that are markers of public virtue.

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The chasms led to a loss of faith, a loss of trust, a sense of betrayal. Nine days before the elections, I visited a Christian nationalist church in Tennessee. The service was illuminated by genuine faith, it is true, but also a corrosive atmosphere of bitterness, aggression, betrayal. As the pastor went on about the Judases who seek to destroy us, the phrase “dark world” popped into my head — an image of a people who perceive themselves to be living under constant threat and in a culture of extreme distrust. These people, and many other Americans, weren’t interested in the politics of joy that Kamala Harris and the other law school grads were offering.

The Democratic Party has one job: to combat inequality. Here was a great chasm of inequality right before their noses and somehow many Democrats didn’t see it. Many on the left focused on racial inequality, gender inequality and L.G.B.T.Q. inequality. I guess it’s hard to focus on class inequality when you went to a college with a multibillion-dollar endowment and do environmental greenwashing and diversity seminars for a major corporation. Donald Trump is a monstrous narcissist, but there’s something off about an educated class that looks in the mirror of society and sees only itself.

As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet. His Queens-born resentment of the Manhattan elites dovetailed magically with the class animosity being felt by rural people across the country. His message was simple: These people have betrayed you, and they are morons to boot.

In 2024, he built the very thing the Democratic Party once tried to build — a multiracial, working-class majority. His support surged among Black and Hispanic workers. He recorded astonishing gains in places like New Jersey, the Bronx, Chicago, Dallas and Houston. According to the NBC exit polls he won a third of voters of color. He’s the first Republican to win a majority of the votes in 20 years.

The Democrats obviously have to do some major rethinking. The Biden administration tried to woo the working class with subsidies and stimulus, but there is no economic solution to what is primarily a crisis of respect.

There will be some on the left who will say Trump won because of the inherent racism, sexism and authoritarianism of the American people. Apparently, those people love losing and want to do it again and again and again.

The rest of us need to look at this result with humility. The American voters are not always wise but they are generally sensible, and they have something to teach us. My initial thought is that I have to re-examine my own priors. I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.

Can the Democratic Party do this? Can the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs and the hipster urban cores do this? Well, Donald Trump hijacked a corporate party, which hardly seemed like a vehicle for proletarian revolt, and did exactly that. Those of us who condescend to Trump should feel humbled — he did something none of us could do.

But we are entering a period of white water. Trump is a sower of chaos, not fascism. Over the next few years, a plague of disorder will descend upon America, and maybe the world, shaking everything loose. If you hate polarization, just wait until we experience global disorder. But in chaos there’s opportunity for a new society and a new response to the Trumpian political, economic and psychological assault. These are the times that try people’s souls, and we’ll see what we are made of.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about political, social and cultural trends. @nytdavidbrooks

4. China says it respects America's choice, congratulates Trump

China says it respects America's choice, congratulates Trump

channelnewsasia.com

People pass under a pole with security cameras, US and China flags near the Forbidden City, Nov 8, 2017. (File photo: REUTERS/Damir Sagolj)

07 Nov 2024 08:33AM (Updated: 07 Nov 2024 08:55AM)

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HONG KONG: China expressed respect for the US election result and congratulated Donald Trump on his victory while an official newspaper called for a "pragmatic" approach to China-US relations to handle their differences properly.

Trump, a Republican who has promised to implement stiff tariffs, recaptured the White House with a sweeping victory over Democrat Kamala Harris in Tuesday's (Nov 5) election.

"We respect the choice of the American people and congratulate Mr Trump on his election as president," a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said in a statement late on Wednesday.

State-run news outlet China Daily said in an editorial on Wednesday that Trump's second presidency could mark a "new beginning in China-US relations if the chance that has been offered is not wasted".

The next US administration can strengthen dialogue and communication with China to handle differences "which range from the Taiwan question to trade and to the South China Sea", it said.

US policies and "misconceptions" towards China have posed significant challenges for relations, China Daily said.

"A pragmatic approach to bilateral relations is essential in navigating the complexities of global challenges."

The proper handling of China-US relations, which the newspaper called the world's most important bilateral relationship, "not only serves the common interests of both countries but also will inject greater certainty and stability into the world".

Source: Reuters/cm

channelnewsasia.com

5. Trump is Eyeing Iran Hawk Brian Hook as First Foreign Policy Pick

Trump is Eyeing Iran Hawk Brian Hook as First Foreign Policy Pick

"The Iranian view is that Trump wants to make a deal, but it depends on whether he appoints the same neoconservatives as last time"

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/trump-iran-hawk-hook-pompeo-israel-netanyahu-russia?utm

Murtaza Hussain

Nov 06, 2024

Brian Hook, a hawkish fixture of the first Donald Trump administration who formerly served under George W. Bush, is reportedly getting the call to start staffing the State Department for a new Trump term. Hook, known as a major Iran hawk who helped lead the “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions, sabotage, and assassinations that characterized Trump’s approach to Tehran, has been appointed to help oversee the formation of a new foreign policy team, according to reports from Politico and CNN.

Hook served as U.S. Special Representative for Iran and advisor to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during the last two years of Trump’s presidency, which saw the killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and expansion of crushing sanctions intended to spur regime change in Iran. That approach ultimately failed to collapse the Iranian government, or compel it to reduce its support for its network of armed proxies in the region. Instead, it wound up escalating the hostility between the two countries while Iran ramped up its nuclear enrichment following Trump’s withdrawal from the Obama-era nuclear deal.

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In addition to his Iran portfolio and work on the Abraham Accords—the set of agreements spearheaded by Jared Kushner that aimed to “normalize” Israel’s relationships with the Arab world at the expense of the Palestinians—Hook was also the head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff at the time the department was producing outlandish documents calling for the Trump administration to help orchestrate an “Islamic reformation.”

Brian Hook, onstage during the 2021 Concordia Annual Summit / Getty Images for Concordia Summit

Prior to working for Trump in his first term, Hook had been a critic of his candidacy. Hook was a co-founder of the John Hay Initiative, a group that sought to counter alleged “isolationist” trends in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. In 2016, the group issued a letter signed by 121 GOP foreign policy experts denouncing Trump’s candidacy as a threat to America’s standing abroad. Hook himself did not sign the letter but had made other statements critical of Trump, shortly before being appointed to his administration to serve as director of policy planning under his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson.

Hook has also had a longstanding hawkish view of Russia that may place him at odds with Trump, who has promised a speedy negotiated conclusion to the war in Ukraine. Since leaving the Trump administration, Hook has worked as vice-chairman for a New York private equity firm focused on international investments.

Hook’s views on Iran may wind up influencing Trump’s approach to the country. While both Trump and vice president-elect J.D. Vance have said that war with Iran is not in America’s interest, Hook has pushed forward policies throughout his time in office that increase the likelihood of such an outcome. His appointment may also set up a clash between neoconservatives and the restraint-focused wing of the Republican Party.

“The Trump administration’s approach towards Iran depends very much on who he chooses to staff his administration. In his first term he was sold on an idea by people like Pompeo and John Bolton that Iran could be sanctioned and pressured into oblivion, but that was an approach more likely to deliver war than an agreement,” said Trita Parsi, the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “The Iranian view is that Trump himself wants to make a deal, but it depends on whether he appoints the same neoconservatives as last time to his administration.”

For his part, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, an effort that he will likely try to push the U.S. to join. In an escalating tit-for-tat cycle of attacks, Iran is soon expected to retaliate against last month’s Israeli airstrikes that killed four soldiers and a civilian inside the country.

In the face of this delicate situation, and notwithstanding Trump and Vance’s own statements about wanting to avoid another military quagmire in the Middle East, the potential appointment of hawkish officials like Hook is a signal that they may continue with a policy that drags the U.S. closer to war, regardless.

“There are roughly two months left before Trump comes into office and it is in Netanyahu’s interest to create a situation where Trump's options are very limited, and all of them to varying degrees are in support of Netanyahu,” Parsi said. “Netanyahu may escalate against Iran, but the Iranians themselves also might decide that they need to hit back now against Israel, because the neoconservatives, after the last Israeli attack, are arguing that it is pretty easy to strike Iran, and so Trump should let Israel finish the job.”

“One way to convince Trump it is not easy would be to strike hard now, and send a message that a war with Iran would be bloody and difficult, which is not what Trump wants.”

6. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, November 6, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, November 6, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-november-6-2024

Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Qassem claimed that Hezbollah would outlast Israel in a “war of attrition” in a speech on November 6. Qassem said that Hezbollah was “ready” for a war of attrition and that Israel would “not win, even if it takes a long time.” The speech marked the 40-day death anniversary of former Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and was Qassem’s second public statement since taking over as head of Hezbollah.

Qassem did not tie a Lebanon ceasefire to Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip, a notable shift from Nasrallah’s position before the ground operation. Qassem said that Israel would have to end operations in Lebanon before Hezbollah would agree to indirect ceasefire talks through Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabhi Berri, who is a Hezbollah ally. Qassem said that the ”ceiling” for negotiation would be the ”full protection of Lebanese sovereignty without any reduction,” suggesting that Hezbollah will not permit foreign forces to operate in southern Lebanon in any way that is beyond UNIFIL’s current mandate.

Key Takeaways:

Iranian-backed Iraqi Militias: Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Harakat Hezbollah al Nujaba threatened to target US bases in Iraq and Syria on November 4, likely to compel the US to prevent potential Israeli strikes in Iraq. The Biden Administration has conveyed to the Iraqi government that the United States will not be able to prevent an Israeli strike in Iraq if Iran attacks Israel from Iraqi territory.

Iran in Iraq: The IRGC is reportedly transferring ballistic missiles and drones and planning a joint attack with Iranian-backed Iraqi militias against Israel, further suggesting Iran will retaliate for Israel’s October 25 strikes in Iran from Iraqi territory.

Hezbollah: Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Qassem claimed that Hezbollah would outlast Israel in a “war of attrition” in a speech on November 6. Qassem did not tie a Lebanon ceasefire to Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip, a notable shift from Nasrallah’s position before the ground operation.

Israeli Ground Operations in Lebanon: IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi said on November 6 that the IDF will prepare plans to expand military operations in Lebanon.

Anti-Regime Militancy in Iran: Iranian media claimed that Iran and Pakistan conducted a joint airstrike attack against Jaish al Adl, a Baloch, Salafi-jihadi militia on November 5.

7. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 6, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 6, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-6-2024

Ukrainian forces reportedly struck a Russian naval base in Kaspiysk, Republic of Dagestan for the first time on November 6 damaging several missile ships of the Russia Caspian Sea Flotilla. Ukrainian media outlets, citing Ukraine’s military intelligence, reported that the Ukrainian drones struck a naval base in damaging the Tatarstan and Dagestan Gepard-class frigates (Project 11661) and possibly damaging several nearby Buyan-class corvettes (Project 21631). Republic of Dagestan Head Sergei Melikov claimed on November 6 that Russian forces downed a Ukrainian drone over Kaspiysk without specifying the consequences. Satellite imagery collected on November 6 indicates the presence of three likely Russian Buyan-class vessels, two likely Buyan-M-class vessels, one likely Tarantul-class vessel, one likely Gepard-class vessel, and one likely Karakurt-class vessel present on the day of the strike in the port of Kaspiysk, although the images are insufficient for identifying damage to ships or naval piers. Geolocated footage published on November 6 shows drones striking near port infrastructure in Kaspiysk.

Key Takeaways:

Ukrainian forces reportedly struck a Russian naval base in Kaspiysk, Republic of Dagestan for the first time on November 6 damaging several missile ships of the Russia Caspian Sea Flotilla.

Ukrainian authorities reported that Russian forces executed at least 109 Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) since the start of the full-scale invasion amid new reports of Russian executions of Ukrainian POWs.

Russian forces recently advanced in the Kupyansk, Svatove, Pokrovsk, Kurakhove, and Vuhledar directions.

A prominent Russian brigade commander and official indicated that Russian commanders and civilian leadership explicitly view Russian military volunteers as expendable resources, consistent with high casualty rates across the frontline.

8. Trump admin will bring 'uncertainty,' opportunities for defense industry: Analysts

Trump admin will bring 'uncertainty,' opportunities for defense industry: Analysts - Breaking Defense

"The makeup of Congress, and specifically the makeup of the House, I think will actually matter much more to the future of the defense budget than whoever the president is," said Todd Harrison of AEI.

breakingdefense.com · by Valerie Insinna · November 6, 2024

Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump takes the stage during a campaign rally at the Santander Arena on November 04, 2024 in Reading, Pennsylvania. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

EDITOR’S NOTE: A version of this story was published last week. With Donald Trump’s victory in Tuesday’s election, we are republishing with updated commentary.

WASHINGTON — A second Donald Trump administration will likely bring unpredictability in defense spending, but the final makeup of Congress will help drive the ultimate final number for the defense budget, analysts tell Breaking Defense.

Trump’s win over Vice President Kamala Harris is coming hand in hand with a takeover of the Senate. The House remains undecided, but even if Democrats take over the lower chamber, it seems likely to be with a razor thin edge.

“We have a [wide] range of uncertainty when it comes to Trump,” Todd Harrison, a defense budget expert with the American Enterprise Institute, said ahead of the election. “Under Trump, we could see a huge shift in strategy to become much more isolationist, which could end up bringing major changes in the defense budget and a drastic reduction in force structure.”

At the same time, Harrison added, “the makeup of Congress, and specifically the makeup of the House, I think will actually matter much more to the future of the defense budget than whoever the president is.”

In a note to investors this morning, Roman Schweizer, a defense analyst with TD Cowen, said the budget outlook for national security is still to be determined.

However, he added that the “first 100 days of the new Trump Administration could represent a major reset in foreign policy and defense spending,” with a Trump Pentagon likely positive for space, shipbuilding, missile defense and defense startups.

Meanwhile, recent public comments by industry executives suggest they’re confident the demand signal for their products will remain strong.

For Trump, Uncertainties And International Skepticism

The Republican platform includes a promise to “prevent World War Three, restore peace in Europe and in the Middle East, and build a great Iron Dome missile defense shield over our entire country.” Throughout the campaign trail, Trump reiterated those statements, potentially setting the stage for greater missile defense investments.

At the same time, he has questioned whether the US should remain in NATO, a longtime point of skepticism for the former president, who has hammered alliance members for failing to live up to the 2 percent GDP commitment for defense spending.

Trump has also signaled that he would oppose further military aid for Ukraine unless it enters peace talks, and stated in September that Ukraine should have made “concessions” to Russia to avoid war, according to the Associated Press.

During an end of campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump said he would strengthen and modernize the military, reiterating an old 2020 claim that he had “rebuilt our military in total.”

But Harrison said those comments are somewhat contradictory, leaving it unclear how much defense funding Trump believes is actually needed.

“If you’ve got all new equipment, why do you need to procure anything else?” Harrison said. “Of course, it’s laughably untrue what he said. But what if he actually believes it?”

While Trump’s first term brought rising budgets and a renewed focus on China to the Pentagon, Trump himself was sometimes a turbulent influence on the department, with moments that included personally involving himself in contract negotiations for the F-35 and Air Force One, and unilaterally promising to cut the defense budget, only to reverse course and boost the budget after meeting with key defense leaders.

That volatility makes it hard to know whether Trump is serious when he talks about leaving NATO or signaling that he could revoke support for Ukraine, analysts said.

“Maybe none of this happens. That is one view that, ‘Oh, this is just rhetoric,’” Byron Callan of Capital Alpha Partners said ahead of the election. “But I think that there would be a pretty profound period of uncertainty until those answers are known.”

Robert Stallard, an aerospace and defense analyst with Vertical Research Partners, said that a more isolationist United States under Trump would likely support a continued trend for increased defense spending in Europe.

“It could also see a more ‘Buy European’ approach to procurement. Other parts of the world lack this domestic option, and so we could see continue strong demand for US defense exports,” Stallard said in a note to investors this morning.

He added that there is also “a possibility” that Trump gets involved in “defense contracting minutia,’ as he did in his previous term.

Speaking to Breaking Defense before the election, Schweizer was optimistic about defense investments under a Trump presidency, characterizing the Republican platform as “very supportive of defense.”

He added that prominent national security Republicans in Congress and within the administration would likely be supportive of increasing the base budget, though they may be less likely to approve supplemental spending like the foreign aid bill passed last spring, which approved additional funds for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and key US defense industrial base priorities.

However, even if the Trump administration is broadly supportive of defense spending, other campaign priorities could have negative impacts on the defense industry, Callan said. For instance, plans to enact a 20 percent tariff on all imported goods could result in financial pressure on defense contracts.

Another complication could be the potential creation of a new organization, the Department of Government Efficiency, centered on reducing federal spending, Callan said. Trump has said he would tap SpaceX founder Elon Musk to lead the new department, and Musk said last week he believed he could cut at least $2 trillion from the $7.3 trillion federal budget requested for FY25.

“When you start hearing those numbers get thrown around, it’s like, if you think defense is going to be rising with a $2 trillion cut, it’s not going to happen,” Callan said. “Not that I think a $2 trillion cut is likely, but just this period of uncertainty about, well, what’s going to happen?”

Ahead of the election, Schweizer said the single best scenario for defense contractors is a Harris win, coupled with a Democratic House and Republican Senate. That permutation of what he called the “congressional Rubik’s cube” couples Harris’s likely support for Ukraine and Israel with a pro-defense Senate and — most importantly — a House where the far-right Freedom Caucus would have little power to stymie military aid for supplemental spending, he said.

The worst-case scenario, according to Harrison, is a narrow Republican majority in the House — something currently in play — “because the Freedom Caucus will continue to hold defense hostage to try to give more spending cuts overall,” he said.

Callan, in a Nov. 3 note to analysts, labeled a GOP sweep as the worst outcome for defense, noting that his view diverts sharply from other analysts who believe Republicans would serve up tax cuts and a larger defense budget. Callan disagreed, positing that tax cuts could drive up the federal deficit, potentially “cast[ing]t a larger cloud over U.S. fiscal capacity for defense.”

‘Trading On Results’

Although defense companies announced third quarter results in late October, just a couple weeks before Election Day, the subject of the next president largely flew under the radar during earnings calls with investors.

“Right now, the stocks are really trading on results,” Callan said. “They don’t appear to be looking beyond results and into election scenarios.”

Even when pressed, executives haven’t drawn a distinction between how a Harris or Trump presidency could impact defense spending — at least not publicly.

Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden said she didn’t expect a “significant difference” in defense spending between a Trump or Harris administration during an earnings call last month.

“What we have seen over time is that the defense budget more reflects the threat environment than any particular administration change, and so we fully expect that again, this time,” she said. “The national defense strategy has remained consistent over the past several years, in the last couple of administrations, and we believe that’s because it is responsive to the emerging threats around the globe and focused on both deterring and defending. And in that regard, it’s well aligned to the program portfolio that Northrop Grumman has.”

Similar sentiments have been shared by Frank St. John, Lockheed Martin’s chief operating officer. During an August interview with Breaking Defense, St. John said that the Pentagon is experiencing “a flat or a declining real purchasing power” relative to inflation, but added that it was too early to say how defense budget toplines could shape up over the next couple years.

“With regards to the election, we think that deterrence and deterrence capabilities are an enduring theme, regardless of which party is in the executive branch or who’s in control of Congress,” he said. “And so we think our programs are well supported in the budget, and we’re looking forward to working with whatever the new administration looks like.”

Other defense executives pointed to the uncertain political environment as a factor underlying more conservative projections about how business could fare in 2025 and beyond.

Speaking to investors during an Oct. 19 earnings call, Leidos Chief Financial Officer Chris Cage said the company sees “growth momentum” in its defense unit but wants to be “cautious” about giving more exact financial guidance for 2025 until there is greater certainty on the outcome of the election and ongoing FY25 budget process.

“You look at the backdrop, we’re clearly in an election year. There is a risk of … an extended CR and some disruption,” he said. “If we get more clarity in the several months ahead, we’ll be in a better position to refine that point of view going into the early part of next year.”

breakingdefense.com · by Valerie Insinna · November 6, 2024

9. The Low Fertility Fallacy

Excerpts:

Low fertility rates have recently become a highly politicized subject in the United States. Some conservative U.S. politicians have invoked the prospect of depopulation and accuse their opponents of indifference to or, worse, of being responsible for the plummeting of birthrates. The heated rhetoric is interesting given that the United States, by comparison with other high-income countries, has a relatively high total fertility rate: 1.67 children per woman in 2023, versus 1.47. The lifetime fertility of the most recent cohort for whom data is available, women born in 1976, stands at 2.2 children per woman, equivalent to the average number of children the country’s men and women say they want to have. Both the lifetime fertility of that cohort of women and the average number of children desired sit above the replacement rate.

There is also no indication that the United States has become a nation of “childless cat ladies,” a term used by JD Vance, the current Republican vice-presidential candidate, in 2021. In fact, men in the United States are more likely than women to be childless at the age of 55 (in 2018, 18.2 percent versus 15 percent). Similar proportions of men and women are thought to have remained childless in pre-industrial Europe—indicating that childlessness in the United States is hardly a modern or isolated phenomenon. Absent convincing evidence of a fertility crisis in the country, it appears that the prominence of pronatalism in the United States has more to do with its symbolic value in appealing to a species of conservative identity politics than in responding to a real problem.

The Low Fertility Fallacy

Why Panic About Birthrates Is Overblown

By Vegard Skirbekk and Catherine Bowen

November 6, 2024

Foreign Affairs · November 6, 2024

Many politicians and pundits around the world have raised the alarm in recent years about declining fertility rates. They evoke the ominous specters of imploding populations, a “gray tsunami” of older people, the demise of the family, and even the very extinction of mankind. They can marshal a good deal of data in issuing these warnings. The world’s total fertility rate has plunged over the past 70 years from around five children per woman in 1950 to 2.25 children in 2023. In 2023, more than 100 countries had a total fertility rate below the level needed to maintain their population sizes over the long term, the so-called replacement rate, often pegged to about 2.1 children per woman.

It is true that total fertility rates in many countries have dropped to historically low levels, but those figures are, on their own, no reason for panic. Some of the decline in the total fertility rate has more to do with changes in when people have children than it does with how many children people have in their lifetimes. Fertility decline is also the product of many positive developments, including better contraception, a reduction in teenage pregnancy, and higher levels of female education. The consequences of low fertility can also be easily exaggerated. With astute planning and policies, countries can survive and even thrive as their societies grow older.

THE MIRAGE OF A BUST

Some of the panic surrounding low fertility probably arises from a misunderstanding of what the total fertility rate measures. The total fertility rate is calculated by averaging the age-specific birthrates for a population in a given year. For instance, in 2022, the United States saw 13.6 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19 years, 57.5 births for those aged 20 to 24, 93.5 births for those aged 25 to 29, 97.5 births for those aged 30 to 34, 55.3 births for those aged 35 to 40, and 12.6 births for those aged 40 to 44. The total fertility rate in the United States in 2022 is calculated by adding up the age-specific birthrates, multiplying the sum by five to account for the five-year range of each age group, and then dividing by 1,000 to arrive at a birthrate for women of reproductive age in a given year—1.6 children per woman in 2022.

The total fertility rate provides a snapshot of fertility at a given time point. However, it does not necessarily reveal anything about how many children women have in their lifetimes, which can only be assessed once women have reached age 45 or 50. For instance, returning to the example above, it is entirely possible that many American women who were in their teens, 20s, and early 30s in 2022 will have children in the future. Herein lies the problem with using the total fertility rate as an indicator of fertility decline: it is very sensitive to changes in fertility timing. Over the past few decades, it has become more common to have children later in life. Teenage births in particular have declined dramatically since the early 1970s in developed countries, and since around 2000 in developing countries. Some of the decline in the total fertility rate observed over the past few decades is due to the shift toward bearing children later in life as opposed to a decline in lifetime fertility. In fact, lifetime fertility has been relatively stable or declined only moderately over the past few decades. For example, women born in 1976 in the United States had on average 2.2 children by the time they turned 45. That figure is actually slightly higher than that of women born in 1959 (2.0 children). In sum, fertility decline may be less dramatic than many people think.

Considering the broader sweep of human fertility may also help quell any fears about current low levels of fertility. For most of human history, women gave birth to many children. Typically, however, just two children survived to adulthood. Today, women give birth to around two children, and nearly all children born survive to adulthood. Thus, the net reproduction rate—that is, the number of surviving children per woman—is essentially the same today as it has been for most of human existence. Human reproduction appears to have finally caught up with the low levels of infant and child mortality that thankfully now characterize most of the world.

Those who wistfully compare today’s relatively low fertility rates with the baby booms of the 1950s and 1960s should remember that the rates of this period were in fact historically outliers. And the high fertility of this period came with costs: growth in the world population and consumption since the 1960s has accelerated the use of land and driven the earth’s systems closer to collapse. It is important to keep in mind that today’s low fertility is the product of various positive societal developments, including fewer unplanned births; a dramatic drop in child and teenage fertility; lower child and infant mortality; the empowerment of women; and improvements in education, contraception, and reproductive autonomy. There is no reason to assume that past generations were universally happy to have as many children as they did. In the past, many people probably had numerous children because they lacked access to effective contraception and alternative, socially sanctioned life pathways. Even today, it is estimated that 48 percent of all pregnancies globally and 34 percent of pregnancies in high-income countries are unintended, and surveys in many high-income countries suggest that about ten percent of parents regret having had children.

AGING WELL

Low fertility will have important consequences, chief among them changes to the age structures of populations. When fewer children are born, the ratio of “older” (generally defined as 60 or 65 years and up) to younger people in a population increases. Some worry that this will put an impossible burden on public welfare and health care systems and on younger generations who will have to care for a huge population of older people. Despite common stereotypes, only a small proportion of older adults are in fact dependent on other people for care. Across countries within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in 2019, an average of 10.7 percent of people aged 65 and over received long-term care, either at home or in a facility devoted to that purpose. Moreover, population aging has increased most rapidly in the countries where older adults are healthiest, most educated, and most capable of living independently. For instance, Japan has the highest proportion of people 65 and older in the world but also one of the healthiest older populations. As a result, the ratio of people with significant age-related health complaints to those without in Japan is roughly the same as in India, which has a much younger population. Investments in health and education can mitigate the impact of population aging.

Many assumptions about the negative impacts of low fertility on the economy are likewise either overstated or unsupported by evidence. It is often assumed that, absent migration, low fertility will cause a country’s labor force to shrink, leading to shortages of workers, decreased productivity, and a diminishing tax base. There is little question that pay-as-you-go welfare and health-care systems will require adjustment to maintain an adequate balance between contributions put into these programs and benefits taken out. But at the same time, population decline can go hand in hand with growing GDP, per capita GDP, and labor participation rates. China’s economy, for instance, has boomed in the same period that births have plummeted. In fact, all of the world’s largest economies now have fertility rates below the replacement rate yet remain economically dynamic; low-fertility countries now produce around nine-tenths of the world’s GDP.

Today’s low fertility is the product of various positive societal developments.

Effective public health measures, such as those that encourage people to exercise regularly and abstain from smoking, could go a long way in improving the health of the population as it grows older. Governments can also do much to compensate for an overall decline in the traditional working-age population. For instance, they can help improve citizens’ productive potential across their lifetimes by investing in early education, health care, and lifelong learning. Investments in automation and artificial intelligence could also help. Although labor forces could indeed become smaller, these reductions could be offset by greater employment among groups that traditionally have lower employment rates: for example, women (in some countries), older adults, and marginalized communities. Over the past few decades in Europe, more and more women joined the labor market, perhaps as a result of the opportunities afforded by having fewer children. Even as Europe’s population has aged, the proportion of economically active to inactive people in the region has actually increased.

It’s not just that low fertility may not be that bad—it could also yield benefits. Having fewer children makes it easier for societies to commit sufficient resources to improving the education, health, and well-being of their populations. Having fewer children also makes it easier for parents to invest in the development of their children and in other important areas of their lives. Currently, at least two-thirds of the world’s youth do not obtain the basic skills needed to participate effectively in modern economies. Even in the world’s high-income countries, a quarter of children lack basic skills and one of five children experiences material deprivation. Clearly, children would benefit from additional investment. By reducing population growth, low fertility also makes it easier for societies to reduce their impact on the environment.

Regardless of whether one sees it as a triumph or a curse, there is no reason to expect that low fertility will be reversed in any major way. Societies should thus accept low fertility and try to make the best of the opportunities it affords. Instead of seeking to encourage people to have more children or berating those who delay parenthood or decide not to have children, policymakers should focus on helping more people to realize their own fertility goals. More people could have children—and governments would not be infringing on their reproductive autonomy and right to privacy—if they had better access to paid parental leave, affordable high-quality childcare, and assisted reproductive technologies. Societies should also consider how they can help young people use the relatively new norm of singledom in their 20s in ways that put them on track for long-term success, and how they can help people avoid both unwanted pregnancies and unwanted childlessness resulting from waiting “too long” to have children.

FERTILITY POLITICS

Low fertility rates have recently become a highly politicized subject in the United States. Some conservative U.S. politicians have invoked the prospect of depopulation and accuse their opponents of indifference to or, worse, of being responsible for the plummeting of birthrates. The heated rhetoric is interesting given that the United States, by comparison with other high-income countries, has a relatively high total fertility rate: 1.67 children per woman in 2023, versus 1.47. The lifetime fertility of the most recent cohort for whom data is available, women born in 1976, stands at 2.2 children per woman, equivalent to the average number of children the country’s men and women say they want to have. Both the lifetime fertility of that cohort of women and the average number of children desired sit above the replacement rate.

There is also no indication that the United States has become a nation of “childless cat ladies,” a term used by JD Vance, the current Republican vice-presidential candidate, in 2021. In fact, men in the United States are more likely than women to be childless at the age of 55 (in 2018, 18.2 percent versus 15 percent). Similar proportions of men and women are thought to have remained childless in pre-industrial Europe—indicating that childlessness in the United States is hardly a modern or isolated phenomenon. Absent convincing evidence of a fertility crisis in the country, it appears that the prominence of pronatalism in the United States has more to do with its symbolic value in appealing to a species of conservative identity politics than in responding to a real problem.

VEGARD SKIRBEKK is Principal Investigator at the Center for Fertility and Health at the Norwegian Institute for Public Health, Professor at Columbia University, and Professor at Oslo University. He is the author of Decline and Prosper!: Changing Global Birth Rates and the Advantages of Fewer Children.
CATHERINE BOWEN is a psychologist, independent researcher, and editor, and a former Research Associate at the Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna, Austria.

Foreign Affairs · November 6, 2024

10. Russian Drone Jockeys Hunt Front-Line Shop Clerks and Repairmen in Ukraine

Excerpts:

Russian drones are hunting civilians in Kherson, unleashing a new kind of terror on Ukraine’s largest front-line city.

Since Ukraine retook Kherson two years ago, Russian forces just across the Dnipro River have pummeled the city with artillery, missiles and one-ton glide bombs. The central square, where tens of thousands celebrated the Russian withdrawal, is now largely abandoned, the regional administration building boarded up. Less than a quarter of the 280,000 prewar residents remain.

Russian Drone Jockeys Hunt Front-Line Shop Clerks and Repairmen in Ukraine

Drone attacks have made any time outdoors in the city, even a cigarette break, potentially deadly. ‘Run for shelter.’

https://www.wsj.com/world/russian-drone-jockeys-hunt-front-line-shop-clerks-and-repairmen-in-ukraine-6557cdf1?mod=itp_wsj%2CdjemITP_h&utm

By Ian LovettFollow and Nikita Nikolaienko | Photographs by Svet Jacqueline for WSJ

Nov. 5, 2024 11:00 pm ET

KHERSON, Ukraine—The first time a drone attacked Olha Chernishova, she was just getting home from a grocery run. As she carried the bags toward her house, she heard the telltale whirring overheard and sprinted toward the door. Before she made it inside, a grenade detonated as it hit her car, showering her with glass.

Her injuries were minor, but a few weeks later, she found herself hiding under a tree while another drone circled above. At the end of October, she watched from the window of her house while a drone dropped a grenade on a car parked nearby.

“I try to stay home as much as possible now,” said Chernishova, a 38-year-old grocery-store clerk in Kherson.

Russian drones are hunting civilians in Kherson, unleashing a new kind of terror on Ukraine’s largest front-line city.

Since Ukraine retook Kherson two years ago, Russian forces just across the Dnipro River have pummeled the city with artillery, missiles and one-ton glide bombs. The central square, where tens of thousands celebrated the Russian withdrawal, is now largely abandoned, the regional administration building boarded up. Less than a quarter of the 280,000 prewar residents remain.

Trump’s Win Signals More Confrontation With Beijing

President-elect set to deepen trade tensions with Washington’s top rival, while China could benefit from weaker U.S. alliances

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/trump-presidency-us-china-relationship-edc2711e?mod=latest_headlines

By Brian Spegele

Follow and Austin Ramzy

Updated Nov. 6, 2024 10:39 pm ET

BEIJING—Donald Trump’s return to the White House injects new volatility into ties between the U.S. and China, threatening to transform a tense relationship between the world’s two main powers into something less predictable and more confrontational.

Trump’s election comes at a starkly different moment in U.S.-China ties than when he first took office in 2017. Prior to Trump’s first term, Washington largely played down differences with Beijing in a bid to bring China into the U.S.-led global order.

Eight years later, Democrats and Republicans have converged on a far more hawkish posture, much of that a direct result of Trump’s tough rhetoric and action against Beijing—and China’s own increasing assertiveness. President Biden has largely maintained policies from Trump’s first term, although he also talked about prioritizing stability in the relationship.

Trump is less likely to offer such platitudes. In his campaign speeches, he has at times described China as a threat and raised the idea of slapping 60% tariffs on all Chinese imports, while at others expressing admiration at Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s ability to wield power over a vast nation.

Despite their past tensions, Xi congratulated Trump on the election victory in a phone call, China’s state broadcaster reported Thursday, telling the president-elect that China and the U.S. benefit from cooperation and stand to lose from confrontation.

A day earlier, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning hewed to a cautious line on Wednesday, calling for mutual benefit between the two countries regardless of who is president.

Results from the 2024 U.S. presidential election being broadcast at a restaurant in Shanghai. Photo: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg News

“Our policy toward the U.S. is consistent,” Mao said during a daily briefing, as major U.S. news outlets were projecting a Trump electoral victory. “We will continue to approach and handle China-U.S. relations in accordance with the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation.”

Mao declined to answer questions about the possibility of increased tariffs.

China was a foreign-policy priority for Trump during his first presidency, with his trade war against Beijing a hallmark of his time in office. Trump often talked in friendly terms about Xi, and exuded warmth during their in-person summit meetings.

That tone changed as Trump launched his trade war in January 2018, and curdled when the Covid-19 pandemic, which was first detected in China, spread to the U.S. in March 2020, prompting then-President Trump to accuse Beijing of having deliberately spread what he called a “plague” to America.

When President Biden took office, he retained much of Trump’s posture on China, as well as the tariffs. However, Biden modulated the tone, saying he wanted better ties with Beijing even as he took actions such as limiting access to sensitive technologies that sought to contain its economy.

In the leadup to this month’s election, many Chinese officials and ordinary citizens saw little difference in how Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party candidate, would handle relations with Beijing.

A cargo ship docks at the container terminal in Lianyungang Port in China. Photo: Cfoto/Zuma Press

Chinese officials especially recoiled at what they regarded as the Biden administration’s hypocrisy in stating a desire for better ties while enacting tough policies. And state media has consistently portrayed the U.S. as an aggressor toward China, a depiction that will likely only intensify under Trump.

At the same time, China could benefit if Trump weakens U.S. alliances. An especially sore point for Beijing in recent years was how the Biden administration nudged partners in Europe and Asia towards a more confrontational stance with China.

Trump’s praise of Xi, and his calls for higher tariffs on allies and for them to spend more on defense, has created uneasiness in Asia, where many of China’s neighbors, including South Korea, Japan and the Philippines, rely heavily on Washington’s backing.

“Trump’s trade policy last time was a huge headache, and they do worry this time that this promise of tariffs will sow division among allies when we need to be unified to deal with China,” said Michael J. Green, chief executive of the United States Studies Center at Australia’s University of Sydney.

Trump’s victory has stirred particular anxiety in Taiwan, a self-governed island democracy that faces a growing military threat from Beijing. Biden said four times that the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion, breaking with longstanding U.S. ambiguity—though his advisers walked back the comment each time.

Taiwanese conscripts during a live-fire drill inside a military base in Taiwan. Photo: ritchie b tongo/Shutterstock

Trump, in contrast, has been more critical of the island democracy, calling on it to pay more for its own defense. He has also accused Taiwan, which is a world leader in semiconductor manufacturing, of stealing American jobs.

Though many of Trump’s foreign-policy advisers have made high-profile visits to Taiwan and criticized Biden for not doing enough to support Taiwan, Trump himself has highlighted Taiwan’s proximity to the Chinese mainland—and its distance from the U.S.—in recent interviews.

“Taiwan is obviously going to be concerned,” said Wen-ti Sung, a Taipei-based nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. “Trump has made it clear he doesn’t distinguish between friends and foes, he manages relationships.”

Taiwan could be at a disadvantage in such an equation, Sung said. “If pay-to-play is the name of the game, then whoever has the biggest purse will likely fare better,” Sung said. “China is many times bigger, so Taiwan has reason to be concerned about its capacity to match China in winning U.S. friendship under Trump.”

Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, congratulated Trump on social-media platform X, expressing his confidence that ties between Washington and Taipei, “built on shared values & interests, will continue to serve as a cornerstone for regional stability.”

One wild card for Beijing under the new administration is the possibility of warming ties between Washington and Moscow. The war in Ukraine has pushed China and Russia closer together, though Trump could seek to undermine that partnership through extending an olive branch to Russia.

Still, in recent conversations with former Chinese officials, many told the University of Sydney’s Green that the trajectory of relations between the U.S. and China would remain the same regardless of the election outcome.

“There is a bottom-line assumption baked into Chinese analysis of the U.S. that no matter who becomes president, strategic competition with China will continue,” said Green, who was senior Asia director at the National Security Council under George W. Bush. “Then it’s a matter of—my words, not theirs—China picking its poison.”

Chun Han Wong contributed to this article.

Write to Brian Spegele at Brian.Spegele@wsj.com and Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com

12. Allies Fret Over Trump Presidency as Authoritarian Axis Challenges U.S.-Led Order

Since the President-elect is the master of chaos and sowing uncertainty, what if he realizes that alliances are key to him winning in foreign affairs and national security?

What if he realizes the the "Dark Quad" of China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea have been building their relationships out of fear, weakness, desperation, and envy.

They fear the strength of the silk web of US alliances. They are weak because of their internal political conditions and contradictions. Some are desperate for aid and assistance and their own strength in numbers. And lastly they envy the US silk web of alliances even though they are unwilling to build their alliances on a foundation of trust, respect, and shared values and can only be transactional.

What if the President-elect realizes that the "Dark Quad" is trying to "out-alliance" the US? I do not think the President-elect wants to lose that competition. This is an easy win for him. And he will also more easily get allied cooperation to increase their spending for their own defense as well. What if he is responsible for defeating the Dark Quad just as President Reagan was responsible for winning the Cold War. This is a win-win for him because it is a competition he can win.

What if the President-elect turns conventional wisdom on its head and embraces alliances?

Excerpts:

In Japan and in South Korea alike, the new sense of uncertainty is likely to reopen debates about indigenous military capabilities, including potential nuclear weapons. This new environment may pull American allies and partners—such as Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines—closer together into defensive cooperation, but it could also encourage hedging in their relationship with Washington, said Gordon Flake, CEO of the Perth USAsia Center at the University of Western Australia.

In any case, Trump’s comeback—and the scale of his victory—will force America’s allies to recalibrate their approach, he said.

“I don’t think anybody can predict how those recalibrations will take place because we also live in democratic societies here,” said Flake. “And in a democratic society, you can no longer take support for the U.S. for granted in a way we have always had.”

Allies Fret Over Trump Presidency as Authoritarian Axis Challenges U.S.-Led Order

Western capitals brace for White House shifts on trade and security as cooperation among China, Russia, Iran and North Korea deepens

https://www.wsj.com/world/allies-fret-over-trump-presidency-as-authoritarian-axis-challenges-u-s-led-order-3f2d2cb9?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=1

By Yaroslav TrofimovFollow

Nov. 6, 2024 9:30 am ET

Donald Trump is returning to the White House as the world is embroiled in two widening regional wars, America’s rivals are coalescing into a new global authoritarian axis and some of the U.S.’s closest allies fret over his re-election’s consequences.

Russia has now enlisted North Korea into its nearly three-year war in Ukraine, where it is making slow but steady advances. Israel’s year-old war with Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza has expanded into an invasion of Lebanon and the first-ever direct exchanges of missile strikes between Israel and Iran. China is giving crucial economic and political support to the cooperation among Moscow, Pyongyang and Tehran—while strengthening its own military for a possible war over Taiwan.

In remarks that sent shivers through allied capitals, Trump declared days before the Nov. 5 election that “in many cases, our allies are worse than our so-called enemies.” He also repeated his threat not to protect “under any circumstances from Russia” the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization who are “delinquent” in their contributions to the alliance’s security.

Many in the Arab world believe Donald Trump would force Israel to scale back fighting in Gaza. Photo: mahmoud issa/Reuters

Europeans are among those most worried worldwide about a second Trump presidency. A Gallup opinion poll carried out last month showed that overwhelming majorities rooted for Kamala Harris in Germany, France, Italy and the U.K.—as well as in South Korea and Japan. By contrast, she was supported by only 12% of surveyed people in Russia.

Despite lofty promises of “Zeitenwende”—a historic turning point—made by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Europe hasn’t expanded its security capabilities by nearly as much as it would need to defend itself. The continent remains highly dependent on American protection that is no longer guaranteed.

Now, as Trump’s support for European security is very much in doubt, Europe faces a test of whether it will have the political will to protect its future—which involves, in the immediate term, preventing a Russian victory in Ukraine.

“If this is not the jolt that Europe needed to get its act together, I don’t know what could be one. Absent U.S. leadership, NATO could be paralyzed,” said Bruno Tertrais, deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Research, a think tank that advises the French government. The leaders of the U.K., France, Germany and Poland should urgently meet to coordinate a joint stand, he said, especially to avoid the pitfalls of the first Trump presidency, when individual European nations sought to cut bilateral deals with Washington.

“The result needs to reaffirm the commitment of the United Kingdom and European allies to the values of freedom and democracy,” said British lawmaker Alex Sobel, chair of the U.K. parliament’s all-party group on Ukraine. “We all need to work together to ensure there is no creeping isolationism and protectionism.”

Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

When asked about dealing with Trump, senior officials in allied capitals said they first need to see what kind of administration he assembles and who fills key national-security and foreign-policy positions. Many national-security professionals from Trump’s first term have publicly broken with him and won’t return to the new administration.

Trump’s current orbit includes people such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an old-school Republican hawk on Russia and China, JD Vance, his vice-presidential pick, who favors cutting commitments to Europe and focusing on Asia, as well as outright isolationists and backers of a purely transactional approach. “Everything will depend on who gets what job,” a senior European official said. “The bench is thin.”

While Trump has promised to negotiate a peace in Ukraine within 24 hours, he hasn’t indicated how. European officials expect him to try to seek some kind of grand bargain with Russian President Vladimir Putin—but wonder whether he will have the persistence to actually reach a deal or will give up, as he did after a failed summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in 2019.

U.S. President Donald Trump, with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at a meeting in 2019. Photo: Associated Press

In a way, the better option for Europe would be Trump simply stopping American military aid for Ukraine, saying it is a European problem and putting Europe in front of its own responsibilities, said Norbert Röttgen, a leading lawmaker from Germany’s center-right CDU party. Far worse for Europe would be a Trump who is actually determined to strike a deal with Putin, Röttgen said: “Such an agreement can only come at the expense of Ukraine’s, and therefore Europe’s, security.”

In the first scenario, as long as Washington continues sharing intelligence and remains benevolent, the Europeans could buy weapons from the U.S. for Ukraine, preventing a collapse on the battlefield, a German official said. But it would be much tougher, the official said, if Trump decided to withhold all security assistance as a means of pressuring Ukraine to adhere to a deal on terms that would be acceptable to Putin.

Among the large European countries, only Poland has massively invested in its military, and plans to spend more than 4% of its gross domestic product on defense this year. Over the past three years, total delivered and pledged German military aid to Ukraine—some of which won’t arrive until 2028—amounted to 28 billion euros, or roughly $2 a week per German citizen.

A military exercise in Sweden. Trump’s support for European security is very much in doubt. Photo: Åsa Sjöström for WSJ

Officials in France, Poland and several other European nations worry that Germany is increasingly inclined to work with Trump on a deal that would erode Ukrainian sovereignty—as Scholz positions himself as the “candidate of peace” ahead of national elections that must be held next year at the latest. Pro-Russian parties on the far right and the far left in the country are eating into Scholz’s electoral base, and opinion polls predict that the center-right CDU will return to power. The CDU leader, Friedrich Merz, has been somewhat more hawkish, saying that, under certain conditions, he would approve supplying Ukraine with Taurus long-range precision missiles able to hit Russia, something that Scholz has repeatedly ruled out.

Lithuania’s outspoken foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, took to social media this week, warning fellow Western leaders that by trying to cut a deal with Russia, “we are choosing dishonor and we will have war.”

While one of Trump’s closest confidants in Europe has been Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban—who opposes aid to Ukraine and favors warmer ties with Russia—the president-elect has also developed a close relationship with Poland’s conservative president, Andrzej Duda. In a meeting with Duda in April, Trump quoted Orban as saying that Russia has always been victorious in land wars, defeating Hitler and Napoleon, and therefore would crush Ukraine, according to people familiar with the encounter. Duda challenged that record, pointing out that Russia was only successful when it had been invaded—and doesn’t have such a record of invincibility when invading other nations.

A U.S. Army combat outpost in northeastern Syria. Turkey hopes Trump will recall U.S. troops from the country. Photo: Emanuele Satolli for WSJ

A demonstrator holds a picture of Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, whose killing was ordered by Trump during his first administration. Photo: Maryam Rahmanian for WSJ

In the Middle East, unlike in Europe, many American allies and partners are sanguine or outright thrilled by Trump’s victory. With checkered human-rights records, many of these governments look forward to not being lectured by Washington.

Turkey hopes Trump will withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, abandoning the Kurdish enclave there. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is counting on Trump’s support for more aggressive actions against Iran, while the Saudis and other Gulf states believe Trump would provide more credible guarantees of their own security. Many in the Arab world also believe Trump—unlike President Biden—would force Netanyahu to scale back fighting in Gaza, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military action over the past year. Israel has repeatedly defied the Biden administration’s demands.

“There is a sense of relief that Trump has won,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political scientist and commentator in the United Arab Emirates. “We need a strong U.S. president rather than a weak U.S. president that Biden has proven to be, and that Harris would have been too. A weak U.S. president is bad for the region—and is even bad for the Palestinians.”

This leaves Iran as the only major Middle Eastern nation that sees Trump’s return to the White House as a clear threat. Trump, during his previous term, authorized the killing of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, and pulled the U.S. from a nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration. “The way the Iranian authorities will read this outcome will be, I think, to try to accelerate their nuclear program so as to acquire a nuclear deterrent to protect the safety of their regime—because of the fear that there could be an agenda of regime change inside Iran,” said Sinan Ulgen, director of the Edam think tank in Istanbul.

In Asia, as in Europe, the betting is on what shape the second Trump administration will take. A Chinese former official pointed out that, despite the presence of China hawks in Trump’s orbit, Trump—unlike Biden—never explicitly said the U.S. will go to war over Taiwan, and is more likely to listen to the business lobby that wants a detente with China. The former official cited Trump’s flip-flop over banning TikTok as proof of his pragmatism when it comes to Beijing. Tesla chief executive and Trump supporter Elon Musk also has significant investments in China.

While officials in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are concerned about stiff tariffs potentially coming their way, some also see new opportunities in a Trump presidency. Takashi Kawakami, the foreign-policy adviser to Japan’s new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, made headlines this month by saying in an interview with the Daily Cyzo publication that a Trump victory would finally allow Japan to reclaim sovereignty curtailed since the end of World War II, returning control over much of Japanese airspace and reclaiming land occupied by U.S. military bases.

“We can take the initiative and become a truly independent country,” he said, and instead of following the U.S. lead, “find a skillful way to manage the power balance with China, Russia and North Korea.”

A U.S. military helicopter in Japan, where uncertainty is likely to reopen debates about the country’s military capabilities. Photo: str/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

American allies and partners—such as South Korea—could be pulled closer together into defensive cooperation. Photo: jung yeon-je/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

In Japan and in South Korea alike, the new sense of uncertainty is likely to reopen debates about indigenous military capabilities, including potential nuclear weapons. This new environment may pull American allies and partners—such as Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Philippines—closer together into defensive cooperation, but it could also encourage hedging in their relationship with Washington, said Gordon Flake, CEO of the Perth USAsia Center at the University of Western Australia.

In any case, Trump’s comeback—and the scale of his victory—will force America’s allies to recalibrate their approach, he said.

“I don’t think anybody can predict how those recalibrations will take place because we also live in democratic societies here,” said Flake. “And in a democratic society, you can no longer take support for the U.S. for granted in a way we have always had.”

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

13. Next-Generation Decoys for the Marine Corps

Conclusion:

Finally, but most importantly, the Marine Corps must confront cultural attitudes regarding decoy employment. In time-constrained environments, non-lethal systems such as decoys are frequently perceived as secondary by tactical commanders, particularly those with experience from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Decoy systems must be prioritized as critical enablers that improve the operational effectiveness and survivability of the force in future conflicts. With such a drastic review of current doctrine and education, the Marine Corps can avoid sending decoys into the halls of the unit supply warehouse, where they will only be opened during supply inspections.

Next-Generation Decoys for the Marine Corps - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Jorge Rivero · November 7, 2024

Sometimes, even mannequins fight battles. In the early weeks of the war in Ukraine, a captivating video surfaced on social media, offering a glimpse into tactics defining the conflict. The footage shows a Ukrainian trench line south of Kharkiv, battered by artillery craters and under assault from Russian tanks. Amid the chaos, lifeless figures — mannequins used as decoys — stood rigidly in place, absorbing the Russian barrage as projectiles attacked their positions. While almost absurd at first glance, this moment highlights a critical element of Ukrainian strategy: using a decoy to outmaneuver and outwit a far larger and better-equipped Russian force.

Since those hectic first weeks of the war, both Russian and Ukrainian forces have employed drones to enhance their targeting processes and maintain persistent observation over the battlefield, characterizing the war as the first drone war. This has made it much harder to mass forces or deploy critical assets near the forward line of troops. Drones variants have expanded to include resupply, air defense, and casualty evacuation functions. The deployment of thousands of sensors across the battlefield has highlighted the evolving nature of warfare. The U.S. military, through carefully evaluated lessons, must adopt novel approaches to mitigate these capabilities and emerging technologies. As the Marine Corps transforms its force structure, it must fully integrate technological advancements and update tactics, techniques, and procedures, particularly in decoy employment. As highlighted in the 2024 Marine Corps tactical publication, Deception, decoy efforts will ensure force survivability and degrade adversary targeting capabilities in the modern battlespace. To succeed, the Marine Corps must disrupt enemy sensors, deny the adversary the ability to engage first, and remain agile in contested environments deep within the enemy’s weapons engagement zone, where our opponents possess significant targeting capabilities. Decoys can be introduced into the force to enhance survivability, create ambiguity in enemy targeting processes, and maintain operational advantage in future conflicts. However, as it stands now, the Marine Corps has not integrated decoy operations into doctrine, training programs, or standardized equipment across the force.

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A Brief Buzz Through Decoy Employment

Decoys are probably as old as war itself, but the modern era has seen many famous uses of this form of deception. Four days after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Red Army’s military engineer administration issued its first directive on Soviet maskirovka on June 26, 1941. Initially, Soviet decoys were crude and poorly executed. From 1942 onward, successful Soviet operations included deception plans with decoys, false radio traffic, misinformation, artificial sound effects, and altered appearances of installations and vehicles. This was evident during the winter counter-offensive of 1941–42 near Moscow. Soviet forces used fake bridges, dummy tanks, and artillery to mislead German intelligence, effectively diverting strikes and reconnaissance efforts toward counterfeit targets. Post–World War II, the Soviet Union used six decoy SS-4 missiles during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the invasions of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.

British troops misled Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at the Second Battle of El Alamein with a fake armored corps consisting of 4,500 decoy vehicles, 8,000 tons of supplies, and damaged vehicles used as decoys. During the Battle of Britain, more than 400 decoy aircraft were used to protect infrastructure. The Royal Air Ministry’s decoys saved critical infrastructure and lives, establishing 237 decoy sites, known as “Starfish,” which protected 81 towns and redirected more than 730 bombing raids away from critical metropolitan centers such as Bristol, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Portsmouth. Lastly, during the Normandy landings, the First U.S. Army Group, commonly referred to as the Ghost Army, led by General George Patton, fixed German reserves in Pais De Calais after forming a fake army consisting of decoy tanks, jeeps, fuel depots, tents, hospitals, and ammo supply points in southeast England. Ultimately, these efforts saved thousands of civilian and military lives.

More recently, during the 1999 NATO air campaign in Kosovo, Serbian forces successfully diverted NATO air attacks from high-value targets by deploying fake military assets, complicating the coalition’s targeting efforts. Serbian forces also used destroyed tanks, with fires burning underneath to enhance their infrared signature for sensors. Chechen fighters likewise used decoy command posts and firing positions to draw Russian fire during the attack on Grozny in 1994. Houthi fighters also utilized decoys effectively to counter aerial surveillance, and Hizballah spent years building decoy bunkers to blunt significant and influential Israeli advantages.

Decoys in Ukraine and Russia

Russian and Ukrainian troops have both extensively utilized drones to maintain persistent surveillance over the front lines, which has made it exceedingly difficult to concentrate troops and equipment without exposing them to significant risk. Ukrainian and Russian forces’ attacks with platoon and company-level formations, therefore, are quickly located and engaged with artillery, mortars, anti-tank missiles, and first-person-view drones. This persistent threat has significantly altered how commanders plan and execute offensives, deploy forces, and manage logistics, including resupply and evacuation operations near the front lines.

In this context, decoys have become indispensable to disrupting adversary surveillance and targeting networks, enhancing the force’s survivability in the battlespace. For example, Ukraine’s advanced Western-supplied weapon systems are high-value targets for Russian forces. When first introduced, these systems degraded Russian logistics, command and control nodes, air defense systems, and ammunition depots. Nevertheless, Russian forces, over time, developed an adaptation cycle, relocating assets out of range and deploying decoys to deceive Ukrainian forces into expending valuable Western munitions on false targets.

Russian tactics, supported by a constellation of drones, have significantly impacted their reconnaissance-strike complex and reconnaissance-fire complex, considerably reducing the time to strike targets close to the front line and at operational depth. However, early reporting during the war indicated that Russian forces, even with the ability to maintain persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, had been incentivized to target Western equipment through bounties of high-mobility artillery rocket systems, Western tanks, and equipment. These incentives, which Ukraine has exploited by introducing high- and low-fidelity decoys, have led to trigger-happy operators and dishonest reporting of battlefield failures. Through visual evidence, Russian targeting of clear Ukrainian decoys has highlighted how a military with advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities can still fall prey to deception measures and decoy deployments.

For example, in a video on social media, Ukrainian forces employed a decoy M-270 system — which was likely manufactured by the Czech company Inflatech — to divert attention from the genuine launcher as it relocated to a secondary firing position or resupply point. In the video, the M-270 launcher is tracked by a Russian reconnaissance drone, which eventually lost sight of the system and only rediscovered it after scanning along a tree line. Russian forces reacquired the target after seeing the front end of the M-270 along the tree line and engaged the target with a 9M723 Iskander M missile, which can cost upward of $3 million each. The target was a decoy.

These high-fidelity decoys, such as those provided by Inflatech, can imitate optical, radar, and infrared signatures, making them highly effective against Russian intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. Metinvest and other Ukrainian companies and civilian organizations have also significantly contributed by manufacturing low-fidelity decoys in large quantities. Despite their rudimentary nature, these decoys have been equally effective in congesting the Russian targeting loop and diverting Russian targeting efforts, underscoring the significance of these tactics.

Decoys for the Marine Corps

In an April 2022 article entitled Stand-in Forces: Adapt or Perish, the 39th Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Eric M. Smith, emphasized that Marines need to be prepared to survive in executing reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance missions while operating well inside enemy weapons engagement zones. Such concepts are not new. Perhaps senior Marine leaders emphasize these points in articles, speeches, and updated doctrinal publications because most currently and soon-to-be-fielded Marine Corps equipment is costly and complex to manufacture, and can strain logistics. High-fidelity decoys, such as the systems developed by Inflatech for Ukraine, are only a fraction of the cost of the assets they replicate, are lightweight, and take only days to produce. For example, the total cost of a Navy-Marine Corps ship interdiction system launcher is approximately $2.194 million, which does not include the additional equipment or the missile storage container, nor does it include ready-made decoys. An F-35B, as another example, costs well over $100 million and takes two years to build. This investment of over $100 million doesn’t include a single decoy.

The Marine Corps’ ongoing investments in fielding three Marine littoral regiments are significant. In addition to the Navy-Marine Corps ship interdiction system, the new regiments are being equipped with capabilities such as long-range unmanned surface vessels armed with loitering munitions, joint light tactical vehicles priced at $395,000 each, and other critical assets like tactical trucks. Similarly, the AN/TPS-80 ground/air task-oriented radar system is priced at approximately $35 million. With plans to establish three littoral regiments in the Indo-Pacific by 2030 and for a service that prides itself on being able to fight with less, the scale of this investment emphasizes the need for protection against advanced adversary surveillance and targeting capabilities to ensure the survivability of these assets in contested environments. However, as it stands now, the Marine Corps has not integrated decoy operations into doctrine, training programs, employment manuals, or standardized equipment across the force.

Even though these sophisticated missile systems, vehicles, loitering munitions, and radars significantly improve the capabilities of the Marine Corps stand-in forces, their relatively high cost and the limited industrial capacity to support large-scale combat operations far from manufacturing hubs can create significant logistical challenges, which would likely lead to the Marine littoral regiments becoming high-value targets for the People’s Liberation Army in any conflict in the Western Pacific. On the other hand, decoys for systems such as the Navy-Marine corps ship interdiction system and ground/air task-oriented radar can be manufactured at a significantly reduced cost, enhancing critical assets’ survivability in contested environments and alleviating the logistical burden in future combat operations.

Integrating decoys is essential to supporting distributed operations and improving survivability. As Gen. David Berger mentioned in the 2019 Commandant’s Planning Guidance, “Friendly forces must be able to disguise actions and intentions and deceive the enemy through decoys, signature management, and the signature reduction.” More specifically, in one of the Force Design 2030 Annual Updates, Berger writes, “How do we organize, train, and resource so that the ability to plan and implement deception becomes an integral part of each unit, training event, and materiel solution? Additionally, while there is no mention of decoys or deception in Gen. Eric Smith’s Commandant Planning Guidance release in 2024, the document does mention, as did his statements to the Senate Appropriations Committee in 2024 and his interview with War on The Rocks in October 2023, reconnaissance/counter-reconnaissance as critical in the changing character of warfare.

In short, the modern battlespace provides a critical advantage for those capable of disrupting adversary targeting processes and overwhelming enemy sensors and networks. Decoys generate operational ambiguity, which may result in adversary decision-makers questioning their intelligence analysts and delaying critical targeting information, which, in turn, diminishes the effectiveness of adversary precision strikes — and, in the case of the new Marine littoral regiments, could enable them from being detected or targeted over more extended periods.

Recommendations for Implementation

The Marine Corps should prioritize the research and development of next-generation decoys specifically designed for forward-deployed, expeditionary operations. This would foster collaboration between Marine Corps units and the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, which can facilitate experimentation under modern conditions. The Marine Corps should capitalize on military exercises, training events, and force-on-force conditions in various training locations to provide thorough, evidence-based reports to decision stakeholders. Furthermore, it is imperative to organize decoy capabilities within the force effectively. Marine Corps Combat Development and Integration should begin a standalone decoy program office that funds, synchronizes the acquisition process, fields, and sustains decoys throughout the life cycle. Training and Education Command should review its current list of training venues that teach tactical employment of decoys and prioritize implementing decoy events into training and readiness manuals. These commands should also review existing Marine Corps doctrine. Doctrine and training should run in parallel to development.

Commanders are likely to deprioritize the use of decoys if they are perceived as a supplementary capability rather than an operational necessity. To prevent this, decoys must be thoroughly integrated into the doctrine and instruction of all levels of command. Commanders must undergo training to completely comprehend deception’s operational and tactical significance in modern warfare. The U.S. Army’s wargaming studies on decoy use have shown that insufficient training in the appropriate use of decoys can result in unintended and potentially harmful consequences and can reduce combat capabilities.

In the past, decoy units have typically been held in engineer units, a model well suited to the current capabilities. The combat engineer battalion, an integral part of the Marine Division, is well equipped to maintain decoys. Additionally, the engineer support battalion, a component of a Marine logistics group, is well prepared to execute this mission due to its control of structure and construction materials that are closely aligned with decoy and survivability requirements. Lastly, the Marine wing support squadron can support the Marine aircraft group with decoy operations around airfields, defensive counterair operations, forward arming, and refueling points. The Marine Corps can improve force protection, operational flexibility, and survivability in complex, contested environments by incorporating decoy operations into the engineering units.

Finally, but most importantly, the Marine Corps must confront cultural attitudes regarding decoy employment. In time-constrained environments, non-lethal systems such as decoys are frequently perceived as secondary by tactical commanders, particularly those with experience from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Decoy systems must be prioritized as critical enablers that improve the operational effectiveness and survivability of the force in future conflicts. With such a drastic review of current doctrine and education, the Marine Corps can avoid sending decoys into the halls of the unit supply warehouse, where they will only be opened during supply inspections.

Conclusion

The current war in Ukraine provides critical lessons on modern warfare. Unmanned aerial vehicles, robots, advanced weapons, and targeting assets are abundant, making rapid deployment of troops difficult and dangerous. Ukraine has demonstrated that large-scale combat operations are unforgiving, and success frequently depends on the capacity to adapt rapidly, maintain manpower, and maintain industrial capacity. Like in past wars, decoys have played a role in this conflict, often taxing adversaries with advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. Integrating decoys into Marine Corps doctrine involves adopting new tools and transforming the force’s approach to combat and thinking in a contested environment. To ensure success, the Marine Corps must prioritize using decoys, train its leaders to employ them effectively, and thoroughly integrate these systems into operational planning and execution.

Applying the appropriate lessons from Ukraine’s ongoing conflict to our force structure and doctrine is imperative for the Marine Corps. The complexity, cost, and logistical demands of sophisticated weapons systems present challenges that cannot be disregarded even though the fundamental nature of war remains consistent. The Corps cannot afford to rely exclusively on air defense assets, which are susceptible to being quickly overrun by enemy drones, cruise missiles, aircraft, and ballistic missiles. Investing in decoys to maintain the Marine Corps’ capabilities and guarantee its survival on the modern battlefield will be imperative. The moment to act is now. Without this essential investment, we risk being surpassed by adversaries who comprehend the importance of adaptability and deception.

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Jorge Rivero is a retired Marine staff noncommissioned officer. He is a senior information operations planner and previously served as a Russian foreign area specialist. Jorge holds masters of arts degrees from the Bundeswehr University in Munich and from George Washington University. He is also an MIT Seminar XXI fellow. His work focuses on Russian information operations, the Russian military, and Russian strategic weapons.

Image: Vitaly V. Kuzmin via Wikimedia Commons.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Jorge Rivero · November 7, 2024

14. Ukrainian drones strike Russian fleet's Caspian hideout

As someone mentioned to me: A lesson for Taiwan here?

Ukrainian drones strike Russian fleet's Caspian hideout

Newsweek · by Ellie Cook · November 6, 2024

Published Nov 06, 2024 at 7:46 AM ESTBySecurity & Defense Reporter

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Kyiv has attacked Russian vessels in the Caspian Sea, hundreds of miles from Ukrainian territory, according to a Ukrainian and Russian official.

"A port was attacked in Kaspiysk, Russia," said Andriy Kovalenko, the head of countering disinformation under Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, in a post to messaging app Telegram early Wednesday.

The Russian city of Kaspiysk sits on the Caspian Sea, part of the southwestern republic of Dagestan.

Dagestan's regional governor, Sergey Melikov, said on Wednesday that Russian air defenses had "destroyed an unmanned aerial vehicle over Kaspiysk," and authorities were investigating the incident. But Russia's Defense Ministry did not report any Ukrainian drones over the Dagestan region overnight.

A Russian corvette launches a Kalibr missile during Caspian Flotilla exercises. Kyiv attacked Russian vessels in the Caspian Sea, hundreds of miles from Ukrainian territory, according to a Ukrainian and Russian official. A Russian corvette launches a Kalibr missile during Caspian Flotilla exercises. Kyiv attacked Russian vessels in the Caspian Sea, hundreds of miles from Ukrainian territory, according to a Ukrainian and Russian official. Denis Abramov/Sputnik via AP

Several Ukrainian media outlets reported that at least two missile ships, the Dagestan and the Tatarstan, were damaged. Other vessels may have been hit, but this could not yet be verified, according to the domestic reports. The port is just under 1,000 miles from the Ukrainian border and was flagged in 2021 for expansion to be able to berth at least 50 Caspian Flotilla ships.

Russian Telegram channels and open-source intelligence agencies shared footage purporting to show the Ukrainian attacks on Kaspiysk, with what appears to be at least one drone heading for port facilities and vessels and exploding.

Newsweek could not independently verify the footage. The Russian Defense Ministry has been contacted for comment via email.

Ukraine has kept up a persistent campaign of targeting Russia's high-value assets inside Russian territory and in Moscow-controlled parts of Ukraine, homing in on air and naval bases, typically with long-range explosive drones.

Kyiv has managed this, despite not being allowed to use long-range Western weapons to strike deep inside internationally-recognized Russian territory and attacks typically focus on Russia's Black Sea Fleet, partly based in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol.

The Washington, D.C.-based Caspian Policy Center think tank has described the Volga-Don Canal, which links the Caspian Sea to the Sea of Azov and on to the Black Sea, as "a crucial hub for the movement of military equipment."

"Russia utilizes this route, particularly during the non-winter seasons, to transport warships and military supplies between the Caspian and Black Seas," the nonprofit wrote earlier this year.

Kyiv does not have a major navy or large warships, but its strikes have forced Moscow to rein in its activity in the western Black Sea, where Ukraine can more easily threaten its fleet, according to British intelligence. Ukraine has also targeted the Novorossiysk Black Sea Fleet base further to the east.

Ukraine's GUR military intelligence agency said last month that its operatives had "disabled" a Russian minesweeping vessel belonging to the Kremlin's Baltic Fleet in the Kaliningrad city of Baltiysk, around 400 miles from Kyiv's territory.

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About the writer

Ellie Cook

Ellie Cook is a Newsweek security and defense reporter based in London, U.K. Her work focuses largely on the Russia-Ukraine war, the U.S. military, weapons systems and emerging technology. She joined Newsweek in January 2023, having previously worked as a reporter at the Daily Express, and is a graduate of International Journalism at City, University of London.

Languages: English, Spanish.

You can reach Ellie via email at e.cook@newsweek.com.

Ellie Cook is a Newsweek security and defense reporter based in London, U.K. Her work focuses largely on the Russia-Ukraine ...

Newsweek · by Ellie Cook · November 6, 2024

15. What the Army learned from its first all-digital ground vehicle design

What the Army learned from its first all-digital ground vehicle design

Prototypes of the XM-30 Combat Vehicle are expected in 2025, said the Army’s top vehicle buyer.

By Lauren C. Williams

Senior Editor

November 6, 2024 01:00 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams

The Army is betting on digital engineering to save time and money as it develops its new infantry combat vehicle.

“XM-30 is being built through a modular open standard that allows us, in theory, to more rapidly replace components, which allows us to modernize more quickly,” Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, the program executive officer for ground combat systems, told Defense One during an interview.

The Army has traditionally deployed an updated combat vehicle “about every 10 years,” Dean said. “Some of that's driven by the industrial timelines of what it takes to stand up the supply chain in the factory and building the vehicle, but some of that's because the way we have architected software in the past is not as flexible.”

By leaning on digital engineering—a practice the Army has been embracing more broadly—the Army can spot deficiencies in vehicle designs sooner. The XM-30 is the service’s latest effort to replace the M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. The Army in 2023 selected two contractors, Rheinmetall Vehicles and General Dynamics Land Systems, to produce prototypes for the XM-30. The contracts are worth about $1.6 billion.

The XM-30 program, formerly called the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, is the Army’s first ground combat vehicle designed completely digitally, Dean said. And by using modular open system architecture, different systems from different vendors can be put together—and work seamlessly—on the same platform.

“We are actually building the stand-in capability. So it's not the final XM-30, but it's a surrogate for it that will allow us to test that,” Dean said.

That demonstrator platform will allow each contractor to install and change out their systems to see how quickly it can be done.

“And that's tied to our digital acquisition, digital engineering effort, which XM-30 is a born-digital program. All of its design work is essentially being done in the cloud, tied to model-based assessment,” he said.

“We have unprecedented insight into [the] level of design, level of detail, level of interaction between the components and the design, all the way from preliminary design through how we validate and test whether all the performance parameters we specify we are actually going to achieve.”

But before contractors can build physical XM-30 prototypes to test, the Army needs to finalize the vehicle’s design through a critical design review in fiscal year 2025.

“This is the first time we've taken a complete system through that level of design in a purely digital space,” he said. “We've learned quite a bit based on the amount of insight we're getting through that digital process. A little bit frightening, because we learn we know a lot more than we ever did before. Before we do these design reviews, everybody would get in the room for a week, and we'd go through the 500-PowerPoint slide presentation about every system on the platform. And you thought you saw how everything interrelated. Now, we're seeing we didn't. There's a lot of holes in our knowledge that we now actually can see live in real time. And so we believe we're getting to the end product, a better end product sooner than we were before.”

Dean said there’s still work to be done to realize digital engineering’s benefits, but the goal is for the combat vehicle industrial base to “match what we've seen in the commercial space.”

“We're building new tools. We're building new relationships. XM-30 is kind of unique in that in some ways, it's highly joint—they are using Air Force software development tools in the Space Force cloud, using a bunch of best practices that we adopted from some Navy development programs. So we've really benefited from the total force modernization,” Dean said. “We're training, now, people to operate in a digital environment, and that, I think, is going to pay us forward for generations.”

defenseone.com · by Lauren C. Williams

16. What does Trump's win mean for the world? by Sir Lawrence Freedman

My biased focus (Asia and Korea) and provocative conclusion.

The best way to assure our allies is to demonstrate what are US interests and how we are working to sustain, poroect, and advance US interests around the world. Where those interests align with those of our allies they will be reassured. For example, it is in the US national security interest to prevent war on the Korean peninsula therefore we are going to act accordingly to protect our interest there.

Excerpts:

Lastly there is China and North Korea. The rise of China as a strategic rival to the US was a big theme of the first Trump administration, and one that continued as a priority for Biden. China’s rise has stuttered in recent years and it faces major problem of demography, debt, and a controlling, authoritarian ideology that is stultifying social and economic development. I suspect Trump relishes an economic war with China more than a proper war. O’Brien’s article suggests a readiness to disengage completely economically from China. I doubt that will be so easy and the effort to try might add to the risks of a financial crisis.

Taiwan may be an interesting test case of his readiness to go for peace through strength. That would require him to repeat Biden’s promise to defend Taiwan should Beijing attempt reunification through force and I am not convinced he will. Taiwan’s defence budget is not large relative to the threat and we can expect pressure on Taiwan to do more to help itself rather than just rely on the US coming to the rescue. A concern for Taiwan is that a conspicuous boost to its military preparations might be one of the moves that could trigger Chinese aggression, a concern that may not impress Trump whose line may be that the US will only help those who help themselves, although then there are still no guarantees.

There is also the question of the Korean peninsula where Kim Jong-un has become more aggressive and less predictable – Pyongyang combined its recent despatch of troops to support Russia with an ICBM test. Based on his comments last time round, Seoul and also Tokyo will also be anxious about the potential combination of Trump’s disinterest in the obligations of alliance with a readiness to impose tariffs on allies. Last time this led to suggestions that perhaps it was time to consider their own nuclear programmes as a source of deterrence. Such thoughts may well return.

Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State, once called the US the world’s ’indispensable nation’. It had influence and responsibilities that far exceeded any other state and this meant that it should embrace this unique role. It meant that others depended on the US more than the US depended on them. But this role had not been adopted out of altruism but also because it served US political and economic interests, which would be damaged irretrievably if it was abandoned. During his first term Trump toyed with the possibilities of breaking free. The question for his second is whether this time he will try harder or whether the logic of the US’s international position continues to act as a restraint.

What does Trump's win mean for the world?

https://samf.substack.com/p/what-does-trumps-win-mean-for-the?utm

Lawrence Freedman

Nov 07, 2024

We are going to do a Q+A for paying subscribers next week - so please put your questions in the comment section below (or email us if you want to ask anonymously). We’ll focus on the US election but we’ll include questions on other topics too. As ever Lawrence will cover those on international relations and Sam on UK (and US) domestic politics.

What does Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the presidential election mean for the international system? No other country matches the US in its number of alliances and partnerships, or in its ability to influence others through its economic and military policies. It has prided itself as offering an exemplary vision of the best sort of society, which it encouraged others to emulate.

Yet Trump campaigned with a darker vision of a failing country let down by its elites, and promised instead nationalist remedies – anti-immigration, protectionist, and potentially isolationist. Past advisors, veterans of his first term, have warned of how he has toyed with radical and disruptive notions, such as leaving NATO. In principle he finds the very idea of alliance, that the US must come to the defence of others if attacked, is offensive. He has shown little interest in international organisations or multilateral initiatives, while climate change is a ‘hoax’ designed to undermine the US oil industry. He abandoned the Paris accords on climate change during his first term and, although Biden rejoined, he will abandon them again.

We have had enough experience of Trump to know that he is not going to turn out to be a closet globalist. His instincts are well set. Allied governments have rushed to congratulate him on his victory and expressed a desire to work with him on their shared interests. They are engaged in damage limitation. They dare not assume that NATO is doomed or that a transatlantic trade war is imminent. Their message is that the choices that he will face on questions such as Ukraine may turn out to be more complex than he has supposed and that he will soon find that the challenges that emerge cannot be easy resolved on a purely national basis. So, however much we think we know what to expect we should not assume that the direction of the second Trump administration has been firmly set. Trump has often seemed to be delighted by his own unpredictability and impulsiveness.

The New Administration

Trump will return to the White House older, if not necessarily wiser, but without any evident need to pacify the establishment figures who were so hostile to his re-election. The experience of his first term left Trump suspicious of the government bureaucracy and the FBI, CIA, and the military. There are MAGA enthusiasts who have been plotting radical restructuring of the government (and this is one task he has set for Elon Musk). It is not just the top leadership of government, the political appointees that change with every incoming administration, but also the levels below that who should expect upheaval. This could result in more dysfunction than usual in the system and a loss of state capacity.

In 2016 there were hopes that he would be tamed by office and obliged to govern from the centre. Some appointments to the senior positions led to expectations that he would be restrained by the ‘adults in the room.’ In the event the adults came and went, exhausted by the efforts to contain the prejudices and channel the energies of their boss. Numerous accounts of Trump’s first term describe senior staff struggling to cope with his tantrums and idiosyncrasies, often deliberately ignoring his instructions in the hope he would forget what he had just demanded. His reputation renders it unlikely that many individuals not already in Trump’s orbit would agree now to work for him, even if they were asked. This will narrow the pool of talent from which he can draw.

Until we see who is nominated for the key positions it is hard to be sure of the policies the new administration will follow. Mike Pompeo, who served Trump as Director of the CIA and then became Secretary of State, without falling out with him, is no isolationist. Nor is Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security advisor from 2019 to 2021. His article for Foreign Affairs last June described a potential Trump foreign policy that would be robust but ready to work with other states in pursuit of shared interests. But also look at this interview with now Vice-President-elect J D Vance (who could quite possibly become president at some point over the next four years). He offers a transactional approach to NATO and a stance towards Moscow far less robust than reported by O’Brien.

Tariffs

It is easier to adopt a unilateral approach than attempt to exert international leadership in multilateral forums for that requires an energetic and imaginative diplomacy. Letting the world get on with its business while you get on with yours need not involve much international engagement. Except that it is rarely that easy to ignore the rest of the world. The reaction of other countries to your policies and the impact of unexpected events in important parts of the world can demand attention and lead to unanticipated challenges and shifts in policy.

To take one obvious example, dealing with unwanted immigration will require engagement with countries to the south, especially if the aim is to deport large numbers of people who have crossed the border. Another, with a wider impact, concerns tariffs. Trump waxed lyrical about their wonders during the campaign, as if they were an almost painless way to raise money and even an alternative to taxes.

It is not that difficult to impose them. All that is required is an executive order. Now a case can be made that Chinese trade practices, including dumping manufactured goods for which it has failed to generate a domestic market, deserve tariffs. Many other countries feel the same way. But he has suggested not only a 60% tariff on imported goods from China but also 10% and possibly more on those from everywhere else. This would invite retaliation and soon have a dire effect on the international economy, pushing up inflation and causing job losses. This is the area that worries the EU most and on which it will seek early discussions before Trump does anything drastic. (Here the UK may regret no longer being in the EU: it will be very exposed in the event of a trade war.)

The Biden years saw steady growth and revealed the many strengths of the American economy. Little however was done to bring down the national debt which is extremely high and still growing – last month it was put at $35.7 trillion, of which about a third is owned by foreigners. Servicing debt costs as much as the annual defence budget. The factors that drive up this debt are unlikely to go away, especially with an administration that wants to cut taxes and impose tariffs. It would not therefore be surprising if at some point this administration found itself facing a major financial crisis.

Peace Through Strength

A telling aspect of Trump’s critique of Biden’s foreign policy (reflected in O’Brien’s article) was that his failure to demonstrate strength meant that he could not deter others starting wars nor could he conclude them quickly once they had begun. We can question whether Putin would have held back his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, or Hamas its attack on Israel in October 2023, if Trump had then been in the White House. Nonetheless, while Biden’s instincts may have been sound after both these events, there was palpable hesitancy about the use of American power, reflecting a sense of potential risks and a determination to limit US liabilities. The result was that conflicts dragged on and got more rather than less dangerous.

Trump campaigned on the basis that he could keep the US out of wars. When he appeared to be fantasising about putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad his explanation was that he was denouncing her as a ‘war hawk’, at which point many leftist critics of her father, George Bush’s Vice President, nodded in agreement.

During his first term, Trump did authorise strikes against Syria after chemical weapons had been used against rebel groups (something Obama had been reluctant to do), took on ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and ordered the assassination of the leader of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. But at other times he held back. After appearing to threaten North Korea with ‘fire and fury’ early in his first term, he embarked on a summit and strange romance with Kim Jong-un to encourage him – unsuccessfully - to abandon his nuclear programmes. Although Biden got the blame for abandoning Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 it was Trump who had done the original deal with the Taliban, having made clear from the start of his administration that he thought this was a pointless commitment.

For those who worry that Trump’s natural belligerence marks him out as a warmonger this may be reassuring but it creates problems for America’s allies, because the durability of these alliances depends on the US being ready to fight on their behalf. This problem is compounded by Trump’s admiration for strongmen whose unconstrained power he seems to envy. Add to this his belief in his unique abilities to achieve great deals he is as likely to rely on personal diplomacy as much as shows of strength. He has already promised as much with Vladimir Putin when he claimed that he could sort out the Ukraine war in a day.

Trump expects the allies to do more to look after themselves. Whether they need to persuade Trump that NATO is worth preserving, or prepare for him concluding that it is not, European governments are going to have to do more on defence. The possible need to keep Ukraine going absent American support adds to the pressure – despite the stretched finances of European governments. The same issues will arise in the Indo-Pacific region, where they do not even have the advantage of a collective security agreement but instead Japan, South Korea and Australia have their own separate alliances with the US.

This point is well understood among European governments but they are suffering from anaemic growth, high debt, and unsettled populations. The German coalition is teetering on the edge of collapse. President Macron was left in a weak position after he called an unnecessary election in the summer which his party then lost. The UK government is secure in power but struggling to work out how it can be financially responsible while advancing its domestic agenda. It has a defence review now underway and this provides an opportunity to make the case for a greater effort, tending not just to 2.5% GDP but to 3%, however unhappy it may make the Chancellor. Trump is by no means the first American president to note the discrepancy between the American and European contributions to NATO but he is going to press the point insistently.

Ukraine

At the moment Ukraine is struggling to hold back Russian advances in Donetsk, is skirmishing with North Korean troops in Kursk, and faces a difficult winter with insufficient energy and regular attack on cities. It is also imposing enormous casualties on the Russians and mounting attacks against targets deep inside Russia so it is still fighting back. In its remaining weeks the Biden administration will do what it can to get more weaponry and ammunition to Kyiv, having been tardy in spending the amount appropriated by Congress. Ukraine has not really recovered from the almost six month’s hiatus in support when the supplemental bill was stuck in Congress from late 2023.

The simplest assumption is that Trump will abandon Ukraine or at least force it to do a bad deal with Russia. That is possible (and this is where it matters who is in Trumps’ national security team) but far from certain.

First, it is not easy to impose a deal on Ukraine, even by withdrawing support. There are some negotiated outcomes that the Ukrainian people might reluctantly accept but otherwise, one way or the other, and with whatever support Europe can muster, it will carry on fighting. That was the message coming out of Kyiv in the aftermath of the election, even as President Zelensky sent his congratulations to Trump.

Second, Putin has shown no readiness to move away from his maximalist demands, and may feel tempted to test Trump to see how far he can push Ukraine to capitulation. If he is not prepared to offer compromises to give Trump something to work with, then Trump will have to decide whether he could threaten to raise the support to Ukraine to encourage Putin to back down. Putin will be keen to talk to Trump, if only to confirm his equal status, but may be more interested in an attempt to push for a new European security order (which he put on the agenda before the full-scale invasion) than make an offer on Ukraine – and there would be little in this for Trump as this really could have echoes of Munich in 1938.

Third, agreeing even a limited cease-fire never mind a full peace deal is not at all straightforward (drawing lines, disengaging forces, ensuring compliance).

Fourth, there are political dangers for Trump as he could look weak and feckless if he simply abandoned Ukraine to Russian aggression and stood back from the consequences. Many Congressional Republicans would be concerned as well as allies. This could usher in an even more dangerous period for European security - for which if it led to an even wider conflict Trump would be blamed. He has an interest in winding the conflict but not in a rampant Russian victory.

Middle East

On the Middle East TRump has stressed the urgency of ending the killing but said little more. Those supporters of the Palestine cause who are congratulating themselves on punishing the current administration for backing Israel are going to be disappointed if they think that Trump is at all inclined to pressure the Israelis to do more for Palestinian rights. Benjamin Netanyahu, who has just sacked his defence minister, was hoping for a Trump victory on the assumption that he will now face no pressure to moderate his policies in Gaza and Lebanon, where his aim is apparently to create buffer zones on the country’s northern and southern borders, and to push hard to suppress Palestinian restlessness in the West Bank.

Although Iran has become a key partner to Russia as a source of drones and missiles, it is much weaker than Russia’s other partners - China and North Korea. With Harris it might have hoped for sanctions relief at some point but not so much under Trump. Its ailing supreme leader is not the sort of strong man that attracts Trump’s admiration. (Though one could imagine him offering a summit with his eventual successor as with Kim Jong-un). This past year has seen Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’ take a hammering. Teheran might conclude that this is as good time to call it a day.

Hezbollah has insisted it is prepared to carry on fighting but its purpose was always presented as supporting Hamas. Hamas has also been refusing to agree a hostage deal and cease fire but now that it is even easier for Israel to act with impunity it may feel that it really is time to work with Egypt and Qatar to cut its losses. Then there is still the question of more humanitarian relief and reconstruction in Gaza.

This is where Saudi Arabia may come in. The Saudis consider Trump a friend because of his indifference to human rights. Trump will expect to continue with the Abraham accords, which was one of the few signature achievements of his first administration. Prior to the Hamas attack on Israel the Biden Administration was trying to extend the accords to Saudi Arabia, with a carrot of arms sales. The Saudi view remains that there has to be something for the Palestinians before it can make this move, so that issue will not go away. When negotiating with Biden’s people the Saudis could assume that the President also wanted to see a pathway to a Palestinian state. They can make no such assumption about Trump.

China and North Korea

Lastly there is China and North Korea. The rise of China as a strategic rival to the US was a big theme of the first Trump administration, and one that continued as a priority for Biden. China’s rise has stuttered in recent years and it faces major problem of demography, debt, and a controlling, authoritarian ideology that is stultifying social and economic development. I suspect Trump relishes an economic war with China more than a proper war. O’Brien’s article suggests a readiness to disengage completely economically from China. I doubt that will be so easy and the effort to try might add to the risks of a financial crisis.

Taiwan may be an interesting test case of his readiness to go for peace through strength. That would require him to repeat Biden’s promise to defend Taiwan should Beijing attempt reunification through force and I am not convinced he will. Taiwan’s defence budget is not large relative to the threat and we can expect pressure on Taiwan to do more to help itself rather than just rely on the US coming to the rescue. A concern for Taiwan is that a conspicuous boost to its military preparations might be one of the moves that could trigger Chinese aggression, a concern that may not impress Trump whose line may be that the US will only help those who help themselves, although then there are still no guarantees.

There is also the question of the Korean peninsula where Kim Jong-un has become more aggressive and less predictable – Pyongyang combined its recent despatch of troops to support Russia with an ICBM test. Based on his comments last time round, Seoul and also Tokyo will also be anxious about the potential combination of Trump’s disinterest in the obligations of alliance with a readiness to impose tariffs on allies. Last time this led to suggestions that perhaps it was time to consider their own nuclear programmes as a source of deterrence. Such thoughts may well return.

Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s Secretary of State, once called the US the world’s ’indispensable nation’. It had influence and responsibilities that far exceeded any other state and this meant that it should embrace this unique role. It meant that others depended on the US more than the US depended on them. But this role had not been adopted out of altruism but also because it served US political and economic interests, which would be damaged irretrievably if it was abandoned. During his first term Trump toyed with the possibilities of breaking free. The question for his second is whether this time he will try harder or whether the logic of the US’s international position continues to act as a restraint.

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17. No, the Problem Isn’t the Voters

Will there be a reckoning among the political elite and the "legacy press?"

No, the Problem Isn’t the Voters

The legacy press explains reality away. Matthew Continetti on the right. Freddie deBoer on the left. Marianne Williamson on Democratic elites. Plus: Olivia Reingold, Frannie Block, and more.

https://www.thefp.com/p/no-the-problem-isnt-the-voters?utm

By Bari Weiss and Oliver Wiseman

November 7, 2024

Ever since Donald J. Trump arrived on the political scene in 2015, elites have claimed his rise signals the last gasp of a dying white-majority America alarmed by cultural and demographic shifts. This was always a kind of security blanket—an excuse to ignore uncomfortable truths.

If Tuesday’s election results do not demolish that cope once and for all, we’re not sure what will. Because look at the results: Trump made big gains among almost every demographic group: Latinos (45 percent went for Trump—a history-making number for a Republican presidential candidate), African Americans (13 percent voted Trump compared to 8 percent in 2020), Asians (39 percent), women (46 percent), the young (46 percent).

The only group Kamala Harris made gains with was white college-educated women and those over 65.

Just look at this graph from the Financial Times:

But if the media meltdown that followed Trump’s extraordinary comeback is anything to go by, there is no end to that fever dream. Just take a look at what has transpired over the last 36 hours:

On MSNBC, Joy Ann Reid said, “anyone who has experienced this country’s history. . . and knows it, cannot have believed that it would be easy to elect a woman president, let alone a woman of color.” Of Harris’s election effort, she added: “I mean, this really was a historic, flawlessly run campaign.”
On The View, Sunny Hostin said: “I was so hopeful that a mixed-race woman married to a Jewish guy could be elected president of this country. And I think that it had nothing to do with policy. I think this was a referendum of cultural resentment in this country.”
On Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough said to a nodding Al Sharpton that “It’s not just misogyny from white men; it’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from black men—things we’ve all been talking about—who do not want a woman leading them.” He added that it “might be race issues with Hispanics. They don’t want a black woman as president.” (He left out the fact that Trump performed nine points better with Hispanic women this year compared to 2020.)
Laura Helmuth, the editor in chief of Scientific American, chimed in with a now-deleted tweet: “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.” (Fifty-four percent of Gen X voted Trump.)
The pastor and activist John Pavlovitz, who has 400,000 followers on X, declared: “Kamala Harris was the perfect candidate and she ran a beautiful campaign of joy, empathy, and unity. She just happened to run in a nation that is addicted to nihilism, cruelty, and division.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project at The New York Times, warned that: “We must not delude ourselves in this moment.” Among “shifting demographics where white Americans will lose their numeric majority,” she added, there is “a growing embrace of autocracy to keep the ‘legitimate’ rulers of this country in power.”

We could go on, but you get the point. And their point is: Don’t blame Harris, blame the voters.

On one level, that’s true. In a democracy, the electorate is responsible for the results—for better or for worse. H.L. Mencken nailed it when he called democracy “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

But you don’t succeed in an election by calling the common people racist or sexist or stupid. You win by listening to them.

And our media elite have put their heads in the sand. Again. They seem to think that if they keep calling Americans knuckle-dragging bigots, one day they’ll get the message.

That’s why you’ll get more insight from our nine-year-old election-night livestream star Josie Savodnik than from some of the best-paid cable hosts on TV. Josie’s take on why Kamala lost? “Maybe because of the border. Maybe it’s because of Kamala’s personality. And she also did kind of a terrible job at being vice president.”

She’s not wrong.

Unlike what’s happening in the old media, here at The Free Press, we’ve been working hard to understand last night’s results—and explain what happened to our readers.

Today’s Front Page is stuffed with brilliant analysis on Trump’s win—from Matthew Continetti on the future of the right, and Freddie deBoer on the failure of the left. Former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson’s evisceration of her own party, Olivia Reingold’s dispatch from the swing voters of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Kat Rosenfield’s take on the liberals crying misogyny.

We have tons in store for you this morning—and more later today. If we’re doing our job right, you’ll have 20 tabs open by the end of the day.

Okay, let’s get to it:

Matthew Continetti—who wrote the book on the American right—looks at how Donald Trump remade the Republican Party in his image. But, he warns, Trump should not interpret his decisive win as an unqualified endorsement of his personality and program. Read Matthew Continetti on how Donald Trump Broke the Republican Party—And Put It Back Together Again.

Freddie deBoer’s politics could not be more different than Continetti’s, which is why we wanted him to make sense of Tuesday’s results from the left. “There are many reasons that Kamala Harris and the Democrats lost so thoroughly last night. But they’re for another day,” deBoer writes. “Right now, let’s acknowledge the biggest problem, the overarching problem, which is that the Democrats are not a political party. The Republicans are a party—a repugnant party, to me, but a party. The Democrats are a nonparty, an anti-party. And until that changes, durable progressive political victory is impossible.” Read Freddie deBoer on the Democrats’ Identity Crisis—and How the Left Can Win Again.

Marianne Williamson, meanwhile, is coming for blood. She says the elites of her own party “have not sauntered out of their gated communities long enough to have made sense of what is going on out there.” Read her brutal diagnosis of what went wrong in the Democratic Party.

Many Democrats have blamed Kamala Harris’s loss on one factor: the fact she’s a woman. But, says Kat Rosenfield, it’s easier for the party to demonize sexist voters than to critique their own failed campaign. And “to suggest that Americans balk at the notion of putting women in power is absurd.” Read Kat’s op-ed: It’s Not Because She’s a Woman.

Olivia Reingold headed to the swingiest county in the swingiest state in the nation—Bucks County, Pennsylvania—to find out why a region that hasn’t voted for a Republican president since 1988 finally tipped into the red zone. Justine Zaremba, a 37-year-old Bucks County native, held back tears as she told Olivia, “I’m elated, like a huge weight just lifted off of my shoulders,” as news of Trump’s win spread throughout a watch party in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Read Olivia’s report: Voters in America’s Swingiest County: ‘I’m Crying, I’m So Happy.’

Finally, Frannie Block reveals how our institutions of higher education have gone into election trauma mode after Trump’s historic reelection. From Northwestern offering a “postelection wellness space” with “puzzles, crafts, games, snacks, and a variety of brain break activities” to professors canceling classes at Columbia and Michigan State, she shows how colleges have turned into “infantilizing safe spaces.” Read her report on how universities rushed to console their “grieving” students here.

For more election analysis, listen to the latest episode of Honestly. Bari sits down with Peter Savodnik, Batya Ungar-Sargon, and Brianna Wu. They discuss what Trump got right, what the Dems got wrong, what a second Trump term will look like, and more. Click play below to listen, or catch their conversation wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to read an edited transcript of the episode, you can find that here.

We’re rounding things out with a palate cleanser. If you happened to catch our election-night livestream, you’ll have seen a series of videos featuring pairs of voters—one Republican and one Democrat—heading to the polls together on Election Day. In the clip below, made in conjunction with Braver Angels, Lissa and Brad of Lancaster County, PA—who attend the same church but vote for different parties—discuss their vote and the importance of finding “common solutions to our big problems.”

Help us build a new kind of media company by becoming a paid subscriber to The Free Press today:

The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.

18. Pace of war shortens EU-based training for Ukrainian troops

This is not a good sign. Training is the key to victory.

Pace of war shortens EU-based training for Ukrainian troops

Instruction has been pared to the basics in everything from combined arms to officer training.

By Sam Skove

Staff Writer

November 6, 2024 05:34 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

AT A TRAINING SITE IN POLAND—On the monitor, a row of drone feeds piped in live footage from a war zone: Russia’s Kursk province, where Ukrainian forces have been fighting since August.

Sitting in front of the monitor, an Ukrainian officer kept an eye on the feed. Just behind him, officers clustered around an enormous paper map, on which Ukrainian and Russian forces sprawled in long sinuous lines.

The drone stream was real. The battle on the map wasn’t. The officer watching the drone feed had no soldiers to control, nor did the busy officers bustling behind him and manning computers.

The eager Ukrainian brigade staff were instead focused on a training exercise, part of a 21-day crash course run in Poland as part of the EU mission for training Ukraine’s army. The drone streams were being incorporated into the fictional exercise—although Ukrainian officers wouldn’t say how, citing operational security.

As the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine grinds into its third year, Ukraine is in desperate need of experienced troops. Western military training, like that seen in Poland, could be the answer. Western officers say their high-quality training, which emphasizes initiative, is a key advantage that their armies have over Russia.

Polish staff, Ukrainian trainers, and Ukrainian soldiers say the effort is bearing fruit. Per a request from the Polish training effort, all soldiers are referred to only by their nationality and occupation to preserve their anonymity amid Russian sabotage efforts targeting Poland.

However, it’s no easy task to fight an existential war while training up new troops, as seen by Defense One during a visit in late August to Poland.

With Kyiv straining to hold a 600-mile front line against Russian assaults, Ukrainian and Polish officers said soldiers must be rushed through training cycles to get them back to the front.

Ukraine’s system for selecting soldiers for training, meanwhile, is plagued by inefficiencies that keeps trainers and trainees in a constant scramble to adjust.

The EU Mission

Russia has lost as many as 600,000 soldiers, wounded and dead. That figure exceeds the Russian army’s estimated ground strength at the beginning of the war—360,000 troops— and is the most casualties Moscow’s armies have suffered since Soviet losses in World War II.

But Ukraine’s losses have also been high, with an estimated 80,000 dead and 400,000 wounded, the Wall Street Journal reported. Many units are exhausted, operating with fewer troops than they need and desperate for ammunition. Russia, meanwhile, is using its superiority in munitions and personnel to break through Ukrainian lines in areas that had once been secure.

The U.S. and its allies in NATO have worked to replenish Ukraine’s losses through training. Among the largest efforts is the EU Military Assistance Mission (EUMAM) Ukraine, which coordinates EU member states’ efforts to train soldiers.

Speaking from a conference room on a military base, where upbeat music played incongruously on hallway speakers, Polish staff detailed a sweeping mission that’s training a large percentage of the EU total. In 2023, EUMAM’s staff in Poland trained 10,528 troops. Poland is aiming to train some12,000 in 2024, one-fifth of the EU’s overall goal of 60,000.

The multinational mission in Poland runs specialist training, in which medics, sappers, artillerymen, tank crews, and other specialized soldiers refine their skills or gain new ones. It also operates leadership courses, including training for platoon leaders, non-commissioned officers, battalion staff officers, and brigade staff. Western officials sometimes frame non-commissioned leadership training in particular as the secret ingredient in Ukraine’s successful defense early in the war.

The EUMAM mission in Poland also runs collective training for squads, platoons, and companies, in which soldiers learn to work with each other and other types of units, like mortars. The mission also began running basic training courses in August.

Speaking from his office, the Polish deputy commander of the training effort said that Ukraine saw particular value in learning NATO-standard methods of doing battle damage assessment and in civil-military relations, as well as in specialized courses like electronic warfare and emergency medical training.

The Polish side also gets to see modern warfare nearly first-hand. Ukrainian troops train on real combat scenarios, some of them drawn from battles they actually fought in. They also bring along with them drones, including armed ones.

But Ukraine’s desperate need for more troops warps training in ways that weaken their effectiveness.

Most courses run for just a month, or slightly longer—far shorter than the multiple months that Western militaries devote to similar types of training, according to a briefing slide. Collective training for squads, platoons, and companies runs for one week each.

Ukraine sets those timetables based on their needs, the deputy commander of the Polish EUMAM mission said.

But the EU can’t train all the necessary skills in just a month, the commander said. Consequently, training must focus on what the soldiers “need to have,” he said. “If we could have more time, then we will provide more types of training, and it will be more complex.”

Programs to train Ukrainian soldiers as instructors who can then work in Ukraine under a program dubbed “train the trainers” also struggle in Ukraine’s high intensity conflict. Ukraine will use such soldiers for training for a few months, and then be forced to send them into battle, where their skills are lost if they’re killed, the deputy commander said.

“He will go to the battle, and he will disappear somewhere,” said the deputy. “And we need to train another guy.”

Ukraine will also split up battalions trained in Poland into their component companies, the deputy said. “Even if you are providing the collective training for the battalion after that, when they are coming back to Ukraine, they are coming for the two places, and they will be split and they will join the different brigades,” he said.

Although the center trains both brigade staff and the battalions that theoretically fight under them, in reality it's a “luxury” situation when a brigade and battalion from the same unit are present at the same time, he added.

Communication between the incoming Ukrainian units and the trainers is another challenge, added a Ukrainian liaison officer, echoing statements by American forces involved in training Ukraine.

Often, trainers won’t know their trainees’ level of experience until they arrive.

“Instructors have to be very, very flexible,” he said.

Some of this is down to bureaucratic inefficiency. For instance, Ukrainian officers told to send sappers to Poland for further training will identify candidates based on their qualifications on paper. However, in reality that candidate’s training may be years out of date, or not to the standard that trainers are expecting. Trainers must then spend time rejigging coursework.

And even if these soldiers have some experience from prior service, their experiences may not be relevant in today’s modern battlefield. “Twenty years ago, nobody [was] thinking about drones, nobody [was] thinking about software,” said the liaison officer.

Ukraine’s need for infantry also means that it must retrain soldiers from other parts of the Army, like logistics. Those soldiers are better than raw recruits as they already have experience of being shelled, but it still takes time to train them to lead infantry, he said.

“For us, it's much better if he has participated in the war and he knows what war” is.

Brigade training

Later that day at the brigade staff training, at least some of the officers were exactly that: experienced soldiers with ample time on the battlefield.

The commander of the brigade, a flint-eyed colonel who preferred cigarettes to the vapes often seen in the hands of Ukrainian soldiers, had previously fought in Ukraine’s liberation on Kharkiv province in its 2022 campaign.

The colonel was already well acquainted with how technology has changed the battlefield. Thanks to Russian drones and anti-tank strikes, he said he must keep command vehicles up to 10 kilometers from the front to avoid being targeted.

He has other ways of keeping touch, though. During Ukraine’s major counter-offensive in Kharkiv, the colonel said, he used a commercial Starlink satellite dish to keep in touch with soldiers who, due to the speed of their advance, were as far as 62 miles away.

Much of the training at the brigade staff headquarters is run by Ukrainian trainers, who praised the EUMAM mission for providing them with the logistics, housing, food, safety necessary to run their training.

The training process typically starts when the trainers make contact with the incoming unit and learn what skills it wants to focus on, said one trainer.

That typically happens just a few days before the new brigade staff arrives, giving the trainers little time to prepare. With a full-scale war on, though, there’s little choice. Ukraine needs new staff officers, a deficiency that think tank RUSI has identified as one of the key problems facing Ukraine’s army and a factor in its failed summer counter-offensive in 2023.

Part of the training involves familiarizing officers with the range of home-brewed battlefield intelligence platforms that Ukraine uses, like the battlefield-mapping software Kropyva and the intelligence platform Delta. Just like the U.S. Army, the units also train on paper maps, which can show data even when the power goes out, the trainer said.

The trainer said that an emphasis is placed on using drones. Ukraine operates a broad range of drones, including small first-person-view suicide drones, quadcopter observation drones, drone bombers, and fixed-wing surveillance drones. The units also benefit by getting to use real data from past battles.

As with everything in Ukraine, though, manpower is a major factor.

Parts of the training are drawn from the U.S.’s Military Decision-Making Process, a guideline for managing staff. The process rests in part on the U.S. Army’s practice of mission command, in which soldiers are given objectives and given broad authority to achieve them in whatever way they see fit. Its effectiveness relies in part on trust that soldiers are well-trained enough to make decisions on their own.

The practice contrasts with historic Ukraine military doctrine, which emphasizes detailed command, in which commanders are expected to plan military operations down to the last detail and soldiers are given less initiative.

The U.S. system requires highly trained soldiers to operate effectively, said the Ukrainian brigade staff trainer. Soldiers in the U.S. system rely on years of training, particularly for the non-commissioned officers and officers who spearhead military operations.

Ukraine, though, has only weeks or at most months to train soldiers, and brigade staff training is just 21 days. The units the brigade will lead have just a few weeks to train in complex combined arms operations.

MDMP works when armies have experienced sergeant or commanders, the trainer said. “But when you have a lot of casualties, such a system can break,” he said. Consequently, Ukrainian trainers teach a blend of the two styles, he said. A handful of brigades staffed by experienced soldiers do use organizational strategies that are closer to MDMP, he said.

Combined-arms training

Later the next day, Defense One arrived at a sprawling training base designed for collective training.

Poland works with Ukraine to make the training as realistic as possible, said the Polish deputy commander of the training unit, pointing to how Ukrainian engineers had advised them on building trenches. The double line of trenches were covered in the remains of blue plastic practice grenades.

Unit training there included a battalion training in combined arms maneuvers, as well as others learning how to operate new weapons, like sniper rifles and Javelins.

Crowded into a small room on the base, a group of soldiers from a specialized unit that focuses on assaults were practicing their skills using the U.S. made Javelin anti-tank missile using an electronic simulator. Others outside practiced their skill in identifying enemy vehicles, using a combination of binoculars and small plastic models of tanks set on a table some distance away.

The men were experienced, having fought in the intense fighting around Chasiv Yar during the last year. In keeping with Ukrainian struggles to attract younger soldiers, though, many appeared above the average age of 40, including one soldier with a beard like Santa Claus.

Their senior non-commissioned officer, a lean former construction worker, said that the unit operated along mission command principles that favor initiative. The soldier said he had joined a local territorial defense unit in the first days of the war, then transitioned to a regular military unit later once he was formally drafted. Now, he said he saw the Army as a career, and intended to become a professional soldier.

His unit, he said, operated according to NATO principles that gave more autonomy to lower ranked soldiers. The non-commissioned officer wasn’t alone. A battalion commander of another reconnaissance unit out practicing rifle skills said similarly that his battalion was run according to mission command principles.

In a reflection of Western slowness in arming Ukraine — stemming from both production problems and political infighting — units sometimes had relatively little live ammunition to train with, said one Ukrainian training officer.

Other problems were simpler, but no less hard to fix. Poland uses a laser-tag like system similar to the U.S. MILES system for training troops, but Ukraine uses a different type of rifle that’s not compatible with the system, the liaison officer said.

The Ukrainian battalion in training did, however, have its full complement of over 200 soldiers which is in keeping with U.S. estimates of Ukraine’s battalion sizes.

But manpower isn’t the only issue for Ukraine, noted the Ukrainian liaison officer at the EUMAM headquarters.

Perhaps the greatest challenge, though, is the supply of equipment, they said. Ukraine can draft—and send–many more of its men. But without more weapons and vehicles to replace those lost in the war, Ukraine would not actually be able to arm them.

“If you see how the war goes, everyday we have losses not only in soldiers, but in equipment,” he said.

“And there’s only one way which we have to [replace] what is damaged. That means [deliveries from] partner nations, or our industry” he said. “Our industry, it's not very big.”

This article was completed with support from the Transatlantic Media Fellowship grant from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

19. What Trump’s win means for the federal workforce

What Trump’s win means for the federal workforce

The Republican former president has vowed to remake the civil service in his image with the reinstatement of Schedule F.

By Erich Wagner

November 6, 2024 10:00 AM ET

defenseone.com · by Erich Wagner

Donald Trump is projected to return to the White House next January, according to the Associated Press, and is poised to spur the most dramatic reimagining of the staffing of government in more than a century.

That’s because Trump has vowed to revive Schedule F, a controversial abortive effort at the end of his first term to strip the civil service protections of potentially tens of thousands of career federal workers in “policy-related” positions, effectively making them at-will employees. Trump and many of his former staffers have frequently bemoaned that “rogue bureaucrats” inhibited his policymaking power during his first stint in the White House.

Though President Biden quickly rescinded Schedule F when he took office in 2021—before any positions could be converted out of the federal government’s competitive service—that hasn’t stopped Trump and his allies from working on the initiative in absentia. Both the Heritage Foundation and America First Policy Institute, which have organized dueling unofficial transition projects have endorsed reviving Schedule F, going so far as to creating lists of upwards of 50,000 current career civil servants to strip of their removal protections and threaten with termination.

And the America First Policy Institute, which The New York Times reported last month has recently gained favor with Trump after Heritage’s Project 2025 transition project and policy playbook proved unpopular with voters, has called for more sweeping changes, such as converting the entire federal workforce into at-will employees and outlawing collective bargaining at federal agencies altogether.

Though Biden has sought to install new safeguards against politicizing the federal workforce via Office of Personnel Management regulations defining “policy-related” workers as political appointees and requiring agencies that convert employees out of the competitive service to allow current workers to retain their civil service protections. But in interviews earlier this year, experts described the effort as akin to a speed bump.

“Of course, any effort to try to launch Schedule F again would immediately be met with an effort to stop it in courts,” Donald Kettl told Government Executive in September. “But my conclusion is that it is probably constitutional. If unions and Democrats challenge it, they will probably lose. That path also would require finding a plaintiff with standing—someone who can prove they’ve been injured. It would take time to find the right plaintiff and to wait for the Trump administration to take action that frames the issues in just the right way . . . and then it goes through a tremendous maze of a process. It would probably take at least two years to resolve the constitutional questions, which at that point, even if Schedule F loses, it would provide two years for the administration to establish a new pattern of practice.”

On labor issues, Trump is likely to revive a series of executive orders making it easier to fire federal workers and severely curtailing union access to the workplace, both by evicting labor officials from agency office space and cutting access to official time, a practice by which federal workers who serve as union leaders are compensated by the government for time spent on representational activities, such as collective bargaining negotiations and representing employees in disciplinary hearings and litigation.

Union officials say that their members are in a much stronger position than they were entering Trump’s first term, thanks in no small part to a series of Biden administration edicts encouraging agencies to work collaboratively with labor partners and expanding what topics unions may negotiate over with management. Over the last four years, many unions have negotiated contracts whose terms run until after the 2028 presidential election, making it harder for agencies to implement workforce policy changes unilaterally on their bargaining units, and unions representing workers at agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency secured “scientific integrity” provisions to protect employees from being retaliated against for doing their jobs.

But like with Schedule F, they acknowledged that in an all-out assault on organized labor in government, these provisions may not be foolproof.

"If they’re just going to disregard the rules, there isn’t going to be anything to protect anyone—not even just scientists, but anyone,” said Nicole Cantello, legislative and political coordinator for the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents EPA workers, in June. “Sure, that could definitely happen. That’s a concern for every federal employee, that they don’t know what [a second Trump] administration would put into action against feds.”

defenseone.com · by Erich Wagner

20. China backing off when Philippine forces patrol with allies, says Navy official

The importance of alliances.

China backing off when Philippine forces patrol with allies, says Navy official

Cristina Chi - Philstar.com

November 6, 2024 | 5:03pm

philstar.com · by Cristina Chi

MANILA, Philippines — Chinese forces keep their distance when they see Philippine forces sailing with powerful nations in the South China Sea, a ranking Philippine Navy official shared on Wednesday, November 6.

Rear Admiral Roy Vincent Trinidad, the Philippine Navy's spokesperson for the West Philippine Sea, noted that Chinese vessel display different conduct when encountering multilateral rather than purely Philippine patrols.

"We have noticed a slight change in the behavior of the [People's Liberation Army] Navy, with those maritime militia, each time we have a multilateral maritime activity," Trinidad said at a forum by the Stratbase Group.

China's maritime forces, including its warships and shadowy maritime militia vessels, have not displayed coercive or aggressive behavior before, during and after the Philippines' joint patrols in the disputed waters, Trinidad told reporters.

The Navy has conducted 10 joint maritime activities this year with various international partners, including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Vietnam, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, and France.

At a press conference on October 22, Trinidad said more joint drills are planned. "We can expect more of that in the coming days... [But] we do not give advance notice on future operations," he said.

Self-reliant defense posture

Trinidad shared the Navy's observation while emphasizing the Philippines' plans to pursue further maritime cooperation while working toward eventual self-reliance.

He added that partnerships with "like-minded navies" allow the Philippines to maintain its maritime defense while developing its own defense capacity. "This would allow us to bide time as we continue developing our capabilities," he said.

The Navy said in September that two Chinese warships tailed the Philippines' joint drills with the United States, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Trinidad said, however, that China had "behaved" during the drills.

Restraint as strategy

Beijing does not recognize the 2016 ruling that invalidated its so-called nine-dash line claim to the South China Sea. While a draft South China Sea code of conduct has been long in the works between Beijing and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Philippines believes China is responsible for delaying the long-sought document.

Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro said "good faith discussions" with China on the regional code of conduct is unlikely to happen.

Over the past year, Chinese forces have increasingly shadowed or block Philippine ships to prevent them from conducting patrols or resupply missions to its outposts in the West Philippine Sea. This refers to the country's 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the South China Sea.

The most violent altercation between Chinese and Philippine forces occurred on June 17 when Chinese forces assaulted Philippine troops and seized their weapons.

The military has been working on updating its rules of engagement to prevent unnecessary escalation of violence during encounters with foreign powers at sea, Trinidad said.

He cited the June 17 incident as an example of how "a single shot would have escalated things [out of control]."

"Our troops right now are very well aware that the use of force is not allowed in mission accomplishment," he said.

The Philippines is implementing a "persistent presence" strategy in the West Philippine Sea, which Trinidad likened to counter-insurgency tactics. "Just as insurgency thrives where government presence is absent, we need to have a persistent presence in the West Philippine Sea," he said.

Trinidad said these developments align with the military's shift from internal security to external defense, following President Marcos Jr.'s directive last year to prioritize territorial defense.

philstar.com · by Cristina Chi

21. What Trump’s Win Means for U.S. Foreign Policy

I may have to cancel my subscription to Foreign Policy. This article and all the articles I skimmed through at the link at the bottom of this article make no mention of Korea, north or South.

Disappointing.

What Trump’s Win Means for U.S. Foreign Policy

Foreign Policy · by FP Staff

U.S. Foreign Policy
Foreign & Public Diplomacy
United States

Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s election victory marks the beginning of another roller-coaster ride in U.S. foreign policy. The president-elect is poised to bring back the hallmarks of his first term: a trade war with China, a deep skepticism—even hostility—toward multilateralism, a fondness for strongmen, and an iconoclastic, tweet-from-the-hip style of dealmaking diplomacy. Trump’s advisors have said his “peace through strength” approach is what the country needs in this precarious moment.

This second term will bring new challenges, though—not least the two wars, in the Middle East and Ukraine, that the United States is deeply involved in. Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine before he even takes office, but he has yet to offer any detailed plan; his plans for bringing peace to the Middle East are equally vague.

Unclear as Trump’s designs may be, Foreign Policy waded into his track record as well as his statements and those of his advisors to offer clues on what the future of U.S. foreign policy holds. As Trump’s first term showed, his own whims often contrast with his advisors’ agenda; this time around, he may have a tighter grip on the wheel as a second-time president likely staffed by a more loyal circle of advisors.

Here’s a glimpse into the Trump 2.0 future.

JUMP TO TOPIC

China

Donald Trump wearing a suit and red tie grimaces as he pulls Xi Jinping's hand toward him in a handshake. Xi wears a suit and blue tie and smiles slightly. Behind them are U.S. and Chinese flags.

Trump shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Nov. 9, 2017. Fred Dufour/AFP via Getty Images

On China policy, to some extent President Joe Biden will just be passing the baton back to Trump. The current administration inherited much of the first Trump term’s harsher approach to China, and a second Trump term is likely to continue identifying China as the United States’ top national security challenge. But on specific issues—and certainly overall style—a second Trump term will bring significant changes.

As with his first term, Trump has set his sights first and foremost on trade. Trump told the Wall Street Journal in an October interview that “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” and his clearest priority when it comes to China is relaunching the trade war that he began in 2018.

Trump’s campaign website calls for cutting the U.S. reliance on China for all essential goods. But that’s just the beginning. Biden maintained Trump’s original tariffs and added some additional ones; Trump is poised to go much further. With promised tariffs of at least 60 percent on all imports from China, Trump would get closer to the full decoupling of the world’s two largest economies espoused by some of his closest advisors.

Such a move would worsen the already tense bilateral relationship and cost American households thousands of dollars a year and U.S. exporters one of their biggest markets. But the knock-on effects of an aggressive trade policy toward China would also end up weakening other potential U.S. friends and allies.

China still depends overwhelmingly on exports to drive its growth, and measures designed to weaken that main motor of growth, such as Trump’s tariffs, would also weaken Chinese demand for manufacturing inputs, including energy and minerals. That would be bad news for U.S. neighbors such as Peru, Chile, and Mexico (all big exporters of copper to China), U.S. ally Australia (a big exporter of iron ore and coal), and U.S. frenemy Saudi Arabia, a big source of China’s crude oil.

In Trump’s first term, tariff leverage over China led to a bilateral deal that he deemed “the biggest deal anyone has ever seen.” It was meant to boost U.S. agricultural and energy exports to China, but it never came close to realizing its objectives. Reviving that Phase One agreement could be the starting point for a revamped deal under the new Trump administration, according to the America First Policy Institute, a think tank in Trump’s orbit.

If the purpose of the sky-high import taxes is to force China to overhaul its trade and economic practices—the ostensible and unmet goal of the first-term trade war with China—Trump’s other trade policies would make that much more difficult. The strong-arming of China would be undermined by similar treatment of friends and allies, as during his first term. Trump has promised tariffs as high as 20 percent on all other countries, including the European Union. That would not only bring instant and well-prepared reprisals on U.S. exports, further weakening U.S. economic prospects, but it would also dampen the prospects for a big-tent coalition of major economies that could bring coordinated pressure on Beijing to curb its most egregious trade abuses.

Beyond trade, Trump’s biggest point of departure from the Biden administration may be on Taiwan. During his campaign, he repeatedly cast doubt on the future extent of U.S. support, applying the same transactional approach he has taken with many countries to the island. “Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company. … Taiwan doesn’t give us anything,” he said in a July interview with Bloomberg Businessweek.

Such statements have led some China experts to think Trump will look to forge some sort of deal with Taiwan in exchange for further U.S. defense support. Taiwan’s military spending stands at some 2.6 percent of its GDP today; Trump may require the island to hike that number up, as former Trump National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien and senior defense official Elbridge Colby have proposed. TSMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor giant, has already invested more than $65 billion in new plants located in Arizona, but Trump may push for further domestic investment, Taiwan experts told Foreign Policy.

While Trump may drive a hard bargain, it is unlikely that he would actually abandon support for Taiwan. Among his potential top advisors is former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is a staunch supporter of Taiwan and has called for formally recognizing Taiwanese independence. In interviews, Trump has stuck with the long-standing U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity when pressed about whether the U.S. military would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack or blockade. Trump’s own personal unpredictability also provides its own layer of ambiguity, strategic or not. When asked that question in his October interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump responded, “I wouldn’t have to, because [Chinese President Xi Jinping] respects me and he knows I’m f— crazy.”

Which voices ultimately hold sway in Trump’s cabinet will also influence his administration’s China policy. As Foreign Policy previously reported, Republican China hawks are divided over how existential competition with China should be, along with other key questions, including how much to decouple the two economies. As with Trump’s first term, these battle lines will surely carry over into the White House.

Trump’s own guanxi—or personal relationships—will surely shape policy as well. The president-elect has repeatedly expressed admiration for Xi. “I very much respect President Xi. I got to know him very well. And I liked him a lot. He’s a strong guy, but I liked him a lot,” he told Businessweek. Trump’s first term showed his willingness to buck his administration’s policy in favor of his own brand of personal politics with Xi; that may well happen again in pursuit of a second trade deal.—Lili Pike and Keith Johnson

A pencil-drawn portrait of Robert Lighthizer seen in profile, wearing glasses and looking to the right.

Profile

The Man Who Would Help Trump Upend the Global Economy

As a potential U.S. Treasury secretary, Robert Lighthizer has more than trade policy to revolutionize.

A photo collage illustration shows Chinese leader Xi Jinping walking down red-carpeted stairs. At left are two sparring hawks. Behind him is the US Capitol and Donald Trump with his hand to his face. At lower right are two Chinese protesters.

Deep Dive

How Does the U.S.-China ‘Cold War’ End?

Republicans are divided on whether regime change in Beijing should be the ultimate goal.

Middle East

Benjamin Netanyahu leans in to speak closely to Donald Trump. Behind them is a blue and white clouded sky.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with Trump in Tel Aviv on May 23, 2017.Kobi Gideon/GPO via Getty Images

Unless Israel’s wars with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon are fully resolved before Trump is inaugurated—which seems unlikely—one of the most urgent foreign-policy issues on his desk will be the escalating tensions in the Middle East. The president-elect has spoken about the need to bring the war in Gaza to a close, claiming in August that he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “get your victory” because the “killing has to stop.”

It’s unclear what role, if any, the next administration would play in trying to bring that war to a close. Trump has criticized the Biden team’s call for a cease-fire, describing it as an effort to “tie Israel’s hand behind its back” and saying a cease-fire would only give Hamas time to regroup.

During his first term, Trump rhetorically backed a two-state solution to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while putting his thumb on the scale, handing Israel a series of long-sought diplomatic prizes such as moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, cutting funding to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, and reversing decades of U.S. policy by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and declaring that Israeli settlements in the West Bank do not violate international law.

Trump has previously said he “fought for Israel like no president ever before,” and his administration’s role in brokering the Abraham Accords—a series of diplomatic agreements between Israel and a number of Arab states—was regarded as one of his major foreign-policy triumphs; the Biden administration has continued those efforts.

While Netanyahu and Trump had a warm relationship during his first term, things soured after the Israeli leader congratulated Biden on his 2020 election victory a day after the race was called, angering Trump. His tone toward Israel in recent months has also been critical at times, with Trump warning in April that the country was “losing the PR war” in Gaza.

Trump takes to the White House for a second term as the wider Middle East has been ignited by clashes between Israel and Tehran’s proxies in Lebanon, Yemen, and beyond. This year saw Israel and Iran directly trade fire for the first time. While the Biden administration has sought to de-escalate tensions, urging Israel not to strike Iran’s nuclear and energy facilities in a recent wave of retaliatory strikes, Trump is likely to be less cautious, saying in October that Israel should “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later.”

The first Trump administration took a hard line on Iran, withdrawing from the nuclear deal, pursuing a policy of “maximum pressure” on the regime, and assassinating the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani, in an airstrike in January 2020.

Speaking to reporters in September, Trump said he would be open to striking a new deal with Iran to prevent the country from developing a nuclear weapon. “We have to make a deal, because the consequences are impossible. We have to make a deal,” he said, without offering further details of what such negotiations could entail.

While Trump sought to wind down the U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is not entirely averse to bringing U.S. military might to bear in pursuit of clear goals, said Robert Greenway, who served as the senior director for the Middle East on Trump’s National Security Council. That could include preventing Iran from joining the short list of countries with nuclear arms. “The military option may be the only viable option left to prevent Iran developing a nuclear weapon,” Greenway said.

Adding another wrinkle, the U.S. intelligence community has warned that Iran has plotted to assassinate Trump and will likely continue those efforts beyond Election Day. “Now it’s also personal. I wouldn’t discount that,” Greenway said.—Amy Mackinnon

Then-U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 15, 2020.

Analysis

Netanyahu Favors Trump, but He Could Come to Regret It

A second Trump administration might have less sympathy for Israel.

Russia-Ukraine and NATO

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are silhouetted as they walk in front of a set of stairs. Other leaders are seen in shadows at left.

Trump walks with Russian President Vladimir Putin before taking a family photo at the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on June 28, 2019. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Trump has criticized U.S. funding for Ukraine’s war effort and called for Europe to assume more of the burden of supporting Kyiv. He labeled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “the greatest salesman on Earth” for how much money he’s been able to get for Ukraine from the Biden administration, though he added, “That doesn’t mean I don’t want to help [Zelensky], because I feel very badly for those people.” Yet he has expressed doubt that Ukraine can defeat Russia.

Trump has claimed that it will take him just 24 hours to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war and that he will get it done before his inauguration in January. But details on how he intends to end the war are scant. In a July 2023 interview with Fox News, Trump suggested that he would force Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table by telling the Ukrainian leader that Kyiv will get no more U.S. aid and telling the Russian leader that Washington will dramatically increase aid to Kyiv if a deal isn’t made.

Trump has said even less about what a negotiated settlement would look like beyond that he wants “to see a fair deal made.”

Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has offered a bit more specifics on what such a deal might look like. Although he said Trump would leave it to the two warring countries as well as Europe to work out the details of a peace agreement, Vance suggested that it would likely entail the establishment of a demilitarized zone along current battle lines, allowing Ukraine to retain its sovereignty while forcing it to give up some of its territory currently in Moscow’s hands, as well as a guarantee that Ukraine will remain neutral—meaning it won’t join NATO or other “allied institutions.”

Analysts have noted that this is very similar to the terms that Putin has laid out for a cease-fire, which Ukraine and several of its backers—including the United States, Italy, and Germany—have rejected.

Trump is far from NATO’s biggest supporter, and the alliance is no fan of him, either. Trump has chastised NATO members that do not meet the bloc’s minimum defense spending goal, even encouraging Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to countries that don’t hit the 2 percent target. Eight countries in the 32-nation bloc do not meet this requirement.

Ahead of the election, NATO tried to Trump-proof the alliance. Fearing that a second Trump term would slow or halt aid to Ukraine, the bloc ramped up production of key weapons and equipment as well as worked to consolidate authority over training and provisions to Europe. At this year’s NATO summit in Washington, the alliance reaffirmed that “Ukraine’s future is in NATO” but declined to extend an invitation for Kyiv to join or set a timeline for membership.

From Russia’s perspective, a second Trump presidency might pave the way for friendlier relations between Washington and Moscow, as the Kremlin has long preferred the Republican leader over his Democratic opponents. Yet even the Russians are hesitant about Trump’s promises to immediately end the conflict. This sort of thinking falls within “the realm of fantasy,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in September.

Since leaving office, Trump has reportedly spoken to Putin as many as seven times. Trump has not confirmed these conversations, saying only that if he did have them, then “it’s a smart thing.” In September, Trump met with Zelensky in New York. The president-elect has a fraught history with the Ukrainian leader, having been impeached in 2019 for pressuring Zelensky to dig up political dirt on Biden and the Democrats to help Trump try to win the 2020 election; at the time, Trump was withholding nearly $400 million in U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.—Alexandra Sharp

Illustration of a torn map of Europe revealing Donald Trump

Essay

Trump’s Return Would Transform Europe

Without Washington’s embrace, the continent could revert to an anarchic and illiberal past.

Africa

A youth wearing a U.S. flag shirt and cargo shorts stands barefoot on a pile of dirt. He holds a rectangular sifter above his head. Another youth is seen at left.

A youth works in a cobalt mine in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, on Dec. 13, 2005.Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images

U.S. Africa policy didn’t make much of a splash on the campaign trail this year, with neither Trump nor Democratic nominee Kamala Harris offering many—if any—details on what their plans would be on taking office. But Trump’s first term offers some clues about what his future approach might look like.

Trump’s signature regional initiative, known as “Prosper Africa,” focused on boosting trade and deepening U.S. companies’ business ties on the continent. Yet he often spoke of U.S. Africa policy in a dismissive, even racist way, perhaps most famously when he disparaged what he called “shithole countries” in Africa—all while never once stepping foot on the continent.

Further complicating matters is the fact that Trump consistently framed U.S. Africa policy in the context of the wider U.S.-China contest, frustrating African leaders who have grown tired of being treated as an afterthought in U.S. policy circles or, alternatively, seen solely as pawns in geopolitics.

Trump “very much framed the U.S. interest in Africa as a competition with China and, to a lesser degree, Russia,” said Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “The Biden administration has learned not to frame our interest in those terms because they realize that it doesn’t get us very far with African governments.”

U.S. engagement in Africa was mentioned in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page conservative policy playbook that has deep links to Team Trump—even though Trump himself sought to distance himself from it on the campaign trail. Yet many of the foreign-policy interests outlined in Project 2025—including the continent’s growing population size, ample supplies of critical minerals, and vicinity to key shipping routes, as well as countering terrorism there—resemble the Biden administration’s priorities, as Hudson noted in a CSIS report. Project 2025 also stressed the importance of countering “malign Chinese activity on the continent” through public diplomacy.

One of the big questions going forward, Hudson said, is whether Trump will be able to stay on message and resist making the kinds of derogatory remarks about Africa that he did during his first term, which heightened tensions and impeded diplomacy. “Will he be able to refrain from those kinds of flip remarks that he’s frankly known for?” Hudson said. That’s a “big kind of wild card.”—Christina Lu

Trucks loaded with copper prepare to leave Tenke Fungurume Mine, one of the largest copper and cobalt mines in the world, in the southeastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on June 17, 2023.

Report

Washington Wants to Revive a Critical Minerals Mega-Railway Through Africa

The move comes straight out of China’s Belt-and-Road playbook.

Immigration

Donald Trump stands behind a lectern wi the words "The Southern Border" on it. Behind him are four other men and a woman in a red dress. Fencing is seen on either side with mountains in the background.

Trump speaks about immigration and border security in Montezuma Pass, Arizona, on Aug. 22. Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images

Trump’s first term was marked by a hard-line immigration agenda that included his highly controversial family separation policy and travel ban on people from certain Muslim-majority countries. This time around, Trump has promised a more dramatic overhaul of U.S. immigration policy, vowing to carry out the “largest deportation operation in American history.”

The president-elect’s advisors have laid out a plan that would see U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement conduct sweeping workplace raids and arrests in order to deport millions of undocumented immigrants every year. The administration would build “vast holding facilities,” likely in Texas near the U.S. southern border, in order to detain the immense number of immigrants expected to be awaiting deportation, according to Stephen Miller, Trump’s former immigration czar and current advisor. Trump also envisions halting the U.S. refugee program and reinstating some of the more contentious policies from his first presidential term, such as implementing another variation of the Muslim travel ban.

The implementation of those plans is estimated to cost upwards of billions of dollars; the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, put the total sum at $88 billion per year over more than a decade. Beyond those upfront costs—and the massive human toll of such a policy—economists have warned that conducting mass deportations on the scale that Trump has proposed would deal a painful blow to the U.S. economy.

An analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that Trump’s proposed mass deportations—which would target a key labor force that is difficult to replace—would drive up inflation, lower the U.S. GDP, and reduce employment. The report noted that agriculture would be the hardest-hit sector.

Trump’s proposed overhaul won’t be easy to implement, as it will likely face political, legal, and logistical obstacles, said Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a policy expert at the Migration Policy Institute. “Domestically, it will be very difficult for the Trump administration to receive the congressional support needed to actually conduct mass deportations,” he said. “Logistically, it is difficult to try to identify migrants, detain them for long periods of time without violating the current U.S. law, and then return them to a country that they may have not been to for a while.”

Yet Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and pledges are set to instill considerable fear among immigrant communities. “Whether they’re practical or implementable or not, these policy consequences will have real effects on people,” Soto said, who said there was a significant “chilling effect” under Trump’s first term.—Christina Lu

An aerial view of a long line of migrants walking through the jungle.

Deep Dive

How Migration Became a U.S. Foreign-Policy Priority

The Biden administration quietly helped develop a regional strategy to tackle the issue. Can it survive the U.S. election?

India

Donald Trump clasps his hands, Narendra Modi waves, both on stage in front of a large crowd. A U.S. flag and the words Namaste Trump are on a sign behind them. Flowers are banked in front of them.

Trump stands with Modi during the “Namaste Trump” rally on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, India, on Feb. 24, 2020. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

The U.S. relationship with India has for decades been touted as bipartisan and almost leader-proof on both sides. Trump’s first term was no exception, at least in terms of optics. Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—who was elected to a third term this year—established a relationship that seemed more personal and political than diplomatic. This was perhaps best exemplified by the “Howdy, Modi” rally that took place in Houston in September 2019 and the “Namaste Trump” rally that occurred in Ahmedabad, India, five months later.

There is thus far no reason to believe the two leaders won’t just pick up where they left off. But Trump’s transactional worldview also caused a degree of friction, with his “America First” doctrine clashing with Modi’s “Make in India” policy. On immigration (the topic closest to Indian hearts as the largest group of applicants by far for U.S. work visas), Trump imposed multiple restrictions on the H-1B visa program that thousands of Indians use to enter the United States every year. While Biden maintained some of those H-1B restrictions early in his administration, he has subsequently eased many of the immigration restrictions Trump put in place. Trump has slammed the H-1B program in the past as unfair to U.S. workers but has thus far not indicated how he would approach it this time around.

Washington and New Delhi are now in a markedly better place, with Biden and Modi having significantly deepened the two countries’ technology, trade, and defense relationship and with a mutual concern around China’s rise driving the two countries even closer together. That dynamic is likely to continue under Trump, with opposition to China boosting U.S. relations with other countries in South Asia and the broader Indo-Pacific region as well. India’s increased purchases of U.S. defense equipment may also get the country into Trump’s good books, but his distaste for multilateralism could hurt groupings such as the Quad.

“I think India is pretty confident that it can deal with either of the administrations,” said Sushant Singh, a lecturer at Yale University and frequent Foreign Policy contributor, speaking shortly before the election—even if a Trump administration “can be highly unpredictable and inconsistent.”—Rishi Iyengar

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shakes hands with U.S. President Joe Biden during the G-7 summit in Savelletri, Italy.

Analysis

Modi’s Third-Term Foreign Policy Looks the Same

New Delhi’s relations with the West—and especially Washington—are likely to stay the course.

Technology

Donald Trump, seated, points up to Brian Krzanich, standing and holding a circular semiconductor chip. The curtains of the Oval Office frame them and a pile of papers sit on a desk in front of them.

Trump speaks during a meeting with Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, who holds a semiconductor wafer, at the White House in Washington on Feb. 8, 2017.Chris Kleponis/Getty Images

Given technology’s centrality in today’s geopolitics, Trump’s handling of the industry both domestically and from a national security standpoint will have big global ripple effects. His approach on the former is less clear—much of Silicon Valley enthusiastically supported his campaign, including Elon Musk, but Vance has also praised Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair (and Big Tech’s nemesis), Lina Khan.

On the latter, however, Trump could bring more continuity than people might expect. After all, Biden’s semiconductor export controls were preceded by Trump’s Huawei crackdown, and Trump’s ban on TikTok in his first term was undone only for Biden—spurred on by Congress—to resurrect it. Actually kicking out the Chinese-owned app remains an open question, however, considering it may remain tied up in court for several more months and Trump on the campaign trail expressed a degree of previously unseen ambiguity on following through on a ban.

But in terms of curbing China’s technological rise and bringing tech manufacturing back to U.S. shores, Trump will likely continue what he started and what Biden furthered.—Rishi Iyengar

Sam Altman speaks into a microphone onstage at an event, flanked on either side by a group of five men and one woman in suits. A screen behind him shows the Open AI logo.

Review

How Technology Ruined Democracy

Two new books issue fresh warnings about Silicon Valley ahead of the U.S. election.

This post is part of FP’s live coverage with global updates and analysis throughout the U.S. election. Follow along here.

Foreign Policy · by FP Staff

22. The Chinese Military Is Weaponizing Facebook's Open Source AI

Oh no.

The Chinese Military Is Weaponizing Facebook's Open Source AI

Futurism

The company seems to be ok with it.

Yoinked

Here's an unintended consequence for you: Reuters reports that Facebook owner Meta's open source Llama model is already being used by the Chinese military.

According to the report, the military-focused AI tool dubbed "ChatBIT" is being developed to gather intelligence and provide information for operational decision-making, as laid out in an academic paper obtained by Reuters.

Unsurprisingly, allowing a foreign adversary's military to make use of your large language model isn't exactly a good look.

In a thinly-veiled attempt to own the narrative, Meta's president of global affairs Nick Clegg published a blog post just three days after Reuters' report, arguing that it's working to make Llama "available to US government agencies and contractors working on national security applications."

The blog post desperately attempts to tug at the heartstrings of American tech leaders, with Clegg arguing that AI models like Llama will "not only support the prosperity and security of the United States, they will also help establish US open source standards in the global race for AI leadership."

But its timing is certainly suspicious, as Gizmodo notes. What else could explain the saccharine chest-thumping appeal to Americans now, while China's People's Liberation Army was making use of its AI before the US government even considered doing the same?

Please and Thank You

As Reuters points out, Meta's blog post also flies in the face of the company's acceptable use policy, which forbids "military, warfare, nuclear industries or applications, espionage."

But since the AI is completely open source, these provisions are utterly ineffective and unenforceable, serving largely as a way for Meta to cover its tracks.

Clegg argued that by open-sourcing AI models, the US could better compete with other nations "including China," which are "racing to develop their own open source models" and "investing heavily to leap ahead of the US."

"We believe it is in both America and the wider democratic world’s interest for American open source models to excel and succeed over models from China and elsewhere," the former deputy prime minister for the UK wrote.

But whether that kind of reasoning will satisfy officials at the Pentagon remains to be seen. Meta's flailing is symptomatic of a massive national security blindspot. Now that the cat is out of the bag, the United States' adversaries are enjoying the exact same leaps in tech as it and its allies.

Last month, the Biden administration announced that it was finalizing rules to limit US investment in AI in China that could threaten US national security. But given Meta's fast-and-loose approach, these rules will likely be far too little, far too late.

Meta, on the other hand, thinks its AI is far too puny to make any difference for China anyway.

"In the global competition on AI, the alleged role of a single, and outdated, version of an American open-source model is irrelevant when we know China is already investing more than a trillion dollars to surpass the US on AI," a spokesperson told Reuters.

More on Meta's AI: Meta's AI Says Trump Wasn't Shot

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Futurism

23. Trump and the Future of American Power

A sobering conclusion:

Maybe the biggest weakness of the liberal international order is that the whole world feels the consequences of U.S. elections but has no say in them. We Americans elect what is often called “the leader of the free world.” And our allies and friends, to say nothing of our enemies, have to suck it up: the person we choose is now in charge of the U.S.-led international order. Most foreign governments have become adept over the years at managing Washington, the multilayered and federal U.S. political system. And most have experience from Trump’s first term. Still, the return of Trump has already affected what they think of America’s commitments, political stability, long-term trajectory. I think those who feel confirmed in their pessimism are mistaken, for a host of reasons. But their impressions are a reality that affects U.S. soft power.

As a historian, my tendency is to focus less on the cut and thrust of politics of the moment and more on the longer term, the structural directions and the big drivers of change. The deepest structural trend for the U.S. is, in some ways, the gulf that opened up between our commitments and our capabilities. We have been talking about taking on more commitments—whether it’s bringing Ukraine into NATO or signing a treaty alliance with Saudi Arabia—even as there are doubts at home and abroad about whether we have the will and the capabilities to meet our current commitments. Whether our defense industrial base is up to the task of defending all our current treaty allies. And doubts about our fiscal situation, which has been very severely eroded and will likely erode still more under Trump 2.0, as it did under Biden and Trump 1.0.

Obama tried to enact retrenchment, but he kept getting buffeted by demands for more applications of American power—and we saw the results. Trump also wanted to wind down commitments abroad yet ended up, rightly, shifting to a more confrontational approach vis-à-vis China, and that requires vast new resources that need to come from somewhere. Like Trump, Biden wanted out of Afghanistan, come what may, and found he had to react to the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war with significant additional commitments. How can America manage all the commitments it has? How can it increase its capabilities?

So that is at the top of Trump’s inbox. His approach, rhetorically, looks night-and-day different from Obama’s and Biden’s. And he faces the same dilemma, and it’s been building, and I’m not sure his critics had answers. Still, he needs an answer. Because America needs an answer.

Trump and the Future of American Power

A Conversation With Stephen Kotkin

November 7, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by November 7, 2024 · November 7, 2024

Stephen Kotkin is a preeminent historian of Russia, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the author of an acclaimed three-volume biography of Joseph Stalin. (The third volume is forthcoming.) Kotkin has also written extensively and insightfully on geopolitics, the sources of American power, and the twists and turns of the Trump era. Executive Editor Justin Vogt spoke with Kotkin on Wednesday, November 6, in the wake of Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the U.S. presidential election.

You’ve written a number of times for Foreign Affairs about the war in Ukraine and what it means for the world and for American foreign policy. So let’s start with an obvious question. It’s impossible to know, of course, but what do you imagine Russian President Vladimir Putin is thinking right now, with Donald Trump poised to return to the White House for a second term?

Stephen Kotkin

I wish I knew. These opaque regimes in Moscow and Beijing don’t want us to know what they think. What we do know from their actions as well as their frequent public pronouncements is that they came to the view that America was in irreversible decline. We had the Iraq War and the shocking incompetence of the follow-up, where Washington lost the peace. And we lost the peace in Afghanistan. We had the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. We had a lot of episodes that reinforced their view that we were in decline. They were only too happy to latch onto examples of their view that the United States and the collective West, as they call it, is in decline and, therefore, their day is going to come. They are the future; we are the past.

Now, all of that happened before Trump. True, it looks like Trump is potentially a gift to them, because he doesn’t like alliances, or at least that’s what he says: allies are freeloaders. But what happened under [President Joe] Biden? It’s not as if American power vastly increased under Biden, or under Obama, for that matter. So Trump may accelerate what Moscow and Beijing see as that self-weakening trend. But he’s unpredictable. They may get the opposite. And they have revealed a lot of their own weaknesses and poor decision-making, to put it mildly.

On Ukraine, Trump’s unpredictability could cut in many directions. Trump doesn’t believe one thing or the other on Ukraine. And so in a way, anything is possible. It may turn out to be worse for Ukraine, but it may turn out to be better. It’s extremely hard to predict because Trump is hard to predict, even for himself. You could even have Ukraine getting into NATO under Trump, which was never going to happen under Biden. Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen. I’m not saying there’s even a high probability—nor am I saying it would be a good thing, or a bad thing, if it happened. I’m just saying that the idea that Trump is some special gift to our adversaries doesn’t wash with me. And he may surprise them on alliances and on rebuilding American power. It might well cut in multiple directions at once.

OK, but if you had to give Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky advice right now, what would it be?

I’d say the same thing I’ve been saying for the past two years or so, which is similar to what Richard Haass wrote so eloquently in Foreign Affairs just this week. [Editor’s Note: Haass wrote, in part, that Washington “should jettison the idea that, to win, Kyiv needs to liberate all its land. So as the United States and its allies continue to arm Ukraine, they must take the uncomfortable step of pushing Kyiv to negotiate with the Kremlin—and laying out a clear sense of how it should do so.”]

The main problem is that there’s been insufficient political pressure on the Putin regime. Until he worries that he has to pay a political price for his war, until his regime might be at risk—not his per capita GDP, not his soldiers, his cannon fodder, not his replaceable weapons—he can expend things that he doesn’t care about: the lives of his own people, more and more ammunition, his domestic automobile industry, whatever. So if Trump is unable to bring significant pressure on Putin’s political regime, then the outcome is that Ukraine will be condemned to fight a rear-guard action, a war of attrition against a superior power that can sacrifice lives more easily at a far higher scale. And even if the Ukrainians can be successful in the short term, and keep surviving through continued courage and ingenuity, they still have to figure out some modus vivendi with Russian power, which is adjacent to them and isn’t going anywhere. Ukraine has to win the peace.

And the reality is that Russian aggression is hardly the biggest risk Trump faces.

So what is?

The nontrivial chance of a great-power war breaking out in the Pacific theater in East Asia—a war that the United States could lose, which is something we as a nation haven’t talked about in a long time. I’m not defeatist by any means; I’m not suggesting we would lose. But the mere fact that it’s thinkable is a big change.

It’s also been a long time since Americans have thought about mobilizing for such a war.

Right. And to put it bluntly, we don’t have the people to die in a war at that scale. Everyone talks about the demographic problem the Chinese face. But they have 50 million 18-to-24-year-old men. [Editor’s Note: There are around 12 million American men between 20 and 24 years old.] So even if a lot of young Chinese men go down to the bottom of the Taiwan Strait, a lot more can be sent into action.

The United States is used to renting a land army. That‘s how U.S. military power works. It‘s a lend-lease approach to war. In World War II, we sent the Studebakers and the Jeeps and the radios and the Spam, and the Soviets sent 27 million people to die in defeating Hitler’s land army. In the Pacific theater, we sent Chiang Kai-shek some planes and weapons, and he provided the soldiers. And he lost at least 13 million. So we rented the Soviet land army in one theater and the Chinese land army in another theater, and we sent materiel and finances, and we won in both theaters as a result. But who are we going to rent now? Who’s available to rent?

Yes, in the first Gulf War, we used superior technology. That keeps casualties low, even in a land war, which is usually very deadly for soldiers and civilians. But that degree of technological superiority is gone now, vis-à-vis China, in too many ways.

Earlier this year, you wrote this in Foreign Affairs: “The supreme irony of American grand strategy for the past 70 years is that it worked, fostering an integrated world of impressive and shared prosperity, and yet is now being abandoned. The United States was open for business to its adversaries, without reciprocation. Today, however, so-called industrial policy and protectionism are partially closing the country not just to rivals but also to U.S. allies, partners, friends, and potential friends. American policy has come to resemble China’s—right when the latter has hit a wall.”

How does Trump fit into that story?

Well, we weren’t ready for our success. The goal was to create this open global system that everyone could join and prosper from: a liberal international order. And it was going to be amazing for everybody. And they could join on a voluntary basis, not through some coercive “spheres of influence” approach. And they were going to get wealthy; they were going to go from poor to middle income. Win-win.

And it worked. It happened. It’s stunning how many people around the world benefited from this U.S.-led order, including in America. And we’re not just talking about China; we’re also talking about India. It’s our neighbors, too, in Mexico. And it’s the developed world, as well, to a certain extent: Japan and Germany, the two enemies of World War II, became our closest allies and the second- and third-largest economies. There’s never been a geopolitical turnabout bigger than that.

So it worked, but we’re not ready for this success. It turns out that well, geez, you know, these other countries, they want a voice. They’re not just going to become middle-income countries and continue to be told what to do. They want international institutions that reflect their achievements, their hard work, their entrepreneurialism, their creation of middle classes, their place in the world. They’re justifiably proud countries. And we don’t know how to accommodate their aspirations. The conventional argument is seductive: the liberal order is supremely flexible and can accommodate everybody, and so therefore it’s going to survive. But it doesn’t work in the Iranian case, it doesn’t work in the Russian case, and it doesn’t work in the Chinese case. What are the terms of the accommodation? They see themselves, in several cases, as rooted in ancient civilizations that predate the U.S.-led order. What if they don’t accept our terms, even if they’re the beneficiaries?

Beyond the Eurasian land powers, what about the rising powers, whose rise the open order facilitated and who don’t see the existing U.S.-led order as a threat to their regime’s survival? What’s the opportunity set for them? Where do they fit in? How are their voices heard?

Let’s talk about Trump himself a little bit. In 2019, you wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs about the investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign and its links to Russia. As I watched the returns last night, I kept thinking about one passage from that piece: “Showmanship, a buccaneering spirit, and go-for-broke instincts are [among] the traits that made America what it is. ... Trump is a phenomenon. Only a genuinely formidable personality could withstand such intense, unremitting investigative pressure and hostility, even if he has brought no small degree of it on himself. Trump lacks the facility to govern effectively, but he knows how to command the attention of the highly educated and dominate the news cycle. There is a reason he proved able, in a single election cycle, to vanquish both the entrenched Bush and Clinton dynasties.”

“Trump,” you wrote, “is as American as apple pie.”

The results of this election seem to confirm the idea that, far from the aberration or fluke that many observers have portrayed him as being, Trump captures and reflects the American spirit, at this moment in history, far more accurately than his meritocratic, elite, Establishment foes.

I get impatient when I read or hear people say about Trump, “That’s not who we are.” Because who’s the “we?” I don’t mean when Trump is called a racist and people insist “we” are not racists. Or when Trump is called misogynist and people say “we” are better than that. I just mean that Trump is quintessentially American.

Trump is not an alien who landed from some other planet. This is not somebody who got implanted in power by Russian special operations, obviously. This is somebody that the American people voted for who reflects something deep and abiding about American culture. Think of all the worlds that he has inhabited and that lifted him up. Pro wrestling. Reality TV. Casinos and gambling, which are no longer just in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but everywhere, embedded in daily life. Celebrity culture. Social media. All of that looks to me like America. And yes, so does fraud, and brazen lying, and the P. T. Barnum, carnival barker stuff. But there is an audience, and not a small one, for where Trump came from and who he is.

The system proved incapable of punishing Trump personally for his concerted, multifaceted refusal to accept his defeat and accept a peaceful transfer of power in 2020. Paradoxically, the efforts to punish him, legally, ended up propelling him back from political irrelevance to the top of the Republican ticket. At the same time, this election saw massive turnout, extraordinary levels of voter commitment, by American standards.

And it happened in a great year for democracy, for all the efforts in multiple countries to deny or overturn the voters’ will. Globally, half the adult population participated in or will participate in elections this year, and around the world, voters by and large threw out or incumbents when they could. Even in stolid Japan!

In America, no incumbent party with presidential approval ratings as low as Biden’s has ever retained power. Voters in democracies cannot always get what they want, but they can punish those in power. The Democrats overreached. Biden eked out an electoral college victory, having campaigned as a moderate, a stabilizer. He proceeded to govern as if he had won in a landslide, and often from the hard left, on a whole range of things: the border, climate and energy, gender, race, crime and policing, and so on.

And, as I wrote, Trump is a phenomenon. In addition to the Clinton dynasty and the Bush dynasty, he has now vanquished the Cheney dynasty. And he co-opted the Kennedy dynasty, of course, in what many would regard as a degraded form—although some people would regard the current incarnation of the Kennedy dynasty as reflecting, in some ways, the trajectory of America.

And Trump vanquished the military and national security establishment that served him and came out against his reelection. He vanquished the scientific establishment. Wow.

You know, they made fun of [Soviet leader] Nikita Khrushchev when he denounced Stalin in 1956, in the “secret speech” at the 20th Party Congress. In that speech, Khrushchev condemned the cult of the personality that Stalin had developed. But Khrushchev, he wasn’t known for his commanding presence, and behind his back, people said, “It’s true, there was a cult—but there was also a personality!”

Speaking of Stalin: one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today is that you’ve spent decades closely studying him and his regime, and few people know more than you do about authoritarianism. Trump’s critics often accuse him of being or aspiring to be a strongman, or an autocrat, or even a fascist dictator. What do you think of that critique?

Not much. Trump no doubt has a lot of desires. He would no doubt like to have the kind of control over the American political system that Xi Jinping has in China or Putin has in Russia. He’s said so. I’m not sure Trump’s personality would be conducive to wielding that kind of power and control. And that’s not the system that we have. Stalin was effective in his system. But what if you put a personality like Stalin in our system? What do you get? Someone who is supremely skilled at despotism maybe finds himself bereft in a system with innumerable checks and balances and a free press and open society, doesn’t know how to manage. You have to consider the larger system, the set of institutions, the political culture, not just the personality, not just the fantasies of the individual person.

But surely you would agree that Trump represents something different from the kind of leadership that has guided American government in the postwar era, right? The constant overt lying, the demand for loyalty to him above loyalty to the Constitution or the country—and especially the “big lie” about winning the 2020 election and his efforts to undermine the results and stay in office. Those things don’t have much precedent in U.S. history or in the U.S. system. And he’s threatened things that have been unimaginable in this country for decades: using military force against critics he calls “the enemy within,” jailing opponents, purging people who won’t pledge loyalty, mass deportations. Should we not worry that some of those things could do permanent damage to American democracy and the U.S. system?

I don’t like any of that. I don’t like it at all. But is it American fascism? OK, you’re going to mass deport ten million people. Where is your Gestapo? Sure, you have ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. You have some police forces. But how are you going to round up that many people and forcibly evict them from the country and keep them out? So I don’t like the idea of mass deportation—and by the way, the Obama administration conducted a high number of deportations. But this is just nothing at all like the kind of stuff that I study and write about. And yes, it’s worrisome to hear rhetoric that is expressly antidemocratic, but some of that rhetoric is about stirring the pot, driving the other side into a frenzy, and whipping up your side, especially in this social media age.

When radio was introduced on a mass scale, many elites panicked: “This is the end of democracy, the end of civilization, what are we going to do? They can just broadcast anything and everything right into the living rooms of people, unfiltered, we cannot control what they say.” The establishment couldn’t censor it, and over the radio someone could just say anything and could just make stuff up. And [Italian dictator Benito] Mussolini was great at radio, and [the Nazi propaganda minister Paul] Goebbels was amazing at radio. And lo and behold, we got Franklin Roosevelt, who mastered the medium and was a transformative president; whether one approves or disapproves of what he did, it was significant and enduring.

And so we’ve been through this before, with radio. It was very destabilizing, and yet we managed to assimilate it. And then we got the TV version of that story, which was even worse because it was images, not just audio. And again, they could just broadcast anything and everything right into people’s living rooms. They could just say anything they wanted to, and the establishment, the self-assigned filters, couldn’t censor it. And we got [John F.] Kennedy, as opposed to his opponent, Richard Nixon, who sweated on TV and was mopping his brow while Kennedy shined and beamed.

And now we have social media, which is potentially even more destabilizing for an open society. Everyone’s their own National Enquirer, and everyone is connected. And everyone can broadcast these previously fringe conspiracy theories that are now mainstream. Not because everybody believes them. I don’t know whether more people believe them now than did before. But everybody can see them, hear them, propagate them, forward them.

We always disagree on what the truth is. But now we have a problem with the truth regime. The truth regime is how we determine the truth: evidence, argument, proof. But that truth regime has been destabilized. No one has the truth alone, and we should argue about the truth. But we used to have a consensus on how we got to the truth and how we recognized truth. Not anymore. So how are we going to manage this, to assimilate this new technology and media?

Strong, successful countries have competent and compassionate leadership and social solidarity and trust. It’s been a long time since we had both competence and compassion at the top. And the loss of social solidarity and trust is debilitating for our institutions. We are an open society and must remain so. But how?

Earlier this year, in trying to sketch out a way forward for the United States, you wrote this in Foreign Affairs: “The government and philanthropists should redirect significant higher education funding to community colleges that meet or exceed performance metrics. States should launch an ambitious rollout of vocational schools and training, whether reintroducing them in existing high schools or opening new self-standing ones in partnership with employers at the ground level. Beyond human capital, the United States needs to spark a housing construction boom by drastically reducing environmental regulations and to eliminate subsidies for builders, letting the market work. The country also needs to institute national service for young people, perhaps with an intergenerational component, to rekindle broad civic consciousness and a sense of everyone being in this together.”

How would you rate the Trump administration’s chances of grasping this challenge and taking those kinds of steps?

Well, he’ll be a lame duck immediately after the inauguration, and second term presidencies generally don’t get a lot done. And he has a lot of grievances that he might pursue that have nothing to do with that agenda I was describing. I think the Justice Department is going to be in his cross hairs, potentially the Federal Reserve, maybe the CIA. Trump is passionate about retribution and those he perceives as having wronged him, gone after him, and some of these grievances are legitimate, even if retribution does not bode well for a successful presidency.

But there are some things he’d be well positioned to do that would be significant contributions to American revitalization. Fund AI-inflected vocational training to reward the people who helped sweep him back into office, are not going to college, yet need pathways forward, opportunities. Invest in community colleges, where a gigantic proportion of American students are but where a lack of resources often thwarts their ambitions.

Trump is a builder, and Trump is a deregulator. So he could lift environmental regulations when it comes to housing, which have very little to do with environmental protection and more to do with a not-in-my-backyard blockage. Build housing, which would increase supply and therefore lower rents and real-estate prices. There is an entire package of things that could make for effective policy and effective politics. He’d need people in an administration to implement it all, and he’d need the Senate and the House to pass legislation where necessary. And he’d have to want to do it. But it’s there for the taking.

Trump’s reelection, even before his inauguration, has dealt a blow to American soft power. This is a critical component of our strength, our security, our prosperity. Trump might be unaware of this or indifferent to it. Part of the challenge is not his fault: sometimes foreigners, even our allies and partners, do not understand America as well as they think. What [the novelist] Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk”—which was always there but which social media has revealed and to an extent enhanced—frightens many of them. Many, though not all, see Trump as a breakdown, as a turn away from the America they know and hope to see again. So Trump’s administration will have some work to do in this regard, as many of his officials did in his first term. There’s an opening here: he wants America, and himself, to be perceived as strong.

Maybe the biggest weakness of the liberal international order is that the whole world feels the consequences of U.S. elections but has no say in them. We Americans elect what is often called “the leader of the free world.” And our allies and friends, to say nothing of our enemies, have to suck it up: the person we choose is now in charge of the U.S.-led international order. Most foreign governments have become adept over the years at managing Washington, the multilayered and federal U.S. political system. And most have experience from Trump’s first term. Still, the return of Trump has already affected what they think of America’s commitments, political stability, long-term trajectory. I think those who feel confirmed in their pessimism are mistaken, for a host of reasons. But their impressions are a reality that affects U.S. soft power.

As a historian, my tendency is to focus less on the cut and thrust of politics of the moment and more on the longer term, the structural directions and the big drivers of change. The deepest structural trend for the U.S. is, in some ways, the gulf that opened up between our commitments and our capabilities. We have been talking about taking on more commitments—whether it’s bringing Ukraine into NATO or signing a treaty alliance with Saudi Arabia—even as there are doubts at home and abroad about whether we have the will and the capabilities to meet our current commitments. Whether our defense industrial base is up to the task of defending all our current treaty allies. And doubts about our fiscal situation, which has been very severely eroded and will likely erode still more under Trump 2.0, as it did under Biden and Trump 1.0.

Obama tried to enact retrenchment, but he kept getting buffeted by demands for more applications of American power—and we saw the results. Trump also wanted to wind down commitments abroad yet ended up, rightly, shifting to a more confrontational approach vis-à-vis China, and that requires vast new resources that need to come from somewhere. Like Trump, Biden wanted out of Afghanistan, come what may, and found he had to react to the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war with significant additional commitments. How can America manage all the commitments it has? How can it increase its capabilities?

So that is at the top of Trump’s inbox. His approach, rhetorically, looks night-and-day different from Obama’s and Biden’s. And he faces the same dilemma, and it’s been building, and I’m not sure his critics had answers. Still, he needs an answer. Because America needs an answer.

Foreign Affairs · by November 7, 2024 · November 7, 2024

24.How Ukraine Became a World War

Conclusion:

Countless countries have a vested interest in the war in Ukraine, and many of them have the tools to act on that interest. Were Russia to falter in the war and start seeking an exit, countries outside Europe could be vital to the ensuing diplomacy. If negotiations yielded arrangements suitable to Ukraine, to Europe, and to the United States, then it would not particularly matter which country hosted the talks or which plan was their catalyst. As for the military help that China, Iran, and North Korea are lending, there may be ways to limit it on the margins or to raise the costs of providing it. But the best defense against the possible erosion of European security via an advancing Russia is still the intelligent and patient support of Ukraine, especially as the United States’ financial (and possibly military) commitment to Ukraine is likely to diminish in Donald Trump’s second term. The whole world is watching.

How Ukraine Became a World War

New Players Are Transforming the Conflict—and Complicating the Path to Ending It

By Michael Kimmage and Hanna Notte

November 7, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability · November 7, 2024

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was an event of global magnitude. The scale of the invasion, commensurate with its goal of eliminating Ukrainian statehood, was massive. Millions of refugees fled Ukraine into the rest of Europe. Fuel and fertilizer prices shot up, stimulating inflation worldwide. The war disrupted the production and distribution of grain, generating concerns about supply far afield from Russia and Ukraine. And as the conflict stretched into its second and third years, its international repercussions have expanded in scope.

In the war’s early stages, countries outside Europe tried mostly just to manage its effects. For those that chose not to directly back Ukraine—not to provide Kyiv with weapons or to sanction Russia—two priorities predominated. Seeing that there were deals to be made, some countries sought to benefit from Russia’s loss of European and U.S. markets for gas, oil, and other commodities. Others offered themselves as mediators in the sincere (or insincere) hope of minimizing the war’s direct and ancillary costs or even of ending it altogether. Their diplomacy was motivated in part by the prestige that comes from adjudicating a large-scale conflict.

As the war drags on, however, non-European countries are becoming more and more involved. Some are giving Russia the means to prolong the war—men and munitions. By using Ukraine as a testing ground, they hope that they will be better prepared for wars they themselves may fight in the future. North Korea’s decision to deploy thousands of troops to help Russia reclaim the embattled Kursk region is just the latest example. Other non-Western states are trying to shape the course of the war or positioning themselves to be present at the creation of a postwar Europe—that is, to be at the table for the negotiations that will end the conflict, however distant that prospect may be. Amid this terrible war, non-European states are turning Europe into an object of their foreign policy. Many commentators have said that the precedent set by a Russian victory in Ukraine—a nuclear power seizing another country’s territory at will—would transform the global order. The deep involvement of powers outside Europe adds another layer to the war’s transformative potential. Europe, having projected its power outward for centuries, is becoming a theater for the projection of non-European power. Brussels, Kyiv, and Washington will have to come to terms with this new reality.

PEACE LOVERS

Non-Western countries have noted the limits of Western policy on Ukraine. The West’s diplomatic activity, although intense, has been confined to supporting Ukraine against what Western capitals consider an unjust invasion. They have tried to persuade any country that will listen about the righteousness of the Ukrainian war effort, the inadmissibility of conceding to Russian demands, and the importance of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. Yet Ukraine and the West have not brought Russia to heel, and the West’s backing of Ukraine has clearly plateaued since the war’s start. Fears of escalation constrain the kinds of weapons that Western states give to Ukraine, as well as the terms of those weapons’ use. Western countries are also unwilling to compensate for acute troop shortages in Ukraine by sending in their own soldiers, even though they characterize the war as existential to the European security order.

The obvious limits of Western policy and leverage have opened the door to actors outside Europe. Diplomatically, they have the opposite problem that the West does. Any country that is neither behind Ukraine nor sanctioning Moscow can approach Russian President Vladimir Putin with diplomatic schemes for ending the war. But if it adopts a neutral or pro-Russian attitude, it will struggle to get Ukraine on board. Whether pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian or somewhere in between, no force—no country, group of countries, or international institution—is powerful enough to impose a cease-fire in Ukraine, much less an armistice or a negotiated settlement. Yet no one wants to be seen as not trying to mediate.

Despite the obstacles, many countries have committed to mediator roles. Turkey offered its services on a variety of issues at the start of the war, lobbying for humanitarian corridors during the Russian siege of Mariupol, helping negotiate the Black Sea Grain Initiative, and facilitating exchanges on the security of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants. Turkey also hosted peace talks between Russia and Ukraine early in the war. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have assisted with prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine; Abu Dhabi recently claimed that its efforts allowed 2,200 prisoners to return home. The Saudi government convened some 40 countries (not including Russia) in Jeddah in August 2023 to discuss principles for ending the war. More recently, Qatar hosted renewed talks between Russia and Ukraine about halting strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure. Many more non-European countries, from China to Brazil to a delegation of African states, have put together peace missions or plans. This frenetic form of diplomacy is notable not only for its lack of progress so far and for its piecemeal and fragmentary nature but also for its considerable scale and scope.

These peace plans can be taken at face value, as the countries that advance them may genuinely want to help secure peace. The war in Ukraine has generated instability and exacted economic costs outside Europe, and to be at the negotiating table is to determine the postwar economic and geopolitical landscape. That was the lesson of the conferences at Versailles, Yalta, and Potsdam after the two world wars: to the negotiator go the spoils. The configuration of postwar Ukraine truly matters to China and Turkey, less so perhaps to Brazil and South Africa.

But the peace plans can also be interpreted as a stimulus to the Russian war effort. They are easy to propose and nearly impossible to implement. While paying lip service to Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, these countries offer no viable path for Kyiv. The predictably tepid response to their plans in Ukraine and the West also fits into narratives of Western intransigence, a key Russian talking point, as if the West that (allegedly) caused the war in the first place is prolonging and exploiting it to weaken Russia.

MANPOWER AND MUNITIONS

If international diplomacy related to Ukraine has been both aspirational and ephemeral, assistance to the Russian defense enterprise has been all too tangible. Western sanctions have not been geared toward regime change or even toward altering Russia’s calculus on the war, welcome as the latter would be. The point of Western sanctions has been to grind down the Russian war effort, to starve it of capital and technology and thereby give Ukraine a long-term structural advantage in the war. Out of economic self-interest, non-European countries have undercut this approach by maintaining ties with Russia; by purchasing Russian oil, gas, and fertilizer; and by facilitating its “roundabout” trade. Throwing lifelines to Russia’s economy enhances its military machine, even though bolstering Russia’s defense industry may not be Brazil’s, India’s, or Saudi Arabia’s primary objective when conducting business with the Kremlin. If these countries’ priority had been that Russia lose in Ukraine, however, they would have adopted a different set of economic policies.

Most consequential are the countries directly assisting the Russian military. China has provided dual-use goods, from machine tools to microchips, that are highly coveted by Russian arms manufacturers. Its control over the supplies of these products gives Beijing significant leverage in Russia’s war. Western officials have also accused China of aiding the Russian military more fundamentally—by supplying it with attack drones, for instance. Iran’s support of Russia has been versatile, with Tehran providing combat drones (and related production technology), ammunition, and short-range ballistic missiles. Iran is building up its defense relationship with Russia even as its escalating conflict with Israel may temporarily curtail its weapons shipments. Although Iranian missiles have yet to enter the Ukrainian battlefield, Russia has been deploying North Korean missiles since the beginning of this year. By some estimates, Pyongyang has also supplied half the shells Russia is using in Ukraine. Ridiculed in the early phase of the war as fellow “pariahs” that Russia had resorted to working with, Iran and North Korea are now actively shaping the conflict’s trajectory.

Given the importance of manpower in a war of attrition, the first battlefield employment of thousands of North Korean troops recently deployed to Russia marks another escalation in non-European involvement. Although Russia has manpower advantages over Ukraine, it has lost an enormous number of soldiers in the war. Putin is reluctant to order another large-scale mobilization that might sour Russians on the war. Over the past two years, there have been episodic reports of Cuban, Indian, and Nepalese soldiers and volunteers lured to fight for Russia. But the North Korean deployments are of an altogether different magnitude, and the West has few tools to change North Korea’s calculus, as the country is already isolated and heavily sanctioned.

Europe’s war is slowly becoming the world’s war, an expansion that is not to Europe’s advantage. For China, Iran, and North Korea, deeper involvement in Ukraine might help prepare them for the wars they could fight in the future. At issue is not just Russia’s tangible contributions to these countries’ defense capacities to pay them back for the support Moscow has received; there is also the question of what they will learn from the battlefield. Chinese strategists are said to have been studying the performance of capabilities used in Ukraine—such as drones and HIMARS—that they might encounter in a war over Taiwan. Iran has obtained Western technology captured in Ukraine, including antitank and antiaircraft missiles, that it can study for reverse engineering or for developing countermeasures. North Korea may have decided to send troops to Russia not just to honor the two countries’ new defense treaty but also to afford the North Korean military firsthand combat experience. (North Korea has not fought a war since the 1950–53 Korean War.) Ukraine has become a laboratory for non-European powers contemplating future wars.

THE WORLD COMES TO EUROPE

Since the sixteenth century, if not earlier, Europe has been waging war beyond its continental borders. In just the past few decades, European countries fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. Until recently, France had a pronounced military presence in the Sahel. Europe is a military factor, although a modest one, in the Indo-Pacific, and European countries provide substantial military aid to Israel, which is fighting multiple wars in the Middle East. For U.S. and European architects of the post–World War II transatlantic relationship, the use of European power beyond Europe was not anomalous. It was a Cold War necessity. European forces joined American ones in both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Even the NATO alliance, tasked with defending its member states, has operated outside its members’ borders, most recently in Libya in 2011. The United States has welcomed an expeditionary Europe, whether the challenge has been counterterrorism or managing the revisionist activities of China or Russia.

Europe’s long history of power projection has conditioned worldviews in Western capitals, making it nearly impossible to imagine that countries such as Iran or North Korea could be determinants of European security. But what was once hard to fathom is now an obvious reality. If the United States and Europe are to counter the various interventions in Ukraine originating outside the continent, they must understand what local and national agendas each effort serves, what its potential impact may be, and where its vulnerabilities lie. The role of non-European countries in the war will only grow, and these states will not be absent from the diplomacy that concludes the war. Many of them will also jump into the reconstruction of Ukraine. The opportunity to gain a foothold in Europe will be too good (and too low cost) to pass up.

Non-European involvement in the war does not promise a Ukrainian defeat. Nor is it an unequivocal boon to Russia. Forced to turn to partners to try to sustain its progress on the battlefield, Russia must now balance a kaleidoscopic array of economic, military, and diplomatic relationships. And the motivations and interests of the countries contributing to Russia’s military capacity vary widely. Some may genuinely want the war to be over; some want Russia to win. Some want Russia not to fail—a nuanced but important difference—and some simply want to exploit Russia’s reliance on their money and materiel. Countries such as Iran and North Korea share Russia’s virulent anti-Westernism. Others, such as Brazil and India, work with Russia as members of BRICS but want to reform rather than renounce the existing global order. These disparities in attitude will intensify as the war gets closer to an end and as Ukraine’s postwar status comes into sharper focus.

Countless countries have a vested interest in the war in Ukraine, and many of them have the tools to act on that interest. Were Russia to falter in the war and start seeking an exit, countries outside Europe could be vital to the ensuing diplomacy. If negotiations yielded arrangements suitable to Ukraine, to Europe, and to the United States, then it would not particularly matter which country hosted the talks or which plan was their catalyst. As for the military help that China, Iran, and North Korea are lending, there may be ways to limit it on the margins or to raise the costs of providing it. But the best defense against the possible erosion of European security via an advancing Russia is still the intelligent and patient support of Ukraine, especially as the United States’ financial (and possibly military) commitment to Ukraine is likely to diminish in Donald Trump’s second term. The whole world is watching.

MICHAEL KIMMAGE is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and Richard C. Holbrooke Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is the author of Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability.
HANNA NOTTE is Director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and Nonresident Senior Associate with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Foreign Affairs · by Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability · November 7, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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