Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"There is no friend as loyal as a book."

- Ernest Hemingway

“There was always a minority, afraid of something, and a great majority, afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”

– Ray Bradbury

“When you are dead, you don't know you are dead. It's pain only for others.

It's the same thing when you are stupid”

— Richard Feynman

1. Hegseth Faces Heat After New Signal Chat Emerges and Claim of Pentagon ‘Chaos’

2. Trump Stands by Hegseth After Phone Call About Newly Revealed Signal Chat

3. White House backs Hegseth, Leavitt says ‘entire Pentagon’ is resisting him

4. The Hegseth Pentagon Chronicles

5. First House Republican calls for Pete Hegseth's ouster

6. Exclusive: The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as defense secretary

7. Shades of Appeasement

8. Achieving Decision Dominance: Leveraging AI in Small Wars

9. Troops can now detain, search people on newly minted military land on the border

10. The Conventional Balance of Terror – America Needs a New Triad to Restore Its Eroding Deterrence

11. The Rise and Fall of Great-Power Competition – Trump’s New Spheres of Influence

12. How Donald Trump dismantled US-led global order in 100 days

13. USMC Anti-Ship Missile Deployment To Highly Strategic Luzon Strait Is Unprecedented

14. The China That Replaced Mine – A Return After Nearly a Decade to a Country That Never Stays Still

15. It’s China’s turn to face transnational terrorism threats

16. Joint Chiefs Chairman Caine Decides Not to Keep Senior Enlisted Adviser, Breaking with Past Precedent

17. US to allies: Don’t use Chinese satellite services

18. US Army deploys solar-powered spy drone with 1,000-mile range for endurance missions

19. U.S. Navy Seeks Large Storage Facility in the Philippines by 2026

20. Air Force warns airmen, veterans of foreign intelligence recruitment ploy

21. US general says allied forces can repel Asia aggression as Philippines combat drills open

22. Close the US Military Bases in Asia

23. Revealed: Trump Admin Launches the Biggest Shake-Up ‘In Decades’ at the State Department

24. The Special Sauce: How Hegseth’s Software Memo Can Start a Revolution

25. The Counterproductive Legal Precedent That Strikes on Cartels Would Set

26. She told Trump the Smithsonian needs changing. He’s ordered her to do it.

27. A Different Kind of F.B.I. Chief: Jet-Setting Patel Loves the Limelight

28. State Dept defends human rights abuse report changes, says streamlined process eliminates 'political bias'

29. China Is In Economic Dire Straits And They're No Longer Able To Hide It

1. Hegseth Faces Heat After New Signal Chat Emerges and Claim of Pentagon ‘Chaos’

Excerpts:

The disclosure of the Signal chat comes after an unusual number of top political appointees have either been removed from the Pentagon or resigned just in the past few weeks, some with little explanation. President Trump’s national-security team, meanwhile, is attempting to broker sensitive deals with Russia, Ukraine and Iran, putting enormous pressure on a group that is largely inexperienced in sensitive foreign-policy diplomacy.

Trump told reporters at the White House Easter Egg Roll on Monday that Hegseth was “doing a great job.”

“It’s just fake news,” the president added. “You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people, and that’s what he’s doing. You don’t always have friends when you do that.”

“This is what the media does,” Hegseth said. “They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations.” Hegseth added that he and Trump were “on the same page all the way.”

Hegseth Faces Heat After New Signal Chat Emerges and Claim of Pentagon ‘Chaos’

Trump says his embattled defense chief is doing a ‘great job’

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pete-hegseth-signal-chat-pentagon-e717ea84?mod=hp_trendingnow_article_pos1

By Nancy A. Youssef

Follow and Alexander Ward

Updated April 21, 2025 2:08 pm ET

Trump Stands by Hegseth After Phone Call About Newly Revealed Signal Chat

President says defense secretary is ‘doing a great job’

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pete-hegseth-trump-defense-secretary-job-signal-bc5605de?mod=hp_lista_pos2

By Meridith McGraw

Follow and Alexander Ward

Updated April 21, 2025 8:10 pm ET

White House backs Hegseth, Leavitt says ‘entire Pentagon’ is resisting him

By Joe Gould, Connor O'Brien and Amanda Friedman

04/21/2025 09:33 AM EDT

Updated: 04/21/2025 11:03 AM EDT

Politico

Hegseth “is doing phenomenal leading the Pentagon,” Leavitt said during a Monday “Fox & Friends” appearance.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks to reporters while attending the 2025 Easter Egg Roll with his family on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, on April 21, 2025. | Samuel Corum/Sipa USA

04/21/2025 09:33 AM EDT

Updated: 04/21/2025 11:03 AM EDT

President Donald Trump “stands strongly behind Pete Hegseth,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday morning, defending the scandal-plagued Defense secretary against escalating criticism from Democrats and former senior officials.

Hegseth “is doing phenomenal leading the Pentagon,” Leavitt said in a “Fox & Friends” appearance. “This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and working against the monumental change you are trying to implement.”

Her comments came a day after The New York Times reported that Hegseth shared sensitive information about military operations in Yemen in a private chat on the Signal app that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer — the second reported instance of the secretary sharing operational plans in an unclassified chat. The revelations have reignited the so-called Signalgate scandal and deepened scrutiny over Hegseth’s judgment and leadership.

Former top Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot, who stepped down last week, also bashed the Pentagon leader for allegedly plunging the department into dysfunction in a POLITICO Magazine opinion piece published Sunday night.

Ullyot — once a vocal supporter of the Defense secretary — accused Hegseth’s team of spreading unverified claims about three top officials who were fired last week, falsely accusing them of leaking sensitive information to media outlets.

“President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account,’” Ullyot wrote. “Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.”

Hegseth brushed off the allegations Monday and blamed it on backlash for his efforts to reshape the Pentagon.

“Big surprise that a few leakers get fired, and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax,” Hegseth said at the White House Easter Egg Roll. “We’re changing the Defense Department, putting the Pentagon back in the hands of warfighters. Slash and burn doesn’t work with me.”

Democrats already made Hegseth a foil in the Trump administration, but new revelations about the Pentagon’s disarray have sent them into overdrive. The new report has unleashed a blue wave of calls for the Pentagon chief to resign or be fired.

The scandal offers the party a timely focal point as it searches for ways to rally its base, counter Trump and sharpen its critique of his administration. In the wake of internal divisions and an identity crisis within their own party, Democrats are eager to reinvigorate their message and stoke anti-Trump sentiment.

“The Secretary of Defense clearly doesn’t understand the concept of operational security or he doesn’t care,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a former Navy pilot, said in a post on social media. “Carelessness puts our service members at risk. If this is true, he has again proven himself unqualified for this job and should resign or be fired.”

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a combat veteran and member of the Armed Services Committee, was even more direct, saying Hegseth’s tenure is endangering American troops.

“How many times does Pete Hegseth need to leak classified intelligence before Donald Trump and Republicans understand that he isn’t only a f*cking liar, he is a threat to our national security?” she said in a statement. “Every day he stays in his job is another day our troops’ lives are endangered by his singular stupidity.”

The cascading criticism from congressional Democrats for Hegseth to go compounds a week of turmoil at the Pentagon. A wave of firings of senior staff amid a leak investigation and open infighting among some of those aides has further undercut Hegseth just three months into the job.

That call was echoed across the Democratic spectrum — from centrist voices such as Senate Intelligence ranking member Mark Warner (D-Va.) to left-leaning lawmakers such as former Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and her allies.

“We keep learning how Pete Hegseth put lives at risk,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said. “But Trump is still too weak to fire him.”

The new criticism follows Times reporting that Hegseth disclosed the flight schedules of fighter jets preparing to strike Houthi targets in Yemen to a Signal chat group composed of his personal allies. Unlike the Signal chat that accidentally included the editor of The Atlantic, this channel was reportedly of Hegseth’s creation.

“You can’t turn chicken shit into chicken salad,” Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a former Pentagon official, said in a social media post echoing Ullyot’s warnings. “As Hegseth’s staffer is now telling the world, Hegseth has turned the Pentagon into a place of chaos.”

Politico

4. The Hegseth Pentagon Chronicles

Ironically (and sadly) I told students at George Mason, UT Austin, Princeton, and UC Berkeley recently (and will say the same to students tomorrow and Friday at San Francisco State and UCLA) that I am bullish on our future because of young people. I said that it is time we have more younger people taking a role in the government and we old people (boomers) need to get out of the way because it is time to have the next generations lead. A 40-somethng person should be old enough to lead the largest organization in the world (the Pentagon). I remind students all the time that most of our founding fathers were in their 20s, 30, and 40s (except for George Washginton and Benjamin Franklin). James Madison was only 17 when the Declaration of Independence was signed. They were some of the most brilliant people who have ever lived.

The Hegseth Pentagon Chronicles

The Defense secretary is validating the concerns of his critics.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/pete-hegseth-pentagon-leaks-dismissals-signal-chat-b296e38e?mod=hp_opin_pos_2#cxrecs_s

By The Editorial Board

April 21, 2025 5:16 pm ET

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

No doubt the Beltway press would love to knock Pete Hegseth out as Defense secretary, but that doesn’t come close to explaining the mess at the Pentagon. The staff infighting, dismissals, and leaks over Signal app chats look to be the self-inflicted mistakes of a management neophyte.

Three advisers were dismissed last week and hit social media to claim ill-treatment. Another departed adviser published an account of what he called “a month of total chaos at the Pentagon” in Politico. According to multiple media accounts, Mr. Hegseth ran a chat on the Signal messaging app that discussed a military strike and included his wife and other associates.

Sen. Tom Cotton quipped on social media that President Trump won’t be taking staffing advice from Politico, and that is for sure. Mr. Hegseth was typically dismissive. “A few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out, from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax,” Mr. Hegseth said Monday.

But the media didn’t make up the staff turmoil, or the embarrassing Signal chat that Mr. Hegseth didn’t deny. Can you imagine Bob Gates talking about a military strike on an app with friends and family?

All of this is news because it relates to whether Mr. Hegseth can handle the job. As GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell warned in voting against Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation, the desire to be a change agent isn’t a sufficient credential to run the giant Pentagon bureaucracy.

If Mr. Hegseth is wise, he’ll use the staff shakeup to hire some loyal grownups who know the building, instead of the self-promoting isolationists he first brought in. What is harder to know is how much these first two months on the job have hurt Mr. Hegseth’s credibility inside the military. His calling card is enforcing high standards and accountability at every military level. He’s relieved several general officers to make his point, sometimes firing indiscriminately without checking his scope. Is the secretary accountable himself?

President Trump gave Mr. Hegseth a vote of public confidence Monday. But it’s no credit to either man that the Defense chief has spent his first weeks in office validating the confirmation concerns of his critics.

First House Republican calls for Pete Hegseth's ouster

Axios · by Andrew Solender · April 21, 2025

Updated 16 hours ago - Politics & Policy

Andrew Solender

Rep. Don Bacon speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on Oct. 24, 2023. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) on Monday became the first Republican member of Congress to openly indicate support for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's removal from office.

Why it matters: Hegseth is under fire for a series of scandals including the departures of several of his top officials at the Pentagon and new reporting about his use of Signal to discuss sensitive information.

Several Pentagon officials who left amid allegations of leaking have in turn publicly criticized the Defense Department.
The New York Times reported Thursday that Hegseth shared information on strikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen to a Signal chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer.

What he's saying: "The military should always pride itself on operational security. If the reports are true, the Secretary of Defense has failed at operational security, and that is unacceptable," Bacon told Axios.

"If a Democrat did this we'd be demanding a scalp. I don't like hypocrisy. We should be Americans first when it comes to security," he added.
Bacon is the chair of a House Armed Services subcommittee and one of just a handful of House Republicans in districts that Kamala Harris carried last year. He first made his comments to Politico.

The other side: President Trump suggested he is standing by Hegseth, telling reporters, "Pete's doing a great job. Everybody's happy about him."

He said of reports about Hegseth's Signal use and allegations of dysfunction at the Pentagon: "It's just fake news, they just bring up stories. It sounds like disgruntled employees."
Hegseth similarly dismissed the reporting, with the White House also pushing back on an NPR report that aides are eyeing replacements for him.

Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional reporting.

Axios · by Andrew Solender · April 21, 2025

6. Exclusive: The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as defense secretary

I have seen no other reporting that is this specific (I guess that's why it is an "exclusive."). And as noted in the article the White House is denying this. But it begs the question who would be a replacement and could the next nominee be confirmed?

Exclusive: The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as defense secretary

Updated April 21, 20253:34 PM ET

Tom Bowman

Quil Lawrence

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/21/nx-s1-5371312/trump-white-house-pete-hegseth-defense-department

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks to reporters during the White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House on April 21, the day after The New York Times reported that he shared information last month to a second private Signal group chat about strikes in Yemen. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The White House has begun the process of looking for a new leader at the Pentagon to replace Pete Hegseth, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly. This comes as Hegseth is again mired in controversy over sharing military operational details in a group chat.

The defense secretary is under fire after revelations that he shared classified information in a group chat with his wife, brother and lawyer, according to the official.

National

Hegseth 2nd Signal chat cause for 'worry' about nation's security, says Rep. Jim Himes

The source said Hegseth used the Signal messaging app on his personal smartphone, detailing minute-by-minute classified information about airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. It happened at about the same time in March that Hegseth shared similar details with top White House officials in a different Signal chat group that accidentally included a journalist. That leak, hours before air strikes hit, could have endangered U..S. pilots if that information about the timing of strikes was intercepted by U.S. adversaries. Already the Houthis have twice shot down American predator drones.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that there's an effort to replace Hegseth, posting on X that President Trump "stands strongly" behind him. Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump backed Hegseth and said concerns over the Signal chats are a "waste of time."

"He's doing a great job — ask the Houthis how he's doing," Trump said.

Hegseth had denied wrongdoing at a White House Easter event earlier Monday.

"This is what the media does, they take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees, and then they try to slash and burn people, ruin their reputation. It's not going to work with me," he said.

Hegseth was likely referring to four senior advisers who left the Pentagon abruptly last week. Former Defense Department spokesperson John Ullyot resigned and then published an opinion piece calling the past month at the Pentagon a "full-blown meltdown" of infighting that is hurting President Trump.

Three other Pentagon advisers — Dan Caldwell, Colin Carroll, and Darin Selnick — were escorted out of the Pentagon and accused of leaking information to the press. The trio then put out a joint statement on X calling their dismissal "unconscionable" and saying they have not even been told what they stand accused of leaking.

"All three of us served our country honorably in uniform — for two of us, this included deployments to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, based on our collective service, we understand the importance of information security and worked every day to protect it," they wrote.

National

Days after the Signal leak, the Pentagon warned the app was the target of hackers

Caldwell and Selnik are longtime associates of Hegseth who worked with him at Concerned Veterans for America, a right-leaning policy group.

New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that Hegseth should accept responsibility.

"But we must not forget that ultimate responsibility here lies with President Trump for selecting a former weekend TV host, without any experience successfully leading a large and complex organization, to run our government's biggest department and make life and death decisions for our military and country," she said.

NPR disclosure: Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR, chairs the board of the Signal Foundation.

Correction

April 21, 2025

A previous version of this story misspelled John Ullyot's name as Ollyot.

NPR · by Tom Bowman

7. Shades of Appeasement

From our youth. An authentic young voice speaking out.

Conclusion:

Appeasement is not a pathway to peace. As the new president begins his time in the White House, he should not listen to the voices telling him to step back and let authoritarian rulers have their way with the world. The United States must work with other democratic states to uphold the rules-based international order and to protect the ideals of freedom and democracy which America was built upon.

Shades of Appeasement

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/04/22/shades-of-appeasement/

by Grant Montonye

04.22.2025 at 06:00am

The United States finds itself at a political crossroads in its dedication to international involvement. Meanwhile, its predominant strategic adversaries – predominantly Russia and China – have grown increasingly aggressive in their subversion of the international rules-based order emplaced by the U.S. and its allies since the end of World War II (WWII). Whether in taking actions above the point of armed conflict in places like Ukraine, below it in the waters surrounding Taiwan, or through proxies in the Middle East, the world is progressively falling into chaos.

Many, rightly, see the need for change – but there is one option being considered that is grossly misguided. Across the American electorate, there is a quickly growing argument that the United States should make concessions to aggressive foreign powers to prevent armed conflict. These voices are following a concept known as appeasement, which, as the late Henry Kissinger defined it, is a “foreign policy of pacifying an aggrieved country through negotiation in order to prevent war.” But as proven by the countless examples of appeasement’s failures, from the infamous example of the Munich Agreement of WWII to the general indifference more recently displayed by the international community after Russia’s invasion of Georgia, such things lead to further conflict.

History of Appeasement

The classic example of appeasement is the Munich Agreement, which was a treaty between Great Britain, France, and Nazi Germany which gave Germany control over the Sudetenland; territory that belonged to Czechoslovakia, in return for a guarantee by Hitler that Germany would not invade more territory. This agreement was formed without the participation of the Czechoslovak government and forced them to hand over large parts of their lands. The British Prime Minister at the time, Neville Chamberlain said “My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.” Unfortunately, Chamberlain was wrong, and Germany would go on to invade the rest of Czechoslovakia. In September of 1939, less than a year after the Munich Agreement was signed, Germany invaded Poland, kicking off World War Two. Chamberlain’s appeasement of Nazi Germany failed to prevent another great war; all it did was give Germany more time to build up its military forces without arousing suspicion from the Allies. If Britain and France had threatened to declare war if Germany invaded the Sudetenland, Germany would have had less time to build up its military, it would have lacked Czechoslovak resources at the start of the war, and Czechoslovakia would have still had its heavily fortified border regions from which it could better defend itself against the German invasion. If German aggression was properly deterred, World War 2 may have been much shorter and less deadly.

Once again, appeasement was used in 2008 following a Russian invasion of Georgia, a small country in the Caucasus Mountain range. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly independent state of Georgia struggled to deal with internal separatist movements, and in the 1990s two of them, those of Abkhazia and South Ossetia revolted against the Georgian state with the backing of the Kremlin. Russian “peacekeepers” then inserted themselves to maintain de facto control. Years later, in 2008, following explosions in South Ossetia which both sides blamed on one another, war resumed between the Georgian government and separatist forces backed by Russian troops. The Russians and their separatist allies took many Georgian towns and cities, and a new ceasefire was negotiated, refreezing the conflict with much more territory under Moscow’s influence. During this round of conflict in 2008, the West did little to support the Georgian government, and helped orchestrate the ceasefire which greatly benefited the Russians. In addition, after the ceasefire the Georgian government requested defensive weapons to protect its land if Russia ever attacked again, a request which the Bush administration denied. Finally, when Barrack Obama became president the next year, he introduced a “Russia Reset” policy which essentially forgot Russia’s past transgressions and tried to start anew. Instead, all it did was appease Russia’s demands, allowing Moscow to get away with its invasion, and giving Vladimir Putin a green light for his future actions in Ukraine.

Are there cases for appeasement though? Are the criticisms of it so absolute? Is the U.S. – having shouldered the burden of leading and upholding the international order since the fall of the Berlin Wall – wrong to look at some form of disengagement, or some level of warming relations with authoritarian adversaries? One might start by exploring another two historical examples.

Morell Island

One is lesser known, taking place in the vast and remote reaches of the South Atlantic in the 1980s- namely, the British appeasement towards Argentina before the Falklands War. Often this does not jump to people’s minds when thinking of the folly of appeasement. What they remember is the British armada leaving Portsmouth within days of Argentina’s takeover of South Georgia and the Falkland Islands. They remember Prime Minister Thatcher’s – the “Iron Lady’s” – resolve to take them back. But less remembered was Britain’s somewhat dulled response to Argentina building a military base on sovereign British territory in the prelude to the Falkland Islands War.

During the 1970s and 80s, tensions heated up between Argentina and Great Britain over a territorial dispute concerning several groups of islands in the South Atlantic and Southern Oceans. In 1976, Argentinian forces set up a base on Morell Island (also known as Thule Island), part of the British held Southern Thule Islands. The base had scientific equipment, an Argentine flag, and could support 50 personnel. It was built without the permission of the British government, meaning that its construction was an infringement upon British sovereignty over the islands. The Argentine military also cut off the fuel supply to an airport in the neighboring Falkland Islands, another set of British held islands under dispute. These were aggressive actions which broke international laws and norms. Argentina most likely took these actions to achieve two aims: first was to weaken Britain’s claim to the islands by interfering with their territorial integrity, and second was to test Britain’s resolve so they would know how it would respond to Argentine aggressions. Britain did eventually send a small flotilla of naval ships to remove the Argentine personnel from the island and dismantle the base; however, it is a little bit more complicated than that.

The author recently communicated with Rear Admiral Chris Parry of the Royal Navy (ret.), confirming that the Royal Navy did not remove the Argentine presence from the Southern Thule Islands until 1982, 6 years after the base was set up. For those six years, the base was allowed to remain, infringing upon British sovereignty. Although there were no outright concessions made and the British did eventually succeed in getting the Argentinians to abandon their base, action was taken years too late and did not go far enough, strengthening Argentina’s claim over the British held islands in the South Atlantic. Britain’s proportionate and overdue response failed to deter further aggression in the future; or as the Imperial War Museums puts it in their video ‘Why Argentina thought Britain wouldn’t fight for the Falklands’, “For Britain, the response to all these crises had been proportionate, but to the Argentinians, they appeared token at best. All this pointed to one glaring conclusion, that an invasion of the Falklands would meet no British counter.” In 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, and Britain did respond, starting a conflict that unnecessarily cost people their lives. Just as the Imperial War Museums argues in their video, if Britain’s response to earlier aggressions had been stronger and sought more than simply undoing Argentine advances, all-out war might have been deterred.

The Cold War

Others might point to the Cold War between the U.S. and USSR as a form of appeasement, with neither side coming to direct blows against one another. Fighting instead through proxies and under the deterrent effect of mutually assured nuclear destruction, both sides avoided the larger scale hot war between superpowers that would have likely eclipsed the destruction incurred by previous world wars. But although they are correct that some minimal levels of appeasement can help prevent conflict, they are missing a massive piece of context. The difference between the Cold War and the aforementioned examples of appeasement is that Cold War appeasement was made with the knowledge that the USSR was still an adversary, and that by appeasing Moscow it was no guarantee that they would stop expanding, whereas in the previously mentioned cases, there was an assumption of long lasting peace. I like to call this short-term vs long-term appeasement, with the short term being a method to manage escalation whilst still competing with an adversary, whereas the long term is appeasing to build long-lasting peace. Long term appeasement is not an effective strategy and rarely works. And as the previous example from the South Atlantic highlights, neither does short-term.

Modern-day Applicability

Appeasement, as a long-term solution is, in general, not an effective strategy to prevent war. Even if it buys a little time, it tells pariahs that their actions will be tolerated, allowing them to take more and more until finally the world is forced to react, by which time the aggressor state is much better prepared for war. Instead, to prevent armed conflict, states that adhere to the rules based international order need to stay true to their ideals, and to stand up to aggressive actors. Global leaders must also reach a consensus that malicious actors corrupted by authoritarianism are not to be trusted, that they are an enemy, not a friend; and that any agreements reached with them should not be with an assumption that it will bring long-lasting peace, because it won’t. Through such actions and assumptions, a reputation of consistency is built with a strong deterrent to back it up. This leaves no room for pariahs to weave their way through and take advantage of the rules-based order.

In the current state of international affairs, such lessons can most directly be applied in the cases of Ukraine, Taiwan, and the South China Sea. The west must continue to supply Ukraine with the weapons it needs to defeat Russia, for if it fails, Russia will continue to threaten the security and territorial integrity of its neighbors. Perhaps next there will be a new chapter in the Russo-Georgian conflict. If Ukraine loses due to a cutting of western support, Russia will know that in any future military conflicts all it needs to do is to hold out until the west grows weary of aiding the victim state, and then it will achieve victory. The U.S. must maintain a clear commitment to Taiwan’s defense, for if it falters, China may take advantage of the opportunity to advance its claim over the island. Furthermore, international law must be maintained in the South China Sea. China cannot be allowed to enforce its claims over the sea, because if those claims become the de facto reality, all the international laws developed in the modern system will lose credibility and may grow irrelevant. These conflicts and disputes are challenges which the new U.S. president will have to deal with, and he must maintain the international system and not appease aggressors. There are many other cases where an anti-appeasement stance could, and should, be used, but these are three of the most prominent.

Appeasement is not a pathway to peace. As the new president begins his time in the White House, he should not listen to the voices telling him to step back and let authoritarian rulers have their way with the world. The United States must work with other democratic states to uphold the rules-based international order and to protect the ideals of freedom and democracy which America was built upon.

Tags: appeasement, Deterrence, Foreign Policy, US Foreign Policy

About The Author

Grant Montonye
Grant Montonye is a freshman at Syracuse University studying International Relations at the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs.

8. Achieving Decision Dominance: Leveraging AI in Small Wars

Excerpts:

There are a myriad of ways artificial intelligence can help tame this sprawling information environment. With internet capabilities and social media, information operations personnel can now collect observations from a computer screen and attempt to monitor the impact of information operations on a target audience. The challenge for information operations officers and personnel is gauging the sentiment of social media posts. With artificial intelligence capabilities such as discriminative AI, service members can label, classify, and perform sentiment and impact analyses using natural language processing and AI to assess their respective social media presence. With GenAI models, psychological operations can create ultra-realistic audio, visuals, and imagery. These capabilities should be gradually introduced into any information operations campaign to erode the potential for the enemy to make timely decisions.

AI has not yet been fully embraced within the DoD’s culture, organization, and doctrine. The DoD is still grappling with its effective integration to ensure that it becomes a commonly used capability. Therefore, it remains imperative for the DoD to incorporate AI within its information operations framework, operations, and doctrine, triggering what some scholars have called a revolution in military affairs. Mission-specific training must incorporate AI, and the military education system must be leveraged to ensure AI plays a prominent role in any contemporary operation—for both defensive and offensive purposes. Project Maven is a starting point, not the final product, as AI can be used for decision dominance and to maintain information advantage, especially during gray zone competition or hyper-competitive hybrid warfare.

Will these capabilities offer a silver bullet solution to achieve information advantage and prevent any more Afghanistans or Iraqs? Probably not, but they do offer the DoD the most optimal way forward to ensure that it has all the tools it needs to navigate this complex information environment—and at least align commander priorities with the operational picture on the ground.

Achieving Decision Dominance: Leveraging AI in Small Wars

https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/04/22/achieving-decision-dominance-leveraging-ai-in-small-wars/

by Matthew Fecteau

04.22.2025 at 06:00am

The information environment is expansive, complex, and rapidly evolving. During contemporary conflicts, including gray zone and hybrid warfare, perception often outweighs reality. That is why artificial intelligence is critical for navigating this complex yet fluid landscape. The Department of Defense (DoD) can enhance its effectiveness within the information environment during “small wars” to achieve decision dominance, but it needs to further incorporate artificial intelligence and its respective capabilities within its doctrine and culture.

Decision dominance ensures the commander can better understand the area of operations and deprive the enemy of the ability to make timely decisions. This method emphasizes proficiencies, not physical capability. It is not simply a matter of denying the opposing forces their decision-making ability, but rather a strategy of influencing actions by offering specific choices and limiting alternatives for the opposing force. The concept of decision dominance suggests that when an opposing force is left incapable of acting—having been stripped of all practical choices—it will cease fighting, perhaps even before major combat commences.

The DoD’s performance is in a precarious state. The last war that most closely resembled a victory was the 1991 Gulf War, and even that was convoluted, as the belligerents withdrew but remained in power. In Afghanistan in 2001, the U.S. Joint Forces won the initial stages of the war. Still, the Taliban adopted insurgent tactics and used the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan to plan their return and destabilize the environment. This led to the perception that the Afghan government was unable to protect its citizens, and the Afghan military surrendered en masse despite trillions in investment. In Iraq in 2003, the U.S. Joint and Combined Forces won the initial phase of the war and fought the later part to a stalemate.

The DoD’s experiences in both Afghanistan and Iraq highlight the challenges within the information environment. During the Iraq War, the U.S. military was inundated with vast sums of information, overwhelming operations. Decision dominance was challenging to achieve with the various competing interests in the region—and even in the Pentagon. In the information environment, a perception of victory can be as impactful as an actual outcome, while a belief in defeat can lead to tangible losses.

One of the largest challenges in both Iraq and Afghanistan was harmonizing and synchronizing practices between information-related capabilities to counter the often competitive and changing narratives of insurgents. This disconnect between official capabilities and their implementation in the field was counterproductive. The situation was further complicated by doctrinal changes (e.g., MISO), which further convoluted information-related capabilities, triggering changes in organization, practice, and doctrine.

The lack of coordination was also a key factor. The complexity resulted in setbacks because commanders were hindered from making timely decisions by insufficient synchronization and coordination of the information environment. For example, psychological operations and public affairs sometimes presented competing themes and messages, benefiting Taliban propagandists within a vastly complex information ecosystem. The Taliban routinely accused U.S. forces of needlessly causing civilian casualties. A failure to coordinate between these elements allowed the Taliban to seize the initiative and shape perceptions. This failure to shape the information environment contributed to the erosion of public trust and, ultimately, strategic setbacks.

The DoD has been investing in AI capabilities for almost over a decade. The DoD has invested in Project Maven, a sign of the DoD’s attempt to embrace artificial intelligence. However, relatively little unclassified information is known about its impact on information operations—the synchronization of information-related capabilities. The Maven prototype fuses information sources from multi-source surveillance data into a familiar battlefield analysis interface, enabling speedier and more accurate decision-making and analysis, which predictably will complement information advantage. The Maven prototype uses machine learning to sort through multitudes of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data—unmanned systems video, paper documents, computer hard drives, thumb drives, and more—collected by the department and intelligence agencies for operational use across the services.

In 2018, the DoD adopted multi-domain operations within its National Defense Strategy with a transition to near-peer adversaries. Of note, the information environment transcends all recognized war domains per the doctrine. However, challenges remain within the gray zone and hybrid conflicts, especially due to the expansive information environment. With enhancements in discriminative and generative AI, non-state actors pose both benefits and significant challenges within gray zone and hybrid conflicts, which are likely to remain below the threshold of full-blown war—especially if supported by nation-state actors with vested interests.

With the recent advent of advanced capabilities, the DoD was able to incorporate AI within its organization, culture, and operations. 2022 was a year of rapid advancement with the release of a number of public-facing models. The information environment was relatively untamed due to the failure to fully incorporate artificial intelligence into ongoing operations. With advances in artificial intelligence—thanks to Nvidia’s GPU and TPU architecture—AI is more pervasive than ever before with tools to navigate the complex information environment.

Regardless, the information environment seems to have evolved significantly since Project Maven was first introduced. With these capabilities—including off-the-shelf options—the DoD’s information operations community should enhance its campaigns and shape the information environment to achieve decision dominance and maintain information advantage to undermine the perception of the adversary in future conflicts. Information operations personnel are typically tasked with measuring the impact of information-related capabilities on a target audience. Once, that was challenging, especially before the internet and social media, making impact measurement nearly impossible.

There are a myriad of ways artificial intelligence can help tame this sprawling information environment. With internet capabilities and social media, information operations personnel can now collect observations from a computer screen and attempt to monitor the impact of information operations on a target audience. The challenge for information operations officers and personnel is gauging the sentiment of social media posts. With artificial intelligence capabilities such as discriminative AI, service members can label, classify, and perform sentiment and impact analyses using natural language processing and AI to assess their respective social media presence. With GenAI models, psychological operations can create ultra-realistic audio, visuals, and imagery. These capabilities should be gradually introduced into any information operations campaign to erode the potential for the enemy to make timely decisions.

AI has not yet been fully embraced within the DoD’s culture, organization, and doctrine. The DoD is still grappling with its effective integration to ensure that it becomes a commonly used capability. Therefore, it remains imperative for the DoD to incorporate AI within its information operations framework, operations, and doctrine, triggering what some scholars have called a revolution in military affairs. Mission-specific training must incorporate AI, and the military education system must be leveraged to ensure AI plays a prominent role in any contemporary operation—for both defensive and offensive purposes. Project Maven is a starting point, not the final product, as AI can be used for decision dominance and to maintain information advantage, especially during gray zone competition or hyper-competitive hybrid warfare.

Will these capabilities offer a silver bullet solution to achieve information advantage and prevent any more Afghanistans or Iraqs? Probably not, but they do offer the DoD the most optimal way forward to ensure that it has all the tools it needs to navigate this complex information environment—and at least align commander priorities with the operational picture on the ground.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Tags: Artificial Intelligence, decision dominance, decision-making, machine learning

About The Author

Matthew Fecteau
Lieutenant Colonel Matthew J. Fecteau is a PhD researcher at King’s College London and an information operations officer. He can be reached at matthew.fecteau.alumni@armywarcolleg.edu.

9. Troops can now detain, search people on newly minted military land on the border

It is a brave new world.

Excerpts:

“Through these enhanced authorities, U.S. Northern Command will ensure those who illegally trespass in the New Mexico National Defense Area are handed over to Customs and Border Protection or our other law enforcement partners,” said Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, NORTHCOM commander. “Joint Task Force-Southern Border will conduct enhanced detection and monitoring, which will include vehicle and foot patrols, rotary wing, and fixed surveillance site operations.”

Troops in the area can also request help with temporary barriers, signs and fencing from Fort Huachuca.

The Department of Interior last week transferred the land, known as the Roosevelt Reservation, to the Defense Department as directed by an executive order by President Donald Trump. The Interior Department and Department of Homeland Security were directed to cede jurisdiction to the military.

The noncontiguous land, which is about 170 square miles, runs along the border between New Mexico and Mexico, according to the Army. Under the new arrangement, military personnel will continue to work together with Customs and Border Protection personnel to establish and enforce a controlled perimeter and access to the area to prevent criminal activities across the border.

Troops can now detain, search people on newly minted military land on the border

Stars and Stripes · by Rose L. Thayer · April 21, 2025

Soldiers conduct a squad patrol along the southern border outside of Sierra Blanca, Texas, on March 31, 2025. (Pfc. Malik Waddy-Fiffee/U.S. Army)

A 60-foot-wide zone of New Mexico land that runs along the U.S. border with Mexico has been deemed part of Fort Huachuca, Ariz., to allow troops to begin arresting people for trespassing on military territory — an escalation of the authority given active-duty service members deployed to the region to deter illegal activity.

Troops can temporarily detain, search, enforce crowd control and provide medical treatment to anyone found on the land referred to as the New Mexico National Defense Area, according to U.S. Northern Command, the combatant command overseeing the deployment of about 6,600 troops at the southwest border.

“Through these enhanced authorities, U.S. Northern Command will ensure those who illegally trespass in the New Mexico National Defense Area are handed over to Customs and Border Protection or our other law enforcement partners,” said Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, NORTHCOM commander. “Joint Task Force-Southern Border will conduct enhanced detection and monitoring, which will include vehicle and foot patrols, rotary wing, and fixed surveillance site operations.”

Troops in the area can also request help with temporary barriers, signs and fencing from Fort Huachuca.

The Department of Interior last week transferred the land, known as the Roosevelt Reservation, to the Defense Department as directed by an executive order by President Donald Trump. The Interior Department and Department of Homeland Security were directed to cede jurisdiction to the military.

The noncontiguous land, which is about 170 square miles, runs along the border between New Mexico and Mexico, according to the Army. Under the new arrangement, military personnel will continue to work together with Customs and Border Protection personnel to establish and enforce a controlled perimeter and access to the area to prevent criminal activities across the border.

Border Patrol agents have encountered roughly 30,000 people suspected of crossing into the U.S. without authorization at the southwest border in New Mexico since fiscal 2025 began in October, according to agency data. More than 121,500 people were encountered during the previous fiscal year.

The increase in military authorities at the border with Mexico is building upon an ongoing mission for troops to monitor and report possible criminal activity or people crossing into the U.S. without authorization to Customs and Border Protection. It first began in 2018 during Trump’s first term and continued under former President Joe Biden with the National Guard.

When Trump returned to office in January, he ordered the deployment of active-duty forces. Since then, border crossings have dropped from an average of 5,100 migrants each day under Biden’s four years to 230 a day in the first four months of Trump’s second term, according to Customs and Border Protection.

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Rose Thayer

Rose L. Thayer is based in Austin, Texas, and she has been covering the western region of the continental U.S. for Stars and Stripes since 2018. Before that she was a reporter for Killeen Daily Herald and a freelance journalist for publications including The Alcalde, Texas Highways and the Austin American-Statesman. She is the spouse of an Army veteran and a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in journalism. Her awards include a 2021 Society of Professional Journalists Washington Dateline Award and an Honorable Mention from the Military Reporters and Editors Association for her coverage of crime at Fort Hood.

Stars and Stripes · by Rose L. Thayer · April 21, 2025

10. The Conventional Balance of Terror – America Needs a New Triad to Restore Its Eroding Deterrence

Note that according to the bio the co-author is serving in OSD. (USD(P))

Excerpts:

The “rest” of the task, which involves a broad reconfiguring of U.S. forces in the western Pacific, remains a work in progress. U.S. submarine and munitions industrial bases remain sclerotic and are improving only slowly and at significant cost. The construction of 100 or more B-21 bombers will take a decade or longer. Boeing stopped building C-17s in 2015, and the air force’s plans for its next-generation cargo transports remain in infancy. Meanwhile, the ultimate range and capacity of the mobile land-based firing capabilities of the army and the Marine Corps have not yet been fully determined. To keep pace with China’s continued missile development, all these force levels would have to be greatly increased.

The constraints and challenges that stand in the way of developing these capabilities are real. But China is not slowing its efforts to expand its conventional precision-strike arsenal, and the threat posed to U.S. allies and partners in the western Pacific by China’s military modernization is not going away. If the United States perceives the current security architecture in the region as a vital interest, it must be prepared to build a stable conventional deterrence equilibrium that will endure for as long as it expects China to be a military challenger.

Construction of a conventional triad would not only produce a more powerful deterrent but also lower the risks of rapid conventional or even nuclear escalation if deterrence fails. Just as U.S. strategists during the Cold War discovered when the Soviets achieved nuclear parity, their successors facing a world of long-range precision-guided conventional weapons today may find that a stable balance of deterrence remains possible. It will depend, however, on U.S. forces acquiring a credible and assured conventional second-strike capability. This will force Washington to make difficult choices amid sharp political and budgetary debates. But the approach is feasible. And the alternative—increasing levels of risk to U.S. forces, to deterrence in the western Pacific, and to crisis stability—is not one the United States can afford to accept.

The Conventional Balance of Terror

Foreign Affairs · by More by Andrew S. Lim · April 22, 2025

America Needs a New Triad to Restore Its Eroding Deterrence

Andrew S. Lim and James D. Fearon

May/June 2025 Published on April 22, 2025

Edward Tuckwell

ANDREW S. LIM is a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. The views expressed here are his own.

JAMES D. FEARON is Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Senior Fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He served as a Senior Adviser in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2021 to 2022.

More by James D. Fearon

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In 1959, the American political scientist Albert Wohlstetter argued in these pages that the United States did not possess a sufficient second-strike capability to provide stable nuclear deterrence against the Soviet Union. A year later, the economist and strategist Thomas Schelling offered what has become the seminal definition of strategic nuclear stability. “It is not the ‘balance’—the sheer equality or symmetry in the situation—that constitutes mutual deterrence,” he wrote in The Strategy of Conflict. “It is the stability of the balance.” Schelling concluded that two nuclear powers can achieve a stable balance only “when neither, in striking first, can destroy the other’s ability to strike back.” This insight became a pillar of U.S. nuclear strategy, which is premised on the principle that large portions of the nuclear force must be able to survive and retaliate against any first strike by an adversary.

Today, the United States faces a parallel strategic challenge with its conventional forces in the western Pacific. Since the early years of this century, China has vastly expanded the quantity and quality of its conventional missile arsenal, especially precision-guided ballistic missiles, which it could use in a first strike to inflict grave damage on conventional U.S. forces in the region. To counter this growing threat, strategists in Washington have begun to consider the United States’ options for a preemptive conventional attack against China’s conventional forces, a strategy that appears dangerously reminiscent of the U.S. Cold War doctrines that Wohlstetter and Schelling argued increased first-strike incentives. For example, in February 2024, in response to questions from the Senate Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo, President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, stated that preventing China from using its conventional missile arsenal against U.S. forces was his highest priority. As he put it, the United States needs to be able to “blind” Chinese forces—in broad terms, to disable Beijing’s burgeoning conventional precision-strike capabilities before they can inflict significant damage on U.S. forces.

But as happened in the Cold War, once the Soviet Union began to reach nuclear parity with the United States, such an objective would likely prove difficult if not infeasible. China’s inventory of mobile missiles and its accompanying communications and surveillance infrastructure is large and dispersed, with many systems housed in underground facilities spread over its vast territory. Even if the United States were to attempt a large-scale first strike on these capabilities, doing so would present significant escalatory risks. Moreover, if Beijing suspected that U.S. strategy was premised on preemption, China would have powerful incentives to quickly blind and disable U.S. capabilities before having its own forces blinded. U.S. forces’ vulnerability thus exacerbates reciprocal first-strike incentives, a classic recipe for crisis instability.

The logic articulated by Wohlstetter, Schelling, and others suggests a way to escape this dilemma. During the Cold War, the United States stabilized deterrence by developing a “nuclear triad”—deploying its nuclear weapons across the domains of sea, air, and land in ways that were and remain difficult for an adversary to find and disable in a first strike. Namely, it used ballistic missile submarines, which are highly elusive at sea; developed “bomber alert” operations, by which bombers could be quickly scattered to multiple bases, or even kept airborne, to ensure that they could not all be caught at once (even by a surprise first strike); and in Europe, deployed road-mobile launch vehicles, which are difficult to target when they are moving through cluttered terrain.

By contrast, many of the United States’ conventional assets in the Indo-Pacific, such as its surface ships, are highly visible or heavily dependent on fixed facilities that could easily be targeted. If a crisis were to break out, the United States might have to threaten escalation to compensate for its lack of conventional response options—potentially up to the nuclear level. To remedy this problem, the United States should develop a “conventional triad” modeled on its successful nuclear strategy. Such a force structure would both increase U.S. combat credibility and decrease first-strike incentives on both sides.

The U.S. nuclear force structure provides a basic template for building a conventional triad. Like their nuclear counterparts, U.S. ballistic and cruise missiles would be dispersed among a combination of mobile launch vehicles on land, submarines at sea, and bombers in the air. These forces would be connected through a resilient communications network analogous to the nuclear command, control, and communications system. Once established, this conventional triad could prevent the destabilizing scenario in which a conventional first strike could lead to a nuclear confrontation.

COLLISION COURSE

China’s rapidly expanding arsenal of conventional missiles suggests that the revolution in precision weapons is following a course similar to that of nuclear weapons. During the first 15 years of the Cold War, the United States held a significant advantage over the Soviet Union in nuclear weapons and delivery systems, but the Soviets eventually caught up. By the late 1960s, Moscow was approaching nuclear parity with Washington.

Likewise, in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States developed and maintained a monopoly over conventional precision-strike capabilities, such as stealth aircraft and GPS-guided bombs and missiles, which it employed to great effect in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the 1999 Kosovo war, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. China drew important lessons from these systems and sought to replicate them. As the political scientist M. Taylor Fravel wrote in his 2019 study of Chinese military strategy, Active Defense, Beijing’s doctrine and capabilities today emphasize so-called keypoint strikes designed to “paralyze [the enemy’s] ability to fight, rather than simply annihilating an opponent’s forces.” The long-range precision weapons in China’s arsenal are now well suited for this task, especially against U.S. forces in the western Pacific, which are highly visible and heavily dependent on fixed infrastructure close to mainland China.

The United States has hardly been unaware of China’s development of precision-strike weapons. Since 2002, the Defense Department has cataloged Chinese missile forces in its annual report on China’s military power. In 2005, the report estimated China’s missile inventory at approximately 700 short-range ballistic missiles and much smaller numbers of longer-range weapons, most of which were likely armed with nuclear payloads: around 20 medium-range ballistic missiles, roughly 20 intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and approximately 40 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Today, the situation has transformed: the 2024 report found that China’s forces include 900 short-range, 1,300 medium-range, 500 intermediate-range, and 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Apart from the ICBMs, almost all of China’s ballistic missiles can carry conventional explosive payloads, showing the extent to which Beijing values conventional strike capabilities.

In addition to these advances in ballistic missiles, China has also developed a formidable arsenal of cruise missiles. Although they are slower than ballistic missiles, cruise missiles cost less to produce and can therefore be manufactured in greater quantities, and they have variable trajectories, allowing them to evade detection and defenses in a way that ballistic missiles cannot. The 2024 report counts only the estimated 400 ground-launched cruise missiles belonging to China’s People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force. But this is a small fraction of Beijing’s overall cruise missile inventory, which also includes highly capable antiship and land-attack cruise missiles aboard surface ships, submarines, aircraft, and ground vehicles. This force structure makes China’s conventional forces difficult to target, disable, or eliminate.

These missile capabilities are enabled by China’s C4ISR—command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance—systems, which are based on the ground, in the air, and in space. Together, these resources underpin a strategy that Beijing calls “counterintervention” (often referred to as “anti-access/area denial” in the West), which seeks to protect Chinese forces while threatening U.S. forces and bases in the western Pacific with heavy damage or destruction. The aim of this approach is to deter U.S. engagement in a potential conflict by making intervention prohibitively costly.

The strategy appears to be working. After conducting a war game in 2023, the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that Beijing’s counterintervention capabilities would impose steep costs on U.S. forces in a conflict, including the loss of two forward-based aircraft carriers and up to 20 cruisers and destroyers, with commensurate losses in aircraft, infrastructure, and personnel. Such losses would represent a significant proportion of the 11 carriers and approximately 80 cruisers and destroyers currently in service around the world. CSIS concluded that “such losses would damage the U.S. global position for many years.” These outcomes suggest that the United States’ ability to deter a conventional conflict with China may be inadequate and call into question whether the United States would prevail in a war if deterrence failed.

To address this heightened risk to its forces, the United States could seek to preempt or disable China’s conventional precision-strike capabilities, either by attacking the strike weapons directly or the C4ISR networks that enable them. But the scale, redundancy, and continued growth of China’s information systems capabilities, mobile missile inventory, and underground facilities are likely to make such an objective difficult to achieve. The 2024 China military power report notes, for example, that the People’s Liberation Army maintains thousands of technologically advanced underground facilities “to conceal and protect all aspects of its military forces,” and it is rapidly building more. U.S. attempts to attack those forces or this infrastructure at a scale necessary to achieve useful military effects would likely carry real escalatory risks.

The United States needs more elusive conventional forces.

Defense strategists both inside and outside China continue to debate which actions by an adversary Beijing might regard as “first use” and therefore might prompt a Chinese nuclear response under the country’s no-first-use policy. But it is reasonable to assume that China could view a U.S. effort to preempt or disable its precision-strike capabilities as attacking vital Chinese interests or even setting the stage for an attack on Beijing’s nuclear capabilities—especially if the preemptive strikes degraded China’s nuclear early warning or nuclear command-and-control systems, whether intentionally or not. The United States certainly might view a large-scale attack on its own precision-strike capabilities and C4ISR systems in the same way.

China’s attainment of parity with or even superiority over the United States in precision-strike capability has prompted U.S. planners to seek other countermeasures. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s achievement of nuclear parity, together with its significant conventional advantage in Europe, led U.S. strategists to adopt what is known as the “second offset.” To counteract, or offset, Soviet numerical advantages, the United States developed stealth and precision-strike capabilities that could maximize the effect of each weapon and pinpoint key targets such as command and communications centers or bridges and other logistical chokepoints. But with China now able to match or surpass the United States in precision capabilities, the second offset strategy no longer offsets. In late 2014, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work announced a new initiative for a “third offset,” with the aim of harnessing disruptive technological advantages for U.S. forces in response to the loss of the U.S. monopoly on conventional precision-strike capabilities. Most discussions of a third offset have focused on technologies such as artificial intelligence, autonomous systems or drones, and sensor fusion, which allows forces across multiple domains to see and respond to the same picture of the battlefield.

But no new strategic approach is likely to succeed unless it provides the United States with forces that have an assured ability to survive large-scale conventional attacks. A U.S. conventional triad would present China with a choice between a limited first strike, which would likely fail to seriously degrade U.S. forces, and a large-scale first strike, which would carry a significant risk of escalation and might still fail to find U.S. submarines at sea, bombers dispersed or already airborne, or mobile missile launchers out of garrison. Regardless of China’s choice, a greater proportion of U.S. conventional forces would be left to respond. Deterrence would thus be strengthened at the conventional level by the same logic that Wohlstetter and Schelling elucidated for nuclear stability in the late 1950s and that has helped keep the peace at the nuclear level for nearly three-quarters of a century.

TARGET LOCKED

Just as the Soviets’ achievement of nuclear parity challenged the United States to revise its theory of nuclear deterrence and, as a consequence, its force structure, China’s achievement of parity in precision-strike capabilities now requires the United States to rethink how it should construct its conventional forces. U.S. forces should be able to defeat and deter a large-scale Chinese conventional missile attack while maintaining a condition in which, as Schelling described it, “neither, in striking first, can destroy the other’s ability to strike back.”

In a 2014 report, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments noted that the U.S. defense program was “heavily skewed” toward capabilities aimed at “low-medium threat environment[s],” referring to conflicts with adversaries that lacked the ability to seriously threaten forces such as surface ships and short-range or nonstealthy aircraft. This remains largely the case today, despite the global proliferation of precision-strike capabilities. At the same time, the vulnerability of U.S. conventional forces creates powerful first-strike incentives for both sides, making minor political crises and military frictions more dangerous and prone to escalation.

For these reasons, the same principles that guided the U.S. response to Soviet nuclear parity can apply to conventional forces today. Of central importance is developing survivable forces that would be more costly in time and money for an attacker to overcome than for a defender to build. The inherent difficulty of finding submarines in the open ocean, bombers dispersed and airborne, and road-mobile missile launchers on the move ensures the survivability of a greater proportion of the force. By contrast, defending fixed bases or highly visible surface ships often requires an active missile defense that must “hit a bullet with a bullet”—a proposition that is almost always much more costly than firing that first bullet. Equipping mobile platforms with long-range munitions, such as medium-range or intermediate-range ballistic or cruise missiles, amplifies their survivability by allowing them to roam farther from an adversary’s densest concentrations of sensors and weapons and by multiplying geometrically the area that an adversary must search.

Multiple analyses and war games over many years have corroborated the basic conclusion that submarines, bombers, and mobile land-based missile launchers equipped with long-range strike weapons and resilient communications technology are the most survivable and effective assets in an environment dense with precision-strike capabilities, such as the one China has created in the western Pacific. In other words, to make its conventional arsenal survivable, the United States must replace its current stock of fixed and visible assets with elusive forces in multiple domains, following the nuclear triad model.

ASYMMETRIC ADVANTAGE

In almost any prospective conflict with China, the United States will be on the defending side. Since at least the end of World War II, Washington has generally opposed states’ attempts to change international boundaries by force as a matter of principle—one that is enshrined in treaties with Japan and the Philippines and in law regarding Taiwan. By contrast, Beijing’s policies and objectives imply a need for offensive military action: China must change territorial realities to achieve its stated goals.

This strategic reality disadvantages the United States in one respect: China would almost certainly have the initiative at the outset of a conflict because it would move first. Given the way that U.S. forces are constructed today, U.S. defense strategists face a difficult choice between preemption, with its attendant risks of escalation, and the real possibility of a first strike by Beijing, with the heavy losses that would cause. Apart from the high visibility of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific region, the U.S. military’s basing infrastructure is sprawling and fixed; its logistics are dependent on unprotected commercial support, such as commercial ships, cargo aircraft, and computer networks, which may be more vulnerable than military assets; and its space-based communications infrastructure, despite recent technological advances, is still dependent on a relatively small number of satellites. Indeed, Chinese military doctrine has explicitly set for its forces the task of disabling this U.S. infrastructure and the weapons platforms that rely on it, and Beijing has shaped its formidable missile arsenal to achieve that goal.

At the same time, the United States and its partners would have one significant advantage if China were to act on its revanchist claims against Taiwan: they would be defending against an amphibious assault, widely acknowledged as being among the most challenging of military operations. To take and hold territory beyond the Chinese mainland, China must expose its forces over open water and in complex landing operations, while the United States and its partners can conceal their forces and fortify their positions on terrain that they already control.

A U.S. submarine off the coast of Western Australia, March 2025 Colin Murty / Reuters

But to fully maximize these advantages, the United States must restructure its conventional forces in the Indo-Pacific. A force weighted toward submarines, long-range bombers (or similar capabilities), and road-mobile missile launchers would reduce the current dependence on highly visible surface ships and short-range aircraft operating from bases close to China, which are within range of the largest number of Chinese missiles.

Making such a shift will be a significant undertaking, but the United States undertook a similar effort when it designed and constructed the nuclear triad. One indication of the logic of the approach is that other nuclear powers, including China, India, and Russia, have replicated the structure, fielding nuclear weapons in some combination of submarines, bombers, and road- or rail-based mobile launch vehicles. (Silo-based ICBMs, which also form part of the land-based triad, are less survivable and contribute to deterrence by a different logic: they force states to choose between using one of their nuclear weapons on an adversary’s silo, thereby forgoing a more valuable target, and using one on a more valuable target, accepting the damage that the intact silo’s missile might cause.) This basic force structure is a product of operations analysis and refinement over the 80 years of the nuclear age, grounded in the deterrence logic that points to the indispensability of an assured second strike.

To build an effective conventional triad, the United States must invest in more submarines, bombers, and mobile launch vehicles. This would entail, for example, redoubling current efforts to increase the production of Virginia-class attack submarines; increasing the production of B-21 bombers; accelerating air force efforts to deploy a “palletized” munitions launch system, which enables transport aircraft to launch conventional cruise missiles; and expanding the range and capacity of the Marine Littoral Regiments and the U.S. Army’s Mid-Range Capability, a land-based missile launcher system that was recently deployed to the Philippines.

A conventional triad would impose asymmetric challenges on any U.S. adversary.

To support this new force structure, the United States will need more advanced communications and surveillance systems. These could take the form of a large array of satellites or clusters of satellites that would be resilient to Chinese attack, especially when augmented by large numbers of uncrewed aerial vehicles that can detect adversarial forces and serve as nodes for communication. Each component of the triad must also be equipped with deep magazines of the medium- and intermediate-range conventional cruise and ballistic missiles—especially antiship missiles—that China already possesses in the many thousands.

Constructed in this way, the U.S. conventional force would impose asymmetric challenges on any adversary. For one thing, it would cost an adversary much more to discover and destroy U.S. forces in all three domains than it would cost the United States to operate those forces. The munitions that those mobile platforms carry are likewise usually cheaper to employ than to defend against because of the speed of ballistic missiles and the maneuverability of cruise missiles. The difficulty of finding and defending against these platforms and their weapons essentially ensures that a significant proportion of the force would survive a first strike and thus be able to launch a second. China and the United States are also both developing hypersonic weapons, which, although costly, are likely to make missiles even harder to defend against by combining the properties of speed and maneuverability.

Should a major conflict break out between China and the United States, the ability of the United States to protect its conventional forces and provide an assured second strike would also reduce its number of losses relative to China’s. This could be crucial in a contest against a state with vast economic, technological, and industrial resources. Since neither side would be able to achieve a total victory akin to the Allied defeat of Japan and Germany in World War II, the United States’ ability to minimize its losses and reconstitute its forces and preparedness, especially relative to China’s ability to do the same, would become a salient measure of success. By contrast, a conflict in which the United States successfully defended against a first attack but at such a high cost that it could not defend against a second would put it at a long-term disadvantage. Survivable combat capabilities are therefore essential not only to deterrence but also to guaranteeing a stable postconflict balance should deterrence fail.

BALANCING ACT

The principle of an assured second strike has underpinned nuclear stability for more than half a century. Because of advances in technology, this logic increasingly applies at the conventional level. If the United States is to retain the credible ability to defeat and thereby deter a Chinese attempt to revise the East Asian political order by military means, U.S. conventional forces will need to develop an assured second-strike capability. By reducing incentives on both sides to strike first, such a capability would also reduce the likelihood of inadvertent and potentially catastrophic escalation.

The Defense Department and Congress have taken important steps to increase the production of conventionally armed submarines, bombers, and mobile missile launchers and to develop resilient communications and surveillance infrastructure. There is broad bipartisan support for developing mobile land-based long-range missile capabilities through the army’s Multi-Domain Task Forces and the Marines’ Littoral Regiments and for expanding the production of U.S. attack submarines beyond two per year. There is also significant backing for expanding procurement of long-range weapons, such as the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile Extended Range and the Tomahawk cruise missile. The air force, for its part, has long recognized the importance of the B-21 strategic bomber and continues to develop options to use cargo aircraft such as the C-17 and C-130 as large-capacity munitions launchers. And the Defense Department’s efforts to expand its use of proliferated satellite constellations such as Starlink will enable all its fighting forces to better communicate with one another, detect adversaries, and coordinate attacks, among other essential functions.

The Defense Department has also made recent efforts to accelerate the development of low-cost autonomous systems, such as uncrewed aerial and underwater vehicles. These include the Replicator initiative, the department’s program to develop and field these systems, and the “Hellscape” concept for the systems’ use in the Indo-Pacific. By fielding large numbers of relatively inexpensive drones, these programs offer important ways to offset China’s numerical advantages in military assets. And if positioned close to the adversary, these systems could potentially respond to an attack more quickly than U.S. ships or planes that would have to travel from Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, or the West Coast of the continental United States. For now, however, Replicator-type systems are a specific solution to the specific problem of defending U.S. partners close to China on short notice. As Paparo told The Washington Post in June 2024, Hellscape is intended primarily to buy time—to make the lives of Chinese troops “utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything.”

At Airshow China in Zhuhai, China, November 2024 Tingshu Wang / Reuters

The “rest” of the task, which involves a broad reconfiguring of U.S. forces in the western Pacific, remains a work in progress. U.S. submarine and munitions industrial bases remain sclerotic and are improving only slowly and at significant cost. The construction of 100 or more B-21 bombers will take a decade or longer. Boeing stopped building C-17s in 2015, and the air force’s plans for its next-generation cargo transports remain in infancy. Meanwhile, the ultimate range and capacity of the mobile land-based firing capabilities of the army and the Marine Corps have not yet been fully determined. To keep pace with China’s continued missile development, all these force levels would have to be greatly increased.

The constraints and challenges that stand in the way of developing these capabilities are real. But China is not slowing its efforts to expand its conventional precision-strike arsenal, and the threat posed to U.S. allies and partners in the western Pacific by China’s military modernization is not going away. If the United States perceives the current security architecture in the region as a vital interest, it must be prepared to build a stable conventional deterrence equilibrium that will endure for as long as it expects China to be a military challenger.

Construction of a conventional triad would not only produce a more powerful deterrent but also lower the risks of rapid conventional or even nuclear escalation if deterrence fails. Just as U.S. strategists during the Cold War discovered when the Soviets achieved nuclear parity, their successors facing a world of long-range precision-guided conventional weapons today may find that a stable balance of deterrence remains possible. It will depend, however, on U.S. forces acquiring a credible and assured conventional second-strike capability. This will force Washington to make difficult choices amid sharp political and budgetary debates. But the approach is feasible. And the alternative—increasing levels of risk to U.S. forces, to deterrence in the western Pacific, and to crisis stability—is not one the United States can afford to accept.

ANDREW S. LIM is a Foreign Affairs Specialist in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. The views expressed here are his own.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Andrew S. Lim · April 22, 2025

11. The Rise and Fall of Great-Power Competition – Trump’s New Spheres of Influence

Excerpts:

After the Concert was established, the European powers remained at peace for almost 40 years. This was a stunning achievement on a continent that had been wrecked by great-power conflict for centuries. In that sense, the Concert might offer a viable framework for an increasingly multipolar world. But getting there would require a story that involves less collusion and more collaboration, a narrative in which great powers act in concert to advance not merely their own interests but broader ones, as well.

What made the original Concert possible was the presence of like-minded leaders who shared a collective interest in continental governance and the aim of avoiding another catastrophic war. The Concert also had rules to manage great-power competition. These were not the rules of the liberal international order, which sought to supplant power politics with legal procedures. They were, rather, jointly generated “rules of thumb” that guided the great powers as they negotiated conflict. They established norms about when they would intervene in conflicts, how they would apportion territory, and who would be responsible for the public goods that would maintain the peace. Finally, the original Concert vision embraced formal deliberation and moral suasion as the key mechanism of collaborative foreign policy. The Concert relied on forums that brought the great powers into discussions about their collective interests.

It is hard to imagine Trump crafting that sort of arrangement. Trump seems to believe he can build a concert not through genuine collaboration but through transactional dealmaking, relying on threats and bribes to push his partners toward collusion. And as a habitual transgressor of rules and norms, Trump seems unlikely to stick to any parameters that might mitigate the conflicts among great powers that would inevitably crop up. Nor is it easy to imagine Putin and Xi as enlightened partners, embracing self-abnegation and settling differences in the name of the greater good.

It is worth remembering how the Concert of Europe ended: first with a series of limited wars on the continent, then with imperial conflicts erupting overseas, and, finally, with the outbreak of World War I. The system was ill equipped to prevent confrontation when competition intensified. And when careful collaboration devolved into mere collusion, the concert narrative became a fairy tale. The system came crashing down in a paroxysm of raw power politics, and the world was set ablaze.

The Rise and Fall of Great-Power Competition

Foreign Affairs · by More by Stacie E. Goddard · April 22, 2025

Trump’s New Spheres of Influence

Stacie E. Goddard

May/June 2025 Published on April 22, 2025

Ed Johnson

STACIE E. GODDARD is Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of Political Science and Associate Provost at Wellesley College.

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“After being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned.” So declared the National Security Strategy that President Donald Trump released in 2017, capturing in a single line the story that American foreign policymakers have spent the last decade telling themselves and the world. In the post–Cold War era, the United States generally sought to cooperate with other powers whenever possible and embed them in an American-led global order. But in the mid-2010s, a new consensus took hold. The era of cooperation was over, and U.S. strategy had to focus on Washington’s contests with its major rivals, China and Russia. The main priority of American foreign policy was clear: stay ahead of them.

Washington’s rivals “are contesting our geopolitical advantages and trying to change the international order in their favor,” Trump’s 2017 document explained. As a result, his National Defense Strategy argued the following year, interstate strategic competition had become “the primary concern in U.S. national security.” When Trump’s bitter rival Joe Biden took office as president in 2021, some aspects of U.S. foreign policy changed dramatically. But great-power competition remained the leitmotif. In 2022, Biden’s National Security Strategy warned that “the most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy.” The only answer, it argued, was to “out-compete” China and constrain an aggressive Russia.

Some hailed this consensus on great-power competition; others lamented it. But as Russia amped up its aggression in Ukraine, China made clear its designs on Taiwan, and the two autocratic powers deepened their ties and collaborated more closely with other U.S. rivals, few predicted that Washington would abandon competition as its guiding light. As Trump returned to the White House in 2025, many analysts expected continuity: a “Trump-Biden-Trump foreign policy,” as the title of an essay in Foreign Affairs described it.

Then came the first two months of Trump’s second term. With astonishing speed, Trump has shattered the consensus he helped create. Rather than compete with China and Russia, Trump now wants to work with them, seeking deals that, during his first term, would have seemed antithetical to U.S. interests. Trump has made clear that he supports a swift end to the war in Ukraine, even if it requires publicly humiliating the Ukrainians while embracing Russia and allowing it to claim vast swaths of Ukraine.

Relations remain more tense with China, especially as Trump’s tariffs come into effect and the threat of Chinese retaliation looms. But Trump has signaled that he seeks a wide-ranging settlement with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Anonymous Trump advisers told The New York Times that Trump would like to sit down “man to man” with Xi to hammer out terms governing trade, investment, and nuclear arms. All the while, Trump has ramped up economic pressure on U.S. allies in Europe and on Canada (which he hopes to coerce into becoming “the 51st state”) and has threatened to seize Greenland and the Panama Canal. Almost overnight, the United States went from competing with its aggressive adversaries to bullying its mild-mannered allies.

Some observers, trying to make sense of Trump’s behavior, have tried to put his policies firmly back in the box of great-power competition. In this view, moving closer to Russian President Vladimir Putin is great-power politics at its finest—even a “reverse Kissinger,” designed to split apart the Chinese-Russian partnership. Others have suggested that Trump is simply pursuing a more nationalistic style of great-power competition, one that would make sense to Xi and Putin, as well as India’s Narendra Modi and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.

These interpretations might have been persuasive in January. But it should now be clear that Trump’s vision of the world is not one of great-power competition but of great-power collusion: a “concert” system akin to the one that shaped Europe during the nineteenth century. What Trump wants is a world managed by strongmen who work together—not always harmoniously but always purposefully—to impose a shared vision of order on the rest of the world. This does not mean that the United States will stop competing with China and Russia altogether: great-power competition as a feature of international politics is enduring and undeniable. But great-power competition as the organizing principle for American foreign policy has proved remarkably shallow and short-lived. And yet if history sheds any light on Trump’s new approach, it is that things may end badly.

WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

Although competing with major rivals was central to Trump’s first term and Biden’s term, it’s important to note that “great-power competition” never described a coherent strategy. To have a strategy suggests that leaders have defined concrete ends or metrics of success. During the Cold War, for example, Washington sought to increase its power in order to contain Soviet expansion and influence. In the contemporary era, by contrast, the struggle for power has often seemed like an end in itself. Although Washington identified its rivals, it rarely specified when, how, and for what reason competition was taking place. As a result, the concept was exceedingly elastic. “Great-power competition” could explain Trump’s threats to abandon NATO unless European countries increased defense spending, since doing so could protect American security interests from free-riding. But the term could also apply to Biden’s reinvestment in NATO, which sought to revitalize an alliance of democracies against Russian and Chinese influence.

Rather than defining a specific strategy, great-power competition represented a potent narrative of world politics, one that provides essential insight into how U.S. policymakers saw themselves and the world around them, and how they wanted others to perceive them. In this story, the main character was the United States. Sometimes, the country was cast as a strong and imposing hero, with unparalleled economic vitality and military might. But Washington could also be presented as a victim, as in Trump’s 2017 strategy document, which portrayed the United States operating in a “dangerous world” with rival powers “aggressively undermining American interests around the globe.” At times, there was a supporting cast: for example, a community of democracies that, in Biden’s view, was a necessary partner in ensuring global economic prosperity and the protection of human rights.

China and Russia, in turn, served as the primary antagonists. Although there were cameos by other foils—Iran, North Korea, and an array of nonstate actors—Beijing and Moscow stood out as the perpetrators of a plot to weaken the United States. Here again, some of the details varied depending on who was telling the story. For Trump, the tale was grounded in national interests: these revisionist powers sought to “erode American security and prosperity.” Under Biden, the focus shifted from interests to ideals, from security to order. Washington had to compete with the major autocratic powers to ensure the safety of democracy and the resilience of the rules-based international order.

But for nearly a decade, the broad narrative arc remained the same: aggressive antagonists were seeking to harm American interests, and Washington had to respond. Once this vision of the world was in place, it imbued events with particular meanings. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was an attack not just on Ukraine but also on the U.S.-led order. China’s military buildup in the South China Sea represented not a defense of Beijing’s core interests but an attempt to expand Beijing’s influence in the Indo-Pacific at Washington’s expense. Great-power competition meant that technology could not be neutral and that the United States needed to push China out of Europe’s 5G networks and limit Beijing’s access to semiconductors. Foreign aid and infrastructure projects in African countries were not simply instruments of development but weapons in the battle for primacy. The World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, even the UN World Tourism Organization all became arenas in a contest for supremacy. Everything, it seemed, was now great-power competition.

CONCERT TICKETS

In his first term, Trump emerged as one of the most compelling bards of great-power competition. “Our rivals are tough, they’re tenacious, and committed to the long term—but so are we,” he said in a speech in 2017. “To succeed, we must integrate every dimension of our national strength, and we must compete with every instrument of our national power.” (Announcing his candidacy for president two years earlier, he was more characteristically blunt: “I beat China all the time. All the time.”)

But having returned to office for a second term, Trump has changed tack. His approach remains abrasive and confrontational. He does not hesitate to threaten punishment—often economic—to force others to do what he wants. Instead of trying to beat China and Russia, however, Trump now wants to persuade them to work with him to manage international order. What he is telling now is a narrative of collusion, not competition; a story of acting in concert. After a call with Xi in mid-January, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “We will solve many problems together, and starting immediately. We discussed balancing Trade, fentanyl, TikTok, and many other subjects. President Xi and I will do everything possible to make the World more peaceful and safe!” Addressing business leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, that month, Trump mused that “China can help us stop the war with, in particular, Russia-Ukraine. And they have a great deal of power over that situation, and we’ll work with them.”

Writing on Truth Social about a phone call with Putin in February, Trump reported, “We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II. . . . We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.” In March, as members of Trump’s administration negotiated with Russian counterparts over the fate of Ukraine, Moscow made clear its view of a potential future. “We can emerge with a model that will allow Russia and the United States, and Russia and NATO, to coexist without interfering in each other’s spheres of interests,” Feodor Voitolovsky, a scholar who serves on advisory boards at the Russian Foreign Ministry and Security Council, told The New York Times. The Russian side understands that Trump grasps this prospect “as a businessman,” Voitolovsky added. Around the same time, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, a real estate magnate who has been heavily involved in the negotiations with Russia, mused about the possibilities for U.S.-Russian collaboration in an interview with the commentator Tucker Carlson. “Share sea lanes, maybe send [liquefied natural] gas into Europe together, maybe collaborate on AI together,” Witkoff said. “Who doesn’t want to see a world like that?”

In pursuing accommodations with rivals, Trump may be breaking with recent convention, but he is tapping into a deeply rooted tradition. The notion that rival great powers should come together to manage a chaotic international system is one that leaders have embraced at many points in history, often in the wake of catastrophic wars that left them seeking to establish a more controlled, reliable, and resilient order. In 1814–15, in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars that engulfed Europe for almost a quarter century, the major European powers assembled in Vienna with the aim of forging a more stable and peaceful order than the one produced by the balance-of-power system of the eighteenth century, where great-power war occurred practically every decade. The result was “the Concert of Europe,” a group that initially included Austria, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom. In 1818, France was invited to join.

Trump may be breaking with recent convention, but he is tapping into a deep tradition.

As mutually recognized great powers, members of the Concert were endowed with special rights and responsibilities to mitigate destabilizing conflicts in the European system. If territorial disputes arose, instead of seeking to exploit them to expand their own power, the European leaders would meet to seek a negotiated solution to the conflict. Russia had long eyed expansion into the Ottoman Empire, and in 1821, the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule seemed to provide Russia with a significant opportunity to do just that. In response, Austria and the United Kingdom called for restraint, arguing that a Russian intervention would wreak havoc on the European order. Russia backed down, with Tsar Alexander I promising, “It is for me to show myself convinced of the principles on which I founded the alliance.” At other times, when revolutionary nationalist movements threatened the order, the great powers convened to guarantee a diplomatic settlement, even if it meant forgoing significant gains.

For around four decades, the Concert channeled great-power competition into collaboration. Yet by the end of the century, the system had collapsed. It had proved unable to prevent conflict among its members, and over the course of three wars, Prussia systemically defeated Austria and France and consolidated its position as the head of a unified Germany, upending the stable balance of power. Meanwhile, intensifying imperial competition in Africa and Asia proved too much for the Concert to manage.

But the idea that great powers could and should take on the responsibility of collectively steering international politics took hold and reemerged from time to time. The concert idea guided U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China as “the Four Policemen” who would secure the world in the aftermath of World War II. The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev imagined a post–Cold War world in which the Soviet Union would continue to be recognized as a great power, working with its former enemies to help order Europe’s security environment. And as Washington’s relative power appeared to wane at the beginning of this century, some observers urged the United States to cooperate with Brazil, China, India, and Russia to provide a similar modicum of stability in an emerging post-hegemonic world.

CARVING UP THE WORLD

Trump’s interest in a great-power concert does not derive from a deep understanding of this history. His affection for it rests on impulse. Trump seems to see foreign relations much as he sees the worlds of real estate and entertainment, but on a larger scale. As in those industries, a select group of power brokers are in constant competition—not as mortal enemies, but as respected equals. Each is in charge of an empire that he may manage as he sees fit. China, Russia, and the United States may jockey for advantage in various ways, but they understand that they exist within—and are in charge of—a shared system. For that reason, the great powers must collude, even as they compete. Trump sees Xi and Putin as “smart, tough” leaders who “love their country.” He has stressed that he gets along well with them and treats them as equals, despite the fact that the United States remains more powerful than China and far stronger than Russia. As with the Concert of Europe, it is the perception of equality that matters: in 1815, Austria and Prussia were no material match for Russia and the United Kingdom but were accommodated as equals nonetheless.

In Trump’s concert story, the United States is neither a hero nor a victim of the international system, obligated to defend its liberal principles to the rest of the world. In his second inaugural address, Trump promised that the United States would lead the world again not through its ideals but through its ambitions. With a drive to greatness, he promised, would come material power and an ability “to bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable.” What has become clear in the weeks since he gave this speech is that the unity Trump seeks is primarily with China and Russia.

In the great-power-competition narrative, those countries were positioned as implacable enemies, ideologically opposed to the U.S.-led order. In the concert narrative, China and Russia no longer appear as pure antagonists but as potential partners, working with Washington to preserve their collective interests. This is not to say that concert partners become close friends; far from it. A concert order will continue to see competition as each of these strongmen angles for superiority. But each recognizes that conflicts among themselves must be muted so that they can confront the real enemy: the forces of disorder.

Chinese and Russian foreign ministers Wang Yi and Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, April 2025 Pavel Bednyakov / Reuters

It was precisely this story about the dangers of counterrevolutionary forces that laid the foundations for the Concert of Europe. The great powers set aside their ideological differences, recognizing that the revolutionary nationalist forces that the French Revolution had unleashed posed more of a threat to Europe than their narrower rivalries ever could. In Trump’s vision of a new concert, Russia and China must be treated as kindred spirits in quelling rampant disorder and worrisome social change. The United States will continue to compete with its peers, especially with China on issues of trade, but not at the expense of aiding the forces that Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, have called “enemies within”: illegal immigrants, Islamist terrorists, “woke” progressives, European-style socialists, and sexual minorities.

For a concert of powers to work, members must be able to pursue their own ambitions without trampling on the rights of their peers (trampling on the rights of others, in contrast, is both acceptable and necessary to maintaining order). This means organizing the world into distinct spheres of influence, boundaries that demarcate the spaces where a great power has the right to practice unfettered expansion and domination. In the Concert of Europe, great powers allowed their peers to intervene within recognized spheres of influence, as when Austria crushed a revolution in Naples in 1821, and when Russia brutally suppressed Polish nationalism, as it did repeatedly throughout the nineteenth century.

In the logic of a contemporary concert, it would be reasonable for the United States to allow Russia to permanently seize Ukrainian territory to prevent what Moscow sees as a threat to regional security. It would make sense for the United States to remove “military forces or weapons systems from the Philippines in exchange for the China Coast Guard executing fewer patrols,” as the scholar Andrew Byers proposed in 2024, shortly before Trump appointed him deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia. A concert mindset would even leave open the idea that the United States would stand aside if China decided to take control of Taiwan. In return, Trump would expect Beijing and Moscow to remain on the sidelines as he threatened Canada, Greenland, and Panama.

Just as a concert narrative gives the great powers the right to order the system as they wish, it limits the ability of others to have their voices heard. The great European powers of the nineteenth century cared little for the interests of smaller powers, even on issues of vital importance. In 1818, after a decade of revolution in South America, Spain was faced with the final collapse of its empire in the Western Hemisphere. The great powers met in Aix-la-Chapelle to decide the fate of the empire and to debate whether they should intervene to restore monarchical power. Spain, notably, was not invited to the bargaining table. Likewise, Trump seems to have little interest in giving Ukraine a role in negotiations over its fate and even less desire to bring European allies into the process: he and Putin and their various proxies will sort it out by “dividing up certain assets,” Trump has said. Kyiv will just have to live with the results.

THE SUM OF ALL SPHERES

In some instances, Washington should see Beijing and even Moscow as partners. For example, revitalizing arms control would be a welcome development, one that requires more collaboration than a narrative of great-power competition would have allowed. And in this respect, the concert narrative can be alluring. By turning over global order to strongmen running powerful countries, perhaps the world could enjoy relative peace and stability instead of conflict and disorder. But this narrative distorts the realities of power politics and obscures the challenges of acting in concert.

For one thing, although Trump might think that spheres of influence would be easy to delineate and manage, they are not. Even at the height of the Concert period, the powers struggled to define the boundaries of their influence. Austria and Prussia consistently clashed over control of the German Confederation. France and Britain struggled for dominance in the Low Countries. More recent attempts to establish spheres of influence have proved no less problematic. At the Yalta Conference in 1945, Roosevelt, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill envisioned peacefully co-managing the post–World War II world. Instead, they soon found themselves battling at the boundaries of their respective spheres, first at the core of the new order, in Germany, and later at the peripheries in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. Today, thanks to the economic interdependence brought on by globalization, it would be even more difficult for powers to neatly divide the world. Complex supply chains and streams of foreign direct investment would defy clear boundaries. And problems such as pandemics, climate change, and nuclear proliferation hardly exist inside an enclosed sphere, where a single great power can contain them.

Trump seems to think a more transactional approach can circumvent ideological differences that might otherwise pose obstacles to cooperation with China and Russia. But despite the ostensible unity of great powers, concerts often mask rather than mitigate ideological frictions. It did not take long for such rifts to emerge within the Concert of Europe. During its early years, the conservative powers, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, formed their own exclusive grouping, the Holy Alliance, to protect their dynastic systems. They saw the revolts against Spanish rule in the Americas as an existential threat, one whose outcome would reverberate across Europe, and as thus requiring an immediate response to restore order. But leaders in the more liberal United Kingdom saw the rebellions as fundamentally liberal, and although they worried about the power vacuum that could arise in their wake, the British were not inclined to intervene. Ultimately, the British worked with an upstart liberal country—the United States—to cordon off the Western Hemisphere from European intervention, tacitly supporting the Monroe Doctrine with British naval might.

Concerts often mask rather than mitigate ideological frictions.

It is not a stretch to imagine similar ideological battles in a new concert. Trump might care little about how Xi managed his sphere of influence, but images of China’s using force to crush Taiwan’s democracy would likely galvanize opposition in the United States and elsewhere, just as Russia’s aggression against Ukraine angered democratic publics. So far, Trump has been able to essentially reverse U.S. policy on Ukraine and Russia without paying any political price. But an Economist-YouGov poll conducted in mid-March found that 47 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of the war, and 49 percent disapproved of his overall foreign policy.

When great powers attempt to suppress challenges to a prevailing order, they often provoke a backlash, spawning efforts to break their grasp on power. National and transnational movements can chip away at a concert. In nineteenth-century Europe, the nationalist revolutionary forces that the great powers attempted to contain not only became stronger throughout the century but also forged ties with one another. By 1848, they were strong enough to mount coordinated revolutions across Europe. Although these revolts were put down, they unleashed forces that would ultimately deal a fatal blow to the Concert in the wars of German unification in the 1860s.

The concert narrative suggests that great powers can act jointly to keep the forces of instability at bay indefinitely. Both common sense and history say otherwise. Today, Russia and the United States might successfully impose order in Ukraine, negotiating a new territorial boundary and freezing that conflict. Doing so might produce a temporary lull but probably wouldn’t generate a lasting peace, since Ukraine is unlikely to forget about its lost territory and Putin is unlikely to be satisfied with his current lot for long. The Middle East stands out as another region where great-power collusion is unlikely to foster stability and peace. Even if they were working together harmoniously, it is difficult to see how Washington, Beijing, and Moscow would be able to broker an end to the war in Gaza, head off a nuclear confrontation with Iran, and stabilize post-Assad Syria.

A screen promoting the Russian armed forces in Moscow, February 2025 Yulia Morozova / Reuters

Challenges would also come from other states, especially from rising “middle” powers. In the nineteenth century, rising powers such as Japan demanded entrance to the great-power club and equal footing on issues such as trade. The most repressive form of European domination, colonial governance, eventually produced fierce resistance all over the world. Today, an international hierarchy would be even more difficult to sustain. There is little recognition among smaller countries that the great powers have any special rights to dictate a world order. Middle powers have already created their own institutions—multilateral free trade agreements, regional security organizations—that can facilitate collective resistance. Europe has struggled to build its own independent defenses but is likely to double down to provide for its own security and to aid Ukraine. Over the last several years, Japan has built up its own networks of influence in the Indo-Pacific, positioning itself as a power more capable of independent diplomatic action in that region. India is unlikely to accept any exclusion from the great-power order, especially if that means the growth of China’s power along its border.

To deal with all the problems that great-power collusion poses, it helps to have the skills of an Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian leader who found ways to manipulate the Concert of Europe to his advantage. Bismarck’s diplomacy could even pull apart ideologically aligned allies. As Prussia prepared to go to war against Denmark to wrest control of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864, Bismarck’s appeals to Concert rules and existing treaties sidelined the United Kingdom, whose leaders had pledged to secure the integrity of the Danish kingdom. He exploited colonial competition in Africa, positioning himself as an “honest broker” between France and the United Kingdom. Bismarck was opposed to the liberal, nationalist forces that were sweeping through mid-nineteenth-century Europe and was thus a reactionary conservative—but not a reactive one. He thought carefully about when to crush revolutionary movements and when to harness them, as he did in his pursuit of German unification. He was incredibly ambitious but not beholden to expansionist impulses, and often opted for restraint. He saw no need to pursue an empire on the African continent, for example, since that would only draw Germany into a conflict with France and the United Kingdom.

Alas, most leaders, despite how they might see themselves, are not Bismarcks. Many more closely resemble Napoleon III. The French ruler came to power as the 1848 revolutions were winding down and believed that he had an exceptional capacity to use the Concert system for his own ends. He attempted to drive a wedge between Austria and Prussia to expand his own influence in the German Confederation, and he tried to organize a grand conference to redraw European boundaries to reflect national movements. But he thoroughly failed. Vain and emotional, susceptible to flattery and shame, he found himself either abandoned by great-power peers or manipulated into doing the bidding of others. As a result, Bismarck found in Napoleon III the dupe he needed to push German unification forward.

In a present-day concert, how might Trump fare as a leader? It’s possible he could emerge as a Bismarckian figure, bullying and bluffing his way into advantageous concessions from other great powers. But he might also get played, winding up like Napoleon III, outmaneuvered by wilier rivals.

COOPERATION OR COLLUSION?

After the Concert was established, the European powers remained at peace for almost 40 years. This was a stunning achievement on a continent that had been wrecked by great-power conflict for centuries. In that sense, the Concert might offer a viable framework for an increasingly multipolar world. But getting there would require a story that involves less collusion and more collaboration, a narrative in which great powers act in concert to advance not merely their own interests but broader ones, as well.

What made the original Concert possible was the presence of like-minded leaders who shared a collective interest in continental governance and the aim of avoiding another catastrophic war. The Concert also had rules to manage great-power competition. These were not the rules of the liberal international order, which sought to supplant power politics with legal procedures. They were, rather, jointly generated “rules of thumb” that guided the great powers as they negotiated conflict. They established norms about when they would intervene in conflicts, how they would apportion territory, and who would be responsible for the public goods that would maintain the peace. Finally, the original Concert vision embraced formal deliberation and moral suasion as the key mechanism of collaborative foreign policy. The Concert relied on forums that brought the great powers into discussions about their collective interests.

It is hard to imagine Trump crafting that sort of arrangement. Trump seems to believe he can build a concert not through genuine collaboration but through transactional dealmaking, relying on threats and bribes to push his partners toward collusion. And as a habitual transgressor of rules and norms, Trump seems unlikely to stick to any parameters that might mitigate the conflicts among great powers that would inevitably crop up. Nor is it easy to imagine Putin and Xi as enlightened partners, embracing self-abnegation and settling differences in the name of the greater good.

It is worth remembering how the Concert of Europe ended: first with a series of limited wars on the continent, then with imperial conflicts erupting overseas, and, finally, with the outbreak of World War I. The system was ill equipped to prevent confrontation when competition intensified. And when careful collaboration devolved into mere collusion, the concert narrative became a fairy tale. The system came crashing down in a paroxysm of raw power politics, and the world was set ablaze.

Foreign Affairs · by More by Stacie E. Goddard · April 22, 2025

12. How Donald Trump dismantled US-led global order in 100 days

Excerpts:

The US remains, by most measures, the world’s most powerful country and Trump has vowed to strengthen it further by aggressively promoting domestic business and ramping up military spending.

But the Republican billionaire offers a far more unilateralist vision than any modern US president.

Reviving views long seen as antiquated, Trump has vowed US expansionism, setting sights on the Panama Canal, Greenland and Canada, which he has belittled as the “51st state”.

In another throwback, Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on both friends and foes – a step that was mostly suspended following a market rout, except against China, which is seen as Washington’s top adversary.

Yet the property tycoon turned president who boasts of his deal making skills has also been open to reaching transactional agreements with rivals, including China and Russia.

He and Vice-President J.D. Vance have been less committed to maintaining post-second world war security guarantees to allies, especially in Europe, seeing the region’s developed countries as commercial competitors who are freeloading on US defence.

“His initiatives are shattering what we have known, certainly since World War II,” said Melvyn Leffler, a historian of US foreign policy at the University of Virginia.

“I think Trump is a return to late 19th-century Social Darwinism, in which he believes all nations are embroiled in a struggle for survival of the fittest,” he said.

How Donald Trump dismantled US-led global order in 100 days

With China on the rise, a historian expects the US president’s actions to ‘portend a new trajectory’ in world affairs

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3307382/how-donald-trump-dismantled-us-led-global-order-100-days?module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article

Agence France-Presse

Published: 10:30am, 22 Apr 2025

For eight decades the United States has built a global order around its interests and values. In 100 days, Donald Trump has torn it down.

The US remains, by most measures, the world’s most powerful country and Trump has vowed to strengthen it further by aggressively promoting domestic business and ramping up military spending.

But the Republican billionaire offers a far more unilateralist vision than any modern US president.

Reviving views long seen as antiquated, Trump has vowed US expansionism, setting sights on the Panama Canal, Greenland and Canada, which he has belittled as the “51st state”.

In another throwback, Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on both friends and foes – a step that was mostly suspended following a market rout, except against China, which is seen as Washington’s top adversary.

Yet the property tycoon turned president who boasts of his deal making skills has also been open to reaching transactional agreements with rivals, including China and Russia.

He and Vice-President J.D. Vance have been less committed to maintaining post-second world war security guarantees to allies, especially in Europe, seeing the region’s developed countries as commercial competitors who are freeloading on US defence.

“His initiatives are shattering what we have known, certainly since World War II,” said Melvyn Leffler, a historian of US foreign policy at the University of Virginia.

“I think Trump is a return to late 19th-century Social Darwinism, in which he believes all nations are embroiled in a struggle for survival of the fittest,” he said.

“I think what is most fundamentally important is that Trump does not believe in the concepts of mutual interdependence, shared values and common interests, even with allies.”

The full heated argument between Zelensky, Trump and Vance

Trump, showing a distaste for soft power, has killed more than 80 per cent of US overseas help and has eyed major cuts in diplomatic staff in Africa.

But he also said in his January 20 inaugural address that his ultimate ambition was to be a “peacemaker” – a role in which his success rate is decidedly mixed.

Trump had vowed to end the Ukraine war on his first day back in the White House.

On Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the US may “move on” from seeking a Ukraine solution, after talks initiated by Washington have failed to lead to concrete outcomes.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has rebuffed calls for a complete truce, even as he relishes the shift in US tone on Ukraine – seen most dramatically in a February 28 White House showdown where Trump and Vance publicly accused President Volodymyr Zelensky of being an ingrate.

Trump spoke proudly of how his globe-trotting envoy Steve Witkoff helped secure a Gaza ceasefire shortly before the inauguration, using the outline of a plan prepared by outgoing president Joe Biden’s team.

Israel has now resumed military operations in Gaza, vowing a death blow to Hamas over its October 7, 2023 attack, and blocking aid to the Palestinian territory, leading to the worst humanitarian situation since the start of the war.

Trump, however, appears for the moment to have restrained Israel from a strike on Iran, with Witkoff holding two friendly meetings with Tehran on seeking a deal on its contested nuclear programme.

After defeating Trump in 2020, Biden vowed to restore the US’ global role, especially with allies.

Trump pauses US tariffs on most nations for 90 days but raises levies on China to 125%

The extent of the tumult induced by Trump in his second term – and the reaction to it – is far wider-reaching.

After Trump’s dressing down of Zelensky, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said that “the free world needs a new leader”

Faith in US policymaking has historically been so strong that the dollar gains during times of crisis, with investors turning to US Treasury bonds.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the dollar has slipped nine per cent against a basket of other major currencies.

The trend is largely welcomed in Trump’s circles. Vance has blamed foreign investors for keeping the dollar high at the expense of US manufacturers.

Prime Minister Lawrence Wong of Singapore, long a major US partner in Asia, said Trump’s tariff announcement showed that “the era of rules-based globalisation and free trade is over” after having America as its “anchor” for eight decades.

Wong noted that the US has fared better than other advanced countries but acknowledged the Americans who lived in “hollowed-out towns” and felt the economy is “fundamentally broken”.

Leffler, the historian, said that many Americans had lost faith in the system based around a globalised economy, promoted by presidents of both major parties.

With China also on the rise, Leffler expected Trump’s actions to “portend a new trajectory” in world affairs.

“I do not believe the United States will return to the same type of liberal, global, hegemonic order that has existed more or less from 1945,” he said.

13. USMC Anti-Ship Missile Deployment To Highly Strategic Luzon Strait Is Unprecedented

USMC Anti-Ship Missile Deployment To Highly Strategic Luzon Strait Is Unprecedented

From the Batanes Islands, Naval Strike Missiles would be able to engage any surface vessel transiting the channel between Taiwan and the Philippines.

Tyler Rogoway

Published Apr 21, 2025 4:31 PM EDT

179

twz.com · by Tyler Rogoway

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The U.S. Marine Corps is deploying its Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) armed with Naval Strike Missiles into the heart of one of the world’s most strategic and tense bodies of water — the Luzon Strait. It will be the closest to the Chinese mainland that U.S. land-based cruise missiles have been deployed.

The Luzon Strait sits between Taiwan and the Philippines and is roughly 220 miles across at its narrowest point. It is a critical shipping artery and also an incredibly important military conduit, especially for China’s rapidly growing fleet. It’s from here that assets based in the South China Sea can access the Philippine Sea and the greater Pacific, and vice versa. This includes China’s growing fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, some of which provide the country’s second-strike nuclear deterrent. It’s also a key path for the U.S. Navy to access the South China Sea. The stretch of water is also a primary area where a major battle over Taiwan would be fought. As a result, the choke point formed by the strait is very heavily monitored for activity above and below the waves. In a conflict, it will instantly become an anti-ship super missile engagement zone (SMEZ).

A map showing the region in relation to the Luzon Strait. The arrow points to the Batanes Islands that sit in the middle of the strait. Controlled by the Philippines, the NMESIS system and other USMC capabilities are heading there. (Google Earth)

The deployment of the USMC’s new land-based anti-ship missile systems, as well as other assets, including organic ground-based air defenses, will come as part of Exercise Balikatan ’25 — the 40th iteration of the annual drills. The 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment (MLR), designed to fight within an enemy’s own watery backyard, will be a key U.S. player in the exercise, which will include some 14,000 personnel, predominantly from the U.S. and Philippine armed forces. Smaller contingents from Australia and Japan will also be taking part, which is a first for the latter country.

A Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System launcher deploys into position aboard Pacific Missile Range Facility Barking Sands, Hawaii, Aug. 16, 2021. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Maj. Nick Mannweiler, released) Maj. Nicholas Mannweiler

For Balikatan ’25, 3rd MLR’s unique capabilities, including its NSMs, will be heading to Northern Luzon and the Batanes Islands in the Philippines, the latter of which sits nearly smack-dab in the middle of the Luzon Strait. There they will be participating in drills that will include live-fire and a sinking exercise (SINKEX), although NSM launches will be simulated.

A USMC release provides additional details as to its capabilities that are going to be integrated into the exercise:

“The NMESIS will be employed during the Maritime Key Terrain Security Operations in Northern Luzon and the Batanes Islands. During this event, U.S. Marines with 3d Littoral Combat Team’s Medium-Range Missile Battery and Philippine Marines with 4th Marine Brigade will use air lift from the U.S. Army’s 25th Combat Aviation Brigade and the U.S. Air Force’s 29th Tactical Airlift Squadron to transport several NMESIS launchers from Northern Luzon to multiple islands in the Batanes island chain. Once on the islands, U.S. and Philippine Marines will work together to establish a Fires Expeditionary Advanced Base.

In Northern Luzon, the AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar, operated by 3d Littoral Anti-Air Battalion’s Tactical Air Control Element – will surveil the surrounding airspace in 3d MLR’s area of operations in support of maritime strike and airspace deconfliction. Through various communication means and methods, the sensing data collected by the G/ATOR will be sent to the Fires and Air Direction Element via tactical data links in support of the commander’s information exchange requirements. That sensing data will then transfer to the Battery Operations Center, where it will be processed into tracks and targeting data before making its way back to the Fires EAB.”

U.S. Marines with 3d Littoral Combat Team, 3d Marine Littoral Regiment, 3d Marine Division, load a Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System onto a KC-130J Super Hercules during aerial transport operations on Marine Corps Base Hawaii, Nov. 5, 2024. Aerial transport operations allow Marines to rapidly deploy and relocate the NMESIS to remote locations, enhancing flexibility and responsiveness in contested areas. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Grace Gerlach) Sgt. Grace Gerlach

The U.S. military has stationed missiles in the Philippines recently in the form of U.S. Army Typhon launchers capable of firing Tomahawk cruise missiles, as well as SM-6s that can rapidly strike targets as a quasi-ballistic missile. While Tomahawks and SM-6s possess longer range, they are not based as far forward as NMESIS and its NSMs will be. Neither of those missiles are as focused on anti-ship and sea control operations as the NSM, either.

NMESIS uses an unmanned variant of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), also known as the Remotely Operated Ground Unit Expeditionary-Fires (ROGUE-Fires), and a launcher with two ready-to-fire NSMs inside their self-contained canisters. The system is meant to be rapidly deployable and capable of highly dispersed operations in austere areas. As an uncrewed vehicle-launcher combo, small teams of Marines monitor multiple launchers dispersed around an area and move them regularly to keep them from being targeted by the enemy.

NMESIS firing an NSM during a test. (DoD)

The NSM itself is a Norwegian design from Kongsberg Defence that is now produced for the U.S. in concert with Raytheon. The missile has stealthy features to help aid in its survivability. It also uses an imaging infrared seeker for terminal-phase targeting. Emitting no radar radio frequency (RF) energy of its own, the missile screams toward its target without alerting the enemy to its presence using passive RF detection measures. The type is now equipping some U.S. Navy Littoral Combat Ships and destroyers, with the Constellation class frigates also slated to have NSMs as part of their armament package. The missiles cost about $1.9M each.

With the baseline NSM’s range of around 110 nautical miles, there is perhaps no better place for NMESIS to be. From its island position in the heart of the strait, it would be able to put any vessel transiting the waterway from the tip of Taiwan, nearly to the northern reaches of Luzon in the Philippines, and 100 miles east to west, at risk. To put it bluntly, this is what the system, and the new Marine Littoral Regiments for that matter, were designed to do. On the other hand, executing such an anti-access strategy in the Luzon Strait represents what would be among the highest risk operations an MLR could conceivably carry out.

A rough depiction of the NSM’s range from its forward operating point in the Batanes Islands. (Google Earth)

This deployment will definitely rattle Beijing, which has already expressed great ire at the deployment of the Army’s Typhon system to the Philippines. This also comes as China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is ratcheting up the pressure on Taiwan by encircling the island with multi-domain military might on a regular basis now, and massive treasure is being dumped into expanding the country’s Navy as fast as possible. Considering how critical this waterway is to China, it’s only logical that the PLA is doing everything it can to come up with a plan to neutralize such a deployment as fast as possible should hostilities break out. But targeting small truck-sized launchers using standoff weapons, even those on an island, wouldn’t be easy. This raises the cost of assuredly destroying this capability for PLA and thus making the concept more effective. This all fits in with the Marines’ Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) strategy that is rapidly evolving.

U.S. Marines with 3d Littoral Combat Team, 3d Marine Littoral Regiment, 3d Marine Division, load a Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System onto a trailer during aerial transport operations on Marine Corps Base Hawaii, Nov. 5, 2024. Aerial transport operations allow Marines to rapidly deploy and relocate the NMESIS to remote locations, enhancing flexibility and responsiveness in contested areas. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Grace Gerlach) Sgt. Grace Gerlach

Marine Lt. Gen. James Glynn, the U.S. exercise director for this year’s Balikatan, has described it as a “full battle test.”

“The full battle tests is intended to take into consideration all of the regional security challenges that we face today, beginning in the South China Sea,” he stated.

“The Balikatan exercise may probably help deter the conflict in Taiwan. But for our concern, it is only for deterrence of any possible coercion or invasion to our country,” Maj. Gen. Francisco Lorenzo of the Philippines, who is overseeing his country’s portion of the drills, said.

While the scope of the drills is impressive, the U.S. deploying land-based missiles capable of shutting down the Luzon Strait is certainly a new construct in the growing tensions between Beijing and Washington, D.C.

Balikatan ’25 began today and it will run through May 9.

A Landing Craft Air Cushioned (LCAC) assigned to Assault Craft Unit Five (ACU-5) delivers a Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System launcher to Pacific Missile Range Facility Barking Sands, Hawaii as a part of Large Scale Exercise 2021. (DoD) Senior Chief Petty Officer Justin Oxford

Contact the author: Tyler@twz.com

Tyler Rogoway

Editor-in-Chief

Tyler’s passion is the study of military technology, strategy, and foreign policy and he has fostered a dominant voice on those topics in the defense media space. He was the creator of the hugely popular defense site Foxtrot Alpha before developing The War Zone.

twz.com · by Tyler Rogoway

14. The China That Replaced Mine – A Return After Nearly a Decade to a Country That Never Stays Still

Seven insights. I wonder how a person from China who returns to the US after many years like the author returned to China would feel? Would there be some parallel or similar assessments?

Conclusion:

The Beijing I became an adult in, the people I knew, the rhythms I once moved through—they were all part of a particular chapter. What I saw in late last year is another. And there will be more.

China has been many things across centuries: empire, revolution, experiment, machine. It morphs fast, unapologetically. The only constant is change. Even the China I saw half a year ago is likely already receding in the rearview.

The one thing that stayed the same is that nothing stays the same. And maybe that’s the most honest thing I can say about it.

The 7 (VII):

I. Back in the Loop

II. Welcome to the Super App State

III. New Pavement, No Pulse

IV. The Vanishing Foreigner

V. Gen Z, A Generation Behind the Firewall

VI. From Ambition to Resignation

VII. Conclusion: China Built the Future. It Just Doesn’t Need You in It.

I. Back in the Loop

The China That Replaced Mine

A Return After Nearly a Decade to a Country That Never Stays Still

https://ncotemunoz.substack.com/p/the-china-that-replaced-mine?utm

Natalia Cote-Munoz

Apr 16, 2025

Hutong lanterns reflected against a Beijing window, October 2012 – one month after I first arrived.

I. Back in the Loop

I went back to China last September for the first time in eight years, carrying both anticipation and uncertainty about what I would find.

I hadn’t planned to wait so long. Life, work, and then the pandemic made returning impossible. By fall 2024, the window finally opened—and I jumped through it, eager to reconnect with a place that had once been home.

Getting to China in 2024 wasn’t easy. Direct flights from the U.S. had been gutted—there was only one from DC, operated by China Airlines, and it didn’t align with my travel needs. I ended up taking a long, multi-leg route that turned what used to be a 12-hour journey into a 17+ hour ordeal. The cost was also shockingly high—more than double what I used to pay back in the early 2010s. This physical distance felt symbolic: China isn’t just harder to reach metaphorically; it’s harder to reach, period.

Once in the country, I traveled for two weeks, taking high-speed trains between Beijing, Wuhan, and Shanghai. My main goal was simple: to update my mental model of China. Even though I still read the op-eds, track expert debates, and work in the U.S.-China space, I no longer trusted my gut instincts on China. Context gaps were getting wider. I needed to see it for myself.

One of the central problems in U.S.-China work today—whether you’re hawkish, dovish, or just trying to make sense of it all—is how little reliable information remains accessible. Foreign journalists have been systematically pushed out. COVID made entry nearly impossible for years. And a potent mix of tightening authoritarianism and worsening bilateral ties has choked the flow of students, researchers, and analysts able to spend time on the ground. As a result, those of us in the field are reduced to reading tea leaves from a distance, grasping at signals, operating on increasingly outdated mental models. Everyone is flying half-blind.

This would be problematic for understanding any country, but China doesn’t operate on normal time. Its scale, pace, and political volatility make it uniquely hard to track from afar. It’s one of the few countries where a five-year absence can leave you thirty years behind. I call this the “China-time math.” There’s probably an equation that captures it, but I calculate it with vibes.

But this trip wasn’t just professional. It was deeply personal. I lived in Beijing from 2012 to 2016—first studying Chinese, then doing college consulting, and later teaching current affairs at the university level. That city raised me during my formative years. It’s where I started becoming an adult, where I began dating my now-husband, and where I built friendships and started to make sense of myself in the world.

Having grown up mostly in Mexico City, I’d always felt at home in vibrant, chaotic urban environments. Beijing’s bustling hutongs and constant energy had felt familiar in that way—a different kind of chaos, but one that resonated with me.

I’d always imagined I’d return much sooner. China was supposed to be a post-college gap year before I moved back to Latin America (either Mexico, where I mostly grew up, or Colombia, where my family is from). Instead, it became four transformative years that rerouted my entire career and set me on the path I’m still walking now.

Before I went back, I knew the Beijing I had lived in was gone. The speed of change in China made that inevitable—but the warning signals had been flashing for years. Over the past decade, most of my friends—foreign and Chinese alike—had trickled out. First, they left Beijing for Shanghai, saying Beijing felt more and more like a government city and less like a hipster haven. Then they left China altogether, many between 2019 and 2022, even those who had once sworn they would stay forever.

This trip, I wanted to reconnect with the few old friends who had stayed—or who had returned. Some I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. I wanted to visit old haunts, retrace familiar paths, and see what had survived. I knew I wouldn’t find the same city, but I hoped I might still find echoes.

What follows are my impressions—now over half a year old, or about two years in China-time math. I was only there for two weeks and only in three cities, so this isn’t comprehensive. But in an era where firsthand perspectives are scarce, I hope this provides at least a bit more texture to the conversation.

II. Welcome to the Super App State

In many ways, China today is the most technologically integrated country I’ve ever seen. It’s not just “cashless”—it’s a fully digitized society where your phone, national ID, and bank account exist as a single integrated system. If you’re Chinese, life flows through one frictionless (and highly surveilled) app after another. If you’re not, you’re navigating a labyrinth designed primarily for domestic users—which makes sense given that the vast majority of users are Chinese citizens.

This technological integration offers tremendous convenience and efficiency for those within the system. Many Chinese citizens I spoke with appreciate how seamlessly everything works compared to the bureaucratic hurdles of the past. For them, the digital transformation represents genuine progress in daily life, even as it creates new challenges for privacy and autonomy.

I got a separate phone just for the trip and reconnected my old WeChat account. That moment was surreal. It was like I’d never left. All my old data was still there—ride histories, chat threads, massage appointments. The massage app I used in 2016 hadn’t just survived—it still had my full transaction history from eight years ago. Prices had barely changed: what cost 200 RMB then now cost just over 250.

That kind of digital continuity was both eerie and oddly comforting. Especially since it’s not the norm. Many of my friends who left China were later locked out of their accounts—unable to reactivate WeChat unless someone with a Chinese ID vouched for them. Why I was able to get in so easily, I’m still not sure. I have theories about potential digital surveillance, but I’ll leave it at that.

This digital persistence—the way your data lingers in suspended animation—stands in stark contrast to the physical changes in the city itself. Your digital ghost remains perfectly preserved while the streets you walked have been transformed beyond recognition.

Still, that sense of seamless reconnection didn’t extend everywhere. Because I no longer had a Chinese bank account, I couldn’t use WeChat Pay. Alipay, which now technically accepts foreign credit cards, was glitchy at best. Every other day, it would freeze and ask me to re-upload my passport and visa. Customer service was polite but endlessly circular. And even when Alipay worked, I could only pay verified businesses—not individuals. That meant I couldn’t split bills or send money to friends. No equivalent of Venmo. Just a lot of awkward workarounds.

Ride-hailing apps like Didi were slightly more functional—but only when accessed through Alipay. Standalone versions either didn’t load or blocked payments. Even when integrated, they only worked about half the time. Food delivery was worse. I tried multiple apps I’d used before, and every time the payment failed. It wasn’t the apps—it was the limits of my foreigner-tagged Alipay account. The moment I hit a prompt asking for a Chinese ID or bank account, I was out.

This created a strange paradox: I was physically present in China, but digitally semi-existent—capable of observing the ecosystem but not fully participating in it. A digital half-life.

And forget cash. People won’t take it. Not even street vendors.

Take Panjiayuan 潘家园, for example. Every single stall at Panjiayuan—the sprawling antiques market in Beijing where I used to spend weekends hunting for treasures—had their own QR code.

But it wasn’t just the cashlessness that was different. Panjiayuan used to feel like treasure hunting: most stalls were full of junk, and you had to dig to find the gems. Negotiation was half the experience. This time, it was completely different. Everything was curated. Nothing looked like garbage. Every stall felt like it was professionally merchandised. The pieces I found—beautiful porcelain, Foo Dogs, intricate metalwork—were both higher quality and cheaper than their equivalents in the U.S. Haggling still existed, but only at the margins. You could tell when a seller meant it—when they really wouldn’t go lower—because the prices actually matched the quality.

The market was undeniably more efficient, more professional, and better organized. The quality of goods was higher, the experience more streamlined. It was impressive. And, paradoxically, less fun. The messy treasure-hunting element that had made it exciting was gone—replaced with something more polished but less joyful. Like so much else in today’s China, it had been optimized at the cost of its soul.

That said, payment was still difficult. On a foreign credit card through AliPay, you can only pay official business accounts. No going dutch with friends at restaurants or sending people a hongbao 紅包 (red envelope) transfer. And no paying small businesses without official business accounts. For one particular seller, she had to find a colleague who could receive my payment into her account and then transfer it to her personal one. She had never had this issue with anybody else because she had never had to deal with foreigners and their glitchy payment system.

That was the larger irony: the more advanced the system, the harder it became to access. Japan has Suica cards. Europe has contactless. These are systems built to be interoperable. China’s tech ecosystem is world-class, but it’s not designed to accommodate outsiders. It’s designed to be closed.

It also made me wonder: what about people inside the system who can’t integrate either? When I lived in China, some families hid second or third children to avoid fines under the one-child policy. Those kids sometimes grew up undocumented—unable to get state services, attend school, or fully participate in society. If those dynamics still exist in some form, how do you navigate an ecosystem that now requires ID-linked everything? What does it mean to be undocumented in a digitized society?

I don’t have those answers. But as tech becomes more dominant—everywhere, not just in China—it’s worth asking: who gets left out? And what happens to them when the future arrives without them?

III. New Pavement, No Pulse

Everything felt more convenient. Less crowded. More streamlined. Service was better, faster, and far more efficient. One of the moments that hit me hardest was when I got on a phone call while riding the train—something I used to do without thinking, and that everyone did all the time. This time, a train attendant politely asked me to stop. I felt uncouth. That kind of public courtesy simply didn’t exist in the same way before.

The experience was jarring in its orderliness. Beijing had once had a quality of spontaneous energy that allowed for unexpected encounters. Now it felt more regulated and streamlined—which undoubtedly represents improved quality of life in many respects, particularly for residents who valued predictability and convenience over the messier aspects of urban life I personally found appealing.

Ironically, I tended to associate this public quietness with Japan, which I also visited recently. Due to the increased number of tourists, Japanese trains are no longer as silent as they used to be. But I digress.

The infrastructure itself is staggering. I’m not just talking about Beijing or Shanghai—those were already modern when I lived there. I’m talking about the places that used to be, to use a technical term, bumblefuck nowhere. Towns that once required convoluted transfers and overnight trains now sit squarely on the high-speed rail grid. They’re not just reachable—they’re regular. Normal. Fully integrated into a national system that makes most Western transportation networks look piecemeal and outdated by comparison.

Airports, stations, sidewalks, streets—it all feels freshly built. The grime is gone. Everything is smooth and gleaming. And yes, it’s impressive. But the feeling it left me with was more complicated.

When I returned to Beijing, I deliberately wandered through the hutongs within the Second Ring Road—the heart of my old life. I used to know it block by block. It was gritty, cluttered, chaotic, alive. Now, I got lost over and over. Everything had been flattened into clean lines and silence. The snack stalls, tiny storefronts, winding bars—they were gone. Even the wonky sidewalk tiles had been redone to perfect uniformity.

For context, hutongs are the historic alleyways that once formed Beijing’s soul—narrow, winding passages between traditional courtyard homes, some dating back centuries. They were living, breathing communities where multiple generations shared communal spaces, hung laundry across alleys, and lived in a jumble of improvised additions. The hutongs I remembered were organically evolved rather than centrally planned.

It’s worth noting that while I found charm in these spaces, many residents also faced challenges in these older neighborhoods—limited indoor plumbing, heating issues, cramped quarters, and aging infrastructure. The improvements brought real quality-of-life benefits for many longtime residents who remained, even as the character of the neighborhoods changed dramatically.

Beijing used to feel like a strange hybrid of Foggy Bottom and Bushwick—part stiff political capital, part hipster haven. It was full of artists, policy nerds, students, poets creating in the cracks of the system. Foreigners weren’t just passing through—they were woven into the city’s fabric. There was this energy of exchange, of mess, of creative collision: the productive friction of different worlds rubbing against each other.

The underground creative scene was particularly vibrant. There were countless hidden music venues and speakeasies tucked away in the hutongs. I remember a “swords bar” where people would drink mead and fight with LARPing medieval suits and swords right next to a tiki bar—what a combination! Or an arrow-throwing bar with a pet pig that roamed around (dangerous but cute). These quirky, non-mainstream spaces fostered a sense of discovery and possibility that’s largely vanished.

To give you some context, during my time living in Beijing, some expats equated the city to Paris in the 1920s due to the plethora of artists, intellectuals, and the sheer energy of creation, all done by people from all over the world. Like anything China-related, people had very strong opinions for or against this characterization. Some rightly pointed out the colonial undertones of such comparisons, while others saw genuine parallels in the creative ferment. Either way, none of these semantic discussions matter for this story—what matters is that Beijing felt electric to many people at the time, including me, despite its contradictions.

Now that energy is gone. The city is clean. It’s efficient. But it’s also been curated into sterility—the urban equivalent of those perfectly merchandised stalls at Panjiayuan, impressive but lacking spontaneity.

One Saturday night, I decided to walk through the hutongs just to see what the city still felt like. I stayed within the Second Ring Road, weaving through old streets I once knew by heart. Outside of Nanluoguxiang 南锣鼓巷 and Great Leap Brewing, the hutongs were eerily silent. Before, they were alive with bars, street vendors selling chuan’r 串 (Chinese kebabs, which the character endearingly looks like), people chatting, drinking, lingering in alleyways. Now, everything was dark. Quiet. Residential. It didn’t feel unsafe exactly—but it did feel empty. Like a ghost town with nice paving.

The shift in Beijing wasn’t just organic—it was top-down. Years ago, the city launched a significant urban renewal campaign that involved relocating residents, closing businesses, and redeveloping entire communities. The “great brickening“—marked by the character chai 拆 painted on buildings slated for demolition—was a visible symbol of this transformation. When hutongs were marked with the 拆 character, it meant demolition was imminent.

This redevelopment had complex impacts. While some buildings were preserved for their historical value, others were simply destroyed or “improved” beyond recognition. Many small business owners and residents were forced out in the process, fundamentally altering the social fabric of these neighborhoods. At the same time, the renewal brought improved infrastructure, better sanitation, and more regulated spaces that benefited many who remained. As with most large-scale urban changes, there were both winners and losers in this transformation.

Wuhan, which I visited for the first time, offered a different comparison. It was enormous—so sprawling that I joked with a friend, “How did COVID even happen here? It’s so spread out.” The city felt clean, developed, efficient. I didn’t have a past version to compare it to, but it fit neatly into the new China: megacity energy without the old grit. It did have street stalls, however. That was comforting.

Shanghai still had energy—and a certain artistic flair—but even that felt different. It wasn’t rebellious or weird. It just felt like the only place left where things could still happen without someone’s sign-off.

Everything is smoother. Everything works better. But the version of China I had called home for four years—the disorganized, slightly chaotic, strangely thrilling one—was not there anymore. Or at least not in the places I visited.

IV. The Vanishing Foreigner

One moment that crystallized how much had shifted was at a high-end hotel in Shanghai.

This wasn’t some off-brand place. It was part of a major international chain—one I’d stayed at during work trips when I lived in China. The building also houses several floors of foreign company offices, and the hotel regularly hosts international clientele. It’s a business hotel specifically designed for global travelers.

So I was shocked when the staff couldn’t speak English at a professional level. I found myself defaulting to Chinese—decent, but rusty. At first I thought maybe it was me, or just a fluke. But then a friend who visited a few months later had the exact same experience at a similarly positioned hotel.

In 2016, these hotels had prided themselves on staff who could switch effortlessly between languages. English proficiency was a selling point, a marker of international standards. Now it seemed almost an afterthought—not because of any decline in education but because the international clientele these skills once served had largely vanished.

This wouldn’t have caught my attention in other types of hotels or other cities. But it was striking for Shanghai. This was, after all, China’s most cosmopolitan city, historically saturated with foreigners, generally fluent in English, and shaped by over a century of global exchange and colonialism. During my previous visits, you’d hear multiple languages just walking down the street. Now? Days would pass without seeing another foreigner.

This absence felt particularly jarring in Shanghai because of its history as China’s gateway to the world. The Bund—that iconic waterfront strip with its colonial-era buildings—was built as a statement of international presence. Now it felt more like a museum piece than a living embodiment of global exchange.

Even in hotspots like Panjiayuan in Beijing, which used to be crawling with foreign antique-hunters from across the globe, I kept bumping into the same three foreigners over and over again—doing the same circuit. That’s how few foreigners remained in spaces once defined by international presence.

The only places where I consistently saw other non-Chinese faces were within embassy and consulate compounds or in specific foreign businesses. These enclaves felt increasingly separate from everyday Chinese life—institutional bubbles rather than integrated parts of the city.

V. Gen Z, A Generation Behind the Firewall

More than just foreign absence, I noticed a generational shift in engagement with the wider world. When I was last in China, many Chinese millennials—my peers—had studied abroad, interacted with foreigners, or at least used social media platforms that connected them with global culture. Many of my students had accounts on international platforms from before access became more restricted. They grew up during the 2000s and early 2010s, when international engagement was more actively encouraged under China’s previous development strategies.

Gen Z in China has had a different experience. They came of age during a period of changing priorities in international engagement, culminating in COVID lockdowns, with fewer opportunities for international travel, educational exchanges, and spontaneous cross-cultural interactions. Their digital experience is primarily through domestic platforms—Douyin instead of TikTok, WeChat instead of WhatsApp, Bilibili instead of YouTube. This isn’t inherently better or worse, just different—creating an experience more distinctly Chinese and less internationally hybrid than what I observed in previous generations.

That said, it would be a mistake to view this generation as isolated or unaware. Many young Chinese I met were sophisticated about international affairs, just from a different perspective. Their understanding comes through different channels and information sources than their Western counterparts, leading to different—but not necessarily less informed—worldviews.

I saw this most clearly at Beijing West Station. It’s a massive transportation hub handling millions of passengers daily, but if you don’t have a Chinese national ID, you can’t just scan your way through the automated gates. There’s a side gate for the elderly, disabled, pregnant women—and foreigners. I waited in that line while everyone else sailed through the high-tech turnstiles.

A Gen Z woman, maybe 23, helped me. I handed her my printed train ticket and passport. She paused, clearly confused by the dark blue booklet in her hands. Then she turned to a colleague and asked what to do. He said, “Just scan her passport.” She came back and scanned a blank visa page.

It wasn’t incompetence. It was unfamiliarity. She had probably never handled a foreign passport before. She’d likely never traveled abroad. And she’d clearly never been trained for this scenario. I was foreign in a way that had become alien—a rare exception to a system designed for uniformity.

This was a stark contrast to the Beijing I remembered, where station attendants had routinely processed foreigners and often spoke basic English phrases to help international travelers navigate.

Older people—Gen X, older Millennials—were noticeably more confident engaging with me. You could tell they had worked with foreigners before during China’s more internationally oriented period. Many had studied English during an era when it was considered essential for career advancement. Some even smiled in recognition when I switched languages, as if reconnecting with a part of their past. They’d lived through the globalizing phase of the 1990s and 2000s—when China was actively joining the world.

Gen Z hasn’t.

Their hesitation wasn’t hostile. It was curious, but distant. Polite, but disconnected. I didn’t feel unwelcome. I just felt… unfamiliar.

That lack of exposure matters. You can’t relate to a world you’ve never touched, even virtually. And that gap isn’t just cultural—it’s emotional.

And it makes me wonder what that means about China’s future.

One brief exception to this pattern occurred months after my trip, when Chinese TikTokers and Western users briefly connected over RedNote, creating a rare moment of cultural engagement. But even this flare of interaction quickly faded—a momentary glimpse of what global digital exchange could look like, rather than a sustained bridge.

VI. From Ambition to Resignation

When I lived in Beijing a decade ago, there was a restlessness in the air. It wasn’t always pretty. It was chaotic, messy, bursting at the seams. But it felt like a country on the move—filled with young people trying to hustle their way up, migrants from other provinces chasing opportunities, foreigners bouncing between languages, jobs, and visas. People were hungry. You could feel it in the streets.

This time, the hunger was gone.

What replaced it wasn’t stillness. China is never still. There are too many people, too much movement. But it felt subdued. Like the air pressure had dropped before a storm. The same cities that once felt electric now felt... tired. Not developing-world tired, but a different kind of exhaustion—the fatigue of a system that had sprinted too long without a clear finish line. At least compared to my “China” reference point from a decade ago, when the future seemed limitless and the only question was how high China would rise.

Some of this shift is pure economics. China’s double-digit growth rate at the beginning of the millennium was never going to continue in the long run—no economy maintains that pace forever. The country had reached the middle-income stage where growth naturally slows.

A lot of it was also COVID-related. The pandemic took a particularly heavy toll on Chinese people due to the draconian “zero-COVID” policies imposed on them. Major cities like Shanghai endured months of harsh lockdowns that the rest of the world had long abandoned. For a while, people even protested with blank sheets of paper to avoid censorship while still expressing dissent—a powerful symbol of the constraints they operated under. You can tell people are exhausted, and often quietly resentful of the sacrifices demanded of them during those years.

Some of that, of course, is also age. People are older. I’m older. We all see the world less brightly with time. But even Gen Z—the shop attendants, the ticket agents, the kids in trendy cafes—carried a different energy from what I remembered in young Chinese people a decade ago. Not jaded, not cynical, just dulled. Like they were living in a country that no longer expected anything exceptional from them beyond compliance.

This contrasted sharply with the young people I knew in 2016, who spoke constantly of startups, opportunities, and “China’s century.” Back then, ambition wasn’t just personal—it was national, collective, shared. Now it felt more like people were focused on getting by rather than getting ahead.

Conversations with friends and former students reflected the same shift. I was careful not to push too hard in these discussions—partly out of respect for their privacy, partly because I didn’t know what topics were safe to discuss anymore given the tightened political climate. I was working at the U.S. State Department at the time, in a role focused on subnational engagement that would have been considered innocuous in the past, but in today’s climate of heightened suspicion, even this connection carried potential risk. I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable or create problems for them after I left.

The people I met with were now scattered across vastly different sectors and life stages. Some were working in education, others in business, some in the arts. The common thread? A sense of professional stagnation that transcended industry. Across the board, people told me it felt like they were working harder for less—less security, less mobility, less potential upside. Those who had previously worked in the U.S.-China space—once a booming field with endless opportunities—had mostly pivoted to other careers out of necessity. The bilateral relationship’s deterioration had eliminated entire career paths that once seemed promising.

But beyond work, life had marched on in familiar rhythms. People had gotten married, had children, bought homes (albeit at eye-watering prices in major cities). It mirrored what’s happening to many of my peers globally in an era of diminishing expectations—just with a heavier undercurrent of constraint, like everyone had adjusted their ambitions downward in response to both economic reality and political boundaries.

I deliberately avoided bringing up politics during these reunions. I asked about their lives. Their families. Their jobs. Where they were living now. I just wanted to reconnect with them as people—people I had cared about, people whose lives I had lost touch with because we no longer inhabited the same digital spaces. (It’s a strange realization, how much of our emotional continuity with others now depends on which platforms we can access—the Great Firewall had created not just information divides but relationship divides as well.)

But even without my prompting, some people brought up politics on their own. Or rather—they tried to, in ways that revealed how much had changed.

What stood out most was how often people didn’t explicitly say what they were trying to communicate.

Instead of speaking directly, they would make subtle gestures. Meaningful facial expressions. Strategically long pauses. Coded signs. I remember sitting across from someone I had known for years, initially wondering if they were having a medical episode, only to realize they were essentially playing charades about sensitive topics. Whole complex ideas about current events reduced to eye movements and half-formed hand signals—a sophisticated form of communication that bypassed verbal expression entirely.

At first I was confused. Then I caught on. They weren’t being vague because they didn’t trust me. They were concerned about potential monitoring of conversations. About phones potentially recording discussions. About who might be watching, even in public, even in innocuous settings.

Some people went further—physically turning off their phones, or pointing at them to explain why they couldn’t say something aloud.

That would have been less common in 2016.

Back then, people were generally more comfortable speaking candidly—especially one-on-one, especially outside formal settings. Once they trusted you, they’d typically share their thoughts more openly. But this time, there seemed to be more caution in the air. Not overwhelming or panicked. Just present.

It wasn’t fear in the theatrical sense. No one screamed or ran or whispered dramatically. It was something quieter—more like a habit of discretion. Friends used gestures instead of speaking directly about certain topics. They used indirect references. Phones were turned off, moved to the side, pointed at like unwelcome eavesdroppers. This wasn’t universal—many conversations remained completely normal—but the pattern was noticeable.

That said, I was also working for the United States government at the time, and this fact probably did increase the level of caution among my contacts, understandably so. It wouldn’t surprise me if this influenced the dynamic, and that would mean that my experience wasn’t necessarily representative of how most people communicate.

It reminded me of something I’ve started to see more in the U.S., too. Not from security professionals—just regular people becoming more conscious about their digital privacy. Concerns about data collection that used to be considered fringe are slowly becoming mainstream.

But in China, this awareness seemed more developed and normalized.

And so I sat with old friends, noticed their careful communication styles, and realized I was observing how technology and social norms shape conversation in different contexts. Not dramatic political repression, but something more subtle—a careful navigation of what is discussed and how, influenced by both government policies and technological systems.

VII. Conclusion: China Built the Future. It Just Doesn’t Need You in It.

There’s no denying it—China is developed.

Not “developing with caveats.” Not “emerging.” Developed.

Claims about China being a developing country—often made in international trade and climate negotiations—feel even more disconnected from reality than they did in 2016. When I lived there, I could at least understand the argument, given the stark urban-rural divide and pockets of genuine poverty. Not anymore. (And yes, I acknowledge the limitations of my perspective—I only spent two weeks in three major cities. Rural China might tell a different story. Still, the transformation is undeniable.)

The infrastructure alone makes this development status obvious. From the ultra-fast trains connecting even formerly remote regions, to the seamless integration of daily life into a single phone ecosystem, to the pristine streets of its megacities—China looks and operates like one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth. The gap between Chinese infrastructure and that of the United States is no longer even a contest in many areas—China is simply ahead.

I’ve traveled extensively in the last two years—France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Uzbekistan. Nowhere I’ve seen is as digitally integrated as China. Not even close. Other countries have digital payments, smart transportation, advanced infrastructure—but they’re still discrete systems rather than a single unified ecosystem. Nowhere else has achieved China’s level of integration between your ID, your money, your transportation, your communications, your entire life. For pure convenience, it’s unmatched.

China has eliminated virtually all the daily friction that exists in developing infrastructure—the small inefficiencies that collectively consume time and energy—creating a seamlessness that even the most advanced Western economies haven’t achieved.

What’s left is a country that is, by many technical and infrastructure measures, ahead of the curve. And at the same time, it appears to be pursuing a development path that prioritizes internal cohesion over international integration. China is more modern than ever, but increasingly following its own distinct trajectory rather than convergent development with Western models.

This challenges a central assumption of globalization theory from the 1990s and 2000s: that economic development would necessarily lead to greater political openness and integration with global norms. China has demonstrated that a nation can selectively engage with aspects of globalization while maintaining its own distinct systems and priorities.

This self-contained development is evident in initiatives like “Made in China 2025,” which aims to reduce dependency on foreign technology and expertise. The digital ecosystem that makes life difficult for foreigners, the barriers facing international businesses, researchers, and journalists—these aren’t bugs in the system, they’re features. They reflect a deliberate strategy to develop on China’s own terms, without the external influences that once seemed inevitable companions to modernization.

Maybe China will reopen more fully to the world. Maybe it won’t. But whatever happens next, it will be on China’s terms, not due to external pressure or inevitable forces of globalization. And increasingly, those of us outside China will be peering in through whatever narrow windows China chooses to provide—trying to understand a system that no longer needs outside validation or participation to thrive.

In the end, I realize I lived in a version of China that no longer exists. That iteration—gritty, strange, alive, contradictory—was the China I experienced and internalized. But China was never mine to hold or define. It has always been vast, shapeshifting, older than any of us and fundamentally unbothered by our attachments or interpretations.

I’ve seen similar urban transformations in Mexico City’s Roma neighborhood, which used to be gritty and hip when I’d visit friends during college breaks. Now it’s still cool, but has become very international, reminiscent of Los Angeles—in part due to an influx of U.S. remote workers. It feels nice but much more curated than before.

What’s striking is how different types of development create similar effects. In Mexico City, the sanitizing force was foreign influence; in Beijing, it was internal policy. Yet both result in something more orderly but less spontaneous.

Interestingly, as China has become more difficult to access physically, its global presence has only expanded. In Mexico City today, you can find high-end Chinese restaurants, markets, and businesses established by Chinese companies avoiding U.S. tariffs while accessing North American markets. I’ve enjoyed these connections, speaking Chinese with newcomers and accessing aspects of Chinese culture that would otherwise be harder to reach now. It’s a reminder that even as China’s development model has become more distinct, its international footprint continues to grow—a complexity that defies simple narratives about isolation versus engagement.

The Beijing I became an adult in, the people I knew, the rhythms I once moved through—they were all part of a particular chapter. What I saw in late last year is another. And there will be more.

China has been many things across centuries: empire, revolution, experiment, machine. It morphs fast, unapologetically. The only constant is change. Even the China I saw half a year ago is likely already receding in the rearview.

The one thing that stayed the same is that nothing stays the same. And maybe that’s the most honest thing I can say about it.

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By Natalia Cote-Munoz · Launched 6 days ago

Musings from the Time of Monsters is my space for candid reflections, personal essays, and sharp-eyed explorations as I navigate a season of change, both for me personally and for the world.

15. It’s China’s turn to face transnational terrorism threats

While there seems to be apparent logic (US logic perhaps) in a number of the points outlined below, I think we should heed the cautionary note implied in the opening paragraph and in the conclusion. I think that if China did cooperate in any of these areas its main purpose would be to try to ensure that the Uyghurs were designated as terrorist group so that it could legitimize its genocide. We must not allow that blood on our hands. And we must continue to pressure China for its human rights abuses against the Uighurs.

Excerpts:

It remains unclear if China is prepared to counter this threat outside of its borders. Primarily, the CCP has obsessively focused on the “three evils”—separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism—at home, a cornerstone security policy used to oppress religious and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang in the name of counterterrorism. The U.S. has assessed that the alleged threat posed by Uyghur terrorist groups in China and the potential ties they harbor with groups overseas is likely overblown and misconstrued by the CCP.

Recent events in Pakistan, however, suggest that China may be increasingly concerned with the growing terrorism threat targeting its interests overseas. Accordingly, the CCP may seek to shore up bilateral and multilateral avenues—including through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Global Security Initiative—to increase its overseas security footprint in the name of anti-terrorism operations. This may have wider implications for the strategic competition between the U.S. and China.

It behooves Beijing to work with Washington on counterterrorism. After all, the U.S. intelligence community provided forewarning to both Iran and Russia before IS-K attacks in those countries last year. Even as the U.S. and China compete in a range of geopolitical arenas, counterterrorism can and should remain a vector for open and transparent cooperation.

It’s China’s turn to face transnational terrorism threats

Beijing may be more motivated than ever to cooperate with the United States on counterterrorism.

By Mollie Saltskog and Colin P. Clarke

April 21, 2025 09:00 AM ET

defenseone.com · by Mollie Saltskog

This commentary is published in coordination with the 2025 Global Security Forum, of which Defense One is a media partner.

One of the less-heralded features of the Global War on Terror—roughly, the two decades that followed the 9/11 attacks—were the conversations that the United States shared with Russia and China about counterterrorism. Though Moscow and Beijing were targets of Sunni jihadists such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, there was always some skepticism in Washington about whether China’s terrorism problem was as dire as Beijing proclaimed. Was the Chinese Communist Party exaggerating the threat to justify the repression—which the U.S. and other countries have called genocide—of its Uyghur population?

Now, in 2025, there is less doubt that China is in the crosshairs of transnational terror groups. Capable and determined violent non-state actors could give China trouble in various hotspots around the world—in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

Syria

Since Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fell in late December, jihadist-cum-statesman named Ahmed al-Sharaa—previously known as Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, al-Qaeda’s former frontman in Syria—has skillfully taken control. But the Chechen, Balkan, and Central Asia hardliners who helped overthrow Assad may not be on board with al-Sharaa’s more moderate state-building project. This could lead to fissures in the Syrian governing coalition, or their recruitment by ISIS.

Among them are jihadists from China or Central Asia who took time after and even during the fight against Assad to threaten China. For example, Abdul Haq al-Turkistani, the leader of the Turkestan Islamic Party—one of the groups Beijing is most concerned about and which maintains links to al-Qaeda and other jihadists—released a statement in the midst of HTS’ offensive: “The Chinese disbelievers will soon taste the same torment that the disbelievers in [Syria] have tasted, if God wills.” And shortly after Assad fled to Russia, Uyghur jihadists released a video showing missiles seized from Assad’s arms depots and directly threatened China.

Afghanistan

The primary terrorism threat to the PRC and its interests in Central Asia stems from the Islamic State Khorasan group, IS-K for short, which operates out of Afghanistan. Since the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban takeover in 2021, IS-K has orchestrated a string of attacks against Taliban government and security forces as well as foreign nationals and interests—including China’s. In December 2022, the IS-K attack on LongAn, a popular hotel for Chinese business people visiting Afghanistan, killed three Afghans and injured 18 people, including five Chinese nationals. A month later, an IS-K suicide attack targeted a PRC delegation outside the Foreign Ministry in Kabul. And in January, IS-K claimed responsibility for the murder of a Chinese national working for a mining company who was traveling in the northern province of Takhar, close to the Tajik border.

In recent years, IS-K propaganda has increasingly focused on China, highlighting CCP abuses and oppression of Muslim minorities in China. It has threatened Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure projects in Afghanistan, including mining operations and pipeline projects in the north. This is largely because IS-K believes threatening Chinese nationals and economic interests undermines projects and investment that can help the Taliban government.

But the CCP, which was the first government to name an ambassador to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, has more at stake in the country than profit or resource extraction. It views economic investment as a way to stabilize that country and the Central Asian countries that border China. It has long been wary of the region’s porous borders and the fertile ground for jihadist recruitment that could threaten to China’s economic and energy-security interests in the region. And the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan only exacerbated these fears.

This puts IS-K and the CCP on a collision course inside Afghanistan—and perhaps beyond. The terror group has shown its ability to orchestrate terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan, such as last year’s devastating bombing in Kerman, Iran, and attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall venue.

Pakistan

Terrorism and political violence in Pakistan perhaps pose the most pressing terrorism threat to China’s strategic interests.

Chinese diplomatic presence, economic interests, and nationals have become a target for terrorist and separatist organizations that harbor grievances against Beijing. In 2018, the Balochistan Liberation Army attacked the Chinese consulate in Karachi. In 2021, Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan orchestrated an attack targeting China’s ambassador to Pakistan. Last year saw a string of deadly attacks by the military wing of the Balochistan Liberation Army on Belt-and-Road projects in the south and Chinese workers and businessmen, including in the port city of Gwadar. In October, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on a convoy close to the Karachi airport that killed two Chinese nationals. The attack, which following an especially perilous year for Chinese nationals and projects, drew sharp criticism and concern from the CCP, which urged Pakistan to take action against “all anti-China terrorist groups.”

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s overall security situation has been deteriorating since 2021’s Taliban takeover in neighboring Afghanistan. 2023 saw a 34 percent increase in attacks by terrorist organizations and other armed militants. Last year, the number of terrorist attacks more than doubled to more than 1,000.

Most were focused on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor: areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border and in the Balochistan region where many of China’s key BRI projects are underway. This threatens a key strategic goal: building a route to import energy that does not go through the narrow Straits of Malacca. In November, Beijing and Islamabad held their first joint military counterterrorism exercise in five years. In February, President Xi and President Zadari agreed to strengthen bilateral and multilateral counterterrorism cooperation. At the end of March, the PRC permanently deployed private security contractors in Pakistan to protect Chinese nationals involved in CPEC projects—an unprecedented move.

These actions likely reflect Beijing’s mounting frustration and pressure on Islamabad over the deteriorating security situation. It is evident that it is becoming a pressing issue and that China may increase its security footprint in the region in the name of protecting its economic and energy security interests.

Conclusion

Beijing was once suspected of overhyping its terror threat, but no longer. As China continues to expand its Belt and Road Initiative, with Chinese personnel and infrastructure expanding across the globe, there will likely be more incidents of kidnapping for ransom, terrorist attacks, and other actions targeting a growing Chinese presence abroad.

It remains unclear if China is prepared to counter this threat outside of its borders. Primarily, the CCP has obsessively focused on the “three evils”—separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism—at home, a cornerstone security policy used to oppress religious and ethnic minorities in Xinjiang in the name of counterterrorism. The U.S. has assessed that the alleged threat posed by Uyghur terrorist groups in China and the potential ties they harbor with groups overseas is likely overblown and misconstrued by the CCP.

Recent events in Pakistan, however, suggest that the China may be increasingly concerned with the growing terrorism threat targeting its interests overseas. Accordingly, the CCP may seek to shore up bilateral and multilateral avenues—including through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Global Security Initiative—to increase its overseas security footprint in the name of anti-terrorism operations. This may have wider implications for the strategic competition between the U.S. and China.

It behooves Beijing to work with Washington on counterterrorism. After all, the U.S. intelligence community provided forewarning to both Iran and Russia before IS-K attacks in those countries last year. Even as the U.S. and China compete in a range of geopolitical arenas, counterterrorism can and should remain a vector for open and transparent cooperation.

Mollie Saltskog is the Chief of Staff at The Soufan Group and a Research Fellow at The Soufan Center.

Colin P. Clarke, Ph.D., is the Director of Research at The Soufan Group and a Senior Research Fellow at The Soufan Center.

defenseone.com · by Mollie Saltskog

16. Joint Chiefs Chairman Caine Decides Not to Keep Senior Enlisted Adviser, Breaking with Past Precedent

I wonder what his thought process is on this? Perhaps there was a personality conflict. I hope he intends to replace him and not let the position go unfilled as it did during Admiral Mullins' tenure. Every good leader's effectiveness depends on having the advice and assistance from a Command Sergeant Major/Senior Enlisted Advisor. I would not leave home without one. Hopefully his special operations experience will guide him to select a strong non-commissioned officer as a partner.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Caine Decides Not to Keep Senior Enlisted Adviser, Breaking with Past Precedent

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · April 21, 2025

The military's top enlisted adviser -- a senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs chairman -- will be stepping down in the months to come, Pentagon officials told Military.com on Monday.

Marine Corps Sgt. Maj. Troy Black will depart the post and retire from military service after the newly confirmed Joint Chiefs chairman, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chose not to renew Black's posting for another two-year stretch, one official said.

However, that defense official stressed that, while Black would not be serving in the senior enlisted adviser to the chairman, or SEAC, role for as long as his predecessors, the move was not a firing and that Caine "has the greatest respect and admiration for SEAC Black."

Caine's decision not to give Black another term appears to be one of his first major moves in the Joint Chiefs chairman role since he was confirmed and took over earlier this month. President Donald Trump handpicked Caine, despite his retirement from the military and not meeting the qualifications for the job.

Black came to the role in the summer of 2023 after serving as the Marine Corps' top enlisted service member, Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps. Then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley named Black to the position that serves as the chairman's "direct tie to the enlisted force."

Black, then a 35-year Marine veteran, relieved Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Ramón "CZ" Colón-López, who had served in the SEAC job for four years.

The official said that, while Black's predecessors like Colón-López served four-year terms, the SEAC job is actually a two-year post with an option to be extended two more years -- an option that Caine will not be exercising.

The official who spoke with Military.com did so on the condition of anonymity to be able to discuss personnel matters more candidly.

Despite their assurances that the move was not a firing, the two-year term appeared to be unanticipated on Black's part. On his official website, Black outlined a "four-year plan" that includes transitioning to his successor in year four.

Black is only the fifth person to hold the job since the position was created in 2005. Three of his predecessors served for four years, while the first SEAC served for only three.

From 2008 to 2011, while Adm. Mike Mullen was Joint Chiefs chairman, the post went unfilled.

Overall, the posting is relatively obscure, and the service members who have held the job have been relatively unknown compared to their service-level counterparts who have taken on leading roles in shaping service-level policy that directly affects troops, helping raise awareness and funds, or serving as an example of what women can achieve in the service.

Black focused some of his efforts on boosting fitness in the military as well as how military leaders manage their enlisted force -- a goal that he had as the Marine Corps' top enlisted adviser as well.

"A holistic human performance system is being developed right now in order to make sure that we talk about our mental, physical, behavioral, spiritual and emotional or social fitness," Black told troops at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, in February.

"We focus on the physical as the end state, but the fact of the matter is we are machines encased as humans; we don't just do one thing," he said.

Black's background as a machine gunner and his battlefield accomplishments drew attention early in his tenure as the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, but he would go on to speak regularly about improving quality of life for average Marines.

Black used his time in that job to speak to the press and Congress about policy changes or improvements that were being made with an eye toward making service in the Corps less challenging. Black often referenced his wife, a retired first sergeant, as a source of inside knowledge on the challenges that come with a military lifestyle.

The official who spoke with Military.com said he expected Black to retire from the military in the summer or early fall.

-- Steve Beynon contributed to this report.

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · April 21, 2025

17. US to allies: Don’t use Chinese satellite services

Is there sufficient "bandwidth" among the alternatives for all the allies?

If not China and with the Starlink warning, where else are they to go? Again, is there sufficient "bandwidth?"

Excerpts:

The memo also suggested that U.S. providers offer more reliable services, but acknowledged that U.S.-based SpaceX — like other U.S. firms — retains the right to restrict or withdraw its Starlink service at its whim, as it has reportedly done in Ukraine.

The memo, which has not been previously reported, said that working with Chinese space providers operating in low earth orbit, or LEO, could help Beijing advance its foreign-policy goals. It noted that Chinese law allows its central government to compel domestic satellite operators to hand over sensitive information on their business activities, granting possible openings for sensitive data exfiltration.

If asked about the Starlink satellite-communications service, U.S. officials are told under the memo to acknowledge that parent company SpaceX may restrict the delivery or operation of ground terminals as local regulations require — and otherwise as it pleases.

US to allies: Don’t use Chinese satellite services

Internal talking points also give State Department officials guidance on responding to concerns about SpaceX’s Starlink.

By Audrey Decker and David DiMolfetta

April 21, 2025 04:00 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

The State Department is urging other countries to avoid doing business with Chinese satellite firms, arguing that such contracts fuel military development and help Beijing gather sensitive intelligence from allies.

“It is important to ensure satellite services provided by untrusted suppliers, such as those from China, are not permitted to operate in your country,” said an undated memo that laid out talking points for U.S. officials. A copy was obtained by Nextgov/FCW and Defense One.

The memo also suggested that U.S. providers offer more reliable services, but acknowledged that U.S.-based SpaceX — like other U.S. firms — retains the right to restrict or withdraw its Starlink service at its whim, as it has reportedly done in Ukraine.

The memo, which has not been previously reported, said that working with Chinese space providers operating in low earth orbit, or LEO, could help Beijing advance its foreign-policy goals. It noted that Chinese law allows its central government to compel domestic satellite operators to hand over sensitive information on their business activities, granting possible openings for sensitive data exfiltration.

If asked about the Starlink satellite-communications service, U.S. officials are told under the memo to acknowledge that parent company SpaceX may restrict the delivery or operation of ground terminals as local regulations require — and otherwise as it pleases.

While there’s no law that permits the U.S. government to dictate where satellite-communication firms may or may not operate, Elon Musk’s control of Starlink operations has raised questions about the roles of commercial services during wartime and of private companies in policy decisions.

“When a prospective user attempts to place an order for Starlink service, Starlink’s internal systems check the location of the address entered by the user, and if an address is located in a territory in which Starlink service is not offered, these systems prevent that order from being completed,” the State memo said.

Some military officials have voiced concern that the U.S. can’t compel SpaceX to continue to provide services to allies. In 2022, Elon Musk reportedly refused a request by Ukraine to extend Starlink access in Russian-occupied Crimea to strike Russian targets.

Today, Musk is a top Trump advisor and is playing an outsized role in the president’s second term. Some observers said the memo’s mention of a specific U.S. company is inappropriate.

“Much of this looks like the U.S. government is shilling for SpaceX,” said a former senior defense official who was granted anonymity to candidly share their thoughts on the readout. “These [talking] points seem particularly dissonant to argue for trusted LEO [satellite communications] providers when Elon Musk has shown he cannot be trusted. ... He is willing to threaten turning off Starlink access when it suits his own political agenda, has a history of statements sympathetic to Russia and to China, and is clearly financially entangled with China.”

However, the former official added, avoiding Chinese space services is sound advice.

“U.S. allies should look elsewhere for [satellite communications] solutions, ideally from providers without ties to either China or Russia and without political agendas,” the ex-official said. “Of course allies shouldn’t use Chinese [satellite communications]; that’s ridiculous. Of course it provides yet another vector for cyber intrusion and a lever arm of influence in crisis.”

The agency’s talking points underscored how rising tensions between the U.S. and China have extended into the space economy, a sector projected to grow by billions of dollars and become a new frontier for cybersecurity and military conflict.

Countries should “take steps to exclude untrusted satellite providers, such as those based in China, and make sure they cannot enter the market and jeopardize national security, business secrets and citizens’ privacy,” the memo said.

Chinese satellite companies may seek to use anticompetitive practices to lock out other providers, they later added, arguing that such moves “may bar competitors — leaving your host country stuck in a monopolistic, Beijing controlled market.”

A State spokesperson said the department does not comment on the contents of internal documents and added that the U.S. “encourages allies and partners around the world to protect their infrastructure and technology by only allowing trusted vendors.” The agency did not address mentions of SpaceX in the memo.

The memo did not say whether the talking points might be meant for specific countries. It did note that the U.S. is seeking continued partnership with countries to build out and increase the security “of trustworthy satellite communications systems in all orbits.”

Last week, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said that European allies wary of Starlink may face even greater concerns if they turn to Chinese satellite internet alternatives.

“If Europe has its own satellite constellation, then great, I think the more the better. But more broadly, I think Europe is caught a little bit between the U.S. and China. And it’s sort of time for choosing,” Carr told the Financial Times.

U.S. officials separately told the FT on Thursday that Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co. Ltd., a Chinese company with military ties, is providing the Iran-backed Houthis with targeting intelligence against U.S. naval assets in the Red Sea.

Space is an emerging national-security frontier. Orbital assets, including satellites, underpin communications technologies used by both civilians and the military. Space matters came to the fore last February, amid confirmed reports of Russia developing an anti-satellite nuke. In May, a former Pentagon official told a congressional panel that a satellite detonation could render objects traveling in low-Earth orbit unusable for a year.

“This capability could pose a threat to all satellites operated by countries and companies around the globe, as well as to the vital communications, scientific, meteorological, agricultural, commercial and national security services we all depend upon,” said John Plumb, who at the time was assistant defense secretary for space policy.

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

18. US Army deploys solar-powered spy drone with 1,000-mile range for endurance missions

US Army's new 1,000-mile-range solar-powered spy drone takes to the skies

interestingengineering.com · by Kapil Kajal

Military

US Army deploys solar-powered spy drone with 1,000-mile range for endurance missions

This was the first time the soldiers could operate the system independently.

Updated: Apr 21, 2025 08:11 AM EST

Kapil Kajal

a day ago

K1000 ultra-long range endurance Unmanned Aircraft System.

DVIDS

To improve its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities, the US Army has introduced the K1000 Ultra-Long Endurance Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS).

Developed by California-based Kraus Hamdani Aerospace, this solar-powered drone is now operational with the Army’s 1st Multi-Effects Battalion (MDEB) under the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF).

Solar drone for surveillance

According to a press release by the US Army, the highlight of the training was the network extension integration and deep sensing capability of High-Altitude Balloons (HABs) and the experimentation with K1000 ultra-long-endurance, solar-powered UAS.

“This is our first real exercise integrating government owned and operated ultra long-endurance UAS specifically designed for long-range deep sensing,” said Lt. Col. Joseph Mroszczyk, commander of 1 MDEB.

Before the exercise, the unit spent two years working with Kraus Hamdani Aerospace to test and train on the long-endurance UAS system.

This was the first time the soldiers could operate the system independently.

“We’ve got trained pilots and mechanics gaining valuable experience on the platform now,” Lt. Col. Mroszczyk added.

Soldiers assigned to the UAS platoon assemble the modular K1000 ultra-long-range endurance drone. (Source: DVIDS)

“They’re logging hours and providing crucial sensor data, enabling us to serve as the task force’s eyes and ears, and as key contributing Army sensor to the Joint Force.”

During Static Focus 3, 1 MDEB completed over one hundred hours of UAS flights in different setups.

“From a maintenance perspective, I was astonished by how little time and resources the platform demanded,” said Sgt. Jake Meyer from the UAS platoon from 1 MDEB’s Extended Range and Sensing Effects (ERSE) Company.

“Compared to traditional platforms, which require several months to get familiarized with, we were up and running in just two days.”

1,000-mile drone

The US Army included max endurance testing in the platform experiments for flights with multiple ships.

“Multi-ship flight operations are the most complex missions, but the autonomous capability allows me, as an operator, to focus on the mission instead of my continuous direct management of each aircraft,” said Staff Sgt. Jacob Wilbert from the UAS platoon of 1 MDEB’s ERSE Company.

Complementary to the long-range deep sensing UAS, the unit also experimented with HABs from three vendors sponsored by the Army ISR Task Force for inclusion in the event.

The K1000 is three meters (9.8 feet) long and has a wingspan of five meters (16.4 feet). It uses lithium-ion batteries for power and has a folding propeller.

U.S. Navy Seeks Large Storage Facility in the Philippines by 2026 - USNI News

news.usni.org · by Aaron-Matthew Lariosa · April 21, 2025

U.S. Marines with 3rd Landing Support Battalion lay down fire hoses during a Maritime Prepositioning Force offload in preparation for Balikatan 23 at the Port of Subic Bay, Philippines, March 26, 2023. US Marine Corps Photo

The Department of the Navy is looking to lease a climate-controlled facility between 19,000 and 33,000 square meters near Subic Bay and Clark for the storage of equipment in the Philippines by 2026 under a ten-year-long lease which could mark the largest prepositioning effort to date between Washington and Manila since 1992.

According to solicitation documents on the proposed lease, this new facility would be utilized for “storage and maintenance of vehicles and vehicle equipment.” While the Navy specified its preference for a 33,022 square meter facility, the minimum requirements encompass 19,979 square meters. Both projections dwarf a previously leased 5,300 square meter warehouse at Naval Support Depot in Subic Bay, which is set to support U.S. Marine Corps staging efforts in the Philippines and throughout the region.

Navy documents specify that the climate-controlled facility must be within 60 miles of the Naval Support Depot and under the jurisdiction of either the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority or the Clark Economic Freeport Zone. The Port of Subic Bay, formerly Naval Station Cubi Point, receives a flurry of American maritime activity every Spring as U.S. forces surge into the Philippines for military drills.

Subic Bay has been the recent focus of alleged Chinese spies, who documented U.S. vessels entering the strategic bay and equipment being staged for Balikatan 2025.

If the project adheres to the Navy’s preferences, the dimensions of the planned warehouse at Luzon are larger than Marine Corps Prepositioning Plan – Norway’s largest stockpile at Tromsdal.

Numerous maintenance shops for electronics, vehicles and communications equipment were also specified in the solicitation. While the storage of munitions was not explicitly mentioned, an ARMAG high security modular armory facility is set to be provided by the Marine Corps. Approximately 69-100 personnel are expected to work at the facility.

Amid tensions in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, U.S.-Philippine defense cooperation has seen ever-increasing numbers of American troops in the archipelago to train alongside their counterparts in drills such as Balikatan. However, these forces have had to contend with a lack of infrastructure. The withdrawal of American military bases from the Philippines over three decades ago also meant the departure of equipment storage and maintenance facilities.

In recent years, American investments in improving U.S.-Philippine military infrastructure have expanded at Subic Bay and the nine Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement sites. These select Philippine military bases allow rotationally deployed U.S. forces and American-funded projects.

If pursued, the lease will permit American forces to store and maintain equipment on Philippine soil from 2026 to 2036. The solicitation also specified that the Navy seeks a lease with no renewal options.

news.usni.org · by Aaron-Matthew Lariosa · April 21, 2025

20. Air Force warns airmen, veterans of foreign intelligence recruitment ploy

We all need to heed this warning.

I recall sitting in the auditorium at NDU about a decade ago for an all day conference. I noticed a number of attractive women from China who would sit next to men and chat them up. After each break they would change their seats and chat up someone new. This went on all day and it was obvious what they were doing (spot, assess, recruit). I recall being disappointed because they did not even once try to chat me up.

Air Force warns airmen, veterans of foreign intelligence recruitment ploy - Breaking Defense

If that consulting gig seems to good to be true, it probably is, Air Force investigators say.

breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · April 21, 2025

A US Air Force servicemember types on his computer at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, Feb.19, 2025. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Elizabeth Figueroa.)

WASHINGTON — The Air Force Office of Special Investigations warned airmen and former servicemembers of a “recruitment scheme” that could trick them into working for “foreign intelligence entities.”

“These aren’t just job offers, they’re intelligence operations in disguise,” Special Agent Lee Russ, executive director of AFOSI Office of Special Projects, said in a report from the office today. “Our adversaries are targeting the very people who’ve kept this nation secure.”

An unnamed counterintelligence analyst added, “These aren’t random messages. They’re calculated attempts to exploit trust.”

The AFOSI warning says the offers come in the form of social media messages that offer high-paying consulting jobs. While it’s not a new tactic, the counterintelligence analyst said it’s become “more aggressive and more refined.”

“Foreign actors reach out to service members privately, which means there’s no institutional oversight,” the analyst said in the AFOSI report. “What someone does on their personal account doesn’t necessarily have the same safeguards as an official one, and adversaries are taking advantage of that.”

The warning follows others from elsewhere in the US government and from international partners. Recently the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) reportedly said foreign spies, including Chinese intelligence specifically, were “targeting current and former U.S. government (USG) employees for recruitment by posing as consulting firms, corporate headhunters, think tanks, and other entities on social and professional networking sites.”

In June 2024, the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partnership collectively pointed the finger at China’s efforts to recruit current and former “Western military personnel to train the PRC military.”

“To overcome their shortcomings, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been aggressively recruiting Western military talent to train their aviators, using private firms around the globe that conceal their PLA ties and offer recruits exorbitant salaries,” then-NCSC Director Michael Casey said. “Recent actions by Western governments have impacted these operations, but PLA recruitment efforts continue to evolve in response.”

breakingdefense.com · by Lee Ferran · April 21, 2025

21. US general says allied forces can repel Asia aggression as Philippines combat drills open

US general says allied forces can repel Asia aggression as Philippines combat drills open

By JIM GOMEZ

Updated 10:28 AM PDT, April 21, 2025

AP · by JIM GOMEZ · April 21, 2025

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Thousands of allied American and Filipino forces opened annual combat drills Monday that include repelling an island attack to simulate the defense of the Philippine archipelago and seas in a “full-scale battle scenario” that has antagonized China.

The annual Balikatan military exercises between the longtime treaty allies are scheduled from April 21 to May 9 with about 9,000 American and 5,000 Filipino military personnel. Fighter jets, warships and an array of weaponry including a U.S. Marine anti-ship missile system will be involved, U.S. and Philippine military officials said.

China has steadfastly opposed such war drills in or near the disputed South China Sea and in northern Philippine provinces close to Taiwan, especially if they involve U.S. and allied forces that Beijing says aim to contain it and, consequently, threaten regional stability and peace.

“We are ready,” U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James Glynn told a news conference when asked if U.S. and Philippine forces have built up the capability to address any major act of aggression in the Taiwan Straits or the South China Sea after years of joint combat exercises.

“Our combined strength … possesses a degree of lethality for a force that possesses an indomitable warrior ethos and spirit,” Glynn said in a speech in the opening ceremony of the annual combat-readiness exercises. “It’s all dedicated to one purpose, to ensure the defense of the Philippines and to maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

“All of us want to resolve any regional conflict peacefully but should deterrence fail, we need to be prepared,” said Glynn, who previously helped lead special operations forces against the Islamic State group and served in Fallujah, Iraq.

Philippine army Maj. Gen. Francisco Lorenzo said the exercises during Balikatan, meaning shoulder to shoulder in Tagalog, are not aimed at any particular country.

“It’s joint training with the U.S. forces to increase our capability in securing our territory and, of course, it will increase our capabilities and our preparedness and responsiveness to any eventuality,” Lorenzo said.

The exercises include a mock allied counter-assault against an enemy attack on an island, the use of a barrage of artillery and missile fire to sink a mock enemy ship, joint navy sails in or near the disputed South China Sea, and aerial combat surveillance, according to the Philippine military.

A Philippine military statement described this year’s largescale combat exercises as “a full-scale battle scenario meticulously designed to rigorously test and enhance the combined capabilities of both nations’ armed forces under the most realistic and challenging conditions.”

Aside from U.S. and Philippine military personnel, Australia plans deploy about 260 participants, an Australian military officer said. Several countries including Japan intend to send military observers.

A mid-range missile system, which was deployed to the northern Philippines by the U.S. Army last year, will be used again in the combat exercises, U.S. and Philippine military officials said without offering additional details.

China has repeatedly expressed alarm over the missile deployment and demanded that Filipino officials pull the weaponry from Philippine territory, saying it could spark an arms race.

The U.S. Army’s mid-range missile system consisting of a mobile launcher and at least 16 Standard Missile-6 and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles has been repositioned in the Philippines, a Philippine official told The Associated Press early this year.

The system was repositioned from the northern Philippine city of Laoag to a strategic area in a western coastal province facing a disputed South China Sea shoal, where Chinese and Philippine coast guard and navy forces have had increasingly tense confrontations.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited Manila last month in his first trip to Asia and said the Trump administration would work with allies to ramp up deterrence against China’s aggression in the South China Sea.

The U.S. was not gearing up for war, Hegseth said, while underscoring that peace would be won “through strength.”

During the Balikatan exercises, the U.S. would deploy an anti-ship missile system called the Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, as well as unmanned sea vessels to enable the allies forces to train together to defend Philippine sovereignty, Hegseth said.

The allied forces also agreed to stage special operations forces training in Batanes province in the northernmost tip of the Philippine archipelago across a sea border from Taiwan, he said.

Aside from China and the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also have overlapping claims in the busy waterway.

Washington does not lay any claim to the waterway but repeatedly has warned that it’s obligated to defend the Philippines, its oldest treaty ally in Asia, if Filipino forces, ships and aircraft come under an armed attack, including in the South China Sea.

AP · by JIM GOMEZ · April 21, 2025

22. Close the US Military Bases in Asia

History is important. It is valuable for understanding the past and present and what might be in the future. But not Professor Sach's historical analysis here. And the proposal for a security architecture through a regional security system including China, Japan, Russia, North Korea, South Korea without the US is pure fantasy.

I hesitated to send this but we must know the arguments from all sides. But it is difficult to take this professor's ideas seriously.

Close the US Military Bases in Asia

With America’s 750 or so overseas military bases in around 80 countries, it’s high time to close these bases, pocket the saving, and return to diplomacy. Our bases across Asia are a good place to start.

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-military-bases-asia

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Apr 22, 2025

Common Dreams

President Donald Trump is again loudly complaining that the U.S. military bases in Asia are too costly for the U.S. to bear. As part of the new round of tariff negotiations with Japan and Korea, Trump is calling on Japan and Korea to pay for stationing the US troops. Here’s a much better idea: close the bases and bring the U.S. servicemen home.

Trump implies that the U.S. is providing a great service to Japan and Korea by stationing 50,000 troops in Japan and nearly 30,000 in Korea. Yet these countries do not need the U.S. to defend themselves. They are wealthy and can certainly provide their own defense. Far more importantly, diplomacy can ensure the peace in northeast Asia far more effectively and far less expensively than U.S. troops.

The U.S. acts as if Japan needs to be defended against China. Let’s have a look. During the past 1,000 years, during which time China was the region’s dominant power for all but the last 150 years, how many times did China attempt to invade Japan? If you answered zero, you are correct. China did not attempt to invade Japan on a single occasion.

You might quibble. What about the two attempts in 1274 and 1281, roughly 750 years ago? It’s true that when the Mongols temporarily ruled China between 1271 and 1368, the Mongols twice sent expeditionary fleets to invade Japan, and both times were defeated by a combination of typhoons (known in Japanese lore as the Kamikaze winds) and by Japanese coastal defenses.

Japan, on the other hand, made several attempts to attack or conquer China. In 1592, the arrogant and erratic Japanese military leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched an invasion of Korea with the goal of conquering Ming China. He did not get far, dying in 1598 without even having subdued Korea. In 1894-5, Japan invaded and defeated China in the Sino-Japanese war, taking Taiwan as a Japanese colony. In 1931, Japan invaded northeast China (Manchuria) and created the Japanese colony of Manchukuo. In 1937, Japan invaded China, starting World War II in the Pacific region.

Nobody thinks that Japan is going to invade China today, and there is no rhyme, reason, or historical precedent to believe that China is going to invade Japan. Japan has no need for the US military bases to protect itself from China.

The same is true of China and Korea. During the past 1,000 years, China never invaded Korea, except on one occasion: when the U.S. threatened China. China entered the war in late 1950 on the side of North Korea to fight the U.S. troops advancing northward towards the Chinese border. At the time, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur recklessly recommended attacking China with atomic bombs. MacArthur also proposed to support Chinese nationalist forces, then based in Taiwan, to invade the Chinese mainland. President Harry Truman, thank God, rejected MacArthur’s recommendations.

South Korea needs deterrence against North Korea, to be sure, but that would be achieved far more effectively and credibly through a regional security system including China, Japan, Russia, North Korea, South Korea, than through the presence of the U.S., which has repeatedly stoked North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and military build-up, not diminished it.

In fact, the U.S. military bases in East Asia are really for the U.S. projection of power, not for the defense of Japan or Korea. This is even more reason why they should be removed. Though the U.S. claims that its bases in East Asia are defensive, they are understandably viewed by China and North Korea as a direct threat – for example, by creating the possibility of a decapitation strike, and by dangerously lowering the response times for China and North Korea to a U.S. provocation or some kind of misunderstanding. Russia vociferously opposed NATO in Ukraine for the same justifiable reasons. NATO has frequently intervened in U.S.-backed regime-change operations and has placed missile systems dangerously close to Russia. Indeed, just as Russia feared, NATO has actively participated in the Ukraine War, providing armaments, strategy, intelligence, and even programming and tracking for missile strikes deep inside of Russia.

Note that Trump is currently obsessed with two small port facilities in Panama owned by a Hong Kong company, claiming that China is threatening U.S. security (!), and wants the facilities sold to an American buyer. The U.S. on the other hand surrounds China not with two tiny port facilities but with major U.S. military bases in Japan, South Korea, Guam, the Philippines, and the Indian Ocean near to China’s international sea lanes.

The best strategy for the superpowers is to stay out of each other’s lanes. China and Russia should not open military bases in the Western Hemisphere, to put it mildly. The last time that was tried, when the Soviet Union placed nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, the world nearly ended in nuclear annihilation. (See Martin Sherwin’s remarkable book, Gambling with Armageddon for the shocking details on how close the world came to nuclear Armageddon). Neither China nor Russia shows the slightest inclination to do so today, despite all of the provocations of facing US bases in their own neighborhoods.

Trump is looking for ways to save money – an excellent idea given that the U.S. federal budget is hemorrhaging $2 trillion dollars a year, more than 6% of U.S. GDP. Closing the U.S. overseas military bases would be an excellent place to start.

Trump even seemed to point that way at the start of his second term, but the Congressional Republicans have called for increases, not decreases, in military spending. Yet with America’s 750 or so overseas military bases in around 80 countries, it’s high time to close these bases, pocket the saving, and return to diplomacy. Getting the host countries to pay for something that doesn’t help them or the U.S. is a huge drain of time, diplomacy, and resources, both for the U.S. and the host countries.

The U.S. should make a basic deal with China, Russia, and other powers. “You keep your military bases out of our neighborhood, and we’ll keep our military bases out of yours.” Basic reciprocity among the major powers would save trillions of dollars of military outlays over the coming decade and, more importantly, would push the Doomsday Clock back from 89 seconds to nuclear Armageddon

Jeffrey D. Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of "A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism" (2020). Other books include: "Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable" (2017) and "The Age of Sustainable Development," (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.

23. Revealed: Trump Admin Launches the Biggest Shake-Up ‘In Decades’ at the State Department

We may rue the day....

That said, some of this reorganization could make good sense. It is hard to tell from an org chart and the speculation in the article below. We have to give State the benefit of the doubt. As Socrates said: “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” At least we seem to be getting a plan for the future from State. But change is hard.

Photos of the current and proposed line and block org charts are at the link.

Revealed: Trump Admin Launches the Biggest Shake-Up ‘In Decades’ at the State Department

Internal documents obtained by The Free Press detail plans to close 132 offices, including those launched to further human rights, counter extremism, and prevent war crimes.

By Gabe Kaminsky and Madeleine Rowley

04.22.25 — The Big Read

https://www.thefp.com/p/trump-state-shake-up-rubio?utm

Secretary of State Marco Rubio (left) and President Donald Trump attend a cabinet meeting earlier this month. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The Trump administration has begun an aggressive shake-up at the State Department that will close 132 agency offices, including those launched to further human rights, advance democracy overseas, counter extremism, and prevent war crimes.

The plans to reorganize the leading foreign policy agency in the United States are outlined in internal documents obtained by The Free Press. They show how the State Department will eliminate or restructure hundreds of offices in Washington, D.C.—a revelation that comes after reports in recent weeks of a rumored overhaul at the agency. The State Department is bringing its number of offices down from 734 to 602, a 17 percent reduction.

Separately, under secretaries at the State Department are also being instructed within 30 days to present plans to reduce their U.S. personnel in individual departments by 15 percent, according to a senior State Department official. These include six top offices employing thousands of people. The reorganization comes as the Trump administration seeks to drastically reduce the size and scope of the federal government.

The current State Department org chart.

The proposed new State Department org chart.

Earlier this morning, roughly a dozen top officials at the State Department were briefed on the plans by leadership at the agency, according to a second senior State Department official. The State Department also sent a brief letter to Congress on Tuesday informing lawmakers that there will be changes to the department, although it is expected to send a more detailed congressional notice in the near future that will outline them. Officials say it is the biggest shake-up at the State Department “in decades.”

“In its current form, the Department is bloated, bureaucratic, and unable to perform its essential diplomatic mission in this new era of great power competition,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement to The Free Press. “That is why today I am announcing a comprehensive reorganization plan that will bring the Department into the twenty-first century.”

Rubio is working alongside Elon Musk’s DOGE on the reorganization, according to one U.S. official familiar with the matter, who said Rubio has viewed the prospect of broad reform to the State Department as a priority since his time in the Senate.

Mike Pompeo, secretary of state during the first Trump administration, has also long believed a reorganization at the State Department is needed to streamline work. “The State Department is desperately in need of significant reorganization, and there’s much efficiency that can be gained there,” Pompeo told The Free Press.

Previous speculation, including a report published Sunday in The New York Times, had focused on the possible closure of overseas offices, including the elimination of almost all its Africa operations.

But the planning documents seen by The Free Press, several of which are marked “SBU” for Sensitive But Unclassified, make no mention of the rumored changes covered by the Times.

Rubio said the Times story amounted to “fake news.” And two senior State Department officials involved in the reorganization efforts said its contents bore no resemblance to the plan Rubio is now undertaking. The Free Press also obtained internal documents showing the proposed new organizational chart for the State Department.

According to the planning documents, the State Department will eliminate 132 of its offices along with 700 positions within them. These offices are wings of the agency in Washington, D.C., that focus on a variety of foreign policy issues and are viewed by the Trump administration as no longer necessary.

The 700 positions are for civil service and foreign service employees, rather than political appointees. The elimination of the roles is in addition to the State Department’s ask for under secretaries to reduce their personnel by 15 percent.

The State Department is also transferring 137 offices to other parts of the agency to consolidate programs.

“This approach will empower the Department from the ground up, from the bureaus to the embassies,” Rubio said. “Region-specific functions will be consolidated to increase functionality, redundant offices will be removed, and non-statutory programs that are misaligned with America’s core national interests will cease to exist.”

The Trump administration’s move will almost certainly face staunch criticism from Democrats in Congress, who have expressed concerns about national security and American diplomacy amidst reports of President Donald Trump potentially shrinking the agency.

The programs that the State Department is cutting are among those that do not require approval from Congress, the second senior State Department official stressed. Top offices at the agency will have 30 days to devise plans for how they will implement the changes, the second official said.

One notable part of the restructuring will involve an office called the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, also known as the agency’s “J programs.” It “leads global diplomatic efforts to advance universal human rights, democratic renewal, and human-centered security,” according to its website.

The J office, the documents show, is being overhauled and renamed as the Under Secretary for Foreign Assistance and Human Rights. There, officials plan to abolish its Office of Global Criminal Justice, which was formed in 1997 to advise on U.S. policy related to genocide, war crimes, and other grave human rights violations.

In the past, the Office of Global Criminal Justice has worked with the Department of Justice on investigating atrocities committed in Syria, and has aided Balkan countries in setting up war crime tribunals, according to a former State Department official. This March, the office met with a group of Syrians to discuss human rights issues.

Some functions of that criminal justice office will be absorbed by the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser, according to the documents.

Another office on the chopping block is the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, or CSO. It received $336 million between 2016 and 2023, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, an independent agency examining how federal funds are spent.

The CSO was established in 2011 to help anticipate, prevent, and respond to conflicts that may threaten U.S. national security, according to a press release upon its launch. The office says on its website that its programs have included generating data analytics to document war crimes by Russia-aligned forces in Ukraine and issuing policy recommendations to target radical armed forces in countries like Myanmar, Iraq, and Libya.

Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported on an internal memo that said the White House’s budget office was considering asking Congress to close the CSO as part of a separate proposal. The proposal would reduce the agency’s budget by $27 billion.

Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for the White House budget office, told The Free Press that no final funding decisions have been made.

“Nobody is really sure what they do,” the second senior State Department official said of the CSO. “When I ask them, they seem to not really be sure what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s an office that was created several years ago to look at Afghanistan [issues] and to avoid conflict areas. But we already have other offices within the department that do that.”

Brett Bruen, a former State Department official during the Obama administration, raised concerns last week that the possible closure of the CSO and other programs was the “demolishing of our international influence instruments.”

The State Department also has plans to eliminate “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) activities at the Bureau of Counterterrorism, the documents say. CVE refers to “actions to counter efforts by violent extremists to radicalize, recruit, and mobilize followers to violence and to address specific factors that facilitate violent extremist recruitment and radicalization to violence,” the State Department said in a 2016 report.

The State Department increased spending on CVE in 2015, at the height of ISIS’s rise to power in the Middle East, as part of a push to work with international allies on thwarting the spread of extremism, according to a 2019 State Department audit. Officials in the Trump administration are of the mind that the CVE programs at that bureau duplicate others in the agency, including programs at a bureau focused on international narcotics.

One significant way the Trump administration is consolidating programs is by targeting the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was launched in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy to administer foreign aid.

Since Trump took office, he has moved to slash most of USAID’s contracts over concerns that too much overseas spending was either wasted or not in alignment with U.S. interests. Congressional Democrats have said Trump’s attack on USAID is illegal.

The second senior State Department official told The Free Press that foreign assistance functions formerly run by USAID will now be taken on by regional State Department bureaus or folded into other existing offices. For example, USAID’s disaster assistance functions will be moved to the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration and its health programs to the Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy, the official said.

“On July 1, USAID ceases to exist,” that official added. The State Department has said it will complete its USAID reorganization by that date, which is expected to draw legal challenges since Congress established USAID as an independent agency.

The broader restructuring at the State Department will also see the elimination of a nuclear nonproliferation envoy role at a bureau working to prevent weapons of mass destruction.

According to the internal documents, the State Department is planning to create an office called the Bureau of Emerging Threats. It will focus on cyber threats to the U.S., the second senior State Department official said.

“We’re trying to streamline the organization, to centralize functions that should be centralized, and to focus on the big things that support our America First diplomacy out in the field,” the official added.

24. The Special Sauce: How Hegseth’s Software Memo Can Start a Revolution

Excerpt:

Conclusion

Secretary Hegseth’s new memo is a significant step toward broadening the dual-use industrial base. This step was emphasized in the recent executive order that reinforces the “general preference” for acquisition officials to leverage Other Transactions Authority. However, the success of these initiatives will depend on steps beyond simply using the Commercial Solutions Opening or Other Transactions. Fundamental culture and business changes are required to open up a new commercial industrial base — ultimately, it comes down to people and their incentives. Venture capitalists, seeing the promise and potential of the Department of Defense market seeded by the Defense Innovation Unit and other innovators over the last 10 years, invested nearly $43 billion this past year in dual-use technology companies. To harness the power of this private capital, the department will need to change how it views the industrial base, accept more risk with nontraditional vendors, and transform itself into a more attractive customer. In the face of global competition and the department’s technological disadvantage, the time has come for the procurement system to be transformed.

The Special Sauce: How Hegseth’s Software Memo Can Start a Revolution - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Lauren Dailey · April 22, 2025

Reliable, fast, working, and user-friendly software is the basis of our everyday lives — something we all take for granted. The military can’t always say the same thing. A new memo endeavors to address that by announcing a huge, structural shift in procurement policy.

The Commercial Solutions Opening, pioneered by the Defense Innovation Unit, has been named by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as the default contracting approach for software acquisition pathway programs and projects. This expansion from a niche contracting approach to a default process marks a decisive move away from the Defense Department’s traditional procurement mode and more fully embraces commercial leading practices.

But why is this memo needed in the first place?

It’s important to look back at the origin of the Defense Innovation Unit and why the Commercial Solutions Opening was created: to change the way the Department of Defense does business and open up a new commercial and dual-use technology industrial base that complements (not replaces) the traditional defense industrial base. As former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter put it in his Drell Lecture almost 10 years ago, “[W]e must renew the bonds of trust and rebuild the bridge between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley.”

For the Department of Defense to achieve the outcomes it desires from this new memo, it may want to consider key lessons learned from the Defense Innovation Unit’s experience developing and scaling the Commercial Solution Opening. Our perspective comes from our collective experience: in addition to pioneering this original methodology at the Defense Innovation Unit, both of us now work for organizations (Deloitte Consulting LLP and Shield Capital) who sell to or invest in companies that sell commercial, dual-use, and defense capabilities to the Department of Defense.

To that end, we offer a summary of the Defense Innovation Unit’s “special sauce” that allowed the Commercial Solutions Opening to be uniquely successful in opening up this new industrial base. To scale this approach, the Department should inculcate a culture that emphasizes speed, flexibility, and collaboration. If done effectively, the Department of Defense should be able to align procurement practices with commercial market incentives, encourage acquisition leaders to take appropriate risk, center the user experience throughout the development process, and leverage established relationships to accelerate innovation and leading technology for the warfighter.

Become a Member

Why Did It Work So Well?

The Defense Innovation Unit’s mission was seemingly simple: connect venture-backed, commercial start-ups — what the Defense Department calls “nontraditional companies” — with Defense customers to leverage top technology. Historically, relationships with these nontraditional companies have been challenging due to acquisition culture. The department had, for many decades, effectively been a monopsonist: a single buyer of things like tanks, missiles, and aircraft carriers in the defense industrial base market. As such, its buying approach, culture, and infrastructure were designed from this perspective, engaging its industrial base as the primary buyer and wielding that market power to the best of its ability. This approach worked in the past. In 1960, 36 percent of all global research and development was driven by the Defense Department. Today, it makes up less than 3 percent, with the commercial sector driving advancements in technology. This means that not only is the Department of Defense not the single buyer, but it is often not considered an important buyer.

Most start-ups can’t afford to take 12 to 18 months to negotiate a contract under the traditional contracting rules governed by the Federal Acquisition Regulation. As recent as 2016, most venture investors would actively discourage start-ups from working with the government based on inefficient outcomes.

We led the creation of a new construct — the Commercial Solutions Opening — to enable the Defense Innovation Unit to be faster, more flexible, and collaborative. However, just using this new approach alone wouldn’t guarantee that the department would become a more attractive customer. Several elements enabled this unique approach to realize the outcomes it sought.

The first was true collaboration. We designed the process to build a better understanding between the government and the vendor of what constituted success, and what might get in the way of it. We put the warfighters in the same room with the technologists to collaboratively design the project with the best possible outcomes for both sides.

The second factor was leadership support of appropriate risk. Without leadership support to do things differently — all the way to the secretary of defense — this would not have happened.

Third, by demonstrating that we could deploy capital quickly and reliably to true nontraditional defense contractors, we signaled to the commercial venture community that the Department of Defense could indeed be a valuable customer.

This resulted in not only an expansion of this dual-use tech industrial base (more companies competing), but also more investors encouraging their portfolio companies to work with the department. In 2016, when the Defense Innovation Unit launched the Commercial Solutions Opening, there was ~$8 billion in venture capital investment focused on defense technology. In 2024, that number was up to ~$43 billion, a 525% increase in just eight years. Still, investment in software as a service technology in 2024 alone accounted for $130 billion in venture capital investment, just under the entirety of the defense budget’s fiscal year 2024 funding line for research, development, testing, and evaluation.

Source: PitchBook

Finally, relationships with this nontraditional industrial base were key. The Defense Innovation Unit leveraged commercial executives — former venture capitalists and technology executives who had the relationships and credibility across various innovation hubs. Through these relationships, they built bridges and connective tissue to entrepreneurs and investors. Without this approach, the Commercial Solutions Opening would not have engaged the companies and solutions it did.

From Memo to Better Outcomes

How can the new memo enable the desired outcomes of faster software development with commercial best-of-breed companies? Drawing on our lessons learned from building and scaling the first Commercial Solutions Opening at the Defense Innovation Unit, there are six key tenets to enable the memo’s desired objectives.

Be a More Attractive Customer to the Nontraditional Defense Market

First, acquisition professionals should recognize how the Defense Department’s value proposition differs between the traditional defense market and the emerging nontraditional defense market. Each market views the business proposition of the department differently, and each segment responds to different incentives. Rather than just engaging its traditional suppliers, who will follow the complex rules for doing business with the department, acquisition professionals need to realize how dual-use and commercial tech markets are fundamentally different. In these ecosystems, the Department of Defense is often a smaller customer, lacking the market power to drive long procurement timelines, complex and one-sided terms and conditions, and detailed cost and pricing insights and direction. Imagine a software firm with hundreds or even thousands of commercial customers who are easy to work with and can buy their products quickly. A defense acquisition officer asking for dozens of unique contract terms with only the potential promise of a sale at the end of a long timeframe is not something many of these firms are equipped for or willing to accommodate. The Department of Defense should comprehend this market’s incentives, structure projects to align to those incentives, and understand necessary changes to effectively engage this market.

Incentivize Critical Thinking and Embrace Flexibility

Leaders should incentivize and reward appropriate risk taking and consideration of opportunity cost to utilize the fast and flexible nature of this tool. Without a top-down approach encouraging a different way of thinking, the use of Commercial Solutions Opening Other Transaction Agreements is at risk of becoming even slower than traditional contracts. Unfamiliarity with this approach is often compensated for by additional process and reviews: more time and more reviewers are often seen as a mechanism to de-risk procurements. However, understanding that risk and opportunity cost are two sides of the same coin, leadership should encourage acquisition professionals to look at both — consider what won’t happen if we don’t move faster or do business differently.

For example, if a contracting officer must sign off that they are willing to accept an opportunity cost of a six-month delay in initiating a new software procurement for a user’s needs, they may be more likely to accept the risk associated with starting it earlier — and getting it into the hands of the user sooner. At the end of the day, behavior and culture are driven from the top down. If leadership incentivizes a different culture and approach to acquisition and contracting, rewards risk-taking, and accepts failure as a necessary and integral part of doing business differently, the Department of Defense can leverage the full power of these innovative approaches and expand its software industrial base.

Put the User at the Center

User feedback is a cornerstone of commercial software development. To get the effective, warfighter-centered outcomes that the Department of Defense desires, end users and their feedback should be central throughout the process. This can be done in multiple ways. First, end user feedback can drive the development of initial solicitation statements to ensure the root problem faced by users is effectively captured. Second, users can be part of the collaborative design of the project. Their expertise in what needs to be prototyped can help design more effective projects. Finally, user feedback should be included as part of the project to ensure that actual feedback informs whether a prototype is successful. To best align with commercial software development, user needs should be at the forefront of every project, every prototype — even every sprint — to effectively deliver capabilities to the department.

Connecting Capital to Accelerate Impact

Program offices should harness the power of existing relationships built by the Defense Innovation Unit and the Office of Strategic Capital with private capital and start-ups to effectively engage nontraditional companies and accelerate innovation across the broader Department of Defense. Outreach to this different commercial industrial base is key. The Department of Defense shouldn’t expect these nontraditional companies (or their investors) to immediately start responding to deals simply because a Commercial Solutions Opening is being used. They’re also not likely using SAM.gov, the federal government’s solicitation website, to search for contract opportunities, or attending industry days hosted at government sites. Instead, program offices leveraging the Commercial Solutions Opening should collaborate with organizations like the Defense Innovation Unit to leverage their existing networks of private capital providers and nontraditional companies who are best positioned to respond to a solicitation. Finally, these relationships are built on trust and an expectation of an addressable market. Once the broader Department of Defense awards more software projects to these nontraditional vendors, we expect more of these companies and their investors will respond to future solicitations, thus growing this dual-use industrial base.

Commercial Practices Show the Way

The software-as-a-service marketplace is highly competitive, and most providers have published licensing models based on customer-derived value. To effectively work with commercial software providers, procurement professionals should move away from labor driven cost-reimbursable contracts to firm-fixed price contract models — including buying capacity or outcomes, rather than hours. Instead of spending time estimating labor hours to create a bespoke piece of software, the Department of Defense can leverage commercially developed software with mission applications that can be applied across the enterprise or multiple customers at speed. This would require a different approach to requirements. Today, the Defense Department often attempts to forecast all the capabilities a piece of software should accomplish. Such an approach leads to a belief that the acquisition community can award a contract for an ideal solution absent ongoing customer feedback. This approach inevitably leads to long timelines before the warfighter can see it in action. However, without iterative customer feedback, the requirements process may likely miss key features and/or workflows necessary for evolving warfighter needs. Instead of looking for the 100 percent solution, the acquisition community should identify commercially developed software that meets 80 percent of the needs but is immediately available for deployment. Over time, with commercial leading practices and regular user feedback, the Department of Defense can evolve the software based on practical, quick-hitting needs.

The Pentagon Can Leverage More Than Just Money

Other Transaction Agreements enable the Department of Defense to create more flexible business arrangements. Imagine an innovative company building flying cars which has plenty of private funding and doesn’t need any new money from the government. However, access to a Department of Defense test range exempt from Federal Aviation Administration regulations can provide valuable non-monetary contributions to their overall path to market. Additionally, putting these early prototypes in the hands of servicemembers — who will use them in more extreme environments and situations than commercial customers — also provides invaluable user feedback. These are compelling, unique, and innovative options that the Department of Defense brings to the negotiating table. The key is understanding how and when to apply these negotiating levers to achieve the desired outcomes.

Conclusion

Secretary Hegseth’s new memo is a significant step toward broadening the dual-use industrial base. This step was emphasized in the recent executive order that reinforces the “general preference” for acquisition officials to leverage Other Transactions Authority. However, the success of these initiatives will depend on steps beyond simply using the Commercial Solutions Opening or Other Transactions. Fundamental culture and business changes are required to open up a new commercial industrial base — ultimately, it comes down to people and their incentives. Venture capitalists, seeing the promise and potential of the Department of Defense market seeded by the Defense Innovation Unit and other innovators over the last 10 years, invested nearly $43 billion this past year in dual-use technology companies. To harness the power of this private capital, the department will need to change how it views the industrial base, accept more risk with nontraditional vendors, and transform itself into a more attractive customer. In the face of global competition and the department’s technological disadvantage, the time has come for the procurement system to be transformed.

Become a Member

Lauren Dailey led the creation of the Commercial Solutions Opening at the Defense Innovation Unit and served as its first acquisition lead from 2015 to 2018. She previously served as an Army civilian in the Pentagon and as the chief operating officer of Second Front Systems. She is now a leader in the defense acquisition and innovation practice at Deloitte Consulting LLP, helping Department of Defense clients leverage commercial technology for defense missions.

David Rothzeid is a former active-duty Air Force acquisition officer. He served at the Defense Innovation Unit from 2016 to 2018 as a member of the original Commercial Solutions Opening creation team and scaled it as the acquisition lead from 2018-2019. He is now a principal investor at Shield Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm investing at the intersection of national security and commercial innovation. David still serves in the Air Force as a reservist at the Pentagon.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of any entities they represent.

Image: Trevor Cokley via U.S. Department of Defense

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Lauren Dailey · April 22, 2025

25. The Counterproductive Legal Precedent That Strikes on Cartels Would Set

Excerpts:

More significantly for international politics, if the United States invokes the unwilling or unable doctrine, it would negatively affect longer-term U.S. interests. Over the years, several states—some hostile to the United States—have used the same doctrine to justify using force against neighboring states. Both Turkey and Iran, for instance, have used this practice to justify their illegal bombardment of non-state actors in Syria and Pakistan.

As the distribution of power shifts away from unipolarity, countries worldwide will gain strength. Some of them will have the ability and, thanks to the precedents set by the United States, the legal justification for using military force against their neighbors and beyond, with fewer and weaker legal constraints. By applying the doctrine so freely, the United States could socialize countries into accepting laxer justifications for attacking non-state actors and adversaries.

The unwilling or unable doctrine, combined with the realities of multipolarity risks, dramatically increases global instability for everyone, including the United States itself. A longer-term view of U.S. national security would recognize the benefits of the Mexican argument for the United States’s own safety and security.

The Counterproductive Legal Precedent That Strikes on Cartels Would Set

J. Luis Rodriguez

Monday, April 21, 2025, 12:00 PM

Mexico rejects the “unwilling or unable” doctrine of self-defense. The United States should, too.

lawfaremedia.org · by J. Luis Rodriguez

President Trump’s decision to list six Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) has significantly increased tensions with Mexico and may even pave the way for U.S. military action. The Mexican government has not watched these developments passively. Mexican authorities have publicly objected to the idea of a potential unilateral U.S. deployment of troops in Mexican territory. In addition to these policy objections, the Mexican government is making a legal critique of the “unwilling or unable” doctrine of self-defense. Regardless of the tensions over the Mexican cartels, Washington should carefully consider whether to reject this legal argument; if it is successful, its proliferation in a post-unipolar world will endanger U.S. security.

Mexico Is Willing and Able to Defend International Law ... Again

Earlier in January, before the Trump administration designated six Mexican cartels as FTOs, Mexico submitted a position paper to the UN Security Council outlining its legal reading of the doctrine of self-defense under the UN Charter. In it, Mexico rejected the notion that a state can use force against threats posed by state or non-state actors in the territory of another state without that state’s consent.

In particular, Mexico called out the unwilling or unable doctrine. This doctrine purports that when a state is unwilling or unable to control a threat emanating from its territory, another state can take action, even when the territorial state does not consent to use force. The United States has invoked this doctrine to justify its military activity in Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Sudan, among other states. Several countries have opposed this doctrine for years, including Mexico.

Supporters of the unwilling or unable doctrine trace its lineage to a pre-UN Charter body of law defining the rules for neutral states in armed conflict. That body of law provides that a state can attack the troops of its adversary in a neutral state if the neutral state is unwilling or unable to keep them out of its territory. Some states—especially the United States, but also the United Kingdom, Australia, Turkey, and others—apply this line of thinking one step further to justify their military actions against non-state actors, especially terrorist organizations. It is also a point of contention whether a non-state actor can commit an attack that justifies invoking the unwilling or unable doctrine.

The Mexican government’s consistent rejection of the modern application of this doctrine is grounded in principle and interest. Mexico has condemned terrorist attacks and state support of terrorist organizations, especially after the 9/11 attacks, but has also criticized the use of force against terrorist organizations. For example, like most Latin American countries, Mexico did not support the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and criticized a 2008 Colombian attack on a FARC encampment in Ecuador as a violation of Ecuador’s territorial sovereignty.

Now that its neighbor might use force against the country, Mexico’s rejection of this rationale for the use of force is back. In the past couple of years, Mexican diplomats condemned Russia’s actions in Ukraine at the United Nations, but the former Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, declared himself neutral in the conflict. As rhetoric from the White House becomes more hostile to Mexico, the government of the new Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is using international law again to delegitimize unilateral uses of military force outside of the traditional self-defense setting.

Mexican Principles and U.S. Interests

President Trump has invoked the unwilling or unable doctrine before, even if not directly as a justification for a use of force by the United States. During his first administration, he tweeted that Mexicans “were unable, or unwilling to stop” migrants from coming to the United States and considered designating Mexican cartels as FTOs. In 2019, Mexican President López Obrador struck a deal to avoid this designation.

Designating a group as an FTO gives the U.S. government more instruments to use against it, but it is not an automatic blank check on using force against that group. Perhaps the first Trump administration did not designate Mexican cartels as FTOs out of economic interest because the designation could harm U.S. companies. For example, gun manufacturers in the United States and U.S. importers of Mexican avocados could face legal repercussions for doing business with actors knowingly providing material support to the FTOs.

If President Trump interprets cartel activity as an armed attack on the United States, he could use a broad interpretation of the unwilling or unable doctrine to try to justify U.S. troops or bombs on Mexican soil. This would be the first time in decades that the United States overtly used military force in the hemisphere. Though the White House might invoke the doctrine and past presidential uses of force, it would have a difficult time using international law to defend it. The ramifications of these attacks would be devastating for an already fragile international order that cannot constrain the use of force.

According to the Mexican government’s position, the unwilling or unable doctrine contradicts established international law and multilateral practices. While most countries have either not established their view or have an ambiguous opinion about this doctrine, a vocal minority of countries have proposed a restrictive interpretation. Those opposed to the expansive view promoted by the United States and others argue that states that feel threatened by non-state actors should seek collective and multilateral responses following established procedures under international law. These countries do so out of an interest in ordering international politics, not just as a principled defense of the law.

These states want to prevent setting precedents that erode existing limits on the legitimate use of force. If an increasing number of states start to use this justification to take military action against non-state actors in the territory of other states, not only would the use of force in the international system increase significantly, but the system as a whole would become destabilized. Mexico is, in essence, making the case for a law-based order, with legal constraints on using military force as one of its key components.

Consequences of Invoking the Unwilling or Unable Doctrine

Invoking the unwilling or unable doctrine to attack Mexico would be counterproductive to U.S. interests. The cartels in Mexico are morphing constantly. A unilateral display of force to demonstrate U.S. strength will likely be ineffective in combating them. Bombing the cartels won’t stop or deter them.

Attacking the cartels unilaterally would also alienate the Mexican government. Mexico would stop cooperating with the United States if it bombed the cartels unilaterally. President Sheinbaum has publicly stated that the Mexican government will collaborate in fighting cartels but will not accept “subordination.” Washington would find itself fighting both the cartels and the Mexican government. A potential way to prevent the cartels from dispersing and reorganizing would be to design a coordinated strategy with Mexico to counter their finances and weapons.

Mexico has already asked the United States to target the cartels’ arms supply. Domestically, the Mexican government has proposed stricter laws to prosecute arms traffickers in Mexico. Also, the Mexican government, in response to the designation of cartels as FTOs, has doubled down on its legal campaign against U.S. companies in U.S. courts, accusing them of arming the cartels. The FTO designation could potentially force the Trump administration to pay closer attention to the activities of gun manufacturers.

Reforming and Clarifying the Use of Force Is in U.S. Interests

More significantly for international politics, if the United States invokes the unwilling or unable doctrine, it would negatively affect longer-term U.S. interests. Over the years, several states—some hostile to the United States—have used the same doctrine to justify using force against neighboring states. Both Turkey and Iran, for instance, have used this practice to justify their illegal bombardment of non-state actors in Syria and Pakistan.

As the distribution of power shifts away from unipolarity, countries worldwide will gain strength. Some of them will have the ability and, thanks to the precedents set by the United States, the legal justification for using military force against their neighbors and beyond, with fewer and weaker legal constraints. By applying the doctrine so freely, the United States could socialize countries into accepting laxer justifications for attacking non-state actors and adversaries.

The unwilling or unable doctrine, combined with the realities of multipolarity risks, dramatically increases global instability for everyone, including the United States itself. A longer-term view of U.S. national security would recognize the benefits of the Mexican argument for the United States’s own safety and security.

lawfaremedia.org · by J. Luis Rodriguez

26. She told Trump the Smithsonian needs changing. He’s ordered her to do it.

"improper ideology?"

She told Trump the Smithsonian needs changing. He’s ordered her to do it.

Who is Lindsey Halligan, the attorney assigned to help remove “improper ideology” from a major cultural institution?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2025/04/21/lindsey-halligan-smithsonian-executive-order/?utm

April 21, 2025 at 5:00 a.m. EDTYesterday at 5:00 a.m. EDT

Lindsey Halligan has a White House title that contains both “assistant” and “special assistant.” (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Maura Judkis

here is only one person mentioned by name in President Donald Trump’s March 27 executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” That’s the order that seeks to “restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness” through removing mentions of historical racism. And the name in the order will probably not ring a bell.

Get concise answers to your questions. Try Ask The Post AI.

“Lindsey Halligan, Esq.”

Halligan, according to the order, will consult with Vice President JD Vance to “remove improper ideology” from Smithsonian properties.

The first question is: What is improper ideology, exactly?

The second: Who is Lindsey Halligan, Esq.?

We have her on the phone, actually. She’s calling from the White House.

Follow Trump’s first 100 Days

“I would say that improper ideology would be weaponizing history,” Halligan says. “We don’t need to overemphasize the negative to teach people that certain aspects of our nation’s history may have been bad.” That overemphasis “just makes us grow further and further apart.”

As for the second question: Halligan, 35, is a Trump attorney who seems to have tasked herself as a sort of commissioner — or expurgator, according to critics — of a premier cultural institution.

After moving to D.C. just before the inauguration to continue working for Trump as a special assistant and senior associate staff secretary, Halligan visited local cultural institutions, including the Smithsonian museums of Natural History, American History and American Art. She didn’t like everything she saw. Some exhibits, in her view, did not reflect the America she knows and loves.

“And so I talked to the president about it,” Halligan says, “and suggested an executive order, and he gave me his blessing, and here we are.”

Halligan leaves a 2022 court hearing related to the seizure of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago. (Marco Bello/AFP/Getty Images)

ere we are: A former Fox News host is leading the Pentagon. A vaccine skeptic is running the Department of Health and Human Services. A former professional wrestling executive is head of the Department of Education.

And Lindsey Halligan, Esq., could turn a major cultural institution upside down.

How did she arrive at this point? Halligan grew up in Broomfield, Colorado, and went to a private Catholic high school, Holy Family, where she excelled at softball and basketball. Her parents worked in the audiology industry. Halligan’s sister, Gavin, a family-law attorney in Colorado, ran for a state House seat as a Republican in 2016 in a blue district and lost.

Halligan attended Regis University, a Jesuit university in Denver, where she studied politics and broadcast journalism. She was always interested in history, she says — particularly the Civil War and the westward expansion of the country.

She competed in the Miss Colorado USA pageant, making the semifinals in 2009 and earning third runner-up in 2010, according to photos and records of the events. This was back when Trump co-owned the organization that puts on the Miss Universe pageant, for which Miss Colorado USA is a preliminary event.

“Sports and pageants taught me confidence, discipline, and how to handle pressure — on the court, on the field, on the stage, in the courtroom and now in the White House,” Halligan says in a post-interview email.

She studied law at the University of Miami. She interned for the Innocence Project — which works to exonerate wrongfully convicted people — and the Miami-Dade County public defender’s office.

Halligan was a “very smart, respectful and well-liked student,” says one of her professors, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she did not have permission from the university to speak about a former student. The professor recalls that people often underestimated Halligan because of her good looks.

Halligan graduated in 2013 and handled insurance matters in South Florida for a firm called Cole, Scott & Kissane. She made partner in 2018 and defeated a more than $500,000 property damage claim in a 2019 case about a leaky roof.

Halligan says she met Trump at a November 2021 event at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. She had come from court and was in a suit, which probably made her stand out from other female attendees. Trump noticed her, asked what she did and made her part of his legal team in early 2022.

In the president, “I saw the same thing that I saw when I interned at the Innocence clinic: someone who was getting railroaded by the system,” Halligan says.

Halligan in New York in 2022 with other members of Trump’s legal team: Evan Corcoran, center, James Trusty, right, and Christopher Kise, back right. (Alex Kent/Getty Images)

he was present at Mar-a-Lago for the August 2022 FBI raid of the president’s property, during which classified documents were seized. With her pageant looks, legal degree and broadcast journalism training, she became one of the president’s defenders on TV.

“They looked at God-knows-what in there, and did God-knows-what in there,” Halligan told Sean Hannity on Fox News shortly after the search. “We have no idea. What the FBI did was an appalling display of abuse of power.”

Halligan was a front-row guest in Trump’s box at the 2024 Republican National Convention. She was later a target of Iranian hackers looking to infiltrate the campaign, according to CNN. She had become part of Trump’s inner circle.

The president “holds her in high regard,” says John Rowley, a former Trump attorney who worked with Halligan. “She obviously has the president’s confidence.”

Halligan has been pictured in the Oval Office, sometimes at the side of Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, as the president signs various documents. On March 6, Halligan herself introduced two proclamations: on Irish American Heritage Month (Halligan identifies as such) and Women’s History Month — “in honor of everything you’ve done for women,” she told the president.

Then there was the March 27 executive order — signed “behind closed doors,” according to ABC News — in which Halligan herself was named, at Halligan’s own suggestion.

“She is an avid — and well-read — fan of history,” emails Jim Trusty, who worked with Halligan until he resigned from Trump’s legal team, citing “irreconcilable differences” with Trump. “I had no idea that there was going to be an Executive Order regarding the Smithsonian, but in hindsight it makes a lot of sense to me that Lindsey would have a role.”

The order affirmed her title using a splendid cascade of Washington jargon: “Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Associate Staff Secretary.”

The Organization of American Historians was sharper in its estimation of the other words in the executive order: “a disturbing attack on core institutions … and history itself.”

Halligan is present in the Oval Office on Jan. 31 as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and his wife, Kathryn, meet with Trump. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

rump is not much of a museumgoer. On Feb. 21, 2017, he visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In his memoir, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, then the museum’s director, recalled that, before the president arrived, aides told Bunch that Trump “was in a foul mood and that he did not want to see anything ‘difficult.’” Nevertheless, Bunch began the private tour in a gallery about the transatlantic slave trade.

“It was not my job to make the rough edges of history smooth, even for the president,” Bunch wrote.

In the executive order that features Halligan, three D.C. museums are specifically mentioned: First, a reference to an infographic about “white culture” on the African American Museum’s website that was removed in 2020, after Donald Trump Jr. criticized it in a social media post.

The second is the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, whose opening is years down the road — yet the order claims it will celebrate “male athletes participating in women’s sports.” False, according to Smithsonian spokeswoman Linda St. Thomas.

The third museum is the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which Halligan visited this winter as she was getting to know D.C. An exhibit titled “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” is specified in the executive order as an example of improper ideology.

Walking through that exhibition, it’s easy to see how it could become a flash point for the Trump administration. Text accompanying the artworks, which explore the way different races of people sculpt themselves and others, explains that “race is not biological” and that sculpture “has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” — in that it could be used to perpetuate harmful stereotypes about bodies of color.

During her visits to the museums, Halligan says she saw “exhibits that have to do with either another country’s history entirely or art and sculpture that describes on the placards next to it that America and sculpture are inherently racist,” though she did not offer specific details.

She says she also saw exhibitions that did not focus on America at all. “There’s a lot about other countries’ history that has nothing to do with America, and I think, you know, America is so special,” she says, adding: “We should all be focused on how amazing our country is and how much America has to offer.”

Halligan is not alone in the MAGAverse for wanting to change the nation’s cultural institutions. The content of the executive order was foreshadowed by a Nov. 25 Wall Street Journal opinion piece co-written by the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez, one of the contributors to Project 2025. With co-author Armen Tooloee, he laid out a plan for “How Trump Can Rid Washington of Wokeness” — and “retake control of museums” was one step.

“Smithsonian museums have forsaken their mission of spreading knowledge and instead are trying to ‘decolonize’ society,” they wrote. “... Mr. Trump should ask Congress to restore ideological balance by appointing real conservatives willing to stand up to progressive views to the Board of Regents” of the Smithsonian.

How Halligan (and the vice president, who is on the board of regents) will carry out the executive order remains to be seen. The order is unusual because the Smithsonian’s programming is not under the purview of the executive branch. The independent institution receives about 60 percent of its funding from congressional appropriations and federal grants and contracts, according to fiscal 2023 numbers, but those funds cover operations, infrastructure and maintaining collections. Generally, exhibitions are funded by private donations.

But the order makes clear that the administration will find a way to punish the museums financially if desired changes are not enacted, by prohibiting “expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”

Those words have thrown the nation’s cultural class into a tailspin. The American Historical Association said the order “completely misconstrues the nature of historical work.”

The Organization of American Historians wrote that the order “accuses historians and Smithsonian curators of professional malfeasance.”

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation said the order — which promotes the reinstatement of statues and memorials that were removed for “partisan” reasons — “encourages the veneration of historical figures who committed racist acts.”

On Thursday, four Democratic members of the Committee on House Administration urged Vance to preserve the Smithsonian in a letter, writing that the order is “shaped solely by the views and ideology of one individual as a means of expanding his political power ... The attempt to paper over elements of American history is both cowardly and unpatriotic.”

Asked whether Halligan had been in touch with Bunch, the board of regents, or any of the directors of the museums, the White House and the Smithsonian declined to answer.

The White House also would not say whether or how Halligan would pursue the removal of any current works of art or wall text in any museums, or the cancellation of any upcoming Smithsonian exhibitions.

“We will be working with a diverse group of people with varying fields of expertise to make sure that the Smithsonian portrays a fair and balanced representation of American history, culture and art,” says Halligan, who did not answer a follow-up question about how that group would be selected.

Despite her role in this executive order, and apart from her Oval Office appearances, Halligan has mainly stayed out of the spotlight in Washington. She has no social media presence. She doesn’t seem to pop up in the background of MAGA party pics. Her only recent “Playbook” sighting was at a British Embassy brunch in honor of the Shakespeare Theatre Company. (Halligan was “not someone we invited, nor on our guest list,” says a representative for the company, though she may have been a guest of another guest.)

“I’m more of a private person, as you can probably see,” says Halligan, whose influence could soon be very, very public.

What readers are saying

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Maura Judkis is a features reporter for The Washington Post. She is a two-time James Beard Award winner. She joined The Post in 2011. follow on X@MauraJudkis

27. A Different Kind of F.B.I. Chief: Jet-Setting Patel Loves the Limelight

A Different Kind of F.B.I. Chief: Jet-Setting Patel Loves the Limelight

Kash Patel’s embrace of the spotlight appears to be a break from the recent past, as his predecessors typically did the job with little fanfare.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/20/us/politics/kash-patel-spotlight-fbi-director.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm

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Kash Patel, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, has embraced the spotlight in a way traditionally shunned by his recent predecessors.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

By Adam Goldman and Aric Toler

Adam Goldman reported from Washington, and Aric Toler from Kansas City.

April 20, 2025

Kash Patel flew to Miami on Air Force One last weekend to watch an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, wearing his signature wraparound sunglasses — at least the second time he has gone to a mixed-martial arts fight as F.B.I. director.

Days earlier, he showed up at two N.H.L. games, grinning in photographs with the hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. At one, in Washington, Mr. Patel, who has played the sport since he was a child, was spotted in the owner’s suite as he watched the Capitals player Alex Ovechkin tie Mr. Gretzky’s scoring record.

And since taking over the agency, Mr. Patel has been a noticeable presence at President Trump’s side, delivering a warm-up speech at the Justice Department before Mr. Trump himself spoke and hovering behind him during the U.F.C. match in Miami.

Mr. Patel, 44, seems to relish his new status as director, cutting a highly visible path while running the most important law enforcement agency in the nation. His embrace of the spotlight appears to be a break from the recent past. Previous directors did the job with little fanfare, deflecting any attention that might detract from the work of the bureau.

“As director, I had never sought publicity or the spotlight that sometimes corners public officials,” Louis Freeh, the bureau’s fifth director, wrote in his memoir.

The last three directors have been a mix of personalities, all intent on operating at arm’s length from the president. Robert S. Mueller III was known as serious and laconic. His successor, James B. Comey, was considered a powerful orator who did not shrink from making headlines. Christopher A. Wray, who stepped down before Mr. Trump took office rather than get fired, fell somewhere in between Mr. Mueller, who did not speak enough, and Mr. Comey, who spoke too much, former agents said. (They pointed to Mr. Comey’s infamous news conference and two letters to Congress during the 2016 campaign that upended the presidential election.)

Image

Mr. Patel and other top administration officials accompanied President Trump to a U.F.C. event in Miami last Sunday.Credit...Tom Brenner for The New York Times

Since being confirmed in February, Mr. Patel has wasted little time emblazoning his vision. He has begun to reshape the bureau in short order — in some ways similar to Mr. Freeh — like pushing agents into the field. He has also pushed senior executives to step down. (J. Edgar Hoover, its founding director, simply fired them.) He has rejiggered the agency’s reporting structure, undoing changes that Mr. Mueller made, and brought in a deputy who has never been an agent, a first for the agency.

The changes have not resonated with Mr. Patel’s fierce following, prompting his deputy, Dan Bongino, to post on social media: “Because you don’t see things happening in live time, does not mean they aren’t happening. Not even close. You will see results, and not every result will please everyone, but you will absolutely see results.”

Days later, Mr. Patel, heeding congressional requests, released some records about the F.B.I.’s investigation into whether any Trump advisers had conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election — an inquiry that Mr. Patel denounced.

The conservative news media breathlessly covered the move as online sleuths hunted for new tidbits.

The F.B.I. quietly suspended with pay a longtime analyst Mr. Patel had singled out in his book as a member of the so-called deep state and another veteran agent who had been the target of Republicans in Congress angry over how the F.B.I. dealt with Hunter Biden’s laptop. He has promoted others, including one senior agent whose ascent prompted outcry and infighting among Mr. Patel’s loyalists.

Even as some of Mr. Patel’s work has flown under the radar, he has not shied away from praising his own success, posting on social media glowing news coverage of his early moves. “Kash Patel’s F.B.I. hits the ground running with major early victories,” read one Fox News headline he shared. A smattering of posts highlighted a surge in recruitment applications after he took over in February, though they did not acknowledge that applications had been paused for weeks shortly after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

Asked to comment, an F.B.I. spokesman said, “The numbers for March were our highest ever, and America is better for it.”

Trump Administration: Live Updates

Updated

April 22, 2025, 10:44 a.m. ET17 minutes ago

Mr. Patel has made clear that this is his show.

In March, the F.B.I. published a recruitment video featuring the bureau’s elite Hostage Rescue Team training in Quantico, Va. Punctuated to rock music, Mr. Patel, dressed in hunting camouflage, watched as helicopters ferried faceless agents who rappelled onto a building and burst into the unit’s shooting house while tossing flash bangs.

Mr. Hoover, who was relentless about self-promotion, may have welcomed such efforts, but the display rankled some former and current agents as performative. Kyle Seraphin, a former agent who has been deeply critical of the agency and has supported Mr. Patel, took to social media to poke fun at the director for “taking selfies with the Hostage Rescue Team.”

Mr. Patel and Mr. Bongino, once known for their tough talk toward the bureau, have since emerged as some of its most avid supporters, leading Mr. Seraphin to suggest that they might have been “captured” by the F.B.I. During a recent visit to Quantico, Mr. Bongino got a taste of F.B.I. toughness when he hit the mats with an instructor skilled in jujitsu. Mr. Bongino did not fare well, several former agents said.

In a post on social media about the incident, Mr. Bongino said, “The instructor I was grappling with got the best of me, because he’s incredibly talented.”

Image

Mr. Patel took in a Washington Capitals home game this month alongside Wayne Gretzky, center, and Gary Bettman, the N.H.L. commissioner.Credit...Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

Mr. Patel’s active presence on social media, including his personal and work profiles, reflect his approach. His accounts on X intersperse flattering stories about the F.B.I. under his guidance and photographs of his public appearances with regular updates on priorities like drug seizures and extraditions of gang leaders. Yet they also serve as a cudgel, upbraiding publications like The New York Times for reporting on personnel moves at the agency.

Mr. Patel, the ninth director of the F.B.I., is also the youngest since Mr. Hoover was appointed in 1924. A bachelor who lives in Las Vegas, Mr. Patel belongs to the Poodle Room, a lavish members-only club at the Fontainebleau resort near his home.

Mr. Hoover also was fond of clubs catering to a wealthy clientele, such as the Stork Club in Manhattan, which he occasionally frequented. One picture of Mr. Hoover at the club depicts him with Al Jolson, an entertainment star, and Walter Winchell, an influential journalist who helped burnish the director’s reputation. (Mr. Hoover had his favorite journalists do his bidding.)

Mr. Hoover never married. Mr. Patel is enjoying bachelorhood, dating Alexis Wilkins, 26, a country music singer who lives in Nashville. Despite the challenges of being director, Mr. Patel appears to be making time for her.

According to flight-tracking data, one of the bureau’s Gulfstream jets has made three round trips to Nashville. On at least one of those stops, Mr. Patel conducted official business, visiting the local field office and meeting with Tennessee’s Republican senators, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, along with sheriffs from around the state.

There is little information about the other trips, including who covered the cost, but it is not unusual for the director to take an F.B.I. plane for personal reasons. Directors must fly on government aircraft for their travel because of required access to secure communications equipment.

Directors must reimburse the government for use of the plane at the price of a commercial ticket — much less than it actually costs to operate the expensive jets.

The F.B.I. spokesman declined to comment, citing security reasons and saying, “All ethical guidelines are rigorously followed.”

Still, Mr. Wray’s use of the plane for personal reasons drew swift condemnation from Republicans in Congress. Senator Chuck Grassley has railed against “jet-setting executive travel” as he called it.

“There’s no reason they can’t take a less expensive mode of transportation, or cut their personal travel,” he said in 2013.

The F.B.I. recently put out a request for information about buying another jet for “required-use executive travel.” It was not clear why the bureau needed another plane. The Justice Department has a small fleet that the director can use to carry out his duties, including two Gulfstreams and two Boeing 757s.

One of those 757s landed at Kennedy International Airport shortly before the N.H.L. game on April 6 that Mr. Patel attended on Long Island, where he grew up, again seated next to Mr. Gretzky in a suite. The plane departed J.F.K. soon after the game ended.

Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.

Aric Toler is a reporter on the Visual Investigations team at The Times where he uses emerging techniques of discovery to analyze open source information.

A version of this article appears in print on April 21, 2025, Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: A Different Kind of F.B.I. Chief: Jet-Setting Patel Loves the Limelight. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

28. State Dept defends human rights abuse report changes, says streamlined process eliminates 'political bias'

Excerpts;

During President Donald Trump's first term, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited what he categorized as a "proliferation of human rights" on the global stage.

"We wanted to go back to first principles, back to our founding documents, our Declaration of Independence, our Bill of Rights to focus on those things that are central to the understanding of rights here in America," he said in July 2020.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is overseeing changes at the department during Trump's second term. Last week, he announced the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI), formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which he accused of costing taxpayers more than $50 million per year and spending "millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving."

State Dept defends human rights abuse report changes, says streamlined process eliminates 'political bias'

Senior State Department official condemns NPR 'misleading and misguided' reporting on human rights report

By Danielle Wallace Fox News

Published April 21, 2025 1:48pm EDT

foxnews.com · by Danielle Wallace Fox News

Video

Fox News Flash top headlines for April 21

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com.

The State Department is pushing back against criticism of its changes to the process of reporting human rights abuses.

NPR reported last week that the Trump administration was scaling back annual reports meant to inform congressional decisions on allocating foreign aid to countries, claiming the State Department was "changing its mind on what it calls human rights."

Fox News Digital is told the 2024 Human Rights Report has been restructured to remove redundancy, increase readability, and return the focus to human rights abuses – instead of a "laundry list of politically biased demands and assertions."

RUBIO ANNOUNCES CLOSURE OF STATE DEPARTMENT EFFORT THAT 'WAS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD ALREADY'

The Department of State headquarters building in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood in Washington, D.C., on April 15, 2025. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

"NPR’s report that the State Department is scaling back the Human Rights Report is misleading and misguided," a senior State Department official told Fox News Digital. "This year’s modifications are critical for removing report redundancy, increasing readability, maintaining consistency to U.S. statutes, and returning focus to human rights issues rather than political bias."

Fox News Digital is told the restructuring of the reports "will be more responsive to legislative mandates that underpin the report" and "does not reflect a change in U.S. policy on promoting respect for human rights around the globe or in any particular country." The State Department notably has attempted to streamline the reports to better align with statutory requirements under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

NPR and Politico reported on an internal memo that purportedly showed the 2024 Human Rights Report, which was finished in January but has been adjusted under the new administration, will no longer include references to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) or sections on discrimination or abuse against the LGBTQ+ community.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio listens as President Donald Trump meets with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador in the Oval Office on April 14, 2025. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

STATE DEPARTMENT'S ‘GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT CENTER’ ACCUSED OF CENSORING AMERICANS SHUTS ITS DOORS

The annual reports – known as "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices" – normally come out in March or April. NPR said sections that called out countries for "forcibly returning a refugee or asylum-seeker to a home country" or the "serious harassment of human rights organizations" would be absent this year. NPR also stressed that prior reports had sections detailing countries' "involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices," "arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy," "serious restrictions to internet freedom," "extensive gender-based violence," and "violence or threats of violence targeting people with disabilities," but the new report would not.

Paul O'Brien, executive director of Amnesty International, USA, criticized the changes under the Trump administration. He told NPR: "What this is, is a signal that the United States is no longer going to [pressure] other countries to uphold those rights that guarantee civic and political freedoms – the ability to speak, to express yourself, to gather, to protest, to organize."

Secretary of State Marco Rubio sits alongside President Donald Trump during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on April 10, 2025. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

During President Donald Trump's first term, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited what he categorized as a "proliferation of human rights" on the global stage.

"We wanted to go back to first principles, back to our founding documents, our Declaration of Independence, our Bill of Rights to focus on those things that are central to the understanding of rights here in America," he said in July 2020.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is overseeing changes at the department during Trump's second term. Last week, he announced the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI), formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which he accused of costing taxpayers more than $50 million per year and spending "millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving."

Danielle Wallace is a breaking news and politics reporter at Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to danielle.wallace@fox.com and on X: @danimwallace.

foxnews.com · by Danielle Wallace Fox News

29. China Is In Economic Dire Straits And They're No Longer Able To Hide It

China Is In Economic Dire Straits And They're No Longer Able To Hide It

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/china-economic-dire-straits-and-theyre-no-longer-able-hide-it

by Tyler Durden

Monday, Apr 21, 2025 - 01:35 AM

Official economic data from any government is always treated with suspicion by anyone with common sense. The US, for example, witnessed some of the most egregious statistical tinkering imaginable under the Biden Administration, not to mention outright lies and propaganda from the establishment media on the health of the economy. To this day no one has been fired (or tarred and feathered) for hiding the reality of the stagflation crisis. Any government or corporate economist that called the threat "transitory" should be stripped of their financial prestige and banished to a cash register at Arby's.

And let's not forget Biden's misrepresentation of the labor market, portraying millions of new jobs for illegal migrants and visa holders as if they were jobs benefiting American citizens. In the US and across the western world, lying about the economy is generally seen by politicians as a temporary solution to secure reelection. However, in China, lying about the economy is treated as a national security imperative. If there's anything in the world that gives communists a feeling of existential dread, it's the fear that their ideological enemies will discover proof that communism doesn't work.

The Trump Administration's tariffs on China are not the initiator of the nation's troubles, they are more a bookend to a process of decline that has been ongoing for years.

Overall tariffs on Chinese goods currently sit at 124%, but some goods will be taxed as high as 245%. Trump has given a 1 month exemption on electronic parts and devices, perhaps to offer manufacturers like Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft time to arrange sourcing from alternative vendors. The problem for Chinese manufacturers is not just the tariffs but the uncertainty of timing and sudden changes to policy. They say no one is willing to make a big move on production or shipments until the trade landscape becomes more predictable. This means most Chinese factories are frozen in stasis.

Trump's tariff actions are widely criticized by the media as erratic or poorly planned, but what they don't understand is that uncertainty is the real leverage, not the tariffs. What seems like a spur of the moment decision or a sudden capitulation on Trump's part can be highly effective at throwing foreign governments and corporations off balance. Globalism requires a perpetual status quo, change of any kind is like holy water to a vampire.

Chinese shipments are on standby and orders are frozen. Nothing is moving.

At bottom, China will not be able to survive tariffs on the current scale for long (a single year of 124% tariffs would crush China's economy beyond repair). The US is 15% of China's export market, which may not sound substantial but their next largest trading partner (outside of Hong Kong) is Vietnam at 4% of exports. In terms of domestic buying, China is 11% of the global consumer market which is not too shabby, but compared to the US with its 30%-35% global consumer market share there is no chance that the Chinese will be able to fill the void domestically and stay afloat.

But the situation is far worse than most people know...

China has been suffering from a deflationary crisis since 2023. An uptick in exports during the pandemic was offset by the CCP's draconian lockdowns. This was, essentially, fiscal suicide on the part of the government and China has been struggling ever since. Their property market has imploded, partially due to overbuilding through government subsidized infrastructure programs that flooded the market with poorly constructed homes and buildings that were then left to rot. Corporate defaults have run rampant and left investors with nothing.

There was some optimism that the government’s measures to end the crisis had been working to reinvigorate the market, but on Mar 31st, government-linked developer Vanke reported a record 49.5 billion yuan (S$9.1 billion) annual loss for 2024. It’s the company’s first full-year loss since its initial public offering in 1991, reigniting concerns about the sector and showing just how deep the problem runs.

When these projects do finally see some progress it is often due to dangerously poor construction standards and subpar workmanship; what many now refer to as "Tofu Dreg" buildings.

The deflationary spiral has been eating away at employment and has also resulted in numerous factories refusing to pay their workers on time (or at all). Unpaid wages are leading to frequent protests and a disturbing trend of factory fires. The government is limited in how it can respond to the problem. Stimulus is an option, but China's overall non-financial debt is well over 300% of GDP already.

China's attempts to hide the decay from the outside world are becoming less and less effective. With Chinese citizens able to access the internet beyond the "Great Firewall", more and more videos are being leaked by people within the country who are tired of the misinformation. Again, the CCP views negative economic data as a national security threat and any citizen caught leaking this info could be subject to harsh punishment. Chinese citizens have taken substantial risks to get the truth out there.

It cannot be stressed enough that the global economy is largely a farce, but China is closest to the edge of the cliff in terms of consequences and crisis. The interdependency of globalism has left many nations without the ability to weather a trade dispute and China's survival is almost entirely based on steady exports to the west and the US in particular.

Don't let high paid TikTok and YouTube influencers fool you with videos of Chinese skyscrapers caked with LED lights or lavish parties with dancing robots. This is not the true China. Underneath the facade is a nation on the brink of disaster.

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

Company Name | Website

Hegseth Faces Heat After New Signal Chat Emerges and Claim of Pentagon ‘Chaos’

Trump says his embattled defense chief is doing a ‘great job’

Trump Stands by Hegseth After Phone Call About Newly Revealed Signal Chat

President says defense secretary is ‘doing a great job’

White House backs Hegseth, Leavitt says ‘entire Pentagon’ is resisting him

The Hegseth Pentagon Chronicles

The Defense secretary is validating the concerns of his critics.

First House Republican calls for Pete Hegseth's ouster

Exclusive: The White House is looking to replace Pete Hegseth as defense secretary

Hegseth 2nd Signal chat cause for 'worry' about nation's security, says Rep. Jim Himes

National

Days after the Signal leak, the Pentagon warned the app was the target of hackers

Shades of Appeasement

History of Appeasement

Morell Island

The Cold War

Modern-day Applicability

About The Author

Achieving Decision Dominance: Leveraging AI in Small Wars

About The Author

Troops can now detain, search people on newly minted military land on the border

The Conventional Balance of Terror

America Needs a New Triad to Restore Its Eroding Deterrence

COLLISION COURSE

TARGET LOCKED

ASYMMETRIC ADVANTAGE

BALANCING ACT

The Rise and Fall of Great-Power Competition

Trump’s New Spheres of Influence

Stacie E. Goddard

WHAT’S YOUR STORY?

CONCERT TICKETS

CARVING UP THE WORLD

THE SUM OF ALL SPHERES

COOPERATION OR COLLUSION?

How Donald Trump dismantled US-led global order in 100 days

With China on the rise, a historian expects the US president’s actions to ‘portend a new trajectory’ in world affairs

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3307382/how-donald-trump-dismantled-us-led-global-order-100-days?module=perpetual_scroll_0&pgtype=article

USMC Anti-Ship Missile Deployment To Highly Strategic Luzon Strait Is Unprecedented

Tyler Rogoway

Editor-in-Chief

I. Back in the Loop

II. Welcome to the Super App State

III. New Pavement, No Pulse

IV. The Vanishing Foreigner

V. Gen Z, A Generation Behind the Firewall

VI. From Ambition to Resignation

VII. Conclusion: China Built the Future. It Just Doesn’t Need You in It.

I. Back in the Loop

The China That Replaced Mine

A Return After Nearly a Decade to a Country That Never Stays Still

I. Back in the Loop

II. Welcome to the Super App State

III. New Pavement, No Pulse

IV. The Vanishing Foreigner

V. Gen Z, A Generation Behind the Firewall

VI. From Ambition to Resignation

VII. Conclusion: China Built the Future. It Just Doesn’t Need You in It.

It’s China’s turn to face transnational terrorism threats

Beijing may be more motivated than ever to cooperate with the United States on counterterrorism.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Caine Decides Not to Keep Senior Enlisted Adviser, Breaking with Past Precedent

US to allies: Don’t use Chinese satellite services

Internal talking points also give State Department officials guidance on responding to concerns about SpaceX’s Starlink.

US Army's new 1,000-mile-range solar-powered spy drone takes to the skies

US Army deploys solar-powered spy drone with 1,000-mile range for endurance missions

Solar drone for surveillance

1,000-mile drone

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The Counterproductive Legal Precedent That Strikes on Cartels Would Set

She told Trump the Smithsonian needs changing. He’s ordered her to do it.

A Different Kind of F.B.I. Chief: Jet-Setting Patel Loves the Limelight

Trump Administration: Live Updates

State Dept defends human rights abuse report changes, says streamlined process eliminates 'political bias'

Senior State Department official condemns NPR 'misleading and misguided' reporting on human rights report