Does “One Nation, One Election” Make Sense for India?

Milan Vaishnav

Source Link

One of the central motifs of the past decade of governance under Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been the embrace of policy measures that seek to apply uniform solutions to disparate policy dilemmas facing the country. These measures, often termed One Nation policies, are motivated by a desire to replace the existing patchwork of state-specific policies, regulations, and regimes with measures that are identical across the length and breadth of India. There are numerous examples of such One Nation policies being propagated and, in several cases, implemented in the eleven years since Modi came to power. 

For instance, in 2016, Parliament passed a series of constitutional amendments to introduce a new Goods and Services Tax (GST), which introduced a unified value-added tax in place of state-specific levies. This reform, known informally as One Nation, One Tax, had been debated and discussed for nearly two decades and was widely touted as an important precursor to forging a common market across India’s twenty-eight states. In a similar vein, the government rolled out a new initiative to allow Indian citizens to take advantage of subsidized food rations irrespective of their state of residence. 

This scheme, commonly termed One Nation, One Ration Card, was intended to increase access to welfare benefits, especially for the millions of internal migrants in India without a fixed place of residence. Earlier this year, the government announced the launch of a new online portal that will provide students, faculty, and researchers across the country’s public higher education institutions with open access to international scholarly journals and articles under a scheme it has dubbed One Nation, One Subscription.

One Nation, One Election would do away with India’s current system of staggered elections, replacing it with a framework of simultaneous elections.Most notably, the government recently signaled its intention to pursue a monumental One Nation policy that has been long discussed but only recently outlined in detail. This measure, known as One Nation, One Election, would do away with India’s current system of staggered elections for state and national assemblies, replacing it with a framework of simultaneous elections.

The Islamic State in Afghanistan: A Jihadist Threat in Retreat?

Source Link

What’s new? Since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (IS-KP) has emerged as a major international security threat, orchestrating or inspiring attacks abroad following a Taliban clampdown on its home turf. Although its strikes have fallen in number in 2025, its offensive could resurge. Why does it matter? Despite the recent lull, IS-KP might reactivate commanders willing to carry out attacks abroad or coordinate with other ISIS branches to launch them. 

Even a small number of high-profile operations – such as the March 2024 mass shooting and arson in Moscow – can cause numerous deaths and have major international repercussions. What should be done? Coordination among security services has improved, particularly in intelligence sharing and rendition. There are strong reasons not to resort to military action, but more could be done in terms of collaborating with the Taliban and Syrian governments, redefining the global anti-ISIS coalition’s law enforcement role, and supporting Central Asian countries.

The Islamic State-Khorasan Province (IS-KP) has swiftly emerged as a leading jihadist threat to international peace and security, though of late its fortunes seem to be on the wane. Following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, IS-KP pulled back from an offensive in the country where it is based and shifted its focus abroad, increasingly targeting countries such as Iran, Russia and Pakistan, as well as attempting to strike both Europe and the U.S.

 While it retains only limited capabilities in the West, where it has faced a crackdown and relies on low-level recruits often drawn from minority communities, the group continues to pose a danger, especially as it learns to adapt to online surveillance and tightened law enforcement controls. While interstate coordination and intelligence sharing is improving – even among the Taliban, Russia and Western governments – more sustained collaboration is essential lest the group hatch new deadly attacks.

Xi’s Personal Priorities: What Matters Most to China’s Leader?

Source Link

Time is a politician’s most precious resource. Every decision to attend a meeting, launch an initiative, or deliver a speech involves trade-offs. Unlike budgets or personnel, time cannot be expanded or replenished. How a leader allocates their time reveals their priorities. Xi Jinping is acutely aware of this reality. “To realise the China Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, we must race against time,” he declared in January 2020. State media claimed that on an “ordinary day,” Xi sleeps just six hours and works through every meal. Li Zhanshu, Xi’s former chief of staff, summarised his work tempo in one word. 

“fast.” This urgency helps explain why Xi wants to become the “chairman of everything,” replacing collective leadership with personalised rule, sidelining colleagues, and centralising decision-making within Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bodies under his direct control. Yet even a leader as powerful and driven as Xi cannot do everything. So how does Xi spend his time? It is impossible to know for sure, but a useful proxy could be official statements about actions that he has taken “personally” (qinzi). 

In particular, CCP media have mentioned several policies that Xi has “personally planned, personally arranged, and personally promoted” (qinzi mouhua, qinzi bushu, qinzi tuidong). The Center for China Analysis has compiled a database of these policies. Analysis suggests that Xi pays special attention to regional development projects, internal CCP governance, and environmental protection. Notably absent are indications of personal involvement in key political economy issues such as consumption, demographics, healthcare, public finance, and welfare reform. 

For policymakers and businesses seeking leverage or opportunity in China, understanding Xi’s priorities is a critical starting point.The word qinzi is an everyday term in Chinese but has historically been far less common in the language of elite politics. Leaders might be described as doing something “personally” if they attended an event, chaired a meeting, or issued an instruction, but in the post-Mao era it was rare for CCP discourse to portray paramount leaders Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, or Hu Jintao as “personally” initiating or directing policies (see Figure 1).

Huawei and Hyperscalers:

Source Link

As artificial intelligence ushers in the next industrial revolution, the war over who will lead it is already in full force. China’s aggressive, state-driven push for global AI dominance has splintered America’s allies over the values of responsible innovation and sparked a technology arms race between Washington and Beijing. If urgent action is not taken to expand and secure American AI infrastructure, the Chinese Communist Party will weaponize global cloud networks to undermine free markets, oppress its people, and covertly influence foreign states and citizens. If AI competition is a war, then global cloud architecture is the theater. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google control 63% of the world’s $900 billion cloud market, a critical win for American AI leadership. 

But Beijing is on the offensive, infiltrating U.S. systems and proliferating its own predatory AI infrastructure. Worse, some U.S. firms are trading data and compute for Chinese market access, putting U.S. national security at risk. Huawei and Hyperscalers explores how Beijing exploits global AI infrastructure and pressures firms to sacrifice safety for growth, then provides actionable solutions for U.S. policymakers to help deploy and defend the cloud. The Problem The Solution America’s global AI partnerships have rapidly extended U.S. cloud computing infrastructure to the furthest edges of the globe, straining federal oversight capacity and creating critical cybersecurity gaps that CCP-aligned hackers and other cyber criminals exploit for geostrategic gain. 

Anticompetitive state subsidies and loan rates allow Chinese firms to aggressively expand their cloud infrastructure and undercut U.S. and allied firms in global markets. The Chinese Communist Party uses this infrastructure to absorb massive volumes of foreign data while creating lasting technological dependencies in the Global South and elsewhere. U.S. hyperscalers cooperate with the CCP’s protectionist policies and predatory data ecosystem to gain access to lucrative Chinese markets. This one-way flow of AI resources facilitates Beijing’s aggressive weaponization of artificial intelligence and places America’s AI development at risk. 

To begin reducing the hundreds of millions of cyber attacks on American cloud networks daily, the United States must treat cloud infrastructure as critical infrastructure and afford it the same oversight and protection mechanisms as America’s energy, healthcare, and transportation networks. Clear rules governing which infrastructure projects threaten U.S. national security would save American firms tens of millions of dollars annually by reducing government delays and cancellations of data cables and other cloud infrastructure. 

Turkey’s Time to Rise

George Friedman and Kamran Bokhari

Source Link

“The Next 100 Years,” which was published some 15 years ago, forecast the emergence of three significant powers over the next few decades: Japan, Poland and Turkey. Japan’s stable and growing economy and its focus on military development evince a steady, if quiet, growth in its power. Poland is now the fifth-largest economy in Europe and a Continental leader in military development. Yet both countries are constrained by major powers. Japan must contend with China, and Poland must contend with Russia, located as it is on the rear of Ukraine.

Now is Turkey’s time to shine. It has a large military and economy that, while only modestly growing, flashes the kind of potential few others in the region can. But more important, it has a massive geopolitical opportunity. With Russia bogged down in Ukraine, the United States seeking to reduce its global footprint, Iran suffering losses throughout the region that have been complicated by its internal leadership transition, and Israel reeling from crises at home and abroad, Turkey can exploit these openings in any direction in which it has fundamental interests.

In some cases, it already has. Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, Turkey played a critical role in helping Azerbaijan defeat Armenia in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, which resulted in a historic shift in the balance of power on Turkey’s eastern flank. Baku’s seizure of the territory has allowed Armenia and Azerbaijan to distance themselves from Russia and align themselves with Turkey. As important, an Azerbaijan-Armenia peace deal, which is expected to be signed soon, will facilitate Ankara’s development of the Zangezur corridor, an economic artery traversing the South Caucasus. 

Meanwhile, Turkey has been the biggest winner in the Israel-Iran conflict. The decimation of Hezbollah’s leadership and offensive warning capabilities led to the collapse of the Assad regime. Israel’s subsequent attacks against Iran have seriously weakened the Islamic Republic. Turkey quickly capitalized on the opportunity to bring Syria into its sphere of influence, supporting one of its proxy groups to take control of the capital in Damascus. Ankara has also improved relations with major Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. 

India Surpasses China in Production of iPhones

Matt Cookson

Source Link

For years, China has been the global leader in manufacturing. Everything from technology to medical equipment is made in China. That is why it is so surprising that India displaced China as the number one manufacturer of iPhones. While the iPhone is one product, this trend demonstrates a potential strategy for the U.S. to diversify away from China. Doing so not only benefits us economically, but also for national security reasons.

The rise of China as a manufacturing powerhouse has been a story many years in the making. Deng Xiaoping's opening of the economy after the death of Chairman Mao opened the world to a source of labor that was as plentiful as it was cheap. China’s rise has been so rapid, especially since the turn of the century, that its share of manufacturing output rose from 9% of global output in 2004 to almost 30% in 2023.

Despite this dominance, there is a crack in the armor developing. A stagnating economy, draconian COVID-19 measures, and the trade war are all contributing factors in companies moving out of China. India, Vietnam, and Mexico are some of the countries benefiting from this. Nevertheless, China’s manufacturing prowess remains. It is not just commercial items that China produces, but also goods vital to America’s national security. One example of this arose during the pandemic, when we learned how dependent the U.S. is on China for pharmaceuticals as well as Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). 

If China were an ally of the U.S., this wouldn’t be a problem, but the fact that China is a rival of the U.S. in the best of times is cause for concern. The U.S. military also has supply chain concerns related to China. While we certainly don’t buy any equipment from China, we do buy rare earth metals from China. These metals are needed in the production of all kinds of military equipment, from fighter planes to missiles. China cut off the export of these critical minerals in its trade war with the United States. If the U.S.

Kaplan’s Revenge: Why Geography Still Constrains China at Sea

Sahil Yar Muhammad

Source Link

In an age defined by artificial intelligence, long-range missiles, naval modernization, and other advancements, geography may seem like an outdated constraint, a relic conquered by modern technology and global ambition. There are many who assume so. However, the reality is different for many states whose geography remains an overarching shadow over their policies; ever-present in the minds of the men who navigate the ship of state. Nowhere is this more painfully evident than in China’s maritime ambitions.

Despite unprecedented economic and strategic rise, the seas remain stubbornly resistant to domination. What we’re witnessing is the slow return of a geopolitical truth long articulated by Robert D. Kaplan: that geography still defines the outer limits of strategic ambition. This idea, which I call “Kaplan’s Revenge,” captures the resurgence of geographic significance in contemporary power politics. Despite all the technological prowess and assertive foreign policy it has brought to bear in its near abroad, China will not find it easy to escape its geography. 

Its efforts to reshape the maritime order face resistance not just from the United States and its allies, but from natural chokepoints, other regional states, and the physical realities of the Indo-Pacific region. China’s maritime flank is hemmed in by a chain of islands which are also referred to by Chinese policymakers as the ‘first island chain,’ many of them occupied or backed by US allies Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. These unsinkable aircraft carriers, to use General Douglas MacArthur’s term for Taiwan, sit like fixed sentries across China’s maritime exit routes. 

Even with advanced anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities the PLA Navy operates in the region, the geography inherently constrains open-ocean maneuvers. The South China Sea, long touted as Beijing’s natural sphere of influence, is shallow, crowded, and politically explosive. It is what the Mediterranean Sea was to the Roman Empire and what the Caribbean Sea is to the U.S. However unlike the other two, this one has a great power presence already established, not to mention other regional states. And breaking out of this straitjacket will mean confrontation with not only the states that have a claim to the sea but also the great power that supports them.

After Xi

Source Link

For more than a decade, Chinese politics has been defined by one man: Xi Jinping. Since Xi assumed leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012, he has made himself into a strongman ruler. He has remade the CCP elite through a wide-ranging purge and corruption crackdown. He has curbed civil society and suppressed dissent. He has reorganized and modernized the military. And he has reinvigorated the role of the state in the economy.

Xi’s rise has also redefined China’s relationship with the rest of the world. He has pursued a more muscular foreign policy, including by increasing the tempo of military drills in the Taiwan Strait and overseeing a growing military presence in the South China Sea. He has encouraged (and then later reined in) a battalion of “wolf warrior” diplomats who engaged in a harsh war of words with foreign critics. And he has pushed China closer to Russia, even after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a war in Ukraine. In short, it has been a new era for China. It has been Xi’s era.

Soon, however, everything will start to change. As the CCP elite begins the search for a leader to replace the 72-year-old Xi, China is transitioning from a phase defined by power consolidation to one defined by the question of succession. For any authoritarian regime, political succession is a moment of peril, and for all its strengths, the CCP is no exception. The last time the party dealt with the problem of political succession—when Xi took over from Hu Jintao—rumors swirled in Beijing of coup attempts, failed assassinations, and tanks on the streets. The rumors may have been unfounded, but the political drama at the top was real.

Xi probably has years, perhaps even more than a decade, before he steps down. But the reality is that succession shapes political choices well before leaders finally relinquish control. Chinese rulers, sensitive to their legacies, jostle to install people who will carry on their political agendas. Mao Zedong’s fixation with maintaining China’s revolutionary spirit after his death led to the Cultural Revolution, a mass political campaign that reshuffled the CCP leadership repeatedly during the last decade of Mao’s life.

Leashing Chinese AI Needs Smart Chip Controls

Kyle Chan

Source Link

China’s stunning achievements in AI have one glaring weak spot: access to compute—the raw processing power that fuels AI and relies on large volumes of advanced semiconductors. The U.S. currently has a tenfold advantage over China in total compute capacity, a gap that may only widen over time. U.S. tech firms are pouring billions of dollars into new data centers and can reap the benefits of the latest chip advancements from Nvidia and AMD or their own self-developed AI chips.

Meanwhile, the performance and volume of foreign AI chips that Chinese firms can obtain have gone down over time due to increasingly stringent U.S. export controls. Chinese tech leaders such as Tencent, Baidu, and DeepSeek have called out compute constraints as a key bottleneck to faster AI development. Kyle Chan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Sociology Department at Princeton University and an adjunct researcher at the Rand Corporation.Ray Wang is research director of semiconductors, supply chain, and emerging technology at Futurum Group.

Myanmar’s Dangerous Drift: Conflict, Elections and Looming Regional Détente

Source Link

What’s new? Changing global and regional conditions are giving Myanmar’s military regime greater room for manoeuvre. Growing diplomatic fatigue in Western capitals, China’s moves to prevent regime collapse, shifts in U.S. policy and other geopolitical realignments are hastening normalisation of relations with Naypyitaw’s rulers, despite worsening conflict. Why does it matter? As geopolitical shifts give neighbouring countries more latitude to engage Naypyitaw, Myanmar’s conflict and humanitarian crisis could face ever greater neglect. 

Planned elections will lack credibility and may lead to further violence, even as they could encourage some governments to normalise ties with a future military-backed administration. What should be done? Diplomats should preserve multilateral coordination on Myanmar, above all at the UN Security Council and Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and be ready to seize any opening for a peaceful settlement. They should avoid conferring legitimacy on the regime’s elections, while donors should sustain humanitarian and other vital programming.

Myanmar’s military regime is discovering new diplomatic opportunities as global and regional politics shift. China’s recent moves to prevent the junta’s collapse, diminishing Western interest, chaotic U.S. foreign policy and regional fatigue with a protracted conflict are reshaping the international environment. These trends have led to a gradual thaw in relations between many Asian countries and Naypyitaw, even as the regime continues to lose ground in the post-2021 coup conflict and humanitarian conditions worsen. 

Elections planned for late in the year will not resolve the political impasse and will likely be violent, but they may offer a convenient pretext for some governments to deepen engagement with the junta. Instead of rushing to recognise the country’s military rulers, foreign powers should preserve what limited space remains for coordinated diplomacy on Myanmar, particularly at the UN Security Council and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), standing ready to seek a peaceful settlement if the opening arises but not conferring unwarranted legitimacy on the forthcoming polls.

A New Strategic Review for a New Age

Source Link

Contemporary U.S. plans for the modernization of nuclear forces are an approximately 15-year-old legacy of the Obama Administration. They were not established in anticipation of the dramatic changes in the security environment since 2010—when it was assumed that a one-for-one replacement for the legacy nuclear delivery systems and the New START Treaty limit on nuclear weapon numbers would be more than adequate. Rather, the existing nuclear modernization program was established at a time when many U.S. officials continued to believe that U.S. 

relations with Russia and China were relatively benign and would remain so, or improve further. How the contemporary nuclear program, largely inherited from the Obama Administration, fares over the next few years, and how the new presidential administration entering office in 2025 decides to adapt the U.S. nuclear posture for the much more dynamic and dangerous contemporary threat environment will affect the US strategic and non-strategic nuclear posture for decades, and, correspondingly, U.S. deterrence strategies and options.

This study examines several key issues: developments in the international threat environment; U.S. deterrence goals in that contemporary threat environment; needed adjustments in U.S. deterrence strategies and force posture, and for the assurance of allies; and, near-term initiatives and decisions needed to enable the United States to move toward a force posture that is fit to address contemporary threats. Unfortunately, given the past four decades of deep U.S. strategic and non-strategic force reductions and the atrophying of the U.S. nuclear production infrastructure, the United States has a limited near-term capacity to strengthen its nuclear force posture in response to an unprecedentedly threatening security environment.

Given contemporary threats, whatever may be the preferred future U.S. nuclear force posture and characteristics for deterrence and allied assurance purposes, the reality is that U.S. options for adjustment are largely limited through the early 2030s to available nuclear systems and warheads. Uploading the existing Triad of nuclear forces is the only near-term option to strengthen U.S. deterrence force numbers to meet looming threats, pending the deployment of new U.S. strategic systems in the 2030s.

Challenging US dominance: China's DeepSeek model and the pluralisation of AI development

Source Link

The release of a new AI model by the Chinese startup DeepSeek in January 2025, known as R1, captured global attention. The company claimed to have developed a model that performs on par with those of leading American tech firms such as OpenAI, xAI or Anthropic, but at significantly lower cost and requiring far less computing power. This announcement sent shockwaves across the globe, signalling a potential reshaping of the global AI race between the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

China’s restricted access to cutting-edge chips due to American export controls had led many to doubt its ability to develop a frontier AI model. The release of DeepSeek’s model has challenged those assumptions, calling into question the effectiveness of the US’s ‘small yard, high fence’ strategy. Crucially, the Chinese firm’s breakthrough relies primarily on the model’s algorithmic efficiency, dealing a serious blow to the technical and business model long championed by US tech giants. 

In reaction to US export controls, DeepSeek compensated for the computing power shortcomings it faced by improving its model’s efficiency. In particular, it focused on inference enhancement, generating text faster, at lower cost, and with higher quality, once the model is trained. Techniques such as mixture-of-experts (MoE), selective activation, and transfer learning allow for the optimisation of computational resources(1). In particular, the MoE architecture activates only a few relevant subnetworks of the model during the inference, which significantly reduces computational overhead.  

Even so, Chinese AI development is not fully autonomous. DeepSeek’s techniques build on foundational research developed by other firms, notably Meta’s LLaMA series. DeepSeek has also acknowledged using US-manufactured Nvidia chips instead of Chinese semiconductors. Without access to US research and hardware, DeepSeek would thus have not achieved what it did. In addition, despite notable progress by Chinese chipmakers, competing with the technological sophistication of American AI chipsets, especially for compute-intensive pre-training, will remain a significant challenge in the coming years.

Data: Zhang, S. et al., ‘A survey on mixture of experts in large language models’, 2024; DeepSeek, ‘DeepSeek-VL: Scaling Vision-Language Models with Mixture of Experts’, 2024; Daily Dose of DS, ‘Transformer vs. Mixture of Experts in LLMs’, 2025

Room for alternative models

R1 is not a fully open-source model as DeepSeek did not release its complete training data or codebase; but it is an open-weight model, meaning its trained parameters – the weights – are publicly available, allowing others to use, fine-tune and deploy the model. It thus makes AI accessible and usable to a broader range of actors with limited technical expertise or computing resources. DeepSeek R1 is also released under the MIT License, making it freely available for commercial use. This lowers the barrier to entry for actors lacking capital or infrastructure and facilitates the development of AI applications across sectors like finance, manufacturing or healthcare. Additionally, by focusing on algorithmic innovation and cost reduction, DeepSeek establishes efficiency as a new key parameter for future frontier AI innovation. As computing power is becoming a critical asset, resource optimisation could be a decisive factor in the AI race.

DeepSeek thus embodies a shift from the prevailing business and technical model based on closed-source, proprietary and scale-first AI development towards more flexible and resource-conscious approaches. It not only challenges the widespread ‘winner-takes-all’ assumption in the digital sector, but also raises the question of whether smaller-scale companies, including European ones, could make significant progress with ‘good enough’ AI models. Such models, while not necessarily state-of-the-art, can perform specific tasks effectively within a given context, prioritising practical utility, affordability and accessibility. They are particularly useful for edge models (especially the Internet of Things), chatbots, transcriptions or machinery monitoring.

Amplifying risks

The release of R1 has also raised several security-related concerns. The first issue is data security and privacy. DeepSeek’s terms of service indicate that user data may be stored in China and used for training purposes, raising serious questions about compliance with international data protection standards, including the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), South Korea’s national data protection authority, has reported that personal information from over a million South Koreans was transferred to China without consent(2). Suspicions about potential backdoors enabling government access have deepened mistrust, especially given China’s recently amended Intelligence Law, as it includes a blanket requirement for Chinese entities and individuals to cooperate with Chinese security services(3). This has led countries such as Australia, India, Italy and Taiwan to ban DeepSeek from government devices. Nonetheless, such concerns are neither new nor unique to China. The DeepSeek controversy has reignited broader debates about data surveillance and the role of intelligence agencies, particularly given the close ties between the US government and major American tech firms.

DeepSeek has also faced criticism for adhering to Beijing’s content regulations on politically sensitive issues such as the Tiananmen Massacre, Taiwan and the repression against Uyghurs, leading to accusations of restricting data access and embedding ideological bias. While censorship only applies to the online version, the model is likely to reflect the authoritarian context in which it was developed, as any AI model is shaped by its training data and the political values it embeds. DeepSeek has also fallen short in protecting sensitive user data, including chat histories and authentication keys(4), raising concerns about both free speech and cybersecurity.

Beyond these immediate normative and security issues, DeepSeek’s ambition to develop AI models approaching or exceeding human cognitive abilities, known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), is the most concerning. Advancements in this field would not only exacerbate tensions in the US-China AI race leading to the development of unsafe models, but could even lead to the development of AI systems escaping human control. Robust multilateral frameworks for AI governance are urgently needed.

Five pillars for deterring strategic attacks

Mark J. Massa and Alyxandra Marine

Source Link

To achieve the likely objectives of the National Defense Strategy—defending the US homeland and deterring China—the United States must address the risk of strategic attacks on the homeland. This imperative includes preventing such attacks and ensuring that the Department of Defense has both the strategy and capabilities to restore deterrence at the lowest possible level of damage if prevention fails.

This is essential because a strategic attack could coerce the United States into halting its support for allies and partners, or cause military disruption severe enough to prevent such support altogether—thus undermining the objective of deterring China. Moreover, adversaries could inflict damage on US society that far outweighs the benefits the United States seeks through its foreign policy, further weakening homeland defense.

An effective strategy to address the risk of strategic attack on the US homeland must rest on several overlapping pillars. These include deterring a large-scale nuclear attack on the United States; preventing nuclear escalation during conventional regional conflicts; fielding US and allied forces sufficient to deter the outbreak of major-power conventional war; maintaining a flexible declaratory policy and adaptable strategic forces; and enhancing the nation’s ability to sustain warfighting capacity—even while under strategic attack.

The Militarization of Silicon Valley

Sheera Frenkel

Source Link

In a ceremony in June at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Va., four current and former executives from Meta, OpenAI and Palantir lined up onstage to swear an oath to support and defend the United States. The U.S. Army had just created a technical innovation unit for the executives, who were dressed in combat gear and boots. At the event, they were pronounced lieutenant colonels in the new unit, Detachment 201, which will advise the Army on new technologies for potential combat.

“We desperately need what they are good at,” Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll said of the tech executives, who have since undergone basic training. “It’s an understatement how grateful we are that they are taking this risk to come and try to build this out with us.” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer; Bob McGrew, an adviser at Thinking Machines Lab and OpenAI’s former chief research officer; Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer; and Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer at a military ceremony in June.Credit...Staff Sgt. Leroy Council/United States Army

The military is not just courting Silicon Valley tech companies. In the age of President Trump, it has successfully recruited them. Over the past two years, Silicon Valley’s leaders and investors — many of whom had once forsworn involvement in weapons and war — have plunged headfirst into the military-industrial complex. Meta, Google and OpenAI, which once had language in their corporate policies banning the use of artificial intelligence in weapons, have removed such wording. OpenAI is creating anti-drone technology, while Meta is making virtual reality glasses to train soldiers for battle.

At the same time, weapons and defense start-ups are taking off. Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm, said in 2023 that it would invest $500 million in defense technology and other companies that would help America “move forward.” Y Combinator, the start-up incubator known for hatching companies like Airbnb and DoorDash, funded its first defense start-up in August 2024. Venture capital investment in defense-related companies surged 33 percent last year to $31 billion, according to McKinsey.

Netanyahu Squanders His Moment to Halt the War

Patrick Kingsley

Source Link

When Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, led the country to a military victory over Iran in June, both his allies and rivals portrayed it as his finest achievement. Flush with newfound confidence and authority, Mr. Netanyahu seemed finally to have gained the political capital he needed to override opposition from his far-right government allies to reach a truce in Gaza. Six weeks later, the prime minister has squandered that moment. The talks between Hamas and Israel are, yet again, stuck. Israel is now pushing for a deal to end the war in one go, instead of in phases.

Now as then, both Hamas and Mr. Netanyahu are refusing to make the compromises needed for such a comprehensive deal to work. As long as this is the government — and assuming it doesn’t fundamentally change its course — there will be no comprehensive agreement, and the hostages will not return,” wrote Oren Setter, a former member of Israel’s negotiation team, in a column on Monday in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot. “The opposition needs to understand this, the public needs to understand this, and the media needs to understand this,” Mr. Setter added.

In short, the credit that Mr. Netanyahu accrued following the war with Iran in June has evaporated, both domestically and overseas.International condemnation of the growing starvation in Gaza — which aid agencies and many foreign government have largely blamed on Israel’s 11-week blockade on the territory between March and May — is at its peak. Partly to protest Israel’s responsibility for that situation, several of the country’s longstanding allies have recognized a Palestinian state, or pledged to do so in the near future. 

In the United States, most Democratic senators voted last week to block some arms sales to Israel. A Republican lawmaker, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has accused Israel of genocide, an accusation it strongly denies. Palestinians at a charity kitchen in Gaza. A growing hunger crisis in the territory after Israel imposed a blockade has been widely condemned, including by many of Israel’s allies.Credit...Saher Alghorra for The New York Times Domestic opposition to the Gaza war is at an all-time high, and calls are growing for the remaining hostages held by Hamas to be returned through a diplomatic deal. 

The Art of Trump’s Trade Deals

Source Link

This week, Walter and Jeremy discuss transatlantic pressure on Israel, Arab pressure on Hamas, Xi Jinping’s new infrastructure play in Tibet, Trump’s criticism of India’s relationship with Russia, the significance of Trump’s trade deals with Japan and the European Union, and tips for haggling in bazaars, souks, and night markets.

Each week on What Really Matters, Walter Russell Mead and Jeremy Stern help you understand the news, decide what matters and what doesn’t, and enjoy following the story of America and the world more than you do now. For more, check out tabletmag.com/whatreallymatters. You can read Mead’s Tablet columns here and check out more from Tablet here.

Opinion | Europe’s Future Depends on Confrontation, Not Compromise

Source Link

Much has been made of Mark Rutte recently calling President Donald Trump “daddy” at the recent NATO summit. Certainly, the slip indicates how impotent Europe has shown itself to be in the face of geopolitical threats. But dependence on American support for its defense is not the only problem. The European Union, a bold experiment in international governance envisioned in the follow-up to World War II, has reached its limits. What we are witnessing is a sunset of Europe, the decline of a union founded on principles of peace and diplomacy that can no longer effectively respond to the moment. 

Today’s crisis requires decisive action — not the cooperation and incrementalism designed to prevent war, but the admission that war is already here, and that now it is time to fight. In the 1950s, after the calamity of World War II, European countries, understandably, were desperate to find an arrangement that would safeguard the peace and security of the continent going forward. The uniting of European nations began with only six countries as its founding members (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg), comprising an institution radically different in size and scope from the one we know today. 

France and Germany were constant sources of tension for the continent, and leaders were eager to find a way to prevent these conflicts from spiralling into another war. The simple idea on which the European project was founded was that economic integration would liquidate the threat of war. Countries financially and politically intertwined with one another would have more at stake in ensuring continued peace. Cooperation would increase the economic pie for all, and that would in turn create incentives against military escalation. As the European experiment grew, it changed not only in scope but in its fundamental nature. 

It began its radical transformation with the Maastricht Treaty in 1991, which established the European Union. A few years later came monetary union, the adoption of the euro, and subsequently the Schengen Agreement which opened borders inside Europe. All these changes paved the way for further growth: In 1995, three countries, Austria, Finland and Sweden, joined the Union; in 2004, in one big-bang enlargement, Europe invited 10 additional members. The formerly subjugated countries of the East were accepted into the fold, given a chance at stability, prosperity and a peaceful European future. It was also a geopolitical promise: Those who adhere to Western values and accept the rules can become members of the European family. 

Tech manufacturing has powered Asia - now it's a casualty of Trump's tariffs

Source Link

When he began his trade war, President Donald Trump said his goal was to bring American jobs and manufacturing back to the US, reduce trade deficits and create a more level playing field for American companies competing globally. But after months of negotiations and many countries' refusal to meet America's demands, his strategy has taken a more punitive turn. Under Trump's first administration, when he imposed tariffs on Chinese exports, they scrambled to limit their exposure to Beijing, with many shifting production to Vietnam, Thailand and India to avoid higher levies.

But his battery of new tariffs does not spare any of these economies. Stocks saw a sell-off, with benchmark indexes in Taiwan and South Korea in the red on Friday. Both countries are central to Asia's sprawling electronics production. The details are still hazy, but US firms from Apple to Nvidia will likely be paying more for their supply chains - they source critical components from several Asian countries and assemble devices in the region.

Now they are on the hook - for iPhones, chips, batteries, and scores of other tiny components that power modern lives. It's not good news for Asian economies that have grown and become richer because of exports and foreign investment - from Japanese cars to South Korean electronics to Taiwanese chips. Soaring demand for all these goods fuelled trade surpluses with Washington over the years - and has driven President Trump's charge that Asian manufacturing has been taking American jobs away.

In May, Trump told Apple CEO Tim Cook: "We put up with all the plants you built in China for years... we are not interested in you building in India, India can take care of themselves." Apple earns roughly half its revenue by selling iPhones that are manufactured in China, Vietnam and India. The tech giant reported bumper earnings for the three months to June, hours before Trump's tariff announcement on Thursday night, but now the future looks more uncertain.

What the Next Round of Sanctions Against Russia Should Look Like

Nicholas Fenton

Source Link

Recent news reports suggest U.S. President Donald Trump may finally have overcome his seeming unwillingness to level additional economic sanctions on Russia. Faced with the reality that at the current level of pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin feels no imperative to seriously engage in negotiations with Kyiv, Trump said Monday he would give Russia 10 or 12 days to make progress toward ending the war before imposing “sanctions and maybe tariffs, secondary tariffs.” If Trump wants to end the war anytime soon, additional sanctions will likely be necessary. 

Our latest research concludes that at the current level of sanctions and battlefield intensity, Russia is likely able to maintain its war effort for at least the next three years. Over the three and a half years since its invasion of Ukraine, analysts have consistently underestimated Russia’s economic resilience. Moscow has not only maintained economic growth but also successfully restructured its economy on an impressive war footing. It is inaccurate to claim that sanctions don’t work, as Trump mused later this week, but there are ways to make them more effective. First, we need to examine the reasons for Russia’s economic sustainability, of which there are several.

Russia Issues Nuclear Warning Directed at US and NATO

Source Link

Russia said Monday it is no longer bound by a self‑imposed moratorium on deploying land‑based intermediate‑range nuclear missiles, blaming United States and NATO plans to station similar weapons in Europe and the Asia‑Pacific. Newsweek reached out to the White House for comment via email on Monday. The U.S. and Russia signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty (INF) in 1987, but the U.S. withdrew from it in 2019, during President Donald Trump's first term, while accusing Russia of repeatedly violating the agreement.

Moscow signaled that it, too, would withdraw from the agreement last December, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov telling the state news agency Ria Novosti that the agreement was no longer viable while accusing the U.S. of deploying the weapons globally. Later Monday, Russian former President Dmitry Medvedev blamed NATO countries for the abandonment of a moratorium on short- and medium-range nuclear missiles and said Moscow would take further steps in response.

"The Russian Foreign Ministry's statement on the withdrawal of the moratorium on the deployment of medium- and short-range missiles is the result of NATO countries' anti-Russian policy," Medvedev posted in English on X. "This is a new reality all our opponents will have to reckon with. Expect further steps." Tensions between Washington and Moscow have reached a boiling point in recent months, particularly related to the Trump administration's efforts to negotiate a ceasefire in Russia's war against neighbouring Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia. Associated Press What To Know The Russian Foreign Ministry accused Washington of escalating tensions by testing, producing and moving systems once banned under the defunct Intermediate‑Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Moscow said the deployments, including recent U.S. missile activity in Denmark, the Philippines and Australia, pose a "direct threat" to Russian security. The Kremlin warned it will take "military‑technical" steps in response to restore what it calls a strategic balance.

Netanyahu Has Decided on Full Occupation of Gaza Strip: Reports

Source Link

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) should push to fully occupy the besieged Gaza Strip, including operating in areas where hostages are being held, according to multiple media reports. The prime minister's office also conveyed a message to Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, the army's chief of staff, saying, "If this does not suit him, you should resign," according to EuroNews and i24's diplomatic correspondent, Amichai Stein. Newsweek reached out to Netanyahu's office for comment via email on Monday.

Israeli media reported that the Cabinet will meet on Tuesday to come to a formal decision on the matter.The Israeli prime minister's reported decision comes after months of ceasefire talks between his government and Hamas, with both sides accusing each other of repeated violations. Israel has also faced increased international pressure to reach a ceasefire deal as Hamas released videos showing emaciated Israeli hostages being held in Gaza, which the group said was the result of Israel's blockade of humanitarian aid to the war-torn territory.

The videos had a significant impact on the Israeli public and sparked protests by thousands on Saturday night and calls for a ceasefire deal. It was one of the largest turnouts for the weekly protests in recent months. Johann Wadephul (CDU), Federal Foreign Minister, with Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, for a meeting in Jerusalem Netanyahu said after the videos were released that he would convene a Cabinet meeting to discuss how Israel can meet the three main goals he set out for the war.

defeating Hamas, returning the hostages and ensuring Gaza doesn't pose a threat to Israel. But the prime minister has faced opposition, including from within his own country, to increasing the IDF's operations in the Gaza Strip. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its counteroffensive in the territory following Hamas' devastating October 7, 2023, attack that claimed the lives of as many as 1,200 Israelis, most of whom were civilians. The Times of Israel, citing Israeli media, reported that Netanyahu told ministers in the last day that he will seek the Cabinet's backing of a plan to fully occupy Gaza.

AI on the Frontline: Evaluating Large Language Models in Real-World Conflict Resolution

Nathalie Bussemaker and Mark Freeman / IFIT Founder & Executive Director

Source Link

This groundbreaking study by the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT) reveals that all major large language models (LLMs) are providing dangerous conflict resolution advice without conducting basic due diligence that any human mediator would consider essential. IFIT tested six leading AI models, including ChatGPT, Deepseek, Grok, and others, on three real-world prompt scenarios from Syria, Sudan, and Mexico. Each LLM response, generated on June 26, 2025. was evaluated by two independent five-person teams of IFIT researchers across ten key dimensions. 

based on well-established conflict resolution principles such as due diligence and risk disclosure. Scores were assigned on a 0 to 10 scale for each dimension to assess the quality of each LLM’s advice. A senior expert sounding board of IFIT conflict resolution experts from Afghanistan, Colombia, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Sudan, Syria, the United States, Uganda, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe then reviewed the findings to assess implications for real-world practice.

From a total possible point value of 100/100, the average score across all six models was only 27 points. The maximum score was obtained by Google Gemini with 37.8/100, followed by Grok with 32.1/100, ChatGPT with 24.8/100, Mistral with 23.3/100, Claude with 22.3/100, and DeepSeek last with 20.7/100. All scores represent a failure to abide by minimal professional conflict resolution standards and best practices.

“In a world where LLMs are increasingly penetrating our daily lives, it’s crucial to identify where these models provide dangerous advice, and to encourage LLM providers to upgrade their system prompts,” IFIT founder and executive director Mark Freeman notes. “The reality is that LLMs are already being used for actionable advice in conflict zones and crisis situations, making it urgent to identify and fix key blind spots.”

Silicon Valley Is in Its ‘Hard Tech’ Era

Mike Isaac

Source Link

In a scene in HBO’s “Silicon Valley” in 2014, a character who had just sold his idea to a fictional tech company that was a thinly veiled analogue to Google encountered some of his new colleagues day drinking on the roof in folding lawn chairs. They were, they said tipsily, essentially being paid to do nothing while earning out — or “vesting” — their stock grants.

The tongue-in-cheek sendup wasn’t far from Silicon Valley’s reality. At the time, young engineers at Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google made the most of what was known as the “Web 2.0” era. Much of their work was building the consumer internet — things like streaming music services and photo-sharing sites. It was a time of mobile apps and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, wanting to give everyone a Facebook email address.

It was also the antithesis of corporate America’s stuffy culture. Engineers held morning meetings sitting in rainbow-colored beanbags, took lunch gratis at the corporate sushi bar and unwound in the afternoon with craft brews from the office keg (nitrogen chilled, natch). And if they got sweaty after a heated office table-tennis tournament, no matter — dry cleaning service was free.

That Silicon Valley is now mostly ancient history. Today, the tech has become harder, the perks are fewer and the mood has turned more serious. The nation’s tech capital has shifted into its artificial intelligence age — some call it the “hard tech” era — and the signs are everywhere. In office conference rooms, hacker houses, third-wave coffee houses or over Zoom meetings, knowledge of terms like neural network, large language model and graphical processing unit has become mandatory. 

Military AI Challenges Human Accountability

Source Link

Artificial intelligence is no longer confined to code-stained labs or military contractors’ slideshows: it has become a regular presence on modern battlefields. In 2024, as Israeli analysts relied on tools like Gospel and Lavender to generate targeting lists, the Pentagon set out to deploy swarms of autonomous drones through its Replicator Initiative. Targeting algorithms (AI systems analyzing data to identify and prioritize military targets) now compress the decision cycle from days to minutes, sometimes seconds, fundamentally challenging the way law, ethics, and accountability operate in armed conflict. 

It was in response to these realities that, on December 24, 2024, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 79/239, affirming that international humanitarian law (IHL) applies “throughout all stages of the life-cycle of artificial intelligence in the military domain” and calling for appropriate safeguards to keep human judgment and control at the heart of military decision-making. But resolutions and declarations, while necessary, do not themselves restrain machines. The responsibility for lawful conduct must remain anchored in human actors: commanders, engineers, and political authorities. 

Algorithms, after all, have no legal personality; they cannot form intent, stand before a court, or bear the weight of tragedy or blame. This is why the real task for military commanders, policymakers, and legal advisers is about translating the timeless obligations of the laws of war into practices and workflows that keep the chain of accountability intact, even as machines accelerate the tempo of armed conflict beyond anything imagined by those who first wrote those rules.

The question, then, is whether states are willing and able to build safeguards so that, even as decisions speed up and control becomes diffuse, a human being remains at the end of every algorithmic chain of action.Ask three officers to describe what counts as AI in uniform, and you will likely hear three different answers. One will mention software that sorts satellite imagery, another will point to a drone that selects its flight path, and a third may describe a logistics program that determines which convoy moves first. All of them are correct because military AI is a broad spectrum of software-enabled capabilities that touch nearly every corner of modern operations.

The Greene revolution: How politicians benefit from conspiracies about cloud seeding and weather control

Justin Key Canfil

Source Link

On summer nights as a child at my grandmother’s house in rural west Texas, I’d sometimes stay up, in defiance of my bedtime, for Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM, the radio show that made “chemtrails” a household word. So-called “chemtrails”—actually contrails—are the long white plumes of ice crystals that form behind passenger jetliners when hot engine exhaust meets sub-zero air in the upper atmosphere, a well-understood physical process. But “chemtrail” conspiracists believe they are chemicals dispersed as part of a secret government weather-control program. Back then, the idea felt fringe; by 2016, polls found nearly one in six Americans buy into it.

Conspiracy theories are on the rise everywhere, and last month’s Texas Hill Country floods, which caused more than 130 deaths, were no exception. On July 4, heavy precipitation caused the Guadalupe River to rise more than 25 feet in less than an hour. In addition to the death toll, the storm is estimated to have caused at least $18 billion in damages. Even before the water had stopped rising, rumors about the storm’s origins began swirling online. Many conspiracy theorists blamed a small California-based startup called Rainmaker Technology, which acknowledged having conducting cloud-seeding operations in Texas two days prior.

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a longtime promulgator of weather control conspiracy theories, was quick to latch onto the allegations. As fatalities continued to climb on July 5, Greene posted a photo of Rainmaker’s CEO, Augustus Dorick, and called for national legislation to make weather modification a felony offense. Anticipating blowback, the Texas Department of Agriculture quickly released a statement disclaiming any government involvement, and the Environmental Protection Agency launched two websites to counter weather control disinformation. 

However, in a public address on July 10, EPA head Lee Zeldin implied that Greene’s suspicions were “legitimate,” stating that the EPA “shares the significant reservations many Americans have [about] geoengineering activities.” While tragic, the floods were hardly suspicious. For outsiders, Texas often conjures images of cacti and tumbleweeds. But Texas is no stranger to flooding. Often called “Flash Flood Alley,” Central Texas has had more flood fatalities since 1959 than any other US state. The July 2025 floods were caused by the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry off southeastern Mexico, as was conclusively shown by radar imagery.