India’s thaw in relations with China is nothing to fear

Lyle Goldstein

Source Link

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent trip to China has rightly gotten the attention of many global strategists. Some in Washington seem especially concerned that Modi’s first trip to China since 2018 signals a potential rapprochement between New Delhi and Beijing, a development that could undermine many years of U.S. efforts to build up India as a counterweight to growing Chinese power in Asia.

Yet, it would be a major mistake to view this evident turnaround in China-India relations through a zero-sum lens (and thus as a problem for U.S. national security). American national interests will be well served if the two Asian giants can “bury the hatchet” on their decades-long border dispute, embrace compromise and return to more pragmatic bilateral relations.

For one, global trade and prosperity will be enhanced through much more extensive China-India trade linkages and, fundamentally, the world will not have to watch nervously as two nuclear-armed powers engage in regular, violent skirmishing. Most importantly, U.S. interests will be served by accepting the new multipolar world, including the distinct Chinese and Indian poles within that new global order.

China-India relations have never been warm in recent decades, but they became especially tense after a June 2020 skirmish in the Galwan Valley of the Himalayan mountains that forms the border between the two Asian giants. That incident was remarkable in two respects: first, there was a rather heavy loss of life on both sides, and second, because neither side resorted to the use of firearms.

That latter point reflects an admirable level of restraint, but New Delhi opted to take strenuous measures to curb India’s diplomatic and economic contacts with China after the conflict. Indeed, New Delhi went much further than Washington in placing draconian restrictions against Chinese companies in the Indian market. As if to rub salt in the wound, it was Chinese-made missiles and fighters that scored victories for the Pakistan Air Force against Indian fighters during the early summer 2025 fighting over Kashmir. Thus, New Delhi’s decision to pursue a more conciliatory line on China comes as somewhat of a surprise.

A challenging time for Indian diplomacy

Karan Thapar

Source Link

Just as the US ambassador-designate Sergio Gor admitted to “minor hiccups” in India-US ties and assured that the two countries are “not that far apart right now on a (trade) deal”, one could ask how badly damaged the relationship is. What impact could improving relations between Washington and Beijing have on India’s relationship with America? And if India doesn’t stop buying Russian oil could we see a second or, even, third phase of additional tariffs?

Former foreign secretary Shyam Saran believes “this is certainly a most challenging time for Indian diplomacy. There is no doubt that we are perhaps in a more vulnerable situation than we’ve been for quite some time”. Meanwhile, there have been positive exchanges between President Trump and Prime Minister Modi on social media. Parallelly, Trump is reported to have asked the European Union to impose 100% tariffs on India if Delhi persists with oil purchases from Moscow.

Let’s come to developments that could seriously impact Delhi’s relationship with Washington. First, Trump continues to talk about his very good relationship with China and his friendship with Xi. He’s keen to do a deal with Beijing and he’s even talked about visiting China. The question is how far will he go? Could he sacrifice Quad for a big deal with China? The New York Times says Trump has no plans to visit India for the Quad Summit. Does this mean the Indo-Pacific strategy is no longer central to the Trump Administration’s foreign policy? That would have a markedly deleterious influence on India-US relations. It would push us to the margins from the central position we once had in America’s policy vis-à-vis China. Saran puts it pithily: “India is most comfortable when its relations with the US and China are better than their relationship with each other.” That’s not the case today. The vibes between Washington and Beijing are certainly better than those between Washington and Delhi.

This raises the question: Is there a possibility of some sort of G2 emerging between America and China? If yes, would that “legitimise” China’s dominance of the Asian region? India definitely would not want that.

The Multi-Polar World Order: Rise of Civilisational States in India, China & Russia and the decline of Western Hegemony

Navroop Singh and Himja Parekh

Source Link

In geopolitics, history often provides the clearest playbook, but only for those willing to learn. The United States once mastered the art of pragmatic statecraft in the 1970s, when the Cold War seemed locked in stalemate. Rather than doubling down on confrontation with both Moscow and Beijing, Washington, under Richard Nixon and guided by Henry Kissinger, engineered a bold strategic pivot i.e. opening to China. This move reshaped the global balance of power, isolating the Soviet Union and ultimately tilting the Cold War in America’s favour. At its core, Kissinger’s doctrine recognized that stability required engagement, balance, and the willingness to work even with adversaries when interests aligned. Trump’s tariff-heavy strategy, by contrast, ignores these lessons. His “all-or-nothing” approach seeks to punish rivals and pressure partners simultaneously, leaving the United States isolated while others recalibrate. Where Kissinger wielded diplomacy to split adversaries, Trump’s failure to recognize this doctrine risks driving them together.

Henry Kissinger’s doctrine of statecraft was rooted in the cold logic of balance of power realism, where nations act not on sentiment but on interest, and stability emerges not from moral absolutes but from calibrated equilibrium. For Kissinger, the art of diplomacy lay in managing rivalries rather than seeking to eliminate them. His worldview rejected the “all-or-nothing” confrontational approach and instead emphasized triangular diplomacy, leveraging differences between powers to America’s advantage. This philosophy produced the famous U.S.-China opening in the 1970s, which split Beijing from Moscow and reshaped the Cold War’s strategic geometry. Kissinger believed that durable order could not be built on ideology but only through recognition of spheres of influence, acceptance of limits, and pragmatic engagement with adversaries. His statecraft was not about domination but about managing contradictions, keeping adversaries off balance while ensuring the United States always held the decisive weight in the global balance.

After Indonesia, Nepal — is the Philippines next to erupt?

Jason Gutierrez

Source Link

MANILA – President Ferdinand Marcos Jr on Monday said police would not stop a nationwide protest planned for this Sunday, while vowing to investigate alleged massive corruption in state infrastructure projects.

Filipinos have been glued to their television sets in recent days as both houses of Congress probed graft allegations tied to state-funded flood control projects.

The news has coincided with the monsoon season, which has put many parts of the capital, Manila, and nearby suburbs under water. The deluge has embarrassed Marcos, who last year boasted about the completion of many flood-control projects.

University students and activists have taken to the streets in droves in recent days and vowed to stage a bigger, nationwide protest on September 21. That’s raised concerns that public anger is mounting and could snowball into massive, destabilizing protests similar to those recently seen in Indonesia and Nepal.

That date marks the anniversary of the declaration of martial law by Marcos’ late father and namesake, Ferdinand Marcos Sr, whose two-decade abusive regime was ended by a “people power” revolt in 1986.

The Marcos family name is synonymous with corruption to many Filipinos; the late dictator is believed to have plundered untold billions from state coffers and parked them overseas. Thousands of activists also went missing or were killed, in what many considered the darkest years in modern Philippine history.

Marcos Jr, also known as Bongbong, won the presidency overwhelmingly in 2022, and on several measures since has appeared to be on the right track. For one, he has been laser-focused on defense and sovereignty by pivoting back to the United States to defend the country’s contested sea border vis-à-vis an expansionist China.

Next is what? On Nepal.

Source Link

This post is different from our usual focus at The Araniko Project. But as Nepali co-founders watching the chaos unfold from Beijing, it is difficult to remain silent and feel the need to share some reflections on the aftermath of the past two days of protest.

This post is only about Nepal. If you want to know what happened in the past 48 hrs, please read Kalam Weekly

What we witnessed in these past two days in Nepal is a war of two worlds. On one side stand the old regimes and their old netas, with their outdated mindset of conducting daily public affairs. Until just 48 hours ago, they were the invincibles. Now, Nepal’s ruling elites stand among the fallen: disgraced and deposed, fleeing for their lives with almost no path back to the political stage.

On the other side lies the outlook for a “new Nepal,” which has not yet even been born. There is still no certainty (as of this writing) as to who will lead the interim government. And while the protestors relish on the carnage of 9/9, is there any guarantee this will turn out better?

Mercilessly beating politicians nearly to death, burning a former Prime Minister’s wife, vandalizing the streets, and destroying public property: these are no longer Gen Z protests. These are hooligans, who in their desperation and anger failed to see the evil in themselves. If its the outlook for “new Nepal,” then what is the difference between the upcoming “new” and the already “old”? We can only hope we don’t end up with the worst of both worlds.

In the digital age, network power such as social media has challenged traditional state authority, as seen in the Gen Z protest that led to the resignation of Prime Minister K.P. Oli. But such network power can only challenge and overthrow; it cannot successfully govern a country. It also needs a stable structure and well functioning bureaucracy.

That is where the greatest challenge lies. The protestors have burned down Singha Durbar (the country’s administrative center and repository of key government records), the Supreme Court, educational institutions, Nepal Telecom, banks, hotels, large corporations, and even media institutions like Kanitpur: essentially every major structural institution shaping Nepal’s functioning has collapsed. Thousands of papers, documentations, gone in seconds! prisoners escaped from prison!

Chinese Cyber Skirmishes in the Indo-Pacific Show Emerging Patterns of Conflict

Gil Baram

Source Link

China’s Salt Typhoon hacking campaign has taken on new urgency with revelations it may have compromised the data of millions of Australians. This demonstrates how cyber operations have evolved beyond merely gathering intelligence.

When first identified by U.S. government partners back in mid-2023, the campaign by the Salt Typhoon group was assessed as a targeted espionage effort against U.S. and allied government systems. It involved stealthy intrusions, selective data theft and probing of networks in a handful of countries. At the time, the effect was thought to be limited and largely confined to government targets.

But August 2025 disclosures have shown just how broad the campaign truly has been. The Australian Signals Directorate, working with 20 foreign partners, has publicly attributed the operation to Beijing’s Ministry of State Security and People’s Liberation Army. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation now assesses that Salt Typhoon has struck dozens of countries, sweeping up telecommunications, transport, lodging and civilian data on a massive scale.These operations may have reached virtually every Australian household and millions more across partner nations.

Cyber operations now function as tools for coercion and competition, influencing the balance of power across the Indo-Pacific. They are central to rivalry. Even as governments invest in resilience and attempt to set boundaries, the persistent tension between the United States and China ensures that new vulnerabilities and threats will continue to emerge.

The Indo-Pacific is the epicentre of 21st-century competition. China and the U.S. vie for influence, while South Korea, India, Japan and Southeast Asian countries all face mounting digital vulnerabilities. With the digital economy of Southeast Asian nations expected to surpass U.S.$1 trillion by 2030, growth is driving their prosperity but also compounding risk.

Don’t Overestimate the Autocratic Alliance

Patricia M. Kim

Source Link

No moment captured the shifting global balance of power more vividly than when Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un walked in lockstep on the red carpet at China’s military parade in early September. The three autocrats, despite a long history of mutual suspicion, projected a show of unity against Washington. The message behind the carefully managed scene was unmistakable: China is at the center of a rising anti-Western bloc, while the United States is adrift—divided at home, faltering abroad, and rebuffed by its rivals.

U.S. President Donald Trump has made no secret of what he wants from each of the three leaders: a peace deal with Putin to end the war in Ukraine, a trade pact with Xi to rebalance the U.S.-Chinese economic relationship, and a summit with Kim to revive stalled diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula. But all three have spurned his overtures. Instead of engaging on Washington’s terms, Kim, Putin, and Xi are now linking arms in Beijing, flaunting not only their growing willingness to challenge U.S. leadership but also their ability to do so in concert.

But beneath this show of solidarity, China, North Korea, and Russia remain uneasy partners. What the three countries have is a tactical alignment rooted not in trust or shared values but in overlapping grievances and necessity. History demonstrates that they are not natural allies. Each state remains wary of entrapment and is unwilling to subordinate its national interests to those of the others. And crucially, each still seeks something from the United States—leverage that Washington must wield wisely.

THREE’S A CROWD

AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over

Eva Roytburg

Source Link

“Everywhere we went, people treated energy availability as a given,” Rui Ma wrote on X after returning from a recent tour of China’s AI hubs.

For American AI researchers, that’s almost unimaginable. In the U.S., surging AI demand is colliding with a fragile power grid, the kind of extreme bottleneck that Goldman Sachs warns could severely choke the industry’s growth.

In China, Ma continued, it’s considered a “solved problem.”

Ma, a renowned expert in Chinese technology and founder of the media company Tech Buzz China, took her team on the road to get a firsthand look at the country’s AI advancements. She told Fortune that while she isn’t an energy expert, she attended enough meetings and talked to enough insiders to come away with a conclusion that should send chills down the spine of Silicon Valley: In China, building enough power for data centers is no longer up for debate.

“This is a stark contrast to the U.S., where AI growth is increasingly tied to debates over data center power consumption and grid limitations,” she wrote on X.

The stakes are difficult to overstate. Data center building is the foundation of AI advancement, and spending on new centers now displaces consumer spending in terms of impact to U.S. GDP. That’s concerning since consumer spending is generally two-thirds of the pie. McKinsey projects that between 2025 and 2030, companies worldwide will need to invest $6.7 trillion into new data center capacity to keep up with AI’s strain.

In a recent research note, Stifel Nicolaus warned of a looming correction to the S&P 500, since it forecasts this data center capital expenditures boom to be a one-off build-out of infrastructure, while consumer spending is clearly on the wane.

However, the clear limiting factor to the U.S.’s data center infrastructure development, according to a Deloitte industry survey, is stress on the power grid. Cities’ power grids are so weak that some companies are just building their own power plants rather than relying on existing grids. The public is growing increasingly frustrated over increasing energy bills. In Ohio, the electricity bill for a typical household has increased at least $15 a month this summer from the data centers, while energy companies prepare for a sea change of surging demand.

What China Wants With Global Governance

Steven Langendonk and Matthew D. Stephen

Source Link

What does China want from world order? Many observers, especially in the West, look upon China’s growing assertiveness and expanding ambitions with trepidation. In a speech on China-EU relations in 2023, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned that “the Chinese Communist Party’s clear goal is a systemic change of the international order with China at its center.” She went on to characterize China’s diplomacy in multilateral institutions as demonstrating a “determination to promote an alternative vision of the world order. One, where individual rights are subordinated to national security. Where security and economy take prominence over political and civil rights.”

Similarly, in a speech at the Körber Foundation in Berlin in January 2025, Friedrich Merz – then Germany’s opposition leader, currently the chancellor – lumped China in with Russia as the leaders of a new systemic conflict between liberal democracies and “anti-liberal autocracies,” which aggressively oppose the multilateral order as it has existed since the end of World War II Such statements follow in the footsteps of the United States, which classified China as a “revisionist” power in 2017.

While increasingly widespread, the view of China as an existential challenge to world order reflects political alarmism more than sober analysis. Our research on China’s ambitions for world order leads us to a different conclusion. While China does indeed pose a challenge to some aspects of the contemporary world order, there is little evidence to suggest that it poses a greater challenge to world order than other revisionist powers, including today’s United States. Moreover, China’s ambitions vary across different domains of world order, where it faces challenges that limit what it can achieve.

Owing to its growing influence around the world, what China wants for world order has become one of the decisive questions of our time. Scholars have sought to identify and understand China’s goals using a variety of methods. Some look at China’s domestic political and economic order, which is authoritarian capitalist, and extrapolate this to the international level. Others infer China’s preferences based on theoretical arguments about its position in the international system. We argue that a more accurate picture can be gained by looking empirically at China’s track record. In particular, we focus on two aspects of China’s behavior: what it says (i.e. its vision for world order) and what it does (i.e. its behavior in different international regimes).

For Beijing’s Foreign Disinformation, the Era of AI-Driven Operations Has Arrived

Sarah Cook

Source Link

In early August, two professors from Vanderbilt University published an essay outlining a trove of Chinese documents linked to the private firm GoLaxy. The sources revealed a sophisticated and troubling use of artificial intelligence (AI) not only to generate misleading content for target audiences – such as in Hong Kong and Taiwan – but also to extract information about U.S. lawmakers, creating profiles that might be used for future espionage or influence campaigns. The article received significant coverage, rightfully so.

Yet, those findings represent only the tip of the iceberg in an emerging phenomenon. A series of reports, incidents, and takedowns over the summer – spanning OpenAI, Meta, and Graphika – shed further light on the latest uses of AI by China-linked actors focused on foreign propaganda and disinformation. Notably, generative AI tools are now employed not only for content production but also for operational purposes like data collection and drafting internal reports to the party-state apparatus. This evolution marks a new frontier in Beijing’s information warfare tactics, offering insights into what a more AI-dominated future could yield and why urgent attention is needed from social media platforms, software developers, and democratic governments.

A close review of these reports reveals five key dimensions:

1. Using AI for Content Generation

While prior China-linked disinformation campaigns had deployed AI-tools to generate false personas or deepfakes, these latest disclosures point to a more concerted effort to leverage these tools for creating entire fake news websites that distribute Beijing-aligned narratives simultaneously in multiple languages. Graphika’s “Falsos Amigos” report published last month identified a network of 11 fake websites, established between late December 2024 and March 2025, using AI-generated pictures as logos or cover images to enhance credibility.

How Taiwan Is Trying to Defend Its Democracy From Mis- and Disinformation

Cathy Harper

Source Link

Taiwan’s version of the “democracy sausage” – a public display at the Presidential Palace, Taipei, August 2025.Credit: Cathy Harper

“Taiwan is on the front line,” Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Dr. Lin Chai-Lung said ahead of a recent referendum, “and we have to come up with solutions.”

Taiwan is ranked highly as a liberal democracy, but it is the target of significant pro-China misinformation and disinformation campaigns, aimed at undermining trust in elections and democracy, according to several reports and a growing body of academic research.

Its solutions involve a whole-of-society approach, including legal change, civil society and education.

Taiwan’s Fraud Crime Hazard Prevention Act 2024 imposes significant fines on social media platforms that do not remove content that is verifiably fake and intended to be misleading, such as fake videos of celebrities promoting a product that they don’t actually endorse. Taiwan’s cyber ambassador, Audrey Tang – who until last year was its first minister of digital affairs – said that since the law’s enactment “there are no deep fake ads anymore if you scroll on Taiwan Facebook or YouTube.”

Additionally, before national elections in 2020, Taiwan passed the Anti-Infiltration Act, which imposes criminal penalties of up to five years in prison and significant fines on persons or entities receiving support from “hostile external forces” aiming to disrupt elections and democracy. The law is not without critics, though – the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) warns that it could be used in a politicized manner and violate fundamental rights.

Tang does not endorse censoring content or banning social media due to Taiwan’s almost four decades of martial law (1949-1987) when freedom of speech was curtailed and political dissidents were jailed and killed. She agrees with U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance who spoke out strongly against any form of censorship, including on social media and the internet, in a major speech in Munich in February. In 2022, Taiwan’s government proposed a Digital Intermediary Services Act (modeled on the European Union’s Digital Services Act 2022 aimed at preventing the spread of disinformation), but it was withdrawn due to public concern about censorship.

Assessing China’s Strategy Towards Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Julian McBride

Source Link

China is adopting a deliberate and sustained approach to expanding its soft power and global influence. Eyeing a growing militarized foothold in the Indo-Pacific, China is taking a chessboard approach to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Neither outright militarily backing Russia, condemning the invasion, nor voting in favor of the illegitimate annexations, China is taking a passive, yet calculated approach. Wanting a fractured West, while simultaneously bringing Moscow under its fold, Beijing seeks to position itself as a legitimate superpower, promote multilateralism, and test the coalition of the willing if the Chinese government gives the green light for future military provocations in the Asian Pacific.

Amidst the ongoing war, Russia was internationally isolated, accumulating more sanctions than North Korea, and became increasingly reliant on economic aid and exports to China. During the numerous United Nations General Assembly resolutions against the war, occupation, and annexations, Beijing has abstained numerous times – neither condemning nor supporting Moscow’s aggression. A major factor as to why China does not support Russia’s annexations openly is due to fears of the West changing its foreign policies on Taiwan. If Beijing were to openly back Moscow, Western countries could reconsider the ‘One China policy’ and provide further military and diplomatic support to Taiwan. Nevertheless, Beijing has seldom cracked down on Chinese companies that send critical components for Russian weaponry, particularly drones. According to a July 2025 Bloomberg report, 92% of all drone components are of Chinese origin, and with Russia’s ongoing production, drones are playing a significant role on the frontlines.

The prolonged war has led to exhaustion in not just the Ukrainian and Russian militaries and society, but also in Western perception. The gridlock benefits China for several reasons. Russia is a historical rival of China, and both countries have clashed throughout various governments, including the mid-1800s and the Cold War, over border disputes. Moscow occupies Outer Manchuria, a region that Beijing has eyed for return to the Chinese fold, much like Taiwan. Internationally isolated and under stringent sanctions, Russia is becoming increasingly reliant on exports to China, as well as economic relief.

Israel’s attack on Qatar has shaken the Gulf

Emile Hokayem

Source Link

“Has Israel become the new Iran?” is not the debate the enthusiastic architects of the Abraham Accords envisioned playing out across the Gulf region following Tuesday’s Israeli attack in Qatar. However exaggerated and fleeting this sentiment may seem, it shows the lasting impact of the Gaza catastrophe.

US officials once proudly took credit for preventing the regionalisation of Israel’s war against Hamas and Iran. Yet, for the second time in three months, a Gulf state has faced the material consequences of the wholly mismanaged two-year war that is now radiating across the Middle East. In June, Iran fired a volley of missiles at a US base in Qatar. On Tuesday, Israel fired missiles into the headquarters of Hamas in an upscale residential district of Doha, hoping to kill its political leadership while they reportedly met to discuss the latest US ceasefire proposal.

Despite the apparent failure of the operation (no senior Hamas leader seems to have died) and unanimous condemnation of the strike, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has remained unapologetic. The attack, like the continuing Israeli campaign in Gaza City, is the latest evidence that Netanyahu has discarded diplomacy in favour of force and abandoned Israeli hostages in favour of the illusory goal of completely destroying Hamas. On top of the six people killed in Doha, Tuesday’s missile attack’s probable casualties will be any future negotiations, Qatar’s willingness to serve as a mediator, the remaining Israeli hostages and many more Palestinian civilians.

Netanyahu may pay a domestic price for this failed gambit, but his spin-doctors insist that the mere shock will erode Hamas’s morale and can force it to cave. This is a profound misunderstanding of extremist organisations which, even when faced with defeat, will find narratives to justify perpetual resistance. Hamas ceased to be a capable military organisation long ago. It may lob a rocket at Israel but it has lost cohesion, capabilities, leadership, supply lines and allies. What it still has — hostages, a grip on parts of Gaza and much of its population — it owes to Netanyahu’s machinations, territorial maximalism and his refusal to discuss a viable framework for Gaza’s future.

The End of Development

Adam Tooze

Source Link

The first week of March featured a moment of dark political comedy worthy of Veep creator Armando Iannucci. In a scene that felt scripted for satire, the United States became the sole nation in the U.N. General Assembly to vote against the establishment of both an International Day of Hope and an International Day of Peaceful Coexistence. More astonishing still was the formal letter read out by Washington to explain its position on the latter resolution.

In the letter, the U.S. government categorically rejected the entirety of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. This wasn’t simply a withdrawal, as from the climate commitments of the Paris Agreement; it was an unambiguous denunciation of the collective ambition to improve the material condition of humanity. American voters, the letter claimed, had delivered a clear mandate in the last election: Their government must put America first, caring first and foremost for

Moscow Downplays Drone Incursion on Poland

Pavel K. Baev

Source Link

Russia’s September 9–10 drone attack, when at least 19 decoy Gerbera drones entered Polish airspace, caused little physical damage but triggered a swift response, including operation “Eastern Sentry,” in a kinetic test of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) resolve.

Moscow’s incursion occurred alongside large-scale drone attacks on Ukraine and the launch of Zapad-2025 exercises, possibly to demonstrate long-range aviation capabilities despite losses from Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb, while simultaneously cultivating plausible deniability and testing NATO’s reaction.

NATO’s military response included shooting down four of the drones and Article 4 activation, while broader Western sanctions continue to deepen Russia’s economic crisis.

The incursion of at least 19 Russian drones into Polish airspace on September 9–10 produced plenty of shock but hardly any awe. The damage was minimal because the Gerbera decoy drones that Russia deployed in the attack, cheap Shahed-mimic drones that Moscow uses to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses, were not carrying explosives. One Russian drone landed on the roof of a rabbit pen so smoothly that the animals were unharmed (Radio Svoboda, September 11). The incident was nevertheless extremely dangerous, and the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) responded accordingly despite Moscow’s claim that the incursion was unintentional (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, September 10). The response was swift and multilateral, and by September 12, NATO launched a new allied operation, Eastern Sentry, to bolster air defense along the entire Eastern flank (Kommersant, September 11; Meduza, September 12). After many hybrid attacks, the Russian drone incursion into Poland represents the first kinetic test of NATO unity and resolve. While the full outcome is still in the making, the Kremlin can hardly be satisfied with its test’s result so far.

The Force We Need: Stand-off and Penetrating Airpower

Col. Mark Gunzinger, USAF (Ret.) and Heather Penney

Source Link

Decades of force cuts and deferred modernization have left the U.S. Air Force unable to simultaneously deter nuclear attacks, defend the U.S. homeland, and defeat Chinese aggression at acceptable levels of risk. Years of insufficient resources have also eroded the Air Force’s ability to conduct long-range, penetrating attacks against China’s centers of gravity and deny the operational sanctuaries the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) needs to generate air and missile attacks against U.S. bases in the Pacific. The net result: China holds a decisive advantage in combat mass that cannot be overcome by the United States and its allies and friends.

It is not enough for the U.S. to simply prevent the PLA from seizing ground on the shores of Taiwan. That by itself will not guarantee victory. A war-winning strategy must also deny sanctuaries to the PLA—including sanctuaries on China’s mainland—and enable U.S. forces to degrade China’s ability to launch long-range air and missile salvos that could cripple U.S. joint force operations in the Pacific.

But such a war-winning strategy requires a war-winning force structure to ensure the U.S. has the capability and capacity to defeat a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and deny the PLA sanctuaries from attacks.

The Air Force will soon field next-generation bombers and fighters with the range, survivability, and payload capacity to deny sanctuaries to PLA forces wherever they are. But these will be of little value unless the service acquires enough of them. Multiple studies have concluded the USAF needs at least 200 B-21 Raider bombers to meet operational demand for penetrating strikes. Stealthy F-47s and F-35As, supported by uncrewed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) and F-15EX stand-off strike aircraft, are also required at scale. Yet the Air Force is acquiring new fighters below the sustainment rate necessary to maintain its combat inventory. Delaying or truncating any of these acquisition programs now would create a fragile force unable to take the fight to China—a force incapable of achieving peace through strength or of winning should deterrence fail.

The Wrong Way to Fight the Cartels

Ryan C. Berg, Daniel Byman, Iselin Brady, Riley McCabe, Alexander Palmer, and Henry Ziemer

Source Link

Since returning to the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump has pledged to defeat the Western Hemisphere’s violent drug traffickers by any means necessary. In a March address to Congress, Trump declared, “The cartels are waging war in America, and it’s time for America to wage war on the cartels.” Over the last several months, his administration has designated 13 cartels and criminal groups, including six based in Mexico and two in Venezuela, as foreign terrorist organizations. It has also surged troops to the U.S.-Mexican border, declared several tracts of land near the border to be military zones, directed the Central Intelligence Agency to step up reconnaissance drone missions over Mexico, and ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to draw up plans to assess potential collateral damage from airstrikes in Mexico.

Washington has left behind its traditional conception of the fight against transnational criminal organizations as a matter of law enforcement with its threats of “war” and consideration of military action against the cartels. In July, Trump directed the Department of Defense to prepare such plans. Then, in September, the U.S. military struck what administration officials claimed was a vessel used by members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to smuggle drugs, killing 11. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the strikes on the basis that the U.S. president has the authority “under exigent circumstances to eliminate imminent threats to the United States.”

A militarized approach may be a politically attractive way for Trump to project strength. And indeed, the United States can, and should, draw on many valuable lessons from the last two decades of counterterrorism missions during the “war on terror” in its campaign against the cartels. But there is a more productive path forward than drastically shifting the rules of engagement with transnational criminal groups. In Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Washington may have a genuine partner in containing the cartels that pose the most direct threat to the United States. More extensive border measures, increased bilateral security coordination, and more frequent (but not more lethal) maritime interdiction efforts can accomplish just as much as unilateral U.S. military interventions using drones and special operations forces would, all while limiting risk to U.S. personnel and mitigating blowback.

NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN

The United States in a Multipolar World

Andrew Latham

Source Link

Every so often a book comes along that slices through comforting illusions and forces readers to face the world as it is. Emma Ashford’s First Among Equals is one of those books. For too long the foreign policy debate in Washington has oscillated between two equally pernicious illusions. On the one side are the fantasists who believe that America can somehow rediscover the unipolar moment of the 1990s. On the other are those who are convinced that the United States is fated to decline into second-rank irrelevance as China rises. Ashford rejects both views. Her alternative is a simple one, but a radical one too: the world is multipolar, the unipolar era is over, but the United States can still thrive as the most powerful actor in the system. It just needs to understand that its role is one of “first among equals” rather than that of an unchallenged hegemon.

The book is intellectually rigorous and, for a work of IR scholarship, refreshingly accessible. Ashford draws on the realist tradition but avoids the jargon that can suffocate that literature. Her writing is sharp and clear-eyed. Free of illusions, she reminds us that power—not institutions, not platitudes about “the rules-based order”—remains the coin of the realm. At the same time, her realism is not the crude kind that reduces international politics to a zero-sum balance of tanks and ships. Instead, Ashford locates America’s choices within a broader sweep of history, showing that multipolarity is neither catastrophe nor apocalypse but a recurring rhythm of world politics.

Ashford is at her best when taking aim at the lazy analogies that saturate Washington’s discourse. Thus, she rightly debunks the myth that today’s strategic competition with China is a rerun of the Cold War. Beijing is not the Soviet Union, and the Indo-Pacific is not Europe circa 1949. To frame the rivalry in such terms, Ashford argues, is to risk overextension, squandered resources, and a self-destructive spiral of ideological crusading. Instead, the United States must prioritize ruthlessly, choosing between vital interests and peripheral distractions. That means focusing on maintaining the balance of power in Asia while resisting the temptation to fight ideological battles everywhere.

How America’s economy is dodging disaster

Source Link

Economic doom beckoned after President Donald Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2nd. Stocks crashed; forecasters predicted a recession within the year. Three months on, the mood is more relaxed. Prices in shops are not noticeably higher, unemployment is flat and the S&P 500 index of big American firms is resurgent, back at all-time highs. Although Mr Trump has sent letters threatening a whole host of countries with swingeing tariffs if they do not reach an agreement on trade with America by August 1st, nobody is too worried.

Tanks Were Just Tanks, Until Drones Made Them Change

Marco Hernandez and Thomas Gibbons-Neff 

Source Link

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the two sides’ tank divisions looked much as they did during the Cold War.

Now, Russia’s and Ukraine’s Soviet-era tanks rumble across the battlefield covered in anti-drone nets and spikes, dangling chains and unwieldy cages.

The exterior transformations of these hulking vehicles are a testament to how quickly drones have changed the war in Ukraine in just over three years. Lethal drones have pushed traditional missiles and artillery to the sidelines.

The armor changes began early in the war after Ukrainian forces used U.S.-supplied anti-tank missiles to strike Russian tanks directly from above, piercing weaker points in vehicles’ armor.

To counter the explosive projectiles, Russian tank crews began mounting homemade cages above their turrets to cushion the tanks from blasts. Other Russian units already had cages on their tanks, anticipating strikes from above.

Since then, the battlefield has completely changed. It is now driven by small, cheap first-person-view (F.P.V.) drones that can be used like homing missiles.

In response, both Ukrainian and Russian tanks have undergone transformations to address their vulnerabilities. Here’s how it happened:

Earlier in the war, anti-tank missiles and drones that dropped grenades primarily threatened tanks from above.

To protect the tanks from above, mechanics built structures on the tops. Then, soldiers began using F.P.V. drones to maneuver like homing projectiles into other vulnerable areas of the vehicles.

If the US Retreats to the Western Hemisphere, What Happens to Asia?

Denny Roy

Source Link

U.S. grand strategy under the new Trump administration remains unsettled. There are strong indications Washington is moving toward a nascent hemispheric retrenchment approach. It is not yet clear, however, whether that would include a withdrawal of US strategic influence from the Asia-Pacific region. If so, the consequences for the region will be dramatic.

According to media reports, the Trump administration’s soon-to-be-released National Security Strategy breaks with recent practice by prioritizing homeland security and threats within the Western Hemisphere over countering China. This follows months of other statements and actions suggesting a desire to consolidate the United States’ control over its own geographic region, including interest in annexing Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal; renaming the “Gulf of America”; and dispatching U.S. Navy vessels to waters near the coast of Venezuela to intimidate the Maduro government.

The White House has also backed away from the United States’ accustomed postwar leadership role in Europe by distancing itself from NATO and showing little willingness to meaningfully punish Russian aggression against Ukraine. The U.S. government has decided to stop funding programs for building Europe’s capacity to defend against a possible attack from Russia. The movement toward a permanent NATO-U.S. separation is not based solely on policy disagreements, but also stems from an ideological schism.

In the Middle East, the Trump administration’s approach involves mostly diplomacy and economic deals. Despite the air strikes he ordered against Iran, the Trump team favors reduced U.S. military commitments. Indeed, his MAGA base is highly sensitive to any apparent departure from the promise to avoid another “forever war” in the Middle East.

The Golden Age of Multilateralism Is Over

Jo Inge Bekkevold

Source Link

Multilateralism matters. As a growing number of issues become increasingly global, international cooperation is simply a must. Nonetheless, the multilateral system established at the end of World War II, with the founding of the United Nations and other organizations, is now unraveling in front of our eyes. This calls for a serious debate about why the system is unraveling, whether it can be saved, and what may replace it if not.

The school of realism in international relations suggests that all institutions are a function of the international power structure. Fundamental shifts in the latter rob the former of its foundation. From now on, realism advises us, we must accustom ourselves to more fragile and suboptimal forms of cross-border cooperation.

America’s Greatest Threat to Democracy Comes From Within

Garry Kasparov

Source Link

In the fight to save democracies from the grips of autocrats, defenders of democratic values must partner with people who would otherwise be their political opponents. In this episode, host Garry Kasparov seeks to demonstrate this lesson by welcoming former National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan as his guest. Their long-held and many disagreements aside, Garry and Jake find common ground in standing up to the forces that are working to undermine the rule of law and endanger American democracy.

Garry Kasparov: In a fight as important as the one to save American democracy from the grips of would-be autocrats and dictators, we must partner with people who would otherwise be our political opponents. We must welcome them to the cause and put aside other disagreements, at least for the time being.

This is a lesson dissidents in unfree places understand well, but not one that comes easy to Americans. It is a lesson I hope to personally demonstrate in today’s episode.

From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Garry Kasparov.

My guest today is Jake Sullivan, the former National Security Adviser for President Joe Biden, and before that, a top adviser to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state and when she ran for president.

My disagreements with him are too numerous to detail in full, but I will offer this summary. Sullivan and the presidential administrations he has worked for have too often failed to understand and predict the threats facing the world and misjudged what those threats mean for America and its democracy. They have been flat-footed time and again in Afghanistan, in Ukraine, in the Middle East. The list goes on.

In 2023, I called for congressional hearings into Sullivan’s leadership at the National Security Council, and I even wrote that Biden should fire him to be replaced with someone who understood the meaning of deterrence. But even with all those many disagreements, Jake and I still see eye to eye on the threat to American democracy, and that’s why I asked him to join me for this conversation.

The AI Raj: How tech giants are recolonizing power

Allison Stanger 

Source Link

On December 31, 1600, Queen Elizabeth I signed a royal charter granting the East India Company exclusive rights to conduct trade in the Indian Ocean region. The document was precise in its limitations: The company could establish trading posts, negotiate with local rulers, and defend its commercial interests. Nothing more.

Seventy-seven years later, the same company had acquired the right to mint currency on behalf of the British crown. By 1765, it controlled the tax collection (ruthlessly enforced by its own private army) for the Indian provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa—territories containing roughly 20 million people. What began as commercial efficiency had become imperial governance. The transformation was so gradual that few contemporaries even noticed sovereignty shifting in the region from local rule to corporation.

A similar pattern can be seen today with national governments and Big Tech—only this time, centuries of drift have been compressed into months. Where the East India Company deployed trading posts and private armies, today’s technology firms and specifically AI development companies use data pipelines, data centers, and algorithmic systems. The medium has changed; the mechanics of private power assuming public functions remain the same.

Consider the trajectory of Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). Established in February 2025 with the stated goal of eliminating bureaucratic waste but an unstated aspiration to vacuum up new data to improve Musk’s companies, DOGE began with access to federal payment systems—ostensibly to identify inefficiencies. Within weeks, reports emerged that DOGE personnel had gained the ability to alter government databases, including Social Security records and contractor payments. The justification remained consistent: To deliver efficiency, one must first seize control.

The parallel extends beyond metaphor. Just as the East India Company’s commercial success gradually justified new powers, today’s AI firms seek to leverage technical prowess to assume public functions by default, implicitly assuming that the reallocation of power will serve human flourishing. Each efficiency gain becomes justification for the next transfer of authority, yet the costs of that automation go uncalculated.

Forecasting the Next World War: Between Theory and Practice

Raphaël P.P. Dosson

Source Link

Winston Churchill famously said, “those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat it.” The truth is, even when we do learn history, we often remain trapped in its repetition. Worse still, attempts to act on historical lessons—such as after World War I—often end up creating new conditions for history to repeat itself. And when we choose passivity or forget history altogether, as seems to be the case today, history turns us into its next lesson. This captivity to historical cycles appears methodologically inescapable. Worse, it suggests a kind of universal curse: one that plays out at both the level of individual human nature, as Morgenthau explored, and at the level of interstate dynamics, as seen in Mearsheimer’s analysis. Power—and its corrupting influence—remains the defining feature of both human and international relations.

Power returns, war resurfaces, and crisis deepens—all of which we are collectively experiencing today. Analogously, whether we look at: 50–60 year Kondratieff cycles of economic growth and contraction; 80–100 year Power Transition Theory (Organski and Kugler); 80–120 year Modelski Long Cycle Theory of global power; 100–150 year Gilpinian hegemonic cycles; the World-Systems Theory of Wallerstein (center-periphery expansion); the 200–300 year secular Malthusian cycles of population and resource pressure; or even Toynbee’s 500–800-year civilizational cycles of east-west transitions – they all appear to converge in our current historical moment.

A better framework for studying these recurring cycles in international relations may be found in the evolution of the discipline of International Relations (IR) itself: at the intersection of theory (knowledge, agents, discourses) and practice (interstate relations, wars, trade, power distribution, international system configuration). The frictions between theory and practice are not separate—they are co-constitutive. Reality shapes theory, and theory shapes reality. IR moves through recurring cycles aligned with the rise and decline of structural power. These cycles manifest in theory—through oscillations between realism/rationalism and liberalism/reflectivism—and in practice—through the alternation between periods of peace and moments of war. Their co-constitutive relation make that the state of intellectual realm is directly associated (or inversely related) to the state of the system’s power distribution (i.e., war/peace). The closer to war the more realist and the further from conflict the more idealist. The undulating patterns of theory and practice converge at critical inflection points, resulting in paroxysms: major wars or profound ideological transformations.