Indian Strategic Studies: 09/26/25

26 September 2025

Who Rules The Waves? The Answer Is Shifting To New Delhi – OpEd

Girish Linganna

Recent political moves in Indian Ocean island nations are boosting India’s influence in the region.

In May, following a UN resolution supported by 116 nations, including India, the United Kingdom handed over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

The Chagos Islands, also called the Chagos Archipelago, are a group of small but strategically important islandsin the middle of the Indian Ocean. For decades, they were controlled by the U.K., which even allowed the U.S. to use one of the islands, Diego Garcia, as a military base. Mauritius had long demanded their return.

The recent handover marked a historic moment, as it restored sovereignty to Mauritius and was widely seen as a diplomatic win for India, since New Delhi had consistently supported Mauritius’ claim at international forums.

This move has boosted New Delhi’s image and influence in the Indian Ocean, reports The Diplomat.

However, London and Washington still control Diego Garcia, the biggest island in the Chagos. It is a U.S.-U.K. military base, placed at a key location in the Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, New Delhi, sticking to its anti-colonial policy, pushed the U.K. to end its colonial rule in the Chagos Islands, and helped restore Mauritius’ sovereignty over the island chain.

Controlling Key Sea Routes

Further north in the Indian Ocean, the Indian Navy guards two important choke points – the Lakshadweep and Andaman Islands – where major global trade ships pass, reports The Diplomat.

All ships going to the Pacific from the Persian Gulf (region rich in oil, near Iran and Saudi Arabia) and Gulf of Aden (sea route near Yemen and Somalia) pass through a 200 km wide route called the Nine Degree Channel, which lies along India’s Lakshadweep Islands.

Trump's $100,000 H-1B visa shock: Why US may lose more than India

Soutik Biswas and Nikhil Inamdar

Panic, confusion and then a hasty White House climbdown - it was a weekend of whiplash for hundreds of thousands of Indians on H-1B visas.

On Friday, US President Donald Trump stunned the tech world by announcing an up to 50-fold hike in the cost of skilled worker permits - to $100,000. Chaos followed: Silicon Valley firms urged staff not to travel outside the country, overseas workers scrambled for flights, and immigration lawyers worked overtime to decode the order.

By Saturday, the White House sought to calm the storm, clarifying that the fee applied only to new applicants and was a one-off. Yet, the long-standing H-1B programme - criticised for undercutting American workers but praised for attracting global talent - still faces an uncertain future.

Even with the tweak, the policy effectively shutters the H-1B pipeline that, for three decades, powered the American dream for millions of Indians and, more importantly, supplied the lifeblood of talent to US industries.

That pipeline reshaped both countries. For India, the H-1B became a vehicle of aspiration: small-town coders turned dollar earners, families vaulted into the middle class, and entire industries - from airlines to real estate - catered to a new class of globe-trotting Indians.

For the US, it meant an infusion of talent that filled labs, classrooms, hospitals and start-ups. Today, Indian-origin executives run Google, Microsoft and IBM, and Indian doctors make up nearly 6% of the US physician workforce.

Indians dominate the H-1B programme, making up more than 70% of the recipients in recent years. (China was the second-largest source, making up about 12% of beneficiaries.)

In tech, their presence is even starker: a Freedom of Information Act request in 2015 showed over 80% of "computer" jobs went to Indian nationals - a share industry insiders say hasn't shifted much.

India-Pakistan Conflict: How a Deepfake Video Made it Mainstream

Pooja Chaudhuri, Eliot Higgins

India and Pakistan have been trading blows in the wake of a militant attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir last month.

On May 7, India said it had launched missile strikes in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Pakistan – which denies any involvement in the April attack on the tourists, most of whom were Indian – then claimed to have shot down Indian drones and jets.

Claims and counterclaims of ongoing strikes and attacks have been forthcoming from both sides. Some have been difficult to immediately and independently verify, creating a vacuum that has enabled the spread of disinformation.

For example, on May 8, a deepfake video of US President Donald Trump appearing to state that he would “destroy Pakistan” was quickly debunked by Indian fact-checkers. Its impact was therefore minimal.

However, the same cannot be said of another deepfake video spotted by Bellingcat and, by the time of publication, at least one Pakistani outlet.

The altered video had been shared on X (formerly Twitter) nearly 700,000 times at the time of publication and purports to show a General in the Pakistani army, Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, saying that Pakistan had lost two of its aircraft.

A Community Note was later added to the video on X detailing it as an “AI generated deepfake”.

However, several Indian media companies had already picked up and ran with the story, including large outlets like NDTV. Other established news media that featured quotes from the altered footage in their coverage include The Free Press Journal, The Statesman and Firstpost.

Bellingcat was able to debunk the video by finding another clip of the same press conference from last year. The video confirms that a different audio was added over the original footage, with Chaudhry’s lips appearing to sync with the altered audio.

The US Alienation of India is Backfiring Badly

Phillips P. OBrien

Its been a few weeks now since Donald Trump embarked on his trade war with India—which has been given a movable feast of justifications, but which seems to have been originally motivated by the desire to punish the Indian government for not supporting the narrative that Trump settled the recent dispute between Pakistan and India.

The different arguments given for the US move, depending on when and who was speaking, range from a desire to punish India for buying Russian oil, to trying to pry open the Indian market for US agricultural goods, to trying to generally rebalance the trading relationship between the two states.

One thing is clear, though, and that is that the policy has had the definite impact of driving India away from the USA and closer to Russia and China. It has already strengthened the Russian war effort in a very short period of time, and provided the Russian war economy with fresh capital at a time when things are looking uncertain.

In August, instead of cutting back on their purchases of Russian oil, the Indians jumped in and seemed to buy all that they could. They almost matched the Chinese for crude oil purchases that month, buying €2.7 billions worth when compared to the Chinese total of €2.9 billion. This was a real benefit to the Russian economy as the Chinese purchase represented a real drop from the €4.1 billion of Russian crude they bought in July.

And this was only part of Indian purchases of Russian energy. Overall, India’s fossil fuel imports from Russia reached €3.6 billion in August, including €510 million in coal and €282 million in refined products.

And the Indians in buying so much crude are helping the Russians cope with the effects of the Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries. With Russian refining capacity being reduced, the Russians could be faced with a massive crude storage problem soon. However the Indians are stepping in and providing the Russians a market to ship their unrefined oil—which the Indians then refine themselves.

Are Taliban-Iran Relations Moving on a Positive Trajectory?

Muhammad Murad

A high-ranking Iranian economic delegation, including lawmakers and private investors, led by Industry, Mining, and Trade Minister Seyed Mohammad Atabak, visited Afghanistan for three days from September 15 to 17 to hold high-level talks with the Taliban regime. The objective of these discussions was to enhance investment and trade between the two countries.

A spokesman for the Taliban Ministry of Industry and Commerce, Abdul Salam Jawad Akhundzada, said that the Iranian delegation’s visit “aims to identify obstacles hindering bilateral trade and to improve cooperation in transport and joint investment.”

During the visit, the Iranian delegation also met with officials from the prime minister’s economic office, as well as representatives from the ministries of mines and petroleum, and public works, along with members of the Afghan private sector. In addition, the delegation visited Afghanistan’s western province of Herat in order to inspect mines, the railway, and the Islam Qala border crossing.

Besides exploring new investment opportunities, the visit sought to expand Afghanistan-Iran bilateral trade with the goal of increasing it to $10 billion from the current $3.5 billion. It is yet to be determined whether the targeted increase in trade would benefit Afghanistan, mainly the common Afghan, or not; Iran already holds a trade surplus in the bilateral relationship.

Iran’s Atabak, nevertheless, seemed positive about his country’s commitment to cooperate with Afghanistan. He emphasized Iran’s intention to strengthen trade relations with all of Iran’s neighboring countries, particularly Afghanistan. He highlighted the historic ties between the two nations and reaffirmed Iran’s commitment to enhancing commercial and economic cooperation with Afghanistan. “We intend to pursue the plans we have laid out during our meetings with Afghan government officials to elevate the level of exchanges and strengthen bilateral cooperation, and to initiate new programs as well,” Atabak said.

According to the Tehran Times, the bilateral discussions also covered joint work in the mining sector, banking ties, expansion of cargo movement via the Khaf-Herat railway, and the greater use of Iran’s Chabahar port, which is currently being developed by India as part of a 10-year agreement. During an economic and trade meeting between delegations from both sides, Iran’s delegation proposed to adjust shipping capacities of the Chabahar port to accommodate more vessels with 50-container capacities to smoothly streamline the port operations.

The Saudi-Pakistan Defence Pact Is An American Plan – OpEd

P. K. Balachandran

It is part of Trump’s plan to withdraw US boots from other countries leaving it to them to work out their own arrangements. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, both pro-US, worked out a defence pact with Trump showing the green signal.

Last week, two unexpected developments took place in South and West Asia. The first, was the Saudi Arabia-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SMDA), and the second, was US President Donald Trump’s demand that the Taliban return the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan which it had seized from the US in September 2001.

With the signing of the KSA-Pak SMDA, the US ceased to be the guarantor of KSA’s security and Pakistan had taken its place.

The most widely held view is that this happened because of America’s failure to protect its allies in West Asia against Israeli aggression. Qatar, a US ally, was bombed by both the US and Israel disregarding the US guarantee of security and the presence of 20,000 US troops there.

But there are others who think that vacating the guarantor of security role in favour of Pakistan was America’s way of getting West Asian States to manage their own defences, as indeed it did in the case of the European members of NATO. Under MAGA, President Trump had decided not to put US boots on the ground anywhere abroad.

Evidence of this could be seen in Washington’s silence on the KSA-Pakistan pact. The involvement of pro-Trump Pakistani leaders such as Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir in bringing about the KSA-Pak SMDA is an indication of the hidden American hand. Both KSA and Pakistan remain close allies of the US despite the pact. Pakistan became a very close of the US after the India-Pakistan war in May this year. Asim Munir was hosted by the US twice this year by Trump first and the CENTCOM next.

The timing of President Trump’s announcement that he intends to retrieve the Bagaram airbase in Afghanistan is also significant and indicative of the new security architecture in West and South Asia. Trump’s statement, in fact, coincided with the signing of the KSA-Pak SMDA.

Video Of Pakistan Admitting To Losing Two Fighter Jets Is A Deepfake

Video Of Pakistan Admitting To Losing Two Fighter Jets Is A Deepfake By - Swasti Chatterjee Published - 9 May 2025 1:15 PM3 mins read Listen to this Article CLAIM Pakistan agrees that they lost two fighter jets FACT CHECK The video is a deepfake where the voice is AI generated and the lip movements do not match with the audio A deepfake video of Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) of the Pakistan Armed Forces, is viral claiming the country has admitted to losing two fighter jets amidst an escalating military conflict with India. Professor Hany Farid, a forensic expert in synthetic media at UC Berkeley confirmed to BOOM that the viral clip is a deepfake.

India and Pakistan dangerously escalated their armed confrontation late into Thursday night, with the two nuclear-armed states accusing each other of attacking military sites. Heavy shelling and strikes were reported overnight on each side of their border especially in Jammu, Udhampur and Pathankot, with missiles and drones seen flying past through the night sky. The latest military face-off began on May 7, 2025, when India launched a military strike on Pakistan, as retaliation for the terror attack in Pahalgam in which 26 people were killed. The deepest strike inside Pakistan in decades, Indian defence forces have in press briefings said the country remains prepared for all forms of escalation. The viral deepfake shows Chaudhry at a press briefing where after talking about the ongoing military tensions between the two countries, he admits that India has shot down two Pakistani fighter jets.

Philippines looking like next powder keg to blow in Asia

Jason Gutierrez

MANILA – Tens of thousands of fed-up Filipinos took to various points in Manila on Sunday (September 21) for a day-long protest against alleged massive corruption tied to anomalous infrastructure projects that have led to a shakeup in Congress amid widespread calls for reforms.

Angry protesters, many garbed symbolically in black, torched a steel container van that police used to block a bridge leading to the presidential Malacañang Palace compound, while hurling bottles and rocks towards the police.

Protesters, mostly youths, engaged police in a violent cat-and-mouse game near the presidential palace that lasted until 8 pm. By day’s end, police said 49 people – 36 adults and 13 minors – were arrested for “violent behavior, including stone-throwing and acts of arson.” At least 70 police officials were injured.

Acting national police chief Lieutenant General Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr said: “Our police units worked hard to keep everyone safe today. While there were some isolated incidents, including a trailer truck set on fire at Ayala corner Romualdez by a few unruly protesters, most rallies went on peacefully because many participants cooperated with the authorities.”

There were more than 60,000 protesters scattered in different locations in and around Manila. More than 50,000 police personnel were deployed across the country, with 29,300 stationed in Metro Manila alone as part of Civil Disturbance Management (CDM) units.

The protests came weeks after Filipinos were treated to nationally-televised sessions in the Senate and the House of Representatives, where officials from the public works department testified about the implementations of billions of dollars worth of “ghost” infrastructure projects.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, whose father was ousted by a “people power” revolt in 1986 that ended his two-decade dictatorship, ironically placed the corruption issue front and center after an address before Congress in July that came in the wake of deadly floods that hit parts of the capital city.

Hizb ut-Tahrir on the Rise in Bangladesh

Khandakar Tahmid Rejwan

Since the ouster of Sheikh Hasina in August 2024, the banned Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir Bangladesh (HTB) has taken advantage of weak interim governance to openly campaign for its legalization, as well as stage protests and recruit among students, professionals, and elements of the security forces. The group poses a growing long-term threat to Bangladesh’s stability.

HTB’s appeal lies in targeting high-achieving youth disillusioned with secular values, while cultivating links with military officers and bureaucrats to push its agenda of establishing a global caliphate. Although branding itself as nonviolent, HTB’s ideology has served as a pipeline to more violent jihadist groups.

The group’s resurgence has been marked by propaganda campaigns, covert seminars, and large mobilizations like the “March for Khilafot” earlier in 2025, which drew thousands to Dhaka’s main mosque. These activities underscore its capacity to operate in the “gray zone” between politics and extremism, challenging state control.

There are hundreds of trained members unaccounted for after prison breaks in 2024, and sympathizers are known to be in elite positions within Bangladesh’s interim government.

Since the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s regime in early August 2024, there has been an increase in activities by the banned group Hizb ut-Tahrir in Bangladesh (Bangla: হিযবুত তাহরীর বাংলাদেশ; the organization’s Bangladeshi chapter is referred to as HTB). Taking advantage of a dysfunctional administrative and law enforcement system, HTB began conducting political-religious activities openly, and demanded its name be removed from the list of designated terrorist groups (Prothom Alo Bangla, September 9, 2024). The Islamist group exploited the fragile state of the new Bangladeshi interim government to hold public seminars, appeal to remove its proscribed status, and engage in recruitment. These HTB activities primarily utilize online and in-person “gray zone tactics” (neither clearly legal nor illegal) that exploit the interim government’s weak and indecisive posture.

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China, Russia’s gray zone tactics raising risk of wider war

Daniel Williams

Almost in tandem, Russia and China have expanded their hostilities with Taiwan and Ukraine, respectively, to allies of each.

Russia sent fighter aircraft into the territory of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which is supplying weapons and intelligence to help Ukraine fend off Russia’s full-scale invasion.

At sea and in the sky, China is moving to tighten its grip in areas around Taiwan, the self-governing island China claims as its own, with low-intensity intimidation.

The incidents that have become frequent in recent weeks fall under the category of “gray zone” activity, in which countries take action against enemies because the low-intensity attacks are unlikely to attract military retaliation from the targeted countries.

Both Beijing and Moscow have used gray zone tactics for years. Russia has employed methods even before its first invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and its second full-scale one that began in 2022:

Those include military aircraft overflights around Western Europe, cyberattacks on NATO allied countries, sabotage of infrastructure, damage to undersea communication cables, interference with electronic navigation tools, misinformation campaigns and financing activities of pro-Kremlin politicians abroad.

China’s menu is similar, though much of it doubles as rehearsals for a possible invasion or blockade of Taiwan.

On Saturday, Poland scrambled fighter jets in response to a massive Russian bombardment of Ukraine, some of which occurred close to the Polish border.

The day before, three Russian fighter jets flew over Estonia, a former Soviet republic that joined NATO after it gained independence. NATO jets scrambled and the Russian MIG-31 jets retired.

How Apple Turned China Into a Tech Behemoth

Dan Blumenthal and Ian Jones

In Apple in China, Patrick McGee, a veteran Financial Times journalist, provides a sobering and meticulous account of how Apple's pursuit of scale and profit helped fuel the meteoric rise of China's techno-industrial power. Ultimately, Apple outsourced not just production, but national leverage.

McGee compares Apple's total investment in China—through capital, supplier development, logistics, and ecosystem support—to over twice the inflation-adjusted cost of the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Western Europe after World War II. According to internal documents, Apple was investing up to $55 billion annually in China by 2015. In 2016, Apple CEO Tim Cook pledged $275 billion over five years—more than all American and Canadian investment into Mexico from NAFTA between 1993 and 2020. By comparison, the United States' supposedly "generational" federal investment in the semiconductor industry—the CHIPS and Science Act—will cost taxpayers $52 billion over four years.

But, while the Marshall Plan rebuilt democratic allies, Apple's version helped turbocharge an authoritarian competitor. Apple helped build railways, power infrastructure, specialized tooling, and entire cities around assembly lines. All of this enabled a level and precision in Chinese manufacturing that no other Western firm could match. As McGee states: "What Apple was doing was akin to making 10 million Ferraris a year." Apple's plan was not simply about cheap labor, but China's unmatched capacity to coordinate state-backed infrastructure, training, logistics, and scale.

Apple implemented a form of contract manufacturing that McGee dubs the "Apple squeeze." Apple products demanded novel components, cutting-edge techniques, rapid scale, and stringent quality control. To achieve this, Apple embedded designers and engineers into its manufacturers, training and co-inventing with them. Apple "squeezed" suppliers for low-margin high-volume output. In turn, suppliers gained valuable know-how that it could use to win contracts from other clients. Taiwan features prominently in McGee's tale. Foxconn, a Taiwanese firm led by Terry Gou, was the key intermediary that allowed Apple to scale in China. Gou emerged as a figure who combined industrial savvy with a disregard for the risks of building China up.

Beijing’s “Robot Army” Isn’t Science Fiction. It’s Already Here.

Ryan Fedasiuk

Failing to take the robotics race seriously means watching Beijing set the rules of the automated economy, and risks leaving American power to rust.

China commands two-thirds of global robotics patents. Its flagship robotics company is shipping humanoid robots at one-tenth the cost, and ten times the volume, of American alternatives. These are not the distant indicators that some commentators cite arguing that America “might fall behind” in a future robotics competition with China. They are urgent signs that Beijing is already succeeding in its quest to control the physical infrastructure of the automated economy. Time is running out to adjust course.

Why Robotics Matters to US National Security

Robotics is not merely about improving manufacturing efficiency or making another billion off of consumer gadgets. It stands to reshape the future architecture of economic and military power. Banks and market research groups project the market for the machines and related services will surge to $7 trillion by 2050, and envision a world populated by hundreds of millions of human-like robots. Demographic decline and major strides in AI are further accelerating demand for “embodied intelligence.” As it faces a dearth of physical laborers and the dawn of intelligence too cheap to meter, the key question now facing the United States is how to build a capable and modern manufacturing base. The answer lies in mobile platforms capable of rendering services in physical space.

China has figured this out. President Xi Jinping has made robotics a central pillar of the country’s economic growth model in the 2020s. China’s 14th Five-Year Plan lists “robotics and smart manufacturing” as a cornerstone of its industrial innovation, with China aiming to be a global innovation hub by 2025 and a world leader by 2035. Beijing is well on the way to achieving this objective; between 2013 and 2022, Chinese universities added over 7,500 new engineering majors, with nearly 100 focused specifically on robotics. China’s academic output is already surpassing American contributions at major robotics and computer vision conferences. Moreover, Chinese institutions hold more than 190,000 robot-related patents, two-thirds of the global total. The country is already home to more than half of the top humanoid robotics companies.

“War Without Harm”: China’s Hybrid Warfare Playbook Against Taiwan

Yen-ting Lin

The escalating tensions across Taiwan are not isolated provocations—they are calculated maneuvers in China’s evolving blueprint for hybrid warfare. Unlike traditional military campaigns, this strategy seeks to conquer Taiwan without destroying its infrastructure or economy, aiming instead to coerce submission under a pretense of “peaceful” unification.

China’s approach to this “war without harm” involves a systematic five-phase strategy: sabotaging critical infrastructure, waging cognitive warfare through disinformation, conducting cyber-physical convergence attacks, employing military encirclement, and leveraging political subversion. Recent incidents, including the Matsu cable sabotage and disinformation campaigns during Taiwan’s 2024 elections, provide a glimpse of what future efforts to destabilize Taiwanese defense and erode public trust might look like. The attacks represent more than just scattered provocations among the typical ebb and flow of cross-Strait relations—they constitute a new model for hybrid warfare, one designed to neutralize Taiwan’s ability to resist while preserving its value as an economic and strategic asset.

Here’s how a Taiwan conflict might play out under this new hybrid warfare paradigm:

Phase One: Cutting Taiwan Off from the World via Infrastructure Sabotage

The first phase involves operations that leverage non-military and proxy actors, such as state-aligned civilian vessels, to target infrastructure in such a way that creates a classic ‘gray zone’ dilemma for Taiwanese policymakers. To respond risks escalating tensions and alienating international support, as any retaliation can be framed as aggression against non-combatants. Conversely, failing to respond allows China to continue disrupting Taiwan’s critical systems unchecked. This strategic ambiguity is central to China’s hybrid warfare strategy, enabling significant disruption while evading direct attribution.

Documented incidents attest to how this strategy is neither isolated nor unprecedented. In February 2023, Chinese vessels severed cables near the Matsu Islands, leaving residents and businesses without internet access for over 50 days . A similar operation in January 2025 targeted the Trans Pacific Express Cable System, with Chinese-linked entities concealing their involvement through sophisticated vessel-tracking obfuscation. The operations align with a broader global pattern of infrastructure sabotage, as seen in the 2024 Baltic Sea attacks, where China-linked vessels disrupted European undersea networks to gain strategic leverage without triggering conventional retaliation.

Washington Breakthrough Spurs Armenia–Azerbaijan–Türkiye Momentum

Onnik James Krikorian

Following the meeting between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev at the White House on August 8, there are hopes that Yerevan and Baku are close to signing a long-anticipated peace treaty.

Armenia and Türkiye have been making progress as the two special envoys for normalizing relations met in Yerevan on September 12. Armenia–Türkiye normalization efforts are believed to be linked to Armenia–Azerbaijan.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said he anticipated that the peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan would be signed in the first half of next year, stating that normalization between Armenia and Türkiye would happen soon after.

Against the backdrop of reported progress in normalizing relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, there has been similarly positive news in normalizing relations between Armenia and Türkiye (see EDM, August 12). On September 12, former Turkish Ambassador Serdar Kilic, now the country’s special envoy for normalizing relations, traveled across one of two unused border points into Armenia to meet his Armenian counterpart, National Assembly Deputy Speaker Ruben Rubinyan (Azatutyun, September 12). The last time the two men met was in July last year on the border itself (Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, July 30, 2024; OBCT, August 1, 2024).

The two diplomats have been involved in the process since first meeting for talks in Moscow in January 2022 (Eurasianet, January 14, 2022). In March 2024, Kilic had expressed hopes that he could meet Rubinyan in Yerevan (News.am, March 1, 2024). In the identical one-page communique released following the latest meeting, it was noted that the normalization process would continue to be advanced, including the restoration of the railway line between Kars in Türkiye and Gyumri in Armenia, as well as a 2022 undertaking to open the land border for diplomats and third-country citizens. There were also other proposed activities in the area of education and additional flights (Armenian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, September 12).

How Qatar Is Responding to Israel’s Sept. 9 Attack

Ravi Agrawal

On Sept. 9, Israel’s air force bombed a residential neighborhood in Doha, Qatar, to take out Hamas’s senior political leadership. According to Hamas, five members were killed, but not its primary leaders. Doha, a key U.S. ally, strongly condemned the attack. Even U.S. President Donald Trump lamented the strike on Truth Social: “I view Qatar as a strong ally and friend of the U.S., and feel very badly about the location of the attack.”

Will Doha continue to play a role mediating between Hamas and Israel? And does Qatar still believe its interests lie in its broader role in peace negotiations around the world? I spoke with Majed al-Ansari at the Concordia summit on Monday, Sept. 22, on the sidelines of the 80th annual United Nations General Assembly. Ansari is an advisor to the prime minister of Qatar and the spokesperson of its ministry of foreign affairs.

How to Silence Dissent, Bit by Bit Until Fear Takes Over

Li Yuan

In early March, I asked a lawyer, a naturalized citizen living in Texas, whether he shared the unease among Chinese immigrants that American politics under President Trump was beginning to echo the China we left behind: fawning officials, intimidation of the press and business leaders currying favor with leadership.

He shrugged. As long as late-night talk show hosts can still make fun of the president, he said, American democracy is safe.

For those of us who grew up under strict censorship, late-night comedy always felt like an emblem of American freedom. The idea that millions of Americans could go to bed each night having watched their presidents mocked felt almost magical, something unimaginable where we came from.

That’s why ABC’s suspension of the Jimmy Kimmel show after pressure from the Trump administration, amid the president’s public threats toward critical journalists, felt so jarring. To many Chinese who have endured the relentless erosion of speech by the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, it felt ominous. Free speech rarely vanishes in a single blow. It erodes until silence feels normal.

The NATO-Russia War of 2025: Who Wins?

Andrew Latham

Key Points and Summary – Baltic incidents—drones, airspace brushes, GNSS spoofing—could cascade into a NATO–Russia war driven by fear, honor, and interest.

-Opening phases likely favor NATO in air and sea with superior ISR, EW, and standoff fires; Russia counters with missiles, dense air defenses, cyber, and navigation attacks.

-Two plausible endgames emerge: a non-nuclear grind to an armistice shaped by attrition and political risk, or limited nuclear use to coerce termination, shattering the taboo and accelerating crisis instability.

-By Clausewitz’s test, NATO’s best “win” is defending territory without crossing the nuclear threshold; overall, no side truly wins—the result is a harsher, more brittle cold peace.

World War III? How NATO and Russia Could End Up At War

The Baltic has felt jittery again in recent days. Reports of alleged incursions into Polish airspace by Russian drones, a lumbering Il-20 buzzed by German and Swedish fighters, new allegations of navigation interference in crowded flight corridors.

None of it is a Hollywood provocation; all of it is friction—small, deniable, cumulative. If one of them snaps into gunfire the questions that follow are blunt: who wins, and how does it end? For Clausewitz, victory is the attainment of a political object at a cost your polity will endure; for Thucydides, honor, fear, and interest can drive leaders to gamble with calamitous stakes. By those measures a NATO–Russia war produces no true victor. NATO likely wins battles; politics, economics, and nuclear risk devour the gains.

NATO-Russia War: How the War Starts

The war’s opening would probably include several depressingly familiar incidents. Fighter crosses a line; interceptor fires; missiles answer; suppression missions fan out from Kaliningrad. Each move is justified in defensive terms; each one tightens the coil. Thucydides’ triad does the pushing—fear of being seen as weak, honor bruised by losses, interests tied to geography and alliance credibility. Clausewitz’s trinity does the pulling—passion in the street and the headquarters, chance in the fog, and policy in an escalatory bind.

How Israel can stop the slaughter A brutal occupation won’t work

Reuel Marc Gerecht

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu certainly wants to believe that the Israeli Defense Forces’ ongoing assault on Gaza City, the last unchallenged redoubt of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, will finally destroy the jihadist outfit, solve the hostage crisis, and allow the IDF to return most of its young men and women to Israel: all with minimal Israeli efforts over the longer term. The odds of this happening are poor.

The Israelis are trapped in Gaza. No matter who the Israeli prime minister, no one is going to save Jerusalem from being responsible for the Palestinians. Neither Americans nor Europeans nor, as former Secretary of State Tony Blinken recently dreamed in The Wall Street Journal, Gulf Arabs, are coming to rescue Israelis from garrisoning and feeding the Strip.

All the European self-flagellation about unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state, and the Democratic Party’s canonical embrace of the two-state solution, spring from a conviction that Israel can’t be a liberal, democratic society and the Palestinians won’t stop killing Israelis, and vice versa, until Palestinians have a country of their own. This conviction persists even though the possibility of a Palestinian homeland in the West Bank and Gaza died when Yasser Arafat, in response to Bill Clinton’s and Ehud Barak’s arduous and pretty generous diplomacy, unleashed the Second Intifada in 2000.

Its suicide bombers destroyed Israeli hopefulness and the Labor Party; it also fueled Israeli territorial ambitions — a deeper defense through settlements — and Right-wing Jewish revanchism about a Biblical homeland including so-called Judea and Samaria. Two-state dreaming in the West persists even though it does an enormous disservice to Palestinians, who have to live with far stronger Israelis, who can, if they choose, seize yet more land on the West Bank.

There is no historical reason to believe that the premise about a Palestinian homeland delivering “justice and peace”, as French President Emanuel Macron recently put it, is likely to be true. Both European and Middle Eastern history strongly suggest that nationalism and, even more so, nation-state creation, often intensifies a willingness to kill neighbors and minorities precisely because such a state has the capacity to do so.

The Only Security Guarantee Ukraine Can Trust

Andriy Zagorodnyuk

Ever since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to the White House, officials across Europe have scrambled to craft a peace deal that could work for Ukraine. They know by now that, at the moment, Russian President Vladimir Putin is not interested in stopping his offensives, and they fear that shifting American priorities may leave Ukraine without a critical source of support. As a result, they are racing to find a way to provide Kyiv with security guarantees that could deter Russia and allow for an armistice.

In conversations about security guarantees, officials have tended to focus on a handful of measures: placing a small number of European troops in Ukraine to shore up the country’s defense (so-called reassurance forces), levying additional sanctions against Russia, and providing Ukraine with more weapons, including conventional ones. They have also mused about committing themselves, on paper, to Ukraine’s defense. Two of these actions—more weapons and sanctions—could take place before any cease-fire. The rest would go into effect only after the fighting ends.

These proposals have certain virtues. But by themselves, they are not enough to guarantee Ukraine’s security. Since the start of Russia’s invasion in 2022, Putin has been transparent about his objective—the destruction of Ukraine as an independent nation—and has subjected many people to almost unimaginable suffering in order to achieve it. He will not be deterred by words, a smattering of NATO troops, or by more agony (including if it affects Russians). In fact, he will not stop the war unless Russian troops literally cannot advance any further.

Testing the waters: Russia’s use of banned chemicals in Ukraine

Annemiek Dols

Despite being a founding member of the Chemical Weapons Convention, Russia is intensifying its weaponisation and use of riot control agents and industrial chemicals in Ukraine. These developments show that preventing the use and proliferation of chemical weapons remains an international concern.

Russia has used banned chemicals on the battlefield in Ukraine – violating international law – in an attempt to break through front lines. The use of toxic chemicals as a weapon, including the use of riot control agents (RCAs) outside civilian law enforcement, is banned under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). The convention bans the use of chloropicrin – an industrial chemical, but also a recognised choking agent, and more toxic than RCAs – as a weapon as well. Germany first used chloropicrin during the First World War. The Soviet Union also used it against protesters in Georgia in 1989.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Federation inherited the Soviet chemical-weapons arsenal. Officially declared to consist of 40,000 tonnes in 1997 – the world’s largest chemical-weapons stockpile of all time – it included sarin, soman and VX. In September 2017, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) declared that Russia had destroyed all its chemical weapons. However, questions soon resurfaced about Russia’s undeclared capabilities, as assassinations with chemical agents and efforts to disguise the programme confirmed Russia’s possession of banned chemicals.

Chemical warfare in Ukraine

Ukraine first reported on Russia’s use of RCAs and industrial chemicals in September 2022. These allegations resurfaced in May 2023 when a Russian battalion commander, Vladislav Vodolazsky, claimed to have dropped grenades containing chemical-warfare agents on Ukrainian soldiers. In April 2024, Kyiv reported that the Russian military had used tear gas on the eastern front in Ukraine. Russia’s sourcing of critical components for chemical-weapons production continued until at least May 2024, with its Scientific Research Institute for Applied Chemistry – another body linked with the programme – purchasing pyrotechnic moderators. In June 2024, the US accused Russia of using banned chemicals, chloropicrin in particular, in a manner that ‘is not an isolated incident’. Consequently, the US government sanctioned three Russian bodies linked to the Russian chemical-weapons programme. This included the Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defence Troops unit, partly responsible for the use of chemicals in the war with Ukraine, and its head, lieutenant-general Igor Kirillov (who was killed by a bomb in Moscow in December 2024).

Russia and Belarus Decrease Parameters of Zapad-2025 Joint Military Exercise

Alexander Taranov

Belarusian officials insist that the joint strategic exercise Zapad-2025 of the Regional Troops Grouping (RTG) of Belarus and Russia poses no threat to neighboring states, has limited parameters, and is purely defensive in nature.

The Belarusian authorities present the scaling back of strategic maneuvers—from what was initially planned as the largest exercise in the history of RTG—to a minimum troop participation level as a de-escalatory step and a demonstration of commitment to arms control obligations and confidence-building measures.

In practice, Russia has simply been unable to generate the necessary troop grouping for a new large-scale offensive against Ukraine from Belarusian territory this time.

This current shift in Russia’s war priorities (seizing Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in full and creating a buffer zone in Sumy, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Chernihiv), however, does not signify an abandonment of plans to prepare for a new large-scale offensive from Belarusian territory in the future.

On September 12–16, a joint strategic exercise (JSE) Zapad-2025 will be taking place on the territory of Belarus and Russia. Chief of the General Staff of the Belarusian Armed Forces, Major General Paval Muraveika, stressed that Belarus has been and remains committed to transparency in exercises held on its territory. According to him, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka decided to move the drills away from the western and southern borders of the country to reduce tensions, demonstrate openness and tolerance, and avoid accusations of provocation. The exercises are now planned to be conducted at training ranges deep inside the country or in its eastern part. (Telegram/modmilby, August 31). State Secretary of the Belarusian Security Council Alyaksandr Valfovich contrasted the defensive Russian–Belarusian drills with offensive maneuvers conducted on the territory of neighboring North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states. He added that, to ease tensions, all training areas were moved further inland, although initially almost all ranges in the Brest and Grodno regions had been earmarked for use (Belta.by, August 27).

Initially, Zapad-2025 was planned to be the largest exercise in the history of the Regional Troops Grouping (RTG) (seeEDM, November 18, 2024). The exercise was originally supposed to exceed the parameters of the snap readiness check of the RTG’s Response Forces during Allied Resolve-2022 (Soyuznaya Reshimost-2022; Союзная решимость-2022), which evolved into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from Belarusian territory on February 24, 2022 (see EDM, January 26, February 9, 16, 2022).

The Need to Adopt Deception-Centric Warfare

Jack Casey Buckley

A new era of hyper-transparent warfare is emerging, and it is having a profoundly erosive effect on American military power. This erosion has been accelerated by the democratization of destruction and precision mass, which are readily available to a wide array of state and non-state actors. To adapt to these new realities, the United States Military must learn new lessons to adapt to this emerging battlespace; it must refocus its military strategy, doctrine, and tactics on the role of deception in wartime. The Department of Defense must relearn how to employ the “Dark Arts” of warfare by taking new lessons from the evolving character of war. To do this, it must look to the ongoing Russian war of aggression in Ukraine: The Ukrainian military has successfully used deception in many of its major combat operations. Ukraine has used tactics such as decoy checkpoints, phony HIMARS, and even dropped speakers projecting Ukrainian soldiers’ voices behind Russian Trenches before all-robotic attack forces captured the Russian position.

This specific battle, which some analysts argued was a major turning point in the evolution of modern warfare, is now much-discussed in defense circles as the Battle of Lyptsi. This is by no means the only major example, however, of high-tech deception, or deception throughout the war in Ukraine: Ukraine also used deception extensively in its counteroffensive in Kherson. The Ukrainians made the Russians anticipate a major counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast, where the Russians then moved forces to reinforce from Kharkiv in 2022. The Ukrainians then launched a major surprise counteroffensive in Kherson and reclaimed over 2,000 kilometers of territory from the Russians in the Kherson Oblast.

The Ukrainians have also employed deception on the operational and tactical levels of war, utilizing techniques such as creating false tracks in fields to simulate the presence of military vehicles and artillery systems, when in fact, no such systems were in that vicinity. Russia, for its part, has also employed deceptive tactics both in Ukraine and against Europe, yet has fallen significantly behind in the deception competition vis-à-vis Ukraine. In the deception competition, Ukraine is the clear victor. This is a shocking development, given the fact that deception has deep roots in Russian strategic and military culture: Known as Maskirovka (маскировка), which involves camouflage, concealment, disguise, and misinformation. This theory has deep roots in Russian and Soviet military culture. The Ukrainian military and security services have done a much better job at Maskirovka, essentially beating the Russian military at their own game.

Army aviation to shed 6,500 positions to make way for rise of drone operations

MATTHEW M. BURKE STARS AND STRIPES

Helicopters assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division take flight in formation June 10, 2025, at Fort Bragg, N.C., for a celebration of the Army’s 250th birthday. The service plans to cut thousands of active-duty aviation jobs, including Black Hawk and Apache pilots and aircrews. (Kamar Williams/U.S. Army) Thousands of Army aviation jobs will be eliminated in line with the service’s ongoing switch to a force that brings lots of savvy with drones and other autonomous systems to the battlefield. The Army will cut 6,500 active-duty positions in 2026 and 2027, more than 20% of the approximately 30,000 maintainers, flight crews and pilots in the aviation ranks, Army spokesman Maj. Montrell Russell said this week. “We won’t see a time where there will be no crewed systems,” Russell said.

“A lot of people say, ‘Oh, we don’t need pilots.’ That is not the takeaway from the policy right now.” The growing dependence on offensive and defensive drone technology emerged from the Russia-Ukraine war and has since been integrated into U.S. Army doctrine through modernization initiatives dubbed Transforming in Contact and Project Flytrap. The 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Vilseck, Germany, and 173rd Airborne Brigade units in Germany and Italy have been at the forefront of the service’s European testing and development of the concepts. As part of the restructuring, the Army plans to convene “talent panels” starting in October to decide which soldiers will remain or transfer to other specialties, Army Human Resources Command said in an administrative message Wednesday.

DIMET: Shaping the Age of “Techno-Strategic” Power

Curtis McGiffin

The Information Age began in the mid-twentieth century with the invention of the transistor and the development of first-generation computers. The digital revolution accelerated in the 1970s, transforming society by the 1990s with the normalization of the internet. New inventions continue to disrupt the socio-economic landscape and enter the military-industrial complex. Today, the world is in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, advancing the digital age through machine learning, automation, digitalized manufacturing, and augmented reality.[1]

In the twenty-first century, the levers of national power have evolved from the traditional DIME framework—diplomacy, information, military, and economic strength—by including a fifth lever: technology. Rather than just supporting other instruments, technology is integrated into all operations, acting as an enabler, multiplier, and indicator of a nation’s strength and geopolitical power. Advances in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), biotechnology, and quantum computing have a direct impact on a country’s ability to project power, protect its interests, and compete globally.

This new era of “techno-strategic” power involves blending high-tech capabilities with strategy, transforming societies and industries through advanced, interconnected technologies that blur the physical, digital, and biological boundaries.[2] It reshapes economies, societies, and global power, making technology an essential instrument of national power.

If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies review – how AI could kill us all

David Shariatmadari

What if I told you I could stop you worrying about climate change, and all you had to do was read one book? Great, you’d say, until I mentioned that the reason you’d stop worrying was because the book says our species only has a few years before it’s wiped out by superintelligent AI anyway.

We don’t know what form this extinction will take exactly – perhaps an energy-hungry AI will let the millions of fusion power stations it has built run hot, boiling the oceans. Maybe it will want to reconfigure the atoms in our bodies into something more useful. There are many possibilities, almost all of them bad, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and who knows which will come true. But just as you can predict that an ice cube dropped into hot water will melt without knowing where any of its individual molecules will end up, you can be sure an AI