Losing the Swing States

Washington Is Driving the BRICS to Become an Anti-American Bloc

Richard Fontaine and Gibbs McKinley

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Leaders of the BRICS countries at a summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2025 Pilar Olivares / Reuters

RICHARD FONTAINE is CEO of the Center for a New American Security. He has worked at the U.S. Department of State, on the National Security Council, and as a foreign policy adviser to U.S. Senator John McCain.

GIBBS MCKINLEY is Research Associate to the CEO at the Center for a New American Security. She previously worked at the International Republican Institute on the Countering Foreign Authoritarian Influence program.More by Richard Fontaine

In the battle to shape the global order, the BRICS—a ten-country group, which is named for its first five members (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa)—has become increasingly important. The bloc represents roughly a third of global GDP and nearly half the world’s population. It exists to give countries that belong to the so-called global South more sway on the world stage.

That might make the BRICS seem like an inherently anti-Western group. It was, after all, founded in part by Beijing and Moscow. But for most of its 16-year history, the BRICS has not positioned

Fresh immigration wave to hit the EU as Pakistan and Taliban set South Asia on fire

Konstantinos Bogdanos

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Peace talks between embattled Pakistan and Afghanistan collapsed earlier this week in Istanbul. Islamabad demands written Taliban guarantees to crush Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants in Afghanistan, while Kabul calls it impossible and blames the escalation on airstrikes. Pakistani Defence Minister has warned of “open war”, borders are sealed and Europe is faced with a fresh illegal immigration surge, comparable with the Syrian civil war surge.

Last weekend alone, clashes killed five Pakistani soldiers and 25 TTP fighters. The latest round of violence erupted when Pakistani jets hit Kabul on October 10, retaliating for a Kashmir bombing that killed 26 civilians. Then, as the Taliban seized border posts, clashes claimed dozens of Pakistani troops and hundreds of militants, while the UN reported 37 civilians dead and 425 wounded. A Doha truce collapsed on October 17, after fresh Pakistani air strikes.

Pakistan cites UN proof of Taliban sheltering TTP militants, yet it demands things that Kabul cannot enforce over tribal networks, as there is no centralised government control in a country were provinces are ruled by clans and warlords. So, while Pakistan launches pre-emptive strikes, skirmishes persist and Kabul promises payback. At the same time, India eyes proxy gains, China guards its Belt and Road initiative, Russia is concerned with the security of pipelines and energy market wobbles — which means that Europe pays the bill.

Still, it is illegal immigration that poses the biggest threat to Europe. Pakistan hosts around three million Afghans, of which it deports thousands on a monthly basis, only for them to flee Afghanistan again. Chaos now further aggravates undocumented flows through Iran, Turkey, and the Balkans to the EU. The first half of 2025 saw 250,000 asylum petitions from South Asia — up 30 per cent — with Afghans filing over 100,000.

Pakistanis flee too. With Ahmadis being lynched, thousands vanishing in Balochistan yearly, blasphemy laws arming mobs, and journalists being thrown in jail together with dissidents, many Pakistanis wish to leave their country and do so by any means possible.

Toward a Taiwan Truce

How Trump and Xi Can Pull Back From the Brink

Stephen Wertheim

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Tourists walking past a wall painted with a Taiwan flag, Kinmen, Taiwan, October 2025Ann Wang / Reuters

STEPHEN WERTHEIM is a Senior Fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School, and the author of Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.More by Stephen Wertheim

When U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet on Thursday, they should take bold action to reduce the risk of war over Taiwan. That risk has reached alarming heights in recent years. China, the most dangerous party, has militarized the strait, launching large military drills simulating blockades of the island and daily incursions across the median line. Taiwan, under President Lai Ching-te, has asserted its sovereignty in new and destabilizing ways, casting its political system as separate from and threatened by the mainland’s. And the United States has been increasingly one-sided in backing Taiwan, chipping

Structure Trumps Agency in the U.S.-China Relationship Why the Competition Is Here to Stay

Mira Rapp-Hooper

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The Chinese flag, in Beijing, August 2025Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

MIRA RAPP-HOOPER is a Partner at The Asia Group and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She was Senior Director for East Asia and Oceania and Director for Indo-Pacific Strategy at the U.S. National Security Council during the Biden administration. She is the author of Shields of the Republic: The Triumph and Peril of America’s Alliances.More by Mira Rapp-Hooper

In the United States, bipartisan consensus is painfully hard to achieve—except on the issue of China. Even as American political polarization has intensified over the last eight years, both Republicans and Democrats have agreed that an increasingly powerful Beijing poses an economic, technological, and security threat to Washington and its close allies.

This consensus is, in part, Donald Trump’s achievement. During the president’s first term in office, his officials raised alarms about Beijing’s growing technological prowess, its military buildup, and its dominance over the critical minerals industry. They slapped sanctions on Chinese entities, imposed tariffs on U.S. imports of Chinese goods, placed some restrictions on the country’s access to semiconductors, and even labeled Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang a genocide against the Uyghur people. Upon taking office, the Biden administration kept and, in many cases, expanded on these policies and positions. It took the Trump team’s diagnosis and built a government-wide strategy to comprehensively address the China challenge through domestic investment, cooperation with allies, and hard-nosed diplomacy. When Trump returned to office four years later, China was one of the only areas in which analysts expected continuity.

Yet Trump has dashed these expectations. In fact, since starting his second term, the president and his closest advisers appear determined to build a commercially based détente with Beijing. The president imposed crippling tariffs on China in April but then quickly lowered them. He has loosened multiple export restrictions at the behest of Beijing. And he has sought a leader-level meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in hopes of moving the two countries closer to a trade deal and overall rapprochement. The two are now set to talk this week, on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in South Korea.

It’s All About China

What observers call a trade war is, for Trump, simply part of a larger war—in the Middle East, in South America, in Ukraine—against an entire axis

Lee Smith

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Shortly after October 7, 2023, Israeli forces sorting through the remains of the 1,200 people killed during the deadliest attack on Israel since the 1973 Yom Kippur war recovered drones that Hamas and other Iranian proxies had used to target Israeli civilians. Officials found that the unmanned aerial vehicles contained multiple U.S.-origin electronic components, and further investigation showed that these parts had been procured by Chinese firms then transferred to Iranian front companies, which in turn passed them on to Hamas. The Iranians distributed U.S.-made technology bought by the Chinese to other proxies as well, including the Houthi rebels, who used them to target U.S. and allied shipping.

Although people don’t readily make the connection, this episode from the Middle East throws into sharp relief the nature of the U.S.-China power competition. Indeed, though observers like to frame President Donald Trump’s policy on China narrowly as a trade war, tariffs and other economic measures are simply instruments the White House is deploying in a larger war against the China axis. It’s a conflict fought at home and abroad that has ramifications for U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Supplying Ukraine to defend itself against Russia is part of Trump’s campaign against the China axis. Targeting Venezuelan drug cartels, shutting down fentanyl shipments, and supporting allies like Argentina’s President Javier Milei to stand firm against Chinese encroachment into Latin American are as much a part of the campaign as Trump’s China tariffs. Campaigns against China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran and its proxies have dominated the U.S. news cycle the last year because the Trump administration sees the China axis as the most dangerous threat to our national security. It’s all about China.

Sadly, certain cohorts of Americans, including many under 30, can’t perceive this—for a very good reason: The reckless and deracinated foreign policies of the last several administrations have made it impossible for Americans to understand the purpose of foreign policy—including most significantly the nature of our alliance system—because successive White Houses before Trump have subverted the national interest by rewarding our adversaries at the expense not only of our allies but of America itself. In fact, that bug became a feature in the system that Trump is trying to fix.

China Is Building the Future

Eric Schmidt

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After a months-long trade war between China and the United States, Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet Thursday in Korea. Both countries seem to be angling for a truce; over the weekend, they announced a “framework” for a possible agreement.

The negotiations offer an occasion to stop to consider how China went from technological backwater to superpower in less than half a lifetime, and an opportunity for the United States to learn from that success. U.S. companies can work to regain hardware-manufacturing expertise, absorb knowledge and talent from some of China’s best companies, and shift their approach toward AI, encouraging more practical applications and open-source innovation. The United States must accept that we can be better while not relinquishing our strengths.

If America focuses only on undermining its rival, it risks stagnating, and China might end up offering a more attractive vision of the future to the rest of the world than the United States can. What’s at stake is America’s ability to keep innovating and leading in the industries of the future.

In 1896, Li Hongzhang, a diplomat from imperial China, arrived in the United States for the first time. China, then under Qing dynasty rule, had yet to fully undergo the Industrial Revolution. The year before, the Chinese had suffered a humiliating defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, and the country painfully awoke to its own backwardness. Li was stunned by New York City’s tall buildings, rising 20 stories or more, and remarked to American reporters that he had “never seen anything like them before.” He told them: “You are the most inventive people in the world.”

[Read: China gets tough on Trump]

Nearly a century later, in 1988, Wang Huning—then a Fudan University professor and now the fourth-most-powerful man on China’s politburo—visited the United States and experienced a similar “future shock.” After the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Communist China’s GDP was a mere 6 percent of America’s. During his six months in the United States, Wang marveled at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, credit cards, computers, the Discovery space shuttle, and research universities such as MIT. “If the Americans are to be overtaken,” he later wrote, “one thing must be done: surpass them in science and technology.”

Taiwan Searches for Economic Allies in a Divided World

Meng Kit Tang

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In 2025, Taiwan navigates a geopolitical tightrope, balancing the US policy volatility of Trump’s tariffs against China’s economic coercion, where each trade negotiation signals resilience or risks peril. The fractured trade landscape shaped by Canada’s post-election recalibration under Prime Minister Mark Carney and Trump’s October 20 remarks downplaying Taiwan in Xi talks amplifies uncertainty among allies.

The Canada-Taiwan economic cooperation framework, initiated in early 2025, embodies this tension. Its cautious progression reflects a broader truth: Taiwan’s economic ambitions cannot be divorced from geopolitical realities. This article explores the domestic, foreign, and societal factors shaping Taiwan’s negotiation stance using the stalled Canada pact as a case study. It then draws lessons for resilience in a world divided by strategic rivalry.

Domestic Factors: Internal Divisions and Ambitious Economic Strategies

To understand how Taiwan strikes its balance on the foreign policy front, we must first look inward at how domestic politics shapes Taiwan’s international credibility. Here, sharp divisions between the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) continue to complicate trade and economic diplomacy.

KMT-Led Budget Delays and Political Polarization

In October 2025, the KMT intensified its obstruction of critical budgets, including those tied to defense and trade initiatives. A proposed NT$300 billion special budget that was intended to fund the New Southbound Policy, infrastructure, and economic diversification remains stalled. KMT lawmakers argue that Taiwan’s overreliance on Washington weakens bargaining power, citing the 20% tariffs imposed by Trump in August 2025 as evidence.

For international partners like Canada, this domestic friction signals instability. Ottawa, navigating its own debates over immigration and the renegotiation of United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (CUSMA), prefers predictable counterparts. Legislative gridlock raises concerns that Taiwan may be unable to implement trade commitments fully.

Yet resilience is possible. President Lai has proposed a cross-party task force aimed at fostering consensus on economic strategy. If implemented, such mechanisms could reassure allies, projecting unity and stability. They highlight that Taiwan’s internal divisions, while real, are not insurmountable barriers to credible economic diplomacy.

“Non-Red Supply Chain” Initiative

Taiwan’s “non-Red supply chain” initiative, launched in February 2025, represents a bold attempt to reduce dependence on China. By redirecting trade toward the U.S., Japan, and Southeast Asia, particularly in semiconductors and high-tech manufacturing, Taiwan aims to strengthen both economic resilience and strategic autonomy. The opening of TSMC’s Arizona fab and a new US trade agreement in 2025 exemplify some early successes.

The Military-Narrational Complex

What Stories Do in an Age of Conflict

Elizabeth D. Samet

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The U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, Arlington, Virginia, March 2025Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Elizabeth D. Samet is the author of Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness and Professor of English at West Point. The views expressed here are her own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.More by Elizabeth D. Samet

Since 1989, an estimated four million people have died as a result of armed conflicts around the globe—740,000 between 2021 and 2024 alone. A thorough understanding of these violent decades and of today’s persistent geopolitical volatility demands policy expertise, of course, but it also calls for a perspective beyond the realm of political science, which for all its rigor does not always account for certain human elements of war: desire for glory, thirst for vengeance, and other irrational passions that shape the belligerence of warriors and nations. In other words, the stuff of literature.

Nations weave myths out of victories and erase defeats with the promise of future triumphs. They tend to calibrate “bad” wars against “good” ones while memorializing the latter with a wistfulness that lures them into vainglorious and ultimately inglorious quests for new conflicts.

There are a few things to know about stories. First, humans have fed on them for millennia, from the Bible and the epic in ancient times to the nineteenth-century novel and the twenty-first-century Marvel franchise. Second, the hard-nosed realists and instrumentalists who are most contemptuous of the worth of stories, in particular of fictional ones, and wary of the enterprise of literary study are often the most gullible consumers of fables, swept away by the power of fictions yet ignorant of their limits, constraints, and capacity to delude. Third, the story has become many people’s primary way of understanding the world. As the literary theorist Peter Brooks argues in his 2022 book Seduced by Story, “Narrative seems to have become accepted as the only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs.” In the process, Brooks observes, story has eclipsed rational argument as the dominant purveyor of social, political, and historical truths.

We operate in a world in which the teller of the best story triumphs over the one who reasons most clearly. The most successful stories attain the quality of myth, at which point, as Brooks writes, “their status as fictions . . . is forgotten and they are taken as real explanations of the world.” In the face of this “narrative takeover,” Brooks exhorts readers “to oppose critical and analytical intelligence to narratives that seduce us into the acceptance of dominant ideologies.” What listeners and readers need, he urges, is “to resist a passive narcosis of response.”

How Russia Recovered

What the Kremlin Is Learning From the War in Ukraine

Dara Massicot

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Illustration by Vartika Sharma; Photo Sources: Reuters, Getty Images

The story of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been one of upset expectations and wild swings in performance. At the start of the war, most of NATO saw Russia as an unstoppable behemoth, poised to quickly defeat Ukraine. Instead, Russia’s forces were halted in their tracks and pushed back. Then, outside observers decided the Russian military was rotten, perhaps one counterattack away from collapse. That also proved incorrect—Ukrainian offensives failed, and Moscow resumed its slow advance. Now, plenty of people look beyond Russia to understand the state of the battlefield, blaming Kyiv’s troubles on insufficient external

The New Eurasian Order

America Must Link Its Atlantic and Pacific Strategies

Julianne Smith and Lindsey Ford

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Illustration by Michaela Staton; Photo source: Reuters.

On October 28, 2024, a group of South Korean intelligence officials briefed NATO members and the alliance’s three other Indo-Pacific partners—Australia, Japan, and New Zealand—on a shocking development in the war in Ukraine: North Korea’s deployment of thousands of its troops to Russia’s Kursk region to aid Moscow’s war effort. The fact that Seoul sent its top intelligence analysts to Brussels for the briefing was nearly as stunning as North Korea’s decision to enter the war in Ukraine.

Both developments reflected a new reality. The United States’ adversaries are coordinating with one another in unprecedented

America and China Can Have a Normal Relationship How to Move Past Strategic Competition

Da Wei 

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U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, October 2025Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters

DA WEI is Director of the Center for International Security and Strategy and a Professor in the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University.More by Da Wei

In the repeated cycles of confrontation and détente that define U.S.-Chinese relations, a paradox has emerged. Economic relations between the two countries are more fraught than ever: in early October, for the second time in just six months, the United States and China launched a trade war, imposing prohibitive export restrictions and threatening to raise tariffs to previously unthinkable levels.

Yet the U.S.-Chinese relationship also appears increasingly resilient. Although leaders in both Washington and Beijing have seemingly shrugged their shoulders at the rapid decoupling of the world’s two largest economies, the first bout of trade escalation in April and May gave way to a period of relative calm. Over the past ten months and even during the final two years of the Biden administration, U.S.-Chinese relations have been showing signs of rebalancing. Each time a crisis has arisen, such as when a Chinese unmanned high-altitude balloon flew into American airspace in 2023, U.S. and Chinese leaders have sought to quickly stabilize ties, suggesting that the world’s two largest economies still share a structural need for a broadly steady relationship.

These contradictory trends signal that the U.S.-Chinese relationship might be at an inflection point. Neither Washington nor Beijing harbors any illusions that the two countries can return to the pre-2017 era, in which interdependence and engagement, rather than decoupling and strategic competition, were its defining features. But short-term economic spats and tactical maneuvering for potential deals should not obscure the possibility that the United States and China can move beyond an era of adversarial competition toward a more normal relationship—one in which they can coexist peacefully in a state of cool but not hostile interactions. The meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping this week in South Korea presents a narrow but important opportunity for the United States and China to enter a new phase of bilateral relations.

How to Put IR Theory Into Practice

Stacie E. Goddard and Joshua D. Kertzer

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American Strategists Should Think More Like Social Scientists

American flags on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., October 2025 Kylie Cooper / Reuters

STACIE E. GODDARD is Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of Political Science and Associate Provost for Wellesley in the World.

JOSHUA D. KERTZER is John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and of Government at Harvard University.More by Joshua D. Kertzer

America’s grand strategy is in turmoil. Over the past decade, power shifts, territorial disputes, and the faltering of international institutions have fueled an increasingly heated debate about what geopolitical position the United States finds itself in and the necessary trajectory of U.S. foreign policy. Some Washington analysts and policymakers (such as former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy Nadia Schadlow and Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby) believe that after several decades of U.S. hegemony, great-power competition has returned, and Washington must embrace a foreign policy designed to counter threats from Beijing and Moscow. Others, including former members of the Biden administration such as Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper, counsel that although the liberal multilateralism that defined the post–World War II order is under threat, it will persist; U.S. leaders should hold firm to a grand strategy that promotes strong institutions, democracy, and free trade. Still others—such as the former U.S. diplomat Michael McFaul and the writer Anne Applebaum—believe that the current moment is defined by a new degree of contestation of norms, in which revisionist states in particular feel increasingly empowered to flout rules that once hemmed in conflict, promoted human rights, and even protected sovereignty. These analysts advise that the United States must defend critical norms explicitly by promoting them abroad.

As different as these arguments may seem, they have a common foundation. They are each built on one of three paradigms that has dominated international relations theory since World War II: realism, liberalism, and constructivism. Realists see politics as rooted in anarchy, driving countries to compete for power and security. Liberals assume that individuals all strive for universally desired public goods, which are best delivered by democracy, open economies, and multilateral institutions. Constructivists believe that the adoption of political ideas and norms by large powers drives the trajectory of global affairs just as much as any state’s will to power.

Practitioners sometimes dismiss international relations theory as immaterial to real-world policymaking. In 2010, for instance, the longtime U.S. diplomat David Newsom complained that it was “either irrelevant or inaccessible to policymakers” and remained “locked in a circle of esoteric scholarly discussion.” The divide between theory and practice is problematic in normal times, and downright dangerous in turbulent ones. For many of the voices leading Washington’s foreign policy debate, international relations paradigms lurk in the background, generating an array of strategic recommendations that cannot easily be debated or reconciled because they are built on fundamentally different assumptions about how international politics works. If realist assumptions about power and security are right, then the United States needs to prepare for decades of great-power competition. But if liberal beliefs about the universality of individual desires are correct, U.S. policymakers should in fact be striving to rebuild and reinforce a liberal order. And if constructivist assumptions are correct, then any U.S. grand strategy must remain rooted in legitimate norms and values.

Dark Pragmatism and the Ethics of Cognitive Warfare

Niklas Serning 

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The West struggles with cognitive warfare, and it urgently needs to get better. Its defenses are weak. Its tactics are limited and outdated. It still hasn’t grown out of the belief that the end of the Cold War meant that Western liberal democracy had won, that the End of History has arrived, and that everyone else simply needs to catch up with it.

This article argues that these struggles stem from the unique constraints that the West faces in the domain of information warfare. Western countries operate from Enlightenment ideals of individual liberties and human rights. These values make Western societies places that many others aspire to move to and take part in. The freedom of information and thought that follows from them created the conditions for rapid scientific and technological progress that the rest of the world is now benefiting from. Such values are, therefore, worth fighting for. But they can also make the West vulnerable. An open society is open to hostile actors and messaging, and the commitment to freedom of expression prevents the West from shutting those actors down. Humanitarian commitments prevent the West from sowing the same division and harm that their adversaries sow in their populations. It is playing under Queensberry Rules while its adversaries get to fight dirty.

Ethics and Cognitive Warfare

The problem, then, is to work out how the West can fight back effectively while remaining something worth fighting for. This is a current topic of concern for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), whose most recent cognitive warfare concept identifies the tension between operating within an ethical framework while gaining advantage over adversaries who operate without those ethical constraints. A small number of ethical frameworks (RAND, Skerker, Henschke) have been proposed in order to address this tension, largely arguing for adherence to classic Western Kantian imperative norms of autonomy and dignity.

This article argues that a more fundamental philosophical rethink is warranted. Western Enlightenment values include a commitment to the pursuit of truth. The way the secular West understands truth is through a metaphysically realist framework. Truth is out there; any statement about the world can be determined to be valid by finding corresponding facts to back it up. Accordingly, fact-checking comes first when faced with problem information: if the Russian claim that the CIA created AIDS can be debunked by waving the right facts at people, they will update their beliefs and peacefully move on.

US Strategic Command nominee acknowledges shortfalls in electronic warfare operations, training

“We’re not where we need to be, but we’re focused on it and making progress,” Vice Adm. Richard Correll said Thursday during his confirmation hearing.

Mikayla Easley

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U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Richard Correll testifies during his confirmation hearing to be commander of the United States Strategic Command before the Senate Armed Services Committee in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on October 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. U.S. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The Trump administration’s nominee to serve at the helm of U.S. Strategic Command told lawmakers Thursday that the Pentagon’s ability to test, exercise and conduct electronic warfare operations are inadequate.

“We’re not where we need to be, but we’re focused on it and making progress,” Vice Adm. Richard Correll, who currently serves as Stratcom’s deputy commander, said during his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

While Stratcom is primarily responsible for overseeing the Defense Department’s nuclear capabilities and global strike missions, it is also charged with leading the military’s joint electromagnetic spectrum operations. The command manages those EMS efforts from the Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations Center (JEC), established in 2023 to increase the U.S. military’s readiness within the spectrum.

But Correll stressed to lawmakers both during his confirmation hearing and in written responses to advance policy questions that there is still much work to be done to integrate EW into the Defense Department’s operational plans.

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Furthermore, the joint force’s ability to test capabilities and train troops for future conflicts is limited due to increasing congestion in the electromagnetic spectrum, he added.

“We’ve got to continue along all efforts to advance our spectrum capabilities,” he said. “That includes world class test ranges, modeling and simulation and testing ourselves against the most exquisite capabilities that are out there. That’s where the joint force is headed.”

The Pentagon is limited in its ability to conduct open-air electronic warfare tests and training exercises at the joint level due to overcrowding in the spectrum, a lack of adequate ranges and frequent interference, Correll noted in his responses to advance policy questions. Simulation capabilities are also constrained, despite the department’s efforts to fund and upgrade its capabilities.

The military is working to modernize its EW capabilities through the Electronic Warfare Infrastructure Improvement Plan, which includes the Navy’s Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program (SEWIP) and Electronic Warfare Infrastructure Improvement Program (EWIIP).

Russian Military Breaches Ukraine’s Outer Ring Of Defenses Around Long-Embattled City Of Pokrovsk

Can Kasapoğlu

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1. Battlefield Assessment: Russian Troops Enter Pokrovsk

Last week saw a reduction in tactical engagements across the battle space. According to the Ukrainian General Staff, Ukrainian forces fought between 120 and 140clashes per day on average, down from the previous week’s peak of over 200.

The Ukrainian military has officially admitted that Russian troops have entered Pokrovsk. Open-source images from the embattled city depict heavy urban warfare. Elite Russian combat formations, in addition to preying on Ukrainian drone operators, are likely targeting Ukrainian information superiority and reconnaissance-strike capabilities. Last summer, Ukrainian sources identified Russian sabotage groups in the city, which remains key to the defense of eastern Ukraine.

Russia targeted Kherson with multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS), deliberately hitting civilians with artillery fire. The Kupiansk, Orikhiv, Vovchansk, and Lyman sectors also saw heavy combat.

In addition, the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) continued to launchoverwhelming missile and drone salvos. And as winter descends on Ukraine, widespread power outages plague the country.

2. Drone Warfare Update

New developments in drone warfare continued to shape the battle space. Open-source intelligence revealed the existence of a Russian unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) equipped with an electronic warfare suite designed to intercept aerial drones. The visual evidence of this novel platform suggests that robotic warfare has reached a new paradigm in which UGVs operate as soft-kill platforms in counter-drone defenses. This report will continue to note the new system’s frontline deployment as open-source intelligence reveals further details.

Drone wreckage data that Ukraine has obtained from multiple intercepted platforms suggests that the Russian military is equipping its Iran-designed Shahed drones with Chinese-made camera systems and radio-datalink suites. These advances enable operator-in-the-loop course corrections—targeting adjustments performed by a human in real-time—at a range of about 124 miles.

Drone Wreckage Shows Chinese-Made Camera. Image via Serhii Flash (@serhii_flash) on Telegram.

From Attrition to Adaptation: Reforming U.S. Military Culture for the Generations of Modern War by Donald E. Vandergriff

In sum, excising bloat isn’t austerity—it’s inoculation against defeat. A lean, merit-driven force, steeped in 3GW adaptability, can deter 4GW chaos and win peer wars.

Donald Vandergriff

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Begin Vandergriff Analysis:

In the looming great-power competition with China, the U.S. military stands at a cultural crossroads. Decades of peacetime inertia have entrenched a mindset ill-suited for the fluid, decentralized conflicts that define our era. Drawing on the foundational theories of generations of warfare—pioneered by William S. Lind and echoed in my own work on leadership development—this analysis examines how entrenched “bloat” in officer ranks and awards systems perpetuates a Second Generation (2GW) culture, blocking the transition to a Third Generation (3GW) force capable of prevailing in Fourth Generation (4GW) warfare.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Only by excising these cultural tumors can we restore a warfighting ethos that honors the legacies of leaders like Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, preparing us for the peer-level clashes ahead.

The generations of warfare framework, first articulated by Lind in his seminal 1989 Marine Corps Gazette article “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation,” provides a lens to diagnose this malaise. Lind, alongside co-authors like Colonel Keith Nightengale and Captain John F. Schmitt, described warfare’s evolution as dialectical shifts driven by technology, society, and tactics.

First Generation (1GW) warfare, born from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, relied on line-and-column tactics suited to smoothbore muskets and rigid state armies.

Second Generation warfare emerged from World War I’s trenches, emphasizing firepower, attrition, and centralized control—hallmarks of the French and American militaries post-1918.

Third Generation, the German Blitzkrieg of World War II, shifted to maneuver, initiative, and psychological dislocation, bypassing enemy strengths to collapse their will.

Fourth Generation, as Lind elaborated in his 4th Generation Warfare Handbook (co-authored with Lt. Col. Gregory A. Thiele), transcends state-on-state battles, blurring lines between combatants and civilians, war and politics, through non-state actors, cultural subversion, and low-intensity networks.

How Donald Trump Could Still Win the Nobel Peace Prize

Michael O’Hanlon

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If President Trump really wants the Nobel, he must work harder to ensure his peacemaking diplomacy succeeds in the long term.

Apparently, President Donald Trump really did want that Nobel Peace Prize, recently awarded instead to Maria Corina Machado, a Venezuelan advocate for political reform. In fact, some press accounts suggest that this October’s rancorous meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky resulted from Trump’s continued anger over the letdown.

If Trump wants the Nobel, he should begin by being less deliberately divisive and vindictive against political opponents at home, as well as change his ways with most allies and key trade partners abroad. But put all that to the side for a moment. It is a good thing Trump wants a Nobel. That is a worthy goal for any American president. But even he should see why it’s better to wait—and to have to work a little harder for it. That will make the winning of the prize more meaningful if and when it ever happens.

Only four previous American presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize. Theodore Roosevelt received it in 1906, five years into his presidency, for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. That was arguably the only case at all comparable to Trump’s impressive efforts, say in Gaza. By 1906, the Russia-Japan peace had taken root in a way that peace in the Middle East today has not, at least yet. In any case, Japan’s regional imperialism was far from over.

In 2002, Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Prize more for his work as a former president, promoting democracy and human rights around the world, than for his actions while in the Oval Office.

In 2009, Barack Obama won the award after being elected to the American presidency and preaching an aspirational message of global inclusiveness and hopefulness. His record then also included major speeches that year in Prague and Cairo that sketched visions of a world free of nuclear weapons and enmity between the West and the Middle East. They were good speeches, but even he acknowledged that he may have received the Nobel too soon and more out of a sense of the promise he brought than the accomplishments he had delivered so far.

Trump claims to have stopped some eight wars. I agree that he has been significantly helpful in several instances, including Gaza, Iran, the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict, and the Armenia-Azerbaijan dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. However, other players also played significant roles. And the first two problems, at least, are far from definitively solved.

As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Congo, I am thrilled to see Trump’s interest in bringing peace and economic development to eastern Congo. However, so far, despite small steps forward last spring and an Oval Office signing ceremony involving the foreign ministers of the DRC and Rwanda, there has been neither peace nor economic progress from the interim deals that the three countries, as well as other actors, have reached.

In the Kosovo-Serbia and Egypt-Ethiopia disputes of late, there was no real fighting. Still, one must give Trump and his team credit for useful diplomacy in calming tensions. Less so on India-Pakistan, where, by claiming too much credit for helping end their skirmish in May, Trump has set back US-India relations. Finally, on the Ukraine-Russia war, Trump has been pushing in the right general policy direction, if belatedly and intermittently—and President Trump himself acknowledges the frustration and continued tragedy of the situation.

There Is No Ceasefire in Gaza

Alexander Langlois

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The Trump administration must be ready to apply pressure to Benjamin Netanyahu if it wants to save its peace plan.

Any semblance of a ceasefire in Gaza died this week with Israel’s brief resumption of total war against Hamas on October 28. While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unilaterally declared a resumption of the ceasefire the next day, the reality is clear: Any agreement that allows one party to systematically violate its terms at will only constitutes meaningless words on paper. Without sustained US pressure, that dynamic will only worsen.

Israeli violations before this week’s strikes already raised serious concerns regarding the ceasefire’s sustainability. Since it began on October 10, Israel has continued to limit humanitarian aid flows into Gaza—a core component of the agreement with Hamas to end the fighting. It has regularly struck the Strip, citing unconfirmed reports of Hamas attacks on its forces, killing well over 100 people while injuring hundreds more. It refuses to open additional crossings that would further bolster aid flows for starving and impoverished Palestinian civilians.

To be clear, any actor violating the ceasefire should be held accountable for their actions. That includes Hamas, which is certainly working to regain its strength and will challenge Israel where it can. While many reports of attacks on Israeli forces are either exaggerated or incorrect, in no small part due to the likelihood that some of its fighters remain disconnected from command channels, it also signed a deal that it must honor.

Still, power asymmetry and US influence over Israel matter in this context, especially considering the latter has broken previous ceasefires unilaterally. That Israel’s new strikes on October 28 killed over 100 more people—including 46 children—puts to rest any idea that a real ceasefire exists in Gaza today. Rather, the same rules that have provided exceptional leniency to Israel for decades reign supreme. As such, the deal with Hamas resembles the Israel-Hezbollah “ceasefire” in Lebanon, with its ongoing bombings and illegal occupation of sovereign Lebanese territory.

In that context, Israel is imposing its will on a new, reformist Lebanese government with the full backing of Washington. The results speak for themselves: noble efforts to disarm Hezbollah are hitting roadblocks because Israel’s ongoing presence only bolsters the group’s raison d’etre—namely that of resisting Israeli occupation.

Like Hamas, Hezbollah will take advantage of that dynamic to retain its arms and power. Meanwhile, helpless Lebanese and Syrian refugees are trapped in the middle, likely viewed as another pressure point on Beirut by Israeli and American leaders as opposed to civilians deserving of dignity and security, not the worst of the realpolitik dictating the supposed “New Midle East.”

That future appears set for Gaza as well, but under worse, near-apocalyptic conditions for Palestinian civilians in the Strip. Nearly all are displaced, with most public infrastructure decimated. Famine conditions persist amid widespread food insecurity and child malnutrition. Ongoing intra-Palestinian fighting between Hamas and Israel-backed militias threatens civilians on a daily basis.

Under the so-called ceasefire and US President Donald Trump’s broader 20-point peace plan, Israel still controls roughly 53 percent of Gaza, with vague language dictating a future withdrawal closer to 8 percent—called a “buffer zone” surrounding Gaza’s disputed border with Israel—upon Hamas disarming. Israeli and US officials openly talk of only rebuilding Israel-controlled areas in a clear rebrand of the plan to move Palestinians to previous so-called “humanitarian zones” that many likened to concentration camps.

How to Solve Gaza’s Hamas Problem

Disarming the Group Will Require Arab and Muslim Forces—and Strong American Leadership

Jonathan Panikoff 

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Hamas militants carrying a deceased hostage in Gaza, October 2025 Ramadan Abed / Reuters

JONATHAN PANIKOFF is Director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council. From 2015 to 2020, he was Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East at the National Intelligence Council.More by Jonathan Panikoff

In the weeks since the October 8 cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, establishing and maintaining security in Gaza has become a crucial test. Already in the days after the deal was announced, Hamas began a campaign of violent retribution against rival groups as it sought to reconsolidate control over areas Israel had vacated. On October 19, the killing of two Israel Defense Forces soldiers in Rafah prompted Israeli airstrikes. And on October 28, the killing of another IDF soldier and Hamas’s continued delay in returning the bodies of hostages caused Israel to strike dozens of targets across Gaza, killing more than one hundred people and raising concerns that the deal itself might collapse.

If Hamas is allowed to reassert its influence and Israel is forced to continue to intervene at this or even larger scale, the cease-fire may become yet another temporary interlude in an unending conflict. The security challenge was anticipated in U.S. President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan, which specifically calls for the disarmament of Hamas and the deployment of an international stabilization force for Gaza. Yet the time required to carry out complex negotiations on the implementation of these goals has created a vacuum that will worsen the longer action is delayed or stalled.

In one promising step, the United States opened the Civil-Military Coordination Center, a new CENTCOM-led headquarters, on October 17. Located about 15 miles east of Ashkelon, the CMCC will provide a base for some 200 U.S. service members who have been sent to support the cease-fire and could play a key role in overseeing the international stabilization force. For legitimacy in Gaza, the ISF will need to be staffed by troops from Arab and Muslim countries, but strong U.S. leadership will be crucial. Alongside the CMCC, Washington must leverage other resources it has in the region, including the U.S. military’s work with Israeli and Palestinian security forces in the West Bank.

Gaza “Stabilization Force” Has a Problem: No One Wants to Go First

Military Hardware: Tanks, Bombers, Submarines and More

Seth Frantzman

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Merkava Tank Firing. Image Credit: IDF.

Key Points and Summary – The October 8 Gaza deal envisioned phased progress: hostages returned, stabilization, and an international force.

-But momentum is stalling.

-Jordan’s King Abdullah warns that a “peace-enforcing” mission is a non-starter; nations might train Palestinian police, yet few will deploy into firefights.

Merkava Tank Israel. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

-The U.S. has opened a Civil-Military Coordination Center in Israel to synchronize aid and security support—but won’t send troops into Gaza, and partners are hesitant.

-Meanwhile, Israel holds roughly half the Strip behind a “Yellow Line,” while Hamas reasserts control elsewhere.

-The longer deployment lags, the more facts on the ground harden—jeopardizing stabilization, governance, and the chance to rebuild daily life.

The Gaza Deal Is Stuck on Step One—Here’s Why

The agreed-upon Gaza deal, set on October 8, is facing several challenges. This has occurred around twenty days after the cease-fire helped end the fighting in Gaza. The agreement is supposed to proceed in phases. Hamas must return all the hostages.

Additionally, the goal is to stabilize the Gaza Strip. A key to that process is the deployment of an international stabilization force.

The dark side of Zelenskyy’s rule

Jamie Dettmer

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Opposition lawmakers and civil society activists say Ukraine’s leadership is using lawfare to intimidate opponents and silence critics.

The Ukrainian leadership has been accused of creeping "authoritarianism." | Tetiana Dzhafarova/AFP via Getty Images

Unpacked

Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a foreign affairs columnist at POLITICO Europe.

As Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, then head of Ukraine’s state-owned national power company Ukrenergo, was scrambling to keep the lights on.

Somehow, he succeeded and continued to do so every year, earning the respect of energy executives worldwide by ensuring the country was able to withstand Russian missile and drone strikes on its power grid and avoid catastrophic blackouts — until he was abruptly forced to resign in 2024, that is.

Kudrytskyi’s dismissal was decried by many in the energy industry and also prompted alarm in Brussels. At the time, Kudrytskyi told POLITICO he was the victim of the relentless centralization of authority that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his powerful head of office Andriy Yermak often pursue. He said he feared “corrupt individuals” would end up taking over the state-owned company.

According to his supporters, it is that kind of talk — and his refusal to remain silent — that explains why Kudrytskyi ended up in a glass-enclosed cubicle in a downtown Kyiv courtroom last week, where he was arraigned on embezzlement charges. Now, opposition lawmakers and civil society activists are up in arms, labeling this yet another example of Ukraine’s leadership using lawfare to intimidate opponents and silence critics by accusing them of corruption or of collaboration with Russia. Zelenskyy’s office declined to comment.

Others who have received the same treatment include Zelenskyy’s predecessor in office, Petro Poroshenko, who was sanctioned and arraigned on corruption charges this year — a move that could prevent him from standing in a future election. Sanctions have frequently been threatened or used against opponents, effectively freezing assets and blocking the sanctioned person from conducting any financial transactions, including using credit cards or accessing bank accounts.

The Fantasy of a New Middle East

Israel Cannot Destroy Its Way to Peace

Marc Lynch

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A Palestinian boy at the site of an overnight Israeli strike in Gaza, October 2025Mahmoud Issa / Reuters

MARC LYNCH is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and the author of America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region.More by Marc Lynch

The regional order of the Middle East is rapidly evolving, but not in the way many Israeli and U.S. officials assume it is. U.S. President Donald Trump’s push to end the war in Gaza delivered the release of all the surviving Israeli hostages and a respite from the relentless killing and destruction that has so scarred the territory. That breakthrough raised hopes of a broader regional transformation, even if what comes after the initial cease-fire remains hugely uncertain. Trump himself speaks of the dawn of peace in the Middle East. If his deal prevents the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank, many Arab governments may once again be eager to explore normalizing ties with Israel. Indeed, Israelis saw how Arab leaders pressured Hamas to accept Trump’s deal as evidence that normalization could be back on the table.

But even if the Gaza deal holds, this moment of U.S.-Israeli convergence won’t last. Israel’s mistaken belief that the country has established permanent strategic superiority over its adversaries will almost certainly lead it to take increasingly provocative actions that directly challenge the goals of the White House. The Gulf states that Israel dreams of bringing into its fold doubt that it is willing or able to protect their core interests. They are now less concerned about confronting Iran—and less convinced that the road to Washington leads through Tel Aviv. And Israel seems not to grasp the extent of Trump’s affinities with the Gulf states.

Wishful thinking has pervaded the Israeli government and national security establishment, which have reveled in the opportunities created by the country’s exercise of strength. After the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, Israel embarked on a cascading series of airstrikes and interventions across the region aimed not just at Hamas but at the entire Iranian-led axis, repeatedly crossing redlines that had long governed the regional shadow war, killing leaders who had been viewed as untouchable: Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with a massive bomb dropped in central Beirut, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in an Iranian safe house, multiple Iranian military commanders in Syria, and the Houthi prime minister of Yemen. Its bombing of nuclear and military sites in Iran represented the culmination of Israel’s long-held desire to strike at the heart of its greatest foe.

How Vulnerable Is China?

HAROLD JAMES

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The meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping may have delivered a kind of détente, after months of escalating tariff threats by the United States and retaliatory restrictions on rare-earth exports by China. While China had good reason to de-escalate the conflict with the US, however, it remains beset by political and economic weaknesses.

Wall Street Risks Shorting Freedom in Hong KongMARK L. CLIFFORD

US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping appear to have stepped back, once again, from the brink of a renewed trade war. At their face-to-face meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in South Korea, Trump and Xi reached a one-year agreement, which includes lower US tariffs on Chinese imports and postponement of Chinese restrictions on rare-earth exports.

As Princeton’s Harold James pointed out before the meeting, both Xi and Trump were “pushed toward some sort of truce,” given their countries’ economic interdependence.” But a trade agreement will not resolve their “intractable” long-term concerns – namely, public debt levels in the US and rapid population aging in China – so both are betting on AI to rescue them, in what is “more a sign of desperation than of confidence.”

Yale’s Stephen S. Roach thinks that the “most daunting” economic challenge China faces is a “long-awaited consumer-led rebalancing.” But he is “confident” that, if China’s leaders “set a clear target of raising household consumption to 50% of GDP by 2035,” they would then “settle on the right mix of pro-consumption measures.”

But even if China succeeds at boosting domestic consumption, warns Keun Lee of Seoul National University, this would not be enough to enable China to achieve Xi’s goal of becoming the world’s largest economy. To be sure, with gross national income (GNI) per capita having reached $13,660 in 2024, China appears to have “evaded the middle-income trap.” But China’s GDP is declining relative to that of the US – a trend that will be difficult to reverse, owing to “unfavorable demographics.”

AI Needs Its Complements: Investing in the Next Wave of Innovation

Matt Pearl and Kuhu Badgi

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Remote Visualization

During the British Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the United Kingdom experienced an unprecedented time of innovation, technological advancement, and economic growth. The most noteworthy invention during this time was the steam engine, which turned coal and boiling water into motion, pushing pistons, turning wheels, and for the first time, supplying reliable power on demand. This invention, however, was insufficient on its own to advance the British economy. Steam engines enabled reliable power generation independent of natural forces such as wind or water currents. Still, they were limited in their utility because of their great expense and the imperfect fit between all the cylinders and components. Beyond these limitations, the engines also had external effects that needed to be mitigated, such as coal-fired boilers that consumed enormous amounts of fuel, polluted waterways, and contributed to urban smog.

Improvements in manufacturing processes—such as the creation of the cylinder boring machine—created stronger and cheaper steam engines. At the same time, pollution was addressed by furnaces capable of better combustion, efficient steam boilers, and safer engineering standards. To make the steam engine scalable, however, incremental improvements were not enough: The United Kingdom ultimately relied on new complementary technologies, such as improvements in metallurgy that created better rails and the development of the mechanized factory system.

Is AI Becoming Selfish?

Eurasia Review

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New research from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science shows that the smarter the artificial intelligence system, the more selfish it will act.

Researchers in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) found that large language models (LLMs) that can reason possess selfish tendencies, do not cooperate well with others and can be a negative influence on a group. In other words, the stronger an LLM’s reasoning skills, the less it cooperates.

As humans use AI to resolve disputes between friends, provide marital guidance and answer other social questions, models that can reason might provide guidance that promotes self-seeking behavior.

“There’s a growing trend of research called anthropomorphism in AI,” said Yuxuan Li, a Ph.D. student in the HCII who co-authored the study with HCII Associate Professor Hirokazu Shirado. “When AI acts like a human, people treat it like a human. For example, when people are engaging with AI in an emotional way, there are possibilities for AI to act as a therapist or for the user to form an emotional bond with the AI. It’s risky for humans to delegate their social or relationship-related questions and decision-making to AI as it begins acting in an increasingly selfish way.”

Li and Shirado set out to explore how AI reasoning models behave differently than nonreasoning models when placed in cooperative settings. They found that reasoning models spend more time thinking, breaking down complex tasks, self-reflecting and incorporating stronger human-based logic in their responses than nonreasoning AIs.

“As a researcher, I’m interested in the connection between humans and AI,” Shirado said. “Smarter AI shows less cooperative decision-making abilities. The concern here is that people might prefer a smarter model, even if it means the model helps them achieve self-seeking behavior.”

As AI systems take on more collaborative roles in business, education and even government, their ability to act in a prosocial manner will become just as important as their capacity to think logically. Overreliance on LLMs as they are today may negatively impact human cooperation.

To test the link between reasoning models and cooperation, Li and Shirado ran a series of experiments using economic games that simulate social dilemmas between various LLMs. Their testing included models from OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek and Anthropic.

In one experiment, Li and Shirado pitted two different ChatGPT models against each other in a game called Public Goods. Each model started with 100 points and had to decide between two options: contribute all 100 points to a shared pool, which is then doubled and distributed equally, or keep the points.