Indian Strategic Studies: 04/21/26

21 April 2026

An Opportunity or an Illusion? The Iran War and China’s Taiwan Calculus

Allen Zhang

On April 7, the United States and Iran formally agreed to a ceasefire, bringing the nearly seven weeks of fighting in the Middle East to a temporary pause. Still, the path to a more permanent peace remains uncertain, with a round of peace talks ending with no agreement and the U.S. announcing a naval blockade of Iran. Although the tenuous ceasefire continues to hold, it is clear that the United States’ defense posture in the Indo-Pacific is being strained by competing operational demands. The conflict has seen the U.S. burn through billions of dollars in missiles, redeploy a Marine Expeditionary Unit from Japan, and shift 48 THAAD interceptors off the Korean Peninsula.

Replenishing the munitions inventory will certainly take time and money, as will the redeployment of weapons systems back to South Korea. Recognizing that the United States will possess fewer capabilities in the Indo-Pacific over the coming months, some commentators have expressed concern that China might view this as an opportune time to pursue unification with Taiwan. That possibility has raised alarm among some Taiwanese security officials, with one worried that “this is a moment for China to exercise influence.”

China This Week: Strategic Moves and Messaging

Erika Lafrennie

Bottom Line: In a single seven-day window, Beijing advanced a counter-sanctions legal regime, a four-point Gulf security framework, party-to-party political security bindings with Vietnam, a Russia alignment restatement, cross-strait administrative integration measures, and posted Q1 trade numbers that suggest a structural shift away from US dependence is already measurable. Read together, the pattern across domains is more significant than any individual item.

1. China Expands and Operationalizes Its Extraterritorial Counter-Sanctions Architecture

The State Council issued Regulations on Countering Improper Extraterritorial Application of Foreign Laws, establishing an identification mechanism, a Malicious Entity List, and a graduated countermeasures menu targeting foreign organizations and individuals that “promote or participate in” enforcement of foreign extraterritorial jurisdiction measures Beijing deems unlawful. The regulations assert Chinese extraterritorial jurisdiction over conduct with “appropriate connection” to China and prohibit any organization or individual from executing or assisting such foreign measures without State Council approval.

CENTCOM using underwater drones to clear mines in the Strait of Hormuz

ANNA AHRONHEIM

As ceasefire talks hit a stalemate in Pakistan, US Central Command (CENTCOM) has announced that it will be sending underwater drones to help clear the Strait of Hormuz. “Today, we began the process of establishing a new passage, and we will share this safe pathway with the maritime industry soon to encourage the free flow of commerce,” said Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of CENTCOM, as quoted as saying.

The press release added that “The Strait of Hormuz is an international sea passage and an essential trade corridor that supports regional and global economic prosperity. Additional US forces, including underwater drones, will join the clearance effort in the coming days.”

Here’s What the U.S. Blockade of Iran Looks Like

Roque Ruiz

A U.S. blockade of Iranian ports relies on more than 15 warships and potentially thousands of U.S. servicemembers, including possibly Marines and special-operations forces to enforce the operation.

Until now, Iran had been freely shipping its own oil and goods while sharply curtailing vessel traffic from other countries, especially those it deems unfriendly. Now, the U.S. military says it will stop any ship headed to or from an Iranian port, physically boarding it if necessary.

From Rejection to Acceptance: Why Iran Agreed to a Ceasefire

Arsalan Bilal

After more than a month of an intense regional war, a ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. has de-escalated the conflict, at least for some time, as international efforts toward a broader agreement continue. Recent commentary talks about the diplomacy that resulted in the ceasefire, but a critical question remains: why did Iran agree to a ceasefire it initially opposed?

For close to six weeks, Iran suffered significant leadership and material losses amid the U.S and Israel striking key targets, yet it developed meaningful leverage. To this end, it demonstrated its ability to disrupt energy supplies flowing through the region, thereby imposing significant costs on its adversaries that depend on the stability of the global economy. The strategy was the linchpin of Iran’s asymmetric warfare through which it could compensate for its military disadvantage and operational degradation.

How China’s Weapons Transfers to Iran Have Evolved Over Decades

David Pierson

That approach is now drawing renewed attention after U.S. officials said intelligence agencies were assessing whether China may have shipped shoulder-fired missiles to Iran in recent weeks. President Trump has said he would impose an additional 50 percent tariff on Chinese goods if the assessment proves accurate. China has denied the claim, calling it “pure fabrication” and has vowed to “resolutely retaliate” if the Trump administration goes through with tariffs.

The American officials said the information obtained by U.S. intelligence agencies was not definitive. But if proven true, it would be a significant tactical change in the way Beijing supports its closest strategic partner in the Middle East.

Field Observation: The Strait of Hormuz Is Not a Chokepoint

Erika Lafrennie

Foreign Affairs published an assessment of the war yesterday that represents, by both credentials and access, the ceiling of what the American policy establishment can produce on this crisis. The diagnosis is sharp. Iran’s three traditional security pillars have been systematically destroyed: Hamas and Hezbollah decimated, nuclear infrastructure buried, and the missile program degraded. But Iran discovered a fourth instrument more powerful than the other three combined. The analysis names the mechanism precisely: Iran attacked two ships, spooked maritime insurers into pulling coverage, and collapsed commercial transit through the Strait of Hormuz without needing to sustain a military campaign. The piece titles a central section “Battle of the Bridge Trolls,” capturing the toll-collector logic in a single image.

Dozens of ships have paid Iran to transit. The toll system functions simultaneously as a revenue stream and a security guarantee, replacing the deterrence Hezbollah once provided. The United States responded with a counter-blockade that mirrors Iran’s own move. Iran’s systemic domestic problems remain unfixed. The war gave the regime a temporary reprieve it did not earn through governance performance. Coercion has not produced capitulation and likely will not. Both sides are misreading each other. Maximalist positions are reducing the chance of settlement.

For Iran, Hormuz Is More a Weakness Than a Weapon

Miad Maleki

On Monday, six weeks into its war with Iran, the United States imposed a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. According to conventional wisdom, the war has made Tehran realize that its control of the strait constitutes powerful leverage. In this story line, the strait turned out to be Iran’s real nuclear weapon, its potent deterrent. Because Tehran could use this chokepoint to threaten global shipping, it was able to resist pressure from the world’s most powerful air force, reject Washington’s peace demands, and ultimately gain leverage over its nemesis. Iranian leaders have repeatedly touted that

US Navy leaning on AI to sweep Iran’s Hormuz mines

John Femiani

US military officials said the Navy has begun the process of clearing mines in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical choke point for global shipping. Iranian forces have deployed a small number of mines in the strait. The move gave the Iranians a means, along with missiles and drones, of threatening ships.

The US Navy recently decommissioned the minesweeping vessels that it had operating in the Persian Gulf region. However, it has other ships and aircraft for finding and destroying mines. As a computer scientist who researches how to detect mines, I have been researching how artificial intelligence techniques, such as machine learning, can help navies detect modern sea mines. Here’s what I’ve learned about how the mines work and how they can be neutralized.

What the Iran War Means for the “Axis of Resistance”

Hamidreza Azizi

In the final weeks before his death, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei cast the mounting hostility of U.S. President Donald Trump in religious and explicitly Shiite terms. Rejecting calls for capitulation, he invoked the example of Imam Hussein—the third imam, or spiritual leader, of the Shiites—refusing to pledge allegiance to Yazid, the Umayyad ruler widely associated in Shiite memory with tyranny and injustice. Defiance, in this light, was not simply a strategic imperative but a value rooted in history and identity.

That framing did not disappear with Khamenei’s death. Instead, Shiite political figures, clerics, and communities

Iran Is Teaching Us Something About the American War Machine

David Wallace-Wells

“History is littered with great power militaries that looked in the mirror every day and told themselves that they were the best in the world — until they got popped,” the former Pentagon official Michael Horowitz told me. “This is the time where danger lights should be flashing for a great power like the United States, if we take history as a guide.”

As soon as the first day of the war, when Iran retaliated against unprovoked American and Israeli strikes by targeting civilian infrastructure around the Gulf, the battlefield of this conflict looked different. It didn’t take long for Iran to deploy its “Hormuz weapon,” attacking civilian energy infrastructure and attacking commercial oil tankers and mining the strait and taking the world’s fossil-fuel economy hostage.

But just as striking was the simple math of munitions. American and Israeli forces were destroying quite a lot of Iranian targets, both military and civilian. But they were doing so with extremely expensive weaponry and depleting fragile stockpiles. Perhaps the Iranians were doing less damage, but they were doing it much more cheaply, with what seemed like a bountiful supply of low-cost drones, missiles and mines.

NPT Gives Trump a Way to Rally the World Against Iran

Henry Sokolski

Even though Iran is a member of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, it has relentlessly pursued the bomb. Yet that’s no reason to abandon the NPT, which has been remarkably effective at preventing proliferation among member states from South Korea to South Africa and Libya. When the NPT Review Conference begins on April 27, the Trump administration has an opportunity to toughen the treaty, which would enhance both the U.S. position vis-à-vis Iran and the broader nonproliferation regime.

President Trump knows the Pentagon may have to target Iran’s nuclear program again. To make whatever action he takes stick, not only with Tehran but with its neighbors and beyond, he should take a tough view of the NPT—one that would prevent nonnuclear states from making nuclear fuels and bombs.

Trump’s Blockade Is a Crisis for Iran

Iran’s regime has tried to make this war all about economics, and now it is getting its wish. Since Monday the U.S. Navy has quarantined Iranian ports, blocking ships from entering or exiting the Strait of Hormuz for the purpose of commerce with Iran. The economic damage to the regime is immediate, and the pain will grow the longer the blockade is sustained.

Damaged residential building in Tehran on Tuesday. MAJID SAEEDI/GETTY IMAGES

The best estimates we have are from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Miad Maleki, who led the U.S. Treasury’s sanctions campaign against Iran until last year. He writes that the blockade is expected to wipe out $435 million in Iranian economic activity a day and force oil-field shut-ins within two weeks.

Revamping U.S. Military Assistance: A Four-Tier Model for a New Strategic Era

Peter W. Aubrey

In the eighty years that have passed since the conclusion of the Second World War, the United States has been the world’s largest provider of foreign assistance, delivering an estimated $6.5 trillion across all major categories of foreign aid—humanitarian, developmental, economic, and military. Military aid alone totals over $1.1 trillion. Begun with strategic calculations that sought to prevent another global catastrophe by stabilizing allies and former enemies, deterring adversaries and indirectly extending U.S. power, current funds allocation now seem to be allocated based on habit, with funding streams continuing regardless of how the recipient’s foreign policy behavior aligns with U.S. interests.

The current structure is a fragmented, program-driven system that allocates military assistance based on legacy relationships, regional stovepipes, and political inertia. Washington rewards legacy ties, not performance. This article argues that today’s geopolitical environment requires sharper instruments; a system that requires strategic alignment, that asks hard questions like; where does our money generate the most strategic return on investment?

Trump’s Blockade Risks Upending an Emerging Détente With China

David E. Sanger and Tyler Pager

When China declared on Monday that the U.S. blockade of Iranian oil leaving the Strait of Hormuz was “dangerous and irresponsible,” it was a brief window into President Trump’s latest challenge: how to keep the Iran conflict from upending an emerging détente with China. Mr. Trump is expected to land in Beijing in four weeks, in what was imagined as a carefully planned, highly orchestrated effort to recast the relationship between the world’s two largest economies.

The president has already delayed the trip once, and White House officials insist there is no discussion of putting it off again, even if the United States is still choking off Iranian oil exports. Ninety percent of those exports — more than 1.3 million barrels per day — were purchased by China before the American and Israeli attack began on Feb. 28.

U.S. and NATO Need To Learn From Ukraine

Joshua Segal

In the manner of the ancient Greek myth recounting the demise of Icarus due to his hubris—when his wings failed as he flew too close to the sun—the United States and its NATO allies must acknowledge the shortcomings in their strategy, technology, and planning following the initial month of Operation Epic Fury, and open their arms to Ukrainian willingness to assist.

The subpar performance of Western precision weapons in Ukraine’s challenging electronic warfare environment, the absence of immediate options to counter adversary attempts to deplete costly weapons with significantly cheaper attack drones, and repeated failures of NATO troops to perform against Ukrainian red teams in exercises underscore the fact that the United States and its NATO partners are not trained or equipped for the modern battlefield. Consequently, they would likely encounter substantial setbacks in a direct confrontation with China, Russia, and even North Korea, which are rapidly assimilating lessons gleaned from the Ukrainian battlefield. To highlight the development, numerous reports suggest that Iran successfully utilized drones in the Gulf that were deemed too ineffective against Ukrainian defenses.

Iran’s Regime Has Changed—for the Worse

Margherita Stancati

On March 13, a massive billboard appeared in Tehran’s Enqelab Square. It showed Iran’s newly selected supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, standing in a trench and instructing commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to fire missiles at their enemies. The text suggested the mission is divinely inspired, comparing Khamenei to Imam Ali, a revered Muslim figure known for his legendary victory over Jewish tribes.

For opponents of Iran’s regime, the image is the visual representation of their worst nightmare: a militarized Iran ruled by a younger, hard-line leader where the Revolutionary Guard plays an even more dominant role.

Trump’s Iran Blockade Is Functioning—But Will It Work?

Aaron MacLean

Donald Trump’s blockade of Iran, announced after the breakdown of ceasefire negotiations in Pakistan last weekend, has begun, and early reports suggest it is working. But its strategic goal is to bring Iran to a more serious diplomatic position—and success there remains a long shot.

Despite some confusing rhetoric over the weekend, the United States has not actually blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, as such, in really any sense at all. The source of the confusion was the president himself, who announced on Sunday that the “United States Navy . . . will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.” This announcement didn’t make a great deal of sense. First of all, Iran was already engaged in a de facto blockade of the strait, and had been choking traffic through it to a minimum since early March. Each day it allowed through a handful of ships that were carrying Iranian cargo or, it seems, paying a toll to Iran.

Targeting Decisions: A Simpler Framework for Information Warfare

Joseph Augello

The United States military has developed a formidable arsenal of information-related capabilities over the past 15 years. From sophisticated cyber and electronic warfare tools to refined psychological operations, the joint force possesses an impressive array of technical means. However, these capabilities are often employed in isolation, constrained by domain-specific authorities and organizational stovepipes, rather than integrated to achieve decisive effects on adversary behavior.

The fundamental challenge facing PSYOP is not capability development, but rather the lack of a unifying framework for employing these capabilities in concert. At its core, PSYOP should be understood as the deliberate shaping of adversary decisions: not in the abstract, but at specific moments, under specific conditions, and through specific information inputs.

Hegseth’s War on Generals

Peter Gattuso, James P. Sutton, & Ross Anderson

With the ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. set to end in less than a week, White House officials say they intend to resume negotiations with Iranian negotiators shortly, and that discussions to make that happen are underway. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump said the talks could “be happening over the next two days” and praised Pakistani officials for serving as mediators. Meanwhile, on the first day of America’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, six ships turned around after receiving warnings from American warships, returning to Iranian ports. No shots were fired, and five of these ships were oil tankers, according to U.S. officials. To learn more about the blockade, read yesterday’s issue of TMD.

The Financial Times reported that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps secretly acquired a Chinese-built spy satellite in late 2024 for roughly $36.6 million and used it to surveil military bases across the Middle East hosting U.S. troops, including Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base, where five U.S. refueling planes were damaged.

Aerial Drones Change How Wars Are Fought—Unmanned Ground Vehicles Will Decide Who Wins Them

James Chaney

In Ukraine, the battlefield has become transparent. The sky over the front line is saturated with sensors and strike platforms. Small drones hover constantly above, watching trenches, vehicles, and supply routes in real time. First-person-view drones strike within seconds of detection. The result is a battlefield where movement is exposed and survival increasingly depends on who can see first. Many observers have concluded that whoever dominates the air with drones will dominate the war. They are only half right.

There is no longer any serious debate about whether unmanned aircraft systems have changed warfare. Tactical concealment has become much more difficult. Even moving in a rear area is not without risks. Formations that previously maneuvered beyond direct observation now assume they are always watched from above. In Ukraine, soldiers routinely describe the front line as under constant observation.

Cyberwar’s New Frontier

Brianna Rosen

In late 2025, the U.S. artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced it had disrupted a Chinese state-sponsored group that had used the company’s own technology to attack roughly 30 Western technology, finance, government, and critical infrastructure targets—all with minimal human supervision. It was the first reported AI-orchestrated espionage campaign. But it will not be the last. Just a few months later, Anthropic revealed that its latest model, Mythos Preview, had autonomously uncovered critical vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser. In the hands of criminal networks, terrorist groups, or countries unconstrained by AI safety concerns, virtually any system

Designing Lethal Decisions: AI, Accountability, and the Future of Military Judgment

Michael A. Santoro

As artificial intelligence systems are integrated into military operations, a familiar intuition hardens into an institutional standard: The higher the stakes, the more essential it is to keep humans in the loop. In matters of life and death, machines must not be left to decide on their own.

That intuition is understandable. It is also, in important respects, wrong.

In lower-stakes environments—traffic management, service delivery, even routine policing—human oversight can sometimes function as a backstop. Errors are visible, decisions can be revisited, and the costs of delay are tolerable. In crisis response, human oversight becomes less effective in addressing errors. Decisions must be made quickly, information is incomplete, and the consequences of hesitation grow more severe. Under these conditions, late-stage human intervention becomes less reliable, not more.

The Future of Armored Warfare in the Drone Era; Adapting to a Battlefield That Now Sees Everything

David T. Cloft

For decades, armored warfare was built on a simple, brutal equation: armor protects, firepower kills, mobility wins. Tanks and infantry fighting vehicles like the M2 Bradley were designed for a world where the biggest threat came from another armored formation across the tree line. You found the enemy, you engaged, and whoever shot first—accurately—usually won. That world is gone. Ukraine didn’t just tweak the formula; it detonated it. The battlefield now sees everything, all the time, from above, and the kill chain has compressed from minutes to seconds.

The romantic image of armored columns rolling forward under cover of smoke and artillery has been replaced by something far less cinematic: vehicles hiding, dispersing, and moving like hunted animals under constant aerial surveillance. Cheap drones—$500 quadcopters and $20,000 FPV kamikazes—are hunting million-dollar platforms with ruthless efficiency. The lesson is not subtle. If you can be seen, you can be targeted. If you can be targeted, you can be killed.

Who Should Control AI’s Most Dangerous Secrets?

Josh Code

When Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote that “we are building machines that can think and reason,” America was still trying to wrap its head around AI. This was back in June 2024; Aschenbrenner had just been fired from the most powerful AI lab in the world—OpenAI—and he wanted to warn people that this technology, which still sounded like science fiction to many Americans, posed the most important national security challenge since the atomic bomb.

“By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I,” he wrote. “Along the way, national security forces not seen in