Hackers Bypass Signal, Telegram And WhatsApp Encryption To Read Messages

Davey Winder

Source Link

Nobody wants their secrets to leak, whether that is the Department of War, FTSE 100 companies, or your average consumer VPN user. One place where many secrets exist is within the encrypted instant messages we send via apps such as Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp. So, what if I were to tell you that a new threat has been identified, targeting Android smartphone users, that effectively bypasses the secure encryption that protects the privacy of your messages, and captures them for cybercriminal hackers to read? Welcome to the distinctly dangerous world of the Sturnus trojan.ForbesAmazon Issues Attack Warning For 300 Million CustomersBy Davey Winder

These Hackers Can Read Your ‘Private’ Instant Messages

Security researchers at threat intelligence outfit ThreatFabric have confirmed that they have observed a new and dangerous piece of Android malware, a banking trojan that goes beyond the normal boundaries of such malicious software. Not only can Sturnus, which the ThreatFabric analysis said is “currently in a development or limited testing phase,” provide hackers with the ability to gain full device control and harvest banking credentials, but also, and here’s the killer blow, it can “bypass encrypted messaging” according to the in-depth technical report.

I’m a user of all three of these instant messaging apps, for different use-cases, and rely upon Signal and WhatsApp encryption for some of them. The good news is that this has not been broken, the attackers have not found a way to read your encrypted messages. What they have done, however, is put together a complex technical process that, ultimately, does something very simple indeed: it reads your messages after you’ve decrypted them and they are displayed on the smartphone screen. This harks back to a warning that I used to give people all the time when secure messengers made a big play on the fact that screenshots could be disabled on time-limited, one-hit and done, messages, so the recipient couldn’t take a copy and share it around. They could if they took a photo of the screen with another device.

India’s Cautious Stance toward the Securitization of the Quad

Interview with Rohan Mukherjee

Source Link

As the Quad (comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) emerges as a key platform in the Indo-Pacific’s evolving strategic landscape, India maintains a cautious stance toward deepening security commitments within the forum. In this interview, Ruhi Kulkarni asks Rohan Mukherjee about New Delhi’s efforts to balance India’s role in an increasingly securitized Quad with the country’s domestic and regional interests. Mukherjee discusses how India’s approach to the Quad reflects careful calibration in leveraging select economic, security, and diplomatic initiatives while also maintaining nonalignment in its foreign policy engagements.

Even as the Quad has gained increasing strategic significance in the Indo-Pacific, India remains hesitant to embrace it for greater security cooperation. Are there discrepancies between India’s vision for an open, stable, and prosperous Indo-Pacific and that of its Quad counterparts. If so, what is driving these differences?

Much depends on what we mean by “security cooperation.” If this means a treaty alliance, then India is unlikely to embrace it. If we mean more robust cooperation on security issues, then India has supported this vision of the Quad since at least 2020, when the border standoff between India and China began in Ladakh. How firmly New Delhi pursues such cooperation is probably where the difference lies between India, on the one hand, and the United States and its treaty allies, Japan and Australia, on the other. It is noticeable that India became more active in the Quad and supportive of its security objectives after relations with China soured in 2020. Now that diplomacy between Beijing and New Delhi has yielded some agreement on a disengagement process, there will be less incentive for India to aggressively counter China, especially given the importance of bilateral trade.

In this sense, India’s vision for an open, stable, and prosperous Indo-Pacific is different from its Quad counterparts in that New Delhi is more open to an arrangement that develops regional stability by engaging China rather than treating it as an outright adversary—provided that Beijing itself is cooperative. In the past, India has modified the free and open Indo-Pacific framing to add the term “inclusive,” which reflects this more flexible approach to regional diplomacy.

Desh, Bidesh and Fractured Dreams: Bangladeshi Labor Migrants in the GCC

Raisha Jesmin Rafa

Source Link

Poor, low-skilled Bangladeshi men and women represent a majority of the laborers migrating to the Gulf region for transitory work. The Bangladesh Bureau of Manpower, Employment & Training (BMET) reports that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), encompassing Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, accommodates millions of Bangladeshi labor migrants annually (BMET, 2023a). Bangladesh’s developmental vision champions the role of migrant workers, placing on them the duty of earning foreign currency to nourish the country’s socioeconomic health and national status; migrant remittances contribute well over 6% of Bangladesh’s annual GDP, making it one of the top recipients of remittance flows in the world (Mahmud, 2023:56; The World Bank, 2023). The economic gains, however, mask the deeper structural inequities and power hierarchies forming the substratum of migration. Caught between intricate class, gender, and racial hierarchies, Bangladeshi migrants come to confront multiple challenges throughout the migration lifecycle.

Gender pervades every step of the migration process in Bangladesh, from the recruitment process to the flow of remittances. Prevailing gender norms dictate men’s and women’s migration opportunities, processes, and experiences, creating gender-differentiated impacts. Gender, however, does not operate in a silo and intersects with class and race, revealing the interrelatedness of multiple axes of oppression that can influence the migration ecosystem. These interlinked themes animate this paper as I move beyond the economic dimensions of labor migration to contend that the motivations and experiences of poor, low-skilled Bangladeshi migrants are shaped by their embeddedness in complex power hierarchies linked to class, gender, and race.

Opinion – Sheikh Hasina’s Conviction and the Weaponization of Justice

Christopher Burke

Source Link

The news from Bangladesh is stark and historic. Former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has been sentenced to death by a domestic tribunal for “crimes against humanity.” The charges relate not to the ghosts of the 1971 war, but to the brutal crackdown on the student-led popular uprising that ultimately ended her long and often autocratic rule in the summer of 2024. The verdict is a profound, contradictory moment. A victory for the victims of state-sanctioned violence, it affirms that modern political leaders are not beyond the law. However, the legitimacy of the verdict is undermined by procedural flaws forcing a deeper examination of questions haunting transitional regimes. When does national justice become an unquestionable international precedent and when is it a political weapon of the next regime?

The conviction of Sheikh Hasina marks the latest challenge to the concept of sovereign immunity-an increasingly antiquated idea that a Head of State cannot be prosecuted for their actions. The trend was cemented in the late 1990s. The indictment of the sitting President of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milošević shattered the notion that leaders are untouchable while in office. This was reinforced by the subsequent convictions of Liberia’s Charles Taylor by the Special Court for Sierra Leone and Chad’s Hissène Habré by the Extraordinary African Chambers. Habré’s 2016 conviction for crimes against humanity by a hybrid court in Senegal was a major milestone–African justice for an African dictator.

Hasina’s case adds a unique layer. Unlike Taylor and Habré who were tried for atrocities committed decades ago, Hasina was convicted by a domestic court, the International Crimes Tribunal, for ordering the deadly repression of a political movement in a struggle for self-preservation that ended her regime. Ironically, Hasina’s government revived the tribunal in March 2010 to try alleged crimes from the 1971 war. The verdict sends a chillingly relevant message to leaders everywhere. The risk of domestic legal reckoning for crushing dissent is real and immediate. The shield of political office is no longer effective protection from charges of using state power to commit atrocities.

All Under Heaven: China’s Awakening

Francisco Lobo

Source Link

This is an excerpt from The Praeter-Colonial Mind: An Intellectual Journey Through the Back Alleys of Empire by Francisco Lobo. Download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.

In 2011, Stephen Spielberg produced another sci-fi narrative with a prehistoric flavor – Terra Nova, a tv production that despite its promise got canceled after only one season. It follows the exploits of a time-traveling family forced to escape an overpopulated and polluted planet Earth in 2149, making their way to a colony established 85 million years in the past. Their world is not only in the throes of combating climate disaster and demographic collapse; as expected, war is also part of this dystopian tale. More importantly, the leader of the colony, Commander Taylor, is a veteran of the 2138 Somalia War where he fought against such fictional foes as the ‘Axis’ and the ‘Russo- Chinese’. For a show that fell under most people’s radars, Terra Nova’s script does seem to capture some of the main struggles of our time – not least climate change, overpopulation, war, and great power competition. This ‘Russo-Chinese’ plotline, in particular, might have been made in a Hollywood basement, but it may yet become a reality in our present.

Russian-Chinese official relations date all the way back to the seventeenth century, when the Treaty of Nerchinsk was signed in 1689 (Becker Lorca 2015, 114). It was an agreement between two imperial powers, those of Tsarist Russia and Qing Dynasty China (Stent 2023, 255). Fast forward to the mid-twentieth century and the picture does not change much. ‘The Soviet Union of today is the China of tomorrow’. This was the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official slogan for 1953, the same year Xi Jinping was born (Torigian 2024, para. 4). It was an aspirational slogan, adopted at a time when Chinese admiration for the Soviet model was at an all-time high.

Admittedly, following down the path chartered by the USSR meant not only boosting productivity and growth; it also entailed administering violence, lots of violence at home and abroad, by cracking down on domestic dissent and seeking territorial expansion of its sphere of influence, for the Soviet Union was a land empire in everything but name (Stent 2023, 31). Likewise, the People’s Republic of China aimed to regain its lost imperial grandeur following in the footsteps of its Russian ‘elder brothers’ (Ibid, 262), not only by furthering the communist ideology common to both, but also by displaying an unwavering commitment to the ‘One China’ policy (Maçães 2019, 141) whereby the territorial integrity of this modern-day land empire can only be accomplished if it engulfs Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

China might be winning the AI race. Does it matter?

Jenna Benchetrit 

Source Link

A Beijing company recently released China's smartest artificial intelligence model yet — narrowing the gap between that country and the U.S. in a race that some have likened to a new cold war.

Kimi K2 Thinking, which was developed by Moonshot AI, is a generative AI-powered chatbot similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude.

“It’s the closest a Chinese model has come to matching a U.S. or Western model’s performance since Deepseek in January,” said Michael Deng, a geoeconomics technology analyst at Bloomberg. That model caused a market meltdown over fears of Chinese AI advancement.

Kimi K2's release flew under the radar by comparison. But it scored high on Humanity's Last Exam, a notoriously difficult, 2,500-question benchmark that tests an AI's reasoning abilities beyond regurgitating information, placing just behind recent ChatGPT models and surpassing both Claude 4.5 and Meta's Llama.

"It is definitely [still] the case that the U.S. is ahead of China on AI," said Dan Wang, the author of Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future. But, according to those same benchmarks, that lead "is narrowing in all sorts of ways."

Whether China's advancements against the U.S. matter depends on who you ask, according to experts who spoke with CBC News.

That some North American companies and consumers are choosing Chinese-made AI "just tells you about the technical sophistication that we're seeing from China and that it really rivals the best from what we're seeing in the U.S. right now," said Sheldon Fernandez, the Toronto-based co-founder of DarwinAI, which developed AI for quality control in manufacturing and has since been acquired by Apple.

Open-source AI models like the ones being developed in China "are cheaper and you can control them in your own environment," he said. They can be modified to suit a user's needs, though that might require some technical expertise.

Cybercrime is Iraq’s Next Big Challenge

Tanya Goudsouzian  Ibrahim Al-Marashi

Source Link

Whatever the outcome of Iraq’s November 11 parliamentary elections, the next government must address the threat of cybercrimes that threaten Iraq’s post-conflict recovery and could inflame both domestic and regional conflict.

From the 2019 defacing of more than 30 government websites to a surge in blackmail and extortion campaigns targeting women and youth on social media, cybercrime in Iraq is rapidly expanding to include attacks aimed at governments and critical institutions.

In September, a blog monitoring the dark web reported that a threat actor claimed to possess the personal records of over 30 million Iraqi citizens, describing the breach as a victory in the “cyber war” against the Iraqi government. If true, the data leak would represent one of the largest digital compromises in history, laying bare the country’s fragile cyber defenses.

Trump might allow Nvidia to sell powerful computer chips to China

Joseph Zeballos-Roig

Source Link

President Donald Trump is deciding whether to allow the AI chipmaker Nvidia to sell advanced computer chips to Beijing, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Monday.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been lobbying the Trump administration to green-light those chip sales, Lutnick said. At the moment, the firm has ceded its market share in China due to persistent tensions between the U.S. and China that haven't been settled due to the lack of a trade agreement.

Reform Without Purpose Is Just Motion

Tom Balish

Source Link

COL (Ret.) Thomas A. Balish served 28 years as an Army aviation officer and scout helicopter pilot, later as Chief of Operations and Integration in HQDA G-8. He now leads LH6-Services, LLC, supporting Army modernization and defense-industry initiatives. He lives in South Carolina.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth wants to replace JCIDS with a faster, service-led approach—complete with new institutions such as the Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board (RRAB), Mission Engineering and Integration Activity (MEIA), and Joint Acceleration Reserve (JAR). Each is meant to speed the path from idea to fielding. Yet faster does not necessarily mean smarter. The Army still struggles to define what its formations are supposed to do in twenty-first century warfare. Until that doctrinal foundation is clear—especially for armor, light, and expeditionary forces—no amount of acceleration will help. Doctrine defines purpose: it tells the force why it exists and how it fights. For too long, the requirements process has sprinted ahead of doctrine, building capabilities for environments that no longer exist.

Deep Strike Capabilities

Olena Kryzhanivska

Source Link

Since the number of my posts on Ukraine’s Arms Monitor has already exceeded 130, I’ve decided to group them by theme and launch a Topic Navigator.

I’ll send some of the largest and most popular sections by email, but please note that the full Topic Navigator will now be available on Ukraine’s Arms Monitor website at all times.

You can use it whenever you want to explore specific topics — such as UAVs, naval drones, ground drones, Ukraine–Europe cooperation, arms control, and more. If you have suggestions for topics you’d like to see listed, feel free to let me know — I’ll consider them.

New posts and sections will be automatically added to the relevant lists in the Navigator.

Weekend Update #160: The US Becomes A Mouthpiece To Pass On Putin's Demands

Phillips P. OBrien

Source Link

Well, what a difference a week makes. Last week there were still many loud voices discussing just how profound the Trump pivot towards Ukraine was in reality (ho, ho). People were focused on “crippling” sanctions on Russia, on Trump being angry at Putin, etc. Then on Wednesday rumors started coming out that the Trump administration had an approved “peace” plan for Russia-Ukraine and the rest, as the say, is tragedy. When the details on the 28 points of the plan were released they were shown to be a threat to the continuing existence of Ukraine as a free and sovereign state (though that did not stop some Ukraine-Trump backers from showing their true colors and saying what a solid plan it was). Then even more fascinating news broke. The peace plan seems to have been at least partly taken word for word from Russian documents—and then we ended up with some fascinating reactions from within the Trump administration with JD Vance playing a key role as a backer of the deal and Marco Rubio (possibly) trying to disassociate himself. Welcome to the 2028 election.

Russian Unreality and American Weakness

Timothy Snyder

Source Link

The history of diplomacy is full of strangeness. Touch the surface of the dusty books and peculiar characters spring forth to demand that their tales be heard. And yet the American diplomacy of the past few days, I believe, will stand out as something peculiarly gruesome -- not simply incompetent, but openly courting national and global catastrophe.

A document suddenly appeared a few days ago under the inapplicable (and too-often repeated) heading of “peace plan” regarding the Russo-Ukrainian war. It would be more accurately described as a plan to intensify the war to the profit of a few Russians and Americans. It seems to have produced entirely or mostly by Russians, and then leaked by a Russian negotiator to an American outlet. It was then claimed by a fraction within the White House, endorsed (sight unseen) by the president of the United States, who insisted (at least at first) that Ukraine had to accept it.

Since then there have been many denials, denials of denials, and obfuscations. The scandal will perhaps clarify problems of process in Washington. It is not that we -- America -- are trying to sell out Ukraine. American public opinion is favorable to Ukraine. Republican voters support Ukraine. A majority in Congress supports Ukraine. It is rather that a few Russians and a few Americans have the ability to define as a “peace plan” what is essentially the furtherance of personal economic interests combined with a strengthening of Russia’s capacity for warfighting and a weakening of Ukraine’s. Along the way, it contradicts every major principle of international law and furthers a world dominated by China and its Russian ally.

Commercial innovation, not government production, will win the drone war

Nadia Schadlow

Source Link

U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Tequarrie Jackson, 332nd Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron small unmanned aircraft systems operator, controls a Skydio quadcopter in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility Nov. 6, 2025. The sUAS team specializes in aerial defense through reconnaissance, target identification, and terrain observation by flying drones around base perimeters to better protect and defend personnel and assets. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Kari Degraffenreed)

The central theme of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s recent speech on acquisition reform was that commercial companies and technologies are at the foundation of a strong defense industrial base and military innovation. As he put it, the department wants to harness more of America’s cutting-edge companies to focus their talent and technologies on our toughest national-security problems. New results won’t appear overnight, but the direction launched by Hegseth is the right one.

That’s why defense policymakers should be cautious about a provision now under consideration in the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that could undercut the dynamism we need in one of our most critical emerging defense sectors: unmanned autonomous systems

Are New Defense Companies Giving Away Sensitive Info Through Marketing?

Jake Chapman

Source Link

“Loose lips sink ships.” It was catchy, memorable, and above all, true. That wisdom feels incompatible with Silicon Valley’s culture and business model, yet today’s national security strategy depends on it. By oversharing, emerging defense companies may be undermining the very deterrence to which they hope to be contributing.

For much of the past 30 years, U.S. deterrence was straightforward: reveal to deter and conceal to win. Put simply, the United States had the biggest stick, and just brandishing it was enough. The world is no longer that clear. A peer adversary now matches or surpasses U.S. capacity in key areas. Deterrence in this environment is a choreographed dance, revealing some capabilities, concealing others, and hinting at yet more in the shadows. Yesterday, deterrence was about certainty that America would win. Today, it’s increasingly about creating uncertainty in peer adversaries.

The Colonial and Its Discontents: Anti-Colonialism, Decolonization, and Post-Colonialism

Francisco Lobo

Source Link

These powerful words, full of passion and righteous indignation, were written by Thiong’o in 1986. However, the ‘decolonization’ project remains alive and well today, as evidenced by the active battlefronts of academia and the so- called ‘culture wars’ (on which I will have more to say in the next chapter). Many of our major struggles today have to do with war and political violence, and they are as pressing as they are palpable for way too many victims of their material destructiveness. Yet, as the UNESCO constitution states, ‘since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed’ (UNESCO 1945, para. 2).

As this study is intended to offer food for thought for the praeter-colonial mind, this chapter will focus on the intellectual challenges of colonialism and its many discontents – including anti-colonialism, decolonization, and post- colonialism – and the ways in which the praeter-colonial mind can make sense of all of them and negotiate the cognitive dissonance that arises between the past and the present, between what is imposed and what is inherited, between the natural and the naturalized.

America First, Humanity Second: Trump, MAGA, and American Imperialism Revisited

Francisco Lobo

Source Link

The world is a strange place in 2025. A generalized sense of despondency and malaise fill the very air we breathe. Many are unhappy. Not just the poor, the disenfranchised, the oppressed. Those who are on top are also not happy. It was comedian Bill Burr who pointed out that billionaires aren’t happy with a billion dollars. But there is more. Countries endowed with a massive landmass, like Russia, are not happy with their territorial allotment. They want more. They want more land, land that does not belong to them. And, perhaps strangest of all, the first economy of the world, the country with the mightiest military forces this planet has ever seen, believes it has lost its greatness. And they want it back. They want to ‘Make America Great Again’. Enter the church of MAGA, and its prophet Donald J. Trump. In this final chapter, I will explore the impact of Trump, Trumpism, and MAGA in the rest of the world – that is, humanity or the portion of the global population that, if America is always put first, will invariably come second. This chapter should be read in tandem with Chapter Two, as it is a corollary to those initial reflections on the US as the Reluctant Empire.

As we have seen throughout this study, the praeter-colonial mind is the outlook that attempts to make sense of the many legacies of colonialism in our supposedly post-colonial world, in accordance with the varied meanings of the prefix ‘praeter’ (namely ‘past, by, beyond, above, more than, in addition to, besides’). Thus, the praeter-colonial mind sees colonialism simultaneously as past and present as it is confronted with the evidence of its many legacies. It is a mind that, ultimately, attempts to step aside to gain perspective and go above and beyond colonialism for the sake of the present and the future.

Now, if MAGA was indeed the isolationist movement many of its followers believe it to be, then the praeter-colonial mind would have very little to say about it. It would merely be a domestic phenomenon with no impact on the rest of the world. Yet, MAGA’s prophet has chosen a different path. Instead of retreating to the inner citadel of the North American landmass, to ‘Fortress America’ standing in splendid isolation, Trump has embarked on a campaign to remake the international order, seeking not only a realignment of alliances but even a redrawing of borders the likes of which we have not seen since the days of the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference or the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. How the praeter-colonial mind can make sense of what is happening to the world today is the subject of this chapter. Before that, however, a few thoughts on the domestic situation in the US are needed to lay the groundwork for further praeter-colonial reflections.

Transitional Fantasies

Crisis of Secrecy: The Weaponisation of Ambiguity in Covert Action

Ninon de Buchet

Sourec Link

This content was originally written for an undergraduate or Master's program. It is published as part of our mission to showcase peer-leading papers written by students during their studies. This work can be used for background reading and research, but should not be cited as an expert source or used in place of scholarly articles/books.

The strategic utility of covert action has traditionally been grounded in its ability to cause effects in a plausibly deniable manner (Duffield 2024, 4). However, recent transformations in the media and information environments have sparked a ‘crisis of secrecy’ with far-reaching implications for covert operations (Aldrich and Richterova 2018, 1003). Western governments’ ascription of a wide range of attacks to the Russian state since 2014, for instance, exemplify the growing implausibility of denial. Intelligence scholars have attributed this heightened risk of exposure to a variety of factors, the principal one being changes in the information landscape which have enabled investigative journalists to expose foreign interference, occasionally even rivalling domestic intelligence agencies in their attribution efforts (Cormac 2017, 170). Some have concluded that the decline of plausible deniability will nullify the benefits of covert activity (Cormac and Aldrich 2018, 493). Drawing on examples of suspected and confirmed Russian covert operations since the annexation of Crimea, this essay will argue that denial has largely become implausible due to credible attribution by non-state intelligence professionals using publicly available analytical technologies. It will further argue that the deterioration of secrecy in this domain has created new avenues for Russia to conduct operations below the threshold of armed conflict with NATO while cultivating an image of impunity.

The first section of the essay will explore how the proliferation of open-source and forensic investigation techniques has led to significant advances in the attribution and monitoring of Russian covert operations in Western Europe, particularly those undertaken as part of the Kremlin’s alleged ‘hybrid war’ against NATO. These attribution efforts are supported by globalised information flows, which facilitate greater interaction between independent media organisations and broader civil society. The second section will discuss how Russia has embraced implausible deniability. It will show that while sophisticated attribution efforts have significantly enhanced NATO’s collective response to hybrid warfare, the Kremlin has countered this by exploiting the strategic ambiguity generated by unacknowledged yet identifiable kinetic operations. As the essay will demonstrate, this dynamic has both positive and negative implications for the international security environment.

Why We Fight: The Rules-Based International Order

Francisco Lobo

Source Link

On the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings on the Normandy coast, US President Joe Biden reminded his European allies gathered in Omaha Beach the reasons why his and their forebears undertook this gallant feat of arms eight decades prior: ‘To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators is simply unthinkable. If we were to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here on these hallowed beaches’. What happened there exactly? A lot of American soldiers, as well as fighters from other nations including the UK, Canada, and France, stormed the beaches of Normandy in order to breach the impregnable ‘Fortress Europa’ lying behind Hitler’s Atlantic wall. They succeeded at an enormous human cost, but ‘Operation Overlord’ would go down in history as one of the largest, most successful, military actions on record. Furthermore, D-Day brought about something in addition to the beginning of the end of World War II. Something else happened in those ‘hallowed beaches’ that would define our lives to this day. It was the tangible consolidation of the normative commitment that the Allies had vowed to uphold a few years before with the Atlantic Charter of 1941.

In characteristically praeter-colonial fashion as they had to accommodate the colonial and the post-colonial in the same declaration of principles, the Allies committed to political freedom, self-determination, free trade and freedom of navigation, and a lasting peace made possible first by disarmament and, more importantly, by ‘a wider and permanent system of general security’ (NATO 2018, para. 15). Such a system would come to be known as the United Nations, founded a little over a year after D-Day and one of the most salient legacies of World War II.

Almost a decade later, in 1954, an acclaimed writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, William Golding, would publish his famous novel Lord of the Flies (Golding 2023). His notoriously realistic portrayal of human nature as a deposit of savagery and cruelty buried under a thin veneer of civilization waiting to come out at the first opportunity has become shorthand for chaos and pessimism about the prospects of peace among people (Bregman 2021). Like Sawyer, the folksy redneck from the TV series Lost, remarked ominously as he waved a knife at another man: ‘Folks down on the beach might have been doctors and accountants a month ago, but it’s Lord of the Flies time now’.

Opinion – Trump’s Cairo Roast and the Performance of Populism

Nicholas Morieson

Source Link

When Donald Trump spoke at the Gaza ceasefire ceremony in Cairo in October 2025, he transformed what would ordinarily have been a solemn diplomatic event into something more akin to a comedy ‘roast’. Some of the most powerful people in the world watched as Trump performed a comedy act that involved their almost ritual humiliation. Not only did Trump make jokes at the expense of a variety of Prime Ministers and Presidents, but he accepted, if not demanded, their praise. And praise him they did, calling for Trump to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and describing him as a figure of world historical importance. There were other populist leaders present, including Viktor Orban and Giorgia Meloni, but none sought to match Trump’s vulgarity or challenge his jokes and insults.

Trump did what, perhaps, no other contemporary leader could do and retain their position. He asked the Pakistani prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, whether he would now “live very nicely” with India, and when Sharif gave a halting reply, joked that he was disappointed by the response. He mentioned the absence of Norway’s Prime Minister, asking, “What happened, Norway?” He called Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni “a beautiful young woman,” acknowledging that such a comment could end a political career in the United States, before declaring, “I’ll take my chances.” The audience laughed, as well they might have, because none of them had the courage to tell Trump to his face that his behaviour was inappropriate. Rather than stick to his prepared remarks, Trump drifted freely between stories and asides. He joked about the cost of Egyptian fighter jets, praised their beauty, and reminisced about Air Force One flying over the desert sands. His stories deflated the ceremony’s gravity and replaced it with his own comic authority, with Trump as a sort of Don Rickles style insult comedian licensed to dish out the insults at will.

What is particularly interesting about this for those of us interested in Populism, is that Trump both performed as the ultimate authority and power in the world, but also as an anti-elite populist, who with common and crude speech challenged the effete, diplomatic, and ultimately dull world of the global elite. How, then, does Trump retain his status as a populist man of the people while also acting as the most powerful ‘elite’ politician in the world, essentially bullying the great and the good while demanding they pay him tribute? Perhaps the best way to understand this is to turn to Benjamin Moffitt’s work on Populism as a political style. Moffitt describes Populism as a performance that thrives on crisis, authenticity, and emotion. Populist leaders distinguish themselves through a deliberate breach of decorum. They act as though their rejection of elite manners proves they are genuine, that their lack of polish makes them more real. In Cairo, Trump embodied this principle with perfect precision. matter, because only Trump’s own opinion carried any weight in the world. Trump acted as if he had drawn these people together only to insult them to their faces, at one point saying that among the leaders present there were “a few of them [he did not] like at all. But you’ll never find out who they are”. Then he added, “Maybe you will, come to think of it”.

Review – Russia’s War on Everybody

Keir Giles

Source Link

“You may not be interested in Russia. But Russia is interested in you.” So reads the description on the back cover of Russia’s War on Everybody, a book whose title is meant literally. Giles argues that Moscow has been engaged in conflict – often covert, political, and informational, but also kinetic – around the world for decades, and that no one is beyond its hostile reach. Originally slated to be published in 2022, it had to be updated to reflect Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but in a testament to the book’s foresight, its concept and execution had only grown in relevance. Giles’ work is a darkly humorous analysis and an impassioned call to action, combining rigorous research with sharp-tongued policy analysis to drive home a central message: we underestimate the Russian threat at our peril. His unnervingly direct tone and grim subject matter is lightened by wry wit and skilful writing, making this book as enjoyable as it is informative.

“This must be the essence of our greatness. . . enemies everywhere” (p.20). The central thesis of Russia’s War on Everybody is that the Kremlin defines its enemies sweepingly, such that only a fraction of these “enemies” consider Russia to be their enemy. As Giles documents, “the Kremlin’s daily business” includes what some in the West would consider “acts of war” – poisoning dissidents, shooting down planes, election meddling, cyberattacks, and blatant political assassinations. Giles describes the Kremlin’s zero-sum worldview, in which anything benefitting others is a threat to Russia, and demonstrates that the Kremlin’s ambitions are far broader, and its methods more pervasive, than most realise.

“We would like to be playing chess, but they are already punching us in the face” (p.21). Every decision in this book is strategic. Giles willingly trades away a perception of academic impartiality for a chance at making an impact on policymakers and the public. In fact, the book’s greatest success derives from Giles’ greatest risk: his willingness to dive into the murky and epistemologically-challenging world of strategic culture. Russia’s War on Everybody serves as a kind of sequel to Giles’s earlier book, Moscow Rules (2019), which similarly focused on Russia’s strategic culture, urging Western policymakers to recognise the dangers of Russia’s obsession with power and prestige and willingness to bend the truth to the point of breaking.

20 Incredible Winning Photos from the IPF Portrait Prize 2025

Venkat Prakash

Source Link

The IPF Portrait Prize 2025 just dropped its winning images, and trust me—these portraits hit with the kind of energy that stops you mid-scroll. 20 Incredible Winning Photos from the IPF Portrait Prize 2025 isn’t just a gallery; it’s a full-blown celebration of identity, culture, emotion, and everything that makes portrait photography one of the most powerful art forms out there.

The Indian Photo Festival’s Portrait Prize has become one of the hottest platforms for photographers across the Indian subcontinent. Portraiture has always carried weight in the photography world—from those classic studio portraits your grandparents posed for, to raw, modern-day explorations of who we are and how we show up. And this year’s winners? They go way beyond a simple face in a frame. These photographers captured soul, struggle, joy, roots, rebellion—real stories that stay with you.

What makes this award so special is the way it lifts both rising talents and seasoned pros, giving them space to share their vision with the world. These images spark conversations about identity, culture, diversity, and representation—topics that matter now more than ever. And honestly, the storytelling in these frames is unmatched. You can feel the heartbeat of entire communities in some shots, while others zoom in on intimate moments that feel almost sacred.

Huge shoutout to this year’s judge, Kiran Karnani, Global Chief Marketing Officer at Harlowe, for leading the selection of these unforgettable portraits.

All 20 winning images will be showcased at the Indian Photo Festival from November 20th, 2025, to January 4th, 2026, at the State Art Gallery in Hyderabad. If you’re anywhere near the city, this is one exhibition you don’t wanna miss.

Donald Trump: Reconfiguring Global Order

Jeffrey Sommers, Zoltán Vörös and István Tarrósy

Source Link

Chaos seems to mark US policy under President Donald Trump at first blush. But behind what appears (and sometimes is) capricious Trump Administration decision making are policymakers with serious plans. They intend to engage perceived threats to the United States power, while transforming its economy in ways making it less dependent on global supply chains and “reserve assets.” Recognizing festering wounds to the US economy while seeing areas of strength, Trump policymakers look to cauterize the former while pivoting more fully to the latter. Trump’s presidency has openly engaged in criticizing past US liberal interventionist and neoconservative foreign policy. Branded as “America First” Trump’s US does not seek isolationist withdrawal from the globe, but rather a dismantling of institutional structures and alliances that no longer benefit Washington.

The United States can and should continue projecting power far but, not wide, according to America Firsters. Under America First, the national interest does not always align with the “international community,” a term America Firsters would regardless see, borrowing a line from Benedict Anderson, as a fictitious “imagined community.” America First means dismantling the liberal hegemonic world order, or at minimum the US offloading the bill for it. The cost of that liberal order, with some 750 US military bases abroad, combined with growing power of the BRICS (China chiefly, but not only), signals to America Firsters America’s need to retreat from some parts of the world, while continuing to exercise dominance in others.

Related to national security is the fallout from a generation of globalization in labor markets. US offshoring of manufacturing in the post-Bretton Woods period lowered production costs. Cheap goods produced abroad were then purchased by Americans even more cheaply courtesy of the overvalued dollar as the world’s reserve currency. This worked great for US consumers, albeit with the intention of also pushing down US labor costs. Globalization enabled the United States to vacuum up global manufactures, while also running up massive government fiscal deficits. As former Vice-President Dick Cheney described it during globalization’s heyday, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” What was once, however, a massive advantage for the United States later became its “twin deficits” problem.

In short, the best fit for the US is a realist spheres of influence model, according to the Trump Administration. The criticism of the liberal world order, of course, circles back to the aforementioned economic challenges: on the one hand, the negative economic processes related to global labor organization and America’s indebtedness, and on the other hand, the strengthening of emerging international actors. Amongst these entities, the People’s Republic of China has long been high on the agenda. During the first Trump administration the president escalated tariffs on goods imported from Asia’s giant, which then led to a trade war. According to a Pew Research Center survey from mid-April 2025, although Americans believe that this bilateral trade relationship benefits China more than the US, they are “skeptical that increased tariffs on Chinese imports will have a positive effect on the country or on their own lives.” The Trump Administration thinks otherwise.

Western soldiers are turning to Xbox controllers to fight a new kind of drone war. The pilots love them.

Jake Epstein

Source Link 

Western soldiers are using Xbox controllers to fly interceptor drones.

The drones, part of the Merops system, have been used in Ukraine and are now being deployed by NATO.

A US soldier training on Merops said the Xbox controller makes it easy to work the system.

NOWA DĘBA, Poland — Western soldiers are using off-the-shelf Xbox controllers to pilot $15,000 interceptor drones that are combat-proven in Ukraine and now part of NATO's toolbox for battling a growing threat.

The Merops system, an American-made air-defense setup that comes with an Xbox controller for the operators, launches interceptor drones capable of destroying enemy drone threats midair. US, Polish, and Romanian troops have been training on it as NATO rushes to field affordable air defenses across Eastern Europe.

A US soldier who pilots the interceptors told Business Insider that the Xbox controller is an ideal choice.

"It's compact and easy to pack and store, and Xbox controllers are very rugged," Army Sgt. Riley Hiner said on the sidelines of a Merops demonstration in southeast Poland this week.

'Very intuitive'

The US and other global militaries have long used Xbox-style controllers to support operations, including those involving drones. The practice has expanded to the war in Ukraine and is now being applied to the Merops system.

Controllers akin to those of Microsoft's Xbox or other video game systems have been increasingly integrated into military systems. The controls are often easier for soldiers who grew up playing with something similar to operate. They adapt right away, something that might not happen with an overly engineered system built to meet specialized military specifications.

The Myths That Warp How America Sees Russia—and Vice Versa

Michael Kimmage and Jeremy Shapiro

Source Link

“Mythology is not a lie,” wrote Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of myth and archetype. “It is metaphorical.” Myths and metaphors provide the narratives that inspire patriotic devotion, motivate soldiers to fight, and help explain the outside world. And the myths that nations cherish about themselves often reinforce the complementary myths that they adopt about others.

Russia and the United States harbor especially powerful myths about each other. The myth that Russia believes about the United States is that it has vassals rather than allies—that it is a hegemonic power that

AI attack agents are accelerators, not autonomous weapons: the Anthropic attack

Pierluigi Paganini 

Source Link

Why today’s AI attack agents boost human attackers but still fall far from becoming real autonomous weapons.

Anthropic recently published a report that sparked a lively debate about what AI agents can actually do during a cyberattack. The study shows an AI system, trained specifically for offensive tasks, handling 80–90% of the tactical workload in simulated operations. At first glance, this sounds like a giant leap toward autonomous cyber weapons, but the real story is more nuanced, and far less dramatic.

Anthropic’s agent excelled at one thing: speed. It generated scripts in seconds, tested known exploits with no fatigue, scanned configurations at scale, and built basic infrastructure faster than any analyst could. These tasks normally take hours or days, and the AI completed them almost instantly. It automated the “grunt work” that fills so much of an attacker’s time.

But the report also shows what the AI didn’t do. Human operators designed the attack, set objectives, structured the campaign, monitored results, and made every strategic decision. The model never decided whom to target, how far to escalate, or how to respond to unexpected defenses. It didn’t reason about risk, attribution, timing, or geopolitical consequences. Humans handled all of that.

Parts of the internet are hitting their AI-slop breaking point

Shannon Carroll

Source Link

AI slop is hitting feeds faster than anyone can scroll past it, and the pitch from the billionaires funding this generative future — Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, etc. — hasn’t convinced their own users. It seems that people increasingly want less machine-made slop, not more of it. Now, some of the biggest social platforms are quietly offering ways to turn down the synthetic noise that they spent the last two years amplifying.

People aren’t shy about saying why they’re tired of the synthetic stuff. Fandoms are banning AI “fan art” because it flattens every character into the same glassy-eyed template, and book communities have pushed publishers into replacing covers that were quietly built from Midjourney scraps. Multiple studies keep pointing in the same direction: People want AI to help artists, not create the art; people show a clear bias against AI-generated art when they think a machine made it; and people choose human-made work even when they can’t immediately tell the difference.

Russian and North Korean Hackers Forge Global Cyberattack Alliance

Mayura Kathir

Source Link

State-sponsored hackers from Russia and North Korea are collaborating on shared infrastructure, marking a significant shift in cyber geopolitics.

Security researchers have uncovered evidence suggesting that Gamaredon, a Russia-aligned advanced persistent threat (APT) group, and Lazarus, North Korea’s primary cyber warfare unit, may be operating jointly a development with profound implications for global security.

Russia and North Korea’s partnership extends well beyond traditional military cooperation. Moscow backed Pyongyang during the Korean War, and in 2024, both nations formalized their alliance through a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership featuring mutual defense commitments.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, North Korea has supplied munitions and troops to support Moscow’s military efforts. This ground-level cooperation now appears to have a digital equivalent.

On July 28, 2025, security monitoring systems detected suspicious activity linking Gamaredon and Lazarus through a shared IP address, suggesting operational-level coordination between the two state-backed actors.

Six Technologies the Pentagon Thinks Will Win the Next War

Source Linik

This week, the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (USD(R&E)) Emil Michael released the updated list of critical technologies for the Department. We were anticipating the list and even understood that the new list would significantly reduce the number of technologies.

The pared down list goes from 14 critical technologies to 6.

Looking at the list, it appears that several of the original 14 have been consolidated within the six. For example, the quantum and battlefield information dominance technologies—defined as Quantum and Battlefield Information Dominance (Q-BID): Delivering advanced capabilities to maintain communications, precision navigation and timing (PNT), and electromagnetic spectrum maneuverability, even in degraded or denied environments.—really combines the quantum science, FutureG, integrated network systems-of-systems from the original list.

Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael Announces Six Critical Technology Areas for the War Department

Source Link

The Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering (USW(R&E)), Emil Michael, unveiled six Critical Technology Areas (CTAs) that will define the future of American military superiority. These CTAs represent the cutting edge of research and engineering, designed to deliver immediate, tangible results to the warfighter and ensure the United States remains the most lethal fighting force in the world. From unleashing the full potential of artificial intelligence to scaling our hypersonic weapon arsenal, the Department is committed to delivering technologies that will shape the destiny of American military might for generations to come.

"Our adversaries are moving fast, but we will move faster," said Emil Michael, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering. "The warfighter is not asking for results tomorrow; they need them today. These six Critical Technology Areas are not just priorities; they are imperatives. The American warfighter will wield the most advanced technology to maximize lethality. This is how the War Department wins wars."

The time to move ICBMs from the Air Force to the Army is now

Todd Harrison 

Source Link

Airman 1st Class Vincent Rymar, 341st Missile Maintenance Squadron missile management team cage man trainee, lowers himself into a trainer missile silo March 5, 2025, at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Mont. Becoming a certified MMT technician takes six months of continuous training both in the classroom and in the missile training silo. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Mary Bowers)

In his first message to airmen, new Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach said it plainly: “At our core, we fly and fix aircraft. It is the heart of who we are and what we do.” He’s right — and yet, for decades, the land-based leg of America’s nuclear triad has sat within a military service fundamentally mismatched to the mission.

Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) ended up in the Air Force in the early days of the space age when missile and rocket technology were deeply intertwined. The architects who championed ICBMs — figures like Gen. Bernard Schriever — have long since passed. What remains is an ICBM force sliding into disrepair and a troubled modernization program that is 81 percent over budget and risks undermining the credibility of America’s nuclear deterrent.

With the ICBM enterprise at a crossroads, Congress and the administration should move this critical mission to the Army, where it logically belongs today.

The moment is right for decisive change: The Sentinel program is already being restructured, and new missiles, silos, and support facilities will begin to take shape in the coming years. The question is whether we use this opportunity to fix a long simmering structural mismatch, or whether we pour new systems and even more funding into an outdated structure that continues down the failed path of the past 30 years.

There are three fundamental reasons why the Air Force is no longer a fit for the ICBM mission, and why the Army is.

From drones to fighter jets: How AI is quietly reshaping India’s battlefield strategy

Subhadra Srivastava

Source Link

India has moved beyond treating artificial intelligence as experimental research and is now embedding it as a core combat capability. AI is already driving battlefield decisions, logistics, aerial combat support and autonomous surveillance, with more than 300 defence-focused AI projects underway across DRDO, the services, defence PSUs and iDEX startups. According to an official announcement, the Defence Artificial Intelligence Council (DAIC) and Defence AI Project Agency (DAIPA) have been created to accelerate military adoption under a formal roadmap. The message is clear: future conflicts will be shaped not only by weapons, but by algorithms that decide faster than the enemy.

Battlefield intelligence and decision systems

In a press note issued in October 2025, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh had stated, 'The battlefield has changed. Wars of tomorrow will be fought with algorithms, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence.' One of the most significant changes lies in command-and-control. AI-enabled data-fusion tools now combine inputs from satellites, drones, UAVs, radars and electronic sensors to create real-time battlefield pictures. These systems assist commanders by recommending optimal responses to threats, significantly shortening decision loops. Early field deployment has shown that AI-supported battle management can reduce reaction time from minutes to seconds — a critical advantage in high-tempo mechanised or air-land engagements.

Autonomous aerial systems and combat assistance

AI is also altering the aerial domain. Unmanned and semi-autonomous aircraft, including TAPAS-BH UAV and the stealth UCAV programme Ghatak, rely on AI for navigation, target recognition and mission autonomy. The Tejas Mk1A, and future AMCA platform, incorporate AI-based pilot workload reduction, predictive flight diagnostics and mission-planning assistance. In parallel, swarm drone technology is being developed for co-ordinated attacks, with AI allocating targets across dozens of autonomous platforms simultaneously.

India's largest conglomerate stops Russian oil imports amid global pressure

Cherylann Mollan

Source Link

Reliance Industries is India's largest importer of Russian oil

India's largest conglomerate Reliance Industries, owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, has stopped importing Russian crude oil for its export-only refining unit at Jamnagar in the western state of Gujarat.

The move aims to comply with an EU ban on fuel imports made from Russian oil through third countries, which takes effect next year. It also aligns with US sanctions on major Russian oil producers Rosneft and Lukoil, set to kick in on Friday.

"This transition has been completed ahead of schedule to ensure full compliance with product-import restrictions coming into force on 21 January 2026," Reliance said in a statement.

The White House has welcomed the move by Reliance.

"We welcome this shift and look forward to advancing meaningful progress on US-India trade talks," the White House press office said, in a statement to the Washington Post.

Delhi's purchase of Russian oil has been a major sticking point between India and the US. Trump slapped India with 50% tariffs in August, including a 25% penalty for buying Russian oil and arms, which he says was funding Moscow's war on Ukraine - a charge India has denied.

India's purchases of discounted Russian oil shot up from barely 2.5% of imports before the war began in 2022, to around 35.8% in 2024-25.

Reliance is India's largest importer of Russian oil, and accounts for around 50% of Russian oil flows into the country.

The Jamnagar refinery is the largest single-site refining complex in the world - with two separate units dedicated for exports and the domestic market.

Economic Deterrence in a China Contingency

Howard J. Shatz, Marco Hafner, Naoko Aoki, Peter Dortmans, Timothy R. Heath, Fiona Quimbre

Source Link

Deterring China from launching an attack on Taiwan is a central focus of U.S. and allied security planning. This planning encompasses creation and revision of military strategies, the establishment of partnerships with like-minded nations, and the gaming and simulation of conflict scenarios. Restrictive economic measures, such as sanctions, are also part of the deterrence toolkit. However, the timing, effectiveness, and desirability of these measures remain uncertain.

In this report, the authors explore a scenario involving a strong perceived likelihood that China would blockade or invade Taiwan within an ensuing three to six months. The authors discuss what economic measures the United States, Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom (UK) might employ to deter such aggression, how such measures might influence China’s actions, and how such measures might affect the global economic system. The report concludes with policy implications for U.S. and allied policymakers as they navigate an increasingly complex relationship with China. While U.S. policymakers may well institute such preemptive economic measures, the chances of success will depend heavily on the specific scenario under which the measures are instituted, and allies are highly unlikely to join in such preemptive economic measures absent strong U.S. pressure and leadership.

Key Findings

The United States can institute a variety of measures. If it were well-supported that China were to invade Taiwan in an ensuing three to six months, it is possible, but uncertain, that the United States would institute preemptive sanctions.

Australia would seek to use other levels of national power before sanctions. Australia would embrace economic deterrence tools only if it believed the threat from China was existential or if it significantly and irreversibly threatened Australia’s immediate security interests. The United States would need to exert significant pressure on Australia to have it join meaningful, preemptive actions.

China’s innovation paradox

George Magnus

Source Link

On the day of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, a small Chinese tech company founded in only 2023, DeepSeek, shocked the AI industry, rattled US financial markets, and created a truly global stir. Notwithstanding controversies about cost and intellectual property surrounding what is still a genuine and significant accomplishment, it is fair to say that DeepSeek’s commoditisation of AI is exactly how transformational technology happens. Innovation and competition drive down costs, leading to the technology becoming embedded in the whole economy, not just the narrower, innovative parts.

These AI industry implications are centre-stage for now. It has also been argued that DeepSeek’s model represents not so much a ‘Sputnik’ moment as a case of hyperbole, and that the consequences of the AI arms race will throw up many surprises. Not the least of these is China’s persistent dependency on semiconductor technology developed by the US and its close allies, heightened by tariffs and export controls, which Trump’s administration looks set to tighten. American tech companies will want to exploit this in developing artificial general intelligence themselves.

Wider economic and geopolitical considerations are equally important. DeepSeek is, after all, part of China’s dichotomous economic state. On the one hand, China has many dynamic, modern sectors. Several firms and industries are in the vanguard of scientific and technological development in clean energy, electric vehicles, and batteries, as well as other so-called strategic emerging industries in which China seeks to dominate and become self-reliant. These include industrial machinery, semiconductors and computing, artificial intelligence and robotics, life-science industries, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals. These industries, which, in Xi Jinping’s Marxist framing are called ‘new productive forces’, accounted for about 13 per cent of GDP in 2022. Beijing’s heavy emphasis on industrial policy and exports, and its uniquely large state-assistance programmes aim to push this proportion up.

At the same time, over 80 per cent of China’s economy is in the doldrums. The lion’s share of this part of the economy, roughly two fifths, comprises real estate and infrastructure, both of which feature over-expansion, excess supply, shrinking demand as the working age population falls, and severe financial problems among heavily indebted local and provincial governments. In this part of China’s economy, the principal features are slowing economic growth, stagnating productivity, and the misallocation and inefficient use of capital, as well as weak household income, consumer demand and employment.

A Cold War with Chinese characteristics

Rana Mitter

Source Link

The Cold War, in its classic sense, did not start or end in East Asia in 1989. There was an uprising against the Communist Party in China in the spring of that year, but it was suppressed at the cost of many deaths as the army was sent in to crack down on protesters in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989. We now know that the inner circles of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) were dismayed not only by the events of that year, but also two years later in 1991, at the fall of the USSR. Yet the liberalisers within the CCP, who were more reformers of the existing system than pluralist democrats, were purged from the leadership in 1989. China’s leadership made the bet, which turned out to be a cynical if valid one, that there was a way of combining economic reform with political continuity.

One of the great moments of possibility was symbolised by the Chinese television show River Elegy, broadcast to hundreds of millions in summer 1988. More than three decades after it was broadcast, this six-part programme remains one of the most important shows ever to be broadcast in any country. Part documentary, part polemic, the show advocated democratisation, made a condemnation of Mao, and embraced closeness to the West. It is probably the most liberal statement of values ever seen in the Chinese public sphere. It mixed interviews with intellectuals, archive footage, and shots of top CCP leader Zhao Ziyang. After 1989, both Zhao and River Elegy were locked away, unmentionable in the new, harsher atmosphere. In China, the show has never been seen again; for the rest of the world, though, much of it has now reappeared on YouTube. Watch it. It’s worth it.

Despite the political chill after 1989, however, there was also real political liberalisation in China, albeit not on the scale seen in Eastern Europe, or indeed in South Korea or Taiwan: the 1990s and early 2000s saw a move toward a limited civil society as well as more openness of political discussion. The overall pattern of post-1989 political discourse in China is more complex than it appears on the surface: post-Tiananmen crackdown and freezing of discussion (1989-92); cautious openness influenced by the desire to re-enter the global community (1992-2008); shock at the global financial crisis and turn toward a more authoritarian rule, underpinned by the Bo Xilai political scandal (2008-12); and then the steady narrowing of political discourse under Xi Jinping (2012-). Xi’s rise was not the cause of the new authoritarian turn – it was a symptom of it.