CCP Appropriates Taiwan Retrocession Day

Dennis Yang

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Taiwan Retrocession 80th Anniversary hosted by the Philadelphia Chapter of the Alliance for China’s Peaceful Reunification. (Source: ACPR)

Executive Summary:

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using the 80th anniversary of Taiwan’s retrocession to push a revisionist history, formally designating it as a national holiday, and framing 1945 as the legal return of Taiwan to China to strengthen its sovereignty claims over Taiwan.

Through its “Three 80th Anniversaries” campaign, Beijing ties Taiwan’s retrocession to China’s World War Two victory and the founding of the United Nations, repackaging these events as historical proof of rightful unification.

Taiwan’s domestic struggles regarding its identity and different interpretations of the retrocession by the two leading parties create social cleavages that Beijing exploits.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is sponsoring retrocession commemoration events in the United States, exporting misinformation and lawfare abroad, and using historical commemoration to legitimize present-day territorial claims.

On October 24, the New York chapter of the Alliance for China’s Peaceful Reunification (ACPR; 全美和平统一促进会) hosted a gala in Flushing to commemorate the “80th Anniversary of Taiwan’s Retrocession” (台湾光复 80 周年). The event, attended by the New York Consul General of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Chen Li (陈立) and several deputies, combined a policy forum with a cultural performance. Chen called on overseas Chinese to “support national reunification and oppose ‘Taiwan independence’” (支持国家统一、反对‘台独’). Organizers hailed Beijing’s decision to designate October 25 as “Taiwan Retrocession Memorial Day” (台湾光复纪念日), describing it as a reminder of the “shared bloodline and destiny between compatriots on both sides of the Strait” (两岸同胞血脉相连、命运与共) (The Voice of Chinese, October 25). At a similar event in June, the Philadelphia ACPR declared that the victory in the anti-Japanese War belongs especially to the “Taiwan compatriots” (尤其是台湾同胞) who sacrificed their lives (ACPR, June 9). [1] The commemorations on U.S. soil highlights the PRC’s use of united front networks to export revisionist historical narratives that use the language of remembrance to advance legally dubious present-day sovereignty claims.

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The Art of Letting Trump Claim a Win, While Walking Away Stronger

Lily Kuo and David Pierson

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By withholding soybean purchases and rare-earth exports, China extracted relief from U.S. tariffs and delayed export controls, without conceding much in return.

President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, after talks on Thursday ended. Mr. Xi said to Mr. Trump that both sides should avoid falling into a “vicious cycle of mutual retaliation.”Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Lily Kuo reported from Taipei, Taiwan. David Pierson reported from Busan, where China’s leader Xi Jinping and President Trump met at an airport.

When Xi Jinping walked out of his meeting with President Trump on Thursday, he projected the confidence of a powerful leader who could make Washington blink.

The outcome of the talks suggested that he succeeded.

By flexing China’s near monopoly on rare earths and its purchasing power over U.S. soybeans, Mr. Xi won key concessions from Washington — a reduction in tariffs, a suspension of port fees on Chinese ships and the delay of U.S. export controls that would have barred more Chinese firms from access to American technology. Both sides also agreed to extend a truce struck earlier this year to limit tariffs.

“What’s clear is they have become increasingly bold in exerting leverage and they are happy to pocket any and all U.S. concessions,” said Julian Gewirtz, who was a senior China policy official at the White House and the State Department in President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration.

Sounding almost as if he were delivering a lecture, Mr. Xi said to Mr. Trump that the “recent twists and turns” of the trade war should be instructive to them both, according to a Chinese government summary of Mr. Xi’s remarks at the meeting in Busan, South Korea.

Profiles in Weakness at the Trump-Xi Meeting

HAROLD JAMES

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While most people regard the Sino-American rivalry as a new cold war between two world-bestriding giants, the truth is that both countries are tightly constrained. Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping each sense the other side's vulnerabilities, which means they cannot hide their own.

PRINCETON – The world has awaited this week’s meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping with bated breath. Can a face-to-face encounter – this time at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in South Korea – resolve a conflict that has generated increasingly alarming headlines this year?

Financial Investors Can’t Profit From Complacency Forever

ŞEBNEM KALEMLI-ÖZCAN argues that bond-market participants and others are consciously choosing to ignore obvious policy risks.

While most people regard the Sino-American rivalry as a new cold war – a struggle for global preeminence, with each side seeking to extend its financial, trade, and military influence to every corner of the world – the truth is that both countries are tightly constrained.

True, their leaders’ rhetoric supports the Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf’s contention that we are witnessing a clash between two predatory superpowers in a new age of polarization and simmering conflict. Xi regularly speaks of “great changes unseen in a century,” by which he means that the United States is declining and China is rising, whereas US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent views China’s recent export controls as “a sign of how weak their economy is.”

Both sides are right. China knows that America is highly dependent on Chinese critical minerals and rare earths – from gallium and germanium to dysprosium and samarium. Any disruption to the supply of these materials could halt US production of advanced semiconductors and other technologies. While mining and processing capacity could eventually be developed elsewhere, including in the US, that will not happen quickly or cheaply. For the time being, the US is locked in its dependency, with little choice but to compromise.

But China also has vulnerabilities. It still needs exports to drive its economy’s growth, and thus cannot afford a collapse in world trade. This fact alone undercuts the argument that we are in a new cold war: the original Cold War involved almost no economic dependence between the US and the Soviet Union. They might not like it, but today’s cold warriors are being pushed toward some sort of truce, on the way to some sort of longer-term commitment.

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Go beyond the headlines to understand the issues, forces, and trends shaping the US presidential election – and the likely implications of its outcome.

US missiles stationed in Philippines can reach China: official

Ryan Chan

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A Philippine general said on Friday that the United States Typhon missile system deployed in the country since April last year is capable of striking China.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Why It Matters

The Typhon Mid-Range Capability system is a land-based missile system operated by the U.S. Army. It can launch two types of missiles—the Tomahawk and the Standard Missile-6—against aerial, surface and land targets, with respective ranges of about 1,000 and 290 miles.

The U.S. Army initially deployed the Typhon missile system in the Philippines for drills, but the U.S. and the Philippines, allies under a mutual defense treaty, later decided to keep it there indefinitely. Eastern and southern China and parts of the South China Sea—where Beijing and Manila have territorial disputes—fall within range of the system.

What To Know

Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief General Romeo Brawner Jr. said in an interview that deploying the Typhon missile system is part of the military's effort to strengthen its capability to defend the country against any invasion attempt, the Daily Tribune reported.

While acknowledging that mainland China and China's artificial islands in the South China Sea are within range of the system, the general said the weapon's range does "not matter to others" as the Philippines focuses on building defenses against "any threats."

"It is not specifically targeting China, but these missile systems are here so we can train. Once we acquire these capabilities, we must be ready to use them," the general said. Manila revealed its interest in buying the Typhon missile system last November.

The Philippine military chief said that even without hosting the U.S. missile system, the country is already a target because of its "very strategic" location, close to Taiwan and serving as a chokepoint between the South China Sea and the broader Pacific.

China's communist government has claimed sovereignty over the self-governed island of Taiwan and has threatened to use force to achieve reunification. The Typhon missile system could strike Chinese invasion forces in the air and at sea from the Philippines.

Trump and Xi Ease Off the Trade War, but New Nuclear Threat Brings a Chill

President Trump said after their meeting in Busan, South Korea, that he and Xi Jinping of China had agreed to an economic truce, walking back some of the tariffs and retaliatory measures that had roiled the world economy.Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Katie Rogers

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Katie Rogers and Erica Green are White House correspondents following the president’s travels in Asia.

Ahead of the high-stakes meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping of China on Thursday, world leaders were hoping for news of an economic truce that could help stabilize the global economy. They got it.

They got something extra, as well: intensified concerns about whether the world is entering a new era of nuclear weapons proliferation among global powers.

After a 90-minute face to face meeting in South Korea, Mr. Trump announced that the two leaders had sharply de-escalated their trade standoff, agreeing, in essence, on a yearlong cease-fire that would roll back tit-for-tat measures including steep tariffs and shutting off access to rare earth metals.

The meeting was the most anticipated and consequential event of Mr. Trump’s nearly weeklong tour through Asia, where he engaged in a series of trade and security agreements with other countries in the region, many of them geared toward containing Beijing.

“I guess on the scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being the best, I would say the meeting was a 12,” Mr. Trump said aboard Air Force One as he returned to Washington.

The agreement was a win for the world economy, but was brokered under the shadow of a new and sudden amplification of nuclear threats between global powers.

Just minutes before he landed in Busan, South Korea, to meet with Mr. Xi, Mr. Trump announced on social media that the United States would immediately restart nuclear weapons testing after a lull of more than 30 years. The announcement came after Russia announced that it had also conducted tests of a nuclear-capable missile and sea drone this week.

One of the helicopters in the presidential transport fleet, known as Marine One, arriving at the international airport in Busan.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

“Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” he wrote, saying the process would begin immediately.

Mr. Trump did not provide any further details about the decision. But with his message, Mr. Trump seemed to be ratcheting up pressure as he prepared to meet with the leader with the world’s second- largest economy and third-largest nuclear arsenal.

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The New Eurasian Order America Must Link Its Atlantic and Pacific Strategies

Julianne Smith and Lindsey Ford

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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 ways, creating a more unified theater of competition in Eurasia. In response, U.S. allies are coalescing. For a few years, the United States led that effort. In 2021, it formed AUKUS, a security arrangement with Australia and the United Kingdom. In 2022, NATO began inviting Asian countries to participate in its annual summits. And in 2024, Japan, South Korea, the United States, and the EU created a coalition to loosen China’s grip over pharmaceutical supply chains.

Today, however, the United States appears to be dispensing with a transregional approach to great-power competition. In May, Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, dissuaded British officials from sending an aircraft carrier on a scheduled deployment to the Indo-Pacific. The gist of Colby’s position, according to an anonymous source quoted by Politico, was simple: “We don’t want you there.” He urged them to focus instead on threats closer to home—namely, Russia.

Washington is now encouraging its Asian and E

Counterpunch: NATO Must Take the Offensive

Too many NATO members fail to understand the risks of cyberspace and the need to hit back at aggressors. This is a recipe for failure.

Emily Otto

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NATO has invested heavily in cyber defense since 2016, but most of its members remain focused on protecting national networks rather than taking the initiative.

Starting in 2020, the alliance found itself in an unbalanced position: threat sharing is improving, but offense and contesting NATO’s very active adversaries in cyberspace is the responsibility of only a few. This gap matters because cyberspace is a domain of constant contact, where passivity cedes advantage.

Five years on, little has changed: NATO’s cyber posture remains weak, anchored in passive defense, while a handful of states shoulder the burden of offensive operations in cyberspace.

NATO recognizes cyberspace as an operational domain, but its members diverge sharply in practice. Most allies focus on network defense — fielding incident response teams and resilience frameworks built around “protection” and “security”. Few explicitly mention offensive action. Only a few, like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, “counter,” “contest,” and “deliver effects” through military-led offensive cyber forces. The result is an uneven posture: many defend, but few fight.

A handful of members have inched toward a more active cyber posture but still stop short of persistently disrupting adversaries. The Netherlands, for instance, recognizes the constant nature of foreign interference yet confines its response to intelligence sharing and coordination — an upgrade from wartime-only operations but still reactive. Russian-backed groups exploit this hesitation. Like it or not, NATO is already in a cyber conflict — it’s just refusing to admit it.

Military Strategy Magazine Volume 10, Issue 3

Nuclear Deterrence Reconsidered: The Emerging Threat of Limited Nuclear Warfare

Thomas Rijntalder

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This article analyzes the concept of limited nuclear war (LNW) and argues that the likelihood of states adopting an LNW strategy is increasing, driven by shifting global power dynamics and technological advancements. Under certain conditions, the use of nuclear weapons could achieve political objectives without escalating into full-scale nuclear war, something that Cold War dynamics largely precluded.

Strategy and the Last Manager: The Case for Dissenting War Studies

Jules J.S. Gaspard, M.L.R. Smith

Applying James Burnham’s theory of the ‘managerial revolution’ to the evolution of war studies, this article argues that the field has been captured and reshaped by a managerial class more concerned with institutional consensus than with the political essence of war. Tracing war studies from its aristocratic and capitalist roots through the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, it contends that managerial dominance has replaced strategic insight with technocratic jargon and policy-adjacent busywork. The essay calls for a ‘dissenting war studies’ that resists insider capture, restores political clarity, and re-centres the study of war on its true purpose.

Lasers Will Not Win Wars

Jules J.S. Gaspard

Lasers may dazzle and impress us, but they will not win wars. This essay shows how faith in “game-changing” technology represents the Red Queen’s race—running faster, only to stay in place—and why true strategic change remains a political, not technical, act.

Trump hails 'amazing' meeting with China's Xi but no formal trade deal agreed

Laura Bicker,China correspondent ,

Anthony Zurcher,North America correspondent and

Flora Drury

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US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, have met for the first time in six years - raising hopes for a de-escalation of tensions between the world's two biggest economies.

Trump described the talks, held in South Korea, as "amazing", while Beijing said they had reached a consensus to resolve "major trade issues".

Relations have been tense since Trump began imposing new tariffs on China, prompting retaliation from Beijing. The two agreed to a truce in May, but tensions remained high.

Thursday's talks did not lead to a formal agreement but the announcements suggest they are closer to a deal - the details of which have long been subject to behind-the-scenes negotiations.

Trade deals normally take years to negotiate. Countries around the world have been thrown into resolving differences with Trump within a matter of months, after he imposed sweeping tariffs - or import taxes - on some of his top trade partners.

Some of those key trading partners are in Asia, where Trump has spent the last several days.

Tariff 'truce' and movement on rare earths

China has agreed to suspend export control measures it had placed on rare earths, crucial for the production of everything from smartphones to fighter jets. This has been seen as a key win for Trump from his meeting with Xi.

A jubilant Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he had also got China to start immediately buying a "tremendous amounts of soybeans and other farm products". Retaliatory tariffs on American soybeans by Beijing had effectively halted imports from the US, harming US farmers - who constitute a key voting block for Trump.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent later told Fox Business that China had agreed to buy 12 million metric tonnes of soybeans this season, and would follow that up with a minimum of 25 million tonnes per year for the next three years.

Trump's 'amazing' bargain with Xi turns out a dud - Asia Times

Trump raised expectations of a grand China trade deal but wholly underdelivered in his much-anticipated summit with Xi

William Pesek

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US President Donald Trump touted the trade-war breakthrough with China’s Xi Jinping with predictable triumphalism. On Thursday, Trump gushed about an “amazing” meeting with Xi, where he agreed to cut China’s tariff to 47%. But the odds that posterity will concur are exceedingly low.

For one thing, there’s nothing “grand” about the bargain to which Trump and Xi are discussing in the loosest and vaguest terms possible. Specifics, targets, enforcement mechanisms and punishment for non-compliance will all be discussed by US and Chinese trade officials at a future date.

Nothing on the table, though, alters the mechanics of a US$659 billion trade relationship in any notable way. Face-saving agreements to throttle back on tariffs, buy more soybeans and increase the flow of rare-earth minerals are grand on some levels. But narrowing America’s trade deficit with China requires a wholesale remaking of commercial dynamics.

For another, myriad tripwires could — and likely will — return Trump and Xi to battle stations. Count the ways things could go awry: China depreciating the yuan; Trump depreciating the dollar; the US economy slowing sharply; either side failing to live up to a deal; domestic political troubles prompting either leader to lash out abroad.

“It’s good for the world’s top two largest economies to dial down tensions,” says Ting Lu, economist at Nomura Holdings, “but we believe the superpower rivalry will likely escalate in the future.” As such, he says, global investors are learning to embrace the new normal of “tension, escalation and truce.”

Economist Chang Shu at Bloomberg Economics says, “we expect the leaders to approve the deal, but whether it will bring lasting relief to markets is less clear — the new reality for US-China ties appears to be one of frequent ruptures and short-term fixes.”

Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius adds that the “recent policy moves suggest a wider range of potential outcomes than appeared to be the case ahead of the last few key US-China meetings. The likely scenario seems to be that both sides pull back on the most aggressive policies and that talks lead to a further—and possibly indefinite—extension of the tariff escalation pause reached in May.”

Of Trump, Ali Wyne, senior US-China researcher at the International Crisis Group, notes that “he seems to think of Xi not as an avatar of imperial ambition, but rather as the head of an impressive rival business company.” This means the best-case scenario is for Trump and Xi to “leverage mutual vulnerability as a gateway to mutual restraint.”

America and China Can Have a Normal Relationship

Da Wei 

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How to Move Past Strategic Competition

Da Wei

U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Geneva, Switzerland, May 2025 Martial Trezzini / 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.

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.

AMERICA VERSUS THE WORLD

The possibility of an inflection point stems in part from changes in U.S. foreign policy. From Beijing’s perspective, Trump’s first term marked the onset of a period of strategic competition in which the United States, viewing China as its most serious adversary and competitor, sought primarily to contain or slow China’s economic and technological rise. It was, in other words, the United States versus China. Under President Joe Biden, Washington maintained the same goals but sought to do so in concert with its allies—the West versus China. For strategists and policymakers in China, both Trump and Biden believed that American and Chinese interests were fundamentally at odds, and therefore the only option was unyielding competition that left no room for compromise

As Trump Weighs Sale of Advanced A.I. Chips to China, Critics Sound Alarm

Ana Swanson and Tripp Mickle

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Ana Swanson covers trade, and Tripp Mickle reports on technology.

The president signaled he would discuss the sale of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips in a summit on Thursday, a move U.S. officials warned would be a “massive” national security mistake.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, at the company’s conference in Washington on Tuesday.Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times

As President Trump flew to South Korea on Wednesday to prepare for a summit with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, he made some remarks that set off alarm bells among Washington officials concerned about America’s rivalry with China.

“We’ll be speaking about Blackwell,” Mr. Trump said of his meeting with Mr. Xi, referring to the most advanced artificial intelligence chip from the U.S. chipmaker Nvidia. Mr. Trump called the technology a “super duper chip”; complimented Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang; and declared, “We’re about 10 years ahead of anybody else in chips.”

Mr. Trump’s comments signaled a major potential change for U.S. policy that many Washington officials warn poses a national security risk. Selling such advanced A.I. chips to China is currently banned, and U.S. officials have worked for years to restrain Beijing’s access to the cutting-edge technology.

The president’s reversal, if it comes to pass, would have widespread implications. Nvidia, which has emphasized the importance of maintaining access to the Chinese market, would reap new sales. But critics have argued that A.I. technology is important enough to potentially shift the balance of power in a strategic competition between the United States and China.

On Wednesday, speculation that the Trump administration may imminently approve the sale of those chips to China mobilized opposition from critics inside and outside the White House and in Congress.

Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said on CNN that the reports “alarmed” him.

“The defining fight of the 21st century will be who controls artificial intelligence,” he said. “It would be a tragic mistake for President Trump, in order to get some soybean orders out of China, to sell them these critical cutting-edge A.I. chips.”

In an interview, R. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China from 2021 to 2025 and now a Harvard professor, said he hoped the Trump administration would “hold the line” on U.S. tech sales to China, calling them “a massive mistake.”

The People’s Liberation Army of China wants to dislodge the United States, and sees technology as key to doing that, Mr. Burns said. Chinese laws also require companies to share technology and information with the government if asked.

If the Chinese military became stronger by better adapting technology over the next decade, the consequences for the United States and allies like Japan, South Korea and India could be dire. Any gains for American companies from selling into China would most likely be “very short-lived,” Mr. Burns said, since the Chinese government wants to become self-sufficient in chip technology, as it has in other industries.

Groundwater Decline And Land Subsidence Threaten India’s Big Cities

Eurasia Review

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Across many of the world’s fastest-growing cities, demand for water has outpaced what rivers and reservoirs can provide. This has increased dependence on groundwater and placed heavy strain on underground reserves. Climate change has also worsened the problem by disrupting rainfall and causing surface water to dry up more quickly. Yet each time water is pumped from underground, it removes the support that keeps the ground stable, putting overlying structures at risk of damage.

A new study published in Nature Sustainability, finds that gradual land subsidence poses a growing threat to buildings across India’s largest cities. The analysis led by Dr. Manoochehr Shirzaei, the Chief Scientist of UNU-INWEH’s Global Environmental Intelligence Lab, shows that over 2,400 structures in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai are already at high risk of damage. It also warns that if current trends continue, more than 23,000 buildings across India’s five megacities could face very high risk of structural damage in the coming decades.

“You can think of land subsidence as the Earth’s response to our growing pressure on its surface and subsurface systems,” said Shirzaei, who is also an associate professor at Virginia Tech. “It starts quietly, with the ground sinking by just a few millimetres each year, but when combined with extreme events such as floods or storms, it amplifies their impact by increasing the vulnerability of structures.”

The study explains that land subsidence is largely linked to falling pressure in underground aquifers as groundwater is withdrawn faster than it can be replaced. In India, this problem is intensifying with population growth and rapid urban expansion, while changing monsoon patterns further limit the natural recharge of these underground reserves.

“In many places around the world, the irreversible damages to groundwater resources are orders of magnitude greater than what we have done to surface water resources,” said Professor Kaveh Madani, Director of UNU-INWEH. “But such damage remains invisible and unnoticed until the sinking land makes our cities unsafe.”

Critiques From The Right –

Allen Gindler

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The Trump Presidency is not boring, that is for sure. His public appearances, pressers, interviews and, most importantly, the actions of his administration have given ample cause for ongoing and heated debates.

Such exchanges of opinions, happen not only on podcasts, TV programs, or newspaper columns but also among family members and close friends. As a rule, there are two camps that take part in the discourse: Trump supporters and his opponents. However, my personal experience has added a more nuanced position, which I called critique from the right, that is, from the libertarian point of view. More precisely, from the point of view of classical liberalism.

My friends utterly reject the leftist policies of progressivism, wokeism, DEI (“Don’t Earn It”), cancel culture, mandatory redistribution of wealth, open borders and illegal immigration, and any form of collectivization. They are proponents of freedom and against all forms of terrorism or aggression (whether Hamas or Russia). And yet, we manage to find a discrepancy in the understanding and explanation of Trump’s policies. I chose the neutral, independent stance politically, as libertarianism does not have a viable political organization in the US political duopoly settings. But libertarianism has a rich philosophical tenet that forms a pretty coherent worldview. My friends jumped onto the MAGA bandwagon, and their worldview shrank to the slogan “Trump is always right.”

So, what is my critique from the right of Trump’s policies? His program started with a slew of presidential orders, and some of them caused genuine amazement and made me wary. One of the first orders was “renaming” of the Gulf of Mexico. I put renaming in quotes as the body of water designated in the presidential order does not encompass the entire gulf but renames the U.S. Continental Shelf portion, which does not adhere to the definition of the gulf. Thus, the actual renaming has never happened. Trump’s assistants fooled the President, and he in turn continues to deceive the public, firmly believing that his vision is fulfilled.

The renaming business continues. Now we have the Department of War and the Secretary of War. Did we? Not really. The order stated, “The Secretary of Defense is authorized the use of this additional secondary title — the Secretary of War — and may be recognized by that title in official correspondence, public communications, ceremonial contexts, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch.” And further, “Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of War shall submit to the President, through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, a recommendation on the actions required to permanently change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War.” (italic is mine). Statutory references to the Department of Defense remain controlling until changed by law. Thus, the main and the official names for all branches of government and governments abroad are still the Department of Defense and the Secretary of Defense. Some can use the secondary titles (aliases) — the Department and the Secretary of War — to appear tougher, I guess.

Trump Seeks Trade Agreement With Xi As Ukraine, Taiwan Loom Large

Reid Standish

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US President Donald Trump has said he expects to strike a deal when he meets with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea amid a monthslong trade war with Beijing.

“We’re going to be, I hope, making a deal. I think we’re going to have a deal. I think it will be a good deal for both,” Trump said on October 29, a day before he is set to sit down with Xi on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

A centerpiece of the October 30 in-person meeting — the first between the two leaders since 2019 — is how to ease the bruising trade war, with both sides putting out similar positive signals in the lead up to the high-stakes talks.

But while Trump and Xi look poised strike a truce in the trade war, experts who spoke to RFE/RL said that reaching a lasting trade deal is unlikely and they were less optimistic that the talks would result in dialing back US-China tensions over Taiwan — the self-governing island that Beijing claims as its own territory — or in convincing China to limit its support for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow’s war in Ukraine.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that preparatory talks ahead of the meeting have led to an agreement on a “framework” that includes a pause on China’s rare-earth restrictions, the final approvals on a deal to allow popular Chinese-owned video app TikTok to continue operating in the United States, and easing other trade frictions.

“Although the meeting might project an image of détente between China and the United States, the competition is far from over,” Claus Soong, an analyst at the Berlin-based think tank MERICS, told RFE/RL. “Structural issues persist, and neither side is willing to back off from its core interests.”

Why Gaza Proves The World Still Flinches When Genocide And Geopolitics Collide

Jonathan Lessware

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In 1994, a month into the massacre of 800,000 people in Rwanda — the fastest killing of humans in the 20th century — a US defense official raised a concern about the language to be used about the slaughter.

“Be careful … genocide finding could commit (the US government) to actually ‘do something,’” he wrote in a document to be shared with other departments.

The skittishness of President Bill Clinton’s administration to use the accurate word to describe what was unfolding in Rwanda came amid an international failure to stop what was clearly a genocide.

Thirty years later, the same diplomatic dance around the “g-word,” as some US officials referred to it, has unfolded in Western capitals and global institutions over the war in Gaza.

Last month, the most significant and comprehensive report so far declaring that Israel has carried out acts of genocide in the conflict was published by a UN-appointed commission of inquiry.

Yet the US, most European countries, and the UN itself still refrained from describing Israeli actions in Gaza as a genocide.

Traditional alliances, including longstanding support for Israel, have become entangled in a reluctance by nations to shoulder the legal burdens of international law that they had signed up to.

The inertia of nations to accept that a genocide has taken place and to therefore act to try and stop it has infuriated Palestinians and the wider Arab and Islamic world. It begs the question: How many lives could have been saved if they had?

If the fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas were to collapse and the fighting resumes, would countries like the UK and Germany then accept what international law experts say is happing — that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians?

The War That Rewrote the Middle East

Gad Yishayahu

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Ultimately, the war has shredded more than a few assumptions about Israeli strategic and military limitations.

Exactly twenty-four months after the October 7 massacre that ignited the October 7 War, the first stage of President Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan has taken effect. Under the US brokered deal, Hamas began releasing the last group of Israeli hostages, twenty alive and twenty-eight bodies (so far, fifteen returned), in exchange for 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, alongside commitments toward Gaza’s demilitarization and technocratic governance. The ceasefire, while fragile and dogged by disputes over the return of the remains of deceased Israeli hostages, still looks like it will hold.

Following the back-to-back speeches of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, this moment feels less like the end of a war than the beginning of a new strategic chapter. It is, therefore, an apt time to reflect on the paradigms that have collapsed and those that continue to define the region’s strategic and political trajectory.

For decades, Israel’s own military doctrine, echoed by outside analysts, rested on the belief that survival depended on swift, decisive campaigns designed to restore deterrence and avoid prolonged entanglement. From the Sinai campaign of 1956 and the Six-Day War of 1967 to Lebanon (1982, 2006) and Gaza (2008, 2012, 2014), Israel’s strategic ethos prized speed, initiative, and overwhelming force. The October 7 War shattered that assumption. Over twenty-four months of sustained combat, Israel demonstrated an unexpected capacity for prolonged warfare politically, economically, and psychologically. The public, long accustomed to brief campaigns, absorbed heavy losses without withholding support from the government, while the state maintained operations across multiple fronts.

Army’s new 3D printed FPV drone ‘can put lethal effects on target right now’

The deployment of 3D printers and other additive manufacturing tools will be needed in the INDOPACOM theater given the "tyranny of distance," said Gen. Ronald Clark, commanding general of Army Pacific.

Carley Welch 

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A U.S. Army Soldier assigned to the 25th Infantry Division builds a drone in a First-Person View (FPV) Drone Operating Course on Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, July 24, 2025. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Wyatt Moore, 28th Public Affairs Detachment)

WASHINGTON — The Army’s 25th Infantry Division has successfully used 3D printing to build a first person view (FPV) drone attached with lethal effects, according to a Tuesday presentation at AFCEA’s TechNet Indo-Pacific conference.

“Our Lightning Labs team has fabricated a drone that we’re calling the Capstone drone, and in partnership with the EOD [explosive ordnance disposal] team, they’ve developed a detonation system for that drone so that we can go ahead and put lethal effects on target,” Capt. David Velasquez, a multi-purpose company commander in 3rd Brigade, 25th infantry division, said.

“[It’s] completely built in house here in the 25th ID, so [I’m] extremely grateful to the soldiers who are extremely motivated. They want to get out here and be proficient on their systems, and they really do work. They can put lethal effects on target right now.”

The 25th ID, based in Hawaii, has been experimenting with 3D printers to repair parts and build new platforms, especially drones, as part of its rotational exercises across the theater, but Velasquez’s announcement Tuesday marked the first time the division has attached a lethal effect to a 3D-printed drone.

The deployment of 3D printers and other additive manufacturing tools will be needed in the Indo-Pacific theater given the “tyranny of distance” — the significant logistical challenges military forces face due to the vast geographical distances — of the INDOPACOM theater, Gen. Ronald Clark, commanding general of Army Pacific said during his keynote address Tuesday.

“When we think about the Indo-Pacific, we envision vast and diverse terrain, from dense jungles to coral atolls, from frozen Arctic tundra to tropical archipelagos, from coastal plains to the most majestic and massive mountain ranges on the planet,” Clark said.

Last month, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll shared this sentiment, telling a group of reporters that given the success and growing prominence of additive manufacturing, especially in Ukraine’s war with Russia, such tools will serve as a critical capability in the INDOPACOM region.

“The way around that is technology and additive manufacturing, where our soldiers are actually able and capable of printing things for munitions or other purposes in the theater or in the area where we send them,” Driscoll said at the time.

Further, he predicted that additive manufacturing will receive more funding in the fiscal year 2027 budget, especially given the imminent threat of a potential conflict with China, which the Pentagon has said could potentially happen in calendar 2027.

Bill Gates Is Right—Climate Change Isn’t the End of the World

Lauren Smith

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Muslim and Migrant Fatigue

What has become clear is that liberal democracy may not depend on shared ethnicity, but it absolutely depends on a shared culture.

The Last Trial of Päivi Räsänen

“Whatever the outcome of this trial is, my conscience is clear, and my faith is firm,” the Finnish parliamentarian emphasized.

Who’s Really Crashing the Economy?

The establishment elite's fake consensus is dragging Germany into the abyss they claimed only populists could create.

Why has Bill Gates, of all people, decided to break rank on climate change? The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist wrote earlier this week on his Gates Notes website, challenging what he called the “doomsday view of climate change.” While acknowledging that climate change would have “serious consequences” for some, he maintained that “it will not lead to humanity’s demise.” Rather, for the vast majority of the planet, “the biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.” Too much focus on climate is “diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”

Gates’s intervention might have been sparked by the United Nations’ latest apocalyptic proclamation, ahead of COP30 next month. In a statement on Monday, UN Secretary General António Guterres lamented the world’s failure to stop the average global surface temperature from rising by 1.5C—something that he believes will now have “devastating consequences” for humanity. As a result of this ‘overshoot,’ Guterres has warned that the Amazon rainforest could be turned into a savannah. “That is a real risk if we don’t change course and if we don’t make a dramatic decrease of emissions as soon as possible,” he said.

Guterres firmly falls into the “doomsday” camp of green acolytes. He believes that climate change (or the ‘climate crisis,’ as he would likely insist on calling it) will end life on Earth as we know it. All of humanity will be engulfed in hellfire. “The era of global warming has ended,” he declared in 2023, “the era of global boiling has arrived.” The year before, he told the world that “we are in the fight of our lives and we are losing.” He thundered: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.” He has also, unsurprisingly, hinted that high-polluting nations have an obligation to address “loss and damage” (read: climate reparations) to poorer countries.

Incredibly, Guterres is not even an extreme outlier in the world of climate activism. These people really do believe that the apocalypse is just around the corner and, within a few decades, human life on this planet will be wiped out. This hysterical belief is why increasing numbers of young people are refusing to reproduce, and why children are reporting feeling paralysed by ‘climate anxiety.’

Naturally, Gates’s defection from climate catastrophism has provoked outcry from the true believers. Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University, accused Gates of “setting up a false dichotomy,” as reported in the New York Times, “that pits efforts to tackle climate change against foreign aid for the poor.” Climatologist Michael Mann similarly called Gates “deeply misguided on climate,” while writer David Callahan suggested that Gates’s comments were the result of “not wanting to be a target of the Trump administration.”

What none of them can deny, however, is that Gates is certainly no anti-science crank. Via the Gates Foundation, he has poured billions into projects combatting climate change—including funding the development of stress-resilient strains of crops and helping farmers in Africa and South Asia to adapt to changing weather. In 2015, he founded Breakthrough Energy, an organisation with the aim of creating new technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emission and facilitate the more efficient use of renewable energies. And just four years ago, he penned a book titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, which proposed various technological innovations that would be needed to feasibly reach Net Zero and reduce human impact on climate.

The issue with Gates, as far as the green activists are concerned, is that he was always far too optimistic. Coming from a computing background, he believes that many of humanity’s problems could be solved by technology. Climate change in particular could be slowed or even reversed by existing or yet-to-be-invented tech. This is why the focus of his climate-related projects is typically innovation (developing new ways to harness clean energy, for example, or backing nuclear research), rather than attempting to socially engineer people into living more ‘sustainable’ lives.

Nvidia Is Now Worth $5 Trillion as It Consolidates Power in A.I. Boom

The A.I. chip maker has become a linchpin in the Trump administration’s trade negotiations in Asia.

Tripp Mickle

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As Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip making giant Nvidia, traveled to Asia to meet with President Trump on Wednesday, his company’s value topped $5 trillion. It was a show of wealth that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

But that was before the ChatGPT chatbot ignited an artificial intelligence boom that is remaking the global economy. It was before other tech titans began spending hundreds of billions of dollars on construction projects on almost every continent. And it was before Nvidia’s computer chips, the most essential and expensive component in almost every A.I. scheme, became a linchpin of the Trump administration’s foreign policy.

Nvidia’s milestone, making it the first publicly traded company to top $5 trillion in market value, is indicative not only of the astonishing levels of wealth consolidating among a handful of Silicon Valley companies but also the strategic importance of this company, which added $1 trillion in market value in just the past four months.

Nvidia has become a driving force behind the U.S. economy. Spending on data centers, which are filled with the company’s chips, accounted for 92 percent of the country’s gross domestic product growth in the first half of the year, according to Jason Furman, a professor of economic policy at Harvard. Without it, the economy would have grown 0.1 percent.

But Nvidia’s stunning growth also comes with a warning to investors, from the biggest banks on Wall Street to small-time traders on Main Street, that the stock market is becoming more and more dependent on a group of technology companies that are churning out billions in profits and splurging to develop an unproven technology that needs to deliver enormous returns

Corporate Geopolitics: When Billionaires Rival States

Tech giants are increasingly able to wield significant geopolitical influence. To ensure digital sovereignty, governments must insist on transparency and accountability.

Raluca Csernatoni

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Strategic Europe offers insightful analysis, fresh commentary, and concrete policy recommendations from some of Europe’s keenest international affairs observers.Learn More

Major technology companies and the billionaire entrepreneurs behind them are becoming geopolitical actors in their own right. A handful of these tech titans now rival nation-states in influence, shaping the rules of the global digital order and even competing with states over governance authority. Some have called this the technopolar world, in which big tech firms act as de facto sovereigns, setting the rules that shape how societies communicate, trade, and even wage war. Their growing leverage raises urgent questions about sovereignty, security, and democracy, as corporate leaders make decisions that have ramifications worldwide.

The twenty-first century’s real geopolitical contest is no longer only between states, but between states and the corporations that command the world’s digital infrastructure. The challenge is not to wrest control back from technology but instead to democratize it, embedding legitimacy within the algorithms, infrastructures, and partnerships that now quietly govern our digital future.

The war in Ukraine brought this shift into sharp relief. Within days of Russia’s 2022 invasion, billionaire Elon Musk provided Starlink, a satellite network managed by his company SpaceX, to keep Ukraine online in the midst of cyberattacks. The private authority of an unelected tech magnate proved vital for the country’s communications and battlefield coordination. Yet, months later, Musk declined to maintain satellite service for a Ukrainian drone mission, raising questions about the U.S. government’s ability to compel private actors to provide critical military support during times of war.

Collectively, the tech sector joined the digital frontlines as a quasi-ally to Kyiv. But Ukraine’s dependence on Starlink also exposed the fragility of outsourcing national security to corporate actors.

DeepSeek Use in PRC Military and Public Security Systems

Sunny Cheung & Kai-shing Lau

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DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, met Xi Jinping at a symposium in February. (Source: CCTV)

Executive Summary:

Military procurement documents show that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is adopting homegrown artificial intelligence (AI) systems like DeepSeek to accelerate its shift toward “intelligentized warfare.”

PLA experts describe DeepSeek not as a single product but as an evolving system architecture. They envision integrating this system across the PLA’s entire command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) chain.

Debate is ongoing as to DeepSeek’s utility for PLA purposes. Some powerful institutions back its deployment, while others remain sceptical.

Public security and policing are two areas also exploring the use of DeepSeek, especially for enhancing surveillance and data analysis, as well as for assisting with report writing and other processes.

The model’s success is framed as both a technological breakthrough and a political achievement in “algorithmic sovereignty.”

On October 21, the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek (深度求索) announced the release of a new tool to converts large text datasets into compact image-based formats: DeepSeek-OCR (DeepSeek, October 21). While not the long-awaited R2 large language model (LLM), the firm’s latest release shows that it is continuing to innovate, even as it moves deeper into the orbit of the Party-state. DeepSeek’s success, however, has brought it to the attention of not just the government in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but also the military.

The Internet Today

George Friedman

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Editor’s Note: In 2017, we published an article titled “The Internet and the Tragedy of the Commons,” which argued that anonymity was destroying our global commons: the internet. Never before has it been so easy for “people to act without shame and to tell lies without fear.” So strongly do we believe in the relevance of that earlier article that we want to reprint it here, where it is most easily accessible, followed by George Friedman’s updated thoughts on the matter.

The Internet and the Tragedy of the Commons

The tragedy of the commons is a concept developed by a British economist in the early 19th century and refreshed by ecologist Garrett Hardin in 1968. They were addressing different issues arising out of the commons, an area that is owned by no one but used by everyone. The commons could be a green space at the center of a town, public land used for agriculture or the atmosphere. The tragedy of the commons is that while many benefit from it, no one is responsible for it. Each person’s indifference has little effect. Everyone’s collective indifference will destroy the commons. The tragedy of the commons is that it is vital, vulnerable and destroyed by the very people who need it.

The internet has become the global commons. This has happened with lightning speed. In this case, the commons is not just one place. It is a collection of places where people meet, discuss the latest news and gossip, play games and perhaps do a little business. The internet, with its complex web of connections and modes of communication, from email to Twitter to Instagram, has had a profound effect on society. There used to be private life and the village green, where public life was lived. There is now private life and the lives we live online. We have lost intimacy but have gained access to a vast world.

Good manners and the desire to be well thought of by your neighbors mitigated the tragedy of the physical commons. Even if you were not motivated to care for the commons, you were motivated to behave properly while using the commons. The incentive did not come from law but a sense of community; the community could censure and shun you if you failed to behave appropriately. Embarrassment and shame were compelling forces that shaped your behavior. What made both possible was that you were known. You would have to live with the consequences of your behavior, while trying to develop that thing which all humans crave – a good reputation and even being admired. The worst thing, the ultimate punishment of the Greeks, was to be exiled. The commons were still exploited tragically but not wantonly savaged.