In South Asia, Expect Continuity From Washington

Michael Kugelman

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The highlights this week: U.S. South Asia policy will likely have considerable continuity in Donald Trump’s second term, Indian firms and individuals are caught up in U.S. sanctions for Russian business connections, and Canada accuses Indian Home Minister Amit Shah of orchestrating a campaign against Sikh activists on its soil.

Inside China’s cognitive warfare strategy

Aleksandra Gadzala Tirziu

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Amid rising geopolitical tensions, much attention is being paid to the need to rebuild and revitalize Western defense industries, particularly in the United States and Europe. The growing threat of conflict with China, especially over Taiwan, has sharpened this focus. Chinese President Xi Jinping has made clear that China is preparing for “worst-case and extreme scenarios,” ready to face “high winds, choppy waters and even dangerous storms.” Its military is fast modernizing, with a shipbuilding capacity that outstrips that of the U.S. by a factor of 200, and a nuclear arsenal expanding faster than that of any other nation. Meanwhile, the U.S. lacks the shipyards needed to build and maintain its fleets, and Europe’s military capacity is weak, at best.

In this context, the Western preoccupation with bolstering its military hardware is understandable. Yet what such a focus overlooks is that, for Beijing, the true battlefield is not one of missiles or ships, but in the domains of information and cognitive warfare. People’s Liberation Army manuals describe cognitive warfare as its “fundamental function” and “the basis for the ability to accomplish military tasks.”

Soon after he took control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), President Xi urged China’s military to expand an “ideological concept of information warfare,” to spread Beijing’s preferred narratives and silence global dissent, as well as one of cognitive warfare, to shape the perceptions and behaviors of its adversaries.

I Study Guys Like Trump. There’s a Reason They Keep Winning.

Ben Rhodes

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In December 2019, I traveled to Hong Kong, where a heavy unease hung in the air. For months, young people had taken to the streets to protest the encroachment of the Chinese Communist Party on what was supposed to be a self-governing, democratic system. On walls they had scrawled: “Save Hong Kong! If we burn you burn with us!” All the protesters I spoke to knew their movement would fail; it was a last assertion of democratic identity before it was extinguished by a new order that saw democracy as the enemy within.

I met with a government official preparing to resign and told him I was writing a book about the rise of authoritarian nationalism. “The nationalism in the U.S. and Europe is somewhat different,” he told me. “Yours started with the financial crisis in 2008. That’s when liberalism started to lose its appeal, when people saw this wasn’t working. The narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed. This spilled over into China, too. This is when China started to think — should we really follow a Western model?” We were sitting in a hotel lounge, the invisible forces he described surrounding us: capitalism, but not democracy; cultural elites cloistered away from the working class. “The nationalist movements in East and West were both a response to the collapse of the Western model,” he added.

Everything I’d experienced told me he was right. Eight years serving in the Obama White House after the financial crisis felt like swimming upstream, against the currents of global politics. A radicalized Republican Party rejected liberal democracy at home, mirroring far-right leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary who spoke about installing “illiberal democracy” (a polite term for “blood and soil” nationalism) across Europe. In Russia, Vladimir Putin set out to undermine — if not dismantle — the liberal order helmed by the United States. In China, Xi Jinping began to shift Beijing’s strategy from rising within that order to building a separate one, drained of democratic values. Barack Obama’s political skills and cultural appeal allowed him to navigate those currents, but they didn’t always transfer to other Democrats.

The National Security Imperative for a Trump Presidency

Kori Schake

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Most U.S. allies are sure to be worried by the choice Americans made on November 5. Many observers are confounded by voters’ willingness to roll the dice and reelect the intemperate Donald Trump as president. But Americans have long had an outsize risk tolerance, a characteristic that is integral to both the dynamism of the country’s economy and the vibrance of its society. As the poet Robert Pinsky wrote in 2002, American culture is “so much in process, so brilliantly and sometimes brutally in motion, that standard models for it fail to apply”—an analysis the election result only reaffirms.

Since his arrival a decade ago on the national political stage, Trump has broken the Republican Party and rebuilt it in his image. The GOP is no longer the party of figures such as Senator Mitt Romney and the late Senator John McCain (for whom I once worked), both of whom ran unsuccessful presidential bids on traditional Republican platforms. In their place are figures such as JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, and Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri, who hew more closely to Trump’s brand of populist politics. American voters delivered a resounding victory for this new brand of conservative leadership. It is right and proper that Trump now get a chance to enact the policies he campaigned on and the latitude to respond to events as they happen, supported by a cabinet and an executive-branch bureaucracy that are responsive to his direction. It is in the United States’ interest that its president succeed.

But making Trump’s presidency successful does not mean simply adopting his ideas wholesale. Any new administration needs to square its sweeping campaign rhetoric with the realities of market behavior, fiscal constraints, and the actions of U.S. adversaries. In Trump’s case, the former president’s unpredictable, even erratic approach to decision-making could lead to foreign policy choices that reduce American power and increase the risk of conflict. It is therefore especially important to find ways to pursue Trump’s goals while avoiding potential harm.

Pentagon officials discussing how to respond if Trump issues controversial orders

Natasha Bertrand and Haley Britzky

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Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers, defense officials told CNN.

Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement and mass deportations and has indicated he wants to stack the federal government with loyalists and “clean out corrupt actors” in the US national security establishment.

Trump in his last term had a fraught relationship with much of his senior military leadership, including now-retired Gen. Mark Milley who took steps to limit Trump’s ability to use nuclear weapons while he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president-elect, meanwhile, has repeatedly called US military generals “woke,” “weak” and “ineffective leaders.”

Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.

“We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one defense official said.

Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back.

“Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defense official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?”

Democracy Without America?

Larry Diamond

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Since the beginning of this historic “year of elections” worldwide, it was apparent that none would be more important in shaping global democratic prospects than the presidential contest in the United States. Across a broad span of countries and partisan leanings, people who value freedom, democracy, and the rule of law—including leaders of government, opposition parties, civic activists, businesspersons, journalists, or ordinary citizens—watched with growing trepidation as political polarization intensified in the United States and Donald Trump drew closer to retaking the White House. With Trump’s decisive victory in the election, these admirers of the long arc of the United States’ democratic journey, if not necessarily all its global policies, now fear what might come next for the country and, by extension, democracies across the world.

The rise of autocratic regimes across the world over the last decade and a half has put democrats on high alert. In the last year, successful efforts to beat back antidemocratic movements and governments have provided some indication that this protracted “democratic recession” could be reversed. But Trump’s victory has dealt a blow to these hopes. His triumph in the Electoral College and the popular vote leaves democratic friends and allies of the United States wondering: Will a Trump presidency demand more burden-sharing from them, or even abandon them altogether? And will the United States remain a liberal democracy, or will its institutions gradually erode beyond recognition or repair?

Early analysis of the election results suggests that Trump’s victory was more attributable to issues like the economy and immigration rather than an endorsement of his autocratic tendencies. And yet whatever the reason Americans may have had for supporting Trump, his campaign made it clear that he will be unencumbered by any global checks on his and his administration’s antidemocratic impulses. As has been the case in other backsliding democracies in the last decade, the defense of democratic norms in the United States will therefore depend on the actions of other leaders of government and society in Congress, state and local governments, the civil service, the armed forces and local police, business, civic institutions, and perhaps most of all, the courts. Their success or failure in upholding the Constitution and the rule of law will heavily determine global democracy’s outlook in the coming years.

Analysis: Trump election win could add 4bn tonnes to US emissions by 2030

Multiple Authors 

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A victory for Donald Trump in November’s presidential election could lead to an additional 4bn tonnes of US emissions by 2030 compared with Joe Biden’s plans, Carbon Brief analysis reveals.

This extra 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2030 would cause global climate damages worth more than $900bn, based on the latest US government valuations.

For context, 4GtCO2e is equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries.

Put another way, the extra 4GtCO2e from a second Trump term would negate – twice over – all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years.

If Trump secures a second term, the US would also very likely miss its global climate pledge by a wide margin, with emissions only falling to 28% below 2005 levels by 2030. The US’s current target under the Paris Agreement is to achieve a 50-52% reduction by 2030.

Carbon Brief’s analysis is based on an aggregation of modelling by various US research groups. It highlights the significant impact of the Biden administration’s climate policies. This includes the Inflation Reduction Act – which Trump has pledged to reverse – along with several other policies.

The findings are subject to uncertainty around economic growth, fuel and technology prices, the market response to incentives and the extent to which Trump is able to roll back Biden’s policies.

The analysis might overstate the impact Trump could have on US emissions, if some of Biden’s policies prove hard to unpick – or if subnational climate action accelerates.

What Trump’s Victory Means for Climate Change

Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman

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The fight against climate change has taken a body blow with the election of Donald J. Trump, who calls global warming a “scam” and has promised to erase federal efforts to reduce the pollution that is heating the planet.

Mr. Trump told a jubilant crowd Wednesday that the United States, which signed a global agreement last year to transition away from fossil fuels, will instead amp up oil production even beyond current record levels. “We have more liquid gold than any country in the world,” said the president-elect, who won with substantial financial support from the oil and gas industry. “More than Saudi Arabia. We have more than Russia.”

But Mr. Trump’s zeal to repeal the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate law that is pouring more than $390 billion into electric vehicles, batteries and other clean energy technology, will quickly face a political test.

Roughly 80 percent of the money spent so far has flowed to Republican congressional districts, where lawmakers and business leaders want to protect that investment and the jobs they bring.

And voters in some states approved policies to fight climate change, setting up tension between states that want to accelerate climate action and an incoming federal administration that intends to slow it down.

In Washington State, voters upheld an ambitious new law to force polluters to cap their fossil fuel emissions. In California, voters backed a ballot initiative to create a $10 billion “climate bond” for climate and environmental projects.

The US is about to make a sharp turn on climate policy

Casey Crownhartarchive page

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In the days leading up to the election, I kept thinking about what four years means for climate change right now. We’re at a critical moment that requires decisive action to rapidly slash greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, transportation, industry, and the rest of the economy if we’re going to achieve our climate goals.

The past four years have seen the US take climate action seriously, working with the international community and pumping money into solutions. Now, we’re facing a period where things are going to be very different. A Trump presidency will have impacts far beyond climate, but for the sake of this newsletter, we’ll stay focused on what four years means in the climate fight as we start to make sense of this next chapter.

Joe Biden arguably did more to combat climate change than any other American president. One of his first actions in office was rejoining the Paris climate accord—Trump pulled out of the international agreement to fight climate change during his first term in office. Biden then quickly set a new national goal to cut US carbon emissions in half, relative to their peak, by 2030.

The Environmental Protection Agency rolled out rules for power plants to slash pollution that harms both human health and the climate. The agency also announced new regulations for vehicle emissions to push the country toward EVs.

And the cornerstone of the Biden years has been unprecedented climate investment. A trio of laws—the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act—pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure and research, much of it on climate.

Musk Believes in Global Warming. Trump Doesn’t. Will That Change?

Brad Plumer

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Elon Musk has described himself as “pro-environment” and “super pro climate.” But he also threw himself wholeheartedly into electing as president someone who has dismissed global warming as a hoax.

Now, as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to enter the White House, one big question is how much sway — if any — Mr. Musk’s views on climate change and clean energy might have in the new administration.

During the campaign, Mr. Trump noticeably softened his rhetoric on electric vehicles as he grew more friendly with Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla. After months of bashing plug-in cars and promising to halt their sales, Mr. Trump backtracked slightly this summer.

“I’m constantly talking about electric vehicles, but I don’t mean I’m against them. I’m totally for them,” he told a crowd in Michigan. “I’ve driven them and they are incredible, but they’re not for everybody.”

At the time, Mr. Musk claimed credit for Mr. Trump’s apparent shift, telling Tesla shareholders at a June meeting, “I can be persuasive.” Referring to Mr. Trump, he said, “A lot of his friends now have Teslas, and they all love it. And he’s a huge fan of the Cybertruck. So I think those may be contributing factors.”

Now Mr. Musk, who spent election night at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and posed for a group photograph with the president-elect’s family, is expected to have a direct line to the White House in the coming months. Mr. Musk’s companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, already make billions from government contracts and federal policies, and he is expected to seek additional advantages for his businesses.

How Economies Around the World Will Respond to Trump 2.

Cameron Abadi

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U.S. voters have given President-elect Donald Trump a mandate to govern the United States, but his policies are certain to influence the entire world. It’s possible to speculate on the potential effects based on Trump’s first term as president. But his agenda is now more extreme, and his power less restrained.

Is Europe any more prepared than it was eight years ago to contend with a Trump presidency? What does another Trump administration mean for global climate policy? And what is China’s view on the U.S. election?

QI Panel: Can Americans Agree on How to Settle the Ukraine War?

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos 

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I'd like to welcome everyone here to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. My name is Kelley Vlahos. I am a senior advisor at QI, but I'm also the editor of our online foreign policy magazine, Responsible Statecraft, which I hope you are all reading and writing for me. So I'm very excited to be hosting this event with my colleague George Beebe this afternoon. I see a lot of familiar faces in the room and a lot of new faces too. I've been talking with a lot of you previously about the Ukraine war, and I know it's been a major part of your professional lives for the last 32 months since the Russian invasion in February 2022. Many of you are researchers, scholars, diplomats, congressional staffers, or like me, journalists who have been reading, writing and editing, reporting and analysis on the war for years. It's very consuming and unfortunately seemingly unending. But there seems to be a new spirit in the air today, a sense of urgency and maybe just an acknowledgement finally, that time is running out, that if Ukraine is not winning on the battlefield, then it is time to truly focus on the alternatives to fighting and to start negotiating a pathway to peace. 

Many of us, including my esteemed panelists today, have been aware of and if not promoting actively that pathway for a long time. Is Washington catching up though, or is a diplomatic end to the war even possible without a hands-on American engagement with all interested parties? And what about the bitter partisanship in Washington? Will there ever be a time when the political stars are aligned so that the US can take the steps necessary to steer this conflict toward a resolution deploying words and not weapons? So we have a lot of ground to cover today, so I'd like to formally introduce our panelists and then we can get on with the discussion. Tom Graham, Graham in the center here, has worn many hats and has had extensive experience in US-Russian relations. Early in his career, he was a foreign service officer with assignments in the US Embassy in Moscow. He also worked on Russian and Soviet affairs on the policy planning staff at the State Department. Later he served in the George W. Bush administration as a special assistant to the president and then in two roles on the national security staff, including senior director for Russia and director for Russian affairs. Early on in the administration he served as the associate director of policy planning on the staff at the Department of State. He's the author of Russia's Decline in Uncertain Recovery and co-author of US-Russian Relations at the Turn of the Century, and is a co-founder of Yale University's Russian, East European and Eurasian studies program. Charles Kupchan, to my right has served at the State Department on the policy planning staff

Trump’s victory is a cataclys

Andrew Marr

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There is no sugar-coating. This is a huge victory for the right which challenges British political security and prosperity. Suddenly, we seem a social-democratic outlier, surrounded by angrier, more confident and more pugnacious neighbours. What will be, will be. The world is as it is. There is no point hand-wringing now about the policy failures and delusion of the Kamala Harris campaign. What matters is to think clearly about the choices Britain makes next.

Nor should we feel sorry for ourselves. Any grief, any empathy should be reserved for our liberal brothers and sisters in the United States, who face a much bleaker future; and of course, for the people of Ukraine, who may be forced into a humiliating and destructive “peace”. I spoke this week to Sergei Markov, the former adviser to the Russian president, and well-connected Moscow politics professor. He said he expected Donald Trump almost immediately to call Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky to demand an immediate ceasefire, followed by talks which would recognise the Ukrainian conflict as, essentially, a civil one between Russians rather than independent states.

Hybrid War and National Security: NATO, the U.S., and the West

Anita Parlow

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In early September 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) reported that it had disrupted thirty-two internet domains operated by a Russian government–directed disinformation campaign known as “Doppleganger.” The two-year campaign targeted Americans and Europeans with a combination of false domain names and cloned websites, and targeted cyber-generated social media.

That same month, the DOJ indicted two Russian nationals for “conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering” for a Russian state-directed and state-controlled media company based in Tennessee. In the DOJ brief, Attorney General Merrick Garland charged the two U.S.-based agents with conducting a “$10 million scheme” that Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said was intended to “illegally manipulate American public opinion by sowing discord and division.”

The threat of Russia cyberattacks directed at the West is intensifying, somewhat resembling the nonkinetic methods of hybrid warfare used during the Kremlin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Danish defense minister Troels Lund Poulson highlighted the unprecedented number and range of cyberattacks against his nation at the 2024 region-wide NORDEFCO meeting. (The Nordic Defense Cooperation is a defense alliance and includes Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.) The minister announced that Denmark’s Centre for Cyber Security (CFCS) had raised its threat level owing to increasing Russian cyber-threats. “Increasingly,” he said, “we see a Russia that is willing to challenge NATO countries through sabotage, influencing campaigns, and cyberattacks.”

Russia’s Toolkit

Russia has practiced a hybrid strategy of political-military warfare throughout its history. It has adapted this strategy to contemporary times by leveraging technology, culture, and asymmetric tactics to escalate geopolitical tensions, seeking to assemble just the right combination of these to achieve the desired effect.

Trump and the desertion of Ukraine

Rajan Menon

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While addressing the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on 5 September, Vladimir Putin, in yet another attempt to sow confusion in American politics, remarked that while his “favourite” candidate in the presidential contest was Joe Biden, “he was removed from the race, and he recommended all his supporters to support Ms Harris. Well, we will do so – we will support her.” For good measure Putin criticised Donald Trump for having imposed sanctions on Russia, “like no other president has ever introduced before”.

These statements are the diplomatic equivalent of what’s known these days as “trolling”. Can anyone seriously doubt that Putin sat smiling as Trump delivered his victory speech in the early hours of 6 November? As for Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, it’s safe to say that no leader, save perhaps Kamala Harris, can be more dejected than him. The feeling is justified. Trump has called Zelensky a “salesman”, one who bilked American taxpayers to pursue a futile war and blames him for not making concessions to Russia in early 2022. (The latter is a bogus accusation that, as I have argued elsewhere, has nevertheless gained wide currency in the United States and other countries.)

In late-night texts to me, friends in Ukraine tried to put a brave face on the emerging outcome. One, a journalist, paraphrased the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko: “the only way to win is fight”. Another, who trained to serve as a sniper in Ukraine’s army, was more cynical (and characteristically salty). “For us,” she wrote, “nothing changes because no one has balls except those of us who are here”. These reactions are not surprising. Ukrainians can hardly throw in the towel and say that everything has now become hopeless – not when they are fighting with their backs to the wall. In the four visits I have made to wartime Ukraine, a refrain I heard in multiple variations was that Ukrainians cannot afford to stop fighting because, if they lose, they will not merely have lost the war, they will have lost their country. It might seem overly dramatic, but that’s easy to say sitting in New York or London.

Trump’s Win Could Lead To Push For Peace In Ukraine, But On Whose Terms? – Analysis

Steve Gutterman

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(RFE/RL) — The common view is that an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine is nowhere in sight. But Donald Trump’s election could generate a push to reach a peace deal — with Ukraine, Russia, the United States, and others wrangling over the potential terms.

Trump’s victory in the November 5 presidential vote set the clock ticking, in a way, because he repeatedly said during the campaign that he would be able to end the war very quickly if elected, without even waiting for his inauguration on January 20.

Russian President Vladimir Putin seized on this in his first public remarks about the U.S. election result, saying on November 7 that what he called Trump’s statements about a desire to “revive relations” with Russia and help end the war in Ukraine “deserve attention, to say the least.”

That comment came amid high praise from Putin for Trump: He said that the now president-elect had shown “courage” and “acted like a man” when a would-be assassin shot at him in July, and that his impression was that during his 2017-2021 term, Trump was straitjacketed and prevented from pursuing his goals.

Putin’s words were delivered in a way that was clearly meant to seem casual and off-the-cuff. But they suggest that the Kremlin will try to leverage the change of power in the United States, and Trump’s hopes of brokering peace, in a bid to further its own goals in Ukraine.

Building Defence Capacity in Europe: An Assessment

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Introduction: How Ready?

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has raised the spectre of a war in Europe involving NATO states’ military forces and reshaped the European security landscape.

The 2022 NATO Strategic Concept identified Russia as ‘the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area’.1 Defence ministries across NATO states are scrutinising the effect of the war on the Russian armed forces and trying to assess how quickly these forces could become a direct threat to NATO members’ territories, particularly in Eastern Europe. The US Defense Intelligence Agency stated in mid-2024 that Russia was ‘very likely incapable of seizing and holding territory inside a NATO country’, due to the severe attrition of its ground forces in Ukraine. However, even whilst fighting in Ukraine, Russia’s forces still pose a significant threat, given the capabilities at the country’s disposal, including ‘a cyber and indirect actions threat’ against NATO countries.2 According to the head of the United Kingdom’s Security Service, agents from Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency, the GRU, have ‘carried out “arson, sabotage and more dangerous actions conducted with increasing recklessness”’.3 Russia also remains capable of conducting long-range strikes against critical sites, with military power still also residing in the largely intact parts of its forces, such as its Northern Fleet.4

Assessments of Russia´s military recovery vary, but all identify Russia as posing a significant threat to NATO-Europe in the medium to long term. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the UK Chief of the Defence Staff, stated that ‘it would take Putin five years to reconstitute the Russian Army to where it was in February 2022; and another five years beyond that to rectify the weaknesses that the war has revealed’.5 However, NATO states closer to Russia are more pessimistic. The Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service expects that ‘within the next decade, NATO will face a Soviet-style mass army that, while technologically inferior to the allies, poses a significant threat due to its size, firepower and reserves’.6 In mid-2024, Norway’s chief of defence, Eirik Kristoffersen, painted an even more concerning picture, arguing that Russia’s defence-industrial mobilisation meant the Alliance had a ‘window of two to three years to prepare before Russia has rebuilt the ability to carry out a conventional attack’.7

Biden administration to allow American military contractors to deploy to Ukraine for first time since Russia’s invasion

Natasha Bertrand, Haley Britzky and Oren Liebermann

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Two Ukrainian army mechanics repair a broken MT-LB (light armored multi-purpose towing vehicle) in the Donetsk region in Kharkiv, Ukraine on October 25, 2024. Fermin Torrano/Anadolu/Getty Images

CNN —

The Biden administration has lifted a de facto ban on American military contractors deploying to Ukraine to help the country’s military maintain and repair US-provided weapons systems, particularly F16 fighter jets and Patriot air defense systems, an official with direct knowledge of the plan told CNN.

The new policy, approved earlier this month before the election, would allow the Pentagon to provide contracts to American companies for work inside Ukraine for the first time since Russia invaded in 2022. Officials said they hope it will speed up the maintenance and repairs of weapons systems being used by the Ukrainian military.

It is not clear whether Donald Trump will keep the policy in place when he takes office in January. Trump has said he hopes to end the war between Ukraine and Russia “within 24 hours” of returning to power.

“In order to help Ukraine repair and maintain military equipment provided by the US and its allies, DoD (Department of Defense) is soliciting bids for a small number of contractors who will help Ukraine maintain the assistance we’ve already provided,” a defense official said.

“These contractors will be located far from the front lines and they will not be fighting Russian forces. They will help Ukrainian Armed Forces rapidly repair and maintain US provided equipment as needed so it can be quickly returned to the front lines.”

Western leader blurts out what was once taboo on Ukraine

Eldar Mamedov

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This week, Politico scooped the news: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, before meeting NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in Berlin, informally voiced opposition to Ukraine’s prospects for an alliance membership, suggesting instead a “Finlandization” option — a neutral status like Finland maintained between NATO and the Soviet Union during the Cold War and for the subsequent three decades between NATO and Russia.

According to the report, his suggestion was mulled amid talk in Berlin of setting up a “contact group” together with China, India, and Brazil in search of a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine. This idea was not raised during the meeting with Rutte as it does not yet represent a consolidated position of the German government — an unwieldy coalition of Scholz’s war-weary Social Democrats, ardently pro-Ukraine Greens, and fiscal hawks in the liberal Free Democrats party (FDP).

The fact, however, that the Finlandization option is even discussed now shows how far the debate in Europe has shifted from the “whatever it takes for Ukraine’s victory” mantra to a more sober assessment of the realities on the ground: even The Economist, a staunch supporter of Ukraine’s cause from the outset, now accepts that it’s not a victory but mere survival as an independent state that is at stake for Ukraine.

With U.S. Weapons, Israel’s New Strategy Is Redefining Military Power In The Middle East

Dan Gouré

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The combination of Israeli intelligence and U.S.-built weapons systems has enabled the Israel Defense Force to conduct a new strategic campaign against its adversaries.

Just hours after winning the election, President-elect Donald J. Trump spoke with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As soon as the classified transition briefings start, Trump will see the clear evidence that Israel has reshaped the regional military balance by unleashing its precise, U.S.-built long-range striking power against Iran. On October 26, Israel’s U.S.-made combat fighters entered Iran’s airspace, struck targets, and returned unscathed. The air campaign was a complex and technological blow that has diminished Iran as a military power.

That marked a turnaround for Israel. A year ago, Hamas’ surprise attack on October 7, 2023 demonstrated how woefully unprepared Israel was, psychologically, even more than physically, to deal with a coalition of adversaries bent on its total destruction. Tragically, a combination of hubris, complacency and underinvestment in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and its supporting industrial base resulted in Hamas’ initial successful attack from Gaza. Successive governments and Israeli society took false comfort in the belief that their country’s enemies, both near and abroad, but Hamas, in particular, had neither the capacity nor the desire to disturb the status quo.

The IDF’s leadership was so invested in its sense of absolute superiority that it failed to maintain adequate defenses along the border with Gaza. An even greater sign of hubris was the IDF’s rejection of repeated warnings of an impending attack, some dating back more than a year before October 7. In the weeks leading up to the attack, the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate suppressed warnings from members of its border observation corps that Hamas was preparing for some sort of large-scale action. Even worse, the IDF had no plan for how to respond to a major terrorist attack on either its southern or northern borders.

Houthis’ Lesson for the U.S. Army: How a Land Force Can Fight a Maritime War

Andrew Rolander

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The U.S. Army should consider borrowing a page from the playbook of Yemen’s Houthi militants.

The character of war is always changing, and the Houthis’ ongoing attacks against shipping in the Red Sea may prove to be one of the more significant inflection points in military history.

The change involves sea control and sea denial through the application of long-range precision missile fire and autonomous drone employment from the shore. The Houthis effectively blend a mix of anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and one-way attack drones to contest control over maritime lines of communication in the Red Sea littoral. They have so far damaged at least 30 merchant ships, sunk two and killed or detained several merchant sailors.

The U.S. Army should aim for much the same capability in a contested littoral environment against an adversary such as China. Technically and tactically, the service is moving in this direction, but it needs to fully embrace the strategy to avoid becoming largely irrelevant in the major war in which the U.S. is most likely to become involved. Army heavy formations almost certainly won’t be available in the initial fighting in a Western Pacific war.

The army can draw on efforts that are already underway in the U.S. military. It can, for example, take inspiration from the U.S. Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) concept, in which ships are widely separated but act in unison. Army units might operate similarly in the Western Pacific.

The US needs to get real about maneuver warfare in space

Christopher Stone

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An upgraded Ground Based Interceptor with a Capability Enhanced-II Block 1 Exo-Atmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) is launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, during Flight Test Ground-based Midcourse Defense Weapon System-12, or FTG-12, on December 11, 2023

Recently, senior Space Force commanders have been articulating support for the use of maneuver warfare in space deterrence and warfighting operations. While laudable, upon further review, it appears that these statements are not speaking about maneuver warfare as much as they are about rapid movement of spacecraft to avoid intercept by an enemy spacecraft or ground-based threats.

These passive defensive actions are not true maneuver warfare. And if the Space Force wants to get serious about being able to defeat enemy nations in space, it needs to stop tip-toeing around the issue. It’s time for America to put real investments into space weapons capable of targeting earth-bound targets.

As defined by Robert Leonhard in his book, The Art of Maneuver, “maneuver warfare” as “the means of defeat[ing] … the enemy.” The objective is to achieve victory, not the sustainment of competition. To achieve this victory requires an aggressiveness that under current DoD space policy and strategy, is considered irresponsible. As Leonhard proclaims, “maneuver warfare is, to put it simply, a kick in the groin, a poke in the eye, a stab in the back. It is quick, violent for a moment and unfair. It is decisive, even pre-emptive, at the expense of protocol and posturing.” To use Chinese military terms in their strategy document, The Science of Strategy, this type of attack should be “rapid and destructive.”

The Incredible Power of Quantum Memory

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It’s not easy to study quantum systems—collections of particles that follow the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, a cornerstone of quantum theory, says it’s impossible to simultaneously measure a particle’s exact position and its speed—pretty important information for understanding what’s going on.

In order to study, say, a particular collection of electrons, researchers have to be clever about it. They might take a box of electrons, poke at it in various ways, then take a snapshot of what it looks like at the end. In doing so, they hope to reconstruct the internal quantum dynamics at work.

But there’s a catch: They can’t measure all the system’s properties at the same time. So they iterate. They’ll start with their system, poke, then measure. Then they’ll do it again. Every iteration, they’ll measure some new set of properties. Build together enough snapshots, and machine learning algorithms can help reconstruct the full properties of the original system—or at least get really close.

War in the AI age

Lawrence Freedman

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We are delighted to welcome to Comment is Freed Eric Schmidt. Eric is former CEO of Google, chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project, an honorary KBE and founding partner of Innovation Endeavors. He has written extensively on how AI is transforming armed conflict, and will soon be publishing Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, (New York: Little Brown), co-authored with Craig Mundie and the late Dr. Henry Kissinger.

In our conversation we talked about the impact of AI on warfare, drones, and deterrence.

Lawrence Freedman (LF): Three years ago you published a book, also with Henry Kissinger, on AI. And now you have published a new one. Why now? Is it just because technology has developed even faster than you thought it would, or because new issues have arisen?

Eric Schmidt (ES): The first book came out right before ChatGPT. We did talk about GPT and other transformer architectures, but I don't think people understood its importance. Now we understand that these neural networks, and in particular, this next generation of multi-modal transformer-based architectures, have much more power than people thought. The book therefore is not about why LLMs [Large Language Models] have become more powerful. It’s a book about what happens to society as they get more powerful.

The book, which is called Genesis, starts by talking at some length about polymaths. Many of the people who we study when we're in high school were the polymaths of the time, such as Leonardo da Vinci. They are unique and very rare, and they move science, art, culture, society, forward. There are polymaths in every society, in every religion. What happens when you have a polymath of that level in your pocket, available to you as an individual? This is a major change in human experience. It really changes the definition of what it is to be human.

When the Drone Threat Comes Home

Darrell Owens

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The next war may not start with missiles or boots on the ground. It could begin with small, undetectable drones that rain destruction on America’s most vital infrastructure.

In recent years, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have evolved rapidly in sophistication. But by and large, our defenses against them have not. And if the situation persists, it could lead to catastrophe.

We don’t need to look far to see how drone warfare is reshaping conflicts. On the battlefields of Ukraine, UAVs have revolutionized combat, leveled the playing field for Ukraine’s defenders, allowing Kyiv to strike back at Russian forces and the Russian homeland, and providing new intelligence-gathering capabilities. These advantages are working the other way as well, with Russian forces augmented by Iranian-origin suicide drones that have allowed Moscow to strike deep into Ukrainian territory.

The Ukraine war is a portent of things to come. Gone are the days of expensive overhead aerial reconnaissance and dangerous scouting missions. Today, small first-person drones flood the battlefield. These multi-role drones are fast, cheap, easy to train on, and extremely difficult to detect and defeat. They help with artillery targeting, conduct battle damage assessments, drop ordinance on vehicles, or be used as a weapon directly. That’s why leading technologists like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have argued that the U.S. Army should be developing drones instead of tanks.

The problem is acute—and a distinct threat to U.S. security. Picture a group of foreign-backed terrorists deploying a swarm of explosive-laden drones over a busy U.S. airport. In mere minutes, these nearly invisible machines could destroy an airplane on the runway, claiming lives and paralyzing air travel nationwide.

Humanoid Robots

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Humanoid robots are undergoing rapid development, led by firms in the United States and China. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have improved the degree of autonomy in humanoid robots, allowing them to handle more complex interactions with humans and their environment. These improvements are accelerating as robots use generative AI to learn new tasks, replacing what was previously accomplished through manual programming. China has set a series of goals relating to the development of its humanoid robots sector, including having two to three humanoid robot firms that are global leaders by 2025. Many other aspects of its stated goals, however, are vague and susceptible to multiple interpretations. While China’s capacity to achieve these goals in the stated time frames may be doubtful, if their overall efforts are successful, humanoid robots could have transformative implications across commercial industries, including manufacturing, agriculture, and healthcare, and potentially for military and law enforcement as well. The Chinese government has thrown its weight behind developing humanoid robots, as it has previously for other critical emerging technologies, with the aim of expanding its role in the global market.