Indian Strategic Studies: 02/04/25

4 February 2025

Gwadar airport opening boosts China-Pakistan ties but raises India’s concerns

Junaid Kathju

The opening of Gwadar International Airport, a key piece of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, is expected to bolster the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), while also intensifying India’s concerns over Beijing’s potential military presence in the region, analysts said.

The US$230 million state-of-the-art airport, which spans 430 acres in southwestern Pakistan, is central to China’s US$65 billion CPEC project to develop Gwadar into a pivotal trade and transport hub.

Inaugurated in October by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Chinese Premier Li Qiang, the airport began commercial operations on January 20, signalling significant regional economic and strategic development.

Antoine Levesques, a research fellow for South and Central Asian Defence, Strategy and Diplomacy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said that while India does not seek Pakistan’s economic decline, the regional rival has deep-seated misgivings about CPEC.

There is a possibility China and Pakistan may choose to secure Gwadar as a Chinese base in the northwestern Indian Ocean during peacetime, Levesques said, “with the potential for shades of militarisation for ‘hybrid’ or even overt high-intensity warfare.”

China Decoupling Beyond the United States: Comparing Germany, Japan, and India

Joshua Sullivan and Jon Bateman

Introduction

A number of U.S.-aligned countries are “decoupling” or “de-risking” their economic and technological ties with China in some form. Yet this international trend is often seen primarily through the lens of U.S. policy. Unilateral U.S. tools, like export controls, have enabled American officials to play an outsized role in isolating China from global supply chains—and in inspiring, or forcing, other countries to follow suit. Although U.S. leaders frequently debate these moves with allied counterparts, many in Washington still tend to presume that friendly nations are fundamentally like-minded on overall decoupling strategy.

In reality, the loose coalition of countries involved in decoupling from China have varied approaches and perspectives. No other country fully shares all U.S. goals. Understanding these differences—and the historical, economic, and political factors that drive them—will be key to effective policymaking in Washington and elsewhere.

This paper compares how three key countries—Germany, Japan, and India—have managed their technological and economic ties with China in the last twenty years. These countries are the world’s biggest economies after the United States and China. They all play leading roles in various technology sectors. And each country has a distinct set of economic and geopolitical interests at stake in their relationships with China. Collectively, the three countries serve as valuable case studies to explore divergence and convergence within the U.S.-aligned world on how to handle decoupling.

Positivity Peaks At The Japan–China Summit – Analysis

Haruka Satake

Addressing challenges related to North Korea remains a shared concern for both Japan and China and a critical security issue in East Asia. Japan and China’s efforts to strengthen diplomatic and strategic engagement are particularly vital as they navigate complex regional security challenges, including North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and the broader implications for East Asian stability.

During the meeting between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping on 16 November 2024, Xi clarified his concern about North Korea, stating ‘China cannot tolerate conflict and chaos in the Korean Peninsula and will not sit by and watch China’s strategic security and core interests being threatened’. Though Xi did not explicitly name North Korea or Russia, the reference to conflict on the Korean Peninsula can be seen as a concern about the possibility of problems between North Korea and Russia.

While the North Korean issue was not discussed at the Japan–China summit in Peru on 15 November 2024, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and President Xi, agreed to continue to promote their ‘strategic mutually beneficial relationship’. Established in 2008, this framework aims to nurture a stable and progressive bilateral relationship by respecting mutual interests and addressing common challenges through cooperation. This relationship also highlights a shared emphasis on promoting peace and prosperity in Asia and the broader international community.

Bangladesh After 2024: Islamic Resurgence, Shift In National Identity And Rising Tensions With India – OpEd

Allen David Simon

Even as the Nobel laureate, Muhammad Yunus, leads the nation following Sheikh Hasina’s resignation and flight, Bangladesh’s interim government has moved to lift the ban on the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) party that had been imposed under antiterrorism laws indicating a mainstreaming of radical Islamist groups. With this turn towards religious nationalism, minorities, especially Hindus, have faced ethnic tensions and violence in post-Hasina Bangladesh. With three Hindu temples set on fire, 24 people burnt alive; Chinmoy Das, an ISKON Hindu priest arrested, and a narrative of exclusion of tribal populations as ‘alibashi’ (separatists).

Religious nationalism: Challenges to secularism and democracy

The Awami League (AL), led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, had secured Bangladesh’s independence in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War: which was fought against the in the post-partition Panjabi-Pathaan hegemony over the Pakistani government and the military, political exclusion of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and an imposition of Urdu as the national language. Built on the back of the Bangla Bhasha Movement (Bengali language Movement), linguistic autonomy defined Mujibur’s secular construct of the Bengali ethnic identity.

The Case for “Avalanche Decoupling” From China

Eyck Freymann and Hugo Bromley

As tensions rise in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, U.S. efforts to deter Chinese aggression suffer from a fundamental credibility problem. The United States has conventional and strategic tools to deter Beijing, including the threat of punishing economic sanctions. But China is much too big and integrated into the global trading system to expel it from the world economy overnight. A sudden economic break between Beijing and Washington would be devastating for the United States and catastrophic for the rest of the world.

DeepSeek Is Reshaping China’s AI Landscape - Analysis

Ray Wang

Chinese artificial intelligence lab DeepSeek shocked the world on Jan. 20 with the release of its product “R1,” an AI model on par with global leaders in performance but trained at a much lower cost.

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger referred to the new DeepSeek R1’s breakthrough in a LinkedIn post as a “world class solution.” Artificial Analysis’s AI Model Quality Index now lists two DeepSeek models in its ranking of the top 10 models, with DeepSeek’s R1 ranking second only to OpenAI’s o1 model.

Chinese AI company DeepSeek rocks the tech world

Theara Coleman

Challenging the 'bigger is better' narrative

The U.S. has imposed sanctions on advanced chip sales to slow down progress in AI elsewhere. At the same time, U.S. tech giants rely on sprawling data centers powered by Nvidia GPU chips. These sanctions, first imposed under the Biden administration, have "cut China off from critical AI hardware, forcing its developers to innovate with far fewer resources," said The Spectator. This is the environment that led to the birth of DeepSeek. The relatively unknown Chinese AI startup has "emerged as a formidable challenger to the 'bigger is better' narrative" while achieving the seemingly impossible: "delivering performance comparable to the West's cutting-edge models" at a much lower price point.

In a 22-page paper that sent shockwaves through the tech world, DeepSeek revealed the workings of its new AI model called DeepSeek-R1. A team of researchers claimed to have used around 2,000 of Nvidia's H800 chips, drastically undercutting the number and cost of more advanced H100 chips typically used by the top AI companies. The chatbot run on the R1 model distinguishes itself from competitors like ChatGPT by "articulating its reasoning before delivering a response to a prompt," said Bloomberg. DeepSeek said its R1 release performs on par with the latest iteration of ChatGPT. The company also offers licenses for developers interested in creating chatbots with the technology "at a price well below what OpenAI charges for similar access." The efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the model "puts into question the need for vast expenditures of capital to acquire the latest and most powerful AI accelerators from the likes of Nvidia," Bloomberg added. It also highlights "U.S. export curbs of such advanced semiconductors to China," which were supposed to "prevent a breakthrough of the sort that DeepSeek appears to represent."

DeepSeek Has Taught AI Startups a Lesson Automakers Learned Years Ago

Aarian Marshall

This week, some auto industry observers felt a creeping sense of déjà vu. Seemingly out of nowhere, a Chinese firm made international headlines by besting Western companies at the tech they supposedly invented.

No, it wasn’t BYD, the 20-year-old automaker that gained sudden global recognition in recent years as it began to export low-price electric vehicles all over the world. (BYD built more electric vehicles in 2024 than Tesla.) This week’s buzz was about DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that shocked techies when it released a new open-source artificial intelligence model with seemingly a fraction of the funding US competitors have hoovered up to build their own. DeepSeek’s success saw US tech stocks slide earlier this week, and investors scramble to reexamine their bets.

In some ways, experts say, the startup’s success follows the auto industry’s playbook. And the lesson was similar: Chinese firms can still build it better and more cheaply. “There is an underestimation of Chinese innovation and ingenuity,” says Ilaria Mazzocco, a senior fellow researching Chinese policy at the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There is resourcefulness even when there may not be access to the best technology.”

Exposed DeepSeek Database Revealed Chat Prompts and Internal Data

Lily Hay Newman & Matt Burgess

The Chinese generative artificial intelligence platform DeepSeek has had a meteoric rise this week, stoking rivalries and generating market pressure for United States–based AI companies, which in turn has invited scrutiny of the service. Amid the hype, researchers from the cloud security firm Wiz published findings on Wednesday that show that DeepSeek left one of its critical databases exposed on the internet, leaking system logs, user prompt submissions, and even users’ API authentication tokens—totaling more than 1 million records—to anyone who came across the database.

DeepSeek is a relatively new company and has been virtually unreachable to press and other organizations this week. In turn, the company did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment about the exposure. The Wiz researchers say that they themselves were unsure about how to disclose their findings to the company and simply sent information about the discovery on Wednesday to every DeepSeek email address and LinkedIn profile they could find or guess. The researchers have yet to receive a reply, but within a half hour of their mass contact attempt, the database they found was locked down and became inaccessible to unauthorized users. It is unclear whether any malicious actors or authorized parties accessed or downloaded any of the data.

“The fact that mistakes happen is correct, but this is a dramatic mistake, because the effort level is very low and the access level that we got is very high,” Ami Luttwak, the CTO of Wiz tells WIRED. “I would say that it means that the service is not mature to be used with any sensitive data at all.”

Is Turkey Breaking Its Own Oil Embargo? - Analysis

Hannah Lucinda Smith

At the end of November, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered the keynote address at a forum for the country’s national public broadcaster and reaffirmed his support for Gaza. Seyma Yildirim, a Turkish pro-Palestinian activist in the audience, knew that the moment to speak up had come. “I felt compelled to highlight the inconsistency between the stated support for Palestine and the actions on the ground,” she said.

Yildirim and eight others from the Turkish activist group A Thousand Youths for Palestine shouted, “Stop fueling genocide!” in front of live television cameras, calling attention to under-the-radar Turkish oil exports to Israel. Though less visible than arms sales, oil exports are a vital component of Israel’s war machine. As the protesters were escorted from the room, Erdogan’s response was vehement: “Do not be the mouthpiece of Zionists here.”

How—and Where—to Build an Oct. 7 Memorial

Hillel Kuttler

The gray layer of outlined ash hints at the round glasses that once stood on the small shelf unit now resting on a floor in a storage room at Kibbutz Kfar Aza. The ash attests to the fire that engulfed the kibbutz on Oct. 7, 2023, during Hamas terrorists’ rampage in Israel’s western Negev. Next to the shelf sits a transparent box containing the tins of yahrzeit candles lit nearby by parents of soldiers killed defending the kibbutz that day.

“Take this shelf,” said Dina Grossman, who’d come to the kibbutz one late December morning from Jerusalem, where she is the director of digital heritage projects for the Ben Zvi Institute, a research body. “You see it and know that much drama occurred here. Artificial intelligence can’t fake it. This is something very authentic and real.”

The shelf and candles are among 1,300 items housed in the building—which is the culture club for the still-evacuated kibbutz—and on the second floor of the dining room across the way. Another 1,700 items are kept in two buildings at Kibbutz Be’eri, with 15,000 items from other invaded communities expected to be stored at a rented warehouse in Netivot, a town to the east. Eventually, a modern warehouse might be built.

Lessons from Ukraine: Why the US Army Needs to Rethink Engineer Reconnaissance

Adam Martin

As the US Army modernizes and prepares for the challenges of tomorrow’s battlefield, it naturally seeks lessons from the war in Ukraine—lessons on everything from maneuver to drones to command post survivability and beyond. To not seek out these lessons would be a wasted opportunity—after all, the ongoing conflict is the largest land war in Europe since World War II. And in fact, Ukraine offers a glimpse into the future of warfare, but what it reveals are some striking parallels with that last major war in Europe. One of the areas in which this is most true is engineer reconnaissance. If the conduct of the war in Ukraine over the past three years is any indication—and there is little reason to expect otherwise—modern warfighters should prepare for the largest obstacle belts seen since World War II.

Russia’s Deep and Layered Defensive Lines

Current Russian defensive tactics in Ukraine—and the toll these tactics have taken on Ukrainian engineers—illustrate the complexities of large-scale combat operations. Russian obstacle belts are layered with dragon’s teeth, mines, wire obstacles, antitank and antivehicle ditches, infantry entrenchments, and protected artillery and vehicle positions. These obstacles aim to attrit attacking Ukrainian forces and retain captured land. The need for engineer reconnaissance is paramount in this evolved battlefield. Attacking forces require real-time intelligence before assaulting heavily defended positions.

Right now NATO could not win a war with Russia

Steve Jermy

In 2024, reflecting a popular Western belief, former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said: “NATO is the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” Yet just two years earlier in 2022, after a 15-year campaign, NATO was defeated by the Taliban, a rag-tag group of poorly armed insurgents.

How can NATO’s humiliating defeat and Austin’s view be reconciled?

Of course NATO was never the most powerful military alliance in history — that accolade surely goes to the World War II Allies: the U.S., Russia, Britain, and the Commonwealth nations. Nevertheless, after 1945, NATO did its job, did it well, and those of us who served in it were proud to do so.

Since the Berlin Wall’s fall, though, its record has become tarnished. Satisfactory in Kosovo. Humiliated in Afghanistan. Strategic failure looming in Ukraine. Are we really sure NATO is up to the job of defending democratic Europe from a supposedly expansionist Russia in the doomsday scenario of a conventional NATO-Russia war?

The doomsday NATO-Russia war scenario is the defining way to explore this question. “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics,” and our strategic analysis needs to start all the way back in NATO’s logistics rear areas, then work forward to a future line of battle on the continent of Europe.

Biopower : Securing American Leadership in Biotechnology

Vivek Chilukuri and Hannah Kelley

The biorevolution is upon us. Converging breakthroughs in biological sequencing, engineering biology, and machine learning are ushering in an almost science fiction–like world in which humans can manipulate and even design the building blocks of life with increasing sophistication—for good or ill. In this world, cutting-edge biotechnologies will create organs, capture carbon emissions, restore polluted environments, tailor medicines to a person’s genes, and replace vulnerable supply chains for food, fuel, fabrics, and firepower with domestic biobased alternatives. According to one estimate, existing biotechnologies could have a direct economic impact of $4 trillion a year for the next 20 years.1 As innovation continues, the ceiling could be far higher.

If next-generation biotechnologies hold great promise, they also come with gathering perils from new bioweapons, intrusive biosurveillance, and the race for biotechnology breakthroughs without adequate safeguards for public health, the environment, and democratic values. For policymakers, the question is not whether the biorevolution has transformative power, but which nation will responsibly harness that power to unlock new tools for defense, health, manufacturing, food security, environmental remediation, and the fight against climate change. No country is better positioned to lead the biorevolution than the United States, but it requires that policymakers act now with swift, ambitious, and far-sighted steps to secure America’s place as the global biopower.

Jamestown FoundationChina Brief, January 17, 2025, v. 25, no. 1

Dreams Deferred in Xi’s New Year’s Speech

Assessment of PLA Leaders at the End of 2024

The Four Main Groups Challenging Xi Jinping

Military Implications of PLA Aircraft Incursions in Taiwan’s Airspace 2024

The Leninist Leash: Control and Mobilization in Beijing’s Global Order

Trends in Terrorism: What’s on the Horizon in 2025?

Colin P. Clarke

Sitting down to write my annual assessment on trends in terrorism in early 2025, I am struggling more than usual, fresh off the horrors of an Islamic State (ISIS)-inspired terrorist attack in New Orleans that killed fourteen people and injured dozens more. It is always a challenge to look beyond the immediate, to take a step back and weigh myriad factors and variables that impact which trends may accelerate and which may disappear.

It is impossible to know whether the New Orleans attack suggests a “new wave” of ISIS-inspired attacks in the West and in the United States in particular. Rather, the attack is another data point that demonstrates what many in the counterterrorism community have been saying ad nauseum for years—the threat posed by ISIS is consistent, enduring, and likely to ebb and flow over time in response to geopolitical events and counterterrorism pressure. Still, the threat is enduring and will remain an uncomfortable truth for policymakers as they attempt to right-size the resources provided to counter-terrorism agencies with their agreed-upon level of risk tolerance.

Predicting when and where terrorists will strike is among the most difficult tasks an intelligence analyst has. This requires assessing the combination of capabilities, intent, and operational environment, overlayed with public statements and propaganda of terrorist groups to understand their grievances and discern possible target selection.

A Coming Showdown Between the US and Venezuela

Allison Fedirka

It’s no secret that the United States’ physical and economic security depends on the security of the Western Hemisphere, and it’s no secret that Washington has been rethinking how it engages the region. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has taken a comparatively hands-off approach. In fact, Western Hemispheric affairs – save for Mexico and Canada – tend to take a back seat to European, Russian and Asian affairs. But threats such as the ones Venezuela is believed to pose have persuaded Washington to be more interventionist. The threats, in Washington’s estimation, are three-fold. First, corruption and economic decline under the Maduro regime made Venezuela ripe for illicit criminal activities such as drug trafficking, gun running and illegal mining, compelling many Venezuelans to flee the country for better conditions. Second, an influx of irregular migration has occurred as a result. Third, the Maduro government aligned itself with China, Russia and Iran, offering a foothold in the Americas in exchange for political and economic support.

This helps to explain why some of President Donald Trump’s first actions in office hit close to home. In the hours after assuming office, he said the U.S. no longer needed Venezuelan oil, and so the U.S. could soon stop buying it. He also signed an executive order that repealed the CHNV (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela) humanitarian parole program, which allowed as many as 30,000 Venezuelans to enter the U.S. legally per month and stay up to two years. And, through Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the U.S. government officially recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez as the democratically elected president of the country. U.S. special envoy for Venezuela, Richard Grenell, has already spoken with officials from the Maduro and Gonzalez camps.

Lessons Learnt from the Past. Disruptive Technologies, Warfare and Implications for Strategy, Ethics, and Global Security

Luigi Martino

Georges Clemenceau once remarked that “war is too important to be left to the generals”. Building on this perspective, we have to think if Clemenceau’s statement remains pertinent even in the face of rapid technological advancements and if we can replace “generals” with “politicians”.

In 2018, The Economist published a special report titled “The Future of War”, exploring what impact emerging technologies might have in the future, and how they will create “new battlegrounds”. According to the authors,technology and geopolitical competition are reshaping their character in the 21st century, yet Clausewitz’s axiom “war is still contest of wills” appears to remain valid. Highlighting a spectrum of disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous weapon systems, drones, robots, new biological weapons, and cyber operations, the report concludes that in the context of new wars, the competition for supremacy in these technologies raises the significant question: can this technological arms race be controlled, and is it possible to create rules that ensure human control over [these] systems?

This concern is so significant that Paul Scharre describes a “nightmare scenario” caused not so much by “Napoleonic” invasions relegated to the past century, but rather by malfunctions of these technologies due primarily to human errors (e.g., incorrect software coding) or cyberattacks perpetrated by adversaries.

In Depth: Biological Threats

John Mecklin

Daunting biological threats

Emerging and reemerging infectious diseases continue to threaten the global economy, society, and security. The collective experience with COVID-19 has led to increased skepticism about the recommendations of public health officials. The off-season appearance and in-season continuance of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), the number and types of birds it has infected, the number and types of mammals to which it has spread, its appearance in dairy products, and the troubling occurrence of human cases have combined to create an increasingly worrisome situation. The ability of all influenza viruses to mutate, break apart, and recombine to create new strains makes the emergence of a human-transmissible version of bird flu a serious possibility. Meanwhile, climate change is altering the characteristics of habitats worldwide, with more animals carrying, and more insects spreading, diseases to each other and to humans.

Concern is also growing over the continued proliferation of high-containment biological laboratories around the world, indicating scientific interest in high-risk biological research. Such research often underpins advances in biological science, and nations cannot afford to back away from biological research and development that will increase their competitiveness in the global bioeconomy. Yet such research also poses dangers. Continued arguments about dual-use and gain-of-function research acknowledge both the risks associated with such research efforts—including the possibility of pathogen escapes from biological labs—and the need to continue this research to find ways to treat some of humanity’s worst diseases. Proponents of synthetic biology say that it could provide much-sought-after medical breakthroughs; opponents say that the ability to engineer organisms could lead to the development of entirely new and dangerous pathogens. That we “don’t know what we don’t know” with regard to secret biological research undertaken for nefarious reasons remains an ever-present concern.

In Depth: Climate Change

John Mecklin

Devastating impacts and insufficient progress

With respect to climate change, 2024 was in many ways similar to 2023: Manifestations of a changed climate continued to be felt increasingly across the world, even as the clean-energy transition continued to gather pace against formidable headwinds.

Major climate indicators showed 2023 to be the warmest year in the 174-year observational record, with the highest measured level of ocean heat content, the highest global mean sea level on record, and the lowest measured Antarctic sea-ice extent—and 2024 is on track to be even warmer. The global average surface air temperature in the January-September period of 2024 was 1.54 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level, already slightly exceeding the “defense line” target of 1.5 degrees Celsius put forward in the Paris Agreement.

Similarly, extreme weather and climate events continued to negatively affect societies, rich and poor, as well as ecosystems around the world. East Asia, Southeast Europe, the Mediterranean and Middle East, the Southwestern United States, Southeast Asia, Northern India, Central America, and the Horn of Africa all suffered from heat waves. The Americas and Northwestern and Southern Africa experienced major droughts while Europe, Brazil, the Sahel, Afghanistan, and East Africa endured devastating floods.

In Depth: Nuclear Risk

John Mecklin

Extremely dangerous trends continue

There were no calamitous new developments last year with respect to nuclear weapons—but this is hardly good news.

Longstanding concerns about nuclear weapons—involving the modernization and expansion of arsenals in all nuclear weapons countries, the build-up of new capabilities, the risks of inadvertent or deliberate nuclear use, the loss of arms control agreements, and the possibility of nuclear proliferation to new countries—continued or were amplified in 2024. The outgoing Biden administration showed little willingness or capacity to pursue new efforts in these areas, and it remains to be seen whether the Trump administration will seize the initiative. At this time, it is difficult to anticipate when and how these negative trends may be slowed and, ultimately, reversed.

Against the backdrop of Russia’s continuing war against Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin suspended compliance with the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), and Russia’s Duma voted to withdraw Moscow's ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Western officials confirmed in March 2024 that Russian nuclear weapons have been deployed in Belarus. In August 2024, Ukrainian forces entered Russia’s Kursk Oblast, and Ukraine subsequently attacked targets deeper into Russia, using US-supplied missiles with Washington’s permission. Russia revised its nuclear doctrine to signal a lower threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, and it used an intermediate-range ballistic missile against a Ukrainian target.

Washington, DC, Plane Crash: Everything We Know So Far

Alec Luhn

Investigators are scrambling to figure out why a military helicopter and a passenger airplane collided and plunged into the Potomac River in Washington, DC, late Wednesday, the first major US air crash in 16 years.

From the little that’s known, human error likely played a role, raising questions about a chronic shortage of air traffic controllers and pilots. During a press conference Thursday morning, President Donald Trump at times appeared to blame diversity programs within the Federal Aviation Administration and the helicopter’s pilots for the crash, though he admitted there were no known links between FAA hiring policies and the crash beyond “common sense.” Authorities may also be looking at coordination between military and civilian aviation.

US officials say an Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter carrying three soldiers plowed into the tail of a Bombardier CRJ-700 jet out of Wichita, Kansas, as the airliner was less than a mile from landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport. Video of the incident appeared to show the flaming remains of both aircraft tumble a few hundred feet into the shallow, icy river.

The passenger jet, which was operated by regional carrier PSA Airlines on behalf of American Airlines, had 64 people on board, and police boats have already recovered 27 bodies. Officials said Thursday morning they expect there to be no survivors. The last aircraft tragedy this deadly in the United States was the Colgan Air crash in New York state in 2009.

Can the decline of two-party politics be reversed?

Sam Freedman and Lewis Baston

One of four themes I’m focusing on this year is the fragmentation of British politics. There hasn’t been a poll since 3rd January in which any party reached 30%. The Conservative party is still losing votes to Reform (and has fallen into third place behind Farage’s party as I predicted in my post at the start of the year). Labour are losing votes everywhere. This isn’t just due to our current political situation but reflects the decline of big parties across the world.

Is it reverserable? Should we want to reverse it? And can electoral systems make a difference? To look at these questions we welcome back Lewis Baston, who wrote a superb guest post on the decline of the Conservatives back in July.

Lewis one of the most astute political analysts in the UK. He started out as a researcher to the great David Butler, who founded election studies in this country, and has subsequently written a number of outstanding political biographies. His most recent book “Borderlines: A History of Europe, Told From the Edges” is a fascinating guide to the way redrawn borders have changed the continent’s history.

Measuring Changes Caused by Generative Artificial Intelligence: Setting the Foundations

Samantha Lai, Ben Nimmo, Derek Ruths, and Alicia Wanless

Introduction

In 2024’s so-called year of elections, fears abounded over how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) would impact voting around the world.1 However, as with other game-changing technologies throughout history, the sociopolitical risks of GenAI extend far beyond direct threats to democracy. As GenAI is leveraged to power “intelligent” products, made available for public use, adopted into routine business and personal activities, and used to refactor whole government and industry workflows, there are major opportunities for these disruptions to have negative consequences as well as positive ones.

These consequences will be hard to identify for two reasons. First, GenAI is being integrated into already complex processes. When the outputs of such processes change, it can be hard to trace changes back to their root causes. Second, most processes—whether in industry, government, or our personal lives—are not sufficiently well understood to allow detection of changes, especially those that are just emerging.

Informed policy that leads to beneficial change is extremely challenging to develop without being able to measure the material impacts of GenAI on governance, social services, criminal activities, health services, and myriad other aspects of social, political, and personal life. The act of measurement is necessary to help identify negative consequences that warrant prioritization and to understand whether claimed threats are over-hyped or under-recognized. Without measurement, we may fail to target policies directly towards issues that need the most attention. Worse, we may risk making changes that yield worse outcomes than the status quo.

2024 Annual Report : Explore our 2024 Threat Analysis and 2025 Predictions

In 2024, two key trends defined the cybersecurity landscape: the resilience of cybercriminal networks despite law enforcement actions and the growing complexity of enterprise attack surfaces. In addition, state-sponsored threat actors, primarily linked to China and Russia, intensified their focus on critical infrastructure and leveraged generative AI to conduct influence operations to advance their geopolitical objectives.

Recorded Future’s just-released threat report explores these trends and more. It presents the industry’s most comprehensive analysis of intelligence from 2024 as well as predictions to prepare your security organization for the year ahead.

Read on for a summary of key topics and themes, and then download the full report for an in-depth look at the adversary’s TTPs so you can strengthen your security posture.

Top Themes from our 2024 Research

Theme #1: Extortion Groups Proliferated Despite Law Enforcement Action

Despite significant global law enforcement efforts targeting ransomware groups like LockBit and ALPHV, cybercriminals demonstrated their ability to adapt and thrive. They reorganized, leveraged leaked malware builders, and shifted to smaller, independent groups. By mid-2024, ransomware payments had already reached $459.8 million, with a record $75 million paid by a single victim.

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