Indian Strategic Studies

14 February 2026

When the Gulf Heats Up, India Is the First to Pay

Fatemeh Aman

A new US-Iran crisis in the Persian Gulf need not escalate into a full-scale war to harm India. The fear that the region is sliding into an escalatory cycle in which markets, shipping companies, and insurers begin pricing in the worst-case scenario is enough to create problems for New Delhi, whether in the form of inflationary pressures, higher shipping costs and insurance premiums, and diaspora anxiety.

India’s exposure to Gulf instability is structural. New Delhi may be a rising power in the Indo-Pacific, but the Gulf remains one of its most sensitive economic lifelines. That is why even limited military action involving Iran, Israel, or the United States tends to force India into caution, narrowing its options before it forces anyone else’s.

The Strait of Hormuz is the clearest reminder of how the region exports shock. The International Energy Agency estimates that from January to May 2025, approximately 14.5 million barrels per day of crude oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz, and that China and India’s imports together accounted for 46 percent of those volumes. Even without a blockade, escalation can trigger large pricing reactions because markets price risk, not certainty.

Will India’s Kaladan Project in Myanmar Meet the 2027 Deadline?

Rajesh A M and Varun Tripuraneni

In July 2025, India’s Union Minister of Shipping, Sarbananda Sonowal, told the Indian parliament that the India-funded and developed Kaladan Multi-Modal Transit Transport Project (KMMTTP) in Myanmar will be fully operational by 2027 after the completion of the Paletwa-Zorinpui Road.

The project was initiated in 2003, and a Framework Agreement and Protocols were signed in 2008. But since then, the project has faced numerous obstacles, delaying its completion.

The Kaladan project includes a sea component between Kolkata and Sittwe, a river component involving 158 km of the Kaladan river from Sittwe to Paletwa, and a 109 km road component linking Paletwa in Myanmar’s Chin State with Zorinpui in India’s Mizoram state.

Grassroots workers of Awami League blame top Ministers, former General Secretary for downfall of party

Kallol Bhattacherjee

As Bangladesh goes to the polls, the Awami League continues to remain underground while its workers carry out internal discussions dissecting the reasons behind the party’s downfall.

The party’s top leadership, including deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, remain in exile in various countries such as India and Belgium, its grassroots leaders mince no words while examining the reasons that led to the overthrow of the party in the 2024 uprising.

Mohibul Hasan Chowdhury Nowfel and Hasan Mahmud, who were Ministers in the Sheikh Hasina Government, addressed press conferences in Delhi in January, but Awami League workers who spoke to The Hindu here said that many of the Ministers and individuals who formed the coterie around Ms. Hasina lacked popularity and acceptance within the party.

An army of lawyers is advancing. Taiwan is the target

Nathan Attrill and Shelly Shih

China has built not only a military to coerce Taiwan, but an army of lawyers to intimidate and constrain it. In 2025, Beijing’s lawfare campaign shifted decisively from largely declaratory threats to active enforcement. The objective is not legal resolution but deterrence: raising the personal cost of engagement with Taiwan’s democracy and normalising coercion under the fig leaf of law.

One clear indicator is the sharp rise in the detention and restriction of Taiwanese nationals in mainland China just in 2025. While Beijing frames these detentions as routine law enforcement, the pattern points to a deliberate strategy: using vague or politicised national-security charges to intimidate Taiwanese citizens, deter travel and engagement with the mainland, and signal that legal risk now attaches to Taiwanese identity itself.

The Chinese embassy just told you how it controls local media

Raymond Powell

When China’s embassy in Manila responds to criticism, it occasionally does something remarkable: it tells the truth. Recently the embassy has been remarkably forthcoming about how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) views the job of overseas Chinese-language media. These revelations were not intentional, I’m sure, but in defending its tight coordination with these Manila-based outlets, the embassy has given us all an education in how authoritarian states exploit free societies.

Over the past month, the embassy’s deputy spokesperson Guo Wei has issued four social media statements attacking the SeaLight Foundation’s recent reporting on Chinese state influence through these Chinese-language outlets. Rather than refuting the facts we documented, however, Mr. Guo’s responses confirm our thesis.

China is the bright spot in Trump’s foreign policy

Lyle Goldstein

After one year in office, the Trump administration’s foreign policy has drawn mostly negative reviews. Major efforts to bring peace to both Eastern Europe and the Middle East—both admittedly tall orders—have resulted in meager progress. That is to say nothing of the intense nervousness neighbors and allies feel over Washington’s unique new vision for hemispheric defense.

Amid that bleak overall picture, China stands out as a possible bright spot. While many pundits have forecast an intensifying great-power rivalry in the Asia-Pacific, it has not yet meaningfully materialized. The second Trump administration has rejected the ideologically charged anti-China position that hawkish figures like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton brought to Trump’s first term. Trump’s new approach in the Asia-Pacific considers deterring China as a secondary priority to the primary objective of securing the homeland.

China is the clean energy superpower, but there’s another snapping at its heels — and it’s moving even faster

Laura Paddison

The Pavagada Solar Park in Karnataka, India, on October 11, 2021. New research has found that India is electrifying faster and using fewer fossil fuels than China did at a similar level of economic development. Abhishek Chinnappa/Getty Images

Prem Chand is one of the many rickshaw drivers who spend their days darting and weaving along Delhi’s hectic roads. And like an increasing number of the city’s many thousands of rickshaws, Chand’s vehicle is electric.

He used to drive a gas-powered cab but ditched it eight months ago when he did the math and realized an e-rickshaw was far cheaper to run. Plus there’s an added bonus: it pumps no tailpipe pollution into the city’s famously toxic air.

From Venezuela to Tehran, Trump keeps the world guessing — to his advantage

Martin Gurri

We Americans are a parochial people — we’re homebodies.

War with Iran?

We’d rather watch the Super Bowl.

Overthrow a South American dictator?

Are you kidding?

Let’s talk about the Epstein files — sex, a supposed suicide and CIA all wrapped in one lurid package.

It’s one of our better traits.

Our country is often accused of rank imperialism, but in truth we’d rather putter around our own backyards.

Now and then, though, we need to peek over the garden wall and see how the rest of the world is doing.

If we do so today, we’ll find our sitting president, Donald Trump, feverishly rearranging the scenery and props on the geopolitical stage.

If the play he inherited from his predecessor was “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire,” Trump’s new production is an updated remake of “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”

Everything is in an uproar, everything looks different — mostly, I must say, to the president’s advantage.

Iran’s Water Crisis: A National Security Imperative

Scott N. Romaniuk & Erzsébet N. Rózsa & László Csicsmann

Iran is confronting an unprecedented water crisis. Rivers that have sustained settlements and agriculture for centuries are drying, while groundwater reserves are being extracted far beyond natural replenishment—over 70% of major aquifers are considered overdrawn. According to Isa Bozorgzadeh, spokesperson for Iran’s water industry, many plains and reservoirs have reached critically low levels. Over the past two decades, the country’s renewable water resources have declined by more than a third, pushing Iran to the brink of absolute water scarcity.

Drought cycles are becoming more frequent and severe; this past autumn marked one of the driest periods in the last 20 years in contemporary Iranian history. For decades, national development policies assumed that engineering and extraction could overcome environmental limits. Today, those limits are reasserting themselves, and shortages are moving from rural peripheries into major cities, placing pressure on a political system already managing numerous economic, social, and national security challenges. Rising scarcity underscores the multifaceted ways in which water intersects with livelihoods, public trust, and national security, creating pressures that extend from rural communities to urban centers and shaping Iran’s domestic and regional policies.

Trump’s NATO Dilemma

Sara Bjerg Moller

Last November, Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, startled a gathering of European officials at the Berlin Security Conference by remarking that he looked forward to the day when Germany would tell the United States, “We’re ready to take over the supreme allied commander position.” Despite Whitaker’s acknowledgment that such a moment was not imminent, his comments nonetheless shocked the audience of seasoned security officials who, like much of Washington, have long regarded NATO’s top military post as an American prerogative.

America and China at the Edge of Ruin

David M. Lampton and Wang Jisi

Since the early 2010s, the relationship between Beijing and Washington has steadily shifted from cautious engagement to tense rivalry. Step by step, both sides have adopted national security strategies that treat the other not merely as a competitor but as the principal threat to their core values, political legitimacy, and vital national interests. This evolution has been driven not only by external events but also by domestic political incentives, bureaucratic maneuvering, and deeply rooted anxieties about vulnerability, decline, and status. Each country’s increasingly muscular attempts to deter the other have caused rising friction in the realms of defense, economics, culture, and diplomacy. What began as hedging behavior has hardened into mutually reinforcing strategic postures that assume long-term hostility as the organizing principle of policy.

A world in which the two most powerful countries organize their strategies around mutual enmity is one marked by arms races, institutional paralysis, and the neglect of shared threats such as climate change, pandemic infection, and financial instability. In such a world, conflicts can readily spiral out of control. In the absence of meaningful guardrails, the present trajectory risks locking both societies and the international system into a condition of managed hostility, diminished prosperity, and chronic insecurity—a condition in which competition becomes an end in itself and the costs are borne not by Beijing and Washington alone but by the whole world.

I was wrong about fighting China in 2025. But the US still isn’t ready for that fight.

Mike Minihan

WASHINGTON—Three years after I made that prediction, and with 2025 fully behind us, I can now say that I was wrong. That is good. But I know it was right to sound the alarm.

I was the commander of the US Air Force’s Air Mobility Command when I issued an order to my command to aggressively prepare for possible conflict in the Pacific. I was grappling with a critical question: How can the United States project power across the Pacific—the largest ocean on Earth—fast enough to deter and if necessary decisively defeat a peer adversary that has geographic positional advantage?

When I took over my post in October 2021, I was given clear direction to go faster in preparing for conflict with China. Air Mobility Command moves nearly everything the US military needs to fight—from troops and fuel to missiles and medical care. I was selected for that role because of my experience in the Indo-Pacific, where air maneuver is the difference between arriving in time and arriving too late.

The US Army’s new presence in the Philippines and the push to contain China

Yuanyue Dang

The US has established a new army foothold in the Philippines with a rotational deployment designed to sustain the Typhon missile system and contain China, according to military analysts.

The US Army has commenced rotational deployments in the Philippines, according to a post published on January 29 on the Defence Visual Information Distribution Service, the US military’s image and video hosting website.

The photographs showed exchanges on January 12 between the Army Rotational Force-Philippines and the US Marine Corps, which already maintains its own rotational force in the country.The deployment marks the US Army’s first rotational unit in the Philippines – a development first reported by USNI News.

Border Officials Are Said to Have Caused El Paso Closure by Firing Anti-Drone Laser

Karoun Demirjian, Eric Schmitt, Kate Kelly, Hamed Aleaziz and Luke Broadwater

The abrupt closure of El Paso’s airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation.

The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would be shut down for 10 days, an extraordinary pause that was quickly lifted Wednesday morning at the direction of the White House.

Top administration officials quickly claimed that the closure was in response to a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels that required a military response, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declaring in a social media post that “the threat has been neutralized.”

The rupture is here: Why Canada needs an economic security act like Japan's

Bentley Allan

Prime Minister Mark Carney‘s speech at Davos laid out a Canadian grand strategy rooted in strategic autonomy through collaboration with other middle powers. To achieve this vision, Canada needs an economic security act that would bolster supply chain resilience and create high-priority technological capabilities. Such an act must be integrated with similar efforts by our European and Asian partners to become an indispensable ally.

As Carney explained, we live in an era of great power rivalry in which strong states can exploit economic interdependence. In order to increase Canada’s freedom to manoeuvre, it must bolster its economic and security capabilities. Countries earn the right to take principled stands by reducing the leverage that other states can wield over them.

Challenges Overshadow Hope in Gaza

Aaron David Miller, and Lauren Morganbesser

Whether or not they’re prepared to admit it, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump will be forced to conclude that the current and future prospects for Gaza are bleak when they meet at the White House this week. While the horrors of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack and the ferocious war that Israel waged in response are probably over, the sheer recalcitrance of both Hamas and Israel ensure that demilitarization and successful governance are unlikely to be realized. Focused U.S. leadership might improve matters. But as we look ahead into 2026, chances are Gaza will remain divided, dysfunctional, and sporadically violent.

The good news is that the large-scale war we have watched for two years has ended and is unlikely to resume. Pressure from the Trump administration, Israel’s failure to accomplish its military goals, election year politics, and the exhaustion and dislocation caused by the extended deployment of reservists has diminished that possibility. Still, there are credible reports that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has plans for a major operation to destroy Hamas in the roughly half of Gaza under its control. And we cannot rule it out.

To Survive, the EU Must Split

Rym Momtaz

There is safety in numbers, or so the popular saying goes. And EU institutions have taken it to heart. The thinking is: The larger the European bloc, the more powerful it is, and the better equipped it is to confront geopolitical and geoeconomic earthquake underway.

The obsession with unity is real in Brussels and in some capitals. Any hint of disunity taken as proof of the dreaded decline the EU is constantly accused of.

The twenty-seven EU members have certainly defied many expectations since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Along with the European Commission, they have come up with creative workarounds for their divisions to impose sanctions, raise funds, and finance military aid—even if it has often been a laborious and lengthy process.

As naval combat evolves, there will be few ‘safe havens’ in a future war

Jeff Schogol

The Navy has been heavily involved in combat operations in recent years, including two lengthy campaigns against Houthi rebels in Yemen, during which sailors were pitted against enemy drones, missiles, unmanned boats, and other threats.

U.S. sailors have not faced a peer adversary since World War II, when the Navy fought against German submarines, helped the Allies come ashore in North Africa and Europe, and waged titanic battles against the Japanese across the Pacific. But the sheer variety of threats facing sailors today has not been seen since then, said retired Navy Capt. Bradley Martin, a senior policy researcher with the RAND Corporation.

How Ukraine Can Help the US Compete in the Global Tech Race

Iulia Lupse

Modern military competition is no longer decided by who invents first, but by who can learn, adapt, and scale faster. China seems to understand this. Its system moves new capabilities from civilian research to operational deployment with little friction.

This is evident across Ukraine’s defense innovation ecosystem, where innovation is not a distant, lab-based exercise, but real-time learning under pressure. A system is built, tested in live conditions, brought back with feedback, adjusted, and sent out again almost immediately. If it fails, it gets reworked and tried again, sometimes within the same operational window.

Speed Is Becoming the Core Measure of Power. That pace feels unfamiliar in Washington today—and that disconnect could cost the United States the global technology edge. American debates about competition with China still fixate on budgets, white papers, and long planning cycles, rather than on how fast new technologies move from idea to deployment and spread across the force.

Unmanned Ground Vehicles Could Be the Next Big Battlefield Disruptor

Peter Suciu

As the ongoing war in Ukraine is set to enter its fifth year later this month, it is worth remembering that few could have anticipated the role that unmanned aerial systems (UAS) would play in the conflict. Aerial drones have proven extremely effective at destroying tanks, striking convoys, and targeting forward positions. Likewise, Ukraine has employed unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) and unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) to successfully target Russia’s warships and submarines in the Black Sea.

Both Russia and Ukraine continue to employ unmanned and even semi-autonomous systems, but according to a new study from the Jamestown Foundation think tank, Kyiv could be leading the way in the deployment of “unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs),” which can “perform surveillance, logistics, fire support, and self-detonating attacks in lethal frontline ‘kill zones.'” The study added that UGVs could reduce “Ukrainian casualties” and reshape “tactics through coordinated, multi-domain robotic warfare.”

Decision-Based Artificial Intelligence and the Strategic Reordering of Military Power

Elise Annett

The public acknowledgement of the increasing use of decision-based artificial intelligence (AI) in U.S. defense provides a backdrop to a structural reordering of how military missions will be generated, exercised, and contested. The declassification of U.S. interest in AI-enabled decision operations, coinciding with the National Defense Authorization Act, the National Strategic Security Study, and the 2026 Responsible AI in the Military Domain summit advances a strategic transition in which military competition progressively centers on control over the decision-space itself. As this domain matures, differentiation in decision-making capability (and speed) will prove to be decisive; yet this emphasis tends to de-emphasize alignment with multinational norms; simply put, the tempo of AI-based action affords greater advantage than the more lethargic pace of norm development.

Decision-space therefore emerges as a battle domain that can be shaped, contested, and degraded through cognitive means. Recognizing this necessitates institutional structures that align command authority, planning horizons, and operational design around the structuring of choice. Decision-based AI enables actors to pre-shape operational environments by filtering information, sequencing options, and accelerating commitment in ways that constrain adversary response sets and compress opportunities for political intervention. In this environment, power increasingly derives from the capacity to structure choice rather than from the accumulation of force alone; and advantage accrues through decisions that channel opponent behavior toward predictable pathways and foreclose adaptive response. To exploit this dynamic at scale, command architectures will benefit from explicit designs that enable exercising human authority at machine speed rather than reliance on legacy models of human involvement that were shaped for slower paces of conflict.

What We Know About China’s Secretive Nuclear Submarine Fleet

Rick Joe

The growth in China’s naval capability over the past decade has been mostly discussed in terms of the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) surface fleet. However, nuclear attack submarines (SSN) production has also proceeded at a new, steady pace in recent years.

China’s SSNs receive less attention in most defense commentary due to a combination of high PLA secrecy and the lack of images – which is to be expected, given their role. This article will examine recent SSN developments for the PLAN, in context of established defense media commentary and observable images, and cautiously project future possibilities based on indicators from the PLA watching grapevine.

CIA, SOCOM gearing up for rapid capability assessment with an eye toward ‘field-forward’ ops

Jon Harper

CIA personnel and American special operations forces are preparing for a collaboration event with members of industry and other subject matter experts in pursuit of new capabilities that could support so-called “field-forward” operations.

The spy agency and SOF community are known to have worked closely together during the Global War on Terror. Today, with the proliferation of emerging technologies, these secretive arms of the U.S. government are trying to prepare for future ops in more “data-dense” environments.

U.S. Special Operations Command’s Science and Technology Directorate and the CIA’s S&T organization are collaborating with the SOFWERX and ICWERX innovation hubs to host the upcoming “Rapid Capability Assessment” in Chantilly, Virginia, which is slated for April, according to a special notice posted online.

Invisible Battles: Health Logistics Win Wars

Darryl Scarborough

The British Army of 1879 marched on its stomach but died by its sanitation. The desperate glory of Rorke’s Drift and the shock of Isandlwana continue to captivate the public imagination. Yet, beneath this fascination, the real lesson of the Anglo-Zulu War is overlooked. It lies buried in the earthworks of a forgotten mission station, waiting to be unearthed. The Siege of Eshowe lacks the cinematic violence of the war’s famous battles. Yet, it offers a far more relevant case study for the modern military practitioner.

The conflict was not decided solely by the bayonet. Attrition shaped the conflict, driven by logistics, disease, and isolation. The Siege of Eshowe represents the strategic depth often ignored in favor of tactical heroism. In irregular warfare, victory is rarely decided by dramatic clashes on the battlefield. Success depends on sustaining positions and keeping logistics intact against a relentless adversary.

Weapons Used to Fight Drones Don’t Mix Well With Civilian Airspace

Dave Philipps

The military has made fast progress in recent years building an arsenal of guns, missiles, lasers, jammers and even high-powered microwaves that can shoot down drones. But it has made much less progress figuring out the rules and procedures needed to use those technologies safely in a crowded civilian airspace.

That disconnect caused the sudden, unexpected shutdown of the airspace over El Paso on Tuesday night. There are conflicting accounts of what caused the Federal Aviation Administration to close the airspace, with the Trump administration saying Wednesday that a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels had necessitated a military response. Others said the closure was prompted by use of a new military counter-drone technology and concerns about the risks it could pose to other aircraft in the area.

13 February 2026

From Rivalry to Indifference: India’s New Pakistan Strategy

Arijit Mazumdar

For decades, Pakistan was the fixed axis of India’s strategic world. From the first war in 1948 through repeated crises and major terrorist attacks, New Delhi defined its regional posture almost exclusively in relation to Islamabad. That era has ended – not because the disputes have been resolved, but because India has concluded that Pakistan no longer merits sustained strategic engagement.

What has replaced rivalry is strategic indifference: a deliberate choice to deter, punish, and disengage rather than negotiate. This shift is evident in recent crises, most notably the February 2019 Pulwama attack and the April 2025 terrorist attack near Pahalgam – both in Jammu and Kashmir – and the brief India-Pakistan confrontations that followed. Together, these episodes show how India now seeks to manage confrontation while avoiding diplomacy and mediation.

Why India doesn’t need a digital kill switch but smarter, risk-based friction in paymen

Lt. Gen. M. U. Nair

As India confronts a sharp rise in cyber fraud— particularly socially engineered “digital arrest” and impersonation scams— there is growing discussion around introducing a digital “kill switch” to halt fraudulent transactions.

What India needs instead is not an emergency brake, but intelligent friction: a calibrated, risk-based intervention that slows down high-risk transactions just enough to disrupt fraud, without undermining trust, efficiency, or the credibility of digital payments.

The fundamental weakness of a kill-switch approach lies in how most cyber fraud actually occurs. Contemporary scams rarely exploit system vulnerabilities. They exploit human psychology. Victims are coerced through fear, authority, urgency, or greed, and are often manipulated into acting against their own instincts.

RATs in the Machine: Inside a Pakistan-Linked Three-Pronged Cyber Assault on India

Kevin Townsend

Indian government and defense organizations are being targeted by multiple espionage campaigns delivered by the Pakistan-attributed Transparent Tribe (aka APT36), according to a newly released threat report.

These campaigns target both Windows and Linux. One active campaign employs GETA RAT (often specifically attributed to the SideCopy subgroup of Transparent Tribe). It is a dot-NET RAT that abuses legitimate Windows components (including mshta.exe, XAML deserialization, and in-memory payload execution) to avoid signature based detection.

Persistence is achieved by layered startup mechanisms that ensure continued access. “The result,” writes Aditya Sood, VP of security engineering and AI strategy at Aryaka in a report-accompanying blog, “is a lightweight but durable foothold, well-suited for extended reconnaissance and intelligence gathering.”

After Gen Z Protests, Bangladesh and Nepal Head to the Polls

Clara Fong

Citizens in Bangladesh and Nepal head to the polls on February 12 and March 5, respectively, for the first general elections since youth-led uprisings toppled both countries’ governments. The two countries are seeking to rebuild their government institutions, but the elections could reflect the political headwinds in the region. Despite similar reform sentiments appearing in Japan and Thailand over the past few years, voters in those recent elections chose to back pro-establishment, conservative parties.

In August 2024, students in Bangladesh protested job quotas favoring those with ties to the previous political party in power, while in September 2025, protests against nepotism erupted in Nepal after social media posts by the children of political elites appeared to flaunt lavish lifestyles.

Bangladesh Goes To The Polls In Unprecedented Conditions

P. K. Balachandran

The 13th parliamentary elections in Bangladesh, scheduled for Thursday, February 12, are taking place under unprecedented conditions. The old warhorse, the Awami League, is absent, disqualified on charges of misrule. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) has emerged from the doghouse and is poised to capture power. The previously banned Jamaat-i-Islami has teamed up with the new student-led outfit, the National Citizens Party (NCP), in a bid to surpass the BNP.

The Bangladeshi parliament is a unicameral legislature consisting of 350 Members of which 300 are elected from 300 territorial constituencies. The remaining 50 seats are reserved for women who are elected by the aforesaid elected Members of Parliament.

Hong Kong’s Freedoms: What China Promised and How It’s Cracking Down

Clara Fong

China pledged to preserve much of what makes Hong Kong unique when the former British colony was handed over in 1997. Beijing said it would give Hong Kong fifty years to keep its capitalist system and enjoy many freedoms not found in mainland Chinese cities.

But more than halfway through the transition, Beijing has taken increasingly brazen steps to encroach on Hong Kong’s political system and crack down on dissent. In 2020, Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong. In the years since, authorities have arrested dozens of pro-democracy activists, lawmakers, and journalists; curbed voting rights; and limited freedoms of press and speech. In March 2024, Hong Kong lawmakers passed Article 23, an expansion of the 2020 security law that broadens the definition of external interference and espionage, further cementing China’s rule on the city’s rights and freedom.

America losing the cognitive war with China

Beijing’s power, influence and reach have expanded exponentially over the past five decades. It has outmaneuvered us on multiple fronts (economic, political, military, social, etc.). Unfortunately, this fact remains true despite multiple warnings over a decade. But why?

The recent discovery of a second illegal bioweapons lab in California with ties to China, some three years after the first, gives us a clue. A first step to winning this war is to acknowledge that our national security leaders remain unaware, unprepared and unarmed to fight it. It is ill-defined by many analysts and functional experts who wrongly link the definition of cognitive war to a specific function, when, in fact, it crosses any and all functions. This lack of clarity is captured in the Senate Armed Services Committee report for fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act.

China’s AI industry looks unstoppable in the race to best US rivals. But is it?

John Liu

When China’s biggest artificial intelligence players gathered for a landmark meeting in Beijing in January, one question was in the spotlight: What are the chances of a Chinese AI firm overtaking US frontrunners in the next three to five years?

The answer from a top AI scientist present at the gathering was surprisingly blunt: “Below 20 percent,” said Justin Lin, technical lead for Chinese tech giant Alibaba’s Qwen AI models. “And I think 20 percent is already very optimistic.”

The sobering assessment stood in stark contrast to a year of headlines celebrating China’s AI boom. Since little-known startup DeepSeek shocked the world with a powerful AI model it said was built at a fraction of the cost of American equivalents, Chinese companies have topped global downloads for freely-available-to-use models and raised huge sums in market debuts.

Offsetting Without Oversight: The Wrong War with China

Erika Lafrennie

US defense strategy is converging around the China challenge with a level of clarity not seen since the Cold War. Precision strike investments are accelerating. Unmanned systems are transitioning from development to deployment. Force posture across the Indo-Pacific is being reshaped to support sustained strategic competition. The effort is deliberate, resourced, and institutionally coordinated, but the operational focus is misaligned with the nature of the conflict.

Offset thinking anchored in traditional warfighting domains cannot account for the terrain where strategic outcomes are already being shaped. Disruption requires domain awareness. Competitive advantage depends on recognizing where systems are being contested and how control is being exercised.

Is Iran Weaponizing ISIS-K Against Azerbaijan?

Joseph Epstein

Iran may have a new weapon in its shadow war against the West—and it’s one that Tehran spent decades fighting: Sunni jihadists.

Last week, Azerbaijani security forces arrested three men planning to attack the Israeli embassy in Baku. The suspects claimed allegiance to ISIS-K, the Afghan branch of the Islamic State responsible for the devastating Crocus City Hall massacre in Moscow that killed 145 people in 2024. On its face, this looks like another data point in ISIS-K’s expanding campaign of global terror.

But look closer, and a more troubling picture emerges—one that should concern policymakers in Washington. The South Caucasus is becoming a new front in the shadow war between Iran and its enemies, and the Islamic Republic may be using Sunni extremists as a cover for its own malign activities.

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